CHAPTER IV

Inheritance


On a morning four days later Jack MacRae sat staring into the coals on
the 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 of
fishing craft. He was alone under his own rooftree, alone with an
oppressive silence and his own thoughts.

These were not particularly pleasant thoughts. There was nothing mawkish
about Jack MacRae. He had never been taught to shrink from the
inescapable facts of existence. Even if he had, the war would have cured
him of that weakness. As it was, twelve months in the infantry, nearly
three years in the air, had taught him that death is a commonplace after
a man sees about so much of it, that it is many times a welcome relief
from suffering either of the body or the spirit. He chose to believe
that it had proved so to his father. So his feelings were not that
strange mixture of grief and protest which seizes upon those to whom
death is the ultimate tragedy, the irrevocable disaster, when it falls
upon some one near and dear.

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