|IN an unfamiliar upper room of the Canderays' house Jason stood
prepared for the signal to descend to his wedding. The ceremony was
to occur at six o'clock; it was now only five minutes before--he had
absently looked at his watch a great many times in a short space--and he
was striving to think seriously of what was to follow. But in place
of this he was passing again through a state of silent, incoherent
surprise. This was the sort of thing for which a man might pinch himself
to discover if he were awake or dreaming. In five, no, four, minutes now
Honora Canderay was to become his, Jason Burrage's, wife.
A certain complacency had settled over him in the past few days,
something of his inborn feeling of the Canderays as a house apart seemed
to have evaporated; and, in addition, he had risen--Honora wouldn't take
any just happen so. Jason was never notable for humility. Yet who,
even after he had returned from California with his riches, could
have predicted this evening? His astonishment was as much at himself,
illuminated by extraordinary events, as at any exterior circumstance.
At times he had the ability to see himself, as if from the outside; and
that view, here, was amazing. Why, only a short while ago he had been
drinking rum in the shed in back of “Pack” Clower's house, perhaps the
least desirable shed in Cottarsport.
Of one fact, however, he was certain--no more promiscuous draughts of
Medford. He recognized that he had taken so much not from the presence
of desire, but from a total absence of it as well as of any other mental
state. “Pack” and his associates, too, were now a thing of the past,
a bitterly rough and vacant element. The glass lamp on a bureau was
smoking: he stepped forward to lower the wick, when a knock fell on the
door. A young Boston relative of Honora's--a supercilious individual
in checked trousers and lemon-colored gloves--announced that they were
waiting for Jason below. With a determined settling of his shoulders and
tightly drawn lips, he marched resolutely forward.
The marriage was to be in the chamber across from the one in which he
had generally sat. Smilax and white Killamey roses had been bowed over
the mantel at the farthest end, and there Jason found the clergyman
waiting. The room was half full of people occupying chairs brought from
other parts of the house; and he was conscious of a sudden silence, an
intent, curious scrutiny, as he entered. An instinctive antagonism to
this deepened in him: he felt that, with the exception of his father and
mother, he hadn't a friend in the room.
Such other local figures as were there were facilely imitating the
cold stare of Honora's connections. He stood belligerently facing Mrs.
Cozzens' glacial calm, the inspection of a man he had seen driving with
Honora in Cottarsport, now accompanied by a pettish, handsome girl,
evidently his wife. His father's weathered countenance, sunken and dry
on its bones, was blank, except for a faint doubt, as if some mistake
had been made which would presently be exposed, sending them about face.
His mother, however, was triumphant pride and justification personified.
Then the music commenced--a harp, violin, and double bass.
The wedding ring firmly secured, Jason stirred with a feeling of
increasing awkwardness. He glared back, with a protruding lip, at the
fellow with the young wife, at the small, aggressive group from Boston;
and then he saw that Honora was in the room. She was coming slowly
toward him. Her expression of absolute unconcern released him from all
petty annoyance, any thought of the malicious onlookers. As she stopped
at his side she gave him a slight nod and smile; and at that moment a
tremendous, sheer admiration for her was born in him.
Honora had chosen to be unattended--she had coolly observed that she was
well beyond the age for such sentimentality--and he realized that though
the present would have been a racking occasion for most women, it
was evident that she was not disturbed in the least. He had a general
impression of sugary white satin, of her composed, almost disdainful
face in a cloud of veil with little waxen orange flowers, of slender
still hands, when they turned from the room to the minister.
They had gone over the marriage service together, he had read it again
in the kitchen at home; he was fairly familiar with its periods and
responses, and got through with only a slight hesitation and half
prompting. But the thickness of his voice, in comparison with Honora's
open, decisive utterance, vainly annoyed him. He wanted desperately to
clear his throat. Suddenly it was over, and Honora, in a swirl of satin,
was sinking to her knees. Beside her he listened with a feeling of
comfortable lull to a lengthy prayer.
Rising, he perfunctorily clasped a number of indifferent palms, replied
inanely to gabbled expressions of good will and hopes for the future
unmistakably pessimistic in tone. Honora told him in a rapid aside
the names of those approaching. She smiled radiantly at his father
and mother, leaned forward and whispered in the latter's ear; and they
followed the guests streaming into the dining room.
There champagne was being opened by the caterer's assistants from
Boston. There were steaming platters of terrapin and oysters and fowl.
The table bore pyramids of nuts and preserved fruit, hot Cinderellas
in cups with sugar and wine, black case cake, Savoy biscuits, pumpkin
paste, and frothed creams with preserved peach leaves. A laden plate was
thrust into Jason's hand, and he sat with it in a clatter of voices and
topics that completely ignored him. He was isolated in the absorption of
food and wine, in a conversational exchange as strange to him as if had
been spoken in a foreign language.
Honora was busily talking to young Mrs. Fifield--he remembered the name
now. Apparently she had forgotten his existence. At first this annoyed
him; he determined to force his way into their attention, but a wiser
realization held him where he was. Honora was exactly right: he had
nothing in common with these people, probably not one of them would come
into his life or house again. And his wife, in the fact of her marriage,
had clearly signified how little important they were to her. His father
joined him.
“You made certain when the New York packet leaves?” he queried.
“Everything's fixed,” Jason reassured him.
“Your mother wanted to see you. But she got set and is kind of timid
about moving.” Jason rose promptly, and, with the elder, found Mrs.
Hazzard Burrage. “I'd like to have Honora, too,” the latter told them,
and Jason turned sharply to find her. When they stood facing the old
couple his mother hesitated doubtfully; then she put out her hand to
the woman in wedding array. But Honora ignored it; leaning forward she
kissed the round, bright cheek.
“You have to be patient with them at times,” the mother said, looking up
anxiously.
“I'm afraid Jason will need that warning,” Honora replied; “he is a very
imprudent man.”
*****
Jason's mind returned to this later, sitting in the house that had been
the Canderays', but which now was his too. Honora's remark to his mother
had been clear in itself, but it suggested wide speculations beyond
his grasp. For instance--why, after all, had Honora married him? He was
forced to acknowledge that it was not the result of any overwhelming
feeling for him. The manner of their wedding, the complete absence of
the emotion supposed to be the incentive of such consummations, Honora
herself, all, denied any effort to fix such a personally satisfactory
cause. That she might have had no other opportunity--Honora was not so
young as she had been--he dismissed as obviously absurd. Why----
His gaze was fastened upon the carpet, and he saw that time and the
passage of feet had worn away the design. He looked about the room, and
was surprised to discover a general dinginess which he had never noticed
before. He said nothing, but, in his movements about the house, examined
the furnishings and walls, and an astonishing fact was thrust upon
him--the celebrated dwelling was grievously run down. It was plain that
no money had been spent on it for years. The carriage, too, and the
astrakhan collar on Coggs' coat, were worn out.
He considered this at breakfast--his wife behind a tall Sheffield coffee
urn--and he was aware of the cold edge of a distasteful possibility.
The thought enveloped him insidiously, like the fog which often rolled
through the Narrows and over the town, that the Canderays were secretly
impoverished, and Honora had married him only for his money. Jason
was not resentful of this in itself, since he had been searching for
a motive he could accept, but it struck him in a peculiarly vulnerable
spot--his admiration for his wife, for Honora. The idea, although he
assured himself that the thing was readily comprehensible, somehow
managed to diminish her, to tarnish the luster she held for him. It was
far beneath the elevation on which Cottarsport had placed the Canderays;
and he suffered a distinct sense of loss, a feeling of the staleness and
disappointment of living.
The more he considered this explanation the more he was convinced of
its probability. A great deal of his genuine warmth in his marriage
evaporated. Still--Honora had married him, she had given herself in
return for what material advantage he might bring; and he would have to
perform his part thoroughly. He ought to have known that----
What he must do now was to save them both from any painful revelation
by keeping for ever hid that he was aware of her purpose, he must never
expose himself by a word or act; and he must make her understand that
whatever he had was absolutely hers. It would be necessary for her to go
to the money with entire freedom and without any accounting.
This, he found, was not so easy to establish as he thought. Honora was
his wife, but nevertheless there was a well marked reticence between
them, a formal nicety with which he was heartily in accord. He couldn't
just thrust his fortune before her on the table. He hesitated through
the day, on the verge of various blunders; and then, in the evening,
said in a studied causality of manner:
“What do you think about fixing some of the rooms over new? You might
get tired of seeing the same things for so long. I saw real elegant
furniture in Boston.”
She looked about indifferently. “I think I wouldn't like it changed,”
she remarked, almost in the manner of a defense. “I suppose it does seem
worn to you; but I'm used to it; there are so many associations. I am
certain I'd be lost in new hangings.”
Jason was so completely silenced by her reply that he felt he must have
shown some confusion, for her gaze deliberately turned to him. “Is there
any particular thing you would like repaired?” she inquired.
“No, of course not,” he said hastily. “I think it's all splendid. I
wouldn't change a curtain, only--but....” He cursed himself for a
clumsy fool while Honora continued to study him. He endeavored to shield
himself behind the trivial business of lighting a cheroot; but he felt
Honora's query searching him out. Finally, to his extreme dismay, he
heard her say:
“Jason, I believe you think I married you for money!”
Pretense, he realized, would be no good now.
“Something like that did occur to me,” he acknowledged desperately.
“Really,” she told him sharply. “I could be cross very easily. You are
too stupid. Father did wonderfully well on his voyages, and his profit
was invested by Frederic Cozzens, one of the shrewdest financiers of his
day. I have twice, probably three times, as much as you.”
She confronted him with a faintly sparkling resentment. However,
the pleasure, the reassurance, in what he had just heard made him
indifferent to the rest. It was impossible now to comprehend how he had
been such a block! He even smiled at her, which, he was delighted to
observe, obviously puzzled her.
“Perhaps I ought to tell you, Jason, and perhaps it is too late already,
that I thought I married you because I was lonely, because I feared the
future. Anyhow, that's what I told myself the night I sent for you. You
might have a right to complain very bitterly about it.”
“If I have, I won't,” he assured her cheerfully.
“I thought that then; but now I am not at all sure. It no longer seems
so simple, so easily explained. I used to feel that I understood myself
very thoroughly, I could look inside and see what was there; but in the
last month I haven't been able to; and it is very disturbing.”
“Anyhow we're married,” he announced comfortably.
“That's a beautiful way to feel,” she remarked. “I appear to get less
sure of things as I grow older, which is pathetic.”
He wondered what, exactly, she meant by this. Honora said a great many
little things which, their meaning escaping him, gave him momentary
doubts. He discovered that she had a habit of saying things indirectly,
and that, as the seriousness of the occasion increased, her manner
became lighter and he could depend less on the mere order of her words.
This continually disconcerted him, put him on the defensive and at small
disadvantages: he was never quite at ease with Honora.
Obversely--the ugly shade of mercenary purpose dispelled--close at hand
his admiration for her grew. Every detail of her living was as fine
as that publicly exposed in the drawing room. She was not rigidly and
impossibly perfect, in, for instance, the inflexible attitude of Olive
Stanes; Honora had a very human impatience, she could be disagreeable,
he found, in the morning, and she undoubtedly felt herself superior to
the commonalty of life. But in the ordering of her person there was a
wonderfully exact delicacy and fragrant charm. Just as she had no formal
manner, so, he discovered, she possessed no “good” clothes; she dressed
evidently from some inner necessity, and not merely for the sake of
impression. She had, too, a remarkable vigor of expression; Honora was
not above swearing at contradictory circumstance; and she was so free of
small pruderies that often she became a cause of embarrassment to him.
At times he would tell himself uneasily that her conduct was not quite
ladylike; but at the same instant his amusement in her would mount until
it threatened him with laughter.
There was a great deal to be learned from Honora, he told himself; and
then he would speculate whether he were progressing in that acquisition;
and whether she were happy; no, not happy, but contented. Ignorant
of her reason for marrying, he vaguely dreaded the possibility of its
departure, mysterious as it had come, leaving her regarding him with
surprise and disdain. He tried desperately, consciously, to hold her
interest and esteem.
That was the base of his conception of their married existence, which,
then, he was entirely willing to accept.
*****
However, as the weeks multiplied without bringing him any corresponding
increase in the knowledge of either Honora or their true situation,
he was aware of a disturbance born of his very pleasure in her; an
uncomfortable feeling of insecurity fastened upon him. But all this he
was careful to keep hidden. There was evidently no doubt in the minds
of Cottarsport of the enviableness of his position--with all that gold,
wedded to Honora Canderay, living in the Canderay mansion. The more
solid portion of the town gave him a studied consideration denied to the
mere acquisition of wealth; and the rough element, once his companion
but now relentlessly held at a distance, regarded him with a loud
disdain fully as humanly flattering. Sometimes with Honora he passed
the latter, and they grumbled an obscure acknowledgment of his curt
greeting; when he was alone, they openly disparaged his attainments and
qualified pride.
There were “Pack” Clower, an able seaman whose indolent character had
dissipated his opportunities of employment without harming his slow,
powerful body; Emery Radlaw, the brother of the apothecary and a
graduate of Williams College, a man of vanished refinements and taker of
strange drugs, as thin and erratically rapid in movements as Clower was
slow; Steven, an incredibly soiled Swede; John Vleet, the master and
part owner of a fishing schooner, a capable individual on the sea, but
an insanely violent drunkard on land. There were others, all widely
different, but alike in the bitterness of a common failure and the habit
of assuaging doubtful self-esteem, of ministering to crawling nerves,
with highly potential stimulation.
Jason passed “Pack” and Emery Radlaw on a day of late March, and a
mocking and purposely audible aside almost brought him to an adequate
reply. He had disposed of worse men than these in California and the
Isthmus. His arrogant temper rose and threatened to master him; but
something more powerful held him steadily and silently on his way. This
was his measureless admiration for Honora, his determination to involve
her in nothing that would detract from her fineness and erect pride.
Brawling on the street would not do for her husband. He must give her
no cause to lessen what incomprehensible feeling, liking, she might
have for him, give life to no regrets for a hasty and perhaps only
half considered act. After this, in passing any of his late temporary
associates, he failed to express even the perfunctory consciousness of
their being.
*****
In April he was obliged to admit to himself that he knew no more of
Honora's attitude toward him than on the day of their wedding. He
recognized that she made no show of emotion; it was an essential part of
her to seem at all times unmoved. That was well enough for the face she
turned toward the world; but directed at him, her husband, its enigmatic
quality began to obsess his mind. What Honora thought of him, why she
had married him, became an almost continuous question.
It bred an increasing sense of instability that became loud, defiant.
More than once he was at the point of self-betrayal: query, demand,
objection, would rise on a temporary angry flood to his lips. But,
struggling, behind a face as unmoved as Honora's own, he would suppress
his resentment, the sense of injury, and smoke with the appearance of
the greatest placidity.
His regard for his wife placed an extraordinary check on his impulses
and utterance. He deliberated carefully over his speech, watched her
with an attention not far from a concealed anxiety, and was quick to
absorb any small conventions unconsciously indicated by her remarks. She
never instructed or held anything over him; he would have been acutely
sensitive to any air of superiority, and immediately antagonized. But
Honora was entirely free from pretensions of that variety; she was as
clear and honest as a goblet of water.
Jason's regard for her grew pace by pace with the feeling of baffling
doubt. He was passing through the public square, and his thoughts were
interrupted by a faint drifting sweetness. “I believe the lilacs are
out,” he said unconsciously aloud and stopping. His surrounding was
remarkably serene, withdrawn--the courthouse, a small block of brick
with white corniced windows, flat Ionic portico, and slatted wood
lantern with a bell, stood in the middle of the grassy common shut in by
an irregular rectangle of dwellings with low eaves and gardens. The sun
shone with a beginning warmth in a vague sky that intensified the early
green. It seemed that he could see, against a house, the lavender blur
of the lilac blossoms.
Then his attention was attracted by the figure of a man, at once strange
and familiar, coming toward him with a dragging gait. Jason studied the
other until a sudden recognition clouded his countenance, filled him
with a swift, unpleasant surprise.
“Thomas!” he exclaimed. “Whenever did you get back?”
“Yesterday,” said Thomas Gast.
Well, here was Thomas returned from California like himself. Yet
the most negligent view of the latter revealed that there was a vast
difference between Jason and this last Argonaut--Thomas Gast's loosely
hung jaw, which gave to his countenance an air of irresolution, was now
exaggerated by an aspect of utter defeat. His ill conditioned clothes,
sodden brogans, and stringy handkerchief still knotted miner-fashion
about his throat, all multiplied the fact of failure proclaimed by his
attitude.
“How did you strike it?” Jason uselessly asked.
“What chance has the prospector today?” the other heatedly and
indirectly demanded. “At first a man could pan out something for
himself; but now it's all companies, all capital. The state's interfered
too, claims are being held up in court while their owners might starve;
there are new laws and trimmings every week. I struck it rich on the
Reys, but I was drove out before I could get my stakes in. They tell me
you did good.”
“At last,” Jason replied.
“And married Honora Canderay, too.”
The other assented shortly.
“Some are shot with luck,” Thomas Gast proclaimed; “they'd fall and skin
their face on a nugget.”
“How did you come back?”
“Worked my passage in a crazy clipper with moon-sails and the halliards
padlocked to the rail. Carried away the foretopmast and yard off the
Horn and ran from port to port in a hundred and four days.”
The conversation dwindled and expired. Thomas Gast gazed about moodily,
and Jason, with a tight mouth, nodded and moved on. His mind turned back
abruptly to Eddie Lukens, the man who had robbed him of his find in the
early days of cradle mining, the man he had killed.
He had said nothing of this to Honora; the experience with Olive Stanes
had convinced him of the advisability of keeping past accident where,
he now repeated, it belonged. He despaired of ever being able, in
Cottarsport, to explain the place and times that had made his act
comprehensible. How could he picture, here, the narrow ravines cut
by swift rivers from the stupendous slopes and forests of the Sierra
Nevada, the isolation of a handful of men with their tents by a plunging
stream in' a rift so deep that there would be only a brief glimmer of
sunlight at noon? And, failing that, the ignorant could never grasp the
significance of the stillness, the timeless shadows, which the
miners penetrated in their madness for gold. They'd never realize the
strangling passion of this search in a wilderness without habitation
or law or safety. They could not understand the primary justice of such
rude courts as the miners were able to maintain on the more populous
outskirts of the region.
He, Jason Burrage, had been tried by a jury for killing Eddie Lukens,
and had been exonerated. It had been months since he had reiterated this
dreary and only half satisfying formula. The inner necessity filled him
with a shapeless concern such as might have been caused by a constant,
unnatural shadow flickering out at his back. He almost wished that
he had told Honora at the beginning; and then he fretfully cursed the
incertitude of life--whatever he did appeared, shortly after, wrong.
But it was obvious that he couldn't go to her with the story today; the
only time for that had been before his marriage; now it would have the
look of a confession of weakness, opportunely timed; and he could think
of nothing more calculated to antagonize Honora than such a crumbling
admission.
All this had been re-animated by the mere presence of Thomas Gast in
Cottarsport; certainly, he concluded, an insufficient reason for
his troubling. Gast had been a miner, too, he was familiar with the
conditions in the West.... There was a great probability that he hadn't
even heard of the unfortunate affair; while Olive Stanes would be
dragged to death rather than garble a word of what he had told her:
Jason willingly acknowledged this of Olive. He resolutely banished the
whole complication from his mind; and, walking with Honora after supper
over the garden in back of their house, he was again absorbed by her
vivid delicate charm.
The garden was deep and narrow, a flight of terraces connected by a
flagged path and steps. At the bottom were the bergamot pear trees that
had been Ithiel Canderay's especial charge in his last, retired years.
Their limbs, faintly blurred with new foliage, rose above the wall,
against a tranquil evening sky with a white slip of May moon. The peace
momentarily disturbed in Jason Burrage's heart flooded back, a sense of
great well-being settled over him. Honora rested her hand within his arm
at an inequality of the stone walk.
“I am really a very bad wife, Jason,” she said suddenly; “self-absorbed
and inattentive.”
“You suit me,” he replied inadequately. He was extraordinarily moved by
her remark: she had never before even suggested that she was conscious
of obligation. He wanted to put into words some of the warmth of feeling
which filled his heart, but suitable speech evaded him. He could not
shake off the fear that such protestations might be displeasing to her
restrained being. Moving slightly away from him she seemed, in the soft
gloom, more wonderful than ever. Set in white against the depths of the
garden, her face, dimly visible, appeared to be without its customary
faintly mocking smile.
“Do you remember, Jason,” she continued, “how I once said I thought I
was marrying you because I was lonely, and that I found out it wasn't
so? I didn't know why.” She paused.
He was enveloped by an intense eagerness to hear her to the end: it
might be that something beyond his greatest hopes was to follow. But
disappointment overtook him.
“I was certain I'd see more clearly into myself soon, but I haven't;
it's been useless trying. And I've decided to do this--to give up
thinking about things for myself, and to wait for you to show me.”
“But I can't do that,” he protested, facing her; “more-than half the
time I wonder over almost that same question--why you ever married me?”
“This is a frightful situation,” she observed with a return of her
familiar manner; “two mature people joined for life, and neither with
the slightest idea of the reason. Anyhow I have given it up.... I
suppose I'll die in ignorance. Perhaps I was too old---”
He interrupted her with an uncustomary incivility, a heated denunciation
of what she had been about to say.
“So you are not sorry,” he remarked after a little.
“No,” she answered slowly, “and I'm certain I shan't be. I'm not that
sort of person. I would go down to ruin sooner than regret.” She said no
more, but went into the house, leaving Jason in the potent spring night.
There was no longer any doubt about the lilacs: the air was laden with
their scent. An entire hedge of them must have blossomed as he was
standing there. He moved to the terrace below: there might be buds on
the pear trees. But it was impossible to see the limbs. How could Honora
expect him to make their marriage clear? He had never before seen her
face so serene. He thought that he heard a vague stir outside the wall,
and he remembered the presence of a semi-public path. Now there was
a cautious mutter of voices. He advanced a step, then stopped at a
scrambling of shoes against the wall. A vague form shouldered into view,
momentarily clinging above him, and a harsh voice cried:
“Murderer!”
Even above the discordant dash of his startled sensibilities rose
the fear, instantaneously born, that Honora had heard. All the vague
uneasiness which had possessed him at Thomas Gust's return solidified
into a recognizable, leaden dread--the conviction that his wife must
learn the story of his misadventure, told with animus and lies. Then a
more immediate dread held him rigidly attentive: there might be a second
cry, a succession of them shouted discordantly to the sky. Honora
would come out, the servants gather, while that accusing voice,
indistinguishable and disembodied by the night, proclaimed his error.
This was not the shooting of Eddie Lukens, but the neglect to comprehend
Honora Canderay.
Absolute silence followed. He made a motion toward the wall, but,
oppressed by the futility of such an act, arrested himself in the
midst of a step and stood with a foot extended. The stillness seemed to
thicken the air until he could hardly breathe; he was seized by a sullen
anger at the events which had gathered to betray him. The crying tones
had been like a chemical acting on his complexity, changing him to an
entirely different entity, darkening his being; the peace and fragrance
of the night were destroyed by the anxiety that now sat upon him.
Convinced that nothing more was to follow here, he was both impelled
into the house, to Honora, and held motionless by the fear of seeing
her turn toward him with her familiar light surprise and a question.
However, he slowly retraced his way over the terraces, through a trellis
hung with grape vines, and into the hall. As he hoped, Honora was on
the opposite side of the dwelling. She had heard nothing. Jason sat down
heavily, his gaze lowered and somber.
The feeling smote him that he should tell Honora of the whole miserable
business at once, make what excuse for himself was possible, and prepare
her for the inevitable public revelation. He pronounced her name,
with the intention of doing this; but she showed him such a tranquil,
superfine face that he was unable to proceed. Her interrogation held for
a moment and then left him, redirected to a minute, colorful square of
glass beads.
A multiplication of motives kept him silent, but principal among them
was the familiar shrinking from appearing to his wife in any little or
mean guise. It was precisely into such a peril that he had been forced.
He felt, now, that she would overlook a murder such as the one he had
committed far more easily than an intangible error of spirit. He could
actually picture Honora, in his place, shooting Eddie Lukens; but he
couldn't imagine her in his humiliating situation of a few minutes
before.
He turned to the consideration of who it might be that had called over
the wall, and immediately recognized that it was one of a small number,
one of “Pack” Clower's gang: Thomas Gast would have gravitated quickly
to their company, and their resentment of his, Jason Burrage's, place
in life must have been nicely increased by Gast's jealousy. The latter,
Jason knew, had not washed an honest pan of gravel in his journey and
search for a mythical easy wealth; he had hardly left the littered
fringe of San Francisco, but had filled progressively menial places in
the less admirable resorts and activities.
With so much established beyond doubt he was confronted by the
necessity for immediate action, the possibility of yet averting all that
threatened him, of preserving his good opinion in Honora's eyes. Clower
and Emery Radlaw and the rest, with the balance of neither property nor
position, lawless and inflamed with drink, were a difficult opposition.
He repeated that he had mastered worse, but out in California, where a
man had been nakedly a man; and then he hadn't been married. There he
would have found them at once, and an explosion of will, perhaps of
powder, would soon have cleared the atmosphere. But in Cottarsport, with
so much to keep intact, he was all but powerless.
Yet, the following day, when he saw the apothecary's brother enter
the combined drug and liquor store, he followed; and, to his grim
satisfaction, found Thomas Gast already inside. The apothecary gave
Jason an inhospitable stare, but the latter ignored him, striding toward
Gast. “Just what is it you've brought East about me?” he demanded.
The other avoided the query, his gaze shifting over the floor. “Well?”
Jason insisted, after a pause. Thomas Gast was leaning against a high
counter at one side, behind which shelves held various bottles and paper
boxes and tins. The counter itself was laden with scales and a mortar,
powders and vividly striped candy in tall glass jars.
“You know well as I do,” Gast finally admitted.
“Then we're both certain there's no reason for name-calling over my back
wall.”
“You shot him, didn't you?” the other asked thinly. “You can't get away
from the fact that you killed a pardner.”
“I did,” said Jason Burrage harshly. “He robbed me. But I didn't shout
thief at him from the safety of the dark; it was right after dinner, the
middle of the day. He was ready first, too; but I shot him. Can you get
anything from that?”
“You ought to realize this isn't San Francisco,” Radlaw, the drug taker,
put in. “A man couldn't be coolly derringered in Cottarsport. There's
law here, there's order.” He had a harried face, dulled eyes under
a fine brow, a tremulous flabby mouth, with white crystals of powder
adhering to its corners, and a countenance like the yellow oilskins of
the fishermen.
Jason turned darkly in his direction. “What have you or Clower got to do
with law?”
“Not only them,” the apothecary interposed, “but all the other men of
the town are interested in keeping it orderly. We'll have no western
rowdyism in Cottarsport.”
“Then hear this,” Jason again addressed Thomas Gast; “see that you tell
the truth and all the truth. My past belongs to me, and I don't aim to
have it maligned by any empty liar back from the Coast. And either of
you Radlaws--I'm not going to be blanketed by the town drunkards or old
women, either. If I have shot one man I can shoot another, and I care
this much for your talk--if any of this muck is allowed to annoy Mrs.
Burrage I'll kill whoever starts it, spang in the middle of day.”
“That's where it gets him,” the ex-scholar stated. “Just there,” Jason
agreed; “and this Gast, who has brought so much back from California,
can tell you this, too--that I had the name of finishing what I began.”
But, once more outside, alone, his appearance of resolution vanished:
the merest untraceable rumor would be sufficient to accomplish all
that he feared, damage him irreparably with Honora. He was far older in
spirit and body than he had been back on Indian Bar; he had passed the
tumultuous years of living. The labor and privation, the continuous
immersion in frigid streams, had lessened his vitality, sapped his
ability for conflict. All that he now wished was the happiness of his
wife, Honora, and the quietude of their big, peaceful house; the winter
evenings by the Franklin stove and the spring evenings with the windows
open and the candles guttering in the mild, lilac-hung air.
*****
Together with his uncertainty the pleasure in the sheer fact of his wife
increased; and with it the old wonderment at their situation returned.
What, for instance, did she mean by saying that he must explain her
to herself? He tried again all the conventional reasons for marriage
without satisfaction: the sentimental and material equally failed. Jason
felt that if he could penetrate this mystery his grasp on actuality
would be enormously improved; he might, with such knowledge,
successfully defy Thomas Gast and all that past which equally threatened
to reach out destructively into the future.
His happiness, in its new state of fragility, became infinitely
precious; a thing to dwell on at nights, to ponder over walking through
the town. Then, disagreeably aware of what overshadowed him, he would
watch such passersby as spoke, searching for some sign of the spreading
of his old fault. Often he imagined that he saw such an indication,
and he would hurry home, in a panic of haste--which was, too, intense
reluctance--to discover if Honora yet knew.
He approached her a hundred times determined to end his misery of
suspense, and face the incalculable weight of her disdain; but on each
occasion he failed as he had at the first. Now his admission seemed too
damned roundabout; in an unflattering way forced upon him. His position
was too insecure, he told himself.... Perhaps the threat in the
apothecary's shop would be sufficient to shut the mouth of rumor. It had
not been empty; he was still capable of uncalculating rage. How closely
was Honora bound to him? What did she think of him at heart?
He couldn't bear to remember how he had laid open her dignity, the
dignity and position of the Canderays in Cottarsport, to whispered
vilification. Connected with him she was being discussed in “Pack”
Clower's shanty. His mind revolved endlessly about the same few topics,
he elaborated and discarded countless schemes to secure Honora. He even
considered giving Thomas Gast a sum of money to repair what harm the
latter had wrought. Useless--his danger flourished on hatred and envy
and malice. However exculpable the killing of Eddie Lukens had been, the
results were immeasurably unfortunate, for a simple act of violent local
justice.
They were in the carriage above Cottarsport; Coggs had died through the
winter, and his place been taken by a young coachman from the city. The
horses rested somnolently in their harness, the bright bits of rubbed
silver plate shining. Honora was looking out over the harbor, a gentian
blue expanse. “Good Heavens,” she cried with sudden energy, “I am
getting old at a sickening rate. Only last year the schooners and sea
made me as restless as a gull. I wanted to sail to the farthest places;
but now the boats are--are no more than boats. It fatigues me to think
of their jumping about; and I haven't walked down to the wharves for six
weeks. Do I look a haggard fright?”
“You seem as young as before I went to California,” he replied simply.
She did. A strand of hair had slipped from its net, and wavered across
her flawless cheek, her lips were bright and smooth, her shoulders
slimly square.
“You're a marvelous woman, Honora,” he told her.
She gazed at him, smiling. “I wonder if you realize that that is your
first compliment of our entire wedded life?”
“Ridiculous,” he declared incredulously.
“Isn't it?”
“I mean I'm complimenting you all the time. I think----”
“You can hardly expect me to hear thoughts,” she interrupted.
He silently debated another--it was to be about the ribbon on her
throat--but decided against giving it voice. Why, like the reasons for
so much else, he was unable to say; they all had their root in the blind
sense of the uncertainty of his situation.
Throughout the evening his thoughts shifted ceaselessly from one
position to another. This, he realized, could not continue indefinitely;
soon, from within or out, Honora and himself must be revealed to each
other. He was permeated by the weariness of constant strain; the peace
of the past months had been destroyed; it seemed to him that he had
become an alien to the serenity of the high, tranquil rooms and of his
wife.
He rose early the following morning, and descended into a rapt purity of
sunlight and the ecstatic whistling of robins. The front door had not
been opened; and, as he turned its shining brass knob, his gaze fell
upon a sheet of paper projecting below. Jason bent, securing it, and,
with a premonition of evil, thrust the folded scrap into his pocket.
He turned through the house into the garden; and there privately
scrutinized a half sheet with a clumsily formed, disguised writing:
“This,” he read, “will serve you notice to move on. Dangerous
customers are not desired here. Take a suggestion in time and skip bad
consequences. You can't hide back of your wife's hoops.” It was signed
“Committee.”
A robin was thrilling the air with melody above his head. Jason
listened mechanically as the bird ended his song and flew away. Then
the realization of what he had found overwhelmed him with a strangling
bitterness: he, Jason Burrage, had been ordered from his birthplace,
he had been threatened and accused of hiding behind a woman, by the
off-scouring of the alleys and rum holes. A feeling of impotence thrust
its chilling edge into the swelling heat of his resentment. He would
have to stand like a condemned animal before the impending fatal blow;
he was held motionless, helpless, by every circumstance of his life and
hopes.
He crumpled the warning in a clenched hand. How Cottarsport would point
and jeer at him, at Jason Burrage who was Honora Canderay's husband, a
murderer; Jason, who had returned from California with the gold fleece!
It wasn't golden, he told himself, but stained--a fleece dark with
blood, tarnished from hellish unhappiness, a thing infected with
immeasurable miseries. Its edge had fallen on Olive Stanes and left
her--he had passed her only yesterday--dry-lipped and shrunken into
sterile middle age. It promised him only sorrow, and now its influence
was reaching up toward Honora, in herself serenely apart from the muck
and defilement out of which he thought he had struggled.
The sun, rising over the bright spring foliage, filled the garden
with sparkling color. His wife, in a filmy white dress, called him to
breakfast. She waited for him with her faint smile, against the cool
interior. He went forward isolated, lonely, in his secret distress.
This communication, like the spoken accusation of a previous evening,
was, apparently, bare of other consequences. Jason's exterior life
progressed without a deviation from its usual smooth course. It was
clear to him that no version of the facts about the killing of Eddie
Lukens had yet spread in Cottarsport. This, he decided, considering the
character of Thomas Gast, the oblique quality of his statements, was
natural. He could not doubt that such public revelation, if threat and
intimidation failed, must come. Meanwhile he was victimized by a growing
uncertainty--from what direction would the next attack thrust?
He smiled grimly to himself at the memory of the withdrawn and secure
aspect of the town when he had first returned from the West. To him,
striding across the hills from the Dumner stage, it had resembled an
ultimate haven. The seeming harmony and peace of the grey fold of houses
about their placid harbor had concealed possibilities of debasement as
low as California's worst camps. Now, successful, when he had looked for
the reward of his long years of brutal toil, the end of struggle, he was
confronted by the ugliest situation of his existence.
He was glad that he had always been a silent man, or Honora would have
noticed and demanded the cause of the moroseness which must have settled
over him. They sat no longer before the stove in the drawing room, but
on a side porch that commanded an expanse of lawn and a high privet
hedge, while he smoked morosely at the inevitable cheroots, gloomily
searching for a way from the difficulty closing in upon him.
Honora had been to Boston, and she was describing lightly an encounter
with her aunt, Herriot Cozzens. He was only half conscious of her amused
voice. Clouds had obscured the evening sky, and there was an air of
suspense, like that preceding a thunder storm, in the thickening dark.
A restlessness filled Jason which he was unable to resist; and, with
a short, vague explanation, he rose and proceeded out upon the street.
There, his hands clasped behind his back and head lowered, he wandered
on, lost in inner despondence.
He turned into the courthouse square, dimly lighted by gas lamps at
its outer confines, and paced across the grass, stirring a few wan
fireflies. It was blacker still beyond the courthouse. He stumbled
slightly, recovered himself, and wearily commenced a return home. But
he had scarcely taken a step when a figure closed in upon him,
materializing suddenly out of the darkness. He stopped and was about to
speak when a violent blow from behind grazed his head and fell with a
splintering impact on his shoulder. He stood for a moment bewildered by
the unexpected pain; then, as he saw another shape, and another, gather
around him, he came sharply to his senses. His hand thrust into
a pocket, but it was empty--he had laid aside the derringer in
Cottarsport.
His assailants grappled with him swiftly, and he swayed struggling
and hitting out with short blows in the center of a silent, vicious
conflict. A rough hard palm was crushed against his mouth, a head ground
into his throat, and a heavy, mucous breath of rum smote him. There was
muttered cursing, and low, disregarded commands. A cotton handkerchief,
evidently used as a mask, tore off in Jason's hand; strained voices,
their caution lost in passion, took unmistakably the accents of “Pack”
Clower and the Swede, Steven. A thinner tone outside the swirling
bodies cried low and urgent, “Get it done with.” A fist was driven again
Jason's side, leaving a sharp, stabbing hurt, a heavy kick tore his
thigh. Then he got his fingers into a neck and put into the grip all
the sinewy strength got by long years with a miner's pan and shovel. A
choked sob responded, and blood spread stickily over his palms.
It seemed to Jason Burrage that he was shaking himself free, that he
was victorious; with a final supreme wrench he stood alone, breathing in
gusts. There was a second's imponderable stillness, and then the entire
night appeared to crash down upon his head...
He thought it was the flumed river, all their summer's labor, bursting
over him. He was whirled downward through a swift course of jagged
pains, held under the hurtling water and planks and stones. He fought,
blind and strangled, but he was soon crushed into a supine nothingness.
Far below, the river discharged him: he was lying beside a slaty bank
in which the gold glittered like fine and countless fish scales. But he
couldn't move, and the bank flattened into a plain under a gloomy ridge,
with a camp of miners. He saw that it was Sunday, for the men were all
grouped before the tents singing. There was Eddie Lukens gravely waving
a hand to the beat of the melody:
“'Don't you cry for me.