“The wicked, wicked man!” she kept saying in her teeth.
She never saw the pretty glowworms she was so fond of at other times, or heard the nightingales singing in the woods, for when a sin is in the soul it makes the eyes blind and the ears deaf. She only ran on, stumbling often and feeling for the matches in the bosom of her ugly gray cotton frock. The frock was irksome to her: she longed for her own short skirts and pliable bodice, and she missed the scarf about her loins, and the necklace at her throat. But she ran on and on, having a set purpose and a great crime in her mind.
She knew that if she only followed the towing-path long enough she would come to the place called Carey’s Honor.
She knew it well: she had often looked over its white gates and envied the calves and the lambs in its pastures, and wondered what the rooms were like within beyond the rose-hung windows, and sighed for the nectarines and the cherries that grew in its green old garden-ways. It might be farther or nearer than she fancied; that she could not be sure about; but she knew that if she went on long enough along the Dart water she would come to it. She did not feel at all frightened at being out all alone so late; after the excitement and despair of the day she seemed to have no feeling left except this one burning, consuming, terrible longing for vengeance, which made her feet fly over the towing-path to the peaceful Elizabethan house lying among its yews and limes and stacks and hives and byres in the moonlight.
She had been running and walking an hour and a half or more, when a bend in the water showed her the twisted chimney-stacks and the black-and-white wood-work and the honeysuckle-covered porches of the homestead, with the moon shining above it and the green uplands sloping behind. Then Gemma, whose young soul was now so full of wickedness that there was not a spot of light left in it, climbed over the white wooden gate and crept up over the wide grass-lands where the cattle were asleep and the big ox-eye daisies were shut up at rest. The air was full of the sweet smell of the dog-rose, of the honeysuckle, of the sweet brier, and away across the meadows the black-and-white timbers and the deep gables of the old house were distinct in the moon-rays.
She crossed the pastures and opened a little wicket that was never latched, and got into the gardens, where the stocks and picotees and gilly-flowers and moss roses and sweet williams and all other dear old-fashioned blossoms were filling the night with their fragrance. But Gemma had no thought for them. She crept on up to the house, and saw that in one part the thatched roof came down so low to the ground that, standing on a stone bench which was beneath, she would be able to touch it. She sprang on to the bench, drew her matches out of her bosom, struck light to them, and was about to thrust the blazing bunch into the thatch, when a huge dog bounded out of the shadow, leaped on her, and knocked her head downwards off the stone seat on to the grass: he would have torn her to pieces, only he was such a great and good creature that, seeing she was a child, he was merciful in his strength.
“Monarch, what is it, my lad?” said Philip Carey, as he came out from the open door of the porch, alarmed at the noise of the fall.
The Newfoundland left her and went to his master, and Mr. Carey saw the form of Gemma lying prone upon his gravel and the bundle of blazing matches still clutched in her clinched hand.
“Good heavens! the child came to burn my house down!” he cried, half aloud, as he stooped over her and lifted her up: she had fallen on the back of her head and was stunned into insensibility for the moment. He wrenched the burning matches out of her tightly-closed fingers and stamped the fire out of them with his heel. That was soon done, and when the dangerous things were mere harmless splinters of wood he lifted the insensible form of the child up in his arms and carried her into his house.
“She has escaped from the reformatory,” he thought, as he saw the ugly gray cotton gown and the blue apron that was tacked on to it.