  HONORA 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 compliment. She wanted to follow it on and on, unfold its every exposition; but, of course, that was impossible. All this she concealed behind an indifferent countenance, her slim white fingers half embedded in the black mantle. Jason Burrage lighted another cheroot and put his feet up on the polished brass railing of the iron hearth. This amused her beyond words. She couldn't remember when she had had another such vitalized evening. She realized that, through the last years, she had been appallingly lonely; but with Jason smoking beside her in a tilted chair the solitude was banished. She got a coal for him in the small burnished tongs, and he responded with a prodigious puff that set her to coughing. When he had gone the house was hatefully vacant; as she went up to her chamber the empty spaciousness, the semi-dark well of the stair, the high hall with its low-turned lamp, the blackness of the third story pouring down over her, oppressed her almost beyond endurance. Her Aunt Herriot, already old, must be dead before very long, there was none other of her connections who could live with her, and she would have to depend on perfunctory, hired companionship. Honora saw that she should never escape from the influence which held her in Cottarsport. In her room, the door bolted, it was no better. The interior was large, uncompromisingly square; and, though every possible light was burning, still it seemed somber, menacing. The following day was a lowering void with gusts of rain driving against the windows. Mrs. Cozzens would be away until tomorrow, and Honora met the afternoon alone. At times she embroidered, short-lived efforts broken by despondent and aimless excursions through the echoing halls. She attempted to read, to compose herself with an elaborate gilt and embellished volume called “The Garland.” But, at a Lamentation on the Death of Her Canary, by a Person of Quality, she deliberately dropped the book into the burning coals of the Franklin stove. The satisfaction of seeing the pages crisp and burst into flame soon evaporated. The day was a calamity, the approaching murky evening a horror. At supper she wondered what Jason Burrage was doing. A trace of the odor of his cheroot lingered in the dining room. He was an astonishingly solid, the only, actuality in a nebulous world of lofty, flickering ceilings and the lash of rain. He might as well smoke in her drawing room as in the Burrage kitchen. Paret Fifield would have drifted naturally to the Canderay house, but not Jason, not a native of Cottarsport.... With an air of determination she sharply pulled the plush, tasseled bell rope in the corner.
She heard the servant open the front door; there was a pause—Jason was taking off his greatcoat—after which he entered, calm and without query. “I was tired of sitting by myself,” she said with an air of entire frankness. In a minute or so more it was all as it had been the evening before—she held a coal for his cheroot as he tilted back beside her with his feet on the rail. “You are a very comfortable man, Jason,” she told him. He made no reply, although a quiver crossed his lips. Then, after a little, “It's astonishing how soon you get used to things. Seems as if I had been here for years, and this is only the third time.'” “Have you thought any more of California?” He faced her with an expression of surprise. “It had gone clean out of my mind. I suppose I will shift back, though—nothing here for me. I can't come to see you every evening.” She preserved a silence in which they both fell to staring into a dancing, bluish flame. The gusts of rain were audible like the tearing of heavy linen. An extraordinary idea had taken possession of Honora—if the day had been fine, if she had been out in a sparkling air and sun, a very great deal would have happened differently. But just what she couldn't then say: the fact alone was all that she curiously apprehended. “I suppose not,” she answered, so long after his last statement that he gazed questioningly at her. “I wonder if it has occurred to you,” she continued, “how much alike we are? I often think about it.” “Why, no,” he replied, “it hasn't. Jason Bur-rage and Honora Canderay! I wouldn't have guessed it, and I don't believe any one else ever has. I'd have a hard time thinking about two more different. It's—it's ridiculous.” He became seriously animated. “Here I am—well, you know all about me—with some money, perhaps, and a little of the world in my head; but you're Honora Canderay.” “You said once that I was nothing but a woman,” she reminded him. “I remember that,” he admitted with evident chagrin. “I was drunk.” “That's when the truth is often hit on; I am quite an ordinary sort of woman.” He laughed indulgently. “You said last evening I had some of a very common quality.” “Now you mustn't take that serious,” he protested; “it was just in a way of speech. I told you I couldn't rightly explain myself.” “Anyhow,” she asserted bluntly, “I am lonely. What will you do about it?” His amazement turned into a consternation which even now she found almost laughable. “Me?” he stammered. “There's no way I can help you. You are having a joke.” She realized, with a feeling that her knowledge came too late, that she was entirely serious. Jason Burrage was the only being alive who could give her any assistance, yes, save her from the future. Her hands were cold, she felt absolutely still, as if she had suddenly turned into marble, a statue with a heart slightly fluttering. “You could be here a lot,” she told him, and then paused, glancing at him swiftly with hard, bright eyes. He had removed his feet from the stove, and sat with his cheroot in a poised, awkward hand. She was certain that he would never speak. “We might get married.” Honora was startled at the ease with which the words were pronounced, and conscious of an absurdly trivial curiosity—she wondered just how much he had been shocked by her proposal? She saw that he was stupefied. Then: “So we might,” he pronounced idiotically. “There isn't any real reason why we shouldn't. That is——.” He stopped. “Where does the laugh start?” he demanded. Suddenly Honora was overwhelmed, not by what she had said, but by the whole difficulty and inner confusion of her existence. She turned away her head with an unintelligible period. A silence followed, intensified by the rain flinging against the glass. “It's a bad night,” he muttered. The banality saved her. Again practically at her ease, she regarded him with slightly smiling lips. “I believe I've asked you to marry me,” she remarked. “Thank you,” said Jason Burrage. He stood up. “If you mean it, I'd like to very much.” “You'd better sit down,” she went on in an impersonal voice; “there ought to be a lot of things to arrange. For instance, hadn't we better live on here, for a while anyhow? It's a big house to waste.” “Honora, you'll just have to stop a little,” he asserted; “I'm kind of lost. It was quick in California, but that was a funeral procession compared with you.” Now that it was done, she was frightened. But there was time to escape even yet. She determined to leave the room quickly, get away to the safety of her bolted door, her inviolable privacy. She didn't stir. An immediate explanation that she hadn't been serious—how could he have thought it for a moment!—would save her. But she was silent. A sudden enthusiasm lighted up his immobile face. “I'll get the prettiest diamond in Boston,” he declared. “You mustn't——” she commenced, struggling still to retreat. He misunderstood her. “The very best,” he insisted. When he had gone she remained seated in the formal chamber. At any rate she had conquered the emptiness of her life, of the great square house above her. It was definitely arranged, they were to marry. How amazed Herriot Cozzens would be! It was probable that she would leave Cot-tarsport, and her, Honora, immediately. Jason hadn't kissed her, he had not even touched her hand, in going. He had been extremely subdued, except at the thought of the ring he would buy for her. There were phases of the future which she resolutely ignored. Mrs. Cozzens came back as had been planned, and Honora told her at once. The older woman expressed her feeling in contained, acid speech. “I am surprised he had the assurance to ask you.” “Jason didn't,” Honora calmly returned. “It's your father,” the elder stated; “he had some very vulgar blood. I felt that it was a calamity when my sister accepted him. A Cot-tarsport person at heart, just as you are, always down about the water and those low docks.” “I'm sure you're right, and so it's much better for me to find where I belong. I have tried to get away from Cottarsport, and from the sea and the schooners sailing in and out of the Narrows, a thousand times. But I always come back, just as father did, back to this little place from the entire world—China and Africa and New York. The other influences weren't strong enough, Aunt Herriot; they only made me miserable; and now I've killed them. I'll say good-bye to you and Paret and the cotillions.” She kissed her hand, but not gaily, to a whole existence irrevocably lost. With Jason's ring blazing on her slim finger she drove, the day before the wedding, for the last time as Honora Canderay. The leaves had been stripped from the elms on the hills, brown and barren against the flashing, steely water. She saw that Coggs was so impotent with age that if the horses had been more vigorous he would be helpless. Coggs had driven for her father, then her, for thirty years. It was too cold for the old man to be out today. His cheeks were dark crimson, and continually wet from his failing eyes. Herriot Cozzens had left her; Coggs... all the intimate figures of so many years were vanishing. Jason remained. He had almost entirely escaped annoying her, and she was conscious of his overwhelming admiration, the ineradicable esteem of Cottarsport for the Canderays; but a question, a doubt more obscure than fear, was taking possession of her. After all she was supremely ignorant of life; she had been screened from it by pride and luxurious circumstance; but now she had surrendered all her advantage. She had given herself to Jason; and he was life, mysterious and rude. The thunder of large, threatening seas, reaching everywhere beyond the placid gulf below, beat faintly on her perception.
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