Mary looked up and snorted, but made no other response.
“Mrs. Clement tells me that you wish to leave us,” I said.
Mary condescended to reply to this.
“There’s some things,” she said darkly, “as no girl can be asked to put up with.”
“Will you tell me exactly what it is that has upset you?”
“Tell you that in two words, I can.” (Here, I may say, she vastly underestimated.) “People coming snooping round here when my back’s turned. Poking round. And what business of hers is it, how often the study is dusted or turned out? If you and the missus don’t complain, it’s nobody else’s business. If I give satisfaction to you that’s all that matters, I say.”
Mary has never given satisfaction to me. I confess that I have a hankering after a room thoroughly dusted and tidied every morning. Mary’s practice of flicking off the more obvious deposit on the surface of low tables is to my thinking grossly inadequate. However, I realised that at the moment it was no good to go into side issues.
“Had to go to that inquest, didn’t I? Standing up before twelve men, a respectable girl like me! And who knows what questions you may be asked. I’ll tell you this. I’ve never before been in a place where they had a murder in the house, and I never want to be again.”
“I hope you won’t,” I said. “On the law of averages, I should say it was very unlikely.”
“I don’t hold with the law. He was a magistrate. Many a poor fellow sent to jail for potting at a rabbit – and him with his pheasants and what not. And then, before he’s so much as decently buried, that daughter of his comes round and says I don’t do my work properly.”
“Do you mean that Miss Protheroe has been here?”
“Found her here when I come back from the Blue Boar. In the study she was. And ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘I’m looking for my little yellow berry – a little yellow hat. I left it here the other day.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I haven’t seen no hat. It wasn’t here when I done the room on Thursday morning,’ I says. And ‘Oh!’ she says, ‘but I dare say you wouldn’t see it. You don’t spend much time doing a room, do you?’ And with that she draws her finger along the mantelshelf and looks at it. As though I had time on a morning like this to take off all them ornaments and put them back, with the police only unlocking the room the night before. ‘If the vicar and his lady are satisfied that’s all that matters, I think, miss,’ I said. And she laughs and goes out of the window and says, ‘Oh! but are you sure they are?'”
“And there it is! A girl has her feelings! I’m sure I’d work my fingers to the bone for you and the missus. And if she wants a new-fangled dish tried, I’m always ready to try it.”
“I’m sure you are,” I said soothingly.
“But she must have heard something or she wouldn’t have said what she did. And if I don’t give satisfaction I’d rather go. Not that I take any notice of what Miss Protheroe says. She’s not loved up at the Hall, I can tell you. Never a please or a thank you, and everything scattered right and left. I wouldn’t set any store by Miss Lettice Protheroe myself for all that Mr. Dennis is so set upon her. But she’s the kind that can always twist a young gentleman round her little finger.”
During all this, Mary had been extracting eyes from potatoes with such energy that they had been flying round the kitchen like hailstones. At this moment one hit me in the eye and caused a momentary pause in the conversation.
“Don’t you think,” I said, as I dabbed my eye with my handkerchief, “that you have been rather too inclined to take offense where none is meant? You know, Mary, your mistress will be very sorry to lose you.”
“I’ve nothing against the mistress – or against you, sir, for that matter.”