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

“Well, I did think,” said Beale, rubbing his nose thoughtfully, “of asking ’Melia to come down ’ere along o’ the dawgs. Seems a pity to separate ’em somehow. It was Lord Arden put it into my ’ed. ‘You oughter be married you ought,’ ’e says to me pleasant like, man to man; ‘ain’t there any young woman I could give a trifle to, to set you and her up in housekeeping?’ So then I casts about, and I thinks of ’Melia. As well ’er as anybody, and she’s used to the dawgs. And the trifle’s an hundred pounds. That’s all. That’s all! So I’m sending to her by this post, and it’s an awful toss up getting married, but ’Melia ain’t like a stranger, and it couldn’t ever be the same with us two and nipper after all this set out. What you say?”

I don’t know what Dickie said; what he felt was something like this:⁠—

“I have tried to stick to Beale, and help him along, and I did come back from the other old long-ago world to help him, and I have been sticking to things I didn’t like so as to help him and get him settled. He was my bit of work, and now someone else comes along and takes my work out of my hands, and finishes it. And here’s Beale provided for and settled. And I meant to provide for him myself. And I don’t like it!”

That was what he felt at first. But afterwards he had to own that it was “a jolly lucky thing for Beale.” And for himself too. He found that to be at Arden Castle with Edred and Elfrida all day, at play and at lessons, was almost as good as being with them in the beautiful old dream-life. All the things that he had hated in this modern life, when he was Dickie of Deptford, ceased to trouble him now that he was Richard Arden. For the difference between being rich and poor is as great as the difference between being warm and cold.

After that first day a sort of shyness came over the three children, and they spoke no more of the strange adventures they had had together, but just played at all the ordinary everyday games, till they almost forgot that there was any magic, had ever been any. The fact was, the life they were leading was so happy in itself that they needed no magic to make them contented. It was not till after the wedding of ’Melia and Mr. Beale that Dickie remembered that to find the Arden Treasure for his cousins had been one of his reasons for coming back to this, the Nowadays world.

I wish I had time to tell you about the wedding. I could write a whole book about it. How Amelia came down from London and was married in Arden Church. How she wore a white dress and a large hat with a wreath of orange blossoms, a filmy veil, and real kid gloves⁠—all gifts of Miss Edith Arden, Lord Arden’s sister. How Lord Arden presented an enormous wedding cake and a glorious wedding breakfast, and gave away the bride, and made a speech saying he owed a great debt to Mr. Beale for his kindness to his nephew Richard Arden, and how surprised everyone was to hear Dickie’s new name. How all the dogs wore white favors and had each a crumb of wedding cake; and how when the wedding feast was over and the guests gone, the bride tucked up her white dress under a big apron and set about arranging in the new rooms the “sticks” of furniture which Dickie and Beale had brought together from the little home in Deptford, and which had come in a van by road all the way to Arden.

The Ardens had gone back to the Castle, and Dickie with them, and old Beale was smoking in his usual chair by his front door⁠—so there was no one to hear Beale’s compliment to his bride. He came behind her and put his arm round her as she was dusting the mantelpiece. “Go on with you,” said the new Mrs. Beale; “anyone ’ud think we was courting.”

“So we be,” said Beale, and kissed ’Melia for the first time. “We got all our courtin’ to do now. See? I might a-picked an’ choosed,” he added reflectively, “but there⁠—I dare say I might a-done worse.”

’Melia blushed with pleasure at the compliment, and went on with the dusting.

It was as the Ardens walked home over the short turf that Lord Arden said to his sister, “I wish all the cottages about here were like Beale’s. It didn’t cost so very much. If I could only buy back the rest of the land, I’d show some people what a model village is like. Only I can’t buy it back. He wants far more than we can think of managing.”

And Dickie heard what he said. That was why, when next he was alone with his cousins, he began⁠—

“Look here⁠—you aren’t allowed to use your magic any more, to go and look for the treasure. But I am. And I vote we go and look for it. And then your father can buy back the old lands, and build the new cottages and mend up Arden Castle, and make it like it used to be.”

“Oh, let’s,” said Elfrida, with enthusiasm. But Edred unexpectedly answered, “I don’t know.” The three children were sitting in the window of the gate-tower looking down on the green turf of the Castle yard.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Elfrida asked briskly.

“I mean I don’t know,” said Edred stolidly; “we’re all right as we are, I think. I used to think I liked magic and things. But if you come to think of it something horrid happened to us every single time we went into the past with our magic. We were always being chased or put in prison or bothered