He took some papers off a table and sat fussing with them. He didn't seem inclined to talk at first, beyond a few casual remarks. Rod waited. He knew his father. He felt that something was coming,—something that rested with a great weight on the elder man's mind. Since Rod came home there seemed to have arisen between them a more keenly sympathetic understanding than had ever existed before. It wasn't a matter of words. It was a feeling. Rod divined intuitively that his father had some deep trouble to share with him. He could not have defined any reason for this belief. It existed as a belief. In that conviction he waited.
"Five years ago," Norquay senior began abruptly, "I looked forward to sitting back with a pipe and slippers and a book while my sons carried on in the old way. For a hundred and thirty years, to speak precisely, we have gone ahead solidifying our position, doing well by ourselves and all connected with us. We seemed—as a family—to have acquired a permanence, a solidarity, beyond that of any family in this province. We have become a sort of institution. We were here first. Of the exploring adventurers, we were the first to take root. You know the family history. We have helped to make this country what it is. We have acquired a great deal of material power, yet I do not recall that we have ever abused it. In each generation we have had a lot of faithful service, and we have had it because we have scrupulously observed some form of obligation to those who served us. Men have trusted us as being persons entirely trustworthy. We have not been Shylocks. We have not been arrogant. We have never been greedy for more."
Five years earlier Rod would have assented, as a matter of course. Now he stirred slightly in his chair, as his father paused, and observed dispassionately:
"Would you include Grove in that last?"
"I am coming to Grove," Norquay senior answered. "To arrive at Grove by a logical sequence is the reason for this summing-up of ourselves. A few weeks before your grandfather died he said to me, 'My father once prophesied that Hawk's Nest would some day hatch out an eagle. What's the last hatching? Sparrows. Sparrows!' Quite apropos of nothing. We hadn't even been talking. He grew very uncertain in his mind at the last. A great age, Rod. Nearly ninety. He scarcely comprehended the war. Grove was there with a house party. I think their high spirits annoyed him. Sparrows!"
He contemplated the rug with a fixed frown.
"I wonder if he were right," he said at last.
"I must confess," he continued, "that I have spent my life in a state of inertia compared to his, and to the energy his father worked with. They were actively constructive. Looking back, I seem to have done nothing but maintain a sort of status quo. Indeed, lacking any necessity or any great personal ambition, with a disinclination for politics, a distaste for anything in the way of business outside of estate affairs, there seemed nothing upon which to expend great energy. I've moved along pleasant lines of least resistance. Looking back, it doesn't seem so satisfactory. Avoiding boredom, keeping up a moderate revenue without being a taskmaster to labor—that about expresses it.
"It seemed to me, however, that my sons must inherit some of the abounding energy, the creativeness, that I somehow lacked. Your eldest brother, whom you were named after, was a vigorous, high-spirited boy. That venturesomeness resulted in his death at an early age. That left Grove next in line. For many years I watched the three of you develop from sturdy youngsters into young men. Phil, it seemed to me, was something like myself. You were always a puzzle, an odd sort of boy, somewhat given to precocious remarks and unexpected actions. Lovable, but erratic, probably brilliant but not entirely dependable, I used sometimes to say to myself: How wide one can go of the mark.
"So you see it was natural that Grove, being the eldest, should be looked to for able carrying on of that which has become a tradition since old Roderick outlined his plan to hold compactly for the entire family that which he had built up out of nothing himself.