Therefore he deemed it best to get across to England at the earliest possible moment.
At six o’clock next morning he found himself in a small hotel called the Norfolk in Surrey Street, Strand, where he had on one or two occasions stayed. The waiter having brought up his breakfast, he locked the door and, going to the table, he took from his pocket the packet of charred paper and broken tinder which he had abstracted from the stove in Paris.
With infinite care he opened the handkerchief and spread it out. The tinder had broken into tiny fragments and some had been reduced to black powder, while the half-charred paper split as he attempted to open it.
He had switched on the light, for the London dawn had not yet spread. Then, seating himself at the table, he proceeded to examine and decipher the remains of the papers which the dying man believed he had entirely destroyed.
For some time he could make nothing of the lines of written words, which had neither beginning nor end.
Suddenly, however, he held his breath. He sat erect, statuesque, his dark eyes staring at the paper.
Then he re-read the written lines eagerly.
“Great Heavens! How strange!” he cried. “How utterly astounding! That man who refused his name had learned the greatest and most important secret this modern world of ours contains! And it is in my hands—mine! My God! Is it true—is it really true what this man alleges?”
He paused and again re-read the smoke-blackened, half-burned pages. For some moments he sat with his mouth open in utter astonishment. He could scarcely believe his own eyes.
“His secret—his amazing secret, one unheard of—is mine!” he gasped, glancing around the room, as though half-fearful lest he had been overheard. “I shall be a rich man—one of the richest in all Europe! Before six months is out the whole world will be at the feet of Raymond Diamond!”
Chapter Three.
Shows One of the Fragments.
“Well,” declared the Doctor, speaking to himself, “even my success in intra-laryngeal operations was not half so interesting as this!”
And again he bent to examine the half-charred fragments before him. Some were in typewriting, one was in a small fine script. One hardly legible was in German, others were in English, interspersed here and there with words which he recognised were in Hebrew character.
In that small bedroom, beneath the rather dim electric light, the deformed little man sat pouring over the folios so dry that they cracked and crumbled when touched.
Much was undecipherable; the greater part had indeed been utterly consumed, but here and there he was enabled to read consecutive sentences, and those he made out utterly staggered him.
Indeed, so full of interest, so curious, and so amazing they would have staggered anybody.
He held in his hands the dead man’s secret—a secret that on the face of it, seemed to be the strangest and at the same time the most unsuspected in 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 thousand pounds for the remains of these papers! But would I sell them? No—not for ten times that amount! Who knows what this discovery may not be worth?”
He chuckled to himself. Already he felt himself a wealthy man, a man who could dictate his own terms in financial circles—a man who would be welcomed in audience by crowned heads themselves!
He sighed, and the heavy exhalation blew a quantity of fragments of tinder away upon the carpet.
“I wish I hadn’t burned them quite so much,” he said regretfully. “Had I had a newspaper handy I could have lit that instead. Or—or I might easily have delayed their destruction until—until after the end. Yet he seemed quite conscious, up to the very last moment. No wonder he regretted death before the fulfilment of the great work he had commenced—no wonder he contemplated moving to the Grand Hotel at an early date! And yet,” he added, after a pause, “it’s all very intricate, very indistinct, and requires a greater scholar than myself to properly understand and unravel it.”
The chief document, consisting of about ten typewritten pages in English, had been badly burned. It was this which he was now engaged in trying to decipher. At the top left-hand corner the sheets had originally been held together by a paper-fastener, but that corner had been consumed as well as all round the edges. The centre alone of three folios remained readable, even though it had been yellowed by smoke.
“There seem very many references to Israel, to Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and to the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. Yet they seem to convey nothing. Ah!” he sighed, “if only I could reconstruct the context. There are Biblical references, too. I must obtain a Bible.”
So he rose, rang for a waiter, and asked him whether there was such a thing in the hotel as a copy of Holy Writ.
The man, a young German, naturally regarded the visitor as an eccentric person or a religious crank, but he went at once and borrowed a small Bible from the chambermaid—a volume which afterwards proved to contain, between its leaves, small texts of her Sunday-school days, several pressed 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 Diamond hastily turned over the pages of the little well-thumbed Bible and found what proved to be the prophecy of the restoration of Israel.
Another reference in the next line of the half-burnt screed was Ezekiel xl, xli and xlii, no verses being designated.
On turning to these chapters, the doctor found that they contained a description of Ezekiel’s vision of the measuring of the temple.
Continuing, he read the further dimensions of the temple, the size of the chambers for the priests, and the measures of the outer court “to make 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 in what manner he failed to distinguish.
He had gathered broadly that the dead man’s discovery was an amazing one, and that a strange secret was revealed by those documents when they were intact, but it was all so mystifying, so astounding, that he could scarce give it shape within his own bewildered brain.
The enormous possibilities of the discovery had utterly dumbfounded him—it was a discovery that was unheard of.
In order to present to the reader some idea of the fragments of the dead man’s papers lying upon the table before him, it may be of interest if the present writer gives a photographic representation of one of the badly burned folios.
As will easily be seen, the undestroyed fragment of the document showed but little that was tangible. Of interest, it was true, but the interest was, alas! a well-concealed one. The dead man was a scholar. Of that there was no doubt whatsoever. The doctor had recognised from the first that he was no ordinary person.
The document seemed to be a portion of some statement made by a person as 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,