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 a 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 burnt strong enough, she held it high above her head and looked about her. The kitchen was still 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 realised 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 levelled 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 parlour, 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 amongst 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.
Chapter 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 discoloured 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 warnings 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 draught 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 had 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
