“‘Ah!’ she said, ‘I know why you’re sitting here, and fretting, all by

yourself. The best thing that can happen for your advantage, Rosanna,

will be for Mr. Franklin’s visit here to come to an end. It’s my belief

that he won’t be long now before he leaves the house.”

“In all my thoughts of you I had never thought of your going away. I

couldn’t speak to Penelope. I could only look at her.

“‘I’ve just left Miss Rachel,’ Penelope went on. ‘And a hard matter I

have had of it to put up with her temper. She says the house is

unbearable to her with the police in it; and she’s determined to speak

to my lady this evening, and to go to her Aunt Ablewhite tomorrow. If

she does that, Mr. Franklin will be the next to find a reason for going

away, you may depend on it!’

“I recovered the use of my tongue at that. ‘Do you mean to say Mr.

Franklin will go with her?’ I asked.

“‘Only too gladly, if she would let him; but she won’t. _He_ has been

made to feel her temper; _he_ is in her black books too—and that after

having done all he can to help her, poor fellow! No! no! If they don’t

make it up before tomorrow, you will see Miss Rachel go one way, and

Mr. Franklin another. Where he may betake himself to I can’t say. But

he will never stay here, Rosanna, after Miss Rachel has left us.’

“I managed to master the despair I felt at the prospect of your going

away. To own the truth, I saw a little glimpse of hope for myself if

there was really a serious disagreement between Miss Rachel and you.

‘Do you know,’ I asked, ‘what the quarrel is between them?’

“‘It is all on Miss Rachel’s side,’ Penelope said. ‘And, for anything I

know to the contrary, it’s all Miss Rachel’s temper, and nothing else.

I am loth to distress you, Rosanna; but don’t run away with the notion

that Mr. Franklin is ever likely to quarrel with _her_. He’s a great

deal too fond of her for that!’

“She had only just spoken those cruel words when there came a call to

us from Mr. Betteredge. All the indoor servants were to assemble in the

hall. And then we were to go in, one by one, and be questioned in Mr.

Betteredge’s room by Sergeant Cuff.

“It came to my turn to go in, after her ladyship’s maid and the upper

housemaid had been questioned first. Sergeant Cuff’s inquiries—though

he wrapped them up very cunningly—soon showed me that those two women

(the bitterest enemies I had in the house) had made their discoveries

outside my door, on the Tuesday afternoon, and again on the Thursday

night. They had told the Sergeant enough to open his eyes to some part

of the truth. He rightly believed me to have made a new nightgown

secretly, but he wrongly believed the paint-stained nightgown to be

mine. I felt satisfied of another thing, from what he said, which it

puzzled me to understand. He suspected me, of course, of being

concerned in the disappearance of the Diamond. But, at the same time,

he let me see—purposely, as I thought—that he did not consider me as

the person chiefly answerable for the loss of the jewel. He appeared to

think that I had been acting under the direction of somebody else. Who

that person might be, I couldn’t guess then, and can’t guess now.

“In this uncertainty, one thing was plain—that Sergeant Cuff was miles

away from knowing the whole truth. You were safe as long as the

nightgown was safe—and not a moment longer.

“I quite despair of making you understand the distress and terror which

pressed upon me now. It was impossible for me to risk wearing your

nightgown any longer. I might find myself taken off, at a moment’s

notice, to the police court at Frizinghall, to be charged on suspicion,

and searched accordingly. While Sergeant Cuff still left me free, I had

to choose—and at once—between destroying the nightgown, or hiding it in

some safe place, at some safe distance from the house.

“If I had only been a little less fond of you, I think I should have

destroyed it. But oh! how could I destroy the only thing I had which

proved that I had saved you from discovery? If we did come to an

explanation together, and if you suspected me of having some bad

motive, and denied it all, how could I win upon you to trust me, unless

I had the nightgown to produce? Was it wronging you to believe, as I

did and do still, that you might hesitate to let a poor girl like me be

the sharer of your secret, and your accomplice in the theft which your

money-troubles had tempted you to commit? Think of your cold behaviour

to me, sir, and you will hardly wonder at my unwillingness to destroy

the only claim on your confidence and your gratitude which it was my

fortune to possess.

“I determined to hide it; and the place I fixed on was the place I knew

best—the Shivering Sand.

“As soon as the questioning was over, I made the first excuse that came

into my head, and got leave to go out for a breath of fresh air. I went

straight to Cobb’s Hole, to Mr. Yolland’s cottage. His wife and

daughter were the best friends I had. Don’t suppose I trusted them with

your secret—I have trusted nobody. All I wanted was to write this

letter to you, and to have a safe opportunity of taking the nightgown

off me. Suspected as I was, I could do neither of those things with any

sort of security, at the house.

“And now I have nearly got through my long letter, writing it alone in

Lucy Yolland’s bedroom. When it is done, I shall go downstairs with the

nightgown rolled up, and hidden under my cloak. I shall find the means

I want for keeping it safe and dry in its hiding-place, among the

litter of old things in Mrs. Yolland’s kitchen. And then I shall go to

the Shivering Sand—don’t be afraid of my letting my footmarks betray

me!—and hide the nightgown down in the sand, where no living creature

can find it without being first let into the secret by myself.

“And, when that’s done, what then?

“Then, Mr. Franklin, I shall have two reasons for making another

attempt to say the words to you which I have not said yet. If you leave

the house, as Penelope believes you will leave it, and if I haven’t

spoken to you before that, I shall lose my opportunity forever. That is

one reason. Then, again, there is the comforting knowledge—if my

speaking does make you angry—that I have got the nightgown ready to

plead my cause for me as nothing else can. That is my other reason. If

these two together don’t harden my heart against the coldness which has

hitherto frozen it up (I mean the coldness of your treatment of me),

there will be the end of my efforts—and the end of my life.

“Yes. If I miss my next opportunity—if you are as cruel as ever, and if

I feel it again as I have felt it already—good-bye to the world which

has grudged me the happiness that it gives to others. Good-bye to life,

which nothing but a little kindness from _you_ can ever make

pleasurable to me again. Don’t blame yourself, sir, if it ends in this

way. But try—do try—to feel some forgiving sorrow for me! I shall take

care that you find out what I have done for you, when I am past telling

you of it myself. Will you say something kind of me then—in the same

gentle way that you have when you speak to Miss Rachel? If you do that,

and if there are such things as ghosts, I believe my ghost will hear

it, and tremble with the pleasure of it.

“It’s time I left off. I am making myself cry. How am I to see my way

to the hiding-place if I let these useless tears come and blind me?

“Besides, why should I look at the gloomy side? Why not believe, while

I can, that it will end well after all? I may find you in a good humour

tonight—or, if not, I may succeed better tomorrow morning. I sha’n’t

improve my plain face by fretting—shall I? Who knows but I may have

filled all these weary long pages of paper for nothing? They will go,

for safety’s sake (never mind now for what other reason) into the

hiding-place along with the nightgown. It has been hard, hard work

writing my letter. Oh! if we only end in understanding each other, how

I shall enjoy tearing it up!

“I beg to remain, sir, your true lover and humble servant,

“ROSANNA SPEARMAN.”

The reading of the letter was completed by Betteredge in silence. After

carefully putting it back in the envelope, he sat thinking, with his

head bowed down, and his eyes on the ground.

“Betteredge,” I said, “is there any hint to guide me at the end of the

letter?”

He looked up slowly, with a heavy sigh.

“There is nothing to guide you, Mr. Franklin,” he answered. “If you

take my advice you will keep the letter in the cover till these present

anxieties of yours have come to an end. It will sorely distress you,

whenever you read it. Don’t read it now.”

I put the letter away in my pocket-book.

A glance back at the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of Betteredge’s

Narrative will show that there really was a reason for my thus sparing

myself, at a time when my fortitude had been already cruelly tried.

Twice over, the unhappy woman had made her last attempt to speak to me.

And twice over, it had been my misfortune (God knows how innocently!)

to repel the advances she had made to me. On the Friday night, as

Betteredge truly describes it, she had found me alone at the

billiard-table. Her manner and language suggested to me and would have

suggested to any man, under the circumstances—that she was about to

confess a guilty knowledge of the disappearance of the Diamond. For her

own sake, I had purposely shown no special interest in what was coming;

for her own sake, I had purposely looked at the billiard-balls, instead

of looking at _her_—and what had been the result? I had sent her away

from me, wounded to the heart! On the Saturday again—on the day when

she must have foreseen, after what Penelope had told her, that my

departure was close at hand—the same fatality still pursued us. She had

once more attempted to meet me in the shrubbery walk, and she had found

me there in company with Betteredge and Sergeant Cuff. In her hearing,

the Sergeant, with his own underhand object in view, had appealed to my

interest in Rosanna Spearman. Again for the poor creature’s own sake, I

had met the police-officer with a flat denial, and had declared—loudly

declared, so that she might hear _me_ too—that I felt “no interest

whatever in Rosanna Spearman.” At those words, solely designed to warn

her against attempting to gain my private ear, she had turned away and

left the place: cautioned of her danger, as I then believed;

self-doomed to destruction, as I know now. From that point, I have

already traced the succession of events which led me to the astounding

discovery at the quicksand. The retrospect is now complete. I may leave

the miserable story of Rosanna Spearman—to which, even at this distance

of time, I cannot revert without a pang of distress—to suggest for

itself all that is here purposely left unsaid. I may pass from the

suicide at the Shivering Sand, with its strange and terrible influence

on my present position and future prospects, to interests which concern

the living people of this narrative, and to events which were already

paving my way for the slow and toilsome journey from the darkness to

the light.

CHAPTER VI

I walked to the railway station accompanied, it is needless to say, by

Gabriel Betteredge. I had the letter in my pocket, and the nightgown

safely packed in a little bag—both to be submitted, before I slept that

night, to the investigation of Mr. Bruff.

We left the house in silence. For the first time in my experience of

him, I found old Betteredge in my company without a word to say to me.

Having something to say on my side, I opened the conversation as soon

as we were clear of the lodge gates.

“Before I go to London,” I began, “I have two questions to ask you.

They relate to myself, and I believe they will rather surprise you.”

“If they will put that poor creature’s letter out of my head, Mr.

Franklin, they may do anything else they like with me. Please to begin

surprising me, sir, as soon as you can.”

“My first question, Betteredge, is this. Was I drunk on the night of

Rachel’s Birthday?”

“_You_ drunk!” exclaimed the old man. “Why it’s the great defect of

your character, Mr. Franklin that you only drink with your dinner, and

never touch a drop of liquor afterwards!”

“But the birthday was a special occasion. I might have abandoned my

regular habits, on that night of all others.”

Betteredge considered for a moment.

“You did go out of your habits, sir,” he said. “And I’ll tell you how.

You looked wretchedly ill—and we persuaded you to have a drop of brandy

and water to cheer you up a little.”

“I am not used to brandy and water. It is quite possible——”

“Wait a bit, Mr. Franklin. I knew you were not used, too. I poured you

out half a wineglass-full of our fifty year old Cognac; and (more shame

for me!) I drowned that noble liquor in nigh on a tumbler-full of cold

water. A child couldn’t have got drunk on it—let alone a grown man!”

I knew I could depend on his memory, in a matter of this kind. It was

plainly impossible that I could have been intoxicated. I passed on to

the second question.

“Before I was sent abroad, Betteredge, you saw a great deal of me when

I was a boy? Now tell me plainly, do you remember anything strange of

me, after I had gone to bed at night? Did you ever discover me walking

in my sleep?”

Betteredge stopped, looked at me for a moment, nodded his head, and

walked on again.

“I see your drift now, Mr. Franklin!” he said “You’re trying to account

for how you got the paint on your nightgown, without knowing it

yourself. It won’t do, sir. You’re miles away still from getting at the

truth. Walk in your sleep? You never did such a thing in your life!”

Here again, I felt that Betteredge must be right. Neither at home nor

abroad had my life ever been of the solitary sort. If I had been a

sleep-walker, there were hundreds on hundreds of people who must have

discovered me, and who, in the interest of my own safety, would have

warned me of the habit, and have taken precautions to restrain it.

Still, admitting all this, I clung—with an obstinacy which was surely

natural and excusable, under the circumstances—to one or other of the

only two explanations that I could see which accounted for the

unendurable position in which I then stood. Observing that I was not

yet satisfied, Betteredge shrewdly adverted to certain later events in

the history of the Moonstone; and scattered both my theories to the

wind at once and for ever.

“Let’s try it another way, sir,” he said. “Keep your own opinion, and

see how far it will take you towards finding out the truth. If we are

to believe the nightgown—which I don’t for one—you not only smeared off

the paint from the door, without knowing it, but you also took the

Diamond without knowing it. Is that right, so far?”

“Quite right. Go on.”

“Very good, sir. We’ll say you were drunk, or walking in your sleep,

when you took the jewel. That accounts for the night and morning, after

the birthday. But how does it account for what has happened since that

time? The Diamond has been taken to London, since that time. The

Diamond has been pledged to Mr. Luker, since that time. Did you do

those two things, without knowing it, too? Were you drunk when I saw

you off in the pony-chaise on that Saturday evening? And did you walk

in your sleep to Mr. Luker’s, when the train had brought you to your

journey’s end? Excuse me for saying it, Mr. Franklin, but this business

has so upset you, that you’re not fit yet to judge for yourself. The

sooner you lay your head alongside Mr. Bruff’s head, the sooner you

will see your way out of the dead-lock that has got you now.”

We reached the station, with only a minute or two to spare.

I hurriedly gave Betteredge my address in London, so that he might

write to me, if necessary; promising, on my side, to inform him of any

news which I might have to communicate. This done, and just as I was

bidding him farewell, I happened to glance towards the

book-and-newspaper stall. There was Mr. Candy’s remarkable-looking

assistant again, speaking to the keeper of the stall! Our eyes met at

the same moment. Ezra Jennings took off his hat to me. I returned the

salute, and got into a carriage just as the train started. It was a

relief to my mind, I suppose, to dwell on any subject which appeared to

be, personally, of no sort of importance to me. At all events, I began

the momentous journey back which was to take me to Mr. Bruff,

wondering—absurdly enough, I admit—that I should have seen the man with

the piebald hair twice in one day!

The hour at which I arrived in London precluded all hope of my finding

Mr. Bruff at his place of business. I drove from the railway to his

private residence at Hampstead, and disturbed the old lawyer dozing

alone in his dining-room, with his favourite pug-dog on his lap, and

his bottle of wine at his elbow.

I shall best describe the effect which my story produced on the mind of

Mr. Bruff by relating his proceedings when he had heard it to the end.

He ordered lights, and strong tea, to be taken into his study; and he

sent a message to the ladies of his family, forbidding them to disturb

us on any pretence whatever. These preliminaries disposed of, he first

examined the nightgown, and then devoted himself to the reading of

Rosanna Spearman’s letter.

The reading completed, Mr. Bruff addressed me for the first time since

we had been shut up together in the seclusion of his own room.

“Franklin Blake,” said the old gentleman, “this is a very serious

matter, in more respects than one. In my opinion, it concerns Rachel

quite as nearly as it concerns you. Her extraordinary conduct is no

mystery _now_. She believes you have stolen the Diamond.”

I had shrunk from reasoning my own way fairly to that revolting

conclusion. But it had forced itself on me, nevertheless. My resolution

to obtain a personal interview with Rachel, rested really and truly on

the ground just stated by Mr. Bruff.

“The first step to take in this investigation,” the lawyer proceeded,

“is to appeal to Rachel. She has been silent all this time, from

motives which I (who know her character) can readily understand. It is

impossible, after what has happened, to submit to that silence any

longer. She must be persuaded to tell us, or she must be forced to tell

us, on what grounds she bases her belief that you took the Moonstone.

The chances are, that the whole of this case, serious as it seems now,

will tumble to pieces, if we can only break through Rachel’s inveterate

reserve, and prevail upon her to speak out.”

“That is a very comforting opinion for _me_,” I said. “I own I should

like to know——”

“You would like to know how I can justify it,” interposed Mr. Bruff. “I

can tell you in two minutes. Understand, in the first place, that I

look at this matter from a lawyer’s point of view. It’s a question of

evidence, with me. Very well. The evidence breaks down, at the outset,

on one important point.”

“On what point?”

“You shall hear. I admit that the mark of the name proves the nightgown

to be yours. I admit that the mark of the paint proves the nightgown to

have made the smear on Rachel’s door. But what evidence is there to

prove that you are the person who wore it, on the night when the

Diamond was lost?”

The objection struck me, all the more forcibly that it reflected an

objection which I had felt myself.

“As to this,” pursued the lawyer taking up Rosanna Spearman’s

confession, “I can understand that the letter is a distressing one to

_you_. I can understand that you may hesitate to analyse it from a

purely impartial point of view. But _I_ am not in your position. I can

bring my professional experience to bear on this document, just as I

should bring it to bear on any other. Without alluding to the woman’s

career as a thief, I will merely remark that her letter proves her to

have been an adept at deception, on her own showing; and I argue from

that, that I am justified in suspecting her of not having told the

whole truth. I won’t start any theory, at present, as to what she may

or may not have done. I will only say that, if Rachel has suspected you

_on the evidence of the nightgown only_, the chances are ninety-nine to

a hundred that Rosanna Spearman was the person who showed it to her. In

that case, there is the woman’s letter, confessing that she was jealous

of Rachel, confessing that she changed the roses, confessing that she

saw a glimpse of hope for herself, in the prospect of a quarrel between

Rachel and you. I don’t stop to ask who took the Moonstone (as a means

to her end, Rosanna Spearman would have taken fifty Moonstones)—I only

say that the disappearance of the jewel gave this reclaimed thief who

was in love with you, an opportunity of setting you and Rachel at

variance for the rest of your lives. She had not decided on destroying

herself, _then_, remember; and, having the opportunity, I distinctly

assert that it was in her character, and in her position at the time,

to take it. What do you say to that?”

“Some such suspicion,” I answered, “crossed my own mind, as soon as I

opened the letter.”

“Exactly! And when you had read the letter, you pitied the poor

creature, and couldn’t find it in your heart to suspect her. Does you

credit, my dear sir—does you credit!”

“But suppose it turns out that I did wear the nightgown? What then?”

“I don’t see how the fact can be proved,” said Mr. Bruff. “But assuming

the proof to be possible, the vindication of your innocence would be no

easy matter. We won’t go into that, now. Let us wait and see whether

Rachel hasn’t suspected you on the evidence of the nightgown only.”

“Good God, how coolly you talk of Rachel suspecting me!” I broke out.

“What right has she to suspect Me, on any evidence, of being a thief?”

“A very sensible question, my dear sir. Rather hotly put—but well worth

considering for all that. What puzzles you, puzzles me too. Search your

memory, and tell me this. Did anything happen while you were staying at

the house—not, of course, to shake Rachel’s belief in your honour—but,

let us say, to shake her belief (no matter with how little reason) in

your principles generally?”

I started, in ungovernable agitation, to my feet. The lawyer’s question

reminded me, for the first time since I had left England, that

something _had_ happened.

In the eighth chapter of Betteredge’s Narrative, an allusion will be

found to the arrival of a foreigner and a stranger at my aunt’s house,

who came to see me on business. The nature of his business was this.

I had been foolish enough (being, as usual, straitened for money at the

time) to accept a loan from the keeper of a small restaurant in Paris,

to whom I was well known as a customer. A time was settled between us

for paying the money back; and when the time came, I found it (as

thousands of other honest men have found it) impossible to keep my

engagement. I sent the man a bill. My name was unfortunately too well

known on such documents: he failed to negotiate it. His affairs had

fallen into disorder, in the interval since I had borrowed of him;

bankruptcy stared him in the face; and a relative of his, a French

lawyer, came to England to find me, and to insist upon the payment of

my debt. He was a man of violent temper; and he took the wrong way with

me. High words passed on both sides; and my aunt and Rachel were

unfortunately in the next room, and heard us. Lady Verinder came in,

and insisted on knowing what was the matter. The Frenchman produced his

credentials, and declared me to be responsible for the ruin of a poor

man, who had trusted in my honour. My aunt instantly paid him the

money, and sent him off. She knew me better of course than to take the

Frenchman’s view of the transaction. But she was shocked at my

carelessness, and justly angry with me for placing myself in a

position, which, but for her interference, might have become a very

disgraceful one. Either her mother told her, or Rachel heard what

passed—I can’t say which. She took her own romantic, high-flown view of

the matter. I was “heartless”; I was “dishonourable”; I had “no

principle”; there was “no knowing what I might do next”—in short, she

said some of the severest things to me which I had ever heard from a

young lady’s lips. The breach between us lasted for the whole of the

next day. The day after, I succeeded in making my peace, and thought no

more of it. Had Rachel reverted to this unlucky accident, at the

critical moment when my place in her estimation was again, and far more

seriously, assailed? Mr. Bruff, when I had mentioned the circumstances

to him, answered the question at once in the affirmative.

“It would have its effect on her mind,” he said gravely. “And I wish,

for your sake, the thing had not happened. However, we have discovered

that there _was_ a predisposing influence against you—and there is one

uncertainty cleared out of our way, at any rate. I see nothing more

that we can do now. Our next step in this inquiry must be the step that

takes us to Rachel.”

He rose, and began walking thoughtfully up and down the room. Twice, I

was on the point of telling him that I had determined on seeing Rachel

personally; and twice, having regard to his age and his character, I

hesitated to take him by surprise at an unfavourable moment.

“The grand difficulty is,” he resumed, “how to make her show her whole

mind in this matter, without reserve. Have you any suggestions to

offer?”

“I have made up my mind, Mr. Bruff, to speak to Rachel myself.”

“You!” He suddenly stopped in his walk, and looked at me as if he

thought I had taken leave of my senses. “You, of all the people in the

world!” He abruptly checked himself, and took another turn in the room.

“Wait a little,” he said. “In cases of this extraordinary kind, the

rash way is sometimes the best way.” He considered the question for a

moment or two, under that new light, and ended boldly by a decision in

my favour. “Nothing venture, nothing have,” the old gentleman resumed.

“You have a chance in your favour which I don’t possess—and you shall

be the first to try the experiment.”

“A chance in my favour?” I repeated, in the greatest surprise.

Mr. Bruff’s face softened, for the first time, into a smile.

“This is how it stands,” he said. “I tell you fairly, I don’t trust

your discretion, and I don’t trust your temper. But I do trust in

Rachel’s still preserving, in some remote little corner of her heart, a

certain perverse weakness for _you_. Touch that—and trust to the

consequences for the fullest disclosures that can flow from a woman’s

lips! The question is—how are you to see her?”

“She has been a guest of yours at this house,” I answered. “May I

venture to suggest—if nothing was said about me beforehand—that I might

see her here?”

“Cool!” said Mr. Bruff. With that one word of comment on the reply that

I had made to him, he took another turn up and down the room.

“In plain English,” he said, “my house is to be turned into a trap to

catch Rachel; with a bait to tempt her, in the shape of an invitation

from my wife and daughters. If you were anybody else but Franklin

Blake, and if this matter was one atom less serious than it really is,

I should refuse point-blank. As things are, I firmly believe Rachel

will live to thank me for turning traitor to her in my old age.

Consider me your accomplice. Rachel shall be asked to spend the day

here; and you shall receive due notice of it.”

“When? Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow won’t give us time enough to get her answer. Say the day

after.”

“How shall I hear from you?”

“Stay at home all the morning and expect me to call on you.”

I thanked him for the inestimable assistance which he was rendering to

me, with the gratitude that I really felt; and, declining a hospitable

invitation to sleep that night at Hampstead, returned to my lodgings in

London.

Of the day that followed, I have only to say that it was the longest

day of my life. Innocent as I knew myself to be, certain as I was that

the abominable imputation which rested on me must sooner or later be

cleared off, there was nevertheless a sense of self-abasement in my

mind which instinctively disinclined me to see any of my friends. We

often hear (almost invariably, however, from superficial observers)

that guilt can look like innocence. I believe it to be infinitely the

truer axiom of the two that innocence can look like guilt. I caused

myself to be denied all day, to every visitor who called; and I only

ventured out under cover of the night.

The next morning, Mr. Bruff surprised me at the breakfast-table. He

handed me a large key, and announced that he felt ashamed of himself

for the first time in his life.

“Is she coming?”

“She is coming today, to lunch and spend the afternoon with my wife and

my girls.”

“Are Mrs. Bruff, and your daughters, in the secret?”

“Inevitably. But women, as you may have observed, have no principles.

My family don’t feel my pangs of conscience. The end being to bring you

and Rachel together again, my wife and daughters pass over the means

employed to gain it, as composedly as if they were Jesuits.”

“I am infinitely obliged to them. What is this key?”

“The key of the gate in my back-garden wall. Be there at three this

afternoon. Let yourself into the garden, and make your way in by the

conservatory door. Cross the small drawing-room, and open the door in

front of you which leads into the music-room. There, you will find

Rachel—and find her, alone.”

“How can I thank you!”

“I will tell you how. Don’t blame _me_ for what happens afterwards.”

With those words, he went out.

I had many weary hours still to wait through. To while away the time, I

looked at my letters. Among them was a letter from Betteredge.

I opened it eagerly. To my surprise and disappointment, it began with

an apology warning me to expect no news of any importance. In the next

sentence the everlasting Ezra Jennings appeared again! He had stopped

Betteredge on the way out of the station, and had asked who I was.

Informed on this point, he had mentioned having seen me to his master

Mr. Candy. Mr. Candy hearing of this, had himself driven over to

Betteredge, to express his regret at our having missed each other. He

had a reason for wishing particularly to speak to me; and when I was

next in the neighbourhood of Frizinghall, he begged I would let him

know. Apart from a few characteristic utterances of the Betteredge

philosophy, this was the sum and substance of my correspondent’s

letter. The warm-hearted, faithful old man acknowledged that he had

written “mainly for the pleasure of writing to me.”

I crumpled up the letter in my pocket, and forgot it the moment after,

in the all-absorbing interest of my coming interview with Rachel.

As the clock of Hampstead church struck three, I put Mr. Bruff’s key

into the lock of the door in the wall. When I first stepped into the

garden, and while I was securing the door again on the inner side, I

own to having felt a certain guilty doubtfulness about what might

happen next. I looked furtively on either side of me; suspicious of the

presence of some unexpected witness in some unknown corner of the

garden. Nothing appeared, to justify my apprehensions. The walks were,

one and all, solitudes; and the birds and the bees were the only

witnesses.

I passed through the garden; entered the conservatory; and crossed the

small drawing-room. As I laid my hand on the door opposite, I heard a

few plaintive chords struck on the piano in the room within. She had

often idled over the instrument in this way, when I was staying at her

mother’s house. I was obliged to wait a little, to steady myself. The

past and present rose side by side, at that supreme moment—and the

contrast shook me.

After the lapse of a minute, I roused my manhood, and opened the door.

CHAPTER VII

At the moment when I showed myself in the doorway, Rachel rose from the

piano.

I closed the door behind me. We confronted each other in silence, with

the full length of the room between us. The movement she had made in

rising appeared to be the one exertion of which she was capable. All

use of every other faculty, bodily or mental, seemed to be merged in

the mere act of looking at me.

A fear crossed my mind that I had shown myself too suddenly. I advanced

a few steps towards her. I said gently, “Rachel!”

The sound of my voice brought the life back to her limbs, and the

colour to her face. She advanced, on her side, still without speaking.

Slowly, as if acting under some influence independent of her own will,

she came nearer and nearer to me; the warm dusky colour flushing her

cheeks, the light of reviving intelligence brightening every instant in

her eyes. I forgot the object that had brought me into her presence; I

forgot the vile suspicion that rested on my good name; I forgot every

consideration, past, present, and future, which I was bound to

remember. I saw nothing but the woman I loved coming nearer and nearer

to me. She trembled; she stood irresolute. I could resist it no

longer—I caught her in my arms, and covered her face with kisses.

There was a moment when I thought the kisses were returned; a moment

when it seemed as if she, too, might have forgotten. Almost before the

idea could shape itself in my mind, her first voluntary action made me

feel that she remembered. With a cry which was like a cry of

horror—with a strength which I doubt if I could have resisted if I had

tried—she thrust me back from her. I saw merciless anger in her eyes; I

saw merciless contempt on her lips. She looked me over, from head to

foot, as she might have looked at a stranger who had insulted her.

“You coward!” she said. “You mean, miserable, heartless coward!”

Those were her first words! The most unendurable reproach that a woman

can address to a man, was the reproach that she picked out to address

to Me.

“I remember the time, Rachel,” I said, “when you could have told me

that I had offended you, in a worthier way than that. I beg your

pardon.”

Something of the bitterness that I felt may have communicated itself to

my voice. At the first words of my reply, her eyes, which had been

turned away the moment before, looked back at me unwillingly. She

answered in a low tone, with a sullen submission of manner which was

quite new in my experience of her.

“Perhaps there is some excuse for me,” she said. “After what you have

done, is it a manly action, on your part, to find your way to me as you

have found it today? It seems a cowardly experiment, to try an

experiment on my weakness for you. It seems a cowardly surprise, to

surprise me into letting you kiss me. But that is only a woman’s view.

I ought to have known it couldn’t be your view. I should have done

better if I had controlled myself, and said nothing.”

The apology was more unendurable than the insult. The most degraded man

living would have felt humiliated by it.

“If my honour was not in your hands,” I said, “I would leave you this

instant, and never see you again. You have spoken of what I have done.

What have I done?”

“What have you done! _You_ ask that question of _me_?”

“I ask it.”

“I have kept your infamy a secret,” she answered. “And I have suffered

the consequences of concealing it. Have I no claim to be spared the

insult of your asking me what you have done? Is _all_ sense of

gratitude dead in you? You were once a gentleman. You were once dear to

my mother, and dearer still to me——”

Her voice failed her. She dropped into a chair, and turned her back on

me, and covered her face with her hands.

I waited a little before I trusted myself to say any more. In that

moment of silence, I hardly know which I felt most keenly—the sting

which her contempt had planted in me, or the proud resolution which

shut me out from all community with her distress.

“If you will not speak first,” I said, “I must. I have come here with

something serious to say to you. Will you do me the common justice of

listening while I say it?”

She neither moved, nor answered. I made no second appeal to her; I

never advanced an inch nearer to her chair. With a pride which was as

obstinate as her pride, I told her of my discovery at the Shivering

Sand, and of all that had led to it. The narrative, of necessity,

occupied some little time. From beginning to end, she never looked

round at me, and she never uttered a word.

I kept my temper. My whole future depended, in all probability, on my

not losing possession of myself at that moment. The time had come to

put Mr. Bruff’s theory to the test. In the breathless interest of

trying that experiment, I moved round so as to place myself in front of

her.

“I have a question to ask you,” I said. “It obliges me to refer again

to a painful subject. Did Rosanna Spearman show you the nightgown? Yes,

or No?”

She started to her feet; and walked close up to me of her own accord.

Her eyes looked me searchingly in the face, as if to read something

there which they had never read yet.

“Are you mad?” she asked.

I still restrained myself. I said quietly, “Rachel, will you answer my

question?”

She went on, without heeding me.

“Have you some object to gain which I don’t understand? Some mean fear

about the future, in which I am concerned? They say your father’s death

has made you a rich man. Have you come here to compensate me for the

loss of my Diamond? And have you heart enough left to feel ashamed of

your errand? Is _that_ the secret of your pretence of innocence, and

your story about Rosanna Spearman? Is there a motive of shame at the

bottom of all the falsehood, this time?”

I stopped her there. I could control myself no longer.

“You have done me an infamous wrong!” I broke out hotly. “You suspect

me of stealing your Diamond. I have a right to know, and I _will_ know,

the reason why!”

“Suspect you!” she exclaimed, her anger rising with mine. “_You

villain, I saw you take the Diamond with my own eyes!_”

The revelation which burst upon me in those words, the overthrow which

they instantly accomplished of the whole view of the case on which Mr.

Bruff had relied, struck me helpless. Innocent as I was, I stood before

her in silence. To her eyes, to any eyes, I must have looked like a man

overwhelmed by the discovery of his own guilt.

She drew back from the spectacle of my humiliation and of her triumph.

The sudden silence that had fallen upon me seemed to frighten her. “I

spared you, at the time,” she said. “I would have spared you now, if

you had not forced me to speak.” She moved away as if to leave the

room—and hesitated before she got to the door. “Why did you come here

to humiliate yourself?” she asked. “Why did you come here to humiliate

me?” She went on a few steps, and paused once more. “For God’s sake,

say something!” she exclaimed, passionately. “If you have any mercy

left, don’t let me degrade myself in this way! Say something—and drive

me out of the room!”

I advanced towards her, hardly conscious of what I was doing. I had

possibly some confused idea of detaining her until she had told me

more. From the moment when I knew that the evidence on which I stood

condemned in Rachel’s mind, was the evidence of her own eyes,

nothing—not even my conviction of my own innocence—was clear to my

mind. I took her by the hand; I tried to speak firmly and to the

purpose. All I could say was, “Rachel, you once loved me.”

She shuddered, and looked away from me. Her hand lay powerless and

trembling in mine. “Let go of it,” she said faintly.

My touch seemed to have the same effect on her which the sound of my

voice had produced when I first entered the room. After she had said

the word which called me a coward, after she had made the avowal which

branded me as a thief—while her hand lay in mine I was her master

still!

I drew her gently back into the middle of the room. I seated her by the

side of me. “Rachel,” I said, “I can’t explain the contradiction in

what I am going to tell you. I can only speak the truth as you have

spoken it. You saw me—with your own eyes, you saw me take the Diamond.

Before God who hears us, I declare that I now know I took it for the

first time! Do you doubt me still?”

She had neither heeded nor heard me. “Let go of my hand,” she repeated

faintly. That was her only answer. Her head sank on my shoulder; and

her hand unconsciously closed on mine, at the moment when she asked me

to release it.

I refrained from pressing the question. But there my forbearance

stopped. My chance of ever holding up my head again among honest men

depended on my chance of inducing her to make her disclosure complete.

The one hope left for me was the hope that she might have overlooked

something in the chain of evidence—some mere trifle, perhaps, which

might nevertheless, under careful investigation, be made the means of

vindicating my innocence in the end. I own I kept possession of her

hand. I own I spoke to her with all that I could summon back of the

sympathy and confidence of the bygone time.

“I want to ask you something,” I said. “I want you to tell me

everything that happened, from the time when we wished each other

good-night, to the time when you saw me take the Diamond.”

She lifted her head from my shoulder, and made an effort to release her

hand. “Oh, why go back to it!” she said. “Why go back to it!”

“I will tell you why, Rachel. You are the victim, and I am the victim,

of some monstrous delusion which has worn the mask of truth. If we look

at what happened on the night of your birthday together, we may end in

understanding each other yet.”

Her head dropped back on my shoulder. The tears gathered in her eyes,

and fell slowly over her cheeks. “Oh!” she said, “have _I_ never had

that hope? Have _I_ not tried to see it, as you are trying now?”

“You have tried by yourself,” I answered. “You have not tried with me

to help you.”

Those words seemed to awaken in her something of the hope which I felt

myself when I uttered them. She replied to my questions with more than

docility—she exerted her intelligence; she willingly opened her whole

mind to me.

“Let us begin,” I said, “with what happened after we had wished each

other good-night. Did you go to bed? or did you sit up?”

“I went to bed.”

“Did you notice the time? Was it late?”

“Not very. About twelve o’clock, I think.”

“Did you fall asleep?”

“No. I couldn’t sleep that night.”

“You were restless?”

“I was thinking of you.”

The answer almost unmanned me. Something in the tone, even more than in

the words, went straight to my heart. It was only after pausing a

little first that I was able to go on.

“Had you any light in your room?” I asked.

“None—until I got up again, and lit my candle.”

“How long was that, after you had gone to bed?”

“About an hour after, I think. About one o’clock.”

“Did you leave your bedroom?”

“I was going to leave it. I had put on my dressing-gown; and I was

going into my sitting-room to get a book——”

“Had you opened your bedroom door?”

“I had just opened it.”

“But you had not gone into the sitting-room?”

“No—I was stopped from going into it.”

“What stopped you?

“I saw a light, under the door; and I heard footsteps approaching it.”

“Were you frightened?”

“Not then. I knew my poor mother was a bad sleeper; and I remembered

that she had tried hard, that evening, to persuade me to let her take

charge of my Diamond. She was unreasonably anxious about it, as I

thought; and I fancied she was coming to me to see if I was in bed, and

to speak to me about the Diamond again, if she found that I was up.”

“What did you do?”

“I blew out my candle, so that she might think I was in bed. I was

unreasonable, on my side—I was determined to keep my Diamond in the

place of my own choosing.”

“After blowing out the candle, did you go back to bed?”

“I had no time to go back. At the moment when I blew the candle out,

the sitting-room door opened, and I saw——”

“You saw?”

“You.”

“Dressed as usual?”

“No.”

“In my nightgown?”

“In your nightgown—with your bedroom candle in your hand.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“Could you see my face?”

“Yes.”

“Plainly?”

“Quite plainly. The candle in your hand showed it to me.”

“Were my eyes open?”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice anything strange in them? Anything like a fixed, vacant

expression?”

“Nothing of the sort. Your eyes were bright—brighter than usual. You

looked about in the room, as if you knew you were where you ought not

to be, and as if you were afraid of being found out.”

“Did you observe one thing when I came into the room—did you observe

how I walked?”

“You walked as you always do. You came in as far as the middle of the

room—and then you stopped and looked about you.”

“What did you do, on first seeing me?”

“I could do nothing. I was petrified. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t call

out, I couldn’t even move to shut my door.”

“Could I see you, where you stood?”

“You might certainly have seen me. But you never looked towards me.

It’s useless to ask the question. I am sure you never saw me.”

“How are you sure?”

“Would you have taken the Diamond? would you have acted as you did

afterwards? would you be here now—if you had seen that I was awake and

looking at you? Don’t make me talk of that part of it! I want to answer

you quietly. Help me to keep as calm as I can. Go on to something

else.”

She was right—in every way, right. I went on to other things.

“What did I do, after I had got to the middle of the room, and had

stopped there?”

“You turned away, and went straight to the corner near the window—where

my Indian cabinet stands.”

“When I was at the cabinet, my back must have been turned towards you.

How did you see what I was doing?”

“When you moved, I moved.”

“So as to see what I was about with my hands?”

“There are three glasses in my sitting-room. As you stood there, I saw

all that you did, reflected in one of them.”

“What did you see?”

“You put your candle on the top of the cabinet. You opened, and shut,

one drawer after another, until you came to the drawer in which I had

put my Diamond. You looked at the open drawer for a moment. And then

you put your hand in, and took the Diamond out.”

“How do you know I took the Diamond out?”

“I saw your hand go into the drawer. And I saw the gleam of the stone

between your finger and thumb, when you took your hand out.”

“Did my hand approach the drawer again—to close it, for instance?”

“No. You had the Diamond in your right hand; and you took the candle

from the top of the cabinet with your left hand.”

“Did I look about me again, after that?”

“No.”

“Did I leave the room immediately?”

“No. You stood quite still, for what seemed a long time. I saw your

face sideways in the glass. You looked like a man thinking, and

dissatisfied with his own thoughts.”

“What happened next?”

“You roused yourself on a sudden, and you went straight out of the

room.”

“Did I close the door after me?”

“No. You passed out quickly into the passage, and left the door open.”

“And then?”

“Then, your light disappeared, and the sound of your steps died away,

and I was left alone in the dark.”

“Did nothing happen—from that time, to the time when the whole house

knew that the Diamond was lost?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure of that? Might you not have been asleep a part of the

time?”

“I never slept. I never went back to my bed. Nothing happened until

Penelope came in, at the usual time in the morning.”

I dropped her hand, and rose, and took a turn in the room. Every

question that I could put had been answered. Every detail that I could

desire to know had been placed before me. I had even reverted to the

idea of sleep-walking, and the idea of intoxication; and, again, the

worthlessness of the one theory and the other had been proved—on the

authority, this time, of the witness who had seen me. What was to be

said next? what was to be done next? There rose the horrible fact of

the Theft—the one visible, tangible object that confronted me, in the

midst of the impenetrable darkness which enveloped all besides! Not a

glimpse of light to guide me, when I had possessed myself of Rosanna

Spearman’s secret at the Shivering Sand. And not a glimpse of light

now, when I had appealed to Rachel herself, and had heard the hateful

story of the night from her own lips.

She was the first, this time, to break the silence.

“Well?” she said, “you have asked, and I have answered. You have made

me hope something from all this, because _you_ hoped something from it.

What have you to say now?”

The tone in which she spoke warned me that my influence over her was a

lost influence once more.

“We were to look at what happened on my birthday night, together,” she

went on; “and we were then to understand each other. Have we done

that?”

She waited pitilessly for my reply. In answering her I committed a

fatal error—I let the exasperating helplessness of my situation get the

better of my self-control. Rashly and uselessly, I reproached her for

the silence which had kept me until that moment in ignorance of the

truth.

“If you had spoken when you ought to have spoken,” I began; “if you had

done me the common justice to explain yourself——”

She broke in on me with a cry of fury. The few words I had said seemed

to have lashed her on the instant into a frenzy of rage.

“Explain myself!” she repeated. “Oh! is there another man like this in

the world? I spare him, when my heart is breaking; I screen him when my

own character is at stake; and _he_—of all human beings, _he_—turns on

me now, and tells me that I ought to have explained myself! After

believing in him as I did, after loving him as I did, after thinking of

him by day, and dreaming of him by night—he wonders I didn’t charge him

with his disgrace the first time we met: ‘My heart’s darling, you are a

Thief! My hero whom I love and honour, you have crept into my room

under cover of the night, and stolen my Diamond!’ That is what I ought

to have said. You villain, you mean, mean, mean villain, I would have

lost fifty diamonds, rather than see your face lying to me, as I see it

lying now!”

I took up my hat. In mercy to _her_—yes! I can honestly say it—in mercy

to _her_, I turned away without a word, and opened the door by which I

had entered the room.

She followed, and snatched the door out of my hand; she closed it, and

pointed back to the place that I had left.

“No!” she said. “Not yet! It seems that _I_ owe a justification of my

conduct to _you_. You shall stay and hear it. Or you shall stoop to the

lowest infamy of all, and force your way out.”

It wrung my heart to see her; it wrung my heart to hear her. I answered

by a sign—it was all I could do—that I submitted myself to her will.

The crimson flush of anger began to fade out of her face, as I went

back, and took my chair in silence. She waited a little, and steadied

herself. When she went on, but one sign of feeling was discernible in

her. She spoke without looking at me. Her hands were fast clasped in

her lap, and her eyes were fixed on the ground.

“I ought to have done you the common justice to explain myself,” she

said, repeating my own words. “You shall see whether I did try to do

you justice, or not. I told you just now that I never slept, and never

returned to my bed, after you had left my sitting-room. It’s useless to

trouble you by dwelling on what I thought—you would not understand my

thoughts—I will only tell you what I did, when time enough had passed

to help me to recover myself. I refrained from alarming the house, and

telling everybody what had happened—as I ought to have done. In spite

of what I had seen, I was fond enough of you to believe—no matter

what!—any impossibility, rather than admit it to my own mind that you

were deliberately a thief. I thought and thought—and I ended in writing

to you.”

“I never received the letter.”

“I know you never received it. Wait a little, and you shall hear why.

My letter would have told you nothing openly. It would not have ruined

you for life, if it had fallen into some other person’s hands. It would

only have said—in a manner which you yourself could not possibly have

mistaken—that I had reason to know you were in debt, and that it was in

my experience and in my mother’s experience of you, that you were not

very discreet, or very scrupulous about how you got money when you

wanted it. You would have remembered the visit of the French lawyer,

and you would have known what I referred to. If you had read on with

some interest after that, you would have come to an offer I had to make

to you—the offer, privately (not a word, mind, to be said openly about

it between us!), of the loan of as large a sum of money as I could

get.—And I would have got it!” she exclaimed, her colour beginning to

rise again, and her eyes looking up at me once more. “I would have

pledged the Diamond myself, if I could have got the money in no other

way! In those words I wrote to you. Wait! I did more than that. I

arranged with Penelope to give you the letter when nobody was near. I

planned to shut myself into my bedroom, and to have the sitting-room

left open and empty all the morning. And I hoped—with all my heart and

soul I hoped!—that you would take the opportunity, and put the Diamond

back secretly in the drawer.”

I attempted to speak. She lifted her hand impatiently, and stopped me.

In the rapid alternations of her temper, her anger was beginning to

rise again. She got up from her chair, and approached me.

“I know what you are going to say,” she went on. “You are going to

remind me again that you never received my letter. I can tell you why.

I tore it up.

“For what reason?” I asked.

“For the best of reasons. I preferred tearing it up to throwing it away

upon such a man as you! What was the first news that reached me in the

morning? Just as my little plan was complete, what did I hear? I heard

that you—you!!!—were the foremost person in the house in fetching the

police. You were the active man; you were the leader; you were working

harder than any of them to recover the jewel! You even carried your

audacity far enough to ask to speak to _me_ about the loss of the

Diamond—the Diamond which you yourself had stolen; the Diamond which

was all the time in your own hands! After that proof of your horrible

falseness and cunning, I tore up my letter. But even then—even when I

was maddened by the searching and questioning of the policeman, whom

_you_ had sent in—even then, there was some infatuation in my mind

which wouldn’t let me give you up. I said to myself, ‘He has played his

vile farce before everybody else in the house. Let me try if he can

play it before me.’ Somebody told me you were on the terrace. I went

down to the terrace. I forced myself to look at you; I forced myself to

speak to you. Have you forgotten what I said?”

I might have answered that I remembered every word of it. But what

purpose, at that moment, would the answer have served?

How could I tell her that what she had said had astonished me, had

distressed me, had suggested to me that she was in a state of dangerous

nervous excitement, had even roused a moment’s doubt in my mind whether

the loss of the jewel was as much a mystery to her as to the rest of

us—but had never once given me so much as a glimpse at the truth?

Without the shadow of a proof to produce in vindication of my

innocence, how could I persuade her that I knew no more than the

veriest stranger could have known of what was really in her thoughts

when she spoke to me on the terrace?

“It may suit your convenience to forget; it suits my convenience to

remember,” she went on. “I know what I said—for I considered it with

myself, before I said it. I gave you one opportunity after another of

owning the truth. I left nothing unsaid that I _could_ say—short of

actually telling you that I knew you had committed the theft. And all

the return you made, was to look at me with your vile pretence of

astonishment, and your false face of innocence—just as you have looked

at me today; just as you are looking at me now! I left you, that

morning, knowing you at last for what you were—for what you are—as base

a wretch as ever walked the earth!”

“If you had spoken out at the time, you might have left me, Rachel,

knowing that you had cruelly wronged an innocent man.”

“If I had spoken out before other people,” she retorted, with another

burst of indignation, “you would have been disgraced for life! If I had

spoken out to no ears but yours, you would have denied it, as you are

denying it now! Do you think I should have believed you? Would a man

hesitate at a lie, who had done what I saw _you_ do—who had behaved

about it afterwards, as I saw _you_ behave? I tell you again, I shrank

from the horror of hearing you lie, after the horror of seeing you

thieve. You talk as if this was a misunderstanding which a few words

might have set right! Well! the misunderstanding is at an end. Is the

thing set right? No! the thing is just where it was. I don’t believe

you _now!_ I don’t believe you found the nightgown, I don’t believe in

Rosanna Spearman’s letter, I don’t believe a word you have said. You

stole it—I saw you! You affected to help the police—I saw you! You

pledged the Diamond to the money-lender in London—I am sure of it! You

cast the suspicion of your disgrace (thanks to my base silence!) on an

innocent man! You fled to the Continent with your plunder the next

morning! After all that vileness, there was but one thing more you

_could_ do. You could come here with a last falsehood on your lips—you

could come here, and tell me that I have wronged you!”

If I had stayed a moment more, I know not what words might have escaped

me which I should have remembered with vain repentance and regret. I

passed by her, and opened the door for the second time. For the second

time—with the frantic perversity of a roused woman—she caught me by the

arm, and barred my way out.

“Let me go, Rachel” I said. “It will be better for both of us. Let me

go.”

The hysterical passion swelled in her bosom—her quickened convulsive

breathing almost beat on my face, as she held me back at the door.

“Why did you come here?” she persisted, desperately. “I ask you

again—why did you come here? Are you afraid I shall expose you? Now you

are a rich man, now you have got a place in the world, now you may

marry the best lady in the land—are you afraid I shall say the words

which I have never said yet to anybody but you? I can’t say the words!

I can’t expose you! I am worse, if worse can be, than you are

yourself.” Sobs and tears burst from her. She struggled with them

fiercely; she held me more and more firmly. “I can’t tear you out of my

heart,” she said, “even now! You may trust in the shameful, shameful

weakness which can only struggle against you in this way!” She suddenly

let go of me—she threw up her hands, and wrung them frantically in the

air. “Any other woman living would shrink from the disgrace of touching

him!” she exclaimed. “Oh, God! I despise myself even more heartily than

I despise _him_!”

The tears were forcing their way into my eyes in spite of me—the horror

of it was to be endured no longer.

“You shall know that you have wronged me, yet,” I said. “Or you shall

never see me again!”

With those words, I left her. She started up from the chair on which

she had dropped the moment before: she started up—the noble

creature!—and followed me across the outer room, with a last merciful

word at parting.

“Franklin!” she said, “I forgive you! Oh, Franklin, Franklin! we shall

never meet again. Say you forgive _me!_”

I turned, so as to let my face show her that I was past speaking—I

turned, and waved my hand, and saw her dimly, as in a vision, through

the tears that had conquered me at last.

The next moment, the worst bitterness of it was over. I was out in the

garden again. I saw her, and heard her, no more.

CHAPTER VIII

Late that evening, I was surprised at my lodgings by a visit from Mr.

Bruff.

There was a noticeable change in the lawyer’s manner. It had lost its

usual confidence and spirit. He shook hands with me, for the first time

in his life, in silence.

“Are you going back to Hampstead?” I asked, by way of saying something.

“I have just left Hampstead,” he answered. “I know, Mr. Franklin, that

you have got at the truth at last. But, I tell you plainly, if I could

have foreseen the price that was to be paid for it, I should have

preferred leaving you in the dark.”

“You have seen Rachel?”

“I have come here after taking her back to Portland Place; it was

impossible to let her return in the carriage by herself. I can hardly

hold you responsible—considering that you saw her in my house and by my

permission—for the shock that this unlucky interview has inflicted on

her. All I can do is to provide against a repetition of the mischief.

She is young—she has a resolute spirit—she will get over this, with

time and rest to help her. I want to be assured that you will do

nothing to hinder her recovery. May I depend on your making no second

attempt to see her—except with my sanction and approval?”

“After what she has suffered, and after what I have suffered,” I said,

“you may rely on me.”

“I have your promise?”

“You have my promise.”

Mr. Bruff looked relieved. He put down his hat, and drew his chair

nearer to mine.

“That’s settled!” he said. “Now, about the future—_your_ future, I

mean. To my mind, the result of the extraordinary turn which the matter

has now taken is briefly this. In the first place, we are sure that

Rachel has told you the whole truth, as plainly as words can tell it.

In the second place—though we know that there must be some dreadful

mistake somewhere—we can hardly blame her for believing you to be

guilty, on the evidence of her own senses; backed, as that evidence has

been, by circumstances which appear, on the face of them, to tell dead

against you.”

There I interposed. “I don’t blame Rachel,” I said. “I only regret that

she could not prevail on herself to speak more plainly to me at the

time.”

“You might as well regret that Rachel is not somebody else,” rejoined

Mr. Bruff. “And even then, I doubt if a girl of any delicacy, whose

heart had been set on marrying you, could have brought herself to

charge you to your face with being a thief. Anyhow, it was not in

Rachel’s nature to do it. In a very different matter to this matter of

yours—which placed her, however, in a position not altogether unlike

her position towards you—I happen to know that she was influenced by a

similar motive to the motive which actuated her conduct in your case.

Besides, as she told me herself, on our way to town this evening, if

she _had_ spoken plainly, she would no more have believed your denial

then than she believes it now. What answer can you make to that? There

is no answer to be made to it. Come, come, Mr. Franklin! my view of the

case has been proved to be all wrong, I admit—but, as things are now,

my advice may be worth having for all that. I tell you plainly, we

shall be wasting our time, and cudgelling our brains to no purpose, if

we attempt to try back, and unravel this frightful complication from

the beginning. Let us close our minds resolutely to all that happened

last year at Lady Verinder’s country house; and let us look to what we

_can_ discover in the future, instead of to what we can _not_ discover

in the past.”

“Surely you forget,” I said, “that the whole thing is essentially a

matter of the past—so far as I am concerned?”

“Answer me this,” retorted Mr. Bruff. “Is the Moonstone at the bottom

of all the mischief—or is it not?”

“It is—of course.”

“Very good. What do we believe was done with the Moonstone, when it was

taken to London?”

“It was pledged to Mr. Luker.”

“We know that you are not the person who pledged it. Do we know who

did?”

“No.”

“Where do we believe the Moonstone to be now?”

“Deposited in the keeping of Mr. Luker’s bankers.”

“Exactly. Now observe. We are already in the month of June. Towards the

end of the month (I can’t be particular to a day) a year will have

elapsed from the time when we believe the jewel to have been pledged.

There is a chance—to say the least—that the person who pawned it, may

be prepared to redeem it when the year’s time has expired. If he

redeems it, Mr. Luker must himself—according to the terms of his own

arrangement—take the Diamond out of his banker’s hands. Under these

circumstances, I propose setting a watch at the bank, as the present

month draws to an end, and discovering who the person is to whom Mr.

Luker restores the Moonstone. Do you see it now?”

I admitted (a little unwillingly) that the idea was a new one, at any

rate.

“It’s Mr. Murthwaite’s idea quite as much as mine,” said Mr. Bruff. “It

might have never entered my head, but for a conversation we had

together some time since. If Mr. Murthwaite is right, the Indians are

likely to be on the lookout at the bank, towards the end of the month

too—and something serious may come of it. What comes of it doesn’t

matter to you and me except as it may help us to lay our hands on the

mysterious Somebody who pawned the Diamond. That person, you may rely

on it, is responsible (I don’t pretend to know how) for the position in

which you stand at this moment; and that person alone can set you right

in Rachel’s estimation.”

“I can’t deny,” I said, “that the plan you propose meets the difficulty

in a way that is very daring, and very ingenious, and very new. But——”

“But you have an objection to make?”

“Yes. My objection is, that your proposal obliges us to wait.”

“Granted. As I reckon the time, it requires you to wait about a

fortnight—more or less. Is that so very long?”

“It’s a life-time, Mr. Bruff, in such a situation as mine. My existence

will be simply unendurable to me, unless I do something towards

clearing my character at once.”

“Well, well, I understand that. Have you thought yet of what you can

do?”

“I have thought of consulting Sergeant Cuff.”

“He has retired from the police. It’s useless to expect the Sergeant to

help you.”

“I know where to find him; and I can but try.”

“Try,” said Mr. Bruff, after a moment’s consideration. “The case has

assumed such an extraordinary aspect since Sergeant Cuff’s time, that

you _may_ revive his interest in the inquiry. Try, and let me hear the

result. In the meanwhile,” he continued, rising, “if you make no

discoveries between this, and the end of the month, am I free to try,

on my side, what can be done by keeping a lookout at the bank?”

“Certainly,” I answered—“unless I relieve you of all necessity for

trying the experiment in the interval.”

Mr. Bruff smiled, and took up his hat.

“Tell Sergeant Cuff,” he rejoined, “that _I_ say the discovery of the

truth depends on the discovery of the person who pawned the Diamond.

And let me hear what the Sergeant’s experience says to that.”

So we parted.

Early the next morning, I set forth for the little town of Dorking—the

place of Sergeant Cuff’s retirement, as indicated to me by Betteredge.

Inquiring at the hotel, I received the necessary directions for finding

the Sergeant’s cottage. It was approached by a quiet by-road, a little

way out of the town, and it stood snugly in the middle of its own plot

of garden ground, protected by a good brick wall at the back and the

sides, and by a high quickset hedge in front. The gate, ornamented at

the upper part by smartly-painted trellis-work, was locked. After

ringing at the bell, I peered through the trellis-work, and saw the

great Cuff’s favourite flower everywhere; blooming in his garden,

clustering over his door, looking in at his windows. Far from the

crimes and the mysteries of the great city, the illustrious thief-taker

was placidly living out the last Sybarite years of his life, smothered

in roses!

A decent elderly woman opened the gate to me, and at once annihilated

all the hopes I had built on securing the assistance of Sergeant Cuff.

He had started, only the day before, on a journey to Ireland.

“Has he gone there on business?” I asked.

The woman smiled. “He has only one business now, sir,” she said; “and

that’s roses. Some great man’s gardener in Ireland has found out

something new in the growing of roses—and Mr. Cuff’s away to inquire

into it.”

“Do you know when he will be back?”

“It’s quite uncertain, sir. Mr. Cuff said he should come back directly,

or be away some time, just according as he found the new discovery

worth nothing, or worth looking into. If you have any message to leave

for him, I’ll take care, sir, that he gets it.”

I gave her my card, having first written on it in pencil: “I have

something to say about the Moonstone. Let me hear from you as soon as

you get back.” That done, there was nothing left but to submit to

circumstances, and return to London.

In the irritable condition of my mind, at the time of which I am now

writing, the abortive result of my journey to the Sergeant’s cottage

simply aggravated the restless impulse in me to be doing something. On

the day of my return from Dorking, I determined that the next morning

should find me bent on a new effort at forcing my way, through all

obstacles, from the darkness to the light.

What form was my next experiment to take?

If the excellent Betteredge had been present while I was considering

that question, and if he had been let into the secret of my thoughts,

he would, no doubt, have declared that the German side of me was, on

this occasion, my uppermost side. To speak seriously, it is perhaps

possible that my German training was in some degree responsible for the

labyrinth of useless speculations in which I now involved myself. For

the greater part of the night, I sat smoking, and building up theories,

one more profoundly improbable than another. When I did get to sleep,

my waking fancies pursued me in dreams. I rose the next morning, with

Objective-Subjective and Subjective-Objective inextricably entangled

together in my mind; and I began the day which was to witness my next

effort at practical action of some kind, by doubting whether I had any

sort of right (on purely philosophical grounds) to consider any sort of

thing (the Diamond included) as existing at all.

How long I might have remained lost in the mist of my own metaphysics,

if I had been left to extricate myself, it is impossible for me to say.

As the event proved, accident came to my rescue, and happily delivered

me. I happened to wear, that morning, the same coat which I had worn on

the day of my interview with Rachel. Searching for something else in

one of the pockets, I came upon a crumpled piece of paper, and, taking

it out, found Betteredge’s forgotten letter in my hand.

It seemed hard on my good old friend to leave him without a reply. I

went to my writing-table, and read his letter again.

A letter which has nothing of the slightest importance in it, is not

always an easy letter to answer. Betteredge’s present effort at

corresponding with me came within this category. Mr. Candy’s assistant,

otherwise Ezra Jennings, had told his master that he had seen me; and

Mr. Candy, in his turn, wanted to see me and say something to me, when

I was next in the neighbourhood of Frizinghall. What was to be said in

answer to that, which would be worth the paper it was written on? I sat

idly drawing likenesses from memory of Mr. Candy’s remarkable-looking

assistant, on the sheet of paper which I had vowed to dedicate to

Betteredge—until it suddenly occurred to me that here was the

irrepressible Ezra Jennings getting in my way again! I threw a dozen

portraits, at least, of the man with the piebald hair (the hair in

every case, remarkably like), into the waste-paper basket—and then and

there, wrote my answer to Betteredge. It was a perfectly commonplace

letter—but it had one excellent effect on me. The effort of writing a

few sentences, in plain English, completely cleared my mind of the

cloudy nonsense which had filled it since the previous day.

Devoting myself once more to the elucidation of the impenetrable puzzle

which my own position presented to me, I now tried to meet the

difficulty by investigating it from a plainly practical point of view.

The events of the memorable night being still unintelligible to me, I

looked a little farther back, and searched my memory of the earlier

hours of the birthday for any incident which might prove of some

assistance to me in finding the clue.

Had anything happened while Rachel and I were finishing the painted

door? or, later, when I rode over to Frizinghall? or afterwards, when I

went back with Godfrey Ablewhite and his sisters? or, later again, when

I put the Moonstone into Rachel’s hands? or, later still, when the

company came, and we all assembled round the dinner-table? My memory

disposed of that string of questions readily enough, until I came to

the last. Looking back at the social event of the birthday dinner, I

found myself brought to a standstill at the outset of the inquiry. I

was not even capable of accurately remembering the number of the guests

who had sat at the same table with me.

To feel myself completely at fault here, and to conclude, thereupon,

that the incidents of the dinner might especially repay the trouble of

investigating them, formed parts of the same mental process, in my

case. I believe other people, in a similar situation, would have

reasoned as I did. When the pursuit of our own interests causes us to

become objects of inquiry to ourselves, we are naturally suspicious of

what we don’t know. Once in possession of the names of the persons who

had been present at the dinner, I resolved—as a means of enriching the

deficient resources of my own memory—to appeal to the memory of the

rest of the guests; to write down all that they could recollect of the

social events of the birthday; and to test the result, thus obtained,

by the light of what had happened afterwards, when the company had left

the house.

This last and newest of my many contemplated experiments in the art of

inquiry—which Betteredge would probably have attributed to the

clear-headed, or French, side of me being uppermost for the moment—may

fairly claim record here, on its own merits. Unlikely as it may seem, I

had now actually groped my way to the root of the matter at last. All I

wanted was a hint to guide me in the right direction at starting.

Before another day had passed over my head, that hint was given me by

one of the company who had been present at the birthday feast!

With the plan of proceeding which I now had in view, it was first

necessary to possess the complete list of the guests. This I could

easily obtain from Gabriel Betteredge. I determined to go back to

Yorkshire on that day, and to begin my contemplated investigation the

next morning.

It was just too late to start by the train which left London before

noon. There was no alternative but to wait, nearly three hours, for the

departure of the next train. Was there anything I could do in London,

which might usefully occupy this interval of time?

My thoughts went back again obstinately to the birthday dinner.

Though I had forgotten the numbers, and, in many cases, the names of

the guests, I remembered readily enough that by far the larger

proportion of them came from Frizinghall, or from its neighbourhood.

But the larger proportion was not all. Some few of us were not regular

residents in the country. I myself was one of the few. Mr. Murthwaite

was another. Godfrey Ablewhite was a third. Mr. Bruff—no: I called to

mind that business had prevented Mr. Bruff from making one of the

party. Had any ladies been present, whose usual residence was in

London? I could only remember Miss Clack as coming within this latter

category. However, here were three of the guests, at any rate, whom it

was clearly advisable for me to see before I left town. I drove off at

once to Mr. Bruff’s office; not knowing the addresses of the persons of

whom I was in search, and thinking it probable that he might put me in

the way of finding them.

Mr. Bruff proved to be too busy to give me more than a minute of his

valuable time. In that minute, however, he contrived to dispose—in the

most discouraging manner—of all the questions I had to put to him.

In the first place, he considered my newly-discovered method of finding

a clue to the mystery as something too purely fanciful to be seriously

discussed. In the second, third, and fourth places, Mr. Murthwaite was

now on his way back to the scene of his past adventures; Miss Clack had

suffered losses, and had settled, from motives of economy, in France;

Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite might, or might not, be discoverable somewhere in

London. Suppose I inquired at his club? And suppose I excused Mr.

Bruff, if he went back to his business and wished me good morning?

The field of inquiry in London, being now so narrowed as only to

include the one necessity of discovering Godfrey’s address, I took the

lawyer’s hint, and drove to his club.

In the hall, I met with one of the members, who was an old friend of my

cousin’s, and who was also an acquaintance of my own. This gentleman,

after enlightening me on the subject of Godfrey’s address, told me of

two recent events in his life, which were of some importance in

themselves, and which had not previously reached my ears.

It appeared that Godfrey, far from being discouraged by Rachel’s

withdrawal from her engagement to him had made matrimonial advances

soon afterwards to another young lady, reputed to be a great heiress.

His suit had prospered, and his marriage had been considered as a

settled and certain thing. But, here again, the engagement had been

suddenly and unexpectedly broken off—owing, it was said, on this

occasion, to a serious difference of opinion between the bridegroom and

the lady’s father, on the question of settlements.

As some compensation for this second matrimonial disaster, Godfrey had

soon afterwards found himself the object of fond pecuniary remembrance,

on the part of one of his many admirers. A rich old lady—highly

respected at the Mothers’ Small-Clothes-Conversion-Society, and a great

friend of Miss Clack’s (to whom she left nothing but a mourning

ring)—had bequeathed to the admirable and meritorious Godfrey a legacy

of five thousand pounds. After receiving this handsome addition to his

own modest pecuniary resources, he had been heard to say that he felt

the necessity of getting a little respite from his charitable labours,

and that his doctor prescribed “a run on the Continent, as likely to be

productive of much future benefit to his health.” If I wanted to see

him, it would be advisable to lose no time in paying my contemplated

visit.

I went, then and there, to pay my visit.

The same fatality which had made me just one day too late in calling on

Sergeant Cuff, made me again one day too late in calling on Godfrey. He

had left London, on the previous morning, by the tidal train, for

Dover. He was to cross to Ostend; and his servant believed he was going

on to Brussels. The time of his return was rather uncertain; but I

might be sure he would be away at least three months.

I went back to my lodgings a little depressed in spirits. Three of the

guests at the birthday dinner—and those three all exceptionally

intelligent people—were out of my reach, at the very time when it was

most important to be able to communicate with them. My last hopes now

rested on Betteredge, and on the friends of the late Lady Verinder whom

I might still find living in the neighbourhood of Rachel’s country

house.

On this occasion, I travelled straight to Frizinghall—the town being

now the central point in my field of inquiry. I arrived too late in the

evening to be able to communicate with Betteredge. The next morning, I

sent a messenger with a letter, requesting him to join me at the hotel,

at his earliest convenience.

Having taken the precaution—partly to save time, partly to accommodate

Betteredge—of sending my messenger in a fly, I had a reasonable

prospect, if no delays occurred, of seeing the old man within less than

two hours from the time when I had sent for him. During this interval,

I arranged to employ myself in opening my contemplated inquiry, among

the guests present at the birthday dinner who were personally known to

me, and who were easily within my reach. These were my relatives, the

Ablewhites, and Mr. Candy. The doctor had expressed a special wish to

see me, and the doctor lived in the next street. So to Mr. Candy I went

first.

After what Betteredge had told me, I naturally anticipated finding

traces in the doctor’s face of the severe illness from which he had

suffered. But I was utterly unprepared for such a change as I saw in

him when he entered the room and shook hands with me. His eyes were

dim; his hair had turned completely grey; his face was wizen; his

figure had shrunk. I looked at the once lively, rattlepated, humorous

little doctor—associated in my remembrance with the perpetration of

incorrigible social indiscretions and innumerable boyish jokes—and I

saw nothing left of his former self, but the old tendency to vulgar

smartness in his dress. The man was a wreck; but his clothes and his

jewellery—in cruel mockery of the change in him—were as gay and as

gaudy as ever.

“I have often thought of you, Mr. Blake,” he said; “and I am heartily

glad to see you again at last. If there is anything I can do for you,

pray command my services, sir—pray command my services!”

He said those few commonplace words with needless hurry and eagerness,

and with a curiosity to know what had brought me to Yorkshire, which he

was perfectly—I might say childishly—incapable of concealing from

notice.

With the object that I had in view, I had of course foreseen the

necessity of entering into some sort of personal explanation, before I

could hope to interest people, mostly strangers to me, in doing their

best to assist my inquiry. On the journey to Frizinghall I had arranged

what my explanation was to be—and I seized the opportunity now offered

to me of trying the effect of it on Mr. Candy.

“I was in Yorkshire, the other day, and I am in Yorkshire again now, on

rather a romantic errand,” I said. “It is a matter, Mr. Candy, in which

the late Lady Verinder’s friends all took some interest. You remember

the mysterious loss of the Indian Diamond, now nearly a year since?

Circumstances have lately happened which lead to the hope that it may

yet be found—and I am interesting myself, as one of the family, in

recovering it. Among the obstacles in my way, there is the necessity of

collecting again all the evidence which was discovered at the time, and

more if possible. There are peculiarities in this case which make it

desirable to revive my recollection of everything that happened in the

house, on the evening of Miss Verinder’s birthday. And I venture to

appeal to her late mother’s friends who were present on that occasion,

to lend me the assistance of their memories——”

I had got as far as that in rehearsing my explanatory phrases, when I

was suddenly checked by seeing plainly in Mr. Candy’s face that my

experiment on him was a total failure.

The little doctor sat restlessly picking at the points of his fingers

all the time I was speaking. His dim watery eyes were fixed on my face

with an expression of vacant and wistful inquiry very painful to see.

What he was thinking of, it was impossible to divine. The one thing

clearly visible was that I had failed, after the first two or three

words, in fixing his attention. The only chance of recalling him to

himself appeared to lie in changing the subject. I tried a new topic

immediately.

“So much,” I said, gaily, “for what brings me to Frizinghall! Now, Mr.

Candy, it’s your turn. You sent me a message by Gabriel Betteredge——”

He left off picking at his fingers, and suddenly brightened up.

“Yes! yes! yes!” he exclaimed eagerly. “That’s it! I sent you a

message!”

“And Betteredge duly communicated it by letter,” I went on. “You had

something to say to me, the next time I was in your neighbourhood.

Well, Mr. Candy, here I am!”

“Here you are!” echoed the doctor. “And Betteredge was quite right. I

had something to say to you. That was my message. Betteredge is a

wonderful man. What a memory! At his age, what a memory!”

He dropped back into silence, and began picking at his fingers again.

Recollecting what I had heard from Betteredge about the effect of the

fever on his memory, I went on with the conversation, in the hope that

I might help him at starting.

“It’s a long time since we met,” I said. “We last saw each other at the

last birthday dinner my poor aunt was ever to give.”

“That’s it!” cried Mr. Candy. “The birthday dinner!” He started

impulsively to his feet, and looked at me. A deep flush suddenly

overspread his faded face, and he abruptly sat down again, as if

conscious of having betrayed a weakness which he would fain have

concealed. It was plain, pitiably plain, that he was aware of his own

defect of memory, and that he was bent on hiding it from the

observation of his friends.

Thus far he had appealed to my compassion only. But the words he had

just said—few as they were—roused my curiosity instantly to the highest

pitch. The birthday dinner had already become the one event in the

past, at which I looked back with strangely-mixed feelings of hope and

distrust. And here was the birthday dinner unmistakably proclaiming

itself as the subject on which Mr. Candy had something important to say

to me!

I attempted to help him out once more. But, this time, my own interests

were at the bottom of my compassionate motive, and they hurried me on a

little too abruptly, to the end I had in view.

“It’s nearly a year now,” I said, “since we sat at that pleasant table.

Have you made any memorandum—in your diary, or otherwise—of what you

wanted to say to me?”

Mr. Candy understood the suggestion, and showed me that he understood

it, as an insult.

“I require no memorandum, Mr. Blake,” he said, stiffly enough. “I am

not such a very old man, yet—and my memory (thank God) is to be

thoroughly depended on!”

It is needless to say that I declined to understand that he was

offended with me.

“I wish I could say the same of _my_ memory,” I answered. “When _I_ try

to think of matters that are a year old, I seldom find my remembrance

as vivid as I could wish it to be. Take the dinner at Lady Verinder’s,

for instance——”

Mr. Candy brightened up again, the moment the allusion passed my lips.

“Ah! the dinner, the dinner at Lady Verinder’s!” he exclaimed, more

eagerly than ever. “I have got something to say to you about that.”

His eyes looked at me again with the painful expression of inquiry, so

wistful, so vacant, so miserably helpless to see. He was evidently

trying hard, and trying in vain, to recover the lost recollection. “It

was a very pleasant dinner,” he burst out suddenly, with an air of

saying exactly what he wanted to say. “A very pleasant dinner, Mr.

Blake, wasn’t it?” He nodded and smiled, and appeared to think, poor

fellow, that he had succeeded in concealing the total failure of his

memory, by a well-timed exertion of his own presence of mind.

It was so distressing that I at once shifted the talk—deeply as I was

interested in his recovering the lost remembrance—to topics of local

interest.

Here, he got on glibly enough. Trumpery little scandals and quarrels in

the town, some of them as much as a month old, appeared to recur to his

memory readily. He chattered on, with something of the smooth gossiping

fluency of former times. But there were moments, even in the full flow

of his talkativeness, when he suddenly hesitated—looked at me for a

moment with the vacant inquiry once more in his eyes—controlled

himself—and went on again. I submitted patiently to my martyrdom (it is

surely nothing less than martyrdom to a man of cosmopolitan sympathies,

to absorb in silent resignation the news of a country town?) until the

clock on the chimney-piece told me that my visit had been prolonged

beyond half an hour. Having now some right to consider the sacrifice as

complete, I rose to take leave. As we shook hands, Mr. Candy reverted

to the birthday festival of his own accord.

“I am so glad we have met again,” he said. “I had it on my mind—I

really had it on my mind, Mr. Blake, to speak to you. About the dinner

at Lady Verinder’s, you know? A pleasant dinner—really a pleasant

dinner now, wasn’t it?”

On repeating the phrase, he seemed to feel hardly as certain of having

prevented me from suspecting his lapse of memory, as he had felt on the

first occasion. The wistful look clouded his face again; and, after

apparently designing to accompany me to the street door, he suddenly

changed his mind, rang the bell for the servant, and remained in the

drawing-room.

I went slowly down the doctor’s stairs, feeling the disheartening

conviction that he really had something to say which it was vitally

important to me to hear, and that he was morally incapable of saying

it. The effort of remembering that he wanted to speak to me was, but

too evidently, the only effort that his enfeebled memory was now able

to achieve.

Just as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and had turned a corner on

my way to the outer hall, a door opened softly somewhere on the ground

floor of the house, and a gentle voice said behind me:—

“I am afraid, sir, you find Mr. Candy sadly changed?”

I turned round, and found myself face to face with Ezra Jennings.

CHAPTER IX

The doctor’s pretty housemaid stood waiting for me, with the street

door open in her hand. Pouring brightly into the hall, the morning

light fell full on the face of Mr. Candy’s assistant when I turned, and

looked at him.

It was impossible to dispute Betteredge’s assertion that the appearance

of Ezra Jennings, speaking from a popular point of view, was against

him. His gipsy-complexion, his fleshless cheeks, his gaunt facial

bones, his dreamy eyes, his extraordinary parti-coloured hair, the

puzzling contradiction between his face and figure which made him look

old and young both together—were all more or less calculated to produce

an unfavourable impression of him on a stranger’s mind. And yet—feeling

this as I certainly did—it is not to be denied that Ezra Jennings made

some inscrutable appeal to my sympathies, which I found it impossible

to resist. While my knowledge of the world warned me to answer the

question which he had put, acknowledging that I did indeed find Mr.

Candy sadly changed, and then to proceed on my way out of the house—my

interest in Ezra Jennings held me rooted to the place, and gave him the

opportunity of speaking to me in private about his employer, for which

he had been evidently on the watch.

“Are you walking my way, Mr. Jennings?” I said, observing that he held

his hat in his hand. “I am going to call on my aunt, Mrs. Ablewhite.”

Ezra Jennings replied that he had a patient to see, and that he was

walking my way.

We left the house together. I observed that the pretty servant girl—who

was all smiles and amiability, when I wished her good morning on my way

out—received a modest little message from Ezra Jennings, relating to

the time at which he might be expected to return, with pursed-up lips,

and with eyes which ostentatiously looked anywhere rather than look in

his face. The poor wretch was evidently no favourite in the house. Out

of the house, I had Betteredge’s word for it that he was unpopular

everywhere. “What a life!” I thought to myself, as we descended the

doctor’s doorsteps.

Having already referred to Mr. Candy’s illness on his side, Ezra

Jennings now appeared determined to leave it to me to resume the

subject. His silence said significantly, “It’s your turn now.” I, too,

had my reasons for referring to the doctor’s illness: and I readily

accepted the responsibility of speaking first.

“Judging by the change I see in him,” I began, “Mr. Candy’s illness

must have been far more serious than I had supposed?”

“It is almost a miracle,” said Ezra Jennings, “that he lived through

it.”

“Is his memory never any better than I have found it today? He has been

trying to speak to me——”

“Of something which happened before he was taken ill?” asked the

assistant, observing that I hesitated.

“Yes.”

“His memory of events, at that past time, is hopelessly enfeebled,”

said Ezra Jennings. “It is almost to be deplored, poor fellow, that

even the wreck of it remains. While he remembers dimly plans that he

formed—things, here and there, that he had to say or do before his

illness—he is perfectly incapable of recalling what the plans were, or

what the thing was that he had to say or do. He is painfully conscious

of his own deficiency, and painfully anxious, as you must have seen, to

hide it from observation. If he could only have recovered in a complete

state of oblivion as to the past, he would have been a happier man.

Perhaps we should all be happier,” he added, with a sad smile, “if we

could but completely forget!”

“There are some events surely in all men’s lives,” I replied, “the

memory of which they would be unwilling entirely to lose?”

“That is, I hope, to be said of most men, Mr. Blake. I am afraid it

cannot truly be said of _all_. Have you any reason to suppose that the

lost remembrance which Mr. Candy tried to recover—while you were

speaking to him just now—was a remembrance which it was important to

_you_ that he should recall?”

In saying those words, he had touched, of his own accord, on the very

point upon which I was anxious to consult him. The interest I felt in

this strange man had impelled me, in the first instance, to give him

the opportunity of speaking to me; reserving what I might have to say,

on my side, in relation to his employer, until I was first satisfied

that he was a person in whose delicacy and discretion I could trust.

The little that he had said, thus far, had been sufficient to convince

me that I was speaking to a gentleman. He had what I may venture to

describe as the _unsought self-possession_, which is a sure sign of

good breeding, not in England only, but everywhere else in the

civilised world. Whatever the object which he had in view, in putting

the question that he had just addressed to me, I felt no doubt that I

was justified—so far—in answering him without reserve.

“I believe I have a strong interest,” I said, “in tracing the lost

remembrance which Mr. Candy was unable to recall. May I ask whether you

can suggest to me any method by which I might assist his memory?”

Ezra Jennings looked at me, with a sudden flash of interest in his

dreamy brown eyes.

“Mr. Candy’s memory is beyond the reach of assistance,” he said. “I

have tried to help it often enough since his recovery, to be able to

speak positively on that point.”

This disappointed me; and I owned it.

“I confess you led me to hope for a less discouraging answer than

that,” I said.

Ezra Jennings smiled. “It may not, perhaps, be a final answer, Mr.

Blake. It may be possible to trace Mr. Candy’s lost recollection,

without the necessity of appealing to Mr. Candy himself.”

“Indeed? Is it an indiscretion, on my part, to ask how?”

“By no means. My only difficulty in answering your question, is the

difficulty of explaining myself. May I trust to your patience, if I

refer once more to Mr. Candy’s illness: and if I speak of it this time

without sparing you certain professional details?”

“Pray go on! You have interested me already in hearing the details.”

My eagerness seemed to amuse—perhaps, I might rather say, to please

him. He smiled again. We had by this time left the last houses in the

town behind us. Ezra Jennings stopped for a moment, and picked some

wild flowers from the hedge by the roadside. “How beautiful they are!”

he said, simply, showing his little nosegay to me. “And how few people

in England seem to admire them as they deserve!”

“You have not always been in England?” I said.

“No. I was born, and partly brought up, in one of our colonies. My

father was an Englishman; but my mother—We are straying away from our

subject, Mr. Blake; and it is my fault. The truth is, I have

associations with these modest little hedgeside flowers—It doesn’t

matter; we were speaking of Mr. Candy. To Mr. Candy let us return.”

Connecting the few words about himself which thus reluctantly escaped

him, with the melancholy view of life which led him to place the

conditions of human happiness in complete oblivion of the past, I felt

satisfied that the story which I had read in his face was, in two

particulars at least, the story that it really told. He had suffered as

few men suffer; and there was the mixture of some foreign race in his

English blood.

“You have heard, I dare say, of the original cause of Mr. Candy’s

illness?” he resumed. “The night of Lady Verinder’s dinner-party was a

night of heavy rain. My employer drove home through it in his gig, and

reached the house wetted to the skin. He found an urgent message from a

patient, waiting for him; and he most unfortunately went at once to

visit the sick person, without stopping to change his clothes. I was

myself professionally detained, that night, by a case at some distance

from Frizinghall. When I got back the next morning, I found Mr. Candy’s

groom waiting in great alarm to take me to his master’s room. By that

time the mischief was done; the illness had set in.”

“The illness has only been described to me, in general terms, as a

fever,” I said.

“I can add nothing which will make the description more accurate,”

answered Ezra Jennings. “From first to last the fever assumed no

specific form. I sent at once to two of Mr. Candy’s medical friends in

the town, both physicians, to come and give me their opinion of the

case. They agreed with me that it looked serious; but they both

strongly dissented from the view I took of the treatment. We differed

entirely in the conclusions which we drew from the patient’s pulse. The

two doctors, arguing from the rapidity of the beat, declared that a

lowering treatment was the only treatment to be adopted. On my side, I

admitted the rapidity of the pulse, but I also pointed to its alarming

feebleness as indicating an exhausted condition of the system, and as

showing a plain necessity for the administration of stimulants. The two

doctors were for keeping him on gruel, lemonade, barley-water, and so

on. I was for giving him champagne, or brandy, ammonia, and quinine. A

serious difference of opinion, as you see! A difference between two

physicians of established local repute, and a stranger who was only an

assistant in the house. For the first few days, I had no choice but to

give way to my elders and betters; the patient steadily sinking all the

time. I made a second attempt to appeal to the plain, undeniably plain,

evidence of the pulse. Its rapidity was unchecked, and its feebleness

had increased. The two doctors took offence at my obstinacy. They said,

‘Mr. Jennings, either we manage this case, or you manage it. Which is

it to be?’ I said, ‘Gentlemen, give me five minutes to consider, and

that plain question shall have a plain reply.’ When the time expired, I

was ready with my answer. I said, ‘You positively refuse to try the

stimulant treatment?’ They refused in so many words. ‘I mean to try it

at once, gentlemen.’—‘Try it, Mr. Jennings, and we withdraw from the

case.’ I sent down to the cellar for a bottle of champagne; and I

administered half a tumbler-full of it to the patient with my own hand.

The two physicians took up their hats in silence, and left the house.”

“You had assumed a serious responsibility,” I said. “In your place, I

am afraid I should have shrunk from it.”

“In my place, Mr. Blake, you would have remembered that Mr. Candy had

taken you into his employment, under circumstances which made you his

debtor for life. In my place, you would have seen him sinking, hour by

hour; and you would have risked anything, rather than let the one man

on earth who had befriended you, die before your eyes. Don’t suppose

that I had no sense of the terrible position in which I had placed

myself! There were moments when I felt all the misery of my

friendlessness, all the peril of my dreadful responsibility. If I had

been a happy man, if I had led a prosperous life, I believe I should

have sunk under the task I had imposed on myself. But _I_ had no happy

time to look back at, no past peace of mind to force itself into

contrast with my present anxiety and suspense—and I held firm to my

resolution through it all. I took an interval in the middle of the day,

when my patient’s condition was at its best, for the repose I needed.

For the rest of the four-and-twenty hours, as long as his life was in

danger, I never left his bedside. Towards sunset, as usual in such

cases, the delirium incidental to the fever came on. It lasted more or

less through the night; and then intermitted, at that terrible time in

the early morning—from two o’clock to five—when the vital energies even

of the healthiest of us are at their lowest. It is then that Death

gathers in his human harvest most abundantly. It was then that Death

and I fought our fight over the bed, which should have the man who lay

on it. I never hesitated in pursuing the treatment on which I had

staked everything. When wine failed, I tried brandy. When the other

stimulants lost their influence, I doubled the dose. After an interval

of suspense—the like of which I hope to God I shall never feel

again—there came a day when the rapidity of the pulse slightly, but

appreciably, diminished; and, better still, there came also a change in

the beat—an unmistakable change to steadiness and strength. _Then_, I

knew that I had saved him; and then I own I broke down. I laid the poor

fellow’s wasted hand back on the bed, and burst out crying. An

hysterical relief, Mr. Blake—nothing more! Physiology says, and says

truly, that some men are born with female constitutions—and I am one of

them!”

He made that bitterly professional apology for his tears, speaking

quietly and unaffectedly, as he had spoken throughout. His tone and

manner, from beginning to end, showed him to be especially, almost

morbidly, anxious not to set himself up as an object of interest to me.

“You may well ask, why I have wearied you with all these details?” he

went on. “It is the only way I can see, Mr. Blake, of properly

introducing to you what I have to say next. Now you know exactly what

my position was, at the time of Mr. Candy’s illness, you will the more

readily understand the sore need I had of lightening the burden on my

mind by giving it, at intervals, some sort of relief. I have had the

presumption to occupy my leisure, for some years past, in writing a

book, addressed to the members of my profession—a book on the intricate

and delicate subject of the brain and the nervous system. My work will

probably never be finished; and it will certainly never be published.

It has none the less been the friend of many lonely hours; and it

helped me to while away the anxious time—the time of waiting, and

nothing else—at Mr. Candy’s bedside. I told you he was delirious, I

think? And I mentioned the time at which his delirium came on?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I had reached a section of my book, at that time, which touched

on this same question of delirium. I won’t trouble you at any length

with my theory on the subject—I will confine myself to telling you only

what it is your present interest to know. It has often occurred to me

in the course of my medical practice, to doubt whether we can

justifiably infer—in cases of delirium—that the loss of the faculty of

speaking connectedly, implies of necessity the loss of the faculty of

thinking connectedly as well. Poor Mr. Candy’s illness gave me an

opportunity of putting this doubt to the test. I understand the art of

writing in shorthand; and I was able to take down the patient’s

‘wanderings’, exactly as they fell from his lips.—Do you see, Mr.

Blake, what I am coming to at last?”

I saw it clearly, and waited with breathless interest to hear more.

“At odds and ends of time,” Ezra Jennings went on, “I reproduced my

shorthand notes, in the ordinary form of writing—leaving large spaces

between the broken phrases, and even the single words, as they had

fallen disconnectedly from Mr. Candy’s lips. I then treated the result

thus obtained, on something like the principle which one adopts in

putting together a child’s ‘puzzle.’ It is all confusion to begin with;

but it may be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find

the right way. Acting on this plan, I filled in each blank space on the

paper, with what the words or phrases on either side of it suggested to

me as the speaker’s meaning; altering over and over again, until my

additions followed naturally on the spoken words which came before

them, and fitted naturally into the spoken words which came after them.

The result was, that I not only occupied in this way many vacant and

anxious hours, but that I arrived at something which was (as it seemed

to me) a confirmation of the theory that I held. In plainer words,

after putting the broken sentences together I found the superior

faculty of thinking going on, more or less connectedly, in my patient’s

mind, while the inferior faculty of expression was in a state of almost

complete incapacity and confusion.”

“One word!” I interposed eagerly. “Did my name occur in any of his

wanderings?”

“You shall hear, Mr. Blake. Among my written proofs of the assertion

which I have just advanced—or, I ought to say, among the written

experiments, tending to put my assertion to the proof—there _is_ one,

in which your name occurs. For nearly the whole of one night, Mr.

Candy’s mind was occupied with _something_ between himself and you. I

have got the broken words, as they dropped from his lips, on one sheet

of paper. And I have got the links of my own discovering which connect

those words together, on another sheet of paper. The product (as the

arithmeticians would say) is an intelligible statement—first, of

something actually done in the past; secondly, of something which Mr.

Candy contemplated doing in the future, if his illness had not got in

the way, and stopped him. The question is whether this does, or does

not, represent the lost recollection which he vainly attempted to find

when you called on him this morning?”

“Not a doubt of it!” I answered. “Let us go back directly, and look at

the papers!”

“Quite impossible, Mr. Blake.”

“Why?”

“Put yourself in my position for a moment,” said Ezra Jennings. “Would

_you_ disclose to another person what had dropped unconsciously from

the lips of your suffering patient and your helpless friend, without

first knowing that there was a necessity to justify you in opening your

lips?”

I felt that he was unanswerable, here; but I tried to argue the

question, nevertheless.

“My conduct in such a delicate matter as you describe,” I replied,

“would depend greatly on whether the disclosure was of a nature to

compromise my friend or not.”

“I have disposed of all necessity for considering that side of the

question, long since,” said Ezra Jennings. “Wherever my notes included

anything which Mr. Candy might have wished to keep secret, those notes

have been destroyed. My manuscript experiments at my friend’s bedside,

include nothing, now, which he would have hesitated to communicate to

others, if he had recovered the use of his memory. In your case, I have

every reason to suppose that my notes contain something which he

actually wished to say to you.”

“And yet, you hesitate?”