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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 But when Jason had lighted one of his blunt cigars, and begun a
vivid description of western life, the Staneses were transported by
the marvels following one upon another: a nugget had been picked
up over a foot long, it weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, and
realized forty-three thousand dollars. “Why, fifty and seventy-five
lumps were common,” he asserted. “At Ford's Bar a man took out
seven hundred dollars a day for near a month. Another found
seventeen thousand dollars in a gutter two or three feet deep and
not a hundred yards long.
“But 'Frisco was the place; you could see it spread in a day with
warehouses on the water and tents climbing up every hill. Happy
Valley, on the beach, couldn't hold another rag house. The Parker
House rented for a hundred and seventy thousand a year, and most
of it paid for gambling privileges; monté and faro, blazing lights and
brass bands everywhere and dancing in the El Dorado saloon. At first
the men danced with each other, but later——”
He stopped; an awkward silence followed. Olive was rigid with
inarticulate protest, a sense of outrage—gambling, saloons, and
dancing! All that she had feared about Jason became more concrete,
more imminent. She saw California as a modern Babylon, a volcano
of gold and vice; already she had heard of great fires that had
devastated it.
“We didn't mine on Sunday, Olive,” Jason assured her; “and all the
boys went to the preaching and sang the hymns, standing out on
the grass.”
Hester, finally, with a muttered period, rose and disappeared; Jem
went out to consult with a man, his nod to Olive spoke of yawls; and
Rhoda, at last, reluctantly made her way above. Olive's uneasiness
increased when she found herself alone with the man she was to
marry.
“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

H
ONORA 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:
“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.
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
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