THE SERANG.
The inn stood midway in one side of the village green, which was already
surrounded with walking groups as well as stationary ranks awaiting
patiently the opening of the game. For Ecclesthorpe had a name in its
county, owning two families of hereditary professionals, as well as a
lord of the manor, who, before the war, had kept wicket in three Test
Matches, while the workman's club from Millsborough, captained this year
by Dixon Mallaby, a 'Varsity Blue, had already a quarter of a century's
repute of being hard to beat. So from far and wide those who had not
gone to Timsdale-Horton races came always on the third Saturday in June
to the "Ecclesthorpe Fixture."
As he brought his horses to a stand, Dick perceived that, while some
notice was given to the oddity of his team, scarce a glance was bestowed
on its unusual driver. The visiting eleven were the objects of interest
to the straggling crowd in front of "The George."
When he had helped Amaryllis down from her perch, he lit a fresh gasper
from the yellow packet, and methodically assisted the ostler to unhitch
the horses; but just as the leader stepped free, a smart motor, coming
from the south-west, hooted impatiently for space to reach the door of
the inn.
The ostler, leaving Dick with his detached horses, hurried bandily to
shift a farmer's gig, drawn up and abandoned in front of the porch.
Dick caught one glimpse of the car's driver, and took his wheelers by
their bridles.
"Hey, lass!" he said. "Move tha legs a bit, now, an' lead Tod into
staable."
By his tone she knew something evil was near, and obeyed with never a
look round, but disappeared with Tod into the stable-yard, Dick
following with his pair.
They found empty stalls, unbridled and haltered the horses without a
word, and, just as Dick had found the few he must say to her, there was
the ostler in the doorway.
"You be more helpin' like," he said, "'n owd Ned Blossom. I thank 'ee
kind, I do--and you, miss."
"Ah'll thank 'ee, owd hoss, to pass no word agen Ned Blossom. My friend
'e be."
Then, to the vast surprise of Bandy-legs, Dick pushed a half-crown into
his hand, and added, pleasantly as you please:
"Give nags feed an' rub down. And, when Ned comes rolling along to trot
'em home, tell 'im Sam Bunce won't forget Town Moor and Challacombe's
Leger."
Crossing the stable-yard with Amaryllis, "Don't walk like that--bit more
flat-footed, but don't clown it," said Dick. "And don't turn your face
towards the door of the inn--mind. Know why I made you lead Tod?"
The girl's face seemed shrunken, and shone white in the bluish shade of
her bonnet.
"There was a car," she stammered softly. "I didn't look. Was it----"
"Looked like Melchard driving," answered Dick. "I'd half a mind to take
you out into the lane at the back. But it's safest amongst the crowd.
And I must know whether----"
The crowd had grown dense before the open gates of the stable-yard, and
Dick's words were interrupted by the sudden outbreak of a quarrel in the
heart of it.
To a running chorus of jeers, expostulation, and fierce incentives to
retaliation, there came in sight, pushing his way through the crush, a
creature whose appearance immediately struck Dick and Amaryllis as
ominous of danger.
The man, although of middle height and erect carriage, had so vast a
spread and depth of chest, development of the deltoid muscles so
unusual, and length of arm so unnatural as to establish the effect at
once of power and deformity; to which the yellow skin, high cheek-bones,
small eyes, and the thin black moustaches, drooping long and
perpendicular from each corner of the broken-toothed mouth, added an
expression of cruelty so unmitigated that Amaryllis turned sick at the
sight, closing her eyes in dreadful disgust; while the European leather
and cloth costume of a chauffeur not only added horror to the outlandish
figure, but gave Dick Bellamy almost the certainty that here was yet
another accomplice of Alban Melchard.
As the monster drew near, making his way savagely towards the stables,
there thrust himself in the way Bob Woodfall, the good-natured champion
of the village--six feet two inches and fourteen stone of bone and
muscle, good cricket and five years' war record, dressed in country-made
flannels, ready for his place in the Ecclesthorpe team.
"Hey, man!" he cried good-naturedly. "Be no manner o' sense bargin'
thro' decent throng like a blasty tank into half battalion o' lousy
Jerrys."
Then, quite close, the Malay turned his face full on Amaryllis, and Dick
saw that its right ear had a large gold ring hanging from a hole in the
lobe--a hole that was stretched by the mere weight of the metal to three
times the size of its thickness.
But on the left side of the head was no ring to match, for the reason
that no ear was there to support it. In some unclean strife in Hong-Kong
or Zanzibar it had been torn away, leaving, to mark its place, only the
orifice in the head, staring in ghastly isolation most horrible of all.
Amaryllis saw the face again, this time in its full lopsided
monstrosity, and turned to Dick, clutching him and hiding her eyes
against his shoulder.
Hearing her gasp, a woman in the crowd cried out:
"Howd t' heathen! He flays t' lasses, and he'll curd t' milk."
"Gi' 'im a flap on jaw, Bob Woodfall," cried a youth. "One's all '_e_'ll
take."
It was. Bob, perhaps, was too kindly to put his full weight into the
blow, and got no chance for a second.
With a savage cry, between a grunt and a squeal, the Malay ran in,
clutching with his great horny sailor's hands. Too quickly for any eye
but Dick's to see how it was done, he had Bob Woodfall by the nape of
the neck and the band of his trousers and lifted the long body high
above the crowd at full-length of his terrible arms, brandishing it
helpless, like some Mongolian Hercules a Norse Antaeus; took three steps
to the stone wall of the stable-yard, and would have flung the village
hero over it to break upon the cobble-stones, but for a gloved hand laid
upon his shoulder, and a soft, high-pitched voice, saying: "_Taroh, plan
plan, Mut-mut_!"
And the monster obeyed the voice and touch of his master, restoring
Woodfall to his feet with a docility that made him, if possible, more
hateful to the crowd than before.
"_Akau baleh_," continued Melchard. "_Dan nante sana_."
And Mut-mut, the crowd yielding passage, made his way to the car, and
sat at the wheel.
Arrived at the gates of the stable-yard almost simultaneously with
Melchard, was Dixon Mallaby; and Dick observed not only that there was
acquaintance between them, but also that, while the parson endured
recognition, Melchard sought it.
"I'm ashamed of that fellow of mine," he said. "Yet I cannot help being
attached to the ruffian. He would die to serve me; but the ribaldry of
an English crowd is too much for his temperament."
"If you don't want him to die without serving you, Mr. Melchard,"
replied the parson, "I should advise you to keep him in better control."
"Ah, well! I owe him so much already, you see. The strange fellow saved
my life in the Persian Gulf. Serang--boat's swain, you know, to the
Lascar crew. Sharks in the water--horrible!"
The parson thought that even in this the serang had done the world poor
service.
Having delicately wiped his face with a ladylike handkerchief in memory
of his danger and gratitude, Melchard tried again.
"I saw you arrive with your quaint team, sir," he said; "the unicorn, I
mean, not the eleven."
But the parson allowed no outsider to poke fun at the St. Asaph's
cricket club.
"Handled his horses in fine style, your driver. Why!" exclaimed
Melchard, as if noticing Dick and Amaryllis with her head on his
shoulder for the first time, "there he is--and pleasantly occupied. I
mean the fellow with the girl in his arms, and the cut on his face. I
wonder how he got it."
Amaryllis heard the voice and the words, and, to keep her breath from
gasping and her body from trembling, she caught and ground between her
teeth a wrinkle of Dick's coat.
Melchard, she felt, had taken a step towards her.
"I don't know how he got it," the clergyman was saying. "But something
painful, I understand, happened to the other man. The girl is his
daughter, recovering from an illness."
Melchard took another step towards the couple.
"Better let well alone, Mr. Melchard," said Dixon Mallaby sternly. "Your
servant has already made trouble enough."
Throughout these few strained moments Dick had borne himself as a man
concerned only with his daughter. But at this moment Dixon Mallaby
caught a gleam from his eyes which assured him that the least
familiarity or impertinence of Melchard's would be resented in a manner
likely to divert the crowd's lingering anger from Mut-mut to his master.
Much as he disliked Melchard and his indefinitely unpleasant reputation,
he was not going to have his match spoiled by the beating and kicking to
a jelly of a scented and dandified Millsborough dentist.
So, ignoring Melchard, he went up to Sam Bunce.
"I am afraid your daughter is hardly as strong as you thought, Mr.
Bunce," he said.
Melchard, with a finicking air of nonchalance, stood where he was left,
lighting a cigarette.
"'Tis nowt but she's frit with that flay-boggart of a Chinaman," said
Dick, "wi'out it be she trembles lest 'er daddy gets fightin' agen.
There, then, little lass," he said, stooping to her ear, and coaxing
back courage, thought the parson, with a voice extraordinarily tender.
"Way out o' t' crowd her vitals'll settle back to rights and she'll foot
it another six mile singing."
"Then you won't see our match, Mr. Bunce?"
"'T' lass knows nowt o' cricket," replied Dick. "'Mornin' seemed like
she relished going to t' fun and press o't. But now she's feared o'
seein' that blasted ogre again. So, thankin' you, sir, for your lift and
your good heart to us, we'll just foot it along o'er t' moor."
Dixon Mallaby shook hands with him; the girl, as she drew away from Sam
Bunce's arm, bobbed the parson a curtsey. But she never turned her face
to him, and Mallaby, thoughtfully watching the pair down the road to the
south-west, observed that she never once looked back; for even when,
being almost indistinguishable among the moving crowd at the corner of
the green, they were hailed by the ostler, toddling quickly from the
yard, waving a handkerchief and crying: "Hey, Mr. Bunce, Mr. Sam'l
Bunce!" it was only the man who turned his head, waving his hand as if
in reply to a belated farewell.
The parson swung round in time to see Melchard snatch the handkerchief
from the ostler's hand.
Feeling the clergyman's eyes upon him, he muttered: "Looks like one of
mine," and ran the hem quickly through his fingers, prying into the
corners.
At the third, he found a mark, and dropped the handkerchief on the
stones.
"Of course not," he said, and laughed. "Stupid of me, when I hadn't been
in the stables."
Dixon Mallaby picked it up.
"Tis t'yoong wumman's," objected Bandy-legs. "Dropped un inside,
stablin' t' 'osses."
But the parson put the handkerchief in his pocket.
"I am acquainted with Miss Bunce," he said. "Perhaps I shall see them
again."
With a feeling which he found unreasonable, that he had protected a good
woman from a bad man, Mr. Dixon Mallaby went to the dressing-room in
"The Royal George."
Out of Melchard's sight, he examined the handkerchief--a lady's, marked
with the embroidered initials A.C., and it struck him, once more with a
sense of unreason, not only that the beastly dentist had discovered that
these letters did not stand for Araminta Bunce, but that he knew the
names which they were here intended to represent.