Harding's Luck Part 27

"My lamb!" she said; "my dear, foolish, brave lamb!"

d.i.c.kie 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 s.p.a.ce--the s.p.a.ce 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 d.i.c.kie--"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?" d.i.c.kie asked.

"Oh, they were somewhere else--in Julius Caesar'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..." d.i.c.kie 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.

d.i.c.kie and the nurse sat most of the night talking by the replenished fire, for the tale seemed endless. d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie--"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 d.i.c.kie 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' s.h.i.+eld 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?" d.i.c.kie asked, but not eagerly, for he was very tired.

"Not now, my lamb," she said; and so at last d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie, 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."

"But," said d.i.c.kie, very much bewildered, as I am myself, and as I am afraid you too must be, "if they're seven months ahead, won't they always be seven months ahead?"

"Odds bodikins," said the nurse impatiently, "how often am I to tell you that there's no such thing as time? But there's seasons, and the season they came out of was summer, and the season you'll go back to 'tis autumn--so you _must_ live the seven months in their time, and then it'll be summer and you'll meet them."

"And what about Lord Arden in the Tower? Will he be beheaded for treason?" d.i.c.kie asked.

"Oh, _that's_ part of their magic. It isn't in your magic at all. Lord Arden will be safe enough. And now, my lamb, I've more to tell thee. But come into thy panelled chamber where thy tutor cannot eavesdrop and betray us, and have thee given over to him wholly, and me burned for a witch."

These terrible words kept d.i.c.kie silent till he and the nurse were safe in his room, and then he said, "Come with me to my time, nurse--they don't burn people for witches there."

"No," said the nurse, "but they let them live such lives in their ugly towns that my life here with all its risks is far better worth living.

Thou knowest how folk live in Deptford in thy time--how all the green trees are gone, and good work is gone, and people do bad work for just so much as will keep together their worn bodies and desolate souls. And sometimes they starve to death. And they won't burn me if thou'lt only keep a still tongue. Now listen." She sat down on the edge of the bed, and d.i.c.kie cuddled up against her stiff bodice.

"Edred and Elfrida first went into the past to look for treasure. It is a treasure buried in Arden Castle by the sea, which is their home. They want the treasure to restore the splendor of the old Castle, which in your time is fallen into ruin and decay, and to mend the houses of the tenants, and to do good to the poor and needy. But you know that now they have used their magic to get back their father, and can no longer use it to look for treasure. But your magic will hold. And if you lay out your moon-seeds round _them_, in the old shape, and stand with them in the midst, holding your Tinkler and your white seal, you will all go whithersoever you choose."

"I shall choose to go straight to the treasure, of course," said practical d.i.c.kie, swinging his feet in their rosetted shoes.

"That thou canst not. Thou canst only choose some year in the past--any year--go into it and then seek for the treasure there and then."

"I'll do it," d.i.c.kie said, "and then I may come back to you, mayn't I?"

"If thou'rt not needed elsewhere. The Ardens stay where duty binds them, and go where duty calls."

"But I'm not an Arden _there_," said d.i.c.kie sadly.

"Thou'rt Richard Arden there as here," she said; "thy grandfather's name got changed, by breathing hard on it, from Arden to Harden, and that again to Harding. Thus names are changed ever and again. And d.i.c.kie of Deptford has the honor of the house of Arden to uphold there as here, then as now."

"I shall call myself Arden when I go back," said d.i.c.kie proudly.

"Not yet," she said; "wait."

"If you say so," said d.i.c.kie rather discontentedly.

"The time is not ripe for thee to take up all thine honors there," she said. "And now, dear lamb, since thy tutor is imagining unkind things in his heart for thee, go quickly. Set out thy moon-seeds and, when thou hearest the voices, say, 'I would see both Mouldiwarps,' and thou shalt see them both."

"Thank you," said d.i.c.kie. "I do want to see them both."

See them he did, in a blue-gray mist in which he could feel nothing solid, not even the ground under his feet or the touch of his clenched fingers against his palms.

They were very white, the Mouldiwarps, outlined distinctly against the gray blueness, and the Mouldiwarp he had seen in that wonderful adventure in the far country smiled, as well as a mole can, and said--

"Thou'rt a fair sprig of de old tree, Muster d.i.c.kie, so 'e be," in the thick speech of the peasant people round about Talbot house where d.i.c.kie had once been a little burglar.

"He is indeed a worthy scion of the great house we serve," said the other Mouldiwarp with precise and gentle utterance. "As Mouldierwarp to the Ardens I can but own that I am proud of him."