The Guarded Heights Part 24

"Good man!"

But even then Wandel wouldn't let him go, and the music had stopped again, and only the undefinable shadows of women's voices reached him.

He tried to shake off Wandel who had followed him to the hall. He couldn't wait. He had to enter that moving, chattering crowd to find out what Sylvia had decided.

"Go downstairs, great man," Wandel was whispering, "get a cab, and wait in it at the door, so that you will be handy when I bring the infant Bacchus out."

"I'd rather not," George said, impatiently. "Someone else will do."

"By no means. Expediency, my dear friend, and the general welfare.

Hercules for little Bacchus."

He couldn't refuse. Wandel and Goodhue, and, for that matter all of Dalrymple's friends, those girls in there, depended on him; yet he knew it was a bad business for him and for Dalrymple; and he wanted above all other things to pa.s.s for a moment through that brilliant screen that moved perpetually between him and Sylvia.

He waited in the shadows of the cab until Dalrymple and Wandel left the building. Wandel motioned the other into the cab. Dalrymple obeyed, willingly enough, swinging his stick, and humming off the key. Probably Wandel's diplomacy. Wandel jumped in, called an address to the driver, and slammed the door.

"Where are you taking him?" George asked.

For the first time Dalrymple seemed to realize who the silent man in the shadows was.

"I'm not going on any party with Morton," he said, sullenly.

"You can go to the devil," Wandel said, pleasantly, "as long as you keep away from decent people until you're decent yourself."

"No," George said. "He's going home or I have nothing more to do with it."

"Perhaps you're right," Wandel agreed, "but you can fancy I had to offer him something better than that to get him out."

He tapped on the pane and gave the driver the new address. Dalrymple started to rise.

"Won't go home--you keep your dirty hands off me, Morton. You----"

"Hercules!" softly from Wandel.

George grasped Dalrymple's arms, pulled him down, held him as in a vise. Dalrymple raved. Wandel laughed pleasantly.

"Dirty hands," flashed through George's brain. Did Dalrymple know anything, or was it an instinctive suspicion, or merely the explosion of helpless temper and dislike?

The ride was brief, and the block in which Dalrymple lived was, fortunately, at that moment free of pedestrians. Wandel descended and rang the bell. When the door was opened George relaxed his grasp.

Dalrymple tried to spring from the opposite side of the cab. George caught him, lifted him, carried him like a child across the sidewalk, and set him down in the twilight of a hall where a flunky gaped.

"There's your precious friend," he accused Wandel.

He returned to the cab, rubbing his hands as if they needed cleansing.

"There's no one like you, great man," Wandel said when he had come back to the cab. "You've done Dolly and everyone he would have seen to-night a good turn."

But George felt he had done himself a bad one. During the rest of his time at Princeton, and afterward in New York, he would have a dangerous enemy. Dirty hands! Trust Dalrymple to do his best to give that qualification its real meaning. And these people! You could trust them, too, to stand by Dalrymple against the man who had done them a good turn. It had been rotten of Wandel to ask it, to take him away at that vital moment. Anyway, it was done. He forgot Dalrymple in his present anxiety. The ride seemed endless. The ascent in the elevator was a unique torture. The cloak-room attendants had an air of utter indifference. When he could, George plunged into the ballroom, escaping Wandel, threading the hurrying maze to the other end of the room where earlier in the evening he had seen Sylvia's mother sitting with Mrs.

Alston. George pa.s.sed close, every muscle taut. Mrs. Planter gave no sign. Mrs. Alston reached over and tapped his arm with her fan. He paused, holding his breath.

"Betty asked me to look for you," she said. "Where have you been? She was afraid you had found her party tiresome. You haven't been dancing much."

He answered her politely, and walked on. He braced himself against the wall, the strain completely broken. She hadn't told. She hadn't demanded that her mother take her home. She hadn't said: "Betty, what kind of men do you ask to your dances?" Why hadn't she? Again he saw his big, well-clothed figure in a gla.s.s, and he smiled. Was it because he was already transformed?

Here she came, dancing with Goodhue, and Goodhue seemed trying to lead her close. George didn't understand at first that he silently asked for news of Dalrymple. His own eyes studied Sylvia. Her face held too much colour. She gave him back his challenge, but the contempt in her eyes broadened his smile. He managed a rea.s.suring nod to Goodhue, but Dalrymple, for the time, was of no importance. Sylvia was going to fight, and not like a spoiled child. He must have impressed her as being worthy of a real fight.

He faced the rest of the evening with new confidence. He forgot to be over-careful with these people whose actions were unstudied. He dodged across the floor and took Betty from Lambert Planter while Lambert raised his eyebrows, relinquished her with p.r.o.nounced reluctance, and watched George guide her swiftly away. Maybe Lambert was right, and he ought to tell Betty, but not now. To-night, against all his expectations, he found himself having a good time, enjoying more than anything else this intimate and exhilarating progress with Betty. Always he hated to give her up, but he danced with other girls, and found they liked to dance with him because he was big, and danced well, and was d.i.c.ky Goodhue's friend and Betty's, and played football; but, since he couldn't very well ask Sylvia, he only really cared to dance with Betty.

He was at Betty's table for supper. He didn't like to hear these pretty girls laughing about Dalrymple, but then with them Dalrymple must have exercised a good deal of restraint. It ought to be possible to make them see the ugly side, to bare the man's instinct to go from this party to another. Then they wouldn't laugh.

Lambert sat down for awhile.

"Where's Sylvia?" Betty asked.

Lambert shrugged his shoulders.

"It's hard enough to keep track of you, Betty. Sylvia's a sister."

George gathered that Sylvia's absence from that table had impressed them both. He knew very well where she was, across the room, focus for as large a gathering as Betty's, chiefly of young men, eager for her brilliancy. Lambert went on, glancing at George his questions of the smoking-room.

It wasn't long before the dawn when George said polite things with Goodhue and Wandel, and after their pattern. In the lower hall he noticed that all these pleasure seekers, a while ago flushed and happy, had undergone a devastating change. Faces were white. Gowns looked rumpled and old. The laughter and chatter were no longer impulsive.

"The way one feels after a hard game," he thought.

Goodhue offered to take Wandel in and drop him. The little man alone seemed as fresh and neat as at the start of the evening.

"Had a good time, great person?" he asked as they drove off. "But then why shouldn't great men always have good times?"

Wandel's manner suggested that he had seen to George's good time. What he had actually done was to involve him in an open hostility with Dalrymple. The others didn't mention that youth. Was there a tactful thought for him in their restraint?

They left Wandel at an expensive bachelor apartment house overlooking the park. George gathered from Goodhue, as they drove on, that Wandel's att.i.tude toward his family was that of an old and confidential friend.

"You see Driggs always has to be his own master," he said.

XVII

Because of the restless contrast of that trip George brought back to Princeton a new appreciation; yet beneath the outer beauty there, he knew, a man's desires and ambitions lost none of their ugliness. He stared at Sylvia's portrait, but it made him want the living body that he had touched, that was going to give him a decent fight. Already he planned for other opportunities to meet her, although with her att.i.tude what it was he didn't see how he could use them to advance his cause; and always there was the possibility of her resenting his persistence to the point of changing her mind about telling.

He had decided to avoid Dalrymple as far as possible, but that first night, as he drowsed over a book, he heard a knock at his door, not loud, and suggestive of reluctance and indecision. He hid the photograph and the riding crop, and called:

"Come in!"

The door opened slowly. Dalrymple stood on the threshold, his weak face white and perverse. George waited, watching him conquer a bitter disinclination. He knew what was coming and how much worse it would make matters between them.

"It seems," the tortured man said, "that I was beastly rude to you last night. I've come to say I didn't mean it and am sorry."

"You've come," George said, quietly, "because Goodhue and Wandel have made you, through threats, I daresay. If you hadn't meant it you wouldn't have been rude in just that way. I'm grateful to Goodhue and Wandel, but I won't have your apologies, because they don't mean a d.a.m.n thing."