“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.