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 any one. 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 home-work, when, if Aunt Edith had time to help them, geography became like adventures, history like story-books, 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.