The Moonstone
women—but how could it be the case with me? In the days when I was a
thief, I had run fifty times greater risks, and found my way out of
difficulties to which _this_ difficulty was mere child’s play. I had
been apprenticed, as you may say, to frauds and deceptions—some of them
on such a grand scale, and managed so cleverly, that they became
famous, and appeared in the newspapers. Was such a little thing as the
keeping of the nightgown likely to weigh on my spirits, and to set my
heart sinking within me, at the time when I ought to have spoken to
you? What nonsense to ask the question! The thing couldn’t be.
“Where is the use of my dwelling in this way on my own folly? The plain
truth is plain enough, surely? Behind your back, I loved you with all
my heart and soul. Before your face—there’s no denying it—I was
frightened of you; frightened of making you angry with me; frightened
of what you might say to me (though you _had_ taken the Diamond) if I
presumed to tell you that I had found it out. I had gone as near to it
as I dared when I spoke to you in the library. You had not turned your
back on me then. You had not started away from me as if I had got the
plague. I tried to provoke myself into feeling angry with you, and to
rouse up my courage in that way. No! I couldn’t feel anything but the
misery and the mortification of it. ‘You’re a plain girl; you have got a
crooked shoulder; you’re only a housemaid—what do you mean by
attempting to speak to Me?’ You never uttered a word of that, Mr.
Franklin; but you said it all to me, nevertheless! Is such madness as
this to be accounted for? No. There is nothing to be done but to
confess it, and let it be.
“I ask your pardon, once more, for this wandering of my pen. There is
no fear of its happening again. I am close at the end now.
“The first person who disturbed me by coming into the empty room was
Penelope. She had found out my secret long since, and she had done her
best to bring me to my senses—and done it kindly too.
“‘Ah!’ she said, ‘I know why you’re sitting here, and fretting, all by
yourself. The best thing that can happen for your advantage, Rosanna,
will be for Mr. Franklin’s visit here to come to an end. It’s my belief
that he won’t be long now before he leaves the house.”
“In all my thoughts of you I had never thought of your going away. I
couldn’t speak to Penelope. I could only look at her.
“‘I’ve just left Miss Rachel,’ Penelope went on. ‘And a hard matter I
have had of it to put up with her temper. She says the house is
unbearable to her with the police in it; and she’s determined to speak
to my lady this evening, and to go to her Aunt Ablewhite tomorrow. If
she does that, Mr. Franklin will be the next to find a reason for going
away, you may depend on it!’
“I recovered the use of my tongue at that. ‘Do you mean to say Mr.
Franklin will go with her?’ I asked.
“‘Only too gladly, if she would let him; but she won’t. _He_ has been
made to feel her temper; _he_ is in her black books too—and that after
having done all he can to help her, poor fellow! No! no! If they don’t
make it up before tomorrow, you will see Miss Rachel go one way, and
Mr. Franklin another. Where he may betake himself to I can’t say. But
he will never stay here, Rosanna, after Miss Rachel has left us.’
“I managed to master the despair I felt at the prospect of your going
away. To own the truth, I saw a little glimpse of hope for myself if
there was really a serious disagreement between Miss Rachel and you.
‘Do you know,’ I asked, ‘what the quarrel is between them?’
“‘It is all on Miss Rachel’s side,’ Penelope said. ‘And, for anything I
know to the contrary, it’s all Miss Rachel’s temper, and nothing else.
I am loth to distress you, Rosanna; but don’t run away with the notion
that Mr. Franklin is ever likely to quarrel with _her_. He’s a great
deal too fond of her for that!’
“She had only just spoken those cruel words when there came a call to
us from Mr. Betteredge. All the indoor servants were to assemble in the
hall. And then we were to go in, one by one, and be questioned in Mr.
Betteredge’s room by Sergeant Cuff.
“It came to my turn to go in, after her ladyship’s maid and the upper
housemaid had been questioned first. Sergeant Cuff’s inquiries—though
he wrapped them up very cunningly—soon showed me that those two women
(the bitterest enemies I had in the house) had made their discoveries
outside my door, on the Tuesday afternoon, and again on the Thursday
night. They had told the Sergeant enough to open his eyes to some part
of the truth. He rightly believed me to have made a new nightgown
secretly, but he wrongly believed the paint-stained nightgown to be
mine. I felt satisfied of another thing, from what he said, which it
puzzled me to understand. He suspected me, of course, of being
concerned in the disappearance of the Diamond. But, at the same time,
he let me see—purposely, as I thought—that he did not consider me as
the person chiefly answerable for the loss of the jewel. He appeared to
think that I had been acting under the direction of somebody else. Who
that person might be, I couldn’t guess then, and can’t guess now.
“In this uncertainty, one thing was plain—that Sergeant Cuff was miles
away from knowing the whole truth. You were safe as long as the
nightgown was safe—and not a moment longer.
“I quite despair of making you understand the distress and terror which
pressed upon me now. It was impossible for me to risk wearing your
nightgown any longer. I might find myself taken off, at a moment’s
notice, to the police court at Frizinghall, to be charged on suspicion,
and searched accordingly. While Sergeant Cuff still left me free, I had
to choose—and at once—between destroying the nightgown, or hiding it in
some safe place, at some safe distance from the house.
“If I had only been a little less fond of you, I think I should have
destroyed it. But oh! how could I destroy the only thing I had which
proved that I had saved you from discovery? If we did come to an
explanation together, and if you suspected me of having some bad
motive, and denied it all, how could I win upon you to trust me, unless
I had the nightgown to produce? Was it wronging you to believe, as I
did and do still, that you might hesitate to let a poor girl like me be
the sharer of your secret, and your accomplice in the theft which your
money-troubles had tempted you to commit? Think of your cold behaviour
to me, sir, and you will hardly wonder at my unwillingness to destroy
the only claim on your confidence and your gratitude which it was my
fortune to possess.
“I determined to hide it; and the place I fixed on was the place I knew
best—the Shivering Sand.
“As soon as the questioning was over, I made the first excuse that came
into my head, and got leave to go out for a breath of fresh air. I went
straight to Cobb’s Hole, to Mr. Yolland’s cottage. His wife and
daughter were the best friends I had. Don’t suppose I trusted them with
your secret—I have trusted nobody. All I wanted was to write this
letter to you, and to have a safe opportunity of taking the nightgown
off me. Suspected as I was, I could do neither of those things with any
sort of security, at the house.
“And now I have nearly got through my long letter, writing it alone in
Lucy Yolland’s bedroom. When it is done, I shall go downstairs with the
nightgown rolled up, and hidden under my cloak. I shall find the means
I want for keeping it safe and dry in its hiding-place, among the
litter of old things in Mrs. Yolland’s kitchen. And then I shall go to
the Shivering Sand—don’t be afraid of my letting my footmarks betray
me!—and hide the nightgown down in the sand, where no living creature
can find it without being first let into the secret by myself.
“And, when that’s done, what then?
“Then, Mr. Franklin, I shall have two reasons for making another
attempt to say the words to you which I have not said yet. If you leave
the house, as Penelope believes you will leave it, and if I haven’t
spoken to you before that, I shall lose my opportunity forever. That is
one reason. Then, again, there is the comforting knowledge—if my
speaking does make you angry—that I have got the nightgown ready to
plead my cause for me as nothing else can. That is my other reason. If
these two together don’t harden my heart against the coldness which has
hitherto frozen it up (I mean the coldness of your treatment of me),
there will be the end of my efforts—and the end of my life.
“Yes. If I miss my next opportunity—if you are as cruel as ever, and if
I feel it again as I have felt it already—good-bye to the world which
has grudged me the happiness that it gives to others. Good-bye to life,
which nothing but a little kindness from _you_ can ever make
pleasurable to me again. Don’t blame yourself, sir, if it ends in this
way. But try—do try—to feel some forgiving sorrow for me! I shall take
care that you find out what I have done for you, when I am past telling
you of it myself. Will you say something kind of me then—in the same
gentle way that you have when you speak to Miss Rachel? If you do that,
and if there are such things as ghosts, I believe my ghost will hear
it, and tremble with the pleasure of it.
“It’s time I left off. I am making myself cry. How am I to see my way
to the hiding-place if I let these useless tears come and blind me?
“Besides, why should I look at the gloomy side? Why not believe, while
I can, that it will end well after all? I may find you in a good humour
tonight—or, if not, I may succeed better tomorrow morning. I sha’n’t
improve my plain face by fretting—shall I? Who knows but I may have
filled all these weary long pages of paper for nothing? They will go,
for safety’s sake (never mind now for what other reason) into the
hiding-place along with the nightgown. It has been hard, hard work
writing my letter. Oh! if we only end in understanding each other, how
I shall enjoy tearing it up!
“I beg to remain, sir, your true lover and humble servant,
“ROSANNA SPEARMAN.”
The reading of the letter was completed by Betteredge in silence. After
carefully putting it back in the envelope, he sat thinking, with his
head bowed down, and his eyes on the ground.
“Betteredge,” I said, “is there any hint to guide me at the end of the
letter?”
He looked up slowly, with a heavy sigh.
“There is nothing to guide you, Mr. Franklin,” he answered. “If you
take my advice you will keep the letter in the cover till these present
anxieties of yours have come to an end. It will sorely distress you,
whenever you read it. Don’t read it now.”
I put the letter away in my pocket-book.
A glance back at the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of Betteredge’s
Narrative will show that there really was a reason for my thus sparing
myself, at a time when my fortitude had been already cruelly tried.
Twice over, the unhappy woman had made her last attempt to speak to me.
And twice over, it had been my misfortune (God knows how innocently!)
to repel the advances she had made to me. On the Friday night, as
Betteredge truly describes it, she had found me alone at the
billiard-table. Her manner and language suggested to me and would have
suggested to any man, under the circumstances—that she was about to
confess a guilty knowledge of the disappearance of the Diamond. For her
own sake, I had purposely shown no special interest in what was coming;
for her own sake, I had purposely looked at the billiard-balls, instead
of looking at _her_—and what had been the result? I had sent her away
from me, wounded to the heart! On the Saturday again—on the day when
she must have foreseen, after what Penelope had told her, that my
departure was close at hand—the same fatality still pursued us. She had