doubtful about it himself. He put his spade in methodically in

every place but just this. There must be a mighty fine potato

just here."

    Flambeau pulled up the spade and impetuously drove it into the

place. He turned up, under a load of soil, something that did not

look like a potato, but rather like a monstrous, over-domed

mushroom. But it struck the spade with a cold click; it rolled

over like a ball, and grinned up at them.

    "The Earl of Glengyle," said Brown sadly, and looked down

heavily at the skull.

    Then, after a momentary meditation, he plucked the spade from

Flambeau, and, saying "We must hide it again," clamped the skull

down in the earth. Then he leaned his little body and huge head

on the great handle of the spade, that stood up stiffly in the

earth, and his eyes were empty and his forehead full of wrinkles.

"If one could only conceive," he muttered, "the meaning of this

last monstrosity." And leaning on the large spade handle, he

buried his brows in his hands, as men do in church.

    All the corners of the sky were brightening into blue and

silver; the birds were chattering in the tiny garden trees; so

loud it seemed as if the trees themselves were talking. But the

three men were silent enough.

    "Well, I give it all up," said Flambeau at last boisterously.

"My brain and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end

of it. Snuff, spoilt Prayer Books, and the insides of musical

boxes--what--"

    Brown threw up his bothered brow and rapped on the spade

handle with an intolerance quite unusual with him. "Oh, tut, tut,

tut, tut!" he cried. "All that is as plain as a pikestaff. I

understood the snuff and clockwork, and so on, when I first opened

my eyes this morning. And since then I've had it out with old

Gow, the gardener, who is neither so deaf nor so stupid as he

pretends. There's nothing amiss about the loose items. I was

wrong about the torn mass-book, too; there's no harm in that. But

it's this last business. Desecrating graves and stealing dead

men's heads--surely there's harm in that? Surely there's black

magic still in that? That doesn't fit in to the quite simple

story of the snuff and the candles." And, striding about again,

he smoked moodily.

    "My friend," said Flambeau, with a grim humour, "you must be

careful with me and remember I was once a criminal. The great

advantage of that estate was that I always made up the story

myself, and acted it as quick as I chose. This detective business

of waiting about is too much for my French impatience. All my

life, for good or evil, I have done things at the instant; I

always fought duels the next morning; I always paid bills on the

nail; I never even put off a visit to the dentist--"

    Father Brown's pipe fell out of his mouth and broke into three

pieces on the gravel path. He stood rolling his eyes, the exact

picture of an idiot. "Lord, what a turnip I am!" he kept saying.

"Lord, what a turnip!" Then, in a somewhat groggy kind of way, he

began to laugh.

    "The dentist!" he repeated. "Six hours in the spiritual

abyss, and all because I never thought of the dentist! Such a

simple, such a beautiful and peaceful thought! Friends, we have

passed a night in hell; but now the sun is risen, the birds are

singing, and the radiant form of the dentist consoles the world."

    "I will get some sense out of this," cried Flambeau, striding

forward, "if I use the tortures of the Inquisition."

    Father Brown repressed what appeared to be a momentary

disposition to dance on the now sunlit lawn and cried quite

piteously, like a child, "Oh, let me be silly a little. You don't

know how unhappy I have been. And now I know that there has been

no deep sin in this business at all. Only a little lunacy, perhaps

--and who minds that?"

    He spun round once more, then faced them with gravity.

    "This is not a story of crime," he said; "rather it is the

story of a strange and crooked honesty. We are dealing with the

one man on earth, perhaps, who has taken no more than his due. It

is a study in the savage living logic that has been the religion

of this race.

    "That old local rhyme about the house of Glengyle--

    As green sap to the simmer trees

    Is red gold to the Ogilvies--

was literal as well as metaphorical. It did not merely mean that

the Glengyles sought for wealth; it was also true that they

literally gathered gold; they had a huge collection of ornaments

and utensils in that metal. They were, in fact, misers whose

mania took that turn. In the light of that fact, run through all

the things we found in the castle. Diamonds without their gold

rings; candles without their gold candlesticks; snuff without the

gold snuff-boxes; pencil-leads without the gold pencil-cases; a

walking stick without its gold top; clockwork without the gold

clocks--or rather watches. And, mad as it sounds, because the

halos and the name of God in the old missals were of real gold;

these also were taken away."

    The garden seemed to brighten, the grass to grow gayer in the

strengthening sun, as the crazy truth was told. Flambeau lit a

cigarette as his friend went on.

    "Were taken away," continued Father Brown; "were taken away--

but not stolen. Thieves would never have left this mystery.

Thieves would have taken the gold snuff-boxes, snuff and all; the

gold pencil-cases, lead and all. We have to deal with a man with

a peculiar conscience, but certainly a conscience. I found that

mad moralist this morning in the kitchen garden yonder, and I

heard the whole story.

    "The late Archibald Ogilvie was the nearest approach to a good

man ever born at Glengyle. But his bitter virtue took the turn of

the misanthrope; he moped over the dishonesty of his ancestors,

from which, somehow, he generalised a dishonesty of all men. More

especially he distrusted philanthropy or free-giving; and he swore

if he could find one man who took his exact rights he should have

all the gold of Glengyle. Having delivered this defiance to

humanity he shut himself up, without the smallest expectation of

its being answered. One day, however, a deaf and seemingly

senseless lad from a distant village brought him a belated

telegram; and Glengyle, in his acrid pleasantry, gave him a new

farthing. At least he thought he had done so, but when he turned

over his change he found the new farthing still there and a

sovereign gone. The accident offered him vistas of sneering

speculation. Either way, the boy would show the greasy greed of

the species. Either he would vanish, a thief stealing a coin; or

he would sneak back with it virtuously, a snob seeking a reward.

In the middle of that night Lord Glengyle was knocked up out of

his bed--for he lived alone--and forced to open the door to

the deaf idiot. The idiot brought with him, not the sovereign,

but exactly nineteen shillings and eleven-pence three-farthings

in change.

    "Then the wild exactitude of this action took hold of the mad

lord's brain like fire. He swore he was Diogenes, that had long

sought an honest man, and at last had found one. He made a new

will, which I have seen. He took the literal youth into his huge,

neglected house, and trained him up as his solitary servant and

--after an odd manner--his heir. And whatever that queer

creature understands, he understood absolutely his lord's two

fixed ideas: first, that the letter of right is everything; and

second, that he himself was to have the gold of Glengyle. So far,

that is all; and that is simple. He has stripped the house of

gold, and taken not a grain that was not gold; not so much as a

grain of snuff. He lifted the gold leaf off an old illumination,

fully satisfied that he left the rest unspoilt. All that I

understood; but I could not understand this skull business.

I was really uneasy about that human head buried among the

potatoes. It distressed me--till Flambeau said the word.

    "It will be all right. He will put the skull back in the

grave, when he has taken the gold out of the tooth."

    And, indeed, when Flambeau crossed the hill that morning, he

saw that strange being, the just miser, digging at the desecrated

grave, the plaid round his throat thrashing out in the mountain

wind; the sober top hat on his head.

 

    The Wrong Shape

 

Certain of the great roads going north out of London continue far

into the country a sort of attenuated and interrupted spectre of a

street, with great gaps in the building, but preserving the line.

Here will be a group of shops, followed by a fenced field or

paddock, and then a famous public-house, and then perhaps a market

garden or a nursery garden, and then one large private house, and

then another field and another inn, and so on. If anyone walks

along one of these roads he will pass a house which will probably

catch his eye, though he may not be able to explain its attraction.

It is a long, low house, running parallel with the road, painted

mostly white and pale green, with a veranda and sun-blinds, and

porches capped with those quaint sort of cupolas like wooden

umbrellas that one sees in some old-fashioned houses. In fact, it

is an old-fashioned house, very English and very suburban in the

good old wealthy Clapham sense. And yet the house has a look of

having been built chiefly for the hot weather. Looking at its

white paint and sun-blinds one thinks vaguely of pugarees and even

of palm trees. I cannot trace the feeling to its root; perhaps

the place was built by an Anglo-Indian.

    Anyone passing this house, I say, would be namelessly

fascinated by it; would feel that it was a place about which some

story was to be told. And he would have been right, as you shall

shortly hear. For this is the story--the story of the strange

things that did really happen in it in the Whitsuntide of the year

18--:

    Anyone passing the house on the Thursday before WhitSunday at

about half-past four p.m. would have seen the front door open, and

Father Brown, of the small church of St. Mungo, come out smoking a

large pipe in company with a very tall French friend of his called

Flambeau, who was smoking a very small cigarette. These persons

may or may not be of interest to the reader, but the truth is that

they were not the only interesting things that were displayed when

the front door of the white-and-green house was opened. There are

further peculiarities about this house, which must be described to

start with, not only that the reader may understand this tragic

tale, but also that he may realise what it was that the opening of

the door revealed.

    The whole house was built upon the plan of a T, but a T with a

very long cross piece and a very short tail piece. The long cross

piece was the frontage that ran along in face of the street, with

the front door in the middle; it was two stories high, and

contained nearly all the important rooms. The short tail piece,

which ran out at the back immediately opposite the front door, was

one story high, and consisted only of two long rooms, the one

leading into the other. The first of these two rooms was the study

in which the celebrated Mr. Quinton wrote his wild Oriental poems

and romances. The farther room was a glass conservatory full of

tropical blossoms of quite unique and almost monstrous beauty, and

on such afternoons as these glowing with gorgeous sunlight. Thus

when the hall door was open, many a passer-by literally stopped to

stare and gasp; for he looked down a perspective of rich apartments

to something really like a transformation scene in a fairy play:

purple clouds and golden suns and crimson stars that were at once

scorchingly vivid and yet transparent and far away.

    Leonard Quinton, the poet, had himself most carefully arranged

this effect; and it is doubtful whether he so perfectly expressed

his personality in any of his poems. For he was a man who drank

and bathed in colours, who indulged his lust for colour somewhat

to the neglect of form--even of good form. This it was that had

turned his genius so wholly to eastern art and imagery; to those

bewildering carpets or blinding embroideries in which all the

colours seem fallen into a fortunate chaos, having nothing to

typify or to teach. He had attempted, not perhaps with complete

artistic success, but with acknowledged imagination and invention,

to compose epics and love stories reflecting the riot of violent

and even cruel colour; tales of tropical heavens of burning gold or

blood-red copper; of eastern heroes who rode with twelve-turbaned

mitres upon elephants painted purple or peacock green; of gigantic

jewels that a hundred negroes could not carry, but which burned

with ancient and strange-hued fires.

    In short (to put the matter from the more common point of

view), he dealt much in eastern heavens, rather worse than most

western hells; in eastern monarchs, whom we might possibly call

maniacs; and in eastern jewels which a Bond Street jeweller (if

the hundred staggering negroes brought them into his shop) might

possibly not regard as genuine. Quinton was a genius, if a morbid

one; and even his morbidity appeared more in his life than in his

work. In temperament he was weak and waspish, and his health had

suffered heavily from oriental experiments with opium. His wife

--a handsome, hard-working, and, indeed, over-worked woman

objected to the opium, but objected much more to a live Indian

hermit in white and yellow robes, whom her husband insisted on

entertaining for months together, a Virgil to guide his spirit

through the heavens and the hells of the east.

    It was out of this artistic household that Father Brown and

his friend stepped on to the door-step; and to judge from their

faces, they stepped out of it with much relief. Flambeau had

known Quinton in wild student days in Paris, and they had renewed

the acquaintance for a week-end; but apart from Flambeau's more

responsible developments of late, he did not get on well with the

poet now. Choking oneself with opium and writing little erotic

verses on vellum was not his notion of how a gentleman should go

to the devil. As the two paused on the door-step, before taking a

turn in the garden, the front garden gate was thrown open with

violence, and a young man with a billycock hat on the back of his

head tumbled up the steps in his eagerness. He was a

dissipated-looking youth with a gorgeous red necktie all awry, as

if he had slept in it, and he kept fidgeting and lashing about

with one of those little jointed canes.

    "I say," he said breathlessly, "I want to see old Quinton. I

must see him. Has he gone?"

    "Mr. Quinton is in, I believe," said Father Brown, cleaning

his pipe, "but I do not know if you can see him. The doctor is

with him at present."

    The young man, who seemed not to be perfectly sober, stumbled

into the hall; and at the same moment the doctor came out of

Quinton's study, shutting the door and beginning to put on his

gloves.

    "See Mr. Quinton?" said the doctor coolly. "No, I'm afraid

you can't. In fact, you mustn't on any account. Nobody must see

him; I've just given him his sleeping draught."

    "No, but look here, old chap," said the youth in the red tie,

trying affectionately to capture the doctor by the lapels of his

coat. "Look here. I'm simply sewn up, I tell you. I--"

    "It's no good, Mr. Atkinson," said the doctor, forcing him to

fall back; "when you can alter the effects of a drug I'll alter my

decision," and, settling on his hat, he stepped out into the

sunlight with the other two. He was a bull-necked, good-tempered

little man with a small moustache, inexpressibly ordinary, yet

giving an impression of capacity.

    The young man in the billycock, who did not seem to be gifted

with any tact in dealing with people beyond the general idea of

clutching hold of their coats, stood outside the door, as dazed as

if he had been thrown out bodily, and silently watched the other

three walk away together through the garden.

    "That was a sound, spanking lie I told just now," remarked the

medical man, laughing. "In point of fact, poor Quinton doesn't

have his sleeping draught for nearly half an hour. But I'm not

going to have him bothered with that little beast, who only wants

to borrow money that he wouldn't pay back if he could. He's a

dirty little scamp, though he is Mrs. Quinton's brother, and she's

as fine a woman as ever walked."

    "Yes," said Father Brown. "She's a good woman."

    "So I propose to hang about the garden till the creature has

cleared off," went on the doctor, "and then I'll go in to Quinton

with the medicine. Atkinson can't get in, because I locked the

door."

    "In that case, Dr. Harris," said Flambeau, "we might as well

walk round at the back by the end of the conservatory. There's no

entrance to it that way, but it's worth seeing, even from the

outside."

    "Yes, and I might get a squint at my patient," laughed the

doctor, "for he prefers to lie on an ottoman right at the end of

the conservatory amid all those blood-red poinsettias; it would

give me the creeps. But what are you doing?"

    Father Brown had stopped for a moment, and picked up out of

the long grass, where it had almost been wholly hidden, a queer,

crooked Oriental knife, inlaid exquisitely in coloured stones and

metals.

    "What is this?" asked Father Brown, regarding it with some

disfavour.

    "Oh, Quinton's, I suppose," said Dr. Harris carelessly; "he

has all sorts of Chinese knickknacks about the place. Or perhaps

it belongs to that mild Hindoo of his whom he keeps on a string."

    "What Hindoo?" asked Father Brown, still staring at the dagger

in his hand.

    "Oh, some Indian conjuror," said the doctor lightly; "a fraud,

of course."

    "You don't believe in magic?" asked Father Brown, without

looking up.

    "O crickey! magic!" said the doctor.

    "It's very beautiful," said the priest in a low, dreaming

voice; "the colours are very beautiful. But it's the wrong shape."

    "What for?" asked Flambeau, staring.

    "For anything. It's the wrong shape in the abstract. Don't

you ever feel that about Eastern art? The colours are

intoxicatingly lovely; but the shapes are mean and bad--

deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked things in a Turkey

carpet."

    "Mon Dieu!" cried Flambeau, laughing.

    "They are letters and symbols in a language I don't know; but

I know they stand for evil words," went on the priest, his voice

growing lower and lower. "The lines go wrong on purpose--like

serpents doubling to escape."

    "What the devil are you talking about?" said the doctor with a

loud laugh.

    Flambeau spoke quietly to him in answer. "The Father

sometimes gets this mystic's cloud on him," he said; "but I give

you fair warning that I have never known him to have it except

when there was some evil quite near."

    "Oh, rats!" said the scientist.

    "Why, look at it," cried Father Brown, holding out the crooked

knife at arm's length, as if it were some glittering snake.

"Don't you see it is the wrong shape? Don't you see that it has

no hearty and plain purpose? It does not point like a spear. It

does not sweep like a scythe. It does not look like a weapon. It

looks like an instrument of torture."

    "Well, as you don't seem to like it," said the jolly Harris,

"it had better be taken back to its owner. Haven't we come to the

end of this confounded conservatory yet? This house is the wrong

shape, if you like."

    "You don't understand," said Father Brown, shaking his head.

"The shape of this house is quaint--it is even laughable. But

there is nothing wrong about it."

    As they spoke they came round the curve of glass that ended

the conservatory, an uninterrupted curve, for there was neither

door nor window by which to enter at that end. The glass,

however, was clear, and the sun still bright, though beginning to

set; and they could see not only the flamboyant blossoms inside,

but the frail figure of the poet in a brown velvet coat lying

languidly on the sofa, having, apparently, fallen half asleep over

a book. He was a pale, slight man, with loose, chestnut hair and

a fringe of beard that was the paradox of his face, for the beard

made him look less manly. These traits were well known to all

three of them; but even had it not been so, it may be doubted

whether they would have looked at Quinton just then. Their eyes

were riveted on another object.

    Exactly in their path, immediately outside the round end of

the glass building, was standing a tall man, whose drapery fell to

his feet in faultless white, and whose bare, brown skull, face,

and neck gleamed in the setting sun like splendid bronze. He was

looking through the glass at the sleeper, and he was more

motionless than a mountain.

    "Who is that?" cried Father Brown, stepping back with a

hissing intake of his breath.

    "Oh, it is only that Hindoo humbug," growled Harris; "but I

don't know what the deuce he's doing here."

    "It looks like hypnotism," said Flambeau, biting his black

moustache.

    "Why are you unmedical fellows always talking bosh about

hypnotism?" cried the doctor. "It looks a deal more like

burglary."

    "Well, we will speak to it, at any rate," said Flambeau, who

was always for action. One long stride took him to the place

where the Indian stood. Bowing from his great height, which

overtopped even the Oriental's, he said with placid impudence:

    "Good evening, sir. Do you want anything?"

    Quite slowly, like a great ship turning into a harbour, the

great yellow face turned, and looked at last over its white

shoulder. They were startled to see that its yellow eyelids were

quite sealed, as in sleep. "Thank you," said the face in

excellent English. "I want nothing." Then, half opening the

lids, so as to show a slit of opalescent eyeball, he repeated, "I

want nothing." Then he opened his eyes wide with a startling

stare, said, "I want nothing," and went rustling away into the

rapidly darkening garden.

    "The Christian is more modest," muttered Father Brown; "he

wants something."

    "What on earth was he doing?" asked Flambeau, knitting his

black brows and lowering his voice.

    "I should like to talk to you later," said Father Brown.

    The sunlight was still a reality, but it was the red light of

evening, and the bulk of the garden trees and bushes grew blacker

and blacker against it. They turned round the end of the

conservatory, and walked in silence down the other side to get

round to the front door. As they went they seemed to wake

something, as one startles a bird, in the deeper corner between

the study and the main building; and again they saw the

white-robed fakir slide out of the shadow, and slip round towards

the front door. To their surprise, however, he had not been

alone. They found themselves abruptly pulled up and forced to

banish their bewilderment by the appearance of Mrs. Quinton, with

her heavy golden hair and square pale face, advancing on them out

of the twilight. She looked a little stern, but was entirely

courteous.

    "Good evening, Dr. Harris," was all she said.

    "Good evening, Mrs. Quinton," said the little doctor heartily.

"I am just going to give your husband his sleeping draught."

    "Yes," she said in a clear voice. "I think it is quite time."

And she smiled at them, and went sweeping into the house.

    "That woman's over-driven," said Father Brown; "that's the

kind of woman that does her duty for twenty years, and then does

something dreadful."

    The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye

of interest. "Did you ever study medicine?" he asked.

    "You have to know something of the mind as well as the body,"

answered the priest; "we have to know something of the body as

well as the mind."

    "Well," said the doctor, "I think I'll go and give Quinton his

stuff."

    They had turned the corner of the front facade, and were

approaching the front doorway. As they turned into it they saw

the man in the white robe for the third time. He came so straight

towards the front door that it seemed quite incredible that he had

not just come out of the study opposite to it. Yet they knew that

the study door was locked.

    Father Brown and Flambeau, however, kept this weird

contradiction to themselves, and Dr. Harris was not a man to

waste his thoughts on the impossible. He permitted the

omnipresent Asiatic to make his exit, and then stepped briskly

into the hall. There he found a figure which he had already

forgotten. The inane Atkinson was still hanging about, humming

and poking things with his knobby cane. The doctor's face had a

spasm of disgust and decision, and he whispered rapidly to his

companion: "I must lock the door again, or this rat will get in.

But I shall be out again in two minutes."

    He rapidly unlocked the door and locked it again behind him,

just balking a blundering charge from the young man in the

billycock. The young man threw himself impatiently on a hall

chair. Flambeau looked at a Persian illumination on the wall;

Father Brown, who seemed in a sort of daze, dully eyed the door.

In about four minutes the door was opened again. Atkinson was

quicker this time. He sprang forward, held the door open for an

instant, and called out: "Oh, I say, Quinton, I want--"

    From the other end of the study came the clear voice of

Quinton, in something between a yawn and a yell of weary laughter.

    "Oh, I know what you want. Take it, and leave me in peace.

I'm writing a song about peacocks."

    Before the door closed half a sovereign came flying through

the aperture; and Atkinson, stumbling forward, caught it with

singular dexterity.

    "So that's settled," said the doctor, and, locking the door

savagely, he led the way out into the garden.

    "Poor Leonard can get a little peace now," he added to Father

Brown; "he's locked in all by himself for an hour or two."

    "Yes," answered the priest; "and his voice sounded jolly enough

when we left him." Then he looked gravely round the garden, and

saw the loose figure of Atkinson standing and jingling the

half-sovereign in his pocket, and beyond, in the purple twilight,

the figure of the Indian sitting bolt upright upon a bank of grass

with his face turned towards the setting sun. Then he said

abruptly: "Where is Mrs. Quinton!"

    "She has gone up to her room," said the doctor. "That is her

shadow on the blind."

    Father Brown looked up, and frowningly scrutinised a dark

outline at the gas-lit window.

    "Yes," he said, "that is her shadow," and he walked a yard or

two and threw himself upon a garden seat.

    Flambeau sat down beside him; but the doctor was one of those

energetic people who live naturally on their legs. He walked

away, smoking, into the twilight, and the two friends were left

together.

    "My father," said Flambeau in French, "what is the matter with

you?"

    Father Brown was silent and motionless for half a minute, then

he said: "Superstition is irreligious, but there is something in

the air of this place. I think it's that Indian--at least,

partly."

    He sank into silence, and watched the distant outline of the

Indian, who still sat rigid as if in prayer. At first sight he

seemed motionless, but as Father Brown watched him he saw that the

man swayed ever so slightly with a rhythmic movement, just as the

dark tree-tops swayed ever so slightly in the wind that was

creeping up the dim garden paths and shuffling the fallen leaves a

little.

    The landscape was growing rapidly dark, as if for a storm, but

they could still see all the figures in their various places.

Atkinson was leaning against a tree with a listless face; Quinton's

wife was still at her window; the doctor had gone strolling round

the end of the conservatory; they could see his cigar like a

will-o'-the-wisp; and the fakir still sat rigid and yet rocking,

while the trees above him began to rock and almost to roar. Storm

was certainly coming.

    "When that Indian spoke to us," went on Brown in a

conversational undertone, "I had a sort of vision, a vision of him

and all his universe. Yet he only said the same thing three

times. When first he said `I want nothing,' it meant only that he

was impenetrable, that Asia does not give itself away. Then he

said again, `I want nothing,' and I knew that he meant that he was

sufficient to himself, like a cosmos, that he needed no God,

neither admitted any sins. And when he said the third time, `I

want nothing,' he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew that he

meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and his

home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation,

the mere destruction of everything or anything--"

    Two drops of rain fell; and for some reason Flambeau started

and looked up, as if they had stung him. And the same instant the

doctor down by the end of the conservatory began running towards

them, calling out something as he ran.

    As he came among them like a bombshell the restless Atkinson

happened to be taking a turn nearer to the house front; and the

doctor clutched him by the collar in a convulsive grip. "Foul

play!" he cried; "what have you been doing to him, you dog?"

    The priest had sprung erect, and had the voice of steel of a

soldier in command.

    "No fighting," he cried coolly; "we are enough to hold anyone

we want to. What is the matter, doctor?"

    "Things are not right with Quinton," said the doctor, quite

white. "I could just see him through the glass, and I don't like

the way he's lying. It's not as I left him, anyhow."

    "Let us go in to him," said Father Brown shortly. "You can

leave Mr. Atkinson alone. I have had him in sight since we heard

Quinton's voice."

    "I will stop here and watch him," said Flambeau hurriedly.

"You go in and see."

    The doctor and the priest flew to the study door, unlocked it,

and fell into the room. In doing so they nearly fell over the

large mahogany table in the centre at which the poet usually

wrote; for the place was lit only by a small fire kept for the

invalid. In the middle of this table lay a single sheet of paper,

evidently left there on purpose. The doctor snatched it up,

glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and crying, "Good God,

look at that!" plunged toward the glass room beyond, where the

terrible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crimson memory of

the sunset.

    Father Brown read the words three times before he put down the

paper. The words were: "I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!"

They were in the quite inimitable, not to say illegible,

handwriting

of Leonard Quinton.

    Then Father Brown, still keeping the paper in his hand, strode

towards the conservatory, only to meet his medical friend coming

back with a face of assurance and collapse. "He's done it," said

Harris.

    They went together through the gorgeous unnatural beauty of

cactus and azalea and found Leonard Quinton, poet and romancer,

with his head hanging downward off his ottoman and his red curls

sweeping the ground. Into his left side was thrust the queer

dagger that they had picked up in the garden, and his limp hand

still rested on the hilt.

    Outside the storm had come at one stride, like the night in

Coleridge, and garden and glass roof were darkened with driving

rain. Father Brown seemed to be studying the paper more than the

corpse; he held it close to his eyes; and seemed trying to read it

in the twilight. Then he held it up against the faint light, and,

as he did so, lightning stared at them for an instant so white

that the paper looked black against it.

    Darkness full of thunder followed, and after the thunder

Father Brown's voice said out of the dark: "Doctor, this paper is

the wrong shape."

    "What do you mean?" asked Doctor Harris, with a frowning

stare.

    "It isn't square," answered Brown. "It has a sort of edge

snipped off at the corner. What does it mean?"

    "How the deuce should I know?" growled the doctor. "Shall we

move this poor chap, do you think? He's quite dead."

    "No," answered the priest; "we must leave him as he lies and

send for the police." But he was still scrutinising the paper.

    As they went back through the study he stopped by the table

and picked up a small pair of nail scissors. "Ah," he said, with

a sort of relief, "this is what he did it with. But yet--" And

he knitted his brows.

    "Oh, stop fooling with that scrap of paper," said the doctor

emphatically. "It was a fad of his. He had hundreds of them. He

cut all his paper like that," as he pointed to a stack of sermon

paper still unused on another and smaller table. Father Brown

went up to it and held up a sheet. It was the same irregular

shape.

    "Quite so," he said. "And here I see the corners that were

snipped off." And to the indignation of his colleague he began to

count them.

    "That's all right," he said, with an apologetic smile.

"Twenty-three sheets cut and twenty-two corners cut off them. And

as I see you are impatient we will rejoin the others."

    "Who is to tell his wife?" asked Dr. Harris. "Will you go and

tell her now, while I send a servant for the police?"

    "As you will," said Father Brown indifferently. And he went

out to the hall door.

    Here also he found a drama, though of a more grotesque sort.

It showed nothing less than his big friend Flambeau in an attitude

to which he had long been unaccustomed, while upon the pathway at

the bottom of the steps was sprawling with his boots in the air

the amiable Atkinson, his billycock hat and walking cane sent

flying in opposite directions along the path. Atkinson had at

length wearied of Flambeau's almost paternal custody, and had

endeavoured to knock him down, which was by no means a smooth game

to play with the Roi des Apaches, even after that monarch's

abdication.

    Flambeau was about to leap upon his enemy and secure him once

more, when the priest patted him easily on the shoulder.

    "Make it up with Mr. Atkinson, my friend," he said. "Beg a

mutual pardon and say `Good night.' We need not detain him any

longer." Then, as Atkinson rose somewhat doubtfully and gathered

his hat and stick and went towards the garden gate, Father Brown

said in a more serious voice: "Where is that Indian?"

    They all three (for the doctor had joined them) turned

involuntarily towards the dim grassy bank amid the tossing trees

purple with twilight, where they had last seen the brown man

swaying in his strange prayers. The Indian was gone.

    "Confound him," cried the doctor, stamping furiously. "Now I

know that it was that nigger that did it."

    "I thought you didn't believe in magic," said Father Brown

quietly.

    "No more I did," said the doctor, rolling his eyes. "I only

know that I loathed that yellow devil when I thought he was a sham

wizard. And I shall loathe him more if I come to think he was a

real one."

    "Well, his having escaped is nothing," said Flambeau. "For we

could have proved nothing and done nothing against him. One hardly

goes to the parish constable with a story of suicide imposed by

witchcraft or auto-suggestion."

    Meanwhile Father Brown had made his way into the house, and

now went to break the news to the wife of the dead man.

    When he came out again he looked a little pale and tragic, but

what passed between them in that interview was never known, even

when all was known.

    Flambeau, who was talking quietly with the doctor, was

surprised to see his friend reappear so soon at his elbow; but

Brown took no notice, and merely drew the doctor apart. "You have

sent for the police, haven't you?" he asked.

    "Yes," answered Harris. "They ought to be here in ten

minutes."

    "Will you do me a favour?" said the priest quietly. "The

truth is, I make a collection of these curious stories, which

often contain, as in the case of our Hindoo friend, elements which

can hardly be put into a police report. Now, I want you to write

out a report of this case for my private use. Yours is a clever

trade," he said, looking the doctor gravely and steadily in the

face. "I sometimes think that you know some details of this

matter which you have not thought fit to mention. Mine is a

confidential trade like yours, and I will treat anything you write

for me in strict confidence. But write the whole."

    The doctor, who had been listening thoughtfully with his head

a little on one side, looked the priest in the face for an

instant, and said: "All right," and went into the study, closing

the door behind him.

    "Flambeau," said Father Brown, "there is a long seat there

under the veranda, where we can smoke out of the rain. You are my

only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps,

be silent with you."

    They established themselves comfortably in the veranda seat;

Father Brown, against his common habit, accepted a good cigar and

smoked it steadily in silence, while the rain shrieked and rattled

on the roof of the veranda.

    "My friend," he said at length, "this is a very queer case. A

very queer case."

    "I should think it was," said Flambeau, with something like a

shudder.

    "You call it queer, and I call it queer," said the other, "and

yet we mean quite opposite things. The modern mind always mixes

up two different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous,

and mystery in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its

difficulty about miracles. A miracle is startling; but it is

simple. It is simple because it is a miracle. It is power coming

directly from God (or the devil) instead of indirectly through

nature or human wills. Now, you mean that this business is

marvellous because it is miraculous, because it is witchcraft

worked by a wicked Indian. Understand, I do not say that it was

not spiritual or diabolic. Heaven and hell only know by what

surrounding influences strange sins come into the lives of men.

But for the present my point is this: If it was pure magic, as you

think, then it is marvellous; but it is not mysterious--that is,

it is not complicated. The quality of a miracle is mysterious,

but its manner is simple. Now, the manner of this business has

been the reverse of simple."

    The storm that had slackened for a little seemed to be swelling

again, and there came heavy movements as of faint thunder. Father

Brown let fall the ash of his cigar and went on:

    "There has been in this incident," he said, "a twisted, ugly,

complex quality that does not belong to the straight bolts either

of heaven or hell. As one knows the crooked track of a snail, I

know the crooked track of a man."

    The white lightning opened its enormous eye in one wink, the

sky shut up again, and the priest went on:

    "Of all these crooked things, the crookedest was the shape of

that piece of paper. It was crookeder than the dagger that killed

him."

    "You mean the paper on which Quinton confessed his suicide,"

said Flambeau.

    "I mean the paper on which Quinton wrote, `I die by my own

hand,'" answered Father Brown. "The shape of that paper, my

friend, was the wrong shape; the wrong shape, if ever I have seen

it in this wicked world."

    "It only had a corner snipped off," said Flambeau, "and I

understand that all Quinton's paper was cut that way."

    "It was a very odd way," said the other, "and a very bad way,

to my taste and fancy. Look here, Flambeau, this Quinton--God

receive his soul!--was perhaps a bit of a cur in some ways, but

he really was an artist, with the pencil as well as the pen. His

handwriting, though hard to read, was bold and beautiful. I can't

prove what I say; I can't prove anything. But I tell you with the

full force of conviction that he could never have cut that mean

little piece off a sheet of paper. If he had wanted to cut down

paper for some purpose of fitting in, or binding up, or what not,

he would have made quite a different slash with the scissors. Do

you remember the shape? It was a mean shape. It was a wrong

shape. Like this. Don't you remember?"

    And he waved his burning cigar before him in the darkness,

making irregular squares so rapidly that Flambeau really seemed to

see them as fiery hieroglyphics upon the darkness--hieroglyphics

such as his friend had spoken of, which are undecipherable, yet

can have no good meaning.

    "But," said Flambeau, as the priest put his cigar in his mouth

again and leaned back, staring at the roof, "suppose somebody else

did use the scissors. Why should somebody else, cutting pieces off

his sermon paper, make Quinton commit suicide?"

    Father Brown was still leaning back and staring at the roof,

but he took his cigar out of his mouth and said: "Quinton never

did commit suicide."

    Flambeau stared at him. "Why, confound it all," he cried,

"then why did he confess to suicide?"

    The priest leant forward again, settled his elbows on his

knees, looked at the ground, and said, in a low, distinct voice:

"He never did confess to suicide."

    Flambeau laid his cigar down. "You mean," he said, "that the

writing was forged?"

    "No," said Father Brown. "Quinton wrote it all right."

    "Well, there you are," said the aggravated Flambeau; "Quinton

wrote, `I die by my own hand,' with his own hand on a plain piece

of paper."

    "Of the wrong shape," said the priest calmly.

    "Oh, the shape be damned!" cried Flambeau. "What has the

shape to do with it?"

    "There were twenty-three snipped papers," resumed Brown

unmoved, "and only twenty-two pieces snipped off. Therefore one

of the pieces had been destroyed, probably that from the written

paper. Does that suggest anything to you?"

    A light dawned on Flambeau's face, and he said: "There was

something else written by Quinton, some other words. `They will

tell you I die by my own hand,' or `Do not believe that--'"

    "Hotter, as the children say," said his friend. "But the

piece was hardly half an inch across; there was no room for one

word, let alone five. Can you think of anything hardly bigger

than a comma which the man with hell in his heart had to tear away

as a testimony against him?"

    "I can think of nothing," said Flambeau at last.

    "What about quotation marks?" said the priest, and flung his

cigar far into the darkness like a shooting star.

    All words had left the other man's mouth, and Father Brown

said, like one going back to fundamentals:

    "Leonard Quinton was a romancer, and was writing an Oriental

romance about wizardry and hypnotism. He--"

    At this moment the door opened briskly behind them, and the

doctor came out with his hat on. He put a long envelope into the

priest's hands.

    "That's the document you wanted," he said, "and I must be

getting home. Good night."

    "Good night," said Father Brown, as the doctor walked briskly

to the gate. He had left the front door open, so that a shaft of

gaslight fell upon them. In the light of this Brown opened the

envelope and read the following words:

 

    DEAR FATHER BROWN,--Vicisti Galilee. Otherwise, damn your

 

eyes, which are very penetrating ones. Can it be possible that

 

there is something in all that stuff of yours after all?

 

    I am a man who has ever since boyhood believed in Nature and

 

in all natural functions and instincts, whether men called them

 

moral or immoral. Long before I became a doctor, when I was a

 

schoolboy keeping mice and spiders, I believed that to be a good

 

animal is the best thing in the world. But just now I am shaken;

 

I have believed in Nature; but it seems as if Nature could betray

 

a man. Can there be anything in your bosh? I am really getting

 

morbid.

 

    I loved Quinton's wife. What was there wrong in that? Nature

 

told me to, and it's love that makes the world go round. I also

 

thought quite sincerely that she would be happier with a clean

 

animal like me than with that tormenting little lunatic. What was

 

there wrong in that? I was only facing facts, like a man of

 

science. She would have been happier.

 

    According to my own creed I was quite free to kill Quinton,

 

which was the best thing for everybody, even himself. But as a

 

healthy animal I had no notion of killing myself. I resolved,

 

therefore, that I would never do it until I saw a chance that

 

would leave me scot free. I saw that chance this morning.

 

    I have been three times, all told, into Quinton's study today.

 

The first time I went in he would talk about nothing but the weird

 

tale, called "The Cure of a Saint," which he was writing, which

 

was all about how some Indian hermit made an English colonel kill

 

himself by thinking about him. He showed me the last sheets, and

 

even read me the last paragraph, which was something like this:

 

"The conqueror of the Punjab, a mere yellow skeleton, but still

 

gigantic, managed to lift himself on his elbow and gasp in his

 

nephew's ear: `I die by my own hand, yet I die murdered!'" It so

 

happened by one chance out of a hundred, that those last words

 

were written at the top of a new sheet of paper. I left the room,

 

and went out into the garden intoxicated with a frightful

 

opportunity.

 

    We walked round the house; and two more things happened in my

 

favour. You suspected an Indian, and you found a dagger which the

 

Indian might most probably use. Taking the opportunity to stuff

 

it in my pocket I went back to Quinton's study, locked the door,

 

and gave him his sleeping draught. He was against answering

 

Atkinson at all, but I urged him to call out and quiet the fellow,

 

because I wanted a clear proof that Quinton was alive when I left

 

the room for the second time. Quinton lay down in the

conservatory,

and I came through the study. I am a quick man with my hands, and

 

in a minute and a half I had done what I wanted to do. I had

 

emptied all the first part of Quinton's romance into the fireplace,

 

where it burnt to ashes. Then I saw that the quotation marks

 

wouldn't do, so I snipped them off, and to make it seem likelier,

 

snipped the whole quire to match. Then I came out with the

 

knowledge that Quinton's confession of suicide lay on the front

 

table, while Quinton lay alive but asleep in the conservatory

 

beyond.

 

    The last act was a desperate one; you can guess it: I pretended

 

to have seen Quinton dead and rushed to his room. I delayed you

 

with the paper, and, being a quick man with my hands, killed

 

Quinton while you were looking at his confession of suicide. He

 

was half-asleep, being drugged, and I put his own hand on the

 

knife and drove it into his body. The knife was of so queer a

 

shape that no one but an operator could have calculated the angle

 

that would reach his heart. I wonder if you noticed this.

 

    When I had done it, the extraordinary thing happened. Nature

 

deserted me. I felt ill. I felt just as if I had done something

 

wrong. I think my brain is breaking up; I feel some sort of

 

desperate pleasure in thinking I have told the thing to somebody;

 

that I shall not have to be alone with it if I marry and have

 

children. What is the matter with me? ... Madness ... or can one

 

have remorse, just as if one were in Byron's poems! I cannot

 

write any more.

 

    James Erskine Harris.

 

    Father Brown carefully folded up the letter, and put it in his

breast pocket just as there came a loud peal at the gate bell, and

the wet waterproofs of several policemen gleamed in the road

outside.

 

    The Sins of Prince Saradine

 

When Flambeau took his month's holiday from his office in

Westminster he took it in a small sailing-boat, so small that it

passed much of its time as a rowing-boat. He took it, moreover,

in little rivers in the Eastern counties, rivers so small that the

boat looked like a magic boat, sailing on land through meadows and

cornfields. The vessel was just comfortable for two people; there

was room only for necessities, and Flambeau had stocked it with

such things as his special philosophy considered necessary. They

reduced themselves, apparently, to four essentials: tins of

salmon, if he should want to eat; loaded revolvers, if he should

want to fight; a bottle of brandy, presumably in case he should

faint; and a priest, presumably in case he should die. With this

light luggage he crawled down the little Norfolk rivers, intending

to reach the Broads at last, but meanwhile delighting in the

overhanging gardens and meadows, the mirrored mansions or villages,

lingering to fish in the pools and corners, and in some sense

hugging the shore.

    Like a true philosopher, Flambeau had no aim in his holiday;

but, like a true philosopher, he had an excuse. He had a sort of

half purpose, which he took just so seriously that its success

would crown the holiday, but just so lightly that its failure

would not spoil it. Years ago, when he had been a king of thieves

and the most famous figure in Paris, he had often received wild

communications of approval, denunciation, or even love; but one

had, somehow, stuck in his memory. It consisted simply of a

visiting-card, in an envelope with an English postmark. On the

back of the card was written in French and in green ink: "If you

ever retire and become respectable, come and see me. I want to

meet you, for I have met all the other great men of my time. That

trick of yours of getting one detective to arrest the other was

the most splendid scene in French history." On the front of the

card was engraved in the formal fashion, "Prince Saradine, Reed

House, Reed Island, Norfolk."

    He had not troubled much about the prince then, beyond

ascertaining that he had been a brilliant and fashionable figure

in southern Italy. In his youth, it was said, he had eloped with

a married woman of high rank; the escapade was scarcely startling

in his social world, but it had clung to men's minds because of an

additional tragedy: the alleged suicide of the insulted husband,

who appeared to have flung himself over a precipice in Sicily.

The prince then lived in Vienna for a time, but his more recent

years seemed to have been passed in perpetual and restless travel.

But when Flambeau, like the prince himself, had left European

celebrity and settled in England, it occurred to him that he might

pay a surprise visit to this eminent exile in the Norfolk Broads.

Whether he should find the place he had no idea; and, indeed, it

was sufficiently small and forgotten. But, as things fell out, he

found it much sooner than he expected.

    They had moored their boat one night under a bank veiled in

high grasses and short pollarded trees. Sleep, after heavy

sculling, had come to them early, and by a corresponding accident

they awoke before it was light. To speak more strictly, they

awoke before it was daylight; for a large lemon moon was only just

setting in the forest of high grass above their heads, and the sky

was of a vivid violet-blue, nocturnal but bright. Both men had

simultaneously a reminiscence of childhood, of the elfin and

adventurous time when tall weeds close over us like woods.

Standing up thus against the large low moon, the daisies really

seemed to be giant daisies, the dandelions to be giant dandelions.

Somehow it reminded them of the dado of a nursery wall-paper. The

drop of the river-bed sufficed to sink them under the roots of all

shrubs and flowers and make them gaze upwards at the grass. "By

Jove!" said Flambeau, "it's like being in fairyland."

    Father Brown sat bolt upright in the boat and crossed himself.

His movement was so abrupt that his friend asked him, with a mild

stare, what was the matter.

    "The people who wrote the mediaeval ballads," answered the

priest, "knew more about fairies than you do. It isn't only nice

things that happen in fairyland."

    "Oh, bosh!" said Flambeau. "Only nice things could happen

under such an innocent moon. I am for pushing on now and seeing

what does really come. We may die and rot before we ever see

again such a moon or such a mood."

    "All right," said Father Brown. "I never said it was always

wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous."

    They pushed slowly up the brightening river; the glowing

violet of the sky and the pale gold of the moon grew fainter and

fainter, amd faded into that vast colourless cosmos that precedes

the colours of the dawn. When the first faint stripes of red and

gold and grey split the horizon from end to end they were broken

by the black bulk of a town or village which sat on the river just

ahead of them. It was already an easy twilight, in which all

things were visible, when they came under the hanging roofs and

bridges of this riverside hamlet. The houses, with their long,

low, stooping roofs, seemed to come down to drink at the river,

like huge grey and red cattle. The broadening and whitening dawn

had already turned to working daylight before they saw any living

creature on the wharves and bridges of that silent town.

Eventually they saw a very placid and prosperous man in his shirt

sleeves, with a face as round as the recently sunken moon, and

rays of red whisker around the low arc of it, who was leaning on a

post above the sluggish tide. By an impulse not to be analysed,

Flambeau rose to his full height in the swaying boat and shouted

at the man to ask if he knew Reed Island or Reed House. The

prosperous man's smile grew slightly more expansive, and he simply

pointed up the river towards the next bend of it. Flambeau went

ahead without further speech.

    The boat took many such grassy corners and followed many such

reedy and silent reaches of river; but before the search had

become monotonous they had swung round a specially sharp angle and

come into the silence of a sort of pool or lake, the sight of

which instinctively arrested them. For in the middle of this

wider piece of water, fringed on every side with rushes, lay a

long, low islet, along which ran a long, low house or bungalow

built of bamboo or some kind of tough tropic cane. The upstanding

rods of bamboo which made the walls were pale yellow, the sloping

rods that made the roof were of darker red or brown, otherwise the

long house was a thing of repetition and monotony. The early

morning breeze rustled the reeds round the island and sang in the

strange ribbed house as in a giant pan-pipe.

    "By George!" cried Flambeau; "here is the place, after all!

Here is Reed Island, if ever there was one. Here is Reed House,

if it is anywhere. I believe that fat man with whiskers was a

fairy."

    "Perhaps," remarked Father Brown impartially. "If he was, he

was a bad fairy."

    But even as he spoke the impetuous Flambeau had run his boat

ashore in the rattling reeds, and they stood in the long, quaint

islet beside the odd and silent house.

    The house stood with its back, as it were, to the river and

the only landing-stage; the main entrance was on the other side,

and looked down the long island garden. The visitors approached

it, therefore, by a small path running round nearly three sides of

the house, close under the low eaves. Through three different

windows on three different sides they looked in on the same long,

well-lit room, panelled in light wood, with a large number of

looking-glasses, and laid out as for an elegant lunch. The front

door, when they came round to it at last, was flanked by two

turquoise-blue flower pots. It was opened by a butler of the

drearier type--long, lean, grey and listless--who murmured

that Prince Saradine was from home at present, but was expected

hourly; the house being kept ready for him and his guests. The

exhibition of the card with the scrawl of green ink awoke a flicker

of life in the parchment face of the depressed retainer, and it

was with a certain shaky courtesy that he suggested that the

strangers should remain. "His Highness may be here any minute,"

he said, "and would be distressed to have just missed any gentleman

he had invited. We have orders always to keep a little cold lunch

for him and his friends, and I am sure he would wish it to be

offered."

    Moved with curiosity to this minor adventure, Flambeau assented

gracefully, and followed the old man, who ushered him ceremoniously

into the long, lightly panelled room. There was nothing very

notable about it, except the rather unusual alternation of many

long, low windows with many long, low oblongs of looking-glass,

which gave a singular air of lightness and unsubstantialness to

the place. It was somehow like lunching out of doors. One or two

pictures of a quiet kind hung in the corners, one a large grey

photograph of a very young man in uniform, another a red chalk

sketch of two long-haired boys. Asked by Flambeau whether the

soldierly person was the prince, the butler answered shortly in

the negative; it was the prince's younger brother, Captain Stephen

Saradine, he said. And with that the old man seemed to dry up

suddenly and lose all taste for conversation.

    After lunch had tailed off with exquisite coffee and liqueurs,

the guests were introduced to the garden, the library, and the

housekeeper--a dark, handsome lady, of no little majesty, and

rather like a plutonic Madonna. It appeared that she and the

butler were the only survivors of the prince's original foreign

menage the other servants now in the house being new and collected

in Norfolk by the housekeeper. This latter lady went by the name

of Mrs. Anthony, but she spoke with a slight Italian accent, and

Flambeau did not doubt that Anthony was a Norfolk version of some

more Latin name. Mr. Paul, the butler, also had a faintly foreign

air, but he was in tongue and training English, as are many of the

most polished men-servants of the cosmopolitan nobility.

    Pretty and unique as it was, the place had about it a curious

luminous sadness. Hours passed in it like days. The long,

well-windowed rooms were full of daylight, but it seemed a dead

daylight. And through all other incidental noises, the sound of

talk, the clink of glasses, or the passing feet of servants, they

could hear on all sides of the house the melancholy noise of the

river.

    "We have taken a wrong turning, and come to a wrong place,"

said Father Brown, looking out of the window at the grey-green

sedges and the silver flood. "Never mind; one can sometimes do

good by being the right person in the wrong place."

    Father Brown, though commonly a silent, was an oddly

sympathetic little man, and in those few but endless hours he

unconsciously sank deeper into the secrets of Reed House than his

professional friend. He had that knack of friendly silence which

is so essential to gossip; and saying scarcely a word, he probably

obtained from his new acquaintances all that in any case they

would have told. The butler indeed was naturally uncommunicative.

He betrayed a sullen and almost animal affection for his master;

who, he said, had been very badly treated. The chief offender

seemed to be his highness's brother, whose name alone would

lengthen the old man's lantern jaws and pucker his parrot nose

into a sneer. Captain Stephen was a ne'er-do-weel, apparently,

and had drained his benevolent brother of hundreds and thousands;

forced him to fly from fashionable life and live quietly in this

retreat. That was all Paul, the butler, would say, and Paul was

obviously a partisan.

    The Italian housekeeper was somewhat more communicative,

being, as Brown fancied, somewhat less content. Her tone about

her master was faintly acid; though not without a certain awe.

Flambeau and his friend were standing in the room of the

looking-glasses examining the red sketch of the two boys, when the

housekeeper swept in swiftly on some domestic errand. It was a

peculiarity of this glittering, glass-panelled place that anyone

entering was reflected in four or five mirrors at once; and Father

Brown, without turning round, stopped in the middle of a sentence

of family criticism. But Flambeau, who had his face close up to

the picture, was already saying in a loud voice, "The brothers

Saradine, I suppose. They both look innocent enough. It would be

hard to say which is the good brother and which the bad." Then,

realising the lady's presence, he turned the conversation with

some triviality, and strolled out into the garden. But Father

Brown still gazed steadily at the red crayon sketch; and Mrs.

Anthony still gazed steadily at Father Brown.

    She had large and tragic brown eyes, and her olive face glowed

darkly with a curious and painful wonder--as of one doubtful of

a stranger's identity or purpose. Whether the little priest's coat

and creed touched some southern memories of confession, or whether

she fancied he knew more than he did, she said to him in a low

voice as to a fellow plotter, "He is right enough in one way, your

friend. He says it would be hard to pick out the good and bad

brothers. Oh, it would be hard, it would be mighty hard, to pick

out the good one."

    "I don't understand you," said Father Brown, and began to move

away.

    The woman took a step nearer to him, with thunderous brows and

a sort of savage stoop, like a bull lowering his horns.

    "There isn't a good one," she hissed. "There was badness

enough in the captain taking all that money, but I don't think

there was much goodness in the prince giving it. The captain's

not the only one with something against him."

    A light dawned on the cleric's averted face, and his mouth

formed silently the word "blackmail." Even as he did so the woman

turned an abrupt white face over her shoulder and almost fell.

The door had opened soundlessly and the pale Paul stood like a

ghost in the doorway. By the weird trick of the reflecting walls,

it seemed as if five Pauls had entered by five doors

simultaneously.

    "His Highness," he said, "has just arrived."

    In the same flash the figure of a man had passed outside the

first window, crossing the sunlit pane like a lighted stage. An

instant later he passed at the second window and the many mirrors

repainted in successive frames the same eagle profile and marching

figure. He was erect and alert, but his hair was white and his

complexion of an odd ivory yellow. He had that short, curved

Roman nose which generally goes with long, lean cheeks and chin,

but these were partly masked by moustache and imperial. The

moustache was much darker than the beard, giving an effect

slightly theatrical, and he was dressed up to the same dashing

part, having a white top hat, an orchid in his coat, a yellow

waistcoat and yellow gloves which he flapped and swung as he

walked. When he came round to the front door they heard the stiff

Paul open it, and heard the new arrival say cheerfully, "Well, you

see I have come." The stiff Mr. Paul bowed and answered in his

inaudible manner; for a few minutes their conversation could not

be heard. Then the butler said, "Everything is at your disposal";

and the glove-flapping Prince Saradine came gaily into the room to

greet them. They beheld once more that spectral scene--five

princes entering a room with five doors.

    The prince put the white hat and yellow gloves on the table

and offered his hand quite cordially.

    "Delighted to see you here, Mr. Flambeau," he said. "Knowing

you very well by reputation, if that's not an indiscreet remark."

    "Not at all," answered Flambeau, laughing. "I am not

sensitive. Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue."

    The prince flashed a sharp look at him to see if the retort

had any personal point; then he laughed also and offered chairs to

everyone, including himself.

    "Pleasant little place, this, I think," he said with a

detached air. "Not much to do, I fear; but the fishing is really

good."

    The priest, who was staring at him with the grave stare of a

baby, was haunted by some fancy that escaped definition. He looked

at the grey, carefully curled hair, yellow white visage, and slim,

somewhat foppish figure. These were not unnatural, though perhaps

a shade prononce, like the outfit of a figure behind the

footlights. The nameless interest lay in something else, in the

very framework of the face; Brown was tormented with a half memory

of having seen it somewhere before. The man looked like some old

friend of his dressed up. Then he suddenly remembered the

mirrors, and put his fancy down to some psychological effect of

that multiplication of human masks.

    Prince Saradine distributed his social attentions between his

guests with great gaiety and tact. Finding the detective of a

sporting turn and eager to employ his holiday, he guided Flambeau

and Flambeau's boat down to the best fishing spot in the stream,

and was back in his own canoe in twenty minutes to join Father

Brown in the library and plunge equally politely into the priest's

more philosophic pleasures. He seemed to know a great deal both

about the fishing and the books, though of these not the most

edifying; he spoke five or six languages, though chiefly the slang

of each. He had evidently lived in varied cities and very motley

societies, for some of his cheerfullest stories were about

gambling hells and opium dens, Australian bushrangers or Italian

brigands. Father Brown knew that the once-celebrated Saradine had

spent his last few years in almost ceaseless travel, but he had

not guessed that the travels were so disreputable or so amusing.

    Indeed, with all his dignity of a man of the world, Prince

Saradine radiated to such sensitive observers as the priest, a

certain atmosphere of the restless and even the unreliable. His

face was fastidious, but his eye was wild; he had little nervous

tricks, like a man shaken by drink or drugs, and he neither had,

nor professed to have, his hand on the helm of household affairs.

All these were left to the two old servants, especially to the

butler, who was plainly the central pillar of the house. Mr.

Paul, indeed, was not so much a butler as a sort of steward or,

even, chamberlain; he dined privately, but with almost as much

pomp as his master; he was feared by all the servants; and he

consulted with the prince decorously, but somewhat unbendingly--

rather as if he were the prince's solicitor. The sombre

housekeeper was a mere shadow in comparison; indeed, she seemed to

efface herself and wait only on the butler, and Brown heard no

more of those volcanic whispers which had half told him of the

younger brother who blackmailed the elder. Whether the prince was

really being thus bled by the absent captain, he could not be

certain, but there was something insecure and secretive about

Saradine that made the tale by no means incredible.

    When they went once more into the long hall with the windows

and the mirrors, yellow evening was dropping over the waters and

the willowy banks; and a bittern sounded in the distance like an

elf upon his dwarfish drum. The same singular sentiment of some

sad and evil fairyland crossed the priest's mind again like a

little grey cloud. "I wish Flambeau were back," he muttered.

    "Do you believe in doom?" asked the restless Prince Saradine

suddenly.

    "No," answered his guest. "I believe in Doomsday."

    The prince turned from the window and stared at him in a

singular manner, his face in shadow against the sunset. "What do

you mean?" he asked.

    "I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,"

answered Father Brown. "The things that happen here do not seem

to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere

else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often

seems to fall on the wrong person."

    The prince made an inexplicable noise like an animal; in his

shadowed face the eyes were shining queerly. A new and shrewd

thought exploded silently in the other's mind. Was there another

meaning in Saradine's blend of brilliancy and abruptness? Was the

prince-- Was he perfectly sane? He was repeating, "The wrong

person--the wrong person," many more times than was natural in a

social exclamation.

    Then Father Brown awoke tardily to a second truth. In the

mirrors before him he could see the silent door standing open, and

the silent Mr. Paul standing in it, with his usual pallid

impassiveness.

    "I thought it better to announce at once," he said, with the

same stiff respectfulness as of an old family lawyer, "a boat

rowed by six men has come to the landing-stage, and there's a

gentleman sitting in the stern."

    "A boat!" repeated the prince; "a gentleman?" and he rose to

his feet.

    There was a startled silence punctuated only by the odd noise

of the bird in the sedge; and then, before anyone could speak

again, a new face and figure passed in profile round the three

sunlit windows, as the prince had passed an hour or two before.

But except for the accident that both outlines were aquiline, they

had little in common. Instead of the new white topper of Saradine,

was a black one of antiquated or foreign shape; under it was a

young and very solemn face, clean shaven, blue about its resolute

chin, and carrying a faint suggestion of the young Napoleon. The

association was assisted by something old and odd about the whole

get-up, as of a man who had never troubled to change the fashions

of his fathers. He had a shabby blue frock coat, a red, soldierly

looking waistcoat, and a kind of coarse white trousers common among

the early Victorians, but strangely incongruous today. From all

this old clothes-shop his olive face stood out strangely young and

monstrously sincere.

    "The deuce!" said Prince Saradine, and clapping on his white

hat he went to the front door himself, flinging it open on the

sunset garden.

    By that time the new-comer and his followers were drawn up on

the lawn like a small stage army. The six boatmen had pulled the

boat well up on shore, and were guarding it almost menacingly,

holding their oars erect like spears. They were swarthy men, and

some of them wore earrings. But one of them stood forward beside

the olive-faced young man in the red waistcoat, and carried a large

black case of unfamiliar form.

    "Your name," said the young man, "is Saradine?"

    Saradine assented rather negligently.

    The new-comer had dull, dog-like brown eyes, as different as

possible from the restless and glittering grey eyes of the prince.

But once again Father Brown was tortured with a sense of having

seen somewhere a replica of the face; and once again he remembered

the repetitions of the glass-panelled room, and put down the

coincidence to that. "Confound this crystal palace!" he muttered.

"One sees everything too many times. It's like a dream."

    "If you are Prince Saradine," said the young man, "I may tell

you that my name is Antonelli."

    "Antonelli," repeated the prince languidly. "Somehow I

remember the name."

    "Permit me to present myself," said the young Italian.

    With his left hand he politely took off his old-fashioned

top-hat; with his right he caught Prince Saradine so ringing a

crack across the face that the white top hat rolled down the steps

and one of the blue flower-pots rocked upon its pedestal.

    The prince, whatever he was, was evidently not a coward; he

sprang at his enemy's throat and almost bore him backwards to the

grass. But his enemy extricated himself with a singularly

inappropriate air of hurried politeness.

    "That is all right," he said, panting and in halting English.

"I have insulted. I will give satisfaction. Marco, open the

case."

    The man beside him with the earrings and the big black case

proceeded to unlock it. He took out of it two long Italian

rapiers, with splendid steel hilts and blades, which he planted

point downwards in the lawn. The strange young man standing facing

the entrance with his yellow and vindictive face, the two swords

standing up in the turf like two crosses in a cemetery, and the

line of the ranked towers behind, gave it all an odd appearance of

being some barbaric court of justice. But everything else was

unchanged, so sudden had been the interruption. The sunset gold

still glowed on the lawn, and the bittern still boomed as

announcing some small but dreadful destiny.

    "Prince Saradine," said the man called Antonelli, "when I was

an infant in the cradle you killed my father and stole my mother;

my father was the more fortunate. You did not kill him fairly, as

I am going to kill you. You and my wicked mother took him driving

to a lonely pass in Sicily, flung him down a cliff, and went on

your way. I could imitate you if I chose, but imitating you is

too vile. I have followed you all over the world, and you have

always fled from me. But this is the end of the world--and of

you. I have you now, and I give you the chance you never gave my

father. Choose one of those swords."

    Prince Saradine, with contracted brows, seemed to hesitate a

moment, but his ears were still singing with the blow, and he

sprang forward and snatched at one of the hilts. Father Brown had

also sprung forward, striving to compose the dispute; but he soon

found his personal presence made matters worse. Saradine was a

French freemason and a fierce atheist, and a priest moved him by

the law of contraries. And for the other man neither priest nor

layman moved him at all. This young man with the Bonaparte face

and the brown eyes was something far sterner than a puritan--a

pagan. He was a simple slayer from the morning of the earth; a

man of the stone age--a man of stone.

    One hope remained, the summoning of the household; and Father

Brown ran back into the house. He found, however, that all the

under servants had been given a holiday ashore by the autocrat

Paul, and that only the sombre Mrs. Anthony moved uneasily about

the long rooms. But the moment she turned a ghastly face upon

him, he resolved one of the riddles of the house of mirrors. The

heavy brown eyes of Antonelli were the heavy brown eyes of Mrs.

Anthony; and in a flash he saw half the story.

    "Your son is outside," he said without wasting words; "either

he or the prince will be killed. Where is Mr. Paul?"

    "He is at the landing-stage," said the woman faintly. "He is

--he is--signalling for help."

    "Mrs. Anthony," said Father Brown seriously, "there is no time

for nonsense. My friend has his boat down the river fishing.

Your son's boat is guarded by your son's men. There is only this

one canoe; what is Mr. Paul doing with it?"

    "Santa Maria! I do not know," she said; and swooned all her

length on the matted floor.

    Father Brown lifted her to a sofa, flung a pot of water over

her, shouted for help, and then rushed down to the landing-stage

of the little island. But the canoe was already in mid-stream,

and old Paul was pulling and pushing it up the river with an

energy incredible at his years.

    "I will save my master," he cried, his eyes blazing maniacally.

"I will save him yet!"

    Father Brown could do nothing but gaze after the boat as it

struggled up-stream and pray that the old man might waken the

little town in time.

    "A duel is bad enough," he muttered, rubbing up his rough

dust-coloured hair, "but there's something wrong about this duel,

even as a duel. I feel it in my bones. But what can it be?"

    As he stood staring at the water, a wavering mirror of sunset,

he heard from the other end of the island garden a small but

unmistakable sound--the cold concussion of steel. He turned his

head.

    Away on the farthest cape or headland of the long islet, on a

strip of turf beyond the last rank of roses, the duellists had

already crossed swords. Evening above them was a dome of virgin

gold, and, distant as they were, every detail was picked out.

They had cast off their coats, but the yellow waistcoat and white

hair of Saradine, the red waistcoat and white trousers of

Antonelli, glittered in the level light like the colours of the

dancing clockwork dolls. The two swords sparkled from point to

pommel like two diamond pins. There was something frightful in

the two figures appearing so little and so gay. They looked like

two butterflies trying to pin each other to a cork.

    Father Brown ran as hard as he could, his little legs going

like a wheel. But when he came to the field of combat he found he

was born too late and too early--too late to stop the strife,

under the shadow of the grim Sicilians leaning on their oars, and

too early to anticipate any disastrous issue of it. For the two

men were singularly well matched, the prince using his skill with

a sort of cynical confidence, the Sicilian using his with a

murderous care. Few finer fencing matches can ever have been seen

in crowded amphitheatres than that which tinkled and sparkled on

that forgotten island in the reedy river. The dizzy fight was

balanced so long that hope began to revive in the protesting

priest; by all common probability Paul must soon come back with

the police. It would be some comfort even if Flambeau came back

from his fishing, for Flambeau, physically speaking, was worth

four other men. But there was no sign of Flambeau, and, what was

much queerer, no sign of Paul or the police. No other raft or

stick was left to float on; in that lost island in that vast

nameless pool, they were cut off as on a rock in the Pacific.

    Almost as he had the thought the ringing of the rapiers

quickened to a rattle, the prince's arms flew up, and the point

shot out behind between his shoulder-blades. He went over with a

great whirling movement, almost like one throwing the half of a

boy's cart-wheel. The sword flew from his hand like a shooting

star, and dived into the distant river. And he himself sank with

so earth-shaking a subsidence that he broke a big rose-tree with

his body and shook up into the sky a cloud of red earth--like

the smoke of some heathen sacrifice. The Sicilian had made

blood-offering to the ghost of his father.

    The priest was instantly on his knees by the corpse; but only

to make too sure that it was a corpse. As he was still trying

some last hopeless tests he heard for the first time voices from

farther up the river, and saw a police boat shoot up to the

landing-stage, with constables and other important people,

including the excited Paul. The little priest rose with a

distinctly dubious grimace.

    "Now, why on earth," he muttered, "why on earth couldn't he

have come before?"

    Some seven minutes later the island was occupied by an

invasion of townsfolk and police, and the latter had put their

hands on the victorious duellist, ritually reminding him that

anything he said might be used against him.

    "I shall not say anything," said the monomaniac, with a

wonderful and peaceful face. "I shall never say anything more.

I am very happy, and I only want to be hanged."

    Then he shut his mouth as they led him away, and it is the

strange but certain truth that he never opened it again in this

world, except to say "Guilty" at his trial.

    Father Brown had stared at the suddenly crowded garden, the

arrest of the man of blood, the carrying away of the corpse after

its examination by the doctor, rather as one watches the break-up

of some ugly dream; he was motionless, like a man in a nightmare.

He gave his name and address as a witness, but declined their

offer of a boat to the shore, and remained alone in the island

garden, gazing at the broken rose bush and the whole green theatre

of that swift and inexplicable tragedy. The light died along the

river; mist rose in the marshy banks; a few belated birds flitted

fitfully across.

    Stuck stubbornly in his sub-consciousness (which was an

unusually lively one) was an unspeakable certainty that there was

something still unexplained. This sense that had clung to him all

day could not be fully explained by his fancy about "looking-glass

land." Somehow he had not seen the real story, but some game or

masque. And yet people do not get hanged or run through the body

for the sake of a charade.

    As he sat on the steps of the landing-stage ruminating he grew

conscious of the tall, dark streak of a sail coming silently down

the shining river, and sprang to his feet with such a backrush of

feeling that he almost wept.

    "Flambeau!" he cried, and shook his friend by both hands again

and again, much to the astonishment of that sportsman, as he came

on shore with his fishing tackle. "Flambeau," he said, "so you're

not killed?"

    "Killed!" repeated the angler in great astonishment. "And why

should I be killed?"

    "Oh, because nearly everybody else is," said his companion

rather wildly. "Saradine got murdered, and Antonelli wants to be

hanged, and his mother's fainted, and I, for one, don't know

whether I'm in this world or the next. But, thank God, you're in

the same one." And he took the bewildered Flambeau's arm.

    As they turned from the landing-stage they came under the

eaves of the low bamboo house, and looked in through one of the

windows, as they had done on their first arrival. They beheld a

lamp-lit interior well calculated to arrest their eyes. The table

in the long dining-room had been laid for dinner when Saradine's

destroyer had fallen like a stormbolt on the island. And the

dinner was now in placid progress, for Mrs. Anthony sat somewhat

sullenly at the foot of the table, while at the head of it was Mr.

Paul, the major domo, eating and drinking of the best, his

bleared, bluish eyes standing queerly out of his face, his gaunt

countenance inscrutable, but by no means devoid of satisfaction.

    With a gesture of powerful impatience, Flambeau rattled at the

window, wrenched it open, and put an indignant head into the

lamp-lit room.

    "Well," he cried. "I can understand you may need some

refreshment, but really to steal your master's dinner while he

lies murdered in the garden--"

    "I have stolen a great many things in a long and pleasant

life," replied the strange old gentleman placidly; "this dinner is

one of the few things I have not stolen. This dinner and this

house and garden happen to belong to me."

    A thought flashed across Flambeau's face. "You mean to say,"

he began, "that the will of Prince Saradine--"

    "I am Prince Saradine," said the old man, munching a salted

almond.

    Father Brown, who was looking at the birds outside, jumped as

if he were shot, and put in at the window a pale face like a

turnip.

    "You are what?" he repeated in a shrill voice.

    "Paul, Prince Saradine, A vos ordres," said the venerable

person politely, lifting a glass of sherry. "I live here very

quietly, being a domestic kind of fellow; and for the sake of

modesty I am called Mr. Paul, to distinguish me from my

unfortunate brother Mr. Stephen. He died, I hear, recently--in

the garden. Of course, it is not my fault if enemies pursue him

to this place. It is owing to the regrettable irregularity of his

life. He was not a domestic character."

    He relapsed into silence, and continued to gaze at the

opposite wall just above the bowed and sombre head of the woman.

They saw plainly the family likeness that had haunted them in the

dead man. Then his old shoulders began to heave and shake a

little, as if he were choking, but his face did not alter.

    "My God!" cried Flambeau after a pause, "he's laughing!"

    "Come away," said Father Brown, who was quite white. "Come

away from this house of hell. Let us get into an honest boat

again."

    Night had sunk on rushes and river by the time they had pushed

off from the island, and they went down-stream in the dark,

warming themselves with two big cigars that glowed like crimson

ships' lanterns. Father Brown took his cigar out of his mouth and

said:

    "I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it's

a primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man.

And so he discovered that two enemies are better than one."

    "I do not follow that," answered Flambeau.

    "Oh, it's really simple," rejoined his friend. "Simple,

though anything but innocent. Both the Saradines were scamps, but

the prince, the elder, was the sort of scamp that gets to the top,

and the younger, the captain, was the sort that sinks to the

bottom. This squalid officer fell from beggar to blackmailer, and

one ugly day he got his hold upon his brother, the prince.

Obviously it was for no light matter, for Prince Paul Saradine was

frankly `fast,' and had no reputation to lose as to the mere sins

of society. In plain fact, it was a hanging matter, and Stephen

literally had a rope round his brother's neck. He had somehow

discovered the truth about the Sicilian affair, and could prove

that Paul murdered old Antonelli in the mountains. The captain

raked in the hush money heavily for ten years, until even the

prince's splendid fortune began to look a little foolish.

    "But Prince Saradine bore another burden besides his

blood-sucking brother. He knew that the son of Antonelli, a mere

child at the time of the murder, had been trained in savage

Sicilian loyalty, and lived only to avenge his father, not with

the gibbet (for he lacked Stephen's legal proof), but with the old

weapons of vendetta. The boy had practised arms with a deadly

perfection, and about the time that he was old enough to use them

Prince Saradine began, as the society papers said, to travel. The

fact is that he began to flee for his life, passing from place to

place like a hunted criminal; but with one relentless man upon his

trail. That was Prince Paul's position, and by no means a pretty

one. The more money he spent on eluding Antonelli the less he had

to silence Stephen. The more he gave to silence Stephen the less

chance there was of finally escaping Antonelli. Then it was that

he showed himself a great man--a genius like Napoleon.

    "Instead of resisting his two antagonists, he surrendered

suddenly to both of them. He gave way like a Japanese wrestler,

and his foes fell prostrate before him. He gave up the race round

the world, and he gave up his address to young Antonelli; then he

gave up everything to his brother. He sent Stephen money enough

for smart clothes and easy travel, with a letter saying roughly:

`This is all I have left. You have cleaned me out. I still have

a little house in Norfolk, with servants and a cellar, and if you

want more from me you must take that. Come and take possession if

you like, and I will live there quietly as your friend or agent or

anything.' He knew that the Sicilian had never seen the Saradine

brothers save, perhaps, in pictures; he knew they were somewhat

alike, both having grey, pointed beards. Then he shaved his own

face and waited. The trap worked. The unhappy captain, in his

new clothes, entered the house in triumph as a prince, and walked

upon the Sicilian's sword.

    "There was one hitch, and it is to the honour of human nature.

Evil spirits like Saradine often blunder by never expecting the

virtues of mankind. He took it for granted that the Italian's

blow, when it came, would be dark, violent and nameless, like the

blow it avenged; that the victim would be knifed at night, or shot

from behind a hedge, and so die without speech. It was a bad

minute for Prince Paul when Antonelli's chivalry proposed a formal

duel, with all its possible explanations. It was then that I

found him putting off in his boat with wild eyes. He was fleeing,

bareheaded, in an open boat before Antonelli should learn who he

was.

    "But, however agitated, he was not hopeless. He knew the

adventurer and he knew the fanatic. It was quite probable that

Stephen, the adventurer, would hold his tongue, through his mere

histrionic pleasure in playing a part, his lust for clinging to

his new cosy quarters, his rascal's trust in luck, and his fine

fencing. It was certain that Antonelli, the fanatic, would hold

his tongue, and be hanged without telling tales of his family.

Paul hung about on the river till he knew the fight was over.

Then he roused the town, brought the police, saw his two vanquished

enemies taken away forever, and sat down smiling to his dinner."

    "Laughing, God help us!" said Flambeau with a strong shudder.

"Do they get such ideas from Satan?"

    "He got that idea from you," answered the priest.

    "God forbid!" ejaculated Flambeau. "From me! What do you

mean!"

    The priest pulled a visiting-card from his pocket and held it

up in the faint glow of his cigar; it was scrawled with green ink.

    "Don't you remember his original invitation to you?" he asked,

"and the compliment to your criminal exploit? `That trick of

yours,' he says, `of getting one detective to arrest the other'?

He has just copied your trick. With an enemy on each side of him,

he slipped swiftly out of the way and let them collide and kill

each other."

    Flambeau tore Prince Saradine's card from the priest's hands

and rent it savagely in small pieces.

    "There's the last of that old skull and crossbones," he said

as he scattered the pieces upon the dark and disappearing waves of

the stream; "but I should think it would poison the fishes."

    The last gleam of white card and green ink was drowned and

darkened; a faint and vibrant colour as of morning changed the

sky, and the moon behind the grasses grew paler. They drifted in

silence.

    "Father," said Flambeau suddenly, "do you think it was all a

dream?"

    The priest shook his head, whether in dissent or agnosticism,

but remained mute. A smell of hawthorn and of orchards came to

them through the darkness, telling them that a wind was awake; the

next moment it swayed their little boat and swelled their sail,

and carried them onward down the winding river to happier places

and the homes of harmless men.

 

    The Hammer of God

 

The little village of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep

that the tall spire of its church seemed only like the peak of a

small mountain. At the foot of the church stood a smithy,

generally red with fires and always littered with hammers and

scraps of iron; opposite to this, over a rude cross of cobbled

paths, was "The Blue Boar," the only inn of the place. It was

upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden and silver

daybreak, that two brothers met in the street and spoke; though

one was beginning the day and the other finishing it. The Rev.

and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was making his way to

some austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn.

Colonel the Hon. Norman Bohun, his elder brother, was by no means

devout, and was sitting in evening dress on the bench outside "The

Blue Boar," drinking what the philosophic observer was free to

regard either as his last glass on Tuesday or his first on

Wednesday. The colonel was not particular.

    The Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families

really dating from the Middle Ages, and their pennon had actually

seen Palestine. But it is a great mistake to suppose that such

houses stand high in chivalric tradition. Few except the poor

preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in

fashions. The Bohuns had been Mohocks under Queen Anne and

Mashers under Queen Victoria. But like more than one of the

really ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two centuries

into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even

come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly

human about the colonel's wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his

chronic resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the

hideous clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly,

but with hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked

merely blonde and leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in

his face that they looked black. They were a little too close

together. He had very long yellow moustaches; on each side of

them a fold or furrow from nostril to jaw, so that a sneer seemed

cut into his face. Over his evening clothes he wore a curious

pale yellow coat that looked more like a very light dressing gown

than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck an

extraordinary broad-brimmed hat of a bright green colour,

evidently some oriental curiosity caught up at random. He was

proud of appearing in such incongruous attires--proud of the

fact that he always made them look congruous.

    His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the

elegance, but he was buttoned up to the chin in black, and his

face was clean-shaven, cultivated, and a little nervous. He

seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were some

who said (notably the blacksmith, who was a Presbyterian) that it

was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God, and that his

haunting of the church like a ghost was only another and purer

turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his brother

raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful, while the

man's practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was

mostly an ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and

secret prayer, and was founded on his being often found kneeling,

not before the altar, but in peculiar places, in the crypts or

gallery, or even in the belfry. He was at the moment about to

enter the church through the yard of the smithy, but stopped and

frowned a little as he saw his brother's cavernous eyes staring in

the same direction. On the hypothesis that the colonel was

interested in the church he did not waste any speculations. There

only remained the blacksmith's shop, and though the blacksmith was

a Puritan and none of his people, Wilfred Bohun had heard some

scandals about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He flung a

suspicious look across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing

to speak to him.

    "Good morning, Wilfred," he said. "Like a good landlord I am

watching sleeplessly over my people. I am going to call on the

blacksmith."

    Wilfred looked at the ground, and said: "The blacksmith is out.

He is over at Greenford."

    "I know," answered the other with silent laughter; "that is

why I am calling on him."

    "Norman," said the cleric, with his eye on a pebble in the

road, "are you ever afraid of thunderbolts?"

    "What do you mean?" asked the colonel. "Is your hobby

meteorology?"

    "I mean," said Wilfred, without looking up, "do you ever think

that God might strike you in the street?"

    "I beg your pardon," said the colonel; "I see your hobby is

folk-lore."

    "I know your hobby is blasphemy," retorted the religious man,

stung in the one live place of his nature. "But if you do not

fear God, you have good reason to fear man."

    The elder raised his eyebrows politely. "Fear man?" he said.

    "Barnes the blacksmith is the biggest and strongest man for

forty miles round," said the clergyman sternly. "I know you are

no coward or weakling, but he could throw you over the wall."

    This struck home, being true, and the lowering line by mouth

and nostril darkened and deepened. For a moment he stood with the

heavy sneer on his face. But in an instant Colonel Bohun had

recovered his own cruel good humour and laughed, showing two

dog-like front teeth under his yellow moustache. "In that case,

my dear Wilfred," he said quite carelessly, "it was wise for the

last of the Bohuns to come out partially in armour."

    And he took off the queer round hat covered with green,

showing that it was lined within with steel. Wilfred recognised

it indeed as a light Japanese or Chinese helmet torn down from a

trophy that hung in the old family hall.

    "It was the first hat to hand," explained his brother airily;

"always the nearest hat--and the nearest woman."

    "The blacksmith is away at Greenford," said Wilfred quietly;

"the time of his return is unsettled."

    And with that he turned and went into the church with bowed

head, crossing himself like one who wishes to be quit of an

unclean spirit. He was anxious to forget such grossness in the

cool twilight of his tall Gothic cloisters; but on that morning it

was fated that his still round of religious exercises should be

everywhere arrested by small shocks. As he entered the church,

hitherto always empty at that hour, a kneeling figure rose hastily

to its feet and came towards the full daylight of the doorway.

When the curate saw it he stood still with surprise. For the

early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a nephew

of the blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the

church or for anything else. He was always called "Mad Joe," and

seemed to have no other name; he was a dark, strong, slouching

lad, with a heavy white face, dark straight hair, and a mouth

always open. As he passed the priest, his moon-calf countenance

gave no hint of what he had been doing or thinking of. He had

never been known to pray before. What sort of prayers was he

saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.

    Wilfred Bohun stood rooted to the spot long enough to see the

idiot go out into the sunshine, and even to see his dissolute

brother hail him with a sort of avuncular jocularity. The last

thing he saw was the colonel throwing pennies at the open mouth of

Joe, with the serious appearance of trying to hit it.

    This ugly sunlit picture of the stupidity and cruelty of the

earth sent the ascetic finally to his prayers for purification and

new thoughts. He went up to a pew in the gallery, which brought

him under a coloured window which he loved and always quieted his

spirit; a blue window with an angel carrying lilies. There he

began to think less about the half-wit, with his livid face and

mouth like a fish. He began to think less of his evil brother,

pacing like a lean lion in his horrible hunger. He sank deeper

and deeper into those cold and sweet colours of silver blossoms

and sapphire sky.

    In this place half an hour afterwards he was found by Gibbs,

the village cobbler, who had been sent for him in some haste. He

got to his feet with promptitude, for he knew that no small matter

would have brought Gibbs into such a place at all. The cobbler

was, as in many villages, an atheist, and his appearance in church

was a shade more extraordinary than Mad Joe's. It was a morning

of theological enigmas.

    "What is it?" asked Wilfred Bohun rather stiffly, but putting

out a trembling hand for his hat.

    The atheist spoke in a tone that, coming from him, was quite

startlingly respectful, and even, as it were, huskily sympathetic.

    "You must excuse me, sir," he said in a hoarse whisper, "but

we didn't think it right not to let you know at once. I'm afraid

a rather dreadful thing has happened, sir. I'm afraid your

brother--"

    Wilfred clenched his frail hands. "What devilry has he done

now?" he cried in voluntary passion.

    "Why, sir," said the cobbler, coughing, "I'm afraid he's done

nothing, and won't do anything. I'm afraid he's done for. You

had really better come down, sir."

    The curate followed the cobbler down a short winding stair

which brought them out at an entrance rather higher than the

street. Bohun saw the tragedy in one glance, flat underneath him

like a plan. In the yard of the smithy were standing five or six

men mostly in black, one in an inspector's uniform. They included

the doctor, the Presbyterian minister, and the priest from the

Roman Catholic chapel, to which the blacksmith's wife belonged.

The latter was speaking to her, indeed, very rapidly, in an

undertone, as she, a magnificent woman with red-gold hair, was

sobbing blindly on a bench. Between these two groups, and just

clear of the main heap of hammers, lay a man in evening dress,

spread-eagled and flat on his face. From the height above Wilfred

could have sworn to every item of his costume and appearance, down

to the Bohun rings upon his fingers; but the skull was only a

hideous splash, like a star of blackness and blood.

    Wilfred Bohun gave but one glance, and ran down the steps into

the yard. The doctor, who was the family physician, saluted him,

but he scarcely took any notice. He could only stammer out: "My

brother is dead. What does it mean? What is this horrible

mystery?" There was an unhappy silence; and then the cobbler, the

most outspoken man present, answered: "Plenty of horror, sir," he

said; "but not much mystery."

    "What do you mean?" asked Wilfred, with a white face.

    "It's plain enough," answered Gibbs. "There is only one man

for forty miles round that could have struck such a blow as that,

and he's the man that had most reason to."

    "We must not prejudge anything," put in the doctor, a tall,

black-bearded man, rather nervously; "but it is competent for me

to corroborate what Mr. Gibbs says about the nature of the blow,

sir; it is an incredible blow. Mr. Gibbs says that only one man

in this district could have done it. I should have said myself

that nobody could have done it."

    A shudder of superstition went through the slight figure of

the curate. "I can hardly understand," he said.

    "Mr. Bohun," said the doctor in a low voice, "metaphors

literally fail me. It is inadequate to say that the skull was

smashed to bits like an eggshell. Fragments of bone were driven

into the body and the ground like bullets into a mud wall. It was

the hand of a giant."

    He was silent a moment, looking grimly through his glasses;

then he added: "The thing has one advantage--that it clears most

people of suspicion at one stroke. If you or I or any normally

made man in the country were accused of this crime, we should be

acquitted as an infant would be acquitted of stealing the Nelson

column."

    "That's what I say," repeated the cobbler obstinately;

"there's only one man that could have done it, and he's the man

that would have done it. Where's Simeon Barnes, the blacksmith?"

    "He's over at Greenford," faltered the curate.

    "More likely over in France," muttered the cobbler.

    "No; he is in neither of those places," said a small and

colourless voice, which came from the little Roman priest who had

joined the group. "As a matter of fact, he is coming up the road

at this moment."

    The little priest was not an interesting man to look at,

having stubbly brown hair and a round and stolid face. But if he

had been as splendid as Apollo no one would have looked at him at

that moment. Everyone turned round and peered at the pathway

which wound across the plain below, along which was indeed walking,

at his own huge stride and with a hammer on his shoulder, Simeon

the smith. He was a bony and gigantic man, with deep, dark,

sinister eyes and a dark chin beard. He was walking and talking

quietly with two other men; and though he was never specially

cheerful, he seemed quite at his ease.

    "My God!" cried the atheistic cobbler, "and there's the hammer

he did it with."

    "No," said the inspector, a sensible-looking man with a sandy

moustache, speaking for the first time. "There's the hammer he

did it with over there by the church wall. We have left it and

the body exactly as they are."

    All glanced round and the short priest went across and looked

down in silence at the tool where it lay. It was one of the

smallest and the lightest of the hammers, and would not have

caught the eye among the rest; but on the iron edge of it were

blood and yellow hair.

    After a silence the short priest spoke without looking up, and

there was a new note in his dull voice. "Mr. Gibbs was hardly

right," he said, "in saying that there is no mystery. There is at

least the mystery of why so big a man should attempt so big a blow

with so little a hammer."

    "Oh, never mind that," cried Gibbs, in a fever. "What are we

to do with Simeon Barnes?"

    "Leave him alone," said the priest quietly. "He is coming

here of himself. I know those two men with him. They are very

good fellows from Greenford, and they have come over about the

Presbyterian chapel."

    Even as he spoke the tall smith swung round the corner of the

church, and strode into his own yard. Then he stood there quite

still, and the hammer fell from his hand. The inspector, who had

preserved impenetrable propriety, immediately went up to him.

    "I won't ask you, Mr. Barnes," he said, "whether you know

anything about what has happened here. You are not bound to say.

I hope you don't know, and that you will be able to prove it. But

I must go through the form of arresting you in the King's name for

the murder of Colonel Norman Bohun."

    "You are not bound to say anything," said the cobbler in

officious excitement. "They've got to prove everything. They

haven't proved yet that it is Colonel Bohun, with the head all

smashed up like that."

    "That won't wash," said the doctor aside to the priest.

"That's out of the detective stories. I was the colonel's medical

man, and I knew his body better than he did. He had very fine

hands, but quite peculiar ones. The second and third fingers were

the same length. Oh, that's the colonel right enough."

    As he glanced at the brained corpse upon the ground the iron

eyes of the motionless blacksmith followed them and rested there

also.

    "Is Colonel Bohun dead?" said the smith quite calmly. "Then

he's damned."

    "Don't say anything! Oh, don't say anything," cried the

atheist cobbler, dancing about in an ecstasy of admiration of the

English legal system. For no man is such a legalist as the good

Secularist.

    The blacksmith turned on him over his shoulder the august face

of a fanatic.

    "It's well for you infidels to dodge like foxes because the

world's law favours you," he said; "but God guards His own in His

pocket, as you shall see this day."

    Then he pointed to the colonel and said: "When did this dog

die in his sins?"

    "Moderate your language," said the doctor.

    "Moderate the Bible's language, and I'll moderate mine. When

did he die?"

    "I saw him alive at six o'clock this morning," stammered

Wilfred Bohun.

    "God is good," said the smith. "Mr. Inspector, I have not the

slightest objection to being arrested. It is you who may object

to arresting me. I don't mind leaving the court without a stain

on my character. You do mind perhaps leaving the court with a bad

set-back in your career."

    The solid inspector for the first time looked at the

blacksmith with a lively eye; as did everybody else, except the

short, strange priest, who was still looking down at the little

hammer that had dealt the dreadful blow.

    "There are two men standing outside this shop," went on the

blacksmith with ponderous lucidity, "good tradesmen in Greenford

whom you all know, who will swear that they saw me from before

midnight till daybreak and long after in the committee room of our

Revival Mission, which sits all night, we save souls so fast. In

Greenford itself twenty people could swear to me for all that

time. If I were a heathen, Mr. Inspector, I would let you walk on

to your downfall. But as a Christian man I feel bound to give you

your chance, and ask you whether you will hear my alibi now or in

court."

    The inspector seemed for the first time disturbed, and said,

"Of course I should be glad to clear you altogether now."

    The smith walked out of his yard with the same long and easy

stride, and returned to his two friends from Greenford, who were

indeed friends of nearly everyone present. Each of them said a

few words which no one ever thought of disbelieving. When they

had spoken, the innocence of Simeon stood up as solid as the great

church above them.

    One of those silences struck the group which are more strange

and insufferable than any speech. Madly, in order to make

conversation, the curate said to the Catholic priest:

    "You seem very much interested in that hammer, Father Brown."

    "Yes, I am," said Father Brown; "why is it such a small

hammer?"

    The doctor swung round on him.

    "By George, that's true," he cried; "who would use a little

hammer with ten larger hammers lying about?"

    Then he lowered his voice in the curate's ear and said: "Only

the kind of person that can't lift a large hammer. It is not a

question of force or courage between the sexes. It's a question

of lifting power in the shoulders. A bold woman could commit ten

murders with a light hammer and never turn a hair. She could not

kill a beetle with a heavy one."

    Wilfred Bohun was staring at him with a sort of hypnotised

horror, while Father Brown listened with his head a little on one

side, really interested and attentive. The doctor went on with

more hissing emphasis:

    "Why do these idiots always assume that the only person who

hates the wife's lover is the wife's husband? Nine times out of

ten the person who most hates the wife's lover is the wife. Who

knows what insolence or treachery he had shown her--look there!"

    He made a momentary gesture towards the red-haired woman on

the bench. She had lifted her head at last and the tears were

drying on her splendid face. But the eyes were fixed on the

corpse with an electric glare that had in it something of idiocy.

    The Rev. Wilfred Bohun made a limp gesture as if waving away

all desire to know; but Father Brown, dusting off his sleeve some

ashes blown from the furnace, spoke in his indifferent way.

    "You are like so many doctors," he said; "your mental science

is really suggestive. It is your physical science that is utterly

impossible. I agree that the woman wants to kill the

co-respondent much more than the petitioner does. And I agree

that a woman will always pick up a small hammer instead of a big

one. But the difficulty is one of physical impossibility. No

woman ever born could have smashed a man's skull out flat like

that." Then he added reflectively, after a pause: "These people

haven't grasped the whole of it. The man was actually wearing an

iron helmet, and the blow scattered it like broken glass. Look at

that woman. Look at her arms."

    Silence held them all up again, and then the doctor said

rather sulkily: "Well, I may be wrong; there are objections to

everything. But I stick to the main point. No man but an idiot

would pick up that little hammer if he could use a big hammer."

    With that the lean and quivering hands of Wilfred Bohun went

up to his head and seemed to clutch his scanty yellow hair. After

an instant they dropped, and he cried: "That was the word I wanted;

you have said the word."

    Then he continued, mastering his discomposure: "The words you

said were, `No man but an idiot would pick up the small hammer.'"

    "Yes," said the doctor. "Well?"

    "Well," said the curate, "no man but an idiot did." The rest

stared at him with eyes arrested and riveted, and he went on in a

febrile and feminine agitation.

    "I am a priest," he cried unsteadily, "and a priest should be

no shedder of blood. I--I mean that he should bring no one to

the gallows. And I thank God that I see the criminal clearly now

--because he is a criminal who cannot be brought to the gallows."

    "You will not denounce him?" inquired the doctor.

    "He would not be hanged if I did denounce him," answered

Wilfred with a wild but curiously happy smile. "When I went into

the church this morning I found a madman praying there --that

poor Joe, who has been wrong all his life. God knows what he

prayed; but with such strange folk it is not incredible to suppose

that their prayers are all upside down. Very likely a lunatic

would pray before killing a man. When I last saw poor Joe he was

with my brother. My brother was mocking him."

    "By Jove!" cried the doctor, "this is talking at last. But