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 Scarborough, in a series of very
large and well-lighted french windows, which showed the
North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble.
In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a
blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled
throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible
tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood's
apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These things
were there, in their place; but one felt that they were
never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there
stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best
cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the
strongest were always nearest the wall and the mildest
nearest the window. A tantalus containing three kinds of
spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this
table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the
whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same
level. Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room
was lined with as complete a set of English classics as the
right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists.
But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that
rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man's
front teeth. One could not say the books were never read;
probably they were, but there was a sense of their being
chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old
churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it
were a public library. And if this strict scientific
intangibility steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and
ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco, it goes
without saying that yet more of such heathen holiness
protected the other shelves that held the specialist's
library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and
even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.
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 he 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 had
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 had 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 he 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 look 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 how 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.
