# The Blue Window/Chapter 23

A WEEK later, Hildegarde left for the farm and found Crispin at the train to meet her. He took her out to her old home in his father's car, and as they drove along, all her apprehensions left her. The day was delightful, the air like wine, a golden haze over the hills.
"It is good to be back again," Hildegarde said, and thought that she meant it.
Aunt Olivia and Aunt Catherine welcomed her with beaming faces. Tears were in Hildegarde's eyes as she kissed them. She felt she had never before known their real affection for her.
"Crispin will carry your bag upstairs," Aunt Catherine told her, "and when you come down, we will have supper."
"We have killed the fatted calf," Aunt Olivia announced, "or rather it is a porker. There's a young pig roasting in the oven."
Hildegarde, ascending the stairs, had a sudden vision of what that supper would be—roast pork and a half-dozen hot things to go with it. What would Bobby have said to that—Bobby with his ortolans, his omelettes, his anchovies and artichokes?
As she entered her room, she was conscious of sudden fright. Was it really so small? And so shabby? Had ​she changed so much? She had thought she might find her mother's spirit waiting—the old sense of peace. But now she was aware only of the difference from her chintz-bright chamber at Round Hill, the tall ceilings and gilt garlands of her boudoir in Paris.
Crispin, coming up with the bags, set them down on the threshold. "Glad to get back?" he asked in his quick young voice.
"I don't know."
He glanced at her, saw the shadow on her face, and said the thing which was best for her.
"You won't know how you feel until you get your supper. Come on down and help us eat that young pig. I'll be ashamed of you if you don't have an appetite after your ride."
She found, as she sat at the table, that it wasn't so bad after all. The food was delicious, although there was too much of it, and it was heart-warming to have the three of them hanging on her words, eager to hear of her adventures.
"Crispin used to read us parts of your letters. We were always so glad when he came."
Hildegarde recalled with compunction the scantiness of her correspondence with the two old women. It seemed dreadful that neither of them had known anything but life on the farm. Her soul shuddered away from the thought of such an existence. As for herself, she couldn't stand it. She simply couldn't.
Her aunts insisted that while they washed the dishes, she should go for a walk with Crispin. So the two young people took their way along the familiar paths, ​through the grove, and up the hill where, almost a year ago, they had watched the flying geese.
They sat down at the foot of the great rock, and once more looked off together over the valley. Hildegarde wore a pansy-colored frock of a thin, fluttering material. As the darkness descended, she seemed a part of the purple night. The jewel on her finger matched the sparkle of the stars.
Crispin said out of the dark, "How often I have dreamed of you here like this!"
He told her then of the trysts he had kept on the hill, and of how her mother had seemed to come. "She was very real to me. Perhaps, as she used to say, 'Love never dies'."
"She was wonderful," Hildegarde told him. "Honor and courage were more to her than food and drink. I am not like that. Oh, Crispin, I could never have come back."
"How can you say that? When you haven't been tested?"
"I am like the Carews. They want beauty around them. They must have it. They can't live without it."
There was a new and stubborn note in his voice as he said, "Just what do you mean by beauty, Hildegarde?"
"Oh, having lovely things around you—nothing ugly, or sordid."
"Was it a lovely thing for your father to break your mother's heart?"
"Crispin!"
"Oh, there's beauty in moral and spiritual values, ​Hildegarde. It isn't fashionable to talk about them. But I'll tell you this, that Elizabeth Musgrove found more beauty here on this old farm than Sally Hulburt will find in the whole of Winslow's house."
Crashing words! But with tonic in them. She found herself faltering an apology. "Of course, I don't approve of Sally, nor of the things that Daddy did. But mother forgave him, why shouldn't I?"
"Forgive him if you like—but don't talk of loveliness."
"Crispin, you know this farm is—unspeakable."
"Yes. I don't want you to live here—ever. But I know that nothing any Carew can ever do will match the life your mother made for herself. And for you. It was astounding that amid such surroundings she could hold herself above it all and make her child so sweet."
His voice broke on that. "Oh, Hildegarde, I'm not quarreling with you because you don't like all this. I am quarreling with you because you don't know yourself."
"Perhaps I do know myself."
"No. When the big thing comes, you'll meet it. And you won't meet it in your father's way, but your mother's. You are her child, Hildegarde."
In the momentary silence which followed, a light wind went whispering about them. Was Elizabeth there? Elizabeth Musgrove? In the purple dark?
Crispin's hand found Hildegarde's. "I have something for you."
"What?"
​He pressed a small object into her palm, and as she held it up, it caught the pale shine of the stars.
"What is it?" she asked.
"A key. A silver key."
"What is it for?"
"To unlock the door of a house. Our house."
"But how perfectly absurd!"
"Why?"
"It can't be 'ours.' It may be yours, but it certainly isn't mine."
"It will be some day. I bought it because you are to live in it. I may have to wait—a thousand years. But in the end you'll come."
"In a thousand years there'll be no house."
"Yes. My dream of it will make it real forever, and some day, even if we should be separated here, your reincarnated spirit will find mine waiting on the steps!"
"Don't," she said sharply. "I don't want to come to you as a reincarnated spirit."
"Then come now."
"No. Please don't make love to me, Crispin . . . Your will is so strong . . . And I don't want to be won like that—because your will is stronger. If I ever—care—I want my heart to run to meet you."
He caught both her hands in his. "Pray God that time may come!" he said hoarsely, then flung her hands away and stood up.
"It's time to go," he said, "if I'm to keep my head."
As they walked along together, he told her of the buying of the little house. "It is on the road to ​Mount Vernon, so that we'll be neighbors of George Washington. I motored down and saw the sign For Sale—and it seemed so absolutely ours with a grove of pine trees back of it—and the river in front—and a garden. It isn't paid for, of course, only a part. But I shall work for the rest, and be glad to do it, and when I meet the shade of George Washington coming down the road, I shall say to him, 'It is all very well to be the father of your country, but I'd rather be the husband of Hildegarde Carew!'"
His mood of deep seriousness had passed. Hildegarde found herself talking to him in the old carefree fashion. When they walked through the grove, she tucked her arm in his and in the dark brushed her cheek against his coat. He was a dear and a darling, but she didn't want to marry him. She didn't want to marry anybody. She wanted things to be as they had once been with her father loving her and leaning on her for companionship. Perhaps, when she got back to Round Hill, she might find him like that. He might even let her be friends again with Crispin.·
Crispin stayed over Sunday, and on Monday morning Hildegarde was left alone with her aunts. The routine of farm life began again. It had now to do with harvest-time—fruits and vegetables to be gathered and stored. It was a picturesque crop, and Hildegarde rather enjoyed the days. In the golden September light she stood on a ladder in the orchard and picked apples, or clipped grapes from the vines on the south hill.
The nights were the worst—deadly quiet settled down after supper. Her aunts did their best to stay ​awake and be companionable, but the habit of years was fixed. At half-past eight they would say apologetically, "You won't mind if we go to bed?" and Hildegarde, remembering that dinner at Round Hill was just at its height, would feel desperately that she must flap her wings and fly across the intervening space.
Now and then, in the afternoons, she walked up the hill where she had sat with Crispin. He wrote to her every day, and she would read his letters, leaning against the big rock.
She heard, too, from Bobby every day by wire or telephone. He begged her to let him come and see her. She was appalled by the fear that he might. She couldn't imagine Bobby at the farm. He wouldn't understand how once it had been glorified by her mother's presence. He would see only its squalor. Bobby belonged to dainty and delicate backgrounds. She felt that if once he faced the big black stove in the sitting room, he would dissolve with dismay.
There was, she discovered, one significant fact about her so sojourn on the farm. She found herself missing things, not people. There was no one at Round Hill, not even her father, whose companionship seemed vital at the moment. The old aunts did very well indeed for company. She missed, as it were, the stage properties—the crystal cat, the bronze turtle, the silver pheasants on the table, Delia's crisp ginghams, Sampson's delectable trays, the scarlet-coated ancestor in the library.
It was Sally's wedding which took Hildegarde back finally to Round Hill. Sally wrote that she wanted ad​vice about the bridesmaids' costumes, and that it was time things were getting under way.
On her last night at the farm, Hildegarde said farewell to that upper room in which she had spent so many hours with her mother. Everything spoke of the past—the little beds so close together, the books on the shelves, the portraits on the wall. Here, after all the tumult of her unhappy romance, Elizabeth Musgrove had found peace. Here alone she had fought her battles; here the baby Hildegarde had lain on her arm, and here, in later years, the two had talked together. Hildegarde remembered that lovely face lighted by the candle, and lighted, too, by the spirit which burned within.
She knelt for a moment by her mother's bed. "Darling, darling," she said, "if you could only come back to me!"
When she told her aunts "good-by," she cried a little. She couldn't understand her emotion. She wasn't really sorry to go. Her blood quickened, indeed, at the thought of the good times that lay ahead of her. But there was a touch of sadness in this second separation from the place which had so long sheltered her.
She met Sally in Baltimore. They were to stay at Miss Anne's for a few days. Mrs. Hulburt was in New York having some old jewels reset for her daughter's wedding-present.
"Thank heaven, they're pearls," Sally said, as she and Hildegarde sat in Miss Anne's sun-room an hour after Hildegarde's arrival. "I hate anything else. Those white jade ornaments of Neale's give me the creeps."
​Dickory, the parrot, preening her feathers, stopped for a moment to laugh sepulchrally.
"Listen to that," Sally said, "isn't she human? Well, I wish I could sit on a perch all day like a parrot, and have feathers for clothes. I am fed up on tailors and dressmakers."
She threw herself full-length on the couch, her hands over her head. "Everything is to be in the Spanish effect," she explained. "Madame says that I am the blonde Castilian type, whatever that may mean, and I'm to have a fan of lace in my hair, with the wedding veil in a mantilla drapery, and a short dress with lace flounces. Theatrical, I call it, but Madame says it will be ravissante.
She stuck her slippered feet up on the arm of the couch. "I wish I cared what I am going to wear." She turned and buried her face in a cushion.
Hildegarde went over and knelt beside her. "Sally!"
"Oh, I know I'm a fool. But I've got to go through with it."
"You haven't got to go through with it. Tell Neale."
"Do you think he'll give me up now? I'd have to fight him and fight mother, and I couldn't hold out."
"But if it means a life's unhappiness?"
"Oh, I shan't feel this way afterward. It's like taking a cold plunge. One gets hardened." She sat up, the tears still staining her cheeks. "You're a darling, Hildegarde, to care. Nobody else does."
In the days that followed, Mrs. Hulburt, Sally, and Hildegarde rushed hectically about town. Then, ​"worn to a frazzle," as Sally put it, they went back to Round Hill. They found there word from Meriweather. His uncle was very ill. There seemed to be little hope. Merry was afraid he would have to cancel all his plans for participation in the wedding. He was sorry, but it could not of course be helped.
The letter was written to Sally. She read it aloud at luncheon and listened, without joining in, to the various comments. When the meal was over, she mounted her horse and rode down to the inn.
"I want to use your telephone," she said to Christopher, "it is quite clandestine."
He smiled at her. "That sounds worse than it is, doesn't it?"
"Perhaps. I want to talk to Merry, and I don't want to shout it to the world. You know how the telephones are at Round Hill. One in the hall, with an echo like a foghorn, and the other in Louis' room with no chance for the rest of us to use it."
There was a booth at the inn, and Sally shut herself into it. When she got Merry on the wire, she said, "I am down at Christopher's, so I can say anything I please, but first, I want to ask about your uncle."
"I'm afraid he's very ill, Sally."
"He's such a dear. Will you give him my love? I liked him. He has eyes like yours. Please don't answer that, Merry. I couldn't say it at Round Hill, but down here it doesn't sound half bad. And shan't I see you before I am Mrs. Neale Winslow? The time is short, you know."
"Too short."
​"Well, the sooner the better, as the man said when they put the noose around his neck. . . ."
"Sally! That sounds a bit tragical for a bride?"
"I'm not a bride. I am chief performer in a Spanish extravaganza. You should see my costume, Merry."
"Your wedding gown?"
"Call it that if you will.
"You ought to be married in sackcloth and ashes."
"Don't!" sharply. "I didn't call you up to be scolded."
"I'm sorry."
"I wonder if you are—really? Merry—try to come to my wedding . . . I want you."
"My dear, I will."
"Promise?"
"If it is humanly possible, Sally."
"Well, then 'good-by' and 'God bless you.'"
As she rang off, he wondered if it was a little sob that he caught across the miles. He went back to his uncle, his mind in a turmoil.
"Sally sent her love to you."
"She probably meant it for you."
Merry shook his head and sat down. "She's going to marry Winslow."
"She wouldn't look at Winslow if you cared. I read that between the lines of every letter she wrote from Paris. And somebody ought to save her from that marriage."
"You mean, of course, that I should."
"I want you to be happy."
"I think I have put happiness behind me, Uncle Buck."
​"We all think that, dear boy, when we are young. But there's more than one woman in the world—and this old house is lonely. . . ."
That was all they said about it. But that night, before old Buchanan Meriweather went to bed, he wrote a letter and gave it to his nurse. She was to mail it herself the first thing in the morning, and it was addressed to Sally Hulburt.