“I have—I cannot.”
The man took a step forward and threw back his hood.
He was no other than the man whom Casteno had sent me that night to consult in the House of Commons—John Cooper-Nassington.
I started back amazed.
“You, Mr Cooper-Nassington!” I cried. “You here, in this office, and in this house! What on earth, then, can this Order of St. Bruno be?”
An awkward pause followed. We both stood and stared at each other, and neither of us spoke.
“Well, at all events,” said the Honourable Member, at length summoning up a faint smile to his lips, “you can see now for yourself that in this matter of the manuscripts England is quite safe. I shall do nothing—I shall tolerate nothing—that will hurt our mother country or her interests. On the contrary, all of us here are fighting for her, and will do so until our last breath. We may not have particular faith in unscrupulous office-seekers and popularity-mongers of the type of Lord Cyril Cuthbertson or that precious but exceedingly foolish ally of his, the Earl of Fotheringay, but we have faith in the righteousness of Britain’s claims and her needs. Hence we are going to see that, as this Lake of Sacred Treasure in Tangikano really belongs to her, it is not snapped from her by Spain, by the Jesuits, or by a lot of needy foreign adventurers who have begged, borrowed, and stolen all manner of concessions from the Mexican Republic, and who even to-day may have got wind of the existence of these documents and may be moving heaven and earth, and the diabolical powers under the earth, to get hold of them!”
“That may be so—no doubt it is so,” I returned doggedly—“but there has been too much foul play in this hidden treasure hunt, as witness that murder in Whitehall Court, to content me or to let me take as gospel everything you choose to tell me and to treat as wisdom everything you like to leave untold. I must insist on my rights as an individual in this matter before we go any further or any deeper into mutual obligations which later all of us may find it difficult to free ourselves from, however much we may desire to do so. To-day I am my own master—I can stay or I can go. My decision now will rest on one consideration alone. What is this Order of St. Bruno?”
“I cannot tell you,” said the Prior, and his strong face looked out at me without one shadow of hesitancy or fear.
“Casteno,” I went on, turning to the Spaniard, “you are in a different position to Mr Cooper-Nassington. You are not an officer of this sect, this institution, this organisation, this brotherhood. You are a plain member, free to speak or to hold your tongue. I ask you to remember your pledge to me—to reveal to me all that it is necessary for me to know in this business to satisfy my own conscience, and, remembering this, to tell me what tie binds these people together.”