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.”