The Moonstone

I address these lines⁠—written in India⁠—to my relatives in England.

My object is to explain the motive which has induced me to refuse the right hand of friendship to my cousin, John Herncastle. The reserve which I have hitherto maintained in this matter has been misinterpreted by members of my family whose good opinion I cannot consent to forfeit. I request them to suspend their decision until they have read my narrative. And I declare, on my word of honour, that what I am now about to write is, strictly and literally, the truth.

The private difference between my cousin and me took its rise in a great public event in which we were both concerned⁠—the storming of Seringapatam, under General Baird, on the 4th of May, 1799.

In order that the circumstances may be clearly understood, I must revert for a moment to the period before the assault, and to the stories current in our camp of the treasure in jewels and gold stored up in the Palace of Seringapatam.

Well, when the Indian said, “Hold out your hand,” the boy shrunk back, and shook his head, and said he didn’t like it. The Indian, thereupon, asked him (not at all unkindly), whether he would like to be sent back to London, and left where they had found him, sleeping in an empty basket in a market⁠—a hungry, ragged, and forsaken little boy. This, it seems, ended the difficulty. The little chap unwillingly held out his hand. Upon that, the Indian took a bottle from his bosom, and poured out of it some black stuff, like ink, into the palm of the boy’s hand. The Indian⁠—first touching the boy’s head, and making signs over it in the air⁠—then said, “Look.” The boy became quite stiff, and stood like a statue, looking into the ink in the hollow of his hand.

(So far, it seemed to me to be juggling, accompanied by a foolish waste of ink. I was beginning to feel sleepy again, when Penelope’s next words stirred me up.)

The Indians looked up the road and down the road once more⁠—and then the chief Indian said these words to the boy; “See the English gentleman from foreign parts.”

The boy said, “I see him.”

The Indian said, “Is it on the road to this house, and on no other, that the English gentleman will travel today?”

The boy said, “It is on the road to this house, and on no other, that the English gentleman will travel today.” The Indian put a second question⁠—after waiting a little first. He said: “Has the English gentleman got It about him?”

Before I could leave the room in my turn, Miss Rachel, always considerate to the old servant who had been in the house when she was born, stopped me. “Look, Gabriel!” she said, and flashed the jewel before my eyes in a ray of sunlight that poured through the window.

Lord bless us! it was a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover’s egg! The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark. No wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated: no wonder her cousins screamed. The Diamond laid such a hold on me that I burst out with as large an “O” as the Bouncers themselves. The only one of us who kept his senses was Mr. Godfrey. He put an arm round each of his sister’s waists, and, looking compassionately backwards and forwards between the Diamond and me, said, “Carbon Betteredge! mere carbon, my good friend, after all!”

About half-past seven I woke, and opened my window on a fine sunshiny day. The clock had struck eight, and I was just going out to chain up the dogs again, when I heard a sudden whisking of petticoats on the stairs behind me.

I turned about, and there was Penelope flying down after me like mad. “Father!” she screamed, “come upstairs, for God’s sake! The Diamond is gone!”

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked her.

“Gone!” says Penelope. “Gone, nobody knows how! Come up and see.”

She dragged me after her into our young lady’s sitting-room, which opened into her bedroom. There, on the threshold of her bedroom door, stood Miss Rachel, almost as white in the face as the white dressing-gown that clothed her. There also stood the two doors of the Indian cabinet, wide open. One of the drawers inside was pulled out as far as it would go.

“Look!” says Penelope. “I myself saw Miss Rachel put the Diamond into that drawer last night.” I went to the cabinet. The drawer was empty.

“Is this true, miss?” I asked.

With a look that was not like herself, with a voice that was not like her own, Miss Rachel answered as my daughter had answered: “The Diamond is gone!” Having said those words, she withdrew into her bedroom, and shut and locked the door.

Mr. Franklin and I waited to see what was coming next. The Sergeant stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking out, and whistling the tune of “The Last Rose of Summer” softly to himself. Later in the proceedings, I discovered that he only forgot his manners so far as to whistle, when his mind was hard at work, seeing its way inch by inch to its own private ends, on which occasions “The Last Rose of Summer” evidently helped and encouraged him. I suppose it fitted in somehow with his character. It reminded him, you see, of his favourite roses, and, as he whistled it, it was the most melancholy tune going.

Turning from the window, after a minute or two, the Sergeant walked into the middle of the room, and stopped there, deep in thought, with his eyes on Miss Rachel’s bedroom door. After a little he roused himself, nodded his head, as much as to say, “That will do,” and, addressing me, asked for ten minutes’ conversation with my mistress, at her ladyship’s earliest convenience.

Leaving the room with this message, I heard Mr. Franklin ask the Sergeant a question, and stopped to hear the answer also at the threshold of the door.

“Can you guess yet,” inquired Mr. Franklin, “who has stolen the Diamond?”

“Nobody has stolen the Diamond,” answered Sergeant Cuff.

We both started at that extraordinary view of the case, and both earnestly begged him to tell us what he meant.