CHAPTER 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 moon-seeds and the rattle and the white seal, and try to get back into that other world. So he crept down into the parlour where a little layer of clear, red fire still burned.
And now the moon-seeds 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 moon-seeds 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 any one 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 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, 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 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 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 favourites 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 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 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 thunder-cloud 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 grown up 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.
"No; but there are chests of different clothes, and whatever clothes we put on we come to that time in history. I know it sounds like silly untruths," she added rather sadly, "and I knew you wouldn't believe it, but it is true. And now we're going back to our times—Queen Alexandra, you know, and King Edward the Seventh and electric light and motors and 1908. Don't try to believe it if it hurts you, Dickie dear. I know it's most awfully rum—but it's the real true truth."
Richard said nothing. Had never thought it possible but that he was the only one to whom things like this happened.
"You don't believe it," said Edred complacently. "I knew you wouldn't."
Dickie felt a swimming sensation. It was impossible that this wonderful change should happen to any one besides himself. This just meant that the whole thing was a dream. And he said nothing.
"Never mind," said Elfrida in comforting tones; "don't try to believe it. I know you can't. Forget it. Or pretend we were just kidding you."
"Well, it doesn't matter," Edred said. "What can we do to pay out old Parrot-nose?"
Then Richard found a voice and words.
"I don't like it," he said. "It's never been like this before. It makes it seem not real. It's only a dream, really, I suppose. And I'd got to believe that it was really real."
"I don't understand a word you're saying," said Edred; and, darting to a corner, produced a photographic camera, of the kind called "Brownie."
"Look here," he said, "you've never seen anything like this before. This comes from the times we belong to."
Richard knew it well. A boy at school had had one. And he had borrowed it once. And the assistant master had had a larger one of the same kind. It was horrible to him, this intrusion of the scientific attainments of the ugly times in which he was born into the beautiful times that he had grown to love.
"Oh, stow it!" he said. "I know now it's all a silly dream. But it's not worth while to pretend I don't know a Kodak when I see it. That's a Brownie."
"If you've dreamed about our time," said Elfrida. . . . "Did you ever dream of fire carriages and fire-boats, and"
Richard explained that he was not a baby, that he knew all about railways and steamboats and the triumphs of civilisation. And added that Kent made 615 against Derbyshire last Thursday. Edred and Elfrida began to ask questions. Dickie was much too full of his own questionings to answer theirs.
"I shan't tell you anything more," he said. "But I'll help you to get even with old Parrot-nose." And suggested shovelling the snow off the roof into the room of that dismal tyrant through the skylight conveniently lighting it.
But Edred wanted that written down—about Kent and Derbyshire—so that they might see, when they got back to their own times, whether it was true. And Dickie found he had a bit of paper in his doublet on which to write it. It was a bill—he had had it in his hand when he made the magic moon-seed pattern, and it had unaccountably come with him. It was a bill for three ship's guns and compasses and six flags, which Mr. Beale had bought for him in London for the fitting out of a little ship he had made to order for the small son of the amiable pawnbroker. He scribbled on the back of this bill, gave it to Edred, and then they all went out on the roof and shovelled snow in on to Mr. Parados, and when he came out on the roof very soon and angry, they slipped round the chimney-stacks and through the trapdoor, and left him up on the roof in the snow, and shut the trapdoor and hasped it.
And then the nurse caught them and Richard was sent to bed. But he did not go. There was no sleep in that house that night. Sleepiness filled it like a thick fog. Dickie put out his rush light and stayed quiet for a little while, but presently it was impossible to stay quiet another moment, so very softly and carefully he crept out and hid behind a tall press at the end of the passage. He felt that strange things were happening in the house and that he must know what they were. Presently there were voices below, voices coming up the stairs—the nurse's voice, his cousins', and another voice. Where had he heard that other voice? The stopped-clock feeling was thick about him as he realised that this was one of the voices he had heard on that night of the first magic—the voice that had said, "He is more yours than mine."
The light the nurse carried gleamed and disappeared up the second flight of stairs. Dickie followed. He had to follow. He could not be left out of this, the most mysterious of all the happenings that had so wonderfully come to him.
He saw, when he reached the upper landing, that the others were by the window, and that the window was open. A keen wind rushed through it, and by the blown candle's light he could see snowflakes whirled into the house through the window's dark, star-studded square. There was whispering going on. He heard her words, "Here. So! Jump."
And then a little figure—Edred it must be; no, Elfrida—climbed up on to the window-ledge. And jumped out. Out of the third-floor window undoubtedly jumped. Another followed it—that was Edred.
"It is a dream," said Dickie to himself, "but if they've been made to jump out, to punish them for getting even with old Parrot-nose or anything, I'll jump too."
He rushed past the nurse, past her voice and the other voice that was talking with hers, made one bound to the window, set his knee on it, stood up and jumped; and he heard, as his knee touched the icy window-sill, the strange voice say, "Another," and then he was in the air falling, falling.
"I shall wake when I reach the ground," Dickie told himself, "and then I shall know it's all only a dream, a silly dream."
But he never reached the ground. He had not fallen a couple of yards before he was caught by something soft as heaped feathers or drifted snow; it moved and shifted under him, took shape; it was a chair—no, a carriage. And there were reins in his hand—white reins. And a horse? No—a swan with wide, white wings. He grasped the reins and guided the strange steed to a low swoop that should bring him near the flare of torches in the street, outside the great front door. And as the swan laid its long neck low in downward flight he saw his cousins in a carriage like his own rise into the sky and sail away towards the south. Quite without meaning to do it he pulled on the reins; the swan rose. He pulled again and the carriage stopped at the landing window.
Hands dragged him in. The old nurse's hands. The swan glided away between snow and stars, and on the landing inside the open window the nurse held him fast in her arms.
"My lamb!" she said; "my dear, foolish, brave lamb!"
Dickie 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 grey 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 space—the space 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 Dickie—"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?" Dickie asked.
"Oh, they were somewhere else—in Julius Cæsar'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 . . . ." Dickie 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.
Dickie and the nurse sat most of the night talking by the replenished fire, for the tale seemed endless. Dickie 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 Dickie—"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 Dickie 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 chequered field of the Ardens' shield 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?" Dickie asked, but not eagerly, for he was very tired.
"Not now, my lamb," she said; and so at last Dickie went to bed, his weary brain full of new things more dreamlike 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 Dickie 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 Dickie 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 Dickie, 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 Dickie, 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?" Dickie 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 Dickie 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 Dickie 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 splendour 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 Dickie, swinging his feet in their resetted 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," Dickie 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 Dickie 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 Dickie of Deptford has the honour of the house of Arden to uphold there as here, then as now."
"I shall call myself Arden when I go back," said Dickie proudly.
"Not yet," she said; "wait."
"If you say so," said Dickie rather discontentedly.
"The time is not ripe for thee to take up all thine honours 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 Dickie. "I do want to see them both."
See them he did, in a blue-grey 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 grey 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 Dickie, so 'e be," in the thick speech of the peasant people round about Talbot House where Dickie 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."
The Mouldierwarp had, as well as a gentle voice, a finer nose than the Mouldiwarp, his fur was more even and his claws sharper.
"Eh, you be a gentleman, you be," said the Mouldiwarp, "so's 'e—so there's two of ye sure enough."
It was very odd to see and hear these white moles talking like real people and looking like figures on a magic-lantern screen. But Dickie did not enjoy it as much as perhaps you or I would have done. It was not his pet kind of magic. He liked the good, straight-forward, old-fashioned kind of magic that he was accustomed to—the kind that just took you out of one life into another life, and made both lives as real one as the other. Still one must always be polite. So he said—
"I am very glad to see you both."
"There's purty manners," the Mouldiwarp said.
"The pleasure is ours," said the Mouldierwarp instantly. Dickie could not help seeing that both these old creatures were extremely pleased with him.
"When shall I see the other Mouldiwarp?" he asked, to keep up the conversation—"the one on our shield of arms?"
"You mean the Mouldiestwarp?" said the Mouldier, as I will now call him for short; "you will not see him till the end of the magic. He is very great. I work the magic of space, my brother here works the magic of time, and the Great Mouldiestwarp controls us, and many things beside. You must only call on him when you wish to end our magics and to work a magic greater than ours."
"What could be greater?" Dickie asked, and both the creatures looked very pleased.
"He is a worthier Arden than those little black and white chits of thine," the Mouldier said to the Mouldy (which is what, to save time, we will now call the Mouldiwarp).
"An' so should be—an' so should be," said the Mouldy shortly. "All's for the best, and the end's to come. Where'd ye want to go, my lord?"
"I'm not 'my lord'; I'm only Richard Arden," said Dickie, "and I want to go back to Mr. Beale and stay with him for seven months, and then to find my cousins."
"Back thou goes then," said the Mouldy; "that part's easy."
"And for the second half of thy wish no magic is needed but the magic of steadfast heart and the patient purpose, and these thou hast without any helping or giving of ours," said the courtly Mouldierwarp.
They waved their white paws on the grey-blue curtain of mist, and behold they were not there any more, and the blue-grey mist was only the night's darkness turning to dawn, and Dickie was able again to feel solid things the floor under him, his hand on the sharp edge of the arm-chair, and the soft, breathing, comfortable weight of True, asleep against his knee. He moved, the dog awoke, and Dickie felt its soft nose nuzzled into his hand.
"And now for seven months' work, and not one good dream," said Dickie, got up, put Tinkler and the seal and the moon-seeds into a very safe place, and crept back to bed.
He felt rather heroic. He did not want the treasure. It was not for him. He was going to help Edred and Elfrida to get it. He did not want the life at Lavender Terrace. He was going to help Mr. Beale to live it. So let him feel a little bit of a hero, since that was what indeed he was, even though, of course, all right-minded children are modest and humble, and fully sensible of their own intense unimportance, no matter how heroically they may happen to be behaving.