# The Blue Window/Chapter 2

THERE were steps again on the stairs, Aunt Olivia this time. It was unusual for Aunt Olivia or Aunt Catherine to climb the stairs when they wanted their niece. They had always called in their high-pitched voices. The extra exertion was a concession, apparently, to the solemnity of the occasion.
"Crispin Harlowe is here," Aunt Olivia announced.
Crispin Harlowe was the boy at the State College who Hildegarde had thought would come when he heard of her bereavement, and now he had come.
"I'll be down in a moment, Aunt Olivia."
Aunt Olivia looked at the little red box and asked, "Did you read the letter?"
"Yes." Hildegarde found it hard to speak of the things that her mother had written. "It was a great surprise," she said at last.
"Catherine and I sometimes thought she might have told you sooner. But we didn't advise. It was her business."
"I am glad she didn't, Aunt Olivia. It wouldn't have done me any good to know I had a father. I couldn't have gone to him while she lived."
"No," said Aunt Olivia, "you couldn't."
​"There'll be a great deal to talk over," Hildegarde stated, "but we'll have to wait until the others are gone. Perhaps you'd like to read her letter."
She handed it to her aunt, who stood looking down at it. "She wrote a prettier hand than Catherine or I. She learned it after she was married."
Hildegarde, with a heart-breaking vision of her mother as a young wife striving to fit herself into her environment, said, "Everything she did was lovely."
"Yes," Aunt Catherine agreed, "it was." Her voice was gentle.
They went down together.
There were several people in the room, and Crispin Harlowe was sitting on the edge of the high sofa. He rose, as Hildegarde entered, and went up to her.
"I came as soon as I heard."
It was as if he answered in her some accusation of procrastination.
"I did not hear," he continued, "until this morning."
She had given him her hand, and he still held it. The eyes of the other people in the room were on them.
"Shall we go for a walk?" he asked in a low tone. "We can't talk here."
"Presently," she said. "I want to speak to the Skinners."
The Skinners were distant cousins. They had been late for the funeral, and for the feast that followed. Hildegarde had not seen them, so now she sat and talked to them. Crispin, from across the room, watched her, and thought he had never seen her lovelier ​than now, in her straight black dress, with that smoky cloud of hair framing her white face.
She went out, after a while, wrapped in a black cape which had been her mother's. She wore no hat. In spite of the wind, the air was warm.
Crispin said, as they walked along, "You are beautiful in black."
"They didn't want me to wear it," she told him passionately. "I should have died if I hadn't."
He said he knew how she felt. They were drawn together by his comprehension of her mood. As they passed the garden, he stopped and found a late white rose blooming. She pinned it on her cape. He thought it completed, perfectly, the effect of sorrowing beauty.
As they came to the road, he asked, "Where shall we go?"
"I don't care. Only let it be as far away from people as possible. I have something to tell you—I want to tell you before I talk it over with any one else."
He was touched by her confidence in him, and laid his hand, for a moment, on her arm. He rarely touched her. She was too fine, he felt, for that.
Yet it was not alone her fineness which held him back. It was his own. He belonged to the village and had gone to school with Hildegarde. His father was judge of the county court, and much respected for a certain hearty sense of justice, which made him understand the sinner, but not sentimentalize about his sin.
Crispin was like his father in looks and in his attitude of mind. He was a strong, upstanding fellow. His hair was thick and fair, and gilded by a touch of ​auburn. His skin had the rich red and brown which belongs to those who live much out of doors.
So they walked along together—she a slender black shadow against the shine and glow of him. They ascended a long hill, going first through a pasture, and then through a wooded grove, coming at last on a bluff which overlooked a wide valley. Below were the farms, with shocks of corn in long, even rows—pale gold and russet—with a line of emerald where the trees along the streams still kept their green. Far off was the village and the church spire, and hanging just above it, the sun, half-shrouded in thin veils of mist, so that its top was arched like the gilded dome of some ethereal Eastern mosque.
They sat down in a place sheltered by a great rock, which loomed up behind them. They faced the south and west. Across the sky was now a rippling, ruddy wave of cloud. Hildegarde, wrapped tight against the wind in her black cape, spoke of it.
"It is like a shining sea," she said. "I like to think that somewhere out there mother is sailing on it."
It seemed as if she could talk of nothing but her mother. Crispin listened patiently enough. But the thing he wished to talk about was Hildegarde.
Presently he came to it. "What are you going to do now that she is gone?"
"That's what I have to tell you."
She was aware of the dramatic qualities of the revelation she was about to make. She was like a little sybil as she sat there speaking—with the black cape drawn tight about her, the wind blowing her hair.
When she had finished, there was silence for a mo​ment, then Crispin said, "How wonderful that she could keep it to herself like that!"
"It changes everything, doesn't it?"
"In what way?"
"To know that I have a father."
He broke out fiercely, "Don't say it as if it were something to be proud of."
Her startled eyes met his. "Isn't it?"
"No. A man like that. To break your mother's heart."
"But you see what she says. He couldn't help it."
"He wasn't true to either of them. He should have found out before he married your mother which one he wanted."
She turned this over in her mind. At last she said, "Still, he's my father."
"And, of course, you'll go?"
"Yes."
"Suppose he doesn't want you?"
"I am not going to find out whether he wants me, but whether I want him."
"Why go at all? Why not stay here and marry me, Hildegarde?"
"Oh," she turned toward him started, "but I'm not in love with you."
He was eager. "You don't know whether you are or not. You don't know anything about it? But I could teach you." He took her hand, drawing her toward him.
She drew back. "Please—" Then, after a little: "Crispin, I must go to my father. Mother wanted it."
​"But you'll come back. I'll make you come. Do you think I'll give you up for all the fathers in the world?"
"I don't want to give you up. But I don't want to think about marriage. Mother used to say that love for a woman is giving; for a man it is taking."
"All men are not like your father."
"How can a woman tell?"
"Well, at least I can tell you this, that there has never one instant been any one else, that however far you may go from me—you will always know that my heart is waiting."
She had no answer ready for him. Darkness was coming fast upon them. Back of them the day was gone. But toward the west and south the clouds had been swept away by a change of wind, and the sky was now one clear, unbroken stretch of chrysoprase.
And out of the sky dropped suddenly a harsh and thrilling cry.
Crispin jumped to his feet. "The wild geese are flying. Look, Hildegarde."
He drew her up beside him. The wind caught her cape, and it billowed out behind her. He swept it down with a strong arm and stood holding her steady. Etched black against the wide green expanse, the geese flew in wedge-like formation, a few laggards trailing in a whipcord behind. Steadily they passed, their strong wings bearing them on, their clamorous voices calling. It was a thing to lift the heart. To feed the soul. Up there in the infinite sky was a faith that carried those feathered things through miles of un​charted flight. Who told them when to go and when to come? Who showed them the way? Who held them thus together? A brave company on a brave adventure?
Crispin, feeling this, said, "When I see them, I want to follow."
It came to Hildegarde that it was wonderful to hear a man speak like that. It was wonderful to be standing there with a strong arm about her in that green light, and with the wild geese flying. For the first time Crispin seemed more to her than the boy she had always known. He was a part of the wonder of it—the ineffable beauty.
When she got back to the house, the feeling lingered. She found herself watching Crispin as he had watched her earlier in the day. She found herself, too, contrasting him with the others in the room. There was supper still to be eaten, and Crispin was to stay for it. As she came back and forth from the kitchen, she was aware of him in the midst of the group of men about the dining-room stove—outranking them all in strength and good looks. Across the room she caught his quick smile for her. They had brought some leaves and berries back with them from their walk. Hildegarde was arranging a dish of fruit in the center of the table.
"I thought we might make a wreath of bittersweet and trumpet vine," she said, as he joined her.
Other people were watching. The women in the kitchen. "It would be a fine match for her," they were saying to each other as they fried the potatoes, and scrambled the eggs, and stirred the cream gravy. ​The men, too, were watching over their pipes, envious of youth and beauty.
At supper Hildegarde sat beside Crispin.
"I am not hungry," she said, but she found herself eating.
Crispin buttered bits of hot biscuit and laid them on her plate. He helped her to cottage cheese and honey. As for himself, he ate the fried things with hearty appetite. He had two cups of coffee and cake and pie and preserves. And Hildegarde was glad he ate. She would have had no use for a sighing lover. His heartiness and strength appealed to her. It was as if on some wide and lonely sea she had hoisted a flag of distress, and he had come bravely to meet her.
His comforting presence kept, too, the shadows away from her. After a while she would have to go up to her room with its dreadful emptiness. The blackness would shut down on her, and she would cry out for her mother. She grew faint with the thought of it. She was glad to sit there in the light with that line of people about the table, talking, and even laughing a little. The gloom which had surrounded them for the past three days was lightening; it would not be long before everything was as it had been before.
After supper, Hildegarde and Crispin sat apart from the others, and she told him her plans. She was to go as soon as she could get ready. She was sure Aunt Olivia and Aunt Catherine would be willing. He made her promise to write him. Often.
When it was time for him to leave, she went with him to the front door. They were alone in the hall.
"Walk to the gate with me," he begged.
​She took a sweater from the hatrack. It belonged to one of the Skinners and was a bright scarlet. When Hildegarde put it on, it wrapped her like a flame.
Crispin said, "Some day, when you are happy, you must have a dress like that."
"I shall never be happy."
"Yes," he said, "you will. I shall make you happy."
The night, as they went out in it, was cold and clear. Sharp, white stars pierced the sky. Dry leaves rustled under their feet as they walked; the wind sighed in the bare branches.
When they came to the gate, Crispin took her hand and said, "I shall live on the thought of your letters."
"Shan't I see you before I go?"
"I shall come as often as I can. You know that."
"And—I haven't promised anything, Crispin."
"No. I don't need any promises. I know what I want and what I mean to have."
She was much stirred by the way he said it. For the first time she was meeting the mastery of a masculine mind. "You mustn't expect too much."
"No." His fingers tightened on. hers. "Hildegarde, let me kiss you. It won't tie you to anything. But it will make you remember that I—care."
She stood very still, then: "Crispin, it would tie me—I mustn't."
After everybody had gone that night, Hildegarde and her aunts talked for a long time. They told her many things the letter did not tell. There was some money, they said, in the bank. Not much, but a few hundreds. It had been her mother's share when the ​lower lot was sold, and she had kept it for Hildegarde. They, too, thought she ought to go to her father. They would miss her dreadfully, but the farm was no place for a young girl. And, of course, if she found she could not stay, she could come back.
At last Aunt Olivia went upstairs and came down with a traveling bag. "It was your mother's."
Louis Carew had bought it for Elizabeth on their wedding journey. It was lined with rose-color and outfitted with ivory with the monogram in gold letters.
"Everything he gave her was like that," Catherine said. "Handsome. We had never seen such handsome things as she brought back with her. Yet she said they were nothing to what she left behind."
"If he had given her more love, she would have liked it better than anything that money could buy," was Aunt Olivia's grim response. "I couldn't ever forgive him, although she didn't want us to feel that way. He broke her heart."
Hildegarde wondered if she ought to feel as Aunt Olivia did, and Crispin. Yet, somehow, she couldn't hate her father. Her mother hadn't hated him. Whatever she had suffered, she had loved him to the end.