Harding's luck

Dickie could not stand this. "I might have asked," he said presently, "but I have forgot what the promise was – the fever – "

"Ay, ay, poor lad! And of a high truth, too! Owned he had forgot! Come, jog that poor peaked remembrance."

Dickie could hardly believe the beautiful hope that whispered in his ear.

"I almost think I remember," he said. "Father – did you promise – ?"

"I promised, if thou wast a good lad and biddable and constant at thy book and thy manly exercises, to give thee, so soon as thou should'st have learned to ride him – "

"A little horse?" said Dickie breathlessly; "oh, father, not a little horse?" It was good to hear one's father laugh that big, jolly laugh – to feel one's father's arm laid like that across one's shoulders.

The little horse turned round to look at them from his stall in the big stables. It was really rather a big horse.

What colored horse would you choose – if a horse were to be yours for the choosing? Dickie would have chosen a gray, and a gray it was.

"What is his name?" Dickie asked, when he had admired the gray's every point, had had him saddled, and had ridden him proudly round the pasture in his father's sight.

"We call him Rosinante," said his father, "because he is so fat," and he laughed, but Dickie did not understand the joke. He had not read "Don Quixote," as you, no doubt, have.

"I should like," said Dickie, sitting square on the gray, "to call him Crutch. May I?"

"Crutch?" the father repeated.

"Because his paces are so easy," Dickie explained. He got off the horse very quickly and came to his father. "I mean even a lame boy could ride him. Oh! father, I am so happy!" he said, and burrowed his nose in a velvet doublet, and perhaps snivelled a little. "I am so glad I am not lame."

"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."

"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 with 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 full 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 —

"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.