Amongst other particular occasions I remember one night when the moon shone very brightly in the garden, and I was sitting near my bedroom window looking over it, meditating flight. My father's cruelty had then reached its highest point. I was always spoken to harshly when he condescended to take any notice of me at all, and was very frequently beaten. Our meals together had become perfectly intolerable. He would sit and trifle with his cutlet, and cover it with pepper, for his appetite was completely gone, and there was no conversation except perhaps an occasional expression of displeasure. The continual tension caused by anxiety made my sleep broken and uncertain, and that night I sat up alone in the bedroom longer than usual and looking down upon the moonlit garden. There was an octagonal summer-house of trellis-work on the formal oblong lawn, and on the top of it was a large hollow ball of sheet-copper painted green that had cost my grandmother three pounds. It is oddly associated with my anxieties on that night, because I looked first at it and then at the moon alternately whilst thinking. The situation had become absolutely intolerable, the servants were my only protectors, and though devoted they never dared to interfere when their master was actually beating me. I therefore seriously weighed, in my own childish manner, the possibilities of a secret flight. The moonlight was tempting--it would be easy to go alone to the stable and saddle the pony. On a fine night I could be many miles away before morning. There was no difficulty whatever about money; I had plenty of sovereigns in a drawer to be accounted for afterwards to my father, and meanwhile could employ them in escaping from him. Still, I knew that such an employment of _his_ money would be looked upon by him as a breach of trust, and would, in fact, _be_ a breach of trust. This consideration was not easily set aside, though I now see that it was needlessly scrupulous, and have no doubt whatever that if a child is left by the ignorance or the carelessness of superior authority in the hands of a madman, it has a clear right to provide for its own safety by any means in its power.
But where was I to go? My uncles were two very cool lawyers, always on the side of authority, and they would not be likely to believe my story entirely. A vague but sure instinct warned me that they would set me down for a rebellious boy who wanted to escape from justly severe paternal authority, and that they would at once send me back to Ivy Cottage. One of my two maiden aunts would be very likely to take the same view, but if the other received me with kindness, she could not have strength to resist my father, who would send or go to her at once and claim me. After thinking over all these things, I came to the conclusion that real safety was only to be found amongst strangers, and it seemed so hazardous to ask protection from unknown people that I decided to remain; but a very little would have settled it the other way. If those sovereigns had been really my own, I should probably have crept out of the house, saddled the pony, and ridden many miles; but so young a boy travelling alone would have been sure to attract attention, and the attempt to win deliverance would have been a failure. In after years, one of my elder relatives said that the attempt would almost certainly have caused my father to disinherit me by a new will, as my mother's property had been left to him absolutely. This danger was quite of a serious kind (more serious than the reader will think probable from what I choose to say in this place), as my father had another heir in view whom I never saw, but who was held _in terrorem_ over me.