by Edith Nesbit
“Tell me all — every name, every particular,” the loathsome tutor was saying, “or it will be the worse for thee and thy father.”
Elfrida was positively green with terror, and looked appealingly at Dickie.
“Come, sir,” he said, in as manly a voice as he could manage, “you frighten my cousin. It is but a tale she told. She is always merry and full of many inventions.”
But the tutor would not be silenced.
“And it’s in history,” he heard Elfrida say.
What followed was a mist of horrible things. When the mist cleared Dickie found himself alone in the house with Mr. Parados, the nurse, and the servants, for the Earl and Countess of Arden, Edred, and Elfrida were lodged in the Tower of London on a charge of high treason.
For this was, it seemed, the Fifth of November, the day on which the Gunpowder Plot should have been carried out; and Elfrida it was, and not Mr. Tresham, Lord Monteagle’s cousin, who had given away the whole business.
But how had Elfrida known? Could it be that she had dreams like his, and in those dreams visited later times when all this was matter of history? Dickie’s brain felt fat — swollen — as though it would burst, and he was glad to go to bed — even in that cupboardy place with the panels. But he begged the nurse to leave the panel open.
And when he woke next day it was all true. His aunt and uncle and his two cousins were in the Tower and gloom hung over Arden House in Soho like a black thunder-cloud over a mountain. And the days went on, and lessons with Mr. Parados were a sort of Inquisition torture to Dickie. For the tutor never let a day pass without trying to find out whether Dickie had shared in any way that guilty knowledge of Elfrida’s which had, so Mr. Parados insisted, overthrown the fell plot of the Papists and preserved to a loyal people His Most Gracious Majesty James the First.
And then one day, quite as though it were the most natural thing in the world, his cousin Edred and Lady Arden his aunt were set free from the Tower and came home. The King had suddenly decided that they at least had had nothing to do with the plot. Lady Arden cried all the time, and, as Dickie owned to himself, “there was enough to make her.” But Edred was full of half thought-out plans and schemes for being revenged on old Parrot-nose. And at last he really did arrange a scheme for getting Elfrida out of the Tower — a perfectly workable scheme. And what is more, it worked. If you want to know how it was done, ask some grown-up to tell you how Lady Nithsdale got her husband out of the Tower when he was a prisoner there, and in danger of having his head cut off, and you will readily understand the kind of scheme it was. A necessary part of it was the dressing up of Elfrida in boy’s clothes, and her coming out of the Tower, pretending to be Edred, who, with Richard, had come in to visit Lord Arden. Then the guard at the Tower gateway was changed, and another Edred came out, and they all got into a coach, and there was Elfrida under the coach seat among the straw and other people’s feet, and they all hugged each other in the dark coach as it jolted through the snowy streets to Arden House in Soho.
Dickie, feeling very small and bewildered among all these dangerous happenings, found himself suddenly caught by the arm. The nurse’s hand it was.
“Now,” she said, “Master Richard will go take off his fine suit, and — —” He did not hear the end, for he was pushed out of the room. Very discontentedly he found his way to his panelled bed-closet, and took off the smart velvet and fur which he had worn in his visit to the Tower, and put on his every-day things. You may be sure he made every possible haste to get back to his cousins. He wanted to talk over the whole wonderful adventure with them. He found them whispering in a corner.
“What is it?” he asked.
“We’re going to be even with old Parrot-nose,” said Edred, “but you mustn’t be in it, because we’re going away, and you’ve got to stay here, and whatever we decide to do you’ll get the blame of it.”
“I don’t see,” said Richard, “why I shouldn’t have a hand in what I’ve wanted to do these four years.” He had not known that he had known the tutor for four years, but as he said the words he felt that they were true.
“There is a reason,” said Edred. “You go to bed, Richard.”
“Not me,” said Dickie of Deptford firmly.
“If we tell you,” said Elfrida, explaining affectionately, “you won’t believe us.”
“You might at least,” said Richard Arden, catching desperately at the grand manner that seemed to suit these times of ruff and sword and cloak and conspiracy—”you might at least make the trial.”
“Very well, I will,” said Elfrida abruptly. “No, Edred, he has a right to hear. He’s one of us. He won’t give us away. Will you, Dickie dear?”
“You know I won’t,” Dickie assured her.
“Well, then,” said Elfrida slowly, “we are. . . . You listen hard and believe with both hands and with all your might, or you won’t be able to believe at all. We are not what we seem, Edred and I. We don’t really belong here at all. I don’t know what’s become of the real Elfrida and Edred who belong to this time. Haven’t we seemed odd to you at all? Different, I mean, from the Edred and Elfrida you’ve been used to?”
The remembrance of the stopped-clock feeling came strongly on Dickie and he nodded.
“Well, that’s because we’re not them. We don’t belong here. We belong three hundred years later in history. Only we’ve got a charm — because in our time Edred is Lord Arden, and there’s a white mole who helps us, and we can go anywhere in history we like.”
“Not quite,” said Edred.
“No; but there are chests of different clothes, and whatever clothes we put on we come to that time in history. I know it sounds like silly untruths,” she added rather sadly, “and I knew you wouldn’t believe it, but it is true. And now we’re going back to our times — Queen Alexandra, you know, and King Edward the Seventh and electric light and motors and 1908. Don’t try to believe it if it hurts you, Dickie dear. I know it’s most awfully rum — but it’s the real true truth.”
Richard said nothing. Had never thought it possible but that he was the only one to whom things like this happened.
“You don’t believe it,” said Edred complacently. “I knew you wouldn’t.”
Dickie felt a swimming sensation. It was impossible that this wonderful change should happen to any one besides himself. This just meant that the whole thing was a dream. And he said nothing.
“Never mind,” said Elfrida in comforting tones; “don’t try to believe it. I know you can’t. Forget it. Or pretend we were just kidding you.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Edred said. “What can we do to pay out old Parrot-nose?”
Then Richard found a voice and words.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s never been like this before. It makes it seem not real. It’s only a dream, really, I suppose. And I’d got to believe that it was really real.”
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying,” said Edred; and, darting to a corner, produced a photographic camera, of the kind called “Brownie.”
“Look here,” he said, “you’ve never seen anything like this before. This comes from the times we belong to.”
Richard knew it well. A boy at school had had one. And he had borrowed it once. And the assistant master had had a larger one of the same kind. It was horrible to him, this intrusion of the scientific attainments of the ugly times in which he was born into the beautiful times that he had grown to love.
“Oh, stow it!” he said. “I know now it’s all a silly dream. But it’s not worth while to pretend I don’t know a Kodak when I see it. That’s a Brownie.”
“If you’ve dreamed about our time,” said Elfrida. . . . “Did you ever dream of fire carriages and fire-boats, and — —”
Richard explained that he was not a baby, that he knew all about railways and steamboats and the triumphs of civilization. And added that Kent made 615 against Derbyshire last Thursday. Edred and Elfrida began to ask questions. Dickie wa
s much too full of his own questionings to answer theirs.
“I shan’t tell you anything more,” he said. “But I’ll help you to get even with old Parrot-nose.” And suggested shovelling the snow off the roof into the room of that dismal tyrant through the skylight conveniently lighting it.
But Edred wanted that written down — about Kent and Derbyshire — so that they might see, when they got back to their own times, whether it was true. And Dickie found he had a bit of paper in his doublet on which to write it. It was a bill — he had had it in his hand when he made the magic moon-seed pattern, and it had unaccountably come with him. It was a bill for three ship’s guns and compasses and six flags, which Mr. Beale had bought for him in London for the fitting out of a little ship he had made to order for the small son of the amiable pawnbroker. He scribbled on the back of this bill, gave it to Edred, and then they all went out on the roof and shovelled snow in on to Mr. Parados, and when he came out on the roof very soon and angry, they slipped round the chimney-stacks and through the trap-door, and left him up on the roof in the snow, and shut the trap-door and hasped it.
And then the nurse caught them and Richard was sent to bed. But he did not go. There was no sleep in that house that night. Sleepiness filled it like a thick fog. Dickie put out his rushlight and stayed quiet for a little while, but presently it was impossible to stay quiet another moment, so very softly and carefully he crept out and hid behind a tall press at the end of the passage. He felt that strange things were happening in the house and that he must know what they were. Presently there were voices below, voices coming up the stairs — the nurse’s voice, his cousins’, and another voice. Where had he heard that other voice? The stopped-clock feeling was thick about him as he realized that this was one of the voices he had heard on that night of the first magic — the voice that had said, “He is more yours than mine.”
The light the nurse carried gleamed and disappeared up the second flight of stairs. Dickie followed. He had to follow. He could not be left out of this, the most mysterious of all the happenings that had so wonderfully come to him.
He saw, when he reached the upper landing, that the others were by the window, and that the window was open. A keen wind rushed through it, and by the blown candle’s light he could see snowflakes whirled into the house through the window’s dark, star-studded square. There was whispering going on. He heard her words, “Here. So! Jump.”
And then a little figure — Edred it must be; no, Elfrida — climbed up on to the window-ledge. And jumped out. Out of the third-floor window undoubtedly jumped. Another followed it — that was Edred.
“It is a dream,” said Dickie to himself, “but if they’ve been made to jump out, to punish them for getting even with old Parrot-nose or anything, I’ll jump too.”
He rushed past the nurse, past her voice and the other voice that was talking with hers, made one bound to the window, set his knee on it, stood up and jumped; and he heard, as his knee touched the icy window-sill, the strange voice say, “Another,” and then he was in the air falling, falling.
“I shall wake when I reach the ground,” Dickie told himself, “and then I shall know it’s all only a dream, a silly dream.”
But he never reached the ground. He had not fallen a couple of yards before he was caught by something soft as heaped feathers or drifted snow; it moved and shifted under him, took shape; it was a chair — no, a carriage. And there were reins in his hand — white reins. And a horse? No — a swan with wide, white wings. He grasped the reins and guided the strange steed to a low swoop that should bring him near the flare of torches in the street, outside the great front door. And as the swan laid its long neck low in downward flight he saw his cousins in a carriage like his own rise into the sky and sail away towards the south. Quite without meaning to do it he pulled on the reins; the swan rose. He pulled again and the carriage stopped at the landing window.
Hands dragged him in. The old nurse’s hands. The swan glided away between snow and stars, and on the landing inside the open window the nurse held him fast in her arms.
“My lamb!” she said; “my dear, foolish, brave lamb!”
Dickie was pulling himself together.
“If it’s a dream,” he said slowly, “I’ve had enough. I want to wake up. If it’s real — real, with magic in it — you’ve got to explain it all to me — every bit. I can’t go on like this. It’s not fair.”
“Oh, tell him and have done,” said the voice that had begun all the magic, and it seemed to him that something small and white slid along the wainscot of the corridor and vanished quite suddenly, just as a candle flame does when you blow the candle out.
“I will,” said the nurse. “Come, love, I will tell you everything.” She took him down into a warm curtained room, blew to flame the gray ashes on the open hearth, gave him elder wine to drink, hot and spiced, and kneeling before him, rubbing his cold, bare feet, she told him.
“There are certain children born now and then — it does not often happen, but now and then it does — children who are not bound by time as other people are. And if the right bit of magic comes their way, those children have the power to go back and forth in time just as other children go back and forth in space — the space of a room, a playing-field, or a garden alley. Often children lose this power when they are quite young. Sometimes it comes to them gradually so that they hardly know when it begins, and leaves them as gradually, like a dream when you wake and stretch yourself. Sometimes it comes by the saying of a charm. That is how Edred and Elfrida found it. They came from the time that you were born in, and they have been living in this time with you, and now they have gone back to their own time. Didn’t you notice any difference in them? From what they were at Deptford?”
“I should think I did,” said Dickie—”at least, it wasn’t that I noticed any difference so much as that I felt something queer. I couldn’t understand it — it felt stuffy — as if something was going to burst.”
“That was because they were not the cousins you knew at Deptford.”
“But where have the real cousins I knew at Deptford been then — all this time — while those other kids were here pretending to be them?” Dickie asked.
“Oh, they were somewhere else — in Julius Cæsar’s time, to be exact — but they don’t know it, and never will know it. They haven’t the charm. To them it will be like a dream that they have forgotten.”
“But the swans and the carriages and the voice — and jumping out of the window. . .” Dickie urged.
“The swans were white magic — the white Mouldiwarp of Arden did all that.”
Then she told him all about the white Mouldiwarp of Arden, and how it was the badge of Arden’s house — its picture being engraved on Tinkler, and how it had done all sorts of magic for Edred and Elfrida, and would do still more.
Dickie and the nurse sat most of the night talking by the replenished fire, for the tale seemed endless. Dickie learned that the Edred and Elfrida who belonged to his own times had a father who was supposed to be dead. “I am forbidden to tell them,” said the nurse, “but thou canst help them, and shalt.”
“I should like that,” said Dickie—”but can’t I see the white Mouldiwarp?”
“I dare not — even I dare not call it again to-night,” the nurse owned. “But maybe I will teach thee a little spell to bring it on another day. It is an angry little beast at times, but kindly, and hard-working.”
Then Dickie told her about the beginnings of the magic, and how he had heard two voices, one of them the Mouldiwarp’s.
“There are three white Mouldiwarps friends to thy house,” she told him—”the Mouldiwarp who is the badge, and the Mouldiwarp who is the crest, and the Great Mouldiwarp who sits on the green and white checkered field of the Ardens’ shield of arms. It was the first two who talked of thee.”
“And how can I find my cousins and help them to find their father?”
“Lay out the moon-seeds and the other charms, and wish to
be where they are going. Then thou canst speak with them. Wish to be there a week before they come, that thou mayst know the place and the folk.”
“Now?” Dickie asked, but not eagerly, for he was very tired.
“Not now, my lamb,” she said; and so at last Dickie went to bed, his weary brain full of new things more dream-like than any dreams he had ever had.
After this he talked with the nurse every day, and learned more and more wonders, of which there is no time now for me to tell you. But they are all written in the book of “The House of Arden.” In that book, too, it is written how Dickie went back from the First James’s time to the time of the Eighth Henry, and took part in the merry country life of those days, and there found the old nurse herself, Edred and Elfrida, and helped them to recover their father from a far country. There also you may read of the marvels of the white clock, and the cliff that none could climb, and the children who were white cats, and the Mouldiwarp who became as big as a polar bear, with other wonders. And when all this was over, Elfrida and Edred wanted Dickie to come back with them to their own time. But he would not. He went back instead to the time he loved, when James the First was King. And when he woke in the little panelled room it seemed to him that all this was only dreams and fancies.
In the course of this adventure he met the white Mouldiwarp, and it was just a white mole, very funny and rather self-important. The second Mouldiwarp he had not yet met. I have told you all these things very shortly, because they were so dream-like to Dickie, and not at all real like the double life he had been leading.
“That always happens,” said the nurse; “if you stumble into some one else’s magic it never feels real. But if you bring them into yours it’s quite another pair of sleeves. Those children can’t get any more magic of their own now, but you could take them into yours. Only for that you’d have to meet them in your own time that you were born in, and you’ll have to wait till it’s summer, because that’s where they are now. They’re seven months ahead of you in your own time.”