Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (636 page)

He too went his way into the house. For the moment, Miss Rachel had completely unmanned him. Judge from that, how fond he must have been of her!

Sergeant Cuff and I were left face to face, at the bottom of the steps. The Sergeant stood with his face set towards a gap in the trees, commanding a view of one of the windings of the drive which led from the house. He had his hands in his pockets, and he was softly whistling “The Last Rose of Summer” to himself.

“There’s a time for everything,” I said savagely enough. “This isn’t a time for whistling.”

At that moment, the carriage appeared in the distance, through the gap, on its way to the lodge-gate. There was another man, besides Samuel, plainly visible in the rumble behind.

“All right!” said the Sergeant to himself. He turned round to me. “It’s no time for whistling, Mr. Betteredge, as you say. It’s time to take this business in hand, now, without sparing anybody. We’ll begin with Rosanna Spearman. Where is Joyce?”

We both called for Joyce, and received no answer. I sent one of the stable-boys to look for him.

“You heard what I said to Miss Verinder?” remarked the Sergeant, while we were waiting. “And you saw how she received it? I tell her plainly that her leaving us will be an obstacle in the way of my recovering her Diamond — and she leaves, in the face of that statement! Your young lady has got a travelling companion in her mother’s carriage, Mr. Betteredge — and the name of it is, the Moonstone.”

I said nothing. I only held on like death to my belief in Miss Rachel.

The stable-boy came back, followed — very unwillingly, as it appeared to me — by Joyce.

“Where is Rosanna Spearman?” asked Sergeant Cuff.

“I can’t account for it, sir,” Joyce began; “and I am very sorry. But somehow or other —
 
— ”

“Before I went to Frizinghall,” said the Sergeant, cutting him short, “I told you to keep your eyes on Rosanna Spearman, without allowing her to discover that she was being watched. Do you mean to tell me that you have let her give you the slip?”

“I am afraid, sir,” says Joyce, beginning to tremble, “that I was perhaps a little TOO careful not to let her discover me. There are such a many passages in the lower parts of this house —
 
— ”

“How long is it since you missed her?”

“Nigh on an hour since, sir.”

“You can go back to your regular business at Frizinghall,” said the Sergeant, speaking just as composedly as ever, in his usual quiet and dreary way. “I don’t think your talents are at all in our line, Mr. Joyce. Your present form of employment is a trifle beyond you. Good morning.”

The man slunk off. I find it very difficult to describe how I was affected by the discovery that Rosanna Spearman was missing. I seemed to be in fifty different minds about it, all at the same time. In that state, I stood staring at Sergeant Cuff — and my powers of language quite failed me.

“No, Mr. Betteredge,” said the Sergeant, as if he had discovered the uppermost thought in me, and was picking it out to be answered, before all the rest. “Your young friend, Rosanna, won’t slip through my fingers so easy as you think. As long as I know where Miss Verinder is, I have the means at my disposal of tracing Miss Verinder’s accomplice. I prevented them from communicating last night. Very good. They will get together at Frizinghall, instead of getting together here. The present inquiry must be simply shifted (rather sooner than I had anticipated) from this house, to the house at which Miss Verinder is visiting. In the meantime, I’m afraid I must trouble you to call the servants together again.”

I went round with him to the servants’ hall. It is very disgraceful, but it is not the less true, that I had another attack of the detective-fever, when he said those last words. I forgot that I hated Sergeant Cuff. I seized him confidentially by the arm. I said, “For goodness’ sake, tell us what you are going to do with the servants now?”

The great Cuff stood stock still, and addressed himself in a kind of melancholy rapture to the empty air.

“If this man,” said the Sergeant (apparently meaning me), “only understood the growing of roses he would be the most completely perfect character on the face of creation!” After that strong expression of feeling, he sighed, and put his arm through mine. “This is how it stands,” he said, dropping down again to business. “Rosanna has done one of two things. She has either gone direct to Frizinghall (before I can get there), or she has gone first to visit her hiding-place at the Shivering Sand. The first thing to find out is, which of the servants saw the last of her before she left the house.”

On instituting this inquiry, it turned out that the last person who had set eyes on Rosanna was Nancy, the kitchenmaid.

Nancy had seen her slip out with a letter in her hand, and stop the butcher’s man who had just been delivering some meat at the back door. Nancy had heard her ask the man to post the letter when he got back to Frizinghall. The man had looked at the address, and had said it was a roundabout way of delivering a letter directed to Cobb’s Hole, to post it at Frizinghall — and that, moreover, on a Saturday, which would prevent the letter from getting to its destination until Monday morning, Rosanna had answered that the delivery of the letter being delayed till Monday was of no importance. The only thing she wished to be sure of was that the man would do what she told him. The man had promised to do it, and had driven away. Nancy had been called back to her work in the kitchen. And no other person had seen anything afterwards of Rosanna Spearman.

“Well?” I asked, when we were alone again.

“Well,” says the Sergeant. “I must go to Frizinghall.”

“About the letter, sir?”

“Yes. The memorandum of the hiding-place is in that letter. I must see the address at the post-office. If it is the address I suspect, I shall pay our friend, Mrs. Yolland, another visit on Monday next.”

I went with the Sergeant to order the pony-chaise. In the stable-yard we got a new light thrown on the missing girl.

CHAPTER XIX

The news of Rosanna’s disappearance had, as it appeared, spread among the out-of-door servants. They too had made their inquiries; and they had just laid hands on a quick little imp, nicknamed “Duffy” — who was occasionally employed in weeding the garden, and who had seen Rosanna Spearman as lately as half-an-hour since. Duffy was certain that the girl had passed him in the fir-plantation, not walking, but RUNNING, in the direction of the sea-shore.

“Does this boy know the coast hereabouts?” asked Sergeant Cuff.

“He has been born and bred on the coast,” I answered.

“Duffy!” says the Sergeant, “do you want to earn a shilling? If you do, come along with me. Keep the pony-chaise ready, Mr. Betteredge, till I come back.”

He started for the Shivering Sand, at a rate that my legs (though well enough preserved for my time of life) had no hope of matching. Little Duffy, as the way is with the young savages in our parts when they are in high spirits, gave a howl, and trotted off at the Sergeant’s heels.

Here again, I find it impossible to give anything like a clear account of the state of my mind in the interval after Sergeant Cuff had left us. A curious and stupefying restlessness got possession of me. I did a dozen different needless things in and out of the house, not one of which I can now remember. I don’t even know how long it was after the Sergeant had gone to the sands, when Duffy came running back with a message for me. Sergeant Cuff had given the boy a leaf torn out of his pocket-book, on which was written in pencil, “Send me one of Rosanna Spearman’s boots, and be quick about it.”

I despatched the first woman-servant I could find to Rosanna’s room; and I sent the boy back to say that I myself would follow him with the boot.

This, I am well aware, was not the quickest way to take of obeying the directions which I had received. But I was resolved to see for myself what new mystification was going on before I trusted Rosanna’s boot in the Sergeant’s hands. My old notion of screening the girl, if I could, seemed to have come back on me again, at the eleventh hour. This state of feeling (to say nothing of the detective-fever) hurried me off, as soon as I had got the boot, at the nearest approach to a run which a man turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.

As I got near the shore, the clouds gathered black, and the rain came down, drifting in great white sheets of water before the wind. I heard the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank at the mouth of the bay. A little further on, I passed the boy crouching for shelter under the lee of the sand hills. Then I saw the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like a flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach with one solitary black figure standing on it — the figure of Sergeant Cuff.

He waved his hand towards the north, when he first saw me. “Keep on that side!” he shouted. “And come on down here to me!”

I went down to him, choking for breath, with my heart leaping as if it was like to leap out of me. I was past speaking. I had a hundred questions to put to him; and not one of them would pass my lips. His face frightened me. I saw a look in his eyes which was a look of horror. He snatched the boot out of my hand, and set it in a footmark on the sand, bearing south from us as we stood, and pointing straight towards the rocky ledge called the South Spit. The mark was not yet blurred out by the rain — and the girl’s boot fitted it to a hair.

The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the footmark, without saying a word.

I caught at his arm, and tried to speak to him, and failed as I had failed when I tried before. He went on, following the footsteps down and down to where the rocks and the sand joined. The South Spit was just awash with the flowing tide; the waters heaved over the hidden face of the Shivering Sand. Now this way and now that, with an obstinate patience that was dreadful to see, Sergeant Cuff tried the boot in the footsteps, and always found it pointing the same way — straight TO the rocks. Hunt as he might, no sign could he find anywhere of the footsteps walking FROM them.

He gave it up at last. Still keeping silence, he looked again at me; and then he looked out at the waters before us, heaving in deeper and deeper over the quicksand. I looked where he looked — and I saw his thought in his face. A dreadful dumb trembling crawled all over me on a sudden. I fell upon my knees on the beach.

“She has been back at the hiding-place,” I heard the Sergeant say to himself. “Some fatal accident has happened to her on those rocks.”

The girl’s altered looks, and words, and actions — the numbed, deadened way in which she listened to me, and spoke to me — when I had found her sweeping the corridor but a few hours since, rose up in my mind, and warned me, even as the Sergeant spoke, that his guess was wide of the dreadful truth. I tried to tell him of the fear that had frozen me up. I tried to say, “The death she has died, Sergeant, was a death of her own seeking.” No! the words wouldn’t come. The dumb trembling held me in its grip. I couldn’t feel the driving rain. I couldn’t see the rising tide. As in the vision of a dream, the poor lost creature came back before me. I saw her again as I had seen her in the past time — on the morning when I went to fetch her into the house. I heard her again, telling me that the Shivering Sand seemed to draw her to it against her will, and wondering whether her grave was waiting for her THERE. The horror of it struck at me, in some unfathomable way, through my own child. My girl was just her age. My girl, tried as Rosanna was tried, might have lived that miserable life, and died this dreadful death.

The Sergeant kindly lifted me up, and turned me away from the sight of the place where she had perished.

With that relief, I began to fetch my breath again, and to see things about me, as things really were. Looking towards the sand-hills, I saw the men-servants from out-of-doors, and the fisherman, named Yolland, all running down to us together; and all, having taken the alarm, calling out to know if the girl had been found. In the fewest words, the Sergeant showed them the evidence of the footmarks, and told them that a fatal accident must have happened to her. He then picked out the fisherman from the rest, and put a question to him, turning about again towards the sea: “Tell me,” he said. “Could a boat have taken her off, in such weather as this, from those rocks where her footmarks stop?”