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

“I am so glad,” she said. “I do hate this horrid sampler!”

And as she said it Dickie had a most odd feeling, rather as if a clock had struck, or had stopped striking⁠—a feeling of sudden change. But he could not wait to wonder about it or to question what it was that he really felt. His cousin was waiting.

“Come, Elfrida,” he said, and held out his hand. They went together into the garden.

Now if you have read a book called The House of Arden you will already know that Dickie’s cousins were called Edred and Elfrida, and that their father, Lord Arden, had a beautiful castle by the sea, as well as a house in London, and that he and his wife were great favorites at the Court of King James the First. If you have not read that book, and didn’t already know these things⁠—well, you know them now. And Arden was Dickie’s own name too, in this old life, and his father was Sir Richard Arden, of Deptford and Aylesbury. And his tutor was Mr. Parados, called Parrot-nose “for short” by his disrespectful pupils.

Dickie and Elfrida played ball, and they played hide-and-seek, and they ran races. He preferred play to talk just then; he did not want to let out the fact that he remembered nothing whatever of the doings of the last month. Elfrida did not seem very anxious to talk, either. The garden was most interesting, and the only blot on the scene was the black figure of the tutor walking up and down with a sour face and his thumbs in one of his dull-looking books.

The children sat down on the step of one of the stone seats, and Dickie was wondering why he had felt that queer clock-stopping feeling, when he was roused from his wonderings by hearing Elfrida say⁠—

“Please to remember
The Fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.”

“How odd!” he thought. “I didn’t know that was so old as all this.” And he remembered hearing his father, Sir Richard Arden, say, “Treason’s a dangerous word to let lie on your lips these days.” So he said⁠—

“ ’Tis not a merry song, cousin, nor a safe one. ’Tis best not to sing of treason.”

“But it didn’t come off, you know, and he’s always burnt in the end.”

So already Guy Fawkes burnings went on. Dickie wondered whether there would be a bonfire tonight. It was the Fifth of November. He had had to write the date two hundred times so he was fairly certain of it. He was afraid of saying too much or too little. And for the life of him he could not remember the date of the Gunpowder Plot. Still he must say something, so he said⁠—

“Are there more verses?”

“No,” said Elfrida.

“I wonder,” he said, trying to feel his way, “what treason the ballad deals with?”

He felt it had been the wrong thing to say, when Elfrida answered in surprised tones⁠—

“Don’t you know? I know. And I know some of the names of the conspirators and who they wanted to kill and everything.”

“Tell me” seemed the wisest thing to say, and he said it as carelessly as he could.

“The King hadn’t been fair to the Catholics, you know,” said Elfrida, who evidently knew all about the matter, “so a lot of them decided to kill him and the Houses of Parliament. They made a plot⁠—there were a whole lot of them in it.”

The clock-stopping feeling came on again. Elfrida was different somehow. The Elfrida who had gone on the barge to Gravesend and played with him at the Deptford house had never used such expressions as “a whole lot of them in it.” He looked at her and she went on⁠—

“They said Lord Arden was in it, but he wasn’t, and some of them were to pretend to be hunting and to seize the Princess Elizabeth and proclaim her Queen, and the rest were to blow the Houses of Parliament up when the King went to open them.”

“I never heard this tale from my tutor,” said Dickie. And without knowing why he felt uneasy, and because he felt uneasy he laughed. Then he said, “Proceed, cousin.”

Elfrida went on telling him about the Gunpowder Plot, but he hardly listened. The stopped-clock feeling was growing so strong. But he heard her say, “Mr. Tresham wrote to his relation, Lord Monteagle, that they were going to blow up the King,” and he found himself saying, “What King?” though he knew the answer perfectly well.

“Why, King James the First,” said Elfrida, and suddenly the horrible tutor pounced and got Elfrida by the wrist. Then all in a moment everything grew confused. Mr. Parados was asking questions and little Elfrida was trying to answer them, and Dickie understood that the Gunpowder Plot had not happened yet, and that Elfrida had given the whole show away. How did she know? And the verse?

“Tell me all⁠—every name, every particular,” the loathsome tutor was saying, “or it will be the worse for thee and thy father.”

Elfrida was positively green with terror, and looked appealingly at Dickie.

“Come, sir,” he said, in as manly a voice as he could manage, “you frighten my cousin. It is but a tale she told. She is always merry and full of many inventions.”

But the tutor would not be silenced.

“And it’s in history,” he heard Elfrida say.

What followed was a mist of horrible things. When the mist cleared Dickie found himself alone in the house with Mr. Parados, the nurse, and the servants, for the Earl and Countess of Arden, Edred, and Elfrida were lodged in the Tower of London on a charge of high treason.

For this was, it seemed, the Fifth of November, the day on which the Gunpowder Plot should have been carried out; and Elfrida it was, and not Mr. Tresham, Lord Monteagle’s cousin, who had given away the whole business.

But how had Elfrida known? Could it be that she had dreams like his, and in those dreams