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

“It can’t be a spring-cleaning,” he said, “because it’s the wrong time of year.”

“Never say I did not tell thee,” she answered, unfolding a great embroidered cupboard cloth and holding it up critically. “Tomorrow thy father and mother come home, and thy baby-brother, and today sennight thy little cousins come to visit thee.”

“How perfectly glorious!” said Dickie. “But you didn’t tell me.”

“If I didn’t ’twas because you never asked.”

“I⁠—I didn’t dare to,” he said dreamily; “I was so afraid. You see, I’ve never seen them.”

“Afraid?” she said, laying away the folded cloth and taking out another from the deep press, oaken, with smooth-worn, brown iron hinges and lock; “never seen thy father and mother, forsooth!”

“Perhaps it was the fever,” said Dickie, feeling rather deceitful. “You said it made me forget things. I don’t remember them. Not at all, I don’t.”

“Do not say that to them,” the nurse said, looking at him very gravely.

“I won’t. Unless they ask me,” he added. “Oh, nurse, let me do something too. What can I do to help?”

“Thou canst gather such flowers as are left in the garden to make a nosegay for thy mother’s room; and set them in order in fair water. And bid thy tutor teach thee a welcome song to say to them when they come in.”

Gathering the flowers and arranging them was pleasant and easy. Asking so intimate a favor from the sour-faced tutor whom he so much disliked was neither easy nor pleasant. But Dickie did it. And the tutor was delighted to set him to learn a particularly hard and uninteresting piece of poetry, beginning⁠—

“Happy is he
Who, to sweet home retired,
Shuns glory so admired
And to himself lives free;
While he who strives with pride to climb the skies
Falls down with foul disgrace before he dies.”

Dickie could not help thinking that the father and mother who were to be his in this beautiful world might have preferred something simpler and more affectionate from their little boy than this difficult piece whose last verse was the only one which seemed to Dickie to mean anything in particular. In this verse Dickie was made to remark that he hoped people would say of him, “He died a good old man,” which he did not hope, and indeed had never so much as thought of. The poetry, he decided, would have been nicer if it had been more about his father and mother and less about fame and trees and burdens. He felt this so much that he tried to write a poem himself, and got as far as⁠—

“They say there is no other
Can take the place of mother.
I say there is no one I’d rather
See than my father.”

But he could not think of any more to say, and besides, he had a haunting idea that the first two lines⁠—which were quite the best⁠—were not his own makeup. So he abandoned the writing of poetry, deciding that it was not his line, and painfully learned the dismal verses appointed by his tutor.

But he never got them said. When the bustle of arrival had calmed a little, Dickie, his heart beating very fast indeed, found himself led by his tutor into the presence of the finest gentleman and the dearest lady he had ever beheld. The tutor gave him a little push so that he had to go forward two steps and to stand alone on the best carpet, which had been spread in their honor, and hissed in a savage whisper⁠—

“Recite your song of welcome.”

“ ‘Happy the man,’ ” began Dickie, in tones of gloom, and tremblingly pronounced the first lines of that unpleasing poem.

But he had not got to “strive with pride” before the dear lady caught him in her arms, exclaiming, “Bless my dear son! how he has grown!” and the fine gentleman thumped him on the back, and bade him “bear himself like a gentleman’s son, and not like a queasy square-toes.” And they both laughed, and he cried a little, and the tutor seemed to be blotted out, and there they were, all three as jolly as if they had known each other all their lives. And a stout young nurse brought the baby, and Dickie loved it and felt certain it loved him, though it only said, “Goo ga goo,” exactly as your baby-brother does now, and got hold of Dickie’s hair and pulled it and would not let go.

There was a glorious dinner, and Dickie waited on this new father of his, changed his plate, and poured wine out of a silver jug into the silver cup that my lord drank from. And after dinner the dear lady-mother must go all over the house to see everything, because she had been so long away, and Dickie walked in the garden among the ripe apples and grapes with his father’s hand on his shoulder, the happiest, proudest boy in all Deptford⁠—or in all Kent either.

His father asked what he had learned, and Dickie told, dwelling, perhaps, more on the riding, and the fencing, and the bowls, and the music than on the sour-faced tutor’s side of the business.

“But I’ve learned a lot of Greek and Latin, too,” he added in a hurry, “and poetry and things like that.”

“I fear,” said the father, “thou dost not love thy book.”

“I do, sir; yet I love my sports better,” said Dickie, and looked up to meet the fond, proud look of eyes as blue as his own.

“Thou’rt a good, modest lad,” said his father when they began their third round of the garden, “not once to ask for what I promised thee.”

Dickie could not stand this. “I might have asked,” he said presently, “but I have forgot what the promise was⁠—the fever⁠—”

“Ay, ay, poor lad! And of a high truth, too! Owned he had forgot! Come, jog that poor peaked remembrance.”

Dickie could hardly believe the beautiful hope that whispered in his ear.

“I almost think I remember,” he said. “Father⁠—did you promise⁠—?”

“I promised, if thou