CHAPTER II
The path Rod walked approached the house by a circuitous route. It turned aside here and there like a leisurely pedestrian to skirt red-trunked arbutus with oily-green leaves and clusters of unripe berries, to curve around the base of massive firs that rose like dun pillars in a blue-vaulted forum, to pass great fibrous-barked cedars with drooping boughs wherein unseen squirrels chattered. Everywhere grass clothed the ground, a carpet with green velvet pile, close shorn. Stones great and small had been gathered in artless piles so long ago that their granite nakedness was hidden under thick moss, disguised with ivy, or bright with flowering plants, brilliant dabs of color against vivid greens and somber browns. This walk brought him at last to one end of a great stone house with wide, cool porches, deep window recesses, a roof of tiles that glowed in the sun like a cardinal's hat.
There were people sitting about on the porch, a dozen or more. Rod greeted them without halting until he reached the corner. Then he looked back over his shoulder. Through the trees on the parked slope he got a flash of the racing tide. The voice of the rapids waxed strong. Across the channel Oliver Thorn's weather-beaten house was a drab spot on the forest's edge. Over the low shoulders of Valdez the distant backbone of Vancouver Island cut the sky line into jagged tracery. That three-hundred-mile wall which stopped the marching surges from tropical seas loomed in a bluish haze out of which rose high, conical peaks, far and white and faintly shining.
He skirted the house. If he had destination or purpose Rod was not conscious of either as a definite urge. He was simply strolling. But as he turned the corner he came upon a girl leaning on a parasol and staring at some letters cut in a massive cornerstone where the thick foundation rose out of the earth.
"Oh, Rod," she said. "Do answer about a million questions for me, please."
"Have you got a list?" he asked.
"A list? Oh, no," she chuckled. "I'm still on an even keel."
"Nautically all right," Rod smiled.
He didn't know Laska Wall very well. He hadn't seen much of her. She had only been at Hawk's Nest three days. Prior to that he had heard more or less about the Walls. They were people who had lately begun to cut quite a figure in Vancouver society. His brothers knew them. Both Phil and Grove had pretty well monopolized Laska since her arrival here. But what Rod had seen of her he liked. She was a quiet girl, with a slow smile that wonderfully transformed a piquant, delicately tinted face. Rod looked at her now admiringly. He wondered if Isabel, the pretty, bisque-doll creature whose dainty clothes Mary Thorn had remarked, would be like that when she was twenty-one. He supposed so, since they were sisters, but he could scarcely believe it. He detested Isabel. She giggled incessantly, flaunted herself before him with an irritating archness, annoyed him with her glib French, with numerous manifestations of what Rod contemptuously termed (to himself) "kindergarten stuff." He was a man,—in his own estimation. It was a trial, which he bore as a gentleman, to be expected to act as Isabel's cavalier, merely because they were the juveniles of this house party. Isabel was juvenile enough, Rod admitted. He exempted himself from the charge of extreme youth. But it was provoking to have every one else blandly proceed on that assumption.
Perhaps that was why he warmed to this fair-haired young woman who addressed him as an intellectual equal who could impart knowledge.
"What does that signify, Rod?" she asked, pointing to a group of letters and figures graven deep in the stone.
"Oh, that's the cornerstone of the first course of masonry above ground, of the first wing of the old house, built by the first Norquay," Rod told her with a trace of pride that he covered by assumed casualness. "Those are his initials. R.S.N. for Roderick Sylvester Norquay. And the year."
"1809," the girl murmured. "A hundred years exactly. You know I have always thought of this country as a semi-wilderness—the last American frontier. How many generations, Rod?"
"We're the fifth from his time," he indicated the chiseled stone. "Grove and Phil and myself and Dorothy. I don't know if you've met Dorothy. She's married to a chap named Hale. Lives in Victoria."
"A century since that stone was laid by a man's hands," Laska continued musingly. "Five generations. No, certainly I did not imagine one would find any such well-established ancestral heritage on this wild coast."
"What's a century?" Rod commented. "Greece and Egypt had philosophers and poets and noble ruins when our ancestors were wearing skins and killing their meat with clumsy spears."
The girl paid no heed to this.
"I knew this place was old the moment I stepped ashore," she continued. "I knew it must have a history. Who was this first enterprising Norquay, Rod? Where did he come from and how did he pitch on this spot so long ago as the place for his baronial hall? I wonder if you realize what a—an air of distinction this place has? As if it were so well established that all the crudities had been ironed out—an atmosphere like—well, of permanency and power."
"Well, it's home, and that's a good deal," Rod answered, a little doubtful of too eager response. "I don't know about the power, but it's permanent enough."
"You can hardly imagine other people dispossessing you and making it their home, eh?" Laska asked mischievously.
"No chance," Rod grinned at the suggestion. "I should say not."
"Tell me about the first Norquay," she wheedled. "I am sure it's vivid history. What was he—great—great—"
"Great-great-grandfather," Rod supplied. "Have you seen the family boneyard?"
She shook her head.
"I have seen most of the interior of the house. I have sat on the porch and drank tea and stared at these wonderful mountains that stick up everywhere, I have walked about on this lovely turf, in these grounds that are like an English park—and marveled how it had been made so beautiful. But I haven't seen the family boneyard. Is that literal?"
The boy nodded.
"There have been quite a few of us born here at one time and another," he said in his pleasant low-toned voice, "and buried here finally. Come and I'll show you, Miss Wall."
"My name's Laska," she smiled at him.
"All right then, Laska," he agreed. "Odd name. I like the sound."
"R.S.N. Eighteen hundred and nine. Hoc saxum posuit. I've forgotten all my Latin, Rod."
"He placed this stone," Rod translated. "Come on. I'll show you where the old chap's buried and tell you something about him."
Big Dent passes on map and chart for an island, by a geographical laxity. But it is an island only for brief moments at an extremely high tide. Otherwise it is a peninsular out-thrust, that helps to choke the Euclataw Passage.
Big Dent was a mile wide and twice as long. From side to side and from end to end it stood clothed in its ancient garment, the forest. Everywhere lifted enormous firs in whose plumy crests had sighed the winds that blew the first Norquay's trading vessel down Cardero Channel, cedars that were lusty when Columbus crossed the Western Ocean. For profit there had never been ax laid to tree on that twelve hundred acres. On its northern extremity Big Dent remained the natural forest of the region, a hushed jungle of devil's club, salal brush, ferns that grew man-high, salmonberry, branchy dogwood, vine maple. Out of this lesser growth the great trees rose in their majesty, silent, immobile, brooding. The sun blazed on their lofty heads. About their boles were silence and shade, a coolness at midday heat, the commingled smells of moist, fecund earth and rotting wood.
But all across the southern portion, the greater half of Big Dent, the thickets had been cut away, the patriarchal trees freed of the litter about their solidly planted feet, the sun let in, grass sowed, so that the eye could reach far down wooded corridors and get glimpses of sparkling sea; so that a Norquay or his guests could walk abroad in those friendly places and observe—if they were minded to observe—how man had imposed order and beauty upon the wasteful processes of nature by sweeping away all the detritus of the arboreal struggle to survive.
Leaving the house Rod and Laska walked a little way up the slope. They came to a small square enclosed by a low wall of masonry, the half-acre of the Norquay dead. A gate of grilled iron let them in. A red cedar rose in the middle of the plot like an enormous brown mast which had sprouted flat, feathery boughs that drooped as if tired with the weight of long-borne years, and cast a deep shadow over part of this burial ground. In this shaded portion uprose a number of gray granite slabs, the native rock every Norquay had used for such of his works as he wished to endure. Apart from these simple slabs stood a row of uniform design: a headstone four feet high, three feet wide; another, the width of the headstone and the length of a tall man, laid flat on the earth. Ornamentation there was none. Plain gray stone, worked to a smooth polish, briefly lettered,—that was all. A few flower beds were let into the turf between. A simple, unpretentious place in which plain men could take their long sleep.
Rod stopped by the first of the larger headstones.
"This was the first of our family here," he said.
The girl looked down at the inscription.
RODERICK SYLVESTER NORQUAY
Born 1770
Died 1834
His eye was not dim
Nor his natural force abated
"This was his wife," Rod pointed. "The first white woman to live on the Pacific coast north of California. That was his youngest son. That was his eldest son, my great-grandfather. And that was his youngest son, who was killed by the Chilcotin Indians on their second raid. There's grandfather's wife, and a son and daughter. There is my mother's grave. And over there is my oldest brother, who died before I was born."
"How interesting," the girl murmured. "What an adventurous time these first people of yours must have had."
"Rather," Rod agreed, "when you think of some of the things they had to face. Still, by all accounts, they rather enjoyed themselves. It never seems to have occurred to them to go elsewhere. There were lots of men pioneered after Vancouver's first voyage, but all of them except old Roderick seem to have come here to make a fortune in the fur trade and go home to live on their gains. Old Roderick kept a journal all his life. It's a queer matter-of-fact account of what he did, mixed up with a lot of philosophic speculation on why he did it. It appears that from the first time he dropped anchor in Mermaid Bay to wait out a fair tide through the narrows, he had the feeling that right here was the place to make a stand. He says quite frankly in his journal that a few determined men could easily subdue the natives and possess great estates. He says further that shortly after letting go the anchor he saw a hawk fly from its nest in a great tree, and he thought to himself that, by the grace of God and his own resolution, he would some day build on this silent headland a stout nest in which many a brood of Norquays should be hatched.
"Imagine a man who had crossed the Atlantic and rounded Cape Horn in a hundred-ton sailing vessel on a fur-trading venture looking at a savage coast and planning to found a family!"
"He had vision," Laska supplied.
"He needed to have, those days," Rod grinned. "The North Pacific was a fur-trader's paradise, but it was several thousand miles from anything like civilization. Old Roderick knew that well enough. He knew a good deal about this region before he came here on his own hook, you see. He happened out here first when Captain George Vancouver made his voyage of exploration in 1792. He was a petty officer on the Discovery. He had the journal habit, even in those days. He tells about the surveys they made that year and the next. The idea of this country—after he'd seen a lot of it—took such a hold of him that three or four years later he got out of the British navy, scraped up all the money he could beg and borrow, outfitted a barque called the Hermes and sailed for the Northwest to make a fortune trading beads and brass wire and Sheffield knives to the Indians for sea-otter skins.
"On that first voyage he got the idea of settling here. It evidently grew on him, because when he came out the second time—the first venture was a very profitable one—he brought a couple of dozen extra men, artisans of different trades, and set up a trading post here just as Captain John Meares tried to do at Nootka Sound a few years earlier—you'll find a very interesting account of Meares and his clash with the Spaniards over that post in Begg's 'History of British Columbia.' Meares and Don Martinez between them very nearly got Spain and Great Britain into war. Vancouver came out here to look into that squabble as much as for anything else.
"But ancestor Norquay had this spot pretty much to himself. He bought Big Dent from a local chief for six sheets of copper, an old cutlass, and a pint of glass beads. Think of it! He built a blockhouse of logs with a sixteen-foot stockade. His men cultivated some land for vegetables. He had cattle and pigs and sheep—brought 'em out in the Hermes, like Noah with the animals aboard the Ark. But fur-trading was the chief business. He traded for sea otter as far north as Sitka. Here at home he got beaver, mink, marten, whatever the Indians brought in. The Northwest Fur Company claimed this territory. They were carrying on a big scrap with the Hudson's Bay Company at the time. Finally the Hudson's Bay swallowed the Northwest concern and got a free hand. They tried for years to make all North America their private fur preserve. But they didn't scare old Roderick off. Apparently he wasn't afraid of them. Too well-equipped, I suppose, to be driven off.
"On his fourth voyage in 1804 he took a cargo of twenty-two hundred sea otter which netted him fifty-six thousand dollars—so you can see what the fur trade meant in those times. On that trip he made off with the daughter of a country gentleman of Northumberland—he was Scotch himself, you know—an English girl named Dorothy Grosvenor. Her people considered him a low-class adventurer. So they took the bit in their teeth, boarded the Hermes and sailed away. Sounds quaint. They brought out three or four families with them. The men stationed here had mostly gotten Indian wives by that time. Dorothy sailed with great-great-grandfather wherever he went with the barque for three or four years. But their first child was born here on Big Dent in 1807.
"The next year the Chilcotins came down. They're a fighting tribe from the interior. They had a way of coming down a river to the head of Bute Inlet, killing as many coast Indians as they could, taking the loot and the young women back across the mountains. I suppose they had heard of this white man who had lots of goods. So they organized a surprise attack on Hawk's Nest, as it was already called.
"There was quite a scrimmage, by all accounts. The Chilcotins were beaten off. We lost six men in the fight. Those small headstones are for them," Rod indicated a compact row of graves.
"So the following year old Roderick, who had never given up for a moment the idea of making this his permanent home, started the stone house. He built one wing. His son added a wing. Grandfather can tell you how he built the last addition, and another story, and how he put on a roof of tiles in 1860 after the Cariboo gold rush.
"The Chilcotins pulled off another surprise party in 1826, but they got such a hot reception they never tried again. By that time old Roderick had two sons and two daughters. The youngest son was the only man killed on our side. He led a party to destroy the Chilcotin canoes while they were attacking the house. He was killed by an arrow. But they smashed the canoes and only two Chilcotins out of forty got away. In fact, they were spared to go back and tell the rest of the tribe that it was bad medicine to molest the white men who lived at Hawk's Nest.
"They understood that, evidently, because they never came back. Although nearly twenty years later a brother of grandfather's was stuck full of arrows one evening right down where our boat landing is now. That killing was credited to the Chilcotins—in revenge. But it wasn't a fight. It was pure assassination. However, that was the last bloodshed here.
"The first fifty years of holding Hawk's Nest was altogether a pretty lively affair. But they kept right on the job. In '59 gold was found in the Cariboo and people rushed into B.C. by thousands. The Hudson's Bay monopoly was broken. B.C. became a Crown colony. We got title to our land. Grandfather began to operate in timber. Confederation with the Dominion took place in '69 or '70, in my father's time. There have been lots of changes in this country since old Roderick came. But we're still here."
"You can quite truthfully say that you belong to one of the first families, eh, Rod?" Laska bantered.
"Oh, well," he replied carelessly, "that's sheer accident. Nothing to be cocky about. I didn't have any hand in the big doings."
"Still, it's something to live up to, don't you think?" she inquired seriously.
"Perhaps. I don't know that it's on the cards for me to carry on any particular tradition. Neither myself nor Phil. We're superfluous, in a way. Of course we belong to the family, and all that sort of thing. But we're only younger sons, after all."
"I don't quite understand," Laska wrinkled her brows. "What difference does that make?"
"Quite a lot—to us," Rod grinned amiably. "You see, the original Roderick had certain notions about money and property. He laid down as a working principle for his heirs that the estate should never be divided and portioned out to each generation. He said that the bulk of it ought to remain compactly in one inheritance, for the benefit of everybody concerned. He made various suggestions as to how this should be carried out, but the main one is that the home place and the bulk of the holdings shall pass into control of the eldest son. We've proceeded always on that basis. Grandfather, in fact, when it came his turn, converted the estate into a corporation. The control is always vested in the eldest son. He owns the shares and carries on the management. Seventy per cent of the net income goes to him. The other thirty per cent of revenue is equally divided among the rest of the children, whether there's one or a dozen, and is paid to each for life as each attains his majority.
"Grandfather is really the king of the castle. He's eighty now and I don't suppose he can last much longer. The governor is the active manager. When the governor goes out, Grove takes over the whole works. He'll live here. His children will probably be born here, and his oldest son will be expected to carry on in the usual manner. It's a pretty well-established family custom."
"What do the younger sons do?" Laska inquired. "The girls naturally get married and go away with their husbands. But the younger sons?"
"Oh, we generally stick around," Rod said casually. "But once our schooling is completed, we are at liberty to do what we please. There's usually plenty of opportunity in connection with the family affairs. We own a lot of timber and land along the coast. But when a younger son wants to set up his own vine and fig tree he has to do it elsewhere."
"I see," Laska looked thoughtful. "It's something like the old English law of entail."
"Yes, except that it isn't a law. Merely a custom. You might call it a family tradition. Any generation could depart from it, if they wanted to."
They stood for a minute looking at the dull red of the tile roof showing through the trees.
"Shall we walk around a bit?" Rod asked. "Or shall we go and have a game of tennis before dinner?"
"Let's walk. I hate tennis when it's hot," she said frankly.
They closed the iron gate behind them and lounged along under the trees.
"What became of the Hermes?" Laska asked suddenly.
"Went to the boneyard long ago," Rod replied. "Next time you're up in the library look in that big glass case by the east wall. You'll see old Roderick's charts and navigating instruments, sextant, chronometers, so on. The binnacle and compass is on the Haida—some of the old metal fittings, too. The old Hermes was all oak, brass, copper and bronze. Her figurehead stands in a corner of the hall. You noticed it?"
"The wooden figure of a battered Neptune? I didn't know what it was," Laska confessed.
Across the lawn as they strolled, there came presently a man in flannels. When he came up to them it turned out to be Phil.
"The governor wants you, Rod," he said. "They're making medicine in the library. I'll look out for Miss Wall."
"You'd better look out for yourself," Rod answered with brotherly impudence.
If he had dreamed how close he came to the mark with this youthful attempt at repartee, Rod would assuredly have kept silence. If there were any one of his blood for whom Rod had a genuine unselfish affection, it was this tall brother who stood smiling down at Laska Wall. In the very nature of things Rod could not know that he had just placed in Laska's hands a weapon to be used—however unconsciously—against his brother, that anything he could say or do should conceivably tilt the uncertain scales of a woman's decision. So he grinned at his own sally and strode away toward the house, whistling "Hey, Johnny Cope" and wondering carelessly why "they" were making medicine and what his father could want of him so urgent that Phil had been sent to command his attendance. So far as Rod was concerned, his father's intentions and commands were usually conveyed in the most casual manner. In the Norquay establishment the authority of the head of the house was such that it never needed to be peremptory.
The wide porch facing seaward was deserted when he came there. He passed into a roomy hall, panelled in weathered oak to a ceiling crossed with massive beams. He took the broad stairway two steps at a bound, and turned more sedately into a big, low-ceilinged room where every inch of wall space was given over to loaded bookshelves.
When he saw what councillors composed Phil's cryptic "they," Rod felt for the first time a shadow of trouble in the offing.
His tutor, Mr. Arthur Spence, occupied one chair. Near him sat Grove, the eldest son of the house, a true Norquay in physique, long-limbed, wide-shouldered, with a more mature, slightly less engaging countenance than his brothers, although he had the same fresh coloring, the same reddish-brown hair and clear bluish-gray eyes. Norquay senior sat with his legs crossed, a bulky, well-preserved man. His years rode him lightly. He looked at his youngest son in silence. No one but Rod, perhaps, would have felt critical disapproval in that impersonal glance. None of the three understood how impressionable to a look, a tone, the nuances of personal atmosphere, an eighteen-year-old boy could be. Rod himself did not realize the lightning-like quality of his own perceptions where people were concerned. He had what he called "hunches." That they invariably proved correct never aroused in him more than a passing wonder.
"Sit down, Rod," his father indicated a chair.
The tutor and Grove arose, left the room. The fancy flitted across Rod's mind that they constituted a jury which had deliberated and given a verdict and now withdrew to permit the august judge to pronounce sentence. He racked his brain for a misdemeanor, a possible offence which merited paternal condemnation. He could recall none. Yet there was an air of suspended judgment in the slow puffing of his father's cigar, the judicial immobility of his manner, in the very silence of that pleasant room with its massive furniture and burdened shelves.
"I've decided it will be as well for you to enter McGill in the fall semester," he said dispassionately, fixing his eyes on his son with a slight obliquity of his brows. "Spence assures me you can easily qualify for entrance. You will go down to Vancouver day after to-morrow, get what clothes you need, then proceed to Montreal and stay with your Aunt Maida until the University opens. Give you a chance to meet a few people and get your bearings."
"Day after to-morrow!" Rod echoed.
"Yes," Norquay senior methodically deposited the ash from his cigar in a brass tray. "And in the meantime—" his even, mellow tone took on a slight acidity—"no more of this harebrained rapid-running with that Thorn girl in that gaudy barge of yours. It may amuse you, but it's hardly fair to the girl."
"Amuse me—well, it is good fun," Rod manifested a trace of bewilderment. He had never been attacked from such an angle. "But I don't see—unfair to Mary Thorn? D' you mean dangerous? We both swim like fish, and you can't sink a dugout. I know enough about swirly water not to run the rapids when it isn't safe."
"I wasn't thinking about the specific danger of drowning."
"What then?" Rod asked.
His father regarded him with a mild impatience.
"You're almost a man," he said impersonally. "It's time your taste in feminine associations rose a little above the half-wild daughter of a dreamy-eyed incompetent. Especially when it begins to attract attention. You seem to have forgotten, the last two or three days, that we have guests here."
"Oh, I see," Rod muttered. A flush crept up into his cheeks, as the implication of his father's words and attitude drove home. He was sophisticated enough to understand—and to resent—and to keep both understanding and resentment to himself. But he could not wholly conceal the small tempest that began to stir in him. He was dealing with a man accustomed to dealing with men, with personalities, and gauging them correctly for his own purposes. The boy's quick color, the momentary flash in his eyes, brought an amused smile to the elder Norquay's face.
"That's all," he said. "Most youngsters seem to find it necessary to makes asses of themselves about some sort of female sometime early in their careers. Don't be a common ass, Rod."
"I'll try not to, sir," Rod answered with as near an approach to sarcasm as he dared, "for the sake of the family."
With that he left the room, conscious of a quickly gathered frown on his father's face at this tonal shadow of irony. The Norquay characteristic, as Mr. Kipling once mentioned of colonials, was one of straight-flung words and few. This was not the first time Rod had manifested a variation from family type in his mode of expressing himself.
And as Rod strode down the hall to his own room he muttered to himself: "That's Grove. The governor never would have thought of such a rotten thing himself. Well, I may be an ass—but I'm not a damned cad."
He snicked the lock on his own door, flung himself moodily into a chair by the window. He felt a queer mixture of boyish anger and a touch of forlornness,—as a colt that has had the run of wide pastures must feel when it is first haltered and thrust into a stall.