h
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:
