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As those words were whispered to me, the plaintive music ceased. The three men prostrated themselves on the rock, before the curtain which hid the shrine. They rose--they looked on one another--they embraced. Then they descended separately among the people. The people made way for them in dead silence. In three different directions I saw the crowd part, at one and the same moment. Slowly the grand white mass of the people closed together again. The track of the doomed men through the ranks of their fellow mortals was obliterated. We saw them no more.

A new strain of music, loud and jubilant, rose from the hidden shrine. The crowd around me shuddered, and pressed together.

The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine was disclosed to view.

There, raised high on a throne--seated on his typical antelope, with his four arms stretching towards the four corners of the earth--there, soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom of a woman's dress!

Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild native land--by what accident, or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight of it for ever.

So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell?

________

Go to Start

MISS OR MRS.?

by Wilkie Collins

Persons of The Story | First Scene | Second Scene | Third Scene | Fourth Scene | Fifth Scene | Sixth Scene | Seventh Scene | Eighth Scene | Ninth Scene | Tenth Scene | Eleventh Scene | Twelfth Scene | Documentary Hints, In Conclusion

PERSONS OF THE STORY.

Sir Joseph Graybrooke. . . . . . . . . .(Knight)

Richard Turlington . . . . (Of the Levant Trade)

Launcelot Linzie . .(Of the College of Surgeons)

James Dicas. . . . . .(Of the Roll of Attorneys)

Thomas Wildfang. . . . . .(Superannuated Seaman)

Miss Graybrooke. . . . . . (Sir Joseph's Sister)

Natalie. . . . . . . . . (Sir Joseph's Daughter)

Lady Winwood . . . . . . . .(Sir Joseph's Niece)

Amelia} Sophia}. (Lady Winwood's Stepdaughter's) and Dorothea}

Period: THE PRESENT TIME. Place: ENGLAND.

FIRST SCENE

At Sea.

The night had come to an end. The new-born day waited for its quickening light in the silence that is never known on land--the silence before sunrise, in a calm at sea.

Not a breath came from the dead air. Not a ripple stirred on the motionless water. Nothing changed but the softly-growing light; nothing moved but the lazy mist, curling up to meet the sun, its master, on the eastward sea. By fine gradations, the airy veil of morning thinned in substance as it rose--thinned, till there dawned through it in the first rays of sunlight the tall white sails of a Schooner Yacht.

From stem to stern silence possessed the vessel--as silence possessed the sea.

But one living creature was on deck--the man at the helm, dozing peaceably with his arm over the useless tiller. Minute by minute the light grew, and the heat grew with it; and still the helmsman slumbered, the heavy sails hung noiseless, the quiet water lay sleeping against the vessel's sides. The whole orb of the sun was visible above the water-line, when the first sound pierced its way through the morning silence. From far off over the shining white ocean, the cry of a sea-bird reached the yacht on a sudden out of the last airy circles of the waning mist.

The sleeper at the helm woke; looked up at the idle sails, and yawned in sympathy with them; looked out at the sea on either side of him, and shook his head obstinately at the superior obstinacy of the calm.

"Blow,