The Hearth and Eagle (50 page)

“Did ye, Susan?” said Peg-Leg. “She’s out o’ season. But mebbe ’twas boys imitatin’ her screeches. Oi had a tur-rn at thot meself, sixty years ago.”

Susan shook her head. “ ’Twasn’t boys. I heard
her
plain screeching, ‘Ha’ mercy! Ha’ mercy! Oh Lord Jesus=save me!’ Like she always does. There’s bad luck coming.”

Hesper knew she should laugh; Amos’s expression of bewildered annoyance was funny in itself, her mother’s belief in a shrieking ghost was funny, but she could not laugh.

“What in the name of heaven is the screechin’ woman?” Amos demanded. The three old Marbleheaders turned and looked at him somberly. They had forgotten him.

“Furriners don’t hear her,” said Peg-Leg in a grumpy voice, and he clamped his jaws again on his pipestem.

“It’s an old legend,” explained Hesper hurriedly. “A couple of hundred years ago a high-born English lady was captured by pirates and forced ashore here at Marblehead. The pirates murdered her just up the street in Oakum Bay. Some people,” she glanced at her mother’s impassive face, “some people think they can still hear her screams for mercy.”

“She screeches—” said Susan, calmly, filling Peg-Leg’s mug from a pitcher. “Sometimes on the night she was slaughtered, and sometimes when there’s evil coming to Marblehead.”

“That’s roight,” agreed Tamsen. “Oi hear-rd her in ’73 two days before the town was strick with the smallpox, and so did many another.”

Amos stood up abruptly, ignoring Mrs. Peach and addressing his mother-in-law. “I am surprised at a sensible woman like you, talking like that.” It pained him to have to revise his long-held respect for Mrs. Honeywood, pained him the more as this nonsense somehow reflected on Hesper. He had always soothed the disquiet occasioned by her father’s undeniable whimsies and fantasies by the reflection that she took after her robustly practical mother. Susan still further disquieted him by smiling tolerantly and saying, “You sound like Roger. He was grouty with me for saying I heard her, but he heard her too, despite his deafness. I could tell by the jump he gave and the look on his face. But he wouldn’t own to it.”

“Of course not—” snapped Amos, reversing his usual position. “He’s a sensible, well-educated man.”

Susan sat still with her fat mottled hands clasped on her ample lap. “Funny thing about Roger—” she said, in a saddened almost gentle voice. “He hankers after the past, sets such a store by past things—but when the past really comes through to him like it does sometimes—he’s afeared, and he won’t listen and he won’t see.”

Maybe that’s true—thought Hesper. Her mother’s words gave her a strange shock. The past comes through, not only the evil in the past likethe screechin’ woman—but good too—like Arbella’s letter—the past always there, flowing beside us as we journey, like a river hidden by mist. It seemed to her for one second that she was close to both her parents, understanding their viewpoints, which were not opposed, as she had always thought, but the two sides of the same shield.

She hurried upstairs to see her father, but she found him fast asleep, propped up against the headboard of the old spool bed in her parents’ room. His spectacles had slipped down his nose, the inky pen had fallen to the counterpane, and across his lap there lay open and half covered with his scratchy writing—the second volume of the “Memorabilia.” She kissed the top of his head where the pink scalp showed through the white hair. She took off his glasses, and eased the pillows under his head. He stirred and smiled a little, but his deafness prevented him from hearing her. Last she put the pen on the oak chest by the bed, and lifting the heavy volume off his lap, she glanced at the page he had been writing. First there were several lines in parenthesis. “(This incident refers to April, 1814, when the British frigates
Tenedos
and
Endymion
had been three days pursuing our
Constitution
which took refuge in Marblehead Harbor and was thereby saved, by Fort Sewall’s doughty cannon. I saw this myself, being a lad of eight, and great was my perturbation, since my father, Thomas Honeywood, was a seaman on the
Constitution
and amongst those Marbleheaders who piloted her to safety.)”

And he had written one stanza.

Old Ironsides, fleeing from pursuers
Shelters in our harbor still.
Adds one more glory to our story,
“Marblehead is Marblehead, has been and always will.”

Hesper’s eyes filled with tears. She shut the volume gently, marking the place with the pen, and she stole out of the room.

Amos and Hesper left the Inn, re-entered the carriage, and drove over to the Neck across the causeway at Riverhead Beach. When they reached the squat white lighthouse on the Point they found a crowd of people crowded around its base. Though Marblehead youngsters were perched amongst the rocks, and the Portermans recognized a few acquaintances like the Browns and the Harrises, the crowd consisted mostly of strangers, the summer cottagers on the Neck, and excursionists who had not wished to remain on the steamers.

Amos drifted off to speak to Mr. Harris, and Hesper sat alone in the carriage beneath her sunshade and watched the distant white yachts sail in past the stake boat off Marblehead Rock. Near the carriage there stood a young couple from Lynn. The man wore a blue-and-white-striped jacket with gold buttons, and a blue cap with a shiny visor and an anchor embroidered above it. He had a spyglass, and he informed his lady of the progress of the race, in a loud, confident voice. That was
Halcyon
coming first, followed by
Magic.
The young man was a trifle dejected, because he’d bet Ned two dollars on
Latona,
but
Latona
had run into trouble past Halfway Rock, and parted her port main shrouds, so she was out of the race.

Hesper sat and perforce listened, but the sun poured very hot from out that cloudless sky, the violet haze on the horizon shimmered before her aching eyes, and the depression which had lifted from her that morning returned again. Pretty boats with pretty names, a charming spectacle to watch as one watched colored lantern slides of romantic scenery. But Marblehead was more than a convenient screen on which to project an alien spectacle, no matter how charming.

She felt a sudden fierce resentment, jealous for the harbor as it had been once, teeming with the bankers and the riggers and the coalers and the ballast lighters. It was
ours
then, she thought, the sea and the town were united in purpose, integrated with each other. She looked out toward the fairy yachts, slipping now one by one into the harbor, their sails half furled and strings of rose and green lanterns festooned between their masts. From the Boston steamer there floated the delicious and sensuous strains of the Blue Danube.

Get out—she cried to them all, go away, with your waltzes and your fairy lanterns and your make-believe races. You don’t belong here. And like the cat’s-paw of wind that skimmed across the harbor, something whispered in her heart—“And do
you
belong here, either? Isn’t your life, too, a pretty colored lantern slide?” But she scarcely heard the whisper, before it was gone. Amos came back, and they drove home together through the dusk. He was concerned because she looked very tired, and indeed she felt drained and empty. Her head ached now in earnest and she longed with singlehearted yearning for the moment when she might again slip between her cool lavender-scented sheets, and sip the sugared lemonade that Annie would have waiting.

T
HE STORM
prophesied by Peg-Leg duly arrived in the night and it blew and rained all Saturday and most of Sunday. Hesper spent those days in bed. She and Amos thought it wise to rest after the fatigue of the expedition; neither was there any particular reason for getting up, even on Sunday, for it had been years since she had gone to church. Amos was no churchgoer. Right after their marriage they had gone to the Old North, but they had not enjoyed the buzz of whispers that accompanied their appearance, and once it became apparent to Amos that the effort would produce neither social nor financial results, they gave it up.

Except that Hesper ate her meals off a tray sloppily prepared by Annie, Sunday plodded by much like all other Sundays. She read Henry a Bible story, then questioned him on it. She leafed through a couple of Ladies’ Magazines, she played a hand or two of euchre with Amos. After dinner she napped and dreamed about the baby, seeing it as a rosy, laughing little girl. They were on a ship together, she and her little girl, the ship was Johnnie’s old
Diana,
but it looked like one of the Boston yachtsman’s schooners, and it was bound for a soft southern country far away where they were to live in a little white temple amongst a grove of flowered trees.

She awoke from this dream, and lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain until Amos came in from a trip to the stables, and coming to the bedside asked affectionately how she was feeling.

“All right—” she said, smiling up at him. “I was dreaming of the baby.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, taking her hand in his. “You’re not too worried, Pussie—about, well—your ordeal? It’s awful that women have to go through those things.”

“I’m not much worried—” she said, and she could see the admiration in his eyes. Though in fact Henry’s birth had not been bad. It had been methodical and expeditious as Henry himself, and she had had whiffs of chloroform all the way through.

“I’ve told Doctor Flagg to get hold of that special woman’s doctor from Boston—” said Amos. “Should have had him for Henry’s birth, but I didn’t know about him, then.”

“Ah darling—” whispered Hesper, much touched, and her hand closed around his. “You’re good to me.” Far off in the back of her head she heard Susan’s snort of derision, and she heard her mother’s voice as though she stood in the room—“So even me and the monthly nurse and Doctor Flagg and chloroform a’nt enough to birth a strapping healthy woman!”

But I lost the first baby, Hesper reminded her mother’s image sharply. You never make allowances.

Amos bent and kissed her. She looked young and pretty, lying there against the pillows with the two curly auburn braids falling down her shoulders against her blue swansdown jacket. He no longer noticed the heavy straight black eyebrows which had once disconcerted him with their startling effect of strength in a face otherwise very feminine. He saw only that her hazel eyes looked softly at him, and that her lips had an appealing and wistful curve.

“Of course I’m good to you, my girl. I’m fond of you,” he said gruffly. Her heart swelled. It’s for this—she thought—for this. Why do I ever fed discontent—how dare I feel an emptiness? We have so much, Amos and I.

“Amos, dear—” she said, after a moment. “Are things still going well at the factory?”

He looked surprised and indulgent. “Certainly. Very well indeed. Just got a big new order. Why do you ask?”

The real optimism in his voice convinced her. She answered hesitantly. “Do you think, maybe, you might—sell the factory—someday—we might move from here?”

“Well, I suppose I might,” said Amos, still indulgently, though he was startled. “You don’t like it here, Hes? Why, it’s your own town and—” and he glanced around the luxurious room, “and this is our home.”

“Yes, I know, and it’s beautiful. But—we aren’t really part of the town, are we?”

Now it was out. The thing they never mentioned, and she had said it so quickly and casually that he hardly heard her. He put her suggestion down to a whim born of her condition. The time had passed when he cared what the town thought of him. As long as there was money to be made from it. Cheap labor and now this new prospect of profitable real estate. As soon as the factory was on its feet again, they could travel more, perhaps buy a winter house in Boston if she wished it. And soon as money flowed in again, as it surely would.

“We’ll see, Pussie,” he said. “I guess you’ll be far too busy with the new baby to think of moving yet awhile,” and he went out again to go down-town and make a final quick inspection of the factory.

At five, Hesper decided after all to get up for supper. She rose languidly and put on a summer house gown, made of white muslin, with a loose, flowing overdress of leaf-green silk edged with black braid. The weather had begun to clear and it was growing warm. It tired her to raise her arms for long. So it was too much effort to rebraid her hair after its perfunctory brushing, or to arrange the little lace “breakfast” cap which should accompany negligée.

She wadded all the stubborn curly red mass into a black net and tied the black ribbons in a bow on the top of her head, ending with a quick survey in the rosewood cheval glass.

I look pretty good, considering, she thought, surprised. The long flowing lines of the green overdress hid the thickness of her waistline. This burden that she carried forced her body to a proud, even magnificent carriage, with head and shoulders well back to balance the forward pull.

Her skin glowed with the fine-grained luster sometimes bestowed by late pregnancy. I do look handsome in green, she thought, and yet for many years she had avoided the color because of its painful associations with the green dress Evan had bought her in New York. The dress in which he had tried to paint her and failed.

She turned from the mirror. It was never wise to think of Evan. Pain and failure must be thrust back again at once behind the protective wall. Or they might be denied existence, as Charity said. “Evil is nothing but illusion, Hesper, it has no reality. You must think only sweet loving thoughts, for the sake of the little one, if not your own.”

Hesper sighed. Well, maybe. Charity was certainly a good example of her own preaching. Healthy, bustling, and complacent to the point of smugness. No more feverish yearnings and clutchings for her, no doubts or self-distrust.

She heard the front door slam and moved to the head of the stairs, calling greeting to Amos, who ran up to her boyishly. “So you’re all dressed, Pussie! Sure you feel up to it?” and she noticed that Amos was in his happiest mood.

He and Johnson had been inspecting every room in his factory, and found everything in topnotch condition for the start of the great effort tomorrow. The stitching machines and the buffers and the channel turners were all cleansed, oiled, and in working order. The cutting tables and the lasters’ benches cleared from back orders and ready. And in the basement stock room he had been delighted with the quality of the new shipment of tanned and dyed black Morocco hides. He congratulated Johnson, who nodded and admitted that the hands were showing a good spirit. He’d told the cutters to show up at five-thirty tomorrow morning and they’d agreed without fussing. It was the promise of the bonus had done it, that and the thrill of optimism communicated downwards from Amos.