Ambrotox and Limping Dick | Page 3

Carpenteer's when he's pleased with life in the movies; hair black as a Crow Injun's; eyes blue as a hummin' bird's weskit; and a grip--wa-al, he don't wear no velvet gloves: Limpin' Dick Bellamy!'
"'That's him,' said the queer man. I agreed that the portrait was unmistakable, and asked if either of them could tell me where he was now, as I hadn't seen him for a long time. So the queer man told me that two years before Dick, who was then overseer of a large rubber plantation north of Banjermassin in Borneo, had given him a job. He added, however, that my brother had left Borneo some six months later. The American had first met him four years before in Bombay, and they had joined forces in a pearl-fishing expedition which took them somewhere in the Persian Gulf--the Bahr-el--Bahr-el-Benat Islands, I think; they had separated four months later and had not met again for more than three years, when the American had run across him as part owner of a cattle ranch in Southern Paraguay."
Amaryllis was interested in spite of herself; but her father had heard these things before, and was thinking of others.
"Jack-of-all-trades," he said, turning towards the house.
"And master of most," called Bellamy after him.
"What a good brother you are!" said Amaryllis softly.
"He's all the family I've got, Amaryllis," he said. "Besides, I'm almost old enough to be his father, and I often feel as if I were."
"From what you've told me, he must be thirty at least," objected the girl, "and I'm sure you're not fifty."
"Over," said Bellamy.
"You don't look it," she answered.
"Thank you."
"What for?"
"You make it easier."
"What easier?"
"What I'm going to say to you."
Amaryllis looked up, surprised.
"Before I met you, Miss Caldegard, I had got thoroughly into the way of thinking of myself not as an elderly man, but as a confirmed bachelor. For more than a month I have been enjoying your company and admiring your goodness and beauty more and more every day, without perceiving, until some few days ago, that I did so at great risk to myself. If I were twenty years younger I should put off speaking like this, in the hope of gaining ground by a longer association with you. But to-day I have made up my mind that my best chance of winning at least your affection lies in telling you simply and at once how completely you have conquered mine."
That this must come sometime, Amaryllis no doubt had foreseen; yet at this moment she felt as much surprised and embarrassed as if she had never read the signs.
If a woman, mother or sister, could have asked her yesterday whether she were willing to marry Randal Bellamy, she might, perhaps, have answered that she liked him awfully, that she valued his love, and felt very sure of being happier as his wife than as an old maid; but now, with the famous lawyer's kind and handsome face before her, and that pleading note mixing unexpectedly with the splendid tones of his voice, her delicacy rebelled against taking so much more than she could give.
Twice she tried to speak; but, instead of words to her tongue, there came a tiresome lump in her throat and a horrid swimminess over her eyes which she was determined should not culminate in tears.
"What a dear you are, Sir Randal!" she said huskily. "But--but--oh! I do like you most awfully, but--I can't say what I mean."
The new beauty in the face which he had from the first thought so lovely, the new brightness of tears in the dark-brown eyes, and the womanly tenderness which he had never before found in her voice, made his heart quicken as never since he was thirty. That extra beat, if it told him that he was still young, warned him also of the pain which is the tribute imposed on conquered youth.
But before he found words, Caldegard appeared on the terrace, shouting that it was five minutes past one, and lunch waiting.
The pair walked side by side to the house.
"Don't answer me to-day, Amaryllis," he said, "but just turn me and it over in your mind now and then between this and Friday."
CHAPTER III.
"HUMMIN' BIRD'S WESKIT."
At a quarter past two that afternoon, Amaryllis, with her bull-dog, set out for a walk.
Her father was in the laboratory, ostensibly at work, and Sir Randal, beaming expectant, had driven off to St. Albans.
Tea-time, or even dinner was early enough, thought Amaryllis, to meet the new-comer; and then, in spite of the mixture of bewilderment, pride and regret which oppressed her, she remembered the words of the American in the Cape Town bar: "Eyes blue as a hummin' bird's weskit."
"How absurd!" she exclaimed, laughing to herself.
Then she sighed, and was quite sure she really wanted to be alone, and set herself,