The Blue Window

Front matter

The Blue Window

The Holly Hedge

Peacock Feathers

The Wearing of Black

HILDEGARDE had always known that her mother was different from the others, but she had not known why. She had thought it might be because, before her father died, her mother had had an easy time. And Aunt Catherine and Aunt Olivia had never had an easy time. They had worked hard, as girls, on the farm, and they worked hard now. Aunt Olivia, to be sure, had been married, but she had worked hard for her husband, and when he left her a widow, she made her home with Aunt Catherine and kept on working.

At first, they had all done woman's work, but when the war came on, with labor scarce, the three sisters toiled out of doors, sowing, planting, hoeing, weeding. None of them liked it except Hildegarde's mother. She had explained it to Hildegarde:

"When I plant a seed, I feel that it is an act of creation, as if I had painted a picture or had written a poem—and I love the smell of the fresh earth, with everything bursting into beauty."

Hildegarde's mother had never talked like that to Aunt Catherine and Aunt Olivia. She had kept such thoughts for her child. Now that she was dead, Hildegarde dared not think of the things her mother had said to her. They tugged at her heart until she felt it would burst in her breast. It was only by not remembering that she could go on living.

It was these thoughts of her mother's which had made her seem so different from the others, and she was different, too, because she put on gloves when she worked, to keep her hands smooth, and waved her hair, and wore her cheap, plain clothes with an air of distinction. Yet these things did not quite explain why she and her sisters were so unlike. Now and then their divergence of ideas would create a crisis, as when the aunts would protest that Hildegarde's manners were too fine for a farm.

"It makes me nervous to have her stand up when I come in a room. None of the other boys and girls do it."

"I don't want her to be like the other boys and girls," Hildegarde's mother had said.

Yet in spite of that unexplained fineness, her mother had never shirked the hardest labor. Indeed, it was whispered that hard work had killed her. Hildegarde hated that. She knew it was not true. Her mother had said:

"Work is the most beautiful thing in the world, my darling. You don't know it yet, but you will some day. And it holds people from madness."

Her mother had said these things to her, usually, when they were in their own big room, their two little white beds side by side, a candle by each bed, and a book.

Hildegarde's mother had always read late into the night. Hildegarde would read until half-past nine, and then blow out her candle and kiss her mother. And her mother would say:

"God bless you, my darling, and keep you safe."

It was this blessing which Hildegarde missed now before she went to sleep. It was, indeed, hard to get to sleep without it. And it was dreadful to have that other little bed empty beside her—dreadful, dreadful, dreadful—

She tried to reach out in the dark to that vague thing, her mother's soul. Love never died, her mother had said. It lived on and on until eternity. Hildegarde had always believed in guardian angels—that they were around her, and the saints—

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless the bed that I lie on—

But now there was no one around her; the angels had fled, and the saints. There was nothing out there in the immeasurable dark; her mother had been caught on the wave of some vast sea of blackness which had swallowed her up.

Hildegarde had kept, however, the awfulness of this feeling to herself. It would have been impossible to talk about it to Aunt Catherine and Aunt Olivia. They were good-hearted, but uncomprehending. There was one person who might have understood, but he was away at the State College. Hildegarde had felt that when he heard of her bereavement he would come to her. But he had not come.

So she had gone to the cemetery in the carriage with her aunts, and had come back to the feast which had been prepared for the relatives and friends who had seen so little of her mother in life, but who had traveled far to do her honor after death.

They all sat around a great table which was loaded with hearty food—boiled beef and baked ham and stacks of bread, pickles and slaw and potato salad, and cakes and pies and preserves. Hildegarde drank a glass of milk and crumbled some bread on her plate. The people around her were solicitous. "You ought to eat," they said. She felt they would have been more solicitous if she had cried at the funeral. She was sure they thought she should have cried. They couldn't, of course, know how numb she had felt. And dazed. She saw their faces now around the table in a blurred line. None of them looked natural; they were either too broad or too tall—as she had seen people in convex and concave mirrors. And they were wabbly, like a reflection in water when the wind blows over it—

She heard some one cry sharply, "Hildegarde," and another voice, "She has fainted."

She came to herself to find that she was on the sofa in the sitting-room, and that a lot of women were bending over her. Aunt Olivia had a glass in her hand which gave out the sweet, spiced aroma of home-made wine.

She learned, when at last she sat up, that her fainting had given her a new place among them. They no longer thought her unfeeling. When the meal was finished, they would not let her help clear the table. They insisted that she lie on the sofa and rest.

Some of the guests went away as soon as they had eaten, but some of the women stayed to help Aunt Catherine and Aunt Olivia wash the dishes, and set the house in order. The men who belonged to these women went out of doors and smoked their pipes and cigars; they talked about their cows and their crops and their little Ford cars.

When the women finished their work, they all came into the sitting-room. It was not late, for they had eaten at twelve. They pulled up the window-shades, restoring the house once more to its normal aspect. The pale October sun streamed in. Hildegarde sat on the high, old horsehair sofa. There was a fire in the tall, iron stove, and the women drew their chairs into a circle around it. The air was chilly—for the sunshine had been excluded, and the windows had been opened to let out the last faint odors of fading flowers and stagnant air.

The women talked about many things, while Hildegarde listened. At last they talked about the wearing of black.

There were, it seemed, two factions—the women who had modern minds and those who hadn't. Mourning, said the modern group, was out of date. One could wear red or blue or green and mourn, and not make the rest of the world unhappy. Quite surprisingly, it seemed to Hildegarde, Aunt Olivia and Aunt Catherine sided with this group.

"It would be foolish," Aunt Catherine said, "for the child to put on black. It would make her gloomy."

And Aunt Catherine supplemented this with, "It would be expensive."

Hildegarde's little white face, under its sweeping cloud of dark hair, was troubled. Her thin hands were clasped tight in her lap. "I want to be gloomy," she said. "And I am going to wear black."

They all turned and looked at her, perched on the high old sofa, just the tips of her toes touching the carpet. She looked about twelve, but she was eighteen. Nobody had ever thought of Hildegarde as grown-up. Nobody but Crispin Harlowe, and he was at college.

She held to her point, arguing it before them all. "I loved my mother," she said, "and I should hate a red dress or a blue one. I should like to put ashes on my head, and tear my hair—"

"That will do, Hildegarde," her Aunt Olivia said. "You can wear black if you want to, but don't get all worked up about it."

Then Hildegarde fled from them all, and rushed up to her room to cry wildly, calling on her mother, "Darling, darling, darling—"

It was nearly three o'clock when at last she rose from her bed and went to the window and looked out. It had been a dry fall, and the trees which lined the driveway had been blown bare by the October winds. There was no wind today, and a sort of amethyst haze enveloped the world. Hildegarde's mother had loved these Indian summer days, with a few grapes still on the vines, a few chrysanthemums still glowing in the garden. Her slight figure seemed to move even now in the midst of that amethystine haze.

The farmhouse stood well back from the road, where there still waited a line of more or less shabby cars. Hildegarde wished that she might get into one of the cars and ride away. She hated to face the loneliness of the house when there was no one left in it but her two aunts and herself. She wondered how she was going to stand it.

Something stirred in her for the first time. Re- bellion. Anything would be better than this. If her mother had not left her so suddenly, they might have planned it.

There was a tap on her door. "Hildegarde."

"Yes, Aunt Catherine."

Her aunt came in. In her hand she held a little red-lacquered box. "Your mother left it for you," she said. "I thought this was the time to give it to you. It is always hardest after the funeral."

It came to Hildegarde, with a kind of shock, that Aunt Catherine, too, was unhappy. The plump, flat face showed signs of weeping. She stood there, bulbous and ungainly in her black dress, a picture of unattractive woe.

"I don't know how we are going to get along without Bessie," she said. Her features were contorted; her bosom rose and fell.

Hildegarde had never liked to have them call her mother "Bessie," but now there seemed something pathetic in the return to the childish name—there had been a time when the three sisters had been to each other "Katie" and "Ollie" and "Bessie." It had been her mother who had stopped the use of the diminutives—"Olivia" and "Catherine" and "Elizabeth" were too lovely, she had said, to be spoiled.

Yet now Aunt Catherine had gone back to the little name, and Hildegarde was moved by it and felt a sense of nearness and affection for her poor old aunt, and of compunction that she had wanted to leave her.

"Oh, Aunt Catherine," she said, "why did God do it?"

Something soft and luminous shone in Aunt Cath- erin's faded eyes. "Don't blame it on God," she said. "She will be happier."

Hildegarde caught her breath at that. In her youth and egotism, she had not considered her mother's happiness, but her own "I don't believe she could be happy away from me."

"She has never been happy since she lost your father," Aunt Catherine said.

A wild feeling of jealousy assailed Hildegarde. Was that why she couldn't reach her mother out there in the dark? Was she so happy that she had forgotten earth and all that she had left behind? The thought brought desolation.

"I can't bear it," she said tensely, "to be left alone. I don't know what I am going to do with my life."

"None of us does," said Aunt Catherine. "Olivia and I ain't got much to live for."

Again with youth's selfishness Hildegarde felt that it didn't really matter about Aunt Olivia and Aunt Catherine. They were old; the years did not stretch out interminably before them. And they did not suffer, not with the sharp poignancy of youth. She could not know, of course, that Aunt Olivia and Aunt Catherine did not think of themselves as old. Neither of them was fifty. Hildegarde's mother had died at forty-one.

Some one downstairs was calling Aunt Catherine. She handed the box to Hildegarde.

"There is a letter in it from your mother. I expect you'll be surprised when you read what she has to tell you. She told us she was going to do it, and made us promise not to tell you first."

Hildegarde took the box from her; her heart was beating madly. She waited until Aunt Catherine had gone before she opened the box. The letter lay on top, with her name written on it in her mother's firm script. She was eager to read it, yet half afraid to break the seal. She hardly knew why she was afraid. It was, perhaps, as one holds back a little before crossing the line which leads to undiscovered country.

She read the letter through once. Then read it again. It was astounding. Her father was not dead. He was living somewhere in the East. A divorce had been granted him the year that Hildegarde was born!

That Hildegarde might understand the thing which had happened, her mother rehearsed the history of her early years. Some of it Hildegarde knew, but in the light of the things the letter told, the events of her mother's girlhood gained a new significance.

Elizabeth Musgrove's father had been a country doctor. He had married a plain and pleasant woman, who had been a good housekeeper, but who had not filled his heart. He had died poor, and his wife had soon followed him. He had left the old house and its bit of farm-land to his three daughters. To Elizabeth, his youngest daughter, he had left more than the others, although the thing he had left was not in his will. She had inherited his dreams. Years before, he had told her:

"You will have more than the others, Elizabeth. No matter how hard life may be, you'll always glimpse the Vision Splendid."

Because of this heritage Elizabeth had refused to stagnate on the farm. She had gone back and forth to town to school, driving a little horse in a ramshackle buggy, coming in on winter nights half-frozen but happy, sitting up long after the others were in bed, to read and to study, finding at last a thrilling climax to her ambitions in an appointment to teach school far up in the hills of Colorado.

So she had left the Missouri farm behind her, and it was in Colorado that she had met Louis Carew, who had come out to look after the mining interests of a client. He had fallen in love with her at first sight, and when he had known her only a month he had married her. He was a Baltimorean of good blood and ample means. He had taken Elizabeth back with him, proud of her youth and beauty.

Yet youth and beauty had not been enough. She had found that when she came among her husband's people. She was not like them. And she had found, too, after the first ecstasy had worn from their love-affair, that Louis wanted to make her over to fit the family pattern. His mother and sisters had soft voices and perfect ease of manner. They knew what to do at a dinner-party and what to say. They spoke French fluently, and were much traveled. Compared with them, young Elizabeth was crude, middle-class. She knew only how to be lovely and how to worship her husband.

To please him, she tried to make herself over. She had a dancing teacher and one who taught French. She was manicured and coiffed and cold-creamed. She spent hours in her room trying to change her round, public-school penmanship into something elegant, unshaded, and fashionable. She eliminated her "r's," and her voice was like a murmuring brook.

"Louis' sisters helped me. You must not think they made a Cinderella of me. They really did their best, and I learned much from them that I have tried to pass on to you, my dearest."

Then had come the great tragedy. Just as Elizabeth had begun to hope she might measure up to all that was required of her, and just as she had found, too, that the great joy of motherhood was to be hers, it had been revealed to her that her husband loved another woman.

"It is not necessary to tell you how I found it out. But I knew. They had grown up together, and every one expected he would marry her. And she had expected it. Then he met me and was swept away by a sudden infatuation.

"There was nothing sordid about their—romance. They kept it on a high level. They had simply learned too late that they cared, and their lives were spoiled.

"Well, I adored your father. Even now, I can't think of him without an agony of mind. But I gave him up. I had a sort of sturdy pride which compelled it. He begged me to stay, but I insisted I would go away, and he could get a divorce on the grounds of desertion. I would not take any of his money. If he could not give me love—I would have nothing.

"So I came back here to Catherine and Olivia. Your father does not know he has a daughter. Yet, as the years have passed, I have begun to feel that I have no right to deprive you of the things he might do for you. As long as I live you are mine—but if anything happens to me, I want you to go to him. And I want you to remember this, that he has never wronged you in any way. And what he did to me was a thing he could not help.

"And you are like him, Hildegarde. You look like him and have certain tricks of manner. You have his gaiety, his almost faun-like quality of enjoyment. But I like to think that you are my child in many ways. You have, I am sure, my courage—for it took courage to do the thing I have done—to put from me the love that made my life.

"So, I have said, I want you to go to him and tell him who you are. His wife died several years ago. I could never have asked anything of him for myself, but for you I can ask anything. You may tell him that. I can not bear to think of your future, if you stay here with Catherine and Olivia. They are fine women. You are too much of a child to know that their apparent hardness and harshness is on the surface. But they can never give you what I want you to have. And your father can give it to you if he will. I want him to give, and I want you to take. I have no bitterness in my thought of him. He was always kind, and I loved him. I love him still."

It was on this high note that the letter ended. As she finished, Hildegarde found herself trembling. In the few moments since Aunt Catherine had left her, the world had changed. Out of that dark, immeasurable space her mother's voice had spoken. Yet it was not the rapturous voice of one who would go soaring through eternity with a fore-ordained mate. Out there in that vast space her mother was lonely—a wandering spirit, seeking always the love which has been denied.

There was a picture of her father in the little red box. Hildegarde studied it closely, seeing herself like him in the sweep of dark hair, the gray eyes. Her mother's hair had a copper tint, and her eyes had been blue—such clear blue eyes even at the end of forty years!

There was a ring in the red box and a string of pearls. "The ring is my engagement ring; your father gave me the pearls when we were married. I kept them for you—all the rest I left behind. I wanted none of them."

Wild Geese and a Windy Sky

THERE were steps again on the stairs, Aunt Olivia this time. It was unusual for Aunt Olivia or Aunt Catherine to climb the stairs when they wanted their niece. They had always called in their high-pitched voices. The extra exertion was a concession, apparently, to the solemnity of the occasion.

"Crispin Harlowe is here," Aunt Olivia announced.

Crispin Harlowe was the boy at the State College who Hildegarde had thought would come when he heard of her bereavement, and now he had come.

"I'll be down in a moment, Aunt Olivia."

Aunt Olivia looked at the little red box and asked, "Did you read the letter?"

"Yes." Hildegarde found it hard to speak of the things that her mother had written. "It was a great surprise," she said at last.

"Catherine and I sometimes thought she might have told you sooner. But we didn't advise. It was her business."

"I am glad she didn't, Aunt Olivia. It wouldn't have done me any good to know I had a father. I couldn't have gone to him while she lived."

"No," said Aunt Olivia, "you couldn't."

"There'll be a great deal to talk over," Hildegarde stated, "but we'll have to wait until the others are gone. Perhaps you'd like to read her letter."

She handed it to her aunt, who stood looking down at it. "She wrote a prettier hand than Catherine or I. She learned it after she was married."

Hildegarde, with a heart-breaking vision of her mother as a young wife striving to fit herself into her environment, said, "Everything she did was lovely."

"Yes," Aunt Catherine agreed, "it was." Her voice was gentle.

They went down together.

There were several people in the room, and Crispin Harlowe was sitting on the edge of the high sofa. He rose, as Hildegarde entered, and went up to her.

"I came as soon as I heard."

It was as if he answered in her some accusation of procrastination.

"I did not hear," he continued, "until this morning."

She had given him her hand, and he still held it. The eyes of the other people in the room were on them.

"Shall we go for a walk?" he asked in a low tone. "We can't talk here."

"Presently," she said. "I want to speak to the Skinners."

The Skinners were distant cousins. They had been late for the funeral, and for the feast that followed. Hildegarde had not seen them, so now she sat and talked to them. Crispin, from across the room, watched her, and thought he had never seen her lovelier than now, in her straight black dress, with that smoky cloud of hair framing her white face.

She went out, after a while, wrapped in a black cape which had been her mother's. She wore no hat. In spite of the wind, the air was warm.

Crispin said, as they walked along, "You are beautiful in black."

"They didn't want me to wear it," she told him passionately. "I should have died if I hadn't."

He said he knew how she felt. They were drawn together by his comprehension of her mood. As they passed the garden, he stopped and found a late white rose blooming. She pinned it on her cape. He thought it completed, perfectly, the effect of sorrowing beauty.

As they came to the road, he asked, "Where shall we go?"

"I don't care. Only let it be as far away from people as possible. I have something to tell you—I want to tell you before I talk it over with any one else."

He was touched by her confidence in him, and laid his hand, for a moment, on her arm. He rarely touched her. She was too fine, he felt, for that.

Yet it was not alone her fineness which held him back. It was his own. He belonged to the village and had gone to school with Hildegarde. His father was judge of the county court, and much respected for a certain hearty sense of justice, which made him understand the sinner, but not sentimentalize about his sin.

Crispin was like his father in looks and in his attitude of mind. He was a strong, upstanding fellow. His hair was thick and fair, and gilded by a touch of auburn. His skin had the rich red and brown which belongs to those who live much out of doors.

So they walked along together—she a slender black shadow against the shine and glow of him. They ascended a long hill, going first through a pasture, and then through a wooded grove, coming at last on a bluff which overlooked a wide valley. Below were the farms, with shocks of corn in long, even rows—pale gold and russet—with a line of emerald where the trees along the streams still kept their green. Far off was the village and the church spire, and hanging just above it, the sun, half-shrouded in thin veils of mist, so that its top was arched like the gilded dome of some ethereal Eastern mosque.

They sat down in a place sheltered by a great rock, which loomed up behind them. They faced the south and west. Across the sky was now a rippling, ruddy wave of cloud. Hildegarde, wrapped tight against the wind in her black cape, spoke of it.

"It is like a shining sea," she said. "I like to think that somewhere out there mother is sailing on it."

It seemed as if she could talk of nothing but her mother. Crispin listened patiently enough. But the thing he wished to talk about was Hildegarde.

Presently he came to it. "What are you going to do now that she is gone?"

"That's what I have to tell you."

She was aware of the dramatic qualities of the revelation she was about to make. She was like a little sybil as she sat there speaking—with the black cape drawn tight about her, the wind blowing her hair.

When she had finished, there was silence for a mo- ment, then Crispin said, "How wonderful that she could keep it to herself like that!"

"It changes everything, doesn't it?"

"In what way?"

"To know that I have a father."

He broke out fiercely, "Don't say it as if it were something to be proud of."

Her startled eyes met his. "Isn't it?"

"No. A man like that. To break your mother's heart."

"But you see what she says. He couldn't help it."

"He wasn't true to either of them. He should have found out before he married your mother which one he wanted."

She turned this over in her mind. At last she said, "Still, he's my father."

"And, of course, you'll go?"

"Yes."

"Suppose he doesn't want you?"

"I am not going to find out whether he wants me, but whether I want him."

"Why go at all? Why not stay here and marry me, Hildegarde?"

"Oh," she turned toward him started, "but I'm not in love with you."

He was eager. "You don't know whether you are or not. You don't know anything about it? But I could teach you." He took her hand, drawing her toward him.

She drew back. "Please—" Then, after a little: "Crispin, I must go to my father. Mother wanted it."

"But you'll come back. I'll make you come. Do you think I'll give you up for all the fathers in the world?"

"I don't want to give you up. But I don't want to think about marriage. Mother used to say that love for a woman is giving; for a man it is taking."

"All men are not like your father."

"How can a woman tell?"

"Well, at least I can tell you this, that there has never one instant been any one else, that however far you may go from me—you will always know that my heart is waiting."

She had no answer ready for him. Darkness was coming fast upon them. Back of them the day was gone. But toward the west and south the clouds had been swept away by a change of wind, and the sky was now one clear, unbroken stretch of chrysoprase.

And out of the sky dropped suddenly a harsh and thrilling cry.

Crispin jumped to his feet. "The wild geese are flying. Look, Hildegarde."

He drew her up beside him. The wind caught her cape, and it billowed out behind her. He swept it down with a strong arm and stood holding her steady. Etched black against the wide green expanse, the geese flew in wedge-like formation, a few laggards trailing in a whipcord behind. Steadily they passed, their strong wings bearing them on, their clamorous voices calling. It was a thing to lift the heart. To feed the soul. Up there in the infinite sky was a faith that carried those feathered things through miles of un- charted flight. Who told them when to go and when to come? Who showed them the way? Who held them thus together? A brave company on a brave adventure?

Crispin, feeling this, said, "When I see them, I want to follow."

It came to Hildegarde that it was wonderful to hear a man speak like that. It was wonderful to be standing there with a strong arm about her in that green light, and with the wild geese flying. For the first time Crispin seemed more to her than the boy she had always known. He was a part of the wonder of it—the ineffable beauty.