# The Blue Window/Chapter 28

THE old farmhouse was dark with the gloom of a rainy October day. The two aunts went about their tasks drearily. There wasn't much to look forward to. Ahead of them were other rainy days, and the snows of winter. Monotony. Old age closing in upon them. Loneliness.
At noon they ate a silent meal. Still raining. Drearily. Aunt Olivia had an inspiration. "I'll bake this afternoon instead of tomorrow. If it clears I'll want to be working out-of-doors in the morning."
Aunt Catherine, cheered by a break in the weekly program, said, "Make some spice cake, and we'll send a box to Hildegarde."
Aunt Olivia had a feeling that sending cake to Hildegarde was carrying coals to Newcastle. Yet such things were the only expression they could make of their affection for their niece. "I'll frost it and put nuts on it."
They washed the dishes and built a great fire in the range. The kitchen glowed with it. The rain streamed against the windows. The old women beat eggs, creamed butter and sugar, and found a certain excitement in testing the boiling syrup for the frosting until it showed thread-like filaments on the spoon.
​"They'll be having plenty of cake for Sally's wedding," Aunt Catherine said, out of her thoughts of Hildegarde.
"Not like this." In some things Aunt Olivia was dogmatic. This cake recipe had been handed down in her family. She was sure that nothing baked at Round Hill could measure up to it.
Their last letter from their niece had given an account of the spectacular wedding preparations. She had sent samples of Sally's dress and of her own. The old aunts had never heard anything like it. They wished they might see Hildegarde in her bridesmaid's gown. They were sure she would outshine Sally.
"Perhaps she'll be getting married some day," Miss Catherine said, "and we can be there."
"If she marries Crispin, she won't have all that fuss and feathers."
"She won't marry him if Louis has his way."
"I don't know as I blame him—when you think of all his friends can do for her."
They went on beating their eggs and cracking their nuts for the frosting. The cakes were out of the oven now, and the room was rich with fragrance.
"Let's have some for our supper," Aunt Catherine said, "it's all I'll want with a cup of tea."
"We are getting so we eat less and less," her sister told her.
"Well, most old people get that way, don't they?"
They were beginning to call themselves old. It was a sign of disintegration. They needed youth about them and high spirits. They had no initiative when it came to making new interests. In the death of Eliza​beth and in the departure of her daughter they had lost all which had given zest to their lives.
Aunt Olivia smoothed the frosting in snowy layers over the dark cakes. Aunt Catherine placed the nuts in prim rows on top. When they finished, they looked at the clock. "It's after five," Aunt Olivia said, "we'll go out and feed the chickens, and then come in and have our tea."
They wore rubber coats, and carried a lantern. It was dark enough for that, and they had to visit the barns and outhouses. Of late they had hired a man to help with the heavy work. But he left at four and they made their rounds after he had gone to be sure that everything was safe and snug.
As they came back to the house they heard the whistle of the five-fifteen train—a whistle made hoarse tonight, and faint, by the thickness of the atmosphere.
The five-fifteen was the most important train that stopped at the town—an express which went on to the far west. On clear nights as it came out of the cut, trailing a long line of lighted windows, it was a challenge to their imaginations. Who sat at those windows? And where were they going? And how did they look? And what did they say? And what did they eat at this hour in the dining-car?
But tonight the rain shut the train from them, so they went on into the kitchen and closed the door. There they found warmth and the rich fragrance which still lingered from the baking of the cakes. The room was very still. Not a sound but the streaming rain, and the singing kettle. It was very cosy, but they were ​conscious of a need of company. On nights like this they felt the loneliness.
They set two plates on the red table-cloth, and made the tea. They had brought in the daily paper from the mail box. After supper they would wash the dishes, and Aunt Olivia would read aloud to Aunt Catherine. And that would be their evening.
The storm increased. The rain was noisier than ever, so noisy that when Aunt Olivia said, "Did you hear a car stop, Catherine?" her sister said, "It was the wind."
But it was not the wind. Presently there was the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the porch. Then a voice that made their hearts jump. Hildegarde's! "Such a night . . . if you'll hold my umbrella."
She came in, the man who had driven her from the station just behind her. "Such a night," she said again, "oh, you darlings. . . ."
The wind literally blew her into their arms. The man who had brought her bag closed the door with difficulty. "If this keeps up," he stated, "it 'ull be doing some damage."
But what cared those two old women if the wind blew or if the storm raged? Youth had entered their lonely house and had lighted it. Hildegarde's cheeks were red with the bluster of the night, her eyes were bright with happiness. "Oh, you darlings, darlings, darlings!" she said over and over again, and the reiteration was like a song.
She paid the man and he went out. Hildegarde wore a raincoat of thin red oilskin. She had a red umbrella and a red hat. Her vividness was amazing. "You're ​like a redbird, like a redbird," the old women said to her. "Come and get warm, come and get warm. . . . Have you had your supper . . . have you had your supper? . . ." they kept saying these things over and over again in their excitement. It was a perfect babel of sound, and out of it Hildegarde's voice emerged, with laughter in it. "I'm not in the least chilled, but I'm hungry enough to eat a house."
They helped her strip off the shimmering coat, they took the red hat from her, and opened the red umbrella that it might dry. They did these things in a sort of dream. It seemed incredible that she was here when they had wanted her so much. Usually the things they had wanted had been withheld. But here she was, and she was saying: "I am never going back. Never."
"Why not?" they asked, breathlessly.
"Oh, it's a long story. I'll tell you while we're having supper. I'm starved. Aunt Olivia, you've baked a spice cake. What a heavenly thing to do. The minute I opened the door I smelled the dee-liciousness. . . ."
They felt it was delightful the way she said "dee-licous." They laughed with her. "You run along upstairs," Aunt Olivia urged, "and make yourself comfortable, and we'll cook something hot. There's everything in the pantry. . . ."
After that they rushed back and forth excitedly, getting things ready. "We'll have coffee," Aunt Catherine said, "I'll drink a cup if it keeps me awake all night."
Aunt Olivia felt that it would be a great adventure to keep awake. She wanted coffee, and she wanted more than that. She wanted a good supper. She ​wanted to eat with Hildegarde. She wanted something of everything they would cook. "We'll have cream toast enough for all of us, and poach enough eggs."
Because of the lack of warmth, they decided not to eat in the dining-room. But they put a white cloth in place of the red one on the kitchen table, and they set on it glass dishes of pickled peaches, and other pickles and red plum jelly, and strawberry preserves, and when Hildegarde came down, and beheld the steaming dishes, she said, "Is this the fatted calf?"
And Aunt Olivia said, "This is your welcome home."
But there was another welcome. Hildegarde had found it in that upper room where she had slept with her mother. This time the room had not seemed small, it had not seemed squalid. It had seemed like a calm and beautiful island in a sea of strife. With the rain beating around it, it was safe and still. All the clamour she had left at Round Hill seemed far away. Blessedly far. She could not even catch the echo.
And so as she sat at her aunts' table, and they bent their heads in their usual silent grace, she lifted her own, "Oh, dear Lord," she said, "I am so—thankful. . . ." That was all. But it seemed to the old aunts, listening, that their sister, Elizabeth, spoke.
While Hildegarde ate, she talked to them. She told them everything. They had a right to know. Summing it all up, it came to this—that Louis had asked things of her which were impossible. There had been no other way but to leave him.
"If I had stayed, I should have given up my self-respect—my freedom."
​Aunt Olivia, pouring a third reckless cup of coffee, said: "It won't be easy after you have lived in luxury."
"There's the luxury of a mind at ease," Hildegarde said staunchly.
They gazed at her with admiration. She seemed so strong and sure. Yet she was slender as a willow, a slip of a thing, almost a child.
It was significant that, throughout the whole conversation there had been no mention of Crispin. They had not seemed to avoid it.
But they had avoided it. And now out of a silence in which they heard the beating of the rain, the howling of the wind, Aunt Catherine said, "Does Crispin know that you've left your father?"
"No. I am going to write to him tonight."
It was a simple statement, but something in her voice seemed to open to the two old women the gate of romance, as Crispin had opened it when he had talked to them. And as they listened they did not feel barred out of her paradise as those two dark men had felt on the morning she had left Round Hill. They had rather a sense of being included in this miracle which was happening before their eyes.
After Hildegarde went upstairs, they talked of it in low tones. "She's found out that she cares," they told each other, as they made the house fast for the night.
They could hear Hildegarde moving about in her room. It was wonderful how those little echoes of her footsteps broke the loneliness which had bound them for so long.
Longing to hear again that lovely voice, Aunt Olivia called up the stairs: "Have you any ink?"
​"My fountain pen is filled."
"Are you warm enough?"
"Yes."
"You might write your letter by the kitchen fire."
"I shall sit up in bed with a pillow for a desk. I've done it a thousand times, and with the blankets I shall be toasting."
She was standing now at the head of the stairs with a faint light behind her. She wore a pale blue robe—a thing of silky texture and wing-like sleeves.
"It's like having an angel in the house," Aunt Olivia remarked as she rejoined her sister in the kitchen.
"I wonder if she'd like her breakfast upstairs."
"You might ask her."
Aunt Catherine trotted into the narrow hall, and had presently, her glimpse of the angel-visitant shining above her. "Shall we bring your breakfast up to you?"
"Darling . . . of course not. I want to come down. I want to run out in the rain if it is raining. I want to run out in the sun if it is shining. And oh, Aunt Catherine, if we could have hot cakes. . . ."
They would, they planned ecstatically, have sausage with the cakes. They found their own appetites returning. They no longer felt old. "We'll set the table in the dining-room. We might as well begin to have a fire in there, now that Hildegarde's back."
It was amazing to be swept along like this on a tide of anticipation. Whether it rained or shone in the morning, Hildegarde would be going in and out, she would eat with her young girl's appetite. They would hear her lovely laughter.
​After they went to bed, the reckless cup of coffee kept them awake. But little cared they! The wind blew and the rain washed unceasingly against the windows, but, upstairs, snug as a bird in a nest, Hildegarde was writing a letter. They had a vision of her propped up on her pillows, the blue gown about her, the sweep of dark hair across her forehead, the candle on her bedside table, her pen flying.
But Hildegarde's pen was not flying. She was finding her letter hard to write. She began bravely, stopped, went on, tore up what she had written. For how was she ever going to tell Crispin what was in her mind? That she loved him? That her heart beat high with the thought of it? That against all the shams and shallowness his strength and sincerity shone like a star? And that she had known it all in that moment when her father had said: "You are going back to marry that clodhopper—Crispin."
She would, of course, never tell Crispin that her father had called him a clodhopper. But she would tell him the rest. How her heart had called to him. How she had wanted to take the train at once to his little house, and unlock the door with her silver key. How her sorrow at leaving her father had been swallowed up in her joy that at last she knew her love.
Yet how could she write it? What words were adequate? What pen could flame with the fire that burned her soul?
Another attempt. Failure! She lay back on her pillows, dreams in her eyes. How still it was, how heavenly still, with a sudden break in the storm. . . .
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John . . . all the saints ​had come back. And another saint . . . Elizabeth, leaning close, with wings folded about the bed. . . .
The wind again, shaking the shutters, the rain splashing. Hildegarde roused herself, picked up her pen, wrote her letter, sealed it. Then she blew out her candle, settled herself for the night . . . slept.
The five saints guarded her—the four at the posts and the one with folded wings. Peace was there in the midst of the storm. And promise for the future.