Standing in the doorway he bowed, and if his smile was Mephistophelean, there was much about Colonel Juan Menendez which commanded respect.
“Mr. Harley,” he began, and his high, thin voice afforded yet another surprise, “I feel somewhat ill at ease to— how do you say it?— appropriate your time, as I am by no means sure that what I have to say justifies my doing so.”
He spoke most fluent, indeed florid, English. But his sentences at times were oddly constructed; yet, save for a faint accent, and his frequent interpolation of such expressions as “how do you say?”— a sort of nervous mannerism— one might have supposed him to be a Britisher who had lived much abroad. I formed the opinion that he had read extensively, and this, as I learned later, was indeed the case.
“Sit down, Colonel Menendez,” said Harley with quiet geniality. “Officially, my working day is ended, I admit, but if you have no objection to the presence of my friend, Mr. Knox, I shall be most happy to chat with you.”
He smiled in a way all his own.
“If your business is of a painfully professional nature,” he added, “I must beg you to excuse me for fourteen days, as I am taking a badly needed holiday with my friend.”
“Ah, is it so?” replied the Colonel, placing his hat and cane upon the table, and sitting down rather wearily in a big leathern armchair which Harley had pushed forward. “If I intrude I am sorry, but indeed my business is urgent, and I come to you on the recommendation of my friend, Senor Don Merry del Val, the Spanish Ambassador.”
He raised his eyes to Harley’s face with an expression of peculiar appeal. I rose to depart, but:
“Sit down, Knox,” said Harley, and turned again to the visitor. “Please proceed,” he requested. “Mr. Knox has been with me in some of the most delicate cases which I have ever handled, and you may rely upon his discretion as you may rely upon mine.” He pushed forward a box of cigars. “Will you smoke?”
“Thanks, no,” was the answer; “you see, I rarely smoke anything but my cigarettes.”
Colonel Menendez extracted a slip of rice paper from a little packet which he carried, next, dipping two long, yellow fingers into his coat pocket, he brought out a portion of tobacco, laid it in the paper, and almost in the twinkling of an eye had made, rolled, and lighted a very creditable cigarette. His dexterity was astonishing, and seeing my surprise he raised his heavy eyebrows, and:
“Practice makes perfect, is it not said?” he remarked.
He shrugged his shoulders and dropped the extinguished match in an ash tray, whilst I studied him with increasing interest. Some dread, real or imaginary, was oppressing the man’s mind, I mused. I felt my presence to be unwelcome, but:
“Very well,” he began, suddenly. “I expect, Mr. Harley, that you will be disposed to regard what I have to tell you rather as a symptom of what you call nerves than as evidence of any agency directed against me.”
Paul Harley stared curiously at the speaker. “Do I understand you to suspect that someone is desirous of harming you?” he enquired.
Colonel Menendez slowly nodded his head.
“Such is my meaning,” he replied.
“You refer to bodily harm?”
“But yes, emphatically.”
“Hm,” said Harley; and taking out a tin of tobacco from a cabinet beside him he began in leisurely manner to load a briar. “No doubt you have good reasons for this suspicion?”
“If I had not good reasons, Mr. Harley, nothing could have induced me to trouble you. Yet, even now that I have compelled myself to come here, I find it difficult, almost impossible, to explain those reasons to you.”
An expression of embarrassment appeared upon the brown face, and now Colonel Menendez paused and was plainly at a loss for words with which to continue.
Harley replaced the tin in the cupboard and struck a match. Lighting his pipe he nodded good humouredly as if to say, “I quite understand.” As a matter of fact, he probably thought, as I did, that this was a familiar case of a man of possibly blameless life who had become subject to that delusion which leads people to believe themselves threatened by mysterious and unnameable danger.
Our visitor inhaled deeply.
“You, of course, are waiting for the facts,” he presently resumed, speaking with a slowness which told of a mind labouring for the right mode of expression. “These are so scanty, I fear, of so, shall I say, phantom a kind, that even when they are in your possession you will consider me to be merely the victim of a delusion. In the first place, then, I have reason to believe that someone followed me from my home to your office.”
“Indeed,” said Paul Harley, sympathetically, for this I perceived was exactly what he had anticipated, and merely tended to confirm his suspicion. “Some member of your household?”
“Certainly not.”
“Did you actually see this follower?”
“My dear sir,” cried Colonel Menendez, excitement emphasizing his accent, “if I had seen him, so much would have been made clear, so much! I have never seen him, but I have heard him and felt him— felt his presence, I mean.”
“In what way?” asked Harley, leaning back in his chair and studying the fierce face.
“On several occasions on turning out the light in my bedroom and looking across the lawn from my window I have observed the shadow of someone— how do you say?— lurking in the garden.”
“The shadow?”
“Precisely. The person himself was concealed beneath a tree. When he moved his shadow was visible on the ground.”
“You were not deceived by a waving branch?”
“Certainly not. I speak of a still, moonlight night.”
“Possibly, then, it was the shadow of a tramp,” suggested Harley. “I gather that you refer to a house in the country?”
“It was not,” declared Colonel Menendez, emphatically; “it was not. I wish to God I could believe it had been. Then there was, a month ago, an attempt to enter my house.”
Paul Harley exhibited evidence of a quickening curiosity. He had perceived, as I had perceived, that the manner of the speaker differed from that of the ordinary victim of delusion, with whom he had become professionally familiar.
“You had actual evidence of this?” he suggested.
“It was due to insomnia, sleeplessness, brought about, yes, I will admit it, by apprehension, that I heard the footsteps of this intruder.”
“But you did not see him?”
“Only his shadow”
“What!”
“You can obtain the evidence of all my household that someone had actually entered,” declared Colonel Menendez, eagerly. “Of this, at least, I can give you the certain facts. Whoever it was had obtained access through a kitchen window, had forced two locks, and was coming stealthily along the hallway when the sound of his footsteps attracted my attention.”
“What did you do?”
“I came out on to the landing and looked down the stairs. But even the slight sound which I made had been sufficient to alarm the midnight visitor, for I had never a glimpse of him. Only, as he went swiftly back in the direction from which he had come, the moonlight shining in through a window in the hall cast his shadow on the carpet.”
“Strange,” murmured Harley. “Very strange, indeed. The shadow told you nothing?”
“Nothing at all.”
Colonel Menendez hesitated momentarily, and glanced swiftly across at Harley.
“It was just a vague— do you say blur?— and then it was gone. But— ”
“Yes,” said Harley. “But?”
“Ah,” Colonel Menendez blew a cloud of smoke into the air, “I come now to the matter which I find so hard to explain.”
He inhaled again deeply and was silent for a while.