Ambrotox and Limping Dick Part 48

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

"If it depends on him it will be," said d.i.c.k'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 d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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 G.o.d'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 d.i.c.k 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, d.i.c.k!" 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 d.i.c.k had already talked much that morning; but of that adventure which he accounted the greatest, d.i.c.k had said nothing.

"Amaryllis has told me," said Randal.

"I'm glad," said d.i.c.k. "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 d.i.c.k, and stopped short, shocked by conviction.

"Yes, I do. And I don't think I should ever have let you know it, d.i.c.k, 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, d.i.c.k."

"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 d.i.c.k'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 d.i.c.k.

"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. d.i.c.k. You've got your own, and they fit."