The Moonstone
originally deposited with it. The proceeds of the sale were, in that
case, to be added to the money already left by the Will for the
professorship of chemistry at the university in the north.
I handed the paper back to Mr. Franklin, sorely troubled what to say to
him. Up to that moment, my own opinion had been (as you know) that the
Colonel had died as wickedly as he had lived. I don’t say the copy from
his Will actually converted me from that opinion: I only say it
staggered me.
“Well,” says Mr. Franklin, “now you have read the Colonel’s own
statement, what do you say? In bringing the Moonstone to my aunt’s
house, am I serving his vengeance blindfold, or am I vindicating him in
the character of a penitent and Christian man?”
“It seems hard to say, sir,” I answered, “that he died with a horrid
revenge in his heart, and a horrid lie on his lips. God alone knows the
truth. Don’t ask _me_.”
Mr. Franklin sat twisting and turning the extract from the Will in his
fingers, as if he expected to squeeze the truth out of it in that
manner. He altered quite remarkably, at the same time. From being brisk
and bright, he now became, most unaccountably, a slow, solemn, and
pondering young man.
“This question has two sides,” he said. “An Objective side, and a
Subjective side. Which are we to take?”
He had had a German education as well as a French. One of the two had
been in undisturbed possession of him (as I supposed) up to this time.
And now (as well as I could make out) the other was taking its place.
It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don’t understand.
I steered a middle course between the Objective side and the Subjective
side. In plain English I stared hard, and said nothing.
“Let’s extract the inner meaning of this,” says Mr. Franklin. “Why did
my uncle leave the Diamond to Rachel? Why didn’t he leave it to my
aunt?”
“That’s not beyond guessing, sir, at any rate,” I said. “Colonel
Herncastle knew my lady well enough to know that she would have refused
to accept any legacy that came to her from _him_.”
“How did he know that Rachel might not refuse to accept it, too?”
“Is there any young lady in existence, sir, who could resist the
temptation of accepting such a birthday present as The Moonstone?”
“That’s the Subjective view,” says Mr. Franklin. “It does you great
credit, Betteredge, to be able to take the Subjective view. But there’s
another mystery about the Colonel’s legacy which is not accounted for
yet. How are we to explain his only giving Rachel her birthday present
conditionally on her mother being alive?”
“I don’t want to slander a dead man, sir,” I answered. “But if he _has_
purposely left a legacy of trouble and danger to his sister, by the
means of her child, it must be a legacy made conditional on his
sister’s being alive to feel the vexation of it.”
“Oh! That’s your interpretation of his motive, is it? The Subjective
interpretation again! Have you ever been in Germany, Betteredge?”
“No, sir. What’s your interpretation, if you please?”
“I can see,” says Mr. Franklin, “that the Colonel’s object may, quite
possibly, have been—not to benefit his niece, whom he had never even
seen—but to prove to his sister that he had died forgiving her, and to
prove it very prettily by means of a present made to her child. There
is a totally different explanation from yours, Betteredge, taking its
rise in a Subjective-Objective point of view. From all I can see, one
interpretation is just as likely to be right as the other.”
Having brought matters to this pleasant and comforting issue, Mr.
Franklin appeared to think that he had completed all that was required
of him. He laid down flat on his back on the sand, and asked what was
to be done next.
He had been so clever, and clear-headed (before he began to talk the
foreign gibberish), and had so completely taken the lead in the
business up to the present time, that I was quite unprepared for such a
sudden change as he now exhibited in this helpless leaning upon _me_.
It was not till later that I learned—by assistance of Miss Rachel, who
was the first to make the discovery—that these puzzling shifts and
transformations in Mr. Franklin were due to the effect on him of his
foreign training. At the age when we are all of us most apt to take our
colouring, in the form of a reflection from the colouring of other
people, he had been sent abroad, and had been passed on from one nation
to another, before there was time for any one colouring more than
another to settle itself on him firmly. As a consequence of this, he
had come back with so many different sides to his character, all more
or less jarring with each other, that he seemed to pass his life in a
state of perpetual contradiction with himself. He could be a busy man,
and a lazy man; cloudy in the head, and clear in the head; a model of
determination, and a spectacle of helplessness, all together. He had
his French side, and his German side, and his Italian side—the original
English foundation showing through, every now and then, as much as to
say, “Here I am, sorely transmogrified, as you see, but there’s
something of me left at the bottom of him still.” Miss Rachel used to
remark that the Italian side of him was uppermost, on those occasions
when he unexpectedly gave in, and asked you in his nice sweet-tempered
way to take his own responsibilities on your shoulders. You will do him
no injustice, I think, if you conclude that the Italian side of him was
uppermost now.
“Isn’t it your business, sir,” I asked, “to know what to do next?
Surely it can’t be mine?”
Mr. Franklin didn’t appear to see the force of my question—not being in
a position, at the time, to see anything but the sky over his head.
“I don’t want to alarm my aunt without reason,” he said. “And I don’t
want to leave her without what may be a needful warning. If you were in
my place, Betteredge, tell me, in one word, what would you do?”
In one word, I told him: “Wait.”
“With all my heart,” says Mr. Franklin. “How long?”
I proceeded to explain myself.
“As I understand it, sir,” I said, “somebody is bound to put this
plaguy Diamond into Miss Rachel’s hands on her birthday—and you may as
well do it as another. Very good. This is the twenty-fifth of May, and
the birthday is on the twenty-first of June. We have got close on four
weeks before us. Let’s wait and see what happens in that time; and
let’s warn my lady, or not, as the circumstances direct us.”
“Perfect, Betteredge, as far as it goes!” says Mr. Franklin. “But
between this and the birthday, what’s to be done with the Diamond?”
“What your father did with it, to be sure, sir!” I answered. “Your
father put it in the safe keeping of a bank in London. You put in the
safe keeping of the bank at Frizinghall.” (Frizinghall was our nearest
town, and the Bank of England wasn’t safer than the bank there.) “If I
were you, sir,” I added, “I would ride straight away with it to
Frizinghall before the ladies come back.”
The prospect of doing something—and, what is more, of doing that
something on a horse—brought Mr. Franklin up like lightning from the
flat of his back. He sprang to his feet, and pulled me up, without
ceremony, on to mine. “Betteredge, you are worth your weight in gold,”
he said. “Come along, and saddle the best horse in the stables
directly.”
Here (God bless it!) was the original English foundation of him showing
through all the foreign varnish at last! Here was the Master Franklin I
remembered, coming out again in the good old way at the prospect of a
ride, and reminding me of the good old times! Saddle a horse for him? I
would have saddled a dozen horses, if he could only have ridden them
all!
We went back to the house in a hurry; we had the fleetest horse in the
stables saddled in a hurry; and Mr. Franklin rattled off in a hurry, to
lodge the cursed Diamond once more in the strongroom of a bank. When I
heard the last of his horse’s hoofs on the drive, and when I turned
about in the yard and found I was alone again, I felt half inclined to
ask myself if I hadn’t woke up from a dream.
CHAPTER VII
While I was in this bewildered frame of mind, sorely needing a little
quiet time by myself to put me right again, my daughter Penelope got in
my way (just as her late mother used to get in my way on the stairs),
and instantly summoned me to tell her all that had passed at the
conference between Mr. Franklin and me. Under present circumstances,
the one thing to be done was to clap the extinguisher upon Penelope’s
curiosity on the spot. I accordingly replied that Mr. Franklin and I
had both talked of foreign politics, till we could talk no longer, and
had then mutually fallen asleep in the heat of the sun. Try that sort
of answer when your wife or your daughter next worries you with an
awkward question at an awkward time, and depend on the natural
sweetness of women for kissing and making it up again at the next
opportunity.
The afternoon wore on, and my lady and Miss Rachel came back.
Needless to say how astonished they were, when they heard that Mr.
Franklin Blake had arrived, and had gone off again on horseback.
Needless also to say, that _they_ asked awkward questions directly, and
that the “foreign politics” and the “falling asleep in the sun”
wouldn’t serve a second time over with _them_. Being at the end of my
invention, I said Mr. Franklin’s arrival by the early train was
entirely attributable to one of Mr. Franklin’s freaks. Being asked,
upon that, whether his galloping off again on horseback was another of
Mr. Franklin’s freaks, I said, “Yes, it was;” and slipped out of it—I
think very cleverly—in that way.
Having got over my difficulties with the ladies, I found more
difficulties waiting for me when I went back to my own room. In came
Penelope—with the natural sweetness of women—to kiss and make it up
again; and—with the natural curiosity of women—to ask another question.
This time she only wanted me to tell her what was the matter with our
second housemaid, Rosanna Spearman.
After leaving Mr. Franklin and me at the Shivering Sand, Rosanna, it
appeared, had returned to the house in a very unaccountable state of
mind. She had turned (if Penelope was to be believed) all the colours
of the rainbow. She had been merry without reason, and sad without
reason. In one breath she asked hundreds of questions about Mr.
Franklin Blake, and in another breath she had been angry with Penelope
for presuming to suppose that a strange gentleman could possess any
interest for her. She had been surprised, smiling, and scribbling Mr.
Franklin’s name inside her workbox. She had been surprised again,
crying and looking at her deformed shoulder in the glass. Had she and
Mr. Franklin known anything of each other before today? Quite
impossible! Had they heard anything of each other? Impossible again! I
could speak to Mr. Franklin’s astonishment as genuine, when he saw how
the girl stared at him. Penelope could speak to the girl’s
inquisitiveness as genuine, when she asked questions about Mr.
Franklin. The conference between us, conducted in this way, was
tiresome enough, until my daughter suddenly ended it by bursting out
with what I thought the most monstrous supposition I had ever heard in
my life.
“Father!” says Penelope, quite seriously, “there’s only one explanation
of it. Rosanna has fallen in love with Mr. Franklin Blake at first
sight!”
You have heard of beautiful young ladies falling in love at first
sight, and have thought it natural enough. But a housemaid out of a
reformatory, with a plain face and a deformed shoulder, falling in
love, at first sight, with a gentleman who comes on a visit to her
mistress’s house, match me that, in the way of an absurdity, out of any