“The banker’s receipt, Rachel—as I have heard it described—mentioned nothing of the kind. A valuable gem, belonging to Mr. Luker; deposited by Mr. Luker; sealed with Mr. Luker’s seal; and only to be given up on Mr. Luker’s personal application. That was the form, and that is all I know about it.”
She waited a moment, after he had said that. She looked at her mother, and sighed. She looked back again at Mr. Godfrey, and went on.
“Some of our private affairs, at home,” she said, “seem to have got into the newspapers?”
“I grieve to say, it is so.”
“And some idle people, perfect strangers to us, are trying to trace a connexion between what happened at our house in Yorkshire and what has happened since, here in London?”
“The public curiosity, in certain quarters, is, I fear, taking that turn.”
“The people who say that the three unknown men who ill-used you and Mr. Luker are the three Indians, also say that the valuable gem——”
There she stopped. She had become gradually, within the last few moments, whiter and whiter in the face. The extraordinary blackness of her hair made this paleness, by contrast, so ghastly to look at, that we all thought she would faint, at the moment when she checked herself in the middle of her question. Dear Mr. Godfrey made a second attempt to leave his chair. My aunt entreated her to say no more. I followed my aunt with a modest medicinal peace-offering, in the shape of a bottle of salts. We none of us produced the slightest effect on her. “Godfrey, stay where you are. Mamma, there is not the least reason to be alarmed about me. Clack, you’re dying to hear the end of it—I won’t faint, expressly to oblige you.”
Those were the exact words she used—taken down in my diary the moment I got home. But, oh, don’t let us judge! My Christian friends, don’t let us judge!
She turned once more to Mr. Godfrey. With an obstinacy dreadful to see, she went back again to the place where she had checked herself, and completed her question in these words: