`I wondered whether the risks and difficulties of keeping the nightgown were as much as I could manage, without having other risks and difficulties added to them? This might have been the case with some women--but how could it be the case with me? In the days when I was a thief, I had run fifty times greater risks, and found my way out of difficulties to which this difficulty was mere child's play.I had been apprenticed, as you may say, to frauds and deceptions--some of them on such a grand scale, and managed so cleverly, that they became famous, and appeared in the newspapers.Was such a little thing as the keeping of the nightgown likely to weigh on my spirits, and to set my heart sinking within me, at the time when I ought to have spoken to you? What nonsense to ask the question! The thing couldn't be.
`Where is the use of my dwelling in this way on my own folly? The plain truth is plain enough, surely? Behind your back, I loved you with all my heart and soul.Before your face--there's no denying it--I was frightened of you; frightened of making you angry with me; frightened of what you might say to me (though you had taken the Diamond) if I presumed to tell you that I had found it out.I had gone as near to it as I dared when I spoke to you in the library.You had not turned your back on me then.You had not started away from me as if I had got the plague.I tried to provoke myself into feeling angry with you, and to rouse up my courage in that way.No! I couldn't feel anything but the misery and the mortification of it."You're a plain girl; you have got a crooked shoulder; you're only a housemaid--what do you mean by attempting to speak to Me?" You never uttered a word of that, Mr.Franklin; but you said it all to me, nevertheless!
Is such madness as this to be accounted for? No.There is nothing to be done but to confess it, and let it be.
`I ask your pardon, once more, for this wandering of my pen.There is no fear of its happening again.I am close at the end now.
`The first person who disturbed me by coming into the empty room was Penelope.She had found out my secret long since, and she had done her best to bring me to my senses--and done it kindly too.
`"Ah!" she said, "I know why you're sitting here, and fretting, all by yourself.The best thing that can happen for your advantage, Rosanna, will be for Mr.Franklin's visit here to come to an end.It's my belief that he won't be long now before he leaves the house."`In all my thoughts of you I had never thought of your going away.Icouldn't speak to Penelope.I could only look at her.
`"I've just left Miss Rachel," Penelope went on."And a hard matter I have had of it to put up with her temper.She says the house is unbearable to her with the police in it; and she's determined to speak to my lady this evening, and to go to her Aunt Ablewhite to-morrow.If she does that, Mr.Franklin will be the next to find a reason for going away, you may depend on it!"`I recovered the use of my tongue at that."Do you mean to say Mr.Franklin will go with her?" I asked.
`"Only too gladly, if she would let him; but she won't.He has been made to feel her temper; he is in her black books too--and that after having done all he can to help her, poor fellow! No! no! If they don't make it up before to-morrow, you will see Miss Rachel go one way, and Mr.Franklin another.Where he may betake himself to I can't say.
But he will never stay here, Rosanna, after Miss Rachel has left us."`I managed to master the despair I felt at the prospect of your going away.To own the truth, I saw a little glimpse of hope for myself if there was really a serious disagreement between Miss Rachel and you."Do you know," I asked, "what the quarrel is between them?"`"It is all on Miss Rachel's side," Penelope said."And for anything I know to the contrary, it's all Miss Rachel's temper, and nothing else.
I am loth to distress you, Rosanna; but don't run away with the notion that Mr.Franklin is ever likely to quarrel with her.He's a great deal too fond of her for that!"`She had only just spoken those cruel words when there came a call to us from Mr.Betteredge.All the indoor servants were to assemble in the hall.And then we were to go in, one by one, and be questioned in Mr.Betteredge's room by Sergeant Cuff.
`It came to my turn to go in, after her ladyship's maid and the upper housemaid had been questioned first.Sergeant Cuff's inquiries--though he wrapped them up very cunningly--soon showed me that those two women (the bitterest enemies I had in the house) had made their discoveries outside my door, on the Tuesday afternoon, and again on the Thursday night.They had told the Sergeant enough to open his eyes to some part of the truth.
He rightly believed me to have made a new nightgown secretly, but he wrongly believed the paint-stained nightgown to be mine.I felt satisfied of another thing, from what he said, which it puzzled me to understand.He suspected me, of course, of being concerned in the disappearance of the Diamond.
But, at the same time, he let me see--purposely, as I thought--that he did not consider me as the person chiefly answerable for the loss of the jewel.He appeared to think that I had been acting under the direction of somebody else.Who that person might be, I couldn't guess then, and can't guess now.
`In this uncertainty, one thing was plain--that Sergeant Cuff was miles away from knowing the whole truth.You were safe as long as the nightgown was safe--and not a moment longer.
`I quite despair of making you understand the distress and terror which pressed upon me now.It was impossible for me to risk wearing your nightgown any longer.I might find myself taken off, at a moment's notice, to the police court at Frizinghall, to be charged on suspicion, and searched accordingly.
While Sergeant Cuff still left me free, I had to choose--and at once--between destroying the nightgown, or hiding it in some safe place, at some safe distance from the house.
