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.