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"The Incredulity of Father Brown"
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CONTENTS
The Resurrection of Father Brown
The Arrow of Heaven
The Oracle of the Dog
The Miracle of Moon Crescent
The Curse of the Golden Cross
The Dagger with Wings
The Doom of the Darnaways
The Ghost of Gideon Wise
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The Resurrection of Father Brown
THERE was a brief period during which Father
Brown enjoyed, or rather did not enjoy, something
like fame. He was a nine days' wonder in the
newspapers; he was even a common topic of
controversy in the weekly reviews; his exploits were
narrated eagerly and inaccurately in any number of
clubs and drawing--rooms, especially in America.
Incongruous and indeed incredible as it may seem to
any one who knew him, his adventures as a detective
were even made the subject of short stories
appearing in magazines.
Strangely enough, this wandering limelight struck
him in the most obscure, or at least the most
remote, of his many places of residence. He had been
sent out to officiate, as something between a
missionary and a parish priest, in one of those
sections of the northern coast of South America,
where strips of country still cling insecurely to
European powers, or are continually threatening to
become independent republics, under the gigantic
shadow of President Monroe. The population was red
and brown with pink spots; that is, it was
Spanish--American, and largely
Spanish--American--Indian, but there was a
considerable and increasing infiltration of
Americans of the northern sort--Englishmen, Germans,
and the rest. And the trouble seems to have begun
when one of these visitors, very recently landed and
very much annoyed at having lost one of his bags,
approached the first building of which he came in
sight--which happened to be the mission--house and
chapel attached to it, in front of which ran a long
veranda and a long row of stakes, up which were
trained the black twisted vines, their square leaves
red with autumn. Behind them, also in a row, a
number of human beings sat almost as rigid as the
stakes, and coloured in some fashion like the vines.
For while their broad--brimmed hats were as black as
their unblinking eyes, the complexions of many of
them might have been made out of the dark red timber
of those transatlantic forests. Many of them were
smoking very long, thin black cigars; and in all
that group the smoke was almost the only moving
thing. The visitor would probably have described
them as natives, though some of them were very proud
of Spanish blood. But he was not one to draw any
fine distinction between Spaniards and Red Indians,
being rather disposed to dismiss people from the
scene when once he had convicted them of being
native to it.
He was a newspaper man from Kansas City, a lean,
light-- haired man with what Meredith called an
adventurous nose; one could almost fancy it found
its way by feeling its way and moved like the
proboscis of an ant--eater. His name was Snaith, and
his parents, after some obscure meditation, had
called him Saul, a fact which he had the good
feeling to conceal as far as possible. Indeed, he
had ultimately compromised by calling himself Paul,
though by no means for the same reason that had
affected the Apostle of the Gentiles. On the
contrary, so far as he had any views on such things,
the name of the persecutor would have been more
appropriate; for he regarded organized religion with
the conventional contempt which can be learnt more
easily from Ingersoll than from Voltaire. And this
was, as it happened, the not very important side of
his character which he turned towards the mission--
station and the groups in front of the veranda.
Something in their shameless repose and indifference
inflamed his own fury of efficiency; and, as he
could get no particular answer to his first
questions, he began to do all the talking himself.
Standing out there in the strong sunshine, a
spick--and--span figure in his Panama hat and neat
clothes, his grip--sack held m a steely grip, he
began to shout at the people in the shadow. He began
to explain to them very loudly why they were lazy
and filthy, and bestially ignorant and lower than
the beasts that perish, in case this problem should
have previously exercised their minds. In his
opinion it was the deleterious influence of priests
that had made them so miserably poor and so
hopelessly oppressed that they were able to sit in
the shade and smoke and do nothing.
'And a mighty soft crowd you must be at that,' he
said, 'to be bullied by these stuck--up josses
because they walk about in their mitres and their
tiaras and their gold copes and other glad rags,
looking down on everybody else like dirt-- being
bamboozled by crowns and canopies and sacred
umbrellas like a kid at a pantomime; just because a
pompous old High Priest of Mumbo--Jumbo looks as if
he was the lord of the earth. What about you? What
do you look like, you poor simps? I tell you, that's
why you're way--back in barbarism and can't read or
write and--'
At this point the High Priest of Mumbo--Jumbo
came in an undignified hurry out of the door of the
mission--house, not looking very like a lord of the
earth, but rather like a bundle of black second--
hand clothes buttoned round a short bolster in the
semblance of a guy. He was not wearing his tiara,
supposing him to possess one, but a shabby broad hat
not very dissimilar from those of the Spanish
Indians, and it was thrust to the back of his head
with a gesture of botheration. He seemed just about
to speak to the motionless natives when he caught
sight of the stranger and said quickly:
'Oh, can I be of any assistance? Would you like
to come inside?'
Mr Paul Snaith came inside; and it was the
beginning of a considerable increase of that
journalist's information on many things. Presumably
his journalistic instinct was stronger than his
prejudices, as, indeed, it often is in clever
journalists; and he asked a good many questions, the
answers to which interested and surprised him. He
discovered that the Indians could read and write,
for the simple reason that the priest had taught
them; but that they did not read or write any more
than they could help, from a natural preference for
more direct communications. He learned that these
strange people, who sat about in heaps on the
veranda without stirring a hair, could work quite
hard on their own patches of land; especially those
of them who were more than half Spanish; and he
learned with still more astonishment that they all
had patches of land that were really their own. That
much was part of a stubborn tradition that seemed
quite native to natives. But in that also the priest
had played a certain part, and by doing so had taken
perhaps what was his first and last part in
politics, if it was only local politics.
There had recently swept through that region one
of those fevers of atheist and almost anarchist
Radicalism which break out periodically in countries
of the Latin culture, generally beginning in a
secret society and generally ending in a civil war
and in very little else. The local leader of the
iconoclastic party was a certain Alvarez, a rather
picturesque adventurer of Portuguese nationality
but, as his enemies said, of partly Negro origin,
the head of any number of lodges and temples of
initiation of the sort that in such places clothe
even atheism with something mystical. The leader on
the more conservative side was a much more
commonplace person, a very wealthy man named
Mendoza, the owner of many factories and quite
respectable, but not very exciting. It was the
general opinion that the cause of law and order
would have been entirely lost if it had not adopted
a more popular policy of its own, in the form of
securing land for the peasants; and this movement
had mainly originated from the little mission--
station of Father Brown.
While he was talking to the journalist, Mendoza,
the Conservative leader, came in. He was a stout,
dark man, with a bald head like a pear and a round
body also like a pear; he was smoking a very
fragrant cigar, but he threw it away, perhaps a
little theatrically, when he came into the presence
of the priest, as if he had been entering church;
and bowed with a curve that in so corpulent a
gentleman seemed quite improbable. He was always
exceedingly serious in his social gestures,
especially towards religious institutions. He was
one of those laymen who are much more ecclesiastical
than ecclesiastics. It embarrassed Father Brown a
good deal, especially when carried thus into private
life.
'I think I am an anti--clerical,' Father Brown
would say with a faint smile; 'but there wouldn't be
half so much clericalism if they would only leave
things to the clerics.'
'Why Mr Mendoza,' exclaimed the journalist with a
new animation,' I think we have met before. Weren't
you at the Trade Congress in Mexico last year?'
The heavy eyelids of Mr Mendoza showed a flutter
of recognition, and he smiled in his slow way. 'I
remember.'
'Pretty big business done there in an hour or
two,' said Snaith with relish.' Made a good deal of
difference to you, too, I guess.'
'I have been very fortunate,' said Mendoza
modestly.
'Don't you believe it!' cried the enthusiastic
Snaith.' Good fortune comes to the people who know
when to catch hold; and you caught hold good and
sure. But I hope I'm not interrupting your
business?'
'Not at all,' said the other. 'I often have the
honour of calling on the padre for a little talk.
Merely for a little talk.'
It seemed as if this familiarity between Father
Brown and a successful and even famous man of
business completed the reconciliation between the
priest and the practical Mr Snaith. He felt, it
might be supposed, a new respectability clothe the
station and the mission, and was ready to overlook
such occasional reminders of the existence of
religion as a chapel and a presbytery can seldom
wholly avoid. He became quite enthusiastic about the
priest's programme-- at least on its secular and
social side--and announced himself ready at any
moment to act in the capacity of a live wire for its
communication to the world at large. And it was at
this point that Father Brown began to find the
journalist rather more troublesome in his sympathy
than in his hostility.
Mr Paul Snaith set out vigorously to feature
Father Brown. He sent long and loud eulogies on him
across the continent to his newspaper in the Middle
West. He took snapshots of the unfortunate cleric in
the most commonplace occupations, and exhibited them
in gigantic photographs in the gigantic Sunday
papers of the United States. He turned his sayings
into slogans, and was continually presenting the
world with 'A message' from the reverend gentleman
in South America. Any stock less strong and
strenuously receptive than the American race would
have become very much bored with Father Brown. As it
was, he received handsome and eager offers to go on
a lecturing tour in the States; and when he
declined, the terms were raised with expressions of
respectful wonder. A series of stories about him,
like the stories of Sherlock Holmes, were, by the
instrumentality of Mr Snaith, planned out and put
before the hero with requests for his assistance and
encouragement. As the priest found they had started,
he could offer no suggestion except that they should
stop. And this in turn was taken by Mr Snaith as the
text for a discussion on whether Father Brown should
disappear temporarily over a cliff, in the manner of
Dr Watson's hero. To all these demands the priest
had patiently to reply in writing, saying that he
would consent on such terms to the temporary
cessation of the stories and begging that a
considerable interval might occur before they began
again. The notes he wrote grew shorter and shorter;
and as he wrote the last of them, he sighed.
Needless to say, this strange boom in the North
reacted on the little outpost in the South where he
had expected to live in so lonely an exile. The
considerable English and American population already
on the spot began to be proud of possessing so
widely advertised a person. American tourists, of
the sort who land with a loud demand for Westminster
Abbey, landed on that distant coast with a loud
demand for Father Brown. They were within measurable
distance of running excursion trains named after
him, and bringing crowds to see him as if he were a
public monument. He was especially troubled by the
active and ambitious new traders and shopkeepers of
the place, who were perpetually pestering him to try
their wares and to give them testimonials. Even if
the testimonials were not forthcoming, they would
prolong the correspondence for the purpose of
collecting autographs. As he was a good--natured
person they got a good deal of what they wanted out
of him; and it was in answer to a particular request
from a Frankfort wine--merchant named Eckstein that
he wrote hastily a few words on a card, which were
to prove a terrible turning-- point in his life.
Eckstein was a fussy little man with fuzzy hair
and pince-- nez, who was wildly anxious that the
priest should not only try some of his celebrated
medicinal port, but should let him know where and
when he would drink it, in acknowledging its
receipt. The priest was not particularly surprised
at the request, for he was long past surprise at the
lunacies of advertisement. So he scribbled something
down and turned to other business which seemed a
little more sensible. He was again interrupted, by a
note from no less a person than his political enemy
Alvarez, asking him to come to a conference at which
it was hoped that a compromise on an outstanding
question might be reached; and suggesting an
appointment that evening at a cafe just outside the
walls of the little town. To this also he sent a
message of acceptance by the rather florid and
military messenger who was waiting for it; and then,
having an hour or two before him, sat down to
attempt to get through a little of his own
legitimate business. At the end of the time he
poured himself out a glass of Mr Eckstein's
remarkable wine and, glancing at the clock with a
humorous expression, drank it and went out into the
night.
Strong moonlight lay on the little Spanish town,
so that when he came to the picturesque gateway,
with its rather rococo arch and the fantastic fringe
of palms beyond it, it looked rather like a scene in
a Spanish opera. One long leaf of palm with jagged
edges, black against the moon, hung down on the
other side of the arch, visible through the archway,
and had something of the look of the jaw of a black
crocodile. The fancy would not have lingered in his
imagination but for something else that caught his
naturally alert eye. The air was deathly still, and
there was not a stir of wind; but he distinctly saw
the pendent palm--leaf move.
He looked around him and realized that he was
alone. He had left behind the last houses, which
were mostly closed and shuttered, and was walking
between two long blank walls built of large and
shapeless but flattened stones, tufted here and
there with the queer prickly weeds of that region--
walls which ran parallel all the way to the gateway.
He could not see the lights of the cafe outside the
gate; probably it was too far away. Nothing could be
seen under the arch but a wider expanse of
large--flagged pavement, pale in the moon, with the
straggling prickly pear here and there. He had a
strong sense of the smell of evil; he felt queer
physical oppression; but he did not think of
stopping. His courage, which was considerable, was
perhaps even less strong a part of him than his
curiosity. All his life he had been led by an
intellectual hunger for the truth, even of trifles.
He often controlled it in the name of proportion;
but it was always there. He walked straight through
the gateway, and on the other side a man sprang like
a monkey out of the tree-- top and struck at him
with a knife. At the same moment another man came
crawling swiftly along the wall and, whirling a
cudgel round his head, brought it down. Father Brown
turned, staggered, and sank in a heap, but as he
sank there dawned on his round face an expression of
mild and immense surprise.
There was living in the same little town at this
time another young American, particularly different
from Mr Paul Snaith. His name was John Adams Race,
and he was an electrical engineer, employed by
Mendoza to fit out the old town with all the new
conveniences. He was a figure far less familiar in
satire and international gossip than that of the
American journalist. Yet, as a matter of fact,
America contains a million men of the moral type of
Race to one of the moral type of Snaith. He was
exceptional in being exceptionally good at his job,
but in every other way he was very simple. He had
begun life as a druggist's assistant in a Western
village, and risen by sheer work and merit; but he
still regarded his home town as the natural heart of
the habitable world. He had been taught a very
Puritan, or purely Evangelical, sort of Christianity
from the Family Bible at his mother's knee; and in
so far as he had time to have any religion, that was
still his religion. Amid all the dazzling lights of
the latest and even wildest discoveries, when he was
at the very edge and extreme of experiment, working
miracles of light and sound like a god creating new
stars and solar systems, he never for a moment
doubted that the things 'back home' were the best
things in the world; his mother and the Family Bible
and the quiet and quaint morality of his village. He
had as serious and noble a sense of the sacredness
of his mother as if he had been a frivolous
Frenchman. He was quite sure the Bible religion was
really the right thing; only he vaguely missed it
wherever he went in the modern world. He could
hardly be expected to sympathize with the religious
externals of Catholic countries; and in a dislike of
mitres and croziers he sympathized with Mr Snaith,
though not in so cocksure a fashion. He had no
liking for the public bowings and scrapings of
Mendoza and certainly no temptation to the masonic
mysticism of the atheist Alvarez. Perhaps all that
semi--tropical life was too coloured for him, shot
with Indian red and Spanish gold. Anyhow, when he
said there was nothing to touch his home town, he
was not boasting. He really meant that there was
somewhere something plain and unpretentious and
touching, which he really respected more than
anything else in the world. Such being the mental
attitude of John Adams Race in a South American
station, there had been growing on him for some time
a curious feeling, which contradicted all his
prejudices and for which he could not account. For
the truth was this: that the only thing he had ever
met in his travels that in the least reminded him of
the old wood-- pile and the provincial proprieties
and the Bible on his mother's knee was (for some
inscrutable reason) the round face and black clumsy
umbrella of Father Brown.
He found himself insensibly watching that
commonplace and even comic black figure as it went
bustling about; watching it with an almost morbid
fascination, as if it were a walking riddle or
contradiction. He had found something he could not
help liking in the heart of everything he hated; it
was as if he had been horribly tormented by lesser
demons and then found that the Devil was quite an
ordinary person.
Thus it happened that, looking out of his window
on that moonlit night, he saw the Devil go by, the
demon of unaccountable blamelessness, in his broad
black hat and long black coat, shuffling along the
street towards the gateway, and saw it with an
interest which he could not himself understand. He
wondered where the priest was going, and what he was
really up to; and remained gazing out into the
moonlit street long after the little black figure
had passed. And then he saw something else that
intrigued him further. Two other men whom he
recognized passed across his window as across a
lighted stage. A sort of blue limelight of the moon
ran in a spectral halo round the big bush of hair
that stood erect on the head of little Eckstein, the
wine--seller, and it outlined a taller and darker
figure with an eagle profile and a queer old--
fashioned and very top--heavy black hat, which
seemed to make the whole outline still more bizarre,
like a shape in a shadow pantomime. Race rebuked
himself for allowing the moon to play such tricks
with his fancy; for on a second glance he recognized
the black Spanish sidewhiskers and high--featured
face of Dr Calderon, a worthy medical man of the
town, whom he had once found attending
professionally on Mendoza. Still, there was
something in the way the men were whispering to each
other and peering up the street that struck him as
peculiar. On a sudden impulse he leapt over the low
window-- sill and himself went bareheaded up the
road, following their trail. He saw them disappear
under the dark archway, and a moment after there
came a dreadful cry from beyond; curiously loud and
piercing, and all the more blood--curdling to Race
because it said something very distinctly in some
tongue that he did not know.
The next moment there was a rushing of feet, more
cries, and then a confused roar of rage or grief
that shook the turrets and tall palm trees of the
place; there was a movement in the mob that had
gathered, as if they were sweeping backwards through
the gateway. And then the dark archway resounded
with a new voice, this time intelligible to him and
falling with the note of doom, as someone shouted
through the gateway:
'Father Brown is dead!'
He never knew what prop gave way in his mind, or
why something on which he had been counting suddenly
failed him; but he ran towards the gateway and was
just in time to meet his countryman, the journalist
Snaith, coming out of the dark entrance, deadly pale
and snapping his fingers nervously.
'It's quite true,' said Snaith, with something
which for him approached to reverence. 'He's a
goner. The doctor's been looking at him, and there's
no hope. Some of these damned Dagos clubbed him as
he came through the gate--God knows why. It'll be a
great loss to the place.'
Race did not or perhaps could not reply, but ran
on under the arch to the scene beyond. The small
black figure lay where it had fallen on the
wilderness of wide stones starred here and there
with green thorn; and the great crowd was being kept
back, chiefly by the mere gestures of one gigantic
figure in the foreground. For there were many there
who swayed hither and thither at the mere movement
of his hand, as if he had been a magician.
Alvarez, the dictator and demagogue, was a tall,
swaggering figure, always rather flamboyantly clad,
and on this occasion he wore a green uniform with
embroideries like silver snakes crawling all over
it, with an order round his neck hung on a very
vivid maroon ribbon. His close curling hair was
already grey, and in contrast his complexion, which
his friends called olive and his foes octoroon,
looked almost literally golden, as if it were a mask
moulded in gold. But his large--featured face, which
was powerful and humorous, was at this moment
properly grave and grim. He had been waiting, he
explained, for Father Brown at the cafe when he had
heard a rustle and a fall and, coming out, had found
the corpse lying on the flagstones.
'I know what some of you are thinking,' he said,
looking round proudly, 'and if you are afraid of
me--as you are--I will say it for you. I am an
atheist; I have no god to call on for those who will
not take my word. But I tell you in the name of
every root of honour that may be left to a soldier
and a man, that I had no part in this. If I had the
men here that did it, I would rejoice to hang them
on that tree.'
'Naturally we are glad to hear you say so,' said
old Mendoza stiffly and solemnly, standing by the
body of his fallen coadjutor. 'This blow has been
too appalling for us to say what else we feel at
present. I suggest that it will be more decent and
proper if we remove my friend's body and break up
this irregular meeting. I understand,' he added
gravely to the doctor, 'that there is unfortunately
no doubt.'
'There is no doubt,' said Dr Calderon.
John Race went back to his lodgings sad and with
a singular sense of emptiness. It seemed impossible
that he should miss a man whom he never knew. He
learned that the funeral was to take place next day;
for all felt that the crisis should be past as
quickly as possible, for fear of riots that were
hourly growing more probable. When Snaith had seen
the row of Red Indians sitting on the veranda, they
might have been a row of ancient Aztec images carved
in red wood. But he had not seen them as they were
when they heard that the priest was dead.
Indeed they would certainly have risen in
revolution and lynched the republican leader, if
they had not been immediately blocked by the direct
necessity of behaving respectfully to the coffin of
their own religious leader. The actual assassins,
whom it would have been most natural to lynch,
seemed to have vanished into thin air. Nobody knew
their names; and nobody would ever know whether the
dying man had even seen their faces. That strange
look of surprise that was apparently his last look
on earth might have been the recognition of their
faces. Alvarez repeated violently that it was no
work of his, and attended the funeral, walking
behind the coffin in his splendid silver and green
uniform with a sort of bravado of reverence.
Behind the veranda a flight of stone steps scaled
a very steep green bank, fenced by a cactus--hedge,
and up this the coffin was laboriously lifted to the
ground above, and placed temporarily at the foot of
the great gaunt crucifix that dominated the road and
guarded the consecrated ground. Below in the road
were great seas of people lamenting and telling
their beads--an orphan population that had lost a
father. Despite all these symbols that were
provocative enough to him, Alvarez behaved with
restraint and respect; and all would have gone
well--as Race told himself--had the others only let
him alone.
Race told himself bitterly that old Mendoza had
always looked like an old fool and had now very
conspicuously and completely behaved like an old
fool. By a custom common in simpler societies, the
coffin was left open and the face uncovered,
bringing the pathos to the point of agony for all
those simple people. This, being consonant to
tradition, need have done no harm; but some
officious person had added to it the custom of the
French freethinkers, of having speeches by the
graveside. Mendoza proceeded to make a speech--a
rather long speech, and the longer it was, the
longer and lower sank John Race's spirits and
sympathies with the religious ritual involved. A
list of saintly attributes, apparently of the most
antiquated sort, was rolled out with the dilatory
dullness of an after--dinner speaker who does not
know how to sit down. That was bad enough; but
Mendoza had also the ineffable stupidity to start
reproaching and even taunting his political
opponents. In three minutes he had succeeded in
making a scene, and a very extraordinary scene it
was.
'We may well ask,' he said, looking around him
pompously; 'we may well ask where such virtues can
be found among those who have madly abandoned the
creed of their fathers. It is when we have atheists
among us, atheist leaders, nay sometimes even
atheist rulers, that we find their infamous
philosophy bearing fruit in crimes like this. If we
ask who murdered this holy man, we shall assuredly
find--'
Africa of the forests looked out of the eyes of
Alvarez the hybrid adventurer; and Race fancied he
could see suddenly that the man was after all a
barbarian, who could not control himself to the end;
one might guess that all his 'illuminated'
transcendentalism had a touch of Voodoo. Anyhow,
Mendoza could not continue, for Alvarez had sprung
up and was shouting back at him and shouting him
down, with infinitely superior lungs.
'Who murdered him?' he roared. 'Your God murdered
him! His own God murdered him! According to you, he
murders all his faithful and foolish servants--as he
murdered that one,' and he made a violent gesture,
not towards the coffin but the crucifix. Seeming to
control himself a little, he went on in a tone still
angry but more argumentative: 'I don't believe it,
but you do. Isn't it better to have no God than one
that robs you in this fashion? I, at least, am not
afraid to say that there is none. There is no power
in all this blind and brainless universe that can
hear your prayer or return your friend. Though you
beg Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Though I
dare Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Here and
now I will put it to the test--I defy the God who is
not there to waken the man who sleeps for ever.'
There was a shock of silence, and the demagogue
had made his sensation.
'We might have known,' cried Mendoza in a thick
gobbling voice, 'when we allowed such men as you--'
A new voice cut into his speech; a high and
shrill voice with a Yankee accent.
'Stop! Stop!' cried Snaith the journalist;
'something's up! I swear I saw him move.'
He went racing up the steps and rushed to the
coffin, while the mob below swayed with
indescribable frenzies. The next moment he had
turned a face of amazement over his shoulder and
made a signal with his finger to Dr Calderon, who
hastened forward to confer with him. When the two
men stepped away again from the coffin, all could
see that the position of the head had altered. A
roar of excitement rose from the crowd and seemed to
stop suddenly, as if cut off in mid--air; for the
priest in the coffin gave a groan and raised himself
on one elbow, looking with bleared and blinking eyes
at the crowd.
John Adams Race, who had hitherto known only
miracles of science, never found himself able in
after--years to describe the topsy-- turvydom of the
next few days. He seemed to have burst out of the
world of time and space, and to be living in the
impossible. In half an hour the whole of that town
and district had been transformed into something
never known for a thousand years; a medieval people
turned to a mob of monks by a staggering miracle; a
Greek city where the god had descended among men.
Thousands prostrated themselves in the road;
hundreds took vows on the spot; and even the
outsiders, like the two Americans, were able to
think and speak of nothing but the prodigy. Alvarez
himself was shaken, as well he might be; and sat
down, with his head upon his hands.
And in the midst of all this tornado of beatitude
was a little man struggling to be heard. His voice
was small and faint, and the noise was deafening. He
made weak little gestures that seemed more those of
irritation than anything else. He came to the edge
of the parapet above the crowd, waving it to be
quiet, with movements rather like the flap of the
short wings of a penguin. There was something a
little more like a lull in the noise; and then
Father Brown for the first time reached the utmost
stretch of the indignation that he could launch
against his children.
'Oh, you silly people,' he said in a high and
quavering voice; 'Oh, you silly, silly people.'
Then he suddenly seemed to pull himself together,
made a bolt for the steps with his more normal gait,
and began hurriedly to descend.
'Where are you going, Father?' said Mendoza, with
more than his usual veneration.
'To the telegraph office,' said Father Brown
hastily. 'What? No; of course it's not a miracle.
Why should there be a miracle? Miracles are not so
cheap as all that.'
And he came tumbling down the steps, the people
flinging themselves before him to implore his
blessing.
'Bless you, bless you,' said Father Brown
hastily. 'God bless you all and give you more
sense.'
And he scuttled away with extraordinary rapidity
to the telegraph office, where he wired to his
Bishop's secretary: 'There is some mad story about a
miracle here; hope his lordship not give authority.
Nothing in it.'
As he turned away from his effort, he tottered a
little with the reaction, and John Race caught him
by the arm.
'Let me see you home,' he said; 'you deserve more
than these people are giving you.'
John Race and the priest were seated in the
presbytery; the table was still piled up with the
papers with which the latter had been wrestling the
day before; the bottle of wine and the emptied
wine-- glass still stood where he had left them.
'And now,' said Father Brown almost grimly, 'I
can begin to think.'
'I shouldn't think too hard just yet,' said the
American. 'You must be wanting a rest. Besides, what
are you going to think about?'
'I have pretty often had the task of
investigating murders, as it happens,' said Father
Brown. 'Now I have got to investigate my own
murder.'
'If I were you,' said Race, 'I should take a
little wine first.'
Father Brown stood up and filled himself another
glass, lifted it, looked thoughtfully into vacancy,
and put it down again. Then he sat down once more
and said:
'Do you know what I felt like when I died? You
may not believe it, but my feeling was one of
overwhelming astonishment.'
'Well,' answered Race, 'I suppose you were
astonished at being knocked on the head.'
Father Brown leaned over to him and said in a low
voice, 'I was astonished at not being knocked on the
head.'
Race looked at him for a moment as if he thought
the knock on the head had been only too effective;
but he only said: 'What do you mean?'
'I mean that when that man brought his bludgeon
down with a great swipe, it stopped at my head and
did not even touch it. In the same way, the other
fellow made as if to strike me with a knife, but he
never gave me a scratch. It was just like
play--acting. I think it was. But then followed the
extraordinary thing.'
He looked thoughtfully at the papers on the table
for a moment and then went on:
'Though I had not even been touched with knife or
stick, I began to feel my legs doubling up under me
and my very life failing. I knew I was being struck
down by something, but it was not by those weapons.
Do you know what I think it was?' And he pointed to
the wine on the table.
Race picked up the wine--glass and looked at it
and smelt it.
'I think you are right,' he said. 'I began as a
druggist and studied chemistry. I couldn't say for
certain without an analysis; but I think there's
something very unusual in this stuff. There are
drugs by which the Asiatics produce a temporary
sleep that looks like death.'
'Quite so,' said the priest calmly.' The whole of
this miracle was faked, for some reason or other.
That funeral scene was staged--and timed. I think it
is part of that raving madness of publicity that has
got hold of Snaith; but I can hardly believe he
would go quite so far, merely for that. After all,
it's one thing to make copy out of me and run me as
a sort of sham Sherlock Holmes, and--'
Even as the priest spoke his face altered. His
blinking eyelids shut suddenly and he stood up as if
he were choking. Then he put one wavering hand as if
groping his way towards the door.
'Where are you going?' asked the other in some
wonder.
'If you ask me,' said Father Brown, who was quite
white, 'I was going to pray. Or rather, to praise.'
'I'm not sure I understand. What is the matter
with you?'
'I was going to praise God for having so
strangely and so incredibly saved me--saved me by an
inch.'
'Of course,' said Race, 'I am not of your
religion; but believe me, I have religion enough to
understand that. Of course, you would thank God for
saving you from death.'
'No,' said the priest. 'Not from death. From
disgrace.'
The other sat staring; and the priest's next
words broke out of him with a sort of cry. 'And if
it had only been my disgrace! But it was the
disgrace of all I stand for; the disgrace of the
Faith that they went about to encompass. What it
might have been! The most huge and horrible scandal
ever launched against us since the last lie was
choked in the throat of Titus Oates.'
'What on earth are you talking about?' demanded
his companion.
'Well, I had better tell you at once,' said the
priest; and sitting down, he went on more
composedly: 'It came to me in a flash when I
happened to mention Snaith and Sherlock Holmes. Now
I happen to remember what I wrote about his absurd
scheme; it was the natural thing to write, and yet I
think they had ingeniously manoeuvred me into
writing just those words. They were something like
'I am ready to die and come to life again like
Sherlock Holmes, if that is the best way.' And the
moment I thought of that, I realized that I had been
made to write all sorts of things of that kind, all
pointing to the same idea. I wrote, as if to an
accomplice, saying that I would drink the drugged
wine at a particular time. Now, don't you see?'
Race sprang to his feet still staring: 'Yes,' he
said, 'I think I began to see.'
'They would have boomed the miracle. Then they
would have bust up the miracle. And what is the
worst, they would have proved that I was in the
conspiracy. It would have been our sham miracle.
That's all there is to it; and about as near hell as
you and I will ever be, I hope.'
Then he said, after a pause, in quite a mild
voice: 'They certainly would have got quite a lot of
good copy out of me.'
Race looked at the table and said darkly: 'How
many of these brutes were in it?'
Father Brown shook his head. 'More than I like to
think of,' he said; 'but I hope some of them were
only tools. Alvarez might think that all's fair in
war, perhaps; he has a queer mind. I'm very much
afraid that Mendoza is an old hypocrite; I never
trusted him, and he hated my action in an industrial
matter. But all that will wait; I have only got to
thank God for the escape. And especially that I
wired at once to the Bishop.'
John Race appeared to be very thoughtful. 'You've
told me a lot I didn't know,' he said at last, 'and
I feel inclined to tell you the only thing you don't
know. I can imagine how those fellows calculated
well enough. They thought any man alive, waking up
in a coffin to find himself canonized like a saint,
and made into a walking miracle for everyone to
admire, would be swept along with his worshippers
and accept the crown of glory that fell on him out
the sky. And I reckon their calculation was pretty
practical psychology, as men go. I've seen all sorts
of men in all sorts of places; and I tell you
frankly I don't believe there's one man in a
thousand who could wake up like that with all his
wits about him; and while he was still almost
talking in his sleep, would have the sanity and the
simplicity and the humility to--' He was much
surprised to find himself moved, and his level voice
wavering.
Father Brown was gazing abstractedly, and in a
rather cockeyed fashion, at the bottle on the table.
'Look here,' he said, ' what about a bottle of real
wine?'
|
|
The Arrow of Heaven
IT is to be feared that about a hundred detective
stories have begun with the discovery that an
American millionaire has been murdered; an event
which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of
calamity. This story, I am happy to say, has to
begin with a murdered millionaire; in one sense,
indeed, it has to begin with three murdered
millionaires, which some may regard as an cmbarras
de richesse. But it was chiefly this coincidence or
continuity of criminal policy that took the whole
affair out of the ordinary run of criminal cases and
made it the extraordinary problem that it was.
It was very generally said that they had all
fallen victims to some vendetta or curse attaching
to the possession of a relic of great value both
intrinsically and historically: a sort of chalice
inlaid with precious stones and commonly called the
Coptic Cup. Its origin was obscure, but its use was
conjectured to be religious; and some attributed the
fate that followed its possessors to the fanaticism
of some Oriental Christian horrified at its passing
through such materialistic hands. But the mysterious
slayer, whether or no he was such a fanatic, was
already a figure of lurid and sensational interest
in the world of journalism and gossip. The nameless
being was provided with a name, or a nickname. But
it is only with the story of the third victim that
we are now concerned; for it was only in this case
that a certain Father Brown, who is the subject of
these sketches, had an opportunity of making his
presence felt.
When Father Brown first stepped off an Atlantic
liner on to American soil, he discovered as many
other Englishman has done, that he was a much more
important person than he had ever supposed. His
short figure, his short--sighted and undistinguished
countenance, his rather rusty--black clerical
clothes, could pass through any crowd in his own
country without being noticed as anything unusual,
except perhaps unusually insignificant. But America
has a genius for the encouragement of fame; and his
appearance in one or two curious criminal problems,
together with his long association with Flambeau,
the ex-- criminal and detective, had consolidated a
reputation in America out of what was little more
than a rumour in England. His round face was blank
with surprise when he found himself held up on the
quay by a group of journalists, as by a gang of
brigands, who asked him questions about all the
subjects on which he was least likely to regard
himself as an authority, such as the details of
female dress and the criminal statistics of the
country that he had only that moment clapped his
eyes on. Perhaps it was the contrast with the black
embattled solidarity of this group that made more
vivid another figure that stood apart from it,
equally black against the burning white daylight of
that brilliant place and season, but entirely
solitary; a tall, rather yellow--faced man in great
goggles, who arrested him with a gesture when the
journalists had finished and said: 'Excuse me, but
maybe you are looking for Captain Wain.'
Some apology may be made for Father Brown; for he
himself would have been sincerely apologetic. It
must be remembered that he had never seen America
before, and more especially that he had never seen
that sort of tortoise--shell spectacles before; for
the fashion at this time had not spread to England.
His first sensation was that of gazing at some
goggling sea-- monster with a faint suggestion of a
diver's helmet. Otherwise the man was exquisitely
dressed; and to Brown, in his innocence, the
spectacles seemed the queerest disfigurement for a
dandy. It was as if a dandy had adorned himself with
a wooden leg as an extra touch of elegance. The
question also embarrassed him. An American aviator
of the name of Wain, a friend of some friends of his
own in France, was indeed one of a long list of
people he had some hope of seeing during his
American visit; but he had never expected to hear of
him so soon.
'I beg your pardon,' he said doubtfully, 'are you
Captain Wain? Do you-- do you know him?'
'Well, I'm pretty confident I'm not Captain Wain,'
said the man in goggles, with a face of wood. 'I was
pretty clear about that when I saw him waiting for
you over there in the car. But the other question's
a bit more problematical. I reckon I know Wain and
his uncle, and old man Merton, too. I know old man
Merton, but old man Merton don't know me. And he
thinks he has the advantage, and I think I have the
advantage. See?'
Father Brown did not quite see. He blinked at the
glittering seascape and the pinnacles of the city,
and then at the man in goggles. It was not only the
masking of the man's eyes that produced the
impression of something impenetrable. Something in
his yellow face was almost Asiatic, even Chinese;
and his conversation seemed to consist of stratified
layers of irony. He was a type to be found here and
there in that hearty and sociable population; he was
the inscrutable American.
'My name's Drage,' he said, 'Norman Drage, and
I'm an American citizen, which explains everything.
At least I imagine your friend Wain would like to
explain the rest; so we'll postpone The Fourth of
July till another date.'
Father Brown was dragged in a somewhat dazed
condition towards a car at some little distance, in
which a young man with tufts of untidy yellow hair
and a rather harassed and haggard expression, hailed
him from afar, and presented himself as Peter Wain.
Before he knew where he was he was stowed in the car
and travelling with considerable speed through and
beyond the city. He was unused to the impetuous
practicality of such American action, and felt about
as bewildered as if a chariot drawn by dragons had
carried him away into fairyland. It was under these
disconcerting conditions that he heard for the first
time, in long monologues from Wain, and short
sentences from Drage, the story of the Coptic Cup
and the two crimes already connected with it.
It seemed that Wain had an uncle named Crake who
had a partner named Merton, who was number three in
the series of rich business men to whom the cup had
belonged. The first of them, Titus P. Trant, the
Copper King, had received threatening letters from
somebody signing himself Daniel Doom. The name was
presumably a pseudonym, but it had come to stand for
a very public if not a very popular character; for
somebody as well known as Robin Hood and Jack the
Ripper combined. For it soon became clear that the
writer of the threatening letter did not confine
himself to threatening. Anyhow, the upshot was that
old Trant was found one morning with his head in his
own lily--pond, and there was not the shadow of a
clue. The cup was, fortunately, safe in the bank;
and it passed with the rest of Trant's property to
his cousin, Brian Horder, who was also a man of
great wealth and who was also threatened by the
nameless enemy. Brian Horder was picked up dead at
the foot of a cliff outside his seaside residence,
at which there was a burglary, this time on a large
scale. For though the cup apparently again escaped,
enough bonds and securities were stolen to leave
Horder's financial affairs in confusion.
'Brian Horder's widow,' explained Wain, 'had to
sell most of his valuables, I believe, and Brander
Merton must have purchased the cup at that time, for
he had it when I first knew him. But you can guess
for yourself that it's not a very comfortable thing
to have.'
'Has Mr Merton ever had any of the threatening
letters?' asked Father Brown, after a pause.
'I imagine he has,' said Mr Drage; and something
in his voice made the priest look at him curiously,
until he realized that the man in goggles was
laughing silently, in a fashion that gave the
newcomer something of a chill.
'I'm pretty sure he has,' said Peter Wain,
frowning. 'I've not seen the letters, only his
secretary sees any of his letters, for he is pretty
reticent about business matters, as big business men
have to be. But I've seen him real upset and annoyed
with letters; and letters that he tore up, too,
before even his secretary saw them. The secretary
himself is getting nervous and says he is sure
somebody is laying for the old man; and the long and
the short of it is, that we'd be very grateful for a
little advice in the matter. Everybody knows your
great reputation. Father Brown, and the secretary
asked me to see if you'd mind coming straight out to
the Merton house at once.'
'Oh, I see,' said Father Brown, on whom the
meaning of this apparent kidnapping began to dawn at
last. 'But, really, I don't see that I can do any
more than you can. You're on the spot, and must have
a hundred times more data for a scientific
conclusion than a chance visitor.'
'Yes,' said Mr Drage dryly; 'our conclusions are
much too scientific to be true. I reckon if anything
hit a man like Titus P. Trant, it just came out of
the sky without waiting for any scientific
explanation. What they call a bolt from the blue.'
'You can't possibly mean,' cried Wain, 'that it
was supernatural!'
But it was by no means easy at any time to
discover what Mr Drage could possibly mean; except
that if he said somebody was a real smart man, he
very probably meant he was a fool. Mr Drage
maintained an Oriental immobility until the car
stopped, a little while after, at what was obviously
their destination. It was rather a singular place.
They had been driving through a thinly--wooded
country that opened into a wide plain, and just in
front of them was a building consisting of a single
wall or very high fence, round, like a Roman camp,
and having rather the appearance of an aerodrome.
The barrier did not look like wood or stone, and
closer inspection proved it to be of metal.
They all alighted from the car, and one small
door in the wall was slid open with considerable
caution, after manipulations resembling the opening
of a safe. But, much to Father Brown's surprise, the
man called Norman Drage showed no disposition to
enter, but took leave of them with sinister gaiety.
'I won't come in,' he said. 'It 'ud be too much
pleasurable excitement for old man Merton, I reckon.
He loves the sight of me so much that he'd die of
joy.'
And he strode away, while Father Brown, with
increasing wonder, was admitted through the steel
door which instantly clicked behind him. Inside was
a large and elaborate garden of gay and varied
colours, but entirely without any trees or tall
shrubs or flowers. In the centre of it rose a house
of handsome and even striking architecture, but so
high and narrow as rather to resemble a tower. The
burning sunlight gleamed on glass roofing here and
there at the top, but there seemed to be no windows
at all in the lower part of it. Over everything was
that spotless and sparkling cleanliness that seemed
so native to the clear American air. When they came
inside the portal, they stood amid resplendent
marble and metals and enamels of brilliant colours,
but there was no staircase. Nothing but a single
shaft for a lift went up the centre between the
solid walls, and the approach to it was guarded by
heavy, powerful men like plain--clothes policemen.
'Pretty elaborate protection, I know,' said Wain.
'Maybe it makes you smile a little, Father Brown, to
find Merton has to live in a fortress like this
without even a tree in the garden for anyone to hide
behind. But you don't know what sort of proposition
we're up against in this country. And perhaps you
don't know just what the name of Brander Merton
means. He's a quiet--looking man enough, and anybody
might pass him in the street; not that they get much
chance nowadays, for he can only go out now and then
in a closed car. But if anything happened to Brander
Merton there'd be earthquakes from Alaska to the
Cannibal Islands. I fancy there was never a king or
emperor who had such power over the nations as he
has. After all, I suppose if you'd been asked to
visit the tsar, or the king of England, you'd have
had the curiosity to go. You mayn't care much for
tsars or millionaires; but it just means that power
like that is always interesting. And I hope it's not
against your principles to visit a modern sort of
emperor like Merton.'
'Not at all,' said Father Brown, quietly. 'It is
my duty to visit prisoners and all miserable men in
captivity.'
There was a silence, and the young man frowned
with a strange and almost shifty look on his lean
face. Then he said, abruptly:
'Well, you've got to remember it isn't only
common crooks or the Black Hand that's against him.
This Daniel Doom is pretty much like the devil. Look
how he dropped Trant in his own gardens and Horder
outside his house, and got away with it.'
The top floor of the mansion, inside the
enormously thick walls, consisted of two rooms; an
outer room which they entered, and an inner room
that was the great millionaire's sanctum. They
entered the outer room just as two other visitors
were coming out of the inner one. One was hailed by
Peter Wain as his uncle-- a small but very stalwart
and active man with a shaven head that looked bald,
and a brown face that looked almost too brown to
have ever been white. This was old Crake, commonly
called Hickory Crake in reminiscence of the more
famous Old Hickory, because of his fame in the last
Red Indian wars. His companion was a singular
contrast--a very dapper gentleman with dark hair
like a black varnish and a broad, black ribbon to
his monocle: Barnard Blake, who was old Merton's
lawyer and had been discussing with the partners the
business of the firm. The four men met in the middle
of the outer room and paused for a little polite
conversation, in the act of respectively going and
coming. And through all goings and comings another
figure sat at the back of the room near the inner
door, massive and motionless in the half--light from
the inner window; a man with a Negro face and
enormous shoulders. This was what the humorous
self--criticism of America playfully calls the Bad
Man; whom his friends might call a bodyguard and his
enemies a bravo.
This man never moved or stirred to greet anybody;
but the sight of him in the outer room seemed to
move Peter Wain to his first nervous query.
'Is anybody with the chief?' he asked.
'Don't get rattled, Peter,' chuckled his uncle.
'Wilton the secretary is with him, and I hope that's
enough for anybody. I don't believe Wilton ever
sleeps for watching Merton. He is better than twenty
bodyguards. And he's quick and quiet as an Indian.'
'Well, you ought to know,' said his nephew,
laughing. 'I remember the Red Indian tricks you used
to teach me when I was a boy and liked to read Red
Indian stories. But in my Red Indian stories Red
Indians seemed always to have the worst of it.'
'They didn't in real life,' said the old
frontiersman grimly.
'Indeed?' inquired the bland Mr Blake. 'I should
have thought they could do very little against our
firearms.'
'I've seen an Indian stand under a hundred guns
with nothing but a little scalping--knife and kill a
white man standing on the top of a fort,' said
Crake.
'Why, what did he do with it?' asked the other.
'Threw it,' replied Crake, 'threw it in a flash
before a shot could be fired. I don't know where he
learnt the trick.'
'Well, I hope you didn't learn it,' said his
nephew, laughing.
'It seems to me,' said Father Brown,
thoughtfully, 'that the story might have a moral.'
While they were speaking Mr Wilton, the
secretary, had come out of the inner room and stood
waiting; a pale, fair--haired man with a square chin
and steady eyes with a look like a dog's; it was not
difficult to believe that he had the single-- eye of
a watchdog.
He only said, 'Mr Merton can see you in about ten
minutes,' but it served for a signal to break up the
gossiping group. Old Crake said he must be off, and
his nephew went out with him and his legal
companion, leaving Father Brown for the moment alone
with his secretary; for the negroid giant at the
other end of the room could hardly be felt as if he
were human or alive; he sat so motionless with his
broad back to them, staring towards the inner room.
'Arrangements rather elaborate here, I'm afraid,'
said the secretary. 'You've probably heard all about
this Daniel Doom, and why it isn't safe to leave the
boss very much alone.'
'But he is alone just now, isn't he?' said Father
Brown.
The secretary looked at him with grave, grey
eyes. 'For fifteen minutes,' he said. 'For fifteen
minutes out of the twenty--four hours. That is all
the real solitude he has; and that he insists on,
for a pretty remarkable reason.'
'And what is the reason?' inquired the visitor.
Wilton, the secretary, continued his steady gaze,
but his mouth, that had been merely grave, became
grim.
'The Coptic Cup,' he said. 'Perhaps you've
forgotten the Coptic Cup; but he hasn't forgotten
that or anything else. He doesn't trust any of us
about the Coptic Cup. It's locked up somewhere and
somehow in that room so that only he can find it;
and he won't take it out till we're all out of the
way. So we have to risk that quarter of an hour
while he sits and worships it; I reckon it's the
only worshipping he does. Not that there's any risk
really; for I've turned all this place into a trap I
don't believe the devil himself could get into-- or
at any rate, get out of. If this infernal Daniel
Doom pays us a visit, he'll stay to dinner and a
good bit later, by God! I sit here on hot bricks for
the fifteen minutes, and the instant I heard a shot
or a sound of struggle I'd press this button and an
electrocuting current would run in a ring round that
garden wall, so that it 'ud be death to cross or
climb it. Of course, there couldn't be a shot, for
this is the only way in; and the only window he sits
at is away up on the top of a tower as smooth as a
greasy pole. But, anyhow, we're all armed here, of
course; and if Doom did get into that room he'd be
dead before he got out.'
Father Brown was blinking at the carpet in a
brown study. Then he said suddenly, with something
like a jerk: 'I hope you won't mind my mentioning
it, but a kind of a notion came into my head just
this minute. It's about you.'
'Indeed,' remarked Wilton, 'and what about me?'
'I think you are a man of one idea,' said Father
Brown, 'and you will forgive me for saying that it
seems to be even more the idea of catching Daniel
Doom than of defending Brander Merton.'
Wilton started a little and continued to stare at
his companion; then very slowly his grim mouth took
on a rather curious smile. 'How did you--what makes
you think that?' he asked.
'You said that if you heard a shot you could
instantly electrocute the escaping enemy,' remarked
the priest. 'I suppose it occurred to you that the
shot might be fatal to your employer before the
shock was fatal to his foe. I don't mean that you
wouldn't protect Mr Merton if you could, but it
seems to come rather second in your thoughts. The
arrangements are very elaborate, as you say, and you
seem to have elaborated them. But they seem even
more designed to catch a murderer than to save a
man.'
'Father Brown,' said the secretary, who had
recovered his quiet tone, 'you're very smart, but
there's something more to you than smartness.
Somehow you're the sort of man to whom one wants to
tell the truth; and besides, you'll probably hear
it, anyhow, for in one way it's a joke against me
already. They all say I'm a monomaniac about running
down this big crook, and perhaps I am. But I'll tell
you one thing that none of them know. My full name
is John Wilton Border.' Father Brown nodded as if he
were completely enlightened, but the other went on.
'This fellow who calls himself Doom killed my
father and uncle and ruined my mother. When Merton
wanted a secretary I took the job, because I thought
that where the cup was the criminal might sooner or
later be. But I didn't know who the criminal was and
could only wait for him; and I meant to serve Merton
faithfully.'
'I understand,' said Father Brown gently; 'and,
by the way, isn't it time that we attended on him?'
'Why, yes,' answered Wilton, again starting a
little out of his brooding so that the priest
concluded that his vindictive mania had again
absorbed him for a moment.' Go in now by all means.'
Father Brown walked straight into the inner room.
No sound of greetings followed, but only a dead
silence; and a moment after the priest reappeared in
the doorway.
At the same moment the silent bodyguard sitting
near the door moved suddenly; and it was as if a
huge piece of furniture had come to life. It seemed
as though something in the very attitude of the
priest had been a signal; for his head was against
the light from the inner window and his face was in
shadow.
'I suppose you will press that button,' he said
with a sort of sigh.
Wilton seemed to awake from his savage brooding
with a bound and leapt up with a catch in his voice.
'There was no shot,' he cried.
'Well,' said Father Brown, 'it depends what you
mean by a shot.'
Wilton rushed forward, and they plunged into the
inner room together. It was a comparatively small
room and simply though elegantly furnished. Opposite
to them one wide window stood open, over--looking
the garden and the wooded plain. Close up against
the window stood a chair and a small table, as if
the captive desired as much air and light as was
allowed him during his brief luxury of loneliness.
On the little table under the window stood the
Coptic Cup; its owner had evidently been looking at
it in the best light. It was well worth looking at,
for that white and brilliant daylight turned its
precious stones to many--coloured flames so that it
might have been a model of the Holy Grail. It was
well worth looking at; but Brander Merton was not
looking at it. For his head had fallen back over his
chair, his mane of white hair hanging towards the
floor, and his spike of grizzled beard thrust up
towards the ceiling, and out of his throat stood a
long, brown--painted arrow with red leathers at the
other end.
'A silent shot,' said Father Brown, in a low
voice; 'I was just wondering about those new
inventions for silencing firearms. But this is a
very old invention, and quite as silent.'
Then, after a moment, he added: 'I'm afraid he is
dead. What are you going to do?'
The pale secretary roused himself with abrupt
resolution. 'I'm going to press that button, of
course,' he said, 'and if that doesn't do for Daniel
Doom, I'm going to hunt him through the world till I
find him.'
'Take care it doesn't do for any of our friends,'
observed Father Brown; 'they can hardly be far off;
we'd better call them.'
'That lot know all about the wall,' answered
Wilton. 'None of them will try to climb it, unless
one of them ... is in a great hurry.'
Father Brown went to the window by which the
arrow had evidently entered and looked out. The
garden, with its flat flower-- beds, lay far below
like a delicately coloured map of the world. The
whole vista seemed so vast and empty, the tower
seemed set so far up in the sky that as he stared
out a strange phrase came back to his memory.
'A bolt from the blue,' he said. 'What was that
somebody said about a bolt from the blue and death
coming out of the sky? Look how far away everything
looks; it seems extraordinary that an arrow could
come so far, unless it were an arrow from heaven.'
Wilton had returned, but did not reply, and the
priest went on as in soliloquy. 'One thinks of
aviation. We must ask young Wain ... about
aviation.'
'There's a lot of it round here,' said the
secretary.
'Case of very old or very new weapons,' observed
Father Brown. 'Some would be quite familiar to his
old uncle, I suppose; we must ask him about arrows.
This looks rather like a Red Indian arrow. I don't
know where the Red Indian shot it from; but you
remember the story the old man told. I said it had a
moral.'
'If it had a moral,' said Wilton warmly, 'it was
only that a real 'Red Indian might shoot a thing
farther than you'd fancy. It's nonsense your
suggesting a parallel.'
'I don't think you've got the moral quite right,'
said Father Brown.
Although the little priest appeared to melt into
the millions of New York next day, without any
apparent attempt to be anything but a number in a
numbered street, he was, in fact, unobtrusively busy
for the next fortnight with the commission that had
been given him, for he was filled with profound fear
about a possible miscarriage of justice. Without
having any particular air of singling them out from
his other new acquaintances, he found it easy to
fall into talk with the two or three men recently
involved in the mystery; and with old Hickory Crake
especially he had a curious and interesting
conversation. It took place on a seat in Central
Park, where the veteran sat with his bony hands and
hatchet face resting on the oddly-- shaped head of a
walking--stick of dark red wood, possibly modelled
on a tomahawk.
'Well, it may be a long shot,' he said, wagging
his head, 'but I wouldn't advise you to be too
positive about how far an Indian arrow could go.
I've known some bow--shots that seemed to go
straighter than any bullets, and hit the mark to
amazement, considering how long they had been
travelling. Of course, you practically never hear
now of a Red Indian with a bow and arrows, still
less of a Red Indian hanging about here. But if by
any chance there were one of the old Indian
marksmen, with one of the old Indian bows, hiding in
those trees hundreds of yards beyond the Merton
outer wall--why, then I wouldn't put it past the
noble savage to be able to send an arrow over the
wall and into the top window of Merton's house; no,
nor into Merton, either. I've seen things quite as
wonderful as that done in the old days.'
'No doubt,' said the priest, 'you have done
things quite as wonderful, as well as seen them.'
Old Crake chuckled, and then said gruffly: 'Oh,
that's all ancient history.'
'Some people have a way of studying ancient
history,' the priest said. 'I suppose we may take it
there is nothing in your old record In make people
talk unpleasantly about this affair.'
'What do you mean?' demanded Crake, his eyes
shifting sharply for the first time, in his red,
wooden face, that was rather like I he head of a
tomahawk.
'Well, since you were so well acquainted with all
the arts and crafts of the Redskin--' began Father
Brown slowly.
Crake had had a hunched and almost shrunken
appearance as he sat with his chin propped on its
queer--shaped crutch. But the next instant he stood
erect in the path like a fighting bravo with the
crutch clutched like a cudgel.
'What?' he cried--in something like a raucous
screech--'what the hell! Are you standing up to me
to tell me I might happen to have murdered my own
brother--in--law?'
From a dozen seats dotted about the path people
looked to-- wards the disputants, as they stood
facing each other in the middle of the path, the
bald--headed energetic little man brandishing his
outlandish stick like a club, and the black, dumpy
figure of the little cleric looking at him without
moving a muscle, save for his hinging eyelids. For a
moment it looked as if the black, dumpy figure would
be knocked on the head, and laid out with true Red
Indian promptitude and dispatch; and the large form
of an Irish policeman could be seen heaving up in
the distance and bearing down on the group. But the
priest only said, quite placidly, like one answering
an ordinary query:
'I have formed certain conclusions about it, but
I do not think I will mention them till I make my
report.'
Whether under the influence of the footsteps of
the policeman or of the eyes of the priest, old
Hickory tucked his stick under his arm and put his
hat on again, grunting. The priest bade him a placid
good morning, and passed in an unhurried fashion out
of the park, making his way to the lounge of the
hotel where he knew that young Wain was to be found.
The young man sprang up with a greeting; he looked
even more haggard and harassed than before, as if
some worry were eating him away; and the priest had
a suspicion that his young friend had recently been
engaged, with only too conspicuous success, in
evading the last Amendment to the American
Constitution. But at the first word about his hobby
or favourite science he was vigilant and
concentrated enough. For Father Brown had asked, in
an idle and conversational fashion, whether much
flying was done in that district, and had told how
he had at first mistaken Mr Merton's circular wall
for an aerodrome.
'It's a wonder you didn't see any while we were
there,' answered Captain Wain. 'Sometimes they're as
thick as flies; that open plain is a great place for
them, and I shouldn't wonder if it were the chief
breeding--ground, so to speak, for my sort of birds
in the future. I've flown a good deal there myself,
of course, and I know most of the fellows about here
who flew in the war; but there are a whole lot of
people taking to it out there now whom I never heard
of in my life. I suppose it will be like motoring
soon, and every man in the States will have one.'
'Being endowed by his Creator,' said Father Brown
with a smile, 'with the right to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of motoring-- not to mention aviation.
So I suppose we may take it that one strange
aeroplane passing over that house, at certain times,
wouldn't be noticed much.'
'No,' replied the young man; 'I don't suppose it
would.'
'Or even if the man were known,' went on the
other, 'I suppose he might get hold of a machine
that wouldn't be recognized as his. If you, for
instance, flew in the ordinary way, Mr Merton and
his friends might recognize the rig--out, perhaps;
but you might pass pretty near that window on a
different pattern of plane, or whatever you call it;
near enough for practical purposes.'
'Well, yes,' began the young man, almost
automatically, and then ceased, and remained staring
at the cleric with an open mouth and eyes standing
out of his head.
'My God!' he said, in a low voice;' my God!'
Then he rose from the lounge seat, pale and
shaking from head to foot and still staring at the
priest.
'Are you mad?' he said;' are you raving mad?'
There was a silence and then he spoke again in a
swift hissing fashion. 'You positively come here to
suggest--'
'No; only to collect suggestions,' said Father
Brown, rising. 'I may have formed some conclusions
provisionally, but I had better reserve them for the
present.'
And then saluting the other with the same stiff
civility, he passed out of the hotel to continue his
curious peregrinations.
By the dusk of that day they had led him down the
dingy streets and steps that straggled and tumbled
towards the river in the the oldest and most
irregular part of the city. Immediately under the
coloured lantern that marked the entrance to a
rather low Chinese restaurant he encountered a
figure he had seen before, though by no means
presenting itself to the eye as he had seen it.
Mr Norman Drage still confronted the world grimly
behind his great goggles, which seemed somehow to
cover his face like a dark musk of glass. But except
for the goggles, his appearance had undergone a
strange transformation in the month that had elapsed
since the murder. He had then, as Father Brown had
noted, been dressed up to the nines-- up to that
point, indeed, where there begins to be too fine a
distinction between the dandy and the dummy outside
a tailor's shop. But now all those externals were
mysteriously altered for the worse; as if the
tailor's dummy had been turned into a scarecrow. His
top hat still existed, but it was battered and
shabby; his clothes were dilapidated; his
watch--chain and minor ornaments were gone. Father
Brown, however, addressed him as if they had met
yesterday, and made no demur to silting down with
him on a bench in the cheap eating--house whither he
was bound. It was not he, however, who began the
conversation.
'Well?' growled Drage, 'and have you succeeded in
avenging your holy and sainted millionaire? We know
all millionaires are holy and sainted; you can find
it all in the papers next day, about how they lived
by the light of the Family Bible they read at their
mother's knee. Gee! if they'd only read out some of
the things there are in the Family Bible, the mother
might have been startled some. And the millionaire,
too, I reckon. The old Book's full of a lot of grand
fierce old notions they don't grow nowadays; sort of
wisdom of the Stone Age and buried under the
Pyramids. Suppose somebody had flung old man Merton
from the top of that tower of his, and let him be
eaten by dogs at the bottom, it would be no worse
than what happened to Jezebel. Wasn't Agag hacked
into little pieces, for all he went walking
delicately? Merton walked delicately all his life,
damn him--until he got too delicate to walk at all.
But the shaft of the Lord found him out, as it might
have done in the old Book, and struck him dead on
the top of his tower to be a spectacle to the
people.
'The shaft was material, at least,' said his
companion.
'The Pyramids are mighty material, and they hold
down the dead kings all right,' grinned the man in
the goggles. 'I think there's a lot to be said for
these old material religions. There's old carvings
that have lasted for thousands of years, showing
their gods and emperors with bended bows; with hands
that look as if they could really bend bows of
stone. Material, perhaps--but what materials! Don't
you sometimes stand staring at those old Eastern
patterns and things, till you have a hunch that old
Lord God is still driving like a dark Apollo, and
shooting black rays of death?'
'If he is,' replied Father Brown, 'I might call
him by another name. But I doubt whether Merton died
by a dark ray or even a stone arrow.'
'I guess you think he's St Sebastian,' sneered
Drage, 'killed with an arrow. A millionaire must be
a martyr. How do you know he didn't deserve it? You
don't know much about your millionaire, I fancy.
Well, let me tell you he deserved it a hundred times
over.'
'Well,' asked Father Brown gently, 'why didn't
you murder him?'
'You want to know why I didn't?' said the other,
staring. 'Well, you're a nice sort of clergyman.'
'Not at all,' said the other, as if waving away a
compliment.
'I suppose it's your way of saying I did,'
snarled Drage. 'Well, prove it, that's all. As for
him, I reckon he was no loss.'
'Yes, he was,' said Father Brown, sharply. 'He
was a loss to you. That's why you didn't kill him.'
And he walked out of the room, leaving the man in
goggles gaping after him.
It was nearly a month later that Father Brown
revisited the house where the third millionaire had
suffered from the vendetta of Daniel Doom. A sort of
council was held of the persons most interested. Old
Crake sat at the head of the table with his nephew
at his right hand, the lawyer on his left; the big
man with the African features, whose name appeared
to be Harris, was ponderously present, if only as a
material witness; a red--haired, sharp -nosed
individual addressed as Dixon seemed to be the
representative of Pinkerton's or some such private
agency; and Father Brown slipped unobtrusively into
an empty seat beside him.
Every newspaper in the world was full of the
catastrophe of the colossus of finance, of the great
organizer of the Big Business that bestrides the
modern world; but from the tiny group that had been
nearest to him at the very instant of his death very
little could be learned. The uncle, nephew, and
attendant solicitor declared they were well outside
the outer wall before the alarm was raised; and
inquiries of the official guardians at both barriers
brought answers that were rather confused, but on
the whole confirmatory. Only one other complication
seemed to call for consideration. It seemed that
round about the time of the death, before or after,
a stranger had been found hanging mysteriously round
the entrance and asking to see Mr Merton. The
servants had some difficulty in understanding what
he meant, for his language was very obscure; but it
was afterwards considered to be also very
suspicious, since he had said something about a
wicked man being destroyed by a word out of the sky.
Peter Wain leaned forward, the eyes bright in his
haggard face, and said:
'I'll bet on that, anyhow. Norman Drage.'
'And who in the world is Norman Drage?' asked his
uncle.
'That's what I want to know,' replied the young
man. 'I practically asked him, but he has got a
wonderful trick of twisting every straight question
crooked; it's like lunging at a fencer. He hooked on
to me with hints about the flying--ship of the
future; but I never trusted him much.'
'But what sort of a man is he?' asked Crake.
'He's a mystagogue,' said Father Brown, with
innocent promptitude. 'There are quite a lot of them
about; the sort of men about town who hint to you in
Paris cafes and cabarets that they've lifted the
veil of Isis or know the secret of Stonehenge. In a
case like this they're sure to have some sort of
mystical explanations.'
The smooth, dark head of Mr Barnard Blake, the
lawyer, was inclined politely towards the speaker,
but his smile was faintly hostile.
'I should hardly have thought, sir,' he said,
'that you had any quarrel with mystical
explanations.'
'On the contrary,' replied Father Brown, blinking
amiably at him. 'That's just why I can quarrel with
'em. Any sham lawyer could bamboozle me, but he
couldn't bamboozle you; because you're a lawyer
yourself. Any fool could dress up as a Red Indian
and I'd swallow him whole as the only original
Hiawatha; but Mr Crake would see through him at
once. A swindler could pretend to me that he knew
all about aeroplanes, but not to Captain Wain. And
it's just the same with the other, don't you see?
It's just because I have picked up a little about
mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real
mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They
set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've
seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues
hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you
find it, it's a platitude. But in the case of Drage,
I admit he had also another and more practical
notion in talking about fire from heaven or bolts
from the blue.'
'And what was his notion?' asked Wain. 'I think
it wants watching whatever it is.'
'Well,' replied the priest, slowly, 'he wanted us
to think the murders were miracles because . . .
well, because he knew they weren't.'
'Ah,' said Wain, with a sort of hiss, 'I was
waiting for that. In plain words, he is the
criminal.'
'In plain words, he is the criminal who didn't
commit the crime,' answered Father Brown calmly.
'Is that your conception of plain words?'
inquired Blake politely.
'You'll be saying I'm the mystagogue now,' said
Father Brown somewhat abashed, but with a broad
smile, 'but it was really quite accidental. Drage
didn't commit the crime--I mean this crime. His only
crime was blackmailing somebody, and he hung about
here to do it; but he wasn't likely to want the
secret to be public property or the whole business
to be cut short by death. We can talk about him
afterwards. Just at the moment, I only want him
cleared out of the way.'
'Out of the way of what?' asked the other.
'Out of the way of the truth,' replied the
priest, looking at him tranquilly, with level
eyelids.
'Do you mean,' faltered the other, 'that you know
the truth?'
'I rather think so,' said Father Brown modestly.
There was an abrupt silence, after which Crake
cried out suddenly and irrelevantly in a rasping
voice:
'Why, where is that secretary fellow? Wilton! He
ought to be here.'
'I am in communication with Mr Wilton,' said
Father Brown gravely; 'in fact, I asked him to ring
me up here in a few minutes from now. I may say that
we've worked the thing out together, in a manner of
speaking.'
'If you're working together, I suppose it's all
right,' grumbled Crake. 'I know he was always a sort
of bloodhound on the trail of his vanishing crook,
so perhaps it was well to hunt in couples with him.
But if you know the truth about this, where the
devil did you get it from?'
'I got it from you,' answered the priest,
quietly, and continued to gaze mildly at the glaring
veteran.' I mean I made the first guess from a hint
in a story of yours about an Indian who threw a
knife and hit a man on the top of a fortress.'
'You've said that several times,' said Wain, with
a puzzled air; 'but I can't see any inference,
except that this murderer threw an arrow and hit a
man on the top of a house very like a fortress. But
of course the arrow wasn't thrown but shot, and
would go much further. Certainly it went uncommonly
far; but I don't see how it brings us any farther.'
'I'm afraid you missed the point of the story,'
said Father Brown. 'It isn't that if one thing cap
go far another can go farther. It is that the wrong
use of a tool can cut both ways. The men on Crake's
fort thought of a knife as a thing for a hand--to--
hand fight and forgot that it could be a missile
like a javelin. Some other people I know thought of
a thing as a missile like a javelin and forgot that,
after all, it could be used hand--to--hand as a
spear. In short, the moral of the story is that
since a dagger can be turned into an arrow, so can
an arrow be turned into a dagger.'
They were all looking at him now; but he
continued in the same casual and unconscious tone:
'Naturally we wondered and worried a good deal about
who shot that arrow through the window and whether
it came from far away, and so on. But the truth is
that nobody shot the arrow at all. It never came in
at the window at all.'
'Then how did it come there?' asked the swarthy
lawyer, with a rather lowering face.
'Somebody brought it with him, I suppose,' said
Father Brown; 'it wouldn't be hard to carry or
conceal. Somebody had it in his hand as he stood
with Merton in Merton's own room. Somebody thrust it
into Merton's throat like a poignard, and then had
the highly intelligent idea of placing the whole
thing at such a place and angle that we all assumed
in a flash that it had flown in at the window like a
bird.'
'Somebody,' said old Crake, in a voice as heavy
as stone.
The telephone bell rang with a strident and
horrible clamour of insistence. It was in the
adjoining room, and Father Brown had darted there
before anybody else could move.
'What the devil is it all about?' cried Peter
Wain, who seemed all shaken and distracted.
'He said he expected to be rung up by Wilton, the
secretary,' replied his uncle in the same dead
voice.
'I suppose it is Wilton?' observed the lawyer,
like one speaking to fill up a silence. But nobody
answered the question until Father Brown reappeared
suddenly and silently in the room, bringing the
answer.
'Gentlemen,' he said, when he had resumed his
seat,' it was you who asked me to look into the
truth about this puzzle; and having found the truth,
I must tell it, without any pretence of softening
the shock. I'm afraid anybody who pokes his nose
into things like this can't afford to be a respecter
of persons.'
'I suppose,' said Crake, breaking the silence
that followed, 'that means that some of us are
accused, or suspected.'
'All of us are suspected,' answered Father Brown.
'I may be suspected myself, for I found the body.'
'Of course we're suspected,' snapped Wain.
'Father Brown kindly explained to me how I could
have besieged the tower in a flying--machine.'
'No,' replied the priest, with a smile; 'you
described to me how you could have done it. That was
just the interesting part of it.'
'He seemed to think it likely,' growled Crake,
'that I killed him myself with a Red Indian arrow.'
'I thought it most unlikely,' said Father Brown,
making rather a wry face. I'm sorry if I did wrong,
but I couldn't think of any other way of testing the
matter. I can hardly think of anything more
improbable than the notion that Captain Wain went
careering in a huge machine past the window, at the
very moment of the murder, and nobody noticed it;
unless, perhaps, it were the notion that a
respectable old gentleman should play at Red Indians
with a bow and arrow behind the bushes, to kill
somebody he could have killed in twenty much simpler
ways. But I had to find out if they had had anything
to do with it; and so I had to accuse them in order
to prove their innocence.'
'And how have you proved their innocence?' asked
Blake the lawyer, leaning forward eagerly.
'Only by the agitation they showed when they were
accused,' answered the other.
'What do you mean, exactly?'
'If you will permit me to say so,' remarked
Father Brown, composedly enough, 'I did undoubtedly
think it my duty to suspect them and everybody else.
I did suspect Mr Crake and I did suspect Captain
Wain, in the sense that I considered the possibility
or probability of their guilt. I told them I had
formed conclusions about it; and I will now tell
them what those conclusions were. I was sure they
were innocent, because of the manner and the moment
in which they passed from unconsciousness to
indignation. So long as they never thought they were
accused, they went on giving me materials to support
the accusation. They practically explained to me how
they might have committed the crime. Then they
suddenly realized with a shock and a shout of rage
that they were accused; they realized it long after
they might well have expected to be accused, but
long before I had accused them. Now no guilty person
could possibly do that. He might be snappy and
suspicious from the first; or he might simulate
unconsciousness and innocence up to the end. But he
wouldn't begin by making things worse for himself
and then give a great jump and begin furiously
denying the notion he had himself helped to suggest.
That could only come by his having really failed to
realize what he was suggesting. The
self--consciousness of a murderer would always be at
least morbidly vivid enough to prevent him first
forgetting his relation with the thing and then
remembering to deny it. So I ruled you both out and
others for other reasons I needn't discuss now. For
instance, there was the secretary--
'But I'm not talking about that just now. Look
here, I've just heard from Wilton on the phone, and
he's given me permission to tell you some rather
serious news. Now I suppose you all know by this
time who Wilton was, and what he was after.'
'I know he was after Daniel Doom and wouldn't be
happy till he got him,' answered Peter Wain; 'and
I've heard the story that he's the son of old
Horder, and that's why he's the avenger of blood.
Anyhow, he's certainly looking for the man called
Doom.'
'Well,' said Father Brown, 'he has found him.'
Peter Wain sprang to his feet in excitement.
'The murderer!' he cried. 'Is the murderer in the
lock--up already?'
'No,' said Father Brown, gravely; 'I said the
news was serious, and it's more serious than that.
I'm afraid poor Wilton has taken a terrible
responsibility. I'm afraid he's going to put a
terrible responsibility on us. He hunted the
criminal down, and just when he had him cornered at
last--well, he has taken the law into his own
hands.'
'You mean that Daniel Doom--' began the lawyer.
'I mean that Daniel Doom is dead,' said the
priest. 'There was some sort of wild struggle, and
Wilton killed him.'
'Serve him right,' growled Mr Hickory Crake.
'Can't blame Wilton for downing a crook like
that, especially considering the feud,' assented
Wain; 'it was like stepping on a viper.'
'I don't agree with you,' said Father Brown. 'I
suppose we all talk romantic stuff at random in
defence of lynching and lawlessness; but I have a
suspicion that if we lose our laws and liberties we
shall regret it. Besides, it seems to me illogical
to say there is something to be said for Wilton
committing murder, without even inquiring whether
there was anything to be said for Doom committing
it. I rather doubt whether Doom was merely a vulgar
assassin; he may have been a sort of outlaw with a
mania about the cup, demanding it with threats and
only killing after a struggle; both victims were
thrown down just outside their houses. The objection
to Wilton's way of doing it is that we shall never
hear Doom's side of the case.'
'Oh, I've no patience with all this sentimental
whitewashing of worthless, murderous blackguards,'
cried Wain, heatedly. 'If Wilton croaked the
criminal he did a jolly good day's work, and there's
an end of it.'
'Quite so, quite so,' said his uncle, nodding
vigorously.
Father Brown's face had a yet heavier gravity as
he looked slowly round the semicircle effaces. 'Is
that really what you all think?' he asked. Even as
he did so he realized that he was an Englishman and
an exile. He realized that he was among foreigners,
even if he was among friends. Around that ring of
foreigners ran a restless fire that was not native
to his own breed; the fiercer spirit of the western
nation that can rebel and lynch, and above all,
combine. He knew that they had already combined.
'Well,' said Father Brown, with a sigh, 'I am to
understand, then, that you do definitely condone
this unfortunate man's crime, or act of private
justice, or whatever you call it. In that case it
will not hurt him if I tell you a little more about
it.'
He rose suddenly to his feet; and though they saw
no meaning in his movement, it seemed in some way to
change or chill the very air in the room.
'Wilton killed Doom in a rather curious way,' he
began.
'How did Wilton kill him?' asked Crake, abruptly.
'With an arrow,' said Father Brown.
Twilight was gathering in the long room, and
daylight dwindling to a gleam from the great window
in the inner room, where the great millionaire had
died. Almost automatically the eyes of the group
turned slowly towards it, but as yet there was no
sound. Then the voice of Crake came cracked and high
and senile in a sort of crowing gabble.
'What you mean? What you mean? Brander Merton
killed by an arrow. This crook killed by an arrow--'
'By the same arrow,' said the priest, 'and at the
same moment.'
Again there was a sort of strangled and yet
swollen and bursting silence, and young Wain began:
'You mean--'
'I mean that your friend Merton was Daniel Doom,'
said Father Brown firmly;' and the only Daniel Doom
you'll ever find. Your friend Merton was always
crazy after that Coptic Cup that he used to worship
like an idol every day; and in his wild youth he had
really killed two men to get it, though I still
think the deaths may have been in a sense accidents
of the robbery. Anyhow, he had it; and that man
Drage knew the story and was blackmailing him. But
Wilton was after him for a very different purpose; I
fancy he only discovered the truth when he'd got
into this house. But anyhow, it was in this house,
and in that room, that this hunt ended, and he slew
the slayer of his father.'
For a long time nobody answered. Then old Crake
could be heard drumming with his fingers on the
table and muttering:
'Brander must have been mad. He must have been
mad.'
'But, good Lord!' burst out Peter Wain;' what are
we to do? What are we to say? Oh, it's all quite
different! What about the papers and the big
business people? Brander Merton is a thing like the
President or the Pope of Rome.'
'I certainly think it is rather different,' began
Barnard Blake, the lawyer, in a low voice. 'The
difference involves a whole--'
Father Brown struck the table so that the glasses
on it rang; and they could almost fancy a ghostly
echo from the mysterious chalice that still stood in
the room beyond.
'No!' he cried, in a voice like a pistol--shot.
'There shall be no difference. I gave you your
chance of pitying the poor devil when you thought he
was a common criminal. You wouldn't listen then; you
were all for private vengeance then. You were all
for letting him be butchered like a wild beast
without a hearing or a public trial, and said he had
only got his deserts. Very well then, if Daniel Doom
has got his deserts, Brander Merton has got his
deserts. If that was good enough for Doom, by all
that is holy it is good enough for Merton. Take your
wild justice or our dull legality; but in the name
of Almighty God, let there be an equal lawlessness
or an equal law.'
Nobody answered except the lawyer, and he
answered with something like a snarl: 'What will the
police say if we tell them we mean to condone a
crime?'
'What will they say if I tell them you did
condone it?' replied Father Brown. 'Your respect for
the law comes rather late, Mr Barnard Blake.'
After a pause he resumed in a milder tone: 'I,
for one, am ready to tell the truth if the proper
authorities ask me; and the rest of you can do as
you like. But as a fact, it will make very little
difference. Wilton only rang me up to tell me that I
was now free to lay his confession before you; for
when you heard it, he would be beyond pursuit.'
He walked slowly into the inner room and stood
there by the little table beside which the
millionaire had died. The Coptic Cup still stood in
the same place, and he remained there for a space
staring at its cluster of all the colours of the
rainbow, and beyond it into a blue abyss of sky.
|
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The Oracle of the Dog
'YES,' said Father Brown, 'I always like a dog,
so long as he isn't spelt backwards.'
Those who are quick in talking are not always
quick in listening. Sometimes even their brilliancy
produces a sort of stupidity. Father Brown's friend
and companion was a young man with a stream of ideas
and stories, an enthusiastic young man named
Fiennes, with eager blue eyes and blond hair that
seemed to be brushed back, not merely with a hair--
brush but with the wind of the world as be rushed
through it. But he stopped in the torrent of his
talk in a momentary bewilderment before he saw the
priest's very simple meaning.
'You mean that people make too much of them?' he
said. 'Well, I don't know. They're marvellous
creatures. Sometimes I think they know a lot more
than we do.'
Father Brown said nothing, but continued to
stroke the head of the big retriever in a
half--abstracted but apparently soothing fashion.
'Why,' said Fiennes, warming again to his
monologue, 'there was a dog in the case I've come to
see you about: what they call the 'Invisible Murder
Case', you know. It's a strange story, but from my
point of view the dog is about the strangest thing
in it. Of course, there's the mystery of the crime
itself, and how old Druce can have been killed by
somebody else when he was all alone in the
summer--house--'
The hand stroking the dog stopped for a moment in
its rhythmic movement, and Father Brown said calmly:
'Oh, it was a summer--house, was it?'
'I thought you'd read all about it in the
papers,' answered Fiennes.' Stop a minute; I believe
I've got a cutting that will give you all the
particulars.' He produced a strip of newspaper from
his pocket and handed it to the priest, who began to
read it, holding it close to his blinking eyes with
one hand while the other continued its
half--conscious caresses of the dog. It looked like
the parable of a man not letting his right hand know
what his left hand did.
Many mystery stories, about men murdered behind
locked doors and windows, and murderers escaping
without means of entrance and exit, have come true
in the course of the extraordinary events at
Cranston on the coast of Yorkshire, where Colonel
Druce was found stabbed from behind by a dagger that
has entirely disappeared from the scene, and
apparently even from the neighbourhood.
The summer--house in which he died was indeed
accessible at one entrance, the ordinary doorway
which looked down the central walk of the garden
towards the house. But, by a combination of events
almost to be called a coincidence, it appears that
both the path and the entrance were watched during
the crucial time, and there is a chain of witnesses
who confirm each other. The summer--house stands at
the extreme end of the garden, where there is no
exit or entrance of any kind. The central garden
path is a lane between two ranks of tall
delphiniums, planted so close that any stray step
off the path would leave its traces; and both path
and plants run right up to the very mouth of the
summer--house, so that no straying from that
straight path could fail to be observed, and no
other mode of entrance can be imagined.
Patrick Floyd, secretary of the murdered man,
testified that he had been in a position to overlook
the whole garden from the time when Colonel Druce
last appeared alive in the doorway to the time when
he was found dead; as he, Floyd, had been on the top
of a step--ladder clipping the garden hedge. Janet
Druce, the dead man's daughter, confirmed this,
saying that she had sat on the terrace of the house
throughout that time and had seen Floyd at his work.
Touching some part of the time, this is again
supported by Donald Druce, her brother--who
overlooked the garden--standing at his bedroom
window in his dressing--gown, for he had risen late.
Lastly, the account is consistent with that given by
Dr Valentine, a neighbour, who called for a time to
talk with Miss Druce on the terrace, and by the
Colonel's solicitor, Mr Aubrey Traill, who was
apparently the last to see the murdered man alive--
presumably with the exception of the murderer.
All are agreed that the course of events was as
follows: About half past three in the afternoon,
Miss Druce went down the path to ask her father when
he would like tea; but he said he did not want any
and was waiting to see Traill, his lawyer, who was
to be sent to him in the summer--house. The girl
then came away and met Traill coming down the path;
she directed him to her father and he went in as
directed. About half an hour afterwards he came out
again, the Colonel coming with him to the door and
showing himself to all appearance in health and even
high spirits. He had been somewhat annoyed earlier
in the day by his son's irregular hours, but seemed
to recover his temper in a perfectly normal fashion,
and had been rather markedly genial in receiving
other visitors, including two of his nephews, who
came over for the day. But as these were out walking
during the whole period of the tragedy, they had no
evidence to give. It is said, indeed, that the
Colonel was not on very good terms with Dr
Valentine, but that gentleman only had a brief
interview with the daughter of the house, to whom he
is supposed to be paying serious attentions.
Trail, the solicitor, says he left the Colonel
entirely alone in the summer--house, and this is
confirmed by Floyd's bird's--eye view of the garden,
which showed nobody else passing the only entrance.
Ten minutes later. Miss Druce again went down the
garden and had not reached the end of the path when
she saw her father, who was conspicuous by his white
linen coat, lying in a heap on the floor. She
uttered a scream which brought others to the spot,
and on entering the place they found the Colonel
lying dead beside his basket--chair, which was also
upset. Dr Valentine, who was still in the immediate
neighbourhood, testified that the wound was made by
some sort of stiletto, entering under the
shoulder--blade and piercing the heart. The police
have searched the neighbourhood for such a weapon,
but no trace of it can be found.
'So Colonel Druce wore a white coat, did he?'
said Father Brown as he put down the paper.
'Trick he learnt in the tropics,' replied
Fiennes, with some wonder. 'He'd had some queer
adventures there, by his own account; and I fancy
his dislike of Valentine was connected with the
doctor coming from the tropics, too. But it's all an
infernal puzzle. The account there is pretty
accurate. I didn't see the tragedy, in the sense of
the discovery; I was out walking with the young
nephews and the dog--the dog I wanted to tell you
about. But I saw the stage set for it as described;
the straight lane between the blue flowers right up
to the dark entrance, and the lawyer going down it
in his blacks and his silk hat, and the red head of
the secretary showing high above the green hedge as
he worked on it with his shears. Nobody could have
mistaken that red head at any distance; and if
people say they saw it there all the time, you may
be sure they did.
This red--haired secretary, Floyd, is quite a
character; a breathless bounding sort of fellow,
always doing everybody's work as he was doing the
gardener's. I think he is an American; he's
certainly got the American view of life--what they
call the view--point, bless 'em.'
'What about the lawyer?' asked Father Brown.
There was a silence and then Fiennes spoke quite
slowly for him. 'Traill struck me as a singular man.
In his fine black clothes he was almost foppish, yet
you can hardly call him fashionable. For he wore a
pair of long, luxuriant black whiskers such as
haven't been seen since Victorian times. He had
rather a fine grave face and a fine grave manner,
but every now and then he seemed to remember to
smile. And when he showed his white teeth he seemed
to lose a little of his dignity, and there was
something faintly fawning about him. It may have
been only embarrassment, for he would also fidget
with his cravat and his tie--pin, which were at once
handsome and unusual, like himself. If I could think
of anybody-- but what's the good, when the whole
thing's impossible? Nobody knows who did it. Nobody
knows how it could be done. At least there's only
one exception I'd make, and that's why I really
mentioned the whole thing. The dog knows.'
Father Brown sighed and then said absently: 'You
were there as a friend of young Donald, weren't you?
He didn't go on your walk with you?'
'No,' replied Fiennes smiling. 'The young
scoundrel had gone to bed that morning and got up
that afternoon. I went with his cousins, two young
officers from India, and our conversation was
trivial enough. I remember the elder, whose name I
think is Herbert Druce and who is an authority on
horse--breeding, talked about nothing but a mare he
had bought and the moral character of the man who
sold her; while his brother Harry seemed to be
brooding on his bad luck at Monte Carlo. I only
mention it to show you, in the light of what
happened on our walk, that there was nothing psychic
about us. The dog was the only mystic in our
company.'
'What sort of a dog was he?' asked the priest.
'Same breed as that one,' answered Fiennes.
'That's what started me off on the story, your
saying you didn't believe in believing in a dog.
He's a big black retriever, named Nox, and a
suggestive name, too; for I think what he did a
darker mystery than the murder. You know Druce's
house and garden are by the sea; we walked about a
mile from it along the sands and then turned back,
going the other way. We passed a rather curious rock
called the Rock of Fortune, famous in the
neighbourhood because it's one of those examples of
one stone barely balanced on another, so that a
touch would knock it over. It is not really very
high but the hanging outline of it makes it look a
little wild and sinister; at least it made it look
so to me, for I don't imagine my jolly young
companions were afflicted with the picturesque. But
it may be that I was beginning to feel an
atmosphere; for just then the question arose of
whether it was time to go back to tea, and even then
I think I had a premonition that time counted for a
good deal in the business. Neither Herbert Druce nor
I had a watch, so we called out to his brother, who
was some paces behind, having stopped to light his
pipe under the hedge. Hence it happened that he
shouted out the hour, which was twenty past four, in
his big voice through the growing twilight; and
somehow the loudness of it made it sound like the
proclamation of something tremendous. His
unconsciousness seemed to make it all the more so;
but that was always the way with omens; and
particular ticks of the clock were really very
ominous things that afternoon. According to Dr
Valentine's testimony, poor Druce had actually died
just about half past four.
'Well, they said we needn't go home for ten
minutes, and we walked a little farther along the
sands, doing nothing in particular-- throwing stones
for the dog and throwing sticks into the sea for,
him to swim after. But to me the twilight seemed to
grow oddly oppressive, and the very shadow of the
top--heavy Rock of Fortune lay on me like a load.
And then the curious thing happened. Nox had just
brought back Herbert's walking-- stick out of the
sea and his brother had thrown his in also. The dog
swam out again, but just about what must have been
the stroke of the half--hour, he stopped swimming.
He came back again on to the shore and stood in
front of us. Then he suddenly threw up his head and
sent up a howl or wail of woe--if ever I heard one
in the world.
What the devil's the matter with the dog?' asked
Herbert; but none of us could answer. There was a
long silence after the brute's wailing and whining
died away on the desolate shore; and then the
silence was broken. As I live, it was broken by a
faint and far--off shriek, like the shriek of a
woman from beyond the hedges inland. We didn't know
what it was then; but we knew afterwards. It was the
cry the girl gave when she first saw the body of her
father.'
'You went back, I suppose,' said Father Brown
patiently. 'What happened then?'
'I'll tell you what happened then,' said Fiennes
with a grim emphasis. 'When we got back into that
garden the first thing we saw was Traill, the
lawyer; I can see him now with his black hat and
black whiskers relieved against the perspective of
the blue flowers stretching down to the
summer--house, with the sunset and the strange
outline of the Rock of Fortune in the distance. His
face and figure were in shadow against the sunset;
but I swear the white teeth were showing in his head
and he was smiling. The moment Nox saw that man the
dog dashed forward and stood in the middle of the
path barking at him madly, murderously, volleying
out curses that were almost verbal in their dreadful
distinctness of hatred. And the man doubled up and
fled, along the path between the flowers.'
Father Brown sprang to his feet with a startling
impatience. 'So the dog denounced him, did he?' he
cried. 'The oracle of the dog condemned him. Did you
see what birds were flying, and are you sure whether
they were on the right hand or the left? Did you
consult the augurs about the sacrifices? Surely you
didn't omit to cut open the dog and examine his
entrails. That is the sort of scientific test you
heathen humanitarians seem to trust when you are
thinking of taking away the life and honour of a
man.'
Fiennes sat gaping for an instant before he found
breath to say: 'Why, what's the matter with you?
What have I done now?' A sort of anxiety came back
into the priest's eyes--the anxiety of a man who has
run against a post in the dark and wonders for a
moment whether he has hurt it.
'I'm most awfully sorry,' he said with sincere
distress. 'I beg your pardon for being so rude; pray
forgive me.'
Fiennes looked at him curiously. 'I sometimes
think you are more of a mystery than any of the
mysteries,' he said. 'But anyhow, if you don't
believe in the mystery of the dog, at least you
can't get over the mystery of the man. You can't
deny that at the very moment when the beast came
back from the sea and bellowed, his master's soul
was driven out of his body by the blow of some
unseen power that no mortal man can trace or even
imagine. And as for the lawyer-- I don't go only by
the dog--there are other curious details, too. He
struck me as a smooth, smiling, equivocal sort of
person; and one of his tricks seemed like a sort of
hint. You know the doctor and the police were on the
spot very quickly; Valentine was brought back when
walking away from the house, and he telephoned
instantly. That, with the secluded house, small
numbers, and enclosed space, made it pretty possible
to search everybody who could have been near; and
everybody was thoroughly searched--for a weapon. The
whole house, garden, and shore were combed for a
weapon. The disappearance of the dagger is almost as
crazy as the disappearance of the man.'
'The disappearance of the dagger,' said Father
Brown, nodding. He seemed to have become suddenly
attentive.
'Well,' continued Fiennes, 'I told you that man
Traill had a trick of fidgeting with his tie and
tie--pin--especially his tie--pin. His pin, like
himself, was at once showy and old--fashioned. It
had one of those stones with concentric coloured
rings that look like an eye; and his own
concentration on it got on my nerves, as if he had
been a Cyclops with one eye in the middle of his
body. But the pin was not only large but long; and
it occurred to me that his anxiety about its
adjustment was because it was even longer than it
looked; as long as a stiletto in fact.'
Father Brown nodded thoughtfully. 'Was any other
instrument ever suggested?' he asked.
'There was another suggestion,' answered Fiennes,
'from one of the young Druces--the cousins, I mean.
Neither Herbert nor Harry Druce would have struck
one at first as likely to be of assistance in
scientific detection; but while Herbert was really
the traditional type of heavy Dragoon, caring for
nothing but horses and being an ornament to the
Horse Guards, his younger brother Harry had been in
the Indian Police and knew something about such
things. Indeed, in his own way he was quite clever;
and I rather fancy he had been too clever; I mean he
had left the police through breaking some red--tape
regulations and taking some sort of risk and
responsibility of his own. Anyhow, he was in some
sense a detective out of work, and threw himself
into this business with more than the ardour of an
amateur. And it was with him that I had an argument
about the weapon-- an argument that led--to
something new. It began by his countering my
description of the dog barking at Traill; and he
said that a dog at his worst didn't bark, but
growled.'
'He was quite right there,' observed the priest.
'This young fellow went on to say that, if it
came to that, he'd heard Nox growling at other
people before then; and among others at Floyd, the
secretary. I retorted that his own argument answered
itself; for the crime couldn't be brought home to
two or three people, and least of all to Floyd, who
was as innocent as a harum--scarum schoolboy, and
had been seen by everybody all the time perched
above the garden hedge with his fan of red hair as
conspicuous as a scarlet cockatoo.
'I know there's difficulties anyhow,' said my
colleague, 'but I wish you'd come with me down the
garden a minute. I want to show you something I
don't think any one else has seen.' This was on the
very day of the discovery, and the garden was just
as it had been. The step--ladder was still standing
by the hedge, and just under the hedge my guide
stopped and disentangled something from the deep
grass. It was the sheers used for clipping the
hedge, and on the point of one of them was a smear
of blood.'
There was a short silence, and then Father Brown
said suddenly; 'What was the lawyer there for?'
'He fold us the Colonel sent for him to alter his
will,' answered Fiennes. 'And, by the way, there was
another thing about the business of the will that I
ought to mention. You see, the will wasn't actually
signed in the summer-- house that afternoon.'
'I suppose not,' said Father Brown; 'there would
have to be two witnesses.'
'The lawyer actually came down the day before and
it was signed then; but he was sent for again next
day because the old man had a doubt about one of the
witnesses and had to be reassured.'
'Who were the witnesses?' asked Father Brown.
'That's just the point,' replied his informant
eagerly, 'the witnesses were Floyd, the secretary,
and this Dr Valentine, the foreign sort of surgeon
or whatever he is; and the two had a quarrel. Now
I'm bound to say that the secretary is something of
a busybody. He's one of those hot and headlong
people whose warmth of temperament has unfortunately
turned mostly to pugnacity and bristling suspicion;
to distrusting people instead of to trusting them.
That sort of red-- haired red--hot fellow is always
either universally credulous or universally
incredulous; and sometimes both. He was not only a
Jack--of--all--trades, but he knew better than all
tradesmen. He not only knew everything, but he
warned everybody against everybody. All that must be
taken into account in his suspicions about
Valentine; but in that particular case there seems
to have been something behind it. He said the name
of Valentine was not really Valentine. He said he
had seen him elsewhere known by the name of De
Villon. He said it would invalidate the will; of
course he was kind enough to explain to the lawyer
what the law was on that point. They were both in a
frightful wax.'
Father Brown laughed. 'People often are when they
are to witness a will,' he said; 'for one thing, it
means that they can't have any legacy under it. But
what did Dr Valentine say? No doubt the universal
secretary knew more about the doctor's name than the
doctor did. But even the doctor might have some
information about his own name.'
Fiennes paused a moment before he replied. 'Dr
Valentine took it in a curious way. Dr Valentine is
a curious man. His appearance is rather striking but
very foreign. He is young but wears a beard cut
square; and his face is very pale, dreadfully
pale--and dreadfully serious. His eyes have a sort
of ache in them, as if he ought to wear glasses, or
had given himself a headache with thinking; but he
is quite handsome and always very formally dressed,
with a top hat and a dark coat and a little red
rosette. His manner is rather cold and haughty, and
he has a way of staring at you which is very
disconcerting. When thus charged with having changed
his name, he merely stared like a sphinx and then
said with a little laugh that he supposed Americans
had no names to change. At that I think the Colonel
also got into a fuss and said all sorts of angry
things to the doctor; all the more angry because of
the doctor's pretensions to a future place in his
family. But I shouldn't have thought much of that
but for a few words that I happened to hear later,
early in the afternoon of the tragedy. I don't want
to make a lot of them, for they weren't the sort of
words on which one would like, in the ordinary way,
to play the eavesdropper. As I was passing out
towards the front gate with my two companions and
the dog, I heard voices which told me that Dr
Valentine and Miss Druce had withdrawn for a moment
in the shadow of the house, in an angle behind a row
of flowering plants, and were talking to each other
in passionate whisperings--sometimes almost like
hissings; for it was something of a lovers' quarrel
as well as a lovers' tryst. Nobody repeats the sort
of things they said for the most part; but in an
unfortunate business like this I'm bound to say that
there was repeated more than once a phrase about
killing somebody. In fact, the girl seemed to be
begging him not to kill somebody, or saying that no
provocation could justify killing anybody; which
seems an unusual sort of talk to address to a
gentleman who has dropped in to tea.'
'Do you know,' asked the priest, 'whether Dr
Valentine seemed to be very angry after the scene
with the secretary and the Colonel--I mean about
witnessing the will?'
'By all accounts,' replied the other, 'he wasn't
half so angry as the secretary was. It was the
secretary who went away raging after witnessing the
will.'
'And now,' said Father Brown,' what about the
will itself?'
'The Colonel was a very wealthy man, and his will
was important. Traill wouldn't tell us the
alteration at that stage, but I have since heard
only this morning in fact--that most of the money
was transferred from the son to the daughter. I told
you that Druce was wild with my friend Donald over
his dissipated hours.'
'The question of motive has been rather
over--shadowed by the question of method,' observed
Father Brown thoughtfully. 'At that moment,
apparently, Miss Druce was the immediate gainer by
the death.'
'Good God! What a cold--blooded way of talking,'
cried Fiennes, staring at him. 'You don't really
mean to hint that she--'
'Is she going to marry that Dr Valentine?' asked
the other.
'Some people are against it,' answered his
friend. 'But he is liked and respected in the place
and is a skilled and devoted surgeon.'
'So devoted a surgeon,' said Father Brown, 'that
he had surgical instruments with him when he went to
call on the young lady at teatime. For he must have
used a lancet or something, and he never seems to
have gone home.'
Fiennes sprang to his feet and looked at him in a
heat of inquiry. 'You suggest he might have used the
very same lancet--'
Father Brown shook his head. 'All these
suggestions are fancies just now,' he said. 'The
problem is not who did it or what did it, but how it
was done. We might find many men and even many
tools-- pins and shears and lancets. But how did a
man get into the room? How did even a pin get into
it?'
He was staring reflectively at the ceiling as he
spoke, but as he said the last words his eye cocked
in an alert fashion as if he had suddenly seen a
curious fly on the ceiling.
'Well, what would you do about it?' asked the
young man. 'You have a lot of experience; what would
you advise now?'
'I'm afraid I'm not much use,' said Father Brown
with a sigh. 'I can't suggest very much without
having ever been near the place or the people. For
the moment you can only go on with local inquiries.
I gather that your friend from the Indian Police is
more or less in charge of your inquiry down there. I
should run down and see how he is getting on. See
what he's been doing in the way of amateur
detection. There may be news already.'
As his guests, the biped and the quadruped,
disappeared, Father Brown took up his pen and went
back to his interrupted occupation of planning a
course of lectures on the Encyclical Rerum Novarum.
The subject was a large one and he had to recast it
more than once, so that he was somewhat similarly
employed some two days later when the big black dog
again came bounding into the room and sprawled all
over him with enthusiasm and excitement. The master
who followed the dog shared the excitement if not
the enthusiasm. He had been excited in a less
pleasant fashion, for his blue eyes seemed to start
from his head and his eager face was even a little
pale.
'You told me,' he said abruptly and without
preface, 'to find out what Harry Druce was doing. Do
you know what he's done?' The priest did not reply,
and the young man went on in jerky tones: I'll tell
you what he's done. He's killed himself.'
Father Brown's lips moved only faintly, and there
was nothing practical about what he was
saying--nothing that has anything to do with this
story or this world.
'You give me the creeps sometimes,' said Fiennes.
'Did you-- did you expect this?'
'I thought it possible,' said Father Brown; 'that
was why I asked you to go and see what he was doing.
I hoped you might not be too late.'
'It was I who found him,' said Fiennes rather
huskily. 'It was the ugliest and most uncanny thing
fever knew. I went down that old garden again, and I
knew there was something new and unnatural about it
besides the murder. The flowers still tossed about
in blue masses on each side of the black entrance
into the old grey summer--house; but to me the blue
flowers looked like blue devils dancing before some
dark cavern of the underworld. I looked all round,
everything seemed to be in its ordinary place. But
the queer notion grew on me that there was something
wrong with the very shape of the sky. And then I saw
what it was. The Rock of Fortune always rose in the
background beyond the garden hedge and against the
sea. The Rock of Fortune was gone.'
Father Brown had lifted his head and was
listening intently.
'It was as if a mountain had walked away out of a
landscape or a moon fallen from the sky; though I
knew, of course, that a touch at any time would have
tipped the thing over. Something possessed me and I
rushed down that garden path like the wind and went
crashing through that hedge as if it were a spider's
web. It was a thin hedge really, though its
undisturbed trimness had made it serve all the
purposes of a wall. On the shore I found the loose
rock fallen from its pedestal; and poor Harry Druce
lay like a wreck underneath it. One arm was thrown
round it in a sort of embrace as if he had pulled it
down on himself; and on the broad brown sands beside
it, in large crazy lettering, he had scrawled the
words: 'The Rock of Fortune falls on the Fool'.'--
'It was the Colonel's will that did that,'
observed Father Brown. 'The young man had staked
everything on profiting himself by Donald's
disgrace, especially when his uncle sent for him on
the same day as the lawyer, and welcomed him with so
much warmth. Otherwise he was done; he'd lost his
police job; he was beggared at Monte Carlo. And he
killed himself when he found he'd killed his kinsman
for nothing.'
'Here, stop a minute!' cried the staring Fiennes.
'You're going too fast for me.'
'Talking about the will, by the way,' continued
Father Brown calmly,' before I forget it, or we go
on to bigger things, there was a simple explanation,
I think, of all that business about the doctor's
name. I rather fancy I have heard both names before
somewhere. The doctor is really a French nobleman
with the title of the Marquis de Villon. But he is
also an ardent Republican and has abandoned his
title and fallen back on the forgotten family
surname. 'With your Citizen Riquetti you have
puzzled Europe for ten days.'
'What is that?' asked the young man blankly.
'Never mind,' said the priest. 'Nine times out of
ten it is a rascally thing to change one's name; but
this was a piece of fine fanaticism. That's the
point of his sarcasm about Americans having no
names--that is, no titles. Now in England the
Marquis of Hartington is never called Mr Hartington;
but in France the Marquis de Villon is called M. de
Villon. So it might well look like a change of name.
As for the talk about killing, I fancy that also was
a point of French etiquette. The doctor was talking
about challenging Floyd to a duel, and the girl was
trying to dissuade him.'
'Oh, I see,' cried Fiennes slowly. 'Now I
understand what she meant.'
'And what is that about?' asked his companion,
smiling.
'Well,' said the young man, 'it was something
that happened to me just before I found that poor
fellow's body; only the catastrophe drove it out of
my head. I suppose it's hard to remember a little
romantic idyll when you've just come on top of a
tragedy. But as I went down the lanes leading to the
Colonel's old place I met his daughter walking with
Dr Valentine. She was in mourning, of course, and he
always wore black as if he were going to a funeral;
but I can't say that their faces were very funereal.
Never have I seen two people looking in their own
way more respectably radiant and cheerful. They
stopped and saluted me, and then she told me they
were married and living in a little house on the
outskirts of the town, where the doctor was
continuing his practice. This rather surprised me,
because I knew that her old father's will had left
her his property; and I hinted at it delicately by
saying I was going along to her father's old place
and had half expected to meet her there. But she
only laughed and said: 'Oh, we've given up all that.
My husband doesn't like heiresses.' And I discovered
with some astonishment they really had insisted on
restoring the property to poor Donald; so I hope
he's had a healthy shock and will treat it sensibly.
There was never much really the matter with him; he
was very young and his father was not very wise. But
it was in connexion with that that she said
something I didn't understand at the time; but now
I'm sure it must be as you say. She said with a sort
of sudden and splendid arrogance that was entirely
altruistic:
I hope it'll stop that red--haired fool from
fussing any more about the will. Does he think my
husband, who has given up a crest and a coronet as
old as the Crusades for his principles, would kill
an old man in a summer--house for a legacy like
that?' Then she laughed again and said, 'My husband
isn't killing anybody except in the way of business.
Why, he didn't even ask his friends to call on the
secretary.' Now, of course, I see what she meant.'
'I see part of what she meant, of course,' said
Father Brown. 'What did she mean exactly by the
secretary fussing about the will?'
Fiennes smiled as he answered, 'I wish you knew
the secretary, Father Brown. It would be a joy to
you to watch him make things hum, as he calls it. He
made the house of mourning hum. He filled the
funeral with all the snap and zip of the brightest
sporting event. There was no holding him, after
something had really happened. I've told you how he
used to oversee the gardener as he did the garden,
and how he instructed the lawyer in the law.
Needless to say, he also instructed the surgeon in
the practice of surgery; and as the surgeon was Dr
Valentine, you may be sure it ended in accusing him
of something worse than bad surgery. The secretary
got it fixed in his red head that the doctor had
committed the crime, and when the police arrived he
was perfectly sublime. Need I say that he became, on
the spot, the greatest of all amateur detectives?
Sherlock Holmes never towered over Scotland Yard
with more Titanic intellectual pride and scorn than
Colonel Druce's private secretary over the police
investigating Colonel Druce's death. I tell you it
was a joy to see him. He strode about with an
abstracted air, tossing his scarlet crest of hair
and giving curt impatient replies. Of course it was
his demeanour during these days that made Druce's
daughter so wild with him. Of course he had a
theory. It's just the sort of theory a man would
have in a book; and Floyd is the sort of man who
ought to be in a book. He'd be better fun and less
bother in a book.'
'What was his theory?' asked the other.
'Oh, it was full of pep,' replied Fiennes
gloomily. 'It would have been glorious copy if it
could have held together for ten minutes longer. He
said the Colonel was still alive when they found him
in the summer-- house, and the doctor killed him
with the surgical instrument on pretence of cutting
the clothes.'
'I see,' said the priest. 'I suppose he was lying
flat on his face on the mud floor as a form of
siesta.'
'It's wonderful what hustle will do,' continued
his informant. ' I believe Floyd would have got his
great theory into the papers at any rate, and
perhaps had the doctor attested, when all these
things were blown sky high as if by dynamite by the
discovery of that dead body lying under the Rock of
Fortune. And that's what we come back to after all.
I suppose the suicide is almost a confession. But
nobody will ever know the whole story.'
There was a silence, and then the priest said
modestly: 'I rather think I know the whole story.'
Fiennes stared. 'But look here,' he cried; 'how
do you come to know the whole story, or to be sure
it's the true story? You've been sitting here a
hundred miles away writing a sermon; do you mean to
tell me you really know what happened already? If
you've really come to the end, where in the world do
you begin? What started you off with your own
story?'
Father Brown jumped up with a very unusual
excitement and his first exclamation was like an
explosion.
'The dog!' he cried. 'The dog, of course! You had
the whole story in your hands in the business of the
dog on the beach, if you'd only noticed the dog
properly.'
Fiennes stared still more. 'But you told me
before that my feelings about the dog were all
nonsense, and the dog had nothing to do with it.'
'The dog had everything to do with it,' said
Father Brown, 'as you'd have found out if you'd only
treated the dog as a dog, and not as God Almighty
judging the souls of men.'
He paused in an embarrassed way for a moment, and
then said, with a rather pathetic air of apology:
'The truth is, I happen to be awfully fond of dogs.
And it seemed to me that in all this lurid halo of
dog superstitions nobody was really thinking about
the poor dog at all. To begin with a small point,
about his barking at the lawyer or growling at the
secretary. You asked how I could guess things a
hundred miles away; but honestly it's mostly to your
credit, for you described people so well that I know
the types. A man like Traill, who frowns usually and
smiles suddenly, a man who fiddles with things,
especially at his throat, is a nervous, easily
embarrassed man. I shouldn't wonder if Floyd, the
efficient secretary, is nervy and jumpy, too; those
Yankee hustlers often are. Otherwise he wouldn't
have cut his fingers on the shears and dropped them
when he heard Janet Druce scream.
'Now dogs hate nervous people. I don't know
whether they make the dog nervous, too; or whether,
being after all a brute, he is a bit of a bully; or
whether his canine vanity (which is colossal) is
simply offended at not being liked. But anyhow there
was nothing in poor Nox protesting against those
people, except that he disliked them for being
afraid of him. Now I know you're awfully clever, and
nobody of sense sneers at cleverness. But I
sometimes fancy, for instance, that you are too
clever to understand animals. Sometimes you are too
clever to understand men, especially when they act
almost as simply as animals. Animals are very
literal; they live in a world of truisms. Take this
case: a dog barks at a man and a man runs away from
a dog. Now you do not seem to be quite simple enough
to see the fact: that the dog barked because he
disliked the man and the man fled because he was
frightened of the dog. They had no other motives and
they needed none; but you must read psychological
mysteries into it and suppose the dog had super--
normal vision, and was a mysterious mouthpiece of
doom. You must suppose the man was running away, not
from the dog but from the hangman. And yet, if you
come to think if it, all this deeper psychology is
exceedingly improbable. If the dog really could
completely and consciously realize the murderer of
his master he wouldn't stand yapping as he might at
a curate at a tea--party; he's much more likely to
fly at his throat. And on the other hand, do you
really think a man who had hardened his heart to
murder an old friend and then walk about smiling at
the old friend's family, under the eyes of his old
friend's daughter and post--mortem doctor-- do you
think a man like that would be doubled up by mere
remorse because a dog barked? He might feel the
tragic irony of it; it might shake his soul, like
any other tragic trifle. But he wouldn't rush madly
the length of a garden to escape from the only
witness whom he knew to be unable to talk. People
have a panic like that when they are frightened, not
of tragic ironies, but of teeth. The whole thing is
simpler than you can understand.
'But when we come to that business by the
seashore, things are much more interesting. As you
stated them, they were much more puzzling. I didn't
understand that tale of the dog going in and out of
the water; it didn't seem to me a doggy thing to do.
If Nox had been very much upset about something
else, he might possibly have refused to go after the
stick at all. He'd probably go off nosing in
whatever direction he suspected the mischief. But
when once a dog is actually chasing a thing, a stone
or a stick or a rabbit, my experience is that he
won't stop for anything but the most peremptory
command, and not always for that. That he should
turn round because his mood changed seems to me
unthinkable.'
'But he did turn round,' insisted Fiennes; 'and
came back without the stick.'
'He came back without the stick for the best
reason in the world,' replied the priest. 'He came
back because he couldn't find it. He whined because
be couldn't find it. That's the sort of thing a dog
really does whine about. A dog is a devil of a
ritualist. He is as particular about the precise
routine of a game as a child about the precise
repetition of a fairy--tale. In this case something
had gone wrong with the game. He came back to
complain seriously of the conduct of the stick.
Never had such a thing happened before. Never had an
eminent and distinguished dog been so treated by a
rotten old walking--stick.'
'Why, what had the walking--stick done?' inquired
the young man.
'It had sunk,' said Father Brown.
Fiennes said nothing, but continued to stare; and
it was the priest who continued: 'It had sunk
because it was not really a stick, but a rod of
steel with a very thin shell of cane and a sharp
point. In other words, it was a sword stick. I
suppose a murderer never gets rid of a bloody weapon
so oddly and yet so naturally as by throwing it into
the sea for a retriever.'
'I begin to see what you mean,' admitted
Fiennes;' but even if a sword-- stick was used, I
have no guess of how it was used.'
'I had a sort of guess,' said Father Brown,
'right at the beginning when you said the word
summer--house. And another when you said that Druce
wore a white coat. As long as everybody was looking
for a short dagger, nobody thought of it; but if we
admit a rather long blade like a rapier, it's not so
impossible.'
He was leaning back, looking at the ceiling, and
began like one going back to his own first thoughts
and fundamentals.
'All that discussion about detective stories like
the Yellow Room, about a man found dead in sealed
chambers which no one could enter, does not apply to
the present case, because it is a summer--house.
When we talk of a Yellow Room, or any room, we imply
walls that are really homogeneous and impenetrable.
But a summer--house is not made like that; it is
often made, as it was in this case, of closely
interlaced but separate boughs and strips of wood,
in which there are chinks here and there. There was
one of them just behind Druce's back as he sat in
his chair up against the wall. But just as the room
was a summer-- house, so the chair was a
basket--chair. That also was a lattice of loopholes.
Lastly, the summer--house was close up under the
hedge; and you have just told me that it was really
a thin hedge. A man standing outside it could easily
see, amid a network of twigs and branches and canes,
one white spot of the Colonel's coat as plain as the
white of a target.
'Now, you left the geography a little vague; but
it was possible to put two and two together. You
said the Rock of Fortune was not really high; but
you also said it could be seen dominating the garden
like a mountain--peak. In other words, it was very
near the end of the garden, though your walk had
taken you a long way round to it. Also, it isn't
likely the young lady really howled so as to be
heard half a mile. She gave an ordinary involuntary
cry, and yet you heard it on the shore. And among
other interesting things that you told me, may I
remind you that you said Harry Druce had fallen
behind to light his pipe under a hedge.'
Fiennes shuddered slightly. 'You mean he drew his
blade there and sent it through the hedge at the
white spot. But surely it was a very odd chance and
a very sudden choice. Besides, he couldn't be
certain the old man's money had passed to him, and
as a fact it hadn't.'
Father Brown's face became animated. 'You
misunderstand the man's character,' he said, as if
he himself had known the man all his life. 'A
curious but not unknown type of character. If he had
really known the money would come to him, I
seriously believe he wouldn't have done it. He would
have seen it as the dirty thing it was.'
'Isn't that rather paradoxical?' asked the other.
'This man was a gambler,' said the priest, 'and a
man in disgrace for having taken risks and
anticipated orders. It was probably for something
pretty unscrupulous, for every imperial police is
more like a Russian secret police than we like to
think. But he had gone beyond the line and failed.
Now, the temptation of that type of man is to do a
mad thing precisely because the risk will be
wonderful in retrospect. He wants to say, 'Nobody
but I could have seized that chance or seen that it
was then or never. What a wild and wonderful guess
it was, when I put all those things together; Donald
in disgrace; and the lawyer being sent for; and
Herbert and I sent for at the same time--and then
nothing more but the way the old man grinned at me
and shook hands. Anybody would say I was mad to risk
it; but that is how fortunes are made, by the man
mad enough to have a little foresight.' In short, it
is the vanity of guessing. It is the megalomania of
the gambler. The more incongruous the coincidence,
the more instantaneous the decision, the more likely
he is to snatch the chance. The accident, the very
triviality of the white speck and the hole in the
hedge intoxicated him like a vision of the world's
desire. Nobody clever enough to see such a
combination of accidents could be cowardly enough
not to use them! That is how the devil talks to the
gambler. But the devil himself would hardly have
induced that unhappy man to go down in a dull,
deliberate way and kill an old uncle from whom he'd
always had expectations. It would be too
respectable.'
He paused a moment, and then went on with a
certain quiet emphasis.
'And now try to call up the scene, even as you
saw it yourself. As he stood there, dizzy with his
diabolical opportunity, he looked up and saw that
strange outline that might have been the image of
his own tottering soul; the one great crag poised
perilously on the other like a pyramid on its point,
and remembered that it was called the Rock of
Fortune. Can you guess how such a man at such a
moment would read such a signal? I think it strung
him up to action and even to vigilance. He who would
be a tower must not fear to be a toppling tower.
Anyhow, he acted; his next difficulty was to cover
his tracks. To be found with a sword--stick, let
alone a blood--stained sword-- stick, would be fatal
in the search that was certain to follow. If he left
it anywhere, it would be found and probably traced.
Even if he threw it into the sea the action might be
noticed, and thought noticeable--unless indeed he
could think of some more natural way of covering the
action. As you know, he did think of one, and a very
good one. Being the only one of you with a watch, he
told you it was not yet time to return, strolled a
little farther, and started the game of throwing in
sticks for the retriever. But how his eyes must have
rolled darkly over all that desolate sea-- shore
before they alighted on the dog!'
Fiennes nodded, gazing thoughtfully into space.
His mind seemed to have drifted back to a less
practical part of the narrative.
'It's queer,' he said, 'that the dog really was
in the story after all.'
'The dog could almost have told you the story, if
he could talk,' said the priest. 'All I complain of
is that because he couldn't talk you made up his
story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of
men and angels. It's part of something I've noticed
more and more in the modern world, appearing in all
sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational
catchwords; something that's arbitrary without being
authoritative. People readily swallow the untested
claims of this, that, or the other. It's drowning
all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming
in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.'
He stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of
frown, and went on talking almost as if he were
alone. 'It's the first effect of not believing in
God that you lose your common sense and can't see
things as they are. Anything that anybody talks
about, and says there's a good deal in it, extends
itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And
a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery, and a pig
is a mascot, and a beetle is a scarab, calling up
all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old
India; Dog Anubis and great green-- eyed Pasht and
all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back
to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into
elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because
you are frightened of four words:
'He was made Man'.'
The young man got up with a little embarrassment,
almost as if he had overheard a soliloquy. He called
to the dog and left the room with vague but breezy
farewells. But he had to call the dog twice, for the
dog had remained behind quite motionless for a
moment, looking up steadily at Father Brown as the
wolf looked at St Francis.
|
|
The Miracle of Moon Crescent
MOON CRESCENT was meant in a sense to be as
romantic as its name; and the things that happened
there were romantic enough in their way. At least it
had been an expression of that genuine element of
sentiment--historic and almost heroic--which manages
to remain side by side with commercialism in the
elder cities on the eastern coast of America. It was
originally a curve of classical architecture really
recalling that eighteenth-- century atmosphere in
which men like Washington and Jefferson had seemed
to be all the more republicans for being
aristocrats. Travellers faced with the recurrent
query of what they thought of our city were
understood to be specially answerable for what they
thought of our Moon Crescent. The very contrasts
that confuse its original harmony were
characteristic of its survival. At one extremity or
horn of the crescent its last windows looked over an
enclosure like a strip of a gentleman's park, with
trees and hedges as formal as a Queen Anne garden.
But immediately round the corner, the other windows,
even of the same rooms, or rather 'apartments',
looked out on the blank, unsightly wall of a huge
warehouse attached to some ugly industry. The
apartments of Moon Crescent itself were at that end
remodelled on the monotonous pattern of an American
hotel, and rose to a height, which, though lower
than the colossal warehouse, would have been called
a skyscraper in London. But the colonnade that ran
round the whole frontage upon the street had a grey
and weather-- stained stateliness suggesting that
the ghosts of the Fathers of the Republic might
still be walking to and fro in it. The insides of
the rooms, however, were as neat and new as the last
New York fittings could make them, especially at the
northern end between the neat garden and the blank
warehouse wall. They were a system of very small
flats, as we should say in England, each consisting
of a sitting--room, bedroom, and bathroom, as
identical as the hundred cells of a hive. In one of
these the celebrated Warren Wynd sat at his desk
sorting letters and scattering orders with wonderful
rapidity and exactitude. He could only be compared
to a tidy whirlwind.
Warren Wynd was a very little man with loose grey
hair and a pointed beard, seemingly frail but
fierily active. He had very wonderful eyes, brighter
than stars and stronger than magnets, which nobody
who had ever seen them could easily forget. And
indeed in his work as a reformer and regulator of
many good works he had shown at least that he had a
pair of eyes in his head. All sorts of stories and
even legends were told of the miraculous rapidity
with which he could form a sound judgement,
especially of human character. It was said that he
selected the wife who worked with him so long in so
charitable a fashion, by picking her out of a whole
regiment of women in uniform marching past at some
official celebration, some said of the Girl Guides
and some of the Women Police. Another story was told
of how three tramps, indistinguishable from each
other in their community of filth and rags, had
presented themselves before him asking for charity.
Without a moment's hesitation he had sent one of
them to a particular hospital devoted to a certain
nervous disorder, had recommended the second to an
inebriates' home, and had engaged the third at a
handsome salary as his own private servant, a
position which he filled successfully for years
afterwards. There were, of course, the inevitable
anecdotes of his prompt criticisms and curt
repartees when brought in contact with Roosevelt,
with Henry Ford, and with Mrs Asquith and all other
persons with whom an American public man ought to
have a historic interview, if only in the
newspapers. Certainly he was not likely to be
overawed by such personages; and at the moment here
in question he continued very calmly his centrifugal
whirl of papers, though the man confronting him was
a personage of almost equal importance.
Silas T. Vandam, the millionaire and oil magnate,
was a lean man with a long, yellow face and
blue--black hair, colours which were the less
conspicuous yet somehow the more sinister because
his face and figure showed dark against the window
and the white warehouse wall outside it; he was
buttoned up tight in an elegant overcoat with strips
of astrakhan. The eager face and brilliant eyes of
Wynd, on the other hand, were in the full light from
the other window over-- looking the little garden,
for his chair and--desk stood facing it; and though
the face was preoccupied, it did not seem unduly
preoccupied about the millionaire. Wynd's valet or
personal servant, a big, powerful man with flat fair
hair, was standing behind his master's desk holding
a sheaf of letters; and Wynd's private secretary, a
neat, red-- haired youth with a sharp face, had his
hand already on the door handle, as if guessing some
purpose or obeying some gesture of his employer. The
room was not only neat, but austere to the point of
emptiness; for Wynd, with characteristic
thoroughness, had rented the whole floor above, and
turned it into a loft or storeroom, where all his
other papers and possessions were stacked in boxes
and corded bales.
'Give these to the floor--clerk, Wilson,' said
Wynd to the servant holding the letters, 'and then
get me the pamphlet on the Minneapolis Night Clubs;
you'll find it in the bundle marked 'G'. I shall
want it in half an hour, but don't disturb me till
then. Well, Mr Vandam, I think your proposition
sounds very promising; but I can't give a final
answer till I've seen the report. It ought to reach
me to--morrow afternoon, and I'll phone you at once.
I'm sorry I can't say anything more definite just
now.'
Mr Vandam seemed to feel that this was something
like a polite dismissal; and his sallow, saturnine
face suggested that he found a certain irony in the
fact.
'Well, I suppose I must be going,' he said.
'Very good of you to call, Mr Vandam,' said Wynd,
politely; 'you will excuse my not coming out, as
I've something here I must fix at once. Fenner,' he
added to the secretary,' show Mr Vandam to his car,
and don't come back again for half an hour. I've
something here I want to work out by myself; after
that I shall want you.'
The three men went out into the hallway together,
closing the door behind them. The big servant,
Wilson, was turning down the hallway in the
direction of the floor--clerk, and the other two
moving in the opposite direction towards the lift;
for Wynd's apartment was high up on the fourteenth
floor. They had hardly gone a yard from the closed
door when they became conscious that the corridor
was filled with a marching and even magnificent
figure. The man was very tall and broad--shouldered,
his bulk being the more conspicuous for being clad
in white, or a light grey that looked like it, with
a very wide white panama hat and an almost equally
wide fringe or halo of almost equally white hair.
Set in this aureole his face was strong and
handsome, like that of a Roman emperor, save that
there was something more than boyish, something a
little childish, about the brightness of his eyes
and the beatitude of his smile. 'Mr Warren Wynd in?'
he asked, in hearty tones.
'Mr Warren Wynd is engaged,' said Fenner; 'he
must not be disturbed on any account. I may say I am
his secretary and can take any message.'
'Mr Warren Wynd is not at home to the Pope or the
Crowned Heads,' said Vandam, the oil magnate, with
sour satire. 'Mr Warren Wynd is mighty particular. I
went in there to hand him over a trifle of twenty
thousand dollars on certain conditions, and, he told
me to call again like as if I was a call--boy.'
'It's a fine thing to be a boy,' said the
stranger, 'and a finer to have a call; and I've got
a call he's just got to listen to. It's a call of
the great good country out West, where the real
American is being made while you're all snoring.
Just tell him that Art Alboin of Oklahoma City has
come to convert him.'
'I tell you nobody can see him,' said the
red--haired secretary sharply. 'He has given orders
that he is not to be disturbed for half an hour.'
'You folks down East are all against being
disturbed,' said the breezy Mr Alboin, 'but I
calculate there's a big breeze getting up in the
West that will have to disturb you. He's been
figuring out how much money must go to this and that
stuffy old religion; but I tell you any scheme that
leaves out the new Great Spirit movement in Texas
and Oklahoma, is leaving out the religion of the
future.'
'Oh; I've sized up those religions of the
future,' said the millionaire, contemptuously. 'I've
been through them with a tooth-- comb and they're as
mangy as yellow dogs. There was that woman called
herself Sophia: ought to have called herself
Sapphira, I reckon. Just a plum fraud. Strings tied
to all the tables and tambourines. Then there were
the Invisible Life bunch; said they could vanish
when they liked, and they did vanish, too, and a
hundred thousand of my dollars vanished with them. I
knew Jupiter Jesus out in Denver; saw him for weeks
on end; and he was just a common crook. So was the
Patagonian Prophet; you bet he's made a bolt for
Patagonia. No, I'm through with all that; from now
on I only believe what I see. I believe they call it
being an atheist.'
'I guess you got me wrong,' said the man from
Oklahoma, almost eagerly. 'I guess I'm as much of an
atheist as you are. No supernatural or superstitious
stuff in our movement; just plain science. The only
real right science is just health, and the only real
right health is just breathing. Fill your lungs with
the wide air of the prairie and you could blow all
your old eastern cities into the sea. You could just
puff away their biggest men like thistledown. That's
what we do in the new movement out home: we breathe.
We don't pray; we breathe.'
'Well, I suppose you do,' said the secretary,
wearily. He had a keen, intelligent face which could
hardly conceal the weariness; but he had listened to
the two monologues with the admirable patience and
politeness (so much in contrast with the legends of
impatience and insolence) with which such monologues
are listened to in America.
'Nothing supernatural,' continued Alboin, 'just
the great natural fact behind all the supernatural
fancies. What did the Jews want with a God except to
breathe into man's nostrils the breath of life? We
do the breathing into our own nostrils out in
Oklahoma. What's the meaning of the very word
Spirit? It's just the Greek for breathing exercises.
Life, progress, prophecy; it's all breath.'
'Some would allow it's all wind,' said Vandam;
'but I'm glad you've got rid of the divinity stunt,
anyhow.'
The keen face of the secretary, rather pale
against his red hair, showed a flicker of some odd
feeling suggestive of a secret bitterness.
'I'm not glad,' he said, 'I'm just sure. You seem
to like being atheists; so you may be just believing
what you like to believe. But. I wish to God there
were a God; and there ain't. It's just my luck.'
Without a sound or stir they all became almost
creepily conscious at this moment that the group,
halted outside Wynd's door, had silently grown from
three figures to four. How long the fourth figure
had stood there none of the earnest disputants could
tell, but he had every appearance of waiting
respectfully and even timidly for the opportunity to
say something urgent. But to their nervous
sensibility he seemed to have sprung up suddenly and
silently like a mushroom. And indeed, he looked
rather like a big, black mushroom, for he was quite
short and his small, stumpy figure was eclipsed by
his big, black clerical hat; the resemblance might
have been more complete if mushrooms were in the
habit of carrying umbrellas, even of a shabby and
shapeless sort.
Fenner, the secretary, was conscious of a curious
additional surprise at recognizing the figure of a
priest; but when the priest turned up a round face
under the round hat and innocently asked for Mr
Warren Wynd, he gave the regular negative answer
rather more curtly than before. But the priest stood
his ground.
'I do really want to see Mr Wynd,' he said. 'It
seems odd, but that's exactly what I do want to do.
I don't want to speak to him. I just want to see
him. I just want to see if he's there to be seen.'
'Well, I tell you he's there and can't be seen,'
said Fenner, with increasing annoyance. 'What do you
mean by saying you want to see if he's there to be
seen? Of course he's there. We all left him there
five minutes ago, and we've stood outside this door
ever since.'
'Well, I want to see if he's all right,' said the
priest.
'Why?' demanded the secretary, in exasperation.
'Because I have a serious, I might say solemn,
reason,' said the cleric, gravely, 'for doubting
whether he is all right.'
'Oh, Lord!' cried Vandam, in a sort of fury; 'not
more superstitions.'
'I see I shall have to give my reasons,' observed
the little cleric, gravely. 'I suppose I can't
expect you even to let me look through the crack of
a door till I tell you the whole story.' He was
silent a moment as in reflection, and then went on
without noticing the wondering faces around him. 'I
was walking outside along the front of the colonnade
when I saw a very ragged man running hard round the
corner at the end of the crescent. He came pounding
along the pavement towards me, revealing a great
raw--boned figure and a face I knew. It was the face
of a wild Irish fellow I once helped a little; I
will not tell you his name. When he saw me he
staggered, calling me by mine and saying, 'Saints
alive, it's Father Brown; you're the only man whose
face could frighten me to--day.'
'I knew he meant he'd been doing some wild thing
or other, and I don't think my face frightened him
much, for he was soon telling me about it. And a
very strange thing it was. He asked me if I knew
Warren Wynd, and I said no, though I knew he lived
near the top of these flats. He said, 'That's a man
who thinks he's a saint of God; but if he knew what
I was saying of him he should be ready to hang
himself.' And he repeated hysterically more than
once, 'Yes, ready to hang himself.' I asked him if
he'd done any harm to Wynd, and his answer was
rather a queer one. He said: 'I took a pistol and I
loaded it with neither shot nor slug, but only with
a curse.' As far as I could make out, all he had
done was to go down that little alley between this
building and the big warehouse, with an old pistol
loaded with a blank charge, and merely fire it
against the wall, as if that would bring down the
building. 'But as I did it,' he said, 'I cursed him
with the great curse, that the justice of God should
take him by the hair and the vengeance of hell by
the heels, and he should be torn asunder like Judas
and the world know him no more.'
'Well, it doesn't matter now what else I said to
the poor, crazy fellow; he went away quieted down a
little, and I went round to the back of the building
to inspect. And sure enough, in the little alley at
the foot of this wall there lay a rusty antiquated
pistol; I know enough about pistols to know it had
been loaded only with a little powder, there were
the black marks of powder and smoke on the wall, and
even the mark of the muzzle, but not even a dent of
any bullet. He had left no trace of destruction; he
had left no trace of anything, except those black
marks and that black curse he had hurled into
heaven. So I came back here to ask for this Warren
Wynd and find out if he's all right.'
Penner the secretary laughed. 'I can soon settle
that difficulty for you. I assure you he's quite all
right; we left him writing at his desk only a few
minutes ago. He was alone in his flat; it's a
hundred feet up from the street, and so placed that
no shot could have reached him, even if your friend
hadn't fired blank. There's no other entrance to
this place but this door, and we've been standing
outside it ever since.'
'All the same,' said Father Brown, gravely, 'I
should like to look in and see.'
'Well, you can't,' retorted the other. 'Good
Lord, you don't tell me you think anything of the
curse.'
'You forget,' said the millionaire, with a slight
sneer, 'the reverend gentleman's whole business is
blessings and cursings. Come, sir, if he's been
cursed to hell, why don't you bless him back again?
What's the good of your blessings if they can't beat
an Irish larrykin's curse?'
'Does anybody believe such things now?' protested
the Westerner.
'Father Brown believes a good number of things, I
take it,' said Vandam, whose temper was suffering
from the past snub and the present bickering.
'Father Brown believes a hermit crossed a river on a
crocodile conjured out of nowhere, and then he told
the crocodile to die, and it sure did. Father Brown
believes that some blessed saint or other died, and
had his dead body turned into three dead bodies, to
be served out to three parishes that were all I bent
on figuring as his home--town. Father Brown believes
that a saint hung his cloak on a sunbeam, and
another used his for a boat to cross the Atlantic.
Father Brown believes the holy donkey had six legs
and the house of Loretto flew through the air. He
believes in hundreds of stone virgins winking and
weeping all day long. It's nothing to him to believe
that a man might escape through the keyhole or
vanish out of a locked room. I reckon he doesn't
take much stock of the laws of nature.'
'Anyhow, I have to take stock in the laws of
Warren Wynd,' said the secretary, wearily, 'and it's
his rule that he's to be left alone when he says so.
Wilson will tell you just the same,' for the large
servant who had been sent for the pamphlet, passed
placidly down the corridor even as he spoke,
carrying the pamphlet, but serenely passing the
door. 'He'll go and sit on the bench by the
floor--clerk and twiddle his thumbs till he's
wanted; but he won't go in before then; and nor will
I. I reckon we both know which side our bread is
buttered, and it'd take a good many of Father
Brown's saint and angels to make us forget it.'
'As for saints and angels--' began the priest.
'It's all nonsense,' repeated Fenner. 'I don't
want to say anything offensive, but that sort of
thing may be very well for crypts and cloisters and
all sorts of moonshiny places. But ghosts can't get
through a closed door in an American hotel.'
'But men can open a door, even in an American
hotel,' replied Father Brown, patiently. 'And it
seems to me the simplest thing would be to open it.'
'It would be simple enough to lose me my job,'
answered the secretary, 'and Warren Wynd doesn't
like his secretaries so simple as that. Not simple
enough to believe in the sort of fairy tales you
seem to believe in.'
'Well,' said the priest gravely, 'it is true
enough that I believe in a good many things that you
probably don't. But it would take a considerable
time to explain all the things I believe in, and all
the reasons I have for thinking I'm right. It would
take about two seconds to open that door and prove I
am wrong.'
Something in the phrase seemed to please the more
wild and restless spirit of the man from the West.
'I'll allow I'd love to prove you wrong,' said
Alboin, striding suddenly past them, 'and I will.'
He threw open the door of the flat and looked in.
The first glimpse showed that Warren Wynd's chair
was empty. The second glance showed that his room
was empty also.
Fenner, electrified with energy in his turn,
dashed past the other into the apartment.
'He's in his bedroom,' be said curtly, 'he must
be.'
As he disappeared into the inner chamber the
other men stood in the empty outer room staring
about them. The severity and simplicity of its
fittings, which had already been noted, returned on
them with a rigid challenge. Certainly in this room
there was no question of hiding a mouse, let alone a
man. There were no curtains and, what is rare in
American arrangements, no cupboards. Even the desk
was no more than a plain table with a shallow drawer
and a tilted lid. The chairs were hard and high--
backed skeletons. A moment after the secretary
reappeared at the inner door, having searched the
two inner rooms. A staring negation stood in his
eyes, and his mouth seemed to move in a mechanical
detachment from it as he said sharply: 'He didn't
come out through here?'
Somehow the others did not even think it
necessary to answer that negation in the negative.
Their minds had come up against something like the
blank wall of the warehouse that stared in at the
opposite window, gradually turning from white to
grey as dusk slowly descended with the advancing
afternoon. Vandam walked over to the window--sill
against which he had leant half an hour before and
looked out of the open window. There was no pipe or
fire--escape, no shelf or foothold of any kind on
the sheer fall to the little by--street below, there
was nothing on the similar expanse of wall that rose
many stories above. There was even less variation on
the other side of the street; there was nothing
whatever but the wearisome expanse of whitewashed
wall. He peered downwards, as if expecting to see
the vanished philanthropist lying in a suicidal
wreck on the path. He could see nothing but one
small dark object which, though diminished by
distance, might well be the pistol that the priest
had found lying there. Meanwhile, Fenner had walked
to the other window, which looked out from a wall
equally blank and inaccessible, but looking out over
a small ornamental park instead of a side street.
Here a clump of trees interrupted the actual view of
the ground; but they reached but a little way up the
huge human cliff. Both turned back into the room and
faced each other in the gathering twilight where the
last silver gleams of daylight on the shiny tops of
desks and tables were rapidly turning grey. As if
the twilight itself irritated him, Fenner touched
the switch and the scene sprang into the startling
distinctness of electric light.
'As you said just now,' said Vandam grimly,
'there's no shot from down there could bit him, even
if there was a shot in the gun. But even if he was
hit with a bullet he wouldn't have just burst like a
bubble.'
The secretary, who was paler than ever, glanced
irritably at the bilious visage of the millionaire.
'What's got you started on those morbid notions?
Who's talking about bullets and bubbles? Why
shouldn't he be alive?'
'Why not indeed?' replied Vandam smoothly. 'If
you'll tell me where he is, I'll tell you how he got
there.'
After a pause the secretary muttered, rather
sulkily: 'I suppose you're right. We're right up
against the very thing we were talking about. It'd
be a queer thing if you or I ever came to think
there was anything in cursing. But who could have
harmed Wynd shut up in here?'
Mr Alboin, of Oklahoma, had been standing rather
astraddle in the middle of the room, his white,
hairy halo as well as his round eyes seeming to
radiate astonishment. At this point he said,
abstractedly, with something of the irrelevant
impudence of an enfant terrible: 'You didn't cotton
to him much, did you, Mr Vandam?'
Mr Vandam's long yellow face seemed to grow
longer as it grew more sinister, while he smiled and
answered quietly: 'If it comes to these
coincidences, it was you, I think, who said that a
wind from the West would blow away out big men like
thistledown.'
'I know I said it would,' said the Westerner,
with candour; 'but all the same, how the devil could
it?'
The silence was broken by Fenner saying with an
abruptness amounting to violence: 'There's only one
thing to say about this affair. It simply hasn't
happened. It can't have happened.'
'Oh, yes,' said Father Brown out of the corner;
'it has happened all right.'
They all jumped; for the truth was they had all
forgotten the insignificant little man who had
originally induced them to open the door. And the
recovery of memory went with a sharp reversal of
mood; it came back to them with a rush that they had
all dismissed him as a superstitious dreamer for
even hinting at the very thing that had since
happened before their eyes.
'Snakes!' cried the impetuous Westerner, like one
speaking before he could stop himself; 'suppose
there were something in it, after all!'
'I must confess,' said Fenner, frowning at the
table, 'that his reverence's anticipations were
apparently well founded. I don't know whether he has
anything else to tell us.'
'He might possibly tell us,' said Vandam,
sardonically, 'what the devil we are to do now.'
The little priest seemed to accept the position
in a modest, but matter--of--fact manner. 'The only
thing I can think of,' he said, 'is first to tell
the authorities of this place, and then to see if
there were any more traces of my man who let off the
pistol. He vanished round the other end of the
Crescent where the little garden is. There are seats
there, and it's a favourite place for tramps.'
Direct consultations with the headquarters of the
hotel, leading to indirect consultations with the
authorities of the police, occupied them for a
considerable time; and it was already nightfall when
they went out under the long, classical curve of the
colonnade. The crescent looked as cold and hollow as
the moon after which it was named, and the moon
itself was rising luminous but spectral behind the
black tree--tops when they turned the corner by the
little public garden. Night veiled much of what was
merely urban and artificial about the place, and as
they melted into the shadows of the trees they had a
strange feeling of having suddenly travelled many
hundred miles from their homes. When they had walked
in silence for a little, Alboin, who had something
elemental about him, suddenly exploded.
'I give up,' he cried; 'I hand in my checks. I
never thought I should come to such things; but what
happens when the things come to you? I beg your
pardon, Father Brown; I reckon I'll just come
across, so far as you and your fairy--tales are
concerned. After this, it's me for the fairy--tales.
Why, you said yourself, Mr Vandam, that you're an
atheist and only believe what you see. Well, what
was it you did see? Or rather, what was it you
didn't see?'
'I know,' said Vandam and nodded in a gloomy
fashion.
'Oh, it's partly all this moon and trees that get
on one's nerves,' said Fenner obstinately. 'Trees
always look queer by moonlight, with their branches
crawling about. Look at that--'
'Yes,' said Father Brown, standing still and
peering at the moon through a tangle of trees.
'That's a very queer branch up there.'
When he spoke again he only said: 'I thought it
was a broken branch.'
But this time there was a catch in his voice that
unaccountably turned his hearers cold. Something
that looked rather like a dead branch was certainly
dependent in a limp fashion from the tree that
showed dark against the moon; but it was not a dead
branch. When they came close to it to see what it
was Fenner sprang away again with a ringing oath.
Then he ran in again and loosened a rope from the
neck of the dingy little body dangling with drooping
plumes of grey hair. Somehow he knew that the body
was a dead body before he managed to take it down
from the tree. A very long coil of rope was wrapped
round and round the branches, and a comparatively
short length of it hung from the fork of the branch
to the body. A long garden tub was rolled a yard or
so from under the feet, like the stool kicked away
from the feet of a suicide.
'Oh, my God!' said Alboin, so that it seemed as
much a prayer as an oath.' What was it that man said
about him?--'If he knew, he would be ready to hang
himself.' Wasn't that what he said, Father Brown?'
'Yes,' said Father Brown.
'Well,' said Vandam in a hollow voice, 'I never
thought to see or say such a thing. But what can one
say except that the curse has worked?'
Fenner was standing with hands covering his face;
and the priest laid a hand on his arm and said,
gently, 'Were you very fond of him?'
The secretary dropped his hands and his white
face was ghastly under the moon.
'I hated him like hell,' he said; 'and if he died
by a curse it might have been mine.'
The pressure of the priest's hand on his arm
tightened; and the priest said, with an earnestness
he had hardly yet shown: 'It wasn't your curse; pray
be comforted.'
The police of the district had considerable
difficulty in dealing with the four witnesses who
were involved in the case. All of them were
reputable, and even reliable people in the ordinary
sense; and one of them was a person of considerable
power and importance: Silas Vandam of the Oil Trust.
The first police--officer who tried to express
scepticism about his story struck sparks from the
steel of that magnate's mind very rapidly indeed.
'Don't you talk to me about sticking to the
facts,' said the millionaire with asperity. 'I've
stuck to a good many facts before you were born and
a few of the facts have stuck to me. I'll give you
the facts all right if you've got the sense to take
'em down correctly.'
The policeman in question was youthful and
subordinate, and had a hazy idea that the
millionaire was too political to be treated as an
ordinary citizen; so he passed him and his
companions on to a more stolid superior, one
Inspector Collins, a grizzled man with a grimly
comfortable way of talking; as one who was genial
but would stand no nonsense.
'Well, well,' he said, looking at the three
figures before him with twinkling eyes, 'this seems
to be a funny sort of a tale.'
Father Brown had already gone about his daily
business; but Silas Vandam had suspended even the
gigantic business of the markets for an hour or so
to testify to his remarkable experience. Fenner's
business as secretary had ceased in a sense with his
employer's life; and the great Art Alboin, having no
business in New York or anywhere else, except the
spreading of the Breath of Life religion or the
Great Spirit, had nothing to draw him away at the
moment from the immediate affair. So they stood in a
row in the inspector's office, prepared to
corroborate each other.
'Now I'd better tell you to start with,' said the
inspector cheerfully, 'that it's no good for anybody
to come to me with any miraculous stuff. I'm a
practical man and a policeman, and that sort of
thing is all very well for priests and parsons. This
priest of yours seems to have got you all worked up
about some story of a dreadful death and judgement;
but I'm going to leave him and his religion out of
it altogether. If Wynd came out of that room,
somebody let him out. And if Wynd was found hanging
on that tree, somebody hung him there.'
'Quite so,' said Fenner; 'but as out evidence is
that nobody let him out, the question is how could
anybody have hung him there?'
'How could anybody have a nose on his face?'
asked the inspector. 'He had a nose on his face, and
he had a noose round his neck. Those are facts; and,
as I say, I'm a practical man and go by the facts.
It can't have been done by a miracle, so it must
have been done by a man.'
Alboin had been standing rather in the
background; and indeed his broad figure seemed to
form a natural background to the leaner and more
vivacious men in front of him. His white head was
bowed with a certain abstraction; but as the
inspector said the last sentence, he lifted it,
shaking his hoary mane in a leonine fashion, and
looking dazed but awakened. He moved forward into
the centre of the group, and they had a vague
feeling that he was even vaster than before. They
had been only too prone to take him for a fool or a
mountebank; but he was not altogether wrong when he
said that there was in him a certain depth of lungs
and life, like a west wind stored up in its
strength, which might some day puff lighter things
away.
'So you're a practical man, Mr Collins,' he said,
in a voice at once soft and heavy. 'It must be the
second or third time you've mentioned in this little
conversation that you are a practical man; so I
can't be mistaken about that. And a very interesting
little fact it is for anybody engaged in writing
your life, letters, and table--talk, with portrait
at the age of five, daguerreotype of your
grandmother and views of the old home--town; and I'm
sure your biographer won't forget to mention it
along with the fact that you had a pug nose with a
pimple on it, and were nearly too fat to walk. And
as you're a practical man, perhaps you would just go
on practising till you've brought Warren Wynd to
life again, and found out exactly how a practical
man gets through a deal door. But I think you've got
it wrong. You're not a practical man. You're a
practical joke; that's what you are. The Almighty
was having a bit of fun with us when he thought of
you.'
With a characteristic sense of drama he went
sailing towards the door before the astonished
inspector could reply; and no after-- recriminations
could rob him of a certain appearance of triumph.
'I think you were perfectly right,' said Fenner.
'If those are practical men, give me priests.'
Another attempt was made to reach an official
version of the event when the authorities fully
realized who were the backers of the story, and what
were the implications of it. Already it had broken
out in the Press in its most sensationally and even
shamelessly psychic form. Interviews with Vandam on
his marvellous adventure, articles about Father
Brown and his mystical intuitions, soon led those
who feel responsible for guiding the public, to wish
to guide it into a wiser channel. Next time the
inconvenient witnesses were approached in a more
indirect and tactful manner. They were told, almost
in an airy fashion, that Professor Vair was very
much interested in such abnormal experiences; was
especially interested in their own astonishing case.
Professor Vair was a psychologist of great
distinction; he had been known to take a detached
interest in criminology; it was only some little
time afterwards that they discovered that he was in
any way connected with the police.
Professor Vair was a courteous gentleman, quietly
dressed in pale grey clothes, with an artistic tie
and a fair, pointed beard; he looked more like a
landscape painter to anyone not acquainted with a
certain special type of don. He had an air not only
of courtesy, but of frankness.
'Yes, yes, I know,' he said smiling; 'I can guess
what you must have gone through. The police do not
shine in inquiries of a psychic sort, do they? Of
course, dear old Collins said he only wanted the
facts. What an absurd blunder! In a case of this
kind we emphatically do not only want the facts. It
is even more essential to have the fancies.'
'Do you mean,' asked Vandam gravely, 'that all
that we thought facts were merely fancies?'
'Not at all,' said the professor; 'I only mean
that the police are stupid in thinking they can
leave out the psychological element in these things.
Well, of course, the psychological element is
everything in everything, though it is only just
beginning to be understood. To begin with, take the
element called personality. Now I have heard of this
priest, Father Brown, before; and he is one of the
most remarkable men of our time. Men of that sort
carry a sort of atmosphere with them; and nobody
knows how much his nerves and even his very senses
are affected by it for the time being. People are
hypnotized-- yes, hypnotized; for hypnotism, like
everything else, is a matter of degree; it enters
slightly into all daily conversation: it is not
necessarily conducted by a man in evening-- dress on
a platform in a public hall. Father Brown's religion
has always understood the psychology of atmospheres,
and knows bow to appeal to everything
simultaneously; even, for instance, to the sense of
smell. It understands those curious effects produced
by music on animals and human beings; it can--'
'Hang it,' protested Fenner, 'you don't think he
walked down the corridor carrying a church organ?'
'He knows better than to do that,' said Professor
Vair laughing. 'He knows how to concentrate the
essence of all these spiritual sounds and sights,
and even smells, in a few restrained gestures; in an
art or school of manners. He could contrive so to
concentrate your minds on the supernatural by his
mere presence, that natural things slipped off your
minds to left and right unnoticed. Now you know,' he
proceeded with a return to cheerful good sense,
'that the more we study it the more queer the whole
question of human evidence becomes. There is not one
man in twenty who really observes things at all.
There is not one man in a hundred who observes them
with real precision; certainly not one in a hundred
who can first observe, then remember, and finally
describe. Scientific experiments have been made
again and again showing that men under strain have
thought a door was shut when it was open, or open
when it was shut. Men have differed about the number
of doors or windows in a wall just in front of them.
They have suffered optical illusions in broad
daylight. They have done this even without the
hypnotic effect of personality; but here we have a
very powerful and persuasive personality bent upon
fixing only one picture on your minds; the picture
of the wild Irish rebel shaking his pistol at the
sky and firing that vain volley, whose echoes were
the thunders of heaven.'
'Professor,' cried Fenner, 'I'd swear on my
deathbed that door never opened.'
'Recent experiments,' went on the professor,
quietly, 'have suggested that our consciousness is
not continuous, but is a succession of very rapid
impressions like a cinema; it is possible that
somebody or something may, so to speak, slip in or
out between the scenes. It acts only in the instant
while the curtain is down. Probably the patter of
conjurors and all forms of sleight of hand depend on
what we may call these black flashes of blindness
between the flashes of sight. Now this priest and
preacher of transcendental notions had filled you
with a transcendental imagery; the image of the Celt
like a Titan shaking the tower with his curse.
Probably he accompanied it with some slight but
compelling gesture, pointing your eyes and minds in
the direction of the unknown destroyer below. Or
perhaps something else happened, or somebody else
passed by.'
'Wilson, the servant,' grunted Alboin, 'went down
the hallway to wait on the bench, but I guess he
didn't distract us much.'
'You never know how much,' replied Vair; 'it
might have been that or more likely your eyes
following some gesture of the priest as he told his
tale of magic. It was in one of those black flashes
that Mr Warren Wynd slipped out of his door and went
to his death. That is the most probable explanation.
It is an illustration of the new discovery. The mind
is not a continuous line, but rather a dotted line.'
'Very dotted,' said Fenner feebly. 'Not to say
dotty.'
'You don't really believe,' asked Vair, 'that
your employer was shut up in a room like a box?'
'It's better than believing that I ought to be
shut up in a room like a padded cell,' answered
Fenner. 'That's what I complain of in your
suggestions, professor. I'd as soon believe in a
priest who believes in a miracle, as disbelieve in
any man having any right to believe in a fact. The
priest tells me that a man can appeal to a God I
know nothing about to avenge him by the laws of some
higher justice that I know nothing about. There's
nothing for me to say except that I know nothing
about it. But, at least, if the poor Paddy's prayer
and pistol could be heard in a higher world, that
higher world might act in some way that seems odd to
us. But you ask me to disbelieve the facts of this
world as they appear to my own five wits. According
to you, a whole procession of Irishmen carrying
blunderbusses may have walked through this room
while we were talking, so long as they took care to
tread on the blind spots in our minds. Miracles of
the monkish sort, like materializing a crocodile or
hanging a cloak on a sunbeam, seem quite sane
compared to you.'
'Oh, well,' said Professor Vair, rather curtly,
'if you are resolved to believe in your priest and
his miraculous Irishman I can say no more. I'm
afraid you have not had an opportunity of studying
psychology.'
'No,' said Fenner dryly; 'but I've had an
opportunity of studying psychologists.'
And, bowing politely, he led his deputation out
of the room and did not speak till he got into the
street; then he addressed them rather explosively.
'Raving lunatics!' cried Fenner in a fume. 'What
the devil do they think is to happen to the world if
nobody knows whether he's seen anything or not? I
wish I'd blown his silly head off with a blank
charge, and then explained that I did it in a blind
flash. Father Brown's miracle may be miraculous or
no, but he said it would happen and it did happen.
All these blasted cranks can do is to see a thing
happen and then say it didn't. Look here, I think we
owe it to the padre to testify to his little
demonstration. We're all sane, solid men who never
believed in anything. We weren't drunk. We weren't
devout. It simply happened just as he said it
would.'
'I quite agree,' said the millionaire. 'It may be
the beginning of mighty big things in the spiritual
line; but anyhow, the man who's in the spiritual
line himself, Father Brown, has certainly scored
over this business.'
A few days afterwards Father Brown received a
very polite note signed Silas T. Vandam, and asking
him if he would attend at a stated hour at the
apartment which was the scene of the disappearance,
in order to take steps for the establishment of that
marvellous occurrence. The occurrence itself had
already begun to break out in the newspapers, and
was being taken up everywhere by the enthusiasts of
occultism. Father Brown saw the flaring posters
inscribed 'Suicide of Vanishing Man', and 'Man's
Curse Hangs Philanthropist', as he passed towards
Moon Crescent and mounted the steps on the way to
the elevator. He found the little group much as he
left it, Vandam, Alboin, and the secretary; but
there was an entirely new respectfulness and even
reverence in their tone towards himself. They were
standing by Wynd's desk, on which lay a large paper
and writing materials; they turned to greet him.
'Father Brown,' said the spokesman, who was the
white--haired Westerner, somewhat sobered with his
responsibility, 'we asked you here in the first
place to offer our apologies and our thanks. We
recognize that it was you that spotted the spiritual
manifestation from the first. We were hard--shell
sceptics, all of us; but we realize now that a man
must break that shell to get at the great things
behind the world. You stand for those things; you
stand for the super--normal explanation of things;
and we have to hand it to you. And in the second
place, we feel that this document would not be
complete without your signature. We are notifying
the exact facts to the Psychical Research Society,
because the newspaper accounts are not what you
might call exact. We've stated how the curse was
spoken out in the street; how the man was sealed up
here in a room like a box; how the curse dissolved
him straight into thin air, and in some unthinkable
way materialized him as a suicide hoisted on a
gallows. That's all we can say about it; but all
that we know, and have seen with our own eyes. And
as you were the first to believe in the miracle, we
all feel that you ought to be the first to sign.'
'No, really,' said Father Brown, in
embarrassment. 'I don't think I should like to do
that.'
'You mean you'd rather not sign first?'
'I mean I'd rather not sign at all,' said Father
Brown, modestly. 'You see, it doesn't quite do for a
man in my position to joke about miracles.'
'But it was you who said it was a miracle,' said
Alboin, staring.
'I'm so sorry,' said Father Brown; 'I'm afraid
there's some mistake. I don't think I ever said it
was a miracle. All I said was that it might happen.
What you said was that it couldn't happen, because
it would be a miracle if it did. And then it did.
And so you said it was a miracle. But I never said a
word about miracles or magic, or anything of the
sort from beginning to end.'
'But I thought you believed in miracles,' broke
out the secretary.
'Yes,' answered Father Brown, 'I believe in
miracles. I believe in man-- eating tigers, but I
don't see them running about everywhere. If I want
any miracles, I know where to get them.'
'I can't understand your taking this line, Father
Brown,' said Vandam, earnestly. 'It seems so narrow;
and you don't look narrow to me, though you are a
parson. Don't you see, a miracle like this will
knock all materialism endways? It will just tell the
whole world in big print that spiritual powers can
work and do work. You'll be serving religion as no
parson ever served it yet.'
The priest had stiffened a little and seemed in
some strange way clothed with unconscious and
impersonal dignity, for all his stumpy figure.
'Well,' he said, 'you wouldn't suggest I should
serve religion by what I know to be a lie? I don't
know precisely what you mean by the phrase; and, to
be quite candid, I'm not sure you do. Lying may be
serving religion; I'm sure it's not serving God. And
since you are harping so insistently on what I
believe, wouldn't it be as well if you had some sort
of notion of what it is?'
'I don't think I quite understand,' observed the
millionaire, curiously.
'I don't think you do,' said Father Brown, with
simplicity. 'You say this thing was done by
spiritual powers. What spiritual powers? You don't
think the holy angels took him and hung him on a
garden tree, do you? And as for the unholy
angels--no, no, no. The men who did this did a
wicked thing, but they went no further than their
own wickedness; they weren't wicked enough to be
dealing with spiritual powers. I know something
about Satanism, for my sins; I've been forced to
know. I know what it is, what it practically always
is. It's proud and it's sly. It likes to be
superior; it loves to horrify the innocent with
things half understood, to make children's flesh
creep. That's why it's so fond of mysteries and
initiations and secret societies and all the rest of
it. Its eyes are turned inwards, and however grand
and grave it may look, it's always hiding a small,
mad smile.' He shuddered suddenly, as if caught in
an icy draught of air. 'Never mind about them;
they've got nothing to do with this, believe me. Do
you think that poor, wild Irishman of mine, who ran
raving down the street, who blurted out half of it
when he first saw my face, and ran away for fear he
should blurt out more, do you think Satan confides
any secrets to him? I admit he joined in a plot,
probably in a plot with two other men worse than
himself; but for all that, he was just in an
everlasting rage when he rushed down the lane and
let off his pistol and his curse.'
'But what on earth does all this mean?' demanded
Vandam. 'Letting off a toy pistol and a twopenny
curse wouldn't do what was done, except by a
miracle. It wouldn't make Wynd disappear like a
fairy. It wouldn't make him reappear a quarter of a
mile away with a rope round his neck.'
'No,' said Father Brown sharply; 'but what would
it do?'
'And still I don't follow you,' said the
millionaire gravely.
'I say, what would it do?' repeated the priest;
showing, for the first time, a sort of animation
verging on annoyance. 'You keep on repeating that a
blank pistol--shot wouldn't do this and wouldn't do
that; that if that was all, the murder wouldn't
happen or the miracle wouldn't happen. It doesn't
seem to occur to you to ask what would happen. What
would happen to you if a lunatic let off a firearm
without rhyme or reason right under your window?
What's the very first thing that would happen?'
Vandam looked thoughtful. 'I guess I should look
out of the window,' he said.
'Yes,' said Father Brown, 'you'd look out of the
window. That's the whole story. It's a sad story,
but it's finished now; and there were extenuating
circumstances.'
'Why should looking out of the window hurt him?'
asked Alboin. 'He didn't fall out, or he'd have been
found in the lane.'
'No,' said Father Brown, in a low voice. 'He
didn't fall. He rose.'
There was something in his voice like the groan
of a gong, a note of doom, but otherwise he went on
steadily: 'He rose, but not on wings; not on the
wings of any holy or unholy angels. He rose at the
end of a rope, exactly as you saw him in the garden;
a noose dropped over his head the moment it was
poked out of the window. Don't you remember Wilson,
that big servant of his, a man of huge strength,
while Wynd was the lightest of little shrimps?
Didn't Wilson go to the floor above to get a
pamphlet, to a room full of luggage corded in coils
and coils of rope? Has Wilson been seen since that
day? I fancy not.'
'Do you mean,' asked the secretary, 'that Wilson
whisked him clean out of his own window like a trout
on a line?'
'Yes,' said the other, 'and let him down again
out of the other window into the park, where the
third accomplice hooked him on to a tree. Remember
the lane was always empty; remember the wall
opposite was quite blank; remember it was all over
in five minutes after the Irishman gave the signal
with the pistol. There were three of them in it of
course; and I wonder whether you can all guess who
they were.'
They were all three staring at the plain, square
window and the blank, white wall beyond; and nobody
answered.
'By the way,' went on Father Brown, 'don't think
I blame you for jumping to preternatural
conclusions. The reason's very simple, really. You
all swore you were hard--shelled materialists; and
as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the
very edge of belief-- of belief in almost anything.
There are thousands balanced on it today; but it's a
sharp, uncomfortable edge to sit on. You won't rest
till you believe something; that's why Mr Vandam
went through new religions with a tooth--comb, and
Mr Alboin quotes Scripture for his religion of
breathing exercises, and Mr Fenner grumbles at the
very God he denies. That's where you all split; it's
natural to believe in the supernatural. It never
feels natural to accept only natural things. But
though it wanted only a touch to tip you into
preternaturalism about these things, these things
really were only natural things. They were not only
natural, they were almost unnaturally simple. I
suppose there never was quite so simple a story as
this.'
Fenner laughed and then looked puzzled. 'I don't
understand one thing,' he said. 'If it was Wilson,
how did Wynd come to have a man like that on such
intimate terms? How did he come to be killed by a
man he'd seen every day for years? He was famous as
being a judge of men.'
Father Brown thumped his umbrella on the ground
with an emphasis he rarely showed.
'Yes,' he said, almost fiercely; 'that was how he
came to be killed. He was killed for just that. He
was killed for being a judge of men.'
They all stared at him, but he went on, almost as
if they were not there.
'What is any man that he should be a judge of
men?' he demanded. 'These three were the tramps that
once stood before him and were dismissed rapidly
right and left to one place or another; as if for
them there were no cloak of courtesy, no stages of
intimacy, no free--will in friendship. And twenty
years has not exhausted the indignation born of that
unfathomable insult in that moment when he dared to
know them at a glance.'
'Yes,' said the secretary; 'I understand ... and
I understand how it is that you understand--all
sorts of things.'
'Well, I'm blamed if I understand,' cried the
breezy Western gentleman boisterously. 'Your Wilson
and your Irishman seem to be just a couple of
cut--throat murderers who killed their benefactor.
I've no use for a black and bloody assassin of that
sort, in my morality, whether it's religion or not.'
'He was a black and bloody assassin, no doubt,'
said Fenner quietly. 'I'm not defending him; but I
suppose it's Father Brown's business to pray for all
men, even for a man like--'
'Yes,' assented Father Brown, 'it's my business
to pray for all men, even for a man like Warren Wynd.'
|
|
The Curse of the Golden Cross
Six people sat around a small table, seeming
almost as incongruous and accidental as if they had
been shipwrecked separately on the same small desert
island. At least the sea surrounded them; for in one
sense their island was enclosed in another island, a
large and flying island like Laputa. For the little
table was one of many little tables dotted about in
the dining saloon of that monstrous ship the
Moravia, speeding through the night and the
everlasting emptiness of the Atlantic. The little
company had nothing in common except that all were
travelling from America to England. Two of them at
least might be called celebrities; others might be
called obscure, and in one or two cases even
dubious.
The first was the famous Professor Smaill, an
authority on certain archaeological studies touching
the later Byzantine Empire. His lectures, delivered
in an American University, were accepted as of the
first authority even in the most authoritative seats
of learning in Europe. His literary works were so
steeped in a mellow and imaginative sympathy with
the European past, that it often gave strangers a
start to hear him speak with an American accent. Yet
he was, in his way, very American; he had long fair
hair brushed back from a big square forehead, long
straight features and a curious mixture of
preoccupation with a poise of potential swiftness,
like a lion pondering absent-- mindedly on his next
leap.
There was only one lady in the group; and she was
(as the journalists often said of her) a host in
herself; being quite prepared to play hostess, not
to say empress, at that or any other table. She was
Lady Diana Wales, the celebrated lady traveller in
tropical and other countries; but there was nothing
rugged or masculine about her appearance at dinner.
She was herself handsome in an almost tropical
fashion, with a mass of hot and heavy red hair; she
was dressed in what the journalists call a daring
fashion, but her face was intelligent and her eyes
had that bright and rather prominent appearance
which belongs to the eyes of ladies who ask
questions at political meetings.
The other four figures seemed at first like
shadows in this shining presence; but they showed
differences on a close view. One of them was a young
man entered on the ship's register as Paul T.
Tarrant. He was an American type which might be more
truly called an American antitype. Every nation
probably has an antitype; a sort of extreme
exception that proves the national rule. Americans
really respect work, rather as Europeans respect
war. There is a halo of heroism about it; and he who
shrinks from it is less than a man. The antitype is
evident through being exceedingly rare. He is the
dandy or dude: the wealthy waster who makes a weak
villain for so many American novels. Paul Tarrant
seemed to have nothing whatever to do but change his
clothes, which he did about six times a day; passing
into paler or richer shades of his suit of exquisite
light grey, like the delicate silver changes of the
twilight. Unlike most Americans, he cultivated very
carefully a short, curly beard; and unlike most
dandies, even of his own type, he seemed rather
sulky than showy. Perhaps there was something almost
Byronic about his silence and his gloom.
The next two travellers were naturally classed
together; merely because they were both English
lecturers returning from an American tour. One of
them was described as Leonard Smyth, apparently a
minor poet, but something of a major journalist;
long--headed, light--haired, perfectly dressed, and
perfectly capable of looking after himself. The
other was a rather comic contrast, being short and
broad, with a black, walrus moustache, and as
taciturn as the other was talkative. But as he had
been both charged with robbing and praised for
rescuing a Roumanian Princess threatened by a jaguar
in his travelling menagerie, and had thus figured in
a fashionable case, it was naturally felt that his
views on God, progress, his own early life, and the
future of Anglo--American relations would be of
great interest and value to the inhabitants of
Minneapolis and Omaha. The sixth and most
insignificant figure was that of a little English
priest going by the name of Brown. He listened to
the conversation with respectful attention, and he
was at that moment forming the impression that there
was one rather curious thing about it.
'I suppose those Byzantine studies of yours,
Professor,' Leonard Smyth was saying, 'would throw
some light on this story of a tomb found somewhere
on the south coast; near Brighton, isn't it?
Brighton's a long way from Byzantium, of course. But
I read something about the style of burying or
embalming or something being supposed to be
Byzantine.'
'Byzantine studies certainly have to reach a long
way,' replied the Professor dryly. 'They talk about
specialists; but I think the hardest thing on earth
is to specialize. In this case, for instance: how
can a man know anything about Byzantium till he
knows everything about Rome before it and about
Islam after it? Most Arab arts were old Byzantine
arts. Why, take algebra--'
'But I won't take algebra,' cried the lady
decisively. 'I never did, and I never do. But I'm
awfully interested in embalming. I was with Gatton,
you know, when he opened the Babylonian tombs. Ever
since then I found mummies and preserved bodies and
all that perfectly thrilling. Do tell us about this
one.'
'Gatton was an interesting man,' said the
Professor. 'They were an interesting family. That
brother of his who went into Parliament was much
more than an ordinary politician. I never understood
the Fascisti till he made that speech about Italy.'
'Well, we're not going to Italy on this trip,'
said Lady Diana persistently, 'and I believe you're
going to that little place where they've found the
tomb. In Sussex, isn't it?'
'Sussex is pretty large, as these little English
sections go,' replied the Professor. 'One might
wander about in it for a goodish time; and it's a
good place to wander in. It's wonderful how large
those low hills seem when you're on them.'
There was an abrupt accidental silence; and then
the lady said, 'Oh, I'm going on deck,' and rose,
the men rising with her. But the Professor lingered
and the little priest was the last to leave the
table, carefully folding up his napkin. And as they
were thus left alone together the Professor said
suddenly to his companion:
'What would you say was the point of that little
talk?'
'Well,' said Father Brown, smiling, 'since you
ask me, there was something that amused me a little.
I may be wrong; but it seemed to me that the company
made three attempts to get you to talk about an
embalmed body said to be found in Sussex. And you,
on your side, very courteously offered to talk--
first about algebra, and then about the Fascisti,
and then about the landscape of the Downs.'
'In short,' replied the Professor, 'you thought I
was ready to talk about any subject but that one.
You were quite right.'
The Professor was silent for a little time,
looking down at the tablecloth; then he looked up
and spoke with that swift impulsiveness that
suggested the lion's leap.
'See here. Father Brown,' he said, 'I consider
you about wisest and whitest man I ever met.'
Father Brown was very English. He had all the
normal nation helplessness about what to do with a
serious and sincere compliment suddenly handed to
him to his face in the American manner. His reply
was a meaningless murmur; and it was the Professor
who proceeded, with the same staccato earnestness:
'You see, up to a point it's all simple enough. A
Christian tomb of the Dark Ages, apparently that of
a bishop, has been found under a little church at
Dulham on the Sussex coast. The Vicar happens to be
a good bit of an archaeologist himself and has been
able to find a good deal more than I know yet. There
was a rumour of the corpse being embalmed in a way
peculiar to Greeks and Egyptians but unknown in the
West, especially at that date. So Mr Walters (that
is the Vicar) naturally wonders about Byzantine
influences. But he also mentions something else,
that is of even more personal interest to me.'
His long grave face seemed to grow even longer
and graver as he frowned down at the tablecloth. His
long finger seemed to be tracing patterns on it like
the plans of dead cities and their temples and
tombs.
'So I'm going to tell you, and nobody else, why
it is I have to be careful about mentioning that
matter in mixed company; and why, the more eager
they are to talk about it, the more cautious I have
to be. It is also stated that in the coffin is a
chain with a cross, common enough to look at, but
with a certain secret symbol on the back found on
only one other cross in the world. It is from the
arcana of the very earliest Church, and is supposed
to indicate St Peter setting up his See at Antioch
before he came to Rome. Anyhow, I believe there is
but one other like it, and it belongs to me. I hear
there is some story about a curse on it; but I take
no notice of that. But whether or no there is a
curse, there really is, in one sense, a conspiracy;
though the conspiracy should only consist of one
man.'
'Of one man?' repeated Father Brown almost
mechanically.
'Of one madman, for all I know,' said Professor
Smaill. 'It's a long story and in some ways a silly
one.'
He paused again, tracing plans like architectural
drawings with his finger on the cloth, and then
resumed: 'Perhaps I had better tell you about it
from the beginning, in case you see some little
point in the story that is meaningless to me. It
began years and years ago, when I was conducting
some investigations on my own account in the
antiquities of Crete and the Greek islands. I did a
great deal of it practically single--handed;
sometimes with the most rude and temporary help from
the inhabitants of the place, and sometimes
literally alone. It was under the latter
circumstances that I found a maze of subterranean
passages which led at last to a heap of rich refuse,
broken ornaments and scattered gems which I took to
be the ruins of some sunken altar, and in which I
found the curious gold cross. I turned it over, and
on the back of it I saw the Ichthus or fish, which
was an early Christian symbol, but of a shape and
pattern rather different from that commonly found;
and, as it seemed to me, more realistic--more as if
the archaic designer had meant it to be not merely a
conventional enclosure or nimbus, but to look a
little more like a real fish. It seemed to me that
there was a flattening towards one end of it that
was not like mere mathematical decoration, but
rather like a sort of rude or even savage zoology.
'In order to explain very briefly why I thought
this find important, I must tell you the point of
the excavation. For one thing, it had something of
the nature of an excavation of an excavation. We
were on the track not only of antiquities, but of
the antiquarians of antiquity. We had reason to
believe, or some of us thought we had reason to
believe, that these underground passages, mostly of
the Minoan period, like that famous one which is
actually identified with the labyrinth of the
Minotaur, had not really been lost and left
undisturbed for all the ages between the Minotaur
and the modern explorer. We believed that these
underground places, I might almost say these
underground towns and villages, had already been
penetrated during the intervening period by some
persons prompted by some motive. About the motive
there were different schools of thought: some
holding that the Emperors had ordered an official
exploration out of mere scientific curiosity; others
that the furious fashion in the later Roman Empire
for all sorts of lurid Asiatic superstitions had
started some nameless Manichaean sect or other
rioting in the caverns in orgies that had to be
hidden from the face of the sun. I belong to the
group which believed that these caverns had been
used in the same way as the catacombs. That is, we
believed that, during some of the persecutions which
spread like a fire over the whole Empire, the
Christians had concealed themselves in these ancient
pagan labyrinths of stone. It was therefore with a
thrill as sharp I as a thunderclap that I found and
picked up the fallen golden cross and saw the design
upon it; and it was with still more of a shock of
felicity that, on turning to make my way once more
outwards and upwards into the light of day, I looked
up at the walls of bare rock that extended endlessly
along the low passages, and saw scratched in yet
ruder outline, but if possible more unmistakable,
the shape of the Fish.
'Something about it made it seem as if it might
be a fossil fish or some rudimentary organism fixed
for ever in a frozen sea. I could not analyse this
analogy, otherwise unconnected with a mere drawing
scratched upon the stone, till I realized that I was
saying in my sub--conscious mind that the first
Christians must have seemed something like fish,
dumb and dwelling in a fallen world of twilight and
silence, dropped far below the feet of men and
moving in dark and twilight and a soundless world.
'Everyone walking along stone passages knows what
it is to be followed by phantom feet. The echo
follows flapping or clapping behind or in front, so
that it is almost impossible for the man who is
really lonely to believe in his loneliness. I had
got used to the effects of this echo and had not
noticed it much for some time past, when I caught
sight of the symbolical shape scrawled on the wall
of rock. I stopped, and at the same instant it
seemed as if my heart stopped, too; for my own feet
had halted, but the echo went marching on.
'I ran forward, and it seemed as if the ghostly
footsteps ran also, but not with that exact
imitation which marks the material reverberation of
a sound. I stopped again, and the steps stopped
also; but I could have sworn they stopped an instant
too late; I called out a question; and my cry was
answered; but the voice was not my own.
'It came round the corner of a rock just in front
of me; and throughout that uncanny chase I noticed
that it was always at some such angle of the crooked
path that it paused and spoke. The little space in
front of me that could be illuminated by my small
electric torch was always as empty as an empty room.
Under these conditions I had a conversation with I
know not whom, which lasted all the way to the first
white gleam of daylight, and even there I could not
see in what fashion he vanished into the light of
day. But the mouth of the labyrinth was full of many
openings and cracks and chasms, and it would not
have been difficult for him to have somehow darted
back and disappeared again into the underworld of
the caves. I only know that I came out on the lonely
steps of a great mountain like a marble terrace,
varied only with a green vegetation that seemed
somehow more tropical than the purity of the rock,
like the Oriental invasion that has spread
sporadically over the fall of classic Hellas. I
looked out on a sea of stainless blue, and the sun
shone steadily on utter loneliness and silence; and
there was not a blade of grass stirred with a
whisper of flight nor the shadow of a shadow of man.
'It had been a terrible conversation; so intimate
and so individual and in a sense so casual. This
being, bodiless, faceless, nameless and yet calling
me by my name, had talked to me in those crypts and
cracks where we were buried alive with no more
passion or melodrama than if we had been sitting in
two armchairs at a club. But he had told me also
that he would unquestionably kill me or any other
man who came into the possession of the cross with
the mark of the fish. He told me frankly he was not
fool enough to attack me there in the labyrinth,
knowing I had a loaded revolver, and that he ran as
much risk as I. But he told me, equally calmly, that
he would plan my murder with the certainty of
success, with every detail developed and every
danger warded off, with the sort of artistic
perfection that a Chinese craftsman or an Indian
embroiderer gives to the artistic work of a
life--time. Yet he was no Oriental; I am certain be
was a white man. I suspect that he was a countryman
of my own.
'Since then I have received from time to time
signs and symbols and queer impersonal messages that
have made me certain, at least, that if the man is a
maniac he is a monomaniac. He is always telling me,
in this airy and detached way, that the preparations
for my death and burial are proceeding
satisfactorily; and that the only way in which I can
prevent their being crowned with a comfortable
success is to give up the relic in my
possession--the unique cross that I found in the
cavern. He does not seem to have any religious
sentiment or fanaticism on the point; he seems to
have no passion but the passion of a collector of
curiosities. That is one of the things that makes me
feel sure he is a man of the West and not of the
East. But this particular curiosity seems to have
driven him quite crazy.
'And then came this report, as yet
unsubstantiated, about the duplicate relic found on
an embalmed body in a Sussex tomb. If he had been a
maniac before, this news turned him into a demoniac
possessed of seven devils. That there should be one
of them belonging to another man was bad enough, but
that there should be two of them and neither
belonging to him was a torture not to be borne. His
mad messages began to come thick and fast like
showers of poisoned arrows, and each cried out more
confidently than the last that death would strike me
at the moment when I stretched out my unworthy hand
towards the cross in the tomb.
You will never know me,' he wrote, 'you will
never say my name; you will never see my face; you
will die, and never know who has killed you. I may
be in any form among those about you; but I shall be
in that alone at which you have forgotten to look.'
'From those threats I deduce that he is quite
likely to shadow me on this expedition; and try to
steal the relic or do me some mischief for
possessing it. But as I never saw the man in my
life, he may be almost any man I meet. Logically
speaking, he may be any of the waiters who wait on
me at table. He may be any of the passengers who sit
with me at table.'
'He may be me,' said Father Brown, with cheerful
contempt for grammar.
'He may be anybody else,' answered Smaill
seriously. 'That is what I meant by what I said just
now. You are the only man I feel sure is not the
enemy.'
Father Brown again looked embarrassed; then he
smiled and said: 'Well, oddly enough, I'm not. What
we have to consider is any chance of finding out if
he really is here before he-- before he makes
himself unpleasant.'
'There is one chance of finding out, I think,'
remarked the Professor rather grimly. 'When we get
to Southampton I shall take a car at once along the
coast; I should be glad if you would come with me,
but in the ordinary sense, of course, our little
party will break up. If any one of them turns up
again in that little churchyard on the Sussex coast,
we shall know who he really is.'
The Professor's programme was duly carried out,
at least to the extent of the car and its cargo in
the form of Father Brown. They coasted along the
road with the sea on one side and the hills of
Hampshire and Sussex on the other; nor was there
visible to the eye any shadow of pursuit. As they
approached the village of Dulham only one man
crossed their path who had any connexion with the
matter in hand; a journalist who had just visited
the church and been courteously escorted by the
vicar through the new excavated chapel; but his
remarks and notes seemed to be of the ordinary
newspaper sort. But Professor Smaill was perhaps a
little fanciful, and could not dismiss the sense of
something odd and discouraging in the attitude and
appearance of the man, who was tall and shabby,
hook-- nosed and hollow--eyed, with moustaches that
drooped with depression. He seemed anything but
enlivened by his late experiment as a sightseer;
indeed, he seemed to be striding as fast as possible
from the sight, when they stopped him with a
question.
'It's all about a curse,' he said; 'a curse on
the place, according to the guide--book or the
parson, or the oldest inhabitant or whoever is the
authority; and really, it feels jolly like it. Curse
or curse, I'm glad to have got out of it.'
'Do you believe in curses?' asked Smaill
curiously.
'I don't believe in anything; I'm a journalist,'
answered the melancholy being--'Boon, of the Daily
Wire. But there's a some--thing creepy about that
crypt; and I'll never deny I felt a chill.' And he
strode on towards the railway station with a further
accelerated pace.
'Looks like a raven or a crow, that fellow,'
observed Smaill as they turned towards the
churchyard. 'What is it they say about a bird of ill
omen?'
They entered the churchyard slowly, the eyes of
the American antiquary lingering luxuriantly over
the isolated roof of the lynch-- gate and the large
unfathomable black growth of the yew looking like
night itself defying the broad daylight. The path
climbed up amid heaving levels of turf in which the
gravestones were tilted at all angles like stone
rafts tossed on a green sea, till it came to the
ridge beyond which the great sea itself ran like an
iron bar, with pale lights in it like steel. Almost
at their feet the tough rank grass turned into a
tuft of sea-- holly and ended in grey and yellow
sand; and a foot or two from the holly, and outlined
darkly against the steely sea, stood a motionless
figure. But for its dark--grey clothing it might
almost have been the statue on some sepulchral
monument. But Father Brown instantly recognized
something in the elegant stoop of the shoulders and
the rather sullen outward thrust of the short beard.
'Gee!' exclaimed the professor of archaeology;
'it's that man Tarrant, if you call him a man. Did
you think, when I spoke on the boat, that I should
ever get so quick an answer to my question?'
'I thought you might get too many answers to it,'
answered Father Brown.
'Why, how do you mean?' inquired the Professor,
darting a look at him over his shoulder.
'I mean,' answered the other mildly, 'that I
thought I heard voices behind the yew--tree. I don't
think Mr Tarrant is so solitary as he looks; I might
even venture to say, so solitary as he likes to
look.'
Even as Tarrant turned slowly round in his moody
manner, the confirmation came. Another voice, high
and rather hard, but none the less feminine, was
saying with experienced raillery: 'And how was I to
know he would be here?' It was borne in upon
Professor Smaill that this gay observation was not
addressed to him; so he was forced to conclude in
some bewilderment, that yet a third person was
present. As Lady Diana Wales came out, radiant and
resolute as ever, from the shadow of the yew, he
noted grimly that she had a living shadow of her
own. The lean dapper figure of Leonard Smyth, that
insinuating man of letters, appeared immediately
behind her own flamboyant form, smiling, his head a
little on one side like a dog's.
'Snakes!' muttered Smaill; 'why, they're all
here! Or all except that little showman with the
walrus whiskers.'
He heard Father Brown laughing softly beside him;
and indeed the situation was becoming something more
than laughable. It seemed to be turning topsy--turvy
and tumbling about their ears like a pantomime
trick; for even while the Professor had been
speaking, his words had received the most comical
contradiction. The round head with the grotesque
black crescent of moustache had appeared suddenly
and seemingly out of a hole in the ground. An
instant afterwards they realized that the hole was
in fact a very large hole, leading to a ladder which
descended into the bowels of the earth; that it was
in fact the entrance to the subterranean scene they
had come to visit. The little man had been the first
to find the entrance and had already descended a
rung or two of the ladder before he put his head out
again to address his fellow--travellers. He looked
like some particularly preposterous Grave--digger in
a burlesque of Hamlet. He only said thickly behind
his thick moustaches, 'It is down here.' But it came
to the rest of the company with a start of
realization that, though they had sat opposite him
at meal-- times for a week, they had hardly ever
heard him speak before; and that though he was
supposed to be an English lecturer, he spoke with a
rather occult foreign accent.
'You see, my dear Professor,' cried Lady Diana
with trenchant cheerfulness, 'your Byzantine mummy
was simply too exciting to be missed. I simply had
to come along and see it; and I'm sure the gentlemen
felt just the same. Now you must tell us all about
it.'
'I do not know all about it,' said the Professor
gravely, not to say grimly, 'In some respects I
don't even know what it's all about. It certainly
seems odd that we should have all met again so soon,
but I suppose there are no limits to the modern
thirst for information. But if we are all to visit
the place it must be done in a responsible way and,
if you will forgive me, under responsible
leadership. We must notify whoever is in charge of
the excavations; we shall probably at least have to
put our names in a book.'
Something rather like a wrangle followed on this
collision between the impatience of the lady and the
suspicions of the archaeologist; but the latter's
insistence on the official rights of the Vicar and
the local investigation ultimately prevailed; the
little man with the moustaches came reluctantly out
of his grave again and silently acquiesced in a less
impetuous descent. Fortunately, the clergyman
himself appeared at this stage-- a grey--haired,
good--looking gentleman with a droop accentuated by
doublet eyeglasses; and while rapidly establishing
sympathetic relations with the Professor as a
fellow--antiquarian, he did not seem to regard his
rather motley group of companions with anything more
hostile than amusement.
'I hope you are none of you superstitious,' he
said pleasantly. 'I ought to tell you, to start
with, that there are supposed to be all sorts of bad
omens and curses hanging over our devoted heads in
this business. I have just been deciphering a Latin
inscription which was found over the entrance to the
chapel; and it would seem that there are no less
than three curses involved; a curse for entering the
sealed chamber, a double curse for opening the
coffin, and a triple and most terrible curse for
touching the gold relic found inside it. The two
first maledictions I have already incurred myself,'
he added with a smile; 'but I fear that even you
will have to incur the first and mildest of them if
you are to see anything at all. According to the
story, the curses descend in a rather lingering
fashion, at long intervals and on later occasions. I
don't know whether that is any comfort to you.' And
the Reverend Mr Walters smiled once more in his
drooping and benevolent manner.
'Story,' repeated Professor Smaill, 'why, what
story is that?'
'It is rather a long story and varies, like other
local legends,' answered the Vicar. 'But it is
undoubtedly contemporary with the time of the tomb;
and the substance of it is embodied in the
inscription and is roughly this: Guy de Gisors, a
lord of the manor here early in the thirteenth
century, had set his heart on a beautiful black
horse in the possession of an envoy from Genoa,
which that practical merchant prince would not sell
except for a huge price. Guy was driven by avarice
to the crime of pillaging the shrine and, according
to one story, even killing the bishop, who was then
resident there. Anyhow, the bishop uttered a curse
which was to fall on anybody who should continue to
withhold the gold cross from its resting-- place in
his tomb, or should take steps to disturb it when it
had returned there. The feudal lord raised the money
for the horse by selling the gold relic to a
goldsmith in the town; but on the first day he
mounted the horse the animal reared and threw him in
front of the church porch, breaking his neck.
Meanwhile the goldsmith, hitherto wealthy and
prosperous, was ruined by a series of inexplicable
accidents, and fell into the power of a Jew
money--lender living in the manor. Eventually the
unfortunate goldsmith, faced with nothing but
starvation, hanged himself on an apple--tree. The
gold cross with all his other goods, his house,
shop, and tools, had long ago passed into the
possession of the money--lender. Meanwhile, the son
and heir of the feudal lord, shocked by the
judgement on his blasphemous sire, had become a
religious devotee in the dark and stern spirit of
those times, and conceived it his duty to persecute
all heresy and unbelief among his vassals. Thus the
Jew, in his turn, who had been cynically tolerated
by the father, was ruthlessly burnt by order of the
son; so that he, in his turn, suffered for the
possession of the relic; and after these three
judgements, it was returned to the bishop's tomb;
since when no eye has seen and no hand has touched
it.'
Lady Diana Wales seemed to be more impressed than
might have been expected. 'It really gives one
rather a shiver,' she said, 'to think that we are
going to be the first, except the vicar.'
The pioneer with the big moustaches and the
broken English did not descend after all by his
favourite ladder, which indeed had only been used by
some of the workmen conducting the excavation; for
the clergyman led them round to a larger and more
convenient entrance about a hundred yards away, out
of which he himself had just emerged from his
investigations underground. Here the descent was by
a fairly gradual slope with no difficulties save the
increasing darkness; for they soon found themselves
moving in single file down a tunnel as black as
pitch, and it was some little time before they saw a
glimmer of light ahead of them. Once during that
silent march there was a sound like a catch in
somebody's breath, it was impossible to say whose;
and once there was an oath like a dull explosion,
and it was in an unknown tongue.
They came out in a circular chamber like a
basilica in a ring of round arches; for that chapel
had been built before the first pointed arch of the
Gothic had pierced our civilization like a spear. A
glimmer of greenish light between some of the
pillars marked the place of the other opening into
the world above, and gave a vague sense of being
under the sea, which was intensified by one or two
other incidental and perhaps fanciful resemblances.
For the dog--tooth pattern of the Norman was faintly
traceable round all the arches, giving them, above
the cavernous darkness, something of the look of the
mouths of monstrous sharks. And in the centre the
dark bulk of the tomb itself, with its lifted lid of
stone, might almost have been the jaws of some such
leviathan.
Whether out of the sense of fitness or from the
lack of more modern appliances, the clerical
antiquary had arranged for the illumination of the
chapel only by four tall candles in big wooden
candlesticks standing on the floor. Of these only
one was alight when they entered, casting a faint
glimmer over the mighty architectural forms. When
they had all assembled, the clergyman proceeded to
light the three others, and the appearance and
contents of the great sarcophagus came more clearly
into view.
All eyes went first to the face of the dead,
preserved across all those ages in the lines of life
by some secret Eastern process, it was said,
inherited from heathen antiquity and unknown to the
simple graveyards of our own island. The Professor
could hardly repress an exclamation of wonder; for,
though the face was as pale as a mask of wax, it
looked otherwise like a sleeping man, who had but
that moment closed his eyes. The face was of the
ascetic, perhaps even the fanatical type, with a
high framework of bones; the figure was clad in a
golden cope and gorgeous vestments, and high up on
the breast, at the base of the throat, glittered the
famous gold cross upon a short gold chain, or rather
necklace. The stone coffin had been opened by
lifting the lid of it at the head and propping it
aloft upon two strong wooden shafts or poles,
hitched above under the edge of the upper slab and
wedged below into the corners of the coffin behind
the head of the corpse. Less could therefore be seen
of the feet or the lower part of the figure, but the
candle--light shone full on the face; and in
contrast with its tones of dead ivory the cross of
gold seemed to stir and sparkle like a fire.
Professor Smaill's big forehead had carried a big
furrow of reflection, or possibly of worry, ever
since the clergyman had told the story of the curse.
But feminine intuition, not untouched by feminine
hysteria, understood the meaning of his brooding
immobility better than did the men around him. In
the silence of that candle--lit cavern Lady Diana
cried out suddenly: 'Don't touch it, I tell you!'
But the man had already made one of his swift
leonine movements, leaning forward over the body.
The next instant they all darted, some forward and
some backward, but all with a dreadful ducking
motion as if the sky were falling.
As the Professor laid a finger on the gold cross,
the wooden props, that bent very slightly in
supporting the lifted lid of stone, seemed to jump
and straighten themselves with a jerk. The lip of
the stone slab slipped from its wooden perch; and in
all their souls and stomachs came a sickening sense
of down-- rushing ruin, as if they had all been
flung off a precipice. Smaill had withdrawn his head
swiftly, but not in time; and he lay senseless
beside the coffin, in a red puddle of blood from
scalp or skull. And the old stone coffin was once
more closed as it had been for centuries; save that
one or two sticks or splinters stuck in the crevice,
horribly suggestive of bones crunched by an ogre.
The leviathan had snapped its jaws of stone.
Lady Diana was looking at the wreck with eyes
that had an electric glare as of lunacy; her red
hair looked scarlet against the pallor of her face
in the greenish twilight. Smyth was looking at her,
still with something dog--like in the turn of his
head; but it was the expression of a god who looks
at a master whose catastrophe he can only partly
understand. Tarrant and the foreigner had stiffened
in their usual sullen attitudes, but their faces had
turned the colour of clay. The Vicar seemed to have
fainted. Father Brown was kneeling beside the fallen
figure, trying to test its condition.
Rather to the general surprise, the Byronic
lounger, Paul Tarrant, came forward to help him.
'He'd better be carried up into the air,' he
said. 'I suppose there's just a chance for him.'
'He isn't dead,' said Father Brown in a low
voice, 'but I think it's pretty bad; you aren't a
doctor by any chance?'
'No; but I've had to pick up a good many things
in my time,' said the other. 'But never mind about
me just now. My real profession would probably
surprise you.'
'I don't think so,' replied Father Brown, with a
slight smile. 'I thought of it about halfway through
the voyage. You are a detective shadowing somebody.
Well, the cross is safe from thieves now, anyhow.'
While they were speaking Tarrant had lifted the
frail figure of the fallen man with easy strength
and dexterity, and was carefully carrying him
towards the exit. He answered over his shoulder:
'Yes, the cross is safe enough.'
'You mean that nobody else is,' replied Brown.
'Are you thinking of the curse, too?'
Father Brown went about for the next hour or two
under a burden of frowning perplexity that was
something beyond the shock of the tragic accident.
He assisted in carrying the victim to the little inn
opposite the church, interviewed the doctor, who
reported the injury as serious and threatening,
though not certainly fatal, and carried the news to
the little group of travellers who had gathered
round the table in the inn parlour. But whereever he
went the cloud of mystification rested on him and
seemed to grow darker the more deeply he pondered.
For the central mystery was growing more and more
mysterious, actually in proportion as many of the
minor mysteries began to clear themselves up in his
mind. Exactly in proportion as the meaning of
individual figures in that motley group began to
explain itself, the thing that had happened grew
more and more difficult to explain. Leonard Smyth
had come merely because Lady Diana had come; and
Lady Diana had come merely because she chose. They
were engaged in one of those floating Society
flirtations that are all the more silly for being
semi--intellectual. But the lady's romanticism had a
superstitious side to it; and she was pretty well
prostrated by the terrible end of her adventure.
Paul Tarrant was a private detective, possibly
watching the flirtation, for some wife or husband;
possibly shadowing the foreign lecturer with the
moustaches, who had much the air of an undesirable
alien. But if he or anybody else had intended to
steal the relic, the intention had been finally
frustrated. And to all mortal appearance, what had
frustrated it was either an incredible coincidence
or the intervention of the ancient curse.
As he stood in unusual perplexity in the middle
of the village street, between the inn and the
church, he felt a mild shock of surprise at seeing a
recently familiar but rather unexpected figure
advancing up the street. Mr Boon, the journalist,
looking very haggard in the sunshine, which showed
up his shabby raiment like that of a scarecrow, had
his dark and deep--set eyes (rather close together
on either side of the long drooping nose) fixed on
the priest. The latter looked twice before he
realized that the heavy dark moustache hid something
like a grin or at least a grim smile.
'I thought you were going away,' said Father
Brown a little sharply. 'I thought you left by that
train two hours ago.'
'Well, you see I didn't,' said Boon.
'Why have you come back?' asked the priest almost
sternly.
'This is not the sort of little rural paradise
for a journalist to leave in a hurry,' replied the
other. 'Things happen too fast here to make it worth
while to go back to a dull place like London.
Besides, they can't keep me out of the affair--I
mean this second affair. It was I that found the
body, or at any rate the clothes. Quite suspicious
conduct on my part, wasn't it? Perhaps you; think I
wanted to dress up in his clothes. Shouldn't I make
a lovely parson?'
And the lean and long--nosed mountebank suddenly
made an extravagant gesture in the middle of the
market--place, stretching out his arms and spreading
out his dark--gloved hands in a sort of burlesque
benediction and saying: 'Oh, my dear brethren and
sisters, for I would embrace you all....'
'What on earth are you talking about?' cried
Father Brown, and rapped the stones slightly with
his stumpy umbrella, for he was a little less
patient than usual.
'Oh, you'll find out all about it if you ask that
picnic party of yours at the inn,' replied Boon
scornfully. 'That man Tarrant seems to suspect me
merely because I found the clothes; though he only
came up a minute too late to find them himself. But
there are all sorts of mysteries in this business.
The little man with the big moustaches may have more
in him than meets the eye. For that matter I don't
see why you shouldn't have killed the poor fellow
yourself.'
Father Brown did not seem in the least annoyed at
the suggestion, but he seemed exceedingly bothered
and bewildered by the remark. 'Do you mean,' he
asked with simplicity, 'that it was I who tried to
kill Professor Smaill?'
'Not at all,' said the other, waving his hand
with the air of one making a handsome concession.
'Plenty of dead people for you to choose among. Not
limited to Professor Smaill. Why, didn't you know
somebody else had turned up, a good deal deader than
Professor Smaill? And I don't see why you shouldn't
have done him in, in a quiet way. Religious
differences, you know... lamentable disunion of
Christendom. ... I suppose you've always wanted to
get the English parishes back.'
'I'm going back to the inn,' said the priest
quietly; 'you say the people there know what you
mean, and perhaps they may be able to say it.'
In truth, just afterwards his private
perplexities suffered a momentary dispersal at the
news of a new calamity. The moment he entered the
little parlour where the rest of the company were
collected, something in their pale faces told him
they were shaken by something yet more recent than
the accident at the tomb. Even as he entered,
Leonard Smyth was saying:' Where is all this going
to end?'
'It will never end, I tell you,' repeated Lady
Diana, gazing into vacancy with glassy eyes; 'it
will never end till we all end. One after another
the curse will take us; perhaps slowly, as the poor
vicar said; but it will take us all as it has taken
him.'
'What in the world has happened now?' asked
Father Brown.
There was a silence, and then Tarrant said in a
voice that sounded a little hollow: 'Mr Walters, the
Vicar, has committed suicide. I suppose it was the
shock unhinged him. But I fear there can be no doubt
about it. We've just found his black hat and clothes
on a rock jutting out from the shore. He seems to
have jumped into the sea. I thought he looked as if
it had knocked him half--witted, and perhaps we
ought to have looked after him; but there was so
much to look after.'
'You could have done nothing,' said the lady.
'Don't you see the thing is dealing doom in a sort
of dreadful order? The Professor touched the cross,
and he went first; the Vicar had opened the tomb,
and he went second; we only entered the chapel, and
we--'
'Hold on,' said Father Brown, in a sharp voice he
very seldom used; 'this has got to stop.'
He still wore a heavy though unconscious frown,
but in his eyes was no longer the cloud of
mystification, but a light of almost terrible
understanding. 'What a fool I am!' he muttered. 'I
ought to have seen it long ago. The tale of the
curse ought to have told me.'
'Do you mean to say,' demanded Tarrant, 'that we
can really be killed now by something that happened
in the thirteenth century?'
Father Brown shook his head and answered with
quiet emphasis: 'I won't discuss whether we can be
killed by something that happened in the thirteenth
century; but I'm jolly certain that we can't be
killed by something that never happened in the
thirteenth century, something that never happened at
all.'
'Well,' said Tarrant, 'it's refreshing to find a
priest so sceptical of the supernatural as all
that.'
'Not at all,' replied the priest calmly; 'it's
not the supernatural part I doubt. It's the natural
part. I'm exactly in the position of the man who
said, 'I can believe the impossible, but not the
improbable.
'That's what you call a paradox, isn't it?' asked
the other.
'It's what I call common sense, properly
understood,' replied Father Brown. 'It really is
more natural to believe a preternatural story, that
deals with things we don't understand, than a
natural story that contradicts things we do
understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in
his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell,
and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr
Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria,
wore his hat in her drawing--room and slapped her on
the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not
agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only
incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't
happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear;
because it violates the laws of the world I do
understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It
isn't the legend that I disbelieve--it's the
history.'
Lady Diana had recovered a little from her trance
of Cassandra, and her perennial curiosity about new
things began to peer once more out of her bright and
prominent eyes.
'What a curious man you are!' she said. 'Why
should you disbelieve the history?'
'I disbelieve the history because it isn't
history,' answered Father Brown. 'To anybody who
happens to know a little about the Middle Ages, the
whole story was about as probable as Gladstone
offering Queen Victoria a cigar. But does anybody
know anything about the Middle Ages? Do you know
what a Guild was? Have you ever heard of salvo
managio suo? Do you know what sort of people were
Servi Regis?
'No, of course I don't,' said the lady, rather
crossly. 'What a lot of Latin words!'
'No, of course,' said Father Brown. 'If it had
been Tutankhamen and a set of dried--up Africans
preserved, Heaven knows why, at the other end of the
world; if it had been Babylonia or China; if it had
been some race as remote and mysterious as the Man
in the Moon, your newspapers would have told you all
about it, down to the last discovery of a
tooth--brush or a collar--stud. But the men who
built your own parish churches, and gave the names
to your own towns and trades, and the very roads you
walk on-- it has never occurred to you to know
anything about them. I don't claim to know a lot
myself; but I know enough to see that story is stuff
and nonsense from beginning to end. It was illegal
for a money--lender to distrain on a man's shop and
tools. It's exceedingly unlikely that the Guild
would not have saved a man from such utter ruin,
especially if he were ruined by a Jew. Those people
had vices and tragedies of their own; they sometimes
tortured and burned people. But that idea of a man,
without God or hope in the world, crawling away to
die because nobody cared whether he lived--that
isn't a medieval idea. That's a product of our
economic science and progress. The Jew wouldn't have
been a vassal of the feudal lord. The Jews normally
had a special position as servants of the King.
Above all, the Jew couldn't possibly have been
burned for his religion.'
'The paradoxes are multiplying,' observed
Tarrant; 'but surely , you won't deny that Jews were
persecuted in the Middle Ages?'
'It would be nearer the truth,' said Father
Brown, 'to say they were the only people who weren't
persecuted in the Middle Ages. If you want to
satirize medievalism, you could make a good case by
saying that some poor Christian might be burned
alive for 'making a mistake about the Homoousion,
while a rich Jew might walk down the street openly
sneering at Christ and the Mother of God. Well,
that's what the story is like. It was never a story
of the Middle Ages; it was never even a legend about
the Middle Ages. It was made up by somebody whose
notions came from novels and newspapers, and
probably made up on the spur of the moment.'
The others seemed a little dazed by the
historical digression, and seemed to wonder vaguely
why the priest emphasized it and made it so
important a part of the puzzle. But Tarrant, whose
trade it was to pick the practical detail out of
many tangles of digression, had suddenly become
alert. His bearded chin was thrust forward farther
than ever, out his sullen eyes were wide awake.
'Ah,' he said; 'made up on the spur of the moment!'
'Perhaps that is an exaggeration,' admitted
Father Brown calmly. 'I should rather say made up
more casually and carelessly than the rest of an
uncommonly careful plot. But the plotter did not
think the details of medieval history would matter
much to anybody. And his calculation in a general
way was pretty nearly right, like most of his other
calculations.'
'Whose calculations? Who was right?' demanded the
lady with a sudden passion of impatience. 'Who is
this person you are talking about? Haven't we gone
through enough, without your making our flesh creep
with your he's and him's?'
'I am talking about the murderer,' said Father
Brown.
'What murderer?' she asked sharply. 'Do you mean
that the poor Professor was murdered?'
'Well,' said the staring Tarrant gruffly into his
beard, 'we can't say 'murdered', for we don't know
he's killed.'
'The murderer killed somebody else, who was not
Professor Smaill,' said the priest gravely.
'Why, whom else could he kill?' asked the other.
'He killed the Reverend John Walters, the Vicar of
Dulham,' replied Father Brown with precision. 'He
only wanted to kill those two, because they both had
got hold of relics of one rare pattern. The murderer
was a sort of monomaniac on the point.'
'It all sounds very strange,' muttered Tarrant.
'Of course we can't swear that the Vicar's really
dead either. We haven't seen his body.'
'Oh yes, you have,' said Father Brown.
There was a silence as sudden as the stroke of a
gong; a silence in which that sub--conscious
guesswork that was so active and accurate in the
woman moved her almost to a shriek.
'That is exactly what you have seen,' went on the
priest. 'You have seen his body. You haven't seen
him-- the real living man; but you have seen his
body all right. You have stared at it hard by the
light of four great candles; and it was not tossing
suicidally in the sea but lying in state like a
Prince of the Church in a shrine built before the
Crusade.'
'In plain words,' said Tarrant, 'you actually ask
us to believe that the embalmed body was really the
corpse of a murdered man.'
Father Brown was silent for a moment; then he
said almost with an air of irrelevance: 'The first
thing I noticed about it was the cross; or rather
the string suspending the cross. Naturally, for most
of you, it was only a string of beads and nothing
else in particular; but, naturally also, it was
rather more in my line than yours. You remember it
lay close up to the chin, with only a few beads
showing, as if the whole necklet were quite short.
But the beads that showed were arranged in a special
way, first one and then three, and so on; in fact, I
knew at a glance that it was a rosary, an ordinary
rosary with a cross at the end of it. But a rosary
has at least five decades and additional beads as
well; and I naturally wondered where all the rest of
it was. It would go much more than once round the
old man's neck. I couldn't understand it at the
time; and it was only afterwards I guessed where the
extra length had gone to. It was coiled round and
round the foot of the wooden prop that was fixed in
the corner of the coffin, holding up the lid. So
that when poor Smaill merely plucked at the cross it
jerked the prop out of its place and the lid fell on
his skull like a club of stone.'
'By George!' said Tarrant; 'I'm beginning to
think there's something in what you say. This is a
queer story if it's true.'
'When I realized that,' went on Father Brown, 'I
could manage more or less to guess the rest.
Remember, first of all, that there never was any
responsible archaeological authority for anything
more than investigation. Poor old Walters was an
honest antiquary, who was engaged in opening the
tomb to find out if there was any truth in the
legend about embalmed bodies. The rest was all
rumour, of the sort that often anticipates or
exaggerates such finds. As a fact, he found the body
had not been embalmed, but had fallen into dust long
ago. Only while he was working there by the light of
his lonely candle in that sunken chapel, the
candlelight threw another shadow that was not his
own.'
'Ah!' cried Lady Diana with a catch in her
breath; 'and I know what you mean now. You mean to
tell us we have met the murderer, talked and joked
with the murderer, let him tell us a romantic tale,
and let him depart untouched.'
'Leaving his clerical disguise on a rock,'
assented Brown. 'It is all dreadfully simple. This
man got ahead of the Professor in the race to the
churchyard and chapel, possibly while the Professor
was talking to that lugubrious journalist. He came
on the old clergyman beside the empty coffin and
killed him. Then he dressed himself in the black
clothes from the corpse, wrapped it in an old cope
which had been among the real finds of the
exploration, and put it in the coffin, arranging the
rosary and the wooden support as I have described.
Then, having thus set the trap for his second enemy,
he went up into the daylight and greeted us all with
the most amiable politeness of a country clergyman.'
'He ran a considerable risk,' objected Tarrant,
'of somebody knowing Walters by sight.'
'I admit he was half--mad,' agreed Father Brown;
'and I think you will admit that the risk was worth
taking, for he has got off, after all.'
'I'll admit he was very lucky,' growled Tarrant.
'And who the devil was he?'
'As you say, he was very lucky,' answered Father
Brown, 'and not least in that respect. For that is
the one thing we may never know.' He frowned at the
table for a moment and then went on: 'This fellow
has been hovering round and threatening for years,
but the one thing he was careful of was to keep the
secret of who he was; and he has kept it still. But
if poor Smaill recovers, as I think he will, it is
pretty safe to say that you will hear more of it.'
'Why, what will Professor Smaill do, do you
think?' asked Lady Diana.
'I should think the first thing he would do,'
said Tarrant, 'would be to put the detectives on
like dogs after this murdering devil. I should like
to have a go at him myself.'
'Well,' said Father Brown, smiling suddenly after
his long fit of frowning perplexity, 'I think I know
the very first thing he ought to do.'
'And what is that?' asked Lady Diana with
graceful eagerness.
'He ought to apologize to all of you,' said
Father Brown.
It was not upon this point, however, that Father
Brown found himself talking to Professor Smaill as
he sat by the bedside during the slow convalescence
of that eminent archaeologist. Nor, indeed, was it
chiefly Father Brown who did the talking; for though
the Professor was limited to small doses of the
stimulant of conversation, he concentrated most of
it upon these interviews with his clerical friend.
Father Brown had a talent for being silent in an
encouraging way and Smaill was encouraged by it to
talk about many strange things not always easy to
talk about; such as the morbid phases of recovery
and the monstrous dreams that often accompany
delirium. It is often rather an unbalancing business
to recover slowly from a bad knock on the head; and
when the head is as interesting a head as that of
Professor Smaill even its disturbances and
distortions are apt to be original and curious. His
dreams were like bold and big designs rather out of
drawing, as they can be seen in the strong but stiff
archaic arts that he had studied; they were full of
strange saints with square and triangular haloes, of
golden out-- standing crowns and glories round dark
and flattened faces, of eagles out of the east and
the high headdresses of bearded men with their hair
bound like women. Only, as he told his friend, there
was one much simpler and less entangled type, that
continually recurred to his imaginative memory.
Again and again all these Byzantine patterns would
fade away like the fading gold on which they were
traced as upon fire; and nothing remained but the
dark bare wall of rock on which the shining shape of
the fish was traced as with a finger dipped in the
phosphorescence of fishes. For that was the sign
which he once looked up and saw, in the moment when
he first heard round the corner of the dark passage
the voice of his enemy.
'And at last,' he said, 'I think I have seen a
meaning in the picture and the voice; and one that I
never understood before. Why should I worry because
one madman among a million of sane men, leagued in a
great society against him, chooses to brag of
persecuting me or pursuing me to death? The man who
drew in the dark catacomb the secret symbol of
Christ was persecuted in a very different fashion.
He was the solitary madman; the whole sane society
was leagued together not to save but to slay him. I
have sometimes fussed and fidgeted and wondered
whether this or that man was my persecutor; whether
it was Tarrant; whether it was Leonard Smyth;
whether it was any one of them. Suppose it had been
all of them? Suppose it had been all the men on the
boat and the men on the train and the men in the
village. Suppose, so far as I was concerned, they
were all murderers. I thought I had a right to be
alarmed because I was creeping through the bowels of
the earth in the dark and there was a man who would
destroy me. What would it have been like, if the
destroyer had been up in the daylight and had owned
all the earth and commanded all the armies and the
crowds? How if he had been able to stop all the
earths or smoke me out of my hole, or kill me the
moment I put my nose out in the daylight? What was
it like to deal with murder on that scale? The world
has forgotten these things, as until a little while
ago it had forgotten war.'
'Yes,' said Father Brown, 'but the war came. The
fish may be driven underground again, but it will
come up into the daylight once more. As St Antony of
Padua humorously remarked, 'It is only fishes who
survive the Deluge.
|
|
The Dagger with Wings
FATHER BROWN, at one period of his life, found it
difficult to hang his hat on a hat--peg without
repressing a slight shudder. The origin of this
idiosyncrasy was indeed a mere detail in much more
complicated events; but it was perhaps the only
detail that remained to him in his busy life to
remind him of the whole business. Its remote origin
was to be found in the facts which led Dr Boyne, the
medical officer attached to the police force, to
send for the priest on a particular frosty morning
in December.
Dr Boyne was a big dark Irishman, one of those
rather baffling Irishmen to be found all over the
world, who will talk scientific scepticism,
materialism, and cynicism at length and at large,
but who never dream of referring anything touching
the ritual of religion to anything except the
traditional religion of their native land. It would
be hard to say whether their creed is a very
superficial varnish or a very fundamental
substratum; but most probably it is both, with a
mass of materialism in between. Anyhow, when he
thought that matters of that sort might be involved,
he asked Father Brown to call, though he made no
pretence of preference for that aspect of them.
'I'm not sure I want you, you know,' was his
greeting. 'I'm not sure about anything yet. I'm
hanged if I can make out whether it's a case for a
doctor, or a policeman, or a priest.'
'Well,' said Father Brown with a smile, 'as I
suppose you're both a policeman and a doctor, I seem
to be rather in a minority.'
'I admit you're what politicians call an
instructed minority,' replied the doctor. 'I mean, I
know you've had to do a little in our line as well
as your own. But it's precious hard to say whether
this business is in your line or ours, or merely in
the line of the Commissioners in Lunacy. We've just
had a message from a man living near here, in that
white house on the hill, asking for protection
against a murderous persecution. We've gone into the
facts as far as we could, and perhaps I'd better
tell you the story as it is supposed to have
happened, from the beginning.
'It seems that a man named Aylmer, who was a
wealthy landowner in the West Country, married
rather late in life and had three sons, Philip,
Stephen, and Arnold. But in his bachelor days, when
he thought he would have no heir, he had adopted a
boy whom he thought very brilliant and promising,
who went by the name of John Strake. His origin
seems to be vague; they say he was a foundling; some
say he was a gipsy. I think the last notion is mixed
up with the fact that Aylmer in his old age dabbled
in all sorts of dingy occultism, including palmistry
and astrology, and his three sons say that Strake
encouraged him in it. But they said a great many
other things besides that. They said Strake was an
amazing scoundrel, and especially an amazing liar; a
genius in inventing lies on the spur of the moment,
and telling them so as to deceive a detective. But
that might very well be a natural prejudice, in the
light of what happened.
Perhaps you can more or less imagine what
happened. The old man left practically everything to
the adopted son; and when he died the three real
sons disputed the will. They said their father had
been frightened into surrender and, not to put too
fine a point on it, into gibbering idiocy. They said
Strake had the strangest and most cunning ways of
getting at him, in spite of the nurses and the
family, and terrorizing him on his death--bed.
Anyhow, they seemed to have proved something about
the dead man's mental condition, for the courts set
aside the will and the sons inherited. Strake is
said to have broken out in the most dreadful
fashion, and sworn he would kill all three of them,
one after another, and that nothing could hide them
from his vengeance. It is the third or last of the
brothers, Arnold Aylmer, who is asking for police
protection.'
'Third and last,' said the priest, looking at him
gravely.
'Yes,' said Boyne. 'The other two are dead.'
There was a silence before he continued. 'That is
where the doubt comes in. There is no proof they
were murdered, but they might possibly have been.
The eldest, who took up his position as squire, was
supposed to have committed suicide in his garden.
The second, who went into trade as a manufacturer,
was knocked onthe head by the machinery in his
factory; he might very well have taken a false step
and fallen. But if Strake did kill them, he is
certainly very cunning in his way of getting to work
and getting away. On the other hand, it's more than
likely that the whole thing is a mania of conspiracy
founded on a coincidence. Look here, what I want is
this. I want somebody of sense, who isn't an
official, to go up and have a talk with this Mr
Arnold Aylmer and form an impression of him. You
know what a man with a delusion is like, and how a
man looks when he is telling the truth. I want you
to be the advance guard, before we take the matter
up.'
'It seems rather odd,' said Father Brown, 'that
you haven't had to take it up before. If there is
anything in this business, it seems to have been
going on for a good time. Is there any particular
reason why he should send for you just now, any more
than any other time?'
'That had occurred to me, as you may imagine,'
answered Dr Boyne. 'He does give a reason, but I
confess it is one of the things that make me wonder
whether the whole thing isn't only the whim of some
half-- witted crank. He declared that all his
servants have suddenly gone on strike and left him,
so that he is obliged to call on the police to look
after his house. And on making inquiries, I
certainly do find that there has been a general
exodus of servants from that house on the hill; and
of course the town is full of tales, very one--sided
tales I dare say. Their account of it seems to be
that their employer had become quite impossible in
his fidgets and fears and exactions; that he wanted
them to guard the house like sentries, or sit up
like night nurses in a hospital; that they could
never be left alone because he must never be left
alone. So they all announced in a loud voice that he
was a lunatic, and left. Of course that does not
prove he is a lunatic; but it seems rather rum
nowadays for a man to expect his valet or his
parlour--maid to act as an armed guard.'
'And so,' said the priest with a smile, 'he wants
a policeman to act as his parlour--maid because his
parlour--maid won't act as a policeman.'
'I thought that rather thick, too,' agreed the
doctor; 'but I can't take the responsibility of a
flat refusal till I've tried a compromise. You are
the compromise.'
'Very well,' said Father Brown simply. 'I'll go
and call on him now if you like.'
The rolling country round the little town was
sealed and bound with frost, and the sky was as
clear and cold as steel, except in the north-- east
where clouds with lurid haloes were beginning to
climb up the sky. It was against these darker and
more sinister colours that the house on the hill
gleamed with a row of pale pillars, forming a short
colonnade of the classical sort. A winding road led
up to it across the curve of the down, and plunged
into a mass of dark bushes. Just before it reached
the bushes the air seemed to grow colder and colder,
as if he were approaching an ice--house or the North
Pole. But he was a highly practical person, never
entertaining such fancies except as fancies. And he
merely cocked his eye at the great livid cloud
crawling up over the house, and remarked cheerfully:
'It's going to snow.'
Through a low ornamental iron gateway of the
Italianate pattern he entered a garden having
something of that desolation which only belongs to
the disorder of orderly things. Deep--green growths
were grey with the faint powder of the frost, large
weeds--had fringed the fading pattern of the
flower--beds as if in a ragged frame; and the house
stood as if waist--high in a stunted forest of
shrubs and bushes. The vegetation consisted largely
of evergreens or very hardy plants; and though it
was thus thick and heavy, it was too northern to be
called luxuriant. It might be described as an Arctic
jungle. So it was in some sense with the house
itself, which had a row of columns and a classical
facade, which might have looked out on the
Mediterranean; but which seemed now to be withering
in the wind of the North Sea. Classical ornament
here and there accentuated the contrast; caryatides
and carved masks of comedy or tragedy looked down
from corners of the building upon the grey confusion
of the garden paths; but the faces seemed to be
frost--bitten. The very volutes of the capitals
might have curled up with the cold.
Father Brown went up the grassy steps to a square
porch flanked by big pillars and knocked at the
door. About four minutes afterwards he knocked
again. Then he stood still patiently waiting with
his back to the door and looked out on the slowly
darkening landscape. It was darkening under the
shadow of that one great continent of cloud that had
come flying out of the north; and even as he looked
out beyond the pillars of the porch, which seemed
huge and black above him in the twilight, he saw the
opalescent crawling rim of the great cloud as it
sailed over the roof and bowed over the porch like a
canopy. The great canopy with its faintly coloured
fringes seemed to sink lower and lower upon the
garden beyond, until what had recently been a clear
and pale--hued winter sky was left in a few silver
ribbons and rags like a sickly sunset. Father Brown
waited, and there was no sound within.
Then he betook himself briskly down the steps and
round the house to look for another entrance. He
eventually found one, a side door in the flat wall,
and on this also he hammered and outside this also
he waited. Then he tried the handle and found the
door apparently bolted or fastened in some fashion;
and then he moved along that side of the house,
musing on the possibilities of the position, and
wondering whether the eccentric Mr Aylmer had
barricaded himself too deep in the house to hear any
kind of summons; or whether perhaps he would
barricade himself all the more, on the assumption
that any summons must be the challenge of the
avenging Strake. It might be that the decamping
servants had only unlocked one door when they left
in the morning, and that their master had locked
that; but whatever he might have done it was
unlikely that they, in the mood of that moment, had
looked so carefully to the defences. He continued
his prowl round the place: it was not really a large
place, though perhaps a little pretentious; and in a
few moments he found he had made the complete
circuit. A moment after he found what he suspected
and sought. The french window of one room, curtained
and shadowed with creeper, stood open by a crack,
doubtless accidentally left ajar, and he found
himself in a central room, comfortably upholstered
in a rather old--fashioned way, with a staircase
leading up from it on one side and a door leading
out of it on the other. Immediately opposite him was
another door with red glass let into it, a little
gaudily for later tastes; something that looked like
a red--robed figure in cheap stained glass. On a
round table to the right stood a sort of aquarium--
a great bowl full of greenish water, in which fishes
and similar things moved about as in a tank; and
just opposite it a plant of the palm variety with
very large green leaves. All this looked so very
dusty and Early Victorian that the telephone,
visible in the curtained alcove, was almost a
surprise.
'Who is that?' a voice called out sharply and
rather suspiciously from behind the stained--glass
door.
'Could I see Mr Aylmer?' asked the priest
apologetically.
The door opened and a gentleman in a
peacock--green dressing--gown came out with an
inquiring look. His hair was rather rough and
untidy, as if he had been in bed or lived in a state
of slowly getting up, but his eyes were not only
awake but alert, and some would have said alarmed.
Father Brown knew that the contradiction was likely
enough in a man who had rather run to seed under the
shadow either of a delusion or a danger. He had a
fine aquiline face when seen in profile, but when
seen full face the first impression was that of the
untidiness and even the wilderness of his loose
brown beard.
'I am Mr Aylmer,' he said, 'but I've got out of
the way of expecting visitors.'
Something about Mr Aylmer's unrestful eye
prompted the priest to go straight to the point. If
the man's persecution was only a monomania, he would
be the less likely to resent it.
'I was wondering,' said Father Brown softly,
'whether it is quite true that you never expect
visitors.'
'You are right,' replied his host steadily. 'I
always expect one visitor. And he may be the last.'
'I hope not,' said Father Brown, 'but at least I
am relieved to infer that I do not look very like
him.'
Mr Aylmer shook himself with a sort of savage
laugh. 'You certainly do not,' he said.
'Mr Aylmer,' said Father Brown frankly, 'I
apologize for the liberty, but some friends of mine
have told me about your trouble, and asked me to see
if I could do anything for you. The truth is, I have
some little experience in affairs like this.'
'There are no affairs like this,' said Aylmer.
'You mean,' observed Father Brown, 'that the
tragedies in your unfortunate family were not normal
deaths?'
'I mean they were not even normal murders,'
answered the other. 'The man who is hounding us all
to death is a hell--hound, and his power is from
hell.'
'All evil has one origin,' said the priest
gravely. 'But how do you know they were not normal
murders?'
Aylmer answered with a gesture which offered his
guest a chair; then he seated himself slowly in
another, frowning, with his hands on his knees; but
when he looked up his expression had grown milder
and more thoughtful, and his voice was quite cordial
and composed.
'Sir,' he said, 'I don't want you to imagine that
I'm in the least an unreasonable person. I have come
to these conclusions by reason, because
unfortunately reason really leads there. I have read
a great deal on these subjects; for I was the only
one who inherited my father's scholarship in
somewhat obscure matters, and I have since inherited
his library. But what I tell you does not rest on
what I have read but on what I have seen.'
Father Brown nodded, and the other proceeded, as
if picking his words: 'In my elder brother's case I
was not certain at first. There were no marks or
footprints where he was found shot, and the pistol
was left beside him. But he had just received a
threatening letter certainly from our enemy, for it
was marked with a sign like a winged dagger, which
was one of his infernal cabalistic tricks. And a
servant said she had seen something moving along the
garden wall in the twilight that was much too large
to be a cat. I leave it there; all I can say is that
if the murderer came, he managed to leave no traces
of his coming. But when my brother Stephen died it
was different; and since then I have known. A
machine was working in an open scaffolding under the
factory tower; I scaled the platform a moment after
he had fallen under the iron hammer that struck him;
I did not see anything else strike him, but I saw
what I saw.
'A great drift of factory smoke was rolling
between me and the factory tower; but through a rift
of it I saw on the top of it a dark human figure
wrapped in what looked like a black cloak. Then the
sulphurous smoke drove between us again; and when it
cleared I looked up at the distant chimney--there
was nobody there. I am a rational man, and I will
ask all rational men how he had reached that dizzy
unapproachable turret, and how he left it.'
He stared across at the priest with a
sphinx--like challenge; then after a silence he said
abruptly: 'My brother's brains were knocked out, but
his body was not much damaged. And in his pocket we
found one of those warning messages dated the day
before and stamped with the flying dagger.
'I am sure,' he went on gravely, 'that the symbol
of the winged dagger is not merely arbitrary or
accidental. Nothing about that abominable man is
accidental. He is all design; though it is indeed a
most dark and intricate design. His mind is woven
not only out of elaborate schemes but out of all
sorts of secret languages and signs, and dumb
signals and wordless pictures which are the names of
nameless things. He is the worst sort of man that
the world knows: he is the wicked mystic. Now, I
don't pretend to penetrate all that is conveyed by
this symbol; but it seems surely that it must have a
relation to all that was most remarkable, or even
incredible, in his movements as he had hovered round
my unfortunate family. Is there no connexion between
the idea of a winged weapon and the mystery by which
Philip was struck dead on his own lawn without the
lightest touch of any footprint having disturbed the
dust or grass? Is there no connexion between the
plumed poignard flying like a feathered arrow and
that figure which hung on the far top of the
toppling chimney, clad in a cloak for pinions?'
'You mean,' said Father Brown thoughtfully, 'that
he is in a perpetual state of levitation.'
'Simon Magus did it,' replied Aylmer, 'and it was
one of the commonest predictions of the Dark Ages
that Antichrist would be able to fly. Anyhow, there
was the flying dagger on the document; and whether
or no it could fly, it could certainly strike.'
'Did you notice what sort of paper it was on?'
asked Father Brown. 'Common paper?'
The sphinx--like face broke abruptly into a harsh
laugh.
'You can see what they're like,' said Aylmer
grimly, 'for I got one myself this morning.'
He was leaning back in his chair now, with his
long legs thrust out from under the green
dressing--gown, which was a little short for him,
and his bearded chin pillowed on his chest. Without
moving otherwise, he thrust his hand deep in the
dressing-- gown pocket and held out a fluttering
scrap of paper at the end of a rigid arm. His whole
attitude was suggestive of a sort of paralysis, that
was both rigidity and collapse. But the next remark
of the priest had a curious effect of rousing him.
Father Brown was blinking in his short--sighted
way at the paper presented to him. It was a singular
sort of paper, rough without being common, as from
an artist's sketch--book; and on it was drawn boldly
in red ink a dagger decorated with wings like the
rod of Hermes, with the written words, 'Death comes
the day after this, as it came to your brothers.'
Father Brown tossed the paper on the floor and
sat bolt upright in his chair.
'You mustn't let that sort of stuff stupefy you,'
he said sharply. 'These devils always try to make us
helpless by making us hopeless.'
Rather to his surprise, an awakening wave went
over the prostrate figure, which sprang from its
chair as if startled out of a dream.
'You're right, you're right!' cried Aylmer with a
rather uncanny animation; 'and the devils shall find
that I'm not so hopeless after all, nor so helpless
either. Perhaps I have more hope and better help
than you fancy.'
He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning
down at the priest, who had a momentary doubt,
during that strained silence, about whether the
man's long peril had not touched his brain. But when
he spoke it was quite soberly.
'I believe my unfortunate brothers failed because
they used the wrong weapons. Philip carried a
revolver, and that was how his death came to be
called suicide. Stephen had police protection, but
he also had a sense of what made him ridiculous; and
he could not allow a policeman to climb up a ladder
after him to a scaffolding where he stood only a
moment. They were both scoffers, reacting into
scepticism from the strange mysticism of my father's
last days. But I always knew there was more in my
father than they understood. It is true that by
studying magic he fell at last under the blight of
black magic; the black magic of this scoundrel
Strake. But my brothers were wrong about the
antidote. The antidote to black magic is not brute
materialism or worldly wisdom. The antidote to black
magic is white magic.'
'It rather depends,' said Father Brown, 'what you
mean by white magic.'
'I mean silver magic,' said the other, in a low
voice, like one speaking of a secret revelation.
Then after a silence he said: 'Do you know what I
mean by silver magic? Excuse me a moment.'
He turned and opened the central door with the
red glass and went into a passage beyond it. The
house had less depth than Brown had supposed;
instead of the door opening into interior rooms, the
corridor it revealed ended in another door on the
garden. The door of one room was on one side of the
passage; doubtless, the priest told himself, the
proprietor's bedroom whence he had rushed out in his
dressing--gown. There was nothing else on that side
but an ordinary hat-- stand with the ordinary dingy
cluster of old hats and overcoats; but on the other
side was something more interesting: a very dark old
oak sideboard laid out with some old silver, and
overhung by a trophy or ornament of old weapons. It
was by that that Arnold Aylmer halted, looking up at
a long antiquated pistol with a bell--shaped mouth.
The door at the end of the passage was barely
open, and through the crack came a streak of white
daylight. The priest had very quick instincts about
natural things, and something in the unusual
brilliancy of that white line told him what had
happened outside. It was indeed what he had
prophesied when he was approaching the house. He ran
past his rather startled host and opened the door,
to face something that was at once a blank and a
blaze. What he had seen shining through the crack
was not only the most negative whiteness of daylight
but the positive whiteness of snow. All round, the
sweeping fall of the country was covered with that
shining pallor that seems at once hoary and
innocent.
'Here is white magic anyhow,' said Father Brown
in his cheerful voice. Then, as he turned back into
the hall, he murmured, 'And silver magic too, I
suppose,' for the white lustre touched the silver
with splendour and lit up the old steel here and
there in the darkling armoury. The shaggy head of
the brooding Aylmer seemed to have a halo of silver
fire, as he turned with his face in shadow and the
outlandish pistol in his hand.
'Do you know why I chose this sort of old
blunderbuss?' he asked. 'Because I can load it with
this sort of bullet.'
He had picked up a small apostle spoon from the
sideboard and by sheer violence broke off the small
figure at the top. 'Let us go back into the other
room,' he added.
'Did you ever read about the death of Dundee?' he
asked when they had reseated themselves. He had
recovered from his momentary annoyance at the
priest's restlessness. 'Graham of Claverhouse, you
know, who persecuted the Covenanters and had a black
horse that could ride straight up a precipice. Don't
you know he could only be shot with a silver bullet,
because he had sold himself to the Devil? That's one
comfort about you; at least you know enough to
believe in the Devil.'
'Oh, yes,' replied Father Brown, 'I believe in
the Devil. What I don't believe in is the Dundee. I
mean the Dundee of Covenanting legends, with his
nightmare of a horse. John Graham was simply a
seventeenth--century professional soldier, rather
better than most. If he dragooned them it was
because he was a dragoon, but not a dragon. Now my
experience is that it's not that sort of swaggering
blade who sells himself to the Devil. The
devil--worshippers I've known were quite different.
Not to mention names, which might cause a social
flutter, I'll take a man in Dundee's own day. Have
you ever heard of Dalrymple of Stair?'
'No,' replied the other gruffly.
'You've heard of what he did,' said Father Brown,
'and it was worse than anything Dundee ever did; yet
he escapes the infamy by oblivion. He was the man
who made the Massacre of Glencoe. He was a very
learned man and lucid lawyer, a statesman with very
serious and enlarged ideas of statesmanship, a quiet
man with a very refined and intellectual face.
That's the sort of man who sells himself to the
Devil.'
Aylmer half started from his chair with an
enthusiasm of eager assent.
'By God! you are right,' he cried. 'A refined
intellectual face! That is the face of John Strake.'
Then he raised himself and stood looking at the
priest with a curious concentration. 'If you will
wait here a little while,' he said, 'I will show you
something.'
He went back through the central door, closing it
after him; going, the priest presumed, to the old
sideboard or possibly to his bedroom. Father Brown
remained seated, gazing abstractedly at the carpet,
where a faint red glimmer shone from the glass in
the doorway. Once it seemed to brighten like a ruby
and then darkened again, as if the sun of that
stormy day had passed from cloud to cloud. Nothing
moved except the aquatic creatures which floated to
and fro in the dim green bowl. Father Brown was
thinking hard.
A minute or two afterwards he got up and slipped
quietly to the alcove of the telephone, where he
rang up his friend Dr Boyne, at the official
headquarters. 'I wanted to tell you about Aylmer and
his affairs,' he said quietly. 'It's a queer story,
but I rather think there's something in it. If I
were you I'd send some men up here straight away;
four or five men, I think, and surround the house.
If anything does happen there'll probably be
something startling in the way of an escape.'
Then he went back and sat down again, staring at
the dark carpet, which again glowed blood--red with
the light from the glass door. Something in the
filtered light set his mind drifting on certain
borderlands of thought, with the first white
daybreak before the coming of colour, and all that
mystery which is alternately veiled and revealed in
the symbol of windows and of doors.
An inhuman howl in a human voice came from beyond
the closed doors, almost simultaneously with the
noise of firing. Before the echoes of the shot had
died away the door was violently flung open and his
host staggered into the room, the dressing--gown
half torn from his shoulder and the long pistol
smoking in his hand. He seemed to be shaking in
every limb, yet he was shaken in part with an
unnatural laughter.
'Glory be to the White Magic!' he cried. 'Glory
be to the silver bullet! The hell--hound had hunted
once too often, and my brothers are avenged at
last.'
He sank into a chair and the pistol slid from his
hand and fell on the floor. Father Brown darted past
him, slipped through the glass door and went down
the passage. As he did so he put his hand on the
handle of the bedroom door, as if half intending to
enter; then he stooped a moment, as if examining
something--and then he ran to the outer door and
opened it.
On the field of snow, which had been so blank a
little while before, lay one black object. At the
first glance it looked a little like an enormous
bat. A second glance showed that it was, after all,
a human figure; fallen on its face, the whole head
covered by a broad black hat having something of a
Latin--American look; while the appearance of
black--wings came from the two flaps or loose
sleeves of a very vast black cloak spread out,
perhaps by accident, to their utmost length on
either side. Both the hands were hidden, though
Father Brown thought he could detect the position of
one of them, and saw close to it, under the edge of
the cloak, the glimmer of some metallic weapon. The
main effect, however, was curiously like that of the
simple extravagances of heraldry; like a black eagle
displayed on a white ground. But by walking round it
and peering under the hat the priest got a glimpse
of the face, which was indeed what his host had
called refined and intellectual; even sceptical and
austere: the face of John Strake.
'Well, I'm jiggered,' muttered Father Brown. 'It
really does look like some vast vampire that has
swooped down like a bird.'
'How else could he have come?' came a voice from
the doorway, and Father Brown looked up to see
Aylmer once more standing there.
'Couldn't he have walked?' replied Father Brown
evasively.
Aylmer stretched out his arm and swept the white
landscape with a gesture.
'Look at the snow,' he said in a deep voice that
had a sort of roll and thrill in it. 'Is not the
snow unspotted--pure as the white magic you yourself
called it? Is there a speck on it for miles, save
that one foul black blot that has fallen there?
There are no footprints, but a few of yours and
mine; there are none approaching the house from
anywhere.'
Then he looked at the little priest for a moment
with a concentrated and curious expression, and
said: 'I will tell you something else. That cloak he
flies with is too long to walk with. He was not a
very tall man, and it would trail behind him like a
royal train. Stretch it out over his body, if you
like, and see.'
'What happened to you both?' asked Father Brown
abruptly.
'It was too swift to describe,' answered Aylmer.
'I had looked out of the door and was turning back
when there came a kind of rushing of wind all around
me, as if I were being buffeted by a wheel revolving
in mid--air. I spun round somehow and fired blindly;
and then I saw nothing but what you see now. But I
am morally certain that you wouldn't see it if I had
not had a silver shot in my gun. It would have been
a different body lying there in the snow.'
'By the way,' remarked Father Brown, 'shall we
leave it lying there in the snow? Or would you like
it taken into your room-- I suppose that's your
bedroom in the passage?'
'No, no,' replied Aylmer hastily, 'we must leave
it here till the police have seen it. Besides, I've
had as much of such things as I can stand for the
moment. Whatever else happens, I'm going to have a
drink. After that, they can hang me if they like.'
Inside the central apartment, between the palm
plant and the bowl of fishes, Aylmer tumbled into a
chair. He had nearly knocked the bowl over as he
lurched into the room, but he had managed to find
the decanter of brandy after plunging his hand
rather blindly into several cupboards and corners.
He did not at any time look like a methodical
person, but at this moment his distraction must have
been extreme. He drank with a long gulp and began to
talk rather feverishly, as if to fill up a silence.
'I see you are still doubtful,' he said, 'though
you have seen the thing with your own eyes. Believe
me, there was something more behind the quarrel
between the spirit of Strake and the spirit of the
house of Aylmer. Besides, you have no business to be
an unbeliever. You ought to stand for all the things
these stupid people call superstitions. Come now,
don't you think there's a lot in those old wives'
tales about luck and charms and so on, silver
bullets included? What do you say about them as a
Catholic?'
'I say I'm an agnostic,' replied Father Brown,
smiling.
'Nonsense,' said Aylmer impatiently. 'It's your
business to believe things.'
'Well, I do believe some things, of course,'
conceded Father Brown; 'and therefore, of course, I
don't believe other things.'
Aylmer was leaning forward, and looking at him
with a strange intensity that was almost like that
of a mesmerist.
'You do believe it,' he said. 'You do believe
everything. We all believe everything, even when we
deny everything. The denyers believe. The
unbelievers believe. Don't you feel in your heart
that these contradictions do not really contradict:
that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The
soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things
return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many
shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird,
and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we
seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred
is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a
wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not
realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all
your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we
are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects
of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and
Man into God?'
'No,' said Father Brown.
Outside, twilight had begun to fall, in that
phase of such a snow-- laden evening when the land
looks brighter than the sky. In the porch of the
main entrance, visible through a half-- curtained
window. Father Brown could dimly see a bulky figure
standing. He glanced casually at the french windows
through which he had originally entered, and saw
they were darkened with two equally motionless
figures. The inner door with the coloured glass
stood slightly ajar; and he could see in the short
corridor beyond, the ends of two long shadows,
exaggerated and distorted by the level light of
evening, but still like grey caricatures of the
figures of men. Dr Boyne had already obeyed the
telephone message. The house was surrounded.
'What is the good of saying no?' insisted his
host, still with the same hypnotic stare. 'You have
seen part of that eternal drama with your own eyes.
You have seen the threat of John Strake to slay
Arnold Aylmer by black magic. You have seen Arnold
Aylmer slay John Strake by white magic. You see
Arnold Aylmer alive and talking to you now. And yet
you don't believe it.'
'No, I do not believe it,' said Father Brown, and
rose from his chair like one terminating a visit.
'Why not?' asked the other.
The priest only lifted his voice a little, but it
sounded in every corner of the room like a bell.
'Because you are not Arnold Aylmer,' he said. 'I
know who you are. Your name is John Strake; and you
have murdered the last of the brothers, who is lying
outside in the snow.'
A ring of white showed round the iris of the
other man's eyes; he seemed to be making, with
bursting eyeballs, a last effort to mesmerize and
master his companion. Then he made a sudden movement
sideways; and even as he did so the door behind him
opened and a big detective in plain clothes put one
hand quietly on his shoulder. The other hand hung
down, but it held a revolver. The man looked wildly
round, and saw plain--clothes men in all corners of
the quiet room.
That evening Father Brown had another and longer
conversation with Dr Boyne about the tragedy of the
Aylmer family. By that time there was no longer any
doubt of the central fact of the case, for John
Strake had confessed his identity and even confessed
his crimes; only it would be truer to say that he
boasted of his victories. Compared to the fact that
he had rounded off his life's work with the last
Aylmer lying dead, everything else, including
existence itself, seemed to be indifferent to him.
'The man is a sort of monomaniac,' said Father
Brown. 'He is not interested in any other matter;
not even in any other murder. I owe him something
for that; for I had to comfort myself with the
reflection a good many times this afternoon. As has
doubtless occurred to you, instead of weaving all
that wild but ingenious romance about winged
vampires and silver bullets, he might have put an
ordinary leaden bullet into me, and walked out of
the house. I assure you it occurred quite frequently
to me.'
'I wonder why he didn't,' observed Boyne. 'I
don't understand it; but I don't understand anything
yet. How on earth did you discover it, and what in
the world did you discover?'
'Oh, you provided me with very valuable
information,' replied Father Brown modestly,
'especially the one piece of information that really
counted. I mean the statement that Strake was a very
inventive and imaginative liar, with great presence
of mind in producing his lies. This afternoon he
needed it; but he rose to the occasion. Perhaps his
only mistake was in choosing a preternatural story;
he had the notion that because I am a clergyman I
should believe anything. Many people have little
notions of that kind.'
'But I can't make head or tail of it,' said the
doctor. 'You must really begin at the beginning.'
'The beginning of it was a dressing--gown,' said
Father Brown simply. 'It was the one really good
disguise I've ever known. When you meet a man in a
house with a dressing--gown on, you assume quite
automatically that he's in his own house. I assumed
it myself; but afterwards queer little things began
to happen. When he took the pistol down he clicked
it at arm's length, as a man does to make sure a
strange weapon isn't loaded; of course he would know
whether the pistols in his own hall were loaded or
not. I didn't like the way he looked for the brandy,
or the way he nearly barged into the bowl of fishes.
For a man who has a fragile thing of that sort as a
fixture in his rooms gets a quite mechanical habit
of avoiding it. But these things might possibly have
been fancies; the first real point was this. He came
out from the little passage between the two doors;
and in that passage there's only one other door
leading to a room; so I assumed it was the bedroom
he had just come from. I tried the handle; but it
was locked. I thought this odd; and looked through
the keyhole. It was an utterly bare room, obviously
deserted; no bed, no anything. Therefore he had not
come from inside any room, but from outside the
house. And when I saw that, I think I saw the whole
picture.
'Poor Arnold Aylmer doubtless slept and perhaps
lived upstairs, and came down in his dressing--gown
and passed through the red glass door. At the end of
the passage, black against the winter daylight, he
saw the enemy of his house. He saw a tall bearded
man in a broad--brimmed black hat and a large
flapping black cloak. He did not see much more in
this world. Strake sprang at him, throttling or
stabbing him; we cannot be sure till the inquest.
Then Strake, standing in the narrow passage between
the hat-- stand and the old sideboard, and looking
down in triumph on the last of his foes heard
something he had not expected. He heard footsteps in
the parlour beyond. It was myself entering by the
french windows.
'His masquerade was a miracle of promptitude. It
involved not only a disguise but a romance--an
impromptu romance. He took off his big black hat and
cloak and put on the dead man's dressing--gown. Then
he did a rather grisly thing; at least a thing that
affects my fancy as more grisly than the rest. He
hung the corpse like a coat on one of the hat pegs.
He draped it in his own long cloak, and found it
hung well below the heels; he covered the head
entirely with his own wide hat. It was the only
possible way of hiding it in that little passage
with the locked door; but it was really a very
clever one. I myself walked past the hat--stand once
without knowing it was anything but a hat--stand. I
think that unconsciousness of mine will always give
me a shiver.
'He might perhaps have left it at that; but I
might have discovered the corpse at any minute; and,
hung where it was, it was a corpse calling for what
you might call an explanation. He adopted the bolder
stroke of discovering it himself and explaining it
himself.
'Then there dawned on this strange and
frightfully fertile mind the conception of a story
of substitution; the reversal of the parts. He had
already assumed the part of Arnold Aylmer. Why
should not his dead enemy assume the part of John
Strake? There must have been something in that
topsy--turyydom to take the fancy of that darkly
fanciful man. It was like some frightful
fancy--dress ball to which the two mortal enemies
were to go dressed up as each other. Only, the
fancy--dress ball was to be a dance of death: and
one of the dancers would be dead. That is why I can
imagine that man putting it in his own mind, and I
can imagine him smiling.'
Father Brown was gazing into vacancy with his
large grey eyes, which, when not blurred by his
trick of blinking, were the one notable thing in his
face. He went on speaking simply and seriously: 'All
things are from God; and above all, reason and
imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They
are good in themselves; and we must not altogether
forget their origin even in their perversion. Now
this man had in him a very noble power to be
perverted; the power of telling stories. He was a
great novelist; only he had twisted his fictive
power to practical and to evil ends; to deceiving
men with false fact instead of with true fiction. It
began with his deceiving old Aylmer with elaborate
excuses and ingeniously detailed lies; but even that
may have been, at the beginning, little more than
the tall stories and tarradiddles of the child who
may say equally he has seen the King of England or
the King of the Fairies. It grew strong in him
through the vice that perpetuates all vices, pride;
he grew more and more vain of his promptitude in
producing stories of his originality, and subtlety
in developing them. That is what the young Aylmers
meant by saying that he could always cast a spell
over their father; and it was true. It was the sort
of spell that the storyteller cast over the tyrant
in the Arabian Nights. And to the last he walked the
world with the pride of a poet, and with the false
yet unfathomable courage of a great liar. He could
always produce more Arabian Nights if ever his neck
was in danger. And today his neck was in danger.
'But I am sure, as I say, that he enjoyed it as a
fantasy as well as a conspiracy. He set about the
task of telling the true story the wrong way round:
of treating the dead man as living and the live man
as dead. He had already got into Aylmer's
dressing--gown; he proceeded to get into Aylmer's
body and soul. He looked at the corpse as if it were
his own corpse lying cold in the snow. Then he
spread--eagled it in that strange fashion to suggest
the sweeping descent of a bird of prey, and decked
it out not only in his own dark and flying garments
but in a whole dark fairy-- tale about the black
bird that could only fall by the silver bullet. I do
not know whether it was the silver glittering on the
sideboard or the snow shining beyond the door that
suggested to his intensely artistic temperament the
theme of white magic and the white metal used
against magicians. But whatever its origin, he made
it his own like a poet; and did it very promptly,
like a practical man. He completed the exchange and
reversal of parts by flinging the corpse out on to
the snow as the corpse of Strake. He did his best to
work up a creepy conception of Strake as something
hovering in the air everywhere, a harpy with wings
of speed and claws of death; to explain the absence
of footprints and other things. For one piece of
artistic impudence I hugely admire him. He actually
turned one of the contradictions in his case into an
argument for it; and said that the man's cloak being
too long for him proved that he never walked on the
ground like an ordinary mortal. But he looked at me
very hard while he said that; and something told me
that he was at that moment trying a very big bluff.'
Dr Boyne looked thoughtful. 'Had you discovered
the truth by then?' he asked. 'There is something
very queer and close to the nerves, I think, about
notions affecting identity. I don't know whether it
would be more weird to get a guess like that swiftly
or slowly. I wonder when you suspected and when you
were sure.'
'I think I really suspected when I telephoned to
you,' replied his friend. 'And it was nothing more
than the red light from the closed door brightening
and darkening on the carpet. It looked like a splash
of blood that grew vivid as it cried for vengeance.
Why should it change like that? I knew the sun had
not come out; it could only be because the second
door behind it had been opened and shut on the
garden. But if he had gone out and seen his enemy
then, he would have raised the alarm then; and it
was some time afterwards that the fracas occurred. I
began to feel he had gone out to do something ... to
prepare something ... but as to when I was certain,
that is a different matter. I knew that right at the
end he was trying to hypnotize me, to master me by
the black art of eyes like talismans and a voice
like an incantation. That's what he used to do with
old Aylmer, no doubt. But it wasn't only the way he
said it, it was what he said. It was the religion
and philosophy of it.'
'I'm afraid I'm a practical man,' said the doctor
with gruff humour, 'and I don't bother much about
religion and philosophy.'
'You'll never be a practical man till you do,'
said Father Brown. 'Look here, doctor; you know me
pretty well; I think you know I'm not a bigot. You
know I know there are all sorts in all religions;
good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones. But
there's just one little fact I've learned simply as
a practical man, an entirely practical point, that
I've picked up by experience, like the tricks of an
animal or the trade-- mark of a good wine. I've
scarcely ever met a criminal who philosophized at
all, who didn't philosophize along those lines of
orientalism and recurrence and reincarnation, and
the wheel of destiny and the serpent biting its own
tail. I have found merely in practice that there is
a curse on the servants of that serpent; on their
belly shall they go and the dust shall they eat; and
there was never a blackguard or a profligate born
who could not talk that sort of spirituality. It may
not be like that in its real religious origins; but
here in our working world it is the religion of
rascals; and I knew it was a rascal who was
speaking.'
'Why,' said Boyne, 'I should have thought that a
rascal could pretty well profess any religion he
chose.'
'Yes,' assented the other; 'he could profess any
religion; that is he could pretend to any religion,
if it was all a pretence. If it was mere mechanical
hypocrisy and nothing else, no doubt it could be
done by a mere mechanical hypocrite. Any sort of
mask can be put on any sort of face. Anybody can
learn certain phrases or state verbally that he
holds certain views. I can go out into the street
and state that I am a Wesleyan Methodist or a
Sandemanian, though I fear in no very convincing
accent. But we are talking about an artist; and for
the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some
extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside
him must correspond to something inside him; he can
only make his effects out of some of the materials
of his soul. I suppose he could have said he was a
Wesleyan Methodist; but he could never be an
eloquent Methodist as he can be an eloquent mystic
and fatalist. I am talking of the sort of ideal such
a man thinks of if he really tries to be idealistic.
It was his whole game with me to be as idealistic as
possible; and whenever that is attempted by that
sort of man, you will generally find it is that sort
of ideal. That sort of man may be dripping with
gore; but he will always be able to tell you quite
sincerely that Buddhism is better than Christianity.
Nay, he will tell you quite sincerely that Buddhism
is more Christian than Christianity. That alone is
enough to throw a hideous and ghastly ray of light
on his notion of Christianity.'
'Upon my soul,' said the doctor, laughing, 'I
can't make out whether you're denouncing or
defending him.'
'It isn't defending a man to say he is a genius,'
said Father Brown. 'Far from it. And it is simply a
psychological fact that an artist will betray
himself by some sort of sincerity. Leonardo da Vinci
cannot draw as if he couldn't draw. Even if he
tried, it will always be a strong parody of a weak
thing. This man would have made something much too
fearful and wonderful out of the Wesleyan
Methodist.'
When the priest went forth again and set his face
homeward, the cold had grown more intense and yet
was somehow intoxicating. The trees stood up like
silver candelabra of some incredible cold candlemas
of purification. It was a piercing cold, like that
silver sword of pure pain that once pierced the very
he of purity. But it was not a killing cold, save in
the sense of seeming to kill all the mortal
obstructions to our immortal and immeasurable
vitality. The pale green sky of twilight, with one
star like the star of Bethlehem, seemed by some
strange contradiction to be a cavern of clarity. It
was as if there could be a green furnace of cold
which wakened all things to life like warmth, and
that the deeper they went into those cold
crystalline colours the more were they light like
winged creatures and clear like coloured glass! It
tingled with truth and it divided truth from error
with a blade like ice; but all that was left had
never felt so much alive. It was as if all joy were
a jewel in the heart of an iceberg. The priest
hardly understood his own mood as he advanced deeper
and, deeper into the green gloaming, drinking deeper
and deeper draughts of that virginal vivacity of the
air. Some forgotten muddle and morbidity seemed to
be left behind, or wiped out as the snow had painted
out the footprints of the man of blood. As he
shuffled homewards through the snow, he muttered to
himself: 'And yet he is right enough about there
being a white magic, if he only knows where to look
for it.'
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The Doom of the Darnaways
Two landscape--painters stood looking at one
landscape, which was also a seascape, and both were
curiously impressed by it, though their impressions
were not exactly the same. To one of them, who was a
rising artist from London, it was new as well as
strange. To the other, who was a local artist but
with something more than a local celebrity, it was
better known; but perhaps all the more strange for
what he knew of it.
In terms of tone and form, as these men saw it,
it was a stretch of sands against a stretch of
sunset, the whole scene lying in strips of sombre
colour, dead green and bronze and brown and a drab
that was not merely dull but in that gloaming in
some way more mysterious than gold. All that broke
these level lines was a long building which ran out
from the fields into the sands of the sea, so that
its fringe of dreary weeds and rushes seemed almost
to meet the seaweed. But its most singular feature
was that the upper part of it had the ragged
outlines of a ruin, pierced by so many wide windows
and large rents as to be a mere dark skeleton
against the dying light; while the lower bulk of the
building had hardly any windows at all, most of them
being blind and bricked up and their outlines only
faintly traceable in the twilight. But one window at
least was still a window; and it seemed strangest of
all that it showed a light.
'Who on earth can live in that old shell?'
exclaimed the Londoner, who was a big,
bohemian--looking man, young but with a shaggy red
beard that made him look older; Chelsea knew him
familiarly as Harry Payne.
'Ghosts, you might suppose,' replied his friend
Martin Wood. 'Well, the people who live there really
are rather like ghosts.'
It was perhaps rather a paradox that the London
artist seemed almost bucolic in his boisterous
freshness and wonder, while the local artist seemed
a more shrewd and experienced person, regarding him
with mature and amiable amusement; indeed, the
latter was altogether a quieter and more
conventional figure, wearing darker clothes and with
his square and stolid face clean shaven.
'It is only a sign of the times, of course,' he
went on,' or of the passing of old times and old
families with them. The last of the great Darnaways
live in that house, and not many of the new poor are
as poor as they are. They can't even afford to make
their own top--storey habitable; but have to live in
the lower rooms of a ruin, like bats and owls. Yet
they have family portraits that go back to the Wars
of the Roses and the first portrait--painting in
England, and very fine some of them are; I happen to
know, because they asked for my professional advice
in overhauling them. There's one of them especially,
and one of the earliest, but it's so good that it
gives you the creeps.'
'The whole place gives you the creeps, I should
think by the look of it,' replied Payne.
'Well,' said his friend, 'to tell you the truth,
it does.'
The silence that followed was stirred by a faint
rustle among the rushes by the moat; and it gave
them, rationally enough, a slight nervous start when
a dark figure brushed along the bank, moving rapidly
and almost like a startled bird. But it was only a
man walking briskly with a black bag in his hand: a
man with a long sallow face and sharp eyes that
glanced at the London stranger in a slightly
darkling and suspicious manner.
'It's only Dr Barnet,' said Wood with a sort of
relief. 'Good evening, Doctor. Are you going up to
the house? I hope nobody's ill.'
'Everybody's always ill in a place like that,'
growled the doctor; 'only sometimes they're too ill
to know it. The very air of the place is a blight
and a pestilence. I don't envy the young man from
Australia.'
'And who,' asked Payne abruptly and rather
absently, 'may the young man from Australia be?'
'Ah!' snorted the doctor; 'hasn't your friend
told you about him? As a matter of fact I believe he
is arriving today. Quite a romance in the old style
of melodrama: the heir back from the colonies to his
ruined castle, all complete even down to an old
family compact for his marrying the lady watching in
the ivied tower. Queer old stuff, isn't it? but it
really happens sometimes. He's even got a little
money, which is the only bright spot there ever was
in this business.'
'What does Miss Darnaway herself, in her ivied
tower, think of the business?' asked Martin Wood
dryly.
'What she thinks of everything else by this
time,' replied the doctor. 'They don't think in this
weedy old den of superstitions, they only dream and
drift. I think she accepts the family contract and
the colonial husband as part of the Doom of the
Darnaways, don't you know. I really think that if he
turned out to be a humpbacked Negro with one eye and
a homicidal mania, she would only think it added a
finishing touch and fitted in with the twilight
scenery.'
'You're not giving my friend from London a very
lively picture of my friends in the country,' said
Wood, laughing. 'I had intended taking him there to
call; no artist ought to miss those Darnaway
portraits if he gets the chance. But perhaps I'd
better postpone it if they're in the middle of the
Australian invasion.'
'Oh, do go in and see them, for the Lord's sake,'
said Dr Barnet warmly. 'Anything that will brighten
their blighted lives will make my task easier. It
will need a good many colonial cousins to cheer
things up, I should think; and the more the merrier.
Come, I'll take you in myself.'
As they drew nearer to the house it was seen to
be isolated like an island in a moat of brackish
water which they crossed by a bridge. On the other
side spread a fairly wide stony floor or embankment
with great cracks across it, in which little tufts
of weed and thorn sprouted here and there. This rock
platform looked large and bare in the grey twilight,
and Payne could hardly have believed that such a
corner of space could have contained so much of the
soul of a wilderness. This platform only jutted out
on one side, like a giant door-- step and beyond it
was the door; a very low--browed Tudor archway
standing open, but dark like a cave.
When the brisk doctor led them inside without
ceremony, Payne had, as it were, another shock of
depression. He could have expected to find himself
mounting to a very ruinous tower, by very narrow
winding staircases; but in this case the first steps
into the house were actually steps downwards. They
went down several short and broken stairways into
large twilit rooms which but for their lines of dark
pictures and dusty bookshelves, might have been the
traditional dungeons beneath the castle moat. Here
and there a candle in an old candlestick lit up some
dusty accidental detail of a dead elegance; but the
visitor was not so much impressed or depressed by
this artificial light as by the one pale gleam of
natural light. As he passed down the long room he
saw the only window in that wall-- a curious low
oval window of a late--seventeenth--century fashion.
But the strange thing about it was that it did not
look out directly on any space of sky but only on a
reflection of sky; a pale strip of daylight merely
mirrored in the moat, under the hanging shadow of
the bank. Payne had a memory of the Lady of Shallot
who never saw the world outside except in a mirror.
The lady of this Shallot not only in some sense saw
the world in a mirror, but even saw the world
upside--down.
'It's as if the house of Darnaway were falling
literally as well as metaphorically,' said Wood in a
low voice; 'as if it were sinking slowly into a
swamp or a quicksand, until the sea goes over it
like a green roof.'
Even the sturdy Dr Barnet started a little at the
silent approach of the figure that came to receive
them. Indeed, the room was so silent that they were
all startled to realize that it was not empty. There
were three people in it when they entered: three dim
figures motionless in the dim room; all three
dressed in black and looking like dark shadows. As
the foremost figure drew nearer the grey light from
the window, he showed a face that looked almost as
grey as its frame of hair. This was old Vine, the
steward, long left in loco parentis since the death
of that eccentric parent, the last Lord Darnaway. He
would have been a handsome old man if he had had no
teeth. As it was, he had one which showed every now
and then and gave him a rather sinister appearance.
He received the doctor and his friends with a fine
courtesy and escorted them to where the other two
figures in black were seated. One of them seemed to
Payne to give another appropriate touch of gloomy
antiquity to the castle by the mere fact of being a
Roman Catholic priest, who might have come out of a
priest's hole in the dark old days. Payne could
imagine him muttering prayers or telling beads, or
tolling bells or doing a number of indistinct and
melancholy things in that melancholy place. Just
then he might be supposed to have been giving
religious consolation to the lady; but it could
hardly be supposed that the consolation was very
consoling, or at any rate that it was very cheering.
For the rest, the priest was personally
insignificant enough, with plain and rather
expressionless features; but the lady was a very
different matter. Her face was very far from being
plain or insignificant; it stood out from the
darkness of her dress and hair and background with a
pallor that was almost awful, but a beauty that was
almost awfully alive. Payne looked at it as long as
he dared; and he was to look at it a good deal
longer before he died.
Wood merely exchanged with his friends such
pleasant and polite phrases as would lead up to his
purpose of revisiting the portraits. He apologized
for calling on the day which he heard was to be one
of family welcome; but he was soon convinced that
the family was rather mildly relieved to have
visitors to distract them or break the shock. He did
not hesitate, therefore, to lead Payne through the
central reception--room into the library beyond,
where hung the portrait, for there was one which he
was especially bent on showing, not only as a
picture but almost as a puzzle. The little priest
trudged along with them; he seemed to know something
about old pictures as well as about old prayers.
'I'm rather proud of having spotted this,' said
Wood.' I believe it's a Holbein. If it isn't, there
was somebody living in Holbein's time who was as
great as Holbein.'
It was a portrait in the hard but sincere and
living fashion of the period, representing a man
clad in black trimmed with gold and fur, with a
heavy, full, rather pale face but watchful eyes.
'What a pity art couldn't have stopped for ever
at just that transition stage,' cried Wood, 'and
never transitioned any more. Don't you see it's just
realistic enough to be real? Don't you see the face
speaks all the more because it stands out from a
rather stiffer framework of less essential things?
And the eyes are even more real than the face. On my
soul, I think the eyes are too real for the face!
It's just as if those sly, quick eyeballs were
protruding out of a great pale mask.'
'The stiffness extends to the figure a little, I
think,' said Payne. 'They hadn't quite mastered
anatomy when medievalism ended, at least in the
north. That left leg looks to me a good deal out of
drawing.'
'I'm not so sure,' replied Wood quietly. 'Those
fellows who painted just when realism began to be
done, and before it began to be overdone, were often
more realistic than we think. They put real details
of portraiture into things that are thought merely
conventional. You might say this fellow's eyebrows
or eye-- sockets are a little lop--sided; but I bet
if you knew him you'd find that one of his eyebrows
did really stick up more than the other. And I
shouldn't wonder if he was lame or something, and
that black leg was meant to be crooked.'
'What an old devil he looks!' burst out Payne
suddenly. 'I trust his reverence will excuse my
language.'
'I believe in the devil, thank you,' said the
priest with an inscrutable face. 'Curiously enough
there was a legend that the devil was lame.'
'I say,' protested Payne, 'you can't really mean
that he was the devil; but who the devil was he?'
'He was the Lord Darnaway under Henry VII and
Henry VIII,' replied his companion. 'But there are
curious legends about him, too; one of them is
referred to in that inscription round the frame, and
further developed in some notes left by somebody in
a book I found here. They are both rather curious
reading.'
Payne leaned forward, craning his head so as to
follow the archaic inscription round the frame.
Leaving out the antiquated lettering and spelling,
it seemed to be a sort of rhyme running somewhat
thus:
In the seventh heir I shall return: In the
seventh hour I shall depart: None in that hour shall
hold my hand: And woe to her that holds my heart.
'It sounds creepy somehow,' said Payne, 'but that
may be partly because I don't understand a word of
it.'
'It's pretty creepy even when you do,' said Wood
in a low voice. 'The record made at a later date, in
the old book I found, is all about how this beauty
deliberately killed himself in such a way that his
wife was executed for his murder. Another note
commemorates a later tragedy, seven successions
later-- under the Georges--in which another Darnaway
committed suicide, having first thoughtfully left
poison in his wife's wine. It's said that both
suicides took place at seven in the evening. I
suppose the inference is that he does really return
with every seventh inheritor and makes things
unpleasant, as the rhyme suggests, for any lady
unwise enough to marry him.'
'On that argument,' replied Payne, 'it would be a
trifle uncomfortable for the next seventh
gentleman.'
Wood's voice was lower still as he said: 'The new
heir will be the seventh.'
Harry Payne suddenly heaved up his great chest
and shoulders like a man flinging off a burden.
'What crazy stuff are we all talking?' he cried.
'We're all educated men in an enlightened age, I
suppose. Before I came into this damned dank
atmosphere I'd never have believed I should be
talking of such things, except to laugh at them.'
'You are right,' said Wood. 'If you lived long
enough in this underground palace you'd begin to
feel differently about things. I've begun to feel
very curiously about that picture, having had so
much to do with handling and hanging it. It
sometimes seems to me that the painted face is more
alive than the dead faces of the people living here;
that it is a sort of talisman or magnet: that it
commands the elements and draws out the destinies of
men and things. I suppose you would call it very
fanciful.'
'What is that noise?' cried Payne suddenly.
They all listened, and there seemed to be no
noise except the dull boom of the distant sea; then
they began to have the sense of something mingling
with it; something like a voice calling through the
sound of the surf, dulled by it at first, but coming
nearer and nearer. The next moment they were
certain: someone was shouting outside in the dusk.
Payne turned to the low window behind him and
bent to look out. It was the window from which
nothing could be seen except the moat with its
reflection of bank and sky. But that inverted vision
was not the same that he had seen before. From the
hanging shadow of the bank in the water depended two
dark shadows reflected from the feet and legs of a
figure standing above upon the bank. Through that
limited aperture they could see nothing but the two
legs black against the reflection of a pale and
livid sunset. But somehow that very fact of the head
being invisible, as if in the clouds, gave something
dreadful to the sound that followed; the voice of a
man crying aloud what they could not properly hear
or understand. Payne especially was peering out of
the little window with an altered face, and he spoke
with an altered voice:
'How queerly he's standing!'
'No, no,' said Wood, in a sort of soothing
whisper. 'Things often look like that in reflection.
It's the wavering of the water that makes you think
that.'
'Think what?' asked the priest shortly.
'That his left leg is crooked,' said Wood.
Payne had thought of the oval window as a sort of
mystical mirror; and it seemed to him that there
were in it other inscrutable images of doom. There
was something else beside the figure that he did not
understand; three thinner legs showing in dark lines
against the light, as if some monstrous
three--legged spider or bird were standing beside
the stranger. Then he had the less crazy thought of
a tripod like that of the heathen oracles; and the
next moment the thing had vanished and the legs of
the human figure passed out of the picture.
He turned to meet the pale face of old Vine, the
steward, with his mouth open, eager to speak, and
his single tooth showing. 'He has come,' he said.
'The boat arrived from Australia this morning.'
Even as they went back out of the library into
the central salon they heard the footsteps of the
newcomer clattering down the entrance steps, with
various items of light luggage trailed behind him.
When Payne saw one of them, he laughed with a
reaction of relief. His tripod was nothing but the
telescopic legs of a portable camera, easily packed
and unpacked; and the man who was carrying it seemed
so far to take on equally solid and normal
qualities. He was dressed in dark clothes, but of a
careless and holiday sort; his shirt was of grey
flannel, and his boots echoed uncompromisingly
enough in those still chambers. As he strode forward
to greet his new circle his stride had scarcely more
than the suggestion of a limp. But Payne and his
companions were looking at his face, and could
scarcely take their eyes from it.
He evidently felt there was something curious and
uncomfortable about his reception; but they could
have sworn that he did not himself know the cause of
it. The lady, supposed to be in some sense already
betrothed to him, was certainly beautiful enough to
attract him; but she evidently also frightened him.
The old steward brought him a sort of feudal homage,
yet treated him as if he were the family ghost. The
priest still looked at him with a face which was
quite indecipherable, and therefore perhaps all the
more unnerving. A new sort of irony, more like the
Greek irony, began to pass over Payne's mind. He had
dreamed of the stranger as a devil, but it seemed
almost worse that he was an unconscious destiny. He
seemed to march towards crime with the monstrous
innocence of Oedipus. He had approached the family
mansion in so blindly buoyant a spirit as to have
set up his camera to photograph his first sight of
it; and even the camera had taken on the semblance
of the tripod of a tragic pythoness.
Payne was surprised, when taking his leave a
little while after, at something which showed that
the Australian was already less unconscious of his
surroundings. He said in a low voice:
'Don't go ... or come again soon. You look like a
human being. This place fairly gives me the jumps.'
When Payne emerged out of those almost
subterranean halls and came into the night air and
the smell of the sea, he felt as if he had come out
of that underworld of dreams in which events jumble
on top of each other in a way at once unrestful and
unreal.
The arrival of the strange relative had been
somehow unsatisfying and, as it were, unconvincing.
The doubling of the same face in the old portrait
and the new arrival troubled him like a two headed
monster. And yet it was not altogether a nightmare;
nor was it that face, perhaps, that he saw most
vividly.
'Did you say?' he asked of the doctor, as they
strode together across the striped dark sands by the
darkening sea; 'did you say that young man was
betrothed to Miss Darnaway by a family compact or
something? Sounds rather like a novel.'
'But an historical novel,' answered Dr Barnet.
'The Darnaways all went to sleep a few centuries
ago, when things were really done that we only read
of in romances. Yes; I believe there's some family
tradition by which second or third cousins always
marry when they stand in a certain relation of age,
in order to unite the property. A damned silly
tradition, I should say; and if they often married
in and in, in that fashion, it may account on
principles of heredity for their having gone so
rotten.'
'I should hardly say,' answered Payne a little
stuffily, 'that they had all gone rotten.'
'Well,' replied the doctor, 'the young man
doesn't look rotten, of course, though he's
certainly lame.'
'The young man!' cried Payne, who was suddenly
and unreasonably angry. 'Well, if you think the
young lady looks rotten, I think it's you who have
rotten taste.'
The doctor's face grew dark and bitter. 'I fancy
I know more about it than you do,' he snapped.
They completed the walk in silence, each feeling
that he had been irrationally rude and had suffered
equally irrational rudeness; and Payne was left to
brood alone on the matter, for his friend Wood had
remained behind to attend to some of his business in
connexion with the pictures.
Payne took very full advantage of the invitation
extended by the colonial cousin, who wanted somebody
to cheer him up. During the next few weeks he saw a
good deal of the dark interior of the Darnaway home;
though it might be said that he did not confine
himself entirely to cheering up the colonial cousin.
The lady's melancholy was of longer standing and
perhaps needed more lifting; anyhow, he showed a
laborious readiness to lift it. He was not without a
conscience, however, and the situation made him
doubtful and uncomfortable. Weeks went by and nobody
could discover from the demeanour of the new
Darnaway whether he considered himself engaged
according to the old compact or no. He went mooning
about the dark galleries and stood staring vacantly
at the dark and sinister picture. The shades of that
prison-- house were certainly beginning to close on
him, and there was little of his Australian
assurance left. But Payne could discover nothing
upon the point that concerned him most. Once he
attempted to confide in his friend Martin Wood, as
he was pottering about in his capacity of
picture--hanger; but even out of him he got very
little satisfaction.
'It seems to me you can't butt in,' said Wood
shortly, 'because of the engagement.'
'Of course I shan't butt in if there is an
engagement,' retorted his friend; 'but is there? I
haven't said a word to her of course; but I've seen
enough of her to be pretty certain she doesn't think
there is, even if she thinks there may be. He
doesn't say there is, or even hint that there ought
to be. It seems to me this shillyshallying is rather
unfair on everybody.'
'Especially on you, I suppose,' said Wood a
little harshly. 'But if you ask me, I'll tell you
what I think--I think he's afraid.'
'Afraid of being refused?' asked Payne.
'No; afraid of being accepted,' answered the
other. 'Don't bite my head off--I don't mean afraid
of the lady. I mean afraid of the picture.'
'Afraid of the picture!' repeated Payne.
'I mean afraid of the curse,' said Wood. 'Don't
you remember the rhyme about the Darnaway doom
falling on him and her.'
'Yes, but look here,' cried Payne; 'even the
Darnaway doom can't have it both ways. You tell me
first that I mustn't have my own way because of the
compact, and then that the compact mustn't have its
own way because of the curse. But if the curse can
destroy the compact, why should she be tied to the
compact? If they're frightened of marrying each
other, they're free to marry anybody else, and
there's an end of it. Why should I suffer for the
observance of something they don't propose to
observe? It seems to me your position is very
unreasonable.'
'Of course it's all a tangle,' said Wood rather
crossly, and went on hammering at the frame of a
canvas.
Suddenly, one morning, the new heir broke his
long and baffling silence. He did it in a curious
fashion, a little crude, as was his way, but with an
obvious anxiety to do the right thing. He asked
frankly for advice, not of this or that individual
as Payne had done, but collectively as of a crowd.
When he did speak he threw himself on the whole
company like a statesman going to the country. He
called it 'a show--down'. Fortunately the lady was
not included in this large gesture; and Payne
shuddered when he thought of her feelings. But the
Australian was quite honest; he thought the natural
thing was to ask for help and for information,
calling a sort of family council at which he put his
cards on the table. It might be said that he flung
down his cards on the table, for he did it with a
rather desperate air, like one who had been harassed
for days and nights by the increasing pressure of a
problem. In that short time the shadows of that
place of low windows and sinking pavements had
curiously changed him, and increased a certain
resemblance that crept through all their memories.
The five men, including the doctor, were sitting
round a table; and Payne was idly reflecting that
his own light tweeds and red hair must be the only
colours in the room, for the priest and the steward
were in black, and Wood and Darnaway habitually wore
dark grey suits that looked almost like black.
Perhaps this incongruity had been what the young man
had meant by calling him a human being. At that
moment the young man himself turned abruptly in his
chair and began to talk. A moment after the dazed
artist knew that he was talking about the most
tremendous thing in the world.
'Is there anything in it?' he was saying. 'That
is what I've come to asking myself till I'm nearly
crazy. I'd never have believed I should come to
thinking of such things; but I think of the portrait
and the rhyme and the coincidences or whatever you
call them, and I go cold. Is there anything in it?
Is there any Doom of the Darnaways or only a damned
queer accident? Have I got a right to marry, or
shall I bring something big and black out of the
sky, that I know nothing about, on myself and
somebody else?'
His rolling eye had roamed round the table and
rested on the plain face of the priest, to whom he
now seemed to be speaking. Payne's submerged
practicality rose in protest against the problem of
superstition being brought before that supremely
superstitious tribunal. He was sitting next to
Darnaway and struck in before the priest could
answer.
'Well, the coincidences are curious, I admit,' he
said, rather forcing a note of cheerfulness; 'but
surely we--' and then he stopped as if he had been
struck by lightning. For Darnaway had turned his
head sharply over his shoulder at the interruption,
and with the movement, his left eyebrow jerked up
far above its fellow and for an instant the face of
the portrait glared at him with a ghastly
exaggeration of exactitude. The rest saw it; and all
had the air of having been dazzled by an instant of
light. The old steward gave a hollow groan.
'It is no good,' he said hoarsely;' we are
dealing with something too terrible.'
'Yes,' assented the priest in a low voice, 'we
are dealing with something terrible; with the most
terrible thing I know, and the name of it is
nonsense.'
'What did you say?' said Darnaway, still looking
towards him.
'I said nonsense,' repeated the priest. 'I have
not said anything in particular up to now, for it
was none of my business; I was only taking temporary
duty in the neighbourhood and Miss Darnaway wanted
to see me. But since you're asking me personally and
point--blank, why, it's easy enough to answer. Of
course there's no Doom of the Darnaways to prevent
your marrying anybody you have any decent reason for
marrying. A man isn't fated to fall into the
smallest venial sin, let alone into crimes like
suicide and murder. You can't be made to do wicked
things against your will because your name is
Darnaway, any more than I can because my name is
Brown. The Doom of the Browns,' he added with
relish--'the Weird of the Browns would sound even
better.'
'And you of all people,' repeated the Australian,
staring, 'tell me to think like that about it.'
'I tell you to think about something else,'
replied the priest cheerfully. 'What has become of
the rising art of photography? How is the camera
getting on? I know it's rather dark downstairs, but
those hollow arches on the floor above could easily
be turned into a first--rate photographic studio. A
few workmen could fit it out with a glass roof in no
time.'
'Really,' protested Martin Wood, 'I do think you
should be the last man in the world to tinker about
with those beautiful Gothic arches, which are about
the best work your own religion has ever done in the
world. I should have thought you'd have had some
feeling for that sort of art; but I can't see why
you should be so uncommonly keen on photography.'
'I'm uncommonly keen on daylight,' answered
Father Brown, 'especially in this dingy business;
and photography has the virtue of depending on
daylight. And if you don't know that I would grind
all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save
the sanity of a single human soul, you don't know so
much about my religion as you think you do.'
The young Australian had sprung to his feet like
a man rejuvenated. 'By George! that's the talk,' he
cried; 'though I never thought to hear it from that
quarter. I'll tell you what, reverend sir, I'll do
something that will show I haven't lost my courage
after all.'
The old steward was still looking at him with
quaking watchfulness, as if he felt something fey
about the young man's defiance. 'Oh,' he cried,
'what are you going to do now?'
'I am going to photograph the portrait,' replied
Darnaway.
Yet it was barely a week afterwards that the
storm of the catastrophe seemed to stoop out of the
sky, darkening that sun of sanity to which the
priest had appealed in vain, and plunging the
mansion once more in the darkness of the Darnaway
doom. It had been easy enough to fit up the new
studio; and seen from inside it looked very like any
other such studio, empty except for the fullness of
the white light. A man coming from the gloomy rooms
below had more than normally the sense of stepping
into a more than modern brilliancy, as blank as the
future. At the suggestion of Wood, who knew the
castle well and had got over his first aesthetic
grumblings, a small room remaining intact in the
upper ruins was easily turned into a dark room, into
which Darnaway went out of the white daylight to
grope by the crimson gleams of a red lamp. Wood
said, laughing, that the red lamp had reconciled him
to the vandalism; as that bloodshot darkness was as
romantic as an alchemist's cave.
Darnaway had risen at daybreak on the day that he
meant to photograph the mysterious portrait, and had
it carried up from the library by the single
corkscrew staircase that connected the two floors.
There he had set it up in the wide white daylight on
a sort of easel and planted his photographic tripod
in front of it. He said he was anxious to send a
reproduction of it to a great antiquary who had
written on the antiquities of the house; but the
others knew that this was an excuse covering much
deeper things. It was, if not exactly a spiritual
duel between Darnaway and the demoniac picture, at
least a duel between Darnaway and his own doubts. He
wanted to bring the daylight of photography face to
face with that dark masterpiece of painting; and to
see whether the sunshine of the new art would not
drive out the shadows of the old.
Perhaps this was why he preferred to do it by
himself, even if some of the details seemed to take
longer and involve more than normal delay. Anyhow,
he rather discouraged the few who visited his studio
during the day of the experiment, and who found him
focusing and fussing about in a very isolated and
impenetrable fashion. The steward had left a meal
for him, as he refused to come down; the old
gentleman also returned some hours afterwards and
found the meal more or less normally disposed of;
but when he brought it he got no more gratitude than
a grunt. Payne went up once to see how he was
getting on, but finding the photographer disinclined
for conversation came down again. Father Brown had
wandered that way in an unobtrusive style to lake
Darnaway a letter from the expert to whom the
photograph was to be sent. But he left the letter on
a tray, and whatever he thought of that great
glasshouse full of daylight and devotion to a hobby,
a world he had himself in some sense created, he
kept it to himself and came down. He had reason to
remember very soon that he was the last to come down
the solitary staircase connecting the floors,
leaving a lonely man and an empty room behind him.
The others were standing in the salon that led into
the library, just under the great black ebony clock
that looked like a titanic coffin.
'How was Darnaway getting on,' asked Payne, a
little later, 'when you last went up?'
The priest passed a hand over his forehead.
'Don't tell me I'm getting psychic,' he said with a
sad smile. 'I believe I'm quite dazzled with
daylight up in that room and couldn't see things
straight. Honestly, I felt for a flash as if there
were something uncanny about Darnaway's figure
standing before that portrait.'
'Oh, that's the lame leg,' said Barnet promptly.
'We know all about that.'
'Do you know,' said Payne abruptly, but lowering
his voice, 'l don't think we do know all about it or
anything about it. What's the matter with his leg?
What was the matter with his ancestor's leg?'
'Oh, there's something about that in the book I
was reading in there, in the family archives,' said
Wood; 'I'll fetch it for you.' And he stepped into
the library just beyond.
'I think,' said Father Brown quietly, 'Mr Payne
must have some particular reason for asking that.'
'I may as well blurt it out once and for all,'
said Payne, but in a yet lower voice. 'After all,
there is a rational explanation. A man from anywhere
might have made up to look like the portrait. What
do we know about Darnaway? He is behaving rather
oddly--'
The others were staring at him in a rather
startled fashion; but the priest seemed to take it
very calmly.
'I don't think the old portrait's ever been
photographed,' he said. 'That's why he wants to do
it. I don't think there's anything odd about that.'
'Quite an ordinary state of things, in fact,'
said Wood with a smile; he had just returned with
the book in his hand. And even as he spoke there was
a stir in the clockwork of the great dark clock
behind him and successive strokes thrilled through
the room up to the number of seven. With the last
stroke there came a crash from the floor above that
shook the house like a thunderbolt; and Father Brown
was already two steps up the winding staircase
before the sound had ceased.
'My God!' cried Payne involuntarily; 'he is alone
up there.'
'Yes,' said Father Brown without turning, as he
vanished up the stairway. 'We shall find him alone.'
When the rest recovered from their first
paralysis and ran helter-- skelter up the stone
steps and found their way to the new studio, it was
true in that sense that they found him alone. They
found him lying in a wreck of his tall camera, with
its long splintered legs standing out grotesquely at
three different angles; and Darnaway had fallen on
top of it with one black crooked leg lying at a
fourth angle along the floor. For the moment the
dark heap looked as if he were entangled with some
huge and horrible spider. Little more than a glance
and a touch were needed to tell them that he was
dead. Only the portrait stood untouched upon the
easel, and one could fancy the smiling eyes shone.
An hour afterwards Father Brown in helping to
calm the confusion of the stricken household, came
upon the old steward muttering almost as
mechanically as the clock had ticked and struck the
terrible hour. Almost without hearing them, he knew
what the muttered words must be.
In the seventh heir I shall return In the seventh
hour I shall depart.
As he was about to say something soothing, the
old man seemed suddenly to start awake and stiffen
into anger; his mutterings changed to a fierce cry.
'You!' he cried; 'you and your daylight! Even you
won't say now there is no Doom for the Darnaways.'
'My opinion about that is unchanged,' said Father
Brown mildly. Then after a pause he added: 'I hope
you will observe poor Darnaway's last wish, and see
the photograph is sent off.'
'The photograph!' cried the doctor sharply.
'What's the good of that? As a matter of fact, it's
rather curious; but there isn't any photograph. It
seems he never took it after all, after pottering
about all day.'
Father Brown swung round sharply. 'Then take it
yourselves,' he said. 'Poor Darnaway was perfectly
right. It's most important that the photograph
should be taken.'
As all the visitors, the doctor, the priest, and
the two artists trailed away in a black and dismal
procession across the brown and yellow sands, they
were at first more or less silent, rather as if they
had been stunned. And certainly there had been
something like a crack of thunder in a clear sky
about the fulfilment of that forgotten superstition
at the very time when they had most forgotten it;
when the doctor and the priest had both filled their
minds with rationalism as the photographer had
filled his rooms with daylight. They might be as
rationalistic as they liked; but in broad daylight
the seventh heir had returned, and in broad daylight
at the seventh hour he had perished.
'I'm afraid everybody will always believe in the
Darnaway superstition now,' said Martin Wood.
'I know one who won't,' said the doctor sharply.
'Why should I indulge in superstition because
somebody else indulges in suicide?'
'You think poor Mr Darnaway committed suicide?'
asked the priest.
'I'm sure he committed suicide,' replied the
doctor.
'It is possible,' agreed the other.
'He was quite alone up there, and he had a whole
drug-- store of poisons in the dark room. Besides,
it's just the sort of thing that Darnaways do.'
'You don't think there's anything in the
fulfilment of the family curse?'
'Yes,' said the doctor; 'I believe in one family
curse, and that is the family constitution. I told
you it was heredity, and they are all half mad. If
you stagnate and breed in and brood in your own
swamp like that, you're bound to degenerate whether
you like it or not. The laws of heredity can't be
dodged; the truths of science can't be denied. The
minds of the Darnaways are falling to pieces, as
their blighted old sticks and stones are falling to
pieces, eaten away by the sea and the salt air.
Suicide--of course he committed suicide; I dare say
all the rest will commit suicide. Perhaps the best
thing they could do.'
As the man of science spoke there sprang suddenly
and with startling clearness into Payne's memory the
face of the daughter of the Darnaways, a tragic mask
pale against an unfathomable blackness, but itself
of a blinding and more than mortal beauty. He opened
his mouth to speak and found himself speechless.
'I see,' said Father Brown to the doctor; 'so you
do believe in the superstition after all?'
'What do you mean--believe in the superstition? I
believe in the suicide as a matter of scientific
necessity.'
'Well,' replied the priest, 'I don't see a pin to
choose between your scientific superstition and the
other magical superstition. They both seem to end in
turning people into paralytics, who can't move their
own legs or arms or save their own lives or souls.
The rhyme said it was the Doom of the Darnaways to
be killed, and the scientific textbook says it is
the Doom of the Darnaways to kill themselves. Both
ways they seem to be slaves.'
'But I thought you said you believed in rational
views of these things,' said Dr Barnet. 'Don't you
believe in heredity?'
'I said I believed in daylight,' replied the
priest in a loud and clear voice, 'and I won't
choose between two tunnels of subterranean
superstition that both end in the dark. And the
proof of it is this: that you are all entirely in
the dark about what really happened in that house.'
'Do you mean about the suicide?' asked Payne.
'I mean about the murder,' said Father Brown; and
his voice, though only slightly lifted to a louder
note, seemed somehow to resound over the whole
shore.' It was murder; but murder is of the will,
which God made free.'
What the other said at the moment in answer to it
Payne never knew. For the word had a rather curious
effect on him; stirring him like the blast of a
trumpet and yet bringing him to a halt. He stood
still in the middle of the sandy waste and let the
others go on in front of him; he felt the blood
crawling through all his veins and the sensation
that is called the hair standing on end; and yet he
felt a new and unnatural happiness. A psychological
process too quick and too complicated for himself to
follow had already reached a conclusion that he
could not analyse; but the conclusion was one of
relief. After standing still for a moment he turned
and went back slowly across the sands to the house
of the Darnaways.
He crossed the moat with a stride that shook the
bridge, descended the stairs and traversed the long
rooms with a resounding tread, till he came to the
place where Adelaide Darnaway sat haloed with the
low light of the oval window, almost like some
forgotten saint left behind in the land of death.
She looked up, and an expression of wonder made her
face yet more wonderful.
'What is it?' she said.' Why have you come back?'
'I have come for the Sleeping Beauty,' he said in
a tone that had the resonance of a laugh. 'This old
house went to sleep long ago, as the doctor said;
but it is silly for you to pretend to be old. Come
up into the daylight and hear the truth. I have
brought you a word; it is a terrible word, but it
breaks the spell of your captivity.'
She did not understand a word he said, but
something made her rise and let him lead her down
the long hall and up the stairs and out under the
evening sky. The ruins of a dead garden stretched
towards the sea, and an old fountain with the figure
of a triton, green with rust, remained poised there,
pouring nothing out of a dried horn into an empty
basin. He had often seen that desolate outline
against the evening sky as he passed, and it had
seemed to him a type of fallen fortunes in more ways
than one. Before long, doubtless, those hollow fonts
would be filled, but it would be with the pale green
bitter waters of the sea and the flowers would be
drowned and strangled in seaweed. So, he had told
himself, the daughter of the Darnaways might indeed
be wedded; but she would be wedded to death and a
doom as deaf and ruthless as the sea. But now he
laid a hand on the bronze triton that was like the
hand of a giant, and shook it as if he meant to hurl
it over like an idol or an evil god of the garden.
'What do you mean?' she asked steadily. 'What is
this word that will set us free?'
'The word is murder,' he said, 'and the freedom
it brings is as fresh as the flowers of spring. No;
I do not mean I have murdered anybody. But the fact
that anybody can be murdered is itself good news,
after the evil dreams you have been living in. Don't
you understand? In that dream of yours everything
that happened to you came from inside you; the Doom
of the Darnaways was stored up in the Darnaways; it
unfolded itself like a horrible flower. There was no
escape even by happy accident; it was all
inevitable; whether it was Vine and his old--wives'
tales, or Barnet and his new--fangled heredity. But
this man who died was not the victim of a magic
curse or an inherited madness. He was murdered; and
for us that murder is simply an accident; yes,
requiescat in pace: but a happy accident. It is a
ray of daylight, because it comes from outside.'
She suddenly smiled. 'Yes, I believe I
understand. I suppose you are talking like a
lunatic, but I understand. But who murdered him?'
'I do not know,' he answered calmly, 'but Father
Brown knows. And as Father Brown says, murder is at
least done by the will, free as that wind from the
sea.'
'Father Brown is a wonderful person,' she said
after a pause; 'he was the only person who ever
brightened my existence in any way at all until--'
'Until what?' asked Payne, and made a movement
almost impetuous, leaning towards her and thrusting
away the bronze monster so that it seemed to rock on
its pedestal.
'Well, until you did,' she said and smiled again.
So was the sleeping palace awakened, and it is no
part of this story to describe the stages of its
awakening, though much of it had come to pass before
the dark of that evening had fallen upon the shore.
As Harry Payne strode homewards once more, across
those dark sands that he had crossed in so many
moods, he was at the highest turn of happiness that
is given in this mortal life,-- and the whole red
sea within him was at the top of its tide. He would
have had no difficulty in picturing all that place
again in flower, and the bronze triton bright as a
golden god and the fountain flowing with water or
with wine. But all this brightness and blossoming
had been unfolded for him by the one word 'murder',
and it was still a word that he did not understand.
He had taken it on trust, and he was not unwise; for
he was one of those who have a sense of the sound of
truth.
It was more than a month later that Payne
returned to his London house to keep an appointment
with Father Brown, taking the required photograph
with him. His personal romance had prospered as well
as was fitting under the shadow of such a tragedy,
and the shadow itself therefore lay rather more
lightly on him; but it was hard to view it as
anything but the shadow of a family fatality. In
many ways he had been much occupied; and it was not
until the Darnaway household had resumed its
somewhat stern routine, and the portrait had long
been restored to its place in the library, that he
had managed to photograph it with a magnesium flare.
Before sending it to the antiquary, as originally
arranged, he brought it to the priest who had so
pressingly demanded it.
'I can't understand your attitude about all this.
Father Brown,' he said.' You act as if you had
already solved the problem in some way of your own.'
The priest shook his head mournfully. 'Not a bit
of it,' he answered. 'I must be very stupid, but I'm
quite stuck; stuck about the most practical point of
all. It's a queer business; so simple up to a point
and then-- Let me have a look at that photograph,
will you?'
He held it close to his screwed, short--sighted
eyes for a moment, and then said: 'Have you got a
magnifying glass?'
Payne produced one, and the priest looked through
it intently for some time and then said:' Look at
the title of that book at the edge of the bookshelf
beside the frame; it's 'The History of Pope Joan'.
Now, I wonder ... yes, by George; and the one above
is something or other of Iceland. Lord! what a queer
way to find it out! What a dolt and donkey I was not
to notice it when I was there!'
'But what have you found out?' asked Payne
impatiently.
'The last link,' said Father Brown, 'and I'm not
stuck any longer. Yes; I think I know how that
unhappy story went from first to last now.'
'But why?' insisted the other.
'Why, because,' said the priest with a smile,
'the Darnaway library contained books about Pope
Joan and Iceland, not to mention another I see with
the title beginning 'The Religion of Frederick',
which is not so very hard to fill up.' Then, seeing
the other's annoyance, his smile faded and he said
more earnestly: 'As a matter of fact, this last
point, though it is the last link, is not the main
business. There were much more curious things in the
case than that. One of them is rather a curiosity of
evidence. Let me begin by saying something that may
surprise you. Darnaway did not die at seven o'clock
that evening. He had been already dead for a whole
day.'
'Surprise is rather a mild word,' said Payne
grimly, 'since you and I both saw him walking about
afterwards.'
'No, we did not,' replied Father Brown quietly.
'I think we both saw him, or thought we saw him,
fussing about with the focusing of his camera.
Wasn't his head under that black cloak when you
passed through the room? It was when I did. And
that's why I felt there was something queer about
the room and the figure. It wasn't that the leg was
crooked, but rather that it wasn't crooked. It was
dressed in the same sort of dark clothes; but if you
see what you believe to be one man standing in the
way that another man stands, you will think he's in
a strange and strained attitude.'
'Do you really mean,' cried Payne with something
like a shudder, 'that it was some unknown man?'
'It was the murderer,' said Father Brown. 'He had
already killed Darnaway at daybreak and hid the
corpse and himself in the dark room--an excellent
hiding--place, because nobody normally goes into it
or can see much if he does. But he let it fall out
on the floor at seven o'clock, of course, that the
whole thing might be explained by the curse.'
'But I don't understand' observed Payne. 'Why
didn't he kill him at seven o'clock then, instead of
loading himself with a corpse for fourteen hours?'
'Let me ask you another question,' said the
priest. 'Why was there no photograph taken? Because
the murderer made sure of killing him when he first
got up, and before he could take it. It was
essential to the murderer to prevent that photograph
reaching the expert on the Darnaway antiquities.'
There was a sudden silence for a moment, and then
the priest went on in a lower tone: 'Don't you see
how simple it is? Why, you yourself saw one side of
the possibility; but it's simpler even than you
thought. You said a man might be faked to resemble
an old picture. Surely it's simpler that a picture
should be faked to resemble a man. In plain words,
it's true in a rather special way that there was no
Doom of the Darnaways. There was no old picture;
there was no old rhyme; there was no legend of a man
who caused his wife's death. But there was a very
wicked and a very clever man who was willing to
cause another man's death in order to rob him of his
promised wife.'
The priest suddenly gave Payne a sad smile, as if
in reassurance. 'For the moment I believe you
thought I meant you,' he said,' but you were not the
only person who haunted that house for sentimental
reasons. You know the man, or rather you think you
do. But there were depths in the man called Martin
Wood, artist and antiquary, which none of his mere
artistic acquaintances were likely to guess.
Remember that he was called in to criticize and
catalogue the pictures; in an aristocratic dustbin
of that sort that practically means simply to tell
the Darnaways what art treasures they had got. They
would not be surprised at things turning up they had
never noticed before. It had to be done well, and it
was; perhaps he was right when he said that if it
wasn't Holbein it was somebody of the same genius.'
'I feel rather stunned,' said Payne; 'and there
are twenty things I don't see yet. How did he know
what Darnaway looked like? How did he actually kill
him? The doctors seem rather puzzled at present.'
'I saw a photograph the lady had which the
Australian sent on before him,' said the priest,
'and there are several ways in which he could have
learned things when the new heir was once
recognized. We may not know these details; but they
are not difficulties. You remember he used to help
in the dark room; it seems to me an ideal place,
say, to prick a man with a poisoned pin, with the
poison's all handy. No; I say these were not
difficulties. The difficulty that stumped me was how
Wood could be in two places at once. How could he
take the corpse from the dark--room and prop it
against the camera so that it would fall in a few
seconds, without coming downstairs, when he was in
the library looking out a book? And I was such a
fool that I never looked at the books in the
library; and it was only in this photograph, by very
undeserved good luck, that I saw the simple fact of
a book about Pope Joan.'
'You've kept your best riddle for the end,' said
Payne grimly. 'What on earth can Pope Joan have to
do with it?'
'Don't forget the book about the Something of
Iceland,' advised the priest, 'or the religion of
somebody called Frederick. It only remains to ask
what sort of man was the late Lord Darnaway.'
'Oh, does it?' observed Payne heavily.
'He was a cultivated, humorous sort of eccentric,
I believe,' went on Father Brown. 'Being cultivated,
he knew there was no such person as Pope Joan. Being
humorous, he was very likely to have thought of the
title of 'The Snakes of Iceland' or something else
that didn't exist. I venture to reconstruct the
third title as 'The Religion of Frederick the
Great'-- which also doesn't exist. Now, doesn't it
strike you that those would be just the titles to
put on the backs of books that didn't exist; or in
other words on a bookcase that wasn't a book--case?'
'Ah!' cried Payne; 'I see what you mean now.
There was some hidden staircase--'
'Up to the room Wood himself selected as a dark
room,' said the priest nodding. 'I'm sorry. It
couldn't be helped. It's dreadfully banal and
stupid, as stupid as I have been on this pretty
banal case. But we were mixed up in a real musty old
romance of decayed gentility and a fallen family
mansion; and it was too much to hope that we could
escape having a secret passage. It was a priest's
hole; and I deserve to be put in it.'
|
|
The Ghost of Gideon Wise
FATHER BROWN always regarded the case as the
queerest example of the theory of an alibi: the
theory by which it is maintained, in defiance of the
mythological Irish bird, that it is impossible for
anybody to be in two places at once. To begin with,
James Byrne, being an Irish journalist, was perhaps
the nearest approximation to the Irish bird. He came
as near as anybody could to being in two places at
once: for he was in two places at the opposite
extremes of the social and political world within
the space of twenty minutes. The first was in the
Babylonian halls of the big hotel, which was the
meeting place of the three commercial magnates
concerned with arranging for a coal lock--out and
denouncing it as a coal--strike, the second was in a
curious tavern, having the facade of a grocery
store, where met the more subterranean triumvirate
of those who would have been very glad to turn the
lock--out into a strike--and the strike into a
revolution. The reporter passed to and fro between
the three millionaires and the three Bolshevist
leaders with the immunity of the modern herald or
the new ambassador.
He found the three mining magnates hidden in a
jungle of flowering plants and a forest of fluted
and florid columns of gilded plaster; gilded
birdcages hung high under the painted domes amid the
highest leaves of the palms; and in them were birds
of motley colours and varied cries. No bird in the
wilderness ever sang more unheeded, and no flower
ever wasted its sweetness on the desert air more
completely than the blossoms of those tall plants
wasted theirs upon the brisk and breathless business
men, mostly American, who talked and ran to and fro
in that place. And there, amid a riot of rococo
ornament that nobody ever looked at, and a chatter
of expensive foreign birds that nobody ever heard,
and a mass of gorgeous upholstery and a labyrinth of
luxurious architecture, the three men sat and talked
of how success was founded on thought and thrift and
a vigilance of economy and self--control.
One of them indeed did not talk so much as the
others; but he watched with very bright and
motionless eyes, which seemed to be pinched together
by his pince--nez, and the permanent smile under his
small black moustache was rather like a permanent
sneer. This was the famous Jacob P. Stein, and he
did not speak till he had something to say. But his
companion, old Gallup the Pennsylvanian, a huge fat
fellow with reverend grey hair but a face like a
pugilist, talked a great deal. He was in a jovial
mood and was half rallying, half bullying the third
millionaire, Gideon Wise--a hard, dried, angular old
bird of the type that his countrymen compare to
hickory, with a stiff grey chin--beard and the
manners and clothes of any old farmer from the
central plains. There was an old argument between
Wise and Gallup about combination and competition.
For old Wise still retained, with the manners of the
old backwoodsman, something of his opinions of the
old individualist; he belonged, as we should say in
England, to the Manchester School; and Gallup was
always trying to persuade him to cut out competition
and pool the resources of the world.
'You'll have to come in, old fellow, sooner or
later,' Gallup was saying genially as Byrne entered.
'It's the way the world is going, and we can't go
back to the one--man--business now. We've all got to
stand together.'
'If I might say a word,' said Stein, in his
tranquil way, 'I would say there is something a
little more urgent even than standing together
commercially. Anyhow, we must stand together
politically; and that's why I've asked Mr Byrne to
meet us here today. On the political issue we must
combine; for the simple reason that all our most
dangerous enemies are already combined.'
'Oh, I quite agree about political combination,'
grumbled Gideon Wise.
'See here,' said Stein to the journalist; 'I know
you have the run of these queer places, Mr Byrne,
and I want you to do something for us unofficially.
You know where these men meet; there are only two or
three of them that count, John Elias and Jake
Halket, who does all the spouting, and perhaps that
poet fellow Home.'
'Why Home used to be a friend of Gideon,' said
the jeering Mr Gallup; 'used to be in his Sunday
School class or something.'
'He was a Christian, then,' said old Gideon
solemnly; 'but when a man takes up with atheists you
never know. I still meet him now and then. I was
quite ready to back him against war and conscription
and all that, of course, but when it comes to all
the goddam bolshies in creation--'
'Excuse me,' interposed Stein, 'the matter is
rather urgent, so I hope you will excuse me putting
it before Mr Byrne at once. Mr Byrne, I may tell you
in confidence that I hold information, or rather
evidence that would land at least two of those men
in prison for long terms, in connexion with
conspiracies during the late war. I don't want to
use that evidence. But I want you to go to them
quietly and tell them that I shall use it, and use
it tomorrow, unless they alter their attitude.'
'Well,' replied Byrne, 'what you propose would
certainly be called compounding a felony and might
be called blackmail, Don't you think it is rather
dangerous?'
'I think it is rather dangerous for them,' said
Stein with a snap; 'and I want you to go and tell
them so.'
'Oh, very well,' said Byrne standing up, with a
half humorous sigh. 'It's all in the day's work; but
if I get into trouble, I warn you I shall try to
drag you into it.'
'You will try, boy,' said old Gallup with a
hearty laugh.
For so much still lingers of that great dream of
Jefferson and, the thing that men have called
Democracy that in his country, while the rich rule
like tyrants, the poor do not talk like slaves; but
there is candour between the oppressor and the
oppressed.
The meeting--place of the revolutionists was a
queer, bare, whitewashed place, on the walls of
which were one or two distorted uncouth sketches in
black and white, in the style of something that was
supposed to be Proletarian Art, of which not one
proletarian in a million could have made head or
tail. Perhaps the one point in common to the two
council chambers was that both violated the American
Constitution by the display of strong drink.
Cocktails of various colours had stood before the
three millionaires. Halket, the most violent of the
Bolshevists, thought it only appropriate to drink
vodka. He was a long, hulking fellow with a menacing
stoop, and his very profile was aggressive like a
dog's, the nose and lips thrust out together, the
latter carrying a ragged red moustache and the whole
curling outwards with perpetual scorn. John Elias
was a dark watchful man in spectacles, with a black
pointed beard; and he had learnt in many European
cafes a taste for absinthe. The journalist's first
and last feeling was how very like each other, after
all, were John Elias and Jacob P. Stein. They were
so like in face and mind and manner, that the
millionaire might have disappeared down a trap--door
in the Babylon Hotel and come up again in the
stronghold of the Bolshevists.
The third man also had a curious taste in drinks,
and his drink was symbolic of him. For what stood in
front of the poet Home was a glass of milk, and its
very mildness seemed in that setting to have
something sinister about it, as if its opaque and
colourless colour were of some leprous paste more
poisonous than the dead sick green of absinthe. Yet
in truth the mildness was so far genuine enough; for
Henry Home came to the camp of revolution along a
very different road and from very different origins
from those of Jake, the common tub-- thumper, and
Elias, the cosmopolitan wire--puller. He had had
what is called a careful upbringing, had gone to
chapel in his childhood, and carried through life a
teetotalism which he could not shake off when he
cast away such trifles as Christianity and marriage.
He had fair hair and a fine face that might have
looked like Shelley, if he had not weakened the chin
with a little foreign fringe of beard. Somehow the
beard made him look more like a woman; it was as if
those few golden hairs were all he could do.
When the journalist entered, the notorious Jake
was talking, as he generally was. Home had uttered
some casual and conventional phrase about 'Heaven
forbid' something or other, and this was quite
enough to set Jake off with a torrent of profanity.
'Heaven forbid! and that's about all it bally
well does do,' he said. 'Heaven never does anything
but forbid this, that and the other; forbids us to
strike, and forbids us to fight, and forbids us to
shoot the damned usurers and blood--suckers where
they sit. Why doesn't Heaven forbid them something
for a bit? Why don't the damned priests and parsons
stand up and tell the truth about those brutes for a
change? Why doesn't their precious God--'
Elias allowed a gentle sigh, as of faint fatigue,
to escape him.
'Priests,' he said, 'belonged, as Marx has shown,
to the feudal stage of economic development and are
therefore no longer really any part of the problem.
The part once played by the priest is now played by
the capitalist expert and--'
'Yes,' interrupted the journalist, with his grim
and ironic implacability, 'and it's about time you
knew that some of them are jolly expert in playing
it.' And without moving his own eyes from the bright
but dead eyes of Elias, he told him of the threat of
Stein.
'I was prepared for something of that sort,' said
the smiling Elias without moving; 'I may say quite
prepared.'
'Dirty dogs!' exploded Jake. 'If a poor man said
a thing like that he'd go to penal servitude. But I
reckon they'll go somewhere worse before they guess.
If they don't go to hell, I don't know where the
hell they'll go to--'
Home made a movement of protest, perhaps not so
much at what the man was saying as at what he was
going to say, and Elias cut the speech short with
cold exactitude.
'It is quite unnecessary for us,' he said,
looking at Byrne steadily through his spectacles,
'to bandy threats with the other side. It is quite
sufficient that their threats are quite ineffective
so far as we are concerned. We also have made all
our own arrangements, and some of them will not
appear until they appear in motion. So far as we are
concerned, an immediate rupture and an extreme trial
of strength will be quite according to plan.'
As he spoke in a quite quiet and dignified
fashion, something in his motionless yellow face and
his great goggles started a faint fear creeping up
the journalist's spine. Halket's savage face might
seem to have a snarl in its very silhouette when
seen sideways; but when seen face to face, the
smouldering rage in his eyes had also something of
anxiety, as if the ethical and economic riddle were
after all a little too much for him; and Home seemed
even more hanging on wires of worry and
self--criticism. But about this third man with the
goggles, who spoke so sensibly and simply, there was
something uncanny; it was like a dead man talking at
the table.
As Byrne went out with his message of defiance,
and passed along the very narrow passage beside the
grocery store, he found the end of it blocked by a
strange though strangely familiar figure: short and
sturdy, and looking rather quaint when seen in dark
outline with its round head and wide hat.
'Father Brown!' cried the astonished journalist.
'I think you must have come into the wrong door.
You're not likely to be in this little conspiracy.'
'Mine is a rather older conspiracy,' replied
Father Brown smiling,' but it is quite a widespread
conspiracy.'
'Well,' replied Byrne,' you can't imagine any of
the people here being within a thousand miles of
your concern.'
'It is not always easy to tell,' replied the
priest equably; 'but as a matter of fact, there is
one person here who's within an inch of it.'
He disappeared into the dark entrance and the
journalist went on his way very much puzzled. He was
still more puzzled by a small incident that happened
to him as he turned into the hotel to make his
report to his capitalist clients. The bower of
blossoms and bird--cages in which those crabbed old
gentlemen were embosomed was approached by a flight
of marble steps, flanked by gilded nymphs and
tritons. Down these steps ran an active young man
with black hair, a snub nose, and a flower in his
buttonhole, who seized him and drew him aside before
he could ascend the stair.
'I say,' whispered the young man, 'I'm
Potter--old Gid's secretary, you know: now, between
ourselves, there is a sort of a thunderbolt being
forged, isn't there, now?'
'I came to the conclusion,' replied Byrne
cautiously, 'that the Cyclops had something on the
anvil. But always remember that the Cyclops is a
giant, but he has only one eye. I think Bolshevism
is--'
While he was speaking the secretary listened with
a face that had a certain almost Mongolian
immobility, despite the liveliness of his legs and
his attire. But when Byrne said the word
'Bolshevism', the young man's sharp eyes shifted and
he said quickly:
'What has that--oh yes, that sort of thunderbolt;
so sorry, my mistake. So easy to say anvil when you
mean ice--box.'
With which the extraordinary young man
disappeared down the steps and Byrne continued to
mount them, more and more mystification clouding his
mind.
He found the group of three augmented to four by
the presence of a hatchet--faced person with very
thin straw--coloured hair and a monocle, who
appeared to be a sort of adviser to old Gallup,
possibly his solicitor, though he was not definitely
so called. His name was Nares, and the questions
which he directed towards Byrne referred chiefly,
for some reason or other, to the number of those
probably enrolled in the revolutionary organization.
Of this, as Byrne knew little, he said less; and the
four men eventually rose from their seats, the last
word being with the man who had been most silent.
'Thank you, Mr Byrne,' said Stein, folding up his
eyeglasses. 'It only remains to say that everything
is ready; on that point I quite agree with Mr Elias.
Tomorrow, before noon, the police will have arrested
Mr Elias, on evidence I shall by then have put
before them, and those three at least will be in
jail before night. As you know, I attempted to avoid
this course. I think that is all, gentlemen.'
But Mr Jacob P. Stein did not lay his formal
information next day, for a reason that has often
interrupted the activities of such industrious
characters. He did not do it because he happened to
be dead; and none of the rest of the programme was
carried out, for a reason which Byrne found
displayed in gigantic letters when he opened his
morning paper: 'Terrific Triple Murder: Three
Millionaires Slain in One Night.' Other exclamatory
phrases followed in smaller letters, only about four
times the size of normal type, which insisted on the
special feature of the mystery: the fact that the
three men had been killed not only simultaneously
but in three widely separated places-- Stein in his
artistic and luxurious country seat a hundred miles
inland, Wise outside the little bungalow on the
coast where he lived on sea breezes and the simple
life, and old Gallup in a thicket just outside the
lodge--gates of his great house at the other end of
the county. In all three cases there could be no
doubt about the scenes of violence that had preceded
death, though the actual body of Gallup was not
found till the second day, where it hung, huge and
horrible, amid the broken forks and branches of the
little wood into which its weight had crashed, like
a bison rushing on the spears: while Wise had
clearly been flung over the cliff into the sea, not
without a struggle, for his scraping and slipping
footprints could still be traced upon the very
brink. But the first signal of the tragedy had been
the sight of his large limp straw hat, floating far
out upon the waves and conspicuous from the cliffs
above. Stein's body also had at first eluded search,
till a faint trail of blood led the investigators to
a bath on the ancient Roman model he had been
constructing in his garden; for he had been a man of
an experimental turn of mind with a taste for
antiquities.
Whatever he might think, Byrne was bound to admit
that there was no legal evidence against anybody as
things stood. A motive for murder was not enough.
Even a moral aptitude for murder was not enough. And
he could not conceive that pale young pacifist,
Henry Home, butchering another man by brutal
violence, though he might imagine the blaspheming
Jake and even the sneering Jew as capable of
anything. The police, and the man who appeared to be
assisting them (who was no other than the rather
mysterious man with the monocle, who had been
introduced as Mr Nares), realized the position quite
as clearly as the journalist.
They knew that at the moment the Bolshevist
conspirators could not be prosecuted and convicted,
and that it would be a highly sensational failure if
they were prosecuted and acquitted. Nares started
with an artful candour by calling them in some sense
to the council, inviting them to a private conclave
and asking them to give their opinions freely in the
interests of humanity. He had started his
investigations at the nearest scene of tragedy, the
bungalow by the sea; and Byrne was permitted to be
present at a curious scene, which was at once a
peaceful parley of diplomatists and a veiled
inquisition or putting of suspects to the question.
Rather to Byrne's surprise the incongruous company,
seated round the table in the seaside bungalow,
included the dumpy figure and owlish head of Father
Brown, though his connexion with the affair did not
appear until some time afterwards. The presence of
young Potter, the dead man's secretary, was more
natural; yet somehow his demeanour was not quite so
natural. He alone was quite familiar with their
meeting--place, and was even in some grim sense
their host; yet he offered little assistance or
information. His round snub--nosed face wore an
expression more like sulks than sorrow.
Jake Halket as usual talked most; and a man of
his type could not be expected to keep up the polite
fiction that he and his friends were not accused.
Young Home, in his more refined way, tried to
restrain him when he began to abuse the men who had
been murdered; but Jake was always quite as ready to
roar down his friends as his foes. In a spout of
blasphemies he relieved his soul of a very
unofficial obituary notice of the late Gideon Wise.
Elias sat quite still and apparently indifferent
behind those spectacles that masked his eyes.
'It would be useless, I suppose,' said Nares
coldly, 'to tell you that your remarks are indecent.
It may affect you more if I tell you they are
imprudent. You practically admit that you hated the
dead man.'
'Going to put me in quod for that, are you?'
jeered the demagogue. 'All right. Only you'll have
to build a prison for a million men if you're going
to jail all the poor people who had reason to hate
Gid Wise. And you know it's God truth as well as I
do.'
Nares was silent; and nobody spoke until Elias
interposed with his clear though faintly lisping
drawl.
'This appears to me to be a highly unprofitable
discussion on both sides,' he said. 'You have
summoned us here either to ask us for information or
to subject us to cross--examination. If you trust
us, we tell you we have no information. If you
distrust us, you must tell us of what we are
accused, or have the politeness to keep the fact to
yourselves. Nobody has been able to suggest the
faintest trace of evidence connecting any one of us
with these tragedies any more than with the murder
of Julius Caesar. You dare not arrest us, and you
will not believe us. What is the good of our
remaining here?'
And he rose, calmly buttoning his coat, his
friends following his example. As they went towards
the door, young Home turned back and faced the
investigators for a moment with his pale fanatical
face.
'I wish to say,' he said, 'that I went to a
filthy jail during the whole war because I would not
consent to kill a man.'
With that they passed out, and the members of the
group remaining looked grimly at each other.
'I hardly think,' said Father Brown, 'that we
remain entirely victorious, in spite of the
retreat.'
'I don't mind anything,' said Nares, 'except
being bullyragged by that blasphemous blackguard
Halket. Home is a gentleman, anyhow. But whatever
they say, I am dead certain they know; they are in
it, or most of them are. They almost admitted it.
They taunted us with not being able to prove we're
right, much more than with being wrong. What do you
think, Father Brown?'
The person addressed looked across at Nares with
a gaze almost disconcertingly mild and meditative.
'It is quite true,' he said, 'that I have formed
an idea that one particular person knows more than
he has told us. But I think it would be well if I
did not mention his name just yet.'
Nares' eyeglass dropped from his eye, and he
looked up sharply. 'This is unofficial so far,' he
said. 'I suppose you know that at a later stage if
you withhold information, your position may be
serious.'
'My position is simple,' replied the priest. 'I
am here to look after the legitimate interests of my
friend Halket. I think it will be in his interest,
under the circumstances, if I tell you I think he
will before long sever his connexion with this
organization, and cease to be a Socialist in that
sense. I have every reason to believe he will
probably end as a Catholic.'
'Halket!' exploded the other incredulously. 'Why
he curses priests from morning till night!'
'I don't think you quite understand that kind of
man,' said Father Brown mildly. 'He curses priests
for failing (in his opinion) to defy the whole world
for justice. Why should he expect them to defy the
whole world for justice, unless he had already begun
to assume they were--what they are? But we haven't
met here to discuss the psychology of conversion. I
only mention this because it may simplify your
task-- perhaps narrow your search.'
'If it is true, it would jolly well narrow it to
that narrow-- faced rascal Elias--and I shouldn't
wonder, for a more creepy, coldblooded, sneering
devil I never saw.'
Father Brown sighed. 'He always reminded me of
poor Stein,' he said, 'in fact I think he was some
relation.'
'Oh, I say,' began Nares, when his protest was
cut short by the door being flung open, revealing
once more the long loose figure and pale face of
young Home; but it seemed as if he had not merely
his natural, but a new and unnatural pallor.
'Hullo,' cried Nares, putting up his single
eyeglass, 'why have you come back again?'
Home crossed the room rather shakily without a
word and sat down heavily in a chair. Then he said,
as in a sort of daze: 'I missed the others ... I
lost my way. I thought I'd better come back.'
The remains of evening refreshments were on the
table, and Henry Home, that lifelong Prohibitionist,
poured himself out a wine--glassful of liqueur
brandy and drank it at a gulp. 'You seem upset,'
said Father Brown.
Home had put his hands to his forehead and spoke
as from under the shadow of it: he seemed to be
speaking to the priest only, in a low voice.
'I may as well tell you. I have seen a ghost.'
'A ghost!' repeated Nares in astonishment. 'Whose
ghost?'
'The ghost of Gideon Wise, the master of this
house,' answered Home more firmly, 'standing over
the abyss into which he fell.'
'Oh, nonsense!' said Nares; 'no sensible person
believes in ghosts.'
'That is hardly exact,' said Father Brown,
smiling a little. 'There is really quite as good
evidence for many ghosts as there is for most
crimes.'
'Well, it's my business to run after the
criminals,' said Nares rather roughly, 'and I will
leave other people to run away from the ghosts. If
anybody at this time of day chooses to be frightened
of ghosts it's his affair.'
'I didn't say I was frightened of them, though I
dare say I might be,' said Father Brown. 'Nobody
knows till he tries. I said I believed in them, at
any rate, enough to want to hear more about this
one. What, exactly, did you see, Mr Home?'
'It was over there on the brink of those
crumbling cliffs; you know there is a sort of gap or
crevice just about the spot where he was thrown
over. The others had gone on ahead, and I was
crossing the moor towards the path along the cliff.
I often went that way, for I liked seeing the high
seas dash up against the crags. I thought little of
it to--night, beyond wondering that the sea should
be so rough on this sort of clear moonlight night. I
could see the pale crests of spray appear and
disappear as the great waves leapt up at the
headland. Thrice I saw the momentary flash of foam
in the moonlight and then I saw something
inscrutable. The fourth flash of the silver foam
seemed to be fixed in the sky. It did not fall; I
waited with insane intensity for it to fall. I
fancied I was mad, and that time had been for me
mysteriously arrested or prolonged. Then I drew
nearer, and then I think I screamed aloud. For that
suspended spray, like unfallen snowflakes, had
fitted together into a face and a figure, white as
the shining leper in a legend, and terrible as the
fixed lightning.'
'And it was Gideon Wise, you say?'
Home nodded without speech. There was a silence
broken abruptly by Nares rising to his feet; so
abruptly indeed that he knocked a chair over.
'Oh, this is all nonsense,' he said, 'but we'd
better go out and see.'
'I won't go,' said Home with sudden violence.
'I'll never walk by that path again.'
'I think we must all walk by that path tonight,'
said the priest gravely; 'though I will never deny
it has been a perilous path ... to more people than
one.'
'I will not... God, how you all goad me,' cried
Home, and his eyes began to roll in a strange
fashion. He had risen with the rest, hut he made no
motion towards the door.
'Mr Home,' said Nares firmly, 'I am a
police--officer, and this house, though you may not
know it, is surrounded by the police. I have tried
to investigate in a friendly fashion, but I must
investigate everything, even anything so silly as a
ghost. I must ask you to take me to the spot you
speak of.'
There was another silence while Home stood
heaving and panting as with indescribable fears.
Then he suddenly sat down on his chair again and
said with an entirely new and much more composed
voice:
'I can't do it. You may just as well know why.
You will know it sooner or later. I killed him.'
For an instant there was the stillness of a house
struck by a thunderbolt and full of corpses. Then
the voice of Father Brown sounded in that enormous
silence strangely small like the squeak of a mouse.
'Did you kill him deliberately?' he asked.
'How can one answer such a question?' answered
the man in the chair, moodily gnawing his finger. 'I
was mad, I suppose. He was intolerable and insolent,
I know. I was on his land and I believe he struck
me; anyhow, we came to a grapple and he went over
the cliff. When I was well away from the scene it
burst upon me that I had done a crime that cut me
off from men; the brand of Cain throbbed on my brow
and my very brain; I realized for the first time
that I had indeed killed a man. I knew I should have
to confess it sooner or later.' He sat suddenly
erect in his chair. 'But I will say nothing against
anybody else. It is no use asking me about plots or
accomplices--I will say nothing.'
'In the light of the other murders,' said Nares,
'it is difficult to believe that the quarrel was
quite so unpremeditated. Surely somebody sent you
there?'
'I will say nothing against anybody I worked
with,' said Home proudly. 'I am a murderer, but I
will not be a traitor.'
Nares stepped between the man and the door and
called out in an official fashion to someone
outside.
'We will all go to the place, anyhow,' he said in
a low voice to the secretary; 'but this man must go
in custody.'
The company generally felt that to go
spook--hunting on a seacliff was a very silly
anti--climax after the confession of the murderer.
But Nares, though the most sceptical and scornful of
all, thought it his duty to leave no stone unturned;
as one might say, no gravestone unturned. For, after
all, that crumbling cliff was the only gravestone
over the watery grave of poor Gideon Wise. Nares
locked the door, being the last out of the house,
and followed the rest across the moor to the cliff,
when he was astonished to see young Potter, the
secretary, coming back quickly towards them, his
face in the moonlight looking white as a moon.
'By God, sir,' he said, speaking for the first
time that night, 'there really is something there.
It--it's just like him.'
'Why, you're raving,' gasped the detective.
'Everybody's raving.'
'Do you think I don't know him when I see him?'
cried the secretary with singular bitterness. 'I
have reason to.'
'Perhaps,' said the detective sharply, 'you are
one of those who had reason to hate him, as Halket
said.'
'Perhaps,' said the secretary; 'anyhow, I know
him, and I tell you I can see him standing there
stark and staring under this hellish moon.'
And he pointed towards the crack in the cliffs,
where they could already see something that might
have been a moonbeam or a streak of foam, but which
was already beginning to look a little more solid.
They had crept a hundred yards nearer, and it was
still motionless; but it looked like a statue in
silver.
Nares himself looked a little pale and seemed to
stand debating what to do. Potter was frankly as
much frightened as Home himself; and even Byrne, who
was a hardened reporter, was rather reluctant to go
any nearer if he could help it. He could not help
considering it a little quaint, therefore, that the
only man who did not seem to be frightened of a
ghost was the man who had said openly that he might
be. For Father Brown was advancing as steadily, at
his stumping pace, as if he were going to consult a
notice--board.
'It don't seem to bother you much,' said Byrne to
the priest; 'and yet I thought you were the only one
who believed in spooks.'
'If it comes to that,' replied Father Brown, 'I
thought you were one who didn't believe in them. But
believing in ghosts is one thing, and believing in a
ghost is quite another.'
Byrne looked rather ashamed of himself, and
glanced almost covertly at the crumbling headlands
in the cold moonlight which were the haunts of the
vision or delusion. 'I didn't believe in it till I
saw it,' he said.
'And I did believe in it till I saw it,' said
Father Brown. The journalist stared after him as he
went stumping across the great waste ground that
rose towards the cloven headland like the sloping
side of a hill cut in two. Under the discolouring
moon the grass looked like long grey hair all combed
one way by the wind, and seeming to point towards
the place where the breaking cliff showed pale
gleams of chalk in the grey--green turf, and where
stood the pale figure or shining shade that none
could yet understand. As yet that pale figure
dominated a desolate landscape that was empty except
for the black square back and business-- like figure
of the priest advancing alone towards it. Then the
prisoner Home broke suddenly from his captors with a
piercing cry and ran ahead of the priest, falling on
his knees before the spectre.
'I have confessed,' they heard him crying. 'Why
have you come to tell them I killed you?'
'I have come to tell them you did not,' said the
ghost, and stretched forth a hand to him. Then the
kneeling man sprang up with quite a new kind of
scream; and they knew it was the hand of flesh.
It was the most remarkable escape from death in
recent records, said the experienced detective and
the no less experienced journalist. Yet, in a sense,
it had been very simple after all. Flakes and shards
of the cliff were continually falling away, and some
had caught in the gigantic crevice, so as to form
what was really a ledge or pocket in what was
supposed to be a sheer drop through darkness to the
sea. The old man, who was a very tough and wiry old
man, had fallen on this lower shoulder of rock and
had passed a pretty terrible twenty--four hours in
trying to climb back by crags that constantly
collapsed under him, but at length formed by their
very ruins a sort of stairway of escape. This might
be the explanation of Home's optical illusion about
a white wave that appeared and disappeared, and
finally came to stay. But anyhow there was Gideon
Wise, solid in bone and sinew, with his white hair
and white dusty country clothes and harsh country
features, which were, however, a great deal less
harsh than usual. Perhaps it is good for
millionaires to spend twenty-- four hours on a ledge
of rock within a foot of eternity. Anyhow, he not
only disclaimed all malice against the criminal, but
gave an account of the matter which considerably
modified the crime. He declared that Home had not
thrown him over at all; that the continually
breaking ground had given way under him, and that
Home had even made some movement as of attempted
rescue.
'On that providential bit of rock down there,' he
said solemnly, 'I promised the Lord to forgive my
enemies; and the Lord would think it mighty mean if
I didn't forgive a little accident like that.'
Home had to depart under police supervision, of
course, but the detective did not disguise from
himself that the prisoner's detention would probably
be short, and his punishment, if any, trifling. It
is not every murderer who can put the murdered man
in the witness-- box to give him a testimonial.
'It's a strange case,' said Byrne, as the
detective and the others hastened along the cliff
path towards the town.
'It is,' said Father Brown. 'It's no business of
ours; but I wish you'd stop with me and talk it
over.'
There was a silence and then Byrne complied by
saying suddenly: 'I suppose you were thinking of
Home already, when you said somebody wasn't telling
all he knew.'
'When I said that,' replied his friend, 'I was
thinking of the exceedingly silent Mr Potter, the
secretary of the no longer late or (shall we say)
lamented Mr Gideon Wise.'
'Well, the only time Potter ever spoke to me I
thought he was a lunatic,' said Byrne, staring, 'but
I never thought of his being a criminal. He said
something about it all having to do with an icebox.'
'Yes, I thought he knew something about it,' said
Father Brown reflectively. 'I never said he had
anything to do with it ... I suppose old Wise really
is strong enough to have climbed out of that chasm.'
'What do you mean?' asked the astonished
reporter. 'Why, of course he got out of that chasm;
for there he is.'
The priest did not answer the question but asked
abruptly: 'What do you think of Home?'
'Well, one can't call him a criminal exactly,'
answered Byrne. 'He never was at all like any
criminal I ever knew, and I've had some experience;
and, of course, Nares has had much more. I don't
think we ever quite believed him a criminal.'
'And I never believed in him in another
capacity,' said the priest quietly. 'You may know
more about criminals. But there's one class of
people I probably do know more about than you do, or
even Nares for that matter. I've known quite a lot
of them, and I know their little ways.'
'Another class of people,' repeated Byrne,
mystified.' Why, what class do you know about?'
'Penitents,' said Father Brown.
'I don't quite understand,' objected Byrne. 'Do
you mean you don't believe in his crime?'
'I don't believe in his confession,' said Father
Brown. 'I've heard a good many confessions, and
there was never a genuine one like that. It was
romantic; it was all out of books. Look how he
talked about having the brand of Cain. That's out of
books. It's not what anyone would feel who had in
his own person done a thing hitherto horrible to
him. Suppose you were an honest clerk or shop-- boy
shocked to feel that for the first time you'd stolen
money. Would you immediately reflect that your
action was the same as that of Barabbas? Suppose
you'd killed a child in some ghastly anger. Would
you go back through history, till you could identify
your action with that of an Idumean potentate named
Herod? Believe me, our own crimes are far too
hideously private and prosaic to make our first
thoughts turn towards historical parallels, however
apt. And why did he go out of his way to say he
would not give his colleagues away? Even in saying
so, he was giving them away. Nobody had asked him so
far to give away anything or anybody. No; I don't
think he was genuine, and I wouldn't give him
absolution. A nice state of things, if people
started getting absolved for what they hadn't done.'
And Father Brown, his head turned away, looked
steadily out to sea.
'But I don't understand what you're driving at,'
cried Byrne. 'What's the good of buzzing round him
with suspicions when he's pardoned? He's out of it
anyhow. He's quite safe.'
Father Brown spun round like a teetotum and
caught his friend by the coat with unexpected and
inexplicable excitement.
'That's it,' he cried emphatically.' Freeze on to
that! He's quite safe. He's out of it. That's why
he's the key of the whole puzzle.'
'Oh, help,' said Byrne feebly.
'I mean,' persisted the little priest, 'he's in
it because he's out of it. That's the whole
explanation.'
'And a very lucid explanation too,' said the
journalist with feeling.
They stood looking out to sea for a time in
silence, and then Father Brown said cheerfully: 'And
so we come back to the ice--box. Where you have all
gone wrong from the first in this business is where
a good many of the papers and the public men do go
wrong. It's because you assumed that there is
nothing whatever in the modern world to fight about
except Bolshevism. This story has nothing whatever
to do with Bolshevism; except perhaps as a blind.'
'I don't see how that can be,' remonstrated
Byrne. 'Here you have the three millionaires in that
one business murdered--'
'No!' said the priest in a sharp ringing voice.
'You do not. That is just the point. You do not have
three millionaires murdered. You have two
millionaires murdered; and you have the third
millionaire very much alive and kicking and quite
ready to kick. And you have that third millionaire
freed for ever from the threat that was thrown at
his head before your very face, in playfully polite
terms, and in that conversation you described as
taking place in the hotel. Gallup and Stein
threatened the more old-- fashioned and independent
old huckster that if he would not come into their
combine they would freeze him out. Hence the
ice--box, of course.'
After a pause he went on. 'There is undoubtedly a
Bolshevist movement in the modern world, and it must
undoubtedly be resisted, though I do not believe
very much in your way of resisting it. But what
nobody notices is that there is another movement
equally modern and equally moving: the great
movement towards monopoly or the turning of all
trades into trusts. That also is a revolution. That
also produces what all revolutions produce. Men will
kill for that and against that, as they do for and
against Bolshevism. It has its ultimatums and its
invasions and its executions. These trust magnates
have their courts like kings; they have their
bodyguard and bravos; they have their spies in the
enemy camp. Home was one of old Gideon's spies in
one of the enemy camps; but he was used here against
another enemy: the rivals who were ruining him for
standing out.'
'I still don't quite see how he was used,' said
Byrne, 'or what was the good of it.'
'Don't you see,' cried Father Brown sharply,
'that they gave each other an alibi?'
Byrne still looked at him a little doubtfully,
though understanding was dawning on his face.
'That's what I mean,' continued the other, 'when
I say they were in it because they were out of it.
Most people would say they must be out of the other
two crimes, because they were in this one. As a
fact, they were in the other two because they were
out of this one; because this one never happened at
all. A very queer, improbable sort of alibi, of
course; improbable and therefore impenetrable. Most
people would say a man who confesses a murder must
be sincere; a man who forgives his murderer must be
sincere. Nobody would think of the notion that the
thing never happened, so that one man had nothing to
forgive and the other nothing to fear. They were
fixed here for that night by a story against
themselves. But they were not here that night; for
Home was murdering old Gallup in the Wood, while
Wise was strangling that little Jew in his Roman
bath. That's why I ask whether Wise was really
strong enough for the climbing adventure.'
'It was quite a good adventure,' said Byrne
regretfully. 'It fitted into the landscape, and was
really very convincing.'
'Too convincing to convince,' said Father Brown,
shaking his head. 'How very vivid was that moonlit
foam flung up and turning to a ghost. And how very
literary! Home is a sneak and a skunk, but do not
forget that, like many other sneaks and skunks in
history, he is also a poet.'
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