Du Maurier, Daphne (17 page)

On the landing above, a door closed softly. Mary felt the lethargy of sleep steal upon her, and her head sank lower into her hands. The slow ticking of the clock made a pattern in her mind, like footsteps dragging on a highroad… one… two… one… two… they followed one another; she was on the moors beside the running brook, and the burden that she carried was heavy, too heavy to bear. If she could lay it aside for a little while, and rest herself beside the bank, and sleep…

It was cold, though, much too cold. Her foot was wringing wet from the water. She must pull herself higher up the bank, out of the way…. The fire was out; there was no more fire…. Mary opened her eyes and saw that she was lying on the floor beside the white ashes of the fire. The kitchen was very cold, and the light was dim. The candle had burnt low. She yawned and shivered and stretched her stiff arms. When she lifted her eyes she saw the door of the kitchen open very slowly, little by little, an inch at a time.

Mary sat without moving, her hands on the cold floor. She waited, and nothing happened. The door moved again, and then was flung wide, crashing against the wall behind it. Joss Merlyn stood on the threshold of the room, his arms outstretched, rocking on his two feet.

At first she thought he had not noticed her; his eyes were fixed on the wall in front of him, and he stood still where he was, without venturing further into the room. She crouched low, her head beneath the level of the table, hearing nothing but the steady thump of her heart. Slowly he turned in her direction and stared at her a moment or two without speaking. When his voice came, it was strained and hoarse, hardly above a whisper. “Who’s there?” he said. “What are you doing? Why don’t you speak?” His face was a grey mask, drained of its usual colour. His bloodshot eyes fastened themselves upon her without recognition. Mary did not move.

“Put away that knife,” he whispered. “Put it away, I tell you.”

She stretched her hand along the floor and touched the leg of a chair with the tips of her fingers. She could not hold onto it unless she moved. It was just out of reach. She waited, holding her breath. He stepped forward into the room, his head bent, his two hands feeling the air, and he crept slowly along the floor towards her.

Mary watched his hands until they were within a yard of her and she could feel his breath on her cheek.

“Uncle Joss,” she said softly. “Uncle Joss—”

He crouched where he was, staring down at her, and then he leant forward and touched her hair and her lips. “Mary,” he said, “is it you, Mary? Why don’t you speak to me? Where have they gone? Have you seen them?”

“You’ve made a mistake, Uncle Joss,” she said; “there is no one here, only myself. Aunt Patience is upstairs. Are you ill? Can I help you?”

He looked about him in the half-light, searching the corners of the room.

“They can’t scare me,” he whispered. “Dead men don’t harm the living. They’re blotted out, like a candle…. That’s it, isn’t it, Mary?”

She nodded, watching his eyes. He pulled himself to a chair and sat down, his hands outstretched on the table. He sighed heavily and passed his tongue over his lips. “It’s dreams,” he said, “all dreams. The faces stand out like live things in the darkness, and I wake with the sweat pouring down my back. I’m thirsty, Mary; here’s the key; go into the bar and fetch me some brandy.” He fumbled in his pocket and produced a bunch of keys. She took them from him, her hand trembling, and slipped out of the room into the passage. She hesitated for a moment outside, wondering whether she should creep upstairs at once to her room, and lock the door, and leave him to rave alone in the kitchen. She began to tiptoe along the passages to the hall.

Suddenly he shouted to her from the kitchen. “Where are you going? I told you to fetch the brandy from the bar.” She heard the chair scrape as he pushed it away from the table. She was too late. She opened the door of the bar and felt in the cupboard amongst the bottles. When she returned to the kitchen he was sprawling at the table, his head in his hands. At first she thought he was asleep again, but at the sound of her footstep he lifted his head, and stretched his arms, and leant back in the chair. She put the bottle and a glass on the table in front of him. He filled the glass half full, and held it between his two hands, watching her all the while over the rim of it.

“You’re a good girl,” he said. “I’m fond of you, Mary; you’ve got sense, and you’ve got pluck; you’d make a good companion to a man. They ought to have made you a boy.” He rolled the brandy around on his tongue, smiling foolishly, and then he winked at her, and pointed his finger.

“They pay gold for this upcountry,” he said; “the best that money can buy. King George himself hasn’t better brandy than this in his cellar. And what do I pay? Not one damned bloody sixpence. We drink free at Jamaica Inn.”

He laughed and put out his tongue. “It’s a hard game, Mary, but it’s a man’s game, for all that. I’ve risked my neck ten, twenty times. I’ve had the fellows thundering at my heels, with a pistol shot whistling through my hair. They can’t catch me, Mary; I’m too cunning; I’ve been at the game too long. Before we came here I was at Padstow, working from the shore. We ran a lugger once a fortnight with the spring tides. There were five of us in it, besides myself. But there’s no money working in a small way; you’ve got to do it big, and you’ve got to take your orders. There’s over a hundred of us now, working inland to the border from the coast. By God, I’ve seen blood in my time, Mary, and I’ve seen men killed a score of times, but this game beats all of it—it’s running side by side with death.”

He beckoned her to his side, winking again, glancing first over his shoulder to the door. “Here,” he whispered, “come close, down here by my side, where I can talk to you. You’ve got guts in you, I can see that; you’re not scared like your aunt. We ought to be partners, you and I.” He seized hold of Mary’s arm and pulled her on the floor beside his chair. “It’s this cursed drink that makes a fool of me,” he said. “I’m as weak as a rat when it has hold of me, you can see that. And I have dreams, nightmares; I see things that never scare me when I’m sober. Damn it, Mary, I’ve killed men with my own hands, trampled them under water, beaten them with rocks and stones; and I’ve never thought no more about it; I’ve slept in my bed like a child. But when I’m drunk I see them in my dreams; I see their white-green faces staring at me, with their eyes eaten by fish; and some of them are torn, with the flesh hanging on their bones in ribbons, and some of them have seaweed in their hair…. There was a woman once, Mary; she was clinging to a raft, and she had a child in her arms; her hair was streaming down her back. The ship was close in on the rocks, you see, and the sea was as flat as your hand; they were all coming in alive, the whole bunch of ‘em. Why, the water in places didn’t come above your waist. She cried out to me to help her, Mary, and I smashed her face in with a stone; she fell back, her hands beating the raft. She let go of the child, and I hit her again; I watched them drown in four feet of water. We were scared then; we were afraid some of them would reach the shore…. For the first time we hadn’t reckoned on the tide. In half an hour they’d be walking dryshod on the sand. We had to pelt at ‘em all with stones, Mary; we had to break their arms and legs; and they drowned there in front of us, like the woman and her child, with the water not up to their shoulders—they drowned because we smashed them with rocks and stones; they drowned because they couldn’t stand….”

His face was close to Mary, his red-flecked eyes staring into hers, and his breath on her cheek. “Did you never hear of wreckers before?” he whispered.

Outside in the passage the clock struck one o’clock, and the single note rang in the air like a summons. Neither of them moved. The room was very cold, for the fire had sunk away to nothing, and a little current of air blew in from the open door. The yellow flame of the candle bowed and flickered. He reached out to her and took her hand; it lay limp in his, like a dead hand. Perhaps he saw something of the frozen horror in her face, for he let her go and turned away his eyes. He stared straight before him at the empty glass, and he began to drum with his fingers on the table. Crouched on the floor beside him, Mary watched a fly crawl across his hand. She watched it pass through the short black hairs and over the thick veins to the knuckles, and it ran to the tips of the long slim fingers. She remembered the swift and sudden grace of those fingers when they cut bread for her that first evening, and how if they chose they could be delicate and light; she watched them drumming now on the table, and in her fancy she saw them curl round a block of jagged stone and fasten upon it; she saw the stone fly through the air….

Once more he turned to her, his whisper hoarse, and he jerked his head towards the ticking of the clock. “The sound of it rings in my head sometimes,” he said, “and when it struck one just now, it was like the tolling of a bell buoy in a bay. I’ve heard it come travelling down the air on the westerly wind: one-two-one-two, backwards and forwards the clapper goes against the bell, as though it tolled for dead men. I’ve heard it in my dreams, I heard it tonight. A mournful, weary sound, Mary, is a bell buoy out in the bay. It rubs on your nerves and you want to scream. When you work on the coast you have to pull out to them in a boat and muffle them; wrap the tongue in flannel. That deadens them. There’s silence then. Maybe it’s a misty night, with patches of white fog on the water, and outside the bay there’ll be a ship casting for scent like a hound. She listens for the buoy, and no sound comes to her. And she comes in then, driving through the fog—she comes straight in to us who are waiting for her, Mary—and we see her shudder suddenly, and strike, and then the surf has her.”

He reached for the bottle of brandy and let a little liquid trickle slowly into the glass. He smelt it and rolled it on his tongue.

“Have you ever seen flies caught in a jar of treacle?” he said. “I’ve seen men like that; stuck in the rigging like a swarm of flies. They cling there for safety, shouting in terror at the sight of the surf. Just like flies they are, spread out on the yards, little black dots of men. I’ve seen the ship break up beneath them, and the masts and yards snap like thread, and there they’ll be flung into the sea, to swim for their lives. But when they reach the shore they’re dead men, Mary.”

He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and stared at her. “Dead men tell no tales, Mary,” he said.

His face nodded at her, and narrowed suddenly, and was blotted out. No longer was she kneeling on the kitchen floor, her hands gripping the table; she was a child again, running beside her father on the cliffs beyond St. Keverne. He swung her up onto his shoulder, and there were other men running with them, who shouted and cried. Somebody pointed to the distant sea, and, clinging to her father’s head, she saw a great white ship like a bird rolling helplessly in the trough of the sea, her masts broken short and her sails trailing in the water beside her. “What are they doing?” asked the child that had been herself; and nobody answered her; they stood where they were, staring in horror at the ship that rolled and plunged. “God have mercy upon them,” said her father; and the child Mary began to cry, calling for her mother, who came at once from amongst the crowd and took her in her arms, and walked away with her out of sight of the sea. There all memory snapped, and vanished, and there was no ending to the story; but when she grew to understanding, and was no longer a child, her mother would talk of the day they had gone to St. Keverne, when a great barque had sunk with all on board, her back broken on the dreaded Manacles. Mary shivered and sighed, and once more her uncle’s face loomed before her in its frame of matted hair, and she was kneeling beside him again in the kitchen at Jamaica Inn. She felt deadly sick, and her hands and feet were icy cold. She longed only to stumble to her bed and bury her head in her hands, pulling the blanket and pillow over her for greater darkness. Perhaps if she pressed her hands against her eyes she would blot out his face and the pictures he had painted for her. Perhaps if she thrust her fingers in her ears she would muffle the sound of his voice and the thunder of the surf upon the shore. Here she could see the pale faces of drowned men, their arms above their heads; she could hear the screams of terror and the cries; she could hear the mournful clamour of the bell buoy as it swayed backwards and forward in the sea. Mary shivered again.

She looked up at her uncle, and she saw that he had sloped forward in his chair, and his head had fallen on his chest. His mouth was wide open, and he snorted and spluttered as he slept. His long dark lashes swept his cheeks like a fringe. His arms rested on the table before him, and his hands were clasped as though in prayer.

On Christmas Eve the sky was overcast and threatened rain. It had turned mild, too, in the night, and the mud in the yard was churned where the cows had trodden. The walls of Mary’s bedroom felt damp to her hand, and there was a great yellow patch in one corner caused by the shrinking plaster.

Mary leant out of the window, and the soft wet wind blew upon her face. In an hour’s time Jem Merlyn would be waiting for her on the moor, to take her to Launceston fair. Whether she met him or not depended upon herself, and she could not make up her mind. She had grown older in four days, and the face that looked back at her from the spotted, cracked mirror was drawn and tired.

There were dark rings beneath her eyes, and little hollows in her cheeks. Sleep came late to her at night, and she had no appetite for food. For the first time in her life she saw a resemblance between herself and her Aunt Patience. They had the same pucker of the forehead, and the same mouth. If she pursed up her lips and worked them, biting the edges, it might be Aunt Patience who stood there, with the lank brown hair framing her face. The trick was an easy one to catch, as was the nervous twisting of the hands, and Mary turned away from the telltale mirror and began to pace up and down her cramped room. During the past few days she had kept as much as possible to the privacy of her own room, excusing herself on the score of a chill. Mary could not trust herself to speak to her aunt at present—not for any length of time. Her eyes would have betrayed her. They would look at one another with the same dumb horror, the same hidden anguish; and Aunt Patience would have understood. They shared a secret now, a secret that must never be spoken between them. Mary wondered how many years Aunt Patience had kept that knowledge to herself in an agony of silence. No one would ever know how greatly she had suffered. Wherever she would go in the future, the pain of that knowledge would go with her. It could never leave her alone. At last Mary was able to understand the pale, twitching face, the hands that plucked at the dress, the wide, staring eyes. The evidence screamed at her now that she knew.