He held in his hands the dead man’s secret—a secret that on the face of it, seemed to be the strangest and at the same time the most unsuspected in all the world.
Suddenly he sat back, and, staring straight across the narrow room, exclaimed aloud:
“Why, there are men in the city this very day who’d give me ten thousand pounds for the remains of these papers! But would I sell them? No—not for ten times that amount! Who knows what this discovery may not be worth?”
He chuckled to himself. Already he felt himself a wealthy man, a man who could dictate his own terms in financial circles—a man who would be welcomed in audience by crowned heads themselves!
He sighed, and the heavy exhalation blew a quantity of fragments of tinder away upon the carpet.
“I wish I hadn’t burned them quite so much,” he said regretfully. “Had I had a newspaper handy I could have lit that instead. Or—or I might easily have delayed their destruction until—until after the end. Yet he seemed quite conscious, up to the very last moment. No wonder he regretted death before the fulfilment of the great work he had commenced—no wonder he contemplated moving to the Grand Hotel at an early date! And yet,” he added, after a pause, “it’s all very intricate, very indistinct, and requires a greater scholar than myself to properly understand and unravel it.”
The chief document, consisting of about ten typewritten pages in English, had been badly burned. It was this which he was now engaged in trying to decipher. At the top left-hand corner the sheets had originally been held together by a paper-fastener, but that corner had been consumed as well as all round the edges. The centre alone of three folios remained readable, even though it had been yellowed by smoke.
“There seem very many references to Israel, to Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and to the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. Yet they seem to convey nothing. Ah!” he sighed, “if only I could reconstruct the context. There are Biblical references, too. I must obtain a Bible.”
So he rose, rang for a waiter, and asked him whether there was such a thing in the hotel as a copy of Holy Writ.
The man, a young German, naturally regarded the visitor as an eccentric person or a religious crank, but he went at once and borrowed a small Bible from the chambermaid—a volume which afterwards proved to contain, between its leaves, small texts of her Sunday-school days, several pressed flowers, and a lock of hair.