PRESIDENT NORQUAY TRUST INSTANTLY KILLED
SHOTGUN ACCIDENTALLY DISCHARGED
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.