Chapter III: The Flutter of Sable Wings

A path took form on the mossy rock as Jack MacRae strode on. He followed this over patches of grass, by lone firs and small thickets, until it brought him out on the rim of the Cove. He stood a second on the cliffy north wall to look down on the quiet harbor. It was bare of craft, save that upon the beach two or three rowboats lay hauled out. On the farther side a low, rambling house of logs showed behind a clump of firs. Smoke lifted from its stone chimney.

MacRae smiled reminiscently at this and moved on. His objective lay at the Cove's head, on the little creek which came whispering down from the high land behind. He gained this in another two hundred yards, coming to a square house built, like its neighbor, of stout logs with a high-pitched roof, a patch of ragged grass in front, and a picket-fenced area at the back in which stood apple trees and cherry and plum, gaunt-limbed trees all bare of leaf and fruit. Ivy wound up the corners of the house. Sturdy rosebushes stood before it, and the dead vines of sweet peas bleached on their trellises.

It had the look of an old place--as age is reckoned in so new a country--old and bearing the marks of many years' labor bestowed to make it what it was. Even from a distance it bore a homelike air. MacRae's face lightened at the sight. His step quickened. He had come a long way to get home.

Across the front of the house extended a wide porch which gave a look at the Cove through a thin screen of maple and alder. From the grass-bordered walk of beach gravel half a dozen steps lifted to the floor level. As MacRae set foot on the lower step a girl came out on the porch.

MacRae stopped. The girl did not see him. Her eyes were fixed questioningly on the sea that stretched away beyond the narrow mouth of the Cove. As she looked she drew one hand wearily across her forehead, tucking back a vagrant strand of dusky hair. MacRae watched her a moment. The quick, pleased smile that leaped to his face faded to soberness.

"Hello, Dolly," he said softly.

She started. Her dark eyes turned to him, and an inexpressible relief glowed in them. She held up one hand in a gesture that warned silence,--and by that time MacRae had come up the steps to her side and seized both her hands in his. She looked at him speechlessly, a curious passivity in her attitude. He saw that her eyes were wet.

"What's wrong, Dolly?" he asked. "Aren't you glad to see Johnny come marching home? Where's dad?"

"Glad?" she echoed. "I never was so glad to see any one in my life. Oh, Johnny MacRae, I wish you'd come sooner. Your father's a sick man. We've done our best, but I'm afraid it's not good enough."

"He's in bed, I suppose," said MacRae. "Well, I'll go in and see him. Maybe it'll cheer the old boy up to see me back."

"He won't know you," the girl murmured. "You mustn't disturb him just now, anyway. He has fallen into a doze. When he comes out of that he'll likely be delirious."

"Good Lord," MacRae whispered, "as bad as that! What is it?"

"The flu," Dolly said quietly. "Everybody has been having it. Old Bill Munro died in his shack a week ago."

"Has dad had a doctor?"

The girl nodded.

"Harper from Nanaimo came day before yesterday. He left medicine and directions; he can't come again. He has more cases than he can handle over there."

They went through the front door into a big, rudely furnished room with a very old and worn rug on the floor, a few pieces of heavy furniture, and bare, uncurtained windows. A heap of wood blazed in an open cobblestone fireplace.

MacRae stopped short just within the threshold. Through a door slightly ajar came the sound of stertorous breathing, intermittent in its volume, now barely audible, again rising to a labored harshness. He listened, a look of dismayed concern gathering on his face. He had heard men in the last stages of exhaustion from wounds and disease breathe in that horribly distressed fashion.

He stood a while uncertainly. Then he laid off his mackinaw, walked softly to the bedroom door, looked in. After a minute of silent watching he drew back. The girl had seated herself in a chair. MacRae sat down facing her.

"I never saw dad so thin and old-looking," he muttered. "Why, his hair is nearly white. He's a wreck. How long has he been sick?"

"Four days," Dolly answered. "But he hasn't grown old and thin in four days, Jack. He's been going downhill for months. Too much work. Too much worry also, I think--out there around the Rock every morning at daylight, every evening till dark. It hasn't been a good season for the rowboats."

MacRae stirred uneasily in his chair. He didn't understand why his father should have to drudge in a trolling boat. They had always fished salmon, so far back as he could recall, but never of stark necessity. He nursed his chin in his hand and thought. Mostly he thought with a constricted feeling in his throat of how frail and old his father had grown, the slow-smiling, slow-speaking man who had been father and mother and chum to him since he was an urchin in knee breeches. He recalled him at their parting on a Vancouver railway platform,--tall and rugged, a lean, muscular, middle-aged man, bidding his son a restrained farewell with a longing look in his eyes. Now he was a wasted shadow. Jack MacRae shivered. He seemed to hear the sable angel's wing-beats over the house.

He looked up at the girl at last.

"You're worn out, aren't you, Dolly?" he said. "Have you been caring for him alone?"

"Uncle Peter helped," she answered. "But I've stayed up and worried, and I am tired, of course. It isn't a very cheerful home-coming, is it, Jack? And he was so pleased when he got your cable from London. Poor old man!"

MacRae got up suddenly. But the clatter of his shoes on the floor recalled him to himself. He sat down again.

"I've got to do something," he asserted.

"There's nothing you can do," Dolly Ferrara said wistfully. "He can't be moved. You can't get a doctor or a nurse. The country's full of people down with the flu. There's only one chance and I've taken that. I wrote a message to Doctor Laidlaw--you remember he used to come here every summer to fish--and Uncle Peter went across to Sechelt to wire it. I think he'll come if he can, or send some one, don't you? They were such good friends."

"That was a good idea," MacRae nodded. "Laidlaw will certainly come if it's possible."

"And I can keep cool cloths on his head and feed him broth and give him the stuff Doctor Harper left. He said it depended mostly on his own resisting power. If he could throw it off he would. If not--"

She turned her palms out expressively.

"How did you come?" she asked presently.

"Across from Qualicum in a fish carrier to Folly Bay. I borrowed a boat at the Bay and rowed up."

"You must be hungry," she said. "I'll get you something to eat."

"I don't feel much like eating,"--MacRae followed her into the kitchen--"but I can drink a cup of tea."

He sat on a corner of the kitchen table while she busied herself with the kettle and teapot, marveling that in four years everything should apparently remain the same and still suffer such grievous change. There was an air of forlornness about the house which hurt him. The place had run down, as the sands of his father's life were running down. Of the things unchanged the girl he watched was one. Yet as he looked with keener appraisal, he saw that Dolly Ferrara too had changed.

Her dusky cloud of hair was as of old; her wide, dark eyes still mirrored faithfully every shift of feeling, and her incomparable creamy skin was more beautiful than ever. Moving, she had lost none of her lithe grace. And though she had met him as if it had been only yesterday they parted, still there was a difference which somehow eluded him. He could feel it, but it was not to be defined. It struck him for the first time that many who had never seen a battlefield, never heard a screaming shell, nor shuddered at the agony of a dressing station, might still have suffered by and of and through the reactions of war.

They drank their tea and ate a slice of toast in silence. MacRae's comrades in France had called him "Silent" John, because of his lapses into concentrated thought, his habit of a close mouth when he was hurt or troubled or uncertain. One of the things for which he had liked Dolly Ferrara had been her possession of the same trait, uncommon in a girl. She could sit on the cliffs or lie with him in a rowboat lifting and falling in the Gulf swell, staring at the sea and the sky and the wheeling gulls, dreaming and keeping her dreams shyly to herself,--as he did. They did not always need words for understanding. And so they did not talk now for the sake of talking, pour out words lest silence bring embarrassment. Dolly sat resting her chin in one hand, looking at him impersonally, yet critically, he felt. He smoked a cigarette and held his peace until the labored breathing of the sick man changed to disjointed, muttering, incoherent fragments of speech.

Dolly went to him at once. MacRae lingered to divest himself of the brown overalls so that he stood forth in his uniform, the R.A.F. uniform with the two black wings joined to a circle on his left breast and below that the multicolored ribbon of a decoration. Then he went in to his father.

Donald MacRae was far gone. His son needed no M.D. to tell him that. He burned with a high fever which had consumed his flesh and strength in its furnace. His eyes gleamed unnaturally, with no light of recognition for either his son or Dolly Ferrara. And there was a peculiar tinge to the old man's lips that chilled young MacRae, the mark of the Spanish flu in its deadliest manifestation. It made him ache to see that gray head shift from side to side, to listen to the incoherent babble, to mark the feeble shiftings of the nervous hands.

For a terrible half hour he endured the sight of his father struggling for breath, being racked by spasms of coughing. Then the reaction came and the sick man slept,--not a healthy, restful sleep; it was more like the dying stupor of exhaustion. Young MacRae knew that.

He knew with disturbing certainty that without skilled treatment--perhaps even in spite of that--his father's life was a matter of hours. Again he and Dolly Ferrara tiptoed out to the room where the fire glowed on the hearth. MacRae sat thinking. Dusk was coming on, the long twilight shortened by the overcast sky. MacRae glowered at the fire. The girl watched him expectantly.

"I have an idea," he said at last. "It's worth trying."

He opened his bag and, taking out the wedge-shaped cap of the birdmen, set it on his head and went out. He took the same path he had followed home. On top of the cliff he stopped to look down on Squitty Cove. In a camp or two ashore the supper fires of the rowboat trollers were burning. Through the narrow entrance the gasboats were chugging in to anchorage, one close upon the heels of another.

MacRae considered the power trollers. He shook his head.

"Too slow," he muttered. "Too small. No place to lay him only a doghouse cabin and a fish hold."

He strode away along the cliffs. It was dark now. But he had ranged all that end of Squitty in daylight and dark, in sun and storm, for years, and the old instinctive sense of direction, of location, had not deserted him. In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle Bay. The Gower house, all brightly gleaming windows, loomed near. He struck down through the dead fern, over the unfenced lawn.

Halfway across that he stopped. A piano broke out loudly. Figures flittered by the windows, gliding, turning. MacRae hesitated. He had come reluctantly, driven by his father's great need, uneasily conscious that Donald MacRae, had he been cognizant, would have forbidden harshly the request his son had come to make. Jack MacRae had the feeling that his father would rather die than have him ask anything of Horace Gower.

He did not know why. He had never been told why. All he knew was that his father would have nothing to do with Gower, never mentioned the name voluntarily, let his catch of salmon rot on the beach before he would sell to a Gower cannery boat,--and had enjoined upon his son the same aloofness from all things Gower. Once, in answer to young Jack's curious question, his natural "why," Donald MacRae had said:

"I knew the man long before you were born, Johnny. I don't like him. I despise him. Neither I nor any of mine shall ever truck and traffic with him and his. When you are a man and can understand, I shall tell you more of this."

But he had never told. It had never been a mooted point. Jack MacRae knew Horace Gower only as a short, stout, elderly man of wealth and consequence, a power in the salmon trade. He knew a little more of the Gower clan now than he did before the war. MacRae had gone overseas with the Seventh Battalion. His company commander had been Horace Gower's son. Certain aspects of that young man had not heightened MacRae's esteem for the Gower family. Moreover, he resented this elaborate summer home of Gower's standing on land he had always known to be theirs, the MacRaes'. That puzzled him, as well as affronted his sense of ownership.

But these things, he told himself, were for the moment beside the point. He felt his father's life trembling in the balance. He wanted to see affectionate, prideful recognition light up those gray-blue eyes again, even if briefly. He had come six thousand miles to cheer the old man with a sight of his son, a son who had been a credit to him. And he was willing to pocket pride, to call for help from the last source he would have chosen, if that would avail.

He crossed the lawn, waited a few seconds till the piano ceased its syncopated frenzy and the dancers stopped.

Betty Gower herself opened at his knock.

"Is Mr. Gower here?" he asked.

"Yes. Won't you come in?" she asked courteously.

The door opened direct into a great living room, from the oak floor of which the rugs had been rolled aside for dancing. As MacRae came in out of the murk along the cliffs, his one good eye was dazzled at first. Presently he made out a dozen or more persons in the room,--young people nearly all. They were standing and sitting about. One or two were in khaki--officers. There seemed to be an abrupt cessation of chatter and laughing at his entrance. It did not occur to him at once that these people might be avidly curious about a strange young man in the uniform of the Flying Corps. He apprehended that curiosity, though, politely veiled as it was. In the same glance he became aware of a middle-aged woman sitting on a couch by the fire. Her hair was pure white, elaborately arranged, her eyes were a pale blue, her skin very delicate and clear. Her face somehow reminded Jack MacRae of a faded rose leaf.

In a deep armchair near her sat Horace Gower. A young man, a very young man, in evening clothes, holding a long cigarette daintily in his fingers, stood by Gower.

MacRae followed Betty Gower across the room to her father. She turned. Her quick eyes had picked out the insignia of rank on MacRae's uniform.

"Papa," she said. "Captain--" she hesitated.

"MacRae," he supplied.

"Captain MacRae wishes to see you."

MacRae wished no conventionalities. He did not want to be introduced, to be shaken by the hand, to have Gower play host. He forestalled all this, if indeed it threatened.

"I have just arrived home on leave," he said briefly. "I find my father desperately ill in our house at the Cove. You have a very fast and able cruiser. Would you care to put her at my disposal so that I may take my father to Vancouver? I think that is his only chance."

Gower had risen. He was not an imposing man. At his first glimpse of MacRae's face, the pink-patched eye, the uniform, he flushed slightly,--recalling that afternoon.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You'd be welcome to the _Arrow_ if she were here. But I sent her to Nanaimo an hour after she landed us. Are you Donald MacRae's boy?"

"Yes," MacRae said. "Thank you. That's all."

He had said his say and got his answer. He turned to go. Betty Gower put a detaining hand on his arm.

"Listen," she put in eagerly. "Is there anything any of us could do to help? Nursing or--or anything?"

MacRae shook his head.

"There is a girl with him," he answered. "Nothing but skilled medical aid would help him at this stage. He has the flu, and the fever is burning his life out."

"The flu, did you say?" The young man with the long cigarette lost his bored air. "Hang it, it isn't very sporting, is it, to expose us--these ladies--to the infection? I'll say it isn't."

Jack MacRae fixed the young man--and he was not, after all, much younger than MacRae--with a steady stare in which a smoldering fire glowed. He bestowed a scrutiny while one might count five, under which the other's gaze began to shift uneasily. A constrained silence fell in the room.

"I would suggest that you learn how to put on a gas mask," MacRae said coldly, at last.

Then he walked out. Betty Gower followed him to the door, but he had asked his question and there was nothing to wait for. He did not even look back until he reached the cliff. He did not care if they thought him rude, ill-bred. Then, as he reached the cliff, the joyous jazz broke out again and shadows of dancing couples flitted by the windows. MacRae looked once and went on, moody because chance had decreed that he should fail.

* * * * *

When a ruddy dawn broke through the gray cloud battalions Jack MacRae sat on a chair before the fireplace in the front room, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his cupped palms. He had been sitting like that for two hours. The fir logs had wasted away to a pile of white ash spotted with dying coals. MacRae sat heedless that the room was growing cold.

He did not even lift his head at the sound of heavy footsteps on the porch. He did not move until a voice at the door spoke his name in accents of surprise.

"Is that you, yourself, Johnny MacRae?"

The voice was deep and husky and kind, and it was not native to Squitty Cove. MacRae lifted his head to see his father's friend and his own, Doctor Laidlaw, physician and fisherman, bulking large. And beyond the doctor he saw a big white launch at anchor inside the Cove.

"Yes," MacRae said.

"How's your father?" Laidlaw asked. "That wire worried me. I made the best time I could."

"He's dead," MacRae answered evenly. "He died at midnight."