Good Old Anna: Historical Thriller. Marie Belloc Lowndes
canvas, a section of a bed-spread, on which was traced an intricate and beautiful Jacobean design. Rose had already been working at it for six months, and she hoped to have finished it by the 14th of December, her mother’s birthday. She enjoyed doing this beautiful work, of which the pattern had been lent to her by a country neighbour who collected such things.
How surprised Rose would have been on this early August afternoon could she have foreseen that this cherished piece of work, on which she had already lavished so many hours of close and pleasant toil, would soon be put away for an indefinite stretch of time; and that knitting, which she had always disliked doing, would take its place!
But no such thought, no such vision of the future, came into her mind as she bent her pretty head over her work.
She felt rather excited, a thought more restless than usual. England at war, and with Germany! Dear old Anna’s Fatherland—the great country to which Rose had always been taught by her mother to look with peculiar affection, as well as respect and admiration.
Rose and Mrs. Otway had hoped to go to Germany this very autumn. They had saved up their pennies—as Mrs. Otway would have put it—for a considerable time, in order that they might enjoy in comfort, and even in luxury, what promised to be a delightful tour. Rose could hardly realise even yet that their journey, so carefully planned out, so often discussed, would now have to be postponed. They were first to have gone to Weimar, where Mrs. Otway had spent such a happy year in her girlhood, and then to Munich, to Dresden, to Nuremberg—to all those dear old towns with whose names Rose had always been familiar. It seemed such a pity that now they would have to wait till after the war to go to Germany.
After the war? Fortunately the people she had seen that day—and there had been a good deal of coming and going in the Close—all seemed to think that the war would be over very soon, and this pleasant view had been confirmed in a rather odd way.
Rose’s cousin, James Hayley, had rung her up on the telephone from London. She had been very much surprised, for a telephone message from London to Witanbury costs one-and-threepence, and James was careful about such things. When he did telephone, which was very seldom, he always waited to do so till the evening, when the fee was halved. But to-day James had rung up just before luncheon, and she had heard his voice almost as though he were standing by her side.
“Who’s there? Oh, it’s you, is it, Rose? I just wanted to say that I shall probably be down Saturday night. I shan’t be able to be away more than one night, worse luck. I suppose you’ve heard what’s happened?”
And then, as she had laughed—she had really not been able to help it (how very odd James was! He evidently thought Witanbury quite out of the world), he had gone on, “It’s a great bore, for it upsets everything horribly. The one good point about it is that it won’t last long.”
“How long?” she had called out.
And he had answered rather quickly, “You needn’t speak so loud. I hear you perfectly. How long? Oh, I think it’ll be over by October—may be a little before, but I should say October.”
“Mother thinks there’ll be a sort of Trafalgar!”
And then he had answered, speaking a little impatiently for he was very overworked just then, “Nothing of the sort! The people who will win this war, and will win it quickly, are the Russians. We have information that they will mobilise quickly—much more quickly than most people think. You see, my dear Rose,”—he was generally rather old-fashioned in his phraseology—“the Russians are like a steam roller”; she always remembered that she had heard that phrase from him first. “We have reason to believe that they can put ten million men into their fighting line every year for fifty years!”
Rose, in answer, said the first silly thing she had said that day: “Oh, I do hope the war won’t last as long as that!”
And then she had heard, uttered in a strange voice, the words, “Another three minutes, sir?” and the hasty answer at the other end, “No, certainly not! I’ve quite done.” And she had hung up the receiver with a smile.
And yet Rose, if well aware of his little foibles, liked her cousin well enough to be generally glad of his company. During the last three months he had spent almost every week-end at Witanbury. And though it was true, as her mother often observed, that James was both narrow-minded and self-opinionated, yet even so he brought with him a breath of larger air, and he often told the ladies at the Trellis House interesting things.
While Rose Otway sat musing over her beautiful work in the garden, good old Anna came and went in her kitchen. She too still felt restless and anxious, she too wondered how long this unexpected war would last. But whereas Rose couldn’t have told why she was restless and anxious, her one-time nurse knew quite well what ailed herself this afternoon.
Anna had a very good reason for feeling worried and depressed, but it was one she preferred to keep to herself. For the last two days she had been expecting some money from Germany, and since this morning she had been wondering, with keen anxiety, whether that money would be stopped in the post.
What made this possibility very real to her was the fact that an uncle of Anna’s, just forty-four years ago, that is, in the August of 1870, had been ruined owing to the very simple fact that a sum of money owing him from France had not been able to get through! It was true that she, Anna, would not be ruined if the sum due to her, which in English money came to fifty shillings exactly, were not to arrive. Still, it would be very disagreeable, and the more disagreeable because she had foolishly given her son-in-law five pounds a month ago. She knew it would have to be a gift, though he had pretended at the time that it was only a loan.
Anna wondered how she could find out whether money orders were still likely to come through from Germany. She did not like to ask at the Post Office, for her Berlin nephew, who transmitted the money to her half-yearly, always had the order made out to some neighbouring town or village, not to Witanbury. In vain Anna had pointed out that this was quite unnecessary, and indeed very inconvenient; and that when she had said she did not wish her mistress to know, she had not meant that. In spite of her protests Willi had persisted in so sending it.
Suddenly her face brightened. How easy it would be to find out all that sort of thing at the meeting to-night! Such a man as Manfred Hegner would be sure to know.
There came a ring at the front door of the Trellis House, and Anna got up reluctantly from her easy chair and laid down her crochet. She was beginning to feel old, so she often told herself regretfully—older than the Englishwomen of her own age seemed to be. But none of them had worked as hard as she had always worked. Englishwomen, especially English servants, were lazy good-for-nothings!
Poor old Anna; she did not feel happy or placid to-day, and she hated the thought of opening the door to some one who, maybe, would condole with her on to-day’s news. All Mrs. Otway’s friends knew Anna, and treated her as a highly respected institution. Those who knew a little German were fond of trying it on her.
It was rather curious, considering how long Anna had been in England, that she still kept certain little habits acquired in the far-off days when she had been the young cook of a Herr Privy Councillor. Thus never did she open the front door with a cheerful, pleasant manner. Also, unless they were very intimately known to her and to her mistress, she always kept visitors waiting in the hall. She would forget, that is, to show them straight into the pretty sitting-room which lay just opposite her kitchen. She often found herself regretting that the heavy old mahogany door of the Trellis House lacked the tiny aperture which in Berlin is so well named a “stare-hole,” and which enables the person inside the front door to command, as it were, the position outside.
But to-day, when she saw who it was who stood on the threshold, her face cleared a little, for she was well acquainted with the tall young man who was looking at her with so pleasant a smile. His name was Jervis Blake, and he came very often to the Trellis House. For two years he had been at “Robey’s,” the Army coaching establishment which was, in a minor degree, one of the glories of Witanbury, and which consisted of a group of beautiful old Georgian houses spreading across the whole of one of the wide corners of the Close.