The Moonstone

he first thing I did, after we were left together alone, was to make a
third attempt to get up from my seat on the sand. Mr. Franklin stopped
me.

“There is one advantage about this horrid place,” he said; “we have got
it all to ourselves. Stay where you are, Betteredge; I have something
to say to you.”

While he was speaking, I was looking at him, and trying to see
something of the boy I remembered, in the man before me. The man put me
out. Look as I might, I could see no more of his boy’s rosy cheeks than
of his boy’s trim little jacket. His complexion had got pale: his face,
at the lower part was covered, to my great surprise and disappointment,
with a curly brown beard and moustachios. He had a lively touch-and-go
way with him, very pleasant and engaging, I admit; but nothing to
compare with his free-and-easy manners of other times. To make matters
worse, he had promised to be tall, and had not kept his promise. He was
neat, and slim, and well made; but he wasn’t by an inch or two up to
the middle height. In short, he baffled me altogether. The years that
had passed had left nothing of his old self, except the bright,
straightforward look in his eyes. There I found our nice boy again, and
there I concluded to stop in my investigation.

“Welcome back to the old place, Mr. Franklin,” I said. “All the more
welcome, sir, that you have come some hours before we expected you.”

“I have a reason for coming before you expected me,” answered Mr.
Franklin. “I suspect, Betteredge, that I have been followed and watched
in London, for the last three or four days; and I have travelled by the
morning instead of the afternoon train, because I wanted to give a
certain dark-looking stranger the slip.”

Those words did more than surprise me. They brought back to my mind, in
a flash, the three jugglers, and Penelope’s notion that they meant some
mischief to Mr. Franklin Blake.

“Who’s watching you, sir,—and why?” I inquired.

“Tell me about the three Indians you have had at the house today,” says
Mr. Franklin, without noticing my question. “It’s just possible,
Betteredge, that my stranger and your three jugglers may turn out to be
pieces of the same puzzle.”

“How do you come to know about the jugglers, sir?” I asked, putting one
question on the top of another, which was bad manners, I own. But you
don’t expect much from poor human nature—so don’t expect much from me.

“I saw Penelope at the house,” says Mr. Franklin; “and Penelope told
me. Your daughter promised to be a pretty girl, Betteredge, and she has
kept her promise. Penelope has got a small ear and a small foot. Did
the late Mrs. Betteredge possess those inestimable advantages?”

“The late Mrs. Betteredge possessed a good many defects, sir,” says I.
“One of them (if you will pardon my mentioning it) was never keeping to
the matter in hand. She was more like a fly than a woman: she couldn’t
settle on anything.”

“She would just have suited me,” says Mr. Franklin. “I never settle on
anything either. Betteredge, your edge is better than ever. Your
daughter said as much, when I asked for particulars about the jugglers.
‘Father will tell you, sir. He’s a wonderful man for his age; and he
expresses himself beautifully.’ Penelope’s own words—blushing divinely.
Not even my respect for you prevented me from—never mind; I knew her
when she was a child, and she’s none the worse for it. Let’s be
serious. What did the jugglers do?”

I was something dissatisfied with my daughter—not for letting Mr.
Franklin kiss her; Mr. Franklin was welcome to that—but for forcing
me to tell her foolish story at second hand. However, there was no help
for it now but to mention the circumstances. Mr. Franklin’s merriment
all died away as I went on. He sat knitting his eyebrows, and twisting
his beard. When I had done, he repeated after me two of the questions
which the chief juggler had put to the boy—seemingly for the purpose of
fixing them well in his mind.

“‘Is it on the road to this house, and on no other, that the English
gentleman will travel today?’ ‘Has the English gentleman got It about
him?’ I suspect,” says Mr. Franklin, pulling a little sealed paper
parcel out of his pocket, “that ‘It’ means this. And ‘this,’
Betteredge, means my uncle Herncastle’s famous Diamond.”

“Good Lord, sir!” I broke out, “how do you come to be in charge of the
wicked Colonel’s Diamond?”

“The wicked Colonel’s will has left his Diamond as a birthday present
to my cousin Rachel,” says Mr. Franklin. “And my father, as the wicked
Colonel’s executor, has given it in charge to me to bring down here.”

If the sea, then oozing in smoothly over the Shivering Sand, had been
changed into dry land before my own eyes, I doubt if I could have been
more surprised than I was when Mr. Franklin spoke those words.

“The Colonel’s Diamond left to Miss Rachel!” says I. “And your father,
sir, the Colonel’s executor! Why, I would have laid any bet you like,
Mr. Franklin, that your father wouldn’t have touched the Colonel with a
pair of tongs!”

“Strong language, Betteredge! What was there against the Colonel. He
belonged to your time, not to mine. Tell me what you know about him,
and I’ll tell you how my father came to be his executor, and more
besides. I have made some discoveries in London about my uncle
Herncastle and his Diamond, which have rather an ugly look to my eyes;
and I want you to confirm them. You called him the ‘wicked Colonel’
just now. Search your memory, my old friend, and tell me why.”

I saw he was in earnest, and I told him.

Here follows the substance of what I said, written out entirely for
your benefit. Pay attention to it, or you will be all abroad, when we
get deeper into the story. Clear your mind of the children, or the
dinner, or the new bonnet, or what not. Try if you can’t forget
politics, horses, prices in the City, and grievances at the club. I
hope you won’t take this freedom on my part amiss; it’s only a way I
have of appealing to the gentle reader. Lord! haven’t I seen you with
the greatest authors in your hands, and don’t I know how ready your
attention is to wander when it’s a book that asks for it, instead of a
person?

I spoke, a little way back, of my lady’s father, the old lord with the
short temper and the long tongue. He had five children in all. Two sons
to begin with; then, after a long time, his wife broke out breeding
again, and the three young ladies came briskly one after the other, as
fast as the nature of things would permit; my mistress, as before
mentioned, being the youngest and best of the three. Of the two sons,
the eldest, Arthur, inherited the title and estates. The second, the
Honourable John, got a fine fortune left him by a relative, and went
into the army.

It’s an ill bird, they say, that fouls its own nest. I look on the
noble family of the Herncastles as being my nest; and I shall take it
as a favour if I am not expected to enter into particulars on the
subject of the Honourable John. He was, I honestly believe, one of the
greatest blackguards that ever lived. I can hardly say more or less for
him than that. He went into the army, beginning in the Guards. He had
to leave the Guards before he was two-and-twenty—never mind why. They
are very strict in the army, and they were too strict for the
Honourable John. He went out to India to see whether they were equally
strict there, and to try a little active service. In the matter of
bravery (to give him his due), he was a mixture of bull-dog and
game-cock, with a dash of the savage. He was at the taking of
Seringapatam. Soon afterwards he changed into another regiment, and, in
course of time, changed into a third. In the third he got his last step
as lieutenant-colonel, and, getting that, got also a sunstroke, and
came home to England.

He came back with a character that closed the doors of all his family
against him, my lady (then just married) taking the lead, and declaring
(with Sir John’s approval, of course) that her brother should never
enter any house of hers. There was more than one slur on the Colonel
that made people shy of him; but the blot of the Diamond is all I need
mention here.

It was said he had got possession of his Indian jewel by means which,
bold as he was, he didn’t dare acknowledge. He never attempted to sell
it—not being in need of money, and not (to give him his due again)
making money an object. He never gave it away; he never even showed it
to any living soul. Some said he was afraid of its getting him into a
difficulty with the military authorities; others (very ignorant indeed
of the real nature of the man) said he was afraid, if he showed it, of
its costing him his life.

There was perhaps a grain of truth mixed up with this last report. It
was false to say that he was afraid; but it was a fact that his life
had been twice threatened in India; and it was firmly believed that the
Moonstone was at the bottom of it. When he came back to England, and
found himself avoided by everybody, the Moonstone was thought to be at
the bottom of it again. The mystery of the Colonel’s life got in the
Colonel’s way, and outlawed him, as you may say, among his own people.
The men wouldn’t let him into their clubs; the women—more than one—whom
he wanted to marry, refused him; friends and relations got too
near-sighted to see him in the street.

Some men in this mess would have tried to set themselves right with the
world. But to give in, even when he was wrong, and had all society
against him, was not the way of the Honourable John. He had kept the
Diamond, in flat defiance of assassination, in India. He kept the
Diamond, in flat defiance of public opinion, in England. There you have
the portrait of the man before you, as in a picture: a character that
braved everything; and a face, handsome as it was, that looked
possessed by the devil.

We heard different rumours about him from time to time. Sometimes they
said he was given up to smoking opium and collecting old books;
sometimes he was reported to be trying strange things in chemistry;
sometimes he was seen carousing and amusing himself among the lowest
people in the lowest slums of London. Anyhow, a solitary, vicious,
underground life was the life the Colonel led. Once, and once only,
after his return to England, I myself saw him, face to face.

About two years before the time of which I am now writing, and about a
year and a half before the time of his death, the Colonel came
unexpectedly to my lady’s house in London. It was the night of Miss
Rachel’s birthday, the twenty-first of June; and there was a party in
honour of it, as usual. I received a message from the footman to say
that a gentleman wanted to see me. Going up into the hall, there I
found the Colonel, wasted, and worn, and old, and shabby, and as wild
and as wicked as ever.

“Go up to my sister,” says he; “and say that I have called to wish my
niece many happy returns of the day.”

He had made attempts by letter, more than once already, to be
reconciled with my lady, for no other purpose, I am firmly persuaded,
than to annoy her. But this was the first time he had actually come to
the house. I had it on the tip of my tongue to say that my mistress had
a party that night. But the devilish look of him daunted me. I went
upstairs with his message, and left him, by his own desire, waiting in
the hall. The servants stood staring at him, at a distance, as if he
was a walking engine of destruction, loaded with powder and shot, and
likely to go off among them at a moment’s notice.

My lady had a dash—no more—of the family temper. “Tell Colonel
Herncastle,” she said, when I gave her her brother’s message, “that
Miss Verinder is engaged, and that I decline to see him.” I tried to
plead for a civiller answer than that; knowing the Colonel’s
constitutional superiority to the restraints which govern gentlemen in
general. Quite useless! The family temper flashed out at me directly.
“When I want your advice,” says my lady, “you know that I always ask
for it. I don’t ask for it now.” I went downstairs with the message, of
which I took the liberty of presenting a new and amended edition of my
own contriving, as follows: “My lady and Miss Rachel regret that they
are engaged, Colonel; and beg to be excused having the honour of seeing
you.”

I expected him to break out, even at that polite way of putting it. To
my surprise he did nothing of the sort; he alarmed me by taking the
thing with an unnatural quiet. His eyes, of a glittering bright grey,
just settled on me for a moment; and he laughed, not out of himself,
like other people, but into himself, in a soft, chuckling, horridly
mischievous way. “Thank you, Betteredge,” he said. “I shall remember my
niece’s birthday.” With that, he turned on his heel, and walked out of
the house.

The next birthday came round, and we heard he was ill in bed. Six
months afterwards—that is to say, six months before the time I am now
writing of—there came a letter from a highly respectable clergyman to
my lady. It communicated two wonderful things in the way of family
news. First, that the Colonel had forgiven his sister on his death-bed.
Second, that he had forgiven everybody else, and had made a most
edifying end. I have myself (in spite of the bishops and the clergy) an
unfeigned respect for the Church; but I am firmly persuaded, at the
same time, that the devil remained in undisturbed possession of the
Honourable John, and that the last abominable act in the life of that
abominable man was (saving your presence) to take the clergyman in!

This was the sum-total of what I had to tell Mr. Franklin. I remarked
that he listened more and more eagerly the longer I went on. Also, that
the story of the Colonel being sent away from his sister’s door, on the
occasion of his niece’s birthday, seemed to strike Mr. Franklin like a
shot that had hit the mark. Though he didn’t acknowledge it, I saw that
I had made him uneasy, plainly enough, in his face.

“You have said your say, Betteredge,” he remarked. “It’s my turn now.
Before, however, I tell you what discoveries I have made in London, and
how I came to be mixed up in this matter of the Diamond, I want to know
one thing. You look, my old friend, as if you didn’t quite understand
the object to be answered by this consultation of ours. Do your looks
belie you?”

“No, sir,” I said. “My looks, on this occasion at any rate, tell the
truth.”

“In that case,” says Mr. Franklin, “suppose I put you up to my point of
view, before we go any further. I see three very serious questions
involved in the Colonel’s birthday-gift to my cousin Rachel. Follow me
carefully, Betteredge; and count me off on your fingers, if it will
help you,” says Mr. Franklin, with a certain pleasure in showing how
clear-headed he could be, which reminded me wonderfully of old times
when he was a boy. “Question the first: Was the Colonel’s Diamond the
object of a conspiracy in India? Question the second: Has the
conspiracy followed the Colonel’s Diamond to England? Question the
third: Did the Colonel know the conspiracy followed the Diamond; and
has he purposely left a legacy of trouble and danger to his sister,
through the innocent medium of his sister’s child? That is what I am
driving at, Betteredge. Don’t let me frighten you.”

It was all very well to say that, but he had frightened me.

If he was right, here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a
devilish Indian Diamond—bringing after it a conspiracy of living
rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man. There was our
situation as revealed to me in Mr. Franklin’s last words! Who ever
heard the like of it—in the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of
progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of the
British constitution? Nobody ever heard the like of it, and,
consequently, nobody can be expected to believe it. I shall go on with
my story, however, in spite of that.

When you get a sudden alarm, of the sort that I had got now, nine times
out of ten the place you feel it in is your stomach. When you feel it
in your stomach, your attention wanders, and you begin to fidget. I
fidgeted silently in my place on the sand. Mr. Franklin noticed me,
contending with a perturbed stomach or mind—which you please; they mean
the same thing—and, checking himself just as he was starting with his
part of the story, said to me sharply, “What do you want?”

What did I want? I didn’t tell him; but I’ll tell you, in
confidence. I wanted a whiff of my pipe, and a turn at Robinson
Crusoe.