The Hearth and Eagle

by Anya Seton

  The Hearth and Eagle reopened that August, and the taproom under Susan’s competent management quickly regained most of its old standing.

  And at the same time Hesper left the factory. In quitting she denied herself the scene with Mr. Porterman which she had pictured so pleasurably. Her mother’s loan had squashed that indulgence. You couldn’t be rude to a benefactor. So she informed only Miss Simpkins and Mr. Johnson who were equally indifferent. She had been a good stitcher but now that the war was over, there were plenty to replace her. Yet she did see Amos after all, for on her last Saturday as she went to collect her pay, Johnson told her she was to report to Mr. Porterman’s office.

  Hesper raised her eyebrows, and knocked on Amos’s door. He rose from his mahogany roll-top desk as she entered, and said, “Good afternoon, Miss Honeywood,” in a formal voice.

  The office was large and comfortable. It was carpeted in red lozenges. The two armchairs were of mohair and walnut veneer, and there were three framed chromos hanging against the green and yellow roses of the wallpaper. The windows were draped in brown plush fringed with woolly brown balls and excluded much daylight. So the lamps were lit— female draped figures made of plaster of Paris whose raised arms supported the frosted lamp globes.

  He does himself well, Hesper thought, and said “Good afternoon.”

  Amos indicated a chair and sat down. He wasn’t very sure why he had summoned her, nor did he know what to say, now that she was here.

  “Johnson tells me you’re leaving us—” he said abruptly. “Too bad, you’ve made quite a good record.” He hadn’t meant to strike that tone at all—condescending, owner to factory hand. But it was her own attitude that embarrassed him. Always remote, when it wasn’t actually hostile.

  “Yes. I’m going home to help Ma with the Inn,” she said. “We’re grateful for the loan.” Her hazel eyes passed over his face and rested on a snow-scene paper weight on his desk.

  “Purely a matter of business—” he said, more ungraciously than he meant to.

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt of that—” she answered with faint sarcasm. “But thanks anyhow.”

  She wasn’t as handsome as he had sometimes thought, and he had been very conscious of her during his inspections of the stitching room. She sat awkwardly in the armchair, she was too pale, and thin, her cheekbones and jaw too prominent. And yet, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  I didn’t ask her here to be thanked, damn it, he thought, annoyed. He crossed his legs, and leaned back in the swivel chair. “Factory work wasn’t as bad as you expected, was it!” he said on a hearty, rallying note.

  Hesper turned her head. Her mouth curved. “Quite as bad,” she said. “There’s never been a moment of these ten months when I haven’t loathed it.”

  Amos’s chair squeaked stridently. He jumped to his feet, flushing—“My dear Miss Honeywood! What d’you mean by that! My factory’s as well run as any in the country! I do a great deal for my hands. You can’t say you haven’t had fair treatment.”

  Hesper got up too. “I didn’t mean to make you angry, Mr. Porterman. You asked me and I told you. It’s doubtless that I’m not suited to the work.” And not another word will I say. I’m quit of the place, thank heaven. I never thought he had such a sharp temper, he doesn’t look it, being so fair and big. She waited coolly.

  Amos controlled himself, ashamed that she had roused him to a disproportionate fury. She was under no compulsion to like his factory, yet for a second he had wanted to slap her.

  “Good-bye—” she said, as he didn’t speak. She smiled again. She had the strange and pleasant sensation of having the upper hand. I wonder if Charity knows how to manage him, she thought. Everyone knew that Charity and Mr. Porterman were keeping company, though there’d been no announcement.

  “Well, good-bye,” he said through stiff lips, suddenly wishing that she wouldn’t go, that she would look at him with friendliness. “I daresay you’ll be happier at home. I—” he had meant to give her a bonus, with a few cordial words of commendation. He had the five-dollar gold piece all ready in an envelope on his desk, but the gift was unthinkable now. “I may run down some day, and see how your mother’s getting on—” he said. “Unless, of course, I’d be unwelcome.”

  “Oh no—Mr. Porterman. Ma’d admire to see you, I’m sure.”

  After she left, Amos sat on in his office, brooding. The girl disliked him, and he disliked her; at least she aroused in him feelings of embarrassment and inadequacy. Too trivial to think about except that her attitude seemed to typify the general one of Marblehead. He’d tried to be kind to her, as he’d been generous toward his adopted town. Both accepted his generosity, expressed tepid thanks, and continued to exclude him. Except Charity, of course. He slipped his bulbous gold watch out of his vest pocket. Due right now at the Trevercombes for supper. He’d be late again, and she’d be archly reproving—“Naughty man—working so hard at that horrid old factory—forgetting all about poor little Charity—” fluttering, tense and anxious underneath. Her mother too, watching—waiting as Charity was, for him really to declare himself. Poor little devil, he thought. I’ll do it tonight. He had used respect for the memory of Lily Rose as long as he decently could.

  He sighed and got up, going behind the fretwork screen to fetch his gloves and beaver hat. Well, at any rate, he thought, the Trevercombes would make him comfortable and give him a good supper, much better than the Marblehead Hotel.

  He walked along School Street from his factory and crossed Pleasant Street, passing rival shoe factories, but none as big as his, he thought complacently, except Harris & Sons with their new plant on Elm Street, and he had every intention of surpassing them soon.

  He turned down Washington and his pleasant thoughts were cut short by a dark shadow that moved behind a maple tree. He smothered an exclamation and stopped, but it was not a woman. It was only a trick of the waning light.

  Besides, Leah had not been out of her house since January, he knew through the discreet inquiries he had had Johnson make. They said in the town she had had a recurrence of the madness she once suffered from, and her son was caring for her, as he had before.

  But I didn’t know she wasn’t—wasn’t normal—and even if I had—His face and neck grew hot, and he tried not to think of what had happened, but the scene took shape inexorably in his mind. This thing had happened before supper. He had come home early to attend to some personal correspondence, and Nat wasn’t due for a couple of hours yet. He had been sitting at the table in his bedroom, when Leah walked in dressed again in that white nightgown, or whatever it was. He had jumped up—and suddenly before he knew what was happening, she had twined her arms around his neck, and was pressing the length of her body against him, murmuring “Love Leah—love Leah—you know you want to—” her head thrown back and her great dark eyes burning. He had felt her full breasts pressing against his chest, from the warmth of her body there rose a compelling perfume, and her face seemed to shimmer in a flame. And he had lost his head. There had been strange unreal moments, gilded with a bizarre beauty, and then he had returned to himself, appalled. He had shoved her away, shouting at her, telling her to hurry out of there lest Nat should come back. She had stared at him piteously, seeming not to understand—“Don’t tell Nat—” she whispered. “You must never tell him, love—oh, you don’t know...”

  “No. No—” he’d said more gently. “We’ll both forget this forever. I’ll leave here in the morning, of course.”

  “Leave—?” she said in a small bewildered voice like a child. “You want to leave Leah, alone?”

  “I must. Be reasonable. I can’t stay now.” He spoke very sharply, because he felt a quiver of fear. And he took her arm and led her across the threshold. She went quietly, but as she stood by the door of her own room, she raised her head and looked at him with a clouded and poignant yearning. “Leah’Il be watching and waiting for you always—” she whispered.

  She had stayed in her room the rest of that evening, l
ocking her door, and not answering Nat when he knocked and tried to find out what was the matter. The two men ate their cold supper in silence, both conscious of faint, stifled sobbing upstairs from Leah’s room. After supper Amos had made the bald announcement that he was leaving the next day, and had seen the lightning flash of relief in Nat’s eyes. Nat might connect this with his mother’s distress, but thank God he could guess nothing of what had happened.

  The next morning, Leah had seemed to be her normal self again, though her motions and the few words she spoke were very slow, as though they proceeded from conscious effort. When his luggage was all piled in the van, the awkward moment of farewell had not been difficult. She had stood beside Nat in her doorway, and said “Good-bye” quite naturally, though her great dark eyes had not looked at Amos.

  He had seen her but once since then, about a month later, when she had suddenly emerged from the shadow of a porch on Pleasant Street as he walked home from the factory. Her hands were outstretched toward him, her eyes alight, and there was a joyous beseeching smile on her lips. He had seen at once that she was in the other phase, the one in which she spoke of herself in the third person, in strange disassociation from the passionate and tortured beauty which possessed her. There were many passers-by on Pleasant Street, and he had been seized with a furious embarrassment. “Go home!” he shouted at her and turning his back had crossed to the other side of the street. He had not seen her again.

  What else could I have done? thought Amos walking faster up the hill on Washington Street towards the Trevercombes. Her son knows how to take care of her. This damn town. Lots of them are queer, it seems to me. Inbred. Never leaving the place for as much as an hour. Moss-backs, die-hards, got to do everything the way their “grandsir” did it. Got to use words the rest of the world never heard of—show how exclusive they are, I guess. Planchment, grouty, froach, crimmy, gormy, clitch, cautch—lot of gibberish. Some of the old-timers you couldn’t understand at all, and they were proud of it, he thought with sharpening irritation. He stumbled against an abutment of rocky ledge and looked down at his boots. Their sleek, polished blackness was gray with clinging dust. Look at that—wouldn’t you think they’d pave their streets, at least! He entered Charity’s house in a lowering mood.

  Hesper slipped back quietly into her normal role of helping her mother at the Inn.

  The Marblehead matrons said that she had settled down and become an excellent daughter. Usually this remark was directed in reproach at one of their Annies or Bessies who were sulking under parental discipline. Most of Hesper’s own contemporaries had married long ago, except, of course, Charity.

  Sometimes Hesper, urged by her mother, went to take a cup of tea with one of her married friends—Nellie Higgins who had married Willy Bowen, or Agatha Bray, now Mrs. Woodfin. From these expeditions she usually returned with a dull headache and a feeling of constriction around her heart. Marblehead had always been known for its fecundity, and the new young matrons rapidly contributed to the tradition. Hesper had to endure a good-natured patronage, and she was always called upon to admire a clutch of round-cheeked infants, trotted out in pinafores or swaddling clothes for the admiration of Miss Hesper. Now be good, dear, Miss Hessie won’t eat you, she just loves babies.

  Hesper increasingly avoided these visits. She helped her mother at the Inn, she did a little church work, she still occasionally wrote little verses in her Pansy Album, and once unsuccessfully submitted one of her poems to the Atlantic, then Leslie's, then Godey’s. She did not try again.

  She knew that nobody had the slightest expectation that she would ever marry. There weren’t enough men to go around in Marblehead. Hesper had had a chance and been unlucky. Well, there were plenty of useful spinsters, and always room for more. Hesper consciously shared this view, but she suffered from strange unhappy dreams full of yearnings and unknown faces, from which she sometimes woke up crying.

  The fifteenth of June was a beautiful day and a quiet one at the Inn. The fishing fleet lay off the Georges Banks for the summer fare, because now only a couple of the sturdiest old jiggers ventured as far as the Grand Banks. For the first time since before the war the town had tried to give its fleet the traditional sendoff. On the Monday morning of their departure each freshly painted schooner had sailed up and down the harbor, and the drone of chanteys from their decks competed with the spasmodic ringing of church bells and the honk of fish horns blown by excited small boys. Hesper and Susan had stolen time from the taproom to climb Fort Sewall and watch. But the celebration had rung hollow. Susan had shaken her head, sighing. “It isn’t like before the war is it—Hes—and you should’ve seen it in my young days. The harbor so thick you could’ve walked across on the decks, an’ the whole town dressed to kill and singing too. Those days there wasn’t one of us but had a man on board, and we sent ’em off to man’s work. It’s a niminy-piminy business now with the dory fishing and the trawling and the seines.”

  Still, there were over a hundred men gone with the fleet, and the Inn was nearly empty. On this June day Hesper served fishballs and ale to two old sail-makers who had come over on business from Salem by dory, and to a seedy youngish drummer from Boston who was trying with little hope to interest the new Emporium in a line of ladies’ cloth gaiters. He had wandered in to the Hearth and Eagle because someone had told him it was a cheap place to board. Seeing that Hesper was young he volunteered a few listless sallies. These small-town girls always expected to be sparked a bit by the traveling men. But as Hesper returned no answer at all, and served him in chill silence, he pushed back his pie plate, pulled out his gold-plated toothpick, and relapsed into nervous gloom.

  Hesper stacked the dinner dishes and carried them into the kitchen where they clattered into the old stone sink.

  “Have a care—” said Susan automatically. She was kneading bread in an enormous wooden bowl, and her stout freckled arms and one cheek were dabbed with flour. A gauze of flour dust swirled in the ray of June sunlight that fell across the sink, the scarred oak table, and the glossy wide-planked floor. A soft breeze fluttered through the open door and stirred a tiny cobweb high against the smoke-blackened summer beam. The kitchen sharpened to the scent of Atlantic salt and wild roses.

  “It’s a fine day,” said Susan, plunging her fingers again into the viscous gray dough.

  Hesper nodded. She pulled the wooden stopper from under the cleansed dishes. The dirty water gurgled through the pipe in the wall and dispersed itself on the grass beside the back step.

  “Did you get ’em real clean?” asked Susan sharply. “I was mortified at that egg spot yesterday on Judge Salter’s plate.”

  Hesper nodded again, not answering. She stacked the dried plates on a lower shelf of the oak dresser.

  One of her black spells, thought Susan with annoyance and pity. “Go out an’ help your pa in the garden, child, breath of air’ll do you good.”

  The girl shook her head. “I’ve got to shred the cod and the potatoes aren’t peeled yet. Besides I don’t fancy fussing in the garden.”

  Susan’s irritation flared. “Rather go back to stitching uppers at Porterman’s I guess—” and she would have said more, but something in the dulled look of Hesper’s face stopped her. “Never mind the garden,” she said more gently. “It’ll wait. And the fishcakes too. Get your shawl and go out for a walk. Over to the Neck, mebbe. You used to like that.”

  Hesper glanced toward the south window, toward the bare slopes and green tufted outline of the Neck. “I don’t feel like it, Ma.”

  Susan looked again at her daughter, then she rolled pellets of dough from her fingers, wiped her hands on her apron. “Domnation—Hes! I’m not asking you how you feel, I’m telling you to go. Here’s your shawl. Now scat. And don’t come back ’till suppertime.”

  Hesper gave her mother a dreary little smile. I wish I never had to come back, she thought, but there was no actual urge or conviction. She took the shawl and went out the back door.

  She wandered alon
g Front Street glancing without interest into the open windows which ran along beside her at shoulder level. Blinds were never drawn in Marblehead, even at night. Old Gee Haw and Mrs. Bessom were sitting in their parlor entertaining the stylish young niece from Beverley. They nodded at Hesper, who nodded back, seeing in that one quick glance that the niece was very pretty and smartly dressed and her saucer-blue eyes held a coquettish assurance.

  Hesper quickened her step and her gaze after that remained on the waterfront side with its string of docks, sail lofts, ship’s chandleries, and boat yards. The smell of tar and oakum and paint mingled with the smell of roses across the way. Beside each house a meager plot sprawled over the cliff and flamed with lusty pink cabbage roses.

  At the town dock, Hesper paused. The ferry was about to cross over to the Neck. Well, why not? It had been two years since she had gone there. “Budgeo” Watson the ferryman was a frequent customer at the Inn, and greeted her amiably. “Ye goin’ over to Ham’s far-rm fur yore ma?—Business is been mighty brisk terday. Took three furriners over this mar-rnin’. Young couple from Par-rtsmouth was goin’ to board a week with Mor-rtin Ham. They was screechin’ about how ro-mantic the Neck was. I liked to ’ve bust a gut laughin’.” He chuckled and rested on his oars. “But they warn’t the queerest. Was a paintin’ feller went over too. Leastways said he was, when the young folk axed him. Had a tin box with him an’ a package an’ his vittles in a red kerchief. They axed him what he was goin’ to paint, an he said, ‘Anything worth the paintin’—’ Just like that. Gruff an’ grouty. An’ then they kep’ at him and axed where did he come from and he give ’em a smile sharp as a splittin’ knife, an’ said ‘From here an’ there along the coast.’ That shet ’em up.”