IN THE APPLE-COUNTRY
It was in one of the green lanes of South Devonshire that Gemma, being quite tired out, threw herself down on the daisied grass and said to her grandfather,—
“Nonno, let us rest a little and eat.” Her grandfather said to her,—
“Carina mia, I would eat gladly, but we have nothing to eat. The satchel is empty.”
“LET US REST A LITTLE AND EAT”
Gemma, lying chest downward on the turf, sighed, and buried her hands in her abundant curls and cooled her forehead on the damp grass. She was just thirteen years old, and she was so pretty that she made the heart of the old grandfather ache often when he looked at her and thought that she would most likely soon be left alone in the world, for her little brother Bindo could not be said to count for anything, being only ten years old. Gemma was very lovely indeed, being tall and lithe and gay, and full of grace, and having a beautiful changeable face, all light and color. But she was only thirteen, and all she could do to get her livelihood was to dance the saltarello and the tarantella. She and her brother danced, which they did very prettily, and the old man whom they called Nonno told fortunes and performed some simple conjuring tricks, and these were all bad trades as times went, for nowadays nobody amuses himself with simple things, and the rural folk have grown as sharp and as serious as the city people, which to my thinking is a very great loss to the world, for merry people are generally kind people, and contented people are easily governed, and have no appetites for politics and philosophies and the like indigestible things.
Nonno and Gemma and Bindo were merry enough even on empty stomachs. The old man was as simple as a duck, and as gentle as a rabbit, and was rather more of a child than either of the children. Bindo was a little, round, playful, gleeful thing, like a little field-mouse, and Gemma was as gay as a lark, though she had to bear the burden of the only brains that there were in the family.
They were little Neapolitans; they had been born in a little cabin on the sunny shore facing Ischia, and in their infancy had tumbled about naked and glad as young dolphins in the bright blue waters. Then their parents had died,—their father at sea, their mother of fever,—and left them to the care of Nonno; Nonno, who was very old, so old that they thought he must have been made almost before the world itself, and who, after having been a showman of puppets to divert the poorest classes all his life, was so very poor himself then that he could hardly scrape enough together to get a little drink of thin wine and an inch or two of polenta. Being so very poor, he was seduced into accepting an engagement for himself and the children with a wicked man whose business it was in life to decoy poor little Italians and make money out of them in foreign lands. Nonno was so good and simple himself that he thought everybody was as harmless as he was, and his grief and amazement were very great when on reaching the English shores with this wicked man he found that the wicked man meant to give him the slip altogether and go off with the two children. By a mere hazard, Nonno, whose name was Epifania Santo (a droll name, but he himself had been a foundling), was able to defeat the wicked man so far that he got out of his clutches and took his grandchildren with him. But there they all three were in England, with no money at all, and nothing on earth but a few puppets, and a conjurer’s box of playthings, and the stilts on which the wicked man had had the children taught to walk. And in England they had now been four years, remaining there chiefly because they had no notion how to get home again, and partly because Nonno had such a great terror of the sea. He had suffered so much on the long voyage into which he had been entrapped from Naples, round by the Bay of Biscay up the Bristol Channel, that he would sooner have died there and then than have set foot again on board a sea-going vessel. So in England they had stayed, wandering about and picking up a few pence in villages and towns, and clinging together tenderly, and being very often hungry, cold, tired, roofless, but yet being all the while happy.
Sometimes, too, they fared well: the children’s brilliant uncommon beauty and pretty foreign accent often touched country-people’s hearts, and sometimes they would get bed and board at homely farm-houses high on lonely hills, or be made welcome without payment in little wayside inns. They had kept to the southwest part of the kingdom, never being able to afford other means of locomotion than their own feet, and the farthest distance they had ever compassed had been this far-south country-side, where the green woods and pastures roll down to the broad estuaries of Exe and Dart. This green, wet, shadowy country always seemed strange to the children; for a long while they thought it was always evening in England. They could remember the long sunshiny years at home, and the radiant air, and the blue, clear sky, and the sea that seemed always laughing. They could never forget it indeed, and when they were together they never talked of anything else: only the cactus-fruit and the green and black figs, the red tomatoes and the rough pomegranates, and the big balls of gold to be had in the orange woods just for the plucking; the boats with the pretty striped sails, and the villas with the marbles and the palms, and the islands all aglow in the sunset, and the distance you could see looking away, away, away into the immeasurable azure of the air. Oh, yes, they remembered it all, and at night they would weep for it, the old man’s slow salt tears mingling with the passionate rain of the childish eyes. Here it was green and pretty in its own way, but all so dark, so wet, so misty!
“When I try to see, there is a white wall of shadow,—I think it is shadow; perhaps it is fog, but it is always there,” said Gemma. “At home one looks, and looks, and looks; there is no end to it.”
Gemma longed sorely to go home; she had not minded the sea at all. Bindo, like Nonno, had been very ill on the voyage and cried even now whenever he saw a ship, for fear he should be going in it. Bindo was sadly babyish for ten years old; to make amends, his sister was almost a woman at thirteen.
They ought now to have been all three serious and alarmed, for Nonno’s satchel had not a penny in it, nor a crust, and they were all hungry, for it was noonday. But instead of being miserable they joked, and laughed, and kissed each other, as thousands of their country-folks at home with equally empty stomachs were doing, lying on sunny moles, or marble-strewn benches, or thymy turf under ilex shadows. But then in our dear Italy there is always the sun, the light, the air that kisses and feeds and sends to soft sleep her children, and Gemma and her brother and grandfather were in a wet English lane, with the clouds hurrying up over the distant hills by Dartmoor, and the raindrops still hanging to the great elm-boughs overhead.
Yet they were merry, and sang snatches of Neapolitan songs, and took no thought for the morrow. They were not far off Dartmouth, and they meant to go into the quaint old town by market-day, and the Dart fisher- and boating-folk were always kind to them. If they were hungry now they would eat to-morrow.
Suddenly, however, Nonno grew thoughtful as he looked at Gemma, lying face downward on the wet grass, her sandalled feet in air, a dragon-fly fluttering above her head.
“What would you do if I were to die, my piccicotta?” said the poor old man, all at once remembering he was nigh eighty years old. Gemma raised herself, and said nothing. Her eyes, which were very beautiful eyes, grew sad and moist.
“I would take care of Bindo, Nonno,” she answered, at last. “Do not be afraid of that.”
“But how? It is easy to say. But how?”
“I suppose I could dance at theatres,” said Gemma after reflection. Nonno shook his head.
“For the theatres you would need to dance differently: it is all spinning, craning, drilling there; you dance, my child, as a flower in the wind. The theatres do not care for that.”
“Then I do not know,” said Gemma. “But something I would do. Bindo should not suffer.”
“You are a good child,” said the old man, tenderly. She sank down again on the grass.
“Do not think of dying, Nonno,” she said. “It is all so dark where death is.”
“Not when one gets to the saints,” said the simple old man. He always fancied Paradise just like Amalfi,—his own Amalfi, where long ago, so long ago, he had run and leaped, a merry naked boy, in the azure waves, and caught the glittering sea-mouse and the pink column of the gemmia in his hands. Paradise would be just like Amalfi; the promise of it consoled him as he trotted on tired limbs along the wet gravel of English market-roads, or meekly bore the noisy horse-play of English village crowds.
The rain had ceased, and the sun was shining a little in a drowsy half-hearted way, as if it were but half awake even at mid-day. There were big hedges on either side of the lane, and broad strips of turf. These lanes are almost all that is left of the rural and leafy old England of Seventeen Hundred; and they are beautiful in their own way when midsummer crowds them with flowers, and in spring when their palm-willows blossom, and in autumn when their hazel-coppices are brown with nuts, and in winter when their holly and ivy clamber high, and their fine trees make a tracery of bare boughs delicate as the net-work of lace against the gray skies.
On the other side of the hedge, to their right, there was a large corn-field; it was now the time when wheat is ripe in England, and the men and women who were reaping it were sitting, resting, drinking their cider and eating their noonday bread and bacon. Bindo watched them through a hole in the hedge, and began to cry.
“It makes me hungrier to see them eat!” he said, with a sob. Gemma sprang to her feet.
“Do not cry so, my Bindo,” she said, with a tender voice: “I will ask them to give you some.”
She thrust her lithe body through the gap, and walked boldly across the field,—a strange figure for an English corn-field, with her short white skirt, and her red bodice, and her striped sash of many colors, and her little coral ear-rings in her ears; she was bareheaded, and her dusky gold hair, the hair that the old painters loved, was coiled rope-like all around her small head.
“My little brother is hungry: will you be so very gentle and give us a little bread?” she said, in her pretty accent, which robbed the English tongue of all its gutturals and clothed it in a sweetness not its own. She was not fond of begging, being proud, and she colored very much as she said it.
The reapers stared, then grinned, gaped once or twice, and then stretched big brown hands out to her with goodly portions of food, and one added a mug of cider.
“I do thank you so much,” she said, with a smile that was like a sunbeam. “The drink I take not, for Nonno has no love of it; but for the bread I pray may San Martino bless you!”
Then she courtesied to them, as nature and nobody else had taught her to do, and ran away, fleet as a lapwing, with her treasure.
“’Tis that dancing-girl of the Popish country,” said the men one to another, and added that if the master caught her in his lane ’twould be the worse for her, for he couldna abide tramps and vagabon’s. But Gemma, who knew nothing of that, was sharing her spoils with glee, and breaking the small bit of bread she allowed to herself with teeth as white as a dog’s.
“The way to Dartmouth will not now seem so long,” she said, and Bindo nodded his head with a mouth quite full of good brown bread and fat bacon.
“How much do they love carne secca here!” said Nonno, with a sigh, thinking of the long coils of macaroni, the lovely little fried fish, the oil, the garlic, the black beans, that he never saw now, alas, alas! “The land is fat, but the people they know not how to live,” he added, with a sigh. “A people without wine,—what should they know?”
“They make good bread,” said Gemma, with her ivory teeth in a crust.
Meantime, the person who owned the lane was coming out into the fields to see how his men got on with their work. His house stood near, hidden in trees on a bend of the Exe. He was rich, young, prosperous, and handsome; he was also generous and charitable; but he was a magistrate, and he hated strollers. By name he was known as Philip Carey; his people had been squires here for many generations; he called himself a yeoman, and was as proud as if he were a prince.
As fates would have it, he rode down the lane now on his gray horse, and when he saw the group of Nonno and Gemma and Bindo, with their bags and bales and bundles, scattered about on the turf of his lane, his gray eyes grew ominously dark.
“Who gave you leave to come here?” he asked, sternly enough, as he reined up his horse.
Nonno looked up smiling, and stood up and bowed with grace and ease. The English tongue he had never been able to master: he glanced at Gemma to bid her answer.
“We were only resting, Excellenza,” said she, boldly. “It is a public road.”
“It is not a public road,” said the owner of it. “And if it were, you would have no right to cumber it. Are you strollers?”
“Strollers?” repeated Gemma: she did not understand the word.
“Tramps? Are you tramps?”
“We are artists,” said Gemma.
“What do you do for your living?” asked her judge.
“We dance,” she answered, “and Nonno yonder he does conjuring tricks, and sometimes has a little lotto, but that is only when we have got a little money: we have none now.”
“A lottery!” exclaimed Mr. Carey, whose face grew very stern. “You are mere idle vagabonds, then, when you are not worse. Do you live by your wits?”
“We dance,” said Gemma, again.
“Dance! Can you read and write?”
“Oh, no.”
“How old are you?”
“I am thirteen, Bindo is ten, Nonno is—is—is, oh, as old as the world.”
“Is he your grandfather?”
“That is what you say in English. We say Nonno.”
“Cannot he speak English?”
“No: he has lost his teeth, and it is so hard, is your English.”
“You are an impudent girl.”
Gemma smiled her beautiful shining smile, as if he had paid her an admirable compliment.
She knew the rider by sight very well, though he did not know her. His housekeeper had whipped Bindo for getting into her poultry-house and putting two eggs in his pocket, and his gardener one day had turned them both out of his orchards as trespassers, so that he and his residence of Carey’s Honor were already scored with black in the tablets of the children’s memories.
That he was a handsome young man, with a grave and pensive face and a very sweet smile, when he did smile, which was rarely, did not affect Gemma’s dislike to him: she was too young to be impressed by good looks. Philip Carey was not touched by the beauty of her either: he scarcely saw that she was pretty, he was so angry with her for what seemed to him her saucy answers.
“Why are you not dressed like a Christian?” he said, somewhat irrelevantly.
“I am a Christian,” said Gemma, angry in her turn,—“a better Christian than you are. And what is my dress to you? You do not buy it.”
“It is immodest.”
“Oh! oh!” cried Gemma, with a flame-like lightning in her eyes; and like lightning she leaped up on to the saddle and gave the astonished gentleman a sounding box on both ears.
He was so utterly astonished that he had no time to protect himself, and his horse, which was utterly astonished too, began to plunge and rear and kick, and fully occupied him, whilst a guffaw from the field beyond added to his rage by telling him that his reapers had witnessed his discomfiture.
Gemma had leaped to the ground as swiftly as she had leaped to the 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.
SHE ONLY RAN ON, STUMBLING OFTEN, AND FEELING FOR THE MATCHES IN THE BOSOM OF HER UGLY GRAY COTTON FROCK
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.