"The man who was found murdered in Colonel Napier's flat in Embankment
Mansions has been identified by an official of the Foreign Office from a
description and photograph that were hurriedly circulated by Scotland
Yard last night. The victim is no other than a gentleman occupying a
responsible position in the Treaty Department of the Foreign Office, and
the papers found in his desk tend to show that the crime was the work of
some secret society which has its headquarters in London, and which had
decreed his end because he, as a member, was supposed to have
communicated some of its secrets to Lord Cyril Cuthbertson, the
Secretary for Foreign Affairs. How he came to be in Colonel Napier's
flat--and bed--remains, however, to be explained. He certainly bears an
extraordinary resemblance to the missing colonel."
By this time the day had begun to close in. The sun had sunk, leaving,
as it sometimes does, even in the height of an English summer, the sky
grey with mystery and suggestion of on-coming disaster. The paper
itself slipped from my fingers as I dropped back into my seat and let my
eyes wander over the landscape that, all of a sudden, seemed to have
taken on itself the colour of my own thoughts, which were now troubled
and perplexed with a dozen doubts and emotions which ever evaded me but
none the less filled me with unrest and pain.
With an effort I recovered myself and looked curiously at Jose Casteno.
He had curled himself up in an attitude that struck me as being too
strained and unnatural to be comfortable, but, to all appearances, he
was sleeping gently like an over-tired child. Strangely enough, it was
the first time that I had seen his features in such absolute repose, and
I caught myself examining each one of them with that careful minuteness
and patience a geologist may bestow on a half-identified specimen--the
lines at the corners of his mouth, the shape and setting of his chin,
the high yet thin cheek-bones, the curl of the nostrils, and those
hollow jaws of his, that seemed to be accentuated by curves of baleful
but elusive significance. I had lived quite long enough, and had
suffered disillusion sufficient, not to make the error into which fall
so many earnest amateur disciples of Lavater, to pin my faith on any one
of these features. In imagination I tried to add each point of
elucidation to another, so that I might arrive at a just estimate of the
true balance of his vices and virtues, for, believe me, no man is
without some vice held in abeyance or left to flourish in riotous
luxuriance.
On the whole, I realised that the head, large and powerful as it was,
had qualities that might make for the highest intelligence and ambition,
but now the face seemed weighed down with anxiety and grief of mind, and
in its present expression there was just a touch of remorse, or was it
some hidden consciousness of guilt? Keen observers who have lived much
in solitude, and have not been perplexed by the sight of too many
strange, eager, and passionate faces, say that every human being's
countenance resembles in some degree some animal's. I tried to apply
this rough-and-ready method of mental measurement to the Spaniard,
fettered as I was by the fact that those two great glowing eyes of his,
like twin black lamps that flashed so often with suppressed fire, were
closed, and could not, therefore, give me any clue. Somehow I caught
the impression of a panther, forest bred, highly strung, but held in
leash by some strong sentiment: was it love for Camille Velasquon?
All the warnings I had had against this man, the impassioned appeal
Doris had made to me when she released me from the hunchback's, the hot
scorn poured on my championship by old Zouche himself--the man's father,
be it remembered--even Fotheringay's appeal to me to cease my
association with him, lest worse befall me--all these things started up
to bear witness against him. These had no reference to the tragic
sequence of events--concrete things that had followed my engagement to
him and had culminated in this mystery in Whitehall Court with the cruel
slaying of an unnamed official of the Foreign Office by some secret
brotherhood, which, as likely as not, might be the very order of St
Bruno, to whose headquarters I was hastening without a thought of my own
safety or freedom.
Could I, therefore, trust him? Was I discreet to rely on him when great
stakes, not only mine but England's, hung in the balance?
On and on sped the train through hamlet, village and township. The
twilight faded slowly into night, and as the gas lamps above my head
flamed coarsely upward a terrible temptation assailed me and kept
knocking on the doors of my brain in form something like this:
1. Why be a merely passive instrument in this great struggle between
nations and persons for this Lake of Sacred Treasure?
2. Casteno stole the documents from the hunchback as he lay in the tent
at Worcester senseless; why don't you take them from Casteno now he is
senseless? Then you would be quite certain England would get her just
rights.
3. You need not fear what the Spaniard might say or do to you if he
caught you in the act. After all, you have got those clever imitations
of the real thing which the hunchback and Paul Zouche prepared, and at a
pinch you could substitute for the true manuscripts the false, and get
clear away from St Bruno's to the protection of the Foreign Office
before the fraud were discovered.
Everybody is a potential scoundrel in some great crisis of his career.
"Opportunity makes the thief," says one old school of cynics; and I was,
I admit, sore beset to do this deed, with some excuse for my own
conscience that after all it was but the doing of a patriot and that it
had the sanction of a sacred national need.
But as I toyed with the temptation compromise came and sat beside me and
told me that, if I didn't do the trick then, I could do it some other
moment, when I was the more convinced of Casteno's _mala fides_. Fate
also took a hand in the struggle between conscience and duty and a sense
of honour.