The Hunchback of Westminster

“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?”