by Edith Nesbit
The cats looked imploringly at their father, but they went and stood by Richard.
“I suppose we may go?” he asked.
“Every one is perfectly free here,” said Lord Arden. “The only thing you may not do is to leave the golden plain. It is very strange. There are hardly any laws. We are all free to do as we like, and no one seems to like to do anything that hurts any one else. Only if any one is caught trying to get into the outer world, or to let the outer world in, he is killed–without pain, and not as vengeance but as necessity.”
The white cats looked at each other rather ruefully. This was not at all the way in which they remembered their daddy’s talking to them.
“But,” said Lord Arden, “for the children and my sister we must risk it. I trust you completely, and we will be at the crevice when the moon rises.”
So Richard and his three white animals went out down steps cut in the solid rock, and the townspeople crowded round them with fruits and maize-cakes for Richard, and milk in golden platters for the cats.
And later Richard made signs of being sleepy, and they let him go away among the fields, followed by the three white creatures. And at the appointed hour they all met under the vast cliff that was the natural wall and guardian of the golden plain.
And the Mouldiwarp carried Uncle Jim up to the top, and then came back for Lord Arden and Richard. But before there was time to do more a shout went up, and a thousand torches sprang to life in the city they had left, and they knew that their flight had been discovered.
“There’s no time,” the white Bear-Mouldiwarp, to the utter astonishment of Lord Arden, opened its long mouth and spoke. And the white cats also opened their mouths and cried, “Oh, daddy, how awful! what shall we do?”
“Hold your silly tongues,” said the Mouldiwarp crossly. “You was told not to go gossiping. Here! scratch a way out with them white paws of yours.”
It set the example, scratching at the enormous cliff with those strong, blunt, curved front feet of it. And the cats scratched too, with their white, padded gloves that had tiger claws to them. And the rock yielded–there was a white crack–wider, wider. And the swaying, swirling torches came nearer and nearer across the plain.
“In with you!” cried the Mouldiwarp; “in with you!”
“Jim!” said Lord Arden. “I’ll not go without Jim!”
“He’s half-way there already,” said the Mouldiwarp, pushing Lord Arden with its great white shoulder. “Come, I say, come!” It pushed them all into the crack of the rock, and the cliff closed firm and fast behind them, an unanswerable “No” set up in the face of their pursuers.
“This way out,” said the Mouldiwarp, pointing its dusty claw to where ahead light showed.
“Why,” said Edred, “it’s the smuggler’s cave–and there’s the clock!”
Next moment there it wasn’t, for Richard had leapt on it, and he and it had vanished together, the Mouldiwarp clinging to the hour hand at the last moment.
The white cats, which were Edred and Elfrida, drew back from the whirl of the hands that was the first step towards vanishment. They saw their father and Uncle Jim go up the steps that led to the rude wooden door whose key was like a church key–the door that led to the opening among the furze that they had never been able to find again.
When the vanishing of the clock allowed them to follow, and they regained the sunny outer air where the skylark were singing as usual, they were just in time to see two figures going towards the castle and very near it.
They turned to look at each other.
“Why,” said Edred, “you’re not a cat any more!”
“No more are you, if it comes to that,” said Elfrida. “Oh, Edred, they’re going in at the big gate! Do you really think it’s real–or have we just dreamed it–this time? It was much more dreamish than any of the other things.”
“I feel,” said Edred, sitting down abruptly, “as if I’d been a cat all my life, and been swung round by my tail every day of my life. I think I’ll sit here till I’m quite sure whether I’m a white cat or Edred Arden.”
“I know which I am,” said Elfrida; but she, too, was not sorry to sit down.
“That’s easy. You aren’t either of them,” said Edred.
. . . . .
When, half an hour later, they slowly went down to the castle, still doubtful whether anything magic had ever really happened, or whether all the magic things that had seemed to happen had really been only a sort of double, or twin, dream. They were met at the door by Aunt Edith, pale as the pearl and ivory of the white clock, and with eyes that shone like the dewdrops on the wild flowers that Elfrida had given to the Queen.
“Oh, kiddies!” she cried. “Oh, dear, darling kiddies!”
And she went down on her knees so that she should be nearer their own height and could embrace them on more equal terms.
“Something lovely’s happened,” she said; “something so beautiful that you won’t be able to believe it.”
They kissed her heartily, partly out of affection, and partly to conceal their want of surprise.
“Darlings, it’s the loveliest thing that could possible happen. What do you think?”
“Daddy’s come home,” said Elfrida, feeling dreadfully deceitful.
“Yes,” said Aunt Edith. “How clever of you, my pet! And Uncle Jim. They’ve been kept prisoners in South America, and an English boy with a performing bear helped them to escape.”
No mention of cats. The children felt hurt.
“And they had the most dreadful time–months and months and months–coming across the interior–no water, and Indians and all sorts of adventures; and daddy had fever, and would insist that the bear was the Mouldiwarp–our crest, you know–come to life, and talking just like you or me, and that there were white cats that had your voices, and called him daddy. But he’s all right now, only very weak. That’s why I’m telling you all this. You must be very quiet and gentle. Oh, my dears, it’s too good to be true, too good to be true!”
. . . . .
Now, was it the father of Edred and Elfrida who had brain fever and fancied things? Or did they, blameless of fever, and not too guilty of brains, imagine it all? Uncle Jim can tell you exactly how it all happened. There is no magic in his story. Father–I mean Lord Arden–does not talk of what he dreamed when he had brain fever. And Edred and Elfrida do not talk of what happened when they hadn’t. At least they do, but only to me.
It is all very wonderful and mysterious, as all life is apt to be if you go a little below the crust, and are not content just to read newspapers and go by the Tube Railway, and buy your clothes ready-made, and think nothing can be true unless it is uninteresting.
. . . . .
“I’ve found the most wonderful photographs of pictures of Arden Castle,” said Aunt Edith, later on. “We can restore the castle perfectly from them. I do wish I knew where the original pictures were.”
“I’m afraid we can’t restore the castle,” said Lord Arden laughing; “our little fortune’s enough to keep us going quite comfortably–but it won’t rebuild Norman masonry.”
“I do wish we could have found the buried treasure,” said Edred.
“We’ve got treasure enough,” said Aunt Edith, looking at Uncle Jim.
As for what Elfrida thinks–well, I wish you could have seen her face when she went into the parlour that evening after Aunt Edith had knelt down to meet them on equal terms, and tell them of the treasure of love and joy that had come home to Arden.
There was Lord Arden, looking exactly like the Lord Arden she had known in the Gunpowder Plot days, and also exactly like the daddy she had known all her life, sitting at ease in the big chair just underneath the secret panel behind which Sir Edward Talbot had hidden when he was pretending to be the Chevalier St. George. His dear face was just the same, and the smile on it was her own smile–the merry, tender, twinkling smile that was for her and for no one else in the world. It was just a moment that she stood at the do
or. But it was one of these moments that are as short as a watch-tick, and as long as a year. She stood there and asked herself, “Have I dreamed it all? Isn’t there really any Mouldiwarp or any treasure?”
And then a great wave of love and longing caught at her, and she knew that, Mouldiwarp or no Mouldiwarp, the treasure was hers, and in one flash she was across the room and in her father’s arms, sobbing and laughing and saying again and again–
“Oh, my daddy! Oh, my daddy, my daddy!”
THE END
HARDING’S LUCK
Harding’s Luck, published by Benn Brothers in 1909, is a companion to Nesbit’s The House of Arden, which appeared the year before. H. R. Millar provided the illustrations, as he had with several earlier Nesbit novels. Harding’s Luck focuses on the life of a young orphan, Dickie Harding, a plucky boy living in poverty in London with a cruel woman claiming to be his aunt. Dickie copes with hardship, including a severe limp, through the kindness of friends. One day, Dickie finds himself thrown back in time to 1606, where he lives a completely different life as Richard Arden, the son of a nobleman in the court of King James I. Best of all, he is no longer lame. The plot hinges on how Dickie deals with the tension between the pull of present day obligations and the temptation of a better life in the past. Dickie also meets a trio of Mouldiwarps and Edred and Elfrida Arden, familiar characters from The House of Arden.
A first edition copy of ‘Harding’s Luck’
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. TINKLER AND THE MOONFLOWER
CHAPTER II. BURGLARS
CHAPTER III. THE ESCAPE
CHAPTER IV. WHICH WAS THE DREAM?
CHAPTER V. “TO GET YOUR OWN LIVING”
CHAPTER VI. BURIED TREASURE
CHAPTER VII. DICKIE LEARNS MANY THINGS
CHAPTER VIII. GOING HOME
CHAPTER IX. KIDNAPPED
CHAPTER X. THE NOBLE DEED
CHAPTER XI. LORD ARDEN
CHAPTER XII. THE END
TO
ROSAMUND PHILIPPA PHILIPS
WITH
E. NESBIT’S LOVE
CHAPTER I. TINKLER AND THE MOONFLOWER
Dickie lived at New Cross. At least the address was New Cross, but really the house where he lived was one of a row of horrid little houses built on the slope where once green fields ran down the hill to the river, and the old houses of the Deptford merchants stood stately in their pleasant gardens and fruitful orchards. All those good fields and happy gardens are built over now. It is as though some wicked giant had taken a big brush full of yellow ochre paint, and another full of mud color, and had painted out the green in streaks of dull yellow and filthy brown; and the brown is the roads and the yellow is the houses. Miles and miles and miles of them, and not a green thing to be seen except the cabbages in the greengrocers’ shops, and here and there some poor trails of creeping-jenny drooping from a dirty window-sill. There is a little yard at the back of each house; this is called “the garden,” and some of these show green — but they only show it to the houses’ back windows. You cannot see it from the street. These gardens are green, because green is the color that most pleases and soothes men’s eyes; and however you may shut people up between bars of yellow and mud color, and however hard you may make them work, and however little wage you may pay them for working, there will always be found among those people some men who are willing to work a little longer, and for no wages at all, so that they may have green things growing near them.
But there were no green things growing in the garden at the back of the house where Dickie lived with his aunt. There were stones and bones, and bits of brick, and dirty old dish-cloths matted together with grease and mud, worn-out broom-heads and broken shovels, a bottomless pail, and the mouldy remains of a hutch where once rabbits had lived. But that was a very long time ago, and Dickie had never seen the rabbits. A boy had brought a brown rabbit to school once, buttoned up inside his jacket, and he had let Dickie hold it in his hands for several minutes before the teacher detected its presence and shut it up in a locker till school should be over. So Dickie knew what rabbits were like. And he was fond of the hutch for the sake of what had once lived there.
And when his aunt sold the poor remains of the hutch to a man with a barrow who was ready to buy anything, and who took also the pails and the shovels, giving threepence for the lot, Dickie was almost as unhappy as though the hutch had really held a furry friend. And he hated the man who took the hutch away, all the more because there were empty rabbit-skins hanging sadly from the back of the barrow.
It is really with the going of that rabbit-hutch that this story begins. Because it was then that Dickie, having called his aunt a Beast, and hit at her with his little dirty fist, was well slapped and put out into the bereaved yard to “come to himself,” as his aunt said. He threw himself down on the ground and cried and wriggled with misery and pain, and wished — ah, many things.
“Wot’s the bloomin’ row now?” the Man Next Door suddenly asked; “been hittin’ of you?”
“They’ve took away the ‘utch,” said Dickie.
“Well, there warn’t nothin’ in it.”
“I diden want it took away,” wailed Dickie.
“Leaves more room,” said the Man Next Door, leaning on his spade. It was Saturday afternoon and the next-door garden was one of the green ones. There were small grubby daffodils in it, and dirty-faced little primroses, and an arbor beside the water-butt, bare at this time of the year, but still a real arbor. And an elder-tree that in the hot weather had flat, white flowers on it big as tea-plates. And a lilac-tree with brown buds on it. Beautiful. “Say, matey, just you chuck it! Chuck it, I say! How in thunder can I get on with my digging with you ‘owlin’ yer ‘ead off?” inquired the Man Next Door. “You get up and peg along in an’ arst your aunt if she’d be agreeable for me to do up her garden a bit. I could do it odd times. You’d like that.”
“Not ‘arf!” said Dickie, getting up.
“Come to yourself, eh?” sneered the aunt. “You mind, and let it be the last time you come your games with me, my beauty. You and your tantrums!”
Dickie said what it was necessary to say, and got back to the “garden.”
“She says she ain’t got no time to waste, an’ if you ‘ave she don’t care what you does with it.”
“There’s a dirty mug you’ve got on you,” said the Man Next Door, leaning over to give Dickie’s face a rub with a handkerchief hardly cleaner. “Now I’ll come over and make a start.” He threw his leg over the fence. “You just peg about an’ be busy pickin’ up all them fancy articles, and nex’ time your aunt goes to Buckingham Palace for the day we’ll have a bonfire.”
“Fifth o’ November?” said Dickie, sitting down and beginning to draw to himself the rubbish that covered the ground.
“Fifth of anything you like, so long as she ain’t about,” said he, driving in the spade. “‘Ard as any old door-step it is. Never mind, we’ll turn it over, and we’ll get some little seedses and some little plantses and we shan’t know ourselves.”
“I got a ‘apenny,” said Dickie.
“Well, I’ll put one to it, and you leg ‘long and buy seedses. That’s wot you do.”
Dickie went. He went slowly, because he was lame. And he was lame because his “aunt” had dropped him when he was a baby. She was not a nice woman, and I am glad to say that she goes out of this story almost at once. But she did keep Dickie when his father died, and she might have sent him to the work-house. For she was not really his aunt, but just the woman of the house where his father had lodged. It was good of her to keep Dickie, even if she wasn’t very kind to him. And as that is all the good I can find to say about her, I will say no more. With his little crutch, made out of a worn-out broom cut down to his little height, he could manage quite well in spite of his lameness.
“‘GIMME,’ SAID DICKIE—’GIMME A PENN’ORTH O’ THAT THERE.’”
He found the corn-chandler’s — a really charming shop that smelled
like stables and had deep dusty bins where he would have liked to play. Above the bins were delightful little square-fronted drawers, labelled Rape, Hemp, Canary, Millet, Mustard, and so on; and above the drawers pictures of the kind of animals that were fed on the kind of things that the shop sold. Fat, oblong cows that had eaten Burley’s Cattle Food, stout pillows of wool that Ovis’s Sheep Spice had fed, and, brightest and best of all, an incredibly smooth-plumaged parrot, rainbow-colored, cocking a black eye bright with the intoxicating qualities of Perrokett’s Artistic Bird Seed.
“Gimme,” said Dickie, leaning against the counter and pointing a grimy thumb at the wonder—”gimme a penn’orth o’ that there!”
“Got the penny?” the shopman asked carefully.
Dickie displayed it, parted with it, and came home nursing a paper bag full of rustling promises.
“Why,” said the Man Next Door, “that ain’t seeds. It’s parrot food, that is.”
“It said the Ar-something Bird Seed,” said Dickie, downcast; “I thought it ‘ud come into flowers like birds — same colors as wot the poll parrot was, dontcherknow?”
“And so it will like as not,” said the Man Next Door comfortably. “I’ll set it along this end soon’s I’ve got it turned over. I lay it’ll come up something pretty.”
So the seed was sown. And the Man Next Door promised two more pennies later for real seed. Also he transplanted two of the primroses whose faces wanted washing.
It was a grand day for Dickie. He told the whole story of it that night when he went to bed to his only confidant, from whom he hid nothing. The confidant made no reply, but Dickie was sure this was not because the confidant didn’t care about the story. The confidant was a blackened stick about five inches long, with little blackened bells to it like the bells on dogs’ collars. Also a rather crooked bit of something whitish and very hard, good to suck, or to stroke with your fingers, or to dig holes in the soap with. Dickie had no idea what it was. His father had given it to him in the hospital where Dickie was taken to say good-bye to him. Good-bye had to be said because of father having fallen off the scaffolding where he was at work and not getting better. “You stick to that,” father had said, looking dreadfully clean in the strange bed among all those other clean beds; “it’s yourn, your very own. My dad give it to me, and it belonged to his dad. Don’t you let any one take it away. Some old lady told the old man it ‘ud bring us luck. So long, old chap.”