第 二十六 章 · Chapter III

Consideration 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 mantelpiece 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 footman—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.