



Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England




The Hunchback of Westminster
By William Le Queux
Published by Methuen & Co, 36 Essex Street, London WC.
This edition dated 1904.

The Hunchback of Westminster, by William Le Queux.

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THE HUNCHBACK OF WESTMINSTER, BY WILLIAM LE QUEUX.

PREFACE.

A Word Before Reading.

For many years I have busied myself making a collection of rare and
valuable historical documents, and strange indeed are some of the
stories and scandals which these ancient, crinkled parchments whisper to
me in my hours of leisure.

In France, in Italy, in Russia, in Germany, in Belgium, in all corners
of England, this craze of mine has led me, through many adventures, free
but captive; and, looking back now, I realise that it has been really
through this little-known hobby of mine, the hobby of palaeography, that
there have come some of the most suggestive and magical hours I have
ever spent in a wandering, erratic life that has never been wholly free
from movement, but has often held its time of danger and its resistless,
restless passion for change, romance, and adventure.

Perhaps, then, it is not really wonderful that this love of mine for the
records of the dead-and-gone ages colours my later stories.  Yet, in a
sense, it would be strangely odd if it did not, for when an author hears
so weird and thrilling a narrative of hidden treasure as this I have
here striven to recount it would surely be more than human of him to
fail to put it into print.

This "Hunchback of Westminster" is really no idle fiction spun for the
entertainment of an idle hour.  In many ways, indeed, it is tragically
true--particularly that portion which tells how men only a few months
ago in this prosaic London of ours fought for a certain treasure worth
several millions of pounds.

William Le Queux.

CHAPTER ONE.

HOW DON JOSE BAITED HIS TRAP.

It was in the second year of my practice as a private detective that
young Jose Casteno came to my office in Stanton Street, WC, and
entrusted me with that strange and terrible mission in regard to which I
have really hesitated, in all sincerity, for some days before I could
actually nerve myself to take the public into my confidence.

Up to that time, I remember, my big brass plate, with the legend "Mr
Hugh Glynn, Secret Investigator," had only succeeded in drawing a very
average and ordinary amount of business.  True, I had had several
profitable cases in which wives wanted to know what happened to their
husbands when they didn't come home at the usual hours, and employers
were anxious to discover certain leakages through which had disappeared
a percentage of their cash; but for the most part my work had been
shockingly humdrum, and already I had begun to regret the whim that had
prompted me, after reading certain latter-day romances, to throw up my
career as a barrister in Gray's Inn to emulate the romancer's heroes in
real life.

Indeed, at the rate of progress I was making then, I calculated that it
would be exactly forty-seven and a half years before I could save 1000
pounds out of my expenses, and, with that as a nest-egg, dare to ask
pretty Doris Napier to marry me; and hence, as such long engagements
were no more fashionable then than they are now, I can assure you I
often felt a trifle despondent about my future.

Still, that was before Jose Casteno appeared on the scene in Stanton
Street, WC.  Afterwards things, as you will see, were different.

Now, of course, there are always plenty of people who do not believe
that the great and wonderful things that happen in life come heralded by
a sky angry with the glow of blood or by a storm in which the wind seems
to range from end to end of the gamut of all human emotion, and to sob
and shriek and sigh as though it were possessed by some fugitive spirit
stricken with mortal pain.  On the contrary, they argue, the biggest
things have the smallest beginnings, and hence one never knows what tiny
affair betokens crisis.  As a matter of fact, I hadn't noticed, I own,
any peculiar association of sympathy between Man and Nature until this
particular night I write of, but then I do recollect very well it did so
happen that I was very late indeed at the office