I thought of her as I had seen her last night, watching me through the open door to the west wing, and that diabolical smile on her white skull’s face, and I remembered that she was a living breathing woman like myself, she was made of flesh and blood. She was not dead, like Rebecca. I could speak to her, but I could not speak to Rebecca.
I walked back across the lawns on sudden impulse to the house. I went through the hall and up the great stairs, I turned in under the archway by the gallery, I passed through the door to the west wing, and so along the dark silent corridor to Rebecca’s room. I turned the handle of the door and went inside.
Mrs. Danvers was still standing by the window, and the shutter was folded back.
“Mrs. Danvers,” I said. “Mrs. Danvers.” She turned to look at me, and I saw her eyes were red and swollen with crying, even as mine were, and there were dark shadows in her white face.
“What is it?” she said, and her voice was thick and muffled from the tears she had shed, even as mine had been.
I had not expected to find her so. I had pictured her smiling as she had smiled last night, cruel and evil. Now she was none of these things, she was an old woman who was ill and tired.
I hesitated, my hand still on the knob of the open door, and I did not know what to say to her now or what to do.
She went on staring at me with those red, swollen eyes and I could not answer her. “I left the menu on the desk as usual,” she said. “Do you want something changed?” Her words gave me courage, and I left the door and came to the middle of the room.
“Mrs. Danvers,” I said. “I have not come to talk about the menu. You know that, don’t you?”
She did not answer me. Her left hand opened and shut.
“You’ve done what you wanted, haven’t you?” I said, “you meant this to happen, didn’t you? Are you pleased now? Are you happy?”
She turned her head away, and looked out of the window as she had done when I first came into the room. “Why did you ever come here?” she said. “Nobody wanted you at Manderley. We were all right until you came. Why did you not stay where you were out in France?”
“You seem to forget I love Mr. de Winter,” I said.
“If you loved him you would never have married him,” she said.
I did not know what to say. The situation was mad, unreal. She kept talking in that choked muffled way with her head turned from me.
“I thought I hated you but I don’t now,” she said; “it seems to have spent itself, all the feeling I had.”
“Why should you hate me?” I asked; “what have I ever done to you that you should hate me?”
“You tried to take Mrs. de Winter’s place,” she said.
Still she would not look at me. She stood there sullen, her head turned from me. “I had nothing changed,” I said. “Manderley went on as it had always been. I gave no orders, I left everything to you. I would have been friends with you, if you had let me, but you set yourself against me from the first. I saw it in your face, the moment I shook hands with you.”
She did not answer, and her hand kept opening and shutting against her dress. “Many people marry twice, men and women,” I said. “There are thousands of second marriages taking place every day. You talk as though my marrying Mr. de Winter was a crime, a sacrilege against the dead. Haven’t we as much right to be happy as anyone else?”
“Mr. de Winter is not happy,” she said, turning to look at me at last; “any fool can see that. You have only to look at his eyes. He’s still in hell, and he’s looked like that ever since she died.”
“It’s not true,” I said. “It’s not true. He was happy when we were in France together; he was younger, much younger, and laughing and gay.”
“Well, he’s a man, isn’t he?” she said. “No man denies himself on a honeymoon, does he? Mr. de Winter’s not forty-six yet.”
She laughed contemptuously, and shrugged her shoulders.
“How dare you speak to me like that? How dare you?” I said.
I was not afraid of her anymore. I went up to her, shook her by the arm. “You made me wear that dress last night,” I said, “I should never have thought of it but for you. You did it because you wanted to hurt Mr. de Winter, you wanted to make him suffer. Hasn’t he suffered enough without your playing that vile hideous joke upon him? Do you think his agony and pain will bring Mrs. de Winter back again?”
She shook herself clear of me, the angry color flooded her dead white face. “What do I care for his suffering?” she said, “he’s never cared about mine. How do you think I’ve liked it, watching you sit in her place, walk in her footsteps, touch the things that were hers? What do you think it’s meant to me all these months knowing that you wrote at her desk in the morning room, using the very pen that she used, speaking down the house telephone, where she used to speak every morning of her life to me, ever since she first came to Manderley? What do you think it meant to me to hear Frith and Robert and the rest of the servants talking about you as ‘Mrs. de Winter’？ ‘Mrs. de Winter has gone out for a walk.’ ‘Mrs. de Winter wants the car this afternoon at three o’clock.’ ‘Mrs. de Winter won’t be in to tea till five o’clock.’ And all the while my Mrs. de Winter, my lady with her smile and her lovely face and brave ways, the real Mrs. de Winter, lying dead and cold and forgotten in the church crypt. If he suffers then he deserves to suffer, marrying a young girl like you not ten months afterwards. Well, he’s paying for it now, isn’t he? I’ve seen his face, I’ve seen his eyes. He’s made his own hell and there’s no one but himself to thank for it. He knows she sees him, he knows she comes by night and watches him. And she doesn’t come kindly, not she, not my lady. She was never one to stand mute and still and be wronged. ‘I’ll see them in hell, Danny,’ she’d say, ‘I’ll see them in hell first.’ ‘That’s right, my dear,’ I’d tell her, ‘no one will put upon you. You were born into this world to take what you could out of it,’ and she did, she didn’t care, she wasn’t afraid. She had all the courage and spirit of a boy, had my Mrs. de Winter. She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that. I had the care of her as a child. You knew that, didn’t you?”