It was closer than I had thought, much closer; it ran, surely, beneath that little knot of trees below the lawns, barely five minutes away, and if I listened now, my ear to the window, I could hear the surf breaking on the shores of some little bay I could not see. I knew then I had made the circuit of the house, and was standing in the corridor of the west wing. Yes, Mrs. Danvers was right. You could hear the sea from here. You might imagine, in the winter, it would creep up onto those green lawns and threaten the house itself, for even now, because of the high wind, there was a mist upon the window-glass, as though someone had breathed upon it. A mist salt-laden, borne upwards from the sea. A hurrying cloud hid the sun for a moment as I watched, and the sea changed color instantly, becoming black, and the white crests with them very pitiless suddenly, and cruel, not the gay sparkling sea I had looked on first.
Somehow I was glad my rooms were in the east wing. I preferred the rose garden, after all, to the sound of the sea. I went back to the landing then, at the head of the stairs, and as I prepared to go down, one hand upon the banister, I heard the door behind me open, and it was Mrs. Danvers. We stared at one another for a moment without speaking, and I could not be certain whether it was anger I read in her eyes or curiosity, for her face became a mask directly she saw me. Although she said nothing I felt guilty and ashamed, as though I had been caught trespassing, and I felt the telltale color come up into my face.
“I lost my way,” I said, “I was trying to find my room.”
“You have come to the opposite side of the house,” she said; “this is the west wing.”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“Did you go into any of the rooms?” she asked me.
“No,” I said. “No, I just opened a door, I did not go in. Everything was dark, covered up in dust-sheets. I’m sorry. I did not mean to disturb anything. I expect you like to keep all this shut up.”
“If you wish to open up the rooms I will have it done,” she said; “you have only to tell me. The rooms are all furnished, and can be used.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “No. I did not mean you to think that.”
“Perhaps you would like me to show you all over the west wing?” she said.
I shook my head. “No, I’d rather not,” I said. “No, I must go downstairs.” I began to walk down the stairs, and she came with me, by my side, as though she were a warder, and I in custody.
“Any time, when you have nothing to do, you have only to ask me, and I will show you the rooms in the west wing,” she persisted, making me vaguely uncomfortable. I knew not why. Her insistence struck a chord in my memory, reminding me of a visit to a friend’s house, as a child, when the daughter of the house, older than me, took my arm and whispered in my ear, “I know where there is a book, locked in a cupboard, in my mother’s bedroom. Shall we go and look at it?” I remembered her white, excited face, and her small, beady eyes, and the way she kept pinching my arm.
“I will have the dust-sheets removed, and then you can see the rooms as they looked when they were used,” said Mrs. Danvers. “I would have shown you this morning, but I believed you to be writing letters in the morning room. You have only to telephone through to my room, you know, when you want me. It would only take a short while to have the rooms in readiness.”
We had come down the short flight of stairs, and she opened another door, standing aside for me to pass through, her dark eyes questing my face.
“It’s very kind of you, Mrs. Danvers,” I said. “I will let you know sometime.”
We passed out together onto the landing beyond, and I saw we were at the head of the main staircase now, behind the minstrel’s gallery.
“I wonder how you came to miss your way?” she said, “the door through the west wing is very different to this.”
“I did not come this way,” I said.
“Then you must have come up the back way, from the stone passage?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, not meeting her eyes. “Yes, I came through a stone passage.”
She went on looking at me, as though she expected me to tell her why I left the morning room in sudden panic, going through the back regions, and I felt suddenly that she knew, that she must have watched me, that she had seen me wandering perhaps in that west wing from the first, her eye to a crack in the door. “Mrs. Lacy, and Major Lacy, have been here sometime,” she said. “I heard their car drive up shortly after twelve.”