The Blue Window/Chapter 4
HILDEGARDE was shown to her room by Sampson's wife, a bronze negress who, like her husband, was descended from a long line of dependents who had served several generations of Carews.
Yet Sampson and Delia were modern in everything except their dialect and their grammar. They read the papers and took their airings in a rackety runabout. Louis Carew often complained that they had more unmortgaged property than he possessed.
To Delia, going upstairs with Hildegarde, the thing took on the aspect of adventure. When she entered the library Carew had made the simple announcement:
"This is my daughter, Miss Hildegarde Carew. You remember Miss Elizabeth, Delia? This is her child—and mine. She has come to me now that her mother is dead."
Delia had few sensations in her day's work. This was one, therefore, beyond her dreaming.
"You'll want a nice bath, honey," she said, as they came into the room. "You jes' set and rest while I gits it ready."
Hildegarde had never been waited on. She saw Delia take her bag and thought of the sparseness of her wardrobe. Yet she was not ashamed. Her mother had taught her that poverty was not disgraceful if one bore it with dignity. She tried to remember that. Yet she wished Delia would go down—leave her to open her own bag, hide her few simple garments in the great clothes-press.
Everything in the room was massive and old-fashioned, with the massiveness redeemed a bit by the roses on the faded chintz that covered the chairs and couch, and by the clean, frilled swiss covers on dresser and table. Two long windows gave a wide view of the Bay with gulls flashing white against the deep blue sky.
Her eyes came back to Delia, who was opening the bag. "My chile," she said, as the rose-colored lining and ivory fittings were revealed, "my chile—I 'members dis bag."
Hildegarde's voice was eager. "You knew my mother?"
"Yes, miss." Delia, kneeling on the floor, was aware of the dramatic quality of her own revelation. "Many's the time she's cried in these arms."
Their eyes met. "She was unhappy?" Hildegarde said.
"I packed her bag for the las' time, honey." Delia was in the full swing of her recital. "An' she set right where you's a-settin' now, and she look like she were ca'ved fum stone."
"In this chair—?"
"Yes, miss, this were her room. And she set there, and downstai's Mr. Louis was rompin' and ragin'. You see, he wanted her to stay, and he wanted her to go. Seems like he were to'n thisaway and thataway. An' I were hopin' and prayin' she wouldn't leave him."
"You wanted her to stay?"
"Yes, honey. She loved him, and she was made for Mr. Louis. But he's allus havin' things and losin' 'em, and then wishin' he had 'em back. Seems like the only ones he's evah kep' on is Sampson and me."
Hildegarde wanted to ask about his second wife. Hadn't he kept her on? She felt, however, that this was not a thing to discuss with Delia.
"But you love him, don't you?" she said at last. "You've stayed with him so long."
"Lord, yes, honey. Me and Sampson belongs right heah, like the house and the trees and the garden gate. An' we knows Mistah Louis and his ways." She hesitated a moment, then gave a warning. "Don't evah let him see you loves him too much. 'T'aint good for him."
A breath of cold wind seemed to blow against the warm hope in Hildegarde's heart. Her interview with her father had shed a ray of light in the darkness in which she had moved since her mother's death. His gentleness, his need of her, the things he had said to her in those first moments of meeting—on these she had built a structure of dreams.
The water was booming in the bath. Delia went in to turn it off. When she came back, she said, "I'll sen' down to the station fo' yo' trunk honey."
"I just brought my bag," Hildegarde told her. "I didn't know whether I was going to stay or not. I can send home if I need more."
Weighing, mentally, the clothes she had taken out of the bag, Delia said: "I wouldn' send. Just git yo' Daddy to buy you some."
Hildegarde flushed. "Oh, I couldn't ask him for money."
"Effen yo' don't ask, you nevah gits," the maid warned her. "Plums don't drop 'thout you shakes the tree."
Leaving Hildegarde, presently, to bathe and rest, Delia went downstairs to the front porch where Carew and young Meriweather were smoking in the soft autumn sunlight.
"Mistah Louis," Delia remarked, "that po' chile needs some clothes, but she say she won't ask you."
"Why not?"
"I reckon she doan feel that you's her real Daddy. An' I tole her she ain't gwine git no plums effen she don't shake the tree—"
The men shouted at that.
"So I'm the plum-tree, Delia?"
The eyes of the negress were inscrutable. "I ain't sayin' it, is I?"
"I'm not made of money, Delia."
"No, suh. But you knows the kin' of clo'es Miss Sally wears."
With sudden decision Carew's hands came down on the arm of his chair. "I'll run up to Baltimore with her tomorrow and have Anne take her to the shops. I'm not going to have my daughter put in the shade by Sally Hulburt."
When Delia had gone, Carew said to Meriweather, "I might as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb."
"It is all right if your credit stays good."
"What do you mean?" sharply.
"Well, there's an insistence about their demands, in this month's bills."
"I'll pay them some day. But in the meantime, if I introduce my daughter to my friends, she's got to make a decent appearance."
Meriweather, with his hand on the head of the nearest hound, weighed the matter thoughtfully. It was the dickens of a time for a daughter to appear. His employer didn't half appreciate the gravity of the financial situation. A little more, and Round Hill would go with the rest. And Carew and the girl would be high and dry.
"You'll have to have somebody here, won't you?" he said at last, "if you are going to keep her with you. Some woman."
"Anne can come down. I telephoned her. She was shocked to flinders, of course. Everybody will be." An amused light flamed in his eyes. "I'm going to take her over with us tonight to the Hulburts'."
"What?" Meriweather's tone was incredulous.
"Why not? I want to see Ethel's face, and Sally's. I am going to call them up and ask them to put an extra plate on the dinner table for—my daughter."
He was, Meriweather could see, delighting in the sensation he would create. He would forget his money worries in this new interest.
Carew rose. "I'll telephone, and then I'll get at those affidavits. Are you going to ride?"
"I'll take a run with the dogs, and come back and type the stuff you gave me this morning."
From the window Hildegarde saw young Meriweather ride away, a half-dozen dogs streaming ahead of him. She liked the picture it made—the erect figure on the brown horse sweeping down the white oyster-shell road that led to the Bay.
Delia came up with a message from Carew. Miss Hildegarde would dine with her father at the Hulburts'. She must not worry about what she would wear. The Hulburts were most informal. Delia, enlarging the theme, revealed that the Hulburts had been neighbors for more than one generation. There was now only Mrs. Hulburt, a widow, and her daughter, Sally. They were not rich, but their social position was unassailable. Delia's vocabulary was somewhat limited, but she made this clear.
Hildegarde, curled up luxuriously in the puffy bed, listened. It sounded, she thought, rather like a storybook. Life, as she had known it, wasn't made up of balls and parties and hunt breakfasts.
Delia left her at last, and Hildegarde lay, very tired and very comfortable, looking out at the Bay. She had never before been near the sea. Her imagination carried her beyond the limits of the Chesapeake to the ocean that stretched to Spain. Perhaps some day she would sail it. She drifted off into sleep, waking at last to find that it was nearly five o'clock and was time to dress for dinner.
When at last she went down, she found her father by the library fire.
"I did the best I could with myself," she told him, as he rose to meet her. "I'm afraid I'm not very fashionable."
"You are very pretty, which is much better," he assured her.
Meriweather came in just then, and sat and talked with them until it was time to go. The young secretary was glad the girl had come. Carew was often overtaken by moods which made him poor company. Yet when he was in these moods Meriweather did not want to leave him, even for a game of bridge.
It was Sally Hulburt who asked a little later about Hildegarde.
"For Heaven's sake, Merry, I didn't know there was a daughter."
"There is. Long-lost, and all that sort of thing. First wife."
"The one he divorced?"
"Yes. She made him do it. She gave him his liberty to let him marry Corinne, and now here's the daughter."
"But why did she come? After all these years?"
"Her mother is dead. And made her promise to look up Carew. She stuck it out herself on an awful old farm in Missouri, but she wanted more than that for Hildegarde."
"She's a pretty thing," Sally said, "but she is not quite comfortable with us."
Hildegarde was not comfortable. Dinner had been difficult. She had known the right forks and spoons, but she had not known what to talk about. With the best intentions in the world, they had sailed right over her head with their light chatter of things which belonged to their lives, but which had never belonged to hers. She had tried not to be self-conscious. But she knew she was as different from these people as her mother had been from the old aunts—she was as different, she told herself passionately, as Mrs. Hulburt's thin, lovely china was from her aunts' thick blue dishes. There was something about the way Sally wore her clothes—she had not even dressed for dinner, but had kept on a sleeveless little coat of pale yellow over a straight dress of white silk. Hildegarde, in her long black serge, with her mother's pearls about her neck, felt awkward and over-dressed against the elegance of Sally's simplicity.
She wondered if Meriweather were in love with Sally. She thought he ought to be. If she were a man she would, she was sure, fall in love with Sally.
She was aware, as they sat by the fire, that Sally was trying to set her at her ease.
"You are all to come here on election night for dinner. Neale Winslow, a friend of Louis', will be down, and there'll be just the six of us. I wanted some younger men. But Merry won't let me have them. He's a dog in the manger. He's not in love with me, and he won't let anybody else be."
Meriweather defended himself. "Sally's a perfect queen bee, Miss Carew; she always has a swarm of adorers. I'm trying to keep away from the honey-pot—self-preservation—"
Hildegarde spoke out of her honest conviction. "I'd be in love with her if I were a man."
Sally liked that. But she laughed with the rest of them. "Why would you love me? Tell me that. The men say it's because of my hair or my eyes. Please don't say you'd like me because of my eyes or hair—"
"No," said Hildegarde, "I wouldn't. I'd love you because you are funny and sweet."
She was so very much in earnest that she was bewildered by their laughter.
"You peach!" Sally said. "Merry, did you hear her?"
He had heard, and something fine in him had responded to her earnestness. And her honesty. Even Sally with all her sincerity could not have said a thing like that.
During the evening his eyes were often upon her. And when they reached home, he kept her for a moment with him before they went into the house.
"I want you to see the moon over the Bay. It's rather splendid on a night like this."
The moon hung high above the water, making a wide, golden track, and in that track the molten waves moved restlessly. The wind blew softly with a little whistling sound. Except for that, all the world was still. Then suddenly across the golden radiance of the moon drifted a thin, black shadow, another followed, and another. Steadily, beating strong wings, went the wild geese—so far away that no sound of them reached the watchers on the porch.
"By jinks," Meriweather said, "that's fine. One doesn't often see it."
Hildegarde did not answer. Indeed, she hardly heard him. All that belonged to this new life had dropped away. Again she stood beside Crispin, his strong arm about her; again she was lifted up with him by the exaltation of their high mood; again his voice came to her, "When I see them, I want to follow!"
Her heart cried out for him, "Crispin, Crispin." She longed to bridge the distance, fly to him with steady-beating wings as the wild geese were flying. What had she to do with this place and these people? Long ago her mother had left them never to return.