Search of house and grounds was fruitless.
Before half-past eleven the rainstorm was over, and a bright moon lighted the brothers and the men-servants to the discovery of just nothing at all.
Except to give an order, or make a suggestion, neither Bellamy spoke until they stood alone together in the hall.
They looked at each other like men who from dreams of hell have waked to find it.
Then the elder groaned, beside himself.
"The poor girl!" he said. "To think of her ill-used—murdered, perhaps!"
The younger man cut him short with a glance, which even through his agony pierced Randal as if the livid lightning of a god had been launched at the ineptitude of human compassion.
"Cut it out," said Dick. "That's a car coming. The father. Take him right back to town in it. You've got the pull. You can make the political coves get Scotland Yard and the police of the world working, before you'd get the county bobbies into their trousers."
The car drew up in front of the house.
"How shall I tell him?" said Randal.
"I shall," answered Dick. "You get into tweeds—jump." And he went to meet Caldegard at the door.
"Good God!" said the old man, when he saw the young one's face. "What's happened?"
"I'll tell you," said Dick. "Is that a good car?"
Caldegard knew how to obey. "It's Broadfoot's—Rolls-Royce, six cylinder," he replied promptly.
"Tell the man he must take you back to town."
When the order was given, the lover, in curt and terrible phrases, told the father what had happened. And Caldegard's face, as he listened without a word, was a tragedy which Dick Bellamy, heeding it not at all for the moment, remembered all his life.
"Set every dog in the world on the men who've stolen Ambrotox," he said in conclusion, "and you'll find Amaryllis. A trace of one is a track of the other; news of either is news of both. Leave the local work to me."
Caldegard looked into the strange face, and almost flinched from the terrible eyes.
"I'll do all you say," he replied simply.
Then Randal came, pulling on his coat. His brother made him swallow whisky and water, forced the elder man to do the same, and before they left, demanded money of Randal.
"There's a hundred and twenty pounds in notes, in the small right-hand drawer in the safe," he replied, "—unless they got that too."
"No," said Dick. "They were hustled. Let her rip," he said to the driver, and went back into the house.
Trembling with excitement and keeping back genuine tears for Amaryllis, a guest to serve whom had been pleasure, the parlour-maid fetched him cold meat, bread and beer. When he had changed his clothes, he ate hastily in the hall, swallowing doggedly what he could not taste.
"Twenty-five minutes—they'll be in town. Another fifteen and the wires'll be humming," he calculated. "Twenty more—the local police will be here, and rub out every trace. Is there a trace, a mark—a print—a smell, even? I've got an hour."
He sent all the servants to bed, except Randal's chauffeur, whom he summoned to the hall.
"My car's fit to travel, Martin," he said. "Shove in as many tins of petrol as she'll hold. I may want her to-night. Run her out into the drive, put on an overcoat and sit inside till I come."
Then he went to the study, lit all the candles and another lamp, opened the safe with the duplicate key, and found, as he had expected, the money in its drawer.
"Mostly one-pound notes," he muttered, as he locked the safe.
Turning to leave it, he stood suddenly stock-still, head up and sniffing the air, puzzled by an intangible association of sense and memory.
Failing to fix it, he left the alcove, and went to the writing-table, choosing the chair she had sat in, when she could not, or would not, give reason for her tears. And now he gave a flash of thought where before he had refrained even from speculation. Could it have been the forgotten letter that had made her weep? Yet there had been no trouble in her face while she read it, and it seemed certain that the handwriting was unfamiliar.
While he mused his eyes were fixed on the alcove at the end of the room. The light of the candle he had left there outlined sharply the edges of the two curtains which hung from the rod crossing the recess. At the ceiling their edges met, but, at a height of some two and a half feet from the floor, their folds were looped back to the wall in a style formally old-fashioned. And now, even before his mind became concerned, his eye was irritated by a lack of symmetry in the draping; for the drooping fold of the right-hand curtain was out of shape. Again, his thought ran, if thieves playing for so great a stake as Ambrotox had found a woman in their way, their best card was prompt murder. If they could abduct in silence, they could have killed silently. And this made clear to him the soundness of what had been hitherto a merely instinctive conviction; since they had not left her body dead, they had taken it away alive—and with no intent to kill elsewhere. For, if murder were to be done, the dead was safest of all behind them in the place of the theft.
Then again—while the distorted loop of the curtain haunted his subconscious mind, so that with imaginary fingers he was adjusting its curves, even while his mind pulled and twisted the elements of his problem—then, again, he thought, this thief—had he shrunk from murder, or merely fromthismurder?
"If I could know that!"
And before he was well aware of what he did, he was in the opening of the alcove, handling that awkward fold—and again he drew breath, deep and slow through the nose; again the vague memory—again the elusive association. Was the scent—sweet as well as musty—was it in the curtain? But as he stooped, he saw what made him forget that vague odour: a crumpled bunch of the soft linen had been squeezed together, and was not yet recovered from the strain of some violent compression. Gently stretching the stuff, and bringing it closer to the light, he found the almost regular marks, above and below, as of some serrated, semi-trenchant tool which had been closed upon the doubled piece of cloth.
"Teeth, by God!" said Dick. "Tried to gag her with it—shoved a bag of it in with his fingers, gets 'em out, and stoppers the lot with his hand. Before she faints, she bites—here and there she's gone clean through the stuff."
Indecision gone, he took the smaller lamp in his hand, and made a tour of the room.
At an angle to the fireplace was a broad-seated, high-backed oaken settee, covered with cushions. The back almost hid the hearth from the french-window. The silk pillow nearest the alcove still kept the impress of a head.
"When they came in," he reasoned, "the back of that thing hid her. She'd lain down to rest, and stop that sobbing before she came back to me. Fell asleep—women'll do that, happy or wretched, before they know where they are. They reached the safe, and that arm at the end would hide even her hair. While they're messing round with the safe, she wakes and peeps at 'em—was it cold feet or sand kept her from yelling? What next?"
He was back at the alcove now, on hands and knees, the lamp set on the ground, searching the thick pile of the carpet for signs of the struggle there must have been. And again the smell—near the right hand curtain where the wool of the carpet was rubbed.
Roses—attar of roses! Where had he heard of attar of roses combined with—with what? And again the two wires would not touch—but they were throwing a spark across the gap.
Yes, it was Caldegard—Caldegard had said something—something of a foul man and a rotten stink. It was some story he'd been telling that first night at dinner.
Then a glitter in the carpet. Half-hidden—trodden in amongst the roughened wool, he found it—a morsel of bright steel—the needle of a hypodermic syringe. Who had spoken lately of a morphinomaniac that carried his syringe always with him?
Why, Caldegard, Caldegard!
"Melhuish?—Melford?—Meldrum?—Melcher?-Melchard!By God, the swine that stank!"
And he remembered how he had upset the silver candlestick, setting fire to the shades, to cover the girl's discomfort, and the smile she had paid him with. Then it was this particular murder from which the thief had shrunk.
Melchard, the chemist, had guessed at the direction of Caldegard's research. Discharged at a moment when his hope of mastering a valuable secret was at its height, he had found means to track Caldegard's movements, and even, it seemed, to discover the hiding-place of the perfected drug and its formula.
"Agent—or, p'r'aps, a leading member of the Dope Gang Caldegard hinted at. He lays his plans to grab the stuff and the formula. Just as he gets his fingers on it, up pops the only being on earth he'd give a damn about knifing. Twenty years' clink if he leaves her to talk. Takes her with him—hell's blight on him! Wouldn't have been dosing himself on a game like this. Used the syringe on her."
To find Melchard was to find Amaryllis. The first thing to do, therefore, was to find Melchard's address, and the first man to ask was Caldegard. If Caldegard could not give it to him, it meant a long hunt with the police. Anyway, he must begin with Caldegard.
He crossed to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and, hearing no tinkle, blew into the transmitter with the receiver at his ear. Hearing nothing, he hung it up with a curse.
Sitting at Randal's desk, he wrote rapidly the following note:
"Got the money. Enclose key. Melchard's the man we want. Get his address. 'Phone cut outside. Wire me address P.D.Q.—Dick."
"Got the money. Enclose key. Melchard's the man we want. Get his address. 'Phone cut outside. Wire me address P.D.Q.—Dick."
Through the window he went to his car in the drive.
"Martin," he said, "get out Sir Randal's car and take this note to him. Go to New Scotland Yard. They'll tell you where he is. Drive like hell."
He went back into the house, ran upstairs, lit a candle in his room, stuffed one pocket with handkerchiefs, and into another dropped a tin of tobacco and an electric torch.
Why hadn't he brought a gun? Oh, well, it only meant five minutes at his flat in Great Windmill Street.
As he came down the passage, his eyes, obeying a new habit which seemed already old, lingered a moment on Amaryllis' door. But it was not sentiment which checked his feet.
"There might be something," he muttered, and, without hesitation, entered the room.
An oppression of silence weighed upon him painfully as he felt for his match-box. When the candle showed it, the pretty room was a cruel jest.
His examination was made with business-like care. On the dressing-table was nothing but the pretty things which served her toilet; but on the writing-table in the window lay a pile of letters. The topmost he recognised at once for that which she had read in his presence after dinner.
As he pulled the stiff sheet from the envelope, he was aware once more of the odour which he had smelt first in the alcove of the study.
He spread the letter open. It was signed "Alban Melchard."
It was written on good paper, stamped with the address, and read as follows:
"Rue de la Harpe, 31,"Paris,"June18th."My dear Miss Caldegard,"I fear that you will be surprised at my venturing to write to you, considering the distressing circumstances under which we parted. Although the small request I have to make of you is of some importance to me, I should not have the presumption to make it, if it were not that it gives me the opportunity to assure you that the passage of time has made a wiser man of me—and a grateful one, for the delicate forbearance with which you taught me my place."I have recently met with good fortune in my profession, and am settling down as a man of business in the neighbourhood of Millsborough, with considerable prospect of success."In the happy days when it was my privilege to pick up unconsidered scraps of your father's scientific wisdom, I kept, jotted down in a notebook, many items for future use. Until recently I have had no occasion to refer to these notes, which I now find are essential to the success of my most promising scheme. I must have left the memoranda behind me with some other things, when I departed so suddenly last September."If you can have this notebook found for me, I will ask that it may be posted to me at The Myrtles, Grove End, near Millsborough, as I shall only be in Paris for three days longer."I heard, quite by chance from a friend, that Professor Caldegard was staying with Sir Randal Bellamy in Hertfordshire, so I have ventured to use his address."Thanking you gratefully in anticipation,"I remain,"My dear Miss Caldegard,"Yours very sincerely,"Alban Melchard."
"Rue de la Harpe, 31,"Paris,"June18th.
"Rue de la Harpe, 31,"Paris,"June18th.
"My dear Miss Caldegard,
"I fear that you will be surprised at my venturing to write to you, considering the distressing circumstances under which we parted. Although the small request I have to make of you is of some importance to me, I should not have the presumption to make it, if it were not that it gives me the opportunity to assure you that the passage of time has made a wiser man of me—and a grateful one, for the delicate forbearance with which you taught me my place.
"I have recently met with good fortune in my profession, and am settling down as a man of business in the neighbourhood of Millsborough, with considerable prospect of success.
"In the happy days when it was my privilege to pick up unconsidered scraps of your father's scientific wisdom, I kept, jotted down in a notebook, many items for future use. Until recently I have had no occasion to refer to these notes, which I now find are essential to the success of my most promising scheme. I must have left the memoranda behind me with some other things, when I departed so suddenly last September.
"If you can have this notebook found for me, I will ask that it may be posted to me at The Myrtles, Grove End, near Millsborough, as I shall only be in Paris for three days longer.
"I heard, quite by chance from a friend, that Professor Caldegard was staying with Sir Randal Bellamy in Hertfordshire, so I have ventured to use his address.
"Thanking you gratefully in anticipation,
"I remain,"My dear Miss Caldegard,"Yours very sincerely,"Alban Melchard."
"I remain,"My dear Miss Caldegard,"Yours very sincerely,"Alban Melchard."
"H'm, in Paris, is he? No more in Paris than I am. Wrote this in case he should be suspected, but didn't count on having to cart the girl along. False addresses wouldn't help him. These two are straight goods. Clever move, if it hadn't been for the girl. Your alibi'll hang you, Alban Melchard. That fixes Millsborough."
Savagely he cranked up his engine and jumped into the driving-seat. The car rushed forward.
When St. Albans was behind him the confusion of excitement began to settle, and his thoughts presented themselves clear as those of a dispassionate spectator. For him, in all this tangle, there was one thing, and one thing only, that mattered; to be in time. He did not fear murder; but the very reason of her security from death was the cause of a fear so horrible, that he knew inaction would have been torture past endurance.
When Amaryllis left her bedroom, having laid Melchard's letter on her table, she had intended returning at once to pleasant and frivolous conversation with Dick Bellamy. For to-night she was nervous—a little unstrung, it may be, by the pain she had given to his brother; and Dick, with his quiescent vitality, his odd phrases and uncompromising directness of expression, seemed to her at that moment the most restful companion in the world. If she could only get him started, he might amuse and interest her as on the long drive the day before. And then, he seemed to be one of those people who understand even when you don't talk—and she remembered how he had cut into her father's chatter about Melchard by upsetting the candles.
But Sir Randal had met her between the door and the stairhead.
"Dick tells me I've got to play billiards all alone," he said; and though his self-pity was merely playful, it struck the girl painfully.
"What a shame!" she began—and then a stupid lump came in her throat, and Randal saw the change in her face.
"My dear," he said, "you mustn't. I'm all right. Believe me, if it does hurt a little, it won't spoil things for me as it might for a young fellow. The world's a very interesting place, and I'm going to be jolly in it, just the same."
He looked at her for a moment anxiously.
"Be jolly too—there's a good girl. And, I say," he added with simple eagerness, "you won't go running away from here to some dreadful aunt, will you?"
"I'll stay just as long as you and father want me to," she replied; but, finding speech difficult, finished with the best smile she could command, and went down the stair, avoiding Dick and seeking refuge in Randal's study.
There the tears overcame her—though she tried to hide from herself their full reason.
Randal she had known for many weeks, and for Randal she was indeed tenderly grieved; but the other man, with his abruptness, his humour, and his lurking intensity, she had first seen the day before yesterday; and although she knew nothing of Mr. Richard Bellamy's opinion of herself, and admitted in regard to her own future no more than that she found him interesting, she was too well aware to deny, even to herself, that he had pushed his brother out of his chance.
To say this, she told herself, was but to confess that the younger man had unconsciously reminded her of possibilities and dangers; but it seemed to be not only unkind but unjust that Sir Randal's misfortune should arise out of the very eagerness of his affection for this weird brother of his.
And then her father! He had said nothing, implied nothing, but she foresaw disappointment.
It was all rotten, and the tears flowed.
Then came that hand on her shoulder, whose touch, although they had never, she remembered, even shaken hands, she knew before lifting her eyes to his.
When he had left her, although her tears were soon dry, she felt a curious restlessness of mind, and what she would have called "an excited tiredness," and she stretched her body on the cushions of the settee for a moment's relaxation, which slipped at once into half an hour's sleep.
A whisper awoke her. She raised her head. The voice was behind her. Cautiously, kept silent between fear and curiosity, she rose and turned her face to the alcove.
A man was there, with his back towards her—not one of her men. His clothes were grey; his right hand was on the open door of the safe, the left holding a small parcel wrapped in white paper, and, separate, an envelope.
Amaryllis knew what he held, and the courage rose in her to hold back the scream which was coming, until she should have tight hold of the thief—the fingers of both hands, she hoped, fast in his collar.
She was close behind him, and he was locking the safe, when suddenly he felt or heard her presence and swung round.
It was the face of Melchard; astonishment and disgust for a fatal moment took away her breath. Before she could scream, his hands were on her mouth and naked neck, pushing her roughly backward until she was against the right-hand curtain and the corner of the wall. From behind the curtain, it seemed, two small, soft hands stole over her shoulders and gripped her neck, squeezing it savagely.
Melchard took his left hand from her mouth, and as she tried in vain to scream in spite of the double grip on her throat, he crammed a handful of the linen curtain between her tongue and palate with his long fingers.
"Take your cat's claws off her neck," she heard him mutter. "I'll keep her quiet."
And that was all before she fainted.
Her next sensation was of half-sitting, half-lying in an uneasy arm-chair—a chair which jolted, slid and swung, and then again glided smoothly. There was something hairy over her face, and she drew her breath with difficulty.
She was in a car—the weight on her face was the hairy side of a rug. Movement seemed impossible, and the fur now and then hurt her eyes. With an effort she managed to close the lids, and as tears slowly refreshed the eye-balls, she was so much relieved that she might have fallen asleep, but for Melchard's detested voice sounding above her.
"I think that's Escrick we've just run through. York in ten minutes about. When I say 'now,' down you go under the rug again. I'm the only passenger through the town."
"Why not go round York?" asked another voice, which Amaryllis had heard before; but where, she could not remember.
"We mustn't waste any time," answered Melchard. "Besides, if more people see you in the streets of a town, fewer look at you than in the country. You'll have to duck in a minute, and I shall pile the bags and things on top."
"They hurt me last time," said the softer voice.
"A thousand apologies," replied Melchard carelessly. "But it's all in the good cause. By the way, you'd better have a look, and see if the girl's all right before I cover you over."
"Oh, damn the girl!" answered the woman. "What's it matter if she dies?"
"If I'd wanted that, I'd have left her dead in her lover's study."
"Lover! Old Bellamy!" said the woman—and laughed.
"Not old enough, I guess, to help it."
"Nor you, Alban, to hide it," she retorted, groping at the rug which covered Amaryllis. "You gave her enough to keep her quiet another hour or two, didn't you?"
"It's hard to tell with a new subject," he answered. "Morphine is tricky in opiate doses."
Then Amaryllis knew she had been drugged, and to appear as when they last saw her, she half-opened her eyes, showed her teeth between drawn lips, and managed to keep her face rigid without even the quiver of an eyelid.
The rug was lifted for a moment and a face peered at hers; and she knew it for that of Sir Randal's late parlour-maid and lamented coffee-maker.
"She's just the same," said the woman. "Quite insensible, but not dead yet. Blast her!"
Melchard laughed. "The green-eyed monster as per usual," he said. "You ought to know me by this time, but you always mistake my universal admiration of beauty for the tender passion."
"Don't be a fool," she answered. "What are you going to do with her?"
Melchard was silent, and the woman spoke again.
"Look here," she said, "I'm going to be right in this. I found the stuff for you. I got the key. And if I hadn't been with you to-night you'd have been lagged. I'm not so sure that you won't be, now, with that —— letter of yours from Paris."
"What's wrong with the letter?" asked Melchard.
"It would have done well enough if we hadn't had to bring this red-haired wench of yours with us. Now that the girl's disappeared, it'll only attract attention."
"My sweet child," retorted Melchard, "that letter is a masterpiece. I did leave a notebook behind. Legarde and Morneaux, besides swearing to it themselves, would bring a dozen others, all most respectable men, to say that I did not leave Paris until the twenty-second, the day after to-morrow."
"H'm!" said the woman. "M'yes, perhaps. And anyhow," she went on, with a chuckle of relish, "by the time we've shipped the girl to Holland, she won't remember her own name."
Then at last horror seized the soul of Amaryllis, and consciousness left her.
For the better part of their journey to town Caldegard and Randal Bellamy ate their hearts in silence. The road was good, and they had it almost to themselves.
As they were nearing London, Caldegard spoke.
"Bellamy," he said, "that brother of yours won't stop at killing if——"
"He'll begin with it," replied Randal, "if he gets a fair chance."
"It gives me unreasonable hope," said Caldegard.
"Men who've trusted Dick would call your hope reasonable."
"Yet he's sent us after Ambrotox," complained the father, "and my heart's breaking for my little girl."
"His argument convinced you, anyhow," said Randal.
At New Scotland Yard Sir Randal's card gained them instant admission to the presence of the Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department.
He listened without a word to Randal's compact and lucid statement of the facts.
"It's a good thing I was kept here so late to-night, gentlemen," he said. "We shall act without losing a moment in the matter of your daughter's disappearance, Dr. Caldegard. But the theft of your secret, of which both Sir Charles Colombe and the Home Secretary have spoken to me, is a matter of such tremendous importance, that I am obliged to communicate immediately with both these gentlemen and the Commissioner. And you will be doing me a great kindness if you will both remain here until I hear from them."
An hour later a sombre group of six, after protracted discussion, seemed almost to have exhausted the evidence, suggestion and counsel which could be brought to bear upon a crime so sudden and so obscure.
Sir Charles Colombe looked anxiously round him as he spoke.
"That is the danger," he said, "which we have to face: that these foul pests of society should escape with Professor Caldegard's discovery and master his secret—a peril to which all the dangers mankind has run since the world began from greed, bigotry, alcohol and opium are child's play. The bill of which Sir Gregory has just spoken would give us powers to lay hands on all these local branches of what Superintendent Finucane has described as 'the Dope Gang.' We know already some twenty-five or thirty of them. If we were as well advanced in our knowledge of their central organisation, we might even now do something fairly vigorous under the law of conspiracy. As it is, we can only proceed against individuals trafficking in and supplying certain specified drugs. The secret of this greatest drug of all must not, if human power can prevent it, come into the hands of the inner ring before we have our grip on it. Needles, before now, have been successfully hunted in haystacks, and perhaps even you, Professor Caldegard, have no adequate conception of how close the meshes are in the net Superintendent Finucane is spreading. And I should like you to understand, sir," he said, drawing nearer to the old man who sat staring with fixed eyes out of a ghastly face, "that, though our duty makes us think of millions where you can think only of one, every effort which the Criminal Investigation Department makes, every trap it lays, every device it contrives to recover your property is equally adapted to finding your daughter. In your fear for her safety you have forgotten your drug; in our fear for the drug we cannot let your daughter out of our minds."
"She may be—dead," said Caldegard.
The Superintendent answered him.
"I don't believe it," he declared. "You see, sir, the thief's plan worked smoothly, bar the one unexpected factor—the young lady in the room. If he didn't kill her then, he don't mean to kill her."
"That's my brother's argument," said Randal, adding his word of comfort.
There was a tap at the door, and a constable entered.
"Sir Randal Bellamy's chauffeur, sir," he said to Finucane. "He has brought this letter. Says it's from Mr. Richard Bellamy."
Randal glanced at the note and then read aloud:
"Melchard's the man we want. Get his address. 'Phone cut outside. Wire me address P.D.Q."
"Melchard's the man we want. Get his address. 'Phone cut outside. Wire me address P.D.Q."
"From my brother Richard," he said. "Dr. Caldegard knows this Melchard, I believe."
When Caldegard had told them all he knew of the man, the Superintendent looked at the Commissioner,
"I think, sir," he said, "we'd better inquire about Mr. Alban Melchard."
"Rather a wildgoose chase," grumbled the Home Secretary.
"I shouldn't wonder, sir," replied Finucane, "if Mr. Richard Bellamy isn't a very wideawake young gentleman."
Seven miles south of Millsborough, just before you come to the cross-roads, whose eastern branch runs to the coast some thirty miles away, there stands, the only house in sight, a little roadside inn called "The Coach and Horses."
At half-past seven on the morning of Saturday, June the twenty-first, there drew up before it a long, low two-seater car.
The landlord, a sharp-faced little man with kindly eyes and a shrewd mouth, came to the door.
"Looks like you've been travelling all night, sir," he remarked pleasantly.
"It looks right," said Dick Bellamy. "I want a house called The Myrtles."
Turning to the north, the landlord waved his hand towards the right.
"Two mile, mebbe more, mebbe less. Lies in a bit of a hollow. But you won't see no myrtles—less they've growed in the night—just a low stone house with a bit of a copse back o't. Mr. Melchard you're seekin', like? He's a girt man wi' the teeth," said the landlord, chuckling.
"Big eater?" asked Dick.
"Dentist's my meanin', sir. They do say he keeps seven shops in Millsborough district, and never drew tooth in his life. Just drives round so free, takin' t'money. But I reckon, if you're goin' to t'Myrtles, you know the gentleman."
"I'm going to leave my car here. Don't know how long, but I'll pay you five shillings a day. I want some food and I've only got five minutes. Can you manage it?"
Waiting, he scribbled a note in pencil, tore the leaf from his notebook, demanded an envelope, addressed it, and attacked the cold beef and beer hurriedly set before him.
"Can you post this?" he asked.
"You passed t'box quarter mile back," said the landlord.
"Half-a-crown if you'll take it yourself."
"All right, sir. But there's no stamp in the house."
"Post it without," said Dick, well pleased.
He laid down his knife and fork.
"Walkin'?" inquired the landlord. "Then you'd better take path across t'moor. I'll show'ee."
Alone on the heath, Dick felt he had at last a few minutes to consider his position. Plans must come with events. Though besieged still by the fear which had haunted him throughout the night, he found comfort, however indefinite, in the daylight. Time was everything; but if he were indeed in time, it was well to have the day before him.
The letter to his brother, which he had posted in York at three o'clock in the morning, though it gave the address of the man he was hunting, could not, any more than that which he had just entrusted to the landlord of "The Coach and Horses," reach Scotland Yard in time to bring help in the immediate danger which he foresaw—danger which he would never have run the risk of bringing upon Amaryllis Caldegard but for his conviction of that worse peril threatening her. He was, indeed, sure that his course, rash as it would be accounted in the event of failure, offered the best, and perhaps the only chance of taking home with him an Amaryllis as happy and full of laughter as he had known on the road between Oxford and Chesham.
Twenty minutes' walking led him up a sharp rise to the level of the road, from which he looked down into the corresponding hollow on the other side. And there he saw what the little man of "The Coach and Horses" had described: a long, low stone house of two stories, facing south-west; windows neatly curtained, and fitted—an exotic touch—withpersiennes; gravelled walks and smooth grass plots, a tree or two, shrubs and a few garden saplings; a garage big enough for one car which would look bigger than its envelope as it came out; and a pretentious gate—suburban villa half-heartedly aping country house—guarding the drive.
He stood in the road, boldly looking down at the blinded windows, thinking how common these houses were; in many parts of England he had seen them, grinning, sulking, boasting, counterfeiting, smirking at a world that would not look twice.
But this house seemed to leer at you through a filthy parade of modesty.
On a bench in the shade of a large tree not more than thirty yards from the road was a patch of colour: a woman's garden hat, bound with an orange scarf. Since it was not hers, it seemed the best thing in sight.
Fearing observation, he turned from the house, walking eastward.
The copse of which he had been told lay not only behind the building to the north-east, but encroached on its eastern side so as to intervene with the tops of its younger trees between him and the back of the building.
He followed the highway until he came to a field of ragged oats running from the road northward behind the little wood. Vaulting the stone fence at the roadside, he scrambled down the steep bank. Soon he was among the trees, making his way to the left towards the rear of "The Myrtles." Bushes and tree-trunks gave him cover until he was within five yards of the low wall of unmortared stone which made an irregular and dilapidated fence about the back of the house.
From the wood's edge to the wall he crawled with the speed and silence of a Houssa scout, and, once in shelter of the stones, was not long in finding a crevice roughly funnel-shaped, which gave him, with small eyepiece, a wide outlook.
Wretched grass-plots trodden into patches of bare earth, ashes, bones, potato-parings, a one-legged wheelbarrow; a brick dustbin overfilled till its rickety wooden lid gaped to show the mouthful it could not swallow; a coal-shed from whose door, hanging by one hinge, a blackened track led across the dying grass to a door standing open outwards from the structural excrescence which must be kitchen or scullery: these made the sordid complement of the hypocrisy which exuded from the front.
That open door tempted him.
If only he could find some indication of her room! For that Amaryllis was in that house he had less doubt than proof.
From the front the windows looked out at no great distance on the high road. Signals were possible. They would lodge—imprison her at the back, and surely on the upper floor. But even that, on this side, had six windows, and he searched their flat glitter in vain for a peg to hang a guess upon.
He had almost made up his mind to creep to that open scullery door and try his luck when, from the third window from the right, behind the glass there shone something white.
Now the first window in this row was next the end of the house; the second, over the roof of the scullery; and the third had beneath it a straight drop—some seventeen feet of unbroken wall—to the ground.
There was, indeed, three feet below the window-sill a rough string-course, which might give to a fugitive a moment's finger-hold before dropping to earth. But the fall between shoes and ground would be some two and a half yards—a serious matter even for an acrobat so placed that he could not watch his feet.
And how should man or woman escaping get even the moment's grasp of that two-inch projection of stone?
It was, then, a safe room for a prison.
Bad glass refracted grotesquely the white shape behind it, but could not make its movement unfeminine; and, when the lower sash was slowly raised until it jammed about a foot above the sill, and two hands showed their fingers under the frame straining to force it higher, Dick's heart leapt to the belief that they were those pretty, expressive hands he had watched so often in lazy pleasure.
He was upon the point of making a signal above the edge of his cover when a footfall checked him.
A woman, dressed in a blue overall and carrying an empty japanned bucket, was hurrying from the scullery along the grimy track to the coal-shed.
This out-house was so near to the watcher, that he could hear the pretty, eager, flaxen-haired, savage-faced little woman muttering to herself as she scraped and shovelled. He could, after a fashion, speak the Taal, and knew her more distinct phrases for European Dutch.
"Not used to the job," reasoned Dick. "And no skivvy in the housethisweek." And he remembered the garden hat with the orange band.
Half-way back she set down her load, straightened her back, and glanced at the upper part of the house.
The sight of the partly-opened window and the white figure now drawn back a little into the room seemed to fill her with rage. She ran forward and, standing a few yards from the house, shook her fists furiously, pouring out a stream of abuse and threats of which hardly an articulate word reached Dick's ears. Having come to a climax with a shriek, hoarsely suppressed, she ran back to the bucket and with it stumbled quickly into the house.
Dick was over the wall almost before she was out of sight; but clattering of coal-shovel and fire-grate told him she had not yet started on her way upstairs, and he followed with extreme caution.
The door which stuck out into the yard soon hid him from the open doorway, and enabled him to bring his eyes above the sill of the window, which must be passed to reach the house, without fear of attack from behind.
In the scullery, at the end further from the main building, was a small hobbed grate. By this the woman with the flaxen hair had set her coals, and was now lighting a fire, of which the paper was flaming high and the wood began already to crackle.
In this commonplace task she seemed so unnaturally absorbed that Dick watched her with intense curiosity, his head held horizontally, so that one eye only topped the lower edge of the window-sill, thus making the least possible exposure of his head above it.
Every now and then she would turn and pick out with her fingers little lumps of coal and drop them in the hottest crevices among the sticks; and each time he saw a face of cruelty more determined.
He thought of Amaryllis, and knew that it was of Amaryllis that this little Dutch devil also was thinking.
"Melchard's!" he thought; and knew that for him, Dick Bellamy, she must be, in what was coming, not a woman but a tiger or a bad man.
The fire now glowed under its blaze. She took a shovel and strewed a thin layer of small coal over all. Next she spread a doubled sheet of newspaper on the stone floor, and laid on it small sticks and again small coal.
Several times during this fire-lighting Dick had seen her glance, as she turned, at a small mound of stuff which lay on the further side of the hearth. She now lifted it, holding high, with a finger and thumb pinching each shoulder-strap, a woman's frock—a light, slender slip, of these latter days, to add the last exquisite grace.
The fire flared, and shed its changing light on the green silk, so that by its iridescence of interwoven colours, chasing each other as the garment wavered in the draught, he knew it. Amaryllis had worn it at dinner last night.
Under the light of the big lamp in the hall it had made her figure turn colour like an opal. And again, as she ran with that letter to her bedroom, crimson, purple, peacock blue and a green never the same, had chased each other down the swaying folds of her skirt.
The little Dutchwoman eyed the frock, hating while she admired; then suddenly she pushed a fold of the silk into her mouth, and pulled with hands and tore with teeth until long streamers of silk flickered their reds and greens towards the fire.
At last, with a sound between purring and growling, she bunched the stuff together and pushed it down on the coals, lifted the paper tray of fuel from the floor, laid it in the grate over the silk, turned away, threw off her overall and ran cat-footed into the house and out of his sight.
And with her vanished Dick's last shadow of hesitation.
He crept from behind the door, faced its outer edge, laid a hand from each side on its top, set his right foot on the inside knob of the handle, raised his left to the outer, and thence with a quick movement sprang astride of the top.
When Amaryllis awoke from a sleep in which the remains of the drug Melchard had given her had happily combated the restlessness of fear, she had no memory of how she came to the room in which she found herself.
Under the shock of the strange surroundings she sprang from the bed, and as her feet touched the floor, last night came back to her.
She tried the door—locked!
She went to the window, and had already raised the lower part until it jammed, when there came running beneath an angry woman, threatening with gesture and unintelligible words.
It was Fridji, who was once Sir Randal's parlour-maid, and last night Melchard's companion in the car.
Amaryllis drew back and looked round the room for her gown—the green silk she had worn at dinner last night. It had been taken from her body before she was laid on the bed. The rest of her clothes she still wore, even to the evening shoes which were hurting her feet. But the green frock was gone—an added precaution, no doubt, against her escape.
Fear thrilled in her heart, and grew so terrible that, if the window had given her any prospect but that foul yard and the dark pine trees behind it, she would have broken its glass and screamed for help.
Almost in despair, she sat trembling on the bed, and thought of her father and of the two Bellamys, and of what they would do, when they caught them, to the men who had stolen Ambrotox and the woman they loved.
All the three? Well, two at least. Yet somehow she felt that it would not be surprising if the worst vengeance should be Limping Dick's.
And inside her she smiled, and the shaking of her body began to subside.
But before her courage was firm in the saddle there came footsteps in the passage—a foot that she knew. The key grated, the door opened, and Melchard entered the room, dressed in a soft, new-looking suit of purplish grey; the jacket too long in the body and too close in the waist, the wide, unstarched cuffs of the mauve shirt turned back—an embryo fashion—over the coat-sleeves.
And with him came the miasma of that nauseating perfume.
The mercy of God sent her anger, and she forgot that she rose before this intruder covered only in white princess petticoat, green silk stockings and high-heeled bronze shoes.
The petticoat was cut low on neck and shoulders, and the white of the lace shoulder-straps showed bluish between the warm cream-colour of neck and of arms. The face, a moment before pale and worn almost to haggardness, was now flushed with the indignation which gave point and edge to the words which overwhelmed for a moment even the shameless and commercialized criminal.
Of what he was, she knew little, but what she thought of him he could not escape hearing.
Yet, when she paused in, rather than concluded her invective, he had already recovered his effrontery.
"My dear Miss Caldegard," he said, "we were compelled last night, for your own good, to exhibit a mild opiate. Your health required it. It has impaired, I fear, your memory of the circumstances which have brought you under my care. When you have had a few weeks in which to benefit by the devoted care and scientific attention which we shall bring to bear on your case, you will learn to look on me as what I am—your medical attendant, and to forget—or—or——" and here he ogled her horribly with his fine eyes—"or remember in a new fashion your old lover."
And with this disgusting phrase he came close up to her.
"Lover still," he said, "though discarded and trampled upon."
Amaryllis could not know that her very truculence was a fan to his flame.
"Go out of my room," she cried, and struck him on his mouth and cheek.
The blow was delivered with the action of a slap, but the fingers were clenched, and the arm was swung from the shoulder.
Melchard seized her by the elbows, cruelty and joy making in his countenance a horrible mixture of emotion.
With his face close to hers, he said:
"Oh, yes, I'll go—soon! That tawny hair of yours, Amaryllis, is splendidly voluptuous against your skin of live, creamy satin. I long to run my fingers into its meshes."
And actually he would have touched it—her hair!—but for a voice which spoke sharply through the partly-open door:
"You're wanted, Alban. Come!"
And Amaryllis, in spite of fear and disgust, almost laughed at the disgust and fear in his face as he released her.
"My men downstairs," he said. "Soon—soon I shall see you again."
Then, at the door, he turned to add: "There are four of them, prompt, even rash fellows—all armed but faithful and devoted to me. I beg you to wait until your breakfast is sent up. Attempts to escape are dangerous."
Again the key was turned, and Amaryllis flung herself on the bed, shaking with rage and horror.
But her attention was distracted from herself by the absence of departing footsteps.
The man must be still at the door—listening, spying through some crevice, perhaps.
No—he was talking—listening—replying, in a voice too low for the words to reach her.
And then an answering voice, which rose by swift crescendo, until it drove the man with hasty steps down the passage, followed by a screaming final curse.
Fridji the parlour-maid was jealous, was angry, and was making her Melchard a scene! Oh, but how funny things would be if they weren't so beastly!
But Dutch Fridji, having no humour, entered the room in the worst temper of a depraved woman.
"You want breakfast?" she said, locking the door and taking out the key.
Amaryllis looked up with disdainful laziness.
"Of course," she said, "please be quick."
"If you cannot wait," replied Fridji, "you must go without."
"You must not speak to me like that. You know very well that parlour-maids say 'ma'am' and are expected to be respectful."
"Parlour-maids! I am no parlour-maid."
"Indeed?" said Amaryllis.
"Here—I am mistress!"
"Oh!" said Amaryllis.
"And you are prisoner—I tell you."
"Yes?" said Amaryllis. "I'm afraid you've let yourself be dragged into a very wicked crime for which you will be severely punished."
"Punish! To punishme! Drag in! But me? Me? Me? I am not dragged. I lead."
"Really?" said Amaryllis.
"The head is mine. I plan. And, because you will never leave this place I do not mind to tell you that it is I have done it. All this. We have the New Drug. I hold the man that shall make it and sell it. I am the leader. I get the key. I catch you by the throat, there in The Manor House, my pretty, red-haired mistress! I catch you while my Melchard, who is clever, prick your arm with the needle. I—I—I!"
"Oh, yes," said Amaryllis. "But I do not think you are wise to tell all this to me."
"Because you tell again? Oh, no, ma'am! I squeeze harder next time—and there are other things. This is good old establish firm, no risk taken."
And Dutch Fridji came slowly towards Amaryllis.
"You make love with my Alban," she said, "an' I stop it." Lifting her skirt, she fetched from a sheath in her stocking a sharp-pointed knife. "I have enough of you. Two months I must say 'ma'am'! And now, it is Alban!"
"You mean to kill me?" asked Amaryllis.
Dutch Fridji was like the nightmare vision of a Fury.
For a moment Amaryllis was paralyzed. But Fridji liked the clatter of her own tongue.
"It is that I mean," she said. "To kill you very slow. Your beautiful frock, it burn now. Soon your shoes, your stockings, your long petticoat, the corset shall burn, till there shall not be a shred they can say was yours. And then the body shall be burned—but first carve and chopped like meat at table."
Amaryllis gasped and shuddered, giving fuel to the blaze, so that it crackled once more into fierce indiscretion.
"I tell you things. Oh, yes, I tell. For the last one that died—it was a pity. He did not know before—knew not ever what was coming to him and to each part of him. That spoil the flavour of my dish, do you see?"
A flourish of the knife put expressive finish to the words.
Amaryllis backed into the corner between bed and door, speaking any word that came. On equal terms she would have fought for life like a cat, but the knife——
"Mr. Melchard doesn't want me to be killed," she said.
For a moment Fridji's rage choked her.
"I'll scream, and he'll come with his men."
"With this I have sent him running from your door," cried Fridji. "It is locked this side, and you will bleed to die before they break it."
Not rushing, but creeping, Dutch Fridji approached.
Amaryllis raised her eyes towards the window and the strip of sky it framed, in silent supplication. And already, half through the window, she saw her answer.
And Fridji saw her victim's face flush with hope, and turned to see its cause.
Through the opening which Amaryllis had left between sill and sash, his hands on the floor, his chin almost touching it, while his legs from knee to feet were still outside the window, she saw Dick Bellamy.
Fridji, with blood in her mind, knife in her hand, and the proof of Amaryllis' face that this was an enemy, sprang to deal with the defenceless intruder.
Amaryllis had seen the lank black hair, no longer sleek, and had received one gleam from the uplifted blue eyes; and now knew terror such as she had not felt even for herself.
Nothing, it seemed, could come between the knife and Dick Bellamy—Dick who had come to her. And then she saw his left arm dart forward—an arm that seemed, on the floor, to shoot out to twice its natural length—and its fingers gripped Fridji's left ankle, jerking it towards him.
The woman fell backwards, and Amaryllis caught her from behind.
"Stop her mouth," said Dick from the floor.
And the girl, her long hands almost meeting round Fridji's slender neck, squeezed with all her strength, forcing the head and shoulders to the ground.
Fridji gaped for breath.
"Stuff her mouth—blanket," said Dick, with his feet almost clear of the window-sill, yet keeping his hold on the ankle.
Amaryllis forced the corner of the coverlet between Fridji's teeth and held it there, keeping up the pressure of the other hand on the throat.
"That's what they did to me," she thought.
Dick stood beside her.
"Change with me," he whispered, and slid his left hand round the front of Dutch Fridji's neck. Amaryllis stood up.
By the hold of his left, Dick raised the woman almost to her feet and, measuring his distance, struck her with his right fist on the left side of the neck directly below the ear—a short, sharp blow, the sound of which affected the watching girl with a pang of physical sickness.
It might have been the noise made by a butcher flinging a slab of raw steak upon his block.
Dick let the woman's body gently back to the floor, and Amaryllis saw that she was unconscious as a corpse.
"Is she dead?" she said softly.
"For five minutes—p'r'aps ten," he answered. "Where's the key?"
Amaryllis picked it up from the floor.
"Melchard said he'd got four men downstairs—armed," she whispered.
"Heard him—but it's the only way—they've fixed that window. Just scraped in head first and we can't get out like that. Come on," said Dick, and put the key in the lock.
"I've—I haven't got—haven't got any clothes." And there was no other expression of shame in her face than the two large tears that gathered slowly in her eyes.
But Dick Bellamy ignored them, looking her up and down like a man considering the harness needed for a horse.
"Take off her skirt," he said; then added: "Shoes might do." And with his back turned to the girl, he knelt and quickly unshod Dutch Fridji while Amaryllis unfastened the waistband of the skirt.
"Yours wouldn't last a mile," said Dick, going to the window and looking out. "Put 'em on quick—say when."
In a time wonderfully short, he thought, for a girl, she spoke.
"I'm ready," said the small voice; and he turned to face a quaint figure in a skirt too short, and too wide on the hips. The brogue shoes would have looked better if the stockings had been of anything but green silk.
But the pathos of sentiment and custom was in the bare arms and the two hands crossed on the chest and throat, with fingers spread in vain attempt to cover the whole; and in the plaintive simplicity of the voice which said:
"But, oh, my neck! I can't possibly get into her blouse, and a blanket's too conspicuous."
Dick stripped off his Norfolk jacket, holding it for her arms. As she hesitated, glancing at him, he frowned.
"Please obey orders," he said, and she meekly slipped on the loose coat. He took from its pocket a folded white handkerchief, and tied it round her neck by two adjacent corners, so that it hung like a child's bib. Amaryllis pulled the collar up over the knot at the back, and began to button the coat over the linen.
"Don't button it," he said, pulling off his necktie. "Cross the edges. Lift your arms."
And he tied the dark green strip round her waist, knotting it in front.
"Come on," he said; and, stooping, picked up Fridji's knife. "Where's the sheath?"
"In her stocking," said Amaryllis.
"Get it," said Dick, and unlocked the door.
Amaryllis behind him whispered: "She moved a little," and brought him the leather sheath.
They stepped silently into the passage. Dick locked the door and pocketed the key.
"Quietly," he said, and as they crept towards the stairhead, he slid the sheathed knife into the pocket of the tweed jacket.
The passage ended in an arch, beyond which appeared a balustrade.
The corridor was wider than the archway; and Dick, having made the girl hide behind its projection, stepped delicately out upon the square landing, and looked over the rails.
The staircase mounted in a single broad flight from the floor of an entrance hall larger and more pretentious than he had expected. The attempt at an appearance of comfort was a failure, but money had been spent, and a sort of bad harmony between furniture and decoration forced itself upon the eye.
Across the hall, to the left, the front door stood open to the sunlight. In the wall facing him and the stair's foot were two closed doors, and others, doubtless, to match them, beneath the gallery on which he stood.
He had already made up his mind to lead the girl noiselessly down the stair and through the open door, and thence to make, if necessary, a running fight for it, with the chance of taking his pursuers in detail, when he heard a man's steps, accompanied by a faint tinkle of china, coming towards the hall, he judged, along the corridor immediately beneath that which he and Amaryllis had used.
Something, he remembered, had been said of breakfast, to be sent up, and he waited until there appeared, first the tray and then the man that carried it; a thick-set fellow, with heavy boots, shabby clothes, and a bald spot among the rough sandy hair of his crown.
It was plain that he was making for the stair, and Dick drew back behind the projection of the arch, opposite to Amaryllis. He saw the questions in her eyes and knew she could hear the approaching footsteps.
He made a gesture for silence; a silence which seemed to Amaryllis to last immeasurable time, while tea-cup tinkled against milk-jug, ever nearer and nearer.
She saw him take a swift glance through the arch at the comer she could not see, draw back three steps up the passage, and start forward again with a face that made her heart jump, and a terrific limping rush of three or four strides to the stairhead. And she craned forward just in time to see the man with the tray, two steps from the top, receive in his stomach a kick which lifted, it seemed, the wretched creature and all that he carried in a single flight to the bottom of the stair.
After a little clash of plates and cups on the impact of the kick, there was a sensible silence before the appalling crash and thud at the stair's foot. Amaryllis held back a scream, but reeled as if fainting.
Dick caught her by the shoulders and shook her, as women will shake a child.
"Buck up," he said; and she clung to his hands a moment. Then,
"I'm all right," she murmured, and stood alone.
Even as she spoke it seemed that in the hall below three doors opened at once, and that from each rushed a man, clamouring questions; and then, having seen the clutter of tray and crockery, stood aghast.
Dick, after one glimpse of the three so standing, took cover again, drawing the girl with him.
"Looks as if he fell backwards right from the top," said a bass voice, which Dick ascribed to the big man with the black beard who had seemed to carry himself somewhat above the others.
"Slipped 'is foot and pitched backwards, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."
"But why backwards?" asked Black Beard. And Dick imagined a suspicious glance at the stairhead.
"I guess 'e try save tray and losebalanzaof 'eemself," said a third, whose exotic voice and uneasy English affected Dick with an undefined reminiscence.
"Carry the fool to his kennel, you two," said Black Beard. And Dick heard the crushing under foot and the kicking aside of broken china, and a shuffling of two pairs of feet.
But they had not gone many yards with their burden, when he heard a fourth man enter the hall, and a voice in which langour strove in vain against asperity—Melchard's voice, which he had heard for the first time while he clung with his fingers to the window-sill of the bedroom and with his shoe-tips to the string-course below it, sinking his head even below his defenceless knuckles.
At the sound of this voice Dick now stretched himself prone, and wriggled, Amaryllis thought, like some horrid worm, laying his left cheek to the floor until he reached a point where his right eye got its line of sight, between the uprights of the gallery's balustrade, on the four live men and the inert, midway between the door out of sight beneath him, and the place where the broken tea-pot had spilt its contents in an ugly pool near the lowest tread of the stair.
"What's that?" Melchard had said. "Oh, put it down." And they laid the body on the floor.
Melchard looked from Black Beard to the cockney, and back.
"Is it beer again? I said not more than a tumbler of whisky before lunch. Beer always plays hell with him."
"Then you should give 'im 'arshish, sir," said the cockney. "It's the Injin 'emp 'e needs. But 'e ain't smelt beer since we left Millsborough. Somethin's just appeared to 'im, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."
"Appeared? Tell me what happened," said Melchard, querulously.
"Fell right down the stair, tray and all," said Black Beard, "just as if he'd been pushed."
Melchard was stooping over the scarce breathing body.
"He's not dead," he declared.
"He will be," said Black Beard, "unless you 'phone to Millsborough for a doctor damn quick."
"Don't be a fool, Ockley. Better let him die than bring a sharp-witted medical practitioner tomyhouse, to-day of all days."
"If we have a death here inyourhouse," Ockley retorted, "they'll want to knowhowandwhyandwhen. And 'no doctor called'—and 'this shady Mr. Melchard'—and all the damned things that always happen. Will that be good for your health—with the whole game in your hands, too?"
Melchard was hit, and Dick thought that he saw his face lose colour.
"Well?" he said nervously.
"Either fetch medical aid," replied Ockley, "or bury him under the ash-heap. And that's going a bit far for an accident."
"Was he pushed? I wonder," said Melchard; and the pair, with heads together, spoke in whispers inaudible to Dick, who writhed himself six inches back from the baluster, in fear of the upward glance which might come at any moment.
He had heard enough, and his usual policy came into play.
Amaryllis was able to watch him without exposing herself to the eyes of the enemy; for they had gathered round the injured tray-bearer so near to her side of the hall that the floor of the gallery shut off their view of anything below the top of the arch round whose side she peered, crouching low.
Dick, then, she saw moving snake-wise to the stair; and she marvelled that, even in the hush of the voices below, no slightest sound of his movement reached her ear. Chin first, his head disappeared over the first step, the long body dragging after it, half-inch by half-inch, until all of him that she could see was the thick soles of his boots, clinging, as it appeared, by their toes to the edge of the highest step.
Her heart shook for his danger, which now so closely embraced her own that she forgot its separate significance.
The voices rose again.
"But you're a qualified man yourself," said Melchard. "You'll be responsible."
"Fat lot of good that'll do you," replied Black Beard. "Qualified, by God! When I can't prove it without proving also that I'm off the register, and that my name's not Ockley!" He broke off with an ugly laugh, then added: "Let's go up and see."
And now Amaryllis saw her serpent shoot up to a great rod of vengeance. Before she could ask herself, "What is he going to do?" Dick Bellamy had done it; vaulting, even as he rose, over the rail of the stair, and, with an appalling scream which might have come from a maniac in frenzy, or the mortal agony of a wounded beast, literally falling upon his enemies.
His right foot caught Melchard between jaw and shoulder, shooting him supine and headlong upon the polished floor until his head hit the corner of the stone kerb about the hearth; while the left knee simultaneously struck the cockney, who fell, with Dick's crouching weight full upon him, heavily to the ground; and Amaryllis, fear forgotten, leaning over the rail, heard at the same moment, but as separate sounds, the blow of the under man's head upon the boards and that of Dick's right fist on its left jaw.
Then Dick was on his feet again, but barely in time. For in the clamour and rushing fall of this wild figure, clad in grey flannel trousers and blue shirt, with lank black hair flying stiffly up and away from the savage mouth and blazing blue eyes, Ockley had leapt back out of reach. But the little Spaniard, standing apart, was astonished; his dark eyes showed wide rings of white eyeball, and the open mouth teeth even whiter, as he stared, aghast yet curious, at the living thunderbolt which had fallen so near to him.
Ockley, however, directly his eyes had taken in what he had leapt back from, had begun what even Amaryllis could see was the rush of an expert. He did not, indeed, catch Dick upon his knees, as she had feared, but left him little time to steady himself. She could see that the big man was brave, and as strong as a bull, so that hers looked slender by comparison.
But Dick was less unprepared than he seemed. Arms hanging and face vacuous, he side-stepped smartly to the left, escaping a swinging right aimed at his head, and, as the great body passed, drove a short, heavy left punch under the still raised right arm, which shook Ockley severely and, increasing the impetus of his attack, sent him staggering against the balustrade of the stair.
And now the Spaniard found what he had been looking for.
"Por Dios!" he wailed, "it iss Limping Deek!" and so fled.
Dick followed up his advantage, forcing the pace, but Ockley would have none of it until he had worked himself into the middle of the floor; then suddenly coming again, got home with a tremendous right which Dick failed to stop with anything better than his left cheek-bone.
The blow was well timed and delivered with the full force of a strong man fighting scientifically, perhaps for his life; and Dick Bellamy knew that, hard as he kept himself, he could not afford to take another of its kind.
Crouching, he watched Black Beard between his fists which protected his face, the perpendicular fore-arms guarding his body; and in the moment while his sight was clearing, he heard, from somewhere above him, a little agonized moan, and found himself again.
Ockley, elated, pursued his advantage with a savage left drive which might have proved worse for Dick than the right which had just split his cheek, had he not, ducking to his right in perfect time, met the big man with a heavy left jolt in the mouth, and, simultaneously advancing his right foot and straightening his body, followed it up with a right to the jaw that knocked his opponent full length. He fell and lay beyond the projection of the hearth on the other side of which was Melchard, still as death.