"The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the footmark, without saying a word."
F. A. Fraser
Wood engraving
14 x 8.8 cm
Fifth illustration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance in the Chatto and Windus Edition (1890), facing p. 144.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Send me one of Rosanna Spearman's boots, and be quick about it."
I despatched the first woman-servant I could find to Rosanna's room; and I sent the boy back to say that I myself would follow him with the boot.
This, I am well aware, was not the quickest way to take of obeying the directions which I had received. But I was resolved to see for myself what new mystification was going on before I trusted Rosanna's boot in the Sergeant's hands. My old notion of screening the girl, if I could, seemed to have come back on me again, at the eleventh hour. This state of feeling (to say nothing of the detective-fever) hurried me off, as soon as I had got the boot, at the nearest approach to a run which a man turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.
As I got near the shore, the clouds gathered black, and the rain came down, drifting in great white sheets of water before the wind. I heard the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank at the mouth of the bay. A little further on, I passed the boy crouching for shelter under the lee of the sand hills. Then I saw the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like a flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach with one solitary black figure standing on it— the figureof Sergeant Cuff.
He waved his hand towards the north, when he first saw me. "Keep on that side!" he shouted. "And come on down here to me!"
I went down to him, choking for breath, with my heart leaping as if it was like to leap out of me. I was past speaking. I had a hundred questions to put to him; and not one of them would pass my lips. His face frightened me. I saw a look in his eyes which was a look of horror. He snatched the boot out of my hand, and set it in a footmark on the sand, bearing south from us as we stood, and pointing straight towards the rocky ledge called the South Spit. The mark was not yet blurred out by the rain— and the girl's boot fitted it to a hair.
The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the footmark, without saying a word.
I caught at his arm, and tried to speak to him, and failed as I had failed when I tried before. He went on, following the footsteps down and down to where the rocks and the sand joined. The South Spit was just awash with the flowing tide; the waters heaved over the hidden face of the Shivering Sand. Now this way and now that, with an obstinate patience that was dreadful to see, Sergeant Cuff tried the boot in the footsteps, and always found it pointing the same way — straighttothe rocks. Hunt as he might, no sign could he find anywhere of the footsteps walking from them. — "First Period: The Loss of the Diamond (1848)," Chapter 19, p.144-145.
The Shivering Sand has claimed the life of Rosanna Spearman, and the Moonstone's curse has claimed another victim. The nineteenth chapter follows up the suspense-building curtain at the end of the previous chapter, when Cuff tells Betteredge he believes that the hiding place is noted in a letter that Rosanna asked the butcher's delivery man to mail at Frizinghall, a letter directed to the Yollands at nearby Cobb's hole, thereby delaying the delivery of the letter for a few crucial days. During which time, Rosanna has "disappeared" — in fact, she has committed suicide, as the investigation at the beginning of Chapter 19 reveals, and as the illustrations at the seashore suggest.
Receiving a note from the Sergeant to procure one of Rosanna's boots from her room, Betteredge, despite his advanced age of seventy, makes his way with the boot to meet Cuff at the seashore, adjacent to the South Spit and the Shivering Sand. The look of "horror" that Betteredge sees on Cuff's face confirms the reader's suspicion that Rosanna Spearman has committed suicide, providing a considerable complication for the Sergeant's investigation. Cuff's initial construction of the bootprints is that Rosanna has met with a "fatal accident" in approaching the place where she has hidden the metal box she bought from Mrs. Yolland. For all his obtuseness, Betteredge has rightly concluded that Rosanna has done away with herself, drawn to the Shivering Sand by a morbid obsession. The key image from the weekly instalment in Harper's Weekly depicts the men-servants from the Verinder estate and Mrs. Yolland's husband, the fisherman (indicated by his sou'wester and position of prominence in the composition, immediately opposite the dripping wet Sergeant and steward) running onto the beach and Cuff's preparing to show them Rosanna's bootprints he explains what he still describes as "a fatal accident" — "In the fewest words the Sergeant showed them the evidence of the foot marks" (14 March 1868). Since Yolland confirms that she cannot have left the shore by boat, the only reasonable explanation is that she has disappeared into the Shivering Sand. Subsequently, at the close of the chapter, Betteredge receives a final note from Rosanna by way of his daughter, Penelope, confirming that she has taken her own life — and the kindly, old steward accuses Cuff of having hounded her into her watery grave.
Left: The American serial's depiction of the scene on the beach near the Shivering Sand as estate workers and Yolland confront Cuff and Betteredge, "In the fewest words the Sergeant showed them the evidence of the foot marks." (14 March 1868, p. 165). Right: John Sloan's depiction of the visit by Cuff and Betteredge to Mrs. Yolland at Cobb's Hole, Weigh it in your hand, sir,' she said to the Sergeant. (1908) [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone: A Romance. with sixty-six illustrations. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Vol. 12 (1868), 4 January through 8 August, pp. 5-503.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone: A Romance. All the Year Round. 1 January-8 August 1868.
_________. The Moonstone: A Novel. With 19 illustrations. Second edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1874.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by George Du Maurier and F. A. Fraser. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890.
_________. The Moonstone. With 19 illustrations. The Works of Wilkie Collins. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1900. Volumes 6 and 7.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. With four illustrations by John Sloan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. Illustrated by A. S. Pearse. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1910, rpt. 1930.
_________. The Moonstone: A Romance. With nine illustrations by Edwin La Dell. London: Folio Society, 1951.
Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge. "The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the Illustrated Serial in Harper's Weekly." Victorian Periodicals Review Volume 42, Number 3 (Fall 2009): pp. 207-243. Accessed 1 July 2016. http://englishnovel2.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2014/01/42.3.leighton-moonstone-serializatation.pdf
Lonoff, Sue. Chapter 7: "The Moonstone and Its Audience." Wilkie Collins and His Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship. New York: AMS Studies in the Nineteenth Century, 1982. Pp. 170-227.
Nayder, Lillian. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, & Victorian Authorship. London and Ithaca, NY: Cornll U. P., 2001.
Peters, Catherine. The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Minerva, 1991.
Reed, John R. "English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged crime of The Moonstone. Clio 2, 3 (June, 1973): 281-290.
Robinson, Kenneth. "Chapter 12: 'The Moonstone'." Wilkie Collins: A Biography London: The Bodley Head, 1951. Pp. 200-224.
Stewart, J. I. M. "A Note on Sources." Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, rpt. 1973. Pp. 527-8.
Vann, J. Don. "The Moonstone in All the Year Round, 4 January-8 1868." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Pp. 48-50.
Last updated 2 September 2016
