A Word Before Reading.
For many years I have busied myself making a collection of rare and
valuable historical documents, and strange indeed are some of the
stories and scandals which these ancient, crinkled parchments whisper to
me in my hours of leisure.
In France, in Italy, in Russia, in Germany, in Belgium, in all corners
of England, this craze of mine has led me, through many adventures, free
but captive; and, looking back now, I realise that it has been really
through this little-known hobby of mine, the hobby of palaeography, that
there have come some of the most suggestive and magical hours I have
ever spent in a wandering, erratic life that has never been wholly free
from movement, but has often held its time of danger and its resistless,
restless passion for change, romance, and adventure.
Perhaps, then, it is not really wonderful that this love of mine for the
records of the dead-and-gone ages colours my later stories. Yet, in a
sense, it would be strangely odd if it did not, for when an author hears
so weird and thrilling a narrative of hidden treasure as this I have
here striven to recount it would surely be more than human of him to
fail to put it into print.
This "Hunchback of Westminster" is really no idle fiction spun for the
entertainment of an idle hour. In many ways, indeed, it is tragically
true--particularly that portion which tells how men only a few months
ago in this prosaic London of ours fought for a certain treasure worth
several millions of pounds.
William Le Queux.