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Passage Illustrated

About two years before the time of which I am now writing, and about a year and a half before the time of his death, the Colonel came unexpectedly to my lady's house in London. It was the night of Miss Rachel's birthday, the twenty-first of June; and there was a party in honour of it, as usual. I received a message from the footman to say that a gentleman wanted to see me. Going up into the hall, there I found the Colonel, wasted, and worn, and old, and shabby, and as wild and as wicked as ever.

"Go up to my sister," says he; "and say that I have called to wish my niece many happy returns of the day."

​He had made attempts by letter, more than once already, to be reconciled with my lady, for no other purpose, I am firmly persuaded, than to annoy her. But this was the first time he had actually come to the house. I had it on the tip of my tongue to say that my mistress had a party that night. But the devilish look of him daunted me. I went up-stairs with his message, and left him, by his own desire, waiting in the hall. The servants stood staring at him, at a distance, as if he was a walking engine of destruction, loaded with powder and shot, and likely to go off among them at a moment's notice.

My lady had a dash — no more — of the family temper. "Tell Colonel Herncastle," she said, when I gave her her brother's message, "that Miss Verinder is engaged, and that I decline to see him." I tried to plead for a civiller answer than that; knowing the Colonel's constitutional superiority to the restraints which govern gentlemen in general. Quite useless! The family temper flashed out at me directly. "When I want your advice," says my lady, "you know that I always ask for it. I don't ask for it now." I went downstairs with the message, of which I took the liberty of presenting a new and amended edition of my own contriving, as follows: "My lady and Miss Rachel regret that they are engaged, Colonel; and beg to be excused having the honour of seeing you."

I expected him to break out, even at that polite way of putting it. To my surprise he did nothing of the sort; he alarmed me by taking the thing with an unnatural quiet. His eyes, of a glittering bright grey, just settled on me for a moment; and he laughed, not out of himself, like other people, but into​ himself, in a soft, chuckling, horridly mischievous way. "Thank you, Betteredge," he said. "I shall remember my niece's birthday." With that, he turned on his heel, and walked out of the house.​— Chapter 5, p. 22.

The Honourable John, "one of the greatest blackguards that ever lived" (Chapter 5)

Although Betteredge describes Colonel Herncastle in the 1846 flashback as "wasted, and worn, and old, and shabby, and as wild and as wicked as ever," the American illustrator has the difficult task of making this shadow of his former self still resemble the twenty-year-old officer of the siege of Seringapatam as seen in the illustration for the first instalment, "The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!" (4 January 1868, p. 4). The second figure, that of Gabriel Betteredge, the Verinder family retainer, poses no such problem in continuity because we have just been introduced to him in "What's wrong now, Nancy?", The headnote vignette for this second instalment (11 January 1868). A "notorious opium-eater," John Herncastle has proven a traitor to his class, consorting with "the lowest people in the lowest slums of London," carousing and smoking opium in the kinds of dives that Dickens was to describe as the haunts of John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood two years later. All of this self-abuse and self-medication for a guilty conscience (assuming he has one) must surely have taken its toll on the once manly form of the vigorous and determined ex-military man, whose face, although still "handsome" should have a strange cast, as if its owner is "possessed by the devil." Having sinned against the tenets of Christianity as well as the Hindu Moon god, since returning to England Herncastle has gone to the Devil since mustering out as a lieutenant-colonel. But now, suddenly, after years of social rejection, not permitted in the clubs of "gentlemen" and not accepted romantically by any woman of his own class, John Herncastle is determined to accepted by his own family at least as he approaches his final years.

So what lineaments in this portrait of a scoundrel does one see that betrays in him the vestiges of the imperial conqueror of the second illustration of the first instalment? He is still, as has been remarked of Collins's Count Fosco, a demon in human shape, so that the blighting influence of the stolen jewel should be evident in Herncastle's face. Against the genial common sense and conciliatory demeanour of Gabriel Betteredge the illustrator juxtaposes the inflexible pride of the retired officer whose crime in youth begets further crimes after his death. Like Rosanna Spearman, against whose image Herncastle's appears in this third instalment, the Honourable John has been forced by his initial sin to become secretive, solitary, and mistrusting. Here is a man of advancing middle age who has retained his youthful figure. However, his shaggy hair is thinning and his beard, though still black, is unruly. His topcoat and lace at his throat are stylish, but his face seems permantly sunburnt, as if he bears the mark of Cain for the murders of the Brahmins. He listen attentively, his hands behind his back, as Betteredge announces that Lady Julia Verinder is indisposed – indeed, he does not seem either angry or surprised as he stares relentlessly into the steward's face.

As a footnote one might add that, although he wrote approving of the illustrations, Collins felt that as both butler and steward Betteredge should not have been shown in livery, but rather as a gentleman's gentleman. In the 1890 Chatto and Windus edition, F. A. Fraser depicts Betteredge accoutered correctly in "One of these days (please God) I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses" in "The Loss of the Diamond," Chapter 12.

Related Materials

• The Moonstone and British India (1857, 1868, and 1876)
• Detection and Disruption inside and outside the 'quiet English home' in The Moonstone
• Illustrations by F. A. Fraser for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance (1890)
• Illustrations by John Sloan for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance (1908)
• 1910 illustrations by Alfred Pearse for The Moonstone
• The 1944 Illustrations by William Sharp for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1946)

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Last updated 8 August 2016