THE STOLEN MANUSCRIPT.
Captain Edmund Ducie came of a good family. His people were people of
mark among the landed gentry of their county, and were well to do even
for their position. Although only a fourth son his allowance had been
a very handsome one, both while at Cambridge and afterwards during the
early years of his life in the army. When of age, he had come into the
very nice little fortune, for a fourth son, of nine thousand pounds;
and it was known that there would be "something handsome" for him at
his father's death, He had a more than ordinary share of good looks;
his mind was tolerably cultivated, and afterwards enlarged by travel
and service in various parts of the world; in manners and address he
was a finished gentleman of the modern "swell" school. Yet all these
advantages of nature and fortune were in a great measure nullified and
rendered of no avail by reason of one fatal defect, of one black speck
at the core. In a word, Captain Ducie was a born gambler.
He had gambled when a child in the nursery, or had tried to gamble,
for cakes and toys. He had gambled when at school for coppers,
pocketknives, and marbles. He had gambled when at the University, and
had felt the claws of the Children of Usury. He gambled away his nine
thousand pounds, or such remainder of it as had not been forestalled,
when he came of age. Later on, when in the army, and on home allowance
again, for his father would not let him starve, he had kept on
gambling; so that when, some five years later, his father died, and he
dropped in for the "something handsome," two-thirds of it had to be
paid down on the nail to make a free man of him again. On the
remaining one-third he contrived to keep afloat for a couple of years
longer; then, after a season of heavy losses, came the final crash,
and Captain Ducie found himself under the necessity of selling his
commission, and of retiring into private life.
From this date Captain Ducie was compelled to live by "bleeding" his
friends and connexions. He was a great favourite among them, and they
rallied gallantly to his rescue. But Ducie still gambled; and the best
of friends, and the most indulgent of relatives, grew tired after a
time of seeing their cherished gold pieces slip heedlessly through the
fingers of the man whom it was intended that they should substantially
help, and be lost in the foul gutter of a gaming-house. One by one
friend and relative dropped away from the doomed man till none were
left. Little by little the tide of fortune ebbed away from his feet,
leaving him stranded high and dry on the cruel shore of impecuniosity,
hemmed in by a thousand debts, with the gaunt wolf of beggary staring
him in the face.
There was one point about Captain Ducie's gambling that redounded to
his credit. No one ever suspected him of cheating. His "run of luck"
was so uniformly bad, despite a brief fickle gleam of fortune now and
again, which seemed sent only to lure him on to deeper destruction; it
was so well known that he had spent two fortunes and alienated all his
friends through his passion for the green cloth; that it would have
been the height of absurdity to even suspect him of roguery. Indeed,
"Ducie's luck" was a proverbial phrase at the whist-tables of his
club. He was not a "turf" man, and had no knowledge of horses beyond
that legitimate knowledge which every soldier ought to have. His money
had all been lost either at cards or roulette. He was one of the most
imperturbable of gamblers. Whatever the varying chances of the game
might be, no man ever saw him either elated or depressed: he fought
with his vizor down.
No man could be more aware of his one besetting weakness, nor of his
inability to conquer it, than was Captain Ducie. When he could no
longer muster five pounds to gamble with, he would gamble with five
shillings. There was a low public-house in Southwark to which, poorly
dressed, he sometimes went when his funds were low. Here, unknown to
the police, a little quiet gambling for small stakes went on from
night to night. But however small might be the amount involved, there
was the passion, the excitement, the gambling contagion, precisely as
at Homburg or Baden; and these it was that made the very salt of
Captain Ducie's life.
About six months before we made his acquaintance he had been compelled
to leave his pleasant suite of apartments in New Bond-street, and had,
since that time, been the tenant of a shabby bedroom in a shabby
little out-of-the-way street. When in town he took his meals at his
club, and to that address all letters and papers for him were sent.
But of late even the purlieus of his club had become dangerous ground.
Round the palatial portal duns seemed to hover and flit mysteriously,
so that the task of reaching the secure haven of the smoke-room was
one of danger and difficulty; while the return voyage to the shabby
little bedroom in the shabby little street could be accomplished in
safety only by frequent tacking, and much skilful pilotage, to avoid
running foul of various rocks and quicksands by the way.
But now, after a six weeks' absence in Scotland, Captain Ducie felt
that for a day or two at least he was tolerably safe. He felt like an
old fox venturing into the open after the noise of the hunt has died
away in the distance, who knows that for a little while he is safe
from molestation. How delightful town looked, he thought, after the
dull life he had been leading at Stapleton. He had managed to screw
another fifty pounds out of Barnstake, and this very evening, the
first of his return, he would go to Tom Dawson's rooms and there
refresh himself with a little quiet faro or chicken-hazard: very quiet
it must of necessity be unless he saw that it was going to turn out
one of his lucky evenings, in which case he would try to "put up" the
table and finish with a fortunate coup. But there was one little task
that he had set himself to do before going out for the evening, and he
proceeded to consider it over while discussing his cup of strong green
tea and his strip of dry toast. To aid him in considering the matter
he brought out of an inner pocket the stolen manuscript of M.
Platzoff.
While in Scotland, when shut up in his own room of a night, he had
often exhumed the MS., and had set himself seriously to the task of
deciphering it, only to acknowledge at the end of a terrible half-hour
that he was ignominiously beaten. Whereupon he would console himself
by saying that such a task was "not in his line," that his brains were
not of that pettifogging order which would allow of his sitting down
with the patience requisite to master the secret of the figures.
To-night, for the twentieth time, he brought out the MS. He again read
the prefatory note carefully over, although he could almost have said
it by heart, and once more his puzzled eyes ran over the complicated
array of figures, till at last, with an impatient "Pish!" he flung the
MS. to the other side of the table, and poured out for himself another
cup of tea.
"I must send it to Bexell," he said to himself. "If anybody can make
it out, he can. And yet I don't like making another man as wise as
myself in such a matter. However, there is no help for it in the
present case. If I keep the MS. by me till doomsday I shall never
succeed in making out the meaning of those confounded figures."
When he had finished his tea he took out his writing-desk and wrote as
under:
"My Dear Bexell,--I have only just got back from Scotland after an
absence of six weeks. I have brought with me a severe catarrh, a new
plaid, a case of Mountain Dew, and a MS. written in cipher. The first
and second of these articles I retain for my own use. Of the third I
send you half a dozen bottles by way of sample: a judicious imbibition
of the contents will be found to be a sovereign remedy for the Pip and
other kindred disorders that owe their origin to a melancholy frame of
mind. The fourth article on my list I send you bodily. It has been
lent to me by a friend of mine who states that he found it in his
muniment chest among a lot of old title deeds, leases, &c., the first
time he waded through them after coming into possession of his
property. Neither he nor any friend to whom he has shown it can make
out its meaning, and I must confess to being myself one of the
puzzled. My friend is very anxious to have it deciphered, as he thinks
it may in some way relate to his property, or to some secret bit of
family history with which it would be advisable that he should become
acquainted. Anyhow, he gave it to me to bring to town, with a request
that I would seek out some one clever in such things, and try to get
it interpreted for him. Now I know of no one except yourself who is at
all expert in such matters. You, I remember, used to take a delight
that to me was inexplicable in deciphering those strange
advertisements which now and again appear in the newspapers. Let me
therefore ask of you to bring your old skill to bear in the present
case, and if you can make me anything like a presentable translation
to send back to my friend the laird, you will greatly oblige
"Your friend,
"E. Ducie."
The MS. consisted of three or four sheets of deed-paper fastened
together at on e corner with silk. The prefatory note was on the first
sheet. This first sheet Ducie cut away with his penknife and locked up
in his desk. The remaining sheets he sent to his friend Bexell,
together with the note which he had written.
Three days later Mr. Bexell returned the sheets with his reply. In
order properly to understand this reply it will be necessary to offer
to the reader's notice a specimen of the MS. The conclusions arrived
at by Mr. Bexell, and the mode by which he reached them, will then be
more clearly comprehensible:
The following is a counterpart of the first few lines of the MS.:
253.12 59.29 14.5 96.14 158.49 1.29 465.1 28.53
4 1 6 10 4 12 9 1
____________________________________
16.36 151.18 58.7 14.29 368.1 209.18 43.11 1.31 1.1
____________________________________
11 3 9 8
29.6 186.9 204.11 86.19 43.16 348.14 196.29 203.5
4 5 10 6 1 5 6 2
186.9 1.31 21.10 143.18 200.6 29.40 408.9 61.5
5 9 4 8 3 12 11 4
209.11 496.1 24.24 28.59 69.39 391.10 60.13 200.1
2 6 4 1 10 11 3 3
The following is Mr. Bexel's reply to his friend Captain Ducie:
"My Dear Ducie,--With this note you will receive back your confounded
MS., but without a translation. I have spent a good deal of time and
labour in trying to decipher it, and the conclusions at which I have
arrived may be briefly laid before you.
"1. Each group of three sets of figures represents a word.
"2. Each group of two sets of figures--those with a line above and a
line below--represents a letter only.
"3. Those letters put together from the point where the double line
begins to the point where it ceases, make up a word.
"4. In the composition of this cryptogram _a book_ has been used as the
basis on which to work.
"5. In every group of three sets of figures the first set represents
the page of the book; the second, the number of the line on that page,
probably counting from the top; the third the position in ordinary
rotation of the word on that line. Thus you have the number of the
page, the number of the line, and the number of the word.
"6. In the case of the interlined groups of two sets of figures, the
first set represents the number of the page; the second set the number
of the line, probably counting from the top, of which line the
required letter will prove to be the initial one.
"7. The words thus spelled out by the interlined groups of double
figures are, in all probability, proper names, or other uncommon words
not to be found in their entirety in the book on which the cryptogram
is based, and consequently requiring to be worked out letter by
letter.
"8. The book in question is not a dictionary, nor any other work the
words of which come in alphabetical rotation. It is probably some
ordinary book which the writer of the cryptogram, and the person for
whom it is written, have agreed upon beforehand to make use of as a
key. I have no means of judging whether the book in question is an
English or a foreign one, but by it alone, whatever it may be, can the
cryptogram be read.
"Now, my dear Ducie, it would be wearisome for me to describe, and
equally wearisome for you to read, the processes of reasoning by means
of which the above deductions have been arrived at. But in order to
satisfy you that my assumptions are not entirely fanciful or destitute
of sober sense, I will describe to you, as briefly as may be, the
process by means of which I have come to the conclusion that the book
used as the basis of the cryptogram was not a dictionary or other work
in which the words come in alphabetical rotation: and such a
conclusion is very easy of proof.
"In a document so lengthy as the MS. of your friend the Scotch laird
there must of necessity be many repetitions of what may be called
'indispensable words'--words one or more of which are used in the
composition of almost every long sentence. I allude to such words as
_a, an, and, as, of, by, the, their, them, these, they, you, I, it_,
&c. The first thing to do was to analyse the MS., and classify the
different groups of figures for the purpose of ascertaining the number
of repetitions of any one group. My analysis showed me that these
repetitions were surprisingly few. Forty groups were repeated twice,
fifteen three times, and nine groups four times. Now, according to my
calculation, the MS. contains 1283 words. Out of those 1283 words
there must have been more than the number of repetitions shown by my
analysis, and not of one only, but of several of what I have called
'indispensable words.' Had a dictionary been made use of by the writer
of the MS. all such repetitions would have been referred to one
particular page, and to one particular line of that page: that is to
say, in every case where a word repeated itself in the MS. the same
group of numbers would in every case have been its _valuer_. As the
repetitions were so few I could only conclude that some book of an
ordinary kind had been made use of and that the writer of the
cryptogram had been sufficiently ingenious not to repeat his numbers
very frequently in the case of 'indispensable words,' but had in the
majority of cases given a fresh group of numbers at each repetition of
such a word. I might, perhaps, go further and say that in the majority
of cases where a group of figures is repeated such group refers to
some word less frequently used than any of those specified above, and
that one group was obliged to do duty on two or more occasions, simply
because the writer was unable to find the word more than once in the
book on which his cryptogram was based.
"Having once arrived at the conclusion that some book had been used as
the basis of the cryptogram, my next supposition that each group of
three sets of numbers showed the page of the book, the number of the
line from the top, and the position of the required word in that line,
seemed at once borne out by an analysis of the figures themselves.
Thus, taking the first set of figures in each group, I found that in
no case did they run to a higher number than 500 which would seem to
indicate that the basis-book was limited to that number of pages. The
second set of figures ran to no higher number than 60, which would
seem to limit the lines on each page to that number. The third set of
figures in no case yielded a higher number than 12; which numerals,
according to my theory, would indicate the maximum number of words in
each line. Thus you have at once (if such information is of any use to
you) a sort of a key to the size of the required volume.
"I think I have now written enough, my dear Ducie, to afford you some
idea of the method by means of which my conclusions have been arrived
at. If you wish for further details I will supply them--but by word of
mouth, and it be all the same to your honour; for this child detests
letter-writing, and has taken a vow that if he reach the end of his
present pen-and-ink venture in safety, he will never in time to come
devote more than two pages of cream note to even the most exacting of
friends: the sequitur of which is, that if you want to know more than
is here set down you must give the writer a call, when you shall be
talked to to your heart's content.
"Your exhausted friend,
"Geo. Bexell.
"Captain Ducie."
Captain Ducie had too great a respect for the knowledge of his friend
Bexell in matters like the one under review, to dream for one moment
of testing the validity of any of his conclusions. He accepted the
whole of them as final. Having got the conclusions themselves, he
cared nothing as to the processes by which they had been deduced: the
details interested him not at all. Consequently he kept out of the way
of his friend, being in truth considerably disgusted to find that, so
far as he was himself concerned, the affair had ended in a fiasco. He
could not look upon it in any other light. It was utterly out of the
range of probability that he should ever succeed in ascertaining on
what particular book the cryptogram was based, and no other knowledge
was now of the slightest avail. He was half inclined to send back the
MS. anonymously to Platzoff, as being of no further use to himself;
but he was restrained by the thought that there was just a faint
chance that the much-desired volume might turn up during his
forthcoming visit to Bon Repos--that even at the eleventh hour the key
might be found.
He was terribly chagrined to think that the act of genteel petty
larceny, by which he had lowered himself more in his own eyes than he
would have cared to acknowledge, had been so absolutely barren of
results. That portion of his moral anatomy which he would have called
his conscience pricked him shrewdly now and again, but such pricks had
their origin in the fact of his knavery having been unsuccessful. Had
his wrong-doing won for him such a prize as he had fondly hoped to
gain by its means, Conscience would have let her rusted spear hang
unheeded on the wall, and beyond giving utterance now and then to a
faint whisper in the dead of night, would have troubled him not at
all.
It was some time in the middle of the night, about a week after Bexell
had sent him back the papers, that he awoke suddenly and completely,
and there before him, as clearly as though it had been written in
letters of fire on the black wall, he saw the title of the wished-for
book. It was the book mentioned by Platzoff in his prefatory note:
_The Confessions of Parthenio the Mystic_. The knowledge had come to
him like a revelation. How stupid he must have been never to have
thought of it before! That night he slept no more.
Next morning he went to one of the most famous bookdealers in the
metropolis. The book inquired for by Ducie was not known to the man.
But that did not say that there was no such work in existence. Through
his agents at home and abroad inquiry should be made, and the result
communicated to Captain Ducie. Therewith the latter was obliged to
content himself. Three days later came a pressing note of invitation
from Platzoff.