My arm was bruised and numb from the pressure of her fingers. I could see how tightly the skin was stretched across her face, showing the cheekbones. There were little patches of yellow beneath her ears.
“Mr. de Winter had been dining with Mr. Crawley down at his house,” she went on. “I don’t know what time he got back, I dare say it was after eleven. But it began to blow quite hard just before midnight, and she had not come back. I went downstairs, but there were no lights under the library door. I came upstairs again and knocked on the dressing-room door. Mr. de Winter answered at once, ‘Who is it, what do you want?’ he said. I told him I was worried about Mrs. de Winter not being back. He waited a moment, and then he came and opened the door in his dressing gown. ‘She’s spending the night down at the cottage I expect,’ he said. ‘I should go to bed if I were you. She won’t come back here to sleep if it goes on like this.’ He looked tired, and I did not like to disturb him. After all, she spent many nights at the cottage, and had sailed in every sort of weather. She might not even have gone for a sail, but just wanted the night at the cottage as a change after London. I said good night to Mr. de Winter and went back to my room. I did not sleep though. I kept wondering what she was doing.”
She paused again. I did not want to hear any more. I wanted to get away from her, away from the room.
“I sat on my bed until half past five,” she said, “then I couldn’t wait there any longer. I got up and put on my coat and went down through the woods to the beach. It was getting light, but there was still a misty sort of rain falling, although the wind had dropped. When I got to the beach I saw the buoy there in the water and the dinghy, but the boat had gone…” It seemed to me that I could see the cove in the gray morning light, feel the thin drizzle on my face, and peering through the mist could make out, shadowy and indistinct, the low dark outline of the buoy.
Mrs. Danvers loosened the pressure on my arm. Her hand fell back again to her side. Her voice lost all expression, became the hard mechanical voice of every day.
“One of the lifebuoys was washed up at Kerrith in the afternoon,” she said, “and another was found the next day by some crabbers on the rocks below the headland. Bits and pieces of rigging too would come in with the tide.” She turned away from me, and closed the chest of drawers. She straightened one of the pictures on the wall. She picked up a piece of fluff from the carpet. I stood watching her, not knowing what to do.
“You know now,” she said, “why Mr. de Winter does not use these rooms anymore. Listen to the sea.”
Even with the windows closed and the shutters fastened I could hear it; a low sullen murmur as the waves broke on the white shingle in the cove. The tide would be coming in fast now and running up the beach nearly to the stone cottage.
“He has not used these rooms since the night she was drowned,” she said. “He had his things moved out from the dressing-room. We made up one of the rooms at the end of the corridor. I don’t think he slept much even there. He used to sit in the armchair. There would be cigarette ash all round it in the morning. And in the daytime Frith would hear him in the library pacing up and down. Up and down, up and down.”
I too could see the ash on the floor beside the chair. I too could hear his footsteps; one, two, one, two, backwards and forwards across the library… Mrs. Danvers closed the door softly between the bedroom and the anteroom where we were standing, and put out the light. I could not see the bed anymore, nor the nightdress case upon the pillow, nor the dressing table, nor the slippers by the chair. She crossed the anteroom and put her hand on the knob of the door and stood waiting for me to follow her.
“I come to the rooms and dust them myself every day,” she said. “If you want to come again you have only to tell me. Ring me on the house telephone. I shall understand. I don’t allow the maids up here. No one ever comes but me.”
Her manner was fawning again, intimate and unpleasant. The smile on her face was a false, unnatural thing. “Sometimes when Mr. de Winter is away, and you feel lonely, you might like to come up to these rooms and sit here. You have only to tell me. They are such beautiful rooms. You would not think she had gone now for so long, would you, not by the way the rooms are kept? You would think she had just gone out for a little while and would be back in the evening.”
I forced a smile. I could not speak. My throat felt dry and tight.
“It’s not only this room,” she said. “It’s in many rooms in the house. In the morning room, in the hall, even in the little flower room. I feel her everywhere. You do too, don’t you?”