The Moonstone - Page 33/404

"What did your father do, sir?" I asked.

"Do?" says Mr. Franklin. "I'll tell you what he did. He brought the

invaluable faculty, called common sense, to bear on the Colonel's

letter. The whole thing, he declared, was simply absurd. Somewhere in

his Indian wanderings, the Colonel had picked up with some wretched

crystal which he took for a diamond. As for the danger of his being

murdered, and the precautions devised to preserve his life and his piece

of crystal, this was the nineteenth century, and any man in his senses

had only to apply to the police. The Colonel had been a notorious

opium-eater for years past; and, if the only way of getting at the

valuable papers he possessed was by accepting a matter of opium as

a matter of fact, my father was quite willing to take the ridiculous

responsibility imposed on him--all the more readily that it involved no

trouble to himself. The Diamond and the sealed instructions went into

his banker's strong-room, and the Colonel's letters, periodically

reporting him a living man, were received and opened by our family

lawyer, Mr. Bruff, as my father's representative. No sensible person,

in a similar position, could have viewed the matter in any other way.

Nothing in this world, Betteredge, is probable unless it appeals to our

own trumpery experience; and we only believe in a romance when we see it

in a newspaper."

It was plain to me from this, that Mr. Franklin thought his father's

notion about the Colonel hasty and wrong.

"What is your own private opinion about the matter, sir?" I asked.

"Let's finish the story of the Colonel first," says Mr. Franklin. "There

is a curious want of system, Betteredge, in the English mind; and your

question, my old friend, is an instance of it. When we are not occupied

in making machinery, we are (mentally speaking) the most slovenly people

in the universe."

"So much," I thought to myself, "for a foreign education! He has learned

that way of girding at us in France, I suppose."

Mr. Franklin took up the lost thread, and went on.

"My father," he said, "got the papers he wanted, and never saw his

brother-in-law again from that time. Year after year, on the prearranged

days, the prearranged letter came from the Colonel, and was opened by

Mr. Bruff. I have seen the letters, in a heap, all of them written in

the same brief, business-like form of words: 'Sir,--This is to certify

that I am still a living man. Let the Diamond be. John Herncastle.' That

was all he ever wrote, and that came regularly to the day; until some

six or eight months since, when the form of the letter varied for the

first time. It ran now: 'Sir,--They tell me I am dying. Come to me, and

help me to make my will.' Mr. Bruff went, and found him, in the little

suburban villa, surrounded by its own grounds, in which he had lived

alone, ever since he had left India. He had dogs, cats, and birds to

keep him company; but no human being near him, except the person who

came daily to do the house-work, and the doctor at the bedside. The will

was a very simple matter. The Colonel had dissipated the greater part of

his fortune in his chemical investigations. His will began and ended in

three clauses, which he dictated from his bed, in perfect possession

of his faculties. The first clause provided for the safe keeping

and support of his animals. The second founded a professorship of

experimental chemistry at a northern university. The third bequeathed

the Moonstone as a birthday present to his niece, on condition that

my father would act as executor. My father at first refused to act. On

second thoughts, however, he gave way, partly because he was assured

that the executorship would involve him in no trouble; partly because

Mr. Bruff suggested, in Rachel's interest, that the Diamond might be

worth something, after all."