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"Let me pour out the water."
Harper & Bros. house illustrators; unsigned.
Wood engraving
17.5 cm high by 11.6 cm wide
Second illustration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance in Harper's Weekly (25 July 1868), lower right, page 469. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Illustrations courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.
"I shall wait in my bedroom — just as I did before. I shall keep the door a little way open. It was a little way open last year. I will watch the sitting-room door; and the moment it moves, I will blow out my light. It all happened in that way, on my birthday night. And it must all happen again in the same way, musn't it?"
"Are you sure you can control yourself, Miss Verinder?"
"In his interests, I can do anything!" she answered fervently.
One look at her face told me that I could trust her. I addressed myself again to Mr. Bruff.
"I must trouble you to put your papers aside for a moment," I said.
"Oh, certainly!" He got up with a start — as if I had disturbed him at a particularly interesting place— and followed me to the medicine-chest. There, deprived of the breathless excitement incidental to the practice of his profession, he looked at Betteredge — and yawned wearily.
Miss Verinder joined me with a glass jug of cold water, which she had taken from a side-table. "Let me pour out the water," she whispered. "I must have a hand in it!"
I measured out the forty minims from the bottle, and poured the laudanum into a medicine glass. "Fill it till it is three parts full," I said, and handed the glass to Miss Verinder. I then directed Betteredge to lock up the medicine chest; informing him that I had done with it now. A look of unutterable relief overspread the old servant's countenance. He had evidently suspected me of a medical design on his young lady!
After adding the water as I had directed, Miss Verinder seized a moment — while Betteredge was locking the chest, and while Mr. Bruff was looking back to his papers— and slyly kissed the rim of the medicine glass. "When you give it to him," said the charming girl, "give it to him on that side!"
I took the piece of crystal which was to represent the Diamond from my pocket, and gave it to her.
"You must have a hand in this, too," I said. "You must put it where you put the Moonstone last year."
She led the way to the Indian cabinet, and put the mock Diamond into the drawer which the real Diamond had occupied on the birthday night. Mr. Bruff witnessed this proceeding, under protest, as he had witnessed everything else. But the strong dramatic interest which the experiment was now assuming, proved (to my great amusement) to be too much for Betteredge's capacity of self restraint. His hand trembled as he held the candle, and he whispered anxiously, "Are you sure, miss, it's the right drawer?" — "Fourth Narrative, extracted from the Journal of Ezra Jennings," p. 470, column 2.
Originally, Rachel Verinder was merely a spoiled, young aristocrat who flaunted a highly valuable gift, and then failed to protect it; now, just a year later, she is depicted as the equal (or nearly equal) of a senior group of men entrusted with restoring the reputation and personal honour of Franklin Blake, and vindicating her remaining in love with him. This reflex action "bookending" the novel is reflected in the initial and final illustrations in the American serial. Related to the initial theft of the Moonstone and Herncastle's murdering its guardians in the initial illustrations ia the discovery of the Indians' having murdered Abelwhite and regained possession of the stone for the Hindu deity of the moon in the final illustrations in the serial, giving the Harper's readers the sense of having come full circle in the narrative. Rachel had been an interesting adolescent with a wilful streak in the opening chapters; under the stress of the loss of the diamond (and the knowledge that the supposed culprit was the young man she loves) she had becomes a highly complex character with conflicting motivations; now, she joins the male investigators whom she had initially stonewalled, and assists in solving the mystery of the first stage of the Moonstone's disappearance. And while over the course of the narrative Collins has shown the publicly virtuous Godfrey Ablewhite to be a mere "whited sepulchre," the teenaged aristocrat grows in character, her love for Blake a gem of rarest price.
The figures in the illustration are well-known to the reader by this penultimate stage of the narrative: to the left, Rachel Verinder, dressed in a light-coloured dress, pouring the water; centre, the mixed-race physician, Ezra Jennings, with streaked hair, measuring out the proportion of laudanum in a calibrated spoon; and acting as observers the Verinder family attorney, Mr. Bruff (left of centre), and the steward of the Verinder estate, Gabriel Betteredge (right). On the same, complementing this scientific and psychological experiment is the figure of a man in a dressing-gown in the headnote vignette for Part Thirty. The thumbnail wood-engraving, placed in a position of prominence, sets up expectations in the reader that only the text itself can fulfill. It describes Franklin Blake's sleepwalking under the influence of the slightly enlarged dose of laudanum administered by Ezra Jennings, but does not show his opening the cabinet to move the Moonstone. The two illustrations for July 25 (rather than the customary three) contain a gap or an ellipsis and are arrayed in reverse chronological order. In other words, the illustrators show the result of Blake's taking the drug before they show the group mixing the drug in proper proportions in water, leaving the reader to fill in the blank, the critical scene in which Blake opens the cabinet and takes the Diamond. Thus, the illustrations complement the text but do not pre-empt it, and compel the readers to find out for themselves (and picture in the mind's eye) the highly dramatic scene in Rachel's sitting-room that ends the instalment.
The "measuring" scene, by the way, was chosen as the frontispiece for the July 1868 single-volume edition of The Moonstone: A Romance published by Harper and Brothers, New York, the first illustrated volume edition of the novel.
Left: F. A. Fraser's realisation of Franklin Blake's taking the substitute Moonstone under the influence of laudanum, "He took the mock Diamond out with his right hand." (1890). Centre: Alfred Rearse's recapitulation of the 1890 illustration, "He took the Diamond." (1910). Right: William Sharp's illustration of the reconstructed crime-scene, Franklin Blake sleepwalking (uncaptioned, 1944). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Last updated 21 August 2016