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
THE little Earl was a very little one indeed, as far as years and
stature were, but he was a very big one if you consider his possessions
and his importance. He was only a month old when his father died, and
only six months old when his mother, too, left him for the cold damp
vault, with its marbles and its rows of velvet coffins,—a vault that
was very grand, but so chilly and so desolate that when they took the
little Earl there on holy-days to lay his flowers down upon the dead he
could never sleep for nights afterwards, remembering its darkness and
solemnity.
The little Earl was called Hubert Hugh Lupus Alured Beaudesert, and was
the Earl of Avillion and Lantrissaint; but by his own friends and his
grandmother and his old nurse he was called only Bertie.
He was eight years old in the summer-time, when there befell him the
adventure I am going now to relate to you, and he was, for his age,
quite a baby; he was slender and slight, and he had a sweet little
face like a flower, with very big eyes, and a quantity of fair hair
cut after the fashion of the Reynolds and Gainsborough children. He
had always been kept as if he were a china doll that would break at a
touch. His grandmother and his uncle had been left the sole charge of
him; and as they were both invalids, and the latter a priest, and both
dwelt in great retirement at the castle of Avillion, the little Earl’s
little life had not been a boy’s life.
He had always been tranquil, for every one loved him, and he had all
things that he wished for; yet he was treated more as if he were a rare
flower or a most fragile piece of porcelain, than a little bright boy
of real flesh and blood; and, without knowing it, he was often tired
of all his cotton-wool. He was such a tiny fellow, you see, to be the
head of his race, and the last of it too; for there were no others of
this great race from which he had sprung, and his uncle, as a priest,
could never marry. Thus so much depended on this small short life that
the fuss made over him, and the care taken of him, had ended in making
him so incapable of taking any care of himself that if he had ever got
out alone in a street he would have been run over to a certainty, and
as he grew older he grew sad and feverish, and chafed because he was
never allowed to do the things that all boys by instinct love to do.
By nature the little Earl was very brave, but he was made timid by
incessant cautions; and as he was, too, by nature very thoughtful, the
seclusion from other children in which he was brought up made him too
serious for his age.
Avillion was deep-bosomed in woods, throned high above a lake and moors
and mountains, and setting its vast stone buttresses firmly down into
the greenest, smoothest turf in all the green west country of England
a grand and glorious place, famous in history, full of majesty and
magnificence, and sung to, forever, by the deep music of the Atlantic
waves. Once upon a time the Arthurian Court that Mr. Tennyson has told
you of so often had held its solemn jousts and its blameless revels
there; at least, so said the story of Avillion, as told in ballads of
the country-side,—more trustworthy historians than most people think.
All those ballads the little Earl knew by heart, and he loved them more
than anything, for Deborah, his nurse, had crooned them over his cradle
before ever he could understand even the words of them; so that Arthur
and Launcelot, and Sir Gawain and Sir Galahad, and all the knightly
lives that were once at Tintagel, were more real to him than the living
figures about him, and these fancies served him as his playmates,—for
he had few others, except his dog Ralph and his pony Royal. His
relatives were ailing, melancholy, attached to silence and solitude,
and though they would have melted gold and pearls for Bertie’s drinking
if he could have drunk them, never bethought themselves that noise
and romps and laughter and fun and a little spice of peril are all
things without which a child’s life is as dead and spiritless as a
squirrel’s in a cage. And Bertie did not know it either. He studied
under his tutor, Father Philip, a noble and learned old man, and he
was caressed and cosseted by his nurse Deborah, and he wore beautiful
little dresses, most usually of velvet, and he had wonderful toys
that were sent from Paris, automatons that danced and fenced and
played the guitar and animals that did just what live animals do and
Punches and puppets that played and mimicked by clock-work, and little
yachts that sailed by clock-work and whole armies of soldiers, and
marvellous games costly and splendid; but he had nobody to play at all
these things with, and it was dull work playing with them by himself.
Deborah played with them in the best way she knew, but she was not a
child, being sixty-six years old, and was of a slow imagination and of
rheumatic movements.
“Run and play,” Father Philip would often say to him, taking him
perforce from his books; but the little Earl would answer, sadly, “I
have nobody to play with!”
That want of his attracted no attention from all those people who
loved the ground his little feet trod on; he was surrounded with every
splendor and indulgence, he had half the toys of the Palais Royal
in his nursery, and he had a bed to sleep in of ivory inlaid with
silver, that had once belonged to the little King of Rome; millions
of money were being stored up for him, and lands wide enough to make
a principality called him lord: it never occurred to anybody that the
little Earl of Avillion was not the most fortunate child that lived
under the sun.
“Why do people all call me ‘my lord’?” he asked one day, suddenly
becoming observant of this fact.
“Because you are my lord,” said Deborah,—which did not content him.
He asked Father Philip.
“My dear little boy, it is your title: think not of it save as an
obligation to bear your rank well and without stain.”
At last the little Earl grew so pale and thin and so delicate in
health that the physician who was always watching over him said to
his grandmother that the boy wanted change of air, and advised the
southern coast for him, and cessation of almost all study; which order
grieved Father Philip sorely, for Bertie could read his Livy well, and
was beginning to spell through his Xenophon, and it cut the learned
gentleman to the heart that his pupil should give up all this and go
back on the royal road to learning. For both he and his uncle were
resolved that the little Earl should be very learned, and the boy was
eager enough to learn, only he liked still better knowing how the
flowers grew, and why the birds could fly while he could not, and how
the wood-bee made his neat house in the tree-trunk, and the beaver
built his dam across the river,—inquiries which everybody about him was
inclined to discourage. Natural science was not looked on with favor
in the nursery and school-room of Avillion. It was considered to lead
people astray.
So the little Earl was moved southward, with his grandmother, and his
nurse, and his physician, and Ralph and Royal,—for he would not go
without them,—and several servants as well. They were to go to Shanklin
in the Isle of Wight, and they made the journey by sea in the beautiful
sailing-yacht which was waiting for Bertie’s manhood, after having been
the idol of his father’s. On board, the little Earl was well amused;
but he worried every one about him by questions as to the fishes.
“Lord, child! they are but nasty clammy things, only nice when they are
cooked,” said his nurse; and his grandmamma said to him, “Dear, they
were made to live in the sea, just as the birds are made to fly in the
air.” And this did not satisfy the little man at all; but he could get
no more information, for the doctor, who could have told him a good
deal, was under the thumb of his stately mistress, and Lady Avillion
had said very sternly that the boy was not to be encouraged in his
nonsense: what he must be taught were the duties of his position and
all he owed to the country,—the poor little Earl!
He was a very small, slender, pale-cheeked lord indeed, with his golden
hair hanging over his puzzled forehead, that used to ache sometimes
with carrying Xenophon and Livy, and underneath the hair two great
wondering blue eyes, of a blue so dark that they were like wet violets.
His hands were tiny and thin, and his legs, clad in their red-silk
stockings and black-velvet breeches, were like two sticks: people who
saw him go by whispered about him and said all the poor little fellow’s
rank and riches would not keep him long in the land of the living.
Once the little Earl heard that said, and understood what it meant,
and thought to himself, “I shouldn’t mind dying if I could take Ralph:
perhaps there would be somebody to play with there.”