CHAPTER XXIII
A northwest gale rattled a loose window in the library at Hawk's Nest. Beyond that the house stood solid to the blasts, as solid as a mountain mass of the granite that formed its walls. In the surrounding woods branchy cedar and tall, plumed firs bent before that gusty wind like bowed giants, giants that sighed in mournful cadences. Rod stuffed a folded bit of paper between sash and frame to silence the tremulous chatter of the wood.
He flattened his face against the pane for a few seconds. In the dark where the wind lashed at everything as if the Borean gods were in a towering passion, he could see faint, shifting flecks of white,—wind-whipped seas breaking in the channel. In brief lulls he could hear the rapids grumbling at full flood, the deep roar of agitated waters softened by distance. He could mark under that black canopy of sky a silver streak where straight current met back eddy in a foaming line, and the devil's dishpans spun about deep vortices.
He went back to his chair before a glowing fireplace. It was near midnight, and he was wakeful, his brain a simmering pot. A succession of images trooped by; he couldn't stop them. Thoughts, fancies, realities leaped out of nothingness, loomed before him, vanished before the crowding army of their fellows; as if he were engaged upon a review of the past and a projection of the future. He could no more stop that procession than he could check the tide roaring through the Euclataw Passage. It was as if he stood aside and watched the entity that was himself performing this and that action,—a single thread tracing a formless pattern in the warp and woof of persons and things. He could see it all very clearly up to the present. Beyond that the images were uncertain, tentative, sometimes blurred.
His youthful sense of the family as a permanent, imperishable force, in relation to which he as an individual was negligible, had been wiped out of his mind. The colossal stature of the Norquays had shrunk to his own dimension. The solid had become fluid, ready to trickle through his fingers if he did not have a care.
Five years ago to-night he had been at Hawk's Nest in a breathing spell from the Valdez camp. Out of all the permanences that surrounded him then, he was now only sure of one,—Mary, his wife. His grandfather was dead. Phil was dead, and Grove. Their father was dying here to-night, while the northwester swept the coast. Materially, their hold was now uncertain on all that had served to make them what they were.
In a little while there would be only himself to make decisions, to take action, to bear a responsibility for matters which no longer involved merely himself or his immediate family but embraced people he had never seen, would never know. Their welfare, resting in his hands, burdened him with an oppressive weight.
Why should he shoulder this burden. He began to understand why men here and there evade responsibility, or break down under it, when the shadow of such responsibility loomed darkly over himself.
He had had no preparation for responsibility. He had lived—he smiled at the platitude—a sheltered life. Except in one or two isolated instances, such as his marriage, he had never been compelled to make a momentous decision. His youth, with its romantic dreaming, its fastidiousness which had made him shun such physical grossness as Grove's, had been ordered and directed. So had his more formal education. Even his four years in the army, except in unimportant details, had never taken him into the realm of plan and execution. He had simply been a cog in the military machine, obeying orders, reissuing those orders to men bound to obey him, as he was himself bound to obey others. Responsibility rested always in other hands. He had been aware of that and fairly content to have it so.
But that was at an end. Very soon now, a matter of hours, when the unconscious old man in a room down the hallway breathed out his tired life he, Rod Norquay, would become the fulcrum and lever which should move enormous weights. He would be faced by a necessity to take up a task which offered little hope of reward save a sense of duty performed. Other men's welfare, other men's money, other men's sins. He could draw back from this, or see it through. He could evade it or grapple it stoutly. But there it was, waiting for him to decide.
Grove had evaded, when he faced the incontrovertible result of his handiwork. Or had he? No one would ever know. He had gone in mid-afternoon from the Norquay Trust office to his home. He had telephoned a friend to join him in a duck hunt at a gun club on the Ladner flats, had arranged to pick up his friend. He had come out from the house to the garage, bearing a shotgun, a bag and a shooting coat, whistling as he came. He spoke to the chauffeur genially. While the man attended to some detail of his machine the shotgun cracked and Grove Norquay fell against the running-board. He was dead before the man could cry for help.
And whether it was sheer accident, or whether he had killed himself in a moment of despair at the muddle he had wrought, Rod could not say. Publicly it went as a sad accident. But he knew what his father thought. He knew, too, what rumors ran like sly foxes in the street, rumors which did not have their origin in mere conjecture, but which nevertheless would have brought Grove's financial castle tumbling about their ears if his father had not been prepared.
Rod would never forget the crowd of people in the street an hour before the Norquay Trust Company opened its doors. People well and ill-dressed, shopclerks, business men, middle-aged women, people whose motors were parked at the curb. They strove and pushed and jostled for advantage, eager to be first, until policemen came and herded them into line,—a line that extended a block and curved around a corner up a side street like the tail of an uneasy, muttering serpent.
All that forenoon and well past the luncheon hour they filed past the paying tellers, presented checks, passbooks, demanding their money, withdrawing accounts. As the cash boxes of the Norquay Trust emptied into pockets that departed hastily through the front door they were replenished by sheafs of Norquay estate currency withdrawn from other banks in hundred-thousand-dollar lots.
From behind bronze grillwork Rod watched this scene. He marked the nervous eagerness of these people over their money. They were frightened, watchful, uneasy, until they had it in their hands. The air was charged with hostile currents, with a tension that communicated itself to department managers, the ledgerkeepers, the tellers. One man made a five-hundred-dollar mistake,—and broke under the strain. He sat in his cage and wept, and a murmuring that was like a growl swept through the lofty, pillared room until he was led away and another man took up his work of handing out cash.
Once Rod's father came to sit by him for a minute. He looked out at the anxious faces, the people crowding forward, pressing eagerly up to the wickets. After a little he said to Rod in a low, tense whisper:
"The coward. The damned coward! He couldn't face the music."
About one-thirty the run tapered off. Every certificate of deposit, every demand was met promptly, courteously. Human nature asserted itself. An institution that could disgorge an enormous total and still exhibit great bales of currency and gold behind each teller couldn't be shaky. Who peddled the story that the Norquay Trust was broke, anyhow? Some damn fool. It was a false alarm. Fellow that started it ought to be shot—scaring people like that—making so much trouble. The Norquay estate's backing it. No chance of a concern like that being in the hole. What you think? Eh?
They stood out on the curb, repeating things like that. Men turned back at the very wickets. Some returned shamefacedly to redeposit their money, only to be told politely that the Norquay Trust declined to reopen closed accounts.
The ordinary cash depositors ceased from troubling long before the closing hour.
"That's that," Charlie Hale grunted. "We've pretty well disposed of the small fry. Fortunately a few big accounts can be met. And none of the trust accounts are at our heads like a pistol."
That was the end of a salient demonstration. Routine resumed its placid groove. Time and effort Norquay senior declared and his son-in-law, whose profession was accountancy, agreed, would bring order out of the chaos Grove had wrought.
Yes, he had somehow blundered into chaos. And no matter how many other clutching fingers might have been dipped into the trust coffers, Grove had failed to feather his own nest. His personal estate included only his house and his yacht. There was no record of his having ever withdrawn a dollar from trust funds, of receiving more than a liberal salary. His assets didn't include enough cash to bury him. Where, then, did the money go?
"Ask Wall, Richston, Deane—that crowd," Charlie Hale muttered, when Rod put the question. "I may be able to tell you after awhile. A few things look very, very fishy. The fact remains that half the so-called assets are junk. There's no mistake about the liabilities. If I can follow certain leads far enough, we may be able to make somebody disgorge. But they're pretty clever. They seem to have got Grove coming and going."
"You will have to get crews together soon," his father had told him after Grove's funeral. "I'd put the first crew in on that Horn limit. It's beautiful timber and easy logging. Also start up the old Valdez camp. There are two or three limits on Hardwicke yet, as well. In fact, timber's all we have left. I've hypothecated everything else. I'll look after the town end. The woods will be your field. The weather ought to break soon."
The weather had not permitted woods work. But the turn of affairs had sent Rod and his wife and boy almost immediately to Hawk's Nest. The elder Norquay urged them to go.
"That's the place for you," he said. "It's our home. It has always been our home. It will be yours, Rod. You can consider it yours now. When I feel my time coming, I shall want to be there too."
And his time had come, perhaps a little sooner than he expected, perhaps not sooner than he wished.
"My life has been a failure," he said to Rod one day. "I might have made a different man of Grove, if I hadn't been so comfortably secure in the egotistic belief that to be my son was guarantee enough. Oh, I've been blind with the sort of pride that goes before a fall. And I was too harsh. He was proud too. I killed him myself, Rod."
He would talk like that, full of grief. And he would go on to speak of expiation, of the obligation upon them to give a steward's account of their trust.
"You see," he would repeat, "it was not simply Grove, but what Grove represented, what he sprang from, that bred people's confidence. No casual promoter, no fly-by-night financier could have induced that simple trust on such a scale. People looked beyond him and they saw something that was solid as a rock, that couldn't fail. We must live up to that, somehow."
The library door opened. Mary beckoned silently.
"He wants to speak to you," she said in the hall.
But the momentary flash of consciousness lapsed before Rod reached the bedside. He had been sinking for days. He was going out now, like a guttering candle. A nurse stood at the foot of the bed. A doctor stood, watch in hand, his fingers on the faint pulse. Rod looked a question. The man shook his head. Rod sat down beside the bed. To his quickened imagination the room seemed full of the flutter of sable wings.
An hour later his father died.