The Victorian Mystery Megapack (131 page)

“It didn’t matter then; it doesn’t matter now. On the Friday morning, hours before Sergeant Cuff entered the house, there was the new nightgown—to make up your number in place of the nightgown that I had got—made, wrung out, dried, ironed, marked, and folded as the laundry woman folded all the others, safe in your drawer. There was no fear (if the linen in the house was examined) of the newness of the nightgown betraying me. All your underclothing had been renewed, when you came to our house—I suppose on your return home from foreign parts.

“The next thing was the arrival of Sergeant Cuff; and the next great surprise was the announcement of what
he
thought about the smear on the door.

“I had believed you to be guilty (as I have owned), more because I wanted you to be guilty than for any other reason. And now, the Sergeant had come round by a totally different way to the same conclusion (respecting the nightgown) as mine! And I had got the dress that was the only proof against you! And not a living creature knew it—yourself included! I am afraid to tell you how I felt when I called these things to mind—you would hate my memory for ever afterwards.”

At that place, Betteredge looked up from the letter.

“Not a glimmer of light so far, Mr. Franklin,” said the old man, taking off his heavy tortoiseshell spectacles, and pushing Rosanna Spearman’s confession a little away from him. “Have you come to any conclusion, sir, in your own mind, while I have been reading?”

“Finish the letter first, Betteredge; there may be something to enlighten us at the end of it. I shall have a word or two to say to you after that.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll just rest my eyes, and then I’ll go on again. In the meantime, Mr. Franklin—I don’t want to hurry you—but would you mind telling me, in one word, whether you see your way out of this dreadful mess yet?”

“I see my way back to London,” I said, “to consult Mr. Bruff. If he can’t help me——”

“Yes, sir?”

“And if the Sergeant won’t leave his retirement at Dorking——”

“He won’t, Mr. Franklin!”

“Then, Betteredge—as far as I can see now—I am at the end of my resources. After Mr. Bruff and the Sergeant, I don’t know of a living creature who can be of the slightest use to me.”

As the words passed my lips, some person outside knocked at the door of the room.

Betteredge looked surprised as well as annoyed by the interruption.

“Come in,” he called out, irritably, “whoever you are!”

The door opened, and there entered to us, quietly, the most remarkable-looking man that I had ever seen. Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West. His forehead rose high and straight from the brow. His marks and wrinkles were innumerable. From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast—it had turned completely white. The line between the two colours preserved no sort of regularity. At one place, the white hair ran up into the black; at another, the black hair ran down into the white. I looked at the man with a curiosity which, I am ashamed to say, I found it quite impossible to control. His soft brown eyes looked back at me gently; and he met my involuntary rudeness in staring at him, with an apology which I was conscious that I had not deserved.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I had no idea that Mr. Betteredge was engaged.” He took a slip of paper from his pocket, and handed it to Betteredge. “The list for next week,” he said. His eyes just rested on me again—and he left the room as quietly as he had entered it.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Mr. Candy’s assistant,” said Betteredge. “By-the-bye, Mr. Franklin, you will be sorry to hear that the little doctor has never recovered that illness he caught, going home from the birthday dinner. He’s pretty well in health; but he lost his memory in the fever, and he has never recovered more than the wreck of it since. The work all falls on his assistant. Not much of it now, except among the poor.
They
can’t help themselves, you know.
They
must put up with the man with the piebald hair, and the gipsy complexion—or they would get no doctoring at all.”

“You don’t seem to like him, Betteredge?”

“Nobody likes him, sir.”

“Why is he so unpopular?”

“Well, Mr. Franklin, his appearance is against him, to begin with. And then there’s a story that Mr. Candy took him with a very doubtful character. Nobody knows who he is—and he hasn’t a friend in the place. How can you expect one to like him, after that?”

“Quite impossible, of course! May I ask what he wanted with you, when he gave you that bit of paper?”

“Only to bring me the weekly list of the sick people about here, sir, who stand in need of a little wine. My lady always had a regular distribution of good sound port and sherry among the infirm poor; and Miss Rachel wishes the custom to be kept up. Times have changed! times have changed! I remember when Mr. Candy himself brought the list to my mistress. Now it’s Mr. Candy’s assistant who brings the list to me. I’ll go on with the letter, if you will allow me, sir,” said Betteredge, drawing Rosanna Spearman’s confession back to him. “It isn’t lively reading, I grant you. But, there! it keeps me from getting sour with thinking of the past.” He put on his spectacles, and wagged his head gloomily. “There’s a bottom of good sense, Mr. Franklin, in our conduct to our mothers, when they first start us on the journey of life. We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world. And we are all of us right.”

Mr. Candy’s assistant had produced too strong an impression on me to be immediately dismissed from my thoughts. I passed over the last unanswerable utterance of the Betteredge philosophy; and returned to the subject of the man with the piebald hair.

“What is his name?” I asked.

“As ugly a name as need be,” Betteredge answered gruffly. “Ezra Jennings.”

CHAPTER V

Having told me the name of Mr. Candy’s assistant, Betteredge appeared to think that we had wasted enough of our time on an insignificant subject. He resumed the perusal of Rosanna Spearman’s letter.

On my side, I sat at the window, waiting until he had done. Little by little, the impression produced on me by Ezra Jennings—it seemed perfectly unaccountable, in such a situation as mine, that any human being should have produced an impression on me at all!—faded from my mind. My thoughts flowed back into their former channel. Once more, I forced myself to look my own incredible position resolutely in the face. Once more, I reviewed in my own mind the course which I had at last summoned composure enough to plan out for the future.

To go back to London that day; to put the whole case before Mr. Bruff; and, last and most important, to obtain (no matter by what means or at what sacrifice) a personal interview with Rachel—this was my plan of action, so far as I was capable of forming it at the time. There was more than an hour still to spare before the train started. And there was the bare chance that Betteredge might discover something in the unread portion of Rosanna Spearman’s letter, which it might be useful for me to know before I left the house in which the Diamond had been lost. For that chance I was now waiting.

The letter ended in these terms:

“You have no need to be angry, Mr. Franklin, even if I did feel some little triumph at knowing that I held all your prospects in life in my own hands. Anxieties and fears soon came back to me. With the view Sergeant Cuff took of the loss of the Diamond, he would be sure to end in examining our linen and our dresses. There was no place in my room—there was no place in the house—which I could feel satisfied would be safe from him. How to hide the nightgown so that not even the Sergeant could find it? and how to do that without losing one moment of precious time?—these were not easy questions to answer. My uncertainties ended in my taking a way that may make you laugh. I undressed, and put the nightgown on me. You had worn it—and I had another little moment of pleasure in wearing it after you.

“The next news that reached us in the servants’ hall showed that I had not made sure of the nightgown a moment too soon. Sergeant Cuff wanted to see the washing-book.

“I found it, and took it to him in my lady’s sitting-room. The Sergeant and I had come across each other more than once in former days. I was certain he would know me again—and I was
not
certain of what he might do when he found me employed as servant in a house in which a valuable jewel had been lost. In this suspense, I felt it would be a relief to me to get the meeting between us over, and to know the worst of it at once.

“He looked at me as if I was a stranger, when I handed him the washing-book; and he was very specially polite in thanking me for bringing it. I thought those were both bad signs. There was no knowing what he might say of me behind my back; there was no knowing how soon I might not find myself taken in custody on suspicion, and searched. It was then time for your return from seeing Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite off by the railway; and I went to your favourite walk in the shrubbery, to try for another chance of speaking to you—the last chance, for all I knew to the contrary, that I might have.

“You never appeared; and, what was worse still, Mr. Betteredge and Sergeant Cuff passed by the place where I was hiding—and the Sergeant saw me.

“I had no choice, after that, but to return to my proper place and my proper work, before more disasters happened to me. Just as I was going to step across the path, you came back from the railway. You were making straight for the shrubbery, when you saw me—I am certain, sir, you saw me—and you turned away as if I had got the plague, and went into the house.
³

“I made the best of my way indoors again, returning by the servants’ entrance. There was nobody in the laundry-room at that time; and I sat down there alone. I have told you already of the thoughts which the Shivering Sand put into my head. Those thoughts came back to me now. I wondered in myself which it would be harder to do, if things went on in this manner—to bear Mr. Franklin Blake’s indifference to me, or to jump into the quicksand and end it for ever in that way?

“It’s useless to ask me to account for my own conduct, at this time. I try—and I can’t understand it myself.

“Why didn’t I stop you, when you avoided me in that cruel manner? Why didn’t I call out, ‘Mr. Franklin, I have got something to say to you; it concerns yourself, and you must, and shall, hear it?’ You were at my mercy—I had got the whip-hand of you, as they say. And better than that, I had the means (if I could only make you trust me) of being useful to you in the future. Of course, I never supposed that you—a gentleman—had stolen the Diamond for the mere pleasure of stealing it. No. Penelope had heard Miss Rachel, and I had heard Mr. Betteredge, talk about your extravagance and your debts. It was plain enough to me that you had taken the Diamond to sell it, or pledge it, and so to get the money of which you stood in need. Well! I could have told you of a man in London who would have advanced a good large sum on the jewel, and who would have asked no awkward questions about it either.

“Why didn’t I speak to you! why didn’t I speak to you!

“I wonder whether the risks and difficulties of keeping the nightgown were as much as I could manage, without having other risks and difficulties added to them? This might have been the case with some women—but how could it be the case with me? In the days when I was a thief, I had run fifty times greater risks, and found my way out of difficulties to which
this
difficulty was mere child’s play. I had been apprenticed, as you may say, to frauds and deceptions—some of them on such a grand scale, and managed so cleverly, that they became famous, and appeared in the newspapers. Was such a little thing as the keeping of the nightgown likely to weigh on my spirits, and to set my heart sinking within me, at the time when I ought to have spoken to you? What nonsense to ask the question! The thing couldn’t be.

“Where is the use of my dwelling in this way on my own folly? The plain truth is plain enough, surely? Behind your back, I loved you with all my heart and soul. Before your face—there’s no denying it—I was frightened of you; frightened of making you angry with me; frightened of what you might say to me (though you
had
taken the Diamond) if I presumed to tell you that I had found it out. I had gone as near to it as I dared when I spoke to you in the library. You had not turned your back on me then. You had not started away from me as if I had got the plague. I tried to provoke myself into feeling angry with you, and to rouse up my courage in that way. No! I couldn’t feel anything but the misery and the mortification of it. You’re a plain girl; you have got a crooked shoulder; you’re only a housemaid—what do you mean by attempting to speak to Me?” You never uttered a word of that, Mr. Franklin; but you said it all to me, nevertheless! Is such madness as this to be accounted for? No. There is nothing to be done but to confess it, and let it be.