Part 6

“Really,” she told him sharply. “I could be cross very easily. You are too stupid. Father did wonderfully well on his voyages, and his profit was invested by Frederic Cozzens, one of the shrewdest financiers of his day. I have twice, probably three times, as much as you.”

She confronted him with a faintly sparkling resentment. However, the pleasure, the reassurance, in what he had just heard made him indifferent to the rest. It was impossible now to comprehend how he had been such a block! He even smiled at her, which, he was delighted to observe, obviously puzzled her.

“Perhaps I ought to tell you, Jason, and perhaps it is too late already, that I thought I married you because I was lonely, because I feared the future. Anyhow, that's what I told myself the night I sent for you. You might have a right to complain very bitterly about it.”

“If I have, I won't,” he assured her cheerfully.

“I thought that then; but now I am not at all sure. It no longer seems so simple, so easily explained. I used to feel that I understood myself very thoroughly, I could look inside and see what was there; but in the last month I haven't been able to; and it is very disturbing.”

“Anyhow we're married,” he announced comfortably.

“That's a beautiful way to feel,” she remarked. “I appear to get less sure of things as I grow older, which is pathetic.”

He wondered what, exactly, she meant by this. Honora said a great many little things which, their meaning escaping him, gave him momentary doubts. He discovered that she had a habit of saying things indirectly, and that, as the seriousness of the occasion increased, her manner became lighter and he could depend less on the mere order of her words. This continually disconcerted him, put him on the defensive and at small disadvantages: he was never quite at ease with Honora.

Obversely--the ugly shade of mercenary purpose dispelled--close at hand his admiration for her grew. Every detail of her living was as fine as that publicly exposed in the drawing room. She was not rigidly and impossibly perfect, in, for instance, the inflexible attitude of Olive Stanes; Honora had a very human impatience, she could be disagreeable, he found, in the morning, and she undoubtedly felt herself superior to the commonalty of life. But in the ordering of her person there was a wonderfully exact delicacy and fragrant charm. Just as she had no formal manner, so, he discovered, she possessed no “good” clothes; she dressed evidently from some inner necessity, and not merely for the sake of impression. She had, too, a remarkable vigor of expression; Honora was not above swearing at contradictory circumstance; and she was so free of small pruderies that often she became a cause of embarrassment to him. At times he would tell himself uneasily that her conduct was not quite ladylike; but at the same instant his amusement in her would mount until it threatened him with laughter.

There was a great deal to be learned from Honora, he told himself; and then he would speculate whether he were progressing in that acquisition; and whether she were happy; no, not happy, but contented. Ignorant of her reason for marrying, he vaguely dreaded the possibility of its departure, mysterious as it had come, leaving her regarding him with surprise and disdain. He tried desperately, consciously, to hold her interest and esteem.

That was the base of his conception of their married existence, which, then, he was entirely willing to accept.

*****

However, as the weeks multiplied without bringing him any corresponding increase in the knowledge of either Honora or their true situation, he was aware of a disturbance born of his very pleasure in her; an uncomfortable feeling of insecurity fastened upon him. But all this he was careful to keep hidden. There was evidently no doubt in the minds of Cottarsport of the enviableness of his position--with all that gold, wedded to Honora Canderay, living in the Canderay mansion. The more solid portion of the town gave him a studied consideration denied to the mere acquisition of wealth; and the rough element, once his companion but now relentlessly held at a distance, regarded him with a loud disdain fully as humanly flattering. Sometimes with Honora he passed the latter, and they grumbled an obscure acknowledgment of his curt greeting; when he was alone, they openly disparaged his attainments and qualified pride.

There were “Pack” Clower, an able seaman whose indolent character had dissipated his opportunities of employment without harming his slow, powerful body; Emery Radlaw, the brother of the apothecary and a graduate of Williams College, a man of vanished refinements and taker of strange drugs, as thin and erratically rapid in movements as Clower was slow; Steven, an incredibly soiled Swede; John Vleet, the master and part owner of a fishing schooner, a capable individual on the sea, but an insanely violent drunkard on land. There were others, all widely different, but alike in the bitterness of a common failure and the habit of assuaging doubtful self-esteem, of ministering to crawling nerves, with highly potential stimulation.

Jason passed “Pack” and Emery Radlaw on a day of late March, and a mocking and purposely audible aside almost brought him to an adequate reply. He had disposed of worse men than these in California and the Isthmus. His arrogant temper rose and threatened to master him; but something more powerful held him steadily and silently on his way. This was his measureless admiration for Honora, his determination to involve her in nothing that would detract from her fineness and erect pride. Brawling on the street would not do for her husband. He must give her no cause to lessen what incomprehensible feeling, liking, she might have for him, give life to no regrets for a hasty and perhaps only half considered act. After this, in passing any of his late temporary associates, he failed to express even the perfunctory consciousness of their being.

*****

In April he was obliged to admit to himself that he knew no more of Honora's attitude toward him than on the day of their wedding. He recognized that she made no show of emotion; it was an essential part of her to seem at all times unmoved. That was well enough for the face she turned toward the world; but directed at him, her husband, its enigmatic quality began to obsess his mind. What Honora thought of him, why she had married him, became an almost continuous question.

It bred an increasing sense of instability that became loud, defiant. More than once he was at the point of self-betrayal: query, demand, objection, would rise on a temporary angry flood to his lips. But, struggling, behind a face as unmoved as Honora's own, he would suppress his resentment, the sense of injury, and smoke with the appearance of the greatest placidity.

His regard for his wife placed an extraordinary check on his impulses and utterance. He deliberated carefully over his speech, watched her with an attention not far from a concealed anxiety, and was quick to absorb any small conventions unconsciously indicated by her remarks. She never instructed or held anything over him; he would have been acutely sensitive to any air of superiority, and immediately antagonized. But Honora was entirely free from pretensions of that variety; she was as clear and honest as a goblet of water.

Jason's regard for her grew pace by pace with the feeling of baffling doubt. He was passing through the public square, and his thoughts were interrupted by a faint drifting sweetness. “I believe the lilacs are out,” he said unconsciously aloud and stopping. His surrounding was remarkably serene, withdrawn--the courthouse, a small block of brick with white corniced windows, flat Ionic portico, and slatted wood lantern with a bell, stood in the middle of the grassy common shut in by an irregular rectangle of dwellings with low eaves and gardens. The sun shone with a beginning warmth in a vague sky that intensified the early green. It seemed that he could see, against a house, the lavender blur of the lilac blossoms.

Then his attention was attracted by the figure of a man, at once strange and familiar, coming toward him with a dragging gait. Jason studied the other until a sudden recognition clouded his countenance, filled him with a swift, unpleasant surprise.

“Thomas!” he exclaimed. “Whenever did you get back?”

“Yesterday,” said Thomas Gast.

Well, here was Thomas returned from California like himself. Yet the most negligent view of the latter revealed that there was a vast difference between Jason and this last Argonaut--Thomas Gast's loosely hung jaw, which gave to his countenance an air of irresolution, was now exaggerated by an aspect of utter defeat. His ill conditioned clothes, sodden brogans, and stringy handkerchief still knotted miner-fashion about his throat, all multiplied the fact of failure proclaimed by his attitude.

“How did you strike it?” Jason uselessly asked.

“What chance has the prospector today?” the other heatedly and indirectly demanded. “At first a man could pan out something for himself; but now it's all companies, all capital. The state's interfered too, claims are being held up in court while their owners might starve; there are new laws and trimmings every week. I struck it rich on the Reys, but I was drove out before I could get my stakes in. They tell me you did good.”

“At last,” Jason replied.

“And married Honora Canderay, too.”

The other assented shortly.

“Some are shot with luck,” Thomas Gast proclaimed; “they'd fall and skin their face on a nugget.”

“How did you come back?”

“Worked my passage in a crazy clipper with moon-sails and the halliards padlocked to the rail. Carried away the foretopmast and yard off the Horn and ran from port to port in a hundred and four days.”

The conversation dwindled and expired. Thomas Gast gazed about moodily, and Jason, with a tight mouth, nodded and moved on. His mind turned back abruptly to Eddie Lukens, the man who had robbed him of his find in the early days of cradle mining, the man he had killed.

He had said nothing of this to Honora; the experience with Olive Stanes had convinced him of the advisability of keeping past accident where, he now repeated, it belonged. He despaired of ever being able, in Cottarsport, to explain the place and times that had made his act comprehensible. How could he picture, here, the narrow ravines cut by swift rivers from the stupendous slopes and forests of the Sierra Nevada, the isolation of a handful of men with their tents by a plunging stream in' a rift so deep that there would be only a brief glimmer of sunlight at noon? And, failing that, the ignorant could never grasp the significance of the stillness, the timeless shadows, which the miners penetrated in their madness for gold. They'd never realize the strangling passion of this search in a wilderness without habitation or law or safety. They could not understand the primary justice of such rude courts as the miners were able to maintain on the more populous outskirts of the region.

He, Jason Burrage, had been tried by a jury for killing Eddie Lukens, and had been exonerated. It had been months since he had reiterated this dreary and only half satisfying formula. The inner necessity filled him with a shapeless concern such as might have been caused by a constant, unnatural shadow flickering out at his back. He almost wished that he had told Honora at the beginning; and then he fretfully cursed the incertitude of life--whatever he did appeared, shortly after, wrong.

But it was obvious that he couldn't go to her with the story today; the only time for that had been before his marriage; now it would have the look of a confession of weakness, opportunely timed; and he could think of nothing more calculated to antagonize Honora than such a crumbling admission.

All this had been re-animated by the mere presence of Thomas Gast in Cottarsport; certainly, he concluded, an insufficient reason for his troubling. Gast had been a miner, too, he was familiar with the conditions in the West.... There was a great probability that he hadn't even heard of the unfortunate affair; while Olive Stanes would be dragged to death rather than garble a word of what he had told her: Jason willingly acknowledged this of Olive. He resolutely banished the whole complication from his mind; and, walking with Honora after supper over the garden in back of their house, he was again absorbed by her vivid delicate charm.

The garden was deep and narrow, a flight of terraces connected by a flagged path and steps. At the bottom were the bergamot pear trees that had been Ithiel Canderay's especial charge in his last, retired years. Their limbs, faintly blurred with new foliage, rose above the wall, against a tranquil evening sky with a white slip of May moon. The peace momentarily disturbed in Jason Burrage's heart flooded back, a sense of great well-being settled over him. Honora rested her hand within his arm at an inequality of the stone walk.

“I am really a very bad wife, Jason,” she said suddenly; “self-absorbed and inattentive.”

“You suit me,” he replied inadequately. He was extraordinarily moved by her remark: she had never before even suggested that she was conscious of obligation. He wanted to put into words some of the warmth of feeling which filled his heart, but suitable speech evaded him. He could not shake off the fear that such protestations might be displeasing to her restrained being. Moving slightly away from him she seemed, in the soft gloom, more wonderful than ever. Set in white against the depths of the garden, her face, dimly visible, appeared to be without its customary faintly mocking smile.

“Do you remember, Jason,” she continued, “how I once said I thought I was marrying you because I was lonely, and that I found out it wasn't so? I didn't know why.” She paused.

He was enveloped by an intense eagerness to hear her to the end: it might be that something beyond his greatest hopes was to follow. But disappointment overtook him.

“I was certain I'd see more clearly into myself soon, but I haven't; it's been useless trying. And I've decided to do this--to give up thinking about things for myself, and to wait for you to show me.”

“But I can't do that,” he protested, facing her; “more-than half the time I wonder over almost that same question--why you ever married me?”

“This is a frightful situation,” she observed with a return of her familiar manner; “two mature people joined for life, and neither with the slightest idea of the reason. Anyhow I have given it up.... I suppose I'll die in ignorance. Perhaps I was too old---”

He interrupted her with an uncustomary incivility, a heated denunciation of what she had been about to say.

“So you are not sorry,” he remarked after a little.

“No,” she answered slowly, “and I'm certain I shan't be. I'm not that sort of person. I would go down to ruin sooner than regret.” She said no more, but went into the house, leaving Jason in the potent spring night.

There was no longer any doubt about the lilacs: the air was laden with their scent. An entire hedge of them must have blossomed as he was standing there. He moved to the terrace below: there might be buds on the pear trees. But it was impossible to see the limbs. How could Honora expect him to make their marriage clear? He had never before seen her face so serene. He thought that he heard a vague stir outside the wall, and he remembered the presence of a semi-public path. Now there was a cautious mutter of voices. He advanced a step, then stopped at a scrambling of shoes against the wall. A vague form shouldered into view, momentarily clinging above him, and a harsh voice cried:

“Murderer!”

Even above the discordant dash of his startled sensibilities rose the fear, instantaneously born, that Honora had heard. All the vague uneasiness which had possessed him at Thomas Gust's return solidified into a recognizable, leaden dread--the conviction that his wife must learn the story of his misadventure, told with animus and lies. Then a more immediate dread held him rigidly attentive: there might be a second cry, a succession of them shouted discordantly to the sky. Honora would come out, the servants gather, while that accusing voice, indistinguishable and disembodied by the night, proclaimed his error. This was not the shooting of Eddie Lukens, but the neglect to comprehend Honora Canderay.

Absolute silence followed. He made a motion toward the wall, but, oppressed by the futility of such an act, arrested himself in the midst of a step and stood with a foot extended. The stillness seemed to thicken the air until he could hardly breathe; he was seized by a sullen anger at the events which had gathered to betray him. The crying tones had been like a chemical acting on his complexity, changing him to an entirely different entity, darkening his being; the peace and fragrance of the night were destroyed by the anxiety that now sat upon him.

Convinced that nothing more was to follow here, he was both impelled into the house, to Honora, and held motionless by the fear of seeing her turn toward him with her familiar light surprise and a question. However, he slowly retraced his way over the terraces, through a trellis hung with grape vines, and into the hall. As he hoped, Honora was on the opposite side of the dwelling. She had heard nothing. Jason sat down heavily, his gaze lowered and somber.

The feeling smote him that he should tell Honora of the whole miserable business at once, make what excuse for himself was possible, and prepare her for the inevitable public revelation. He pronounced her name, with the intention of doing this; but she showed him such a tranquil, superfine face that he was unable to proceed. Her interrogation held for a moment and then left him, redirected to a minute, colorful square of glass beads.

A multiplication of motives kept him silent, but principal among them was the familiar shrinking from appearing to his wife in any little or mean guise. It was precisely into such a peril that he had been forced. He felt, now, that she would overlook a murder such as the one he had committed far more easily than an intangible error of spirit. He could actually picture Honora, in his place, shooting Eddie Lukens; but he couldn't imagine her in his humiliating situation of a few minutes before.

He turned to the consideration of who it might be that had called over the wall, and immediately recognized that it was one of a small number, one of “Pack” Clower's gang: Thomas Gast would have gravitated quickly to their company, and their resentment of his, Jason Burrage's, place in life must have been nicely increased by Gast's jealousy. The latter, Jason knew, had not washed an honest pan of gravel in his journey and search for a mythical easy wealth; he had hardly left the littered fringe of San Francisco, but had filled progressively menial places in the less admirable resorts and activities.

With so much established beyond doubt he was confronted by the necessity for immediate action, the possibility of yet averting all that threatened him, of preserving his good opinion in Honora's eyes. Clower and Emery Radlaw and the rest, with the balance of neither property nor position, lawless and inflamed with drink, were a difficult opposition. He repeated that he had mastered worse, but out in California, where a man had been nakedly a man; and then he hadn't been married. There he would have found them at once, and an explosion of will, perhaps of powder, would soon have cleared the atmosphere. But in Cottarsport, with so much to keep intact, he was all but powerless.

Yet, the following day, when he saw the apothecary's brother enter the combined drug and liquor store, he followed; and, to his grim satisfaction, found Thomas Gast already inside. The apothecary gave Jason an inhospitable stare, but the latter ignored him, striding toward Gast. “Just what is it you've brought East about me?” he demanded.

The other avoided the query, his gaze shifting over the floor. “Well?” Jason insisted, after a pause. Thomas Gast was leaning against a high counter at one side, behind which shelves held various bottles and paper boxes and tins. The counter itself was laden with scales and a mortar, powders and vividly striped candy in tall glass jars.

“You know well as I do,” Gast finally admitted.

“Then we're both certain there's no reason for name-calling over my back wall.”

“You shot him, didn't you?” the other asked thinly. “You can't get away from the fact that you killed a pardner.”

“I did,” said Jason Burrage harshly. “He robbed me. But I didn't shout thief at him from the safety of the dark; it was right after dinner, the middle of the day. He was ready first, too; but I shot him. Can you get anything from that?”

“You ought to realize this isn't San Francisco,” Radlaw, the drug taker, put in. “A man couldn't be coolly derringered in Cottarsport. There's law here, there's order.” He had a harried face, dulled eyes under a fine brow, a tremulous flabby mouth, with white crystals of powder adhering to its corners, and a countenance like the yellow oilskins of the fishermen.

Jason turned darkly in his direction. “What have you or Clower got to do with law?”

“Not only them,” the apothecary interposed, “but all the other men of the town are interested in keeping it orderly. We'll have no western rowdyism in Cottarsport.”

“Then hear this,” Jason again addressed Thomas Gast; “see that you tell the truth and all the truth. My past belongs to me, and I don't aim to have it maligned by any empty liar back from the Coast. And either of you Radlaws--I'm not going to be blanketed by the town drunkards or old women, either. If I have shot one man I can shoot another, and I care this much for your talk--if any of this muck is allowed to annoy Mrs. Burrage I'll kill whoever starts it, spang in the middle of day.”

“That's where it gets him,” the ex-scholar stated. “Just there,” Jason agreed; “and this Gast, who has brought so much back from California, can tell you this, too--that I had the name of finishing what I began.”

But, once more outside, alone, his appearance of resolution vanished: the merest untraceable rumor would be sufficient to accomplish all that he feared, damage him irreparably with Honora. He was far older in spirit and body than he had been back on Indian Bar; he had passed the tumultuous years of living. The labor and privation, the continuous immersion in frigid streams, had lessened his vitality, sapped his ability for conflict. All that he now wished was the happiness of his wife, Honora, and the quietude of their big, peaceful house; the winter evenings by the Franklin stove and the spring evenings with the windows open and the candles guttering in the mild, lilac-hung air.

*****

Together with his uncertainty the pleasure in the sheer fact of his wife increased; and with it the old wonderment at their situation returned. What, for instance, did she mean by saying that he must explain her to herself? He tried again all the conventional reasons for marriage without satisfaction: the sentimental and material equally failed. Jason felt that if he could penetrate this mystery his grasp on actuality would be enormously improved; he might, with such knowledge, successfully defy Thomas Gast and all that past which equally threatened to reach out destructively into the future.

His happiness, in its new state of fragility, became infinitely precious; a thing to dwell on at nights, to ponder over walking through the town. Then, disagreeably aware of what overshadowed him, he would watch such passersby as spoke, searching for some sign of the spreading of his old fault. Often he imagined that he saw such an indication, and he would hurry home, in a panic of haste--which was, too, intense reluctance--to discover if Honora yet knew.