Vision House. Williamson Charles Norris
Samson again!" Marise broke in. "Isn't that absolutely the name for him? It jumped into my head when he passed before and gave me that wild sort of look – did you notice?"
"I did," said Severance drily. "I thought you didn't. Your eyes were apparently glued to your gold bag."
"What's the good of being an actress if you can't see two things at once, especially if one of them's the biggest thing on the ship? Nobody could help noticing that – any more than if Mont Blanc suddenly waltzed down stage from off the back drop."
"Waltzed? 'Galumped' is the word in this case."
"Oh, do you think so?" Marise appealed. "He walks like a man used to wide, free spaces."
"Like a farmer, you mean. To my mind, that's his part: Hodge – not Samson."
"I've forgotten what Samson was, I'm ashamed to say, before he played opposite Delilah," confessed Marise. "I suppose he was a warrior – most men were in those days – as now. This might be one – if it weren't for the clothes. They certainly are the limit! But do you know, he could be very distinguished-looking, even handsome, decently turned out?"
"No, I don't know it, my child." Severance beat down his irritation. "The only way I can picture that ugly blighter being decently 'turned out,' is out of a respectable club."
"You talk as if you had a grudge against my provincial Samson," laughed Marise, whose blue eyes had followed the "blighter" along the deck to the point of disappearance.
"I don't want to talk about him at all," protested Severance. "I want to talk about you."
"We're always talking about me!" smiled Marise, who was honestly not aware how she enjoyed talking about herself, or how soon she tired of most other subjects. "If you won't talk of one man, let's talk of another! For instance, have you seen our V.C. passenger?"
Severance flushed slightly. "Didn't I tell you, angel girl, that I've been in my cabin the whole time?"
"You didn't say the 'whole' time. And anyhow, there's such a crowd on board, they might have stuck a fellow-soldier in with you at the last moment. Didn't they warn you that they couldn't promise a cabin to yourself? Naturally they'd have chosen a V.C. as the least insupportable person."
"Several V.C.'s I've met have been most insupportable persons," grumbled Severance.
Something in his tone made the girl suddenly face him with wide-open eyes. She saw the dusky stain of red under the olive skin, and the drawing down of the black brows. "Why, Tony, how stupid of me not to remember before!" she exclaimed.
There! It had come – the thing that was bound to come sooner or later. Severance, rawly sensitive on this subject which the girl refused to drop, had wanted it to be later.
For the first time he thought that Marise Sorel was more obstinate than a beautiful young woman ought to be. In a man he would call such persistence mulish.
CHAPTER II
EXIT THE BLIGHTER
"Stupid not to remember what?" Severance still temporised, though he knew the answer.
"Not to remember that man named Garth, in your regiment, who was promoted from a private to be an officer, and won the V.C. I think it was Mums who asked you about him one day, when she'd read something in the Daily Mail, and you said he was a cad. Is this by any chance the same Garth?"
"By evil chance, it is."
Marise was interested. She was dramatic, and liked coincidences. Mrs. Sorel was interested too, with that part of her mind – the principal part – which was not reading Wells's Joan and Peter. It was quite easy, for two reasons, to unhook her attention from the book. One reason was that as a chaperon she was reading by discretion, not inclination. The other reason was, if she had to read at all, she would secretly have preferred a "smart society" novel. But when she read in public she always selected a book which could be talked about intellectually.
She knew how strong this feeling of Lord Severance against the regimental hero had been, and she wished that Marise would show a little tact, and not vex him. He had not proposed yet!
But Marise went on. "How quaint that your Major Garth should be on board our ship!"
"For Heaven's sake, don't call him my Major Garth, dear girl! I loathe the brute."
"But why, old thing? You might tell me why."
"I did, at the time your mother mentioned him."
"If you did, I've forgotten. Do tell me again. It sounds exciting."
Mary Sorel thought that intervention would now be more useful than detachment.
"You two are talking so loudly, I can't read!" she sweetly reproved the pair. "I caught the name of Garth, and the whole conversation we had that day, about him, came back to me. We were lunching with Lord Severance at the Carlton, and I showed him a paragraph I'd clipped from the Daily Mail. I thought as it was about his regiment he might be interested if he hadn't seen it. It was headed 'Romantic Career of a Hero. British-born American Wins the Victoria Cross.' But he wasn't interested, because he explained that the man was a blot on the Brigade; very common, not a gentleman."
"Yes, it comes back to me, too," said Marise. "But if he was a hero – "
"That's all newspaper tosh!" cut in Severance. "They must have headings! It's luck more than heroism that gets a chap the Victoria Cross. Soldiers all know that. Otherwise – "
His lips said no more. Only his eyes were eloquent. The beautiful lavender-grey overcoat hid no ribbon-symbols of decorations on his breast. But how can a staff officer find the chance his soul yearns for, to show his mettle – except the metal on his expensive "brass hat"?
"Of course!" Mrs. Sorel breathed sympathetically.
"Garth was all right as a private, I dare say," Severance grudged. "Even as an officer he might have passed in some regiments. But not in the Guards. He ought never to have been let come in. And he ought certainly not to have stayed in, knowing how we felt. If he'd had any proper pride, he wouldn't have stopped a day."
"Perhaps it was pride made him stick," suggested Marise, led on somehow she hardly knew why – to defend the culprit.
"'Proper' pride was my word," Severance reminded her.
"Extraordinary that an American should be serving with the Guards, in the first place!" Mary Sorel flung herself into the breach, hoping to stop the argument. Arguments made her anxious. She thought that they led to quarrels. And not for anything on earth would she have Marise quarrel with Severance, the only earl who had ever shown symptoms of proposing. It had been well enough for the girl to pique him when he was a handsome young man about town, whose good position was counterbalanced by the star's financial and face value. But since six weeks Severance had become a great catch. Other girls were digging bait in case the fish should wriggle, or be coaxed, off Marise Sorel's hook.
"The fellow's luck again!" growled Severance. "I don't know what his job was in his own country. I don't interest myself in the private life of the lower classes. All I know is, he wasn't a soldier; but he had some bee in his bonnet about a future war, and a theory that there'd be trench fighting on a big scale. He contrived to invent and patent a motor entrenching tool, supposed to act fifty times quicker than anything else ever seen. Then he proceeded to experiment on his back-woods farm, or his wild west ranch, or whatever it was. Washington wasn't 'taking any,' however (isn't that what you say in the States?), so Garth decided to try it on the British bulldog. Where his big stroke of luck came in was meeting our old C.O. on board ship crossing to England. The Colonel had been in New York with his American wife. He probably heard the blighter brag of his invention, and that would catch him as toasted cheese in a trap catches a hungry rat. You see, the old boy always had a craze of his own about trench warfare, and I believe he used to bore the W.O. stiff, roaring for some such machine as this chap Garth invented. Naturally, Pobbles (that's what we call the C.O. behind his back) – Lord Pobblebrook, you know – took the man up. Not socially, of course. Garth's about on a social level with Lady Pobblebrook's foot-man, I should think. But he got the W.O. to look at the trench tool, and – as if that wasn't luck enough for the bounder! –