Poor Man's Rock Part 23

"And you, I suppose, rather pride yourself on being wise in your day and generation."

There was gentle raillery in her tone.

"I don't like you to be sarcastic," he said.

"I don't think you like me sarcastic or otherwise," Betty observed, after a moment's silence.

"But I do," he protested. "That's the devil of it. I do--and you know I do. It would be a great deal better if I didn't."

Betty's fingers began to twist in her lap. The color rose faintly in her smooth cheeks. Her eyes turned to the sea.

"I don't know why," she said gently. "I'd hate to think it would."

MacRae did not find any apt reply to that. His mind was in an agonized muddle, in which he could only perceive one or two things with any degree of clearness. Betty loved him. He was sure of that. He could tell her that he loved her. And then? Therein arose the conflict. Marriage was the natural sequence of love. And when he contemplated marriage with Betty he found himself unable to detach her from her background, in which lurked something which to MacRae's imagination loomed sinister, hateful. To make peace with Horace Gower--granting that Gower was willing for such a consummation--for love of his daughter struck MacRae as something very near to dishonor. And if, contrariwise, he repeated to Betty the ugly story which involved her father and his father, she would be hara.s.sed by irreconcilable forces even if she cared enough to side with him against her own people. MacRae was gifted with acute perception, in some things. He said to himself despairingly--nor was it the first time that he had said it--that you cannot mix oil and water.

He could do nothing at all. That was the sum of his ultimate conclusions. His hands were tied. He could not go back and he could not go on. He sat beside Betty, longing to take her in his arms and still fighting stoutly against that impulse. He was afraid of his impulses.

A faint moisture broke out on his face with that acute nervous strain. A lump rose chokingly in his throat. He stared out at the white-crested seas that came marching up the Gulf before a rising wind until his eyes grew misty. Then he slid down off the log and laid his head on Betty's knee. A weight of dumb grief oppressed him. He wanted to cry, and he was ashamed of his weakness.

Betty's fingers stole caressingly over his bare head, rumpled his hair, stroked his hot cheek.

"Johnny-boy," she said at last, "what is it that comes like a fog between you and me?"

MacRae did not answer.

"I make love to you quite openly," Betty went on. "And I don't seem to be the least bit ashamed of doing so. I'm not a silly kid. I'm nearly as old as you are, and I know quite well what I want--which happens to be you. I love you, Silent John. The man is supposed to be the pursuer. But I seem to have that instinct myself. Besides," she laughed tremulously, "this is leap year. And, remember, you kissed me. Or did I kiss you?

Which was it, Jack?"

MacRae seated himself on the log beside her. He put his arm around her and drew her close to him. That disturbing wave of emotion which had briefly mastered him was gone. He felt only a pa.s.sionate tenderness for Betty and a pity for them both. But he had determined what to do.

"I do love you, Betty," he said--"your hair and your eyes and your lips and the sound of your voice and the way you walk and everything that is you. Is that quite plain enough? It's a sort of emotional madness."

"Well, I am afflicted with the same sort of madness," she admitted. "And I like it. It is natural."

"But you wouldn't like it if you knew it meant a series of mental and spiritual conflicts that would be almost like physical torture," he said slowly. "You'd be afraid of it."

"And you?" she demanded.

"Yes," he said simply. "I am."

"Then you're a poor sort of lover," she flung at him, and freed herself from his arms with a quick twist of her body. Her breast heaved. She moved away from him.

"I'll admit being a poor lover, perhaps," MacRae said. "I didn't want to love you. I shouldn't love you. I really ought to hate you. I don't, but if I was consistent, I should. I ought to take every opportunity to hurt you just because you are a Gower. I have good reason to do so. I can't tell you why--or at least I am not going to tell you why. I don't think it would mend matters if I did. I dare say I'm a better fighter than a lover. I fight in the open, on the square. And because I happen to care enough to shrink from making you risk things I can't dodge, I'm a poor lover. Well, perhaps I am."

"I didn't really mean that, Jack," Betty muttered.

"I know you didn't," he returned gently. "But I mean what I have just said."

"You mean that for some reason which I do not know and which you will not tell me, there is such bad blood between you and my father that you can't--you won't--won't even take a chance on me?"

"Something like that," MacRae admitted. "Only you put it badly. You'd either tie my hands, which I couldn't submit to, or you'd find yourself torn between two factions, and life would be a pretty sad affair."

"I asked you once before, and you told me it was something that happened before either of us was born," Betty said thoughtfully. "I am going to get at the bottom of this somehow. I wonder if you do really care, or if this is all camouflage,--if you're just playing with me to see how big a fool I _will_ make of myself."

That queer mistrust of him which suddenly clouded Betty's face and made her pretty mouth harden roused Jack MacRae to an intolerable fury. It was like a knife in a tender spot. He had been stifling the impulse to forget and bury all these ancient wrongs and injustices for which neither of them was responsible but for which, so far as he could see, they must both suffer. Something cracked in him at Betty's words. She jumped, warned by the sudden blaze in his eyes. But he caught her with a movement quicker than her own. He held her by the arms with fingers that gripped like iron clamps. He shook her.

"You wonder if I really care," he cried. "My G.o.d, can't you see? Can't you feel? Must a man grovel and weep and rave?"

Betty whitened a little at this storm which she had evoked. But she did not flinch. Her eyes looked straight into his, fearlessly.

"You are raving now," she said. "And you are hurting my arms terribly."

MacRae released his hold on her. His hands dropped to his sides.

"I suppose I was," he said in a flat, lifeless tone. "But don't say that to me again, ever. You can say anything you like, Betty, except that I'm not in earnest. I don't deserve that."

Betty retreated a little. MacRae was not even looking at her now. His eyes were turned to the sea, to hide the blur that crept into them in spite of his will.

"You don't deserve anything," Betty said distinctly. She moved warily away as she spoke. "You have the physical courage to face death; but you haven't the moral courage to face a problem in living, even though you love me. You take it for granted that I'm as weak as you are. You won't even give me a chance to prove whether love is strong or weak in the face of trouble. And I will never give you another chance--never."

She sprang from the beach to the low pile of driftwood and from that plunged into the thicket. MacRae did not try to follow. He did not even move. He looked after her a minute. Then he sat down on the log again and stared at the steady march of the swells. There was a sense of finality in this thing which made him flounder desperately. Still, he a.s.sured himself, it had to be. And if it had to be that way it was better to have it so understood. Betty would never look at him again with that disturbing message in her eyes. He would not be troubled by a futile longing. But it hurt. He had never imagined how so abstract a thing as emotion could breed such an ache in a man's heart.

After a little he got up. There was a trail behind that thicket, an old game trail widened by men's feet, that ran along the seaward slope to Cradle Bay. He went up now to this path. His eye, used to the practice of woodcraft, easily picked up tiny heel marks, toe prints, read their message mechanically. Betty had been running. She had gone home.

He went back to the beach. The rowboat and the rising tide caught his attention. He hauled the boat up on the driftwood so that it should not float away. Then he busied himself on the deer's legs with a knife for a minute and shouldered the carca.s.s.

It was a mile and a half across country to the head of Squitty Cove. He had intended to hang his deer in a tree by the beach and come for it later with a boat. Now he took up this hundred-pound burden for the long carry over steep hills and through brushy hollows in the spirit of the medieval flagellantes, mortifying his flesh for the ease of his soul.

An hour or so later he came out on a knoll over-looking all the southeastern face of Squitty. Below, the wind-hara.s.sed Gulf spread its ruffled surface. He looked down on the cliffs and the Cove and Cradle Bay. He could see Gower's cottage white among the green, one chimney spitting blue smoke that the wind carried away in a wispy banner. He could see a green patch behind his own house with the white headboard that marked his father's grave. He could see Poor Man's Rock bare its kelp-grown head between seas, and on the point above the Rock a solitary figure, squat and brown, that he knew must be Horace Gower.

MacRae laid down his pack to rest his aching shoulders. But there was no resting the ache in his heart. Nor was it restful to gaze upon any of these things within the span of his eye. He was reminded of too much which it was not good to remember. As he sat staring down on the distant Rock and a troubled sea with an intolerable heaviness in his breast, he recalled that so must his father have looked down on Poor Man's Rock in much the same anguished spirit long ago. And Jack MacRae's mind reacted morbidly to the suggestion, the parallel. His eyes turned with smoldering fire to the stumpy figure on the tip of Point Old.

"I'll pay it all back yet," he gritted. "Betty or no Betty, I'll make him wish he'd kept his hands off the MacRaes."

About the time Jack MacRae with his burden of venison drew near his own dooryard, Betty Gower came out upon the winter-sodden lawn before their cottage and having crossed it ran lightly up the steps to the wide porch. From there she saw her father standing on the Point. She called to him. At her hail he came trudging to the house. Betty was piling wood in the living-room fireplace when he came in.

"I was beginning to worry about you," he said.

"The wind got too much for me," she answered, "so I put the boat on the beach a mile or so along and walked home."

Gower drew a chair up to the fire.

"Blaze feels good," he remarked. "There's a chill in this winter air."

Betty made no comment.