Somehow Mary found her way to the hall, and, hardly conscious of what she was doing, she turned the handle of the parlor door and stumbled inside. Then she crumpled in a heap on the floor, her head between her knees.
She must have fainted quite away for a minute or two, because the specks in front of her eyes grouped themselves into one tremendous whole, and her world went black; but the position in which she had fallen brought her to herself quicker than anything else could have done, and in a moment she was sitting up, propped on one elbow, listening to the clatter of a pony's hoofs in the yard outside. She heard a voice curse the animal to stand still--it was Harry the pedlar--and then he must have mounted and driven his heels into the pony's side, for the sound of the hoofs drew away and out of the yard, and disappeared in the distance down the high road, and so was lost beneath the slope of the hill. Her uncle was alone now in the bar with his victim, and Mary wondered whether it would be possible for her to find her way to the nearest dwelling-place on the road to Dozmary and summon help. It meant a walk of two or three miles across a moorland track before the first shepherd's cottage was reached, and somewhere on that same track the poor idiot boy had flown, earlier in the evening, and was even now perhaps wailing and grimacing by the side of the ditch.
She knew nothing of the inhabitants of the cottage; possibly they belonged to her uncle's company, in which case she would be running straight into a trap. Aunt Patience, upstairs in bed, was useless to her, and if anything an encumbrance. It was a hopeless situation, and there seemed no way of escape for the stranger, whoever he should be, unless he himself came to some agreement with Joss Merlyn. If he had any cunning he might be able to overpower her uncle; now that the pedlar had gone they were evenly matched as far as numbers went, though her uncle's physical strength would tell heavily in his favor. Mary began to feel desperate. If only there were a gun somewhere, or a knife, she might be able to wound her uncle, or at least disarm him while the wretched man made his escape from the bar.
She felt careless now for her own safety; it was only a matter of time, anyway, before she was discovered, and there was little sense in crouching here in the empty parlor. That fainting attack had been a momentary affair, and she despised herself for her weakness. She got up from the floor, and, placing both hands on the latch for greater silence, she opened the door a few inches. There was not a sound in the hall but the ticking of the clock, and the beam of light in the back passage shone no more. The door of the bar must be shut. Perhaps at this moment the stranger was fighting for his life, struggling for breath in the great hands of Joss Merlyn, shaken backwards and forwards on the stone floor of the bar. She could hear nothing, though; whatever work there was behind that closed door happened in silence.
Mary was about to step out into the hall once more and creep past the stairs to the further passage, when a sound from above made her pause and lift her head. It was the creaking of a board. There was silence for a minute, and then it happened again: quiet footsteps pacing gently overhead. Aunt Patience slept in the further passage at the other end of the house, and Mary herself had heard Harry the pedlar ride away on his pony nearly ten minutes ago. Her uncle she knew to be in the bar with the stranger, and no one had climbed the stairs since she had descended them. There, the board creaked again, and the soft footsteps continued. Someone was in the empty guest-room on the floor above.
Mary's heart began to thump in her side again, and her breath came quickly. Whoever was in hiding up above must have been there many hours. He must have lain in waiting there since the early evening; stood behind the door when she had gone to bed. Had he gone later she would have heard his footsteps on the stairs. Perhaps he had watched the arrival of the wagons from the window, as she had done, and had seen the idiot boy run screaming down the road to Dozmary. She had been separated from him by a thin partition of wall, and he must have heard her every movement--the falling onto her bed, and later her dressing, and her opening of her door.
Therefore he must wish to remain concealed, otherwise he would have stepped out onto the landing when she had done; had he been one of the company in the bar he would have spoken with her, surely; he would have questioned her movements. Who had admitted him? When could he have gone into the room? He must have hidden there so that he should remain unseen by the smugglers. Therefore he was not one of them; he was enemy to her uncle. The footfalls had ceased now, and, though she held her breath and listened intently, she could hear nothing. She had not been mistaken, though, she was convinced of that. Someone--an ally perhaps--was hiding in the guest-room next to hers, and could help her save the stranger in the bar. She had her foot on the lowest step of the stairs when the beam of light shone forth once more from the back passage, and she heard the door of the bar swing open. Her uncle was coming out into the hall. There was no time for Mary to climb the stairs before he turned the corner, so she was forced to step quickly back into the parlor and stand with her hand against the door. In the blackness of the hall he would never see that the door was not latched.
Trembling with excitement and fear, she waited in the parlor, and she heard the landlord pass across the hall and climb the stairs to the landing above. His footsteps came to a halt above her head, outside the guest-room, and for a second or two he waited, as though he too listened for some alien sound. Then he tapped twice, very softly on the door.
Once more the board creaked, and someone crossed the floor of the room above and the door was opened. Mary's heart sank within her, and her first despair returned. This could be no enemy to her uncle, after all. Probably Joss Merlyn had admitted him in the first place, early in the evening when she and Aunt Patience had been preparing the bar for the company, and he had lain in waiting there until all the men had departed. It was some personal friend of the landlord's, who had no wish to meddle in his evening's business, and would not show himself even to the landlord's wife.
Her uncle had known him to be there all the time, and that was why he had sent the pedlar away. He did not wish the pedlar to see his friend. She thanked God then that she had not climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.
Supposing they went into her room to see if she were there and asleep? There would be little hope for her once her absence was discovered. She glanced behind her at the window. It was closed and barred. There was no road of escape. Now they were coming down the stairs; they stopped for an instant outside the parlor door. For one moment Mary thought they were coming inside. They were so close to her that she could have touched her uncle on the shoulder through the crack of the door. As it was, he spoke, and his voice whispered right against her ear.
"It's for you to say," he breathed; "it's your judgment now, not mine. I'll do it, or we'll do it between us. It's for you to say the word."
Screened as she was by the door, Mary could neither see nor hear her uncle's new companion, and whatever gesture or sign he made in return escaped her. They did not linger outside the parlor, but turned back along the hall to the further passage, and so down it to the bar beyond.
Then the door closed, and she heard them no more.
Her first instinct was to unbar the entrance and run out into the road, and so be away from them; but on reflection she realized that by doing this she would gain nothing; for all she knew, there might be other men--the pedlar himself perhaps, and the rest of them--posted at intervals along the high road in the anticipation of trouble.
It seemed as though this new man, who had hidden all evening in the room above, could not have heard her leave her bedroom after all; had he done so he would by now have acquainted her uncle with the fact, and they would search for her; unless they dismissed her as being of no importance whatsoever in the general scheme of things. The man in the bar was their first concern; she could be attended to later.
She must have stood for ten minutes or more waiting for some sound or signal, but everything was still. Only the clock in the hall ticked on, wheezing slowly and impervious to action, a symbol of age and indi
fference. Once she fancied she heard a cry; but it was gone and lost in an instant, and was so faint and far a thing that it might have been some strange conjuring of her imagination, whipped as it was by all she had seen since midnight.
Then Mary went out into the hall, and so through to the dark passage. No crack of light came under the skirting of the door to the bar. The candles must have been extinguished. Were they sitting there inside the room, all three of them, in darkness? They made an ugly picture in her mind, a silent, sinister group, ruled by some purpose that she did not understand; but the very snuffing out of the light made the quietude more deadly.
She ventured as far as the door, and laid her ear against the panel. There was not even the murmur of a voice, nor that unmistakable suggestion of living, breathing people. The old fusty drink smell that had clung to the passage all evening had cleared, and through the keyhole came a steady draft of air. Mary gave way to a sudden uncontrollable impulse, and, lifting the latch, she opened the door and stepped into the room.
There was nobody there. The door leading to the yard was open, and the room was filled with the fresh November air. It was this that caused the draft in the passage. The benches were empty, and the table that had crashed to the ground in that first scuffle still lay upon the floor, its three legs pointing to the ceiling.
The men had gone, though; they must have turned to the left outside the kitchen and walked straight onto the moor, for she would have heard them had they crossed the road. The air felt cold and sweet upon her face, and now that her uncle and the strangers had left it the room seemed harmless and impersonal once more. The horror was spent.
A last little ray of moonlight made a white circle on the floor, and into the circle moved a dark blob like a finger. It was the reflection of a shadow. Mary looked up to the ceiling and saw that a rope had been slung through a hook in the beam. It was the rope's end that made the blob in the white circle; and it kept moving backwards and forwards, blown by the draft from the open door.
5
As the days passed, Mary Yellan settled down to life at Jamaica Inn with a sense of stubborn resolution. It was evident that she could not leave her aunt to face the winter alone, but perhaps, with the coming of spring, Patience Merlyn could be persuaded to see reason, and the pair of them would leave the moors for the peace and quietude of Helford valley.
This was at any rate Mary's hope, and meanwhile she must make the best of the grim six months that lay ahead, and if possible she was determined to have the better of her uncle in the long run, and expose him and his confederates to the law. She would have shrugged her shoulders at smuggling alone, though the flagrant dishonesty of the trade disgusted her, but all she had seen so far went to prove that Joss Merlyn and his friends were not content with this only; they were desperate men, afraid of nothing and no one, and did not stop at murder. The events of that first Saturday night were never far from her mind, and the straggling rope's end hanging from the beam told its own tale. Mary had not a doubt that the stranger had been killed by her uncle and another man, and his body buried somewhere on the moors.
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 cow-house, 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 preceding night. He seemed in fair good humor, 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 traveling 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 wagons 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 learned to avoid the low soggy grass with tufted tops that by their very harmless appearance invited inspection, only to reveal themselves as the borderline of treacherous and dangerous marsh.
Though lonely, she was not actively unhappy, and these rambles in the gray 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 recognized her driver, but he took no notice of her, only whipping his horses the harder, and she realized 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 humor 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 favored 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 defense of her uncle, but scrubbing the stone flags had done away with her sense of humor, if only for the moment, and she felt she must vent her ill temper on the nearest victim.