THE STAIRS.
The passage ended in an arch, beyond which appeared a balustrade.
The corridor was wider than the archway; and Dick, 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 Dick 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 passage, 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.
Dick 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.
Dick, 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 bass voice,
which Dick 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 Dick 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 Dick with an undefined
reminiscence.
"Carry the fool to his kennel, you two," said Black Beard. And Dick
heard the crushing 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 Dick now stretched himself prone, 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 balustrade, 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 cockney, and back.
"Is it beer again? I said not more than a tumbler of whisky before
lunch. Beer always plays hell with him."
"Then you should give 'im 'arshish, sir," said the cockney. "It's the
Injin 'emp 'e needs. But 'e ain't smelt beer since we left Millsborough.
Somethin's just appeared to 'im, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."
"Appeared? Tell me what happened," said Melchard, querulously.
"Fell right down the stair, tray and all," said Black Beard, "just as if
he'd been pushed."
Melchard was stooping over the scarce breathing body.
"He's not dead," he declared.
"He will be," said Black Beard, "unless you 'phone to Millsborough for a
doctor damn quick."
"Don't be a fool, Ockley. Better let him die than bring a sharp-witted
medical practitioner to _my_ house, to-day of all days."
"If we have a death here in _your_ house," Ockley retorted, "they'll
want to know _how_ and _why_ and _when_. And 'no doctor called'--and
'this shady Mr. Melchard'--and all the damned things that always happen.
Will that be good for your health--with the whole game in your hands,
too?"
Melchard was hit, and Dick thought that he saw his face lose colour.
"Well?" he said nervously.
"Either fetch medical aid," replied Ockley, "or bury him under the
ash-heap. And that's going a bit far for an accident."
"Was he pushed? I wonder," said Melchard; and the pair, with heads
together, spoke in whispers inaudible to Dick, who writhed himself six
inches back from the baluster, in fear of the upward glance which might
come at any moment.
He had heard enough, and his usual policy came into play.
Amaryllis was able to watch him without exposing herself to the eyes of
the enemy; for they had gathered round the injured tray-bearer so near
to her side of the hall that the floor of the gallery shut off their
view of anything below the top of the arch round whose side she peered,
crouching low.
Dick, then, she saw moving snake-wise to the stair; and she marvelled
that, even in the hush of the voices below, no slightest sound of his
movement reached her ear. Chin first, his head disappeared over the
first step, the long body dragging after it, half-inch by half-inch,
until all of him that she could see was the thick soles of his boots,
clinging, as it appeared, by their toes to the edge of the highest step.
Her heart shook for his danger, which now so closely embraced her own
that she forgot its separate significance.
The voices rose again.
"But you're a qualified man yourself," said Melchard. "You'll be
responsible."
"Fat lot of good that'll do you," replied Black Beard. "Qualified, by
God! When I can't prove it without proving also that I'm off the
register, and that my name's not Ockley!" He broke off with an ugly
laugh, then added: "Let's go up and see."
And now Amaryllis saw her serpent shoot up to a great rod of vengeance.
Before she could ask herself, "What is he going to do?" Dick Bellamy had
done it; vaulting, even as he rose, over the rail of the stair, and,
with an appalling scream which might have come from a maniac in frenzy,
or the mortal agony of a wounded beast, literally falling upon his
enemies.
His right foot caught Melchard between jaw and shoulder, shooting him
supine and headlong upon the polished floor until his head hit the
corner of the stone kerb about the hearth; while the left knee
simultaneously struck the cockney, who fell, with Dick's crouching
weight full upon him, heavily to the ground; and Amaryllis, fear
forgotten, leaning over the rail, heard at the same moment, but as
separate sounds, the blow of the under man's head upon the boards and
that of Dick's right fist on its left jaw.
Then Dick was on his feet again, but barely in time. For in the clamour
and rushing fall of this wild figure, clad in grey flannel trousers and
blue shirt, with lank black hair flying stiffly up and away from the
savage mouth and blazing blue eyes, Ockley had leapt back out of reach.
But the little Spaniard, standing apart, was astonished; his dark eyes
showed wide rings of white eyeball, and the open mouth teeth even
whiter, as he stared, aghast yet curious, at the living thunderbolt
which had fallen so near to him.
Ockley, however, directly his eyes had taken in what he had leapt back
from, had begun what even Amaryllis could see was the rush of an expert.
He did not, indeed, catch Dick upon his knees, as she had feared, but
left him little time to steady himself. She could see that the big man
was brave, and as strong as a bull, so that hers looked slender by
comparison.
But Dick was less unprepared than he seemed. Arms hanging and face
vacuous, he side-stepped smartly to the left, escaping a swinging right
aimed at his head, and, as the great body passed, drove a short, heavy
left punch under the still raised right arm, which shook Ockley severely
and, increasing the impetus of his attack, sent him staggering against
the balustrade of the stair.
And now the Spaniard found what he had been looking for.
"Por Dios!" he wailed, "it iss Limping Deek!" and so fled.
Dick followed up his advantage, forcing the pace, but Ockley would have
none of it until he had worked himself into the middle of the floor;
then suddenly coming again, got home with a tremendous right which Dick
failed to stop with anything better than his left cheek-bone.
The blow was well timed and delivered with the full force of a strong
man fighting scientifically, perhaps for his life; and Dick Bellamy knew
that, hard as he kept himself, he could not afford to take another of
its kind.
Crouching, he watched Black Beard between his fists which protected his
face, the perpendicular fore-arms guarding his body; and in the moment
while his sight was clearing, he heard, from somewhere above him, a
little agonized moan, and found himself again.
Ockley, elated, pursued his advantage with a savage left drive which
might have proved worse for Dick than the right which had just split his
cheek, had he not, ducking to his right in perfect time, met the big man
with a heavy left jolt in the mouth, and, simultaneously advancing his
right foot and straightening his body, followed it up with a right to
the jaw that knocked his opponent full length. He fell and lay beyond
the projection of the hearth on the other side of which was Melchard,
still as death.