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

me. I knows you’re straight now, even if it didn’t begin just like that. Let’s get to bed, shan’t us?”

Mr. Beale dreamed that he was trying to drown Dickie in a pond full of stewed eels. Dickie didn’t dream at all.

You may wonder why, since going to the beautiful other world took no time and was so easy, Dickie did not do it every night, or even at odd times during the day.

Well, the fact was he dared not. He loved the other life so much that he feared that, once again there, he might not have the courage to return to Mr. Beale and Deptford and the feel of dirty clothes and the smell of dustbins. It was no light thing to come back from that to this. And now he made a resolution⁠—that he would not set out the charm of Tinkler and seal and moonseeds until he had established Mr. Beale in an honorable calling and made a life for him in which he could be happy. A great undertaking for a child? Yes. But then Dickie was not an ordinary child, or none of these adventures would ever have happened to him.

The pawnbroker, always a good friend to Dickie, had the wit to see that the child was not lying when he said that the box and the bag and the gold pieces had been given to him.

He changed the gold pieces stamped with the image of Queen Elizabeth for others stamped with the image of Queen Victoria. And he gave five pounds for the wrought-iron box, and owned that he should make a little⁠—a very little⁠—out of it. “And if your grand society friends give you any more treasures, you know the house to come to⁠—the fairest house in the trade, though I say it.”

“Thank you very much,” said Dickie; “you’ve been a good friend to me. I hope some day I shall do you a better turn than the little you make out of my boxes and things.”

The Jew sold the wrought-iron box that very week for twenty guineas.

And Dickie and Mr. Beale now possessed twenty-seven pounds. New clothes were bought⁠—more furniture. Twenty-two pounds of the money was put in the savings bank. Dickie bought carving tools and went to the Goldsmiths’ Institute to learn to use them. The front bedroom was fitted with a bench for Dickie. The back sitting-room was a kennel for the dogs which Mr. Beale instantly began to collect. The front room was a parlor⁠—a real parlor. A decent young woman⁠—Amelia by name⁠—was engaged to come in every day and “do for” them. The clothes they wore were clean; the food they ate was good. Dickie’s knowledge of an ordered life in a great house helped him to order life in a house that was little. And day by day they earned their living. The new life was fairly started. And now Dickie felt that he might dare to go back through the three hundred years to all that was waiting for him there.

“But I will only stay a month,” he told himself, “a month here and a month there, that will keep things even. Because if I were longer there than I am here I should not be growing up so fast here as I should there. And everything would be crooked. And how silly if I were a grown man in that life and had to come back and be a little boy in this!”

I do not pretend that the idea did not occur to Dickie, “Now that Beale is fairly started he could do very well without me.” But Dickie knew better. He dismissed the idea. Besides, Beale had been good to him and he loved him.

The white curtains had now no sordid secrets to keep⁠—and when the landlord called for the rent Mr. Beale was able to ask him to step in⁠—into a comfortable room with a horsehair sofa and a big, worn easy-chair, a carpet, four old mahogany chairs, and a table with a clean blue-and-red checked cloth on it. There was a bright clock on the mantelpiece, and vases with chrysanthemums in them, and there were red woollen curtains as well as the white lace ones.

“You’re as snug as snug in here,” said the landlord.

“Not so dusty,” said Beale, shining from soap; “ ’ave a look at my dawgs?”

He succeeded in selling the landlord a pup for ten shillings and came back to Dickie sitting by the pleasant firelight.

“It’s all very smart,” he said, “but don’t you never feel the fidgets in your legs? I’ve kep’ steady, and keep steady I will. But in the spring⁠—when the weather gets a bit open⁠—what d’you say to shutting up the little ’ouse and taking the road for a bit? Gentlemen do it even,” he added wistfully. “Walking towers they call ’em.”

“I’d like it,” said Dickie, “but what about the dogs?”

“Oh! Amelia’d do for them a fair treat, all but Fan and Fly, as ’ud go along of us. I dunno what it is,” he said, “makes me ’anker so after the road. I was always like it from a boy. Couldn’t get me to school, so they couldn’t⁠—allus after birds’ nests or rabbits or the like. Not but what I liked it well enough where I was bred. I didn’t tell you, did I, we passed close longside our old ’ome that time we slep’ among the furze bushes? I don’t s’pose my father’s alive now. But ’e was a game old chap⁠—shouldn’t wonder but what he’d stuck it out.”

“Let’s go and see him some day,” said Dickie.

“I dunno,” said Beale; “you see, I was allus a great hanxiety to ’im. And besides, I shouldn’t like to find ’im gone. Best not know nothing. That’s what I say.”

But he sighed as he said it, and he filled his pipe in a thoughtful silence.

VII Dickie Learns Many Things

That night Dickie could not sleep. And as he lay awake a great resolve grew strong within him. He would