Ambrotox and Limping Dick Part 36

As they glided down the wide bends of the descent, d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d! 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. d.i.c.k 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, d.i.c.k," 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 G.o.ddess 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 to _you_--touched you--looked at you--blasphemy, profanation and sacrilege! And barged into your bedroom, when--. My G.o.d! woman," cried poor d.i.c.k, 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 d.a.m.ned 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.

CHAPTER XXII.

LORD LABRADOR.

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 d.i.c.k.

"Motor-cycle and side-car," said Amaryllis. "Is it another picket?"

Instead of answering, d.i.c.k 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 d.y.k.es, 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 d.i.c.k, on the a.s.sumption 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, d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k. "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 d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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. d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k. 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."