William Le Queux (continued 4)

“Then you mean actually to walk off to the railway station with all the Worcester police on the alert and to take the next express up to town?” I questioned. “You think we shall escape without any trouble!”

“Of course I do. Is it not race time, and is not the city full of strangers? Besides, you seem to have forgotten the most important thing of all. I have these manuscripts in my possession, and Camille Velasquon has brought the key to them all the way from Mexico. Now all we have got to do is to compare the two—and then?”

He stopped and looked straight at me, as we stood with the ruins silhouetted against the old cathedral chapter-house. My gaze met his.

“And then?” I repeated; and I stopped, and instinctively my hands clenched.

“I will do what is right to England, Glynn,” he cried in tones of intense emotion, stretching out his hands to me. “Good heavens, man! don’t stare at me like that! I’m a creature of flesh and blood like yourself. I have feelings and a sense of honour just as you have. I have not gone into this business simply to feather my own nest. I have not fought my father—Fotheringay—Cuthbertson—I have not besought powerful assistance, such as Cooper-Nassington’s, to sell this country to some Continental enemies—no.”

“I take your word—I believe you have not,” I replied slowly. “The point is whether the Order of St. Bruno has, for it seems to me that they are the principals in this treasure hunt and not yourself.”

“Well, come with me and see,” replied Casteno, averting his eyes. “I have pledged myself, but you will not take my word. You doubt—you hint—you mistrust me.”

“I do,” I gasped. “I can’t help it.”

“Then, come.” And without another word he turned away, and, seizing the ivy that grew in rich profusion on both sides of the wall, he climbed up by this support, closely followed by myself. The drop on the far side was only a matter of some ten feet, and, aided by similar branches, we passed into the playground again, and soon found ourselves heading for the chief station in Worcester—Shrub Hill.

As Casteno, however, had predicted, we found the streets thronged with all manner of queer characters hastening to or from the races, and we managed to secure places in a “race special,” which was timed to run to Paddington with only four stops on the road. There were, we saw for ourselves, plenty of detectives in the station, and they had evidently got wind of us and our flight, for every wretched soldier who swaggered into the building was stopped and cross-examined, and we actually saw two poor privates in the engineer uniform, who had had a little beer, and were inclined to be cheeky and not to answer questions, bundled into a cab and driven off to the city police station.

Punctually, however, at the time appointed the train left with us. As it happened, by judicious tips we secured not only a first-class carriage to ourselves but copies of the London papers, which we had failed to get in Shrewsbury before we had to hurry off to the fête to look after our seats in the air-ship.

José, plainly, was fagged out, and no sooner did the train move off than he stretched himself across the seat and composed himself for a nap. I, however, was strung up to the highest pitch of excitement, not by the perils we had just passed through, but by the prospect of getting to the heart of the mysteries of that most mysterious Order of St. Bruno, which had all the ways and uniforms of regular monks without their recognised symbolism. Indeed, I had not forgotten what my guide said when I had walked across the courtyard of their house at Chantry Road, Hampstead—“We are neither Roman Catholics nor Anglicans”—and yet if they did not belong to one or other of these two persuasions to which sect did they belong, and what was the object of their banding together, with houses in Delhi, Sydney, London, and Mexico? And why, as José pretended, should they have any patriotic notions for England in preference to Spain—or France, or Russia, or Mexico for that matter? If the manuscripts really belonged to them, as the Spaniard declared, why didn’t they desire to get them, to keep them, and to recover the Lake of Sacred Treasure for themselves?

Try as I would, I could not, as the train rattled through the fragrant orchards and hopfields of Worcestershire, bring myself to believe that my companion had told me the whole of the truth about this mysterious Order and the part it played in the life of our times. Like most private investigators I had grown to realise that “’tis not the habit that bespeaks the monk,” and that often under the most simple and impressive guises there lurked secret forces that meant treachery and villainy of the worst description.

“One thing I do promise myself,” I thought to myself rather firmly, “I will not rest whilst I am at St. Bruno’s until I have got to know all about these mysterious people—all. Señor Casteno may try as he will to put me off with explanations that only leave things more difficult and puzzling and hard to understand, but this time I will stand my ground. I will be the spy on this occasion, and if I find the Spaniard or his friends in the Order up to any mischief I will not hesitate a second—I will strike for England, cost what it will.”

Sinking back, I took up one of the papers I had purchased, and began to glance carelessly down its columns. I had not forgotten that these news sheets might contain some further news about that discovery of a murdered man in the Napiers’ flat, but seeing that I had had a Sunday special edition of a London paper I was not expecting to learn anything really new just then about the tragedy that had stricken the West End with a sense of painful impotence and danger; I felt the police and the press had not had sufficient time.

Nevertheless, something fresh had been discovered by one of the most enterprising of the younger papers—the Daily Graphic—which, unlike its contemporaries, did not reprint the old story about a man unknown being found stabbed to the heart in the colonel’s bed, but boldly ventured forth into big type with this extraordinary statement:

THE MYSTERY AT WHITEHALL

IDENTITY OF THE DEAD MAN

“The man who was found murdered in Colonel Napier’s flat in Embankment Mansions has been identified by an official of the Foreign Office from a description and photograph that were hurriedly circulated by Scotland Yard last night. The victim is no other than a gentleman occupying a responsible position in the Treaty Department of the Foreign Office, and the papers found in his desk tend to show that the crime was the work of some secret society which has its headquarters in London, and which had decreed his end because he, as a member, was supposed to have communicated some of its secrets to Lord Cyril Cuthbertson, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs. How he came to be in Colonel Napier’s flat—and bed—remains, however, to be explained. He certainly bears an extraordinary resemblance to the missing colonel.”

By this time the day had begun to close in. The sun had sunk, leaving, as it sometimes does, even in the height of an English summer, the sky grey with mystery and suggestion of on-coming disaster. The paper itself slipped from my fingers as I dropped back into my seat and let my eyes wander over the landscape that, all of a sudden, seemed to have taken on itself the colour of my own thoughts, which were now troubled and perplexed with a dozen doubts and emotions which ever evaded me but none the less filled me with unrest and pain.

With an effort I recovered myself and looked curiously at José Casteno. He had curled himself up in an attitude that struck me as being too strained and unnatural to be comfortable, but, to all appearances, he was sleeping gently like an over-tired child. Strangely enough, it was the first time that I had seen his features in such absolute repose, and I caught myself examining each one of them with that careful minuteness and patience a geologist may bestow on a half-identified specimen—the lines at the corners of his mouth, the shape and setting of his chin, the high yet thin cheek-bones, the curl of the nostrils, and those hollow jaws of his, that seemed to be accentuated by curves of baleful but elusive significance. I had lived quite long enough, and had suffered disillusion sufficient, not to make the error into which fall so many earnest amateur disciples of Lavater, to pin my faith on any one of these features. In imagination I tried to add each point of elucidation to another, so that I might arrive at a just estimate of the true balance of his vices and virtues, for, believe me, no man is without some vice held in abeyance or left to flourish in riotous luxuriance.

On the whole, I realised that the head, large and powerful as it was, had qualities that might make for the highest intelligence and ambition, but now the face seemed weighed down with anxiety and grief of mind, and in its present expression there was just a touch of remorse, or was it some hidden consciousness of guilt? Keen observers who have lived much in solitude, and have not been perplexed by the sight of too many strange, eager, and passionate faces, say that every human being’s countenance resembles in some degree some animal’s. I tried to apply this rough-and-ready method of mental measurement to the Spaniard, fettered as I was by the fact that those two great glowing eyes of his, like twin black lamps that flashed so often with suppressed fire, were closed, and could not, therefore, give me any clue. Somehow I caught the impression of a panther, forest bred, highly strung, but held in leash by some strong sentiment: was it love for Camille Velasquon?

All the warnings I had had against this man, the impassioned appeal Doris had made to me when she released me from the hunchback’s, the hot scorn poured on my championship by old Zouche himself—the man’s father, be it remembered—even Fotheringay’s appeal to me to cease my association with him, lest worse befall me—all these things started up to bear witness against him. These had no reference to the tragic sequence of events—concrete things that had followed my engagement to him and had culminated in this mystery in Whitehall Court with the cruel slaying of an unnamed official of the Foreign Office by some secret brotherhood, which, as likely as not, might be the very order of St. Bruno, to whose headquarters I was hastening without a thought of my own safety or freedom.

Could I, therefore, trust him? Was I discreet to rely on him when great stakes, not only mine but England’s, hung in the balance?

On and on sped the train through hamlet, village and township. The twilight faded slowly into night, and as the gas lamps above my head flamed coarsely upward a terrible temptation assailed me and kept knocking on the doors of my brain in form something like this:

1. Why be a merely passive instrument in this great struggle between nations and persons for this Lake of Sacred Treasure?

2. Casteno stole the documents from the hunchback as he lay in the tent at Worcester senseless; why don’t you take them from Casteno now he is senseless? Then you would be quite certain England would get her just rights.

3. You need not fear what the Spaniard might say or do to you if he caught you in the act. After all, you have got those clever imitations of the real thing which the hunchback and Paul Zouche prepared, and at a pinch you could substitute for the true manuscripts the false, and get clear away from St. Bruno’s to the protection of the Foreign Office before the fraud were discovered.

Everybody is a potential scoundrel in some great crisis of his career. “Opportunity makes the thief,” says one old school of cynics; and I was, I admit, sore beset to do this deed, with some excuse for my own conscience that after all it was but the doing of a patriot and that it had the sanction of a sacred national need.

But as I toyed with the temptation compromise came and sat beside me and told me that, if I didn’t do the trick then, I could do it some other moment, when I was the more convinced of Casteno’s mala fides. Fate also took a hand in the struggle between conscience and duty and a sense of honour.

Chapter Eighteen.

London Again.

Suddenly Casteno roused himself and sat upright, and with him went quite irrevocably all opportunity of taking the three fatal manuscripts from him by stealth during that journey up to Paddington. For his hunger was infectious and the meal he had provided excellent, and so it came about that in quite a few moments the pair of us were devouring roast chicken and ham and pledging each other in glasses of quite passable railway-station claret. Indeed, the tedium of the ride vanished like magic, and before we had finished the commonplaces of conversation we found ourselves back again in dear old smoke-begrimed London. That night we slept at Paddington Hotel, for we had had an exciting day, and did not feel inclined for a further journey to Stanton Street. Whence next day Chantry Road, Hampstead, was reached in an incredibly short time, and once again I found myself standing at the tiny door in the wall with its suggestive peep-hole. Only this time there seemed to be no delay in answering our summons, and we passed with great rapidity from the public street into the courtyard that shut the home of St. Bruno’s off the porter’s box at the entrance, and then we made our way, without any black-robed guide, to the huge hall with its great flower-decked statue of a woman, heroic in size but incommunicably fair.

Somehow I was conscious that our arrival had caused quite a thrill of excitement through the community, even in the various offices of the house itself. As Casteno and I stood there and waited for the prior, for whom he had asked immediately we had crossed the threshold, various figures of men and youths of various ages flitted in and out on obvious and childish pretexts to snatch the opportunity of a whispered word or handshake with my companion, who seemed to me a most popular personage, and whose return now began to take the form of a kind of triumphal progress. All these visitors, however, wore the same habit, and all had the same peculiar way of looking at one, like the members of some brotherhood that held the same tie very closely in common, and by practice and method had grown to resemble each other more nearly than do many members of the same families in our great, cheating, bustling world outside.

What could these monks be?

In vain I looked about the hall in the hope that it would give some clue to their practice or their faith. I could discover nothing to help me more than one would find in the refectory of some large public college except this same beautiful statue I have spoken of, with its floral offerings and candles. All the same, the expression on this sculptured woman’s face was not one of benignity or of sweetness at all but of a remote passionless beauty for beauty’s sake, as it were—something that had been wrought without any ethical ideal behind it or hope of moral change or influence in the beholder. Soon I decided quite finally that there was no religious tie at St. Bruno’s—none at all. Their secret of organisation was not, I was persuaded, one of a common faith or of devotion to a concrete and well-defined Church. They had some other bond which might be as strong as death, but it had nothing to do with the hereafter.

Now was that bond good or evil?

Abruptly I was aroused from my meditations by the arrival of the Prior, a powerful-looking, hooded figure in a robe of black, whose face at first was kept carefully concealed, but who wore around his neck one mark of distinction not possessed by his fellows—a thin chain of gold, at the end of which dangled a compass set around with some gold ornamentation, on which was inscribed a well-worn truism: “I point always to the north.”

“Welcome, Mr Glynn,” he said in a voice which somehow had a familiar ring in it but which I could not then recognise. “Our mutual friend, José Casteno, has kept us of St. Bruno’s well posted as to the earnest way in which you have laboured for the rightful recovery of the documents relating to the whereabouts of the Lake of Sacred Treasure in Tangikano, and I am glad to see you here—to thank you.”

I bowed, and in return murmured something conventional—that the pleasure was mutual. Inwardly I was assailed with one question: “Where had I heard that voice before?”

“You are, of course, quite a free agent,” the Prior proceeded, “and any moment you choose to leave or to set about other business you are at liberty to do so. Personally, however, I hope you will stay with us whilst we decipher these documents. You are, I understand, quite a palaeographic expert yourself, and it may well happen that your experience or your knowledge may prove of infinite value to us.”

“I am quite at your service,” I returned coldly.

“Indeed, the understanding between us is,” broke in José eagerly, “that he shall have our full confidence over this matter. I have promised him that we shall do nothing in the dark. Every step we take shall be accompanied by him.”

“Quite so, quite so,” exclaimed the Prior vaguely, but rather impatiently I thought. “But there is much to be done before we can say that anything wonderful will happen in regard to these discoveries. Now, Mr Glynn,” he said, turning to me as though he were anxious to bring an awkward development of the conversation to an end, “shall I show you your rooms?”

But I threw my shoulders back and stood my ground. I was not, I felt, a pawn on their chessboard, to be pushed forward as a mere gambit to cover other and more subtle forms of attack. “Excuse me, Prior,” I said firmly, “but have we not met before?”

The figure in front of me shook either with merriment or with annoyance, whilst José himself averted his face lest there I should discover too much.

“Yes,” he said, after a pause, in painfully noncommittal tones; “we have.”

“Where?” I queried.

“Can’t you recollect?”

“No; I can’t.”

“Think.”

“I have—I cannot.”

The man took a step forward and threw back his hood.

He was no other than the man whom Casteno had sent me that night to consult in the House of Commons—John Cooper-Nassington.

I started back amazed.

“You, Mr Cooper-Nassington!” I cried. “You here, in this office, and in this house! What on earth, then, can this Order of St. Bruno be?”

An awkward pause followed. We both stood and stared at each other, and neither of us spoke.

“Well, at all events,” said the Honourable Member, at length summoning up a faint smile to his lips, “you can see now for yourself that in this matter of the manuscripts England is quite safe. I shall do nothing—I shall tolerate nothing—that will hurt our mother country or her interests. On the contrary, all of us here are fighting for her, and will do so until our last breath. We may not have particular faith in unscrupulous office-seekers and popularity-mongers of the type of Lord Cyril Cuthbertson or that precious but exceedingly foolish ally of his, the Earl of Fotheringay, but we have faith in the righteousness of Britain’s claims and her needs. Hence we are going to see that, as this Lake of Sacred Treasure in Tangikano really belongs to her, it is not snapped from her by Spain, by the Jesuits, or by a lot of needy foreign adventurers who have begged, borrowed, and stolen all manner of concessions from the Mexican Republic, and who even to-day may have got wind of the existence of these documents and may be moving heaven and earth, and the diabolical powers under the earth, to get hold of them!”

“That may be so—no doubt it is so,” I returned doggedly—“but there has been too much foul play in this hidden treasure hunt, as witness that murder in Whitehall Court, to content me or to let me take as gospel everything you choose to tell me and to treat as wisdom everything you like to leave untold. I must insist on my rights as an individual in this matter before we go any further or any deeper into mutual obligations which later all of us may find it difficult to free ourselves from, however much we may desire to do so. To-day I am my own master—I can stay or I can go. My decision now will rest on one consideration alone. What is this Order of St. Bruno?”

“I cannot tell you,” said the Prior, and his strong face looked out at me without one shadow of hesitancy or fear.

“Casteno,” I went on, turning to the Spaniard, “you are in a different position to Mr Cooper-Nassington. You are not an officer of this sect, this institution, this organisation, this brotherhood. You are a plain member, free to speak or to hold your tongue. I ask you to remember your pledge to me—to reveal to me all that it is necessary for me to know in this business to satisfy my own conscience, and, remembering this, to tell me what tie binds these people together.”

“I cannot,” he answered, and clasped his hands.

“Why?” I demanded sternly, pointing an accusing finger at him. “Why do you refuse? If a man is a monk—a Dominican, a Franciscan, a Norbertine—ay, of any Order you like, even of one of the great silent, enclosed orders like the Trappists or the Cistercians—he does not hesitate to admit his kind and to explain under what rule he lives. Why should you people, here in the very heart of a busy modern city like London, not practise the same candour? Why should you cloak yourselves in mystery, in doubt, in veiled hints, in suspicion? Your reticence is not meaningless. You have some cause for it. What is the reason of it? Why won’t you tell me?”

“Because we are all alike bound by an oath,” he muttered, and he moved away from me as though the mere acknowledgment of that secret bond had set up a new barrier, an unseen gulf, between us. “We cannot tell anyone what we have in mind.”

“Still there is one way out of the difficulty,” put in the MP, speaking now with marked care and deliberation, “which, fortunately, rests with you whether it is acted upon. It is this: While it is quite true we cannot reveal the secrets of our existence to outsiders, no such bar rests against any communications or confidences between members themselves. Why, therefore, Glynn, don’t you apply yourself for admission to the Order of St. Bruno?”

“Impossible,” I cried. “I have no wish to join the Order.”

“Well,” said Cooper-Nassington, “I can’t pledge the Order, of course—I have no power to—but I am almost certain that they would take you in.”

“But for what purpose?” I demanded. “Don’t you see we are arguing in a circle and that we have arrived again at the point why the Order exists?”

“I do. But that can’t be helped. Will you join?”

“I don’t know,” I said lamely after a moment’s reflection. “Answer me one question before I decide, and answer it to me with the most solemn truth: Do all the candidates join you in as deep ignorance as I?”

“All,” cried José and the Prior in one breath. “That is the essence of our union—this appalling ignorance of what we commit ourselves to.”

“Then I’ll risk it,” I cried. “Propose me at once for initiation.”

“And you will stand the tests?” demanded the Prior, now drawing back and giving me a most searching look. “Remember, this is no child’s play—we are men with men’s purposes.”

“I will undergo any test,” I returned recklessly, for all at once I had seen that if I were to continue on the track of those three manuscripts I must stand by St. Bruno’s whether I wanted to or not. Hence, now I had got the chance of joining the society, I was resolved to let no foolish scruples stand in the way but to go into the thing heart and soul till the whole mystery of its existence stood clearly out.

The Prior and Casteno now drew together and conferred for a few minutes in whispers. Afterwards the Spaniard approached me as the MP hurried off, and said: “If you will go into an ante-room at the end of the passage the Order will be called together here and their pleasure about you instantly ascertained. If they decide to admit you your initiation will be proceeded with at once.” And thereon he conducted me to a small, barely-furnished waiting-room and, closing the door upon me, left me to my own reflections, which, now the critical moment had come, were, I regret to state, none of the most pleasant.

Nor was that feeling of apprehension removed when, about twenty minutes later, Casteno reappeared and told me that the Order had approved me and that I was about to become a St. Bruno-ite. All at once I realised that this initiation upon which I had decided to venture with so much foolhardy pluck might be a most serious business for me and for my future.

Chapter Nineteen.

Reveals the Secret of the Order.

There are, of course, many strange and weird methods used for the initiation of novices into secret societies. As the years have rolled on it has fallen to my lot to belong to a large number of these quaint organisations; and I have been always impressed by one fact about them—whether they were rowdy and very humanly convivial, or whether they were wholly serious and oppressed by a lot of ill-digested moral earnestness—they all aimed at one thing in their entrance ceremonies. They strove to impress the new-comer by all the resources they had at their command with the majestic wonder and glory and weight of the brotherhood to which he had been privileged to enter on the payment of the usual entrance fees.

Now sometimes, of course, these resources I have mentioned are purely ridiculous, as witness that noble and ancient Order which directs its initiates, when they are blindfold, to crawl step by step up a flight of stairs, only to fall with a splash from the top into an artfully-arranged tank of lukewarm water at the bottom. Also, there is a body of apparently sane men in existence who have come together in the sacred name of charity and who find the climax of artistic realism in the disguise of themselves in long white beards and cloaks and in a profound darkness, which leaves them free to play practical jokes of the most stupid description on the strangers within their gates.

On the other hand, by the use of waxen effigies and coffins and other symbols of the shortness of life, there are associations which try the nerves of the candidate in the most severe fashion.

I am no enemy of secret societies and no friend. Possibly, with two or three exceptions, they are none of them very much good either to the men who belong to them or to the cause they espouse. All these early tests are justified by one and the same plea—that they serve to reveal the real character of the man who comes before them for reception. So they do. But decent people find it hard to be heroic when they feel themselves thrown suddenly on their backs, and have a revolver pressed to their temples, and, in language of flowing periods that recall the noblest efforts of Burke and John B. Gough, are told they are traitors and spies and deserve to be blown into atoms!

One graceless scamp I knew subjected to this test jumped up unexpectedly and yelled blue murder, then let out his fist with a haste that surprised, and much pained, the apoplectic warden who was exhorting him to confession and repentance, and whose mouth never resumed its natural position after this truly lamentable occurrence. As a rule, though, candidates suffer these things according to their temperaments and the measure of their fortitude, and they receive the joy of their reward at the sight of, and part in the initiation of, their dearest and their best friends.

Personally, I was too old a hand at the entrance to a secret organisation to feel much trepidation when José came to me in that tiny waiting-room in the London quarters of the Order of St. Bruno and told me the decision of the brethren.

“After all,” I reasoned within myself, “in a few moments I shall know the best and worst about these quaintly-garbed people. It is useless to anticipate. So far as I know there is only one rule to guide a man at a moment like this, and that was given me by a man who had money and much leisure coupled with the mania to belong to all the secret societies in existence. He it was who said: ‘Whatever they ask you to do, do it; whatever they ask you to say, say it; whatever they ask you to believe, believe it.’ In one word, reverence is the true keynote to all these initiations, and possessed of this every man may go forward with confidence and good will, certain that by its use he will flatter his fellow-members and save himself a good deal of confusion and shamefacedness.”

Hence I arose immediately I was bidden and, signifying my willingness to proceed, followed the Spaniard down the corridor, which all at once had grown strangely silent and gloomy-looking, for the gas lights had now been lowered to a tiny blue glimmer, and as I moved forward I caught the sound of a low dirge-like chant that might well have passed for an Office of the Dead.

Now music at such a moment is a very curious and powerful agent. Indeed, I don’t know what some secret societies would do without it. Although I had quite made up my mind not to be impressed by this initiation but to keep every nerve and sense on the alert to see if treachery were afoot regarding that Lake of Sacred Treasure, I caught myself again and again giving way to a shiver. Indeed, now and then the sounds would break from a plain chant into a long, low mournful wail of anguish inexpressibly pitiful and sad, summoning at a note, as it were, all the grisly, ghostly spectres of the hearer’s dead and gone memories and making friends walk in imagination that had long since gathered their tired muscles together and stretched their weary limbs out in a last sleep from which no human hand should ever awaken them.

At length, with nerves strung up to a painful tension, I was led into a tiny vault-like cell, and the door suddenly closed upon me. At first, so abrupt was the change, that I could see nothing. But after a time my eyes managed to pierce the gloom, and through the half lights I saw in front of me an old monk seated at a table poring over a huge and musty volume.

For two or three minutes he took no notice of me at all. Then suddenly, when I least expected it, he looked up at me, and his expression was calm, benign, yet dignified.

“I understand,” he began in a rich, penetrating voice that had a wonderful melody in it, “that you have, for some selfish reason of your own, decided to seek election in our Order of St. Bruno. You are no stranger to secret societies or their methods, and you think it a cheap and an easy way to get at certain facts which you are anxious to possess.”

He stopped and gazed searchingly at me, as though he would read the deepest secret of my heart, and I flushed scarlet. I had not expected this form of address, and his charge threw my mind off its usual balance.

“Indeed, sir,” I broke out hotly, “I have done—I have suggested nothing of the sort.”

“Are you quite sure of that?” he returned softly, bending down and searching for something amongst his papers on the table. “Do you not deceive yourself rather than me? Have you not made a bit of a mistake in that contention? Just look at that a moment, and study what you see there, and tell me whether my surmise is not really correct.” He handed me a small silver casket about ten inches square, and as I pulled open the lid a light suddenly flashed in the depths of the box, and I caught the reflection of my own features in the mirror that had been artfully concealed at the bottom. For a second—but only for a second—I was inclined to be very angry, very angry indeed. Then I checked myself. Why, after all, should I fall into that very common error and get enraged with the truth?

“You are quite right,” I said, suddenly closing up the casket and passing this portable mirror back to him. “I have decided to join you for the cause you have told me. I am sorry if it is likely to give you or the other members of the Order any annoyance, but remember, my face has spoken where I have been silent and revealed the truth to you—”

“And as a matter of fact,” he interposed gently, “you are no worse and no better than nine-tenths of the men we have here through our hands, and we reject them because they are not fit to be of us.

“Still,” he went on with increasing earnestness, “we have no wish to lose the value of your powerful personality and influence from the Order. On the contrary, indeed, we welcome the prospect of your adhesion, and we only hope that you will succeed in going through the tests we shall be bound to set you before we can receive you with credit to ourselves, and hope for your own peace of mind and happiness. As a matter of fact, we have long had you in view as a possible candidate for the Order of St. Bruno—longer, much longer, than you can even imagine. Perhaps you may think it was chance, a whim, a case of peculiar personal artfulness, that led our young friend Casteno to seek your offices in Stanton Street, to pay you a sum down, and to trust you so blindly with the secret of those manuscripts, on the fate and translation of which hangs the disposal of several millions of pounds. Indeed, indeed, it was nothing of the sort. By that time the Order of St. Bruno had got its point of view about you, was anxious to have you in the midst of it, and so it sent Casteno to you, and not a thing you have said to him, not a deed you have done with him, has it failed to hear and to weigh.

“Why do I tell you these things? you may perhaps ask. Is it to frighten you? Is it to make you wish to join a body that can, in a time when nearly every man throws out his hands like a wild beast and grabs what seems to him to be the largest, the finest thing and the best, lay its plans with so much patience, far-sightedness, and care? Or do I explain this to you as a wise friend will teach an ignorant, not in vain-glory or boastfulness, but with an honest desire to reveal what is best and highest in himself? Well, of all these things I leave you to judge. Choose the answer that seems best to you, and let me fortify you with this assurance—the Order of St. Bruno requires no forced men. At any point in the tests that will be put to you, you can retire from your candidature and from the house. It will make no difference to us. It will cause us no grief, no surprise, no annoyance. We shall be always friendly disposed towards you—and any day you like you can visit us—and we shall only ask you to give us one assurance.”

“And what is that?” I questioned with great eagerness, for my curiosity now was aroused to the highest pitch. Never, never had I known a secret society conducted like this.

“That you will not reveal without our permission any of the things that we communicate to you in the course of this initiation?”

“I will not.” I answered, and I held up my hand.

“This is a serious matter. You must swear it,” said my mentor.

“I swear it,” I replied, and a sound like a mighty crash of thunder followed, and for a moment great eccentric streaks of lightning seem to flash on all sides of the cave.

“That is a token that your word has been accepted by the brethren, who, quite unknown to you, are gathered around the cell listening very carefully and observantly to your words, and particularly to the tones in which they are uttered. Thus encouraged, I am at liberty to proceed; and, first, I must tell you why the Order of St. Bruno came into existence. Not many years ago there was no such body of men in any country in the world. Now we number over two thousand adherents, and every day witnesses fresh accessions to our membership. The idea at the root of our brotherhood is a very curious, but also a very powerful one. It owes its origin to a man named Bruno Delganni, who was for many years a translator in one of our Government offices—the Foreign Office—and who suddenly inherited a large sum of money—nearly half-a-million, I believe. As it happened, his years of servitude to red tape had given him a very hearty disgust for, and contempt with, the ordinary Government servants. His idea was that they are all machine-made dummies, and he trembled to think what would happen to England should she ever get involved in a really serious quarrel with the European Powers. These men, he argued, are for the most part worse than useless in their present positions. Picture an invasion of England by a large armed force—where would they be? At their desks probably, sorting their papers and indexing their previous performances. Not a dozen of them have in them the making of a strong man in an emergency, for the system on which we train our Government servants in every department is to stamp out of them all the fine, heroic, unselfish qualities and to leave them mere calculating or recording machines. As a consequence, all the business of the country would be at a deadlock. The chaos would be awful to contemplate.

“Spurred on by these reflections,” proceeded the old monk, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands on his knees, “Bruno Delganni resolved to found with his fortune a secret society which would silently, noiselessly, but none the less resistlessly, band together all the real patriots in every corner of the British Empire. Their names, he resolved should never be known unless England was actually invaded, and then the St. Bruno-ites should spring up like magic everywhere—in the War Office, in Parliament, in every hole and corner of the Empire—and should take the helm of affairs with one determination and one determination alone—to make Britain the greatest, grandest, and noblest Empire ever seen since the days of Imperial Rome. Nobody in his organisation was to be afraid of place, of power, of enemies or of this wonderful birthright. All diplomatists may be born cowards, this Bruno Delganni argued, but all St. Bruno-ites should be strong in the faith of the possibilities of the Greater British Empire, and should march towards the light of the world domination of the Anglo-Saxon race with the belief that this was the only way to secure the ‘peace on earth and goodwill towards men’ which all sincere philanthropists and rulers, no matter to what nationality they belong, really crave.

“Well,” continued the speaker after a significant pause, “as, perhaps, you will agree, this was really the dream of a most wonderful patriot with a breadth of vision that puts each and all of our statesmen of to-day to everlasting shame, for look in the House of Commons now and tell me is there one—ay, only one—of its members—who would dare to get up in his place in Parliament to-day and even declare as a matter of righteous sentiment that England should rule the earth to safeguard the world’s destinies and peace?”

“There is not one,” I answered, and half instinctively I bowed my head.

“No!” proceeded the old monk sadly, “they are all as flabby to-day, as prone to compromise, as eager to renounce the destinies of the Empire as they were that day when Bruno Delganni left the Foreign Office and determined to strike a blow for an ideal he hoped might change the entire face of the history of the world. Had Bruno, of course, not been ground down by this Government system he might have been another Napoleon. As it was, the man of action in him was sunk in the man of thought, and so he set to work to build his dreams on paper, so that when they stood fully erect they would be there all ready to become material forces when the hour struck. I won’t weary you now with all the reverses he met, all the wild and disappointing experiences he went through. It is, we know, an easy thing, to feel patriotic when one is shouting the national anthem or reading the carefully-turned periods of a party leader; and quite another, and a different thing, to be a real, copper-bottomed, oak-through-and-through kind of patriot whom no storm can disturb and no question of family, money, or self-interest can alter, but with whom ‘God’ and ‘Fatherland’ are the only two watchwords that matter, and all the other facts of life are mere subsidiary shadows of the two same great all—dominant themes.

“Many and heartbreaking were the reverses dealt out to him before he got hold of the right ideas to find out patriots and to weld them together in a union that could never be broken; but, as these ideas will form your tests as a candidate for admission to the Order, I must not now reveal them to you. I have really only one more duty left to me to do now I have sketched out to you the broad reason which governs our existence. It is this: Do you, Hugh Glynn, feel that you are a good enough Englishman to say ‘there is no country like mine, no Empire so fine, no laws, no people so beneficent. I am determined that everywhere she goes, in everything she does, my own Motherland should triumph, and as long as I have breath, as long as I can stretch out my hands or use my brains, I will never, if words or deeds of mine can avail her anything, suffer her to fall behind her enemies, but everywhere, in everything, I will cherish one ideal—“God prosper England.”’”

“Indeed I am,” I cried in eager enthusiasm.

“Then you may safely advance to the first stage of your initiation!” said the old monk, but, to my surprise, his face was now very grave. “Don’t be alarmed at what is going to happen, but be warned in time, for many men, I must tell you, have been just as keen and as loyal, apparently, as yourself and have failed to be worthy of the name of Englishmen—have miserably failed!” And he gave a great sigh.

I should have liked to ask him what he meant, but dared not.

Already I was conscious of extraordinary things happening about me, and it was as much as I could do to stand still and to keep my courage from oozing through my hands.

Chapter Twenty.

More Mystery.

Slowly, very slowly, the walls of that hermit’s cell seemed to fade out of sight.

The darkness of the place did not appear to grow more profound, but the light became greyer in tone, more misty in character, so that at length I felt I was standing in a kind of opalescent vapour, which would not let me distinguish objects more than two or three feet distant from the point where I stood, lost in profound amazement at the changes that came upon me from every quarter.

Something went moaning and sighing past me with eyes so huge and luminous that they gleamed like lamps of fire. Then I caught the sound of a woman crying—not with heartrending sobs that would tear to atoms the grief that had caused that outburst of emotion—but slowly, regularly, resistlessly, as though sorrow had touched the centre of her being and her tears flowed with every single throb of her heart.

Afterwards a scene formed itself in front of me, but whether it was a piece of clever stage realism or the free use of a panorama and a cinematograph I could never discover. All at once the light grew soft and rosy like that of early summer dawn, and I saw, apparently, stretched in front of me a sandy waste of country, across which the old monk, who had just been speaking to me was walking, footsore and bowed with age and weariness. Then came a shrill blast on a horn, and before one could utter even a sound a horde of savages in their war paint swept across the landscape and seized the old man and demanded something from him which he refused to yield. In a flash they caught him up amongst them, and there I saw inflicted on him such hideous atrocity and torture that I found myself reeling backward sick with the smell of burning flesh and faint with the sight of that flow of human blood.

Fortunately, the scene at length faded—everything went completely black—and out of a silence, so still that it could be felt almost, there arose the shrill whistle of an Arctic blast that pierced me through and through with cold. Sharper and sharper grew the frost about me. Eventually I became conscious of something that bit and stung which was falling on my hands, my face, my shoulders with ever-increasing swiftness, till, stretching out my fingers, I seemed to be in the centre of a bitter and searching snowstorm, above which the moon appeared to rise and to exhibit in front of me a man clad in the uniform of a Canadian letter-carrier. Almost as soon as he became visible I could see that the man was well-nigh spent and broken with the cold, but, as he toiled on and on in front of me I saw him sink deeper and deeper into the drift, until at length, absolutely exhausted, he threw up his arms and fell face downwards in the snow. Oh! how I toiled to reach him as the snow fell faster and faster, rapidly blocking his form out of sight. Somehow something seemed to force me perpetually to take a wrong direction—I became conscious of inhaling something uncommonly like chloroform—and I, too, fell.

When I next opened my eyes the scene had changed. Instead of snowclad plain and a wind that howled and whistled and cut through me like a newly-sharpened knife, I seemed to find myself in a brilliantly-furnished throne-room hung with rich tapestries and candelabra of gold, whilst dotted about the floor were pieces of gilded furniture of the days of Louis Seize. At the far end of this magnificent apartment were folding doors, and as, all sick and dizzy, like a man newly recovered from a surgical operation, I arose from the lounge on which in some miraculous fashion I had become stretched I saw these flung wide open. A stately march broke from an organ in a hidden gallery above, and there entered a procession of pages, who, taking no notice of my presence, ranged themselves, in their picturesque costumes of a bygone court period, on all sides of the room.

The music now became more jubilant as other figures loomed up in the doorway—figures of courtiers, jesters, ecclesiastics—until at length the apartment was almost filled with people, all conversing eagerly in that melodious Spanish tongue which I recognised but could not follow, although my knowledge of Latin was really profound enough to qualify me for a priest. Suddenly, however, the music stopped—all sounds of conversation ceased as if by magic—and all present appeared to take up their allotted positions. The next moment there entered two ecclesiastics in scarlet cassocks and cottas, carrying their birettas in their hands, whilst close behind there came a thin, white-faced cardinal, clad in the purple of the Roman Church, with the traditional skull cap at the back of his head.

Very low bent the assemblage at his approach to the throne, and no sooner was he seated than the smell of incense, cast on braziers full of burning charcoal in the corners of the room, arose, in clouds of smoke that had a most stimulating, instead of an oppressive, feeling upon me. I felt so bright, so strong so elastic that I could run, jump, anything, and I could barely contain myself as supplicant after supplicant entered the throne-room, and besought, in Spanish, some favour from the cardinal, who, I gathered, from the constant repetition of the phrase, could be no less a dignitary than the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo. Priests came—country curés, apparently newly arrived from remote mountain districts; pale-faced, humble-looking mother superiors, whose clothes and bearing bore eloquent evidence of their faithfulness to their vows of poverty and obedience; interspersed with which would now and then figure some crafty, oily scrivener; or, again, a fat, well-clad merchant, who seemed to bring the very trafficking of his shop into his language, his gestures, and attitude.

To my surprise, the last comers of all proved to be no less a personage than the very Prior of the Order of St. Bruno, clad in the Benedictine garb he affected, accompanied by José Casteno and two or three of the brethren. Apparently they had to pay some dues, for a table, crossed like a draught-board, and a pair of balances were brought in and fixed up before the cardinal, and from stout leather bags carried by the brethren were poured diamonds and rubies and emeralds that must have been worth thousands of pounds. Yet, large as their value looked, the Cardinal-Archbishop did not seem satisfied. He rose impatiently from his seat on the throne, his thin, ascetic, shrunken figure towering wrathfully over Mr Cooper-Nassington, who this time looked a prey to acute nervousness, and, shaking a warning finger at the pile of jewels, His Eminence spoke, in the quick, fiery Spanish tongue, some words that seemed to cause the St. Bruno-ites to cower and shiver as though they were being severely whipped.

A moment later they were hurried out of the audience chamber, and as the crowd of courtiers and ecclesiastics, who had drawn nearer to the throne during the altercation, settled themselves once again in their accustomed places I saw the Cardinal beckon to one of his chamberlains, to whom he whispered for a few seconds, looking the while, for the first time, in my direction.

The man bowed very low at the close of his instructions, and, taking up his wand of office, he marched with measured and dignified step in my direction, the crowd stopping suddenly their whispers and watching his movements with obvious interest. No sooner did he draw level with me than he spoke:

“His Eminence desires that you should approach him, Mr Hugh Glynn,” he said in excellent English, although his tone was decidedly that of a Spaniard. “He has some offer to make to you which he believes it is well for you to consider. Pray follow me.” And he turned about and led me right to the steps of the throne itself.

By this time the effect of the incense had very largely passed from me. In a way I was under the influence of the drugs in the sense that I was conscious of a high degree of exaltation and moral fervour, but the lust for action had gone and left in its place a consciousness of extraordinary importance and power.

Very low I bent before the bowed figure in front of me, and after the customary salutation: “Pax vobiscum,” to which I found myself answering quite mechanically: “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the cardinal addressed me, in rather laboured accents, in my own tongue.

“I have had you brought here, Mr Glynn,” he said slowly and with great care, “in a rather curious fashion, it is true, but none the less effective, although I won’t stop now to explain it, for two special and momentous reasons. The first relates to the Order of St. Bruno, from which I had you rescued in the moment of your initiation, for a cause that will quickly appear to all obvious enough. You have seen for yourself how the Prior and his brethren have come before me. They are, as a body, in my debt to an extent that would appal you, and yet, although I am probably one of the most lenient lenders in the world, you have seen for yourself how they attempt to evade payment by presents of costly jewels and of precious stones. Knowing this, I ask you, was it wise of you to want to link yourself with them? Remember, once you join them you become liable ipso facto for as much money as they happen to owe and cannot afford to pay for themselves. As a man who has been trained as a lawyer—nay, as one who intends shortly to incur all the sacred obligations of matrimony—is it wise of you to rush blindfold into this zone of debt and difficulty you can have no certain knowledge of, no appreciation? Take time to consider it while I put before you the second reason why you have been bidden here to this audience chamber.

“As a matter of fact,” he went on with increasing earnestness, “you stand at present in the most important city of Spain—Toledo—which possesses one of the most valuable collections of ancient historical manuscripts that have remained untranscribed since centuries and centuries before the days of the ill-fated Armada. In the minds of the rulers, however, the time has come for these documents to be disinterred from the chests in which they have lain from time immemorial, to be deciphered, and to be given to the world at the discretion of the head curator. Now, that place of head curator is vacant, and, although it is decided that only a Spaniard can fill it, I can easily get you letters of naturalisation, for I am empowered to offer you that position—a life appointment—at a salary of 2000 pounds English each year.”

In spite of myself I gasped at the munificence of this offer. In a flash I saw all the magnificent possibilities of a position of eminence and of usefulness such as that—to practise as a means of livelihood the finest and most fascinating hobby man who loved history ever had—and I own I was just on the point of accepting it when I felt instinctively the prick of the thorn hidden beneath the rose. I had to renounce my rights as an Englishman! I had to disavow my birthright! I had to throw aside the thing I treasured most—pride of race and birth! How could I do this with those burning words of the old hermit in his cell ringing even then in my ears? The Order of St. Bruno might be a gang of spendthrifts, they might have as officers adventurers who exploited the poor puffed-up patriots they caught in the meshes of their sophistries and vanity of their habits, but, after all, their ideal was too noble to cast aside just for money alone.

“Must—must this curator be a Spaniard?” I cried, stretching out my hands.

“He must,” came the inexorable answer.

“Then I am deeply honoured by the trouble you have taken, the kindly interest you have shown in me,” I replied slowly, “but the thing is frankly impossible—I cannot give up my nationality at a word in the the way you stipulate.”

There was a sudden shout, so loud that it sent me staggering backward with my hands pressed closely to the drums of my ears. The Cardinal-Archbishop appeared to bound from his throne like a man who had been shot, and once again, as something soft, diaphanous, and white was waved in front of me, I caught the sickly, sticky smell of chloroform, which overpowered me so quickly that almost as soon as it reached me I dropped to a lounge like a man dead with sleep.

When next I came to my senses I was astounded to find myself stretched on the floor in that same hermit’s cell from which I had started. The old monk who had first explained to me the secret that held men together in the Order of St. Bruno was bending over me, bathing my temples with some aromatic preparation from a small silver ewer that stood on the floor beside him, whilst I found my head resting on the only evidence of luxury in the place—a beautifully—embroidered silken cushion, that insensibly recalled to me all the glories of the palace of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo.

Weak and trembling, like a man who had just recovered from a long and debilitating illness, I scrambled to my feet, and, aided by my companion, I seated myself on a chair that was standing near the table.

“Tell me,” I said, passing a tremulous hand over my throbbing forehead, “what has happened? Have you had a serious accident here while I have been in this cell?”

“No,” he said, with a grave shake of his head; “nothing has occurred here—nothing at all.”

“Did something hit me, or was I all of a sudden stricken with a fit.”

“Neither,” he replied; “all through you have been a free and a conscious agent.”

“Then, I didn’t dream! I didn’t rave! I have actually seen the things I have pictured?” I stammered, thoroughly bewildered by the man’s steady and truthful gaze. “Oh! I have it,” I cried suddenly again, “you have hypnotised me! You made me believe that I was first at the foot of a mountain in far-off Africa then on the snowclad wastes of Canada, and afterwards in a noble throne-room in Spain, where an offer was made that tempted me most sorely.”

“That is not so,” he answered coldly. “I am not a hypnotist! I do not understand mesmerism, and, if I did, I wouldn’t practise it. I consider it is based on a malign perversion of some beneficent law of Nature.

“No,” he went on, reaching out a hand and turning up the light that hung above his head; “there has been no occult influence at work here—none at all. All that you have seen has happened, fairly enough, but with this distinction—it has all happened round about this room.

“As a matter of fact, you must always remember this,” he proceeded, “the founder of our order, the Bruno Delganni, had a most marvellous knowledge of stage mechanics and effects, and when he found it so hard to discover whether the men who wished to join him were really patriots or not he turned this knowledge to the use you have seen. He erected in every monastery that he established huge theatrical machinery and properties, with the result that the brethren there are able to carry out any kind of test they wish.

“In your case, the plan agreed on was a very simple but an effective one. The first idea was to give you a fright, and then to take you off on all manner of excursions, so that you would not realise when the supreme test came what and which it was. Hence the deaths on the mountain and in the snowstorm. The real trial came when we played with all the force we could on the one string we knew held you like a vice—your love of manuscripts. Would you respond to this and renounce your birthright, or not?

“Luckily, you did not, although we bent every energy we had, every trick we knew, to lure you into the trap, using hasheesh, chloroform, anything that suited our purpose, to make our stage scenes seem to you the more vital, the more real. In the end you made the supreme refusal—you would not cease to be an Englishman. Therefore all our show ended as suddenly as it had begun. We had tested you, and we had found you were really the patriot you had always pretended to be to José Casteno when any question arose of the safety or the use of those three manuscripts that gave the whereabouts of the Lake of Sacred Treasure.

“We wanted to learn no more then. We decided there and then that you were the kind of novice which the Order of St. Bruno required, and we hastened back to our proper garbs again, anxious only now to bring the ceremony of initiation to an end. Hence it has come about that only one other test remains to be applied to you, and then you will be free to enter forthwith on all the rights and privileges of our brotherhood, which are, I am to explain, very numerous, far-reaching, and valuable.

“Do not fear it. In character, in effect, it is totally different to any experience you have been through; but our noble founder, Bruno Delganni, held it to be a very precious expedient to practise, and in his institutes, which we follow with scrupulous exactness, he lays it down in the clearest fashion that on no account must we omit it, however enthusiastic we may feel at the conduct of our novice in the other and more theatrical tests we have applied to him.”

“Very well,” I said resignedly. “I am prepared. Do with me as you will.” And taking the glass of wine he pressed on me I drained it, and then seated myself once more in the chair to await developments, although in my inmost heart I felt so upset and confused that I hardly knew how to speak.

With a stately inclination of the head the old monk passed through the doorway and left me.

Slowly, very very slowly, the light faded, and then I became surrounded by soft greyish darkness that afflicted me with a sense of intense mournfulness.

Chapter Twenty One.

The Use of the Image.

For several seconds I felt that I could not bear the strain and suspense of this fresh test; already I had suffered so much I had grown weak and nervous. I wanted to be quiet, to sit still for a few minutes, and to think out all the extraordinary things I had heard and witnessed. Yet here I was caught up in this weird kaleidoscope of sensation. I no longer felt my feet on solid earth, but all at once I recognised that I had become the prey of some elements that defied all the ordinary laws of reason, and might, if I gave way to childish or unreasoning panic, send me practically demented.

In vain I told myself that the whole movement about me was but the insane jest of some crazy stage craftsman. In vain I held myself tightly together, and with all the vigour I was capable of anathematised Delganni for his preposterous notions of finding out the true metal of a man and what, in apparently grave moments of physical distress, he might be capable of. The hideousness of the scene afflicted me with a sense of intolerable vertigo. First there were ear-piercing screams, then long lurid intervals of silence in which some red light burned angrily in the background, and I saw the walls about me and the ceiling above me bend and crack and stoop; there appeared to be nothing—nothing to prevent them falling with a crash upon me and dashing me to instant annihilation.

The culminating horror of it all was reached when even the chair on which I sat, the table against which I rested, began to slowly revolve. The movements of the floor were steady, well ordered and rhythmical, but, as loud sonorous sounds were struck, afar off, on some brazen instruments, the framework seemed to rock and roll, as though the very earth were shaken by some subterranean power.

I verily believe that the physical strain of saving myself from being pitched forward kept me sane in these moments. I know I began by extending my rage to all secret societies, and then I passed on to swearing at myself for being so rash and foolish as to submit myself to these indignities—I, a free-born Englishman, upon whom, if I had confined myself to the ordinary walk of life, nobody dared lay a hand so grim and preposterous as this was.

Finally, as the movement grew more erratic, I was content to hang on, and I hung on so effectually that my tortures all at once ceased to torture me, the movements in the hermit’s cell stopped as though by magic, the light grew larger, rounder, more luminous, and suddenly Casteno appeared through the gloom in the doorway with a hand stretched out in welcome.

“I congratulate you, Glynn,” he said. “You have gone through all the tests required with flying colours. Now, come with me and receive your reward.”

Stiff, sick, and sore, I rose unsteadily from the chair and grabbed his arm. “I’ll come with you all right,” I panted, “but the kind of reward I feel interested in just at this minute is to give somebody such a thrashing that will relieve my feelings and teach my good friends at St. Bruno’s the danger of banging and bewildering a man in the way I have been.”

“Well,” conceded José, with a pleasant smile, “some of us do hold that this ceremony of initiation into the Order is rather foolish; but, after all, we don’t quite know how we can get out of it. In the first place, we see that Delganni was really a most wonderful man. Years before we had all this babble and talk and political trickery about a wise imperialism for England, and a Greater Britain, and the responsibilities of empire and so forth, he saw the eternal mission of our country, and he saw it clearly. More than that, he did, with all those fantastic methods of his, manage to institute this brotherhood and to get a very fine and reliable nucleus of workers together. That being so, who are we, his disciples as it were, to judge him? We are glad enough to take up his burden and his dream just when he laid them down. Then, if we put away this ceremony of initiation of his, what ceremony could we devise to take its place?”

“Anything,” I snapped, “anything but the one you have.” And with him I began to walk down the corridor.

“I am not so sure about that,” answered Casteno. “There will, I suppose, be always adventurers attracted to a cause by loaves and fishes, and it is highly necessary for the ideal we cherish that such should be weeded out. Anything that stops these sharks is useful, very useful. Why, we have had both Lord Cyril Cuthbertson and Lord Fotheringay up before us for examination, and we played so well on their weak points, as we tried to play on yours, over the place of curator at Toledo, that we actually got them to say they would renounce their nationality as Englishmen! No wonder, then, we won’t trust them with the deeds that would show the whereabouts of the Lake of Sacred Treasure. In our opinion, they are nothing more than the most pestilential parasites England has ever bred—I mean political patriots!”

I halted in amazement. “Then,” I stammered, “am I to take it that the Order is so rich and so powerful that even His Majesty’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs tried to get within its ranks?”

“Indeed it is,” answered Casteno earnestly. “Why, it is true Bruno Delganni only left about a million, but that million he left was in land near Leeds which had not at the time been exploited. Since his death it has been opened up, developed, and sold with remarkable care and skill, with the result that, aided by other benefactions, the Order to-day is enormously wealthy. It was computed a short time ago that if we divided the property amongst the members for any reason, say a terrific European war with England where the cash might in a patriotic sense be useful, we should each receive about seventy-five thousand pounds.

“And perhaps, what is more to the point just now, you will now become entitled to a share of that amount. In fact, we St. Bruno-ites boast and know we shall never want money for any good purpose either for ourselves or our friends. We have only to apply to the three rulers we have, whom we call the Council of Three, to get it.

“For instance, when I am married I shall ask their assistance, and I am sure they will yield it to me with great pleasure, and that they will allot my bride and myself such a handsome wedding portion that neither she nor I will ever want the means of keeping up a perfectly respectable and well-balanced position in society. Why, there are to-day five or six members of Parliament who are St. Bruno-ites, and where do you think they get the means from to win their different constituencies and to keep up their seats? From the Order, of course; and yet they never set foot inside these walls or write a line to the Council of Three from year’s end to year’s end. The money they require is put to their credit at their particular bank regularly every quarter, and all they do is to send to the Council of Three every New Year’s Day a small slip bearing the words: ‘Ready, ay ready,’ with the date, and their ordinary signatures.”

“And shall I be entitled to similar consideration?” I queried, blundering into a foolish, selfish question out of sheer nervousness.

“Of course you will,” answered Casteno, smilingly; “all are equal in this house—there are no favourites. The idea is that everybody wants everybody else to be perfectly happy and comfortable. You can come when you like; you can go when you like. Once in the house, of course, as a resident you have to submit yourself to the semi-monastic rule we affect, but you will find even that very good and helpful to you—yes, even the strikingly distinctive dress we wear—for it will serve to recall to you the sacred duties of patriotism which you have undertaken. It will accustom you, in a way, to your own ideal.”

“But why is the place so unlike a monastery?” I asked, stopping suddenly and pointing to some of the beautiful modern pictures which adorned the walls. “Look at these lovely works of art! There is nothing grim, nothing austere, nothing of self-sacrifice in these.”

“Of course there isn’t,” returned Casteno gaily. “We want our men to be as bright, as cheerful, and as ardent lovers of beauty and goodness as we can. We never interfere with their religions. That is their affair. Ours, we own, is a frankly worldly organisation, which, although it is under divine favour, we hope, as witness our watchwords: ‘God’ and ‘England,’ does really work to a worldly and an obvious conclusion. Therefore we make use of all the best things of the world, and amongst those we place beauty and things of beauty as of the highest therapeutic importance!”

“Is that why you have that statue in the entrance hall?” I questioned—“that wonderful figure of a woman, with the face of a Greek goddess, which stands on a pedestal, and before which there seem to be constant offerings of flowers and candles.”

José stopped at the mere suggestion, and laughed quite loudly. “Good gracious, no, man!” he replied so soon as he recovered his breath, “that statue has nothing to do with the members—nothing at all. You must know that poor old Bruno Delganni, although he really was a patriotic genius, had also a strangely poetic and romantic vein in his composition. Hence, when he found that the dream of his life, the Order of St. Bruno, did actually take form and substance and become a living organism powerful for great historical ends and occasions, he bethought himself of another vision of his youth—the woman who would not marry him.

“Of course, this idol of his, like all women with these faces of perfect beauty of form and expression, had no soul and no heart. In my opinion all those women in history who inspired noble resolves were like the idol of poor Bruno Delganni—Dante’s Beatrice, I mean, Paolo’s Francesca, Werther’s Charlotte, and so forth—mere mirrors in which great men saw depicted their own great possibilities.

“At all events, the woman in question married Bruno’s elder brother, because he was the better off, but Bruno never forgot her, and on his deathbed he ordered that her statue should be carved from an old photograph of her that he had in his possession and that a replica of that work of art should be placed in the refectory of each house connected with the Order of St. Bruno and duly and regularly adorned with so many candles and flowers.

“Unfortunately, we graceless bachelors, when we feel particularly irreverent, say that our founder had the image placed there as a fearful warning to us against pretty women, as a dumb but forcible appeal to each one of us to remember that ‘handsome is as handsome does,’ that ‘beauty is only skin deep,’ and that as the flowers around the statue fade so does woman’s charm. But it means nothing beyond this—nothing whatever.” And he caught me by one arm and stayed my steps opposite to one of the doors let into the wall.

“But here we are,” he went on in a more restrained tone. “When I open this you will find yourself in the presence of the brotherhood, all of whom, absolutely without exception, are eager to welcome you as one of themselves. Don’t be frightened of them. You have got through all the tests, and nothing but a joyous reception of you as a fine adherent to Brunoism now remains to be gone through. They all of them know about the manuscripts and the Lake of Sacred Treasure in Tangikano, and all you have done to assist me, so you can talk to anyone with the utmost freedom. When this is over I will get you to come with me and we will tackle the translation of the deeds with the aid of the key to the Jesuits’ cipher which Miss Velasquon has brought from Mexico; but at present your formal recognition as a Bruno-ite is the thing in hand, so follow me.”

He raised his hand to tap on the door, but I stopped him. “Just one question,” I muttered, “before I go in—only one. Why Saint Bruno if you have no religious object and significance? Why didn’t you call yourselves something less Catholic, more indicative of your real object?”

“Oh! we had nothing to do with it,” retorted Casteno lightly. “Delganni, I’m told, was a Catholic, and he christened the Order after his own notion. His institutes say that he had a great devotion to his name saint, and so he called the Order after him to pay him honour, and perhaps, what is more to the point to-day, to throw inquisitive persons off the scent as to our real motive, for they jump at once to the idea that we are some very wicked yet very religious brotherhood, and, therefore, leave us severely alone.”

I nodded. Almost in spite of my own subtle, suspicious self I was satisfied. The next moment the door was flung open and Casteno marched me through an avenue of black-habited brethren to a daïs at the far end of the room, on which the Prior stood with hand outstretched to greet me.

“Welcome, brother Hugh, welcome!” he cried in those rich sonorous tones of his. “My duty to-day is a very simple yet a very pleasant one; again I bid you welcome. Here in this book I hand to you are the institutes of the Order of St. Bruno, the rules which govern our organisation, and the explanation thereof as supplied by our founder, good Bruno Delganni, on whom, we say, may the earth rest very lightly, for he has done England much good! Take them; study them at your convenience. They will prove to you we are not quite so black here as our habit would seem to indicate. Here, also, is the scroll which testifies that this day you have become a member with us and are entitled to all the rights, privileges, and appurtenances of that distinguished and cherished position. It is written in cypher numerals, as you will observe—another idea and protection of our founder’s—but if you take page one of the institutes you will find that is the key to the riddle and that the numbers stand as references to the particular letters of the first few lines.

“Thus you will observe the first word on page one is ‘The.’ Hence in the cipher document the letter ‘t’ will be marked by the number ‘one,’ the letter ‘h’ by the number ‘two,’ and the letter ‘e’ by the number ‘three.’ Indeed, this is the cipher code we always make use of when we write to our members and communicate with each other in confidence, so I advise you, if you don’t want to carry the institutes about with you constantly, to learn by heart the first few lines of the handbook, and then you will have in your mind the key to the cryptic language we make use of.

“Here, also, is a small spring gold bracelet which I must ask you to wear on your right arm above the elbow,” he went on. “It serves various purposes—for one, to remind you that you are a Bruno-ite, and of your ceaseless duty of high and dignified patriotism. Its catch, also, is, as you may observe, key shape, and can be used as a key to penetrate the most secret archives of the Order, should you ever feel suspicious, or fancy that you have any ground for discontent, or that you are not being as fairly treated as your fellow-members, for in this Order we are all equal, and only take personal favours from the Council of Three. Any day or hour you are free to overhaul our records and to call the brethren together should you find any ground of complaint. Should you be away some time from the house and want to know whether the stranger you meet is a Bruno-ite or not, take the bracelet off your forearm and put it on your wrist. Then call the man’s attention to the inscription engraved on it: ‘For God and England.’ If he be a Bruno-ite he will answer immediately: ‘May we be worthy of both.’ If he does not, pass it off with some jest, and at the right moment return the bracelet to its original place. Other tests you will find in the institutes. They consist of phrases to learn and answers to give to them, but all these must be disclosed with discretion. We in the Order have no fear of you, your courage, or your zeal. On the contrary, we believe you will be a shining light of patriotism, and so we receive you with open arms and say:—”

“Welcome! Ten thousand welcomes!” cried the brethren in one united voice.

“And now,” said the Prior, beckoning to two assistants, who came forward with the habit, “it only remains for me to garb you as becometh a good and loyal follower of Bruno Delganni.” And in a few moments I found myself arrayed like my companions in the uniform of a black friar, and monstrously comfortable, I own, I found it.

Then a bell rang, and we all trooped into the refectory to a banquet. The place was certainly liberty hall, for, although I was placed in the seat of honour to the right of the Prior, everybody insisted on talking to me, and to my intense amazement I found gathered in this Order many of the most distinguished men I knew in the literary, the artistic, and the legal life of London.

Over all reigned a spirit of the uttermost joyousness, and not until the meal was quite over did José, the Prior, and I make our way to a study in a far part of the building and spread out before us those three fateful manuscripts relating to the sacred treasures and the conflicting claims of England and the Jesuits.

Chapter Twenty Two.

The Jesuits’ Cipher.

Directly I saw the half-faded parchments I recognised that the cipher which those early Jesuit writers had used was a very simple one. This, I may explain to the uninitiated, is not so difficult a matter to observe as they might perhaps think. Some very simple considerations guided me to this conclusion. For instance, unlike the cipher in use by the founder of St. Bruno, there were practically no figures in the manuscripts, and by that I gathered the cipher was complete in the alphabet in use, and did not refer to any book, like the institutes of St. Bruno. The one thing that does puzzle and sometimes confound experts is to adopt a book, as Bruno Delganni had done, and then to put in the record simply figures that related to letters in this volume.

That, however, is not always quite safe. The expert looks in the manuscript for the letter that appears most often, and he decides, perhaps, that that is “e,” the second “i,” and so on according to the letters that are most frequently used in the language in which he believes the document to be written, and by this simple means he can often construct the entire code alphabet.

On some such method I too proceeded with the inspection of the manuscripts in question, and found that the letter that appeared the most often therein was a certain letter that was not often used in any language. I, therefore, turned the alphabet round thus:

ZYXWVUTSRQP

abcdefghijk

It was, unfortunately, useless. Later I tried the alphabet in Portuguese form, and I saw with joy that we need not trouble at all about the rolls of explanation which Camille Velasquon had brought, and which were laid on the table beside us, but that I had really hit on the right solution—at the very start—without a glance at those cipher keys that had come to us from Mexico. The Jesuits had first merely reversed the order of the letters, and instead of writing “A” when they should have done, they had put “Z” in its place, and so on right through the alphabet, making the language of the base Portuguese, and not Spanish or English, as we had all expected at first.

The cunning old sons of St. Ignatius of Loyola had, however, not left their secret quite so plain as that. They had also added to it, to disguise it the better, a trick which most of us learn when we are boys at school. This consisted in adding to every syllable another rhyming with it but beginning with “p.” Thus to put “Venha Ca” (come here) they wrote “Venpenhapa Capa,” or if in English, “comepum herepere,” and this, when written to any extent, is really quite bewildering to any student of manuscripts unaccustomed to it.

Luckily, I was well up to it, and so there and then I caught hold of the first manuscript that came to hand, and although I was as ignorant of Portuguese as the man in the street I managed in a very few hours to write out the text of the documents, and this in turn was translated by Mr Cooper-Nassington, who had, it seemed, learned the language when a youth, his father having been consul in Lisbon.

To our surprise the communication turned out to be a letter from the Father Provincial of the Monastery of St. Stanislaus in the city of Mexico, and was addressed to a firm of merchants in the interior, at Xingu, a settlement we found marked on a map. As it is a very good specimen of Jesuit composition and politeness I will give here the English translation of it. Thus:

“AMDG.

“Friends and Gentlemen, Loyal Sons of the Church.

“From many years’ experience of your methods, and from much pleasant and profitable intercourse with your honourable and honoured house, I know that it is always agreeable for you to have an opportunity of showing your hospitable and generous feelings towards strangers in general, and more particularly to those who visit our country for the purpose of making discoveries and of extending the sphere of their knowledge. I do not hesitate, therefore, to take advantage of the opportunity which the journey of our good Father Thomas Bonaventure and his three worthy companions presents to recommend them to your friendship and protection in the scientific and business enterprise which they have undertaken, in order to obtain those natural productions and wealth which render our province a classic land in the history of animals and plants, no less than in the record of hardly-won gold.

“Hence it comes about that in this illustrious enterprise to Tangikano, which the illustrious (élites) travellers have undertaken, I much wish that they may find in you all that the limited resources of the place allow, not only that whatever difficulties they encounter may be removed, but that you may be able to render less irksome the labours and privations which they must necessarily endure. Indeed, for men like them, devoted to our Holy Faith, stars of knowledge, pioneers of fortune to be used for the good of the souls of others, it must in a country like ours be easy to find amongst our most exquisite productions means to gratify them.

“I, therefore, hope, and above all pray, that you may be led to fulfil my wishes in the attentions you pay to Father Thomas Bonaventure and his three companions, and thus give me another proof of your esteem and friendship.

“So I remain, Your friend and obedient Servant, João (Father Provincial), LDS.”

“Well, there is not much in that, is there?” said José, with a queer little grimace as he finished taking down the translation from the Prior’s rapid and incisive dictation.

“No,” I observed; “it only shows that the Jesuits got wind of the existence of great wealth at Tangikano, and so, with their customary subtlety, they fitted out an expedition to recover it under the guise of a noble quest for science. Still, that is something, isn’t it? It proves to us the thing was thought worth doing centuries ago by men on the spot who must have had a better knowledge of what the district contained than any of us to-day can have.”

“True,” replied the Prior thoughtfully, passing a hand reflectively across his forehead. “It shows us, too, that we are on the right track, and that their musty-looking old manuscripts may have a very real message about the sacred lake, so I vote that, although the night is so very far advanced, we push on with our researches. Do you agree, Glynn?”

“Yes,” I replied at once, for my interest too was now most keenly excited, and thereupon we all three of us bent down to work again and tackled the next document.

This proved to be an account of the journey of the same Father Thomas Bonaventure and his three companions mentioned in the letter when they had passed Xingu and had drawn within a few miles of the wonderful lake itself. It was written in the same kind of cipher as the other and in the same florid terms. In our opinion it was put on record at the Monastery of St. Stanislaus in the city of Mexico at the same time as the Father Provincial’s letter.

Stripped of its verbiage, it related how the four explorers had duly arrived at the village of Tangikano, and, in order not to excite suspicion, had pretended they had come for a missionary effort which would last several weeks. By this means they won the entire confidence of the settlement, the population of which consisted of about forty persons, of whom twenty were slaves, and the remainder free Indians and negroes in the employ of the principal resident, a Spaniard named Pedro Barra, who kept them engaged attending to a large number of cattle and horses.

The priests, indeed, gave a very pretty picture of the state of things in existence on this estate. It was as follows:—

“The slaves appeared contented and happy, as slaves generally do. Every evening at sunset they came to bid good-night to Senhor Pedro and ourselves, a similar salutation taking place when they first met us in the morning. As a rule, the master would be seated in a comfortable easy-chair on the verandah, and each passed with a salutation suited to his age or station. The Indians would be generally content with ‘Boa noite’ (good-night), the younger ones and most of the women and children, both Indians and slaves, would hold out their hand, saying: ‘Sua benção’ (your blessing), to which he would reply, ‘Deos te benços’ (God bless you) making at the same time the sign of the cross. Others—and these were mostly the old negroes—would gravely repeat: ‘Louvado seja of nome do Senhor Jesu Christo’ (Blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus Christ), to which he would reply with equal gravity: ‘Para sempre’ (for ever). Children of all classes here (they went on) never meet their parents in the morning or leave them at night without in the same manner asking their blessing, and they do the same invariably of every stranger who enters the house. In fact, it is there the common salutation of children and inferiors, and has a very pleasing effect.”

But all the time they lingered here, however, it was easy to see that the four Jesuits ached to be off to the sacred lake. Even when they described these idyllic scenes they harked off to this one all-absorbing subject, and recounted their conviction what fine guides these same slaves would make, and, later, told openly how they hastened to bargain with the Senhor Pedro Barra for the services of some of them to row them in a canoe up the river that led to the foot of the lake itself. Even the sight of this muddy and pestilential stream stirred in them emotions of admiration and awe. They might have been near the Amazon itself, have gazed on the stream of this mighty and far-famed river, and have let their imaginations wander to its sources in the distant Andes, to the Peruvian Incas of old, to the silver mountains of Potosi, and the gold-seeking Spaniards and wild Indians who once inhabited the country about its thousand sources rather than the sluggish stream of Tangikano.

“Yet this is all proof of what fabulous wealth they were sure the lake contained,” argued Casteno. “Let’s bear with the laboured way they recount their adventures. After all, if what we have heard here in England is true there were riches enough ahead of them to justify all their impatience and enthusiasm.”

So we bent to the rather tedious work of translation again, and learned how at length Father Thomas Bonaventure and his companions, having arrived at the height of the dry season, heard that at length the waters of the sacred lake were sufficiently low to justify them to travel thither on an excursion, the ostensible reason of which was to kill alligators. They found that there were two ways to reach the place—overland in nearly a direct line, or by a zigzag course up the river, which way was the one they chose.

Accordingly, they were aroused at midnight, and got into the canoe with three negroes, who worked their craft steadily day after day, until at length they reached the narrowest part of the stream. Hitherto they had been charmed with the beauty of the vegetation, which surpassed everything they had ever seen before. Here is the description:

“At the water’s edge were numerous flowering shrubs, often completely covered with convolvuli and passion flowers, whilst every dead or half rotten tree was clothed with parasites of singular forms or bearing beautiful flowers. Nor were there wanting animated figures to complete the picture, for brilliant scarlet and yellow macaws flew continually overhead, while screaming parrots and paroquets were passing from branch to branch in search of food.

“Now, however, the scenery was much more gloomy; the tall trees closed overhead so as to keep out every sunbeam. Even the palms were twisted and bent in various contortions, so that we sometimes could hardly pass beneath, and sunken logs often lay across from bank to bank, compelling us to get out of the canoe and to use all our exertions to force our clumsy craft over.

“After some hours and hours of very hard and disagreeable work we reached the end of the navigable water. Then we left the negroes and immediately set off on foot over an extensive plain, which was in some places completely bare, and in others thinly clothed with low trees. There could not have been a greater contrast than between the scene on the river and that which we then entered upon. The one was all luxuriance and verdure, the other as brown and as barren as could be—a marsh now parched up by the burning sun and covered with tufts of a wiry grass, with here and there rushes and prickly, sensitive plants and a few pretty little flowers occasionally growing up amongst them.

“In the end we arrived at the lake just as the day was fading. The only building there was a small reed shed, and this we promptly took possession of, unfastening the baggage we carried and piecing together a hand-dredger. We were now half frantic with excitement to put to the test all the wonderful stories we had heard about the bed of the lake, and so we immediately set to work on its slimy depths, and quickly passed our net arrangement over a space of a hundred yards at a point where the water seemed to have receded the most. Then we drew up and examined our captures.