The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins [find a book to read txt] 📗

second man was nowhere to be seen. He looked behind him for his attendant sprite. Gooseberry had disappeared.

“What the devil does it mean?” said Mr. Bruff angrily. “They have both left us at the very time when we want them most.”

It came to the turn of the man in the grey suit to transact his business at the counter. He paid in a cheque—received a receipt for it—and turned to go out.

“What is to be done?” asked Mr. Bruff. “We can’t degrade ourselves by following him.”

“I can!” I said. “I wouldn’t lose sight of that man for ten thousand pounds!”

“In that case,” rejoined Mr. Bruff, “I wouldn’t lose sight of you, for twice the money. A nice occupation for a man in my position,” he muttered to himself, as we followed the stranger out of the bank. “For Heaven’s sake don’t mention it. I should be ruined if it was known.”

The man in the grey suit got into an omnibus, going westward. We got in after him. There were latent reserves of youth still left in Mr. Bruff. I assert it positively—when he took his seat in the omnibus, he blushed!

The man in the grey suit stopped the omnibus, and got out in Oxford Street. We followed him again. He went into a chemist’s shop.

Mr. Bruff started. “My chemist!” he exclaimed. “I am afraid we have made a mistake.”

We entered the shop. Mr. Bruff and the proprietor exchanged a few words in private. The lawyer joined me again, with a very crestfallen face.

“It’s greatly to our credit,” he said, as he took my arm, and led me out—“that’s one comfort!”

“What is to our credit?” I asked.

“Mr. Blake! you and I are the two worst amateur detectives that ever tried their hands at the trade. The man in the grey suit has been thirty years in the chemist’s service. He was sent to the bank to pay money to his master’s account—and he knows no more of the Moonstone than the babe unborn.”

I asked what was to be done next.

“Come back to my office,” said Mr. Bruff. “Gooseberry, and my second man, have evidently followed somebody else. Let us hope that they had their eyes about them at any rate!”

When we reached Gray’s Inn Square, the second man had arrived there before us. He had been waiting for more than a quarter of an hour.

“Well!” asked Mr. Bruff. “What’s your news?”

“I am sorry to say, sir,” replied the man, “that I have made a mistake. I could have taken my oath that I saw Mr. Luker pass something to an elderly gentleman, in a light-coloured paletot. The elderly gentleman turns out, sir, to be a most respectable master iron-monger in Eastcheap.”

“Where is Gooseberry?” asked Mr. Bruff resignedly.

The man stared. “I don’t know, sir. I have seen nothing of him since I left the bank.”

Mr. Bruff dismissed the man. “One of two things,” he said to me. “Either Gooseberry has run away, or he is hunting on his own account. What do you say to dining here, on the chance that the boy may come back in an hour or two? I have got some good wine in the cellar, and we can get a chop from the coffee-house.”

We dined at Mr. Bruff’s chambers. Before the cloth was removed, “a person” was announced as wanting to speak to the lawyer. Was the person Gooseberry? No: only the man who had been employed to follow Mr. Luker when he left the bank.

The report, in this case, presented no feature of the slightest interest. Mr. Luker had gone back to his own house, and had there dismissed his guard. He had not gone out again afterwards. Towards dusk, the shutters had been put up, and the doors had been bolted. The street before the house, and the alley behind the house, had been carefully watched. No signs of the Indians had been visible. No person whatever had been seen loitering about the premises. Having stated these facts, the man waited to know whether there were any further orders. Mr. Bruff dismissed him for the night.

“Do you think Mr. Luker has taken the Moonstone home with him?” I asked.

“Not he,” said Mr. Bruff. “He would never have dismissed his two policemen, if he had run the risk of keeping the Diamond in his own house again.”

We waited another half-hour for the boy, and waited in vain. It was then time for Mr. Bruff to go to Hampstead, and for me to return to Rachel in Portland Place. I left my card, in charge of the porter at the chambers, with a line written on it to say that I should be at my lodgings at half past ten, that night. The card was to be given to the boy, if the boy came back.

Some men have a knack of keeping appointments; and other men have a knack of missing them. I am one of the other men. Add to this, that I passed the evening at Portland Place, on the same seat with Rachel, in a room forty feet long, with Mrs. Merridew at the further end of it. Does anybody wonder that I got home at half past twelve instead of half past ten? How thoroughly heartless that person must be! And how earnestly I hope I may never make that person’s acquaintance!

My servant handed me a morsel of paper when he let me in.

I read, in a neat legal handwriting, these words—“If you please, sir, I am getting sleepy. I will come back tomorrow morning, between nine and ten.” Inquiry proved that a boy, with very extraordinary-looking eyes, had called, and presented my card and message, had waited an hour, had done nothing but fall asleep and wake up again, had written a line for me, and had gone home—after gravely informing the servant that “he was fit for nothing unless he got his night’s rest.”

At nine, the next morning, I was ready for my visitor. At half past nine, I heard steps outside my door. “Come in, Gooseberry!” I called out. “Thank you, sir,” answered a grave and melancholy voice. The door opened. I started to my feet, and confronted—Sergeant Cuff!

“I thought I would look in here, Mr. Blake, on the chance of your being in town, before I wrote to Yorkshire,” said the Sergeant.

He was as dreary and as lean as ever. His eyes had not lost their old trick (so subtly noticed in Betteredge’s Narrative) of “looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself.” But, so far as dress can alter a man, the great Cuff was changed beyond all recognition. He wore a broad-brimmed white hat, a light shooting jacket, white trousers, and drab gaiters. He carried a stout oak stick. His whole aim and object seemed to be to look as if he had lived in the country all his life. When I complimented him on his Metamorphosis, he declined to take it as a joke. He complained, quite gravely, of the noises and the smells of London. I declare I am far from sure that he did not speak with a slightly rustic accent! I offered him breakfast. The innocent countryman was quite shocked. His breakfast hour was half-past six—and he went to bed with the cocks and hens!

“I only got back from Ireland last night,” said the Sergeant, coming round to the practical object of his visit, in his own impenetrable manner. “Before I went to bed, I read your letter, telling me what has happened since my inquiry after the Diamond was suspended last year. There’s only one thing to be said about the matter on my side. I completely mistook my case. How any man living was to have seen things in their true light, in such a situation as mine was at the time, I don’t profess to know. But that doesn’t alter the facts as they stand. I own that I made a mess of it. Not the first mess, Mr. Blake, which has distinguished my professional career! It’s only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake.”

“You have come in the nick of time to recover your reputation,” I said.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Blake,” rejoined the Sergeant. “Now I have retired from business, I don’t care a straw about my reputation. I have done with my reputation, thank God! I am here, sir, in grateful remembrance of the late Lady Verinder’s liberality to me. I will go back to my old work—if you want me, and if you will trust me—on that consideration, and on no other. Not a farthing of money is to pass, if you please, from you to me. This is on honour. Now tell me, Mr. Blake, how the case stands since you wrote to me last.”

I told him of the experiment with the opium, and of what had occurred afterwards at the bank in Lombard Street. He was greatly struck by the experiment—it was something entirely new in his experience. And he was particularly interested in the theory of Ezra Jennings, relating to what I had done with the Diamond, after I had left Rachel’s sitting-room, on the birthday night.

“I don’t hold with Mr. Jennings that you hid the Moonstone,” said Sergeant Cuff. “But I agree with him, that you must certainly have taken it back to your own room.”

“Well?” I asked. “And what happened then?”

“Have you no suspicion yourself of what happened, sir?”

“None whatever.”

“Has Mr. Bruff no suspicion?”

“No more than I have.”

Sergeant Cuff rose, and went to my writing-table. He came back with a sealed envelope. It was marked “Private;” it was addressed to me; and it had the Sergeant’s signature in the corner.

“I suspected the wrong person, last year,” he said: “and I may be suspecting the wrong person now. Wait to open the envelope, Mr. Blake, till you have got at the truth. And then compare the name of the guilty person, with the name that I have written in that sealed letter.”

I put the letter into my pocket—and then asked for the Sergeant’s opinion of the measures which we had taken at the bank.

“Very well intended, sir,” he answered, “and quite the right thing to do. But there was another person who ought to have been looked after besides Mr. Luker.”

“The person named in the letter you have just given to me?”

“Yes, Mr. Blake, the person named in the letter. It can’t be helped now. I shall have something to propose to you and Mr. Bruff, sir, when the time comes. Let’s wait, first, and see if the boy has anything to tell us that is worth hearing.”

It was close on ten o’clock, and the boy had not made his appearance. Sergeant Cuff talked of other matters. He asked after his old friend Betteredge, and his old enemy the gardener. In a minute more, he would no doubt have got from this, to the subject of his favourite roses, if my servant had not interrupted us by announcing that the boy was below.

On being brought into the room, Gooseberry stopped at the threshold of the door, and looked distrustfully at the stranger who was in my company. I told the boy to come to me.

“You may speak before this gentleman,” I said. “He is here to assist me; and he knows all that has happened. Sergeant Cuff,” I added, “this is the boy from Mr. Bruff’s office.”

In our modern system of civilisation, celebrity (no matter of what kind) is the lever that will move anything. The fame of the great Cuff had even reached the ears of the small Gooseberry. The boy’s ill-fixed eyes rolled, when I mentioned the illustrious name, till I thought they really must have dropped on the carpet.

“Come here, my lad,” said the Sergeant, “and let’s hear what you have got to tell us.”

The notice of the great man—the hero of many a famous story in every lawyer’s office in