The Rebellion of Margaret.

by Geraldine Mockler.

CHAPTER I

MARGARET'S DREAM FRIEND

"Margaret Anstruther! Margaret Anstruther! Margaret Anstruther!"

It was a sultry afternoon in early July. The sun was shining out of a cloudless blue sky, the air was so still and so overpoweringly hot that it seemed to have sent every living creature, save the owner of the voice that was calling upon Margaret Anstruther, to sleep, for no answer was returned to the thrice repeated call, and the silence which the summons had broken settled once more over the garden. Not a leaf on even one of the topmost twigs of the huge old elms from underneath which that insistent voice had come was stirring, not an insect chirped, and the birds who held morning and evening concerts among the branches were silent now.

"Margaret Anstruther, will you come and play tennis? My brothers Reginald and Lionel want a game, and if you will play we shall be four, and because you have not had much practice lately you shall play with Reginald, for he plays better than Lionel."

Greystones was noted for its elm-trees. The grounds, indeed, contained little else in the shape of flowers or trees but elms. For a few brief weeks in spring when they were dressed in the tenderest of greens they were lovely, and in the autumn, if the leaves were not stripped off by gales before they had a chance to turn golden, their hues could vie with those flaunted by any other trees, but in the summer their dull, uniform green was apt to become monotonous, and Margaret Anstruther was then wont to declare that she could cheerfully have rooted up every one of them.

But as the remark never reached any one else's ears but her own, no one's feelings were hurt. A chance visitor to Greystones, regular visitors were not encouraged, had once observed that the entire grounds, some thirty or forty acres in extent, which comprised the domain must have been an elm wood originally, and that a s.p.a.ce just sufficient on which to erect a house of moderate dimensions had been cleared in the heart of it, Greystones had been built, a way cut through the trees to form a drive to the road a quarter of a mile distant from the house, and the rest of the wood left undisturbed to be called a garden or not as the owner pleased.

Certainly the present owner had made no attempt to form a garden, but had allowed the elms to grow right up to the walls of the house and to darken the windows of the gloomily situated dwelling as much as they pleased.

"Margaret Anstruther, if you will not come and play tennis, will you come for a ride upon your bicycle--that nice new one that you received as a present from--from your grandfather." Here the speaker paused and laughed as if the idea of Margaret Anstruther getting a bicycle from her grandfather was a distinctly amusing idea. "We will go far, far along to the blue distance--much farther than you ever went with Miss Bidwell--and we will have tea at the inn down by the river and come home by moonlight.

We shall be quite safe, for Reginald and Lionel will be with us, and they will take care of us."

The part of the grounds in which this so far one-sided conversation was taking place was at some considerable distance from the house, in fact it was right on the confines of the wood and as far from the house as possible. Beyond the wood flat, green fields stretched on all sides undiversified by as much as a copse or a hill. Even a bare, ploughed field would have been a welcome relief to the landscape, while a yellow cornfield would have imparted a positively gay appearance to it; but year in year out those green fields wore always the same aspect.

But dull though the view might be, it was at least a wide one, and there were the sheep and the cows that grazed in them to look at. Occasionally, too, a stray pa.s.ser-by, under the erroneous impression that in crossing them he was taking a short cut, would venture into them, only to turn back discomfited when confronted with padlocked gates and hedges threaded with barbed wire, to say nothing of notice boards warning trespa.s.sers to beware.

For the man who owned Greystones and those densely wooded grounds also owned the fields that surrounded them, and his hatred of intruders was well known in the immediate neighbourhood. It was a brave child who crept through his hedges or climbed over his gates to pick primroses or blackberries, and the urchin that was unlucky enough to encounter old Mr.

Anstruther while so engaged never ventured to trespa.s.s on his property again.

"Margaret Anstruther! Margaret Anstruther! are you going to sit under that tree all the afternoon? If you are too lazy to play tennis or to come for a ride, will you come with me to Lady Barchester's garden party?

She has invited two hundred guests, and you must wear that lovely white muslin dress with the little frills all up the skirt, and the big white hat with the pink roses, and do not forget to take the pink chiffon parasol that was sent you from Paris last week. We have been asked to remain to dinner there, you may remember, for there will be a dance afterwards. And the moon will be shining, and will it not be very pleasant to sit out in the garden between the dances! Will you come, Margaret Anstruther?"

That proposal was surely one that ought to have been tempting enough to have called forth an answer of some sort from the girl to whom it was addressed, but it was met by the same dead silence that had followed the other suggestions.

Then somewhere near at hand a gate creaked loudly, there was the sound of a key being turned in a padlock, and with his back towards the sunlit fields from which he had come some ten minutes previously, the tall, thin figure of an old man with a flowing white beard and with an Inverness cloak hanging from his spare shoulders strode over the gra.s.s in the direction of the thick clump of trees from which the unseen voice had proceeded.

Though he took no pains to render them inaudible, his footsteps made no sound on the gra.s.s, and as he approached the same voice spoke again, unconscious of his near presence.

"Margaret Anstruther," it went on, "do you not then wish to do any of the nice things I have told you about? Do you like sitting here by yourself, when outside in the world real things are happening, and there are real people to whom you might be talking, and whom you might know? Are you happy? Tell me that."

The old man came to a pause, as abrupt as it was involuntary. Had any one been there to see his face at that moment they would have perceived that he was finding it difficult to believe the evidence of his ears. Almost against his will it seemed he waited to hear the answer to that question, for his obvious impulse had been to stride on and confront the speaker, on whom his cold blue eyes, lightened now with a gleam of anger, rested.

She was sitting at the foot of a big elm-tree, with her back resting against its trunk and her hands loosely clasped round her knees. She was very young, and the forlorn droop of her figure and the pathetic expression that was at that moment depicted upon her face made her look even younger than her years, which numbered barely eighteen.

"Oh, Eleanor Humphreys!" she said, and her clear hazel eyes brimmed over with tears as she spoke. "I am very, very miserable. n.o.body loves me, and I have n.o.body to love except you, of course, Eleanor Humphreys, and sometimes I cannot make believe that you are real at all."

"Margaret!" said the old man, breaking into speech at last, and in a very harsh voice. "What folly is this? To whom are you talking? Who is this Eleanor Humphreys? Where is she?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MARGARET," SAID THE OLD MAN, BREAKING INTO SPEECH AT LAST, AND IN A VERY HARSH VOICE, "WHAT FOLLY IS THIS?"]

And with both hands resting on his stick, which was planted firmly on the ground in front of him, he darted suspicious searching glances among the surrounding trees.

At the sound of her name uttered in those hard tones Margaret had sprung to her feet; her face, pale before, had turned yet paler, and her big hazel eyes fastened themselves with a terror-stricken expression on her grandfather's face.

"How dare you encourage people to come into my grounds and talk to you without my permission? Have I not expressly forbidden you to make acquaintances without my knowledge. Who is this Eleanor Humphreys? Where is she hiding? What does she mean by coming here and asking you to accompany her to tennis parties and dances? Answer me. Tell me who she is, and how she comes to be here without my knowledge."

"She is n.o.body; she--she is nowhere," stammered Margaret, whose trembling lips could scarcely frame the words.

"n.o.body, nowhere," thundered the old man. "Don't dare to trifle with me, Margaret. Show her to me immediately, and I will tell her, whoever she may be, what I think of her for presuming to come here without my leave."

Margaret's lips gave a sudden little twitch, which showed that, badly frightened as she was, a hint of the humour of the situation had dawned upon her mind.

"You--you can't scold her, grandfather. She--she isn't real. She is my dream friend."

There was a momentary silence, during which Margaret, glancing timidly at her grandfather's stern and angry face and reading there the contemptuous scorn which he felt for her unworthy self, wished that the earth might open and swallow her up. But as it remained unyieldingly firm she had perforce to remain above ground and endure to the full his prolonged scrutiny.

"So," he said at length, and if anything had been wanting to complete her discomfiture and to drive away any lingering feeling of mirth, his tone would have been more than sufficient for that purpose, "so this is the manner in which you pa.s.s your time. In dreaming about imaginary people, and in holding conversations remarkable for their utter inanity with them, about tennis parties and dances and pink chiffon parasols."

Failing a yawning chasm at her feet, Margaret would have been thankful if that same pink parasol had been a reality at that moment, and in her hand, so that she could have held it as a screen between her crimsoning face and his pitiless old eyes. She writhed inwardly to think that all the idle fancies in which she had been indulging during the afternoon had been poured into her grandfather's angry ears. And it was positive agony to her shy nature to know that her shadowy friend was no longer her own secret.

"Kindly have the goodness to answer my question. Seeing that but a few minutes have elapsed since you were proving yourself capable of sustaining both sides of a conversation, I think that it cannot be too great a strain upon you to reply to my question now. Do you hear me?"

All trace of anger had vanished now both from Mr. Anstruther's face and from his manner, and he spoke in the cold, precise tones, and framed his sentences in the rather stilted manner habitual to him.

"Yes, grandfather," Margaret gasped in a very small voice. She was rarely at ease with her grandfather--he had never taken any pains to render her so--and when he addressed her in tones of semi-sarcasm she grew so disconcerted that she could not answer him coherently. And, as the more confused she became the more caustic his tongue waxed; their interviews, brief though they were, often concluded with anger on his part and with tears on hers.

"Then I should be obliged if you would have the kindness to answer me."

"I--I forget what it was that you asked me," stammered Margaret.

"Oh, I do not flatter myself that my questions can vie in interest with those addressed to you by your imaginary friend. Nevertheless, I should be glad if you will kindly pay attention to them. I asked you if it was in this profitable manner that you usually pa.s.sed your afternoons now."

"Sometimes, grandfather."

"Then I will find you something else to do. What is it that you ought to be doing at this hour?"

"Three to four. Take exercise," said Margaret in the tone of a child repeating a lesson.

"And this is the way in which you take it? By sitting and dreaming away your time in nonsense and folly and in making up silly, idle conversations with idiotic creatures of your own imagination. I gave even you, Margaret, credit for more sense. Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

Now, if Margaret had murmured the meek affirmative reply that was obviously expected of her, the whole course of her life might have been different. Her grandfather would probably have delivered himself of a few more harsh strictures, and then Margaret would have been dismissed to the house, with orders to double her morrow's lessons.

But though she winced at the scorn with which he spoke to her, it did not cut so deep as the ridicule he poured on what he contemptuously termed the idiotic creatures of her own imagination, and oddly enough, though she would never have summoned up enough courage to justify her own actions to him, she could not remain silent when the intelligence of her shadowy friend was derided.

"No;" she said slowly, thoughtfully, and quite as much amazed at her own temerity as Mr. Anstruther was; "I don't think I am ashamed, grandfather.

You see, I am very fond of Eleanor Humphreys. She has been a very great comfort to me."

Sheer amazement held Mr. Anstruther silent. He would probably have been less surprised if the kitchen cat had entered into conversation with him.