“What more can you expect from me, sir?” asked Betteredge, with an appearance of the utmost humility.
“I expect more—from what you said just now.”
“Mere boasting, Mr. Franklin,” returned the old man obstinately. “Some people are born boasters, and they never get over it to their dying day. I’m one of them.”
There was only one way to take with him. I appealed to his interest in Rachel, and his interest in me.
“Betteredge, would you be glad to hear that Rachel and I were good friends again?”
“I have served your family, sir, to mighty little purpose, if you doubt it!”
“Do you remember how Rachel treated me, before I left England?”
“As well as if it was yesterday! My lady herself wrote you a letter about it; and you were so good as to show the letter to me. It said that Miss Rachel was mortally offended with you, for the part you had taken in trying to recover her jewel. And neither my lady, nor you, nor anybody else could guess why.
“Quite true, Betteredge! And I come back from my travels, and find her mortally offended with me still. I knew that the Diamond was at the bottom of it, last year, and I know that the Diamond is at the bottom of it now. I have tried to speak to her, and she won’t see me. I have tried to write to her, and she won’t answer me. How, in Heaven’s name, am I to clear the matter up? The chance of searching into the loss of the Moonstone, is the one chance of inquiry that Rachel herself has left me.”
Those words evidently put the case before him, as he had not seen it yet. He asked a question which satisfied me that I had shaken him.