CHAPTER IV
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.