The Secret Service Submarine Part 6

"Leave it all to me," he replied. "I am skipper of this from now onwards. You follow my lead."

A minute or two afterwards the girls came in. Doris, as I have already explained, was as pretty as Venus, Cleopatra, and Gertie Millar all in one, and she only beat Marjorie by a short head. All the other girls I've ever met were simply "also ran."

Marjorie's hair was black. She was a brunette with olive-coloured skin and green eyes, like very dark, clear emeralds. She was extraordinarily lovely. Indeed, all three of us had seriously considered starting a picture postcard firm, with the girls as models and I to manage it, so that Doris and I could get married and have Marjorie to live with us.

Rather a good scheme, only it would have needed at least two hundred pounds capital, which we hadn't got! Doris had on her engagement ring, which she generally wore on a string round her neck, underneath her blouse. I had put thirty s.h.i.+llings each way on "Baby Mine" for the Grand National and it had come off--hence the ring.

"Let me introduce you to my fiancee, Miss Joyce," I said to Bernard.

He took her hand and bowed over it, looking out of the corner of his eyes at Marjorie.

Little Lockhart gasped. "Babe that I am!" he said, "blind mole! To think that I have lived in this house with young John Carey for so long, the house honeycombed with secret wires, and an illicit engagement in progress under my nose, and I knew nothing of it!"

"Well, you are not the only person, Mr. Lockhart," Marjorie said. "And now I am going to fetch up dinner. Cook is out for the evening. Amy is in the plot. We've got soup--only tinned, but quite nice; there's a round of cold beef; and we will make an omelette on John's fire."

"I'll come and help you carry the things," said my brother, and they left the room as friendly as if they had known each other for years.

"Well, what do you think of my brother?" I asked Doris. I'm afraid my arm was round her waist and I had forgotten Lockhart.

"I'm decidedly of the opinion," she said, "that Commander Carey knows more than enough to come indoors when it rains."

Lockhart here revealed qualities of an unsuspected nature--I had never really appreciated Lockhart until the night before.

"I happen to have, locked up in the cupboard of my sitting-room," he said, "a bottle of claret wine and a bottle of sherry wine. I will go and fetch them to grace this feast."

"You nasty, horrid villain, so you drink in secret, do you?" I remarked.

"Only Bovril, but please don't let it be known," was the reply, and then Doris and I were alone.

I have never been one of those people who kiss and tell, so I will pa.s.s over the next minute; but after some business of no importance, she put her hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the face.

"John," she said, "there is something up!"

"What do you mean?"

"I don't exactly know, but there is something up. I can feel it--and something has happened, too, that I have got to tell you about. Before the Doctor left this morning, he told Marjorie that Mr. Jones had fallen in love with her and that she would have to marry him after the war was over, when he has straightened out his business affairs."

"Good Lord!" I said, "that thing? Why----"

"What have you got against him?" she asked quickly. "He's wealthy, the Doctor says, he has got good manners; of course, he's older than Marjorie, but he's not an old man. I thought you said you rather liked him?"

"I did say so, and I liked him better than ever after meeting him this morning. You know I had breakfast with the Doctor?"

"I know, and there is something up. Something to do with your brother--I am certain of it. But why do you object to Mr. Jones for Marjorie?"

"What does Marjorie say herself?"

"She told the Doctor"--the girls would never call the Doctor "Father"--"that if Mr. Jones had a million a minute and was the last man left on earth after a second flood, she would rather spend her life in the garden eating worms than marry him!"

"Marjorie's plenty of pluck," I answered, "and is obviously of romantic temperament. Anyone else in the wind?"

"Anyone else?" she said, with a bitter note in her voice, "whom do we ever see? We live as prisoners here, as you very well know, Johnny, and if it were not for you I should long ago have jumped into Thirty Main Creek and ended it all."

I held her close to me. "Dear," I said, "it will all come right, I am certain. Somehow or other, we shall be able to be married soon, and then you need never see Morstone or the Doctor any more."

"I love Morstone," she replied. "I love the lonely marshes and the bird-noises and the great red dawns and the sweet salt air, but"--she shuddered--"that fiend who married my poor dear mother and drove her to death, I would see burnt to-morrow without a pang of remorse. He has been worse lately, John, far worse. Mrs. Gaunt has been put to watch us like a spy. I can't tell whether he suspects anything about you and me.

He may or may not. At any rate, there is something going on which frightens me. I've no doubt you will think me quite hysterical, quite foolish, and I feel it rather than know it, but I am frightened. Only this morning, the Doctor said things to dear Marjorie which were awful.

He caught her by the arm and twisted it when she defied him, and his voice was so ugly and cruel, it seemed so inhuman, that I felt as if someone had put ice to the back of my neck. Oh, take me away soon, take Marjorie away too!"

She clung to me in a pa.s.sion of appeal, and then and there I resolved that, come what might, we would marry and leave this ill-omened and mysterious place.

"What a long time they are!" Doris said after a moment or two, when I had soothed her. "Oh, here they come!"

But it wasn't, it was only Lockhart, who knocked at the door loudly and waited for several seconds before coming in with his contribution to the dinner.

"I'll run down and hurry them up, as there is no one about," I said.

"You'll do nothing of the sort!" she replied quickly. "Really, what a babe you are, John!"

I was just the least bit in the world offended, not seeing why I should not hurry up the truants, especially as I was extremely hungry again; but they came at last, carrying two piled trays of provisions. I had never seen Marjorie look prettier. Her eyes were brighter than ever, and she showed not the slightest trace of unhappiness. Obviously, she had quite forgotten the events of the morning.

I cannot tell you what fun the dinner was. The soup was top-hole--mock turtle, and one of Elizabeth Lazenby's finest efforts. Lockhart was a tremendous success as butler, and the "claret wine"--I should have thrown it at my scout's head at Oxford--tasted like "Chateau la Rose" at least.

Bernard and Marjorie made the omelette over my fire, while the rest of us sat waiting and Lockhart and I smoked a cigarette. Marjorie ordered my brother about most unmercifully. Suddenly, it was nearing a critical moment and both of them were crouching over the pan, I happened to turn my eyes in their direction. They were not looking at the omelette at all. They were looking at each other and their faces were almost solemn.

Then it burst upon me and I fear I was indiscreet. I said aloud: "The very thing! Oh, my holy aunt, the very thing!"

They whipped round.

"What is?" Bernard asked.

"Why, the omelette, you blighter!" I replied, and kicked Doris under the table. She understood at once. Girls are so quick, aren't they?

When we had eaten the omelette and the round of cold beef had "ebbed some," as I once heard a Rhodes' Scholar say at Oxford, my brother rose, gla.s.s in hand.

"Mr. Vice," he said, "the King!"

I had dined in the wardroom with Bernard when he was on board the _Terrific_, and I knew what to do.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the King!" I said, and we drank that loyal toast in silence. Somehow it altered the mood of each individual. A gravity fell upon us, not sadness or boredom, but we stopped to think, as it were. Only two hundred miles away, over the marshes and over the sea, the great German battles.h.i.+ps were waiting. Nearer than Penzance is to London, the armies of England at that moment were s.h.i.+vering in the trenches round Ostend. And in Morstone House School--what was there that hung undefined, but heavy and secret, like a miasma upon the air?

Then Bernard said: "Miss Joyce, I have taken the liberty to bring you a little present from London."

"'Doris,' please," she answered.

"Very well then, Doris. It is a bracelet, a little affair of turquoises and pearls, to commemorate our meeting and in the hope that you will always be a good girl and love your brother-in-law."

"Oh, Commander Carey!"

"'Bernard,' please!"