“One thing I do promise myself,” I thought to myself rather firmly, “I will not rest whilst I am at St. Bruno’s until I have got to know all about these mysterious people—all. Señor Casteno may try as he will to put me off with explanations that only leave things more difficult and puzzling and hard to understand, but this time I will stand my ground. I will be the spy on this occasion, and if I find the Spaniard or his friends in the Order up to any mischief I will not hesitate a second—I will strike for England, cost what it will.”
Sinking back, I took up one of the papers I had purchased, and began to glance carelessly down its columns. I had not forgotten that these news sheets might contain some further news about that discovery of a murdered man in the Napiers’ flat, but seeing that I had had a Sunday special edition of a London paper I was not expecting to learn anything really new just then about the tragedy that had stricken the West End with a sense of painful impotence and danger; I felt the police and the press had not had sufficient time.
Nevertheless, something fresh had been discovered by one of the most enterprising of the younger papers—the Daily Graphic—which, unlike its contemporaries, did not reprint the old story about a man unknown being found stabbed to the heart in the colonel’s bed, but boldly ventured forth into big type with this extraordinary statement:
THE MYSTERY AT WHITEHALL
IDENTITY OF THE DEAD MAN
“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 José 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.