The house of arden, p.1
The House of Arden, page 1
part #1 of House of Arden Series
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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 fo rget 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!”
“What is it, auntie?” Elfrida asked anxiously; “is it the taxes?” It had been the taxes once, and Elfrida had never forgotten. (If you don’t understand what this means ask your poorest relations, who are also likely to be your nicest, and if they don’t know, ask the washerwoman.)
“No; it’s not the taxes, darling,” said Aunt Edith; “on the contrary.”
I don’t know what the contrary (or opposite) of taxes is, any more than the children did—but I am sure it is something quite nice—and so were they.
“Oh, auntie, I am so glad,” they both said, and said it several times before they asked again, “What is it?”
“I think—I’m not quite sure—but I think it’s a ship come home—oh, just a quite tiny little bit of a ship—a toy boat—hardly more than that. But I must go up to London tomorrow the first thing, and see if it really is a ship, and, if so, what sort of ship it is. Mrs. Blake shall come in, and you’ll be good as gold, children, won’t you?”
“Yes—oh, yes,” said the two.
“And not make booby traps for the butcher, or go on the roof in your nightgowns, or play Red Indians in the dustbin, or make apple-pie beds for the lodgers?” Aunt Edith asked, hastily mentioning a few of the little amusements which had lately enlivened the spare time of her nephew and niece.
“No, we really won’t,” said Edred; “and we’ll truly try not to think of anything new and amusing,” he added, with real self-sacrifice.
“I must go by the eight-thirty train. I wish I could think of some way of—of amusing you,” she ended, for she was too kind to say “of keeping you out of mischief for the day,” which was what she really thought. “I’ll bring you something jolly for your birthday, Edred. Wouldn’t you like to spend the day with nice Mrs. Hammond?”
“Oh, no,” said Edred; and added, on the inspiration of the moment, “Why mayn’t we have a picnic—just Elf and me—on the downs, to keep my birthday? It doesn’t matter it being the day before, does it? You said we were too little last summer, and we should this, and now it is this and I have grown two inches and Elf’s grown three, so we’re five inches taller than when you said we weren’t big enough.”
“Now you see how useful arithmetic is,” said the aunt. “Very well, you shall. Only wear your old clothes, and always keep in sight of the road. Yes; you can have a whole holiday. And now to bed. Oh, there’s that bell again! Poor, dear Eliza.”
A Clapham cub, belonging to one of the lodgers, happened to be going up to bed just as Edred and Elfrida came through the baize door that shut off the basement from the rest of the house. He put his tongue out through the banisters at the children of the house and said, “Little slaveys.” The cub thought he could get up the stairs before the two got round the end of the banisters, but he had not counted on the long arm of Elfrida, whose hand shot through the banisters and caught the cub’s leg and held on to it till Edred had time to get round. The two boys struggled up the stairs together and then rolled together from top to bottom, where they were picked up and disentangled by their relations. Except for this little incident, going to bed was uneventful.
Next morning Aunt Edith went off by the eight-thirty train. The children’s school satchels were filled, not with books, but with buns; instead of exercise-books there were sandwiches; and in the place of inky pencil-boxes were two magnificent boxes of peppermint creams which had cost a whole shilling each, and had been recklessly bought by Aunt Edith in the agitation of the parting hour when they saw her off at the station.
They went slowly up the redbrick-paved sidewalk that always looks as though it had just been washed, and when they got to the top of the hill they stopped and looked at each other.
“It can’t be wrong,” said Edred.
“She never told us not to,” said Elfrida.
“I’ve noticed,” said Edred, “that when grown-up people say ‘they’ll see about’ anything you want it never happens.”
“I’ve noticed that, too,” said Elfrida. “Auntie always said she’d see about taking us there.”
“Yes, she did.”
“We won’t be mean and sneaky about it,” Edred insisted, though no one had suggested that he would be mean and sneaky. “We’ll tell auntie directly she gets back.”
“Of course,” said Elfrida, rather relieved, for she had not felt at all sure that Edred meant to do this.
“After all,” said Edred, “it’s our castle. We ought to go and see the cradle of our race. That’s what it calls it in Cliffgate and Its Environs. I say, let’s call it a pilgrimage. The satchels will do for packs, and we can get halfpenny walking-sticks with that penny of yours. We can put peas in our shoes, if you like,” he added generously.
“We should have to go back for them, and I don’t expect the split kind count, anyhow. And perhaps they’d hurt,” said Elfrida doubtfully. “And I want my penny for—” She stopped, warned by her brother’s frown. “All right, then,” she ended; “you can have it. Only give me half next time you get a penny; that’s only fair.”
“I’m not usually unfair,” said Edred coldly. “Don’t let’s be pilgrims.”
“But I should like to,” said Elfrida.
Edred was obstinate. “No,” he said, “we’ll just walk.”
So they just walked, rather dismally.
The town was getting thinner, like the tract of stocking that surrounds a hole; the houses were farther apart and had large gardens. In one of them a maid was singing to herself as she shook out the mats—a thing which, somehow, maids don’t do much in towns.
“Good luck!” says I to my sweetheart,
“For I will love you true;
And all the while we’ve got to part,
My luck shall go with you.”
“That’s lucky for us,” said Elfrida amiably.
“We’re not her silly sweetheart,” said Edred.
“No; but we heard her sing it, and he wasn’t here, so he couldn’t. There’s a signpost. I wonder how far we’ve gone? I’m getting awfully tired.”
“You’d better have been pilgrims,” said Edred. “They never get tired, however many peas they have in their shoes.”
“I will now,” said Elfrida.
“You can’t,” said Edred; “it’s too late. We’re miles and miles from the stick shop.”
“Very well, I shan’t go on,” said Elfrida. “You got out of bed the wrong side this morning. I’ve tried to soft-answer you as hard as ever I could all the morning, and I’m not going to try any more, so there.”
