The Guarded Heights Part 2

Abruptly his mother's drudgery ceased. She stared. His father rose stiffly.

"You've got yourself in trouble," he said.

George had not fancied the revolution had unfurled banners so easily discernible. He became self-conscious. His parents' apprehension made matters more difficult for him. They, at least, were too old to revolt.

"I suppose I have," he acknowledged shortly.

His father used the tone of one announcing an unspeakable catastrophe.

"You mean you've had trouble with Miss Sylvia."

"George!" his mother cried, aghast. "You've never been impertinent with Miss Sylvia!"

"She thinks I have," George said, "so it amounts to the same thing."

His father's face twitched.

"And you know Old Planter can put us out of here without a minute's notice, and where do you think we'd go? How do you think we'd get bread and b.u.t.ter? You talk up, young man. You tell us what happened."

"I can't," George said, sullenly. "I can't talk about it. You'll hear soon enough."

"I always said," his mother lamented, "that Georgie wasn't one to know his place up there."

"Depends," George muttered, "on what my place is. I've got to find that out. Look! You'll hear now."

A bald-headed figure in livery, one of the house servants, glided toward them through the shrubbery, over that vanished boundary line, with nervous haste. George squared his shoulders. The messenger, however, went straight to the older man.

"Mr. Planter's on his ear, and wants to see you right off in the library. What you been up to, young Morton?"

George resented the curiosity in the pallid, unintelligent eyes, the fellow's obvious pleasure in the presence of disaster. It would have appeased him to grasp those sloping shoulders, to force the grinning face from his sight. A queer question disturbed him. Had Sylvia felt something of the sort about him?

"Come on," the elder Morton said. "It's pretty hard at my age. You'll pay for this, George."

"Old Planter would never be that unfair," George encouraged him.

"Georgie! Georgie!" his mother said when the others were out of sight, "what have you been up to?"

He walked closer and placed his arm around her shoulders.

"I've been getting my eyes opened," he answered. "I never ought to have listened to them. I never ought to have gone up there. I did say something to Miss Sylvia I had no business to. If I'd been one of her own kind, instead of the son of a livery stable keeper, I'd have got polite regrets or something. It's made me realize how low I am."

"No," she said with quick maternal pa.s.sion. "You're not low. Maybe some day those people'll be no better than we are."

He shook his head.

"I'd rather I was no worse than they are. And I will be. I won't put up with it. If some people have to be treated like dirt, I'm going to help do the treating."

"That's no right way of thinking," she warned. "It's money makes the mare go."

But in Sylvia's case, George admitted, there was other propulsion than that; something more fragile, and harder to understand or capture for one's self.

"Don't you worry, I'll make money," he said.

She glanced up quickly.

"Who's that?"

A brisk masculine voice volleyed through the shrubbery:

"Young Morton! I say, young Morton!"

"It's Mr. Lambert," she breathed. "Go quick."

George remembered what Sylvia had said about someone else having the strength.

"Can't you guess, Ma, what the young lady's brother wants of me?"

The bitterness left his face. His smile was engaging.

"To give me the devil."

"Young Morton! Young Morton!"

"Coming!" he called.

"George," she begged, "don't have any trouble with Mr. Lambert."

III

She watched him with anxious eyes, failing to observe, because she was his mother, details that informed his boasts with power. His ancestry of labour had given him, at least, his straight, slender, and unusually muscular body, and from somewhere had crept in the pride, just now stimulated, with which he carried it. His wilful, regular features, moreover, guarded by youth, were still uncoa.r.s.ened.

He found Lambert Planter waiting beyond the old boundary behind a screen of bushes, his hands held behind his back. In his face, which had some of Sylvia's beauty, hardened and enlarged, dwelt the devil George had foreseen.

George nodded, feeling all at once at ease. He could take care of himself in an argument with Lambert Planter. No such distances separated them as had widened beyond measure a little while back between him and Sylvia. He wondered if that conception sprang from Lambert, or if it came simply from the fact that they were two men, facing each other alone; for it was from the first patent that Sylvia had asked her brother to complete a punishment she had devised as fitting, but which she had been incapable of carrying out herself. Lambert, indeed, brought his hands forward, disclosing a whip. It was a trifle in his way as he took off his coat.

"That's right," George said. "Make yourself comfortable."

"You won't help matters by being impertinent, Morton."

Lambert's voice contrasted broadly with George's round, loud tones.

While, perhaps, not consciously affected, its accents fell according to the custom of the head master of a small and particular preparatory school. George crushed his instinct to mock. What the deuce had he craved ever since his encounter with Sylvia unless it was to be one with men like Lambert Planter? So all he said was:

"What's the whip for?"

"You know perfectly well," Lambert answered. "There's no possible excuse for what you said and did this afternoon. I am going to impress that on you."

"You mean you want a fight?"