London Again.
Suddenly Casteno roused himself and sat upright, and with him went quite irrevocably all opportunity of taking the three fatal manuscripts from him by stealth during that journey up to Paddington. For his hunger was infectious and the meal he had provided excellent, and so it came about that in quite a few moments the pair of us were devouring roast chicken and ham and pledging each other in glasses of quite passable railway-station claret. Indeed, the tedium of the ride vanished like magic, and before we had finished the commonplaces of conversation we found ourselves back again in dear old smoke-begrimed London. That night we slept at Paddington Hotel, for we had had an exciting day, and did not feel inclined for a further journey to Stanton Street. Whence next day Chantry Road, Hampstead, was reached in an incredibly short time, and once again I found myself standing at the tiny door in the wall with its suggestive peep-hole. Only this time there seemed to be no delay in answering our summons, and we passed with great rapidity from the public street into the courtyard that shut the home of St. Bruno’s off the porter’s box at the entrance, and then we made our way, without any black-robed guide, to the huge hall with its great flower-decked statue of a woman, heroic in size but incommunicably fair.
Somehow I was conscious that our arrival had caused quite a thrill of excitement through the community, even in the various offices of the house itself. As Casteno and I stood there and waited for the prior, for whom he had asked immediately we had crossed the threshold, various figures of men and youths of various ages flitted in and out on obvious and childish pretexts to snatch the opportunity of a whispered word or handshake with my companion, who seemed to me a most popular personage, and whose return now began to take the form of a kind of triumphal progress. All these visitors, however, wore the same habit, and all had the same peculiar way of looking at one, like the members of some brotherhood that held the same tie very closely in common, and by practice and method had grown to resemble each other more nearly than do many members of the same families in our great, cheating, bustling world outside.
What could these monks be?
In vain I looked about the hall in the hope that it would give some clue to their practice or their faith. I could discover nothing to help me more than one would find in the refectory of some large public college except this same beautiful statue I have spoken of, with its floral offerings and candles. All the same, the expression on this sculptured woman’s face was not one of benignity or of sweetness at all but of a remote passionless beauty for beauty’s sake, as it were—something that had been wrought without any ethical ideal behind it or hope of moral change or influence in the beholder. Soon I decided quite finally that there was no religious tie at St. Bruno’s—none at all. Their secret of organisation was not, I was persuaded, one of a common faith or of devotion to a concrete and well-defined Church. They had some other bond which might be as strong as death, but it had nothing to do with the hereafter.
Now was that bond good or evil?
Abruptly I was aroused from my meditations by the arrival of the Prior, a powerful-looking, hooded figure in a robe of black, whose face at first was kept carefully concealed, but who wore around his neck one mark of distinction not possessed by his fellows—a thin chain of gold, at the end of which dangled a compass set around with some gold ornamentation, on which was inscribed a well-worn truism: “I point always to the north.”
“Welcome, Mr Glynn,” he said in a voice which somehow had a familiar ring in it but which I could not then recognise. “Our mutual friend, José Casteno, has kept us of St. Bruno’s well posted as to the earnest way in which you have laboured for the rightful recovery of the documents relating to the whereabouts of the Lake of Sacred Treasure in Tangikano, and I am glad to see you here—to thank you.”
I bowed, and in return murmured something conventional—that the pleasure was mutual. Inwardly I was assailed with one question: “Where had I heard that voice before?”
“You are, of course, quite a free agent,” the Prior proceeded, “and any moment you choose to leave or to set about other business you are at liberty to do so. Personally, however, I hope you will stay with us whilst we decipher these documents. You are, I understand, quite a palaeographic expert yourself, and it may well happen that your experience or your knowledge may prove of infinite value to us.”