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

Going back by way of the shrubbery, I smelt tobacco, and found Mr. Franklin and Mr. Murthwaite (the latter smoking a cheroot) walking slowly up and down among the trees. Mr. Franklin beckoned to me to join them.

“This,” says Mr. Franklin, presenting me to the great traveller, “is Gabriel Betteredge, the old servant and friend of our family of whom I spoke to you just now. Tell him, if you please, what you have just told me.”

Mr. Murthwaite took his cheroot out of his mouth, and leaned, in his weary way, against the trunk of a tree.

“Mr. Betteredge,” he began, “those three Indians are no more jugglers than you and I are.”

Here was a new surprise! I naturally asked the traveller if he had ever met with the Indians before.

“Never,” says Mr. Murthwaite; “but I know what Indian juggling really is. All you have seen tonight is a very bad and clumsy imitation of it. Unless, after long experience, I am utterly mistaken, those men are high-caste Brahmins. I charged them with being disguised, and you saw how it told on them, clever as the Hindu people are in concealing their feelings. There is a mystery about their conduct that I can’t explain. They have doubly sacrificed their caste⁠—first, in crossing the sea; secondly, in disguising themselves as jugglers. In the land they live in that is a tremendous sacrifice to make. There must be some very serious motive at the bottom of it, and some justification of no ordinary kind to plead for them, in recovery of their caste, when they return to their own country.”

I was struck dumb. Mr. Murthwaite went on with his cheroot. Mr. Franklin, after what looked to me like a little private veering about between the different sides of his character, broke the silence as follows:

“I feel some hesitation, Mr. Murthwaite, in troubling you with family matters, in which you can have no interest and which I am not very willing to speak of out of our own circle. But, after what you have said, I feel bound, in the interests of Lady Verinder and her daughter, to tell you something which may possibly put the clue into your hands. I speak to you in confidence; you will oblige me, I am sure, by not forgetting that?”

With this preface, he told the Indian traveller all that he had told me at the Shivering Sand. Even the immovable Mr. Murthwaite was so interested in what he heard, that he let his cheroot go out.

“Now,” says Mr. Franklin, when he had done, “what does your experience say?”

“My experience,” answered the traveller, “says that you have had more narrow escapes of your life, Mr. Franklin Blake, than I have had of mine; and that is saying a great deal.”

It was Mr. Franklin’s turn to be astonished now.

“Is it really as serious as that?” he asked.

“In my opinion it is,” answered Mr. Murthwaite. “I can’t doubt, after what you have told me, that the restoration of the Moonstone to its place on the forehead of the Indian idol, is the motive and the justification of that sacrifice of caste which I alluded to just now. Those men will wait their opportunity with the patience of cats, and will use it with the ferocity of tigers. How you have escaped them I can’t imagine,” says the eminent traveller, lighting his cheroot again, and staring hard at Mr. Franklin. “You have been carrying the Diamond backwards and forwards, here and in London, and you are still a living man! Let us try and account for it. It was daylight, both times, I suppose, when you took the jewel out of the bank in London?”

“Broad daylight,” says Mr. Franklin.

“And plenty of people in the streets?”

“Plenty.”

“You settled, of course, to arrive at Lady Verinder’s house at a certain time? It’s a lonely country between this and the station. Did you keep your appointment?”

“No. I arrived four hours earlier than my appointment.”

“I beg to congratulate you on that proceeding! When did you take the Diamond to the bank at the town here?”

“I took it an hour after I had brought it to this house⁠—and three hours before anybody was prepared for seeing me in these parts.”

“I beg to congratulate you again! Did you bring it back here alone?”

“No. I happened to ride back with my cousins and the groom.”

“I beg to congratulate you for the third time! If you ever feel inclined to travel beyond the civilised limits, Mr. Blake, let me know, and I will go with you. You are a lucky man.”

Here I struck in. This sort of thing didn’t at all square with my English ideas.

“You don’t really mean to say, sir,” I asked, “that they would have taken Mr. Franklin’s life, to get their Diamond, if he had given them the chance?”

“Do you smoke, Mr. Betteredge?” says the traveller.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you care much for the ashes left in your pipe when you empty it?”

“No, sir.”

“In the country those men came from, they care just as much about killing a man, as you care about emptying the ashes out of your pipe. If a thousand lives stood between them and the getting back of their Diamond⁠—and if they thought they could destroy those lives without discovery⁠—they would take them all. The sacrifice of caste is a serious thing in India, if you like. The sacrifice of life is nothing at all.”

I expressed my opinion upon this, that they were a set of murdering thieves. Mr. Murthwaite expressed his opinion that they were a wonderful people. Mr. Franklin, expressing no opinion at all, brought us back to the matter in hand.

“They have seen the Moonstone on Miss Verinder’s dress,” he said. “What is to be done?”

“What your uncle threatened to do,” answered Mr. Murthwaite. “Colonel Herncastle understood the people he had to deal with. Send the Diamond tomorrow (under guard of more than one man) to be cut up at Amsterdam. Make half a dozen diamonds of it, instead of one. There is an end of its sacred identity as The Moonstone⁠—and there is an end of the conspiracy.”

Mr. Franklin turned to me.

“There is