CHAPTER VI.
QUEENIE'S WHIM.
"She knew not what was lacking,
Knew not until it came;
She gave it the name of friendship,
But that was not its name.
And the truth could not be hidden
From her own clear-seeing eyes.
When the name her own heart whispered,
And whispered too, 'Be wise.'"—Isa Craig-Knox.
The storm had wholly ceased, but a few snatches of summer lightning still played on the ragged edge of the clouds when Queenie at last bade her old friend good night, and went up to her little room, to think over the bewildering events of the day. The air was still oppressed and sultry. The white slabs of stone in the mason's yard shone dimly in the darkness; the wet ivy scattered a shower of drops on the girl's uncovered head as she leaned out, as though gasping for air. A faint perfume of saturated roses and drowned lavender pervaded everything. A blue-grey moth trailed his draggled wings feebly across the sill. The dark-scented air seemed full of mystery and silence.
Queenie leant her head upon her hands and tried to think, but in reality she was too numb and bewildered. "What has happened to me? why am I more sorry than glad about it all? how have I deserved it? and what am I to do with all this wealth that has come to me?" she kept saying to herself over and over again.
A few hundreds would have sent her back rejoicing and triumphant. A modest competency, an assured income, would have lightened the whole burthen of her responsibility, and made her young heart happy; but all this wealth! It would not be too much to say that for the time she was simply crushed by it.
"Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient to me." Queenie, as well as Garth Clayton, had ever loved that prayer of the wise Agar. If she could have chosen her lot in life it would have been in some such words as these. To have sufficient, but not too much, was the very sum and substance of her wishes.
Now a strange sense of trouble and loss oppressed her. Her plans for the future were strangely disturbed; a moral earthquake had shattered her airy castles, and she was looking mournfully at their wrecks. Her cottage and her work, must she relinquish both? Was Emmie's childish notion of happiness to be frustrated also? "I would rather be the school-mistress at Hepshaw than the richest lady in Carlisle." How passionately she had said those words, and yet she had meant them from her very heart.
And then, with a sudden sharp pang, she remembered that it was one of Garth Clayton's peculiarities to dislike riches for women. A certain conversation that had passed between him and his brother occurred to her with painful vividness.
One of Garth's school friends had just married a wealthy widow.