Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Fancy-full as ever,” said his father; “come, come! Thou’rt weak yet from the fever. Be a man. Remember of what blood thou art. And thy mother — she also hath a gift for thee — from thy grandfather. Hast thou forgotten that? It hangs to the book learning. A reward — and thou hast earned it.”

  “I’ve forgotten that, too,” said Dickie. “You aren’t vexed because I forget? I can’t help it, father.”

  “That I’ll warrant thou cannot. Come, now, to thy mother. My little son! The Earl of Scilly chid me but this summer for sparing the rod and spoiling the child. But thy growth in all things bears out in what I answered him. I said: ‘The boys of our house, my lord, take that pride in it that they learn of their own free will what many an earl’s son must be driven to with rods.’ He took me. His own son is little better than an idiot, and naught but the rod to blame for it, I verily believe.”

  They found the lady-mother and her babe by a little fire in a wide hearth.

  “Our son comes to claim the guerdon of learning,” the father said. And the lady stood up with the babe in her arms.

  “Call the nurse to take him,” she said. But Dickie held out his arms.

  “Oh, mother,” he said, and it was the first time in all his life that he had spoken that word to any one. “Mother, do let me hold him.”

  A warm, stiff bundle was put into his careful arms, and his little brother instantly caught at his hair. It hurt, but Dickie liked it.

  The lady went to one of the carved cabinets and with a bright key from a very bright bunch unlocked one of the heavy panelled doors. She drew out of the darkness within a dull-colored leather bag embroidered in gold thread and crimson silk.

  “He has forgot,” said Sir Richard in an undertone, “what it was that the grandfather promised him. Though he has well earned the same. ’Tis the fever.”

  The mother put the bag in Dickie’s hands.

  “Count it out,” she said, taking her babe from him; and Dickie untied the leathern string, and poured out on to the polished long table what the bag held. Twenty gold pieces.

  “And all with the image of our late dear Queen,” said the mother; “the image of that incomparable virgin Majesty whose example is a beacon for all time to all virtuous ladies.”

  “IT HURT, BUT DICKIE LIKED IT”

  “Ah, yes, indeed,” said the father; “put them up in the bag, boy. They are thine own to thee, to spend as thou wilt.”

  “Not unwisely,” said the mother gently.

  “As he wills,” the father firmly said; “wisely or unwisely. As he wills. And none,” he added, “shall ask how they be spent.”

  The lady frowned; she was a careful housewife, and twenty gold pieces were a large sum.

  “I will not waste it,” said Dickie. “Mother, you may trust me not to waste it.”

  It was the happiest moment of his life to Dickie. The little horse — the gold pieces. . . . Yes, but much more, the sudden, good, safe feeling of father and mother and little brother; of a place where he belonged, where he loved and was loved. And by his equals. For he felt that, as far as a child can be the equal of grown people, he was the equal of these. And Beale was not his equal, either in the graces of the body or in the inner treasures of mind and heart. And hitherto he had loved only Beale; had only, so far as he could remember, been loved by Beale and by that shadowy father, his “Daddy,” who had died in hospital, and dying, had given him the rattle, his Tinkler, that was Harding’s Luck. And in the very heart of that happiest moment came, like a sharp dagger prick, the thought of Beale. What wonders could be done for Beale with those twenty-five gold sovereigns? For Dickie thought of them just as sovereigns — and so they were.

  And as these people who loved him, who were his own, drew nearer and nearer to his heart — his heart, quickened by love of them, felt itself drawn more and more to Mr. Beale. Mr. Beale, the tramp, who had been kind to him when no one else was. Mr. Beale, the tramp and housebreaker.

  So when the nurse took him, tired with new happinesses, to that beautiful tapestried room of his, he roused himself from his good soft sleepiness to say —

  “Nurse, you know a lot of things, don’t you?”

  “I know what I know,” she answered, undoing buttons with speed and authority.

  “You know that other dream of mine — that dream of mine, I mean, the dream of a dreadful place?”

  “And then?”

  “Could I take anything out of this dream — I mean out of this time into the other one?”

  “You could, but you must bring it back when you come again. And you could bring things thence. Certain things: your rattle, your moon-seeds, your seal.”

  He stared at her.

  “You do know things,” he said; “but I want to take things there and leave them there.”

  She knitted thoughtful brows.

  “There’s three hundred thick years between now and then,” she said. “Oh, yes, I know. And if you held it in your hand, you’d lose it like as not in some of the years you go through. Money’s mortal heavy and travels slow. Slower than the soul of you, my lamb. Some one would have time to see it and snatch it and hold to it.”

  “Isn’t there any way?” Dickie asked, insisting to himself that he wasn’t sleepy.

  “There’s the way of everything — the earth,” she said; “bury it, and lie down on the spot where it’s buried, and then, when you get back into the other dream, the kind, thick earth will have hid your secret, and you can dig it up again. It will be there . . . unless other hands have dug there in the three hundred years. You must take your chance of that.”

  “Will you help me?” Dickie asked. “I shall need to dig it very deep if I am to cheat three hundred years. And suppose,” he added, struck by a sudden and unpleasing thought, “there’s a house built on the place. I should be mixed up with the house. Two things can’t be in the same place at the same time. My tutor told me that. And the house would be so much stronger than me — it would get the best of it, and where should I be then?”

  “I’ll ask where thou’d be,” was the very surprising answer. “I’ll ask some one who knows. But it’ll take time — put thy money in the great press, and I’ll keep the key. And next Friday as ever is, come your little cousins.”

  They came. It was more difficult with them than it was with the grown-ups to conceal the fact that he had not always been the Dickie he was now; but it was not so difficult as you might suppose. It was no harder than not talking about the dreams you had last night.

  And now he had indeed a full life: head-work, bodily exercises, work, home life, and joyous hours of play with two children who understood play as the poor little, dirty Deptford children do not and cannot understand it.

  He lived and learned, and felt more and more that this was the life to which he really belonged. And days and weeks and months went by and nothing happened, and that is the happiest thing that can happen to any one who is already happy.

  Then one night the nurse said —

  “I have asked. You are to bury your treasure under the window of the solar parlor, and lie down and sleep on it. You’ll take no harm, and when you’re asleep I will say the right words, and you’ll wake under the same skies and not under a built house, like as you feared.”

  She wrapped him in a warm cloth mantle of her own, when she took him from his bed that night after all the family were asleep, and put on his shoes and led him to the hole she had secretly dug in below the window. They had put his embroidered leather bag of gold in a little wrought-iron coffer that Sebastian had given him, and the nurse had tightly fastened the join of lid and box with wax and resin. The box was wrapped in a silk scarf, and the whole packet put into a big earthenware jar with a lid, and the join of lid and jar was smeared with resin and covered with clay. The nurse had shown him how to do all this.

  “Against the earth spirits and the three hundred years,” she said.

  Now she lifted the jar into the hole, and together they filled the hole wit
h earth, treading it in with their feet.

  “And when you would return,” said the nurse, “you know the way.”

  “Do I?”

  “You lay the rattle, the seal, and the moon-seeds as before, and listen to the voices.”

  And then Dickie lay down in the cloth cloak, and the nurse sat by him and held his hand till he fell asleep. It was June now, and the scent of the roses was very sweet, and the nightingales kept him awake awhile. But the sky overhead was an old friend of his, and as he lay he could see the shining of the dew among the grass blades of the lawn. It was pleasant to lie again in the bed with the green curtains.

  When he awoke there was his old friend the starry sky, and for a moment he wondered. Then he remembered. He raised himself on his elbow. There were houses all about — little houses with lights in some of the windows. A broken paling was quite close to him. There was no grass near, only rough trampled earth; the smell all about him was not of roses, but of dust-bins, and there were no nightingales — but far away he could hear that restless roar that is the voice of London, and near at hand the foolish song and unsteady footfall of a man going home from the “Cat and Whistle.” He scratched a cross on the hard ground with a broken bit of a plate to mark the spot, got up and crept on hands and knees to the house, climbed in and found the room where Beale lay asleep.

  “Father,” said Dickie, next morning, as Mr. Beale stretched and grunted and rubbed sleepy eyes with his unwashed fists in the cold daylight that filled the front room of 15, Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane. “You got to take this house — that’s what you got to do; you remember.”

  “Can’t say I do,” said Beale, scratching his head; “but if the nipper says so, it is so. Let’s go and get a mug and a door-step, and then we’ll see.”

  “You get it — if you’re hungry,” said Dickie. “I’d rather wait here in case anybody else was to take the house. You go and see ‘im now. ‘E’ll think you’re a man in reg’lar work by your being up so early.”

  “P’raps,” said Beale thoughtfully, running his hand over the rustling stubble of his two days’ beard—”p’raps I’d best get a wash and brush-up first, eh? It might be worth it in the end. I’ll ‘ave to go to the doss to get our pram and things, any’ow.”

  The landlord of the desired house really thought Mr. Beale a quite respectable working man, and Mr. Beale accounted for their lack of furniture by saying, quite truthfully, that he and his nipper had come up from Gravesend, doing a bit of work on the way.

  “I could,” he added, quite untruthfully, “give you the gentleman I worked with for me reference — Talbott, ‘is name is — a bald man with a squint and red ears — but p’raps this’ll do as well.” He pulled out of one pocket all their money — two pounds eighteen shillings — except six pennies which he had put in the other pocket to rattle. He rattled them now. “I’m anxious,” he said, confidentially, “to get settled on account of the nipper. I don’t deceive you; we ‘oofed it up, not to waste our little bit, and he’s a hoppy chap.”

  “That’s odd,” said the landlord; “there was a lame boy lived there along of the last party that had it. It’s a cripple’s home by rights, I should think.”

  Beale had not foreseen this difficulty, and had no story ready. So he tried the truth.

  “It’s the same lad, mister,” he said; “that’s why I’m rather set on the ‘ouse. You see, it’s ‘ome to ‘im like,” he added sentimentally.

  “You ‘is father?” said the landlord sharply. And again Beale was inspired to truthfulness — quite a lot of it.

  “No,” he said cautiously, “wish I was. The fact is, the little chap’s aunt wasn’t much class. An’ I found ‘im wandering. An’ not ‘avin’ none of my own, I sort of adopted ‘im.”

  “Like Wandering Hares at the theatre,” said the landlord, who had been told by Dickie’s aunt that the “ungrateful little warmint” had run away. “I see.”

  “And ‘e’s a jolly little chap,” said Beale, warming to his subject and forgetting his caution, “as knowing as a dog-ferret; and his patter — enough to make a cat laugh, ‘e is sometimes. And I’ll pay a week down if you like, mister — and we’ll get our bits of sticks in to-day.”

  “Well,” said the landlord, taking a key from a nail on the wall, “let’s go down and have a look at the ‘ouse. Where’s the kid?”

  “‘E’s there awaitin’ for me,” said Beale; “couldn’t get ‘im away.”

  Dickie was very polite to the landlord, at whom in unhappier days he had sometimes made faces, and when the landlord went he had six of their shillings and they had the key.

  “So now we’ve got a ‘ome of our own,” said Beale, rubbing his hands when they had gone through the house together; “an Englishman’s ‘ome is ‘is castle — and what with the boxes you’ll cut out and the dogs what I’ll pick up, Buckingham Palace’ll look small alongside of us — eh, matey?”

  They locked up the house and went to breakfast, Beale gay as a lark and Dickie rather silent. He was thinking over a new difficulty. It was all very well to bury twenty sovereigns and to know exactly where they were. And they were his own beyond a doubt. But if any one saw those sovereigns dug up, those sovereigns would be taken away from him. No one would believe that they were his own. And the earthenware pot was so big. And so many windows looked out on the garden. No one could hope to dig up a big thing like that from his back garden without attracting some attention. Besides, he doubted whether he were strong enough to dig it up, even if he could do so unobserved. He had not thought of this when he had put the gold there in that other life. He was so much stronger then. He sighed.

  “Got the ‘ump, mate?” asked Beale, with his mouth full.

  “No, I was just a-thinkin’.”

  “We’d best buy the sticks first thing,” said Beale; “it’s a cruel world. ‘No sticks, no trust’ is the landlord’s motto.”

  Do you want to know what sticks they bought? I will tell you. They bought a rusty old bedstead, very big, with laths that hung loose like a hammock, and all its knobs gone and only bare screws sticking up spikily. Also a flock mattress and pillows of a dull dust color to go on the bed, and some blankets and sheets, all matching the mattress to a shade. They bought a table and two chairs, and a kitchen fender with a round steel moon — only it was very rusty — and a hand-bowl for the sink, and a small zinc bath, “to wash your shirt in,” said Mr. Beale. Four plates, two cups and saucers, two each of knives, forks, and spoons, a tin teapot, a quart jug, a pail, a bit of Kidderminster carpet, half a pound of yellow soap, a scrubbing-brush and broom, two towels, a kettle, a saucepan and a baking-dish, and a pint of paraffin. Also there was a tin lamp to hang on the wall with a dazzling crinkled tin reflector. This was the only thing that was new, and it cost tenpence halfpenny. All the rest of the things together cost twenty-six shillings and sevenpence halfpenny, and I think they were cheap.

  But they seemed very poor and very little of them when they were dumped down in the front room. The bed especially looked far from its best — a mere heap of loose iron.

  “And we ain’t got our droring-room suit, neither,” said Mr. Beale. “Lady’s and gent’s easy-chairs, four hoccasionals, pianner, and foomed oak booreau.”

  “Curtains,” said Dickie—”white curtains for the parlor and short blinds everywhere else. I’ll go and get ’em while you clean the winders. That old shirt of mine. It won’t hang through another washing. Clean ’em with that.”

  “You don’t give your orders, neither,” said Beale contentedly.

  The curtains and a penn’orth of tacks, a hammer borrowed from a neighbor, and an hour’s cheerful work completed the fortification of the Englishman’s house against the inquisitiveness of passers-by. But the landlord frowned anxiously as he went past the house.

  “Don’t like all that white curtain,” he told himself; “not much be’ind it, if you ask me. People don’t go to that extreme in Nottingham lace without there’s something to hide — a house ful
l of emptiness, most likely.”

  Inside Dickie was telling a very astonished Mr. Beale that there was money buried in the garden.

  “It was give me,” said he, “for learning of something — and we’ve got to get it up so as no one sees us. I can’t think of nothing but build a chicken-house and then dig inside of it. I wish I was cleverer. Here Ward would have thought of something first go off.”

  “Don’t you worry,” said Beale; “you’re clever enough for this poor world. You’re all right. Come on out and show us where you put it. Just peg with yer foot on the spot, looking up careless at the sky.”

  They went out. And Dickie put his foot on the cross he had scratched with the broken bit of plate. It was close to the withered stalk of the moonflower.

  “This ‘ere garden’s in a poor state,” said Beale in a loud voice; “wants turning over’s what I think — against the winter. I’ll get a spade and ‘ave a turn at it this very day, so I will. This ‘ere old artichook’s got some roots, I lay.”

  The digging began at the fence and reached the moonflower, whose roots were indeed deep. Quite a hole Mr. Beale dug before the tall stalk sloped and fell with slow dignity, like a forest tree before the axe. Then the man and the child went in and brought out the kitchen table and chairs, and laid blankets over them to air in the autumn sunlight. Dickie played at houses under the table — it was not the sort of game he usually played, but the neighbors could not know that. The table happened to be set down just over the hole that had held the roots of the moonflower. Dickie dug a little with a trowel in the blanket house.

  After dark they carried the blankets and things in. Then one of the blankets was nailed up over the top-floor window, and on the iron bedstead’s dingy mattress the resin was melted from the lid of the pot that Mr. Beale had brought in with the other things from the garden. Also it was melted from the crack of the iron casket. Mr. Beale’s eyes, always rather prominent, almost resembled the eyes of the lobster or the snail as their gaze fell on the embroidered leather bag. And when Dickie opened this and showered the twenty gold coins into a hollow of the drab ticking, he closed his eyes and sighed, and opened them again and said —