The House of Arden

I

Arden’s Lord

It had been a great house once, with farms and fields, money and jewels—with tenants and squires and men-at-arms. The head of the house had ridden out three days’ journey to meet King Henry at the boundary of his estate, and the King had ridden back with him to lie in the tall State bed in the castle guest-chamber. The heir of the house had led his following against Cromwell; younger sons of the house had fought in foreign lands, to the honour of England and the gilding and regilding with the perishable gold of glory of the old Arden name. There had been Ardens in Saxon times, and there were Ardens still—but few and impoverished. The lands were gone, and the squires and men-at-arms; the castle itself was roofless, and its unglazed windows stared blankly across the fields of strangers, that stretched right up to the foot of its grey, weatherworn walls. And of the male Ardens there were now known two only—an old man and a child.

The old man was Lord Arden, the head of the house, and he lived lonely in a little house built of the fallen stones that Time and Cromwell’s round-shot had cast from the castle walls. The child was Edred Arden, and he lived in a house in a clean, windswept town on a cliff.

It was a bright-faced house with bow-windows and a green balcony that looked out over the sparkling sea. It had three neat white steps and a brass knocker, pale and smooth with constant rubbing. It was a pretty house, and it would have been a pleasant house but for one thing—the lodgers. For I cannot conceal from you any longer that Edred Arden lived with his aunt, and that his aunt let lodgings. Letting lodgings is one of the most unpleasant of all possible ways of earning your living, and I advise you to try every other honest way of earning your living before you take to that.

Because people who go to the seaside and take lodgings seem, somehow, much harder to please than the people who go to hotels. They want ever so much more waiting on; they want so many meals, and at such odd times. They ring the bell almost all day long. They bring in sand from the shore in every fold of their clothes, and it shakes out of them on to the carpets and the sofa cushions, and everything in the house. They hang long streamers of wet seaweed against the pretty roses of the new wallpapers, and their washhand basins are always full of sea anemones and shells. Also, they are noisy; their boots seem to be always on the stairs, no matter how bad a headache you may have; and when you give them their bill they always think it is too much, no matter how little it may be. So do not let lodgings if you can help it.

Miss Arden could not help it. It happened like this.

Edred and his sister were at school. (Did I tell you that he had a sister? Well, he had, and her name was Elfrida.) Miss Arden lived near the school, so that she could see the children often. She was getting her clothes ready for her wedding, and the gentleman who was going to marry her was coming home from South America, where he had made a fortune. The children’s father was coming home from South America, too, with the fortune that he had made, for he and Miss Arden’s sweetheart were partners. The children and their aunt talked whenever they met of the glorious time that was coming, and how, when father and Uncle Jim—they called him Uncle Jim already—came home, they were all going to live in the country and be happy ever after.

And then the news came that father and Uncle Jim had been captured by brigands, and all the money was lost, too, and there was nothing left but the house on the cliff. So Miss Arden took the children from the expensive school in London, and they all went to live in the cliff house, and as there was no money to live on, and no other way of making money to live on except letting lodgings, Miss Arden let them, like the brave lady she was, and did it well. And then came the news that father and Uncle Jim were dead, and for a time the light of life went out in Cliff House.

This was two years ago; but the children had never got used to the lodgers. They hated them. At first they had tried to be friendly with the lodgers’ children, but they soon found that the lodgers’ children considered Edred and Elfrida very much beneath them, and looked down on them accordingly. And very often the lodgers’ children were the sort of children on whom anybody might have looked down, if it were right and kind to look down on anyone. And when Master Reginald Potts, of Peckham, puts his tongue out at you on the parade and says, right before everybody, “Lodgings! Yah!” it is hard to feel quite the same to him as you did before.

When there were lodgers—and there nearly always were, for the house was comfortable, and people who had been once came again—the children and their aunt had to live in the very top and the very bottom of the house—in the attics and the basement, in fact.

When there were no lodgers they used all the rooms in turn, to keep them aired. But the children liked the big basement parlour room best, because there all the furniture had belonged to dead-and-gone Ardens, and all the pictures on the walls were of Ardens dead and gone. The rooms that the lodgers had were furnished with a new sort of furniture that had no stories belonging to it such as belonged to the old polished oak tables and bureaux that were in the basement parlour.

Edred and Elfrida went to school every day and learned reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, spelling, and useful knowledge, all of which they hated quite impartially, which means they hated the whole lot—one thing as much as another.

The only part of lessons they liked was the homework, when, if Aunt Edith had time to help them, geography became like adventures, history like storybooks, and even arithmetic suddenly seemed to mean something.

“I wish you could teach us always,” said Edred, very inky, and interested for the first time in the exports of China; “it does seem so silly trying to learn things that are only words in books.”

“I wish I could,” said Aunt Edith, “but I can’t do twenty-nine thousand and seventeen things all at once, and—” A bell jangled. “That’s the seventh time since tea.” She got up and went into the kitchen. “There’s the bell again, my poor Eliza. Never mind; answer the bell, but don’t answer them, whatever they say. It doesn’t do a bit of good, and it sometimes prevents their giving you half-crowns when they leave.”

“I do love it when they go,” said Elfrida.

“Yes,” said her aunt. “A cab top-heavy with luggage, the horse’s nose turned stationward, it’s a heavenly sight—when the bill is paid and—But, then, I’m just as glad to see the luggage coming. Chickens! when my ship comes home we’ll go and live on a desert island where there aren’t any cabs, and we won’t have any lodgers in our cave.”

“When I grow up,” said Edred, “I shall go across the sea and look for your ship and bring it home. I shall take a steam-tug and steer it myself.”

“Then I shall be captain,” said Elfrida.

“No, I shall be captain.”

“You can’t if you steer.”

“Yes, I can!”

“No, you can’t!”

“Yes, I can!”

“Well, do, then!” said Elfrida; “and while you’re doing it—I know you can’t—I shall dig in the garden and find a goldmine, and Aunt Edith will be rolling in money when you come back, and she won’t want your silly old ship.”

“Spelling next,” said Aunt Edith. “How do you spell ‘disagreeable’?”

“Which of us?” asked Edred acutely.

“Both,” said Aunt Edith, trying to look very severe.

When you are a child you always dream of your ship coming home—of having a hundred pounds, or a thousand, or a million pounds to spend as you like. My favourite dream, I remember, was a thousand pounds and an express understanding that I was not to spend it on anything useful. And when you have dreamed of your million pounds, or your thousand, or your hundred, you spend happy hour on hour in deciding what presents you will buy for each of the people you are fond of, and in picturing their surprise and delight at your beautiful presents and your wonderful generosity. I think very few of us spend our dream fortunes entirely on ourselves. Of course, we buy ourselves a motor-bicycle straight away, and footballs and bats—and dolls with real hair, and real china tea-sets, and large boxes of mixed chocolates, and Treasure Island, and all the books that Mrs. Ewing ever wrote, but when we have done that we begin to buy things for other people. It is a beautiful dream, but too often, by the time it comes true—up to a hundred pounds or a thousand—we forget what we used to mean to do with our money, and spend it all in stocks and shares, and eligible building sites, and fat cigars and fur coats. If I were young again I would sit down and write a list of all the kind things I meant to do when my ship came home, and if my ship ever did come home I would read that list, and—But the parlour bell is ringing for the eighth time, and the front-door bell is ringing too, and the first-floor is ringing also, and so is the second-floor, and Eliza is trying to answer four bells at once—always a most difficult thing to do.

The front-door bell was rung by the postman; he brought three letters. The first was a bill for mending the lid of the cistern, on which Edred had recently lighted a fire, fortified by an impression that wood could not burn if there were water on the other side—a totally false impression, as the charred cistern lid proved. The second was an inquiry whether Miss Arden would take a clergyman in at half the usual price, because he had a very large family which had all just had measles. And the third was the letter, which is really the seed, and beginning, and backbone, and rhyme, and reason of this story.

Edred had got the letters from the postman, and he stood and waited while Aunt Edith read them. He collected postmarks, and had not been able to make out by the thick half-light of the hall gas whether any of these were valuable.

The third letter had a very odd effect on Aunt Edith. She read it once, and rubbed her hand across her eyes. Then she got up and stood under the chandelier, which wanted new burners badly, and so burned with a very unlighting light, and read it again. Then she read it a third time, and then she said, “Oh!”