Part 7

He approached her a hundred times determined to end his misery of suspense, and face the incalculable weight of her disdain; but on each occasion he failed as he had at the first. Now his admission seemed too damned roundabout; in an unflattering way forced upon him. His position was too insecure, he told himself.... Perhaps the threat in the apothecary's shop would be sufficient to shut the mouth of rumor. It had not been empty; he was still capable of uncalculating rage. How closely was Honora bound to him? What did she think of him at heart?

He couldn't bear to remember how he had laid open her dignity, the dignity and position of the Canderays in Cottarsport, to whispered vilification. Connected with him she was being discussed in “Pack” Clower's shanty. His mind revolved endlessly about the same few topics, he elaborated and discarded countless schemes to secure Honora. He even considered giving Thomas Gast a sum of money to repair what harm the latter had wrought. Useless--his danger flourished on hatred and envy and malice. However exculpable the killing of Eddie Lukens had been, the results were immeasurably unfortunate, for a simple act of violent local justice.

They were in the carriage above Cottarsport; Coggs had died through the winter, and his place been taken by a young coachman from the city. The horses rested somnolently in their harness, the bright bits of rubbed silver plate shining. Honora was looking out over the harbor, a gentian blue expanse. “Good Heavens,” she cried with sudden energy, “I am getting old at a sickening rate. Only last year the schooners and sea made me as restless as a gull. I wanted to sail to the farthest places; but now the boats are--are no more than boats. It fatigues me to think of their jumping about; and I haven't walked down to the wharves for six weeks. Do I look a haggard fright?”

“You seem as young as before I went to California,” he replied simply. She did. A strand of hair had slipped from its net, and wavered across her flawless cheek, her lips were bright and smooth, her shoulders slimly square.

“You're a marvelous woman, Honora,” he told her.

She gazed at him, smiling. “I wonder if you realize that that is your first compliment of our entire wedded life?”

“Ridiculous,” he declared incredulously.

“Isn't it?”

“I mean I'm complimenting you all the time. I think----”

“You can hardly expect me to hear thoughts,” she interrupted.

He silently debated another--it was to be about the ribbon on her throat--but decided against giving it voice. Why, like the reasons for so much else, he was unable to say; they all had their root in the blind sense of the uncertainty of his situation.

Throughout the evening his thoughts shifted ceaselessly from one position to another. This, he realized, could not continue indefinitely; soon, from within or out, Honora and himself must be revealed to each other. He was permeated by the weariness of constant strain; the peace of the past months had been destroyed; it seemed to him that he had become an alien to the serenity of the high, tranquil rooms and of his wife.

He rose early the following morning, and descended into a rapt purity of sunlight and the ecstatic whistling of robins. The front door had not been opened; and, as he turned its shining brass knob, his gaze fell upon a sheet of paper projecting below. Jason bent, securing it, and, with a premonition of evil, thrust the folded scrap into his pocket. He turned through the house into the garden; and there privately scrutinized a half sheet with a clumsily formed, disguised writing:

“This,” he read, “will serve you notice to move on. Dangerous customers are not desired here. Take a suggestion in time and skip bad consequences. You can't hide back of your wife's hoops.” It was signed “Committee.”

A robin was thrilling the air with melody above his head. Jason listened mechanically as the bird ended his song and flew away. Then the realization of what he had found overwhelmed him with a strangling bitterness: he, Jason Burrage, had been ordered from his birthplace, he had been threatened and accused of hiding behind a woman, by the off-scouring of the alleys and rum holes. A feeling of impotence thrust its chilling edge into the swelling heat of his resentment. He would have to stand like a condemned animal before the impending fatal blow; he was held motionless, helpless, by every circumstance of his life and hopes.

He crumpled the warning in a clenched hand. How Cottarsport would point and jeer at him, at Jason Burrage who was Honora Canderay's husband, a murderer; Jason, who had returned from California with the gold fleece! It wasn't golden, he told himself, but stained--a fleece dark with blood, tarnished from hellish unhappiness, a thing infected with immeasurable miseries. Its edge had fallen on Olive Stanes and left her--he had passed her only yesterday--dry-lipped and shrunken into sterile middle age. It promised him only sorrow, and now its influence was reaching up toward Honora, in herself serenely apart from the muck and defilement out of which he thought he had struggled.

The sun, rising over the bright spring foliage, filled the garden with sparkling color. His wife, in a filmy white dress, called him to breakfast. She waited for him with her faint smile, against the cool interior. He went forward isolated, lonely, in his secret distress.

This communication, like the spoken accusation of a previous evening, was, apparently, bare of other consequences. Jason's exterior life progressed without a deviation from its usual smooth course. It was clear to him that no version of the facts about the killing of Eddie Lukens had yet spread in Cottarsport. This, he decided, considering the character of Thomas Gast, the oblique quality of his statements, was natural. He could not doubt that such public revelation, if threat and intimidation failed, must come. Meanwhile he was victimized by a growing uncertainty--from what direction would the next attack thrust?

He smiled grimly to himself at the memory of the withdrawn and secure aspect of the town when he had first returned from the West. To him, striding across the hills from the Dumner stage, it had resembled an ultimate haven. The seeming harmony and peace of the grey fold of houses about their placid harbor had concealed possibilities of debasement as low as California's worst camps. Now, successful, when he had looked for the reward of his long years of brutal toil, the end of struggle, he was confronted by the ugliest situation of his existence.

He was glad that he had always been a silent man, or Honora would have noticed and demanded the cause of the moroseness which must have settled over him. They sat no longer before the stove in the drawing room, but on a side porch that commanded an expanse of lawn and a high privet hedge, while he smoked morosely at the inevitable cheroots, gloomily searching for a way from the difficulty closing in upon him.

Honora had been to Boston, and she was describing lightly an encounter with her aunt, Herriot Cozzens. He was only half conscious of her amused voice. Clouds had obscured the evening sky, and there was an air of suspense, like that preceding a thunder storm, in the thickening dark. A restlessness filled Jason which he was unable to resist; and, with a short, vague explanation, he rose and proceeded out upon the street. There, his hands clasped behind his back and head lowered, he wandered on, lost in inner despondence.

He turned into the courthouse square, dimly lighted by gas lamps at its outer confines, and paced across the grass, stirring a few wan fireflies. It was blacker still beyond the courthouse. He stumbled slightly, recovered himself, and wearily commenced a return home. But he had scarcely taken a step when a figure closed in upon him, materializing suddenly out of the darkness. He stopped and was about to speak when a violent blow from behind grazed his head and fell with a splintering impact on his shoulder. He stood for a moment bewildered by the unexpected pain; then, as he saw another shape, and another, gather around him, he came sharply to his senses. His hand thrust into a pocket, but it was empty--he had laid aside the derringer in Cottarsport.

His assailants grappled with him swiftly, and he swayed struggling and hitting out with short blows in the center of a silent, vicious conflict. A rough hard palm was crushed against his mouth, a head ground into his throat, and a heavy, mucous breath of rum smote him. There was muttered cursing, and low, disregarded commands. A cotton handkerchief, evidently used as a mask, tore off in Jason's hand; strained voices, their caution lost in passion, took unmistakably the accents of “Pack” Clower and the Swede, Steven. A thinner tone outside the swirling bodies cried low and urgent, “Get it done with.” A fist was driven again Jason's side, leaving a sharp, stabbing hurt, a heavy kick tore his thigh. Then he got his fingers into a neck and put into the grip all the sinewy strength got by long years with a miner's pan and shovel. A choked sob responded, and blood spread stickily over his palms.

It seemed to Jason Burrage that he was shaking himself free, that he was victorious; with a final supreme wrench he stood alone, breathing in gusts. There was a second's imponderable stillness, and then the entire night appeared to crash down upon his head...

He thought it was the flumed river, all their summer's labor, bursting over him. He was whirled downward through a swift course of jagged pains, held under the hurtling water and planks and stones. He fought, blind and strangled, but he was soon crushed into a supine nothingness. Far below, the river discharged him: he was lying beside a slaty bank in which the gold glittered like fine and countless fish scales. But he couldn't move, and the bank flattened into a plain under a gloomy ridge, with a camp of miners. He saw that it was Sunday, for the men were all grouped before the tents singing. There was Eddie Lukens gravely waving a hand to the beat of the melody:

“'Don't you cry for me.

I'm going to Calaveras

With my wash bowl on my knee.'”

It was undoubtedly Eddie, his partner, but he had never seen him so white and--why, he had a hole over his eye! Eddie Lukens was dead; it wasn't decent for him to be standing up, flapping his hands and singing. Jason bent forward to remonstrate, to persuade him to go back--back to where the dead belonged. Then he remembered, but it was too late: Eddie had him in an iron clutch, he was dragging him, too, down.

Jason made a convulsive effort to escape, he threw back his head, gasping; and saw Honora, his wife, bending over him. The tormenting illusion slowly perished--this was Cottarsport and not California, he was back again in the East, the present, married to Honora Canderay. An astounding fact, but so. Through the window of his room he could see the foliage of a great horse-chestnut tree that stood by the side walk; it was swelling into flower. Full memory now flooded back upon him, and with it the realization that probably his happiness was destroyed.

It was impossible to tell how much Honora knew of the cause of the assault upon him. She was always like that--enigmatic. But, whatever she knew now, soon she would have to hear all. Even if he wished to lie, it would be impossible to fabricate, maintain, a convincing cover for what had happened. The most superficial, necessary investigation would expose the story brought home by Thomas Gast.

The time had come when he must confide everything to Honora; perhaps she would overlook his cowardice. About to address her, he fell into a bottomless coma, and a day passed before he had gathered himself sufficiently to undertake his task. She was sitting facing him, her chair by a window, where her fingers were swiftly and smoothly occupied. Her features were a little blurred against the light, and--her disconcerting scrutiny veiled--he felt this to be an assistance.

“Those men who broke me up,” he began dis-jointedly, surprised at the thin uncertainty of his voice, “I know pretty well who they are. Ought to get most of them.”

“We thought you could say,” she rejoined in an even tone. “Some guesses were made, but it was better to wait till you could give a statement.”

“Am I badly hurt, Honora?” he asked suddenly. “Not dangerously,” she assured him. “You have splendid powers of recuperation.”

“I'll have to go on,” he added hurriedly, “and tell you the rest--why I was beaten.”

“It would be better not,” she stated. “You ought to be as calm as possible. It may quiet you, Jason, to hear that I know now.”

“You know what the town has been saying,” he cried in bitter revolt, “what lies Thomas Gast spread. You've heard all the envy and malice and drunken vileness of sots. It isn't right for you to think you know before I could speak a word of defense.”

“Not only what the town says, Jason,” she replied simply, “but the truth. Olive Stanes told me.”

“Then----.” An excited weakness broke his voice in a sob, and Honora rose, crossing the room to his bed. “You must positively stop talking of this now,” she directed. “If you attempt it I shall go away and send a nurse.”

He was helpless against her will, and sank into semi-slumberous wonder. Honora knew all: Olive Stanes had told her. She was as noncommittal, he complained to himself, as a wooden Indian. She might have excused him without a second thought, and it might be that she had finished with him entirely, that she was merely dispensing a charity and duty; and, moving uneasily, or lying propped up in a temporary release from suffering, he would study her every movement in an endeavor to gain her all-important opinion of him as he had been lately revealed. It was useless; he was always, Jason felt, in a state of disturbing suspense.

He determined to end it, however, in spite of what Honora had said, on an afternoon when he was supported down to the street and the carriage. His wife took her place at his side, and they rolled forward into the expansive warmth of summer. Jason was impressed by the sheer repetition of life; and it seemed to him that this was the greatest happiness possible--such a procession of days and drives, with Honora.

Her throat rose delicately from ruffled lace, circled by a narrow black velvet band with a clasp of remarkable diamonds; and he smiled at the memory of how he had once thought she was marrying him for money. That seemed years ago, but he was no nearer the solution of her motive now than then. Her slim hands were folded in her lap--how beautifully they were joined at the wrists; her tapering fingers were like ivory. As he studied them he was startled at their suddenly meeting in a rigid clasp, the knuckles white and sharp. He looked up and saw that they were drawing near a small group of men outside the apothecary's shop.

A curious silence fell upon these as the carriage approached: there were the two Radlaws, one saturnine and bleak, the other greenish, shattered by drugs; Thomas Gast; Vleet, the fishing schooner's master, and a casual, familiar passerby. Jason Burrage stared at them with a stony ominous countenance, at which Gast made a gesture of combined insolence and uncertainty. Jason had sunk back on the cushions when he was astonished by Honora's commanding the coachman to stop. It was evident that she was about to descend; he put out a hand to restrain her, but she disregarded him. His astonishment increased to incredulity and then fear; he rose hurriedly, but relaxed with a mutter of pain.

Honora, a Canderay, had taken the carriage whip from its holder, and was walking, direct and composed, toward Thomas Gast. She stopped a short distance away: before an exclamation, a movement, was possible she had swept the thong of the whip across Gast's face. The blow was swung with force, and the man faltered, a burning welt on the pallor of his countenance. The coachman and Jason Burrage in the carriage, the men together on the sidewalk, seemed part of an inanimate group of which the only thing endowed with life was the whip flickering again, cutting and wrapping, about a face.

There was a curiously ruthless impersonality about Honora's erect presence, her icy cold profile. Memories of old stories of Ithiel Canderay, the necessary salt cruelness of punishment in ships, flashed through Jason's mind. An intolerable weight of time seemed to drag upon him. Thomas Gast gave a hoarse gurgle and lurched forward, but the relentless lash drove him back.

“You whisperer!” Honora said in her ringing voice, “you liar and slabbering coward! It's necessary to cut the truth out of you. When you talk again about Mr. Burrage and the man he shot in California don't leave out the smallest detail of his exoneration. Say that he had been robbed, the other broke one of the first laws of miners and should have been killed. You'd not have done it--a knife in the back would be your thought--but a man would!”

She flung the whip down on the bricks.

Thomas Gast pressed his hands to his face, and slow red stains widened through his fingers. The apothecary stood transfixed; his brother was shaking in a febrile and congested horror. The woman turned disdainfully, moving to the carriage; the coachman descended and offered his arm as she mounted to the seat. The reins were drawn and the horses started forward in a walk.

Honora's gaze was set, looking directly ahead; her hands, in her lap of flowered muslin, were now relaxed; they gave an impression of crushing weariness. Jason's heart pounded like a forge hammer; a tremendous realization was forced into his brain--he need never again question why Honora had married him; his doubts were answered, stopped, for ever. He turned to her to speak an insignificant part of his measureless gratitude, but he was choked, blinded, by a passion of honor and homage.

Her gaze sought him, and there was a faint tremor of her lips; it grew into the shadow of an ironic smile. Suddenly it was borne upon his new, acquiescent serenity that Honora would always be a Canderay for him, he must perpetually think of her in the terms of his early habit; she would eternally be a little beyond him, a being to approach, to attend, with ceremony. The memory and sweep of all California, the pageant of life he had seen on the way, his own boasted success and importance, faded before the solid fact of Honora's commanding heritage in life, in Cottarsport.