The Dark House | Page 8

her mind about it.
And afterwards he had cried to himself, for he was sure that he was not
a good little boy at all. He was sure that if she knew about his father
and the bailiffs she would turn away in sorrow and disgust.
He knew that she too was different from the others, but with a greater
difference than his own. He knew that the Banditti looked up to her for
the something in her that he lacked, that if she lifted a finger against
him, his authority would be gone. 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