The Hunchback of Westminster. Le Queux William
wooden apartment, with its familiar roof of green opaque glass and its big staring advertisements in colour on the walls, known to curio lovers all over the world as the “Brom,” crowded from end to end and door to door with foreigners. Now this was extremely unusual. In an ordinary way the same dealers and amateurs turn up at these functions time after time – these people fall into methods of their own of quick and agreeable acquaintance – and the bidding is conducted with certain airs of old-world politeness and decorum, which men who love the work find very delightful and refreshing in themselves, and yet conducive to the best business results.
To-day, however, the whole atmosphere and method of the place were changed as if by magic. A crowd of Jews, Spaniards, and Italians had practically taken entire possession of this huge and rambling mart, and their eager, polyglot conversation recalled nothing less than the Tower of Babel as they chattered, twisted, turned, elbowed, and gesticulated with as much animation as though they had met to devour the effects of a Rothschild instead of the books and goods of a poor, unnamed, dead refugee priest.
Indeed, it was just as much as I could do to elbow my way into the place at all. The crowd didn’t actively impede my progress, but they showed no desire to move out of my path; but finally I did, with a free use of my shoulders and knees, squeeze myself into a good position on a packing case, which lifted me high above the crowd, and yet which also gave me a splendid view of the rostrum upon which, as it happened, the auctioneer had just taken his seat.
Even he seemed rather stupefied by this vast, unexpected, and quite unusual assemblage, for no sooner had he called silence with a touch of his mallet on the table than he cleared his throat and said:
“I hope, gentlemen, that you have not been drawn here this afternoon under any misapprehension. This is not really one of the days of our big sales; all we have to dispose of are some two hundred books, a few vestments, and some quaint, old manuscripts belonging to a priest – a father – ”
He turned despairingly to his clerk, who consulted his ledger, and supplied the name needed.
“I mean a Father Alphonse Calasanctius, who, I am told, arrived quite mysteriously in Southampton late last week by the royal mail steamer Tartar, and was, unfortunately, found dead in the room he took in a private hotel in the Adelphi only the night afterwards.
“My idea, to-day, is to get things over as quickly as possible, and so I will put up the manuscripts first. I confess I don’t know myself whether certain of them are of any value, or whether they are some mere monkish jests of some centuries ago when men had more leisure to penetrate long legal-looking hoaxes. I ought to tell you, though, that I took several of them myself to an expert at the British Museum yesterday afternoon, and he was inclined to think they might be exceedingly precious, for he found that they related to some extraordinary secret which certain Jesuit monks in Mexico had taken that means of putting on record. All the same, he said quite frankly, he could not pledge himself on the point, for, as it happened, he could make nothing out of the greater part of the writing on them, which seemed to him, read in the ordinary fashion, mere gibberish, which might take years of patient study and research to unravel, and then be worth nothing in the end.”
The sale commenced, and the prices realised by some of the codices that comprised the first lots were ridiculously low. Whoever bought them made magnificent investments. For instance, a fourteenth-century English manuscript of Sower’s “Confessio Amantes” on vellum, with eighty-five miniatures – a perfect gem, worth at least the fifteen hundred pounds which the Fountaine copy realised – went for eighteen pounds ten. A French manuscript of the Bible of the same period with a number of ornamental initials and miniatures fetched only sixteen pounds, although, as a collector, I knew it to be worth three hundred at least; while a thirteenth-century manuscript, “De Regimen Principium” of Egidius, written on vellum in double columns, with a beautifully illuminated border on the front page, and bearing the stencil mark of the well-known collector, Sir Thomas Phillips, fetched only twenty-one pounds ten; while a twelfth-century “Decretales Gregorii,” an eleventh-century Latin Bible, and a “Biblia Versificata” of the twelfth century, once the property of the Jesuits’ College at Heidelberg, fetched equally low prices.
Presently the three manuscripts comprising lot eighty-two were held up for inspection. Each was about a foot square, and was intolerably dirty and stained by damp and time.
“Now, gentlemen, what offers?” cried the auctioneer, and again he brought his hammer down on the table with a sharp knock.
“I’ll give ten pounds for them,” instantly shouted a voice in the crowd, and all at once I caught sight of the face of the owner thereof, which, to my intense astonishment, proved to be no other than my friend Peter Zouche, that odd-shaped, deformed person who is familiarly known to the rich and learned everywhere as “The Hunchback of Westminster.”
Now, how had Peter Zouche, who was reputed to spend his life between Sotheby’s, Quaritch’s, Dobell’s, and Maggs’s, and that mysterious den in which he lived, under the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, got wind of these treasures.
Instinctively I felt there was something more in these documents than even Don José had hinted, and so with a quick turn I caught the eye of the auctioneer and nodded briskly again.
“Twenty pounds offered,” he said, and he pointed his hammer straight at me, whereat all the crowd appeared to turn and stare suddenly and openly at me with fierce and malevolent looks.
Then, almost in a flash as it were, the real excitement of the gathering broke out.
Before I quite knew what had happened bids had poured in from a hundred eager voices, and the figures had miraculously climbed up, up, up with the rapidity of lightning, so that before I had interposed five times I believe they were actually all trembling on the brink of a thousand pounds!
And this for three dirty, crisp rolls of parchment!
All the same, I must admit that my determination to get possession of those records seemed to have been carefully noted by my rivals. In fact, I was continually made conscious of those looks of veiled hostility which continued to be shot at me from every direction as time after time I topped the bids. Meanwhile, too, a steady hubbub began to arise around me, above which I found it was increasingly difficult to make oneself heard or noted. Also, during a lull in the contest, the crowd appeared to sway and part, and all at once, to my astonishment, I found that the Hunchback of Westminster himself was standing beside me, and with him the dearest friend and fellow-collector I had ever had, the Earl of Fotheringay, and when I came to examine them I was stupefied to find that both men’s faces were deadly white.
“For God’s sake, for your own sake, Glynn,” whispered Lord Fotheringay in my ear impressively, “end this mad rivalry with us; you have no idea what terrible havoc you are making of things by your wild bids at this momentous juncture. Stand down, man, stand down, or you’ll ruin all.”
But, with my teeth set hard, I glared at him defiantly. “What was my business to him?” Indeed, my blood was up – I knew I was bound in honour – and I nodded again to the auctioneer, who saw me instantly, and repeated aloud: “Mr Glynn says twelve hundred and fifty pounds. Is there any advance?”
The hunchback now turned on me with a snarling expression like a tiger’s.
“Fool,” he hissed, “you won’t be warned,” and, raising his arm, he made a sign with his hand.
Almost instantly the crowd appeared to rise up en masse and to roll right over us, but as I stumbled backward, headlong from my foothold, I was astonished to see a man, got up to resemble me exactly in every feature, scramble on to my place on the upturned case, and in a voice that seemed my very own, to cry out to the auctioneer: “That, sir, is the most I can do. I now retire.” And as a cheer broke out from the crowd he too skipped down instantly out of sight.
“Ah, this is indeed treachery,” I told myself. And, gripping my teeth hard, I let my fists go; next, with a mighty effort, I sprang forward to roll the surging human mob out of my path – to make my voice heard, to regain my old position, to take command of the situation again, for I heard the bids still mounting higher, higher, higher.
In vain.
Lord