The Rebellion of Margaret Part 9

"Play nicely!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Maud, still surveying her companion with a direct glance that the latter found very embarra.s.sing. "Great Scott, what a funny way of putting it! Where on earth were you brought up! And never even to have heard of her! Why, you will be saying next that you never heard of C. B. Fry or Braid, or Grace, or the Dohertys."

But Margaret, in the face of the scorn she already provoked, was not disposed to confess to such depths of ignorance, and she murmured a vague reply that might have meant anything. However, the few unintelligible sounds that pa.s.sed her lips might not have been sufficient to save her from further cross examination on the subject of her knowledge of tennis had not Maud's attention been attracted by the same two girls who, speeding past on their bicycles, called out to her not to forget to-morrow.

"Right oh!" sang out Maud in reply. "I shall expect you 11.30 sharp."

"How beautifully they bicycle!" Margaret said in admiring accents, following the two girls with eyes as they threaded their way through the traffic.

"Oh, well, any one can do that, can't they?" Maud replied. "Did you bring yours? You'd find it useful. I say, what was your hockey eleven like?"

"What was our hockey eleven like?" faltered Margaret. "I--I forget."

"Forget!" Maud exclaimed, in fresh amazement. "How could you forget an important thing like that? Why, nowadays if a school can't put a decent hockey eleven in the field it does not count for much."

"I mean," said Margaret, as a timely recollection of what Eleanor had told her about the games at Waterloo House came to her mind, "Miss McDonald was very old-fashioned, and she did not at all approve of the modern fashion of girls playing boys games."

"Great Scott!" said Maud in tones of intense commiseration. "Fancy being a governess in a rotten school of that sort! I wonder you stayed. Then you didn't play cricket?"

"No."

"Tennis?"

"No. But," added Margaret rather timidly, for it distressed her to see to what depths she was sinking in Maud's estimation, "I have always thought I should like to learn lawn tennis very much. Perhaps you could teach me."

"Me?" said Maud, raising her eyebrows in a quizzical fashion and gazing at Margaret with the point blank stare, which the latter found so trying to encounter with equanimity. "Sorry, but I haven't the time. I daresay one of the kids would give you a game, though, some time."

"As if," she said afterwards, detailing this conversation with much laughter to one of her brothers, "tennis could be taught in a day, or as though I were going to bother to teach her either. And I fancied I saw myself playing with a girl who had never held a racquet in her hand before."

"By the way," Maud went on, "I don't suppose you have much idea at present what our family consists of, have you?"

"No, I have not," said Margaret, feeling that she was quite safe in making that admission, for Eleanor had not known either.

"Well, there's mother, of course, to start with, and then, of the ones who are at home, there's Geoffrey; he's a year older than me, and he's at Sandhurst. Like me, he's fearfully keen on games, and like me too, he's pretty good," added Maud, who, as Margaret had discovered by that time, was not lacking in a good opinion of herself. "Then I come, then Hilary--she's a year younger than me. Then come Jack and Noel--they're fifteen and sixteen respectively, and one's at Osborne and one's at Dartmouth; all they seem to care about at present is sailing and fishing, and so we don't see much of them. Then there's Edward, he's about fourteen, I think; he's mad keen on cricket--besides, he's got all the brains of the family. Then two cousins of ours, Nancy and Joan Green, are staying with us. They're not half bad girls, and Nancy would play quite a decent game of tennis if she wasn't so lazy. She can hit jolly hard, but she won't run, and she will talk, so I won't play with her.

Then there are the kids--your little lot, you know--and I wish you joy of them; they're a jolly handful, and no mistake."

Margaret, who had been listening eagerly to this account of the family in the midst of which she was to live for the next few weeks, puckered her forehead over the last sentences.

"The--the kids," she queried in a puzzled tone.

"Yes, the infants; my eldest sister Joanna's children. You are going to take them over and teach them, aren't you? At least, that is what I believe mother gave me to understand."

"Oh yes, of course," Margaret said, so quickly that Maud had no suspicion that she had never in all her life before heard children called kids.

"Yes, mother hopes great things from you," Maud chattered on. "She says as you have been in a school you will understand discipline and all that.

But I believe Joanna won't have her darlings smacked, and they are such troublesome little monkeys that a sound smacking would do them all the good in the world," wound up their young aunt with a vigour that showed the subject was one on which she felt strongly. "Not that you," with a careless glance at Margaret's pale, thoughtful face, "look strong enough to give them much of a whacking."

Margaret made no reply, simply because at the moment she felt absolutely incapable of speech. Dismay at the thought that she was to be a governess held her spellbound. She certainly had not gathered from anything that Eleanor had said that she was expected to teach, and two naughty unruly children into the bargain. No wonder that she grew paler even than her wont at the appalling thought. Luckily for her, however, Maud was far from guessing the dismay her casually given information was causing her silent companion, and under cover of her chatter, Margaret had time to recover a little from the shock she had received and to resolve to try and make the best of it. Of one thing she was sure, Eleanor herself had no idea of the services she had been expected to give in exchange for being asked to spend her holidays at The Cedars. Neither had Mrs. Danvers wished to get her there under false pretences. After all, had not her letter said that she was both to enjoy herself and to make herself useful. So she had no right to complain at the discovery that the latter half of the sentence meant so much more than either she or Eleanor had suspected. "To make yourself useful," Eleanor had said airily; "oh, that means that you will be expected to arrange flowers for the dinner table, and to write notes, and so on. Little things of that sort, you know."

So, naturally, it had been a great shock to discover that "little things of that sort" included the entire control of two unruly children. It was not the prospect of having to work that perturbed Margaret, it was the knowledge of how incapable she felt to deal with children. Why, she had scarcely ever spoken to a child in her life, and now she was to have the entire charge of two thrust upon her. She could not help wondering what Eleanor would have said or done in her place, but was unable to answer the question satisfactorily. The situation, however, could hardly have dismayed her as much as it was dismaying her subst.i.tute. To fill the post of holiday governess to two small children would seem to her an easy task after having taught for three years in a big school. Of one thing, however, Margaret felt quite convinced. If Eleanor had known of the predicament in which Margaret was placed, she would, after a moment or two of consternation, have gone off into fits of laughter. And no doubt the situation had its comic side; even Margaret, full of alarm as she was, could not restrain a smile as she thought of the very queer governess that she would make.

"You look pretty young to be a governess, don't you?" said Maud. "Did you ever have any difficulty in keeping order?"

"No, never," said Margaret, truthfully enough.

"How many girls were there?"

"Twenty boarders, forty day girls, and five governesses when I--when I----" this came out with a gulp, for Margaret found the first falsehood she had been obliged to tell most distasteful to her--"went there. But the school has been going down the last few years, and last term there were only seven boarders and ten day girls."

"Sounds rather a poor sort of show, doesn't it?" said Maud with a yawn.

"I say, what a slow horse we have got, haven't we? We shall be all night getting home at this rate. What sort of place was Putney or Hampstead, or wherever the school was to live in?"

"Miss McDonald's school was at Hampstead, which is a suburb of London and is situated high up. It is celebrated for its Heath, which is a great holiday resort for the lower orders--the 'Arrys and 'Arriets, you know--on Bank Holidays, at which time it is advisable for quieter members of society to keep off it. But at other times it affords an excellent exercise ground for all the young ladies' schools in the neighbourhood.

The air is fine and invigorating, and there is no reason why, with the help of a little imagination, one should not fancy oneself in the heart of the country, and many miles away from the greatest metropolis in the world. The sunsets can, by those who appreciate the beauties of Nature, be viewed from that portion of the Heath which commands a view of the western sky, and----"

"Very interesting indeed," broke in Maud, who had been listening with astonishment to this flow of instructive discourse.

At first she had thought that Margaret was, to use her own phrase, "rotting her," but a glance at the serious face beside her was sufficient to dispel that theory, and she came to the conclusion that young though she was, Margaret was a typical governess, who rejoiced in framing stilted sentences and in letting them flow from her lips in an even, monotonous voice.

"You speak like a well-informed guide-book," she added, with another yawn.

Margaret took the semi-impertinent remark as a compliment.

"I can tell you a great deal more than that about Hampstead if you would like to listen," she said, for her wonderfully accurate memory had enabled her to retain every word of the banteringly given description of Hampstead with which Eleanor had furnished her. Needless to say, Eleanor had had no idea that Margaret would think it necessary to repeat it word for word, but had thought that Margaret would only pick out facts here and there to help her in any emergency that might arise.

"Not on any account, thanks," said Maud hastily; "let's talk about something more interesting."

"Something more interesting" proved to be her own self, and from that point onwards until they reached their destination Maud talked exclusively of her own doings. And as she appeared to do little else but play games, and as Margaret's knowledge of all games was "nil," it followed that very much of what Maud said was as unintelligible as though she had talked Chinese. But though she never knew when Maud was talking of golf, or when of tennis, or again, when hockey was under discussion, so that handicaps, and sliced b.a.l.l.s, and American services, and good forearm drives, and double faults, and poor pa.s.sing, and good shooting, and half-volleys, were terms that were all jumbled up in absolutely inextricable confusion, her expression of rapt attention as she jotted them down on the tablets of her mind, resolving to acquaint herself with the meaning of each when occasion served, convinced Maud that she had a properly appreciative listener. A person even more ignorant of games than Margaret would have gathered from all she said about them that Maud excelled in each and all.

And that was no vain boast either. Her golf handicap was four; she played an exceedingly good, hard game at tennis, and had twice played hockey in International matches. But it was of billiards she was talking during the last few minutes of their drive. It appeared from what she said that she had promised to play a game with Geoffrey immediately after dinner, but that she had not only broken that promise but had been obliged to come away in the middle of dinner to meet the train.

"Oh, I am so sorry to have caused you this inconvenience," said Margaret.

"But it was most kind of you to come and meet me."

"Oh, I didn't come down to meet you," said Maud, with perfect frankness.

"I wanted to hear how Anna had got on at Surbiton. Then I luckily remembered that you were coming by this train, and so got a lift home in your cab, and killed two birds with one stone."

The little laugh with which Maud accompanied this candid explanation of her presence at the station robbed her words of much of their sting, yet Margaret was conscious of a feeling of mortification that Maud's errand had not been undertaken solely on her behalf. Indeed, she had been given to understand that she was by far the smaller and the least important of the two bird's that Maud's stone had brought down; and the knowledge made her feel very forlorn indeed. Up to that moment she had been under the impression that Maud had been anxious to meet her and make her acquaintance. Well, if not hers, that of the girl she represented, and the casually given information that it was only because she happened to travel by the same train as the Finches that she had been at the station to greet her quite took away the pleasant feeling she had had that there was at least one person in the big, strange household she was entering who was eager to show herself kindly disposed towards the new holiday governess.

They had long ago left the neighbourhood of the town behind them, and had been driving through the deepening dusk towards the downs, which, looking in that dim light like a high green wall, run inland from the sea. Most of the roads hereabouts were wide and bordered by trees, and on either side houses which had for the most part large gardens surrounding them lay back from the road. Even Margaret, unversed as she was in the knowledge of what made the difference between a good and bad neighbourhood in the town, could perceive that the further they went the more prosperous and consequential looking the houses became.

At last, when they were almost underneath the downs, the long, straight road they had been following for some time turned abruptly to the right, and going through a white gate they entered a long drive lined on either side with a hedge of evergreens close clipped and of great thickness.

Here and there openings like doorways had been cut in the hedge, but it was now too dark to see what lay beyond them.

Almost before the cab had time to draw up before the lighted doorway, Maud had jumped out.

"Here we are at last," she said, with a big sigh of relief, "and here you are, Martin," as a portly looking butler came forward. "That's all right.

Thanks ever so for the lift, Miss Carson. You'll excuse me now, won't you, though. I expect Geoffrey is tearing his hair in the billiard-room."

And with that Maud vanished at top speed, and Margaret was left to Martin's guidance. Though Maud's sudden desertion came as an unwelcome surprise to her, Margaret was too tired by this time even to feel shy, and she followed Martin through the hall without any inward tremors of nervousness.

"Miss Carson, Madam," he said, throwing open a door at the far end of the big, square hall they had traversed, and ushering her into a drawing-room whose open French windows gave on to the lawn. The only light in the room, and that was not very much, came from outside, and in the semi-darkness Margaret could just make out a figure seated in a low easy chair partly in and partly out of the window.