The Hearth and Eagle (49 page)

“Draw up over there by the wharf,” said Amos to the coachman. He got out of the carriage, smiling at Hesper. “I’ll be right down again.”

She nodded and watched him ascend the stairs to the sail loft. The voice in her head became silent. Silly, she thought, “makin’ a whale out o’ a minnow.” She turned her back on State Street and looked out over the harbor. It glittered with white sails. She had not seen it so filled with boats—since—since I was sixteen, she realized with shock, and the bankers and riggers were setting out in the spring. Superficially there was resemblance to that other long-past gala day. Today as then, streamers of colored bunting fluttered from many harborside windows, small boys tooted on old fishhorns and penny whistles. The rocks and ledges of Skinner’s Head and Bartol’s Head, as far as Redstone Cove, were dotted with Marbleheaders, happily ensconced with bottles of beer and picnic lunches—waiting to see the schooners sail out. But the schooners themselves—ah, they were as different from the weathered old bankers as swans from ducks. No broad beams and bulging, gaudy striped hulls on these schooners, they were long and slender and white as birch trees, and above them the unfamiliar and complicated rig seemed to Hesper as flimsy as so many pocket handkerchiefs. These toylike alien ships had brought with them a galaxy of satellites; an excursion steamer from Boston bearing Eastern Yacht Club members and their ladies, steamers from Salem and Beverley, and a hundred small pleasure craft from scattered points along the North Shore.

As she watched, the band on board the Boston steamer broke into a raucous march tune, and all the steamers blew their whistles moving out toward the starting-point at Marblehead Rock in the wake of the ten contesting yachts.

“It’s a pretty sight—” she said quietly, as Amos reappeared. “No, it doesn’t matter if we don’t see them start. We’ll get out to the Point in time to see them come home.” She paused a moment and corrected herself. “I mean finish.”

Amos did not notice the correction, nor hear the faint quiver in her voice. He had no means of knowing that for an instant she had slipped back to her girlhood, and had been standing right here on this wharf watching Johnnie sail of! in the old
Diana,
amongst the rest of the fishing fleet. Her heart that day had been a shrunken ball of fear, and in the breasts of all the waving, cheering women there had been the same tight ball. The horns had tooted, the church bells had rung, and the bunting had fluttered from the windows even as now, but it had been a gaiety of gallantry and purpose, not a gaiety of sport.

They drove along Front Street toward the Hearth and Eagle, and Amos pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. “Here’s a list of the yachts that’re racing,” he said. He ran his eye down the names of the boats,
Magic, Halcyon, Romance, Madcap.
“Mighty influential Boston men own ’em,” he added, impressed. “Sure hope some of them decide to build homes on the Neck.”

They both looked across the harbor to the Neck. Its rounded slopes were still barren of much vegetation except scrub pine and beach grass, but above these twenty or so new summer cottages reared their peaked and fretworked roofs against the horizon. Along the harbor beach by the ferry landing, there were a few tents and log cabins, remnant of the Nashua and Lowell Tent Colony, which had come and dispersed during the last ten years.

“Do you remember,” said Hesper thoughtfully, “how short a time ago there was nothing on the Neck but a couple of farms, and that beach there was covered with fish flakes?”

“Progress—” Amos assented with satisfaction, but there was cause for discontent too. Why hadn’t he had sense enough to buy up land on the Neck, or in any of the town’s waterfront outskirts, while it was yet cheap? But this new and growing passion for a sea view on the part of summer people had not occurred to him. As it had never occurred to him to build his own house anywhere but inland on the highway.

Still, he thought, there’s hope yet, soon as I get straightened out a bit and can lay my hands on some cash again, I’ll buy some land.

The carriage drew up with a flourish before the side entrance to the Hearth and Eagle, and Amos stared gloomily at his wife’s old home.

One sure thing, there’d never be any market for the crazy tumbledown houses like this in town. When the old folks go, he thought, Hes and I’ll tear it down, maybe sell the land, or put up a good modern hotel. He had long since given up his earlier ideas for improving the actual structure. Just putting illuminating gas in had proved that it was hopeless. The house resisted improvement, with a nearly human cunning. There was no room to lay pipes, except in the open, the heavy oak carrying beams rejected new nails as though they had been irongirders, there wasn’t a straight line in the house, not a door, not a floor, not a ceiling, and not one room plumb level with the next.

Hesper had long known and agreed with Amos’s views, and now that she again actually saw the long hump-backed silvery old house, the vague fears and mystical aversions and hostilities with which during the last months she had endowed it, all vanished.

She descended slowly from the carriage, leaning on Amos’s arm, and walked up the beaten dirt path toward the taproom door, noting with some amusement that Susan had planted sunflowers by the picket fence. There had never been sunflowers in Hesper’s girlhood, because they somehow produced old maids. “Where sunflowers grow, beaux never go.”

She opened the taproom door, and was annoyed by the cracked jangle of the bell. Ma should have a girl to answer the door, she should in any case give up the taproom. Undignified. The very word “taproom” had a raffish, outmoded flavor—and with half of Marblehead gone temperance already—but Ma was bull-headed always. Hesper perceived however that there was nobody in the dark taproom, nor in the kitchen either. After a minute, Susan appeared from the parlor, and found her daughter and son-in-law standing uncertainly in the entry.

“Well, I’ll be gormed—” she said, advancing towards them across the floorboards. “If it ant Hes and Amos. I didn’t hear the carriage.” Her still-keen eyes glanced through the window. “But I see it’s there.” She surveyed Hesper, noting the modish hat, the best embroidered mantle and the parasol. “So you’ve perked up enough to venture out, have you!”

Of course Ma would use that tone. Never had a day’s illness in her life. Seventy she was now, and still the picture of stout health.

“I’m feeling better—” said Hesper coldly. “We came to see if you and Pa would like to drive over to the Point o’ Neck and watch the regatta.”

“Oh—” answered her mother after a moment. “Aye, the regatta. ’Twas kindly meant of you both. But Roger he’s still ailing, his heart’s not so good, he’s resting upstairs—and I’ve company.”

“We’ll be getting on—we won’t disturb you then—” said Hesper quickly, hurt by her mother’s attitude. Susan had been standing with her back to the parlor door in an unmistakably defensive manner, and far from showing gratitude for this long-delayed visit, the Porterman appearance seemed to be an embarrassment.

Susan had no difficulty in reading her daughter’s thoughts. Her heavy shoulders hunched themselves under the black alpaca, she moved from the door, and the puckers around her mouth flattened into a grim smile.

“It’s naught but Peg-Leg and Tamsen Peach—” she said, “and now you’re here you’d best come in and greet them.”

Hesper glanced at Amos, and she saw that although the reason for her mother’s hesitance was now quite clear to her, Amos was neither •enlightened nor interested.

Peg-Leg Dolliber, of course, was Hesper’s uncle, and he had been exceedingly outspoken in his opinion of Hesper’s two scandalous marriages; egged on by Mattie, he had loudly averred amongst the tight circle of old Marbleheaders that he for one washed his hands of the ■dom-fool gur-rl, and preferred to forget she was blood kin.

The prospect of meeting Tamsen Peach was even more disquieting. It was not only that Mrs. Peach had been Johnnie’s mother, and that Hesper had always an uneasy impression that Tamsen looked upon Hesper’s subsequent loves as a betrayal, but also, rightly or wrongly, Hesper knew that all the Peach connection attributed Lem Peach’s death from consumption to Amos’s tyrannical factory system.

“No—” said Hesper sharply. “We’ll be getting on, Ma.” She arranged the fringes of her mantle, and slipped her hand through Amos’s arm. He patted it, and turning to go was startled by the change in Mrs. Honeywood. The old woman drew herself up until she seemed taller than her daughter, her broad fat face assumed the sternness of a Buddha.

“I said—you’d best come in and greet them, Hes!” she said, weighting each word. “You can’t go on hiding all your life, my girl.”

Amos felt Hesper stiffen, heard her sharp, catching breath. “Oh come now—Mrs. Honeywood—” he said with a small awkward laugh—“that’s a peculiar thing to say. If Hessie doesn’t want to meet those folks, I don’t know why she should. I don’t want her upset.” He saw with alarm that Hesper’s face was flaming red, and she pushed his protective arm aside.

“Who are those old folks to upset me—” she said through her teeth—“Ma making a stupid pother about nothing, as usual.”

She shoved past her mother, burst open the parlor door, and swept in. The two people on either side the fireplace looked up in surprise.

“Good day, Mrs. Peach. Good day, Uncle Noah,” she flung at them, standing in front of the center table and glancing down at them with an angry defiance. Her mother’s guests passed from a shared astonishment into two divergent reactions.

Peg-Leg shifted his wooden stump, took his unlit pipe out of his mouth, put his mug of rum flip down on the hearth tiles by his chair, and exploded into cackles of laughter. “Jesus—” he choked. “Look wot the tide washed in! If it ain’t the high and mighty Mrs. Par-rtermon, fancy bunnit, sunshade ’n all!”

Tamsen Peach said nothing for a moment. She had never been a pretty woman, but she had known deep love from husband and from her brood of children, and now at fifty-five her faded little face shone with a calm fulfillment. Suffering, poverty, and loss had left no bitterness, though they had extinguished all the laughter of her girlhood. She had never felt hostility toward Hesper, but she had never felt affection either, even during the betrothal to Johnnie. The girl had always been too self-contained, too deeply immersed in the egotism of youth to awaken response in a mother’s jealous heart. And there had been that, too, Tamsen had long ago recognized that she had been a little jealous of Johnnie’s love for Hesper. She looked at Hesper now, and saw her condition as Peg-Leg had not, saw the flushed defiance for the bravado it was, and she spoke softly. “Good arternoon, Hessie—’tis foine to see ye once again. And Mr. Par-rtermon—too,” she added, nodding to Amos who had entered with Susan and now stood uncomfortably by the door. Her gentle brown eyes expressed no judgment of him either. It was true Lem’s cough and the night sweats had got worse after he contracted to send all the output of his little shoe shop to Porterman’s factory, but Tamsen had never been one to blame. If it hadn’t been Porterman’s it would have had to be another factory, and maybe it was the shoe shops themselves bred the consumption, stooping all day long over the bench, and breathing in the chalk and smoke.

Amos did not recognize Mrs. Peach—the town was full of Peaches, nor did he connect her with Hesper’s youthful love affair, of which indeed he knew very little. He bowed vaguely to her, and to Peg-Leg whom he knew to be one of Hesper’s hard-bitten, shell-backed relations, sat down on the edge of a chair indicated by Susan, and waited impatiently for Hes to finish off this unwelcome interruption to the day’s outing.

This she seemed in no hurry to do. That curious flash of temper left her as suddenly as it had come; she sat down beside Dolliber on the sofa, and accepted from her mother a glass of dandelion wine. Soon the room thickened with Marblehead gutturals, even Hesper, whose speech was, like her father’s and most of the younger generation, nearly free from the burr and the peculiar transposition of
o
and
a
sounds, fell into a way of talking that he had not heard from her in years.

The truth was that Hesper, having met friendliness from Tamsen, and no worse than ridicule from Peg-Leg, had felt a great relief and a desire to make amends. She asked after her uncle’s garden, sure method of restoring his temper. Peg-Leg was growing larkspur and cinnamon roses—“the Gawd-dom biggest roses in Morblehead.” He’d had to give up dory fishing at last on account of his rheumatics, but he wouldn’t sell his old dory, he’d put her in the front yard and filled her with earth, and grew simples in her, marjoram and rosemary, and mustard and wormwood and pennyroyal. The salt and the fish gurry that had sunk into the dory’s hull seemed to flavor the herbs and make them grow bigger than anyone else’s.

“Have you tansy, Peg-Leg?” inquired Susan. “Mine is scanty this season, and I’d take it kindly could I have some to give Hessie.”

Tamsen nodded gravely; tansy tea was well known to promote easy labor.

“Aye—” answered Peg-Leg, “Oi have some. So that’s the way the wind blows.” He surveyed his niece with a kinder look, drained off his rum flip, and clamped his tough old gums on the pipestem.

“Come, Hes,” muttered Amos fidgeting. “We’ll miss the race altogether.”

She turned to him hastily, murmuring apology. She had quite forgotten the race, unaccountably soothed and sustained by chatter she perceived to be boring to Amos.

“I should think you’d want to watch it too—” said Amos politely to Peg-Leg, “you being such a sailor, and it’s a fine day.”

Peg-Leg snorted. “ ’Tis naught to me which one o’ them fancy boats beats fir-rst to Morblehead Rock, and ’tis not a foine day.”

“Why, there’s not a cloud in the sky—”

The old seaman gave him a look of amused contempt. “Weather breeder—it’ll star-rm afore mar-rnin’.”

“Aye—” said Susan suddenly, “and there’s worse than storm in the air. Did you hear the ‘screechin’ woman’ last night?” She looked at her brother and Tamsen, and she asked the question as casually as one speaks of any disagreeable manifestation of nature—“Did you hear it hailing last night?” But Peg-Leg and Tamsen both started, frowned, and considered the statement distastefully.