I was to have a second dozen."
With blazing eyes, bristling moustache, swollen veins and bared teeth, "Grandfather" rose from his chair. Resting on one stick he struck and struck and struck at the boy with the other, passion feeding on its own passionate acts, and growing to madness—until, as the head gardener and Sergeant rushed forward to intervene, Dam fell to the ground, stunned by an unintentional blow on the head.
"Grandfather" stood trembling…. "Quite a Stukeley," observed he. "Oblige me by flinging his carcase down the stairs."
"'Angry Stookly's mad Stookly' is about right, mate, wot?" observed the Sergeant to the gardener, quoting an ancient local saying, as they carried Dam to his room after dispatching a groom for Dr. Jones of Monksmead.
"Dammy Darling," whispered a broken and tear-stained voice outside Dam's locked and keyless door the next morning, "are you dead yet?"
"Nit," was the prompt reply, "but I'm starving to death, fast."
"I am so glad," was the sobbed answer, "for I've got some flat food to push under the door."
"Shove it under," said Dam. "Good little beast!"
"I didn't know anything about the fearful fracass until tea-time," continued Lucille, "and then I went straight to Grumper and confessed, and he sent me to bed on an empty stummick and I laid upon it, the bed I mean, and howled all night, or part of it anyhow. I howled for your sake, not for the empty stummick. I thought my howls would break or at least soften his hard heart, but I don't think he heard them. I'm sure he didn't, in fact, or I should not have been allowed to howl so loud and long…. Did he blame you with anger as well as injustice?"
"With a stick," was the reply. "What about that grub?"
"I told him you were an innocent unborn babe and that Justice had had a mis-carriage, but he only grinned and said you had got C.B. and dry bread for insilence in the Orderly Room. What is 'insilence'?"
"Pulling Havlan's leg, I s'pose," opined Dam. "What about that grub? There comes a time when you are too hungry to eat and then you die. I—"
"Here it is," squealed Lucille, "don't go and die after all my trouble. I've got some thin ice-wafer biscuits, sulphur tablets, thin cheese, a slit-up apple and three sardines. They'll all come under the door—though the sardines may get a bit out of shape. I'll come after lessons and suck some brandy-balls here and breathe through the key-hole to comfort you. I could blow them through the key-hole when they are small too."
"Thanks," acknowledged Dam gratefully, "and if you could tie some up and a sausage and a tart or two and some bread-and-jam and some chicken and cake and toffee and things in a handkerchief, and climb on to the porch with Grumper's longest fishing-rod, you might be able to relieve the besieged garrison a lot. If the silly Haddock were any good he could fire sweets up with a catapult."
"I'd try that too," announced Lucille, "but I'd break the windows. I feel I shall never have the heart to throw a stone or anything again. My heart is broken," and the penitent sinner groaned in deep travail of soul.
"Have you eaten everything, Darling? How do you feel?" she suddenly asked.
"Yes. Hungrier than ever," was the reply. "I like sulphur tablets with sardines. Wonder when they'll bring that beastly dry bread?"
"If there's a sulphur tablet left I could eat one myself," said Lucille. "They are good for the inside and I have wept mine sore."
"Too late," answered Dam. "Pinch some more."
"They were the last," was the sad rejoinder. "They were for Rover's coat, I think. Perhaps they will make your coat hairy, Dam. I mean your skin."
"Whiskers to-morrow," said Dam.
After a pregnant silence the young lady announced:—
"Wish I could hug and kiss you, Darling. Don't you?… I'll write a kiss on a piece of paper and push it under the door to you. Better than spitting it through the key-hole."
"Put it on a piece of ham,—more sense," answered Dam.
The quarter-inch rasher that, later, made its difficult entry, pulled fore and pushed aft, was probably the only one in the whole history of Ham that was the medium of a kiss—located and indicated by means of a copying-ink pencil and a little saliva.
Before being sent away to school at Wellingborough Dam had a very curious illness, one which greatly puzzled Dr. Jones of Monksmead village, annoyed Miss Smellie, offended Grumper, and worried Lucille.
Sitting in solitary grandeur at his lunch one Sabbath, sipping his old Chambertin, Grumper was vexed and scandalized by a series of blood-curdling shrieks from the floor above his breakfast-room. Butterson, dispatched in haste to see "who the Devil was being killed in that noisy fashion," returned to state deferentially as how Master Damocles was in a sort of heppipletic fit, and foaming at the mouth. They had found him in the General's study where he had been reading a book, apparently; a big Natural History book.
A groom was galloping for Dr. Jones and Mrs. Pont was doin' her possible.
No. Nothing appeared to have hurt or frightened the young gentleman—but he was distinctly 'eard to shout: "It is under my foot. It is moving—moving—moving out…." before he became unconscious.
No, Sir. Absolutely nothing under the young gentleman's foot.
Dr. Jones could shed no light and General Sir Gerald Seymour Stukeley hoped to God that the boy was not going to grow up a wretched epileptic. Miss Smellie appeared to think the seizure a judgment upon an impudent and deceitful boy who stole into his elders' rooms in their absence and looked at their books.
Lucille was troubled in soul for, to her, Damocles confessed the ghastly, terrible, damning truth that he was a Coward. He said that he had hidden the fearful fact for all these years within his guilty bosom and that now it had emerged and convicted him. He lived in subconscious terror of the Snake, and in its presence—nay even in that of its counterfeit presentment—he was a gibbering, lunatic coward. Such, at least, was her dimly realized conception resultant upon the boy's bald, stammering confession.
But how could her dear Dammy be a coward—the vilest thing on earth! He who was willing to fight anyone, ride anything, go anywhere, act anyhow. Dammy the boxer, fencer, rider, swimmer. Absurd! Think of the day "the Cads" had tried to steal their boat from them when they were sailing it on the pond at Revelmead. There had been five of them, two big and three medium. Dam had closed the eye of one of them, cut the lip of another, and knocked one of the smaller three weeping into the dust.
They had soon cleared off and flung stones until Dam had started running for them and then they had fled altogether.
Think of the time when she set fire to the curtains. Why, he feared no bull, no dog, no tramp in England.
A coward! Piffle.
And yet he had screamed and kicked and cried—yes cried—as he had shouted that it was under his foot and moving out. Rum! Very rum!
On the day that Dam left Monksmead for school Lucille wept till she could weep no more. Life for the next few years was one of intermittent streaks of delirious joy and gloomy grief, vacation time when he was at Monksmead and term time when he was at school. All
