Читать книгу Spawn of the North - Barrett Willoughby - Страница 20

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A few hours later, Dian was kneeling at the open window of her bedroom, her elbows on the sill, watching the sky flush with the pink and silver of dawn.

Eve, tired from her revels, had tumbled into bed immediately on their return from the Floating Trap. She was already asleep. Ivor, yielding to Dian's coaxing, had come home with them and was now moving about in his own room getting ready for bed. But to Dian, life, for some reason she was unable to grasp, seemed suddenly to have become so rich, so splendid, she did not want to lose an hour of it in sleep. Every atom of her being stirred with new vitality that demanded an outlet.

She looked from her window with heightened perception, feeling the friendliness of the earth and its beauty, clean and fresh and somehow innocent in the early morning light. There was a purity about everything. The channel, still and smooth, held the reflection of the shores, green, crystal-clear. Between seaward mountains the valleys were blue; along them lines of mist moved in from the ocean following where the rivers ran. She thought: 'The Fog Woman is calling her children home.' And she felt again that vague, delightful promise of all nature.

She thought of Sunny Cove at daybreak. The first rays of the sun would be gilding the waterways; would be drying the dew on the red roofs of the great white cannery buildings that came out on pilings from the shore; would be penciling with shining yellow the lofty spars of the Star of Alaska lying there at the dock. What happy, care-free summers she had spent at the cannery living in her mother's quarters aboard the Star—the cabin her father kept just as her mother had left it.

Was it possible that she would never again wake up in the wide berth there and look out the porthole to the creek where the salmon swam, head to tail, under the overhanging ferns and elder bushes? Would she never again hear the eerie morning calls of sandpipers sprinting on high little legs along the beach when the tide was low? She twisted the emerald on her finger and a faint sadness touched the buoyance of her mood.

Her musing ended as the dawn quiet was broken by the abrupt, unmuffled reports of a gas engine. Dian recognized the distinctive rhythm—Sockeye's Gas Gulper. The foreman was getting an early start for Sunny Cove and, she remembered all at once, taking the new superintendent with him. The launch came in sight and moved down the channel below her. She could see Jim Kemerlee at the wheel ... speeding out of her life. Her antagonism for him seemed strangely softened now. She even hoped he would look up so that she might wave him good-bye. But he did not.

The noisy cruiser passed out of sight, and all at once the world seemed very still. Dian realized, with a singular sense of loneliness, that something had gone from her, something she might never know again.... She felt the glamour of the morning begin to fade.

Her thought moved lingeringly over the thirty-six hours she had been home. They were so crammed with events she seemed to have lived a year.... It was good to live that way. Swiftly. Keenly. And she had but two weeks of such freedom before Alan came. She wanted him to come, but ...

Suddenly she acknowledged that undercurrent that had been just below all her thoughts ever since her morning cruise in the Golden Hind. Why not live her two weeks without regard to consequences? Why not seize every hour left her of this Northern summer that was so beautiful—and so brief? Why not fill those hours with experiences that would furnish her with memories—after December?

She came to her feet and stood before her dressing-table. With thoughtful eyes on a handsome photograph of Alan Bronson, she began twisting the emerald on her slim hand. Then, with an air of decision, she slipped it off and laid it away in her jewel-case.

'It's only until you come, darling,' mentally she addressed the man gazing at her from the tooled and gilded Italian leather frame. 'Only until you come——' She caught up the picture, kissed it with unaccountable fervor, then held it off with both hands. 'After that—I'll go back to your country. I'll live your life.'

A moment later, when she returned to the window she felt a warm elation coursing through her. 'Hello, day!' She spoke joyously under her breath to the sun streaming in. Then she turned and went quickly into Eve's room.

'Eve! Wake up!' She shook the small figure gently. 'We're going to——'

'Oh, for Heaven's sake!' Eve raised a petulant little face from which the make-up had not been removed. 'Get away from me. I wanna sleep——'

'Oh, I know I'm a beast, honey. I know you could kill me, but it's morning, and we're going on a glorious adventure. We're going to get aboard the Golden Hind and move, bag and baggage, over to Sunny Cove!'