Part 14 (1/2)

”Don't ring,” she said, in a voice that was cautiously lowered. ”Mrs.

Murray is out, and it's no use disturbing the servants. I say, what on earth made you come up here on such a grilling day? You must be too hot for anything!”

”I thought you would have been wondering why I had not been up here before,” said Margaret, feeling rather forlorn at the reception she was getting.

”Not a bit of it,” returned Eleanor. ”I have scarcely thought of you the last few days. I feel as if I had been Margaret Anstruther all my life!”

”And do you like it?” Margaret asked. The question slipped almost unawares from her lips, but she could not recall it, and she waited with a good deal of anxiety for the answer. She hoped it would not be in the affirmative, for if it were it would make what she had to say so very much harder for Eleanor to hear.

”Like it?” said Eleanor ecstatically. ”Liking is not the word! And, oh!

I have such news, such glorious, glorious news to give you! So, on the whole, I am glad you have come, although at first I was rather dismayed at the riskiness of it. But come away from here. I can take you to a quiet spot where we can have a long, long talk unheard, and unseen from the windows.”

While she spoke she was piloting Margaret across the lawn, past the shady tree, in full view of the windows where she had been sitting, towards a little gra.s.s path that cut in two the wide border of gay herbaceous flowers that backed the far end of the garden, and led suddenly to a flight of brick steps which descended to a walled-in kitchen garden below. This being on a much lower level than the lawn was quite invisible from the windows. A wide path ran along beside the rock-work that banked up the lawn, and at the end of the path there was a comfortable little summer-house furnished with a table and chairs.

”I have made this snug little retreat my own,” said Eleanor, as she led the way into it and invited Margaret to be seated. ”I come here in the afternoons and do my lessons, and it is already quite understood by Mrs.

Murray and the servants that when I am working here I do not like to be disturbed. She is very good and leaves me to myself now a lot. At first she was rather inclined to come and talk to me a good deal, but I think she sees now that I hate wasting time talking, and so lets me alone.

Well, now I am sure you are longing to hear all about my arrival and my first meeting with Mrs. Murray. So I will tell you about that first, and keep my best news to the last.”

If Margaret had said what was in her mind at that moment, she would have said that what she longed most to hear was herself telling Eleanor that she wanted to change back into her proper self again; but somehow, though the words were on the tip of her tongue, she could not bring herself to utter them. With a sinking heart she was beginning to realise that Eleanor, far from wanting to be herself again, would much rather remain Margaret Anstruther. And it was dreadful to think of the disappointment that she must cause her when she said what she had come to say.

”Well, now to begin at the beginning,” Eleanor said, leaning comfortably back on her chair with her hands lying loosely on her lap. Margaret noticed that three fingers of her right hand were in bandages. ”I can confess now what I am sure you never guessed at the time, and that is that I was in a horrid fright when I said good-bye to you at the station, and I believe at the very last minute if I could have jumped back into the train I would have done so, but Mrs. Murray was so kind that I soon got over my nervousness. Not that it would have mattered, though, if I hadn't,” she added with a little laugh, ”for Margaret, I found, was expected to be shy. I suppose, as poor Mrs. Murray is so dreadfully deaf, it is easier to pa.s.s myself off as you than it might otherwise have been, but certainly if I have made any glaring mistakes she has never noticed them, and if I really had been you my task could not have been simpler.

Of course, the first evening she asked me a great many questions about Mr. Anstruther and your home, and your lessons, and your governess, and why the doctor had said you were to go away, and so on, and I answered them all in first-cla.s.s style, for I have everything you had told me fresh in my mind. Oh, but what do you think! Our plans might have been wrecked at the outset by something neither of us had foreseen. That evening, just as we were going to bed, Mrs. Murray said to me in the quiet, low tone in which she always speaks, and which it makes it dreadfully difficult to hear what she says, that the first thing next morning I must write to my grandfather, and tell him of my safe arrival.

I was dismayed, if you like, for I had no notion what your handwriting was like, or any hope of copying it if I knew, but I kept my countenance, and gave no sign of dismay. And the next morning at breakfast, while cutting a piece of bread in half, the knife slipped and I cut the three middle fingers of my right hand so badly that each of them had to be wrapped up in bandages. So you see that to hold a pen was impossible, and Mrs. Murray wrote instead of me to announce my safe arrival here.”

”Oh, Eleanor!” Margaret exclaimed, ”and you cut yourself on purpose.”

”Of course, it was the only thing to be done; and I say I did it so well that I haven't been able to write yet. It was rather nice and clever of me wasn't it?”

”It was very clever,” Margaret said, in a grave voice.

Three days ago, when they had laid this plot together, she might have been able to add that this final little touch of Eleanor's was nice, too; but somehow she could not now bring herself to utter the word. Eleanor, however, never noticed the omission, but in the vivacious tone in which she had spoken throughout, went on to give a further account of all that had happened to her since she had left Margaret at the station three days since. That she was completely happy could not be doubted. Every word she uttered showed that she was radiantly content with her new existence, and was not troubled by as much as one small single scruple as to the deception on Mrs. Murray that she was so successfully carrying out.

Indeed, it was evident that she had not given that side of the matter a thought.

”But I am keeping the best part of all until the last to tell you,” she said; ”and that is, of course, about my voice.”

”Your voice,” echoed Margaret. ”Oh, of course, about your singing, you mean.”

She had completely forgotten Eleanor's great ambition to be a famous singer.

”You remember what I told you that Signor Vanucci said to me, that I ought to be the greatest singer of my generation, that he foresaw a splendid future before me, that my voice had infinite possibilities.

But that it was, of course, quite untrained.”

Margaret nodded. She remembered now.

”I can never forget those three phrases,” Eleanor said in a slow, thoughtful tone, as she gazed dreamily past Margaret at the wooden wall of the summer-house over behind her. ”Never. How often during the last dreary six months have I not repeated them to myself. They had been alternately my joy and my misery according as my hopes of getting proper training some day, and my fear that I never would were in the ascendant.

But all that is over now, and I am a pupil of Martelli's. Do you know, Margaret, I have to pinch myself sometimes to make sure that I am awake and not dreaming. Even as I sit here telling it all to you the whole situation--you, me, Madame Martelli, and everybody seem as though they were a part of a dream, a lovely dream, but still a dream. Does it seem like a dream to you?”

”N--no, not exactly,” said Margaret, with a slow shake of her head. ”It all seems quite real to me. But tell me what Madame Martelli said about your voice.”