Then, in a flash, the whole history of the book dawned on him; the theory was as incontestable as a mathematical proof.
“I’ve got it!” he cried. “As you know, he built Stanier, he collected pictures and bronzes, and, as I read the other day only, in the Memoirs he himself wrote, he collected a quantity of magical and occult books, and mentions among them a missal of ‘wondrous blasphemies.’ They don’t exist at Stanier nowadays: probably he disposed of them.”
“Dear me, dear me!” said Mr. Cecil, reaching out his hand for the book. “Your arms, are they? And the date, and the coronet.... Yes, I see. Go on, please, my dear fellow.”
“Well, he lived an awful life,” said Colin. “I will show you the Memoirs when you come to England and stay with us, as you must promise to do. He enjoyed the benefits of his bargain to the full. And he certainly contemplated—this is rather private family history—he contemplated building a sanctuary for Satanic worship. Then, the year before he died, he got into a state of terror about the future. He wrote no more about his awful deeds in his Memoirs, and he did not build the chapel, of which he left the plan, with a priest’s lodging adjoining.... Now doesn’t that fit in completely with the disappearance of the collection of magical lore, and the book of wondrous blasphemies? He fired them out of his library, and read lives of the saints, and that sort of truck: those books are there, yards of them. And now the missal of wondrous blasphemies has turned up again. There it is in your hand.”
Mr. Cecil looked at the device on the cover.
“Well, upon my word, that does seem a very sound hypothesis,” he said. “Really, if I had known——”
Colin laughed.
“You needn’t finish that sentence,” he said. “What is in your head is that you would never have shewn it me, if you had known that it came from Stanier.”
He sat down again, and, laying his hand on Mr. Cecil’s arm, summoned all the charm and persuasion of which he was master.
“I must have that book you know,” he said. “I should have tried to get you to let me buy it from you, anyhow, but now, I really have the right to acquire it, haven’t I?”