Read Online Du Maurier, Daphne by Jamaica Inn - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jamaica Inn
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bank, with the inn itself as halting place and general store.
Spies were needed about the countryside to make a success of the trade; hence the sailor from Padstow, the cobbler from Launceston, the gipsies and the tramps, the vile little pedlar.
And yet, allowing for his personality, his energy, the very fear which his enormous physical strength must engender in his companions, had Joss Merlyn the necessary brain and subtlety to lead such an enterprise? Did he plan every move and every departure, and had he been making preparations for tonight’s work during the past week, when away from home?
It must be so; Mary could see no alternative, and, although her loathing for the landlord increased, she allowed herself a grudging respect for his management.
The whole business must be controlled, and the agents picked, for all their rough manners and wild appearance, otherwise the law could never have been evaded for so long. A magistrate who suspected smuggling would surely have suspected the inn before now, unless he were an agent himself. Mary frowned, her chin in her hand. If it were not for Aunt Patience she would walk out of the inn now, and find her way to the nearest town, and inform against Joss Merlyn. He would soon be in jail, and the rest of the rogues with him, and there would be an ending of the traffic. It was useless to reckon without Aunt Patience, however, and the fact that she still held a doglike devotion for her husband made the problem difficult and at the moment impossible.
Mary kept going over and over the question in her mind, and she was not yet satisfied that all was understood. Jamaica Inn was a nest of thieves and poachers, who, with her uncle as leader apparently, worked a profitable smuggling trade between the coast and Devon. So much was clear. But had she seen only part of the game, and was there still more for her to learn? She remembered the terror in Aunt Patience’s eyes, and those words spoken in the hush of that first afternoon, when the shadows of early twilight crept across the kitchen floor: “There’s things happen at Jamaica Inn, Mary, that I’ve never dared to breathe. Bad things. Evil things…. I dare not even admit them to myself.” And she had climbed the staircase to her room, haunted and pale, dragging her feet like a creature old and tired.
Smuggling was dangerous; it was fraught with dishonesty; it was forbidden strictly by the law of the land; but was it evil? Mary could not decide. She needed advice, and there was no one she could ask. She was alone in a grim and rather hateful world, with little prospect of changing it for the better. Had she been a man, she would have gone downstairs and challenged Joss Merlyn to his face, and his friends with him. Yes, and fought them too, and drawn blood, if she were lucky. And then away on a horse from the stable, with Aunt Patience riding pillion, and so down to the south again, to the friendly Helford shore, setting up as a farmer in a small way up Mawgan way, or Gweek, with her aunt to keep house for her.
Well, there was little use in dreaming; the present situation must be faced, and courageously, too, if any good were to come of it.
Here she was on her bed, a girl of three-and-twenty, in petticoat and a shawl, with no weapons but her own brain to oppose a fellow twice her age and eight times her strength who, if he realised she had watched the scene tonight from her window, would encircle her neck with his hand and, pressing lightly with finger and thumb, put an end to her questioning.
Then Mary swore; a thing she had done only once before in her life, when chased by a bull at Manaccan, and then it had been for the same purpose as now—to give herself courage and a certain bold pretence.
“I’ll not show fear before Joss Merlyn or any man,” she said, “and, to prove it, I will go down now, in the dark passage, and take a look at them in the bar, and if he kills me it will be my own fault.”
She dressed hurriedly
Spies were needed about the countryside to make a success of the trade; hence the sailor from Padstow, the cobbler from Launceston, the gipsies and the tramps, the vile little pedlar.
And yet, allowing for his personality, his energy, the very fear which his enormous physical strength must engender in his companions, had Joss Merlyn the necessary brain and subtlety to lead such an enterprise? Did he plan every move and every departure, and had he been making preparations for tonight’s work during the past week, when away from home?
It must be so; Mary could see no alternative, and, although her loathing for the landlord increased, she allowed herself a grudging respect for his management.
The whole business must be controlled, and the agents picked, for all their rough manners and wild appearance, otherwise the law could never have been evaded for so long. A magistrate who suspected smuggling would surely have suspected the inn before now, unless he were an agent himself. Mary frowned, her chin in her hand. If it were not for Aunt Patience she would walk out of the inn now, and find her way to the nearest town, and inform against Joss Merlyn. He would soon be in jail, and the rest of the rogues with him, and there would be an ending of the traffic. It was useless to reckon without Aunt Patience, however, and the fact that she still held a doglike devotion for her husband made the problem difficult and at the moment impossible.
Mary kept going over and over the question in her mind, and she was not yet satisfied that all was understood. Jamaica Inn was a nest of thieves and poachers, who, with her uncle as leader apparently, worked a profitable smuggling trade between the coast and Devon. So much was clear. But had she seen only part of the game, and was there still more for her to learn? She remembered the terror in Aunt Patience’s eyes, and those words spoken in the hush of that first afternoon, when the shadows of early twilight crept across the kitchen floor: “There’s things happen at Jamaica Inn, Mary, that I’ve never dared to breathe. Bad things. Evil things…. I dare not even admit them to myself.” And she had climbed the staircase to her room, haunted and pale, dragging her feet like a creature old and tired.
Smuggling was dangerous; it was fraught with dishonesty; it was forbidden strictly by the law of the land; but was it evil? Mary could not decide. She needed advice, and there was no one she could ask. She was alone in a grim and rather hateful world, with little prospect of changing it for the better. Had she been a man, she would have gone downstairs and challenged Joss Merlyn to his face, and his friends with him. Yes, and fought them too, and drawn blood, if she were lucky. And then away on a horse from the stable, with Aunt Patience riding pillion, and so down to the south again, to the friendly Helford shore, setting up as a farmer in a small way up Mawgan way, or Gweek, with her aunt to keep house for her.
Well, there was little use in dreaming; the present situation must be faced, and courageously, too, if any good were to come of it.
Here she was on her bed, a girl of three-and-twenty, in petticoat and a shawl, with no weapons but her own brain to oppose a fellow twice her age and eight times her strength who, if he realised she had watched the scene tonight from her window, would encircle her neck with his hand and, pressing lightly with finger and thumb, put an end to her questioning.
Then Mary swore; a thing she had done only once before in her life, when chased by a bull at Manaccan, and then it had been for the same purpose as now—to give herself courage and a certain bold pretence.
“I’ll not show fear before Joss Merlyn or any man,” she said, “and, to prove it, I will go down now, in the dark passage, and take a look at them in the bar, and if he kills me it will be my own fault.”
She dressed hurriedly
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