Do you mind calling Brown?”

“Well, Somerton,” said Mr Gregory, as he crossed the room to the door,
“I won’t ask for any explanations till you see fit to give them. And if
this bit of business is as easy as you represent it to be, I will very
gladly undertake it for you the first thing in the morning.”

“Ah, I was sure you would, my dear Gregory; I was certain I could rely
on you. I shall owe you more thanks than I can tell. Now, here is
Brown. Brown, one word with you.”

“Shall I go?” interjected Mr Gregory. “Not at all. Dear me, no. Brown, the first thing tomorrow morning—(you
don’t mind early hours, I know, Gregory)—you must take the Rector
to—_there_, you know” (a nod from Brown, who looked grave and anxious),
“and he and you will put that back. You needn’t be in the least
alarmed; it’s _perfectly_ safe in the daytime. You know what I mean. It
lies on the step, you know, where—where we put it.” (Brown swallowed
dryly once or twice, and, failing to speak, bowed.) “And—yes, that’s
all. Only this one other word, my dear Gregory. If you _can_ manage to
keep from questioning Brown about this matter, I shall be still more
bound to you. Tomorrow evening, at latest, if all goes well, I shall be
able, I believe, to tell you the whole story from start to finish. And
now I’ll wish you good night. Brown will be with me—he sleeps here—and
if I were you, I should lock my door. Yes, be particular to do that. They—they like it, the people here, and it’s better. Good night, good
night.”

They parted upon this, and if Mr Gregory woke once or twice in the
small hours and fancied he heard a fumbling about the lower part of his
locked door, it was, perhaps, no more than what a quiet man, suddenly
plunged into a strange bed and the heart of a mystery, might reasonably
expect. Certainly he thought, to the end of his days, that he had heard
such a sound twice or three times between midnight and dawn. He was up with the sun, and out in company with Brown soon after. Perplexing as was the service he had been asked to perform for Mr
Somerton, it was not a difficult or an alarming one, and within half an
hour from his leaving the inn it was over. What it was I shall not as
yet divulge. Later in the morning Mr Somerton, now almost himself again, was able to
make a start from Steinfeld; and that same evening, whether at Coblentz
or at some intermediate stage on the journey I am not certain, he
settled down to the promised explanation. Brown was present, but how
much of the matter was ever really made plain to his comprehension he
would never say, and I am unable to conjecture. III

This was Mr Somerton’s story:

“You know roughly, both of you, that this expedition of mine was
undertaken with the object of tracing something in connexion with some
old painted glass in Lord D——’s private chapel. Well, the
starting-point of the whole matter lies in this passage from an old
printed book, to which I will ask your attention.”

And at this point Mr Somerton went carefully over some ground with
which we are already familiar. “On my second visit to the chapel,” he went on, “my purpose was to take
every note I could of figures, lettering, diamond-scratchings on the
glass, and even apparently accidental markings. The first point which I
tackled was that of the inscribed scrolls. I could not doubt that the
first of these, that of Job—‘There is a place for the gold where it is
hidden’—with its intentional alteration, must refer to the treasure; so
I applied myself with some confidence to the next, that of St
John—‘They have on their vestures a writing which no man knoweth.’ The
natural question will have occurred to you: Was there an inscription on
the robes of the figures? I could see none; each of the three had a
broad black border to his mantle, which made a conspicuous and rather
ugly feature in the window. I was nonplussed, I will own, and, but for
a curious bit of luck, I think I should have left the search where the
Canons of Steinfeld had left it before me. But it so happened that
there was a good deal of dust on the surface of the glass, and Lord
D——, happening to come in, noticed my blackened hands, and kindly
insisted on sending for a Turk’s head broom to clean down the window. There must, I suppose, have been a rough piece in the broom; anyhow, as
it passed over the border of one of the mantles, I noticed that it left
a long scratch, and that some yellow stain instantly showed up. I asked
the man to stop his work for a moment, and ran up the ladder to examine
the place. The yellow stain was there, sure enough, and what had come
away was a thick black pigment, which had evidently been laid on with
the brush after the glass had been burnt, and could therefore be easily
scraped off without doing any harm. I scraped, accordingly, and you
will hardly believe—no, I do you an injustice; you will have guessed
already—that I found under this black pigment two or three
clearly-formed capital letters in yellow stain on a clear ground. Of
course, I could hardly contain my delight. “I told Lord D—— that I had detected an inscription which I thought
might be very interesting, and begged to be allowed to uncover the
whole of it. He made no difficulty about it whatever, told me to do
exactly as I pleased, and then, having an engagement, was
obliged—rather to my relief, I must say—to leave me. I set to work at
once, and found the task a fairly easy one. The pigment, disintegrated,
of course, by time, came off almost at a touch, and I don’t think that
it took me a couple of hours, all told, to clean the whole of the black
borders in all three lights. Each of the figures had, as the
inscription said, ‘a writing on their vestures which nobody knew’. “This discovery, of course, made it absolutely certain to my mind that
I was on the right track. And, now, what was the inscription? While I
was cleaning the glass I almost took pains not to read the lettering,
saving up the treat until I had got the whole thing clear. And when
that was done, my dear Gregory, I assure you I could almost have cried
from sheer disappointment. What I read was only the most hopeless
jumble of letters that was ever shaken up in a hat. Here it is:

_Job_. DREVICIOPEDMOOMSMVIVLISLCAVIBASBATAOVT _St
John_. RDIIEAMRLESIPVSPODSEEIRSETTAAESGIAVNNR
_Zechariah_. DREVICIOPEDMOOMSMVIVLISLCAVIBASBATAOVT

“Blank as I felt and must have looked for the first few minutes, my
disappointment didn’t last long. I realized almost at once that I was
dealing with a cipher or cryptogram; and I reflected that it was likely
to be of a pretty simple kind, considering its early date. So I copied
the letters with the most anxious care. Another little point, I may
tell you, turned up in the process which confirmed my belief in the
cipher. After copying the letters on Job’s robe I counted them, to make
sure that I had them right.