A few hours earlier, her request would have brought him instantly to his feet. She had given him, on the day of his arrival, an inviting glimpse of the spacious book-lined room above stairs in which she had gathered together all the tokens of her personal tastes: the retreat in which, as one might fancy, Anna Leath had hidden the restless ghost of Anna Summers; and the thought of a talk with her there had been in his mind ever since. But now he sat motionless, as if spell-bound by the play of Madame de Chantelle’s needles and the pulsations of Owen’s fitful music.
“She will want to ask me about the girl,” he repeated to himself, with a fresh sense of the insidious taint that embittered all his thoughts; the hand of the slender- columned clock on the mantel-piece had spanned a half-hour before shame at his own indecision finally drew him to his feet.
From her writing-table, where she sat over a pile of letters, Anna lifted her happy smile. The impulse to press his lips to it made him come close and draw her upward. She threw her head back, as if surprised at the abruptness of the gesture; then her face leaned to his with the slow droop of a flower. He felt again the sweep of the secret tides, and all his fears went down in them.
She sat down in the sofa-corner by the fire and he drew an armchair close to her. His gaze roamed peacefully about the quiet room.
“It’s just like you–it is you,” he said, as his eyes came back to her.
“It’s a good place to be alone in-I don’t think I’ve ever before cared to talk with any one here.”
“Let’s be quiet, then: it’s the best way of talking.”
“Yes; but we must save it up till later. There are things I want to say to you now.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Say them, then, and I’ll listen.”
“Oh, no. I want you to tell me about Miss Viner.”
“About Miss Viner?” He summoned up a look of faint interrogation.
He thought she seemed surprised at his surprise. “It’s important, naturally,” she explained, “that I should find out all I can about her before I leave.”
“Important on Effie’s account?”
“On Effie’s account–of course.”
“Of course…But you’ve every reason to be satisfied, haven’t you?”
“Every apparent reason. We all like her. Effie’s very fond of her, and she seems to have a delightful influence on the child. But we know so little, after all–about her antecedents, I mean, and her past history. That’s why I want you to try and recall everything you heard about her when you used to see her in London.”
“Oh, on that score I’m afraid I sha’n’t be of much use. As I told you, she was a mere shadow in the background of the house I saw her in–and that was four or five years ago…”
“When she was with a Mrs. Murrett?”
“Yes; an appalling woman who runs a roaring dinner-factory that used now and then to catch me in its wheels. I escaped from them long ago; but in my time there used to be half a dozen fagged ‘hands’ to tend the machine, and Miss Viner was one of them. I’m glad she’s out of it, poor girl!” “Then you never really saw anything of her there?”
“I never had the chance. Mrs. Murrett discouraged any competition on the part of her subordinates.”
“Especially such pretty ones, I suppose?” Darrow made no comment, and she continued: “And Mrs. Murrett’s own opinion –if she’d offered you one–probably wouldn’t have been of much value?”
“Only in so far as her disapproval would, on general principles, have been a good mark for Miss Viner. But surely,” he went on after a pause, “you could have found out about her from the people through whom you first heard of her?”
Anna smiled. “Oh, we heard of her through Adelaide Painter –;” and in reply to his glance of interrogation she explained that the lady in question was a spinster of South Braintree, Massachusetts, who, having come to Paris some thirty years earlier, to nurse a brother through an illness, had ever since protestingly and provisionally camped there in a state of contemptuous protestation oddly manifested by her never taking the slip-covers off her drawing-room chairs. Her long residence on Gallic soil had not mitigated her hostility toward the creed and customs of the race, but though she always referred to the Catholic Church as the Scarlet Woman and took the darkest views of French private life, Madame de Chantelle placed great reliance on her judgment and experience, and in every domestic crisis the irreducible Adelaide was immediately summoned to Givre.