Inheritance
On a morning four days later Jack MacRae sat staring into the coals on
the hearth. It was all over and done with, the house empty and still,
Dolly Ferrara gone back to her uncle's home. Even the Cove was bare of
fishing craft. He was alone under his own rooftree, alone with an
oppressive silence and his own thoughts.
These were not particularly pleasant thoughts. There was nothing mawkish
about Jack MacRae. He had never been taught to shrink from the
inescapable facts of existence. Even if he had, the war would have cured
him of that weakness. As it was, twelve months in the infantry, nearly
three years in the air, had taught him that death is a commonplace after
a man sees about so much of it, that it is many times a welcome relief
from suffering either of the body or the spirit. He chose to believe
that it had proved so to his father. So his feelings were not that
strange mixture of grief and protest which seizes upon those to whom
death is the ultimate tragedy, the irrevocable disaster, when it falls
upon some one near and dear.
No, Jack MacRae, brooding by his fire, was lonely and saddened and
heavy-hearted. But beneath these neutral phases there was slowly
gathering a flood of feeling unrelated to his father's death, more
directly based indeed upon Donald MacRae's life, upon matters but now
revealed to him, which had their root in that misty period when his
father was a young man like himself.
On the table beside him lay an inch-thick pile of note paper all closely
written upon in the clear, small pen-script of his father.
My son: [MacRae had written] I have a feeling lately that I may
never see you again. Not that I fear you will be killed. I no
longer have that fear. I seem to have an unaccountable assurance
that having come through so much you will go on safely to the
end. But I'm not so sure about myself. I'm aging too fast. I've
been told my heart is bad. And I've lost heart lately. Things
have gone against me. There is nothing new in that. For thirty
years I've been losing out to a greater or less extent in most
of the things I undertook--that is, the important things.
Perhaps I didn't bring the energy and feverish ambition I might
have to my undertakings. Until you began to grow up I accepted
things more or less passively as I found them.
Until you have a son of your own, until you observe closely
other men and their sons, my boy, you will scarcely realize how
close we two have been to each other. We've been what they call
good chums. I've taken a secret pride in seeing you grow and
develop into a man. And while I tried to give you an
education--broken into, alas, by this unending war--such as
would enable you to hold your own in a world which deals harshly
with the ignorant, the incompetent, the untrained, it was also
my hope to pass on to you something of material value.
This land which runs across Squitty Island from the Cove to
Cradle Bay and extending a mile back--in all a trifle over six
hundred acres--was to be your inheritance. You were born here. I
know that no other place means quite so much to you as this old
log house with the meadow behind it, and the woods, and the sea
grumbling always at our doorstep. Long ago this place came into
my hands at little more cost than the taking. It has proved a
refuge to me, a stronghold against all comers, against all
misfortune. I have spent much labor on it, and most of it has
been a labor of love. It has begun to grow valuable. In years to
come it will be of far greater value. I had hoped to pass it on
to you intact, unencumbered, an inheritance of some worth. Land,
you will eventually discover, Johnny, is the basis of
everything. A man may make a fortune in industry, in the market.
He turns to land for permanence, stability. All that is sterling
in our civilization has its foundation in the soil.
Out of this land of ours, which I have partially and
half-heartedly reclaimed from the wilderness, you should derive
a comfortable livelihood, and your children after you.
But I am afraid I must forego that dream and you, my son, your
inheritance. It has slipped away from me. How this has come
about I wish to make clear to you, so that you will not feel
unkindly toward me that you must face the world with no
resources beyond your own brain and a sound young body. If it
happens that the war ends soon and you come home while I am
still alive to welcome you, we can talk this over man to man.
But, as I said, my heart is bad. I may not be here. So I am
writing all this for you to read. There are many things which
you should know--or at least which I should like you to know.
Thirty years ago--
Donald MacRae's real communication to his son began at that point in the
long ago when the _Gull_ outsailed his sloop and young Horace Gower,
smarting with jealousy, struck that savage blow with a pike pole at a
man whose fighting hands were tied by a promise. Bit by bit, incident
by incident, old Donald traced out of a full heart and bitter memories
all the passing years for his son to see and understand. He made
Elizabeth Morton, the Morton family, Horace Gower and the Gower kin
stand out in bold relief. He told how he, Donald MacRae, a nobody from
nowhere, for all they knew, adventuring upon the Pacific Coast, questing
carelessly after fortune, had fallen in love with this girl whose
family, with less consideration for her feelings and desires than for
mutual advantages of land and money and power, favored young Gower and
saw nothing but impudent presumption in MacRae.
Young Jack sat staring into the coals, seeing much, understanding more.
It was all there in those written pages, a powerful spur to a vivid
imagination.
No MacRae had ever lain down unwhipped. Nor had Donald MacRae, his
father. Before his bruised face had healed--and young Jack remembered
well the thin white scar that crossed his father's cheek bone--Donald
MacRae was again pursuing his heart's desire. But he was forestalled
there. He had truly said to Elizabeth Morton that she would never have
another chance. By force or persuasion or whatsoever means were
necessary they had married her out of hand to Horace Gower.
"That must have been she sitting on the couch," Jack MacRae whispered to
himself, "that middle-aged woman with the faded rose-leaf face. Lord,
Lord, how things get twisted!"
Though they so closed the avenue to a mésalliance, still their pride
must have smarted because of that clandestine affection, that boldly
attempted elopement. Most of all, young Gower must have hated
MacRae--with almost the same jealous intensity that Donald MacRae must
for a time have hated him--because Gower apparently never forgot and
never forgave. Long after Donald MacRae outgrew that passion Gower had
continued secretly to harass him. Certain things could not be otherwise
accounted for, Donald MacRae wrote to his son. Gower functioned in the
salmon trade, in timber, in politics. In whatever MacRae set on foot, he
ultimately discerned the hand of Gower, implacable, hidden, striking at
him from under cover.
And so in a land and during a period when men created fortunes easily
out of nothing, or walked carelessly over golden opportunities, Donald
MacRae got him no great store of worldly goods, whereas Horace Gower,
after one venture in which he speedily dissipated an inherited fortune,
drove straight to successful outcome in everything he touched. By the
time young Jack MacRae outgrew the Island teachers and must go to
Vancouver for high school and then to the University of British
Columbia, old Donald had been compelled to borrow money on his land to
meet these expenses.
Young Jack, sitting by the fire, winced when he thought of that. He had
taken things for granted. The war had come in his second year at the
university,--and he had gone to the front as a matter of course.
Failing fish prices, poor seasons, other minor disasters had
followed,--and always in the background, as old Donald saw it, the Gower
influence, malign, vindictive, harboring that ancient grudge.
Whereas in the beginning MacRae had confidently expected by one resource
and another to meet easily the obligation he had incurred, the end of it
was the loss, during the second year of the war, of all the MacRae
lands on Squitty,--all but a rocky corner of a few acres which included
the house and garden. Old Donald had segregated that from his holdings
when he pledged the land, as a matter of sentiment, not of value. All
the rest--acres of pasture, cleared and grassed, stretches of fertile
ground, blocks of noble timber still uncut--had passed through the hands
of mortgage holders, through bank transfers, by devious and tortuous
ways, until the title rested in Horace Gower,--who had promptly built
the showy summer house on Cradle Bay to flaunt in his face, so old
Donald believed and told his son.
It was a curious document, and it made a profound impression on Jack
MacRae. He passed over the underlying motive, a man justifying himself
to his son for a failure which needed no justifying. He saw now why his
father tabooed all things Gower, why indeed he must have hated Gower as
a man who does things in the open hates an enemy who strikes only from
cover.
Strangely enough, Jack managed to grasp the full measure of what his
father's love for Elizabeth Morton must have been without resenting the
secondary part his mother must have played. For old Donald was frank in
his story. He made it clear that he had loved Bessie Morton with an
all-consuming passion, and that when this burned itself out he had never
experienced so headlong an affection again. He spoke with kindly regard
for his wife, but she played little or no part in his account. And Jack
had only a faint memory of his mother, for she had died when he was
seven. His father filled his eyes. His father's enemies were his. Family
ties superimposed on clan clannishness, which is the blood heritage of
the Highland Scotch, made it impossible for him to feel otherwise. That
blow with a pike pole was a blow directed at his own face. He took up
his father's feud instinctively, not even stopping to consider whether
that was his father's wish or intent.
He got up out of his chair at last and went outside, down to where the
Cove waters, on a rising tide, lapped at the front of a rude shed. Under
this shed, secure on a row of keel-blocks, rested a small
knockabout-rigged boat, stowed away from wind and weather, her single
mast, boom, and gaff unshipped and slung to rafters, her sail and
running gear folded and coiled and hung beyond the wood-rats' teeth.
Beside this sailing craft lay a long blue dugout, also on blocks, half
filled with water to keep it from checking.
These things belonged to him. He had left them lying about when he went
away to France. And old Donald had put them here safely against his
return. Jack stared at them, blinking. He was full of a dumb protest. It
didn't seem right. Nothing seemed right. In young MacRae's mind there
was nothing terrible about death. He had become used to that. But he had
imagination. He could see his father going on day after day, month after
month, year after year, enduring, uncomplaining. Gauged by what his
father had written, by what Dolly Ferrara had supplied when he
questioned her, these last months must have been gray indeed. And he had
died without hope or comfort or a sight of his son.
That was what made young MacRae blink and struggle with a lump in his
throat. It hurt.
He walked away around the end of the Cove without definite objective. He
was suddenly restless, seeking relief in movement. Sitting still and
thinking had become unbearable. He found himself on the path that ran
along the cliffs and followed that, coming out at last on the neck of
Point Old where he could look down on the broken water that marked Poor
Man's Rock.
The lowering cloud bank of his home-coming day had broken in heavy rain.
That had poured itself out and given place to a southeaster. The wind
was gone now, the clouds breaking up into white drifting patches with
bits of blue showing between, and the sun striking through in yellow
shafts which lay glittering areas here and there on the Gulf. The swell
that runs after a blow still thundered all along the southeast face of
Squitty, bursting _boom_--_boom_--_boom_ against the cliffs, shooting
spray in white cascades. Over the Rock the sea boiled.
There were two rowboats trolling outside the heavy backwash from the
cliffs. MacRae knew them both. Peter Ferrara was in one, Long Tom Spence
in the other. They did not ride those gray-green ridges for pleasure,
nor drop sidling into those deep watery hollows for joy of motion. They
were out for fish, which meant to them food and clothing. That was their
work.
They were the only fisher folk abroad that morning. The gasboat men had
flitted to more sheltered grounds. MacRae watched these two lift and
fall in the marching swells. It was cold. Winter sharpened his teeth
already. The rowers bent to their oars, tossing and lurching. MacRae
reflected upon their industry. In France he had eaten canned salmon
bearing the Folly Bay label, salmon that might have been taken here by
the Rock, perhaps by the hands of these very men, by his own father.
Still, that was unlikely. Donald MacRae had never sold a fish to a Gower
collector. Nor would he himself, young MacRae swore under his breath,
looking sullenly down upon the Rock.
Day after day, month after month, his father had tugged at the oars,
hauled on the line, rowing around and around Poor Man's Rock, skirting
the kelp at the cliff's foot, keeping body and soul together with
unremitting labor in sun and wind and rain, trying to live and save that
little heritage of land for his son.
Jack MacRae sat down on a rock beside a bush and thought about this
sadly. He could have saved his father much if he had known. He could
have assigned his pay. There was a government allowance. He could have
invoked the War Relief Act against foreclosure. Between them they could
have managed. But he understood quite clearly why his father made no
mention of his difficulties. He would have done the same under the same
circumstances himself, played the game to its bitter end without a cry.
But Donald MacRae had made a long, hard fight only to lose in the end,
and his son, with full knowledge of the loneliness and discouragement
and final hopelessness that had been his father's lot, was passing
slowly from sadness to a cumulative anger. That cottage amid its green
grounds bright in a patch of sunshine did not help to soften him. It
stood on land reclaimed from the forest by his father's labor. It should
have belonged to him, and it had passed into hands that already grasped
too much. For thirty years Gower had made silent war on Donald MacRae
because of a woman. It seemed incredible that a grudge born of jealousy
should run so deep, endure so long. But there were the facts. Jack
MacRae accepted them; he could not do otherwise. He came of a breed
which has handed its feuds from generation to generation, interpreting
literally the code of an eye for an eye.
So that as he sat there brooding, it was perhaps a little unfortunate
that the daughter of a man whom he was beginning to regard as a
forthright enemy should have chosen to come to him, tripping soundlessly
over the moss.
He did not hear Betty Gower until she was beside him. Her foot clicked
on a stone and he looked up. Betty was all in white, a glow in her
cheeks and in her eyes, bareheaded, her reddish-brown hair shining in a
smooth roll above her ears.
"I hear you have lost your father," she said simply. "I'm awfully
sorry."
Some peculiar quality of sympathy in her tone touched MacRae deeply. His
eyes shifted for a moment to the uneasy sea. The lump in his throat
troubled him again. Then he faced her again.
"Thanks," he said slowly. "I dare say you mean it, although I don't know
why you should. But I'd rather not talk about that. It's done."
"I suppose that's the best way," she agreed, although she gave him a
doubtful sort of glance, as if she scarcely knew how to take part of
what he said. "Isn't it lovely after the storm? Pretty much all the
civilized world must feel a sort of brightness and sunshine to-day, I
imagine."
"Why?" he asked. It seemed to him a most uncalled-for optimism.
"Why, haven't you heard that the war is over?" she smiled. "Surely some
one has told you?"
He shook his head.
"It is a fact," she declared. "The armistice was signed yesterday at
eleven. Aren't you glad?"
MacRae reflected a second. A week earlier he would have thrown up his
cap and whooped. Now the tremendously important happening left him
unmoved, unbelievably indifferent. He was not stirred at all by the
fact of acknowledged victory, of cessation from killing.
"I should be, I suppose," he muttered. "I know a lot of fellows will
be--and their people. So far as I'm concerned--right now--"
He made a quick gesture with his hands. He couldn't explain how he
felt--that the war had suddenly and imperiously been relegated to the
background for him. Temporarily or otherwise, as a spur to his emotions,
the war had ceased to function. He didn't want to talk. He wanted to be
let alone, to think.
Yet he was conscious of a wish not to offend, to be courteous to this
clear-eyed young woman who looked at him with frank interest. He
wondered why he should be of any interest to her. MacRae had never been
shy. Shyness is nearly always born of acute self-consciousness. Being
free from that awkward inturning of the mind Jack MacRae was not
thoroughly aware of himself as a likable figure in any girl's sight.
Four years overseas had set a mark on many such as himself. A man cannot
live through manifold chances of death, face great perils, do his work
under desperate risks and survive, without some trace of his deeds being
manifest in his bearing. Those tried by fire are sure of themselves, and
it shows in their eyes. Besides, Jack MacRae was twenty-four,
clear-skinned, vigorous, straight as a young fir tree, a handsome boy in
uniform. But he was not quick to apprehend that these things stirred a
girl's fancy, nor did he know that the gloomy something which clouded
his eyes made Betty Gower want to comfort him.
"I think I understand," she said evenly,--when in truth she did not
understand at all. "But after a while you'll be glad. I know I should be
if I were in the army, although of course no matter how horrible it all
was it had to be done. For a long time I wanted to go to France myself,
to do _something_. I was simply wild to go. But they wouldn't let me."
"And I," MacRae said slowly, "didn't want to go at all--and I had to
go."
"Oh," she remarked with a peculiar interrogative inflection. Her
eyebrows lifted. "Why did you have to? You went over long before the
draft was thought of."
"Because I'd been taught that my flag and country really meant
something," he said. "That was all; and it was quite enough in the way
of compulsion for a good many like myself who didn't hanker to stick
bayonets through men we'd never seen, nor shoot them, nor blow them up
with hand grenades, nor kill them ten thousand feet in the air and watch
them fall, turning over and over like a winged duck. But these things
seemed necessary. They said a country worth living in was worth fighting
for."
"And isn't it?" Betty Gower challenged promptly.
MacRae looked at her and at the white cottage, at the great Gulf seas
smashing on the rocks below, at the far vista of sea and sky and the
shore line faintly purple in the distance. His gaze turned briefly to
the leafless tops of maple and alder rising out of the hollow in which
his father's body lay--in a corner of the little plot that was left of
all their broad acres--and came back at last to this fair daughter of
his father's enemy.
"The country is, yes," he said. "Anything that's worth having is worth
fighting for. But that isn't what they meant, and that isn't the way it
has worked out."
He was not conscious of the feeling in his voice. He was thinking with
exaggerated bitterness that the Germans in Belgium had dealt less hardly
with a conquered people than this girl's father had dealt with his.
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by that," she
remarked. Her tone was puzzled. She looked at him, frankly curious.
But he could not tell her what he meant. He had a feeling that she was
in no way responsible. He had an instinctive aversion to rudeness. And
while he was absolving himself of any intention to make war on her he
was wondering if her mother, long ago, had been anything like Miss Betty
Gower. It seemed odd to think that this level-eyed girl's mother might
have been _his_ mother,--if she had been made of stiffer metal, or if
the west wind had blown that afternoon.
He wondered if she knew. Not likely, he decided. It wasn't a story
either Horace Gower or his wife would care to tell their children.
So he did not try to tell her what he meant. He withdrew into his shell.
And when Betty Gower seated herself on a rock and evinced an inclination
to quiz him about things he did not care to be quizzed about, he lifted
his cap, bade her a courteous good-by, and walked back toward the Cove.