Du Maurier, Daphne (28 page)

His eyes strayed to the gun against the wall and half-consciously back to the shutter, which still gaped open before the kitchen window.

“Fasten that window, Patience,” he said thoughtfully, “and put the bar across the shutter. When you have finished your supper, you too can go to bed. I shall not leave the kitchen tonight.”

His wife looked up at him in fear, struck by the tone of his voice, and would have spoken, but he cut her short. “Haven’t you learnt by now not to question me?” he shouted. She rose at once and went to the window. Mary, her candle alight, waited by the door. “All right,” he said. “Why are you standing there? I told you to go.” Mary went out into the dark passage, her candle throwing her shadow behind her as she walked. No sound came from the store at the end of the passage, and she thought of the pedlar lying there in the darkness, watching and waiting for the day. The thought of him was abhorrent to her; like a rat he was, imprisoned amongst his fellows, and she suddenly pictured him with rat’s claws scratching and gnawing at the framework of the door, scraping his way to freedom in the silence of the night.

She shuddered, strangely thankful that her uncle had decided to make a prisoner of her as well. The house was treacherous tonight, her very footsteps sounding hollow on the flags, and there were echoes that came unbidden from the walls. Even the kitchen, the one room in the house to possess some measure of warmth and normality, gaped back at her as she left it, yellow and sinister in the candlelight. Was her uncle going to sit there, then, the candles extinguished, his gun across his knee, waiting for something?… for someone?… He crossed into the hall as she mounted the stairs, and he followed her along the landing to the bedroom over the porch.

“Give me your key,” he said, and she handed it to him without a word. He lingered for a moment, looking down at her, and then he bent low and laid his fingers on her mouth. “I’ve a soft spot for you, Mary,” he said; “you’ve got spirit still, and pluck, for all the knocks I’ve given you. I’ve seen it in your eyes tonight. If I’d been a younger man I’d have courted you, Mary—aye, and won you, too, and ridden away with you to glory. You know that, don’t you?”

She said nothing. She stared back at him as he stood beyond the door, and her hand that held the candlestick trembled slightly without her knowledge.

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “There’s danger for me ahead,” he said. “Never mind the law; I can bluff my way to freedom if it comes to that. The whole of Cornwall can come running at my heels for all I care. It’s other game I have to watch for—footsteps, Mary, that come in the night and go again, and a hand that would strike me down.”

His face looked lean and old in the half-light, and there was a flicker of meaning in his eyes that leapt like a flame to tell her, and then dulled again. “We’ll put the Tamar between us and Jamaica Inn,” he said; and then he smiled, the curve of his mouth painfully familiar to her and known, like an echo from the past. He shut the door upon her and turned the key.

She heard him tramp down the stairs and so down into the passage, and he turned the corner to the kitchen and was gone.

She went then to her bed and sat down upon it, her hands in her lap; and, for some reason forever unexplained, thrust away from her later and forgotten, side by side with the little old sins of childhood and those dreams never acknowledged to the sturdy day, she put her fingers to her lips as he had done, and let them stray thence to her cheek and back again.

And she began to cry, softly and secretly, the tears tasting bitter as they fell upon her hand.

She had fallen asleep where she lay, without undressing, and her first conscious thought was that the storm had come again, bringing with it the rain which streamed against her window. She opened her eyes and saw that the night was still, without a tremor of wind from without or the patter of rain. Her senses were alert at once, and she waited for a repetition of the sound that had woken her. It came again in an instant—a shower of earth flung against the pane of glass from the yard outside. She swung her legs to the floor and listened, weighing in her mind the possibility of danger.

If this was a warning signal, the method was a crude one, and better ignored. Someone with little idea of the geography of the inn might have mistaken her window for the landlord’s. Her uncle waited below with his gun across his knee in preparation for a visitor; perhaps the visitor had come and was now standing in the yard…. Curiosity gained the better of her in the end, and she crept softly to the window, holding herself in the shadow of the jutting wall. The night was black still, and there were shadows everywhere, but low in the sky a thin line of cloud foretold the dawn.

She had not been mistaken, though; the earth on the floor was real enough, and so was the figure standing directly beneath the porch: the figure of a man. She crouched by the window, waiting for his further movement. He bent again to the ground, fumbling in the barren flower bed outside the parlour window, and then he raised his hand and threw the little clod of earth at her window, spattering the pane with pebbles and soft mud.

This time she saw his face, and the wonder of it made her cry out in surprise, forgetting the caution to which she had trained herself.

It was Jem Merlyn standing below her in the yard. She leant forward at once, opening her window, and would have called to him, but he lifted his hand for silence. He came close against the wall, skirting the porch which would have hidden her from him, and he cupped his Lands to his mouth and whispered up to her, “Come down to the door here, and unbolt it for me.”

She shook her head at him. “I cannot do that. I am locked here in my room,” she told him. He stared at her, nonplussed and evidently puzzled, and he looked back at the house as though it might offer some solution of its own. He ran his hands along the slates, testing them, feeling for rusted nails used long ago for creepers, that might afford him foothold of a sort. The low tiles of the porch were within his reach, but they had no gripping surface; he would swing his legs from the ground to no purpose.

“Fetch me the blanket from your bed,” he called softly.

She guessed at once his meaning and tied one end of her blanket to the foot of her bed, throwing the other end out of the window, where it dragged limply above his head. This time he had holding power, and, swinging himself to the low roof of the jutting porch, he was able to wedge his body between it and the walls of the house, his feet gripping the slates, and in this manner haul himself up the porch on a level with her window.

He swung his legs over, and straddled the porch, his face close to hers now, the blanket hanging loosely beside him. Mary struggled with the framework of the window, but her efforts were useless. The window opened only a foot or so; he could not enter the room without smashing the glass.

“I shall have to talk to you here,” he said. “Come closer, where I can see you.” She knelt on the floor of her room, her face at the window gap, and they stared at one another for a moment without speaking. He looked worn, and his eyes were hollow, like the eyes of one who has not slept and has endured fatigue. There were lines about his mouth she had not noticed before, nor did he smile.

“I owe you an apology,” he said at length. “I deserted you without excuse at Launceston on Christmas Eve. You can forgive me or not, as you feel; but the reason for it—that I can’t give you. I’m sorry.”

This attitude of harshness did not suit him; he appeared to have changed much, and the change was unwelcome to her.

“I was anxious for your safety,” she said. “I traced you to the White Hart, and there I was told you had entered a carriage with some gentleman; nothing beyond that, no message, no word of explanation. Those men were there, standing before the fire, the horse dealer who spoke with you in the market square. They were horrible men, curious, and I mistrusted them. I wondered if the theft of the pony had been discovered. I was wretched and worried. I blame you for nothing. Your business is your own.”

She was hurt by his manner. She had expected anything but this. When she saw him first, in the yard outside her window, she thought of him only as the man she loved, who had come now to her in the night, seeking her presence. His coolness damped her flame, and she withdrew inside herself at once, trusting that he had not seen the blank disappointment in her face.

He did not even ask how she returned that night, and his indifference stunned her. “Why are you locked in your room?” he questioned.

She shrugged her shoulders, and her voice was flat and dull when she replied:

“My uncle does not care for eavesdroppers. He fears I should wander in the passage and stumble upon his secrets. You appear to have the same dislike of intrusion. To ask you why you are here tonight would be an offence, I suppose?”

“Oh, be as bitter as you like; I deserve it,” he flashed suddenly. “I know what you think of me. One day I may be able to explain, if you’re not out of my reach by then. Be a man for the moment, and send your hurt pride and your curiosity to hell. I’m treading delicate ground, Mary, and one false step will finish me. Where is my brother?”

“He told us he would spend the night in the kitchen. He is afraid of something or someone; the windows and doors are barred, and he has his gun.”

Jem laughed harshly. “I don’t doubt he’s afraid. He’ll be more frightened still before many hours are passed, I can tell you that. I came here to see him, but if he sits there with a gun across his knee I can postpone my visit until tomorrow, when the shadows are gone.”

“Tomorrow may be too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“He intends to leave Jamaica Inn at nightfall.”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

“Why should I lie to you now?”

Jem was silent. The news had evidently come as a surprise to him, and he was turning it over in his mind. Mary watched him, tortured by doubt and indecision; she was thrown back now upon her old suspicion of him. He was the visitor expected by her uncle, and therefore hated by him and feared. He was the man who held the threads of her uncle’s life between his hands. The sneering face of the pedlar returned to her again, and his words, that so provoked the landlord to a flame of fury: “Listen here, Joss Merlyn: do you take your orders from one above you?” The man whose wits made service of the landlord’s strength, the man who had hidden in the empty room.

She thought again of the laughing, carefree Jem who had driven her to Launceston, who had swung hands with her in the market square, who had kissed her and held her. Now he was grave and silent, his face in shadow. The idea of dual personality troubled her, and frightened her as well. He was like a stranger to her tonight, obsessed by some grim purpose she could not understand. Warning him of the landlord’s intended flight had been a false move on her part; it might confound the issue of her plans. Whatever Jem had done or intended to do, whether he was false and treacherous and a murderer of men, she loved him, in the weakness of her flesh, and owed him warning.

“You’d best have a care for yourself when you see your brother,” she said. “His mood is dangerous; whoever interferes with his plans now risks his life. I tell you this for your own safety.”

“I have no fear of Joss, nor ever had.”

“Perhaps not; but what if he is afraid of you?”

To this he said nothing, but, leaning forward suddenly, he looked into her face and touched the scratch that ran from her forehead to her chin.

“Who did this?” he said sharply, turning from the scratch to the bruise on her cheek. She hesitated a moment and then answered him:

“I got them Christmas Eve.”

The gleam in his eye told her at once that he understood, and had knowledge of the evening, and because of it was here now at Jamaica Inn.

“You were there with them, on the shore?” he whispered.

She nodded, watching him carefully, wary of speech, and for answer he cursed aloud, and, reaching forward, smashed the pane of glass with his fist, careless of the splitting sound of glass and the blood that spouted immediately from his hand. The gap in the window was wide enough now for entrance, and he had climbed into the room and was beside her before she realised what he had done. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed, and laid her down upon it; and, fumbling in the darkness for a candle, he found it at length and lit it, and came back to the bed and knelt beside it, throwing the light upon her face. He traced the bruises with his finger down her neck, and when she winced with the pain he drew in his breath quickly, and again she heard him swear. “I might have spared you this,” he said; and then, blowing out the light, he sat down beside her on the bed and reached for her hand, which he held a moment, tight, and then gave back to her.

“God Almighty, why did you go with them?” he said.

“They were crazy with drink. I don’t think they knew what they were doing. I could no more have stood against them than a child. There were a dozen of them or more, and my uncle… he led them. He and the pedlar. If you know about it, why do you ask me? Don’t make me remember. I don’t want to remember.”

“How much have they hurt you?”

“Bruises, scratches—you can see for yourself. I tried to escape, and I grazed my side. They caught me again, of course. They bound my hands and feet down on the shore, and tied sacking over my mouth so that I could not scream. I saw the ship come through the mist, and I could do nothing—alone there in the wind and the rain. I had to watch them die.”

She broke off, her voice trembling, and she turned on her side, her face in her hands. He made no move towards her; he sat there silently on the bed beside her, and she felt him far from her, wrapped in secrecy.

She was lonelier then than before.

“Was it my brother who hurt you most?” he said presently.

She sighed wearily. It was all too late and did not matter now.

“I’ve told you he was drunk,” she said. “You know, better than I perhaps, what he can do then.”

“Yes, I know.” He paused a moment, and then once again he took her hand.