The Guarded Heights Part 37

"I've served," George said, hotly.

"Was it real service," Bailly asked gently, "or a shot at the bull's-eye?"

Almost involuntarily George clapped his fingers to his head.

"You're wrong, sir," he cried. "I've served when nothing but the thought of service brought me through."

Mrs. Bailly hurried in. She put one hand on George's shoulder. With the other she patted his hair.

"What's he scolding my boy for?"

George grinned at Bailly.

"Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do that?"

Bailly nodded thoughtfully.

"If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good."

x.x.x

To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue, talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in justification that he had walked out of the working cla.s.s himself.

Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound?

"I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture.

And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait, forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the smaller was the chance of his growing weak.

He longed for the approaching escape from his gravest temptation. When he was through college and definitely in New York he would find it simpler to be hard. For that matter, why should he grow weak? He had achieved a success far beyond the common. He would graduate president of his cla.s.s, captain of the football team, although he had tried to throw both honours to Goodhue; member of the club that had drawn the best men of his year, a power in the Senior Council; the man who had done most for Princeton; a high-stand scholar; and, most important of all, one who had acquired with his education a certain amount of culture and an ease of manner in any company. Allen was still angular, as were most of those other men who had come here, like George, with nothing behind them.

In his success he saw no miracle, no luck beyond Squibs' early interest.

What he had won he had applied himself to get with hardness, cold calculation, an indomitable will. He had kept his eyes open. He had used everybody, everything, to help him climb toward Sylvia out of the valley of humiliation. The qualities that had brought him all that were good qualities, worth clinging to. As he had climbed he would continue in spite of Bailly or Allen or Betty. But when he thought of Betty he had to fight the tears from his own eyes.

A little while before his graduation he went to her, knowing he must do something to make her less kind, to destroy the impression she gave him of one who, like Mrs. Bailly, always thought of him at his best.

He walked alone through a bland moonlight scented with honeysuckle from the hedges. His heart beat as it had that day four years ago when he had unintentionally let Sylvia know his presumptuous craving.

Two white figures strolled in front of the house. He went up, striving to overcome the absurd reluctance in his heart. It wasn't simple to destroy a thing as beautiful as this friendship. Betty paused and turned, drawing her mother around.

"I thought you'd quite forgotten us, George."

Nor did he want to kill the welcome in her voice.

"You're leaving Princeton very soon," Mrs. Alston said. "I'm glad you've come. Of course, it isn't to say good-bye."

He wondered if she didn't long for a parting to be broken only by occasional meetings in town. He wondered if she didn't fear for Betty.

If there had been no Sylvia, if he had dared abandon the hard things and ask for Betty, this imperious woman would have put plenty of searching questions. But, he reflected, if it hadn't been for Sylvia he never would have come so far, never would have come to Betty. Every consideration held him on his course.

He feared that Mrs. Alston, in her narrow, careful manner, wouldn't give him an opportunity to speak to Betty alone. He was glad when they went in and found Mr. Alston, who liked and admired him. When he left there must come a chance. As he said good-night, indeed, Betty followed him to the hall, and he whispered, so that the servant couldn't hear:

"Betty, I've a confession. Won't you walk toward the gate with me?"

The colour entered her white face as she turned and called to her mother:

"I'll walk to the gate with George."

From the room he fancied a rustling, irritated acknowledgment.

But she came, throwing a transparent scarf over her tawny hair, and they were alone in the moonlight and the scent of flowers, walking side by side across gra.s.s, beneath the heavy branches of trees.

"See here, Betty! I've no business to call you that--never have had.

Without saying anything I've lied to you ever since I've been in Princeton. I've taken advantage of your friendship."

She paused. The thick leaves let through sufficient light to show him the bewilderment in her eyes. Her voice was a little frightened.

"You can't make me believe that. You're not the sort of man that does such things. I don't know what you're talking about."

"Thanks," he said, "but you're wrong, and I can't go away without telling you just what I am."

"You're just--George Morton," she said with a troubled smile.

He tried not to listen. He hurried on with this killing that appealed to him as necessary.

"Remember the day in Freshman year, or before, wasn't it, when you recognized Sylvia Planter's bulldog? It was her dog. She had given him away--to me, because she had set him on me, and instead of biting he had licked my face. So she said to take him away because she could never bear to see him again."

Betty's bewilderment grew. She spoke gropingly.

"I guessed there had been something unusual between you and the Planters. What difference does it make? Why do you tell me now? Anything as old as that makes no difference."

"But it does," he blurted out. "I know you too well now not to tell you."

"But you and Lambert are good friends. You dance with Sylvia."

"And she," he said with a harsh laugh, "still calls me an impertinent servant."

Betty started. She drew a little away.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Just that," he said, softly.

He forced himself to a relentless description of his father and mother, of the livery stable, of the failure, of his acceptance of the privilege to be a paid by the week guardian on a horse of the beautiful Sylvia Planter. The only point he left obscure was the sentimental basis of his quarrel with her.

"I _was_ impertinent," he ended. "She called me an impertinent servant, a stable boy, other pleasant names. She had me fired, or would have, if I hadn't been going anyway. Now you know how I've lied to you and what I am!"

He waited, arms half raised, as one awaits an inevitable blow. For a minute she continued to stare. Then she stepped nearer. Although he had suffered to win an opposite response, she did what he had forced Lambert Planter to do.

"No wonder Lambert admires you," she said, warmly. "To do so much from such a beginning! I knew at first you were different from--from us.