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

The old nurse’s hands. The swan glided away between snow and stars, and on the landing inside the open window the nurse held him fast in her arms.

“My lamb!” she said; “my dear, foolish, brave lamb!”

Dickie was pulling himself together.

“If it’s a dream,” he said slowly, “I’ve had enough. I want to wake up. If it’s real⁠—real, with magic in it⁠—you’ve got to explain it all to me⁠—every bit. I can’t go on like this. It’s not fair.”

“Oh, tell him and have done,” said the voice that had begun all the magic, and it seemed to him that something small and white slid along the wainscot of the corridor and vanished quite suddenly, just as a candle flame does when you blow the candle out.

“I will,” said the nurse. “Come, love, I will tell you everything.” She took him down into a warm curtained room, blew to flame the gray ashes on the open hearth, gave him elder wine to drink, hot and spiced, and kneeling before him, rubbing his cold, bare feet, she told him.

“There are certain children born now and then⁠—it does not often happen, but now and then it does⁠—children who are not bound by time as other people are. And if the right bit of magic comes their way, those children have the power to go back and forth in time just as other children go back and forth in space⁠—the space of a room, a playing-field, or a garden alley. Often children lose this power when they are quite young. Sometimes it comes to them gradually so that they hardly know when it begins, and leaves them as gradually, like a dream when you wake and stretch yourself. Sometimes it comes by the saying of a charm. That is how Edred and Elfrida found it. They came from the time that you were born in, and they have been living in this time with you, and now they have gone back to their own time. Didn’t you notice any difference in them? From what they were at Deptford?”

“I should think I did,” said Dickie⁠—“at least, it wasn’t that I noticed any difference so much as that I felt something queer. I couldn’t understand it⁠—it felt stuffy⁠—as if something was going to burst.”

“That was because they were not the cousins you knew at Deptford.”

“But where have the real cousins I knew at Deptford been then⁠—all this time⁠—while those other kids were here pretending to be them?” Dickie asked.

“Oh, they were somewhere else⁠—in Julius Caesar’s time, to be exact⁠—but they don’t know it, and never will know it. They haven’t the charm. To them it will be like a dream that they have forgotten.”

“But the swans and the carriages and the voice⁠—and jumping out of the window⁠ ⁠…” Dickie urged.

“The swans were white magic⁠—the white Mouldiwarp of Arden did all that.”

Then she told him all about the white Mouldiwarp of Arden, and how it was the badge of Arden’s house⁠—its picture being engraved on Tinkler, and how it had done all sorts of magic for Edred and Elfrida, and would do still more.

Dickie and the nurse sat most of the night talking by the replenished fire, for the tale seemed endless. Dickie learned that the Edred and Elfrida who belonged to his own times had a father who was supposed to be dead. “I am forbidden to tell them,” said the nurse, “but thou canst help them, and shalt.”

“I should like that,” said Dickie⁠—“but can’t I see the white Mouldiwarp?”

“I dare not⁠—even I dare not call it again tonight,” the nurse owned. “But maybe I will teach thee a little spell to bring it on another day. It is an angry little beast at times, but kindly, and hardworking.”

Then Dickie told her about the beginnings of the magic, and how he had heard two voices, one of them the Mouldiwarp’s.

“There are three white Mouldiwarps friends to thy house,” she told him⁠—“the Mouldiwarp who is the badge, and the Mouldiwarp who is the crest, and the Great Mouldiwarp who sits on the green and white checkered field of the Ardens’ shield of arms. It was the first two who talked of thee.”

“And how can I find my cousins and help them to find their father?”

“Lay out the moonseeds and the other charms, and wish to be where they are going. Then thou canst speak with them. Wish to be there a week before they come, that thou mayst know the place and the folk.”

“Now?” Dickie asked, but not eagerly, for he was very tired.

“Not now, my lamb,” she said; and so at last Dickie went to bed, his weary brain full of new things more dreamlike than any dreams he had ever had.

After this he talked with the nurse every day, and learned more and more wonders, of which there is no time now for me to tell you. But they are all written in the book of The House of Arden. In that book, too, it is written how Dickie went back from the First James’s time to the time of the Eighth Henry, and took part in the merry country life of those days, and there found the old nurse herself, Edred and Elfrida, and helped them to recover their father from a far country. There also you may read of the marvels of the white clock, and the cliff that none could climb, and the children who were white cats, and the Mouldiwarp who became as big as a polar bear, with other wonders. And when all this was over, Elfrida and Edred wanted Dickie to come back with them to their own time. But he would not. He went back instead to the time he loved, when James the First was King. And when he woke in the little panelled room it seemed to him that all this was only dreams and fancies.

In the course of this adventure he met the white Mouldiwarp, and it was just a white mole, very funny and rather