“You look well,” he said, wiping his mouth and smiling at Hesper. “Do you feel all right now?”
She nodded. “Never better.” She straightened, throwing back her head and shoulders. The sunlight touched her hair to fire and her body, more slender than it had ever been, seemed to glow through the faded calico wrapper. “I’d forgotten what it felt like to be healthy,” she said, laughing. Her eyes met Evan’s enigmatic gaze. She took a step toward him. Of their own accord her arms lifted, palms outstretched, and her heart began to beat fast.
“Would you like to go out?” he said, still sitting at the table. “I believe there’s a minstrel show over at the Olympic today. Poor girl, you’ve had a thin time of it in New York.”
Her arms dropped, the quick rose spread through her cheeks and died. “Why, of course I would. But, Evan, we couldn’t afford it, could we?”
“I’ll manage,” he said. From somewhere far off she heard the warning bell, and she silenced it angrily. I’ve no cause for sick fancies now, she thought. Why must I forever be fretting when he doesn’t act as I expect? He’s been good to me, and now he’s planned this outing to give me pleasure.
She dressed herself in the warm blue serge gown he had bought for her in October, thinking what joy it was to have it fit again. She filled her mind with small satisfactions. The blue plush bonnet was becoming, the snow-packed streets were gay with sleigh bells, and in some shop windows there were racks of gawdy valentines.
They lunched at a small café to which neither had been before. She finished everything and a second helping which Evan indulgently ordered for her. She tried not to notice that he ate almost nothing.
The minstrel show was a delight; the end men in absurd pink and blue checked costumes, their enormous mouths left white on the blackened faces, cracked very funny jokes. Pretty broad too. Even Evan laughed at the one about the red-skinned man whose mother had been frightened by an Indian. And most of the songs were funny too, and of a rhythm that set your feet tapping. Until just before the end, when the lights faded on the stage and all the minstrels disappeared except a quartette who put their heads close together and began to sing in murmuring harmony.
At first Hesper, caught by the slow melody, did not understand the words. She leaned back in her seat, conscious of the nearness of Evan’s arm, and still buoyed by the gaiety which had gone before and the laugh she and Evan had shared.
But the quartette continued and the audience grew very quiet. And now the words came through to her borne on the mournful tune.
Look down, look down, that Lonesome Road,
Hang down your head and sigh.
The best of friends must part some day
And why not you and I?
She turned her head and looked up at Evan’s dark profile beside her in the dim theater. He seemed to be watching the stage.
“What a stupid song!” cried Hesper suddenly.
“You think so?” said Evan. “Then let’s go,” and he rose. They pushed their way to the aisle, and out onto Broadway.
He offered her his arm and she took it silently. They walked back to the lodging house. She preceded him up the stairs and waited for him to unlock the door. She took off her bonnet and shawl, hung them up on the peg, then she put some sticks of wood into the stove.
When she had finished and the stove gave out warmth and crackle, she stood beside it, leaning her back against the wall.
“Evan—” she said. He had been washing his hands. At the tone of her voice, he hung the towel on the washstand and came over to her.
"You don’t think that’s a stupid song, do you?” she said. “You think it’s true.”
“You mean that last thing, Lonesome Road? Must I have an opinion about it?”
She made an impatient gesture. “I’m well now. You can stop trying to spare me. It’s all over between us, isn’t it ? I think you gave me a treat today, the way Ma used to make me a special gingerbread man before she took me to the toothpuller.”
“My dear—” He took a step toward her and stopped. “Don’t be bitter, Hesper.”
“But it’s true, isn’t it?” she persisted. “The Lonesome Road is what you want. What you’ve always wanted.”
He opened his mouth and shut it again, shrugging his shoulders. He walked over to the chair by the table and sat down.
“Look, Hesper, you’re no happier than I am. I can’t be a husband. I can’t even be a lover for long. I knew damn well it wouldn’t work—”
“Then why did you—” her voice thickened, she turned her back to him.
He sighed. “Oh, I suppose because the delusion was beautiful.”
“While it lasted.”
“While it lasted.” His eyes became cold. “I think, whatever my shortcomings, I’ve not earned reproaches.”
No, she thought, he had not earned reproaches. He had warned her first, though she would not listen. And after they knew of the baby’s coming he had forced himself to work he loathed. She thought of the days he had nursed her.
She went and sat in the other chair across the table from him, exactly as they had sat for so many meals here in the loft. “What are you planning, Evan?” she asked very low.
In the moment before he answered she felt a new numbness wrap around her heart. Now there was no more pain. The words of the song began a measured beating in her head. “The best of friends must part some day and why not you and I.” And we weren’t even the best of friends, she thought. Not friends at all.
“I’m going to sail for England, next Thursday, on the Cedric.”
“Indeed,” she said. “And are you taking someone along to pose for you?”
She raised her head and looked at him. Her hazel eyes steady on his face.
“I am not,” he retorted. “Nor will I ever be tied again—in any way. I shall go to Scotland to paint. Then to France probably.”
“Paris?” she said. “The Bohemian life you mentioned?”
“Perhaps.”
“And what is to become of me?”
“You can’t doubt that I’ve made provision for you. You shall have all I have in the bank, and I’ll send you more when I can. Durand has advanced me money for my trip.”
She said nothing.
Suddenly he put his hand across the table and touched hers. “Don’t look like that, Hesper. You’ll go back to Marblehead. You’re part of it, and it of you, don’t you know that yet?”
She took her hand from under his. The touch had seemed to send fire up her arm and into her breast. The fire consumed the cold numbness. “Why did you touch me, then?” she whispered.
She held herself tight against the chair. Her upturned eyes, no longer steady, searched for his. But they were shuttered against her.
“No, Hesper,” he said. “I’ll not be caught that way again. You saw what happened, though you never rightly understood. I couldn’t paint. My strength went, and all the sureness—the in knowing. I can’t travel two roads at once. Maybe the road I’ve chosen won’t lead anyplace. So be it. I’ve got to follow it.”
The loft gathered itself into silence. “Yes,” she said. “I see.”
He got up and stood beside her, looking down at her. “You’ll be much happier, my dear, believe me.”
Yes, she thought. I too will be much happier, away from this place of ugliness and pain and failure. Go home, discarded wife. Home to the house that has seen a thousand heartaches before yours. Home where the dozens of Honeywoods will welcome you back into the waiting clan and shelter you from this stranger for whom you deserted them.
She rose and went behind the baize curtain to the bureau where she found pen, ink, and paper.
Evan followed her. “What are you doing, Hesper?”
“I’m going to send Ma a telegram. She’ll want some warning.”
“There’s no hurry,” he said uncomfortably. “We have some arrangements to make, and I don’t sail for a week.”
Hesper gave a brief laugh. “Oh, I’ll stay on here a day or
two. After all it’ll be no different from what it has been these six months.” Her pen scratched across the cheap lined paper.
He watched her bent head, the firmly compressed lips. He saw the lovely fluid line of shoulder, bust, and hips, the whiteness of her thin arm and hand as she held the pen, and against her long neck, caught loosely by the black net she had worn for their expedition, the coil of hair, a trifle darker than it used to be, the color of sunlit madeira. It might be possible to paint her now that he was released from her, he thought with sadness. In her face now there was a harshness, a stony resignation that symbolized the spirit of the fisher girl he had been trying to paint in Marblehead. In her face then there had been nothing but youthful excitement and desire to please.
Although for so long he had been eager to leave her whenever he could, he now lingered, hovering near her, himself held by pain different from, but as inexorable as, hers.
It was she who dismissed him. She folded the paper across, and held it out to him.
“Be so kind as to send this message for me, Evan. And you can find some other place to spend the night, no doubt.”
He bowed his head, and took the paper silently. For a moment they confronted each other across the shiny square of oil cloth on the floor. The fire in the stove had died down, the kerosene lamp sputtered and spurted smoke against its cracked glass chimney. Above them night lay black against the skylight.
“I’m sorry—” said Evan. He turned and went out, closing the door carefully behind him.
He had returned in the morning with two hundred dollars, and he had bought her a ticket to Boston. They had been very polite with each other. She accepted the money and ticket calmly, and then told him that she wished nothing more, from him. “I’ll get along at home as I always did,” she said in a thin, formal voice. It was he who mentioned divorce, a word she scarcely knew. “Not that I care,” said Evan, “but in time you may wish to be quite free. I’ll do whatever’s necessary, of course, you have but to write me.” To this she had answered nothing at all, for the subject seemed to her unimportant. She had no tears now, nor inclination towards them. She observed herself and Evan with detachment.
Evan tried to be generous, to share with her his few possessions, his paintings too. She would accept nothing.
When their discussion had ended, she held out her hand and said,“I guess that’s everything.” Her hand was cool and steady, her eyes were cool and green as the sea. Her speech was clipped.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Now that you’re rid of the anchor drag, I hope you’ll be a very great painter.”
“Hesper—don’t—Maybe I’m no artist at all, it’s just that—”
“Good-bye, Evan,” she said.
At seven that evening she sat alone in the loft. Her box and trunk were packed, ready for the morning train to Boston. She had drunk a glass of milk, and now she sat by the table staring at an old copy of Harper’s which she had read two months ago. The lamp sputtered as it always did and smelled of kerosene. But the smell of paint and turpentine was gone. The painting corner was empty of easel and canvas, instead it contained her strapped cowhide trunk.
One more night to spend on that bed. She looked at it with loathing. The cheap speckled brass, and two knobs missing from the top whorls. The lumpy flock mattress, the sagging springs that grated and quivered. On that bed she had known passion and laughter, on this bed she had brought forth her stillborn child, but in these memories there was no reality. They had happened to someone else, like Corinna, this heroine in Harper’s. She leafed through the pages, rereading a snatch of the story here and there.
Evan had drawn the tailpiece which showed Corinna in her bridal dress with a coronet on her head.
Hesper shoved the magazine across the table. I’ll have to get out very early to find a hackney that’ll take the trunk, she thought. I must allow plenty of time. The shore-line train started from Twenty-seventh Street and Fourth Avenue. Wasn’t there a stop for food at New London, or should she take some sandwiches? How long would she have to stay in Boston before catching a Marblehead train? Would the trunk go with her, or was there some way it could be sent afterwards? Of the details of the trip down she remembered almost nothing. I wish I had a watch, she thought. Evan had had one, but she had never owned any timepiece. She would have to judge the hour of getting up by the skylight, then listen for the Grace Church chimes. I wish I could go tonight, she thought, but there wasn’t a night train. Perhaps it wasn’t too early to try to sleep.
She lifted the stovelid, and poked at the sulky embers. Suddenly she heard steps on the stairs outside; the fourth tread from the top squeaked as it always did. Her hand fell from the poker, and her heart gave a leap. But he wouldn’t come back now. It was finished. Why should he comeback?
The door resounded under a determined knock. She expelled her breath sharply, staring at the peeling wooden panels. “Evan?” she called, her voice high and shaking. There was a low indistinct murmur.
She unlocked the door and opened it an inch. A very large man, much taller than Evan, stood on the landing, indistinct in the gloom.
“What do you want?” she whispered, holding the door against her body.
The figure bent near. “Don’t be afraid, Hesper. It’s Amos Porterman. Let me in.”
She moved slowly back, pulling the knob with her. Amos came in stamping the snow from his boots. His startled gaze swept the cold miserable loft, and Hesper, thin and white, shrinking to the wall by the stove, and staring at him.
“My poor child,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home.”
The black wash of hope and disappointment receded from her. She moved from the wall toward him. “It’s good of you to come, Mr. Porterman. Let me have your coat and muffler. Did Ma send you?”
“No. But she showed me your telegram, and I wanted to come, and she was glad of that. Where’s Redlake, my dear?”
My dear. Evan had called her that so often and always the two words had been tinged with irony.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. He’s gone.”
Amos’s lower lip jutted out. Under the bushy blond eyebrows his eyes narrowed to slits. “The yellow-bellied bastard. I’ll find him and—”
“No, no—” she whispered on a note of weary exasperation. “Please. Let be. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Amos sat down heavily on the other chair, Evan’s chair. His powerful hands rested on his thighs. “Well—” he said. “Well—” His breath came like smoke in the chill room. “I’ve not changed. I don’t want to displease you.” ’
She looked at him and smiled a little. His big comforting presence warmed the room. Is he then still fond of me? she thought, vaguely. “How are Ma and Pa?” she said. “And the Inn, and your factory?”
Amos shook his head. He saw the exhaustion in the drop of her body, heard the effort in her voice. She’d been through even worse than he’d known about, it seemed, though what Mrs. Honeywood had told him of the stillbirth, and her husband sending her home, was bad enough. Bastard, he thought again. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her like a child, letting that tired head rest on his shoulder.
“The questions ’11 all wait, Hes,” he said quietly. “You look fit to drop in your tracks. Get some rest, and I’ll be back with a cab in the morning, eight sharp, in case you’re sleeping, there’ll be time to rouse you.”
“Thank you—” she said. “I was wondering how to manage.” He stood up, and she went over to him, laying her hand on his arm. With him there was no self-consciousness, no uncertainty or fear of rebuff. Because it didn’t matter. With Evan she had always been the heavy, the serious one, but Amos made her feel weightless, fluid as quicksilver.
“Mind you don’t get pixilated in this great blaring city—” she said with faint humor. “Oh, I forgot you’re not a Marbleheader.”
He covered her hand with his. “Did you forget that, Hesper? Did you really?”
She slipped away from him, but Amos wa
s happy. Happier than ever before in his life. The brief spring-time love for Lily Rose had not been like this. There’d been never a day since Hesper married that he hadn’t thought of her with bitter yearning. And now at last he had hope. It would be bad. A long time before she got over that fellow. And then a mess. Divorce. He quailed at this, but there was no help for it. It could be done quietly. But if she’ll have me, we’ll face ’em all down. He had a vision of her dressed in velvet and lace, a decent dress for once in her life, standing in the gilt and rosewood hall of his new house, waiting for him to come home. And she would be smiling as she was now—gently, gratefully.
He wrapped his muffler around his neck, and picked up his hat.
“Ah, my dear—” he said, “I’ll be well content to bring you home, where you belong.”
“And I to go—” she answered—her shadowed eyes resting on the empty corner where Evan’s canvases had once stood.
CHAPTER 13
ON THE NEW YEAR’S morning of 1877, Hesper awoke to a placid contentment. It seemed to be sleeting outside, she could hear the faint crackle on the window panes behind the drawn plush curtains, but here in the great mansion on Pleasant Street, weather never seemed important.
She yawned and stretched, burying her head deeper into the soft frilled pillow. It must be nearly nine o’clock. Soon Annie would knock and come in with coffee, draw back the portières, and light the fire. Though you really did not need a fire when the hot-air registers kept the whole house warm as summer.
Amos, beside her in the huge double bed, snorted a little and flopped over. She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at him with amused affection. Since their marriage he had grown sideburns; they were soft and wavy, a shade darker than his flaxen hair, and he was very proud of them. But despite his bearded cheeks and his size, when he was asleep and the pucker lines smoothed from his forehead, he was the image of little Henry.