|THE house in old Cottarsport in which Olive Stanes lived was set midway
on the steepness of Orange Street. It was a low dwelling of weathered
boards holding close to the rocky soil, resembling, like practically all
the Cottarsport buildings, the salt weed clinging to the seaward rocks
of the harbor; and Orange Street, narrow, without walks, and dipping
into cuplike depressions, was a type of almost all the streets. The
Stanes house was built with its gable to the public way; the length
faced a granite shoulder thrust up through the spare earth, a tall,
weedy disorder of golden glow, and the sedgy incline to the habitation
above.
When Hester and Jem and then Rhoda were little they had had great joy of
the boulder in the side yard: it was for them first impossible and then
difficult of accomplishment; but they had rapidly grown into a complete
mastery of its potentialities as a fort, a mansion impressive as that of
the Canderays' on Regent Street, and a ship under the dangerous shore
of the Feejees. Olive, the solitary child of Ira Stanes' first marriage,
had had no such reckless pleasure from the rock----
She had been, she realized, standing in the narrow portico that
commanded by two steps the uneven flagging from the street, a
very careful, yes, considerate, child when measured by the gay
irresponsibility of her half brother and sisters. Money had been no more
plentiful in the Stanes family, nor in all Cottarsport, then than now;
her dresses had been few, she had been told not to soil or tear them,
and she had rigorously attended the instruction.
The second Mrs. Stanes, otherwise an admirable wife and mother, had, to
Olive's young disapproval, rather encouraged a boisterous conduct in her
children which overlooked a complete cleanliness or tidy array. And when
she, like her predecessor, had died, and left Olive at twenty-three to
assume full maternal responsibilities, that serious vicarious parent had
entered into an inevitable and largely unavailing struggle against the
minor damage caused mostly by the activities about the boulder.
Now Hester and Rhoda had left behind such purely imaginative games,
and Jem was away fishing on the Georges Bank; her duty and worries had
shifted, but not lessened; while the rock remained precisely as it
had been through the children's growth, as it had appeared in her own
earliest memories, as it was before ever the Stanes dwelling, now a
hundred and fifty years in place, or old Cottarsport itself, had been
dreamed of. Her thoughts were mixed: at once they created a vague
parallel between the granite in the side yard and herself, Olive
Stanes--they both seemed to have been so long in one spot, so unchanged;
and they dwelt on the fact that soon--as soon as Jason Burrage got
home--she must be utterly different.
Jason had written her that, if they cared to, they could build a house
as large as the Canderays'. Under the circumstances she had been obliged
to look on that as, perhaps, an excusable exaggeration, though she
instinctively condemned the dereliction of the truth; yet, more than any
other figure could possibly have done, it impressed upon her, from the
boldness of the imagery, that Jason had succeeded in finding the gold
for which he had gone in search nine years before. He was coming back,
soon, rich.
The other important fact reiterated in his last letter, that in all his
absent years of struggle he had never faltered in his purpose of coming
to her with any fortune he might chance to get, she regarded with
scant thought. It had not occurred to Olive that Jason Burrage would
do anything else; her only concern had been that he might be killed;
otherwise he had said that he loved her, and that they were to marry
when he returned.
She hadn't, really, been in favor of his going. The Burrages, measured
by Cottarsport standards, were comfortably situated--Mr. Burrage's
packing warehouse and employment in dried fish were locally called
successful--but Jason had never been satisfied with familiar values; he
had always exclaimed against the narrowness of his local circumstance,
and restlessly reached toward greater possessions and a wider horizon.
This dissatisfaction Olive had thought wicked, in that it had seemed to
criticize the omnipotent and far-seeing wisdom of the Eternal; it had
caused her much unhappiness and prayer, she had talked very earnestly
to Jason about his stubborn spirit, but it had persisted in him, and at
last carried him west in the first madness of the discovery of gold in a
California river.
Olive, at times, thought that Jason's revolt had been brought about by
the visible example of the worldly pomp of the Canderays--of their great
white house with the balustraded captain's walk on the gambreled roof,
their chaise, and equable but slightly disconcerting courtesy. But she
had been obliged to admit that, after all was said, Jason's bearing was
the result of his own fretful heart.
He had always been different from the other Cottarsport youths and men:
while they were commonly long and bony, and awkwardly hung together,
thickly tanned by the winds and sun and spray of the sea, Jason was
small, compact, with dead black hair and pale skin. Mr. Burrage, who
resembled a worn and discolored piece of driftwood, was the usual
Cottarsport old man; but his wife, not conspicuously out of the
ordinary, still had a snap in her unfading eyes, a ruddy roundness of
cheek, that showed a lingering trace of a French Acadian intermarriage a
century and more ago.
Olive always regarded with something like surprise her unquestioned love
for Jason. It had grown quietly, unknown to her, through a number
of preliminary years in which she had felt that she must exert some
influence for his good. He frightened her a little by his hot utterances
and by the manner in which his soul shivered on the verge of a righteous
damnation. The effort to preserve him from such destruction became
intenser and more involved; until suddenly, to her later consternation,
she had surrendered her lips in a single, binding kiss.
But with that consummation a great deal of her troubling had ceased;
spiritual vision, she had been certain, must follow their sacred union
and subsequent life. Even the gold agitation and Jason's departure for
Boston and the western wild had not given her especial concern. God
was the supreme Master of human fate, and if He willed for Jason to
go forth, who was she, Olive Stanes, to make a to-do? She had quietly
addressed herself to the task of Hester, Jem, and Rhoda, to the ordering
of her father's household--he was mostly away on the sea and a solitary
man at home--and the formal recurrence of the occasions of the church.
In such ways, she thought, bathed in the keen, pale red glow of a late
afternoon in October, her youth had slipped imperceptibly away.
A strong salt wind dipped into the hollow, and plastered her skirt,
without hoops, against her erect, thin person. With the instinct, bred
by the sea, of the presence in all calculations of the weather, she
mechanically dwelt on its force and direction, wrinkling her forehead
and pinching her lips--she could hear the rising wind straining through
the elms on the hills behind Cottarsport--and then she turned abruptly
and entered the house.
There was a small dark hallway within, a narrow flight of stairs leading
sharply up; the door on the right, to the formal chamber, was closed;
but at the left an interior of somber scrubbed wood was visible. On
the side against the hall a cavernous fireplace, with a brick hearth,
blackened with shadows and the soot of ancient fires, had been left
open, but held an air-tight sheet-iron stove. The windows, high on the
walls, were small and long, rather than deep; and a table, perpetually
spread, stood on a thick hooked rug of brilliant, primitive design.
Rhoda, in a creaking birch rocker, was singing an inarticulated song
with closed eyes. Her voice, giving the impression of being subdued,
filled the room with its vibrant power. She had a mature face for
sixteen years, vividly colored and sensitive, a wide mouth, and heavy
twists of russet hair with metallic lights. The song stopped as Olive
entered. Rhoda said:
“I wish Hester would hurry home; I'm dreadful hungry.”
“Sometimes they keep her at the packing house, especially if there's a
boat in late and extra work.”
“It's not very smart of her without being paid more. They'll just put
anything on you they can in this stingy place. I can tell you I wouldn't
do two men's work for a woman's pay. I'm awful glad Jason's coming
back soon, Olive, with all that money, and I can go to Boston and study
singing.”
“I've said over and over, Rhoda,” Olive replied patiently, “that you
mustn't think and talk all the time about Jason's worldly success. It
doesn't sound nice, but like we were all trying to get everything we
could out of him before ever he's here.”
“Didn't he say in the last letter that I was to go to Boston?” Rhoda
exclaimed impatiently. “Didn't he just up and tell me that? Why, with
all the gold Jason's got it won't mean anything for him to send me away.
It isn't as if I wouldn't pay you all back for the trouble I've been. I
know I can sing, and I'll work harder than ever Hester dreamed of----”
As if materialized by the pronunciation of her name, the latter entered
the room. “Gracious, Hester,” Rhoda declared distastefully, making a
nose, “you smell of dead haddock right this minute.” Hester, unlike
Rhoda's softly rounded proportions, was more bony than Olive, infinitely
more colorless, although ten years the younger. She had a black worsted
scarf over her drab head in place of a hat, its ends wrapped about her
meager shoulders and bombazine waist. Without preliminary she dropped
into her place at the supper table, the shawl trailing on the broad,
uneven boards of the floor.
“The wind's smartening up on the bay,” she told them. “Captain Eagleston
looks for half a blow. It has got cold, too. I wish the tea'd be ready
when I get in from the packing house. It seems that much could be done,
with Olive only sitting around and Rhoda singing to herself in the
mirror on her dresser.”
“It'll draw in a minute more,” Olive said in the door from the kitchen,
beyond the fireplace. Rhoda smiled cheerfully.
“I suppose,” Hester went on, in a voice without emphasis that yet
contrived to be thinly bitter, “you were all talking about what would
happen when Jason came home with that fortune of his. Far as I can see
he's promised and provided for everybody, Jem and Rhoda and his parents
and Olive, every Tom and Noddy, but me.”
“I don't like to keep on about it,” Olive protested, pained. “Yet you
can't see, Hester, how independent you are. A person wouldn't like to
offer you anything until you had signified. You were never very nice
with Jason anyway.”
“Well, I'm not going to be nicer after he's back with gold in his
pocket. I guess he'll find I'm not hanging on his shoulder for a
cashmere dress or a trip to Boston.”
“Pa ought to get into Salem soon,” Rhoda observed. “He said after this
he wasn't going to ship again, even along the coast, but tally fish for
Mr. Burrage. Pa's getting old.”
“And Jem'll be home from the Georges, too,” Olive added, seating herself
with the tea. “I do hope he won't sign for China or any of those long
voyages like he threatened.”
“He won't get so far away from Jason,” Hester stated.
“I saw Honora Canderay today,” Rhoda informed them. “She wasn't in the
carriage, but walking past the courthouse. She had on a small bonnet
with flowers inside the brim and skimpy hoops, gallooned and scalloped.”
“Did she stop?” Olive inquired.
“Yes, and said I was as bright as a fall maple leaf. I wish I could look
like Honora Canderay-----”
“Wait till Jason's back,” Hester interrupted.
“It isn't her clothes,” Rhoda went on; “they're elegant material, of
course, but not the colors I'd choose; nor it isn't her looks, either,
no one would say she's downright pretty; it's just--just her. Is she as
old as you, Olive?”
“Let's see, I'm thirty-six, and Honora Canderay was... she's near as
old, a year younger maybe.”
“She is wonderful to get close to,” said Rhoda, “no cologne and yet a
lovely kind of smell----”
“Not like dead haddock.” This was Hester again.
“Do you know,” proceeded the younger, “she seemed to me kind of lonely.
I wanted to give her a hug, but I wouldn't have for all the gold in
California. I can't make out if she is freezing outside and nice in, or
just polite and thinks nobody's good enough for her. She had an India
shawl as big as a sail, with palm leaf ends, and----”
“Rhoda, I wish you wouldn't put so much on clothes and such corruption.”
Olive spoke firmly, with a light of zeal in her gaze. “Can't you think
on the eternities?”
“Like Jason Burrage and Honora Canderay,” explained Hester; “Honora
Canderay and Jason Burrage. They're eternities if there ever were any.
If it isn't one it's bound to be the other.”
*****
Olive's room had a sloping outer wall and casually placed insufficient
windows; her bed, with a blue-white quilt, was supported by heavy maple
posts; there were a chest of drawers, with a minute mirror stand, a
utilitarian wash-pitcher and basin, a hanging for the protection of her
clothes, and uncompromising chairs. A small circular table with a tatted
cover held her Bible and a devotional book, “The Family Companion, by a
Pastor.” It was cold when she went up to bed; with a desire to linger in
her preparations, she put some resinous sticks of wood into a sheet-iron
stove, and almost immediately there was a busily exploding combustion. A
glass lamp on the chest of drawers shed a pale illumination that failed
to reach the confines of the room; and, for a while, she moved in and
out of its wan influence.
She was thinking fixedly about Jason Burrage, and the great impending
change in her condition, not in its worldly implications--she thought
mostly of material values in the spirit of her admonitions to Rhoda--but
in its personal and inner force. At times a pale question of her
aptitude for marriage disturbed her serenity; at times she saw it as
a sacrifice of her being to a condition commanded of God, a species
of martyrdom even. The nine years of Jason's absence had fixed certain
maidenly habits of privacy; the mold of her life had taken a definite
cast. Her existence had its routine, the recurrence of Sunday, its
contemplations, duties, and heavenly aim. And, lately, Jason's letters
had disturbed her.
They seemed filled with an almost wicked pride and a disconcerting
energy; he spoke of things instinctively distressing to her; there were
hints of rude, Godless force and gaiety--allusions to the Jenny Lind
Theatre, the El Dorado, which she apprehended as a name of evil import,
and to the excursions they would make to Boston or as far as New York.
Jason, too, she realized, must have developed; and California, she
feared, might have emphasized exactly such traits as she would wish
suppressed. The power of self-destruction in the human heart she
believed immeasurable. All, all, must throw themselves in abject
humility upward upon the Rock of Salvation. And she could find
nothing humble in Jason's periods, burdened as they were with a patent
satisfaction in the success of his venture.
Yet parallel with this was a gladness that he had triumphed, and that he
was coming back to Cottarsport a figure of importance. She could measure
that by the attitude of their town, by the number and standing of the
people who cordially stopped her on the street for the purposes of
congratulation and curiosity. Every one, of course, had known of their
engagement; there had been a marked interest when Jason and a fellow
townsman, Thomas Gast, had departed; but that would be insignificant
compared to the permanent bulk Jason must now assume. Why he and the
Canderays would be Cottarsport's most considerable people.
As always, at the merest thought of the Canderays, personal facts were
suspended for a mental glance at that separate family. There was no
sense of inferiority in Olive's mind, but an instinctive feeling of
difference. This wasn't the result of their big house, nor because the
Captain's wife had been a member of Boston society, but resided in the
contrariness of the family itself, now centered in Honora, the only one
alive.
Perhaps Honora's diversity lay in the fact that, while she seldom
actually left Cottarsport, it was easy to see that she had a part in a
life far beyond anything Olive, whose consciousness was strictly
limited to one narrow place, knew. She always suggested a wider and more
elegantly finished existence than that of local sociables and church
activities. Captain Ithiel Canderay, a member of a Cottarsport family
long since moved away, had, from obscure surprising promptings, returned
at his successful retirement from the sea, and built his impressive
dwelling in the grey community. He had always, however different the
tradition of his wife's attitude, entered with a candid spirit into the
interests and life of the town, where he had inspired solid confidence
in a domineering but unimpeachable integrity. Such small civic honors as
the locality had to bestow were his, and were discharged to the last and
most exacting degree. But there had been perpetually about him the aloof
air of the quarter-deck, his tones had never lost the accent of command;
and, while Cottarsport bitterly guarded its personal equality and
independence, it took a certain pride in a recognition of the Captain's
authority.
Something of this had unquestionably descended upon Honora; her position
was made and zealously guarded by the town. Yet that alone failed to
hold the reason for Olive's feeling; it was at once more particular and
more all-embracing, and largely feminine. She was almost contemptuous
of the other's delicacy of person, of the celebrated fact that Honora
Canderay never turned her hand to the cooking of a dish or the sweeping
of a stair; and at the same time these very things lifted her apart from
Olive's commonplace round.
Her mind turned again to herself and Jason's home-coming. He had been
wonderfully generous in his written promises to Rhoda and Jem; and he
would be equally thoughtful of Hester, she was certain of that. People
had a way of overlooking Hester, a faithful and, for all her talk, a
Christian character. Rhoda would study to be a singer; striving, Olive
hoped, to put what talent she had to a sanctioned use; and Jem, a
remarkably vigorous and able boy of eighteen, would command his own
fishing schooner.
The sheet-iron stove glowed cherry red with the energy of its heat, and
a blast of wind rushed against the windows. The wind, she recognized,
had steadily grown in force; and Olive thought of her father in the
barque _Emerald_ of Salem, somewhere between Richmond and the home
port.... The lamplight swelled and diminished.
She got a new pleasure from the conjunction of her surrender
to matrimony and the good it would bring the others;
that--self-sacrifice--was excellence; such subjection of the pride of
the flesh was the essence of her service. Then some mundane affairs
invaded her mind: a wedding dress, the preparation of food for a small
company after the ceremony, whether she should like having a servant.
Jason would insist on that; and there she decided in the negative. She
wouldn't be put upon in her own kitchen.
Her arrangements for the night were complete, and she set the stove door
slightly open, shivering in her coarse night dress before the icy cold
drifts of wind in the room, extinguished the lamp, and, after long,
conscientiously deliberate prayers, got into bed. The wind boomed about
the house, rattling all the sashes. Its force now seemed to be buffeting
her heart until she got a measure of release from the thought of the
granite boulder in the side yard, changeless and immovable.
The morning was gusty, with a coldly blue and cloudless sky. Olive,
reaching the top of Orange Street, was whipped with dust, her hoops
flattened grotesquely against her body. The town fell away on either
hand, lying in a half moon on its harbor. The latter, as blue and bright
as the sky, was formed by the rocky arm of Cottar's Neck, thrust out
into the sea and bent from right to left. Most of the fishing fleet
showed their bare spars at the wharves, but one, a minute fleck of
white canvas, was beating her way through the Narrows. She wondered,
descending, if it were Jem coming home.
Olive was going to the Burrages'; it was possible that they had had a
later letter than hers from Jason. It might be he would arrive that
very day. She was conscious of her heart throbbing slightly at this
possibility, but from a complexity of emotions which still left her
uneasy if faintly exhilarated. She crossed the courthouse square, where
she saw that the green grass had become brown, apparently over night,
and turned into Marlboro Street. Here the houses were more recent than
the Staneses'; they were four square, with a full second story--a series
of detached white blocks with flat porticoes--each set behind a wood
fence in a lawn with flower borders or twisted and tree-like lilacs.
She entered the Burrage dwelling without the formality of knocking; and,
familiar with the household, passed directly through a narrow, darkened
hall, on which all the doors were closed, to the dining room and kitchen
beyond. As she had known he would be, Hazzard Burrage was seated with
his feet, in lamb's wool slippers, thrust under the stove. For the rest,
but lacking his coat, he was formally and completely dressed; his corded
throat was folded in a formal black stock, a watch chain and seal hung
across his waistcoat. Mrs. Burrage was occupied in lining a cupboard
with fresh shelf paper with a cut lace border. She was a small woman,
with quick exact movements and an impatient utterance; but her husband
was slow--a man who deliberately studied the world with a deep-set gaze.
“I thought you might have heard,” Olive stated directly, on the edge of
a painted split-hickory chair. They hadn't, Mrs. Burrage informed her:
“I expect he'll just come walking in. That's the way he always did
things, and I guess California, or anywhere else, won't change him to
notice it. And when he does,” she continued, “he's going to be put out
with Hazzard. I told you Jason sent us three thousand dollars to get the
front of the house fixed up. He said he didn't want to find his father
sitting in the kitchen when he got back. Jason said we were to burn
three or four stoves all at once. But he won't, and that's all there is
to it. Why, he just put the money in the bank and there it lies. I read
him the parable about the talents, but it didn't stir him an inch.”
“Jason always was quick acting,” Hazzard Burrage declared; “he never
stopped to consider; and it's as like as not he'll need that money. It
wouldn't surprise me if when he sat down and counted what he had Jason'd
find it was less than he thought.”
“He wrote me,” Olive stated, “that we could build a house as big as the
Canderays'.”
“Jason always was one to talk,” Mrs. Burrage replied in defense of her
son.
Olive moved over to the older woman and held the dishes to be replaced
in the cupboard. They commented on the force of the wind throughout the
night. “The tail end of a blow at sea,” Bur-rage told them; “I wouldn't
wonder but it reached right down to the West Indies.”
“I hope he brings me a grey satinet pelerine like I wrote,” said Mrs.
Burrage. She was obviously flushed at the thought of the possession
of such a garment--a fact which Olive felt, at the other's age, to be
inappropriate to the not distant solemnity of the Christian ordeal of
death. She repeated automatically: “... turn from these vanities unto
the living God.” She rose:
“I'll let you know if I hear anything, and anyhow stop in tomorrow.”
Outside, sere leaves were whirling in grey funnels of dust, the intense
blue bay sparkled under the cobalt sky; and, leaving Marlboro Street
with a hand on her bonnet, she ran directly into Honora Canderay.
“Oh!” Olive exclaimed, breathless and slightly concerned. “Indeed if I
saw you, Honora; the wind was that strong pulling at a person.”
“What does it matter?” Honora replied. She was wrapped from throat to
hem in a cinnamon colored velvet cloak that, fluttering, showed a lining
of soft, quilted yellow. In the flood of morning her skin was flawless;
her delicate lips and hazel eyes held the faint mockery that was the
visible sign of her disturbing quality. She laid a hand, in a short,
furred kid glove, on Olive's arm.
“I am so pleased about Jason's success,” she continued, in a clear
insistent voice. “You must be mad with anxiety to have him back. It's
the most romantic thing in the world. Aren't you thrilled to the soul?”
“I'm glad to--to know he's been preserved,” Olive stammered, confused by
Honora's frank speech.
“You sound exactly as if he were a jar of quinces,” the other answered
impatiently; “and not a true lover coming back from California with bags
of gold.”
Olive's confusion deepened to painful embarrassment at the indelicate
term lover. She wondered, hotly red, how Honora could go on so, and made
a motion to continue on her way. But the other's fingers closed and held
her. “I wonder, Olive,” she said more thoughtfully, “if I know you well
enough, if you will allow me, to give you some advice. It is this--don't
be too rigid with Jason when he gets back. For nearly ten years he's
been out in a life very different from Cottarsport, and he must have
changed in that time. Here we stay almost the same--ten or twenty or
fifty years is nothing really. The fishing boats come in, they may
have different names, but they are the same. We stop and talk, Honora
Canderay and Olive Stanes, and years before and years later women will
stand here and do the same with beliefs no wider than your finger.
But it isn't like that outside; and Jason will have that advantage of
us--things really very small, but which have always seemed tremendous
here, will mean no more to him than they are worth. He will be careless,
perhaps, of your most cherished ideas; and, if you are to meet him
fairly, you must try to see through his eyes as well as your own. Truly
I want you to be happy, Olive; I want every one in Cottarsport to be as
happy... as they can.”
Olive's embarrassment increased: it was impossible to know what Honora
Canderay meant by her last words, in that echoing voice. Nevertheless,
her independence of spirit, the long nourished tenets of the abhorrence
of sin, asserted themselves in the face of even Honora's directions. “I
trust,” she replied stiffly, “that Jason has been given grace to walk in
the path of God----” She stopped with lips parted, her breath laboring
with shock, at the interruption pronounced in ringing accents. Honora
Canderay said:
“Grace be damned!”
Olive backed away with her hands pressed to her cheeks. In the midst of
her shuddering surprise she realized how much the other resembled her
father, the captain.
“I suppose,” Honora further ventured, “that you are looking for a
bolt of lightning, but it is late in the season for that. There are no
thunder storms to speak of after September.” She turned abruptly, and
Olive watched her depart, gracefully swaying against the wind.
*****
All Olive's unformed opinions and attitude concerning Honora Canderay
crystallized into one sharp, intelligible feeling--dislike. The breadth
of being which the other had seemed to possess was now revealed as
nothing more than a lack of reverence. She was inexpressibly upset by
Honora's profanity, the blasphemous mind it exhibited, her attempted
glossing of sin. It was nothing less. In the assault on Olive's most
fundamental verities--the contempt which, she divined, had been offered
to the edifice of her conscience and creed--she responded blindly,
instinctively, with an overwhelming condemnation. At the same time she
was frightened, and hurried away from the proximity of such unsanctified
talk. She did not go to Citron Street, and the shops, as she had
intended; but kept directly on until she found herself at the harbor
and wharves. The latter serrated the water's edge, projecting from the
relatively tall, bald warehouses, reeking with the odor of dead fish,
cut open and laid in salt, grey-white areas to the sun and wind.
A small group of men, with flat bronzed countenances and rough furze
coats, uneasily stirred their hats, in the local manner of saluting
women, and turned to gaze fixedly at her as she passed. Even in her
perturbation of mind she was conscious of their unusual scrutiny. She
couldn't, now, for the life of her, recall what needed to be bought;
and, mounting the narrow uneven way from the water, she proceeded home.
Some towels, laid on the boulder to dry, had not been sufficiently
weighted, and hung blown and crumpled on a lilac bush. These she
collected, rearranged, complaining of the blindness of whoever might be
about the house, and then proceeded within. There, to her amazement,
she found Hester, in the middle of the morning, and Rhoda bent over the
dinner table, sobbing into her arm. Hester met her with a drawn face
darkly smudged beneath the eyes.
“The _Emerald_ was lost off the Cape,” she said; “sunk with all on
board. A man came over from Salem to tell us. He had to go right back.
Pa, he's lost.”
Olive sank into a chair with limp hands. Rhoda continued uninterrupted
her sobbing, while Hester went on with her recital in a thin, blank
voice. “The ship _J. Q. Adams_ stood by the _Emerald_, but there was
such a sea running she couldn't do anything else. They just had to see
the _Emerald_, with the men in the rigging, go under. That's what he
said who was here. They just had to see Pa drown before their eyes....
The wind was something terrible.”
A deep, dry sorrow constricted Olive's, heart. Suddenly the details of
packing her father's blue sea chest returned to her mind--the wool socks
she had knitted and carefully folded in the bottom, the needles and
emery and thread stowed in their scarlet bag, the tin of goose grease
for his throat, the Bible that had been shipped so often. She thought of
them all scattered and rent in the wild sea, of her father----
She forced herself to rise, with a set face, and put her hand on Rhoda's
shoulder. “It's right to mourn, like Rachel, but don't forget the
majesty of God.” Rhoda shook off her palm and continued in an ecstasy of
emotional relief. Olive hardened. “Get up,” she commanded; “we must fix
things here, for the neighbors and Pastor will be in. I wish Jem were
back.”
At this Rhoda became even more unrestrained, and Olive remembered that
Jem too was at sea, and that probably he had been caught in the same
gale. “He'll be all right,” she added quickly; “the fishing boats live
through everything.”
Yet she was infinitely relieved when, two days later, Jem arrived
safely home. He came into the house with a pounding of heavy boots, a
powerfully built youth with a rugged jaw and an intent quiet gaze. “I
heard at the wharf,” he told Olive. They were in the kitchen, and he
pulled off his boots and set them away from the stove.
“I'm thankful you're so steady and able,” she said.
“I am glad Jason's coming home--rich,” he replied tersely. Later, after
supper, while they still sat at the table, he went on, “There is a fine
yawl for sale at Ipswich, sails ain't been made a year, fifty-five tons;
I could do right good with that. The fishing's never been better. Do
you think Jason would be content to buy her, Olive? I could pay him back
after a run or two.”
“He told you he'd do something like that,” she answered. “I guess now it
wouldn't mean much to him.”
“And I'll be away,” Rhoda eagerly added; “you wouldn't have to give me
anything, Jem. Jason promised me, too.”
An unreasonable and disturbing sense of insecurity enveloped Olive. But,
of course, it would be all right--Jason was coming back rich, to marry
her. Jem would have the yawl and Rhoda get away to study singing. And
yet all that she vaguely dreaded about Jason himself persisted darkly at
the back of her consciousness, augmented by Honora Canderay's warning.
She was a little afraid of Jason, too; in a way, after so long, he
seemed like a stranger, a stranger whom she was going to wed.
“He'll be all dressed up,” Rhoda stated. “I hope, Olive, you will kiss
him as soon as he steps through the door. I know I would.”
“Don't be so shameless, Rhoda,” the elder admonished her. “You are very
indelicate. I'd never think of kissing Jason like that.”
“I will go over and see the man who owns her,” Jem said enigmatically.
“She's a cockpit boat, but I heard the wave wasn't made that could fill
her. And we have my share of the last run till Jason's here.”
He paid this faithfully into Olive's hand the next day and then
disappeared. She thought he came through the door again: someone stood
behind her. Olive turned slowly and saw an impressive figure in stiff
black broadcloth and an incredibly high glassy silk hat.
*****
She knew instinctively that it must be Jason Burrage, and yet the
feeling of strangeness persisted. All sense of the time which had
elapsed since Jason went was lost in the illusion that the figure
familiar to her through years of knowledge and association had
instantly, by a species of magic, been transformed into the slightly
smiling, elaborate man in the doorway. She stepped backward,
hesitatingly pronouncing his name.
“Olive,” he exclaimed, with a deep, satisfied breath, “it hasn't changed
a particle!” To her extreme relief he did not make a move to embrace
her; but gazed intently about the room. One of the things that made him
seem different, she realized, was the rim of whiskers framing his
lower face. She became conscious of details of his appearance--baggy
dove-colored trousers over glazed boots, a quince yellow waistcoat in
diamond pattern, a cluster of seals. Then her attention was held by his
countenance, and she saw that his clothes were only an insignificant
part of his real difference from the man she had known.
Jason Burrage had always had a set will, the reputation of an impatient,
even ugly disposition. This had been marked by a sultry lip and
flickering eye; but now, though his expression was noticeably quieter,
it gave her the impression of a glittering and dangerous reserve; his
masklike calm was totally other than the mobile face she had known.
Then, too, he had grown much older--she swiftly computed his age: it
could not be more than forty-two, yet his hair was thickly stained
with grey, lines starred the comers of his eyes and drew faintly at his
mouth.
“Are you glad to see me, Olive?” he asked.
“Why, Jason, what an unnecessary question. Of course I am, more thankful
than I can say for your safety.”
“I walked across the hills from the Dumner stage,” he proceeded. “It
was something to see Cottarsport on its bay and the Neck and the fishing
boats at Planger's wharf. I'd like to have an ounce of gold for every
time I thought about it and pictured it and you. Out on the placers of
the Calaveras, or the Feather, I got to believing there wasn't any such
town, but here it is.” He advanced toward her; she realized that she was
about to be kissed, and a painful color dyed her cheeks.
“You'll stop for supper,” she said practically.
“I haven't been home yet, I came right here; I'll see them and be back.
I'll bet I find them in the kitchen, with the front stoves cold, in
spite of what I wrote and sent. I brought you a present, just for fun,
and I'll leave it now, since it's heavy.” He bent over a satchel at his
feet and got a buckskin bag, bigger than his two fists, which he dropped
with a dull thud on the table.
“What is it, Jason?” she asked. But of herself she knew the answer. He
untied a string, and, dipping in his fingers, showed her a fine yellow
metallic trickle. “Gold dust, two tumblers full,” he replied. “We used
to measure it that way--a pinch a dollar, teaspoonful to the ounce, a
wineglass holds a hundred, and a tumbler a thousand dollars.”
She was breathless before the small shapeless pouch that held such a
staggering amount. He laughed. “Why, Olive, it's nothing at all. I just
brought it like that so you could see how we carried it in California.
We are all rich now, Olive--the Burrages, and you're one, and the
Staneses. I have close to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
This sum was little more to her than a fable, a thing beyond the scope
of her comprehension; but the two thousand dollars before her gaze was
a miracle made manifest. There it was to study, feel; subconsciously she
inserted her hand in the bag, into the cold, smooth particles.
“A hundred and fifty thousand,” he repeated; “but if you think I didn't
work for it, if you suppose I picked it right out of a pan on the
river bars, why--why, you are wrong.” Words failed him to express the
erroneousness of such conclusions. “I slaved like a Mexican,” he added;
“and in bad luck almost to the end.” She sat and gazed at him with an
easier air and a growing interest, her hands clasped in her lap. “What I
didn't know when I left Cottarsport was wonderful.
“Why, take the mining,” he said with a gesture; “I mean the bowl
mining at first... just the heavy work in it killed off most of the
prospectors--all day with a big iron pan, half full of clay and gravel,
sloshing about in those rivers. And maybe you'd work a month without a
glimmer, waking wet and cold under the sierras, whirling the pan round
and round; and maybe when you had the iron cleared out with a magnet,
and dropped in the quicksilver, what gold was there wouldn't amalgam. I
can tell you, Olive, only the best, or the hardest, came through.”
He produced a blunt, tapering cigar and lighted it expansively.
“A lonely and dangerous business: every one carried his dust right on
his body, and there were plenty would risk a shot at a miner coming
back solitary with his donkey and his pile. It got better when the new
methods came, and we used a rocker-hollowed out of a log. Then four of
us went in partnership--one to dig the gravel, one to carry it to the
cradle, another to keep it rocking, and the last to pour in the water.
Then we drawed off the gold and sand through a plug hole.
“We did fine at that,” he told her, “and in the fall of 'Fifty cleaned
up eighteen thousand apiece. Then we had an argument: we were in the
Yuba country, where it was kind of bad; two of us, and I was one of
them, said to divide the dust, and get out best we could; but the others
wanted to send all the gold to San Francisco in charge of one of them
and a man who was going down with more dust. We finally agreed to this
and lost every ounce we'd mined. The escort said they were shot by some
of the disbanded California army, but I'm not sure. It seemed to me
like our two had met somewhere, killed the other, and got the gold to
rights.”
“O Jason!” Olive exclaimed.
“That was nothing,” he said complacently; “but only a joker to start
with. I did a lot of things then to get a new outfit--sold peanuts on
the Plaza in 'Frisco, or hollered the New York _Tribune_ at a dollar and
a half a copy; I washed glasses in a saloon and drove mules. After that
I took a steamer for Stocton and the Calaveras. You ought to have seen
Stocton, Olive--board shanties and blanket houses and tents, with two
thieves left hanging on a gallows. We went from there, a party of us,
for the north bank of the Calaveras, tramping in dust so hot that it
scorched your face. Sluicing had just started and long Toms--a long Tom
is a short placer--so we didn't know much about it. Looking back I can
see the gold was there; but after working right up to the end of the
season we had no more than a couple of thousand apiece. There were too
many of us to start with.
“Well, I drifted back to San Francisco.” He paused, and the expression
which had most disturbed her deepened on his countenance, a stillness
like the marble of a gravestone guarding implacable secrets.
“San Francisco is different from Cottarsport, Olive,” he said after a
little. “Here you wouldn't believe there was such a place; and there
Cottarsport seemed too safe to be true... Well, I went after it again,
this time as far north as Shasta. I prospected from the Shasta country
south, and got a good lump together again. By then placer mining was
better understood; we had sluice boxes two or three hundred feet long,
connected with the streams, with strips nailed across the bottom where
the gold and sand settled as the water ran through. Yes, I did well; and
then fluming began.
“That,” he explained, “is damming a river around its bed and washing
the opened gravel. It takes a lot of money, a lot of work and men; and
sometimes it pays big, and often it doesn't. I guess there were fifty of
us at it. We slaved all the dry season at the dam and flume, a big wood
course for the stream; we had wing dams for the placers and ditches,
and the best prospects for eight or ten weeks' washing. It was early in
September when we were ready to start, and on a warm afternoon I said
to an old pardner, 'What do you make out of those big, black clouds
settling on the peaks?' He took one look--the wind was a steady and
muggy southwester--and then he sat down and cried. The tears rolled
right over his beard.
“It was the rains, nearly two months early, and the next day dams,
flume, boards, and hope boiled down past us in a brown mash. That left
me poorer than I'd ever been before; I had more when I was home on the
wharves.”
“Wait,” she interrupted him, rising; “if you're coming back to supper
I must put the draught on the stove.” From the kitchen she heard him
singing in a low, contented voice:
“'The pilot bread was in my mouth,
The gold dust in my eye,
And though from you I'm far away,
Dear Anna, don't you cry!'”
Then:
“'Oh, Ann Eliza!
Don't you cry for me.