Briskly the horse and trap covered the weary miles that Mary had walked alone. She recognized each bend in the road now, and how at times the moor encroached upon it, with high tufts of grass or twisted stem of broom.
There, beyond her in the valley, would be the lights of Altarnun, and already the Five Lanes branched out from the road like fingers from a hand.
The wild stretch to Jamaica lay before them. Even when the night was still the wind played here, bare and open as it was to every compass point, and tonight it hummed from Roughtor in the west, keen as a knife and cold, gathering the marsh smells as it came, over the bitter turf and the running streams. There was still no sign of man or beast upon the road, which rose and dipped again across the moor, and, though Mary strained her eyes and her ears, she could hear nothing. On such a night the slightest sound would be magnified, and the approach of Mr. Bassat's party, numbering, as they would, a dozen men or so, said Richards, would easily be heard two miles or more away.
"We shall find them there before us, as likely as not," he told Mary, "and the landlord, with his hands bound, breathing fire at the squire. It will be a good thing for the neighborhood when he's put out of harm's way, and he would have been before now, if the squire could have had his way. It's a pity we were not here sooner; there'll have been some sport in taking him, I reckon."
"Little sport if Mr. Bassat finds that his bird has flown," said Mary quietly. "Joss Merlyn knows these moors like the back of his hand, and he'll not linger once he has the start of an hour, or less than that."
"My master was bred here, same as the landlord," said Richards; "if it comes to a chase across country, I'd lay odds on the squire every time. He's hunted here, man and boy, for nearly fifty years, I should say, and where a fox will go the squire will follow. But they'll catch this one before he starts to run, if I'm not mistaken." Mary let him continue; his occasional jerky statements did not worry her as the kindly prattle of his mistress had done, and his broad back and honest rugged face gave her some confidence in this night of strain.
They were approaching the dip in the road and the narrow bridge that spanned the river Fowey; Mary could hear the ripple and play of the stream as it ran swiftly over the stones. The steep hill to Jamaica rose in front of them, white beneath the moon, and as the dark chimneys appeared above the crest, Richards fell silent, fumbling with the pistols in his belt, and he cleared his throat with a little nervous jerk of his head. Mary's heart beat fast now, and she held tight to the side of the trap. The horse bent to the climb, his head low, and it seemed to Mary that the clop of his hoofs rang too loudly on the surface of the road, and she wished they had been more silent.
As they drew near to the summit of the hill, Richards turned, and whispered in her ear, "Would it be best for you to wait here, in the trap, by the side of the road, and I go forward and see if they are there?"
Mary shook her head. "Better for me to go," she said, "and you follow a pace or two behind, or stay here and wait until I call. From the silence, it seems as though the squire and his party are not yet come, after all, and that the landlord has escaped. Should he be there, however--my uncle, I mean--I can risk an encounter with him, when you could not. Give me a pistol; I shall have little to fear from him then."
"I hardly think it right for you to go alone," said the man doubtfully. "You may walk right into him, and I hear no sound from you again. It's strange, as you say, this silence. I'd expected shouting and fighting, and my master's voice topping it all. It's almost unnatural, in a way. They must have been detained in Launceston. I half fancy there'd be more wisdom if we turned aside down that track there, and waited for them to come."
"I've waited long enough tonight, and gone half mad with it," said Mary. "I'd rather come upon my uncle face to face than lie here in the ditch, seeing and hearing nothing. It's my aunt I'm thinking of. She's as innocent as a child in all this business, and I want to care for her if I can. Give me a pistol and let me go. I can tread like a cat, and I'll not run my head into a noose, I promise you." She threw off the heavy cloak and hood that had protected her from the cold night air, and seized hold of the pistol that he handed down to her reluctantly. "Don't follow me unless I call or give some signal," she said. "Should you hear a shot fired, then perhaps it would be as well to come after me. But come warily, for all that. There's no need for both of us to run like fools into danger. For my part, I believe my uncle to have gone."
She hoped now that he had, and by driving into Devon made an end to the whole business. The country would be rid of him, and in the cheapest possible way. He might, even as he had said, start life again, or, more likely still, dig himself in somewhere five hundred miles from Cornwall, and drink himself to death. She had no interest now in his capture; she wanted it finished and thrust aside; she wanted above all to lead her own life and forget him, and to put the world between her and Jamaica Inn. Revenge was an empty thing. To see him bound and helpless, surrounded by the squire and his men, would be of little satisfaction. She had spoken to Richards with confidence, but for all that she dreaded an encounter with her uncle, armed as she was; and the thought of coming upon him suddenly in the passage of the inn, with his hands ready to strike, and his bloodshot eyes staring down upon her, made her pause in her stride, before the yard, and glance back to the dark shadow in the ditch that was Richards and the trap. Then she leveled her pistol, her finger upon the trigger, and looked round the corner of the stone wall to the yard.
It was empty. The stable door was shut. The inn was as dark and silent as when she had left it nearly seven hours before, and the windows and the door were barred. She looked up to her window, and the pane of glass gaped empty and wide, unchanged since she had climbed from it that afternoon.
There were no wheel-marks in the yard, no preparations for departure. She crept across to the stable and laid her ear against the door. She waited a moment, and then she heard the pony move restlessly in his stall; she heard his hoofs clink on the cobbles.
Then they had not gone, and her uncle was still at Jamaica Inn.
Her heart sank; and she wondered if she should return to Richards and the trap, and wait, as he had suggested, until Squire Bassat and his men arrived. She glanced once more at the shuttered house. Surely, if her uncle intended to leave, he would have gone before now. The cart alone would take an hour to load, and it must be nearly eleven o'clock. He might have altered his plans, and decided to go on foot, but then Aunt Patience could never accompany him. Mary hesitated; the situation had become odd now, and unreal.
She stood by the porch and listened. She even tried the handle of the door. It was locked, of course. She ventured a little way round the corner of the house, past the entrance to the bar, and so to the patch of garden behind the kitchen. She trod softly now, keeping herself in shadow, and she came to where a chink of candlelight would show through the gap in the kitchen shutter. There was no light. She stepped close now to the shutter, and laid her eye against the slit. The kitchen was black as a pit. She laid her hand on the knob of the door, and slowly turned it. It gave, to her astonishment, and the door opened. This easy entrance, entirely unforeseen, shocked her for the moment, and she was afraid to enter.
Supposing her uncle sat on his chair, waiting for her, his gun across his knee? She had her own pistol, but it gave her no confidence.
Very slowly she laid her face to the gap made by the door. No sound came to her. Out of the tail of her eye she could see the ashes of the fire, but the glow was almost gone. She knew then that nobody was there. Some instinct told her that the kitchen had been empty for hours. She pushed the door wide, and went inside. The room struck cold and damp. She waited until her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and she could make out the shape of the kitchen table, and the chair beside it. There was a candle on the table, and she thrust it into the feeble glow of the fire, where it took light, and flickered. When it burned strong enough, she held it high above her head and looked about her. The kitchen was stil
l strewn with the preparations for departure. There was a bundle belonging to Aunt Patience on the chair, and a heap of blankets lay on the floor ready to be rolled. In the corner of the room, where it always stood, was her uncle's gun. They had decided, then, to wait for another day, and were now abed and asleep in the room upstairs.
The door to the passage was wide open, and the silence became more oppressive than before, strangely and horribly still.
Something was not as it had been; some sound was lacking that must account for the silence. Then Mary realized that she could not hear the clock. The ticking had stopped.
She stepped into the passage and listened again. She was right; the house was silent because the clock had stopped. She went forward slowly, with the candle in one hand and the pistol leveled in the other.
She turned the corner, where the long dark passage branched into the hall, and she saw that the clock, which stood always against the wall beside the door into the parlor, had toppled forward and fallen upon its face. The glass was splintered in fragments on the stone flags, and the wood was split. The wall gaped bare where it had stood, very naked now and strange, with the paper marked a deep yellow in contrast to the faded pattern of the wall. The clock had fallen across the narrow hall, and it was not until she came to the foot of the stairs that Mary saw what was beyond.
The landlord of Jamaica Inn lay on his face among the wreckage.
The fallen clock had hidden him at first, for he sprawled in the shadow, one arm flung high above his head and the other fastened upon the broken splintered door. Because his legs were stretched out on either side of him, one foot jamming the wainscoting, he looked even larger in death than he did before, his great frame blocking the entrance from wall to wall.
There was blood on the stone floor; and blood between his shoulders, dark now and nearly dry, where the knife had found him.
When he was stabbed from behind he must have stretched out his hands, and stumbled, dragging at the clock; and when he fell upon his face the clock crashed with him to the ground, and he died there, clutching at the door.
15
It was a long while before Mary moved away from the stairs. Something of her own strength had ebbed away, leaving her powerless, like the figure on the floor. Her eyes dwelt upon little immaterial things: the fragments of glass from the smashed clock-face that were bloodstained too, and the discolored patch of wall where the clock had stood.
A spider settled on her uncle's hand; and it seemed strange to her that the hand stayed motionless and did not seek to rid itself of the spider. Her uncle would have shaken it free. Then it crawled from his hand and ran up his arm, working its way beyond the shoulder. When it came to the wound it hesitated, and then made a circuit, returning to it again in curiosity, and there was a lack of fear in its rapidity that was somehow horrible and desecrating to death. The spider knew that the landlord could not harm him. Mary knew this too, but she had not lost her fear, like the spider.
It was the silence that frightened her most. Now that the clock no longer ticked, her nerves strained for the sound of it; the slow wheezing choke had been familiar and a symbol of normality.
The light of her candle played upon the walls, but it did not reach to the top of the stairs, where the darkness gaped at her like a gulf.
She knew she could never climb those stairs again, nor tread that empty landing. Whatever lay beyond her and above must rest there undisturbed. Death had come upon the house tonight, and its brooding spirit still hovered in the air. She felt now that this was what Jamaica Inn had always waited for and feared. The damp walls, the creaking boards, the whispers in the air, and the footsteps that had no name: these were the warning of a house that had felt itself long threatened.
Mary shivered; and she knew that the quality of this silence had origin in far-off buried and forgotten things.
She dreaded panic, above all things; the scream that forced itself to the lips, the wild stumble of groping feet and hands that beat the air for passage. She was afraid that it might come to her, destroying reason; and, now that the first shock of discovery had lessened, she knew that it might force its way upon her, close in and stifle her. Her fingers might lose their sense of grip and touch, and the candle fall from her hands. Then she would be alone, and covered by the darkness. The tearing desire to run seized hold of her, and she conquered it. She backed away from the hall towards the passage, the candle flickering in the draft of air, and when she came to the kitchen and saw the door still open to the patch of garden, her calm deserted her, and she ran blindly through the door to the cold free air outside, a sob in her throat, her outstretched hands grazing the stone wall as she turned the corner of the house. She ran like a thing pursued across the yard, and came to the open road, where the familiar stalwart figure of the squire's groom confronted her. He put out his hands to save her, and she groped at his belt, feeling for security, her teeth chattering now in the full shock of reaction.
"He's dead," she said; "he's dead there on the floor. I saw him"; and, try as she did, she could not stop this chattering of her teeth and the shivering of her body. He led her to the side of the road, back to the trap, and he reached for the cloak and put it around her, and she held it to her close, grateful for the warmth.
"He's dead," she repeated; "stabbed in the back; I saw the place where his coat was rent, and there was blood. He lay on his face. The clock had fallen with him. The blood was dry; and he looked as though he had lain there for some time. The inn was dark and silent. No one else was there."
"Was your aunt gone?" whispered the man.
Mary shook her head. "I don't know. I did not see. I had to come away."
He saw by her face that her strength had gone, and she would fall, and he helped her up into the trap and climbed onto the seat beside her.
"All right, then," he said, "all right. Sit quiet, then, here. No one shall hurt you. There now. All right, then." His gruff voice helped her, and she crouched beside him in the trap, the warm cloak muffled to her chin.
"That was no sight for a maid to see," he told her. "You should have let me go. I wish now you'd have stayed back here in the trap. That's terrible for you to see him lying dead there, murdered."
Talking eased her, and his rough sympathy was good. "The pony was still in the stable," she said. "I listened at the door and heard him move. They had never even finished their preparations for going. The kitchen door was unlocked and there were bundles on the floor there; blankets too, ready to load into the cart. It must have happened several hours ago."
"It puzzles me what the squire is doing," said Richards. "He should have been here before this. I'd feel easier if he'd come, and you could tell your story to him. There's been bad work here tonight. You should never have come."
They fell silent, and both of them watched the road for the coming of the squire.
"Who'd have killed the landlord?" said Richards, puzzled. "He's a match for most men and should have held his own. There was plenty who might have had a hand in it, though, for all that. If ever a man was hated, he was."
"There was the pedlar," said Mary slowly. "I'd forgotten the pedlar. It must have been him, breaking out from the barred room."
She fastened upon the idea, to escape from another; and she retold the story, eagerly now, of how the pedlar had come to the inn the night before. It seemed at once that the crime was proven, and there could be no other explanation.
"He'll not run far before the squire catches him," said the groom; "you can be sure of that. No one can hide on these moors, unless he's a local man, and I have never heard of Harry the pedlar before. But, then, they came from every hole and corner in Cornwall, Joss Merlyn's men, by all accounts. They were, as you might say, the dregs of the country."
He paused, and then: "I'll go to the inn if you would care for me to, and see for myself if he has left any trace behind him. There might be something..."
Mary seized hold of his arm. "I'll not be alone again," she said swiftly. "
Think me a coward if you will, but I could not stand it. Had you been inside Jamaica Inn you would understand. There's a brooding quiet about the place tonight that cares nothing for the poor dead body lying there."
"I can mind the time, before your uncle came there, when the house stood empty," said the servant, "and we'd take the dogs there after rats, for sport. We thought nothing of it then; just a lonely shell of a place it seemed, without a soul of its own. But the squire kept it in good repair, mind you, while he waited for a tenant. I'm a St. Neot man myself, and never came here until I served the squire, but I've been told in the old days there was good cheer and good company at Jamaica, with friendly, happy folk living in the house, and always a bed for a passing traveler upon the road. The coaches stayed here then, what never do now, and hounds would meet here once a week in Mr. Bassat's boyhood. Maybe these things will come again."
Mary shook her head. "I've only seen the evil," she said; "I've only seen the suffering there's been, and the cruelty, and the pain. When my uncle came to Jamaica Inn he must have cast his shadow over the good things, and they died." Their voices had sunk to a whisper, and they glanced half-consciously over their shoulders to the tall chimneys that stood out against the sky, clear-cut and gray, beneath the moon. They were both thinking of one thing, and neither had the courage to mention it first; the groom from delicacy and tact, Mary from fear alone. Then at last she spoke, her voice husky and low.