—"A."
After his talk with Darby, the dwarf thought long and anxiously as to what would be their best route to Firgrove. Under ordinary circumstances their simplest one would have been to start from Barchester, or else go back to Engleton, then straight along by the canal to Firdale, thence to Firgrove, which was only about a mile from the village. But Joe and Moll would be sure to follow them, in order to make an attempt to recover their captives. Several times before Joe had tried to kidnap an attractive smart child whom he could train to be a sort of golden prop upon which his laziness could lean, but hitherto he had always been balked in his purpose. He would be furiously angry, Bambo knew, when he discovered that, just when a life of ease and idleness such as he had longed for seemed certain in the near future, he was as far as ever from accomplishing his object.
So, in order to avoid the chance of being brought back and subjected to greater cruelty than before, the dwarf decided to take a much longer way than that by the canal. They would strike out across the common behind Barchester, then double back a bit, and follow an unfrequented road which also led to Firdale, winding through a long tract of hilly land, laid out chiefly in runs for mountain cattle and hardy sheep, and scarcely inhabited except by herds and shepherds.
They could, of course, have travelled by rail, but this mode did not even occur to Bambo. For one thing, he was penniless, except for a few coppers that had escaped Moll's covetous eyes and grasping fingers the last time she rifled his pockets, when she supposed him to be asleep; and for another, he was not used to railway journeys. He had never, in fact, been inside a railway carriage in all his life, and he would have hated and shrunk from the attention he would most assuredly have attracted from all sorts of people—pity, horror, shrugs, smiles, grins, jeers, and laughter. It was bad enough to be stared at in booths and fairs when he was dressed up as a general in a shabby scarlet uniform and plumed hat with Bruno by his side. That was different. That was the only way he had ever hit upon by which he might honestly earn his food and shelter, such as it was. But from choice the dwarf had always avoided his fellow-creatures. Surrounded by the strong, the self-satisfied, the handsome, the gay, the consciousness of his own oddity and deformity was borne in upon his sensitive spirit in the keenest manner; but in the woods and fields, by the roadside and the hedgerows, he felt another person entirely. There Bambo forgot that he was so unlike his fellows; and among the birds, the beasts, the trees, the flowers, with God's wide heaven above and the green earth under foot, this simple, large-souled child of nature dropped his burden, and for the time being felt happy and at home.
He knew quite well the way along which he proposed to travel, for he had footed it from Firdale to Barchester more than once when he was a boy. In the scattered cottages and herdsmen's huts there were simple, kindly souls, who would welcome any one from the outside world, and willingly give them a bit of bread, a drink of milk, with maybe a shakedown by their fireside for the night, without asking any awkward questions or gazing too curiously at the odd little man and his charming companions. They might get a lift, too, for a few miles now and again in a cart or wagon going between one and another of the few farms along the route. Bambo sincerely hoped they should, for Joan would not be able to walk very far at once. Her feet were tender, and her shoes were thin. Bambo knew she should have to be carried the greater part of the way, and his great anxiety was lest his fund of strength, which had gradually grown so sadly small, should fail him before he had completed his self-imposed task. What would become of the little ones if he were forced to lie down under the friendly shelter of some wayside hedge, utterly unable to drag himself another step? Would Joe and Moll find them and force them back to a life of lovelessness, hardship, and degradation? Oh, surely not! and the dwarf's soul sank within him as he contemplated the bare possibility of such failure and defeat.
For a while Bambo gave way to despondency and these by no means unnatural fears. Soon, however, this mood passed away, banished as swiftly as mist before sunshine, by the recollection of a promise—old almost as the everlasting hills, yet new as the song which the redeemed ones sing around the throne of God,—
"Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness."
Like a whisper of sweetest music the peace of the words stole over the dwarf's troubled spirit, soothing and fortifying him so that he felt himself no longer a weakling, a pigmy, but a veritable giant to fight and to endure. And with a smile upon his lips and a light not of earth in his sunken eyes, Bambo and his charges slipped noiselessly away from the bear, the monkey, and the caravan, and set out, not to seek the Happy Land, as Darby said with one of his quaint, grave glances, but this time to find it.
The first streaks of sunlight were lighting up the landscape before the little party paused to take a rest, and to eat some of the food which the dwarf's fore-thought had provided. Darby found a dry seat upon the trunk of a fallen tree. Upon it they sat and ate their breakfast of cold rabbit and dry bread, washed down by a draught of pure water carried in a tin porringer from a spring which bubbled out of the bank hard by—a spring that was half hidden by the feathery moss, trailing periwinkle, and brown fern fronds with which it was surrounded. The children breakfasted heartily, their early outing having sharpened their appetites; but Bambo's eating was only a pretence, for he was not hungry. Joan was a fairly solid weight for a girl of five, and he had carried her in his arms nearly all the way from the encampment. He was tired and exhausted in consequence; his hands burned, his lips were parched, his brow fevered. He laved his face with the clear, cool water; and after a long, deep drink from the porringer, which Joan held to his lips with all the precision and gravity of a professional nurse, he felt strengthened and refreshed.