Part 3

“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: