The Guarded Heights Part 38

You're not now. It's----"

She broke off, drawing away a little again. He struggled to keep his hands from her white, slender figure, from her hair, yellow in the moonlight.

"You don't understand," he said, desperately. "This thing that you say I've become is only veneer. It may have thickened, but it's still veneer."

It hurt to say that more than anything else, for all along he had been afraid it was the truth.

"Underneath the veneer," he went on, "I'm the mucker, the stable boy if you like. If I were anything else I would have told you all this years ago. Betty! Betty!"

She drew farther away. He thought her voice was frightened, not quite clear.

"Please! Don't say anything more now. I'd rather not. I--I----Listen!

What difference does it make to me or anybody where you came from?

You're what you are, what you always have been since I've known you. It was brave to tell me. I know that. I'm going now. Please----"

She moved swiftly forward, stretching out her hand. He took it, felt its uncertain movement in his, wondered why it was so cold, tightened his grasp on its delightful and bewitching fragility. Her voice was uncertain, too. It caressed him as he unconsciously caressed her hand.

"Good-night, George."

He couldn't help holding that slender hand tighter. She swayed away, whispering breathlessly:

"Let me go now!"

He opened his fingers, and she ran lightly, with a broken laugh, across the lawn away from him.

The moonlight was like the half light of a breathless chapel, and the scent of flowers suggested death; yet he had not killed what he had come to kill.

When he couldn't see her white figure any more George Morton, greatest of football players, big man of his cla.s.s, already with greedy fingers in the fat purse of Wall Street, flung himself on the thick gra.s.s and fought to keep his shoulders from jerking, his throat from choking, his eyes from filling with tears.

PART III

THE MARKET-PLACE

I

George left Princeton with a sense of flight. The reception of a diploma didn't interest him, nor did the cheers he received cla.s.s day or on the afternoon of the Yale baseball game when, beneath a j.a.panese parasol, he led the seniors in front of admiring thousands who audibly identified him for each other.

The man that had done most for Princeton! He admitted he had done a good deal for himself. Of course, Squibs was right and he was abnormally selfish; only it was too bad Betty couldn't have thought so. He had tried to make her and had failed, he told himself, because Betty couldn't understand selfishness.

He avoided during those last days every chance of seeing her alone; but even in the presence of others he was aware of an alteration in her manner, to be traced, doubtless, to the night of his difficult confession. She was kinder, but her eyes were often puzzled, as if she couldn't understand why he didn't want to see her alone.

He counted the moments, anxious for Blodgett and the enveloping atmosphere of his marble-and-mahogany office. That would break the last permanent tie. He would return to Princeton, naturally, but for only a day or two now and then, too short a time to permit its influences appreciably to swerve him.

Without meaning to, he let himself soften on the very edge of his departure when the cla.s.s sang on the steps of Na.s.sau Hall for the last time, then burned the benches about the cannon, and in lock step, hands on shoulders, shuffled slowly away like men who have accomplished the interment of their youth.

A lot of these mourning fellows he would never meet again; but he would see plenty of Goodhue and Wandel and other useful people. Why, then, did he abruptly and sharply regret his separation from all the others, even the submerged ones who had got from Princeton only an education taken like medicine and of about as much value? In the sway of this mood, induced by permanent farewells, he came upon Dalrymple.

"There's no point saying good-bye to you," George offered, kindly.

Of course not. They would meet each other in town too frequently, secreting a private enmity behind publicly worn masks of friendship.

George was wandering on, but Dalrymple halted him. The man was a trifle drunk, and the sentiment of the moment had penetrated his narrow mind.

"Not been very good friends, George, you and I."

Even then George shrank from his apologies, since he appreciated their precise value.

"Why don't you forget it?" he asked, gruffly.

Dalrymple nodded, but George knew in the morning the other would regret having said as much as he had.

Immediately after that sombre dissolution of the cla.s.s George said good-bye to the Baillys. Although it was quite late they sat waiting for him in the study, neat and serene as it had been on that first day a hundred years ago. The room was quite the same except that Bill Gregory's picture had lost prominence while George's stood in the place of honour--an incentive for new men, although George was confident Squibs didn't urge certain of his qualities on his youngsters.

Squibs looked older to-night, nearly as old, George thought, as the disgraceful tweeds which he still wore. Mrs. Bailly sat in the shadows.

George kissed her and sank on the sofa at her side. She put her hand out and groped for his, clinging to his fingers with a sort of despair. For a long time they sat without speaking. George put his arm around her and waited for one or the other to break this silence which became unbearable. He couldn't, because as he dreamed among the shadows there slipped into his mind the appearance and the atmosphere of another room where three had sat without words on the eve of a vital parting. Tawdry details came back of stove and littered table and ungainly chairs, and of swollen hands and swollen eyes. He had suffered an unbearable silence then because he had found himself suddenly incapable of speaking his companions' language. With these two the silence was more difficult, because there was too much to say--more than ever could be said.

He started. Suppose Squibs at the very last should use his father's parting words:

"It's a bad start, but maybe you'll turn out all right after all."

His lips tightened. Would it be any truer now than it had been then? For that matter, would Squibs have cared for him or done as much for him, if he had been less ambitious, if he had compromised at all?

One thing was definite: No matter what he did these two would never demand his exile; and the old pain caught him, and he knew it was real, and not a specious cover for his relief at not having to see his parents again. It hurt--most of all his mother's acceptance of a judgment she should have fought with all her soul.

He stroked the soft hand that clung to his. From that parting he had come to the tender and eager maternal affection of this childless woman, and he knew she would always believe he was right.

But she wanted him to have Betty----

He stood up. He was going away from home. She expressed that at the door.

"This is your home, George."

Bailly nodded.

"Never forget that. Don't let your ideas smoulder in your own brain.

Come home, and talk them over."

George kissed Mrs. Bailly. He put his hands on Bailly's narrow shoulders. He looked at the young eyes in a wrinkled face.

"The thing that hurts me most," he muttered, "is that I haven't paid you back."

"Perhaps not altogether," Bailly answered, gravely, "but someday you may."

II