Chapter XXI: As it Was in the Beginning

MacRae followed the path along the cliffs. He did not look for Betty. His mind was on something else, engrossed in considerations which had little to do with love. If it be true that a man keeps his loves and hates and hobbies and ambitions and appetites in separate chambers, any of which may be for a time so locked that what lies therein neither troubles nor pleases him, then that chamber in which he kept Betty Gower's image was hermetically sealed. Her figure was obscured by other figures,--his father and Horace Gower and himself.

Not until he had reached the Cove's head and come to his own house did he recall that Betty had gone along the cliffs, and that he had not seen her as he passed. But that could easily happen, he knew, in that mile stretch of trees and thickets, those deep clefts and pockets in the rocky wall that frowned upon the sea.

He went into the house. Out of a box on a shelf in his room he took the message his father had left him and sitting down in the shadowy coolness of the outer room began to read it again, slowly, with infinite care for the reality his father had meant to convey.

All his life, as Jack remembered him, Donald MacRae had been a silent man, who never talked of how he felt, how things affected him, who never was stricken with that irresistible impulse to explain and discuss, to relieve his troubled soul with words, which afflicts so many men. It seemed as if he had saved it all for that final summing-up which was to be delivered by his pen instead of his lips. He had become articulate only at the last. It must have taken him weeks upon weeks to write it all down, this autobiography which had been the mainspring of his son's actions for nearly two years. There was wind and sun in it, and blue sky and the gray Gulf heaving; somber colors, passion and grief, an apology and a justification.

MacRae laid down the last page and went outside to sit on the steps. Shadows were gathering on the Cove. Far out, the last gleam of the sun was touching the Gulf. A slow swell was rising before some far, unheralded wind. The _Blanco_ came gliding in and dropped anchor. Trollers began to follow. They clustered about the big carrier like chickens under the mother wing. By these signs MacRae knew that the fish had stopped biting, that it was lumpy by Poor Man's Rock. He knew there was work aboard. But he sat there, absent-eyed, thinking.

He was full of understanding pity for his father, and also for Horace Gower. He was conscious of being a little sorry for himself. But then he had only been troubled a short two years by this curious aftermath of old passions, whereas they had suffered all their lives. He had got a new angle from which to approach his father's story. He knew now that he had reacted to something that was not there. He had been filled with a thirst for vengeance, for reprisal, and he had declared war on Gower, when that was not his father's intent. Old Donald MacRae had hated Gower profoundly in the beginning. He believed that Gower hated him and had put the weight of his power against him, wherever and whenever he could. But life itself had beaten him,--and not Gower. That was what he had been trying to tell his son.

And life itself had beaten Gower in a strangely similar fashion. He too was old, a tired, disappointed man. He had reached for material success with one hand and happiness with the other. One had always eluded him. The other Jack MacRae had helped wrest from him. MacRae could see Gower's life in detached pictures, life that consisted of making money and spending it, life with a woman who whined and sniffled and complained. These things had been a slow torture. MacRae could no longer regard this man as a squat ogre, merciless, implacable, ready and able to crush whatsoever opposed him. He was only a short, fat, oldish man with tired eyes, who had been bruised by forces he could not understand or cope with until he had achieved a wistful tolerance for both things and men.

Both these old men, MacRae perceived, had made a terrible hash of their lives. Neither of them had succeeded in getting out of life much that a man instinctively feels that he should get. Both had been capable of happiness. Both had struggled for happiness as all men struggle. Neither had ever securely grasped any measure of it, nor even much of content.

MacRae felt a chilly uncertainty as he sat on his doorstep considering this. He had been traveling the same road for many months,--denying his natural promptings, stifling a natural passion, surrendering himself to an obsession of vindictiveness, planning and striving to return evil for what he conceived to be evil, and being himself corrupted by the corrosive forces of hatred.

He had been diligently bestowing pain on Betty, who loved him quite openly and frankly as he desired to be loved; Betty, who was innocent of these old coils of bitterness, who was primitive enough in her emotions, MacRae suspected, to let nothing stand between her and her chosen mate when that mate beckoned.

But she was proud. He knew that he had puzzled her to the point of anger, hurt her in a woman's most vital spot.

"I've been several kinds of a fool," MacRae said to himself. "I have been fooling myself."

He had said to himself once, in a somber mood, that life was nothing but a damned dirty scramble in which a man could be sure of getting hurt. But it struck him now that he had been sedulously inflicting those hurts upon himself. Nature cannot be flouted. She exacts terrible penalties for the stifling, the inhibition, the deflection of normal instincts, fundamental impulses. He perceived the operation of this in his father's life, in the thirty years of petty conflict between Horace Gower and his wife. And he had unconsciously been putting himself and Betty in the way of similar penalties by exalting revenge for old, partly imagined wrongs above that strange magnetic something which drew them together.

Twilight was at hand. Looking through the maple and alder fringe before his house MacRae saw the fishing boats coming one after the other, clustering about the _Blanco_. He went down and slid the old green dugout afloat and so gained the deck of his vessel. For an hour thereafter he worked steadily until all the salmon were delivered and stowed in the _Blanco's_ chilly hold.

He found it hard to keep his mind on the count of salmon, on money to be paid each man, upon these common details of his business. His thought reached out in wide circles, embracing many things, many persons: Norman Gower and Dolly, who had had courage to put the past behind them and reach for happiness together; Stubby Abbott and Etta Robbin-Steele, who were being flung together by the same inscrutable forces within them. Love might not truly make the world go round, but it was a tremendous motive power in human actions. Like other dynamic forces it had its dangerous phases. Love, as MacRae had experienced it, was a curious mixture of affection and desire, of flaming passion and infinite tenderness. Betty Gower warmed him like a living flame when he let her take possession of his thought. She was all that his fancy could conjure as desirable. She was his mate. He had felt that, at times, with a conviction beyond reason or logic ever since the night he kissed her in the Granada. If fate, or the circumstances he had let involve him, should juggle them apart, he felt that the years would lead him down long, drab corridors.

And he was suddenly determined that should not happen. His imagination flung before him kinetoscopic flashes of what his father's life had been and Horace Gower's. That vision appalled MacRae. He would not let it happen,--not to him and Betty.

He washed, ate his supper, lay on his bunk in the pilot house and smoked a cigarette. Then he went out on deck. The moon crept up in a cloudless sky, dimming the stars. There was no wind about the island. But there was wind loose somewhere on the Gulf. The glass was falling. The swells broke more heavily along the cliffs. At the mouth of the Cove white sheets of spray lifted as each comber reared and broke in that narrow place.

He recollected that he had left the _Blanco's_ dinghy hauled up on the beach on the tip of Point Old. He got ashore now in the green dugout and walked across to the Point.

A man is seldom wholly single-track in his ideas, his impulses. MacRae thought of the dinghy. He had a care for its possible destruction by the rising sea. But he thought also of Betty. There was a pleasure in simply looking at the house in which she lived. Lights glowed in the windows. The cottage glistened in the moonlight.

When he came out on the tip of the Point the dinghy, he saw, lay safe where he had dragged it up on the rocks. And when he had satisfied himself of this he stood with hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking down on Poor Man's Rock, watching the swirl and foam as each swell ran over its sunken head.

MacRae had a subconscious perception of beauty, beauty of form and color. It moved him without his knowing why. He was in a mood to respond to beauty this night. He had that buoyant, grateful feeling which comes to a man when he has escaped some great disaster, when he is suddenly freed from some grim apprehension of the soul.

The night was one of wonderful beauty. The moon laid its silver path across the sea. The oily swells came up that moon-path in undulating folds to break in silver fragments along the shore. The great island beyond the piercing shaft of the Ballenas light and the mainland far to his left lifted rugged mountains sharp against the sky. From the southeast little fluffs of cloud, little cottony flecks white as virgin snow, sailed before the wind that mothered the swells. But there was no wind on Squitty yet. There was breathless stillness except for the low, spaced mutter of the surf.

He stood a long time, drinking in the beauty of it all,--the sea and the moon-path, and the hushed, dark woods behind.

Then his gaze, turning slowly, fell on something white in the shadow of a bushy, wind-distorted fir a few feet away. He looked more closely. His eyes gradually made out a figure in a white sweater sitting on a flat rock, elbows on knees, chin resting in cupped palms.

He walked over. Betty's eyes were fixed on him. He stared down at her, suddenly tongue-tied, a queer constricted feeling in his throat. She did not speak.

"Were you sitting here when I came along?" he asked at last.

"Yes," she said. "I often come up here. I have been sitting here for half an hour."

MacRae sat down beside her. His heart seemed to be trying to choke him. He did not know where to begin, or how, and there was much he wanted to say that he must say. Betty did not even take her chin out of her palms. She stared out at the sea, rolling up to Squitty in silver windrows.

MacRae put one arm around her and drew her up close to him, and Betty settled against him with a little sigh. Her fingers stole into his free hand. For a minute they sat like that. Then he tilted her head back, looked down into the gray pools of her eyes, and kissed her.

"You stood there looking down at the sea as if you were in a dream," she whispered; "and all the time I was crying inside of me for you to come to me. And presently, I suppose, you will go away."

"No," he said. "This time I have come for good."

"I knew you would, sometime," she murmured. "At least, I hoped you would. I wanted you so badly."

"But because one wants a thing badly it doesn't always follow that one gets it."

MacRae was thinking of his father when he spoke.

"I know that," Betty said. "But I knew that you wanted me, you see. And I had faith that you would brush away the cobwebs somehow. I've been awfully angry at you sometimes. It's horrible to feel that there is an imaginary wall between you and some one you care for."

"There is no wall now," MacRae said.

"Was there ever one, really?"

"There seemed to be."

"And now there is none?"

"None at all."

"Sure?" she murmured.

"Honest Injun," MacRae smiled. "I went to see your father to-day about a simple matter of business. And I found--I learned--oh, well, it doesn't matter. I buried the hatchet. We are going to be married and live happily ever after."

"Well," Betty said judiciously, "we shall have as good a chance as any one, I think. Look at Norman and Dolly. I positively trembled for them--after Norman getting into that mess over in England. He never exactly shone as a real he-man, that brother of mine, you know. But they are really happy, Jack. They make me envious."

"I think you're a little hard on that brother of yours," MacRae said. He was suddenly filled with a great charity toward all mankind. "He never had much of a chance, from all I can gather."

He went on to tell her what Norman had told him that afternoon on the hill above the Cove. But Betty interrupted.

"Oh, I know that now," she declared. "Daddy told me just recently. Daddy knew what Norman was doing over there. In fact, he showed me a letter from some British military authority praising Norman for the work he did. But Daddy kept mum when Norman came home and those nasty rumors began to go around. He thought it better for Norman to take his medicine. He was afraid mother would smother him with money and insist on his being a proper lounge lizard again, and so he would gradually drop back into his old uselessness. Daddy was simply tickled stiff when Norman showed his teeth--when he cut loose from everything and married Dolly, and all that. He's a very wise old man, that father of mine, Jack. He hasn't ever got much real satisfaction in his life. He has been more content this last month or so than I can ever remember him. We have always had loads of money, and while it's nice to have plenty, I don't think it did him any good. My whole life has been lived in an atmosphere of domestic incompatibility. I think I should make a very capable wife--I have had so many object lessons in how not to be. My mother wasn't a success either as a wife or a mother. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's really true, Jack. Mamma's a very well-bred, distinguished-looking person with exquisite taste in dress and dinner parties, and that's about the only kind thing I can say for her. Do you really love me, Jack? Heaps and heaps?"

She shot this question at him with a swift change of tone and an earnestness which straightway drove out of MacRae's mind every consideration save the proper and convincing answer to such intimate questions.

"Look," Betty said after a long interval. "Daddy has built a fire on the beach. He does that sometimes, and we sit around it and roast clams in the coals. Johnny, Johnny," she squeezed his arm with a quick pressure, "we're going to have some good times on this island now."

MacRae laughed indulgently. He was completely in accord with that prophecy.

The blaze Gower had kindled flickered and wavered, a red spot on the duskier shore, with a yellow nimbus in which they saw him move here and there, and sit down at last with his back to a log and his feet stretched to the fire.

"Let's go down," MacRae suggested, "and break the news to him."

"I wonder what he'll say?" Betty murmured thoughtfully.

"Haven't you any idea?" MacRae asked curiously.

"No. Honestly, I haven't," Betty replied. "Daddy's something like you, Jack. That is, he does and says unexpected things, now and then. No, I really don't know what he will say."

"We'll soon find out."

MacRae took her hand. They went down off the backbone of the Point, through ferns and over the long uncut grass, down to the fire where the wash from the heavy swell outside made watery murmurs along the gravelly beach.

Gower looked up at them, waited for them to speak.

"Betty and I are going to be married soon," MacRae announced abruptly.

"Oh?" Gower took the pipe out of his mouth and rapped the ash out of it in the palm of his hand. "You don't do things half-heartedly, do you, MacRae? You deprive me of a very profitable business. You want my ranch--and now my housekeeper."

"Daddy!" Betty remonstrated.

"Oh, well, I suppose I can learn to cook for myself," Gower rumbled.

He was frowning. He looked at them staring at him, nonplussed. Suddenly he burst into deep, chuckling laughter.

"Sit down, sit down, and look at the fire," he said. "Bless your soul, if you want to get married that's your own business.

"Mind you," he chuckled after a minute, when Betty had snuggled down beside him, and MacRae perched on the log by her, "I don't say I like the idea. It don't seem fair for a man to raise a daughter and then have some young fellow sail up and take her away just when she is beginning to make herself useful."

"Daddy, you certainly do talk awful nonsense," Betty reproved.

"I expect you haven't talked much else the last little while," he retorted.

Betty subsided. MacRae smiled. There was a whimsicality about Gower's way of taking this that pleased MacRae.

They toasted their feet at the fire until the wavering flame burned down to a bed of glowing coals. They talked of this and that, of everything but themselves until the moon was swimming high and the patches of cottony cloud sailing across the moon's face cast intense black patches on the silvery radiance of the sea.

"I've got some clams in a bucket," Gower said at last. "Let's roast some. You get plates and forks and salt and pepper and butter, Bet, while I put the clams on the fire."

Betty went away to the house. Gower raked a flat rock, white-hot, out to the edge of the coals and put fat quahaugs on it to roast. Then he sat back and looked at MacRae.

"I wonder if you realize how lucky you are?" he said.

"I think I do," MacRae answered. "You don't seem much surprised."

Gower smiled.

"Well, no. I can't say I am. That first night you came to the cottage to ask for the _Arrow_ I got a good look at you, and you struck me as a fine, clean sort of boy, and I said to myself, 'Old Donald has never told him anything and he has no grudge against me, and wouldn't it be a sort of compensation if those two should fall naturally and simply in love with each other?' Yes, it may seem sentimental, but that idea occurred to me. Of course, it was just an idea. Betty would marry whoever she wanted to marry. I knew that. Nothing but her own judgment would influence her in a matter of that sort. I know. I've watched her grow up. Maybe it's a good quality or maybe it's a bad one, but she has always had a bull-dog sort of persistence about anything that strikes her as really important.

"And of course I had no way of knowing whether she would take a fancy to you or you to her. So I just watched. And maybe I boosted the game a little, because I'm a pretty wise old fish in my own way. I took a few whacks at you, now and then, and she flew the storm signals without knowing it."

Gower smiled reminiscently, stroking his chin with his hand.

"I had to fight you, after a fashion, to find out what sort of stuff you were, for my own satisfaction," he continued. "I saw that you had your Scotch up and were after my scalp, and I knew it couldn't be anything but that old mess. That was natural. But I thought I could square that if I could ever get close enough to you. Only I couldn't manage that naturally. And this scramble for the salmon got me in deep before I realized where I was. I used to feel sorry for you and Betty. I could see it coming. You both talk with your eyes. I have seen you both when you didn't know I was near.

"So when I saw that you would fight me till you broke us both, and also that if I kept on I would not only be broke but so deep in the hole that I could never get out, I shut the damned cannery up and let everything slide. I knew as soon as you were in shape you would try to get this place back. That was natural. And you would have to come and talk to me about it. I was sure I could convince you that I was partly human. So you see this is no surprise to me. Lord, no! Why, I've been playing chess for two years--old Donald MacRae's knight against my queen."

He laughed and thumped MacRae on the flat of his sturdy back.

"It might have been a stalemate, at that," MacRae said.

"But it wasn't," Gower declared. "Well, I'll get something out of living, after all. I've often thought I'd like to see a big, roomy house somewhere along these cliffs, and kids playing around. You and Betty may have your troubles, but you're starting right. You ought to get a lot out of life. I didn't. I made money. That's all. Poured it into a rat hole. Bessie is sitting over on Maple Point in a big drafty house with two maids and a butler, a two-thousand-acre estate, and her pockets full of Victory Bonds. She isn't happy, and she never can be. She never cared for anybody but herself, not even her children, and nobody cares for her, I'm all but broke, and I'm better off than she is. I hate to think I ever fought for her. She wasn't worth it, MacRae. That's a hell of a thing for a man to say about a woman he lived with for over thirty years. But it's true. It took me a good many miserable years to admit that to myself.

"I suppose she'll cling to her money and go on playing the _grande dame_. And if she can get any satisfaction out of that I'm willing. I've never known as much real peace and satisfaction as I've got now. All I need is a place to sleep and a comfortable chair to sit in. I don't want to chase dollars any more. All I want is to row around the Rock and catch a few salmon now and then and sit here and look at the sea when I'm tired. You're young, and you have all your life before you--you and Betty. If you need money, you are pretty well able to get it for yourself. But I'm old, and I don't want to bother."

He rambled on until Betty came down with plates and other things. The fat clams were opening their shells on the hot rock. They put butter and seasoning on the tender meat and ate, talking of this and that. And when the last clam had vanished, Gower stuffed his pipe and lit it with a coal. He gathered up the plates and forks and rose to his feet.

"Good night," he said benevolently. "I'm going to the house and to bed. Don't sit out here dreaming all night, you two."

He stumped away up the path. MacRae piled driftwood on the fire. Then he sat down with his back against the log, and Betty snuggled beside him, in the crook of his arm. Beyond the Point the booming of the surf rose like far thunder. The tide was on the ebb. Poor Man's Rock bared its kelp-thatched head. The racing swells covered it with spray that shone in the moonlight.

They did not talk. Speech had become nonessential. It was enough to be together.

So they sat, side by side, their backs to the cedar log and their feet to the fire, talking little, dreaming much, until the fluffy clouds scudding across the face of the moon came thicker and faster and lost their snowy whiteness, until the radiance of the night was dimmed.

Across the low summit of Point Old a new sound was carried to them. Where the moonlight touched the Gulf in patches, far out, whitecaps showed.

"Listen," MacRae murmured.

The wind struck them with a puff that sent sparks flying. It rose and fell and rose again until it whistled across the Point in a steady drone,--the chill breath of the storm-god.

MacRae turned up Betty's wrist and looked at her watch.

"Look at the time, Betty mine," he said. "And it's getting cold. There'll be another day."

He walked with her to the house. When she vanished within, blowing him a kiss from her finger tips, MacRae cut across the Point. He laid hold of the _Blanco's_ dinghy and drew it high to absolute safety, then stood a minute gazing seaward, looking down on the Rock. Clouds obscured the moon now. A chill darkness hid distant shore lines and mountain ranges which had stood plain in the moon-glow, a darkness full of rushing, roaring wind and thundering seas. Poor Man's Rock was a vague bulk in the gloom, forlorn and lonely, hidden under great bursts of spray as each wave leaped and broke with a hiss and a roar.

MacRae braced himself against the southeaster. It ruffled his hair, clawed at him with strong, invisible fingers. It shrieked its fury among the firs, stunted and leaning all awry from the buffeting of many storms.

He took a last look behind him. The lights in Gower's house were out and the white-walled cottage stood dim against the darkened hillside. Then MacRae, smiling to himself in the dark, set out along the path that led to Squitty Cove.

THE END

By the author of "Big Timber"

NORTH OF FIFTY-THREE

By BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth.

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He has created the atmosphere of the frozen North with wonderful realism.--_Boston Globe_.

Mr. Sinclair's two characters are exceptionally well-drawn and sympathetic. His style is robust and vigorous. His pictures of Canadian life stimulating.--_New York Nation_.

Mr. Sinclair sketches with bold strokes as befits a subject set amid limitless surroundings. The book is readable and shows consistent progress in the art of novel writing.--_St. Louis Globe-Democrat_.

An unusually good story of the conflict between a man and a woman. It is a readable, well written book showing much observation and good sense. The hero is a fine fellow and manages to have his fling at a good many conventions without being tedious.--_New York Sun_.

The story is well written. It is rich in strong situation, romance and heart-stirring scenes, both of the emotional and courage-stirring order. It ranks with the best of its type.--_Springfield Republican_.

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LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Publishers

34 Beacon St., Boston.