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——