The Guarded Heights Part 34

George waved his hands, holding the column until the slender figure, urged by the spectators remaining in the stands, came down with difficulty and embarra.s.sment to be caught and lifted tenderly up beside George.

Then, with these two aloft in the very front, the wild march was resumed through the Yale goal posts while Squibs' wrinkled face twitched, while in his young eyes burned the unsurpa.s.sable light of a hopeless wish miraculously come true.

XXVII

Green rescued George when his head was drooping and his eyes blurred. He got him to the gymnasium and stretched him out there and set the doctors to work on his head.

A voice got into George's brain. Who was talking? Was it Goodhue, or Stringham?

"I guess you can see him, but he's pretty vague. Played the whole game with a broken head. Lied to the doctors."

George forced his eyes open. Lambert Planter, still in his stained football clothes, bent over him.

"h.e.l.lo, Planter!"

Lambert grasped the black hand.

"h.e.l.lo, George Morton!"

That was all. Lambert went away, but George knew that what he had really said was:

"It's only what you've made of yourself that counts."

XXVIII

At Princeton they kept him in the infirmary for a few days, but he didn't like it. It filled him with a growing fear. Since it made no particular difference now how long he was ill, they let him see too many callers. He distrusted hero worship. Most of all was he afraid when such devotion came from Betty.

"Being a vicarious hero," Mrs. Bailly said, "has made my husband the happiest man in Princeton."

After that she didn't enter the conversation much, and again George sensed, with a reluctant thrill, a maternal caring in her heart for him.

"You never ought to have gone back in the second half," Betty said.

"If I hadn't," he laughed, "who would have taken care of Lambert Planter for you?"

"Squibs says you might have been killed."

"He's a great romancer," George exploded.

"Just the same, it was splendid of you to play at all."

She touched the white bandage about his head.

"Does it hurt a great deal?"

"No," he said, nearly honestly. "I only let them keep me here to cut some dull lectures."

He glanced at Betty wistfully.

"Did I take care of Lambert Planter as you wanted?"

She glanced away.

"Are you punishing me? Haven't you read the papers? You outplayed him and every man on the field."

"That was what you wished?"

She turned back with an a.s.sumption of impatience.

"What do you mean?"

He couldn't tell her. He couldn't probe further into her feelings for Lambert, her att.i.tude toward himself. He had to get his mind in hand again.

Betty brought her mother one day. Mrs. Alston was full of praise, but she exuded an imperial distaste for his sick-room. Both times he had to overcome an impulse to beg Betty not to go so soon. That more than anything else made him afraid of himself. It was, he felt, an excellent change to escape to an active life.

Blodgett's place gave him a ma.s.sive, tasteless welcome. It was one of those houses with high, sloping roofs, numerous chimneys, and much sculptured stone, slightly reminiscent of Mansart, and enormously suggestive of that greatest architect of all, the big round dollar. In its grounds it fitted like a huge diamond on a flowered shirt-front.

There were terraces; and a sunken garden, a little self-conscious with coy replicas of regency sculpture; and formal walks between carefully barbered trees and hedges. It convinced George that his original choice of three necessities had been wise. Blodgett had the money, but he didn't have Squibs Bailly and Goodhue or the things they personified.

And how Blodgett coveted The Goodhue Quality! George told himself that was why he had been asked, because he was so close to Goodhue. But Blodgett let him see that there was another motive. After those games George was temporarily one of the nation's famous men.

It wasn't until he had arrived that George understood how near Blodgett's place was to Oakmont--not more than fifteen miles. He was interested, but he had no idea, even if the Planters were there for Thanksgiving, that he would see any of them.

At Blodgett's bachelor enormity people came and went. At times the huge, over-decorated rooms were filled, yet to George they seemed depressingly empty because he knew they didn't enclose the men and the women Blodgett wanted. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair, indeed, motored out for Thanksgiving dinner--a reluctant concession, George gathered, to a profitable partnership. Blodgett brought him forth as a specimen, and the specimen impressed, for it isn't given to everyone to sit down at the close of the season with the year's most famous football player. It puzzled George that in the precious qualities he craved he knew himself superior to everyone in the house except these two who made him feel depressingly inferior. Would he some day reach the point where he would react unconsciously, as they did, to every social emergency?

When the dinner party had scattered, Blodgett and he walked alone on the terrace in an ashen twilight. There the surprise was sprung. It was clearly no surprise to his host, who beamed at George, pointing to the drive.

"I 'phoned him he would find an old football friend here if he'd take the trouble to drive over."

"But you didn't tell him my name?" George gasped.

"No, but why----"

Blodgett broke off and hurried his heavy body to the terrace edge to greet these important arrivals.

Lambert sprang from the runabout he had driven up and helped Sylvia down. She was bundled in becoming furs. The sharp air had heightened her rich colouring. How beautiful she was--lovelier than George had remembered! Here was the tonic to kill the distracting doubts raised by Betty. Here was the very spring of his wilful ambition. Glancing at Sylvia, Betty's tranquil influence lost its power.

At her first recognition of him she stopped abruptly, but Lambert ran across and grasped his hand.

"How do, Morton. Never guessed Blodgett's message referred to you."

George disapproved of Blodgett's methods. Why had the man made him a mystery at the very moment he used him as a bait to attract Lambert and Sylvia? Wasn't he important enough, or was it only because he was a Princeton man and Blodgett had feared some enmity might linger?

Lambert's manner, at least, was proof that he had, indeed, meant to give George a message that night in the dressing-room at New Haven. George appreciated that "How do, Morton"--greeting at last of a man for a man instead of a man for a servant or a former servant; nor was Lambert's call to his sister without a significance nearly sharp enough to hurt.

"Sylvia! Didn't you meet this strong-armed Princetonian at Betty's dance a year ago?"

George understood that she had no such motives as Lambert's for altering her att.i.tude, so much more uncompromising from the beginning than his.