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

try once more the magic of the moonseeds and the rattle and the white seal, and try to get back into that other world. So he crept down into the parlor where a little layer of clear, red fire still burned.

And now the moonseeds and the voices and the magic were over and Dickie awoke, thrilled to feel how cleverly he had managed everything, moved his legs in the bed, rejoicing that he was no longer lame. Then he opened his eyes to feast them on the big, light tapestried room. But the room was not tapestried. It was panelled. And it was rather dark. And it was so small as not to be much better than a cupboard.

This surprised Dickie more than anything else that had ever happened to him, and it frightened him a little too. If the spell of the moonseeds and the rattle and the white seal was not certain to take him where he wished to be, nothing in the world was certain. He might be anywhere where he didn’t wish to be⁠—he might be anyone whom he did not wish to be.

“I’ll never try it again,” he said: “if I get out of this I’ll stick to the woodcarving, and not go venturing about any more among dreams and things.”

He got up and looked out of a narrow window. From it he saw a garden, but it was not a garden he had ever seen before. It had marble seats, balustrades, and the damp dews of autumn hung chill about its almost unleafed trees.

“It might have been worse; it might have been a prison yard,” he told himself. “Come, keep your heart up. Wherever I’ve come to it’s an adventure.”

He turned back to the room and looked for his clothes. There were no clothes there. But the shirt he had on was like the shirt he had slept in at the beautiful house.

He turned to open the door, and there was no door. All was dark, even panelling. He was not shut in a room but in a box. Nonsense, boxes did not have beds in them and windows.

And then suddenly he was no longer the clever person who had managed everything so admirably⁠—who was living two lives with such credit in both, who was managing a grown man for that grown man’s good; but just a little boy rather badly frightened.

The little shirt was the only thing that helped, and that only gave him the desperate courage to beat on the panels and shout, “Nurse! Nurse! Nurse⁠—!”

A crack of light split and opened between two panels, they slid back and between them the nurse came to him⁠—the nurse with the ruff and the frilled cap and the kind, wrinkled face.

He got his arms round her big, comfortable waist.

“There, there, my lamb!” she said, petting him. His clothes hung over her arm, his doublet and little fat breeches, his stockings and the shoes with rosettes.

“Oh, I am here⁠—oh, I am so glad. I thought I’d got to somewhere different.”

She sat down on the bed and began to dress him, soothing him back to confidence with gentle touches and pet names.

“Listen,” she said, when it came to the silver sugar-loaf buttons of the doublet. “You must listen carefully. It is a month since you went away.”

“But I thought time didn’t move⁠—I thought.⁠ ⁠…”

“It was the money upset everything,” she said; “it always does upset everything. I ought to have known. Now attend carefully. No one knows you have been away. You’ve seemed to be here, learning and playing and doing everything like you used. And you’re on a visit now to your cousins at your uncle’s town house. And you all have lessons together⁠—thy tutor gives them. And thy cousins love him no better than thou dost. All thou hast to do is to forget thy dream, and take up thy life here⁠—and be slow to speak, for a day or two, till thou hast grown used to thine own place. Thou’lt have lessons alone today. One of the cousins goes with his mother to be her page and bear her train at the King’s revels at Whitehall, and the other must sit and sew her sampler. Her mother says she hath run wild too long.”

So Dickie had lessons alone with his detested tutor, and his relief from the panic fear of the morning raised his spirits to a degree that unfortunately found vent in what was, for him, extreme naughtiness. He drew a comic picture of his tutor⁠—it really was rather like⁠—with a scroll coming out of his mouth, and on the scroll the words, “Because I am ugly I need not be hateful!” His tutor, who had a nasty way of creeping up behind people, came up behind him at the wrong moment. Dickie was caned on both hands and kept in. Also his dinner was of bread and water, and he had to write out two hundred times, “I am a bad boy, and I ask the pardon of my good tutor. The fifth day of November, 1608.” So he did not see his aunt and cousin in their Whitehall finery⁠—and it was quite late in the afternoon before he even saw his other cousin, who had been sampler-sewing. He would not have written out the lines, he felt sure he would not, only he thought of his cousin and wanted to see her again. For she was the only little girl friend he had.

When the last was done he rushed into the room where she was⁠—he was astonished to find that he knew his way about the house quite well, though he could not remember ever having been there before⁠—and cried out⁠—

“Thy task done? Mine is, too. Old Parrot-nose kept me hard at it, but I thought of thee, and for this once I did all his biddings. So now we are free. Come play ball in the garden!”

His cousin looked up from her sampler, set the frame down and jumped