Ambrotox and Limping Dick

O >> Oliver Fleming >> Ambrotox and Limping Dick

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She did not now feel as she had felt in his study before she fell
asleep; she did not even define the feeling which had then made her
tears flow; and she understood, with the memory of Dick's kisses on her
face, that Randal was not wounded as Dick would have been in losing her.

She had not wronged Randal, nor had she any sense of wrong-doing; for to
love Dick was a natural thing to do--and a wise thing. It was even a
praiseworthy deed: for that this wonderful Dick of all men should go
without any smallest thing which he desired, would have been wicked
indeed.

The sting was this: Randal did not yet know that she was Dick's, nor
Dick that Randal would have had her his own. And she believed that it
would hurt Randal less in the end to learn the tremendous news from her
mouth than from her father's, Dick's or Lady Elizabeth's; and from Lady
Elizabeth she knew she could not keep it long, having a suspicion, even,
that she knew it already.

She must see Randal before Dick should come to her. She must tell Randal
the most wonderful and most inevitable thing of that terrible and
glorious yesterday. And Randal must decide whether Dick was to know what
Randal had asked and offered. And if Dick was to know, Randal must
decide by whom, and when.

If Randal wished it hidden, she could never tell it--not even to Dick.

For Amaryllis, even before she had "put her hair up," had learned to
hate the woman who tries to hide her nakedness with a belt of scalps.

As these thoughts ran through her head, Amaryllis frowned between her
eyebrows.

"A fly in the ointment, after all?" asked Lady Elizabeth, smiling so
that one knew there was none in hers.

"Only something I remembered. I want----"

"Won't ask, shan't have," said Lady Elizabeth.

"Will Sir Randal Bellamy be here to lunch?" asked the girl.

"I hope so, my dear. He's with Dick--or was--sitting on the bed to keep
him down till the doctor came. He's like a hen with one chick over that
brother of his."

And Lady Elizabeth Bruffin laughed.

"I think it's--it's beautiful," said Amaryllis, with a shade of
indignation in her voice.

"Yes--quite. That's why I laughed."

"I know," replied the girl, unwrinkling her forehead. "I often want to
laugh for that." And then, after a moment's pause, she added: "Please, I
want to speak to Sir Randal for a moment, before lunch."

"You shall. Heroines must have things made smooth for them, mustn't
they, at the end of the book?"

And she took the girl, fresh from Suzanne's finishing touches, to
George's study.

"George won't be coming in for half an hour, dear," she said. "There are
heaps of papers and books, but no looking-glass. So you'll be able to
forget your pretty self for a few minutes."

And off went the fairy godmother--to meet Sir Randal Bellamy on the
stairs.

"But you're staying to lunch," she expostulated.

"If you say so, of course I am," said Randal.

"I've left Amaryllis in George's study. She wants you to see I have
looked after her as well as if she'd been at home with her father and
you."

She passed him, but turned two steps above.

"I wish you'd seen Dr. Caldegard looking at her fast asleep in bed last
night," she said in a low voice, very tender. "It was a picture--the
kind one keeps."

"Yes," said Randal. "I was in the other room, you know, looking at
mine."

And he went down the stair, wondering how a woman he had seen last night
for the first time had managed to get that sentimental speech out of
him.

Amaryllis rose as he entered, and almost ran to meet him.

"Oh, Randal!" she cried.

He had known his gentle doom on the Friday; and her "Randal," _tout
court_, sealed it, for never had she used his name so to him before. It
came now, he knew, not in his own right, but through Dick.

In a single emotion, he was sorry and glad--more glad, he told himself,
than sorry. For the sadness seemed to have been with him a long time,
while the joy was new.

A little while she babbled of the trouble and pain she had given them.

"You and poor dad! If only I could have yelled out in time!"

"To get a knife in you, my dear--no, it's been all just right. Why, we
should never have got the Dope of the Gods back, without you."

And when she laughed, he told her how her father had growled: "Oh, damn
the Ambrotox!" and how he had lectured the potentate on nervous
exhaustion.

But when a little silence fell between them, Amaryllis took a deep
breath and plunged, saying in a half-stifled voice, "I want to tell you
something."

"Tell away, child," he replied, smiling benignantly on her, though his
heart beat heavily, telling him her tale beforehand.

"It's--it's Dick," she said, and broke down.

"Dick?" he responded. "Of course it's Dick--and Dick it is going to be;
Dick for breakfast, Dick for lunch, and Dick for dinner."

"Yes," said Amaryllis, tears running at last, but voice steady. "Dick
for ever, I think. It feels like that, Randal dear."

"If it depends on him it will be," said Dick's brother.

"If it depends on me, it shall be," answered the girl.

"Then what's the dear silly child crying for?" he asked.

"I--I don't know," she replied weakly.

"That's a dear silly little lie--you know as well as I do. Although
you've been perfectly honest with me, you have a dear silly feeling that
the things which have happened so suddenly have been unfair to me. When
I spoke to you last, my dear, you were surer than ever that you'd never
want me. You didn't know why you were surer than ever--because you were
afraid to look and see. Young women all, I suppose, have a moment when
they _won't_ look into that dear silly cupboard. But I looked at the
blind door of it, and I--well, I guessed what was inside."

The tears would not stop. There was no sobbing nor convulsion of throat
or breath. They just ran out in tribute to the man's goodness.

But Randal explained them with a difference.

"The tears from your left eye come tumbling out over the edge of the
well of your kindness for me," he said. "You would like me to have
everything I want. But you know that Dick must have everything that you
are. So there it is. But the tears out of your dear silly right eye are
silly sham jewels, sparkling with dear injured vanity. You're afraid I
shall somehow think you played a crooked little game with me. I don't."

The silly little handkerchief was getting the best of it.

"When you've quite turned that silly tap off," he went on, "I'll tell
you something else."

He got up and walked away from her, looked at two prints which he did
not see, lit a cigarette which he could not taste, and came back to a
pale-faced, dry-eyed Amaryllis--a girl with a smile on her face that was
a woman's smile.

"Tell me that other thing," she said.

"I don't suppose that it'll be altogether news to you, any more than
yours was to me. But it's this: For a good long time I resisted
you--just and only because the more I admired you, the more I couldn't
help thinking that Dick ought to have his chance--what I knew was one of
the great chances. Then I got weak, and last Wednesday I tried to grab
mine, before he'd even had a look in. I felt mean--and I couldn't stop
myself. That afternoon he came, and--well, as it turned out, saved me
from the agonies of gout. I always get it, when I've done anything off
colour."

"You!" said Amaryllis. "D'you know what he told me, the day we drove to
Oxford?"

"Some silly yarn."

"A dear story, not a bit silly. He said he daren't admire a gun or a
book or a horse of yours, for fear you'd force it on him. Said it was a
mercy of Providence that your size and shape permitted him to admire
your coats and trousers."

"Well," asked Randal, "doesn't he deserve the best of everything?"

"Oh, yes!" declared the girl eagerly.

"This time," said Bellamy, "he's getting it. And it's God's truth, my
dear, that it makes me unspeakably happy."

Amaryllis put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

And then George came in with _The Sunday Telegram_.

"Raid on a West-End Flat!" he grumbled. "Nice, respectable lot you are,
getting me mixed up with a thing like this!" And he read out:

"'In consequence of information which has come into the hands of the
police----' and all the usual jabber. And the placards are screaming
'Secret Dope Factories' all over this moral city. 'World-wide
Organisation to be Broken Up.' 'Five Leaders Arrested.' They'll be
getting me and Betsy into the witness-box."

"Come off it, George," said Dick from the doorway. "You and Liz aren't
going to get boomed in this stunt. Put your money into pars about your
yacht and your stables, if the 'Palatial Home' gadget's wearing thin."

His smile was almost straight again, Amaryllis thought, and there was
little sign upon him of what he had been through, except the patch of
black plaster on his left cheek, and the accentuated limp with which he
came across the room to her.

"Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed. "What a lovely coat!"

"That's just what I was going to say about you," he answered, taking her
hand. "We look a bit different, don't we?"

"Sent me in a cab, as if I were his valet," said Randal, "to fetch his
newest and purplest raiment from his beastly little flat."

"Nothing like it," said George, "to take the taste of savagery out of
the mouth. If the proletariat would only dress for dinner every night,
we shouldn't have any labour troubles. The Nationalisation of the
Dinner-jacket would be death to the Agitator. They say Abe Grinnel is
drafting a bill to make it illegal."

Lady Elizabeth came in with Caldegard. Amaryllis soon had her father at
one end of the room in a subdued conversation of which the hostess had
little difficulty in guessing the subject. The two brothers, she
observed, had come together at the other end, and were looking out of
the window across the park. She took George discreetly away from his own
room.

Of yesterday Randal and Dick had already talked much that morning; but
of that adventure which he accounted the greatest, Dick had said
nothing.

"Amaryllis has told me," said Randal.

"I'm glad," said Dick. "It didn't come easy to start the subject. I'm
not used to it yet."

"Neither of you could have done better," said the elder brother. "I
congratulate you, dear boy. And I want to give you--to make you a
present of a thing that isn't mine--couldn't have been mine, anyhow.
But, all the same, I give it you."

"Thanks," replied the younger. "But what the devil d'you mean?"

Randal looked at him.

"You don't mean--you----" began Dick, and stopped short, shocked by
conviction.

"Yes, I do. And I don't think I should ever have let you know it, Dick,
but that it doesn't seem comfortable for a girl to carry about with her
even a little thing like that which she can't speak of to her husband.
So now you know. And there is a way of giving even what one could not
withhold. She's perfect, Dick."

"Like the giver," said his brother.

And it was to Randal also that he owed the few minutes which he was able
to get alone with Amaryllis before lunch.

He went up to Caldegard.

"Have you heard Bruffin describe Dick's solo on the dinner-bells--last
night, you know? Well come and see if he's in the hall now," he said,
and dragged the old man away.

Left alone together,

"It's like a dream," said Amaryllis; and, "Which!" asked Dick.

"Yesterday," said the girl, peering at his calm face.

"It's this that's like dreaming, to me," he answered. "When you're awake
you make things happen. When you're asleep, things have the best of
it--make you follow their lead. Yesterday, Amaryllis, I was some bloke,
because I was useful to you. If I'd had time to think, I'd have thought
very strong beer of myself. But now I'm--oh, a giddy little stranger
that's taken the wrong turning and got in among the Birds of Paradise."

And he touched gingerly the sleeve of her frock,

"Lady Elizabeth's," she said. "You score. Dick. You've got your own, and
they fit."

"Do I fit?" asked Dick.

"You don't really mean you feel strange and lost in _this_ dream, do
you?" she asked a little anxiously.

"I don't mean I feel strange in civilised life. That's only a variation
on savagery--a mere matter of degree--and I like it well enough. I can
talk the language, dear child, when I'm in the country. But you are my
new life, and I'm--well, dazzled, let's call it. Yesterday I had to
fetch you home and see that you didn't get hurt. Now, I've got to make
you happier every day for the next fifty odd years. It's a tall order,
and there's lots to do. I ought to begin."

"You began when you found me crying in Randal's study, Dick."

"Oh, it's easy to make people less wretched," he objected. "That's why
yesterday was, on the whole, a success. But--are you happy?"

"Awfully! Oh, just awfully!" murmured Amaryllis.

"There it is!" sighed Dick, with the humour which she knew already for
the natural shell of some wise little kernel. "And I've got to give you,
as you give me, the keen edge of appetite for all the world and for all
the people that play about in it. The stuff's all there, but----"

"Why, Dick, it's the same thing, after all, as yesterday. You saved me
from beasts and from fear and from myself. You made me laugh, and you
made me love--even made me love Tod, and poor Pepe, and the bees, and
the round-faced girl in the cottage they bumbled round; and 'Opeful
'Arry; and you brought me home to a fairy godmother. If you could do all
that in a day, Dick, just think what a lot of laughing and loving you'll
be able to dig out of fifty years. And I won't let you off. Wake up,
Dick. There's no dreaming about it all."

So they woke up together.

At the lunch-table, Amaryllis looked round her, and felt the last of her
troubles was over.

Randal showed, she thought, a face more serene and contented than she
had ever before seen him wear.

During the earlier part of the meal the talk went to and fro over the
track of what George rashly called the _Amarylliad_.

Randal told him the word was falsely constructed, _Iliad, Odyssey_ and
_Aeneid_ being, he said, syncopated adjectival forms derived from their
respective substantive stems.

"Ours," said George, "has been a rag-time Dunciad."

And when the coffee and George's elbows were on the table, and four of
his irresistible cigars alight:

"And us," he said, "not to get one little puff out of it all!"

"Advertisement," said Randal, "is the false dawn of fame. You, Mr.
Bruffin, do not, I believe, need it, and will certainly not get it out
of the Dope Drama. Miss Caldegard and my brother, who are likely to get
a great deal, will hate it."

Amaryllis flushed a little at the coupling of names, but faced it
bravely.

Her father drew a crumpled newspaper from his pocket.

"'Mysterious Murders near Millsborough,'" he read out. "'Injured Man in
Empty House. Bearded Man Stabbed in Lonely Wood. Dead Chinaman on
Deserted Roman Road. Abandoned Automobile.'"

"Inquests!" said George.

"Horrid!" said Amaryllis.

"Rescued Damsel!" said Lady Elizabeth.

"Scientist's Daughter Abducted!" cackled Caldegard.

"Lightning Pursuit by Gallant Airman!" boomed George.

"Dope Gang Baffled!" chuckled Randal. "And we understand that the
interesting heroine will shortly reward----"

Lady Elizabeth shot a keen glance at Amaryllis and Amaryllis answered it
boldly.

"Oh, of course!" she said.

George, having caught the look, seized upon the words.

"I wish to propose the health," he said, himself raising his glass, "of
Miss Caldegard, coupling it with that of my ancient friend and
fellow-filibuster, Limping Dick."

When four on their feet had toasted the two sitting, Randal spoke
seriously.

"The inquests are likely to begin about Wednesday next," he said. "If
you two children get yourselves neatly married on Monday, you will be
pursued by _subp[oe]nas_ to the Isle of Wight, say, and able to show up
and get your evidence begun at least at the second sitting, about a week
later. There'll be a paragraph or two before that, and by the time the
evidence is reported, you'll be a settled married couple, and the
romance will have evaporated."

"Oh, Randal!" said the girl reproachfully.

"Evaporated from the print and paper, dear child," he explained
paternally. "Take my advice, and you'll just about break the hearts of
the reporters."

"Amaryllis and I," said Lady Elizabeth, rising, "will withdraw and hold
counsel. An interim report will be issued at tea."

THE END.

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