THE GREEN FROCK.
Seven miles south of Millsborough, just before you come to the
cross-roads, whose eastern branch runs to the coast some thirty miles
away, there stands, the only house in sight, a little roadside inn
called "The Coach and Horses."
At half-past seven on the morning of Saturday, June the twenty-first,
there drew up before it a long, low two-seater car.
The landlord, a sharp-faced little man with kindly eyes and a shrewd
mouth, came to the door.
"Looks like you've been travelling all night, sir," he remarked
pleasantly.
"It looks right," said Dick 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 Dick.
"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 shillings 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 passed 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 Dick, 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, Dick 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 grass 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 grass-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 grass 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
glass 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 glass 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, Dick'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 japanned
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 scraped and shovelled. He could, after a fashion, speak
the Taal, and knew her more distinct phrases for European Dutch.
"Not used to the job," reasoned Dick. "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 Dick's ears. Having come to a climax with a
shriek, hoarsely suppressed, she ran back to the bucket and with it
stumbled quickly into the house.
Dick 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 passed 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 Dick
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, Dick 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 Dick 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.
The fire flared, and shed its changing light on the green silk, so that
by its iridescence of interwoven colours, chasing each other as the
garment wavered in the draught, he knew it. Amaryllis had worn it at
dinner last night.
Under the light of the big lamp in the hall it had made her figure turn
colour like an opal. And again, as she ran with that letter to her
bedroom, crimson, purple, peacock blue and a green never the same, had
chased each other down the swaying folds of her skirt.
The little Dutchwoman eyed the frock, hating while she admired; then
suddenly she pushed a fold of the silk into her mouth, and pulled with
hands and tore with teeth until long streamers of silk flickered their
reds and greens towards the fire.
At last, with a sound between purring and growling, she bunched the
stuff together and pushed it down on the coals, lifted the paper tray of
fuel from the floor, laid it in the grate over the silk, turned away,
threw off her overall and ran cat-footed into the house and out of his
sight.
And with her vanished Dick's last shadow of hesitation.
He crept from behind the door, faced its outer edge, laid a hand from
each side on its top, set his right foot on the inside knob of the
handle, raised his left to the outer, and thence with a quick movement
sprang astride of the top.