Part 10

Mr. Carey smiled a little. “Oh, yes,” he said, quietly. “But I had deserved it.”

“I wonder you wanted us to be more lenient, then.”

“One cannot be revenged on a child,” he answered, “and they are children of the sun; they have hotter passions than ours, and quicker oblivion. It would have been better to have given them a little money and shipped them back to Naples. But you outnumbered me. The old man is inoffensive, I think. After all, a penny was not much for a yokel to pay to be blessed by the promise of a coach-and-six.”

But his fellow-magistrates did not see the matter in this light, and thought the old stroller well out of mischief in the jail of Dartmouth. Philip Carey two days before would have thought so with them, for he had the reputation of being severe on the bench; but the sunny, dusky, ardent face of Gemma had touched him, and the love of the three for each other seemed enviable to him. He had been all alone since his early boyhood, and such affection as theirs seemed to him a beautiful and priceless treasure. It was cruel, he thought, to tear it asunder, as cruel as to pluck all to pieces a red rose just flowered to the light.

He rode home that evening in the twilight, somewhat saddened, and doubtful whether the law was as just and unerring a thing as he had always until then believed it.

The night saw poor old Nonno put in prison as if he were a thief, and saw the children severed and taken respectively to the boys’ and the girls’ asylum in a reformatory for naughty children, which some good people with the best intentions had built and endowed in the neighborhood. They had so clung together, and so madly resisted being parted, that they had fairly frightened the men and women in charge of them. They had never been away from each other an hour in their lives ever since little Bindo had been born one summer day in the cabin by the Mediterranean and laid in the half of a great gourd as a cradle for his sister’s wondering eyes to admire. But severed now they were, and whilst poor Bindo in the boys’ ward was subjected to such a scrubbing as he had never had in all his days, and his abundant auburn curls were cut short, Gemma—whose paroxysms of passion had given place to a stolid and strange quietude—was also bathed, and clothed in the clothes of the reformatory, whilst her many-colored sash, her picturesque petticoats, and her coral ear-rings and necklace were all taken away, fumigated, rolled up in a bundle, and ticketed with a number. She submitted, but her great eyes glared and glowed strangely, and she was perfectly mute. Not a single sound could those set in command over her force from her lips.

The superiors were used to stubborn children, savage children, timid children, vicious children; but this silence of hers, following on her delirium of fury and grief, was new and startling to them.

She looked very odd, clad perforce in some straightly-cut stiff gray clothes, and when she was set down, one of a long row, to have supper off oatmeal porridge, the handsome, pale, desperate little face of hers, with burning eyes and an arched red mouth, looked amidst the faces of the other little girls like a carnation among cabbage-stalks. Not a morsel would she eat; not a word would she speak; at no one would she even look.

“Oh, Nonno! oh, Bindo!” her heart kept crying, till it seemed as if it would burst, but never a sound escaped her.

Poor little Bindo, meanwhile, was sobbing every minute, but he ate his porridge, though he watered it with floods of tears, where he was set among a score of gray-clad, crop-headed English boys, who were gaping and grinning at him.

With the close of evening Bindo was stowed away in the boys’ dormitory, and Gemma was led to one of a number of narrow little iron beds with blue counterpanes. She was undressed and bidden to lie down, which she did. Her bed was the last of the row, and next to the wall: she turned her face to the wall and they thought her resigned. Soon the light was put out, and the little sleepers were in the land of dreams.

But Gemma never closed her eyes. Her heart seemed to be beating all over her body. She stuffed the sheet into her mouth, and bit it hard to keep in the cries of agony that sprang to her lips. Would she ever see Nonno again? Bindo she might, perhaps, but Nonno,—she was sure he would die in prison.

There was a window in the wall near the bed; it was unshuttered. She could see the gray of the evening change to the dark of the night, and then the moon came out,—the harvest-moon, as they called it here. She was only waiting for every one to be asleep to get up and look out of that window and see whether it would let her escape. An under-matron slept in the dormitory, but at the farther end, where everything was quite hushed, and when the slow breathing of the children told that they were all sleeping soundly, Gemma got up in her bed and sat erect. Finding all was still, she put one foot out of bed, and then another, and very softly stole to the window. It was a lattice window, and left a little open, for the night was warm. A sweet smell of moist fields, of growing grass, of honeysuckle hedges, came up on the night air. Gemma noiselessly opened the window a little farther and looked out: it was far, far down to the ground below: still, she thought it was possible for her to escape. She stole back to the bedside, put on the hideous, ungainly cotton clothes as well as she could in the dark, and knotted the skirt of the frock tight round her limbs so as to leave them untrammelled. If no one awoke, she could get away, she reflected; for her quick eyes had seen a rain-pipe that passed from the casement to the ground.

She paused a few moments, making sure, quite sure, that every one in the long dormitory was asleep. As she stood she saw some hundred matches lying by a lamp, of which the light was put out, on a little table near. A cruel joy danced into her eyes: she stretched out her hand and took the matches and slipped them in the bosom of her frock. Then, with the courage of desperation, she climbed to the window-seat, put half her body out of it, and, clinging to the iron pipe with both hands, let herself slide down, down, down, to where she knew not. All was dark beneath her.

But if she slid into the sea that would be better, she said to herself, than to live on imprisoned.

As it happened, the window was twenty feet and more from the earth, but the turf was beneath, and the rain-pipe was so made that she could easily clasp it with feet and hands and glide down it, only grazing all the skin off her palms, and bruising her knees and her chest. No one heard her, there was no alarm given; she reached the ground in safety as a village clock tolled ten.

She dropped all in a heap, and lay still, half stunned, for some moments; soon she got her breath and her wits again, and rose up on her feet and looked about her. She knew all the country-side well, having been here ever since the apple-orchards had been in blossom, and, when they had not been performing, having scampered hither and thither with Bindo, begging honey or eggs at the cottages, or coaxing the boatmen to let them drift down the river.

The moon was now very bright, and she saw that she stood near the Dart water, and she could discover here a steeple, there a gable, yonder a windmill, and so forth, by which she could tell where she was. She had been brought in a covered van to the reformatory, and had only known that it was near Dartmouth.

The grass on which she stood grew under a low wall, and beyond the wall was a towing-path, and beyond that the river. The towing-path she knew well; she and Bindo had often ridden on the backs of the towing-horses or got a seat in the big barges by just singing their little songs and twanging their tambourines.

The towing-path served her purpose well. She looked back at the big pile behind her, a white, square, grim-looking place; Bindo was sleeping under its roof; then she hardened her heart, vaulted over the river-wall, and began to run down the river-path.

She did not hesitate, for she had a very wicked resolve in her soul, and her goal was four miles away, she knew, as a water-mill on the other bank among willows was an old friend of hers, and told her her whereabouts. Not a sound came from the house behind her; not a creature had awakened, or the alarm-bell would have been clanging and lights appearing at every window. She was quite safe thus far, and she began to run along the dewy grassy path where the glowworms were twinkling at every step under the ferns and the dock leaves.

“The wicked, wicked man!” she kept saying in her teeth.

She never saw the pretty glowworms she was so fond of at other times, or heard the nightingales singing in the woods, for when a sin is in the soul it makes the eyes blind and the ears deaf. She only ran on, stumbling often and feeling for the matches in the bosom of her ugly gray cotton frock. The frock was irksome to her: she longed for her own short skirts and pliable bodice, and she missed the scarf about her loins, and the necklace at her throat. But she ran on and on, having a set purpose and a great crime in her mind.

She knew that if she only followed the towing-path long enough she would come to the place called Carey’s Honor.

She knew it well: she had often looked over its white gates and envied the calves and the lambs in its pastures, and wondered what the rooms were like within beyond the rose-hung windows, and sighed for the nectarines and the cherries that grew in its green old garden-ways. It might be farther or nearer than she fancied; that she could not be sure about; but she knew that if she went on long enough along the Dart water she would come to it. She did not feel at all frightened at being out all alone so late; after the excitement and despair of the day she seemed to have no feeling left except this one burning, consuming, terrible longing for vengeance, which made her feet fly over the towing-path to the peaceful Elizabethan house lying among its yews and limes and stacks and hives and byres in the moonlight.

She had been running and walking an hour and a half or more, when a bend in the water showed her the twisted chimney-stacks and the black-and-white wood-work and the honeysuckle-covered porches of the homestead, with the moon shining above it and the green uplands sloping behind. Then Gemma, whose young soul was now so full of wickedness that there was not a spot of light left in it, climbed over the white wooden gate and crept up over the wide grass-lands where the cattle were asleep and the big ox-eye daisies were shut up at rest. The air was full of the sweet smell of the dog-rose, of the honeysuckle, of the sweet brier, and away across the meadows the black-and-white timbers and the deep gables of the old house were distinct in the moon-rays.

She crossed the pastures and opened a little wicket that was never latched, and got into the gardens, where the stocks and picotees and gilly-flowers and moss roses and sweet williams and all other dear old-fashioned blossoms were filling the night with their fragrance. But Gemma had no thought for them. She crept on up to the house, and saw that in one part the thatched roof came down so low to the ground that, standing on a stone bench which was beneath, she would be able to touch it. She sprang on to the bench, drew her matches out of her bosom, struck light to them, and was about to thrust the blazing bunch into the thatch, when a huge dog bounded out of the shadow, leaped on her, and knocked her head downwards off the stone seat on to the grass: he would have torn her to pieces, only he was such a great and good creature that, seeing she was a child, he was merciful in his strength.

“Monarch, what is it, my lad?” said Philip Carey, as he came out from the open door of the porch, alarmed at the noise of the fall.

The Newfoundland left her and went to his master, and Mr. Carey saw the form of Gemma lying prone upon his gravel and the bundle of blazing matches still clutched in her clinched hand.

“Good heavens! the child came to burn my house down!” he cried, half aloud, as he stooped over her and lifted her up: she had fallen on the back of her head and was stunned into insensibility for the moment. He wrenched the burning matches out of her tightly-closed fingers and stamped the fire out of them with his heel. That was soon done, and when the dangerous things were mere harmless splinters of wood he lifted the insensible form of the child up in his arms and carried her into his house.

“She has escaped from the reformatory,” he thought, as he saw the ugly gray cotton gown and the blue apron that was tacked on to it.

He laid her gently on a couch, and called his housekeeper, a white-haired, kindly old woman, with cheeks like the apples that crowded his orchards in October.

“Monarch knocked this little girl down, and she is senseless with the fall. Will you do your best for her, Mary? She is one of the Home children,” he said to the old dame, and he did not add a word about the matches.

The housekeeper’s simple remedies soon recalled Gemma back to her senses, and she opened her great, frightened, humid eyes to the light of the lamp-lit room.

“_I zolfini, I zolfini!_” she murmured, thinking of her matches and vaguely fancying that she was in the midst of flames. All her English had gone clean away from her.

“It is that foreign child, master,” said the housekeeper,—“the one that has been roaming the country ever since Candlemas; I caught her little brother at the hen house at Easter-time, and spanked him. They were both of them sentenced, weren’t they, in town this morning, and the old grandfather too?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Carey, curtly, “she has run away, that is evident. Suppose you go and get some little room ready for her, for she will not be able to go back to-night. She is all right now, I fancy, though she is not yet fairly awake.”

“One of the attics, master? Shall she sleep with Hannah?—not as Hannah will stomach it, a little waif and stray out of prison——”

“No, no; get her a nice little room ready anywhere you like, but one that is comfortable. She is a very forlorn little maid: we must be good to her, Mary.”

“Her little brother was at the hen-house, and I spanked him——”

“She is not her brother,” said Philip Carey, impatiently. “Leave me with her a little.”

Though her master was very gentle, the housekeeper knew that he chose to be obeyed, and she trotted off up the broad oak staircase obediently.

Philip Carey remained beside Gemma; and the big black dog also sat looking at her, with his head held critically on one side, for he had not made up his mind about her.

“You came to burn my house down?” said Mr. Carey, gravely, as he looked full into her face.

She understood what he said, but she did not answer. Her mind was still confused; she remembered what she had come to do, and she began to understand that she had failed to do it and was in the power of this man whom she hated.

“I caught you in the act,” he continued, sternly, “and if my dog had not thrown you down you would probably have succeeded, for old thatch burns like tinder. Now, will you tell me why you wished to do me so great an injury?”

Gemma was still mute; her brows were drawn together, her eyes underneath them were flashing and sombre; she had raised herself on one arm on the cushions of the couch, and gazed at him in silence.

“Perhaps you do not know,” said Mr. Carey, “that the crime of arson, the crime you tried to commit, is one punished by only less severity than is shown to murder. Very often it becomes murder too, when people are burned, as they often are, in the house that is fired. For the mere attempt I can have you imprisoned for many years. Now tell me, I order you to tell me instantly, why you desired to injure me so hideously?”

Gemma followed his words and gathered their meaning, and felt forced to obey. But all the passion of hate and of pain in her surged up in broken utterances, for the foreign language was ill able to convey all the vehemence of emotion and of indignation raging in her heart.

“I came—I came—I came,” she muttered, “I came to burn your house: yes; why not? I told you in the morning I would do something worse to you. I did strike you, but you had deserved it. You had said I was immodest; and then because you were angry you had us all taken up by the police, and you put dear Nonno in prison as if he were a thief, when he is so honest that he scolds Bindo if Bindo takes an apple, and you have parted me and Bindo, and shut us in a horrible place, and they have cut our hair and washed us, and I saw I could get away to-night, and I did, and I dropped through the window; and the matches were there, and I said to myself I would burn your house down; I had heard people say that you were fond of your house, and if you say that it was wicked of me, it has been you who have been wicked first. You are a bad, vile, cruel man to shut dear Nonno into your prisons, and he nearly _ottant’ uno_ years old, and so good and so kind and so merry; and never will we see him again, and sooner than go back to that place which you put me in, I will drown myself in your river there, or make your dog tear me to pieces——”

Then the poor little soul burst into a rain of tears enough to have extinguished a million lighted lucifer matches or the very fires of a burning house had there been one.

Philip Carey allowed the tempest of grief to exhaust itself; then he said to her, in a grave and very sweet voice, yet a little sternly,—

“My poor little girl, you were ready to take a great crime on your little white soul to-night; and who knows where its evil might have stopped? Fire is not a plaything. Now, I want you to listen to what I have to say about myself. I am a magistrate, and I was on the bench to-day, it is true. But I did not approve of the sentence passed on you by men of greater age and weight in the county than I am, and I tried my best, vainly, to have it mitigated. I had nothing whatever to do with your grandfather’s arrest. What he did, harmless though it seems, was yet against the law; and the mayor of the town chose to enforce the law against him. More than this, my dear, not only would I not, had I been alone, have sentenced your grandfather in so severe a manner, but I would have aided you all to return to your own country. As it is, I mean to-morrow to use what influence I possess to endeavor to obtain a remission of your grandfather’s sentence, and I meant also to go across to Portsmouth and see the Italian consul there, to ascertain whether or not he could not help you to go back to Naples if I could succeed in getting your punishments remitted, as I hoped to do.”

He paused, and Gemma gazed at him with dilated eyes and a hot color on her cheeks. She was silent and ashamed.

“Now you have spoiled it all,” continued Mr. Carey: “how can I beg for a little incendiary to be let loose on the world? And my gardener will see those lucifer matches in the morning, and every one will know or guess then what you came to do, and why my dog Monarch sprang on you.”

The color went out of her face, and her lips quivered.

“But it was only _me_,” she said, piteously. “Nonno would not have tried to fire your house, nor Bindo. It was only me. Could you not punish me all by myself and let them out? If you will only let them out, I will go back to prison, and I will not run away again: I will bear it all my life if I must, if you will only let out Nonno and Bindo!”

“My dear,” answered Philip Carey, “I have no power: I cannot deal you out life and death, as you seem to think. You are a dangerous and fierce little tigress, of that there is no doubt; but I do not think the reformatory, good as it is, would improve you much. Suppose we make a bargain: if you will promise me to try and be good, I will promise you to try and liberate you all three, and send you all back in a good ship to your own country.”

With as much rapidity as she had sprung up on his saddle to box his ears, Gemma sprang off the couch, and, to his great amazement, threw her arms about his neck and kissed him.

“Oh, you are good!” she murmured, rapturously. “I love you, I love you, I love you as much as I hated you yesterday!”

And she was so pretty that Philip Carey could not be angry with her any more.

She slept soundly that night under the roof she had tried to burn, and in the morning had the most tempting breakfast brought to her on her little bed that she had ever imagined in all her life, and Monarch came and put his big muzzle down on the snowy counterpane, and made friends with her over honey and muffins and cream.

Mr. Carey kept his promise, and, by means of continuous efforts for some ten days, succeeded in getting the release of poor old Epifania Santo and of Bindo, and obtaining also for them a free passage by a sailing-ship then loading in Devonport and bound to go down Channel to the south coast of Italy with a cargo of iron and steel.

During this time that he was thus returning good for evil and exerting himself in her cause, Gemma remained under the care of his housekeeper, and saw him very often in each day, and had a simple, pretty, white linen frock made for her, and spent all her time in the gardens and orchards and meadows with Monarch and the other dogs of the house.

When Philip Carey at last announced to her that all was arranged for their departure by the sailing-vessel, and that she would meet her brother and grandfather at the docks, he was surprised to see a cloud sweep over her mobile face, and great tears fill her eyes once more.

“Cannot we stay? cannot we stay?” she said, with a sob. “Grandfather is so afraid of the sea, and Bindo will be so sorry to leave before the apples are ripe, and me,—I cannot bear to leave _you_!”

“Do you like me a little, then?” said Mr. Carey, astonished and touched.

“Oh, so much!” said Gemma, with a great sigh. “You have been so kind, and I have been so wicked.”

He hesitated a moment, much surprised, then answered,—

“Well, it might perhaps be arranged. Your grandfather is very old for a voyage, and there is a little cottage down beyond my orchards that he might have; but, Gemma, if I let you stay on my land, you must promise me to be very reasonable and obedient, and to learn all you are told to learn, and never to give way to your furious passions.”

“Oh, I will be so good!” she cried, in ecstasy, as she sprang up in his arms and kissed him again. “I will be so good! and when I am with you I forget that we never really see the sun, and Bindo says he is sure that your apples are better than our grapes and figs and oranges at home.”

“It is well you should think so, if you are to live all your lives amidst the apples,” said Philip Carey, with a smile.

So they stayed there; and a few years later, when Gemma had grown a most beautiful young girl, and become wise and gentle as well, though she still kept her April face that was all sunshine and storm in the same moment, Philip Carey made her his wife and Monarch’s mistress; and she is still always ready to declare that apples are the best and sweetest fruit that grows. For, you see, Love gathers them for her.

THE LITTLE EARL