Poor Man's Rock Part 36

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 sh.o.r.e, 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 gra.s.s, 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 b.u.t.ter, 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."