Pimpernel and Rosemary - Baroness Orczy (e reader TXT) 📗

Rosemary dear,” the girl continued with glowing eyes, “to be able to do all this. Now you see, don’t you? that I could not possibly give it all up.”

“Yes, Anna, I do see that. But you are running terrible risks, little ’un.”

“I know I am, and so does Philip; but you don’t know how happy it makes us. The days when an article of his goes to Budapest is a fête day for us both. It is usually a Saturday when the parcels are sent off, and,” the girl went on with pathetic naivete, “on the Sunday morning when I go to Mass, I no longer bother God with my troubles and with senseless prayers, I just thank Him, and thank Him for letting me do something for Hungary.”

Rosemary said nothing for the moment. Indeed, what could she say? To try and dissuade this young fanatic from all her high-souled foolishness was an attempt foredoomed to failure. Rosemary had far too keen a knowledge of human nature, and held far too high an opinion of patriotism as a virtue not to understand the intense happiness that this constant sacrifice brought into Anna’s dreary life. To have suggested that the girl give up this joy⁠—these constant risks⁠—would have been futile.

“You are a splendid, brave thing, Anna!” was all that she could say, and her voice sounded quite harsh as she spoke, because she was fighting against emotion.

She gazed with real admiration on the poor wizened little figure of this girl, in whose soul burned a flame of ardent patriotism. Anna had counted the cost of what she was doing; with her eyes open, envisaging every risk, she was accomplishing quietly and unostentatiously what she believed to be her duty to her poor native land. A heroine of the peace, she risked more than the thousands of heroines of the war had done⁠—save perhaps one. Like Edith Cavell, she faced and risked death for an ideal, happy in her quiet way for the privilege of doing it, enduring a life of grinding routine, of dreary monotony more trying for the young to bear than active sorrow or physical pain.

The two girls had not spoken for some time, they sat side by side on the sofa with hands clasped, and eyes fixed upon one another. Anna, with nerves weakened by privations, was on the verge of giving way to an emotion which would have eased the tension that for the past months was threatening to break down her spirit. Rosemary, on the other hand, felt for the moment almost ashamed of her robust health, her virile brain, the contentment⁠—if not happiness⁠—in life which was her portion since she had married Jasper, and her compassionate heart longed for the power to comfort and to help this gentle, high-souled girl who looked at her with Peter Blakeney’s eyes, and whose lips when she smiled were so like his. Anna was running her head against a stonewall. Rosemary felt that inevitably she would sooner or later be crushed in the process. Her thoughts flew to her husband, the man on whom she knew that she could always rely when knotty problems of life threatened to be beyond her powers to unravel. Jasper would be of good counsel: selfless, generous to a fault, his unerring tact would perhaps find a way into the innermost recesses of Anna’s heart, and find the means to save the child from further fanatical folly without wounding the susceptibilities of her high-mettled patriotism.

“And now, Anna,” Rosemary said after that moment of silence which had sealed a bond of sympathy between herself and Peter’s kinswoman, “you are going to have a cup of hot coffee with me and Jasper. No! No!” she went on determinedly, and took hold of the girl’s wrist. “I shall not let you go till you have seen Jasper. He will just love you, and you and he will get on splendidly together. You two fine creatures are made to understand one another.”

She dragged the obviously unwilling Anna with her into the next room. Jasper was there, waiting. His hand was on the bell-pull at the moment, and his kind, grave, eyes at once sought those of Anna, who, reluctantly, allowed herself to be drawn toward him.

Rosemary effected a quick introduction. In a moment Jasper’s kind words had gained the victory over Anna’s shyness; less than two minutes later they were seated side by side at the table, while Rosemary ordered coffee of the slatternly chambermaid who had come in answer to the bell.

It was wonderful how splendidly Jasper and Anna got on; he seemed in a few seconds to have caught the knack of gaining the girl’s confidence. She became animated, quite pretty, with shinning eyes and full red lips that had lost for the moment their pathetic droop. She did not refer to her cousin, Philip Imrey, or to the dangerous game he and she were playing together, but she talked of her mother and of Ujlak, of the horses and the farm and the difficulties that beset the Hungarian landowners at every turn.

“I dare say that to a great extent it is our fault,” she was even willing to admit in response to gentle criticism from Jasper. “We did not make ourselves beloved by the peasantry; they spoke a different language from ours, theirs was a different religion, and they were the alien race. We did little, if anything, for them. But tell me,” she went on, and fixed her shrewd glance upon Jasper, “do you think that you landowners over in England, who do so much for your tenantry and your villagers, cricket-clubs, football, concerts⁠—oh! I don’t know what else, but things that you pay for and that they enjoy⁠—well! do you think that in their hearts they love you any better than the Romanian peasantry loved us Hungarians? And do you really believe that if you were in trouble, as we are now, and they were given a certain power over you, they would