THE DARK FLEECE
By Joseph Hergesheimer
New York Alfred A. Knopf
1922
Published, April, 1918, in a volume now out of print, entitled “Gold and Iron,” and then reprinted twice.
OLIVE
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.
I'm going to Calaveras
With my wash bowl on my knee.'”=
She returned and resumed her position with her hands folded.
“And that,” Jason Burrage told her, “was how I learned gold mining in California. I sank shafts, too, and worked a windlass till the holes got so deep they had to be timbered and the ore needed a crusher. But after the fluming I knew what to wait for. I kept going in a sort of commerce for a while—buying old outfits and selling them again to the late comers—a pick or shovel would bring ten dollars and long boots fifty dollars a pair. I got twenty-four dollars for a box of Seidlitz powders. Then in 'Fifty-four I went in with three scientific men—one had been a big chemist at Paris—and things took a turn. We had the dead wood on gold. Why, we did nothing but re-travel the American Fork and Indian Bar, the Casumnec and Moquelumne, and work the tailings the earlier miners had piled up and left, just like I had south. We did some pretty things with cyanide; yes, and hydraulics and powder.
“Things took a turn,” he repeated; “investments in stampers and so on, and here I am.”
After he had gone—supper, she had informed him, was at five exactly—Olive had the bewildered feeling of partially waking from an extraordinary dream. Yet the buckskin bag on the table possessed a weighty actuality.
She sat for a long while gazing intently at the gold, which, like a crystal ball, held for her varied reflections. Then, recalling the exigencies of the kitchen, she hurried abruptly away. Her thoughts wheeled about Jason Burrage in a confusion of all the impressions she had ever had of him. But try as she might she could not picture the present man as a part of her life in Cottarsport; she could not see herself married to him, although that event waited just beyond today. She set her lips in a straight line, a fixed purpose gave her courage in place of the timidity inspired by Jason's opulent strangeness—she couldn't allow herself to be turned aside for a moment from the way of righteousness. The gods of mammon, however they might blackly assault her spirit, should be confounded.=
”... hide me
Till the storm of life is past."=
She sang in a high quavering voice. There was a stir beyond—surely Jason wasn't back so soon; but it was Jem.
“What's on the table here?” he called.
“You let that be,” she cried back in a panic at having left the gift so exposed. “That's gold dust; Jason brought it, two thousand dollars' worth.”
A prolonged whistle followed her announcement. Jem appeared with the buckskin bag in his hand. “Why, here's two yawls right in my hand,” he asserted.
“Mind one thing, Jem,” she went on, “he's coming back for supper, and I won't have you and Rhoda at him about boats and singing the minute he's in the house.”
Rhoda, with exclamations, and then Hester, inspected the gold. “I'd slave five years for that,” the latter stated, “and then hardly get it; and here you, have it for nothing.”
“You'll get the good of it too, Hester,” Olive told her.
“I'll just work for what I get,” she replied fiercely. “I won't take a penny from Jason, Olive Stanes; you can't hold that over me, and the sooner you both know it the better.”
“You ought to pray to be saved from pride.”
“I don't ask benefits from any one,” Hester stoutly observed.
“Hester——” Olive commenced, scandalized, but she stopped at Jason's entrance. “Hester she wanted a share of the gold,” Jem declared with a light in his slow gaze, “and Olive was cursing at her.”
“Lots more,” said Jason Burrage, “buckets full.” In spite of the efforts of every one to be completely at ease the supper was unavoidably stiff.
But when Jason had lighted one of his blunt cigars, and begun a vivid description of western life, the Staneses were transported by the marvels following one upon another: a nugget had been picked up over a foot long, it weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, and realized forty-three thousand dollars. “Why, fifty and seventy-five lumps were common,” he asserted. “At Ford's Bar a man took out seven hundred dollars a day for near a month. Another found seventeen thousand dollars in a gutter two or three feet deep and not a hundred yards long.
“But 'Frisco was the place; you could see it spread in a day with warehouses on the water and tents climbing up every hill. Happy Valley, on the beach, couldn't hold another rag house. The Parker House rented for a hundred and seventy thousand a year, and most of it paid for gambling privileges; monté and faro, blazing lights and brass bands everywhere and dancing in the El Dorado saloon. At first the men danced with each other, but later——”
He stopped; an awkward silence followed. Olive was rigid with inarticulate protest, a sense of outrage—gambling, saloons, and dancing! All that she had feared about Jason became more concrete, more imminent. She saw California as a modern Babylon, a volcano of gold and vice; already she had heard of great fires that had devastated it.
“We didn't mine on Sunday, Olive,” Jason assured her; “and all the boys went to the preaching and sang the hymns, standing out on the grass.”
Hester, finally, with a muttered period, rose and disappeared; Jem went out to consult with a man, his nod to Olive spoke of yawls; and Rhoda, at last, reluctantly made her way above. Olive's uneasiness increased when she found herself alone with the man she was to marry.
“I don't like Rhoda and Jem hearing about all that wickedness,” she told Jason Burrage; “they are young and easy affected. Rhoda gives me a lot of worry as it is.”
“Suppose we forget them,” he suggested. “I haven't had a word with you yet; that is, about ourselves. I don't even know but you have gone and fell in love with some one else.”
“Jason,” she answered, “how can you? I told you I'd marry you, and I will.”
“Are you glad to see me?” he demanded, coming closer and capturing her hand.
“Why, what a question. Of course I'm pleased you're back and safe.”
“You haven't got a headache, have you?” he inquired jocularly.
“No,” she replied seriously. His words, his manners, his grasp, worried her more and more. Still, she reminded herself, she must be patient, accept life as it had been ordained. There was a slight flutter at her heart, a constriction of her throat; and she wondered if this were love. She should, she felt, exhibit more warmth at Jason's return, the preservation, through such turbulent years of absence, of her image. But it was beyond her power to force her hand to return his pressure: her fingers lay still and cool in his grasp.
“You are just the same, Olive,” he told her; “and I'm glad you're what you are, and that Cottarsport is what it is. That's why I came back: it was in my blood, the old town and you. All the time I kept thinking of when I'd come back rich as I made up my mind to be, and get you what you ought to have—be of some importance in Cottarsport, like the Canderays. The old captain, too, died while I was away. How's Honora?”
“Honora Canderay is an ungodly woman,” Olive asserted with emphasis.
“I don't know anything about that,” he said; “but I always kind of liked to look at her. She reminded me of a schooner with everything set coming up brisk into the wind.” Olive made a motion toward the stove, but he restrained her; rising, he put in fresh wood. Then he turned and again seemed lost in a long, contented inspection of the quiet interior. Olive saw that marks of weariness shadowed his eyes.
“This is what I came back for,” he reiterated; “peaceful as the forests, and yet warm and human. Blood counts.” He returned to his place by her, and leaned forward, very earnestly. “California isn't real the way this is,” he told her; “the women were just paint and powder, like things you would see in a fever, and then you'd wake up, in Cottarsport, well again, with you, Olive.”
She managed to smile at him in acknowledgment of this.
“I'm desperately glad I pulled through without many scars. But there are some, Olive; that was bound to be. I don't know if a man had better say anything about the past, or just let it be, and go on. Times I think one and then the other. Yet you are so calm sitting here, and so good, it would be a big help to tell you... Olive, out on the American, and God knows how sorry I've been, I killed a man, Olive.”
Slowly she felt herself turning icy cold, except for the hot blood rushing into her head. She stared at him for a moment, horrified; and then mechanically drew back, scraping the chair across the floor. Perhaps she hadn't understood, but certainly he had said——
“Wait till I tell what I can for myself,” he hurried on, following her. “It was when the four of us were working with a rocker. I was shoveling the gravel, and every one in California knows that when you're doing that, and find a nugget over half an ounce, it belongs to you personal and not to the partnership. Well, I came on a big one, and laid it away—they all saw it—and then this Eddie Lukens hid it out on me. He was the only one near where I had it; he broke it up and put it in the cradle, sure; and in the talk that followed I—I shot him.”
He laid a detaining hand on her shoulder, but she wrenched herself away.
“Don't touch me!” she breathed. She thought she saw him bathed in the blood of the man he had slain. Her lips formed a sentence, “'Thou shalt not kill.'”
“I was tried at Spanish Bar,” he continued. “Miners' law is better than you hear in the East. It's quick, it has to be, but in the main it's serious and right. I was tried with witnesses and a jury and they let me off; they justified me. That ought to go for something.”
“Don't come near me,” she cried, choking, filled with dread and utter loathing. “How can you stand there and—stand there, a murderer, with a life on your heart!”
His face quivered with concern; in spite of her words he drew near her again, repeating the fact that he had been judged, released. Olive Stanes' hysteria vanished before the cold stability which came to her assistance, the sense of being rooted in her creed.
“'Thou shalt not kill,'” she echoed.
The emotion faded from his features, his countenance once more became masklike, the jaw was hard and sharp, his eyes narrowed. “It's all over then?” he asked. She nodded, her lips pinched into a white line.
“What else could be hoped? Blood guiltiness. O Jason, pray to save your soul.”
He moved over to where his high silk hat reposed, secured it, and turned. “This will be final.” His voice was hard. Olive stood slightly swaying, with closed eyes. Then she remembered the buckskin bag of not yellow but scarlet gold. She stumbled forward to it and thrust the weight into his hand. Jason Burrage's fingers closed on the gift, while his gaze rested on her from under contracted brows. He was, it seemed, about to speak, but instead preserved an intense silence; he looked once more about the room, still and old in its lamplight. Why didn't he go? Then she saw that she was alone:
Like the eternal rock outside the door.
From above came the clear, joyous voice of Rhoda singing. Olive crumpled into a chair. Soon Jem would be back.... She turned and slipped down upon the floor in an agony of prayer.
HONORA
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.