The Hearth and Eagle Read Free Page A

his landing, and they clambered down to the beach to see what luck the fisherman had had.
    Hesper wiped her face on a corner of her white muslin pinafore, threw the trailing ends of her shawl over her shoulders in a gesture duplicating her mother’s, and continued homeward. The old house awaited her, and she thought as she often had when approaching it from the water side that it looked like a great friendly mama cat. It’s unpainted clapboards had weathered through two centuries to a tawny silver, and the huge chimneys, one on the old wing, one on the new, stuck up like ears. And the inn sign above the taproom door swung back and forth like the cat’s tongue. There had once been painted emblems on the sign, a pair of andirons and a flying bird above the letters “The Hearth and Eagle,” but they had all faded into a rusty red blur.
    Hesper, moved by a feeling of special solemnity, went through the east door under the sign instead of around to the kitchen entrance as usual. The taproom door was closed, but she could hear her mother’s voice, slow and thick with long pauses. So Ma and Pa were shut in there. Hesper wandered into the kitchen. It was still warm with the sunlight from the windows over the sink, but there were clouds building, and the wind rising on the harbor.
    Beside a small bright fire in the great hearth, Gran sat huddled in her Boston rocking chair. She was wrapped in fleecy gray shawls and she looked like a tiny old seagull. Her sharp black eyes were sea-gull eyes too. “What’s Roger doin’ in the taproom with Susan?” she asked querulously when she saw Hesper. “And why’d he run out before?” Her voice was high and thin, but on a good day like this it had a snap to it.
    “There’s been a tor-rible thing happen to the fleet,” said Hesper importantly, imitating Cap’n Chadwick. “Tom and Willy aren’t never coming back. Ma’s telling Pa.”
    The old woman’s wrinkled eyelids hooded her eyes. She stopped rocking. “They ain’t never cornin’ back?” she repeated, seeming to consider. Her eyes opened and stared unseeing at the child. Her mouthdrew itself into a pucker. “No more did Richard. He didn’t come back.” She shook her head. Her gaze slipped around the bright kitchen to rest on the hooked rug by the entry. “Right there I stood when I last saw Richard. I hooked that rug myself. ‘Ship and sunset’ we called it.”
    Hesper stared at the rug on which she had walked a thousand times. “It’s real pretty,” she said, then drew in her breath. There was a queer noise from the taproom. A broken cluttered sound as if someone was crying, and mixed with it Ma’s voice, firm and comforting. Pa was crying? thought the child in amazement, when he hadn’t seemed worried at all about Tom and Willy before. The sounds frightened her, and she puzzled over them until she found the answer. It wasn’t that Pa didn’t feel, it was that he lived so far away he didn’t believe in real things, and when they happened he didn’t know what to do, except turn to Ma, and let her comfort him.
    Old Sarah Honeywood did not hear the sounds from the taproom. She kept on staring at the rug, and the misty present dissolved into the vivid emotion of seventy years ago, emotion she had thought long outrun, and yet it was still strong enough to rush forward again and overpower the changed body and the dim mind.
    She saw Richard as he had stood that July day, boyish and handsome in his regimentals. The “handsomest man in Essex County,” she had said that herself—that long-forgotten Sally Hathaway when Richard first came a-wooing to her father’s house in Cunny Lane. She had said it again on the rug, her arms around his neck, the tears running down her face on to her red linsey-woolsey. With the memory of the red linsey-woolsey the scene grew sharper and brighter. From outside she heard the shouts of the other men in Glover’s regiment. Orders had just come from General Washington, saying the