“It does require a peculiar order of mind, and you have never seemed to me in the least poetical or imaginative,” said her aunt in an appeased voice. “For instance, I could not imagine your writing a book like Mrs. Edes, and The Poor Lady was anonymous, and anybody might have written it as far as one knew. But I should never have imagined her for a moment as capable of doing it.”
“No,” said Annie.
Then they had come to the parsonage and Jane Riggs, as rigid as starched linen could make a human being, admitted them, and presently after a little desultory conversation, the collection, which was really a carefully made one, and exceedingly good and interesting, was being displayed. Then came the charming little tea which Von Rosen had planned; then the suggestion with regard to the rose-garden and Aunt Harriet's terrified refusal, knowing as she knew the agony of sneezes and sniffs sure to follow its acceptance; and then Annie, a vision in blue, was walking among the roses with Von Rosen and both were saying things which they never could remember afterward—about things in which neither had the very slightest interest. It was only when they had reached the end of the pergola, trained over with climbers, and the two were seated on a rustic bench therein, that the conversation to be remembered began.
Chapter VIII
The conversation began, paradoxically, with a silence. Otherwise, it would have begun with platitudes. Since neither Von Rosen nor Annie Eustace were given usually to platitudes, the silence was unavoidable. Both instinctively dreaded with a pleasurable dread the shock of speech. In a way this was the first time the two had been alone with any chance of a seclusion protracted beyond a very few minutes. In the house was Aunt Harriet Eustace, who feared a rose, as she might have feared the plague, and, moreover, as Annie comfortably knew, had imparted the knowledge to Von Rosen as they had walked down the pergola, that she would immediately fall asleep.
“Aunt Harriet always goes to sleep in her chair after a cup of tea,” Annie had said and had then blushed redly.
“Does she?” asked Von Rosen with apparent absent-mindedness but in reality, keenly. He excused himself for a moment, left Annie standing in the pergola and hurried back to the house, where he interviewed Jane Riggs, and told her not to make any noise, as Miss Eustace in the library would probably fall asleep, as was her wont after a cup of tea. Jane Riggs assented, but she looked after him with a long, slow look. Then she nodded her head stiffly and went on washing cups and saucers quietly. She spoke only one short sentence to herself. “He's a man and it's got to be somebody. Better be her than anybody else.”
When the two at the end of the pergola began talking, it was strangely enough about the affair of the Syrian girl.
“I suppose, have always supposed, that the poor young thing's husband came and stole his little son,” said Von Rosen.
“You would have adopted him?” asked Annie in a shy voice.