The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (top 5 books to read .txt) đ
- Author: Wilkie Collins
Book online «The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (top 5 books to read .txt) đ». Author Wilkie Collins
âYou had assumed a serious responsibility,â I said. âIn your place, I am afraid I should have shrunk from it.â
âIn my place, Mr. Blake, you would have remembered that Mr. Candy had taken you into his employment, under circumstances which made you his debtor for life. In my place, you would have seen him sinking, hour by hour; and you would have risked anything, rather than let the one man on earth who had befriended you, die before your eyes. Donât suppose that I had no sense of the terrible position in which I had placed myself! There were moments when I felt all the misery of my friendlessness, all the peril of my dreadful responsibility. If I had been a happy man, if I had led a prosperous life, I believe I should have sunk under the task I had imposed on myself. But I had no happy time to look back at, no past peace of mind to force itself into contrast with my present anxiety and suspenseâand I held firm to my resolution through it all. I took an interval in the middle of the day, when my patientâs condition was at its best, for the repose I needed. For the rest of the four-and-twenty hours, as long as his life was in danger, I never left his bedside. Towards sunset, as usual in such cases, the delirium incidental to the fever came on. It lasted more or less through the night; and then intermitted, at that terrible time in the early morningâfrom two oâclock to fiveâwhen the vital energies even of the healthiest of us are at their lowest. It is then that Death gathers in his human harvest most abundantly. It was then that Death and I fought our fight over the bed, which should have the man who lay on it. I never hesitated in pursuing the treatment on which I had staked everything. When wine failed, I tried brandy. When the other stimulants lost their influence, I doubled the dose. After an interval of suspenseâthe like of which I hope to God I shall never feel againâthere came a day when the rapidity of the pulse slightly, but appreciably, diminished; and, better still, there came also a change in the beatâan unmistakable change to steadiness and strength. Then, I knew that I had saved him; and then I own I broke down. I laid the poor fellowâs wasted hand back on the bed, and burst out crying. An hysterical relief, Mr. Blakeânothing more! Physiology says, and says truly, that some men are born with female constitutionsâand I am one of them!â
He made that bitterly professional apology for his tears, speaking quietly and unaffectedly, as he had spoken throughout. His tone and manner, from beginning to end, showed him to be especially, almost morbidly, anxious not to set himself up as an object of interest to me.
âYou may well ask, why I have wearied you with all these details?â he went on. âIt is the only way I can see, Mr. Blake, of properly introducing to you what I have to say next. Now you know exactly what my position was, at the time of Mr. Candyâs illness, you will the more readily understand the sore need I had of lightening the burden on my mind by giving it, at intervals, some sort of relief. I have had the presumption to occupy my leisure, for some years past, in writing a book, addressed to the members of my professionâa book on the intricate and delicate subject of the brain and the nervous system. My work will probably never be finished; and it will certainly never be published. It has none the less been the friend of many lonely hours; and it helped me to while away the anxious timeâthe time of waiting, and nothing elseâat Mr. Candyâs bedside. I told you he was delirious, I think? And I mentioned the time at which his delirium came on?â
âYes.â
âWell, I had reached a section of my book, at that time, which touched on this same question of delirium. I wonât trouble you at any length with my theory on the subjectâI will confine myself to telling you only what it is your present interest to know. It has often occurred to me in the course of my medical practice, to doubt whether we can justifiably inferâin cases of deliriumâthat the loss of the faculty of speaking connectedly, implies of necessity the loss of the faculty of thinking connectedly as well. Poor Mr. Candyâs illness gave me an opportunity of putting this doubt to the test. I understand the art of writing in shorthand; and I was able to take down the patientâs âwanderingsâ, exactly as they fell from his lips.âDo you see, Mr. Blake, what I am coming to at last?â
I saw it clearly, and waited with breathless interest to hear more.
âAt odds and ends of time,â Ezra Jennings went on, âI reproduced my shorthand notes, in the ordinary form of writingâleaving large spaces between the broken phrases, and even the single words, as they had fallen disconnectedly from Mr. Candyâs lips. I then treated the result thus obtained, on something like the principle which one adopts in putting together a childâs âpuzzle.â It is all confusion to begin with; but it may be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find the right way. Acting on this plan, I filled in each blank space on the paper, with what the words or phrases on either side of it suggested to me as the speakerâs meaning; altering over and over again, until my additions followed naturally on the spoken words which came before them, and fitted naturally into the spoken words which came after them. The result was, that I not only occupied in this way many vacant and anxious hours, but that I arrived at something which was (as it seemed to me) a confirmation of the theory that I held. In plainer words, after putting the broken sentences together I found the superior faculty of thinking going on, more or less connectedly, in my patientâs mind, while the inferior faculty of expression was in a state of almost complete incapacity and confusion.â
âOne word!â I interposed eagerly. âDid my name occur in any of his wanderings?â
âYou shall hear, Mr. Blake. Among my written proofs of the assertion which I have just advancedâor, I ought to say, among the written experiments, tending to put my assertion to the proofâthere is one, in which your name occurs. For nearly the whole of one night, Mr. Candyâs mind was occupied with something between himself and you. I have got the broken words, as they dropped from his lips, on one sheet of paper. And I have got the links of my own discovering which connect those words together, on another sheet of paper. The product (as the arithmeticians would say) is an intelligible statementâfirst, of something actually done in the past; secondly, of something which Mr. Candy contemplated doing in the future, if his illness had not got in the way, and stopped him. The question is whether this does, or does not, represent the lost recollection which he vainly attempted to find when you called on him this morning?â
âNot a doubt of it!â I answered. âLet us go back directly, and look at the papers!â
âQuite impossible, Mr. Blake.â
âWhy?â
âPut yourself in my position for a moment,â said Ezra Jennings. âWould you disclose to another person what had dropped unconsciously from the lips of your suffering patient and your helpless friend, without first knowing that there was a necessity to justify you in opening your lips?â
I felt that he was unanswerable, here; but I tried to argue the question, nevertheless.
âMy conduct in such a delicate matter as you describe,â I replied, âwould depend greatly on whether the disclosure was of a nature to compromise my friend or not.â
âI have disposed of all necessity for considering that side of the question, long since,â said Ezra Jennings. âWherever my notes included anything which Mr. Candy might have wished to keep secret, those notes have been destroyed. My manuscript experiments at my friendâs bedside, include nothing, now, which he would have hesitated to communicate to others, if he had recovered the use of his memory. In your case, I have every reason to suppose that my notes contain something which he actually wished to say to you.â
âAnd yet, you hesitate?â
âAnd yet, I hesitate. Remember the circumstances under which I obtained the information which I possess! Harmless as it is, I cannot prevail upon myself to give it up to you, unless you first satisfy me that there is a reason for doing so. He was so miserably ill, Mr. Blake! and he was so helplessly dependent upon Me! Is it too much to ask, if I request you only to hint to me what your interest is in the lost recollectionâor what you believe that lost recollection to be?â
To have answered him with the frankness which his language and his manner both claimed from me, would have been to commit myself to openly acknowledging that I was suspected of the theft of the Diamond. Strongly as Ezra Jennings had intensified the first impulsive interest which I had felt in him, he had not overcome my unconquerable reluctance to disclose the degrading position in which I stood. I took refuge once more in the explanatory phrases with which I had prepared myself to meet the curiosity of strangers.
This time I had no reason to complain of a want of attention on the part of the person to whom I addressed myself. Ezra Jennings listened patiently, even anxiously, until I had done.
âI am sorry to have raised your expectations, Mr. Blake, only to disappoint them,â he said. âThroughout the whole period of Mr. Candyâs illness, from first to last, not one word about the Diamond escaped his lips. The matter with which I heard him connect your name has, I can assure you, no discoverable relation whatever with the loss or the recovery of Miss Verinderâs jewel.â
We arrived, as he said those words, at a place where the highway along which we had been walking branched off into two roads. One led to Mr. Ablewhiteâs house, and the other to a moorland village some two or three miles off. Ezra Jennings stopped at the road which led to the village.
âMy way lies in this direction,â he said. âI am really and truly sorry, Mr. Blake, that I can be of no use to you.â
His voice told me that he spoke sincerely. His soft brown eyes rested on me for a moment with a look of melancholy interest. He bowed, and went, without another word, on his way to the village.
For a minute or more I stood and watched him, walking farther and farther away from me; carrying farther and farther away with him what I now firmly believed to be the clue of which I was in search. He turned, after walking on a little way, and looked back. Seeing me still standing at the place where we had parted, he stopped, as if doubting
Comments (0)