The Moonstone
aspirations in my profession—obscurity was the only hope left for me. I
parted with the woman I loved—how could I condemn her to share my
disgrace? A medical assistant’s place offered itself, in a remote
corner of England. I got the place. It promised me peace; it promised
me obscurity, as I thought. I was wrong. Evil report, with time and
chance to help it, travels patiently, and travels far. The accusation
from which I had fled followed me. I got warning of its approach. I was
able to leave my situation voluntarily, with the testimonials that I
had earned. They got me another situation in another remote district.
Time passed again; and again the slander that was death to my character
found me out. On this occasion I had no warning. My employer said, ‘Mr.
Jennings, I have no complaint to make against you; but you must set
yourself right, or leave me.’ I had but one choice—I left him. It’s
useless to dwell on what I suffered after that. I am only forty years
old now. Look at my face, and let it tell for me the story of some
miserable years. It ended in my drifting to this place, and meeting
with Mr. Candy. He wanted an assistant. I referred him, on the question
of capacity, to my last employer. The question of character remained. I
told him what I have told you—and more. I warned him that there were
difficulties in the way, even if he believed me. ‘Here, as elsewhere,’
I said ‘I scorn the guilty evasion of living under an assumed name: I
am no safer at Frizinghall than at other places from the cloud that
follows me, go where I may.’ He answered, ‘I don’t do things by
halves—I believe you, and I pity you. If _you_ will risk what may
happen, _I_ will risk it too.’ God Almighty bless him! He has given me
shelter, he has given me employment, he has given me rest of mind—and I
have the certain conviction (I have had it for some months past) that
nothing will happen now to make him regret it.”
“The slander has died out?” I said.
“The slander is as active as ever. But when it follows me here, it will
come too late.”
“You will have left the place?”
“No, Mr. Blake—I shall be dead. For ten years past I have suffered from
an incurable internal complaint. I don’t disguise from you that I
should have let the agony of it kill me long since, but for one last
interest in life, which makes my existence of some importance to me
still. I want to provide for a person—very dear to me—whom I shall
never see again. My own little patrimony is hardly sufficient to make
her independent of the world. The hope, if I could only live long
enough, of increasing it to a certain sum, has impelled me to resist
the disease by such palliative means as I could devise. The one
effectual palliative in my case, is—opium. To that all-potent and
all-merciful drug I am indebted for a respite of many years from my
sentence of death. But even the virtues of opium have their limit. The
progress of the disease has gradually forced me from the use of opium
to the abuse of it. I am feeling the penalty at last. My nervous system
is shattered; my nights are nights of horror. The end is not far off
now. Let it come—I have not lived and worked in vain. The little sum is
nearly made up; and I have the means of completing it, if my last
reserves of life fail me sooner than I expect. I hardly know how I have
wandered into telling you this. I don’t think I am mean enough to
appeal to your pity. Perhaps, I fancy you may be all the readier to
believe me, if you know that what I have said to you, I have said with
the certain knowledge in me that I am a dying man. There is no
disguising, Mr. Blake, that you interest me. I have attempted to make
my poor friend’s loss of memory the means of bettering my acquaintance
with you. I have speculated on the chance of your feeling a passing
curiosity about what he wanted to say, and of my being able to satisfy
it. Is there no excuse for my intruding myself on you? Perhaps there is
some excuse. A man who has lived as I have lived has his bitter moments
when he ponders over human destiny. You have youth, health, riches, a
place in the world, a prospect before you. You, and such as you, show
me the sunny side of human life, and reconcile me with the world that I
am leaving, before I go. However this talk between us may end, I shall
not forget that you have done me a kindness in doing that. It rests
with you, sir, to say what you proposed saying, or to wish me good
morning.”
I had but one answer to make to that appeal. Without a moment’s
hesitation I told him the truth, as unreservedly as I have told it in
these pages.
He started to his feet, and looked at me with breathless eagerness as I
approached the leading incident of my story.
“It is certain that I went into the room,” I said; “it is certain that
I took the Diamond. I can only meet those two plain facts by declaring
that, do what I might, I did it without my own knowledge——”
Ezra Jennings caught me excitedly by the arm.
“Stop!” he said. “You have suggested more to me than you suppose. Have
_you_ ever been accustomed to the use of opium?”
“I never tasted it in my life.”
“Were your nerves out of order, at this time last year? Were you
unusually restless and irritable?”
“Yes.”
“Did you sleep badly?”
“Wretchedly. Many nights I never slept at all.”
“Was the birthday night an exception? Try, and remember. Did you sleep
well on that one occasion?”
“I do remember! I slept soundly.”
He dropped my arm as suddenly as he had taken it—and looked at me with
the air of a man whose mind was relieved of the last doubt that rested
on it.
“This is a marked day in your life, and in mine,” he said, gravely. “I
am absolutely certain, Mr. Blake, of one thing—I have got what Mr.
Candy wanted to say to you this morning, in the notes that I took at my
patient’s bedside. Wait! that is not all. I am firmly persuaded that I
can prove you to have been unconscious of what you were about, when you
entered the room and took the Diamond. Give me time to think, and time
to question you. I believe the vindication of your innocence is in my
hands!”
“Explain yourself, for God’s sake! What do you mean?”
In the excitement of our colloquy, we had walked on a few steps, beyond
the clump of dwarf trees which had hitherto screened us from view.
Before Ezra Jennings could answer me, he was hailed from the high road
by a man, in great agitation, who had been evidently on the look-out
for him.
“I am coming,” he called back; “I am coming as fast as I can!” He
turned to me. “There is an urgent case waiting for me at the village
yonder; I ought to have been there half an hour since—I must attend to
it at once. Give me two hours from this time, and call at Mr. Candy’s
again—and I will engage to be ready for you.”
“How am I to wait!” I exclaimed, impatiently. “Can’t you quiet my mind
by a word of explanation before we part?”
“This is far too serious a matter to be explained in a hurry, Mr.
Blake. I am not wilfully trying your patience—I should only be adding
to your suspense, if I attempted to relieve it as things are now. At
Frizinghall, sir, in two hours’ time!”
The man on the high road hailed him again. He hurried away, and left
me.
CHAPTER X
How the interval of suspense in which I was now condemned might have
affected other men in my position, I cannot pretend to say. The
influence of the two hours’ probation upon _my_ temperament was simply
this. I felt physically incapable of remaining still in any one place,
and morally incapable of speaking to any one human being, until I had
first heard all that Ezra Jennings had to say to me.
In this frame of mind, I not only abandoned my contemplated visit to
Mrs. Ablewhite—I even shrank from encountering Gabriel Betteredge
himself.
Returning to Frizinghall, I left a note for Betteredge, telling him
that I had been unexpectedly called away for a few hours, but that he
might certainly expect me to return towards three o’clock in the
afternoon. I requested him, in the interval, to order his dinner at the
usual hour, and to amuse himself as he pleased. He had, as I well knew,
hosts of friends in Frizinghall; and he would be at no loss how to fill
up his time until I returned to the hotel.
This done, I made the best of my way out of the town again, and roamed
the lonely moorland country which surrounds Frizinghall, until my watch
told me that it was time, at last, to return to Mr. Candy’s house.
I found Ezra Jennings ready and waiting for me.
He was sitting alone in a bare little room, which communicated by a
glazed door with a surgery. Hideous coloured diagrams of the ravages of
hideous diseases decorated the barren buff-coloured walls. A bookcase
filled with dingy medical works, and ornamented at the top with a
skull, in place of the customary bust; a large deal table copiously
splashed with ink; wooden chairs of the sort that are seen in kitchens
and cottages; a threadbare drugget in the middle of the floor; a sink
of water, with a basin and waste-pipe roughly let into the wall,
horribly suggestive of its connection with surgical
operations—comprised the entire furniture of the room. The bees were
humming among a few flowers placed in pots outside the window; the
birds were singing in the garden, and the faint intermittent jingle of
a tuneless piano in some neighbouring house forced itself now and again
on the ear. In any other place, these everyday sounds might have spoken
pleasantly of the everyday world outside. Here, they came in as
intruders on a silence which nothing but human suffering had the
privilege to disturb. I looked at the mahogany instrument case, and at
the huge roll of lint, occupying places of their own on the
bookshelves, and shuddered inwardly as I thought of the sounds,
familiar and appropriate to the everyday use of Ezra Jennings’ room.
“I make no apology, Mr. Blake, for the place in which I am receiving
you,” he said. “It is the only room in the house, at this hour of the
day, in which we can feel quite sure of being left undisturbed. Here
are my papers ready for you; and here are two books to which we may
have occasion to refer, before we have done. Bring your chair to the
table, and we shall be able to consult them together.”
I drew up to the table; and Ezra Jennings handed me his manuscript
notes. They consisted of two large folio leaves of paper. One leaf
contained writing which only covered the surface at intervals. The
other presented writing, in red and black ink, which completely filled
the page from top to bottom. In the irritated state of my curiosity, at
that moment, I laid aside the second sheet of paper in despair.
“Have some mercy on me!” I said. “Tell me what I am to expect, before I
attempt to read this.”
“Willingly, Mr. Blake! Do you mind my asking you one or two more
questions?”
“Ask me anything you like!”
He looked at me with the sad smile on his lips, and the kindly interest
in his soft brown eyes.
“You have already told me,” he said, “that you have never—to your
knowledge—tasted opium in your life.”
“To my knowledge,” I repeated.
“You will understand directly why I speak with that reservation. Let us
go on. You are not aware of ever having taken opium. At this time, last
year, you were suffering from nervous irritation, and you slept
wretchedly at night. On the night of the birthday, however, there was
an exception to the rule—you slept soundly. Am I right, so far?”
“Quite right!”
“Can you assign any cause for the nervous suffering, and your want of
sleep?”
“I can assign no cause. Old Betteredge made a guess at the cause, I
remember. But that is hardly worth mentioning.”
“Pardon me. Anything is worth mentioning in such a case as this.
Betteredge attributed your sleeplessness to something. To what?”