The Guarded Heights
were dead. I never dreamed you could hear. I'll try to forget it."
He saw her grope in the wet grass at her knees. Scarcely understanding,
he watched her rise, lifting her riding crop, her face disclosing a
temper to match his own.
"You're an impertinent servant," she said. "Well, you'll not forget."
She struck at his face with the crop. He got his hand up just in time,
and caught her wrist.
"Don't you touch me," she whispered.
His jaw went out.
"You'll learn not to be afraid of my touch, and I'm not a servant. You
get that straight."
She struggled, but he held her wrist firmly. The sight of the crop, the
memory of her epithet, thickened his voice, lashed his anger.
"Have it your own way. You say I shan't forget, and I won't. I'm going
after you, and I usually get what I go after. You'll find I'm a human
being, and I'd like to see anybody hit me in the face and get away with
it."
"Let me go! Let me go!"
He released her wrist, dragging the crop from her grasp. He snapped it
in two and flung the pieces aside. The slight noise steadied him. It
seemed symbolic of the snapping of his intended fate. She drew slowly
back, chafing the wrist he had held. Her face let escape the desire to
hurt, to hurt hard.
"Someone else will have the strength," she whispered. "You'll be
punished, you--you--stable boy."
She forced her way blindly through the hedge. Responding to his custom
he started automatically after her to hold her stirrup. She faced him,
raising her hands.
"Keep away from me, you beast!"
Unaided, she sprang into her saddle and started home at a hard gallop.
George glanced around thoughtfully. He was quite calm now. The familiar
landscape appeared strangely distorted. Was that his temper, or a
reflection from his altered destiny? He didn't know how the deuce he
could do it, but he was going to justify himself. Maybe the real
situation had never been explained to her, and, as the price of her
companionship, he had, perhaps, let her hold him too cheaply; but now he
was going to show her that he was, indeed, instead of a servant, a human
being, capable of making his boasts good.
He picked up the two pieces of her riding crop and thrust them into his
pocket. They impressed him as a necessary souvenir of his humiliation, a
reminder of what he had to do. She had hurt. Oh, Lord! How she had hurt!
He experienced a hot desire to hurt back. The scar could only be healed,
he told himself, if some day he could strike at her beautiful,
contemptuous body as hard as she had just now struck at him.
II
He mounted and pressed his horse, but he had only one or two glimpses of
Sylvia, far ahead, using her spurs, from time to time raising her hand
as if she had forgotten that her crop had been torn from her, broken,
and thrown aside.
Such frantic haste was urged by more than the necessity of escape. What
then, if not to hasten his punishment, to tell her father, her mother,
and Lambert? She had threatened that someone else would have the
strength to give him a thrashing. Probably Lambert. Aside from that how
could they punish a man who had only committed the crime of letting a
girl know that he loved her? All at once he guessed, and he laughed
aloud. They could kick him out. He wanted, above everything else, to be
kicked out of a job where he was treated like a lackey, although he was
told he was nothing of the kind. Expert with horses, doing Old Planter a
favour for the summer! Hadn't she just called him a servant, a stable
boy? He wanted to put himself forever beyond the possibility of being
humiliated in just that way again.
In the stable he found a groom leading Sylvia's horse to a stall.
"Take mine, too, and rub him down, will you?"
The groom turned, staring.
"The nerve! What's up, George?"
"Only," George said, deliberately, "that I've touched my last horse for
money."
"Say! What goes on here? The young missus rides in like a cyclone, and
looking as if she'd been crying. I always said you'd get in trouble with
the boss's daughter. You're too good looking for the ladies,
Georgie----"
"That's enough of that," George snapped. "Scrape him down, and I'll be
much obliged."
He went out, knowing that the other would obey, for as a rule people did
what George wanted. He took a path through the park toward home, walking
slowly, commencing to appreciate the difficulties he had brought upon
himself. His predicament might easily involve his parents. The afternoon
was about done, they would both be there, unsuspecting. It was his duty
to prepare them. He experienced a bitter regret as he crossed the line
that a few months ago had divided their property, their castle, from
Oakmont. Now Old Planter could cross that line and drive them out.
Before George came in sight of the house he heard a rubbing, slapping
noise, and with a new distaste pictured his mother bending over a
washtub, suggesting a different barrier to be leaped. As he entered the
open space back of the house he wanted to kick the tub over, wanted to
see sprawling in the dirt the delicate, intimate linen sent down weekly
from the great house because his mother was exceptionally clever with
such things. To the uncouth music of her labour her broad back rose and
bent rhythmically. His father, wearing soiled clothing, sat on the porch
steps, an old briar pipe in his mouth.
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 butter? 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 passion. "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 uncoarsened.
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?"
"By no means. I wouldn't feel comfortable fighting a man like you. I'd
never dreamed we had such a rotten person on the place. Oh, no, Morton.
I'm going to give you a good horse-whipping."
George's chin went out. His momentary good-humour fled.
"If you touch me with that whip I'm likely to kill you."
Without hesitating Lambert raised the whip. George sprang and got his
hands on it, intent only on avoiding a blow that would have carried the
same unbearable sting as Sylvia's riding crop. Such tactics took Lambert
by surprise. George's two hands against his one on the stock were
victorious. The whip flew to one side. Lambert, flushing angrily,
started after it. George barred his path, raising his fists.
"You don't touch that thing again."