The Moonstone - Page 404/404

One of the spectators, near whom I was standing, saw me start. In a

whisper, he explained to me the apparition of the three figures on the

platform of rock.

They were Brahmins (he said) who had forfeited their caste in the

service of the god. The god had commanded that their purification should

be the purification by pilgrimage. On that night, the three men were to

part. In three separate directions, they were to set forth as pilgrims

to the shrines of India. Never more were they to look on each other's

faces. Never more were they to rest on their wanderings, from the day

which witnessed their separation, to the day which witnessed their

death.

As those words were whispered to me, the plaintive music ceased. The

three men prostrated themselves on the rock, before the curtain which

hid the shrine. They rose--they looked on one another--they embraced.

Then they descended separately among the people. The people made way

for them in dead silence. In three different directions I saw the crowd

part, at one and the same moment. Slowly the grand white mass of the

people closed together again. The track of the doomed men through the

ranks of their fellow mortals was obliterated. We saw them no more.

A new strain of music, loud and jubilant, rose from the hidden shrine.

The crowd around me shuddered, and pressed together.

The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine was

disclosed to view.

There, raised high on a throne--seated on his typical antelope, with

his four arms stretching towards the four corners of the earth--there,

soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god

of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow

Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom

of a woman's dress!

Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once

more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began.

How it has found its way back to its wild native land--by what accident,

or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem,

may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it

in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight

of it for ever.

So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in

the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone?

Who can tell?