The Dark House | Page 8

And the knowledge darkened everything. It was not that he cried about his leadership. He would have thrown it at her feet gladly. But he longed to prove to her that if he was not a good little boy he was, at any rate, a terribly fine fellow. He had to make her look up to him and admire him like the rest of the Banditti, otherwise he would never hold her fast. And everything served to that end. Before her he swaggered monstrously. He did things which turned him sick with fear. Once he had climbed to the top of a dizzy wall in the ruins, and had postured on the narrow edge, the bricks crumbling under him, the dust rising in clouds, so that he looked like a small devil dancing in mid-air. And when he had reached ground again he had found her reading a book. Then, the plaudits of the awestruck Banditti sounded like jeers. Nothing had ever hurt so much.
About the time that the Banditti first came into his life the vision of his mother began to grow not less wonderful, but less distinct. She seemed to stand a little farther off, as though very gradually she were drawing away into the other world, where she belonged. And often it was Frances who played with him in his secret stories.

3
He threw his indoor shoes into the area. In the next street, beyond pursuit, he sat down on a doorstep and, put on his boots, lacing them with difficulty, for he was half blind with tears and anger. He could not make up his mind how to kill Edith. Nothing seemed quite bad enough. He thought of boiling her in oil or rolling her down hill in a cask full of spikes, after the manner of some fairy story that Christine had told him. It was not the pain, though his arm felt as though it had been wrenched out of its socket, and the blood trickled in a steady stream from his bumped forehead. It was the indignity, the outrage, the physical humiliation that had to be paid back. It made him tremble with fury and a kind of helpless terror to realize that, because he was little, any common woman could shake and beat him and treat him as though he belonged to her. He would tell his father. Even his father, who had so far forgotten himself as to marry such a creature, would see that there were things one couldn't endure. Or he would call up the Banditti and plot a devastating retaliation.
In the meantime he was glad he had bitten her.
He walked on unsteadily. The earth still undulated and threatened every now and then to rise up like a wave in front of him and cast him down. He was growing cold and stiff, too, in the reaction. He had stopped crying, but his teeth chattered and his sobs had degenerated into monotonous, soul-shattering hiccoughs. Passers-by looked at him disapprovingly. Evidently that nasty little boy from No. 10 had been fighting again.
He had counted on the Banditti, but the Banditti were not on their usual hunting-ground. An ominous silence answered the accustomed war-cry, uttered in an unsteady falsetto, and the ruins had a more than usually dejected look, as though they had suddenly lost all hope of themselves. He called again, and this time, like an earth-sprite, Frances Wilmot rose up from a sheltered corner and waved to him. She had a book in her hand, and she rubbed her eyes and rumpled up her short hair as though rousing herself from a dream.
"I did hear you," she said, "but I was working something out. I'll tell you all about it in a minute. But what's happened? Why is your face all bleeding?"
She seemed so concerned about him that he was glad of his wounds. And yet she had the queer effect of making him want to cry again. That wouldn't do. She wouldn't respect him if he cried. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and knitted his fair brows into a fearful Stonehouse scowl.
"Oh, it's nothing. I've had a row--at home. That's all. My father's new wife h-hit me--and I b-bit her. Jolly hard. And then I fell downstairs."
"Why did she hit you?"
"Oh, I don't know. She's just a beast----"
"Of course you know. Don't be silly."
"Well, she said I'd been smoking, and I said I hadn't----"
"Had you? You look awfully green."
"Yes, I had."
"What's the good of telling lies?"
"It's no good telling the truth," Robert answered stolidly. "They only get crosser than ever. She hadn't any right to hit me. She's not even a relation."
"She's your step-mother."
He began to tremble again uncontrollably.
"She's n-not. Not any sort of a mother. My mother's dead."
It was the first time he had ever