The Moonstone
Miss Rachel herself begged him to take to his cigars again. No! he
would take to nothing again that could cause her a moment’s annoyance;
he would fight it out resolutely, and get back his sleep, sooner or
later, by main force of patience in waiting for it. Such devotion as
this, you may say (as some of them said downstairs), could never fail
of producing the right effect on Miss Rachel—backed up, too, as it was,
by the decorating work every day on the door. All very well—but she had
a photograph of Mr. Godfrey in her bedroom; represented speaking at a
public meeting, with all his hair blown out by the breath of his own
eloquence, and his eyes, most lovely, charming the money out of your
pockets. What do you say to that? Every morning—as Penelope herself
owned to me—there was the man whom the women couldn’t do without,
looking on, in effigy, while Miss Rachel was having her hair combed. He
would be looking on, in reality, before long—that was my opinion of it.
June the sixteenth brought an event which made Mr. Franklin’s chance
look, to my mind, a worse chance than ever.
A strange gentleman, speaking English with a foreign accent, came that
morning to the house, and asked to see Mr. Franklin Blake on business.
The business could not possibly have been connected with the Diamond,
for these two reasons—first, that Mr. Franklin told me nothing about
it; secondly, that he communicated it (when the gentleman had gone, as
I suppose) to my lady. She probably hinted something about it next to
her daughter. At any rate, Miss Rachel was reported to have said some
severe things to Mr. Franklin, at the piano that evening, about the
people he had lived among, and the principles he had adopted in foreign
parts. The next day, for the first time, nothing was done towards the
decoration of the door. I suspect some imprudence of Mr. Franklin’s on
the Continent—with a woman or a debt at the bottom of it—had followed
him to England. But that is all guesswork. In this case, not only Mr.
Franklin, but my lady too, for a wonder, left me in the dark.
On the seventeenth, to all appearance, the cloud passed away again.
They returned to their decorating work on the door, and seemed to be as
good friends as ever. If Penelope was to be believed, Mr. Franklin had
seized the opportunity of the reconciliation to make an offer to Miss
Rachel, and had neither been accepted nor refused. My girl was sure
(from signs and tokens which I need not trouble you with) that her
young mistress had fought Mr. Franklin off by declining to believe that
he was in earnest, and had then secretly regretted treating him in that
way afterwards. Though Penelope was admitted to more familiarity with
her young mistress than maids generally are—for the two had been almost
brought up together as children—still I knew Miss Rachel’s reserved
character too well to believe that she would show her mind to anybody
in this way. What my daughter told me, on the present occasion, was, as
I suspected, more what she wished than what she really knew.
On the nineteenth another event happened. We had the doctor in the
house professionally. He was summoned to prescribe for a person whom I
have had occasion to present to you in these pages—our second
housemaid, Rosanna Spearman.
This poor girl—who had puzzled me, as you know already, at the
Shivering Sand—puzzled me more than once again, in the interval time of
which I am now writing. Penelope’s notion that her fellow-servant was
in love with Mr. Franklin (which my daughter, by my orders, kept
strictly secret) seemed to be just as absurd as ever. But I must own
that what I myself saw, and what my daughter saw also, of our second
housemaid’s conduct, began to look mysterious, to say the least of it.
For example, the girl constantly put herself in Mr. Franklin’s way—very
slyly and quietly, but she did it. He took about as much notice of her
as he took of the cat; it never seemed to occur to him to waste a look
on Rosanna’s plain face. The poor thing’s appetite, never much, fell
away dreadfully; and her eyes in the morning showed plain signs of
waking and crying at night. One day Penelope made an awkward discovery,
which we hushed up on the spot. She caught Rosanna at Mr. Franklin’s
dressing-table, secretly removing a rose which Miss Rachel had given
him to wear in his button-hole, and putting another rose like it, of
her own picking, in its place. She was, after that, once or twice
impudent to me, when I gave her a well-meant general hint to be careful
in her conduct; and, worse still, she was not over-respectful now, on
the few occasions when Miss Rachel accidentally spoke to her.
My lady noticed the change, and asked me what I thought about it. I
tried to screen the girl by answering that I thought she was out of
health; and it ended in the doctor being sent for, as already
mentioned, on the nineteenth. He said it was her nerves, and doubted if
she was fit for service. My lady offered to remove her for change of
air to one of our farms, inland. She begged and prayed, with the tears
in her eyes, to be let to stop; and, in an evil hour, I advised my lady
to try her for a little longer. As the event proved, and as you will
soon see, this was the worst advice I could have given. If I could only
have looked a little way into the future, I would have taken Rosanna
Spearman out of the house, then and there, with my own hand.
On the twentieth, there came a note from Mr. Godfrey. He had arranged
to stop at Frizinghall that night, having occasion to consult his
father on business. On the afternoon of the next day, he and his two
eldest sisters would ride over to us on horseback, in good time before
dinner. An elegant little casket in china accompanied the note,
presented to Miss Rachel, with her cousin’s love and best wishes. Mr.
Franklin had only given her a plain locket not worth half the money. My
daughter Penelope, nevertheless—such is the obstinacy of women—still
backed him to win.
Thanks be to Heaven, we have arrived at the eve of the birthday at
last! You will own, I think, that I have got you over the ground this
time, without much loitering by the way. Cheer up! I’ll ease you with
another new chapter here—and, what is more, that chapter shall take you
straight into the thick of the story.
CHAPTER IX
June twenty-first, the day of the birthday, was cloudy and unsettled at
sunrise, but towards noon it cleared up bravely.
We, in the servants’ hall, began this happy anniversary, as usual, by
offering our little presents to Miss Rachel, with the regular speech
delivered annually by me as the chief. I follow the plan adopted by the
Queen in opening Parliament—namely, the plan of saying much the same
thing regularly every year. Before it is delivered, my speech (like the
Queen’s) is looked for as eagerly as if nothing of the kind had ever
been heard before. When it is delivered, and turns out not to be the
novelty anticipated, though they grumble a little, they look forward
hopefully to something newer next year. An easy people to govern, in
the Parliament and in the Kitchen—that’s the moral of it.
After breakfast, Mr. Franklin and I had a private conference on the
subject of the Moonstone—the time having now come for removing it from
the bank at Frizinghall, and placing it in Miss Rachel’s own hands.
Whether he had been trying to make love to his cousin again, and had
got a rebuff—or whether his broken rest, night after night, was
aggravating the queer contradictions and uncertainties in his
character—I don’t know. But certain it is, that Mr. Franklin failed to
show himself at his best on the morning of the birthday. He was in
twenty different minds about the Diamond in as many minutes. For my
part, I stuck fast by the plain facts as we knew them. Nothing had
happened to justify us in alarming my lady on the subject of the jewel;
and nothing could alter the legal obligation that now lay on Mr.
Franklin to put it in his cousin’s possession. That was my view of the
matter; and, twist and turn it as he might, he was forced in the end to
make it his view too. We arranged that he was to ride over, after
lunch, to Frizinghall, and bring the Diamond back, with Mr. Godfrey and
the two young ladies, in all probability, to keep him company on the
way home again.
This settled, our young gentleman went back to Miss Rachel.
They consumed the whole morning, and part of the afternoon, in the
everlasting business of decorating the door, Penelope standing by to
mix the colours, as directed; and my lady, as luncheon time drew near,
going in and out of the room, with her handkerchief to her nose (for
they used a deal of Mr. Franklin’s vehicle that day), and trying vainly
to get the two artists away from their work. It was three o’clock
before they took off their aprons, and released Penelope (much the
worse for the vehicle), and cleaned themselves of their mess. But they
had done what they wanted—they had finished the door on the birthday,
and proud enough they were of it. The griffins, cupids, and so on,
were, I must own, most beautiful to behold; though so many in number,
so entangled in flowers and devices, and so topsy-turvy in their
actions and attitudes, that you felt them unpleasantly in your head for
hours after you had done with the pleasure of looking at them. If I add
that Penelope ended her part of the morning’s work by being sick in the
back-kitchen, it is in no unfriendly spirit towards the vehicle. No!
no! It left off stinking when it dried; and if Art requires these sort
of sacrifices—though the girl is my own daughter—I say, let Art have
them!
Mr. Franklin snatched a morsel from the luncheon-table, and rode off to
Frizinghall—to escort his cousins, as he told my lady. To fetch the
Moonstone, as was privately known to himself and to me.
This being one of the high festivals on which I took my place at the
side-board, in command of the attendance at table, I had plenty to
occupy my mind while Mr. Franklin was away. Having seen to the wine,
and reviewed my men and women who were to wait at dinner, I retired to
collect myself before the company came. A whiff of—you know what, and a
turn at a certain book which I have had occasion to mention in these
pages, composed me, body and mind. I was aroused from what I am
inclined to think must have been, not a nap, but a reverie, by the
clatter of horses’ hoofs outside; and, going to the door, received a
cavalcade comprising Mr. Franklin and his three cousins, escorted by
one of old Mr. Ablewhite’s grooms.
Mr. Godfrey struck me, strangely enough, as being like Mr. Franklin in
this respect—that he did not seem to be in his customary spirits. He
kindly shook hands with me as usual, and was most politely glad to see
his old friend Betteredge wearing so well. But there was a sort of
cloud over him, which I couldn’t at all account for; and when I asked
how he had found his father in health, he answered rather shortly,
“Much as usual.” However, the two Miss Ablewhites were cheerful enough
for twenty, which more than restored the balance. They were nearly as
big as their brother; spanking, yellow-haired, rosy lasses, overflowing
with super-abundant flesh and blood; bursting from head to foot with
health and spirits. The legs of the poor horses trembled with carrying
them; and when they jumped from their saddles (without waiting to be
helped), I declare they bounced on the ground as if they were made of
india-rubber. Everything the Miss Ablewhites said began with a large O;
everything they did was done with a bang; and they giggled and
screamed, in season and out of season, on the smallest provocation.
Bouncers—that’s what I call them.
Under cover of the noise made by the young ladies, I had an opportunity