This sort of thing didn't at all square with my English ideas.
"You don't really mean to say, sir," I asked, "that they would have taken Mr. Franklin's life, to get their Diamond, if he had given them the chance?"
"Do you smoke, Mr. Betteredge?" says the traveller.
"Yes, sir.
"Do you care much for the ashes left in your pipe when you empty it?"
"No, sir."
"In the country those men came from, they care just as much about killing a man, as you care about emptying the ashes out of your pipe.
If a thousand lives stood between them and the getting back of their Diamond--and if they thought they could destroy those lives without discovery--they would take them all.
The sacrifice of caste is a serious thing in India, if you like. The sacrifice of life is nothing at all."
I expressed my opinion upon this, that they were a set of murdering thieves.
Mr. Murthwaite expressed HIS opinion that they were a wonderful people.
Mr. Franklin, expressing no opinion at all, brought us back to the matter in hand.
"They have seen the Moonstone on Miss Verinder's dress," he said.
"What is to be done?"
"What your uncle threatened to do," answered Mr. Murthwaite.
"Colonel Herncastle understood the people he had to deal with.
Send the Diamond to-morrow (under guard of more than one man) to be cut up at Amsterdam.
Make half a dozen diamonds of it, instead of one.
There is an end of its sacred identity as The Moonstone--and there is an end of the conspiracy."
Mr. Franklin turned to me.
"There is no help for it," he said.
"We must speak to Lady Verinder to-morrow."
"What about to-night, sir?" I asked.
"Suppose the Indians come back?"
Mr. Murthwaite answered me before Mr. Franklin could speak.
"The Indians won't risk coming back to-night," he said.
"The direct way is hardly ever the way they take to anything--let alone a matter like this, in which the slightest mistake might be fatal to their reaching their end."
"But suppose the rogues are bolder than you think, sir?" I persisted.
"In that case," says Mr. Murthwaite, "let the dogs loose.
Have you got any big dogs in the yard?"
"Two, sir.
A mastiff and a bloodhound."
"They will do.
In the present emergency, Mr. Betteredge, the mastiff and the bloodhound have one great merit--they are not likely to be troubled with your scruples about the sanctity of human life."
The strumming of the piano reached us from the drawing-room, as he fired that shot at me.
He threw away his cheroot, and took Mr. Franklin's arm, to go back to the ladies.
I noticed that the sky was clouding over fast, as I followed them to the house.
Mr. Murthwaite noticed it too.
He looked round at me, in his dry, droning way, and said:
"The Indians will want their umbrellas, Mr. Betteredge, to-night!"
It was all very well for HIM to joke.
But I was not an eminent traveller--and my way in this world had not led me into playing ducks and drakes with my own life, among thieves and murderers in the outlandish places of the earth.
I went into my own little room, and sat down in my chair in a perspiration, and wondered helplessly what was to be done next.
In this anxious frame of mind, other men might have ended by working themselves up into a fever; I ended in a different way.
I lit my pipe, and took a turn at ROBINSON CRUSOE.
Before I had been at it five minutes, I came to this amazing bit--page one hundred and sixty-one--as follows:
"Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about."
The man who doesn't believe in ROBINSON CRUSOE, after THAT, is a man with a screw loose in his understanding, or a man lost in the mist of his own self-conceit!
Argument is thrown away upon him; and pity is better reserved for some person with a livelier faith.
I was far on with my second pipe, and still lost in admiration of that wonderful book, when Penelope (who had been handing round the tea) came in with her report from the drawing-room.