The Hearth and Eagle (64 page)

When she opened her eyes again, she knew at once that she was lying in her own bed, in the borning room. She knew because her gaze rested on the beam above her head and the little knot in the wood that was shaped like an anchor. She knew too that there were people around her bed, but she did not look to see who they were. She turned her head to the right wall and saw that Evan’s picture again hung there as it always did. The picture she had clutched all during that dreadful hour in the night. I saved that, she thought—the only thing I tried to save. How strange. But as she gazed up at the picture, she knew that it was not strange. For if the house itself had been destroyed, she would still have had this—the symbol of the ideal that could never be destroyed. She looked at the mute, ageless figure in the doorway—its arms outstretched in welcome. She looked beyond the jeweled and living house and saw that they were still all there inside, the people who had built it into an enduring pattern, and that behind the house there lay, forever incarnated—the image of the eternal sea.

She turned her head at last and saw the anxious faces of those by her bedside. Her doctor was bending over her, and next to him Carla knelt by the bed. Behind them, she saw Walt and Henry, and Tony and Eleanor, all crowded together in the narrow doorway.

Yes, she thought, as she tried to smile to them all, it’s coming now, very soon. But she felt no fear. Her eyes wandered past them to the window. She saw that snow was falling against the distant line of black trees along Peach’s Point. She heard the quiet lapping of water on the shingle of the Little Harbor.

And then she heard another sound near her; and after a moment she knew what it was. The sound of Carla’s muffled sobbing.

And this roused her from the clinging gray peace that was falling around her as softly as the snow fell against the window panes.

“Don’t, dear—” she whispered, though she thought she spoke loud. She felt the girl take her hand and press it against a wet cheek.

“There
is
comfort—” she whispered to Carla. “There
is
pity. I thought there wasn’t. But there is.”

But she saw that the girl, deep in grief, could not understand that, and she groped for words to express the new security in her own heart. “The andirons—” she whispered urgently. “Phebe’s andirons. They mean home, and even if the house
had
burned, they couldn’t have burned. Because they’re strong. Do you understand that, Carla? ‘A most sturdy courage to endure.’ That’s what really matters. Do you see, dear?”

She did not hear the girl’s answer, but she did not need to, for it seemed to her that the little room became illumined with a golden light. She knew the light came from the house, and from the sea outside, and from beyond the sky that covered them all. But it seemed to her that the light flowed brightest of all from the ever-replenished lantern that is passed down from hand to hand and shines upon the symbols of the enduring hearth.

THE END