Ambrotox and Limping Dick Part 15

"Melchard said he'd got four men downstairs--armed," she whispered.

"Heard him--but it's the only way--they've fixed that window. Just sc.r.a.ped in head first and we can't get out like that. Come on," said d.i.c.k, and put the key in the lock.

"I've--I haven't got--haven't got any clothes." And there was no other expression of shame in her face than the two large tears that gathered slowly in her eyes.

But d.i.c.k Bellamy ignored them, looking her up and down like a man considering the harness needed for a horse.

"Take off her skirt," he said; then added: "Shoes might do." And with his back turned to the girl, he knelt and quickly unshod Dutch Fridji while Amaryllis unfastened the waistband of the skirt.

"Yours wouldn't last a mile," said d.i.c.k, going to the window and looking out. "Put 'em on quick--say when."

In a time wonderfully short, he thought, for a girl, she spoke.

"I'm ready," said the small voice; and he turned to face a quaint figure in a skirt too short, and too wide on the hips. The brogue shoes would have looked better if the stockings had been of anything but green silk.

But the pathos of sentiment and custom was in the bare arms and the two hands crossed on the chest and throat, with fingers spread in vain attempt to cover the whole; and in the plaintive simplicity of the voice which said:

"But, oh, my neck! I can't possibly get into her blouse, and a blanket's too conspicuous."

d.i.c.k stripped off his Norfolk jacket, holding it for her arms. As she hesitated, glancing at him, he frowned.

"Please obey orders," he said, and she meekly slipped on the loose coat.

He took from its pocket a folded white handkerchief, and tied it round her neck by two adjacent corners, so that it hung like a child's bib.

Amaryllis pulled the collar up over the knot at the back, and began to b.u.t.ton the coat over the linen.

"Don't b.u.t.ton it," he said, pulling off his necktie. "Cross the edges.

Lift your arms."

And he tied the dark green strip round her waist, knotting it in front.

"Come on," he said; and, stooping, picked up Fridji's knife. "Where's the sheath?"

"In her stocking," said Amaryllis.

"Get it," said d.i.c.k, and unlocked the door.

Amaryllis behind him whispered: "She moved a little," and brought him the leather sheath.

They stepped silently into the pa.s.sage. d.i.c.k locked the door and pocketed the key.

"Quietly," he said, and as they crept towards the stairhead, he slid the sheathed knife into the pocket of the tweed jacket.

CHAPTER XII.

THE STAIRS.

The pa.s.sage ended in an arch, beyond which appeared a bal.u.s.trade.

The corridor was wider than the archway; and d.i.c.k, having made the girl hide behind its projection, stepped delicately out upon the square landing, and looked over the rails.

The staircase mounted in a single broad flight from the floor of an entrance hall larger and more pretentious than he had expected. The attempt at an appearance of comfort was a failure, but money had been spent, and a sort of bad harmony between furniture and decoration forced itself upon the eye.

Across the hall, to the left, the front door stood open to the sunlight.

In the wall facing him and the stair's foot were two closed doors, and others, doubtless, to match them, beneath the gallery on which he stood.

He had already made up his mind to lead the girl noiselessly down the stair and through the open door, and thence to make, if necessary, a running fight for it, with the chance of taking his pursuers in detail, when he heard a man's steps, accompanied by a faint tinkle of china, coming towards the hall, he judged, along the corridor immediately beneath that which he and Amaryllis had used.

Something, he remembered, had been said of breakfast, to be sent up, and he waited until there appeared, first the tray and then the man that carried it; a thick-set fellow, with heavy boots, shabby clothes, and a bald spot among the rough sandy hair of his crown.

It was plain that he was making for the stair, and d.i.c.k drew back behind the projection of the arch, opposite to Amaryllis. He saw the questions in her eyes and knew she could hear the approaching footsteps.

He made a gesture for silence; a silence which seemed to Amaryllis to last immeasurable time, while tea-cup tinkled against milk-jug, ever nearer and nearer.

She saw him take a swift glance through the arch at the comer she could not see, draw back three steps up the pa.s.sage, and start forward again with a face that made her heart jump, and a terrific limping rush of three or four strides to the stairhead. And she craned forward just in time to see the man with the tray, two steps from the top, receive in his stomach a kick which lifted, it seemed, the wretched creature and all that he carried in a single flight to the bottom of the stair.

After a little clash of plates and cups on the impact of the kick, there was a sensible silence before the appalling crash and thud at the stair's foot. Amaryllis held back a scream, but reeled as if fainting.

d.i.c.k caught her by the shoulders and shook her, as women will shake a child.

"Buck up," he said; and she clung to his hands a moment. Then,

"I'm all right," she murmured, and stood alone.

Even as she spoke it seemed that in the hall below three doors opened at once, and that from each rushed a man, clamouring questions; and then, having seen the clutter of tray and crockery, stood aghast.

d.i.c.k, after one glimpse of the three so standing, took cover again, drawing the girl with him.

"Looks as if he fell backwards right from the top," said a ba.s.s voice, which d.i.c.k ascribed to the big man with the black beard who had seemed to carry himself somewhat above the others.

"Slipped 'is foot and pitched backwards, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."

"But why backwards?" asked Black Beard. And d.i.c.k imagined a suspicious glance at the stairhead.

"I guess 'e try save tray and lose _balanza_ of 'eemself," said a third, whose exotic voice and uneasy English affected d.i.c.k with an undefined reminiscence.

"Carry the fool to his kennel, you two," said Black Beard. And d.i.c.k heard the crus.h.i.+ng under foot and the kicking aside of broken china, and a shuffling of two pairs of feet.

But they had not gone many yards with their burden, when he heard a fourth man enter the hall, and a voice in which langour strove in vain against asperity--Melchard's voice, which he had heard for the first time while he clung with his fingers to the window-sill of the bedroom and with his shoe-tips to the string-course below it, sinking his head even below his defenceless knuckles.

At the sound of this voice d.i.c.k now stretched himself p.r.o.ne, and wriggled, Amaryllis thought, like some horrid worm, laying his left cheek to the floor until he reached a point where his right eye got its line of sight, between the uprights of the gallery's bal.u.s.trade, on the four live men and the inert, midway between the door out of sight beneath him, and the place where the broken tea-pot had spilt its contents in an ugly pool near the lowest tread of the stair.

"What's that?" Melchard had said. "Oh, put it down." And they laid the body on the floor.

Melchard looked from Black Beard to the c.o.c.kney, and back.