# The Blue Window/Chapter 24

THE open season for hunting was on. Not for duck and quail—the guns must wait for those until November. But yellow-legs, plover, reed-birds, the rails and waders, were legal prey. Flocks, wedge-shaped, crescent-shaped, or loosely scattered, flew low above the ruffled waters of the bay. Shadowy little companies flitted across the sands. On the wings of the wind came the clear whistles, the mellow cries, the musical pipings. The waves were dotted with tiny, floating forms which rose in startled flight at the approach of an intruder.
Christopher's place was full of men in canvas coats and caps, who talked a jargon, unintelligible to the uninitiated, of "sinkboxes" and "sneak boats," of "blinds" and "pushers." Prosperous, sophisticated gentlemen; some of them shooting because it was fashionable, but most of them from sheer love of it.
October came in with lowering clouds, and there was much rain, but the gunners made no complaint. The wet weather simply intensified their sense of sport, and the contrast between the chill without and the coziness of Christopher's hearthstone. They brought in after a day's hard exercise bags of dead birds, which Christopher broiled for them. And while they ate, Colum​bus, the cat, swung his black paws down from the mantel shelf and surveyed them with scornful eyes. When it came to killing, he needed no gun!
Winslow was among the hunters. His bags of dead birds were bigger than the others. He took them up to Round Hill to be cooked. He talked about them at the table. He seemed to think of nothing else, not even his wedding day, which was three weeks away. Sally made up a verse to fit the case and recited it at dinner:
Winslow, glittering on the other side of the table, said, "I shall never forget—"
Bobby Gresham, who was dining with them, remarked: "Sally's rather a darling duck herself. Good enough to eat."
Winslow shot him a baleful glance. He was irritated, too, by Sally's mockery. He was thin-skinned, and there were times when her words stung him like the barb of a little bee. He wondered if, as his wife, she would irritate him. Yet it was too late to think of that. In three weeks she would marry him, and Gresham might save his flatteries. As for hunting, the season was on, and he intended to get all he could out ​of it. No one, not even Sally, could interfere with his sport.
Carew, too, hunted. Hildegarde rather hated it all. Sh didn't like to see things killed. Yet there was something to be said for the out-of-door aspect, the picturesqueness, the inherited love of sport which came to these men of English descent.
As for herself, she was tied up with engagements. Everybody was entertaining Sally, and Carew's daughter was, of course, included in the invitations. Back and forth the two girls swung between Round Hill and Baltimore, with Hildegarde troubled about the expense but enjoying it all none the less. Her father, when now and then she spoke to him about it, urged her not to worry. Winslow, he said, was putting him on to some good things which would soon be paying dividends.
Since their days at the farm together she had not seen Crispin, but his letters came regularly, whether she answered them or not.
"I haven't a bit of pride where you are concerned, Hildegarde. If you won't write, you won't, and that's the end of it. But I've got things to say, and if you don't want to read, you needn't. And the latest thing simply has to be told—I've bought a loveseat and a footstool for the house. They have crooked, carved legs and are done up in faded rose brocade, and they are, as you would say, 'adorable.' That's all the furniture so far, except the little photograph of you and your mother on the mantel. When I am feeling a bit down, I build a fire and sit on the seat and imagine you are beside me, with your little slippers on the ​stool! I get a good deal of vicarious satisfaction out of it. I hope that is the right word. I am never quite sure about 'vicarious.'"
She wrote back that he must not. The idea of furnishing a house for her! "It seems so complacent, Crispin. As if you just had to crook your finger!"
His response to that was: "If crooking my finger would do the trick, I'd have it permanently crippled. But I am not complacent. There are nights when I walk the floor in a deadly funk, my imagination playing with the idea that you are falling in love with somebody else. If that ever happens, Hildegarde, don't tell me. Just send back the silver key. And I'll know you are never going to sit by my fires, nor toast your slippers at my hearth."
Hildegarde found her mind dwelling rather persistently on the thought of that fireplace and Crispin in front of it. She didn't want to think about it, but there it was, popping up at the most unexpected moments in the midst of Sally's chatter or of Bobby's jests.
Then one day, when, with a lot of others, she was having tea in the art gallery of Winslow's house, she came across a picture of George Washington! It had, apparently, just been hung, and was unlike any other portrait she had seen of the father of his country. It gave him less the look of a graven image and more the look of a human being. Here were the tired eyes, the irritated frown of the harassed officer, the coarse skin of the man whom the storms had beaten and the cold hardened. He wore a shabby coat, his hair was wind-blown, and there was something in his expression which reminded her of Crispin as he had been that day under ​the old oak. Washington had no laughter to light his face, but one felt his youth and strength. Here was not the statesman, but the soldier who was fighting the battle of the moment with no idea of the honors ahead.
Bobby, coming up behind her, said, "Old George needs a hair cut."
"I like him."
"You wouldn't in real life. Not with a coat like that."
"One doesn't judge men by their coats."
"Dear child," Bobby surveyed her with a laughing eye, "if I wore lace ruffles and ribbons, you'd adore me."
"Not I."
"All women are like that. Caught by trappings—men in khaki, men in scarlet, men in high boots. They married thousands of 'em during the war. Coats, my dear child, coats!"
Sally, joining them, was white as a sheet. "I have such bad news. Merry's uncle is dead. Louis just got the telegram."
"How dreadful!" Hildegarde said.
Bobby was more practical. "Good thing for Merry. Nice estate, I understand."
Sally blazed at him. "Oh, that's like you, Bobby. As if the money mattered!"
"Does, though," Bobby insisted. "Does with you. Don't try to put it over on me, Sally."
Sally faced him squarely. "Do you mean I am marrying Neale for his money?"
"What else? I wouldn't call him young or good-looking."
​"You're hateful, Bobby."
Hildegarde turned away. How could the two of them squabble like that with the thought of death so near? She wandered down the long room and stopped in front of the picture of the Chinese lady. Winslow, entering under the great archway, stopped beside her and said:
"That's one of the finest things in the collection."
"I don't like it half so well as your George Washington."
His cold eyes lighted. "Not many people have your discrimination. The Washington picture is extremely valuable, painted by an unknown artist. Undoubtedly an excellent likeness. I've had amazing offers for it."
"But you won't sell?"
"Perhaps. If I get my price."
"I wish I had money enough to buy it."
He was amused. "What would you do with it?"
A flush stained her cheeks. How could she tell him that in a flash she had seen the portrait over the fireplace of the little house?
She began to talk hurriedly about the lady with the butterflies. "I hate her face. There's something evil about it."
"Stand farther away," said Winslow. "If you'll sit in that chair, you'll get the best effect."
So Hildegarde sat in the king's chair and suited it so well that Winslow wished he might have her painted in an ermine cloak. She looked like a queen. If Crispin had seen her, his heart might have failed him. She was not in the least like the wife of a man with ​no furniture in his house but a loveseat and a footstool and a photograph in a frame!
When the party got back to Round Hill a few days later, Sally found the letter written by old Buck Meriweather. It had been waiting for a week or more and had not been forwarded. And so it happened that after he was dead, the old man spoke to Sally:
"Will you forgive one who is going very soon into a far country for writing as I am going to write? Sometimes we who are about to cross the border see things clearly. That is my only apology for what may seem to you an unwarrantable intrusion. I want Merry to be happy, and I have a feeling that you hold his happiness in your hands. Perhaps I haven't any right to say this. Perhaps it isn't true. But wrong or right, I wish that you would trust life for more than it will give you in the marriage you are contemplating. Won't you?
"That is all I have to say. To put it more definitely into words would be to confuse myself as well as you. I think you know what I mean. Shall we let it rest there, and again, will you forgive me?"
A strange letter, but one that stirred Sally's heart. "Won't you trust life for more than it will give you . . . ?" Wasn't he in effect asking her not to marry Neale?
How absurd! Why, the wedding was less than three weeks away! And her clothes were all made. Caterers were baking cakes, and florists planning decorations. Presents were pouring in. Even now Hildegarde was downstairs posting things in a note-book—the cosmetic boxes of old Irish silver which had come that ​morning, the table set of antique Italian lace, the petit-point bag with the jeweled clasp, the half-dozen duplicate pairs of Colonial candlesticks.
"It's preposterous," Sally said to the doll, Sarah, on the chiffonier.
Yet if she did not marry Neale? She would be free again! A great sense of relief surged over her. She found herself laughing hysterically, as one might who, hopeless on a desert island, sights a sail. She would be saved! She would own herself once more! She who had been bought with emeralds and frozen jade!
In a dream she dressed for dinner. She went downstairs outwardly composed but inwardly in a tumult. The men came in from their hunting. Winslow was in excellent spirits. His bag was big. He handed it to Sampson and stopped for a moment in the library to talk to Sally.
"It is raining hard outside," he said. "If it keeps it up in the morning I'll run into town. Would you like to go with me?"
She shook her head. "I don't believe I'm equal to it."
He glanced at her sharply. "What's the matter? Aren't you well?"
She tried to laugh. "Too much excitement, perhaps."
"I think we shall both be glad when the wedding is over." He stood, looking down at her. "You can rest as much as you like in my big house."
He went away then, and Sally sat thinking of the things he had said. The big house loomed in her ​imagination as grim and gruesome as a penitentiary, a prison with Winslow as a perpetual jailer. All her life she would be shut up with him!
No, she would not do it. She would tell Neale tomorrow. And her mother.