Ambrotox and Limping Dick

O >> Oliver Fleming >> Ambrotox and Limping Dick

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"There's that cut on your cheek, Dick," said Amaryllis.

"And there's the colour of your hair, la-ass," he answered, laughing.

"He never saw under the bonnet," and she whisked the pig-tail forward
over her shoulder. "Look at that," she said.

"How did you make it that common brown?" he asked, astonished.

"Mother Brundage," said Amaryllis, "greased her hands from the
frying-pan and rubbed it down hand over hand as if she were hoisting a
sail. The Marquis of Ontario," she said, "would _know_ I wasn't his
daughter, with that-coloured hair."

"Then why did you go all to pieces," asked Dick, "at the sound of
Melchard's voice?"

"It was that frightful man made me feel queer. Just as I was getting
better, I heard Melchard, and I thought the best place for my
aristocratic nose was on my daddy's shoulder. Dick!" she cried, looking
up at his solemn face, "I really couldn't help feeling bad."

"Most girls 'd've fainted. You're clever as paint," he said, "you turn
your two-spots into aces, and leave him in baulk every time. Poor,
shaking kid! And I'd brandy in my pocket, and couldn't give it to you!"
He pulled out his flask. "Have some--you'd better."

Amaryllis with a little tender wrinkle somewhere in her beauty, laughed
in his face.

"Do I look," she asked, "as if I needed Dutch courage?"

Colour of skin and splendour of eye answered their own question.

"You _look_ top-hole," he said. "But you've had a heavy call on your
strength."

"What about you, then?" and she touched her left cheek, meaning his.
"One like that," she said, "and I should have been in bed for a
month--or dead."

"Pepe said I was to keep on feeding you," he continued, passing over, as
he always did, she observed, her reference to himself, "and there's been
no chance but that beer and cheese. I meant to stuff you again at 'The
George.'"

On their left, in the very outskirts of Ecclesthorpe, was a little stone
house, roofed with stone slabs, and surrounded with gardens, bee-hives
and flowers. Upon a wooden arch connecting its stone gate-posts was
written "Cyclists' Rest. Tea, Minerals."

"Um!" said Dick. "'Minerals' always makes me think of museums, but it
only means ginger-pop and wuss. Tea's the thing, if brandy isn't."

He pushed the gate open; the hinges screamed, and a young woman came to
the door of the cottage. As they went towards her through hives and
wallflowers,

"How the bees do bumble!" said Amaryllis.

"Pot o' fresh tea, miss," said Bunce to the round-faced, soft-eyed girl
at the door. "And pikelets and parkin an' anything you've got to hand.
We've nobbut ten minutes now forth to eat an' drink."

He put two half-crowns on the table.

"An' Ah'll never take change, my dear," he added, "so be 'tis ready in
three."

In two and a half they were drinking it, Bunce-like, from the saucers;
and Amaryllis once more in danger of the giggles.

"Ma lass and self, miss," said Bunce, between gulps, "be footin' it to
Harthborough Junction. Bain't there a train, five summat wi' another
five in it?"

"Five fifteen," said the girl. "Lunnon way."

"That'll be it. We're takin' 't easy-like o'er moor. Now, Ah do call to
mind there be a track to left, some way down t' ro'd, as'll take 'ee
gentle and pleasant 'tween two gradely hummocks down into Harthborough.
But how far out o' Ecclesthorpe that track takes off the pike, I can't
bring to mind. 'Tis not a ro'd proper but indistink like an' wanderin'.
So Ah be feared o' missin' it."

"T' owd Drovers' Track, tha meanst. 'Tis easy findin'," said the girl.
"Thou turn'st off to left by two thorns wi' a white stone by root o' t'
girt 'un. But they stand a long mile down t' road. Now, if 'ee likes to
go through house an' cross t' paddock, Ah'll put 'ee in sheep path
that'll take thee to Drovers' Track where un runs up 'tween t'
rocks--Bull's Neck, they call it."

When they had finished their tea, and Dick, from the sweetstuff counter,
had crammed into already burdened pockets two half-pound packets of
chocolate, the girl led them to the further gate of her father's
paddock, whence she indicated the highest point of the ridge over which
"T' owd Drovers' Track" threaded its way.

"Howd eyes on t' lofty knob of 'un," she said, "and thou'lt not stray."

For two or three hundred yards the pair walked in silence; and now that
terror had passed with the imminence of danger, and that no strange eyes
surrounded her for which she must play a part not learned nor rehearsed,
the terrible pressure which had brought Amaryllis so close to her
companion was relaxed--not annihilated, but withdrawn to lurk in sky and
air, instead of squeezing the very life and breath out of her physical
body.

Dick, therefore, though not two feet from her side, seemed all at once a
hundred miles away. The man whose arm had held her, and whose coat she
had rubbed her face against, she now found herself too shy to touch or
speak to. Yet she wished to hear his voice, and even more, longed to
feel that he was really there--the same man, no other than she had found
him.

She fixed her eyes upon him, hoping he would feel them and respond--help
her somehow to bridge this silly gulf. But he strode on, at a pace which
made her run lest she should fall behind.

His eyes were set straight forward, his head a little bent. No smoke
came from the pipe in his mouth, and the whole expression of face and
figure was of dogged endurance. A little trickle of blood had started
afresh from the wound on his cheek. She wondered what had set it flowing
again. Could it have been some clumsiness of her own in her convulsive
clinging to him?

A woman's compassion, more easily aroused by a cut finger than by a
suffering mind, narrowed the chasm between them, until a small, soft
voice bridged it.

"Dick!" she cried. "Oh, Dick."

But the stiff face remained rigid, so the frightened girl quickened her
pace until she was well in front; then, turning, she saw that their lids
covered two-thirds of the eye-balls, and that the mechanism of the man
was driven by an impulse of which, if it were his at all, he was surely
not conscious.

As he reached her side, she laid a hand on him, and, "Dick!" she cried
again.

The man started, turning his face the wrong way.

The eyes did not open, but the jaw muscles relaxed, letting the cold
pipe fall from his teeth. The blind effort which he made to catch it
overbalanced the automaton.

He pitched forward, and would have fallen on his face, but for the
shoulder which stopped his head, and the arms that clutched his reeling
body.

Accurate instinct loosened her joints as the weight struck her, and she
came slowly to her knees, sinking back until she sat upon her heels, so
that the man received no shock. She had turned halfside-ways as she went
down; and kneeling, held him across her, with the uninjured cheek
strained upon her left shoulder, and his heels far away to her right.

She looked down into the face, where the eyes were now wholly covered.

The dark semi-circles under the closed lids and the deepened lines of
the thin face moved in her compassion as tender as she felt for the
bleeding bruise on the cheek. She remembered how he had nursed her, and
given her, by his mere sympathy and control, that hour's wonderful
sleep. She remembered him crawling, at the acme of her terror, through
the slit of the window; saving her from the Dutch woman; turning his
back while she dressed; leaping like a heaven-sent devil over the
stair-rail; fighting Ockley with his fists--and refused to remember that
same enemy brought utterly to an end of his enmity.

Her heart swelled, and beat heavily with the sense of ownership and the
dread of losing what was her own; it was a fear more poignant than any
other of the fears which she had suffered in a long chain since she fell
asleep in Randal Bellamy's study--only last night!

Was it death--death which she had seen once already to-day--was it that
coming to her here against her heart? Or was it but with him as it had
been with her in the Brundage bedroom--the awful need of sleep.

She bent her ear close over his lips, and heard the breath long, and
regular.

She forgot his wasted features in the beauty of the long eyelashes
touching his cheeks; and just because she could not see what the lids
were hiding, she remembered her walk down through the wood below the
Manor House, and that foolish phrase, "blue as a hummin-bird's weskit,"
which had then haunted her, till she found him playing with Gorgon in
the road; and from that to her bewilderment twenty-four hours later,
when he had called the dog Zola. She had reproved the enormity of the
syncopated pun, but Dick had insisted that Zola fitted an animal whose
expression was always either disgusted or disgusting.

She must not keep him here, so near the stone cottage, and the road.
They might be seen.

He had offered her brandy. Carefully she felt his coat. The right
outside pocket she could not reach, but there was a hard lump in it,
pressing against her cramped knees.

She leaned over sideways, twisted her legs in front of her, and made a
lap into which, by edging away from the heavy body, she let the head
slide gently. She got the flask out, pulled the metal cup from its base,
and into it poured a little brandy. With tender force she managed at
last to send a trickle of the spirit into his mouth.

He choked, tried to swallow, coughed violently, and then opened his
eyes.

"I told you," he said, "that you needed brandy, not to kill me with it.
What's happened?"

"You were walking in your sleep," she began.

"Sleeping in my walk, perhaps," he admitted. "Bad enough, but very
different."

His senses coming back to him, Dick felt a wet drop on his forehead,
brushed it away, and glanced at the sky, but not, as Amaryllis expected,
at her.

"Well," she said, "I was frightened."

"Why?"

"You dropped your pipe, tried to catch it, and fell on your face,"
explained Amaryllis.

Dick felt his nose and eyebrows. "No, I never!" he declared indignantly.

Amaryllis laughed shakily.

"You see, I'm softer than the ground. You fell on me." And she patted
her left shoulder.

"Your fault, I'm afraid. Must have tipped you right over."

"No, I just subsided--quite neatly. And you never got a bump, Dick. But
I was afraid--afraid, you know."

"I must be in rotten condition, going to pieces like that. Why, look at
you--been through twice as much."

"Oh, no," she answered, snatching greedily at the opportunity of telling
a little of what she had been thinking. "Did I drive two hundred and
fifty miles in the dark, at fifty miles an hour? Did I climb and crawl,
and fight, and nurse a squealing girl after carrying her for miles?"

"Three hundred yards," said Dick dryly. "And you must have been shamming
to know anything about it."

"Mrs. Brundage told me," she answered, "that you came through the wood
carrying me in your arms."

And so was he in hers--the reversal of their cases struck him like a
soft, heavy blow on the heart.

And so much puzzled was Amaryllis by the strange intensity of his eyes
lifted to hers that she found the gaze hard to endure, and moved
uneasily.

"We ought not to stay here, Dick," she said.

He started scrambling to his feet, but Amaryllis was before him, and
giving him a hand, helped him to rise with a pull of which the vigour
surprised him.

"You're strong," he said, swaying unsteadily for a moment.

She flushed with pleasure at male praise.

"I'm awfully strong. I've felt perfectly safe, you see, ever
since--since I was such a fool and you made me sleep and be sensible."

Dick looked about him, and caught sight of the stone roof of the cottage
where the bees bumbled.

"I didn't get far before I crumpled," he said. "Let's get a move on."

As they walked with their eyes on the cleft knob of the ridge, he
reverted to her last words.

"Not scared any more? Then what price Melchard?" he asked, "and
malingering pig-tailed wenches that hide their faces and sob on their
daddies' shoulders?"

"It was that frightful Chinaman, Dick. Yes, I was afraid then. I was
afraid--afraid you'd----"

"Take him on? Nothin' doing," he answered. "I should've stood just a
dog's chance against the village hero, my dear girl, and the Malay made
just one bite of him. Next time that lopsided serang looms on the
horizon, you won't see me for dust and small stones."

The tone, perhaps, more than the words in which the man of whom she
could not help making a hero seemed to disparage himself, annoyed Miss
Caldegard.

It was as if one good friend of hers had maligned another, and she could
not quarrel with the traducer without falling out with the traduced.

"But it was Melchard's voice that made you take a lump of me between
your teeth and bite a hole in my coat," he went on. "There's a hideous
wound just under this." And he picked at two broken threads on his
shoulder.

"That was just hate and disgust, not fear. And it's horrid to say I bit
you, when you know I didn't. But I was afraid, Dick, that you'd have to
do something to that huge dwarf-thing, and get hurt--and----"

"Well, I've told you I'll bolt if he shows his face," he repeated, more
gently. But seeing her flush and frown angrily, "What's wrong,
Amaryllis?" he asked, and drew nearer to her side as they walked.

But she kept the distance undiminished.

"I don't like the way you speak of yourself," she replied hotly. "It
makes me feel angry--as if someone else had done it."

"Done what?"

"Lied about you--said you were afraid of a hideous freak out of a
circus. You!"

The brown eyes blazed on him with the anger meant for his hypothetic
slanderer. And Dick, between the joy with which her annexation of his
honour filled him, and his weakened control, found himself on the edge
of an explosion of feeling; but brought back common-sense and
good-humour to them both with a touch of his antiseptic cynicism.

"Can you swim?" he asked.

"Yes," said the girl, round-eyed.

"If you couldn't, would you jump in after another fool that couldn't?"

"Another? Oh!" exclaimed the girl.

"Well, you would be, if you couldn't. But you can. Now, would you jump
in?"

"No. I should run for a rope or something."

"That's me," said Dick. "Next time that crop-eared, chrome-coloured
coolie shows against the sky-line, I run for a rope or something."

The wrinkles disappeared from her forehead, and once more Amaryllis
slipped her hand through the bend of his arm. She did it as for
friendship or support, but her thought was for him. His rest had been
nothing, and at any moment that deadly sleep might seize him again. She
made up her mind that next time, even should they have to finish their
walking by night, his sleep should be at least as long as that he had
given her.

"I'm a pig to be cross," she said. "But I'm only not cross now because
you make me laugh with your ridiculous good temper. But, Dick----"

She had felt that, without her linked arm, his steps would already be
wandering.

"Well?" he said.

"Next time it's too much for you, I'm going to let you sleep. You must."

He looked at his watch.

"It's a quarter to three," he said. "If we missed that train at
five-fifteen, we should have to wait till ten for the next."

"And it'd be much safer," Amaryllis broke in, "to wait on the moor, than
in a village or a station where people could see us."

"Yes. I'm not clear-headed enough now to see into Melchard's mind, but I
can still calculate on what I know. If he didn't suspect us, he'll go
the round of his pickets, beginning with Gallowstree Dip. If he did
suspect, he'll come this way after us, and run down towards the London
road and look across the moor, along the Drovers' Track from the
hawthorns and the white stone. He won't see us--we are in a fold till we
get a mile further at least. He'll go on towards the main road, but when
he meets his picket that nobody like us two has passed, he'll come back
and try the Drovers' Track."

"He didn't suspect," insisted the girl.

"We'll bank on that, then," said Dick, "--if we can find a bush or a
ditch to hide in."

The faint path they were following here reached the lowest point of the
depression which hid them from the road and from the cottage by whose
back door they had left it, and soon began to rise.

The ascent, as they topped it, proved, however, to be concerned merely
with crossing a spur, below which the path wound about the edge of a
bowl-shaped hollow, rimmed and lined with dark-green, close-cropped
grass; and at the bottom lay a tiny tarn.

So steep were the sides that a broad band of green was reflected to the
eyes bent down upon the still water. And this circle of mirrored green,
embracing a disc of the sky's azure, stared up at them like a pupil-less
blue eye.

"Oh!" exclaimed Amaryllis, "it's a sapphire set in emerald!"

Down a winding path, vague as a wrinkle on a young face, and worn, said
Amaryllis, by ghostly hoofs of departed sheep, they crept to the pool's
edge.

They sat on a little irregular terrace, a few feet above the water, and
Dick, taking the cup from his flask, and having dipped, tasted, rinsed
and filled again, passed it to Amaryllis.

"Good water," he said, watching her drink. Amaryllis smiled on him as
she finished, and plunged into the ample pocket of Mrs. Brundage's skirt
for her chocolate. She broke off a lump and gave him the cup to fill
once more.

"It's lovely water," she said, munching; then poured out half the water
he had given her. "But I'm going to spoil yours," she went on, and
poured in brandy till the cup almost brimmed. "Just obey meekly for
once."

"That's easy," said Dick.

"For brandy, or for me?" asked the girl.

But Dick was drinking.

"Now lie down along the ledge. Be quick. I can't enjoy my chocolate till
you do."

He looked at her with heavy eyes.

"I must," he said. "The brandy's finished me."

Without rising, he drew up his legs to the terrace level, stretched them
out, said: "Wake me, if the chocolate makes you sleepy," and rolled full
length on his left side.

"Lift your head a little, and I'll spread a bit of my skirt under it.
There's plenty of it," said Amaryllis, shifting towards him as she sat.

She got no answer. He was dead asleep.

Five minutes she gave him to sink deeper into the unknown, while she
hovered above his dreams like a seagull over the course of a stream
which has disappeared into a tunnel.

At last she lifted his head and drew a fold of her skirt beneath it; but
was not yet content; for she knew the weariness of lying on the side
when the unsupported neck and heavy head increase the pressure on the
under shoulder. So once more, to slip her knee beneath the neck for a
pillow, she raised the head--and there came to her heart and breath a
flutter which seemed to make its attack through fingers and up the arms.
She felt, with a difference, the strong, subtle, ineffable thrill of a
woman's early handlings of her earliest child.

In spite of her terror in the night, her danger of the early morning,
the men fighting and the man dead; in spite of the excitement and risks
of the afternoon, shaking the heart in relief only less than in
encounter, and in spite of aching head and limbs, stiffening to cramp
while she still sat and the man still slept, Amaryllis knew herself
happier than ever in her life before.

Not rejoicing in the future--neither in hope nor in fear of what the
sleeper might feel, what ask for, when danger was behind him and
fighting once more a splendid thing belonging to newspapers and books;
instinctively aware, perhaps, that his spirit had moved already half-way
to meet hers, yet so far from asking, even of her own mind, whether Dick
Bellamy loved her or no, that she did not even mentally formulate the
idea of love to explain her own feelings, Amaryllis sat in blissful,
unphilosophic enjoyment of service and protection.

Was she not at once his pillow and his defence? Was he not sleeping like
a little child whose fever has abated? And had she not a dog's ears and
a sailor's eyes for his enemies? And did she not know just where to lay
her hand on the butt of Ockley's pistol, how precious were its two
cartridge's, and how near, therefore, to use each with effect, she must
let an enemy approach?

She was happy, then, and time was nothing, until the man's head moved on
her numbed thigh, and a deep sigh came from his chest.

She leaned over him and lifted the lock of straight black hair which had
fallen over the left eye, stroking it back as he would have brushed it,
and murmuring, "Lie still, dear, lie still," in just such words and
tones as some day she would use to a smaller man on a softer pillow.

But the instinct of the man of many wilds had told him that his hour's
rest was over.

He sighed again, turned on his back, and opened his eyes.

He saw her face hanging over him--upside down, it seemed. Yet even
inverted, and seen through the mists of sleep, that face conveyed
something which he did not understand, something so strange that he
caught his breath, gasping, and blundered to his feet.

The girl still sat, looking up at him.

"What is it?" he asked, sharply.

But Amaryllis had forgotten herself altogether, and did not know that he
found his wonder in her face.

"What is what?" she asked, simply.

"Your face----" he began, and could find no more words.

"My face," she echoed, puzzled, and feeling blindly for a handkerchief.
"It's all right, isn't it?"

"It's glorious--shining with happiness," he answered, his voice sounding
like that of a man in pain.

"Weren't you glad," asked Amaryllis, "when you'd got me off to sleep,
and when I woke up all alive again? I know it didn't make you look
anything but stern and pre-occupied and business-like; I felt as if you
were pleased, though. I'm different, and show things in my face, I
suppose."

"But you were looking like that when I opened my eyes."

"Well?" said Amaryllis.

"You hadn't had time to know whether I was well or ill, strong or weak.
And you looked as if it had been there a long time."

"What?" she asked again.

"The--the expression," said Dick, his tone as fierce as his words were
lame.

Very sweetly, and with no taint of derision in the sweetness, Amaryllis
laughed.

"The gloriousness? I'd been watching you all the time, you see, and I
knew it was doing you lots of good--and--and I was proud of being
useful, perhaps. So, of course I looked happy and shining."

"When did you take my head on your knees?" he asked, sternly.

But this time she understood every furrow of his frown.

"As soon as you were asleep," she answered.

He looked at his watch. It was four o'clock.

"And I never moved?" he asked.

"No."

"Nor you?"

"No, Dick."

"An hour and a quarter! My God!" he exclaimed, "you must be as stiff as
a pious book. And I'm damned if you're not sitting there because you
can't get up!"

"Oh, yes, I could. But give me a hand," she answered; and he pulled her
to her feet.

She staggered, and he caught her by an elbow.

"One of them's as fast asleep as you were," she said. "It'll go off in a
minute."

But for Dick Bellamy, caught at last on the ebb of his resistance, one
elbow was not enough. So he seized the other, and by the pair held her
off from him, looking into her eyes.

"Tell me what it meant," he said, "--your face."

"I've told you," she replied, with serious eyes.

"I saw it. It must have meant a great deal more than your words, or a
great deal less than it looked. If you were taking a cheap pleasure in
being charitable, your face is a liar, Amaryllis. If you find great
happiness in being loved, _you_ are."

She ignored the accusation, merely answering:

"I might."

But she was still so serious that Dick could not speak.

"It wasn't exactly that, though," she explained. "I want to be as
truthful as my face--if you could read it right."

"Tell me, then."

"It was my half, I think, that made me so awfully contented."

"Your half? That means--if you mean anything at all--you mean, your half
was loving me?"

She nodded, and spoke before he could answer the nod.

"Of course I might not have stayed contented long, if you hadn't been
like that too. You are, aren't you?"

His hands had slipped up her arms to her shoulders, and it sent a pang
of wild joy through her content to feel them trembling while they held
her.

"Contented? No, by God, I'm not! _Contented's_ as much as saying I could
have enough of you. But I've loved you ever since I heard you calling
Zola in that wonderful voice of yours. Before I even saw your face
close, your 'Gorgon! Gorgon!' gave me a pain I was afraid of, because I
wanted to be hurt again. It made me angry. You've been waking me up at
four in the morning and never letting me sleep again. You've filled my
head with pictures--a whole cinema of pictures; and my ears with sounds!
Your dress on the stairs; your voice calling 'Dad! dad!' from the
garden, and humming little tunes I'd never heard till you sang 'em,
coming in with your arms full of leaves and flowers. Seems like months
you've filled me, and it's only four days. No, I'm not contented,
Amaryllis, but I'm damned happy."

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