The Guarded Heights
little, their total loss would not materially affect his fortune, and he
was glad through them to have a personal share in the irritating and
absorbing evolution in the mills. He heard of Allen frequently as a
fiery and fairly successful organizer of trouble, and he sent for him
when he thought the situation warranted it. Allen came readily enough,
walking into the office, shorn of his London frills, but evidently
retentive of the habit of keeping neat and clean. The eyes, too, had
altered, but not obviously, letting through, perhaps, a certain
disillusionment.
"What are you doing to my mills?" George wanted to know.
Allen, surprisingly, didn't once lose his temper, listening to George's
complaints without change of expression while he wandered about, his
eyes taking in each detail of the richly furnished office.
"The directors report that the men have refused to enter into a fair and
above-board cooperative arrangement, and we've figured all along it was
turning the business over to them; taking money out of our own pockets.
It's a form of communism, and they throw it down. Why, Allen? I want
this straight."
Allen paused in his walk, and looked closely at George. There was no
change in his face even when he commenced to speak.
"A share in a business," he said, softly, "carries uncomfortable
responsibilities. You can't go to yourself, for instance, and say: 'Give
me more wages--more than the traffic will bear; then you sweat about it
in your office, but don't bother me in my cottage.'"
"You acknowledge it!" George cried.
Allen's face at last became a trifle animated.
"Why not--to you? Everybody's out to get it--the butcher, the baker, the
candlestick maker. The capitalist most of all. Why not the man that
turns the wheels?"
George whistled.
"You'd crush essential industries off the face of the earth! You'd go
back to the stone age!"
"Not," Allen answered, slowly, "as long as the profits of the past can
be got out of somebody's pockets."
"You'd grab capital!"
"Like a flash; and what are you going to do about it?"
"I'll tell you what I am going to do," George answered, "and I fancy a
lot of others will follow my example. I am going to get rid of those
stocks if I have to throw them out of the window, then you'll have no
gun to hold at my head."
"Throw too much away," Allen warned, "and you'll throw it all."
"The beautiful, pure social revolution!" George sneered. "You're less
honest than you were when you dropped everything to go to London for me.
What's the matter with you, Allen?"
Allen appraised again the comfortable room. Even now his expression
didn't alter materially.
"Nothing. I don't know. Unless the universal spirit of grab has got in
my own veins."
"Then, my friend," George said, pleasantly, "there's the door."
XVI
George found himself thinking and talking of Allen's views quite enough
to please even Bailly. Blodgett, on the other hand, perhaps because of
the heavy, settled atmosphere of the marble temple, had changed his
tune.
"Things are bound to come right in the end."
As far as George was concerned he might as well have said:
"This marble surrounding me is so many feet thick. Who do you think is
going to interfere with that?"
Something of quite a different nature bothered Lambert, and for a few
days George thought it a not unnatural resentment at seeing Blodgett in
his father's office, but Lambert took pains to awaken him to the truth,
walking in one afternoon a few weeks after the Planters' move to town.
He had an uncertain and discontented appearance.
"By the way, George," he said not without difficulty, "Dolly's about a
good deal."
It was quite certain Lambert hadn't come to announce only that, so
George shrank from his next words, confident that something definite
must have happened. He controlled his anxiety with the thought that
Lambert had, indeed, come to him, and that Dalrymple couldn't permit the
announcement of an engagement without meeting the fulfilment of George's
penalties.
"It's been on my mind for the past week," Lambert went on. "I mean, he
hasn't been seeing her much in public, but he's been hanging around the
house, and last night I spoke to Sylvia about it, told her I didn't
think father would want him any more than I did, pointed out his
financial record, and said I had gathered he owed you no small sum----"
"You blind idiot!" George cried. "Why did you have to say that? How did
you even guess it? I've never opened my mouth."
"He'd milked everybody else dry," Lambert answered, "and Driggs
mentioned a long time ago you'd had a curiously generous notion you'd
like to help Dolly if he ever needed it."
"It wasn't generosity," George said, dryly. "Go ahead. Did you make any
more blunders?"
"You're scarcely one to accuse," Lambert answered. "You put me up to it
in the first place, although I'll admit now, I'd have spoken anyway. I
don't want Sylvia marrying him. I don't want him down town as more than
a salaried man, unless he changes more than he has. I didn't feel even
last night that Sylvia really loved him, but I made her furious, and
you're right. I shouldn't have said that. I daresay she guessed, too, it
wasn't all generosity that had led you to pay Dolly's debts. Anyway, she
wouldn't talk reasonably, said she'd marry any one she pleased--oh,
quite the young lady who sent me after you with a horse whip, and I
daresay she'd have been glad to do it again last night. I spoke to
Mother. She said Sylvia hadn't said anything to her, but she added, if
Sylvia wanted him, she wouldn't oppose her. Naturally she wouldn't,
seeing only Dolly's good points, which are regularly displayed for the
benefit of the ladies. Anyway, I agreed to tell you, and you promised,
if it came to the point, you'd have some things to say to me----"
George nodded shortly.
"Yes, but I blame you for forcing me to say them. You've thrown them
together----"
"I've always wanted to help Dolly as you would any old friend who had
wandered a little to the side, and was anxious to get back on the path.
I can't figure every man that comes about the place as a suitor for
Sylvia. Let's forget all that. What are these important and unpleasant
things you have to tell me? I daresay you know where the money you
loaned Dolly went."
George pressed his lips tight. He frowned. Even now he hesitated to soil
his hands, to divide himself, perhaps, permanently from Sylvia at the
very moment of saving her; and he wasn't quite sure, in view of her
pride and her quick temper, that his very effort wouldn't defeat its own
purpose. If only Lambert hadn't made that worst of all possible
blunders. He wondered how a man felt on the rack. He bent swiftly and
picked up the telephone.
"I shall talk with Dalrymple first," he said. "I'm going to ask him to
come over here at once. I think he'll come."
But Lambert shook his head, stopped him before he could take the
receiver from the hook.
"Isn't in the office. Hasn't been back since luncheon. Left no word
then."
"Perhaps since you've come away----" George hazarded.
He telephoned, while Lambert wandered about the room, or paused to slip
through his fingers the tape that emerged like a long and listless
serpent from the now silent ticker. After a question or two George
replaced the receiver and glanced at Lambert.
"You're right. Sticks to the job, doesn't he?"
"He isn't exactly an ordinary clerk," Lambert offered.
George walked to a window. For a long time he gazed over the lower city,
turned singularly unreal by the early dusk, while it outlined itself
little by little in yellow points of light which gave to the clouds and
the circling columns of steam a mauve quality as if the world, instead
of night, faced the birth of a dawn, new, abnormal, frightening.
He had to make one more effort with Dalrymple before sending Lambert to
Sylvia with his reasons why she shouldn't marry the man. In the
singular, unreal light he glanced at his hands. He had to see Dalrymple
once more first----
He turned and snapped on the lights.
"What are you going to do?" Lambert asked. "There's no likely way to
catch him down town."
A clerk tip-toed in. George swung sharply.
"What is it, Carson?"
"Mr. Dalrymple's outside, sir. It's so late I hesitated to bother you,
but he said it was very important he should see you, sir."
George sighed.
"Wait outside, Carson. I'll call you in a moment."
And when the door was closed he turned to Lambert.
"I'm going to see him here--alone."
"Why?" Lambert asked, uneasily. "I don't quite see what you're up to. No
more battles of the ink pots!"
"Please get out, Lambert; but maybe you'd better hang about the office.
I think Dicky's gone for the night. Wait in his room."
"All right," Lambert agreed.
George opened the door, and, as Lambert went through reluctantly,
beckoned the clerk.
"Send Mr. Dalrymple in, Carson."
He stood behind his desk, facing the open door. Almost immediately the
doorway was blocked by Dalrymple. George stared, trying to value the
alteration in the man. The weak, rather handsome face was bold and
contemptuous. Clearly he had come here for blows of his own choosing,
and had just now borrowed courage from some illicit bar, but he had
taken only enough, George gathered, to make him assured and not too
calculating. He was clothed as if he had returned from an affair, with a
flower in his buttonhole, and a top hat held in the hand with his stick
and gloves.
"Come in!"
Dalrymple closed the door and advanced, smiling.
Not for a moment did George's glance leave the other. He felt taut, hard
to the point of brittleness.
"It's fortunate you've come," he said, quietly. "I've just been trying
to get hold of you."
"Oh! Then Lambert's been here!" Dalrymple answered, jauntily.
George nodded.
"You've been crooked, Dalrymple. Now we'll have an accounting."
Dalrymple laughed.
"It's what I've come for; but first I advise you to hold your temper.
It's late, but there are plenty of people still outside. Any more rough
stuff and you'll spend the night in a cell, or under bail."
"If you lived nine lives," George commented, "you'd never be able to
intimidate me."
Yet the other's manner troubled, and George's doubtful curiosity grew as
he watched Dalrymple commence to draw the strings of the mask.
Dalrymple put down his hat and cane, bent swiftly, placed the palms of
his hands on the desk, stared at George, his face inflamed, his eyes
choked with malicious exultation.
"Your blackmail," he cried, "is knocked into a cocked hat. I married
Sylvia half an hour ago."
Before George's response he lost some of his colour, drew back warily;
but George had no thought of attacking him; it was too late now. That
was why he experienced a dreadful realization of defeat, for a moment
let through a flickering impression of the need for violence, but--and
Dalrymple couldn't be expected to understand that--violence against
George Morton who had let this situation materialize, who experienced,
tumbling about his head, the magnificent but incomplete efforts of many
years. That sensation of boundless, imponderable wreckage crushing upon
him sent him back to his chair where for a moment he sat, sunk down,
stripped of his power and his will.
And Dalrymple laughed, enjoying it.
In George's overwhelmed brain that laughter started an awakening
clamour.
"What difference does the money make now?" Dalrymple jibed. "And she'll
believe nothing else you may tell her, and violence would only make a
laughing stock of you. It's done."
"How was it done?" George whispered.
"No objections to amusing you," Dalrymple mocked. "Lambert interfered
last night, and spoiled his own game by dragging you in. By gad, she has