# The Blue Window/Chapter 19

TEA was being served in Winslow's art gallery, where a carved screen had been set to cut off a corner of the long room.
As Hildegarde and her father rounded the edge of the screen, they were hailed with enthusiasm by the group which had gathered.
Mrs. Hulburt was there and Miss Anne and Sally and Bob Gresham, and a half dozen young people who belonged to Sally's crowd.
They had made Hildegarde one of them. Yet she was not like them. She was surrounded, as it were, by little walls of reticence and aloofness, which none of their modern ideas had as yet battered down. Just as she wore her hair braided, while other heads were bobbed, so she kept the habit of her mind different. It was, perhaps, this very difference in her which drew Bob Gresham. He was satiated by modernity. "I wish the girls would go back to their grandmother's ways," he was at the moment declaiming, "I'd like 'em afraid of mice. They made a man feel like a conquering hero—. He could save her from a mouse and she fainted in his arms."
"Hildegarde's afraid of mice," Sally informed him.
"Are you?" Gresham demanded of Hildegarde.
​"Well, I don't like them. But I wouldn't faint in your arms!"
She felt quite breathless as she flung that last sentence forth. That was the way Sally said things. But Hildegarde was not accustomed to the easy give and take of conversation as these young people knew it.
"Just for that," said Bobby, "I am going to drink a third cup of tea with you in that corner over there with the Chinese lady. She'll be a silent and efficient chaperone, and I can make love to you—"
Hildegarde shook her head, "I loathe the Chinese lady, and I don't want any tea."
But she let Bobby sit at her feet and drink his third cup while Winslow showed them his collection of jade.
It was a wonderful collection, and he had some white pieces for Sally—a pendant and a bracelet. They gave the effect of snow against his glitter, and Sally had a shuddery feeling that if she put them on they would freeze her where they touched.
She wished that Neale wouldn't give her things. She wished that she wasn't going to marry him. . . . She wished that Merry hadn't been called back to his uncle's place in Maryland . . . so that for the next few days she wouldn't see him.
Of course, she knew that she would have to get used to not seeing Merry. But she didn't want to think about it. If Neale would be reasonable there would be the summer in Paris . . . with Merry in the party. And after that? Why think about it? The thing to think about was whether she could again get Winslow to put off the wedding!
When the time came for departure, she lingered be​hind the others. "I want to talk to you, Neale," she said.
"Stay here, then, and I'll come back—" he went down the length of the room with his guests, and returned presently to say, "Louis is taking your mother to the hotel. I told them I would bring you on in a moment."
Sally having met her lover midway in the big room, sat down in the alcove in which hung the Chinese painting of which Bob Gresham had spoken. It was of a woman with a long white face. The whiteness of her face, and the blueness of some butterflies which fluttered about her were the only high lights. The background was dull and drab, but the whole effect was beautiful.
Opposite the painting was a king's chair which stood on a dais. Sally sat down in it, and her scarlet hat blazed against its purple. Winslow sat on the steps of the dais.
Sally, looking down at him, said, "Neale, I want to go to Paris with the rest of them."
"With the rest of them? What do you mean, Sally?"
"Haven't you heard? Louis and Anne and Hildegarde are planning it for the summer."
He considered it. "It isn't a bad idea. A couple of months on the other side. You could get some of your pretty things in the Paris shops."
"Yes. But Neale—I want to stay longer than a couple of months."
His face did not change. "How long?"
"Until fall."
​Silence for a moment. Then, "You are asking a great deal of me, Sally."
"I know, but—if I am married in June, none of them will be here for the wedding."
"I see." And after a pause, "Just whom do you mean by 'them'?"
"I want Hildegarde for my maid of honor, and Merry for one of the ushers."
He demanded; "Is Merry going across?"
"Of course. He always goes with Louis."
"I see. Do you think you are playing quite fair, Sally?"
"Perhaps not. But Neale . . . if you feel that I must marry you in June, I'm afraid that I can't marry you at all. . . ."
As if she had struck him, a red flush flamed across his whiteness. That, sitting in his king's chair, amid all the splendors which were to be hers, she could give it up with a gesture! It was incredible. Sally had nothing. She was, in effect a beggar maid spurning a crown.
"Suppose," he said, drily, "that I should take you at your word and release you."
She had a wild glimpse of freedom. "You'll have to do as you think best, Neale?"
"You won't be married in June?"
"No."
He knew that she meant it, and that if he pressed it she would give him up. And his world and her world would laugh at him. They would say that in spite of his wealth he could not hold her. That it was youth rejecting age. He was an egotist, and the thought that ​he might be joked about was unbearable. And besides he loved Sally. Perhaps, as Carew had said, he loved her more intensely when she flew from him and he had to follow.
Her hand hung over the back of the king's chair. He bent his head and kissed it. "Your wish is my law, Sally."
She slid down from the chair and knelt beside him. "Neale, do you mean, I am to do as I please?"
"Yes. If you'd rather be an October than a June bride, it is for you to decide. And while you are there, I'll run over to Paris."
"Neale, you're a darling."
His smile glittered, "Am I?"
"Yes. I'm afraid I'm not always nice to you. But I mean to be."
Kneeling beside him at the foot of the king's chair, she was like a pretty child. His aesthetic taste was satisfied. He was glad he had pleased her. He must give her her head a little. But in the end she would obey the bit.
He took her presently to the hotel, where she and her mother stayed when they were in town, then he went back to his own big house and to the art gallery where he had left his jades. When he had locked them up, he sat for a long time in the king's chair which faced the Chinese lady. With his icy glitter he belonged to the chair as Sally in her scarlet hat had not belonged. His thin, pale hands hung over the arms as one sees them in the pictures of royalty. They needed only lace ruffles and heavy rings.
As he gazed at the Chinese lady with the long white ​face, Winslow's own face had something in common with its sinister effect of immobility. He was thinking of Merry. And of Sally's summer in Paris. Together. The two of them. With romance rampant. Winslow knew all the witchery of old gardens and dim churches and gay little inns. And Merry sharing all that with Sally! The thing was not to be thought of. It seemed to him as he gazed at the Chinese lady as if she ought to see some way out of it. She was so inscrutably wise as she sat there among her blue butterflies.
Yet it was not the Chinese lady who found a way out for him. Fate took things into her hands, and kept Merry at home.
"I can't leave my uncle," he wrote to Carew. "At first he urged me to do it, and it seemed settled. But I have had a talk with the doctor and he gives little hopes of many months ahead for Uncle Buck. So I must stay here. It would be too unutterably selfish to go when he depends so much on me. I can't tell you how sorry I am. And I shall see as much as possible of you all before you sail."
Carew read Merry's letter at the luncheon table at Round Hill. Sally and her mother were there for the week-end, and when she heard what Merry had written, Sally's heart stopped beating.
It seemed to her a long time before she got her breath, and nobody, apparently was aware that anything was the matter. She heard her mother say; "Well, one man more or less won't make much difference."
Sally knew that her mother was glad that Merry wasn't going. Mrs. Hulburt had been much upset by ​the postponement of the wedding. "The first thing you know you'll let Neale slip through your fingers," she had said, and Sally had flung back, "I wish he would slip. When I am in his big house, I feel as if it would crush me."
And Mrs. Hulburt afraid that she had gone too far, had said soothingly, "It's your nerves, Sally. The trip over will do you good."
Sally managed to get through luncheon without show ing what she felt. Then she had a horse saddled and galloped down to the Bay. Furiously. And as she rode, she faced the truth. She had wanted to go to France because Merry was going. And now she wanted to stay at home because he was staying. And she couldn't stay. All of her plans were made, . . . she had burned her bridges. . . . The only light in the darkness was the fact that she would not have to be married in June.
The clouds were low, and as she started home it began to rain—a chilling downpour. She turned her horse's nose towards the Inn. Christopher would give her a cup of chocolate.
Christopher was glad to give it. "I haven't anybody but Columbus for company."
Sally picked up the big cat. "Cats are sometimes better than people" she said, briefly.
The big man took a look at her white little face, and said, "You put your feet up here by the fire, and I'll get your chocolate."
So Sally sat hugging Columbus up to her breast as if, with his friendly song, he was a buckler and shield against the arrows of outrageous fortune.
​Christopher having served her, stood by the window. "It's a bad storm."
"I like it."
"Well, so do I," said Christopher, "if there's somebody I like to sit by my fire."
Sally looked up at him, "Suppose you knew that for years and years somebody was going to sit by your fire that you didn't like? What would you do?"
Christopher stood with his hands on his hips, considering it seriously, "I'd ask the good Lord to deliver me—"
Sally, out of a long silence, said, in a little voice, "Do you think the good Lord would—listen?"
"Sure thing. . . ."
"Oh," said Sally, and that was all. She finished her chocolate, gave Columbus a farewell hug, and was off in the rain, unheeding Christopher's advice that she'd better wait until the downpour lessened.
Galloping back, her head down against the beating storm, Christopher's words seemed to beat an echo to the horse's hoofs:
"I'd ask . . . the good Lord . . . to deliver me. . . ."
Did people really pray for things and get them. Did they? Crispin had told her once to pray for a good husband. If she gave up Neale, would the good Lord let her marry Merry?
But Merry didn't want her. He wanted Hildegarde. Life was like that. One had to take what one could get. Not what one wanted.
When she got back to Round Hill she found a note from Merry. He said in it practically what he had said ​to Carew. "I am desperately disappointed. I feel like a peri outside the gates of Paradise. But I can't desert Uncle Buck."
Sally's eyes were stormy, "It is Hildegarde who would make it Paradise," she said to the doll, Sarah, who lay among the cushions of the couch, "it is I who am shut out."
It was still raining, and as she stood looking out of the window with Merry's letter in her hand, the dreariness of the day entered into Sally's soul, so that she seemed lost forever to youth and gayety.
Then suddenly, she found herself on her knees beside the couch, with her arms flung out across it. "Oh, good Lord deliver me," she whispered with a sobbing breath, "I'm afraid . . . all by myself . . . and nobody . . . cares. . . ."