A Dog of Flanders, The Nürnberg Stove, and Other Stories

by Ouida

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.