Queenie's Whim: A Novel (Complete)

Download or read book Queenie's Whim: A Novel (Complete) written by Rosa Nouchette Carey and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 1906-01-01 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."