Perhaps Honora's diversity lay in the fact that, while she seldom actually left Cottarsport, it was easy to see that she had a part in a life far beyond anything Olive, whose consciousness was strictly limited to one narrow place, knew. She always suggested a wider and more elegantly finished existence than that of local sociables and church activities. Captain Ithiel Canderay, a member of a Cottarsport family long since moved away, had, from obscure surprising promptings, returned at his successful retirement from the sea, and built his impressive dwelling in the grey community. He had always, however different the tradition of his wife's attitude, entered with a candid spirit into the interests and life of the town, where he had inspired solid confidence in a domineering but unimpeachable integrity. Such small civic honors as the locality had to bestow were his, and were discharged to the last and most exacting degree. But there had been perpetually about him the aloof air of the quarter-deck, his tones had never lost the accent of command; and, while Cottarsport bitterly guarded its personal equality and independence, it took a certain pride in a recognition of the Captain's authority.
Something of this had unquestionably descended upon Honora; her position was made and zealously guarded by the town. Yet that alone failed to hold the reason for Olive's feeling; it was at once more particular and more all-embracing, and largely feminine. She was almost contemptuous of the other's delicacy of person, of the celebrated fact that Honora Canderay never turned her hand to the cooking of a dish or the sweeping of a stair; and at the same time these very things lifted her apart from Olive's commonplace round.
Her mind turned again to herself and Jason's home-coming. He had been wonderfully generous in his written promises to Rhoda and Jem; and he would be equally thoughtful of Hester, she was certain of that. People had a way of overlooking Hester, a faithful and, for all her talk, a Christian character. Rhoda would study to be a singer; striving, Olive hoped, to put what talent she had to a sanctioned use; and Jem, a remarkably vigorous and able boy of eighteen, would command his own fishing schooner.
The sheet-iron stove glowed cherry red with the energy of its heat, and a blast of wind rushed against the windows. The wind, she recognized, had steadily grown in force; and Olive thought of her father in the barque Emerald of Salem, somewhere between Richmond and the home port.... The lamplight swelled and diminished.
She got a new pleasure from the conjunction of her surrender to matrimony and the good it would bring the others; that—self-sacrifice—was excellence; such subjection of the pride of the flesh was the essence of her service. Then some mundane affairs invaded her mind: a wedding dress, the preparation of food for a small company after the ceremony, whether she should like having a servant. Jason would insist on that; and there she decided in the negative. She wouldn't be put upon in her own kitchen.
Her arrangements for the night were complete, and she set the stove door slightly open, shivering in her coarse night dress before the icy cold drifts of wind in the room, extinguished the lamp, and, after long, conscientiously deliberate prayers, got into bed. The wind boomed about the house, rattling all the sashes. Its force now seemed to be buffeting her heart until she got a measure of release from the thought of the granite boulder in the side yard, changeless and immovable.
The morning was gusty, with a coldly blue and cloudless sky. Olive, reaching the top of Orange Street, was whipped with dust, her hoops flattened grotesquely against her body. The town fell away on either hand, lying in a half moon on its harbor. The latter, as blue and bright as the sky, was formed by the rocky arm of Cottar's Neck, thrust out into the sea and bent from right to left. Most of the fishing fleet showed their bare spars at the wharves, but one, a minute fleck of white canvas, was beating her way through the Narrows. She wondered, descending, if it were Jem coming home.
Olive was going to the Burrages'; it was possible that they had had a later letter than hers from Jason. It might be he would arrive that very day. She was conscious of her heart throbbing slightly at this possibility, but from a complexity of emotions which still left her uneasy if faintly exhilarated. She crossed the courthouse square, where she saw that the green grass had become brown, apparently over night, and turned into Marlboro Street. Here the houses were more recent than the Staneses'; they were four square, with a full second story—a series of detached white blocks with flat porticoes—each set behind a wood fence in a lawn with flower borders or twisted and tree-like lilacs.
She entered the Burrage dwelling without the formality of knocking; and, familiar with the household, passed directly through a narrow, darkened hall, on which all the doors were closed, to the dining room and kitchen beyond. As she had known he would be, Hazzard Burrage was seated with his feet, in lamb's wool slippers, thrust under the stove. For the rest, but lacking his coat, he was formally and completely dressed; his corded throat was folded in a formal black stock, a watch chain and seal hung across his waistcoat. Mrs. Burrage was occupied in lining a cupboard with fresh shelf paper with a cut lace border. She was a small woman, with quick exact movements and an impatient utterance; but her husband was slow—a man who deliberately studied the world with a deep-set gaze.
“I thought you might have heard,” Olive stated directly, on the edge of a painted split-hickory chair. They hadn't, Mrs. Burrage informed her: “I expect he'll just come walking in. That's the way he always did things, and I guess California, or anywhere else, won't change him to notice it. And when he does,” she continued, “he's going to be put out with Hazzard. I told you Jason sent us three thousand dollars to get the front of the house fixed up. He said he didn't want to find his father sitting in the kitchen when he got back. Jason said we were to burn three or four stoves all at once. But he won't, and that's all there is to it. Why, he just put the money in the bank and there it lies. I read him the parable about the talents, but it didn't stir him an inch.”