It wasn't a simple flirtatious liking Isabel had for him. Rod was too keen to make such a mistake. It seemed that this dainty doll-like creature was capable of intense feeling and not too sure in her control of the emotional disturbance. Rod began by being amused. Then he felt sorry. In the end he grew a little alarmed over the net result of being sympathetic. It is highly discomforting to a young man to have a girl weep spontaneously on his chest, unless he conceives it to be his special mission and blessed privilege to soothe this particular damsel's tears. Isabel did that one evening in the shadow of a hoary old cedar in Hawk's Nest grounds. She couldn't help it, she said, after a long embarrassed silence during which she dabbed the tears away. She was a fool and she knew it, but it couldn't be helped. One wasn't responsible for one's feelings, was one?
And Rod, with a little ache in his breast, a great deal of wordless sympathy for Isabel, because he had for a long time suffered that queer state of stifled longing, that seemed sometimes as if it would drive him mad, agreed that one was not. They let it go at that.
Rod sat with elbows on the sill of his bedroom window late that night, staring out over a moon-bathed landscape, silver barred with black, where the shadows of great trees lay across the lawn. He looked down a shimmering moon-path that seemed to offer a bright highway across the channel where Mary Thorn lay sleeping,—if indeed she slept. Rod wondered if something in her breast ever drove her to a window to stare across the tide and think of him. She was home now. He had his own sources of information. To-morrow he would see her. To-night the querulous imps that make a man question his destiny and desire bade him consider if he did well to let his heart abide so constantly with Mary Thorn when there were other desirable women to be had for the asking. Isabel, for instance? All clear sailing. No questions asked or answered. The dual family blessing, and any little material wants cheerfully attended to. On the personal side,—well, he was flesh and blood, sexual tinder. When Isabel put her face against his breast and sobbed in that stifled, choking fashion he had been deeply moved, thrilled, conscious of her physical nearness, the sweet fragrant odor of her tousled hair, the trembling of her small, soft body. Wasn't that good enough? What did a man want of a woman when he took her to wife?
Rod shook himself impatiently. What rot he had been thinking. Whatever it was in Mary Thorn that so imperatively promised to fulfil his every need, it didn't reside in Isabel Wall. He was sure of that. He could let himself slide into a temporary infatuation with Isabel—perhaps. He could conceive of possessing her. But he couldn't behold her down a long vista of years playing the game fairly and bravely, taking the cards dealt from the deck of life, good, bad and indifferent, with courage and fortitude. He couldn't picture Isabel doing that any more than he could picture her, aetat sixteen, shooting the Euclataw Rapids in a dugout, eyes shining in sheer ecstasy of swift movement, hair streaming in the wind. Isabel would either have been frightened or wildly, dangerously excited.
That was as far as Rod carried his analogy. It was sufficient. He had not tried his hand at creative fiction without a sense of character, of form, proportion. He egotistically assumed that he could accurately gauge personal values, that he did it intuitively as well as rationally. If his prescience did not clearly account for the depth and tenacity of his affection for Mary Thorn it quickly and thoroughly disposed of Isabel as a substitute.
A light flashed from a window in Oliver Thorn's house. Rod rested his chin on cupped palms. Unrest, longing blew through the spaces of his being like a hot wind. The bright moon and the dusky woods beckoned him into their restful silences, and the light across the channel seemed to blink a message. It drew him like a magnet. Over there his heart lay. If Isabel's unheralded breakdown had served no other purpose, it had filled him with a wild impatience, revived a fever that burned him. The madness of a lover's moon! The coursing blood of youth clamoring for the fulfilment of life's promise,—life that promises so much and often gives so little. The impulse to translate dreams into realities. Quien sabe?
He rose and went softly downstairs and out a side door to the pale emptiness of the lawn crossed with inky bands of shadow, and so sauntering, head bowed and hands sunk deep in his pockets, presently brought up on the float. The Haida lay moored on one side, the Kowloon on the other. A profusion of canoes and rowboats lay hauled out on the planks.
Rod stood awhile, like a man in two minds. His eyes lingered on the moon-path. His ears took note of the lessening monotone between the Gillard Islands on the east and the choked westward passage inside Little Dent. A still night and a slackening tide.
He got into a dinghy, shipped the oars, rowed slowly out into the channel. Halfway, an eddy setting toward the Valdez shore took him in its sweep. He let the oars rest and lighted a cigarette, gazing at the tranquil, silvery beauty.
"What a night," he whispered. "What a night for fairies and mermaids—and lovers."