The Moonstone
noticing was the sudden appearance on the scene of the Indian
traveller, Mr. Murthwaite. Skirting the half-circle in which the
gentlefolks stood or sat, he came quietly behind the jugglers and spoke
to them on a sudden in the language of their own country.
If he had pricked them with a bayonet, I doubt if the Indians could
have started and turned on him with a more tigerish quickness than they
did, on hearing the first words that passed his lips. The next moment
they were bowing and salaaming to him in their most polite and snaky
way. After a few words in the unknown tongue had passed on either side,
Mr. Murthwaite withdrew as quietly as he had approached. The chief
Indian, who acted as interpreter, thereupon wheeled about again towards
the gentlefolks. I noticed that the fellow’s coffee-coloured face had
turned grey since Mr. Murthwaite had spoken to him. He bowed to my
lady, and informed her that the exhibition was over. The Bouncers,
indescribably disappointed, burst out with a loud “O!” directed against
Mr. Murthwaite for stopping the performance. The chief Indian laid his
hand humbly on his breast, and said a second time that the juggling was
over. The little boy went round with the hat. The ladies withdrew to
the drawing-room; and the gentlemen (excepting Mr. Franklin and Mr.
Murthwaite) returned to their wine. I and the footman followed the
Indians, and saw them safe off the premises.
Going back by way of the shrubbery, I smelt tobacco, and found Mr.
Franklin and Mr. Murthwaite (the latter smoking a cheroot) walking
slowly up and down among the trees. Mr. Franklin beckoned to me to join
them.
“This,” says Mr. Franklin, presenting me to the great traveller, “is
Gabriel Betteredge, the old servant and friend of our family of whom I
spoke to you just now. Tell him, if you please, what you have just told
me.”
Mr. Murthwaite took his cheroot out of his mouth, and leaned, in his
weary way, against the trunk of a tree.
“Mr. Betteredge,” he began, “those three Indians are no more jugglers
than you and I are.”
Here was a new surprise! I naturally asked the traveller if he had ever
met with the Indians before.
“Never,” says Mr. Murthwaite; “but I know what Indian juggling really
is. All you have seen tonight is a very bad and clumsy imitation of it.
Unless, after long experience, I am utterly mistaken, those men are
high-caste Brahmins. I charged them with being disguised, and you saw
how it told on them, clever as the Hindoo people are in concealing
their feelings. There is a mystery about their conduct that I can’t
explain. They have doubly sacrificed their caste—first, in crossing the
sea; secondly, in disguising themselves as jugglers. In the land they
live in that is a tremendous sacrifice to make. There must be some very
serious motive at the bottom of it, and some justification of no
ordinary kind to plead for them, in recovery of their caste, when they
return to their own country.”
I was struck dumb. Mr. Murthwaite went on with his cheroot. Mr.
Franklin, after what looked to me like a little private veering about
between the different sides of his character, broke the silence as
follows:
“I feel some hesitation, Mr. Murthwaite, in troubling you with family
matters, in which you can have no interest and which I am not very
willing to speak of out of our own circle. But, after what you have
said, I feel bound, in the interests of Lady Verinder and her daughter,
to tell you something which may possibly put the clue into your hands.
I speak to you in confidence; you will oblige me, I am sure, by not
forgetting that?”
With this preface, he told the Indian traveller all that he had told me
at the Shivering Sand. Even the immovable Mr. Murthwaite was so
interested in what he heard, that he let his cheroot go out.
“Now,” says Mr. Franklin, when he had done, “what does your experience
say?”
“My experience,” answered the traveller, “says that you have had more
narrow escapes of your life, Mr. Franklin Blake, than I have had of
mine; and that is saying a great deal.”
It was Mr. Franklin’s turn to be astonished now.
“Is it really as serious as that?” he asked.
“In my opinion it is,” answered Mr. Murthwaite. “I can’t doubt, after
what you have told me, that the restoration of the Moonstone to its
place on the forehead of the Indian idol, is the motive and the
justification of that sacrifice of caste which I alluded to just now.
Those men will wait their opportunity with the patience of cats, and
will use it with the ferocity of tigers. How you have escaped them I
can’t imagine,” says the eminent traveller, lighting his cheroot again,
and staring hard at Mr. Franklin. “You have been carrying the Diamond
backwards and forwards, here and in London, and you are still a living
man! Let us try and account for it. It was daylight, both times, I
suppose, when you took the jewel out of the bank in London?”
“Broad daylight,” says Mr. Franklin.
“And plenty of people in the streets?”
“Plenty.”
“You settled, of course, to arrive at Lady Verinder’s house at a
certain time? It’s a lonely country between this and the station. Did
you keep your appointment?”
“No. I arrived four hours earlier than my appointment.”
“I beg to congratulate you on that proceeding! When did you take the
Diamond to the bank at the town here?”
“I took it an hour after I had brought it to this house—and three hours
before anybody was prepared for seeing me in these parts.”
“I beg to congratulate you again! Did you bring it back here alone?”
“No. I happened to ride back with my cousins and the groom.”
“I beg to congratulate you for the third time! If you ever feel
inclined to travel beyond the civilised limits, Mr. Blake, let me know,
and I will go with you. You are a lucky man.”
Here I struck in. This sort of thing didn’t at all square with my
English ideas.
“You don’t really mean to say, sir,” I asked, “that they would have
taken Mr. Franklin’s life, to get their Diamond, if he had given them
the chance?”
“Do you smoke, Mr. Betteredge?” says the traveller.
“Yes, sir.
“Do you care much for the ashes left in your pipe when you empty it?”
“No, sir.”
“In the country those men came from, they care just as much about
killing a man, as you care about emptying the ashes out of your pipe.
If a thousand lives stood between them and the getting back of their
Diamond—and if they thought they could destroy those lives without
discovery—they would take them all. The sacrifice of caste is a serious
thing in India, if you like. The sacrifice of life is nothing at all.”
I expressed my opinion upon this, that they were a set of murdering
thieves. Mr. Murthwaite expressed _his_ opinion that they were a
wonderful people. Mr. Franklin, expressing no opinion at all, brought
us back to the matter in hand.
“They have seen the Moonstone on Miss Verinder’s dress,” he said. “What
is to be done?”
“What your uncle threatened to do,” answered Mr. Murthwaite. “Colonel
Herncastle understood the people he had to deal with. Send the Diamond
tomorrow (under guard of more than one man) to be cut up at Amsterdam.
Make half a dozen diamonds of it, instead of one. There is an end of
its sacred identity as The Moonstone—and there is an end of the
conspiracy.”
Mr. Franklin turned to me.
“There is no help for it,” he said. “We must speak to Lady Verinder
tomorrow.”
“What about tonight, sir?” I asked. “Suppose the Indians come back?”
Mr. Murthwaite answered me before Mr. Franklin could speak.
“The Indians won’t risk coming back tonight,” he said. “The direct way
is hardly ever the way they take to anything—let alone a matter like
this, in which the slightest mistake might be fatal to their reaching
their end.”
“But suppose the rogues are bolder than you think, sir?” I persisted.
“In that case,” says Mr. Murthwaite, “let the dogs loose. Have you got
any big dogs in the yard?”
“Two, sir. A mastiff and a bloodhound.”
“They will do. In the present emergency, Mr. Betteredge, the mastiff
and the bloodhound have one great merit—they are not likely to be
troubled with your scruples about the sanctity of human life.”
The strumming of the piano reached us from the drawing-room, as he
fired that shot at me. He threw away his cheroot, and took Mr.
Franklin’s arm, to go back to the ladies. I noticed that the sky was
clouding over fast, as I followed them to the house. Mr. Murthwaite
noticed it too. He looked round at me, in his dry, droning way, and
said:
“The Indians will want their umbrellas, Mr. Betteredge, tonight!”
It was all very well for _him_ to joke. But I was not an eminent
traveller—and my way in this world had not led me into playing ducks
and drakes with my own life, among thieves and murderers in the
outlandish places of the earth. I went into my own little room, and sat
down in my chair in a perspiration, and wondered helplessly what was to
be done next. In this anxious frame of mind, other men might have ended
by working themselves up into a fever; _I_ ended in a different way. I
lit my pipe, and took a turn at _Robinson Crusoe_.
Before I had been at it five minutes, I came to this amazing bit—page
one hundred and sixty-one—as follows:
“Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger
itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety
greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about.”
The man who doesn’t believe in _Robinson Crusoe_, after _that_, is a
man with a screw loose in his understanding, or a man lost in the mist
of his own self-conceit! Argument is thrown away upon him; and pity is
better reserved for some person with a livelier faith.
I was far on with my second pipe, and still lost in admiration of that
wonderful book, when Penelope (who had been handing round the tea) came
in with her report from the drawing-room. She had left the Bouncers
singing a duet—words beginning with a large “O,” and music to
correspond. She had observed that my lady made mistakes in her game of
whist for the first time in our experience of her. She had seen the
great traveller asleep in a corner. She had overheard Mr. Franklin
sharpening his wits on Mr. Godfrey, at the expense of Ladies’ Charities
in general; and she had noticed that Mr. Godfrey hit him back again
rather more smartly than became a gentleman of his benevolent
character. She had detected Miss Rachel, apparently engaged in
appeasing Mrs. Threadgall by showing her some photographs, and really
occupied in stealing looks at Mr. Franklin, which no intelligent lady’s
maid could misinterpret for a single instant. Finally, she had missed
Mr. Candy, the doctor, who had mysteriously disappeared from the
drawing-room, and had then mysteriously returned, and entered into
conversation with Mr. Godfrey. Upon the whole, things were prospering
better than the experience of the dinner gave us any right to expect.
If we could only hold on for another hour, old Father Time would bring
up their carriages, and relieve us of them altogether.
Everything wears off in this world; and even the comforting effect of
_Robinson Crusoe_ wore off, after Penelope left me. I got fidgety
again, and resolved on making a survey of the grounds before the rain
came. Instead of taking the footman, whose nose was human, and
therefore useless in any emergency, I took the bloodhound with me.
_His_ nose for a stranger was to be depended on. We went all round the
premises, and out into the road—and returned as wise as we went, having
discovered no such thing as a lurking human creature anywhere.
The arrival of the carriages was the signal for the arrival of the
rain. It poured as if it meant to pour all night. With the exception of
the doctor, whose gig was waiting for him, the rest of the company went