CHAPTER III
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?