Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Give you? They give you that. I don’t believe you.”

  “You got to believe me,” said Dickie firmly. “I never told you a lie, did I?”

  “Come to think of it, I don’t know as you ever did,” Beale admitted.

  “Well,” said Dickie, “they was give me — see?”

  “We’ll never change ‘em, though,” said Beale despondently. “We’d get lagged for a cert. They’d say we pinched ‘em.”

  “No, they won’t. ‘Cause I’ve got a friend as’ll change ’em for me, and then we’ll ‘ave new clobber and some more furniture, and a carpet and a crockery basin to wash our hands and faces in ‘stead of that old tin thing. And a bath we’ll ‘ave. And you shall buy some more pups. And I’ll get some proper carving tools. And our fortune’s made. See?”

  “You nipper,” said Beale, slowly and fondly, “the best day’s work ever I done was when I took up with you. You’re straight, you are — one of the best. Many’s the boy would ‘ave done a bunk and took the shiners along with him. But you stuck to old Beale, and he’ll stick to you.”

  “That’s all right,” said Dickie, beginning to put the bright coins back into the bag.

  “But it ain’t all right,” Beale insisted stubbornly; “it ain’t no good. I must ‘ave it all out, or bust. I didn’t never take you along of me ‘cause I fancied you like what I said. I was just a-looking out for a nipper to shove through windows — see? — along of that redheaded chap what you never set eyes on.”

  “I’ve known that a long time,” said Dickie, gravely watching the candle flicker on the bare mantel-shelf.

  “I didn’t mean no good to you, not at first I didn’t,” said Beale, “when you wrote on the sole of my boot. I’d bought that bit of paper and pencil a-purpose. There!”

  “You ain’t done me no ‘arm, anyway,” said Dickie.

  “No — I know I ain’t. ‘Cause why? ‘Cause I took to you the very first day. I allus been kind to you — you can’t say I ain’t.” Mr. Beale was confused by the two desires which make it difficult to confess anything truthfully — the desire to tell the worst of oneself and the desire to do full justice to oneself at the same time. It is so very hard not to blacken the blackness, or whiten the whiteness, when one comes to trying to tell the truth about oneself. “But I been a beast all the same,” said Mr. Beale helplessly.

  “Oh, stow it!” Dickie said; “now you’ve told me, it’s all square.”

  “You won’t keep a down on me for it?”

  “Now, should I?” said Dickie, exasperated and very sleepy. “Now all is open as the day and we can pursue our career as honorable men and comrades in all high emprise. I mean,” he explained, noticing Mr. Beale’s open mouth and eyes more lobster-like than ever—”I mean that’s all right, farver, and you see it don’t make any difference to me. I knows you’re straight now, even if it didn’t begin just like that. Let’s get to bed, shan’t us?”

  Mr. Beale dreamed that he was trying to drown Dickie in a pond full of stewed eels. Dickie didn’t dream at all.

  You may wonder why, since going to the beautiful other world took no time and was so easy, Dickie did not do it every night, or even at odd times during the day.

  Well, the fact was he dared not. He loved the other life so much that he feared that, once again there, he might not have the courage to return to Mr. Beale and Deptford and the feel of dirty clothes and the smell of dust-bins. It was no light thing to come back from that to this. And now he made a resolution — that he would not set out the charm of Tinkler and seal and moon-seeds until he had established Mr. Beale in an honorable calling and made a life for him in which he could be happy. A great undertaking for a child? Yes. But then Dickie was not an ordinary child, or none of these adventures would ever have happened to him.

  The pawnbroker, always a good friend to Dickie, had the wit to see that the child was not lying when he said that the box and the bag and the gold pieces had been given to him.

  He changed the gold pieces stamped with the image of Queen Elizabeth for others stamped with the image of Queen Victoria. And he gave five pounds for the wrought-iron box, and owned that he should make a little — a very little — out of it. “And if your grand society friends give you any more treasures, you know the house to come to — the fairest house in the trade, though I say it.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Dickie; “you’ve been a good friend to me. I hope some day I shall do you a better turn than the little you make out of my boxes and things.”

  The Jew sold the wrought-iron box that very week for twenty guineas.

  And Dickie and Mr. Beale now possessed twenty-seven pounds. New clothes were bought — more furniture. Twenty-two pounds of the money was put in the savings bank. Dickie bought carving tools and went to the Goldsmiths’ Institute to learn to use them. The front bedroom was fitted with a bench for Dickie. The back sitting-room was a kennel for the dogs which Mr. Beale instantly began to collect. The front room was a parlor — a real parlor. A decent young woman — Amelia by name — was engaged to come in every day and “do for” them. The clothes they wore were clean; the food they ate was good. Dickie’s knowledge of an ordered life in a great house helped him to order life in a house that was little. And day by day they earned their living. The new life was fairly started. And now Dickie felt that he might dare to go back through the three hundred years to all that was waiting for him there.

  “But I will only stay a month,” he told himself, “a month here and a month there, that will keep things even. Because if I were longer there than I am here I should not be growing up so fast here as I should there. And everything would be crooked. And how silly if I were a grown man in that life and had to come back and be a little boy in this!”

  I do not pretend that the idea did not occur to Dickie, “Now that Beale is fairly started he could do very well without me.” But Dickie knew better. He dismissed the idea. Besides, Beale had been good to him and he loved him.

  The white curtains had now no sordid secrets to keep — and when the landlord called for the rent Mr. Beale was able to ask him to step in — into a comfortable room with a horsehair sofa and a big, worn easy-chair, a carpet, four old mahogany chairs, and a table with a clean blue-and-red checked cloth on it. There was a bright clock on the mantelpiece, and vases with chrysanthemums in them, and there were red woollen curtains as well as the white lace ones.

  “You’re as snug as snug in here,” said the landlord.

  “Not so dusty,” said Beale, shining from soap; “‘ave a look at my dawgs?”

  He succeeded in selling the landlord a pup for ten shillings and came back to Dickie sitting by the pleasant firelight.

  “It’s all very smart,” he said, “but don’t you never feel the fidgets in your legs? I’ve kep’ steady, and keep steady I will. But in the spring — when the weather gets a bit open — what d’you say to shutting up the little ‘ouse and taking the road for a bit? Gentlemen do it even,” he added wistfully. “Walking towers they call ‘em.”

  “I’d like it,” said Dickie, “but what about the dogs?”

  “Oh! Amelia’d do for them a fair treat, all but Fan and Fly, as ‘ud go along of us. I dunno what it is,” he said, “makes me ‘anker so after the road. I was always like it from a boy. Couldn’t get me to school, so they couldn’t — allus after birds’ nests or rabbits or the like. Not but what I liked it well enough where I was bred. I didn’t tell you, did I, we passed close longside our old ‘ome that time we slep’ among the furze bushes? I don’t s’pose my father’s alive now. But ‘e was a game old chap — shouldn’t wonder but what he’d stuck it out.”

  “Let’s go and see him some day,” said Dickie.

  “I dunno,” said Beale; “you see, I was allus a great hanxiety to ‘im. And besides, I shouldn’t like to find ‘im gone. Best not know nothing. That’s what I say.”

  But he sighed as he said it, and he filled his pipe in a thoughtful silence.

  CHAPTER
VII. DICKIE LEARNS MANY THINGS

  That night Dickie could not sleep. And as he lay awake a great resolve grew strong within him. He would try once more the magic of the moon-seeds and the rattle and the white seal, and try to get back into that other world. So he crept down into the parlor where a little layer of clear, red fire still burned.

  And now the moon-seeds and the voices and the magic were over and Dickie awoke, thrilled to feel how cleverly he had managed everything, moved his legs in the bed, rejoicing that he was no longer lame. Then he opened his eyes to feast them on the big, light tapestried room. But the room was not tapestried. It was panelled. And it was rather dark. And it was so small as not to be much better than a cupboard.

  This surprised Dickie more than anything else that had ever happened to him, and it frightened him a little too. If the spell of the moon-seeds and the rattle and the white seal was not certain to take him where he wished to be, nothing in the world was certain. He might be anywhere where he didn’t wish to be — he might be any one whom he did not wish to be.

  “I’ll never try it again,” he said: “if I get out of this I’ll stick to the wood-carving, and not go venturing about any more among dreams and things.”

  He got up and looked out of a narrow window. From it he saw a garden, but it was not a garden he had ever seen before. It had marble seats, balustrades, and the damp dews of autumn hung chill about its almost unleafed trees.

  “It might have been worse; it might have been a prison yard,” he told himself. “Come, keep your heart up. Wherever I’ve come to it’s an adventure.”

  He turned back to the room and looked for his clothes. There were no clothes there. But the shirt he had on was like the shirt he had slept in at the beautiful house.

  He turned to open the door, and there was no door. All was dark, even panelling. He was not shut in a room but in a box. Nonsense, boxes did not have beds in them and windows.

  And then suddenly he was no longer the clever person who had managed everything so admirably — who was living two lives with such credit in both, who was managing a grown man for that grown man’s good; but just a little boy rather badly frightened.

  The little shirt was the only thing that helped, and that only gave him the desperate courage to beat on the panels and shout, “Nurse! Nurse! Nurse —— !”

  A crack of light split and opened between two panels, they slid back and between them the nurse came to him — the nurse with the ruff and the frilled cap and the kind, wrinkled face.

  He got his arms round her big, comfortable waist.

  “There, there, my lamb!” she said, petting him. His clothes hung over her arm, his doublet and little fat breeches, his stockings and the shoes with rosettes.

  “Oh, I am here — oh, I am so glad. I thought I’d got to somewhere different.”

  She sat down on the bed and began to dress him, soothing him back to confidence with gentle touches and pet names.

  “Listen,” she said, when it came to the silver sugar-loaf buttons of the doublet. “You must listen carefully. It is a month since you went away.”

  “But I thought time didn’t move — I thought. . . .”

  “It was the money upset everything,” she said; “it always does upset everything. I ought to have known. Now attend carefully. No one knows you have been away. You’ve seemed to be here, learning and playing and doing everything like you used. And you’re on a visit now to your cousins at your uncle’s town house. And you all have lessons together — thy tutor gives them. And thy cousins love him no better than thou dost. All thou hast to do is to forget thy dream, and take up thy life here — and be slow to speak, for a day or two, till thou hast grown used to thine own place. Thou’lt have lessons alone to-day. One of the cousins goes with his mother to be her page and bear her train at the King’s revels at Whitehall, and the other must sit and sew her sampler. Her mother says she hath run wild too long.”

  So Dickie had lessons alone with his detested tutor, and his relief from the panic fear of the morning raised his spirits to a degree that unfortunately found vent in what was, for him, extreme naughtiness. He drew a comic picture of his tutor — it really was rather like — with a scroll coming out of his mouth, and on the scroll the words, “Because I am ugly I need not be hateful!” His tutor, who had a nasty way of creeping up behind people, came up behind him at the wrong moment. Dickie was caned on both hands and kept in. Also his dinner was of bread and water, and he had to write out two hundred times, “I am a bad boy, and I ask the pardon of my good tutor. The fifth day of November, 1608.” So he did not see his aunt and cousin in their Whitehall finery — and it was quite late in the afternoon before he even saw his other cousin, who had been sampler-sewing. He would not have written out the lines, he felt sure he would not, only he thought of his cousin and wanted to see her again. For she was the only little girl friend he had.

  When the last was done he rushed into the room where she was — he was astonished to find that he knew his way about the house quite well, though he could not remember ever having been there before — and cried out —

  “Thy task done? Mine is, too. Old Parrot-nose kept me hard at it, but I thought of thee, and for this once I did all his biddings. So now we are free. Come play ball in the garden!”

  His cousin looked up from her sampler, set the frame down and jumped up.

  “I am so glad,” she said. “I do hate this horrid sampler!”

  And as she said it Dickie had a most odd feeling, rather as if a clock had struck, or had stopped striking — a feeling of sudden change. But he could not wait to wonder about it or to question what it was that he really felt. His cousin was waiting.

  “Come, Elfrida,” he said, and held out his hand. They went together into the garden.

  Now if you have read a book called “The House of Arden” you will already know that Dickie’s cousins were called Edred and Elfrida, and that their father, Lord Arden, had a beautiful castle by the sea, as well as a house in London, and that he and his wife were great favorites at the Court of King James the First. If you have not read that book, and didn’t already know these things — well, you know them now. And Arden was Dickie’s own name too, in this old life, and his father was Sir Richard Arden, of Deptford and Aylesbury. And his tutor was Mr. Parados, called Parrot-nose “for short” by his disrespectful pupils.

  Dickie and Elfrida played ball, and they played hide-and-seek, and they ran races. He preferred play to talk just then; he did not want to let out the fact that he remembered nothing whatever of the doings of the last month. Elfrida did not seem very anxious to talk, either. The garden was most interesting, and the only blot on the scene was the black figure of the tutor walking up and down with a sour face and his thumbs in one of his dull-looking books.

  The children sat down on the step of one of the stone seats, and Dickie was wondering why he had felt that queer clock-stopping feeling, when he was roused from his wonderings by hearing Elfrida say —

  “Please to remember

  The Fifth of November,

  The gunpowder treason and plot.

  I see no reason

  Why gunpowder treason

  Should ever be forgot.”

  “How odd!” he thought. “I didn’t know that was so old as all this.” And he remembered hearing his father, Sir Richard Arden, say, “Treason’s a dangerous word to let lie on your lips these days.” So he said —

  “’Tis not a merry song, cousin, nor a safe one. ’Tis best not to sing of treason.”

  “But it didn’t come off, you know, and he’s always burnt in the end.”

  So already Guy Fawkes burnings went on. Dickie wondered whether there would be a bonfire to-night. It was the Fifth of November. He had had to write the date two hundred times so he was fairly certain of it. He was afraid of saying too much or too little. And for the life of him he could not remember the date of the Gunpowder Plot. Still he must say something, so he said —

  “Are there more ver
ses?”

  “No,” said Elfrida.

  “I wonder,” he said, trying to feel his way, “what treason the ballad deals with?”

  He felt it had been the wrong thing to say, when Elfrida answered in surprised tones —

  “Don’t you know? I know. And I know some of the names of the conspirators and who they wanted to kill and everything.”

  “Tell me” seemed the wisest thing to say, and he said it as carelessly as he could.

  “The King hadn’t been fair to the Catholics, you know,” said Elfrida, who evidently knew all about the matter, “so a lot of them decided to kill him and the Houses of Parliament. They made a plot — there were a whole lot of them in it.”

  The clock-stopping feeling came on again. Elfrida was different somehow. The Elfrida who had gone on the barge to Gravesend and played with him at the Deptford house had never used such expressions as “a whole lot of them in it.” He looked at her and she went on —

  “They said Lord Arden was in it, but he wasn’t, and some of them were to pretend to be hunting and to seize the Princess Elizabeth and proclaim her Queen, and the rest were to blow the Houses of Parliament up when the King went to open them.”

  “I never heard this tale from my tutor,” said Dickie. And without knowing why he felt uneasy, and because he felt uneasy he laughed. Then he said, “Proceed, cousin.”

  Elfrida went on telling him about the Gunpowder Plot, but he hardly listened. The stopped-clock feeling was growing so strong. But he heard her say, “Mr. Tresham wrote to his relation, Lord Monteagle, that they were going to blow up the King,” and he found himself saying, “What King?” though he knew the answer perfectly well.

  “Why, King James the First,” said Elfrida, and suddenly the horrible tutor pounced and got Elfrida by the wrist. Then all in a moment everything grew confused. Mr. Parados was asking questions and little Elfrida was trying to answer them, and Dickie understood that the Gunpowder Plot had not happened yet, and that Elfrida had given the whole show away. How did she know? And the verse?