A STARTLING REVELATION
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?