"What did your father do, sir?" I asked.
"Do?" says Mr. Franklin. "I'll tell you what he did. He brought the
invaluable faculty, called common sense, to bear on the Colonel's
letter. The whole thing, he declared, was simply absurd. Somewhere in
his Indian wanderings, the Colonel had picked up with some wretched
crystal which he took for a diamond. As for the danger of his being
murdered, and the precautions devised to preserve his life and his piece
of crystal, this was the nineteenth century, and any man in his senses
had only to apply to the police. The Colonel had been a notorious
opium-eater for years past; and, if the only way of getting at the
valuable papers he possessed was by accepting a matter of opium as
a matter of fact, my father was quite willing to take the ridiculous
responsibility imposed on him--all the more readily that it involved no
trouble to himself. The Diamond and the sealed instructions went into
his banker's strong-room, and the Colonel's letters, periodically
reporting him a living man, were received and opened by our family
lawyer, Mr. Bruff, as my father's representative. No sensible person,
in a similar position, could have viewed the matter in any other way.
Nothing in this world, Betteredge, is probable unless it appeals to our
own trumpery experience; and we only believe in a romance when we see it
in a newspaper."
It was plain to me from this, that Mr. Franklin thought his father's
notion about the Colonel hasty and wrong.
"What is your own private opinion about the matter, sir?" I asked.
"Let's finish the story of the Colonel first," says Mr. Franklin. "There
is a curious want of system, Betteredge, in the English mind; and your
question, my old friend, is an instance of it. When we are not occupied
in making machinery, we are (mentally speaking) the most slovenly people
in the universe."
"So much," I thought to myself, "for a foreign education! He has learned
that way of girding at us in France, I suppose."
Mr. Franklin took up the lost thread, and went on.
"My father," he said, "got the papers he wanted, and never saw his
brother-in-law again from that time. Year after year, on the prearranged
days, the prearranged letter came from the Colonel, and was opened by
Mr. Bruff. I have seen the letters, in a heap, all of them written in
the same brief, business-like form of words: 'Sir,--This is to certify
that I am still a living man. Let the Diamond be. John Herncastle.' That
was all he ever wrote, and that came regularly to the day; until some
six or eight months since, when the form of the letter varied for the
first time. It ran now: 'Sir,--They tell me I am dying. Come to me, and
help me to make my will.' Mr. Bruff went, and found him, in the little
suburban villa, surrounded by its own grounds, in which he had lived
alone, ever since he had left India. He had dogs, cats, and birds to
keep him company; but no human being near him, except the person who
came daily to do the house-work, and the doctor at the bedside. The will
was a very simple matter. The Colonel had dissipated the greater part of
his fortune in his chemical investigations. His will began and ended in
three clauses, which he dictated from his bed, in perfect possession
of his faculties. The first clause provided for the safe keeping
and support of his animals. The second founded a professorship of
experimental chemistry at a northern university. The third bequeathed
the Moonstone as a birthday present to his niece, on condition that
my father would act as executor. My father at first refused to act. On
second thoughts, however, he gave way, partly because he was assured
that the executorship would involve him in no trouble; partly because
Mr. Bruff suggested, in Rachel's interest, that the Diamond might be
worth something, after all."