CHAPTER II
Mr. Godfrey followed the announcement of his name—as Mr. Godfrey does everything else—exactly at the right time. He was not so close on the servant’s heels as to startle us. He was not so far behind as to cause us the double inconvenience of a pause and an open door. It is in the completeness of his daily life that the true Christian appears. This dear man was very complete.
“Go to Miss Verinder,” said my aunt, addressing the servant, “and tell her Mr. Ablewhite is here.”
We both inquired after his health. We both asked him together whether he felt like himself again, after his terrible adventure of the past week. With perfect tact, he contrived to answer us at the same moment. Lady Verinder had his reply in words. I had his charming smile.
“What,” he cried, with infinite tenderness, “have I done to deserve all this sympathy? My dear aunt! my dear Miss Clack! I have merely been mistaken for somebody else. I have only been blindfolded; I have only been strangled; I have only been thrown flat on my back, on a very thin carpet, covering a particularly hard floor. Just think how much worse it might have been! I might have been murdered; I might have been robbed. What have I lost? Nothing but Nervous Force—which the law doesn’t recognise as property; so that, strictly speaking, I have lost nothing at all. If I could have had my own way, I would have kept my adventure to myself—I shrink from all this fuss and publicity. But Mr. Luker made his injuries public, and my injuries, as the necessary consequence, have been proclaimed in their turn. I have become the property of the newspapers, until the gentle reader gets sick of the subject. I am very sick indeed of it myself. May the gentle reader soon be like me! And how is dear Rachel? Still enjoying the gaieties of London? So glad to hear it! Miss Clack, I need all your indulgence. I am sadly behind-hand with my Committee Work and my dear Ladies. But I really do hope to look in at the Mothers’-Small-Clothes next week. Did you make cheering progress at Monday’s Committee? Was the Board hopeful about future prospects? And are we nicely off for Trousers?”
The heavenly gentleness of his smile made his apologies irresistible. The richness of his deep voice added its own indescribable charm to the interesting business question which he had just addressed to me. In truth, we were almosttoo nicely off for Trousers; we were quite overwhelmed by them. I was just about to say so, when the door opened again, and an element of worldly disturbance entered the room, in the person of Miss Verinder.
She approached dear Mr. Godfrey at a most unladylike rate of speed, with her hair shockingly untidy, and her face, what I should call, unbecomingly flushed.
“I am charmed to see you, Godfrey,” she said, addressing him, I grieve to add, in the off-hand manner of one young man talking to another. “I wish you had brought Mr. Luker with you. You and he (as long as our present excitement lasts) are the two most interesting men in all London. It’s morbid to say this; it’s unhealthy; it’s all that a well-regulated mind like Miss Clack’s most instinctively shudders at. Never mind that. Tell me the whole of the Northumberland Street story directly. I know the newspapers have left some of it out.”
Even dear Mr. Godfrey partakes of the fallen nature which we all inherit from Adam—it is a very small share of our human legacy, but, alas! he has it. I confess it grieved me to see him take Rachel’s hand in both of his own hands, and lay it softly on the left side of his waistcoat. It was a direct encouragement to her reckless way of talking, and her insolent reference to me.
“Dearest Rachel,” he said, in the same voice which had thrilled me when he spoke of our prospects and our trousers, “the newspapers have told you everything—and they have told it much better than I can.”
“Godfrey thinks we all make too much of the matter,” my aunt remarked. “He has just been saying that he doesn’t care to speak of it.”
“Why?”
She put the question with a sudden flash in her eyes, and a sudden look up into Mr. Godfrey’s face. On his side, he looked down at her with an indulgence so injudicious and so ill-deserved, that I really felt called on to interfere.
“Rachel, darling!” I remonstrated gently, “true greatness and true courage are ever modest.”
“You are a very good fellow in your way, Godfrey,” she said—not taking the smallest notice, observe, of me, and still speaking to her cousin as if she was one young man addressing another. “But I am quite sure you are not great; I don’t believe you possess any extraordinary courage; and I am firmly persuaded—if you ever had any modesty—that your lady-worshippers relieved you of that virtue a good many years since. You have some private reason for not talking of your adventure in Northumberland Street; and I mean to know it.”
“My reason is the simplest imaginable, and the most easily acknowledged,” he answered, still bearing with her. “I am tired of the subject.”
“You are tired of the subject? My dear Godfrey, I am going to make a remark.”
“What is it?”
“You live a great deal too much in the society of women. And you have contracted two very bad habits in consequence. You have learnt to talk nonsense seriously, and you have got into a way of telling fibs for the pleasure of telling them. You can’t go straight with your lady-worshippers. I mean to make you go straight with me. Come, and sit down. I am brimful of downright questions; and I expect you to be brimful of downright answers.”
She actually dragged him across the room to a chair by the window, where the light would fall on his face. I deeply feel being obliged to report such language, and to describe such conduct. But, hemmed in, as I am, between Mr. Franklin Blake’s cheque on one side and my own sacred regard for truth on the other, what am I to do? I looked at my aunt. She sat unmoved; apparently in no way disposed to interfere. I had never noticed this kind of torpor in her before. It was, perhaps, the reaction after the trying time she had had in the country. Not a pleasant symptom to remark, be it what it might, at dear Lady Verinder’s age, and with dear Lady Verinder’s autumnal exuberance of figure.
In the meantime, Rachel had settled herself at the window with our amiable and forbearing—our too forbearing—Mr. Godfrey. She began the string of questions with which she had threatened him, taking no more notice of her mother, or of myself, than if we had not been in the room.
“Have the police done anything, Godfrey?”
“Nothing whatever.”
“It is certain, I suppose, that the three men who laid the trap for you were the same three men who afterwards laid the trap for Mr. Luker?”
“Humanly speaking, my dear Rachel, there can be no doubt of it.”
“And not a trace of them has been discovered?”
“Not a trace.”
“It is thought—is it not?—that these three men are the three Indians who came to our house in the country.”
“Some people think so.”
“Do you think so?”
“My dear Rachel, they blindfolded me before I could see their faces. I know nothing whatever of the matter. How can I offer an opinion on it?”
Even the angelic gentleness of Mr. Godfrey was, you see, beginning to give way at last under the persecution inflicted on him. Whether unbridled curiosity, or ungovernable dread, dictated Miss Verinder’s questions I do not presume to inquire. I only report that, on Mr. Godfrey’s attempting to rise, after giving her the answer just described, she actually took him by the two shoulders, and pushed him back into his chair—Oh, don’t say this was immodest! don’t even hint that the recklessness of guilty terror could alone account for such conduct as I have described! We must not judge others. My Christian friends, indeed, indeed, indeed, we must not judge others!
She went on with her questions, unabashed. Earnest Biblical students will perhaps be reminded—as I was reminded—of the blinded children of the devil, who went on with their orgies, unabashed, in the time before the Flood.
“I want to know something about Mr. Luker, Godfrey.”
“I am again unfortunate, Rachel. No man knows less of Mr. Luker than I do.”
“You never saw him before you and he met accidentally at the bank?”
“Never.”
“You have seen him since?”
“Yes. We have been examined together, as well as separately, to assist the police.”
“Mr. Luker was robbed of a receipt which he had got from his banker’s—was he not? What was the receipt for?”
“For a valuable gem which he had placed in the safe keeping of the bank.”
“That’s what the newspapers say. It may be enough for the general reader; but it is not enough for me. The banker’s receipt must have mentioned what the gem was?”
“The banker’s receipt, Rachel—as I have heard it described—mentioned nothing of the kind. A valuable gem, belonging to Mr. Luker; deposited by Mr. Luker; sealed with Mr. Luker’s seal; and only to be given up on Mr. Luker’s personal application. That was the form, and that is all I know about it.”
She waited a moment, after he had said that. She looked at her mother, and sighed. She looked back again at Mr. Godfrey, and went on.
“Some of our private affairs, at home,” she said, “seem to have got into the newspapers?”
“I grieve to say, it is so.”
“And some idle people, perfect strangers to us, are trying to trace a connexion between what happened at our house in Yorkshire and what has happened since, here in London?”
“The public curiosity, in certain quarters, is, I fear, taking that turn.”
“The people who say that the three unknown men who ill-used you and Mr. Luker are the three Indians, also say that the valuable gem——”
There she stopped. She had become gradually, within the last few moments, whiter and whiter in the face. The extraordinary blackness of her hair made this paleness, by contrast, so ghastly to look at, that we all thought she would faint, at the moment when she checked herself in the middle of her question. Dear Mr. Godfrey made a second attempt to leave his chair. My aunt entreated her to say no more. I followed my aunt with a modest medicinal peace-offering, in the shape of a bottle of salts. We none of us produced the slightest effect on her. “Godfrey, stay where you are. Mamma, there is not the least reason to be alarmed about me. Clack, you’re dying to hear the end of it—I won’t faint, expressly to oblige you.”
Those were the exact words she used—taken down in my diary the moment I got home. But, oh, don’t let us judge! My Christian friends, don’t let us judge!
She turned once more to Mr. Godfrey. With an obstinacy dreadful to see, she went back again to the place where she had checked herself, and completed her question in these words:
“I spoke to you, a minute since, about what people were saying in certain quarters. Tell me plainly, Godfrey, do they any of them say that Mr. Luker’s valuable gem is—the Moonstone?”
As the name of the Indian Diamond passed her lips, I saw a change come over my admirable friend. His complexion deepened. He lost the genial suavity of manner which is one of his greatest charms. A noble indignation inspired his reply.
“They do say it,” he answered. “There are people who don’t hesitate to accuse Mr. Luker of telling a falsehood to serve some private interests of his own. He has over and over again solemnly declared that, until this scandal assailed him, he had never even heard of the Moonstone. And these vile people reply, without a shadow of proof to justify them, He has his reasons for concealment; we decline to believe him on his oath. Shameful! shameful!”
Rachel looked at him very strangely—I can’t well describe how—while he was speaking. When he had done, she said, “Considering that Mr. Luker is only a chance acquaintance of yours, you take up his cause, Godfrey, rather warmly.”
My gifted friend made her one of the most truly evangelical answers I ever heard in my life.
“I hope, Rachel, I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly,” he said.
The tone in which those words were spoken might have melted a stone. But, oh dear, what is the hardness of stone? Nothing, compared to the hardness of the unregenerate human heart! She sneered. I blush to record it—she sneered at him to his face.
“Keep your noble sentiments for your Ladies’ Committees, Godfrey. I am certain that the scandal which has assailed Mr. Luker, has not spared You.”
Even my aunt’s torpor was roused by those words.
“My dear Rachel,” she remonstrated, “you have really no right to say that!”
“I mean no harm, mamma—I mean good. Have a moment’s patience with me, and you will see.”
She looked back at Mr. Godfrey, with what appeared to be a sudden pity for him. She went the length—the very unladylike length—of taking him by the hand.
“I am certain,” she said, “that I have found out the true reason of your unwillingness to speak of this matter before my mother and before me. An unlucky accident has associated you in people’s minds with Mr. Luker. You have told me what scandal says of him. What does scandal say of you?”
Even at the eleventh hour, dear Mr. Godfrey—always ready to return good for evil—tried to spare her.
“Don’t ask me!” he said. “It’s better forgotten, Rachel—it is, indeed.”
“I will hear it!” she cried out, fiercely, at the top of her voice.
“Tell her, Godfrey!” entreated my aunt. “Nothing can do her such harm as your silence is doing now!”
Mr. Godfrey’s fine eyes filled with tears. He cast one last appealing look at her—and then he spoke the fatal words:
“If you will have it, Rachel—scandal says that the Moonstone is in pledge to Mr. Luker, and that I am the man who has pawned it.”
She started to her feet with a scream. She looked backwards and forwards from Mr. Godfrey to my aunt, and from my aunt to Mr. Godfrey, in such a frantic manner that I really thought she had gone mad.
“Don’t speak to me! Don’t touch me!” she exclaimed, shrinking back from all of us (I declare like some hunted animal!) into a corner of the room. “This is my fault! I must set it right. I have sacrificed myself—I had a right to do that, if I liked. But to let an innocent man be ruined; to keep a secret which destroys his character for life—Oh, good God, it’s too horrible! I can’t bear it!”
My aunt half rose from her chair, then suddenly sat down again. She called to me faintly, and pointed to a little phial in her work-box.
“Quick!” she whispered. “Six drops, in water. Don’t let Rachel see.”
Under other circumstances, I should have thought this strange. There was no time now to think—there was only time to give the medicine. Dear Mr. Godfrey unconsciously assisted me in concealing what I was about from Rachel, by speaking composing words to her at the other end of the room.
“Indeed, indeed, you exaggerate,” I heard him say. “My reputation stands too high to be destroyed by a miserable passing scandal like this. It will be all forgotten in another week. Let us never speak of it again.” She was perfectly inaccessible, even to such generosity as this. She went on from bad to worse.
“I must, and will, stop it,” she said. “Mamma! hear what I say. Miss Clack! hear what I say. I know the hand that took the Moonstone. I know—” she laid a strong emphasis on the words; she stamped her foot in the rage that possessed her—“I know that Godfrey Ablewhite is innocent! Take me to the magistrate, Godfrey! Take me to the magistrate, and I will swear it!”
My aunt caught me by the hand, and whispered, “Stand between us for a minute or two. Don’t let Rachel see me.” I noticed a bluish tinge in her face which alarmed me. She saw I was startled. “The drops will put me right in a minute or two,” she said, and so closed her eyes, and waited a little.
While this was going on, I heard dear Mr. Godfrey still gently remonstrating.
“You must not appear publicly in such a thing as this,” he said. “Your reputation, dearest Rachel, is something too pure and too sacred to be trifled with.”
“My reputation!” She burst out laughing. “Why, I am accused, Godfrey, as well as you. The best detective officer in England declares that I have stolen my own Diamond. Ask him what he thinks—and he will tell you that I have pledged the Moonstone to pay my private debts!” She stopped, ran across the room—and fell on her knees at her mother’s feet. “Oh mamma! mamma! mamma! I must be mad—mustn’t I?—not to own the truth now!” She was too vehement to notice her mother’s condition—she was on her feet again, and back with Mr. Godfrey, in an instant. “I won’t let you—I won’t let any innocent man—be accused and disgraced through my fault. If you won’t take me before the magistrate, draw out a declaration of your innocence on paper, and I will sign it. Do as I tell you, Godfrey, or I’ll write it to the newspapers I’ll go out, and cry it in the streets!”
We will not say this was the language of remorse—we will say it was the language of hysterics. Indulgent Mr. Godfrey pacified her by taking a sheet of paper, and drawing out the declaration. She signed it in a feverish hurry. “Show it everywhere—don’t think of me,” she said, as she gave it to him. “I am afraid, Godfrey, I have not done you justice, hitherto, in my thoughts. You are more unselfish—you are a better man than I believed you to be. Come here when you can, and I will try and repair the wrong I have done you.”
She gave him her hand. Alas, for our fallen nature! Alas, for Mr. Godfrey! He not only forgot himself so far as to kiss her hand—he adopted a gentleness of tone in answering her which, in such a case, was little better than a compromise with sin. “I will come, dearest,” he said, “on condition that we don’t speak of this hateful subject again.” Never had I seen and heard our Christian Hero to less advantage than on this occasion.
Before another word could be said by anybody, a thundering knock at the street door startled us all. I looked through the window, and saw the World, the Flesh, and the Devil waiting before the house—as typified in a carriage and horses, a powdered footman, and three of the most audaciously dressed women I ever beheld in my life.
Rachel started, and composed herself. She crossed the room to her mother.
“They have come to take me to the flower-show,” she said. “One word, mamma, before I go. I have not distressed you, have I?”
(Is the bluntness of moral feeling which could ask such a question as that, after what had just happened, to be pitied or condemned? I like to lean towards mercy. Let us pity it.)
The drops had produced their effect. My poor aunt’s complexion was like itself again. “No, no, my dear,” she said. “Go with our friends, and enjoy yourself.”
Her daughter stooped, and kissed her. I had left the window, and was near the door, when Rachel approached it to go out. Another change had come over her—she was in tears. I looked with interest at the momentary softening of that obdurate heart. I felt inclined to say a few earnest words. Alas! my well-meant sympathy only gave offence. “What do you mean by pitying me?” she asked in a bitter whisper, as she passed to the door. “Don’t you see how happy I am? I’m going to the flower-show, Clack; and I’ve got the prettiest bonnet in London.” She completed the hollow mockery of that address by blowing me a kiss—and so left the room.
I wish I could describe in words the compassion I felt for this miserable and misguided girl. But I am almost as poorly provided with words as with money. Permit me to say—my heart bled for her.
Returning to my aunt’s chair, I observed dear Mr. Godfrey searching for something softly, here and there, in different parts of the room. Before I could offer to assist him he had found what he wanted. He came back to my aunt and me, with his declaration of innocence in one hand, and with a box of matches in the other.
“Dear aunt, a little conspiracy!” he said. “Dear Miss Clack, a pious fraud which even your high moral rectitude will excuse! Will you leave Rachel to suppose that I accept the generous self-sacrifice which has signed this paper? And will you kindly bear witness that I destroy it in your presence, before I leave the house?” He kindled a match, and, lighting the paper, laid it to burn in a plate on the table. “Any trifling inconvenience that I may suffer is as nothing,” he remarked, “compared with the importance of preserving that pure name from the contaminating contact of the world. There! We have reduced it to a little harmless heap of ashes; and our dear impulsive Rachel will never know what we have done! How do you feel? My precious friends, how do you feel? For my poor part, I am as light-hearted as a boy!”
He beamed on us with his beautiful smile; he held out a hand to my aunt, and a hand to me. I was too deeply affected by his noble conduct to speak. I closed my eyes; I put his hand, in a kind of spiritual self-forgetfulness, to my lips. He murmured a soft remonstrance. Oh the ecstasy, the pure, unearthly ecstasy of that moment! I sat—I hardly know on what—quite lost in my own exalted feelings. When I opened my eyes again, it was like descending from heaven to earth. There was nobody but my aunt in the room. He had gone.
I should like to stop here—I should like to close my narrative with the record of Mr. Godfrey’s noble conduct. Unhappily there is more, much more, which the unrelenting pecuniary pressure of Mr. Blake’s cheque obliges me to tell. The painful disclosures which were to reveal themselves in my presence, during that Tuesday’s visit to Montagu Square, were not at an end yet.
Finding myself alone with Lady Verinder, I turned naturally to the subject of her health; touching delicately on the strange anxiety which she had shown to conceal her indisposition, and the remedy applied to it, from the observation of her daughter.
My aunt’s reply greatly surprised me.
“Drusilla,” she said (if I have not already mentioned that my Christian name is Drusilla, permit me to mention it now), “you are touching quite innocently, I know—on a very distressing subject.”
I rose immediately. Delicacy left me but one alternative—the alternative, after first making my apologies, of taking my leave. Lady Verinder stopped me, and insisted on my sitting down again.
“You have surprised a secret,” she said, “which I had confided to my sister Mrs. Ablewhite, and to my lawyer Mr. Bruff, and to no one else. I can trust in their discretion; and I am sure, when I tell you the circumstances, I can trust in yours. Have you any pressing engagement, Drusilla? or is your time your own this afternoon?”
It is needless to say that my time was entirely at my aunt’s disposal.
“Keep me company then,” she said, “for another hour. I have something to tell you which I believe you will be sorry to hear. And I shall have a service to ask of you afterwards, if you don’t object to assist me.”
It is again needless to say that, so far from objecting, I was all eagerness to assist her.
“You can wait here,” she went on, “till Mr. Bruff comes at five. And you can be one of the witnesses, Drusilla, when I sign my Will.”
Her Will! I thought of the drops which I had seen in her work-box. I thought of the bluish tinge which I had noticed in her complexion. A light which was not of this world—a light shining prophetically from an unmade grave—dawned on my mind. My aunt’s secret was a secret no longer.
