Harding's Luck Part 25

"I'll never try it again," he said: "if I get out of this I'll stick to the wood-carving, 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, bal.u.s.trades, 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 b.u.t.tons 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 to-day. 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 d.i.c.kie 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.

d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie'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 d.i.c.kie'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.

d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie 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. d.i.c.kie wondered whether there would be a bonfire to-night. 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 d.i.c.kie. 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 d.i.c.kie understood that the Gunpowder Plot _had not happened y_et, 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 d.i.c.kie.

"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.