"What do you make out of that?" I asked in bewilderment.
"I remember hearing of this, but I never saw it before," said Hugh. "Jane Chesby was a character, by all accounts."
"The tradition," said the solicitor, "is that the 'Roote of Evill' was the part of the Instructions containing the directions to the location of the treasure. At any rate, there is no record of its having been seen since the date of Lady Jane's minute."
"But the 'trase' she speaks of?" I queried.
"Nobody has ever found it--unless Lord James did so."
"What is that on the back of the paper?" Nikka asked.
"The lady seems also to have been a poetess," said Mr. Bellowes with a smile. "They are some lines she scrawled, apparently without any reference to the matter on the other side."
Nikka turned the paper over. The lines were scrawled, as the lawyer had said, diagonally across the sheet, as if in a moment of abstraction:
Putte downe ye Anciount riddel In Decente, Seemelie ordour. Rouse, O ye mystic Sybil, Vex hymme who doth Endeavour, Nor treate Hys efortte tendour.
"A farrago of antique spelling and nonsense," commented Hugh. "That gets us no farther."
"Still, I suggest we take a copy of it with us," said Nikka.
"It won't do any harm," agreed Mr. Bellowes, and he called a stenographer and directed him to make copies of the two writings.
"This Lady Jane was a ferocious Protestant," pursued Hugh reflectively. "It was she who blocked up the old family crypt, saying it was not fit to bury Protestant Chesbys with the Papist lords in a place that had known the rites of the Scarlet Woman and all that sort of stuff."
"Yes," said Mr. Bellowes, turning from the stenographer, "and if you recall, my lord, she blocked up the crypt so successfully that its exact location has been a mystery ever since." And to us he explained: "It lies somewhere under the extensive ruins of Crowden Priory, an old monastic establishment which was closely linked with Chesby in the Middle Ages."
"I am afraid we have learned nothing here," he said. "Have we exhausted the Charter Chest?"
"Unless you wish to read the brief records of the Elizabethan Hugh and his ancestor of Henry the Fifth's time," replied the lawyer. "Neither furnishes any concrete information. The one records the suspicion and hampering of the Greeks; the other was never allowed about except under escort of Janissaries."