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

“What is it?” Dickie asked.

“He has forgotten everything,” said the nurse quickly; “ ’tis the good doctor’s pomander, with spices and perfumes in it to avert contagion.”

“As it warms in the hand the perfumes give forth,” said the doctor. “Now the fever is past there must be a fumigatory. Make a good brew, Goody, make a good brew⁠—amber and nitre and wormwood⁠—vinegar and quinces and myrrh⁠—with wormwood, camphor, and the fresh flowers of the camomile. And musk⁠—forget not musk⁠—a strong thing against contagion. Let the vapor of it pass to and fro through the chamber, burn the herbs from the floor and all sweepings on this hearth; strew fresh herbs and flowers, and set all clean and in order, and give thanks that you are not setting all in order for a burying.”

With which agreeable words the black-gowned doctor nodded and smiled at the little patient, and went out.

And now Dickie literally did not know where he was. It was all so difficult. Was he Dickie Harding who had lived at New Cross, and sown the Artistic Parrot Seed, and taken the open road with Mr. Beale? Or was he that boy with the other name whose father was a knight, and who lived in a house in Deptford with green trees outside the windows? He could not remember any house in Deptford that had green trees in its garden. And the nurse had said something about the pleasant fields and orchards. Those, at any rate, were not in the Deptford he knew. Perhaps there were two Deptfords. He knew there were two Bromptons and two Richmonds (one in Yorkshire). There was something about the way things happened at this place that reminded him of that nice Lady Talbot who had wanted him to stay and be her little boy. Perhaps this new boy whose place he seemed to have taken had a real mother of his own, as nice as that nice lady.

The nurse had dropped all sorts of things into an iron pot with three legs, and had set it to boil in the hot ashes. Now it had boiled, and two maids were carrying it to and fro in the room, as the doctor had said. Puffs of sweet, strong, spicy steam rose out of it as they jerked it this way and that.

“Nurse,” Dickie called; and she came quickly. “Nurse, have I got a mother?”

She hugged him. “Indeed thou hast,” she said, “but she lies sick at your father’s other house. And you have a baby brother, Richard.”

“Then,” said Dickie, “I think I will stay here, and try to remember who I am⁠—I mean who you say I am⁠—and not try to dream any more about New Cross and Mr. Beale. If this is a dream, it’s a better dream than the other. I want to stay here, Nurse. Let me stay here and see my mother and my little brother.”

“And shalt, my lamb⁠—and shalt,” the nurse said.

And after that there was more food, and more sleep, and nights, and days, and talks, and silences, and very gradually, yet very quickly, Dickie learned about this new boy who was, and wasn’t, himself. He told the nurse quite plainly that he remembered nothing about himself, and after he had told her she would sit by his side by the hour and tell him of things that had happened in the short life of the boy whose place he filled, the boy whose name was not Dickie Harding. And as soon as she had told him a thing he found he remembered it⁠—not as one remembers a tale that is told, but as one remembers a real thing that has happened.

And days went on, and he became surer and surer that he was really this other Richard, and that he had only dreamed all that old life in New Cross with his aunt and in the pleasant country roads with Mr. Beale. And he wondered how he could ever have dreamed such things.

Quite soon came the day when the nurse dressed him in clothes strange, but strangely comfortable and fine, and carried him to the window, from which, as he sat in a big oak chair, he could see the green fields that sloped down to the river, and the rigging and the masts of the ships that went up and down. The rigging looked familiar, but the shape of the ships was quite different. They were shorter and broader than the ships that Dickie Harding had been used to see, and they, most of them, rose up much higher out of the water.

“I should like to go and look at them closer,” he told the nurse.

“Once thou’rt healed,” she said, “thou’lt be forever running down to the dockyard. Thy old way⁠—I know thee, hearing the master mariners’ tales, and setting thy purpose for a galleon of thine own and the golden South Americas.”

“What’s a galleon?” said Dickie. And was told. The nurse was very patient with his forgettings.

He was very happy. There seemed somehow to be more room in this new life than in the old one, and more time. No one was in a hurry, and there was not another house within a quarter of a mile. All green fields. Also he was a person of consequence. The servants called him “Master Richard,” and he felt, as he heard them, that being called Master Richard meant not only that the servants respected him as their master’s son, but that he was somebody from whom great things were expected. That he had duties of kindness and protection to the servants; that he was expected to grow up brave and noble and generous and unselfish, to care for those who called him master. He felt now very fully, what he had felt vaguely and dimly at Talbot Court, that he was not the sort of person who ought to do anything mean and dishonorable, such as being a burglar, and climbing in at pantry windows; that