The Moonstone
cheap as I could, and I went through all the rest of it as cheap as I
could. We were not a happy couple, and not a miserable couple. We were
six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. How it was I don’t
understand, but we always seemed to be getting, with the best of
motives, in one another’s way. When I wanted to go upstairs, there was
my wife coming down; or when my wife wanted to go down, there was I
coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it.
After five years of misunderstandings on the stairs, it pleased an
all-wise Providence to relieve us of each other by taking my wife. I
was left with my little girl Penelope, and with no other child. Shortly
afterwards Sir John died, and my lady was left with her little girl,
Miss Rachel, and no other child. I have written to very poor purpose of
my lady, if you require to be told that my little Penelope was taken
care of, under my good mistress’s own eye, and was sent to school and
taught, and made a sharp girl, and promoted, when old enough, to be
Miss Rachel’s own maid.
As for me, I went on with my business as bailiff year after year up to
Christmas 1847, when there came a change in my life. On that day, my
lady invited herself to a cup of tea alone with me in my cottage. She
remarked that, reckoning from the year when I started as page-boy in
the time of the old lord, I had been more than fifty years in her
service, and she put into my hands a beautiful waistcoat of wool that
she had worked herself, to keep me warm in the bitter winter weather.
I received this magnificent present quite at a loss to find words to
thank my mistress with for the honour she had done me. To my great
astonishment, it turned out, however, that the waistcoat was not an
honour, but a bribe. My lady had discovered that I was getting old
before I had discovered it myself, and she had come to my cottage to
wheedle me (if I may use such an expression) into giving up my hard
out-of-door work as bailiff, and taking my ease for the rest of my days
as steward in the house. I made as good a fight of it against the
indignity of taking my ease as I could. But my mistress knew the weak
side of me; she put it as a favour to herself. The dispute between us
ended, after that, in my wiping my eyes, like an old fool, with my new
woollen waistcoat, and saying I would think about it.
The perturbation in my mind, in regard to thinking about it, being
truly dreadful after my lady had gone away, I applied the remedy which
I have never yet found to fail me in cases of doubt and emergency. I
smoked a pipe and took a turn at _Robinson Crusoe_. Before I had
occupied myself with that extraordinary book five minutes, I came on a
comforting bit (page one hundred and fifty-eight), as follows: “Today
we love, what tomorrow we hate.” I saw my way clear directly. Today I
was all for continuing to be farm-bailiff; tomorrow, on the authority
of _Robinson Crusoe_, I should be all the other way. Take myself
tomorrow while in tomorrow’s humour, and the thing was done. My mind
being relieved in this manner, I went to sleep that night in the
character of Lady Verinder’s farm-bailiff, and I woke up the next
morning in the character of Lady Verinder’s house-steward. All quite
comfortable, and all through _Robinson Crusoe_!
My daughter Penelope has just looked over my shoulder to see what I
have done so far. She remarks that it is beautifully written, and every
word of it true. But she points out one objection. She says what I have
done so far isn’t in the least what I was wanted to do. I am asked to
tell the story of the Diamond and, instead of that, I have been telling
the story of my own self. Curious, and quite beyond me to account for.
I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of
writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their
subjects, like me? If they do, I can feel for them. In the meantime,
here is another false start, and more waste of good writing-paper.
What’s to be done now? Nothing that I know of, except for you to keep
your temper, and for me to begin it all over again for the third time.
CHAPTER III
The question of how I am to start the story properly I have tried to
settle in two ways. First, by scratching my head, which led to nothing.
Second, by consulting my daughter Penelope, which has resulted in an
entirely new idea.
Penelope’s notion is that I should set down what happened, regularly
day by day, beginning with the day when we got the news that Mr.
Franklin Blake was expected on a visit to the house. When you come to
fix your memory with a date in this way, it is wonderful what your
memory will pick up for you upon that compulsion. The only difficulty
is to fetch out the dates, in the first place. This Penelope offers to
do for me by looking into her own diary, which she was taught to keep
when she was at school, and which she has gone on keeping ever since.
In answer to an improvement on this notion, devised by myself, namely,
that she should tell the story instead of me, out of her own diary,
Penelope observes, with a fierce look and a red face, that her journal
is for her own private eye, and that no living creature shall ever know
what is in it but herself. When I inquire what this means, Penelope
says, “Fiddlesticks!” I say, Sweethearts.
Beginning, then, on Penelope’s plan, I beg to mention that I was
specially called one Wednesday morning into my lady’s own sitting-room,
the date being the twenty-fourth of May, eighteen hundred and
forty-eight.
“Gabriel,” says my lady, “here is news that will surprise you. Franklin
Blake has come back from abroad. He has been staying with his father in
London, and he is coming to us tomorrow to stop till next month, and
keep Rachel’s birthday.”
If I had had a hat in my hand, nothing but respect would have prevented
me from throwing that hat up to the ceiling. I had not seen Mr.
Franklin since he was a boy, living along with us in this house. He
was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever
spun a top or broke a window. Miss Rachel, who was present, and to whom
I made that remark, observed, in return, that _she_ remembered him as
the most atrocious tyrant that ever tortured a doll, and the hardest
driver of an exhausted little girl in string harness that England could
produce. “I burn with indignation, and I ache with fatigue,” was the
way Miss Rachel summed it up, “when I think of Franklin Blake.”
Hearing what I now tell you, you will naturally ask how it was that Mr.
Franklin should have passed all the years, from the time when he was a
boy to the time when he was a man, out of his own country. I answer,
because his father had the misfortune to be next heir to a Dukedom, and
not to be able to prove it.
In two words, this was how the thing happened:
My lady’s eldest sister married the celebrated Mr. Blake—equally famous
for his great riches, and his great suit at law. How many years he went
on worrying the tribunals of his country to turn out the Duke in
possession, and to put himself in the Duke’s place—how many lawyer’s
purses he filled to bursting, and how many otherwise harmless people he
set by the ears together disputing whether he was right or wrong—is
more by a great deal than I can reckon up. His wife died, and two of
his three children died, before the tribunals could make up their minds
to show him the door and take no more of his money. When it was all
over, and the Duke in possession was left in possession, Mr. Blake
discovered that the only way of being even with his country for the
manner in which it had treated him, was not to let his country have the
honour of educating his son. “How can I trust my native institutions,”
was the form in which he put it, “after the way in which my native
institutions have behaved to _me?_” Add to this, that Mr. Blake
disliked all boys, his own included, and you will admit that it could
only end in one way. Master Franklin was taken from us in England, and
was sent to institutions which his father _could_ trust, in that
superior country, Germany; Mr. Blake himself, you will observe,
remaining snug in England, to improve his fellow-countrymen in the
Parliament House, and to publish a statement on the subject of the Duke
in possession, which has remained an unfinished statement from that day
to this.
There! thank God, that’s told! Neither you nor I need trouble our heads
any more about Mr. Blake, senior. Leave him to the Dukedom; and let you
and I stick to the Diamond.
The Diamond takes us back to Mr. Franklin, who was the innocent means
of bringing that unlucky jewel into the house.
Our nice boy didn’t forget us after he went abroad. He wrote every now
and then; sometimes to my lady, sometimes to Miss Rachel, and sometimes
to me. We had had a transaction together, before he left, which
consisted in his borrowing of me a ball of string, a four-bladed knife,
and seven-and-sixpence in money—the colour of which last I have not
seen, and never expect to see again. His letters to me chiefly related
to borrowing more. I heard, however, from my lady, how he got on
abroad, as he grew in years and stature. After he had learnt what the
institutions of Germany could teach him, he gave the French a turn
next, and the Italians a turn after that. They made him among them a
sort of universal genius, as well as I could understand it. He wrote a
little; he painted a little; he sang and played and composed a
little—borrowing, as I suspect, in all these cases, just as he had
borrowed from me. His mother’s fortune (seven hundred a year) fell to
him when he came of age, and ran through him, as it might be through a
sieve. The more money he had, the more he wanted; there was a hole in
Mr. Franklin’s pocket that nothing would sew up. Wherever he went, the
lively, easy way of him made him welcome. He lived here, there, and
everywhere; his address (as he used to put it himself) being “Post
Office, Europe—to be left till called for.” Twice over, he made up his
mind to come back to England and see us; and twice over (saving your
presence), some unmentionable woman stood in the way and stopped him.
His third attempt succeeded, as you know already from what my lady told
me. On Thursday the twenty-fifth of May, we were to see for the first
time what our nice boy had grown to be as a man. He came of good blood;
he had a high courage; and he was five-and-twenty years of age, by our
reckoning. Now you know as much of Mr. Franklin Blake as I did—before
Mr. Franklin Blake came down to our house.
The Thursday was as fine a summer’s day as ever you saw: and my lady
and Miss Rachel (not expecting Mr. Franklin till dinner-time) drove out
to lunch with some friends in the neighbourhood.
When they were gone, I went and had a look at the bedroom which had
been got ready for our guest, and saw that all was straight. Then,
being butler in my lady’s establishment, as well as steward (at my own
particular request, mind, and because it vexed me to see anybody but
myself in possession of the key of the late Sir John’s cellar)—then, I
say, I fetched up some of our famous Latour claret, and set it in the
warm summer air to take off the chill before dinner. Concluding to set
myself in the warm summer air next—seeing that what is good for old
claret is equally good for old age—I took up my beehive chair to go out
into the back court, when I was stopped by hearing a sound like the
soft beating of a drum, on the terrace in front of my lady’s residence.
Going round to the terrace, I found three mahogany-coloured Indians, in
white linen frocks and trousers, looking up at the house.
The Indians, as I saw on looking closer, had small hand-drums slung in
front of them. Behind them stood a little delicate-looking light-haired