The Hunchback of Westminster

“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:

ZYXWVUTSRQPabcdefghijk

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: