CHAPTER XV
Sowergate felt the full force of a south-westerly gale; sometimes heavy seas would be washing right over the Promenade, flooding the road beyond, and rendering it impassable.
It was great fun to go walking by the sea at such times. There was the excitement of dodging the great waves as they broke over the broad sea-wall, and there was the sense of adventure in braving the perils of the road, which at such times was apt to be strewn with wreckage of all sorts.
In the early part of February the weather was so stormy that for three days the girls could not get out, their only exercise being the work in the gymnasium. Of course this meant fresh air of a sort, since they had the whole range of the landward windows open, and the breeze was enough to turn a good-sized windmill. But it was not out of doors by any means, and it was out of doors for which every one was pining.
On the fourth day the wind was still blowing big guns—indeed, it was blowing more than it had been; but as it did not rain, the whole school turned out to struggle along the Promenade. Miss Mordaunt, the games-mistress, was for going up the hill to the church, and taking a turn through the more sheltered lanes beyond. But the mud was deep in that direction; moreover, every girl of them all was longing to see the great waves at play: and, provided they kept a sharp look-out in passing Sowergate Point, it was not likely they would get a drenching. So the crocodile turned down the hill outside the school gates, and took its way along the Promenade in the direction of Ilkestone.
There were very few people abroad this morning; the bus traffic had been diverted during the heavy weather, and sent round by way of the camp. The crocodile had the road to themselves, and great fun they found it.
It was quite impossible to walk on the Promenade, for it was continually being swept by heavy seas. Even on the path at the far side of the road they had to dodge the great wash of water from breaking waves. Then the crocodile broke into little scurrying groups of girls, there were shrieks and bubbling laughter, and every one declared it was lovely fun.
Miss Mordaunt was in front with the younger ones; it was very necessary that a mistress should be there to pick the road, to hold them back when a stream of water threatened them, and to choose when to make a rush to avoid an incoming wave. Miss Groome was at the other end of the crocodile, and those of the Sixth out walking that morning were with her.
They had reached as far as the point where the flight of steps go up to the Military Hospital, when a taxi came along the road at a great rate, mounting the path here and there to avoid the holes in the road which had been washed out by the battering of the sea-water.
Miss Mordaunt promptly herded the front half of the crocodile on to the space which in normal times was a pleasant strip of garden ground. The other half fell back in a confused group round Miss Groome, while the taxi came on at a rate which made it look as if the driver were drunk or demented.
The group squeezed themselves flat against the railings—time to run away there was not. Indeed, to stand still seemed the safest way, as the driver would at least have a better chance of avoiding them.
Suddenly they saw that there was purpose in his haste. A tremendous wave was racing inshore, and he, poor puny human, was trying with all the power of the machinery under his control to run away from it.
He might as well have tried to run away from the wind. With a swirling rush the big wave struck the sea-wall, mounted in a towering column of spray, and dashing on to the Promenade, struck one of the iron seats, wrenched it from its fastenings, and hurled it across the road right on to the bonnet of the taxi at the moment when it was passing the huddled group of girls.
The wind screen was smashed, splinters of glass flying in all directions. The driver hung on to his wheel in spite of the deluge of broken glass; he put on the brakes. But before he could bring the car to a stand the door was wrenched open, and a stout woman, shrieking shrilly, had hurled herself from the car, falling in a heap among the startled girls.
Dorothy was the first one to sense what was happening, and being quick to act, had spread her arms, and so broken the fall of the screaming woman. The force of the impact bowled her over; but as she fell against the thickly-clustered group of girls, no great harm was done. The wind was fairly knocked out of her, for the woman was bulky in size, and in such a fearful state of agitation, too, that it was as if she had been overwhelmed by an avalanche.
“Oh, oh, oh! What a truly awful experience, my dear! I should have been killed outright if it had not been for you!” cried the poor lady; and then, slipping her arms about Dorothy’s neck, she half-strangled her in a frantic sort of embrace.
“It was surely a great risk for you to take, to jump in such a fashion,” said Miss Groome severely. As she spoke she came close to the frightened woman, who was still clinging fast to Dorothy.
“I had to jump—I was simply rained upon with splinters of broken glass. See how I am bleeding,” said the unfortunate one, whose face was cut in several places with broken glass. She was elderly, she was clad in expensive furs, and was unmistakably a lady.
The taxi-driver reached them at this moment; his face was also cut and bleeding. He reported that his car was so badly damaged that he would not be able to continue his journey.
“Oh, I could not have gone any farther, even if the car had escaped injury. I am almost too frightened to live,” moaned the poor lady, who was trembling and hysterical.
The taxi-driver treated her with great deference and respect. Seeing how shaken she was, he appealed to Miss Groome to know what was the best thing to be done for the comfort of his hurt and badly frightened fare.
“Here is the police station; she could rest here while you find another car to take her back to Ilkeston,” said Miss Groome.
“That will do very nicely, and thank you for being so kind,” said the lady, who was still clinging fast to Dorothy. “I wonder if you would be so kind as to permit this dear girl, who saved me from falling, to go with me to my hotel? I am staying at the Grand, in Ilkestone. The car that takes me there could bring her back. I feel too shaken to go alone.”
“Dorothy could go, of course,” said Miss Groome. But her tone was anxious; she did not like allowing even a grown-up girl of the Sixth to go off with a complete stranger. “Would you not rather have some one a little older to take care of you? Miss Mordaunt would go with you, or I can hand the girls over to her, and go with you myself.”
“No, no, I would not permit such a thing!” exclaimed the lady, waving away the suggestion with great energy and determination. “You have duties to perform; your absence even for a couple of hours might mean serious dislocation of machinery. But this dear girl—Dorothy, did you call her?”
“My name is Dorothy Sedgewick,” said Dorothy, her voice having a muffled sound by reason of one arm of the lady being still round her neck.
“Are you a daughter of Dr. Randolph Sedgewick of Farley in Buckinghamshire?” demanded the lady in great excitement, giving Dorothy a vigorous shake.
“Yes—that is my father.” Dorothy smiled happily into the face that was so near to her own—it was so pleasant to encounter some one who knew her father.
“My dear, your father is a very old friend of mine. I am Mrs. Peter Wilson, of Fleetwood Park, near Sevenoaks. It is quite possible you may not have heard him speak of me by my married name; but you have surely heard him talk of Rosie O’Flynn?”
“That wild girl Rosie O’Flynn, is that the one you mean?” asked Dorothy, smiling broadly at the recollection of some of the stories her father had told of the madcap doings of the aforesaid Rosie.
“Yes, yes; but I have altered a good deal since those days,” said Mrs. Wilson with a gasping sigh. “I should have welcomed an experience of this sort then, but now it has shaken me up very badly indeed.”
“May I go with Mrs. Wilson to the Grand?” asked Dorothy, turning to Miss Groome with entreaty in her eyes. What a wonderful sort of adventure this was, that she should have had her father’s old friend flung straight into her arms!
“Yes, certainly you may go,” said Miss Groome, who was decidedly relieved at hearing of the social status of the lady. “But, Dorothy, you must come back in the car that takes Mrs. Wilson to the Grand, for I am sure you must be wet. It will be very unsafe for you to be long without changing. Ah! here comes the driver, and he has another car coming along after him; that is fortunate, because Mrs. Wilson will not have to wait.”
“If I have to send Dorothy straight back to-day, may I have the pleasure of her company to tea to-morrow afternoon at four o’clock?” asked Mrs. Wilson, holding out her hand with such friendliness that Miss Groome at once gave consent.
The driver had secured a taxi from the Crown Inn at Sowergate, and the driver of the fresh car took his way with infinite care along the wreckage-strewn road to Ilkestone.
Mrs. Wilson was fearfully nervous. She kept crying out; she would have jumped out more than once during the journey if Dorothy had not held her down by sheer force of arm, beseeching her to be calm, and promising that no harm should come to her.
“Oh, I know that I am behaving like a silly baby; but, my dear, I have no nerve left,” said the poor lady, who was almost hysterical with agitation. “I am not very well—I ought to be in peace and quiet at Fleetwood—but I had to come on rather unpleasant business about a nephew of mine who is at the Gunnery School at Hayle. I suppose I shall have to go back to Sevenoaks with the business undone, unless I can do it from Ilkestone, for certainly I cannot make another journey along that wreckage-strewn road beyond Sowergate. Oh! it was awful.”
“It was rather grand and terrible; I have never seen anything like it before,” replied Dorothy, who had been really thrilled by the sight of the tremendous seas.
“I can do without such sights; I would rather have things on a more peaceful scale,” sighed Mrs. Wilson, whose face was mottled with little purply patches from the shock of the accident.
Dorothy helped her out of the car when they reached the Grand. She went up in the lift to the suite of rooms on the first floor which Mrs. Wilson occupied. She handed the poor fluttered lady into the care of the capable maid, and then came back to Sowergate in the car.
CHAPTER XVI
Once—that was in her first term—Dorothy had gone with Hazel and Margaret to tea with Margaret’s mother at Ilkestone; but with that exception she had had no invitations out since she had been at the Compton School, so that it was really a great pleasure to be asked to take tea with Mrs. Wilson at the Grand next day.
She reached the hotel punctually at four o’clock. She was shot up in the lift, and was met at the door of Mrs. Wilson’s suite by the same very capable maid whom she had seen the day before.
She told Dorothy that Mrs. Wilson was still very unnerved and shaken from the effects of the previous day’s happenings.
“The doctor says she must not be allowed to talk very much about it, if you please, miss; so if you could get her interested in anything else it would be a very good thing.” The maid spoke rather anxiously, and she seemed so concerned, that Dorothy cheerfully undertook to keep the lady’s mind as far away from Sowergate as possible.
Mrs. Wilson was lying back in a deep chair, and she looked pale and ill. She roused herself to welcome Dorothy, and began to talk of the previous day’s happenings.
“Do you think I am like my father?” Dorothy asked, as soon as she could get Mrs. Wilson’s thoughts a little away from the forbidden subject.
“A little, but the likeness is more of manner than of feature. I suppose you take after your mother, for you are very nice looking, which your father never was.” Mrs. Wilson surveyed Dorothy with a critical air, seeming to be well pleased with her scrutiny.
Dorothy flushed an uncomfortable red; it looked as if she had been asking for compliments, whereas nothing had been farther from her thoughts.
“Tell me about my father, please,” she said hurriedly, intent on keeping the talk well away from recent happenings, yet anxious to avoid any further reference to her own looks.
“Oh, he was a wild one in those days!” Mrs. Wilson gurgled into sudden laughter at her remembrances. “Your father, his cousin Arthur Sedgewick, with Fred and Francis Bagnall, were about the most rackety set of young men it would be possible to find anywhere, I should think. By the way, where is Arthur Sedgewick now?”
Dorothy looked blank. “I do not think I have ever heard of him,” she answered slowly.
“Ah! then I expect he died many years ago, most likely before you were born. A wild one was Arthur Sedgewick. But your father ran him close, and the two Bagnalls were not far behind. I was rather in love with Fred Bagnall at the time, while he fairly adored the ground I walked upon. Ah me! I don’t think the girls of the present day get the whole-hearted devotion from their swains that used to fall to our lot. We should have made a match of it, I dare say, if I had not gone to Dublin for a winter and met Peter Wilson there. Oh, these little ifs, what a difference they make to our lives!”
Mrs. Wilson was interrupted at the moment by the entrance of the maid, who started to lay the table for tea.
“You need not stop to wait on us, Truscot,” said Mrs. Wilson, who already looked brighter and better from having some one to talk to. “Miss Sedgewick will pour out the tea for me, and you can get a little walk; you have had no chance of fresh air to-day.”
Truscot departed well pleased, and Mrs. Wilson sank back in her chair absorbed in those recollections of the past, which had the power to make her laugh still.
“Where did father live when you knew him?” asked Dorothy. “Had he settled in Buckinghamshire then?”
“Oh no,” said Mrs. Wilson. “He was on the staff at Guy’s Hospital when I first knew him, and afterwards he was in Hull. That was where I became acquainted with the Bagnalls and with Arthur Sedgewick. Oh, the larks we used to have, and the mischief those young men got into!” Mrs. Wilson’s laughter broke out again at the recollection, but Dorothy looked a little bit disturbed. This was quite a new light on her quiet, hard-working father, and she was not at all sure that she liked it.
“It is so strange to hear of Dad playing pranks,” she said, and a little chill crept over her. To her Dr. Sedgewick stood as an embodiment of steadfastness and power—the one man in the world who could do no wrong—the man who could always be depended on for right judgment and uprightness of conduct.
Mrs. Wilson’s laughter cackled out again, and suddenly it grew distasteful to Dorothy, She wished she had not come; but it was rather late in the day for wishing that now. The lady went on talking. “I remember the time when we had all been to a dance at Horsden Priory. Mrs. Bagnall was chaperoning me—we had chaperones in those days, but we managed to dodge them sometimes. I did it that night, and we came home in a fly by ourselves. The Bagnalls and I were riding inside; your father and his cousin were on the box. We painted the town red that night, for we raced the Cordells and the Clarksons. We ran into the police wagonette, and the upshot of it all was that your father had to go to prison for fourteen days; for, besides the police wagonette being smashed up, an old woman was knocked down and hurt. There was a fine commotion at the time, but it was hushed up, for the Bagnalls were county people, and my father was furious because I was mixed up in the business.”
“Do you really mean that my father went to prison?” asked Dorothy in a strained voice.
“Yes, my dear, he did; the others deserved to go—but, as I said before, the business was hushed up as much as possible. Oh, but they were great times! It was living then, but now I merely exist.”
Dorothy heard the lady prosing on, but she did not take in the sense of what was being said. She was facing that ugly, stark fact of her father having been in prison, and she was trying to measure what it meant to her personally.
There was a picture before the eyes of her mind of the lecture hall at the Compton School: she saw the Head sitting with several gentlemen on the dais; she heard again the voice of one of the gentlemen reading the conditions for the enrolment of candidates for the Lamb Bursary, and she heard as if it were the actual voice speaking in her ear, “Whose parents have not been in prison—” She had smiled to herself at the time, thinking what a queer thing it was to mention in reference to the highly respectable crowd of girls gathered in the lecture hall.
If she had only known of this escapade of her father’s in the past she would not have dared to enrol. She did not know, and so she had become a candidate with full belief in her own respectability. But now that she knew——
Mrs. Wilson prosed on. She was talking now of that winter she spent in Dublin, when she met Peter Wilson, to whom she was married later on.
Dorothy was conscious of answering yes, and no, at what seemed like proper intervals. She seemed to be sitting there through long months, and years, and she began to wonder whether she would be grey and bent with age by the time the visit was over. Then suddenly there was a soft knock at the door. Truscot entered, and said that a lady had come for Miss Sedgewick.
This was Miss Mordaunt, and Dorothy came down in the lift to join her in the entrance hall.
“Why, Dorothy, what is the matter with you?” asked the games-mistress in consternation. “Do you feel faint?”
“I think the room was hot,” murmured Dorothy in explanation, and then she turned blindly in the direction of the great entrance door, longing to feel the sweeping lift of the strong wind from the sea.
Without a word Miss Mordaunt took her by the arm, and led her out through the vestibule to the open porch, standing with her there to give her time to recover a little.
How good the wind was! There was a dash of salt spray in it, too, which was wonderfully reviving.
Out in the stormy west there was a rift of colour yet, where the clouds had been torn asunder, while a star winked cheerfully out from a patch of sky that was clear of cloud.
It was all very pleasant and very normal, and Dorothy had the sensation of just waking up from a particularly hideous nightmare.
The trouble was that the very worst part of the nightmare was with her still. She could not wake up from that, because it was a reality and no dream.
“Feel better, do you?” asked Miss Mordaunt kindly, as she noted a drift of colour coming back to the pale face of Dorothy.
“Oh yes, I am better now, thank you. I shall be quite all right after we have walked for a little way in the air. What a nice night it is.”
“I was going to take a bus, but we will walk if you would like it better,” said Miss Mordaunt.
“I should like to walk; it is so cool and fresh out here.” Dorothy was drawing long breaths and revelling in the strong sweep of the wind.
“It is funny how these elderly ladies will have their rooms so fearfully overheated,” remarked Miss Mordaunt; and then she asked a string of questions about Dorothy’s visit, the condition of Mrs. Wilson after her shock, and that sort of thing, to all of which Dorothy returned mechanical answers.
Her mind was in a whirl still. She felt quite unable to think clearly, and her outstanding emotion was intense dislike to Mrs. Wilson, whose bread and butter she had so recently been eating.
“Bah, it is just horrid!” she exclaimed aloud.
“Is it the mud you don’t like, or are you tired of walking?” asked Miss Mordaunt a little anxiously.
“I don’t think there is any mud—none to matter, at least—and I simply love walking at night,” replied Dorothy. “I was thinking of Mrs. Wilson, and of the perfumes in which she is soaked, and the joss sticks that were burning in the room most of the time that I was there. Oh! the air was thick.”
“Of course you would feel bad in such an atmosphere. Forget about it now. Think of clean and wholesome things, of wide spaces swept by wind and drenched with rain. Mind is a mighty force, you know, and the person who thinks of clean things feels clean, inside and out.”
“What a nice idea!” cried Dorothy, and then suddenly her hope roused again and began to assert itself. For to-night, at least, she would forget that ugly thing she had heard. She would fix her mind on the path she meant to climb, and climb she would, in spite of everything.
For the rest of the walk back to Sowergate, and then up the hill to the Compton School, she was merry and bright as of old, and Miss Mordaunt was thankful indeed for the restoring power of that walk in the fresh air.
Rhoda Fleming was crossing the hall when they went in, and she turned upon Dorothy with a ready gibe. “It is fine to be you, going out to take tea with county folks, and swanking round generally. The one compensation we stay-at-homes have is that we can get on with our work, while you are doing the social butterfly.”
“Even that compensation will seem rather thin if I can work twice as fast, just because I have been out,” answered Dorothy, smiling back at Rhoda with such radiant good humour that Rhoda was impressed in spite of herself.
“Going out seems to have bucked you up, and I suppose you have had the time of your life,” she said grudgingly. “For my own part, I felt thankful yesterday because the good lady chose to hang round your neck instead of mine, but going to tea with her at the Grand, Ilkestone, puts a different aspect on the affair. I begin to wish she had clawed me instead of you after all.”
“History would have been written differently if she had.” Dorothy’s laugh rippled out as she spoke, but as she went upstairs to the study she wondered what would have happened if Mrs. Wilson had told Rhoda of that wild doing of her father in those days of long ago. Would Rhoda have held the knowledge over her as a whip of knotted cords, or would she have blurted the unpleasant story out to the whole school without loss of time?
What a clamour there would have been! Dorothy shivered as in fancy she heard the wild tale going the round of the school, of how Dr. Sedgewick had been in prison for a fortnight in his reckless youth.
The secret was her own so far. She could hide it until she had time to sort things out in her mind. Meanwhile she would work. Ah, how she would work! She must win that Lamb Bursary. She must! Yet would she dare to keep it?
Would she dare?
CHAPTER XVII
Hazel Dring, one of the most good-natured of girls, was beginning to grumble. Margaret Prime was beginning to despair. Both of them were so much below Dorothy and Rhoda in the matter of marks that their chances of winning the Mutton Bone grew every week more shadowy.
Sometimes it was Rhoda who was top of the school, more often it was Dorothy. Professor Plimsoll talked with perfect rapture in his tone of the pleasure it was to lecture for the Compton Girls’ School, now that there were such magnificent workers there. Miss Groome was having the time of her life, and even the Head declared that the strenuous work of the Sixth must make its mark on the whole of the school.
The Head was quite unusually sympathetic in her nature. That is to say, she was more than ordinarily swift to sense something hidden. It was not according to nature, as she knew schoolgirl nature, for two girls to work at the pressure displayed by Dorothy and Rhoda. She knew Rhoda to be lazy by nature, and although ambitious, by no means the sort of girl to keep up this fierce struggle week after week. Dorothy was a worker by nature, but the almost desperate earnestness that she displayed was so much out of the common that the Head was not satisfied all was right with her.
The days were hard for Dorothy just then. She lived in a constant strain of expecting to hear from some one that the story told by Mrs. Wilson had become public property. It was just the sort of gossip a talkative person would enjoy spreading. Dorothy writhed, as in fancy she heard her father’s name bandied from mouth to mouth, and the scathing comment that would result. She even expected to hear her position as candidate for the Lamb Bursary challenged.
She was not at all clear in her own mind about it being right for her to remain a candidate. She had enrolled in ignorance of there being any impediment, she was entirely innocent of wrong in the matter, and as it was by the purest accident she had learned the true facts of the case, it seemed to her that there was no need for her to withdraw, or to make any declaration about the matter.
Still, she was not at rest. The way in which she eased her conscience on the matter savoured a good deal of drugs and soothing powders. When she felt most uneasy, then she just worked the harder, and so drowned care in work.
The term wore on. February went out in fierce cold, and March came in with tempests one day, and summer sunshine the next. Dorothy went down then with a sharp attack of flu, and for a week was shut up in the san fretting and fuming over her inability to work, and was only consoled by discovering that Rhoda had sprained her right wrist rather badly at gym work, and was unable to do anything.
Hazel mounted to the top of the school in marks that week, and the week following Margaret took her down. The two declared it was just like old times back again. But, strangely enough, they were not so elated by their victory as they might have been. Dorothy had become in a very real sense their chum, and her disaster could not fail to be something of a trouble to them.
Rhoda was unpopular because of her unpleasant trick of snubbing. Dorothy had a way of making friends; she was sympathetic and kind, which counted for a good deal, and really outweighed Rhoda’s splashes of generosity in the matter of treating special friends to chocolates, macaroons, and that sort of thing.
Dorothy came back to work looking very much of a wreck, but with undiminished courage for the fray. She could not recapture her position at first. Hazel was top most weeks, or was edged down by Margaret. Rhoda was finding her sprained wrist a severe nuisance. Being her right wrist, she could not write, and having to trust so largely to her memory with regard to lectures and that sort of thing, found herself handicapped at every turn.
There was one thing in Rhoda’s limitation that was a great comfort to Dorothy, and that was the inability of Rhoda to write to Tom. It had come to Dorothy’s knowledge, that although Bobby Felmore was putting down sweepstakes among the boys with a vigorous hand, gambling in some form or other was still going on, and Tom was mixed up in it.
Rhoda openly boasted in the Form-room of having helped some friends of hers to win a considerable sum of money by laying odds on Jewel, Mr. Mitre’s horse that ran at Wrothamhanger. Two days later, when Tom came over to see Dorothy, he was more jubilant than she had ever seen him, and he offered to pay back the money he had borrowed from her last term.
“How did you manage to save it?” she asked, with a sudden doubt of his inability to deny himself enough to have saved so much in such a short time.
“I did not save it, I made it,” he answered easily. “The great thing with money is not to hoard it, but to use it.”
“How could you use it, just a little money like that, to make money again?” she asked in a troubled tone.
He laughed, but refused to explain. “Oh, there are ways of doing things that girls—at least some girls—don’t understand,” he said, and refused to say anything more about it.
Dorothy handed the money back. “I think I had better not take it,” she said with brisk decision. “If you had made it honourably you would be willing to say how it had been done. If it is not clean money, I would rather not have anything to do with it, thank you.”
“Very well, go without it, then—only don’t taunt me another day with not having been willing to pay my debts,” growled Tom, pocketing the money so eagerly that it looked as if he thought she might change her mind, and want it back again.
“Tom, how did you make that money?” she asked. She was thinking of the boast Rhoda had made of having helped a friend to land a decent little sum of money.
Tom laughed. He seemed very much amused by her question. He would not tell her how it had been done, but poked fun at her for saying she would not take it because she was afraid it had not been made in an honourable fashion.
“It is great to hear a girl prating about honour, when every one knows girls have no sense at all of honour in an ordinary way.” He spread himself out and looked so killingly superior when he said it, that she felt as if she would like to slap him for making himself appear so ridiculous.
“I shall know better how to respect your sense of honour when I have heard how you made that money,” she said quietly.
Tom flew all to pieces then, and abused her roundly, as brothers will, for being a smug sort of a prig. But he would not tell her anything more about it, and he went away, leaving Dorothy to meditate rather sadly on the way in which Tom had changed of late.
There was another matter for thought in what he had said. He had gibed at her again about a girl’s sense of honour being inferior to that of a man, and she, with that rankling, secret knowledge of what had happened to her father, began again to worry, and to wonder what really she ought to do.
“Perhaps I shall not win the Mutton Bone, and then it will not matter,” she murmured to herself. Yet in her heart she knew very well that she was going to strive with all her might to win it.
The next day Miss Groome called her aside, and put the local newspaper into her hand. “Read that, Dorothy. I am so glad you had a chance to be kind to the poor lady that day on the front.”
The paragraph to which Miss Groome pointed was an announcement of the death of Mrs. Peter Wilson, of Fleetwood Park, Sevenoaks.
“Dead, is she?” gasped Dorothy, her face white and a great awe in her heart. Then suddenly it flashed into her mind that if Mrs. Wilson were dead, there would be no danger of that disastrous fact leaking out of her father having been in prison.
How good it was to be able to draw her breath freely again! Dorothy went upstairs to the study feeling as if she trod on air.
No one could know how she had dreaded that Mrs. Wilson would gossip about that ugly fact of the past to some one who would bring the story to the school, and make it public there.
Now, now, the danger was past! That garrulous tongue was stilled, and the past might lie buried for always. How good it was!
Dorothy drew long breaths of satisfaction as she sat down in her accustomed chair. How good life was! How glorious it was to work, and to achieve! Perhaps she would win the Lamb Bursary. Then she would go to the university. She would have her chance of making a mark in the world, and—and——
By a sudden movement of her arm one of the books piled round her on the table was sent spinning to the floor. It opened as it fell, and as she stooped to reach it she read on the opened page—
“That which seemeth to die may only be lying dormant, waiting until the set time shall come, when it shall awake and arise, ready to slay, or to ennoble, according as it shall be written in the Book of Fate.”
“That which seemeth to die may only be lying dormant, waiting until the set time shall come, when it shall awake and arise, ready to slay, or to ennoble, according as it shall be written in the Book of Fate.”
“Humph! There does not seem to be much comfort in that!” muttered Dorothy under her breath.
“What is the dear child prattling about, and what gem of knowledge has it lighted on from that old book, which might well have been used to light a fire, say, a generation ago?” Hazel leaned over from her corner of the table to look curiously at the shabby old volume Dorothy was holding in her hands.
“Oh, it is not so very old,” said Dorothy, with a laugh. “To have consigned it to the fire a generation ago would have been to burn it before it had a being. It is only a dictionary of quotations, and the one the book opened at seemed to give the lie direct to the thing I was thinking about. That is why I made noises with my nose and my mouth, disturbing the studious repose of this chamber of learning.”
“Chamber of learning be blowed! What is the quote?” and Hazel stretched herself in a languid fashion as she held out her hand for the book.
She read the quotation aloud, then in keener interest demanded, “What do you make of it anyhow? ‘To slay, or to ennoble, according as it shall be written in the Book of Fate’—the two ideas seem to knock each other over like the figures in a Punch and Judy show.”
“I don’t know what it means,” said Dorothy slowly. “It gave me the sensation of there being a dog waiting round the corner somewhere, to jump out and bite me.”
“Don’t be a silly sheep, Dorothy; the meaning is plain enough,” put in Margaret, who had left her seat, and was leaning over Hazel, staring down at the quotation. “What it just means is this: we have in us wonderful powers of free will, and the ability to make our own fate. The thing that lies dormant, but not dead, is the influence upon us of the things we come up against in life. If we take them one way they will slay us—that is, let us down mentally, and morally, and every way; if we take them the other way—perhaps the very much harder way—they will lift us up and make us noble.”
“Well done, old girl; you will be a senior wrangler yet, even if Dorothy or Rhoda snatch the Mutton Bone from your trembling jaws,” cried Hazel, giving Margaret a resounding whack on the back, while Jessie Wayne clapped her hands in applause, and only Dorothy was silent.
The old quotation had hit her hard. Margaret’s explanation of it hit her harder still. She was thinking of the thing which had seemed to fade out of life with the death of Mrs. Wilson, and she was wondering what its effect would be on her, and what was the writing for her in the book of Fate.
Margaret turned to her books again; but before she plunged into them she said slowly, “I think we are our own Fate—that is, we have the power to be our own Fate.”
CHAPTER XVIII
The term ended with Dorothy at the top of the school, and she went home feeling that the Lamb Bursary might be well within her grasp, if only she could keep up her present rate of work. The girl who was running her hardest was Rhoda. Hazel and Margaret, very close together in their weekly position, were too far behind to be a serious menace.
The first thing which struck Dorothy when she reached home was the careworn look of her father. Dr. Sedgewick had not been very well; some days it was all he could do to keep about, doing the work of his large practice.
“Mother, why doesn’t father have an assistant to tide him over while he is so unfit?” asked Dorothy.
She had been home three days, and on this particular morning she was helping her mother in sorting and repairing house-linen, really a great treat after the continuous grind of term.
“Times are bad, and he does not feel that he can afford the luxury of an assistant,” said Mrs. Sedgewick with a sigh. “Dr. Bowles is very good at helping him out: he has taken night work for your father several times, which is very good of him. I think that professional men are really very good to each other.”
“Dr. Bowles ought to be good to father; think how father worked for him when he had rheumatic fever—so it is only paying back.” Dorothy spoke with spirit, then asked, with considerable anxiety in her tone, “Is it the expense of my year at the Compton School that is making it so hard for father just now?”
Mrs. Sedgewick hesitated. Of choice she would have kept all knowledge of struggle from the children, so that they might be care free while they were young. But Dorothy had a way of getting at the bottom of things—and perhaps, after all, it was as well that she should appreciate the sacrifice that was being made for her. “We had to go rather carefully this year on your account, of course. Tom is an expense, too, for although he has a scholarship there are a lot of odds and ends to pay for him that take money. But we shall win through all right. And if only you are able to get the Lamb Bursary you will be set up for life—you may even be able to help with the twins when their turn for going away comes.”
“Mother, if I did not go in for the Lamb Bursary, I could take a post as junior mistress when I leave school; then I should be getting a salary directly.” Dorothy spoke eagerly; she was suddenly seeing a way out, in her position with regard to the Mutton Bone—a most satisfactory way out, so she said to herself, as she thought of the horrible story of her father’s past that had been told to her by Mrs. Wilson.
A look of alarm came into the face of Mrs. Sedgewick, and she broke into eager protest. “Don’t think of such a thing, Dorothy. A mistress without a degree can never rise above very third-rate work. Your father and I are straining every nerve to fit you to take a good place in the world; it is up to you to second our efforts. You have got to win the Lamb Bursary somehow. If you can do that your father’s burden will be lifted, and he will have so much less care. Oh! you must win it. We sent you to the Compton School because of that chance, and you must not disappoint us.”
Dorothy shivered. Next moment a hot resentment surged into her heart. She was doing her best to win it, and it was not her fault that in real truth she was not eligible for it.
She had told her mother of her meeting with Mrs. Wilson. What she did find impossible to tell Mrs. Sedgewick was about the stories Mrs. Wilson had told her of her father’s past; there was a certain aloofness about Mrs. Sedgewick—she always seemed to keep her children at arm’s length.
Greatly daring, Dorothy did try to find out what she could about those old days, and she ventured to ask, “Mother, what has become of that cousin of father’s, Arthur Sedgewick? Mrs. Wilson spoke of him to me.”
“Then try and forget that you ever heard of him.” Mrs. Sedgewick spoke harshly; she seemed all at once to freeze up, and Dorothy knew that she would not dare to speak of him to her mother again.
She sighed a little impatiently. Why could not mothers talk to their daughters with some show of reasonable equality? She was nearly a woman; surely her mother might have discussed that old-time story with her, seeing she had been compelled to hear of it from an outsider.
There was a sort of desperation on her that morning—she did so badly want some sort of guidance on the subject of her fitness to work for the Lamb Bursary. Presently she brought the talk back to the subject of the Bursary. She described the enrolment ceremony for her mother’s benefit, and she watched keenly to see the effect it would produce. She told how the provisions of the Bursary read that no girl could be a candidate whose parents had been in prison; she said no girl might enrol who knew herself guilty of cheating or stealing. She waxed really confidential, and told her mother of one girl whom she had seen stealing who had yet dared to enrol.
“That was very wrong of her,” said Mrs. Sedgewick, who was looking rather pale. “Should you not have told about her, Dorothy?”
“Oh, mother, I could not! They would have called me a sneak!” cried Dorothy in distress.
“Well, see to it, then, that the girl does not get a chance of winning the Bursary, or you will be compounding a felony.” Mrs. Sedgewick spoke brusquely, so it seemed to Dorothy, who felt that she could dare no more in the way of extracting guidance in her present dilemma. Several times she tried to say, “Mother, Mrs. Wilson told me about father having to go to prison—was it true?” but the words stuck in her throat—they positively refused to be uttered.
Then a doubt of her mother’s sense of honour crept into her mind. Tom declared that women had no hard-and-fast standpoints with regard to honour, and that it was second nature with them to behave in a way which would be reckoned downright dishonourable in a man.
Was it possible Tom was right? Dorothy set herself to watch her mother very carefully for the remainder of the vacation; but she got no satisfaction from the process, except that of seeing that her mother never once deviated from the lines of uprightness.
She was out with her father a great deal during those holidays. He was old-fashioned enough to still use a horse and trap for most of his professional work. Dorothy drove him on his rounds nearly every day. This should have been Tom’s work; but Tom was choosing to be very busy in other directions just then, and as Dorothy loved to be out with her father, she was quite ready to overlook Tom’s neglect of duty.
Never, never did she dare to ask him the question which she had tried to ask her mother. She spoke to him of Mrs. Wilson, and although his face kindled in a gleam of pleasure at hearing of an old acquaintance, he did not seem to care to talk about her, or of the part of his life in which she figured, and again Dorothy was up against a stone wall in her efforts at further enlightenment on that grim bit of history.
Then came the morning before the two went back to school, and, as usual, Dorothy was out with her father, whose round on this particular day took him to Langbury, where he had to see a patient who was also an old friend. He was a long time in that house; but the spring sunshine was so pleasant that Dorothy did not mind the waiting.
She was sitting with her eyes taking in all the beauty of the ancient High Street, when a car came swiftly round the corner, hooting madly, and missing the doctor’s trap, which was drawn up on the right side of the road, only by inches.
Dorothy heard herself hailed by a familiar voice, and saw Rhoda Fleming leaning out and waving wildly to her as the car went down the street.
Dr. Sedgewick came out at the moment and stood looking at the fluttering handkerchief which was being wagged so energetically.
“Was that some one you know?” he asked. “Downright road hogs they were, anyhow. Why, they almost shaved our wheel as they shot past. It was enough to make a horse bolt. It is lucky Captain is a quiet animal.”
“The girl who was waving her handkerchief was Rhoda Fleming, one of the Sixth, and a candidate for the Lamb Bursary,” said Dorothy, as she guided Captain round the narrow streets of Langbury, and so out to the Farley Road.
“Where does she come from?” asked Dr. Sedgewick, and he frowned. Rhoda’s face had been quite clear to him as she was whirled past in the racing car, and he had been struck by a something familiar in it.
“Her people live at Henlow in Surrey, or is it Sussex?” said Dorothy. “Her father is a rather important person, and has twice been mayor of Henlow.”
“I know him—Grimes Fleming his name is—but I do not know much good about him.” The doctor spoke rather grimly, then asked, “Is this girl a great chum of yours?”
“Not exactly.” Dorothy laughed, thinking of the openly avowed dislike Rhoda had displayed for her. “I think Tom and she are great pals; but I do not know that she is particularly good for him.”
“Seeing she is her father’s daughter, I should say that she is not. Can’t you stop it, Dorothy?” There was anxiety in her father’s tone that Dorothy was quick to sense.
“I have tried, but Tom won’t listen to me,” she said in a troubled tone. “He is like that, you know; to speak against her to him would only make him the more determined to be friends with her.”
“Oh yes, Tom is a chip off the old block, and in more senses than one, I am afraid.” The doctor sighed heavily, thinking of the abundant crop of wild oats which he had sown in those back years. Then he went on, taking her into confidence, “I am a bit worried about Tom: he seems to have got a little out of the straight; there are signs about him of having grown out of his home. He asked me, too, if I could not increase his allowance so that he could spread himself a little for the benefit of his future.”
“Oh, father, what did you say to him?” Dorothy’s tone was shocked. She thought of all the evidence of sacrifice that she had seen since she had been at home, and she wondered where Tom’s eyes were that he had not seen them too.
“I laughed at him.” The doctor chuckled, as if the remembrance was amusing. “I told him he would best advance his future by sticking at his work rather tighter, and leave all ideas of spreading himself out of count until he was in a position to earn his own living. Why does he want a girl for a pal? Are there not enough boys at the Compton School to meet his requirements?”
“Oh, lots of the boys and girls are pally. It is rather looked upon as the right thing in our little lot; and Rhoda is enough older than Tom to be of great use in rubbing down his angles, if she chose to do it,” Dorothy answered, and her cheeks became more rosy as she thought of the part she herself had had in putting down gambling in the boys’ school, by her influence over Bobby Felmore.
“Humph, there is sense in the idea certainly,” the doctor said. “Of course it depends for success on what sort of a girl a boy like Tom gets for a pal. I should not think a daughter of Grimes Fleming would be good for Tom. Do what you can to stop it, Dorothy. Remember, I depend on you.”
“Oh dear, I am afraid you will be disappointed, then,” sighed Dorothy. “I do not seem to have any power at all with Tom. I am older than he is, but that does not count, because he says he is the cleverer, as he won a scholarship for Compton and I did not. I suppose he is right, too, for he has won his way where I have had to be paid for.”
“It looks as if you are going to beat him now, if you keep on as you have done for the last two terms,” said her father. “We are looking to you to win that Lamb Bursary, Dorothy. You have got to do it, for our sakes as well as your own. It will mean a tremendous lot to your mother and me.”
Something that was nearly like a sob came up in Dorothy’s throat and half-choked her. She realized that her father was actually pleading with her not to fail. In the background was that damaging story told to her by Mrs. Wilson. Because of that she was in honour bound not to go in for the Lamb Bursary. What was the right thing to do? If only—oh! if only she knew what was the right thing to do!
The hard part was that she could find no help at home, and she had to face going back to school with her question unsolved.