Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  So Lord Arden got the credit of all that Dickie had learned from his tutors in James the First’s time.

  It is not in the nature of any child to brood continually on the past or the future. The child lives in the present. And Dickie lived at Arden and loved it, and enjoyed himself; and Lord Arden bought him a pony, so that his lame foot was hardly any drag at all. The other children had a donkey-cart, and the three made all sorts of interesting expeditions.

  Once they went over to Talbot Court, and saw the secret place where Edward Talbot had hidden his confession about having stolen the Arden baby, three generations before. Also they saw the portrait of the Lady Talbot who had been a Miss Arden. In rose-colored brocade she was, with a green silk petticoat and her powdered hair dressed high over a great cushion, but her eyes and her mouth were the eyes of Dickie of Deptford.

  Lady Talbot was very charming to the children, played hide-and-seek with them, and gave them a delightful and varied tea in the yew arbor.

  “I’m glad you wouldn’t let me adopt you, Richard,” she said, when Elfrida and Edred had been sent to her garden to get a basket of peaches to take home with them, “because just when I had become entirely attached to you, you would have found out your real relations, and where would your poor foster-mother have been then?”

  “If I could have stayed with you I would,” said Dickie seriously. “I did like you most awfully, even then. You are very like the Lady Arden whose husband was shut up in the Tower for the Gunpowder Plot.”

  “So they tell me,” said Lady Talbot, “but how do you know it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dickie confused, “but you are like her.”

  “You must have seen a portrait of her. There’s one in the National Portrait Gallery. She was a Delamere, and my name was Delamere, too, before I was married. She was one of the same family, you see, dear.”

  Dickie put his arms round her waist as she sat beside him, and laid his head on her shoulder.

  “I wish you’d really been my mother,” he said, and his thoughts were back in the other days with the mother who wore a ruff and hoop. Lady Talbot hugged him tenderly.

  “My dear little Dickie,” she said, “you don’t wish it as much as I do.”

  “There are all sorts of things a chap can’t be sure of — things you mustn’t tell any one. Secrets, you know — honorable secrets. But if it was your own mother it would be different. But if you haven’t got a mother you have to decide everything for yourself.”

  “Won’t you let me help you?” she asked.

  Dickie, his head on her shoulder, was for one wild moment tempted to tell her everything — the whole story, from beginning to end. But he knew that she could not understand it — or even believe it. No grown-up person could. A chap’s own mother might have, perhaps — but perhaps not, too.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said at last, “only I don’t think I want to be Lord Arden. At least, I do, frightfully. It’s so splendid, all the things the Ardens did — in history, you know. But I don’t want to turn people out — and you know Edred came and saved me from those people. It feels hateful when I think perhaps they’ll have to turn out just because I happened to turn up. Sometimes I feel as if I simply couldn’t bear it.”

  “You dear child!” she said; “of course you feel that. But don’t let your mind dwell on it. Don’t think about it. You’re only a little boy. Be happy and jolly, and don’t worry about grown-up things. Leave grown-up things to the grown-ups.”

  “You see,” Dickie told her, “somehow I’ve always had to worry about grown-up things. What with Beale, and one thing and another.”

  “That was the man you ran away from me to go to?”

  “Yes,” said Dickie gravely; “you see, I was responsible for Beale.”

  “And now? Don’t you feel responsible any more?”

  “No,” said Dickie, in businesslike tones; “you see, I’ve settled Beale in life. You can’t be responsible for married people. They’re responsible for each other. So now I’ve got only my own affairs to think of. And the Ardens. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Do? why, there’s nothing to do except to enjoy yourself and learn your lessons and be happy,” she told him. “Don’t worry your little head. Just enjoy yourself, and forget that you ever had any responsibilities.”

  “I’ll try,” he told her, and then the others came back with their peaches, and there was nothing more to be said but “Thank you very much” and good-bye.

  Exploring the old smugglers’ caves was exciting and delightful, as exploring caves always is. It turned out that more than one old man in the village had heard from his father about the caves and the smuggling that had gone on in those parts in old ancient days. But they had not thought it their place to talk about such things, and I suspect that in their hearts they did not more than half believe them. Old Beale said —

  “Why didn’t you ask me? I could a-told you where they was. Only I shouldn’t a done fear you’d break your precious necks.”

  Of course the children were desperately anxious to open up the brickwork and let the stream come out into the light of day; only their father thought it would be too expensive. But Edred and Elfrida worried and bothered in a perfectly gentle and polite way till at last a very jolly gentleman in spectacles, who came down to spend a couple of days, took their part. From the moment he owned himself an engineer Edred and Elfrida gave him no peace, and he seemed quite pleased to be taken to see the caves. He pointed out that the removal of the simple dam would send the water back into the old channel. It would be perfectly simple to have the brickwork knocked out, and to let the stream find its way back, if it could, to its old channel, and thence down the arched way which Edred and Elfrida told him they were certain was under a mound below the Castle.

  “You know a lot about it, don’t you?” he said good-humoredly.

  “Yes,” said Edred simply.

  Then they all went down to the mound, and the engineer then poked and prodded it and said he should not wonder if they were not so far out. And then Beale and another man came with spades, and presently there was the arch, as good as ever, and they exclaimed and admired and went back to the caves.

  It was a grand moment when the bricks had been taken out and daylight poured into the cave, and nothing remained but to break down the dam and let the water run out of the darkness into the sunshine. You can imagine with what mixed feelings the children wondered whether they would rather stay in the cave and see the dam demolished, or stay outside and see the stream rush out. In the end the boys stayed within, and it was only Elfrida and her father who saw the stream emerge. They sat on a hillock among the thin harebells and wild thyme and sweet lavender-colored gipsy roses, with their eyes fixed on the opening in the hillside, and waited and waited and waited for a very long time.

  “Won’t you mind frightfully, daddy,” Elfrida asked during this long waiting, “if it turns out that you’re not Lord Arden?”

  He paused a moment before he decided to answer her without reserve.

  “Yes,” he said, “I shall mind, frightfully. And that’s just why we must do everything we possibly can to prove that Dickie is the rightful heir, so that whether he has the title or I have it you and I may never have to reproach ourselves for having left a single stone unturned to give him his rights — whatever they are.”

  “And you, yours, daddy.”

  “And me, mine. Anyhow, if he is Lord Arden I shall probably be appointed his guardian, and we shall all live together here just the same. Only I shall go back to being plain Arden.”

  “I believe Dickie is Lord Arden,” Elfrida began, and I am not at all sure that she would not have gone on to give her reasons, including the whole story which the Mouldiestwarp had told to Dickie; but at that moment there was a roaring, rushing sound from inside the cave, and a flash of shiny silver gleamed across that dark gap in the hillside. There was a burst of imprisoned splendor. The stream leaped out and flowed right and left over the dry
grass, till it lapped in tiny waves against their hillock—”like sand castles,” as Elfrida observed. It spread out in a lake, wider and wider; but presently gathered itself together and began to creep down the hill, winding in and out among the hillocks in an ever-deepening stream.

  “Come on, childie, let’s make for the moat. We shall get there first, if we run our hardest,” Elfrida’s father said. And he ran, with his little daughter’s hand in his.

  They got there first. The stream, knowing its own mind better and better as it recognized its old road, reached the Castle, and by dinner-time all the grass round the Castle was under water. By tea-time the water in the moat was a foot or more deep, and when they got up next morning the Castle was surrounded by a splendid moat fifty feet wide, and a stream ran from it, in a zigzag way it is true, but still it ran, to the lower arch under the mound, and disappeared there, to run underground into the sea. They enjoyed the moat for one whole day, and then the stream was dammed again and condemned to run underground till next spring, by which time the walls of the Castle would have been examined and concrete laid to their base, lest the water should creep through and sap the foundations.

  “It’s going to be a very costly business, it seems,” Elfrida heard her father say to the engineer, “and I don’t know that I ought to do it. But I can’t resist the temptation. I shall have to economize in other directions, that’s all.”

  When Elfrida had heard this she went to Dickie and Edred, who were fishing in the cave, and told them what she had heard.

  “And we must have another try for the treasure,” she said. “Whoever has the Castle will want to restore it; they’ve got those pictures of it as it used to be. And then there are all the cottages to rebuild. Dear Dickie, you’re so clever, do think of some way to find the treasure.”

  So Dickie thought.

  And presently he said —

  “You once saw the treasure being carried to the secret room — in a picture, didn’t you?”

  They told him yes.

  “Then why didn’t you go back to that time and see it really?”

  “We hadn’t the clothes. Everything in our magic depended on clothes.”

  “Mine doesn’t. Shall we go?”

  “There were lots of soldiers in the picture,” said Edred, “and fighting.”

  “I’m not afraid of soldiers,” said Elfrida very quickly, “and you’re not afraid of anything, Edred — you know you aren’t.”

  “You can’t be or you couldn’t have come after me right into the cave in the middle of the night. Come on. Stand close together and I’ll spread out the moon-seeds.”

  So Dickie said, and they stood, and he spread the moon-seeds out, and he wished to be with the party of men who were hiding the treasure. But before he spread out the seeds he took certain other things in his left hand and held them closely. And instantly they were.

  They were standing very close together, all three of them, in a niche in a narrow, dark passage, and men went by them carrying heavy chests, and great sacks of leather, and bundles tied up in straw and in handkerchiefs. The men had long hair and the kind of clothes you know were worn when Charles the First was King. And the children wore the dresses of that time and the boys had little swords at their sides. When the last bundle had been carried, the last chest set down with a dump on the stone floor of some room beyond, the children heard a door shut and a key turned, and then the men came back all together along the passage, and the children followed them. Presently torchlight gave way to daylight as they came out into the open air. But they had to come on hands and knees, for the path sloped steeply up and the opening was very low. The chests must have been pushed or pulled through. They could never have been carried.

  The children turned and looked at the opening. It was in the courtyard wall, the courtyard that was now a smooth grass lawn and not the rough, daisied grass plot dotted with heaps of broken stone and masonry that they were used to see. And as they looked two men picked up a great stone and staggered forward with it and laid it on the stone floor of the secret passage just where it ended at the edge of the grass. Then another stone and another. The stones fitted into their places like bits of a Chinese puzzle. There was mortar or cement at their edges, and when the last stone was replaced no one could tell those stones from the other stones that formed the wall. Only the grass in front of them was trampled and broken.

  “Fetch food and break it about,” said the man who seemed to be in command, “that it may look as though the men had eaten here. And trample the grass at other places. I give the Roundhead dogs another hour to break down our last defense. Children, go to your mother. This is no place for you.”

  They knew the way. They had seen it in the picture. Edred and Elfrida turned to go. But Dickie whispered, “Don’t wait for me. I’ve something yet to do.”

  And when the soldiers had gone to get food and strew it about, as they had been told to do, Dickie crept up to the stones that had been removed, from which he had never taken his eyes, knelt down and scratched on one of the stones with one of the big nails he had brought in his hand. It blunted over and he took another, hiding in the chapel doorway when the men came back with the food.

  “Every man to his post and God save us all!” cried the captain when the food was spread. They clattered off — they were in their armor now — and Dickie knelt down again and went on scratching with the nail.

  The air was full of shouting, and the sound of guns, and the clash of armor, and a shattering sound like a giant mallet striking a giant drum — a sound that came and came again at five-minute intervals — and the shrieks of wounded men. Dickie pressed up the grass to cover the marks he had made on the stone, so low as to be almost underground and quite hidden by the grass roots.

  Then he brushed the stone dust from his hands and stood up.

  The treasure was found and its hiding-place marked. Now he would find Edred and Elfrida, and they would go back. Whether he was Lord of Arden or no, it was he and no other who had restored the fallen fortunes of that noble house.

  He turned to go the way his cousins had gone. He could see the men-at-arms crowding in the archway of the great gate tower. From a window to his right a lady leaned, pale with terror, and with her were Edred and Elfrida — he could just see their white faces. He made for the door below that window. But it was too late. That dull, thudding sound came again, and this time it was followed by a great crash and a great shouting. The blue sky showed through the archway where the tall gates had been and under the arch was a mass of men shouting, screaming, struggling, and the gleam of steel and the scarlet of brave blood.

  Dickie forgot all about the door below the window, forgot all about his cousins, forgot that he had found the treasure and that it was now his business to get himself and the others safely back to their own times. He only saw the house he loved broken into by men he hated; he saw the men he loved spending their blood like water to defend that house.

  He drew the little sword that hung at his side and shouting “An Arden! an Arden!” he rushed towards the swaying, staggering mêlée. He reached it just as the leader of the attacking party had hewn his way through the Arden men and taken his first step on the flagged path of the courtyard. The first step was his last. He stopped, a big, burly fellow in a leathern coat and steel round cap, and looked, bewildered, at the little figure coming at him with all the fire and courage of the Ardens burning in his blue eyes. The big man laughed, and as he laughed Dickie lunged with his sword — the way his tutor had taught him — and the little sword — no tailor’s ornament to a Court dress, but a piece of true steel — went straight and true up into the heart of that big rebel. The man fell, wrenching the blade from Dickie’s hand.

  A shout of fury went up from the enemy. A shout of pride and triumph from the Arden men. Men struggled and fought all about him. Next moment Dickie’s hands were tied with a handkerchief, and he stood there breathless and trembling with pride.

  “‘I HAVE KILLED A MAN,’
HE SAID”

  “I have killed a man,” he said; “I have killed a man for the King and for Arden.”

  They shut him up in the fuel shed and locked the door. Pride and anger filled him. He could think of nothing but that one good thrust for the good cause. But presently he remembered.

  He had brought his cousins here — he must get them back safely. But how? On a quiet evening on the road Beale had taught him how to untie hands tied behind the back. He remembered the lesson now and set to work — but it was slow work. And all the time he was thinking, thinking. How could he get out? He knew the fuel shed well enough. The door was strong, there was a beech bar outside. But it was not roofed with tile or lead, as the rest of the Castle was. And Dickie knew something about thatch. Not for nothing had he watched the men thatching the oast-house by the Medway. When his hands were free he stood up and felt for the pins that fasten the thatch.

  Suddenly his hands fell by his side. Even if he got out, how could he find his cousins? He would only be found by the rebels and be locked away more securely. He lay down on the floor, lay quite still there. It was despair. This was the end of all his cleverness. He had brought Edred and Elfrida into danger, and he could not get them back again. His anger had led him to defy the Roundheads, and to gratify his hate of them he had sacrificed those two who trusted him. He lay there a long time, and if he cried a little it was very dark in the fuel house, and there was no one to see him.

  He was not crying, however, but thinking, thinking, thinking, and trying to find some way out, when he heard a little scratch, scratching on the corner of the shed. He sat up and listened. The scratching went on. He held his breath. Could it be that some one was trying to get in to help him? Nonsense, of course it was only a rat. Next moment a voice spoke so close to him that he started and all but cried out.