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"The Secret of Father Brown"
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CONTENTS
The Secret of Father Brown
The Mirror of the Magistrate
The Man With Two Beards
The Song of the Flying Fish
The Actor and the Alibi
The Vanishing of Vaudrey
The Worst Crime in the World
The Red Moon of Meru
The Chief Mourner of Marne
The Secret of Flambeau
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Chapter I. The Secret of Father Brown
Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France
and later a very private detective in England, had
long retired from both professions. Some say a
career of crime had left him with too many scruples
for a career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of
romantic escapes and tricks of evasion, he had ended
at what some might consider an appropriate address:
in a castle in Spain. The castle, however, was solid
though relatively small; and the black vineyard and
green stripes of kitchen garden covered a
respectable square on the brown hillside. For
Flambeau, after all his violent adventures, still
possessed what is possessed by so many Latins, what
is absent (for instance) in so many Americans, the
energy to retire. It can be seen in many a large
hotel-proprietor whose one ambition is to be a small
peasant. It can be seen in many a French provincial
shopkeeper, who pauses at the moment when he might
develop into a detestable millionaire and buy a
street of shops, to fall back quietly and
comfortably on domesticity and dominoes. Flambeau
had casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with
a Spanish Lady, married and brought up a large
family on a Spanish estate, without displaying any
apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders.
But on one particular morning he was observed by his
family to be unusually restless and excited; and he
outran the little boys and descended the greater
part of the long mountain slope to meet the visitor
who was coming across the valley; even when the
visitor was still a black dot in the distance.
The black dot gradually increased in size without
very much altering in the shape; for it continued,
roughly speaking, to be both round and black. The
black clothes of clerics were not unknown upon those
hills; but these clothes, however clerical, had
about them something at once commonplace and yet
almost jaunty in comparison with the cassock or
soutane, and marked the wearer as a man from the
northwestern islands, as clearly as if he had been
labelled Clapham Junction. He carried a short thick
umbrella with a knob like a club, at the sight of
which his Latin friend almost shed tears of
sentiment; for it had figured in many adventures
that they shared long ago. For this was the
Frenchman’s English friend, Father Brown, paying a
long-desired but long-delayed visit. They had
corresponded constantly, but they had not met for
years.
Father Brown was soon established in the family
circle, which was quite large enough to give the
general sense of company or a community. He was
introduced to the big wooden images of the Three
Kings, of painted and gilded wood, who bring the
gifts to the children at Christmas; for Spain is a
country where the affairs of the children bulk large
in the life of the home. He was introduced to the
dog and the cat and the live-stock on the farm. But
he was also, as it happened, introduced to one
neighbour who, like himself, had brought into that
valley the garb and manners of distant lands.
It was on the third night of the priest’s stay at
the little chateau that he beheld a stately stranger
who paid his respects to the Spanish household with
bows that no Spanish grandee could emulate. He was a
tall, thin grey-haired and very handsome gentleman,
and his hands, cuffs and cuff-links had something
overpowering in their polish. But his long face had
nothing of that languor which is associated with
long cuffs and manicuring in the caricatures of our
own country. It was rather arrestingly alert and
keen; and the eyes had an innocent intensity of
inquiry that does not go often with grey hairs. That
alone might have marked the man’s nationality, as
well the nasal note in his refined voice and his
rather too ready assumption of the vast antiquity of
all the European things around him. This was,
indeed, no less a person than Mr. Grandison Chace,
of Boston, an American traveller who had halted for
a time in his American travels by taking a lease of
the adjoining estate; a somewhat similar castle on a
somewhat similar hill. He delighted in his old
castle, and he regarded his friendly neighbour as a
local antiquity of the same type. For Flambeau
managed, as we have said, really to look retired in
the sense of rooted. He might have grown there with
his own vine and fig-tree for ages. He had resumed
his real family name of Duroc; for the other title
of “The Torch” had only been a title de guerre, like
that under which such a man will often wage war on
society. He was fond of his wife and family; he
never went farther afield than was needed for a
little shooting; and he seemed, to the American
globe-trotter, the embodiment of that cult of a
sunny respectability and a temperate luxury, which
the American was wise enough to see and admire in
the Mediterranean peoples. The rolling stone from
the West was glad to rest for a moment on this rock
in the South that had gathered so very much moss.
But Mr. Chace had heard of Father Brown, and his
tone faintly changed, as towards a celebrity. The
interviewing instinct awoke, tactful but tense. If
he did try to draw Father Brown, as if he were a
tooth, it was done with the most dexterous and
painless American dentistry.
They were sitting in a sort of partly unroofed
outer court of the house, such as often forms the
entrance to Spanish houses. It was dusk turning to
dark; and as all that mountain air sharpens suddenly
after sunset, a small stove stood on the flagstones,
glowing with red eyes like a goblin, and painting a
red pattern on the pavement; but scarcely a ray of
it reached the lower bricks of the great bare, brown
brick wall that went soaring up above them into the
deep blue night. Flambeau’s big broad-shouldered
figure and great moustaches, like sabres, could be
traced dimly in the twilight, as he moved about,
drawing dark wine from a great cask and handing it
round. In his shadow, the priest looked very
shrunken and small, as if huddled over the stove;
but the American visitor leaned forward elegantly
with his elbow on his knee and his fine pointed
features in the full light; his eyes shone with
inquisitive intelligence.
“I can assure you, sir,” he was saying, “we
consider your achievement in the matter of the
Moonshine Murder the most remarkable triumph in the
history of detective science.”
Father Brown murmured something; some might have
imagined that the murmur was a little like a moan.
“We are well acquainted,” went on the stranger
firmly, “with the alleged achievements of Dupin and
others; and with those of Lecoq, Sherlock Holmes,
Nicholas Carter, and other imaginative incarnations
of the craft. But we observe there is in many ways,
a marked difference between your own method of
approach and that of these other thinkers, whether
fictitious or actual. Some have spec’lated, sir, as
to whether the difference of method may perhaps
involve rather the absence of method.”
Father Brown was silent; then he started a
little, almost as if he had been nodding over the
stove, and said: “I beg your pardon. Yes. . ..
Absence of method. . . . Absence of mind, too, I’m
afraid.”
“I should say of strictly tabulated scientific
method,” went on the inquirer. “Edgar Poe throws off
several little essays in a conversational form,
explaining Dupin’s method, with its fine links of
logic. Dr. Watson had to listen to some pretty exact
expositions of Holmes’s method with its observation
of material details. But nobody seems to have got on
to any full account of your method, Father Brown,
and I was informed you declined the offer to give a
series of lectures in the States on the matter.”
“Yes,” said the priest, frowning at the stove; “I
declined.”
“Your refusal gave rise to a remarkable lot of
interesting talk,” remarked Chace. “I may say that
some of our people are saying your science can’t be
expounded, because it’s something more than just
natural science. They say your secret’s not to be
divulged, as being occult in its character.”
“Being what?” asked Father Brown, rather sharply.
“Why, kind of esoteric,” replied the other. “I
can tell you, people got considerably worked up
about Gallup’s murder, and Stein’s murder, and then
old man Merton’s murder, and now Judge Gwynne’s
murder, and a double murder by Dalmon, who was well
known in the States. And there were you, on the spot
every time, slap in the middle of it; telling
everybody how it was done and never telling anybody
how you knew. So some people got to think you knew
without looking, so to speak. And Carlotta Brownson
gave a lecture on Thought-Forms with illustrations
from these cases of yours. The Second Sight
Sisterhood of Indianapolis — — ”
Father Brown, was still staring at the stove;
then he said quite loud yet as if hardly aware that
anyone heard him: “Oh, I say. This will never do.”
“I don’t exactly know how it’s to be helped,”
said Mr. Chace humorously. “The Second Sight
Sisterhood want a lot of holding down. The only way
I can think of stopping it is for you to tell us the
secret after all.”
Father Brown groaned. He put his head on his
hands and remained a moment, as if full of a silent
convulsion of thought. Then he lifted his head and
said in a dull voice:
“Very well. I must tell the secret.”
His eyes rolled darkly over the whole darkling
scene, from the red eyes of the little stove to the
stark expanse of the ancient wall, over which were
standing out, more and more brightly, the strong
stars of the south.
“The secret is,” he said; and then stopped as if
unable to go on. Then he began again and said:
“You see, it was I who killed all those people.”
“What?” repeated the other, in a small voice out
of a vast silence.
“You see, I had murdered them all myself,”
explained Father Brown patiently. “So, of course, I
knew how it was done.”
Grandison Chace had risen to his great height
like a man lifted to the ceiling by a sort of slow
explosion. Staring down at the other he repeated his
incredulous question.
“I had planned out each of the crimes very
carefully,” went on Father Brown, “I had thought out
exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in
what style or state of mind a man could really do
it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly
like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he
was.”
Chace gradually released a sort of broken sigh.
“You frightened me all right,” he said. “For the
minute I really did think you meant you were the
murderer. Just for the minute I kind of saw it
splashed over all the papers in the States: ‘Saintly
Sleuth Exposed as Killer: Hundred Crimes of Father
Brown.’ Why, of course, if it’s just a figure of
speech and means you tried to reconstruct the
psychogy — ”
Father Brown rapped sharply on the stove with the
short pipe he was about to fill; one of his very
rare spasms of annoyance contracted his face.
“No, no, no,” he said, almost angrily; “I don’t
mean just a figure of speech. This is what comes of
trying to talk about deep things. . . . What’s the
good of words . . .? If you try to talk about a
truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s
merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs
once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost
in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In what
other sense could you believe it?’ And then he
thought I meant he needn’t believe in anything
except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some
bilge. . . . I mean that I really did see myself,
and my real self, committing the murders. I didn’t
actually kill the men by material means; but that’s
not the point. Any brick or bit of machinery might
have killed them by material means. I mean that I
thought and thought about how a man might come to be
like that, until I realized that I really was like
that, in everything except actual final consent to
the action. It was once suggested to me by a friend
of mine, as a sort of religious exercise. I believe
he got it from Pope Leo XIII, who was always rather
a hero of mine.”
“I’m afraid,” said the American, in tones that
were still doubtful, and keeping his eye on the
priest rather as if he were a wild animal, “that
you’d have to explain a lot to me before I knew what
you were talking about. The science of detection — —
”
Father Brown snapped his fingers with the same
animated annoyance. “That’s it,” he cried; “that’s
just where we part company. Science is a grand thing
when you can get it; in its real sense one of the
grandest words in the world. But what do these men
mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it
nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When
they say criminology is a science? They mean getting
outside a man and studying him as if he were a
gigantic insect: in what they would call a dry
impartial light, in what I should call a dead and
dehumanized light. They mean getting a long way off
him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster;
staring at the shape of his ‘criminal skull’ as if
it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a
rhinoceros’s nose. When the scientist talks about a
type, he never means himself, but always his
neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don’t
deny the dry light may sometimes do good; though in
one sense it’s the very reverse of science. So far
from being knowledge, it’s actually suppression of
what we know. It’s treating a friend as a stranger,
and pretending that something familiar is really
remote and mysterious. It’s like saying that a man
has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he falls
down in a fit of insensibility once every
twenty-four hours. Well, what you call ‘the secret’
is exactly the opposite. I don’t try to get outside
the man. I try to get inside the murderer. . . .
Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am
inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his
arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a
murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his
passions; till I have bent myself into the posture
of his hunched and peering hatred; till I see the
world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking
between the blinkers of his half-witted
concentration; looking up the short and sharp
perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood.
Till I am really a murderer.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Chace, regarding him with a long,
grim face, and added: “And that is what you call a
religious exercise.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown; “that is what I call a
religious exercise.”
After an instant’s silence he resumed: “It’s so
real a religious exercise that I’d rather not have
said anything about it. But I simply couldn’t have
you going off and telling all your countrymen that I
had a secret magic connected with Thought-Forms,
could I? I’ve put it badly, but it’s true. No man’s
really any good till he knows how bad he is, or
might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right
he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and
talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a
forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of
all the dirty self-deception of talking about low
types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out
of his soul the last drop of the oil of the
Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to
have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and
sane under his own hat.”
Flambeau came forward and filled a great goblet
with Spanish wine and set it before his friend, as
he had already set one before his fellow guest. Then
he himself spoke for the first time:
“I believe Father Brown has had a new batch of
mysteries. We were talking about them the other day,
I fancy. He has been dealing with some queer people
since we last met.”
“Yes; I know the stories more or less — but not
the application,” said Chace, lifting his glass
thoughtfully. “Can you give me any examples, I
wonder. ... I mean, did you deal with this last
batch in that introspective style?”
Father Brown also lifted his glass, and the glow
of the fire turned the red wine transparent, like
the glorious blood-red glass of a martyr’s window.
The red flame seemed to hold his eyes and absorb his
gaze that sank deeper and deeper into it, as if that
single cup held a red sea of the blood of all men,
and his soul were a diver, ever plunging in dark
humility and inverted imagination, lower than its
lowest monsters and its most ancient slime. In that
cup, as in a red mirror, he saw many things; the
doings of his last days moved in crimson shadows;
the examples that his companions demanded danced in
symbolic shapes; and there passed before him all the
stories that are told here. Now, the luminous wine
was like a vast red sunset upon dark red sands,
where stood dark figures of men; one was fallen and
another running towards him. Then the sunset seemed
to break up into patches: red lanterns swinging from
garden trees and a pond gleaming red with
reflection; and then all the colour seemed to
cluster again into a great rose of red crystal, a
jewel that irradiated the world like a red sun, save
for the shadow of a tall figure with a high
head-dress as of some prehistoric priest; and then
faded again till nothing was left but a flame of
wild red beard blowing in the wind upon a wild grey
moor. All these things, which may be seen later from
other angles and in other moods than his own, rose
up in his memory at the challenge and began to form
themselves into anecdotes and arguments.
“Yes,” he said, as he raised the wine cup slowly
to his lips, “I can remember pretty well — — ”
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Chapter II. The Mirror of the Magistrate
James Bagshaw and Wilfred Underhill were old
friends, and were fond of rambling through the
streets at night, talking interminably as they
turned corner after corner in the silent and
seemingly lifeless labyrinth of the large suburb in
which they lived. The former, a big, dark,
good-humoured man with a strip of black moustache,
was a professional police detective; the latter, a
sharp-faced, sensitive-looking gentleman with light
hair, was an amateur interested in detection. It
will come as a shock to the readers of the best
scientific romance to learn that it was the
policeman who was talking and the amateur who was
listening, even with a certain respect.
'Ours is the only trade,' said Bagshaw, 'in which
the professional is always supposed to be wrong.
After all, people don’t write stories in which
hairdressers can’t cut hair and have to be helped by
a customer; or in which a cabman can’t drive a cab
until his fare explains to him the philosophy of
cab-driving. For all that, I’d never deny that we
often tend to get into a rut: or, in other words,
have the disadvantages of going by a rule. Where the
romancers are wrong is, that they don’t allow us
even the advantages of going by a rule.'
'Surely,' said Underhill, 'Sherlock Holmes would
say that he went by a logical rule.'
'He may be right,' answered the other; 'but I
mean a collective rule. It’s like the staff work of
an army. We pool our information.'
'And you don’t think detective stories allow for
that?' asked his friend.
'Well, let’s take any imaginary case of Sherlock
Holmes, and Lestrade, the official detective.
Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a total
stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely
because he seems to look for the traffic to go to
the right instead of the left. I’m quite ready to
admit Holmes might guess that. I’m quite sure
Lestrade wouldn’t guess anything of the kind. But
what they leave out is the fact that the policeman,
who couldn’t guess, might very probably know.
Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner merely
because his department has to keep an eye on all
foreigners; some would say on all natives, too. As a
policeman I’m glad the police know so much; for
every man wants to do his own job well. But as a
citizen, I sometimes wonder whether they don’t know
too much.'
'You don’t seriously mean to say,' cried
Underhill incredulously, 'that you know anything
about strange people in a strange street. That if a
man walked out of that house over there, you would
know anything about him?'
'I should if he was the householder,' answered
Bagshaw. 'That house is rented by a literary man of
Anglo-Roumanian extraction, who generally lives in
Paris, but is over here in connexion with some
poetical play of his. His name’s Osric Orm, one of
the new poets, and pretty steep to read, I believe.'
'But I mean all the people down the road,' said
his companion. 'I was thinking how strange and new
and nameless everything looks, with these high blank
walls and these houses lost in large gardens. You
can’t know all of them.'
'I know a few,' answered Bagshaw. 'This garden
wall we’re walking under is at the end of the
grounds of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, better known as Mr.
Justice Gwynne, the old judge who made such a row
about spying during the war. The house next door to
it belongs to a wealthy cigar merchant. He comes
from Spanish-America and looks very swarthy and
Spanish himself; but he bears the very English name
of Buller. The house beyond that — did you hear that
noise?'
'I heard something,' said Underhill, 'but I
really don’t know what it was.'
'I know what it was,' replied the detective, 'it
was a rather heavy revolver, fired twice, followed
by a cry for help. And it came straight out of the
back garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne, that paradise of
peace and legality.'
He looked up and down the street sharply and then
added:
'And the only gate of the back garden is half a
mile round on the other side. I wish this wall were
a little lower, or I were a little lighter; but it’s
got to be tried.'
'It is lower a little farther on,' said
Underhill, 'and there seems to be a tree that looks
helpful.'
They moved hastily along and found a place where
the wall seemed to stoop abruptly, almost as if it
had half-sunk into the earth; and a garden tree,
flamboyant with the gayest garden blossom, straggled
out of the dark enclosure and was gilded by the
gleam of a solitary street-lamp. Bagshaw caught the
crooked branch and threw one leg over the low wall;
and the next moment they stood knee-deep amid the
snapping plants of a garden border.
The garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne by night was
rather a singular spectacle. It was large and lay on
the empty edge of the suburb, in the shadow of a
tall, dark house that was the last in its line of
houses. The house was literally dark, being
shuttered and unlighted, at least on the side
overlooking the garden. But the garden itself, which
lay in its shadow, and should have been a tract of
absolute darkness, showed a random glitter, like
that of fading fireworks; as if a giant rocket had
fallen in fire among the trees. As they advanced
they were able to locate it as the light of several
coloured lamps, entangled in the trees like the
jewel fruits of Aladdin, and especially as the light
from a small, round lake or pond, which gleamed,
with pale colours as if a lamp were kindled under
it.
'Is he having a party?' asked Underhill. 'The
garden seems to be illuminated.'
'No,' answered Bagshaw. 'It’s a hobby of his, and
I believe he prefers to do it when he’s alone. He
likes playing with a little plant of electricity
that he works from that bungalow or hut over there,
where he does his work and keeps his papers. Buller,
who knows him very well, says the coloured lamps are
rather more often a sign he’s not to be disturbed.'
'Sort of red danger signals,' suggested the
other.
'Good Lord! I’m afraid they are danger signals!'
and he began suddenly to run.
A moment after Underhill saw what he had seen.
The opalescent ring of light, like the halo of the
moon, round the sloping sides of the pond, was
broken by two black stripes or streaks which soon
proved themselves to be the long, black legs of a
figure fallen head downwards into the hollow, with
the head in the pond.
'Come on,' cried the detective sharply, 'that
looks to me like — — '
His voice was lost, as he ran on across the wide
lawn, faintly luminous in the artificial light,
making a bee-line across the big garden for the pool
and the fallen figure. Underhill was trotting
steadily in that straight track, when something
happened that startled him for the moment. Bagshaw,
who was travelling as steadily as a bullet towards
the black figure by the luminous pool, suddenly
turned at a sharp angle and began to run even more
rapidly towards the shadow of the house. Underhill
could not imagine what he meant by the altered
direction. The next moment, when the detective had
vanished into the shadow of the house, there came
out of that obscurity the sound of a scuffle and a
curse; and Bagshaw returned lugging with him a
little struggling man with red hair. The captive had
evidently been escaping under the shelter of the
building, when the quicker ears of the detective had
heard him rustling like a bird among the bushes.
'Underhill,' said the detective, 'I wish you’d
run on and see what’s up by the pool. And now, who
are you?” he asked, coming to a halt. “What’s your
name?'
'Michael Flood,' said the stranger in a snappy
fashion. He was an unnaturally lean little man, with
a hooked nose too large for his face, which was
colourless, like parchment, in contrast with the
ginger colour of his hair. 'I’ve got nothing to do
with this. I found him lying dead and I was scared;
but I only came to interview him for a paper.'
'When you interview celebrities for the Press,'
said Bagshaw, 'do you generally climb over the
garden wall?'
And he pointed grimly to a trail of footprints
coming and going along the path towards the flower
bed.
The man calling himself Flood wore an expression
equally grim.
'An interviewer might very well get over the
wall,' he said, 'for I couldn’t make anybody hear at
the front door. The servant had gone out.'
'How do you know he’d gone out?' asked the
detective suspiciously.
'Because,' said Flood, with an almost unnatural
calm, 'I’m not the only person who gets over garden
walls. It seems just possible that you did it
yourself. But, anyhow, the servant did; for I’ve
just this moment seen him drop over the wall, away
on the other side of the garden, just by the garden
door.'
'Then why didn’t he use the garden door?'
demanded the cross-examiner.
'How should I know?' retorted Flood. 'Because it
was shut, I suppose. But you’d better ask him, not
me; he’s coming towards the house at this minute.'
There was, indeed, another shadowy figure
beginning to be visible through the fire-shot
gloaming, a squat, square-headed figure, wearing a
red waistcoat as the most conspicuous part of a
rather shabby livery. He appeared to be making with
unobtrusive haste towards a side-door in the house,
until Bagshaw halloed to him to halt. He drew nearer
to them very reluctantly, revealing a heavy, yellow
face, with a touch of something Asiatic which was
consonant with his flat, blue-black hair.
Bagshaw turned abruptly to the man called Flood.
'Is there anybody in this place,' he said, 'who can
testify to your identity?'
'Not many, even in this country,' growled Flood.
'I’ve only just come from Ireland; the only man I
know round here is the priest at St. Dominic’s
Church — Father Brown.'
'Neither of you must leave this place,' said
Bagshaw, and then added to the servant: 'But you can
go into the house and ring up St. Dominic’s
Presbytery and ask Father Brown if he would mind
coming round here at once. No tricks, mind.'
While the energetic detective was securing the
potential fugitives, his companion, at his
direction, had hastened on to the actual scene of
the tragedy. It was a strange enough scene; and,
indeed, if the tragedy had not been tragic it would
have been highly fantastic. The dead man (for the
briefest examination proved him to be dead) lay with
his head in the pond, where the glow of the
artificial illumination encircled the head with
something of the appearance of an unholy halo. The
face was gaunt and rather sinister, the brow bald,
and the scanty curls dark grey, like iron rings;
and, despite the damage done by the bullet wound in
the temple, Underhill had no difficulty in
recognizing the features he had seen in the many
portraits of Sir Humphrey Gwynne. The dead man was
in evening-dress, and his long, black legs, so thin
as to be almost spidery, were sprawling at different
angles up the steep bank from which he had fallen.
As by some weird whim of diabolical arabesque, blood
was eddying out, very slowly, into the luminous
water in snaky rings, like the transparent crimson
of sunset clouds.
Underhill did not know how long he stood staring
down at this macabre figure, when he looked up and
saw a group of four figures standing above him on
the bank. He was prepared for Bagshaw and his Irish
captive, and he had no difficulty in guessing the
status of the servant in the red waistcoat. But the
fourth figure had a sort of grotesque solemnity that
seemed strangely congruous to that incongruity. It
was a stumpy figure with a round face and a hat like
a black halo. He realized that it was, in fact, a
priest; but there was something about it that
reminded him of some quaint old black woodcut at the
end of a Dance of Death.
Then he heard Bagshaw saying to the priest:
'I’m glad you can identify this man; but you must
realize that he’s to some extent under suspicion. Of
course, he may be innocent; but he did enter the
garden in an irregular fashion.'
'Well, I think he’s innocent myself,' said the
little priest in a colourless voice. 'But, of
course, I may be wrong.'
'Why do you think he is innocent?'
'Because he entered the garden in an irregular
fashion,' answered the cleric. 'You see, I entered
it in a regular fashion myself. But I seem to be
almost the only person who did. All the best people
seem to get over garden walls nowadays.'
'What do you mean by a regular fashion?' asked
the detective.
'Well,' said Father Brown, looking at him with
limpid gravity, 'I came in by the front door. I
often come into houses that way.'
'Excuse me,' said Bagshaw, 'but does it matter
very much how you came in, unless you propose to
confess to the murder?'
'Yes, I think it does,' said the priest mildly.
'The truth is, that when I came in at the front door
I saw something I don’t think any of the rest of you
have seen. It seems to me it might have something to
do with it.'
'What did you see?'
'I saw a sort of general smash-up,' said Father
Brown in his mild voice. 'A big looking-glass
broken, and a small palm tree knocked over, and the
pot smashed all over the floor. Somehow, it looked
to me as if something had happened.'
'You are right,' said Bagshaw after a pause. 'If
you saw that, it certainly looks as if it had
something to do with it.'
'And if it had anything to do with it,' said the
priest very gently, 'it looks as if there was one
person who had nothing to do with it; and that is
Mr. Michael Flood, who entered the garden over the
wall in an irregular fashion, and then tried to
leave it in the same irregular fashion. It is his
irregularity that makes me believe in his
innocence.'
'Let us go into the house,' said Bagshaw
abruptly.
As they passed in at the side-door, the servant
leading the way, Bagshaw fell back a pace or two and
spoke to his friend.
'Something odd about that servant,' he said.
'Says his name is Green, though he doesn’t look it;
but there seems no doubt he’s really Gwynne’s
servant, apparently the only regular servant he had.
But the queer thing is, that he flatly denied that
his master was in the garden at all, dead or alive.
Said the old judge had gone out to a grand legal
dinner and couldn’t be home for hours, and gave that
as his excuse for slipping out.'
'Did he,' asked Underhill, 'give any excuse for
his curious way of slipping in?'
'No, none that I can make sense of,' answered the
detective. 'I can’t make him out. He seems to be
scared of something.'
Entering by the side-door, they found themselves
at the inner end of the entrance hall, which ran
along the side of the house and ended with the front
door, surmounted by a dreary fanlight of the
old-fashioned pattern. A faint, grey light was
beginning to outline its radiation upon the
darkness, like some dismal and discoloured sunrise;
but what light there was in the hall came from a
single, shaded lamp, also of an antiquated sort,
that stood on a bracket in a corner. By the light of
this Bagshaw could distinguish the debris of which
Brown had spoken. A tall palm, with long sweeping
leaves, had fallen full length, and its dark red pot
was shattered into shards. They lay littered on the
carpet, along with pale and gleaming fragments of a
broken mirror, of which the almost empty frame hung
behind them on the wall at the end of the vestibule.
At right angles to this entrance, and directly
opposite the side-door as they entered, was another
and similar passage leading into the rest of the
house. At the other end of it could be seen the
telephone which the servant had used to summon the
priest; and a half-open door, showing, even through
the crack, the serried ranks of great leather-bound
books, marked the entrance to the judge’s study.
Bagshaw stood looking down at the fallen pot and
the mingled fragments at his feet.
'You’re quite right,' he said to the priest;
'there’s been a struggle here. And it must have been
a struggle between Gwynne and his murderer.'
'It seemed to me,' said Father Brown modestly,
'that something had happened here.'
'Yes; it’s pretty clear what happened,' assented
the detective. 'The murderer entered by the front
door and found Gwynne; probably Gwynne let him in.
There was a death grapple, possibly a chance shot,
that hit the glass, though they might have broken it
with a stray kick or anything. Gwynne managed to
free himself and fled into the garden, where he was
pursued and shot finally by the pond. I fancy that’s
the whole story of the crime itself; but, of course,
I must look round the other rooms.'
The other rooms, however, revealed very little,
though Bagshaw pointed significantly to the loaded
automatic pistol that he found in a drawer of the
library desk.
'Looks as if he was expecting this,' he said;
'yet it seems queer he didn’t take it with him when
he went out into the hall.'
Eventually they returned to the hall, making
their way towards the front door. Father Brown
letting his eye rove around in a rather
absent-minded fashion. The two corridors,
monotonously papered in the same grey and faded
pattern, seemed to emphasize the dust and dingy
floridity of the few early Victorian ornaments, the
green rust that devoured the bronze of the lamp, the
dull gold that glimmered in the frame of the broken
mirror.
'They say it’s bad luck to break a
looking-glass,' he said. 'This looks like the very
house of ill-luck. There’s something about the very
furniture —'
'That’s rather odd,' said Bagshaw sharply. 'I
thought the front door would be shut, but it’s left
on the latch.'
There was no reply; and they passed out of the
front door into the front garden, a narrower and
more formal plot of flowers, having at one end a
curiously clipped hedge with a hole in it, like a
green cave, under the shadow of which some broken
steps peeped out.
Father Brown strolled up to the hole and ducked
his head under it. A few moments after he had
disappeared they were astonished to hear his quiet
voice in conversation above their heads, as if he
were talking to somebody at the top of a tree. The
detective followed, and found that the curious
covered stairway led to what looked like a broken
bridge, over-hanging the darker and emptier spaces
of the garden. It just curled round the corner of
the house, bringing in sight the field of coloured
lights beyond and beneath. Probably it was the relic
of some abandoned architectural fancy of building a
sort of terrace on arches across the lawn. Bagshaw
thought it a curious cul-de-sac in which to find
anybody in the small hours between night and
morning; but he was not looking at the details of it
just then. He was looking at the man who was found.
As the man stood with his back turned — a small
man in light grey clothes — the one outstanding
feature about him was a wonderful head of hair, as
yellow and radiant as the head of a huge dandelion.
It was literally outstanding like a halo, and
something in that association made the face, when it
was slowly and sulkily turned on them, rather a
shock of contrast. That halo should have enclosed an
oval face of the mildly angelic sort; but the face
was crabbed and elderly with a powerful jowl and a
short nose that somehow suggested the broken nose of
a pugilist.
'This is Mr. Orm, the celebrated poet, I
understand,' said Father Brown, as calmly as if he
were introducing two people in a drawing-room.
'Whoever he is,' said Bagshaw, 'I must trouble
him to come with me and answer a few questions.'
Mr. Osric Orm, the poet, was not a model of
self-expression when it came to the answering of
questions. There, in that corner of the old garden,
as the grey twilight before dawn began to creep over
the heavy hedges and the broken bridge, and
afterwards in a succession of circumstances and
stages of legal inquiry that grew more and more
ominous, he refused to say anything except that he
had intended to call on Sir Humphrey Gwynne, but had
not done so because he could not get anyone to
answer the bell. When it was pointed out that the
door was practically open, he snorted. When it was
hinted that the hour was somewhat late, he snarled.
The little that he said was obscure, either because
he really knew hardly any English, or because he
knew better than to know any. His opinions seemed to
be of a nihilistic and destructive sort, as was
indeed the tendency of his poetry for those who
could follow it; and it seemed possible that his
business with the judge, and perhaps his quarrel
with the judge, had been something in the anarchist
line. Gwynne was known to have had something of a
mania about Bolshevist spies, as he had about German
spies. Anyhow, one coincidence, only a few moments
after his capture, confirmed Bagshaw in the
impression that the case must be taken seriously. As
they went out of the front gate into the street,
they so happened to encounter yet another neighbour,
Duller, the cigar merchant from next door,
conspicuous by his brown, shrewd face and the unique
orchid in his buttonhole; for he had a name in that
branch of horticulture. Rather to the surprise of
the rest, he hailed his neighbour, the poet, in a
matter-of-fact manner, almost as if he had expected
to see him.
'Hallo, here we are again,' he said. 'Had a long
talk with old Gwynne, I suppose?'
'Sir Humphrey Gwynne is dead,' said Bagshaw. 'I
am investigating the case and I must ask you to
explain.'
Buller stood as still as the lamp-post beside
him, possibly stiffened with surprise. The red end
of his cigar brightened and darkened rhythmically,
but his brown face was in shadow; when he spoke it
was with quite a new voice.
'I only mean,' he said, 'that when I passed two
hours ago Mr. Orm was going in at this gate to see
Sir Humphrey.'
'He says he hasn’t seen him yet,' observed
Bagshaw, 'or even been into the house.'
'It’s a long time to stand on the door-step,'
observed Buller.
'Yes,' said Father Brown; 'it’s rather a long
time to stand in the street.'
'I’ve been home since then,' said the cigar
merchant. 'Been writing letters and came out again
to post them.'
'You’ll have to tell all that later,' said
Bagshaw. 'Good night — or good morning.'
The trial of Osric Orm for the murder of Sir
Humphrey Gwynne, which filled the newspapers for so
many weeks, really turned entirely on the same crux
as that little talk under the lamp-post, when the
grey-green dawn was breaking about the dark streets
and gardens. Everything came back to the enigma of
those two empty hours between the time when Buller
saw Orm going in at the garden gate, and the time
when Father Brown found him apparently still
lingering in the garden. He had certainly had the
time to commit six murders, and might almost have
committed them for want of something to do; for he
could give no coherent account of what he was doing.
It was argued by the prosecution that he had also
the opportunity, as the front door was unlatched,
and the side-door into the larger garden left
standing open. The court followed, with considerable
interest, Bagshaw’s clear reconstruction of the
struggle in the passage, of which the traces were so
evident; indeed, the police had since found the shot
that had shattered the glass. Finally, the hole in
the hedge to which he had been tracked, had very
much the appearance of a hiding-place. On the other
hand. Sir Matthew Blake, the very able counsel for
the defence, turned this last argument the other
way: asking why any man should entrap himself in a
place without possible exit, when it would obviously
be much more sensible to slip out into the street.
Sir Matthew Blake also made effective use of the
mystery that still rested upon the motive for the
murder. Indeed, upon this point, the passages
between Sir Matthew Blake and Sir Arthur Travers,
the equally brilliant advocate for the prosecution,
turned rather to the advantage of the prisoner. Sir
Arthur could only throw out suggestions about a
Bolshevist conspiracy which sounded a little thin.
But when it came to investigating the facts of Orm’s
mysterious behaviour that night he was considerably
more effective.
The prisoner went into the witness-box, chiefly
because his astute counsel calculated that it would
create a bad impression if he did not. But he was
almost as uncommunicative to his own counsel as to
the prosecuting counsel. Sir Arthur Travers made all
possible capital out of his stubborn silence, but
did not succeed in breaking it. Sir Arthur was a
long, gaunt man, with a long, cadaverous face, in
striking contrast to the sturdy figure and bright,
bird-like eye of Sir Matthew Blake. But if Sir
Matthew suggested a very cocksure sort of
cock-sparrow, Sir Arthur might more truly have been
compared to a crane or stork; as he leaned forward,
prodding the poet with questions, his long nose
might have been a long beak.
'Do you mean to tell the jury,' he asked, in
tones of grating incredulity, 'that you never went
in to see the deceased gentleman at all?'
'No!' replied Orm shortly.
'You wanted to see him, I suppose. You must have
been very anxious to see him. Didn’t you wait two
whole hours in front of his front door?'
'Yes,' replied the other.
'And yet you never even noticed the door was
open?'
'No,' said Orm.
'What in the world were you doing for two hours
in somebody’s else’s front garden?' insisted the
barrister; 'You were doing something, I suppose?'
'Yes.'
'Is it a secret?' asked Sir Arthur, with
adamantine jocularity.
'It’s a secret from you,' answered the poet.
It was upon this suggestion of a secret that Sir
Arthur seized in developing his line of accusation.
With a boldness which some thought unscrupulous, he
turned the very mystery of the motive, which was the
strongest part of his opponent’s case, into an
argument for his own. He gave it as the first
fragmentary hint of some far-flung and elaborate
conspiracy, in which a patriot had perished like one
caught in the coils of an octopus.
'Yes,' he cried in a vibrating voice, 'my learned
friend is perfectly right! We do not know the exact
reason why this honourable public servant was
murdered. We shall not know the reason why the next
public servant is murdered. If my learned friend
himself falls a victim to his eminence, and the
hatred which the hellish powers of destruction feel
for the guardians of law, he will be murdered, and
he will not know the reason. Half the decent people
in this court will be butchered in their beds, and
we shall not know the reason. And we shall never
know the reason and never arrest the massacre, until
it has depopulated our country, so long as the
defence is permitted to stop all proceedings with
this stale tag about ‘motive,’ when every other fact
in the case, every glaring incongruity, every gaping
silence, tells us that we stand in the presence of
Cain.'
'I never knew Sir Arthur so excited,' said
Bagshaw to his group of companions afterwards. 'Some
people are saying he went beyond the usual limit and
that the prosecutor in a murder case oughtn’t to be
so vindictive. But I must say there was something
downright creepy about that little goblin with the
yellow hair, that seemed to play up to the
impression. I was vaguely recalling, all the time,
something that De Quincey says about Mr. Williams,
that ghastly criminal who slaughtered two whole
families almost in silence. I think he says that
Williams had hair of a vivid unnatural yellow; and
that he thought it had been dyed by a trick learned
in India, where they dye horses green or blue. Then
there was his queer, stony silence, like a
troglodyte’s; I’ll never deny that it all worked me
up until I felt there was a sort of monster in the
dock. If that was only Sir Arthur’s eloquence, then
he certainly took a heavy responsibility in putting
so much passion into it.”
'He was a friend of poor Gwynne’s, as a matter of
fact,' said Underhill, more gently; 'a man I know
saw them hobnobbing together after a great legal
dinner lately. I dare say that’s why he feels so
strongly in this case. I suppose it’s doubtful
whether a man ought to act in such a case on mere
personal feeling.'
'He wouldn’t,' said Bagshaw. 'I bet Sir Arthur
Travers wouldn’t act only on feeling, however
strongly he felt. He’s got a very stiff sense of his
own professional position. He’s one of those men who
are ambitious even when they’ve satisfied their
ambition. I know nobody who’d take more trouble to
keep his position in the world. No; you’ve got hold
of the wrong moral to his rather thundering sermon.
If he lets himself go like that, it’s because he
thinks he can get a conviction, anyhow, and wants to
put himself at the head of some political movement
against the conspiracy he talks about. He must have
some very good reason for wanting to convict Orm and
some very good reason for thinking he can do it.
That means that the facts will support him. His
confidence doesn’t look well for the prisoner.' He
became conscious of an insignificant figure in the
group.
'Well, Father Brown,' he said with a smile; 'what
do you think of our judicial procedure?'
'Well,' replied the priest rather absently, 'I
think the thing that struck me most was how
different men look in their wigs. You talk about the
prosecuting barrister being so tremendous. But I
happened to see him take his wig off for a minute,
and he really looks quite a different man. He’s
quite bald, for one thing.'
'I’m afraid that won’t prevent his being
tremendous,' answered Bagshaw. 'You don’t propose to
found the defence on the fact that the prosecuting
counsel is bald, do you?'
'Not exactly,' said Father Brown good-humouredly.
'To tell the truth, I was thinking how little some
kinds of people know about other kinds of people.
Suppose I went among some remote people who had
never even heard of England. Suppose I told them
that there is a man in my country who won’t ask a
question of life and death, until he has put an
erection made of horse-hair on the top of his head,
with little tails behind, and grey corkscrew curls
at the side, like an Early Victorian old woman. They
would think he must be rather eccentric; but he
isn’t at all eccentric, he’s only conventional. They
would think so, because they don’t know anything
about English barristers; because they don’t know
what a barrister is. Well, that barrister doesn’t
know what a poet is. He doesn’t understand that a
poet’s eccentricities wouldn’t seem eccentric to
other poets. He thinks it odd that Orm should walk
about in a beautiful garden for two hours, with
nothing to do. God bless my soul! a poet would think
nothing of walking about in the same backyard for
ten hours if he had a poem to do. Orm’s own counsel
was quite as stupid. It never occurred to him to ask
Orm the obvious question.'
'What question do you mean?' asked the other.
'Why, what poem he was making up, of course,'
said Father Brown rather impatiently. 'What line he
was stuck at, what epithet he was looking for, what
climax he was trying to work up to. If there were
any educated people in court, who know what
literature is, they would have known well enough
whether he had had anything genuine to do. You’d
have asked a manufacturer about the conditions of
his factory; but nobody seems to consider the
conditions under which poetry is manufactured. It’s
done by doing nothing.'
'That’s all very well,' replied the detective;
'but why did he hide? Why did he climb up that
crooked little stairway and stop there; it led
nowhere.'
'Why, because it led nowhere, of course,' cried
Father Brown explosively. 'Anybody who clapped eyes
on that blind alley ending in mid-air might have
known an artist would want to go there, just as a
child would.'
He stood blinking for a moment, and then said
apologetically: 'I beg your pardon; but it seems odd
that none of them understand these things. And then
there was another thing. Don’t you know that
everything has, for an artist, one aspect or angle
that is exactly right? A tree, a cow, and a cloud,
in a certain relation only, mean something; as three
letters, in one order only, mean a word. Well, the
view of that illuminated garden from that unfinished
bridge was the right view of it. It was as unique as
the fourth dimension. It was a sort of fairy
foreshortening; it was like looking down at heaven
and seeing all the stars growing on trees and that
luminous pond like a moon fallen flat on the fields
in some happy nursery tale. He could have looked at
it for ever. If you told him the path led nowhere,
he would tell you it had led him to the country at
the end of the world. But do you expect him to tell
you that in the witness-box? What would you say to
him if he did? You talk about a man having a jury of
his peers. Why don’t you have a jury of poets?'
'You talk as if you were a poet yourself,' said
Bagshaw.
'Thank your stars I’m not,' said Father Brown.
'Thank your lucky stars a priest has to be more
charitable than a poet. Lord have mercy on us, if
you knew what a crushing, what a cruel contempt he
feels for the lot of you, you’d feel as if you were
under Niagara.'
'You may know more about the artistic temperament
than I do,' said Bagshaw after a pause; 'but, after
all, the answer is simple. You can only show that he
might have done what he did, without committing the
crime. But it’s equally true that he might have
committed the crime. And who else could have
committed it?'
'Have you thought about the servant, Green?'
asked Father Brown, reflectively. 'He told a rather
queer story.'
'Ah,' cried Bagshaw quickly, 'you think Green did
it, after all.'
'I’m quite sure he didn’t,' replied the other. 'I
only asked if you’d thought about his queer story.
He only went out for some trifle, a drink or an
assignation or what not. But he went out by the
garden door and came back over the garden wall. In
other words, he left the door open, but he came back
to find it shut. Why? Because Somebody else had
already passed out that way.'
'The murderer,' muttered the detective
doubtfully. 'Do you know who he was?'
'I know what he looked like,' answered Father
Brown quietly. 'That’s the only thing I do know. I
can almost see him as he came in at the front door,
in the gleam of the hall lamp; his figure, his
clothes, even his face!'
'What’s all this?'
'He looked like Sir Humphrey Gwynne,' said the
priest.
'What the devil do you mean?' demanded Bagshaw.
'Gwynne was lying dead with his head in the pond.'
'Oh, yes,' said Father Brown.
After a moment he went on: 'Let’s go back to that
theory of yours, which was a very good one, though I
don’t quite agree with it. You suppose the murderer
came in at the front door, met the Judge in the
front hall, struggling with him and breaking the
mirror; that the judge then retreated into the
garden, where he was finally shot. Somehow, it
doesn’t sound natural to me. Granted he retreated
down the hall, there are two exits at the end, one
into the garden and one into the house. Surely, he
would be more likely to retreat into the house? His
gun was there; his telephone was there; his servant,
so far as he knew, was there. Even the nearest
neighbours were in that direction. Why should he
stop to open the garden door and go out alone on the
deserted side of the house?'
'But we know he did go out of the house,' replied
his companion, puzzled. 'We know he went out of the
house, because he was found in the garden.'
'He never went out of the house, because he never
was in the house,' said Father Brown. 'Not that
evening, I mean. He was sitting in that bungalow. I
read that lesson in the dark, at the beginning, in
red and golden stars across the garden. They were
worked from the hut; they wouldn’t have been burning
at all if he hadn’t been in the hut. He was trying
to run across to the house and the telephone, when
the murderer shot him beside the pond.'
'But what about the pot and the palm and the
broken mirror?' cried Bagshaw. 'Why, it was you who
found them! It was you yourself who said there must
have been a struggle in the hall.'
The priest blinked rather painfully. 'Did I?' he
muttered. 'Surely, I didn’t say that. I never
thought that. What I think I said, was that
something had happened in the hall. And something
did happen; but it wasn’t a struggle.'
'Then what broke the mirror?' asked Bagshaw
shortly.
'A bullet broke the mirror,' answered Father
Brown gravely; 'a bullet fired by the criminal. The
big fragments of falling glass were quite enough to
knock over the pot and the palm.'
'Well, what else could he have been firing at
except Gwynne?' asked the detective.
'It’s rather a fine metaphysical point,' answered
his clerical companion almost dreamily. 'In one
sense, of course, he was firing at Gwynne. But
Gwynne wasn’t there to be fired at. The criminal was
alone in the hall.'
He was silent for a moment, and then went on
quietly. 'Imagine the looking-glass at the end of
the passage, before it was broken, and the tall palm
arching over it. In the half-light, reflecting these
monochrome walls, it would look like the end of the
passage. A man reflected in it would look like a man
coming from inside the house. It would look like the
master of the house — if only the reflection were a
little like him.'
'Stop a minute,' cried Bagshaw. 'I believe I
begin — —'
'You begin to see,' said Father Brown. 'You begin
to see why all the suspects in this case must be
innocent. Not one of them could possibly have
mistaken his own reflection for old Gwynne. Orm
would have known at once that his bush of yellow
hair was not a bald head. Flood would have seen his
own red head, and Green his own red waistcoat.
Besides, they’re all short and shabby; none of them
could have thought his own image was a tall, thin,
old gentleman in evening-dress. We want another,
equally tall and thin, to match him. That’s what I
meant by saying that I knew what the murderer looked
like.'
'And what do you argue from that?' asked Bagshaw,
looking at him steadily.
The priest uttered a sort of sharp, crisp laugh,
oddly different from his ordinary mild manner of
speech.
'I am going to argue,' he said, 'the very thing
that you said was so ludicrous and impossible.'
'What do you mean?'
'I’m going to base the defence,' said Father
Brown, 'on the fact that the prosecuting counsel has
a bald head.'
'Oh, my God!' said the detective quietly, and got
to his feet, staring.
Father Brown had resumed his monologue in an
unruffled manner.
'You’ve been following the movements of a good
many people in this business; you policemen were
prodigiously interested in the movements of the
poet, and the servant, and the Irishman. The man
whose movements seem to have been rather forgotten
is the dead man himself. His servant was quite
honestly astonished at finding his master had
returned. His master had gone to a great dinner of
all the leaders of the legal profession, but had
left it abruptly and come home. He was not ill, for
he summoned no assistance; he had almost certainly
quarrelled with some leader of the legal profession.
It’s among the leaders of that profession that we
should have looked first for his enemy. He returned,
and shut himself up in the bungalow, where he kept
all his private documents about treasonable
practices. But the leader of the legal profession,
who knew there was something against him in those
documents, was thoughtful enough to follow his
accuser home; he also being in evening-dress, but
with a pistol in his pocket. That is all; and nobody
could ever have guessed it except for the mirror.'
He seemed to be gazing into vacancy for a moment,
and then added:
'A queer thing is a mirror; a picture frame that
holds hundreds of different pictures, all vivid and
all vanished for ever. Yet, there was something
specially strange about the glass that hung at the
end of that grey corridor under that green palm. It
is as if it was a magic glass and had a different
fate from others, as if its picture could somehow
survive it, hanging in the air of that twilight
house like a spectre; or at least like an abstract
diagram, the skeleton of an argument. We could, at
least, conjure out of the void the thing that Sir
Arthur Travers saw. And by the way, there was one
very true thing that you said about him.'
'I’m glad to hear it,' said Bagshaw with grim
good-nature. 'what was it?'
'You said,' observed the priest, 'that Sir Arthur
must have some good reason for wanting to get Orm
hanged.'
A week later the priest met the police detective
once more, and learned that the authorities had
already been moving on the new lines of inquiry when
they were interrupted by a sensational event.
'Sir Arthur Travers,' began Father Brown.
'Sir Arthur Travers is dead,' said Bagshaw,
briefly.
'Ah!' said the other, with a little catch in his
voice; 'you mean that he —'
'Yes,' said Bagshaw, 'he shot at the same man
again, but not in a mirror.'
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Chapter III. The Man With Two Beards
This tale was told by Father Brown to Professor
Crake, the celebrated criminologist, after dinner at
a club, where the two were introduced to each other
as sharing a harmless hobby of murder and robbery.
But, as Father Brown’s version rather minimized his
own part in the matter, it is here re-told in a more
impartial style. It arose out of a playful passage
of arms, in which the professor was very scientific
and the priest rather sceptical.
'My good sir,' said the professor in
remonstrance, 'don’t you believe that criminology is
a science?'
'I’m not sure,' replied Father Brown. 'Do you
believe that hagiology is a science?'
'What’s that?' asked the specialist sharply.
'No; it’s not the study of hags, and has nothing
to do with burning witches,' said the priest,
smiling. 'It’s the study of holy things, saints and
so on. You see, the Dark Ages tried to make a
science about good people. But our own humane and
enlightened age is only interested in a science
about bad ones. Yet I think our general experience
is that every conceivable sort of man has been a
saint. And I suspect you will find, too, that every
conceivable sort of man has been a murderer.'
'Well, we believe murderers can be pretty well
classified,' observed Crake. 'The list sounds rather
long and dull; but I think it’s exhaustive. First,
all killing can be divided into rational and
irrational, and we’ll take the last first, because
they are much fewer. There is such a thing as
homicidal mania, or love of butchery in the
abstract. There is such a thing as irrational
antipathy, though it’s very seldom homicidal. Then
we come to the true motives: of these, some are less
rational in the sense of being merely romantic and
retrospective. Acts of pure revenge are acts of
hopeless revenge. Thus a lover will sometimes kill a
rival he could never supplant, or a rebel
assassinate a tyrant after the conquest is complete.
But, more often, even these acts have a rational
explanation. They are hopeful murders. They fall
into the larger section of the second division, of
what we may call prudential crimes. These, again,
fall chiefly under two descriptions. A man kills
either in order to obtain what the other man
possesses, either by theft or inheritance, or to
stop the other man from acting in some way: as in
the case of killing a blackmailer or a political
opponent; or, in the case of a rather more passive
obstacle, a husband or wife whose continued
functioning, as such, interferes with other things.
We believe that classification is pretty thoroughly
thought out and, properly applied, covers the whole
ground — But I’m afraid that it perhaps sounds
rather dull; I hope I’m not boring you.'
'Not at all,' said Father Brown. 'If I seemed a
little absent-minded I must apologize; the truth is,
I was thinking of a man I once knew. He was a
murderer; but I can’t see where he fits into your
museum of murderers. He was not mad, nor did he like
killing. He did not hate the man he killed; he
hardly knew him, and certainly had nothing to avenge
on him. The other man did not possess anything that
he could possibly want. The other man was not
behaving in any way which the murderer wanted to
stop. The murdered man was not in a position to
hurt, or hinder, or even affect the murderer in any
way. There was no woman in the case. There were no
politics in the case. This man killed a
fellow-creature who was practically a stranger, and
that for a very strange reason; which is possibly
unique in human history.'
And so, in his own more conversational fashion,
he told the story. The story may well begin in a
sufficiently respectable setting, at the breakfast
table of a worthy though wealthy suburban family
named Bankes, where the normal discussion of the
newspaper had, for once, been silenced by the
discussion about a mystery nearer home. Such people
are sometimes accused of gossip about their
neighbours, but they are in that matter almost
inhumanly innocent. Rustic villagers tell tales
about their neighbours, true and false; but the
curious culture of the modern suburb will believe
anything it is told in the papers about the
wickedness of the Pope, or the martyrdom of the King
of the Cannibal Islands, and, in the excitement of
these topics, never knows what is happening next
door. In this case, however, the two forms of
interest actually coincided in a coincidence of
thrilling intensity. Their own suburb had actually
been mentioned in their favourite newspaper. It
seemed to them like a new proof of their own
existence when they saw the name in print. It was
almost as if they had been unconscious and invisible
before; and now they were as real as the King of the
Cannibal Islands.
It was stated in the paper that a once famous
criminal, known as Michael Moonshine, and many other
names that were presumably not his own, had recently
been released after a long term of imprisonment for
his numerous burglaries; that his whereabouts was
being kept quiet, but that he was believed to have
settled down in the suburb in question, which we
will call for convenience Chisham. A resume of some
of his famous and daring exploits and escapes was
given in the same issue. For it is a character of
that kind of press, intended for that kind of
public, that it assumes that its reader have no
memories. While the peasant will remember an outlaw
like Robin Hood or Rob Roy for centuries, the clerk
will hardly remember the name of the criminal about
whom he argued in trams and tubes two years before.
Yet, Michael Moonshine had really shown some of the
heroic rascality of Rob Roy or Robin Hood. He was
worthy to be turned into legend and not merely into
news. He was far too capable a burglar to be a
murderer. But his terrific strength and the ease
with which he knocked policemen over like ninepins,
stunned people, and bound and gagged them, gave
something almost like a final touch of fear or
mystery to the fact that he never killed them.
People almost felt that he would have been more
human if he had.
Mr. Simon Bankes, the father of the family, was
at once better read and more old-fashioned than the
rest. He was a sturdy man, with a short grey beard
and a brow barred with wrinkles. He had a turn for
anecdotes and reminiscence, and he distinctly
remembered the days when Londoners had lain awake
listening for Mike Moonshine as they did for
Spring-heeled Jack. Then there was his wife, a thin,
dark lady. There was a sort of acid elegance about
her, for her family had much more money than her
husband’s, if rather less education; and she even
possessed a very valuable emerald necklace upstairs,
that gave her a right to prominence in a discussion
about thieves. There was his daughter, Opal, who was
also thin and dark and supposed to be psychic — at
any rate, by herself; for she had little domestic
encouragement. Spirits of an ardently astral turn
will be well advised not to materialize as members
of a large family. There was her brother John, a
burly youth, particularly boisterous in his
indifference to her spiritual development; and
otherwise distinguishable only by his interest in
motor-cars. He seemed to be always in the act of
selling one car and buying another; and by some
process, hard for the economic theorist to follow,
it was always possible to buy a much better article
by selling the one that was damaged or discredited.
There was his brother Philip, a young man with dark
curly hair, distinguished by his attention to dress;
which is doubtless part of the duty of a
stockbroker’s clerk, but, as the stockbroker was
prone to hint, hardly the whole of it. Finally,
there was present at this family scene his friend,
Daniel Devine, who was also dark and exquisitely
dressed, but bearded in a fashion that was somewhat
foreign, and therefore, for many, slightly menacing.
It was Devine who had introduced the topic of the
newspaper paragraph, tactfully insinuating so
effective an instrument of distraction at what
looked like the beginning of a small family quarrel;
for the psychic lady had begun the description of a
vision she had had of pale faces floating in empty
night outside her window, and John Bankes was trying
to roar down this revelation of a higher state with
more than his usual heartiness.
But the newspaper reference to their new and
possibly alarming neighbour soon put both
controversialists out of court.
'How frightful,' cried Mrs. Bankes. 'He must be
quite a new-comer; but who can he possibly be?'
'I don’t know any particularly new-comers,' said
her husband, 'except Sir Leopold Pulman, at
Beechwood House.'
'My dear,' said the lady, 'how absurd you are —
Sir Leopold!' Then, after a pause, she added: 'If
anybody suggested his secretary now — that man with
the whiskers; I’ve always said, ever since he got
the place Philip ought to have had — —'
'Nothing doing,' said Philip languidly, making
his sole contribution to the conversation. 'Not good
enough.'
'The only one I know,' observed Devine, 'is that
man called Carver, who is stopping at Smith’s Farm.
He lives a very quiet life, but he’s quite
interesting to talk to. I think John has had some
business with him.'
'Knows a bit about cars,' conceded the monomaniac
John. 'He’ll know a bit more when he’s been in my
new car.'
Devine smiled slightly; everybody had been
threatened with the hospitality of John’s new car.
Then he added reflectively:
'That’s a little what I feel about him. He knows
a lot about motoring and travelling, and the active
ways of the world, and yet he always stays at home
pottering about round old Smith’s beehives. Says
he’s only interested in bee culture, and that’s why
he’s staying with Smith. It seems a very quiet hobby
for a man of his sort. However, I’ve no doubt John’s
car will shake him up a bit.'
As Devine walked away from the house that evening
his dark face wore an expression of concentrated
thought. His thoughts would, perhaps, have been
worthy of our attention, even at this stage; but it
is enough to say that their practical upshot was a
resolution to pay an immediate visit to Mr. Carver
at the house of Mr. Smith. As he was making his way
thither he encountered Barnard, the secretary at
Beechwood House, conspicuous by his lanky figure and
the large side whiskers which Mrs. Bankes counted
among her private wrongs. Their acquaintance was
slight, and their conversation brief and casual; but
Devine seemed to find in it food for further
cogitation.
'Look here,' he said abruptly, 'excuse my asking,
but is it true that Lady Pulman has some very famous
jewellery up at the House? I’m not a professional
thief, but I’ve just heard there’s one hanging
about.'
'I’ll get her to give an eye to them,' answered
the secretary. 'To tell the truth, I’ve ventured to
warn her about them already myself. I hope she has
attended to it.'
As they spoke, there came the hideous cry of a
motor-horn just behind, and John Bankes came to a
stop beside them, radiant at his own steering-wheel.
When he heard of Devine’s destination he claimed it
as his own, though his tone suggested rather an
abstract relish for offering people a ride. The ride
was consumed in continuous praises of the car, now
mostly in the matter of its adaptability to weather.
'Shuts up as tight as a box,' he said, 'and opens
as easy — as easy as opening your mouth.'
Devine’s mouth, at the moment, did not seem so
easy to open, and they arrived at Smith’s farm to
the sound of a soliloquy. Passing the outer gate,
Devine found the man he was looking for without
going into the house. The man was walking about in
the garden, with his hands in his pockets, wearing a
large, limp straw hat; a man with a long face and a
large chin. The wide brim cut off the upper part of
his face with a shadow that looked a little like a
mask. In the background was a row of sunny beehives,
along which an elderly man, presumably Mr. Smith,
was moving accompanied by a short,
commonplace-looking companion in black clerical
costume.
'I say,' burst in the irrepressible John, before
Devine could offer any polite greeting, 'I’ve
brought her round to give you a little run. You see
if she isn’t better than a "Thunderbolt."'
Mr Carver’s mouth set into a smile that may have
been meant to be gracious, but looked rather grim.
'I’m afraid I shall be too busy for pleasure this
evening,' he said.
“How doth the little busy bee,” observed Devine,
equally enigmatically. “Your bees must be very busy
if they keep you at it all night. I was wondering if
— — ”
“Well,” demanded Carver, with a certain cool
defiance.
“Well, they say we should make hay while the sun
shines,” said Devine. “Perhaps you make honey while
the moon shines.”
There came a flash from the shadow of the
broad-brimmed hat, as the whites of the man’s eyes
shifted and shone.
“Perhaps there is a good deal of moonshine in the
business,” he said: “but I warn you my bees do not
only make honey. They sting.”
“Are you coming along in the car?” insisted the
staring John. But Carver, though he threw off the
momentary air of sinister significance with which he
had been answering Devine, was still positive in his
polite refusal.
“I can’t possibly go,” he said. “Got a lot of
writing to do. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to give
some of my friends a run, if you want a companion.
This is my friend, Mr. Smith, Father Brown — ”
“Of course,” cried Bankes; “let ’em all come.”
“Thank you very much,” said Father Brown. “I’m
afraid I shall have to decline; I’ve got to go on to
Benediction in a few minutes.”
“Mr. Smith is your man, then,” said Carver, with
something almost like impatience. “I’m sure Smith is
longing for a motor ride.”
Smith, who wore a broad grin, bore no appearance
of longing for anything. He was an active little old
man with a very honest wig; one of those wigs that
look no more natural than a hat. Its tinge of yellow
was out of keeping with his colourless complexion.
He shook his head and answered with amiable
obstinacy:
“I remember I went over this road ten years ago —
in one of those contraptions. Came over in it from
my sister’s place at Holmgate, and never been over
that road in a car since. It was rough going I can
tell you,”
“Ten years ago!” scoffed John Bankes. “Two
thousand years ago you went in an ox wagon. Do you
think cars haven’t changed in ten years — and roads,
too, for that matter? In my little bus you don’t
know the wheels are going round. You think you’re
just flying.”
“I’m sure Smith wants to go flying,” urged
Carver. “It’s the dream of his life. Come, Smith, go
over to Holmgate and see your sister. You know you
ought to go and see your sister. Go over and stay
the night if you like.”
“Well, I generally walk over, so I generally do
stay the night,” said old Smith. “No need to trouble
the gentleman to-day, particularly.”
“But think what fun it will be for your sister to
see you arrive in a car!” cried Carver. “You really
ought to go. Don’t be so selfish.”
“That’s it,” assented Bankes, with buoyant
benevolence. “Don’t you be selfish. It won’t hurt
you. You aren’t afraid of it, are you?”
“Well,” said Mr. Smith, blinking thoughtfully, “I
don’t want to be selfish, and I don’t think I’m
afraid — I’ll come with you if you put it that way.”
The pair drove off, amid waving salutations that
seemed somehow to give the little group the
appearance of a cheering crowd. Yet Devine and the
priest only joined in out of courtesy, and they both
felt it was the dominating gesture of their host
that gave it its final air of farewell. The detail
gave them a curious sense of the pervasive force of
his personality.
The moment the car was out of sight he turned to
them with a sort of boisterous apology and said:
“Well!”
He said it with that curious heartiness which is
the reverse of hospitality. That extreme geniality
is the same as a dismissal.
“I must be going,” said Devine. “We must not
interrupt the busy bee. I’m afraid I know very
little about bees; sometimes I can hardly tell a bee
from a wasp.”
“I’ve kept wasps, too,” answered the mysterious
Mr. Carver. When his guests were a few yards down
the street, Devine said rather impulsively to his
companion: “Rather an odd scene that, don’t you
think?”
“Yes,” replied Father Brown. “And what do you
think about it?”
Devine looked at the little man in black, and
something in the gaze of his great, grey eyes seemed
to renew his impulse.
“I think,” he said, “that Carver was very anxious
to have the house to himself tonight. I don’t know
whether you had any such suspicions?”
“I may have my suspicions,” replied the priest,
“but I’m not sure whether they’re the same as
yours.”
That evening, when the last dusk was turning into
dark in the gardens round the family mansion, Opal
Bankes was moving through some of the dim and empty
rooms with even more than her usual abstraction; and
anyone who had looked at her closely would have
noted that her pale face had more than its usual
pallor. Despite its bourgeois luxury, the house as a
whole had a rather unique shade of melancholy. It
was the sort of immediate sadness that belongs to
things that are old rather than ancient. It was full
of faded fashions, rather than historic customs; of
the order and ornament that is just recent enough to
be recognized as dead. Here and there, Early
Victorian coloured glass tinted the twilight; the
high ceilings made the long rooms look narrow; and
at the end of the long room down which she was
walking was one of those round windows, to be found
in the buildings of its period. As she came to about
the middle of the room, she stopped, and then
suddenly swayed a little, as if some invisible hand
had struck her on the face.
An instant after there was the noise or knocking
on the front door, dulled by the closed doors
between. She knew that the rest of the household
were in the upper parts of the house, but she could
not have analysed the motive that made her go to the
front door herself. On the doorstep stood a dumpy
and dingy figure in black, which she recognized as
the Roman Catholic priest, whose name was Brown. She
knew him only slightly; but she liked him. He did
not encourage her psychic views; quite the contrary;
but he discouraged them as if they mattered and not
as if they did not matter. It was not so much that
he did not sympathize with her opinions, as that he
did sympathize but did not agree. All this was in
some sort of chaos in her mind as she found herself
saying, without greeting, or waiting to hear his
business:
“I’m so glad you’ve come. I’ve seen a ghost.”
“There’s no need to be distressed about that,” he
said. “It often happens. Most of the ghosts aren’t
ghosts, and the few that may be won’t do you any
harm. Was it any ghost in particular?”
“No,” she admitted, with a vague feeling of
relief, “it wasn’t so much the thing itself as an
atmosphere of awful decay, a sort of luminous ruin.
It was a face. A face at the window. But it was pale
and goggling, and looked like the picture of Judas.”
“Well, some people do look like that,” reflected
the priest, “and I dare say they look in at windows,
sometimes. May I come in and see where it happened?”
When she returned to the room with the visitor,
however, other members of the family had assembled,
and those of a less psychic habit had thought it
convenient to light the lamps. In the presence of
Mrs. Bankes, Father Brown assumed a more
conventional civility, and apologized for his
intrusion.
“I’m afraid it is taking a liberty with your
house, Mrs. Bankes,” he said. “But I think I can
explain how the business happens to concern you. I
was up at the Pulmans’ place just now, when I was
rung up and asked to come round here to meet a man
who is coming to communicate something that may be
of some moment to you. I should not have added
myself to the party, only I am wanted, apparently,
because I am a witness to what has happened up at
Beechwood. In fact, it was I who had to give the
alarm.”
“What has happened?” repeated the lady.
“There has been a robbery up, at Beechwood
House,” said Father Brown, gravely; “a robbery, and
what I fear is worse, Lady Pulman’s jewels have
gone; and her unfortunate secretary, Mr. Barnard,
was picked up in the garden, having evidently been
shot by the escaping burglar.”
“That man,” ejaculated the lady of the house. “I
believe he was — — ”
She encountered the grave gaze of the priest, and
her words suddenly went from her; she never knew
why.
“I communicated with the police,” he went on,
“and with another authority interested in this case;
and they say that even a superficial examination has
revealed foot-prints and finger-prints and other
indications of a well-known criminal.”
At this point, the conference was for a moment
disturbed, by the return of John Bankes, from what
appeared to be an abortive expedition in the car.
Old Smith seemed to have been a disappointing
passenger, after all.
“Funked it, after all, at the last minute,” he
announced with noisy disgust. “Bolted off while I
was looking at what I thought was a puncture. Last
time I’ll take one of these yokels — — ”
But his complaints received small attention in
the general excitement that gathered round Father
Brown and his news.
“Somebody will arrive in a moment,” went on the
priest, with the same air of weighty reserve, “who
will relieve me of this responsibility. When I have
confronted you with him I shall have done my duty as
a witness in a serious business. It only remains for
me to say that a servant up at Beechwood House told
me that she had seen a face at one of the windows —
— ”
“I saw a face,” said Opal, “at one of our
windows.”
“Oh, you are always seeing faces,” said her
brother John roughly.
“It is as well to see facts even if they are
faces,” said Father Brown equably, “and I think the
face you saw — — ”
Another knock at the front door sounded through
the house, and a minute afterwards the door of the
room opened and another figure appeared. Devine
half-rose from his chair at the sight of it.
It was a tall, erect figure, with a long, rather
cadaverous face, ending in a formidable chin. The
brow was rather bald, and the eyes bright and blue,
which Devine had last seen obscured with a broad
straw hat.
“Pray don’t let anybody move,” said the man
called Carver, in clear and courteous tones. But to
Devine’s disturbed mind the courtesy had an ominous
resemblance to that of a brigand who holds a company
motionless with a pistol.
“Please sit down, Mr. Devine,” said Carver; “and,
with Mrs. Bankes’s permission, I will follow your
example. My presence here necessitates an
explanation. I rather fancy you suspected me of
being an eminent and distinguished burglar.”
“I did,” said Devine grimly.
“As you remarked,” said Carver, “it is not always
easy to know a wasp from a bee.”
After a pause, he continued: “I can claim to be
one of the more useful, though equally annoying,
insects. I am a detective, and I have come down to
investigate an alleged renewal of the activities of
the criminal calling himself Michael Moonshine.
Jewel robberies were his speciality; and there has
just been one of them at Beechwood House, which, by
all the technical tests, is obviously his work. Not
only do the prints correspond, but you may possibly
know that when he was last arrested, and it is
believed on other occasions also, he wore a simple
but effective disguise of a red beard and a pair of
large horn-rimmed spectacles.”
Opal Bankes leaned forward fiercely.
“That was it,” she cried in excitement, “that was
the face I saw, with great goggles and a red, ragged
beard like Judas. I thought it was a ghost.”
“That was also the ghost the servant at Beechwood
saw,” said Carver dryly.
He laid some papers and packages on the table,
and began carefully to unfold them. “As I say,” he
continued, “I was sent down here to make inquiries
about the criminal plans of this man, Moonshine.
That is why I interested myself in bee-keeping and
went to stay with Mr. Smith.”
There was a silence, and then Devine started and
spoke: “You don’t seriously mean to say that nice
old man — — ”
“Come, Mr. Devine,” said Carver, with a smile,
“you believed a beehive was only a hiding-place for
me. Why shouldn’t it be a hiding-place for him?”
Devine nodded gloomily, and the detective turned
back to his papers. “Suspecting Smith, I wanted to
get him out of the way and go through his
belongings; so I took advantage of Mr. Bankes’s
kindness in giving him a joy ride. Searching his
house, I found some curious things to be owned by an
innocent old rustic interested only in bees. This is
one of them.”
From the unfolded paper he lifted a long, hairy
object almost scarlet in colour — the sort of sham
beard that is worn in theatricals.
Beside it lay an old pair of heavy horn-rimmed
spectacles.
“But I also found something,” continued Carver,
“that more directly concerns this house, and must be
my excuse for intruding to-night. I found a
memorandum, with notes of the names and conjectural
value of various pieces of jewellery in the
neighbourhood. Immediately after the note of Lady
Pulman’s tiara was the mention of an emerald
necklace belonging to Mrs. Bankes.”
Mrs. Bankes, who had hitherto regarded the
invasion of her house with an air of supercilious
bewilderment, suddenly grew attentive. Her face
suddenly looked ten years older and much more
intelligent. But before she could speak the
impetuous John had risen to his full height like a
trumpeting elephant.
“And the tiara’s gone already,” he roared; “and
the necklace — I’m going to see about that
necklace!”
“Not a bad idea,” said Carver, as the young man
rushed from the room; “though, of course, we’ve been
keeping our eyes open since we’ve been here. Well,
it took me a little time to make out the memorandum,
which was in cipher, and Father Brown’s telephone
message from the House came as I was near the end. I
asked him to run round here first with the news, and
I would follow; and so — — ”
His speech was sundered by a scream. Opal was
standing up and pointing rigidly at the round
window.
“There it is again!” she cried.
For a moment they all saw something — something
that cleared the lady of the charges of lying and
hysteria not uncommonly brought against her. Thrust
out of the slate-blue darkness without, the face was
pale, or, perhaps, blanched by pressure against the
glass; and the great, glaring eyes, encircled as
with rings, gave it rather the look of a great fish
out of the dark-blue sea nosing at the port-hole of
a ship. But the gills or fins of the fish were a
coppery red; they were, in truth, fierce red
whiskers and the upper part of a red beard. The next
moment it had vanished.
Devine had taken a single stride towards the
window when a shout resounded through the house, a
shout that seemed to shake it. It seemed almost too
deafening to be distinguishable as words; yet it was
enough to stop Devine in his stride, and he knew
what had happened.
“Necklace gone!” shouted John Bankes, appearing
huge and heaving in the doorway, and almost
instantly vanishing again with the plunge of a
pursuing hound.
“Thief was at the window just now!” cried the
detective, who had already darted to the door,
following the headlong John, who was already in the
garden.
“Be careful,” wailed the lady, “they have pistols
and things.”
“So have I,” boomed the distant voice of the
dauntless John out of the dark garden.
Devine had, indeed, noticed as the young man
plunged past him that he was defiantly brandishing a
revolver, and hoped there would be no need for him
to so defend himself. But even as he had the
thought, came the shock of two shots, as if one
answered the other, and awakened a wild flock of
echoes in that still suburban garden. They flapped
into silence.
“Is John dead?” asked Opal in a low, shuddering
voice.
Father Brown had already advanced deeper into the
darkness, and stood with his back to them, looking
down at something. It was he who answered her.
“No,” he said; “it is the other.”
Carver had joined him, and for a moment the two
figures, the tall and the short, blocked out what
view the fitful and stormy moonlight would allow.
Then they moved to one side and, the others saw the
small, wiry figure lying slightly twisted, as if
with its last struggle. The false red beard was
thrust upwards, as if scornfully at the sky, and the
moon shone on the great sham spectacles of the man
who had been called Moonshine.
“What an end,” muttered the detective, Carver.
“After all his adventures, to be shot almost by
accident by a stockbroker in a suburban garden.”
The stockbroker himself naturally regarded his
own triumph with more solemnity, though not without
nervousness.
“I had to do it,” he gasped, still panting with
exertion. “I’m sorry, he fired at me.”
'There will have to be an inquest, of course,'
said Carver, gravely. 'But I think there will be
nothing for you to worry about. There’s a revolver
fallen from his hand with one shot discharged; and
he certainly didn’t fire after he’d got yours.'
By this time they had assembled again in the
room, and the detective was getting his papers
together for departure. Father Brown was standing
opposite to him, looking down at the table, as if in
a brown study. Then he spoke abruptly:
'Mr. Carver, you have certainly worked out a very
complete case in a very masterly way. I rather
suspected your professional business; but I never
guessed you would link everything up together so
quickly — the bees and the beard and the spectacles
and the cipher and the necklace and everything.'
'Always satisfactory to get a case really rounded
off,' said Carver.
'Yes,' said Father Brown, still looking at the
table. 'I admire it very much.' Then he added with a
modesty verging on nervousness: 'It’s only fair to
you to say that I don’t believe a word of it.'
Devine leaned forward with sudden interest. 'Do
you mean you don’t believe he is Moonshine, the
burglar?'
'I know he is the burglar, but he didn’t burgle,'
answered Father Brown. 'I know he didn’t come here,
or to the great house, to steal jewels, or get shot
getting away with them. Where are the jewels?'
'Where they generally are in such cases,' said
Carver. 'He’s either hidden them or passed them on
to a confederate. This was not a one-man job. Of
course, my people are searching the garden and
warning the district.'
'Perhaps,' suggested Mrs. Bankes, 'the
confederate stole the necklace while Moonshine was
looking in at the window.'
'Why was Moonshine looking in at the window?'
asked Father Brown quietly. 'Why should he want to
look in at the window?'
'Well, what do you think?' cried the cheery John.
'I think,' said Father Brown, 'that he never did
want to look in at the window.'
'Then why did he do it?' demanded Carver. 'What’s
the good of talking in the air like that? We’ve seen
the whole thing acted before our very eyes.'
'I’ve seen a good many things acted before my
eyes that I didn’t believe in,' replied the priest.
'So have you, on the stage and off.'
'Father Brown,' said Devine, with a certain
respect in his tones, 'will you tell us why you
can’t believe your eyes?'
'Yes, I will try to tell you,' answered the
priest. Then he said gently:
'You know what I am and what we are. We don’t
bother you much. We try to be friends with all our
neighbours. But you can’t think we do nothing. You
can’t think we know nothing. We mind our own
business; but we know our own people. I knew this
dead man very well indeed; I was his confessor, and
his friend. So far as a man can, I knew his mind
when he left that garden to-day; and his mind was
like a glass hive full of golden bees. It’s an
under-statement to say his reformation was sincere.
He was one of those great penitents who manage to
make more out of penitence than others can make out
of virtue. I say I was his confessor; but, indeed,
it was I who went to him for comfort. It did me good
to be near so good a man. And when I saw him lying
there dead in the garden, it seemed to me as if
certain strange words that were said of old were
spoken over him aloud in my ear. They might well be;
for if ever a man went straight to heaven, it might
be he.'
'Hang it all,' said John Bankes restlessly,
'after all, he was a convicted thief.'
'Yes,' said Father Brown; 'and only a convicted
thief has ever in this world heard that assurance:
"This night shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."'
Nobody seemed to know what to do with the silence
that followed, until Devine said, abruptly, at last:
'Then how in the world would you explain it all?'
The priest shook his head. 'I can’t explain it at
all, just yet,” he said, simply. “I can see one or
two odd things, but I don’t understand them. As yet
I’ve nothing to go on to prove the man’s innocence,
except the man. But I’m quite sure I’m right.'
He sighed, and put out his hand for his big,
black hat. As he removed it he remained gazing at
the table with rather a new expression, his round,
straight-haired head cocked at a new angle. It was
rather as if some curious animal had come out of his
hat, as out of the hat of a conjurer. But the
others, looking at the table, could see nothing
there but the detective’s documents and the tawdry
old property beard and spectacles.
'Lord bless us,' muttered Father Brown, 'and he’s
lying outside dead, in a beard and spectacles.' He
swung round suddenly upon Devine. 'Here’s something
to follow up, if you want to know. Why did he have
two beards?'
With that he bustled in his undignified way out
of the room; but Devine was now devoured with
curiosity, and pursued him into the front garden.
'I can’t tell you now,' — said Father Brown. 'I’m
not sure, and I’m bothered about what to do. Come
round and see me to-morrow, and I may be able to
tell you the whole thing. It may already be settled
for me, and — did you hear that noise?'
'A motor-car starting,' remarked Devine.
'Mr. John Bankes’s motor-car,' said the priest.
'I believe it goes very fast.'
'He certainly is of that opinion.' said Devine,
with a smile.
'It will go far, as well as fast, to-night,' said
Father Brown.
'And what do you mean by that?' demanded the
other.
'I mean it will not return,' replied the priest.
'John Bankes suspected something of what I knew from
what I said. John Bankes has gone and the emeralds
and all the other jewels with him.'
Next day, Devine found Father Brown moving to and
fro in front of the row of beehives, sadly, but with
a certain serenity.
'I’ve been telling the bees,' he said. 'You know
one has to tell the bees! "Those singing masons
building roofs of gold." What a line!' Then more
abruptly. 'He would like the bees looked after.'
'I hope he doesn’t want the human beings
neglected, when the whole swarm is buzzing with
curiosity,' observed the young man. 'You were quite
right when you said that Bankes was gone with the
jewels; but I don’t know how you knew, or even what
there was to be known.'
Father Brown blinked benevolently at the
bee-hives and said:
'One sort of stumbles on things, and there was
one stumbling-block at the start. I was puzzled by
poor Barnard being shot up at Beechwood House. Now,
even when Michael was a master criminal, he made it
a point of honour, even a point of vanity, to
succeed without any killing. It seemed extraordinary
that when he had become a sort of saint he should go
out of his way to commit the sin he had despised
when he was a sinner. The rest of the business
puzzled me to the last; I could make nothing out of
it, except that it wasn’t true. Then I had a belated
gleam of sense when I saw the beard and goggles and
remembered the thief had come in another beard with
other goggles. Now, of course, it was just possible
that he had duplicates; but it was at least a
coincidence that he used neither the old glasses nor
the old beard, both in good repair. Again, it was
just possible that he went out without them and had
to procure new ones; but it was unlikely. There was
nothing to make him go motoring with Bankes at all;
if he was really going burgling, he could have taken
his outfit easily in his pocket. Besides, beards
don’t grow on bushes. He would have found it hard to
get such things anywhere in the time.
'No, the more I thought of it the more I felt
there was something funny about his having a
completely new outfit. And then the truth began to
dawn on me by reason, which I knew already by
instinct. He never did go out with Bankes with any
intention of putting on the disguise. He never did
put on the disguise. Somebody else manufactured the
disguise at leisure, and then put it on him.'
'Put it on him!' repeated Devine. 'How the devil
could they?'
'Let us go back,' said Father Brown, 'and look at
the thing through another window — the window
through which the young lady saw the ghost.'
'The ghost!' repeated the other, with a slight
start.
'She called it the ghost,' said the little man,
with composure, 'and perhaps she was not so far
wrong. It’s quite true that she is what they call
psychic. Her only mistake is in thinking that being
psychic is being spiritual. Some animals are
psychic; anyhow, she is a sensitive, and she was
right when she felt that the face at the window had
a sort of horrible halo of deathly things.'
'You mean — —' began Devine.
'I mean it was a dead man who looked in at the
window,' said Father Brown. 'It was a dead man who
crawled round more than one house, looking in at
more than one window. Creepy, wasn’t it? But in one
way it was the reverse of a ghost; for it was not
the antic of the soul freed from the body. It was
the antic of the body freed from the soul.”
He blinked again at the beehive and continued:
“But, I suppose, the shortest explanation is to take
it from the standpoint of the man who did it. You
know the man who did it. John Bankes.”
“The very last man I should have thought of,”
said Devine.
'The very first man I thought of,' said Father
Brown; 'in so far as I had any right to think of
anybody. My friend, there are no good or bad social
types or trades. Any man can be a murderer like poor
John; any man, even the same man, can be a saint
like poor Michael. But if there is one type that
tends at times to be more utterly godless than
another, it is that rather brutal sort of business
man. He has no social ideal, let alone religion; he
has neither the gentleman’s traditions nor the trade
unionist’s class loyalty. All his boasts about
getting good bargains were practically boasts of
having cheated people. His snubbing of his sister’s
poor little attempts at mysticism was detestable.
Her mysticism was all nonsense; but he only hated
spiritualism because it was spirituality. Anyhow,
there’s no doubt he was the villain of the piece;
the only interest is in a rather original piece of
villainy. It was really a new and unique motive for
murder. It was the motive of using the corpse as a
stage property — a sort of hideous doll or dummy. At
the start he conceived a plan of killing Michael in
the motor, merely to take him home and pretend to
have killed him in the garden. But all sorts of
fantastic finishing touches followed quite naturally
from the primary fact; that he had at his disposal
in a closed car at night the dead body of a
recognized and recognizable burglar. He could leave
his finger-prints and foot-prints; he could lean the
familiar face against windows and take it away. You
will notice that Moonshine ostensibly appeared and
vanished while Bankes was ostensibly out of the room
looking for the emerald necklace.
'Finally, he had only to tumble the corpse on to
the lawn, fire a shot from each pistol, and there he
was. It might never have been found out but for a
guess about the two beards.'
“Why had your friend Michael kept the old beard?”
Devine said thoughtfully. “That seems to me
questionable.”
'To me, who knew him, it seems quite inevitable,'
replied Father Brown. 'His whole attitude was like
that wig that he wore. There was no disguise about
his disguises. He didn’t want the old disguise any
more, but he wasn’t frightened of it; he would have
felt it false to destroy the false beard. It would
have been like hiding; and he was not hiding. He was
not hiding from God; he was not hiding from himself.
He was in the broad daylight. If they’d taken him
back to prison, he’d still have been quite happy. He
was not whitewashed, but washed white. There was
something very strange about him; almost as strange
as the grotesque dance of death through which he was
dragged after he was dead. When he moved to and fro
smiling among these beehives, even then, in a most
radiant and shining sense, he was dead. He was out
of the judgment of this world.'
There was a short pause, and then Devine shrugged
his shoulders and said: 'It all comes back to bees
and wasps looking very much alike in this world,
doesn’t it?'
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Chapter IV. The Song of the Flying Fish
The soul of Mr. Peregrine Smart hovered like a
fly round one possession and one joke. It might be
considered a mild joke, for it consisted merely of
asking people if they had seen his goldfish. It
might also be considered an expensive joke; but it
is doubtful whether he was not secretly more
attached to the joke than to the evidence of
expenditure. In talking to his neighbours in the
little group of new houses that had grown up round
the old village green, he lost no time in turning
the conversation in the direction of his hobby. To
Dr. Burdock, a rising biologist with a resolute chin
and hair brushed back like a German’s, Mr. Smart
made the easy transition. “You are interested in
natural history; have you seen my goldfish?” To so
orthodox an evolutionist as Dr. Burdock doubtless
all nature was one; but at first sight the link was
not close, as he was a specialist who had
concentrated entirely upon the primitive ancestry of
the giraffe. To Father Brown, from a church in the
neighbouring provincial town, he traced a rapid
train of thought which touched on the topics of
“Rome — St. Peter — fisherman — fish — goldfish.” In
talking to Mr. Imlack Smith, the bank manager, a
slim and sallow gentleman of dressy appearance but
quiet demeanour, he violently wrenched the
conversation to the subject of the gold standard,
from which it was merely a step to goldfish. In
talking to that brilliant Oriental traveller and
scholar, Count Yvon de Lara (whose title was French
and his face rather Russian, not to say Tartar), the
versatile conversationalist showed an intense and
intelligent interest in the Ganges and the Indian
Ocean, leading naturally to the possible presence of
goldfish in those waters.
From Mr. Harry Hartopp, the very rich but very
shy and silent young gentleman who had recently come
down from London, he had at last extorted the
information that the embarrassed youth in question
was not interested in fishing, and had then added:
“Talking about fishing, have you seen my goldfish?”
The peculiar thing about the goldfish was that
they were made of gold. They were part of an
eccentric but expensive toy, said to have been made
by the freak of some rich Eastern prince, and Mr.
Smart had picked it up at some sale or in some
curiosity shop, such as he frequented for the
purpose of lumbering up his house with unique and
useless things. From the other end of the room it
looked like a rather unusually large bowl containing
rather unusually large living fish; a closer
inspection showed it to be a huge bubble of
beautifully blown Venetian glass, very thin and
delicately clouded with faintly iridescent colour,
in the tinted twilight of which hung grotesque
golden fishes with great rubies for eyes. The whole
thing was undoubtedly worth a great deal in solid
material; how much more would depend upon the waves
of lunacy passing over the world of collectors. Mr.
Smart’s new secretary, a young man named Francis
Boyle, though an Irishman and not credited with
caution, was mildly surprised at his talking so
freely of the gems of his collection to the group of
comparative strangers who happened to have alighted
in a rather nomadic fashion in the neighbourhood;
for collectors are commonly vigilant and sometimes
secretive. In the course of settling down to his new
duties, Mr. Boyle found he was not alone in this
sentiment, and that in others, it passed from a mild
wonder to a grave disapproval.
“It’s a wonder his throat isn’t cut,” said Mr.
Smart’s valet, Harris, not without a hypothetical
relish, almost as if he had said, in a purely
artistic sense: “It’s a pity.”
“It’s extraordinary how he leaves things about,”
said Mr. Smart’s head clerk, Jameson, who had come
up from the office to assist the new secretary, “and
he won’t even put up those ramshackle old bars
across his ramshackle old door.”
“It’s all very well with Father Brown and the
doctor,” said Mr. Smart’s housekeeper, with a
certain vigorous vagueness that marked her opinions,
“but when it comes to foreigners, I call it tempting
providence. It isn’t only the Count, either; that
man at the bank looks to me much too yellow to be
English.”
“Well, that young Hartopp is English enough,”
said Boyle good-humouredly, “to the extent of not
having a word to say for himself.”
“He thinks the more,” said the housekeeper. “He
may not be exactly a foreigner, but he is not such a
fool as he looks. Foreign is as foreign does, I
say,” she added darkly.
Her disapproval would probably have deepened if
she had heard the conversation, in her master’s
drawing-room that afternoon, a conversation of which
the goldfish were the text, though the offensive
foreigner tended more and more to be the central
figure. It was not that he spoke so very much; but
even his silences had something positive about them.
He looked the more massive for sitting in a sort of
heap on a heap of cushions, and in the deepening
twilight his wide Mongolian face seemed faintly
luminous, like a moon. Perhaps his background
brought out something atmospherically Asiatic about
his face and figure, for the room was a chaos of
more or less costly curiosities, amid which could be
seen the crooked curves and burning colours of
countless Eastern weapons, Eastern pipes and
vessels, Eastern musical instruments and illuminated
manuscripts. Anyhow, as the conversation proceeded,
Boyle felt more and more that the figure seated on
the cushions and dark against the twilight had the
exact outline of a huge image of Buddha.
The conversation was general enough, for all the
little local group were present. They were, indeed,
often in the habit of dropping in at each other’s
houses, and by this time constituted a sort of club,
of people coming from the four or five houses
standing round the green. Of these houses Peregrine
Smart’s was the oldest, largest, and most
picturesque; it straggled down almost the whole of
one side of the square, leaving only room for a
small villa, inhabited by a retired colonel named
Varney, who was reported to be an invalid, and
certainly was never seen to go abroad. At right
angles to these stood two or three shops that served
the simpler needs of the hamlet, and at the corner
the inn of the Blue Dragon, at which Mr. Hartopp,
the stranger from London, was staying. On the
opposite side were three houses, one rented by the
Count de Lara, one by Dr. Burdock, and the third
still standing empty. On the fourth side was the
bank, with an adjoining house for the bank manager,
and a line of fence enclosing some land that was let
for building. It was thus a very self-contained
group, and the comparative emptiness of the open
ground for miles round it threw the members more and
more on each other’s society. That afternoon, one
stranger had indeed broken into the magic circle: a
hatchet-faced fellow with fierce tufts of eyebrows
and moustache, and so shabbily dressed that he must
have been a millionaire or a duke if he had really
(as was alleged) come down to do business with the
old collector. But he was known, at the Blue Dragon
at least, as Mr. Harmer.
To him had been recounted anew the glories of the
gilded fish and the criticisms regarding their
custody.
“People are always telling me I ought to lock
them up more carefully,” observed Mr. Smart, cocking
an eyebrow over his shoulder at the dependant who
stood there holding some papers from the office.
Smart was a round-faced, round-bodied little old man
rather like a bald parrot. “Jameson and Harris and
the rest are always at me to bar the doors as if it
were a mediaeval fortress, though really these
rotten old rusty bars are too mediaeval to keep
anybody out, I should think. I prefer to trust to
luck and the local police.”
“It is not always the best bars that keep people
out,” said the Count. “It all depends on who’s
trying to get in. There was an ancient Hindu hermit
who lived naked in a cave and passed through the
three armies that encircled the Mogul and took the
great ruby out of the tyrant’s turban, and went back
unscathed like a shadow. For he wished to teach the
great how small are the laws of space and time.”
“When we really study the small laws of space and
time,” said Dr. Burdock dryly, “we generally find
out how those tricks are done. Western science has
let in daylight on a good deal of Eastern magic.
Doubtless a great deal can be done with hypnotism
and suggestion, to say nothing of sleight-of-hand.”
“The ruby was not in the royal tent,” observed
the Count in his dream fashion; “but he found it
among a hundred tents.”
“Can’t all that be explained by telepathy?” asked
the doctor sharply. The question sounded the sharper
because it was followed by a heavy silence, almost
as if the distinguished Oriental traveller had, with
imperfect politeness, gone to sleep.
“I beg your pardon,” he said rousing himself with
a sudden smile. “I had forgotten we were talking
with words. In the east we talk with thoughts, and
so we never misunderstand each other. It is strange
how you people worship words and are satisfied with
words. What difference does it make to a thing that
you now call it telepathy, as you once called it
tomfoolery? If a man climbs into the sky on a
mango-tree, how is it altered by saying it is only
levitation, instead of saying it is only lies. If a
medieval witch waved a wand and turned me into a
blue baboon, you would say it was only atavism.”
The doctor looked for a moment as if he might say
that it would not be so great a change after all.
But before his irritation could find that or any
other vent, the man called Harmer interrupted
gruffly:
“It’s true enough those Indian conjurers can do
queer things, but I notice they generally do them in
India. Confederates, perhaps, or merely mass
psychology. I don’t think those tricks have ever
been played in an English village, and I should say
our friend’s goldfish were quite safe.”
“I will tell you a story,” said de Lara, in his
motionless way, “which happened not in India, but
outside an English barrack in the most modernized
part of Cairo. A sentinel was standing inside the
grating of an iron gateway looking out between the
bars on to the street. There appeared outside the
gate a beggar, barefoot and in native rags, who
asked him, in English that was startlingly distinct
and refined, for a certain official document kept in
the building for safety. The soldier told the man,
of course, that he could not come inside; and the
man answered, smiling: ‘What is inside and what is
outside?’ The soldier was still staring scornfully
through the iron grating when he gradually realized
that, though neither he nor the gate had moved, he
was actually standing in the street and looking in
at the barrack yard, where the beggar stood still
and smiling and equally motionless. Then, when the
beggar turned towards the building, the sentry awoke
to such sense as he had left, and shouted a warning
to all the soldiers within the gated enclosure to
hold the prisoner fast. ‘You won’t get out of there
anyhow,’ he said vindictively. Then the beggar said
in his silvery voice: ‘What is outside and what is
inside?’ And the soldier, still glaring through the
same bars, saw that they were once more between him
and the street, where the beggar stood free and
smiling with a paper in his hand.”
Mr. Imlack Smith, the bank manager, was looking
at the carpet with his dark sleek head bowed, and he
spoke for the first time.
“Did anything happen about the paper?” he asked.
“Your professional instincts are correct, sir,”
said the Count with grim affability. “It was a paper
of considerable financial importance. Its
consequences were international.”
“I hope they don’t occur often,” said young
Hartopp gloomily.
“I do not touch the political side,” said the
Count serenely, “but only the philosophical. It
illustrates how the wise man can get behind time and
space and turn the levers of them, so to speak, so
that the whole world turns round before our eyes.
But is it so hard for you people to believe that
spiritual powers are really more powerful than
material ones.”
“Well,” said old Smart cheerfully, “I don’t
profess to be an authority on spiritual powers. What
do you say, Father Brown?”
“The only thing that strikes me,” answered the
little priest, “is that all the supernatural acts we
have yet heard of seem to be thefts. And stealing by
spiritual methods seem to me much the same as
stealing by material ones.”
“Father Brown is a Philistine,” said the smiling
Smith.
“I have a sympathy with the tribe,” said Father
Brown. “A Philistine is only a man who is right
without knowing why.”
“All this is too clever for me,” said Hartopp
heartily.
“Perhaps,” said Father Brown with a smile, “you
would like to speak without words, as the Count
suggests. He would begin by saying nothing in a
pointed fashion, and you would retort with a burst
of taciturnity.”
“Something might be done with music,” murmured
the Count dreamily. “It would be better than all
these words.”
“Yes, I might understand that better,” said the
young man in a low voice.
Boyle had followed the conversation with curious
attention, for there was something in the demeanour
of more than one of the talkers that seemed to him
significant or even odd. As the talk drifted to
music, with an appeal to the dapper bank manager
(who was an amateur musician of some merit), the
young secretary awoke with a start to his
secretarial duties, and reminded his employer that
the head clerk was still standing patiently with the
papers in his hand.
“Oh, never mind about those just now, Jameson,”
said Smart rather hurriedly. “Only something about
my account; I’ll see Mr. Smith about it later. You
were saying that the ‘cello, Mr. Smith — — ”
But the cold breath of business had sufficed to
disperse the fumes of transcendental talk, and the
guests began one after another to say farewell. Only
Mr. Imlack Smith, bank manager and musician,
remained to the last; and when the rest were gone he
and his host went into the inner room, where the
goldfish were kept, and closed the door.
The house was long and narrow, with a covered
balcony running along the first floor, which
consisted mostly of a sort of suite of rooms used by
the householder himself, his bedroom and
dressing-room, and an inner room in which his very
valuable treasures were sometimes stored for the
night instead of being left in the rooms below. This
balcony, like the insufficiently barred door below
it, was a matter of concern to the housekeeper and
the head clerk and the others who lamented the
carelessness of the collector; but, in truth, that
cunning old gentleman was more careful than he
seemed. He professed no great belief in the
antiquated fastenings of the old house, which the
housekeeper lamented to see rusting in idleness, but
he had an eye to the more important point of
strategy. He always put his favourite goldfish in
the room at the back of his bedroom for the night,
and slept in front of it, as it were, with a pistol
under his pillow. And when Boyle and Jameson,
awaiting his return from the tete-a-tete, at length
saw the door open and their employer reappear, he
was carrying the great glass bowl as reverently as
if it had been the relic of a saint.
Outside, the last edges of the sunset still clung
to the corners of the green square; but inside, a
lamp had already been kindled; and in the mingling
of the two lights the coloured globe glowed like
some monstrous jewel, and the fantastic outlines of
the fiery fishes seemed to give it, indeed,
something of the mystery of a talisman, like strange
shapes seen by a seer in the crystal of doom. Over
the old man’s shoulder the olive face of Imlack
Smith stared like a sphinx.
“I am going up to London to-night, Mr. Boyle,”
said old Smart, with more gravity than he commonly
showed. “Mr. Smith and I are catching the
six-forty-five. I should prefer you, Jameson, to
sleep upstairs in my room to-night; if you put the
bowl in the back room as usual, it will be quite
safe then. Not that I suppose anything could
possibly happen.”
“Anything may happen anywhere,” said the smiling
Mr. Smith. “I think you generally take a gun to bed
with you. Perhaps you had better leave it behind in
this case.”
Peregrine Smart did not reply, and they passed
out of the house on to the road round the village
green.
The secretary and the head clerk slept that night
as directed in their employer’s bedroom. To speak
more strictly, Jameson, the head clerk, slept in a
bed in the dressing-room, but the door stood open
between, and the two rooms running along the front
were practically one. Only the bedroom had a long
French window giving on the balcony, and an entrance
at the back into the inner apartment where the
goldfish bowl had been placed for safety. Boyle
dragged his bed right across so as to bar this
entrance, put the revolver under his pillow, and
then undressed and went to bed, feeling that he had
taken all possible precautions against an impossible
or improbable event. He did not see why there should
be any particular danger of normal burglary; and as
for the spiritual burglary that figured in the
traveller’s tales of the Count de Lara, if his
thoughts ran on them so near to sleep it was because
they were such stuff as dreams are made of. They
soon turned into dreams with intervals of dreamless
slumber. The old clerk was a little more restless as
usual; but after fussing about a little longer and
repeating some of his favourite regrets and
warnings, he also retired to his bed in the same
manner and slept. The moon brightened and grew dim
again above the green square and the grey blocks of
houses in a solitude and silence that seemed to have
no human witness; and it was when the white cracks
of daybreak had already appeared in the corners of
the grey sky that the thing happened.
Boyle, being young, was naturally both the
healthier and the heavier sleeper of the two. Though
active enough when he was once awake, he always had
a load to lift in waking. Moreover, he had dreams of
the sort that cling to the emerging minds like the
dim tentacles of an octopus. They were a medley of
many things, including his last look from the
balcony across the four grey roads and the green
square. But the pattern of them changed and shifted
and turned dizzily, to the accompaniment of a low
grinding noise, which sounded somehow like a
subterranean river, and may have been no more than
old Mr. Jameson snoring in the dressing-room. But in
the dreamer’s mind all that murmur and motion was
vaguely connected with the words of the Count de
Lara, about a wisdom that could hold the levers of
time and space and turn the world. In the dream it
seemed as if a vast murmuring machinery under the
world were really moving whole landscapes hither and
thither, so that the ends of the earth might appear
in a man’s front-garden, or his own front-garden be
exiled beyond the sea.
The first complete impressions he had were the
words of a song, with a rather thin metallic
accompaniment; they were sung in a foreign accent
and a voice that was still strange and yet faintly
familiar. And yet he could hardly feel sure that he
was not making up poetry in his sleep.
Over the land and over the sea
My flying fishes will come to me,
For the note is not of the world that wakes them,
But in — —
He struggled to his feet and saw that his
fellow-guardian was already out of bed; Jameson was
peering out of the long window on to the balcony and
calling out sharply to someone in the street below.
“Who’s that?” he called out sharply. “What do you
want?”
He turned to Boyle in agitation, saying: “There’s
somebody prowling about just outside. I knew it
wasn’t safe. I’m going down to bar that front door,
whatever they say.”
He ran downstairs in a flutter and Boyle could
hear the clattering of the bars upon the front door;
but Boyle himself stepped out upon the balcony and
looked out on the long grey road that led up to the
house, and he thought he was still dreaming.
Upon that grey road leading across that empty
moor and through that little English hamlet, there
had appeared a figure that might have stepped
straight out of the jungle or the bazaar — a figure
out of one of the Count’s fantastic stories; a
figure out of the “Arabian Nights.” The rather
ghostly grey twilight which begins to define and yet
to discolour everything when the light in the east
has ceased to be localized, lifted slowly like a
veil of grey gauze and showed him a figure wrapped
in outlandish raiment. A scarf of a strange
sea-blue, vast and voluminous, went round the head
like a turban, and then again round the chin, giving
rather the general character of a hood; so far as
the face was concerned it had all the effects of a
mask. For the raiment round the head was drawn close
as a veil; and the head itself was bowed over a
queer-looking musical instrument made of silver or
steel, and shaped like a deformed or crooked violin.
It was played with something like a silver comb, and
the notes were curiously thin and keen. Before Boyle
could open his mouth, the same haunting alien accent
came from under the shadow of the burnous,
singing-words of the same sort:
As the golden birds go back to the tree My golden
fishes return to me. Return — —
“You’ve no right here,” called out Boyle in
exasperation, hardly knowing what he said.
“I have a right to the goldfish,” said the
stranger, speaking more like King Solomon than an
unsandalled Bedouin in a ragged blue cloak. “And
they will come to me. Come!”
He struck his strange fiddle as his voice rose
sharply on the word. There was a pang of sound that
seemed to pierce the mind, and then there came a
fainter sound, like an answer: a vibrant whisper. It
came from the dark room behind where the bowl of
goldfish was standing.
Boyle turned towards it; and even as he turned
the echo in the inner room changed to a long
tingling sound like an electric bell, and then to a
faint crash. It was still a matter of seconds since
he had challenged the man from the balcony; but the
old clerk had already regained the top of the
stairs, panting a little, for he was an elderly
gentleman.
“I’ve locked up the door, anyhow,” he said.
“The stable door,” said Boyle out of the darkness
of the inner room.
Jameson followed him into that apartment and
found him staring down at the floor, which was
covered with a litter of coloured glass like the
curved bits of a broken rainbow.
“What do you mean by the stable door?” began
Jameson.
“I mean that the steed is stolen,” answered
Boyle. “The flying steeds. The flying fishes our
Arab friend outside has just whistled to like so
many performing puppies.”
“But how could he?” exploded the old clerk, as if
such events were hardly respectable.
“Well, they’re gone,” said Boyle shortly. “The
broken bowl is here, which would have taken a long
time to open properly, but only a second to smash.
But the fish are gone, God knows how, though I think
our friend ought to be asked.”
“We are wasting time,” said the distracted
Jameson. “We ought to be after him at once.”
“Much better be telephoning the police at once,”
answered Boyle. “They ought to outstrip him in a
flash with motors and telephones that go a good deal
farther than we should ever get, running through the
village in our nightgowns. But it may be there are
things even the police cars and wires won’t
outstrip.”
While Jameson was talking to the police-station
through the telephone in an agitated voice, Boyle
went out again on to the balcony and hastily scanned
that grey landscape of daybreak. There was no trace
of the man in the turban, and no other sign of life,
except some faint stirrings an expert might have
recognized in the hotel of the Blue Dragon. Only
Boyle, for the first time, noted consciously
something that he had all along been noting
unconsciously. It was like a fact struggling in the
submerged mind and demanding its own meaning. It was
simply the fact that the grey landscape had never
been entirely grey; there was one gold spot amid its
stripes of colourless colour, a lamp lighted in one
of the houses on the other side of the green —
Something, perhaps irrational, told him that it had
been burning through all the hours of the darkness
and was only fading with the dawn. He counted the
houses, and his calculation brought out a result
which seemed to fit in with something, he knew not
what. Anyhow, it was apparently the house of the
Count Yvon de Lara.
Inspector Pinner had arrived with several
policemen, and done several things of a rapid and
resolute sort, being conscious that the very
absurdity of the costly trinkets might give the case
considerable prominence in the newspapers. He had
examined everything, measured everything, taken down
everybody’s deposition, taken everybody’s
finger-prints, put everybody’s back up, and found
himself at the end left facing a fact which he could
not believe. An Arab from the desert had walked up
the public road and stopped in front of the house of
Mr. Peregrine Smart, where a bowl of artificial
goldfish was kept in an inner room; he had then sung
or recited a little poem, and the bowl had exploded
like a bomb and the fishes vanished into thin air.
Nor did it soothe the inspector to be told by a
foreign Count — in a soft, purring voice — that the
bounds of experience were being enlarged.
Indeed, the attitude of each member of the little
group was characteristic enough. Peregrine Smart
himself had come back from London the next morning
to hear the news of his loss. Naturally he admitted
a shock; but it was typical of something sporting
and spirited in the little old gentleman, something
that always made his small strutting figure look
like a cock-sparrow’s, that he showed more vivacity
in the search than depression at the loss. The man
named Harmer, who had come to the village on purpose
to buy the goldfish, might be excused for being a
little testy on learning they were not there to be
bought. But, in truth, his rather aggressive
moustache and eyebrows seemed to bristle with
something more definite than disappointment, and the
eyes that darted over the company were bright with a
vigilance that might well be suspicion. The sallow
face of the bank manager, who had also returned from
London though by a later train, seemed again and
again to attract those shining and shifting eyes
like a magnet. Of the two remaining figures of the
original circle, Father Brown was generally silent
when he was not spoken to, and the dazed Hartopp was
often silent even when he was.
But the Count was not a man to let anything pass
that gave an apparent advantage to his views. He
smiled at his rationalistic rival, the doctor, in
the manner of one who knows how it is possible to be
irritating by being ingratiating.
“You will admit, doctor,” he said, “that at least
some of the stories you thought so improbable look a
little more realistic to-day than they did
yesterday. When a man as ragged as those I described
is able, by speaking a word, to dissolve a solid
vessel inside the four walls of the house he stands
outside, it might perhaps be called an example of
what I said about spiritual powers and material
barriers.”
“And it might be called an example of what I
said,” said the doctor sharply, “about a little
scientific knowledge being enough to show how the
tricks are done.”
“Do you really mean, doctor,” asked Smart in some
excitement, “that you can throw any scientific light
on this mystery?”
“I can throw light on what the Count calls a
mystery,” said the doctor, “because it is not a
mystery at all. That part of it is plain enough. A
sound is only a wave of vibration, and certain
vibrations can break glass, if the sound is of a
certain kind and the glass of a certain kind. The
man did not stand in the road and think, which the
Count tells us is the ideal method when Orientals
want a little chat. He sang out what he wanted,
quite loud, and struck a shrill note on an
instrument. It is similar to many experiments by
which glass of special composition has been
cracked.”
“Such as the experiment,” said the Count lightly,
“by which several lumps of solid gold have suddenly
ceased to exist.”
“Here comes Inspector Pinner,” said Boyle.
“Between ourselves, I think he would regard the
doctor’s natural explanation as quite as much of a
fairy tale as the Count’s preternatural one. A very
sceptical intellect, Mr. Pinner’s, especially about
me. I rather think I am under suspicion.”
“I think we are all under suspicion,” said the
Count.
It was the presence of this suspicion in his own
case that led Boyle to seek the personal advice of
Father Brown. They were walking round the village
green together, some hours later in the day, when
the priest, who was frowning thoughtfully at the
ground as he listened, suddenly stopped.
“Do you see that?” he asked. “Somebody’s been
washing the pavement here — just this little strip
of pavement outside Colonel Varney’s house. I wonder
whether that was done yesterday.”
Father Brown looked rather earnestly at the
house, which was high and narrow, and carried rows
of striped sun-blinds of gay but already faded
colours. The chinks or crannies that gave glimpses
of the interior looked all the darker; indeed, they
looked almost black in contrast with the facade thus
golden in the morning light.
“That is Colonel Varney’s house, isn’t it?” he
asked. “He comes from the East, too, I fancy. What
sort of man is he?”
“I’ve never even seen him,” answered Boyle. “I
don’t think anybody’s seen him, except Dr. Burdock,
and I rather fancy the doctor doesn’t see him more
than he need.”
“Well, I’m going to see him for a minute,” said
Father Brown.
The big front door opened and swallowed the small
priest, and his friend stood staring at it in a
dazed and irrational manner, as if wondering whether
it would ever open again. It opened in a few
minutes, and Father Brown emerged, still smiling,
and continued his slow and pottering progress round
the square of roads. Sometimes he seemed to have
forgotten the matter in hand altogether, for he
would make passing remarks on historical and social
questions, or on the prospects of development in the
district. He remarked on the soil used for the
beginning of a new road by the bank; he looked
across the old village green with a vague
expression.
“Common land. I suppose people ought to feed
their pigs and geese on it, if they had any pigs or
geese; as it is, it seems to feed nothing but
nettles and thistles. What a pity that what was
supposed to be a sort of large meadow has been
turned into a small and petty wilderness. That’s Dr.
Burdock’s house opposite, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” answered Boyle, almost jumping at this
abrupt postscript.
“Very well,” answered Father Brown, “then I think
we’ll go indoors again.”
As they opened the front door of Smart’s house
and mounted the stairs, Boyle repeated to his
companion many details of the drama enacted there at
daybreak.
“I suppose you didn’t doze off again?” asked
Father Brown, “giving time for somebody to scale the
balcony while Jameson ran down to secure the door.”
“No,” answered Boyle; “I am sure of that. I woke
up to hear Jameson challenging the stranger from the
balcony; then I heard him running downstairs and
putting up the bars, and then in two strides I was
on the balcony myself.”
“Or could he have slipped in between you from
another angle? Are there any other entrances besides
the front entrance?”
“Apparently there are not,” said Boyle gravely.
“I had better make sure, don’t you think?” asked
Father Brown apologetically, and scuttled softly
downstairs again. Boyle remained in the front
bedroom gazing rather doubtfully after him. After a
comparatively brief interval the round and rather
rustic visage appeared again at the head of the
stairs, looking rather like a turnip ghost with a
broad grin.
“No; I think that settles the matter of
entrances,” said the turnip ghost, cheerfully. “And
now, I think, having got everything in a tight box,
so to speak, we can take stock of what we’ve got.
It’s rather a curious business.”
“Do you think,” asked Boyle, ‘that the Count or
the colonel, or any of these Eastern travellers have
anything to do with it? Do you think it is —
preternatural?”
“I will grant you this,” said the priest gravely,
“if the Count, or the colonel, or any of your
neighbours did dress up in Arab masquerade and creep
up to this house in the dark — then it was
preternatural.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“Because the Arab left no footprints,” answered
Father Brown. “The colonel on the one side and the
banker on the other are the nearest of your
neighbours. That loose red soil is between you and
the bank, it would print off bare feet like a
plaster cast and probably leave red marks
everywhere. I braved the colonel’s curry-seasoned
temper to verify the fact that the front pavement
was washed yesterday and not to-day; it was wet
enough to make wet footprints all along the road.
Now, if the visitor were the Count or the doctor in
the houses opposite, he might possibly, of course,
have come across the common. But he must have found
it exceedingly uncomfortable with bare feet, for it
is, as I remarked, one mass of thorns and thistles
and stinging nettles. He would surely have pricked
himself and probably left traces of it. Unless, as
you say, he was a preternatural being.”
Boyle looked steadily at the grave and
indecipherable face of his clerical friend.
“Do you mean that he was?” he asked, at length.
“There is one general truth to remember,” said
Father Brown, after a pause. “A thing can sometimes
be too close to be seen, as, for instance, a man
cannot see himself. There was a man who had a fly in
his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he
discovered that there was a most incredible dragon
in the moon. And I am told that if a man hears the
exact reproduction of his own voice it sounds like
the voice of a stranger. In the same way, if
anything is right in the foreground of our life we
hardly see it, and if we did we might think it quite
odd. If the thing in the foreground got into the
middle distance, we should probably think it had
come from the remote distance. Just come outside the
house again for a moment. I want to show you how it
looks from another standpoint.”
He had already risen, and as they descended the
stairs he continued his remarks in a rather groping
fashion as if he were thinking aloud.
“The Count and the Asiatic atmosphere all come
in, because, in a case like this, everything depends
on the preparation of the mind. A man can reach a
condition in which a brick, falling on his head,
will seem to be a Babylonian brick carved with
cuneiform, and dropped from the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon, so that he will never even look at the
brick and see it is of one pattern with the bricks
of his own house. So in your case — ”
“What does this mean?” interrupted Boyle, staring
and pointing at the entrance. “What in the name of
wonder does it mean? The door is barred again.”
He was staring at the front door by which they
had entered but a little while before, and across
which stood, once more, the great dark bands of
rusty iron which had once, as he had said, locked
the stable door too late. There was something darkly
and dumbly ironic in those old fastenings closing
behind them and imprisoning them as if of their own
motion.
“Oh those!” said Father Brown casually. “I put up
those bars myself, just now. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No,” answered Boyle, staring. “I heard nothing.”
“Well, I rather thought you wouldn’t,” said the
other equably. “There’s really no reason why anybody
upstairs should hear those bars being put up. A sort
of hook fits easily into a sort of hole. When you’re
quite close you hear a dull click; but that’s all.
The only thing that makes any noise a man could hear
upstairs, is this.”
And he lifted the bar out of its socket and let
it fall with a clang at the side of the door,
“It does make a noise if you unbar the door,”
said Father Brown gravely, “even if you do it pretty
carefully.”
“You mean — ”
“I mean,” said Father Brown, “that what you heard
upstairs was Jameson opening the door and not
shutting it. And now let’s open the door ourselves
and go outside.”
When they stood outside in the street, under the
balcony, the little priest resumed his previous
explanation as coolly as if it had been a chemical
lecture.
“I was saying that a man may be in the mood to
look for something very distant, and not realize
that it is something very close, something very
close to himself, perhaps something very like
himself. It was a strange and outlandish thing that
you saw when you looked down at this road. I suppose
it never occurred to you to consider what he saw
when he looked up at that balcony?”
Boyle was staring at the balcony and did not
answer, and the other added:
“You thought it very wild and wonderful that an
Arab should come through civilized England with bare
feet. You did not remember that at the same moment
you had bare feet yourself.”
Boyle at last found words, and it was to repeat
words already spoken.
“Jameson opened the door,” he said mechanically.
“Yes,” assented, his friend. “Jameson opened the
door and came out into the road in his nightclothes,
just as you came out on the balcony. He caught up
two things that you had seen a hundred times: the
length of old blue curtain that he wrapped round his
head, and the Oriental musical instrument you must
have often seen in that heap of Oriental
curiosities. The rest was atmosphere and acting,
very fine acting, for he is a very fine artist in
crime.”
“Jameson!” exclaimed Boyle incredulously. “He was
such a dull old stick that I never even noticed
him.”
“Precisely,” said the priest, “he was an artist.
If he could act a wizard or a troubadour for six
minutes, do you think he could not act a clerk for
six weeks?”
“I am still not quite sure of his object,” said
Boyle.
“His object has been achieved,” replied Father
Brown, “or very nearly achieved. He had taken the
goldfish already, of course, as he had twenty
chances of doing. But if he had simply taken them,
everybody would have realized that he had twenty
chances of doing it. By creating a mysterious
magician from the end of the earth, he set
everybody’s thoughts wandering far afield to Arabia
and India, so that you yourself can hardly believe
that the whole thing was so near home. It was too
close to you to be seen.”
“If this is true,” said Boyle, “it was an
extraordinary risk to run, and he had to cut it very
fine. It’s true I never heard the man in the street
say anything while Jameson was talking from the
balcony, so I suppose that was all a fake. And I
suppose it’s true that there was time for him to get
outside before I had fully woken up and got out on
to the balcony.”
“Every crime depends on somebody not waking up
too soon,” replied Father Brown; “and in every sense
most of us wake up too late. I, for one, have woken
up much too late. For I imagine he’s bolted long
ago, just before or just after they took his
finger-prints.”
“You woke up before anybody else, anyhow,” said
Boyle, “and I should never have woken up in that
sense. Jameson was so correct and colourless that I
forgot all about him.”
“Beware of the man you forget,” replied his
friend; “he is the one man who has you entirely at a
disadvantage. But I did not suspect him, either,
until you told me how you had heard him barring the
door.”
“Anyhow, we owe it all to you,” said Boyle
warmly.
“You owe it all to Mrs. Robinson,” said Father
Brown with a smile.
“Mrs. Robinson?” questioned the wondering
secretary. “You don’t mean the housekeeper?”
“Beware of the woman you forget, and even more,”
answered the other. “This man was a very high-class
criminal; he had been an excellent actor, and
therefore he was a good psychologist. A man like the
Count never hears any voice but his own; but this
man could listen, when you had all forgotten he was
there, and gather exactly the right materials for
his romance and know exactly the right note to
strike to lead you all astray. But he made one bad
mistake in the psychology of Mrs. Robinson, the
housekeeper.”
“I don’t understand,” answered Boyle, “what she
can have to do with it.”
“Jameson did not expect the doors to be barred,”
said Father Brown. “He knew that a lot of men,
especially careless men like you and your employer,
could go on saying for days that something ought to
be done, or might as well be done. But if you convey
to a woman that something ought to be done, there is
always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do
it.”
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Chapter V. The Actor and the Alibi
Mr. Mundon Mandeville, the theatrical manager,
walked briskly through the passages behind the
scenes, or rather below the scenes. His attire was
smart and festive, perhaps a little too festive; the
flower in his buttonhole was festive; the very
varnish on his boots was festive; but his face was
not at all festive. He was a big, bull-necked,
black-browed man, and at the moment his brow was
blacker than usual. He had in any case, of course,
the hundred botherations that besiege a man in such
a position; and they ranged from large to small and
from new to old. It annoyed him to pass through the
passages where the old pantomime scenery was
stacked; because he had successfully begun his
career at that theatre with very popular pantomimes,
and had since been induced to gamble in more serious
and classical drama over which he had dropped a good
deal of money. Hence, to see the sapphire Gates of
Bluebeard’s Blue Palace, or portions of the
Enchanted Grove of Golden Orange Trees, leaning up
against the wall to be festooned with cobwebs or
nibbled by mice, did not give him that soothing
sense of a return to simplicity which we all ought
to have when given a glimpse of that wonderland of
our childhood. Nor had he any time to drop a tear
where he had dropped the money, or to dream of this
Paradise of Peter Pan; for he had been summoned
hurriedly to settle a practical problem, not of the
past but of the moment. It was the sort of thing
that does sometimes happen in that strange world
behind the scenes; but it was big enough to be
serious. Miss Maroni, the talented young actress of
Italian parentage, who had undertaken to act an
important part in the play that was to be rehearsed
that afternoon and performed that evening, had
abruptly and even violently refused at the last
moment to do anything of the kind. He had not even
seen the exasperating lady yet; and as she had
locked herself up in her dressing-room and defied
the world through the door, it seemed unlikely, for
the present, that he would. Mr. Mundon Mandeville
was sufficiently British to explain it by murmuring
that all foreigners were mad; but the thought of his
good fortune in inhabiting the only sane island of
the planet did not suffice to soothe him any more
than the memory of the Enchanted Grove. All these
things, and many more, were annoying; and yet a very
intimate observer might have suspected that
something was wrong with Mr. Mandeville that went
beyond annoyance.
If it be possible for a heavy and healthy man to
look haggard, he looked haggard. His face was full,
but his eye-sockets were hollow; his mouth twitched
as if it were always trying to bite the black strip
of moustache that was just too short to be bitten.
He might have been a man who had begun to take
drugs; but even on that assumption there was
something that suggested that he had a reason for
doing it; that the drug was not the cause of the
tragedy, but the tragedy the cause of the drug.
Whatever was his deeper secret, it seemed to inhabit
that dark end of the long passage where was the
entrance to his own little study; and as he went
along the empty corridor, he threw back a nervous
glance now and then.
However, business is business; and he made his
way to the opposite end of the passage where the
blank green door of Miss Maroni defied the world. A
group of actors and other people involved were
already standing in front of it, conferring and
considering, one might almost fancy, the
advisability of a battering-ram. The group contained
one figure, at least, who was already well enough
known; whose photograph was on many mantelpieces and
his autograph in many albums. For though Norman
Knight was playing the hero in a theatre that was
still a little provincial and old-fashioned and
capable of calling him the first walking gentleman,
he, at least, was certainly on the way to wider
triumphs. He was a good-looking man with a long
cleft chin and fair hair low on his forehead, giving
him a rather Neronian look that did not altogether
correspond to his impulsive and plunging movements.
The group also contained Ralph Randall, who
generally acted elderly character parts, and had a
humorous hatchet face, blue with shaving, and
discoloured with grease paint. It contained
Mandeville’s second walking gentleman, carrying on
the not yet wholly vanished tradition of Charles’s
Friend, a dark, curly-haired youth of somewhat
Semitic profile bearing the name of Aubrey Vernon.
It included Mr. Mundon Mandeville’s wife’s maid
or dresser, a very powerful-looking person with
tight red hair and a hard wooden face. It also,
incidentally, included Mandeville’s wife, a quiet
woman in the background, with a pale, patient face,
the lines of which had not lost a classical symmetry
and severity, but which looked all the paler because
her very eyes were pale, and her pale yellow hair
lay in two plain bands like some very archaic
Madonna. Not everybody knew that she had once been a
serious and successful actress in Ibsen and the
intellectual drama. But her husband did not think
much of problem plays; and certainly at the moment
was more interested in the problem of getting a
foreign actress out of a locked room; a new version
of the conjuring trick of the Vanishing Lady.
“Hasn’t she come out yet?” he demanded, speaking
to his wife’s business-like attendant rather than to
his wife.
“No, sir,” answered the woman — who was known as
Mrs. Sands — in a sombre manner.
“We are beginning to get a little alarmed,” said
old Randall. “She seemed quite unbalanced, and we’re
afraid she might even do herself some mischief.”
“Hell!” said Mandeville in his simple and artless
way. “Advertisement’s very good, but we don’t want
that sort of advertisement. Hasn’t she any friends
here? Has nobody any influence with her?”
“Jarvis thinks the only man who might manage her
is her own priest round the corner,” said Randall;
“and in case she does start hanging herself on a hat
peg, I really thought perhaps he’d better be here.
Jarvis has gone to fetch him … and, as a matter of
fact, here he comes.”
Two more figures appeared in that subterranean
passage under the stage: the first was Ashton
Jarvis, a jolly fellow who generally acted villains,
but who had surrendered that high vocation for the
moment to the curly-headed youth with the nose. The
other figure was short and square and clad all in
black; it was Father Brown from the church round the
corner.
Father Brown seemed to take it quite naturally
and even casually, that he should be called in to
consider the queer conduct of one of his flock,
whether she was to be regarded as a black sheep or
only as a lost lamb. But he did not seem to think
much of the suggestion of suicide.
“I suppose there was some reason for her flying
off the handle like that,” he said. “Does anybody
know what it was?”
“Dissatisfied with her part, I believe,” said the
older actor.
“They always are,” growled Mr. Mundon Mandeville.
“And I thought my wife would look after those
arrangements.”
“I can only say,” said Mrs. Mundon Mandeville
rather wearily, “that I gave her what ought to be
the best part. It’s supposed to be what stage-struck
young women want, isn’t it — to act the beautiful
young heroine and marry the beautiful young hero in
a shower of bouquets and cheers from the gallery?
Women of my age naturally have to fall back on
acting respectable matrons, and I was careful to
confine myself to that.”
“It would be devilish awkward to alter the parts
now, anyhow,” said Randall.
“It’s not to be thought of,” declared Norman
Knight firmly. “Why, I could hardly act — but anyhow
it’s much too late.”
Father Brown had slipped forward and was standing
outside the locked door listening.
“Is there no sound?” asked the manager anxiously;
and then added in a lower voice: “Do you think she
can have done herself in?”
“There is a certain sound,” replied Father Brown
calmly. “I should be inclined to deduce from the
sound that she is engaged in breaking windows or
looking-glasses, probably with her feet. No; I do
not think there is much danger of her going on to
destroy herself. Breaking looking-glasses with your
feet is a very unusual prelude to suicide. If she
had been a German, gone away to think quietly about
metaphysics and weltschmerz, I should be all for
breaking the door down. These Italians don’t really
die so easily; and are not liable to kill themselves
in a rage. Somebody else, perhaps — yes, possibly —
it might be well to take ordinary precautions if she
comes out with a leap.”
“So you’re not in favour of forcing the door?”
asked Mandeville.
“Not if you want her to act in your play,”
replied Father Brown. “If you do that, she’ll raise
the roof and refuse to stay in the place; if you
leave her alone — she’ll probably come out from mere
curiosity. If I were you, I should just leave
somebody to guard the door, more or less, and trust
to time for an hour or two.”
“In that case,” said Mandeville, “we can only get
on with rehearsing the scenes where she doesn’t
appear. My wife will arrange all that is necessary
for scenery just now. After all, the fourth act is
the main business. You had better get on with that.”
“Not a dress rehearsal,” said Mandeville’s wife
to the others.
“Very well,” said Knight, “not a dress rehearsal,
of course. I wish the dresses of the infernal period
weren’t so elaborate.”
“What is the play?” asked the priest with a touch
of curiosity.
“The School for Scandal,” said Mandeville. “It
may be literature, but I want plays. My wife likes
what she calls classical comedies. A long sight more
classic than comic.”
At this moment, the old doorkeeper known as Sam,
and the solitary inhabitant of the theatre during
off-hours, came waddling up to the manager with a
card, to say that Lady Miriam Marden wished to see
him. He turned away, but Father Brown continued to
blink steadily for a few seconds in the direction of
the manager’s wife, and saw that her wan face wore a
faint smile; not altogether a cheerful smile.
Father Brown moved off in company with the man
who had brought him in, who happened, indeed, to be
a friend and person of a similar persuasion, which
is not uncommon among actors. As he moved off,
however, he heard Mrs. Mandeville give quiet
directions to Mrs. Sands that she should take up the
post of watcher beside the closed door.
“Mrs. Mandeville seems to be an intelligent
woman,” said the priest to his companion, “though
she keeps so much in the background.”
“She was once a highly intellectual woman,” said
Jarvis sadly; “rather washed-out and wasted, some
would say, by marrying a bounder like Mandeville.
She has the very highest ideals of the drama, you
know; but, of course, it isn’t often she can get her
lord and master to look at anything in that light.
Do you know, he actually wanted a woman like that to
act as a pantomime boy? Admitted that she was a fine
actress, but said pantomimes paid better. That will
give you about a measure of his psychological
insight and sensibility. But she never complained.
As she said to me once: ‘Complaint always comes back
in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence
strengthens us.’ If only she were married to
somebody who understood her ideas she might have
been one of the great actresses of the age; indeed,
the highbrow critics still think a lot of her. As it
is, she is married to that.”
And he pointed to where the big black bulk of
Mandeville stood with his back to them, talking to
the ladies who had summoned him forth into the
vestibule. Lady Miriam was a very long and languid
and elegant lady, handsome in a recent fashion
largely modelled on Egyptian mummies; her dark hair
cut low and square, like a sort of helmet, and her
lips very painted and prominent and giving her a
permanent expression of contempt. Her companion was
a very vivacious lady with an ugly attractive face
and hair powdered with grey. She was a Miss Theresa
Talbot and she talked a great deal, while her
companion seemed too tired to talk at all. Only,
just as the two men passed. Lady Miriam summoned up
the energy to say:
“Plays are a bore; but I’ve never seen a
rehearsal in ordinary clothes. Might be a bit funny.
Somehow, nowadays, one can never find a thing one’s
never seen.”
“Now, Mr. Mandeville,” said Miss Talbot, tapping
him on the arm with animated persistence, “you
simply must let us see that rehearsal. We can’t come
to-night, and we don’t want to. We want to see all
the funny people in the wrong clothes.”
“Of course I can give you a box if you wish it,”
said Mandeville hastily. “Perhaps your ladyship
would come this way.” And he led them off down
another corridor.
“I wonder,” said Jarvis in a meditative manner,
“whether even Mandeville prefers that sort of
woman.”
“Well,” asked his clerical companion, “have you
any reason to suppose that Mandeville does prefer
her?”
Jarvis looked at him steadily for an instant
before answering.
“Mandeville is a mystery,” he said gravely. “Oh,
yes, I know that he looks about as commonplace a cad
as ever walked down Piccadilly. But he really is a
mystery for all that. There’s something on his
conscience. There’s a shadow in his life. And I
doubt whether it has anything more to do with a few
fashionable flirtations than it has with his poor
neglected wife. If it has, there’s something more in
them than meets the eye. As a matter of fact, I
happen to know rather more about it than anyone else
does, merely by accident. But even I can’t make
anything of what I know, except a mystery.”
He looked around him in the vestibule to see that
they were alone and then added, lowering his voice:
“I don’t mind telling you, because I know you are
a tower of silence where secrets are concerned. But
I had a curious shock the other day; and it has been
repeated several times since. You know that
Mandeville always works in that little room at the
end of the passage, just under the stage. Well,
twice over I happened to pass by there when everyone
thought he was alone; and what’s more, when I myself
happened to be able to account for all the women in
the company, and all the women likely to have to do
with him, being absent or at their usual posts.”
“All the women?” remarked Father Brown
inquiringly.
“There was a woman with him,” said Jarvis almost
in a whisper. “There is some woman who is always
visiting him; somebody that none of us knows. I
don’t even know how she comes there, since it isn’t
down the passage to the door; but I think I once saw
a veiled or cloaked figure passing out into the
twilight at the back of the theatre, like a ghost.
But she can’t be a ghost. And I don’t believe she’s
even an ordinary ‘affair’. I don’t think it’s
love-making. I think it’s blackmail.”
“What makes you think that?” asked the other.
“Because,” said Jarvis, his face turning from
grave to grim, “I once heard sounds like a quarrel;
and then the strange woman said in a metallic,
menacing voice, four words: ‘I am your wife.’”
“You think he’s a bigamist,” said Father Brown
reflectively. “Well, bigamy and blackmail often go
together, of course. But she may be bluffing as well
as blackmailing. She may be mad. These theatrical
people often have monomaniacs running after them.
You may be right, but I shouldn’t jump to
conclusions. . . . And talking about theatrical
people, isn’t the rehearsal going to begin, and
aren’t you a theatrical person?”
“I’m not on in this scene,” said Jarvis with a
smile. “They’re only doing one act, you know, until
your Italian friend comes to her senses.”
“Talking about my Italian friend,” observed the
priest, “I should rather like to know whether she
has come to her senses.”
“We can go back and see, if you like,” said
Jarvis; and they descended again to the basement and
the long passage, at one end of which was
Mandeville’s study and at the other the closed door
of Signora Maroni. The door seemed to be still
closed; and Mrs. Sands sat grimly outside it, as
motionless as a wooden idol.
Near the other end of the passage they caught a
glimpse of some of the other actors in the scene
mounting the stairs to the stage just above. Vernon
and old Randall went ahead, running rapidly up the
stairs; but Mrs. Mandeville went more slowly, in her
quietly dignified fashion, and Norman Knight seemed
to linger a little to speak to her. A few words fell
on the ears of the unintentional eavesdroppers as
they passed.
“I tell you a woman visits him,” Knight was
saying violently.
“Hush!” said the lady in her voice of silver that
still had in it something of steel. “You must not
talk like this. Remember, he is my husband.”
“I wish to God I could forget it,” said Knight,
and rushed up the stairs to the stage.
The lady followed him, still pale and calm, to
take up her own position there.
“Somebody else knows it,” said the priest
quietly; “but I doubt whether it is any business of
ours.”
“Yes,” muttered Jarvis; “it seems as if everybody
knows it and nobody knows anything about it.”
They proceeded along the passage to the other
end, where the rigid attendant sat outside the
Italian’s door.
“No; she ain’t come out yet,” said the woman in
her sullen way; “and she ain’t dead, for I heard her
moving about now and then. I dunno what tricks she’s
up to.”
“Do you happen to know, ma’am,” said Father Brown
with abrupt politeness, “where Mr. Mandeville is
just now?”
“Yes,” she replied promptly. “Saw him go into his
little room at the end of the passage a minute or
two ago; just before the prompter called and the
curtain went up — Must be there still, for I ain’t
seen him come out.”
“There’s no other door to his office, you mean,”
said Father Brown in an off-hand way. “Well, I
suppose the rehearsal’s going in full swing now, for
all the Signora’s sulking.”
“Yes,” said Jarvis after a moment’s silence; “I
can just hear the voices on the stage from here. Old
Randall has a splendid carrying voice.”
They both remained for an instant in a listening
attitude, so that the booming voice of the actor on
the stage could indeed be heard rolling faintly down
the stairs and along the passage. Before they had
spoken again or resumed their normal poise, their
ears were filled with another sound. It was a dull
but heavy crash and it came from behind the closed
door of Mundon Mandeville’s private room.
Father Brown went racing along the passage like
an arrow from the bow and was struggling with the
door-handle before Jarvis had wakened with a start
and begun to follow him.
“The door is locked,” said the priest, turning a
face that was a little pale. “And I am all in favour
of breaking down this door.”
“Do you mean,” asked Jarvis with a rather ghastly
look, “that the unknown visitor has got in here
again? Do you think it’s anything serious?” After a
moment he added: “I may be able to push back the
bolt; I know the fastening on these doors.”
He knelt down and pulled out a pocket-knife with
a long steel implement, manipulated it for a moment,
and the door swung open on the manager’s study.
Almost the first thing they noticed was that there
was no other door and even no window, but a great
electric lamp stood on the table. But it was not
quite the first thing that they noticed; for even
before that they had seen that Mandeville was lying
flat on his face in the middle of the room and the
blood was crawling out from under his fallen face
like a pattern of scarlet snakes that glittered
evilly in that unnatural subterranean light.
They did not know how long they had been staring
at each other when Jarvis said, like one letting
loose something that he had held back with his
breath:
“If the stranger got in somehow, she has gone
somehow.”
“Perhaps we think too much about the stranger,”
said Father Brown. “There are so many strange things
in this strange theatre that you rather tend to
forget some of them.”
“Why, which things do you mean?” asked his friend
quickly.
“There are many,” said the priest. “There is the
other locked door, for instance.”
“But the other door is locked,” cried Jarvis
staring.
“But you forgot it all the same,” said Father
Brown. A few moments afterwards he said
thoughtfully: “That Mrs. Sands is a grumpy and
gloomy sort of card.”
“Do you mean,” asked the other in a lowered
voice, “that she’s lying and the Italian did come
out?”
“No,” said the priest calmly; “I think I meant it
more or less as a detached study of character.”
“You can’t mean,” cried the actor, “that Mrs.
Sands did it herself?”
“I didn’t mean a study of her character,” said
Father Brown.
While they had been exchanging these abrupt
reflections, Father Brown had knelt down by the body
and ascertained that it was beyond any hope or
question a dead body. Lying beside it, though not
immediately visible from the doorway, was a dagger
of the theatrical sort; lying as if it had fallen
from the wound or from the hand of the assassin.
According to Jarvis, who recognized the instrument,
there was not very much to be learned from it,
unless the experts could find some finger-prints. It
was a property dagger; that is, it was nobody’s
property; it had been kicking about the theatre for
a long time, and anybody might have picked it up.
Then the priest rose and looked gravely round the
room.
“We must send for the police,” he said; “and for
a doctor, though the doctor comes too late. Looking
at this room, by the way, I don’t see how our
Italian friend could manage it.”
“The Italian!” cried his friend; “I should think
not. I should have thought she had an alibi, if
anybody had. Two separate rooms, both locked, at
opposite ends of a long passage, with a fixed
witness watching it.”
“No,” said Father Brown. “Not quite. The
difficulty is how she could have got in this end. I
think she might have got out the other end.”
“And why?” asked the other.
“I told you,” said Father Brown, “that it sounded
as if she was breaking glass — mirrors or windows.
Stupidly enough I forgot something I knew quite
well; that she is pretty superstitious. She wouldn’t
be likely to break a mirror; so I suspect she broke
a window. It’s true that all this is under the
ground floor; but it might be a skylight or a window
opening on an area. But there don’t seem to be any
skylights or areas here.” And he stared at the
ceiling very intently for a considerable time.
Suddenly he came back to conscious life again
with a start. “We must go upstairs and telephone and
tell everybody. It is pretty painful ... My God, can
you hear those actors still shouting and ranting
upstairs? The play is still going on. I suppose
that’s what they mean by tragic irony.”
When it was fated that the theatre should be
turned into a house of mourning, an opportunity was
given to the actors to show many of the real virtues
of their type and trade. They did, as the phrase
goes, behave like gentlemen; and not only like first
walking gentlemen. They had not all of them liked or
trusted Mandeville, but they knew exactly the right
things to say about him; they showed not only
sympathy but delicacy in their attitude to his
widow. She had become, in a new and very different
sense, a tragedy queen — her lightest word was law
and while she moved about slowly and sadly, they ran
her many errands.
“She was always a strong character,” said old
Randall rather huskily; “and had the best brains of
any of us. Of course poor Mandeville was never on
her level in education and so on; but she always did
her duty splendidly. It was quite pathetic the way
she would sometimes say she wished she had more
intellectual life; but Mandeville — well, nil nisi
bonum, as they say.” And the old gentleman went away
wagging his head sadly.
“Nil nisi bonum indeed,” said Jarvis grimly. “I
don’t think Randall at any rate has heard of the
story of the strange lady visitor. By the way, don’t
you think it probably was the strange woman?”
“It depends,” said the priest, “whom you mean by
the strange woman.”
“Oh! I don’t mean the Italian woman,” said Jarvis
hastily. “Though, as a matter of fact, you were
quite right about her, too. When they went in the
skylight was smashed and the room was empty; but so
far as the police can discover, she simply went home
in the most harmless fashion. No, I mean the woman
who was heard threatening him at that secret
meeting; the woman who said she was his wife. Do you
think she really was his wife?”
“It is possible,” said Father Brown, staring
blankly into the void, “that she really was his
wife.”
“That would give us the motive of jealousy over
his bigamous remarriage,” reflected Jarvis, “for the
body was not robbed in any way. No need to poke
about for thieving servants or even impecunious
actors. But as for that, of course, you’ve noticed
the outstanding and peculiar thing about the case?”
“I have noticed several peculiar things,” said
Father Brown. “Which one do you mean?”
“I mean the corporate alibi,” said Jarvis
gravely. “It’s not often that practically a whole
company has a public alibi like that; an alibi on a
lighted stage and all witnessing to each other. As
it turns out it is jolly lucky for our friends here
that poor Mandeville did put those two silly society
women in the box to watch the rehearsal. They can
bear witness that the whole act was performed
without a hitch, with the characters on the stage
all the time. They began long before Mandeville was
last seen going into his room. They went on at least
five or ten minutes after you and I found his dead
body. And, by a lucky coincidence, the moment we
actually heard him fall was during the time when all
the characters were on the stage together.”
“Yes, that is certainly very important and
simplifies everything,” agreed Father Brown. “Let us
count the people covered by the alibi. There was
Randall: I rather fancy Randall practically hated
the manager, though he is very properly covering his
feelings just now. But he is ruled out; it was his
voice we heard thundering over our heads from the
stage. There is our jeune premier, Mr. Knight: I
have rather good reason to suppose he was in love
with Mandeville’s wife and not concealing that
sentiment so much as he might; but he is out of it,
for he was on the stage at the same time, being
thundered at. There was that amiable Jew who calls
himself Aubrey Vernon, he’s out of it; and there’s
Mrs. Mandeville, she’s out of it. Their corporate
alibi, as you say, depends chiefly on Lady Miriam
and her friend in the box; though there is the
general common-sense corroboration that the act had
to be gone through and the routine of the theatre
seems to have suffered no interruption. The legal
witnesses, however, are Lady Miriam and her friend,
Miss Talbot. I suppose you feel sure they are all
right?”
“Lady Miriam?” said Jarvis in surprise. “Oh, yes.
... I suppose you mean that she looks a queer sort
of vamp. But you’ve no notion what even the ladies
of the best families are looking like nowadays.
Besides, is there any particular reason for doubting
their evidence?”
“Only that it brings us up against a blank wall,”
said Father Brown. “Don’t you see that this
collective alibi practically covers everybody? Those
four were the only performers in the theatre at the
time; and there were scarcely any servants in the
theatre; none indeed, except old Sam, who guards the
only regular entrance, and the woman who guarded
Miss Maroni’s door. There is nobody else left
available but you and me. We certainly might be
accused of the crime, especially as we found the
body. There seems nobody else who can be accused.
You didn’t happen to kill him when I wasn’t looking,
I suppose?”
Jarvis looked up with a slight start and stared a
moment, then the broad grin returned to his swarthy
face. He shook his head.
“You didn’t do it,” said Father Brown; “and we
will assume for the moment, merely for the sake of
argument, that I didn’t do it. The people on the
stage being out of it, it really leaves the Signora
behind her locked door, the sentinel in front of her
door, and old Sam. Or are you thinking of the two
ladies in the box? Of course they might have slipped
out of the box.”
“No,” said Jarvis; “I am thinking of the unknown
woman who came and told Mandeville she was his
wife.”
“Perhaps she was,” said the priest; and this time
there was a note in his steady voice that made his
companion start to his feet once more and lean
across the table.
“We said,” he observed in a low, eager voice,
“that this first wife might have been jealous of the
other wife.”
“No,” said Father Brown; “she might have been
jealous of the Italian girl, perhaps, or of Lady
Miriam Marden. But she was not jealous of the other
wife.”
“And why not?”
“Because there was no other wife,” said Father
Brown. “So far from being a bigamist, Mr. Mandeville
seems to me to have been a highly monogamous person.
His wife was almost too much with him; so much with
him that you all charitably suppose that she must be
somebody else. But I don’t see how she could have
been with him when he was killed, for we agree that
she was acting all the time in front of the
footlights. Acting an important part, too. ...”
“Do you really mean,” cried Jarvis, “that the
strange woman who haunted him like a ghost was only
the Mrs. Mandeville we know?” But he received no
answer; for Father Brown was staring into vacancy
with a blank expression almost like an idiot’s. He
always did look most idiotic at the instant when he
was most intelligent.
The next moment he scrambled to his feet, looking
very harassed and distressed. “This is awful,” he
said. “I’m not sure it isn’t the worst business I
ever had; but I’ve got to go through with it. Would
you go and ask Mrs. Mandeville if I may speak to her
in private?”
“Oh, certainly,” said Jarvis, as he turned
towards the door. “But what’s the matter with you?”
“Only being a born fool,” said Father Brown; “a
very common complaint in this vale of tears. I was
fool enough to forget altogether that the play was
The School For Scandal.”
He walked restlessly up and down the room until
Jarvis re-appeared at the door with an altered and
even alarmed face.
“I can’t find her anywhere,” he said. “Nobody
seems to have seen her.”
“They haven’t seen Norman Knight either, have
they?” asked Father Brown dryly. “Well, it saves me
the most painful interview of my life. Saving the
grace of God, I was very nearly frightened of that
woman. But she was frightened of me, too; frightened
of something I’d seen or said. Knight was always
begging her to bolt with him. Now she’s done it; and
I’m devilish sorry for him.”
“For him?” inquired Jarvis.
“Well, it can’t be very nice to elope with a
murderess,” said the other dispassionately. “But as
a matter of fact she was something very much worse
than a murderess.”
“And what is that?”
“An egoist,” said Father Brown. “She was the sort
of person who had looked in the mirror before
looking out of the window, and it is the worst
calamity of mortal life. The looking-glass was
unlucky for her, all right; but rather because it
wasn’t broken.”
“I can’t understand what all this means,” said
Jarvis. “Everybody regarded her as a person of the
most exalted ideals, almost moving on a higher
spiritual plane than the rest of us. ...”
“She regarded herself in that light,” said the
other; “and she knew how to hypnotize everybody else
into it. Perhaps I hadn’t known her long enough to
be wrong about her. But I knew the sort of person
she was five minutes after I clapped eyes on her.”
“Oh, come.” cried Jarvis; “I’m sure her behaviour
about the Italian was beautiful.”
“Her behaviour always was beautiful,” said the
other. “I’ve heard from everybody here all about her
refinements and subtleties and spiritual soarings
above poor Mandeville’s head. But all these
spiritualities and subtleties seem to me to boil
themselves down to the simple fact that she
certainly was a lady and he most certainly was not a
gentleman. But, do you know, I have never felt quite
sure that St. Peter will make that the only test at
the gate of heaven.
“As for the rest,” he went on with increasing
animation, “I knew from the very first words she
said that she was not really being fair to the poor
Italian, with all her fine airs of frigid
magnanimity. And again, I realized it when I knew
that the play was The School for Scandal.’
“You are going rather too fast for me,” said
Jarvis in some bewilderment. “What does it matter
what the play was?”
“Well,” said the priest, “she said she had given
the girl the part of the beautiful heroine and had
retired into the background herself with the older
part of a matron. Now that might have applied to
almost any play; but it falsifies the facts about
that particular play. She can only have meant that
she gave the other actress the part of Maria, which
is hardly a part at all. And the part of the obscure
and self-effacing married woman, if you please, must
have been the part of Lady Teazle, which is the only
part any actress wants to act. If the Italian was a
first-rate actress who had been promised a
first-rate part, there was really some excuse, or at
least some cause, for her mad Italian rage. There
generally is for mad Italian rages: Latins are
logical and have a reason for going mad. But that
one little thing let in daylight for me on the
meaning of her magnanimity. And there was another
thing, even then. You laughed when I said that the
sulky look of Mrs. Sands was a study in character;
but not in the character of Mrs. Sands. But it was
true. If you want to know what a lady is really
like, don’t look at her; for she may be too clever
for you. Don’t look at the men round her, for they
may be too silly about her. But look at some other
woman who is always near to her, and especially one
who is under her. You will see in that mirror her
real face, and the face mirrored in Mrs. Sands was
very ugly.
“And as for all the other impressions, what were
they? I heard a lot about the unworthiness of poor
old Mandeville; but it was all about his being
unworthy other, and I am pretty certain it came
indirectly from her. And, even so, it betrayed
itself. Obviously, from what every man said, she had
confided in every man about her confounded
intellectual loneliness. You yourself said she never
complained; and then quoted her about how her
uncomplaining silence strengthened her soul. And
that is just the note; that’s the unmistakable
style. People who complain are just jolly, human
Christian nuisances; I don’t mind them. But people
who complain that they never complain are the devil.
They are really the devil; isn’t that swagger of
stoicism the whole point of the Byronic cult of
Satan? I heard all this; but for the life of me I
couldn’t hear of anything tangible she had to
complain of. Nobody pretended that her husband
drank, or beat her, or left her without money, or
even was unfaithful, until the rumour about the
secret meetings, which were simply her own
melodramatic habit of pestering him with
curtain-lectures in his own business office. And
when one looked at the facts, apart from the
atmospheric impression of martyrdom she contrived to
spread, the facts were really quite the other way.
Mandeville left off making money on pantomimes to
please her; he started losing money on classical
drama to please her. She arranged the scenery and
furniture as she liked. She wanted Sheridan’s play
and she had it; she wanted the part of Lady Teazle
and she had it; she wanted a rehearsal without
costume at that particular hour and she had it. It
may be worth remarking on the curious fact that she
wanted that.”
“But what is the use of all this tirade?” asked
the actor, who had hardly ever heard his clerical
friend, make so long a speech before. “We seem to
have got a long way from the murder in all this
psychological business. She may have eloped with
Knight; she may have bamboozled Randall; she may
have bamboozled me. But she can’t have murdered her
husband — for everyone agrees she was on the stage
through the whole scene. She may be wicked; but she
isn’t a witch.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Father Brown,
with a smile. “But she didn’t need to use any
witchcraft in this case. I know now that she did it,
and very simply indeed.”
“Why are you so sure of that?” asked Jarvis,
looking at him in a puzzled way.
“Because the play was The School for Scandal,”
replied Father Brown, “and that particular act of
The School for Scandal. I should like to remind you,
as I said just now, that she always arranged the
furniture how she liked. I should also like to
remind you that this stage was built and used for
pantomimes; it would naturally have trap-doors and
trick exits of that sort. And when you say that
witnesses could attest to having seen all the
performers on the stage, I should like to remind you
that in the principal scene of The School for
Scandal one of the principal performers remains for
a considerable time on the stage, but is not seen.
She is technically ‘on,’ but she might practically
be very much ‘off.’ That is the Screen of Lady
Teazle and the Alibi of Mrs. Mandeville.”
There was a silence and then the actor said: “You
think she slipped through a trap-door behind a
screen down to the floor below, where the manager’s
room was?”
“She certainly slipped away in some fashion; and
that is the most probable fashion,” said the other.
“I think it all the more probable because she took
the opportunity of an undress rehearsal, and even
indeed arranged for one. It is a guess; but I fancy
if it had been a dress rehearsal it might have been
more difficult to get through a trap-door in the
hoops of the eighteenth century. There are many
little difficulties, of course, but I think they
could all be met in time and in turn.”
“What I can’t meet is the big difficulty,” said
Jarvis, putting his head on his hand with a sort of
groan. “I simply can’t bring myself to believe that
a radiant and serene creature like that could so
lose, so to speak, her bodily balance, to say
nothing of her moral balance. Was any motive strong
enough? Was she very much in love with Knight?”
“I hope so,” replied his companion; “for really
it would be the most human excuse. But I’m sorry to
say that I have my doubts. She wanted to get rid of
her husband, who was an old-fashioned, provincial
hack, not even making much money. She wanted to have
a career as the brilliant wife of a brilliant and
rapidly-rising actor. But she didn’t want in that
sense to act in The School for Scandal. She wouldn’t
have run away with a man except in the last resort.
It wasn’t a human passion with her, but a sort of
hellish respectability. She was always dogging her
husband in secret and badgering him to divorce
himself or otherwise get out of the way; and as he
refused he paid at last for his refusal. There’s
another thing you’ve got to remember. You talk about
these highbrows having a higher art and a more
philosophical drama. But remember what a lot of the
philosophy is! Remember what sort of conduct those
highbrows often present to the highest! All about
the Will to Power and the Right to Live and the
Right to Experience — damned nonsense and more than
damned nonsense — nonsense that can damn.”
Father Brown frowned, which he did very rarely;
and there was still a cloud on his brow as he put on
his hat and went out into the night.
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Chapter VI. The Vanishing of Vaudrey
Sir Arthur Vaudrey, in his light-grey summer
suit, and wearing on his grey head the white hat
which he so boldly affected, went walking briskly up
the road by the river from his own house to the
little group of houses that were almost like
outhouses to his own, entered that little hamlet,
and then vanished completely as if he had been
carried away by the fairies.
The disappearance seemed the more absolute and
abrupt because of the familiarity of the scene and
the extreme simplicity of the conditions of the
problem. The hamlet could not be called a village;
indeed, it was little more than a small and
strangely-isolated street. It stood in the middle of
wide and open fields and plains, a mere string of
the four or five shops absolutely needed by the
neighbours; that is, by a few farmers and the family
at the great house. There was a butcher’s at the
corner, at which, it appeared, Sir Arthur had last
been seen. He was seen by two young men staying at
his house — Evan Smith, who was acting as his
secretary, and John Dalmon, who was generally
supposed to be engaged to his ward. There was next
to the butcher’s a small shop combining a large
number of functions, such as is found in villages,
in which a little old woman sold sweets,
walking-sticks, golf-balls, gum, balls of string and
a very faded sort of stationery. Beyond this was the
tobacconist, to which the two young men were
betaking themselves when they last caught a glimpse
of their host standing in front of the butcher’s
shop; and beyond that was a dingy little
dressmaker’s, kept by two ladies. A pale and shiny
shop, offering to the passer-by great goblets of
very wan, green lemonade, completed the block of
buildings; for the only real and Christian inn in
the neighbourhood stood by itself some way, down the
main road. Between the inn and the hamlet was a
cross-roads, at which stood a policeman and a
uniformed official of a motoring club; and both
agreed that Sir Arthur had never passed that point
on the road.
It had been at an early hour of a very brilliant
summer day that the old gentleman had gone gaily
striding up the road, swinging his walking-stick and
flapping his yellow gloves. He was a good deal of a
dandy, but one of a vigorous and virile sort,
especially for his age. His bodily strength and
activity were still very remarkable, and his curly
hair might have been a yellow so pale as to look
white instead of a white that was a faded yellow.
His clean-shaven face was handsome, with a
high-bridged nose like the Duke of Wellington’s; but
the most outstanding features were his eyes. They
were not merely metaphorically outstanding;
something prominent and almost bulging about them
was perhaps the only disproportion in his features;
but his lips were sensitive and set a little
tightly, as if by an act of will. He was the squire
of all that country and the owner of the little
hamlet. In that sort of place everybody not only
knows everybody else, but generally knows where
anybody is at any given moment. The normal course
would have been for Sir Arthur to walk to the
village, to say whatever he wanted to say to the
butcher or anybody else, and then walk back to his
house again, all in the course of about half an
hour: as the two young men did when they had bought
their cigarettes. But they saw nobody on the road
returning; indeed, there was nobody in sight except
the one other guest at the house, a certain Dr.
Abbott, who was sitting with his broad back to them
on the river bank, very patiently fishing.
When all the three guests returned to breakfast,
they seemed to think little or nothing of the
continued absence of the squire; but when the day
wore on and he missed one meal after another, they
naturally began to be puzzled, and Sybil Rye, the
lady of the household, began to be seriously
alarmed. Expeditions of discovery were dispatched to
the village again and again without finding any
trace; and eventually, when darkness fell, the house
was full of a definite fear. Sybil had sent for
Father Brown, who was a friend of hers and had
helped her out of a difficulty in the past; and
under the pressure of the apparent peril he had
consented to remain at the house and see it through.
Thus it happened that when the new day’s dawn
broke without news, Father Brown was early afoot and
on the look-out for anything; his black, stumpy
figure could be seen pacing the garden path where
the garden was embanked along the river, as he
scanned the landscape up and down with his
short-sighted and rather misty gaze.
He realized that another figure was moving even
more restlessly along the embankment, and saluted
Evan Smith, the secretary, by name.
Evan Smith was a tall, fair-haired young man,
looking rather harassed, as was perhaps natural in
that hour of distraction. But something of the sort
hung about him at all times. Perhaps it was more
marked because he had the sort of athletic reach and
poise and the sort of leonine yellow hair and
moustache which accompany (always in fiction and
sometimes in fact) a frank and cheerful demeanour of
“English youth.” As in his case they accompanied
deep and cavernous eyes and a rather haggard look,
the contrast with the conventional tall figure and
fair hair of romance may have had a touch of
something sinister. But Father Brown smiled at him
amiably enough and then said more seriously:
“This is a trying business.”
“It’s a very trying business for Miss Rye,”
answered the young man gloomily; “and I don’t see
why I should disguise what’s the worst part of it
for me, even if she is engaged to Dalmon. Shocked, I
suppose?”
Father Brown did not look very much shocked, but
his face was often rather expressionless; he merely
said, mildly:
“Naturally, we all sympathize with her anxiety. I
suppose you haven’t any news or views in the
matter?”
“I haven’t any news exactly.” answered Smith; “no
news from outside at least. As for views. ...” And
he relapsed into moody silence.
“I should be very glad to hear your views,” said
the little priest pleasantly. “I hope you don’t mind
my saying that you seem to have something on your
mind.”
The young man stirred rather than started and
looked at the priest steadily, with a frown that
threw his hollow eyes into dense shadow.
“Well, you’re right enough,” he said at last. “I
suppose I shall have to tell somebody. And you seem
a safe sort of person to tell.”
“Do you know what has happened to Sir Arthur?”
asked Father Brown calmly, as if it were the most
casual matter in the world.
“Yes,” said the secretary harshly, “I think I
know what has happened to Sir Arthur.”
“A beautiful morning,” said a bland voice in his
ear; “a beautiful morning for a rather melancholy
meeting.”
This time the secretary jumped as if he had been
shot, as the large shadow of Dr. Abbott fell across
his path in the already strong sunshine. Dr. Abbott
was still in his dressing-gown — a sumptuous
oriental dressing-gown covered with coloured flowers
and dragons, looking rather like one of the most
brilliant flower-beds that were growing under the
glowing sun. He also wore large, flat slippers,
which was doubtless why he had come so close to the
others without being heard. He would normally have
seemed the last person for such a light and airy
approach, for he was a very big, broad and heavy
man, with a powerful benevolent face very much
sunburnt, in a frame of old-fashioned grey whiskers
and chin beard, which hung about him luxuriantly,
like the long, grey curls of his venerable head. His
long slits of eyes were rather sleepy and, indeed,
he was an elderly gentleman to be up so early; but
he had a look at once robust and weatherbeaten, as
of an old farmer or sea captain who had once been
out in all weathers. He was the only old comrade and
contemporary of the squire in the company that met
at the house.
“It seems truly extraordinary,” he said, shaking
his head. “Those little houses are like dolls’
houses, always open front and back, and there’s
hardly room to hide anybody, even if they wanted to
hide him. And I’m sure they don’t. Dalmon and I
cross-examined them all yesterday; they’re mostly
little old women that couldn’t hurt a fly. The men
are nearly all away harvesting, except the butcher;
and Arthur was seen coming out of the butcher’s. And
nothing could have happened along that stretch by
the river, for I was fishing there all day.”
Then he looked at Smith and the look in his long
eyes seemed for the moment not only sleepy, but a
little sly.
“I think you and Dalmon can testify,” he said,
“that you saw me sitting there through your whole
journey there and back.”
“Yes,” said Evan Smith shortly, and seemed rather
impatient at the long interruption.
“The only thing I can think of,” went on Dr.
Abbott slowly; and then the interruption was itself
interrupted. A figure at once light and sturdy
strode very rapidly across the green lawn between
the gay flowerbeds, and John Dalmon appeared among
them, holding a paper in his hand. He was neatly
dressed and rather swarthy, with a very fine square
Napoleonic face and very sad eyes — eyes so sad that
they looked almost dead. He seemed to be still
young, but his black hair had gone prematurely grey
about the temples.
“I’ve just had this telegram from the police,” he
said “I wired to them last night and they say
they’re sending down a man at once. Do you know, Dr.
Abbott, of anybody else we ought to send for?
Relations, I mean, and that sort of thing.”
“There is his nephew, Vernon Vaudrey, of course,”
said the old man. “If you will come with me, I think
I can give you his address and — and tell you
something rather special about him.”
Dr. Abbott and Dalmon moved away in the direction
of the house and, when they had gone a certain
distance, Father Brown said simply, as if there had
been no interruption:
“You were saying?”
“You’re a cool hand,” said the secretary. “I
suppose it comes of hearing confessions. I feel
rather as if I were going to make a confession. Some
people would feel a bit jolted out of the mood of
confidence by that queer old elephant creeping up
like a snake. But I suppose I’d better stick to it,
though it really isn’t my confession, but somebody
else’s.” He stopped a moment, frowning and pulling
his moustache; then he said, abruptly:
“I believe Sir Arthur has bolted, and I believe I
know why.”
There was a silence and then he exploded again.
“I’m in a damnable position, and most people
would say I was doing a damnable thing. I am now
going to appear in the character of a sneak and a
skunk and I believe I am doing my duty.”
“You must be the judge,” said Father Brown
gravely. “What is the matter with your duty?”
“I’m in the perfectly foul position of telling
tales against a rival, and a successful rival, too,”
said the young man bitterly; “and I don’t know what
else in the world I can do. You were asking what was
the explanation of Vaudrey’s disappearance. I am
absolutely convinced that Dalmon is the
explanation.”
“You mean,” said the priest, with composure,
“that Dalmon has killed Sir Arthur?”
“No!” exploded Smith, with startling violence.
“No, a hundred times! He hasn’t done that, whatever
else he’s done. He isn’t a murderer, whatever else
he is. He has the best of all alibis; the evidence
of a man who hates him. I’m not likely to perjure
myself for love of Dalmon; and I could swear in any
court he did nothing to the old man yesterday.
Dalmon and I were together all day, or all that part
of the day, and he did nothing in the village except
buy cigarettes, and nothing here except smoke them
and read in the library. No; I believe he is a
criminal, but he did not kill Vaudrey. I might even
say more; because he is a criminal he did not kill
Vaudrey.”
“Yes,” said the other patiently, “and what does
that mean?”
“It means,” replied the secretary, “that he is a
criminal committing another crime: and his crime
depends on keeping Vaudrey alive.”
“Oh, I see,” said Father Brown.
“I know Sybil Rye pretty well, and her character
is a great part of this story. It is a very fine
character in both senses: that is, it is of a noble
quality and only too delicate a texture. She is one
of those people who are terribly conscientious,
without any of that armour of habit and hard common
sense that many conscientious people get. She is
almost insanely sensitive and at the same time quite
unselfish. Her history is curious: she was left
literally penniless like a foundling and Sir Arthur
took her into his house and treated her with
consideration, which puzzled many; for, without
being hard on the old man, it was not much in his
line. But, when she was about seventeen, the
explanation came to her with a shock; for her
guardian asked her to marry him. Now I come to the
curious part of the story. Somehow or other, Sybil
had heard from somebody (I rather suspect from old
Abbott) that Sir Arthur Vaudrey, in his wilder
youth, had committed some crime or, at least, done
some great wrong to somebody, which had got him into
serious trouble. I don’t know what it was. But it
was a sort of nightmare to the girl at her crude
sentimental age, and made him seem like a monster,
at least too much so for the close relation of
marriage. What she did was incredibly typical of
her. With helpless terror and with heroic courage
she told him the truth with her own trembling lips.
She admitted that her repulsion might be morbid; she
confessed it like a secret madness. To her relief
and surprise he took it quietly and courteously, and
apparently said no more on the subject; and her
sense of his generosity was greatly increased by the
next stage of the story. There came into her lonely
life the influence of an equally lonely man. He was
camping-out like a sort of hermit on one of the
islands in the river; and I suppose the mystery made
him attractive, though I admit he is attractive
enough; a gentleman, and quite witty, though very
melancholy — which, I suppose, increased the
romance. It was this man, Dalmon, of course; and to
this day I’m not sure how far she really accepted
him; but it got as far as his getting permission to
see her guardian. I can fancy her awaiting that
interview in an agony of terror and wondering how
the old beau would take the appearance of a rival.
But here, again, she found she had apparently done
him an injustice. He received the younger man with
hearty hospitality and seemed to be delighted with
the prospects of the young couple. He and Dalmon
went shooting and fishing together and were the best
of friends, when one day she had another shock.
Dalmon let slip in conversation some chance phrase
that the old man ‘had not changed much in thirty
years,’ and the truth about the odd intimacy burst
upon her. All that introduction and hospitality had
been a masquerade; the men had obviously known each
other before. That was why the younger man had come
down rather covertly to that district. That was why
the elder man was lending himself so readily to
promote the match. I wonder what you are thinking?”
“I know what you are thinking,” said Father
Brown, with a smile, “and it seems entirely logical.
Here we have Vaudrey, with some ugly story in his
past — a mysterious stranger come to haunt him, and
getting whatever he wants out of him. In plain
words, you think Dalmon is a blackmailer.”
“I do,” said the other; “and a rotten thing to
think, too.”
Father Brown reflected for a moment and then
said: “I think I should like to go up to the house
now and have a talk to Dr. Abbott.”
When he came out of the house again an hour or
two afterwards, he may have been talking to Dr.
Abbott, but he emerged in company with Sybil Rye, a
pale girl with reddish hair and a profile delicate
and almost tremulous; at the sight of her, one could
instantly understand all the secretary’s story of
her shuddering candour. It recalled Godiva and
certain tales of virgin martyrs; only the shy can be
so shameless for conscience’s sake. Smith came
forward to meet them, and for a moment they stood
talking on the lawn. The day which had been
brilliant from daybreak was now glowing and even
glaring; but Father Brown carried his black bundle
of an umbrella as well as wearing his black umbrella
of a hat; and seemed, in a general way, buttoned up
to breast the storm. But perhaps it was only an
unconscious effect of attitude; and perhaps the
storm was not a material storm.
“What I hate about it all,” Sybil was saying in a
low voice, “is the talk that’s beginning already;
suspicions against everybody. John and Evan can
answer for each other, I suppose; but Dr. Abbott has
had an awful scene with the butcher, who thinks he
is accused and is throwing accusations about in
consequence.”
Evan Smith looked very uncomfortable; then
blurted out: “Look here, Sybil, I can’t say much,
but we don’t believe there’s any need for all that.
It’s all very beastly, but we don’t think there’s
been — any violence.”
“Have you got a theory, then?” said the girl,
looking instantly at the priest.
“I have heard a theory,” he replied, “which seems
to me very convincing.”
He stood looking rather dreamily towards the
river; and Smith and Sybil began to talk to each
other swiftly, in lowered tones. The priest drifted
along the river bank, ruminating, and plunged into a
plantation of thin trees on an almost overhanging
bank. The strong sun beat on the thin veil of little
dancing leaves like small green flames, and all the
birds were singing as if the tree had a hundred
tongues. A minute or two later, Evan Smith heard his
own name called cautiously and yet clearly from the
green depths of the thicket. He stepped rapidly in
that direction and met Father Brown returning. The
priest said to him, in a very low voice:
“Don’t let the lady come down here. Can’t you get
rid of her? Ask her to telephone or something; and
then come back here again.”
Evan Smith turned with a rather desperate
appearance of carelessness and approached the girl;
but she was not the sort of person whom it is hard
to make busy with small jobs for others. In a very
short time she had vanished into the house and Smith
turned to find that Father Brown had once more
vanished into the thicket. Just beyond the clump of
trees was a sort of small chasm where the turf had
subsided to the level of the sand by the river.
Father Brown was standing on the brink of this
cleft, looking down; but, either by accident or
design, he was holding his hat in his hand, in spite
of the strong sun pouring on his head.
“You had better see this yourself,” he said,
heavily, “as a matter of evidence. But I warn you to
be prepared.”
“Prepared for what?” asked the other
“Only for the most horrible thing I ever saw in
my life,” said Father Brown.
Even Smith stepped to the brink of the bank of
turf and with difficulty repressed a cry rather like
a scream.
Sir Arthur Vaudrey was glaring and grinning up at
him; the face was turned up so that he could have
put his foot on it; the head was thrown back, with
its wig of whitish yellow hair towards him, so that
he saw the face upside down. This made it seem all
the more like a part of a nightmare; as if a man
were walking about with his head stuck on the wrong
way. What was he doing? Was it possible that Vaudrey
was really creeping about, hiding in the cracks of
field and bank, and peering out at them in this
unnatural posture? The rest of the figure seemed
hunched and almost crooked, as if it had been
crippled or deformed but on looking more closely,
this seemed only the foreshortening of limbs fallen
in a heap. Was he mad? Was he? The more Smith looked
at him the stiffer the posture seemed.
“You can’t see it from here properly,” said
Father Brown, “but his throat is cut.”
Smith shuddered suddenly. “I can well believe
it’s the most horrible thing you’ve seen,” he said.
“I think it’s seeing the face upside down. I’ve seen
that face at breakfast, or dinner, every day for ten
years; and it always looked quite pleasant and
polite. You turn it upside down and it looks like
the face of a fiend.”
“The face really is smiling,” said Father Brown,
soberly; “which is perhaps not the least part of the
riddle. Not many men smile while their throats are
being cut, even if they do it themselves. That
smile, combined with those gooseberry eyes of his
that always seemed standing out of his head, is
enough, no doubt, to explain the expression. But
it’s true, things look different upside down.
Artists often turn their drawings upside down to
test their correctness. Sometimes, when it’s
difficult to turn the object itself upside down (as
in the case of the Matterhorn, let us say), they
have been known to stand on their heads, or at least
look between their legs.”
The priest, who was talking thus flippantly to
steady the other man’s nerves, concluded by saying,
in a more serious tone: “I quite understand how it
must have upset you. Unfortunately, it also upset
something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“It has upset the whole of our very complete
theory,” replied the other; and he began clambering
down the bank on to the little strip of sand by the
river.
“Perhaps he did it himself,” said Smith abruptly.
“After all, that’s the most obvious sort of escape,
and fits in with our theory very well. He wanted a
quiet place and he came here and cut his throat.”
“He didn’t come here at all,” said Father Brown.
“At least, not alive, and not by land. He wasn’t
killed here; there’s not enough blood. This sun has
dried his hair and clothes pretty well by now; but
there are the traces of two trickles of water in the
sand. Just about here the tide comes up from the sea
and makes an eddy that washed the body into the
creek and left it when the tide retired. But the
body must first have been washed down the river,
presumably from the village, for the river runs just
behind the row of little houses and shops. Poor
Vaudrey died up in the hamlet, somehow; after all, I
don’t think he committed suicide; but the trouble is
who would, or could, have killed him up in that
potty little place?”
He began to draw rough designs with the point of
his stumpy umbrella on the strip of sand.
“Let’s see; how does the row of shops run? First,
the butcher’s; well, of course, a butcher would be
an ideal performer with a large carving-knife. But
you saw Vaudrey come out, and it isn’t very probable
that he stood in the outer shop while the butcher
said: ‘Good morning. Allow me to cut your throat!
Thank you. And the next article, please?’ Sir Arthur
doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who’d have
stood there with a pleasant smile while this
happened. He was a very strong and vigorous man,
with rather a violent temper. And who else, except
the butcher, could have stood up to him? The next
shop is kept by an old woman. Then comes the
tobacconist, who is certainly a man, but I am told
quite a small and timid one. Then there is the
dressmaker’s, run by two maiden ladies, and then a
refreshment shop run by a man who happens to be in
hospital and who has left his wife in charge. There
are two or three village lads, assistants and errand
boys, but they were away on a special job. The
refreshment shop ends the street; there is nothing
beyond that but the inn, with the policeman
between.”
He made a punch with the ferrule of his umbrella
to represent the policeman, and remained moodily
staring up the river. Then he made a slight movement
with his hand and, stepping quickly across, stooped
over the corpse.
“Ah,” he said, straightening himself and letting
out a great breath. “The tobacconist! Why in the
world didn’t I remember that about the tobacconist?”
“What is the matter with you?” demanded Smith in
some exasperation; for Father Brown was rolling his
eyes and muttering, and he had uttered the word
“tobacconist” as if it were a terrible word of doom.
“Did you notice,” said the priest, after a pause,
“something rather curious about his face?”
“Curious, my God!” said Evan, with a
retrospective shudder. “Anyhow, his throat was cut.
...”
“I said his face,” said the cleric quietly.
“Besides, don’t you notice he has hurt his hand and
there’s a small bandage round it?”
“Oh, that has nothing to do with it,” said Evan
hastily. “That happened before and was quite an
accident. He cut his hand with a broken ink-bottle
while we were working together.”
“It has something to do with it, for all that,”
replied Father Brown.
There was a long silence, and the priest walked
moodily along the sand, trailing his umbrella and
sometimes muttering the word “tobacconist,” till the
very word chilled his friend with fear. Then he
suddenly lifted the umbrella and pointed to a
boat-house among the rushes.
“Is that the family boat?” he asked. “I wish
you’d just scull me up the river; I want to look at
those houses from the back. There’s no time to lose.
They may find the body; but we must risk that.”
Smith was already pulling the little boat
upstream towards the hamlet before Father Brown
spoke again. Then he said:
“By the way, I found out from old Abbott what was
the real story about poor Vaudrey’s misdemeanour. It
was a rather curious story about an Egyptian
official who had insulted him by saying that a good
Moslem would avoid swine and Englishmen, but
preferred swine; or some such tactful remark.
Whatever happened at the time, the quarrel was
apparently renewed some years after, when the
official visited England; and Vaudrey, in his
violent passion, dragged the man to a pig-sty on the
farm attached to the country house and threw him in,
breaking his arm and leg and leaving him there till
next morning. There was rather a row about it, of
course, but many people thought Vaudrey had acted in
a pardonable passion of patriotism. Anyhow, it seems
not quite the thing that would have kept a man
silent under deadly blackmail for decades.”
“Then you don’t think it had anything to do with
the story we are considering?” asked the secretary,
thoughtfully.
“I think it had a thundering lot to do with the
story I am considering now,” said Father Brown.
They were now floating past the low wall and the
steep strips of back garden running down from the
back doors to the river. Father Brown counted them
carefully, pointing with his umbrella, and when he
came to the third he said again:
“Tobacconist! Is the tobacconist by any chance...
.? But I think I’ll act on my guess till I know.
Only, I’ll tell you what it was I thought odd about
Sir Arthur’s face.”
“And what was that?” asked his companion, pausing
and resting on his oars for an instant.
“He was a great dandy,” said Father Brown, “and
the face was only half-shaved. . . . Could you stop
here a moment? We could tie up the boat to that
post.”
A minute or two afterwards they had clambered
over the little wall and were mounting the steep
cobbled paths of the little garden, with its
rectangular beds of vegetables and flowers.
“You see, the tobacconist does grow potatoes,”
said Father Brown. “Associations with Sir Walter
Raleigh, no doubt. Plenty of potatoes and plenty of
potato sacks. These little country people have not
lost all the habits of peasants; they still run two
or three jobs at once. But country tobacconists very
often do one odd job extra, that I never thought of
till I saw Vaudrey’s chin. Nine times out of ten you
call the shop the tobacconist’s, but it is also the
barber’s. He’d cut his hand and couldn’t shave
himself; so he came up here. Does that suggest
anything else to you?”
“It suggests a good deal,” replied Smith; “but I
expect it will suggest a good deal more to you.”
“Does it suggest, for instance,” observed Father
Brown, “the only conditions in which a vigorous and
rather violent gentleman might be smiling pleasantly
when his throat was cut?”
The next moment they had passed through a dark
passage or two at the back of the house, and came
into the back room of the shop, dimly lit by
filtered light from beyond and a dingy and cracked
looking-glass. It seemed, somehow, like the green
twilight of a tank; but there was light enough to
see the rough apparatus of a barber’s shop and the
pale and even panic-sticken face of a barber.
Father Brown’s eye roamed round the room, which
seemed to have been just recently cleaned and
tidied, till his gaze found something in a dusty
corner just behind the door. It was a hat hanging on
a hat-peg. It was a white hat, and one very well
known to all that village. And yet, conspicuous as
it had always seemed in the street, it seemed only
an example of the sort of little thing a certain
sort of man often entirely forgets, when he has most
carefully washed floors or destroyed stained rags.
“Sir Arthur Vaudrey was shaved here yesterday
morning, I think,” said Father Brown in a level
voice.
To the barber, a small, bald-headed, spectacled
man whose name was Wicks, the sudden appearance of
these two figures out of his own back premises was
like the appearance of two ghosts risen out of a
grave under the floor. But it was at once apparent
that he had more to frighten him than any fancy of
superstition. He shrank, we might almost say that he
shrivelled, into a corner of the dark room; and
everything about him seemed to dwindle, except his
great goblin spectacles.
“Tell me one thing,” continued the priest,
quietly. “You had a reason for hating the squire?”
The man in the corner babbled something that
Smith could not hear; but the priest nodded.
“I know you had,” he said. “You hated him; and
that’s how I know you didn’t kill him. Will you tell
us what happened, or shall I?”
There was a silence filled with the faint ticking
of a clock in the back kitchen; and then Father
Brown went on.
“What happened was this. When Mr. Dalmon stepped
inside your outer shop, he asked for some cigarettes
that were in the window. You stepped outside for a
moment, as shopmen often do, to make sure of what he
meant; and in that moment of time he perceived in
the inner room the razor you had just laid down, and
the yellow-white head of Sir Arthur in the barber’s
chair; probably both glimmering in the light of that
little window beyond. It took but an instant for him
to pick up the razor and cut the throat and come
back to the counter. The victim would not even be
alarmed at the razor and the hand. He died smiling
at his own thoughts. And what thoughts! Nor, I
think, was Dalmon alarmed. He had done it so quickly
and quietly that Mr. Smith here could have sworn in
court that the two were together all the time. But
there was somebody who was alarmed, very
legitimately, and that was you. You had quarrelled
with your landlord about arrears of rent and so on;
you came back into your own shop and found your
enemy murdered in your own chair, with your own
razor. It was not altogether unnatural that you
despaired of clearing yourself, and preferred to
clear up the mess; to clean the floor and throw the
corpse into the river at night, in a potato sack
rather loosely tied. It was rather lucky that there
were fixed hours after which your barber’s shop was
shut; so you had plenty of time. You seem to have
remembered everything but the hat. . . . Oh, don’t
be frightened; I shall forget everything, including
the hat.”
And he passed placidly through the outer shop
into the street beyond, followed by the wondering
Smith, and leaving behind the barber stunned and
staring.
“You see,” said Father Brown to his companion,
“it was one of those cases where a motive really is
too weak to convict a man and yet strong enough to
acquit him. A little nervous fellow like that would
be the last man really to kill a big strong man for
a tiff about money. But he would be the first man to
fear that he would be accused of having done it. ...
Ah, there was a thundering difference in the motive
of the man who did do it.” And he relapsed into
reflection, staring and almost glaring at vacancy.
“It is simply awful,” groaned Evan Smith. “I was
abusing Dalmon as a blackmailer and a blackguard an
hour or two ago, and yet it breaks me all up to hear
he really did this, after all.”
The priest still seemed to be in a sort of
trance, like a man staring down into an abyss. At
last his lips moved and he murmured, more as if it
were a prayer than an oath: “Merciful God, what a
horrible revenge!”
His friend questioned him, but he continued as if
talking to himself.
“What a horrible tale of hatred! What a vengeance
for one mortal worm to take on another! Shall we
ever get to the bottom of this bottomless human
heart, where such abominable imaginations can abide?
God save us all from pride; but I cannot yet make
any picture in my mind of hate and vengeance like
that.”
“Yes,” said Smith; “and I can’t quite picture why
he should kill Vaudrey at all. If Dalmon was a
blackmailer, it would seem more natural for Vaudrey
to kill him. As you say, the throat-cutting was a
horrid business, but — — ”
Father Brown started, and blinked like a man
awakened from sleep.
“Oh, that!” he corrected hastily. “I wasn’t
thinking about that. I didn’t mean the murder in the
barber’s shop, when — when I said a horrible tale of
vengeance. I was thinking of a much more horrible
tale than that; though, of course, that was horrible
enough, in its way. But that was much more
comprehensible; almost anybody might have done it.
In fact, it was very nearly an act of self-defence.”
“What?” exclaimed the secretary incredulously. “A
man creeps up behind another man and cuts his
throat, while he is smiling pleasantly at the
ceiling in a barber’s chair, and you say it was
self-defence!”
“I do not say it was justifiable self-defence,”
replied the other. “I only say that many a man would
have been driven to it, to defend himself against an
appalling calamity — which was also an appalling
crime. It was that other crime that I was thinking
about. To begin with, about that question you asked
just now — why should the blackmailer be the
murderer? Well, there are a good many conventional
confusions and errors on a point like that.” He
paused, as if collecting his thoughts after his
recent trance of horror, and went on in ordinary
tones.
“You observe that two men, an older and a
younger, go about together and agree on a
matrimonial project; but the origin of their
intimacy is old and concealed. One is rich and the
other poor; and you guess at blackmail. You are
quite right, at least to that extent. Where you are
quite wrong is in guessing which is which. You
assume that the poor man was blackmailing the rich
man. As a matter of fact, the rich man was
blackmailing the poor man.”
“But that seems nonsense,” objected the
secretary.
“It is much worse than nonsense; but it is not at
all uncommon,” replied the other. “Half modern
politics consists of rich men blackmailing people.
Your notion that it’s nonsense rests on two
illusions which are both nonsensical. One is, that
rich men never want to be richer; the other is, that
a man can only be blackmailed for money. It’s the
last that is in question here. Sir Arthur Vaudrey
was acting not for avarice, but for vengeance. And
he planned the most hideous vengeance I ever heard
of.”
“But why should he plan vengeance on John
Dalmon?” inquired Smith.
“It wasn’t on John Dalmon that he planned
vengeance,” replied the priest, gravely.
There was a silence; and he resumed, almost as if
changing the subject. “When we found the body, you
remember, we saw the face upside down; and you said
it looked like the face of a fiend. Has it occurred
to you that the murderer also saw the face upside
down, coming behind the barber’s chair?”
“But that’s all morbid extravagance,”
remonstrated his companion. “I was quite used to the
face when it was the right way up.”
“Perhaps you have never seen it the right way
up,” said Father Brown. “I told you that artists
turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to
see it the right way up. Perhaps, over all those
breakfasts and tea-tables, you had got used to the
face of a fiend.”
“What on earth are you driving at?” demanded
Smith, impatiently.
“I speak in parables,” replied the other in a
rather sombre tone. “Of course, Sir Arthur was not
actually a fiend; he was a man with a character
which he had made out of a temperament that might
also have been turned to good. But those goggling,
suspicious eyes; that tight, yet quivering mouth,
might have told you something if you had not been so
used to them. You know, there are physical bodies on
which a wound will not heal. Sir Arthur had a mind
of that sort. It was as if it lacked a skin; he had
a feverish vigilance of vanity; those strained eyes
were open with an insomnia of egoism. Sensibility
need not be selfishness. Sybil Rye, for instance,
has the same thin skin and manages to be a sort of
saint. But Vaudrey had turned it all to poisonous
pride; a pride that was not even secure and
self-satisfied. Every scratch on the surface of his
soul festered. And that is the meaning of that old
story about throwing the man into the pig-sty. If
he’d thrown him then and there, after being called a
pig, it might have been a pardonable burst of
passion. But there was no pig-sty; and that is just
the point. Vaudrey remembered the silly insult for
years and years, till he could get the Oriental into
the improbable neighbourhood of a pig-sty; and then
he took, what he considered the only appropriate and
artistic revenge. . . . Oh, my God! he liked his
revenges to be appropriate and artistic.”
Smith looked at him curiously. “You are not
thinking of the pig-sty story,” he said.
“No,” said Father Brown; “of the other story.” He
controlled the shudder in his voice, and went on:
“Remembering that story of a fantastic and yet
patient plot to make the vengeance fit the crime,
consider the other story before us. Had anybody
else, to your knowledge, ever insulted Vaudrey, or
offered him what he thought a mortal insult? Yes; a
woman insulted him.”
A sort of vague horror began to dawn in Evan’s
eyes; he was listening intently.
“A girl, little more than a child, refused to
marry him, because he had once been a sort of
criminal; had, indeed, been in prison for a short
time for the outrage on the Egyptian. And that
madman said, in the hell of his heart: ‘She shall
marry a murderer.’”
They took the road towards the great house and
went along by the river for some time in silence,
before he resumed: “Vaudrey was in a position to
blackmail Dalmon, who had committed a murder long
ago; probably he knew of several crimes among the
wild comrades of his youth. Probably it was a wild
crime with some redeeming features; for the wildest
murders are never the worst. And Dalmon looks to me
like a man who knows remorse, even for killing
Vaudrey. But he was in Vaudrey’s power and, between
them, they entrapped the girl very cleverly into an
engagement; letting the lover try his luck first,
for instance, and the other only encouraging
magnificently. But Dalmon himself did not know,
nobody but the Devil himself did know, what was
really in that old man’s mind.
“Then, a few days ago, Dalmon made a dreadful
discovery. He had obeyed, not altogether
unwillingly; he had been a tool; and he suddenly
found how the tool was to be broken and thrown away.
He came upon certain notes of Vaudrey’s in the
library which, disguised as they were, told of
preparations for giving information to the police.
He understood the whole plot and stood stunned as I
did when I first understood it. The moment the bride
and bridegroom were married, the bridegroom would be
arrested and hanged. The fastidious lady, who
objected to a husband who had been in prison, should
have no husband except a husband on the gallows.
That is what Sir Arthur Vaudrey considered an
artistic rounding off of the story.”
Evan Smith, deadly pale, was silent; and, far
away, down the perspective of the road, they saw the
large figure and wide hat of Dr. Abbott advancing
towards them; even in the outline there was a
certain agitation. But they were still shaken with
their own private apocalypse.
“As you say, hate is a hateful thing,” said Evan
at last; “and, do you know, one thing gives me a
sort of relief. All my hatred of poor Dalmon is gone
out of me — now I know how he was twice a murderer.”
It was in silence that they covered the rest of
the distance and met the big doctor coming towards
them, with his large gloved hands thrown out in a
sort of despairing gesture and his grey beard
tossing in the wind.
“There is dreadful news,” he said. “Arthur’s body
has been found. He seems to have died in his
garden.”
“Dear me,” said Father Brown, rather
mechanically. “How dreadful!”
“And there is more,” cried the doctor
breathlessly. “John Dalmon went off to see Vernon
Vaudrey, the nephew; but Vernon Vaudrey hasn’t heard
of him and Dalmon seems to have disappeared
entirely.”
“Dear me,” said Father Brown. “How strange!”
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Chapter VII. The Worst Crime in the World
Father Brown was wandering through a picture
gallery with an expression that suggested that he
had not come there to look at the pictures. Indeed,
he did not want to look at the pictures, though he
liked pictures well enough. Not that there was
anything immoral or improper about those highly
modern pictorial designs. He would indeed be of an
inflammable temperament who was stirred to any of
the more pagan passions by the display of
interrupted spirals, inverted cones and broken
cylinders with which the art of the future inspired
or menaced mankind. The truth is that Father Brown
was looking for a young friend who had appointed
that somewhat incongruous meeting-place, being
herself of a more futuristic turn. The young friend
was also a young relative; one of the few relatives
that he had. Her name was Elizabeth Fane, simplified
into Betty, and she was the child of a sister who
had married into a race of refined but impoverished
squires. As the squire was dead as well as
impoverished, Father Brown stood in the relation of
a protector as well as a priest, and in some sense a
guardian as well as an uncle. At the moment,
however, he was blinking about at the groups in the
gallery without catching sight of the familiar brown
hair and bright face of his niece. Nevertheless, he
saw some people he knew and a number of people he
did not know, including some that, as a mere matter
of taste, he did not much want to know.
Among the people the priest did not know and who
yet aroused his interest was a lithe and alert young
man, very beautifully dressed and looking rather
like a foreigner, because, while his beard was cut
in a spade shape like an old Spaniard’s, his dark
hair was cropped so close as to look like a tight
black skull-cap. Among the people the priest did not
particularly want to know was a very
dominant-looking lady, sensationally clad in
scarlet, with a mane of yellow hair too long to be
called bobbed, but too loose to be called anything
else. She had a powerful and rather heavy face of a
pale and rather unwholesome complexion, and when she
looked at anybody she cultivated the fascinations of
a basilisk. She towed in attendance behind her a
short man with a big beard and a very broad face,
with long sleepy slits of eyes. The expression of
his face was beaming and benevolent, if only
partially awake; but his bull neck, when seen from
behind, looked a little brutal.
Father Brown gazed at the lady, feeling that the
appearance and approach of his niece would be an
agreeable contrast. Yet he continued to gaze, for
some reason, until he reached the point of feeling
that the appearance of anybody would be an agreeable
contrast. It was therefore with a certain relief,
though with a slight start as of awakening, that he
turned at the sound of his name and saw another face
that he knew.
It was the sharp but not unfriendly face of a
lawyer named Granby, whose patches of grey hair
might almost have been the powder from a wig, so
incongruous were they with his youthful energy of
movement. He was one of those men in the City who
run about like schoolboys in and out of their
offices. He could not run round the fashionable
picture gallery quite in that fashion; but he looked
as if he wanted to, and fretted as he glanced to
left and right, seeking somebody he knew.
“I didn’t know,” said Father Brown, smiling,
“that you were a patron of the New Art.”
“I didn’t know that you were,” retorted the
other. “I came here to catch a man.”
“I hope you will have good sport,” answered the
priest. “I’m doing much the same.”
“Said he was passing through to the Continent,”
snorted the solicitor, “and could I meet him in this
cranky place.” He ruminated a moment, and said
abruptly: “Look here, I know you can keep a secret.
Do you know Sir John Musgrave?”
“No,” answered the priest; “but I should hardly
have thought he was a secret, though they say he
does hide himself in a castle. Isn’t he the old man
they tell all those tales about — how he lives in a
tower with a real portcullis and drawbridge, and
generally refuses to emerge from the Dark Ages? Is
he one of your clients?”
“No,” replied Granby shortly: “it’s his son,
Captain Musgrave, who has come to us. But the old
man counts for a good deal in the affair, and I
don’t know him; that’s the point. Look here, this is
confidential, as I say, but I can confide in you.“
He dropped his voice and drew his friend apart into
a side gallery containing representations of various
real objects, which was comparatively empty.
“This young Musgrave,” he said, “wants to raise a
big sum from us on a post obit on his old father in
Northumberland. The old man’s long past seventy and
presumably will obit some time or other; but what
about the post, so to speak? What will happen
afterwards to his cash and castles and portcullises
and all the rest? It’s a very fine old estate, and
still worth a lot, but strangely enough it isn’t
entailed. So you see how we stand. The question is,
as the man said in Dickens, is the old man
friendly?”
“If he’s friendly to his son you’ll feel all the
friendlier,” observed Father Brown. “No, I’m afraid
I can’t help you. I never met Sir John Musgrave, and
I understand very few people do meet him nowadays.
But it seems obvious you have a right to an answer
on that point before you lend the young gentleman
your firm’s money. Is he the sort that people cut
off with a shilling?”
“Well, I’m doubtful,” answered the other. “He’s
very popular and brilliant and a great figure in
society; but he’s a great deal abroad, and he’s been
a journalist.”
“Well,” said Father Brown, “that’s not a crime.
At least not always.”
“Nonsense!” said Granby curtly. “You know what I
mean — he’s rather a rolling stone, who’s been a
journalist and a lecturer and an actor, and all
sorts of things. I’ve got to know where I stand. . .
. Why, there he is.”
And the solicitor, who had been stamping
impatiently about the emptier gallery, turned
suddenly and darted into the more crowded room at a
run. He was running towards the tall and
well-dressed young man with the short hair and the
foreign-looking beard.
The two walked away together talking, and for
some moments afterwards Father Brown followed them
with his screwed, short-sighted eyes. His gaze was
shifted and recalled, however, by the breathless and
even boisterous arrival of his niece, Betty. Rather
to the surprise of her uncle, she led him back into
the emptier room and planted him on a seat that was
like an island in that sea of floor.
“I’ve got something I must tell you,” she said.
“It’s so silly that nobody else will understand it.”
“You overwhelm me,” said Father Brown. “Is it
about this business your mother started telling me
about? Engagements and all that; not what the
military historians call a general engagement.”
“You know,” she said, “that she wants me to be
engaged to Captain Musgrave.”
“I didn’t,” said Father Brown with resignation;
“but Captain Musgrave seems to be quite a
fashionable topic.”
“Of course we’re very poor,” she said, “and it’s
no good saying it makes no difference.”
“Do you want to marry him?” asked Father Brown,
looking at her through his half-closed eyes.
She frowned at the floor, and answered in a lower
tone:
“I thought I did. At least I think I thought I
did. But I’ve just had rather a shock.”
“Then tell us all about it.”
“I heard him laugh,” she said.
“It is an excellent social accomplishment,” he
replied.
“You don’t understand,” said the girl. “It wasn’t
social at all. That was just the point of it — that
it wasn’t social.”
She paused a moment, and then went on firmly: “I
came here quite early, and saw him sitting quite
alone in the middle of that gallery with the new
pictures, that was quite empty then. He had no idea
I or anybody was near; he was sitting quite alone,
and he laughed.”
“Well, no wonder,” said Father Brown. “I’m not an
art critic myself, but as a general view of the
pictures taken as a whole — — ”
“Oh, you won’t understand,” she said almost
angrily. “It wasn’t a bit like that. He wasn’t
looking at the pictures. He was staring right up at
the ceiling; but his eyes seemed to be turned
inwards, and he laughed so that my blood ran cold.”
The priest had risen and was pacing the room with
his hands behind him. “You mustn’t be hasty in a
case of this sort,” he began. “There are two kinds
of men — but we can hardly discuss him just now, for
here he is.”
Captain Musgrave entered the room swiftly and
swept it with a smile. Granby, the lawyer, was just
behind him, and his legal face bore a new expression
of relief and satisfaction.
“I must apologize for everything I said about the
Captain,” he said to the priest as they drifted
together towards the door. “He’s a thoroughly
sensible fellow and quite sees my point. He asked me
himself why I didn’t go north and see his old
father; I could hear from the old man’s own lips how
it stood about the inheritance. Well, he couldn’t
say fairer than that, could he? But he’s so anxious
to get the thing settled that he offered to take me
up in his own car to Musgrave Moss. That’s the name
of the estate. I suggested that, if he was so kind,
we might go together; and we’re starting to-morrow
morning.”
As they spoke Betty and the Captain came through
the doorway together, making in that framework at
least a sort of picture that some would be
sentimental enough to prefer to cones and cylinders.
Whatever their other affinities, they were both very
good-looking; and the lawyer was moved to a remark
on the fact, when the picture abruptly altered.
Captain James Musgrave looked out into the main
gallery, and his laughing and triumphant eyes were
riveted on something that seemed to change him from
head to foot. Father Brown looked round as under an
advancing shadow of premonition; and he saw the
lowering, almost livid face of the large woman in
scarlet under its leonine yellow hair. She always
stood with a slight stoop, like a bull lowering its
horns, and the expression of her pale pasty face was
so oppressive and hypnotic that they hardly saw the
little man with the large beard standing beside her.
Musgrave advanced into the centre of the room
towards her, almost like a beautifully dressed
wax-work wound up to walk. He said a few words to
her that could not be heard. She did not answer; but
they turned away together, walking down the long
gallery as if in debate, the short, bull-necked man
with the beard bringing up the rear like some
grotesque goblin page.
“Heaven help us!” muttered Father Brown, frowning
after them. “Who in the world is that woman?”
“No pal of mine, I’m happy to say,” replied
Granby with grim flippancy. “Looks as if a little
flirtation with her might end fatally, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t think he’s flirting with her,” said
Father Brown.
Even as he spoke the group in question turned at
the end of the gallery and broke up, and Captain
Musgrave came back to them in hasty strides.
“Look here,” he cried, speaking naturally enough,
though they fancied his colour was changed. “I’m
awfully sorry, Mr. Granby, but I find I can’t come
north with you to-morrow. Of course, you will take
the car all the same. Please do; I shan’t want it. I
— I have to be in London for some days. Take a
friend with you if you like.”
“My friend, Father Brown — — ” began the lawyer.
“If Captain Musgrave is really so kind,” said
Father Brown gravely. “I may explain that I have
some status in Mr. Granby’s inquiry, and it would be
a great relief to my mind if I could go.”
Which was how it came about that a very elegant
car, with an equally elegant chauffeur, shot north
the next day over the Yorkshire moors, bearing the
incongruous burden of a priest who looked rather
like a black bundle, and a lawyer who had the habit
of running about on his feet instead of racing on
somebody else’s wheels.
They broke their journey very agreeably in one of
the great dales of the West Riding, dining and
sleeping at a comfortable inn, and starting early
next day, began to run along the Northumbrian coast
till they reached a country that was a maze of sand
dunes and rank sea meadows, somewhere in the heart
of which lay the old Border castle which had
remained so unique and yet so secretive a monument
of the old Border wars. They found it at last, by
following a path running beside a long arm of the
sea that ran inland, and turned eventually into a
sort of rude canal ending in the moat of the castle.
The castle really was a castle, of the square,
embattled plan that the Normans built everywhere
from Galilee to the Grampians. It did really and
truly have a portcullis and a drawbridge, and they
were very realistically reminded of the fact by an
accident that delayed their entrance.
They waded amid long coarse grass and thistle to
the bank of the moat which ran in a ribbon of black
with dead leaves and scum upon it, like ebony inlaid
with a pattern of gold. Barely a yard or two beyond
the black ribbon was the other green bank and the
big stone pillars of the gateway. But so little, it
would seem, had this lonely fastness been approached
from outside that when the impatient Granby halloed
across to the dim figures behind the portcullis,
they seemed, to have considerable difficulty even in
lowering the great rusty drawbridge. It started on
its way, turning over like a great falling tower
above them, and then stuck, sticking out in mid-air
at a threatening angle.
The impatient Granby, dancing upon the bank,
called out to his companion:
“Oh, I can’t stand these stick-in-the-mud ways!
Why, it’d be less trouble to jump.”
And with characteristic impetuosity he did jump,
landing with a slight stagger in safety on the inner
shore. Father Brown’s short legs were not adapted to
jumping. But his temper was more adapted than most
people’s to falling with a splash into very muddy
water. By the promptitude of his companion he
escaped falling in very far. But as he was being
hauled up the green, slimy bank, he stopped with
bent head, peering at a particular point upon the
grassy slope.
“Are you botanizing?” asked Granby irritably.
“We’ve got no time for you to collect rare plants
after your last attempt as a diver among the wonders
of the deep. Come on, muddy or no, we’ve got to
present ourselves before the baronet.”
When they had penetrated into the castle, they
were received courteously enough by an old servant,
the only one in sight, and after indicating their
business were shown into a long oak-panelled room
with latticed windows of antiquated pattern. Weapons
of many different centuries hung in balanced
patterns on the dark walls, and a complete suit of
fourteenth-century armour stood like a sentinel
beside the large fireplace. In another long room
beyond could be seen, through the half-open door,
the dark colours of the rows of family portraits.
“I feel as if I’d got into a novel instead of a
house,” said the lawyer. “I’d no idea anybody did
really keep up the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho’ in this
fashion.”
“Yes; the old gentleman certainly carries out his
historical craze consistently,” answered the priest;
“and these things are not fakes, either. It’s not
done by somebody who thinks all mediaeval people
lived at the same time. Sometimes they make up suits
of armour out of different bits; but that suit all
covered one man, and covered him very completely.
You, see it’s the late sort of tilting-armour.”
“I think he’s a late sort of host, if it comes to
that,” grumbled Granby. “He’s keeping us waiting the
devil of a time.”
“You must expect everything to go slowly in a
place like this,” said Father Brown. “I think it’s
very decent of him to see us at all: two total
strangers come to ask him highly personal
questions.”
And, indeed, when the master of the house
appeared they had no reason to complain of their
reception; but rather became conscious of something
genuine in the traditions of breeding and behaviour
that could retain their native dignity without
difficulty in that barbarous solitude, and after
those long years of rustication and moping. The
baronet did not seem either surprised or embarrassed
at the rare visitation; though they suspected that
he had not had a stranger in his house for a quarter
of a life-time, he behaved as if he had been bowing
out duchesses a moment before. He showed neither
shyness nor impatience when they touched on the very
private matter of their errand; after a little
leisurely reflection he seemed to recognize their
curiosity as justified under the circumstances. He
was a thin, keen-looking old gentleman, with black
eyebrows and a long chin, and though the
carefully-curled hair he wore was undoubtedly a wig,
he had the wisdom to wear the grey wig of an elderly
man.
“As regards the question that immediately
concerns you,” he said, “the answer is very simple
indeed. I do most certainly propose to hand on the
whole of my property to my son, as my father handed
it on to me; and nothing — I say advisedly, nothing
— would induce me to take any other course.”
“I am most profoundly grateful for the
information,” answered the lawyer. “But your
kindness encourages me to say that you are putting
it very strongly. I would not suggest that it is in
the least likely that your son would do anything to
make you doubt his fitness for the charge. Still, he
might — — ”
“Exactly,” said Sir John Musgrave dryly, “he
might. It is rather an under-statement to say that
he might. Will you be good enough to step into the
next room with me for a moment.”
He led them into the further gallery, of which
they had already caught a glimpse, and gravely
paused before a row of the blackened and lowering
portraits.
“This is Sir Roger Musgrave,” he said, pointing
to a long-faced person in a black periwig. “He was
one of the lowest liars and rascals in the rascally
time of William of Orange, a traitor to two kings
and something like the murderer of two wives. That
is his father, Sir Robert, a perfectly honest old
cavalier. That is his son, Sir James, one of the
noblest of the Jacobite martyrs and one of the first
men to attempt some reparation to the Church and the
poor. Does it matter that the House of Musgrave, the
power, the honour, the authority, descended from one
good man to another good man through the interval of
a bad one? Edward I governed England well. Edward
III covered England with glory. And yet the second
glory came from the first glory through the infamy
and imbecility of Edward II, who fawned upon
Gaveston and ran away from Bruce. Believe me, Mr.
Granby, the greatness of a great house and history
is something more than these accidental individuals
who carry it on, even though they do not grace it.
From father to son our heritage has come down, and
from father to son it shall continue. You may assure
yourselves, gentlemen, and you may assure my son,
that I shall not leave my money to a home for lost
cats. Musgrave shall leave it to Musgrave till the
heavens fall.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown thoughtfully; “I see
what you mean.”
“And we shall be only too glad,” said the
solicitor, “to convey such a happy assurance to your
son.”
“You may convey the assurance,” said their host
gravely, “He is secure in any event of having the
castle, the title, the land and the money. There is
only a small and merely private addition to that
arrangement. Under no circumstances whatever will I
ever speak to him as long as I live.”
The lawyer remained in the same respectful
attitude, but he was now respectfully staring.
“Why, what on earth has he — — ”
“I am a private gentleman,” said Musgrave, “as
well as the custodian of a great inheritance. And my
son did something so horrible that he has ceased to
be — I will not say a gentleman — but even a human
being. It is the worst crime in the world. Do you
remember what Douglas said when Marmion, his guest,
offered to shake hands with him?”
“Yes,” said Father Brown.
“‘My castles are my king’s alone, from turret to
foundation stone,’” said Musgrave. “‘The hand of
Douglas is his own.’”
He turned towards the other room and showed his
rather dazed visitors back into it.
“I hope you will take some refreshment,” he said,
in the same equable fashion. “If you have any doubt
about your movements, I should be delighted to offer
you the hospitality of the castle for the night.”
“Thank you, Sir John,” said the priest in a dull
voice, “but I think we had better go.”
“I will have the bridge lowered at once,” said
their host; and in a few moments the creaking of
that huge and absurdly antiquated apparatus filled
the castle like the grinding of a mill. Rusty as it
was, however, it worked successfully this time, and
they found themselves standing once more on the
grassy bank beyond the moat.
Granby was suddenly shaken by a shudder.
“What in hell was it that his son did?” he cried.
Father Brown made no answer. But when they had
driven off again in their car and pursued their
journey to a village not far off, called Graystones,
where they alighted at the inn of the Seven Stars,
the lawyer learned with a little mild surprise that
the priest did not propose to travel much farther;
in other words, that he had apparently every
intention of remaining in the neighbourhood.
“I cannot bring myself to leave it like this,” he
said gravely. “I will send back the car, and you, of
course, may very naturally want to go with it. Your
question is answered; it is simply whether your firm
can afford to lend money on young Musgrave’s
prospects. But my question isn’t answered; it is
whether he is a fit husband for Betty. I must try to
discover whether he’s really done something
dreadful, or whether it’s the delusion of an old
lunatic.”
“But,” objected the lawyer, “if you want to find
out about him, why don’t you go after him? Why
should you hang about in this desolate hole where he
hardly ever comes?”
“What would be the use of my going after him?”
asked the other. There’s no sense in going up to a
fashionable young man in Bond Street and saying:
‘Excuse me, but have you committed a crime too
horrible for a human being?’ If he’s bad enough to
do it, he’s certainly bad enough to deny it. And we
don’t even know what it is. No, there’s only one man
that knows, and may tell, in some further outburst
of dignified eccentricity. I’m going to keep near
him for the present.”
And in truth Father Brown did keep near the
eccentric baronet, and did actually meet him on more
than one occasion, with the utmost politeness on
both sides. For the baronet, in spite of his years,
was very vigorous and a great walker, and could
often be seen stumping through the village, and
along the country lanes. Only the day after their
arrival, Father Brown, coming out of the inn on to
the cobbled market-place, saw the dark and
distinguished figure stride past in the direction of
the post office. He was very quietly dressed in
black, but his strong face was even more arresting
in the strong sunlight; with his silvery hair,
swarthy eyebrows and long chin, he had something of
a reminiscence of Henry Irving, or some other famous
actor. In spite of his hoary hair, his figure as
well as his face suggested strength, and he carried
his stick more like a cudgel than a crutch. He
saluted the priest, and spoke with the same air of
coming fearlessly to the point which had marked his
revelations of yesterday.
“If you are still interested in my son,” he said,
using the term with an icy indifference, “you will
not see very much of him. He has just left the
country. Between ourselves, I might say fled the
country.”
“Indeed,” said Father Brown with a grave stare.
“Some people I never heard of, called Grunov,
have been pestering me, of all people, about his
whereabouts,” said Sir John; “and I’ve just come in
to send off a wire to tell them that, so far as I
know, he’s living in the Poste Restante, Riga. Even
that has been a nuisance. I came in yesterday to do
it, but was five minutes too late for the post
office. Are you staying long? I hope you will pay me
another visit.”
When the priest recounted to the lawyer his
little interview with old Musgrave in the village,
the lawyer was both puzzled and interested. “Why has
the Captain bolted?” he asked. “Who are the other
people who want him? Who on earth are the Grunovs?”
“For the first, I don’t know,” replied Father
Brown. “Possibly his mysterious sin has come to
light. I should rather guess that the other people
are blackmailing him about it. For the third, I
think I do know. That horrible fat woman with yellow
hair is called Madame Grunov, and that little man
passes as her husband.”
The next day Father Brown came in rather wearily,
and threw down his black bundle of an umbrella with
the air of a pilgrim laying down his staff. He had
an air of some depression. But it was as it was so
often in his criminal investigations. It was not the
depression of failure, but the depression of
success.
“It’s rather a shock,” he said in a dull voice;
“but I ought to have guessed it. I ought to have
guessed it when I first went in and saw the thing
standing there.”
“When you saw what?” asked Granby impatiently.
“When I saw there was only one suit of armour,”
answered Father Brown. There was a silence during
which the lawyer only stared at his friend, and then
the friend resumed.
“Only the other day I was just going to tell my
niece that there are two types of men who can laugh
when they are alone. One might almost say the man
who does it is either very good or very bad. You
see, he is either confiding the joke to God or
confiding it to the Devil. But anyhow he has an
inner life. Well, there really is a kind of man who
confides the joke to the Devil. He does not mind if
nobody sees the joke; if nobody can safely be
allowed even to know the joke. The joke is enough in
itself, if it is sufficiently sinister and
malignant.”
“But what are you talking about?” demanded
Granby. “Whom are you talking about? Which of them,
I mean? Who is this person who is having a sinister
joke with his Satanic Majesty?”
Father Brown looked across at him with a ghastly
smile.
“Ah,” he said, “that’s the joke.”
There was another silence, but this time the
silence seemed to be rather full and oppressive than
merely empty; it seemed to settle down on them like
the twilight that was gradually turning from dusk to
dark. Father Brown went on speaking in a level
voice, sitting stolidly with his elbows on the
table.
“I’ve been looking up the Musgrave family,” he
said. “They are vigorous and long-lived stock, and
even in the ordinary way I should think you would
wait a good time for your money.”
“We’re quite prepared for that,” answered the
solicitor; “but anyhow it can’t last indefinitely.
The old man is nearly eighty, though he still walks
about, and the people at the inn here laugh and say
they don’t believe he will ever die.”
Father Brown jumped up with one of his rare but
rapid movements, but remained with his hands on the
table, leaning forward and looking his friend in the
face.
“That’s it,” he cried in a low but excited voice.
“That’s the only problem. That’s the only real
difficulty. How will he die? How on earth is he to
die?”
“What on earth do you mean?” asked Granby.
“I mean,” came the voice of the priest out of the
darkening room, “that I know the crime that James
Musgrave committed.”
His tones had such a chill in them that Granby
could hardly repress a shiver; he murmured a further
question.
“It was really the worst crime in the world,”
said Father Brown. “At least, many communities and
civilizations have accounted it so. It was always
from the earliest times marked out in tribe and
village for tremendous punishment. But anyhow, I
know now what young Musgrave really did and why he
did it.”
“And what did he do?” asked the lawyer.
“He killed his father,” answered the priest.
The lawyer in his turn rose from his seat and
gazed across the table with wrinkled brows.
“But his father is at the castle,” he cried in
sharp tones.
“His father is in the moat,” said the priest,
“and I was a fool not to have known it from the
first when something bothered me about that suit of
armour. Don’t you remember the look of that room?
How very carefully it was arranged and decorated?
There were two crossed battle-axes hung on one side
of the fire-place, two crossed battle-axes on the
other. There was a round Scottish shield on one
wall, a round Scottish shield on the other. And
there was a stand of armour guarding one side of the
hearth, and an empty space on the other. Nothing
will make me believe that a man who arranged all the
rest of that room with that exaggerated symmetry
left that one feature of it lopsided. There was
almost certainly another man in armour. And what has
become of him?”
He paused a moment, and then went on in a more
matter-of-fact tone; “When you come to think of it,
it’s a very good plan for a murder, and meets the
permanent problem of the disposal of the body. The
body could stand inside that complete tilting-armour
for hours, or even days, while servants came and
went, until the murderer could simply drag it out in
the dead of night and lower it into the moat,
without even crossing the bridge. And then what a
good chance he ran! As soon as the body was at all
decayed in the stagnant water there would sooner or
later be nothing but a skeleton in
fourteenth-century armour, a thing very likely to be
found in the moat of an old Border castle. It was
unlikely that anybody would look for anything there,
but if they did, that would soon be all they would
find. And I got some confirmation of that. That was
when you said I was looking for a rare plant; it was
a plant in a good many senses, if you’ll excuse the
jest. I saw the marks of two feet sunk so deep into
the solid bank I was sure that the man was either
very heavy or was carrying something very heavy.
Also, by the way, there’s another moral from that
little incident when I made my celebrated graceful
and cat-like leap.”
“My brain is rather reeling,” said Granby, “but I
begin to have some notion of what all this nightmare
is about. What about you and your cat-like leap?”
“At the post office to-day,” said Father Brown,
“I casually confirmed the statement the baronet made
to me yesterday, that he had been there just after
closing-time on the day previous — that is, not only
on the very day we arrived, but at the very time we
arrived. Don’t you see what that means? It means
that he was actually out when we called, and came
back while we were waiting; and that was why we had
to wait so long. And when I saw that, I suddenly saw
a picture that told the whole story.”
“Well,” asked the other impatiently, “and what
about it?”
“An old man of eighty can walk,” said Father
Brown. “An old man can even walk a good deal,
pottering about in country lanes. But an old man
can’t jump. He would be an even less graceful jumper
than I was. Yet, if the baronet came back while we
were waiting, he must have come in as we came in —
by jumping the moat — for the bridge wasn’t lowered
till later. I rather guess he had hampered it
himself to delay inconvenient visitors, to judge by
the rapidity with which it was repaired. But that
doesn’t matter. When I saw that fancy picture of the
black figure with the grey hair taking a flying leap
across the moat I knew instantly that it was a young
man dressed up as an old man. And there you have the
whole story.”
“You mean,” said Granby slowly, “that this
pleasing youth killed his father, hid the corpse
first in the armour and then in the moat, disguised
himself and so on?”
“They happened to be almost exactly alike,” said
the priest. “You could see from the family portraits
how strong the likeness ran. And then you talk of
his disguising himself. But in a sense everybody’s
dress is a disguise. The old man disguised himself
in a wig, and the young man in a foreign beard. When
he shaved and put the wig on his cropped head he was
exactly like his father, with a little make-up. Of
course, you understand now why he was so very polite
about getting you to come up next day here by car.
It was because he himself was coming up that night
by train. He got in front of you, committed his
crime, assumed his disguise, and was ready for the
legal negotiations.”
“Ah,” said Granby thoughtfully, “the legal
negotiations! You mean, of course, that the real old
baronet would have negotiated very differently.
“He would have told you plainly that the Captain
would never get a penny,” said Father Brown. “The
plot, queer as it sounds, was really the only way of
preventing his telling you so. But I want you to
appreciate the cunning of what the fellow did tell
you. His plan answered several purposes at once. He
was being blackmailed by these Russians for some
villainy; I suspect for treason during the war. He
escaped from them at a stroke, and probably sent
them chasing off to Riga after him. But the most
beautiful refinement of all was that theory he
enunciated about recognizing his son as an heir, but
not as a human being. Don’t you see that while it
secured the post obit, it also provided some sort of
answer to what would soon be the greatest difficulty
of all?”
“I see several difficulties,” said Granby; “which
one do you mean?”
“I mean that if the son was not even
disinherited, it would look rather odd that the
father and son never met. The theory of a private
repudiation answered that. So there only remained
one difficulty, as I say, which is probably
perplexing the gentleman now. How on earth is the
old man to die?”
“I know how he ought to die,” said Granby.
Father Brown seemed to be a little bemused, and
went on in a more abstracted fashion.
“And yet there is something more in it than
that,” he said. “There was something about that
theory that he liked in a way that is more — well,
more theoretical. It gave him an insane intellectual
pleasure to tell you in one character that he had
committed a crime in another character — when he
really had. That is what I mean by the infernal
irony; by the joke shared with the Devil. Shall I
tell you something that sounds like what they call a
paradox? Sometimes it is a joy in the very heart of
hell to tell the truth. And above all, to tell it so
that everybody misunderstands it. That is why he
liked that antic of pretending to be somebody else,
and then painting himself as black — as he was. And
that was why my niece heard him laughing to himself
all alone in the picture gallery.”
Granby gave a slight start, like a person brought
back to common things with a bump.
“Your niece,” he cried. “Didn’t her mother want
her to marry Musgrave? A question of wealth and
position, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown dryly; “her mother was
all in favour of a prudent marriage.”
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Chapter VIII. The Red Moon of Meru
Everyone agreed that the bazaar at Mallowood
Abbey (by kind permission of Lady Mounteagle) was a
great success; there were roundabouts and swings and
side-shows, which the people greatly enjoyed; I
would also mention the Charity, which was the
excellent object of the proceedings, if any of them
could tell me what it was. However, it is only with
a few of them that we are here concerned; and
especially with three of them, a lady and two
gentlemen, who passed between two of the principal
tents or pavilions, their voices high in argument.
On their right was the tent of the Master of the
Mountain, that world-famous fortune-teller by
crystals and chiromancy; a rich purple tent, all
over which were traced, in black and gold, the
sprawling outlines of Asiatic gods waving any number
of arms like octopods. Perhaps they symbolized the
readiness of divine help to be had within; perhaps
they merely implied that the ideal being of a pious
palmist would have as many hands as possible. On the
other side stood the plainer tent of Phroso the
Phrenologist; more austerely decorated with diagrams
of the heads of Socrates and Shakespeare, which were
apparently of a lumpy sort. But these were presented
merely in black and white, with numbers and notes,
as became the rigid dignity of a purely
rationalistic science. The purple tent had an
opening like a black cavern, and all was fittingly
silent within. But Phroso the Phrenologist, a lean,
shabby, sunburnt person, with an almost improbably
fierce black moustache and whiskers, was standing
outside his own temple, and talking, at the top of
his voice, to nobody in particular, explaining that
the head of any passer-by would doubtless prove, on
examination, to be every bit as knobbly as
Shakespeare’s. Indeed, the moment the lady appeared
between the tents, the vigilant Phroso leapt on her
and offered, with a pantomime of old-world courtesy,
to feel her bumps.
She refused with civility that was rather like
rudeness; but she must be excused, because she was
in the middle of an argument. She also had to be
excused, or at any rate was excused, because she was
Lady Mounteagle. She was not a nonentity, however,
in any sense; she was at once handsome and haggard,
with a hungry look in her deep, dark eyes and
something eager and almost fierce about her smile.
Her dress was bizarre for the period; for it was
before the Great War had left us in our present mood
of gravity and recollection. Indeed, the dress was
rather like the purple tent; being of a
semi-oriental sort, covered with exotic and esoteric
emblems. But everyone knew that the Mounteagles were
mad; which was the popular way of saying that she
and her husband were interested in the creeds and
culture of the East.
The eccentricity of the lady was a great contrast
to the conventionality of the two gentlemen, who
were braced and buttoned up in all the stiffer
fashion of that far-off day, from the tips of their
gloves to their bright top hats. Yet even here there
was a difference; for James Hardcastle managed at
once to look correct and distinguished, while Tommy
Hunter only looked correct and commonplace.
Hardcastle was a promising politician; who seemed in
society to be interested in everything except
politics. It may be answered gloomily that every
politician is emphatically a promising politician.
But to do him justice, he had often exhibited
himself as a performing politician. No purple tent
in the bazaar, however, had been provided for him to
perform in.
“For my part,” he said, screwing in the monocle
that was the only gleam in his hard, legal face, “I
think we must exhaust the possibilities of mesmerism
before we talk about magic. Remarkable psychological
powers undoubtedly exist, even in apparently
backward peoples. Marvellous things have been done
by fakirs.”
“Did you say done by fakers?” asked the other
young man, with doubtful innocence.
“Tommy, you are simply silly,” said the lady.
“Why will you keep barging in on things you don’t
understand? You’re like a schoolboy screaming out
that he knows how a conjuring trick is done. It’s
all so Early Victorian — that schoolboy scepticism.
As for mesmerism, I doubt whether you can stretch it
to — — ”
At this point Lady Mounteagle seemed to catch
sight of somebody she wanted; a black stumpy figure
standing at a booth where children were throwing
hoops at hideous table ornaments. She darted across
and cried:
“Father Brown, I’ve been looking for you. I want
to ask you something: Do you believe in
fortune-telling?”
The person addressed looked rather helplessly at
the little hoop in his hand and said at last:
“I wonder in which sense you’re using the word
‘believe.’ Of course, if it’s all a fraud — — ”
“Oh, but the Master of the Mountain isn’t a bit
of a fraud,” she cried. “He isn’t a common conjurer
or a fortune-teller at all. It’s really a great
honour for him to condescend to tell fortunes at my
parties; he’s a great religious leader in his own
country; a Prophet and a Seer. And even his
fortune-telling isn’t vulgar stuff about coming into
a fortune. He tells you great spiritual truths about
yourself, about your ideals.”
“Quite so,” said Father Brown. “That’s what I
object to. I was just going to say that if it’s all
a fraud, I don’t mind it so much. It can’t be much
more of a fraud than most things at fancy bazaars;
and there, in a way, it’s a sort of practical joke.
But if it’s a religion and reveals spiritual truths
— then it’s all as false as hell and I wouldn’t
touch it with a bargepole.”
“That is something of a paradox,” said
Hardcastle, with a smile.
“I wonder what a paradox is,” remarked the priest
in a ruminant manner. “It seems to me obvious
enough. I suppose it wouldn’t do very much harm if
somebody dressed up as a German spy and pretended to
have told all sorts of lies to the Germans. But if a
man is trading in the truth with the Germans — well!
So I think if a fortune-teller is trading in truth
like that — — ”
“You really think,” began Hardcastle grimly.
“Yes,” said the other; “I think he is trading
with the enemy.”
Tommy Hunter broke into a chuckle. “Well,” he
said, “if Father Brown thinks they’re good so long
as they’re frauds, I should think he’d consider this
copper-coloured prophet a sort of saint.”
“My cousin Tom is incorrigible,” said Lady
Mounteagle. “He’s always going about showing up
adepts, as he calls it. He only came down here in a
hurry when he heard the Master was to be here, I
believe. He’d have tried to show up Buddha or
Moses.”
“Thought you wanted looking after a bit,” said
the young man, with a grin on his round face. “So I
toddled down. Don’t like this brown monkey crawling
about.”
“There you go again!” said Lady Mounteagle.
“Years ago, when I was in India, I suppose we all
had that sort of prejudice against brown people. But
now I know something about their wonderful spiritual
powers, I’m glad to say I know better.”
“Our prejudices seem to cut opposite ways,” said
Father Brown. “You excuse his being brown because he
is brahminical; and I excuse his being brahminical
because he is brown. Frankly, I don’t care for
spiritual powers much myself. I’ve got much more
sympathy with spiritual weaknesses. But I can’t see
why anybody should dislike him merely because he is
the same beautiful colour as copper, or coffee, or
nut-brown ale, or those jolly peat-streams in the
North. But then,” he added, looking across at the
lady and screwing up his eyes, “I suppose I’m
prejudiced in favour of anything that’s called
brown.”
“There now!” cried Lady Mounteagle with a sort of
triumph. “I knew you were only talking nonsense!”
“Well,” grumbled the aggrieved youth with the
round face. “When anybody talks sense you call it
schoolboy scepticism. When’s the crystal-gazing
going to begin?”
“Any time you like, I believe,” replied the lady.
“It isn’t crystal-gazing, as a matter of fact, but
palmistry; I suppose you would say it was all the
same sort of nonsense.”
“I think there is a via media between sense and
nonsense,” said Hardcastle, smiling. “There are
explanations that are natural and not at all
nonsensical; and yet the results are very amazing.
Are you coming in to be operated on? I confess I am
full of curiosity.”
“Oh, I’ve no patience with such nonsense,”
spluttered the sceptic, whose round face had become
rather a red face with the heat of his contempt and
incredulity. “I’ll let you waste your time on your
mahogany mountebank; I’d rather go and throw at
coco-nuts.”
The Phrenologist, still hovering near, darted at
the opening.
“Heads, my dear sir,” he said, “human skulls are
of a contour far more subtle than that of coco-nuts.
No coco-nut can compare with your own most — — ”
Hardcastle had already dived into the dark entry
of the purple tent; and they heard a low murmur of
voices within. As Tom Hunter turned on the
Phrenologist with an impatient answer, in which he
showed a regrettable indifference to the line
between natural and preternatural sciences, the lady
was just about to continue her little argument with
the little priest, when she stopped in some
surprise. James Hardcastle had come out of the tent
again, and in his grim face and glaring monocle,
surprise was even more vividly depicted. “He’s not
there,” remarked the politician abruptly. “He’s
gone. Some aged nigger, who seems to constitute his
suite, jabbered something to me to the effect that
the Master had gone forth rather than sell sacred
secrets for gold.”
Lady Mounteagle turned radiantly to the rest.
“There now,” she cried. “I told you he was a cut
above anything you fancied! He hates being here in a
crowd; he’s gone back to his solitude.”
“I am sorry,” said Father Brown gravely. “I may
have done him an injustice. Do you know where he has
gone?”
“I think so,” said his hostess equally gravely.
“When he wants to be alone, he always goes to the
cloisters, just at the end of the left wing, beyond
my husband’s study and private museum, you know.
Perhaps you know this house was once an abbey.”
“I have heard something about it,” answered the
priest, with a faint smile.
“We’ll go there, if you like,” said the lady,
briskly. “You really ought to see my husband’s
collection; or the Red Moon at any rate. Haven’t you
ever heard of the Red Moon of Meru? Yes, it’s a
ruby.”
“I should be delighted to see the collection,”
said Hardcastle quietly, “including the Master of
the Mountain, if that prophet is one exhibit in the
museum.” And they all turned towards the path
leading to the house.
“All the same,” muttered the sceptical Thomas, as
he brought up the rear, “I should very much like to
know what the brown beast did come here for, if he
didn’t come to tell fortunes.”
As he disappeared, the indomitable Phroso made
one more dart after him, almost snatching at his
coat-tails. “The bump — — ” he began.
“No bump,” said the youth, “only a hump. Hump I
always have when I come down to see Mounteagle.” And
he took to his heels to escape the embrace of the
man of science.
On their way to the cloisters the visitors had to
pass through the long room that was devoted by Lord
Mounteagle to his remarkable private museum of
Asiatic charms and mascots. Through one open door,
in the length of the wall opposite, they could see
the Gothic arches and the glimmer of daylight
between them, marking the square open space, round
the roofed border of which the monks had walked in
older days. But they had to pass something that
seemed at first sight rather more extraordinary than
the ghost of a monk.
It was an elderly gentleman, robed from head to
foot in white, with a pale green turban, but a very
pink and white English complexion and the smooth
white moustaches of some amiable Anglo-Indian
colonel. This was Lord Mounteagle, who had taken his
Oriental pleasures more sadly, or at least more
seriously than his wife. He could talk of nothing
whatever, except Oriental religion and philosophy;
and had thought it necessary even to dress in the
manner of an Oriental hermit. While he was delighted
to show his treasures, he seemed to treasure them
much more for the truths supposed to be symbolized
in them than for their value in collections, let
alone cash. Even when he brought out the great ruby,
perhaps the only thing of great value in the museum,
in a merely monetary sense, he seemed to be much
more interested in its name than in its size, let
alone its price.
The others were all staring at what seemed a
stupendously large red stone, burning like a bonfire
seen through a rain of blood. But Lord Mounteagle
rolled it loosely in his palm without looking at it;
and staring at the ceiling, told them a long tale
about the legendary character of Mount Meru, and
how, in the Gnostic mythology, it had been the place
of the wrestling of nameless primeval powers.
Towards the end of the lecture on the Demiurge of
the Gnostics (not forgetting its connexion with the
parallel concept of Manichaeus), even the tactful
Mr. Hardcastle thought it time to create a
diversion. He asked to be allowed to look at the
stone; and as evening was closing in, and the long
room with its single door was steadily darkening, he
stepped out in the cloister beyond, to examine the
jewel by a better light. It was then that they first
became conscious, slowly and almost creepily
conscious, of the living presence of the Master of
the Mountain.
The cloister was on the usual plan, as regards
its original structure; but the line of Gothic
pillars and pointed arches that formed the inner
square was linked together all along by a low wall,
about waist high, turning the Gothic doors into
Gothic windows and giving each a sort of flat
window-sill of stone. This alteration was probably
of ancient date; but there were other alterations of
a quainter sort, which witnessed to the rather
unusual individual ideas of Lord and Lady
Mounteagle. Between the pillars hung thin curtains,
or rather veils, made of beads or light canes, in a
continental or southern manner; and on these again
could be traced the lines and colours of Asiatic
dragons or idols, that contrasted with the grey
Gothic framework in which they were suspended. But
this, while it further troubled the dying light of
the place, was the least of the incongruities of
which the company, with very varying feelings,
became aware.
In the open space surrounded by the cloisters,
there ran, like a circle in a square, a circular
path paved with pale stones and edged with some sort
of green enamel like an imitation lawn. Inside that,
in the very centre, rose the basin of a dark-green
fountain, or raised pond, in which water-lilies
floated and goldfish flashed to and fro; and high
above these, its outline dark against the dying
light, was a great green image. Its back was turned
to them and its face so completely invisible in the
hunched posture that the statue might almost have
been headless. But in that mere dark outline, in the
dim twilight, some of them could see instantly that
it was the shape of no Christian thing.
A few yards away, on the circular path, and
looking towards the great green god, stood the man
called the Master of the Mountain. His pointed and
finely-finished features seemed moulded by some
skilful craftsman as a mask of copper. In contrast
with this, his dark-grey beard looked almost blue
like indigo; it began in a narrow tuft on his chin,
and then spread outwards like a great fan or the
tail of a bird. He was robed in peacock green and
wore on his bald head a high cap of uncommon
outline: a head-dress none of them had ever seen
before; but it looked rather Egyptian than Indian.
The man was standing with staring eyes; wide open,
fish-shaped eyes, so motionless that they looked
like the eyes painted on a mummy-case. But though
the figure of the Master of the Mountain was
singular enough, some of the company, including
Father Brown, did not look at him; they still looked
at the dark-green idol at which he himself was
looking.
“This seems a queer thing,” said Hardcastle,
frowning a little, “to set up in the middle of an
old abbey cloister.”
“Now, don’t tell me you’re going to be silly,”
said Lady Mounteagle. “That’s just what we meant; to
link up the great religions of East and West; Buddha
and Christ. Surely you must understand that all
religions are really the same.”
“If they are,” said Father Brown mildly, “it
seems rather unnecessary to go into the middle of
Asia to get one.”
“Lady Mounteagle means that they are different
aspects or facets, as there are of this stone,”
began Hardcastle; and becoming interested in the new
topic, laid the great ruby down on the stone sill or
ledge under the Gothic arch. “But it does not follow
that we can mix the aspects in one artistic style.
You may mix Christianity and Islam, but you can’t
mix Gothic and Saracenic, let alone real Indian.”
As he spoke, the Master of the Mountain seemed to
come to life like a cataleptic, and moved gravely
round another quarter segment of the circle, and
took up his position outside their own row of
arches, standing with his back to them and looking
now towards the idol’s back. It was obvious that he
was moving by stages round the whole circle, like a
hand round a clock; but pausing for prayer or
contemplation.
“What is his religion?” asked Hardcastle, with a
faint touch of impatience.
“He says,” replied Lord Mounteagle, reverently,
“that it is older than Brahminism and purer than
Buddhism.”
“Oh,” said Hardcastle, and continued to stare
through his single eyeglass, standing with both his
hands in his pockets.
“They say,” observed the nobleman in his gentle
but didactic voice, “that the deity called the God
of Gods is carved in a colossal form in the cavern
of Mount Meru — — ”
Even his lordship’s lecturing serenity was broken
abruptly by the voice that came over his shoulder.
It came out of the darkness of the museum they had
just left, when they stepped out into the cloister.
At the sound of it the two younger men looked first
incredulous, then furious, and then almost collapsed
into laughter.
“I hope I do not intrude,” said the urbane and
seductive voice of Professor Phroso, that
unconquerable wrestler of the truth, “but it
occurred to me that some of you might spare a little
time for that much despised science of Bumps, which
— — ”
“Look here,” cried the impetuous Tommy Hunter, “I
haven’t got any bumps; but you’ll jolly well have
some soon, you — — ”
Hardcastle mildly restrained him as he plunged
back through the door; and for the moment all the
group had turned again and were looking back into
the inner room.
It was at that moment that the thing happened. It
was the impetuous Tommy, once more, who was the
first to move, and this time to better effect.
Before anyone else had seen anything, when
Hardcastle had barely remembered with a jump that he
had left the gem on the stone sill, Tommy was across
the cloister with the leap of a cat and, leaning
with his head and shoulders out of the aperture
between two columns, had cried out in a voice that
rang down all the arches: “I’ve got him!”
In that instant of time, just after they turned,
and just before they heard his triumphant cry, they
had all seen it happen. Round the corner of one of
the two columns, there had darted in and out again a
brown or rather bronze-coloured hand, the colour of
dead gold; such as they had seen elsewhere. The hand
had struck as straight as a striking snake; as
instantaneous as the flick of the long tongue of an
ant-eater. But it had licked up the jewel. The stone
slab of the window-sill shone bare in the pale and
fading light.
“I’ve got him,” gasped Tommy Hunter; “but he’s
wriggling pretty hard. You fellows run round him in
front — he can’t have got rid of it, anyhow.”
The others obeyed, some racing down the corridor
and some leaping over the low wall, with the result
that a little crowd, consisting of Hardcastle, Lord
Mounteagle, Father Brown, and even the undetachable
Mr. Phroso of the bumps, had soon surrounded the
captive Master of the Mountain, whom Hunter was
hanging on to desperately by the collar with one
hand, and shaking every now and then in a manner
highly insensible to the dignity of Prophets as a
class.
“Now we’ve got him, anyhow,” said Hunter, letting
go with a sigh. “We’ve only got to search him. The
thing must be here.”
Three-quarters of an hour later. Hunter and
Hardcastle, their top-hats, ties, gloves, slips and
spats somewhat the worse for their recent
activities, came face to face in the cloister and
gazed at each other.
“Well,” asked Hardcastle with restraint, “have
you any views on the mystery?”
“Hang it all,” replied Hunter; “you can’t call it
a mystery. Why, we all saw him take it ourselves.”
“Yes,” replied the other, “but we didn’t all see
him lose it ourselves. And the mystery is, where has
he lost it so that we can’t find it?”
“It must be somewhere,” said Hunter. “Have you
searched the fountain and all round that rotten old
god there?”
“I haven’t dissected the little fishes,” said
Hardcastle, lifting his eyeglass and surveying the
other. “Are you thinking of the ring of Polycrates?”
Apparently the survey, through the eye-glass, of
the round face before him, convinced him that it
covered no such meditation on Greek legend.
“It’s not on him, I admit,” repeated Hunter,
suddenly, “unless he’s swallowed it.”
“Are we to dissect the Prophet, too?” asked the
other smiling. “But here comes our host.”
“This is a most distressing matter,” said Lord
Mounteagle, twisting his white moustache with a
nervous and even tremulous hand. “Horrible thing to
have a theft in one’s house, let alone connecting it
with a man like the Master. But, I confess, I can’t
quite make head or tail of the way in which he is
talking about it. I wish you’d come inside and see
what you think.”
They went in together, Hunter falling behind and
dropping into conversation with Father Brown, who
was kicking his heels round the cloister.
“You must be very strong,” said the priest
pleasantly. “You held him with one hand; and he
seemed pretty vigorous, even when we had eight hands
to hold him, like one of those Indian gods.”
They took a turn or two round the cloister,
talking; and then they also went into the inner
room, where the Master of the Mountain was seated on
a bench, in the capacity of a captive, but with more
of the air of a king.
It was true, as Lord Mounteagle said, that his
air and tone were not very easy to understand. He
spoke with a serene, and yet secretive sense of
power. He seemed rather amused at their suggestions
about trivial hiding-places for the gem; and
certainly he showed no resentment whatever. He
seemed to be laughing, in a still unfathomable
fashion at their efforts to trace what they had all
seen him take.
“You are learning a little,” he said, with
insolent benevolence, “of the laws of time and
space; about which your latest science is a thousand
years behind our oldest religion. You do not even
know what is really meant by hiding a thing. Nay, my
poor little friends, you do not even know what is
meant by seeing a thing; or perhaps you would see
this as plainly as I do.”
“Do you mean it is here?” demanded Hardcastle
harshly.
“Here is a word of many meanings, also,” replied
the mystic. “But I did not say it was here. I only
said I could see it.”
There was an irritated silence, and he went on
sleepily.
“If you were to be utterly, unfathomably, silent,
do you think you might hear a cry from the other end
of the world? The cry of a worshipper alone in those
mountains, where the original image sits, itself
like a mountain. Some say that even Jews and Moslems
might worship that image; because it was never made
by man. Hark! Do you hear the cry with which he
lifts his head and sees in that socket of stone,
that has been hollow for ages, the one red and angry
moon that is the eye of the mountain?”
“Do you really mean,” cried Lord Mounteagle, a
little shaken, “that you could make it pass from
here to Mount Meru? I used to believe you had great
spiritual powers, but — — ”
“Perhaps,” said the Master, “I have more than you
will ever believe.”
Hardcastle rose impatiently and began to pace the
room with his hands in his pockets.
“I never believed so much as you did; but I admit
that powers of a — certain type may . . . Good God!”
His high, hard voice had been cut off in mid-air,
and he stopped staring; the eye-glass fell out of
his eye. They all turned their faces in the same
direction; and on every face there seemed to be the
same suspended animation.
The Red Moon of Meru lay on the stone
window-sill, exactly as they had last seen it. It
might have been a red spark blown there from a
bonfire, or a red rose-petal tossed from a broken
rose; but it had fallen in precisely the same spot
where Hardcastle had thoughtlessly laid it down.
This time Hardcastle did not attempt to pick it
up again; but his demeanour was somewhat notable. He
turned slowly and began to stride about the room
again; but there was in his movements something
masterful, where before it had been only restless.
Finally, he brought himself to a standstill in front
of the seated Master, and bowed with a somewhat
sardonic smile.
“Master,” he said, “we all owe you an apology
and, what is more important, you have taught us all
a lesson. Believe me, it will serve as a lesson as
well as a joke. I shall always remember the very
remarkable powers you really possess, and how
harmlessly you use them. Lady Mounteagle,” he went
on, turning towards her, “you will forgive me for
having addressed the Master first; but it was to you
I had the honour of offering this explanation some
time ago. I may say that I explained it before it
had happened. I told you that most of these things
could be interpreted by some kind of hypnotism. Many
believe that this is the explanation of all those
Indian stories about the mango plant and the boy who
climbs a rope thrown into the air. It does not
really happen; but the spectators are mesmerized
into imagining that it happened. So we were all
mesmerized into imagining this theft had happened.
That brown hand coming in at the window, and
whisking away the gem, was a momentary delusion; a
hand in a dream. Only, having seen the stone vanish,
we never looked for it where it was before. We
plunged into the pond and turned every leaf of the
water lilies; we were almost giving emetics to the
goldfish. But the ruby has been here all the time.”
And he glanced across at the opalescent eyes and
smiling bearded mouth of the Master, and saw that
the smile was just a shade broader. There was
something in it that made the others jump to their
feet with an air of sudden relaxation and general,
gasping relief.
“This is a very fortunate escape for us all,”
said Lord Mounteagle, smiling rather nervously.
“There cannot be the least doubt it is as you say.
It has been a most painful episode and I really
don’t know what apologies — — ”
“I have no complaints,” said the Master or the
Mountain, still smiling. “You have never touched Me
at all.”
While the rest went off rejoicing, with
Hardcastle for the hero of the hour, the little
Phrenologist with the whiskers sauntered back
towards his preposterous tent. Looking over his
shoulder he was surprised to find Father Brown
following him.
“Can I feel your bumps?” asked the expert, in his
mildly sarcastic tone.
“I don’t think you want to feel any more, do
you?” said the priest good-humouredly. “You’re a
detective, aren’t you?”
“Yep,” replied the other. “Lady Mounteagle asked
me to keep an eye on the Master, being no fool, for
all her mysticism; and when he left his tent, I
could only follow by behaving like a nuisance and a
monomaniac. If anybody had come into my tent, I’d
have had to look up Bumps in an encyclopaedia.”
“Bumps, What Ho She; see Folk-Lore,” observed
Father Brown, dreamily. “Well, you were quite in the
part in pestering people — at a bazaar.”
“Rum case, wasn’t it?” remarked the fallacious
Phrenologist. “Queer to think the thing was there
all the time.”
“Very queer,” said the priest.
Something in his voice made the other man stop
and stare.
“Look here!” he cried; “what’s the matter with
you? What are you looking like that for! Don’t you
believe that it was there all the time?”
Father Brown blinked rather as if he had received
a buffet; then he said slowly and with hesitation:
“No, the fact is ... I can’t — I can’t quite bring
myself to believe it.”
“You’re not the sort of chap,” said the other
shrewdly, “who’d say that without reason. Why don’t
you think the ruby had been there all the time?”
“Only because I put it back myself,” said Father
Brown.
The other man stood rooted to the spot, like one
whose hair was standing on end. He opened his mouth
without speech.
“Or rather,” went on the priest, “I persuaded the
thief to let me put it back. I told him what I’d
guessed and showed him there was still time for
repentance. I don’t mind telling you in professional
confidence; besides, I don’t think the Mounteagles
would prosecute, now they’ve got the thing back,
especially considering who stole it.”
“Do you mean the Master?” asked the late Phroso.
“No,” said Father Brown, “the Master didn’t steal
it.”
“But I don’t understand,” objected the other.
“Nobody was outside the window except the Master;
and a hand certainly came from outside.”
“The hand came from outside, but the thief came
from the inside,” said Father Brown.
“We seem to be back among the mystics again. Look
here, I’m a practical man; I only wanted to know if
it is all right with the ruby — — ”
“I knew it was all wrong,” said Father Brown,
“before I even knew there was a ruby.”
After a pause he went on thoughtfully. “Right
away back in that argument of theirs, by the tents,
I knew things were going wrong. People will tell you
that theories don’t matter and that logic and
philosophy aren’t practical. Don’t you believe them.
Reason is from God, and when things are unreasonable
there is something the matter. Now, that quite
abstract argument ended with something funny.
Consider what the theories were. Hardcastle was a
trifle superior and said that all things were
perfectly possible; but they were mostly done merely
by mesmerism, or clairvoyance; scientific names for
philosophical puzzles, in the usual style. But
Hunter thought it all sheer fraud and wanted to show
it up. By Lady Mounteagle’s testimony, he not only
went about showing up fortune-tellers and such like,
but he had actually come down specially to confront
this one. He didn’t often come; he didn’t get on
with Mounteagle, from whom, being a spendthrift, he
always tried to borrow; but when he heard the Master
was coming, he came hurrying down. Very well. In
spite of that, it was Hardcastle who went to consult
the wizard and Hunter who refused. He said he’d
waste no time on such nonsense; having apparently
wasted a lot of his life on proving it to be
nonsense. That seems inconsistent. He thought in
this case it was crystal-gazing; but he found it was
palmistry.”
“Do you mean he made that an excuse?” asked his
companion, puzzled.
“I thought so at first,” replied the priest; “but
I know now it was not an excuse, but a reason. He
really was put off by finding it was a palmist,
because — — ”
“Well,” demanded the other impatiently.
“Because he didn’t want to take his glove off,”
said Father Brown.
“Take his glove off?” repeated the inquirer.
“If he had,” said Father Brown mildly, “we should
all have seen that his hand was painted pale brown
already. ... Oh, yes, he did come down specially
because the Master was here. He came down very fully
prepared.”
“You mean,” cried Phroso, “that it was Hunter’s
hand, painted brown, that came in at the window?
Why, he was with us all the time!”
“Go and try it on the spot and you’ll find it’s
quite possible,” said the priest. “Hunter leapt
forward and leaned out of the window; in a flash he
could tear off his glove, tuck up his sleeve, and
thrust his hand back round the other side of the
pillar, while he gripped the Indian with the other
hand and halloed out that he’d caught the thief. I
remarked at the time that he held the thief with one
hand, where any sane man would have used two. But
the other hand was slipping the jewel into his
trouser pocket.”
There was a long pause and then the
ex-Phrenologist said slowly. “Well, that’s a
staggerer. But the thing stumps me still. For one
thing, it doesn’t explain the queer behaviour of the
old magician himself. If he was entirely innocent,
why the devil didn’t he say so? Why wasn’t he
indignant at being accused and searched? Why did he
only sit smiling and hinting in a sly way what wild
and wonderful things he could do?”
“Ah!” cried Father Brown, with a sharp note in
his voice: “there you come up against it! Against
everything these people don’t and won’t understand.
All religions are the same, says Lady Mounteagle.
Are they, by George! I tell you some of them are so
different that the best man of one creed will be
callous, where the worst man of another will be
sensitive. I told you I didn’t like spiritual power,
because the accent is on the word power. I don’t say
the Master would steal a ruby, very likely he
wouldn’t; very likely he wouldn’t think it worth
stealing. It wouldn’t be specially his temptation to
take jewels; but it would be his temptation to take
credit for miracles that didn’t belong to him any
more than the jewels. It was to that sort of
temptation, to that sort of stealing that he yielded
today. He liked us to think that he had marvellous
mental powers that could make a material object fly
through space; and even when he hadn’t done it, he
allowed us to think he had. The point about private
property wouldn’t occur primarily to him at all. The
question wouldn’t present itself in the form: ‘Shall
I steal this pebble?’ but only in the form: ‘Could I
make a pebble vanish and re-appear on a distant
mountain?’ The question of whose pebble would strike
him as irrelevant. That is what I mean by religious
being different. He is very proud of having what he
calls spiritual powers. But what he calls spiritual
doesn’t mean what we call moral. It means rather
mental; the power of the mind over matter; the
magician controlling the elements. Now we are not
like that, even when we are no better; even when we
are worse. We, whose fathers at least were
Christians, who have grown up under those mediaeval
arches even if we bedizen them with all the demons
in Asia — we have the very opposite ambition and the
very opposite shame. We should all be anxious that
nobody should think we had done it. He was actually
anxious that everybody should think he had — even
when he hadn’t. He actually stole the credit of
stealing. While we were all casting the crime from
us like a snake, he was actually luring it to him
like a snake-charmer. But snakes are not pets in
this country! Here the traditions of Christendom
tell at once under a test like this. Look at old
Mounteagle himself, for instance! Ah, you may be as
Eastern and esoteric as you like, and wear a turban
and a long robe and live on messages from Mahatmas;
but if a bit of stone is stolen in your house, and
your friends are suspected, you will jolly soon find
out that you’re an ordinary English gentleman in a
fuss. The man who really did it would never want us
to think he did it, for he also was an English
gentleman. He was also something very much better;
he was a Christian thief. I hope and believe he was
a penitent thief.”
“By your account,” said his companion laughing,
“the Christian thief and the heathen fraud went by
contraries. One was sorry he’d done it and the other
was sorry he hadn’t.”
“We mustn’t be too hard on either of them,” said
Father Brown. “Other English gentlemen have stolen
before now, and been covered by legal and political
protection; and the West also has its own way of
covering theft with sophistry. After all, the ruby
is not the only kind of valuable stone in the world
that has changed owners; it is true of other
precious stones; often carved like cameos and
coloured like flowers.” The other looked at him
inquiringly; and the priest’s finger was pointed to
the Gothic outline of the great Abbey. “A great
graven stone,” he said, “and that was also stolen.”
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Chapter IX. The Chief Mourner of Marne
A blaze of lightning blanched the grey woods
tracing all the wrinkled foliage down to the last
curled leaf, as if every detail were drawn in
silverpoint or graven in silver. The same strange
trick of lightning by which it seems to record
millions of minute things in an instant of time,
picked out everything, from the elegant litter of
the picnic spread under the spreading tree to the
pale lengths of winding road, at the end of which a
white car was waiting. In the distance a melancholy
mansion with four towers like a castle, which in the
grey evening had been but a dim and distant huddle
of walls like a crumbling cloud, seemed to spring
into the foreground, and stood up with all its
embattled, roofs and blank and staring windows. And
in this, at least, the light had something in it of
revelation. For to some of those grouped under the
tree that castle was, indeed, a thing faded and
almost forgotten, which was to prove its power to
spring up again in the foreground of their lives.
The light also clothed for an instant, in the
same silver splendour, at least one human figure
that stood up as motionless as one of the towers. It
was that of a tall man standing on a rise of ground
above the rest, who were mostly sitting on the grass
or stooping to gather up the hamper and crockery. He
wore a picturesque short cloak or cape clasped with
a silver clasp and chain, which blazed like a star
when the flash touched it; and something metallic in
his motionless figure was emphasized by the fact
that his closely-curled hair was of the burnished
yellow that can be really called gold; and had the
look of being younger than his face, which was
handsome in a hard aquiline fashion, but looked,
under the strong light, a little wrinkled and
withered. Possibly it had suffered from wearing a
mask of make-up, for Hugo Romaine was the greatest
actor of his day. For that instant of illumination
the golden curls and ivory mask and silver ornament
made his figure gleam like that of a man in armour;
the next instant his figure was a dark and even
black silhouette against the sickly grey of the
rainy evening sky.
But there was something about its stillness, like
that of a statue, that distinguished it from the
group at his feet. All the other figures around him
had made the ordinary involuntary movement at the
unexpected shock of light; for though the skies were
rainy it was the first flash of the storm. The only
lady present, whose air of carrying grey hair
gracefully, as if she were really proud of it,
marked her a matron of the United States,
unaffectedly shut her eyes and uttered a sharp cry.
Her English husband, General Outram, a very stolid
Anglo-Indian, with a bald head and black moustache
and whiskers of antiquated pattern, looked up with
one stiff movement and then resumed his occupation
of tidying up. A young man of the name of Mallow,
very big and shy, with brown eyes like a dog’s,
dropped a cup and apologized awkwardly. A third man,
much more dressy, with a resolute head, like an
inquisitive terrier’s, and grey hair brushed stiffly
back, was no other than the great newspaper
proprietor, Sir John Cockspur; he cursed freely, but
not in an English idiom or accent, for he came from
Toronto. But the tall man in the short cloak stood
up literally like a statue in the twilight; his
eagle face under the full glare had been like the
bust of a Roman Emperor, and the carved eyelids had
not moved.
A moment after, the dark dome cracked across with
thunder, and the statue seemed to come to life. He
turned his head over his shoulder and said casually;
“About a minute and half between the flash and
the bang, but I think the storm’s coming nearer. A
tree is not supposed to be a good umbrella for the
lightning, but we shall want it soon for the rain. I
think it will be a deluge.”
The young man glanced at the lady a little
anxiously and said: “Can’t we get shelter anywhere?
There seems to be a house over there.”
“There is a house over there,” remarked the
general, rather grimly; “but not quite what you’d
call a hospitable hotel.”
“It’s curious,” said his wife sadly, “that we
should be caught in a storm with no house near but
that one, of all others.”
Something in her tone seemed to check the younger
man, who was both sensitive and comprehending; but
nothing of that sort daunted the man from Toronto.
“What’s the matter with it?” he asked. “Looks
rather like a ruin.”
“That place,” said the general dryly, “belongs to
the Marquis of Marne.”
“Gee!” said Sir John Cockspur. “I’ve heard all
about that bird, anyhow; and a queer bird, too. Ran
him as a front-page mystery in the Comet last year.
‘The Nobleman Nobody Knows.’”
“Yes, I’ve heard of him, too,” said young Mallow
in a low voice. “There seem to be all sorts of weird
stories about why he hides himself like that. I’ve
heard that he wears a mask because he’s a leper. But
somebody else told me quite seriously that there’s a
curse on the family; a child born with some
frightful deformity that’s kept in a dark room.”
“The Marquis of Marne has three heads,” remarked
Romaine quite gravely. “Once in every three hundred
years a three-headed nobleman adorns the family
tree. No human being dares approach the accursed
house except a silent procession of hatters, sent to
provide an abnormal number of hats. But,” — and his
voice took one of those deep and terrible turns,
that could cause such a thrill in the theatre — “my
friends, those hats are of no human shape.”
The American lady looked at him with a frown and
a slight air of distrust, as if that trick of voice
had moved her in spite of herself.
“I don’t like your ghoulish jokes,” she said;
“and I’d rather you didn’t joke about this, anyhow.”
“I hear and obey,” replied the actor; “but am I,
like the Light Brigade, forbidden even to reason
why?”
“The reason,” she replied, “is that he isn’t the
Nobleman Nobody Knows. I know him myself, or, at
least, I knew him very well when he was an attache
at Washington thirty years ago, when we were all
young. And he didn’t wear a mask, at least, he
didn’t wear it with me. He wasn’t a leper, though he
may be almost as lonely. And he had only one head
and only one heart, and that was broken.”
“Unfortunate love affair, of course,” said
Cockspur. “I should like that for the Comet.”
“I suppose it’s a compliment to us,” she replied
thoughtfully, “that you always assume a man’s heart
is broken by a woman. But there are other kinds of
love and bereavement. Have you never read ‘In
Memoriam’? Have you never heard of David and
Jonathan? What broke poor Marne up was the death of
his brother; at least, he was really a first cousin,
but had been brought up with him like a brother, and
was much nearer than most brothers. James Mair, as
the marquis was called when I knew him, was the
elder of the two, but he always played the part of
worshipper, with Maurice Mair as a god. And, by his
account, Maurice Mair was certainly a wonder. James
was no fool, and very good at his own political job;
but it seems that Maurice could do that and
everything else; that he was a brilliant artist and
amateur actor and musician, and all the rest of it.
James was very good-looking himself, long and strong
and strenuous, with a high-bridged nose; though I
suppose the young people would think he looked very
quaint with his beard divided into two bushy
whiskers in the fashion of those Victorian times.
But Maurice was clean-shaven, and, by the portraits
shown to me, certainly quite beautiful; though he
looked a little more like a tenor than a gentleman
ought to look. James was always asking me again and
again whether his friend was not a marvel, whether
any woman wouldn’t fall in love with him, and so on,
until it became rather a bore, except that it turned
so suddenly into a tragedy. His whole life seemed to
be in that idolatry, and one day the idol tumbled
down, and was broken like any china doll. A chill
caught at the seaside, and it was all over.”
“And after that,” asked the young man, “did he
shut himself up like this?”
“He went abroad at first,” she answered; “away to
Asia and the Cannibal Islands and Lord knows where.
These deadly strokes take different people in
different ways. It took him in the way of an utter
sundering or severance from everything, even from
tradition and as far as possible from memory. He
could not bear a reference to the old tie; a
portrait or an anecdote or even an association. He
couldn’t bear the business of a great public
funeral. He longed to get away. He stayed away for
ten years. I heard some rumour that he had begun to
revive a little at the end of the exile; but when he
came back to his own home he relapsed completely. He
settled down into religious melancholia, and that’s
practically madness.”
“The priests got hold of him, they say,” grumbled
the old general. “I know he gave thousands to found
a monastery, and lives himself rather like a monk —
or, at any rate, a hermit. Can’t understand what
good they think that will do.”
“Goddarned superstition,” snorted Cockspur; “that
sort of thing ought to be shown up. Here’s a man
that might have been useful to the Empire and the
world, and these vampires get hold of him and suck
him dry. I bet with their unnatural notions they
haven’t even let him marry.”
“No, he has never married,” said the lady. “He
was engaged when I knew him, as a matter of fact,
but I don’t think it ever came first with him, and I
think it went with the rest when everything else
went. Like Hamlet and Ophelia — he lost hold of love
because he lost hold of life. But I knew the girl;
indeed, I know her still. Between ourselves, it was
Viola Grayson, daughter of the old admiral. She’s
never married either.”
“It’s infamous! It’s infernal!” cried Sir John,
bounding up. “It’s not only a tragedy, but a crime.
I’ve got a duty to the public, and I mean to see all
this nonsensical nightmare. In the twentieth century
— ”
He was almost choked with his own protest, and
then, after a silence, the old soldier said:
“Well, I don’t profess to know much about those
things, but I think these religious people need to
study a text which says: ‘Let the dead bury their
dead.’”
“Only, unfortunately, that’s just what it looks
like,” said his wife with a sigh. “It’s just like
some creepy story of a dead man burying another dead
man, over and over again for ever.”
“The storm has passed over us,” said Romaine,
with a rather inscrutable smile. “You will not have
to visit the inhospitable house after all.”
She suddenly shuddered.
“Oh, I’ll never do that again!” she exclaimed.
Mallow was staring at her.
“Again! Have you tried it before?” he cried.
“Well, I did once,” she said, with a lightness
not without a touch of pride; “but we needn’t go
back on all that. It’s not raining now, but I think
we’d better be moving back to the car.”
As they moved off in procession, Mallow and the
general brought up the rear; and the latter said
abruptly, lowering his voice:
“I don’t want that little cad Cockspur to hear
but as you’ve asked you’d better know. It’s the one
thing I can’t forgive Marne; but I suppose these
monks have drilled him that way. My wife, who had
been the best friend he ever had in America,
actually came to that house when he was walking in
the garden. He was looking at the ground like a
monk, and hidden in a black hood that was really as
ridiculous as any mask. She had sent her card in,
and stood there in his very path. And he walked past
her without a word or a glance, as if she had been a
stone. He wasn’t human; he was like some horrible
automaton. She may well call him a dead man.”
“It’s all very strange,” said the young man
rather vaguely. “It isn’t like — like what I should
have expected.”
Young Mr. Mallow, when he left that rather dismal
picnic, took himself thoughtfully in search of a
friend. He did not know any monks, but he knew one
priest, whom he was very much concerned to confront
with the curious revelations he had heard that
afternoon. He felt he would very much like to know
the truth about the cruel superstition that hung
over the house of Marne, like the black thundercloud
he had seen hovering over it.
After being referred from one place to another,
he finally ran his friend Father Brown to earth in
the house of another friend, a Roman Catholic
friend, with a large family. He entered somewhat
abruptly to find Father Brown sitting on the floor
with a serious expression, and attempting to pin the
somewhat florid hat belonging to a wax doll on to
the head of a teddy bear.
Mallow felt a faint sense of incongruity; but he
was far too full of his problem to put off the
conversation if he could help it. He was staggering
from a sort of set-back in a subconscious process
that had been going on for some time. He poured out
the whole tragedy of the house of Marne as he had
heard it from the general’s wife, along with most of
the comments of the general and the newspaper
proprietor. A new atmosphere of attention seemed to
be created with the mention of the newspaper
proprietor.
Father Brown neither knew nor cared that his
attitudes were comic or commonplace. He continued to
sit on the floor, where his large head and short
legs made him look very like a baby playing with
toys. But there came into his great grey eyes a
certain expression that has been seen in the eyes of
many men in many centuries through the story of
nineteen hundred years; only the men were not
generally sitting on floors, but at council tables,
or on the seats of chapters, or the thrones of
bishops and cardinals; a far-off, watchful look,
heavy with the humility of a charge too great for
men. Something of that anxious and far-reaching look
is found in the eyes of sailors and of those who
have steered through so many storms the ship of St.
Peter.
“It’s very good of you to tell me this,” he said.
“I’m really awfully grateful, for we may have to do
something about it. If it were only people like you
and the general, it might be only a private matter;
but if Sir John Cockspur is going to spread some
sort of scare in his papers — well, he’s a Toronto
Orangeman, and we can hardly keep out of it.”
“But what will you say about it?” asked Mallow
anxiously.
“The first thing I should say about it,” said
Father Brown, “is that, as you tell it, it doesn’t
sound like life. Suppose, for the sake of argument,
that we are all pessimistic vampires blighting all
human happiness. Suppose I’m a pessimistic vampire.”
He scratched his nose with the teddy bear, became
faintly conscious of the incongruity, and put it
down. “Suppose we do destroy all human and family
ties. Why should we entangle a man again in an old
family tie just when he showed signs of getting
loose from it? Surely it’s a little unfair to charge
us both with crushing such affection and encouraging
such infatuation. I don’t see why even a religious
maniac should be that particular sort of monomaniac,
or how religion could increase that mania, except by
brightening it with a little hope.”
Then he said, after a pause: “I should like to
talk to that general of yours.”
“It was his wife who told me,” said Mallow.
“Yes,” replied the other; “but I’m more
interested in what he didn’t tell you than in what
she did.”
“You think he knows more than she does?”
“I think he knows more than she says,” answered
Father Brown. “You tell me he used a phrase about
forgiving everything except the rudeness to his
wife. After all, what else was there to forgive?”
Father Brown had risen and shaken his shapeless
clothes, and stood looking at the young man with
screwed up eyes and slightly quizzical expression.
The next moment he had turned, and picking up his
equally shapeless umbrella and large shabby hat,
went stumping down the street.
He plodded through a variety of wide streets and
squares till he came to a handsome old-fashioned
house in the West End, where he asked the servant if
he could see General Outram. After some little
palaver he was shown into a study, fitted out less
with books than with maps and globes, where the
bald-headed, black-whiskered Anglo-Indian sat
smoking a long, thin, black cigar and playing with
pins on a chart.
“I am sorry to intrude,” said the priest, “and
all the more because I can’t help the intrusion
looking like interference. I want to speak to you
about a private matter, but only in the hope of
keeping it private. Unfortunately, some people are
likely to make it public. I think, general, that you
know Sir John Cockspur.”
The mass of black moustache and whisker served as
a sort of mask for the lower half of the old
general’s face; it was always hard to see whether he
smiled, but his brown eyes often had a certain
twinkle.
“Everybody knows him, I suppose,” he said. “I
don’t know him very well.”
“Well, you know everybody knows whatever he
knows,” said Father Brown, smiling, “when he thinks
it convenient to print it. And I understand from my
friend Mr. Mallow, whom, I think, you know, that Sir
John is going to print some scorching anti-clerical
articles founded on what he would call the Marne
Mystery. ‘Monks Drive Marquis Mad,’ etc.”
“If he is,” replied the general, “I don’t see why
you should come to me about it. I ought to tell you
I’m a strong Protestant.”
“I’m very fond of strong Protestants,” said
Father Brown. “I came to you because I was sure you
would tell the truth. I hope it is not uncharitable
to feel less sure of Sir John Cockspur.”
The brown eyes twinkled again, but the general
said nothing.
“General,” said Father Brown, “suppose Cockspur
or his sort were going to make the world ring with
tales against your country and your flag. Suppose he
said your regiment ran away in battle, or your staff
were in the pay of the enemy. Would you let anything
stand between you and the facts that would refute
him? Wouldn’t you get on the track of the truth at
all costs to anybody? Well, I have a regiment, and I
belong to an army. It is being discredited by what I
am certain is a fictitious story; but I don’t know
the true story. Can you blame me for trying to find
it out?”
The soldier was silent, and the priest continued:
“I have heard the story Mallow was told
yesterday, about Marne retiring with a broken heart
through the death of his more than brother. I am
sure there was more in it than that. I came to ask
you if you know any more.”
“No,” said the general shortly; “I cannot tell
you any more.”
“General,” said Father Brown with a broad grin,
“you would have called me a Jesuit if I had used
that equivocation.”
The soldier laughed gruffly, and then growled
with much greater hostility.
“Well, I won’t tell you, then,” he said. “What do
you say to that?”
“I only say,” said the priest mildly, “that in
that case I shall have to tell you.”
The brown eyes stared at him; but there was no
twinkle in them now. He went on:
“You compel me to state, less sympathetically
perhaps than you could, why it is obvious that there
is more behind. I am quite sure the marquis has
better cause for his brooding and secretiveness than
merely having lost an old friend. I doubt whether
priests have anything to do with it; I don’t even
know if he’s a convert or merely a man comforting
his conscience with charities; but I’m sure he’s
something more than a chief mourner. Since you
insist, I will tell you one or two of the things
that made me think so.
“First, it was stated that James Mair was engaged
to be married, but somehow became unattached again
after the death of Maurice Mair. Why should an
honourable man break off his engagement merely
because he was depressed by the death of a third
party? He’s much more likely to have turned for
consolation to it; but, anyhow, he was bound in
decency to go through with it.”
The general was biting his black moustache, and
his brown eyes had become very watchful and even
anxious, but he did not answer.
“A second point,” said Father Brown, frowning at
the table. “James Mair was always asking his lady
friend whether his cousin Maurice was not very
fascinating, and whether women would not admire him.
I don’t know if it occurred to the lady that there
might be another meaning to that inquiry.”
The general got to his feet and began to walk or
stamp about the room.
“Oh, damn it all,” he said, but without any air
of animosity.
“The third point,” went on Father Brown, “is
James Mair’s curious manner of mourning — destroying
all relics, veiling all portraits, and so on. It
does sometimes happen, I admit; it might mean mere
affectionate bereavement. But it might mean
something else.”
“Confound you,” said the other. “How long are you
going on piling this up?”
“The fourth and fifth points are pretty
conclusive,” said the priest calmly, “especially if
you take them together. The first is that Maurice
Mair seems to have had no funeral in particular,
considering he was a cadet of a great family. He
must have been buried hurriedly; perhaps secretly.
And the last point is, that James Mair instantly
disappeared to foreign parts; fled, in fact, to the
ends of the earth.
“And so,” he went on, still in the same soft
voice, “when you would blacken my religion to
brighten the story of the pure and perfect affection
of two brothers, it seems — — ”
“Stop!” cried Outram in a tone like a pistol
shot. “I must tell you more, or you will fancy
worse. Let me tell you one thing to start with. It
was a fair fight.”
“Ah,” said Father Brown, and seemed to exhale a
huge breath.
“It was a duel,” said the other. “It was probably
the last duel fought in England, and it is long ago
now.”
“That’s better,” said Father Brown. “Thank God;
that’s a great deal better.”
“Better than the ugly things you thought of, I
suppose?” said the general gruffly. “Well, it’s all
very well for you to sneer at the pure and perfect
affection; but it was true for all that. James Mair
really was devoted to his cousin, who’d grown up
with him like a younger brother. Elder brothers and
sisters do sometimes devote themselves to a child
like that, especially when he’s a sort of infant
phenomenon. But James Mair was the sort of simple
character in whom even hate is in a sense unselfish.
I mean that even when his tenderness turns to rage
it is still objective, directed outwards to its
object; he isn’t conscious of himself. Now poor
Maurice Mair was just the opposite. He was far more
friendly and popular; but his success had made him
live in a house of mirrors. He was first in every
sort of sport and art and accomplishment; he nearly
always won and took his winning amiably. But if
ever, by any chance, he lost, there was just a
glimpse of something not so amiable; he was a little
jealous. I needn’t tell you the whole miserable
story of how he was a little jealous of his cousin’s
engagement; how he couldn’t keep his restless vanity
from interfering. It’s enough to say that one of the
few things in which James Mair was admittedly ahead
of him was marksmanship with a pistol; and with that
the tragedy ended.”
“You mean the tragedy began,” replied the priest.
“The tragedy of the survivor. I thought he did not
need any monkish vampires to make him miserable.”
“To my mind he’s more miserable than he need be,”
said the general. “After all, as I say, it was a
ghastly tragedy, but it was a fair fight. And Jim
had great provocation.”
“How do you know all this?” asked the priest.
“I know it because I saw it,” answered Outram
stolidly. “I was James Mair’s second, and I saw
Maurice Mair shot dead on the sands before my very
eyes.”
“I wish you would tell me more about it,” said
Father Brown reflectively. “Who was Maurice Mair’s
second?”
“He had a more distinguished backing,” replied
the general grimly. “Hugo Romaine was his second;
the great actor, you know. Maurice was mad on acting
and had taken up Romaine (who was then a rising but
still a struggling man), and financed the fellow and
his ventures in return for taking lessons from the
professional in his own hobby of amateur acting. But
Romaine was then, I suppose, practically dependent
on his rich friend; though he’s richer now than any
aristocrat. So his serving as second proves very
little about what he thought of the quarrel. They
fought in the English fashion, with only one second
apiece; I wanted at least to have a surgeon, but
Maurice boisterously refused it, saying the fewer
people who knew, the better; and at the worst we
could immediately get help. ‘There’s a doctor in the
village not half a mile away,’ he said; ‘I know him
and he’s got the fastest horse in the country. He
could be brought here in no time; but there’s no
need to bring him here till we know.’ Well, we all
knew that Maurice ran most risk, as the pistol was
not his weapon; so when he refused aid nobody liked
to ask for it. The duel was fought on a flat stretch
of sand on the east coast of Scotland; and both the
sight and sound of it were masked from the hamlets
inland by a long rampart of sandhills patched with
rank grass; probably part of the links, though in
those days no Englishman had heard of golf. There
was one deep, crooked cranny in the sandhills
through which we came out on the sands. I can see
them now; first a wide strip of dead yellow, and
beyond, a narrower strip of dark red; a dark red
that seemed already like the long shadow of a deed
of blood.
“The thing itself seemed to happen with horrible
speed; as if a whirlwind had struck the sand. With
the very crack of sound Maurice Mair seemed to spin
like a teetotum and pitch upon his face like a
ninepin. And queerly enough, while I’d been worrying
about him up to that moment, the instant he was dead
all my pity was for the man who killed him; as it is
to this day and hour. I knew that with that, the
whole huge terrible pendulum of my friend’s
life-long love would swing back; and that whatever
cause others might find to pardon him, he would
never pardon himself for ever and ever. And so,
somehow, the really vivid thing, the picture that
burns in my memory so that I can’t forget it, is not
that of the catastrophe, the smoke and the flash and
the falling figure. That seemed to be all over, like
the noise that wakes a man up. What I saw, what I
shall always see, is poor Jim hurrying across
towards his fallen friend and foe; his brown beard
looking black against the ghastly pallor of his
face, with its high features cut out against the
sea; and the frantic gestures with which he waved me
to run for the surgeon in the hamlet behind the
sandhills. He had dropped his pistol as he ran; he
had a glove in one hand and the loose and fluttering
fingers of it seemed to elongate and emphasize his
wild pantomime of pointing or hailing for help. That
is the picture that really remains with me; and
there is nothing else in that picture, except the
striped background of sands and sea and the dark,
dead body lying still as a stone, and the dark
figure of the dead man’s second standing grim and
motionless against the horizon.”
“Did Romaine stand motionless?” asked the priest.
“I should have thought he would have run even
quicker towards the corpse.”
“Perhaps he did when I had left,” replied the
general. “I took in that undying picture in an
instant and the next instant I had dived among the
sandhills, and was far out of sight of the others.
Well, poor Maurice had made a good choice in the
matter of doctors; though the doctor came too late,
he came quicker than I should have thought possible.
This village surgeon was a very remarkable man,
redhaired, irascible, but extraordinarily strong in
promptitude and presence of mind. I saw him but for
a flash as he leapt on his horse and went thundering
away to the scene of death, leaving me far behind.
But in that flash I had so strong a sense of his
personality that I wished to God he had really been
called in before the duel began; for I believe on my
soul he would have prevented it somehow. As it was,
he cleaned up the mess with marvellous swiftness;
long before I could trail back to the sea-shore on
my two feet his impetuous practicality had managed
everything; the corpse was temporarily buried in the
sandhills and the unhappy homicide had been
persuaded to do the only thing he could do — to flee
for his life. He slipped along the coast till he
came to a port and managed to get out of the
country. You know the rest; poor Jim remained abroad
for many years; later, when the whole thing had been
hushed up or forgotten, he returned to his dismal
castle and automatically inherited the title. I have
never seen him from that day to this, and yet I know
what is written in red letters in the inmost
darkness of his brain.”
“I understand,” said Father Brown, “that some of
you have made efforts to see him?”
“My wife never relaxed her efforts,” said the
general. “She refuses to admit that such a crime
ought to cut a man off for ever; and I confess I am
inclined to agree with her. Eighty years before it
would have been thought quite normal; and really it
was manslaughter rather than murder. My wife is a
great friend of the unfortunate lady who was the
occasion of the quarrel and she has an idea that if
Jim would consent to see Viola Grayson once again,
and receive her assurance that old quarrels are
buried, it might restore his sanity. My wife is
calling a sort of council of old friends to-morrow,
I believe. She is very energetic.”
Father Brown was playing with the pins that lay
beside the general’s map; he seemed to listen rather
absent-mindedly. He had the sort of mind that sees
things in pictures; and the picture which had
coloured even the prosaic mind of the practical
soldier took on tints yet more significant and
sinister in the more mystical mind of the priest. He
saw the dark-red desolation of sand, the very hue of
Aceldama, and the dead man lying in a dark heap, and
the slayer, stooping as he ran, gesticulating with a
glove in demented remorse, and always his
imagination came back to the third thing that he
could not yet fit into any human picture: the second
of the slain man standing motionless and mysterious,
like a dark statue on the edge of the sea. It might
seem to some a detail; but for him it was that stiff
figure that stood up like a standing note of
interrogation.
Why had not Romaine moved instantly? It was the
natural thing for a second to do, in common
humanity, let alone friendship. Even if there were
some double-dealing or darker motive not yet
understood, one would think it would be done for the
sake of appearances. Anyhow, when the thing was all
over, it would be natural for the second to stir
long before the other second had vanished beyond the
sandhills.
“Does this man Romanic move very slowly?” he
asked.
“It’s queer you should ask that,” answered.
Outram, with a sharp glance. “No, as a matter of
fact he moves very quickly when he moves at all.
But, curiously enough, I was just thinking that only
this afternoon I saw him stand exactly like that,
during the thunderstorm. He stood in that
silver-clasped cape of his, and with one hand on his
hip, exactly and in every line as he stood on those
bloody sands long ago. The lightning blinded us all,
but he did not blink. When it was dark again he was
standing there still.”
“I suppose he isn’t standing there now?” inquired
Father Brown. “I mean, I suppose he moved sometime?”
“No, he moved quite sharply when the thunder
came,” replied the other. “He seemed to have been
waiting for it, for he told us the exact time of the
interval. Is anything the matter?”
“I’ve pricked myself with one of your pins,” said
Father Brown. “I hope I haven’t damaged it.” But his
eyes had snapped and his mouth abruptly shut.
“Are you ill?” inquired the general, staring at
him.
“No,” answered the priest; “I’m only not quite so
stoical as your friend Romaine. I can’t help
blinking when I see light.”
He turned to gather up his hat and umbrella; but
when he had got to the door he seemed to remember
something and turned back. Coming up close to
Outram, he gazed up into his face with a rather
helpless expression, as of a dying fish, and made a
motion as if to hold him by the waistcoat.
“General,” he almost whispered, “for God’s sake
don’t let your wife and that other woman insist on
seeing Marne again. Let sleeping dogs lie, or you’ll
unleash all the hounds of hell.”
The general was left alone with a look of
bewilderment in his brown eyes, as he sat down again
to play with his pins.
Even greater, however, was the bewilderment which
attended the successive stages of the benevolent
conspiracy of the general’s wife, who had assembled
her little group of sympathizers to storm the castle
of the misanthrope. The first surprise she
encountered was the unexplained absence of one of
the actors in the ancient tragedy. When they
assembled by agreement at a quiet hotel quite near
the castle, there was no sign of Hugo Romaine, until
a belated telegram from a lawyer told them that the
great actor had suddenly left the country. The
second surprise, when they began the bombardment by
sending up word to the castle with an urgent request
for an interview, was the figure which came forth
from those gloomy gates to receive the deputation in
the name of the noble owner. It was no such figure
as they would have conceived suitable to those
sombre avenues or those almost feudal formalities.
It was not some stately steward or major-domo, nor
even a dignified butler or tall and ornamental
footman. The only figure that came out of the
cavernous castle doorway was the short and shabby
figure of Father Brown.
“Look here,” he said, in his simple, bothered
fashion. “I told you you’d much better leave him
alone. He knows what he’s doing and it’ll only make
everybody unhappy.”
Lady Outram, who was accompanied by a tall and
quietly-dressed lady, still very handsome,
presumably the original Miss Grayson, looked at the
little priest with cold contempt.
“Really, sir,” she said; “this is a very private
occasion, and I don’t understand what you have to do
with it.’
“Trust a priest to have to do with a private
occasion,” snarled Sir John Cockspur. “Don’t you
know they live behind the scenes like rats behind a
wainscot burrowing their way into everybody’s
private rooms. See how he’s already in possession of
poor Marne.” Sir John was slightly sulky, as his
aristocratic friends had persuaded him to give up
the great scoop of publicity in return for the
privilege of being really inside a Society secret.
It never occurred to him to ask himself whether he
was at all like a rat in a wainscot.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Father Brown, with
the impatience of anxiety. “I’ve talked it over with
the marquis and the only priest he’s ever had
anything to do with; his clerical tastes have been
much exaggerated. I tell you he knows what he’s
about; and I do implore you all to leave him alone.”
“You mean to leave him to this living death of
moping and going mad in a ruin!” cried Lady Outram,
in a voice that shook a little. “And all because he
had the bad luck to shoot a man in a duel more than
a quarter of a century ago. Is that what you call
Christian charity?”
“Yes,” answered the priest stolidly; “that is
what I call Christian charity.”
“It’s about all the Christian charity you’ll ever
get out of these priests,” cried Cockspur bitterly.
“That’s their only idea of pardoning a poor fellow
for a piece of folly; to wall him up alive and
starve him to death with fasts and penances and
pictures of hell-fire. And all because a bullet went
wrong.”
“Really, Father Brown,” said General Outram, “do
you honestly think he deserves this? Is that your
Christianity?”
“Surely the true Christianity,” pleaded his wife
more gently, “is that which knows all and pardons
all; the love that can remember — and forget.”
“Father Brown,” said young Mallow, very
earnestly, “I generally agree with what you say; but
I’m hanged if I can follow you here. A shot in a
duel, followed instantly by remorse, is not such an
awful offence.”
“I admit.” said Father Brown dully, “that I take
a more serious view of his offence.”
“God soften your hard heart,” said the strange
lady speaking for the first time. “I am going to
speak to my old friend.”
Almost as if her voice had raised a ghost in that
great grey house, something stirred within and a
figure stood in the dark doorway at the top of the
great stone flight of steps. It was clad in dead
black, but there was something wild about the
blanched hair and something in the pale features
that was like the wreck of a marble statue.
Viola Grayson began calmly to move up the great
flight of steps; and Outram muttered in his thick
black moustache: “He won’t cut her dead as he did my
wife, I fancy.”
Father Brown, who seemed in a collapse of
resignation, looked up at him for a moment.
“Poor Marne has enough on his conscience,” he
said. “Let us acquit him of what we can. At least he
never cut your wife.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“He never knew her,” said Father Brown.
As they spoke, the tall lady proudly mounted the
last step and came face to face with the Marquis of
Marne. His lips moved, but something happened before
he could speak.
A scream rang across the open space and went
wailing away in echoes along those hollow walls. By
the abruptness and agony with which it broke from
the woman’s lips it might have been a mere
inarticulate cry. But it was an articulated word;
and they all heard it with a horrible distinctness.
“Maurice!”
“What is it, dear?” cried Lady Outram, and began
to run up the steps; for the other woman was swaying
as if she might fall down the whole stone flight.
Then she faced about and began to descend, all bowed
and shrunken and shuddering. “Oh, my God,” she was
saying. “Oh, my God, it isn’t Jim at all. it’s
Maurice!”
“I think, Lady Outram,” said the priest gravely,
“you had better go with your friend.”
As they turned, a voice fell on them like a stone
from the top of the stone stair, a voice that might
have come out of an open grave. It was hoarse and
unnatural, like the voices of men who are left alone
with wild birds on desert islands. It was the voice
of the Marquis of Marne, and it said: “Stop!”
“Father Brown,” he said, “before your friends
disperse I authorize you to tell them all I have
told you. Whatever follows, I will hide from it no
longer.”
“You are right,” said the priest, “and it shall
be counted to you.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown quietly to the
questioning company afterwards. “He has given me the
right to speak; but I will not tell it as he told
me, but as I found it out for myself. Well, I knew
from the first that the blighting monkish influence
was all nonsense out of novels. Our people might
possibly, in certain cases, encourage a man to go
regularly into a monastery, but certainly not to
hang about in a mediaeval castle. In the same way,
they certainly wouldn’t want him to dress up as a
monk when he wasn’t a monk. But it struck me that he
might himself want to wear a monk’s hood or even a
mask. I had heard of him as a mourner, and then as a
murderer; but already I had hazy suspicions that his
reason for hiding might not only be concerned with
what he was, but with who he was.
“Then came the general’s vivid description of the
duel; and the most vivid thing in it to me was the
figure of Mr. Romaine in the background; it was
vivid because it was in the background. Why did the
general leave behind him on the sand a dead man,
whose friend stood yards away from him like a stock
or a stone? Then I heard something, a mere trifle,
about a trick habit that Romaine has of standing
quite still when he is waiting for something to
happen; as he waited for the thunder to follow the
lightning. Well, that automatic trick in this case
betrayed everything. Hugo Romaine on that old
occasion, also, was waiting for something.”
“But it was all over,” said the general. “What
could he have been waiting for?”
“He was waiting for the duel,” said Father Brown.
“But I tell you I saw the duel!” cried the
general.
“And I tell you you didn’t see the duel,” said
the priest.
“Are you mad?” demanded the other. “Or why should
you think I am blind?”
“Because you were blinded — that you might not
see,” said the priest. “Because you are a good man
and God had mercy on your innocence, and he turned
your face away from that unnatural strife. He set a
wall of sand and silence between you and what really
happened on that horrible red shore, abandoned to
the raging spirits of Judas and of Cain.”
“Tell us what happened!” gasped the lady
impatiently.
“I will tell it as I found it,” proceeded the
priest. “The next thing I found was that Romaine the
actor had been training Maurice Mair in all the
tricks of the trade of acting. I once had a friend
who went in for acting. He gave me a very amusing
account of how his first week’s training consisted
entirely of falling down; of learning how to fall
flat without a stagger, as if he were stone dead.”
“God have mercy on us!” cried the general, and
gripped the arms of his chair as if to rise.
“Amen,” said Father Brown. “You told me how
quickly it seemed to come; in fact, Maurice fell
before the bullet flew, and lay perfectly still,
waiting. And his wicked friend and teacher stood
also in the background, waiting.”
“We are waiting,” said Cockspur, “and I feel as
if I couldn’t wait.”
“James Mair, already broken with remorse, rushed
across to the fallen man and bent over to lift him
up. He had thrown away his pistol like an unclean
thing; but Maurice’s pistol still lay under his hand
and it was undischarged. Then as the elder man bent
over the younger, the younger lifted himself on his
left arm and shot the elder through the body. He
knew he was not so good a shot, but there was no
question of missing the heart at that distance.”
The rest of the company had risen and stood
staring down at the narrator with pale faces. “Are
you sure of this?” asked Sir John at last, in a
thick voice.
“I am sure of it,” said Father Brown, “and now I
leave Maurice Mair, the present Marquis of Marne, to
your Christian charity. You have told me something
to-day about Christian charity. You seemed to me to
give it almost too large a place; but how fortunate
it is for poor sinners like this man that you err so
much on the side of mercy, and are ready to be
reconciled to all mankind.”
“Hang it all,” exploded the general; “if you
think I’m going to be reconciled to a filthy viper
like that, I tell you I wouldn’t say a word to save
him from hell. I said I could pardon a regular
decent duel, but of all the treacherous assassins —
— ”
“He ought to be lynched,” cried Cockspur
excitedly. “He ought to burn alive like a nigger in
the States. And if there is such a thing as burning
for ever, he jolly well — — ”
“I wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole myself,”
said Mallow.
“There is a limit to human charity,” said Lady
Outram, trembling all over.
“There is,” said Father Brown dryly; “and that is
the real difference between human charity and
Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not
altogether crushed by your contempt for my
uncharitableness to-day; or by the lectures you read
me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me
that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really
think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they
commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather
as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel,
just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You
forgive because there isn’t anything to be
forgiven.”
“But, hang it all,” cried Mallow, “you don’t
expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing like
this?”
“No,” said the priest; “but we have to be able to
pardon it.”
He stood up abruptly and looked round at them.
“We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole,
but with a benediction,” he said. “We have to say
the word that will save them from hell. We alone are
left to deliver them from despair when your human
charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path
pardoning all your favourite vices and being
generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in
the darkness, vampires of the night, to console
those who really need consolation; who do things
really indefensible, things that neither the world
nor they themselves can defend; and none but a
priest will pardon. Leave us with the men who commit
the mean and revolting and real crimes; mean as St.
Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came.”
“The dawn,” repeated Mallow doubtfully. “You mean
hope — for him?”
“Yes,” replied the other. “Let me ask you one
question. You are great ladies and men of honour and
secure of yourselves; you would never, you can tell
yourselves, stoop to such squalid reason as that.
But tell me this. If any of you had so stooped,
which of you, years afterwards, when you were old
and rich and safe, would have been driven by
conscience or confessor to tell such a story of
yourself? You say you could not commit so base a
crime. Could you confess so base a crime?” The
others gathered their possessions together and
drifted by twos and threes out of the room in
silence. And Father Brown, also in silence, went
back to the melancholy castle of Marne.
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Chapter X. The Secret of Flambeau
“ — the sort of murders in which I played the
part of the murderer,” said Father Brown, putting
down the wineglass. The row of red pictures of crime
had passed before him in that moment.
“It is true,” he resumed, after a momentary
pause, “that somebody else had played the part of
the murderer before me and done me out of the actual
experience. I was a sort of understudy; always in a
state of being ready to act the assassin. I always
made it my business, at least, to know the part
thoroughly. What I mean is that, when I tried to
imagine the state of mind in which such a thing
would be done, I always realized that I might have
done it myself under certain mental conditions, but
not under others; and not generally under the
obvious ones. And then, of course, I knew who really
had done it; and he was not generally the obvious
person.
“For instance, it seemed obvious to say that the
revolutionary poet had killed the old judge who saw
red about red revolutionaries. But that isn’t really
a reason for the revolutionary poet killing him. It
isn’t, if you think what it would really be like to
be a revolutionary poet. Now I set myself
conscientiously down to be a revolutionary poet. I
mean that particular sort of pessimistic anarchial
lover of revolt, not as reform, but rather as
destruction. I tried to clear my mind of such
elements of sanity and constructive common sense as
I have had the luck to learn or inherit. I shut down
and darkened all the skylights through which comes
the good daylight out of heaven; I imagined a mind
lit only by a red light from below; a fire rending
rocks and cleaving abysses upwards. And even with
the vision at its wildest and worst, I could not see
why such a visionary should cut short his own career
by colliding with a common policeman, for killing
one out of a million conventional old fools, as he
would have called them. He wouldn’t do it; however
much he wrote songs of violence. He wouldn’t do it,
because he wrote songs of violence. A man who can
express himself in song need not express himself in
suicide. A poem was an event to him; and he would
want to have more of them. Then I thought of another
sort of heathen; the sort that is not destroying the
world but entirely depending on the world. I thought
that, save for the grace of God, I might have been a
man for whom the world was a blaze of electric
lights, with nothing but utter darkness beyond and
around it. The worldly man, who really lives only
for this world and believes in no other, whose
worldly success and pleasure are all he can ever
snatch out of nothingness — that is the man who will
really do anything, when he is in danger of losing
the whole world and saving nothing. It is not the
revolutionary man but the respectable man who would
commit any crime — to save his respectability. Think
what exposure would mean to a man like that
fashionable barrister; and exposure of the one crime
still really hated by his fashionable world —
treason against patriotism. If I had been in his
position, and had nothing better than his
philosophy, heaven alone knows what I might have
done. That is just where this little religious
exercise is so wholesome.”
“Some people would think it was rather morbid,”
said Grandison Chace dubiously.
“Some people,” said Father Brown gravely,
“undoubtedly do think that charity and humility are
morbid. Our friend the poet probably would. But I’m
not arguing those questions; I’m only trying to
answer your question about how I generally go to
work. Some of your countrymen have apparently done
me the honour to ask how I managed to frustrate a
few miscarriages of justice. Well, you can go back
and tell them that I do it by morbidity. But I most
certainly don’t want them to think I do it by
magic.”
Chace continued to look at him with a reflective
frown; he was too intelligent not to understand the
idea; he would also have said that he was too
healthy-minded to like it. He felt as if he were
talking to one man and yet to a hundred murderers.
There was something uncanny about that very small
figure, perched like a goblin beside the goblin
stove; and the sense that its round head had held
such a universe of wild unreason and imaginative
injustice. It was as if the vast void of dark behind
it were a throng of dark gigantic figures, the
ghosts of great criminals held at bay by the magic
circle of the red stove, but ready to tear their
master in pieces.
“Well, I’m afraid I do think it’s morbid,” he
said frankly. “And I’m not sure it isn’t almost as
morbid as magic. But morbidity or no, there’s one
thing to be said; it must be an interesting
experience.” Then he added, after reflection: “I
don’t know whether you would make a really good
criminal. But you ought to make a rattling good
novelist.”
“I only have to deal with real events,” said
Father Brown. “But it’s sometimes harder to imagine
real things than unreal ones.”
“Especially,” said the other, “when they are the
great crimes of the world.”
“It’s not the great crimes but the small crimes
that are really hard to imagine,” replied the
priest.
“I don’t quite know what you mean by that,” said
Chace.
“I mean commonplace crimes like stealing jewels,”
said Father Brown; “like that affair of the emerald
necklace or the Ruby of Meru or the artificial
goldfish. The difficulty in those cases is that
you’ve got to make your mind small. High and mighty
humbugs, who deal in big ideas, don’t do those
obvious things. I was sure the Prophet hadn’t taken
the ruby; or the Count the goldfish; though a man
like Bankes might easily take the emeralds. For
them, a jewel is a piece of glass: and they can see
through the glass. But the little, literal people
take it at its market value.
“For that you’ve got to have a small mind. It’s
awfully hard to get; like focusing smaller and
sharper in a wobbling camera. But some things
helped; and they threw a lot of light on the
mystery, too. For instance, the sort of man who
brags about having ‘shown up’ sham magicians or poor
quacks of any sort — he’s always got a small mind.
He is the sort of man who ‘sees through’ tramps and
trips them up in telling lies. I dare say it might
sometimes be a painful duty. It’s an uncommonly base
pleasure. The moment I realized what a small mind
meant, I knew where to look for it — in the man who
wanted to expose the Prophet — and it was he that
sneaked the ruby; in the man who jeered at his
sister’s psychic fancies — and it was he who nabbed
the emeralds. Men like that always have their eye on
jewels; they never could rise, with the higher
humbugs, to despising jewels. Those criminals with
small minds are always quite conventional. They
become criminals out of sheer conventionality.
“It takes you quite a long time to feel so
crudely as that, though. It’s quite a wild effort of
imagination to be so conventional. To want one potty
little object as seriously as all that. But you can
do it. ... You can get nearer to it. Begin by
thinking of being a greedy child; of how you might
have stolen a sweet in a shop; of how there was one
particular sweet you wanted … then you must subtract
the childish poetry; shut off the fairy light that
shone on the sweet-stuff shop; imagine you really
think you know the world and the market value of
sweets … you contract your mind like the camera
focus … the thing shapes and then sharpens ... and
then, suddenly, it comes!”
He spoke like a man who had once captured a
divine vision. Grandison Chace was still looking at
him with a frown of mingled mystification and
interest. It must be confessed that there did flash
once beneath his heavy frown a look of something
almost like alarm. It was as if the shock of the
first strange confession of the priest still
thrilled faintly through him like the last vibration
of a thunderclap in the room. Under the surface he
was saying to himself that the mistake had only been
a temporary madness; that, of course. Father Brown
could not really be the monster and murderer he had
beheld for that blinding and bewildering instant.
But was there not something wrong with the man who
talked in that calm way about being a murderer? Was
it possible that the priest was a little mad?
“Don’t you think,” he said, abruptly; “that this
notion of yours, of a man trying to feel like a
criminal, might make him a little too tolerant of
crime?”
Father Brown sat up and spoke in a more staccato
style.
“I know it does just the opposite. It solves the
whole problem of time and sin. It gives a man his
remorse beforehand.”
There was a silence; the American looked at the
high and steep roof that stretched half across the
enclosure; his host gazed into the fire without
moving; and then the priest’s voice came on a
different note, as if from lower down.
“There are two ways of renouncing the devil,” he
said; “and the difference is perhaps the deepest
chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of
him because he is so far off; and the other to have
it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are
so much divided as those two virtues.”
They did not answer and he went on in the same
heavy tone, as if he were dropping words like molten
lead.
“You may think a crime horrible because you could
never commit it. I think it horrible because I could
commit it. You think of it as something like an
eruption of Vesuvius; but that would not really be
so terrible as this house catching fire. If a
criminal suddenly appeared in this room — — ”
“If a criminal appeared in this room,” said Chace,
smiling, “I think you would be a good deal too
favourable to him. Apparently you would start by
telling him that you were a criminal yourself and
explaining how perfectly natural it was that he
should have picked his father’s pocket or cut his
mother’s throat. Frankly, I don’t think it’s
practical. I think that the practical effect would
be that no criminal would ever reform. It’s easy
enough to theorize and take hypothetical cases; but
we all know we’re only talking in the air. Sitting
here in M. Duroc’s nice, comfortable house,
conscious of our respectability and all the rest of
it, it just gives us a theatrical thrill to talk
about thieves and murderers and the mysteries of
their souls. But the people who really have to deal
with thieves and murderers have to deal with them
differently. We are safe by the fireside; and we
know the house is not on fire. We know there is not
a criminal in the room.”
The M. Duroc to whom allusion had been made rose
slowly from what had been called his fireside, and
his huge shadow flung from the fire seemed to cover
everything and darken even the very night above him.
“There is a criminal in this room,” he said. “I
am one. I am Flambeau, and the police of two
hemispheres are still hunting for me.”
The American remained gazing at him with eyes of
a stony brightness; he seemed unable to speak or
move.
“There is nothing mystical, or metaphorical, or
vicarious about my confession,” said Flambeau. “I
stole for twenty years with these two hands; I fled
from the police on these two feet. I hope you will
admit that my activities were practical. I hope you
will admit that my judges and pursuers really had to
deal with crime. Do you think I do not know all
about their way of reprehending it? Have I not heard
the sermons of the righteous and seen the cold stare
of the respectable; have I not been lectured in the
lofty and distant style, asked how it was possible
for anyone to fall so low, told that no decent
person could ever have dreamed of such depravity? Do
you think all that ever did anything but make me
laugh? Only my friend told me that he knew exactly
why I stole; and I have never stolen since.”
Father Brown made a gesture as of deprecation;
and Grandison Chace at last let out a long breath
like a whistle.
“I have told you the exact truth,” said Flambeau;
“and it is open to you to hand me over to the
police.”
There was an instant of profound stillness, in
which could be faintly heard the belated laughter of
Flambeau’s children in the high, dark house above
them, and the crunching and snorting of the great,
grey pigs in the twilight. And then it was cloven by
a high voice, vibrant and with a touch of offence,
almost surprising for those who do not understand
the sensitive American spirit, and how near, in
spite of commonplace contrasts, it can sometimes
come to the chivalry of Spain.
“Monsieur Duroc,” he said rather stiffly. “We
have been friends, I hope, for some considerable
period; and I should be pretty much pained to
suppose you thought me capable of playing you such a
trick while I was enjoying your hospitality and the
society of your family, merely because you chose to
tell me a little of your own autobiography of your
own free will. And when you spoke merely in defence
of your friend — no, sir, I can’t imagine any
gentleman double-crossing another under such
circumstances; it would be a damned sight better to
be a dirty informer and sell men’s blood for money.
But in a case like this — — ! Could you conceive any
man being such a Judas?”
“I could try.” said Father Brown.
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