The Moonstone

he news of Rosanna’s disappearance had, as it appeared, spread among
the out-of-door servants. They too had made their inquiries; and they
had just laid hands on a quick little imp, nicknamed “Duffy”—who was
occasionally employed in weeding the garden, and who had seen Rosanna
Spearman as lately as half-an-hour since. Duffy was certain that the
girl had passed him in the fir-plantation, not walking, but running,
in the direction of the sea-shore.

“Does this boy know the coast hereabouts?” asked Sergeant Cuff.

“He has been born and bred on the coast,” I answered.

“Duffy!” says the Sergeant, “do you want to earn a shilling? If you do,
come along with me. Keep the pony-chaise ready, Mr. Betteredge, till I
come back.”

He started for the Shivering Sand, at a rate that my legs (though well
enough preserved for my time of life) had no hope of matching. Little
Duffy, as the way is with the young savages in our parts when they are
in high spirits, gave a howl, and trotted off at the Sergeant’s heels.

Here again, I find it impossible to give anything like a clear account
of the state of my mind in the interval after Sergeant Cuff had left
us. A curious and stupefying restlessness got possession of me. I did a
dozen different needless things in and out of the house, not one of
which I can now remember. I don’t even know how long it was after the
Sergeant had gone to the sands, when Duffy came running back with a
message for me. Sergeant Cuff had given the boy a leaf torn out of his
pocket-book, on which was written in pencil, “Send me one of Rosanna
Spearman’s boots, and be quick about it.”

I despatched the first woman-servant I could find to Rosanna’s room;
and I sent the boy back to say that I myself would follow him with the
boot.

This, I am well aware, was not the quickest way to take of obeying the
directions which I had received. But I was resolved to see for myself
what new mystification was going on before I trusted Rosanna’s boot in
the Sergeant’s hands. My old notion of screening the girl, if I could,
seemed to have come back on me again, at the eleventh hour. This state
of feeling (to say nothing of the detective-fever) hurried me off, as
soon as I had got the boot, at the nearest approach to a run which a
man turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.

As I got near the shore, the clouds gathered black, and the rain came
down, drifting in great white sheets of water before the wind. I heard
the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank at the mouth of the bay. A
little further on, I passed the boy crouching for shelter under the lee
of the sandhills. Then I saw the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling
in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like
a flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach with one
solitary black figure standing on it—the figure of Sergeant Cuff.

He waved his hand towards the north, when he first saw me. “Keep on
that side!” he shouted. “And come on down here to me!”

I went down to him, choking for breath, with my heart leaping as if it
was like to leap out of me. I was past speaking. I had a hundred
questions to put to him; and not one of them would pass my lips. His
face frightened me. I saw a look in his eyes which was a look of
horror. He snatched the boot out of my hand, and set it in a footmark
on the sand, bearing south from us as we stood, and pointing straight
towards the rocky ledge called the South Spit. The mark was not yet
blurred out by the rain—and the girl’s boot fitted it to a hair.

The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the footmark, without saying a
word.

I caught at his arm, and tried to speak to him, and failed as I had
failed when I tried before. He went on, following the footsteps down
and down to where the rocks and the sand joined. The South Spit was
just awash with the flowing tide; the waters heaved over the hidden
face of the Shivering Sand. Now this way and now that, with an
obstinate patience that was dreadful to see, Sergeant Cuff tried the
boot in the footsteps, and always found it pointing the same
way—straight to the rocks. Hunt as he might, no sign could he find
anywhere of the footsteps walking from them.

He gave it up at last. Still keeping silence, he looked again at me;
and then he looked out at the waters before us, heaving in deeper and
deeper over the quicksand. I looked where he looked—and I saw his
thought in his face. A dreadful dumb trembling crawled all over me on a
sudden. I fell upon my knees on the beach.

“She has been back at the hiding-place,” I heard the Sergeant say to
himself. “Some fatal accident has happened to her on those rocks.”

The girl’s altered looks, and words, and actions—the numbed, deadened
way in which she listened to me, and spoke to me—when I had found her
sweeping the corridor but a few hours since, rose up in my mind, and
warned me, even as the Sergeant spoke, that his guess was wide of the
dreadful truth. I tried to tell him of the fear that had frozen me up.
I tried to say, “The death she has died, Sergeant, was a death of her
own seeking.” No! the words wouldn’t come. The dumb trembling held me
in its grip. I couldn’t feel the driving rain. I couldn’t see the
rising tide. As in the vision of a dream, the poor lost creature came
back before me. I saw her again as I had seen her in the past time—on
the morning when I went to fetch her into the house. I heard her again,
telling me that the Shivering Sand seemed to draw her to it against her
will, and wondering whether her grave was waiting for her there. The
horror of it struck at me, in some unfathomable way, through my own
child. My girl was just her age. My girl, tried as Rosanna was tried,
might have lived that miserable life, and died this dreadful death.

The Sergeant kindly lifted me up, and turned me away from the sight of
the place where she had perished.

With that relief, I began to fetch my breath again, and to see things
about me, as things really were. Looking towards the sandhills, I saw
the men-servants from out-of-doors, and the fisherman, named Yolland,
all running down to us together; and all, having taken the alarm,
calling out to know if the girl had been found. In the fewest words,
the Sergeant showed them the evidence of the footmarks, and told them
that a fatal accident must have happened to her. He then picked out the
fisherman from the rest, and put a question to him, turning about again
towards the sea: “Tell me,” he said. “Could a boat have taken her off,
in such weather as this, from those rocks where her footmarks stop?”

The fisherman pointed to the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and
to the great waves leaping up in clouds of foam against the headlands
on either side of us.

“No boat that ever was built,” he answered, “could have got to her
through that.”

Sergeant Cuff looked for the last time at the foot-marks on the sand,
which the rain was now fast blurring out.

“There,” he said, “is the evidence that she can’t have left this place
by land. And here,” he went on, looking at the fisherman, “is the
evidence that she can’t have got away by sea.” He stopped, and
considered for a minute. “She was seen running towards this place, half
an hour before I got here from the house,” he said to Yolland. “Some
time has passed since then. Call it, altogether, an hour ago. How high
would the water be, at that time, on this side of the rocks?” He
pointed to the south side—otherwise, the side which was not filled up
by the quicksand.

“As the tide makes today,” said the fisherman, “there wouldn’t have
been water enough to drown a kitten on that side of the Spit, an hour
since.”

Sergeant Cuff turned about northward, towards the quicksand.

“How much on this side?” he asked.

“Less still,” answered Yolland. “The Shivering Sand would have been
just awash, and no more.”

The Sergeant turned to me, and said that the accident must have
happened on the side of the quicksand. My tongue was loosened at that.
“No accident!” I told him. “When she came to this place, she came weary
of her life, to end it here.”

He started back from me. “How do you know?” he asked. The rest of them
crowded round. The Sergeant recovered himself instantly. He put them
back from me; he said I was an old man; he said the discovery had
shaken me; he said, “Let him alone a little.” Then he turned to
Yolland, and asked, “Is there any chance of finding her, when the tide
ebbs again?” And Yolland answered, “None. What the Sand gets, the Sand
keeps for ever.” Having said that, the fisherman came a step nearer,
and addressed himself to me.

“Mr. Betteredge,” he said, “I have a word to say to you about the young
woman’s death. Four foot out, broadwise, along the side of the Spit,
there’s a shelf of rock, about half fathom down under the sand. My
question is—why didn’t she strike that? If she slipped, by accident,
from off the Spit, she fell in where there’s foothold at the bottom, at
a depth that would barely cover her to the waist. She must have waded
out, or jumped out, into the Deeps beyond—or she wouldn’t be missing
now. No accident, sir! The Deeps of the Quicksand have got her. And
they have got her by her own act.”

After that testimony from a man whose knowledge was to be relied on,
the Sergeant was silent. The rest of us, like him, held our peace. With
one accord, we all turned back up the slope of the beach.

At the sandhillocks we were met by the under-groom, running to us from
the house. The lad is a good lad, and has an honest respect for me. He
handed me a little note, with a decent sorrow in his face. “Penelope
sent me with this, Mr. Betteredge,” he said. “She found it in Rosanna’s
room.”

It was her last farewell word to the old man who had done his
best—thank God, always done his best—to befriend her.

“You have often forgiven me, Mr. Betteredge, in past times. When you
next see the Shivering Sand, try to forgive me once more. I have found
my grave where my grave was waiting for me. I have lived, and died,
sir, grateful for your kindness.”

There was no more than that. Little as it was, I hadn’t manhood enough
to hold up against it. Your tears come easy, when you’re young, and
beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving
it. I burst out crying.

Sergeant Cuff took a step nearer to me—meaning kindly, I don’t doubt. I
shrank back from him. “Don’t touch me,” I said. “It’s the dread of you,
that has driven her to it.”

“You are wrong, Mr. Betteredge,” he answered, quietly. “But there will
be time enough to speak of it when we are indoors again.”

I followed the rest of them, with the help of the groom’s arm. Through
the driving rain we went back—to meet the trouble and the terror that
were waiting for us at the house.