Chapter IV: Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She flung the whip down on the bricks.

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

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

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