Harding’s Luck E. Nesbit (epub read online books .txt) 📖

mastered by Beale. But Beale was certainly fond of dogs. Dickie remembered how little True had cuddled up to him and nestled inside his coat when he lay down to sleep under the newspapers and the bits of sacking in Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane.

So Dickie went his way to the kennels to talk to the kennelman. He had been there before with Master Roger Fry, his fencing master, but he had never spoken to the kennelman. And when he got to the kennels he knocked on the door of the kennelman’s house and called out, “What ho! within there!” just as people do in old plays. And the door was thrown open by a man in a complete suit of leather, and when Dickie looked in that man’s face he saw that it was the face of the man who had lived next door in Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Lane⁠—the man who dug up the garden for the parrot seed.

“Why,” said Dickie, “it’s you!”

“Who would it be but me, little master?” the man asked with a respectful salute, and Dickie 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.”

Dickie 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 Dickie 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 ships 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!” Dickie 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 Dickie, picking up an awl and feeling its point.

“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 Dickie, “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 Dickie 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 spacious life opened once more for Dickie, 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 Dickie lived gaily and worthily, the life of the son of a great and noble house, and now he had no prickings 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 Dickie.

“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 Dickie felt that for Beale no time at all had passed, 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 rushing 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 Dickie had been turned out of three rooms one after the other, had tumbled over a pail and had a dishcloth pinned to his doublet by an angry cook, he sought out the nurse, very busy in the linen-room, and asked her what all