The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins [howl and other poems TXT] 📗

the door of her house against me, on the occasion of her daughter’s birthday.”

More words followed these, providing if my lady was dead, or if Miss Rachel was dead, at the time of the testator’s decease, for the Diamond being sent to Holland, in accordance with the sealed instructions 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 anyone 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.