Part 13 (1/2)

”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.

b.u.t.terson, dispatched in haste to see ”who the Devil was being killed in that noisy fas.h.i.+on,” 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 G.o.d 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, d.a.m.ning 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 the rest of the world weighed as a grain of dust against her hero, Dam.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SNAKE'S ”MYRMIDON”.

For a couple of years and more, in the lower School at Wellingborough, Damocles de Warrenne, like certain States, was happy in that he had no history. In games rather above the average, and in lessons rather below it, he was very popular among his fellow ”squeakers” for his good temper, modesty, generous disposition, and prowess at football and cricket.