The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

‘I am coming,’ he called back; ‘I am coming as fast as I can!’ He turned to me. ‘There is an urgent case waiting for me at the village yonder; I ought to have been there half an hour since—I must attend to it at once. Give me two hours from this time, and call at Mr. Candy’s again—and I will engage to be ready for you.’

‘How am I to wait!’ I exclaimed, impatiently. ‘Can’t you quiet my mind by a word of explanation before we part?’

‘This is far too serious a matter to be explained in a hurry, Mr. Blake. I am not wilfully trying your patience—I should only be adding to your suspense, if I attempted to relieve it as things are now. At Frizinghall, sir, in two hours’ time!’

The man on the high road hailed him again. He hurried away, and left me.

Chapter X

HOW the interval of suspense in which I was now condemned might have affected other men in my position, I cannot pretend to say. The influence of the two hours’ probation upon my temperament was simply this. I felt physically incapable of remaining still in any one place, and morally incapable of speaking to any one human being, until I had first heard all that Ezra Jennings had to say to me.

In this frame of mind, I not only abandoned my contemplated visit to Mrs. Ablewhite—I even shrank from encountering Gabriel Betteredge himself.

Returning to Frizinghall, I left a note for Betteredge, telling him that I had been unexpectedly called away for a few hours, but that he might certainly expect me to return towards three o’clock in the afternoon. I requested him, in the interval, to order his dinner at the usual hour, and to amuse himself as he pleased. He had, as I well knew, hosts of friends in Frizinghall; and he would be at no loss how to fill up his time until I returned to the hotel.

This done, I made the best of my way out of the town again, and roamed the lonely moorland country which surrounds Frizinghall, until my watch told me that it was time, at last, to return to Mr. Candy’s house.

I found Ezra Jennings ready and waiting for me.

He was sitting alone in a bare little room, which communicated by a glazed door with a surgery. Hideous coloured diagrams of the ravages of hideous diseases decorated the barren buff-coloured walls. A book-case filled with dingy medical works, and ornamented at the top with a skull, in place of the customary bust; a large deal table copiously splashed with ink; wooden chairs of the sort that are seen in kitchens and cottages; a threadbare drugget in the middle of the floor; a sink of water, with a basin and waste-pipe roughly let into the wall, horribly suggestive of its connection with surgical operations—comprised the entire furniture of the room. The bees were humming among a few flowers placed in pots outside the window; the birds were singing in the garden, and the faint intermittent jingle of a tuneless piano in some neighbouring house forced itself now and again on the ear. In any other place, these everyday sounds might have spoken pleasantly of the everyday world outside. Here, they came in as intruders on a silence which nothing but human suffering had the privilege to disturb. I looked at the mahogany instrument case, and at the huge roll of lint, occupying places of their own on the book-shelves, and shuddered inwardly as I thought of the sounds, familiar and appropriate to the everyday use of Ezra Jennings’ room.

‘I make no apology, Mr. Blake, for the place in which I am receiving you,’ he said. ‘It is the only room in the house, at this hour of the day, in which we can feel quite sure of being left undisturbed. Here are my papers ready for you; and here are two books to which we may have occasion to refer, before we have done. Bring your chair to the table, and we shall be able to consult them together.’

I drew up to the table; and Ezra Jennings handed me his manuscript notes. They consisted of two large folio leaves of paper. One leaf contained writing which only covered the surface at intervals. The other presented writing, in red and black ink, which completely filled the page from top to bottom. In the irritated state of my curiosity, at that moment, I laid aside the second sheet of paper in despair.

‘Have some mercy on me!’ I said. ‘Tell me what I am to expect, before I attempt to read this.’

‘Willingly, Mr. Blake! Do you mind my asking you one or two more questions?’

‘Ask me anything you like!’

He looked at me with the sad smile on his lips, and the kindly interest in his soft brown eyes.

‘You have already told me,’ he said, ‘that you have never—to your knowledge—tasted opium in your life.’

‘To my knowledge,’ I repeated.

‘You will understand directly why I speak with that reservation. Let us go on. You are not aware of ever having taken opium. At this time, last year, you were suffering from nervous irritation, and you slept wretchedly at night. On the night of the birthday, however, there was an exception to the rule—you slept soundly. Am I right, so far?’

‘Quite right!’

‘Can you assign any cause for the nervous suffering, and your want of sleep?’

‘I can assign no cause. Old Betteredge made a guess at the cause, I remember. But that is hardly worth mentioning.’

‘Pardon me. Anything is worth mentioning in such a case as this. Betteredge attributed your sleeplessness to something. To what?’

‘To my leaving off smoking.’

‘Had you been an habitual smoker?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you leave off the habit suddenly?’

‘Yes.’

‘Betteredge was perfectly right, Mr. Blake. When smoking is a habit a man must have no common constitution who can leave it off suddenly without some temporary damage to his nervous system. Your sleepless nights are accounted for, to my mind. My next question refers to Mr. Candy. Do you remember having entered into anything like a dispute with him—at the birthday dinner, or afterwards—on the subject of his profession?’

The question instantly awakened one of my dormant remembrances in connection with the birthday festival. The foolish wrangle which took place, on that occasion, between Mr. Candy and myself, will be found described at much greater length than it deserves in the tenth chapter of Betteredge’s Narrative. The details there presented of the dispute—so little had I thought of it afterwards—entirely failed to recur to my memory. All that I could now recall, and all that I could tell Ezra Jennings was, that I had attacked the art of medicine at the dinner-table with sufficient rashness and sufficient pertinacity to put even Mr. Candy out of temper for the moment. I also remembered that Lady Verinder had interfered to stop the dispute, and that the little doctor and I had ‘made it up again,’ as the children say, and had become as good friends as ever, before we shook hands that night.

‘There is one thing more,’ said Ezra Jennings, ‘which it is very important I should know. Had you any reason for feeling any special anxiety about the Diamond, at this time last year?’

‘I had the strongest reasons for feeling anxiety about the Diamond. I knew it to be the object of a conspiracy; and I was warned to take measures for Miss Verinder’s protection, as the possessor of the stone.’

‘Was the safety of the Diamond the subject of conversation between you and any other person, immediately before you retired to rest on the birthday night?’

‘It was the subject of a conversation between Lady Verinder and her daughter—’

Which took place in your hearing?’

‘Yes.’

Ezra Jennings took up his notes from the table, and placed them in my hands.

‘Mr. Blake,’ he said, ‘if you read those notes now, by the light which my questions and your answers have thrown on them, you will make two astounding discoveries concerning yourself. You will find:—First, that you entered Miss Verinder’s sitting-room and took the Diamond, in a state of trance, produced by opium. Secondly, that the opium was given to you by Mr. Candy—without your own knowledge—as a practical refutation of the opinions which you had expressed to him at the birthday dinner.’

I sat with the papers in my hand completely stupefied.

‘Try and forgive poor Mr. Candy,’ said the assistant gently. ‘He has done dreadful mischief, I own; but he has done it innocently. If you will look at the notes, you will see that—but for his illness—he would have returned to Lady Verinder’s the morning after the party, and would have acknowledged the trick that he had played you. Miss Verinder would have heard of it, and Miss Verinder would have questioned him—and the truth which has laid hidden for a year would have been discovered in a day.’