'MISS THEEDORY'
'Oh dear! I wish I could make it come right!'
The speaker was a tall girl of eighteen or so, who sat with her thumbs
pressing her ears, and her fingers shading her eyes, to shut out the
sights and sounds of the blue waters that rolled up and broke in crisp
waves on the stretch of yellow sands under the windows of the Bunk
dining-room.
Theo Carnegy had been trying her hardest for a couple of hours to add
up the housekeeping bills for the week. It was a task the girl dreaded
always, and on this particular day the figures seemed unusually
contrary and obstinate to cope with. Somehow, they utterly refused to
come straight and tally with the money she had been entrusted with to
lay out. The bristling difficulties seemed all the more unmanageable
because the sunshine that afternoon was so bright, and the wind so
fresh; while the boat that belonged to the Carnegy family lay tossing
at anchor within sight, as if inviting the girl down for the greatest
enjoyment of her life--a pull across the bay.
But there was good stuff in Theo, gentle and yielding though she
looked, with her sweet, soft face, and the fair waving hair surrounding
it. She was the one of all the Carnegys who had deliberately given her
heart to God's service. That she had done so spoke out of her clear,
steadfast eyes, and in the peaceful lines of her mouth, and more than
all, in her unflagging determination to keep on straight at what she
knew to be her duty, without allowing herself to be beguiled to this
side or to that of the narrow path. Eighteen is not a very advanced
age, even regarded from the point of view of her brothers and little
sister; and Theo, who passionately loved the sea, had a great struggle
to keep her blue eyes fixed on the tiresome figures, which would not
come right, struggle as she might to make them. It never occurred to
her to shirk a difficulty in any sense; her nature was such that she
must grapple with a duty, however distasteful, once she felt she was
appointed to fulfil it. Her mother had died when Theo, the eldest
Carnegy, was fifteen, and Queenie, the younger, only two years old.
So, already, she had been for three years her father's housekeeper. A
certain sum of money was given into her hands every week by the
captain, and there was an end of the matter as regarded him. He wanted
to hear nothing about ways and means, certainly no details regarding
household management. All such was forbidden sternly; the captain's
time was valuable, he imagined, it being dedicated to the great object
which he hoped to achieve before he died. Distinctly, the naval
battles of the world throughout the ages were more important than the
everyday skirmishes in his own household. Theo, therefore, knew that
on no pretext whatever might she venture to appeal to her preoccupied
father in her difficulties; but she was faithful to her charge, and
gallantly enough fought with the distracting items and their
corresponding figures, which should have agreed, but didn't. It was
uphill work, however, for the youthful housekeeper.
'Can't you come out yet, Theo? The boys are across the bay at the
Vicarage, and we could have the boat all to ourselves, if you would
only leave those nasty sums!'
It was a patient little voice that interrupted the distracted girl.
Its owner had been into the room three times already, with the same
object, to ask the pathetic question.
'Oh, don't worry me, Queenie dear! I'm just as anxious as yourself to
go on the water; but there's three halfpence gone astray, and I--I
can't find it out!' half sobbed Theo, who was getting nervous over the
troublesome figures.
Queenie, a small, sedate maiden of five, a miniature of Theo in face,
stood silent in the doorway for a few seconds, wistfully piecing out
the possible meaning of her tall sister's bewildered grief. Then she
disappeared.
'Theo, look!'
Theo glanced through her fingers, and Queenie, who had been struggling
with the clasp of what looked like a doll-purse, proudly spread out
three halfpennies so remarkably clean and bright that they had
unmistakably been carefully washed by their small owner.
'You may have these, Theo, 'stead of the three you've lost. Please
take them. I don't weally want them, for I've still got five
ha'pennies left!' The small woman spoke urgently.
'Oh, my darling Queenie, you don't understand! I could have done that
myself--I could have put in three halfpence, and made all right, but it
would have been all wrong in another way. Listen now, and I shall try
to explain to you.'
Placing her arm round Queenie's little neck, Theo tried to make the
child understand that such a proceeding would not be fair, nor upright,
nor honest. It would not be getting out of the difficulty; it would
rather be making it a deeper one.
'What's difficulties?' abruptly asked Queenie, with her round, solemn
eyes gazing into her sister's face.
'Difficulties are things made on purpose to be conquered in the right
way,' said Theo, after a pause of consideration. 'I think,' she added,
'that God puts them in our way, very often, just to try us.'
'Oh, if God makes difficulties, they must be quite right, mustn't they,
Theo?'
'Yes, yes!' was the quick response; and Theo, fired afresh, shut out
the fair picture of the tiny speaker whose grave, sweet face looked out
of a tangle of fine-spun, golden hair. Covering her eyes, she applied
herself with renewed vigour to the detested task before her.
Queenie, who had oftentimes witnessed such struggles before, knew
better than to utter another word; the child stood perfectly still.
There was no sound in the room but the ticking of the clock and the
cracking of the seeds with which Miss Pollina, the old grey parrot in
the cage by the window, amused herself unceasingly from morn until
night. Even Miss Pollina seemed to be aware that perfect quietness was
necessary for the present, and she had hushed her usual chatter.
'I've got them! I've got them!' cried out Theo, suddenly throwing up
her pencil in the air, and showing all her white teeth in a joyous
laugh over her triumph. Pollina instantly lifted up her head and
raised her voice also in a succession of deafening screams of
congratulation, while Queenie, always sedate as regards laughter and
chatter, silently performed, with a quaint gravity, a careful, slow
minuet round and round the room.
'I lent three halfpence to Geoff to make up his sixpence for the
hospital-cot collection at the children's service last Sunday. He had
only fourpence halfpenny. I remember it all now. Oh, how stupid I've
been, to be sure!' It was an intense relief to have chased
successfully the truant halfpence. 'Now, Queenie,' went on Theo
gleefully, 'in five minutes I shall be ready for you, and we are going
to have a good time in the boat. Get your hat on, deary.'
'May I bring some of my doll-people, Theo?' Queenie turned as she was
disappearing through the doorway to ask anxiously.
'Oh dear, yes! As many as you can carry!' Theo called back absently,
for she was finishing the column of figures, with a flourish of triumph.
In five minutes more 'Miss Theedory,' as all Northbourne called the
captain's eldest daughter, was rowing across the bay with Queenie
sedately facing her in the Bunk boat. Queenie had seated several
members of her waxen family on either side of her, and taking them an
airing was a serious responsibility for their anxious little parent.
She was in truth over-burdened with family cares, being the owner of no
less than thirteen dolls of various sizes and degrees of beauty. 'Miss
Queenie's baker's dozen,' the boys Geoff and Alick loved to tease her
by calling them.
At the Bunk there was a tiny, three-cornered room overlooking the bay,
too small for any purpose whatever, even for a storeroom. This niche
had been given up to Queenie as a play-room. In it the child kept her
thirteen children; and, in addition, all the accumulated toys of the
family which had come down to herself, the youngest Carnegy, were
therein hoarded and stored by that most staid and careful of little
maids.
'Where is us going to, Theo?' sedately inquired Queenie, after she had
settled her family to her mind in the boat.
'Across to the Vicarage, first. We are going to have tea with Mrs.
Vesey. I wrote this morning to say that we should come. And then, on
our way back, I shall pull round to old Mrs. Dempster's; I want to have
a talk with her about Ned. You won't mind sitting in the boat if I tie
her to the old punt, will you, deary?'
'Oh no!' tranquilly said Queenie. The little maid was quite as much at
home on the sea as on the land, for the Carnegy young folk took to the
water like ducklings, from the time they could walk. The family boat,
'The Theodora,' christened after Theo herself, was in daily use in the
bay, which was generally well sheltered, no matter how fierce the
storms that raged out their fury in the deep waters beyond. 'Is Ned a
naughty boy?' inquired the little girl presently, her watchful eyes
fixed on the waxen ladies and gentlemen who lay back languidly when
they did not abruptly slide altogether down to the bottom of the boat.
'Well, Ned's not a bad boy exactly!' said Theo slowly. 'He's not quite
satisfactory, though. I'm afraid our Alick is too much with Ned; they
are putting mischief into each other's heads, if I'm not mistaken!'
Theo had a trick of talking confidentially to her little sister, as if
she were grown-up enough to understand that this world is not made of
play-days. Possibly that was one of the reasons why Queenie seemed so
sedate and solemn.
'Alick's going to be a sailor, and find the North Pole,' observed
Queenie, administering a quiet box on the ear to an ill-behaved doll
that wobbled with the motion of the boat in a manner that was enough to
render anybody who watched her quite sea-sick. 'Who lost the North
Pole, Theo?' demanded the child.
Queenie's questions were usually of a most unexpected nature, and were
occasionally comical enough.
'Oh, nobody, of course!' laughed Theo. 'What a queer mite you are,
deary!' Then she went on gravely, 'Finding the North Pole means trying
to reach and to see, with human eyes, what I, for one, don't believe
human beings will ever live to behold. It is one of God's mysteries
which man has never yet penetrated, perhaps never was meant to
penetrate.'
'What's mysteries?' Queenie of course thirsted to know.
'Dark, wonderful things; possibly things that it might hurt us to see
or to know. I've heard Mr. Vesey say that when the fever to find the
North Pole gets into the blood it never leaves a man until life
perishes. That's why so many have been already lost in the attempt.
They will persist, and nature gives out. But here we are at the
Vicarage pier. Jump out, dear, and I'll tie "The Theodora" safely up.'