The Rebellion of Margaret Part 26

Then Mrs. Danvers who had been upstairs with her two nieces, for Joan had had an attack of crying only second in intensity to that to which Hilary had given way, informed by Martin of the good news which Geoffrey had brought, came down, followed by Nancy and Joan in their dressing-gowns, to share in the general rejoicing, and presently Mr. Anstruther returned, having been driven up in a motor by one of the doctors who had been at the hospital.

And Mr. Anstruther's harshness and anger against his erring granddaughter was now a thing of the past. Though he had given scarcely more outward sign of his inward feelings than Eleanor, the tragic fate that he had believed to have overtaken Margaret had so appalled and shaken him that the escapade of which she had been guilty had sunk to but insignificant proportions in his eyes, and had she only returned now he would have uttered no word of blame to her.

But meanwhile she had not come back, and they were as far off as ever from knowing what had become of her, although in the general relief and gladness that for anything they knew to the contrary at least she was still alive, they had temporarily lost sight of that fact.

It was Mr. Anstruther who reminded them of it by mentioning that the doctor who had so kindly driven him up to The Cedars had taken him round to the police station on the way, where he, Mr. Anstruther, had given the sergeant on duty a brief description of his granddaughter. This was to be immediately telephoned to all the policemen on their night beats. The sergeant had also telephoned up to the coastguard station, telling them that the poor girl at the hospital was not the missing young lady, and to ask them to keep a sharp look-out for her on the cliffs all night, and to ring up the police station at once if anything was seen or heard of her.

Though Geoffrey's first search had proved so barren of result, he announced his intention of going up on to the downs again, this time on foot, and Maud volunteered to go with him. Her mother would have preferred her to go to bed, but she scouted that notion. Hilary, however, and the two Green girls, were glad enough to go docilely off to bed, and when Maud and Geoffrey, fortified with sandwiches and soup, had departed with freshly filled lanterns on a second expedition, Eleanor and Mr.

Anstruther and Mrs. Danvers were left alone in the drawing-room together to get through the intervening hours of waiting as best they could.

Mr. Anstruther had deprecated the idea of Mrs. Danvers sitting up, but she had averred that she had no desire either to go to bed or to sleep.

The former statement might have been true, but the latter was soon contradicted by the gentle snores which emanated from the direction of her chair. Mr. Anstruther sat so still that he, too, might have been asleep, but Eleanor, glancing at him once or twice, saw that his eyes were wide open and gazing fixedly before him. After awhile, his utter immobility no less than Mrs. Danvers' regular snoring, got on Eleanor's nerves, and rising quietly she slipped from the room, closing the door softly behind her.

The lights were burning in the hall, and there she kept her lonely vigil, pacing up and down. The slow hours wore away, two o'clock, three o'clock struck, and still Geoffrey and Maud did not return. The huge relief and joy she had felt when Geoffrey had come back from the hospital with the news that the girl who had fallen over the cliffs was not Margaret had long since ebbed away, and the anxiety to know what had become of her was almost torturing in its intensity. She wondered how any one in the house could sleep, or how Mr. Anstruther could sit patiently hour after hour by the fire waiting for news. Then she remembered that at least his conscience was at ease, for it was through no fault of his that his granddaughter was wandering about on the downs on such a dreadful night, and she envied him, envied any one who was not, like herself, burdened with remorse, and that awful sense that had grown up with her anxiety that, for whatever might befall Margaret that night, she alone was directly responsible.

Eleanor was seeing things very clearly that night, and quite dispa.s.sionately she told herself that she hated her own character. It was selfish through and through. The specious plea with which she had salved her conscience heretofore, that Margaret had been far the more eager of the two for the mutual exchange of their names, she brushed aside as worthless. Though there was little difference in their ages, Margaret was, as regarded experience of the world, a mere child compared to her, and she felt that in acceding to the deception she had been like a grown-up person cheating a child. Of course, Margaret had been old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, but that was no excuse for her; she ought not to have taken advantage of her.

The sting of shame she had felt before. Mrs. Murray's unvarying kindness and the grat.i.tude she showed for any little mark of attention or service rendered to her while she had been ill, had made Eleanor both remorseful and ashamed, but her repentance then had not led to amendment. Even while she had been deeply ashamed of herself, she had known that, for the sake of her voice, she would have done it all over again, deceived Mrs.

Murray, taken advantage of Margaret, held her, in spite of her tears, to her word, sacrificed her own truth and honesty to her ambition.

And this was the pa.s.s to which her ambition had brought her. Even though Margaret's death was not mercifully to be laid at her door, as for two long, never-to-be-forgotten hours that night she had feared, who could tell what the effects of a night of exposure and fright on the downs might not have upon her const.i.tution?

No wonder, then, that with those miserable thoughts for company, Eleanor could not rest. But her repentance if tardy was at least sincere. Could the clock of time have been put back seven weeks, and were she and Margaret to be meeting now for the first time in the dingy little waiting-room at Carden Station, ah, how differently would she act! Not for the sake of being the greatest singer in the whole round world would she have consented to the deception. Rather would she have drudged as a poorly paid teacher in second-rate schools all the days of her life.

"Oh--if I could only have the time over again!" groaned Eleanor. It seemed such a small thing to wish for she thought despairingly. Just seven short weeks over again.

At five o'clock Mr. Anstruther opened the drawing-room door and came out into the hall. He did not see Eleanor who, wearied out at length with her ceaseless pacing to and fro, had flung herself down a few-minutes previously on Nancy's favourite couch behind the screen, but the ever watchful Martin came forward immediately, and though his offer of coffee was declined, he was permitted to help Mr. Anstruther into his overcoat.

From the brief colloquy that ensued between them Eleanor gathered that he was going down to the police station. As soon as he had left she sprang up and went out into the garden. The long and seemingly endless night was at least over, and surely with daylight they might hope for news of Margaret. The morning had broken cold and chilly, but the mist was sweeping away in great rolling clouds before a light easterly breeze that had sprung up at dawn.

At six o'clock Geoffrey and Maud came home. Eleanor, who then was pacing up and down the drive, was the first to greet them, and her heart sank when, in answer to her eager look, they shook their heads. They had neither seen nor heard anything of Margaret.

"But no news is at least good news," said Geoffrey, quickly seeing how sick at heart she looked, and remembering the news with which he had returned the time before, she could not but agree with him there. "We have scoured the downs between here and Windy Gap thoroughly, and I am beginning to believe that she never tried to get there at all. We have just come straight back from there now. Mrs. Murray has been up all night with a hot bed, and hot blankets, and a hot bath, and all sorts of other hot things, waiting for Miss Anstruther directly she turns up. And her coachman and a couple of men from the village have been beating about on the downs most of the night. I really believe she has crept into a rabbit hole and means to lie low until all this fuss has blown over."

Though this remark did not succeed in bringing a smile to Eleanor's pale lips, his cheery manner insensibly comforted her, and she turned and walked back to the house with him and Maud, feeling that the load of her trouble was somewhat lightened by their society.

"Hot soup again, Martin!" Geoffrey exclaimed, as the servant made his appearance with a tray bearing some steaming cups directly they entered the house, "we really can't do it. What with you at this end of the journey, and Mrs. Murray at the other, this night has been a perfect picnic of hot soup."

"It's not soup, Master Geoffrey, it's coffee," said Martin imperturbably.

"Oh, if it's coffee I am on for some. You must have some, too, Miss Carson. You look a perfect wreck. I expect you have had a harder time of it than we have."

Eleanor shook her head. His sympathetic tone made her lower lip tremble.

"I have done nothing all night--" she said, "but wait," she added.

"And awfully hard work that must have been by the look of you," he said; "and where is everybody, Martin?"

"The mistress is in the drawing-room, Mr. Anstruther has gone down to the police station, and the rest of the young ladies and gentlemen are in bed. And I think, Mr. Geoffrey, if you and Miss Maud went to bed now, too, it would be a good thing."

"Go to bed at half-past six in the morning! What an idea! Do you want to go to bed, Maud?"

"No," she answered promptly; "but what I do want is a stinging hot bath.

That would freshen me up wonderfully. Come and have one, too, Miss Carson. It would do you a world of good."

Eleanor did not feel as if she particularly wanted a hot bath at that moment, but both Maud and Geoffrey so strongly advocated her taking one that out of grat.i.tude to them for the sympathy they evidently desired to show her, she followed them upstairs. After all, she might as well have a bath as do anything else; it would at least help to pa.s.s the time. And when she had had her bath and done her hair, and was dressed and downstairs again, she certainly felt wonderfully better for it. The horrid sort of up-all-night feeling that she had experienced had quite left her.

Presently the whole household was astir. Mrs. Danvers, firmly convinced that she had been awake all night, left the drawing-room when the housemaid entered it and went upstairs, intending to have a bath and dress, but she went to bed instead.

To escape the curious eyes of the servants, who now seemed to be in every room and to be regarding her with not unnatural curiosity, Eleanor wandered out into the hall again and resumed the restless pacing to and fro which she had kept up the greater part of the night. By eight o'clock she seemed to have the princ.i.p.al sitting-rooms to herself. Geoffrey and Maud had not yet come downstairs, and the servants, having finished their dusting and sweeping, had gone to their breakfast.

Consequently when the telephone bell in the morning-room rang sharply she was the first person to hear it. Hurrying toward it with the wild hope that at last she was to hear news of Margaret, she caught up the receiver.

"Hullo!" she heard, "are you there? Is that The Cedars? Mrs. Danvers? Who then? I can't hear--Carson?--Eleanor Carson, you say? What! the young lady who has been impersonating my wife's niece? Yes, I know all about it. Yes--yes, I am telling you. Margaret Anstruther is here. I found her myself, not half an hour ago, in a wood shed in the wood at the back of our house here. She lost her way on the downs last night trying to get to Mrs. Murray's. Yes--yes, well and safe. My wife has sent her to bed. She has a temperature and a bad cold in the head. We have sent for a doctor.

No--no not ill, but it is best to be on the safe side. And I sent a motor off ten minutes ago to let Mrs. Danvers know she is safe----" But the rest was a buzzing noise only. Either they had been cut off or Sir Richard had abruptly stopped speaking.

But Eleanor had heard enough. Margaret was safe. In her intense relief and joy at the news Eleanor let the receiver fall with a clang, and when Geoffrey and Maud, having heard her voice at the telephone, came flying downstairs, they found her shedding tears of joy.

"Margaret is found!" she said in glad accents. "Sir Richard Strangways has just telephoned." And she repeated to them the substance of what she had heard.

"I wonder why they did not send her back here," said Maud presently, when their first excitement was over.

"Because Margaret has evidently told them everything," replied Eleanor.

"For Sir Richard spoke of her as Margaret, and, of course, they know now that she, not I, is Lady Strangways' niece."

"Is she really Lady Strangways' niece?" said Maud, in the wildest astonishment, "but they did not seem to know each other."

"They didn't," said Eleanor, "or, of course, our plot would have been found out at once. It's rather a long story to tell you now, but the gist of it is that as Lady Strangways has been out of England for years she and Margaret had never met. And so when Mrs. Murray told her that she had a niece of Mr. Anstruther's staying with her--meaning me then, of course--I had to pretend to be her niece. But she didn't take to me,"

added Eleanor ruefully.

CHAPTER XVI

CONCLUSION

After that events moved very quickly. When a few minutes later Mr.

Anstruther returned in a cab, he was met on the doorstep by most of the members of the family, who crowded round him and shouted out the good news that his granddaughter was found.

"Margaret at Wrexley Park!" he said, when he had alighted from the cab and could make his voice heard. "How exceedingly strange that she should have found her way there!"

"Well, I don't know," said Geoffrey. "If one shot by Windy Gap, which is what she must have done in the darkness, she had only to keep on and on and she would be bound to strike Wrexley next. You see, sir, it lies right under the lee of the downs."

"Quite so, quite so," said Mr. Anstruther patiently. "But when I commented on the singularity of the circ.u.mstance which had directed the steps of my granddaughter towards Wrexley, I was not referring so much to the relative geographical positions of Windy Gap and Wrexley, with which indeed I am unacquainted, but----"

"You were thinking how funny it was that she should have fetched up at her own aunt's house in the end," broke in Maud, for which unceremonious interruption she received a glance of reproof from Mr. Anstruther, and scant thanks afterwards from the other members of the family who had been hanging delightedly on Mr. Anstruther's careful phraseology, and who had all wanted to hear him finish his remark for himself.

Then Mr. Anstruther went up to Eleanor, who was standing a little apart from all the others, and after subjecting her to a moment's severe scrutiny, spoke abruptly:--