The Moonstone

ne on the top of the other the rest of the company followed the
Ablewhites, till we had the whole tale of them complete. Including the
family, they were twenty-four in all. It was a noble sight to see, when
they were settled in their places round the dinner-table, and the
Rector of Frizinghall (with beautiful elocution) rose and said grace.

There is no need to worry you with a list of the guests. You will meet
none of them a second time—in my part of the story, at any rate—with
the exception of two.

Those two sat on either side of Miss Rachel, who, as queen of the day,
was naturally the great attraction of the party. On this occasion she
was more particularly the centre-point towards which everybody’s eyes
were directed; for (to my lady’s secret annoyance) she wore her
wonderful birthday present, which eclipsed all the rest—the Moonstone.
It was without any setting when it had been placed in her hands; but
that universal genius, Mr. Franklin, had contrived, with the help of
his neat fingers and a little bit of silver wire, to fix it as a brooch
in the bosom of her white dress. Everybody wondered at the prodigious
size and beauty of the Diamond, as a matter of course. But the only two
of the company who said anything out of the common way about it were
those two guests I have mentioned, who sat by Miss Rachel on her right
hand and her left.

The guest on her left was Mr. Candy, our doctor at Frizinghall.

This was a pleasant, companionable little man, with the drawback,
however, I must own, of being too fond, in season and out of season, of
his joke, and of his plunging in rather a headlong manner into talk
with strangers, without waiting to feel his way first. In society, he
was constantly making mistakes, and setting people unintentionally by
the ears together. In his medical practice he was a more prudent man;
picking up his discretion (as his enemies said) by a kind of instinct,
and proving to be generally right where more carefully conducted
doctors turned out to be wrong. What he said about the Diamond to
Miss Rachel was said, as usual, by way of a mystification or joke. He
gravely entreated her (in the interests of science) to let him take it
home and burn it. “We will first heat it, Miss Rachel,” says the
doctor, “to such and such a degree; then we will expose it to a current
of air; and, little by little—puff!—we evaporate the Diamond, and spare
you a world of anxiety about the safe keeping of a valuable precious
stone!” My lady, listening with rather a careworn expression on her
face, seemed to wish that the doctor had been in earnest, and that he
could have found Miss Rachel zealous enough in the cause of science to
sacrifice her birthday gift.

The other guest, who sat on my young lady’s right hand, was an eminent
public character—being no other than the celebrated Indian traveller,
Mr. Murthwaite, who, at risk of his life, had penetrated in disguise
where no European had ever set foot before.

This was a long, lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look,
and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of
the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back
and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East.
Except what he said to Miss Rachel about her jewel, I doubt if he spoke
six words or drank so much as a single glass of wine, all through the
dinner. The Moonstone was the only object that interested him in the
smallest degree. The fame of it seemed to have reached him, in some of
those perilous Indian places where his wanderings had lain. After
looking at it silently for so long a time that Miss Rachel began to get
confused, he said to her in his cool immovable way, “If you ever go to
India, Miss Verinder, don’t take your uncle’s birthday gift with you. A
Hindoo diamond is sometimes part of a Hindoo religion. I know a certain
city, and a certain temple in that city, where, dressed as you are now,
your life would not be worth five minutes’ purchase.” Miss Rachel, safe
in England, was quite delighted to hear of her danger in India. The
Bouncers were more delighted still; they dropped their knives and forks
with a crash, and burst out together vehemently, “O! how interesting!”
My lady fidgeted in her chair, and changed the subject.

As the dinner got on, I became aware, little by little, that this
festival was not prospering as other like festivals had prospered
before it.

Looking back at the birthday now, by the light of what happened
afterwards, I am half inclined to think that the cursed Diamond must
have cast a blight on the whole company. I plied them well with wine;
and being a privileged character, followed the unpopular dishes round
the table, and whispered to the company confidentially, “Please to
change your mind and try it; for I know it will do you good.” Nine
times out of ten they changed their minds—out of regard for their old
original Betteredge, they were pleased to say—but all to no purpose.
There were gaps of silence in the talk, as the dinner got on, that made
me feel personally uncomfortable. When they did use their tongues
again, they used them innocently, in the most unfortunate manner and to
the worst possible purpose. Mr. Candy, the doctor, for instance, said
more unlucky things than I ever knew him to say before. Take one sample
of the way in which he went on, and you will understand what I had to
put up with at the sideboard, officiating as I was in the character of
a man who had the prosperity of the festival at heart.

One of our ladies present at dinner was worthy Mrs. Threadgall, widow
of the late Professor of that name. Talking of her deceased husband
perpetually, this good lady never mentioned to strangers that he was
deceased. She thought, I suppose, that every able-bodied adult in
England ought to know as much as that. In one of the gaps of silence,
somebody mentioned the dry and rather nasty subject of human anatomy;
whereupon good Mrs. Threadgall straightway brought in her late husband
as usual, without mentioning that he was dead. Anatomy she described as
the Professor’s favourite recreation in his leisure hours. As ill-luck
would have it, Mr. Candy, sitting opposite (who knew nothing of the
deceased gentleman), heard her. Being the most polite of men, he seized
the opportunity of assisting the Professor’s anatomical amusements on
the spot.

“They have got some remarkably fine skeletons lately at the College of
Surgeons,” says Mr. Candy, across the table, in a loud cheerful voice.
“I strongly recommend the Professor, ma’am, when he next has an hour to
spare, to pay them a visit.”

You might have heard a pin fall. The company (out of respect to the
Professor’s memory) all sat speechless. I was behind Mrs. Threadgall at
the time, plying her confidentially with a glass of hock. She dropped
her head, and said in a very low voice, “My beloved husband is no
more.”

Unluckily Mr. Candy, hearing nothing, and miles away from suspecting
the truth, went on across the table louder and politer than ever.

“The Professor may not be aware,” says he, “that the card of a member
of the College will admit him, on any day but Sunday, between the hours
of ten and four.”

Mrs. Threadgall dropped her head right into her tucker, and, in a lower
voice still, repeated the solemn words, “My beloved husband is no
more.”

I winked hard at Mr. Candy across the table. Miss Rachel touched his
arm. My lady looked unutterable things at him. Quite useless! On he
went, with a cordiality that there was no stopping anyhow. “I shall be
delighted,” says he, “to send the Professor my card, if you will oblige
me by mentioning his present address.”

“His present address, sir, is the grave,” says Mrs. Threadgall,
suddenly losing her temper, and speaking with an emphasis and fury that
made the glasses ring again. “The Professor has been dead these ten
years.”

“Oh, good Heavens!” says Mr. Candy. Excepting the Bouncers, who burst
out laughing, such a blank now fell on the company, that they might all
have been going the way of the Professor, and hailing as he did from
the direction of the grave.

So much for Mr. Candy. The rest of them were nearly as provoking in
their different ways as the doctor himself. When they ought to have
spoken, they didn’t speak; or when they did speak they were perpetually
at cross purposes. Mr. Godfrey, though so eloquent in public, declined
to exert himself in private. Whether he was sulky, or whether he was
bashful, after his discomfiture in the rose-garden, I can’t say. He
kept all his talk for the private ear of the lady (a member of our
family) who sat next to him. She was one of his committee-women—a
spiritually-minded person, with a fine show of collar-bone and a pretty
taste in champagne; liked it dry, you understand, and plenty of it.
Being close behind these two at the sideboard, I can testify, from what
I heard pass between them, that the company lost a good deal of very
improving conversation, which I caught up while drawing the corks, and
carving the mutton, and so forth. What they said about their Charities
I didn’t hear. When I had time to listen to them, they had got a long
way beyond their women to be confined, and their women to be rescued,
and were disputing on serious subjects. Religion (I understand Mr.
Godfrey to say, between the corks and the carving) meant love. And love
meant religion. And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And
heaven was earth, done up again to look like new. Earth had some very
objectionable people in it; but, to make amends for that, all the women
in heaven would be members of a prodigious committee that never
quarrelled, with all the men in attendance on them as ministering
angels. Beautiful! beautiful! But why the mischief did Mr. Godfrey keep
it all to his lady and himself?

Mr. Franklin again—surely, you will say, Mr. Franklin stirred the
company up into making a pleasant evening of it?

Nothing of the sort! He had quite recovered himself, and he was in
wonderful force and spirits, Penelope having informed him, I suspect,
of Mr. Godfrey’s reception in the rose-garden. But, talk as he might,
nine times out of ten he pitched on the wrong subject, or he addressed
himself to the wrong person; the end of it being that he offended some,
and puzzled all of them. That foreign training of his—those French and
German and Italian sides of him, to which I have already alluded—came
out, at my lady’s hospitable board, in a most bewildering manner.

What do you think, for instance, of his discussing the lengths to which
a married woman might let her admiration go for a man who was not her
husband, and putting it in his clear-headed witty French way to the
maiden aunt of the Vicar of Frizinghall? What do you think, when he
shifted to the German side, of his telling the lord of the manor, while
that great authority on cattle was quoting his experience in the
breeding of bulls, that experience, properly understood counted for
nothing, and that the proper way to breed bulls was to look deep into
your own mind, evolve out of it the idea of a perfect bull, and produce
him? What do you say, when our county member, growing hot, at cheese
and salad time, about the spread of democracy in England, burst out as
follows: “If we once lose our ancient safeguards, Mr. Blake, I beg to
ask you, what have we got left?”—what do you say to Mr. Franklin
answering, from the Italian point of view: “We have got three things
left, sir—Love, Music, and Salad”? He not only terrified the company
with such outbreaks as these, but, when the English side of him turned
up in due course, he lost his foreign smoothness; and, getting on the
subject of the medical profession, said such downright things in
ridicule of doctors, that he actually put good-humoured little Mr.
Candy in a rage.

The dispute between them began in Mr. Franklin being led—I forget
how—to acknowledge that he had latterly slept very badly at night. Mr.
Candy thereupon told him that his nerves were all out of order and that
he ought to go through a course of medicine immediately. Mr. Franklin
replied that a course of medicine, and a course of groping in the dark,
meant, in his estimation, one and the same thing. Mr. Candy, hitting
back smartly, said that Mr Franklin himself was, constitutionally
speaking, groping in the dark after sleep, and that nothing but
medicine could help him to find it. Mr. Franklin, keeping the ball up
on his side, said he had often heard of the blind leading the blind,
and now, for the first time, he knew what it meant. In this way, they
kept it going briskly, cut and thrust, till they both of them got
hot—Mr. Candy, in particular, so completely losing his self-control, in
defence of his profession, that my lady was obliged to interfere, and
forbid the dispute to go on. This necessary act of authority put the
last extinguisher on the spirits of the company. The talk spurted up
again here and there, for a minute or two at a time; but there was a
miserable lack of life and sparkle in it. The Devil (or the Diamond)
possessed that dinner-party; and it was a relief to everybody when my
mistress rose, and gave the ladies the signal to leave the gentlemen
over their wine.

I had just ranged the decanters in a row before old Mr. Ablewhite (who
represented the master of the house), when there came a sound from the
terrace which, startled me out of my company manners on the instant.
Mr. Franklin and I looked at each other; it was the sound of the Indian
drum. As I live by bread, here were the jugglers returning to us with
the return of the Moonstone to the house!

As they rounded the corner of the terrace, and came in sight, I hobbled
out to warn them off. But, as ill-luck would have it, the two Bouncers
were beforehand with me. They whizzed out on to the terrace like a
couple of skyrockets, wild to see the Indians exhibit their tricks. The
other ladies followed; the gentlemen came out on their side. Before you
could say, “Lord bless us!” the rogues were making their salaams; and
the Bouncers were kissing the pretty little boy.

Mr. Franklin got on one side of Miss Rachel, and I put myself behind
her. If our suspicions were right, there she stood, innocent of all
knowledge of the truth, showing the Indians the Diamond in the bosom of
her dress!

I can’t tell you what tricks they performed, or how they did it. What
with the vexation about the dinner, and what with the provocation of
the rogues coming back just in the nick of time to see the jewel with
their own eyes, I own I lost my head. The first thing that I remember
noticing was the sudden appearance on the scene of the Indian
traveller, Mr. Murthwaite. Skirting the half-circle in which the
gentlefolks stood or sat, he came quietly behind the jugglers and spoke
to them on a sudden in the language of their own country.

If he had pricked them with a bayonet, I doubt if the Indians could
have started and turned on him with a more tigerish quickness than they
did, on hearing the first words that passed his lips. The next moment
they were bowing and salaaming to him in their most polite and snaky
way. After a few words in the unknown tongue had passed on either side,
Mr. Murthwaite withdrew as quietly as he had approached. The chief
Indian, who acted as interpreter, thereupon wheeled about again towards
the gentlefolks. I noticed that the fellow’s coffee-coloured face had
turned grey since Mr. Murthwaite had spoken to him. He bowed to my
lady, and informed her that the exhibition was over. The Bouncers,
indescribably disappointed, burst out with a loud “O!” directed against
Mr. Murthwaite for stopping the performance. The chief Indian laid his
hand humbly on his breast, and said a second time that the juggling was
over. The little boy went round with the hat. The ladies withdrew to
the drawing-room; and the gentlemen (excepting Mr. Franklin and Mr.
Murthwaite) returned to their wine. I and the footman followed the
Indians, and saw them safe off the premises.

Going back by way of the shrubbery, I smelt tobacco, and found Mr.
Franklin and Mr. Murthwaite (the latter smoking a cheroot) walking
slowly up and down among the trees. Mr. Franklin beckoned to me to join
them.

“This,” says Mr. Franklin, presenting me to the great traveller, “is
Gabriel Betteredge, the old servant and friend of our family of whom I
spoke to you just now. Tell him, if you please, what you have just told
me.”

Mr. Murthwaite took his cheroot out of his mouth, and leaned, in his
weary way, against the trunk of a tree.

“Mr. Betteredge,” he began, “those three Indians are no more jugglers
than you and I are.”

Here was a new surprise! I naturally asked the traveller if he had ever
met with the Indians before.

“Never,” says Mr. Murthwaite; “but I know what Indian juggling really
is. All you have seen tonight is a very bad and clumsy imitation of it.
Unless, after long experience, I am utterly mistaken, those men are
high-caste Brahmins. I charged them with being disguised, and you saw
how it told on them, clever as the Hindoo people are in concealing
their feelings. There is a mystery about their conduct that I can’t
explain. They have doubly sacrificed their caste—first, in crossing the
sea; secondly, in disguising themselves as jugglers. In the land they
live in that is a tremendous sacrifice to make. There must be some very
serious motive at the bottom of it, and some justification of no
ordinary kind to plead for them, in recovery of their caste, when they
return to their own country.”

I was struck dumb. Mr. Murthwaite went on with his cheroot. Mr.
Franklin, after what looked to me like a little private veering about
between the different sides of his character, broke the silence as
follows:

“I feel some hesitation, Mr. Murthwaite, in troubling you with family
matters, in which you can have no interest and which I am not very
willing to speak of out of our own circle. But, after what you have
said, I feel bound, in the interests of Lady Verinder and her daughter,
to tell you something which may possibly put the clue into your hands.
I speak to you in confidence; you will oblige me, I am sure, by not
forgetting that?”

With this preface, he told the Indian traveller all that he had told me
at the Shivering Sand. Even the immovable Mr. Murthwaite was so
interested in what he heard, that he let his cheroot go out.

“Now,” says Mr. Franklin, when he had done, “what does your experience
say?”

“My experience,” answered the traveller, “says that you have had more
narrow escapes of your life, Mr. Franklin Blake, than I have had of
mine; and that is saying a great deal.”

It was Mr. Franklin’s turn to be astonished now.

“Is it really as serious as that?” he asked.

“In my opinion it is,” answered Mr. Murthwaite. “I can’t doubt, after
what you have told me, that the restoration of the Moonstone to its
place on the forehead of the Indian idol, is the motive and the
justification of that sacrifice of caste which I alluded to just now.
Those men will wait their opportunity with the patience of cats, and
will use it with the ferocity of tigers. How you have escaped them I
can’t imagine,” says the eminent traveller, lighting his cheroot again,
and staring hard at Mr. Franklin. “You have been carrying the Diamond
backwards and forwards, here and in London, and you are still a living
man! Let us try and account for it. It was daylight, both times, I
suppose, when you took the jewel out of the bank in London?”

“Broad daylight,” says Mr. Franklin.

“And plenty of people in the streets?”

“Plenty.”

“You settled, of course, to arrive at Lady Verinder’s house at a
certain time? It’s a lonely country between this and the station. Did
you keep your appointment?”

“No. I arrived four hours earlier than my appointment.”

“I beg to congratulate you on that proceeding! When did you take the
Diamond to the bank at the town here?”

“I took it an hour after I had brought it to this house—and three hours
before anybody was prepared for seeing me in these parts.”

“I beg to congratulate you again! Did you bring it back here alone?”

“No. I happened to ride back with my cousins and the groom.”

“I beg to congratulate you for the third time! If you ever feel
inclined to travel beyond the civilised limits, Mr. Blake, let me know,
and I will go with you. You are a lucky man.”

Here I struck in. This sort of thing didn’t at all square with my
English ideas.

“You don’t really mean to say, sir,” I asked, “that they would have
taken Mr. Franklin’s life, to get their Diamond, if he had given them
the chance?”

“Do you smoke, Mr. Betteredge?” says the traveller.

“Yes, sir.

“Do you care much for the ashes left in your pipe when you empty it?”

“No, sir.”

“In the country those men came from, they care just as much about
killing a man, as you care about emptying the ashes out of your pipe.
If a thousand lives stood between them and the getting back of their
Diamond—and if they thought they could destroy those lives without
discovery—they would take them all. The sacrifice of caste is a serious
thing in India, if you like. The sacrifice of life is nothing at all.”

I expressed my opinion upon this, that they were a set of murdering
thieves. Mr. Murthwaite expressed his opinion that they were a
wonderful people. Mr. Franklin, expressing no opinion at all, brought
us back to the matter in hand.

“They have seen the Moonstone on Miss Verinder’s dress,” he said. “What
is to be done?”

“What your uncle threatened to do,” answered Mr. Murthwaite. “Colonel
Herncastle understood the people he had to deal with. Send the Diamond
tomorrow (under guard of more than one man) to be cut up at Amsterdam.
Make half a dozen diamonds of it, instead of one. There is an end of
its sacred identity as The Moonstone—and there is an end of the
conspiracy.”

Mr. Franklin turned to me.

“There is no help for it,” he said. “We must speak to Lady Verinder
tomorrow.”

“What about tonight, sir?” I asked. “Suppose the Indians come back?”

Mr. Murthwaite answered me before Mr. Franklin could speak.

“The Indians won’t risk coming back tonight,” he said. “The direct way
is hardly ever the way they take to anything—let alone a matter like
this, in which the slightest mistake might be fatal to their reaching
their end.”

“But suppose the rogues are bolder than you think, sir?” I persisted.

“In that case,” says Mr. Murthwaite, “let the dogs loose. Have you got
any big dogs in the yard?”

“Two, sir. A mastiff and a bloodhound.”

“They will do. In the present emergency, Mr. Betteredge, the mastiff
and the bloodhound have one great merit—they are not likely to be
troubled with your scruples about the sanctity of human life.”

The strumming of the piano reached us from the drawing-room, as he
fired that shot at me. He threw away his cheroot, and took Mr.
Franklin’s arm, to go back to the ladies. I noticed that the sky was
clouding over fast, as I followed them to the house. Mr. Murthwaite
noticed it too. He looked round at me, in his dry, droning way, and
said:

“The Indians will want their umbrellas, Mr. Betteredge, tonight!”

It was all very well for him to joke. But I was not an eminent
traveller—and my way in this world had not led me into playing ducks
and drakes with my own life, among thieves and murderers in the
outlandish places of the earth. I went into my own little room, and sat
down in my chair in a perspiration, and wondered helplessly what was to
be done next. In this anxious frame of mind, other men might have ended
by working themselves up into a fever; I ended in a different way. I
lit my pipe, and took a turn at Robinson Crusoe.

Before I had been at it five minutes, I came to this amazing bit—page
one hundred and sixty-one—as follows:

“Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger
itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety
greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about.”

The man who doesn’t believe in Robinson Crusoe, after that, is a
man with a screw loose in his understanding, or a man lost in the mist
of his own self-conceit! Argument is thrown away upon him; and pity is
better reserved for some person with a livelier faith.

I was far on with my second pipe, and still lost in admiration of that
wonderful book, when Penelope (who had been handing round the tea) came
in with her report from the drawing-room. She had left the Bouncers
singing a duet—words beginning with a large “O,” and music to
correspond. She had observed that my lady made mistakes in her game of
whist for the first time in our experience of her. She had seen the
great traveller asleep in a corner. She had overheard Mr. Franklin
sharpening his wits on Mr. Godfrey, at the expense of Ladies’ Charities
in general; and she had noticed that Mr. Godfrey hit him back again
rather more smartly than became a gentleman of his benevolent
character. She had detected Miss Rachel, apparently engaged in
appeasing Mrs. Threadgall by showing her some photographs, and really
occupied in stealing looks at Mr. Franklin, which no intelligent lady’s
maid could misinterpret for a single instant. Finally, she had missed
Mr. Candy, the doctor, who had mysteriously disappeared from the
drawing-room, and had then mysteriously returned, and entered into
conversation with Mr. Godfrey. Upon the whole, things were prospering
better than the experience of the dinner gave us any right to expect.
If we could only hold on for another hour, old Father Time would bring
up their carriages, and relieve us of them altogether.

Everything wears off in this world; and even the comforting effect of
Robinson Crusoe wore off, after Penelope left me. I got fidgety
again, and resolved on making a survey of the grounds before the rain
came. Instead of taking the footman, whose nose was human, and
therefore useless in any emergency, I took the bloodhound with me.
His nose for a stranger was to be depended on. We went all round the
premises, and out into the road—and returned as wise as we went, having
discovered no such thing as a lurking human creature anywhere.

The arrival of the carriages was the signal for the arrival of the
rain. It poured as if it meant to pour all night. With the exception of
the doctor, whose gig was waiting for him, the rest of the company went
home snugly, under cover, in close carriages. I told Mr. Candy that I
was afraid he would get wet through. He told me, in return, that he
wondered I had arrived at my time of life, without knowing that a
doctor’s skin was waterproof. So he drove away in the rain, laughing
over his own little joke; and so we got rid of our dinner company.

The next thing to tell is the story of the night.