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"I seized the Sergeant by the collar of his coat, and pinned him again."
Harper & Bros. house illustrators
Wood engraving
17.4 x 11.5 cm
Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone: A Romance in Harper's Weekly, Part Ten (7 March 1868), page 149. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Illustrations courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.
"That's a wonderful woman," said Sergeant Cuff, when we were out in the hall again. "But for her self-control, the mystery that puzzles you, Mr. Betteredge, would have been at an end to-night."
At those words, the truth rushed at last into my stupid old head. For the moment, I suppose I must have gone clean out of my senses.
"Damn you!" I cried out, "there's something wrong about Miss Rachel — and you have been hiding it from me all this time!"
Sergeant Cuff looked up at me — flat against the wall — without stirring a hand, or moving a muscle of his melancholy face.
"Ah," he said, "you've guessed it at last."
My hand dropped from his collar, and my head sunk on my breast. Please to remember, as some excuse for my breaking out as I did, that I had served the family for fifty years. Miss Rachel had climbed upon my knees, and pulled my whiskers, many and many a time when she was a child. Miss Rachel, with all her faults, had been, to my mind, the dearest and prettiest and best young mistress that ever an old servant waited on, and loved. I begged Sergeant's Cuff's pardon, but I am afraid I did it with watery eyes, and not in a very becoming way. — "First Period: The Loss of the Diamond (1848), The Events related by Gabriel Betteredge, house-steward in the service of Julia, Lady Verinder," Chapter 16, p. 149.
What a contrast between the short, balding old steward in livery, animated by fierce loyalty to the Verinders, and the phlegmatic, lanky, lantern-jawed police detective in complete control of his emotions, observing his assailant dispassionately. But "phlegmatic" he is only in appearance, for, although calm and apparently unconcerned, Sergeant Cuff observes every subtle expression, every seemingly insignificant gesture as he builds his case. Although the illustration does not quite capture his attitude, he admires Betteredge's devotion to his mistress and her daughter, even though (at least in the case of Rachel Verinder) he feels that it is somewhat misplaced as his construction of the crime is that the apparent victim is in fact the thief.
The scene is the hallway outside Lady Julia's sitting-room where she has just revealed to Cuff that her daughter intends to leave for Frizinghall tomorrow morning. For whatever reason, Cuff has persuaded her to defer the journey until 2:00 P. M. Because the narrator is the butler, we know what he thinks and feels, but we are not privy to the Sergeant's thoughts, so that the illustrator has given him an impassive expression that betrays nothing about what is going on in his mind. Although, as Steve Farmer points out in his introduction to the novel, Cuff is a thorough profession, a foil to the bumbling, officious Superintendent Seegrave, whom Cuff has superseded on the case. "Like many fictional detectives who have followed him, then, Cuff is a man whose appearance belies his choice of profession, and we may note also that his physique, his hatchet face, even his steely and expectant eyes remind a modern reader that Conan Doyle's famed detective Sherlock Holmes owes him a debt" (16). The portrait captures his diligence and calmness rather than his idiosyncratic nature, which manifests itself frequently when the topic is roses. This eccentricity disguises a sharp, observant mind, but also serves to humanize him — to the point of making him a figure of fun. However, as the illustrator correctly surmises, he is deadly serious here as he assesses Rachel's sudden decision to pay a visit to her aunt's in the nearby town.
However, Sergeant Cuff's principal foil is not Superintendent Seegrave but the faithful family retainer, Gabriel Betteredge, and nowhere is the difference between the two is more apparent (although it is evident from Cuff's arrival that the pair offer contrasting perceptions of the servants and family) and more sharply drawn than in this scene:
In the novel's extended portrait of Gabriel Betteredge, for example, readers get a real sense that the Verinders' faithful old steward has made them privy to the inner workings of a country estate in the mid-nineteenth century. The details that Collins was so careful to have Betteredge provide throughout the old man's narrative — the longest in the novel — offer a far richer and far less sentimentalized view of such a world than any we see in Collins's contemporaries with the possible exception of Trollope. — Farmer, 19.
Last updated 23 November 2016