The Guarded Heights
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 grass, 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.
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 class, already with greedy fingers
in the fat purse of Wall Street, flung himself on the thick grass 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 class day or on the
afternoon of the Yale baseball game when, beneath a Japanese 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 class sang on the steps of Nassau 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 class 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
The last thing George did before leaving his dismantled room, which for
so long had sheltered Sylvia's riding crop and her photograph, was to
write this little note to Betty:
DEAR BETTY:
It's simpler to go without saying good-bye.
G. M.
Then he was hustled through the window of the railroad train, out of