Du Maurier, Daphne (4 page)

“Oh, Joss,” she whispered. “Oh, Joss, please!”

There was so much urgency in her voice that Mary stared at her in surprise. She saw her aunt lean forward and motion her husband to be silent, and the very eagerness of her chin and the agony in her eyes frightened Mary more than anything that had happened that night. She felt eerie suddenly, chilled, and rather sick. What had roused Aunt Patience to such panic? What had Joss Merlyn been about to say? She was aware of a fevered and rather terrible curiosity. Her uncle waved his hand impatiently.

“Get up to bed, Patience,” he said. “I’m tired of your death’s-head at my supper table. This girl and I understand one another.”

The woman rose at once and went to the door, with a last ineffectual glance of despair over her shoulder. They heard her patter up the stairs. Joss Merlyn and Mary were alone. He pushed the empty brandy glass away from him and folded his arms on the table.

“There’s been one weakness in my life, and I’ll tell you what it is,” he said. “It’s drink. It’s a curse, and I know it. I can’t stop myself. One day it’ll be the end of me, and a good job too. There’s days go by and I don’t touch more than a drop, same as I’ve done tonight. And then I’ll feel the thirst come on me and I’ll soak. Soak for hours. It’s power, and glory, and women, and the Kingdom of God, all rolled into one. I feel a king then, Mary. I feel I’ve got the strings of the world between my two fingers. It’s heaven and hell. I talk then, talk until every damned thing I’ve ever done is spilt to the four winds. I shut myself in my room and shout my secrets in my pillow. Your aunt turns the key on me, and when I’m sober I hammer on the door and she lets me out. There’s no one knows that but she and I, and now I’ve told you. I’ve told you because I’m already a little drunk and I can’t hold my tongue. But I’m not drunk enough to lose my head. I’m not drunk enough to tell you why I live in this God-forgotten spot, and why I’m the landlord of Jamaica Inn.” His voice was hoarse, and now he scarcely spoke above a whisper. The turf fire had sunk low in the hearth, and dark shadows stretched long fingers on the wall. The candles too had burnt down, and cast a monstrous shadow of Joss Merlyn on the ceiling. He smiled at her, and with a foolish drunken gesture he laid his finger against his nose.

“I’ve not told you that, Mary Yellan. Oh no, I’ve got some sense and cunning left. If you want to know any more you can ask your aunt. She’ll pull you a tale. I heard her blathering tonight, telling you we kept fine company here, and the squire takes off his hat to her. It’s lies, all lies. I’ll tell you that much, for you’ll come to know it anyway. Squire Bassat’s too mortal scared to shove his nose in here. If he saw me in the road he’d cross his heart and spur his horse. And so would all the precious gentry. The coaches don’t stop here now, nor the mails neither. I don’t worry; I’ve customers enough. The wider berth the gentry give to me the better pleased I am. Oh, there’s drinking here all right, and plenty of it too. There’s some who come to Jamaica Saturday night, and there’s some who turn the key of their door and sleep with their fingers in their ears. There are nights when every cottage on the moors is dark and silent, and the only lights for miles are the blazing windows of Jamaica Inn. They say the shouting and the singing can be heard as far down as the farms below Rough Tor. You’ll be in the bar those nights, if you’ve a fancy for it, and you’ll see what company I keep.”

Mary sat very still, gripping the sides of her chair. She dared not move for fear of that swift changing of his mood which she had observed already, and which would turn him from this sudden intimate tone of confidence to a harsh and coarse brutality.

“They’re all afraid of me,” he went on; “the whole damned lot of ‘em. Afraid of me, who’s afraid of no man. I tell you, if I’d had education, if I’d had learning, I’d have walked the breadth of England beside King George himself. It’s drink that’s been against me, drink and my hot blood. It’s the curse of all of us, Mary. There’s never been a Merlyn yet that died peaceful in his bed.

“My father was hanged at Exeter—he had a brawl with a fellow and killed him. My granddad had his ears cut for thieving; he was sent out to a convict settlement and died raving mad from a snake bite in the tropics. I’m the eldest of three brothers, all of us born under the shadow of Kilmar, away yonder above Twelve Men’s Moor. You walk out over there across the East Moor till you come to Rushyford, and you’ll see a great crag of granite like a devil’s hand sticking up into the sky. That’s Kilmar. If you’d been born under its shadow you’d take to drink, same as I did. My brother Matthew, he was drowned in Trewartha Marsh. We thought he’d gone for a sailor, and had no news of him, and then in the summer there was a drought, and no rain fell for seven months, and there was Matthew sticking up in the bog, with his hands above his head, and the curlews flying round him. My brother Jem, damn him, he was the baby. Hanging onto mother’s skirts when Matt and I were grown men. I never did see eye to eye with Jem. Too smart he is, too sharp with his tongue. Oh, they’ll catch him in time and hang him, same as they did my father.”

He fell silent a moment, gazing at his empty glass. He picked it up and put it down again. “No,” he said, “I’ve said enough. I’ll have no more tonight. Go up to bed, Mary, before I wring your neck. Here’s your candle. You’ll find your room over the porch.”

Mary took the candlestick without speaking and was about to pass him when he seized hold of her shoulder and twisted her round.

“There’ll be nights sometimes when you’ll hear wheels on the road,” he said, “and those wheels will not pass on, but they’ll stop outside Jamaica Inn. And you’ll hear footsteps in the yard, and voices beneath your window. When that happens, you’ll stay in your bed, Mary Yellan, and cover your head with the blankets. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Very well. Now get out, and if you ever ask me a question again I’ll break every bone in your body.”

She went out of the room and into the dark passage, bumping against the settle in the hall, and so upstairs, feeling her way with her hands, judging her whereabouts by turning round and facing the stairs again. Her uncle had told her the room over the porch, and she crept across the dark landing, which was unlit, pass two doors on either side—guest rooms, she imagined, waiting for those travellers who never came nowadays nor sought shelter beneath the roof of Jamaica Inn—and then stumbled against another door and turned the handle, and saw by the flickering flame of her candle that this was her room, for her trunk lay on the floor.

The walls were rough and unpapered, and the floor boards bare. A box turned upside down served as a dressing table, with a cracked looking-glass on top. There was no jug or basin; she supposed she would wash in the kitchen. The bed creaked when she leant upon it, and the two thin blankets felt damp to her hand. She decided she would not undress, but would lie down upon it in her travelling clothes, dusty as they were, with her cloak wrapped round her. She went to the window and looked out. The wind had dropped, but it was still raining—a thin wretched drizzle that trickled down the side of the house and smeared the dirt on the windowpane.

A noise came from the far end of the yard, a curious groaning sound like that of an animal in pain. It was too dark to see clearly, but she could make out a dark shape swinging gently to and fro. For one nightmare of a moment, her imagination on fire with the tales Joss Merlyn had told her, she thought it was a gibbet, and a dead man hanging. And then she realised it was the signboard of the inn, that somehow or other, through neglect, had become insecure upon its nails and now swung backwards, forwards, with the slightest breeze. Nothing but a poor battered board, that had once known prouder days in its first erection, but whose white lettering was now blurred and grey, and whose message was at the mercy of the four winds—Jamaica Inn—Jamaica Inn. Mary pulled down the blind and crept to her bed. Her teeth were chattering, and her feet and hands were numb. For a long while she sat huddled on the bed, a prey to despair. She wondered whether it was possible to break from the house and find her way back the twelve long miles to Bodmin. She wondered whether her weariness would prove too much for her, and if with an agony of fatigue she would drop by the roadside and fall asleep where she lay, only to be awakened by the morning light and to see the great form of Joss Merlyn towering above her.

She closed her eyes, and at once she saw his face smiling at her, and then the smile changing to a frown, and the frown breaking into a thousand creases as he shook with rage, and she saw his great mat of black hair, his hooked nose, and the long powerful fingers that held such deadly grace.

She felt caught here now, like a bird in a net, and however much she struggled she would never escape. If she wished to be free she must go now, climb from her window and run like a mad thing along the white road that stretched like a snake across the moors. Tomorrow it would be too late.

She waited until she heard his footsteps on the stairs. She heard him mutter to himself, and to her relief he turned aside and went along the other passage to the left of the staircase. In the distance a door closed, and there was silence. She decided that she would wait no longer. If she stayed even one night beneath this roof her nerve would go from her, and she would be lost. Lost, and mad, and broken, like Aunt Patience. She opened the door and stole into the passage. She tiptoed to the head of the stairs. She paused and listened. Her hand was on the bannister and her foot on the top stair when she heard a sound from the other passage. It was somebody crying. It was someone whose breath came in little gasps and spasms, and who tried to muffle the sound in a pillow. It was Aunt Patience. Mary waited a moment, and then she turned back and went to her own room again and threw herself on her bed and closed her eyes. Whatever she would have to face in the future, and however frightened she would be, she would not leave Jamaica Inn now. She must stay with Aunt Patience. She was needed here. It might be that Aunt Patience would take comfort from her, and they would come to an understanding, and, in some way which she was now too tired to plan, Mary would act as a protector to Aunt Patience, and stand between her and Joss Merlyn. For seventeen years her mother had lived and worked alone and known greater hardships than Mary would ever know. She would not have run away because of a half-crazy man. She would not have feared a house that reeked of evil, however lonely it stood on its wind-blown hill, a solitary landmark defying man and storm. Mary’s mother would have the courage to fight her enemies. Yes, and conquer them in the end. There would be no giving way for her.

And so Mary lay upon her hard bed, her mind teeming while she prayed for sleep, every sound a fresh stab to her nerves, from the scratching of a house in the wall behind her to the creaking of the sign in the yard. She counted the minutes and the hours of an eternal night, and when the first cock crew in a field behind the house she counted no more, but sighed, and slept like a dead thing.

Mary woke to a high wind from the west, and a thin watery sun. It was the rattling of the window that roused her from her sleep, and she judged from the broad daylight and the colour of the sky that she had slept late and that it must be past eight o’clock. Looking out at the window and across the yard, she saw that the stable door was open, and there were fresh hoofmarks in the mud outside. With a great sense of relief she realised that the landlord must have gone from home, and she would have Aunt Patience to herself, if only for a little time.

Hurriedly she unpacked her trunk, pulling out her thick skirt and coloured apron and the heavy shoes she had worn at the farm, and in ten minutes she was down in the kitchen and washing in the scullery at the back.

Aunt Patience came in from the chicken run behind the house with some new-laid eggs in her apron, which she produced with a little smile of mystery. “I thought you’d like one for your breakfast,” she said. “I saw you were too tired to eat much last night. And I’ve saved you a spot of cream for your bread.” Her manner was normal enough this morning, and in spite of the red rims round her eyes, which bespoke an anxious night, she was obviously making an effort to be cheerful. Mary decided it was only in the presence of her husband that she went to pieces like a frightened child, and when he was away she had that same child’s aptitude for forgetting, and could seize pleasure from little situations such as this of making breakfast for Mary and boiling her an egg.

They both avoided any reference to the night before, and Joss’s name was not mentioned. Where he had gone, and on what business, Mary neither asked nor cared; she was only too relieved to be rid of him.

Mary could see that her aunt was eager to speak of things unconnected with her present life; she seemed afraid of any questions, so Mary spared her and plunged into a description of the last years at Helford, the strain of the bad times, and her mother’s illness and death.

Whether Aunt Patience took it in or not she could not tell; certainly she nodded from time to time, and pursed her lips, and shook her head, and uttered little ejaculations; but it seemed to Mary that years of fear and anxiety had taken away her powers of concentration, and that some underlying terror prevented her from giving her whole interest to any conversation.

During the morning there was the usual work of the house, and Mary was thus able to explore the inn more thoroughly.

It was a dark, rambling place, with long passages and unexpected rooms. There was a separate entrance to the bar, at the side of the house, and, though the room was empty now, there was something heavy in the atmosphere reminiscent of the last time it was full: a lingering taste of old tobacco, the sour smell of drink, and an impression of warm, unclean humanity packed one against the other on the dark-stained benches.

For all the unpleasant suggestion that it conjured, it was the one room in the inn that had vitality, and was not morne and drear. The other rooms appeared neglected or unused; even the parlour by the entrance porch had a solitary air, as though it were many months since an honest traveller had stepped upon the threshold and warmed his back before a glowing fire. The guest rooms upstairs were in an even worse state of repair. One was used for lumber, with boxes piled against the wall, and old horse blankets chewed and torn by families of rats or mice. In the room opposite, potatoes and turnips had been stored upon a broken-down bed.