“No!” I said, “no. Mrs. Danvers, what’s the use of all this? I don’t want to hear any more, I don’t want to know. Haven’t I got feelings as well as you? Can’t you understand what it means to me, to hear her mentioned, to stand here and listen while you tell me about her?”
She did not hear me, she went on raving like a mad woman, a fanatic, her long fingers twisting and tearing the black stuff of her dress.
“She was lovely then,” she said. “Lovely as a picture; men turning to stare at her when she passed, and she not twelve years old. She knew then, she used to wink at me like the little devil she was. ‘I’m going to be a beauty, aren’t I, Danny?’ she said, and ‘We’ll see about that, my love, we’ll see about that,’ I told her. She had all the knowledge then of a grown person; she’d enter into conversation with men and women as clever and full of tricks as someone of eighteen. She twisted her father round her little finger, and she’d have done the same with her mother, had she lived. Spirit, you couldn’t beat my lady for spirit. She drove a four-in-hand on her fourteenth birthday, and her cousin, Mr. Jack, got up on the box beside her and tried to take the reins from her hands. They fought it out there together, for three minutes, like a couple of wild cats, and the horses galloping to glory. She won though, my lady won. She cracked her whip over his head and down he came, head-over-heels, cursing and laughing. They were a pair, I tell you, she and Mr. Jack. They sent him in the Navy, but he wouldn’t stand the discipline, and I don’t blame him. He had too much spirit to obey orders, like my lady.”
I watched her, fascinated, horrified; a queer ecstatic smile was on her lips, making her older than ever, making her skull’s face vivid and real. “No one got the better of her, never, never,” she said. “She did what she liked, she lived as she liked. She had the strength of a little lion too. I remember her at sixteen getting up on one of her father’s horses, a big brute of an animal too, that the groom said was too hot for her to ride. She stuck to him, all right. I can see her now, with her hair flying out behind her, slashing at him, drawing blood, digging the spurs into his side, and when she got off his back he was trembling all over, full of froth and blood. ‘That will teach him, won’t it, Danny?’ she said, and walked off to wash her hands as cool as you please. And that’s how she went at life, when she grew up. I saw her, I was with her. She cared for nothing and for no one. And then she was beaten in the end. But it wasn’t a man, it wasn’t a woman. The sea got her. The sea was too strong for her. The sea got her in the end.”
She broke off, her mouth working strangely, and dragging at the corners. She began to cry noisily, harshly, her mouth open and her eyes dry.
“Mrs. Danvers,” I said. “Mrs. Danvers.” I stood before her helplessly, not knowing what to do. I mistrusted her no longer, I was afraid of her no more, but the sight of her sobbing there, dry-eyed, made me shudder, made me ill. “Mrs. Danvers,” I said, “you’re not well, you ought to be in bed. Why don’t you go to your room and rest? Why don’t you go to bed?”
She turned on me fiercely. “Leave me alone, can’t you?” she said. “What’s it to do with you if I show my grief? I’m not ashamed of it, I don’t shut myself up in my room to cry. I don’t walk up and down, up and down, in my room like Mr. de Winter, with the door locked on me.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Mr. de Winter does not do that.”
“He did,” she said, “after she died. Up and down, up and down in the library. I heard him. I watched him too, through the keyhole, more than once. Backwards and forwards, like an animal in a cage.”
“I don’t want to hear,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”
“And then you say you made him happy on his honeymoon,” she said; “made him happy—you, a young ignorant girl, young enough to be his daughter. What do you know about life? What do you know about men? You come here and think you can take Mrs. de Winter’s place. You. You take my lady’s place. Why, even the servants laughed at you when you came to Manderley. Even the little scullery-maid you met in the back passage there on your first morning. I wonder what Mr. de Winter thought when he got you back here at Manderley, after his precious honeymoon was over. I wonder what he thought when he saw you sitting at the dining room table for the first time.”
“You’d better stop this, Mrs. Danvers,” I said; “you’d better go to your room.”