# The Blue Window/Chapter 9

THE Hulburts were to spend the holidays at Round Hill, and it was on the day before Christmas—the day on which Crispin was to arrive—that Sally and Meriweather went for a ride. There had been an ice-storm the night before, and the world was of a white and glittering gorgeousness which seemed artificial in its stiffness, like the setting of a pantomime.
Sally, with her red coat and copper hair, was as vivid as a cardinal against the frozen background. Her spirits were at top-notch. There was a week ahead of her in the same house with Merry. Why quarrel with the gods?
Their horses went carefully over the slippery roads. Sally welcomed the slowness. They could talk as they rode, and there were so many things to talk about.
"Aren't you glad you are living, Merry?" she said out of a full heart.
He was glad. He might have been happier if Hildegarde were beside him. But he had had her yesterday, and it was because of yesterday that he was not unhappy, even though Hildegarde was at this moment meeting Crispin at the station, having with him the first hour of reunion.
​Meriweather had offered to take her to the train, but she had said: "No, you wouldn't be interested in the things we'd have to talk about. I shall have a thousand questions for Crispin."
In spite of her refusal, however, he found himself upheld by the hope of what would happen when she saw Harlowe among her new friends. The house was full of people, the pick of Carew's acquaintances. Was it likely that side by side with these the young god would still shine?
Meriweather was not a snob, but he knew the world, and he knew women. Hildegarde had adapted herself amazingly to her new surroundings. People were saying charming things to her. As Miss Anne had prophesied, there had been great curiosity about Louis Carew's daughter. Everybody wanted to see the child of Elizabeth Musgrove who had left her husband and had gone out into a silence which had never been broken. And here was the girl, with her mother's slim grace, plus the Carew eyes and the crown of smoky curls. They made much of her.
"But they can't spoil her," Miss Anne had said to Meriweather: "she's true to the Carew tradition."
And there you had it. Back of her was the blood! But this Harlowe chap? No background apparently. Son of a country lawyer. Educated in a country college. Those things were all right, of course. But here, in the home of her forefathers, Hildegarde must see the difference.
Sally was saying: "Let's go to the Point and have tea. I haven't been there for ages, and no one will care if we don't get back."
​Meriweather had been to the Point the day before with Hildegarde. They had had hot chocolate—with muffins. Not the English kind of muffin, but the crisp, golden cones of Maryland fame. And Hildegarde like a child, buttering hers, had said:
"I love it like this, Merry—with the storm outside, and all this warmth and deliciousness within."
For the storm had caught them, but Meriweather had wrapped Hildegarde in the army cape which he had carried across his saddle, and had ridden home with his hand on her horse's bridle.
He wished now that Sally had not suggested going to the Point. It was fine to ride with Sally, but to sit across from her at a tea-table was another story. Sally had no little outpourings of confidence, no wistful petitions for advice. The charm of Hildegarde lay for Meriweather in a sort of quaint childishness, in her hot little tempers, her quick repentances. She was so utterly herself, without affectation.
Sally, too, seemed utterly herself. Yet her individuality was that of premeditation. She knew the effects she wanted to make, and made them. All the girls of her set were like that. They created a rôle and played it. Just now the rôle was one of perfect frankness and ingenuousness. Tomorrow the rôle might be different.
It was yesterday at tea that Hildegarde had told him breathlessly of her reconciliation with her father.
"If he hadn't come upstairs, my heart would have been broken. I was crying my eyes out."
"Yet you would have left him?"
"I could not have stayed, could I?"
​Meriweather had been daring. "Do you care so much for Harlowe?"
She had looked up at him, startled, and their eyes had held. And after a long pause, Hildegarde had said, with that startled air still upon her:
"I am not in love with him."
"Are you sure?"
She had nodded. "I have told him so over and over again. But he won't take 'no' for an answer. He says I am his. That I have belonged to him from the beginning of the world."
"Of course, you don't believe that?"
"Sometimes I do. And when I think of marriage it always seems as if it would be Crispin."
She had caught herself up. "I don't know why I am telling you all this. It doesn't seem quite right to tell it."
Yet she had told him. And there had been that moment when his eyes had held hers.
When they reached the Point, Sally agreed contentedly to tea and cinnamon toast. Meriweather was glad she did not demand muffins. His lip curled with laughter that the fact of eating or not eating muffins with Sally should matter. But it did. To such depths of sentimentality had he descended. Muffins and chocolate were the nectar and ambrosia of his romance!
When they came finally to the Inn, and he held the door open for Sally, there was the vision of Hildegarde, wrapped in his cape against the storm, his hand keeping her horse steady!
But this was Sally—! He went in with her, sat ​across from her, laughed and talked and ate, even flirted a little. Yet all the time he saw Hildegarde, telling him her troubles, talking of Harlowe—the look in her eyes in that startled moment!
"We've had a whale of a time," Sally said, as they left the Point behind them.
Sally loved the slang of the day. And it contrasted with her exquisiteness somewhat picturesquely, so that it seemed a whimsical adornment to her conversation rather than a defect.
The sky darkened as they rode home, spreading its deep sapphire from horizon to horizon, and under that spreading sky the countryside was flooded with the silver light of a frigid sunset. And in that light everything seemed touched by magic into an almost supernatural stillness. In the garden, when they came to it, the branches of the trees swept down like frozen, silver fountains; the bushes were a tangle of silver wires; the bronze turtle, caught in solid ice, might have been the remnant of some glacial age.
Then Sally said suddenly: "Look, Merry! Who's that?"
In the midst of the frozen garden, beside the pool, stood a young man. His face was turned to the bay, so that they saw only his profile. He had on gray knickerbockers, and a thick white sweater with the collar rolled up to his ears. He wore no hat, and above the collar of the sweater his hair was a flame of gold. There was a fine red in his cheeks, his face showed beauty and strength, and as at the sound of their voices, he turned, Meriweather received an impression of poise.
​"Gee," Sally said, "he's got a peach of a head. Who is he?"
"Harlowe."
"Hildegarde's friend? Merry, he is positively too good-looking to be true."
He was good-looking. He was more than that. Meriweather had to admit to himself that Hildegarde had been right—the boy there in the frozen garden belonged to the beauty of this silver scene as Lohengrin belongs to his swan and his silver star.
He rode up to the fence. "Harlowe?"
Crispin came forward. "Yes. You are Meriweather, aren't you? Hildegarde told me to look out for you. Some more people have come in, and she's giving them tea. And I wanted to see the turtle."
Meriweather presented him to Sally. "I should think you'd want to look at something warmer than turtles," she told him, "on a day like this."
"Red coats, for example?"
He was at his ease. Utterly without self-consciousness. That was, Meriweather was to find later, the secret of his poise. He didn't know that he was good-looking. He didn't in the least care. He didn't know that living in a small town was a handicap. He didn't know that there was any essential difference between himself and the smart and sophisticated crowd in which he found himself. And he didn't know because, as has been said, he didn't care. He was interested in life, eager. He swept everything else away. At this very moment he was telling Sally:
"I'm middle-western, and there's no large body of ​water near us. Did you ever see anything like the blue of that bay? It's like a Madonna's cloak."
Think of saying a thing like that! Where did he get that "Madonna's cloak"? But Crispin wasn't thinking of what he was saying. He was thinking of the Bay and of its beauty, and of how glad he was to be near Hildegarde, and he was saying it all to Sally—all except the nearness to Hildegarde—in his fresh young voice. Meriweather felt suddenly old.
When they came to the house, they found Hildegarde in the library alone.
"We had tea at the Point," Sally told her, "so we won't have any. But you can talk to Merry while I get acquainted with Mr. Harlowe."
"Crispin!" Hildegarde said. "You musn't call him 'Mr. Harlowe.' Nobody does."
"Oh, don't they? Well, then, I want to get acquainted with—Crispin."
She flashed a challenging glance at the newcomer. "Merry will feel that we are public benefactors if we leave Hildegarde to him. Just for the moment he's at her feet."
Meriweather protested, "Do you mean that at other moments I am at other feet?"
Sally shrugged. "I said it, didn't I?"
"'Just for the moment' sounds too temporary to be true to fact," Meriweather stated. "I am under the heel of Hildegarde's slippers 'pummanently and f'ever' as Sampson would say."
Crispin, going upstairs to shed his sweater and get into a coat, reflected that at least Meriweather made ​no secret of his infatuation. And he was no mean rival, with his dark good looks, his pleasant and perfect manner.
When he came down, he stood for a moment outside the library door looking in. The gay group around the fire had the effect of a painting. Hildegarde, with her hair done in that new and beautiful fashion of braids, sat in a high-backed chair of stamped green velvet. Her white tea-gown was edged with soft feather trimming, and she wore silver slippers.
Crispin remembered her as she had walked beside him in her mother's black cape. He had thought her lovely then, but this was a different loveliness—the loveliness of Cinderella after the wand was waved, the loveliness which money makes possible, the loveliness which belonged to the portrait above the fireplace, to the pomegranate bloom of the lacquered cabinet, to the crystal cat and her sleep of a thousand years. It was the loveliness of enchantment. This Hildegarde was a dream-woman. Tomorrow he would wake and find her walking beside him in her stout little shoes and red sweater.
When he went in, Sally claimed him. She had taken off her hat, and her hair was gold. She was extremely pretty, Crispin decided. But not with Hildegarde's loveliness.
He was quite content to talk to Sally because he could feast his eyes on Hildegarde, and willing to let Meriweather talk to Hildegarde because when he was near his love, he felt that nothing could ever come between them.
He had a few moments alone with her before she ​went up to dress for dinner. Meriweather had had a message from Carew calling him away. Sally stated with great regret that she must leave at once. Her dress for the dance that night had come from Baltimore.
"There may be something to be done to it, you know. And I must look my best for—Crispin."
She was off with a wave of her hand.
The dance was to be at the country club, after dinner and the tree at Round Hill.
"The country club is adorable," Hildegarde told him. "They have used an old manor house, and have made as few changes as possible. This part of the country used to be famous for its hunts, and that's the keynote of the decorations. It's wonderful, Crispin, to read in some of the old records that my grandfather, up there, was among the best of them."
Crispin had no hunting grandfathers. Or, rather, if they had hunted, it had not been with hounds and horses. They had conquered the virgin forests with axes and guns, but there had been no red coats, no banquets, no balls, in their social scheme. There had been judges among them, a clergyman or two; and there had been sporting blood and to spare. It had taken strength of fiber and a high spirit of adventure to pioneer in that western wilderness.
Yet Crispin's imagination was held by the thought of the history of this different country—a land where ships had come up from the sea by way of the blue bay, and where men of rank and title had arrived, bringing their luxurious habits with them, and had ​found on the Chesapeake good living and gay, and had gone no farther.
He spoke of this now. "It's all so different. And you're like an enchanted princess."
"Do you like enchanted princesses?"
"Love them," he smiled at her.
She smiled back. "Sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure it's true."
He agreed. "I know how you feel. That you'll wake up some morning and find yourself on the farm."
She asked wistfully, "Do Aunt Catherine and Aunt Olivia miss me?"
"They have your letters. You've been good about writing, Hildegarde."
"Oh, no; they did so much for me. Sometimes I feel like a deserter."
"But you're happy here?"
"Crispin, I want my mother. There's never a moment—" She stopped and could not go on.
"I often think of her," the boy said, "and of how different she was from all the others. She was a wonderful woman."
"None of the women here is like her," Hildegarde confided. "Somehow they all seem to live on the surface. And Miss Anne says emotions aren't fashionable."
"That's all bunk," explosively. "Living at top-notch means feeling at top-notch. I'd rather love and hate like an untutored savage than be so desiccated that I couldn't enjoy everything from a sunset to a good dinner."
​Hildegarde was lighted up and laughing. "Crispin, how utterly like you!"
"Well, why not?"
"It's so good to have you here."
"That's why I came."
He was standing on the hearthrug, his hands in his pockets. She was aware of that touch of masterfulness in him which she had felt on the night of her mother's funeral. No other man had ever given her that impression of strength, of mental and physical poise. She had a sense almost of panic.
"Cock-o'-the-walk," she said suddenly, "the conceit of you!"
"It isn't conceit. It's sense. I came to let you know that you belong to me. I was afraid you might forget."
"I haven't promised."
"I don't need any promises. When I am ready, I am going to pick you up and carry you off."
"You say it as if you believe it."
"I do believe it. You'll see."
She had a feeling that he might do it at this very moment. She rose.
"I must go up and dress."
"Are you sure you must?"
"Yes."
He walked with her into the hall, stood at the foot of the stairs, and said, "Where's your balcony, Juliet?"
"My what?"
"Your room."
"Second floor, front."
​"Sunrise side?"
"Yes—"
"Good. If you hear a pebble on the pane early tomorrow morning, will you look out?"
"Yes. Why?"
"I am going to take you to church." The laughter died out of his eyes as he stood looking up at her. "Hildegarde, I want to say my prayers with you—on Christmas morning."
She had nothing in answer to that but quick-drawn breath, tear-wet eyes. "I'll go," she whispered after a moment, and he watched her as she went upstairs.
Delia, waiting for Hildegarde, was arrayed smartly in a maid's dress of gray, a swiss apron with ruffles, and a matching cap with a lavender bow. Miss Anne had given them to her, and Delia was ecstatic.
"Honey-chile," she said, as Hildegarde complimented her, "I has dreamed of lookin' like this in Heaven, but nevah on dis yearth."
"What does Sampson think of you?"
"He say I'll be gittin' a devorce and marryin' a handsomer man. Sampson's got rheumatism in his feet, Honey-chile, an' he say he's got no eye fo' fumdiddles."
But whatever Sampson lacked in appreciation of sartorial attractions was made up by his wife's absorption in them.
"Mis' Sally's got on silver lace," she said, "an' 'er head's tied up in a silver ribbon. An' if she doan tek her death of col' 'thout anything on her back and arms, I'll miss my guess."
​She said this over again when Sally came into Hildegarde's room.
"You'll tek you' death, honey."
"I'm used to it," Sally said, "and anyhow I'm not ready to die until I know whether I am going to marry Merry."
She flung this at them airily, surveying herself meanwhile in Hildegarde's mirror. Delia, doing Hildegarde's hair, remarked:
"You know right now you ain' gwine marry Mr. Merry. You wouldn't have him, not ef he axed you on his bended knees."
"Oh, but I would, Delia."
"You thinks you would," said Delia sententiously, "but I ain' known you all yo' life fo' nothin', Miss Sally."
When the two girls went down together, Crispin was waiting for them, and there were a lot of other people. The drawing-room was full of color, rose and jade and sapphire in kaleidoscope combinations as the women moved about. Miss Anne was in amethyst velvet, Mrs. Hulburt in gold brocade. Crispin had never been a part of a group like this. At college there had been dances and dinners, but the students had been a heterogeneous mass, and the dresses of the women not gorgeous. Here was perfection of line, opulence of hue, elegance balanced by exquisite and artful simplicity.
Characteristically, Crispin was not in the least embarrassed by the opulence and exquisiteness. He was much too interested. It was all like a lovely play, with the actors and actresses at close range. He stood alone ​by the fire and looked on, enjoying himself, waiting for Hildegarde.
And when she came in simple white with a knot of violets on her shoulder, he liked the fact that she took the center of the stage—took it not because of super-elegance and opulence, but because she was, in effect, the heroine of the drama, the leading lady. As she went from one guest to the other, greeting them, she was for him no dearer, than she had been when, in the old farmhouse, she had greeted the Skinners.
She went out to dinner on the arm of a distinguished diplomat. Crispin took Sally. Hildegarde had managed that and had put Meriweather on the other side of Sally, who was in her liveliest mood.
"Hildegarde is wearing Merry's violets, did you know it?" she demanded of Crispin.
He had not known it. And anyhow what did it matter? She was his! So he said to Sally easily:
"There are flowers that she likes better than violets."
"What are they?"
"I shan't tell you. Meriweather might hear."
Meriweather, turning at the sound of his name, asked, "What might I hear?"
"Hildegarde's favorite flower. Crispin knows it, and it isn't violets. And it serves you right, Merry, for sending them to her instead of to me. She didn't tell me where they came from, but I was up in her room and saw the card with your name."
Meriweather flushed. Sally's frankness had ceased to be amusing.
She was aware she had gone too far, and saved the situation. "Somebody lend me a pencil," she begged.
​Crispin had one. Sally decorated a placecard with a bit of green from her plate and wrote:
She laid it before Meriweather, and in spite of himself he laughed.
"She wears them well."
"She does. But next Christmas I shall be wearing your flowers, Merry."
"Is that a prophecy or a threat?"
"Both."
"There's a present for you on the tree," he digressed.
"Tell me about it." She clapped her hands like a child. "I can't wait. I can't wait."
"I ought to make you wait for your—impertinence." His tone was light, but she knew he meant it.
"I'm sorry," she said softly.
Her eyes, as they came up to his, had tears far back in them. How could he know that the card she had read in Hildegarde's room had stricken all the brightness from her day. For the card had said:
"Wear them, won't you, Hildegarde? They'll be awfully proud to be worn by you."
And now here she was saying, "I'm sorry," and her heart was heavy. And she looked so like a repentant child that Meriweather laid his hand for a second over hers.
"I'll forgive you. And—it's a doll."
"Not really?"
​"Yes. The one we saw in Baltimore."
"Merry, you're precious!"
"I thought you'd like it."
"Oh, I do. And I'm going to call her 'Sarah.'" She turned to Crispin, "That's my real name, but nobody ever gives it to me. This doll is dressed like Queen Victoria. She's fat and short and wears a little cap. I fell in love with her at first sight. She's just what I'd like to be when I grow old. But I shan't be like that at all. I shall be thin and all strung up with beads and things, and my cheeks will be red, and my hair touched up." She stopped from sheer failure of invention.
"But you won't have to look like that, will you?"
"Yes, I shall. You watch the old women of our set. They've got a youth-complex. Can you see mother wearing a cap when her hair gets thin? Or having flat-heeled slippers? But I'll bet that deep down in her heart she envies my Sarah-doll."
Crispin laughed a little, and then, as she talked to Meriweather, turned his attention to the people around him. This was, for him, the second act of the play. And the setting! He had never in his life seen such silver and glass and china. The strip of Italian embroidery down the center of the table might have belonged in a palace—the flower-holder was a silver pheasant, and smaller silver pheasants, placed at intervals down the table, held the salt. The grandfather in the red coat had had the pheasants made by an English silversmith, and they were brought out only on grand occasions.
Like Hildegarde, Crispin wondered at the effect of extravagance. Carew had, he knew, lost his money. ​How could he afford a feast which would have paid the bills of the Harlowe family for days to come?
He found himself weighing Louis Carew against his own father. Weighing the tired eyes, the restless hands, the stooping elegance of the tall figure against the middle-aged serenity of the country judge. Clear-eyed, quick of step, not rich, but with not a money worry in the world, the judge went back and forth to the county court, a wise and just man, with a sense of humor and a love of living which saved him from a provincial point of view.
Yet there was a charm about Carew. Crispin had to admit that, and to admit, too, that he was like Hildegarde—like her as a shadow is like the bright figure by which it is cast. Crispin found himself resenting the likeness. It was as if he saw in the father some prophecy of what the daughter might be. Would he ever see her with that burnt-out look? With fingers tap-tap-tapping on the arm of her chair? Would he ever see her fighting a losing fight against the world?
Well, not if he could help it. He could give her more than her father gave. If he had no silver pheasants, he had at least no debts. His head went up a little. He caught Hildegarde's glance and smiled at her. He was eager to slay the dragons which lay in the path of his beloved—a young St. George in evening dress.
From the other end of the table Louis Carew saw Harlowe smile at Hildegarde. Saw the look she gave him in return, and was infuriated. Things had not turned out as Meriweather had prophesied. The boy was not a clodhopper. He was a gentleman. He had ​manners and ease. And while he was not so good-looking in his evening clothes as he had been in his white sweater, he was good-looking enough to cause much comment, and to have people ask about him.
"A friend of Hildegarde," Carew had told them, and had resented the fact that Hildegarde should have such a friend.
He had had only a moment's conversation with Crispin, and he had recognized in that moment a force stronger than his own, and he had feared it.
And fearing it, he had only one recourse. To run away. He would take Hildegarde to Europe. He and Merry had talked it over—a villa in Capri or an apartment in Venice. A new world for Hildegarde! A world in which young country lovers would have no part. A world in which Carew would have his daughter to himself.
And Winslow had said that this would all be possible—if Carew would say a good word for him here and there to the other men who were dining tonight at his table. It was not a thing that he liked to do, to use his guests for his own advantage. But he was up against a blank wall, and he would sponsor no cause that he did not believe in. Thus it became for him a matter of taste, rather than of conscience. He would do no act of dishonesty, no matter what happened. But why should he question, if he knew that by obliging a friend he could help himself? Once upon a time he had been squeamish in such matters, but Corinne had laughed at his "knightliness" and had called it out of date. Elizabeth had never laughed. She had loved it.
But he did not want to think of Elizabeth and of the ​love he had thrown away. He had never let himself brood over it. He did not intend to begin now. He turned to Mrs. Hulburt.
"What about Europe in the spring, Ethel?"
"Do you mean that you are going?"
"Yes. I'll take Anne and Hildegarde. And with you and Sally over there the thing would be perfect."
"I'd like it. I don't need to tell you that, Louis. But I don't know what Sally will say."
"Are you going to let Sally manage your life for you?"
"Well—why not? There isn't any one else to do it."
It was an opening of a kind. But he did not take it. He liked Ethel Hulburt, but he was not in love with her.
"If we let our daughters get the upper hand," he said, "we might as well be slaves."
Mrs. Hulburt knew the thing he liked, and gave it.
"Hildegarde will never rule you. You've always been king of your own domain, Louis. You will always be."