Part 5

The supper went forward smoothly; there were the welcome inevitable reminiscences of the rough fare of California, laughter at the prohibitive cost of beans; and when, at her direction, he lighted a cheroot, and they lingered on at the table, Honora's aloofness was becoming a thing of the past. The smoke gave her an unexpected thrill, an extraordinary sense of masculine proximity. There had been no such blue clouds in the house since her father's death seven years ago. Settled back contentedly, Jason Burrage seemed--why, actually, he had an air of occupying a familiar place.

It was bitterly cold without, the room into which they trailed insufficiently warm, and they were drawn close together at an open Franklin stove. The lamps on the mantel were distant, and they had not yet been fully turned up: his face was tinged by the glow of the fire. An intense face. “What are you thinking about--me?” she added coolly. “Nothing,” he replied; “I'm too comfortable to think.” There was a note of surprise in his voice; he looked about as if to find reassurance of his present position. “But if I did it would be this--that you are entirely different from any woman I've ever known before. They have always been one of two kinds. One or the other,” he repeated somberly. “Now you are both together. I don't know as I ought to say that, if it's nice. I wouldn't like to try and explain.”

“But you must.”

“It's your clothes and your manner put against what you are. Oh hell, what I mean is you're elegant to look at and good, too.”

An expression of the deepest concern followed his exclamation. He commenced an apology. Hardly launched, it died on his lips.

Honora was at once conscious of the need for his contrition and of the fact that she had never heard a more entertaining statement. It was evident that he viewed her as a desirable compound of the women of the El Dorado and Olive Stanes: an adroit and sincere compliment. She wanted to follow it on and on, unfold its every exposition; but, of course, that was impossible. All this she concealed behind an indifferent countenance, her slim white fingers half embedded in the black mantle.

Jason Burrage lighted another cheroot and put his feet up on the polished brass railing of the iron hearth. This amused her beyond words. She couldn't remember when she had had another such vitalized evening. She realized that, through the last years, she had been appallingly lonely; but with Jason smoking beside her in a tilted chair the solitude was banished. She got a coal for him in the small burnished tongs, and he responded with a prodigious puff that set her to coughing.

When he had gone the house was hatefully vacant; as she went up to her chamber the empty spaciousness, the semi-dark well of the stair, the high hall with its low-turned lamp, the blackness of the third story pouring down over her, oppressed her almost beyond endurance. Her Aunt Herriot, already old, must be dead before very long, there was none other of her connections who could live with her, and she would have to depend on perfunctory, hired companionship.

Honora saw that she should never escape from the influence which held her in Cottarsport.

In her room, the door bolted, it was no better. The interior was large, uncompromisingly square; and, though every possible light was burning, still it seemed somber, menacing.

The following day was a lowering void with gusts of rain driving against the windows. Mrs. Cozzens would be away until tomorrow, and Honora met the afternoon alone. At times she embroidered, short-lived efforts broken by despondent and aimless excursions through the echoing halls.

She attempted to read, to compose herself with an elaborate gilt and embellished volume called “The Garland.” But, at a Lamentation on the Death of Her Canary, by a Person of Quality, she deliberately dropped the book into the burning coals of the Franklin stove. The satisfaction of seeing the pages crisp and burst into flame soon evaporated. The day was a calamity, the approaching murky evening a horror.

At supper she wondered what Jason Burrage was doing. A trace of the odor of his cheroot lingered in the dining room. He was an astonishingly solid, the only, actuality in a nebulous world of lofty, flickering ceilings and the lash of rain. He might as well smoke in her drawing room as in the Burrage kitchen. Paret Fifield would have drifted naturally to the Canderay house, but not Jason, not a native of Cottarsport.... With an air of determination she sharply pulled the plush, tasseled bell rope in the corner.

*****

She heard the servant open the front door; there was a pause--Jason was taking off his greatcoat--after which he entered, calm and without query.

“I was tired of sitting by myself,” she said with an air of entire frankness. In a minute or so more it was all as it had been the evening before--she held a coal for his cheroot as he tilted back beside her with his feet on the rail. “You are a very comfortable man, Jason,” she told him.

He made no reply, although a quiver crossed his lips. Then, after a little, “It's astonishing how soon you get used to things. Seems as if I had been here for years, and this is only the third time.'”

“Have you thought any more of California?”

He faced her with an expression of surprise. “It had gone clean out of my mind. I suppose I will shift back, though--nothing here for me. I can't come to see you every evening.”

She preserved a silence in which they both fell to staring into a dancing, bluish flame. The gusts of rain were audible like the tearing of heavy linen. An extraordinary idea had taken possession of Honora--if the day had been fine, if she had been out in a sparkling air and sun, a very great deal would have happened differently. But just what she couldn't then say: the fact alone was all that she curiously apprehended.

“I suppose not,” she answered, so long after his last statement that he gazed questioningly at her. “I wonder if it has occurred to you,” she continued, “how much alike we are? I often think about it.”

“Why, no,” he replied, “it hasn't. Jason Bur-rage and Honora Canderay! I wouldn't have guessed it, and I don't believe any one else ever has. I'd have a hard time thinking about two more different. It's--it's ridiculous.” He became seriously animated. “Here I am--well, you know all about me--with some money, perhaps, and a little of the world in my head; but you're Honora Canderay.”

“You said once that I was nothing but a woman,” she reminded him.

“I remember that,” he admitted with evident chagrin. “I was drunk.”

“That's when the truth is often hit on; I am quite an ordinary sort of woman.”

He laughed indulgently.

“You said last evening I had some of a very common quality.”

“Now you mustn't take that serious,” he protested; “it was just in a way of speech. I told you I couldn't rightly explain myself.”

“Anyhow,” she asserted bluntly, “I am lonely. What will you do about it?”

His amazement turned into a consternation which even now she found almost laughable. “Me?” he stammered. “There's no way I can help you. You are having a joke.”

She realized, with a feeling that her knowledge came too late, that she was entirely serious. Jason Burrage was the only being alive who could give her any assistance, yes, save her from the future. Her hands were cold, she felt absolutely still, as if she had suddenly turned into marble, a statue with a heart slightly fluttering.

“You could be here a lot,” she told him, and then paused, glancing at him swiftly with hard, bright eyes. He had removed his feet from the stove, and sat with his cheroot in a poised, awkward hand. She was certain that he would never speak.

“We might get married.”

Honora was startled at the ease with which the words were pronounced, and conscious of an absurdly trivial curiosity--she wondered just how much he had been shocked by her proposal? She saw that he was stupefied. Then:

“So we might,” he pronounced idiotically. “There isn't any real reason why we shouldn't. That is----.” He stopped. “Where does the laugh start?” he demanded.

Suddenly Honora was overwhelmed, not by what she had said, but by the whole difficulty and inner confusion of her existence. She turned away her head with an unintelligible period. A silence followed, intensified by the rain flinging against the glass.

“It's a bad night,” he muttered.

The banality saved her. Again practically at her ease, she regarded him with slightly smiling lips. “I believe I've asked you to marry me,” she remarked.

“Thank you,” said Jason Burrage. He stood up. “If you mean it, I'd like to very much.”

“You'd better sit down,” she went on in an impersonal voice; “there ought to be a lot of things to arrange. For instance, hadn't we better live on here, for a while anyhow? It's a big house to waste.”

“Honora, you'll just have to stop a little,” he asserted; “I'm kind of lost. It was quick in California, but that was a funeral procession compared with you.”

Now that it was done, she was frightened. But there was time to escape even yet. She determined to leave the room quickly, get away to the safety of her bolted door, her inviolable privacy. She didn't stir. An immediate explanation that she hadn't been serious--how could he have thought it for a moment!--would save her. But she was silent.

A sudden enthusiasm lighted up his immobile face. “I'll get the prettiest diamond in Boston,” he declared.

“You mustn't----” she commenced, struggling still to retreat. He misunderstood her.

“The very best,” he insisted.

When he had gone she remained seated in the formal chamber. At any rate she had conquered the emptiness of her life, of the great square house above her. It was definitely arranged, they were to marry. How amazed Herriot Cozzens would be! It was probable that she would leave Cot-tarsport, and her, Honora, immediately. Jason hadn't kissed her, he had not even touched her hand, in going. He had been extremely subdued, except at the thought of the ring he would buy for her.

There were phases of the future which she resolutely ignored.

Mrs. Cozzens came back as had been planned, and Honora told her at once. The older woman expressed her feeling in contained, acid speech. “I am surprised he had the assurance to ask you.”

“Jason didn't,” Honora calmly returned.

“It's your father,” the elder stated; “he had some very vulgar blood. I felt that it was a calamity when my sister accepted him. A Cot-tarsport person at heart, just as you are, always down about the water and those low docks.”

“I'm sure you're right, and so it's much better for me to find where I belong. I have tried to get away from Cottarsport, and from the sea and the schooners sailing in and out of the Narrows, a thousand times. But I always come back, just as father did, back to this little place from the entire world--China and Africa and New York. The other influences weren't strong enough, Aunt Herriot; they only made me miserable; and now I've killed them. I'll say good-bye to you and Paret and the cotillions.” She kissed her hand, but not gaily, to a whole existence irrevocably lost.

With Jason's ring blazing on her slim finger she drove, the day before the wedding, for the last time as Honora Canderay. The leaves had been stripped from the elms on the hills, brown and barren against the flashing, steely water. She saw that Coggs was so impotent with age that if the horses had been more vigorous he would be helpless. Coggs had driven for her father, then her, for thirty years. It was too cold for the old man to be out today. His cheeks were dark crimson, and continually wet from his failing eyes.

Herriot Cozzens had left her; Coggs... all the intimate figures of so many years were vanishing. Jason remained. He had almost entirely escaped annoying her, and she was conscious of his overwhelming admiration, the ineradicable esteem of Cottarsport for the Canderays; but a question, a doubt more obscure than fear, was taking possession of her. After all she was supremely ignorant of life; she had been screened from it by pride and luxurious circumstance; but now she had surrendered all her advantage. She had given herself to Jason; and he was life, mysterious and rude. The thunder of large, threatening seas, reaching everywhere beyond the placid gulf below, beat faintly on her perception.

JASON

|IN an unfamiliar upper room of the Canderays' house Jason stood prepared for the signal to descend to his wedding. The ceremony was to occur at six o'clock; it was now only five minutes before--he had absently looked at his watch a great many times in a short space--and he was striving to think seriously of what was to follow. But in place of this he was passing again through a state of silent, incoherent surprise. This was the sort of thing for which a man might pinch himself to discover if he were awake or dreaming. In five, no, four, minutes now Honora Canderay was to become his, Jason Burrage's, wife.

A certain complacency had settled over him in the past few days, something of his inborn feeling of the Canderays as a house apart seemed to have evaporated; and, in addition, he had risen--Honora wouldn't take any just happen so. Jason was never notable for humility. Yet who, even after he had returned from California with his riches, could have predicted this evening? His astonishment was as much at himself, illuminated by extraordinary events, as at any exterior circumstance. At times he had the ability to see himself, as if from the outside; and that view, here, was amazing. Why, only a short while ago he had been drinking rum in the shed in back of “Pack” Clower's house, perhaps the least desirable shed in Cottarsport.

Of one fact, however, he was certain--no more promiscuous draughts of Medford. He recognized that he had taken so much not from the presence of desire, but from a total absence of it as well as of any other mental state. “Pack” and his associates, too, were now a thing of the past, a bitterly rough and vacant element. The glass lamp on a bureau was smoking: he stepped forward to lower the wick, when a knock fell on the door. A young Boston relative of Honora's--a supercilious individual in checked trousers and lemon-colored gloves--announced that they were waiting for Jason below. With a determined settling of his shoulders and tightly drawn lips, he marched resolutely forward.

The marriage was to be in the chamber across from the one in which he had generally sat. Smilax and white Killamey roses had been bowed over the mantel at the farthest end, and there Jason found the clergyman waiting. The room was half full of people occupying chairs brought from other parts of the house; and he was conscious of a sudden silence, an intent, curious scrutiny, as he entered. An instinctive antagonism to this deepened in him: he felt that, with the exception of his father and mother, he hadn't a friend in the room.

Such other local figures as were there were facilely imitating the cold stare of Honora's connections. He stood belligerently facing Mrs. Cozzens' glacial calm, the inspection of a man he had seen driving with Honora in Cottarsport, now accompanied by a pettish, handsome girl, evidently his wife. His father's weathered countenance, sunken and dry on its bones, was blank, except for a faint doubt, as if some mistake had been made which would presently be exposed, sending them about face. His mother, however, was triumphant pride and justification personified. Then the music commenced--a harp, violin, and double bass.

The wedding ring firmly secured, Jason stirred with a feeling of increasing awkwardness. He glared back, with a protruding lip, at the fellow with the young wife, at the small, aggressive group from Boston; and then he saw that Honora was in the room. She was coming slowly toward him. Her expression of absolute unconcern released him from all petty annoyance, any thought of the malicious onlookers. As she stopped at his side she gave him a slight nod and smile; and at that moment a tremendous, sheer admiration for her was born in him.

Honora had chosen to be unattended--she had coolly observed that she was well beyond the age for such sentimentality--and he realized that though the present would have been a racking occasion for most women, it was evident that she was not disturbed in the least. He had a general impression of sugary white satin, of her composed, almost disdainful face in a cloud of veil with little waxen orange flowers, of slender still hands, when they turned from the room to the minister.

They had gone over the marriage service together, he had read it again in the kitchen at home; he was fairly familiar with its periods and responses, and got through with only a slight hesitation and half prompting. But the thickness of his voice, in comparison with Honora's open, decisive utterance, vainly annoyed him. He wanted desperately to clear his throat. Suddenly it was over, and Honora, in a swirl of satin, was sinking to her knees. Beside her he listened with a feeling of comfortable lull to a lengthy prayer.

Rising, he perfunctorily clasped a number of indifferent palms, replied inanely to gabbled expressions of good will and hopes for the future unmistakably pessimistic in tone. Honora told him in a rapid aside the names of those approaching. She smiled radiantly at his father and mother, leaned forward and whispered in the latter's ear; and they followed the guests streaming into the dining room.

There champagne was being opened by the caterer's assistants from Boston. There were steaming platters of terrapin and oysters and fowl. The table bore pyramids of nuts and preserved fruit, hot Cinderellas in cups with sugar and wine, black case cake, Savoy biscuits, pumpkin paste, and frothed creams with preserved peach leaves. A laden plate was thrust into Jason's hand, and he sat with it in a clatter of voices and topics that completely ignored him. He was isolated in the absorption of food and wine, in a conversational exchange as strange to him as if had been spoken in a foreign language.

Honora was busily talking to young Mrs. Fifield--he remembered the name now. Apparently she had forgotten his existence. At first this annoyed him; he determined to force his way into their attention, but a wiser realization held him where he was. Honora was exactly right: he had nothing in common with these people, probably not one of them would come into his life or house again. And his wife, in the fact of her marriage, had clearly signified how little important they were to her. His father joined him.

“You made certain when the New York packet leaves?” he queried.

“Everything's fixed,” Jason reassured him.

“Your mother wanted to see you. But she got set and is kind of timid about moving.” Jason rose promptly, and, with the elder, found Mrs. Hazzard Burrage. “I'd like to have Honora, too,” the latter told them, and Jason turned sharply to find her. When they stood facing the old couple his mother hesitated doubtfully; then she put out her hand to the woman in wedding array. But Honora ignored it; leaning forward she kissed the round, bright cheek.

“You have to be patient with them at times,” the mother said, looking up anxiously.

“I'm afraid Jason will need that warning,” Honora replied; “he is a very imprudent man.”

*****

Jason's mind returned to this later, sitting in the house that had been the Canderays', but which now was his too. Honora's remark to his mother had been clear in itself, but it suggested wide speculations beyond his grasp. For instance--why, after all, had Honora married him? He was forced to acknowledge that it was not the result of any overwhelming feeling for him. The manner of their wedding, the complete absence of the emotion supposed to be the incentive of such consummations, Honora herself, all, denied any effort to fix such a personally satisfactory cause. That she might have had no other opportunity--Honora was not so young as she had been--he dismissed as obviously absurd. Why----

His gaze was fastened upon the carpet, and he saw that time and the passage of feet had worn away the design. He looked about the room, and was surprised to discover a general dinginess which he had never noticed before. He said nothing, but, in his movements about the house, examined the furnishings and walls, and an astonishing fact was thrust upon him--the celebrated dwelling was grievously run down. It was plain that no money had been spent on it for years. The carriage, too, and the astrakhan collar on Coggs' coat, were worn out.

He considered this at breakfast--his wife behind a tall Sheffield coffee urn--and he was aware of the cold edge of a distasteful possibility. The thought enveloped him insidiously, like the fog which often rolled through the Narrows and over the town, that the Canderays were secretly impoverished, and Honora had married him only for his money. Jason was not resentful of this in itself, since he had been searching for a motive he could accept, but it struck him in a peculiarly vulnerable spot--his admiration for his wife, for Honora. The idea, although he assured himself that the thing was readily comprehensible, somehow managed to diminish her, to tarnish the luster she held for him. It was far beneath the elevation on which Cottarsport had placed the Canderays; and he suffered a distinct sense of loss, a feeling of the staleness and disappointment of living.

The more he considered this explanation the more he was convinced of its probability. A great deal of his genuine warmth in his marriage evaporated. Still--Honora had married him, she had given herself in return for what material advantage he might bring; and he would have to perform his part thoroughly. He ought to have known that----

What he must do now was to save them both from any painful revelation by keeping for ever hid that he was aware of her purpose, he must never expose himself by a word or act; and he must make her understand that whatever he had was absolutely hers. It would be necessary for her to go to the money with entire freedom and without any accounting.

This, he found, was not so easy to establish as he thought. Honora was his wife, but nevertheless there was a well marked reticence between them, a formal nicety with which he was heartily in accord. He couldn't just thrust his fortune before her on the table. He hesitated through the day, on the verge of various blunders; and then, in the evening, said in a studied causality of manner:

“What do you think about fixing some of the rooms over new? You might get tired of seeing the same things for so long. I saw real elegant furniture in Boston.”

She looked about indifferently. “I think I wouldn't like it changed,” she remarked, almost in the manner of a defense. “I suppose it does seem worn to you; but I'm used to it; there are so many associations. I am certain I'd be lost in new hangings.”

Jason was so completely silenced by her reply that he felt he must have shown some confusion, for her gaze deliberately turned to him. “Is there any particular thing you would like repaired?” she inquired.

“No, of course not,” he said hastily. “I think it's all splendid. I wouldn't change a curtain, only--but....” He cursed himself for a clumsy fool while Honora continued to study him. He endeavored to shield himself behind the trivial business of lighting a cheroot; but he felt Honora's query searching him out. Finally, to his extreme dismay, he heard her say:

“Jason, I believe you think I married you for money!”

Pretense, he realized, would be no good now.

“Something like that did occur to me,” he acknowledged desperately.