Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

  CHAPTER IV

  Inheritance

  On a morning four days later Jack MacRae sat staring into the coals onthe hearth. It was all over and done with, the house empty and still,Dolly Ferrara gone back to her uncle's home. Even the Cove was bare offishing craft. He was alone under his own rooftree, alone with anoppressive silence and his own thoughts.

  These were not particularly pleasant thoughts. There was nothing mawkishabout Jack MacRae. He had never been taught to shrink from theinescapable facts of existence. Even if he had, the war would have curedhim of that weakness. As it was, twelve months in the infantry, nearlythree years in the air, had taught him that death is a commonplace aftera man sees about so much of it, that it is many times a welcome relieffrom suffering either of the body or the spirit. He chose to believethat it had proved so to his father. So his feelings were not thatstrange mixture of grief and protest which seizes upon those to whomdeath is the ultimate tragedy, the irrevocable disaster, when it fallsupon some one near and dear.

  No, Jack MacRae, brooding by his fire, was lonely and saddened andheavy-hearted. But beneath these neutral phases there was slowlygathering a flood of feeling unrelated to his father's death, moredirectly based indeed upon Donald MacRae's life, upon matters but nowrevealed to him, which had their root in that misty period when hisfather was a young man like himself.

  On the table beside him lay an inch-thick pile of note paper all closelywritten upon in the clear, small pen-script of his father.

  My son: [MacRae had written] I have a feeling lately that I may never see you again. Not that I fear you will be killed. I no longer have that fear. I seem to have an unaccountable assurance that having come through so much you will go on safely to the end. But I'm not so sure about myself. I'm aging too fast. I've been told my heart is bad. And I've lost heart lately. Things have gone against me. There is nothing new in that. For thirty years I've been losing out to a greater or less extent in most of the things I undertook--that is, the important things.

  Perhaps I didn't bring the energy and feverish ambition I might have to my undertakings. Until you began to grow up I accepted things more or less passively as I found them.

  Until you have a son of your own, until you observe closely other men and their sons, my boy, you will scarcely realize how close we two have been to each other. We've been what they call good chums. I've taken a secret pride in seeing you grow and develop into a man. And while I tried to give you an education--broken into, alas, by this unending war--such as would enable you to hold your own in a world which deals harshly with the ignorant, the incompetent, the untrained, it was also my hope to pass on to you something of material value.

  This land which runs across Squitty Island from the Cove to Cradle Bay and extending a mile back--in all a trifle over six hundred acres--was to be your inheritance. You were born here. I know that no other place means quite so much to you as this old log house with the meadow behind it, and the woods, and the sea grumbling always at our doorstep. Long ago this place came into my hands at little more cost than the taking. It has proved a refuge to me, a stronghold against all comers, against all misfortune. I have spent much labor on it, and most of it has been a labor of love. It has begun to grow valuable. In years to come it will be of far greater value. I had hoped to pass it on to you intact, unencumbered, an inheritance of some worth. Land, you will eventually discover, Johnny, is the basis of everything. A man may make a fortune in industry, in the market. He turns to land for permanence, stability. All that is sterling in our civilization has its foundation in the soil.

  Out of this land of ours, which I have partially and half-heartedly reclaimed from the wilderness, you should derive a comfortable livelihood, and your children after you.

  But I am afraid I must forego that dream and you, my son, your inheritance. It has slipped away from me. How this has come about I wish to make clear to you, so that you will not feel unkindly toward me that you must face the world with no resources beyond your own brain and a sound young body. If it happens that the war ends soon and you come home while I am still alive to welcome you, we can talk this over man to man. But, as I said, my heart is bad. I may not be here. So I am writing all this for you to read. There are many things which you should know--or at least which I should like you to know.

  Thirty years ago--

  Donald MacRae's real communication to his son began at that point in thelong ago when the _Gull_ outsailed his sloop and young Horace Gower,smarting with jealousy, struck that savage blow with a pike pole at aman whose fighting hands were tied by a promise. Bit by bit, incidentby incident, old Donald traced out of a full heart and bitter memoriesall the passing years for his son to see and understand. He madeElizabeth Morton, the Morton family, Horace Gower and the Gower kinstand out in bold relief. He told how he, Donald MacRae, a nobody fromnowhere, for all they knew, adventuring upon the Pacific Coast, questingcarelessly after fortune, had fallen in love with this girl whosefamily, with less consideration for her feelings and desires than formutual advantages of land and money and power, favored young Gower andsaw nothing but impudent presumption in MacRae.

  Young Jack sat staring into the coals, seeing much, understanding more.It was all there in those written pages, a powerful spur to a vividimagination.

  No MacRae had ever lain down unwhipped. Nor had Donald MacRae, hisfather. Before his bruised face had healed--and young Jack rememberedwell the thin white scar that crossed his father's cheek bone--DonaldMacRae was again pursuing his heart's desire. But he was forestalledthere. He had truly said to Elizabeth Morton that she would never haveanother chance. By force or persuasion or whatsoever means werenecessary they had married her out of hand to Horace Gower.

  "That must have been she sitting on the couch," Jack MacRae whispered tohimself, "that middle-aged woman with the faded rose-leaf face. Lord,Lord, how things get twisted!"

  Though they so closed the avenue to a mesalliance, still their pridemust have smarted because of that clandestine affection, that boldlyattempted elopement. Most of all, young Gower must have hatedMacRae--with almost the same jealous intensity that Donald MacRae mustfor a time have hated him--because Gower apparently never forgot andnever forgave. Long after Donald MacRae outgrew that passion Gower hadcontinued secretly to harass him. Certain things could not be otherwiseaccounted for, Donald MacRae wrote to his son. Gower functioned in thesalmon trade, in timber, in politics. In whatever MacRae set on foot, heultimately discerned the hand of Gower, implacable, hidden, striking athim from under cover.

  And so in a land and during a period when men created fortunes easilyout of nothing, or walked carelessly over golden opportunities, DonaldMacRae got him no great store of worldly goods, whereas Horace Gower,after one venture in which he speedily dissipated an inherited fortune,drove straight to successful outcome in everything he touched. By thetime young Jack MacRae outgrew the Island teachers and must go toVancouver for high school and then to the University of BritishColumbia, old Donald had been compelled to borrow money on his land tomeet these expenses.

  Young Jack, sitting by the fire, winced when he thought of that. He hadtaken things for granted. The war had come in his second year at theuniversity,--and he had gone to the front as a matter of course.

  Failing fish prices, poor seasons, other minor disasters hadfollowed,--and always in the background, as old Donald saw it, the Gowerinfluence, malign, vindictive, harboring that ancient grudge.

  Whereas in the beginning MacRae had confidently expected by one resourceand another to meet easily the obligation he had incurred, the end of itwas the loss, during the second year of the war, of all the MacRaelands on Squitty,--all but a rocky corner of a few acres which includedthe house and garden. Old Donald had segregated that from his holding
swhen he pledged the land, as a matter of sentiment, not of value. Allthe rest--acres of pasture, cleared and grassed, stretches of fertileground, blocks of noble timber still uncut--had passed through the handsof mortgage holders, through bank transfers, by devious and tortuousways, until the title rested in Horace Gower,--who had promptly builtthe showy summer house on Cradle Bay to flaunt in his face, so oldDonald believed and told his son.

  It was a curious document, and it made a profound impression on JackMacRae. He passed over the underlying motive, a man justifying himselfto his son for a failure which needed no justifying. He saw now why hisfather tabooed all things Gower, why indeed he must have hated Gower asa man who does things in the open hates an enemy who strikes only fromcover.

  Strangely enough, Jack managed to grasp the full measure of what hisfather's love for Elizabeth Morton must have been without resenting thesecondary part his mother must have played. For old Donald was frank inhis story. He made it clear that he had loved Bessie Morton with anall-consuming passion, and that when this burned itself out he had neverexperienced so headlong an affection again. He spoke with kindly regardfor his wife, but she played little or no part in his account. And Jackhad only a faint memory of his mother, for she had died when he wasseven. His father filled his eyes. His father's enemies were his. Familyties superimposed on clan clannishness, which is the blood heritage ofthe Highland Scotch, made it impossible for him to feel otherwise. Thatblow with a pike pole was a blow directed at his own face. He took uphis father's feud instinctively, not even stopping to consider whetherthat was his father's wish or intent.

  He got up out of his chair at last and went outside, down to where theCove waters, on a rising tide, lapped at the front of a rude shed. Underthis shed, secure on a row of keel-blocks, rested a smallknockabout-rigged boat, stowed away from wind and weather, her singlemast, boom, and gaff unshipped and slung to rafters, her sail andrunning gear folded and coiled and hung beyond the wood-rats' teeth.Beside this sailing craft lay a long blue dugout, also on blocks, halffilled with water to keep it from checking.

  These things belonged to him. He had left them lying about when he wentaway to France. And old Donald had put them here safely against hisreturn. Jack stared at them, blinking. He was full of a dumb protest. Itdidn't seem right. Nothing seemed right. In young MacRae's mind therewas nothing terrible about death. He had become used to that. But he hadimagination. He could see his father going on day after day, month aftermonth, year after year, enduring, uncomplaining. Gauged by what hisfather had written, by what Dolly Ferrara had supplied when hequestioned her, these last months must have been gray indeed. And he haddied without hope or comfort or a sight of his son.

  That was what made young MacRae blink and struggle with a lump in histhroat. It hurt.

  He walked away around the end of the Cove without definite objective. Hewas suddenly restless, seeking relief in movement. Sitting still andthinking had become unbearable. He found himself on the path that ranalong the cliffs and followed that, coming out at last on the neck ofPoint Old where he could look down on the broken water that marked PoorMan's Rock.

  The lowering cloud bank of his home-coming day had broken in heavy rain.That had poured itself out and given place to a southeaster. The windwas gone now, the clouds breaking up into white drifting patches withbits of blue showing between, and the sun striking through in yellowshafts which lay glittering areas here and there on the Gulf. The swellthat runs after a blow still thundered all along the southeast face ofSquitty, bursting _boom_--_boom_--_boom_ against the cliffs, shootingspray in white cascades. Over the Rock the sea boiled.

  There were two rowboats trolling outside the heavy backwash from thecliffs. MacRae knew them both. Peter Ferrara was in one, Long Tom Spencein the other. They did not ride those gray-green ridges for pleasure,nor drop sidling into those deep watery hollows for joy of motion. Theywere out for fish, which meant to them food and clothing. That was theirwork.

  They were the only fisher folk abroad that morning. The gasboat men hadflitted to more sheltered grounds. MacRae watched these two lift andfall in the marching swells. It was cold. Winter sharpened his teethalready. The rowers bent to their oars, tossing and lurching. MacRaereflected upon their industry. In France he had eaten canned salmonbearing the Folly Bay label, salmon that might have been taken here bythe Rock, perhaps by the hands of these very men, by his own father.Still, that was unlikely. Donald MacRae had never sold a fish to a Gowercollector. Nor would he himself, young MacRae swore under his breath,looking sullenly down upon the Rock.

  Day after day, month after month, his father had tugged at the oars,hauled on the line, rowing around and around Poor Man's Rock, skirtingthe kelp at the cliff's foot, keeping body and soul together withunremitting labor in sun and wind and rain, trying to live and save thatlittle heritage of land for his son.

  Jack MacRae sat down on a rock beside a bush and thought about thissadly. He could have saved his father much if he had known. He couldhave assigned his pay. There was a government allowance. He could haveinvoked the War Relief Act against foreclosure. Between them they couldhave managed. But he understood quite clearly why his father made nomention of his difficulties. He would have done the same under the samecircumstances himself, played the game to its bitter end without a cry.

  But Donald MacRae had made a long, hard fight only to lose in the end,and his son, with full knowledge of the loneliness and discouragementand final hopelessness that had been his father's lot, was passingslowly from sadness to a cumulative anger. That cottage amid its greengrounds bright in a patch of sunshine did not help to soften him. Itstood on land reclaimed from the forest by his father's labor. It shouldhave belonged to him, and it had passed into hands that already graspedtoo much. For thirty years Gower had made silent war on Donald MacRaebecause of a woman. It seemed incredible that a grudge born of jealousyshould run so deep, endure so long. But there were the facts. JackMacRae accepted them; he could not do otherwise. He came of a breedwhich has handed its feuds from generation to generation, interpretingliterally the code of an eye for an eye.

  So that as he sat there brooding, it was perhaps a little unfortunatethat the daughter of a man whom he was beginning to regard as aforthright enemy should have chosen to come to him, tripping soundlesslyover the moss.

  He did not hear Betty Gower until she was beside him. Her foot clickedon a stone and he looked up. Betty was all in white, a glow in hercheeks and in her eyes, bareheaded, her reddish-brown hair shining in asmooth roll above her ears.

  "I hear you have lost your father," she said simply. "I'm awfullysorry."

  Some peculiar quality of sympathy in her tone touched MacRae deeply. Hiseyes shifted for a moment to the uneasy sea. The lump in his throattroubled him again. Then he faced her again.

  "Thanks," he said slowly. "I dare say you mean it, although I don't knowwhy you should. But I'd rather not talk about that. It's done."

  "I suppose that's the best way," she agreed, although she gave him adoubtful sort of glance, as if she scarcely knew how to take part ofwhat he said. "Isn't it lovely after the storm? Pretty much all thecivilized world must feel a sort of brightness and sunshine to-day, Iimagine."

  "Why?" he asked. It seemed to him a most uncalled-for optimism.

  "Why, haven't you heard that the war is over?" she smiled. "Surely someone has told you?"

  He shook his head.

  "It is a fact," she declared. "The armistice was signed yesterday ateleven. Aren't you glad?"

  MacRae reflected a second. A week earlier he would have thrown up hiscap and whooped. Now the tremendously important happening left himunmoved, unbelievably indifferent. He was not stirred at all by thefact of acknowledged victory, of cessation from killing.

  "I should be, I suppose," he muttered. "I know a lot of fellows willbe--and their people. So far as I'm concerned--right now--"

  He made a quick gesture with his hands. He couldn't explain how hefelt--that the war had suddenly and imperiously been rele
gated to thebackground for him. Temporarily or otherwise, as a spur to his emotions,the war had ceased to function. He didn't want to talk. He wanted to belet alone, to think.

  Yet he was conscious of a wish not to offend, to be courteous to thisclear-eyed young woman who looked at him with frank interest. Hewondered why he should be of any interest to her. MacRae had never beenshy. Shyness is nearly always born of acute self-consciousness. Beingfree from that awkward inturning of the mind Jack MacRae was notthoroughly aware of himself as a likable figure in any girl's sight.Four years overseas had set a mark on many such as himself. A man cannotlive through manifold chances of death, face great perils, do his workunder desperate risks and survive, without some trace of his deeds beingmanifest in his bearing. Those tried by fire are sure of themselves, andit shows in their eyes. Besides, Jack MacRae was twenty-four,clear-skinned, vigorous, straight as a young fir tree, a handsome boy inuniform. But he was not quick to apprehend that these things stirred agirl's fancy, nor did he know that the gloomy something which cloudedhis eyes made Betty Gower want to comfort him.

  "I think I understand," she said evenly,--when in truth she did notunderstand at all. "But after a while you'll be glad. I know I should beif I were in the army, although of course no matter how horrible it allwas it had to be done. For a long time I wanted to go to France myself,to do _something_. I was simply wild to go. But they wouldn't let me."

  "And I," MacRae said slowly, "didn't want to go at all--and I had togo."

  "Oh," she remarked with a peculiar interrogative inflection. Hereyebrows lifted. "Why did you have to? You went over long before thedraft was thought of."

  "Because I'd been taught that my flag and country really meantsomething," he said. "That was all; and it was quite enough in the wayof compulsion for a good many like myself who didn't hanker to stickbayonets through men we'd never seen, nor shoot them, nor blow them upwith hand grenades, nor kill them ten thousand feet in the air and watchthem fall, turning over and over like a winged duck. But these thingsseemed necessary. They said a country worth living in was worth fightingfor."

  "And isn't it?" Betty Gower challenged promptly.

  MacRae looked at her and at the white cottage, at the great Gulf seassmashing on the rocks below, at the far vista of sea and sky and theshore line faintly purple in the distance. His gaze turned briefly tothe leafless tops of maple and alder rising out of the hollow in whichhis father's body lay--in a corner of the little plot that was left ofall their broad acres--and came back at last to this fair daughter ofhis father's enemy.

  "The country is, yes," he said. "Anything that's worth having is worthfighting for. But that isn't what they meant, and that isn't the way ithas worked out."

  He was not conscious of the feeling in his voice. He was thinking withexaggerated bitterness that the Germans in Belgium had dealt less hardlywith a conquered people than this girl's father had dealt with his.

  "I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by that," sheremarked. Her tone was puzzled. She looked at him, frankly curious.

  But he could not tell her what he meant. He had a feeling that she wasin no way responsible. He had an instinctive aversion to rudeness. Andwhile he was absolving himself of any intention to make war on her hewas wondering if her mother, long ago, had been anything like Miss BettyGower. It seemed odd to think that this level-eyed girl's mother mighthave been _his_ mother,--if she had been made of stiffer metal, or ifthe west wind had blown that afternoon.

  He wondered if she knew. Not likely, he decided. It wasn't a storyeither Horace Gower or his wife would care to tell their children.

  So he did not try to tell her what he meant. He withdrew into his shell.And when Betty Gower seated herself on a rock and evinced an inclinationto quiz him about things he did not care to be quizzed about, he liftedhis cap, bade her a courteous good-by, and walked back toward the Cove.