The Moonstone

The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone is a beautiful, priceless diamond, which was originally stolen from a religious temple in India, and brought to England. Its Indian guardians have followed it and are intent on taking it back. It is now in the possession of an English family and is soon to be given to Miss Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday.

The Verinders live in a large country house, and their old butler, Gabriel, is telling the story. His daughter, Penelope, also a servant in the house, has recently seen some Indian jugglers in the village, performing tricks with a bottle of ink. Gabriel wants to make sure that no thieves enter the house.

Towards midnight, I went around the house to lock up, accompanied by my second in command (Samuel, the footman), as usual. When all the doors were made fast, except the side door that opened on the terrace, I sent Samuel to bed and stepped out for a breath of fresh air before I too went to bed in my turn.

The night was still and close, and the moon was at its full in the heavens. It was so silent out of doors that I heard from time to time, very faint and low, the fall of the sea, as the ground swell heaved it in on the sandbank near the mouth of our little bay. As the house stood, the terrace side was the dark side; but the broad moonlight showed fair on the gravel walk that ran along the next side to the terrace. Looking this way, after looking up at the sky, I saw the shadow of a person in the moonlight thrown forward from behind the corner of the house.

Being old and sly, I forbore to call out; but being also, unfortunately, old and heavy, my feet betrayed me on the gravel. Before I could steal suddenly round the corner, as I had proposed, I heard lighter feet than mine – and more than one pair of them as I thought – retreating in a hurry. By the time I had got to the corner, the trespassers, whoever they were, had run into the shrubbery at the offside of the walk and were hidden from sight among the thick trees and bushes in that part of the grounds. From the shrubbery, they could easily make their way, over our fence, into the road.

If I had been forty years younger, I might have had a chance of catching them before they got clear of our premises. As it was, I went back to set a-going a younger pair of legs than mine. Without disturbing anybody, Samuel and I got a couple of guns and went all around the house and through the shrubbery. Having made sure that no persons were lurking about anywhere on our grounds, we turned back. Passing over the walk where I had seen the shadow, I now noticed, for the first time, a little bright object lying on the clean gravel, under the light of the moon. Picking the object up, I discovered it was a small bottle, containing a thick sweet-smelling liquor, as black as ink.

I said nothing to Samuel. But, remembering what Penelope had told me about the jugglers, and the pouring of the little pool of ink into the palm of the boy’s hand, I instantly suspected that I had disturbed the three Indians, lurking about the house, and bent, in their heathenish way, on discovering the whereabouts of the Diamond that night.