Loe raamatut: «The Guarded Heights»

PART I
OAKMONT

I

George Morton never could be certain when he first conceived the preposterous idea that Sylvia Planter ought to belong to him. The full realization, at any rate, came all at once, unexpectedly, destroying his dreary outlook, urging him to fantastic heights, and, for that matter, to rather curious depths.

It was, altogether, a year of violent change. After a precarious survival of a rural education he had done his best to save his father's livery business which cheap automobiles had persistently undermined. He liked that, for he had spent his vacations, all his spare hours, indeed, at the stable or on the road, so that by the time the crash came he knew more of horses and rode better than any hunting, polo-playing gentleman he had ever seen about that rich countryside. Nor was there any one near his own age who could stand up to him in a rough-and-tumble argument. Yet he wondered why he was restless, not appreciating that he craved broader worlds to conquer. Then the failure came, and his close relation with the vast Planter estate of Oakmont, and the arrival of Sylvia, who disclosed such worlds and heralded the revolution.

That spring of his twentieth year the stable and all its stock went to the creditors, and old Planter bought the small frame house just outside the village, on the edge of his estate, and drew his boundary around it. He was willing that the Mortons should remain for the present in their old home at a nominal rent, and after a fashion they might struggle along, for George's mother was exceptionally clever at cleansing fine laces and linens; the estate would have work for his father from time to time; as for himself, Planter's superintendent suggested, there were new and difficult horses at Oakmont and a scarcity of trustworthy grooms. George shook his head.

"Sure, I want a job," he admitted, "but not as old Planter's servant, or anybody else's. I want to be my own boss."

George hadn't guessed that his reputation as a horseman had travelled as far as the big house. The superintendent explained that it had, and that, living at home, merely helping out for the summer, he would be quite apart from the ordinary men around the stables. His parents sensed a threat. They begged him to accept.

"We've got to do as Old Planter wants at the start or he'll put us out, and we're too old to make another home."

So George went with his head up, telling himself he was doing Planter a favour; but he didn't like it, and almost at once commenced to plan to get away, if he could, without hurting his parents. Then Sylvia, just home from her last year at school, came into the stable toward the end of his day's work. Her overpowering father was with her, and her brother, Lambert, who was about George's age. She examined interestedly the horse reserved for her, and one or two others of which she was envious.

George wanted to stare at her. He had only glimpsed her casually and at a distance in summers gone by. Now she was close, and he knew he had never seen anything to match her slender, adolescent figure, or her finely balanced face with its intolerant eyes and its frame of black hair.

"But," he heard her say to her father in a flexible contralto voice, "I don't care to bother you or Lambert every time I want to ride."

An argument, unintelligible to George, flowed for a moment. Then Old Planter's tones, bass and authoritative, filled the stable.

"Come here, young Morton!"

George advanced, not touching his cap, to remind the big man that there was a difference between him and the other stable men, and that he didn't like that tone.

"You are a very dependable horseman," the great millionaire said. "I can trust you. When Miss Sylvia wants to ride alone you will go with her and see that she has no accidents. During your hours here you will be entirely at her disposal."

Instead of arousing George's anger that command slightly thrilled him.

"So you're Morton," Sylvia said, indifferently. "I shall expect you always to be convenient."

He ventured to look at last, pulling off his cap.

"You can depend on it," he said, a trifle dazed by her beauty.

She went out. Her father and her brother followed, like servitors of a sort themselves. George had no sense of having allowed his position there to be compromised. He only realized that he was going to see that lovely creature every day, would be responsible for her safety, would have a chance to know her.

"A peach!" a groom whispered. "You're lucky, Georgie boy."

George shrugged his shoulders.

"Maybe so."

Yet he agreed. She was a peach, and he took no pains to conceal his appraisal from his parents that evening.

"Seen Old Planter's daughter yet?"

His father, a drooping, tired figure in the dusk of the little porch, nodded.

"I haven't," his mother called from the kitchen. "Is she as pretty as she was last summer?"

"Pretty!" he scoffed. "Who was the prettiest woman in the world?"

"I don't know," came the interested voice from the house. "Maybe the Queen of Sheba."

"Then," George said, "she'd have cried her eyes out if she had seen Old Planter's girl."

The elder Morton took his pipe from his mouth.

"Young men like you," he said, slowly, "haven't any business looking at girls like Old Planter's daughter."

George laughed carelessly.

"Even a cat can look at a queen."

And during the weeks that followed he did look, too persistently, never dreaming where his enthusiasm was leading him. Occasionally he would bring her brother's horse around with hers or her father's. At such times he would watch them ride away with a keen disappointment, as if he had been excluded from a pleasure that had become his right. Lambert, however, was away a good deal, and Old Planter that summer fought rheumatic attacks, which he called gout, so that Sylvia, for the most part, rode alone through remote bridle-paths with George at her heels like a well-trained animal.

He knew he could not alter that all at once; she would have it no other way. She only spoke to him, really, about the condition of the horses, or the weather – never a word conceivably personal; and every day he looked at her more personally, let his imagination, without knowing it, stray too far. At first he merely enjoyed being with her; then he appreciated that a sense of intimacy had grown upon him, and he was troubled that she did not reciprocate, that their extended companionship had not diminished at all the appalling distance dividing them. There was something, moreover, beyond her beauty to stimulate his interest. She appeared not to know fear, and once or twice he ventured to reprove her, enjoying her angry reactions. She even came to the stables, urging him to let her ride horses that he knew were not safe.

"But you ride them," she would persist.

"When I find a horse I can't ride, Miss Sylvia, I guess I'll have to take up a new line. If your father would come and say it's all right – "

Even then he failed to grasp the fact that he guarded her for his own sake rather more than for her father's.

He nearly interfered when he heard her cry to her brother as they started off one morning:

"I'm going to ride harder from now on, Lambert. I've got to get fit for next winter. Coming out will take a lot of doing."

"If she rides any harder," he muttered, "she'll break her silly neck."

It angered him that she never spoke to him in that voice, with that easy manner. Perhaps his eagerness to be near her had led her to undervalue him. Somehow he would change all that, and he wanted her to stop calling him "Morton," as if he had been an ordinary groom, or an animal, but he would have to go slowly. Although he didn't realize the great fact then, he did know that he shrank from attempting anything that would take her away from him.

It was her harder riding, indeed, that opened his eyes, that ushered in the revolution.

It happened toward the close of a mid-July afternoon. Mud whirled from her horse's hoofs, plentifully sprinkling her humble guardian.

"Now what the devil's she up to?" he thought with a sharp fear.

She turned and rode at a gallop for a hedge, an uneven, thorny barrier that separated two low meadows. He put spurs to his horse, shouting:

"Hold up, Miss Sylvia! That's a rotten take-off."

Flushed and laughing, she glanced over her shoulder.

"Got to try it to prove it, Morton."

He realized afterward that it was as near intimacy as she had ever come.

He saw her horse refuse, straightening his knees and sliding in the marshy ground. He watched Sylvia, with an ease and grace nearly unbelievable, somersault across the hedge and out of sight in the meadow beyond.

"Miss Sylvia! Are you hurt?"

No answer. He sprang from his horse, leaving it free to graze with hers. He stormed through the hedge, his heart choking him. She lay on her side, quite motionless, the high colour fled from her cheeks, her hair half down. Although the soft ground should have reassured him he was obsessed by the thought that she might never get up again.

In the warmth of his fear barriers were consumed. Within his horizon survived just two people, himself and this silent object of an extended, if unconscious, adoration.

He shrank from learning the truth, yet it was impossible to hesitate. He had to do what he could.

He approached on tip-toe, knelt, and lifted her until she rested against him. The contact was galvanic. He became aware of his trembling hands. Some man, it occurred to him, would touch those curved, slightly parted lips. Not if he knew it, unless it were himself! He wanted to hear those lips speak to him as if he were a human being, and not just – Morton. How could he dream of such things now? He fumbled for her pulse, failed at first to find it, and became panic-stricken. He shook her, more than ever alone, facing an irretrievable loss.

"Open your eyes," he begged wildly. "What's the matter with you? Oh, my God, Miss Sylvia, I can't ever get along without you now."

He glanced haggardly around for water, any means to snatch her back; then she stirred in his arms, and with his relief came a sickening return to a peopled and ordered world. He understood he had sprung headlong with his eyes shut; that his anxiety had dictated phrases he had had no business to form, that he would not have uttered if she had been able to hear. Or, good Lord! Had she heard? For she drew herself convulsively away, the colour rushing back, her eyes opening, and they held a sort of horror.

"Are you hurt?" he said, trying to read her eyes.

She got to her knees, swaying a trifle.

"I remember. A bit of a fall. Stunned me. That's all. But you said something, Morton! Will you please repeat that?"

Her eyes, and her voice, which had a new, frightening quality, stung his quick temper. What he had suffered a moment ago was a little sacred. He couldn't afford to let her cheapen it one cent's worth.

"I guess I don't need to repeat it," he said. "It was scared out of me, Miss Sylvia, because I thought – I know it was silly – but I thought you 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."

Lambert's indecision, his hands hanging at his sides, hurt George nearly as much as the lashing would have done. He had to destroy that attitude of sheer superiority.

"I'm not sure you're a man," he said, thickly, "but you tried to hit me, so you can put your pretty hands up or take it in the face."

He aimed a vicious blow. Lambert side-stepped and countered. George's ear rang. He laughed, his self-respect rushing back with the keen joy of battle. In Lambert's face, stripped of its habitual repression, he recognized an equal excitement. It was a man's fight, with blood drawn at the first moment, staining both of them. Lambert boxed skillfully, and his muscles were hard, but after the first moment George saw victory, and set out to force it. He looked for fear in the other's eyes then, and longed to see it, but those eyes remained as unafraid as Sylvia's until there wasn't left in them much of anything conscious. As a last chance Lambert clinched, and they went down, fighting like a pair of furious terriers. George grinned as he felt those eclectic hands endeavouring in the most brotherly fashion to torture him. He managed to pin them to the ground. He laughed happily.

"Thought you hated to touch me."

"You fight like a tiger, anyway," Lambert gasped.

"Had enough?"

Lambert nodded.

"I know when I'm through."

George didn't release him at once. His soul expanded with a sense of power and authority earned by his own effort. It seemed an omen. It urged him too far.

"Then," he mused, "I guess I'd better let you run home and tell your father what I've done to you."

"That," Lambert said, "proves I was right, and I'm sorry I fought you."

George tried to think. He felt hot and angry. Was the other, after all, the better man?

"I take it back," he muttered. "Ought to have had enough sense to know that a fellow that fights like you's no tattle-tale."

"Thanks, Morton."

George's sense of power grew. He couldn't commence too soon to use it.

"See here, Mr. Planter, I came up here to help with some horses your people didn't know how to handle, and let myself get shifted to this other job; but I'm not your father's slave, and anyway I'm getting out."

He increased the pressure on Lambert's arms.

"Just to remind you what we've been fighting about, and that I'm not your slave, you call me Mr. Morton, or George, just as if I was about as good as you."

Lambert smiled broadly.

"Will you kindly let me go – George?"

George sprang up, grinning.

"How you feel, Mr. Lam – " He caught himself – "Mr. Planter?"

Lambert struggled to his feet.

"Quite unwell, thanks. I'm sorry you made such a damned fool of yourself this afternoon. We might have had some pretty useful times boxing together."

"I'd just as leave tell you," George said, glancing away, "that I never intended to say it. I didn't realize it myself until it was scared out of me."

Lambert put on his coat.

"It won't bear talking about."

"It never hit me," George said, huskily, "that even a cat couldn't look at a queen."

"Perfectly possible," Lambert said as he walked off, feeling his bruises, "only the queen mustn't see the cat."