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."