Ambrotox and Limping Dick Part 12

"It looks right," said d.i.c.k Bellamy. "I want a house called The Myrtles."

Turning to the north, the landlord waved his hand towards the right.

"Two mile, mebbe more, mebbe less. Lies in a bit of a hollow. But you won't see no myrtles--less they've growed in the night--just a low stone house with a bit of a copse back o't. Mr. Melchard you're seekin', like?

He's a girt man wi' the teeth," said the landlord, chuckling.

"Big eater?" asked d.i.c.k.

"Dentist's my meanin', sir. They do say he keeps seven shops in Millsborough district, and never drew tooth in his life. Just drives round so free, takin' t'money. But I reckon, if you're goin' to t'Myrtles, you know the gentleman."

"I'm going to leave my car here. Don't know how long, but I'll pay you five s.h.i.+llings a day. I want some food and I've only got five minutes.

Can you manage it?"

Waiting, he scribbled a note in pencil, tore the leaf from his notebook, demanded an envelope, addressed it, and attacked the cold beef and beer hurriedly set before him.

"Can you post this?" he asked.

"You pa.s.sed t'box quarter mile back," said the landlord.

"Half-a-crown if you'll take it yourself."

"All right, sir. But there's no stamp in the house."

"Post it without," said d.i.c.k, well pleased.

He laid down his knife and fork.

"Walkin'?" inquired the landlord. "Then you'd better take path across t'moor. I'll show'ee."

Alone on the heath, d.i.c.k felt he had at last a few minutes to consider his position. Plans must come with events. Though besieged still by the fear which had haunted him throughout the night, he found comfort, however indefinite, in the daylight. Time was everything; but if he were indeed in time, it was well to have the day before him.

The letter to his brother, which he had posted in York at three o'clock in the morning, though it gave the address of the man he was hunting, could not, any more than that which he had just entrusted to the landlord of "The Coach and Horses," reach Scotland Yard in time to bring help in the immediate danger which he foresaw--danger which he would never have run the risk of bringing upon Amaryllis Caldegard but for his conviction of that worse peril threatening her. He was, indeed, sure that his course, rash as it would be accounted in the event of failure, offered the best, and perhaps the only chance of taking home with him an Amaryllis as happy and full of laughter as he had known on the road between Oxford and Chesham.

Twenty minutes' walking led him up a sharp rise to the level of the road, from which he looked down into the corresponding hollow on the other side. And there he saw what the little man of "The Coach and Horses" had described: a long, low stone house of two stories, facing south-west; windows neatly curtained, and fitted--an exotic touch--with _persiennes_; gravelled walks and smooth gra.s.s plots, a tree or two, shrubs and a few garden saplings; a garage big enough for one car which would look bigger than its envelope as it came out; and a pretentious gate--suburban villa half-heartedly aping country house--guarding the drive.

He stood in the road, boldly looking down at the blinded windows, thinking how common these houses were; in many parts of England he had seen them, grinning, sulking, boasting, counterfeiting, smirking at a world that would not look twice.

But this house seemed to leer at you through a filthy parade of modesty.

On a bench in the shade of a large tree not more than thirty yards from the road was a patch of colour: a woman's garden hat, bound with an orange scarf. Since it was not hers, it seemed the best thing in sight.

Fearing observation, he turned from the house, walking eastward.

The copse of which he had been told lay not only behind the building to the north-east, but encroached on its eastern side so as to intervene with the tops of its younger trees between him and the back of the building.

He followed the highway until he came to a field of ragged oats running from the road northward behind the little wood. Vaulting the stone fence at the roadside, he scrambled down the steep bank. Soon he was among the trees, making his way to the left towards the rear of "The Myrtles."

Bushes and tree-trunks gave him cover until he was within five yards of the low wall of unmortared stone which made an irregular and dilapidated fence about the back of the house.

From the wood's edge to the wall he crawled with the speed and silence of a Houssa scout, and, once in shelter of the stones, was not long in finding a crevice roughly funnel-shaped, which gave him, with small eyepiece, a wide outlook.

Wretched gra.s.s-plots trodden into patches of bare earth, ashes, bones, potato-parings, a one-legged wheelbarrow; a brick dustbin overfilled till its rickety wooden lid gaped to show the mouthful it could not swallow; a coal-shed from whose door, hanging by one hinge, a blackened track led across the dying gra.s.s to a door standing open outwards from the structural excrescence which must be kitchen or scullery: these made the sordid complement of the hypocrisy which exuded from the front.

That open door tempted him.

If only he could find some indication of her room! For that Amaryllis was in that house he had less doubt than proof.

From the front the windows looked out at no great distance on the high road. Signals were possible. They would lodge--imprison her at the back, and surely on the upper floor. But even that, on this side, had six windows, and he searched their flat glitter in vain for a peg to hang a guess upon.

He had almost made up his mind to creep to that open scullery door and try his luck when, from the third window from the right, behind the gla.s.s there shone something white.

Now the first window in this row was next the end of the house; the second, over the roof of the scullery; and the third had beneath it a straight drop--some seventeen feet of unbroken wall--to the ground.

There was, indeed, three feet below the window-sill a rough string-course, which might give to a fugitive a moment's finger-hold before dropping to earth. But the fall between shoes and ground would be some two and a half yards--a serious matter even for an acrobat so placed that he could not watch his feet.

And how should man or woman escaping get even the moment's grasp of that two-inch projection of stone?

It was, then, a safe room for a prison.

Bad gla.s.s refracted grotesquely the white shape behind it, but could not make its movement unfeminine; and, when the lower sash was slowly raised until it jammed about a foot above the sill, and two hands showed their fingers under the frame straining to force it higher, d.i.c.k's heart leapt to the belief that they were those pretty, expressive hands he had watched so often in lazy pleasure.

He was upon the point of making a signal above the edge of his cover when a footfall checked him.

A woman, dressed in a blue overall and carrying an empty j.a.panned bucket, was hurrying from the scullery along the grimy track to the coal-shed.

This out-house was so near to the watcher, that he could hear the pretty, eager, flaxen-haired, savage-faced little woman muttering to herself as she sc.r.a.ped and shovelled. He could, after a fas.h.i.+on, speak the Taal, and knew her more distinct phrases for European Dutch.

"Not used to the job," reasoned d.i.c.k. "And no skivvy in the house _this_ week." And he remembered the garden hat with the orange band.

Half-way back she set down her load, straightened her back, and glanced at the upper part of the house.

The sight of the partly-opened window and the white figure now drawn back a little into the room seemed to fill her with rage. She ran forward and, standing a few yards from the house, shook her fists furiously, pouring out a stream of abuse and threats of which hardly an articulate word reached d.i.c.k's ears. Having come to a climax with a shriek, hoa.r.s.ely suppressed, she ran back to the bucket and with it stumbled quickly into the house.

d.i.c.k was over the wall almost before she was out of sight; but clattering of coal-shovel and fire-grate told him she had not yet started on her way upstairs, and he followed with extreme caution.

The door which stuck out into the yard soon hid him from the open doorway, and enabled him to bring his eyes above the sill of the window, which must be pa.s.sed to reach the house, without fear of attack from behind.

In the scullery, at the end further from the main building, was a small hobbed grate. By this the woman with the flaxen hair had set her coals, and was now lighting a fire, of which the paper was flaming high and the wood began already to crackle.

In this commonplace task she seemed so unnaturally absorbed that d.i.c.k watched her with intense curiosity, his head held horizontally, so that one eye only topped the lower edge of the window-sill, thus making the least possible exposure of his head above it.

Every now and then she would turn and pick out with her fingers little lumps of coal and drop them in the hottest crevices among the sticks; and each time he saw a face of cruelty more determined.

He thought of Amaryllis, and knew that it was of Amaryllis that this little Dutch devil also was thinking.

"Melchard's!" he thought; and knew that for him, d.i.c.k Bellamy, she must be, in what was coming, not a woman but a tiger or a bad man.

The fire now glowed under its blaze. She took a shovel and strewed a thin layer of small coal over all. Next she spread a doubled sheet of newspaper on the stone floor, and laid on it small sticks and again small coal.

Several times during this fire-lighting d.i.c.k had seen her glance, as she turned, at a small mound of stuff which lay on the further side of the hearth. She now lifted it, holding high, with a finger and thumb pinching each shoulder-strap, a woman's frock--a light, slender slip, of these latter days, to add the last exquisite grace.