"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.