“I see.” Miss Fryer continued to play with her watch-chain. “And Portis — do you care for him?”
“He’s a good man,” sobbed Agatha.
“Be quiet. You’ll be heard outside the door. Now listen, Agatha. I don’t pretend to be concerned much with you. I’ve met so many girls like you. Natural sluts! But John Portis is a good servant, f value him very highly. I intend to promote him. I’ve been kind to you because of him.”
“I know, that is why I came to you — because of what you think of John, ma’am.”
Miss Fryer’s hand paused on her chain; she thought that she detected a fleeting look of cunning on the pretty, distorted face.
“I see. Well, I could help you quite easily, Agatha. The money is no more than I intended to give you as a wedding present. And I could think of quite a good excuse to take you away, or to send you away. No one would suspect me of anything like that. You would be quite safe.”
“Oh, Miss! I couldn’t ever thank you — it ’ud be life to me!”
“Don’t thank me yet. I don’t know if I shall do it. I don’t know if it would be right. John Portis is far more important than you are, and I don’t know if it would be fair to him. I must think it out.”
Agatha again began to weep and implore. Miss Fryer checked her by rising. And instinctively the servant also rose.
“Don’t bother me any more. I quite realize the necessity for a quick decision. And it doesn’t take me long to make up my mind.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t be cruel, Miss! You are so charitable!”
“No, I don’t think so. I’ll tell you this evening exactly what I shall do. Now, control yourself — go upstairs and lie down. I shall tell everyone you have a little chill.”
“It’s my half-day, ma’am. Granny ’ud think it queer if I didn’t turn up.”
“Very well. But rest till then.”
Agatha, rubbing her face with a large, coarse white handkerchief, turned to leave; Miss Fryer stopped her at the door.
“Portis — doesn’t suspect?”
The girl’s tears gushed anew.
“Oh, God! I hope not! But he seemed queer like, yesterday—”
“Well, leave it to me. And stop crying, you poor little fool.”
The heavy door closed on Agatha. Miss Fryer was alone with the greatest problem of her life. It was this: Would the happiness of John Portis be best served by allowing him to marry the woman whom he so passionately loved, or by revealing to him the trash that she was? The happiness of John Portis was Mary Fryer’s sole concern in this business; for the girl she cared not one jot.
But he — he was the man whom she would have loved, if he had been a gentleman and if he had been her own age. She had known that when he had first come from Ross five years ago and she had employed him on her estate. Recognized the fact with irony, without regret, even with pleasure in the realization that the world did contain one such man as she had dreamed of in her youth.
But — the son of a small farmer and twenty years her junior. She had not betrayed herself by a flick of an eyelid, not sacrificed her justice, her serenity, her dignity by an iota. The man had not been unduly favored nor rewarded — she was generous with all her servants. She had been glad of his happiness with Agatha; that she regarded tenderly, like a mother watching a child absorbed in the delight of a cheap, silly toy that to him is beautiful and necessary. Nor did her secret passion trouble her content. She often faced it squarely with good humor and irony; she would not name it love — Mary Fryer could not love a man in her employ — but she admitted: “If it had been different I should have loved him.” And looking at her beds of nigella she would think that their country name suited her emotion. Love-in-a-mist! Not clear, warm, radiant, but shining through other emotions that beautified and dimmed. A mist, like that which sets aside the world from the sun and from reality.
But there were no gracious veils about her passion now as she turned over Agatha’s confession in her alert mind. She was astonished at the heat and fury of her protective love for the man, her bitter scorn of the girl. She had felt no jealousy when he had chosen the soft, fondling fool, but now she regarded with hatred the false, cowardly, selfish, stupid slut who had contrived to entangle John Portis.
“A man like that!”
Her pale glance crept to the stiff painted faces of her ancestors in the portraits on the walls, as if she asked advice from their embattled presences. A Fryer ought to know what to do. But for the first time in her life she felt at a loss.
Would he rather be deceived or enlightened?
She knew well enough, from instinct and close, furtive observation, how he doted on the wretched creature. Should she, as she so easily could, help the girl to appear what he thought her? Leave him to find out gradually, when his own passion was spent, what bad fruit he had plucked? Or perhaps never find out at all. Agatha might be frightened into future honesty or she might be cunning enough to deceive him forever.
Or should she, Mary Fryer, tell him the truth, watch him through his rage and grief, and then richly compensate his disappointment?
She did not allow it to interfere with her habits; the sunny day proceeded as usual, leisurely, well-ordered; she had her good meal and drank two glasses of port instead of one, she wrote her letters and paid her visits in the village.
And at the back of her mind the question — “What shall I do?” — lay perpetually coiled.
As she returned from the village about four o’clock, she saw Agatha in a black-and-white plaid shawl and black straw bonnet leaving the Manor garden by the servants’ entrance and walking, heavily, towards Croom Wood.
“She looks quite calm,” thought Miss Fryer. “I suppose she is trusting my womanly pity. How little she guesses!”
But then Mary Fryer remembered that fleeting look of understanding across the girl’s face, as if she had guessed. “But it is impossible. She is a fool. And I haven’t given myself away. I never told her about those high heels, after all. I ought to. It is doubly dangerous in her condition. I suppose, if I tell him, she will drown herself — or something of that kind. That wouldn’t matter at all.”
Miss Fryer went into her parlor and sat down without taking off brown silk shawl and the close little hat with the russet ostrich tip and veil that fitted so neatly to her close, smooth chignon. She was always very careful of appearances; even this afternoon, in her great absorption, she had selected a pair of fresh kid gloves; she like to see them on her small hands. She felt very restless and full of energy, ready to undertake any prodigious action for the sake of John Portis. She was much excited to realize how strong her passion was, how bold, resolute and daring it made her — but, what to do?
Certainly she could not stay in the house; she would go for another walk, away from the village, away from everyone.
She took up her reticule and her parasol and went out from the afternoon hush of the house into the sunny loveliness of the park.
Mary Fryer turned where there were no horizons — into the woods. She was veering towards her decision — not to tell. Her painful and passionate concentration on the case had evolved this judgment: that he would prefer any future disaster to that of being cheated of his present felicity.
Miss Fryer walked quickly, absorbed in plans for helping Agatha, for preserving intact John Portis’s illusion of happiness; her mind worked busily over all the details and she did not notice where she was going until a sound of water disturbed her and she realized that she was in Croom Wood.
She was pleased that she had, as it were, come naturally into this solitude where she was not likely to be disturbed. A space of harsh bracken, deep tresses of broken weeds, and long brambles with withered leaves and green berries spread between spare, high pines that quite shut out the upper air; there was rising ground on either hand and the sound of water falling on stones. She could just see the bridge as she ascended the hilly path.