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.