The Blue Window/Chapter 17
MERIWEATHER was never to forget Hildegarde as she was that night. Watching her from his balcony, he saw her as a green flame streaming meteorically among the dancers. Nobody else counted. The rest of the people in the ballroom were pale phantoms; merged into a paler background. Hildegarde drew to herself all the light, leaving the others drained of brightness.
His search for her earlier in the evening had been fruitless. Passing one of the lower rooms, he had seen Sally, a maid on her knees beside her.
"Come and talk to me while I am being mended," Sally said, "if you have nothing better to do."
"I am looking for Hildegarde."
She was petulant. "Oh, well, I won't keep you."
He smiled at her? "She's probably back in the ballroom by this time."
"She and Louis are creating a great sensation. Everybody is talking about them."
"Louis is great stuff, isn't he? He looks twenty years younger." Meriweather did not say what he thought of Hildegarde. But Sally knew.
The maid had finished mending the flounce. "Let's find a quiet corner," Sally suggested. "I want your advice, Merry."
The quiet corner was found in a gallery which ad-joined the ballroom, and where Winslow's art treasures were displayed. Sally and Meriweather sat on a carved Florentine choir seat and faced an ancient mosaic of a small fat Bacchus with a wreath of purple grapes.
"Neale wants me to marry him right away," Sally said, abruptly, "And I can't. I've got to be free a little longer."
"Sally, Sally," Meriweather said, "why did you do it?"
The Florentine seat was very narrow. It had a high back, and high curved arms, so that the two of them were shut in like people in an old-fashioned hansom cab. As Sally turned towards him, Merry saw in her eyes, so close to his, a strained and wistful look. "I was mad I think, Merry. But I've got to go on with it."
He was sorry for her. Little Sally. "I suppose it would do no good to beg you not to marry him?"
Her voice was low, "What else is there for me to do?"
"Wait until some one comes along who will make you happy."
Her laugh was hard. "Happy?" she jumped to her feet and stood there—gay in her shepherdess' dress, her eyes no longer wistful. "I shall be happy enough when I am spending Neale's money."
He laid his hand on her arm, "Sally, don't."
"Don't what?"
"Talk like that."
"How shall I talk."
He was impatient. "The whole thing is monstrous. You know it, and I know it. And you are too good for this sort of thing."
He saw her face change. "Hush, Neale is looking for me."
Meriweather's glance followed hers. At the other end of the long room, in an archway from which hung a priceless silver lamp, stood Winslow in white brocade. His white wig swept down on each side of his pale face. Even at that distance, they caught the glitter of his diamonds.
He saw them and spoke across the intervening space. "Were you looking at my treasures?"
Sally told him the truth. "We were talking."
Merry commended her frankness. The thing which would help her in her dealings with her lover was her lack of fear of him.
"It is time to go down to supper," Winslow said, "I've been searching for you everywhere."
Sally tucked her arm through his. "I tore my flounce and had to have it mended. Then Merry and I came here and sat in your Florentine seat, and looked at your horrid little Bacchus."
"What makes you call him horrid?" Winslow demanded.
"Because he laughs at life," Sally told him, "and it isn't a thing to laugh at. It is a thing to cry about, and if your little Bacchus had any sense, he'd know it."
At supper, Meriweather sat beside Hildegarde, but he might have been miles away for all the chance he got to talk to her. Other men kept coming up—Bob Gresham among them—the slight, girlish-looking young Croesus, who had won honors as an aviator during the war, who wore his diminutiveness with an air of distinction, and who hid his super-sophistication under a manner youthfully ingenuous.
Bob hung over Hildegarde; asked if he could serve her. "Please give me something to do for you—throw a glove into the arena! Or let me cut off the head of a dragon!"
Hildegarde laughed. She thought Gresham a nice boy. Funny.
He wanted to fill her glass. And when she wouldn't let him, he crowed with delight. "D'ye mean you don't touch it? Champagne? By Jove, you don't need it. The other girls drink it to jack 'em up—. And I'm so tired of 'em tipsy."
Meriweather was a man of the world. He knew all the patter of the younger crowd. But he was aware, more than ever, while Bob Gresham talked that he didn't want Hildegarde to be like the rest of them. He didn't want her to learn their ways. He wanted her sitting by fireplaces; in gardens; or going up the stairs of an old house with a candle in her hand.
When Gresham left them, Merry said. "Do you know I am wondering—? Do you really like all this?"
"Like it?" she threw her head up with a quick and charming gesture. "I love it. All my life I've wanted beauty, and now I have it," her glance swept the great room with its flower-wreathed pillars, its rosy lamps. "Its a fairy tale. Unbelievable romance!"
So that was it? She was Carew's daughter—liking the things he liked. Wanting what he wanted. The Hildegarde of the fireplace and of the garden had been a girl lacking only the opportunity to be luxurious.
Well, whatever she was, he loved her. Yet he saw little hope for the future. In spite of her warm friendliness, he knew that she cared nothing for him. And besides Crispin there were others now in the field—Bob Gresham's manner was unmistakable. And Bob could make any woman the fashion.
It was after supper, that Merry saw Hildegarde as a green flame among the dancers. A will-o'-the-wisp? Like Carew? Or an unquenchable torch of inspiration?
It was after supper, too, that Carew sat in a niche on the wide stairway and talked to an abbess in gray with a ripple of red beads hanging from her belt.
"How austere you look, Ethel."
"I need to be to offset your abandon, Louis."
"But you are not really austere."
She smiled at him. "Perhaps you don't know the real me."
It was provocative. And she was very pretty with the soft folds of white linen concealing the lines of her throat and forehead; bringing out the fine darkness of her eyes, the delicate aristocracy of nose and chin.
"What is the real 'me,' Ethel?"
She ran the beads through her fingers like a rosary. At the end, in place of a crucifix, was a ball of red roses. She detached one of the roses and inhaled its perfume, looking at him above it with those dark smiling eyes.
By Jove, she was pretty. "Give me the rose," he said.
She shook her head, and slipped from her high seat. Her gown had a train and slid like a gray snake on the stairs. She lifted her hand and scattered the rose leaves. "Better scatter them like that than give them to you."
"Why?"
"You'd wonder tomorrow morning which woman you danced with gave it to you."
"I would not. . . ."
"You would. . . ." The gray train slid further down the stairs. He followed it, protesting, "I am not as fickle as that. . . ."
"You are a faun. . . ."
He was at her side. "Well, you are not an abbess. I'll swear to that, Ethel. In spite of your nun's gray. And some day you are going to give me a rose."
She knew that she was going to give it to him—some day. She wanted to give it to him now. But she too knew how to play the game. One must never give Louis, easily, the thing he asked for.
So "I must look for Sally," she said, and left him.
Sally was in the ballroom with Winslow. Most of the guests were gone. Once more the great room seemed to dwarf its occupants. Sally, seeing her mother, far at the other end, said, "Thank you, Wolf, for a very happy time."
"Why do you call me 'Wolf'?" he demanded.
"Because I met you in a forest."
"I don't know what you mean," he said, impatiently.
Sally didn't explain. There was, indeed, no tactful explanation. So she said, "I shall feel very small in this big house."
"You are big enough to fill it for me," he told her gallantly.
"I don't want to be married for a long time, Neale."
"What do you mean by 'a long time.'"
"Months and months."
"Why delay?"
"Oh, one's girlhood is so short. And married life is so long."
It was a poignant note. But his egotism glanced away from it as an arrow from an iron shield.
"I shall make you happy, Sally. We'll travel everywhere. See everything. And there won't be a wish of your heart that I shall be unwilling to grant."
What did he know of the wishes of her heart? What did he know of the Sally who would have shared a crust with the man she loved?
Well, he should never know. Her head went up, and she gave him a gay little glance. "I walked in a forest, and the Wolf ate me up. But he is a nice Wolf."
Neale was smiling. "So that was what you meant."
Sally was truthful! "Well, it was part of what I meant," she told him, and went to join her mother.