The Guarded Heights Part 81

George wouldn't have minded if he had. They had originally cost him 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."