Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (637 page)

The fisherman pointed to the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and to the great waves leaping up in clouds of foam against the headlands on either side of us.

“No boat that ever was built,” he answered, “could have got to her through THAT.”

Sergeant Cuff looked for the last time at the foot-marks on the sand, which the rain was now fast blurring out.

“There,” he said, “is the evidence that she can’t have left this place by land. And here,” he went on, looking at the fisherman, “is the evidence that she can’t have got away by sea.” He stopped, and considered for a minute. “She was seen running towards this place, half an hour before I got here from the house,” he said to Yolland. “Some time has passed since then. Call it, altogether, an hour ago. How high would the water be, at that time, on this side of the rocks?” He pointed to the south side — otherwise, the side which was not filled up by the quicksand.

“As the tide makes to-day,” said the fisherman, “there wouldn’t have been water enough to drown a kitten on that side of the Spit, an hour since.”

Sergeant Cuff turned about northward, towards the quicksand.

“How much on this side?” he asked.

“Less still,” answered Yolland. “The Shivering Sand would have been just awash, and no more.”

The Sergeant turned to me, and said that the accident must have happened on the side of the quicksand. My tongue was loosened at that. “No accident!” I told him. “When she came to this place, she came weary of her life, to end it here.”

He started back from me. “How do you know?” he asked. The rest of them crowded round. The Sergeant recovered himself instantly. He put them back from me; he said I was an old man; he said the discovery had shaken me; he said, “Let him alone a little.” Then he turned to Yolland, and asked, “Is there any chance of finding her, when the tide ebbs again?” And Yolland answered, “None. What the Sand gets, the Sand keeps for ever.” Having said that, the fisherman came a step nearer, and addressed himself to me.

“Mr. Betteredge,” he said, “I have a word to say to you about the young woman’s death. Four foot out, broadwise, along the side of the Spit, there’s a shelf of rock, about half fathom down under the sand. My question is — why didn’t she strike that? If she slipped, by accident, from off the Spit, she fell in where there’s foothold at the bottom, at a depth that would barely cover her to the waist. She must have waded out, or jumped out, into the Deeps beyond — or she wouldn’t be missing now. No accident, sir! The Deeps of the Quicksand have got her. And they have got her by her own act.”

After that testimony from a man whose knowledge was to be relied on, the Sergeant was silent. The rest of us, like him, held our peace. With one accord, we all turned back up the slope of the beach.

At the sand-hillocks we were met by the under-groom, running to us from the house. The lad is a good lad, and has an honest respect for me. He handed me a little note, with a decent sorrow in his face. “Penelope sent me with this, Mr. Betteredge,” he said. “She found it in Rosanna’s room.”

It was her last farewell word to the old man who had done his best — thank God, always done his best — to befriend her.

“You have often forgiven me, Mr. Betteredge, in past times. When you next see the Shivering Sand, try to forgive me once more. I have found my grave where my grave was waiting for me. I have lived, and died, sir, grateful for your kindness.”

There was no more than that. Little as it was, I hadn’t manhood enough to hold up against it. Your tears come easy, when you’re young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.

Sergeant Cuff took a step nearer to me — meaning kindly, I don’t doubt. I shrank back from him. “Don’t touch me,” I said. “It’s the dread of you, that has driven her to it.”

“You are wrong, Mr. Betteredge,” he answered, quietly. “But there will be time enough to speak of it when we are indoors again.”

I followed the rest of them, with the help of the groom’s arm. Through the driving rain we went back — to meet the trouble and the terror that were waiting for us at the house.

CHAPTER XX

Those in front had spread the news before us. We found the servants in a state of panic. As we passed my lady’s door, it was thrown open violently from the inner side. My mistress came out among us (with Mr. Franklin following, and trying vainly to compose her), quite beside herself with the horror of the thing.

“You are answerable for this!” she cried out, threatening the Sergeant wildly with her hand. “Gabriel! give that wretch his money — and release me from the sight of him!”

The Sergeant was the only one among us who was fit to cope with her — being the only one among us who was in possession of himself.

“I am no more answerable for this distressing calamity, my lady, than you are,” he said. “If, in half an hour from this, you still insist on my leaving the house, I will accept your ladyship’s dismissal, but not your ladyship’s money.”

It was spoken very respectfully, but very firmly at the same time — and it had its effect on my mistress as well as on me. She suffered Mr. Franklin to lead her back into the room. As the door closed on the two, the Sergeant, looking about among the women-servants in his observant way, noticed that while all the rest were merely frightened, Penelope was in tears. “When your father has changed his wet clothes,” he said to her, “come and speak to us, in your father’s room.”

Before the half-hour was out, I had got my dry clothes on, and had lent Sergeant Cuff such change of dress as he required. Penelope came in to us to hear what the Sergeant wanted with her. I don’t think I ever felt what a good dutiful daughter I had, so strongly as I felt it at that moment. I took her and sat her on my knee and I prayed God bless her. She hid her head on my bosom, and put her arms round my neck — and we waited a little while in silence. The poor dead girl must have been at the bottom of it, I think, with my daughter and with me. The Sergeant went to the window, and stood there looking out. I thought it right to thank him for considering us both in this way — and I did.

People in high life have all the luxuries to themselves — among others, the luxury of indulging their feelings. People in low life have no such privilege. Necessity, which spares our betters, has no pity on us. We learn to put our feelings back into ourselves, and to jog on with our duties as patiently as may be. I don’t complain of this — I only notice it. Penelope and I were ready for the Sergeant, as soon as the Sergeant was ready on his side. Asked if she knew what had led her fellow-servant to destroy herself, my daughter answered (as you will foresee) that it was for love of Mr. Franklin Blake. Asked next, if she had mentioned this notion of hers to any other person, Penelope answered, “I have not mentioned it, for Rosanna’s sake.” I felt it necessary to add a word to this. I said, “And for Mr. Franklin’s sake, my dear, as well. If Rosanna HAS died for love of him, it is not with his knowledge or by his fault. Let him leave the house to-day, if he does leave it, without the useless pain of knowing the truth.” Sergeant Cuff said, “Quite right,” and fell silent again; comparing Penelope’s notion (as it seemed to me) with some other notion of his own which he kept to himself.

At the end of the half-hour, my mistress’s bell rang.

On my way to answer it, I met Mr. Franklin coming out of his aunt’s sitting-room. He mentioned that her ladyship was ready to see Sergeant Cuff — in my presence as before — and he added that he himself wanted to say two words to the Sergeant first. On our way back to my room, he stopped, and looked at the railway time-table in the hall.

“Are you really going to leave us, sir?” I asked. “Miss Rachel will surely come right again, if you only give her time?”

“She will come right again,” answered Mr. Franklin, “when she hears that I have gone away, and that she will see me no more.”

I thought he spoke in resentment of my young lady’s treatment of him. But it was not so. My mistress had noticed, from the time when the police first came into the house, that the bare mention of him was enough to set Miss Rachel’s temper in a flame. He had been too fond of his cousin to like to confess this to himself, until the truth had been forced on him, when she drove off to her aunt’s. His eyes once opened in that cruel way which you know of, Mr. Franklin had taken his resolution — the one resolution which a man of any spirit COULD take — to leave the house.

What he had to say to the Sergeant was spoken in my presence. He described her ladyship as willing to acknowledge that she had spoken over-hastily. And he asked if Sergeant Cuff would consent — in that case — to accept his fee, and to leave the matter of the Diamond where the matter stood now. The Sergeant answered, “No, sir. My fee is paid me for doing my duty. I decline to take it, until my duty is done.”

“I don’t understand you,” says Mr. Franklin.

“I’ll explain myself, sir,” says the Sergeant. “When I came here, I undertook to throw the necessary light on the matter of the missing Diamond. I am now ready, and waiting to redeem my pledge. When I have stated the case to Lady Verinder as the case now stands, and when I have told her plainly what course of action to take for the recovery of the Moonstone, the responsibility will be off my shoulders. Let her ladyship decide, after that, whether she does, or does not, allow me to go on. I shall then have done what I undertook to do — and I’ll take my fee.”

In those words Sergeant Cuff reminded us that, even in the Detective Police, a man may have a reputation to lose.

The view he took was so plainly the right one, that there was no more to be said. As I rose to conduct him to my lady’s room, he asked if Mr. Franklin wished to be present. Mr. Franklin answered, “Not unless Lady Verinder desires it.” He added, in a whisper to me, as I was following the Sergeant out, “I know what that man is going to say about Rachel; and I am too fond of her to hear it, and keep my temper. Leave me by myself.”

I left him, miserable enough, leaning on the sill of my window, with his face hidden in his hands and Penelope peeping through the door, longing to comfort him. In Mr. Franklin’s place, I should have called her in. When you are ill-used by one woman, there is great comfort in telling it to another — because, nine times out of ten, the other always takes your side. Perhaps, when my back was turned, he did call her in? In that case it is only doing my daughter justice to declare that she would stick at nothing, in the way of comforting Mr. Franklin Blake.

In the meantime, Sergeant Cuff and I proceeded to my lady’s room.

At the last conference we had held with her, we had found her not over willing to lift her eyes from the book which she had on the table. On this occasion there was a change for the better. She met the Sergeant’s eye with an eye that was as steady as his own. The family spirit showed itself in every line of her face; and I knew that Sergeant Cuff would meet his match, when a woman like my mistress was strung up to hear the worst he could say to her.

CHAPTER XXI

The first words, when we had taken our seats, were spoken by my lady.

“Sergeant Cuff,” she said, “there was perhaps some excuse for the inconsiderate manner in which I spoke to you half an hour since. I have no wish, however, to claim that excuse. I say, with perfect sincerity, that I regret it, if I wronged you.”

The grace of voice and manner with which she made him that atonement had its due effect on the Sergeant. He requested permission to justify himself — putting his justification as an act of respect to my mistress. It was impossible, he said, that he could be in any way responsible for the calamity, which had shocked us all, for this sufficient reason, that his success in bringing his inquiry to its proper end depended on his neither saying nor doing anything that could alarm Rosanna Spearman. He appealed to me to testify whether he had, or had not, carried that object out. I could, and did, bear witness that he had. And there, as I thought, the matter might have been judiciously left to come to an end.

Sergeant Cuff, however, took it a step further, evidently (as you shall now judge) with the purpose of forcing the most painful of all possible explanations to take place between her ladyship and himself.

“I have heard a motive assigned for the young woman’s suicide,” said the Sergeant, “which may possibly be the right one. It is a motive quite unconnected with the case which I am conducting here. I am bound to add, however, that my own opinion points the other way. Some unbearable anxiety in connexion with the missing Diamond, has, I believe, driven the poor creature to her own destruction. I don’t pretend to know what that unbearable anxiety may have been. But I think (with your ladyship’s permission) I can lay my hand on a person who is capable of deciding whether I am right or wrong.”