"INSTRUCTIONS of Hugh, Lord of Chesby. I, Hugh, write this for my son, and it may be, those who come after him.
"In the reign of the Emperor Andronicus Comnenus my father visited Constantinople, and the Emperor made much of him. At the Emperor's request my father aided in the disposition of a certain treasure which Andronicus had amassed by confiscating and fining the estates of rebel nobles. None save these two knew the location of the treasure.
"It chanced that my father passed oversea to the Holy Land to make good his vows to Our Lady the Virgin, and the Emperor Andronicus was slain by his enemies. The Emperor Isaac, who succeeded Andronicus, sent urgent messages to my father, bidding him visit Constantinople that the new Emperor might do him honor. And in time my father journeyed again to Constantinople, and the Emperor would have had him yield the secret of the treasure. But my father would not, because Andronicus had obtained from him a solemn oath never to give up the treasure to any save one who would spend it for the bettering of the Empire, and the new Emperor craved it for his courtiers and courtesans. Then the Emperor threw my father into prison, and so kept him until Messer Baldwin of Flanders and Messer Dandolo of Venice and the barons of the Crusade went against the Emperor and smote him down.
"Ill-fortune continued to beset the Empire, and so my father kept the secret. In God's appointed time he died and passed on the secret to me. Now, I, too, see Death riding toward me, nor do I fear it, for those I love are in the Shadow Worlds of Hell or Purgatory.
"Harken, then, my son, and those of your seed who come after us. The Lords of Constantinople are rotten. Their Empire dwindles away. The treasure is not for such as they. Therefore I say it shall go to augment the fortunes of our house and recompense my father's sufferings.
"Take it, he who can. But beware the Greeks, for some know of the treasure and the secret will not die.
"In Manus Tuas, Domine."
Hugh let fall the typed script, and we all stared reverently at the original parchment under its sheltering glass. There was something inexpressibly poignant about these words carried across the ages from a Norman-English baron to his modern descendant.
"Is there anything else?" asked Hugh. "It's odd, he speaks so impressively of going after the treasure, and yet he offers no hint of how to find it. Was the secret always unknown? But no, of course not! There was that chap in Henry the Fifth's time, and the Elizabethan Hugh. They knew where it was."
"There is another document here which sheds light upon that phase of the mystery," volunteered Mr. Bellowes, and he sorted an envelope from the mass of documents in the steel box.