The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins (ebook reader screen TXT) 📗

to me in the course of my medical practice, to doubt whether we can justifiably infer⁠—in cases of delirium⁠—that the loss of the faculty of speaking connectedly, implies of necessity the loss of the faculty of thinking connectedly as well. Poor Mr. Candy’s illness gave me an opportunity of putting this doubt to the test. I understand the art of writing in shorthand; and I was able to take down the patient’s ‘wanderings’, exactly as they fell from his lips.⁠—Do you see, Mr. Blake, what I am coming to at last?”

I saw it clearly, and waited with breathless interest to hear more.

“At odds and ends of time,” Ezra Jennings went on, “I reproduced my shorthand notes, in the ordinary form of writing⁠—leaving large spaces between the broken phrases, and even the single words, as they had fallen disconnectedly from Mr. Candy’s lips. I then treated the result thus obtained, on something like the principle which one adopts in putting together a child’s puzzle. It is all confusion to begin with; but it may be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find the right way. Acting on this plan, I filled in each blank space on the paper, with what the words or phrases on either side of it suggested to me as the speaker’s meaning; altering over and over again, until my additions followed naturally on the spoken words which came before them, and fitted naturally into the spoken words which came after them. The result was, that I not only occupied in this way many vacant and anxious hours, but that I arrived at something which was (as it seemed to me) a confirmation of the theory that I held. In plainer words, after putting the broken sentences together I found the superior faculty of thinking going on, more or less connectedly, in my patient’s mind, while the inferior faculty of expression was in a state of almost complete incapacity and confusion.”

“One word!” I interposed eagerly. “Did my name occur in any of his wanderings?”

“You shall hear, Mr. Blake. Among my written proofs of the assertion which I have just advanced⁠—or, I ought to say, among the written experiments, tending to put my assertion to the proof⁠—there is one, in which your name occurs. For nearly the whole of one night, Mr. Candy’s mind was occupied with something between himself and you. I have got the broken words, as they dropped from his lips, on one sheet of paper. And I have got the links of my own discovering which connect those words together, on another sheet of paper. The product (as the arithmeticians would say) is an intelligible statement⁠—first, of something actually done in the past; secondly, of something which Mr. Candy contemplated doing in the future, if his illness had not got in the way, and stopped him. The question is whether this does, or does not, represent the lost recollection which he vainly attempted to find when you called on him this morning?”

“Not a doubt of it!” I answered. “Let us go back directly, and look at the papers!”

“Quite impossible, Mr. Blake.”

“Why?”

“Put yourself in my position for a moment,” said Ezra Jennings. “Would you disclose to another person what had dropped unconsciously from the lips of your suffering patient and your helpless friend, without first knowing that there was a necessity to justify you in opening your lips?”

I felt that he was unanswerable, here; but I tried to argue the question, nevertheless.

“My conduct in such a delicate matter as you describe,” I replied, “would depend greatly on whether the disclosure was of a nature to compromise my friend or not.”

“I have disposed of all necessity for considering that side of the question, long since,” said Ezra Jennings. “Wherever my notes included anything which Mr. Candy might have wished to keep secret, those notes have been destroyed. My manuscript experiments at my friend’s bedside, include nothing, now, which he would have hesitated to communicate to others, if he had recovered the use of his memory. In your case, I have every reason to suppose that my notes contain something which he actually wished to say to you.”

“And yet, you hesitate?”

“And yet, I hesitate. Remember the circumstances under which I obtained the information which I possess! Harmless as it is, I cannot prevail upon myself to give it up to you, unless you first satisfy me that there is a reason for doing so. He was so miserably ill, Mr. Blake! and he was so helplessly dependent upon me! Is it too much to ask, if I request you only to hint to me what your interest is in the lost recollection⁠—or what you believe that lost recollection to be?”

To have answered him with the frankness which his language and his manner both claimed from me, would have been to commit myself to openly acknowledging that I was suspected of the theft of the Diamond. Strongly as Ezra Jennings had intensified the first impulsive interest which I had felt in him, he had not overcome my unconquerable reluctance to disclose the degrading position in which I stood. I took refuge once more in the explanatory phrases with which I had prepared myself to meet the curiosity of strangers.

This time I had no reason to complain of a want of attention on the part of the person to whom I addressed myself. Ezra Jennings listened patiently, even anxiously, until I had done.

“I am sorry to have raised your expectations, Mr. Blake, only to disappoint them,” he said. “Throughout the whole period of Mr. Candy’s illness, from first to last, not one word about the Diamond escaped his lips. The matter with which I heard him connect your name has, I can assure you, no discoverable relation whatever with the loss or the recovery of Miss Verinder’s jewel.”

We arrived, as he said those words, at a place where the highway along which we had been walking branched off into two roads. One led to Mr. Ablewhite’s house, and the other to a moorland village some two or three