Лучшие романы Уилки Коллинза / The Best of Wilkie Collins. Уилки Коллинз
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him evidently bent on following Rosanna privately when she went out for her walk, it seemed clear to me that he had thought it unadvisable to let the lady’s maid and the housemaid know how materially they had helped him. They were just the sort of women, if he had treated their evidence as trustworthy, to have been puffed up by it, and to have said or done something which would have put Rosanna Spearman on her guard.
I walked out in the fine summer afternoon, very sorry for the poor girl, and very uneasy in my mind at the turn things had taken. Drifting towards the shrubbery, some time later, there I met Mr. Franklin. After returning from seeing his cousin off at the station, he had been with my lady, holding a long conversation with her. She had told him of Miss Rachel’s unaccountable refusal to let her wardrobe be examined; and had put him in such low spirits about my young lady that he seemed to shrink from speaking on the subject. The family temper appeared in his face that evening, for the first time in my experience of him.
“Well, Betteredge,” he said, “how does the atmosphere of mystery and suspicion in which we are all living now, agree with you? Do you remember that morning when I first came here with the Moonstone? I wish to God we had thrown it into the quicksand!”
After breaking out in that way, he abstained from speaking again until he had composed himself. We walked silently, side by side, for a minute or two, and then he asked me what had become of Sergeant Cuff. It was impossible to put Mr. Franklin off with the excuse of the Sergeant being in my room, composing his mind. I told him exactly what had happened, mentioning particularly what my lady’s maid and the house-maid had said about Rosanna Spearman.
Mr. Franklin’s clear head saw the turn the Sergeant’s suspicions had taken, in the twinkling of an eye.
“Didn’t you tell me this morning,” he said, “that one of the tradespeople declared he had met Rosanna yesterday, on the footway to Frizinghall, when we supposed her to be ill in her room?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If my aunt’s maid and the other woman have spoken the truth, you may depend upon it the tradesman did meet her. The girl’s attack of illness was a blind to deceive us. She had some guilty reason for going to the town secretly. The paint-stained dress is a dress of hers; and the fire heard crackling in her room at four in the morning was a fire lit to destroy it. Rosanna Spearman has stolen the Diamond. I’ll go in directly, and tell my aunt the turn things have taken.”
“Not just yet, if you please, sir,” said a melancholy voice behind us.
We both turned about, and found ourselves face to face with Sergeant Cuff.
“Why not just yet?” asked Mr. Franklin.
“Because, sir, if you tell her ladyship, her ladyship will tell Miss Verinder.”
“Suppose she does. What then?” Mr. Franklin said those words with a sudden heat and vehemence, as if the Sergeant had mortally offended him.
“Do you think it’s wise, sir,” said Sergeant Cuff, quietly, “to put such a question as that to me – at such a time as this?”
There was a moment’s silence between them: Mr. Franklin walked close up to the Sergeant. The two looked each other straight in the face. Mr. Franklin spoke first, dropping his voice as suddenly as he had raised it.
“I suppose you know, Mr. Cuff,” he said, “that you are treading on delicate ground?”
“It isn’t the first time, by a good many hundreds, that I find myself treading on delicate ground,” answered the other, as immovable as ever.
“I am to understand that you forbid me to tell my aunt what has happened?”
“You are to understand, if you please, sir, that I throw up the case, if you tell Lady Verinder, or tell anybody, what has happened, until I give you leave.”
That settled it. Mr. Franklin had no choice but to submit. He turned away in anger – and left us.
I had stood there listening to them, all in a tremble; not knowing whom to suspect, or what to think next. In the midst of my confusion, two things, however, were plain to me. First, that my young lady was, in some unaccountable manner, at the bottom of the sharp speeches that had passed between them. Second, that they thoroughly understood each other, without having previously exchanged a word of explanation on either side.
“Mr. Betteredge,” says the Sergeant, “you have done a very foolish thing in my absence. You have done a little detective business on your own account. For the future, perhaps you will be so obliging as to do your detective business along with me.”
He took me by the arm, and walked me away with him along the road by which he had come. I dare say I had deserved his reproof – but I was not going to help him to set traps for Rosanna Spearman, for all that. Thief or no thief, legal or not legal, I don’t care – I pitied her.
“What do you want of me?” I asked, shaking him off, and stopping short.
“Only a little information about the country round here,” said the Sergeant.
I couldn’t well object to improve Sergeant Cuff in his geography.
“Is there any path, in that direction, leading to the sea-beach from this house?” asked the Sergeant. He pointed, as he spoke, to the fir-plantation which led to the Shivering Sand.
“Yes,” I said, “there is a path.”
“Show it to me.”
Side by side, in the grey of the summer evening, Sergeant Cuff and I set forth for the Shivering Sand.
Chapter XV
The Sergeant remained silent, thinking his own thoughts, till we entered the plantation of firs which led to the quicksand. There he roused himself, like a man whose mind was made up, and spoke to me again.
“Mr. Betteredge,” he said, “as you have honoured me by taking an oar in my boat, and as you may, I think, be of some assistance to me before the evening is out, I see no use in our mystifying one another any longer, and I propose to set you an example of plain speaking on my side. You are determined to give me no information to the prejudice of Rosanna Spearman, because she has been a good girl to YOU, and because you pity her heartily. Those humane considerations do you a world of credit, but they happen in this instance to be humane considerations clean thrown away. Rosanna Spearman is not in the slightest danger of getting into trouble – no, not if I fix her with being concerned in the disappearance of the Diamond, on evidence which is as plain as the nose on your face!”
“Do you mean that my lady won’t prosecute?” I asked.
“I mean that your lady CAN’T prosecute,” said the Sergeant. “Rosanna Spearman is simply an instrument in the hands of another person, and Rosanna Spearman will be held harmless for that other person’s sake.”
He spoke like a man in earnest – there was no denying that. Still, I felt something stirring uneasily against him in my mind. “Can’t you give that other person a name?” I said.
“Can’t you, Mr. Betteredge?”
“No.”
Sergeant Cuff stood stock still, and surveyed me with a look of melancholy interest.
“It’s always a pleasure to me to be tender towards human infirmity,” he said. “I feel particularly tender at the present moment, Mr. Betteredge, towards you. And you, with the same excellent motive, feel particularly tender towards Rosanna Spearman, don’t you? Do you happen to know whether she has had a new outfit of linen lately?”
What he meant by slipping in this extraordinary question unawares, I was at a total loss to imagine. Seeing no possible injury to Rosanna if I owned the truth, I answered that the girl had come to us rather sparely provided with linen, and that my lady, in recompense for her good conduct (I laid a stress on her good conduct), had given her a new outfit not a fortnight since.
“This is a miserable world,” says the Sergeant. “Human life, Mr. Betteredge, is a sort of target – misfortune is always firing at it, and always hitting the mark. But for that outfit, we should