He sighed again, and setting his teeth in the very act, forced himself frowningly and inexorably to his task.
“I have hinted to you already,” he said, “that this long fever of my quest dates from Abel’s disappearance with a certain book which contained the clue to an important secret. Hear, then, at last, what that secret was, and how it came into our hands.
“My brother Abel and I were twins and enemies, partners and apart. Why? I cannot tell. Look at two dogs of a litter quarrelling over a bone, and seek for the reason there. We thwarted one another—at every turn we did, and ruined our common business in a mutual spite. You know as much; yet in fairness I must urge that his was the more rancorous and vindictive spirit. I would have cried halt sometimes; but Abel, never. He had the fiercer resolution; he went armed; I feared while I hated him. ... The book in question was one of a packet over which we had perversely disputed in the sale-room; an old scorched and dog’s-eared commonplace book of the seventeenth century, in contemporary crimson calf, and bearing inside its cover the name of ‘Carolus Victor, Chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty’s Prison of Newgate.’ Yes, you remember the name. I once let it out unguarded. Well, he was our inspirer, as some Morell or Morant was your uncle’s. ... There was nothing of note about this book. It contained just the jottings and excerpta of a decent unremarkable man; ‘tips’ for homilies; memoranda of ‘last testaments;’ mere personal data of a conscientious and commonplace clergyman, whose lines had fallen in incongruous places. With all that we have nothing to do. Our business is with a folded letter, in the handwriting of this same Carolus Victor, which ages ago had been slipped between the leaves, and had there adhered through the melting of the wax with which it was sealed.”
“How had it got there?” I asked, because he here came to a dramatic pause, which seemed to challenge questioning.
“Ah!” he answered. “How? And why it had remained undelivered? I can submit only a plausible theory. A second-hand book-shop, gentlemen, is a mine of reference. Research presently revealed to me that this Carolus Victor, Chaplain of Newgate, had died—suddenly, by presumption—in that very year, 1679, which dates not only his letter, but the last entries in his diary where it was found. Suppose, then, the letter written by this Victor, and never delivered to him to whom it was addressed; suppose the book containing it tied up unexamined with the deceased’s other manuscript effects, and put away on some remote shelf and forgotten; suppose some jealous no-Popery bookdealer snatching it years later from the flames of Newgate, and consigning it to his own store, where, in the excitement, it was again forgotten till finally brought to light in the sale-room, a scorched and smoke-stained packet to excite the ridicule of the dealers. Suppose anything or nothing; conjecture and account as you will. The fact remains that Carolus Victor’s commonplace book came intact, and holding fast to its enclosure, into our hands. ... Into our hands—into our hands, I say. Were we not brothers, twins, partners? Abel, before bidding for it, had known or guessed nothing of what the packet contained. He had bought the lot, a business transaction, merely to spite me. And yet now he would claim the whole fruits for himself!”
A fury and excitement took the narrator’s voice at this point. The heat he exhaled was communicated to us in part.
“Go on!” I said, giving a vigorous kick into the water. “There was a letter in the book, you say. What was it about?”
He struggled with himself a moment, dropped his face into his hands with a groan, looked up, and resumed in a more ordered voice—
“I am coming to it. It is stereotyped on my brain—all of its accursed riddle, that is to say, but the key. It was dated Newgate, 1679, and was superscribed to one Peachumn, a doctor of divinity, (to whom, you will always bear in mind, it never was delivered), from which honoured friend and counsellor the writer craved certain instruction and advice in a very private and particular matter. He had had confessed to him that night, he said, a passing strange story by one Vining, a prisoner, and grey in iniquity, who was condemned to suffer on the morrow for piracy on the high seas. This Vining, according to his own statement, had been, about the second decade of the century, a student in the great English College of Douai, in France, whence one winter he had been sent, in company with an ordained brother collegiate, on an extraordinary secret mission across the water to a little town on our east coast. This mission, said Vining, was nothing less than to recover, if possible, from its secret hiding-place in the crypts of a certain long abandoned church, a great treasure of gold pieces, which had lain there ever since the suppression of the religious houses—a suppression which, in this case, had but hardly anticipated a natural dissolution more complete. For the church in question was, it appeared, already doomed when the king’s edict fell. Lingering, a relic of the greater past, amidst the ruin of those eastern shores, the sea had since taken its outworks; and now the treasure (the existence and depository of which had been made known through the death-bed confidence of a former sacristan) must be secured without delay, if recovered it were to be at all ... Richard! it was secured by those two—a loaded box of iron. And then the madness of possession smote the wretched clerk. In the darkness of the crypts he murdered his companion, and in the darkness the curse of God fell upon him. His hands were scarlet with consecrated blood. He loathed to handle the price of his iniquity; but, like Judas, he cast it from him, and with it hid the body of his victim in a place whence he hoped neither could again be brought to light to testify against him.”
He paused. And “Where was that?” I asked faintly. An extraordinary fancy had taken possession of me—a thought so stunning, so bewildering in its first weak conception, yet so explanatory, if admitted, of Rampick’s incomprehensible behaviour, that I fairly shivered under it. I looked dumfounded at Harry. He also, if I was not mistaken, had been smitten with a like shock of expectancy.