|
Blog Summary: Annie rose and fled. She closed the door, turned the key softly, and ran up-stairs in the dark. Kneel-ing before a window on the farther side from her old home, she watched with eager eyes the young man open the gate and come up the path between the old-fashioned shrubs. The clove-like fragrance of the pinks in the border came in her face. Annie watched Tom Reed disappear beneath the trellised hood of the door; then the bell tinkled through the house. It seemed to Annie that she heard it as she had never heard anything before. Every nerve in her body seemed urging her to rise and go down-stairs and admit this young man whom she loved. But her will, turned upon itself, kept her back. She could not rise and go down; something stronger than her own wish restrained her. She suffered horribly, but she remained. The bell tinkled again. There was a pause, then it sounded for the third time.
Annie leaned against the window, faint and trem-bling. It was rather horrible to continue such a fight between will and inclination, but she held out. She would not have been herself had she not done so. Then she saw Tom Reed's figure emerge from under the shadow of the door, pass down the path between the sweet-flowering shrubs, seeming to stir up the odor of the pinks as he did so. He started to go down the road; then Annie heard a loud, silvery call, with a harsh inflection, from her father's house. "Imogen is calling him back," she thought.
Annie was out of the room, and, slipping softly down-stairs and out into the yard, crouched close to the fence overgrown with sweetbrier, its founda-tion hidden in the mallow, and there she listened. She wanted to know what Imogen and her other sisters were about to say to Tom Reed, and she meant to know. She heard every word. The dis-tance was not great, and her sisters' voices carried far, in spite of their honeyed tones and efforts tow-ard secrecy. By the time Tom had reached the gate of the parsonage they had all crowded down there, a fluttering assembly in their snowy summer muslins, like white doves. Annie heard Imogen first. Imogen was always the ringleader.
"Couldn't you find her?" asked Imogen.
"No. Rang three times," replied Tom. He had a boyish voice, and his chagrin showed plainly in it. Annie knew just how he looked, how dear and big and foolish, with his handsome, bewildered face, blurting out to her sisters his disappointment, with innocent faith in their sympathy.
Then Annie heard Eliza speak in a small, sweet voice, which yet, to one who understood her, carried in it a sting of malice. "How very strange!" said Eliza.
Jane spoke next. She echoed Eliza, but her voice was more emphatic and seemed multiple, as echoes do. "Yes, very strange indeed," said Jane.
"Dear Annie is really very singular lately. It has distressed us all, especially father," said Susan, but deprecatingly.
Then Imogen spoke, and to the point. "Annie must be in that house," said she. "She went in there, and she could not have gone out without our seeing her."
Annie could fairly see the toss of Imogen's head as she spoke.
"What in thunder do you all mean?" asked Tom Reed, and there was a bluntness, almost a brutality, in his voice which was refreshing.
"I do not think such forcible language is becoming, especially at the parsonage," said Jane.
Annie distinctly heard Tom Reed snort. "Hang it if I care whether it is becoming or not," said he.
"You seem to forget that you are addressing ladies, sir," said Jane.
|
