The Moonstone

onsideration for poor Lady Verinder forbade me even to hint that I had
guessed the melancholy truth, before she opened her lips. I waited her
pleasure in silence; and, having privately arranged to say a few
sustaining words at the first convenient opportunity, felt prepared for
any duty that could claim me, no matter how painful it might be.

“I have been seriously ill, Drusilla, for some time past,” my aunt
began. “And, strange to say, without knowing it myself.”

I thought of the thousands and thousands of perishing human creatures
who were all at that moment spiritually ill, without knowing it
themselves. And I greatly feared that my poor aunt might be one of the
number. “Yes, dear,” I said, sadly. “Yes.”

“I brought Rachel to London, as you know, for medical advice,” she went
on. “I thought it right to consult two doctors.”

Two doctors! And, oh me (in Rachel’s state), not one clergyman! “Yes,
dear?” I said once more. “Yes?”

“One of the two medical men,” proceeded my aunt, “was a stranger to me.
The other had been an old friend of my husband’s, and had always felt a
sincere interest in me for my husband’s sake. After prescribing for
Rachel, he said he wished to speak to me privately in another room. I
expected, of course, to receive some special directions for the
management of my daughter’s health. To my surprise, he took me gravely
by the hand, and said, ‘I have been looking at you, Lady Verinder, with
a professional as well as a personal interest. You are, I am afraid,
far more urgently in need of medical advice than your daughter.’ He put
some questions to me, which I was at first inclined to treat lightly
enough, until I observed that my answers distressed him. It ended in
his making an appointment to come and see me, accompanied by a medical
friend, on the next day, at an hour when Rachel would not be at home.
The result of that visit—most kindly and gently conveyed to
me—satisfied both the physicians that there had been precious time
lost, which could never be regained, and that my case had now passed
beyond the reach of their art. For more than two years I have been
suffering under an insidious form of heart disease, which, without any
symptoms to alarm me, has, by little and little, fatally broken me
down. I may live for some months, or I may die before another day has
passed over my head—the doctors cannot, and dare not, speak more
positively than this. It would be vain to say, my dear, that I have not
had some miserable moments since my real situation has been made known
to me. But I am more resigned than I was, and I am doing my best to set
my worldly affairs in order. My one great anxiety is that Rachel should
be kept in ignorance of the truth. If she knew it, she would at once
attribute my broken health to anxiety about the Diamond, and would
reproach herself bitterly, poor child, for what is in no sense her
fault. Both the doctors agree that the mischief began two, if not three
years since. I am sure you will keep my secret, Drusilla—for I am sure
I see sincere sorrow and sympathy for me in your face.”

Sorrow and sympathy! Oh, what Pagan emotions to expect from a Christian
Englishwoman anchored firmly on her faith!

Little did my poor aunt imagine what a gush of devout thankfulness
thrilled through me as she approached the close of her melancholy
story. Here was a career of usefulness opened before me! Here was a
beloved relative and perishing fellow-creature, on the eve of the great
change, utterly unprepared; and led, providentially led, to reveal her
situation to Me! How can I describe the joy with which I now remembered
that the precious clerical friends on whom I could rely, were to be
counted, not by ones or twos, but by tens and twenties. I took my aunt
in my arms—my overflowing tenderness was not to be satisfied, now,
with anything less than an embrace. “Oh!” I said to her, fervently,
“the indescribable interest with which you inspire me! Oh! the good I
mean to do you, dear, before we part!” After another word or two of
earnest prefatory warning, I gave her her choice of three precious
friends, all plying the work of mercy from morning to night in her own
neighbourhood; all equally inexhaustible in exhortation; all
affectionately ready to exercise their gifts at a word from me. Alas!
the result was far from encouraging. Poor Lady Verinder looked puzzled
and frightened, and met everything I could say to her with the purely
worldly objection that she was not strong enough to face strangers. I
yielded—for the moment only, of course. My large experience (as Reader
and Visitor, under not less, first and last, than fourteen beloved
clerical friends) informed me that this was another case for
preparation by books. I possessed a little library of works, all
suitable to the present emergency, all calculated to arouse, convince,
prepare, enlighten, and fortify my aunt. “You will read, dear, won’t
you?” I said, in my most winning way. “You will read, if I bring you my
own precious books? Turned down at all the right places, aunt. And
marked in pencil where you are to stop and ask yourself, ‘Does this
apply to me?’” Even that simple appeal—so absolutely heathenising is
the influence of the world—appeared to startle my aunt. She said, “I
will do what I can, Drusilla, to please you,” with a look of surprise,
which was at once instructive and terrible to see. Not a moment was to
be lost. The clock on the mantel-piece informed me that I had just time
to hurry home; to provide myself with a first series of selected
readings (say a dozen only); and to return in time to meet the lawyer,
and witness Lady Verinder’s Will. Promising faithfully to be back by
five o’clock, I left the house on my errand of mercy.

When no interests but my own are involved, I am humbly content to get
from place to place by the omnibus. Permit me to give an idea of my
devotion to my aunt’s interests by recording that, on this occasion, I
committed the prodigality of taking a cab.

I drove home, selected and marked my first series of readings, and
drove back to Montagu Square, with a dozen works in a carpet-bag, the
like of which, I firmly believe, are not to be found in the literature
of any other country in Europe. I paid the cabman exactly his fare. He
received it with an oath; upon which I instantly gave him a tract. If I
had presented a pistol at his head, this abandoned wretch could hardly
have exhibited greater consternation. He jumped up on his box, and,
with profane exclamations of dismay, drove off furiously. Quite
useless, I am happy to say! I sowed the good seed, in spite of him, by
throwing a second tract in at the window of the cab.

The servant who answered the door—not the person with the cap-ribbons,
to my great relief, but the foot-man—informed me that the doctor had
called, and was still shut up with Lady Verinder. Mr. Bruff, the
lawyer, had arrived a minute since and was waiting in the library. I
was shown into the library to wait too.

Mr. Bruff looked surprised to see me. He is the family solicitor, and
we had met more than once, on previous occasions, under Lady Verinder’s
roof. A man, I grieve to say, grown old and grizzled in the service of
the world. A man who, in his hours of business, was the chosen prophet
of Law and Mammon; and who, in his hours of leisure, was equally
capable of reading a novel and of tearing up a tract.

“Have you come to stay here, Miss Clack?” he asked, with a look at my
carpet-bag.

To reveal the contents of my precious bag to such a person as this
would have been simply to invite an outburst of profanity. I lowered
myself to his own level, and mentioned my business in the house.

“My aunt has informed me that she is about to sign her Will,” I
answered. “She has been so good as to ask me to be one of the
witnesses.”

“Aye? aye? Well, Miss Clack, you will do. You are over twenty-one, and
you have not the slightest pecuniary interest in Lady Verinder’s Will.”

Not the slightest pecuniary interest in Lady Verinder’s Will. Oh, how
thankful I felt when I heard that! If my aunt, possessed of thousands,
had remembered poor Me, to whom five pounds is an object—if my name had
appeared in the Will, with a little comforting legacy attached to it—my
enemies might have doubted the motive which had loaded me with the
choicest treasures of my library, and had drawn upon my failing
resources for the prodigal expenses of a cab. Not the cruellest scoffer
of them all could doubt now. Much better as it was! Oh, surely, surely,
much better as it was!

I was aroused from these consoling reflections by the voice of Mr.
Bruff. My meditative silence appeared to weigh upon the spirits of this
worldling, and to force him, as it were, into talking to me against his
own will.

“Well, Miss Clack, what’s the last news in the charitable circles? How
is your friend Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite, after the mauling he got from the
rogues in Northumberland Street? Egad! they’re telling a pretty story
about that charitable gentleman at my club!”

I had passed over the manner in which this person had remarked that I
was more than twenty-one, and that I had no pecuniary interest in my
aunt’s Will. But the tone in which he alluded to dear Mr. Godfrey was
too much for my forbearance. Feeling bound, after what had passed in my
presence that afternoon, to assert the innocence of my admirable
friend, whenever I found it called in question—I own to having also
felt bound to include in the accomplishment of this righteous purpose,
a stinging castigation in the case of Mr. Bruff.

“I live very much out of the world,” I said; “and I don’t possess the
advantage, sir, of belonging to a club. But I happen to know the story
to which you allude; and I also know that a viler falsehood than that
story never was told.”

“Yes, yes, Miss Clack—you believe in your friend. Natural enough. Mr.
Godfrey Ablewhite, won’t find the world in general quite so easy to
convince as a committee of charitable ladies. Appearances are dead
against him. He was in the house when the Diamond was lost. And he was
the first person in the house to go to London afterwards. Those are
ugly circumstances, ma’am, viewed by the light of later events.”

I ought, I know, to have set him right before he went any farther. I
ought to have told him that he was speaking in ignorance of a testimony
to Mr. Godfrey’s innocence, offered by the only person who was
undeniably competent to speak from a positive knowledge of the subject.
Alas! the temptation to lead the lawyer artfully on to his own
discomfiture was too much for me. I asked what he meant by “later
events”—with an appearance of the utmost innocence.

“By later events, Miss Clack, I mean events in which the Indians are
concerned,” proceeded Mr. Bruff, getting more and more superior to poor
Me, the longer he went on. “What do the Indians do, the moment they are
let out of the prison at Frizinghall? They go straight to London, and
fix on Mr. Luker. What follows? Mr. Luker feels alarmed for the safety
of ‘a valuable of great price,’ which he has got in the house. He
lodges it privately (under a general description) in his bankers’
strongroom. Wonderfully clever of him: but the Indians are just as
clever on their side. They have their suspicions that the ‘valuable of
great price’ is being shifted from one place to another; and they hit
on a singularly bold and complete way of clearing those suspicions up.
Whom do they seize and search? Not Mr. Luker only—which would be
intelligible enough—but Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite as well. Why? Mr.
Ablewhite’s explanation is, that they acted on blind suspicion, after
seeing him accidentally speaking to Mr. Luker. Absurd! Half-a-dozen
other people spoke to Mr. Luker that morning. Why were they not
followed home too, and decoyed into the trap? No! no! The plain
inference is, that Mr. Ablewhite had his private interest in the
‘valuable’ as well as Mr. Luker, and that the Indians were so uncertain
as to which of the two had the disposal of it, that there was no
alternative but to search them both. Public opinion says that, Miss
Clack. And public opinion, on this occasion, is not easily refuted.”

He said those last words, looking so wonderfully wise in his own
worldly conceit, that I really (to my shame be it spoken) could not
resist leading him a little farther still, before I overwhelmed him
with the truth.

“I don’t presume to argue with a clever lawyer like you,” I said. “But
is it quite fair, sir, to Mr. Ablewhite to pass over the opinion of the
famous London police officer who investigated this case? Not the shadow
of a suspicion rested upon anybody but Miss Verinder, in the mind of
Sergeant Cuff.”

“Do you mean to tell me, Miss Clack, that you agree with the Sergeant?”

“I judge nobody, sir, and I offer no opinion.”

“And I commit both those enormities, ma’am. I judge the Sergeant to
have been utterly wrong; and I offer the opinion that, if he had known
Rachel’s character as I know it, he would have suspected everybody in
the house but her. I admit that she has her faults—she is secret, and
self-willed; odd and wild, and unlike other girls of her age. But true
as steel, and high-minded and generous to a fault. If the plainest
evidence in the world pointed one way, and if nothing but Rachel’s word
of honour pointed the other, I would take her word before the evidence,
lawyer as I am! Strong language, Miss Clack; but I mean it.”

“Would you object to illustrate your meaning, Mr. Bruff, so that I may
be sure I understand it? Suppose you found Miss Verinder quite
unaccountably interested in what has happened to Mr. Ablewhite and Mr.
Luker? Suppose she asked the strangest questions about this dreadful
scandal, and displayed the most ungovernable agitation when she found
out the turn it was taking?”

“Suppose anything you please, Miss Clack, it wouldn’t shake my belief
in Rachel Verinder by a hair’s-breadth.”

“She is so absolutely to be relied on as that?”

“So absolutely to be relied on as that.”

“Then permit me to inform you, Mr. Bruff, that Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite
was in this house not two hours since, and that his entire innocence of
all concern in the disappearance of the Moonstone was proclaimed by
Miss Verinder herself, in the strongest language I ever heard used by a
young lady in my life.”

I enjoyed the triumph—the unholy triumph, I fear I must admit—of seeing
Mr. Bruff utterly confounded and overthrown by a few plain words from
Me. He started to his feet, and stared at me in silence. I kept my
seat, undisturbed, and related the whole scene as it had occurred. “And
what do you say about Mr. Ablewhite now?” I asked, with the utmost
possible gentleness, as soon as I had done.

“If Rachel has testified to his innocence, Miss Clack, I don’t scruple
to say that I believe in his innocence as firmly as you do. I have been
misled by appearances, like the rest of the world; and I will make the
best atonement I can, by publicly contradicting the scandal which has
assailed your friend wherever I meet with it. In the meantime, allow me
to congratulate you on the masterly manner in which you have opened the
full fire of your batteries on me at the moment when I least expected
it. You would have done great things in my profession, ma’am, if you
had happened to be a man.”

With those words he turned away from me, and began walking irritably up
and down the room.

I could see plainly that the new light I had thrown on the subject had
greatly surprised and disturbed him. Certain expressions dropped from
his lips, as he became more and more absorbed in his own thoughts,
which suggested to my mind the abominable view that he had hitherto
taken of the mystery of the lost Moonstone. He had not scrupled to
suspect dear Mr. Godfrey of the infamy of stealing the Diamond, and to
attribute Rachel’s conduct to a generous resolution to conceal the
crime. On Miss Verinder’s own authority—a perfectly unassailable
authority, as you are aware, in the estimation of Mr. Bruff—that
explanation of the circumstances was now shown to be utterly wrong. The
perplexity into which I had plunged this high legal authority was so
overwhelming that he was quite unable to conceal it from notice. “What
a case!” I heard him say to himself, stopping at the window in his
walk, and drumming on the glass with his fingers. “It not only defies
explanation, it’s even beyond conjecture.”

There was nothing in these words which made any reply at all needful,
on my part—and yet, I answered them! It seems hardly credible that I
should not have been able to let Mr. Bruff alone, even now. It seems
almost beyond mere mortal perversity that I should have discovered, in
what he had just said, a new opportunity of making myself personally
disagreeable to him. But—ah, my friends! nothing is beyond mortal
perversity; and anything is credible when our fallen natures get the
better of us!

“Pardon me for intruding on your reflections,” I said to the
unsuspecting Mr. Bruff. “But surely there is a conjecture to make which
has not occurred to us yet.”

“Maybe, Miss Clack. I own I don’t know what it is.”

“Before I was so fortunate, sir, as to convince you of Mr. Ablewhite’s
innocence, you mentioned it as one of the reasons for suspecting him,
that he was in the house at the time when the Diamond was lost. Permit
me to remind you that Mr. Franklin Blake was also in the house at the
time when the Diamond was lost.”

The old worldling left the window, took a chair exactly opposite to
mine, and looked at me steadily, with a hard and vicious smile.

“You are not so good a lawyer, Miss Clack,” he remarked in a meditative
manner, “as I supposed. You don’t know how to let well alone.”

“I am afraid I fail to follow you, Mr. Bruff,” I said, modestly.

“It won’t do, Miss Clack—it really won’t do a second time. Franklin
Blake is a prime favourite of mine, as you are well aware. But that
doesn’t matter. I’ll adopt your view, on this occasion, before you have
time to turn round on me. You’re quite right, ma’am. I have suspected
Mr. Ablewhite, on grounds which abstractedly justify suspecting Mr.
Blake too. Very good—let’s suspect them together. It’s quite in his
character, we will say, to be capable of stealing the Moonstone. The
only question is, whether it was his interest to do so.”

“Mr. Franklin Blake’s debts,” I remarked, “are matters of family
notoriety.”

“And Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite’s debts have not arrived at that stage of
development yet. Quite true. But there happen to be two difficulties in
the way of your theory, Miss Clack. I manage Franklin Blake’s affairs,
and I beg to inform you that the vast majority of his creditors
(knowing his father to be a rich man) are quite content to charge
interest on their debts, and to wait for their money. There is the
first difficulty—which is tough enough. You will find the second
tougher still. I have it on the authority of Lady Verinder herself,
that her daughter was ready to marry Franklin Blake, before that
infernal Indian Diamond disappeared from the house. She had drawn him
on and put him off again, with the coquetry of a young girl. But she
had confessed to her mother that she loved cousin Franklin, and her
mother had trusted cousin Franklin with the secret. So there he was,
Miss Clack, with his creditors content to wait, and with the certain
prospect before him of marrying an heiress. By all means consider him a
scoundrel; but tell me, if you please, why he should steal the
Moonstone?”

“The human heart is unsearchable,” I said gently. “Who is to fathom
it?”

“In other words, ma’am—though he hadn’t the shadow of a reason for
taking the Diamond—he might have taken it, nevertheless, through
natural depravity. Very well. Say he did. Why the devil——”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Bruff. If I hear the devil referred to in that
manner, I must leave the room.”

“I beg your pardon, Miss Clack—I’ll be more careful in my choice of
language for the future. All I meant to ask was this. Why—even
supposing he did take the Diamond—should Franklin Blake make himself
the most prominent person in the house in trying to recover it? You may
tell me he cunningly did that to divert suspicion from himself. I
answer that he had no need to divert suspicion—because nobody suspected
him. He first steals the Moonstone (without the slightest reason)
through natural depravity; and he then acts a part, in relation to the
loss of the jewel, which there is not the slightest necessity to act,
and which leads to his mortally offending the young lady who would
otherwise have married him. That is the monstrous proposition which you
are driven to assert, if you attempt to associate the disappearance of
the Moonstone with Franklin Blake. No, no, Miss Clack! After what has
passed here today, between us two, the dead-lock, in this case, is
complete. Rachel’s own innocence is (as her mother knows, and as I
know) beyond a doubt. Mr. Ablewhite’s innocence is equally certain—or
Rachel would never have testified to it. And Franklin Blake’s
innocence, as you have just seen, unanswerably asserts itself. On the
one hand, we are morally certain of all these things. And, on the other
hand, we are equally sure that somebody has brought the Moonstone to
London, and that Mr. Luker, or his banker, is in private possession of
it at this moment. What is the use of my experience, what is the use of
any person’s experience, in such a case as that? It baffles me; it
baffles you, it baffles everybody.”

No—not everybody. It had not baffled Sergeant Cuff. I was about to
mention this, with all possible mildness, and with every necessary
protest against being supposed to cast a slur upon Rachel—when the
servant came in to say that the doctor had gone, and that my aunt was
waiting to receive us.

This stopped the discussion. Mr. Bruff collected his papers, looking a
little exhausted by the demands which our conversation had made on him.
I took up my bag-full of precious publications, feeling as if I could
have gone on talking for hours. We proceeded in silence to Lady
Verinder’s room.

Permit me to add here, before my narrative advances to other events,
that I have not described what passed between the lawyer and me,
without having a definite object in view. I am ordered to include in my
contribution to the shocking story of the Moonstone a plain disclosure,
not only of the turn which suspicion took, but even of the names of the
persons on whom suspicion rested, at the time when the Indian Diamond
was believed to be in London. A report of my conversation in the
library with Mr. Bruff appeared to me to be exactly what was wanted to
answer this purpose—while, at the same time, it possessed the great
moral advantage of rendering a sacrifice of sinful self-esteem
essentially necessary on my part. I have been obliged to acknowledge
that my fallen nature got the better of me. In making that humiliating
confession, I get the better of my fallen nature. The moral balance
is restored; the spiritual atmosphere feels clear once more. Dear
friends, we may go on again.