"Throw in the top speed," said Dick. "Wemustgo through the Bull's Neck. No cover the other way."
He looked up at the ridge. Mut-mut was not there nor anywhere in sight.
The car rushed at the slope, and the shoulder of the cutting hid it from Melchard the fraction of a second before his next shot was heard.
Amaryllis took the double bend of the little cañon with an assurance which satisfied Dick of her ability.
The sprint had exhausted his reserve of nervous force, for the moment slender; and he lay back in the ample seat of the tonneau scarcely more than half-conscious.
The road straightening before her and still climbing, Amaryllis glanced at him over her shoulder.
"There's some brandy left," she shouted, her eyes again on her work, "in your left pocket. Finish it."
Her voice roused him; with an effort he found and unscrewed the flask.
He had hardly drained it before sight came back to his eyes and he remembered the danger ahead.
Mut-mut!
They had reached a strip of road level and straight, some two hundred yards in length, which crossed the breadth of the ridge, on its way to a descent as steep as the climb already accomplished. But even this, the highest part of their road, ran in a cutting, or natural cleft, in the spine of the ridge; and rocks and bushes, with a few stunted trees, rose in jumbled terraces on both sides of the car.
Cover was there for a hundred Mut-muts; and for Dick Bellamy one was more than enough, while he could not see him.
With his heart in his mouth and Ockley's gun in his hand, he sat waiting.
But Amaryllis, in the false belief that both enemies were behind her, and well taught in the handling of a car, was not going to begin an unknown descent at full speed. About half-way across the level, she slackened the pace, turning her face a little to the left, as if to speak to the man behind her.
And in that moment, with the words in his mouth to bid her quicken, not relax the speed, Dick saw the bestial one-eared Malay, erect upon a boulder, not more than three feet on the off-side distant from the car.
The brute was on the point of leaping down upon them.
The girl saw Dick's revolver go up, turned, and saw its target.
The horrors of the morning, coming to a climax in this shock like a nightmare's crisis, seemed to stop her heart. With instinctive memory of her instructor's, "If you're taken bad, miss, throw out your clutch, jam on your breaks and faint comfortable," she stopped the car and lost consciousness.
In the same moment Dick fired.
The bullet was too late to stop that gorilla-like spring, and Mut-mut, with a glitter of steel flashing in one of his outspread palms, launched himself upon them, landing, like some huge and horrible cat of dreams, on all fours in the body of the car.
His left ribs were pressed against Dick's knees, his right hand tearing at and ripping the cloth and leather of the car's side-linings as he struggled to rise.
What was fastened in that right hand Dick had seen, and with Ockley's last bullet he blew out Mut-mut's brains.
Before even freeing himself from the weight of the corpse, he felt for its hip-pocket, and pushed what he found into his own belt.
Then, cursing himself for having finished the brandy, he searched the locker under the cushion of the seat and found, amongst a confusion of odds and ends, a sealed bottle of whisky and a corkscrew.
"Robbie Burns, Three Star, All-malt, Pre-War, Liqueur Highland Whisky," said the label, gay with pseudo-tartan colours, which, in happier hours, would have scared him worse than the words.
When he had stretched Amaryllis, still unconscious, in the road, with a cushion under her head and two beneath her feet, he let her lie awhile. Then, encouraged by the faint colour creeping back to her cheeks, he sat beside her in the road and lifted her shoulders in his left arm, coaxing her to life and forcing between her pale lips burning drops of "Robbie Burns."
So that, when her eyes came open, and a little sense into her ears, this was the kind of thing that she heard:
"Oh, yes, but you must! It's three stars, and there's only a pair of twins in your eyes. Proof strength, and yours isn't, you darling! Drink, will you, you wicked girl? I tell you, it's all-malt, and not a jim-jam to the cask. That's the way, my beauty! Now another! It's Pre-War—fitting prize for Our Brave Women Who Showed The Tommies How To Fight!"
"How silly you are, Dick, dear!" she said at last, wiping her lips. "And what perfectly beastly brandy!"
Dick tasted the stuff, and frankly spat it out.
"I suppose it might be worse, seeing its called whisky, and allowing for the label," he said. "Young woman, I'm going to kiss you somethin' crool in a minute. 'Course I'm silly! What was it you did, when I was only taking a snooze?"
"Cried," she answered.
"And I laugh to see you all right again."
But Amaryllis was looking about her.
"Is it gone, that awful thing?" she asked, whispering.
"Gone for good," said Dick.
"And, oh! the car? How did you ever stop it?"
"You stopped it, you wonder-child. And there's a great deal more 'how' about that."
"Then—then it's the same thing as last time?" she said, her face paling once more.
"The same thing," admitted Dick. "It was him or us, you know. And there's not much egoism in saying we're better worth keeping, is there?"
Though she shuddered again and bore a grave face, he could see that she was relieved.
Rising with the help of his hand, she tried to smooth her rumpled feathers, and said:
"Hadn't we better go on?"
"I've got to move something from the car first," he replied, with ambiguity merely euphemistic. "You stand here and keep a look-out towards Harthborough."
"All right," she answered, understanding very well what he had to do. She turned away, and then, with an effort, her face still averted, "Can't I help you, Dick?" she asked.
"Yes—by sitting on that stone and not turning round till I let you."
And he went back to the car, taking the "Robbie Burns" with him.
In his shaken and exhausted condition, the task of dragging that revolting corpse from the car was not easy. Heavy he had known the body would be, but when he had opened the door on the off-side, and would have pulled the dead thing out by the heels, he was surprised to find that he could not move it. On a second effort the slight yielding of the mass was accompanied by a sound of rending and he remembered Mut-mut's right hand, armed with a weapon of unspeakable cruelty, which only once before in his life had he seen—the Mahratta baag-nouk, or Tiger's Claw.
He went round to the car's-near side, and there found, as he had expected, the dead right hand anchored to the lining-cushions by what was, he supposed, a unique specimen, made to the fancy of the creature that wore it; for, in addition to the leather strap across the back of the hand, two rings were welded to the instrument, through which to pass the second and third fingers, thus keeping in position the four short, razor-edged steel claws hidden in the palm.
Dick loosened the buckle of the strap, and drew the hand, already cold, from the rings; picked the baag-nouk from the cushion, wrapped it in a greasy cloth out of the tool-box, and hid it under the seat.
The thought of that gruesome weapon, more frightful than the unsheathed claws of the royalest Bengal tiger, hanging over the head of his chosen among women, stung Dick Bellamy to very unceremonious removal of the body, which, after rifling it of a handful of cartridges, he flung by the roadside; and then, lest Amaryllis should see the awful head again, even in death, he covered the whole corpse with an overcoat of Melchard's from the car.
The engine had run down. As he cranked it up, Dick was seized by a sudden savage desire to have in his hands the man who had brought all his outrage, suffering and terror to the girl whose uncovered head and patient back he could see waiting for him down the road.
A fierce rage, such as he had seldom felt, and never since boyhood, flooded his body with a dry heat, and stimulated his intelligence.
For with these thoughts of the evil Melchard came sudden insight into the man's purpose at the foot of the Bull's Neck, and his probable action at the present moment.
"He was shooting to drive us into Mut-mut's arms, and to make us believe our danger was all behind us," he reasoned. "And it's a white elephant to a dead rat he's trudging up this road now to find what Mut-mut's left of us. Perhaps he's heard the two shots, and me cranking up."
Not daring to call Amaryllis, he trusted her precise obedience to his orders, and sank, almost as swiftly as Pépe into the landscape.
Crouching, crawling, worming himself on his belly from tree-stump to boulder he mounted some ten feet above the road on the side away from the car, and then, invisible from the road level, continued his course until he had retraced about fifty yards of the way they had travelled.
Then he stopped, lying prone where two rocks, standing so little apart that they seemed long years ago to have formed a single mass, gave him view of the road's whole width.
He laid one ear against the rock, and over the other a hand.
After a minute's waiting, footsteps; three more, and a weary figure came in sight where the level road began.
The joy he felt kept him patient until Melchard, unmistakable, was right beneath him.
"Hi! Melchard!" he cried.
Melchard started, stopped, and looked anxiously round.
"Never heard the voice before? You'll hear it often, and lots of it, soon, Melchard. Pull out your gun."
The man in the road made no attempt to obey. From Mut-mut's revolver Dick sent a bullet which threw up the dust at Melchard's feet.
"Two inches to the right of your feet."
He fired again. Again the little puff of dust.
"An inch and a half to the left of your feet," he sang out cheerfully. "The next'll be half-way between and three feet higher. Put down your gun."
Melchard produced his automatic and dropped it.
"Kick it away from you."
Melchard obeyed, and his weapon lay three yards out of reach.
"Move an inch, and I'll put a hole in your slimy heart."
Melchard stood, still game enough to control in some measure the trembling which had seized him.
Then Dick raised his voice.
"Miss Caldegard!" he shouted.
"I'm coming," came the clear voice in reply, and a patter of light feet.
Dick could just see the car, and Amaryllis when she reached it.
"Where are you?" she called, bewildered.
"Keep straight on. You see a thing something like a man, standing in the road, don't you?"
"Yes," answered Amaryllis.
"Near it you will find an automatic pistol, on the ground. Pick it up, please, and go back to your seat," shouted Dick.
Amaryllis obeyed him. But, after going a little way, she called back to him and instinctively she imitated his formality in presence of the unclean.
"Mr. Bellamy!" she cried. "Please—not this one."
To this allusion Melchard had no clue. But there was in her tone something which turned the blood cold in him.
The invisible Dick, however, answered in a laughing voice so joyous that Amaryllis was vaguely distressed.
"Rather not," he replied. "I've something much better for this guy."
With intense pleasure, while his observation-slit gave him sight of her, he watched the girl returning to her post.
Then he shot a fresh order at the prisoner.
"Turn round," he said.
Melchard obeyed.
"If you move a foot or lift a hand before I speak again, it's a bullet between the shoulders."
Judging this to be the position most demoralizing, Dick descended with more haste than precaution. Melchard, his entrails shaking, stood, to all appearance, firm as a rock. When Dick tapped his shoulder, he turned, showing a face white and drawn.
"The man Bunce!" he exclaimed.
"Silly liar!" said Dick. "You knew who I was the moment you saw my cheek—guessed I was the man who was queering your game. I have queered it, and I'm going to queer you. Walk in front of me, and don't forget, that, if I have to disappoint myself by killing you, I shan't lose any sleep about it."
Melchard walked silent and erect, with the unseen pistol-barrel behind him.
Dick could see even in the shoulders before him the ripple of fear controlled, but not conquered.
And the sight brought, not indeed compassion, but a separated measure of respect.
When they had almost reached the car, he called a halt.
"I shan't keep on threatening you," he said "You're down and out. Understand, once for all, that, on the least movement, I shoot to kill."
He pointed to the coat spread over what had been Mut-mut.
"That's yours," he said. "Put it on."
The man was reeking with sweat, exhausted and in mortal fear. A chill might endanger the success of Dick's design.
Melchard, guessing well what it covered, lifted the fawn-coloured overcoat with resolution; but the earless side of that frightful head, with another and bloody hole making a pair of dead eyes to stare up at him, was too much for the shaken nerve, and Alban Melchard collapsed on his face in the road.
Dick turned him over, lifted an eyelid, and, convinced that the man was unconscious, fetched from the car his bottle of the strange device, and poured a stream from its neck into Melchard's half-open mouth.
For some moment's after, he was afraid that the fit of choked coughing his rough remedy had caused would compel him to leave a second corpse by the roadside.
When it was over, however, it appeared that the stimulant had been partly assimilated, for Melchard was able to stand. When he had got his arms into the overcoat, Dick led him to the car.
From the locker under the seat he produced a thick tumbler.
"Get in," he said, and half-filled the glass from the bottle.
Melchard lay back exhausted in the near-side corner, examining with dull eyes the havoc made by Mut-mut's claw.
"Drink that," said Dick.
Melchard shook his head.
"I hate spirits," he objected feebly. "That's his stuff—Mut-mut's."
"You'll hate it worse soon," was all the answer he got; and drank, gasping between gulps.
Knowing that the man had not a kick left in him, Dick ventured, rather than fetch Amaryllis into sight of the uncovered corpse, to mount the front seat and drive the car to the place where she sat waiting.
When she was beside him, he asked if she were fit to drive.
"Yes," she answered. "But I nearly went to sleep waiting for you, Dick."
"I don't think either of us is fit to drive her to town," he said, looking at his watch. "I'm pretty tough, but I'm nearly all in. How you've stuck it as you have, I can't understand. So we'll have a shot at that five-fifteen. We've about seven miles to go. Thirty m.p.h.—that's fourteen minutes. Bar hold-ups, that's good enough. It's just five to five now, but I must fix up my passenger."
Amaryllis looked round at Melchard.
"What are you going to do with him?" she asked, turning back upon Dick a face of disgust.
"Take him up to town," said Dick.
"How beastly!" said Amaryllis.
"Doped, my child—most royally doped—with a kindly poison that he loathes."
He left her and took his seat beside the prisoner. Amaryllis, not a little vexed by the addition to their party, started the car.
As they glided down the wide bends of the descent, Dick plied the wretched Melchard with dose after dose of throat-rasping spirit. After the second half-tumbler the man wept, sobbing out entreaties for mercy. And Amaryllis felt a wave of cold fear run down her spine when she heard the voice and words of her lover's reply—words not meant for her hearing she knew for the voice was so low that it was only the precision of the speaker's passion which carried them, against the wind, to her ears.
"Pity! Pity on a filthy creature that never felt it—not even for his own filthy servants! Pity for a lickspittle parasite that battens on the passions and vices of hopeless gaol-birds, abandoned women, jaded pleasure-hunters and terrified neurasthenics! Pity on a speculator calculating huge revenues from the festering putrefaction of human disease! I haven't hit you yet, because your flesh is foul to me—but—drink that down, or, by God! I'll smash every bone in your face."
A gasp, a spasmodic sound of gulping, another gasp—and silence.
Two-thirds of the bottle's contents was down the man's throat. Dick poured the remnant into his flask and sat watching the effects.
Satisfied at last that he had induced complete alcoholic coma, he touched Amaryllis on the shoulder.
"Stop her as soon as you can," he said. "I'll drive now."
When they were off again, she asked, in a voice none too steady, what he had been doing to the wretched man behind her.
"Made him absolutely blind—blotto," he answered.
"You sounded rather dreadful, Dick," she said; adding, after a hesitation, "Cruel—almost."
His face was set on the road ahead of him, and his profile, she thought, though not definitely vindictive in expression, was hard as stone.
"Cruel?" he asked.
"You said awful things in a very dreadful voice."
"The awful thoughts I had account for the voice, beloved," he explained. "They couldn't be said to him. I thought of his hands touching you—his voice speaking to you—you, young as an angel, as beautiful as the goddess that floated in upon the world in a mother-of-pearl dinghy! As clever as that other one with the fireman's tin hat, as game as Jimmy Wilde, and as kind as Heaven. Spoke toyou—touched you—looked at you—blasphemy, profanation and sacrilege! And barged into your bedroom, when—. My God! woman," cried poor Dick, as if a flame came from the marble lips of him, "I could have watched him through an hour of rack and thumbscrew, when I thought of you up in that room of his. It's the cruelty I haven't done that's my claim to the next vacancy in halos. Cruel? Just for pouring down him a few tumblerfuls of a mixture of arrack and spud-spirit that he'd bought for his damned Caliban! And I only did that because there weren't any handcuffs handy."
Uttered in a voice wonderfully soft, yet vibrating with a quality which thrilled him like some tone of a celestial violin, her answering question reached him through the rush of their speed.
"Do you love me like that?" she asked.
To the short nod of his white silhouette he added curtly:
"Be quiet, please. I'm driving."
She chuckled softly to herself, thinking how well already she began to understand his ways—ways so odd and dear, she told herself, that never, she was sure, would she tire of them.
The Roman causeway ran into the macadam high road from Harthborough to Timsdale-Horton almost on the level, with still a slight fall towards Harthborough, the smoke of whose chimneys was already visible.
Half a mile ahead of them was a knot of men, gathered about what might have been a wheelbarrow. A quarter of a mile further,
"Three men," said Dick.
"Motor-cycle and side-car," said Amaryllis. "Is it another picket?"
Instead of answering, Dick replied with a command:
"Hold tight. Don't turn to look at 'em. You're talking to me by the yard as we go by. We go right through. Shan't give 'em an inch."
The car darted forward. The road ran between stone dykes, bordering pasture and arable enclosures. The pace, close upon fifty miles an hour, took them up to and past the suspected group so swiftly that it was impossible to note the faces of the men who formed it while their movements of recoil and surprise might have been due to the unusual speed alone.
But a little later, Amaryllis, turning in her seat, thought she saw a small cloud of dust start up from the road; and Dick, on the assumption of a pursuit almost as swift as his flight, found himself involved in the solution of complex chances.
The road he followed, as he had been able to determine from the higher ground, led directly to the railway station in the centre of Harthborough. It was now five minutes past five o'clock—ten minutes before the train's scheduled time of departure; which, allowing two minutes for reaching the station, would mean eight minutes to spend on the platform, even if the train were up to time.
Eight minutes for the men with the side-car to reach the station and——
And what?
Even the intoxicated Melchard, should it come to gun-play on platform or in railway carriage, would be no protection to Amaryllis. If the picket had been able to distinguish their leader in his car as it flashed by them, they must have guessed him a prisoner, and, as such, the probable King's evidence to hang them.
For his satellites, Melchard was safer dead than captive.
Just ahead the road branched. Resolved to shorten his time of waiting, and hoping to mislead the chase, Dick took the right line of the fork, which bent to hide him, if only for a moment, from the side-car.
"The station's down the other road," said Amaryllis.
"Yes," said Dick. "Don't want more than three minutes there before the train pulls out."
He slowed suddenly, having seen his expected by-road a little way ahead.
"I'm turning back to the left here," he explained. "Look back as I swing, and see if they're in sight."
"Not a sign," said Amaryllis.
But as she spoke they heard the detonations of a back-fire, and pictured, though they could not see, Melchard's avengers plunging away southward, past the end of the lane into which Dick had turned.
This lane between two rows of blunt cottage-fronts soon proved itself not merely a refuge, but an avenue.
At eleven minutes past five Dick Bellamy stopped Melchard's car outside the booking-office of somnolent Harthborough's dead-alive station—the junction of the single-line track to Whitebay and its bathing machines with the double-track branch of the G.N.R. from York to Caterscliff.
A hopeless porter languished against the hot bricks of the doorway. Dick came round between him and Melchard, peering down upon that sordid wreck of smartness. He turned to Amaryllis, who had followed him.
"Pore old guv'nor!" he said tenderly; and Amaryllis with difficulty restrained her surprise at his change from the local dialect to that of the London cab-rank. "They 'aven't arf filled 'im up proper this time." Then, to the porter, despondently interested in this queer company, "Hi, chum! Give us a 'and," he said, pulling from his pocket a confusion of silver, and crumpled Treasury notes. "Is the London trine up yet?"
"Signalled, she be," said the porter, peering at Melchard.
"Keep yer eyes off wot's no blinkin' good to 'em" said Dick. Then, lowering his voice to oily confidence, he went on: "It's young Lord Labrador—Marquis of Toronto's 'opeful. Put 'im through the mill, they 'ave, at yer three-legged race meetin' at Timsdale-'Orton. Made me larf shockin', it did. 'E's got to meet 'is lovin' pa, ten o'clock a.m. ter-morrer mornin', an' I said as I'd see 'im through, and get 'm a wash an' brush up. I train a bit for 'im—the young un, yer know."
"Well, 'tain't noah business o' mine," said the porter.
"'Ow much to make it yourn, sonny?"
"Ah doan't rightly knaw."
"Won't be less'n a dollar, mate—see?"
The porter saw.
Dick thrust notes into his hand.
"Get us three firsts to King's Crawss, and 'ave a label ready to smudge on the winder, w'ile me an' my girl gets 'im through to the platform, nice and cushy."
Supported on each side, with flaccid legs just able to move in turn, Melchard was guided to a bench some way down the platform, and seated between two bolstering forms to which the contact was disgusting.
Fortunately they had the up-platform to themselves.
The train was late, and the long minutes held each more of anxiety than the last.
The porter came with the tickets.
"'Eere's 'opeless 'Arry," said Dick, going to meet him.
"Wi't'yoong spark in thot trim," said the porter, pocketing a tip of weight to gratify without astounding, "Ah'd'a' pushed onto Lunnon wi' 'im in t'car."
"Not if you'd borrered it, Mr. 'Opeless. She belongs to a Mr. Mills o' Melborough—Na-ow!Melchardo' Millsborough. 'E's one o' them there painful dentisters."
A sound like a smothered sneeze, followed by a syncopated gurgle, coming from behind him, warned Dick to tone down the comic relief.
"You get the car run into cover, and keep an eye on 'er till that there Pluck-'em-W'ile-yer-Wait comes a sorrowing arter 'er. Tell 'im my address is No. 5, John Street, London, and I'll settle for the bit o' damage. There's no need to bring 'is young lordship in. There's plenty o' wailin' an' gnashin' comin' to 'im, any'ow."
In a sad-coloured notebook, with a stump of dirty pencil, the porter solemnly noted that classic address.
"An' that's more trouble foryou, so 'ere's a few more bits o' wot we takes it for."
Four minutes late, the train rumbled in.
With less difficulty than it had taken to extract him from the car, Dick and the porter got Melchard into the corner of a first-class compartment of the last carriage on the train—behind the guard's van even, being the London "slip," the porter told them as he slapped his "engaged" label on the window.
The guard was on the point of waving his flag when the staccato rush of a motor-cycle sounded hideously outside the little station.
"Get in," said Dick to Amaryllis.
The guard called to the porter:
"Can't keep 'er. Five minutes behind already," and let his green signal flutter.
Dick followed Amaryllis and closed the door.
And even as the engine made its first slow movement, there came a rush of heavy feet on the wooden flooring of the booking-office, and two men in motor-cycling rig made a determined dash at the train.
The station-master, eager for unpleasing duty, emerged shouting:
"Stand back!"
But the porter would not see nor hear him, and opened the door of the compartment immediately in front of that which his label had reserved. The runners scrambled in.
Dick had been careful not to show his face until the door—the next, it seemed—was banged shut. But a rapid glance at that very moment showed him that it was indeed from the next compartment that came the half-crown which the porter caught as it fell.
Dick settled back into his seat with the consciousness that the partition against which he leaned was poor protection from a revolver-bullet.
"Is it they?" asked Amaryllis
"Two to one on," he answered.
"Next compartment?"
"Yes."
"Did they see us get in?"
"No."
"Then how can they know?"
"They saw the car outside, and the porter shutting this door. If they hadn't, they'd have bundled in right opposite the entrance, instead of running down the train," reasoned Dick.
"Will they try to come in here, then?" she asked.
"There's no corridor," said Dick.
"But outside? There was a murder—I read about it——"
"Take it easy, little wonder," he answered, with a smile which made of his patronage a tribute. "I haven't got this far to crack in the last lap. I'm thinking out a pretty story for theSunday Magazine; so no murders, please. They make me nervous. We're all right for a bit—next station's fifteen miles ahead. They're getting their wind next door, and talking it over."
He rose, and lifting Melchard's legs, made him lie at full length along the seat farthest from the engine and the motor-cyclists. Next, he drew down the little corner-blinds of each window, leaving the door-blinds up; then sat down again resuming his attitude of abstraction.
In the silence which followed Amaryllis watched him until confidence crept into her unawares, and she found herself becoming sleepily interested in smaller matters than life and death. She did not believe any longer that anyone could prevail against "Limping Dick."
She smiled to herself over the strange figure he cut, forgetting her own.
His bulging pockets amused her into trying to remember all the things he had stowed away in them.
The newest seemed to be an oily piece of cotton rag, sticking out from the side pocket of his Norfolk jacket, which looked already, since she had seen it first, three years older.
At last she spoke.
"Is the little plot finished?" she asked.
"Very nearly," he replied
"And is it decorous in episode, cheerful in tone, and forcible in moral tendency?"
"All these it is, and more."
"Then—please, sir, I have a question to ask."
"Ask, maiden," said Dick.
"I want to know why you keep that filthy cloth in your pocket."
"And why this sudden curiosity about a trifle?" His hand felt the thing as if he had forgotten it.
"Because," said Amaryllis, "I can't possibly sit closer to you if you don't throw it away."
Dick rose, taking the bundle carefully from his pocket.
"It's a curio—a relic. I'll show it you some day," he said, laying it in a corner of the rack.
"Not now?"
"Not now."
And then there came over his face an expression of mixed humour and triumph.
"By the bloomin' idol made of mud!" he cried, "you've given me the climax. It makes the story more moral than ever."
And he murmured, as if only for himself: "Which side, O Bud! Which side?"
A little later he put up both windows.
"It'll be awfully hot," said Amaryllis.
"Let's be absolutely silent for a bit," said Dick. "With our ears to the partition, we might hear something."
With intense concentration, they listened for several minutes.
"It's no good," said Dick at last. "Talking, talking all the time, but the train makes too much row, and the padding's too thick."
"I heard something," said the girl. "Not words—but the different tones of two voices, arguing. One wants to do something, and the other doesn't. He's afraid, I think."
"M'm!" grunted Dick.
"The brave one's here—with his back to me. He's strong and heavy, I think, because his voice is growly, and he sits back hard now and then, and I can feel the partition bulge a little. And then—he keeps fiddling with something that clicks."
"Clicks? How? Like the hammer of an empty gun?" asked Dick, puzzled.
The girl leaned forward and touched the spring lock of the carriage door.
"No. Heavier than a pistol. Clicky and thumpy, like this lock if you pull it and let go."
Dick's face beamed with satisfaction.
"Don't touch it—I know," he said. "I suppose you'll be wanting half the proceeds, and your name as part author."
"What on earth d'you mean, Dick?"
"Collaboration. You've completed the plot."
He changed his seat to face her from the opposite corner; looked at his watch, and thereafter gazed steadily from the window with down-bent eyes for so long that Amaryllis grew bored and nervous.
"Two minutes to do a mile," he said at last, having again looked at his watch. "It's fifteen minutes since we left Harthborough—seven miles and a half. That's another seven and a half to go—Todsmoor's the station, I think. They'll try it on within five minutes, or give it up. What did you do with that snoring beast's automatic?"
Amaryllis thrust her hand deep into the Brundage pocket, rummaging.
"What an awful pouch!" he exclaimed.
"It is a bottomless pit, certainly. But it's much discreeter than yours are, Dick. They bulge so interestingly, and make you an awfuller sight than all the rest of your funny things together," she replied, laughing at him.
Successful at last, she produced the Browning pistol which Melchard had surrendered on the Roman road. "But it bumped horribly when I walked—and itwouldalways knock the same place on my knee. Oh, Dick, shall we ever get into clothes that'll feel nice again?"
"To-night, damsel, shalt thou sleep in fine linen, and to-morrow, so it please you, shalt fare homeward in thy father's chariot, leaving in that progress a ravaged Marshall and Snelgrove, an eviscerated Lewis, and the house of Harrod but a warehouse of mourning."
Softly he let down both windows, fearing glass little less than bullets.
"Sit there," he said, pointing to the corner opposite to Melchard's head; and, when she was seated, gave her back the pistol.
"If anything comes, cover it with that."
"But, Dick—," she faltered, "I know I'm silly, but I—I don't want to kill anybody. I'm afraid."
"P'r'aps they'll funk it. But I've an idea they're more afraid of him—if they know we've got him—than of us." He glanced at Melchard, and then out of the window.
The train was running on an embankment with steep, grassy sides—not a house nor a highway in sight.
"This side would be safer to fall from," said Dick. "On yours it's the down-line rails. Tails up, dear! In three minutes it'll be over or off. Don't shoot—only show you're heeled, and look fierce."
He reached for the oily cloth in the rack. Catching her fascinated eyes fixed on him:
"Watch the window, will you," he snapped; and a sting of indignation at being so addressed gave Amaryllis the stimulant she needed.
It should be obedience now, but a royal exhibition of displeasure afterwards!
So, with the mouth and eyes of a goddess incensed, Amaryllis watched, in lofty silence, her rectangle of sunlight.
But from the preparations of Dick Bellamy dignity was altogether absent.
From the dirty cloth he unwrapped Mut-mut's baag-nouk, slipped his right hand into its straps and rings, and sank to his knees on the floor of the carriage, facing the door and its open, unblinded window.
Leaning to his right, he lifted the corner blind away, bringing his left cheek against the glass; and from this spy-hole kept that eye on the point where the door of the next compartment should just show itself, were it opened at right-angles to the train in letting a man creep out upon the footboard.
And then, as he waited, came a dreadful thought: the door on this side of the compartment, the train running on the left-hand track, was hinged, of course, upon its forward jamb, and must therefore be passed, by one creeping from the direction of the engine, before it could be opened so as to give entrance. On the other side the position was reversed.
Might not this advantage of the door defended only by the girl have been noted by the men on the other side of that partition?
And she? Her back was to the engine and her corner blind pulled down. She would see nothing till her door began to open; and even had she nerve for killing, she could not shoot; for, in pity of her white hands, he had fixed the safety-catch of Melchard's gun.
He pictured the moment's wavering, and a struggle, ending, perhaps, in a double fall from the train.
While still his eye was steady at the loophole, his mind reached the decision to change his dispositions. But before he could move to rise the black, upright line of the enemy's door swung slowly into his field of vision. His position at the window gave him a bare inch to see it in, but the sight lifted his fighting soul into the heaven of certain success.
Still watching, he saw that the door's edge remained steady, fixed, he argued, by the hand of the man that watched his companion, too low for Dick's line of sight, handing himself along by the brass rail, nearer and nearer.
While that door was held, Amaryllis was safe.
Dick sank back upon his haunches, bowing his bare head to bring it below the level of the open window.
There followed a stillness of waiting—stillness wrapped in the roar of the train.
A brushing sound on the door's window-ledge!
Throwing his head backwards, Dick saw, without raising his head, thick, dirty fingers on the split sill.
Lightly he touched them with his left hand. A head came in sight, rising diagonally across the frame it entered; and as it rose, so rose Dick's right hand, showing the steel blades of the Tiger's Claw.
The white face was jerked backward, the black-nailed fingers lost hold, and with a choked scream the whole body fell outward from the train, describing a curve towards the rear which just carried it free of the ballast, to land sideways on the turf of the slope, and roll.
The bank was high and steep, and the body was still rolling, when Dick turned his head to the sound of a door closing. His remaining enemy had shut himself in.
"Got 'em both," he said, facing Amaryllis, and dropping his greasy parcel once more in the rack.
"What's happened? Oh, that horrid scream!" she said, shaking.
"Your brave villain's taken a toss, darling," said Dick, sitting with an arm round her. "And the white-livered accomplice is dithering with funk in there." And he thumped the cushion of the partition. "We shall pull up at Todsmoor in a few minutes. Let's compose ourselves. You must be asleep in your corner——"
He broke off, eyeing her face keenly; then finished his sentence tenderly with an "if you please, my dear."
The girl blushed gloriously.
"I hurt its tender feelings, didn't I, when I barked?"
"Yes—for a moment. But it—it made me so angry, Dick, that I forgot to be frightened. You're so clever! I believe you did it on purpose for that." And, when he smiled at her, "I won't forgive you, then," she murmured. "I'll just say thank you instead."
She kissed him.
There came a groan and a heavy sigh from Melchard.
"No, he's not awake, nor near it," said Dick, when he had examined his patient. "But I'd better give him another dose. There's going to be fun at Todsmoor, and I don't want any Millsborough back-talk mixed up with it. Look out of that window while I physic him. It's not nice to watch."
It was nasty enough to hear, thought Amaryllis.
By the time it was over the train was slowing down. Before it stopped Dick was out on the platform, and in two strides had caught the guard.
"There's been an accident. Man fell out of this carriage—next to mine," he said, in a low voice, speaking now in the assured tones of a gentleman accustomed to obedience. "Don't make a fuss. Fetch the station-master."
The bearded autocrat hesitated, eyeing this strange figure with the "officer's swank," as he called it afterwards.
"I advise you to hurry," said Dick, his eyes opening a little wider.
The autocrat took the advice, and returned with another.
Dick was standing with his hand on the door of the compartment with one traveller—the remaining motor-cyclist.
"Look here, station-master," he said, beginning before the man could open his mouth; "I don't want to leave you with a nasty job like this on your hands, without telling you what I know. I am Major Richard Bellamy of the R.A.F. Never mind my clothes. Take it I've been celebrating. At Harthborough I got into the next compartment with a lady, and a man I have befriended. I am looking after him. He'll be all right to-morrow. Just as we left—the train had actually started—two fellows in overalls jumped intothiscompartment. Half-way between this and Harthborough we heard a row going on—the lady and I. It got worse and worse, and I looked out of the window just in time to see one of the pair fall out backwards."
Here Dick looked at his watch.
"Twelve minutes ago, it was. I took the time then. He hit the grass bank and rolled. Shouldn't wonder if he's all right. Probably alive, anyhow."
"Why didn't you pull the communication cord?" asked the station-master, pompously stern.
Now Dick had forgotten the communication cord. But it would have been impossible for him to forget a few things he had once learned about railways.
He glanced at the guard, and found uneasiness in his eye.
"It's a slip carriage," he said, smiling, tolerantly superior. "Was the connection made?" he asked, looking hard in the guard's face.
The man flushed an awkward red. "No," he said. "'Tain't worth the trouble for the little bit of a journey before we slip her."
"H'm!" said the station-master.
"Just so," said Dick, simultaneously. "So perhaps it'd be just as well for me not to have thought of the communication cord, eh?"
The station-master said nothing. But the guard looked as if there were gratitude in him somewhere.
"If the poor beggar's alive, he'll have gained by our not stopping, because he'll get a doctor and a stretcher all the quicker," Dick went on. "Now, I advise you to hold the fellow in this compartment here for your local police. Look at him. He's sat there like that ever since we ran in here. You can see he was in no hurry to give information concerning what had happened to his friend."
The station-master turned to the guard.
"Did you see anything?" he asked.
"No. But I heard a door bang. I looked out, but I heard nothing. The gentleman's quite right, though, about the two chaps scrambling in as we pulled out of Harthborough."
The station-master turned to Dick with a face diffidently serious.
"I'm afraid you ought to wait here, sir," he said.
"I know I ought not. Duty's duty, and you can't keep me, my good fellow," replied Dick, dredging the breast pocket of his coat and producing and opening his cigarette-case. "Here's my card. The address will always find me."
The station-master looked at the card, hesitating still, and turning it about in his fingers.
"I can uncouple the through carriage," he said.
"And I can move my party to another," Dick blandly retorted. "And you'll only inconvenience everybody up the line that meant to use it. See here, man; I'm witness of what was possibly an accident. I give you the information, and add my private opinion that it was something worse than an accident. That's all. It's up to you to put your police on the job, not to disturb a traveller that wasn't even in the man's compartment. Ask this fellow here, whowasin it. Most likely he's got no ticket, running it fine as they did at Harthborough. That'll give you reason enough to make him miss the train while one of your men's fetching a constable. And the constable won't let him out of sight till you've found the other man, alive or dead. But he won't object to waiting, unless he wants to rouse suspicion. Now I do object." And here Dick laughed. "Why," he went on, "with your way of doing things, they'd have to arrest a hundred witnesses every time a lorry ran into a lamp-post."
And he stood by, lighting his pipe, while the station-master attempted to extract information from the man in overalls.
He proved docile enough; mumbled a halting tale of dozing in his corner when his friend, leaning from the window, had been launched from the train by the sudden opening of the door. Supposed it hadn't been properly latched; his friend had been fooling with the lock a few minutes before. No, there'd been no words—not to say quarrel; they'd talked a bit—nothing more. Oh, yes, of course he'd get out and wait over, and do his bit to help 'em find his chum—poor, silly blighter!
The man cast one sly side-glance at Dick, and thought he was not being watched.
But Dick saw, and gathered from that one flash of the eye that this was Pépe's "Hebérto, the London man," and that 'Erb was not even yet sure whether this was or was not the wild man who had leapt upon him from the stairs in the hall at "The Myrtles," eight or nine hours ago.
As the train ran out of Todsmoor, "I shouldn't wonder," said Dick comfortably to Amaryllis, "if that's the last fence, and a straight run home for us."
But there was fear as well as disgust in the glance which Amaryllis threw at the gross slumber of their prisoner.
She had felt his power stretched over half a county, and who should fix its limit for her?
But she merely said:
"What time do we get to King's Cross, Dick?"
"Ten-thirty—on paper; but we're twenty minutes late already."
"Then—what'm I going to do then? Eleven o'clock, and me so tired!"
"You'll be all right. I'll see that you are," said Dick.
Apparently satisfied by this pledge, Amaryllis had almost fallen asleep in her corner, now the furthest from Melchard, when Dick said:
"What you want to-night, my prize-packet, is a fairy godmother."
"She would save lots of trouble," admitted Amaryllis.
"And all you've got is that mildewed chaperon, snoring there."
Amaryllis shuddered.
"I don't know even yet," she said, "why you brought it—a thing you might have left tied in a bundle by the roadside. He's only been dangerous and disgusting. And you said——"
"Said it wasn't to take it out of him that I did it. Did I? If I did, it's right."
There was a silence.
"I suppose you could guess," said Dick, breaking it.
"Was it because you thought of the harm that he does, making drugs and selling them to sad people and bad people, Dick?"
"That might have been a good reason. It's not my line, though—if I'm on oath."
"Oh, but you're not, Dick. You needn't say anything unless you want to tell me."
"I do. That reason wasn't mine. I don't feel like that about people in the lump. And now they saythepeople is free and democratic—doing things, you know, off its own bat, when it hasn't a cat's notion of cricket—now I think, as far as I think about the lump at all, that it'd better have a fair run at its own game. Result may be anything; might be a new and a good one. But I simply hate seeing the old professional groundsman pretending that the new mob of boys likes cricket, and sweating himself all for nothing.
"As for the drug business, it cures in the end by killing, and grandmotherly legislation belongs to dear old tyranny; and I'm not at all sure, if five-eighths of the people said that the rest mustn't kill pigs to eat 'm, that you and I would be wrong to have an illicit rasher when we could get it. Anyhow, the immoral remnant of the nation doesn't trouble my dreams. It rubs itself out in the end. So, you see, it wasn't the dope evil that made me bind him in the chains of tangle-foot and force his putrid company on an angel. Guess again."
"I'm too tired," said Amaryllis "to have a guess left in me. Tell me."
"My dear," he answered, "the cherry's always been bigger than the bunch to me. You are just the greatest, and the roundest and the reddest, and the sweetest cherry on the big tree. And the cherry nearest to you——"
"My dad?" she asked, interrupting with a catch of the breath.
He nodded.
"Yes," he said. "It was for him I took the dope from that scented ape—because he'd have been hurt if it'd got loose to ravage the world. And when I got the chance I just pouched the ape too for the same reason—so that the man that cursed you shall not only feel that his patent curse hasn't done any damage, but has even helped to chain up a lot of rival plagues. These men of science are like benevolent Jupiters: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday colloguing with Vulcan to forge heavier and sharper thunderbolts; Thursday, Friday and Saturday conferring anxiously with all Olympus as to how they shall be blunted and lightened, lest they hurt poor mortal fools too much.
"This chap Melchard, properly handled, will give the show away, and the League of Nations or some other comic crowd'll corral the lot."
"What lot?" asked Amaryllis.
"The crew your father told us about. My dear, I wanted to please you by pleasing him. To do it I had to let you run a shade more risk and endure a lot more discomfort. Was that—was it——"
For once Dick Bellamy could not find his words. Yet his eyes, it seemed to Amaryllis, were hardened—stabbing hers with steel points barbed with curiosity.
She knew what he meant, and said so.
"Of course it was nothing against me—against love," she answered. "It was just the hook, dear, that's going to hold this fish for ever."
When they had expressed the inexpressible and explained the obvious, he returned to that fish-hook phrase of hers.
"What made you put it like that, young woman?" he asked.
"Your eyes, Dick. For a moment you were afraid, wondering whether I should toe the line exactly. Your eyes got hard. They stabbed right into me, and they had a sort of backward wings, like fish-hooks—father's got a horrid arrow like that—won't come out again without tearing. Yours won't ever, Dick."
Soft, even light filled the wide entrance hall of No. — Park Lane.
The single, expressionless footman appeared almost hopeful, knowing his release was near; for the time was only twenty minutes short of midnight.
The road between the front door and the park railings was almost as peaceful as the houses on its one side, and the grass and trees on the other. Hardly a hoof on the wood, and but a rare motor rushing, at intervals, with soft, apologetic speed over the thoroughfare from north to south.
But there came at last a taxi—Charles, in spite of thick door and perfect roadway, recognised its venal characteristics—a taxi which hesitated, stopped, started again, and came to rest at the very door of No. —.
Though his ears could scarce believe it on that Saturday night, when there was not within earshot any function or reception going on, there came feet up those splendid, shallow steps—feet which seemed to halt, and even vacillate beneath a swaying body.
The mere suspicion was shocking; but even worse, to that cultivated ear, was the clamour of the bell which followed.
But when, having opened the door, Charles examined the ringer, he was astounded, not to say appalled.
The man, though his eyes were heavy and his voice that of one driving himself to the limit of his strength, was certainly not intoxicated; for in that matter, Charles the footman knew and trusted the nicety of his own judgment. But the condition of the dress, the cut cheek-bone, the puffy eye above it, the dirty hands with raw knuckles, and the pockets grotesquely bulging, made a picture so painfully in contrast with the house and its quarter, that the footman's face lost its habitual expression of restrained good-humour under a mask of severity altogether tragic.
For a moment he hesitated: to ask this scarecrow his business would concede him the right to exist; and the ruffian's undamaged eye and his assured carriage were plain warning against any concession whatsoever.
The visitor, therefore, spoke first, even as if he had been respectable.
"I want to see Mr. Bruffin," he said.
"Not at home," replied Charles, trying to boom like a butler.
"Then I'll wait till he comes," said Dick Bellamy, taking a step forward in spite of the door and the footman's hand upon it.
"Impossible to see Mr. Bruffin to-night—sir," said Charles. "I'm afraid I must ask you to step outside."
His vision of what might be in those bloated pockets was only a little less alarming than the reality.
But Dick felt he had only a drop or so of physical energy left; and so, lest they should trickle from him, he used them now.
And Charles, lifted most disconcertingly by the slack of his breeches and the stiffness of his resisting neck, was shifted quickly and painfully to the doorstep, to hear the door close upon him before he could turn to face it.
The house was new, even to its owners. Its rebuilding and exquisite refitting had been a marvel for the magpie chorus of the occasional column. The public already knew more of his new house than George Bruffin could ever forget.
But Dick, who never read more of a newspaper than he must, knew only its address and the day when George and his wife should go into residence. This, he had remembered, was the first day of their second week, and, even if George had already learned his way to his own study, Dick must find means to reach him more expeditious than geographical exploration.
He looked about him, and his eye fell upon a thing of which George had told him with pride almost boyish; a framework of shell-cases, graduated from the slender treble of a shortened soizante-quinze to the deepest base of a full-length monster from some growling siege-gun.
For George had done his portion of fighting and had collected this material for a dinner gong, on which one might play with padded stick anything from the "Devil's Tattoo" to "Caller Herrin'" or the "Wedding March."
From the doorstep, the frantic Charles, with eyes rolling, saw the taxi. What was in it he could not see, for the chauffeur stood blocking the open window, watching, it appeared, whatever the cab might contain—wild Bolshevists with bombs, perhaps, or soft litters of pedigree pups.
From Apsley House to Marble Arch, he felt, was never a policeman. He could have embraced the hoariest of specials.
The service entrance was too far round. Before he could reach it all might be over.
So, forgetting the bell, he turned and beat, with fists none too hard, upon the door that was anything but soft. And cursed, as he had never cursed man before, the architect whose enlightened scheme had found no place for a knocker.
And with his first blow there burst out in the hall the wild, indecorous strains of "Kuk-kuk kuk-Katie," pealing out louder and ever louder as the musician found confidence.
With his left hand supporting half his tired weight on the frame of these bells, translated by some twentieth-century Tubal Cain to a music so strangely different from the first they had uttered, Dick was absorbed in his rendering of such bars of the vulgar melody as he could remember, when he heard, far behind him, a slow, unimpassioned voice.
"What's all this hell's delight?" it asked.
A confused chorus of protesting explanation, interwoven with the yapping cries and hysterical laughter of women, was all his answer.
In a fresh surge of enthusiasm "Katie" drowned it.
Then George Bruffin shouted—almost, the servants felt, as if he might some day lose his temper.
"How did this freak minstrel get in?" he roared.
"Don't know, sir."
"Who was on duty here?"
"Charles, sir," chimed the chorus.
"Where is he?"
The music died in a last tinkling "Kuk-kuk." And then, as the minstrel swung round to face his audience, the whole company heard the beating on the great door.
"That," said Dick with a wave of his baton towards it, "is Charles."
While George stared heavily at the intruder's battle-worn visage, the second footman flung open the door.
With a face livid and distorted by passion, Charles made a rush at his enemy—to be brought up short by the sight of his master, wringing the rascal's hand and patting his disgraceful shoulder.
"You silly goat," were all the words George could find for his laughter.
"I had to see you," said Dick. "And I do."
"Why couldn't you have me fetched decently?"
The chorus had vanished; they two were alone, with Charles, abashed.
"Your man wanted to put me out. I'm all in, George, so I just put him out, and rang the bells for you." He sighed wearily, and added: "Anyhow, it worked."
George turned a heavy face on the footman, but Dick spoke first.
"Charles is a damned good servant," he said. "I know what I look like. He was in the right, so I had to evict."
"What's your trouble, Dick?" asked George, speaking, thought the servant, as if this Dick were the first of all Dicks and all men.
"I've got a girl in a cab out there. She's worse beat than I am, George. I want you and Liz to look after her till to-morrow."
Bruffin turned to his servant.
"Lady Elizabeth is in my study," he said. "Ask her to come to me here." Then, to Dick, "Sit down," he went on, and disappeared, to return quickly with a tumbler in his hand.
With half-closed eyes, Dick continued as if the other man had never left him.
"She's mounting guard," he said, "with the shuvver to help, over our catch—the worst blackguard unhung."
A handsome woman of some thirty years, with masses of darkest hair cunningly disposed, neck and shoulders beautiful beyond criticism, and dressed in a peignoir of delicate simplicity, came to her husband with a rush smooth as the full-sailed speed of a three-masted schooner.
Charles, with recovered dignity, followed in her wake.
"George! What is it, George?" she exclaimed, before she had even time to get her eyes focused upon his companion.
"That," answered George, with a derisive gesture.
"Why, it's—oh,Dick!" she cried.
With her long, slender hands on his shoulders, she peered close and eagerly into the battered countenance.
"Oh, Dickie dear, whatever have they been doing to its good old face?" she demanded, with tenderness for the one, and anger for the many mingling in her voice.
"Nothing to what they got from him, Betsy—unless I'm an ass. But he'll tell us when that whisky's worked in his veins a bit. He's got a lady out there, waiting. Shall I fetch her in—or you?"
Dick half rose from his chair. But Lady Elizabeth Bruffin pushed him back into it.
"I will, of course," she said, and made for the front door so quickly that Charles only just had it open in time.
As he told the butler before he slept that night, "It'd've done your kind heart good, Mr. Baldwin, to see how they were eating 'im with their eyes. His word law, you know, and do what he wanted, almost before he could say what it was, and it might be an hour before he could tell 'em why. And the terrible object he was—but with something strong and compelling, one might say, underneath."
He was thinking, perhaps of the hand which had lifted him over the threshold.
Charles had followed his mistress to the taxi.
The driver, turning on her approach, stood back, touching his cap; amazed by this condescension of jewels and silk to beauty ill-clothed, draggled, dirty and exhausted.
Suddenly Lady Elizabeth remembered that she did not know even the girl's name.
"Open the door, please," she said to the driver. And then, to Amaryllis, "My dear, you're to come in," and stretched her hands out with a motion so inviting that the girl laid her own in them, taking all their support to rise and get out on the pavement.
"Take my arm. Poor little thing, you're tired to death," said Lady Elizabeth, with what the girl called a coo in her voice.
"You don't even know my name——" began Amaryllis.
"I know something better—you're Dick Bellamy's friend. That is a passport and an introduction, my dear."
Charles followed them up the steps. On the third his mistress stopped and turned. Charles halted on the second step.
"There's a man in the taxi?" said Lady Elizabeth interrogatively.
"Yes," replied the girl. "We're keeping him. He's drunk."
"Charles," said Lady Elizabeth, "assist the driver in keeping the person inside from getting out."
"Yes, my lady," said Charles; and, feeling that haply he was mixing in great matters, he went back to the cab and stood sentry very loftily over its further exit.
When they were inside, Lady Elizabeth shut the big door.
"George!" she said; and Bruffin took his eyes from Dick, to see his wife leading towards them a pale-faced, tear-smudged girl, with a battered sun-bonnet flung back on her shoulders and a great halo of untidy red hair topping a graceful, weary figure habited in clothes which, in their present state, would have disgraced the woman they had come from.
George took a step forward, and Dick half rose in courtesy.
"This is Miss ——" said Lady Elizabeth, and stuck.
"Oh, Liz!" cried Dick. "Beginning an introduction, when you haven't been introduced yourself! Lady Elizabeth Bruffin, you have on your arm Miss Caldegard, daughter of the eminent Professor Caldegard. George, you behold the same. Miss Caldegard, Lady Elizabeth Bruffin, and her husband, Mr. George Bruffin. He is famous for immeasurable wealth which he can't use and a few brains which he uses in all sorts of queer ways, and hasn't yet spent."
He limped towards the two women.
"Liz, dear," he went on, "please put her to bed. She's had the deuce and all of a day. She'll tell you, only don't let her talk too much."
Lady Elizabeth nodded.
"Would you like to go to bed now, dear?" she asked.
A smile, radiant on the tired face, illuminated Amaryllis.
"Oh, please, yes. I can see it—all white!" she answered.
And without a word from any of the four, the women left the men standing in the hall.
It was empty when Lady Elizabeth returned. She found George in his study.
Her eyes shone with a kind of maternal satisfaction, but she looked at her husband without speaking.
"How's the young woman?" he asked. "She looked about done in."
"She's had a bath. Suzanne's done her hair. She's in bed, so sleepy that I left Suzanne with her to keep her from spilling her bouillon and toast before she's finished it. Oh, George, she's a ripper—perfectly lovely, without all those horrid clothes."
George took his cigar from his mouth.
"I shouldn't wonder," he said.
Lady Elizabeth ignored the interruption.
"And Ibelieveshe's Dick's," she went on. "Who is this Professor Caldegard?"
"Scientific—coal-tar—big bug of the first magnitude," answered Bruffin. "Some day he'll synthesize albumen, and then all the farmers'll go into the workhouse."
"But are they—what sort of people are they? It'sDick, George."
"You've seen the girl, Betsy."
"Yes," admitted Lady Elizabeth.
"And when you catch Dick Bellamy making a break over a man, a horse, a dog or a woman, Bet, p'r'aps you'll let me know."
Lady Elizabeth sighed contentedly, as if he had removed the last doubt from a happy mind.
"That's quite true," she said. Then she looked round the room. "Is he in your bath-room, or in bed, or where? You oughtn't to leave him alone."
"He's left me," replied George. "Wouldn't stay a moment after he knew Miss Caldegard was in your clutches. He's gone off with his intoxicated captive. He's made a conquest of Charles by pitching him out of the house, and the taxi-man would help him do murders."