“How did you come back?”
“Worked my passage in a crazy clipper with moon-sails and the halliards padlocked to the rail. Carried away the foretopmast and yard off the Horn and ran from port to port in a hundred and four days.”
The conversation dwindled and expired. Thomas Gast gazed about moodily, and Jason, with a tight mouth, nodded and moved on. His mind turned back abruptly to Eddie Lukens, the man who had robbed him of his find in the early days of cradle mining, the man he had killed.
He had said nothing of this to Honora; the experience with Olive Stanes had convinced him of the advisability of keeping past accident where, he now repeated, it belonged. He despaired of ever being able, in Cottarsport, to explain the place and times that had made his act comprehensible. How could he picture, here, the narrow ravines cut by swift rivers from the stupendous slopes and forests of the Sierra Nevada, the isolation of a handful of men with their tents by a plunging stream in' a rift so deep that there would be only a brief glimmer of sunlight at noon? And, failing that, the ignorant could never grasp the significance of the stillness, the timeless shadows, which the miners penetrated in their madness for gold. They'd never realize the strangling passion of this search in a wilderness without habitation or law or safety. They could not understand the primary justice of such rude courts as the miners were able to maintain on the more populous outskirts of the region.
He, Jason Burrage, had been tried by a jury for killing Eddie Lukens, and had been exonerated. It had been months since he had reiterated this dreary and only half satisfying formula. The inner necessity filled him with a shapeless concern such as might have been caused by a constant, unnatural shadow flickering out at his back. He almost wished that he had told Honora at the beginning; and then he fretfully cursed the incertitude of life—whatever he did appeared, shortly after, wrong.
But it was obvious that he couldn't go to her with the story today; the only time for that had been before his marriage; now it would have the look of a confession of weakness, opportunely timed; and he could think of nothing more calculated to antagonize Honora than such a crumbling admission.
All this had been re-animated by the mere presence of Thomas Gast in Cottarsport; certainly, he concluded, an insufficient reason for his troubling. Gast had been a miner, too, he was familiar with the conditions in the West.... There was a great probability that he hadn't even heard of the unfortunate affair; while Olive Stanes would be dragged to death rather than garble a word of what he had told her: Jason willingly acknowledged this of Olive. He resolutely banished the whole complication from his mind; and, walking with Honora after supper over the garden in back of their house, he was again absorbed by her vivid delicate charm.
The garden was deep and narrow, a flight of terraces connected by a flagged path and steps. At the bottom were the bergamot pear trees that had been Ithiel Canderay's especial charge in his last, retired years. Their limbs, faintly blurred with new foliage, rose above the wall, against a tranquil evening sky with a white slip of May moon. The peace momentarily disturbed in Jason Burrage's heart flooded back, a sense of great well-being settled over him. Honora rested her hand within his arm at an inequality of the stone walk.
“I am really a very bad wife, Jason,” she said suddenly; “self-absorbed and inattentive.”
“You suit me,” he replied inadequately. He was extraordinarily moved by her remark: she had never before even suggested that she was conscious of obligation. He wanted to put into words some of the warmth of feeling which filled his heart, but suitable speech evaded him. He could not shake off the fear that such protestations might be displeasing to her restrained being. Moving slightly away from him she seemed, in the soft gloom, more wonderful than ever. Set in white against the depths of the garden, her face, dimly visible, appeared to be without its customary faintly mocking smile.