|HONORA CANDERAY saw Jason Burrage on the day after his arrival in
Cotarsport: he was walking through the town with a set, inattentive
countenance; and, although she was in the carriage and leaned forward,
speaking in her ringing voice, it was evident that he had not noticed
her. She thought his expression gloomy for a man returned with a fortune
to his marriage. Honora still dwelt upon him as she slowly progressed
through the capricious streets and mounted toward the hills beyond. He
presented, she decided, an extraordinary, even faintly comic, appearance
in Cottarsport, with a formal black coat open on a startling waistcoat
and oppressive gold chain, pale trousers and a silk hat.
Such clothes, theatrical in effect, were inevitable to his changed
condition and necessarily stationary taste. Yet, considering, she
shifted the theatrical to dramatic: in an obscure but palpable manner
Jason did not seem cheap. He never had in the past And now, while
his inappropriate overdressing in the old town of loose and weathered
raiment brought a smile to her firm lips, there was still about him
the air which from the beginning had made him more noticeable than his
fellows. It had even been added to--by the romance of his journey and
triumph.
She suddenly realized that, by chance, she had stumbled on the one term
which more than any other might contain Jason. Romantic. Yes, that was
the explanation of his power to stir always an interest in him, vaguely
suggest such possibilities as he had finally accomplished, the venture
to California and return with gold and the complicated watch chain. She
had said no more to him than to the other Cottarsport youth and young
manhood, perhaps a dozen sentences in a year; but the others merged into
a composite image of fuzzy chins, reddened knuckles, and inept, choked
speech, and Jason Burrage remained a slightly sullen individual with
potentialities. He had never stayed long in her mind, or had any actual
part in her life--her mother's complete indifference to Cottarsport
had put a barrier between its acutely independent spirit and the
Canderays--but she had been easily conscious of his special quality.
That in itself was no novelty to her experience of a metropolitan and
distinguished society: what now kept Jason in her thoughts was the fact
that he had made his capability serve his mood; he had taken himself out
into the world and there, with what he was, succeeded. His was not an
ineffectual condition--a longing, a possibility that, without the power
of accomplishment, degenerated into a mere attitude of bitterness. Just
such a state, for example, as enveloped herself.
The carriage had climbed out of Cottarsport, to the crown of the height
under which it lay, and Honora ordered Coggs, a coachman decrepit with
age, to stop. She half turned and looked down over the town with a
veiled, introspective gaze. From here it was hardly more than a narrow
rim of roofs about the bright water, broken by the white bulk of her
dwelling and the courthouse square. The hills, turning roundly down,
were sere and showed everywhere the grey glint of rock; Cottar's Neck
already appeared wintry; a diminished wind, drawing in through the
Narrows, flattened the smoke of the chimneys below.
Cottarsport! The word, with all its implications, was so vivid in her
mind that she thought she must have spoken it aloud. Cottarsport and the
Canderays--now one solitary woman. She wondered again at the curious and
involved hold the locality had upon her; its tyranny over her birth and
destiny. It was comparatively easy to understand the influence the place
had exerted on her father: commencing with his sixteenth year, his life
had been spent, until his retirement from the sea, in arduous voyages to
far ports and cities. His first command--the anchor had been weighed on
his twentieth birthday--had been of a brig to Zanzibar for a cargo of
gum copal; his last a storm-battered journey about, apparently, all the
perilous capes of the world. Then he had been near fifty, and the space
between was a continuous record of struggle with savage and
faithless peoples, strange latitudes and currents, and burdensome
responsibilities.
Her mother, too, presented no insuperable obstacle to a sufficient
comprehension--a noted beauty in a gay and self-indulgent society, she
had passed through a triumphant period without forming any attachment.
An inordinate amount of champagne had been uncorked in her honor,
compliment and service and offers had made up her daily round; until,
almost impossibly exacting, she had found herself beyond her early
radiance, in the first tragic realization of decline. Stopping, perhaps,
in the midst of slipping her elegance of body into a party dress, she
remembered that she was thirty-five--just Honora's age at present.
The compliments and offers had lessened, she was in a state of weary
revulsion when Ithiel Canderay--bronzed and despotic and rich--had
appeared before her and, the following day, urged marriage.
Yes, it was easy to see why the shipmaster, desirous of peace after
the unpeaceful sea, should build his house in the still, old port
the tradition of which was in his blood. It was no more difficult to
understand how his wife, always a little tired now from the beginning
ill effects of ceaseless balls and wining, should welcome a spacious,
quiet house and unflagging, patient care.
All this was clear; and, in a way, it made her own position logical--she
was the daughter, the repository, of such varied and yet unified
forces. In moments of calm, such as this, Honora could be successfully
philosophical. But she was not always placid; in fact she was placid
but an insignificant part of her waking hours. She was ordinarily
filled with emotions that, having no outlet, kept her stirred up, half
resentful, and half desirous of things which she yet made no extended
effort to obtain.
Honora told herself daily that she detested Cot-tarsport, she intended
to sell her house, give it to the town, and move to Boston. But, after
three or four weeks in the city, a sense of weariness and nostalgia
would descend upon her--the bitterness of her mother lived over
again--and drive her back to the place she had left with such decided
expressions of relief.
This was the root of her not large interest in Jason Burrage--he, too,
she had always felt, had had possibilities outside the local life and
fish industry; and he had gone forth and justified, realized, them. He
had broken away from the enormous pressure of custom, personal habit,
and taken from life what was his. But she, Honora Canderay, had not had
the courage to free herself from an existence without incentive, without
reward. Something of this might commonly find excuse in the fact that
she was a woman, and that the doors of life and experience, except
one, were closed to her; but, individually, she had little use for
this supine attitude. Her blood was too domineering. She consigned such
inhibitions to pale creatures like Olive Stanes.
*****
The sun, sinking toward the plum-colored hills on the left, cast a rosy
glow over low-piled clouds at the far horizon, and the water of the
harbor seemed scattered with the petals of crimson peonies. The air
darkened perceptibly. For a moment the grey town on the fading water,
the distant flushed sky, were charged with the vague unrest of the
flickering day. Suddenly it was colder, and Honora, drawing up her
shawl, sharply commanded Coggs to drive on.
She was going to fetch Paret Fifield from the steam railway station
nearest Cottarsport. He visited her at regular intervals--although the
usual period had been doubled since she'd seen him--and asked her with
unfailing formality to be his wife. Why she hadn't agreed long ago,
except that Paret was Boston personified, she did not understand. In the
moments when she fled to the city she always intended to have him come
to her at once. But hardly had she arrived before her determination
would waver, and her thoughts automatically, against her will, return to
Cottarsport.
Studying him, as they drove back through the early dusk, she was
surprised that he had been so long-suffering. He was not a patient type
of man; rather he was the quietly aggressive, suavely selfish example
for whom the world, success, had been a very simple matter. He was not
solemn, either, or a recluse, as faithful lovers commonly were; but
furnished a leading figure in the cotillions and had a nice capacity for
wine. She said almost complainingly:
“How young and gay you look, Paret, with your lemon verbena.”
He was, it seemed to her, not entirely at ease, and almost confused at
her statement. Nevertheless, he gave his person a swiftly complacent
glance.
“I do seem quite well,” he agreed surprisingly. “Honora, I'm the next
thing to fifty. Would any one guess it?”
This was a new aspect of Paret's, and she studied him keenly, with the
slightly satirical mouth inherited from her father. Embarrassment became
evident at his exhibition of trivial pride, and nothing more was said
until, winding through the gloom of Cottarsport, they had reached her
house. Inside there was a wide hall with the stair mounting on the right
under a panelled arch. Mrs. Coz-zens, Honora's aunt and companion, was
in the drawing room when they entered, and greeted Paret Fifield with
the simple friendliness which, clearly without disagreeable intent, she
reserved for an unquestionable few.
After dinner, the elder woman winding wool from an ivory swift clamped
to a table, Honora thought that Paret had never been so vivacious;
positively he was silly. For no comprehensible reason her mind turned to
Jason Burrage, striding with a lowered head, in his incongruous clothes,
through the town of his birth.
“I wonder, Paret,” she remarked, “if you remember two men who went from
here to California about ten years ago? Well, one of them is back
with his pockets full of gold and a silk hat. He was engaged to Olive
Stanes... I suppose their wedding will happen at any time. You see, he
was faithful like yourself, Paret.”
The man's back was toward her; he was examining, as he had on every
visit Honora could recall, the curious objects in a lacquered cabinet
brought from over-seas by Ithiel Canderay, and it was a noticeably long
time before he turned. Mrs. Cozzens, the shetland converted into a ball,
rose and announced her intention of retiring; a thin, erect figure in
black moiré with a long countenance and agate brown eyes, seed pearls,
gold band bracelets, and a Venise point cap.
When she had gone the silence in the room became oppressive. Honora was
thinking of her life in connection with Paret Fifield, wondering if she
could ever bring herself to marry him. She would have to decide soon:
it seemed incredible that he was nearing fifty. Why, it must have been
fifteen years ago when he first----
“Honora,” he pronounced, leaning forward in his chair, “I came prepared
to tell you a particular thing, but I find it much more difficult than I
had anticipated.”
“I know,” she replied, and her voice, the fact she pronounced, seemed
to come from a consciousness other than hers; “you are going to get
married.”
“Exactly,” he said with a deep, relieved sigh.
She had on a dinner dress looped with a silk ball fringe, and her
fingers automatically played with the hanging ornaments as she studied
him with a composed face.
“How old is she, Paret?” Honora asked presently.
He cleared his throat in an embarrassed manner. “Not quite nineteen, I
believe.”
She nodded, and her expression grew imperceptibly colder. A slight but
actual irritation at him, a palpable anger, shocked her, which she was
careful to screen from her manner and voice. “You will be very happy,
certainly. A young wife would suit you perfectly. You have kept
splendidly young, Paret.”
“She is really a superb creature, Honora,” he proceeded gratefully. “I
must bring her to you. But I am going to miss this.” He indicated
the grave chamber in which they sat, the white marble mantel and high
mirror, the heavy mahogany settled back in half shadow, the dark velvet
draperies of the large windows sweeping from alabaster cornices.
“Sometimes I feel like burning it to the ground,” she asserted, rising.
“I would if I could burn all that it signifies, yes, and a great deal of
myself, too.” She raised her arms in a vivid, passionate gesture. “Leave
it all behind and sail up to Java Head and through the Sunda Strait,
into life.”
After the difficulty of his announcement Paret Fifield talked with
animation about his plans and approaching marriage. Honora wondered at
the swiftness with which she--for so long a fundamental part of his
thought--'had dropped from his mind. It had the aspect of a physical act
of seclusion, as if a door had been closed upon her, the last, perhaps,
leading out of her isolation. She hadn't been at all sure that she
would not marry Paret: today she had almost decided in favor of such a
consummation of her existence.
A girl not quite nineteen! She had been only twenty when Paret Fifield
had first danced with her. He had been interested immediately. It was
difficult for her to realize that she was now thirty-five; soon forty
would be upon her, and then a grey reach. She didn't feel any older than
she had, well--on the day that Jason Burrage departed for California.
There wasn't a line on her face; no trace, yet, of time on her spirit or
body; but the dust must inevitably settle over her as it did on a vase
standing unmoved on a shelf. A vase was a tranquil object, well suited
to glimmer from a corner through a decade; but she was different. The
heritage of her father's voyaging stirred in her together with the
negation that held her stationary. A third state, a hot rebellion,
poured through her, while she listened to Paret's facile periods.
Really, he was rather ridiculous about the girl. She was conscious of
the dull pounding of her heart.
The morning following was remarkably warm and still; and, after Paret
Fifield had gone, Honora made her way slowly down to the bay. The
sunlight lay like thick yellow dust on the warehouses and docks, and the
water filled the sweep of Cottar's Neck with a solid and smoothly blue
expanse. A fishing boat, newly arrived, was being disgorged of partly
cured haddock. The cargo was loaded into a wheelbarrow, transferred to
the wharf, and there turned into a basket on a weighing scale, checked
by a silent man in series of marks on a small book, and carried away.
Beyond were heaped corks and spread nets and a great reel of fine cord.
When Honora walked without an objective purpose she always came finally
to the water. It held no surprise for her; there was practically nothing
she was directly interested in seeing. She stood--as at present--gazing
down into the tide clasping the piles, or away at the horizon, the
Narrows opening upon the sea. She exchanged unremarkable sentences with
familiar figures, watched the men swab decks or tail new cordage through
blocks, and looked up absently at the spars of the schooners lying at
anchor.
She had put on a summer dress again of white India barège, a little hat
with a lavender bow, and she stood with her silk shawl on an arm. The
stillness of the day was broken only by the creak of the wheelbarrow.
Last night she had been rebellious, but now a lassitude had settled over
her: all emotion seemed blotted out by the pouring yellow light of the
sun.
At the side of the wharf a small warehouse held several men in the
office, the smoke of pipes lifting slowly from the open door; and,
at the sound of footfalls, she turned and saw Jem Stanes entering the
building. His expression was surprisingly morose. It was, she thought
again as she had of Jason Burrage striding darkly along the street,
singularly inopportune at the arrival of so much good fortune. A burr
of voices, thickened by the salt spray of many sea winds, followed. She
heard laughter, and then Jem's voice, indistinguishable but sullenly
angry.
Honora progressed up into the town, walked past the courthouse square,
and met Jason at the corner of the street. “I am glad to have a chance
to welcome you,” she said, extending her hand. Close to him her sense of
familiarity faded before the set face, the tightly drawn lips and hard
gaze. She grew a little embarrassed. He had on another, still more
surprising waistcoat, his watch chain was ponderous with gold; but dust
had accumulated unattended on his shoulders, and dimmed the luster of
his boots.
“Thank you,” he replied non-committally, giving her palm a brief
pressure. He stood silently, without cordiality, waiting for what might
follow.
“You are safely back with the Golden Fleece,” she continued more
hurriedly, “after yoking the fiery bulls and sailing past the islands of
the sirens.”
“I don't know about all that,” he said stolidly.
“Jason and the Argonauts,” she insisted, conscious of her stupidity. He
was far more compelling than she had remembered, than he appeared from a
distance: the marked discontent of his earlier years had given place to
a certain power, repose: the romance which she had decided was his main
characteristic was emphasized. She was practically conversing with a
disconcerting stranger.
“Olive was, of course, delighted,” she went resolutely on. “You must
marry soon, and build a mansion.”
“We are not going to marry at all,” he stated baldly.
“Oh----!” she exclaimed and then crimsoned with annoyance at the
involuntary syllable. That idiot, Olive Stanes, she added to herself
instantly. Honora could think of nothing appropriate to say. “That's a
great pity,” she temporized. Why didn't the boor help her? Hadn't he the
slightest conception of the obligations of polite existence? He stood
motionless, the fingers of one hand clasping a jade charm. However, she,
Honora Can-deray, had no intention of being affronted by Jason Burrage.
“You must find it pale here after California, if what I've heard is
true,” she remarked crisply, then nodded and left him. That night at
supper she repeated the burden of what he had told her to her aunt. The
latter answered in a measured voice without any trace of interest:
“I thought something of the kind had happened: the upstairs girl was
saying he was drunk last night. A habit acquired West, I don't doubt. It
is remarkable, Honora, how you remember one from another in Cottarsport.
They all appear indifferently alike to me. And I am tremendously upset
about Paret.”
“Well, I'm not,” Honora returned. She spoke inattentively, and she was
surprised at the truth she had exposed. Paret Fifield had never become
a necessary part of her existence. Except for the light he had shed upon
herself--the sudden glimpse of multiplying years and the emptiness of
her days--his marriage was unimportant. She would miss him exactly as
she might a piece of furniture that had been removed after forming a
familiar spot. She was more engrossed in what her aunt had told her
about Jason.
He had been back only two or three days, and already lost his promised
wife and got drunk. The implications of drinking were different in
Cottars-port from what they would be in San Francisco, or even Boston;
in such a small place as this every act offered the substance for talk,
opinion, as long-lived as the elms on the hills. It was foolish of him
not to go away for such excesses. Honora wanted to tell him so. She had
inherited her father's attitude toward the town, she thought, a personal
care of Cottarsport as a whole, necessarily expressed in an attention
toward individual acts and people. She wished Jason wouldn't make a fool
of himself. Then she recalled how ineffectual the same desire, actually
voiced, had been in connection with Olive Stanes. She recalled Olive's
horrified face as she, Honora, had said, “Grace be damned!” It was all
quite hopeless. “I think I'll move to the city,” she informed her aunt.
The latter sighed, from, Honora knew, a sense of superior knowledge and
resignation.
After supper she deserted the more familiar drawing room for the chamber
across the wide hall. A fire of coals was burning in an open grate, but
there was no other light. Honora sat at a piano with a ponderous ebony
case, and picked out Violetta's first aria from Traviata. The round
sweet notes seemed to float away palpable and intact into the gloom.
It was an unusual mood, and when it had gone she looked back at it in
wonderment and distrust. Her customary inner rebellion re-established
itself perhaps more vigorously than before: she was charged with energy,
with vital promptings, but found no opportunity, promise, of expression
or accomplishment.
The warm sun lingered for a day or so more, and then was obliterated
by an imponderable bank of fog that rolled in through the Narrows, over
Cottar's Neck, and changed even the small confines of the town into
a vast labyrinth. That, in turn, was dissipated by a swinging eastern
storm, tipped with hail, which left stripped trees on an ashen blue sky
and dark, frigid water slapping uneasily at the harbor edge.
Honora Canderay's states of mind were as various and similar. Her outer
aspect, however, unlike the weather, showed no evidence of change: as
usual she drove in the carriage on afternoons when it was not too cold;
she appeared, autocratic and lavish, in the shops of Citron Street; she
made her usual aimless excursions to the harbor. Jem Stanes, she saw,
was still a deck hand on the schooner _Gloriana_. Looking back to the
morning when he had scowlingly entered the office on the wharf, she
was able to reconstruct the cause of his ill humor--a brother-in-law to
Jason Burrage was a person of far different employment from an ordinary
Stanes. She passed Olive on the street, but the latter, except for a
perfunctory greeting, hurried immediately by.
The stories of Jason's reckless conduct multiplied--he had consumed
a staggering amount of Medford rum and, in the publicity of noon and
Marlboro Street, sat upon the now notable silk hat. He had paid for some
cheroots with a pinch of gold dust as they were said to do in the far
West. He carried a loaded derringer, and shot “for fun” the jar of
colored water in the apothecary's window, and had threatened, with
a grim face, to do the same for whoever might interfere with his
pleasures. He was, she learned, rapidly becoming a local scandal and
menace.
If it had been any one but Jason Burrage, native born and folded in the
glamour of his extraordinary fortune, he would have been immediately and
roughly suppressed: Honora well knew the rugged and severe temper of the
town. As it was he went about--attended by its least desirable element,
a chorus to magnify his liberality and daring--in an atmosphere of
wonderment and excited curiosity.
This, she thought, was highly regrettable. Yet, in his present frame of
mind, what else was there for him to do? He couldn't be expected to
take seriously, be lost in, the petty affairs of Cottarsport; beyond a
limited amount the gold for which he had endured so much--she had
heard something of his misfortunes and struggle--was useless here; and,
without balance, he must inevitably drift into still greater debauch in
the large cities.
He was now a frequently recurring figure in her thought. In the correct
presence of her aunt, Mrs. Cozzens, in delicate clothes and exact
surroundings, the light of an astral lamp on her sharply cut, slightly
contemptuous face, she would consider the problem of Jason Burrage. In
a way, which she had more than once explained and justified to herself,
she felt responsible for him. If there had been anything to suggest, she
would have gone to him directly, but she had no intention of offering
a barren condemnation. Her peculiar position in Cottarsport, while it
indicated certain obligations, required the maintenance of an impersonal
plane. Why, he might say anything to her; he was quite capable of
telling her--and correctly--to go to the devil!
A new analogy was created between Jason Bur-rage and herself: his
advantage over her had broken down, they both appeared fast in untoward
circumstance beyond their power to alleviate or shape. He had come back
to Cottarsport in the precise manner in which she had returned from
shorter but equally futile excursions. Jason had his money, which at
once established necessities and made satisfaction impossible; and she
had promptings, desires, that by reason of their mere being, allowed her
contentment neither in the spheres of a social importance nor here in
the quiet place where so much of her was rooted. As Honora Canderay
gazed at her Aunt Herriot's hard, fine profile, the thought of her own,
Honora Canderay's, resemblance to the returned miner carousing with
the dregs of the town brought a shade of ironic amusement to her
countenance.
Honora left the house, walking, in the decline of a November afternoon.
She had been busy in a small way, supervising the filling of camphor
chests for the winter, and, intensely disliking any of the duties of
domesticity, she was glad to escape into the still, cold open. Dusk was
not yet perceptible, but the narrow, erratic ways of Cottars-port were
filling with dear grey shadow. When, inevitably, she found herself at
the harbor's edge, she progressed over a narrow wharf to its end. It had
been wet, and there were patches of black, icy film; the water near by
was grey-black, but about the bare thrust of Cottar's Neck it was green;
the warehouses behind her were blank and deserted.
She had on a cloak lined with ermine, and she drew it closer about her
throat at the frigid air lifting from the bay. Suddenly a flare of color
filled the somber space, a coppery glow that glinted like metal shavings
on the water and turned Cottar's Neck red. Against the sunset the town
was formless, murky; but the sky and harbor resembled the interior of
a burnished kettle. The effect was extraordinarily unreal, melodramtic,
and she was watching the color fade, when a figure wavered out of
the shadows and moved insecurely toward her. At first she thought the
stumbling progressions were caused by the ice: then she saw that it was
Jason Burrage, drunk.
He wore the familiar suit of broadcloth, with no outer covering, and a
rough hat pulled down upon his fixed gaze. She stood motionless while he
approached, and then calmly met his heavy interrogation.
“Honora,” he articulated, “Honora Canderay, one--one of the great
Canderays of Cottarsport. Well, why don't you say something? Too set up
for a civil, for a----”
“Don't be ridiculous, Jason,” she replied crisply; “and do go
home--you'll freeze out here as you are.”
“One of the great Canderays,” he reiterated, contemptuously. He came
very close to her. “You're not much. Here they think you.... But I've
been to California, and at the Jenny Lind... in silk like a blue bird,
and sing-. Nobody ever heard of the Canderays in 'Frisco, but they know
Jason Burrage, Burrage who had all the bad luck there was, and then
struck it rich.”
He swayed perilously, and she put out a palm and steadied him. “Go back.
You are not fit to be around.”
Jason struck her hand down roughly. “I'm fitter than you. What are you,
anyway?” He caught her shoulder in vise-like fingers. “Nothing but a
woman, that's all--just a woman.”
“You are hurting me,” she said fearlessly.
His grip tightened, and he studied her, his eyes inhuman in a stony,
white face. “Nothing more than that.”
“You are very surprising,” she responded. “Do you know, I had never
thought of it. And it's true; that is precisely what and all I am.”
His expression became troubled; he released her, stepped back, slipped,
and almost fell into the water. Honora caught his arm and dragged him
to the middle of the wharf. “A dam' Canderay,” he muttered. “And I'm
better, Jason Burrage. Ask them at the El Dorado, or Indian Bar; but
that's gone--the early days. All scientific now. We got the dead wood on
gold... cyanide.”
“Come home,” she repeated brusquely, turning him, with a slight push,
toward the town settled in darkness. It sent him falling forward in the
direction she wished. Honora supported him, led him on. At intervals he
hung back, stopped. His speech became confused; then, it appeared, his
reason commenced slowly to return. The streets were empty; a lamp shone
dimly on its post at a corner; she guided Jason round a sunken space.
Honora had no sense of repulsion; she was conscious of a faint pity, but
her energy came dimly from that feeling of obligation, inherited, she
told herself once more, from her father--their essential attitude to
Cottarsport. At the same time she found herself studying his face with a
personal curiosity. She was glad that it was not weak, that rum had been
ineffectual to loosen its hardness. He now seemed capable of walking
alone, and she stood aside.
Jason was at a loss for words; his lips moved, but inaudibly. “Keep away
from the water,” she commanded, “or from Medford rum. And, some evening
soon, come to see me.” She said this without premeditation, from an
instinct beyond her searching.
“I can't do that,” he replied in a surprisingly rational voice, “because
I've lost my silk hat.”
“There are hundreds for sale in Boston,” she announced impatiently; “go
and get another.”
“That never came to me,” he admitted, patently struck by this course of
rehabilitation through a new high hat. “There was something I had to
say to you, but it left my mind, about a--a gold fleece; it turned into
something else, on the wharf.”
“When you see me again.” She moved farther from him, suddenly in a great
necessity to be home. She left him, talking at her, and went swiftly
through the gloom to Regent Street. Letting herself into the still hall,
the amber serenity of lamplight in suave spaciousness, she swung shut
the heavy door with a startling vigor. Then she stood motionless, the
cape slipping from her shoulders in glistening and soft white folds
about her arms, to the carpet. Honora wasn't faint, not for a moment
had she been afraid of Jason Burrage, this was not a rebellion of
over-strung nerves; yet a passing blindness, a spiritual shudder,
possessed her. She had the sensation of having just passed through an
overwhelming adventure: yet all that had happened was commonplace, even
sordid. She had met a drunken man whom she hardly knew beyond his name
and an adventitious fact, and insisted on his going home. Asking him to
call on her had been little less than perfunctory--an impersonal act of
duty.
Yet her being vibrated as if a loud and disturbing bell had been
unexpectedly sounded at her ear; she was responding to an imperative
summons. In her room, changing for supper, this feeling vanished, and
left her usual introspective humor. Jason had spoken a profound truth,
which her surprise had recognized at the time, in reminding her that she
was an ordinary woman, like, for instance, Olive Stanes. The isolation
of her dignity had hidden that from her for a number of years. She had
come to think of herself exclusively as a Canderay.
Later her sharp enjoyment in probing into all pretensions, into herself,
got slightly the better of her. “I saw Jason Burrage this evening,” she
told Mrs. Cozzens.
“If he was sober,” that individual returned, “it might be worth
recalling.”
“But he wasn't. He nearly fell into the harbor. I asked him to see us.”
“With your education, Honora, there is really no excuse for confusing
the singular and plural. I haven't any doubt you asked him here, but
that has nothing to do with us.”
“You might be amused by his accounts of California. For, although you
never complain, I can see that you think it dull.”
“I am an old woman,” Herriot Cozzens stated, “my life was quite normally
full, and I am content here with you. Any dullness you speak of I regret
for another reason.”
“You are afraid I'll get preserved like a salted haddock. He may not
come.”
*****
Honora was in the less formal of the drawing rooms when Jason Burrage
was announced. He came forward almost immediately, in the most rigorous
evening attire, a new silk hat on his arm.
“You had no trouble getting one,” she nodded in its direction.
“Four,” he replied tersely.
Jason took a seat facing her across an open space of darkly flowered
carpet, and Honora studied him, directly critical. Against a vague
background his countenance was extraordinarily pronounced, vividly
pallid. His black hair swept in a soft wave across a brow with indented
temples, his nose was short with wide nostrils, the lower part of
his face square. His hands, scarred and discolored, rested each on a
black-clad knee.
She was in no hurry to begin a conversation which must either be
stilted, uncomfortable, or reach beyond known confines. For the moment
her daring was passive. Jason Burrage stirred his feet, and she attended
the movement with thoughtful care. He said unexpectedly:
“I believe I've never been in here before.” He turned and studied his
surroundings as if in an effort of memory. “But I talked to your father
once in the hall.”
“Nothing has been changed,” she answered almost unintelligibly. “Very
little does in Cot-tarsport.”
“That's so,” he assented. “I saw it when I came back. It was just the
same, but I----” he stopped and his expression became gloomy.
“If you mean that you were different, you are wrong,” she declared
concisely. “Just that has made trouble for you--you have been unable to
be anything but yourself. I am like that, too. Every one is.”
“I have been through things,” he told her enigmatically. “Why look--just
the trip: to Chagres on the Isthmus, and then mules and canoes through
that ropey woods to Panama, with thousands of prospectors waiting for
the steamer. Then back by Mazatlan, Mexico City, and Vera Cruz. A man
sees things.”
Her inborn uneasiness at rooms, confining circumstance, her restless
desire for unlimited horizons, for the mere fact of reaching, moving,
stirred into being at the names he repeated. Tomorrow she would go away,
find something new--
“It must have been horridly rough and dirty.”
“A good many turned back or died,” he agreed tentatively. “But after you
once got there a sort of craziness came over you--you couldn't wait to
buy a pan or shovel. The bay was full of rotting ships deserted by their
crews, a thicket of masts with even the sails still hanging to them. The
men jumped overboard to get ashore and pick up gold.”
She thought with a pang of the idle ships with sprung rigging, sodden
canvas lumpily left on the decks, rotting as he had said, in files. The
image afflicted her like a physical pain, and she left it hurriedly.
“But San Francisco must have been full of life.”
“You had to shout to be heard over the bands, and everything blazing.
Pyramids of nuggets on the gambling tables. Gold dust and champagne and
mud.”
“Whatever will you find here?” She immediately regretted her query,
which seemed to search improperly into the failure of his marriage.
“I'm thinking of going back,” he admitted.
Curiously Honora was sorry to hear this; unreasonably it gave to
Cottarsport a new aspect of barrenness, the vista of her own life
reached interminable and monotonous into the future. And she was
certain that, without the necessity and incentive of labor, it would be
destructive for Jason to return to San Francisco.
“What would you do?”
“Gamble,” he replied cynically.
“Admirable prospect,” she said lightly. Her manner unmistakably conveyed
the information that his call had drawn to an end. He clearly resisted
this for a minute or two, and then stirred. “You must come again.”
“Why?” he demanded abruptly, grasping his hat, which had reposed on the
carpet at his side.
“News from California, from the world outside, is rare in Cottarsport.
You must see that you are an interesting figure to us.”
“Why?” he persisted, frowning.
She rose, her face as hard as his own, but with a faint smile in place
of his lowering expression. “No, you haven't changed; not even to the
extent of a superficial knowledge of drawing rooms.”
“I ought to have seen better than come.”
“The ignorance was all my own.”
“But once----” he paused.
“Should be enough.” Her smile widened. Yet she was furious with herself
for having quarreled with him; the descent from the altitude of the
Canderays had been enormous. What extraordinary influence had colored
her acts in the past few days?
Mrs. Cozzens, at breakfast, inquired placidly how the evening before had
progressed, and Honora made a gesture expressive of its difficulties.
“You will create such responsibilities for yourself,” the elder stated.
This one, it suddenly appeared to Honora, had been thrust upon her. She
made repeated and angry efforts to put Jason Burrage from her mind;
but his appearance sitting before her, his words and patent discontent,
flooded back again and again. She realized now that he was no impersonal
problem; somehow he had got twisted into the fibres of her existence; he
was more vividly in her thoughts than Paret Fifield had ever been.
She attempted to ridicule him mentally, and called up pictures of his
preposterous clothes, the ill-bred waistcoats and ponderous watch chain.
They faded before the memory of the set jaw, his undeniable romance.
Wrapped in fur, she elected to drive after dinner; the day was cold but
palely clear, and she felt that her cheeks were glowing with unusual
color. Above the town, on the hills now sere with frost and rock, the
horses, under the aged guidance of Coggs, continually dropped from a jog
trot to an ambling walk. Honora paid no attention to the gait, she was
impervious to the wide, glittering reach of water; and she was startled
to find herself abreast a man gazing at her.
“I made a jackass out of myself last night,” he observed gloomily.
She automatically stopped the carriage and held back the buffalo robe.
Jason hesitated, but was forced to take a seat at her side. Honora said
nothing, and the horses again went forward.
“I'd been drinking a lot and was all on edge,” he volunteered further.
“I feel different today. I can remember your mother driving like this. I
was a boy then, and used to think she was made of ice; wondered why she
didn't run away in the sun.”
“Mother was very kind, really,” Honora said absently. She was relaxed
against the cushions, the country dipped and spread before her in a
restful brown garb; she watched Coggs' glazed hat sway against the sky.
The old sense of familiarity with Jason Burrage came back: why not,
since she had known him all their lives? And now, after his years
away, she was the only one in Cottarsport who at all comprehended his
difficulties. He was not commonplace, a strong man was never that; and,
in a way, he had the quality which more than any other had made her
father so notable. And he was not unpleasant so close beside her. That
was of overwhelming importance in the formation of her intimate opinion
of him. He had been refined by the bitterness of his early failure in
California; he bore himself with a certain dignity.
“What'll I do?” he demanded abruptly.
For the life or her she couldn't tell him. Except for platitudes she
could offer no solution against the future. Actual living, directly
viewed, was like that--hopeless of exterior solution. “I don't know,”
she admitted, “I wish I did; I wish I could help you.”
“This money, what's it good for? I can't get my family to burn two small
stoves at once; they'd die in the kitchen if they had a hundred parlors;
I've bought more clothes than I'll ever wear, four high hats and so on.
Not going to get married; no use for a big house, for anything more than
the room I have. I get plenty to eat----”
“You might do some good with it,” she suggested. The base of what she
was saying, Honora realized, was that he would be as well off with his
fortune given away. Yet it was unjust, absurd, for him not to get some
use, pleasure, from what he had worked so extravagantly to obtain.
“Somehow that wouldn't settle anything, for me,” he replied.
Coggs had turned at the usual limit of her afternoon driving, and they
were slowly moving back to the town. Cottar's Neck was fading into the
early gloom, and a group of men stared at Jason seated in the Canderays'
carriage as if their eyes were being played with in the uncertain light.
“Have you thought any more about going West?” she inquired.