"Be careful!" Señor Guffanta said, as he hurled him back, "be careful, or I shall do you an injury."
Stuart had endeavoured to come between them, but before he could do so the short struggle was over, and then the Spaniard turned to him and said, "I must speak with you alone. Come with me," and, turning, left the room.
Before Stuart followed him he spoke to Penlyn, and said: "Do not take this too seriously to heart. This man is evidently under some delusion, if not as to the actual murderer, at least as to your connection with the crime. Perhaps, when he has told me what he knows, we shall find out where the error lies; and then he will ask your pardon for his suspicions."
"It is too awful!" Penlyn said, "too awful to be borne. And I can do nothing. I wish I could have killed him as he stood there falsely accusing me, but he is a giant in strength."
"Let me go to him now," Stuart said; "and do not think of his words. Remember, he, too, is excited at having seen the man again and missed him. And if he does not absolutely bind me to silence I will tell you all." Then he, also, went away. And that night, in Walter Cundall's library, Señor Guffanta told his story. Told it calmly and dispassionately, but with a fulness of detail that struck a chill to Stuart's heart.
"I had been but a few days in London," he said, "when I learnt by Walter's own hand--in the letter you have seen--that he was also here, and that I was to go and see him. I was eager to do so, and on the very night he was murdered, on that fatal Monday night, I set out to visit him. He had told me to come late, and knowing that he was a man much in the world, and also that, from living in Honduras, where the nights alone are cool, one rarely learns to go to bed early, I did go late; so late that the clocks were striking midnight as I reached his house. But, when I stood outside it, there was no light of any kind to be seen, only a faint glimmer from a lamp in the hall. 'He has gone to his bed,' I said to myself, 'and the house is closed for the night. Well, it is indeed late, I will come again.' And so I turned away, and, knowing that there was a road through your Park, though I had not gone by it, I determined to return that way."
"Through the Park--where he was murdered?" Stuart asked.
"Yes, by that way. But before I reached the gates, and when I was outside the Palace of your Queen, Buckingham Palace, the storm that had been threatening broke over me. Caramba! it was a storm to drown a man, a storm such as we see sometimes in the tropics, but which I had never thought to see here. It descended in vast sheets of water, it was impossible to stir without being instantaneously drenched to the skin, and so I sought shelter in a porch close at hand. There, seeing no one pass me but some poor half-drowned creature who looked as though the rain could make his misery no greater than it was, I waited and waited--I had no protection, no umbrella--and heard the quarters and half-hours, and the hours tolled by the clock. At last, as it was striking two, the storm almost ceased, and, leaving my shelter, I crossed the road and entered the Park."
"Yes!" Stuart said in a whisper.
"Yes, I entered the Park, and went on round the bend, and so, under the dripping trees, through what I have since learnt, is called the 'Mall.'"