SETTING THE PACE
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.”
“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.”