Neither he nor I seemed to fancy dealing with this part of the inquiry. We looked at each other, and then we looked at the tide, oozing in smoothly, higher and higher, over the Shivering Sand.
“What are you thinking of?” says Mr. Franklin, suddenly.
“I was thinking, sir,” I answered, “that I should like to shy the Diamond into the quicksand, and settle the question in that way.”
“If you have got the value of the stone in your pocket,” answered Mr. Franklin, “say so, Betteredge, and in it goes!”
It’s curious to note, when your mind’s anxious, how very far in the way of relief a very small joke will go. We found a fund of merriment, at the time, in the notion of making away with Miss Rachel’s lawful property, and getting Mr. Blake, as executor, into dreadful trouble – though where the merriment was, I am quite at a loss to discover now.
Mr. Franklin was the first to bring the talk back to the talk’s proper purpose. He took an envelope out of his pocket, opened it, and handed to me the paper inside.
“Betteredge,” he said, “we must face the question of the Colonel’s motive in leaving this legacy to his niece, for my aunt’s sake. Bear in mind how Lady Verinder treated her brother from the time when he returned to England, to the time when he told you he should remember his niece’s birthday. And read that.”
He gave me the extract from the Colonel’s Will. I have got it by me while I write these words; and I copy it, as follows, for your benefit:
“Thirdly, and lastly, I give and bequeath to my niece, Rachel Verinder, daughter and only child of my sister, Julia Verinder, widow – if her mother, the said Julia Verinder, shall be living on the said Rachel Verinder’s next Birthday after my death – the yellow Diamond belonging to me, and known in the East by the name of The Moonstone: subject to this condition, that her mother, the said Julia Verinder, shall be living at the time. And I hereby desire my executor to give my Diamond, either by his own hands or by the hands of some trustworthy representative whom he shall appoint, into the personal possession of my said niece Rachel, on her next birthday after my death, and in the presence, if possible, of my sister, the said Julia Verinder. And I desire that my said sister may be informed, by means of a true copy of this, the third and last clause of my Will, that I give the Diamond to her daughter Rachel, in token of my free forgiveness of the injury which her conduct towards me has been the means of inflicting on my reputation in my lifetime; and especially in proof that I pardon, as becomes a dying man, the insult offered to me as an officer and a gentleman, when her servant, by her orders, closed the door of her house against me, on the occasion of her daughter’s birthday.”
More words followed these, providing if my lady was dead, or if Miss Rachel was dead, at the time of the testator’s decease, for the Diamond being sent to Holland, in accordance with the sealed instructions originally deposited with it. The proceeds of the sale were, in that case, to be added to the money already left by the Will for the professorship of chemistry at the university in the north.
I handed the paper back to Mr. Franklin, sorely troubled what to say to him. Up to that moment, my own opinion had been (as you know) that the Colonel had died as wickedly as he had lived. I don’t say the copy from his Will actually converted me from that opinion: I only say it staggered me.
“Well,” says Mr. Franklin, “now you have read the Colonel’s own statement, what do you say? In bringing the Moonstone to my aunt’s house, am I serving his vengeance blindfold, or am I vindicating him in the character of a penitent and Christian man?”
“It seems hard to say, sir,” I answered, “that he died with a horrid revenge in his heart, and a horrid lie on his lips. God alone knows the truth. Don’t ask me.”
Mr. Franklin sat twisting and turning the extract from the Will in his fingers, as if he expected to squeeze the truth out of it in that manner. He altered quite remarkably, at the same time. From being brisk and bright, he now became, most unaccountably, a slow, solemn, and pondering young man.
“This question has two sides,” he said. “An Objective side, and a Subjective side. Which are we to take?”
He had had a German education as well as a French. One of the two had been in undisturbed possession of him (as I supposed) up to this time. And now (as well as I could make out) the other was taking its place. It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don’t understand. I steered a middle course between the Objective side and the Subjective side. In plain English I stared hard, and said nothing.
“Let’s extract the inner meaning of this,” says Mr. Franklin. “Why did my uncle leave the Diamond to Rachel? Why didn’t he leave it to my aunt?”
“That’s not beyond guessing, sir, at any rate,” I said. “Colonel Herncastle knew my lady well enough to know that she would have refused to accept any legacy that came to her from him.”
“How did he know that Rachel might not refuse to accept it, too?”
“Is there any young lady in existence, sir, who could resist the temptation of accepting such a birthday present as The Moonstone?”
“That’s the Subjective view,” says Mr. Franklin. “It does you great credit, Betteredge, to be able to take the Subjective view. But there’s another mystery about the Colonel’s legacy which is not accounted for yet. How are we to explain his only giving Rachel her birthday present conditionally on her mother being alive?”
“I don’t want to slander a dead man, sir,” I answered. “But if he has purposely left a legacy of trouble and danger to his sister, by the means of her child, it must be a legacy made conditional on his sister’s being alive to feel the vexation of it.”
“Oh! That’s your interpretation of his motive, is it? The Subjective interpretation again! Have you ever been in Germany, Betteredge?”
“No, sir. What’s your interpretation, if you please?”
“I can see,” says Mr. Franklin, “that the Colonel’s object may, quite possibly, have been – not to benefit his niece, whom he had never even seen – but to prove to his sister that he had died forgiving her, and to prove it very prettily by means of a present made to her child. There is a totally different explanation from yours, Betteredge, taking its rise in a Subjective-Objective point of view. From all I can see, one interpretation is just as likely to be right as the other.”
Having brought matters to this pleasant and comforting issue, Mr. Franklin appeared to think that he had completed all that was required of him. He laid down flat on his back on the sand, and asked what was to be done next.
He had been so clever, and clear-headed (before he began to talk the foreign gibberish), and had so completely taken the lead in the business up to the present time, that I was quite unprepared for such a sudden change as he now exhibited in this helpless leaning upon me. It was not till later that I learned – by assistance of Miss Rachel, who was the first to make the discovery – that these puzzling shifts and transformations in Mr. Franklin were due to the effect on him of his foreign training. At the age when we are all of us most apt to take our colouring, in the form of a reflection from the colouring of other people, he had been sent abroad, and had been passed on from one nation to another, before there was time for anyone colouring more than another to settle itself on him firmly. As a consequence of this, he had come back with so many different sides to his character, all more or less jarring with each other, that he seemed to pass his life