# The Blue Window/Chapter 7

IT was on Thanksgiving afternoon that Crispin had a letter from Hildegarde. He was home for the holidays, had been to church that morning, had shared the thankful feast with his parents, and all the time there had been the thought that lying there in the post-office might be a letter from his love. He had not gone for it earlier in the day, because he had wanted to taste the full savor of it when he was alone. He wanted to read it in some quiet spot where he and Hildegarde had been together, and have her again with him in spirit.
So he turned from the post-office and followed a path which led along the way he had walked with Hildegarde on the day of her mother's funeral. He faced the west, and the trees of the grove as he passed through were black against the flaming clouds which swept the heavens like a conflagration. Crispin felt a sense of great exaltation as he walked in the glory of that flaming light with Hildegarde's letter in his pocket.
He ascended at last the hill where he had stood with her to watch the flying geese. He looked off again toward the south. She was there, far beyond his gaze, but tied to him still by the past which they had shared with each other and with Hildegarde's mother.
​She spoke now of that past in her letter. "Do you remember last Thanksgiving Day? Mother and I went to church, and you were there, and you walked home with us."
Yes, he remembered. How proud he had been of Hildegarde's girlish beauty, of her mother's light carriage and free step! The weather had been almost spring-like, and they had loitered, stopping at last at the cemetery where Elizabeth was so soon to sleep.
Thinking of it now, it seemed to Crispin incredible that all that was left of that quick and burning spirit which had been Elizabeth Musgrove should lie sleeping in that quiet place. She had seemed to him always such an amazing and splendid person. Whether he had found her digging in the garden or tending her stock, there had been an air of detachment from toil, as if the thing she did was not a task, but an achievement.
That had been the charm of Elizabeth for him. She had set her own standards. She had wrested from what would have seemed to some women intolerable conditions a measure of contentment. If there had been a cry in her heart for what she had lost, there had been a song on her lips for what she had found—a brave woman and a royal one.
Early that morning Crispin had gone to the cemetery to lay a wreath for Hildegarde on her mother's grave. He had added for himself a little chaplet of laurel tied with gold. He had felt that the woman who lay there deserved a crown.
And she had passed her courage on to her daughter. ​Hildegarde had not told Crispin all that had happened on election night, but she had told him a part of it and had ended with this:
"Father doesn't want me to have a mind of my own, but I must have it, mustn't I? Mother's love didn't demand that I should be her echo. Sometimes father doesn't seem to mind opposition. He laughs at me and says I am like him. But when he is in one of his moods I have to be careful—I wouldn't tell this to any one else in the world, Crispin, but you always understand."
Crispin's heart leaped at that. Yet, as he read on, he became aware of a sense of disquiet, almost of foreboding. For Hildegarde was talking of Meriweather.
"We are going to church together on Thanksgiving morning. No one else here goes to church—not even Miss Anne. She says she is emancipated, and father is indifferent. But I went last week with Merry to a century-old chapel at the cross-roads. There's a high church priest, so that there were candles on the altar, and there's a war memorial window, with a young soldier in golden armor and his face turned toward a great Light. Mr. Meriweather says that's the way it ought to be. That artists who make memorials of tired and stricken men don't know the Something that illumines men's souls at the very end. He says that war is beastly, but that the souls of men are not beastly. And that's why he likes the soldier in golden armor, with his eyes fixed on the Light—"
Crispin felt that it was a thing to disturb him, this growing intimacy with Meriweather. His name was sprinkled through the pages. She had called him once ​or twice, "Merry." She rode with him, danced with him.
"I am not doing many gay things—but we take up the rugs in the living-room and put on the records, and I am not nearly as awkward as I thought I'd be."
So, almost in spite of herself, she was being swept on to new adventures, and it was not he who shared them, but Meriweather. It was Meriweather who might in time come to share her confidences.
Then young Crispin, looking off toward the south, said in his heart:
"She is mine. No one else shall have her."
If Hildegarde had loved him, he would have felt no fears. Perhaps she did love him, but she had made no promises. And letters were a slender bond with which to hold a woman.
A little moon was hanging over the hills when at last he turned toward home. The valley lay all purple shadows below him. But it was to the sky that he lifted his face as he went along. "God give her to me," he said, and found that his eyes were wet.
That night he talked to his father and mother. "I want to go to Baltimore for the Christmas holidays, to see Hildegarde."
"Is it an invitation?" his mother asked.
"No. But no one ever gets a thing unless he goes after it."
They smiled at him. "So that's it," was what their smiles meant.
"Hildegarde's mine," Crispin told them. "I'm not going to let anybody else have her, and the way to win a woman is to win her."
​"Why should she want anybody else?" his mother demanded.
"Why should she want me? But I can't see my future without her. And she's all linked up with my past. I love her childhood and her little-girlhood. No other man will ever see her as I have seen her."
He was in dead earnest. And they met his earnestness with their own.
"We'll miss you for the holidays," his mother said. "But you'd better go."
So it was settled. None of them was very practical. Crispin couldn't be married for a year or two at the best. But a woman who loved him would wait. Hildegarde was his, and he was going to tell her so. It all sounded simple.
But it really wasn't so simple as it sounded.
Crispin's letter came to Round Hill on a snowy morning. Sampson put it on Hildegarde's tray, and it lay there while he made her toast and boiled her egg.
Delia, upstairs, was drawing water for Hildegarde's bath and singing in a voice of poignant sweetness.
Hildegarde, listening, felt that it was delicious and delightful to lie in bed and have Delia wait on her. Delia had taken on her duties of lady's maid voluntarily. When Hildegarde had protested, she had said,
"I ain't doin' it, Honey-chile, because you likes it, but because I does."
​Which was the truth. Hildegarde's coming had given a fillip, as it were, to Delia's existence. She enjoyed vicariously the things that her young mistress did, and the things she wore. The new gowns which she laid out shone and shimmered for her as well as for Hildegarde. And Hildegarde's experiences, retailed each morning, took on the aspect of a Thousand-and-One-Nights enchantment to the enraptured maid.
This morning they had talked about the Christmas party. Round Hill was to be very gay, with a half-dozen house guests and two servants added to help Delia and Sampson. One of these servants was Mary Jackson—Delia's own cousin.
"I'm havin' her do the cookin'," Delia had stated. "Ma'y kin roas' a tukkey twel hit tase like pa'tridge. I told Mr. Louis effen he'd have Ma'y Jackson an' ol' Edward, we could lay the res' of our troubles at the feet of Jesus."
"Delia!" To Hildegarde, Delia's frankness of expression seemed nothing short of blasphemous.
Delia gave her an oblique glance. "Well, Mr. Louis knows Ma'y, and he knows Edward. Ma'y can cook, and Edward can wait, and that leaves me and Sampson free to circulate."
"Circulating" was, in Delia's vocabulary, the cream of all that was desirable. With the things of the kitchen and dining-room off her mind, she could flit from the room of one feminine guest to another, giving help where it was needed, and getting in return the gossip.
While Hildegarde had her bath, Delia went down for the breakfast tray. The letters lay in a neat pile ​beside the silver covers of the hot dishes. On the top of the pile of letters was Crispin's!
Hildegarde read it before she ate a mouthful. The news it contained seemed too good to be true. Crispin was coming! He wrote that he would be in Baltimore during the holidays, and hoped she would let him come to Round Hill to say "A Merry Christmas."
"The darling, the darling," she found herself saying. She had never called Crispin that even in her thoughts, but she said it again, "The darling!"
Delia's voice came from the bathroom, where she was scrubbing the tub, "Nobody knows the troubles I has—"
Hildegarde felt there weren't any troubles in the world—Crispin was coming—!
"Delia," she called.
"Yes, Honey?"
"Is there an extra room? A friend of mine has written that he is to be in Baltimore, and I want him here for the week-end."
Delia, standing in the bathroom door, surveyed her mistress speculatively. "He mus' be made of gold to make yo' eyes shine like that."
"I've known him all my life, Delia."
"They's some folks I've known all my life," said wise Delia, "that don' make my eyes shine."
Hildegarde passed that over. "Do you think we'll have a room for him?"
"They ain' one left, Honey-chile. Some of them might double up—two beds. But you'll have to ask yo' Daddy."
​Hildegarde finished her breakfast, got up, dressed, and wrote a note to her father.
"Daddy, darling, do have lunch with me in the library. Aunt Anne isn't coming down, and I've something most important to say to you."
She was flinging her "darlings," you see, wherever they might fall. She even called the two dogs "darlings" when she found them on the hearth, waiting for her, with their tails tapping.
Her father came at last, kissed her, and put a finger under her chin. "Well, what's the important matter?"
"Daddy, Crispin is coming."
"Crispin?"
"Yes. He's a boy I've known all my life. He's to be in Baltimore, and I want to ask him here for the week-end."
Her father drew out a chair for her, sat down. "Why should you ask him here?" His tone was sharp.
Hildegarde's heart began to beat wildly. "He's my friend."
"But not one of my invited guests."
The color was drained from Hildegarde's cheeks. "But—can't I invite him?"
"As a house guest? I see no reason. The sooner you cut your ties with the farm, Hildegarde, the better."
"But he isn't on the farm. His father is a judge, and Crispin—why, there isn't any one finer than Crispin."
​Her father looked at her—flushed cheeks, tear-wet eyes. "Are you in love with him?"
The flush deepened. "I haven't promised—anything—"
"But he's in love with you."
"Yes. But—"
Her father beat his fist on the arm of his chair, "I'm not going to have you in love with anybody. Do you think I am going to let any one take you away from me?"
Hildegarde's breath was quick. "But we don't have to think of that, do we? Crispin isn't coming to marry me. Why, Daddy, he isn't out of college."
"I don't care whether he is in college or out of it. I don't want him coming here. I am not going to ask him as a house guest. You can have him down for an afternoon. That's the best I can do. There isn't a bed for him."
Sampson came in just then with a tray. Hildegarde, helping herself, hardly knew what she was doing. It seemed to her that her father, peppering a poached egg composedly, was a monster of inhospitality. Why, Crispin was her friend, her mother's friend. The one who loved them both.
Sampson left them, and suddenly, almost without her volition, Hildegarde found herself saying, "If Crispin can't come to see me here, I shall go back to the farm."
Through a blinding whirl of emotions she heard her father's violent voice:
"You'll do nothing of the kind."
​"But I shall. Do you think I'd stay?"
"That's nonsense, Hildegarde. Simply because the beds are full."
"Oh, if it were only a matter of beds," she flung at him, "I'd give up mine. I'd sleep on the floor." She began to sob. "Why, Crispin—Crispin—was mother's friend—she loved him."
Dead silence. Her father staring at her.
Then, in the midst of that pause, the curtains parted, and Meriweather in riding clothes came in.
"How cozy you look!" he said.
Hildegarde could not speak. Carew laughed harshly.
"Come on in," he said. "We are not cozy. We are quarreling. Hildegarde has just told me that she is going back to the farm."