PART III.

“Are you of our fraternity?  I see you are not.  The secret which Mademoiselle de Bechamel confided to me in her mad triumph and wild hoyden spirits—­she was but a child, poor thing, poor thing, scarce fifteen—­but I love them young—­a folly not unusual with the old!” (Here Mr. Pinto thrust his knuckles into his hollow eyes; and, I am sorry to say, so little regardful was he of personal cleanliness, that his tears made streaks of white over his gnarled dark hands.) “Ah, at fifteen, poor child, thy fate was terrible!  Go to!  It is not good to love me, friend.  They prosper not who do.  I divine you.  You need not say what you are thinking—­”

In truth, I was thinking, if girls fall in love with this sallow hook-nosed, glass-eyed, wooden-legged, dirty, hideous old man, with the sham teeth, they have a queer taste.  That is what I was thinking.

“Jack Wilkes said the handsomest man in London had but half an hour’s start of him.  And without vanity, I am scarcely uglier than Jack Wilkes.  We were members of the same club at Medenham Abbey, Jack and I, and had many a merry night together.  Well, sir, I—­Mary of Scotland knew me but as a little hunchbacked music-master; and yet, and yet, I think she was not indifferent to her David Riz—­and she came to misfortune.  They all do—­they all do!”

“Sir, you are wandering from your point!” I said, with some severity.  For, really, for this old humbug to hint that he had been the baboon who frightened the club at Medenham, that he had been in the Inquisition at Valladolid—­that under the name of D. Riz, as he called it, he had known the lovely Queen of Scots—­was a little too much.  “Sir,” then I said, “you were speaking about a Miss de Bechamel.  I really have not time to hear all your biography.”

“Faith, the good wine gets into my head.” (I should think so, the old toper!  Four bottles all but two glasses.) “To return to poor Blanche.  As I sat laughing, joking with her, she let slip a word, a little word, which filled me with dismay.  Some one had told her a part of the Secret—­the secret which has been divulged scarce thrice in three thousand years—­the Secret of the Freemasons.  Do you know what happens to those uninitiate who learn that secret? to those wretched men, the initiate who reveal it?”

As Pinto spoke to me, he looked through and through me with his horrible piercing glance, so that I sat quite uneasily on my bench.  He continued:  “Did I question her awake?  I knew she would lie to me.  Poor child!  I loved her no less because I did not believe a word she said.  I loved her blue eye, her golden hair, her delicious voice, that was true in song, though when she spoke, false as Eblis!  You are aware that I possess in rather a remarkable degree what we have agreed to call the mesmeric power.  I set the unhappy girl to sleep.  Then she was obliged to tell me all.  It