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

wast a good lad and biddable and constant at thy book and thy manly exercises, to give thee, so soon as thou should’st have learned to ride him⁠—”

“A little horse?” said Dickie breathlessly; “oh, father, not a little horse?” It was good to hear one’s father laugh that big, jolly laugh⁠—to feel one’s father’s arm laid like that across one’s shoulders.

The little horse turned round to look at them from his stall in the big stables. It was really rather a big horse.

What colored horse would you choose⁠—if a horse were to be yours for the choosing? Dickie would have chosen a gray, and a gray it was.

“What is his name?” Dickie asked, when he had admired the gray’s every point, had had him saddled, and had ridden him proudly round the pasture in his father’s sight.

“We call him Rosinante,” said his father, “because he is so fat,” and he laughed, but Dickie did not understand the joke. He had not read Don Quixote, as you, no doubt, have.

“I should like,” said Dickie, sitting square on the gray, “to call him Crutch. May I?”

“Crutch?” the father repeated.

“Because his paces are so easy,” Dickie explained. He got off the horse very quickly and came to his father. “I mean even a lame boy could ride him. Oh! father, I am so happy!” he said, and burrowed his nose in a velvet doublet, and perhaps snivelled a little. “I am so glad I am not lame.”

“Fancy-full as ever,” said his father; “come, come! Thou’rt weak yet from the fever. Be a man. Remember of what blood thou art. And thy mother⁠—she also hath a gift for thee⁠—from thy grandfather. Hast thou forgotten that? It hangs to the book learning. A reward⁠—and thou hast earned it.”

“I’ve forgotten that, too,” said Dickie. “You aren’t vexed because I forget? I can’t help it, father.”

“That I’ll warrant thou cannot. Come, now, to thy mother. My little son! The Earl of Scilly chid me but this summer for sparing the rod and spoiling the child. But thy growth in all things bears out in what I answered him. I said: ‘The boys of our house, my lord, take that pride in it that they learn of their own free will what many an earl’s son must be driven to with rods.’ He took me. His own son is little better than an idiot, and naught but the rod to blame for it, I verily believe.”

They found the lady-mother and her babe by a little fire in a wide hearth.

“Our son comes to claim the guerdon of learning,” the father said. And the lady stood up with the babe in her arms.

“Call the nurse to take him,” she said. But Dickie held out his arms.

“Oh, mother,” he said, and it was the first time in all his life that he had spoken that word to anyone. “Mother, do let me hold him.”

A warm, stiff bundle was put into his careful arms, and his little brother instantly caught at his hair. It hurt, but Dickie liked it.

The lady went to one of the carved cabinets and with a bright key from a very bright bunch unlocked one of the heavy panelled doors. She drew out of the darkness within a dull-colored leather bag embroidered in gold thread and crimson silk.

“He has forgot,” said Sir Richard in an undertone, “what it was that the grandfather promised him. Though he has well earned the same. ’Tis the fever.”

The mother put the bag in Dickie’s hands.

“Count it out,” she said, taking her babe from him; and Dickie untied the leathern string, and poured out on to the polished long table what the bag held. Twenty gold pieces.

“And all with the image of our late dear Queen,” said the mother; “the image of that incomparable virgin Majesty whose example is a beacon for all time to all virtuous ladies.”

“Ah, yes, indeed,” said the father; “put them up in the bag, boy. They are thine own to thee, to spend as thou wilt.”

“Not unwisely,” said the mother gently.

“As he wills,” the father firmly said; “wisely or unwisely. As he wills. And none,” he added, “shall ask how they be spent.”

The lady frowned; she was a careful housewife, and twenty gold pieces were a large sum.

“I will not waste it,” said Dickie. “Mother, you may trust me not to waste it.”

It was the happiest moment of his life to Dickie. The little horse⁠—the gold pieces⁠ ⁠… Yes, but much more, the sudden, good, safe feeling of father and mother and little brother; of a place where he belonged, where he loved and was loved. And by his equals. For he felt that, as far as a child can be the equal of grown people, he was the equal of these. And Beale was not his equal, either in the graces of the body or in the inner treasures of mind and heart. And hitherto he had loved only Beale; had only, so far as he could remember, been loved by Beale and by that shadowy father, his “Daddy,” who had died in hospital, and dying, had given him the rattle, his Tinkler, that was Harding’s Luck. And in the very heart of that happiest moment came, like a sharp dagger prick, the thought of Beale. What wonders could be done for Beale with those twenty-five gold sovereigns? For Dickie thought of them just as sovereigns⁠—and so they were.

And as these people who loved him, who were his own, drew nearer and nearer to his heart⁠—his heart, quickened by love of them, felt itself drawn more and more to Mr. Beale. Mr. Beale, the tramp, who had been kind to him when no one else was. Mr. Beale, the tramp and housebreaker.

So when the nurse took him, tired with new happinesses, to that beautiful tapestried room of his, he roused himself from his good soft sleepiness to say⁠—

“Nurse, you know a lot of things, don’t you?”

“I know what I know,” she answered, undoing buttons with speed and authority.

“You know