Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Chapter 25 - 30
The king and the duke win over the confidence of their nieces and the townspeople with a sickening display of being distraught. The king interacts with the townspeople using the information from the man he had met earlier and attempts to gather more knowledge about the town. The duke makes gibberish sounds and random signs with his hand while talking to the king. Mary Jane, the eldest daughter of John Wilks, hands her father’s will to the King who reads it aloud. The will bestows a sum of six thousand dollars to the brothers, and the King goes with Huck and the duke to retrieve the sum. They find the sum to be a little short of the promised amount which leads them to add the deficit sum from their own pockets to avoid suspicions. The king then gives the amount to John Wilks’s daughters in front of the townspeople with the claim that his brother would have wanted them to do so.
This union is interrupted with the arrival of Doctor Robinson who calls out the conmen for their fraudulent ways given his assessment of the king’s poor English accent and the duke’s laughable attempts at sign language. The nieces defend their fake uncles and publicly entrust the king with their money to invest in them as a symbol of their faith. The doctor leaves with a warning that the townspeople would soon realize their error. Huck has a conversation with one of the younger sisters in which he slips up in his acting as a valet for the king and duke, although Huck can come up with answers for all of the girl’s questions, she retains a suspicion. Mary Jane arrives to hear her accusing Huck of lying, and admonishes her for treating him poorly, and she is eventually joined by the other sister who enforces the same point. The erring sister apologizes to Huck, and the incident leaves him with a strong impression of Mary Jane's beauty as well as virtuous character. He decides that he cannot allow the sisters to be fooled by the conmen and so resolves to retrieve the money that they had entrusted to the king.
Huck sneaks into the king’s room and secretly observes the king’s conversation with the duke, in which he convinces the duke to carry on with the plot until they had auctioned off all the property of the dead man. The duke is reluctant as he does not wish to leave the sisters quite so destitute, but the king counters that the girls would eventually retrieve the property that they would auction off since they could not legally have sold the properties. Huck sees them hide the money and return downstairs. He quickly takes the bag of money and puts it in his room. He stays awake until all the noises in the house cease, and plans to hide the money somewhere so that he can write to the sisters later informing them of its location. He is prevented from leaving the house by locked doors and has to hide the money in the coffin as he nearly runs into Mary Jane. The duke and king convince the girls to sell off all their property so that they can return to England with them, and they willingly agree. The house slaves are the first to be sold, even before the auction, and the king cruelly separates the children from their parents by selling them to different slavers. This separation of the family causes quite an emotional reaction, and the neighbors begin to experience a little uneasiness. The morning after the departure of the slaves, the king and duke interrogate Huck to determine whether he had seen anyone enter the king’s room. Huck lies to them as he tells them that he had seen the slaves go into the room, and this causes both of the conmen a great shock as they note that the slaves had played a convincing act of sorrow. The duke complains that they would have been away from the town with that money if it hadn’t been for the king’s greed, and both of them leave to begin preparations for the auction.
Huck comes across a weeping Mary Jane, and he learns that she has been saddened by the separation of the family of slaves that they had owned. Huck attempts to placate her and he accidentally mentions that they would be reunited soon. She hangs onto his words and convinces him to reveal the truth to her. She is horrified to learn that the king and duke have been duping her, and she is resolved to expose their treachery immediately but Huck convinces her to wait until that evening as he intends to find a more suitable method of ending their plot. He is ashamed of where the bag of money has been hidden but writes its location on a piece of paper that she can read while she is going to her friend’s home. He sends her away with the conviction that she would be unable to pretend now that she had learned the truth.
The auction proceeds well, and the king sends everything except a piece of land to the graveyard, but everything can be concluded as a great crowd descends from the steamboat. The crowd includes the real Wilkes brothers, one of whom has his arm in a sling, and their identity documents have been lost along with their luggage. The king and duke seem confident, but some members of the crowd begin to side with the new arrivals. A great number of the townspeople escort both sets of brothers to a tavern to discover the truth and Huck is taken along with them. Huck is interviewed, and he continues to lie about who he truly is, but his lies about England sound comical to a great number of the crowd. The crowd is unable to discover the real identity through the means of handwriting given the injury on William’s hand. The ‘true’ Harvey Wilks asks the king about the tattoo on the deceased man’s chest and the king comes up with a lie about it being a thin blue arrow.
The whole mob then goes to the graveyard and begins to exhume the body to discover the truth. Huck escapes from the crowd when they discover the bag of money and go wild with astonishment. As he is leaving, he notices the light in the window that indicated Mary Jane’s return and so he hurries to the raft. He finds Jim in his costume of King Lear that the duke had made him wear so that he wouldn’t have to be left tied up as a runaway slave. They attempt to get away as quickly as they can, but the duke and king soon catch up to them. The king threatens violence against Huck for leaving them alone, but Huck presents a fake story and the duke talks the king out of committing any serious harm. The two blame each other for stealing the money and depositing it in the coffin, but the duke manages to make the king admit that it had been him even though it hadn’t been him. The two men retreat to the wigwam and fall asleep, while Huck relates the rest of the tale to Jim.
Analysis
At the beginning of the sequence about John Wilks's death, Huck admits to feeling shame for the whole human race. He experiences this shame when the two con men convince the grieving family of their relationship with them through a tremendously accurate enactment of grief. However, the reader may then find himself confused as to why Huck continues to play along with their farce, and why he doesn’t choose to reveal the conmen’s secret to the family. This question can be answered by considering Huck’s actual status, which has often been compared to that of Jim, especially in how other people view and interact with both of them. Huck is an orphan child with only the support of a runaway slave, and he has little means to oppose the conmen who have already revealed the terrible extent of their villainy to Huck. This is why Huck’s eventual betrayal of the conmen is all the more poignant, as he chooses to place his immediate interests ahead of those of Mary Jane. The conmen, on the other hand, fall further in their moral decline, as they eventually threaten Huck with violence when he chooses to run away from the blood-thirsty crowd.
