With that he left the room, conscious of a quickly gathered frown on his father's face at this tonal shadow of irony. The Norquay characteristic, as Mr. Kipling once mentioned of colonials, was one of straight-flung words and few. This was not the first time Rod had manifested a variation from family type in his mode of expressing himself.
And as Rod strode down the hall to his own room he muttered to himself: "That's Grove. The governor never would have thought of such a rotten thing himself. Well, I may be an ass—but I'm not a damned cad."
He snicked the lock on his own door, flung himself moodily into a chair by the window. He felt a queer mixture of boyish anger and a touch of forlornness,—as a colt that has had the run of wide pastures must feel when it is first haltered and thrust into a stall.
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.