The doctor's pretty housemaid stood waiting for me, with the street door
open in her hand. Pouring brightly into the hall, the morning light fell
full on the face of Mr. Candy's assistant when I turned, and looked at
him.
It was impossible to dispute Betteredge's assertion that the appearance
of Ezra Jennings, speaking from a popular point of view, was against
him. His gipsy-complexion, his fleshless cheeks, his gaunt facial bones,
his dreamy eyes, his extraordinary parti-coloured hair, the puzzling
contradiction between his face and figure which made him look old and
young both together--were all more or less calculated to produce an
unfavourable impression of him on a stranger's mind. And yet--feeling
this as I certainly did--it is not to be denied that Ezra Jennings made
some inscrutable appeal to my sympathies, which I found it impossible to
resist. While my knowledge of the world warned me to answer the question
which he had put, acknowledging that I did indeed find Mr. Candy sadly
changed, and then to proceed on my way out of the house--my interest in
Ezra Jennings held me rooted to the place, and gave him the opportunity
of speaking to me in private about his employer, for which he had been
evidently on the watch.
"Are you walking my way, Mr. Jennings?" I said, observing that he held
his hat in his hand. "I am going to call on my aunt, Mrs. Ablewhite."
Ezra Jennings replied that he had a patient to see, and that he was
walking my way.
We left the house together. I observed that the pretty servant girl--who
was all smiles and amiability, when I wished her good morning on my way
out--received a modest little message from Ezra Jennings, relating to
the time at which he might be expected to return, with pursed-up lips,
and with eyes which ostentatiously looked anywhere rather than look in
his face. The poor wretch was evidently no favourite in the house.
Out of the house, I had Betteredge's word for it that he was unpopular
everywhere. "What a life!" I thought to myself, as we descended the
doctor's doorsteps.
Having already referred to Mr. Candy's illness on his side, Ezra
Jennings now appeared determined to leave it to me to resume the
subject. His silence said significantly, "It's your turn now." I, too,
had my reasons for referring to the doctor's illness: and I readily
accepted the responsibility of speaking first.
"Judging by the change I see in him," I began, "Mr. Candy's illness must
have been far more serious that I had supposed?"
"It is almost a miracle," said Ezra Jennings, "that he lived through
it."
"Is his memory never any better than I have found it to-day? He has been
trying to speak to me----"
"Of something which happened before he was taken ill?" asked the
assistant, observing that I hesitated.
"Yes."
"His memory of events, at that past time, is hopelessly enfeebled," said
Ezra Jennings. "It is almost to be deplored, poor fellow, that even
the wreck of it remains. While he remembers dimly plans that he
formed--things, here and there, that he had to say or do before his
illness--he is perfectly incapable of recalling what the plans were, or
what the thing was that he had to say or do. He is painfully conscious
of his own deficiency, and painfully anxious, as you must have seen, to
hide it from observation. If he could only have recovered in a complete
state of oblivion as to the past, he would have been a happier man.
Perhaps we should all be happier," he added, with a sad smile, "if we
could but completely forget!"
"There are some events surely in all men's lives," I replied, "the
memory of which they would be unwilling entirely to lose?"
"That is, I hope, to be said of most men, Mr. Blake. I am afraid it
cannot truly be said of ALL. Have you any reason to suppose that the
lost remembrance which Mr. Candy tried to recover--while you were
speaking to him just now--was a remembrance which it was important to
YOU that he should recall?"
In saying those words, he had touched, of his own accord, on the very
point upon which I was anxious to consult him. The interest I felt in
this strange man had impelled me, in the first instance, to give him the
opportunity of speaking to me; reserving what I might have to say, on my
side, in relation to his employer, until I was first satisfied that he
was a person in whose delicacy and discretion I could trust. The little
that he had said, thus far, had been sufficient to convince me that I
was speaking to a gentleman. He had what I may venture to describe as
the UNSOUGHT SELF-POSSESSION, which is a sure sign of good breeding, not
in England only, but everywhere else in the civilised world. Whatever
the object which he had in view, in putting the question that he had
just addressed to me, I felt no doubt that I was justified--so far--in
answering him without reserve.
"I believe I have a strong interest," I said, "in tracing the lost
remembrance which Mr. Candy was unable to recall. May I ask whether you
can suggest to me any method by which I might assist his memory?"
Ezra Jennings looked at me, with a sudden flash of interest in his
dreamy brown eyes.
"Mr. Candy's memory is beyond the reach of assistance," he said. "I have
tried to help it often enough since his recovery, to be able to speak
positively on that point."
This disappointed me; and I owned it.
"I confess you led me to hope for a less discouraging answer than that,"
I said.
Ezra Jennings smiled. "It may not, perhaps, be a final answer, Mr.
Blake. It may be possible to trace Mr. Candy's lost recollection,
without the necessity of appealing to Mr. Candy himself."
"Indeed? Is it an indiscretion, on my part, to ask how?"
"By no means. My only difficulty in answering your question, is the
difficulty of explaining myself. May I trust to your patience, if I
refer once more to Mr. Candy's illness: and if I speak of it this time
without sparing you certain professional details?"
"Pray go on! You have interested me already in hearing the details."
My eagerness seemed to amuse--perhaps, I might rather say, to please
him. He smiled again. We had by this time left the last houses in the
town behind us. Ezra Jennings stopped for a moment, and picked some wild
flowers from the hedge by the roadside. "How beautiful they are!" he
said, simply, showing his little nosegay to me. "And how few people in
England seem to admire them as they deserve!"
"You have not always been in England?" I said.
"No. I was born, and partly brought up, in one of our colonies. My
father was an Englishman; but my mother--We are straying away
from our subject, Mr. Blake; and it is my fault. The truth is, I have
associations with these modest little hedgeside flowers--It doesn't
matter; we were speaking of Mr. Candy. To Mr. Candy let us return."
Connecting the few words about himself which thus reluctantly escaped
him, with the melancholy view of life which led him to place the
conditions of human happiness in complete oblivion of the past, I
felt satisfied that the story which I had read in his face was, in two
particulars at least, the story that it really told. He had suffered as
few men suffer; and there was the mixture of some foreign race in his
English blood.
"You have heard, I dare say, of the original cause of Mr. Candy's
illness?" he resumed. "The night of Lady Verinder's dinner-party was a
night of heavy rain. My employer drove home through it in his gig, and
reached the house wetted to the skin. He found an urgent message from
a patient, waiting for him; and he most unfortunately went at once to
visit the sick person, without stopping to change his clothes. I was
myself professionally detained, that night, by a case at some distance
from Frizinghall. When I got back the next morning, I found Mr. Candy's
groom waiting in great alarm to take me to his master's room. By that
time the mischief was done; the illness had set in."
"The illness has only been described to me, in general terms, as a
fever," I said.
"I can add nothing which will make the description more accurate,"
answered Ezra Jennings. "From first to last the fever assumed no
specific form. I sent at once to two of Mr. Candy's medical friends
in the town, both physicians, to come and give me their opinion of the
case. They agreed with me that it looked serious; but they both strongly
dissented from the view I took of the treatment. We differed entirely in
the conclusions which we drew from the patient's pulse. The two
doctors, arguing from the rapidity of the beat, declared that a lowering
treatment was the only treatment to be adopted. On my side, I admitted
the rapidity of the pulse, but I also pointed to its alarming feebleness
as indicating an exhausted condition of the system, and as showing a
plain necessity for the administration of stimulants. The two doctors
were for keeping him on gruel, lemonade, barley-water, and so on. I was
for giving him champagne, or brandy, ammonia, and quinine. A serious
difference of opinion, as you see! a difference between two physicians
of established local repute, and a stranger who was only an assistant in
the house. For the first few days, I had no choice but to give way to my
elders and betters; the patient steadily sinking all the time. I made a
second attempt to appeal to the plain, undeniably plain, evidence of the
pulse. Its rapidity was unchecked, and its feebleness had increased.
The two doctors took offence at my obstinacy. They said, 'Mr. Jennings,
either we manage this case, or you manage it. Which is it to be?' I
said, 'Gentlemen, give me five minutes to consider, and that plain
question shall have a plain reply.' When the time expired, I was ready
with my answer. I said, 'You positively refuse to try the stimulant
treatment?' They refused in so many words. 'I mean to try it at once,
gentlemen.'--'Try it, Mr. Jennings, and we withdraw from the case.' I
sent down to the cellar for a bottle of champagne; and I administered
half a tumbler-full of it to the patient with my own hand. The two
physicians took up their hats in silence, and left the house."
"You had assumed a serious responsibility," I said. "In your place, I am
afraid I should have shrunk from it."
"In 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. Don't 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
suspense--and I held firm to my resolution through it all. I took an
interval in the middle of the day, when my patient's 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 morning--from two
o'clock to five--when 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 suspense--the like of which I
hope to God I shall never feel again--there came a day when the rapidity
of the pulse slightly, but appreciably, diminished; and, better
still, there came also a change in the beat--an 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 fellow's wasted hand back on the bed,
and burst out crying. An hysterical relief, Mr. Blake--nothing more!
Physiology says, and says truly, that some men are born with female
constitutions--and I am one of them!"
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.
"You may well ask, why I have wearied you with all these details?"
he went on. "It 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. Candy's 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 profession--a 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 time--the time of waiting, and nothing
else--at Mr. Candy's bedside. I told you he was delirious, I think? And
I mentioned the time at which his delirium came on?"
"Yes."
"Well, I had reached a section of my book, at that time, which touched
on this same question of delirium. I won't trouble you at any length
with my theory on the subject--I 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
infer--in cases of delirium--that the loss of the faculty of speaking
connectedly, implies of necessity the loss of the faculty of thinking
connectedly as well. Poor Mr. Candy's 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 patient's 'wanderings',
exactly as they fell from his lips.--Do you see, Mr. Blake, what I am
coming to at last?"
I saw it clearly, and waited with breathless interest to hear more.
"At odds and ends of time," Ezra Jennings went on, "I reproduced my
shorthand notes, in the ordinary form of writing--leaving large spaces
between the broken phrases, and even the single words, as they had
fallen disconnectedly from Mr. Candy's lips. I then treated the result
thus obtained, on something like the principle which one adopts in
putting together a child's 'puzzle.' 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 speaker's 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 patient's mind, while the
inferior faculty of expression was in a state of almost complete
incapacity and confusion."
"One word!" I interposed eagerly. "Did my name occur in any of his
wanderings?"
"You shall hear, Mr. Blake. Among my written proofs of the assertion
which I have just advanced--or, I ought to say, among the written
experiments, tending to put my assertion to the proof--there IS one, in
which your name occurs. For nearly the whole of one night, Mr. Candy's
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 statement--first, 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?"
"Not a doubt of it!" I answered. "Let us go back directly, and look at
the papers!"
"Quite impossible, Mr. Blake."
"Why?"
"Put yourself in my position for a moment," said Ezra Jennings. "Would
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?"
I felt that he was unanswerable, here; but I tried to argue the
question, nevertheless.
"My conduct in such a delicate matter as you describe," I replied,
"would depend greatly on whether the disclosure was of a nature to
compromise my friend or not."
"I have disposed of all necessity for considering that side of the
question, long since," said Ezra Jennings. "Wherever my notes included
anything which Mr. Candy might have wished to keep secret, those notes
have been destroyed. My manuscript experiments at my friend's 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."
"And yet, you hesitate?"
"And 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 recollection--or
what you believe that lost recollection to be?"
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.
"I am sorry to have raised your expectations, Mr. Blake, only to
disappoint them," he said. "Throughout the whole period of Mr. Candy's
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 Verinder's jewel."
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.
Ablewhite's 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.
"My way lies in this direction," he said. "I am really and truly sorry,
Mr. Blake, that I can be of no use to you."
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 whether I
might not wish to speak to him again. There was no time for me to reason
out my own situation--to remind myself that I was losing my opportunity,
at what might be the turning point of my life, and all to flatter
nothing more important than my own self-esteem! There was only time to
call him back first, and to think afterwards. I suspect I am one of the
rashest of existing men. I called him back--and then I said to myself,
"Now there is no help for it. I must tell him the truth!"
He retraced his steps directly. I advanced along the road to meet him.
"Mr. Jennings," I said. "I have not treated you quite fairly. My
interest in tracing Mr. Candy's lost recollection is not the interest of
recovering the Moonstone. A serious personal matter is at the bottom
of my visit to Yorkshire. I have but one excuse for not having dealt
frankly with you in this matter. It is more painful to me than I can
say, to mention to anybody what my position really is."
Ezra Jennings looked at me with the first appearance of embarrassment
which I had seen in him yet.
"I have no right, Mr. Blake, and no wish," he said, "to intrude myself
into your private affairs. Allow me to ask your pardon, on my side, for
having (most innocently) put you to a painful test."
"You have a perfect right," I rejoined, "to fix the terms on which you
feel justified in revealing what you heard at Mr. Candy's bedside. I
understand and respect the delicacy which influences you in this matter.
How can I expect to be taken into your confidence if I decline to
admit you into mine? You ought to know, and you shall know, why I am
interested in discovering what Mr. Candy wanted to say to me. If I turn
out to be mistaken in my anticipations, and if you prove unable to
help me when you are really aware of what I want, I shall trust to your
honour to keep my secret--and something tells me that I shall not trust
in vain."
"Stop, Mr. Blake. I have a word to say, which must be said before you go
any farther." I looked at him in astonishment. The grip of some terrible
emotion seemed to have seized him, and shaken him to the soul. His
gipsy complexion had altered to a livid greyish paleness; his eyes
had suddenly become wild and glittering; his voice had dropped to a
tone--low, stern, and resolute--which I now heard for the first time.
The latent resources in the man, for good or for evil--it was hard, at
that moment, to say which--leapt up in him and showed themselves to me,
with the suddenness of a flash of light.
"Before you place any confidence in me," he went on, "you ought to know,
and you MUST know, under what circumstances I have been received into
Mr. Candy's house. It won't take long. I don't profess, sir, to tell my
story (as the phrase is) to any man. My story will die with me. All I
ask, is to be permitted to tell you, what I have told Mr. Candy. If you
are still in the mind, when you have heard that, to say what you have
proposed to say, you will command my attention and command my services.
Shall we walk on?"
The suppressed misery in his face silenced me. I answered his question
by a sign. We walked on.
After advancing a few hundred yards, Ezra Jennings stopped at a gap in
the rough stone wall which shut off the moor from the road, at this part
of it.
"Do you mind resting a little, Mr. Blake?" he asked. "I am not what I
was--and some things shake me."
I agreed of course. He led the way through the gap to a patch of turf
on the heathy ground, screened by bushes and dwarf trees on the side
nearest to the road, and commanding in the opposite direction a grandly
desolate view over the broad brown wilderness of the moor. The clouds
had gathered, within the last half hour. The light was dull; the
distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still
colourless--met us without a smile.
We sat down in silence. Ezra Jennings laid aside his hat, and passed his
hand wearily over his forehead, wearily through his startling white and
black hair. He tossed his little nosegay of wild flowers away from him,
as if the remembrances which it recalled were remembrances which hurt
him now.
"Mr. Blake!" he said, suddenly. "You are in bad company. The cloud of a
horrible accusation has rested on me for years. I tell you the worst at
once. I am a man whose life is a wreck, and whose character is gone."
I attempted to speak. He stopped me.
"No," he said. "Pardon me; not yet. Don't commit yourself to expressions
of sympathy which you may afterwards wish to recall. I have mentioned an
accusation which has rested on me for years. There are circumstances
in connexion with it that tell against me. I cannot bring myself to
acknowledge what the accusation is. And I am incapable, perfectly
incapable, of proving my innocence. I can only assert my innocence. I
assert it, sir, on my oath, as a Christian. It is useless to appeal to
my honour as a man."
He paused again. I looked round at him. He never looked at me in return.
His whole being seemed to be absorbed in the agony of recollecting, and
in the effort to speak.
"There is much that I might say," he went on, "about the merciless
treatment of me by my own family, and the merciless enmity to which
I have fallen a victim. But the harm is done; the wrong is beyond all
remedy. I decline to weary or distress you, sir, if I can help it. At
the outset of my career in this country, the vile slander to which
I have referred struck me down at once and for ever. I resigned my
aspirations in my profession--obscurity was the only hope left for me.
I parted with the woman I loved--how could I condemn her to share my
disgrace? A medical assistant's place offered itself, in a remote
corner of England. I got the place. It promised me peace; it promised me
obscurity, as I thought. I was wrong. Evil report, with time and chance
to help it, travels patiently, and travels far. The accusation from
which I had fled followed me. I got warning of its approach. I was able
to leave my situation voluntarily, with the testimonials that I had
earned. They got me another situation in another remote district. Time
passed again; and again the slander that was death to my character
found me out. On this occasion I had no warning. My employer said, 'Mr.
Jennings, I have no complaint to make against you; but you must set
yourself right, or leave me.' I had but one choice--I left him. It's
useless to dwell on what I suffered after that. I am only forty years
old now. Look at my face, and let it tell for me the story of some
miserable years. It ended in my drifting to this place, and meeting with
Mr. Candy. He wanted an assistant. I referred him, on the question of
capacity, to my last employer. The question of character remained. I
told him what I have told you--and more. I warned him that there were
difficulties in the way, even if he believed me. 'Here, as elsewhere,'
I said 'I scorn the guilty evasion of living under an assumed name: I am
no safer at Frizinghall than at other places from the cloud that follows
me, go where I may.' He answered, 'I don't do things by halves--I
believe you, and I pity you. If you will risk what may happen, I will
risk it too.' God Almighty bless him! He has given me shelter, he
has given me employment, he has given me rest of mind--and I have the
certain conviction (I have had it for some months past) that nothing
will happen now to make him regret it."
"The slander has died out?" I said.
"The slander is as active as ever. But when it follows me here, it will
come too late."
"You will have left the place?"
"No, Mr. Blake--I shall be dead. For ten years past I have suffered from
an incurable internal complaint. I don't disguise from you that I should
have let the agony of it kill me long since, but for one last interest
in life, which makes my existence of some importance to me still. I want
to provide for a person--very dear to me--whom I shall never see again.
My own little patrimony is hardly sufficient to make her independent of
the world. The hope, if I could only live long enough, of increasing
it to a certain sum, has impelled me to resist the disease by such
palliative means as I could devise. The one effectual palliative in my
case, is--opium. To that all-potent and all-merciful drug I am indebted
for a respite of many years from my sentence of death. But even the
virtues of opium have their limit. The progress of the disease has
gradually forced me from the use of opium to the abuse of it. I am
feeling the penalty at last. My nervous system is shattered; my nights
are nights of horror. The end is not far off now. Let it come--I have
not lived and worked in vain. The little sum is nearly made up; and I
have the means of completing it, if my last reserves of life fail me
sooner than I expect. I hardly know how I have wandered into telling you
this. I don't think I am mean enough to appeal to your pity. Perhaps, I
fancy you may be all the readier to believe me, if you know that what I
have said to you, I have said with the certain knowledge in me that I am
a dying man. There is no disguising, Mr. Blake, that you interest me.
I have attempted to make my poor friend's loss of memory the means of
bettering my acquaintance with you. I have speculated on the chance of
your feeling a passing curiosity about what he wanted to say, and of my
being able to satisfy it. Is there no excuse for my intruding myself on
you? Perhaps there is some excuse. A man who has lived as I have lived
has his bitter moments when he ponders over human destiny. You have
youth, health, riches, a place in the world, a prospect before you. You,
and such as you, show me the sunny side of human life, and reconcile me
with the world that I am leaving, before I go. However this talk between
us may end, I shall not forget that you have done me a kindness in doing
that. It rests with you, sir, to say what you proposed saying, or to
wish me good morning."
I had but one answer to make to that appeal. Without a moment's
hesitation I told him the truth, as unreservedly as I have told it in
these pages.
He started to his feet, and looked at me with breathless eagerness as I
approached the leading incident of my story.
"It is certain that I went into the room," I said; "it is certain that
I took the Diamond. I can only meet those two plain facts by declaring
that, do what I might, I did it without my own knowledge----"
Ezra Jennings caught me excitedly by the arm.
"Stop!" he said. "You have suggested more to me than you suppose. Have
you ever been accustomed to the use of opium?"
"I never tasted it in my life."
"Were your nerves out of order, at this time last year? Were you
unusually restless and irritable?"
"Yes."
"Did you sleep badly?"
"Wretchedly. Many nights I never slept at all."
"Was the birthday night an exception? Try, and remember. Did you sleep
well on that one occasion?"
"I do remember! I slept soundly."
He dropped my arm as suddenly as he had taken it--and looked at me with
the air of a man whose mind was relieved of the last doubt that rested
on it.
"This is a marked day in your life, and in mine," he said, gravely.
"I am absolutely certain, Mr. Blake, of one thing--I have got what Mr.
Candy wanted to say to you this morning, in the notes that I took at my
patient's bedside. Wait! that is not all. I am firmly persuaded that I
can prove you to have been unconscious of what you were about, when you
entered the room and took the Diamond. Give me time to think, and time
to question you. I believe the vindication of your innocence is in my
hands!"
"Explain yourself, for God's sake! What do you mean?"
In the excitement of our colloquy, we had walked on a few steps, beyond
the clump of dwarf trees which had hitherto screened us from view.
Before Ezra Jennings could answer me, he was hailed from the high road
by a man, in great agitation, who had been evidently on the look-out for
him.
"I am coming," he called back; "I am coming as fast as I can!" He turned
to me. "There is an urgent case waiting for me at the village yonder;
I ought to have been there half an hour since--I must attend to it
at once. Give me two hours from this time, and call at Mr. Candy's
again--and I will engage to be ready for you."
"How am I to wait!" I exclaimed, impatiently. "Can't you quiet my mind
by a word of explanation before we part?"
"This is far too serious a matter to be explained in a hurry, Mr. Blake.
I am not wilfully trying your patience--I should only be adding to
your suspense, if I attempted to relieve it as things are now. At
Frizinghall, sir, in two hours' time!"
The man on the high road hailed him again. He hurried away, and left me.