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

that other dream of mine⁠—that dream of mine, I mean, the dream of a dreadful place?”

“And then?”

“Could I take anything out of this dream⁠—I mean out of this time into the other one?”

“You could, but you must bring it back when you come again. And you could bring things thence. Certain things: your rattle, your moonseeds, your seal.”

He stared at her.

“You do know things,” he said; “but I want to take things there and leave them there.”

She knitted thoughtful brows.

“There’s three hundred thick years between now and then,” she said. “Oh, yes, I know. And if you held it in your hand, you’d lose it like as not in some of the years you go through. Money’s mortal heavy and travels slow. Slower than the soul of you, my lamb. Someone would have time to see it and snatch it and hold to it.”

“Isn’t there any way?” Dickie asked, insisting to himself that he wasn’t sleepy.

“There’s the way of everything⁠—the earth,” she said; “bury it, and lie down on the spot where it’s buried, and then, when you get back into the other dream, the kind, thick earth will have hid your secret, and you can dig it up again. It will be there⁠ ⁠… unless other hands have dug there in the three hundred years. You must take your chance of that.”

“Will you help me?” Dickie asked. “I shall need to dig it very deep if I am to cheat three hundred years. And suppose,” he added, struck by a sudden and unpleasing thought, “there’s a house built on the place. I should be mixed up with the house. Two things can’t be in the same place at the same time. My tutor told me that. And the house would be so much stronger than me⁠—it would get the best of it, and where should I be then?”

“I’ll ask where thou’d be,” was the very surprising answer. “I’ll ask someone who knows. But it’ll take time⁠—put thy money in the great press, and I’ll keep the key. And next Friday as ever is, come your little cousins.”

They came. It was more difficult with them than it was with the grownups to conceal the fact that he had not always been the Dickie he was now; but it was not so difficult as you might suppose. It was no harder than not talking about the dreams you had last night.

And now he had indeed a full life: head-work, bodily exercises, work, home life, and joyous hours of play with two children who understood play as the poor little, dirty Deptford children do not and cannot understand it.

He lived and learned, and felt more and more that this was the life to which he really belonged. And days and weeks and months went by and nothing happened, and that is the happiest thing that can happen to anyone who is already happy.

Then one night the nurse said⁠—

“I have asked. You are to bury your treasure under the window of the solar parlor, and lie down and sleep on it. You’ll take no harm, and when you’re asleep I will say the right words, and you’ll wake under the same skies and not under a built house, like as you feared.”

She wrapped him in a warm cloth mantle of her own, when she took him from his bed that night after all the family were asleep, and put on his shoes and led him to the hole she had secretly dug in below the window. They had put his embroidered leather bag of gold in a little wrought-iron coffer that Sebastian had given him, and the nurse had tightly fastened the join of lid and box with wax and resin. The box was wrapped in a silk scarf, and the whole packet put into a big earthenware jar with a lid, and the join of lid and jar was smeared with resin and covered with clay. The nurse had shown him how to do all this.

“Against the earth spirits and the three hundred years,” she said.

Now she lifted the jar into the hole, and together they filled the hole with earth, treading it in with their feet.

“And when you would return,” said the nurse, “you know the way.”

“Do I?”

“You lay the rattle, the seal, and the moonseeds as before, and listen to the voices.”

And then Dickie lay down in the cloth cloak, and the nurse sat by him and held his hand till he fell asleep. It was June now, and the scent of the roses was very sweet, and the nightingales kept him awake awhile. But the sky overhead was an old friend of his, and as he lay he could see the shining of the dew among the grass blades of the lawn. It was pleasant to lie again in the bed with the green curtains.

When he awoke there was his old friend the starry sky, and for a moment he wondered. Then he remembered. He raised himself on his elbow. There were houses all about⁠—little houses with lights in some of the windows. A broken paling was quite close to him. There was no grass near, only rough trampled earth; the smell all about him was not of roses, but of dustbins, and there were no nightingales⁠—but far away he could hear that restless roar that is the voice of London, and near at hand the foolish song and unsteady footfall of a man going home from the Cat and Whistle. He scratched a cross on the hard ground with a broken bit of a plate to mark the spot, got up and crept on hands and knees to the house, climbed in and found the room where Beale lay asleep.

“Father,” said Dickie, next morning, as Mr. Beale stretched and grunted and rubbed sleepy eyes with his unwashed fists in the cold daylight that filled the front room of 15, Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane. “You got to take this house⁠—that’s what you got to do; you remember.”

“Can’t say I do,” said