The Guarded Heights

"It is not your fault," George cried. "He's always asked for it. Lambert will tell you that."

George relaxed. Dalrymple's mother came down the stairs with the doctor, and George experienced a quick sympathy for the retiring, elderly woman he had scarcely seen before. She gave Sylvia her hand, while George stepped out with the physician. In reply to George's questions the quiet man shook his head and frowned.

"If it were any one else of the same age – I've attended in this house many years, Mr. Morton, and I've watched him since he was a child. I've marvelled how he's got so far."

He added brutally:

"Scarcely a chance with the turn its taking."

"If there's anything," George muttered, "any great specialist anywhere – Understand money doesn't figure – "

"Everything possible is being done, Mr. Morton. I'm truly sorry, but I can tell you it's quite his own fault."

So even this cold-blooded practitioner had heard the talk, and sympathized, and not with Dalrymple. A trifle dazed George reëntered the house.

"It's good of you to come, Mr. Morton," Mrs. Dalrymple said. "Shall we go upstairs now?"

There was no bitterness in her voice, and she had taken Sylvia's hand, yet undoubtedly she knew everything. Abruptly George felt sorrier for Dalrymple than he had ever done.

"Please wait, Sylvia," she said.

He followed Mrs. Dalrymple upstairs and into the sick-room.

"It's Mr. Morton, dear."

She beckoned to the nurse, and George remained in the room alone with the feverish man in the bed. He walked over and took the hot hand.

"Morton!" came Dalrymple's hoarse voice, "I believe you're sorry for me!"

"I am sorry," George said, quietly, "and you must get well."

Dalrymple shook his head.

"I know all the dope, and I guess I'm off in a few days. Not so bad now I can't talk a little and sorta clean one or two things up. No silly deathbed repentance. I'm jealous of you, Morton; always have been, because you were getting things I couldn't, and I figured from the first you were an outsider."

The dry lips smiled a little.

"When you get like this it makes a lot of difference, doesn't it, how you came into the world? I'll be the real outsider in a few days – "

"Don't talk that way."

A quick temper distorted Dalrymple's face.

"They oughtn't to bring a man into the world as I was brought, without money."

George couldn't think of anything to say, but Dalrymple hurried on:

"I wanted to thank you for the notes. Don't have to leave those to my family, anyway. And I'm not sure hadn't better apologize all 'round. I don't forget I've had raw deal – lots of ways; but no point not saying Sylvia had pretty raw one from Dolly. Lucky escape for her – mean Dolly's not domestic animal, and all that."

George was aware of a slight shiver as Dalrymple's hoarse voice slipped into its old, not quite controlled mannerisms.

"Mean," Dalrymple rambled on, "Dolly won't haunt anybody. Blessings 'n' sort of thing. Best thing, too. Sorry all 'round. That's all. Thanks coming, George."

And all George could say was:

"You have to get well, Dolly."

But Dalrymple turned his head away. After a moment George proposed tentatively:

"Sylvia's downstairs. She wants very much to see you."

Dalrymple shook his head.

"Catching."

"For her sake," George urged.

Dalrymple thought.

"All right," he said at last. "Long enough for me to tell her all right. But not near. Nurse in the room. Catching, and all that."

George clasped the hot hand.

"Thanks, Dolly. You've done a decent thing, and you're going to get well."

But as he left the room George felt that the physician had been right.

He spoke to the nurse, who sat in the upper hall, then he told Sylvia. She went up, and he waited for her. He felt he had to wait. He hoped Mrs. Dalrymple wouldn't appear again.

Sylvia wasn't long. She came down dry-eyed. She didn't speak even when George followed her to her automobile, even when he climbed in beside her; nor did he try to break a silence that he felt was curative. In the light and surrounded by a crowd they could clasp hands; in this obscure solitude there was nothing they could do or say. Only on the steps of her home she spoke.

"Good-night, George, and thank you."

"Good-night, dear Sylvia," he said, and returned to the automobile, and told the man to drive him to his apartment.

XXIX

George didn't hear from Dalrymple again, nor did he expect to, but he was quite aware five days later of Goodhue's absence from the office and of his black clothing when he came in during the late afternoon. He didn't need Goodhue's few words.

"It's hard not to feel sorry, to believe, on the whole, it's rather better. Still, when any familiar object is unexpectedly snatched away from one – "

"We had a talk the other evening," George began.

Goodhue's face lighted.

"I'm glad, George."

He sighed.

"I've got to try to catch up. Mundy says rails have taken a queer turn."

"When you think for a minute not so queer," George commenced to explain.

A few days later Lambert told him that Sylvia had gone to Florida.

"They'll probably stay until late in the spring. It agrees with Father."

"How did Sylvia seem?" George asked, anxiously.

"Wait awhile," Lambert advised, "but I don't think there are going to be any spectres."

He smiled engagingly.

"If there shouldn't be," he went on, "a few matters will have to be arranged, because Sylvia and I share alike. Josiah and I had a long, careful talk with Father last night about what we'd do with Sylvia's husband if she married. He left it to my judgment, advising that we might take him in if he were worth his salt. Josiah wanted to know with his bull voice what Father would think if it should turn out to be you. Very seriously, George, Father was pleased. He pointed out that you were a man who made things go, but that you would end by running us all, and he added that if we wanted that we would be lucky to get you as long as it made Sylvia happy. You know we want you, George."

George felt as he had that day on the Vesle when Wandel had praised him. No longer could Lambert charge him with having fulfilled his boasts, in a way; yet he hadn't consciously wanted this, nor was he quite sure that he did now.

"At least," George said, "you know what my policy would be to make Planter and Company something more than a money making machine."

Lambert imitated Blodgett's voice and manner.

"George, if you wanted to grow hair on a bald man's head I'd say go to it."

"And there must be room for Dicky," George went on.

"We've played together too long to break apart now; but why talk about it? It depends on Sylvia."

That was entirely true. For the present there was nothing whatever to be done. Constantly George conquered the impulse to write to Sylvia, but she didn't write or give any sign, unless Lambert's frequent quotations from her letters could be accepted as thoughtful messages.

He visited the Baillys frequently now, for it was stimulating to talk with Squibs, and he liked to sit quietly with Mrs. Bailly. She had an unstudied habit, nevertheless, of turning his thoughts to his mother. Sylvia had seen her. She knew all about her. After all, his mother had given him the life with which he had accomplished something. He couldn't bear that their continued separation should prove him inconsistent; so early in the spring he went west.

His mother was more than ever ill at ease before his success; more than ever appreciative of the comforts he had given her; even more than at Oakmont appalled at the prospect of change. She wouldn't go east. She couldn't very well, she explained; and, looking at her tired figure in the great chair before the fire which she seldom left, he had an impulse to shower upon her extravagant and fantastic gifts, because before long it would be too late to give her anything at all. The picture made him realize how quickly the generations pass away, drifting one into the other with the rapidity of our brief and colourful seasons. He nodded, satisfied, reflecting that the cure for everything lies in the future, although one must seek it in the diseased present.

He left her, promising to come back, but he carried away a sensation that he had intruded on a secluded content that couldn't possibly survive the presence of the one who had created it.

Lambert had no news for him on his return. It was late spring, in fact, before he told George the family had come north, pausing at a number of resorts on the way up.

"When am I to see Sylvia, Lambert?"

"How should I know?"

It was apparent that he really didn't, and George waited, with a growing doubt and fear, but on the following Friday he received a note from Betty, dated from Princeton. All it said was:

"Spring's at its best here. You'd better come to-morrow – Friday."

He hurried over to the marble temple.

"You didn't tell me Betty was in Princeton," he accused Lambert.

"Must I account to you for the movements of my wife?"

"Then Sylvia – " George began.

Lambert smiled.

"Maybe you'd better run down to Princeton with me this afternoon."

George glanced at his watch.

"First train's at four o'clock. Let Wall Street crash. I shan't wait another minute."

XXX

Betty had been right. Spring was fairly vibrant in Princeton, and for George, through its warm and languid power, it rolled back the years; choked him with a sensation of youth he had scarcely experienced since he had walked defiantly out of the gate of Sylvia's home to commence his journey.

Sylvia wasn't at the station. Neither was Betty. Abruptly uneasy, he drove with Lambert swiftly to the Alstons through riotous, youthful foliage out of which white towers rose with that reassuring illusion of a serene and unchangeable gesture. Undergraduates, surrendered to the new economic eccentricity of overalls, loafed past them, calling to each other contented and lazy greetings; but George glanced at them indifferently; he only wanted to hurry to his journey's end.

At the Tudor house Betty ran out to meet them, and Lambert grinned at George and kissed her, but evidently it was George that Betty thought of now, for she pointed, as if she had heard the question that repeated itself in his mind, to the house; and he entered, and breathlessly crossed the hall to the library, and saw Sylvia – the old Sylvia, it occurred to him – colourful, imperious, and without patience.

She stood in the centre of the room in an eager, arrested attitude, having, perhaps, restrained herself from impetuously following Betty. George paused, staring at her, suddenly hesitant before the culmination of his great desire.

"It's been so long," she whispered. "George, I'm not afraid to have you touch me – You mean I must come to you – "

He shook off his lassitude, but the wonder grew.

As in a dream he went to her, and her curved lips moved beneath his, but he pressed them closer so that she couldn't speak; for he felt encircling them in a breathless embrace, as his arms held her, something thrilling and rudimentary that neither of them had experienced before; something quite beyond the comprehension of Sylvia Planter and George Morton, that belonged wholly to the perplexing and abundant future.

THE END