But there seemed a note of finality in that scene. He could not break down her defences, tenuous as they were.
And so, his heart filled with a strange, heavy ache, Rod walked down to his canoe and put out into the channel. Across the way the red roof and gray gables of Hawk's Nest beckoned him home. Home,—where there were no problems that could not be solved by the writing of a check, Rod thought sardonically.
The inevitable reaction set in. A passionate resentment against Mary Thorn began to burn in him. She was a fool, he said. He himself a greater fool to abase himself before her.
But neither objurgation nor self-bestowed epithets could rid him of that heavy feeling in his breast.
CHAPTER IX
On an afternoon a week later Rod sat in the library nursing a book, a cigarette, and some curiously mixed reflections. A week-end party had come and gone, leaving Laska, her maid, and a friend at Hawk's Nest. Whereupon Phil had taken the Haida and departed for a point up the coast. The old restful quiet had succeeded that forty-eight hours of good-natured glamor, the laughter and drinking and dancing, in which Rod, morose and broody, seemed to detect an irritatingly hectic note. He was glad they were gone, glad to see the Kowloon clear of Mermaid Bay. Grove was getting beefier, more assertive, more arrogant. He was so cocksure, so frankly contemptuous of things and persons outside his own sphere.
Yet by all accounts Grove was becoming a reckonable power in the affairs of B.C. There was a dash and sweep about his operations that moved men to admiration. He had been tremendously successful in all he undertook, far more so than Rod had believed possible. The Norquay Trust Company was a three-ring circus and Grove was the ringmaster. Lesser men and concerns leaped and curvetted when he cracked his whip. He was fond of cracking the whip, Rod cynically observed.
Rod eyed his father, sitting on the other side of a periodical-strewn table. He wondered what his father thought of Grove now. But he knew that his father was thinking of quite another matter,—for which he was himself responsible. He continued to look at Norquay senior with a mildly expectant curiosity. The library was the council chamber of the family, the place chosen for edicts, discussions of policy, admonition. From childhood Rod and his brothers had, so to speak, taken their medicine in that pleasant book-lined room. His father now bent a placid eye, slightly quizzical, on his youngest son. Rod waited.
"I really don't see the necessity," Norquay senior remarked at last. "Of course a gentleman need not necessarily be a drone. On the other hand one doesn't need to do a laborer's work in order to acquire knowledge of labor. You've finished school, of course. You have seen a little of the world and as time passes you will undoubtedly see a great deal more. Still, if you're keen on this, I'll speak to Phil. He can give you charge of a camp."