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

visited later times when all this was matter of history? Dickie’s brain felt fat⁠—swollen⁠—as though it would burst, and he was glad to go to bed⁠—even in that cupboardy place with the panels. But he begged the nurse to leave the panel open.

And when he woke next day it was all true. His aunt and uncle and his two cousins were in the Tower and gloom hung over Arden House in Soho like a black thundercloud over a mountain. And the days went on, and lessons with Mr. Parados were a sort of Inquisition torture to Dickie. For the tutor never let a day pass without trying to find out whether Dickie had shared in any way that guilty knowledge of Elfrida’s which had, so Mr. Parados insisted, overthrown the fell plot of the Papists and preserved to a loyal people His Most Gracious Majesty James the First.

And then one day, quite as though it were the most natural thing in the world, his cousin Edred and Lady Arden his aunt were set free from the Tower and came home. The King had suddenly decided that they at least had had nothing to do with the plot. Lady Arden cried all the time, and, as Dickie owned to himself, “there was enough to make her.” But Edred was full of half thought-out plans and schemes for being revenged on old Parrot-nose. And at last he really did arrange a scheme for getting Elfrida out of the Tower⁠—a perfectly workable scheme. And what is more, it worked. If you want to know how it was done, ask some grownup to tell you how Lady Nithsdale got her husband out of the Tower when he was a prisoner there, and in danger of having his head cut off, and you will readily understand the kind of scheme it was. A necessary part of it was the dressing up of Elfrida in boy’s clothes, and her coming out of the Tower, pretending to be Edred, who, with Richard, had come in to visit Lord Arden. Then the guard at the Tower gateway was changed, and another Edred came out, and they all got into a coach, and there was Elfrida under the coach seat among the straw and other people’s feet, and they all hugged each other in the dark coach as it jolted through the snowy streets to Arden House in Soho.

Dickie, feeling very small and bewildered among all these dangerous happenings, found himself suddenly caught by the arm. The nurse’s hand it was.

“Now,” she said, “Master Richard will go take off his fine suit, and⁠—” He did not hear the end, for he was pushed out of the room. Very discontentedly he found his way to his panelled bed-closet, and took off the smart velvet and fur which he had worn in his visit to the Tower, and put on his everyday things. You may be sure he made every possible haste to get back to his cousins. He wanted to talk over the whole wonderful adventure with them. He found them whispering in a corner.

“What is it?” he asked.

“We’re going to be even with old Parrot-nose,” said Edred, “but you mustn’t be in it, because we’re going away, and you’ve got to stay here, and whatever we decide to do you’ll get the blame of it.”

“I don’t see,” said Richard, “why I shouldn’t have a hand in what I’ve wanted to do these four years.” He had not known that he had known the tutor for four years, but as he said the words he felt that they were true.

“There is a reason,” said Edred. “You go to bed, Richard.”

“Not me,” said Dickie of Deptford firmly.

“If we tell you,” said Elfrida, explaining affectionately, “you won’t believe us.”

“You might at least,” said Richard Arden, catching desperately at the grand manner that seemed to suit these times of ruff and sword and cloak and conspiracy⁠—“you might at least make the trial.”

“Very well, I will,” said Elfrida abruptly. “No, Edred, he has a right to hear. He’s one of us. He won’t give us away. Will you, Dickie dear?”

“You know I won’t,” Dickie assured her.

“Well, then,” said Elfrida slowly, “we are⁠ ⁠… You listen hard and believe with both hands and with all your might, or you won’t be able to believe at all. We are not what we seem, Edred and I. We don’t really belong here at all. I don’t know what’s become of the real Elfrida and Edred who belong to this time. Haven’t we seemed odd to you at all? Different, I mean, from the Edred and Elfrida you’ve been used to?”

The remembrance of the stopped-clock feeling came strongly on Dickie and he nodded.

“Well, that’s because we’re not them. We don’t belong here. We belong three hundred years later in history. Only we’ve got a charm⁠—because in our time Edred is Lord Arden, and there’s a white mole who helps us, and we can go anywhere in history we like.”

“Not quite,” said Edred.

“No; but there are chests of different clothes, and whatever clothes we put on we come to that time in history. I know it sounds like silly untruths,” she added rather sadly, “and I knew you wouldn’t believe it, but it is true. And now we’re going back to our times⁠—Queen Alexandra, you know, and King Edward the Seventh and electric light and motors and 1908. Don’t try to believe it if it hurts you, Dickie dear. I know it’s most awfully rum⁠—but it’s the real true truth.”

Richard said nothing. Had never thought it possible but that he was the only one to whom things like this happened.

“You don’t believe it,” said Edred complacently. “I knew you wouldn’t.”

Dickie felt a swimming sensation. It was impossible that this wonderful change should happen to anyone besides himself. This just meant that the whole thing was a dream. And he said nothing.

“Never mind,” said Elfrida in comforting tones; “don’t try to believe it. I know you can’t. Forget it. Or pretend we