Harding's Luck Part 21

"Who would it be but me, little master?" the man asked with a respectful salute, and d.i.c.kie 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."

d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie 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 s.h.i.+ps 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!" d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie, picking up an awl and feeling its point.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'OH, WHAT A LONG TIME SINCE I HAVE SEEN THEE!' d.i.c.kIE CRIED"

[_Page 147_]

"Have patience with me," laughed Sebastian; "I will teach thee all thou canst learn, but not all in one while. Little by little, slow and sure."

"You must not think," said d.i.c.kie, "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 d.i.c.kie 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 s.p.a.cious life opened once more for d.i.c.kie, 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 d.i.c.kie lived gaily and worthily, the life of the son of a great and n.o.ble house, and now he had no p.r.i.c.kings 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 d.i.c.kie.

"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 d.i.c.kie felt that for Beale no time at all had pa.s.sed, 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie. "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 d.i.c.kie, 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 d.i.c.kie 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."

d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie to mean anything in particular. In this verse d.i.c.kie 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, d.i.c.kie, 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 d.i.c.kie, in tones of gloom, and tremblingly p.r.o.nounced 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 d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie's hair and pulled it and would not let go.

There was a glorious dinner, and d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie, 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."

d.i.c.kie 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."