“Not ’arf!” said Dickie, getting up.
“Come to yourself, eh?” sneered the aunt. “You mind, and let it be the last time you come your games with me, my beauty. You and your tantrums!”
Dickie said what it was necessary to say, and got back to the “garden.”
“She says she ain’t got no time to waste, an’ if you ’ave she don’t care what you does with it.”
“There’s a dirty mug you’ve got on you,” said the Man Next Door, leaning over to give Dickie’s face a rub with a handkerchief hardly cleaner. “Now I’ll come over and make a start.” He threw his leg over the fence. “You just peg about an’ be busy pickin’ up all them fancy articles, and nex’ time your aunt goes to Buckingham Palace for the day we’ll have a bonfire.”
“Fifth o’ November?” said Dickie, sitting down and beginning to draw to himself the rubbish that covered the ground.
“Fifth of anything you like, so long as she ain’t about,” said he, driving in the spade. “ ’Ard as any old doorstep it is. Never mind, we’ll turn it over, and we’ll get some little seedses and some little plantses and we shan’t know ourselves.”
“I got a ’apenny,” said Dickie.
“Well, I’ll put one to it, and you leg ’long and buy seedses. That’s wot you do.”
Dickie went. He went slowly, because he was lame. And he was lame because his “aunt” had dropped him when he was a baby. She was not a nice woman, and I am glad to say that she goes out of this story almost at once. But she did keep Dickie when his father died, and she might have sent him to the workhouse. For she was not really his aunt, but just the woman of the house where his father had lodged. It was good of her to keep Dickie, even if she wasn’t very kind to him. And as that is all the good I can find to say about her, I will say no more. With his little crutch, made out of a worn-out broom cut down to his little height, he could manage quite well in spite of his lameness.
He found the corn-chandler’s—a really charming shop that smelled like stables and had deep dusty bins where he would have liked to play. Above the bins were delightful little square-fronted drawers, labelled Rape, Hemp, Canary, Millet, Mustard, and so on; and above the drawers pictures of the kind of animals that were fed on the kind of things that the shop sold. Fat, oblong cows that had eaten Burley’s Cattle Food, stout pillows of wool that Ovis’s Sheep Spice had fed, and, brightest and best of all, an incredibly smooth-plumaged parrot, rainbow-colored, cocking a black eye bright with the intoxicating qualities of Perrokett’s Artistic Bird Seed.
“Gimme,” said Dickie, leaning against the counter and pointing a grimy thumb at the wonder—“gimme a penn’orth o’ that there!”
“Got the penny?” the shopman asked carefully.
Dickie displayed it, parted with it, and came home nursing a paper bag full of rustling promises.
“Why,” said the Man Next Door, “that ain’t seeds. It’s parrot food, that is.”
“It said the Ar-something Bird Seed,” said Dickie, downcast; “I thought it ’ud come into flowers like birds-same colors as wot the poll parrot was, dontcherknow?”
“And so it will like as not,” said the Man Next Door comfortably. “I’ll set it along this end soon’s I’ve got it turned over. I lay it’ll come up something pretty.”
So the seed was sown. And the Man Next Door promised two more pennies later for real seed. Also he transplanted two of the primroses whose faces wanted washing.
It was a grand day for Dickie. He told the whole story of it that night when he went to bed to his only confidant, from whom he hid nothing. The confidant made no reply, but Dickie was sure this was not because the confidant didn’t care about the story. The confidant was a blackened stick about five inches long, with little blackened bells to it like the bells on dogs’ collars. Also a rather crooked bit of something whitish and very hard, good to suck, or to stroke with your fingers, or to dig holes in the soap with. Dickie had no idea what it was. His father had given it to him in the hospital where Dickie was taken to say goodbye to him. Goodbye had to be said because of father having fallen off the scaffolding where he was at work and not getting better. “You stick to that,” father had said, looking dreadfully clean in the strange bed among all those other clean beds; “it’s yourn, your very own. My dad give it to me, and it belonged to his dad. Don’t you let anyone take it away. Some old lady told the old man it ’ud bring us luck. So long, old chap.”
Dickie remembered every word of that speech, and he kept the treasure. There had been another thing with it, tied on with string. But Aunt Maud had found that, and taken it away “to take care of,” and he had never seen it again. It was brassy, with a white stone and some sort of pattern on it. He had the treasure, and he had not the least idea what it was, with its bells that jangled such pretty music, and its white spike so hard and smooth. He did not know—but I know. It was a rattle-a baby’s old-fashioned rattle—or, if you would rather call it that, a “coral and bells.”
“And we shall ’ave the fairest flowers of hill and dale,” said Dickie, whispering comfortably in his dirty sheets, “and greensward. Oh! Tinkler dear, ’twill indeed be a fair scene. The gayest colors of the rainbow amid the Ague Able green of fresh leaves. I do love the Man Next Door. He has indeed a ’art of gold.”
That was how Dickie talked to his friend Tinkler. You know how he talked to his aunt and the Man
