Du Maurier, Daphne (9 page)

There was nothing to prove it, however, and, considered in the light of day, the very story seemed fantastic. She had returned to her room that night after the discovery of the rope, for the open door of the bar suggested that her uncle would be back at any moment, and, exhausted with all she had seen, she must have fallen asleep, for when she woke the sun was high, and she could hear Aunt Patience pattering about in the hall below.

No sign remained of the evening’s work; the bar had been swept and tidied, the furniture replaced and the broken glass taken away, and there was no rope hanging from the beam. The landlord himself spent the morning in the stable and the cowhouse, pitchforking filth into the yard and doing the work that a cowman should have done had he kept one; and when he came into the kitchen at midday, to wolf an enormous meal, he questioned Mary about the farm stock at Helford, and asked for her opinion on a calf that had fallen sick, nor did he make any reference to the events of the preceeding night. He seemed in fair good humour and went so far as to forget to curse his wife, who hovered around him as usual, watching the expression in his eye like a dog who would please his master. Joss Merlyn behaved like a perfectly sober normal man, and it was impossible to believe that he had murdered a fellow being only a few hours before.

He might be guiltless of this, of course, and the blame rest upon his unknown companion, but at least Mary had seen him with her own eyes chase the naked idiot boy across the yard, and she had heard the boy scream as he felt the lash of the landlord’s whip. She had seen him ringleader of that vile company in the bar; she had heard him threaten the stranger who opposed his will; and here he sat before her now, his mouth full of hot stew, shaking his head over a sick calf.

And she answered “Yes” and “No” in reply to her uncle, and drank down her tea, watching him over the brim of her cup, her eyes travelling from his great plate of steaming stew to his long powerful fingers, hideous in their strength and grace.

Two weeks went by and there was no repetition of Saturday night. Perhaps the last haul had satisfied the landlord and his companions, and they were content with that for the while, for Mary did not hear the waggons again, and, though she was sleeping soundly now, she was certain that the noise of wheels would have woken her. Her uncle appeared to have no objection to her wandering on the moors, and day by day she came to know more of the surrounding country, stumbling upon tracks she had not noticed at first and which kept her to the high ground, leading ultimately to the tors, while she learnt to avoid the low soggy grass with tufted tops that by their very harmless appearance invited inspection, only to reveal themselves as the border line of treacherous and dangerous marsh.

Though lonely, she was not actively unhappy, and these rambles in the grey light of early afternoon kept her healthy at least and went some way towards tempering the gloom and depression of the long dark evenings at Jamaica, when Aunt Patience sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the turf fire, and Joss Merlyn shut himself up alone in the bar or disappeared on the back of his pony to some unknown destination. Companionship there was none, and no one came to the inn for rest or nourishment. The driver of the coach had spoken the truth when he told Mary they never stopped now at Jamaica, for she would stand out in the yard to watch the coaches pass twice in the week, and they were gone by in a moment, rumbling down the hill and climbing the further one towards Five Lanes without drawing rein or pausing for breath. Once Mary waved her hand as she recognised her driver, but he took no notice of her, only whipping his horses the harder, and she realised with a rather helpless sense of futility that so far as other people were concerned she must be considered in the same light as her uncle, and that even if she tried to walk to Bodmin or Launceston no one would receive her, and the doors would be shut in her face.

The future loomed very black at times, especially as Aunt Patience made little effort to be companionable; and though now and again she took hold of Mary’s hand and patted it for a few minutes, telling her how glad she was to have her in the house, for the most part the poor woman existed in a dream, pottering about her household duties in a mechanical fashion and seldom uttering. When she did speak, it was to let forth a torrent of nonsense about the great man her husband might have been had not ill luck constantly followed him. Any normal conversation was practically impossible, and Mary came to humour her and talk gently as she would have done to a child, all of which was a strain on her nerves and on her patience.

So that it was in a mood of truculence, following upon a day of wind and rain that had made it impracticable to venture out of doors, that Mary one morning set herself to clean down the long stone passage that ran the full width of the back of the house. The hard work, if it strengthened her muscles, did not improve her temper, and by the time she had finished she was so disgusted with Jamaica Inn and its inhabitants that for very little she would have walked out into the patch of garden behind the kitchen, where her uncle was working, heedless of the rain upon his mat of hair, and thrown her bucket of dirty soapy water into his very face. The sight of her aunt, who with bent back poked at the dull peat fire with the end of a stick, defeated her, and Mary was about to start on the stone flags of the entrance hall when she heard a clatter of hoofs in the yard, and in a moment someone thundered on the closed door of the bar.

No one had approached Jamaica Inn before, and this summons was an event in itself. Mary went back to the kitchen to warn her aunt, but she had left the room, and, looking out of the window, Mary could see her pattering across the garden to her husband, who was loading turf from the stack into a barrow. They were both out of earshot, and neither could have heard the sound of this new arrival. Mary wiped her hands on her apron and went into the bar. The door must have been unlocked after all, for to her surprise there was a man sitting straddle-legged across a chair, with a glass in his hand filled to the brim with ale, which he had calmly poured out from the tap himself. For a few minutes they considered one another in silence.

Something about him was familiar, and Mary wondered where she had seen him before. The rather drooping lids, the curve of his mouth, and the outline of his jaw, even the bold and decidedly insolent stare with which he favoured her, were things known to her and definitely disliked.

The sight of him looking her up and down and drinking his ale at the same time irritated her beyond measure.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said sharply. “You haven’t any right to walk in here and help yourself. Besides, the landlord doesn’t encourage strangers.” At any other moment she would have laughed to hear herself speak thus, as though in defence of her uncle, but scrubbing the stone flags had done away with her sense of humour, if only for the moment, and she felt she must vent her ill temper on the nearest victim.

The man finished his ale and held out the glass to be refilled.

“Since when have they kept a barmaid at Jamaica Inn?” he asked her, and, feeling in his pocket for a pipe, he lit it, puffing a great cloud of smoke into her face. His manner infuriated Mary, and she leant forward and pulled the pipe out of his hand, throwing it behind her onto the floor, where it smashed at once. He shrugged his shoulders and began to whistle, the very tunelessness adding fuel to her flame of irritation.

“Is this how they train you to serve customers?” he said, breaking off in the middle. “I don’t think much of their choice. There are better-mannered maids in Launceston, where I was yesterday, and pretty as paint into the bargain. What have you been doing with yourself? Your hair is coming down at the back, and your face is none too clean.”

Mary turned away and walked towards the door, but he called her back.

“Fill up my glass. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve ridden twelve miles since breakfast, and I’m thirsty.”

“You may have ridden fifty miles for all I care,” said Mary. “As you seem to know your way about here, you can fill your own glass. I’ll tell Mr. Merlyn you are in the bar, and he can serve you himself if he has the mind.”

“Oh, don’t worry Joss; he’ll be like a bear with a sore head at this time of day,” came the answer. “Besides, he’s never very anxious to see me. What’s happened to his wife? Has he turned her out to make room for you? I call that hard on the poor woman. You’ll never stay with him ten years, anyway.”

“Mrs. Merlyn is in the garden, if you want to see her,” said Mary. “You can walk out of the door and turn to the left, and you’ll come to the patch of garden and the chicken run. They were both of them down under, five minutes ago. You can’t come through this way because I’ve just washed the passage, and I don’t want to do it all over again.”

“Oh, don’t get excited; there’s plenty of time,” he replied. She could see he was still looking her up and down, wondering what to make of her, and the familiar, somewhat lazy insolence in his eyes maddened her.

“Do you want to speak to the landlord or not?” she asked at length. “Because I can’t stand here all day awaiting your pleasure. If you don’t want to see him, and you’ve finished your drink, you can put down your money on the counter and go away.”

The man laughed, and his smile and the flash of his teeth struck a chord in her memory, but still she could not name the resemblance.

“Do you order Joss about in that way?” he said. “He must be a changed man if you do. What a creature of contradictions the fellow is, after all. I never thought he’d run a young woman alongside his other activities. What do you do with poor Patience of an evening? Do you turn her out on the floor, or do you sleep all three abreast?”

Mary flushed scarlet. “Joss Merlyn is my uncle by marriage,” she said. “Aunt Patience was my mother’s only sister. My name is Mary Yellan, if that means anything to you. Good morning. There’s the door behind you.”

She left the bar and walked into the kitchen, straight into the arms of the landlord himself. “Who in hell’s name were you talking to in the bar?” he thundered. “I thought I’d warned you to keep your mouth shut?”

The loudness of his voice echoed in the passage. “All right,” called the man from the bar, “don’t beat her. She’s broken my pipe and refused to serve me; that sounds like your training, doesn’t it? Come in and let’s have a look at you. I’m hoping this maid has done you some good.”

Joss Merlyn frowned, and, pushing Mary aside, he stepped into the bar.

“Oh, it’s you, Jem, is it?” he said. “What do you want at Jamaica today? I can’t buy a horse from you, if that’s what you’re after. Things are going badly, and I’m as poor as a field mouse after a wet harvest.” He closed the door, leaving Mary in the passage outside.

She went back to her bucket of water in the front hall, wiping the dirty mark from her face with her apron. So that was Jem Merlyn, her uncle’s younger brother. Of course, she had seen the resemblance all the time, and, like a fool, had not been able to place it. He had reminded her of her uncle throughout the conversation, and she had not realised it. He had Joss Merlyn’s eyes, without the blood-flecked lines and without the pouches, and he had Joss Merlyn’s mouth, firm, though, where the landlord’s was weak, and narrow where his lower lip sagged. He was what Joss Merlyn might have been eighteen, twenty years ago—but smaller in build and height, neater in person.

Mary splashed the water onto the stone flags and began to scrub furiously, her lips pressed tight together.

What a vile breed they were, then, these Merlyns, with their studied insolence and coarseness, their rough brutality of manner. This Jem had the same streak of cruelty as his brother; she could see it in the shape of his mouth. Aunt Patience had said he was the worst of the family. Although he was a head and shoulders smaller than Joss, and half the breadth, there was a certain strength about him that the elder brother did not possess. He looked hard and keen. The landlord sagged round the chin, and his shoulders weighed on him like a burden. It was as though his power had been wasted in some way and had run to seed. Drink did that to a man, Mary knew, and for the first time she was able to guess something of the wreck Joss Merlyn had become, in comparison to his former self. It was seeing his brother that had shown her. The landlord had betrayed himself. If the younger one had any sense in his head he would pull himself together before he travelled the same road. Perhaps he did not care, though; there must be a fatality about the Merlyn family that did away with striving forward, and making good in life, and resolution. Their record was too black. “There’s no going against bad blood,” her mother used to say, “it always comes out in the end. You may fight it as much as you like, but it will have the better of you. If two generations live clean, that may clear the stream sometimes, but likely as not the third will break out and start it going again.” What a waste it all was, what a waste and a pity! And here was poor Aunt Patience dragged in the current with the Merlyns, all her youth and gaiety gone before her, leaving her—if the truth were faced—very little superior to the idiot boy at Dozmary. And Aunt Patience might have been a farmer’s wife at Gweek, with sons of her own, and a house and land, and all the little happy trivialities of a normal happy life: gossip with the neighbours, and church on Sundays, and driving into market once a week; fruit picking, and harvest-time. Things she would have loved, things that had foundation. She would have known placidity, and they would be tranquil years that turned her hair in time to grey—years of solid work and calm enjoyment. All this promise she had thrown away, to live like a slattern with a brute and a drunkard. Why were women such fools, so shortsighted and unwise? wondered Mary; and she scrubbed the last stone flag of the hall with venom, as though by her very action she might cleanse the world and blot out the indiscretions of her kind.

She had worked up her energy to a frenzy, and, turning from the hall, proceeded to sweep the gloomy, dim parlour that had not seen a broom for years. A cloud of dust met her face, and she beat savagely at the wretched threadbare mat. She was so absorbed in her disagreeable occupation that she did not hear the stone flung at the window of the parlour, and it was not until a shower of pebbles made a crack in the glass that her concentration was disturbed, and, looking out of the window, she saw Jem Merlyn standing in the yard beside his pony.