As I close my eyes I can recall the whole scene again—that black, deserted street, the flickering gaslights, the vague suggestion, in the swirl of the rain, of a mighty, impalpable presence that was sweeping through the metropolis rent by passion and terrors which no human imagination could ever give shape to. Then, all at once, a great calm seemed to fall over the night, and as I swung my chair round from the fireplace to see what had happened I became suddenly conscious of a white, haggard face pressed to the window-pane staring at me with wide, dilated eyes that dogged my every movement and seemed to hypnotise all my senses.
For a moment, I admit, I paused, paralysed by a nameless horror. Immediately afterwards the utter absurdity of any serious cause for fright on a ground floor in a thoroughfare not a dozen yards from the never-dying turmoil of the Strand broke upon me. With one bound I sprang to my office door, which I instantly flung far open, and there immediately entered to me, without a word being uttered on either side, a tall, thin, foreign-looking man of about twenty-five. His was the face which I had seen staring at me so eagerly through the window-pane!
“Pardon me coming at this unseasonable hour,” he said, with a profound gesture of humility, yet in a gentle, refined accent that suggested the student and the scholar. “Permit me to introduce myself,” and, with a flourish, he handed me a large-sized card, on which was engraved the name, in a distinctly foreign hand, “Don José Casteno,” but the address was scratched out.
For an instant his eyes met mine in one long, keen, lingering gaze of scrutiny—in that fatal instant, indeed, which follows the coming together of all men destined to do much in common, and which I have always found, in my experience, invariably decides whether we trust or we hate. Strange as his arrival had been, I will say, frankly, I took a liking to him even in that ghostly glare of the firelight; and, motioning him to a chair opposite to my desk, I turned up the gas. Then as he removed a wide-brimmed felt hat and unfastened a shabby black coat with a kind of Inverness cape, most often seen in use by foreign priests, I noticed his pale, intellectual-looking, clean-shaven face, with a mouth as tender and expressive as a girl’s.
“My business,” he began in a low voice of explanation as soon as he saw me seat myself and take up a pen to follow him, “is by no means a piece of common detective work which I am anxious that you should undertake in my behalf. On the contrary, it deals, Mr Glynn,” and now his voice became very grave, “with much that is startling and mysterious—much that spells ugly words like ‘treachery’ even in London—striking, as it does, at the root of at least one far-reaching unprincipled, foreign intrigue. First of all, then, I must ask you to tell me quite openly and frankly, are you free and prepared to undertake a series of difficult and dangerous missions?”
“I am,” I replied after a moment’s pause; “but it must be on terms.”
“And what are those terms?”
“First, that I am well and punctually paid,” and, in spite of myself, I smiled, for I found quite suddenly I had grown quite mercenary after my bitter reflections about Doris.
“Certainly, you shall be promptly remunerated,” he returned, and, thrusting a hand into a breast pocket, he withdrew a letter case stuffed with bank notes. “Pray let me put you right on that point at once by placing that in your safe,” he added. “Take from it as the work progresses any sums you may reasonably require. When all is over I will call on you to account for the amount. To-night it stands at 750 pounds.”
I counted the notes. They were quite new, but perfectly genuine, and of the amount he had stated, and I promptly locked them up in the small strong room that adjoined my office, which, alas! had hitherto seen too little of all such valuables. Then I faced Don José again.