saddle, and, whilst the horse was rearing and plunging, had caught
up their bag and baggage, had pushed and pulled her brother and her
grandfather before her, and had flown down the lane and out of sight
before Philip Carey had reduced his steed to any semblance of reason.
His ears tingled and his pride was bitterly incensed, yet he could not
help laughing at himself.
“The little tigress!” he thought, as he endeavored to soothe his
fretting and wheeling beast, which was young and only half broken.
When he rode in at last by an open gate among his reapers the men were
all too afraid of him not to wear very grave faces, as though they had
seen nothing. Every one was afraid of Philip Carey except his dogs,
which shows that he had a good heart under a stern manner, for dogs
never make mistakes as men do.
He remained about his fields all the day, and went home to a solitary
dinner. He had no living relative. He was rather more of a scholar
than a farmer, and liked his loneliness. His old house, which was
called Carey’s Honor ever since the days of the Tudors, was a rambling
comfortable building, set amidst green lawn, huge hew- and oak-trees,
and meadows that stretched downward to the broad Dart water. It was
all within and without as it had been in the days of the Armada,
and the ivy that covered it was as old as the brass dogs in the big
chimney-places. Many men with such a possession would have been
restless to reach a higher rank, but Philip Carey was a grave young
man, of refined and severe taste and simple habits. He loved his home,
and was content with it, and wanted nothing of the world.
This evening he did not feel so contented as usual: his ears seemed
still to tingle from those blows at the hand of a child. He liked old
Greek and Latin authors, and when the day was done liked to sit and
read of a summer evening under the biggest yew upon his lawn, with the
lowing of the cattle, the song of the nightingale, and the cries of the
water-birds the only sounds upon the quiet air. But this evening his
favorite philosophers said nothing to him: had Plato or any one of them
ever had his ears boxed by a little fury of a strolling dancer?
The little fury, meanwhile, was dancing the _saltarello_ with her
brother before a crazy old wooden inn in Dartmouth,—dancing it as the
girls do under the cork-trees in Sardinia, and under the spreading oaks
of the Marches, and so pleasing the yokels of the river town with her
grace and fire and animation that the pence rolled in by scores into
her tambourine, and the mistress of the poor little inn said to her,
“Nay, my pretty, as you have gained them here you must spend them here,
and it is market-day to-morrow.”
Gemma was quite happy to have gained so much, and she got a modest
little supper for Nonno, and as she shook down all her dark gold hair
in the moonlight and looked on the water rippling away past the walls
of the old castle she laughed out, though she was all alone, thinking
of the grave gentleman on the gray horse, and murmured naughtily to
herself, “I hope I did hurt him! Oh, I hope I hurt him!”
Then she knew she ought not to hope that, and kissed the Madonnina
that hung at her throat, and asked the Holy Mother’s pardon, and then
laid herself down on the little hard bed and went as sound asleep as a
flittermouse in winter-time.
The next day was market-day in the little sleepy Old-World town upon
the Dart, where the ships and the boats go by on the gray sea and the
brown river-water. There would be watermen and countrymen, both, in
numbers, farmers and fisherfolk, millers and cider-merchants, peddlers
and hucksters, and egg-wives and wagoners, and Nonno was early awakened
by the children, who were eager to begin getting more pence with the
sunrise: the pence when they _were_ made had such a terrible knack
of flying away again. Gemma believed that they grew wings like the
butterflies, though she never could see them, and though she and Nonno
kept such close watch and ward over them.
They made themselves as spruce as they could for the day. Gemma had
washed her white bodice and Bindo’s white shirt, and, though the
scarlet and the blue and the yellow had got stained and weather-worn,
the clothes yet were picturesque, and with their curling hair, and
their beautiful big black eyes, and their cheeks as warm and as soft as
peaches, she and Bindo were a pretty sight as they bent and swayed and
circled and moved, now so slowly, now so furiously, in the changes of
the _saltarello_, whilst their grandfather played for them on a little
wooden flute, and Gemma beat her tambourine high above her auburn head,
and, as the music waxed faster and the dance wilder, sprang and whirled
and leaped and bounded for all the world, the people said, like the
jack-o’-lantern that flashes over the bogs of Dartmoor.
They danced, with pauses for rest between their dances, all the day
long; and when they were so very tired that they could dance no more,
Nonno began his simple tricks with his thimble and peas, his wooden
cups, and his little tray full of cards. They were innocent tricks, and
when he told fortunes by the cards (which Gemma expounded to whosoever
would pay a penny to hear the future) he dealt out fate so handsomely
that such a destiny was very cheap indeed at four farthings.
The country-folks were pleased and content to have a gilt coach and
horses and all manner of good luck promised them over the cards,
and the youths liked to look at pretty Gemma, who was so unlike the
maidens they picked apples with, or sold pilchards to, in their green
Devon; and so the day wore merrily on apace, and the afternoon sun was
slanting towards its setting over the Cornish shores and Cornish seas
far away to the westward, when all in a moment there was a shout of
“Police! Police!” and the good-humored crowd hustled together and made
way, and two constables with wooden truncheons, saying never a word,
marched up to the poor little tray-table, swept off it cards and coins
and conjuring toys, and arrested poor old trembling Nonno in the sacred
name of the Law!
Nonno began to scream a million words to a minute, but, alas! they
were all Italian words, nobody understood one of them. Bindo sobbed,
and Gemma, standing a moment transfixed with horror, flew upon the
constable who had taken her poor old grandfather and bit his arm
till the blood spurted. Mad with pain, the constable seized her, not
gently, and clutched Bindo by the collar with his other hand. There
was no possibility of resistance; Gemma fought, indeed, like a little
polecat, but the men were too strong for her; they soon took her away
through the crowd on the same road that Nonno was taking peaceably, and
when the crowd muttered a little at its play being thus spoiled, the
constables only said, gruffly, “Get you out of the way, or ye’ll be
clapped in jail too, maybe; thimble-rigging, card-sharping, posturing,
gambling, swindling,—why, this old dodger will have a month of
treadmill if he have a day!”
And the crowd said among itself that to be sure the old fellow was a
foreigner, it would not do to get into trouble about him, and most
likely he only made believe to know the future; so left him to himself,
and went to the alehouses and consoled themselves for his misfortunes
in draughts of cider.
The two constables, meanwhile, consigned the old man and his
grandchildren to the lock-up: Nonno kept sighing and sobbing, and
asking innumerable questions in his own tongue, and Bindo shrieked at
the top of his voice as he was dragged along; Gemma alone, now that she
was vanquished, was mute. Her lips were shut and silent, but her eyes
spoke, darting out flames of fire as if Vesuvius itself were burning
behind them. For four whole years they had been wandering about the
southwest part of England, and had done no less and no more than they
had done to-day, and never had they been told that it was wrong.
How could it be wrong to make a pea jump away from under a wooden cup,
and promise a ploughman or a wagoner a coach and horses if it pleased
him? For if Nonno did cheat a little, ever so little, poor old man, the
children did not know it, and whatever Nonno did was always to them
alike virtue and wisdom.
The constables were very angry with them; Gemma had bitten one of them
as if she were a little wild-cat, and the old man seemed to them a
sorry old rascal, living by his wits and his tricks and promising the
yokels coaches-and-six to turn a penny. Foreigners are not favored
by the rural police in England; and whether they have plaster casts,
dancing bears, singing children, performing mice or monkeys, or only
a few conjuring toys, like poor old Epifania Santo, it is all one to
the rural police: down they go as members of the dangerous classes. If
the market-folks wanted diversion, there were good, honest Punch and
Judy generally to be seen on fair-days; and once or twice a year, at
the great cider or horse fairs, there came always a show, with dwarfs,
and giants, and a calf with two heads: what more could any country
population need in the way of entertainment?
Into the lock-up, accordingly, they put poor Nonno and his
grandchildren, and shut and locked the door upon them.
It was now evening-time: there was clean straw in the place, and a mug
of water and some bread. Nonno and Bindo abandoned themselves to the
uttermost hopelessness of despair, and laid themselves face downward
on the straw, sobbing their very hearts out. Gemma was dry-eyed, her
forehead was crimson, her teeth were set; she was consumed with rage,
that burnt up alike her terror and her pain. Oh, why did not a handful
of Neapolitan sailors sail over the water, and land, and kill all
these English? It was four years since she had seen Naples, but she
remembered,—oh, how she remembered! And they had come all the way out
of their own sunshine only to be locked up in a trap like rats! Furious
thoughts of setting fire to this prison-house beset her; she had
matches in her pocket, but it would be hard to set it on fire without
consuming themselves with it, since the doors were fast locked. What
could she do? what could she do?
“Why do they take us? We have done no harm,” she said, through her shut
teeth.
“_Carina mia_,” sighed her grandfather, shivering where he lay on the
straw, “I am afraid before the law we are no better than the owls and
the wood-rats are; we are only vagabonds; we have no dwelling and we
have no trade.”
“We pay for our lodging, and we pay for our bread!”
“Perhaps they do not believe that. Always have I been so afraid this
would happen, and now it has come at last.”
The poor old man sank back on the straw again, and began to sob
piteously. Why had he left the merry crowds of the Strada del Male,
where there was always a laugh and a song, and a slice of melon or of
_pasta_?
At last both he and Bindo sobbed themselves into sleep, but no sleep
came to Gemma; she was wide awake, panting, hot, all alive with fury,
all the night.
With morning they were all taken before the magistrates, who were
sitting that day. There were a great many gentlemen and officials,
but among them all Gemma only saw one, the horseman whose ears she
had boxed in the lane. For Philip Carey was on the bench that day,
and recognized, with not much pleasure, the little group of Italian
strollers. They all three looked miserable, jaded, and very dusty.
The night passed in the lock-up had taken all their look of sunshiny
merriment away; the straw had caught on their poor garments; the faces
of Nonno and the little boy were swollen and disfigured with crying;
only Gemma, all dishevelled and dusty and feverish, had a pride and
ferocity about her that gave her strength and kept her beauty.
As she was the only one who could talk any English, she was ordered
to speak for the others; but when she said her grandfather’s name was
Epifania Santo, there was a laughter in the court, which incensed her
so bitterly that she flung back her curls out of her eyes and said,
“If you do not believe what I say, why do you want me to speak?”
Then being once started she went on before any of the magistrates or
officials could stop her: “You have taken us up; why have you taken
us up? we have done nobody any sort of harm. We only dance, and Nonno
tells fortunes, and does the tricks, and you have taken his box
away, and do you call that honest to a poor man? We do not rob, we
do not kill, we do not hurt; when Bindo takes an apple I am angry.”
And then her English, which was apt to go away from her in moments
of excitement, failed her utterly, and she poured out a torrent of
Neapolitan patois which not a soul there present understood, only from
her flashing eyes and her expressive gestures it was easy to guess that
it meant vehement invective and reproach.
Mr. Carey looked at her attentively, but he said nothing; his brother
magistrates, when she had been peremptorily ordered to be still and
listen, put a few sharp questions to her and examined the witnesses,
who were policemen and country-people, and who all deposed to the fact
that the old Italian did tricks and told fortunes and got them to put
their pence down by fair promises, and had moreover dice and cards
whereby he induced them to lose money. The children only danced; they
had no habitation; they were always wandering about; by their papers
they were natives of Naples. Then the constable whose arm Gemma had
bitten appeared with it in a sling, and stated what she had done to
him, and this terrible piece of violence prejudiced the whole court
greatly against her.
Mr. Carey smiled once; he took no share in the examination. But Gemma
was always looking at him; she was always thinking, “This is all his
doing because I struck him: he has had us all put in prison because I
offended him.”
She hated him,—oh, how she hated him! If she had not been so watched
and warded by the constables, she would have leaped across the court
and done the same thing again. For she did not mind anything for
herself; but if they put Nonno and Bindo back in prison, and parted
them from her,—she knew people were parted in prison and boys and girls
were never together there, nor ever the old left with the young. And
she knew too that in England there were prisons called workhouses,
where they packed away all the people who were poor. Her heart stood
still with fright, and all she saw in the dusky court was the grave
face of Philip Carey, which seemed to her like the stony face of Fate.
“Ah, _bimba mia_,” sobbed her grandfather in a whisper, “yonder is the
gentleman you struck as he rode on his horse. You have been our undoing
with your fiery temper: always was I afraid that you would be!”
Under that reproof Gemma’s head drooped and all the color fled out of
her cheeks. She knew that it was a just one.
Bindo, meanwhile, was clinging to her skirts and whimpering like a poor
little beaten puppy, till she thought her very brain would go mad,
whirling round and round in such misery.
The magistrates spoke together, Mr. Carey alone saying little: there
was a strong feeling against all strollers at that time in the county,
on account of many robberies that had been committed on outlying farms
by tramps and gypsies in the last few years, and many raids that had
been made on poultry-houses, apple-lofts, and sheep-folds. Epifania
Santo and his grandchildren only seemed to the bench idle, useless, and
not harmless vagrants, no better than the wood-rats, as old Nonno had
said; whilst the fierce onslaught on the constable of which Gemma had
been guilty gave their misdeeds a darker color in the eyes of the Devon
gentlemen.
After some consultation and some disagreement among the magistrates,
the old man, having no visible means of subsistence, was condemned to a
month’s imprisonment for unlawfully gambling and deceiving the public,
whilst Bindo and Gemma were respectively ordered to be consigned to
reformatories. In consideration of Epifania Santo’s age, and of his
being a foreigner, he was spared hard labor. When Gemma comprehended
the sentence, and the old man had been made to understand it also, such
a scene of grief and of despair ensued as no English court had ever
beheld. To the slow and stolid folk of the banks of Dart it seemed
as if madness had descended straight upon these strangers. Their
passionate paroxysms of woe had no limit, and no likeness to anything
ever seen in Devon before.
Gemma had to be torn by main force from her brother and grandfather,
and, writhing in the hands of the constables as an otter writhes on a
spear, she shook her little clinched fists at the bench, and, seeing
there only the face of Philip Carey, who to her belief was sole author
of all her sorrows and ills, she cried to him, “I struck you yesterday,
I will hurt you more before many days are over. You are a wicked,
wicked, wicked man!”
Then the policeman seized her more roughly, and put his hand over her
mouth, and carried her away by sheer force.
“Did that little jade really strike you a blow, Carey?” asked one of
his fellow-magistrates, in surprise.
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.
[Illustration: SHE ONLY RAN ON, STUMBLING OFTEN, AND FEELING FOR THE
MATCHES IN THE BOSOM OF HER UGLY GRAY COTTON FROCK]