Rod had come down a hall that had, like everything about Hawk's Nest,
a spacious air. It was high and broad. Dim light filtered into it
through stained-glass windows, fell in mellow patches on carpet so
thick and soft that he moved silent as an ancestral phantom,--which,
however, was no part of the Norquay tradition. Active, resourceful
men, and beautiful, gracious women had lived and moved and had their
being there. Those comfortable homelike rooms had seen their joys
and minor tragedies, births and deaths, quarrels and affections.
Some of them had left various monuments to their credit, chiefly in
the upbuilding and sustaining of the Norquay fortunes. But none, the
remembered and the forgotten, had ever returned in the spirit. It
was as if having lived their span they were content to let their
descendants have undisturbed possession.
Probably Rod was the only Norquay under that roof who had so clear a
vision of all that had preceded him, and so faint a comprehension of
his future. The normal youngster of that age is eagerly
forward-looking. He has no retrospect. He is full of impatient
hopes, dreams, desires, whenever he lifts his eyes beyond the
absorbing present. Rod deliberately refrained from lifting the
curtain of the future. When he went beyond the engrossing moment, he
looked backward over the history of his country and his family which
were so closely knit,--and he saw all the great adventures, the
exciting struggles, the foundation-laying and the slow purposeful
upbuilding, as something which had become a finished process before
he was born. He would spend hours mooning over his
great-great-grandfather's journal and feel a pang of regret that he
had not lived in those quickening days. They were gone. The land
was tamed. The Chilcotins would never again come raiding. The sea
otters were vanished along with the men who hunted them. The trading
vessel, square-rigged or fore-and-after, had given way to the steam
tramp. From Land's End to the Strait of Juan de Fuca was a
twenty-day voyage instead of thirty weeks. Law, order, custom molded
men now. The frontiers were charted and surveyed. What was the use
of being born with a spirit that chafed against the dull certainties
of a world in which everything was known, defined, reduced to a
formula? The world that Rod knew was like the Norquay
family,--static! So he summed it up. All the great deeds done, or
at any rate the necessity, the spur of doing removed beyond him.
Those silent shores to which Roderick Sylvester Norquay sailed with
Vancouver in 1792 were cluttered with grubby towns, marked off into
private areas for individual exploitation. Those inland seas which
they had explored and charted were speckled with vessels in the
lumber trade, the coal trade, coastal transport, fisheries. The
forests were falling under the axes of ten thousand loggers. There
was only the adventure, the struggle, the arid business of making
money. And no Norquay had a vital need of doing that. Their
forefathers had attended shrewdly to the acquisition of land and
timber when it could be had for the taking. The Norquays did not
need to make money. They had it. It came rolling in to them. They
could sit still or play; it was all one. Static! That was the term
Rod used.
That a capacity for thinking about such things in such fashion was
scarcely the normal intellectual equipment of an eighteen-year-old
youth did not occur to Rod. He had the singularly unboyish quality
of hoarding his thoughts, of living very much in a reflective world
of his own, which he shared with no one; which indeed he sedulously
masked from every one he knew, unless it was Mary Thorn. Even to
Mary he permitted only shy, stray glimpses of what sometimes crowded
his brain, as a concession to her confident belief in him, her
conviction that the most fanciful thing he could utter was at least
worth consideration merely because he saw fit to give it utterance.
Whereas any groping effort to encase an abstraction in words served
only to bring an amused look to the collective faces of his own
people. His father would lift heavy eyebrows in polite surprise.
Grove would laugh coarsely. Even Phil would look a little puzzled, a
little bored. Rod knew. He seldom made such experiments in
self-expression. But his mind would concentrate with burning
eagerness on a great variety of things. And sometimes his
conclusions saddened him without his knowing why.
This decree of banishment from Hawk's Nest in mid-summer provoked him
to sullen pondering in the quiet of his own room. He recognized
authority. Obedience was an observed tradition in that house. It
was not the fact of his being bundled off to a university that
troubled Rod. He had looked forward to that as a necessary and
perhaps delightful experience. It was the snap judgment which
hastened the date of this mental discipline--as if it were a penalty
inflicted on him for an offence--as if he were a small child caught
with his fingers in the jam pot.
So Rod, sitting with his elbows on the window sill looking out on the
tiderace streaming full flood between Valdez and Big Dent, seeing the
glassy green incline and the white flash of foam, wondered irritably
why his father saw fit to penalize him, to warn him in that
offensive, suggestive manner about Mary Thorn. There was no ground
for that. Rod knew his father as a fair-minded man, not much given
to moralizing, nor arbitrarily instructing his sons in ethical
problems. He wouldn't have issued a fiat like that without some one
stirring him up. Rod scowled. He could guess pretty well who had
done the stirring; who, being not too nice in surreptitious amours
himself, was inordinately jealous how the family dignity, the family
honor fared in his brothers' hands. Which was a very precise summary
of one phase of Mr. Grosvenor Sylvester Norquay. It wasn't a
flattering estimate of character and Rod kept it strictly to himself.
When he was small he had disliked Grove's high-handed style, his
tendency to domineer, an occasional outcrop of a brutal streak. As
Rod grew older that dislike became contempt, deep and abiding. A
queer feeling to exist between brothers. Yet not so rare.
A warning bell brought Rod out of his absorption. He dressed and
joined the others in the dining room.
It was a leisurely meal, unobtrusively ceremonial, after the
conventional fashion of those who have gained the privilege of
partaking of food as a pleasure, and not as a mere necessity. There
was nothing lacking. To dine at Hawk's Nest was the equivalent of
dining in the home of any cultivated person in New York, Paris,
London,--black broadcloth and planished shirt front, corsage that
revealed gleaming shoulders; snowy linen, polished silver, cut
flowers; conversation as an art; good food, wine, perfect service. A
black-coated man hovered discreetly behind the chairs, silently
anticipating every want.
Rod's eyes swept the table and came to rest on his grandfather. A
lean old patriarch with a thatch of hair white as the table cover, a
mustache waxed to spiky points, a thin curved nose between deep-set,
faded blue eyes. He was past eighty. He could still relish a glass
of port, find pleasure in sitting beside a pretty woman,--upon whom
he would bestow a blend of compliment and reminiscence. For now the
old man lived almost wholly in the past. When he walked slowly about
the grounds, leaning on his stick, he never spoke of what was to be,
only of what had been. Rod looked at him and wondered if he would
live as long and see so many changes. He was sitting beside Mrs.
Wall, a plump well-groomed woman of forty-five. Above the murmur
about the table Rod could hear him telling her of the gold rush to
the Cariboo in '58. He had a crisp incisive manner of speech. He
had been the first Norquay to attend McGill. He was an educated man,
almost a scholarly one, in spite of an active life. He had builded
well and widely on the fur-trading foundation.
"He was the last of the constructive period," Rod mused. "The
governor has merely stood pat. Grove will likely go backward. We're
a rum lot."
He had to give over these inturning reflections and be polite. He
was seated between Isabel Wall and a Miss Sherburne, a darkly
handsome creature whose fascinations were too precious to waste on a
mere youth. Miss Sherburne's profile slanted eagerly to the left,
toward Phil. But Isabel had no such reservations. Rod was nearest
her own age. He was fair game. He proceeded casually to divulge to
Isabel such information as she sought about running the rapids in a
canoe, about Mary Thorn. She appeared to have a considerable
curiosity about Mary. Presently Rod began to wish her deaf and dumb.
Outwardly he remained patiently courteous. It was a relief when
coffee and cigarettes ended the meal.
It took him some time to escape from Isabel. Normally he would not
have minded her chatter nor her appropriation of himself. But just
now his mind held tenaciously to something which had been nagging him
ever since that interview in the library. When he saw Phil give over
a palpable attempt to segregate Laska and saunter off toward the
float landing, he excused himself and followed.
They walked down the slope together, out on the slip, seated
themselves on a bench.
"Give me a cigarette," Rod demanded abruptly, as his first utterance.
Phil handed over his case. Rod lit one.
"Getting real devilish," Phil bantered.
"Was Grove aboard the _Haida_ when you came through the rapids this
afternoon? I didn't see him."
"Down below, I suppose," Phil replied. "I didn't notice. But he was
with us. Why?"
"I thought so. What a skunk he is. Yet in this family he's the
little tin god on wheels. He thinks everybody is as rotten as
himself, too."
"You shouldn't talk like that," Phil remonstrated mildly.
"It's true. You know it is."
For a second Phil said nothing to this.
"One can't go about shouting unpleasant truths," he observed then.
"What's wrong, anyhow?"
"I'm to be packed off to McGill day after to-morrow."
"But the term doesn't begin for weeks yet."
"Oh, I'm to visit Aunt Maida and explore the historic city which has
justified its existence by containing the seat of learning where my
forefathers absorbed the knowledge and culture which has enabled them
to lead such eminently successful and praiseworthy lives," Rod
drawled.
"Well, that's no great grief," Phil replied. "Nothing to get fussed
up over."
"It was generally understood I was to begin next year. I'm being
packed off as a punishment. It seems the family dignity is being
compromised by my running rapids in a dugout with a girl."
"Well?" Phil waited patiently.
"Grove put a bug in the governor's ear," Rod dropped allusion for
plain facts. "The governor wouldn't have thought of disciplining me.
Grove's a damned snob. He has his gang here. He thinks I ought to
spend my time entertaining them. He imagines it is a reflection on
him that I prefer to play with Mary Thorn. Out of his own messy mind
he takes it for granted--the governor would never of his own accord
have suggested that I was--that I might--oh, damn! I don't like
Grove's filthy insinuations, Phil. And I couldn't talk back to the
governor. If it weren't for all these people here, I'd beat Grove up
for his pains."
"You're hardly up to that yet," Phil smiled indulgently.
"Don't you fool yourself," Rod declared hotly. "I weigh a hundred
and fifty-five stripped. I'm as hard as a rock--and he's mush. You
know it, Philip. He's lapped up too much hard liquor, and dallied
too much with that woman he keeps in the Bute Street flat to--to
stand the gaff very long."
"Good Lord; nothing gets by you," Phil grunted. "How do you know
these things?"
"I have eyes and ears," Rod answered. "And I'm not asleep when I'm
in town. He had a little blonde in his harem last year. The latest,
I understand, is a voluptuous brunette. He has more light loves than
some people have servants. By jove, he's the last one that ought to
hint to the pater that _I_ need looking after."
"Maybe it was old Spence," Phil observed thoughtfully. "The three of
them were confabbing when the governor asked me to find you. Old
Spence is rather strait-laced, and you're his especial charge, you
know."
"No, Spence is only an echo," Rod said scornfully, "An echo of other
men's thoughts, books, history, languages. Old Spence is decent, and
he considers me so. Besides, he wouldn't talk himself out of a job
any sooner than he had to. There are no more Norquay children for
him to cram with predigested mental fodder."
Phil laughed.
"You certainly have a piquant way of expressing yourself, kid," he
smiled. "I don't think old Spence would let his job interfere with
his sense of duty if it were aroused. I imagine, too, that he is
slated for a pension after tutoring the three of us. I guess it was
our beloved brother who put you in bad. Does it matter so much?"
"I suppose not," Rod said reflectively. "Still, it does make me sore
to have him meddle like that. He's too fond of butting in and it's
always his own ax that wants grinding. Or else just pure cussedness.
I could run the rapids on every tide, and seduce a settler's daughter
every six months for all he personally cares. He doesn't care a hoot
what I do until some of his guests, I suppose, remark on my paddling
around in a canoe with a girl who isn't anybody and who wears shabby
clothes. Then he's all for class distinctions and a high degree of
personal purity. Huh!"
Rod's snort was eloquent, and Phil grinned in sympathy. His grin
faded with a suddenness that caused Rod to look up, curious as to
what had brought that swift change and sobering fixity of gaze to his
brother. Grove and Laska Wall had walked down to the top of the
bank. They stood thirty feet above tidewater, sixty yards distant,
the slanting sunbeams casting their shadows far across the grass.
Grove had one hand thrust in his trousers pocket. With the other he
gestured largely.
"Behold--these--my possessions," Rod interpreted sardonically. "Go
up and cut him out, Phil. She's too nice a girl to--"
"I wonder why they fall for him the way they do?" Phil muttered under
his breath; but Rod's keen ears heard.
"They don't know him, and we do," he said cynically. "He's there
with the smooth talk, and the pleasing manner, and the good
looks--and don't forget the possessions. That counts a heap with
most of the girls we know."
"Oh, shut up. You don't know what you're talking about," Phil said
roughly. And when Rod turned in surprise at this outburst, Phil rose
to his feet and stalked away up the gravel walk into the grounds.
Rod followed at a more leisurely gait. He bore no ill-will. His
dignity was touchy enough in respect of any affront from Grove. Phil
was privileged to be as brusque as he liked. There was never any
malice in what he said or did. Rod always gave Phil the benefit of
the doubt. He was only a little puzzled as he gained the house and
noiselessly made his way upstairs, to look over his fishing tackle
and then read himself into drowsiness.
Rod's forenoons had been given over to study under Mr. Spence, M.A.,
B.Sc. He found himself, in view of his near departure for academic
pastures, excused from this. He did not feel any particular
gratitude for the exemption. Mr. Spence, in spite of certain
classical prejudices, an insular sense of superiority to mere
colonials which twenty-odd years' residence under the Norquay ægis
had but slightly vitiated, had a faculty of making dry facts
palatable and interesting matters completely absorbing. Rod had a
mind like a sponge; Mr. Spence had supplied it rather deftly with
choice liquids. So Rod had none of the schoolboy's exultation at
seeing the last of his teacher. He merely wondered at a greater
liberty bestowed upon him when the family seemed unduly exercised
lest he plunge into mischief.
Thus having the whole day before him where he had counted only on the
afternoon, he swallowed his breakfast--which was a go-as-you-please
meal that kept the cook and butler busy from eight to
ten-thirty--took his fishing kit and paddled the lurid dugout into
the channel.
He glanced back at a piercing whistle from ashore. The distance was
too great for words to carry, but not for Rod to make out the
signaller as Grove. He waved a paddle and kept on.
"Probably wants to wish somebody on me to go fishing," Rod grunted.
"He knows I'd much rather go alone. No chance, old cockatoo. This
is my party."
He bounded light-footed as a cougar up the steps to a porch floor
pricked full of innumerable tiny holes from the sharp calks of
logging boots, walked without ceremony into a rather bare front room,
and when he found no one there to answer his casual "hello," passed
on to the kitchen. Mary and her mother were cleaning up the
breakfast things.
"I'm headed for the Granite Pool," he announced. "Can Mary come
along, Mrs. Thorn?"
"I expect she can," the girl's mother answered placidly, "if she
wants to."
But Mary shook her head. "You're too early. Lots of work to do yet."
"You can work when you can't do anything else," Rod said. "Come on.
Don't be a piker. You're only in Mrs. Thorn's way. Isn't she, Mrs.
Thorn? Isn't a girl a nuisance around a house? I'm sure you'd much
rather have a boy."
"I don't know about that," Mrs. Thorn smiled gently. "Mary's about
as good at most things as a boy. Isn't she?"
"Oh, sure--that's why I want her to go fishing," Rod grinned. "Come
along, Mary."
"If you want to go, child, never mind the work," Mrs. Thorn
encouraged in her soft, even voice. "There isn't enough to bother
any one."
"Perhaps Mr. Thorn will go, too."
Rod dropped his creel and vanished out the back door in search of the
head of the house.
Mrs. Thorn looked down on her daughter's brown head. She was a tall
woman, with more than a vestige of good looks, a certain grace of
carriage. Her skin was fresh, unwrinkled. Her voice had a pleasant,
throaty tone. An odd expression flitted across her face now, and
Mary, glancing up, caught it; a wordless, sympathetic understanding.
She rose on tiptoe to kiss her mother's cheek.
"Run on. Vacation will end soon enough. I don't suppose your father
will go," Mrs. Thorn said. "Better put up a lunch. The chances are
Rod didn't think of that."
"I thought of it," Rod came back in time to overhear, "but there was
no time. I had to make a get-away."
"Playing hooky?" Mrs. Thorn teased.
"Yes. From our honored guests. They can't do anything without being
personally conducted. And as it isn't my show, I'd rather let some
one else do the conducting."
In ten minutes they were swinging uphill from the narrows, on a path
that rose steeply through heavy timber, turning aside here and there
for great trees. They moved silently, saving their breath for the
climb. High overhead rifts of blue sky showed through interlocked
branches. Dew still clung to the bordering thickets. They walked in
cool shadow, on ground the sun never touched except in narrow shafts
because of that canopy of leaf and bough. They bore on up until they
came out on a height of land bare of timber, where only moss carpeted
the granite ridge. On their right Little Dent and Big Dent and the
twin Gillards lay like dusky green blobs in the shining race of the
tide. The red roof of Hawk's Nest was a flaming dot against paler
green. The channel below was a still paler shade. The mainland
receded to height after height, mountain after mountain, the farther
peaks faint blue cones on a ragged horizon.
"What a look. Air's clear as crystal this morning."
Mary nodded. They walked a hundred yards along the open backbone.
To the left blue-black water mirroring the shore trees, the distant
hills, walled on three sides with bold, ravine-split cliffs, gleamed
in a deep hollow. They plunged downward through dense thickets. The
patch discovered itself anew to their hurrying feet. In ten minutes,
panting a little with the speed of their descent, they stood on a
rock shelf thrusting into the Granite Pool, a little lake hidden in
the Valdez hills. There was neither inlet nor outlet. It was half a
mile broad, mysteriously fed by hidden springs, full of cutthroat
trout rarely disturbed in their aqueous heaven.
In the Granite Pool Rod Norquay and Mary Thorn had a special,
proprietary interest, quite apart from the fact that one side of
Oliver Thorn's land touched its shore, and elsewhere its cliffy
borders were ringed about by the Norquay holdings. Their interest
was not one of physical ownership. They had discovered it for
themselves. They were the first, so far as they knew, to cast a line
in those deep, still waters. They had given it a fitting name. Even
the trail, cleverly blinded, had been the work of their hands,
assisted by Mary's father. Except Indians and timber cruisers, a
ubiquitous and taciturn clan, few people knew that such a lake
nestled in the hills so close to the Euclataw. These two, who had
haunted it through the summers of four years, kept their knowledge to
themselves. The Granite Pool was their own; the way thereto and the
angler's joy therein a secret they refused to share. Oliver Thorn
humored them in this; it pleased him that two children should have
such a sanctuary. Rod evaded divulging the source of the baskets of
trout he carried home,--justifying himself by the sure knowledge that
if all Hawk's Nest knew, vandal parties under Grove's leadership
would invade trail and lake, make fish hogs of themselves in the
Granite Pool, profaning its beautiful solitude in the name of sport.
A raft was moored to the shelving rock. They got aboard and cast
loose, jointing up their rods as the raft drifted down on a patch of
lily pads among which faint splashes sounded intermittently, followed
by concentric ripples that spread away till they were lost on the
surface of the dark water.
"They're still feeding, thank goodness," Rod observed.
Mary nodded, busy with her gear. She rose, flicked a Royal Coachman
forty feet on her third cast and struck a twelve-inch trout.
Whereupon they both became galvanized by that curious suppressed
excitement which is a heritage from remote periods when man secured
his daily food with his own hands, or went hungry.
At four in the afternoon they had taken their leave of the Pool,
climbed to the ridge, and were sitting on a down tree trunk, looking
from that vantage at a steam tug far below with a great boom of logs
trailing astern. She passed through the lower rapids in the brief
slack. Rod's creel lay at his feet, heavy with their catch. He
watched the raft of logs move slowly up the channel. Then his eyes
turned to the girl, rested upon her with definite appraisal.
Rod had been looking at Mary Thorn more or less casually ever since
he was a leggy boy in knickers and she a slim elf in abbreviated
gingham dresses. But he had never been so conscious of her as now.
So late as yesterday he had regarded her without personal awareness
of sex. How was it, he wondered, that a few words from his father, a
cryptic hint or two, could make everything different? Nothing had
happened. Yet he knew that a different quality had entered their
companionship. A boy and a girl could play together without thinking
of themselves as male and female. A man and a woman couldn't. His
father had warned him that he was a man and should comport himself
accordingly. As if a man's natural instinct was to run amuck!
Perhaps that was the truth. Rod smiled uneasily at the notion. He
was not precisely an unsophisticated youth, but he could scarcely
comprehend that there is only a shadowy border between the frank,
sexless affections of childhood and the uneasy glow of maturing
passion. He had never nursed a libidinous thought about Mary Thorn.
And yet--
His eyes rested on her with a new sort of gauge. She sat staring
down Cardero Channel, her hands in her lap, not so much intent on
some distant object as deep in one of those long, thoughtful silences
into which she now and then retired,--a characteristic that Rod liked
because it was something he himself often did. Her hair was a brown
smoothness about her head, tied back with a narrow ribbon. She was
very pretty, Rod decided critically, prettier than any girl he knew.
But something more than superficial prettiness attracted him. He
didn't know what. It eluded him. She had a woman's bosom and neck.
Her body was made up of harmonious contours. Her expression, absent,
reflective, gave him the feeling that he looked at maturity and
wisdom. It surprised him to think that such an aspect of her had
never struck him before.
Looking at her, he suddenly felt a queer, constricted feeling in his
breast. He desired all at once to touch her, to rest his fingers
lightly on that delicately tinted skin. She would laugh at him. He
wondered if she would. He wondered what she thought about, locked up
in herself like that. What went on in her mind that brought tiny
puckers of concentration in her forehead? Was she as suddenly
acutely conscious of him, in a disturbing physical sense, as he was
of her? And he wondered futilely why he should be troubled by such
unaccustomed thoughts and sensations now, when so late as yesterday
they two had sprawled together on the mossy benches of Little Dent,
laughing and chattering like two boys bent on innocent adventure in
the world of boyish action.
Now there was certainly a mischief working in his blood that was not
innocent. He knew it. It made him quiver. There was a ferment in
his mind as well as in his body. Was this what Spence meant when he
discoursed solemnly on the arrival of youth at man's estate? The
pitfalls of uncontrolled passion. The ineradicable animal in man.
Spence always spoke of the most intimate relation between a man and a
woman in guarded terms. He conveyed the idea that it should be a
matter of rational choice,--on the man's side. Spence never
discussed the woman's part; he ignored the woman. The man, then,
according to the Spencian ethic, carried on his sexual life according
to his innate character. If he was inherently brutish he sought
sexual satisfaction promiscuously. The ideal, sanctioned by society,
therefore ethically sound, was love, matrimony, the ultimate family,
achieved progressively with mature deliberation to balance emotion.
Mr. Spence did not inform Rod that this ideal progression depended on
a great many uncertain factors. Perhaps he did not know. But Rod
had accepted his tutor for several years as an oracle on culture in
general, as well as in its specific branches, and it was difficult
for him to turn a deaf ear when the oracle spoke of ethics,--in spite
of the fact that Rod's own observation, the conclusions of a fairly
acute if youthful mind, stirred doubts.
He granted that Phil might pass muster. Grove wouldn't. He could
think of several men, young and old, within the Norquay orbit, who
wouldn't. But Grove was the most outstanding, because he had the
most intimate knowledge of Grove's personality and his surreptitious
amours, which had been overlapping each other ever since Rod was old
enough to understand such matters. If a reasonable state of personal
purity were necessary to the Spencian image of a gentleman, Grove
could not qualify. Yet Mr. Spence had as much respect for Grove
Norquay as Grove's world in general,--which was a great deal more
than either of his brothers held for him. Grove was clever. He was
handsome. He could be generous to his equals. His manner was beyond
reproach. Yet outside of his own class women were to Grove a
sporting proposition, to be pursued and captured for his sensual
gratification.
No, there was something lacking in the wisdom Mr. Spence had
attempted to impart. Mr. Spence distinguished sharply between love
and lust. He had explained the difference without making the
difference clear. Rod wondered which of the two had overtaken him
all unexpectedly, sitting beside Mary Thorn on a log. Which was it
that made his heart beat faster. Was it love,--blooming
precociously? Or was it the other thing, against which Spence had
warned him to be strong?