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

make a fool of himself one time or the other,” he added, apologizing to the spirit of business.

“You mean you will?” said Dickie eagerly.

“More fool me,” said the Jew, feeling in his pocket.

“You won’t be sorry; not in the end you won’t,” said Dickie, as the pawnbroker laid certain monies before him on the mahogany counter. “You’ll lend me this? You’ll trust me?”

“Looks like it,” said the Jew.

“Then some day I shall do something for you. I don’t know what, but something. We never forget, we⁠—” He stopped. He remembered that he was poor little lame Dickie Harding, with no right to that other name which had been his in the dream.

He picked up the coins, put them in his pocket⁠—felt the moonseeds.

“I cannot repay your kindness,” he said, “though some day I will repay your silver. But these seeds⁠—the moonseeds,” he pulled out a handful. “You liked the flowers?” He handed a generous score across the red-brown polished wood.

“Thank you, my lad,” said the pawnbroker. “I’ll raise them in gentle heat.”

“I think they grow best by moonlight,” said Dickie.

So he came to Gravesend and the common lodging-house, and a weary, sad, and very anxious man rose up from his place by the fire when the clickety-clack of the crutch sounded on the threshold.

“It’s the nipper!” he said; and came very quickly to the door and got his arm round Dickie’s shoulders. “The little nipper, so it ain’t! I thought you’d got pinched. No, I didn’t, I knew your clever ways⁠—I knew you was bound to turn up.”

“Yes,” said Dickie, looking round the tramps’ kitchen, and remembering the long, clean tapestry-hung dining-hall of his dream. “Yes, I was bound to turn up. You wanted me to, didn’t you?” he added.

“Wanted you to?” Beale answered, holding him close, and looking at him as men look at some rare treasure gained with much cost and after long seeking. “Wanted you? Not ’arf! I don’t think,” and drew him in and shut the door.

“Then I’m glad I came,” said Dickie. But in his heart he was not glad. In his heart he longed for that pleasant house where he was the young master, and was not lame any more. But in his soul he was glad, because the soul is greater than the heart, and knows greater things. And now Dickie loved Beale more than ever, because for him he had sacrificed his dream. So he had gained something. Because loving people is the best thing in the world⁠—better even than being loved. Just think this out, will you, and see if I am not right.

There were herrings for tea. And in the hard bed, with his clothes and his boots under the pillows, Dickie slept soundly.

But he did not dream.

Yet when he woke in the morning, remembering many things, he said to himself⁠—

“Is this the dream? Or was the other the dream?”

And it seemed a foolish question⁠—with the feel of the coarse sheets and the smell of the close room, and Mr. Beale’s voice saying, “Rouse up, nipper, there’s sossingers for breakfast.”

V “To Get Your Own Living”

“No,” said Mr. Beale, “we ain’t a-goin’ to crack no more cribs. It’s low⁠—that’s what it is. I quite grant you it’s low. So I s’pose we’ll ’ave to take the road again.”

Dickie and he were sitting in the sunshine on a sloping field. They had been sitting there all the morning, and Dickie had told Mr. Beale all his earthly adventures from the moment the redheaded man had lifted him up to the window of Talbot Court to the time when he had come in by the open door of the common lodging-house.

“What a nipper it is, though!” said Mr. Beale regretfully. “For the burgling, I mean⁠—sharp⁠—clever⁠—no one to touch him. But I don’t cotton to it myself,” he added quickly, “not the burgling, I don’t. You’re always liable to get yourself into trouble over it, one way or the other⁠—that’s the worst of it. I don’t know how it is,” he ended pensively, “but somehow it always leads to trouble.”

Dickie picked up seven straws from among the stubble and idly plaited them together; the nurse had taught him this in the dream when he was still weak from the fever.

“That’s very flash, that what you’re doing,” said Beale; “who learned you that?”

“I learned it in a dream,” said Dickie slowly. “I dreamed I ’ad a fever⁠—and⁠—I’ll tell you if you like: it’s a good yarn⁠—good as Here Ward, very near.”

Beale lay back on the dry stubble, his pipe between his teeth.

“Fire away,” he said, and Dickie fired away.

When the long tale ended, the sun was beginning to go down towards its bed in the west. There was a pause.

“You’d make a tidy bit on the ’alls,” said Beale, quite awestruck. “The things you think of! When did you make all that up?”

“I dreamed it, I tell you,” said Dickie.

“You always could stick it on,” said Mr. Beale admiringly.

“I ain’t goin’ to stick it on never no more,” said Dickie. “They called it lying and cheating, where I was⁠—in my dream, I mean.”

“Once let a nipper out of yer sight,” said Mr. Beale sadly, “and see what comes of it! ‘No. 2’ a-goin’ to stick it on no more! Then how’s us to get a honest living? Answer me that, young chap.”

“I don’t know,” said Dickie, “but we got to do it som’ow.”

“It ain’t to be done⁠—not with all the unemployed there is about,” said Mr. Beale. “Besides, you’ve got a regular gift for sticking it on⁠—a talent I call it. And now you want to throw it away. But you can’t. We got to live.”

“In the dream,” said Dickie, “there didn’t seem to be no unemployed. Everyone was ’prenticed to a trade. I wish it was like that here.”

“Well, it ain’t,” said Mr. Beale shortly. “I wasn’t never ’prenticed to no trade, no more’n what you’ll be.”

“Worse luck,” said Dickie. “But I started learning a lot of things⁠—games mostly, in the dream, I did⁠—and I started making