“Gom in veneffer you get leave, Phillips. Always velcome. Good-pye, yong Marcus. I hope to see you in ghaki next time;” and went into the smoking-room, irascibly slamming the door after him.
“I’m hanged if I’ll be convivial to order,” said David. “’Bye, Nell!” he nodded carelessly to Phillips. “Come along, Marcus.” On the steps they passed Antonia Verity on her way to fetch Nell.
“Are you waiting for me, Nell? good child!” She rested her calm lingering regard on Samson Phillips, who, stolidly planted against the umbrella-stand, did not budge.
Nell wished she could run away, wished she were dead; anything to be drastically removed from this awful predicament between two people who did not know each other, of one of whom she was still deadly shy, the other commanded by her father to be their escort.... What was she to do? How long could they all stand like this glaring at one another? The simple expedient of introducing Samson to Antonia never occurred to Nell, who was very childish for her seventeen years. She just stood with interlocked fingers, suffering.... “Perhaps if we wait long enough, Captain Phillips will go away.... Is that how things, dreadful things, come to an end?”
III
“Wonder he didn’t give me a white feather?” growled Richard, as they walked up the street.
David’s eyes were blazing in his thin brown face.
“Hanging on to anything, anybody, English: Beatrice—Con at the Front ... old Con.—And now he wants Samson Phillips; wants to shove Nell into the fellow’s arms.... It’s so cursedly undignified, this crawling round the feet of a country that stands about with folded arms, not wanting you.”
Richard was about to agree, when a peculiar thing happened to him. He was made aware of the Soul of Otto Redbury.... He saw it very clearly, small twitching pink nose of a rabbit—not at all unlike the Soul of Gottlieb Schnabel, the little baker. Alongside of these two, his own soul was an instant laid, then snatched away again ... queer company for the soul of Richard Marcus; he found Redbury objectionable, and despised Schnabel, but—he understood. Funny that David, who was supposed to be an imaginative womanish creature, thrilling quickly to response, a nature artistic and intuitive and all that sort of thing, should reveal himself in certain cases so hard and blunt.