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.