CHAPTER XV
Miss Prince got up very early on the morning Harry Garlett was to appear before the magistrates, to be either committed for trial, or sent out into the world a free man.
Though glad, in a sense, that her friend Agatha Cheale had been saved by illness from the painful ordeal of appearing against her late employer, she, Miss Prince, felt, from a selfish point of view, sorry. For it had been arranged, at Agatha Cheale’s own request, that the older woman should accompany her to the police court, and Miss Prince had a special reason for wishing to know what exact evidence as to the arsenic, the administration of which had undoubtedly killed Mrs. Garlett, would be tendered to-day.
As things had now fallen out, she would have to possess her soul in patience till the afternoon.
It may be asked why Miss Prince did not follow the example of innumerable women belonging to the neighbourhood, that is, go off to Grendon and, after a more or less long wait, fight her way into the police court? Had she been thirty years younger she might have done so, but being the manner of woman she was, the thought of doing so unladylike and bold a thing never even occurred to her. And yet, during the whole of the wakeful night which preceded her early rising, her mind was entirely occupied with the form the evidence against Harry Garlett was likely to assume.
As is the case with most clever, malicious gossips, no woman could on occasion keep her own counsel more rigidly than could Miss Prince. No doubt this was owing, in a measure, to the fact that for more than half her life she had been the trusted confidante of her father. In no profession is there so high a standard of loyalty to another’s personal secrets as in the medical profession, and what is true of the doctor is generally true also of the doctor’s wife and daughter.
So it was that Miss Prince had kept rigidly to herself a dreadful suspicion which since the arrest of Harry Garlett had hardened into certainty.
Lucy Warren, hearing her mistress stirring, had hurried down to cook the breakfast, and Miss Prince, leaving her cold bedroom, felt a certain warmth about the heart as there floated up her tiny staircase a pleasant aroma of frizzling bacon.
Worried and unhappy as she felt, uncertain, too, as to where her duty lay—a most unusual feeling with her—she yet told herself that she was indeed fortunate in her good, quiet, sensible young servant. Even as a child Lucy Warren had been a favourite of hers, and the girl seemed so superior to her class, so reserved, so proud, that for a moment Miss Prince asked herself whether she would not do well to confide in Lucy, for she longed to share her anxiety and uncertainty with some other human being. But the thought was no sooner there than she dismissed it, aware that if the moment came when she felt she must share her secret, it was to a lawyer that a certain fact, known to her alone, must be admitted.
But one thing she did this morning marked both to herself and to Lucy Warren the unusual nature of the day. She ordered her breakfast, for the first time in her life, to be brought to her upstairs sitting room. Perhaps because it was upstairs, she very seldom used this room, except when she asked a few friends in to supper and a game of cards. From her point of view, though she would not have admitted it, the upstairs sitting room of the Thatched Cottage was a cardroom and nothing else.