THE HEAD DECIDES
Miss Arden was writing at the table in the middle of the room when
Dorothy entered. She looked up and motioned to a low chair near the
window. “Sit there for a few minutes, Dorothy; I shall not be long
before I am free to talk to you.”
Dorothy sat down, and instinctively her glance went out to that bit of
shining sea visible through the gap in the trees, which the Head had
pointed out to her a week ago. It was an evening just like that one had
been, with the sun shining on the water, and the trees so still that
they did not sway across that little patch of brightness.
Presently the Head finished writing, rang the bell for the letters to be
taken away for posting, and then, leaving her writing table, came over
to sit by Dorothy at the open window.
“How has your work gone this week?” she asked a little abruptly. Then,
seeing that Dorothy seemed puzzled, she went on speaking in her crisp
tones, “I was not asking in reference to your school position—I know
all about that. I wanted to know how you had felt about your work, and
whether it was easier because of our talk last week.”
Dorothy’s face flashed into smiles, and she answered eagerly, “Oh, it
was much easier, thank you. I have had no worry of responsibility, you
see. I have been free to keep on working without any wonder as to
whether I had the right to work in that special way.”
The Head nodded in sympathetic fashion, and was silent for a few
minutes, as if she were still considering that decision of hers; then
she asked, “Are you willing to trust the responsibility to me for the
rest of the term?”
Dorothy looked blank. “I don’t think I quite understand,” she said. “It
is for you to decide what I have to do.”
The Head laughed, then flung out her hands with a little gesture of
helplessness as she answered, “I know the decision rests with me. The
trouble is that I cannot at the present see any light on the situation.
Until that comes you have just to go on as you are doing now. You have
to make the very bravest fight you can. You have to work and to
struggle—to do your very best; and having done this, you have to wait
in patience for the issue of it all.”
“I can do that, of course,” said Dorothy; but her tone was a little
doubtful—it was even a little disappointed. It was a hard-and-fast
decision she craved: a pronouncement that could not be set aside—which
put an end to hope and fear, and that left her nothing to be anxious
about.
“I want you to do it, feeling that it is the best—and, indeed, the only
way.” The Head spoke with a slow deliberation which carried weight. “You
see, Dorothy, you have to think not merely of yourself and your own
sense of honour, which is a very fine one; but you have to think also of
your father and the effect it might have on him and his career if you
withdrew from your position as a candidate now. You know very well how
serious it is for a doctor to be talked about in such a way as would
inevitably occur if this story became common property. A doctor smirched
is a doctor destroyed. We have to be very careful on his account.”
“I know; I had thought about that,” said Dorothy in a curiously muffled
tone.
“That is good. Your consideration for him will help you more than
anything else.” The Head smiled with such kindly approval that Dorothy
was thrilled. “I am not even going to suggest that you may not win the
Lamb Bursary; to fail in doing that, through any lack of striving on
your part, would be the coward’s way out of a difficulty, and that could
never be the right way. Your chance of winning is very good. Rhoda
Fleming is your most serious rival. In some ways she has the advantage,
because she has been here so much longer that she has been better
grounded on our lines of work. On the other hand, you have an advantage
over her of steadier application. You keep on keeping on, where she goes
slack, and has to pull herself up with extra effort. This may succeed
where the struggle is a short one, but will not be of much use in a long
strain.”
“I can’t work by starts like that,” said Dorothy. “I should soon get
left if I did not keep straight on doing my utmost.”
“It is the only way to real success,” the Head remarked thoughtfully.
Then she went on, hesitating a little now, picking her words very
carefully, “In the event of your winning, then I should think it best to
call the governors of the Bursary together, and make a plain statement
of the case to them. If they decided that you were unfit to receive the
benefit of the Bursary, the matter could be kept from becoming public.
The story about your father need never leak out, and although he would
have the pain of knowing all about it, the outside world would not be
any the wiser.”
“Oh! it would hurt him so dreadfully to know it was his action which had
shut me out from the chance of a university training!” cried Dorothy,
shrinking as if the Head had dealt her a blow.
“I know, dear, and it is painful even to think about it. But the
governors, taking all things into consideration, may even decide to let
you take it, in which case your father may be spared ever hearing of the
affair. I cannot think why such a strange provision was put into the
rules for enrolment. It might have been that poor Miss Lamb had been
compelled to suffer in her time at the hands of some girl whose parent,
one or the other, had been in prison, and so it was a case of avenging
herself at the expense of the girls who might come after her. Such
things do happen. Then, too, it is not as if your father had been in
prison from any deliberate attempt at law-breaking. If he had embezzled
money—if he had set himself up against what was right and
honourable—it would have been a different matter. I think the
punishment was far in excess of the wrong-doing, which appears to have
begun and ended in an outburst of larkiness and high spirits; but I
suppose it was the old woman being hurt which caused the sentence to be
imprisonment.”
“Would the governors have the power to set aside that old rule?” asked
Dorothy, whose eyes had brightened with a sudden stirring of hope.
“I fancy the governors have all power to do as seems wisest to them,”
the Head replied; and then she said, with a low laugh, “As they are men,
it would be no question of their sense of honour being shaky.”
Dorothy gave a start of pure amazement at such an utterance from the
Head; she was even bold enough to ask, “Do you think that women are less
honourable than men?”
“Now, that is a rather difficult question to answer,” replied the Head.
“Taken in the broadest sense, I should be inclined to think that the
great mass of women are less honourable than men. But that is the result
of long ages of being regarded as irresponsible beings—the mere
appendage or chattel of man—with no moral standing of their own. Taken
in the individual sense, I believe that when a woman or a girl is
honourable, she is far more so than a man—that is to say, she would be
honourable down to the last shred of detail, while a man under like
conditions would be honourable in the bulk, but absolutely careless of
the smaller details. That is largely theory, however, and does not
concern the present business in the least. We have talked about it
enough, too, and now we will leave it alone. I do not forget—and I am
sure the governors will not forget—that you, of your own free will,
came to me with this uncomfortable fact from your father’s past, and
that you offered to withdraw, or to do anything else which I might
decide was best.”
Dorothy rose to go. There was one question she had to ask, a fearfully
difficult one, but she screwed her courage to the attempt. “Supposing I
came out top in the running for the Bursary, but the governors decided I
might not take it, would they give the Bursary to the girl who was next
below me?”
The Head looked thoughtful—she even hesitated before replying; then she
said slowly, “I do not know. I do not think such a case as this has ever
arisen before. They might even decide not to give the Bursary at all
this year. Why did you ask?”
The hot colour flamed over Dorothy’s face, it mounted to the roots of
her hair, she was suddenly the picture of confusion, and stammered out
the first answer which came into her head, “I—I just wanted to know.”
“Dorothy, what is it that you know against Rhoda Fleming, which would
put her out of the running for the Bursary if you told?”
The voice of the Head was so quiet, so curiously level, that for a
moment Dorothy did not grasp the full significance of the question. Then
it flashed upon her that she held Rhoda in her hand, and, with Rhoda,
her own sense of honour also.
“Oh! I could not tell you—I could not. I beg of you do not ask me,” she
cried, stretching out her hands imploringly, then questioned eagerly,
“How did you even guess there was anything?”
“By the way Rhoda has treated you all the term; but I could not be sure
until I had asked you a point-blank question at a moment when you were
not expecting it,” replied the Head; and then she said kindly, “Why can
you not trust me with your knowledge, Dorothy?”
The colour faded from Dorothy’s face. She was white and spent; indeed,
she looked as if tears were not far away as she stood with her back to
the door and the strong light of the sunset full on her face. “The
knowledge I have came to me without my seeking,” she said in a low tone.
“I have no means of proving what I know, and if I told you it would seem
like taking a dishonourable way of downing a rival in work.”
“I understand that,” said the Head. “Why did you ask me about Rhoda, if
she would have the Bursary if you were not allowed to keep it?”
Dorothy moved uneasily. Her tongue felt so parched that speech was
difficult; then she said in a low tone, “I spoke to my mother when I was
at home, without, of course, giving her facts or names, and I asked her
what I ought to do.”
“What did she say?” The Head was smiling, and Dorothy took heart again.
“Mother told me to make such an effort to win the Bursary for myself,
that it would not matter in the end whether the girl was fit or unfit to
have enrolled as a candidate.”
“Very good advice, too. But I see your position again. If you speak you
let your rival down; from your point of view, it would not be playing
the game. If you keep silent, and win the Bursary, but yet because of
this story of your father’s past you are passed over and it is given to
Rhoda, the irony of the situation will be fairly crushing.” The Head was
looking at Dorothy with great kindness in her manner, and Dorothy was
comforted because she was understood.
“You will not force me to speak?” she asked, greatly daring, for the
Head was by no means a person to be trifled with.
“No; I will even admire you for your desire not to do so, though it
makes me feel as if I were compounding a felony.” The Head laughed as
she spoke; then, becoming suddenly grave, she went on, “If it should
turn out that you win the Bursary, and the governors will not let you
take it, I shall require of you that you tell me and tell them of this
thing you are keeping to yourself. The honour of the school demands this
at your hands. It is not fair that the Lamb Bursary should go to a girl
who has won it by a trick or by any keeping back of that which should be
known.”
“No, it is not fair,” admitted Dorothy, and a dreadful dismay filled her
heart to think that she might have to tell of what she had seen in the
showroom of Messrs. Sharman and Song.
“Good night, and now let us leave all these problems for the future to
solve,” said the Head, holding out a slim white hand for Dorothy to
shake.
Such a wave of gratitude flowed into the heart of Dorothy, to think she
had not to betray Rhoda, that, yielding to impulse, she carried that
slim white hand to her lips, kissing it in the ardour of her devotion
and admiration. Then she went out of the room with her head carried
high, and such a feeling of elation in her heart that it was difficult
to refrain from dancing a jig on the stairs.
“Dorothy, you are a fraud!” cried Hazel, as Dorothy came into the study,
smiling, radiantly happy, and looking as if it were morning instead of
nearly bedtime. “Here have Margaret and I been snivelling in sympathy
with you, because we thought you were having a ragging from the Head for
some misdemeanour or other, instead of which you come prancing upstairs
as if the whole place belonged to you.”
“That is how I feel,” said Dorothy blithely. “The Head—bless her—has
not been ragging me; she has only been laying down rules for my conduct
in future, and that, you know, is why we come to school, to be taught
what we do not know.”
“It looks as if you are having us on,” said Margaret, glancing up from
her work.
“Never mind, we will go to bed now, and sleep it off,” answered Dorothy,
and then would say no more.