The feeling was strong within me that I should never see Maxim again. It was certainty, born of some strange instinct. He had gone away and would not come back. I knew in my heart that Frank believed this too and would not admit it to me on the telephone. He did not want to frighten me. If I rang him up again at the office now I should find that he had gone. The clerk would say, 'Mr Crawley has just gone out, Mrs de Winter', and I could see Frank, hatless, climbing into his small, shabby Morris, driving off in search of Maxim.
I went and stared out of the window at the little clearing where the satyr played his pipes. The rhododendrons were all over now. They would not bloom again for another year. The tall shrubs looked dark and drab now that the colour had gone. A fog was rolling up from the sea, and I could not see the woods beyond the bank. It was very hot, very oppressive. I could imagine our guests of last night saying to one another, 'What a good thing this fog kept off for yesterday, we should never have seen the fireworks.' I went out of the morning-room and through the drawing-room to the terrace. The sun had gone in now behind a wall of mist. It was as though a blight had fallen upon Manderley taking the sky away and the light of the day. One of the gardeners passed me with a barrow full of bits of paper, and litter, and the skins of fruit left on the lawns by the people last night.
'Good morning,' I said.
'Good morning, Madam.'
'I'm afraid the ball last night has made a lot of work for you,' I said.
"That's all right, Madam,' he said. 'I think everyone enjoyed themselves good and hearty, and that's the main thing, isn't it?'
'Yes, I suppose so,' I said.
He looked across the lawns to the clearing in the woods where the valley sloped to the sea. The dark trees loomed thin and indistinct.
'It's coming up very thick,' he said.
'Yes,' I said.
'A good thing it wasn't like this last night,' he said.
'Yes,' I said.
He waited a moment, and then he touched his cap and went off trundling his barrow. I went across the lawns to the edge of the woods. The mist in the trees had turned to moisture and dripped upon my bare head like a thin rain. Jasper stood by my feet dejected, his tail downcast, his pink tongue hanging from his mouth. The clammy oppression of the day made him listless and heavy. I could hear the sea from where I stood, sullen and slow, as it broke in the coves below the woods. The white fog rolled on past me towards the house smelling of damp salt and seaweed. I put my hand on Jasper's coat. It was wringing wet. When I looked back at the house I could not see the chimneys or the contour of the walls, I could only see the vague substance of the house, the windows in the west wing, and the flower tubs on the terrace. The shutter had been pulled aside from the window of the large bedroom in the west wing, and someone was standing there, looking down upon the lawns. The figure was shadowy and indistinct and for one moment of shock and fear I believed it to be Maxim. Then the figure moved, I saw the arm reach up to fold the shutter, and I knew it was Mrs Danvers. She had been watching me as I stood at the edge of the woods bathed in that white wall of fog. She had seen me walk slowly from the terrace to the lawns. She may have listened to my conversation with Frank on the telephone from the connecting line in her own room. She would know that Maxim had not been with me last night. She would have heard my voice, known about my tears. She knew the part I had played through the long hours, standing by Maxim's side in my blue dress at the bottom of the stairs, and that he had not looked at me nor spoken to me. She knew because she had meant it to happen. This was her triumph, hers and Rebecca's.
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 any more. 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?'