Rod had come down the path with a club bag in one hand, talking
amiably with his father. He had seen his trunk put aboard the
_Haida_. Mrs. Wall, Laska, Isabel, Miss Sherburne, Grove, and three
or four other unattached young men and women who made up the house
party were on the float to see him off. They filled the quiet upper
bay with light talk and low laughter. Rod stood by the deck rail
chaffering with them. But his eye missed one figure. He had not
seen Phil since breakfast. Already the engineer was priming the big
motor. He could hear the hissing of air through open petcocks. And
old Phil hadn't come down to say "good-by, kid."
Rod's glance wandered to Grove, standing by Laska Wall, a fine
upright figure of a man in white flannels. And he wondered idly why
this elder son of the house should be like flint to his brothers'
steel without ever seeming aware of the hostile undercurrents he so
often aroused. Or perhaps he simply did not care. Perhaps he felt
such a complete assurance that the liking and loyalty of younger
brothers was a negligible thing.
Then, as the first deep bark of the exhaust waked a hollow echo in
Mermaid Bay, Phil came down with long, quick strides, dressed in a
gray suit, a bag in his hand.
There was a quick exchange of casual exclamations, a shaking of
hands. Phil stepped aboard.
"All right," he called to the deck hand. "Cast off."
The _Haida_ backed clear, gathered way as she turned into the
slackening tide. She slid past the Gillard light, lonely and
untended on its steel pillar. The narrow gorge of a canoe pass
opened behind the island. From a rocky point south of the pass and
the light a trail that Rod knew ran to Oliver Thorn's house. And as
Rod's eyes swept the shore, he marked a figure on the highest point
of this beach trail. He waved his hat. Something white fluttered
like a pennant in answer. Then the cruiser's way cut off Gillard,
the red roof of Hawk's Nest, and Mary Thorn on the trail. They
vanished behind the low, timbered hills of Valdez, and Rod turned to
his brother.
Phil sat on a skylight, his hands clasped over one knee, his eyes on
the streaming wake. But Rod knew he was not looking at the bubbles
in the wash, or at anything concretely visible. It was too much the
concentrated look a man bestows upon things afar, remote, but vivid
in the eye of the mind.
"Cheer up," he said abruptly. "The worst is yet to come."
"I wonder?" Phil replied absently. A faint smile replaced that set
expression. "I suppose the worst always is ahead--only unseen."
"What's up?" Rod demanded. "Why this last minute dash, and the
abstracted air?"
Phil stared at the deck.
"Do I show such outward signs of inner disturbance?" he inquired
whimsically. "If I do it was a wise move to leave. I didn't think I
gave myself away openly as a bad loser."
Rod said nothing. He waited. He knew his brother.
"Laska Wall's going to marry Grove," Phil said with a simulation of
casualness that would have deceived any one but Rod. "I had the
pleasure of wishing her much happiness last night."
Rod could think of nothing appropriate to say. He seemed to
understand quite clearly. And he couldn't feel anything but
resentment against a girl who, having a choice between the two,
preferred Grove. Laska fell a long way in his estimation in those
few seconds.
"Well," he ventured at last, "I should worry. She's a nice girl.
But there are plenty of nice girls."
"That's true enough," Phil sighed. "But the devil of it is, kid,
that I wanted this particular girl. And I can't seem to be cheerful
about some one else getting her. Maybe it sounds a bit crude, but
I'd almost rather it had been any other man I know. Grove's--well, I
pass him up. He doesn't play the game. But he gets by. I suppose
he always will. Even the governor, who isn't exactly a fool, and who
_is_ decent, can't see our worthy brother as he seems to us. Well,
that's another chapter. I'm not funking, but I think I'll get off
the Norquay band wagon pretty soon. I don't imagine things will seem
quite the same around the old place once Mrs. Grove is installed.
New brooms, you know."
"Maybe. I don't know. I can easily see where we might begin to feel
like intruders in our own home," Rod hazarded. "But what's the use
of crossing bridges before you come to 'em?"
"I think," Phil returned, "I've come to a rather important one."
He fell into moody reflection again. Rod leaned against the rail,
unwilling to break into this absorption. He knew Phil was smarting
under a hurt, the nature of which he could understand very well. And
he was hotly on Phil's side, a position he took instinctively
whenever Grove appeared as the protagonist.
That it was quite in order for Laska Wall to make her own choice
probably carried much less weight with Rod than with Phil. Nor was
Rod clearly aware that all his incipient clashes with Grove took root
in profound differences of character, rather than in any definite
invasion of his rights or Phil's by their elder brother.
There were crossed wires everywhere, he reflected. Why should Phil
want Laska so badly, and why should Laska prefer by far the lesser
man? These mysterious, passionate wants! Rod wandered idly if Mr.
Spence, comfortable in a deck chair, his nose in a red-bound volume,
could interpret these strange impulses of the flesh which could so
sorely try the spirit? He decided Spence could not. Young as he
was, Rod knew there were things in life that cannot be learned. They
must be felt, suffered mostly. Lessons in the school of
self-experience. Phil, he perceived, was getting a lesson, and
taking it seriously. His own turn would come.
He shrugged his shoulders. There would be a different atmosphere
about Hawk's Nest when he came home again. But Rod had already
encountered the philosophic maxim that change was the only constant
factor in a kaleidoscopic universe.
He went up forward, made himself comfortable in the bight of a coiled
hawser, let his mind dwell on what green fields and pastures new four
years on the Atlantic littoral might open to him.
While he pondered over the immediate future and what it might bring,
the _Haida_ plowed down Calm Channel, cleared the Redondas and stood
into the open Gulf, reeling off her fourteen knots per hour. Before
night he would be in Vancouver. In a week he would be in Montreal.
Beyond that Rod could not see, nor, as the sun filled him with a
drowsy lassitude, did he greatly care. For four years yet his life
would be ordered, directed; he would be a human sponge soaking up
knowledge, impressions, experiences common to a university career.
After that--
Rod sleepily declined to transform himself into a seer.