"Look 'ere, you nipper, I ain't a-goin' to stand in your light. You're
goin' up in the world, says you. Well, you ain't the only one. Lord
Arden's bought father's cottage an' 'e's goin' to build on to it, and
I'm to 'ave all the dawgs down 'ere, and sell 'em through the papers
like. And you'll come an' 'ave a look at us sometimes."
"And what about Amelia?" said Dickie, "and the little ones?"
"Well, I did think," said Beale, rubbing his nose thoughtfully, "of
asking 'Melia to come down 'ere along o' the dawgs. Seems a pity to
separate 'em somehow. It was Lord Arden put it into my 'ed. 'You oughter
be married you ought,' 'e says to me pleasant like, man to man; 'ain't
there any young woman I could give a trifle to, to set you and her up in
housekeeping?' So then I casts about, and I thinks of 'Melia. As well
'er as anybody, and she's used to the dawgs. And the trifle's an hundred
pounds. That's all. _That's all!_ So I'm sending to her by this post,
and it's an awful toss up getting married, but 'Melia ain't like a
stranger, and it couldn't ever be the same with us two and nipper after
all this set out. What you say?"
I don't know what Dickie said; what he felt was something like this:--
"I _have_ tried to stick to Beale, and help him along, and I did come
back from the other old long-ago world to help him, and I have been
sticking to things I didn't like so as to help him and get him settled.
He was my bit of work, and now some one else comes along and takes my
work out of my hands, and finishes it. And here's Beale provided for and
settled. And I meant to provide for him myself. And I don't like it!"
That was what he felt at first. But afterwards he had to own that it was
"a jolly lucky thing for Beale." And for himself too. He found that to
be at Arden Castle with Edred and Elfrida all day, at play and at
lessons, was almost as good as being with them in the beautiful old
dream-life. All the things that he had hated in this modern life, when
he was Dickie of Deptford, ceased to trouble him now that he was Richard
Arden. For the difference between being rich and poor is as great as the
difference between being warm and cold.
After that first day a sort of shyness came over the three children, and
they spoke no more of the strange adventures they had had together, but
just played at all the ordinary every-day games, till they almost forgot
that there was any magic, had ever been any. The fact was, the life they
were leading was so happy in itself that they needed no magic to make
them contented. It was not till after the wedding of 'Melia and Mr.
Beale that Dickie remembered that to find the Arden Treasure for his
cousins had been one of his reasons for coming back to this, the
Nowadays world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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