The Moonstone
home snugly, under cover, in close carriages. I told Mr. Candy that I
was afraid he would get wet through. He told me, in return, that he
wondered I had arrived at my time of life, without knowing that a
doctor’s skin was waterproof. So he drove away in the rain, laughing
over his own little joke; and so we got rid of our dinner company.
The next thing to tell is the story of the night.
CHAPTER XI
When the last of the guests had driven away, I went back into the inner
hall and found Samuel at the side-table, presiding over the brandy and
soda water. My lady and Miss Rachel came out of the drawing-room,
followed by the two gentlemen. Mr. Godfrey had some brandy and soda
water, Mr. Franklin took nothing. He sat down, looking dead tired; the
talking on this birthday occasion had, I suppose, been too much for
him.
My lady, turning round to wish them good-night, looked hard at the
wicked Colonel’s legacy shining in her daughter’s dress.
“Rachel,” she asked, “where are you going to put your Diamond tonight?”
Miss Rachel was in high good spirits, just in that humour for talking
nonsense, and perversely persisting in it as if it was sense, which you
may sometimes have observed in young girls, when they are highly
wrought up, at the end of an exciting day. First, she declared she
didn’t know where to put the Diamond. Then she said, “on her
dressing-table, of course, along with her other things.” Then she
remembered that the Diamond might take to shining of itself, with its
awful moony light in the dark—and that would terrify her in the dead of
night. Then she bethought herself of an Indian cabinet which stood in
her sitting-room; and instantly made up her mind to put the Indian
diamond in the Indian cabinet, for the purpose of permitting two
beautiful native productions to admire each other. Having let her
little flow of nonsense run on as far as that point, her mother
interposed and stopped her.
“My dear! your Indian cabinet has no lock to it,” says my lady.
“Good Heavens, mamma!” cried Miss Rachel, “is this an hotel? Are there
thieves in the house?”
Without taking notice of this fantastic way of talking, my lady wished
the gentlemen good-night. She next turned to Miss Rachel, and kissed
her. “Why not let _me_ keep the Diamond for you tonight?” she asked.
Miss Rachel received that proposal as she might, ten years since, have
received a proposal to part her from a new doll. My lady saw there was
no reasoning with her that night. “Come into my room, Rachel, the first
thing tomorrow morning,” she said. “I shall have something to say to
you.” With those last words she left us slowly; thinking her own
thoughts, and, to all appearance, not best pleased with the way by
which they were leading her.
Miss Rachel was the next to say good-night. She shook hands first with
Mr. Godfrey, who was standing at the other end of the hall, looking at
a picture. Then she turned back to Mr. Franklin, still sitting weary
and silent in a corner.
What words passed between them I can’t say. But standing near the old
oak frame which holds our large looking-glass, I saw her reflected in
it, slyly slipping the locket which Mr. Franklin had given to her, out
of the bosom of her dress, and showing it to him for a moment, with a
smile which certainly meant something out of the common, before she
tripped off to bed. This incident staggered me a little in the reliance
I had previously felt on my own judgment. I began to think that
Penelope might be right about the state of her young lady’s affections,
after all.
As soon as Miss Rachel left him eyes to see with, Mr. Franklin noticed
me. His variable humour, shifting about everything, had shifted about
the Indians already.
“Betteredge,” he said, “I’m half inclined to think I took Mr.
Murthwaite too seriously, when we had that talk in the shrubbery. I
wonder whether he has been trying any of his traveller’s tales on us?
Do you really mean to let the dogs loose?”
“I’ll relieve them of their collars, sir,” I answered, “and leave them
free to take a turn in the night, if they smell a reason for it.”
“All right,” says Mr. Franklin. “We’ll see what is to be done tomorrow.
I am not at all disposed to alarm my aunt, Betteredge, without a very
pressing reason for it. Good-night.”
He looked so worn and pale as he nodded to me, and took his candle to
go upstairs, that I ventured to advise his having a drop of
brandy-and-water, by way of night-cap. Mr. Godfrey, walking towards us
from the other end of the hall, backed me. He pressed Mr. Franklin, in
the friendliest manner, to take something, before he went to bed.
I only note these trifling circumstances, because, after all I had seen
and heard, that day, it pleased me to observe that our two gentlemen
were on just as good terms as ever. Their warfare of words (heard by
Penelope in the drawing-room), and their rivalry for the best place in
Miss Rachel’s good graces, seemed to have set no serious difference
between them. But there! they were both good-tempered, and both men of
the world. And there is certainly this merit in people of station, that
they are not nearly so quarrelsome among each other as people of no
station at all.
Mr. Franklin declined the brandy-and-water, and went upstairs with Mr.
Godfrey, their rooms being next door to each other. On the landing,
however, either his cousin persuaded him, or he veered about and
changed his mind as usual. “Perhaps I may want it in the night,” he
called down to me. “Send up some brandy-and-water into my room.”
I sent up Samuel with the brandy-and-water; and then went out and
unbuckled the dogs’ collars. They both lost their heads with
astonishment on being set loose at that time of night, and jumped upon
me like a couple of puppies! However, the rain soon cooled them down
again: they lapped a drop of water each, and crept back into their
kennels. As I went into the house, I noticed signs in the sky which
betokened a break in the weather for the better. For the present, it
still poured heavily, and the ground was in a perfect sop.
Samuel and I went all over the house, and shut up as usual. I examined
everything myself, and trusted nothing to my deputy on this occasion.
All was safe and fast when I rested my old bones in bed, between
midnight and one in the morning.
The worries of the day had been a little too much for me, I suppose. At
any rate, I had a touch of Mr. Franklin’s malady that night. It was
sunrise before I fell off at last into a sleep. All the time I lay
awake the house was as quiet as the grave. Not a sound stirred but the
splash of the rain, and the sighing of the wind among the trees as a
breeze sprang up with the morning.
About half-past seven I woke, and opened my window on a fine sunshiny
day. The clock had struck eight, and I was just going out to chain up
the dogs again, when I heard a sudden whisking of petticoats on the
stairs behind me.
I turned about, and there was Penelope flying down after me like mad.
“Father!” she screamed, “come upstairs, for God’s sake! _The Diamond is
gone!_”
“Are you out of your mind?” I asked her.
“Gone!” says Penelope. “Gone, nobody knows how! Come up and see.”
She dragged me after her into our young lady’s sitting-room, which
opened into her bedroom. There, on the threshold of her bedroom door,
stood Miss Rachel, almost as white in the face as the white
dressing-gown that clothed her. There also stood the two doors of the
Indian cabinet, wide open. One of the drawers inside was pulled out as
far as it would go.
“Look!” says Penelope. “I myself saw Miss Rachel put the Diamond into
that drawer last night.” I went to the cabinet. The drawer was empty.
“Is this true, miss?” I asked.
With a look that was not like herself, with a voice that was not like
her own, Miss Rachel answered as my daughter had answered:
“The Diamond is gone!”
Having said those words, she withdrew into her bedroom, and shut and
locked the door.
Before we knew which way to turn next, my lady came in, hearing my
voice in her daughter’s sitting-room, and wondering what had happened.
The news of the loss of the Diamond seemed to petrify her. She went
straight to Miss Rachel’s bedroom, and insisted on being admitted. Miss
Rachel let her in.
The alarm, running through the house like fire, caught the two
gentlemen next.
Mr. Godfrey was the first to come out of his room. All he did when he
heard what had happened was to hold up his hands in a state of
bewilderment, which didn’t say much for his natural strength of mind.
Mr. Franklin, whose clear head I had confidently counted on to advise
us, seemed to be as helpless as his cousin when he heard the news in
his turn. For a wonder, he had had a good night’s rest at last; and the
unaccustomed luxury of sleep had, as he said himself, apparently
stupefied him. However, when he had swallowed his cup of coffee—which
he always took, on the foreign plan, some hours before he ate any
breakfast—his brains brightened; the clear-headed side of him turned
up, and he took the matter in hand, resolutely and cleverly, much as
follows:
He first sent for the servants, and told them to leave all the lower
doors and windows (with the exception of the front door, which I had
opened) exactly as they had been left when we locked up over night. He
next proposed to his cousin and to me to make quite sure, before we
took any further steps, that the Diamond had not accidentally dropped
somewhere out of sight—say at the back of the cabinet, or down behind
the table on which the cabinet stood. Having searched in both places,
and found nothing—having also questioned Penelope, and discovered from
her no more than the little she had already told me—Mr. Franklin
suggested next extending our inquiries to Miss Rachel, and sent
Penelope to knock at her bedroom door.
My lady answered the knock, and closed the door behind her. The moment
after we heard it locked inside by Miss Rachel. My mistress came out
among us, looking sorely puzzled and distressed. “The loss of the
Diamond seems to have quite overwhelmed Rachel,” she said, in reply to
Mr. Franklin. “She shrinks, in the strangest manner, from speaking of
it, even to _me_. It is impossible you can see her for the present.”
Having added to our perplexities by this account of Miss Rachel, my
lady, after a little effort, recovered her usual composure, and acted
with her usual decision.
“I suppose there is no help for it?” she said, quietly. “I suppose I
have no alternative but to send for the police?”
“And the first thing for the police to do,” added Mr. Franklin,
catching her up, “is to lay hands on the Indian jugglers who performed
here last night.”
My lady and Mr. Godfrey (not knowing what Mr. Franklin and I knew) both
started, and both looked surprised.
“I can’t stop to explain myself now,” Mr. Franklin went on. “I can only
tell you that the Indians have certainly stolen the Diamond. Give me a
letter of introduction,” says he, addressing my lady, “to one of the
magistrates at Frizinghall—merely telling him that I represent your
interests and wishes, and let me ride off with it instantly. Our chance
of catching the thieves may depend on our not wasting one unnecessary
minute.” (_Nota bene:_ Whether it was the French side or the English,
the right side of Mr. Franklin seemed to be uppermost now. The only
question was, How long would it last?)
He put pen, ink, and paper before his aunt, who (as it appeared to me)
wrote the letter he wanted a little unwillingly. If it had been
possible to overlook such an event as the loss of a jewel worth twenty
thousand pounds, I believe—with my lady’s opinion of her late brother,
and her distrust of his birthday-gift—it would have been privately a