The Hearth and Eagle (41 page)

Yes, she thought. I too will be much happier, away from this place of ugliness and pain and failure. Go home, discarded wife. Home to the house that has seen a thousand heartaches before yours. Home where the dozens of Honeywoods will welcome you back into the waiting clan and shelter you from this stranger for whom you deserted them.

She rose and went behind the baize curtain to the bureau where she found pen, ink, and paper.

Evan followed her. “What are you doing, Hesper?”

“I’m going to send Ma a telegram. She’ll want some warning.”

“There’s no hurry,” he said uncomfortably. “We have some arrangements to make, and I don’t sail for a week.”

Hesper gave a brief laugh. “Oh, I’ll stay on here a day or two. After all it’ll be no different from what it has been these six months.” Her pen scratched across the cheap lined paper.

He watched her bent head, the firmly compressed lips. He saw the lovely fluid line of shoulder, bust, and hips, the whiteness of her thin arm and hand as she held the pen, and against her long neck, caught loosely by the black net she had worn for their expedition, the coil of hair, a trifle darker than it used to be, the color of sunlit madeira. It might be possible to paint her now that he was released from her, he thought with sadness. In her face now there was a harshness, a stony resignation that symbolized the spirit of the fisher girl he had been trying to paint in Marblehead. In her face then there had been nothing but youthful excitement and desire to please.

Although for so long he had been eager to leave her whenever he could, he now lingered, hovering near her, himself held by pain different from, but as inexorable as, hers.

It was she who dismissed him. She folded the paper across, and held it out to him.

“Be so kind as to send this message for me, Evan. And you can find some other place to spend the night, no doubt.”

He bowed his head, and took the paper silently. For a moment they confronted each other across the shiny square of oil cloth on the floor. The fire in the stove had died down, the kerosene lamp sputtered and spurted smoke against its cracked glass chimney. Above them night lay black against the skylight.

“I’m sorry—” said Evan. He turned and went out, closing the door carefully behind him.

He had returned in the morning with two hundred dollars, and he had bought her a ticket to Boston. They had been very polite with each other. She accepted the money and ticket calmly, and then told him that she wished nothing more, from him. “I’ll get along at home as I always did,” she said in a thin, formal voice. It was he who mentioned divorce, a word she scarcely knew. “Not that I care,” said Evan, “but in time you may wish to be quite free. I’ll do whatever’s necessary, of course, you have but to write me.” To this she had answered nothing at all, for the subject seemed to her unimportant. She had no tears now, nor inclination towards them. She observed herself and Evan with detachment.

Evan tried to be generous, to share with her his few possessions, his paintings too. She would accept nothing.

When their discussion had ended, she held out her hand and said,“I guess that’s everything.” Her hand was cool and steady, her eyes were cool and green as the sea. Her speech was clipped.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Now that you’re rid of the anchor drag, I hope you’ll be a very great painter.”

“Hesper—don’t—Maybe I’m no artist at all, it’s just that—”

“Good-bye, Evan,” she said.

At seven that evening she sat alone in the loft. Her box and trunk were packed, ready for the morning train to Boston. She had drunk a glass of milk, and now she sat by the table staring at an old copy of Harper’s which she had read two months ago. The lamp sputtered as it always did and smelled of kerosene. But the smell of paint and turpentine was gone. The painting corner was empty of easel and canvas, instead it contained her strapped cowhide trunk.

One more night to spend on that bed. She looked at it with loathing. The cheap speckled brass, and two knobs missing from the top whorls. The lumpy flock mattress, the sagging springs that grated and quivered. On that bed she had known passion and laughter, on this bed she had brought forth her stillborn child, but in these memories there was no reality. They had happened to someone else, like Corinna, this heroine in Harper’s. She leafed through the pages, rereading a snatch of the story here and there.

Evan had drawn the tailpiece which showed Corinna in her bridal dress with a coronet on her head.

Hesper shoved the magazine across the table. I’ll have to get out very early to find a hackney that’ll take the trunk, she thought. I must allow plenty of time. The shore-line train started from Twenty-seventh Street and Fourth Avenue. Wasn’t there a stop for food at New London, or should she take some sandwiches? How long would she have to stay in Boston before catching a Marblehead train? Would the trunk go with her, or was there some way it could be sent afterwards? Of the details of the trip down she remembered almost nothing. I wish I had a watch, she thought. Evan had had one, but she had never owned any timepiece. She would have to judge the hour of getting up by the skylight, then listen for the Grace Church chimes. I wish I could go tonight, she thought, but there wasn’t a night train. Perhaps it wasn’t too early to try to sleep.

She lifted the stovelid, and poked at the sulky embers. Suddenly she heard steps on the stairs outside; the fourth tread from the top squeaked as it always did. Her hand fell from the poker, and her heart gave a leap. But he wouldn’t come back now. It was finished. Why should he comeback?

The door resounded under a determined knock. She expelled her breath sharply, staring at the peeling wooden panels. “Evan?” she called, her voice high and shaking. There was a low indistinct murmur.

She unlocked the door and opened it an inch. A very large man, much taller than Evan, stood on the landing, indistinct in the gloom.

“What do you want?” she whispered, holding the door against her body.

The figure bent near. “Don’t be afraid, Hesper. It’s Amos Porterman. Let me in.”

She moved slowly back, pulling the knob with her. Amos came in stamping the snow from his boots. His startled gaze swept the cold miserable loft, and Hesper, thin and white, shrinking to the wall by the stove, and staring at him.

“My poor child,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home.”

The black wash of hope and disappointment receded from her. She moved from the wall toward him. “It’s good of you to come, Mr. Porterman. Let me have your coat and muffler. Did Ma send you?”

“No. But she showed me your telegram, and I wanted to come, and she was glad of that. Where’s Redlake, my dear?”

My dear. Evan had called her that so often and always the two words had been tinged with irony.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. He’s gone.”

Amos’s lower lip jutted out. Under the bushy blond eyebrows his eyes narrowed to slits. “The yellow-bellied bastard. I’ll find him and—”

“No, no—” she whispered on a note of weary exasperation. “Please. Let be. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Amos sat down heavily on the other chair, Evan’s chair. His powerful hands rested on his thighs. “Well—” he said. “Well—” His breath came like smoke in the chill room. “I’ve not changed. I don’t want to displease you.” ’

She looked at him and smiled a little. His big comforting presence warmed the room. Is he then still fond of me? she thought, vaguely. “How are Ma and Pa?” she said. “And the Inn, and your factory?”

Amos shook his head. He saw the exhaustion in the drop of her body, heard the effort in her voice. She’d been through even worse than he’d known about, it seemed, though what Mrs. Honeywood had told him of the stillbirth, and her husband sending her home, was bad enough. Bastard, he thought again. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her like a child, letting that tired head rest on his shoulder.

“The questions ’11 all wait, Hes,” he said quietly. “You look fit to drop in your tracks. Get some rest, and I’ll be back with a cab in the morning, eight sharp, in case you’re sleeping, there’ll be time to rouse you.”

“Thank you—” she said. “I was wondering how to manage.” He stood up, and she went over to him, laying her hand on his arm. With him there was no self-consciousness, no uncertainty or fear of rebuff. Because it didn’t matter. With Evan she had always been the heavy, the serious one, but Amos made her feel weightless, fluid as quicksilver.

“Mind you don’t get pixilated in this great blaring city—” she said with faint humor. “Oh, I forgot you’re not a Marbleheader.”

He covered her hand with his. “Did you forget that, Hesper? Did you really?”

She slipped away from him, but Amos was happy. Happier than ever before in his life. The brief spring-time love for Lily Rose had not been like this. There’d been never a day since Hesper married that he hadn’t thought of her with bitter yearning. And now at last he had hope. It would be bad. A long time before she got over that fellow. And then a mess. Divorce. He quailed at this, but there was no help for it. It could be done quietly. But if she’ll have me, we’ll face ’em all down. He had a vision of her dressed in velvet and lace, a decent dress for once in her life, standing in the gilt and rosewood hall of his new house, waiting for him to come home. And she would be smiling as she was now—gently, gratefully.

He wrapped his muffler around his neck, and picked up his hat.

“Ah, my dear—” he said, “I’ll be well content to bring you home, where you belong.”

“And I to go—” she answered—her shadowed eyes resting on the empty corner where Evan’s canvases had once stood.

O
N THE NEW YEAR’S
morning of 1877, Hesper awoke to a placid contentment. It seemed to be sleeting outside, she could hear the faint crackle on the window panes behind the drawn plush curtains, but here in the great mansion on Pleasant Street, weather never seemed important.

She yawned and stretched, burying her head deeper into the soft frilled pillow. It must be nearly nine o’clock. Soon Annie would knock and come in with coffee, draw back the portières, and light the fire. Though you really did not need a fire when the hot-air registers kept the whole house warm as summer.

Amos, beside her in the huge double bed, snorted a little and flopped over. She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at him with amused affection. Since their marriage he had grown sideburns; they were soft and wavy, a shade darker than his flaxen hair, and he was very proud of them. But despite his bearded cheeks and his size, when he was asleep and the pucker lines smoothed from his forehead, he was the image of little Henry.

I do hope there
is
going to be another, she thought. Lately she had been almost certain, but there had been false alarms before, and Henry was already seven. Dear Amos—she had never imagined he could show such feeling as he had on the night that Henry was born. Amos wasn’t much of a one for showing emotion, even in their most intimate moments. That part of marriage was moderate and tender and pleasantly satisfying.

And I’m glad it’s that way, she thought. I had enough of the other thing with Evan. She lay back on the pillow again, deliberately remembering—as she had not been willing to do in years—those strange ecstatic, and then miserable, eight months with Evan. The memory no longer brought much pain and it was hard to believe they ever happened.

She had heard no word from or about him in the nine years since the final divorce decree came through. He had been in London then, and he had sent a cable that said, “Better luck—Redlake.” It had angered her very much at the time and she had burned it up at once in the great fireplace at home between Phebe’s andirons, saying to her, “Take that, you and your wifely virtues and your enduring courage!” And she had been very impatient with her father’s fumbling attempts at comfort, and resentful of her mother’s “I told you so’s.” Yet her parents had been good to her during that difficult time of waiting. They had borne with her prickly defensive moods, and shielded her from Marblehead’s gossip. There hadn’t been as much scandal as they had feared. Amos had seen to it that the divorce on grounds of desertion was discreetly handled in Boston. Only a few of the old Marbleheaders knew the facts ■—the Dolliber connection and the Peaches—and they rallied around to protect their own. Poor Hes had had a dreadful time with some worthless furriner, and had had to get shet of him. Well, it served her right—but least said soonest mended.

Her marriage to Amos was quite another matter. She and Amos had driven back from Salem and the magistrate’s ceremony to face virtual ostracism from the old Marbleheaders, and a chill indifference from the newer industrial society. The first group felt that Hesper had forfeited all indulgence by this demented new alliance with another furriner, one, moreover, whose aggressive business tactics, ornate new mansion, and continual exhortations in town meeting towards expansion and progression made him increasingly unpopular. The shoemen and their wives had simpler motives. Amos was taking business away from many older firms, and that redheaded Honeywood woman he’d suddenly married had some sort of an unsavory past. Some said widow, some said not. There was a rumor that she had at best actually been a factory hand herself once, and came from that dilapidated old fishing inn down by the wharves. Not the sort of person you’d call on. And they did not call.

Charity Trevercombe, whose motives were simplest of all, since Hesper had captured the man Charity had marked for her own, did her best to keep the animosity hot against them for a while. But then suddenly, after her mother had died, Charity had experienced a kind of conversion and lost her resentment, so that now relations were friendly enough.

Ah, well, thought Hesper, it’s a stupid little town anyway. I’ve grown beyond it. I wish we didn’t have to have Ma and Pa for dinner tonight. For the Portermans were planning a dinner party in honor of the Hay-Bottses, an English couple they had met the summer before at Franconia Notch. Charity had been invited and Eben Dorch, a middle-aged bachelor, to escort her, and it was a pity that the elder Honeywoods must also be included. You never could tell what Ma might say, and you knew all too well what Pa would, but they always came to New Year’s dinner. Ma closed the Inn and planned for it weeks ahead, and it was the only time Pa would leave home. It had been a terrible struggle to get him out the first New Year’s Day after their marriage, but now he looked forward to it eagerly. The annual dinner had become tradition.