Harding’s Luck · Chapter 7 (1/3)

VII

Dickie Learns Many Things

That night Dickie could not sleep. And as he lay awake a great resolve grew strong within him. He would try once more the magic of the moonseeds and the rattle and the white seal, and try to get back into that other world. So he crept down into the parlor where a little layer of clear, red fire still burned.

And now the moonseeds and the voices and the magic were over and Dickie awoke, thrilled to feel how cleverly he had managed everything, moved his legs in the bed, rejoicing that he was no longer lame. Then he opened his eyes to feast them on the big, light tapestried room. But the room was not tapestried. It was panelled. And it was rather dark. And it was so small as not to be much better than a cupboard.

This surprised Dickie more than anything else that had ever happened to him, and it frightened him a little too. If the spell of the moonseeds and the rattle and the white seal was not certain to take him where he wished to be, nothing in the world was certain. He might be anywhere where he didn’t wish to be⁠—he might be anyone whom he did not wish to be.

“I’ll never try it again,” he said: “if I get out of this I’ll stick to the woodcarving, and not go venturing about any more among dreams and things.”

He got up and looked out of a narrow window. From it he saw a garden, but it was not a garden he had ever seen before. It had marble seats, balustrades, and the damp dews of autumn hung chill about its almost unleafed trees.

“It might have been worse; it might have been a prison yard,” he told himself. “Come, keep your heart up. Wherever I’ve come to it’s an adventure.”

He turned back to the room and looked for his clothes. There were no clothes there. But the shirt he had on was like the shirt he had slept in at the beautiful house.

He turned to open the door, and there was no door. All was dark, even panelling. He was not shut in a room but in a box. Nonsense, boxes did not have beds in them and windows.

And then suddenly he was no longer the clever person who had managed everything so admirably⁠—who was living two lives with such credit in both, who was managing a grown man for that grown man’s good; but just a little boy rather badly frightened.

The little shirt was the only thing that helped, and that only gave him the desperate courage to beat on the panels and shout, “Nurse! Nurse! Nurse⁠—!”

A crack of light split and opened between two panels, they slid back and between them the nurse came to him⁠—the nurse with the ruff and the frilled cap and the kind, wrinkled face.

He got his arms round her big, comfortable waist.

“There, there, my lamb!” she said, petting him. His clothes hung over her arm, his doublet and little fat breeches, his stockings and the shoes with rosettes.

“Oh, I am here⁠—oh, I am so glad. I thought I’d got to somewhere different.”

She sat down on the bed and began to dress him, soothing him back to confidence with gentle touches and pet names.

“Listen,” she said, when it came to the silver sugar-loaf buttons of the doublet. “You must listen carefully. It is a month since you went away.”

“But I thought time didn’t move⁠—I thought.⁠ ⁠…”

“It was the money upset everything,” she said; “it always does upset everything. I ought to have known. Now attend carefully. No one knows you have been away. You’ve seemed to be here, learning and playing and doing everything like you used. And you’re on a visit now to your cousins at your uncle’s town house. And you all have lessons together⁠—thy tutor gives them. And thy cousins love him no better than thou dost. All thou hast to do is to forget thy dream, and take up thy life here⁠—and be slow to speak, for a day or two, till thou hast grown used to thine own place. Thou’lt have lessons alone today. One of the cousins goes with his mother to be her page and bear her train at the King’s revels at Whitehall, and the other must sit and sew her sampler. Her mother says she hath run wild too long.”

So Dickie had lessons alone with his detested tutor, and his relief from the panic fear of the morning raised his spirits to a degree that unfortunately found vent in what was, for him, extreme naughtiness. He drew a comic picture of his tutor⁠—it really was rather like⁠—with a scroll coming out of his mouth, and on the scroll the words, “Because I am ugly I need not be hateful!” His tutor, who had a nasty way of creeping up behind people, came up behind him at the wrong moment. Dickie was caned on both hands and kept in. Also his dinner was of bread and water, and he had to write out two hundred times, “I am a bad boy, and I ask the pardon of my good tutor. The fifth day of November, 1608.” So he did not see his aunt and cousin in their Whitehall finery⁠—and it was quite late in the afternoon before he even saw his other cousin, who had been sampler-sewing. He would not have written out the lines, he felt sure he would not, only he thought of his cousin and wanted to see her again. For she was the only little girl friend he had.

When the last was done he rushed into the room where she was⁠—he was astonished to find that he knew his way about the house quite well, though he could not remember ever having been there before⁠—and cried out⁠—

“Thy task done? Mine is, too. Old Parrot-nose kept me hard at it, but I thought of thee, and for this once I did all his biddings. So now we are free. Come play ball in the garden!”

His cousin looked up from her sampler, set the frame down and jumped up.

“I am so glad,” she said. “I do hate this horrid sampler!”

And as she said it Dickie had a most odd feeling, rather as if a clock had struck, or had stopped striking⁠—a feeling of sudden change. But he could not wait to wonder about it or to question what it was that he really felt. His cousin was waiting.

“Come, Elfrida,” he said, and held out his hand. They went together into the garden.

Now if you have read a book called The House of Arden you will already know that Dickie’s cousins were called Edred and Elfrida, and that their father, Lord Arden, had a beautiful castle by the sea, as well as a house in London, and that he and his wife were great favorites at the Court of King James the First. If you have not read that book, and didn’t already know these things⁠—well, you know them now. And Arden was Dickie’s own name too, in this old life, and his father was Sir Richard Arden, of Deptford and Aylesbury. And his tutor was Mr. Parados, called Parrot-nose “for short” by his disrespectful pupils.

Dickie and Elfrida played ball, and they played hide-and-seek, and they ran races. He preferred play to talk just then; he did not want to let out the fact that he remembered nothing whatever of the doings of the last month. Elfrida did not seem very anxious to talk, either. The garden was most interesting, and the only blot on the scene was the black figure of the tutor walking up and down with a sour face and his thumbs in one of his dull-looking books.

The children sat down on the step of one of the stone seats, and Dickie was wondering why he had felt that queer clock-stopping feeling, when he was roused from his wonderings by hearing Elfrida say⁠—

“Please to remember

The Fifth of November,

The gunpowder treason and plot.

I see no reason

Why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.”

“How odd!” he thought. “I didn’t know that was so old as all this.” And he remembered hearing his father, Sir Richard Arden, say, “Treason’s a dangerous word to let lie on your lips these days.” So he said⁠—

“ ’Tis not a merry song, cousin, nor a safe one. ’Tis best not to sing of treason.”

“But it didn’t come off, you know, and he’s always burnt in the end.”

So already Guy Fawkes burnings went on. Dickie wondered whether there would be a bonfire tonight. It was the Fifth of November. He had had to write the date two hundred times so he was fairly certain of it. He was afraid of saying too much or too little. And for the life of him he could not remember the date of the Gunpowder Plot. Still he must say something, so he said⁠—

“Are there more verses?”

“No,” said Elfrida.

“I wonder,” he said, trying to feel his way, “what treason the ballad deals with?”

He felt it had been the wrong thing to say, when Elfrida answered in surprised tones⁠—

“Don’t you know? I know. And I know some of the names of the conspirators and who they wanted to kill and everything.”

“Tell me” seemed the wisest thing to say, and he said it as carelessly as he could.

“The King hadn’t been fair to the Catholics, you know,” said Elfrida, who evidently knew all about the matter, “so a lot of them decided to kill him and the Houses of Parliament. They made a plot⁠—there were a whole lot of them in it.”

The clock-stopping feeling came on again. Elfrida was different somehow. The Elfrida who had gone on the barge to Gravesend and played with him at the Deptford house had never used such expressions as “a whole lot of them in it.” He looked at her and she went on⁠—

“They said Lord Arden was in it, but he wasn’t, and some of them were to pretend to be hunting and to seize the Princess Elizabeth and proclaim her Queen, and the rest were to blow the Houses of Parliament up when the King went to open them.”

“I never heard this tale from my tutor,” said Dickie. And without knowing why he felt uneasy, and because he felt uneasy he laughed. Then he said, “Proceed, cousin.”

Elfrida went on telling him about the Gunpowder Plot, but he hardly listened. The stopped-clock feeling was growing so strong. But he heard her say, “Mr. Tresham wrote to his relation, Lord Monteagle, that they were going to blow up the King,” and he found himself saying, “What King?” though he knew the answer perfectly well.

“Why, King James the First,” said Elfrida, and suddenly the horrible tutor pounced and got Elfrida by the wrist. Then all in a moment everything grew confused. Mr. Parados was asking questions and little Elfrida was trying to answer them, and Dickie understood that the Gunpowder Plot had not happened yet, and that Elfrida had given the whole show away. How did she know? And the verse?

“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 thundercloud 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 grownup 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 everyday 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.