“And now,” said the Prior, beckoning to two assistants, who came forward with the habit, “it only remains for me to garb you as becometh a good and loyal follower of Bruno Delganni.” And in a few moments I found myself arrayed like my companions in the uniform of a black friar, and monstrously comfortable, I own, I found it.
Then a bell rang, and we all trooped into the refectory to a banquet. The place was certainly liberty hall, for, although I was placed in the seat of honour to the right of the Prior, everybody insisted on talking to me, and to my intense amazement I found gathered in this Order many of the most distinguished men I knew in the literary, the artistic, and the legal life of London.
Over all reigned a spirit of the uttermost joyousness, and not until the meal was quite over did José, the Prior, and I make our way to a study in a far part of the building and spread out before us those three fateful manuscripts relating to the sacred treasures and the conflicting claims of England and the Jesuits.
Chapter Twenty Two.
The Jesuits’ Cipher.
Directly I saw the half-faded parchments I recognised that the cipher which those early Jesuit writers had used was a very simple one. This, I may explain to the uninitiated, is not so difficult a matter to observe as they might perhaps think. Some very simple considerations guided me to this conclusion. For instance, unlike the cipher in use by the founder of St. Bruno, there were practically no figures in the manuscripts, and by that I gathered the cipher was complete in the alphabet in use, and did not refer to any book, like the institutes of St. Bruno. The one thing that does puzzle and sometimes confound experts is to adopt a book, as Bruno Delganni had done, and then to put in the record simply figures that related to letters in this volume.
That, however, is not always quite safe. The expert looks in the manuscript for the letter that appears most often, and he decides, perhaps, that that is “e,” the second “i,” and so on according to the letters that are most frequently used in the language in which he believes the document to be written, and by this simple means he can often construct the entire code alphabet.
On some such method I too proceeded with the inspection of the manuscripts in question, and found that the letter that appeared the most often therein was a certain letter that was not often used in any language. I, therefore, turned the alphabet round thus: