The Man Who Won (1918)

Bert Maester is the man who won, and all for the love of a maid. Bert is a dissolute, bearded, grimy wreck, his manhood kept alive by just one spark-chivalry for womanhood in distress. Even that assertion is debatable, for love rules his actions where little Melicent is concerned. Both Bert and Melicent, though bred in a tiny Boer village, have British blood in their veins. Bert's English mother died way back, and Millie's English father is on his deathbed. The girl is loathed by her Boer stepmother, who has a brood of her own, and resents having to feed and clothe the "white rat." Bert longs to save Millie the misery of such an orphan-hood, but she scorns her loutish swain, preferring even present circumstances to life with him. Before he dies, her father appoints the mister, Carol Mayne, as Millie's guardian, and instructs him to write to the girl's relations in England. Mayne knows how true is Bert's love for Millie, and tries to persuade her into marrying him. After the funeral "feast," the stepmother, having raised her elbow more often than is wise, thrashes Melicent with a horsewhip, so that when Bert comes to the rescue her broken spirit prompts her to say "Yes" to his once-more-reiterated proposal. There comes an answer from England, and Millie's joy is boundless. Promises forgotten, she departs light-heartedly from her disconsolate affianced. England delights Melicent, but her relatives are something of a shock. The clergyman uncle is a prig of the first water, and his wife is content to follow him. There are five girl cousins, weak as lambs in their parents' presence, but with the germ of deceit already well developed. Millie's life in this milieu is no vast improvement on the Boer brand, for her free ways are regarded as "scandalous," and she is deemed unfit to associate with her "innocent" young cousins. The climax comes, when she is unjustly blamed for a scrape, and, though the matter is cleared up, she goes to live with the good friends who brought her from Africa. At their house she meets a young nobleman, heir to Lord Burmester, and by her girlish grace attracts him. Business ambition is in her, however, and she studies architecture, budding forth five years later as a full-flown planner o f houses. Then Mayne arrives in England, bringing Captain Brooke, a Boer war hero. Brooke is, of course, Maester, but a Maester who has mastered his weaknesses and blossomed forth as a well-groomed Adonis. The course of true love is not yet to run smooth, however. One "Amurrica," villain of the piece in South Africa, turns up to continue his role. Millie has still a horror of meeting Bert, and, when she discovers Brooke's identity, engages herself to the young Burmester by way of entrenchment against Maester's imaginary insistence. The last reel shows the unraveling of the tangle-and the end, true to love-story tradition, is the beginning.