Big Timber Part 16

"Why, say, you look like a tourist," Fyfe remarked after an appraising glance.

"I'm making money, pulling ahead of the game, that's all," Benton retorted cheerfully. "I can afford to take a holiday now and then. I'm putting a million feet a month in the water. That's going some for small fry like me. Say, this house of yours is all to the good, Jack. It's got cla.s.s, outside and in. Makes a man feel as if he had to live up to it, eh? Mackinaws and calked boots don't go with oriental rugs and oak floors."

"You should get a place like this as soon as possible then," Stella put in drily, "to keep you up to the mark, on edge aesthetically, one might put it."

"Not to say morally," Benton laughed. "Oh, maybe I'll get to it by and by, if the timber business holds up."

Later, when he and Stella were alone together, he said to her:

"You're lucky. You've got everything, and it comes without an effort.

You sure showed good judgment when you picked Jack Fyfe. He's a thoroughbred."

"Oh, thank you," she returned, a touch of irony in her voice, a subtlety of inflection that went clean over Charlie's head.

He was full of inquiries about where they had been that winter, what they had done and seen. Also he brimmed over with his own affairs. He stayed overnight and went his way with a brotherly threat of making the Fyfe bungalow his headquarters whenever he felt like it.

"It's a touch of civilization that looks good to me," he declared. "You can put my private mark on one of those big leather chairs, Jack. I'm going to use it often. All you need to make this a social center is a good-looking girl or two--unmarried ones. You watch. When the summer flock comes to the lake, your place is going to be popular."

That observation verified Benton's shrewdness. The Fyfe bungalow did become popular. Two weeks after Charlie's visit, a lean, white cruiser, all bra.s.s and mahogany above her topsides, slid up to the float, and two women came at a dignified pace along the path to the house. Stella had met Linda Abbey once, reluctantly, under the circ.u.mstances, but it was different now--with the difference that money makes. She could play hostess against an effective background, and she did so graciously. Nor was her graciousness wholly a.s.sumed. After all, they were her kind of people: Linda, fair-haired, perfectly gowned, perfectly mannered, sweetly pretty; Mrs. Abbey, forty-odd and looking thirty-five, with that calm self-a.s.surance which wealth and position confer upon those who hold it securely. Stella found them altogether to her liking. It pleased her, too, that Jack happened in to meet them. He was not a scintillating talker, yet she had noticed that when he had anything to say, he never failed to attract and hold attention. His quiet, impersonal manner never suggested stolidness. And she was too keen an observer to overlook the fact that from a purely physical standpoint Jack Fyfe made an impression always, particularly on women. Throughout that winter it had not disturbed her. It did not disturb her now, when she noticed Linda Abbey's gaze coming back to him with a veiled appraisal in her blue eyes that were so like Fyfe's own in their tendency to twinkle and gleam with no corresponding play of features.

"We'll expect to see a good deal of you this summer," Mrs. Abbey said cordially at leave-taking. "We have a few people up from town now and then to vary the monotony of feasting our souls on scenery. Sometimes we are quite a jolly crowd. Don't be formal. Drop in when you feel the inclination."

When Stella reminded Jack of this some time later, in a moment of boredom, he put the _Panther_ at her disposal for the afternoon. But he would not go himself. He had opened up a new outlying camp, and he had directions to issue, work to lay out.

"You hold up the social end of the game," he laughed. "I'll hustle logs."

So Stella invaded the Abbey-Monohan precincts by herself and enjoyed it--for she met a houseful of young people from the coast, and in that light-hearted company she forgot for the time being that she was married and the responsible mistress of a house. Paul Abbey was there, but he had apparently forgotten or forgiven the blow she had once dealt his vanity. Paul, she reflected, was not the sort to mourn a lost love long.

She had the amused experience too of beholding Charlie Benton appear an hour or so before she departed and straightway monopolize Linda Abbey in his characteristically impetuous fas.h.i.+on. Charlie was no diplomat. He believed in driving straight to any goal he selected.

"So _that's_ the reason for the outward metamorphosis," Stella reflected. "Well?"

Altogether she enjoyed the afternoon hugely. The only fly in her ointment was a greasy smudge bestowed upon her dress--a garment she prized highly--by some cordage coiled on the _Panther's_ deck. The black tender had carried too many cargoes of loggers and logging supplies to be a fit conveyance for persons in party attire. She exhibited the soiled gown to Fyfe with due vexation.

"I hope you'll have somebody scrub down the _Panther_ the next time I want to go anywhere in a decent dress," she said ruefully. "That'll never come out. And it's the prettiest thing I've got too."

"Ah, what's the odds?" Fyfe slipped one arm around her waist. "You can buy more dresses. Did you have a good time? That's the thing!"

That ruined gown, however, subsequently produced an able, forty-foot, cruising launch, powerfully engined, easy in a sea, and comfortably, even luxuriously fitted as to cabin. With that for their private use, the _Panther_ was left to her appointed service, and in the new boat Fyfe and Stella spent many a day abroad on Roaring Lake. They fished together, explored nooks and bays up and down its forty miles of length, climbed hills together like the bear of the ancient rhyme, to see what they could see. And the _Waterbug_ served to put them on intimate terms with their neighbors, particularly the Abbey crowd. The Abbeys took to them wholeheartedly. Fyfe himself was highly esteemed by the elder Abbey, largely, Stella suspected, for his power on Roaring Lake. Abbey _pere_ had built up a big fortune out of timber. He respected any man who could follow the same path to success. Therefore he gave Fyfe double credit,--for making good, and for a personality that could not be overlooked. He told Stella that once; that is to say, he told her confidentially that her husband was a very "able" young man. Abbey senior was short and double-chinned and inclined to profuse perspiration if he moved in haste over any extended time. Paul promised to be like him, in that respect.

Summer slipped by. There were dances, informal little hops at the Abbey domicile, return engagements at the Fyfe bungalow, laughter and music and j.a.panese lanterns strung across the lawn. There was tea and tennis and murmuring rivers of small talk. And amid this Stella Fyfe flitted graciously, esteeming it her world, a fair measure of what the future might be. Viewed in that light, it seemed pa.s.sable enough.

Later, when summer was on the wane, she withdrew from much of this activity, spending those days when she did not sit buried in a book out on the water with her husband. When October ushered in the first of the fall rains, they went to Vancouver and took apartments. In December her son was born.

CHAPTER XIV

A CLOSE CALL AND A NEW ACQUAINTANCE

With the recurrence of spring, Fyfe's household transferred itself to the Roaring Lake bungalow again. Stella found the change welcome, for Vancouver wearied her. It was a little too crude, too much as yet in the transitory stage, in that civic hobbledehoy period which overtakes every village that shoots up over-swiftly to a city's dimensions. They knew people, to be sure, for the Abbey influence would have opened the way for them into any circle. Stella had made many friends and pleasant acquaintances that summer on the lake, but part of that b.u.t.terfly clique sought pleasanter winter grounds before she was fit for social activity.

Apart from a few more or less formal receptions and an occasional auction party, she found it pleasanter to stay at home. Fyfe himself had spent only part of his time in town after their boy was born. He was extending his timber operations. What he did not put into words, but what Stella sensed because she experienced the same thing herself, was that town bored him to death,--such town existence as Vancouver afforded. Their first winter had been different, because they had sought places where there was manifold variety of life, color, amus.e.m.e.nt. She was longing for the wide reach of Roaring Lake, the immense amphitheater of the surrounding mountains, long before spring.

So she was quite as well pleased when a mild April saw them domiciled at home again. In addition to Sam Foo and Feng Shu, there was a nurse for Jack Junior. Stella did not suggest that; Fyfe insisted on it. He was quite proud of his boy, but he did not want her chained to her baby.

"If the added expense doesn't count, of course a nurse will mean a lot more personal freedom," Stella admitted. "You see, I haven't the least idea of your resources, Jack. All I know about it is that you allow me plenty of money for my individual expenses. And I notice we're acquiring a more expensive mode of living all the time."

"That's so," Fyfe responded. "I never have gone into any details of my business with you. No reason why you shouldn't know what limits there are to our income. You never happened to express any curiosity before.

Operating as I did up till lately, the business netted anywhere from twelve to fifteen thousand a year. I'll double that this season. In fact, with the amount of standing timber I control, I could make it fifty thousand a year by expanding and speeding things up. I guess you needn't worry about an extra servant or two."

So, apart from voluntary service on behalf of Jack Junior, she was free as of old to order her days as she pleased. Yet that small morsel of humanity demanded much of her time, because she released through the maternal floodgates a part of that pa.s.sionate longing to bestow love where her heart willed. Sometimes she took issue with herself over that wayward tendency. By all the rules of the game, she should have loved her husband. He was like a rock, solid, enduring, patient, kind, and generous. He stood to her in the most intimate relation that can exist between a man and a woman. But she never fooled herself; she never had so far as Jack Fyfe was concerned. She liked him, but that was all. He was good to her, and she was grateful.

Sometimes she had a dim sense that under his easy-going exterior lurked a capacity for tremendously pa.s.sionate outbreak. If she had been compelled to modify her first impression of him as an arrogant, dominant sort of character, scarcely less rough than the brown firs out of which he was hewing a fortune, she knew likewise that she had never seen anything but the sunny side of him. He still puzzled her a little at times; there were odd flashes of depths she could not see into, a quality of unexpectedness in things he would do and say. Even so, granting that in him was embodied so much that other men she knew lacked, she did not love him; there were indeed times when she almost resented him.

Why, she could not perhaps have put into words. It seemed too fantastic for sober summing-up, when she tried. But lurking always in the background of her thoughts was the ghost of an unrealized dream, a nebulous vision which once served to thrill her in secret. It could never be anything but a vision, she believed now, and believing, regretted. The cold facts of her existence couldn't be daydreamed away.

She was married, and marriage put a full stop to the potential adventuring of youth. Twenty and maidenhood lies at the opposite pole from twenty-four and matrimony. Stella subscribed to that. She took for her guiding-star--theoretically--the twin concepts of morality and duty as she had been taught to construe them. So she saw no loophole, and seeing none, felt cheated of something infinitely precious. Marriage and motherhood had not come to her as the fruits of love, as the pa.s.sionately eager fulfilling of her destiny. It had been thrust upon her. She had accepted it as a last resort at a time when her powers of resistance to misfortune were at the ebb.

She knew that this sort of self-communing was a bad thing, that it was bound to sour the whole taste of life in her mouth. As much as possible she thrust aside those vague, repressed longings. Materially she had everything. If she had foregone that bargain with Jack Fyfe, G.o.d only knew what long-drawn agony of mind and body circ.u.mstances and Charlie Benton's subordination of her to his own ends might have inflicted upon her. That was the reverse of her s.h.i.+eld, but one that grew dimmer as time pa.s.sed. Mostly, she took life as she found it, concentrating upon Jack Junior, a st.u.r.dy boy with blue eyes like his father, and who grew steadily more adorable.

Nevertheless she had recurring periods when moodiness and ill-stifled discontent got hold of her. Sometimes she stole out along the cliffs to sit on a mossy boulder, staring with absent eyes at the distant hills.

And sometimes she would slip out in a canoe, to lie rocking in the lake swell,--just dreaming, filled with a pa.s.sive sort of regret. She could not change things now, but she could not help wis.h.i.+ng she could.

Fyfe warned her once about getting offsh.o.r.e in the canoe. Roaring Lake, pent in the shape of a boomerang between two mountain ranges, was subject to squalls. Sudden bursts of wind would shoot down its length like blasts from some monster funnel. Stella knew that; she had seen the gla.s.sy surface torn into whitecaps in ten minutes, but she was not afraid of the lake nor the lake winds. She was hard and strong. The open, the clean mountain air, and a measure of activity, had built her up physically. She swam like a seal. Out in that sixteen-foot Peterboro she could detach herself from her world of reality, lie back on a cus.h.i.+on, and lose herself staring at the sky. She paid little heed to Fyfe's warning beyond a smiling a.s.surance that she had no intention of courting a watery end.

So one day in mid-July she waved a farewell to Jack Junior, crowing in his nurse's lap on the bank, paddled out past the first point to the north, and pillowing her head on a cus.h.i.+oned thwart, gave herself up to dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake.

A faint breath of an offsh.o.r.e breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant logging point. Stella, once wakened, had risen and breakfasted with him.

She was tired, drowsy, content to lie there in pure physical relaxation. Lying so, before she was aware of it, her eyes closed.

She wakened with a start at a cold touch of moisture on her face,--rain, great pattering drops. Overhead an ominously black cloud hid the face of the sun. The sh.o.r.e, when she looked, lay a mile and a half abeam. To the north and between her and the land's rocky line was a darkening of the lake's surface. Stella reached for her paddle. The black cloud let fall long, gray streamers of rain. There was scarcely a stirring of the air, but that did not deceive her. There was a growing chill, and there was that broken line sweeping down the lake. Behind that was wind, a summer gale, the black squall dreaded by the Siwashes.

She had to buck her way to sh.o.r.e through that. She drove hard on the paddle. She was not afraid, but there rose in her a peculiar tensed-up feeling. Ahead lay a ticklish bit of business. The sixteen-foot canoe dwarfed to pitiful dimensions in the face of that snarling line of wind-harried water. She could hear the distant murmur of it presently, and gusty puffs of wind began to strike her.

Then it swept up to her, a ripple, a chop, and very close behind that the short, steep, lake combers with a wind that blew off the tops as each wave-head broke in white, bubbling froth. Immediately she began to lose ground. She had expected that, and it did not alarm her. If she could keep the canoe bow on, there was an even chance that the squall would blow itself out in half an hour. But keeping the canoe bow on proved a task for stout arms. The wind would catch all that forward part which thrust clear as she topped a sea and twist it aside, tending always to throw her broadside into the trough. Spray began to splash aboard. The seas were so short and steep that the Peterboro would rise over the crest of a tall one and dip its bow deep in the next, or leap clear to strike with a slap that made Stella's heart jump. She had never undergone quite that rough and tumble experience in a small craft. She was being beaten farther out and down the lake, and her arms were growing tired. Nor was there any slackening of the wind.

The combined rain and slaps of spray soaked her thoroughly. A puddle gathered about her knees in the bilge, slos.h.i.+ng fore and aft as the craft pitched, killing the natural buoyancy of the canoe so that she dove harder. Stella took a chance, ceased paddling, and bailed with a small can. She got a tossing that made her head swim while she lay in the trough. And when she tried to head up into it again, one comber bigger than its fellows reared up and slapped a barrel of water inboard.

The next wave swamped her.

Sunk to the clamps, Stella held fast to the topsides, crouching on her knees, immersed to the hips in water that struck a chill through her flesh. She had the wit to remember and act upon Jack Fyfe's coaching, namely, to sit tight and hang on. No sea that ever ran can sink a canoe.

Wood is buoyant. So long as she could hold on, the submerged craft would keep her head and shoulders above water. But it was numbing cold. Fed by glacial streams, Roaring Lake is icy in hottest midsummer.

What with paddling and bailing and the excitement of the struggle, Stella had wasted no time gazing about for other boats. She knew that if any one at the camp saw her, rescue would be speedily effected. Now, holding fast and sitting quiet, she looked eagerly about as the swamped canoe rose loggily on each wave. Almost immediately she was heartened by seeing distinctly some sort of craft plunging through the blow. She had not long to wait after that, for the approaching launch was a lean-lined speeder, powerfully engined, and she was being forced. Stella supposed it was one of the Abbey runabouts. Even with her teeth chattering and numbness fastening itself upon her, she s.h.i.+vered at the chances the man was taking. It was no sea for a speed boat to smash into at thirty miles an hour. She saw it shoot off the top of one wave and disappear in a white burst of spray, slash through the next and bury itself deep again, flinging a foamy cloud far to port and starboard. Stella cried futilely to the man to slow down. She could hang on a long time yet, but her voice carried no distance.

After that she had not long to wait. In four minutes the runabout was within a hundred yards, open exhausts cracking like a machine gun. And then the very thing she expected and dreaded came about. Every moment she expected to see him drive bows under and go down. Here and there at intervals uplifted a comber taller than its fellows, standing, just as it broke, like a green wall. Into one such h.o.a.ry-headed sea the white boat now drove like a lance. Stella saw the spray leap like a cascade, saw the solid green curl deep over the forward deck and engine hatch and smash the low winds.h.i.+eld. She heard the gla.s.s crack. Immediately the roaring exhausts died. Amid the whistle of the wind and the murmur of broken water, the launch staggered like a drunken man, lurched off into the trough, deep down by the head with the weight of water she had taken.

The man in her stood up with hands cupped over his mouth.