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?