The Secret of Toni

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Toni, in whose mind the paradise of circus land and the paroxysm of terror were rioting confusedly, looked dreamily at Clery, who looked back sternly at him. Toni remaining silent, Clery shook him, and hissed into his ear:

“You are a thief! You stole the money from your mother to go to the circus.”

Toni still said nothing, and Clery continued:

“When you did not come back, I knew that you had gone to the circus. I went over and spoke to your mother, and she told me she was sure you had not gone because you had no money. Then I saw you come back here, and go out again, and run away as fast as you could. I went over and told your mother that you had been in the house, but she declared that you had not. My boy Jean says he saw you running toward the house with both hands open and likewise your mouth, and come out of it holding a franc between your teeth. So Toni, you are a thief, and your mother, I am sure, will never love you again, and to keep you from being sent to prison for life, I mean to give you as good a whipping as I am able, for fear your mother will not do her duty by you, and when I am through, I will take you over to her, and when I tell the police—”

Clery paused. Toni was thoroughly awake and alive then. A thief! Tell the police! That meant prison to him. This awful vision drove everything else out of his mind. And then Clery, suddenly brandishing the cane, brought it down on Toni’s shoulders with all the strength of an able-bodied tailor. Toni uttered a half-shriek, but after that neither cried out nor wept, but bore stoically the blows that Clery rained upon him. It seemed as if the day of judgment had come.

When Clery, honest man, had finished with Toni and was taking him across the street, Toni looked around him with wild eyes of despair. That precious refuge under his little bed seemed no longer open to him. He was a thief—he must go to prison—that was all he knew. And just then he looked up and there was a policeman walking straight toward him. That was enough! Toni, wresting himself from Clery’s grasp, turned and ran like one possessed, the specter of a mad fear chasing him, down toward the bridge. He was afraid to crawl into his usual nook, because he could be easily seen from there, so he ran across the bridge and hid himself in a thicket of young chestnut trees on the other side.

He lay, terror stricken, his heart beating so that he thought it must almost make a hole in the ground. What was to become of him? His mother, as Clery had told him, could love him no longer. He dared not look any one in the face, but felt an outcast, like Cain. He lay there for hours, through the waning afternoon, until the purple shadows descended on the white town, on the sparkling river, the long rows of barracks and the open fields in which the circus tent had been pitched. It was now taken down and the circus people were preparing to go by the highway to the next town, ten miles away.

It was nearly eight o’clock and the young moon was trembling in the heavens, when the circus cavalcade began to travel along the white and dusty highroad, passing by Toni’s place of concealment. It suddenly came into his mind that the only thing for him to do was to go with the circus. As the end of the procession of carts and vans and horsemen and horsewomen passed, Toni crept out of his hiding-place and came up to a company of men who were trudging along on foot. He said to one of them, Nicolas by name, a youngish man with hair and beard as red as Judas’:

“May I walk a little way with you?”