THE AMSTERDAM EDITION OF 1698.
Captain Ducie soon fell into the quiet routine of life at Bon Repos.
It was not distasteful to him. To a younger man it might have seemed
to lack variety, to have impinged too closely on the verge of dulness;
but Captain Ducie had reached that time of life when quiet pleasures
please the most, and when much can be forgiven the man who sets before
you a dinner worth eating. Not that Ducie had anything to forgive.
Platzoff had contracted a great liking for his guest, and his
hospitality was of that cordial quality which makes the object of it
feel himself thoroughly at home. Besides this, the captain knew when
he was well off, and had no wish to exchange his present pleasant
quarters, his rambles across the hills, and his sailings on the lake,
for his dingy bedroom in town with the harassing hunted-down life of a
man upon whom a dozen writs are waiting to be served, and who can
never feel certain that his next day's dinner may not be eaten behind
the locks and bars of a prison.
Sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot, sometimes accompanied by
his host, sometimes alone, Ducie explored the lovely country round Bon
Repos to his heart's content. Another source of pleasure and healthful
exercise he found in long solitary pulls up and down the lake in a
tiny skiff which had been set apart for his service. In the evening
came dinner and conversation with his host, with perhaps a game or two
of billiards to finish up the day.
Captain Ducie found no scope for the exercise of his gambling
proclivities at Bon Repos. Platzoff never touched card or dice. He
could handle a cue tolerably well, but beyond a half-crown game, Ducie
giving him ten points out of fifty, he could never be persuaded to
venture. If the captain, when he went down to Bon Repos, had any
expectation of replenishing his pockets by means of faro and unlimited
loo, he was wretchedly mistaken. But whatever secret annoyance he
might feel, he was too much a man of the world to allow his host even
to suspect its existence.
Of society in the ordinary meaning of that word there was absolutely
none at Bon Repos. None of the neighbouring families by any chance
ever called on Platzoff. By no chance did Platzoff ever call on any of
the neighbouring families. "They are too good for me, too orthodox,
too strait-laced," exclaimed the Russian one day in his quiet jeering
way. "Or it may be that I am not good enough for them. Any way, we do
not coalesce. Rather are we like flint and steel, and eliminate a
spark whenever we come in contact. They look upon me as a pagan, and
hold me in horror. I look upon three-fourths of them as Pharisees, and
hold them in contempt. Good people there are among them no doubt;
people whom it would be a pleasure to know, but I have neither time,
health, nor inclination for conventional English visiting--for your
ponderous style of hospitality. I am quite sure that my ideas of men
and manners would not coincide with those of the quiet country ladies
and gentlemen of these parts; while theirs would seem to me terribly
wearisome and jejune. Therefore, as I take it, we are better apart."
By and by Ducie discovered that his host was not so entirely isolated
from the world as at first sight he appeared to be. Occasional society
there was of a certain kind, intermittent, coming and going like birds
of passage. One, or sometimes two visitors, of whose arrival Ducie had
heard no previous mention, would now and again put in an appearance at
the dinner table, would pass one, or at the most two, nights at Bon
Repos, and would then be seen no more, having gone as mysteriously as
they had come. These visitors were always foreigners, now of one
nationality, now of another; and were always closeted privately with
Platzoff for several hours. In appearance some of them were strangely
shabby and unkempt, in a wild un-English sort of fashion, while others
among them seemed like men to whom the good things of this world were
no strangers. But whatever their appearance, they were all treated by
Platzoff as honoured guests for whom nothing at his command was too
good. As a matter of course, they were all introduced to Captain
Ducie, but none of their names had been heard by him before--indeed,
he had a dim suspicion, gathered, he could not have told how, that the
names by which they were made known to him were in some cases
fictitious ones, and appropriated for that occasion only. But to the
captain that fact mattered nothing. They were people whom he should
never meet after leaving Bon Repos, or if he did chance to meet them,
whom he should never recognise.
One other noticeable feature there was about these birds of passage.
They were all men of considerable intelligence--men who could talk
tersely and well on almost any topic that might chance to come
uppermost at table, or during the after-dinner smoke. Literature, art,
science, travel--on any or all of these subjects they had opinions to
offer; but one subject there was that seemed tabooed among them as by
common consent: that subject was politics. Captain Ducie saw and
recognised the fact, but as he himself was a man who cared nothing for
politics of any kind, and would have voted them a bore in general
conversation, he was by no means disposed to resent their extrusion
from the table talk at Bon Repos.
As to whom and what these strangers might be, no direct information
was vouchsafed by the Russian. Captain Ducie was left in a great
measure to draw his own conclusions. A certain conversation which he
had one day with his host seemed to throw some light on the matter.
Ducie had been asking Platzoff whether he did not sometimes regret
having secluded himself so entirely from the world; whether he did not
long sometimes to be in the great centres of humanity, in London or
Paris, where alone life's full flavour can be tasted.
"Whenever Bon Repos becomes Mal Repos," answered Platzoff,--"whenever
a longing such as you speak of comes over me,--and it does come
sometimes,--then I flee away for a few weeks, to London oftener than
anywhere else--certainly not to Paris: that to me is forbidden ground.
By-and-by I come back to my nest among the hills vowing there is no
place like it in the world's wide round. But even when I am here, I am
not so shut out from the world and its great interests as you seem to
imagine. I see History enacting itself before my eyes, and I cannot
sit by with averted face. I hear the grand chant of Liberty as the
beautiful goddess comes nearer and nearer and smites down one
Oppressor after another with her red right hand; and I cannot shut my
ears. I have been an actor in the great drama of Revolution ever
since, a lad of twelve, I saw my father borne off in chains to
Siberia, and heard my mother with her dying breath curse the tyrant
who had sent him there. Since that day, Conspiracy has been the very
salt of my life. For it I have fought and bled; for it I have suffered
hunger, thirst, imprisonment, and dangers unnumbered. Paris, Vienna,
St. Petersburg, are all places that I can never hope to see again. For
me to set foot in any one of the three would be to run the risk of
almost certain detection, and in my case detection would mean hopeless
incarceration for the poor remainder of my days. To the world at large
I may seem nothing but a simple country gentleman, living a dull life
in a spot remote from all stirring interests. But I may tell you, sir
(in strictest confidence, mind) that although I stand a little aside
from the noise and heat of the battle, I work for it with heart and
brain as busily, and to better purpose let us hope, than when I was a
much younger man. I am still a conspirator, and a conspirator I shall
remain till Death taps me on the shoulder and serves me with his last
great writ of _habeas corpus_."
These words recurred to Ducie's memory a day or two later when he
found at the dinner-table two foreigners whom he had never seen
before. "Is it possible that these bearded gentlemen are also
conspirators?" asked the captain of himself. "If so, their mode of
life must be a very uncomfortable one. It never seems to include the
use of a razor, and very sparingly that of comb and brush. I am glad
that I have nothing to do with what Platzoff calls _The Great Cause_."
But Captain Ducie was not a man to trouble himself with the affairs of
other people unless his own interests were in some way affected
thereby. M. Paul Platzoff might have been mixed up with all the plots
in Europe for anything the captain cared: it was a mere question of
taste, and he never interfered with another man's tastes when they did
not clash with his own. Besides, in the present case, his attention
was claimed by what to him was a matter of far more serious interest.
From day to day he was anxiously waiting for news from the London
bookseller who was making inquiries on his behalf as to the
possibility of obtaining a copy of "_The Confessions of Parthenio the
Mystic_." Day passed after day till a fortnight had gone, and still
there came no line from the bookseller.
Ducie's impatience could no longer be restrained: he wrote, asking for
news. The third day brought a reply. The bookseller had at last heard
of a copy. It was in the library of a monastery in the Low Countries.
The coffers of the monastery needed replenishing; the abbot was
willing to part with the book, but the price of it would be a sum
equivalent to fifty guineas of English money. Such was the purport of
the letter.
To Captain Ducie, just then, fifty guineas were a matter of serious
moment. For a full hour he debated with himself whether or no he
should order the book to be bought. Supposing it duly purchased;
supposing that it really proved to be the key by which the secret of
the Russian's MS. could be mastered; might not the secret itself prove
utterly worthless as far as he, Ducie, was concerned? Might it not be
merely a secret bearing on one of those confounded political plots in
which Platzoff was implicated--a matter of moment no doubt to the
writer, but of no earthly utility to any one not inoculated with such
March-hare madness? These were the questions that it behoved him to
consider. At the end of an hour he decided that the game was worth the
candle: he would risk his fifty guineas.
Taking one of Platzoff's horses, he rode without delay to the nearest
telegraph station. His message to the bookseller was as under:
"Buy the book, and send it down to me here by confidential messenger."
The next few days were days of suspense, of burning impatience. The
messenger arrived almost sooner than Ducie expected, bringing the book
with him. Ducie sighed as he signed the cheque for fifty guineas, with
ten pounds for expenses. That shabby calf-bound worm-eaten volume
seemed such a poor exchange for the precious slip of paper that had
just left his fingers. But what was done could not be undone, so he
locked the book away carefully in his desk and locked up his
impatience with it till nightfall.
He could not get away from Platzoff till close upon midnight. When he
got to his own room he bolted the door, and drew the curtains across
the windows, although he knew that it was impossible for any one to
spy on him from without. Then he opened his desk, spread out the MS.
before him, and took up the volume. A calf-bound volume with red
edges, and numbering five hundred pages. It was in English, and the
title-page stated it to be "The Confessions of Parthenio the Mystic: a
Romance. Translated from the Latin. With Annotations, and a Key to
Sundrie Dark Meanings. Imprinted at Amsterdam in he Year of Grace
1698." It was in excellent condition.
Captain Ducie's eagerness to test his prize would not allow of more
than a very cursory inspection of the general contents of the volume.
So far as he could make out it seemed to be a political satire veiled
under the transparent garb of an Eastern story. Parthenio was
represented as a holy man--a Spiritualist or Mystic--who had lived for
many years in a cave in one of the Arabian deserts. Commanded at
length by what he calls the "inner voice," he sets out on his travels
to visit sundry courts and kingdoms of the East. He returns after five
years, and writes, for the benefit of his disciples, an account of the
chief things he has seen and learned while on his travels. The courts
of England, France, and Spain, under fictitious names, are the chief
marks for his ponderous satire, and some of the greatest men in the
three kingdoms are lashed with his most scurrilous abuse. Under any
circumstances the book was not one that Captain Ducie would have cared
to wade through, and in the present case, after dipping into a page
here and there, and finding that it contained nothing likely to
interest him, he proceeded at once to the more serious business of the
evening.
The clocks of Bon Repos were striking midnight as Captain Ducie
proceeded to test the value of the first group of figures on the MS.,
according to the formula laid down for him by his friend Bexell. The
first group of figures was 253.12/4. Turning to page two hundred and
fifty-three of the Confessions, and counting from the top of that
page, he found that the fourth word of the twelfth line gave him
_you_. The second clump of figures was 59.25/1. The first word of the
twenty-fifth line of page fifty-nine gave him _will_. The third clump
of figures gave him _have_, and the fourth _gathered_. These four
words ranged in order read: _You will have gathered_. Such a sequence
of words could not arise from mere accident. When he had got thus far
Ducie knew that Platzoff's secret would soon be a secret no longer,
that in a very little while the heart of the mystery would be laid
bare.
Encouraged by his success, Ducie went to work with renewed vigour, and
before the clock struck one he had completed the first sentence of the
MS., which ran as under:--
_You will have gathered from the foregoing note, my dear Carlo, that I
have something of importance to relate to you--something that I am
desirous of keeping a secret front every one but yourself_.
As his friend Bexell surmised, Ducie found that the groups of figures
distinguished from the rest by two horizontal lines, one above and one
below, as thus
---------------------------------
58.7 14.29 368.1 209.18 43.11,
---------------------------------
were the _valeurs_ of some proper name or other word for which there
was no equivalent in the book. Such words had to be spelt out letter
by letter in the same way that complete words were picked out in other
cases. Thus the marked figures as above, when taken letter by letter,
made up the word _Carlo_--a name to which there was nothing similar in
the Confessions.
It had been broad daylight for two hours before Captain Ducie grew
tired of his task and went to bed. He went on with it next night, and
every night till it was finished. It was a task that deepened in
interest as he proceeded with it. It grew upon him to such a degree
that when near the close he feigned illness and kept his room for a
whole day, so that he might the sooner get it done.
If Captain Ducie had ever amused himself with trying to imagine the
nature of the secret which he had now succeeded in unravelling, the
reality must have been very different from his expectations. One
gigantic thought, whose coming made him breathless for a moment, took
possession of him, as a demon might have done, almost before he had
finished his task, dwarfing all other thoughts by its magnitude. It
was a thought that found relief in six words only: "It must and shall
be mine!"