In three days the nice children had become the Brothers Banditti with Robert Stonehouse as their chief. Having admitted the stranger into their midst he had gone straight to their heads like wine. He was a rebel and an outlaw who had suddenly come into power. At heart he was older than any of them. He knew things about reversions and bailiffs and life generally that none of them had ever heard of in their well-ordered homes. He was strong and knew how to fight. The nice children had never fought but they found they liked it. Once, like an avenging Attila, he had led them across the hill and fallen upon his ancient enemies with such awful effect that they never raised their heads again. And the Banditti had returned home whooping and drunk with victory and the newly discovered joy of battle. His hand was naturally against all authority. He led them in dark plottings against their governesses and nursemaids, and even against the Law itself as personified by an elderly, somewhat pompous policeman whose beat included their territory. On foggy afternoons they pealed the doorbells of such as had complaint against them, and from concealment gloated over the indignant maids who had been lured down several flights of stairs to answer their summons. And no longer were they nice children who returned home clean and punctual to the bosom of their families.
Very rarely had the Banditti showed signs of revolt against Robert's despotism, and each time he had won them back with ease which sowed the first seeds of cynicism in his mind. It happened to be another of the elder Stonehouse's theories—which he had been known to expound eloquently to his creditors—that children should be taught the use of money, and at such times as the Stonehouse family prospered Robert's pocket bulged with sums that staggered the very imagination of his followers. He appeared among them like a prince—lavish, reckless, distributing chocolates of superior lineage with a haughty magnificence that brought the disaffected cringing to his feet.
But even with them he was not really happy. At heart he was still a strange little boy, different from the rest. There was a shadow over him. He knew that apart from him they were nice, ordinary children, and that he was a man full of sorrows and mystery and bitter experience. He despised them. They could be bought and bribed and bullied. But if he could have been ordinary as they were, with quiet, ordinary homes and people who loved one another and paid their bills, he would have cried with joy.
When he did anything particularly bold and reckless he looked out of the corners of his eyes at Frances Wilmot to see if at last he had impressed her. For she eluded him. She never defied his authority, and very rarely took part in his escapades. But she was always there, sometimes in the midst, sometimes just on the fringe, like a bird, intent on business of its own, coming and going in the heart of human affairs. Sometimes she seemed hardly to be aware of him, and sometimes she treated him as though there were an unspoken intimacy between them which made him glow with pride for days afterwards. She would put her arm about him and walk with him in the long happy silence of comradeship. And once, quite unexpectedly, she had seemed gravely troubled. "Are you a good little boy, Robert?" she had asked, as though she really expected him to know, and relieve her mind about it.
And afterwards he had cried to himself, for he was sure that he was not a good little boy at all. He was sure that if she knew about his father and the bailiffs she would turn away in sorrow and disgust.
He knew that she too was different from the others, but with a greater difference than his own. He knew that the Banditti looked up to her for the something in her that he lacked, that if she lifted a finger against him, his authority would be gone. And the knowledge darkened everything. It was not that he cried about his leadership. He would have thrown it at her feet gladly. But he longed to prove to her that if he was not a good little boy he was, at any rate, a terribly fine fellow. He had to make her look up to him and admire him like the rest of the Banditti, otherwise he would never hold her fast. And everything served to that end. Before her he swaggered monstrously. He did things which turned him sick with fear. Once he had climbed to the top of a dizzy wall in the ruins, and had postured on the narrow edge, the bricks crumbling under him, the dust rising in clouds, so that he looked like a small devil dancing in mid-air. And when he had reached ground again he had found her reading a book. Then, the plaudits of the awestruck Banditti sounded like jeers. Nothing had ever hurt so much.
About the time that the Banditti first came into his life the vision of his mother began to grow not less wonderful, but less distinct. She seemed to stand a little farther off, as though very gradually she were drawing away into the other world, where she belonged. And often it was Frances who played with him in his secret stories.
3
He threw his indoor shoes into the area. In the next street, beyond pursuit, he sat down on a doorstep and, put on his boots, lacing them with difficulty, for he was half blind with tears and anger. He could not make up his mind how to kill Edith. Nothing seemed quite bad enough. He thought of boiling her in oil or rolling her down hill in a cask full of spikes, after the manner of some fairy story that Christine had told him. It was not the pain, though his arm felt as though it had been wrenched out of its socket, and the blood trickled in a steady stream from his bumped forehead. It was the indignity, the outrage, the physical humiliation that had to be paid back. It made him tremble with fury and a kind of helpless terror to realize that, because he was little, any common woman could shake and beat him and treat him as though he belonged to her. He would tell his father. Even his father, who had so far forgotten himself as to marry such a creature, would see that there were things one couldn't endure. Or he would call up the Banditti and plot a devastating retaliation.
In the meantime he was glad he had bitten her.