CHAPTER I.

TREATS OF ARITHMETIC.

"A little way, a very little way (Life is so short), they dig into the rind, And they are very sorry, so they say,-- Sorry for what they find."--_Jean Ingelow._

I have always thought the history of the ugly duckling one of the truest and most pathetic of all stories. It commences in the sad minor key, a long prelude of oppression, of misunderstanding. The unknown creature, sombre of plumage, makes no way among its companions; its folded-up beauties remain hidden. The duck-pond represents the world. Amidst plenty of quackery and folly the weaker goes to the wall. By and by the key changes; the long neck arches above the weeds; amid a burst of triumph the ugly duckling sails away into fairy-land a beautiful swan.

After all there is a wonderful moral hidden under these quaint old stories. Beauty and goodness always go together; the ugly sister, dropping toads instead of diamonds and roses, is only the poetical incarnation of envy and discontent; truth and mercy and kindness to the aged always unfold themselves under the garb of a beautiful young girl. And so the children glean precious stones of wisdom, odd-shaped and many-colored, out of the fanciful borders of fairy-land.

Queenie Marriott once compared herself and her little sister Emmie to the ugly duckling of the fable. "There must be two of them," she said; "only it was dubious whether either of them would become swans."

No one at Granite Lodge understood them; certainly not Miss Titheridge, or the other teachers, or the girls, unless it were Cathy, and even Cathy, much as she loved them, voted them peculiar.

Queenie was only speaking metaphorically when she made this droll simile--the grave young teacher, Madam Dignity, as the other girls had nicknamed her, was sufficiently alive to her own attractions not to fear unjust comparisons.

Without being handsome, Queenie was woman enough to know that her clear brown complexion, white teeth, and brown velvety eyes would win a certain amount of commendation. Queenie's eyes, as she well knew, were her strong point--they were of singular depth and expression. Some one once remarked that they reminded him of brown wells, for they had no bottom. Somebody was right; but they were not mild eyes for all that.

But we must tell how Queenie Marriott became a teacher at Miss Titheridge's, in the select establishment for young ladies at Granite Lodge, where her little sister Emmie was a sort of foundation scholar, or demi-semi-boarder, as one witty young lady described her, with reference to the somewhat scanty scholastic privileges eked out by Miss Titheridge in return for unmitigated drudgery on Queenie's part, and a trifling stipend paid out of Queenie's poor little purse; the contents of which barely sufficed to find them in decent clothing.

Her own and part of Emmie's board were all the wages Queenie received for her endurance and patient labor; and half of the miserable little pittance of forty pounds a year, left to her by her mother, was paid quarterly into Miss Titheridge's hand, invariably received by Miss Titheridge in the same stony manner, and acknowledged in the same words:--"I hope you and Emily will always be grateful to us, Miss Marriott, for the handsome and gratuitous manner in which my poor sister and myself have befriended you" (the second Miss Titheridge had been dead fifteen years, but it was Miss Titheridge's way always to associate the deceased as though she were still the partner of her labors). "There would have been very few in this mercenary world who would have acted as generously, but, as Caroline always beautifully puts it, we do it 'not to be seen of men.'" After which speech it was odd that the visitors to Granite Lodge, when they were ushered into the school-room, always gazed curiously at the young teacher, and then at a certain closely-cropped head in the darkest corner, and went out whispering to themselves of Miss Titheridge's Christianity and magnanimity of soul. In more than one case the story turned the scale in the mind of a dubious parent, who after such a recital could not but trust their darlings under the care of so good a creature as Miss Titheridge.

"My dear, she actually supports those two poor orphans; she assured me that a few pounds are all she receives, and that is pressed upon her. Can you conceive such generosity?" went on one warm-hearted visitor, the mother of seven female hopes, at least to Miss Titheridge; "a poor hard-working school-mistress, and treats them as though they were her own daughters."

Queenie and Em and their staunch friend Cathy could have told a different tale, less varnished and highly colored. Miss Titheridge's adopted daughters fared somewhat scantily; not indeed on the bread and water of affliction, but on bread on which the butter was spread sparingly, on cold tea, on the least tempting cuts of the joint after the young ladies were served. And they were lodged somewhat coldly, in a large roomy attic, with a draughty window and no fireplace, wherein little Em's hands became at times very blue and chilled--a place much haunted by a sportive family of mice, who gambolled and nibbled through the small hours of the night, with an occasional squeak from Mr. or Mrs. Mouse that roused Queenie, dozing uneasily under the thin blankets, and kept her awake and shivering for hours. These were hardships certainly, but, as Queenie was given to observe somewhat bitterly, she was used to hardships.

Queenie and her little half-sister Emily were the daughters of a clergyman, who held a living in the north of England, at first in Lancashire, which afterwards he had exchanged for one in Yorkshire.

Queenie never recollected her mother, but she did not long miss maternal care, which was warmly lavished upon her by her young step-mother.

Queenie was only seven years old when her father married again; he had made an excellent choice in his second wife, and, as was extremely rare in such cases, had secured a real mother for his little girl.

Mrs. Marriott was not a judicious woman in some respects, but she was extremely warm-hearted and sensitive; she would have thought it the height of injustice to make any difference between the children, even though one was her own, and she prided herself on treating them with equal tenderness.

Mr. Marriott was devotedly attached to his wife and children, and yet it could not be said that he was a happy man. He had one fault--he was a bad arithmetician; throughout his life he never could be made to understand that a pound did not consist of thirty shillings.

It sounds ludicrous, impossible. A highly educated man, and a good Christian, nevertheless it was the case. This mistaken notion spoiled his life, and brought him to his death a broken-spirited man.

Queenie never recollected the time when her father was not in debt; the sweet domestic life of the Vicarage was poisoned and blighted by this upas-tree shadow of poverty. Mrs. Marriott's pretty-girl bloom died out under it, her soft cheek grew thin and haggard. It haunted the study chair where Mr. Marriott spent hours of hard brain and heart labor for his people; it spoke despondently in his sermons; it weakened the strong head and arm, and marred their usefulness.

This man was faulty, depend on it; he had begun life at the wrong end; he had been bred up in luxury, and had educated himself to the pitch of fastidiousness; he would preach the gospel, and yet not endure hardness, neither would he lay aside the purple and fine linen that should be his by inheritance.

Fresh from the university, he had commenced life in this wise. Long before prudence would have dreamed of such a thing, he had taken a wife to himself, a beautiful young creature, also a clergyman's daughter, who brought her husband a dowry of forty pounds a year.

After her death, which occurred when Queenie was two years old, there was a long sad interval of confusion and mismanagement. An extravagant master and extravagant servants made sad havoc in an income that ought to have sufficed for comfort and competence.

The young widower was in sore plight when Emily Calcott married him, thereby angering and alienating her only remaining relative, a brother, at that time a wealthy solicitor in Carlisle.

"Heaven forbid that you should do this thing, Emily!" he had said to her, not unkindly, but with the hardness habitual to him. "If you marry Frank Marriott you will live to rue the day you ever became his wife; thriftless, extravagant, and already in debt they tell me, and burthened with a child. Pause a moment before you decide, and remember that you must choose between him and me."

Emily Calcott paused many moments before she consented to shake off the dust of her brother's house, and shut out from him the light of her fair face, the only one his crabbed and narrowed nature ever really loved. But Frank Marriott was a goodly enough man to look upon, and had dangerous gifts of persuasiveness; and pity in her soft heart was even stronger than love, and he seemed so helpless, left with his little child; and so she married him. She had walked, poor thing, open-eyed into a very pitfall of shifting perplexity. From the very first she found herself entangled in a web of every-day worry and annoyance; small debts grew larger and widened pitiably; and so the woman's honest soul grew faint and weak, and no purpose, however strong, and no effort, however well sustained, seemed to extricate them.

It was just that mistake of thirty shillings in the pound that caused the fatal mischief. Queenie, young as she was, soon grasped the truth of it all.

"We are poor because we have never learned to do without things," she said once to her father, whom she loved tenderly, and yet, saddest of all things in a girl's life, whom she somehow failed to honour. She had gone to him like a zealous young reformer, to organize a new regime in that troubled household. Her stepmother was dead--prematurely faded and worn out--and things seemed tending to some painful crisis. "It isn't honest to do what we are doing; we must measure our needs by our purse. I am not ashamed of our poverty, or of my shabby dresses," went on the girl, in a hard, proud voice, with a little gasp in it. "Mamma did not mind it, neither do I. But what shames me is to know that we have not paid people, that we never shall if we go on like this. Papa, papa, do rouse yourself, and look into things, and you will see what I mean."

"Yes, yes, child, so I will," he had answered, cowed by her earnestness and by some presentiment of the truth; but the effort killed him.

He had not been a wilfully dishonest man, he had merely "not learned to do without things," as Queenie put it in her childish way. He was a gentleman, and such things had become the necessaries of life to him. The pound had not yielded him thirty shillings after all.

People said the Vicarage was unhealthy, not properly drained and ventilated, or a low fever would not have carried off both husband and wife. But might it not have been that, in the old Biblical phrase, the man's spirit had died within him, and left him an easy prey to the fever?

Queenie thought so as she sat beside him in those long night watches. "What a fool I have been about money and everything!" she heard him mutter once. Oh, if he had only learned to do without things, how much happier for them all!

It was an unhealthy home atmosphere for a girl to breathe. Queenie grew up with two very prominent ideas: first, that money was essential to happiness, and secondly, that honesty and self-denial were two of the greatest virtues. Poverty is a hard task-master to the young. Queenie became a little hard and reticent in her self-reliance; she made bitter speeches occasionally, and had odd little spasms of repressed passion. But she had two weak points, Emmie and Cathy, and she would have worked her fingers to the bone for either.

Between her and Miss Titheridge there was war to the death. A few of the girls disliked her, two or three feared her, to the rest she was purely indifferent. She was their equal, but because of her shabbiness and poverty they choose to regard her as their inferior. Quiet disdain, unmitigated reserve should be her rôle for the future.

Neither did she owe Miss Titheridge any gratitude. Miss Titheridge had a conscientious teacher cheap, that was all. She had paid her own and Emmie's board over and over again by hours of ceaseless drudgery and painstaking work.

"She gives me stones instead of bread," she said once to her only confidante. "What do I owe her, Cathy? Has she ever a kind word or look for us? is she ever otherwise than hard on Emmie? It makes me miserable to see Emmie; she is pining like a bird in a cage. Sometimes I think I would rather live with Emmie in a garret, and take in plain needle-work. We could talk to each other then, and I could tell her stories, and make her laugh; she never laughs now, Cathy."

"Hush, Queenie; you are so impetuous. I have a plan in my head, a dear, delightful plan. We shall see, we shall see."