The Hearth and Eagle

by Anya Seton

  “Oh, pretty soon, I guess. When I’m up and around.” And though she too had been thinking of the return to their mansion on Pleasant Street, she felt an unpleasant pang. “Don’t you like it here, dear?”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” said Henry indifferently. “Only I miss my bank game, and I was building a toy village in the stable. Tim was helping me.

  “Couldn’t you build it in the barn, here?”

  “Too small.”

  “Why don’t you go down to the harbor, learn something about the boats while we’re here?” persisted Hesper; “that’s what most Marblehead boys like to do.”

  “I did,” answered Henry. “I’ve been out twice with Ben Peach in his dory. He says I row real well. But I’d rather build the village. It’s what I set out to do. I like to finish things.”

  Hesper gazed at her son with a mixture of respect and irritation. He’s certainly got character, she thought, and she looked down at the lusty dark-haired baby, wondering about him. It seemed to her that this one was far more vigorous than Henry had ever been. Certainly he cried louder and oftener and appeased his appetite with a more single-minded vehemence. For a moment she regretted the gentle little girl baby for whom she had longed, and then stifled the regret forever. For the new baby had brought with him a special kind of love, born with him in the turbulence of his birth night.

  “Here—” said Henry suddenly, thrusting a squeezed and wilted bunch of pansies at his mother. “They’re for you. I forgot.” His grandmother had suggested that he pick them, but he had been quite willing. Since the night of the fire, his placid affection for Hesper had been deepened by a tinge of admiring awe. He knew that she had done a very brave thing, for Johnson had told him so. To be sure, here she was lying around in bed again, but the new baby apparently somehow explained that.

  “Thank you, dear,” said Hesper, much touched, and spread the bruised pansies on the counterpane. She ran her fingers softly over the golden brown and purple faces. “They’re for thoughts,” she said. “Some people call them ‘Heart’s-ease.’ I wrote a poem about pansies once. I guess it wasn’t very good.”

  She stared down at the pansies, wondering why her first pleasure at seeing them had dissolved into a dull pain. And suddenly she remembered that she had read the pansy poem to Evan one day at Castle Rock before their marriage. Read it with pride and a quivering expectancy, totally unprepared for the shock of his expression as she looked up for praise at the end. He had been looking at her with embarrassed pity, then quickly turned his head, murmuring “Charming.”

  But she had pressed for an opinion, and he had finally said, “There’s nothing real in it, Hesper. It’s just a lot of flabby little words.” Nothing I did ever really pleased him, she thought.

  “You’re hurting the flowers,” observed Henry, mildly disapproving. “Gramma says it’s naughty to pull them apart.”

  Hesper looked down at the scattered gold and purple petals on the counterpane. “It is,” she said. “Run out and play, dear. It looks like a lovely day.”

  “I guess I’ll take the ferry over to the Neck,” said Henry. “There’s some boys over there who like to trade.”

  “Summer people?” she asked, surprised. “How did you ever meet them?”

  “Oh, I meet lots of people when I want to,” said Henry vaguely.

  “Have you money to pay the ferry?”

  “Sure. Papa gives me plenty.”

  Hesper smiled and held out her arms, and Henry submitted to her kiss, even hugging her in return, before he escaped.

  Amos was so generous and good to them, she thought, reaching down for the baby who had awakened suddenly with an indignant demanding roar.

  “Hey—can’t you even wait one minute?” she said laughing down at the thrashing scrap on her lap, and she longed for Amos to come back so that they might laugh together, taking pride in the vigorous new son they had created.

  But when Amos came back and entered her room in the late afternoon, she saw there would be no laughter.

  “Hello, Hessie,” he said dully. “Feeling all right? How’s the little one?” But he did not look at the baby which she held in her arms. She had brushed all his abundant brownish hair into little peaks, and dressed him in some exquisitely embroidered baby clothes Susan had brought down from the attic, and she had been amused again to see how his rampant masculinity triumphed over the delicacy of his robes.

  Now her gay greeting died on her lips. She saw that Amos had lost weight. There were furrows in his cheeks and lines around his eyes. His broad shoulders were slumped forward under the pearl-gray broadcloth suit, which was rumpled and spotted. She noticed with startled dismay the absence of the massive gold watch chain he always wore.

  “Sit down, dear, and talk to me,” she said, carefully putting the baby in his cradle, so as not to wake him.

  “We’re both fine—” she added, answering Amos’s questions. “But you don’t look very well. You’re worried, aren’t you? Tell me about it.”

  She felt the resistance in him, saw that his impulse was to go out again.

  “Please—” she said.

  He hesitated, then looked at the rush-seated chair. “Isn’t a comfortable chair in this house.”

  “On the bed,” she said quickly, moving over. “Sit here.”

  He obeyed reluctantly, sat staring at the wide glossy floorboards.

  There was a silence and Hesper cast around in her mind to find the best opening. Then she rushed into speech before she lost courage.

  “The loss of the factory’s a heavy blow I know, and the dreadful way it happened. But it’s over now. I mean Nat. I know about that, Amos. Only thing to do is start fresh, never looking back.”

  He turned his head then and looked at her, and she caught her breath, for his eyes were chill and remote as the winter sea, and he gave a bitter laugh. “Start fresh with what?”

  “Why, Amos—” she faltered. “You had lots of other interests. You have property, I know, besides our house, and then the insurance on the factory. I read about that in the Messenger, the factories were covered by insurance. It said so.”

  “Mine wasn’t.”

  She stared at him blankly. “I don’t understand. You’ve never told me much about the business, but the papers said they were starting to build again right away and...”

  “Then I’ll make it clear to you,” he interrupted, in the cold hard voice, “since if you’re reading the papers, it’s obvious I can’t spare you much longer. I am totally and completely bankrupt. I owe thousands of dollars I can’t pay. I let the insurance lapse because I couldn’t afford it, and took a chance until a big new order paid off. You’ll see by Monday’s papers that the bankruptcy court has taken over everything I ever owned.”

  He turned his head back and once more stared down at the floor.

  Hesper swallowed. The room swirled around her, spiraling down to Amos’s averted face. “Oh, my poor darling...” she whispered. No, she thought, that’s not the way.

  “Well—” she spoke in an even tone. “It’s a shock, of course. But we’re still pretty young, and you can start fresh, Amos, after the—the bankruptcy business is finished. You made money before, you can do it again.”

  I didn’t start from nothing before, he thought. I didn’t start from ruin and I wasn’t forty-five. But he was grateful to her, and the bitterness in which he had encased himself cracked a little.

  “It’s for you and the boys—” he said on a softer tone. “Failing you like this—how to provide for you now. I’ve nearly gone crazy trying to think what to do.”

  “But surely it’s very simple,” she said after a minute.

  “What?” he asked, raising his head.

  “Why, we’ll stay on here for a while until you can get on your feet. This house belongs to Ma and me now. They can’t touch that, can they?”

  “No,” said Amos slowly. “They can’t. Mr. Honeywood willed it to your mother for lifetime tenure, then reversion to you. But Hes, yo
u always hated the place. Dilapidated. Uncomfortable. I was so glad to get you out of it. To give you—”

  “I don’t hate it now,” she interrupted. She looked at the baby in the old cradle and at the rush-seated chair where her father had sat beside her that night. Far more truly home than that great, glossy mansion on Pleasant Street. She had never been alive there, always a thinness and an emptiness. But this she knew she could never say to Amos. She watched the defeat in his face change to a bleak resignation, and knew that for him this house and the interwoven richness of generations of Honeywoods would never be home. His next words proved it.

  “You might sell, I suppose,” he said, sighing. “If you could persuade your mother. But who’d buy it? Wrong part of town.”

  “I wouldn’t care to sell,” she said quietly though she had been conscious of a little spurt of anger. “We need a home. I find I like hearing the sea again. It’s—” She paused, searching for a word to express the sensation of release she had been feeling as she lay listening to the beating rhythm, forever unaffected by puny human struggles. “It’s comforting,” she said at last.

  Amos turned his head and stared toward the window. “Is it? I hadn’t noticed.” He drew in his lips with a sharp sound, and reaching behind him found her hand. He held it tight. “Oh, Hessie, you’re a good wife. I haven’t said—I haven’t told you—you saved my stupid life that night.” His voice thickened and he stopped.

  Underneath the gratitude, there was the added twist of humiliation. Hessie, whom he had sworn to protect, delicate, bearing his child, finding him trussed like that on the floor, leading him out like a baby—the strong one....

  Hesper watched the back of his down-bent head, and felt the quiver of his hand as it held hers. And she understood. She bent over and laid her cheek against his hand.

  “I love you—Amos,” she said.

  He turned and gathered her into his arms.

  They lay quiet together, not speaking, while outside the little window the twilight deepened over the sea and the rising night wind slapped the mounting waves against the shingle.

  They were aroused by a vehement wail, and Amos, drowsing in the first surcease he had known since the fire, gave a start, and said, “What’s that!”

  “That’s our baby,” said Hesper, laughing. “He’s hungry again. Light the candle, dear—will you?”

  Amos pulled himself up from the bed and complied. He held the old pewter candlestick down to the cradle and inspected his son. “He’s got good lungs.” He put the candle on the dresser and picking up the squirming baby handed him to his mother. “What shall we name him, Hessie? You’d like Roger Honeywood, wouldn’t you?”

  Yes, she had certainly thought that the baby would be named for her father, and Susan and Mrs. Peach had already assumed so. But then she had not known the situation, nor realized the extent of the mutilation Amos’s pride and self-respect had suffered.

  “Hardly,” she said, smiling. “Pa’s name doesn’t fit this young man at all. I can’t picture him writing poetry.”

  “Nor I,” said Amos, smiling a little at last. “What then would you like?”

  She considered a moment. Henry, of course, had been named for Amos, Amos Henry Porterman. “We’ll name him Walter, for your father. Suit you?”

  “Yes,” said Amos.

  He stood looking down at them. The bent head, copper-tinted in the candlelight, the tender brooding of her mouth as she watched the baby, the curve of the white blue-veined breast from which his son drew abundance and security.

  Amos flushed, and leaning over, kissed the white parting between the waves of hair. “I’ll make money for you, Hessie, again. I’ll get out of here. We’ll start fresh in some other place. Out West maybe. I’ll take care of you better than I ever did. You and Henry and little Walter. You’ll see.”

  She raised her eyes from the baby, and the tender indulgence in their shadowed depths did not change as they rested on her husband. “I know you will, darling,” she said, but in her ears as she spoke, stronger than the voice of any human love or yearning, she heard the fateful and omnipotent pounding of the sea.

  CHAPTER 18

  ON THE twentieth of September, 1909, Hesper dispatched the last of her summer boarders, hung a neat black-and-white “Closed for the Season” notice in her parlor window, and went back through the taproom—now the boarders’ dining room—into the old kitchen to wait for Carla. Hesper still called it the kitchen, though of course Eleanor referred to it as the living room, and a new compact kitchen had been built from the old buttery in the rear.

  Hesper sat down in her rocker by the crackling fire. It had turned chilly out, and the southeast wind was beginning to blow harder from a tarnished pewter sky. The glass had been falling all day. Maybe the line storm.

  She pulled her rocker nearer to the great hearth, watching the flames leap high above the tall black andirons. Walt had laid this fine fire for her, before he went down the path to Little Harbor to look to his lobster pots. She sighed and rocked slowly, feeling the content of fire and rest. Glad to be rid of those boarders, though they were all good people, and mostly regulars from summer to summer. But how delightful to have the house to oneself again. Just Carla, and Walt and me, she thought, savoring it.

  To be sure she’d have to put up with Henry and Eleanor too for one night, but not, praise be, that mincing French governess this time. Even Eleanor wouldn’t try that again. Or Henry. Henry, she thought, sobering. Was he happy? And why not?...He had achieved everything he set out to do. “I mean to be rich, Mama—not just rich in Marblehead, rich in the whole world,” and he was; in banking circles his name would be recognized anywhere. He had married great wealth, but he had made it, too. A millionaire.

  Strange that my two boys should be so different. But they aren’t boys any more, she thought with astonishment. Henry’s forty, and Walt is thirty-three. She stopped rocking and sat up straight, listening to the banjo clock’s tick and staring into the fire.

  All those years—where had they slipped to? Looking back she saw her life flowing like a long river through this house, and yet there was a sharp break in the middle when she had left the river and strayed far from it into a different land. The time with Evan in New York, and then the years with Amos on Pleasant Street.

  Perhaps the house had known all the time that she’d be back. And without its shelter and the comfort it gradually distilled for her out of its memories, she could not have endured watching Amos’s deepening unhappiness through the years that he tried to fit himself into a life he hated. He had been brave and scrupulously honest throughout the bankruptcy proceedings, and in this town which had always excluded him he awakened some sympathy at last. Some of his Marblehead creditors refused to prosecute, and in the end it developed that though everything else was gone he might keep possession of the little sail loft on the wharf.

  Amos had taken it over and doggedly tried to run it, much helped by his old tenant who stayed on for a while out of kindness and taught him the business. The sail loft did begin to make a tiny profit, thanks to the increasing numbers of summer people and their pleasure craft. But the drive had gone out of Amos. He faded before her eyes into a beaten old man, and she, powerless to help him, had watched and grieved.

  And then came a day at the end of the summer like today, when Amos came home to supper and told her that Mr. Thompson of Boston, owner of the Black Hawk, had given an order for two new suits of sails for his yawl.

  “But that’s wonderful!” she had cried. “Aren’t you glad, dear?”

  She had never forgotten the tone of his laugh, and the startled way the two boys looked up at their father.

  “He called me ‘Cap,’ ” said Amos. “He slapped me on the back and told me to get a move on. He asked me to come over to his house on the Neck sometime when his family wasn’t there. Said I could bring the missis and kiddies along for a treat. It’d be fun for them to see all the elegant decorations and imported furniture.”

  She
had smiled uncertainly, saying, “But he meant well, Amos, I’m sure, and that’s a big order.”

  “It’ll bring in enough to take me to Cincinnati.”

  It had been a shock at first, but she had never questioned the rightness of the move for him. He had got wind of a small shoe business there, a young man who might be talked into, taking on an experienced partner. A little hope returned to Amos, and the days before he left they were very close to each other. He was to send for her and the boys as soon as he could. And in a month the summons came, but not from Amos. It came from the Commercial Hospital where he lay dying of a pneumonia he had caught tramping the cold wintry streets in search of an opening that would exactly suit him, for the young man’s shoe business had not.

  She had traveled day and night on the train and reached him in time. He had died in her arms, and just before the end he had recognized her, and murmured something about the boys. “Henry.” And she had known he had meant Henry would take care of her.

  Hesper sighed, leaning back again in the rocker. Heartbreak. That crazy old Aunt ’Crese on Gingerbread Hill fifty years ago. Had she really seen into the future or had she simply guessed at a pattern for a woman’s life from the wisdom of her own years? “Yo’ll think yore heart’ll never mend, but it will. De heart’s tough, honey.”

  Yes, it mends—glued together somehow by hard work, and time and necessity. The cracks are always there, but the organ functions again. And she had had help with the mending—the boys to raise, and the house, and Ma—for five more years.

  The Inn had kept them going, though the type of guests changed as the town changed. After the fire of ’77, some of the shoemen built again and tried to carry on the shoe business, but it was a losing battle to Lynn. And after increasingly violent labor troubles and another disastrous fire in ’88, Marblehead ceased to compete. In ’85, when the town went completely dry, the Inn could no longer get a license, and Hesper had started to take boarders. It was the summer people who kept the town going now, much as most Marbleheaders resented their intrusiveness and careless patronage.