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.