Part 4

“I thought something of the kind had happened: the upstairs girl was saying he was drunk last night. A habit acquired West, I don't doubt. It is remarkable, Honora, how you remember one from another in Cottarsport. They all appear indifferently alike to me. And I am tremendously upset about Paret.”

“Well, I'm not,” Honora returned. She spoke inattentively, and she was surprised at the truth she had exposed. Paret Fifield had never become a necessary part of her existence. Except for the light he had shed upon herself--the sudden glimpse of multiplying years and the emptiness of her days--his marriage was unimportant. She would miss him exactly as she might a piece of furniture that had been removed after forming a familiar spot. She was more engrossed in what her aunt had told her about Jason.

He had been back only two or three days, and already lost his promised wife and got drunk. The implications of drinking were different in Cottars-port from what they would be in San Francisco, or even Boston; in such a small place as this every act offered the substance for talk, opinion, as long-lived as the elms on the hills. It was foolish of him not to go away for such excesses. Honora wanted to tell him so. She had inherited her father's attitude toward the town, she thought, a personal care of Cottarsport as a whole, necessarily expressed in an attention toward individual acts and people. She wished Jason wouldn't make a fool of himself. Then she recalled how ineffectual the same desire, actually voiced, had been in connection with Olive Stanes. She recalled Olive's horrified face as she, Honora, had said, “Grace be damned!” It was all quite hopeless. “I think I'll move to the city,” she informed her aunt.

The latter sighed, from, Honora knew, a sense of superior knowledge and resignation.

After supper she deserted the more familiar drawing room for the chamber across the wide hall. A fire of coals was burning in an open grate, but there was no other light. Honora sat at a piano with a ponderous ebony case, and picked out Violetta's first aria from Traviata. The round sweet notes seemed to float away palpable and intact into the gloom. It was an unusual mood, and when it had gone she looked back at it in wonderment and distrust. Her customary inner rebellion re-established itself perhaps more vigorously than before: she was charged with energy, with vital promptings, but found no opportunity, promise, of expression or accomplishment.

The warm sun lingered for a day or so more, and then was obliterated by an imponderable bank of fog that rolled in through the Narrows, over Cottar's Neck, and changed even the small confines of the town into a vast labyrinth. That, in turn, was dissipated by a swinging eastern storm, tipped with hail, which left stripped trees on an ashen blue sky and dark, frigid water slapping uneasily at the harbor edge.

Honora Canderay's states of mind were as various and similar. Her outer aspect, however, unlike the weather, showed no evidence of change: as usual she drove in the carriage on afternoons when it was not too cold; she appeared, autocratic and lavish, in the shops of Citron Street; she made her usual aimless excursions to the harbor. Jem Stanes, she saw, was still a deck hand on the schooner _Gloriana_. Looking back to the morning when he had scowlingly entered the office on the wharf, she was able to reconstruct the cause of his ill humor--a brother-in-law to Jason Burrage was a person of far different employment from an ordinary Stanes. She passed Olive on the street, but the latter, except for a perfunctory greeting, hurried immediately by.

The stories of Jason's reckless conduct multiplied--he had consumed a staggering amount of Medford rum and, in the publicity of noon and Marlboro Street, sat upon the now notable silk hat. He had paid for some cheroots with a pinch of gold dust as they were said to do in the far West. He carried a loaded derringer, and shot “for fun” the jar of colored water in the apothecary's window, and had threatened, with a grim face, to do the same for whoever might interfere with his pleasures. He was, she learned, rapidly becoming a local scandal and menace.

If it had been any one but Jason Burrage, native born and folded in the glamour of his extraordinary fortune, he would have been immediately and roughly suppressed: Honora well knew the rugged and severe temper of the town. As it was he went about--attended by its least desirable element, a chorus to magnify his liberality and daring--in an atmosphere of wonderment and excited curiosity.

This, she thought, was highly regrettable. Yet, in his present frame of mind, what else was there for him to do? He couldn't be expected to take seriously, be lost in, the petty affairs of Cottarsport; beyond a limited amount the gold for which he had endured so much--she had heard something of his misfortunes and struggle--was useless here; and, without balance, he must inevitably drift into still greater debauch in the large cities.

He was now a frequently recurring figure in her thought. In the correct presence of her aunt, Mrs. Cozzens, in delicate clothes and exact surroundings, the light of an astral lamp on her sharply cut, slightly contemptuous face, she would consider the problem of Jason Burrage. In a way, which she had more than once explained and justified to herself, she felt responsible for him. If there had been anything to suggest, she would have gone to him directly, but she had no intention of offering a barren condemnation. Her peculiar position in Cottarsport, while it indicated certain obligations, required the maintenance of an impersonal plane. Why, he might say anything to her; he was quite capable of telling her--and correctly--to go to the devil!

A new analogy was created between Jason Bur-rage and herself: his advantage over her had broken down, they both appeared fast in untoward circumstance beyond their power to alleviate or shape. He had come back to Cottarsport in the precise manner in which she had returned from shorter but equally futile excursions. Jason had his money, which at once established necessities and made satisfaction impossible; and she had promptings, desires, that by reason of their mere being, allowed her contentment neither in the spheres of a social importance nor here in the quiet place where so much of her was rooted. As Honora Canderay gazed at her Aunt Herriot's hard, fine profile, the thought of her own, Honora Canderay's, resemblance to the returned miner carousing with the dregs of the town brought a shade of ironic amusement to her countenance.

Honora left the house, walking, in the decline of a November afternoon. She had been busy in a small way, supervising the filling of camphor chests for the winter, and, intensely disliking any of the duties of domesticity, she was glad to escape into the still, cold open. Dusk was not yet perceptible, but the narrow, erratic ways of Cottars-port were filling with dear grey shadow. When, inevitably, she found herself at the harbor's edge, she progressed over a narrow wharf to its end. It had been wet, and there were patches of black, icy film; the water near by was grey-black, but about the bare thrust of Cottar's Neck it was green; the warehouses behind her were blank and deserted.

She had on a cloak lined with ermine, and she drew it closer about her throat at the frigid air lifting from the bay. Suddenly a flare of color filled the somber space, a coppery glow that glinted like metal shavings on the water and turned Cottar's Neck red. Against the sunset the town was formless, murky; but the sky and harbor resembled the interior of a burnished kettle. The effect was extraordinarily unreal, melodramtic, and she was watching the color fade, when a figure wavered out of the shadows and moved insecurely toward her. At first she thought the stumbling progressions were caused by the ice: then she saw that it was Jason Burrage, drunk.

He wore the familiar suit of broadcloth, with no outer covering, and a rough hat pulled down upon his fixed gaze. She stood motionless while he approached, and then calmly met his heavy interrogation.

“Honora,” he articulated, “Honora Canderay, one--one of the great Canderays of Cottarsport. Well, why don't you say something? Too set up for a civil, for a----”

“Don't be ridiculous, Jason,” she replied crisply; “and do go home--you'll freeze out here as you are.”

“One of the great Canderays,” he reiterated, contemptuously. He came very close to her. “You're not much. Here they think you.... But I've been to California, and at the Jenny Lind... in silk like a blue bird, and sing-. Nobody ever heard of the Canderays in 'Frisco, but they know Jason Burrage, Burrage who had all the bad luck there was, and then struck it rich.”

He swayed perilously, and she put out a palm and steadied him. “Go back. You are not fit to be around.”

Jason struck her hand down roughly. “I'm fitter than you. What are you, anyway?” He caught her shoulder in vise-like fingers. “Nothing but a woman, that's all--just a woman.”

“You are hurting me,” she said fearlessly.

His grip tightened, and he studied her, his eyes inhuman in a stony, white face. “Nothing more than that.”

“You are very surprising,” she responded. “Do you know, I had never thought of it. And it's true; that is precisely what and all I am.”

His expression became troubled; he released her, stepped back, slipped, and almost fell into the water. Honora caught his arm and dragged him to the middle of the wharf. “A dam' Canderay,” he muttered. “And I'm better, Jason Burrage. Ask them at the El Dorado, or Indian Bar; but that's gone--the early days. All scientific now. We got the dead wood on gold... cyanide.”

“Come home,” she repeated brusquely, turning him, with a slight push, toward the town settled in darkness. It sent him falling forward in the direction she wished. Honora supported him, led him on. At intervals he hung back, stopped. His speech became confused; then, it appeared, his reason commenced slowly to return. The streets were empty; a lamp shone dimly on its post at a corner; she guided Jason round a sunken space.

Honora had no sense of repulsion; she was conscious of a faint pity, but her energy came dimly from that feeling of obligation, inherited, she told herself once more, from her father--their essential attitude to Cottarsport. At the same time she found herself studying his face with a personal curiosity. She was glad that it was not weak, that rum had been ineffectual to loosen its hardness. He now seemed capable of walking alone, and she stood aside.

Jason was at a loss for words; his lips moved, but inaudibly. “Keep away from the water,” she commanded, “or from Medford rum. And, some evening soon, come to see me.” She said this without premeditation, from an instinct beyond her searching.

“I can't do that,” he replied in a surprisingly rational voice, “because I've lost my silk hat.”

“There are hundreds for sale in Boston,” she announced impatiently; “go and get another.”

“That never came to me,” he admitted, patently struck by this course of rehabilitation through a new high hat. “There was something I had to say to you, but it left my mind, about a--a gold fleece; it turned into something else, on the wharf.”

“When you see me again.” She moved farther from him, suddenly in a great necessity to be home. She left him, talking at her, and went swiftly through the gloom to Regent Street. Letting herself into the still hall, the amber serenity of lamplight in suave spaciousness, she swung shut the heavy door with a startling vigor. Then she stood motionless, the cape slipping from her shoulders in glistening and soft white folds about her arms, to the carpet. Honora wasn't faint, not for a moment had she been afraid of Jason Burrage, this was not a rebellion of over-strung nerves; yet a passing blindness, a spiritual shudder, possessed her. She had the sensation of having just passed through an overwhelming adventure: yet all that had happened was commonplace, even sordid. She had met a drunken man whom she hardly knew beyond his name and an adventitious fact, and insisted on his going home. Asking him to call on her had been little less than perfunctory--an impersonal act of duty.

Yet her being vibrated as if a loud and disturbing bell had been unexpectedly sounded at her ear; she was responding to an imperative summons. In her room, changing for supper, this feeling vanished, and left her usual introspective humor. Jason had spoken a profound truth, which her surprise had recognized at the time, in reminding her that she was an ordinary woman, like, for instance, Olive Stanes. The isolation of her dignity had hidden that from her for a number of years. She had come to think of herself exclusively as a Canderay.

Later her sharp enjoyment in probing into all pretensions, into herself, got slightly the better of her. “I saw Jason Burrage this evening,” she told Mrs. Cozzens.

“If he was sober,” that individual returned, “it might be worth recalling.”

“But he wasn't. He nearly fell into the harbor. I asked him to see us.”

“With your education, Honora, there is really no excuse for confusing the singular and plural. I haven't any doubt you asked him here, but that has nothing to do with us.”

“You might be amused by his accounts of California. For, although you never complain, I can see that you think it dull.”

“I am an old woman,” Herriot Cozzens stated, “my life was quite normally full, and I am content here with you. Any dullness you speak of I regret for another reason.”

“You are afraid I'll get preserved like a salted haddock. He may not come.”

*****

Honora was in the less formal of the drawing rooms when Jason Burrage was announced. He came forward almost immediately, in the most rigorous evening attire, a new silk hat on his arm.

“You had no trouble getting one,” she nodded in its direction.

“Four,” he replied tersely.

Jason took a seat facing her across an open space of darkly flowered carpet, and Honora studied him, directly critical. Against a vague background his countenance was extraordinarily pronounced, vividly pallid. His black hair swept in a soft wave across a brow with indented temples, his nose was short with wide nostrils, the lower part of his face square. His hands, scarred and discolored, rested each on a black-clad knee.

She was in no hurry to begin a conversation which must either be stilted, uncomfortable, or reach beyond known confines. For the moment her daring was passive. Jason Burrage stirred his feet, and she attended the movement with thoughtful care. He said unexpectedly:

“I believe I've never been in here before.” He turned and studied his surroundings as if in an effort of memory. “But I talked to your father once in the hall.”

“Nothing has been changed,” she answered almost unintelligibly. “Very little does in Cot-tarsport.”

“That's so,” he assented. “I saw it when I came back. It was just the same, but I----” he stopped and his expression became gloomy.

“If you mean that you were different, you are wrong,” she declared concisely. “Just that has made trouble for you--you have been unable to be anything but yourself. I am like that, too. Every one is.”

“I have been through things,” he told her enigmatically. “Why look--just the trip: to Chagres on the Isthmus, and then mules and canoes through that ropey woods to Panama, with thousands of prospectors waiting for the steamer. Then back by Mazatlan, Mexico City, and Vera Cruz. A man sees things.”

Her inborn uneasiness at rooms, confining circumstance, her restless desire for unlimited horizons, for the mere fact of reaching, moving, stirred into being at the names he repeated. Tomorrow she would go away, find something new--

“It must have been horridly rough and dirty.”

“A good many turned back or died,” he agreed tentatively. “But after you once got there a sort of craziness came over you--you couldn't wait to buy a pan or shovel. The bay was full of rotting ships deserted by their crews, a thicket of masts with even the sails still hanging to them. The men jumped overboard to get ashore and pick up gold.”

She thought with a pang of the idle ships with sprung rigging, sodden canvas lumpily left on the decks, rotting as he had said, in files. The image afflicted her like a physical pain, and she left it hurriedly. “But San Francisco must have been full of life.”

“You had to shout to be heard over the bands, and everything blazing. Pyramids of nuggets on the gambling tables. Gold dust and champagne and mud.”

“Whatever will you find here?” She immediately regretted her query, which seemed to search improperly into the failure of his marriage.

“I'm thinking of going back,” he admitted.

Curiously Honora was sorry to hear this; unreasonably it gave to Cottarsport a new aspect of barrenness, the vista of her own life reached interminable and monotonous into the future. And she was certain that, without the necessity and incentive of labor, it would be destructive for Jason to return to San Francisco.

“What would you do?”

“Gamble,” he replied cynically.

“Admirable prospect,” she said lightly. Her manner unmistakably conveyed the information that his call had drawn to an end. He clearly resisted this for a minute or two, and then stirred. “You must come again.”

“Why?” he demanded abruptly, grasping his hat, which had reposed on the carpet at his side.

“News from California, from the world outside, is rare in Cottarsport. You must see that you are an interesting figure to us.”

“Why?” he persisted, frowning.

She rose, her face as hard as his own, but with a faint smile in place of his lowering expression. “No, you haven't changed; not even to the extent of a superficial knowledge of drawing rooms.”

“I ought to have seen better than come.”

“The ignorance was all my own.”

“But once----” he paused.

“Should be enough.” Her smile widened. Yet she was furious with herself for having quarreled with him; the descent from the altitude of the Canderays had been enormous. What extraordinary influence had colored her acts in the past few days?

Mrs. Cozzens, at breakfast, inquired placidly how the evening before had progressed, and Honora made a gesture expressive of its difficulties. “You will create such responsibilities for yourself,” the elder stated.

This one, it suddenly appeared to Honora, had been thrust upon her. She made repeated and angry efforts to put Jason Burrage from her mind; but his appearance sitting before her, his words and patent discontent, flooded back again and again. She realized now that he was no impersonal problem; somehow he had got twisted into the fibres of her existence; he was more vividly in her thoughts than Paret Fifield had ever been. She attempted to ridicule him mentally, and called up pictures of his preposterous clothes, the ill-bred waistcoats and ponderous watch chain. They faded before the memory of the set jaw, his undeniable romance.

Wrapped in fur, she elected to drive after dinner; the day was cold but palely clear, and she felt that her cheeks were glowing with unusual color. Above the town, on the hills now sere with frost and rock, the horses, under the aged guidance of Coggs, continually dropped from a jog trot to an ambling walk. Honora paid no attention to the gait, she was impervious to the wide, glittering reach of water; and she was startled to find herself abreast a man gazing at her.

“I made a jackass out of myself last night,” he observed gloomily.

She automatically stopped the carriage and held back the buffalo robe. Jason hesitated, but was forced to take a seat at her side. Honora said nothing, and the horses again went forward.

“I'd been drinking a lot and was all on edge,” he volunteered further. “I feel different today. I can remember your mother driving like this. I was a boy then, and used to think she was made of ice; wondered why she didn't run away in the sun.”

“Mother was very kind, really,” Honora said absently. She was relaxed against the cushions, the country dipped and spread before her in a restful brown garb; she watched Coggs' glazed hat sway against the sky. The old sense of familiarity with Jason Burrage came back: why not, since she had known him all their lives? And now, after his years away, she was the only one in Cottarsport who at all comprehended his difficulties. He was not commonplace, a strong man was never that; and, in a way, he had the quality which more than any other had made her father so notable. And he was not unpleasant so close beside her. That was of overwhelming importance in the formation of her intimate opinion of him. He had been refined by the bitterness of his early failure in California; he bore himself with a certain dignity.

“What'll I do?” he demanded abruptly.

For the life or her she couldn't tell him. Except for platitudes she could offer no solution against the future. Actual living, directly viewed, was like that--hopeless of exterior solution. “I don't know,” she admitted, “I wish I did; I wish I could help you.”

“This money, what's it good for? I can't get my family to burn two small stoves at once; they'd die in the kitchen if they had a hundred parlors; I've bought more clothes than I'll ever wear, four high hats and so on. Not going to get married; no use for a big house, for anything more than the room I have. I get plenty to eat----”

“You might do some good with it,” she suggested. The base of what she was saying, Honora realized, was that he would be as well off with his fortune given away. Yet it was unjust, absurd, for him not to get some use, pleasure, from what he had worked so extravagantly to obtain.

“Somehow that wouldn't settle anything, for me,” he replied.

Coggs had turned at the usual limit of her afternoon driving, and they were slowly moving back to the town. Cottar's Neck was fading into the early gloom, and a group of men stared at Jason seated in the Canderays' carriage as if their eyes were being played with in the uncertain light.

“Have you thought any more about going West?” she inquired.

They had stopped for his descent at Marlboro

Street, and he stood with a hand on the wheel. “I had intended to go this morning.”

He held her gaze steadily, and she felt a swift coldness touch her into a shiver.

“Tomorrow?” This came in a spirit of perversity against her every other instinct.

“Shall I?”

“Would you be happier in San Francisco?” Jason Burrage made a hopeless gesture.

“... for supper,” Honora found herself saying in a rush; “at six o'clock. If you aren't bound for California.”

She tried to recall afterward if she had indicated a particular evening for the invitation. There was a vague memory of mentioning Thursday. This was Tuesday... Herriot Cozzens would be in Boston.

*****

A servant told her that Mr. Burrage had arrived when she was but half ready. She was, in reality, undecided in her choice of a dress for the evening; but finally she wore soft white silk, with deep, knotted fringe on the skirt, a low cut neck, and a narrow mantle of black velvet. Her hair, severely plain in its net, was drawn back from a bang cut across her brow. As she entered the room where he was standing a palpable admiration marked his countenance.

He said nothing, however, beyond a conventional phrase. Such natural reticence had a large part in her acceptance of him; he did nothing that actively disturbed her hypercritical being. He was almost distinguished in appearance. She had a feeling that if it had been different.... Honora distinctly wished for a flamboyant touch about him; it presented a symbol of her command of any situation between them, a reminder of her superiority.