half-charred fragments before him.Some were in typewriting, one was in a small fine script. One hardlylegible was in German, others were in English, interspersed here andthere with words which he recognised were in Hebrew character.
In that small bedroom, beneath the rather dim electric light, thedeformed little man sat pouring over the folios so dry that they crackedand crumbled when touched.
Much was undecipherable; the greater part had indeed been utterlyconsumed, but here and there he was enabled to read consecutivesentences, and those he made out utterly staggered him.
Indeed, so full of interest, so curious, and so amazing they would havestaggered anybody.
He held in his hands the dead man's secret--a secret that on the face ofit, seemed to be the strangest and at the same time the most unsuspectedin all the world.
Suddenly he sat back, and, staring straight across the narrow room,exclaimed aloud:
"Why, there are men in the city this very day who'd give me ten thousandpounds for the remains of these papers! But would I sell them? No--notfor ten times that amount! Who knows what this discovery may not beworth?"
He chuckled to himself. Already he felt himself a wealthy man, a manwho could dictate his own terms in financial circles--a man who would bewelcomed in audience by crowned heads themselves!
He sighed, and the heavy exhalation blew a quantity of fragments oftinder away upon the carpet.
"I wish I hadn't burned them quite so much," he said regretfully. "HadI had a newspaper handy I could have lit that instead. Or--or I mighteasily have delayed their destruction until--until after the end. Yethe seemed quite conscious, up to the very last moment. No wonder heregretted death before the fulfilment of the great work he hadcommenced--no wonder he contemplated moving to the Grand Hotel at anearly date! And yet," he added, after a pause, "it's all veryintricate, very indistinct, and requires a greater scholar than myselfto properly understand and unravel it."
The chief document, consisting of about ten typewritten pages inEnglish, had been badly burned. It was this which he was now engaged intrying to decipher. At the top left-hand corner the sheets hadoriginally been held together by a paper-fastener, but that corner hadbeen consumed as well as all round the edges. The centre alone of threefolios remained readable, even though it had been yellowed by smoke.
"There seem very many references to Israel, to Nebuchadnezzar, King ofBabylon, and to the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. Yet they seem toconvey nothing. Ah!" he sighed, "if only I could reconstruct thecontext. There are Biblical references, too. I must obtain a Bible."
So he rose, rang for a waiter, and asked him whether there was such athing in the hotel as a copy of Holy Writ.
The man, a young German, naturally regarded the visitor as an eccentricperson or a religious crank, but he went at once and borrowed a smallBible from the chambermaid--a volume which afterwards proved to contain,between its leaves, small texts of her Sunday-school days, severalpressed flowers, and a lock of hair.
A reference given upon one of the crinkled folios was "Ezekiel xxviii,24."
Reseating himself after the young German had left, Raymond Diamondhastily turned over the pages of the little well-thumbed Bible and foundwhat proved to be the prophecy of the restoration of Israel.
Another reference in the next line of the half-burnt screed was Ezekielxl, xli and xlii, no verses being designated.
On turning to these chapters, the doctor found that they contained adescription of Ezekiel's vision of the measuring of the temple.
Continuing, he read the further dimensions of the temple, the size ofthe chambers for the priests, and the measures of the outer court "tomake a separation between the sanctuary and the profane place."
All this conveyed to the deformed man but little.
That it had some connection with the strange secret was apparent, but inwhat manner he failed to distinguish.
He had gathered broadly that the dead man's discovery was an amazingone, and that a strange secret was revealed by those documents when theywere intact, but it was all so mystifying, so astounding, that he couldscarce give it shape within his own bewildered brain.
The enormous possibilities of the discovery had utterly dumbfoundedhim--it was a discovery that was unheard of.
In order to present to the reader some idea of the fragments of the deadman's papers lying upon the table before him, it may be of interest ifthe present writer gives a photographic representation of one of thebadly burned folios.
As will easily be seen, the undestroyed fragment of the document showedbut little that was tangible. Of interest, it was true, but theinterest was, alas! a well-concealed one. The dead man was a scholar.Of that there was no doubt whatsoever. The doctor had recognised fromthe first that he was no ordinary person.
The document seemed to be a portion of some statement made by a personas to the curious and unexpected result of certain studies.
He who made the declaration had apparently been a student of the Talmud,and especially the school of the Amoraim, or debaters, who about A.D.250 expounded the "Mishna."
Raymond Diamond had long ago read Wunsche, Bacher and Strack, and fromthem had learned how the Amoraim had expounded the "Mishna," and howtheir labours had formed the Gemara, while the united Mishna and Gemaraformed the books of the Talmud. By that time, and even earlier, theteachers of Judaism were also working in the schools of Babylonis.Hence the Talmud now exists in two forms--the Palestinian Talmud, orTalmud of Jerusalem, and the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbi Jehuda compiledthe "Mishna" which, in general, sums up the outcome of the activity ofthe Sopherim, Zugoth and Tannaim, and thus became the canonical book ofthe oral law.
He was recalling these facts as he sat staring at the half-charredfragments on the table before him.
"The person making the declaration," he said aloud to himself, "appearsto have discovered certain hidden meanings in the `Mishna.' Well--onecan read hidden meanings in most writings, I believe, if one wishes.Yet he seems to have come across something which amazed him--somecabalistic message very complicated and ingenious. It caused him greatastonishment when he found himself able to--able to what? Ah! that'sthe point," he sighed.
Then, after another long pause, he decided that "nine ch--" meant "ninechapters," and that the final lines of the page dealt with somedeclaration opening with the arrival of the Messiah.
"Yes," he said in a hard decisive tone, straightening his crooked backas well as he was able. "There is a mystery explained here--a great andmost astounding mystery."
CHAPTER FOUR.
CONCERNS A CONSULTATION.
Late that same afternoon Raymond Diamond walked up the long muddyby-road which led from Horsford station to the village, about a miledistant.
Horsford was an obscure little place, still quite out-of-the-world, evenin these days of trains and motor-cars.
About four miles west of Peterborough on the edge of the fox-huntingcountry, it was a pleasant little spot consisting of a beautiful oldNorman church, with one of the finest towers in England and one long,straggling street mostly of thatched houses.
There were only two large houses--Horsford House, at the top of the hillon the Peterborough side, and the Manor, an old seventeenth-centurymansion, half-way down the village.
It was not yet dark when the Doctor, the only arrival by train, turnedthe corner by the Wheel Inn and entered the village. As he did so,Warr, who combined the business of publican and village butcher, wishedhim a cheery "Good evenin', Doctor."
And as the little man trudged up the long street he was greeted withmany such salutes, to all of which he answered mechanically, for he wasthinking--thinking deeply.
The fragrant smell of burning wood from the cottages greeted hisnostrils--the smell of that quiet little village which for some yearshad been his home.
He breathed again in that rural peace, as a dozen cows slowly ploddedpast him.
At last he turned from the main street, up a short, steep hill where, atthe end of a smal
l _cul-de-sac_, stood a long, old-fashioned,two-storied cottage with its dormer-windows peeping forth from the brownthatch. In summer, over the whole front of it spread a wealth ofclimbing roses, but now, in winter, only the brown leafless branchesremained.
In the small, well-kept front garden were a number of well-trimmedevergreens, while an old box-hedge ran around the tiny domain.
As he lifted the latch of the gate, Mrs Diamond, a neat, well-preservedwoman in black, threw open the door with a cheery welcome, and a momentlater he was in his own old-fashioned little dining-room, warminghimself at the fire, which, sending forth a ruddy glow, illuminated theroom.
For such a humble home, it was quite a cosy apartment. Upon theold-fashioned oak-dresser at the end were one or two pieces of bluechina, and on the oak overmantel were a few odd pieces of Worcester andDelft. On the walls were one or two engravings, while the furniture wasof antique pattern and well in
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