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

wish my uncle may restore the Castle, and take care of the poor people so that there aren’t any poor people, and everyone’s comfortable, just as I meant to do.”

He took off his cap and coat and flung them outside the circle, his boots too.

“I wish I may go back to James the First’s time, and live out my life there, and do honor in my life and death to the house of Arden.”

The children blinked. Dickie and Tinkler and the white seal were gone, and only the empty ring of moonseeds lay on the sand.

“Shocking bathing fatality,” the newspapers said. “Lord Arden drowned. The body not yet recovered.”

It never was recovered, of course. Elfrida and Edred said nothing. No wonder, their elders said. The shock was too great and too sudden.

The father of Edred and Elfrida is Lord Arden now. He has done all that Dickie would have done. He has made Arden the happiest and most prosperous village in England, and the stream beside which Dickie bade farewell to his cousins flows, a broad moat round the waters of the Castle, restored now to all its own splendor.

There is a tablet in the church which tells of the death by drowning of Richard, Sixteenth Lord Arden. The children read it every Sunday for a year, and knew that it did not tell the truth. But by the time the moonseeds had grown and flowered and shed their seeds in the Castle garden they ceased to know this, and talked often, sadly and fondly, of dear cousin Dickie who was drowned. And at the same time they ceased to remember that they had ever been out of their own time into the past, so that if they were to read this book they would think it all nonsense and makeup, and not in the least recognize the story as their own.

But whatever else is forgotten, Dickie is remembered. And he who gave up his life here for the sake of those he loved will live as long as life shall beat in the hearts of those who loved him.

And Dickie himself. I see him in his ruff and cloak, with his little sword by his side, living out the life he has chosen in the old England when James the First was King. I see him growing in grace and favor, versed in book learning, expert in all noble sports and exercises. For Dickie is not lame now.

I see the roots of his being taking fast hold of his chosen life, and the life that he renounced receding, receding till he can hardly see it any more.

I see him, a tall youth, straight and strong, lending the old nurse his arm to walk in the trim, beautiful garden at Deptford. And I hear him say⁠—

“When I was a little boy, nurse, I had mighty strange dreams⁠—of another life than this.”

“Forget them,” she says; “dreams go to the making of all proper men. But now thou art a man; forget the dreams of thy childhood, and play the man to the glory of God and of the house of Arden. And let thy dreams be of the life to come, compared to which all lives on earth are only dreams. And in that life all those who have loved shall meet and be together forevermore, in that life when all the dear and noble dreams of the earthly life shall at last and forever be something more than dreams.”

List of Illustrations

A six-pointed star pattern made up of two overlapping triangles.

Colophon

Harding’s Luck
was published in 1909 by
E. Nesbit.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
David Grigg,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2009 by
Suzanne Shell, Emmy, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
Boy with a Sword,
a painting completed in 1861 by
Édouard Manet.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The League of Moveable Type.

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