Then, with a little rush of embarrassment, she understood the reason for his abnormality, and she turned away her eyes. He was an albino.

He took off his hat and bared his head before her.

"Perhaps I had better introduce myself," he said, with a smile. "However unconventional the meeting, it is, I believe, the usual thing to do. My name is Francis Davey, and I am the vicar of Altarnun."

Chapter 7

There was something strangely peaceful about the house, something very rare and difficult to define. It was like a house in an old tale, discovered by the hero one evening in midsummer; there should be a barrier of thorns about it through which he must cut his way with a knife, and then a galaxy of flowers growing in profusion, with monstrous blooms untended by human hand. Giant ferns would mass themselves beneath the windows, and white lilies on tall stems. In the tale there would be strands of ivy clustering the walls, barring the entrance, and the house itself would have slept for a thousand years.

Mary smiled at her fancy and spread her hands once more to the log fire. The silence was pleasing to her; it soothed her weariness and took away her fear. This was a different world from Jamaica Inn. There the silence was oppressive and heavy with malice; the disused rooms stank of neglect. Here it was different. The room in which she was sitting had the quiet impersonality of a drawing room visited by night. The furniture, the table in the centre, the pictures on the walls were without that look of solid familiarity belonging to the day. They were like sleeping things, stumbled upon at midnight by surprise. People had lived here once — happy, placid people; old rectors with musty books beneath their arms; and there by the window a grey-haired woman in a blue gown had stooped to thread her needle. That was all very long ago. They slept now in the churchyard beyond the gate, their names indecipherable on the lichened stone. Since they had gone the house had withdrawn into itself and become silent, and the man who lived there now had suffered the personality of those who had gone before to remain unchanged.

Mary watched him as he laid the table for supper, and she thought how wisely he had allowed himself to become submerged in the atmosphere of the house; for another man would have chatted, perhaps, or made some clatter with the cups, feeling the silence a constraint. Her eyes wandered about the room, and she accepted without question the walls bare of the usual biblical themes, the polished desk empty of papers and books that in her mind were associated with the living room of a rectory. Standing in the corner was an easel, and on it a half-finished canvas of the pool at Dozmary. It had been painted on a grey day, with the rain clouds overhead, and the water lacked all brilliance and was slate coloured, without wind. The scene held Mary's eyes and fascinated her. She knew nothing of painting, but the picture had power, and she could almost feel the rain in her face. He must have watched the direction of her eyes, for he went to the easel and turned the painting with its back towards her, "Don't look at that," he said. "It was done in a hurry, and I had no time to finish it. If you like pictures, you shall see something better. But first of all I'm going to give you your supper. Don't move from the chair. I'll bring the table to you."

It was a novelty to be waited upon, but he did it so quietly and made such little show that it seemed a natural everyday occurrence, and Mary was without embarrassment. "Hannah lives in the village," he said; "she leaves every afternoon a four. I prefer to be by myself. I like getting my own supper and then I can choose my own time. Luckily she made apple tart today. I hope you can eat it; her pastry is only moderate."

He poured her out a steaming cup of tea, heaping into it a spoonful of cream. She could not yet accustom herself to his white hair and his eyes; they were such a direct contrast to his voice, and his black clerical dress made them the more remarkable. She was still tired, and a little strange to her surroundings, and he respected her desire for silence. Mary swallowed her supper, and now and again she stole a look at him from behind her cup of tea, but he seemed to sense her glance at once, for he would turn his eyes upon her with their cold white stare — like the impersonal and penetrating stare of a blind man — and she would look away again over his shoulder to the lime-green walls of the room, or to the easel in the corner.

"It was providential that I should come upon you on the moor tonight," he said at length, when she had pushed away her plate and sunk once more into the chair, her chin in her hand. The warmth of the room and the hot tea had made her drowsy, and his gentle voice came to her from far away.

"My work sometimes takes me to the outlying cottages and farms," he continued. "This afternoon I helped to bring a child into the world. It will live, and the mother too. They are hardy and care for nothing, these people of the moors. You may have noticed that for yourself. I have a great respect for them."

Mary had nothing to say in reply. The company who came to Jamaica Inn had not impressed her with respect. She wondered what was the scent of roses that filled the air, and then she noticed for the first time the bowl of dried petals on the small table behind her chair. Then he spoke again, his voice gentle as ever, but with a new insistence.

"Why did you wander on the moor tonight?" he said.

Mary roused herself and looked into his eyes. They stared down at her in infinite compassion, and she longed to trespass on their mercy.

Scarcely aware of how it happened, she heard her voice reply to his.

"I'm in terrible trouble," she said. "Sometimes I think I shall become like my aunt and go out of my mind. You may have heard rumours down here in Altarnun, and you will have shrugged your shoulders, and not listened to them. I've not been at Jamaica Inn much over a month, but it seems like twenty years. It's my aunt that worries me; if only I could get her away. But she won't leave Uncle Joss, for all his treatment of her. Every night I go to bed wondering if I shall wake up and hear the waggons. The first time they came there were six or seven of them, and they brought great parcels and boxes that the men stored in the barred room at the end of the passage. A man was killed that night; I saw the rope hanging from the beam downstairs—" She broke off, the warm colour flooding her face. "I've never told anyone before," she said. "It had to come out. I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. I shouldn't have said it. I've done something terrible."

For a little while he did not answer; he let her take her time, and then, when she had recovered herself, he spoke gently, and slowly, like a father who reassures a frightened child.

"Don't be afraid," he said; "your secret is safe; no one shall know of this but me. You're very tired, you know, and this is all my fault for bringing you into the warm room and making you eat. I ought to have put you to bed. You must have been on the moor for hours, and there are bad places between here and Jamaica; the bogs are at their worst this time of the year. When you are rested, I'll take you back in the trap, and I'll make your excuses myself to the landlord if you wish."

"Oh, you mustn't do that," said Mary quickly. "If he suspected half of what I've done tonight he would kill me, and you too. You don't understand. He's a desperate man, and he'd stop at nothing. No, if the worst comes to the worst I'll try and climb up the porch to my bedroom window, and get in that way. He must never know I have been here, or that I've met you even."

"Isn't your imagination running away with you a little?" said the vicar. "I know I must seem unsympathetic and cold, but this is the nineteenth century, you know, and men don't murder one another without reason. I believe I have as much right to drive you on the King's highway as your uncle himself. Having gone so far, don't you think you had better let me hear the rest of your story? What is your name, and how long have you been living at Jamaica Inn?"

Mary looked up at the pale eyes in the colourless face, the halo of cropped white hair, and she thought again how strange a freak of nature was this man, who might be twenty-one, who might be sixty, and who with his soft, persuasive voice would compel her to admit every secret her heart possessed, had he the mind to ask her. She could trust him; that at least was certain. Still she hesitated, turning the words over in her mind.

"Come," he said with a smile; "I have heard confession in my time. Not here in Altarnun, but in Ireland and in Spain. Your story will not sound as strange to me as you think. There are other worlds besides Jamaica Inn."

His speech made her feel humble and a little confused. It was as though he mocked her, for all his tact and kindness, and supposed her, in the back of his mind, to be hysterical and young. She plunged headlong into her story with jerky ill-framed sentences, beginning with that first Saturday night in the bar, and then working backwards to her arrival at the inn. Her tale sounded flat and unconvincing, even to herself who knew the truth of it, and her great fatigue made her labour in the telling of it, so that she was continually at a loss for words, and she kept pausing for reflection, and then going back on her story and repeating herself. He heard her to the end with patience, without comment or question, but all the while she felt his white eyes watching her, and he had a little trick of swallowing at intervals which she came instinctively to recognise and wait for. The fear she had sustained, the agony and the doubt, sounded to her ears, as she listened, like the worked-up invention of an over-stimulated mind, and the conversation in the bar between her uncle and the stranger had developed into an elaborate piece of nonsense. She sensed, rather than saw, the vicar's unbelief; and in a desperate attempt to tone down her now ridiculous and highly coloured story, her uncle, who had been the villain of it, became the usual hard-drinking bully of a countryman who beat his wife once a week, and the waggons themselves had no more menace than carriers' carts, travelling by night to expedite delivery.

The visit of the squire of North Hill early that day had some conviction, but the empty room struck another note of anticlimax, and the only part of the story that rang with any sense of reality was Mary's losing herself on the moors during the afternoon.

When she had finished, the vicar got up from his chair and began to pace about the room. He whistled softly under his breath and kept playing with a loose button on his coat that was hanging by a thread. Then he came to a standstill on the hearth, with his back to the fire, and looked down upon her — but Mary could read nothing from his eyes.

"I believe you, of course," he said, after a moment or so. "You haven't the face of a liar, and I doubt if you know the meaning of hysteria. But your story wouldn't go in a court of law — not as you've told it tonight, anyhow. It's too much of a fairy tale. And another thing — it's a scandal and an outrage, we all know that, but smuggling is rife all over the country, and half the magistrates do very well out of it. That shocks you, doesn't it? But I can assure you it's the truth. If the law was stricter there would be greater supervision, and your uncle's little nest at Jamaica Inn would have been blotted out long ago. I have met Mr. Bassat once or twice, and I believe him to be an honest, genuine sort of fellow, but, between ourselves, a bit of a fool. He'd bluster and talk, but that's about all. He'll keep this morning's expedition very quiet, unless I'm much mistaken. Actually he had no business to walk into the inn and search the rooms, and if it becomes known that he did so, and found nothing for his pains, he'll become the laughingstock of the countryside. I can tell you one thing, though: his visit will have scared your uncle, and he'll lie low now for a time. There won't be any more waggons to Jamaica Inn for some while. I think you can be certain of that."

Mary listened to his reasoning with some misgiving. She had hoped he would be appalled, once admitting the truth of her story, but here he was, apparently quite unmoved, taking it all as a matter of course.

He must have seen the disappointment in her face, for he spoke again.

"I could see Mr. Bassat, if you like," he said, "and put your story to him. But unless he can catch your uncle at work, as it were, with the waggons in the yard, there's little chance of convicting him. That's what I must impress upon your mind. I'm afraid I sound very unhelpful, but the position is a difficult one from every point of view. And then again, you don't want your uncle to be implicated in the business, but I don't see how it can be avoided, if it comes to an arrest."