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.