“You must let me tell the thing in my own way, my lord. It will be far more conclusive than jerking it out at you in scraps. The facts in sequence were as follows—
“Among the family treasures which have come down the centuries—and I sincerely wish there had been more of them—was a certain amount of old coins which have been in the custody of my firm for at least five generations. They comprised for the most part specimens of the gold and silver coinage of most European countries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some were of great value. Some were by no means rare. Evidently one of your ancestors—probably, I should say, Sir John Dorinecourte, the famous Elizabethan admiral—had the craze of collection, which has since broken out in your late uncle’s case. At any rate the box contained moidores, zecchins, pesos, crowns, and every sort of currency of every known land—known to our ancestors of that time, at least—to a very considerable amount. The mere bullion, I should say, would be worth a considerable sum. Among them were, however, a couple of gold pieces placed apart, and these had no signification placed opposite them in the catalogue, and bore no sign either on the face or the reverse in any language known at the present day.”
“It sounds charmingly mysterious, my dear Mr. Crum,” I interrupted. “Now, you aren’t going to tell me that the secret still remains unfathomed?”
“My lord, my lord,” said the old fellow entreatingly, “you must allow me to tell you the thing methodically, or not at all. If I’m hurried I shall forget some detail, and I have given time and effort to memorize the matter completely.”
I apologized humbly, settling myself back in my chair resignedly to hear the thing out with no further interruption. Crum continued in his slow, modulated tones.
“I think that it was the sight of that hoard, when your uncle saw it at his accession to the title, which first woke in him the craze for collecting. He no doubt reflected that here was the nucleus of an exceedingly fine numismatic museum, and from that day he set himself steadily to add to it, with an increasing knowledge of his subject, of which you are now reaping the benefit. But those two unknown coins were always a sore mystery to him. Many a time have I seen him take them up—he used to visit me two or three times every year to place what he had possessed himself of in that time with the rest—and turn them over and over in his fingers wistfully, studying every line and figure as if there must be some concealed clue which he had missed. But it was only last year that he gained the trace which put him on the road to success, and also, as it has unfortunately turned out, to death as well.”
“What!” I shouted, nearly jumping out of my chair. “Do you mean to say——”
He held up his hand deprecatingly.
“Please, my lord, please restrain your impatience. You shall have every detail in good time, I assure you. I only mean to say that it was in pursuit of his intense desire to solve the origin of those coins that he was travelling in Central America, where he caught the fever which has been fatal to him. The rest I will tell you as shortly as possible.
“It was last year, as I was saying, that the first trace came to his hand by the merest accident. His lordship was in Portugal. From there I got a letter from him on business matters, and at the end—his lordship was aware that, of course in a modified form, I was interested in his quest—he remarked, ‘A most extraordinary thing has happened. I have found a dozen more of the unknown coins, and what is more an ancient document—no less than a letter written by Sir John Dorinecourte, my ancestor. I will tell you more on my return.’ It was some three weeks after that that his lordship came to see me.