The Moonstone - Page 13/404

The question of how I am to start the story properly I have tried to

settle in two ways. First, by scratching my head, which led to nothing.

Second, by consulting my daughter Penelope, which has resulted in an

entirely new idea.

Penelope's notion is that I should set down what happened, regularly day

by day, beginning with the day when we got the news that Mr. Franklin

Blake was expected on a visit to the house. When you come to fix your

memory with a date in this way, it is wonderful what your memory will

pick up for you upon that compulsion. The only difficulty is to fetch

out the dates, in the first place. This Penelope offers to do for me by

looking into her own diary, which she was taught to keep when she was

at school, and which she has gone on keeping ever since. In answer to an

improvement on this notion, devised by myself, namely, that she should

tell the story instead of me, out of her own diary, Penelope observes,

with a fierce look and a red face, that her journal is for her own

private eye, and that no living creature shall ever know what is in

it but herself. When I inquire what this means, Penelope says,

"Fiddlesticks!" I say, Sweethearts.

Beginning, then, on Penelope's plan, I beg to mention that I was

specially called one Wednesday morning into my lady's own sitting-room,

the date being the twenty-fourth of May, Eighteen hundred and

forty-eight.

"Gabriel," says my lady, "here is news that will surprise you. Franklin

Blake has come back from abroad. He has been staying with his father in

London, and he is coming to us to-morrow to stop till next month, and

keep Rachel's birthday."

If I had had a hat in my hand, nothing but respect would have prevented

me from throwing that hat up to the ceiling. I had not seen Mr. Franklin

since he was a boy, living along with us in this house. He was, out of

all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or

broke a window. Miss Rachel, who was present, and to whom I made

that remark, observed, in return, that SHE remembered him as the most

atrocious tyrant that ever tortured a doll, and the hardest driver of an

exhausted little girl in string harness that England could produce. "I

burn with indignation, and I ache with fatigue," was the way Miss Rachel

summed it up, "when I think of Franklin Blake."

Hearing what I now tell you, you will naturally ask how it was that Mr.

Franklin should have passed all the years, from the time when he was

a boy to the time when he was a man, out of his own country. I answer,

because his father had the misfortune to be next heir to a Dukedom, and

not to be able to prove it.