The
Wisdom of Father Brown
G.
K. Chesterton
To
LUCIAN OLDERSHAW
ONE
The Absence of Mr Glass
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent
criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the
sea-front at
Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments,
bounded—as the boys' geographies say—on the east by the North Sea and on the
west by the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library. He was
clad in an artist's velvet, but with none of an artist's negligence; his hair
was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy; his face was lean,
but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his room indicated
something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern sea by which (on
pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home.
Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and
introduced into those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps
the most startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a curt but
civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into the room a
shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as
unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle
long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common
in England; the man was the very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless.
The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained
astonishment, not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously
harmless sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor
with that beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a corpulent
charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich
confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled to
the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud; he
reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with an unimpaired smile
on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
“My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about that
business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of such
troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong.”
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made
an odd little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.
“I hardly understand you,” replied the scientist, with a
cold intensity of manner. “I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood,
and my work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have
sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty and
importance, but—”
“Oh, this is of the greatest importance,” broke in the
little man called Brown. “Why, her mother won't let them get engaged.” And he
leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.
The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes
under them were bright with something that might be anger or might be
amusement. “And still,” he said, “I do not quite understand.”
“You see, they want to get married,” said the man with the
clerical hat. “Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what
can be more important than that?”
The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him
of many things—some said of his health, others of his God; but they had not
wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the
ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw himself
into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting physician.
“Mr Brown,” he said gravely, “it is quite fourteen and a
half years since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was
the case of an attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor's
Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of yours
called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend of hers called Todhunter. Well,
Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my
best advice, as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of England—no,
better: fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell
me your story.”
The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with
unquestionable warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather
as if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in passing
the matches, than as if he were (as he was) practically thanking the Curator of
Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field to find a four-leaved clover. With
scarcely a semi-colon after his hearty thanks, the little man began his recital:
“I told you my name was Brown; well, that's the fact, and
I'm the priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you've seen beyond
those straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north. In the last and
straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea like a sea-wall there is
a very honest but rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a widow called
MacNab. She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and between her and the
daughter, and between her and the lodgers—well, I dare say there is a great
deal to be said on both sides. At present she has only one lodger, the young
man called Todhunter; but he has given more trouble than all the rest, for he
wants to marry the young woman of the house.”
“And the young woman of the house,” asked Dr Hood, with huge
and silent amusement, “what does she want?”
“Why, she wants to marry him,” cried Father Brown, sitting
up eagerly. “That is just the awful complication.”
“It is indeed a hideous enigma,” said Dr Hood.
“This young James Todhunter,” continued the cleric, “is a
very decent man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a
bright, brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey, clean-shaven like an
actor, and obliging like a born courtier. He seems to have quite a pocketful of
money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being of a
pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably
connected with dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and noiseless sort, for
the poor fellow only shuts himself up for several hours of the day and studies
something behind a locked door. He declares his privacy is temporary and
justified, and promises to explain before the wedding. That is all that anyone
knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell you a great deal more than even she
is certain of. You know how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of
ignorance as that. There are tales of two voices heard talking in the room;
though, when the door is opened, Todhunter is always found alone. There are
tales of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the
sea-mists and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy
fields and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking
to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end in a quarrel.
Todhunter dashed down his window with violence, and the man in the high hat
melted into the sea-fog again. This story is told by the family with the
fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab prefers her own original
tale: that the Other Man (or whatever it is) crawls out every night from the
big box in the corner, which is kept locked all day. You see, therefore, how
this sealed door of Todhunter's is treated as the gate of all the fancies and
monstrosities of the `Thousand and One Nights'. And yet there is the little
fellow in his respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent as a parlour
clock. He pays his rent to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller; he is
tirelessly kind with the younger children, and can keep them amused for a day
on end; and, last and most urgent of all, he has made himself equally popular
with the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow.”
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a
relish for applying them to any triviality. The great specialist having
condescended to the priest's simplicity, condescended expansively. He settled
himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in the tone of a
somewhat absent-minded lecturer:
“Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the
main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter,
but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the
tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a
series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre
of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all
history is Race. Race produces religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars. There
is no stronger case than that of the wild, unworldly and perishing stock which
we commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends the MacNabs are specimens. Small,
swarthy, and of this dreamy and drifting blood, they accept easily the
superstitious explanation of any incidents, just as they still accept (you will
excuse me for saying) that superstitious explanation of all incidents which you
and your Church represent. It is not remarkable that such people, with the sea
moaning behind them and the Church (excuse me again) droning in front of them,
should put fantastic features into what are probably plain events. You, with
your small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab,
terrified with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the
sea. But the man with the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole
clans of MacNab scattered over the whole world, in its ultimate average as
uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands of Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses,
dropping their little drop of morbidity in the tea-cups of their friends; he
sees—”
Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another
and more impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts
was marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a young
girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste. She had sea-blown
blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful if her cheek-bones had not
been, in the Scotch manner, a little high in relief as well as in colour. Her
apology was almost as abrupt as a command.
“I'm sorry to interrupt you, sir,” she said, “but I had to
follow Father Brown at once; it's nothing less than life or death.”
Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. “Why,
what has happened, Maggie?” he said.
“James has been murdered, for all I can make out,” answered
the girl, still breathing hard from her rush. “That man Glass has been with him
again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain. Two separate voices:
for James speaks low, with a burr, and the other voice was high and quavery.”
“That man Glass?” repeated the priest in some perplexity.
“I know his name is Glass,” answered the girl, in great
impatience. “I heard it through the door. They were quarrelling—about money, I
think—for I heard James say again and again, `That's right, Mr Glass,' or `No,
Mr Glass,' and then, `Two or three, Mr Glass. ' But we're talking too much; you
must come at once, and there may be time yet.”
“But time for what?” asked Dr Hood, who had been studying
the young lady with marked interest. “What is there about Mr Glass and his
money troubles that should impel such urgency?”
“I tried to break down the door and couldn't,” answered the
girl shortly, “Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the
window-sill that looks into the room. It was an dim, and seemed to be empty,
but I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he were drugged or
strangled.”
“This is very serious,” said Father Brown, gathering his
errant hat and umbrella and standing up; “in point of fact I was just putting
your case before this gentleman, and his view—”
“Has been largely altered,” said the scientist gravely. “I
do not think this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing
else to do, I will put on my hat and stroll down town with you.”
In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail
of the MacNabs' street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the
mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was not without a
certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an energetic trot entirely
devoid of distinction. The aspect of this edge of the town was not entirely
without justification for the doctor's hints about desolate moods and
environments. The scattered houses stood farther and farther apart in a broken
string along the seashore; the afternoon was closing with a premature and
partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously. In
the scrappy back garden of the MacNabs which ran down towards the sand, two
black, barren-looking trees stood up like demon hands held up in astonishment,
and as Mrs MacNab ran down the street to meet them with lean hands similarly
spread, and her fierce face in shadow, she was a little like a demon herself. The
doctor and the priest made scant reply to her shrill reiterations of her
daughter's story, with more disturbing details of her own, to the divided vows
of vengeance against Mr Glass for murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being
murdered, or against the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter,
and for not having lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage in
the front of the house until they came to the lodger's door at the back, and
there Dr Hood, with the trick of an old detective, put his shoulder sharply to
the panel and burst in the door.
It opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing
it, even for a flash, could doubt that the room had been the theatre of some
thrilling collision between two, or perhaps more, persons. Playing-cards lay
littered across the table or fluttered about the floor as if a game had been
interrupted. Two wine glasses stood ready for wine on a side-table, but a third
lay smashed in a star of crystal upon the carpet. A few feet from it lay what
looked like a long knife or short sword, straight, but with an ornamental and
pictured handle, its dull blade just caught a grey glint from the dreary window
behind, which showed the black trees against the leaden level of the sea. Towards
the opposite corner of the room was rolled a gentleman's silk top hat, as if it
had just been knocked off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked
to see it still rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack of
potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter, with a scarf
across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round his elbows and ankles. His
brown eyes were alive and shifted alertly.
Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and
drank in the whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across
the carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head of
the yet pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large for him that it almost
slipped down on to his shoulders.
“Mr Glass's hat,” said the doctor, returning with it and
peering into the inside with a pocket lens. “How to explain the absence of Mr
Glass and the presence of Mr Glass's hat? For Mr Glass is not a careless man
with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and systematically brushed and
burnished, though not very new. An old dandy, I should think.”
“But, good heavens!” called out Miss MacNab, “aren't you
going to untie the man first?”
“I say `old' with intention, though not with certainty”
continued the expositor; “my reason for it might seem a little far-fetched. The
hair of human beings falls out in very varying degrees, but almost always falls
out slightly, and with the lens I should see the tiny hairs in a hat recently
worn. It has none, which leads me to guess that Mr Glass is bald. Now when this
is taken with the high-pitched and querulous voice which Miss MacNab described
so vividly (patience, my dear lady, patience), when we take the hairless head
together with the tone common in senile anger, I should think we may deduce
some advance in years. Nevertheless, he was probably vigorous, and he was
almost certainly tall. I might rely in some degree on the story of his previous
appearance at the window, as a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I have more
exact indication. This wineglass has been smashed all over the place, but one
of its splinters lies on the high bracket beside the mantelpiece. No such
fragment could have fallen there if the vessel had been smashed in the hand of
a comparatively short man like Mr Todhunter.”
“By the way,” said Father Brown, “might it not be as well to
untie Mr Todhunter?”
“Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here,”
proceeded the specialist. “I may say at once that it is possible that the man
Glass was bald or nervous through dissipation rather than age. Mr Todhunter, as
has been remarked, is a quiet thrifty gentleman, essentially an abstainer. These
cards and wine-cups are no part of his normal habit; they have been produced
for a particular companion. But, as it happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter
may or may not possess this wine-service, but there is no appearance of his
possessing any wine. What, then, were these vessels to contain? I would at once
suggest some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a luxurious sort, from a flask in the
pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus something like a picture of the man, or at
least of the type: tall, elderly, fashionable, but somewhat frayed, certainly
fond of play and strong waters, perhaps rather too fond of them Mr Glass is a
gentleman not unknown on the fringes of society.”
“Look here,” cried the young woman, “if you don't let me
pass to untie him I'll run outside and scream for the police.”
“I should not advise you, Miss MacNab,” said Dr Hood
gravely, “to be in any hurry to fetch the police. Father Brown, I seriously ask
you to compose your flock, for their sakes, not for mine. Well, we have seen
something of the figure and quality of Mr Glass; what are the chief facts known
of Mr Todhunter? They are substantially three: that he is economical, that he
is more or less wealthy, and that he has a secret. Now, surely it is obvious
that there are the three chief marks of the kind of man who is blackmailed. And
surely it is equally obvious that the faded finery, the profligate habits, and
the shrill irritation of Mr Glass are the unmistakable marks of the kind of man
who blackmails him. We have the two typical figures of a tragedy of hush money:
on the one hand, the respectable man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end
vulture with a scent for a mystery. These two men have met here today and have
quarrelled, using blows and a bare weapon.”
“Are you going to take those ropes off?” asked the girl
stubbornly.
Dr Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table,
and went across to the captive. He studied him intently, even moving him a
little and half-turning him round by the shoulders, but he only answered:
“No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends
the police bring the handcuffs.”
Father Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet,
lifted his round face and said: “What do you mean?”
The man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword
from the carpet and was examining it intently as he answered:
“Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up,” he said, “you all
jump to the conclusion that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose,
escaped. There are four objections to this: First, why should a gentleman so
dressy as our friend Glass leave his hat behind him, if he left of his own free
will? Second,” he continued, moving towards the window, “this is the only exit,
and it is locked on the inside. Third, this blade here has a tiny touch of
blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that
wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary probability. It is
much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus,
rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his
golden egg. There, I think, we have a pretty complete story.”
“But the ropes?” inquired the priest, whose eyes had
remained open with a rather vacant admiration.
“Ah, the ropes,” said the expert with a singular intonation.
“Miss MacNab very much wanted to know why I did not set Mr Todhunter free from
his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did not do it because Mr Todhunter can set
himself free from them at any minute he chooses.”
“What?” cried the audience on quite different notes of
astonishment.
“I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter,” reiterated
Hood quietly. “I happen to know something about knots; they are quite a branch
of criminal science. Every one of those knots he has made himself and could
loosen himself; not one of them would have been made by an enemy really trying
to pinion him. The whole of this affair of the ropes is a clever fake, to make
us think him the victim of the struggle instead of the wretched Glass, whose
corpse may be hidden in the garden or stuffed up the chimney.”
There was a rather depressed silence; the room was
darkening, the sea-blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and
blacker than ever, yet they seemed to have come nearer to the window. One could
almost fancy they were sea-monsters like krakens or cuttlefish, writhing polypi
who had crawled up from the sea to see the end of this tragedy, even as he, the
villain and victim of it, the terrible man in the tall hat, had once crawled up
from the sea. For the whole air was dense with the morbidity of blackmail,
which is the most morbid of human things, because it is a crime concealing a
crime; a black plaster on a blacker wound.
The face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly
complacent and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown. It
was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was rather that creative
curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of an idea. “Say it again,
please,” he said in a simple, bothered manner; “do you mean that Todhunter can
tie himself up all alone and untie himself all alone?”
“That is what I mean,” said the doctor.
“Jerusalem!” ejaculated Brown suddenly, “I wonder if it
could possibly be that!”
He scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered
with quite a new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then
he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company. “Yes, that's it!” he
cried in a certain excitement. “Can't you see it in the man's face? Why, look
at his eyes!”
Both the Professor and the girl followed the direction of
his glance. And though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower half
of Todhunter's visage, they did grow conscious of something struggling and
intense about the upper part of it.
“His eyes do look queer,” cried the young woman, strongly
moved. “You brutes; I believe it's hurting him!”
“Not that, I think,” said Dr Hood; “the eyes have certainly
a singular expression. But I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as
expressing rather such slight psychological abnormality—”
“Oh, bosh!” cried Father Brown: “can't you see he's
laughing?”
“Laughing!” repeated the doctor, with a start; “but what on
earth can he be laughing at?”
“Well,” replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, “not to
put too fine a point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I'm a
little inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about it.”
“Now you know about what?” asked Hood, in some exasperation.
“Now I know,” replied the priest, “the profession of Mr
Todhunter.”
He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after
another with what seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting
into an equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those who had to
watch it. He laughed very much over the hat, still more uproariously over the
broken glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him into mortal convulsions
of amusement. Then he turned to the fuming specialist.
“Dr Hood,” he cried enthusiastically, “you are a great poet!
You have called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that
is than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts are
rather commonplace and comic by comparison.”
“I have no notion what you are talking about,” said Dr Hood
rather haughtily; “my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete. A
place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer the
term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as yet be ascertained.
In the absence of Mr Glass—”
“That's it, that's it,” said the little priest, nodding
quite eagerly, “that's the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He
is so extremely absent. I suppose,” he added reflectively, “that there was
never anybody so absent as Mr Glass.”
“Do you mean he is absent from the town?” demanded the
doctor.
“I mean he is absent from everywhere,” answered Father
Brown; “he is absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak.”
“Do you seriously mean,” said the specialist with a smile,
“that there is no such person?”
The priest made a sign of assent. “It does seem a pity,” he
said.
Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. “Well,” he said,
“before we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first
proof we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell into this room. If
there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?”
“It is Mr Todhunter's,” replied Father Brown.
“But it doesn't fit him,” cried Hood impatiently. “He
couldn't possibly wear it!”
Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. “I
never said he could wear it,” he answered. “I said it was his hat. Or, if you
insist on a shade of difference, a hat that is his.”
“And what is the shade of difference?” asked the
criminologist with a slight sneer.
“My good sir,” cried the mild little man, with his first
movement akin to impatience, “if you will walk down the street to the nearest
hatter's shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference
between a man's hat and the hats that are his.”
“But a hatter,” protested Hood, “can get money out of his
stock of new hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?”
“Rabbits,” replied Father Brown promptly.
“What?” cried Dr Hood.
“Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured
paper,” said the reverend gentleman with rapidity. “Didn't you see it all when
you found out the faked ropes? It's just the same with the sword. Mr Todhunter
hasn't got a scratch on him, as you say; but he's got a scratch in him, if you
follow me.”
“Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter's clothes?” inquired Mrs
MacNab sternly.
“I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter's clothes,” said Father
Brown. “I mean inside Mr Todhunter.”
“Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?”
“Mr Todhunter,” explained Father Brown placidly, “is
learning to be a professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist, and
expert in the rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat. It is without traces
of hair, not because it is worn by the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but because
it has never been worn by anybody. The juggling explains the three glasses,
which Todhunter was teaching himself to throw up and catch in rotation. But,
being only at the stage of practice, he smashed one glass against the ceiling. And
the juggling also explains the sword, which it was Mr Todhunter's professional
pride and duty to swallow. But, again, being at the stage of practice, he very
slightly grazed the inside of his throat with the weapon. Hence he has a wound
inside him, which I am sure (from the expression on his face) is not a serious
one. He was also practising the trick of a release from ropes, like the
Davenport Brothers, and he was just about to free himself when we all burst
into the room. The cards, of course, are for card tricks, and they are
scattered on the floor because he had just been practising one of those dodges
of sending them flying through the air. He merely kept his trade secret,
because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other conjurer. But the mere
fact of an idler in a top hat having once looked in at his back window, and
been driven away by him with great indignation, was enough to set us all on a
wrong track of romance, and make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the
silk-hatted spectre of Mr Glass.”
“But What about the two voices?” asked Maggie, staring.
“Have you never heard a ventriloquist?” asked Father Brown. “Don't
you know they speak first in their natural voice, and then answer themselves in
just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice that you heard?”
There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little
man who had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. “You are certainly a very
ingenious person,” he said; “it could not have been done better in a book. But
there is just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded in explaining away,
and that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly heard him so addressed by Mr
Todhunter.”
The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. “Well,
that,” he said, “that's the silliest part of the whole silly story. When our
juggling friend here threw up the three glasses in turn, he counted them aloud
as he caught them, and also commented aloud when he failed to catch them. What
he really said was: `One, two and three—missed a glass one, two—missed a glass.
' And so on.”
There was a second of stillness in the room, and then
everyone with one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the
corner complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a flourish. Then,
advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he produced from his pocket a
big bill printed in blue and red, which announced that ZALADIN, the World's
Greatest Conjurer, Contortionist, Ventriloquist and Human Kangaroo would be
ready with an entirely new series of Tricks at the Empire Pavilion,
Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o'clock precisely.
TWO
The Paradise of Thieves
THE great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets,
walked swiftly into his favourite restaurant, which overlooked the
Mediterranean, was covered by an awning and fenced by little lemon and orange
trees. Waiters in white aprons were already laying out on white tables the
insignia of an early and elegant lunch; and this seemed to increase a
satisfaction that already touched the top of swagger. Muscari had an eagle nose
like Dante; his hair and neckerchief were dark and flowing; he carried a black
cloak, and might almost have carried a black mask, so much did he bear with him
a sort of Venetian melodrama. He acted as if a troubadour had still a definite
social office, like a bishop. He went as near as his century permitted to
walking the world literally like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.
For he never travelled without a case of swords, with which
he had fought many brilliant duels, or without a corresponding case for his
mandolin, with which he had actually serenaded Miss Ethel Harrogate, the highly
conventional daughter of a Yorkshire banker on a holiday. Yet he was neither a
charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked a certain thing and
was it. His poetry was as straightforward as anyone else's prose. He desired
fame or wine or the beauty of women with a torrid directness inconceivable
among the cloudy ideals or cloudy compromises of the north; to vaguer races his
intensity smelt of danger or even crime. Like fire or the sea, he was too
simple to be trusted.
The banker and his beautiful English daughter were staying
at the hotel attached to Muscari's restaurant; that was why it was his
favourite restaurant. A glance flashed around the room told him at once,
however, that the English party had not descended. The restaurant was
glittering, but still comparatively empty. Two priests were talking at a table
in a corner, but Muscari (an ardent Catholic) took no more notice of them than
of a couple of crows. But from a yet farther seat, partly concealed behind a
dwarf tree golden with oranges, there rose and advanced towards the poet a
person whose costume was the most aggressively opposite to his own.
This figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a
pink tie, a sharp collar and protuberant yellow boots. He contrived, in the
true tradition of 'Arry at Margate, to look at once startling and commonplace. But
as the Cockney apparition drew nearer, Muscari was astounded to observe that
the head was distinctly different from the body. It was an Italian head: fuzzy,
swarthy and very vivacious, that rose abruptly out of the standing collar like
cardboard and the comic pink tie. In fact it was a head he knew. He recognized
it, above all the dire erection of English holiday array, as the face of an old
but forgotten friend name Ezza. This youth had been a prodigy at college, and
European fame was promised him when he was barely fifteen; but when he appeared
in the world he failed, first publicly as a dramatist and a demagogue, and then
privately for years on end as an actor, a traveller, a commission agent or a
journalist. Muscari had known him last behind the footlights; he was but too
well attuned to the excitements of that profession, and it was believed that
some moral calamity had swallowed him up.
“Ezza!” cried the poet, rising and shaking hands in a
pleasant astonishment. “Well, I've seen you in many costumes in the green room;
but I never expected to see you dressed up as an Englishman.”
“This,” answered Ezza gravely, “is not the costume of an
Englishman, but of the Italian of the future.”
“In that case,” remarked Muscari, “I confess I prefer the
Italian of the past.”
“That is your old mistake, Muscari,” said the man in tweeds,
shaking his head; “and the mistake of Italy. In the sixteenth century we
Tuscans made the morning: we had the newest steel, the newest carving, the
newest chemistry. Why should we not now have the newest factories, the newest
motors, the newest finance—the newest clothes?”
“Because they are not worth having,” answered Muscari. “You
cannot make Italians really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see
the short cut to good living will never go by the new elaborate roads.”
“Well, to me Marconi, or D'Annunzio, is the star of Italy”
said the other. “That is why I have become a Futurist—and a courier.”
“A courier!” cried Muscari, laughing. “Is that the last of
your list of trades? And whom are you conducting?”
“Oh, a man of the name of Harrogate, and his family, I
believe.”
“Not the banker in this hotel?” inquired the poet, with some
eagerness.
“That's the man,” answered the courier.
“Does it pay well?” asked the troubadour innocently.
“It will pay me,” said Ezza, with a very enigmatic smile. “But
I am a rather curious sort of courier.” Then, as if changing the subject, he
said abruptly: “He has a daughter—and a son.”
“The daughter is divine,” affirmed Muscari, “the father and
son are, I suppose, human. But granted his harmless qualities doesn't that
banker strike you as a splendid instance of my argument? Harrogate has millions
in his safes, and I have—the hole in my pocket. But you daren't say—you can't
say—that he's cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even more energetic. He's
not clever, he's got eyes like blue buttons; he's not energetic, he moves from
chair to chair like a paralytic. He's a conscientious, kindly old blockhead;
but he's got money simply because he collects money, as a boy collects stamps. You're
too strong-minded for business, Ezza. You won't get on. To be clever enough to
get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”
“I'm stupid enough for that,” said Ezza gloomily. “But I
should suggest a suspension of your critique of the banker, for here he comes.”
Mr Harrogate, the great financier, did indeed enter the
room, but nobody looked at him. He was a massive elderly man with a boiled blue
eye and faded grey-sandy moustaches; but for his heavy stoop he might have been
a colonel. He carried several unopened letters in his hand. His son Frank was a
really fine lad, curly-haired, sun-burnt and strenuous; but nobody looked at
him either. All eyes, as usual, were riveted, for the moment at least, upon
Ethel Harrogate, whose golden Greek head and colour of the dawn seemed set
purposely above that sapphire sea, like a goddess's. The poet Muscari drew a
deep breath as if he were drinking something, as indeed he was. He was drinking
the Classic; which his fathers made. Ezza studied her with a gaze equally
intense and far more baffling.
Miss Harrogate was specially radiant and ready for
conversation on this occasion; and her family had fallen into the easier
Continental habit, allowing the stranger Muscari and even the courier Ezza to
share their table and their talk. In Ethel Harrogate conventionality crowned
itself with a perfection and splendour of its own. Proud of her father's
prosperity, fond of fashionable pleasures, a fond daughter but an arrant flirt,
she was all these things with a sort of golden good-nature that made her very
pride pleasing and her worldly respectability a fresh and hearty thing.
They were in an eddy of excitement about some alleged peril
in the mountain path they were to attempt that week. The danger was not from
rock and avalanche, but from something yet more romantic. Ethel had been
earnestly assured that brigands, the true cut-throats of the modern legend,
still haunted that ridge and held that pass of the Apennines.
“They say,” she cried, with the awful relish of a
schoolgirl, “that all that country isn't ruled by the King of Italy, but by the
King of Thieves. Who is the King of Thieves?”
“A great man,” replied Muscari, “worthy to rank with your
own Robin Hood, signorina. Montano, the King of Thieves, was first heard of in
the mountains some ten years ago, when people said brigands were extinct. But
his wild authority spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution. Men found
his fierce proclamations nailed in every mountain village; his sentinels, gun
in hand, in every mountain ravine. Six times the Italian Government tried to
dislodge him, and was defeated in six pitched battles as if by Napoleon.”
“Now that sort of thing,” observed the banker weightily,
“would never be allowed in England; perhaps, after all, we had better choose
another route. But the courier thought it perfectly safe.”
“It is perfectly safe,” said the courier contemptuously. “I
have been over it twenty times. There may have been some old jailbird called a
King in the time of our grandmothers; but he belongs to history if not to
fable. Brigandage is utterly stamped out.”
“It can never be utterly stamped out,” Muscari answered;
“because armed revolt is a recreation natural to southerners. Our peasants are
like their mountains, rich in grace and green gaiety, but with the fires
beneath. There is a point of human despair where the northern poor take to
drink—and our own poor take to daggers.”
“A poet is privileged,” replied Ezza, with a sneer. “If
Signor Muscari were English be would still be looking for highwaymen in
Wandsworth. Believe me, there is no more danger of being captured in Italy than
of being scalped in Boston.”
“Then you propose to attempt it?” asked Mr Harrogate,
frowning.
“Oh, it sounds rather dreadful,” cried the girl, turning her
glorious eyes on Muscari. “Do you really think the pass is dangerous?”
Muscari threw back his black mane. “I know it is dangerous:”
he said. “I am crossing it tomorrow.”
The young Harrogate was left behind for a moment emptying a
glass of white wine and lighting a cigarette, as the beauty retired with the
banker, the courier and the poet, distributing peals of silvery satire. At
about the same instant the two priests in the corner rose; the taller, a
white-haired Italian, taking his leave. The shorter priest turned and walked
towards the banker's son, and the latter was astonished to realize that though
a Roman priest the man was an Englishman. He vaguely remembered meeting him at
the social crushes of some of his Catholic friends. But the man spoke before
his memories could collect themselves.
“Mr Frank Harrogate, I think,” he said. “I have had an
introduction, but I do not mean to presume on it. The odd thing I have to say
will come far better from a stranger. Mr Harrogate, I say one word and go: take
care of your sister in her great sorrow.”
Even for Frank's truly fraternal indifference the radiance
and derision of his sister still seemed to sparkle and ring; he could hear her
laughter still from the garden of the hotel, and he stared at his sombre
adviser in puzzledom.
“Do you mean the brigands?” he asked; and then, remembering
a vague fear of his own, “or can you be thinking of Muscari?”
“One is never thinking of the real sorrow,” said the strange
priest. “One can only be kind when it comes.”
And he passed promptly from the room, leaving the other
almost with his mouth open.
A day or two afterwards a coach containing the company was
really crawling and staggering up the spurs of the menacing mountain range. Between
Ezza's cheery denial of the danger and Muscari's boisterous defiance of it, the
financial family were firm in their original purpose; and Muscari made his
mountain journey coincide with theirs. A more surprising feature was the
appearance at the coast-town station of the little priest of the restaurant; he
alleged merely that business led him also to cross the mountains of the
midland. But young Harrogate could not but connect his presence with the
mystical fears and warnings of yesterday.
The coach was a kind of commodious wagonette, invented by
the modernist talent of the courier, who dominated the expedition with his
scientific activity and breezy wit. The theory of danger from thieves was
banished from thought and speech; though so far conceded in formal act that
some slight protection was employed. The courier and the young banker carried
loaded revolvers, and Muscari (with much boyish gratification) buckled on a
kind of cutlass under his black cloak.
He had planted his person at a flying leap next to the
lovely Englishwoman; on the other side of her sat the priest, whose name was
Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the father
and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits, seriously
believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have made her think
him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and gorgeous ascent, amid
crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards, that dragged her spirit up
alone with his into purple preposterous heavens with wheeling suns. The white
road climbed like a white cat; it spanned sunless chasms like a tight-rope; it
was flung round far-off headlands like a lasso.
And yet, however high they went, the desert still blossomed
like the rose. The fields were burnished in sun and wind with the colour of
kingfisher and parrot and humming-bird, the hues of a hundred flowering
flowers. There are no lovelier meadows and woodlands than the English, no
nobler crests or chasms than those of Snowdon and Glencoe. But Ethel Harrogate
had never before seen the southern parks tilted on the splintered northern
peaks; the gorge of Glencoe laden with the fruits of Kent. There was nothing
here of that chill and desolation that in Britain one associates with high and
wild scenery. It was rather like a mosaic palace, rent with earthquakes; or
like a Dutch tulip garden blown to the stars with dynamite.
“It's like Kew Gardens on Beachy Head,” said Ethel.
“It is our secret,” answered he, “the secret of the volcano;
that is also the secret of the revolution—that a thing can be violent and yet
fruitful.”
“You are rather violent yourself,” and she smiled at him.
“And yet rather
fruitless,” he admitted; “if I die tonight I die unmarried and a fool.”
“It is not my
fault if you have come,” she said after a difficult silence.
“It is never your
fault,” answered Muscari; “it was not your fault that Troy fell.”
As they spoke
they came under overwhelming cliffs that spread almost like wings above a
corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow on the narrow ledge, the
horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to the earth to hold their heads,
and they became ungovernable. One horse reared up to his full height—the
titanic and terrifying height of a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just
enough to alter the equilibrium; the whole coach heeled over like a ship and
crashed through the fringe of bushes over the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round
Ethel, who clung to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments that he
lived.
At the moment
when the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet's head like a purple
windmill a thing happened which was superficially even more startling. The
elderly and lethargic banker sprang erect in the coach and leapt over the
precipice before the tilted vehicle could take him there. In the first flash it
looked as wild as suicide; but in the second it was as sensible as a safe
investment. The Yorkshireman had evidently more promptitude, as well as more
sagacity, than Muscari had given him credit for; for he landed in a lap of land
which might have been specially padded with turf and clover to receive him. As
it happened, indeed, the whole company were equally lucky, if less dignified in
their form of ejection. Immediately under this abrupt turn of the road was a
grassy and flowery hollow like a sunken meadow; a sort of green velvet pocket
in the long, green, trailing garments of the hills. Into this they were all
tipped or tumbled with little damage, save that their smallest baggage and even
the contents of their pockets were scattered in the grass around them. The
wrecked coach still hung above, entangled in the tough hedge, and the horses
plunged painfully down the slope. The first to sit up was the little priest,
who scratched his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank Harrogate heard him
say to himself: “Now why on earth have we fallen just here?”
He blinked at the
litter around him, and recovered his own very clumsy umbrella. Beyond it lay
the broad sombrero fallen from the head of Muscari, and beside it a sealed
business letter which, after a glance at the address, he returned to the elder
Harrogate. On the other side of him the grass partly hid Miss Ethel's sunshade,
and just beyond it lay a curious little glass bottle hardly two inches long.
The priest picked it up; in a quick, unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed
it, and his heavy face turned the colour of clay.
“Heaven deliver
us!” he muttered; “it can't be hers! Has her sorrow come on her already?” He
slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket. “I think I'm justified,” he said,
“till I know a little more.”
He gazed
painfully at the girl, at that moment being raised out of the flowers by
Muscari, who was saying: “We have fallen into heaven; it is a sign. Mortals
climb up and they fall down; but it is only gods and goddesses who can fall
upwards.”
And indeed she
rose out of the sea of colours so beautiful and happy a vision that the priest
felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. “After all,” he thought, “perhaps the
poison isn't hers; perhaps it's one of Muscari's melodramatic tricks.”
Muscari set the
lady lightly on her feet, made her an absurdly theatrical bow, and then,
drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut reins of the horses, so that they
scrambled to their feet and stood in the grass trembling. When he had done so,
a most remarkable thing occurred. A very quiet man, very poorly dressed and
extremely sunburnt, came out of the bushes and took hold of the horses' heads.
He had a queer-shaped knife, very broad and crooked, buckled on his belt; there
was nothing else remarkable about him, except his sudden and silent appearance.
The poet asked him who he was, and he did not answer.
Looking around
him at the confused and startled group in the hollow, Muscari then perceived
that another tanned and tattered man, with a short gun under his arm, was
looking at them from the ledge just below, leaning his elbows on the edge of
the turf. Then he looked up at the road from which they had fallen and saw,
looking down on them, the muzzles of four other carbines and four other brown
faces with bright but quite motionless eyes.
“The brigands!”
cried Muscari, with a kind of monstrous gaiety. “This was a trap. Ezza, if you
will oblige me by shooting the coachman first, we can cut our way out yet.
There are only six of them.”
“The coachman,”
said Ezza, who was standing grimly with his hands in his pockets, “happens to
be a servant of Mr Harrogate's.”
“Then shoot him
all the more,” cried the poet impatiently; “he was bribed to upset his master.
Then put the lady in the middle, and we will break the line up there—with a
rush.”
And, wading in
wild grass and flowers, he advanced fearlessly on the four carbines; but
finding that no one followed except young Harrogate, he turned, brandishing his
cutlass to wave the others on. He beheld the courier still standing slightly
astride in the centre of the grassy ring, his hands in his pockets; and his
lean, ironical Italian face seemed to grow longer and longer in the evening
light.
“You thought,
Muscari, I was the failure among our schoolfellows,” he said, “and you thought
you were the success. But I have succeeded more than you and fill a bigger
place in history. I have been acting epics while you have been writing them.”
“Come on, I tell
you!” thundered Muscari from above. “Will you stand there talking nonsense
about yourself with a woman to save and three strong men to help you? What do
you call yourself?”
“I call myself
Montano,” cried the strange courier in a voice equally loud and full. “I am the
King of Thieves, and I welcome you all to my summer palace.”
And even as he
spoke five more silent men with weapons ready came out of the bushes, and
looked towards him for their orders. One of them held a large paper in his
hand.
“This pretty
little nest where we are all picnicking,” went on the courier-brigand, with the
same easy yet sinister smile, “is, together with some caves underneath it,
known by the name of the Paradise of Thieves. It is my principal stronghold on
these hills; for (as you have doubtless noticed) the eyrie is invisible both
from the road above and from the valley below. It is something better than
impregnable; it is unnoticeable. Here I mostly live, and here I shall certainly
die, if the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not the kind of criminal that
`reserves his defence,' but the better kind that reserves his last bullet.”
All were staring
at him thunderstruck and still, except Father Brown, who heaved a huge sigh as
of relief and fingered the little phial in his pocket. “Thank God!” he
muttered; “that's much more probable. The poison belongs to this robber-chief,
of course. He carries it so that he may never be captured, like Cato.”
The King of
Thieves was, however, continuing his address with the same kind of dangerous
politeness. “It only remains for me,” he said, “to explain to my guests the
social conditions upon which I have the pleasure of entertaining them. I need
not expound the quaint old ritual of ransom, which it is incumbent upon me to
keep up; and even this only applies to a part of the company. The Reverend
Father Brown and the celebrated Signor Muscari I shall release tomorrow at dawn
and escort to my outposts. Poets and priests, if you will pardon my simplicity
of speech, never have any money. And so (since it is impossible to get anything
out of them), let us, seize the opportunity to show our admiration for classic
literature and our reverence for Holy Church.”
He paused with an
unpleasing smile; and Father Brown blinked repeatedly at him, and seemed
suddenly to be listening with great attention. The brigand captain took the
large paper from the attendant brigand and, glancing over it, continued: “My
other intentions are clearly set forth in this public document, which I will
hand round in a moment; and which after that will be posted on a tree by every
village in the valley, and every cross-road in the hills. I will not weary you
with the verbalism, since you will be able to check it; the substance of my
proclamation is this: I announce first that I have captured the English
millionaire, the colossus of finance, Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that
I have found on his person notes and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he
has given up to me. Now since it would be really immoral to announce such a
thing to a credulous public if it had not occurred, I suggest it should occur
without further delay. I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior should now give me
the two thousand pounds in his pocket.”
The banker looked
at him under lowering brows, red-faced and sulky, but seemingly cowed. That
leap from the failing carriage seemed to have used up his last virility. He had
held back in a hang-dog style when his son and Muscari had made a bold movement
to break out of the brigand trap. And now his red and trembling hand went
reluctantly to his breast-pocket, and passed a bundle of papers and envelopes
to the brigand.
“Excellent!”
cried that outlaw gaily; “so far we are all cosy. I resume the points of my
proclamation, so soon to be published to all Italy. The third item is that of
ransom. I am asking from the friends of the Harrogate family a ransom of three
thousand pounds, which I am sure is almost insulting to that family in its
moderate estimate of their importance. Who would not pay triple this sum for
another day's association with such a domestic circle? I will not conceal from
you that the document ends with certain legal phrases about the unpleasant
things that may happen if the money is not paid; but meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen,
let me assure you that I am comfortably off here for accommodation, wine and
cigars, and bid you for the present a sportsman-like welcome to the luxuries of
the Paradise of Thieves.”
All the time that
he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with carbines and dirty slouch
hats had been gathering silently in such preponderating numbers that even
Muscari was compelled to recognize his sally with the sword as hopeless. He
glanced around him; but the girl had already gone over to soothe and comfort
her father, for her natural affection for his person was as strong or stronger
than her somewhat snobbish pride in his success. Muscari, with the illogicality
of a lover, admired this filial devotion, and yet was irritated by it. He
slapped his sword back in the scabbard and went and flung himself somewhat
sulkily on one of the green banks. The priest sat down within a yard or two,
and Muscari turned his aquiline nose on him in an instantaneous irritation.
“Well,” said the
poet tartly, “do people still think me too romantic? Are there, I wonder, any
brigands left in the mountains?”
“There may be,”
said Father Brown agnostically.
“What do you
mean?” asked the other sharply.
“I mean I am
puzzled,” replied the priest. “I am puzzled about Ezza or Montano, or whatever
his name is. He seems to me much more inexplicable as a brigand even than he
was as a courier.”
“But in what
way?” persisted his companion. “Santa Maria! I should have thought the brigand
was plain enough.”
“I find three
curious difficulties,” said the priest in a quiet voice. “I should like to have
your opinion on them. First of all I must tell you I was lunching in that
restaurant at the seaside. As four of you left the room, you and Miss Harrogate
went ahead, talking and laughing; the banker and the courier came behind,
speaking sparely and rather low. But I could not help hearing Ezza say these
words—`Well, let her have a little fun; you know the blow may smash her any
minute. ' Mr Harrogate answered nothing; so the words must have had some
meaning. On the impulse of the moment I warned her brother that she might be in
peril; I said nothing of its nature, for I did not know. But if it meant this
capture in the hills, the thing is nonsense. Why should the brigand-courier
warn his patron, even by a hint, when it was his whole purpose to lure him into
the mountain-mousetrap? It could not have meant that. But if not, what is this
disaster, known both to courier and banker, which hangs over Miss Harrogate's
head?”
“Disaster to Miss
Harrogate!” ejaculated the poet, sitting up with some ferocity. “Explain
yourself; go on.”
“All my riddles,
however, revolve round our bandit chief,” resumed the priest reflectively. “And
here is the second of them. Why did he put so prominently in his demand for
ransom the fact that he had taken two thousand pounds from his victim on the
spot? It had no faintest tendency to evoke the ransom. Quite the other way, in
fact. Harrogate's friends would be far likelier to fear for his fate if they
thought the thieves were poor and desperate. Yet the spoliation on the spot was
emphasized and even put first in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want so
specially to tell all Europe that he had picked the pocket before he levied the
blackmail?”
“I cannot
imagine,” said Muscari, rubbing up his black hair for once with an unaffected
gesture. “You may think you enlighten me, but you are leading me deeper in the
dark. What may be the third objection to the King of the Thieves?” “The third
objection,” said Father Brown, still in meditation, “is this bank we are
sitting on. Why does our brigand-courier call this his chief fortress and the
Paradise of Thieves? It is certainly a soft spot to fall on and a sweet spot to
look at. It is also quite true, as he says, that it is invisible from valley
and peak, and is therefore a hiding-place. But it is not a fortress. It never
could be a fortress. I think it would be the worst fortress in the world. For
it is actually commanded from above by the common high-road across the
mountains—the very place where the police would most probably pass. Why, five
shabby short guns held us helpless here about half an hour ago. The quarter of
a company of any kind of soldiers could have blown us over the precipice.
Whatever is the meaning of this odd little nook of grass and flowers, it is not
an entrenched position. It is something else; it has some other strange sort of
importance; some value that I do not understand. It is more like an accidental
theatre or a natural green-room; it is like the scene for some romantic comedy;
it is like....”
As the little
priest's words lengthened and lost themselves in a dull and dreamy sincerity,
Muscari, whose animal senses were alert and impatient, heard a new noise in the
mountains. Even for him the sound was as yet very small and faint; but he could
have sworn the evening breeze bore with it something like the pulsation of
horses' hoofs and a distant hallooing.
At the same
moment, and long before the vibration had touched the less-experienced English
ears, Montano the brigand ran up the bank above them and stood in the broken
hedge, steadying himself against a tree and peering down the road. He was a
strange figure as he stood there, for he had assumed a flapped fantastic hat
and swinging baldric and cutlass in his capacity of bandit king, but the bright
prosaic tweed of the courier showed through in patches all over him.
The next moment
he turned his olive, sneering face and made a movement with his hand. The
brigands scattered at the signal, not in confusion, but in what was evidently a
kind of guerrilla discipline. Instead of occupying the road along the ridge,
they sprinkled themselves along the side of it behind the trees and the hedge,
as if watching unseen for an enemy. The noise beyond grew stronger, beginning
to shake the mountain road, and a voice could be clearly heard calling out
orders. The brigands swayed and huddled, cursing and whispering, and the
evening air was full of little metallic noises as they cocked their pistols, or
loosened their knives, or trailed their scabbards over the stones. Then the
noises from both quarters seemed to meet on the road above; branches broke,
horses neighed, men cried out.
“A rescue!” cried
Muscari, springing to his feet and waving his hat; “the gendarmes are on them!
Now for freedom and a blow for it! Now to be rebels against robbers! Come,
don't let us leave everything to the police; that is so dreadfully modern. Fall
on the rear of these ruffians. The gendarmes are rescuing us; come, friends,
let us rescue the gendarmes!”
And throwing his
hat over the trees, he drew his cutlass once more and began to escalade the
slope up to the road. Frank Harrogate jumped up and ran across to help him,
revolver in hand, but was astounded to hear himself imperatively recalled by
the raucous voice of his father, who seemed to be in great agitation.
“I won't have
it,” said the banker in a choking voice; “I command you not to interfere.”
“But, father,”
said Frank very warmly, “an Italian gentleman has led the way. You wouldn't
have it said that the English hung back.”
“It is useless,”
said the older man, who was trembling violently, “it is useless. We must submit
to our lot.”
Father Brown
looked at the banker; then he put his hand instinctively as if on his heart,
but really on the little bottle of poison; and a great light came into his face
like the light of the revelation of death.
Muscari
meanwhile, without waiting for support, had crested the bank up to the road,
and struck the brigand king heavily on the shoulder, causing him to stagger and
swing round. Montano also had his cutlass unsheathed, and Muscari, without
further speech, sent a slash at his head which he was compelled to catch and
parry. But even as the two short blades crossed and clashed the King of Thieves
deliberately dropped his point and laughed.
“What's the good,
old man?” he said in spirited Italian slang; “this damned farce will soon be
over.”
“What do you
mean, you shuffler?” panted the fire-eating poet. “Is your courage a sham as
well as your honesty?”
“Everything about
me is a sham,” responded the ex-courier in complete good humour. “I am an
actor; and if I ever had a private character, I have forgotten it. I am no more
a genuine brigand than I am a genuine courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and
you can't fight a duel with that.” And he laughed with boyish pleasure and fell
into his old straddling attitude, with his back to the skirmish up the road.
Darkness was
deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to discern much of the
progress of the struggle, save that tall men were pushing their horses' muzzles
through a clinging crowd of brigands, who seemed more inclined to harass and
hustle the invaders than to kill them. It was more like a town crowd preventing
the passage of the police than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last
stand of doomed and outlawed men of blood. Just as he was rolling his eyes in
bewilderment he felt a touch on his elbow, and found the odd little priest standing
there like a small Noah with a large hat, and requesting the favour of a word
or two.
“Signor Muscari,”
said the cleric, “in this queer crisis personalities may be pardoned. I may
tell you without offence of a way in which you will do more good than by
helping the gendarmes, who are bound to break through in any case. You will
permit me the impertinent intimacy, but do you care about that girl? Care
enough to marry her and make her a good husband, I mean?”
“Yes,” said the
poet quite simply.
“Does she care
about you?”
“I think so,” was
the equally grave reply.
“Then go over
there and offer yourself,” said the priest: “offer her everything you can;
offer her heaven and earth if you've got them. The time is short.”
“Why?” asked the
astonished man of letters.
“Because,” said
Father Brown, “her Doom is coming up the road.”
“Nothing is
coming up the road,” argued Muscari, “except the rescue.”
“Well, you go
over there,” said his adviser, “and be ready to rescue her from the rescue.”
Almost as he
spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush of the escaping
brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass like defeated men pursued; and
the great cocked hats of the mounted gendarmerie were seen passing along above
the broken hedge. Another order was given; there was a noise of dismounting,
and a tall officer with cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand
appeared in the gap that was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves. There was a
momentary silence, broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who cried out
in a hoarse and strangled voice: “Robbed! I've been robbed!”
“Why, that was
hours ago,” cried his son in astonishment: “when you were robbed of two
thousand pounds.”
“Not of two
thousand pounds,” said the financier, with an abrupt and terrible composure,
“only of a small bottle.”
The policeman
with the grey imperial was striding across the green hollow. Encountering the
King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him on the shoulder with something
between a caress and a buffet and gave him a push that sent him staggering
away. “You'll get into trouble, too,” he said, “if you play these tricks.”
Again to
Muscari's artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of a great outlaw at
bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the Harrogate group and said:
“Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name of the law for embezzlement of the
funds of the Hull and Huddersfield Bank.”
The great banker
nodded with an odd air of business assent, seemed to reflect a moment, and
before they could interpose took a half turn and a step that brought him to the
edge of the outer mountain wall. Then, flinging up his hands, he leapt exactly
as he leapt out of the coach. But this time he did not fall into a little
meadow just beneath; he fell a thousand feet below, to become a wreck of bones
in the valley.
The anger of the
Italian policeman, which he expressed volubly to Father Brown, was largely
mixed with admiration. “It was like him to escape us at last,” he said. “He was
a great brigand if you like. This last trick of his I believe to be absolutely
unprecedented. He fled with the company's money to Italy, and actually got
himself captured by sham brigands in his own pay, so as to explain both the
disappearance of the money and the disappearance of himself. That demand for
ransom was really taken seriously by most of the police. But for years he's
been doing things as good as that, quite as good as that. He will be a serious
loss to his family.”
Muscari was
leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him, as she did for many a
year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could not help having a smile and
a hand of half-mocking friendship for the indefensible Ezza Montano. “And where
are you going next?” he asked him over his shoulder.
“Birmingham,”
answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. “Didn't I tell you I was a Futurist? I
really do believe in those things if I believe in anything. Change, bustle and
new things every morning. I am going to Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield,
Glasgow, Chicago—in short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!”
“In short,” said
Muscari, “to the real Paradise of Thieves.”
THREE
The Duel of Dr
Hirsch
M. MAURICE BRUN
and M. Armand Armagnac were crossing the sunlit Champs Elysee with a kind of
vivacious respectability. They were both short, brisk and bold. They both had
black beards that did not seem to belong to their faces, after the strange
French fashion which makes real hair look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark
wedge of beard apparently affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a
change, had two beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin.
They were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of
outlook but great mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the great Dr
Hirsch, scientist, publicist and moralist.
M. Brun had
become prominent by his proposal that the common expression “Adieu” should be
obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight fine imposed for its use
in private life. “Then,” he said, “the very name of your imagined God will have
echoed for the last time in the ear of man.” M. Armagnac specialized rather in
a resistance to militarism, and wished the chorus of the Marseillaise altered
from “Aux armes, citoyens” to “Aux greves, citoyens”. But his antimilitarism
was of a peculiar and Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy English Quaker,
who had come to see him to arrange for the disarmament of the whole planet, was
rather distressed by Armagnac's proposal that (by way of beginning) the
soldiers should shoot their officers.
And indeed it was
in this regard that the two men differed most from their leader and father in
philosophy. Dr Hirsch, though born in France and covered with the most
triumphant favours of French education, was temperamentally of another
type—mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his sceptical system, not devoid of
transcendentalism. He was, in short, more like a German than a Frenchman; and
much as they admired him, something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was
irritated at his pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party
throughout Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and
daring cosmic theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if somewhat
frigid, morality; he held something of the position of Darwin doubled with the
position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist nor an antipatriot; his
views on disarmament were moderate and evolutionary—the Republican Government
put considerable confidence in him as to various chemical improvements. He had
lately even discovered a noiseless explosive, the secret of which the
Government was carefully guarding.
His house stood
in a handsome street near the Elysee—a street which in that strong summer
seemed almost as full of foliage as the park itself; a row of chestnuts
shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place where a large cafe ran
out into the street. Almost opposite to this were the white and green blinds of
the great scientist's house, an iron balcony, also painted green, running along
in front of the first-floor windows. Beneath this was the entrance into a kind
of court, gay with shrubs and tiles, into which the two Frenchmen passed in
animated talk.
The door was
opened to them by the doctor's old servant, Simon, who might very well have
passed for a doctor himself, having a strict suit of black, spectacles, grey
hair, and a confidential manner. In fact, he was a far more presentable man of
science than his master, Dr Hirsch, who was a forked radish of a fellow, with
just enough bulb of a head to make his body insignificant. With all the gravity
of a great physician handling a prescription, Simon handed a letter to M.
Armagnac. That gentleman ripped it up with a racial impatience, and rapidly
read the following:
I cannot come
down to speak to you. There is a man in this house whom I refuse to meet. He is
a Chauvinist officer, Dubosc. He is sitting on the stairs. He has been kicking
the furniture about in all the other rooms; I have locked myself in my study,
opposite that cafe. If you love me, go over to the cafe and wait at one of the
tables outside. I will try to send him over to you. I want you to answer him
and deal with him. I cannot meet him myself. I cannot: I will not.
There is going to
be another Dreyfus case.
P. HIRSCH
M. Armagnac
looked at M. Brun. M. Brun borrowed the letter, read it, and looked at M.
Armagnac. Then both betook themselves briskly to one of the little tables under
the chestnuts opposite, where they procured two tall glasses of horrible green
absinthe, which they could drink apparently in any weather and at any time.
Otherwise the cafe seemed empty, except for one soldier drinking coffee at one
table, and at another a large man drinking a small syrup and a priest drinking
nothing.
Maurice Brun
cleared his throat and said: “Of course we must help the master in every way,
but—”
There was an
abrupt silence, and Armagnac said: “He may have excellent reasons for not
meeting the man himself, but—”
Before either
could complete a sentence, it was evident that the invader had been expelled
from the house opposite. The shrubs under the archway swayed and burst apart,
as that unwelcome guest was shot out of them like a cannon-ball.
He was a sturdy
figure in a small and tilted Tyrolean felt hat, a figure that had indeed
something generally Tyrolean about it. The man's shoulders were big and broad,
but his legs were neat and active in knee-breeches and knitted stockings. His
face was brown like a nut; he had very bright and restless brown eyes; his dark
hair was brushed back stiffly in front and cropped close behind, outlining a
square and powerful skull; and he had a huge black moustache like the horns of
a bison. Such a substantial head is generally based on a bull neck; but this
was hidden by a big coloured scarf, swathed round up the man's ears and falling
in front inside his jacket like a sort of fancy waistcoat. It was a scarf of
strong dead colours, dark red and old gold and purple, probably of Oriental
fabrication. Altogether the man had something a shade barbaric about him; more
like a Hungarian squire than an ordinary French officer. His French, however,
was obviously that of a native; and his French patriotism was so impulsive as
to be slightly absurd. His first act when he burst out of the archway was to
call in a clarion voice down the street: “Are there any Frenchmen here?” as if
he were calling for Christians in Mecca.
Armagnac and Brun
instantly stood up; but they were too late. Men were already running from the
street corners; there was a small but ever-clustering crowd. With the prompt
French instinct for the politics of the street, the man with the black
moustache had already run across to a corner of the cafe, sprung on one of the
tables, and seizing a branch of chestnut to steady himself, shouted as Camille
Desmoulins once shouted when he scattered the oak-leaves among the populace.
“Frenchmen!” he
volleyed; “I cannot speak! God help me, that is why I am speaking! The fellows
in their filthy parliaments who learn to speak also learn to be silent—silent
as that spy cowering in the house opposite! Silent as he is when I beat on his
bedroom door! Silent as he is now, though he hears my voice across this street
and shakes where he sits! Oh, they can be silent eloquently—the politicians!
But the time has come when we that cannot speak must speak. You are betrayed to
the Prussians. Betrayed at this moment. Betrayed by that man. I am Jules
Dubosc, Colonel of Artillery, Belfort. We caught a German spy in the Vosges
yesterday, and a paper was found on him—a paper I hold in my hand. Oh, they
tried to hush it up; but I took it direct to the man who wrote it—the man in
that house! It is in his hand. It is signed with his initials. It is a
direction for finding the secret of this new Noiseless Powder. Hirsch invented
it; Hirsch wrote this note about it. This note is in German, and was found in a
German's pocket. `Tell the man the formula for powder is in grey envelope in
first drawer to the left of Secretary's desk, War Office, in red ink. He must
be careful. P. H. '”
He rattled short
sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he was plainly the sort of man who is
either mad or right. The mass of the crowd was Nationalist, and already in
threatening uproar; and a minority of equally angry Intellectuals, led by
Armagnac and Brun, only made the majority more militant.
“If this is a
military secret,” shouted Brun, “why do you yell about it in the street?”
“I will tell you
why I do!” roared Dubosc above the roaring crowd. “I went to this man in
straight and civil style. If he had any explanation it could have been given in
complete confidence. He refuses to explain. He refers me to two strangers in a
cafe as to two flunkeys. He has thrown me out of the house, but I am going back
into it, with the people of Paris behind me!”
A shout seemed to
shake the very facade of mansions and two stones flew, one breaking a window
above the balcony. The indignant Colonel plunged once more under the archway
and was heard crying and thundering inside. Every instant the human sea grew
wider and wider; it surged up against the rails and steps of the traitor's
house; it was already certain that the place would be burst into like the
Bastille, when the broken french window opened and Dr Hirsch came out on the
balcony. For an instant the fury half turned to laughter; for he was an absurd
figure in such a scene. His long bare neck and sloping shoulders were the shape
of a champagne bottle, but that was the only festive thing about him. His coat
hung on him as on a peg; he wore his carrot-coloured hair long and weedy; his
cheeks and chin were fully fringed with one of those irritating beards that
begin far from the mouth. He was very pale, and he wore blue spectacles.
Livid as he was,
he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob fell silent in the
middle of his third sentence.
“...only two
things to say to you now. The first is to my foes, the second to my friends. To
my foes I say: It is true I will not meet M. Dubosc, though he is storming
outside this very room. It is true I have asked two other men to confront him
for me. And I will tell you why! Because I will not and must not see
him—because it would be against all rules of dignity and honour to see him.
Before I am triumphantly cleared before a court, there is another arbitration
this gentleman owes me as a gentleman, and in referring him to my seconds I am
strictly—”
Armagnac and Brun
were waving their hats wildly, and even the Doctor's enemies roared applause at
this unexpected defiance. Once more a few sentences were inaudible, but they
could hear him say: “To my friends—I myself should always prefer weapons purely
intellectual, and to these an evolved humanity will certainly confine itself.
But our own most precious truth is the fundamental force of matter and
heredity. My books are successful; my theories are unrefuted; but I suffer in
politics from a prejudice almost physical in the French. I cannot speak like
Clemenceau and Deroulede, for their words are like echoes of their pistols. The
French ask for a duellist as the English ask for a sportsman. Well, I give my
proofs: I will pay this barbaric bribe, and then go back to reason for the rest
of my life.”
Two men were
instantly found in the crowd itself to offer their services to Colonel Dubosc,
who came out presently, satisfied. One was the common soldier with the coffee,
who said simply: “I will act for you, sir. I am the Duc de Valognes.” The other
was the big man, whom his friend the priest sought at first to dissuade; and then
walked away alone.
In the early
evening a light dinner was spread at the back of the Cafe Charlemagne. Though
unroofed by any glass or gilt plaster, the guests were nearly all under a
delicate and irregular roof of leaves; for the ornamental trees stood so thick
around and among the tables as to give something of the dimness and the dazzle
of a small orchard. At one of the central tables a very stumpy little priest
sat in complete solitude, and applied himself to a pile of whitebait with the
gravest sort of enjoyment. His daily living being very plain, he had a peculiar
taste for sudden and isolated luxuries; he was an abstemious epicure. He did
not lift his eyes from his plate, round which red pepper, lemons, brown bread
and butter, etc., were rigidly ranked, until a tall shadow fell across the
table, and his friend Flambeau sat down opposite. Flambeau was gloomy.
“I'm afraid I
must chuck this business,” said he heavily. “I'm all on the side of the French
soldiers like Dubosc, and I'm all against the French atheists like Hirsch; but
it seems to me in this case we've made a mistake. The Duke and I thought it as
well to investigate the charge, and I must say I'm glad we did.”
“Is the paper a
forgery, then?” asked the priest
“That's just the
odd thing,” replied Flambeau. “It's exactly like Hirsch's writing, and nobody
can point out any mistake in it. But it wasn't written by Hirsch. If he's a
French patriot he didn't write it, because it gives information to Germany. And
if he's a German spy he didn't write it, well—because it doesn't give
information to Germany.”
“You mean the
information is wrong?” asked Father Brown.
“Wrong,” replied
the other, “and wrong exactly where Dr Hirsch would have been right—about the
hiding-place of his own secret formula in his own official department. By
favour of Hirsch and the authorities, the Duke and I have actually been allowed
to inspect the secret drawer at the War Office where the Hirsch formula is
kept. We are the only people who have ever known it, except the inventor himself
and the Minister for War; but the Minister permitted it to save Hirsch from
fighting. After that we really can't support Dubosc if his revelation is a
mare's nest.”
“And it is?”
asked Father Brown.
“It is,” said his
friend gloomily. “It is a clumsy forgery by somebody who knew nothing of the
real hiding-place. It says the paper is in the cupboard on the right of the
Secretary's desk. As a fact the cupboard with the secret drawer is some way to
the left of the desk. It says the grey envelope contains a long document
written in red ink. It isn't written in red ink, but in ordinary black ink.
It's manifestly absurd to say that Hirsch can have made a mistake about a paper
that nobody knew of but himself; or can have tried to help a foreign thief by
telling him to fumble in the wrong drawer. I think we must chuck it up and
apologize to old Carrots.”
Father Brown
seemed to cogitate; he lifted a little whitebait on his fork. “You are sure the
grey envelope was in the left cupboard?” he asked.
“Positive,” replied
Flambeau. “The grey envelope—it was a white envelope really—was—”
Father Brown put
down the small silver fish and the fork and stared across at his companion.
“What?” he asked, in an altered voice.
“Well, what?”
repeated Flambeau, eating heartily.
“It was not
grey,” said the priest. “Flambeau, you frighten me.”
“What the deuce
are you frightened of?”
“I'm frightened
of a white envelope,” said the other seriously, “If it had only just been grey!
Hang it all, it might as well have been grey. But if it was white, the whole
business is black. The Doctor has been dabbling in some of the old brimstone
after all.”
“But I tell you
he couldn't have written such a note!” cried Flambeau. “The note is utterly
wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr Hirsch knew all about the
facts.”
“The man who
wrote that note knew all about the facts,” said his clerical companion soberly.
“He could never have got 'em so wrong without knowing about 'em. You have to
know an awful lot to be wrong on every subject—like the devil.”
“Do you mean—?”
“I mean a man
telling lies on chance would have told some of the truth,” said his friend
firmly. “Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door and a blue
blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and where
they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that it
was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was
blue and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden,
where cats were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts
and coffee forbidden—then you would know you had found the house. The man must
have known that particular house to be so accurately inaccurate.”
“But what could
it mean?” demanded the diner opposite.
“I can't
conceive,” said Brown; “I don't understand this Hirsch affair at all. As long
as it was only the left drawer instead of the right, and red ink instead of
black, I thought it must be the chance blunders of a forger, as you say. But
three is a mystical number; it finishes things. It finishes this. That the
direction about the drawer, the colour of ink, the colour of envelope, should
none of them be right by accident, that can't be a coincidence. It wasn't.”
“What was it,
then? Treason?” asked Flambeau, resuming his dinner.
“I don't know
that either,” answered Brown, with a face of blank bewilderment. “The only
thing I can think of.... Well, I never understood that Dreyfus case. I can
always grasp moral evidence easier than the other sorts. I go by a man's eyes
and voice, don't you know, and whether his family seems happy, and by what
subjects he chooses—and avoids. Well, I was puzzled in the Dreyfus case. Not by
the horrible things imputed both ways; I know (though it's not modern to say
so) that human nature in the highest places is still capable of being Cenci or
Borgia. No—, what puzzled me was the sincerity of both parties. I don't mean
the political parties; the rank and file are always roughly honest, and often
duped. I mean the persons of the play. I mean the conspirators, if they were
conspirators. I mean the traitor, if he was a traitor. I mean the men who must
have known the truth. Now Dreyfus went on like a man who knew he was a wronged
man. And yet the French statesmen and soldiers went on as if they knew he
wasn't a wronged man but simply a wrong 'un. I don't mean they behaved well; I
mean they behaved as if they were sure. I can't describe these things; I know
what I mean.”
“I wish I did,”
said his friend. “And what has it to do with old Hirsch?”
“Suppose a person
in a position of trust,” went on the priest, “began to give the enemy
information because it was false information. Suppose he even thought he was
saving his country by misleading the foreigner. Suppose this brought him into
spy circles, and little loans were made to him, and little ties tied on to him.
Suppose he kept up his contradictory position in a confused way by never
telling the foreign spies the truth, but letting it more and more be guessed.
The better part of him (what was left of it) would still say: `I have not
helped the enemy; I said it was the left drawer. ' The meaner part of him would
already be saying: `But they may have the sense to see that means the right. '
I think it is psychologically possible—in an enlightened age, you know.”
“It may be
psychologically possible,” answered Flambeau, “and it certainly would explain
Dreyfus being certain he was wronged and his judges being sure he was guilty.
But it won't wash historically, because Dreyfus's document (if it was his document)
was literally correct.”
“I wasn't
thinking of Dreyfus,” said Father Brown.
Silence had sunk
around them with the emptying of the tables; it was already late, though the
sunlight still clung to everything, as if accidentally entangled in the trees.
In the stillness Flambeau shifted his seat sharply—making an isolated and
echoing noise—and threw his elbow over the angle of it. “Well,” he said, rather
harshly, “if Hirsch is not better than a timid treason-monger...”
“You mustn't be
too hard on them,” said Father Brown gently. “It's not entirely their fault;
but they have no instincts. I mean those things that make a woman refuse to
dance with a man or a man to touch an investment. They've been taught that it's
all a matter of degree.”
“Anyhow,” cried
Flambeau impatiently, “he's not a patch on my principal; and I shall go through
with it. Old Dubosc may be a bit mad, but he's a sort of patriot after all.”
Father Brown
continued to consume whitebait.
Something in the
stolid way he did so caused Flambeau's fierce black eyes to ramble over his
companion afresh. “What's the matter with you?” Flambeau demanded. “Dubosc's
all right in that way. You don't doubt him?”
“My friend,” said
the small priest, laying down his knife and fork in a kind of cold despair, “I
doubt everything. Everything, I mean, that has happened today. I doubt the
whole story, though it has been acted before my face. I doubt every sight that
my eyes have seen since morning. There is something in this business quite
different from the ordinary police mystery where one man is more or less lying
and the other man more or less telling the truth. Here both men.... Well! I've
told you the only theory I can think of that could satisfy anybody. It doesn't
satisfy me.”
“Nor me either,”
replied Flambeau frowning, while the other went on eating fish with an air of
entire resignation. “If all you can suggest is that notion of a message
conveyed by contraries, I call it uncommonly clever, but... well, what would
you call it?”
“I should call it
thin,” said the priest promptly. “I should call it uncommonly thin. But that's
the queer thing about the whole business. The lie is like a schoolboy's. There
are only three versions, Dubosc's and Hirsch's and that fancy of mine. Either
that note was written by a French officer to ruin a French official; or it was
written by the French official to help German officers; or it was written by
the French official to mislead German officers. Very well. You'd expect a
secret paper passing between such people, officials or officers, to look quite
different from that. You'd expect, probably a cipher, certainly abbreviations;
most certainly scientific and strictly professional terms. But this thing's
elaborately simple, like a penny dreadful: `In the purple grotto you will find
the golden casket. ' It looks as if... as if it were meant to be seen through
at once.”
Almost before
they could take it in a short figure in French uniform had walked up to their
table like the wind, and sat down with a sort of thump.
“I have
extraordinary news,” said the Duc de Valognes. “I have just come from this
Colonel of ours. He is packing up to leave the country, and he asks us to make
his excuses sur le terrain.”
“What?” cried
Flambeau, with an incredulity quite frightful—“apologize?”
“Yes,” said the Duke
gruffly; “then and there—before everybody—when the swords are drawn. And you
and I have to do it while he is leaving the country.”
“But what can
this mean?” cried Flambeau. “He can't be afraid of that little Hirsch! Confound
it!” he cried, in a kind of rational rage; “nobody could be afraid of Hirsch!”
“I believe it's
some plot!” snapped Valognes—”some plot of the Jews and Freemasons. It's meant
to work up glory for Hirsch...”
The face of
Father Brown was commonplace, but curiously contented; it could shine with
ignorance as well as with knowledge. But there was always one flash when the
foolish mask fell, and the wise mask fitted itself in its place; and Flambeau,
who knew his friend, knew that his friend had suddenly understood. Brown said
nothing, but finished his plate of fish.
“Where did you
last see our precious Colonel?” asked Flambeau, irritably.
“He's round at
the Hotel Saint Louis by the Elysee, where we drove with him. He's packing up,
I tell you.”
“Will he be there
still, do you think?” asked Flambeau, frowning at the table.
“I don't think he
can get away yet,” replied the Duke; “he's packing to go a long journey...”
“No,” said Father
Brown, quite simply, but suddenly standing up, “for a very short journey. For
one of the shortest, in fact. But we may still be in time to catch him if we go
there in a motor-cab.”
Nothing more
could be got out of him until the cab swept round the corner by the Hotel Saint
Louis, where they got out, and he led the party up a side lane already in deep
shadow with the growing dusk. Once, when the Duke impatiently asked whether
Hirsch was guilty of treason or not, he answered rather absently: “No; only of
ambition—like Caesar.” Then he somewhat inconsequently added: “He lives a very
lonely life; he has had to do everything for himself.”
“Well, if he's
ambitious, he ought to be satisfied now,” said Flambeau rather bitterly. “All
Paris will cheer him now our cursed Colonel has turned tail.”
“Don't talk so
loud,” said Father Brown, lowering his voice, “your cursed Colonel is just in
front.”
The other two
started and shrank farther back into the shadow of the wall, for the sturdy
figure of their runaway principal could indeed be seen shuffling along in the
twilight in front, a bag in each hand. He looked much the same as when they
first saw him, except that he had changed his picturesque mountaineering
knickers for a conventional pair of trousers. It was clear he was already
escaping from the hotel.
The lane down
which they followed him was one of those that seem to be at the back of things,
and look like the wrong side of the stage scenery. A colourless, continuous
wall ran down one flank of it, interrupted at intervals by dull-hued and
dirt-stained doors, all shut fast and featureless save for the chalk scribbles
of some passing gamin. The tops of trees, mostly rather depressing evergreens,
showed at intervals over the top of the wall, and beyond them in the grey and
purple gloaming could be seen the back of some long terrace of tall Parisian
houses, really comparatively close, but somehow looking as inaccessible as a
range of marble mountains. On the other side of the lane ran the high gilt
railings of a gloomy park.
Flambeau was
looking round him in rather a weird way. “Do you know,” he said, “there is
something about this place that—”
“Hullo!” called
out the Duke sharply; “that fellow's disappeared. Vanished, like a blasted
fairy!”
“He has a key,” explained
their clerical friend. “He's only gone into one of these garden doors,” and as
he spoke they heard one of the dull wooden doors close again with a click in
front of them.
Flambeau strode
up to the door thus shut almost in his face, and stood in front of it for a
moment, biting his black moustache in a fury of curiosity. Then he threw up his
long arms and swung himself aloft like a monkey and stood on the top of the
wall, his enormous figure dark against the purple sky, like the dark tree-tops.
The Duke looked
at the priest. “Dubosc's escape is more elaborate than we thought,” he said;
“but I suppose he is escaping from France.”
“He is escaping
from everywhere,” answered Father Brown.
Valognes's eyes
brightened, but his voice sank. “Do you mean suicide?” he asked.
“You will not
find his body,” replied the other.
A kind of cry
came from Flambeau on the wall above. “My God,” he exclaimed in French, “I know
what this place is now! Why, it's the back of the street where old Hirsch
lives. I thought I could recognize the back of a house as well as the back of a
man.”
“And Dubosc's
gone in there!” cried the Duke, smiting his hip. “Why, they'll meet after all!”
And with sudden Gallic vivacity he hopped up on the wall beside Flambeau and
sat there positively kicking his legs with excitement. The priest alone
remained below, leaning against the wall, with his back to the whole theatre of
events, and looking wistfully across to the park palings and the twinkling,
twilit trees.
The Duke, however
stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and desired rather to stare at
the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau, who had the instincts of a burglar
(and a detective), had already swung himself from the wall into the fork of a
straggling tree from which he could crawl quite close to the only illuminated
window in the back of the high dark house. A red blind had been pulled down
over the light, but pulled crookedly, so that it gaped on one side, and by
risking his neck along a branch that looked as treacherous as a twig, Flambeau
could just see Colonel Dubosc walking about in a brilliantly-lighted and
luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau was to the house, he heard the words
of his colleagues by the wall, and repeated them in a low voice.
“Yes, they will
meet now after all!”
“They will never
meet,” said Father Brown. “Hirsch was right when he said that in such an affair
the principals must not meet. Have you read a queer psychological story by
Henry James, of two persons who so perpetually missed meeting each other by
accident that they began to feel quite frightened of each other, and to think
it was fate? This is something of the kind, but more curious.”
“There are people
in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies,” said Valognes
vindictively. “They will jolly well have to meet if we capture them and force
them to fight.”
“They will not
meet on the Day of Judgement,” said the priest. “If God Almighty held the
truncheon of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet for the swords to
cross—even then, if one of them stood ready, the other would not come.”
“Oh, what does
all this mysticism mean?” cried the Duc de Valognes, impatiently; “why on earth
shouldn't they meet like other people?”
“They are the
opposite of each other,” said Father Brown, with a queer kind of smile. “They
contradict each other. They cancel out, so to speak.”
He continued to
gaze at the darkening trees opposite, but Valognes turned his head sharply at a
suppressed exclamation from Flambeau. That investigator, peering into the
lighted room, had just seen the Colonel, after a pace or two, proceed to take
his coat off. Flambeau's first thought was that this really looked like a
fight; but he soon dropped the thought for another. The solidity and squareness
of Dubosc's chest and shoulders was all a powerful piece of padding and came
off with his coat. In his shirt and trousers he was a comparatively slim
gentleman, who walked across the bedroom to the bathroom with no more
pugnacious purpose than that of washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his
dripping hands and face on a towel, and turned again so that the strong light
fell on his face. His brown complexion had gone, his big black moustache had
gone; he—was clean-shaven and very pate. Nothing remained of the Colonel but
his bright, hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall Father Brown was going on in
heavy meditation, as if to himself.
“It is all just
like what I was saying to Flambeau. These opposites won't do. They don't work.
They don't fight. If it's white instead of black, and solid instead of liquid,
and so on all along the line—then there's something wrong, Monsieur, there's
something wrong. One of these men is fair and the other dark, one stout and the
other slim, one strong and the other weak. One has a moustache and no beard, so
you can't see his mouth; the other has a beard and no moustache, so you can't
see his chin. One has hair cropped to his skull, but a scarf to hide his neck;
the other has low shirt-collars, but long hair to bide his skull. It's all too
neat and correct, Monsieur, and there's something wrong. Things made so
opposite are things that cannot quarrel. Wherever the one sticks out the other
sinks in. Like a face and a mask, like a lock and a key...”
Flambeau was
peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet. The occupant of the
room was standing with his back to him, but in front of a looking-glass, and
had already fitted round his face a sort of framework of rank red hair, hanging
disordered from the head and clinging round the jaws and chin while leaving the
mocking mouth uncovered. Seen thus in the glass the white face looked like the
face of Judas laughing horribly and surrounded by capering flames of hell. For
a spasm Flambeau saw the fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were covered
with a pair of blue spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat, the figure
vanished towards the front of the house. A few moments later a roar of popular
applause from the street beyond announced that Dr Hirsch had once more appeared
upon the balcony.
FOUR
The Man in the
Passage
TWO men appeared
simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage running along the side of
the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening daylight in the streets was
large and luminous, opalescent and empty. The passage was comparatively long
and dark, so each man could see the other as a mere black silhouette at the
other end. Nevertheless, each man knew the other, even in that inky outline;
for they were both men of striking appearance and they hated each other.
The covered passage
opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the Adelphi, and at the other
on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured river. One side of the passage was
a blank wall, for the building it supported was an old unsuccessful theatre
restaurant, now shut up. The other side of the passage contained two doors, one
at each end. Neither was what was commonly called the stage door; they were a
sort of special and private stage doors used by very special performers, and in
this case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance of the
day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits and
entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.
The two men in
question were certainly two such friends, men who evidently knew the doors and
counted on their opening, for each approached the door at the upper end with
equal coolness and confidence. Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who
walked fast was the man from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived
before the secret stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each
other with civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker
who seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.
In this and
everything else each man was opposite and neither could be called inferior. As
private persons both were handsome, capable and popular. As public persons,
both were in the first public rank. But everything about them, from their glory
to their good looks, was of a diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour
was the kind of man whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more
you mixed with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often
you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty unintelligent
committees—on every sort of subject, from the reform of the Royal Academy to
the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain. In the Arts especially he was
omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody could quite decide whether he was a
great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats
had taken up. But you could not meet him for five minutes without realizing
that you had really been ruled by him all your life.
His appearance
was “distinguished” in exactly the same sense; it was at once conventional and
unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his high silk hat—, yet it was
unlike anyone else's hat—a little higher, perhaps, and adding something to his
natural height. His tall, slender figure had a slight stoop yet it looked the
reverse of feeble. His hair was silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was
worn longer than the common yet he did not look effeminate; it was curly but it
did not look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look more manly and
militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of Velazquez with
whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were a shade bluer,
his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of such gloves and canes
flapped and flourished about the theatres and the restaurants.
The other man was
not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short, but merely as strong and
handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and cropped close to a strong,
massive head—the sort of head you break a door with, as Chaucer said of the
Miller's. His military moustache and the carriage of his shoulders showed him a
soldier, but he had a pair of those peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which
are more common in sailors. His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square,
his shoulders were square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild
school of caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as a
proposition in the fourth book of Euclid.
For he also was a
public man, though with quite another sort of success. You did not have to be
in the best society to have heard of Captain Cutler, of the siege of Hong-Kong,
and the great march across China. You could not get away from hearing of him
wherever you were; his portrait was on every other postcard; his maps and battles
in every other illustrated paper; songs in his honour in every other music-hall
turn or on every other barrel-organ. His fame, though probably more temporary,
was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous than the other man's. In
thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England, like Nelson. Yet
he had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson Seymour.
The door was
opened to them by an aged servant or “dresser”, whose broken-down face and
figure and black shabby coat and trousers contrasted queerly with the
glittering interior of the great actress's dressing-room. It was fitted and
filled with looking-glasses at every angle of refraction, so that they looked
like the hundred facets of one huge diamond—if one could get inside a diamond.
The other features of luxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few
scraps of stage costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of
the Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the shuffling
attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against the wall.
They both spoke
to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and asking for the lady as
Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the other room, but he would go and
tell her. A shade crossed the brow of both visitors; for the other room was the
private room of the great actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she
was of the kind that does not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In
about half a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she
always did, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar
of applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strange garb of
peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue and green metals,
such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy, hot brown hair framed
one of those magic faces which are dangerous to all men, but especially to boys
and to men growing grey. In company with her male colleague, the great American
actor, Isidore Bruno, she was producing a particularly poetical and fantastic
interpretation of Midsummer Night's Dream: in which the artistic prominence was
given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in
dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume,
like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an
elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a
man looked only at the woman's face.
She greeted both
men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so many males at the same
just dangerous distance from her. She accepted some flowers from Cutler, which
were as tropical and expensive as his victories; and another sort of present
from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered later on and more nonchalantly by that
gentleman. For it was against his breeding to show eagerness, and against his
conventional unconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had
picked up a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient
Greek dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in the time
of Theseus and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the Heroic weapons,
but, oddly enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still. He had really been
attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it was as perfect as a Greek vase. If
it was of any interest to Miss Rome or could come in anywhere in the play, he
hoped she would—
The inner door
burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more of a contrast to the
explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearly six-foot-six, and of more
than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore Bruno, in the gorgeous leopard skin
and golden-brown garments of Oberon, looked like a barbaric god. He leaned on a
sort of hunting-spear, which across a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand,
but which in the small and comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a
pike-staff—and as menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his
bronzed face, handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination of high
cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled certain American conjectures
about his origin in the Southern plantations.
“Aurora,” he
began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had moved so many audiences,
“will you—”
He stopped
indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented itself just inside
the doorway—a figure so incongruous in the scene as to be almost comic. It was
a very short man in the black uniform of the Roman secular clergy, and looking
(especially in such a presence as Bruno's and Aurora's) rather like the wooden
Noah out of an ark. He did not, however, seem conscious of any contrast, but
said with dull civility: “I believe Miss Rome sent for me.”
A shrewd observer
might have remarked that the emotional temperature rather rose at so
unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a professional celibate seemed
to reveal to the others that they stood round the woman as a ring of amorous
rivals; just as a stranger coming in with frost on his coat will reveal that a
room is like a furnace. The presence of the one man who did not care about her
increased Miss Rome's sense that everybody else was in love with her, and each
in a somewhat dangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a
spoilt child; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of will
rather than mind; Sir Wilson with that daily hardening concentration with which
old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay, even the abject Parkinson, who had known
her before her triumphs, and who followed her about the room with eyes or feet,
with the dumb fascination of a dog.
A shrewd person
might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a black wooden Noah (who
was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with a considerable but contained
amusement. It was evident that the great Aurora, though by no means indifferent
to the admiration of the other sex, wanted at this moment to get rid of all the
men who admired her and be left alone with the man who did not—did not admire
her in that sense at least; for the little priest did admire and even enjoy the
firm feminine diplomacy with which she set about her task. There was, perhaps,
only one thing that Aurora Rome was clever about, and that was one half of
humanity—the other half. The little priest watched, like a Napoleonic campaign,
the swift precision of her policy for expelling all while banishing none.
Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that it was easy to send him off in brute
sulks, banging the door. Cutler, the British officer, was pachydermatous to
ideas, but punctilious about behaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he would
die rather than ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he
had to be treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The only way to
move him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to let him into
the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss Rome as she
achieved all these three objects in one selected action.
She went across
to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner: “I shall value all these
flowers, because they must be your favourite flowers. But they won't be
complete, you know, without my favourite flower. Do go over to that shop round
the corner and get me some lilies-of-the-valley, and then it will be quite
lovely.”
The first object
of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was at once achieved. He had
already handed his spear in a lordly style, like a sceptre, to the piteous
Parkinson, and was about to assume one of the cushioned seats like a throne.
But at this open appeal to his rival there glowed in his opal eyeballs all the
sensitive insolence of the slave; he knotted his enormous brown fists for an
instant, and then, dashing open the door, disappeared into his own apartments
beyond. But meanwhile Miss Rome's experiment in mobilizing the British Army had
not succeeded so simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stiffly and
suddenly, and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word of command. But
perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant about the languid figure of
Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glasses that brought him up short at
the entrance, turning his head this way and that like a bewildered bulldog.
“I must show this
stupid man where to go,” said Aurora in a whisper to Seymour, and ran out to
the threshold to speed the parting guest.
Seymour seemed to
be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his posture, and he seemed
relieved when he heard the lady call out some last instructions to the Captain,
and then turn sharply and run laughing down the passage towards the other end,
the end on the terrace above the Thames. Yet a second or two after Seymour's
brow darkened again. A man in his position has so many rivals, and he remembered
that at the other end of the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno's
private room. He did not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to Father
Brown about the revival of Byzantine architecture in the Westminster Cathedral,
and then, quite naturally, strolled out himself into the upper end of the
passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were left alone, and they were neither of
them men with a taste for superfluous conversation. The dresser went round the
room, pulling out looking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark
coat and trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding the
festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame of a new
glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd glass chamber
was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air like angels, turning
somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to everybody like very rude
persons.
Father Brown
seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, but followed Parkinson
with an idly attentive eye till he took himself and his absurd spear into the
farther room of Bruno. Then he abandoned himself to such abstract meditations
as always amused him—calculating the angles of the mirrors, the angles of each
refraction, the angle at which each must fit into the wall... when he heard a
strong but strangled cry.
He sprang to his
feet and stood rigidly listening. At the same instant Sir Wilson Seymour burst
back into the room, white as ivory. “Who's that man in the passage?” he cried.
“Where's that dagger of mine?”
Before Father
Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was plunging about the room looking
for the weapon. And before he could possibly find that weapon or any other, a
brisk running of feet broke upon the pavement outside, and the square face of
Cutler was thrust into the same doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a
bunch of lilies-of-the-valley. “What's this?” he cried. “What's that creature
down the passage? Is this some of your tricks?”
“My tricks!”
hissed his pale rival, and made a stride towards him.
In the instant of
time in which all this happened Father Brown stepped out into the top of the
passage, looked down it, and at once walked briskly towards what he saw.
At this the other
two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him, Cutler calling out: “What
are you doing? Who are you?”
“My name is
Brown,” said the priest sadly, as he bent over something and straightened
himself again. “Miss Rome sent for me, and I came as quickly as I could. I have
come too late.”
The three men
looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in that late light of
afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of gold, and in the midst of it
Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes of green and gold, with her dead face turned
upwards. Her dress was torn away as in a struggle, leaving the right shoulder
bare, but the wound from which the blood was welling was on the other side. The
brass dagger lay flat and gleaming a yard or so away.
There was a blank
stillness for a measurable time, so that they could hear far off a
flower-girl's laugh outside Charing Cross, and someone whistling furiously for
a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand. Then the Captain, with a
movement so sudden that it might have been passion or play-acting, took Sir
Wilson Seymour by the throat.
Seymour looked at
him steadily without either fight or fear. “You need not kill me,” he said in a
voice quite cold; “I shall do that on my own account.”
The Captain's hand
hesitated and dropped; and the other added with the same icy candour: “If I
find I haven't the nerve to do it with that dagger I can do it in a month with
drink.”
“Drink isn't good
enough for me,” replied Cutler, “but I'll have blood for this before I die. Not
yours—but I think I know whose.”
And before the
others could appreciate his intention he snatched up the dagger, sprang at the
other door at the lower end of the passage, burst it open, bolt and all, and
confronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As he did so, old Parkinson tottered in
his wavering way out of the door and caught sight of the corpse lying in the
passage. He moved shakily towards it; looked at it weakly with a working face;
then moved shakily back into the dressing-room again, and sat down suddenly on
one of the richly cushioned chairs. Father Brown instantly ran across to him,
taking no notice of Cutler and the colossal actor, though the room already rang
with their blows and they began to struggle for the dagger. Seymour, who
retained some practical sense, was whistling for the police at the end of the
passage.
When the police
arrived it was to tear the two men from an almost ape-like grapple; and, after
a few formal inquiries, to arrest Isidore Bruno upon a charge of murder,
brought against him by his furious opponent. The idea that the great national
hero of the hour had arrested a wrongdoer with his own hand doubtless had its
weight with the police, who are not without elements of the journalist. They
treated Cutler with a certain solemn attention, and pointed out that he had got
a slight slash on the hand. Even as Cutler bore him back across tilted chair
and table, Bruno had twisted the dagger out of his grasp and disabled him just
below the wrist. The injury was really slight, but till he was removed from the
room the half-savage prisoner stared at the running blood with a steady smile.
“Looks a cannibal
sort of chap, don't he?” said the constable confidentially to Cutler.
Cutler made no
answer, but said sharply a moment after: “We must attend to the... the
death...” and his voice escaped from articulation.
“The two deaths,”
came in the voice of the priest from the farther side of the room. “This poor
fellow was gone when I got across to him.” And he stood looking down at old
Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on the gorgeous chair. He also had paid
his tribute, not without eloquence, to the woman who had died.
The silence was
first broken by Cutler, who seemed not untouched by a rough tenderness. “I wish
I was him,” he said huskily. “I remember he used to watch her wherever she
walked more than—anybody. She was his air, and he's dried up. He's just dead.”
“We are all
dead,” said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down the road.
They took leave
of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with some random apologies for any
rudeness they might have shown. Both their faces were tragic, but also cryptic.
The mind of the
little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wild thoughts that jumped too
quickly for him to catch them. Like the white tail of a rabbit he had the
vanishing thought that he was certain of their grief, but not so certain of
their innocence.
“We had better
all be going,” said Seymour heavily; “we have done all we can to help.”
“Will you
understand my motives,” asked Father Brown quietly, “if I say you have done all
you can to hurt?”
They both started
as if guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: “To hurt whom?”
“To hurt
yourselves,” answered the priest. “I would not add to your troubles if it
weren't common justice to warn you. You've done nearly everything you could do
to hang yourselves, if this actor should be acquitted. They'll be sure to
subpoena me; I shall be bound to say that after the cry was heard each of you
rushed into the room in a wild state and began quarrelling about a dagger. As
far as my words on oath can go, you might either of you have done it. You hurt
yourselves with that; and then Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the
dagger.”
“Hurt myself!”
exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. “A silly little scratch.”
“Which drew
blood,” replied the priest, nodding. “We know there's blood on the brass now.
And so we shall never know whether there was blood on it before.”
There was a
silence; and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite alien to his daily
accent: “But I saw a man in the passage.”
“I know you did,”
answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, “so did Captain Cutler. That's
what seems so improbable.”
Before either
could make sufficient sense of it even to answer, Father Brown had politely
excused himself and gone stumping up the road with his stumpy old umbrella.
As modern
newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most important news is the police
news. If it be true that in the twentieth century more space is given to murder
than to politics, it is for the excellent reason that murder is a more serious
subject. But even this would hardly explain the enormous omnipresence and
widely distributed detail of “The Bruno Case,” or “The Passage Mystery,” in the
Press of London and the provinces. So vast was the excitement that for some
weeks the Press really told the truth; and the reports of examination and
cross-examination, if interminable, even if intolerable are at least reliable.
The true reason, of course, was the coincidence of persons. The victim was a
popular actress; the accused was a popular actor; and the accused had been
caught red-handed, as it were, by the most popular soldier of the patriotic
season. In those extraordinary circumstances the Press was paralysed into
probity and accuracy; and the rest of this somewhat singular business can
practically be recorded from reports of Bruno's trial.
The trial was
presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those who are jeered at as
humorous judges, but who are generally much more serious than the serious
judges, for their levity comes from a living impatience of professional
solemnity; while the serious judge is really filled with frivolity, because he
is filled with vanity. All the chief actors being of a worldly importance, the
barristers were well balanced; the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter
Cowdray, a heavy, but weighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem
English and trustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner
was defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K. C., who was mistaken for a mere flaneur
by those who misunderstood the Irish character—and those who had not been
examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions, the doctor,
whom Seymour had summoned on the spot, agreeing with the eminent surgeon who
had later examined the body. Aurora Rome had been stabbed with some sharp
instrument such as a knife or dagger; some instrument, at least, of which the
blade was short. The wound was just over the heart, and she had died instantly.
When the doctor first saw her she could hardly have been dead for twenty
minutes. Therefore when Father Brown found her she could hardly have been dead
for three.
Some official
detective evidence followed, chiefly concerned with the presence or absence of
any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion of this was the tearing of the
dress at the shoulder, and this did not seem to fit in particularly well with
the direction and finality of the blow. When these details had been supplied,
though not explained, the first of the important witnesses was called.
Sir Wilson
Seymour gave evidence as he did everything else that he did at all—not only
well, but perfectly. Though himself much more of a public man than the judge,
he conveyed exactly the fine shade of self-effacement before the King's
justice; and though everyone looked at him as they would at the Prime Minister
or the Archbishop of Canterbury, they could have said nothing of his part in it
but that it was that of a private gentleman, with an accent on the noun. He was
also refreshingly lucid, as he was on the committees. He had been calling on
Miss Rome at the theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had been joined
for a short time by the accused, who had then returned to his own
dressing-room; they had then been joined by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked
for the deceased lady and said his name was Brown. Miss Rome had then gone just
outside the theatre to the entrance of the passage, in order to point out to
Captain Cutler a flower-shop at which he was to buy her some more flowers; and
the witness had remained in the room, exchanging a few words with the priest.
He had then distinctly heard the deceased, having sent the Captain on his
errand, turn round laughing and run down the passage towards its other end,
where was the prisoner's dressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid
movement of his friends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself
and looked down it towards the prisoner's door. Did he see anything in the
passage? Yes; he saw something in the passage.
Sir Walter
Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which the witness looked down,
and for all his usual composure seemed to have more than his usual pallor. Then
the barrister said in a lower voice, which seemed at once sympathetic and creepy:
“Did you see it distinctly?”
Sir Wilson
Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains in full working-order. “Very
distinctly as regards its outline, but quite indistinctly, indeed not at all,
as regards the details inside the outline. The passage is of such length that
anyone in the middle of it appears quite black against the light at the other
end.” The witness lowered his steady eyes once more and added: “I had noticed
the fact before, when Captain Cutler first entered it.” There was another silence,
and the judge leaned forward and made a note.
“Well,” said Sir
Walter patiently, “what was the outline like? Was it, for instance, like the
figure of the murdered woman?”
“Not in the
least,” answered Seymour quietly.
“What did it look
like to you?”
“It looked to
me,” replied the witness, “like a tall man.”
Everyone in court
kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or his umbrella-handle, or his book, or his
boots or whatever he happened to be looking at. They seemed to be holding their
eyes away from the prisoner by main force; but they felt his figure in the
dock, and they felt it as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to
swell taller and taller when an eyes had been torn away from him.
Cowdray was
resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his black silk robes, and
white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the witness-box, after a few final
particulars to which there were many other witnesses, when the counsel for the
defence sprang up and stopped him.
“I shall only
detain you a moment,” said Mr Butler, who was a rustic-looking person with red
eyebrows and an expression of partial slumber. “Will you tell his lordship how
you knew it was a man?”
A faint, refined
smile seemed to pass over Seymour's features. “I'm afraid it is the vulgar test
of trousers,” he said. “When I saw daylight between the long legs I was sure it
was a man, after all.”
Butler's sleepy
eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. “After all!” he repeated
slowly. “So you did think at first it was a woman?”
Seymour looked
troubled for the first time. “It is hardly a point of fact,” he said, “but if
his lordship would like me to answer for my impression, of course I shall do
so. There was something about the thing that was not exactly a woman and yet
was not quite a man; somehow the curves were different. And it had something
that looked like long hair.”
“Thank you,” said
Mr Butler, K. C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had got what he wanted.
Captain Cutler
was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir Wilson, but his account
of the opening incidents was solidly the same. He described the return of Bruno
to his dressing-room, the dispatching of himself to buy a bunch of
lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the upper end of the passage, the thing he
saw in the passage, his suspicion of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But
he could give little artistic assistance about the black figure that he and
Seymour had seen. Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic—with a
somewhat too obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he
said it looked more like a beast—with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner. But
the man was plainly shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, and Cowdray quickly
excused him from confirming facts that were already fairly clear.
The defending
counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination; although (as was his
custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a long time about it. “You used
a rather remarkable expression,” he said, looking at Cutler sleepily. “What do
you mean by saying that it looked more like a beast than a man or a woman?”
Cutler seemed
seriously agitated. “Perhaps I oughtn't to have said that,” he said; “but when
the brute has huge humped shoulders like a chimpanzee, and bristles sticking
out of its head like a pig—”
Mr Butler cut
short his curious impatience in the middle. “Never mind whether its hair was
like a pig's,” he said, “was it like a woman's?”
“A woman's!”
cried the soldier. “Great Scott, no!”
“The last witness
said it was,” commented the counsel, with unscrupulous swiftness. “And did the
figure have any of those serpentine and semi-feminine curves to which eloquent
allusion has been made? No? No feminine curves? The figure, if I understand
you, was rather heavy and square than otherwise?”
“He may have been
bending forward,” said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather faint voice.
“Or again, he may
not,” said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the second time.
The third,
witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic clergyman, so
little, compared with the others, that his head seemed hardly to come above the
box, so that it was like cross-examining a child. But unfortunately Sir Walter
had somehow got it into his head (mostly by some ramifications of his family's
religion) that Father Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the
prisoner was wicked and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father
Brown up sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and
told him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry.
When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the man in
the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want his theories.
“A black shape
was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black shape. Well, what shape
was it?”
Father Brown
blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal nature of obedience.
“The shape,” he said, “was short and thick, but had two sharp, black
projections curved upwards on each side of the head or top, rather like horns,
and—”
“Oh! the devil
with horns, no doubt,” ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down in triumphant
jocularity. “It was the devil come to eat Protestants.”
“No,” said the
priest dispassionately; “I know who it was.”
Those in court
had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of some monstrosity. They
had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought only of the figure in the
passage. And the figure in the passage, described by three capable and
respectable men who had all seen it, was a shifting nightmare: one called it a
woman, and the other a beast, and the other a devil....
The judge was
looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes. “You are a most
extraordinary witness,” he said; “but there is something about you that makes
me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well, who was the man you saw in the
passage?”
“He was myself,”
said Father Brown.
Butler, K. C.,
sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said quite calmly: “Your
lordship will allow me to cross-examine?” And then, without stopping, he shot
at Brown the apparently disconnected question: “You have heard about this
dagger; you know the experts say the crime was committed with a short blade?”
“A short blade,”
assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, “but a very long hilt.”
Before the
audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had really seen himself
doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt (which seemed somehow to make
it more horrible), he had himself hurried on to explain.
“I mean daggers
aren't the only things with short blades. Spears have short blades. And spears
catch at the end of the steel just like daggers, if they're that sort of fancy
spear they had in theatres; like the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife
with, just when she'd sent for me to settle their family troubles—and I came
just too late, God forgive me! But he died penitent—he just died of being
penitent. He couldn't bear what he'd done.”
The general
impression in court was that the little priest, who was gobbling away, had
literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still looked at him with bright
and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel for the defence went on with his
questions unperturbed.
“If Parkinson did
it with that pantomime spear,” said Butler, “he must have thrust from four
yards away. How do you account for signs of struggle, like the dress dragged
off the shoulder?” He had slipped into treating his mere witness as an expert;
but no one noticed it now.
“The poor lady's
dress was torn,” said the witness, “because it was caught in a panel that slid
to just behind her. She struggled to free herself, and as she did so Parkinson
came out of the prisoner's room and lunged with the spear.”
“A panel?”
repeated the barrister in a curious voice.
“It was a
looking-glass on the other side,” explained Father Brown. “When I was in the
dressing-room I noticed that some of them could probably be slid out into the
passage.”
There was another
vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the judge who spoke. “So you
really mean that when you looked down that passage, the man you saw was
yourself—in a mirror?”
“Yes, my lord;
that was what I was trying to say,” said Brown, “but they asked me for the
shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and so I—”
The judge leaned
forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said in specially distinct tones:
“Do you really mean to say that when Sir Wilson Seymour saw that wild
what-you-call-him with curves and a woman's hair and a man's trousers, what he
saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?”
“Yes, my lord,”
said Father Brown.
“And you mean to
say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with humped shoulders and
hog's bristles, he simply saw himself?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The judge leaned
back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was hard to separate the
cynicism and the admiration. “And can you tell us why,” he asked, “you should
know your own figure in a looking-glass, when two such distinguished men
don't?”
Father Brown
blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered: “Really, my lord, I
don't know unless it's because I don't look at it so often.”
FIVE
The Mistake of
the Machine
FLAMBEAU and his
friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens about sunset; and their
neighbourhood or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to
matters of legal process. From the problem of the licence in cross-examination,
their talk strayed to Roman and mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate
in France and the Third Degree in America.
“I've been reading,”
said Flambeau, “of this new psychometric method they talk about so much,
especially in America. You know what I mean; they put a pulsometer on a man's
wrist and judge by how his heart goes at the pronunciation of certain words.
What do you think of it?”
“I think it very
interesting,” replied Father Brown; “it reminds me of that interesting idea in
the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a corpse if the murderer touched it.”
“Do you really
mean,” demanded his friend, “that you think the two methods equally valuable?”
“I think them
equally valueless,” replied Brown. “Blood flows, fast or slow, in dead folk or
living, for so many more million reasons than we can ever know. Blood will have
to flow very funnily; blood will have to flow up the Matterhorn, before I will
take it as a sign that I am to shed it.”
“The method,”
remarked the other, “has been guaranteed by some of the greatest American men
of science.”
“What
sentimentalists men of science are!” exclaimed Father Brown, “and how much more
sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a Yankee would think of
proving anything from heart-throbs? Why, they must be as sentimental as a man
who thinks a woman is in love with him if she blushes. That's a test from the
circulation of the blood, discovered by the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten
test, too.”
“But surely,”
insisted Flambeau, “it might point pretty straight at something or other.”
“There's a
disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the other. “What is it?
Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends
whether you get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing done once
and I've never believed in it since.” And he proceeded to tell the story of his
disillusionment.
It happened
nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his co-religionists in a
prison in Chicago—where the Irish population displayed a capacity both for
crime and penitence which kept him tolerably busy. The official
second-in-command under the Governor was an ex-detective named Greywood Usher,
a cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee philosopher, occasionally varying a very
rigid visage with an odd apologetic grimace. He liked Father Brown in a
slightly patronizing way; and Father Brown liked him, though he heartily disliked
his theories. His theories were extremely complicated and were held with
extreme simplicity.
One evening he
had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom, took a seat in silence
at a table piled and littered with papers, and waited. The official selected
from the papers a scrap of newspaper cutting, which he handed across to the
cleric, who read it gravely. It appeared to be an extract from one of the
pinkest of American Society papers, and ran as follows:
“Society's
brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive
citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd,
at his palatial home at Pilgrim's Pond, caused so many of our prominent
debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more
miscellaneous and large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick's show the year
previous, the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed
round were sarcastically moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and
during which more than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to
eat his partner. The witticism which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr
Todd's pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our
city's gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the simple
manners and customs at the other end of Society's scale. This would be all the
more telling, as hospitable Todd is entertaining in Lord Falconroy, the famous
traveller, a true-blooded aristocrat fresh from England's oak-groves. Lord
Falconroy's travels began before his ancient feudal title was resurrected, he
was in the Republic in his youth, and fashion murmurs a sly reason for his
return. Miss Etta Todd is one of our deep-souled New Yorkers, and comes into an
income of nearly twelve hundred million dollars.”
“Well,” asked
Usher, “does that interest you?”
“Why, words
rather fail me,” answered Father Brown. “I cannot think at this moment of
anything in this world that would interest me less. And, unless the just anger
of the Republic is at last going to electrocute journalists for writing like
that, I don't quite see why it should interest you either.”
“Ah!” said Mr
Usher dryly, and handing across another scrap of newspaper. “Well, does that
interest you?”
The paragraph was
headed “Savage Murder of a Warder. Convict Escapes,” and ran: “Just before dawn
this morning a shout for help was heard in the Convict Settlement at Sequah in
this State. The authorities, hurrying in the direction of the cry, found the
corpse of the warder who patrols the top of the north wall of the prison, the
steepest and most difficult exit, for which one man has always been found
sufficient. The unfortunate officer had, however, been hurled from the high
wall, his brains beaten out as with a club, and his gun was missing. Further
inquiries showed that one of the cells was empty; it had been occupied by a
rather sullen ruffian giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only temporarily
detained for some comparatively trivial assault; but he gave everyone the
impression of a man with a black past and a dangerous future. Finally, when
daylight bad fully revealed the scene of murder, it was found that he had
written on the wall above the body a fragmentary sentence, apparently with a
finger dipped in blood: `This was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no
harm to him or any man but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim's Pond—O.
R. ' A man must have used most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing
bodily daring to have stormed such a wall in spite of an armed man.”
“Well, the
literary style is somewhat improved,” admitted the priest cheerfully, “but
still I don't see what I can do for you. I should cut a poor figure, with my
short legs, running about this State after an athletic assassin of that sort. I
doubt whether anybody could find him. The convict settlement at Sequah is
thirty miles from here; the country between is wild and tangled enough, and the
country beyond, where he will surely have the sense to go, is a perfect
no-man's land tumbling away to the prairies. He may be in any hole or up any
tree.”
“He isn't in any
hole,” said the governor; “he isn't up any tree.”
“Why, how do you
know?” asked Father Brown, blinking.
“Would you like
to speak to him?” inquired Usher.
Father Brown
opened his innocent eyes wide. “He is here?” he exclaimed. “Why, how did your
men get hold of him?”
“I got hold of
him myself,” drawled the American, rising and lazily stretching his lanky legs
before the fire. “I got hold of him with the crooked end of a walking-stick.
Don't look so surprised. I really did. You know I sometimes take a turn in the
country lanes outside this dismal place; well, I was walking early this evening
up a steep lane with dark hedges and grey-looking ploughed fields on both
sides; and a young moon was up and silvering the road. By the light of it I saw
a man running across the field towards the road; running with his body bent and
at a good mile-race trot. He appeared to be much exhausted; but when he came to
the thick black hedge he went through it as if it were made of spiders'
webs;—or rather (for I heard the strong branches breaking and snapping like
bayonets) as if he himself were made of stone. In the instant in which he
appeared up against the moon, crossing the road, I slung my hooked cane at his
legs, tripping him and bringing him down. Then I blew my whistle long and loud,
and our fellows came running up to secure him.”
“It would have
been rather awkward,” remarked Brown, “if you had found he was a popular
athlete practising a mile race.”
“He was not,”
said Usher grimly. “We soon found out who he was; but I had guessed it with the
first glint of the moon on him.”
“You thought it
was the runaway convict,” observed the priest simply, “because you had read in
the newspaper cutting that morning that a convict had run away.”
“I had somewhat
better grounds,” replied the governor coolly. “I pass over the first as too
simple to be emphasized—I mean that fashionable athletes do not run across
ploughed fields or scratch their eyes out in bramble hedges. Nor do they run
all doubled up like a crouching dog. There were more decisive details to a
fairly well-trained eye. The man was clad in coarse and ragged clothes, but
they were something more than merely coarse and ragged. They were so
ill-fitting as to be quite grotesque; even as he appeared in black outline
against the moonrise, the coat-collar in which his head was buried made him
look like a hunchback, and the long loose sleeves looked as if he had no hands.
It at once occurred to me that he had somehow managed to change his convict
clothes for some confederate's clothes which did not fit him. Second, there was
a pretty stiff wind against which he was running; so that I must have seen the
streaky look of blowing hair, if the hair had not been very short. Then I
remembered that beyond these ploughed fields he was crossing lay Pilgrim's Pond,
for which (you will remember) the convict was keeping his bullet; and I sent my
walking-stick flying.”
“A brilliant
piece of rapid deduction,” said Father Brown; “but had he got a gun?”
As Usher stopped
abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically: “I've been told a bullet
is not half so useful without it.”
“He had no gun,”
said the other gravely; “but that was doubtless due to some very natural
mischance or change of plans. Probably the same policy that made him change the
clothes made him drop the gun; he began to repent the coat he had left behind
him in the blood of his victim.”
“Well, that is
possible enough,” answered the priest.
“And it's hardly
worth speculating on,” said Usher, turning to some other papers, “for we know
it's the man by this time.”
His clerical
friend asked faintly: “But how?” And Greywood Usher threw down the newspapers
and took up the two press-cuttings again.
“Well, since you
are so obstinate,” he said, “let's begin at the beginning. You will notice that
these two cuttings have only one thing in common, which is the mention of
Pilgrim's Pond, the estate, as you know, of the millionaire Ireton Todd. You
also know that he is a remarkable character; one of those that rose on
stepping-stones—”
“Of our dead
selves to higher things,” assented his companion. “Yes; I know that. Petroleum,
I think.”
“Anyhow,” said
Usher, “Last-Trick Todd counts for a great deal in this rum affair.”
He stretched
himself once more before the fire and continued talking in his expansive,
radiantly explanatory style.
“To begin with,
on the face of it, there is no mystery here at all. It is not mysterious, it is
not even odd, that a jailbird should take his gun to Pilgrim's Pond. Our people
aren't like the English, who will forgive a man for being rich if he throws
away money on hospitals or horses. Last-Trick Todd has made himself big by his
own considerable abilities; and there's no doubt that many of those on whom he
has shown his abilities would like to show theirs on him with a shot-gun. Todd
might easily get dropped by some man he'd never even heard of; some labourer
he'd locked out, or some clerk in a business he'd busted. Last-Trick is a man
of mental endowments and a high public character; but in this country the
relations of employers and employed are considerably strained.
“That's how the
whole thing looks supposing this Rian made for Pilgrim's Pond to kill Todd. So
it looked to me, till another little discovery woke up what I have of the
detective in me. When I had my prisoner safe, I picked up my cane again and
strolled down the two or three turns of country road that brought me to one of
the side entrances of Todd's grounds, the one nearest to the pool or lake after
which the place is named. It was some two hours ago, about seven by this time;
the moonlight was more luminous, and I could see the long white streaks of it
lying on the mysterious mere with its grey, greasy, half-liquid shores in which
they say our fathers used to make witches walk until they sank. I'd forgotten
the exact tale; but you know the place I mean; it lies north of Todd's house
towards the wilderness, and has two queer wrinkled trees, so dismal that they
look more like huge fungoids than decent foliage. As I stood peering at this
misty pool, I fancied I saw the faint figure of a man moving from the house
towards it, but it was all too dim and distant for one to be certain of the
fact, and still less of the details. Besides, my attention was very sharply
arrested by something much closer. I crouched behind the fence which ran not
more than two hundred yards from one wing of the great mansion, and which was
fortunately split in places, as if specially for the application of a cautious
eye. A door had opened in the dark bulk of the left wing, and a figure appeared
black against the illuminated interior—a muffled figure bending forward,
evidently peering out into the night. It closed the door behind it, and I saw
it was carrying a lantern, which threw a patch of imperfect light on the dress
and figure of the wearer. It seemed to be the figure of a woman, wrapped up in
a ragged cloak and evidently disguised to avoid notice; there was something
very strange both about the rags and the furtiveness in a person coming out of
those rooms lined with gold. She took cautiously the curved garden path which
brought her within half a hundred yards of me—, then she stood up for an
instant on the terrace of turf that looks towards the slimy lake, and holding
her flaming lantern above her head she deliberately swung it three times to and
fro as for a signal. As she swung it the second time a flicker of its light
fell for a moment on her own face, a face that I knew. She was unnaturally
pale, and her head was bundled in her borrowed plebeian shawl; but I am certain
it was Etta Todd, the millionaire's daughter.
“She retraced her
steps in equal secrecy and the door closed behind her again. I was about to
climb the fence and follow, when I realized that the detective fever that had
lured me into the adventure was rather undignified; and that in a more authoritative
capacity I already held all the cards in my hand. I was just turning away when
a new noise broke on the night. A window was thrown up in one of the upper
floors, but just round the corner of the house so that I could not see it; and
a voice of terrible distinctness was heard shouting across the dark garden to
know where Lord Falconroy was, for he was missing from every room in the house.
There was no mistaking that voice. I have heard it on many a political platform
or meeting of directors; it was Ireton Todd himself. Some of the others seemed
to have gone to the lower windows or on to the steps, and were calling up to
him that Falconroy had gone for a stroll down to the Pilgrim's Pond an hour
before, and could not be traced since. Then Todd cried `Mighty Murder!' and
shut down the window violently; and I could hear him plunging down the stairs
inside. Repossessing myself of my former and wiser purpose, I whipped out of
the way of the general search that must follow; and returned here not later than
eight o'clock.
“I now ask you to
recall that little Society paragraph which seemed to you so painfully lacking
in interest. If the convict was not keeping the shot for Todd, as he evidently
wasn't, it is most likely that he was keeping it for Lord Falconroy; and it looks
as if he had delivered the goods. No more handy place to shoot a man than in
the curious geological surroundings of that pool, where a body thrown down
would sink through thick slime to a depth practically unknown. Let us suppose,
then, that our friend with the cropped hair came to kill Falconroy and not
Todd. But, as I have pointed out, there are many reasons why people in America
might want to kill Todd. There is no reason why anybody in America should want
to kill an English lord newly landed, except for the one reason mentioned in
the pink paper—that the lord is paying his attentions to the millionaire's
daughter. Our crop-haired friend, despite his ill-fitting clothes, must be an
aspiring lover.
“I know the
notion will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that's because you are
English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of Canterbury's daughter
will be married in St George's, Hanover Square, to a crossing-sweeper on
ticket-of-leave. You don't do justice to the climbing and aspiring power of our
more remarkable citizens. You see a good-looking grey-haired man in
evening-dress with a sort of authority about him, you know he is a pillar of
the State, and you fancy he had a father. You are in error. You do not realize
that a comparatively few years ago he may have been in a tenement or (quite
likely) in a jail. You don't allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many
of our most influential citizens have not only risen recently, but risen
comparatively late in life. Todd's daughter was fully eighteen when her father
first made his pile; so there isn't really anything impossible in her having a
hanger-on in low life; or even in her hanging on to him, as I think she must be
doing, to judge by the lantern business. If so, the hand that held the lantern
may not be unconnected with the hand that held the gun. This case, sir, will
make a noise.”
“Well,” said the
priest patiently, “and what did you do next?”
“I reckon you'll
be shocked,” replied Greywood Usher, “as I know you don't cotton to the march of
science in these matters. I am given a good deal of discretion here, and
perhaps take a little more than I'm given; and I thought it was an excellent
opportunity to test that Psychometric Machine I told you about. Now, in my
opinion, that machine can't lie.”
“No machine can
lie,” said Father Brown; “nor can it tell the truth.”
“It did in this
case, as I'll show you,” went on Usher positively. “I sat the man in the
ill-fitting clothes in a comfortable chair, and simply wrote words on a
blackboard; and the machine simply recorded the variations of his pulse; and I
simply observed his manner. The trick is to introduce some word connected with
the supposed crime in a list of words connected with something quite different,
yet a list in which it occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote `heron' and `eagle'
and `owl', and when I wrote `falcon' he was tremendously agitated; and when I
began to make an `r' at the end of the word, that machine just bounded. Who
else in this republic has any reason to jump at the name of a newly-arrived
Englishman like Falconroy except the man who's shot him? Isn't that better
evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses—if the evidence of a reliable
machine?”
“You always
forget,” observed his companion, “that the reliable machine always has to be
worked by an unreliable machine.”
“Why, what do you
mean?” asked the detective.
“I mean Man,”
said Father Brown, “the most unreliable machine I know of. I don't want to be
rude; and I don't think you will consider Man to be an offensive or inaccurate
description of yourself. You say you observed his manner; but how do you know
you observed it right? You say the words have to come in a natural way; but how
do you know that you did it naturally? How do you know, if you come to that,
that he did not observe your manner? Who is to prove that you were not
tremendously agitated? There was no machine tied on to your pulse.”
“I tell you,”
cried the American in the utmost excitement, “I was as cool as a cucumber.”
“Criminals also
can be as cool as cucumbers,” said Brown with a smile. “And almost as cool as
you.”
“Well, this one
wasn't,” said Usher, throwing the papers about. “Oh, you make me tired!”
“I'm sorry,” said
the other. “I only point out what seems a reasonable possibility. If you could
tell by his manner when the word that might hang him had come, why shouldn't he
tell from your manner that the word that might hang him was coming? I should
ask for more than words myself before I hanged anybody.”
Usher smote the
table and rose in a sort of angry triumph.
“And that,” he
cried, “is just what I'm going to give you. I tried the machine first just in
order to test the thing in other ways afterwards and the machine, sir, is
right.”
He paused a
moment and resumed with less excitement. “I rather want to insist, if it comes
to that, that so far I had very little to go on except the scientific
experiment. There was really nothing against the man at all. His clothes were
ill-fitting, as I've said, but they were rather better, if anything, than those
of the submerged class to which he evidently belonged. Moreover, under all the
stains of his plunging through ploughed fields or bursting through dusty
hedges, the man was comparatively clean. This might mean, of course, that he
had only just broken prison; but it reminded me more of the desperate decency
of the comparatively respectable poor. His demeanour was, I am bound to
confess, quite in accordance with theirs. He was silent and dignified as they
are; he seemed to have a big, but buried, grievance, as they do. He professed
total ignorance of the crime and the whole question; and showed nothing but a
sullen impatience for something sensible that might come to take him out of his
meaningless scrape. He asked me more than once if he could telephone for a
lawyer who had helped him a long time ago in a trade dispute, and in every
sense acted as you would expect an innocent man to act. There was nothing
against him in the world except that little finger on the dial that pointed to
the change of his pulse.
“Then, sir, the
machine was on its trial; and the machine was right. By the time I came with
him out of the private room into the vestibule where all sorts of other people
were awaiting examination, I think he had already more or less made up his mind
to clear things up by something like a confession. He turned to me and began to
say in a low voice: `Oh, I can't stick this any more. If you must know all
about me—'
“At the same
instant one of the poor women sitting on the long bench stood up, screaming
aloud and pointing at him with her finger. I have never in my life heard
anything more demoniacally distinct. Her lean finger seemed to pick him out as
if it were a pea-shooter. Though the word was a mere howl, every syllable was
as clear as a separate stroke on the clock.
“`Drugger Davis!'
she shouted. `They've got Drugger Davis!'
“Among the
wretched women, mostly thieves and streetwalkers, twenty faces were turned,
gaping with glee and hate. If I had never heard the words, I should have known
by the very shock upon his features that the so-called Oscar Rian had heard his
real name. But I'm not quite so ignorant, you may be surprised to hear. Drugger
Davis was one of the most terrible and depraved criminals that ever baffled our
police. It is certain he had done murder more than once long before his last
exploit with the warder. But he was never entirely fixed for it, curiously
enough because he did it in the same manner as those milder—or meaner—crimes
for which he was fixed pretty often. He was a handsome, well-bred-looking brute,
as he still is, to some extent; and he used mostly to go about with barmaids or
shop-girls and do them out of their money. Very often, though, he went a good
deal farther; and they were found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates and
their whole property missing. Then came one case where the girl was found dead;
but deliberation could not quite be proved, and, what was more practical still,
the criminal could not be found. I heard a rumour of his having reappeared
somewhere in the opposite character this time, lending money instead of
borrowing it; but still to such poor widows as he might personally fascinate,
but still with the same bad result for them. Well, there is your innocent man,
and there is his innocent record. Even, since then, four criminals and three
warders have identified him and confirmed the story. Now what have you got to
say to my poor little machine after that? Hasn't the machine done for him? Or
do you prefer to say that the woman and I have done for him?”
“As to what
you've done for him,” replied Father Brown, rising and shaking himself in a
floppy way, “you've saved him from the electrical chair. I don't think they can
kill Drugger Davis on that old vague story of the poison; and as for the
convict who killed the warder, I suppose it's obvious that you haven't got him.
Mr Davis is innocent of that crime, at any rate.”
“What do you
mean?” demanded the other. “Why should he be innocent of that crime?”
“Why, bless us
all!” cried the small man in one of his rare moments of animation, “why,
because he's guilty of the other crimes! I don't know what you people are made
of. You seem to think that all sins are kept together in a bag. You talk as if
a miser on Monday were always a spendthrift on Tuesday. You tell me this man
you have here spent weeks and months wheedling needy women out of small sums of
money; that he used a drug at the best, and a poison at the worst; that he
turned up afterwards as the lowest kind of moneylender, and cheated most poor
people in the same patient and pacific style. Let it be granted—let us admit,
for the sake of argument, that he did all this. If that is so, I will tell you
what he didn't do. He didn't storm a spiked wall against a man with a loaded
gun. He didn't write on the wall with his own hand, to say he had done it. He
didn't stop to state that his justification was self-defence. He didn't explain
that he had no quarrel with the poor warder. He didn't name the house of the
rich man to which he was going with the gun. He didn't write his own, initials
in a man's blood. Saints alive! Can't you see the whole character is different,
in good and evil? Why, you don't seem to be like I am a bit. One would think
you'd never had any vices of your own.”
The amazed
American had already parted his lips in protest when the door of his private
and official room was hammered and rattled in an unceremonious way to which he
was totally unaccustomed.
The door flew
open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been coming to the conclusion that
Father Brown might possibly be mad. The moment after he began to think he was
mad himself. There burst and fell into his private room a man in the filthiest
rags, with a greasy squash hat still askew on his head, and a shabby green
shade shoved up from one of his eyes, both of which were glaring like a
tiger's. The rest of his face was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a
matted beard and whiskers through which the nose could barely thrust itself,
and further buried in a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided
himself on having seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he
thought he had never seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But,
above all, he had never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like
that speak to him first.
“See here, old
man Usher,” shouted the being in the red handkerchief, “I'm getting tired.
Don't you try any of your hide-and-seek on me; I don't get fooled any. Leave go
of my guests, and I'll let up on the fancy clockwork. Keep him here for a split
instant and you'll feel pretty mean. I reckon I'm not a man with no pull.”
The eminent Usher
was regarding the bellowing monster with an amazement which had dried up all
other sentiments. The mere shock to his eyes had rendered his ears, almost
useless. At last he rang a bell with a hand of violence. While the bell was
still strong and pealing, the voice of Father Brown fell soft but distinct.
“I have a
suggestion to make,” he said, “but it seems a little confusing. I don't know
this gentleman—but—but I think I know him. Now, you know him—you know him quite
well—but you don't know him—naturally. Sounds paradoxical, I know.”
“I reckon the
Cosmos is cracked,” said Usher, and fell asprawl in his round office chair.
“Now, see here,”
vociferated the stranger, striking the table, but speaking in a voice that was
all the more mysterious because it was comparatively mild and rational though
still resounding. “I won't let you in. I want—”
“Who in hell are
you?” yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.
“I think the
gentleman's name is Todd,” said the priest.
Then he picked up
the pink slip of newspaper.
“I fear you don't
read the Society papers properly,” he said, and began to read out in a
monotonous voice, “`Or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city's gayest
leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the manners and customs of the
other end of Society's scale. ' There's been a big Slum Dinner up at Pilgrim's
Pond tonight; and a man, one of the guests, disappeared. Mr Ireton Todd is a
good host, and has tracked him here, without even waiting to take off his
fancy-dress.”
“What man do you
mean?”
“I mean the man
with comically ill-fitting clothes you saw running across the ploughed field.
Hadn't you better go and investigate him? He will be rather impatient to get
back to his champagne, from which he ran away in such a hurry, when the convict
with the gun hove in sight.”
“Do you seriously
mean—” began the official.
“Why, look here,
Mr Usher,” said Father Brown quietly, “you said the machine couldn't make a
mistake; and in one sense it didn't. But the other machine did; the machine
that worked it. You assumed that the man in rags jumped at the name of Lord
Falconroy, because he was Lord Falconroy's murderer. He jumped at the name of
Lord Falconroy because he is Lord Falconroy.”
“Then why the
blazes didn't he say so?” demanded the staring Usher.
“He felt his
plight and recent panic were hardly patrician,” replied the priest, “so he
tried to keep the name back at first. But he was just going to tell it you,
when”—and Father Brown looked down at his boots—”when a woman found another
name for him.”
“But you can't be
so mad as to say,” said Greywood Usher, very white, “that Lord Falconroy was
Drugger Davis.”
The priest looked
at him very earnestly, but with a baffling and undecipherable face.
“I am not saying
anything about it,” he said. “I leave all the rest to you. Your pink paper says
that the title was recently revived for him; but those papers are very
unreliable. It says he was in the States in youth; but the whole story seems
very strange. Davis and Falconroy are both pretty considerable cowards, but so
are lots of other men. I would not hang a dog on my own opinion about this. But
I think,” he went on softly and reflectively, “I think you Americans are too
modest. I think you idealize the English aristocracy—even in assuming it to be
so aristocratic. You see, a good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you know
he's in the House of Lords; and you fancy he has a father. You don't allow for
our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential noblemen have
not only risen recently, but—”
“Oh, stop it!”
cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean hand in impatience against a shade of
irony in the other's face.
“Don't stay
talking to this lunatic!” cried Todd brutally. “Take me to my friend.”
Next morning
Father Brown appeared with the same demure expression, carrying yet another
piece of pink newspaper.
“I'm afraid you
neglect the fashionable press rather,” he said, “but this cutting may interest
you.”
Usher read the
headlines, “Last-Trick's Strayed Revellers: Mirthful Incident near Pilgrim's
Pond.” The paragraph went on: “A laughable occurrence took place outside
Wilkinson's Motor Garage last night. A policeman on duty had his attention
drawn by larrikins to a man in prison dress who was stepping with considerable
coolness into the steering-seat of a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was
accompanied by a girl wrapped in a ragged shawl. On the police interfering, the
young woman threw back the shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd's
daughter, who had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond, where all
the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille. She and the gentleman who had
donned prison uniform were going for the customary joy-ride.”
Under the pink
slip Mr Usher found a strip of a later paper, headed, “Astounding Escape of
Millionaire's Daughter with Convict. She had Arranged Freak Dinner. Now Safe
in—”
Mr Greenwood
Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was gone.
SIX
The Head of
Caesar
THERE is
somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of tall houses, rich
but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs. The very steps up to the
dark front doors seem as steep as the side of pyramids; one would hesitate to
knock at the door, lest it should be opened by a mummy. But a yet more
depressing feature in the grey facade is its telescopic length and changeless
continuity. The pilgrim walking down it begins to think he will never come to a
break or a corner; but there is one exception—a very small one, but hailed by
the pilgrim almost with a shout. There is a sort of mews between two of the
tall mansions, a mere slit like the crack of a door by comparison with the
street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or eating-house,
still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to stand in the angle.
There is something cheery in its very dinginess, and something free and elfin
in its very insignificance. At the feet of those grey stone giants it looks
like a lighted house of dwarfs.
Anyone passing
the place during a certain autumn evening, itself almost fairylike, might have
seen a hand pull aside the red half-blind which (along with some large white
lettering) half hid the interior from the street, and a face peer out not
unlike a rather innocent goblin's. It was, in fact, the face of one with the
harmless human name of Brown, formerly priest of Cobhole in Essex, and now
working in London. His friend, Flambeau, a semi-official investigator, was
sitting opposite him, making his last notes of a case he had cleared up in the
neighbourhood. They were sitting at a small table, close up to the window, when
the priest pulled the curtain back and looked out. He waited till a stranger in
the street had passed the window, to let the curtain fall into its place again.
Then his round eyes rolled to the large white lettering on the window above his
head, and then strayed to the next table, at which sat only a navvy with beer
and cheese, and a young girl with red hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing
his friend put away the pocket-book), he said softly:
“If you've got
ten minutes, I wish you'd follow that man with the false nose.”
Flambeau looked
up in surprise; but the girl with the red hair also looked up, and with
something that was stronger than astonishment. She was simply and even loosely
dressed in light brown sacking stuff; but she was a lady, and even, on a second
glance, a rather needlessly haughty one. “The man with the false nose!”
repeated Flambeau. “Who's he?”
“I haven't a
notion,” answered Father Brown. “I want you to find out; I ask it as a favour.
He went down there”—and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in one of his
undistinguished gestures—“and can't have passed three lamp-posts yet. I only
want to know the direction.”
Flambeau gazed at
his friend for some time, with an expression between perplexity and amusement;
and then, rising from the table; squeezed his huge form out of the little door
of the dwarf tavern, and melted into the twilight.
Father Brown took
a small book out of his pocket and began to read steadily; he betrayed no
consciousness of the fact that the red-haired lady had left her own table and
sat down opposite him. At last she leaned over and said in a low, strong voice:
“Why do you say that? How do you know it's false?”
He lifted his
rather heavy eyelids, which fluttered in considerable embarrassment. Then his
dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering on the glass front of the
public-house. The young woman's eyes followed his, and rested there also, but
in pure puzzledom.
“No,” said Father
Brown, answering her thoughts. “It doesn't say `Sela', like the thing in the
Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was wool-gathering just now; it says
`Ales. '”
“Well?” inquired
the staring young lady. “What does it matter what it says?”
His ruminating
eye roved to the girl's light canvas sleeve, round the wrist of which ran a
very slight thread of artistic pattern, just enough to distinguish it from a
working-dress of a common woman and make it more like the working-dress of a
lady art-student. He seemed to find much food for thought in this; but his
reply was very slow and hesitant. “You see, madam,” he said, “from outside the
place looks—well, it is a perfectly decent place—but ladies like you
don't—don't generally think so. They never go into such places from choice,
except—”
“Well?” she
repeated.
“Except an
unfortunate few who don't go in to drink milk.”
“You are a most
singular person,” said the young lady. “What is your object in all this?”
“Not to trouble
you about it,” he replied, very gently. “Only to arm myself with knowledge
enough to help you, if ever you freely ask my help.”
“But why should I
need help?”
He continued his
dreamy monologue. “You couldn't have come in to see protegees, humble friends,
that sort of thing, or you'd have gone through into the parlour... and you
couldn't have come in because you were ill, or you'd have spoken to the woman
of the place, who's obviously respectable... besides, you don't look ill in
that way, but only unhappy.... This street is the only original long lane that
has no turning; and the houses on both sides are shut up.... I could only
suppose that you'd seen somebody coming whom you didn't want to meet; and found
the public-house was the only shelter in this wilderness of stone.... I don't
think I went beyond the licence of a stranger in glancing at the only man who
passed immediately after.... And as I thought he looked like the wrong sort...
and you looked like the right sort.... I held myself ready to help if he
annoyed you; that is all. As for my friend, he'll be back soon; and he
certainly can't find out anything by stumping down a road like this.... I
didn't think he could.”
“Then why did you
send him out?” she cried, leaning forward with yet warmer curiosity. She had
the proud, impetuous face that goes with reddish colouring, and a Roman nose,
as it did in Marie Antoinette.
He looked at her
steadily for the first time, and said: “Because I hoped you would speak to me.”
She looked back
at him for some time with a heated face, in which there hung a red shadow of
anger; then, despite her anxieties, humour broke out of her eyes and the
corners of her mouth, and she answered almost grimly: “Well, if you're so keen
on my conversation, perhaps you'll answer my question.” After a pause she
added: “I had the honour to ask you why you thought the man's nose was false.”
“The wax always
spots like that just a little in this weather,” answered Father Brown with
entire simplicity,
“But it's such a
crooked nose,” remonstrated the red-haired girl.
The priest smiled
in his turn. “I don't say it's the sort of nose one would wear out of mere
foppery,” he admitted. “This man, I think, wears it because his real nose is so
much nicer.”
“But why?” she
insisted.
“What is the
nursery-rhyme?” observed Brown absent-mindedly. “There was a crooked man and he
went a crooked mile.... That man, I fancy, has gone a very crooked road—by following
his nose.”
“Why, what's he
done?” she demanded, rather shakily.
“I don't want to
force your confidence by a hair,” said Father Brown, very quietly. “But I think
you could tell me more about that than I can tell you.”
The girl sprang
to her feet and stood quite quietly, but with clenched hands, like one about to
stride away; then her hands loosened slowly, and she sat down again. “You are
more of a mystery than all the others,” she said desperately, “but I feel there
might be a heart in your mystery.”
“What we all
dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre. That is
why atheism is only a nightmare.” “I will tell you everything,” said the
red-haired girl doggedly, “except why I am telling you; and that I don't know.”
She picked at the
darned table-cloth and went on: “You look as if you knew what isn't snobbery as
well as what is; and when I say that ours is a good old family, you'll
understand it is a necessary part of the story; indeed, my chief danger is in
my brother's high-and-dry notions, noblesse oblige and all that. Well, my name
is Christabel Carstairs; and my father was that Colonel Carstairs you've
probably heard of, who made the famous Carstairs Collection of Roman coins. I
could never describe my father to you; the nearest I can say is that he was
very like a Roman coin himself. He was as handsome and as genuine and as
valuable and as metallic and as out-of-date. He was prouder of his Collection
than of his coat-of-arms—nobody could say more than that. His extraordinary
character came out most in his will. He had two sons and one daughter. He
quarrelled with one son, my brother Giles, and sent him to Australia on a small
allowance. He then made a will leaving the Carstairs Collection, actually with
a yet smaller allowance, to my brother Arthur. He meant it as a reward, as the
highest honour he could offer, in acknowledgement of Arthur's loyalty and
rectitude and the distinctions he had already gained in mathematics and
economics at Cambridge. He left me practically all his pretty large fortune;
and I am sure he meant it in contempt.
“Arthur, you may
say, might well complain of this; but Arthur is my father over again. Though he
had some differences with my father in early youth, no sooner had he taken over
the Collection than he became like a pagan priest dedicated to a temple. He
mixed up these Roman halfpence with the honour of the Carstairs family in the
same stiff, idolatrous way as his father before him. He acted as if Roman money
must be guarded by all the Roman virtues. He took no pleasures; he spent
nothing on himself; he lived for the Collection. Often he would not trouble to
dress for his simple meals; but pattered about among the corded brown-paper
parcels (which no one else was allowed to touch) in an old brown dressing-gown.
With its rope and tassel and his pale, thin, refined face, it made him look
like an old ascetic monk. Every now and then, though, he would appear dressed
like a decidedly fashionable gentleman; but that was only when he went up to
the London sales or shops to make an addition to the Carstairs Collection.
“Now, if you've
known any young people, you won't be shocked if I say that I got into rather a
low frame of mind with all this; the frame of mind in which one begins to say
that the Ancient Romans were all very well in their way. I'm not like my
brother Arthur; I can't help enjoying enjoyment. I got a lot of romance and
rubbish where I got my red hair, from the other side of the family. Poor Giles
was the same; and I think the atmosphere of coins might count in excuse for
him; though he really did wrong and nearly went to prison. But he didn't behave
any worse than I did; as you shall hear.
“I come now to
the silly part of the story. I think a man as clever as you can guess the sort
of thing that would begin to relieve the monotony for an unruly girl of
seventeen placed in such a position. But I am so rattled with more dreadful
things that I can hardly read my own feeling; and don't know whether I despise
it now as a flirtation or bear it as a broken heart. We lived then at a little
seaside watering-place in South Wales, and a retired sea-captain living a few
doors off had a son about five years older than myself, who had been a friend
of Giles before he went to the Colonies. His name does not affect my tale; but
I tell you it was Philip Hawker, because I am telling you everything. We used
to go shrimping together, and said and thought we were in love with each other;
at least he certainly said he was, and I certainly thought I was. If I tell you
he had bronzed curly hair and a falconish sort of face, bronzed by the sea
also, it's not for his sake, I assure you, but for the story; for it was the
cause of a very curious coincidence.
“One summer
afternoon, when I had promised to go shrimping along the sands with Philip, I
was waiting rather impatiently in the front drawing-room, watching Arthur
handle some packets of coins he had just purchased and slowly shunt them, one
or two at a time, into his own dark study and museum which was at the back of
the house. As soon as I heard the heavy door close on him finally, I made a
bolt for my shrimping-net and tam-o'-shanter and was just going to slip out, when
I saw that my brother had left behind him one coin that lay gleaming on the
long bench by the window. It was a bronze coin, and the colour, combined with
the exact curve of the Roman nose and something in the very lift of the long,
wiry neck, made the head of Caesar on it the almost precise portrait of Philip
Hawker. Then I suddenly remembered Giles telling Philip of a coin that was like
him, and Philip wishing he had it. Perhaps you can fancy the wild, foolish
thoughts with which my head went round; I felt as if I had had a gift from the
fairies. It seemed to me that if I could only run away with this, and give it
to Philip like a wild sort of wedding-ring, it would be a bond between us for
ever; I felt a thousand such things at once. Then there yawned under me, like
the pit, the enormous, awful notion of what I was doing; above all, the
unbearable thought, which was like touching hot iron, of what Arthur would
think of it. A Carstairs a thief; and a thief of the Carstairs treasure! I
believe my brother could see me burned like a witch for such a thing, But then,
the very thought of such fanatical cruelty heightened my old hatred of his
dingy old antiquarian fussiness and my longing for the youth and liberty that
called to me from the sea. Outside was strong sunlight with a wind; and a
yellow head of some broom or gorse in the garden rapped against the glass of
the window. I thought of that living and growing gold calling to me from all
the heaths of the world—and then of that dead, dull gold and bronze and brass
of my brother's growing dustier and dustier as life went by. Nature and the
Carstairs Collection had come to grips at last.
“Nature is older
than the Carstairs Collection. As I ran down the streets to the sea, the coin
clenched tight in my fist, I felt all the Roman Empire on my back as well as
the Carstairs pedigree. It was not only the old lion argent that was roaring in
my ear, but all the eagles of the Caesars seemed flapping and screaming in
pursuit of me. And yet my heart rose higher and higher like a child's kite,
until I came over the loose, dry sand-hills and to the flat, wet sands, where
Philip stood already up to his ankles in the shallow shining water, some
hundred yards out to sea. There was a great red sunset; and the long stretch of
low water, hardly rising over the ankle for half a mile, was like a lake of
ruby flame. It was not till I had torn off my shoes and stockings and waded to
where he stood, which was well away from the dry land, that I turned and looked
round. We were quite alone in a circle of sea-water and wet sand, and I gave
him the head of Caesar.
“At the very
instant I had a shock of fancy: that a man far away on the sand-hills was
looking at me intently. I must have felt immediately after that it was a mere
leap of unreasonable nerves; for the man was only a dark dot in the distance,
and I could only just see that he was standing quite still and gazing, with his
head a little on one side. There was no earthly logical evidence that he was
looking at me; he might have been looking at a ship, or the sunset, or the
sea-gulls, or at any of the people who still strayed here and there on the
shore between us. Nevertheless, whatever my start sprang from was prophetic;
for, as I gazed, he started walking briskly in a bee-line towards us across the
wide wet sands. As he drew nearer and nearer I saw that he was dark and
bearded, and that his eyes were marked with dark spectacles. He was dressed
poorly but respectably in black, from the old black top hat on his head to the
solid black boots on his feet. In spite of these he walked straight into the
sea without a flash of hesitation, and came on at me with the steadiness of a
travelling bullet.
“I can't tell you
the sense of monstrosity and miracle I had when he thus silently burst the barrier
between land and water. It was as if he had walked straight off a cliff and
still marched steadily in mid-air. It was as if a house had flown up into the
sky or a man's head had fallen off. He was only wetting his boots; but he
seemed to be a demon disregarding a law of Nature. If he had hesitated an
instant at the water's edge it would have been nothing. As it was, he seemed to
look so much at me alone as not to notice the ocean. Philip was some yards away
with his back to me, bending over his net. The stranger came on till he stood
within two yards of me, the water washing half-way up to his knees. Then he
said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing articulation: `Would it
discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin with a somewhat different
superscription?'
“With one
exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him. His tinted glasses
were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough, nor were the eyes
behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark beard was not really
long or wild—, but he looked rather hairy, because the beard began very high up
in his face, just under the cheek-bones. His complexion was neither sallow nor
livid, but on the contrary rather clear and youthful; yet this gave a
pink-and-white wax look which somehow (I don't know why) rather increased the
horror. The only oddity one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of
a good shape, was just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was
soft, it had been tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly a
deformity; yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to me. As he
stood there in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some hellish
sea-monster just risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don't know why a
touch on the nose should affect my imagination so much. I think it seemed as if
he could move his nose like a finger. And as if he had just that moment moved
it.
“`Any little
assistance,' he continued with the same queer, priggish accent, `that may
obviate the necessity of my communicating with the family. '
“Then it rushed
over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of the bronze piece; and all
my merely superstitious fears and doubts were swallowed up in one overpowering,
practical question. How could he have found out? I had stolen the thing
suddenly and on impulse; I was certainly alone; for I always made sure of being
unobserved when I slipped out to see Philip in this way. I had not, to all
appearance, been followed in the street; and if I had, they could not `X-ray'
the coin in my closed hand. The man standing on the sand-hills could no more
have seen what I gave Philip than shoot a fly in one eye, like the man in the
fairy-tale.
“`Philip,' I
cried helplessly, `ask this man what he wants. '
“When Philip
lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked rather red, as if sulky
or ashamed; but it may have been only the exertion of stooping and the red
evening light; I may have only had another of the morbid fancies that seemed to
be dancing about me. He merely said gruffly to the man: `You clear out of this.
' And, motioning me to follow, set off wading shoreward without paying further
attention to him. He stepped on to a stone breakwater that ran out from among
the roots of the sand-hills, and so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our
incubus would find it less easy to walk on such rough stones, green and
slippery with seaweed, than we, who were young and used to it. But my
persecutor walked as daintily as he talked; and he still followed me, picking
his way and picking his phrases. I heard his delicate, detestable voice
appealing to me over my shoulder, until at last, when we had crested the
sand-hills, Philip's patience (which was by no means so conspicuous on most
occasions) seemed to snap. He turned suddenly, saying, `Go back. I can't talk
to you now. ' And as the man hovered and opened his mouth, Philip struck him a
buffet on it that sent him flying from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the
bottom. I saw him crawling out below, covered with sand.
“This stroke
comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my peril; but Philip showed
none of his usual elation at his own prowess. Though as affectionate as ever,
he still seemed cast down; and before I could ask him anything fully, he parted
with me at his own gate, with two remarks that struck me as strange. He said
that, all things considered, I ought to put the coin back in the Collection;
but that he himself would keep it `for the present'. And then he added quite
suddenly and irrelevantly:, `You know Giles is back from Australia?'”
The door of the
tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the investigator Flambeau fell across
the table. Father Brown presented him to the lady in his own slight, persuasive
style of speech, mentioning his knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and
almost without knowing, the girl was soon reiterating her story to two
listeners. But Flambeau, as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small
slip of paper. Brown accepted it with some surprise and read on it: “Cab to
Wagga Wagga, 379, Mafeking Avenue, Putney.” The girl was going on with her
story.
“I went up the
steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it bad not begun to clear
when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a milk-can—and the man with the
twisted nose. The milk-can told me the servants were all out; for, of course,
Arthur, browsing about in his brown dressing-gown in a brown study, would not
hear or answer a bell. Thus there was no one to help me in the house, except my
brother, whose help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into
the horrid thing's hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I had
thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had
expected—perhaps he had been shaken by his fall—and I watched the star of sand
splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid vindictive pleasure.
He turned a corner some six houses down.
“Then I let
myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out. I sat at the
drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still glowed with the last
full evening light. But I was too distracted and dreamy to look at the lawns
and flower-pots and flower-beds with any concentration. So I took the shock the
more sharply because I'd seen it so slowly.
“The man or
monster I'd sent away was standing quite still in the middle of the garden. Oh,
we've all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the dark; but this was more
dreadful than anything of that kind could ever be. Because, though he cast a
long evening shadow, he still stood in warm sunlight. And because his face was
not pale, but had that waxen bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber's
dummy. He stood quite still, with his face towards me; and I can't tell you how
horrid he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost
hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we'd stuck up a waxwork instead of a
statue in the centre of our garden.
“Yet almost the
instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran out of the garden by the
back gate, which stood open and by which he had undoubtedly entered. This
renewed timidity on his part was so different from the impudence with which he
had walked into the sea, that I felt vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps,
that he feared confronting Arthur more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at
last, and had a quiet dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb
Arthur when he was rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little
released, fled to Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking
blankly, but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained,
but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed to me
that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane. But when I
stared harder, it was more like a man's thumb pressed on the pane; it had that
curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage re-awakened together, I
rushed at the window and then recoiled with a strangled scream that any man but
Arthur must have heard.
“For it was not a
thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip of a crooked nose, crushed
against the glass; it looked white with the pressure; and the staring face and
eyes behind it were at first invisible and afterwards grey like a ghost. I
slammed the shutters together somehow, rushed up to my room and locked myself
in. But, even as I passed, I could swear I saw a second black window with
something on it that was like a snail.
“It might be best
to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling close all around the house
like a cat, it might have purposes worse even than blackmail. My brother might
cast me out and curse me for ever, but he was a gentleman, and would defend me
on the spot. After ten minutes' curious thinking, I went down, knocked on the
door and then went in: to see the last and worst sight.
“My brother's
chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man with the crooked nose
was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat still insolently on his head,
and actually reading one of my brother's books under my brother's lamp. His
face was composed and occupied, but his nose-tip still had the air of being the
most mobile part of his face, as if it had just turned from left to right like
an elephant's proboscis. I had thought him poisonous enough while he was
pursuing and watching me; but I think his unconsciousness of my presence was
more frightful still.
“I think I
screamed loud and long; but that doesn't matter. What I did next does matter: I
gave him all the money I had, including a good deal in paper which, though it
was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch. He went off at last, with
hateful, tactful regrets all in long words; and I sat down, feeling ruined in
every sense. And yet I was saved that very night by a pure accident. Arthur had
gone off suddenly to London, as he so often did, for bargains; and returned,
late but radiant, having nearly secured a treasure that was an added splendour
even to the family Collection. He was so resplendent that I was almost emboldened
to confess the abstraction of the lesser gem—, but he bore down all other
topics with his over-powering projects. Because the bargain might still misfire
any moment, he insisted on my packing at once and going up with him to lodgings
he had already taken in Fulham, to be near the curio-shop in question. Thus in
spite of myself, I fled from my foe almost in the dead of night—but from Philip
also.... My brother was often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to
make some sort of secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the
Art Schools. I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the
abomination of desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the
rest is as this gentleman has said.
“I've got only
one thing to say. I don't deserve to be helped; and I don't question or
complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to have happened. But I still
question, with bursting brains, how it can have happened. Am I punished by
miracle? or how can anyone but Philip and myself know I gave him a tiny coin in
the middle of the sea?”
“It is an
extraordinary problem,” admitted Flambeau.
“Not so
extraordinary as the answer,” remarked Father Brown rather gloomily. “Miss
Carstairs, will you be at home if we call at your Fulham place in an hour and a
half hence?”
The girl looked
at him, and then rose and put her gloves on. “Yes,” she said, “I'll be there”;
and almost instantly left the place.
That night the
detective and the priest were still talking of the matter as they drew near the
Fulham house, a tenement strangely mean even for a temporary residence of the
Carstairs family.
“Of course the
superficial, on reflection,” said Flambeau, “would think first of this
Australian brother who's been in trouble before, who's come back so suddenly
and who's just the man to have shabby confederates. But I can't see how he can
come into the thing by any process of thought, unless
“Well?” asked his
companion patiently.
Flambeau lowered
his voice. “Unless the girl's lover comes in, too, and he would be the blacker
villain. The Australian chap did know that Hawker wanted the coin. But I can't
see how on earth he could know that Hawker had got it, unless Hawker signalled
to him or his representative across the shore.”
“That is true,”
assented the priest, with respect.
“Have you noted
another thing?” went on Flambeau eagerly. “this Hawker hears his love insulted,
but doesn't strike till he's got to the soft sand-hills, where he can be victor
in a mere sham-fight. If he'd struck amid rocks and sea, he might have hurt his
ally.”
“That is true
again,” said Father Brown, nodding.
“And now, take it
from the start. It lies between few people, but at least three. You want one
person for suicide; two people for murder; but at least three people for
blackmail”
“Why?” asked the
priest softly.
“Well,
obviously,” cried his friend, “there must be one to be exposed; one to threaten
exposure; and one at least whom exposure would horrify.”
After a long
ruminant pause, the priest said: “You miss a logical step. Three persons are
needed as ideas. Only two are needed as agents.”
“What can you
mean?” asked the other.
“Why shouldn't a
blackmailer,” asked Brown, in a low voice, “threaten his victim with himself?
Suppose a wife became a rigid teetotaller in order to frighten her husband into
concealing his pub-frequenting, and then wrote him blackmailing letters in
another hand, threatening to tell his wife! Why shouldn't it work? Suppose a
father forbade a son to gamble and then, following him in a good disguise,
threatened the boy with his own sham paternal strictness! Suppose—but, here we
are, my friend.”
“My God!” cried
Flambeau; “you don't mean—”
An active figure
ran down the steps of the house and showed under the golden lamplight the
unmistakable head that resembled the Roman coin. “Miss Carstairs,” said Hawker
without ceremony, “wouldn't go in till you came.”
“Well,” observed
Brown confidently, “don't you think it's the best thing she can do to stop
outside—with you to look after her? You see, I rather guess you have guessed it
all yourself.”
“Yes,” said the
young man, in an undertone, “I guessed on the sands and now I know; that was
why I let him fall soft.”
Taking a latchkey
from the girl and the coin from Hawker, Flambeau let himself and his friend
into the empty house and passed into the outer parlour. It was empty of all
occupants but one. The man whom Father Brown had seen pass the tavern was
standing against the wall as if at bay; unchanged, save that he had taken off
his black coat and was wearing a brown dressing-gown.
“We have come,”
said Father Brown politely, “to give back this coin to its owner.” And he
handed it to the man with the nose.
Flambeau's eyes
rolled. “Is this man a coin-collector?” he asked.
“This man is Mr
Arthur Carstairs,” said the priest positively, “and he is a coin-collector of a
somewhat singular kind.”
The man changed
colour so horribly that the crooked nose stood out on his face like a separate
and comic thing. He spoke, nevertheless, with a sort of despairing dignity.
“You shall see, then,” he said, “that I have not lost all the family
qualities.” And he turned suddenly and strode into an inner room, slamming the
door.
“Stop him!”
shouted Father Brown, bounding and half falling over a chair; and, after a
wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it was too late. In dead silence
Flambeau strode across and telephoned for doctor and police.
An empty medicine
bottle lay on the floor. Across the table the body of the man in the brown
dressing-gown lay amid his burst and gaping brown-paper parcels; out of which
poured and rolled, not Roman, but very modern English coins.
The priest held
up the bronze head of Caesar. “This,” he said, “was all that was left of the
Carstairs Collection.”
After a silence
he went on, with more than common gentleness: “It was a cruel will his wicked
father made, and you see he did resent it a little. He hated the Roman money he
had, and grew fonder of the real money denied him. He not only sold the
Collection bit by bit, but sank bit by bit to the basest ways of making
money—even to blackmailing his own family in a disguise. He blackmailed his
brother from Australia for his little forgotten crime (that is why he took the
cab to Wagga Wagga in Putney), he blackmailed his sister for the theft he alone
could have noticed. And that, by the way, is why she had that supernatural
guess when he was away on the sand-dunes. Mere figure and gait, however
distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up face
quite close.”
There was another
silence. “Well,” growled the detective, “and so this great numismatist and
coin-collector was nothing but a vulgar miser.”
“Is there so
great a difference?” asked Father Brown, in the same strange, indulgent tone.
“What is there wrong about a miser that is not often as wrong about a
collector? What is wrong, except... thou shalt not make to thyself any graven
image; thou shalt not bow down to them nor serve them, for I... but we must go
and see how the poor young people are getting on.”
“I think,” said
Flambeau, “that in spite of everything, they are probably getting on very
well.”
SEVEN
The Purple Wig
MR EDWARD NUTT,
the industrious editor of the Daily Reformer, sat at his desk, opening letters
and marking proofs to the merry tune of a typewriter, worked by a vigorous
young lady.
He was a
stoutish, fair man, in his shirt-sleeves; his movements were resolute, his
mouth firm and his tones final; but his round, rather babyish blue eyes had a
bewildered and even wistful look that rather contradicted all this. Nor indeed
was the expression altogether misleading. It might truly be said of him, as for
many journalists in authority, that his most familiar emotion was one of
continuous fear; fear of libel actions, fear of lost advertisements, fear of
misprints, fear of the sack.
His life was a
series of distracted compromises between the proprietor of the paper (and of
him), who was a senile soap-boiler with three ineradicable mistakes in his
mind, and the very able staff he had collected to run the paper; some of whom
were brilliant and experienced men and (what was even worse) sincere
enthusiasts for the political policy of the paper.
A letter from one
of these lay immediately before him, and rapid and resolute as he was, he
seemed almost to hesitate before opening it. He took up a strip of proof
instead, ran down it with a blue eye, and a blue pencil, altered the word
“adultery” to the word “impropriety,” and the word “Jew” to the word “Alien,”
rang a bell and sent it flying upstairs.
Then, with a more
thoughtful eye, he ripped open the letter from his more distinguished
contributor, which bore a postmark of Devonshire, and read as follows:
DEAR NUTT,—As I
see you're working Spooks and Dooks at the same time, what about an article on
that rum business of the Eyres of Exmoor; or as the old women call it down
here, the Devil's Ear of Eyre? The head of the family, you know, is the Duke of
Exmoor; he is one of the few really stiff old Tory aristocrats left, a sound
old crusted tyrant it is quite in our line to make trouble about. And I think
I'm on the track of a story that will make trouble.
Of course I don't
believe in the old legend about James I; and as for you, you don't believe in
anything, not even in journalism. The legend, you'll probably remember, was
about the blackest business in English history—the poisoning of Overbury by
that witch's cat Frances Howard, and the quite mysterious terror which forced
the King to pardon the murderers. There was a lot of alleged witchcraft mixed
up with it; and the story goes that a man-servant listening at the keyhole
heard the truth in a talk between the King and Carr; and the bodily ear with
which he heard grew large and monstrous as by magic, so awful was the secret.
And though he had to be loaded with lands and gold and made an ancestor of
dukes, the elf-shaped ear is still recurrent in the family. Well, you don't
believe in black magic; and if you did, you couldn't use it for copy. If a
miracle happened in your office, you'd have to hush it up, now so many bishops
are agnostics. But that is not the point The point is that there really is
something queer about Exmoor and his family; something quite natural, I dare
say, but quite abnormal. And the Ear is in it somehow, I fancy; either a symbol
or a delusion or disease or something. Another tradition says that Cavaliers
just after James I began to wear their hair long only to cover the ear of the
first Lord Exmoor. This also is no doubt fanciful.
The reason I
point it out to you is this: It seems to me that we make a mistake in attacking
aristocracy entirely for its champagne and diamonds. Most men rather admire the
nobs for having a good time, but I think we surrender too much when we admit
that aristocracy has made even the aristocrats happy. I suggest a series of
articles pointing out how dreary, how inhuman, how downright diabolist, is the
very smell and atmosphere of some of these great houses. There are plenty of
instances; but you couldn't begin with a better one than the Ear of the Eyres.
By the end of the week I think I can get you the truth about it.—Yours ever,
FRANCIS FINN.
Mr Nutt reflected
a moment, staring at his left boot; then he called out in a strong, loud and
entirely lifeless voice, in which every syllable sounded alike: “Miss Barlow,
take down a letter to Mr Finn, please.”
DEAR FINN,—I think
it would do; copy should reach us second post Saturday.—Yours, E. NUTT.
This elaborate
epistle he articulated as if it were all one word; and Miss Barlow rattled it
down as if it were all one word. Then he took up another strip of proof and a
blue pencil, and altered the word “supernatural” to the word “marvellous”, and
the expression “shoot down” to the expression “repress”.
In such happy,
healthful activities did Mr Nutt disport himself, until the ensuing Saturday
found him at the same desk, dictating to the same typist, and using the same
blue pencil on the first instalment of Mr Finn's revelations. The opening was a
sound piece of slashing invective about the evil secrets of princes, and
despair in the high places of the earth. Though written violently, it was in
excellent English; but the editor, as usual, had given to somebody else the
task of breaking it up into sub-headings, which were of a spicier sort, as
“Peeress and Poisons”, and “The Eerie Ear”, “The Eyres in their Eyrie”, and so
on through a hundred happy changes. Then followed the legend of the Ear,
amplified from Finn's first letter, and then the substance of his later
discoveries, as follows:
I know it is the
practice of journalists to put the end of the story at the beginning and call
it a headline. I know that journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones
Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. Your present
correspondent thinks that this, like many other journalistic customs, is bad
journalism; and that the Daily Reformer has to set a better example in such
things. He proposes to tell his story as it occurred, step by step. He will use
the real names of the parties, who in most cases are ready to confirm his
testimony. As for the headlines, the sensational proclamations—they will come
at the end.
I was walking
along a public path that threads through a private Devonshire orchard and seems
to point towards Devonshire cider, when I came suddenly upon just such a place
as the path suggested. It was a long, low inn, consisting really of a cottage
and two barns; thatched all over with the thatch that looks like brown and grey
hair grown before history. But outside the door was a sign which called it the
Blue Dragon; and under the sign was one of those long rustic tables that used
to stand outside most of the free English inns, before teetotallers and brewers
between them destroyed freedom. And at this table sat three gentlemen, who
might have lived a hundred years ago.
Now that I know
them all better, there is no difficulty about disentangling the impressions;
but just then they looked like three very solid ghosts. The dominant figure,
both because he was bigger in all three dimensions, and because he sat
centrally in the length of the table, facing me, was a tall, fat man dressed
completely in black, with a rubicund, even apoplectic visage, but a rather bald
and rather bothered brow. Looking at him again, more strictly, I could not
exactly say what it was that gave me the sense of antiquity, except the antique
cut of his white clerical necktie and the barred wrinkles across his brow.
It was even less
easy to fix the impression in the case of the man at the right end of the
table, who, to say truth, was as commonplace a person as could be seen
anywhere, with a round, brown-haired head and a round snub nose, but also clad
in clerical black, of a stricter cut. It was only when I saw his broad curved
hat lying on the table beside him that I realized why I connected him with
anything ancient. He was a Roman Catholic priest.
Perhaps the third
man, at the other end of the table, had really more to do with it than the
rest, though he was both slighter in physical presence and more inconsiderate
in his dress. His lank limbs were clad, I might also say clutched, in very
tight grey sleeves and pantaloons; he had a long, sallow, aquiline face which
seemed somehow all the more saturnine because his lantern jaws were imprisoned
in his collar and neck-cloth more in the style of the old stock; and his hair
(which ought to have been dark brown) was of an odd dim, russet colour which,
in conjunction with his yellow face, looked rather purple than red. The
unobtrusive yet unusual colour was all the more notable because his hair was
almost unnaturally healthy and curling, and he wore it full. But, after all
analysis, I incline to think that what gave me my first old-fashioned
impression was simply a set of tall, old-fashioned wine-glasses, one or two
lemons and two churchwarden pipes. And also, perhaps, the old-world errand on
which I had come.
Being a hardened
reporter, and it being apparently a public inn, I did not need to summon much
of my impudence to sit down at the long table and order some cider. The big man
in black seemed very learned, especially about local antiquities; the small man
in black, though he talked much less, surprised me with a yet wider culture. So
we got on very well together; but the third man, the old gentleman in the tight
pantaloons, seemed rather distant and haughty, until I slid into the subject of
the Duke of Exmoor and his ancestry.
I thought the
subject seemed to embarrass the other two a little; but it broke the spell of
the third man's silence most successfully. Speaking with restraint and with the
accent of a highly educated gentleman, and puffing at intervals at his long
churchwarden pipe, he proceeded to tell me some of the most horrible stories I
have ever heard in my life: how one of the Eyres in the former ages had hanged
his own father; and another had his wife scourged at the cart tail through the
village; and another had set fire to a church full of children, and so on.
Some of the
tales, indeed, are not fit for public print—, such as the story of the Scarlet
Nuns, the abominable story of the Spotted Dog, or the thing that was done in
the quarry. And all this red roll of impieties came from his thin, genteel lips
rather primly than otherwise, as he sat sipping the wine out of his tall, thin
glass.
I could see that
the big man opposite me was trying, if anything, to stop him; but he evidently
held the old gentleman in considerable respect, and could not venture to do so
at all abruptly. And the little priest at the other end of the-table, though
free from any such air of embarrassment, looked steadily at the table, and
seemed to listen to the recital with great pain—as well as he might.
“You don't seem,”
I said to the narrator, “to be very fond of the Exmoor pedigree.”
He looked at me a
moment, his lips still prim, but whitening and tightening; then he deliberately
broke his long pipe and glass on the table and stood up, the very picture of a
perfect gentleman with the framing temper of a fiend.
“These
gentlemen,” he said, “will tell you whether I have cause to like it. The curse
of the Eyres of old has lain heavy on this country, and many have suffered from
it. They know there are none who have suffered from it as I have.” And with
that he crushed a piece of the fallen glass under his heel, and strode away
among the green twilight of the twinkling apple-trees.
“That is an
extraordinary old gentleman,” I said to the other two; “do you happen to know
what the Exmoor family has done to him? Who is he?”
The big man in
black was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled bull; he did not at
first seem to take it in. Then he said at last, “Don't you know who he is?”
I reaffirmed my
ignorance, and there was another silence; then the little priest said, still
looking at the table, “That is the Duke of Exmoor.”
Then, before I
could collect my scattered senses, he added equally quietly, but with an air of
regularizing things: “My friend here is Doctor Mull, the Duke's librarian. My
name is Brown.”
“But,” I
stammered, “if that is the Duke, why does he damn all the old dukes like that?”
“He seems really
to believe,” answered the priest called Brown, “that they have left a curse on
him.” Then he added, with some irrelevance, “That's why he wears a wig.”
It was a few
moments before his meaning dawned on me. “You don't mean that fable about the
fantastic ear?” I demanded. “I've heard of it, of course, but surely it must be
a superstitious yarn spun out of something much simpler. I've sometimes thought
it was a wild version of one of those mutilation stories. They used to crop
criminals' ears in the sixteenth century.”
“I hardly think
it was that,” answered the little man thoughtfully, “but it is not outside
ordinary science or natural law for a family to have some deformity frequently
reappearing—such as one ear bigger than the other.”
The big librarian
had buried his big bald brow in his big red hands, like a man trying to think
out his duty. “No,” he groaned. “You do the man a wrong after all. Understand,
I've no reason to defend him, or even keep faith with him. He has been a tyrant
to me as to everybody else. Don't fancy because you see him sitting here that
he isn't a great lord in the worst sense of the word. He would fetch a man a
mile to ring a bell a yard off—if it would summon another man three miles to
fetch a matchbox three yards off. He must have a footman to carry his
walking-stick; a body servant to hold up his opera-glasses—”
“But not a valet
to brush his clothes,” cut in the priest, with a curious dryness, “for the
valet would want to brush his wig, too.”
The librarian
turned to him and seemed to forget my presence; he was strongly moved and, I
think, a little heated with wine. “I don't know how you know it, Father Brown,”
he said, “but you are right. He lets the whole world do everything for
him—except dress him. And that he insists on doing in a literal solitude like a
desert. Anybody is kicked out of the house without a character who is so much
as found near his dressing-room door.,
“He seems a
pleasant old party,” I remarked.
“No,” replied Dr
Mull quite simply; “and yet that is just what I mean by saying you are unjust
to him after all. Gentlemen, the Duke does really feel the bitterness about the
curse that he uttered just now. He does, with sincere shame and terror, hide
under that purple wig something he thinks it would blast the sons of man to
see. I know it is so; and I know it is not a mere natural disfigurement, like a
criminal mutilation, or a hereditary disproportion in the features. I know it
is worse than that; because a man told me who was present at a scene that no man
could invent, where a stronger man than any of us tried to defy the secret, and
was scared away from it.”
I opened my mouth
to speak, but Mull went on in oblivion of me, speaking out of the cavern of his
hands. “I don't mind telling you, Father, because it's really more defending
the poor Duke than giving him away. Didn't you ever hear of the time when he
very nearly lost all the estates?”
The priest shook
his head; and the librarian proceeded to tell the tale as he had heard it from
his predecessor in the same post, who had been his patron and instructor, and
whom he seemed to trust implicitly. Up to a certain point it was a common
enough tale of the decline of a great family's fortunes—the tale of a family
lawyer. His lawyer, however, had the sense to cheat honestly, if the expression
explains itself. Instead of using funds he held in trust, he took advantage of
the Duke's carelessness to put the family in a financial hole, in which it
might be necessary for the Duke to let him hold them in reality.
The lawyer's name
was Isaac Green, but the Duke always called him Elisha; presumably in reference
to the fact that he was quite bald, though certainly not more than thirty. He
had risen very rapidly, but from very dirty beginnings; being first a “nark” or
informer, and then a money-lender: but as solicitor to the Eyres he had the
sense, as I say, to keep technically straight until he was ready to deal the
final blow. The blow fell at dinner; and the old librarian said he should never
forget the very look of the lampshades and the decanters, as the little lawyer,
with a steady smile, proposed to the great landlord that they should halve the
estates between them. The sequel certainly could not be overlooked; for the
Duke, in dead silence, smashed a decanter on the man's bald head as suddenly as
I had seen him smash the glass that day in the orchard. It left a red
triangular scar on the scalp, and the lawyer's eyes altered, but not his smile.
He rose tottering
to his feet, and struck back as such men do strike. “I am glad of that,” he
said, “for now I can take the whole estate. The law will give it to me.”
Exmoor, it seems,
was white as ashes, but his eyes still blazed. “The law will give it you,” he
said; “but you will not take it.... Why not? Why? because it would mean the
crack of doom for me, and if you take it I shall take off my wig.... Why, you
pitiful plucked fowl, anyone can see your bare head. But no man shall see mine
and live.”
Well, you may say
what you like and make it mean what you like. But Mull swears it is the solemn
fact that the lawyer, after shaking his knotted fists in the air for an
instant, simply ran from the room and never reappeared in the countryside; and
since then Exmoor has been feared more for a warlock than even for a landlord
and a magistrate.
Now Dr Mull told
his story with rather wild theatrical gestures, and with a passion I think at
least partisan. I was quite conscious of the possibility that the whole was the
extravagance of an old braggart and gossip. But before I end this half of my
discoveries, I think it due to Dr Mull to record that my two first inquiries
have confirmed his story. I learned from an old apothecary in the village that
there was a bald man in evening dress, giving the name of Green, who came to
him one night to have a three-cornered cut on his forehead plastered. And I
learnt from the legal records and old newspapers that there was a lawsuit
threatened, and at least begun, by one Green against the Duke of Exmoor.
Mr Nutt, of the
Daily Reformer, wrote some highly incongruous words across the top of the copy,
made some highly mysterious marks down the side of it, and called to Miss
Barlow in the same loud, monotonous voice: “Take down a letter to Mr Finn.”
DEAR FINN,—Your
copy will do, but I have had to headline it a bit; and our public would never
stand a Romanist priest in the story—you must keep your eye on the suburbs.
I've altered him to Mr Brown, a Spiritualist.
Yours,
E. NUTT.
A day or two
afterward found the active and judicious editor examining, with blue eyes that
seemed to grow rounder and rounder, the second instalment of Mr Finn's tale of
mysteries in high life. It began with the words:
I have made an
astounding discovery. I freely confess it is quite different from anything I
expected to discover, and will give a much more practical shock to the public.
I venture to say, without any vanity, that the words I now write will be read
all over Europe, and certainly all over America and the Colonies. And yet I
heard all I have to tell before I left this same little wooden table in this
same little wood of apple-trees.
I owe it all to
the small priest Brown; he is an extraordinary man. The big librarian had left
the table, perhaps ashamed of his long tongue, perhaps anxious about the storm
in which his mysterious master had vanished: anyway, he betook himself heavily
in the Duke's tracks through the trees. Father Brown had picked up one of the
lemons and was eyeing it with an odd pleasure.
“What a lovely
colour a lemon is!” he said. “There's one thing I don't like about the Duke's
wig—the colour.”
“I don't think I
understand,” I answered.
“I dare say he's
got good reason to cover his ears, like King Midas,” went on the priest, with a
cheerful simplicity which somehow seemed rather flippant under the
circumstances. “I can quite understand that it's nicer to cover them with hair
than with brass plates or leather flaps. But if he wants to use hair, why
doesn't he make it look like hair? There never was hair of that colour in this
world. It looks more like a sunset-cloud coming through the wood. Why doesn't
he conceal the family curse better, if he's really so ashamed of it? Shall I
tell you? It's because he isn't ashamed of it. He's proud of it”
“It's an ugly wig
to be proud of—and an ugly story,” I said.
“Consider,”
replied this curious little man, “how you yourself really feel about such
things. I don't suggest you're either more snobbish or more morbid than the
rest of us: but don't you feel in a vague way that a genuine old family curse
is rather a fine thing to have? Would you be ashamed, wouldn't you be a little
proud, if the heir of the Glamis horror called you his friend? or if Byron's
family had confided, to you only, the evil adventures of their race? Don't be
too hard on the aristocrats themselves if their heads are as weak as ours would
be, and they are snobs about their own sorrows.”
“By Jove!” I
cried; “and that's true enough. My own mother's family had a banshee; and, now
I come to think of it, it has comforted me in many a cold hour.”
“And think,” he
went on, “of that stream of blood and poison that spurted from his thin lips
the instant you so much as mentioned his ancestors. Why should he show every
stranger over such a Chamber of Horrors unless he is proud of it? He doesn't
conceal his wig, he doesn't conceal his blood, he doesn't conceal his family
curse, he doesn't conceal the family crimes—but—”
The little man's
voice changed so suddenly, he shut his hand so sharply, and his eyes so rapidly
grew rounder and brighter like a waking owl's, that it had all the abruptness
of a small explosion on the table.
“But,” he ended,
“he does really conceal his toilet.”
It somehow
completed the thrill of my fanciful nerves that at that instant the Duke
appeared again silently among the glimmering trees, with his soft foot and
sunset-hued hair, coming round the corner of the house in company with his
librarian. Before he came within earshot, Father Brown had added quite
composedly, “Why does he really hide the secret of what he does with the purple
wig? Because it isn't the sort of secret we suppose.”
The Duke came
round the corner and resumed his seat at the head of the table with all his
native dignity. The embarrassment of the librarian left him hovering on his
hind legs, like a huge bear. The Duke addressed the priest with great
seriousness. “Father Brown,” he said, “Doctor Mull informs me that you have
come here to make a request. I no longer profess an observance of the religion
of my fathers; but for their sakes, and for the sake of the days when we met
before, I am very willing to hear you. But I presume you would rather be heard
in private.”
Whatever I retain
of the gentleman made me stand up. Whatever I have attained of the journalist
made me stand still. Before this paralysis could pass, the priest had made a
momentarily detaining motion. “If,” he said, “your Grace will permit me my real
petition, or if I retain any right to advise you, I would urge that as many
people as possible should be present. All over this country I have found
hundreds, even of my own faith and flock, whose imaginations are poisoned by
the spell which I implore you to break. I wish we could have all Devonshire
here to see you do it.”
“To see me do
what?” asked the Duke, arching his eyebrows.
“To see you take
off your wig,” said Father Brown.
The Duke's face
did not move; but he looked at his petitioner with a glassy stare which was the
most awful expression I have ever seen on a human face. I could see the
librarian's great legs wavering under him like the shadows of stems in a pool;
and I could not banish from my own brain the fancy that the trees all around us
were filling softly in the silence with devils instead of birds.
“I spare you,”
said the Duke in a voice of inhuman pity. “I refuse. If I gave you the faintest
hint of the load of horror I have to bear alone, you would lie shrieking at
these feet of mine and begging to know no more. I will spare you the hint. You
shall not spell the first letter of what is written on the altar of the Unknown
God.”
“I know the
Unknown God,” said the little priest, with an unconscious grandeur of certitude
that stood up like a granite tower. “I know his name; it is Satan. The true God
was made flesh and dwelt among us. And I say to you, wherever you find men
ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you
something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too
terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it. I
entreat your Grace to end this nightmare now and here at this table.”
“If I did,” said
the Duke in a low voice, “you and all you believe, and all by which alone you
live, would be the first to shrivel and perish. You would have an instant to
know the great Nothing before you died.”
“The Cross of
Christ be between me and harm,” said Father Brown. “Take off your wig.”
I was leaning
over the table in ungovernable excitement; in listening to this extraordinary
duel half a thought had come into my head. “Your Grace,” I cried, “I call your
bluff. Take off that wig or I will knock it off.”
I suppose I can
be prosecuted for assault, but I am very glad I did it. When he said, in the
same voice of stone, “I refuse,” I simply sprang on him. For three long
instants he strained against me as if he had all hell to help him; but I forced
his head until the hairy cap fell off it. I admit that, whilst wrestling, I
shut my eyes as it fell.
I was awakened by
a cry from Mull, who was also by this time at the Duke's side. His head and
mine were both bending over the bald head of the wigless Duke. Then the silence
was snapped by the librarian exclaiming: “What can it mean? Why, the man had
nothing to hide. His ears are just like everybody else's.”
“Yes,” said
Father Brown, “that is what he had to hide.”
The priest walked
straight up to him, but strangely enough did not even glance at his ears. He
stared with an almost comical seriousness at his bald forehead, and pointed to
a three-cornered cicatrice, long healed, but still discernible. “Mr Green, I
think.” he said politely, “and he did get the whole estate after all.”
And now let me
tell the readers of the Daily Reformer what I think the most remarkable thing
in the whole affair. This transformation scene, which will seem to you as wild
and purple as a Persian fairy-tale, has been (except for my technical assault)
strictly legal and constitutional from its first beginnings. This man with the
odd scar and the ordinary ears is not an impostor. Though (in one sense) he
wears another man's wig and claims another man's ear, he has not stolen another
man's coronet. He really is the one and only Duke of Exmoor. What happened was
this. The old Duke really had a slight malformation of the ear, which really
was more or less hereditary. He really was morbid about it; and it is likely
enough that he did invoke it as a kind of curse in the violent scene (which
undoubtedly happened) in which he struck Green with the decanter. But the
contest ended very differently. Green pressed his claim and got the estates;
the dispossessed nobleman shot himself and died without issue. After a decent
interval the beautiful English Government revived the “extinct” peerage of
Exmoor, and bestowed it, as is usual, on the most important person, the person
who had got the property.
This man used the
old feudal fables—properly, in his snobbish soul, really envied and admired
them. So that thousands of poor English people trembled before a mysterious
chieftain with an ancient destiny and a diadem of evil stars—when they are
really trembling before a guttersnipe who was a pettifogger and a pawnbroker
not twelve years ago. I think it very typical of the real case against our
aristocracy as it is, and as it will be till God sends us braver men.
Mr Nutt put down
the manuscript and called out with unusual sharpness: “Miss Barlow, please take
down a letter to Mr Finn.”
DEAR FINN,—You
must be mad; we can't touch this. I wanted vampires and the bad old days and
aristocracy hand-in-hand with superstition. They like that But you must know
the Exmoors would never forgive this. And what would our people say then, I
should like to know! Why, Sir Simon is one of Exmoor's greatest pals; and it
would ruin that cousin of the Eyres that's standing for us at Bradford.
Besides, old Soap-Suds was sick enough at not getting his peerage last year;
he'd sack me by wire if I lost him it with such lunacy as this. And what about
Duffey? He's doing us some rattling articles on “The Heel of the Norman.” And
how can he write about Normans if the man's only a solicitor? Do be
reasonable.—Yours, E. NUTT.
As Miss Barlow
rattled away cheerfully, he crumpled up the copy and tossed it into the
waste-paper basket; but not before he had, automatically and by force of habit,
altered the word “God” to the word “circumstances.”
EIGHT
The Perishing of
the Pendragons
FATHER BROWN was
in no mood for adventures. He had lately fallen ill with over-work, and when he
began to recover, his friend Flambeau had taken him on a cruise in a small
yacht with Sir Cecil Fanshaw, a young Cornish squire and an enthusiast for
Cornish coast scenery. But Brown was still rather weak; he was no very happy
sailor; and though he was never of the sort that either grumbles or breaks
down, his spirits did not rise above patience and civility. When the other two
men praised the ragged violet sunset or the ragged volcanic crags, he agreed
with them. When Flambeau pointed out a rock shaped like a dragon, he looked at
it and thought it very like a dragon. When Fanshaw more excitedly indicated a
rock that was like Merlin, he looked at it, and signified assent. When Flambeau
asked whether this rocky gate of the twisted river was not the gate of
Fairyland, he said “Yes.” He heard the most important things and the most
trivial with the same tasteless absorption. He heard that the coast was death
to all but careful seamen; he also heard that the ship's cat was asleep. He
heard that Fanshaw couldn't find his cigar-holder anywhere; he also heard the
pilot deliver the oracle “Both eyes bright, she's all right; one eye winks,
down she sinks.” He heard Flambeau say to Fanshaw that no doubt this meant the
pilot must keep both eyes open and be spry. And he heard Fanshaw say to
Flambeau that, oddly enough, it didn't mean this: it meant that while they saw
two of the coast lights, one near and the other distant, exactly side by side,
they were in the right river-channel; but that if one light was hidden behind
the other, they were going on the rocks. He heard Fanshaw add that his country
was full of such quaint fables and idioms; it was the very home of romance; he even
pitted this part of Cornwall against Devonshire, as a claimant to the laurels
of Elizabethan seamanship. According to him there had been captains among these
coves and islets compared with whom Drake was practically a landsman. He heard
Flambeau laugh, and ask if, perhaps, the adventurous title of “Westward Ho!”
only meant that all Devonshire men wished they were living in Cornwall. He
heard Fanshaw say there was no need to be silly; that not only had Cornish
captains been heroes, but that they were heroes still: that near that very spot
there was an old admiral, now retired, who was scarred by thrilling voyages
full of adventures; and who had in his youth found the last group of eight
Pacific Islands that was added to the chart of the world. This Cecil Fanshaw
was, in person, of the kind that commonly urges such crude but pleasing
enthusiasms; a very young man, light-haired, high-coloured, with an eager
profile; with a boyish bravado of spirits, but an almost girlish delicacy of
tint and type. The big shoulders, black brows and black mousquetaire swagger of
Flambeau were a great contrast.
All these
trivialities Brown heard and saw; but heard them as a tired man hears a tune in
the railway wheels, or saw them as a sick man sees the pattern of his
wall-paper. No one can calculate the turns of mood in convalescence: but Father
Brown's depression must have had a great deal to do with his mere unfamiliarity
with the sea. For as the river mouth narrowed like the neck of a bottle, and
the water grew calmer and the air warmer and more earthly, he seemed to wake up
and take notice like a baby. They had reached that phase just after sunset when
air and water both look bright, but earth and all its growing things look
almost black by comparison. About this particular evening, however, there was
something exceptional. It was one of those rare atmospheres in which a
smoked-glass slide seems to have been slid away from between us and Nature; so
that even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than bright colours on cloudier
days. The trampled earth of the river-banks and the peaty stain in the pools
did not look drab but glowing umber, and the dark woods astir in the breeze did
not look, as usual, dim blue with mere depth of distance, but more like
wind-tumbled masses of some vivid violet blossom. This magic clearness and
intensity in the colours was further forced on Brown's slowly reviving senses
by something romantic and even secret in the very form of the landscape.
The river was
still well wide and deep enough for a pleasure boat so small as theirs; but the
curves of the country-side suggested that it was closing in on either hand; the
woods seemed to be making broken and flying attempts at bridge-building—as if
the boat were passing from the romance of a valley to the romance of a hollow
and so to the supreme romance of a tunnel. Beyond this mere look of things
there was little for Brown's freshening fancy to feed on; he saw no human
beings, except some gipsies trailing along the river bank, with faggots and
osiers cut in the forest; and one sight no longer unconventional, but in such
remote parts still uncommon: a dark-haired lady, bare-headed, and paddling her
own canoe. If Father Brown ever attached any importance to either of these, he
certainly forgot them at the next turn of the river which brought in sight a
singular object.
The water seemed
to widen and split, being cloven by the dark wedge of a fish-shaped and wooded
islet. With the rate at which they went, the islet seemed to swim towards them
like a ship; a ship with a very high prow—or, to speak more strictly, a very
high funnel. For at the extreme point nearest them stood up an odd-looking
building, unlike anything they could remember or connect with any purpose. It
was not specially high, but it was too high for its breadth to be called
anything but a tower. Yet it appeared to be built entirely of wood, and that in
a most unequal and eccentric way. Some of the planks and beams were of good,
seasoned oak; some of such wood cut raw and recent; some again of white
pinewood, and a great deal more of the same sort of wood painted black with
tar. These black beams were set crooked or crisscross at all kinds of angles,
giving the whole a most patchy and puzzling appearance. There were one or two
windows, which appeared to be coloured and leaded in an old-fashioned but more
elaborate style. The travellers looked at it with that paradoxical feeling we
have when something reminds us of something, and yet we are certain it is
something very different.
Father Brown, even
when he was mystified, was clever in analysing his own mystification. And he
found himself reflecting that the oddity seemed to consist in a particular
shape cut out in an incongruous material; as if one saw a top-hat made of tin,
or a frock-coat cut out of tartan. He was sure he had seen timbers of different
tints arranged like that somewhere, but never in such architectural
proportions. The next moment a glimpse through the dark trees told him all he
wanted to know and he laughed. Through a gap in the foliage there appeared for
a moment one of those old wooden houses, faced with black beams, which are
still to be found here and there in England, but which most of us see imitated
in some show called “Old London” or “Shakespeare's England'. It was in view only
long enough for the priest to see that, however old-fashioned, it was a
comfortable and well-kept country-house, with flower-beds in front of it. It
had none of the piebald and crazy look of the tower that seemed made out of its
refuse.
“What on earth's
this?” said Flambeau, who was still staring at the tower.
Fanshaw's eyes
were shining, and he spoke triumphantly. “Aha! you've not seen a place quite
like this before, I fancy; that's why I've brought you here, my friend. Now you
shall see whether I exaggerate about the mariners of Cornwall. This place
belongs to Old Pendragon, whom we call the Admiral; though he retired before
getting the rank. The spirit of Raleigh and Hawkins is a memory with the Devon
folk; it's a modern fact with the Pendragons. If Queen Elizabeth were to rise
from the grave and come up this river in a gilded barge, she would be received
by the Admiral in a house exactly such as she was accustomed to, in every
corner and casement, in every panel on the wall or plate on the table. And she
would find an English Captain still talking fiercely of fresh lands to be found
in little ships, as much as if she had dined with Drake.”
“She'd find a rum
sort of thing in the garden,” said Father Brown, “which would not please her
Renaissance eye. That Elizabethan domestic architecture is charming in its way;
but it's against the very nature of it to break out into turrets.”
“And yet,”
answered Fanshaw, “that's the most romantic and Elizabethan part of the
business. It was built by the Pendragons in the very days of the Spanish wars;
and though it's needed patching and even rebuilding for another reason, it's
always been rebuilt in the old way. The story goes that the lady of Sir Peter
Pendragon built it in this place and to this height, because from the top you
can just see the corner where vessels turn into the river mouth; and she wished
to be the first to see her husband's ship, as he sailed home from the Spanish
Main.”
“For what other
reason,” asked Father Brown, “do you mean that it has been rebuilt?”
“Oh, there's a
strange story about that, too,” said the young squire with relish. “You are
really in a land of strange stories. King Arthur was here and Merlin and the
fairies before him. The story goes that Sir Peter Pendragon, who (I fear) had
some of the faults of the pirates as well as the virtues of the sailor, was
bringing home three Spanish gentlemen in honourable captivity, intending to
escort them to Elizabeth's court. But he was a man of flaming and tigerish
temper, and coming to high words with one of them, he caught him by the throat
and flung him by accident or design, into the sea. A second Spaniard, who was
the brother of the first, instantly drew his sword and flew at Pendragon, and
after a short but furious combat in which both got three wounds in as many
minutes, Pendragon drove his blade through the other's body and the second
Spaniard was accounted for. As it happened the ship had already turned into the
river mouth and was close to comparatively shallow water. The third Spaniard sprang
over the side of the ship, struck out for the shore, and was soon near enough
to it to stand up to his waist in water. And turning again to face the ship,
and holding up both arms to Heaven—like a prophet calling plagues upon a wicked
city—he called out to Pendragon in a piercing and terrible voice, that he at
least was yet living, that he would go on living, that he would live for ever;
and that generation after generation the house of Pendragon should never see
him or his, but should know by very certain signs that he and his vengeance
were alive. With that he dived under the wave, and was either drowned or swam
so long under water that no hair of his head was seen afterwards.”
“There's that
girl in the canoe again,” said Flambeau irrelevantly, for good-looking young
women would call him off any topic. “She seems bothered by the queer tower just
as we were.”
Indeed, the
black-haired young lady was letting her canoe float slowly and silently past
the strange islet; and was looking intently up at the strange tower, with a
strong glow of curiosity on her oval and olive face.
“Never mind
girls,” said Fanshaw impatiently, “there are plenty of them in the world, but
not many things like the Pendragon Tower. As you may easily suppose, plenty of
superstitions and scandals have followed in the track of the Spaniard's curse;
and no doubt, as you would put it, any accident happening to this Cornish
family would be connected with it by rural credulity. But it is perfectly true
that this tower has been burnt down two or three times; and the family can't be
called lucky, for more than two, I think, of the Admiral's near kin have
perished by shipwreck; and one at least, to my own knowledge, on practically
the same spot where Sir Peter threw the Spaniard overboard.”
“What a pity!”
exclaimed Flambeau. “She's going.”
“When did your
friend the Admiral tell you this family history?” asked Father Brown, as the
girl in the canoe paddled off, without showing the least intention of extending
her interest from the tower to the yacht, which Fanshaw had already caused to
lie alongside the island.
“Many years ago,”
replied Fanshaw; “he hasn't been to sea for some time now, though he is as keen
on it as ever. I believe there's a family compact or something. Well, here's
the landing stage; let's come ashore and see the old boy.”
They followed him
on to the island, just under the tower, and Father Brown, whether from the mere
touch of dry land, or the interest of something on the other bank of the river
(which he stared at very hard for some seconds), seemed singularly improved in
briskness. They entered a wooded avenue between two fences of thin greyish
wood, such as often enclose parks or gardens, and over the top of which the
dark trees tossed to and fro like black and purple plumes upon the hearse of a
giant. The tower, as they left it behind, looked all the quainter, because such
entrances are usually flanked by two towers; and this one looked lopsided. But
for this, the avenue had the usual appearance of the entrance to a gentleman's
grounds; and, being so curved that the house was now out of sight, somehow
looked a much larger park than any plantation on such an island could really
be. Father Brown was, perhaps, a little fanciful in his fatigue, but he almost
thought the whole place must be growing larger, as things do in a nightmare.
Anyhow, a mystical monotony was the only character of their march, until
Fanshaw suddenly stopped, and pointed to something sticking out through the
grey fence—something that looked at first rather like the imprisoned horn of
some beast. Closer observation showed that it was a slightly curved blade of
metal that shone faintly in the fading light.
Flambeau, who
like all Frenchmen had been a soldier, bent over it and said in a startled
voice: “Why, it's a sabre! I believe I know the sort, heavy and curved, but
shorter than the cavalry; they used to have them in artillery and the—”
As he spoke the
blade plucked itself out of the crack it had made and came down again with a
more ponderous slash, splitting the fissiparous fence to the bottom with a
rending noise. Then it was pulled out again, flashed above the fence some feet
further along, and again split it halfway down with the first stroke; and after
waggling a little to extricate itself (accompanied with curses in the darkness)
split it down to the ground with a second. Then a kick of devilish energy sent
the whole loosened square of thin wood flying into the pathway, and a great gap
of dark coppice gaped in the paling.
Fanshaw peered
into the dark opening and uttered an exclamation of astonishment. “My dear
Admiral!” he exclaimed, “do you—er—do you generally cut out a new front door
whenever you want to go for a walk?”
The voice in the
gloom swore again, and then broke into a jolly laugh. “No,” it said; “I've really
got to cut down this fence somehow; it's spoiling all the plants, and no one
else here can do it. But I'll only carve another bit off the front door, and
then come out and welcome you.”
And sure enough,
he heaved up his weapon once more, and, hacking twice, brought down another and
similar strip of fence, making the opening about fourteen feet wide in all.
Then through this larger forest gateway he came out into the evening light,
with a chip of grey wood sticking to his sword-blade.
He momentarily fulfilled
all Fanshaw's fable of an old piratical Admiral; though the details seemed
afterwards to decompose into accidents. For instance, he wore a broad-brimmed
hat as protection against the sun; but the front flap of it was turned up
straight to the sky, and the two corners pulled down lower than the ears, so
that it stood across his forehead in a crescent like the old cocked hat worn by
Nelson. He wore an ordinary dark-blue jacket, with nothing special about the
buttons, but the combination of it with white linen trousers somehow had a
sailorish look. He was tall and loose, and walked with a sort of swagger, which
was not a sailor's roll, and yet somehow suggested it; and he held in his hand
a short sabre which was like a navy cutlass, but about twice as big. Under the
bridge of the hat his eagle face looked eager, all the more because it was not
only clean-shaven, but without eyebrows. It seemed almost as if all the hair
had come off his face from his thrusting it through a throng of elements. His
eyes were prominent and piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while
partly tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while
it was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no way sickly,
but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the Hesperides—Father Brown
thought he had never seen a figure so expressive of all the romances about the
countries of the Sun.
When Fanshaw had
presented his two friends to their host he fell again into a tone of rallying
the latter about his wreckage of the fence and his apparent rage of profanity.
The Admiral pooh-poohed it at first as a piece of necessary but annoying garden
work; but at length the ring of real energy came back into his laughter, and he
cried with a mixture of impatience and good humour:
“Well, perhaps I
do go at it a bit rabidly, and feel a kind of pleasure in smashing anything. So
would you if your only pleasure was in cruising about to find some new Cannibal
Islands, and you had to stick on this muddy little rockery in a sort of rustic
pond. When I remember how I've cut down a mile and a half of green poisonous
jungle with an old cutlass half as sharp as this; and then remember I must stop
here and chop this matchwood, because of some confounded old bargain scribbled
in a family Bible, why, I—”
He swung up the
heavy steel again; and this time sundered the wall of wood from top to bottom
at one stroke.
“I feel like
that,” he said laughing, but furiously flinging the sword some yards down the
path, “and now let's go up to the house; you must have some dinner.”
The semicircle of
lawn in front of the house was varied by three circular garden beds, one of red
tulips, a second of yellow tulips, and the third of some white, waxen-looking
blossoms that the visitors did not know and presumed to be exotic. A heavy,
hairy and rather sullen-looking gardener was hanging up a heavy coil of garden
hose. The corners of the expiring sunset which seemed to cling about the
corners of the house gave glimpses here and there of the colours of remoter
flowerbeds; and in a treeless space on one side of the house opening upon the
river stood a tall brass tripod on which was tilted a big brass telescope. Just
outside the steps of the porch stood a little painted green garden table, as if
someone had just had tea there. The entrance was flanked with two of those
half-featured lumps of stone with holes for eyes that are said to be South Sea
idols; and on the brown oak beam across the doorway were some confused carvings
that looked almost as barbaric.
As they passed
indoors, the little cleric hopped suddenly on to the table, and standing on it
peered unaffectedly through his spectacles at the mouldings in the oak. Admiral
Pendragon looked very much astonished, though not particularly annoyed; while
Fanshaw was so amused with what looked like a performing pigmy on his little
stand, that he could not control his laughter. But Father Brown was not likely
to notice either the laughter or the astonishment.
He was gazing at
three carved symbols, which, though very worn and obscure, seemed still to
convey some sense to him. The first seemed to be the outline of some tower or
other building, crowned with what looked like curly-pointed ribbons. The second
was clearer: an old Elizabethan galley with decorative waves beneath it, but
interrupted in the middle by a curious jagged rock, which was either a fault in
the wood or some conventional representation of the water coming in. The third
represented the upper half of a human figure, ending in an escalloped line like
the waves; the face was rubbed and featureless, and both arms were held very
stiffly up in the air.
“Well,” muttered
Father Brown, blinking, “here is the legend of the Spaniard plain enough. Here
he is holding up his arms and cursing in the sea; and here are the two curses:
the wrecked ship and the burning of Pendragon Tower.”
Pendragon shook
his head with a kind of venerable amusement. “And how many other things might
it not be?” he said. “Don't you know that that sort of half-man, like a
half-lion or half-stag, is quite common in heraldry? Might not that line
through the ship be one of those parti-per-pale lines, indented, I think they call
it? And though the third thing isn't so very heraldic, it would be more
heraldic to suppose it a tower crowned with laurel than with fire; and it looks
just as like it.”
“But it seems
rather odd,” said Flambeau, “that it should exactly confirm the old legend.”
“Ah,” replied the
sceptical traveller, “but you don't know how much of the old legend may have
been made up from the old figures. Besides, it isn't the only old legend.
Fanshaw, here, who is fond of such things, will tell you there are other versions
of the tale, and much more horrible ones. One story credits my unfortunate
ancestor with having had the Spaniard cut in two; and that will fit the pretty
picture also. Another obligingly credits our family with the possession of a
tower full of snakes and explains those little, wriggly things in that way. And
a third theory supposes the crooked line on the ship to be a conventionalized
thunderbolt; but that alone, if seriously examined, would show what a very
little way these unhappy coincidences really go.”
“Why, how do you
mean?” asked Fanshaw.
“It so happens,”
replied his host coolly, “that there was no thunder and lightning at all in the
two or three shipwrecks I know of in our family.”
“Oh!” said Father
Brown, and jumped down from the little table.
There was another
silence in which they heard the continuous murmur of the river; then Fanshaw
said, in a doubtful and perhaps disappointed tone: “Then you don't think there
is anything in the tales of the tower in flames?”
“There are the
tales, of course,” said the Admiral, shrugging his shoulders; “and some of
them, I don't deny, on evidence as decent as one ever gets for such things.
Someone saw a blaze hereabout, don't you know, as he walked home through a
wood; someone keeping sheep on the uplands inland thought he saw a flame
hovering over Pendragon Tower. Well, a damp dab of mud like this confounded
island seems the last place where one would think of fires.”
“What is that
fire over there?” asked Father Brown with a gentle suddenness, pointing to the woods
on the left river-bank. They were all thrown a little off their balance, and
the more fanciful Fanshaw had even some difficulty in recovering his, as they
saw a long, thin stream of blue smoke ascending silently into the end of the
evening light.
Then Pendragon
broke into a scornful laugh again. “Gipsies!” he said; “they've been camping
about here for about a week. Gentlemen, you want your dinner,” and he turned as
if to enter the house.
But the
antiquarian superstition in Fanshaw was still quivering, and he said hastily:
“But, Admiral, what's that hissing noise quite near the island? It's very like
fire.”
“It's more like
what it is,” said the Admiral, laughing as he led the way; “it's only some
canoe going by.”
Almost as he
spoke, the butler, a lean man in black, with very black hair and a very long,
yellow face, appeared in the doorway and told him that dinner was served.
The dining-room
was as nautical as the cabin of a ship; but its note was rather that of the
modern than the Elizabethan captain. There were, indeed, three antiquated
cutlasses in a trophy over the fireplace, and one brown sixteenth-century map
with Tritons and little ships dotted about a curly sea. But such things were
less prominent on the white panelling than some cases of quaint-coloured South
American birds, very scientifically stuffed, fantastic shells from the Pacific,
and several instruments so rude and queer in shape that savages might have used
them either to kill their enemies or to cook them. But the alien colour
culminated in the fact that, besides the butler, the Admiral's only servants
were two negroes, somewhat quaintly clad in tight uniforms of yellow. The
priest's instinctive trick of analysing his own impressions told him that the
colour and the little neat coat-tails of these bipeds had suggested the word
“Canary,” and so by a mere pun connected them with southward travel. Towards
the end of the dinner they took their yellow clothes and black faces out of the
room, leaving only the black clothes and yellow face of the butler.
“I'm rather sorry
you take this so lightly,” said Fanshaw to the host; “for the truth is, I've
brought these friends of mine with the idea of their helping you, as they know
a good deal of these things. Don't you really believe in the family story at
all?”
“I don't believe
in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a
red tropical bird. “I'm a man of science.”
Rather to
Flambeau's surprise, his clerical friend, who seemed to have entirely woken up,
took up the digression and talked natural history with his host with a flow of
words and much unexpected information, until the dessert and decanters were set
down and the last of the servants vanished. Then he said, without altering his
tone.
“Please don't
think me impertinent, Admiral Pendragon. I don't ask for curiosity, but really
for my guidance and your convenience. Have I made a bad shot if I guess you
don't want these old things talked of before your butler?”
The Admiral
lifted the hairless arches over his eyes and exclaimed: “Well, I don't know
where you got it, but the truth is I can't stand the fellow, though I've no
excuse for discharging a family servant. Fanshaw, with his fairy tales, would
say my blood moved against men with that black, Spanish-looking hair.”
Flambeau struck
the table with his heavy fist. “By Jove!” he cried; “and so had that girl!”
“I hope it'll all
end tonight,” continued the Admiral, “when my nephew comes back safe from his
ship. You looked surprised. You won't understand, I suppose, unless I tell you
the story. You see, my father had two sons; I remained a bachelor, but my elder
brother married, and had a son who became a sailor like all the rest of us, and
will inherit the proper estate. Well, my father was a strange man; he somehow
combined Fanshaw's superstition with a good deal of my scepticism—they were
always fighting in him; and after my first voyages, he developed a notion which
he thought somehow would settle finally whether the curse was truth or trash.
If all the Pendragons sailed about anyhow, he thought there would be too much
chance of natural catastrophes to prove anything. But if we went to sea one at
a time in strict order of succession to the property, he thought it might show
whether any connected fate followed the family as a family. It was a silly
notion, I think, and I quarrelled with my father pretty heartily; for I was an
ambitious man and was left to the last, coming, by succession, after my own
nephew.”
“And your father
and brother,” said the priest, very gently, “died at sea, I fear.”
“Yes,” groaned
the Admiral; “by one of those brutal accidents on which are built all the lying
mythologies of mankind, they were both shipwrecked. My father, coming up this
coast out of the Atlantic, was washed up on these Cornish rocks. My brother's
ship was sunk, no one knows where, on the voyage home from Tasmania. His body
was never found. I tell you it was from perfectly natural mishap; lots of other
people besides Pendragons were drowned; and both disasters are discussed in a
normal way by navigators. But, of course, it set this forest of superstition on
fire; and men saw the flaming tower everywhere. That's why I say it will be all
right when Walter returns. The girl he's engaged to was coming today; but I was
so afraid of some chance delay frightening her that I wired her not to come
till she heard from me. But he's practically sure to be here some time tonight,
and then it'll all end in smoke—tobacco smoke. We'll crack that old lie when we
crack a bottle of this wine.”
“Very good wine,”
said Father Brown, gravely lifting his glass, “but, as you see, a very bad
wine-bibber. I most sincerely beg your pardon”: for he had spilt a small spot
of wine on the table-cloth. He drank and put down the glass with a composed
face; but his hand had started at the exact moment when he became conscious of
a face looking in through the garden window just behind the Admiral—the face of
a woman, swarthy, with southern hair and eyes, and young, but like a mask of
tragedy.
After a pause the
priest spoke again in his mild manner. “Admiral,” he said, “will you do me a
favour? Let me, and my friends if they like, stop in that tower of yours just
for tonight? Do you know that in my business you're an exorcist almost before
anything else?”
Pendragon sprang
to his feet and paced swiftly to and fro across the window, from which the face
had instantly vanished. “I tell you there is nothing in it,” he cried, with
ringing violence. “There is one thing I know about this matter. You may call me
an atheist. I am an atheist.” Here he swung round and fixed Father Brown with a
face of frightful concentration. “This business is perfectly natural. There is
no curse in it at all.”
Father Brown
smiled. “In that case,” he said, “there can't be any objection to my sleeping
in your delightful summer-house.”
“The idea is
utterly ridiculous,” replied the Admiral, beating a tattoo on the back of his
chair.
“Please forgive
me for everything,” said Brown in his most sympathetic tone, “including
spilling the wine. But it seems to me you are not quite so easy about the
flaming tower as you try to be.”
Admiral Pendragon
sat down again as abruptly as he had risen; but he sat quite still, and when he
spoke again it was in a lower voice. “You do it at your own peril,” he said;
“but wouldn't you be an atheist to keep sane in all this devilry?”
Some three hours
afterwards Fanshaw, Flambeau and the priest were still dawdling about the
garden in the dark; and it began to dawn on the other two that Father Brown had
no intention of going to bed either in the tower or the house.
“I think the lawn
wants weeding,” said he dreamily. “If I could find a spud or something I'd do
it myself.”
They followed
him, laughing and half remonstrating; but he replied with the utmost solemnity,
explaining to them, in a maddening little sermon, that one can always find some
small occupation that is helpful to others. He did not find a spud; but he
found an old broom made of twigs, with which he began energetically to brush
the fallen leaves off the grass.
“Always some
little thing to be done,” he said with idiotic cheerfulness; “as George Herbert
says: `Who sweeps an Admiral's garden in Cornwall as for Thy laws makes that
and the action fine. ' And now,” he added, suddenly slinging the broom away,
“Let's go and water the flowers.”
With the same
mixed emotions they watched him uncoil some considerable lengths of the large
garden hose, saying with an air of wistful discrimination: “The red tulips
before the yellow, I think. Look a bit dry, don't you think?”
He turned the
little tap on the instrument, and the water shot out straight and solid as a
long rod of steel.
“Look out,
Samson,” cried Flambeau; “why, you've cut off the tulip's head.”
Father Brown
stood ruefully contemplating the decapitated plant.
“Mine does seem
to be a rather kill or cure sort of watering,” he admitted, scratching his
head. “I suppose it's a pity I didn't find the spud. You should have seen me
with the spud! Talking of tools, you've got that swordstick, Flambeau, you
always carry? That's right; and Sir Cecil could have that sword the Admiral
threw away by the fence here. How grey everything looks!”
“The mist's
rising from the river,” said the staring Flambeau.
Almost as he
spoke the huge figure of the hairy gardener appeared on a higher ridge of the
trenched and terraced lawn, hailing them with a brandished rake and a horribly
bellowing voice. “Put down that hose,” he shouted; “put down that hose and go
to your—”
“I am fearfully
clumsy,” replied the reverend gentleman weakly; “do you know, I upset some wine
at dinner.” He made a wavering half-turn of apology towards the gardener, with
the hose still spouting in his hand. The gardener caught the cold crash of the
water full in his face like the crash of a cannon-ball; staggered, slipped and
went sprawling with his boots in the air.
“How very
dreadful!” said Father Brown, looking round in a sort of wonder. “Why, I've hit
a man!”
He stood with his
head forward for a moment as if looking or listening; and then set off at a
trot towards the tower, still trailing the hose behind him. The tower was quite
close, but its outline was curiously dim.
“Your river
mist,” he said, “has a rum smell.”
“By the Lord it
has,” cried Fanshaw, who was very white. “But you can't mean—”
“I mean,” said
Father Brown, “that one of the Admiral's scientific predictions is coming true
tonight. This story is going to end in smoke.”
As he spoke a
most beautiful rose-red light seemed to burst into blossom like a gigantic
rose; but accompanied with a crackling and rattling noise that was like the
laughter of devils.
“My God! what is
this?” cried Sir Cecil Fanshaw.
“The sign of the
flaming tower,” said Father Brown, and sent the driving water from his hose
into the heart of the red patch.
“Lucky we hadn't
gone to bed!” ejaculated Fanshaw. “I suppose it can't spread to the house.”
“You may
remember,” said the priest quietly, “that the wooden fence that might have
carried it was cut away.”
Flambeau turned
electrified eyes upon his friend, but Fanshaw only said rather absently: “Well,
nobody can be killed, anyhow.”
“This is rather a
curious kind of tower,” observed Father Brown, “when it takes to killing
people, it always kills people who are somewhere else.”
At the same
instant the monstrous figure of the gardener with the streaming beard stood
again on the green ridge against the sky, waving others to come on; but now
waving not a rake but a cutlass. Behind him came the two negroes, also with the
old crooked cutlasses out of the trophy. But in the blood-red glare, with their
black faces and yellow figures, they looked like devils carrying instruments of
torture. In the dim garden behind them a distant voice was heard calling out
brief directions. When the priest heard the voice, a terrible change came over
his countenance.
But he remained
composed; and never took his eye off the patch of flame which had begun by
spreading, but now seemed to shrink a little as it hissed under the torch of
the long silver spear of water. He kept his finger along the nozzle of the pipe
to ensure the aim, and attended to no other business, knowing only by the noise
and that semi-conscious corner of the eye, the exciting incidents that began to
tumble themselves about the island garden. He gave two brief directions to his
friends. One was: “Knock these fellows down somehow and tie them up, whoever
they are; there's rope down by those faggots. They want to take away my nice
hose.” The other was: “As soon as you get a chance, call out to that canoeing
girl; she's over on the bank with the gipsies. Ask her if they could get some
buckets across and fill them from the river.” Then he closed his mouth and
continued to water the new red flower as ruthlessly as he had watered the red
tulip.
He never turned
his head to look at the strange fight that followed between the foes and
friends of the mysterious fire. He almost felt the island shake when Flambeau
collided with the huge gardener; he merely imagined how it would whirl round
them as they wrestled. He heard the crashing fall; and his friend's gasp of
triumph as he dashed on to the first negro; and the cries of both the blacks as
Flambeau and Fanshaw bound them. Flambeau's enormous strength more than
redressed the odds in the fight, especially as the fourth man still hovered
near the house, only a shadow and a voice. He heard also the water broken by
the paddles of a canoe; the girl's voice giving orders, the voices of gipsies
answering and coming nearer, the plumping and sucking noise of empty buckets
plunged into a full stream; and finally the sound of many feet around the fire.
But all this was less to him than the fact that the red rent, which had lately
once more increased, had once more slightly diminished.
Then came a cry
that very nearly made him turn his head. Flambeau and Fanshaw, now reinforced
by some of the gipsies, had rushed after the mysterious man by the house; and
he heard from the other end of the garden the Frenchman's cry of horror and
astonishment. It was echoed by a howl not to be called human, as the being
broke from their hold and ran along the garden. Three times at least it raced
round the whole island, in a way that was as horrible as the chase of a
lunatic, both in the cries of the pursued and the ropes carried by the
pursuers; but was more horrible still, because it somehow suggested one of the
chasing games of children in a garden. Then, finding them closing in on every
side, the figure sprang upon one of the higher river banks and disappeared with
a splash into the dark and driving river.
“You can do no
more, I fear,” said Brown in a voice cold with pain. “He has been washed down
to the rocks by now, where he has sent so many others. He knew the use of a
family legend.”
“Oh, don't talk
in these parables,” cried Flambeau impatiently. “Can't you put it simply in
words of one syllable?”
“Yes,” answered
Brown, with his eye on the hose. “`Both eyes bright, she's all right; one eye
blinks, down she sinks. '”
The fire hissed
and shrieked more and more, like a strangled thing, as it grew narrower and
narrower under the flood from the pipe and buckets, but Father Brown still kept
his eye on it as he went on speaking:
“I thought of
asking this young lady, if it were morning yet, to look through that telescope
at the river mouth and the river. She might have seen something to interest
her: the sign of the ship, or Mr Walter Pendragon coming home, and perhaps even
the sign of the half-man, for though he is certainly safe by now, he may very
well have waded ashore. He has been within a shave of another shipwreck; and
would never have escaped it, if the lady hadn't had the sense to suspect the
old Admiral's telegram and come down to watch him. Don't let's talk about the
old Admiral. Don't let's talk about anything. It's enough to say that whenever
this tower, with its pitch and resin-wood, really caught fire, the spark on the
horizon always looked like the twin light to the coast light-house.”
“And that,” said
Flambeau, “is how the father and brother died. The wicked uncle of the legends
very nearly got his estate after all.”
Father Brown did
not answer; indeed, he did not speak again, save for civilities, till they were
all safe round a cigar-box in the cabin of the yacht. He saw that the
frustrated fire was extinguished; and then refused to linger, though he
actually heard young Pendragon, escorted by an enthusiastic crowd, come
tramping up the river bank; and might (had he been moved by romantic
curiosities) have received the combined thanks of the man from the ship and the
girl from the canoe. But his fatigue had fallen on him once more, and he only
started once, when Flambeau abruptly told him he had dropped cigar-ash on his
trousers.
“That's no
cigar-ash,” he said rather wearily. “That's from the fire, but you don't think
so because you're all smoking cigars. That's just the way I got my first faint
suspicion about the chart.”
“Do you mean
Pendragon's chart of his Pacific Islands?” asked Fanshaw.
“You thought it
was a chart of the Pacific Islands,” answered Brown. “Put a feather with a
fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it's a specimen. Put the same
feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it's for
a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of
writing-paper, and most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So you saw
that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific
Islands. It was the map of this river.”
“But how do you
know?” asked Fanshaw.
“I saw the rock
you thought was like a dragon, and the one like Merlin, and—”
“You seem to have
noticed a lot as we came in,” cried Fanshaw. “We thought you were rather
abstracted.”
“I was sea-sick,”
said Father Brown simply. “I felt simply horrible. But feeling horrible has
nothing to do with not seeing things.” And he closed his eyes.
“Do you think
most men would have seen that?” asked Flambeau. He received no answer: Father
Brown was asleep.
NINE
The God of the
Gongs
IT was one of
those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver
rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a hundred
bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges
of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the, more inhuman for being
broken at very long intervals by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a
tree, or a tree that looked more ugly than a lamp-post. A light fall of snow
had half-melted into a few strips, also looking leaden rather than silver, when
it had been fixed again by the seal of frost, no fresh snow had fallen, but a
ribbon of the old snow ran along the very margin of the coast, so as to
parallel the pale ribbon of the foam.
The line of the
sea looked frozen in the very vividness of its violet-blue, like the vein of a
frozen finger. For miles and miles, forward and back, there was no breathing
soul, save two pedestrians, walking at a brisk pace, though one had much longer
legs and took much longer strides than the other.
It did not seem a
very appropriate place or time for a holiday, but Father Brown had few
holidays, and had to take them when he could, and he always preferred, if
possible, to take them in company with his old friend Flambeau, ex-criminal and
ex-detective. The priest had had a fancy for visiting his old parish at
Cobhole, and was going north-eastward along the coast.
After walking a
mile or two farther, they found that the shore was beginning to be formally
embanked, so as to form something like a parade; the ugly lamp-posts became
less few and far between and more ornamental, though quite equally ugly. Half a
mile farther on Father Brown was puzzled first by little labyrinths of
flowerless flower-pots, covered with the low, flat, quiet-coloured plants that
look less like a garden than a tessellated pavement, between weak curly paths
studded with seats with curly backs. He faintly sniffed the atmosphere of a
certain sort of seaside town that be did not specially care about, and, looking
ahead along the parade by the sea, he saw something that put the matter beyond
a doubt. In the grey distance the big bandstand of a watering-place stood up
like a giant mushroom with six legs.
“I suppose,” said
Father Brown, turning up his coat-collar and drawing a woollen scarf rather
closer round his neck, “that we are approaching a pleasure resort.”
“I fear,”
answered Flambeau, “a pleasure resort to which few people just now have the
pleasure of resorting. They try to revive these places in the winter, but it
never succeeds except with Brighton and the old ones. This must be Seawood, I
think—Lord Pooley's experiment; he had the Sicilian Singers down at Christmas,
and there's talk about holding one of the great glove-fights here. But they'll
have to chuck the rotten place into the sea; it's as dreary as a lost
railway-carriage.”
They had come
under the big bandstand, and the priest was looking up at it with a curiosity
that had something rather odd about it, his head a little on one side, like a
bird's. It was the conventional, rather tawdry kind of erection for its
purpose: a flattened dome or canopy, gilt here and there, and lifted on six
slender pillars of painted wood, the whole being raised about five feet above
the parade on a round wooden platform like a drum. But there was something
fantastic about the snow combined with something artificial about the gold that
haunted Flambeau as well as his friend with some association he could not
capture, but which he knew was at once artistic and alien.
“I've got it,” he
said at last. “It's Japanese. It's like those fanciful Japanese prints, where
the snow on the mountain looks like sugar, and the gilt on the pagodas is like
gilt on gingerbread. It looks just like a little pagan temple.”
“Yes,” said
Father Brown. “Let's have a look at the god.” And with an agility hardly to be
expected of him, he hopped up on to the raised platform.
“Oh, very well,”
said Flambeau, laughing; and the next instant his own towering figure was
visible on that quaint elevation.
Slight as was the
difference of height, it gave in those level wastes a sense of seeing yet
farther and farther across land and sea. Inland the little wintry gardens faded
into a confused grey copse; beyond that, in the distance, were long low barns
of a lonely farmhouse, and beyond that nothing but the long East Anglian
plains. Seawards there was no sail or sign of life save a few seagulls: and even
they looked like the last snowflakes, and seemed to float rather than fly.
Flambeau turned
abruptly at an exclamation behind him. It seemed to come from lower down than
might have been expected, and to be addressed to his heels rather than his
head. He instantly held out his hand, but he could hardly help laughing at what
he saw. For some reason or other the platform had given way under Father Brown,
and the unfortunate little man had dropped through to the level of the parade.
He was just tall enough, or short enough, for his head alone to stick out of
the hole in the broken wood, looking like St John the Baptist's head on a
charger. The face wore a disconcerted expression, as did, perhaps, that of St
John the Baptist.
In a moment he
began to laugh a little. “This wood must be rotten,” said Flambeau. “Though it
seems odd it should bear me, and you go through the weak place. Let me help you
out.”
But the little
priest was looking rather curiously at the corners and edges of the wood
alleged to be rotten, and there was a sort of trouble on his brow.
“Come along,”
cried Flambeau impatiently, still with his big brown hand extended. “Don't you
want to get out?”
The priest was
holding a splinter of the broken wood between his finger and thumb, and did not
immediately reply. At last he said thoughtfully: “Want to get out? Why, no. I
rather think I want to get in.” And he dived into the darkness under the wooden
floor so abruptly as to knock off his big curved clerical hat and leave it
lying on the boards above, without any clerical head in it.
Flambeau looked
once more inland and out to sea, and once more could see nothing but seas as
wintry as the snow, and snows as level as the sea.
There came a
scurrying noise behind him, and the little priest came scrambling out of the
hole faster than he had fallen in. His face was no longer disconcerted, but
rather resolute, and, perhaps only through the reflections of the snow, a
trifle paler than usual.
“Well?” asked his
tall friend. “Have you found the god of the temple?”
“No,” answered
Father Brown. “I have found what was sometimes more important. The Sacrifice.”
“What the devil
do you mean?” cried Flambeau, quite alarmed.
Father Brown did
not answer. He was staring, with a knot in his forehead, at the landscape; and
he suddenly pointed at it. “What's that house over there?” he asked.
Following his
finger, Flambeau saw for the first time the corners of a building nearer than
the farmhouse, but screened for the most part with a fringe of trees. It was
not a large building, and stood well back from the shore—, but a glint of
ornament on it suggested that it was part of the same watering-place scheme of
decoration as the bandstand, the little gardens and the curly-backed iron
seats.
Father Brown
jumped off the bandstand, his friend following; and as they walked in the
direction indicated the trees fell away to right and left, and they saw a
small, rather flashy hotel, such as is common in resorts—the hotel of the
Saloon Bar rather than the Bar Parlour. Almost the whole frontage was of gilt
plaster and figured glass, and between that grey seascape and the grey,
witch-like trees, its gimcrack quality had something spectral in its
melancholy. They both felt vaguely that if any food or drink were offered at
such a hostelry, it would be the paste-board ham and empty mug of the
pantomime.
In this, however,
they were not altogether confirmed. As they drew nearer and nearer to the place
they saw in front of the buffet, which was apparently closed, one of the iron
garden-seats with curly backs that had adorned the gardens, but much longer,
running almost the whole length of the frontage. Presumably, it was placed so
that visitors might sit there and look at the sea, but one hardly expected to
find anyone doing it in such weather.
Nevertheless,
just in front of the extreme end of the iron seat stood a small round
restaurant table, and on this stood a small bottle of Chablis and a plate of
almonds and raisins. Behind the table and on the seat sat a dark-haired young
man, bareheaded, and gazing at the sea in a state of almost astonishing
immobility.
But though he
might have been a waxwork when they were within four yards of him, he jumped up
like a jack-in-the-box when they came within three, and said in a deferential,
though not undignified, manner: “Will you step inside, gentlemen? I have no
staff at present, but I can get you anything simple myself.”
“Much obliged,”
said Flambeau. “So you are the proprietor?”
“Yes,” said the
dark man, dropping back a little into his motionless manner. “My waiters are
all Italians, you see, and I thought it only fair they should see their
countryman beat the black, if he really can do it. You know the great fight
between Malvoli and Nigger Ned is coming off after all?”
“I'm afraid we
can't wait to trouble your hospitality seriously,” said Father Brown. “But my
friend would be glad of a glass of sherry, I'm sure, to keep out the cold and
drink success to the Latin champion.”
Flambeau did not
understand the sherry, but he did not object to it in the least. He could only
say amiably: “Oh, thank you very much.”
“Sherry,
sir—certainly,” said their host, turning to his hostel. “Excuse me if I detain
you a few minutes. As I told you, I have no staff—” And he went towards the
black windows of his shuttered and unlighted inn.
“Oh, it doesn't
really matter,” began Flambeau, but the man turned to reassure him.
“I have the
keys,” he said. “I could find my way in the dark.”
“I didn't mean—”
began Father Brown.
He was
interrupted by a bellowing human voice that came out of the bowels of the
uninhabited hotel. It thundered some foreign name loudly but inaudibly, and the
hotel proprietor moved more sharply towards it than he had done for Flambeau's
sherry. As instant evidence proved, the proprietor had told, then and after,
nothing but the literal truth. But both Flambeau and Father Brown have often
confessed that, in all their (often outrageous) adventures, nothing had so
chilled their blood as that voice of an ogre, sounding suddenly out of a silent
and empty inn.
“My cook!” cried
the proprietor hastily. “I had forgotten my cook. He will be starting
presently. Sherry, sir?”
And, sure enough,
there appeared in the doorway a big white bulk with white cap and white apron,
as befits a cook, but with the needless emphasis of a black face. Flambeau had
often heard that negroes made good cooks. But somehow something in the contrast
of colour and caste increased his surprise that the hotel proprietor should
answer the call of the cook, and not the cook the call of the proprietor. But
he reflected that head cooks are proverbially arrogant; and, besides, the host
had come back with the sherry, and that was the great thing.
“I rather
wonder,” said Father Brown, “that there are so few people about the beach, when
this big fight is coming on after all. We only met one man for miles.”
The hotel
proprietor shrugged his shoulders. “They come from the other end of the town,
you see—from the station, three miles from here. They are only interested in
the sport, and will stop in hotels for the night only. After all, it is hardly
weather for basking on the shore.”
“Or on the seat,”
said Flambeau, and pointed to the little table.
“I have to keep a
look-out,” said the man with the motionless face. He was a quiet, well-featured
fellow, rather sallow; his dark clothes had nothing distinctive about them, except
that his black necktie was worn rather high, like a stock, and secured by a
gold pin with some grotesque head to it. Nor was there anything notable in the
face, except something that was probably a mere nervous trick—a habit of
opening one eye more narrowly than the other, giving the impression that the
other was larger, or was, perhaps, artificial.
The silence that
ensued was broken by their host saying quietly: “Whereabouts did you meet the
one man on your march?”
“Curiously
enough,” answered the priest, “close by here—just by that bandstand.”
Flambeau, who had
sat on the long iron seat to finish his sherry, put it down and rose to his
feet, staring at his friend in amazement. He opened his mouth to speak, and
then shut it again.
“Curious,” said
the dark-haired man thoughtfully. “What was he like?”
“It was rather
dark when I saw him,” began Father Brown, “but he was—”
As has been said,
the hotel-keeper can be proved to have told the precise truth. His phrase that
the cook was starting presently was fulfilled to the letter, for the cook came
out, pulling his gloves on, even as they spoke.
But he was a very
different figure from the confused mass of white and black that had appeared
for an instant in the doorway. He was buttoned and buckled up to his bursting
eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion. A tall black hat was tilted on his
broad black head—a hat of the sort that the French wit has compared to eight
mirrors. But somehow the black man was like the black hat. He also was black,
and yet his glossy skin flung back the light at eight angles or more. It is
needless to say that he wore white spats and a white slip inside his waistcoat.
The red flower stood up in his buttonhole aggressively, as if it had suddenly
grown there. And in the way he carried his cane in one hand and his cigar in
the other there was a certain attitude—an attitude we must always remember when
we talk of racial prejudices: something innocent and insolent—the cake walk.
“Sometimes,” said
Flambeau, looking after him, “I'm not surprised that they lynch them.”
“I am never
surprised,” said Father Brown, “at any work of hell. But as I was saying,” he
resumed, as the negro, still ostentatiously pulling on his yellow gloves,
betook himself briskly towards the watering-place, a queer music-hall figure
against that grey and frosty scene—”as I was saying, I couldn't describe the
man very minutely, but he had a flourish and old-fashioned whiskers and
moustachios, dark or dyed, as in the pictures of foreign financiers, round his
neck was wrapped a long purple scarf that thrashed out in the wind as he
walked. It was fixed at the throat rather in the way that nurses fix children's
comforters with a safety-pin. Only this,” added the priest, gazing placidly out
to sea, “was not a safety-pin.”
The man sitting
on the long iron bench was also gazing placidly out to sea. Now he was once
more in repose. Flambeau felt quite certain that one of his eyes was naturally
larger than the other. Both were now well opened, and he could almost fancy the
left eye grew larger as he gazed.
“It was a very
long gold pin, and had the carved head of a monkey or some such thing,”
continued the cleric; “and it was fixed in a rather odd way—he wore pince-nez
and a broad black—”
The motionless
man continued to gaze at the sea, and the eyes in his head might have belonged
to two different men. Then he made a movement of blinding swiftness.
Father Brown had
his back to him, and in that flash might have fallen dead on his face. Flambeau
had no weapon, but his large brown hands were resting on the end of the long
iron seat. His shoulders abruptly altered their shape, and he heaved the whole
huge thing high over his head, like a headsman's axe about to fall. The mere
height of the thing, as he held it vertical, looked like a long iron ladder by
which he was inviting men to climb towards the stars. But the long shadow, in
the level evening light, looked like a giant brandishing the Eiffel Tower. It
was the shock of that shadow, before the shock of the iron crash, that made the
stranger quail and dodge, and then dart into his inn, leaving the flat and
shining dagger he had dropped exactly where it had fallen.
“We must get away
from here instantly,” cried Flambeau, flinging the huge seat away with furious
indifference on the beach. He caught the little priest by the elbow and ran him
down a grey perspective of barren back garden, at the end of which there was a
closed back garden door. Flambeau bent over it an instant in violent silence,
and then said: “The door is locked.”
As he spoke a black
feather from one of the ornamental firs fell, brushing the brim of his hat. It
startled him more than the small and distant detonation that had come just
before. Then came another distant detonation, and the door he was trying to
open shook under the bullet buried in it. Flambeau's shoulders again filled out
and altered suddenly. Three hinges and a lock burst at the same instant, and he
went out into the empty path behind, carrying the great garden door with him,
as Samson carried the gates of Gaza.
Then he flung the
garden door over the garden wall, just as a third shot picked up a spurt of
snow and dust behind his heel. Without ceremony he snatched up the little
priest, slung him astraddle on his shoulders, and went racing towards Seawood
as fast as his long legs could carry him. It was not until nearly two miles
farther on that he set his small companion down. It had hardly been a dignified
escape, in spite of the classic model of Anchises, but Father Brown's face only
wore a broad grin.
“Well,” said Flambeau,
after an impatient silence, as they resumed their more conventional tramp
through the streets on the edge of the town, where no outrage need be feared,
“I don't know what all this means, but I take it I may trust my own eyes that
you never met the man you have so accurately described.”
“I did meet him
in a way,” Brown said, biting his finger rather nervously—”I did really. And it
was too dark to see him properly, because it was under that bandstand affair.
But I'm afraid I didn't describe him so very accurately after all, for his
pince-nez was broken under him, and the long gold pin wasn't stuck through his
purple scarf but through his heart.”
“And I suppose,”
said the other in a lower voice, “that glass-eyed guy had something to do with
it.”
“I had hoped he
had only a little,” answered Brown in a rather troubled voice, “and I may have
been wrong in what I did. I acted on impulse. But I fear this business has deep
roots and dark.”
They walked on
through some streets in silence. The yellow lamps were beginning to be lit in
the cold blue twilight, and they were evidently approaching the more central
parts of the town. Highly coloured bills announcing the glove-fight between
Nigger Ned and Malvoli were slapped about the walls.
“Well,” said
Flambeau, “I never murdered anyone, even in my criminal days, but I can almost
sympathize with anyone doing it in such a dreary place. Of all God-forsaken
dustbins of Nature, I think the most heart-breaking are places like that
bandstand, that were meant to be festive and are forlorn. I can fancy a morbid
man feeling he must kill his rival in the solitude and irony of such a scene. I
remember once taking a tramp in your glorious Surrey hills, thinking of nothing
but gorse and skylarks, when I came out on a vast circle of land, and over me
lifted a vast, voiceless structure, tier above tier of seats, as huge as a
Roman amphitheatre and as empty as a new letter-rack. A bird sailed in heaven
over it. It was the Grand Stand at Epsom. And I felt that no one would ever be
happy there again.”
“It's odd you
should mention Epsom,” said the priest. “Do you remember what was called the
Sutton Mystery, because two suspected men—ice-cream men, I think—happened to
live at Sutton? They were eventually released. A man was found strangled, it
was said, on the Downs round that part. As a fact, I know (from an Irish
policeman who is a friend of mine) that he was found close up to the Epsom
Grand Stand—in fact, only hidden by one of the lower doors being pushed back.”
“That is queer,”
assented Flambeau. “But it rather confirms my view that such pleasure places
look awfully lonely out of season, or the man wouldn't have been murdered
there.”
“I'm not so sure
he—” began Brown, and stopped.
“Not so sure he
was murdered?” queried his companion.
“Not so sure he
was murdered out of the season,” answered the little priest, with simplicity.
“Don't you think there's something rather tricky about this solitude, Flambeau?
Do you feel sure a wise murderer would always want the spot to be lonely? It's very,
very seldom a man is quite alone. And, short of that, the more alone he is, the
more certain he is to be seen. No; I think there must be some other—Why, here
we are at the Pavilion or Palace, or whatever they call it.”
They had emerged
on a small square, brilliantly lighted, of which the principal building was gay
with gilding, gaudy with posters, and flanked with two giant photographs of
Malvoli and Nigger Ned.
“Hallo!” cried
Flambeau in great surprise, as his clerical friend stumped straight up the broad
steps. “I didn't know pugilism was your latest hobby. Are you going to see the
fight?”
“I don't think
there will be any fight,” replied Father Brown.
They passed
rapidly through ante-rooms and inner rooms; they passed through the hall of
combat itself, raised, roped, and padded with innumerable seats and boxes, and
still the cleric did not look round or pause till he came to a clerk at a desk
outside a door marked “Committee”. There he stopped and asked to see Lord
Pooley.
The attendant
observed that his lordship was very busy, as the fight was coming on soon, but
Father Brown had a good-tempered tedium of reiteration for which the official
mind is generally not prepared. In a few moments the rather baffled Flambeau
found himself in the presence of a man who was still shouting directions to
another man going out of the room. “Be careful, you know, about the ropes after
the fourth—Well, and what do you want, I wonder!”
Lord Pooley was a
gentleman, and, like most of the few remaining to our race, was worried—especially
about money. He was half grey and half flaxen, and he had the eyes of fever and
a high-bridged, frost-bitten nose.
“Only a word,”
said Father Brown. “I have come to prevent a man being killed.”
Lord Pooley
bounded off his chair as if a spring had flung him from it. “I'm damned if I'll
stand any more of this!” he cried. “You and your committees and parsons and
petitions! Weren't there parsons in the old days, when they fought without
gloves? Now they're fighting with the regulation gloves, and there's not the
rag of a possibility of either of the boxers being killed.”
“I didn't mean
either of the boxers,” said the little priest.
“Well, well,
well!” said the nobleman, with a touch of frosty humour. “Who's going to be
killed? The referee?”
“I don't know
who's going to be killed,” replied Father Brown, with a reflective stare. “If I
did I shouldn't have to spoil your pleasure. I could simply get him to escape.
I never could see anything wrong about prize-fights. As it is, I must ask you
to announce that the fight is off for the present.”
“Anything else?”
jeered the gentleman with feverish eyes. “And what do you say to the two
thousand people who have come to see it?”
“I say there will
be one thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them left alive when they have
seen it,” said Father Brown.
Lord Pooley
looked at Flambeau. “Is your friend mad?” he asked.
“Far from it,”
was the reply.
“And took here,”
resumed Pooley in his restless way, “it's worse than that. A whole pack of
Italians have turned up to back Malvoli—swarthy, savage fellows of some
country, anyhow. You know what these Mediterranean races are like. If I send
out word that it's off we shall have Malvoli storming in here at the head of a
whole Corsican clan.”
“My lord, it is a
matter of life and death,” said the priest. “Ring your bell. Give your message.
And see whether it is Malvoli who answers.”
The nobleman
struck the bell on the table with an odd air of new curiosity. He said to the
clerk who appeared almost instantly in the doorway: “I have a serious
announcement to make to the audience shortly. Meanwhile, would you kindly tell
the two champions that the fight will have to be put off.”
The clerk stared
for some seconds as if at a demon and vanished.
“What authority
have you for what you say?” asked Lord Pooley abruptly. “Whom did you consult?”
“I consulted a
bandstand,” said Father Brown, scratching his head. “But, no, I'm wrong; I
consulted a book, too. I picked it up on a bookstall in London—very cheap,
too.”
He had taken out
of his pocket a small, stout, leather-bound volume, and Flambeau, looking over
his shoulder, could see that it was some book of old travels, and had a leaf
turned down for reference.
“`The only form
in which Voodoo—'” began Father Brown, reading aloud.
“In which what?”
inquired his lordship.
“`In which
Voodoo,'” repeated the reader, almost with relish, “`is widely organized
outside Jamaica itself is in the form known as the Monkey, or the God of the
Gongs, which is powerful in many parts of the two American continents,
especially among half-breeds, many of whom look exactly like white men. It
differs from most other forms of devil-worship and human sacrifice in the fact
that the blood is not shed formally on the altar, but by a sort of assassination
among the crowd. The gongs beat with a deafening din as the doors of the shrine
open and the monkey-god is revealed; almost the whole congregation rivet
ecstatic eyes on him. But after—'”
The door of the
room was flung open, and the fashionable negro stood framed in it, his eyeballs
rolling, his silk hat still insolently tilted on his head. “Huh!” he cried,
showing his apish teeth. “What this? Huh! Huh! You steal a coloured gentleman's
prize—prize his already—yo' think yo' jes' save that white 'Talian trash—”
“The matter is
only deferred,” said the nobleman quietly. “I will be with you to explain in a
minute or two.”
“Who you to—”
shouted Nigger Ned, beginning to storm.
“My name is
Pooley,” replied the other, with a creditable coolness. “I am the organizing
secretary, and I advise you just now to leave the room.”
“Who this
fellow?” demanded the dark champion, pointing to the priest disdainfully.
“My name is
Brown,” was the reply. “And I advise you just now to leave the country.”
The prize-fighter
stood glaring for a few seconds, and then, rather to the surprise of Flambeau
and the others, strode out, sending the door to with a crash behind him.
“Well,” asked
Father Brown rubbing his dusty hair up, “what do you think of Leonardo da
Vinci? A beautiful Italian head.”
“Look here,” said
Lord Pooley, “I've taken a considerable responsibility, on your bare word. I
think you ought to tell me more about this.”
“You are quite
right, my lord,” answered Brown. “And it won't take long to tell.” He put the
little leather book in his overcoat pocket. “I think we know all that this can
tell us, but you shall look at it to see if I'm right. That negro who has just
swaggered out is one of the most dangerous men on earth, for he has the brains
of a European, with the instincts of a cannibal. He has turned what was clean,
common-sense butchery among his fellow-barbarians into a very modern and
scientific secret society of assassins. He doesn't know I know it, nor, for the
matter of that, that I can't prove it.”
There was a silence,
and the little man went on.
“But if I want to
murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with
him?”
Lord Pooley's
eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He
only said: “If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.”
Father Brown
shook his head, like a murderer of much riper experience. “So Flambeau said,”
he replied, with a sigh. “But consider. The more a man feels lonely the less he
can be sure he is alone. It must mean empty spaces round him, and they are just
what make him obvious. Have you never seen one ploughman from the heights, or
one shepherd from the valleys? Have you never walked along a cliff, and seen
one man walking along the sands? Didn't you know when he's killed a crab, and
wouldn't you have known if it had been a creditor? No! No! No! For an
intelligent murderer, such as you or I might be, it is an impossible plan to
make sure that nobody is looking at you.”
“But what other
plan is there?”
“There is only
one,” said the priest. “To make sure that everybody is looking at something
else. A man is throttled close by the big stand at Epsom. Anybody might have
seen it done while the stand stood empty—any tramp under the hedges or motorist
among the hills. But nobody would have seen it when the stand was crowded and
the whole ring roaring, when the favourite was coming in first—or wasn't. The
twisting of a neck-cloth, the thrusting of a body behind a door could be done
in an instant—so long as it was that instant. It was the same, of course,” he
continued turning to Flambeau, “with that poor fellow under the bandstand. He
was dropped through the hole (it wasn't an accidental hole) just at some very
dramatic moment of the entertainment, when the bow of some great violinist or
the voice of some great singer opened or came to its climax. And here, of
course, when the knock-out blow came—it would not be the only one. That is the
little trick Nigger Ned has adopted from his old God of Gongs.”
“By the way,
Malvoli—” Pooley began.
“Malvoli,” said
the priest, “has nothing to do with it. I dare say he has some Italians with
him, but our amiable friends are not Italians. They are octoroons and African
half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English think all foreigners are
much the same so long as they are dark and dirty. Also,” he added, with a
smile, “I fear the English decline to draw any fine distinction between the
moral character produced by my religion and that which blooms out of Voodoo.”
The blaze of the
spring season had burst upon Seawood, littering its foreshore with famines and
bathing-machines, with nomadic preachers and nigger minstrels, before the two
friends saw it again, and long before the storm of pursuit after the strange
secret society had died away. Almost on every hand the secret of their purpose
perished with them. The man of the hotel was found drifting dead on the sea
like so much seaweed; his right eye was closed in peace, but his left eye was
wide open, and glistened like glass in the moon. Nigger Ned had been overtaken
a mile or two away, and murdered three policemen with his closed left hand. The
remaining officer was surprised—nay, pained—and the negro got away. But this
was enough to set all the English papers in a flame, and for a month or two the
main purpose of the British Empire was to prevent the buck nigger (who was so
in both senses) escaping by any English port. Persons of a figure remotely
reconcilable with his were subjected to quite extraordinary inquisitions, made
to scrub their faces before going on board ship, as if each white complexion
were made up like a mask, of greasepaint. Every negro in England was put under
special regulations and made to report himself; the outgoing ships would no
more have taken a nigger than a basilisk. For people had found out how fearful
and vast and silent was the force of the savage secret society, and by the time
Flambeau and Father Brown were leaning on the parade parapet in April, the
Black Man meant in England almost what he once meant in Scotland.
“He must be still
in England,” observed Flambeau, “and horridly well hidden, too. They must have
found him at the ports if he had only whitened his face.”
“You see, he is
really a clever man,” said Father Brown apologetically. “And I'm sure he
wouldn't whiten his face.”
“Well, but what
would he do?”
“I think,” said
Father Brown, “he would blacken his face.”
Flambeau, leaning
motionless on the parapet, laughed and said: “My dear fellow!”
Father Brown,
also leaning motionless on the parapet, moved one finger for an instant into
the direction of the soot-masked niggers singing on the sands.
TEN
The Salad of
Colonel Cray
FATHER BROWN was
walking home from Mass on a white weird morning when the mists were slowly
lifting—one of those mornings when the very element of light appears as
something mysterious and new. The scattered trees outlined themselves more and
more out of the vapour, as if they were first drawn in grey chalk and then in
charcoal. At yet more distant intervals appeared the houses upon the broken
fringe of the suburb; their outlines became clearer and clearer until he
recognized many in which he had chance acquaintances, and many more the names
of whose owners he knew. But all the windows and doors were sealed; none of the
people were of the sort that would be up at such a time, or still less on such
an errand. But as he passed under the shadow of one handsome villa with
verandas and wide ornate gardens, he heard a noise that made him almost
involuntarily stop. It was the unmistakable noise of a pistol or carbine or
some light firearm discharged; but it was not this that puzzled him most. The
first full noise was immediately followed by a series of fainter noises—as he
counted them, about six. He supposed it must be the echo; but the odd thing was
that the echo was not in the least like the original sound. It was not like
anything else that he could think of; the three things nearest to it seemed to
be the noise made by siphons of soda-water, one of the many noises made by an
animal, and the noise made by a person attempting to conceal laughter. None of
which seemed to make much sense.
Father Brown was
made of two men. There was a man of action, who was as modest as a primrose and
as punctual as a clock; who went his small round of duties and never dreamed of
altering it. There was also a man of reflection, who was much simpler but much
stronger, who could not easily be stopped; whose thought was always (in the
only intelligent sense of the words) free thought. He could not help, even
unconsciously, asking himself all the questions that there were to be asked,
and answering as many of them as he could; all that went on like his breathing
or circulation. But he never consciously carried his actions outside the sphere
of his own duty; and in this case the two attitudes were aptly tested. He was
just about to resume his trudge in the twilight, telling himself it was no
affair of his, but instinctively twisting and untwisting twenty theories about
what the odd noises might mean. Then the grey sky-line brightened into silver,
and in the broadening light he realized that he had been to the house which
belonged to an Anglo-Indian Major named Putnam; and that the Major had a native
cook from Malta who was of his communion. He also began to remember that
pistol-shots are sometimes serious things; accompanied with consequences with
which he was legitimately concerned. He turned back and went in at the garden
gate, making for the front door.
Half-way down one
side of the house stood out a projection like a very low shed; it was, as he
afterwards discovered, a large dustbin. Round the corner of this came a figure,
at first a mere shadow in the haze, apparently bending and peering about. Then,
coming nearer, it solidified into a figure that was, indeed, rather unusually
solid. Major Putnam was a bald-headed, bull-necked man, short and very broad,
with one of those rather apoplectic faces that are produced by a prolonged
attempt to combine the oriental climate with the occidental luxuries. But the
face was a good-humoured one, and even now, though evidently puzzled and
inquisitive, wore a kind of innocent grin. He had a large palm-leaf hat on the
back of his head (suggesting a halo that was by no means appropriate to the
face), but otherwise he was clad only in a very vivid suit of striped scarlet
and yellow pyjamas; which, though glowing enough to behold, must have been, on
a fresh morning, pretty chilly to wear. He had evidently come out of his house
in a hurry, and the priest was not surprised when he called out without further
ceremony: “Did you hear that noise?”
“Yes,” answered
Father Brown; “I thought I had better look in, in case anything was the
matter.”
The Major looked
at him rather queerly with his good-humoured gooseberry eyes. “What do you
think the noise was?” he asked.
“It sounded like
a gun or something,” replied the other, with some hesitation; “but it seemed to
have a singular sort of echo.”
The Major was
still looking at him quietly, but with protruding eyes, when the front door was
flung open, releasing a flood of gaslight on the face of the fading mist; and
another figure in pyjamas sprang or tumbled out into the garden. The figure was
much longer, leaner, and more athletic; the pyjamas, though equally tropical,
were comparatively tasteful, being of white with a light lemon-yellow stripe.
The man was haggard, but handsome, more sunburned than the other; he had an
aquiline profile and rather deep-sunken eyes, and a slight air of oddity arising
from the combination of coal-black hair with a much lighter moustache. All this
Father Brown absorbed in detail more at leisure. For the moment he only saw one
thing about the man; which was the revolver in his hand.
“Cray!” exclaimed
the Major, staring at him; “did you fire that shot?”
“Yes, I did,”
retorted the black-haired gentleman hotly; “and so would you in my place. If
you were chased everywhere by devils and nearly—”
The Major seemed
to intervene rather hurriedly. “This is my friend Father Brown,” he said. And
then to Brown: “I don't know whether you've met Colonel Cray of the Royal
Artillery.”
“I have heard of
him, of course,” said the priest innocently. “Did you—did you hit anything?”
“I thought so,”
answered Cray with gravity.
“Did he—” asked
Major Putnam in a lowered voice, “did he fall or cry out, or anything?”
Colonel Cray was
regarding his host with a strange and steady stare. “I'll tell you exactly what
he did,” he said. “He sneezed.”
Father Brown's
hand went half-way to his head, with the gesture of a man remembering
somebody's name. He knew now what it was that was neither soda-water nor the
snorting of a dog.
“Well,”
ejaculated the staring Major, “I never heard before that a service revolver was
a thing to be sneezed at.”
“Nor I,” said
Father Brown faintly. “It's lucky you didn't turn your artillery on him or you
might have given him quite a bad cold.” Then, after a bewildered pause, he
said: “Was it a burglar?”
“Let us go
inside,” said Major Putnam, rather sharply, and led the way into his house.
The interior
exhibited a paradox often to be marked in such morning hours: that the rooms
seemed brighter than the sky outside; even after the Major had turned out the
one gaslight in the front hall. Father Brown was surprised to see the whole dining-table
set out as for a festive meal, with napkins in their rings, and wine-glasses of
some six unnecessary shapes set beside every plate. It was common enough, at
that time of the morning, to find the remains of a banquet over-night; but to
find it freshly spread so early was unusual.
While he stood
wavering in the hall Major Putnam rushed past him and sent a raging eye over
the whole oblong of the tablecloth. At last he spoke, spluttering: “All the
silver gone!” he gasped. “Fish-knives and forks gone. Old cruet-stand gone.
Even the old silver cream-jug gone. And now, Father Brown, I am ready to answer
your question of whether it was a burglar.”
“They're simply a
blind,” said Cray stubbornly. “I know better than you why people persecute this
house; I know better than you why—”
The Major patted
him on the shoulder with a gesture almost peculiar to the soothing of a sick
child, and said: “It was a burglar. Obviously it was a burglar.”
“A burglar with a
bad cold,” observed Father Brown, “that might assist you to trace him in the
neighbourhood.”
The Major shook
his head in a sombre manner. “He must be far beyond trace now, I fear,” he
said.
Then, as the
restless man with the revolver turned again towards the door in the garden, he
added in a husky, confidential voice: “I doubt whether I should send for the
police, for fear my friend here has been a little too free with his bullets,
and got on the wrong side of the law. He's lived in very wild places; and, to
be frank with you, I think he sometimes fancies things.”
“I think you once
told me,” said Brown, “that he believes some Indian secret society is pursuing
him.”
Major Putnam
nodded, but at the same time shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose we'd better
follow him outside,” he said. “I don't want any more—shall we say, sneezing?”
They passed out
into the morning light, which was now even tinged with sunshine, and saw
Colonel Cray's tall figure bent almost double, minutely examining the condition
of gravel and grass. While the Major strolled unobtrusively towards him, the
priest took an equally indolent turn, which took him round the next corner of
the house to within a yard or two of the projecting dustbin.
He stood
regarding this dismal object for some minute and a half—, then he stepped
towards it, lifted the lid and put his head inside. Dust and other discolouring
matter shook upwards as he did so; but Father Brown never observed his own
appearance, whatever else he observed. He remained thus for a measurable
period, as if engaged in some mysterious prayers. Then he came out again, with
some ashes on his hair, and walked unconcernedly away.
By the time he
came round to the garden door again he found a group there which seemed to roll
away morbidities as the sunlight had already rolled away the mists. It was in
no way rationally reassuring; it was simply broadly comic, like a cluster of
Dickens's characters. Major Putnam had managed to slip inside and plunge into a
proper shirt and trousers, with a crimson cummerbund, and a light square jacket
over all; thus normally set off, his red festive face seemed bursting with a
commonplace cordiality. He was indeed emphatic, but then he was talking to his
cook—the swarthy son of Malta, whose lean, yellow and rather careworn face
contrasted quaintly with his snow-white cap and costume. The cook might well be
careworn, for cookery was the Major's hobby. He was one of those amateurs who
always know more than the professional. The only other person he even admitted
to be a judge of an omelette was his friend Cray—and as Brown remembered this,
he turned to look for the other officer. In the new presence of daylight and
people clothed and in their right mind, the sight of him was rather a shock.
The taller and more elegant man was still in his night-garb, with tousled black
hair, and now crawling about the garden on his hands and knees, still looking
for traces of the burglar; and now and again, to all appearance, striking the
ground with his hand in anger at not finding him. Seeing him thus quadrupedal
in the grass, the priest raised his eyebrows rather sadly; and for the first
time guessed that “fancies things” might be an euphemism.
The third item in
the group of the cook and the epicure was also known to Father Brown; it was
Audrey Watson, the Major's ward and housekeeper; and at this moment, to judge
by her apron, tucked-up sleeves and resolute manner, much more the housekeeper
than the ward.
“It serves you
right,” she was saying: “I always told you not to have that old-fashioned
cruet-stand.”
“I prefer it,”
said Putnam, placably. “I'm old-fashioned myself; and the things keep
together.”
“And vanish
together, as you see,” she retorted. “Well, if you are not going to bother
about the burglar, I shouldn't bother about the lunch. It's Sunday, and we
can't send for vinegar and all that in the town; and you Indian gentlemen can't
enjoy what you call a dinner without a lot of hot things. I wish to goodness
now you hadn't asked Cousin Oliver to take me to the musical service. It isn't
over till half-past twelve, and the Colonel has to leave by then. I don't
believe you men can manage alone.”
“Oh yes, we can,
my dear,” said the Major, looking at her very amiably. “Marco has all the
sauces, and we've often done ourselves well in very rough places, as you might
know by now. And it's time you had a treat, Audrey; you mustn't be a
housekeeper every hour of the day; and I know you want to hear the music.”
“I want to go to
church,” she said, with rather severe eyes.
She was one of
those handsome women who will always be handsome, because the beauty is not in
an air or a tint, but in the very structure of the head and features. But
though she was not yet middle-aged and her auburn hair was of a Titianesque
fullness in form and colour, there was a look in her mouth and around her eyes
which suggested that some sorrows wasted her, as winds waste at last the edges
of a Greek temple. For indeed the little domestic difficulty of which she was
now speaking so decisively was rather comic than tragic. Father Brown gathered,
from the course of the conversation, that Cray, the other gourmet, had to leave
before the usual lunch-time; but that Putnam, his host, not to be done out of a
final feast with an old crony, had arranged for a special dejeuner to be set
out and consumed in the course of the morning, while Audrey and other graver
persons were at morning service. She was going there under the escort of a
relative and old friend of hers, Dr Oliver Oman, who, though a scientific man
of a somewhat bitter type, was enthusiastic for music, and would go even to
church to get it. There was nothing in all this that could conceivably concern
the tragedy in Miss Watson's face; and by a half conscious instinct, Father
Brown turned again to the seeming lunatic grubbing about in the grass.
When he strolled
across to him, the black, unbrushed head was lifted abruptly, as if in some
surprise at his continued presence. And indeed, Father Brown, for reasons best
known to himself, had lingered much longer than politeness required; or even,
in the ordinary sense, permitted.
“Well!” cried
Cray, with wild eyes. “I suppose you think I'm mad, like the rest?”
“I have
considered the thesis,” answered the little man, composedly. “And I incline to
think you are not.”
“What do you
mean?” snapped Cray quite savagely.
“Real madmen,”
explained Father Brown, “always encourage their own morbidity. They never
strive against it. But you are trying to find traces of the burglar; even when
there aren't any. You are struggling against it. You want what no madman ever
wants.”
“And what is
that?”
“You want to be
proved wrong,” said Brown.
During the last
words Cray had sprung or staggered to his feet and was regarding the cleric
with agitated eyes. “By hell, but that is a true word!” he cried. “They are all
at me here that the fellow was only after the silver—as if I shouldn't be only
too pleased to think so! She's been at me,” and he tossed his tousled black
head towards Audrey, but the other had no need of the direction, “she's been at
me today about how cruel I was to shoot a poor harmless house-breaker, and how
I have the devil in me against poor harmless natives. But I was a good-natured
man once—as good-natured as Putnam.”
After a pause he
said: “Look here, I've never seen you before; but you shall judge of the whole
story. Old Putnam and I were friends in the same mess; but, owing to some
accidents on the Afghan border, I got my command much sooner than most men;
only we were both invalided home for a bit. I was engaged to Audrey out there;
and we all travelled back together. But on the journey back things happened.
Curious things. The result of them was that Putnam wants it broken off, and
even Audrey keeps it hanging on—and I know what they mean. I know what they
think I am. So do you.
“Well, these are
the facts. The last day we were in an Indian city I asked Putnam if I could get
some Trichinopoli cigars, he directed me to a little place opposite his
lodgings. I have since found he was quite right; but `opposite' is a dangerous
word when one decent house stands opposite five or six squalid ones; and I must
have mistaken the door. It opened with difficulty, and then only on darkness;
but as I turned back, the door behind me sank back and settled into its place
with a noise as of innumerable bolts. There was nothing to do but to walk
forward; which I did through passage after passage, pitch-dark. Then I came to
a flight of steps, and then to a blind door, secured by a latch of elaborate
Eastern ironwork, which I could only trace by touch, but which I loosened at
last. I came out again upon gloom, which was half turned into a greenish
twilight by a multitude of small but steady lamps below. They showed merely the
feet or fringes of some huge and empty architecture. Just in front of me was
something that looked like a mountain. I confess I nearly fell on the great
stone platform on which I had emerged, to realize that it was an idol. And
worst of all, an idol with its back to me.
“It was hardly
half human, I guessed; to judge by the small squat head, and still more by a
thing like a tail or extra limb turned up behind and pointing, like a loathsome
large finger, at some symbol graven in the centre of the vast stone back. I had
begun, in the dim light, to guess at the hieroglyphic, not without horror, when
a more horrible thing happened. A door opened silently in the temple wall
behind me and a man came out, with a brown face and a black coat. He had a
carved smile on his face, of copper flesh and ivory teeth; but I think the most
hateful thing about him was that he was in European dress. I was prepared, I
think, for shrouded priests or naked fakirs. But this seemed to say that the
devilry was over all the earth. As indeed I found it to be.
“`If you had only
seen the Monkey's Feet,' he said, smiling steadily, and without other preface,
`we should have been very gentle—you would only be tortured and die. If you had
seen the Monkey's Face, still we should be very moderate, very tolerant—you would
only be tortured and live. But as you have seen the Monkey's Tail, we must
pronounce the worst sentence. which is—Go Free. '
“When he said the
words I heard the elaborate iron latch with which I had struggled,
automatically unlock itself: and then, far down the dark passages I had passed,
I heard the heavy street-door shifting its own bolts backwards.
“`It is vain to
ask for mercy; you must go free,' said the smiling man. `Henceforth a hair
shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite you like an adder; weapons
shall come against you out of nowhere; and you shall die many times. ' And with
that he was swallowed once more in the wall behind; and I went out into the
street.”
Cray paused; and
Father Brown unaffectedly sat down on the lawn and began to pick daisies.
Then the soldier
continued: “Putnam, of course, with his jolly common sense, pooh-poohed all my
fears; and from that time dates his doubt of my mental balance. Well, I'll
simply tell you, in the fewest words, the three things that have happened
since; and you shall judge which of us is right.
“The first
happened in an Indian village on the edge of the jungle, but hundreds of miles
from the temple, or town, or type of tribes and customs where the curse had
been put on me. I woke in black midnight, and lay thinking of nothing in
particular, when I felt a faint tickling thing, like a thread or a hair,
trailed across my throat. I shrank back out of its way, and could not help
thinking of the words in the temple. But when I got up and sought lights and a
mirror, the line across my neck was a line of blood.
“The second
happened in a lodging in Port Said, later, on our journey home together. It was
a jumble of tavern and curiosity-shop; and though there was nothing there
remotely suggesting the cult of the Monkey, it is, of course, possible that
some of its images or talismans were in such a place. Its curse was there,
anyhow. I woke again in the dark with a sensation that could not be put in
colder or more literal words than that a breath bit like an adder. Existence
was an agony of extinction; I dashed my head against walls until I dashed it
against a window; and fell rather than jumped into the garden below. Putnam,
poor fellow, who had called the other thing a chance scratch, was bound to take
seriously the fact of finding me half insensible on the grass at dawn. But I
fear it was my mental state he took seriously; and not my story.
“The third
happened in Malta. We were in a fortress there; and as it happened our bedrooms
overlooked the open sea, which almost came up to our window-sills, save for a
flat white outer wall as bare as the sea. I woke up again; but it was not dark.
There was a full moon, as I walked to the window; I could have seen a bird on
the bare battlement, or a sail on the horizon. What I did see was a sort of
stick or branch circling, self-supported, in the empty sky. It flew straight in
at my window and smashed the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted. It was
one of those queer-shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had come
from no human hand.”
Father Brown
threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose with a wistful look. “Has
Major Putnam,” he asked, “got any Eastern curios, idols, weapons and so on,
from which one might get a hint?”
“Plenty of those,
though not much use, I fear,” replied Cray; “but by all means come into his
study.”
As they entered
they passed Miss Watson buttoning her gloves for church, and heard the voice of
Putnam downstairs still giving a lecture on cookery to the cook. In the Major's
study and den of curios they came suddenly on a third party, silk-hatted and
dressed for the street, who was poring over an open book on the smoking-table—a
book which he dropped rather guiltily, and turned.
Cray introduced
him civilly enough, as Dr Oman, but he showed such disfavour in his very face
that Brown guessed the two men, whether Audrey knew it or not, were rivals. Nor
was the priest wholly unsympathetic with the prejudice. Dr Oman was a very
well-dressed gentleman indeed; well-featured, though almost dark enough for an
Asiatic. But Father Brown had to tell himself sharply that one should be in
charity even with those who wax their pointed beards, who have small gloved
hands, and who speak with perfectly modulated voices.
Cray seemed to
find something specially irritating in the small prayer-book in Oman's
dark-gloved hand. “I didn't know that was in your line,” he said rather rudely.
Oman laughed
mildly, but without offence. “This is more so, I know,” he said, laying his
hand on the big book he had dropped, “a dictionary of drugs and such things.
But it's rather too large to take to church.” Then he closed the larger book,
and there seemed again the faintest touch of hurry and embarrassment.
“I suppose,” said
the priest, who seemed anxious to change the subject, “all these spears and
things are from India?”
“From
everywhere,” answered the doctor. “Putnam is an old soldier, and has been in
Mexico and Australia, and the Cannibal Islands for all I know.”
“I hope it was
not in the Cannibal Islands,” said Brown, “that he learnt the art of cookery.”
And he ran his eyes over the stew-pots or other strange utensils on the wall.
At this moment
the jolly subject of their conversation thrust his laughing, lobsterish face
into the room. “Come along, Cray,” he cried. “Your lunch is just coming in. And
the bells are ringing for those who want to go to church.”
Cray slipped
upstairs to change; Dr Oman and Miss Watson betook themselves solemnly down the
street, with a string of other churchgoers; but Father Brown noticed that the
doctor twice looked back and scrutinized the house; and even came back to the
corner of the street to look at it again.
The priest looked
puzzled. “He can't have been at the dustbin,” he muttered. “Not in those
clothes. Or was he there earlier today?”
Father Brown,
touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer; but today he seemed
about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social law, rigid or implied, could
he be supposed to linger round the lunch of the Anglo-Indian friends; but he
lingered, covering his position with torrents of amusing but quite needless
conversation. He was the more puzzling because he did not seem to want any
lunch. As one after another of the most exquisitely balanced kedgerees of
curries, accompanied with their appropriate vintages, were laid before the
other two, he only repeated that it was one of his fast-days, and munched a
piece of bread and sipped and then left untasted a tumbler of cold water. His
talk, however, was exuberant.
“I'll tell you
what I'll do for you,” he cried—, “I'll mix you a salad! I can't eat it, but
I'll mix it like an angel! You've got a lettuce there.”
“Unfortunately
it's the only thing we have got,” answered the good-humoured Major. “You must
remember that mustard, vinegar, oil and so on vanished with the cruet and the
burglar.”
“I know,” replied
Brown, rather vaguely. “That's what I've always been afraid would happen.
That's why I always carry a cruet-stand about with me. I'm so fond of salads.”
And to the
amazement of the two men he took a pepper-pot out of his waistcoat pocket and
put it on the table.
“I wonder why the
burglar wanted mustard, too,” he went on, taking a mustard-pot from another
pocket. “A mustard plaster, I suppose. And vinegar”—and producing that
condiment—“haven't I heard something about vinegar and brown paper? As for oil,
which I think I put in my left—”
His garrulity was
an instant arrested; for lifting his eyes, he saw what no one else saw—the
black figure of Dr Oman standing on the sunlit lawn and looking steadily into
the room. Before he could quite recover himself Cray had cloven in.
“You're an
astounding card,” he said, staring. “I shall come and hear your sermons, if
they're as amusing as your manners.” His voice changed a little, and he leaned
back in his chair.
“Oh, there are
sermons in a cruet-stand, too,” said Father Brown, quite gravely. “Have you
heard of faith like a grain of mustard-seed; or charity that anoints with oil?
And as for vinegar, can any soldiers forget that solitary soldier, who, when
the sun was darkened—”
Colonel Cray
leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth.
Father Brown, who
was making the salad, tipped two spoonfuls of the mustard into the tumbler of
water beside him; stood up and said in a new, loud and sudden voice—”Drink
that!”
At the same
moment the motionless doctor in the garden came running, and bursting open a
window cried: “Am I wanted? Has he been poisoned?”
“Pretty near,”
said Brown, with the shadow of a smile; for the emetic had very suddenly taken
effect. And Cray lay in a deck-chair, gasping as for life, but alive.
Major Putnam had
sprung up, his purple face mottled. “A crime!” he cried hoarsely. “I will go
for the police!”
The priest could
hear him dragging down his palm-leaf hat from the peg and tumbling out of the
front door; he heard the garden gate slam. But he only stood looking at Cray;
and after a silence said quietly:
“I shall not talk
to you much; but I will tell you what you want to know. There is no curse on
you. The Temple of the Monkey was either a coincidence or a part of the trick;
the trick was the trick of a white man. There is only one weapon that will
bring blood with that mere feathery touch: a razor held by a white man. There
is one way of making a common room full of invisible, overpowering poison:
turning on the gas—the crime of a white man. And there is only one kind of club
that can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the window
next to it: the Australian boomerang. You'll see some of them in the Major's
study.”
With that he went
outside and spoke for a moment to the doctor. The moment after, Audrey Watson
came rushing into the house and fell on her knees beside Cray's chair. He could
not hear what they said to each other; but their faces moved with amazement,
not unhappiness. The doctor and the priest walked slowly towards the garden
gate.
“I suppose the
Major was in love with her, too,” he said with a sigh; and when the other nodded,
observed: “You were very generous, doctor. You did a fine thing. But what made
you suspect?”
“A very small
thing,” said Oman; “but it kept me restless in church till I came back to see
that all was well. That book on his table was a work on poisons; and was put
down open at the place where it stated that a certain Indian poison, though
deadly and difficult to trace, was particularly easily reversible by the use of
the commonest emetics. I suppose he read that at the last moment—”
“And remembered
that there were emetics in the cruet-stand,” said Father Brown. “Exactly. He
threw the cruet in the dustbin—where I found it, along with other silver—for
the sake of a burglary blind. But if you look at that pepper-pot I put on the
table, you'll see a small hole. That's where Cray's bullet struck, shaking up
the pepper and making the criminal sneeze.”
There was a
silence. Then Dr Oman said grimly: “The Major is a long time looking for the
police.”
“Or the police in
looking for the Major?” said the priest. “Well, good-bye.”
ELEVEN
The Strange Crime
of John Boulnois
MR CALHOUN KIDD
was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face dried up with its own
eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black butterfly tie. He was the
emissary in England of the colossal American daily called the Western Sun—also
humorously described as the “Rising Sunset”. This was in allusion to a great
journalistic declaration (attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that “he guessed the
sun would rise in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling.”
Those, however, who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat
mellower traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it. For while
the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity long past anything
English, it also shows a real excitement about the most earnest mental
problems, of which English papers are innocent, or rather incapable. The Sun
was full of the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way. William
James figured there as well as “Weary Willie,” and pragmatists alternated with
pugilists in the long procession of its portraits.
Thus, when a very
unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review
called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series of articles on alleged weak
points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English papers;
though Boulnois's theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary universe
visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness
at Oxford, and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism”. But many American
papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow
of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already
noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with
headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac, headlines such as “Darwin
Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks”—or “Keep Catastrophic,
says Thinker Boulnois.” And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to
take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the little house outside
Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.
That fated
philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to receive the
interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening. The last of a summer
sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills; the romantic Yankee was
both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about his surroundings; and seeing
the door of a genuine feudal old-country inn, The Champion Arms, standing open,
he went in to make inquiries.
In the bar
parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time for a reply to it.
The only other person present was a lean man with close red hair and loose,
horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very bad whisky, but smoking a very
good cigar. The whisky, of course, was the choice brand of The Champion Arms;
the cigar he had probably brought with him from London. Nothing could be more
different than his cynical negligence from the dapper dryness of the young
American; but something in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the
expression of his alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was
a brother journalist.
“Could you do me
the favour,” asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his nation, “of directing me to
the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives, as I understand?”
“It's a few yards
down the road,” said the red-haired man, removing his cigar; “I shall be
passing it myself in a minute, but I'm going on to Pendragon Park to try and
see the fun.”
“What is
Pendragon Park?” asked Calhoun Kidd.
“Sir Claude
Champion's place—haven't you come down for that, too?” asked the other
pressman, looking up. “You're a journalist, aren't you?”
“I have come to
see Mr Boulnois,” said Kidd.
“I've come to see
Mrs Boulnois,” replied the other. “But I shan't catch her at home.” And he
laughed rather unpleasantly.
“Are you
interested in Catastrophism?” asked the wondering Yankee.
“I'm interested
in catastrophes; and there are going to be some,” replied his companion
gloomily. “Mine's a filthy trade, and I never pretend it isn't.”
With that he spat
on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant one could realize that
the man had been brought up as a gentleman.
The American
pressman considered him with more attention. His face was pale and dissipated,
with the promise of formidable passions yet to be loosed; but it was a clever
and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse and careless, but he had a good seal
ring on one of his long, thin fingers. His name, which came out in the course
of talk, was James Dalroy; he was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and
attached to a pink paper which he heartily despised, called Smart Society, in
the capacity of reporter and of something painfully like a spy.
Smart Society, I
regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois on Darwin which was such
a credit to the head and hearts of the Western Sun. Dalroy had come down, it
seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal which might very well end in the
Divorce Court, but which was at present hovering between Grey Cottage and
Pendragon Park.
Sir Claude
Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well as Mr Boulnois. So
were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea of their intimate
acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally incongruous. He had heard of
(and written about, nay, falsely pretended to know) Sir Claude Champion, as
“one of the brightest and wealthiest of England's Upper Ten”; as the great
sportsman who raced yachts round the world; as the great traveller who wrote
books about the Himalayas, as the politician who swept constituencies with a
startling sort of Tory Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music,
literature, and, above all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in
other than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about
his omnivorous culture and restless publicity—, he was not only a great
amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity
that we convey by the word “dilettante”.
That faultless
falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had been snap-shotted so
often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun, gave everyone the impression
of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire, or even a disease. But though Kidd
knew a great deal about Sir Claude—a great deal more, in fact, than there was
to know—it would never have crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an
aristocrat with the newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that
Sir Claude Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such,
according to Dalroy's account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in
couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had been very
different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a millionaire, while
Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately, an unknown one), they still
kept in very close touch with each other. Indeed, Boulnois's cottage stood just
outside the gates of Pendragon Park.
But whether the
two men could be friends much longer was becoming a dark and ugly question. A year
or two before, Boulnois had married a beautiful and not unsuccessful actress,
to whom he was devoted in his own shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of
the household to Champion's had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for
behaving in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement.
Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he seemed to
take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an intrigue that could
do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon were perpetually leaving
bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and motor-cars were perpetually calling at
the cottage for Mrs Boulnois; balls and masquerades perpetually filled the
grounds in which the baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and
Beauty at a tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition
of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air
rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet it was
needless to name.
“I don't think it
can go on without a smash,” said the young man with red hair, getting up and
shaking himself. “Old Boulnois may be squared—or he may be square. But if he's
square he's thick—what you might call cubic. But I don't believe it's possible.”
“He is a man of
grand intellectual powers,” said Calhoun Kidd in a deep voice.
“Yes,” answered
Dalroy; “but even a man of grand intellectual powers can't be such a blighted
fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall be following myself in a minute
or two.”
But Calhoun Kidd,
having finished a milk and soda, betook himself smartly up the road towards the
Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last
of the daylight had faded; the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate,
studded here and there with a star, but lighter on the left side of the sky,
with the promise of a rising moon.
The Grey Cottage,
which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of stiff, high thorn-hedges,
was so close under the pines and palisades of the Park that Kidd at first
mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the name on the narrow wooden gate,
however, and seeing by his watch that the hour of the “Thinker's” appointment
had just struck, he went in and knocked at the front door. Inside the garden
hedge, he could see that the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and
more luxurious than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place
from a porter's lodge. A dog-kennel and a beehive stood outside, like symbols
of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation of
prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was reverend-looking
and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly man-servant who opened the door
was brief but dignified.
“Mr Boulnois
asked me to offer his apologies, sir,” he said, “but he has been obliged to go
out suddenly.”
“But see here, I
had an appointment,” said the interviewer, with a rising voice. “Do you know
where he went to?”
“To Pendragon
Park, sir,” said the servant, rather sombrely, and began to close the door.
Kidd started a
little.
“Did he go with
Mrs—with the rest of the party?” he asked rather vaguely.
“No, sir,” said
the man shortly; “he stayed behind, and then went out alone.” And he shut the
door, brutally, but with an air of duty not done.
The American,
that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness, was annoyed. He felt a
strong desire to hustle them all along a bit and teach them business habits;
the hoary old dog and the grizzled, heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric
shirt-front, and the drowsy old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old
philosopher who couldn't keep an appointment.
“If that's the
way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife's purest devotion,” said Mr Calhoun
Kidd. “But perhaps he's gone over to make a row. In that case I reckon a man
from the Western Sun will be on the spot.”
And turning the
corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up the long avenue of
black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective towards the inner gardens
of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and orderly as plumes upon a hearse;
there were still a few stars. He was a man with more literary than direct
natural associations; the word “Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It
was partly the raven colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable
atmosphere almost described in Scott's great tragedy; the smell of something
that died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken urns,
of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is none the less
incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.
More than once,
as he went up that strange, black road of tragic artifice, he stopped,
startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He could see nothing in
front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit sky above
them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo
of his own tramp. But as he went on he was more and more inclined to conclude,
with the remains of his reason, that there really were other feet upon the
road. He thought hazily of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see
the image of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as
Pierrot's, but patched with black. The apex of the triangle of dark-blue sky
was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that this was
because he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house and garden. He
only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense, there was in the sadness
more violence and secrecy—more—he hesitated for the word, and then said it with
a jerk of laughter—Catastrophism.
More pines, more
pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by a blast of magic. It is
vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but this time he felt
quite certain that he had got into a book. For we human beings are used to
inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it
is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it
wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord. Something happened such as would
have happened in such a place in a forgotten tale.
Over the black
pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon a naked sword—such a slender and
sparkling rapier as may have fought many an unjust duel in that ancient park.
It fell on the pathway far in front of him and lay there glistening like a
large needle. He ran like a hare and bent to look at it. Seen at close quarters
it had rather a showy look: the big red jewels in the hilt and guard were a
little dubious. But there were other red drops upon the blade which were not
dubious.
He looked round
wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile had come, and saw that
at this point the sable facade of fir and pine was interrupted by a smaller
road at right angles; which, when he turned it, brought him in full view of the
long, lighted house, with a lake and fountains in front of it. Nevertheless, he
did not look at this, having something more interesting to look at.
Above him, at the
angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden, was one of those small
picturesque surprises common in the old landscape gardening; a kind of small
round hill or dome of grass, like a giant mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three
concentric fences of roses, and having a sundial in the highest point in the
centre. Kidd could see the finger of the dial stand up dark against the sky
like the dorsal fin of a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to that idle
clock. But he saw something else clinging to it also, for one wild moment—the
figure of a man.
Though he saw it
there only for a moment, though it was outlandish and incredible in costume,
being clad from neck to heel in tight crimson, with glints of gold, yet he knew
in one flash of moonlight who it was. That white face flung up to heaven,
clean-shaven and so unnaturally young, like Byron with a Roman nose, those
black curls already grizzled—he had seen the thousand public portraits of Sir
Claude Champion. The wild red figure reeled an instant against the sundial; the
next it had rolled down the steep bank and lay at the American's feet, faintly
moving one arm. A gaudy, unnatural gold ornament on the arm suddenly reminded
Kidd of Romeo and Juliet; of course the tight crimson suit was part of the
play. But there was a long red stain down the bank from which the man had
rolled—that was no part of the play. He had been run through the body.
Mr Calhoun Kidd
shouted and shouted again. Once more he seemed to hear phantasmal footsteps,
and started to find another figure already near him. He knew the figure, and
yet it terrified him. The dissipated youth who had called himself Dalroy had a
horribly quiet way with him; if Boulnois failed to keep appointments that had
been made, Dalroy had a sinister air of keeping appointments that hadn't. The
moonlight discoloured everything, against Dalroy's red hair his wan face looked
not so much white as pale green.
All this morbid
impressionism must be Kidd's excuse for having cried out, brutally and beyond
all reason: “Did you do this, you devil?”
James Dalroy
smiled his unpleasing smile; but before he could speak, the fallen figure made
another movement of the arm, waving vaguely towards the place where the sword
fell; then came a moan, and then it managed to speak.
“Boulnois....
Boulnois, I say.... Boulnois did it... jealous of me... he was jealous, he was,
he was...”
Kidd bent his
head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the words:
“Boulnois... with
my own sword... he threw it...”
Again the failing
hand waved towards the sword, and then fell rigid with a thud. In Kidd rose
from its depth all that acrid humour that is the strange salt of the
seriousness of his race.
“See here,” he
said sharply and with command, “you must fetch a doctor. This man's dead.”
“And a priest,
too, I suppose,” said Dalroy in an undecipherable manner. “All these Champions
are papists.”
The American
knelt down by the body, felt the heart, propped up the head and used some last
efforts at restoration; but before the other journalist reappeared, followed by
a doctor and a priest, he was already prepared to assert they were too late.
“Were you too
late also?” asked the doctor, a solid prosperous-looking man, with conventional
moustache and whiskers, but a lively eye, which darted over Kidd dubiously.
“In one sense,”
drawled the representative of the Sun. “I was too late to save the man, but I
guess I was in time to hear something of importance. I heard the dead man
denounce his assassin.”
“And who was the
assassin?” asked the doctor, drawing his eyebrows together.
“Boulnois,” said
Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly.
The doctor stared
at him gloomily with a reddening brow—, but he did not contradict. Then the
priest, a shorter figure in the background, said mildly: “I understood that Mr
Boulnois was not coming to Pendragon Park this evening.”
“There again,”
said the Yankee grimly, “I may be in a position to give the old country a fact
or two. Yes, sir, John Boulnois was going to stay in all this evening; he fixed
up a real good appointment there with me. But John Boulnois changed his mind;
John Boulnois left his home abruptly and all alone, and came over to this
darned Park an hour or so ago. His butler told me so. I think we hold what the
all-wise police call a clue—have you sent for them?”
“Yes,” said the
doctor, “but we haven't alarmed anyone else yet.”
“Does Mrs
Boulnois know?” asked James Dalroy, and again Kidd was conscious of an
irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth.
“I have not told
her,” said the doctor gruffly—, “but here come the police.”
The little priest
had stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned with the fallen sword,
which looked ludicrously large and theatrical when attached to his dumpy
figure, at once clerical and commonplace. “Just before the police come,” he
said apologetically, “has anyone got a light?”
The Yankee
journalist took an electric torch from his pocket, and the priest held it close
to the middle part of the blade, which he examined with blinking care. Then,
without glancing at the point or pommel, he handed the long weapon to the
doctor.
“I fear I'm no
use here,” he said, with a brief sigh. “I'll say good night to you, gentlemen.”
And he walked away up the dark avenue towards the house, his hands clasped
behind him and his big head bent in cogitation.
The rest of the
group made increased haste towards the lodge-gates, where an inspector and two
constables could already be seen in consultation with the lodge-keeper. But the
little priest only walked slower and slower in the dim cloister of pine, and at
last stopped dead, on the steps of the house. It was his silent way of
acknowledging an equally silent approach; for there came towards him a presence
that might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd's demands for a lovely and aristocratic
ghost. It was a young woman in silvery satins of a Renascence design; she had
golden hair in two long shining ropes, and a face so startingly pale between
them that she might have been chryselephantine—made, that is, like some old
Greek statues, out of ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her
voice, though low, was confident.
“Father Brown?”
she said.
“Mrs Boulnois?”
he replied gravely. Then he looked at her and immediately said: “I see you know
about Sir Claude.”
“How do you know
I know?” she asked steadily.
He did not answer
the question, but asked another: “Have you seen your husband?”
“My husband is at
home,” she said. “He has nothing to do with this.”
Again he did not
answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a curiously intense expression
on her face.
“Shall I tell you
something more?” she said, with a rather fearful smile. “I don't think he did
it, and you don't either.” Father Brown returned her gaze with a long, grave
stare, and then nodded, yet more gravely.
“Father Brown,”
said the lady, “I am going to tell you all I know, but I want you to do me a
favour first. Will you tell me why you haven't jumped to the conclusion of poor
John's guilt, as all the rest have done? Don't mind what you say: I—I know
about the gossip and the appearances that are against me.”
Father Brown
looked honestly embarrassed, and passed his hand across his forehead. “Two very
little things,” he said. “At least, one's very trivial and the other very
vague. But such as they are, they don't fit in with Mr Boulnois being the
murderer.”
He turned his
blank, round face up to the stars and continued absentmindedly: “To take the
vague idea first. I attach a good deal of importance to vague ideas. All those
things that `aren't evidence' are what convince me. I think a moral
impossibility the biggest of all impossibilities. I know your husband only
slightly, but I think this crime of his, as generally conceived, something very
like a moral impossibility. Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not
be so wicked. Anybody can be wicked—as wicked as he chooses. We can direct our
moral wills; but we can't generally change our instinctive tastes and ways of
doing things. Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this murder. He would not
snatch Romeo's sword from its romantic scabbard; or slay his foe on the sundial
as on a kind of altar; or leave his body among the roses, or fling the sword
away among the pines. If Boulnois killed anyone he'd do it quietly and heavily,
as he'd do any other doubtful thing—take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose
Greek poet. No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It's more like
Champion.”
“Ah!” she said,
and looked at him with eyes like diamonds.
“And the trivial
thing was this,” said Brown. “There were finger-prints on that sword;
finger-prints can be detected quite a time after they are made if they're on
some polished surface like glass or steel. These were on a polished surface.
They were half-way down the blade of the sword. Whose prints they were I have
no earthly clue; but why should anybody hold a sword half-way down? It was a
long sword, but length is an advantage in lunging at an enemy. At least, at
most enemies. At all enemies except one.”
“Except one,” she
repeated.
“There is only
one enemy,” said Father Brown, “whom it is easier to kill with a dagger than a
sword.”
“I know,” said
the woman. “Oneself.”
There was a long
silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly: “Am I right, then? Did
Sir Claude kill himself?”
“Yes” she said,
with a face like marble. “I saw him do it.”
“He died,” said
Father Brown, “for love of you?”
An extraordinary
expression flashed across her face, very different from pity, modesty, remorse,
or anything her companion had expected: her voice became suddenly strong and
full. “I don't believe,” she said, “he ever cared about me a rap. He hated my
husband.”
“Why?” asked the
other, and turned his round face from the sky to the lady.
“He hated my
husband because... it is so strange I hardly know how to say it... because...”
“Yes?” said Brown
patiently.
“Because my
husband wouldn't hate him.”
Father Brown only
nodded, and seemed still to be listening; he differed from most detectives in
fact and fiction in a small point—he never pretended not to understand when he
understood perfectly well.
Mrs Boulnois drew
near once more with the same contained glow of certainty. “My husband,” she
said, “is a great man. Sir Claude Champion was not a great man: he was a
celebrated and successful man. My husband has never been celebrated or
successful; and it is the solemn truth that he has never dreamed of being so.
He no more expects to be famous for thinking than for smoking cigars. On all
that side he has a sort of splendid stupidity. He has never grown up. He still
liked Champion exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him as he would
admire a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table. But he couldn't be got to
conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be envied. He
went mad and killed himself for that.”
“Yes,” said
Father Brown; “I think I begin to understand.”
“Oh, don't you
see?” she cried; “the whole picture is made for that—the place is planned for
it. Champion put John in a little house at his very door, like a dependant—to
make him feel a failure. He never felt it. He thinks no more about such things
than—than an absent-minded lion. Champion would burst in on John's shabbiest
hours or homeliest meals with some dazzling present or announcement or
expedition that made it like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would
accept or refuse amiably with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy
agreeing or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not
turned a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac.”
“And Haman began
to tell them,” said Father Brown, “of all the things wherein the king had
honoured him; and he said: `All these things profit me nothing while I see
Mordecai the Jew sitting in the gate. '”
“The crisis
came,” Mrs Boulnois continued, “when I persuaded John to let me take down some
of his speculations and send them to a magazine. They began to attract
attention, especially in America, and one paper wanted to interview him. When
Champion (who was interviewed nearly every day) heard of this late little crumb
of success falling to his unconscious rival, the last link snapped that held
back his devilish hatred. Then he began to lay that insane siege to my own love
and honour which has been the talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed
such atrocious attentions. I answer that I could not have declined them except
by explaining to my husband, and there are some things the soul cannot do, as
the body cannot fly. Nobody could have explained to my husband. Nobody could do
it now. If you said to him in so many words, `Champion is stealing your wife,'
he would think the joke a little vulgar: that it could be anything but a
joke—that notion could find no crack in his great skull to get in by. Well,
John was to come and see us act this evening, but just as we were starting he
said he wouldn't; he had got an interesting book and a cigar. I told this to
Sir Claude, and it was his death-blow. The monomaniac suddenly saw despair. He
stabbed himself, crying out like a devil that Boulnois was slaying him; he lies
there in the garden dead of his own jealousy to produce jealousy, and John is
sitting in the dining-room reading a book.”
There was another
silence, and then the little priest said: “There is only one weak point, Mrs
Boulnois, in all your very vivid account. Your husband is not sitting in the
dining-room reading a book. That American reporter told me he had been to your
house, and your butler told him Mr Boulnois had gone to Pendragon Park after
all.”
Her bright eyes
widened to an almost electric glare; and yet it seemed rather bewilderment than
confusion or fear. “Why, what can you mean?” she cried. “All the servants were
out of the house, seeing the theatricals. And we don't keep a butler, thank
goodness!”
Father Brown
started and spun half round like an absurd teetotum. “What, what?” he cried
seeming galvanized into sudden life. “Look here—I say—can I make your husband
hear if I go to the house?”
“Oh, the servants
will be back by now,” she said, wondering.
“Right, right!”
rejoined the cleric energetically, and set off scuttling up the path towards
the Park gates. He turned once to say: “Better get hold of that Yankee, or
`Crime of John Boulnois' will be all over the Republic in large letters.”
“You don't
understand,” said Mrs Boulnois. “He wouldn't mind. I don't think he imagines
that America really is a place.”
When Father Brown
reached the house with the beehive and the drowsy dog, a small and neat
maid-servant showed him into the dining-room, where Boulnois sat reading by a
shaded lamp, exactly as his wife described him. A decanter of port and a
wineglass were at his elbow; and the instant the priest entered he noted the
long ash stand out unbroken on his cigar.
“He has been here
for half an hour at least,” thought Father Brown. In fact, he had the air of
sitting where he had sat when his dinner was cleared away.
“Don't get up, Mr
Boulnois,” said the priest in his pleasant, prosaic way. “I shan't interrupt
you a moment. I fear I break in on some of your scientific studies.”
“No,” said
Boulnois; “I was reading `The Bloody Thumb. '” He said it with neither frown
nor smile, and his visitor was conscious of a certain deep and virile
indifference in the man which his wife had called greatness. He laid down a
gory yellow “shocker” without even feeling its incongruity enough to comment on
it humorously. John Boulnois was a big, slow-moving man with a massive head,
partly grey and partly bald, and blunt, burly features. He was in shabby and
very old-fashioned evening-dress, with a narrow triangular opening of shirt-front:
he had assumed it that evening in his original purpose of going to see his wife
act Juliet.
“I won't keep you
long from `The Bloody Thumb' or any other catastrophic affairs,” said Father
Brown, smiling. “I only came to ask you about the crime you committed this
evening.”
Boulnois looked
at him steadily, but a red bar began to show across his broad brow; and he
seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the first time.
“I know it was a
strange crime,” assented Brown in a low voice. “Stranger than murder perhaps—to
you. The little sins are sometimes harder to confess than the big ones—but
that's why it's so important to confess them. Your crime is committed by every
fashionable hostess six times a week: and yet you find it sticks to your tongue
like a nameless atrocity.”
“It makes one
feel,” said the philosopher slowly, “such a damned fool.”
“I know,”
assented the other, “but one often has to choose between feeling a damned fool
and being one.”
“I can't analyse
myself well,” went on Boulnois; “but sitting in that chair with that story I
was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday. It was security, eternity—I
can't convey it... the cigars were within reach... the matches were within
reach... the Thumb had four more appearances to... it was not only a peace, but
a plenitude. Then that bell rang, and I thought for one long, mortal minute
that I couldn't get out of that chair—literally, physically, muscularly
couldn't. Then I did it like a man lifting the world, because I knew all the
servants were out. I opened the front door, and there was a little man with his
mouth open to speak and his notebook open to write in. I remembered the Yankee
interviewer I had forgotten. His hair was parted in the middle, and I tell you
that murder—”
“I understand,”
said Father Brown. “I've seen him.”
“I didn't commit
murder,” continued the Catastrophist mildly, “but only perjury. I said I had
gone across to Pendragon Park and shut the door in his face. That is my crime,
Father Brown, and I don't know what penance you would inflict for it.”
“I shan't inflict
any penance,” said the clerical gentleman, collecting his heavy hat and
umbrella with an air of some amusement; “quite the contrary. I came here
specially to let you off the little penance which would otherwise have followed
your little offence.”
“And what,” asked
Boulnois, smiling, “is the little penance I have so luckily been let off?”
“Being hanged,”
said Father Brown.
TWELVE
The Fairy Tale of
Father Brown
THE picturesque
city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy kingdoms of which
certain parts of the German Empire still consist. It had come under the
Prussian hegemony quite late in history—hardly fifty years before the fine summer
day when Flambeau and Father Brown found themselves sitting in its gardens and
drinking its beer. There had been not a little of war and wild justice there
within living memory, as soon will be shown. But in merely looking at it one
could not dismiss that impression of childishness which is the most charming
side of Germany—those little pantomime, paternal monarchies in which a king
seems as domestic as a cook. The German soldiers by the innumerable
sentry-boxes looked strangely like German toys, and the clean-cut battlements
of the castle, gilded by the sunshine, looked the more like the gilt
gingerbread. For it was brilliant weather. The sky was as Prussian a blue as
Potsdam itself could require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing
use of the colour which a child extracts from a shilling paint-box. Even the
grey-ribbed trees looked young, for the pointed buds on them were still pink,
and in a pattern against the strong blue looked like innumerable childish
figures.
Despite his
prosaic appearance and generally practical walk of life, Father Brown was not
without a certain streak of romance in his composition, though he generally
kept his daydreams to himself, as many children do. Amid the brisk, bright
colours of such a day, and in the heraldic framework of such a town, he did
feel rather as if he had entered a fairy tale. He took a childish pleasure, as
a younger brother might, in the formidable sword-stick which Flambeau always
flung as he walked, and which now stood upright beside his tall mug of Munich.
Nay, in his sleepy irresponsibility, he even found himself eyeing the knobbed
and clumsy head of his own shabby umbrella, with some faint memories of the
ogre's club in a coloured toy-book. But he never composed anything in the form
of fiction, unless it be the tale that follows:
“I wonder,” he
said, “whether one would have real adventures in a place like this, if one put
oneself in the way? It's a splendid back-scene for them, but I always have a
kind of feeling that they would fight you with pasteboard sabres more than
real, horrible swords.”
“You are
mistaken,” said his friend. “In this place they not only fight with swords, but
kill without swords. And there's worse than that.”
“Why, what do you
mean?” asked Father Brown.
“Why,” replied
the other, “I should say this was the only place in Europe where a man was ever
shot without firearms.”
“Do you mean a
bow and arrow?” asked Brown in some wonder.
“I mean a bullet
in the brain,” replied Flambeau. “Don't you know the story of the late Prince
of this place? It was one of the great police mysteries about twenty years ago.
You remember, of course, that this place was forcibly annexed at the time of
Bismarck's very earliest schemes of consolidation—forcibly, that is, but not at
all easily. The empire (or what wanted to be one) sent Prince Otto of
Grossenmark to rule the place in the Imperial interests. We saw his portrait in
the gallery there—a handsome old gentleman if he'd had any hair or eyebrows,
and hadn't been wrinkled all over like a vulture; but he had things to harass
him, as I'll explain in a minute. He was a soldier of distinguished skill and
success, but he didn't have altogether an easy job with this little place. He
was defeated in several battles by the celebrated Arnhold brothers—the three
guerrilla patriots to whom Swinburne wrote a poem, you remember:
Wolves with the
hair of the ermine,
Crows that are
crowned and kings—
These things be
many as vermin,
Yet Three shall
abide these things.
Or something of
that kind. Indeed, it is by no means certain that the occupation would ever
have been successful had not one of the three brothers, Paul, despicably, but
very decisively declined to abide these things any longer, and, by surrendering
all the secrets of the insurrection, ensured its overthrow and his own ultimate
promotion to the post of chamberlain to Prince Otto. After this, Ludwig, the
one genuine hero among Mr Swinburne's heroes, was killed, sword in hand, in the
capture of the city; and the third, Heinrich, who, though not a traitor, had
always been tame and even timid compared with his active brothers, retired into
something like a hermitage, became converted to a Christian quietism which was
almost Quakerish, and never mixed with men except to give nearly all he had to
the poor. They tell me that not long ago he could still be seen about the
neighbourhood occasionally, a man in a black cloak, nearly blind, with very
wild, white hair, but a face of astonishing softness.”
“I know,” said
Father Brown. “I saw him once.”
His friend looked
at him in some surprise. “I didn't know you'd been here before,” he said.
“Perhaps you know as much about it as I do. Anyhow, that's the story of the
Arnholds, and he was the last survivor of them. Yes, and of all the men who
played parts in that drama.”
“You mean that
the Prince, too, died long before?”
“Died,” repeated
Flambeau, “and that's about as much as we can say. You must understand that
towards the end of his life he began to have those tricks of the nerves not
uncommon with tyrants. He multiplied the ordinary daily and nightly guard round
his castle till there seemed to be more sentry-boxes than houses in the town,
and doubtful characters were shot without mercy. He lived almost entirely in a
little room that was in the very centre of the enormous labyrinth of all the
other rooms, and even in this he erected another sort of central cabin or
cupboard, lined with steel, like a safe or a battleship. Some say that under
the floor of this again was a secret hole in the earth, no more than large
enough to hold him, so that, in his anxiety to avoid the grave, he was willing
to go into a place pretty much like it. But he went further yet. The populace
had been supposed to be disarmed ever since the suppression of the revolt, but
Otto now insisted, as governments very seldom insist, on an absolute and literal
disarmament. It was carried out, with extraordinary thoroughness and severity,
by very well-organized officials over a small and familiar area, and, so far as
human strength and science can be absolutely certain of anything, Prince Otto
was absolutely certain that nobody could introduce so much as a toy pistol into
Heiligwaldenstein.”
“Human science
can never be quite certain of things like that,” said Father Brown, still
looking at the red budding of the branches over his head, “if only because of
the difficulty about definition and connotation. What is a weapon? People have
been murdered with the mildest domestic comforts; certainly with tea-kettles,
probably with tea-cosies. On the other hand, if you showed an Ancient Briton a
revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a weapon—until it was fired into him,
of course. Perhaps somebody introduced a firearm so new that it didn't even
look like a firearm. Perhaps it looked like a thimble or something. Was the
bullet at all peculiar?”
“Not that I ever
heard of,” answered Flambeau; “but my information is fragmentary, and only
comes from my old friend Grimm. He was a very able detective in the German
service, and he tried to arrest me; I arrested him instead, and we had many
interesting chats. He was in charge here of the inquiry about Prince Otto, but
I forgot to ask him anything about the bullet. According to Grimm, what
happened was this.” He paused a moment to drain the greater part of his dark
lager at a draught, and then resumed:
“On the evening
in question, it seems, the Prince was expected to appear in one of the outer
rooms, because he had to receive certain visitors whom he really wished to
meet. They were geological experts sent to investigate the old question of the
alleged supply of gold from the rocks round here, upon which (as it was said)
the small city-state had so long maintained its credit and been able to
negotiate with its neighbours even under the ceaseless bombardment of bigger
armies. Hitherto it had never been found by the most exacting inquiry which
could—”
“Which could be
quite certain of discovering a toy pistol,” said Father Brown with a smile.
“But what about the brother who ratted? Hadn't he anything to tell the Prince?”
“He always
asseverated that he did not know,” replied Flambeau; “that this was the one
secret his brothers had not told him. It is only right to say that it received
some support from fragmentary words—spoken by the great Ludwig in the hour of
death, when he looked at Heinrich but pointed at Paul, and said, `You have not
told him... ' and was soon afterwards incapable of speech. Anyhow, the
deputation of distinguished geologists and mineralogists from Paris and Berlin
were there in the most magnificent and appropriate dress, for there are no men
who like wearing their decorations so much as the men of science—as anybody
knows who has ever been to a soiree of the Royal Society. It was a brilliant
gathering, but very late, and gradually the Chamberlain—you saw his portrait,
too: a man with black eyebrows, serious eyes, and a meaningless sort of smile
underneath—the Chamberlain, I say, discovered there was everything there except
the Prince himself. He searched all the outer salons; then, remembering the
man's mad fits of fear, hurried to the inmost chamber. That also was empty, but
the steel turret or cabin erected in the middle of it took some time to open.
When it did open it was empty, too. He went and looked into the hole in the
ground, which seemed deeper and somehow all the more like a grave—that is his
account, of course. And even as he did so he heard a burst of cries and tumult
in the long rooms and corridors without.
“First it was a
distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the horizon of the crowd,
even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless clamour startlingly close, and
loud enough to be distinct if each word had not killed the other. Next came
words of a terrible clearness, coming nearer, and next one man, rushing into
the room and telling the news as briefly as such news is told.
“Otto, Prince of
Heiligwaldenstein and Grossenmark, was lying in the dews of the darkening
twilight in the woods beyond the castle, with his arms flung out and his face
flung up to the moon. The blood still pulsed from his shattered temple and jaw,
but it was the only part of him that moved like a living thing. He was clad in
his full white and yellow uniform, as to receive his guests within, except that
the sash or scarf had been unbound and lay rather crumpled by his side. Before
he could be lifted he was dead. But, dead or alive, he was a riddle—he who had
always hidden in the inmost chamber out there in the wet woods, unarmed and
alone.”
“Who found his
body?” asked Father Brown.
“Some girl
attached to the Court named Hedwig von something or other,” replied his friend,
“who had been out in the wood picking wild flowers.”
“Had she picked
any?” asked the priest, staring rather vacantly at the veil of the branches
above him.
“Yes,” replied
Flambeau. “I particularly remember that the Chamberlain, or old Grimm or
somebody, said how horrible it was, when they came up at her call, to see a
girl holding spring flowers and bending over that—that bloody collapse.
However, the main point is that before help arrived he was dead, and the news,
of course, had to be carried back to the castle. The consternation it created
was something beyond even that natural in a Court at the fall of a potentate.
The foreign visitors, especially the mining experts, were in the wildest doubt
and excitement, as well as many important Prussian officials, and it soon began
to be clear that the scheme for finding the treasure bulked much bigger in the
business than people had supposed. Experts and officials had been promised
great prizes or international advantages, and some even said that the Prince's
secret apartments and strong military protection were due less to fear of the
populace than to the pursuit of some private investigation of—”
“Had the flowers
got long stalks?” asked Father Brown.
Flambeau stared
at him. “What an odd person you are!” he said. “That's exactly what old Grimm
said. He said the ugliest part of it, he thought—uglier than the blood and
bullet—was that the flowers were quite short, plucked close under the head.”
“Of course,” said
the priest, “when a grown up girl is really picking flowers, she picks them
with plenty of stalk. If she just pulled their heads off, as a child does, it
looks as if—” And he hesitated.
“Well?” inquired
the other.
“Well, it looks
rather as if she had snatched them nervously, to make an excuse for being there
after—well, after she was there.”
“I know what
you're driving at,” said Flambeau rather gloomily. “But that and every other
suspicion breaks down on the one point—the want of a weapon. He could have been
killed, as you say, with lots of other things—even with his own military sash;
but we have to explain not bow he was killed, but how he was shot. And the fact
is we can't. They had the girl most ruthlessly searched; for, to tell the
truth, she was a little suspect, though the niece and ward of the wicked old
Chamberlain, Paul Arnhold. But she was very romantic, and was suspected of
sympathy with the old revolutionary enthusiasm in her family. All the same,
however romantic you are, you can't imagine a big bullet into a man's jaw or
brain without using a gun or pistol. And there was no pistol, though there were
two pistol shots. I leave it to you, my friend.”
“How do you know
there were two shots?” asked the little priest.
“There was only
one in his head,” said his companion, “but there was another bullet-hole in the
sash.”
Father Brown's
smooth brow became suddenly constricted. “Was the other bullet found?” he
demanded.
Flambeau started
a little. “I don't think I remember,” he said.
“Hold on! Hold
on! Hold on!” cried Brown, frowning more and more, with a quite unusual concentration
of curiosity. “Don't think me rude. Let me think this out for a moment.”
“All right,” said
Flambeau, laughing, and finished his beer. A slight breeze stirred the budding
trees and blew up into the sky cloudlets of white and pink that seemed to make
the sky bluer and the whole coloured scene more quaint. They might have been
cherubs flying home to the casements of a sort of celestial nursery. The oldest
tower of the castle, the Dragon Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug,
but as homely. Only beyond the tower glimmered the wood in which the man had
lain dead.
“What became of
this Hedwig eventually?” asked the priest at last.
“She is married
to General Schwartz,” said Flambeau. “No doubt you've heard of his career,
which was rather romantic. He had distinguished himself even, before his
exploits at Sadowa and Gravelotte; in fact, he rose from the ranks, which is
very unusual even in the smallest of the German...”
Father Brown sat
up suddenly.
“Rose from the
ranks!” he cried, and made a mouth as if to whistle. “Well, well, what a queer
story! What a queer way of killing a man; but I suppose it was the only one
possible. But to think of hate so patient—”
“What do you
mean?” demanded the other. “In what way did they kill the man?”
“They killed him
with the sash,” said Brown carefully; and then, as Flambeau protested: “Yes,
yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought to say he died of having a sash.
I know it doesn't sound like having a disease.”
“I suppose,” said
Flambeau, “that you've got some notion in your head, but it won't easily get
the bullet out of his. As I explained before, he might easily have been
strangled. But he was shot. By whom? By what?”
“He was shot by
his own orders,” said the priest.
“You mean he
committed suicide?”
“I didn't say by
his own wish,” replied Father Brown. “I said by his own orders.”
“Well, anyhow,
what is your theory?”
Father Brown
laughed. “I am only on my holiday,” he said. “I haven't got any theories. Only
this place reminds me of fairy stories, and, if you like, I'll tell you a
story.”
The little pink
clouds, that looked rather like sweet-stuff, had floated up to crown the
turrets of the gilt gingerbread castle, and the pink baby fingers of the
budding trees seemed spreading and stretching to reach them; the blue sky began
to take a bright violet of evening, when Father Brown suddenly spoke again:
“It was on a
dismal night, with rain still dropping from the trees and dew already
clustering, that Prince Otto of Grossenmark stepped hurriedly out of a side
door of the castle and walked swiftly into the wood. One of the innumerable
sentries saluted him, but he did not notice it. He had no wish to be specially
noticed himself. He was glad when the great trees, grey and already greasy with
rain, swallowed him up like a swamp. He had deliberately chosen the least
frequented side of his palace, but even that was more frequented than he liked.
But there was no particular chance of officious or diplomatic pursuit, for his
exit had been a sudden impulse. All the full-dressed diplomatists he left
behind were unimportant. He had realized suddenly that he could do without
them.
“His great
passion was not the much nobler dread of death, but the strange desire of gold.
For this legend of the gold he had left Grossenmark and invaded
Heiligwaldenstein. For this and only this he had bought the traitor and
butchered the hero, for this he had long questioned and cross-questioned the
false Chamberlain, until he had come to the conclusion that, touching his
ignorance, the renegade really told the truth. For this he had, somewhat
reluctantly, paid and promised money on the chance of gaining the larger
amount; and for this he had stolen out of his palace like a thief in the rain,
for he had thought of another way to get the desire of his eyes, and to get it
cheap.
“Away at the
upper end of a rambling mountain path to which he was making his way, among the
pillared rocks along the ridge that hangs above the town, stood the hermitage,
hardly more than a cavern fenced with thorn, in which the third of the great
brethren had long hidden himself from the world. He, thought Prince Otto, could
have no real reason for refusing to give up the gold. He had known its place
for years, and made no effort to find it, even before his new ascetic creed had
cut him off from property or pleasures. True, he had been an enemy, but he now
professed a duty of having no enemies. Some concession to his cause, some
appeal to his principles, would probably get the mere money secret out of him.
Otto was no coward, in spite of his network of military precautions, and, in
any case, his avarice was stronger than his fears. Nor was there much cause for
fear. Since he was certain there were no private arms in the whole
principality, he was a hundred times more certain there were none in the
Quaker's little hermitage on the hill, where he lived on herbs, with two old
rustic servants, and with no other voice of man for year after year. Prince
Otto looked down with something of a grim smile at the bright, square labyrinths
of the lamp-lit city below him. For as far as the eye could see there ran the
rifles of his friends, and not one pinch of powder for his enemies. Rifles
ranked so close even to that mountain path that a cry from him would bring the
soldiers rushing up the hill, to say nothing of the fact that the wood and
ridge were patrolled at regular intervals; rifles so far away, in the dim
woods, dwarfed by distance, beyond the river, that an enemy could not slink
into the town by any detour. And round the palace rifles at the west door and
the east door, at the north door and the south, and all along the four facades
linking them. He was safe.
“It was all the
more clear when he had crested the ridge and found how naked was the nest of
his old enemy. He found himself on a small platform of rock, broken abruptly by
the three corners of precipice. Behind was the black cave, masked with green
thorn, so low that it was hard to believe that a man could enter it. In front
was the fall of the cliffs and the vast but cloudy vision of the valley. On the
small rock platform stood an old bronze lectern or reading-stand, groaning
under a great German Bible. The bronze or copper of it had grown green with the
eating airs of that exalted place, and Otto had instantly the thought, “Even if
they had arms, they must be rusted by now.” Moonrise had already made a deathly
dawn behind the crests and crags, and the rain had ceased.
“Behind the
lectern, and looking across the valley, stood a very old man in a black robe
that fell as straight as the cliffs around him, but whose white hair and weak
voice seemed alike to waver in the wind. He was evidently reading some daily
lesson as part of his religious exercises. “They trust in their horses...”
“`Sir,' said the
Prince of Heiligwaldenstein, with quite unusual courtesy, `I should like only
one word with you. '
“`... and in
their chariots,' went on the old man weakly, `but we will trust in the name of
the Lord of Hosts....' His last words were inaudible, but he closed the book
reverently and, being nearly blind, made a groping movement and gripped the
reading-stand. Instantly his two servants slipped out of the low-browed cavern
and supported him. They wore dull-black gowns like his own, but they had not
the frosty silver on the hair, nor the frost-bitten refinement of the features.
They were peasants, Croat or Magyar, with broad, blunt visages and blinking
eyes. For the first time something troubled the Prince, but his courage and
diplomatic sense stood firm.
“`I fear we have
not met,' he said, `since that awful cannonade in which your poor brother died.
'
“`All my brothers
died,' said the old man, still looking across the valley. Then, for one instant
turning on Otto his drooping, delicate features, and the wintry hair that
seemed to drip over his eyebrows like icicles, he added: `You see, I am dead,
too. '
“`I hope you'll
understand,' said the Prince, controlling himself almost to a point of
conciliation, `that I do not come here to haunt you, as a mere ghost of those
great quarrels. We will not talk about who was right or wrong in that, but at
least there was one point on which we were never wrong, because you were always
right. Whatever is to be said of the policy of your family, no one for one
moment imagines that you were moved by the mere gold; you have proved yourself
above the suspicion that... '
“The old man in
the black gown had hitherto continued to gaze at him with watery blue eyes and
a sort of weak wisdom in his face. But when the word `gold' was said he held
out his hand as if in arrest of something, and turned away his face to the
mountains.
“`He has spoken
of gold,' he said. `He has spoken of things not lawful. Let him cease to speak.
'
“Otto had the
vice of his Prussian type and tradition, which is to regard success not as an incident
but as a quality. He conceived himself and his like as perpetually conquering
peoples who were perpetually being conquered. Consequently, he was ill
acquainted with the emotion of surprise, and ill prepared for the next
movement, which startled and stiffened him. He had opened his mouth to answer
the hermit, when the mouth was stopped and the voice strangled by a strong,
soft gag suddenly twisted round his head like a tourniquet. It was fully forty
seconds before he even realized that the two Hungarian servants had done it,
and that they had done it with his own military scarf.
“The old man went
again weakly to his great brazen-supported Bible, turned over the leaves, with
a patience that had something horrible about it, till he came to the Epistle of
St James, and then began to read: `The tongue is a little member, but—'
“Something in the
very voice made the Prince turn suddenly and plunge down the mountain-path he
had climbed. He was half-way towards the gardens of the palace before he even
tried to tear the strangling scarf from his neck and jaws. He tried again and
again, and it was impossible; the men who had knotted that gag knew the
difference between what a man can do with his hands in front of him and what he
can do with his hands behind his head. His legs were free to leap like an
antelope on the mountains, his arms were free to use any gesture or wave any
signal, but he could not speak. A dumb devil was in him.
“He had come
close to the woods that walled in the castle before he had quite realized what
his wordless state meant and was meant to mean. Once more he looked down grimly
at the bright, square labyrinths of the lamp-lit city below him, and he smiled
no more. He felt himself repeating the phrases of his former mood with a
murderous irony. Far as the eye could see ran the rifles of his friends, every
one of whom would shoot him dead if he could not answer the challenge. Rifles
were so near that the wood and ridge could be patrolled at regular intervals;
therefore it was useless to hide in the wood till morning. Rifles were ranked
so far away that an enemy could not slink into the town by any detour;
therefore it was vain to return to the city by any remote course. A cry from
him would bring his soldiers rushing up the hill. But from him no cry would
come.
“The moon had
risen in strengthening silver, and the sky showed in stripes of bright,
nocturnal blue between the black stripes of the pines about the castle. Flowers
of some wide and feathery sort—for he had never noticed such things before—were
at once luminous and discoloured by the moonshine, and seemed indescribably
fantastic as they clustered, as if crawling about the roots of the trees.
Perhaps his reason had been suddenly unseated by the unnatural captivity he
carried with him, but in that wood he felt something unfathomably German—the
fairy tale. He knew with half his mind that he was drawing near to the castle
of an ogre—he had forgotten that he was the ogre. He remembered asking his
mother if bears lived in the old park at home. He stooped to pick a flower, as
if it were a charm against enchantment. The stalk was stronger than he
expected, and broke with a slight snap. Carefully trying to place it in his
scarf, he heard the halloo, `Who goes there?' Then he remembered the scarf was
not in its usual place.
“He tried to
scream and was silent. The second challenge came; and then a shot that shrieked
as it came and then was stilled suddenly by impact. Otto of Grossenmark lay
very peacefully among the fairy trees, and would do no more harm either with
gold or steel; only the silver pencil of the moon would pick out and trace here
and there the intricate ornament of his uniform, or the old wrinkles on his
brow. May God have mercy on his soul.
“The sentry who
had fired, according to the strict orders of the garrison, naturally ran
forward to find some trace of his quarry. He was a private named Schwartz,
since not unknown in his profession, and what he found was a bald man in
uniform, but with his face so bandaged by a kind of mask made of his own
military scarf that nothing but open, dead eyes could be seen, glittering
stonily in the moonlight. The bullet had gone through the gag into the jaw;
that is why there was a shot-hole in the scarf, but only one shot. Naturally,
if not correctly, young Schwartz tore off the mysterious silken mask and cast
it on the grass; and then he saw whom he had slain.
“We cannot be
certain of the next phase. But I incline to believe that there was a fairy
tale, after all, in that little wood, horrible as was its occasion. Whether the
young lady named Hedwig had any previous knowledge of the soldier she saved and
eventually married, or whether she came accidentally upon the accident and
their intimacy began that night, we shall probably never know. But we can know,
I fancy, that this Hedwig was a heroine, and deserved to marry a man who became
something of a hero. She did the bold and the wise thing. She persuaded the
sentry to go back to his post, in which place there was nothing to connect him
with the disaster; he was but one of the most loyal and orderly of fifty such
sentries within call. She remained by the body and gave the alarm; and there
was nothing to connect her with the disaster either, since she had not got, and
could not have, any firearms.
“Well,” said
Father Brown rising cheerfully “I hope they're happy.”
“Where are you
going?” asked his friend.
“I'm going to
have another look at that portrait of the Chamberlain, the Arnhold who betrayed
his brethren,” answered the priest. “I wonder what part—I wonder if a man is
less a traitor when he is twice a traitor?”
And he ruminated long before the portrait of a white-haired
man with black eyebrows and a pink, painted sort of smile that seemed to
contradict the black warning in his eyes.