Once free of the cage, I faced him and desired to know whether he would be happier if I wrote at once to Mrs Monnerie and absolved him there and then. "Look at yourself in your own mind," I bade him. "What a sight is a coward!" And I fixed him with none too friendly an eye under the moon.
His clumsiness in opening a window disturbed Mrs French. She came to the head of the staircase and leaned over, while we crouched in a recess beneath. But while the beams of the candle she carried were too feeble to pierce the well of darkness between us, by twisting round my head I could see every movement and changing expression of the shape above me—the frilled, red-flannel dressing-gown, the shawl over her head, and her inflamed peering face surmounted with a "front" of hair in pins. She was talking to herself in peculiar guttural mutterings. But soon, either because she was too sleepy or too indolent to search further, she withdrew again; and Adam and I were free to creep up the glooming shallow staircase into safety.
Last but not least, when I came to undress, I found that my grandfather's little watch was gone. In a fever I tumbled my clothes over again and again. Then I sat down and in memory went over the events of the evening, and came at last to the thief. There was no doubt of him—a small-headed, puny man, who almost with tears in his eyes had besought me to give him one of my buttons to take home to his crippled little daughter. He had pressed close: my thoughts had been far away. I confess this loss unnerved me—a haggard face looked out of my glass. I scrambled into bed, and sought refuge as quickly as possible from these heart-burnings.
After such depressing experiences Adam's resolution was at an even lower ebb next morning. We met together under the sunny whispering pine-trees. I wheedled, argued, adjured him in vain. Almost at my wits' end at last, I solemnly warned him that if we failed the showman the following evening, he would assuredly have the law against us. "A pretty pair we shall look, Adam, standing up there in the dock—with the black cap and the wigs and the policemen and everything. And not a penny for our pains."
He squinted at me in unfeigned alarm at this; the lump in his throat went up and down; and though possibly I had painted the picture in rather sombre colours, this settled the matter. I hope it taught Adam to fight shy ever afterwards of adventuresses. It certainly taught this adventuress that the mind may be "subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." I cast a look of hatred after the weak, silly man as he disappeared between the trees.
The circus, so the showman had warned me, was moving on that day to another market town, Whippington—six miles or so from its present pitch, though not more than four miles further away from Croomham. This would mean a long and wearisome trudge for us the next evening, as I found on consulting an immense map of Kent. Yet my heart sighed with delight at the discovery that, as the dove flies, we should be a full five miles nearer to Beechwood. If this little church on the map was St Peter's, and this faint shading the woody contour of the Hill, why, then, that square dot was Wanderslore. I sprawled over the outspread county with sublime content. My very "last appearance" was at hand; liberty but a few hollow hours away.
It is true I had promised my showman to think over his invitation to me to "sign on" as a permanent member of his troupe of clowns, acrobats, wild beasts, and monstrosities. He had engaged in return to pay me in full, "with a bit over," at the close of the last performance. But I had merely laughed and nodded. Not that I was in any true sense ashamed of what I had done. Not ashamed.
But you cannot swallow your pride and your niceness without any discomfort. I was conscious of a hardening of the skin, of a grimness stealing over my mouth, and of a tendency to stare at the world rather more boldly than modesty should. At least, so it seemed. In reality it may have been that Life was merely scraping off the "cream." Quite a wholesome experience.
On the practical side, all was well. Two pounds to Adam, which I had promised to make three if he earned it, would leave me with thirteen or twelve pounds odd, apart from my clumsy "douceur." I thirsted for my wages. With that sum—two five-pound notes and say, four half-sovereigns—sewn up, if possible, in my petticoat, I should once more be my own mistress; and I asked no more for the moment. The future must take care of itself. On one thing I was utterly resolved—never, never to return to Monk's House, or to No. 2—to that old squalid luxury, dissembling and humiliation.