by Edith Nesbit
“Not with ‘im; ‘e ain’t no class,” said Dickie firmly; “and oh! farver, I do so wanter sleep in that ‘ouse, that was where I ‘ad The Dream, you know.”
“Oh, well — come on, then,” said Beale; “lucky we’ve got our thick coats on.”
It was quite easy for Dickie to get into the house, just as he had done before, and to go along the passage and open the front door for Mr. Beale, who walked in as bold as brass. They made themselves comfortable with the sacking and old papers — but one at least of the two missed the luxury of clean air and soft moss and a bed canopy strewn with stars. Mr. Beale was soon asleep and Dickie lay still, his heart beating to the tune of the hope that now at last, in this place where it had once come, his dream would come again. But it did not come — even sleep, plain, restful, dreamless sleep, would not come to him. At last he could lie still no longer. He slipped from under the paper, whose rustling did not disturb Mr. Beale’s slumbers, and moved into the square of light thrown through the window by the street lamp. He felt in his pockets, pulled out Tinkler and the white seal, set them on the floor, and, moved by memories of the great night when his dream had come to him, arranged the moon-seeds round them in the same pattern that they had lain in on that night of nights. And the moment that he had lain the last seed, completing the crossed triangles, the magic began again. All was as it had been before. The tired eyes that must close, the feeling that through his closed eyelids he could yet see something moving in the centre of the star that the two triangles made.
“Where do you want to go to?” said the same soft small voice that had spoken before. But this time Dickie did not reply that he was “not particular.” Instead, he said, “Oh, there! I want to go there!” feeling quite sure that whoever owned that voice would know as well as he, or even better, where “there” was, and how to get to it.
And as on that other night everything grew very quiet, and sleep wrapped Dickie round like a soft garment. When he awoke he lay in the big four-post bed with the green and white curtains; about him were the tapestry walls and the heavy furniture of The Dream.
“Oh!” he cried aloud, “I’ve found it again! — I’ve found it! — I’ve found it!”
And then the old nurse with the hooped petticoats and the queer cap and the white ruff was bending over him; her wrinkled face was alight with love and tenderness.
“So thou’rt awake at last,” she said. “Did’st thou find thy friend in thy dreams?”
Dickie hugged her.
“I’ve found the way back,” he said; “I don’t know which is the dream and which is real — but you know.”
“Yes,” said the old nurse, “I know. The one is as real as the other.”
He sprang out of bed and went leaping round the room, jumping on to chairs and off them, running and dancing.
“What ails the child?” the nurse grumbled; “get thy hose on, for shame, taking a chill as like as not. What ails thee to act so?”
“It’s the not being lame,” Dickie explained, coming to a standstill by the window that looked out on the good green garden. “You don’t know how wonderful it seems, just at first, you know, not to be lame.”
CHAPTER VI. BURIED TREASURE
And then, as he stood there in the sunshine, he suddenly knew.
Having succeeded in dreaming once again the dream which he had so longed to dream, Dickie Harding looked out of the window of the dream-house in Deptford into the dream-garden with its cut yew-trees and box avenues and bowling-greens, and perceived without doubt that this was no dream, but real — as real as the other Deptford where he had sown Artistic Bird Seed and gathered moonflowers and reaped the silver seeds of magic, for it was magic. Dickie was sure of it now. He had not lived in the time of the First James, be sure, without hearing magic talked of. And it seemed quite plain to him that if this that had happened to him was not magic, then there never was and never would be any magic to happen to any one. He turned from the window and looked at the tapestry-hung room — the big bed, the pleasant, wrinkled face of the nurse — and he knew that all this was as real as anything that had happened to him in that other life where he was a little lame boy who took the road with a dirty tramp for father, and lay in the bed with green curtains.
“Was thy friend well, in thy dream?” the nurse asked.
“Yes, oh, yes,” said Dickie, “and I carved boxes in my dream, and sold them, and I want to learn a lot more things, so that when I go back again — I mean when I dream that dream again — I shall be able to earn more money.”
“’Tis shame that one of thy name should have to work for money,” said the nurse.
“It isn’t my name there,” said Dickie; “and old Sebastian told me every one ought to do some duty to his country, or he wasn’t worth his meat and ale. And you don’t know how good it is having money that you’ve earned yourself.”
“I ought to,” she said; “I’ve earned mine long enough. Now haste and dress — and then breakfast and thy fencing lesson.”
When the fencing lesson was over, Dickie hesitated. He wanted, of course, to hurry off to Sebastian and to go on learning how to make a galleon. But also he wanted to learn some trade that he could teach Beale at Deptford, and he knew, quite as surely as any master craftsman could have known it, that nothing which required delicate handling, such as wood-carving or the making of toy boats, could ever be mastered by Beale. But Beale was certainly fond of dogs. Dickie remembered how little True had cuddled up to him and nestled inside his coat when he lay down to sleep under the newspapers and the bits of sacking in Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane.
So Dickie went his way to the kennels to talk to the kennelman. He had been there before with Master Roger Fry, his fencing master, but he had never spoken to the kennelman. And when he got to the kennels he knocked on the door of the kennelman’s house and called out, “What ho! within there!” just as people do in old plays. And the door was thrown open by a man in a complete suit of leather, and when Dickie looked in that man’s face he saw that it was the face of the man who had lived next door in Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane — the man who dug up the garden for the parrot seed.
“Why,” said Dickie, “it’s you!”
“Who would it be but me, little master?” the man asked with a respectful salute, and Dickie perceived that though this man had the face of the Man Next Door, he had not the Man Next Door’s memories.
“Do you live here?” he asked cautiously—”always, I mean.”
“Where else should I live?” the man asked, “that have served my lord, your father, all my time, boy and man, and know every hair of every dog my lord owns.”
Dickie thought that was a good deal to know — and so it was.
He stayed an hour at the kennels and came away knowing very much more about dogs than he did before, though some of the things he learned would surprise a modern veterinary surgeon very much indeed. But the dogs seemed well and happy, though they were doctored with herb tea instead of stuff from the chemist’s, and the charms that were said over them to make them swift and strong certainly did not make them any the less strong and swift.
When Dickie had learned as much about dogs as he felt he could bear for that day, he felt free to go down to the dockyard and go on learning how ships were built. Sebastian looked up at the voice and ceased the blows with which his axe was smoothing a great tree trunk that was to be a mast, and smiled in answer to his smile.
“Oh, what a long time since I have seen thee!” Dickie cried.
And Sebastian, gently mocking him, answered, “A great while indeed — two whole long days. And those thou’st spent merrymaking in the King’s water pageant. Two days — a great while, a great, great while.”
“I want you to teach me everything you know,” said Dickie, picking up an awl and feeling its point.
“‘OH, WHAT A LONG TIME SINCE I HAVE SEEN THEE!’ DICKIE CRIED”
“Have patience with me,” laughed Sebastian; “I will teach thee all thou canst le
arn, but not all in one while. Little by little, slow and sure.”
“You must not think,” said Dickie, “that it’s only play, and that I do not need to learn because I am my father’s son.”
“Should I think so?” Sebastian asked; “I that have sailed with Captain Drake and Captain Raleigh, and seen how a gentleman venturer needs to turn his hand to every guess craft? If thou’s so pleased to learn as Sebastian is to teach, then he’ll be as quick to teach as thou to learn. And so to work!”
He fetched out from the shed the ribs of the little galleon that he and Dickie had begun to put together, and the two set to work on it. It was a happy day. And one happiness was to all the other happinesses of that day as the sun is to little stars — and that happiness was the happiness of being once more a little boy who did not need to use a crutch.
And now the beautiful spacious life opened once more for Dickie, and he learned many things and found the days all good and happy and all the nights white and peaceful, in the big house and the beautiful garden on the slopes above Deptford. And the nights had no dreams in them, and in the days Dickie lived gaily and worthily, the life of the son of a great and noble house, and now he had no prickings of conscience about Beale, left alone in the little house in Deptford. Because one day he said to his nurse —
“How long did it take me to dream that dream about making the boxes and earning the money in the ugly place I told you of?”
“Dreams about that place,” she answered him, “take none of our time here. And dreams about this place take none of what is time in that other place.”
“But my dream endured all night,” objected Dickie.
“Not so,” said the nurse, smiling between her white cap frills. “It was after the dream that sleep came — a whole good nightful of it.”
So Dickie felt that for Beale no time at all had passed, and that when he went back — which he meant to do — he would get back to Deptford at the same instant as he left it. Which is the essence of this particular kind of white magic. And thus it happened that when he did go back to Mr. Beale he went because his heart called him, and not for any other reason at all.
Days and weeks and months went by and it was autumn, and the apples were ripe on the trees, and the grapes ripe on the garden walls and trellises. And then came a day when all the servants seemed suddenly to go mad — a great rushing madness of mops and brooms and dusters and pails and everything in the house already perfectly clean was cleaned anew, and everything that was already polished was polished freshly, and when Dickie had been turned out of three rooms one after the other, had tumbled over a pail and had a dish-cloth pinned to his doublet by an angry cook, he sought out the nurse, very busy in the linen-room, and asked her what all the fuss was about.
“It can’t be a spring-cleaning,” he said, “because it’s the wrong time of year.”
“Never say I did not tell thee,” she answered, unfolding a great embroidered cupboard cloth and holding it up critically. “To-morrow thy father and mother come home, and thy baby-brother, and to-day sennight thy little cousins come to visit thee.”
“How perfectly glorious!” said Dickie. “But you didn’t tell me.”
“If I didn’t ’twas because you never asked.”
“I — I didn’t dare to,” he said dreamily; “I was so afraid. You see, I’ve never seen them.”
“Afraid?” she said, laying away the folded cloth and taking out another from the deep press, oaken, with smooth-worn, brown iron hinges and lock; “never seen thy father and mother, forsooth!”
“Perhaps it was the fever,” said Dickie, feeling rather deceitful. “You said it made me forget things. I don’t remember them. Not at all, I don’t.”
“Do not say that to them,” the nurse said, looking at him very gravely.
“I won’t. Unless they ask me,” he added. “Oh, nurse, let me do something too. What can I do to help?”
“Thou canst gather such flowers as are left in the garden to make a nosegay for thy mother’s room; and set them in order in fair water. And bid thy tutor teach thee a welcome song to say to them when they come in.”
Gathering the flowers and arranging them was pleasant and easy. Asking so intimate a favor from the sour-faced tutor whom he so much disliked was neither easy nor pleasant. But Dickie did it. And the tutor was delighted to set him to learn a particularly hard and uninteresting piece of poetry, beginning —
“Happy is he
Who, to sweet home retired,
Shuns glory so admired
And to himself lives free;
While he who strives with pride to climb the skies
Falls down with foul disgrace before he dies.”
Dickie could not help thinking that the father and mother who were to be his in this beautiful world might have preferred something simpler and more affectionate from their little boy than this difficult piece whose last verse was the only one which seemed to Dickie to mean anything in particular. In this verse Dickie was made to remark that he hoped people would say of him, “He died a good old man,” which he did not hope, and indeed had never so much as thought of. The poetry, he decided, would have been nicer if it had been more about his father and mother and less about fame and trees and burdens. He felt this so much that he tried to write a poem himself, and got as far as —
“They say there is no other
Can take the place of mother.
I say there is no one I’d rather
See than my father.”
But he could not think of any more to say, and besides, he had a haunting idea that the first two lines — which were quite the best — were not his own make-up. So he abandoned the writing of poetry, deciding that it was not his line, and painfully learned the dismal verses appointed by his tutor.
But he never got them said. When the bustle of arrival had calmed a little, Dickie, his heart beating very fast indeed, found himself led by his tutor into the presence of the finest gentleman and the dearest lady he had ever beheld. The tutor gave him a little push so that he had to go forward two steps and to stand alone on the best carpet, which had been spread in their honor, and hissed in a savage whisper —
“Recite your song of welcome.”
“‘Happy the man,’” began Dickie, in tones of gloom, and tremblingly pronounced the first lines of that unpleasing poem.
But he had not got to “strive with pride” before the dear lady caught him in her arms, exclaiming, “Bless my dear son! how he has grown!” and the fine gentleman thumped him on the back, and bade him “bear himself like a gentleman’s son, and not like a queasy square-toes.” And they both laughed, and he cried a little, and the tutor seemed to be blotted out, and there they were, all three as jolly as if they had known each other all their lives. And a stout young nurse brought the baby, and Dickie loved it and felt certain it loved him, though it only said, “Goo ga goo,” exactly as your baby-brother does now, and got hold of Dickie’s hair and pulled it and would not let go.
There was a glorious dinner, and Dickie waited on this new father of his, changed his plate, and poured wine out of a silver jug into the silver cup that my lord drank from. And after dinner the dear lady-mother must go all over the house to see everything, because she had been so long away, and Dickie walked in the garden among the ripe apples and grapes with his father’s hand on his shoulder, the happiest, proudest boy in all Deptford — or in all Kent either.
His father asked what he had learned, and Dickie told, dwelling, perhaps, more on the riding, and the fencing, and the bowls, and the music than on the sour-faced tutor’s side of the business.
“But I’ve learned a lot of Greek and Latin, too,” he added in a hurry, “and poetry and things like that.”
“I fear,” said the father, “thou dost not love thy book.”
“I do, sir; yet I love my sports better,” said Dickie, and looked up to meet the fond, proud look of eyes as blue as his own.
“Thou’rt a good, modest lad,” said
his father when they began their third round of the garden, “not once to ask for what I promised thee.”
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.”