_You will have gathered from the foregoing note, my dear Carlo, that I have something of importance to relate to you--something that I am desirous of keeping a secret front every one but yourself_.
As his friend Bexell surmised, Ducie found that the groups of figures distinguished from the rest by two horizontal lines, one above and one below, as thus
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58.7 14.29 368.1 209.18 43.11,
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were the _valeurs_ of some proper name or other word for which there was no equivalent in the book. Such words had to be spelt out letter by letter in the same way that complete words were picked out in other cases. Thus the marked figures as above, when taken letter by letter, made up the word _Carlo_--a name to which there was nothing similar in the Confessions.
It had been broad daylight for two hours before Captain Ducie grew tired of his task and went to bed. He went on with it next night, and every night till it was finished. It was a task that deepened in interest as he proceeded with it. It grew upon him to such a degree that when near the close he feigned illness and kept his room for a whole day, so that he might the sooner get it done.
If Captain Ducie had ever amused himself with trying to imagine the nature of the secret which he had now succeeded in unravelling, the reality must have been very different from his expectations. One gigantic thought, whose coming made him breathless for a moment, took possession of him, as a demon might have done, almost before he had finished his task, dwarfing all other thoughts by its magnitude. It was a thought that found relief in six words only: "It must and shall be mine!"
[CHAPTER XIII.]
M. PLATZOFF'S SECRET--CAPTAIN DUCIE'S TRANSLATION
OF M. PAUL PLATZOFF'S MS.
"You will have gathered from the foregoing note, my dear Carlo, that I have something of importance to relate to you; something that I am desirous of keeping a secret from every one but yourself. From the same source you will have learned where to find the key by which alone the lock of my secret can be opened.
"I was induced by two reasons to make use of 'The Confessions of Parthenio the Mystic' as the basis of my cryptographic communication. In the first place, each of us has in his possession a copy of the same edition of that rare book, viz. the Amsterdam edition of 1698. In the second place, there are not more thou half a dozen copies of the same work in England; so that if this document were by mischance to fall into the hands of some person other than him for whom it is intended, such person, even if sufficiently acute to guess at the means by which alone the cryptogram can be read, would still find it a matter of some difficulty to obtain possession of the requisite key.