Harding’s Luck, E. Nesbit [summer reads .TXT] 📗

“What a curious dream!” said Dickie.

The woman looked at him.

“So thou’st found thy tongue,” she said; “folk must look to have curious dreams who fall sick of the fever. But thou’st found thy tongue at last⁠—thine own tongue, not the wandering tongue that has wagged so fast these last days.”

“But I thought I was in the front room at⁠—” Dickie began.

“Thou’rt here,” said she; “the other is the dream. Forget it. And do not talk of it. To talk of such dreams brings misfortune. And ’tis time for thy posset.”

She took a pipkin from the hearth, where a small fire burned, though it was summer weather, as Dickie could see by the green treetops that swayed and moved outside in the sun, poured some gruel out of it into a silver basin. It had wrought roses on it and “Drink me and drink again” in queer letters round the rim; but this Dickie only noticed later. She poured white wine into the gruel, and, having stirred it with a silver spoon, fed Dickie as one feeds a baby, blowing on each spoonful to cool it. The gruel was very sweet and pleasant. Dickie stretched in the downy bed, felt extremely comfortable, and fell asleep again.

Next time he awoke it was with many questions. “How’d I come ’ere? ’Ave I bin run over agen? Is it a hospital? Who are you?”

“Now don’t you begin to wander again,” said the woman in the cap. “You’re here at home in the best bed in your father’s house at Deptford. And you’ve had the plague-fever. And you’re better. Or ought to be. But if you don’t know your own old nurse⁠—”

“I never ’ad no nurse,” said Dickie, “old nor new. So there. You’re a-takin’ me for some other chap, that’s what it is. Where did you get hold of me? I never bin here before.”

“Don’t wander, I tell you,” repeated the nurse briskly. “You lie still and think, and you’ll see you’ll remember me very well. Forget your old nurse⁠—why, you will tell me next that you’ve forgotten your own name.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Dickie.

“What is it, then?” the nurse asked, laughing a fat, comfortable laugh.

Dickie’s reply was naturally “Dickie Harding.”

“Why,” said the nurse, opening wide eyes at him under gray brows, “you have forgotten it. They do say that the fever hurts the memory, but this beats all. Dost mean to tell me the fever has mazed thy poor brains till thou don’t know that thy name’s Richard ⸻?” And Dickie heard her name a name that did not sound to him at all like Harding.

“Is that my name?” he asked.

“It is indeed,” she answered.

Dickie felt an odd sensation of fixedness. He had expected when he went to sleep that the dream would, in sleep, end, and that he would wake to find himself alone in the empty house at New Cross. But he had wakened to the same dream once more, and now he began to wonder whether he really belonged here, and whether this were the real life, and the other⁠—the old, sordid, dirty New Cross life⁠—merely a horrid dream, the consequence of his fever. He lay and thought, and looked at the rich, pleasant room, the kind, clear face of the nurse, the green, green branches of the trees, the tapestry and the rushes. At last he spoke.

“Nurse,” said he.

“Ah! I thought you’d come to yourself,” she said. “What is it, my dearie?”

“If I am really the name you said, I’ve forgotten it. Tell me all about myself, will you, Nurse?”

“I thought as much,” she muttered, and then began to tell him wonderful things.

She told him how his father was Sir Richard⁠—the King had made him a knight only last year⁠—and how this place where they now were was his father’s country house. “It lies,” said the nurse, “among the pleasant fields and orchards of Deptford.” And how he, Dickie, had been very sick of the pestilential fever, but was now, thanks to the blessing and to the ministrations of good Dr. Carey, on the highroad to health.

“And when you are strong enough,” said she, “and the house purged of the contagion, your cousins from Sussex shall come and stay a while here with you, and afterwards you shall go with them to their town house, and see the sights of London. And now,” she added, looking out of the window, “I spy the good doctor a-coming. Make the best of thyself, dear heart, lest he bleed thee and drench thee yet again, which I know in my heart thou’rt too weak for it. But what do these doctors know of babes? Their medicines are for strong men.”

The idea of bleeding was not pleasant to Dickie, though he did not at all know what it meant. He sat up in bed, and was surprised to find that he was not nearly so tired as he thought. The excitement of all these happenings had brought a pink flush to his face, and when the doctor, in a full black robe and black stockings and a pointed hat, stood by his bedside and felt his pulse, the doctor had to own that Dickie was almost well.

“We have wrought a cure, Goody,” he said; “thou and I, we have wrought a cure. Now kitchen physic it is that he needs⁠—good broth and gruel and panada, and wine, the Rhenish and the French, and the juice of the orange and the lemon, or, failing those, fresh apple-juice squeezed from the fruit when you shall have brayed it in a mortar. Ha, my cure pleases thee? Well, smell to it, then. ’Tis many a day since thou hadst the heart to.”

He reached the gold knob of his cane to Dickie’s nose, and Dickie was surprised to find that it smelled sweet and strong, something like grocers’ shops and something like a chemist’s. There were little holes in the gold knob, such as you see in the tops of pepper castors, and