The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (105 page)

“
Did
Romaine stand motionless?” asked the priest. “I should have thought he would have
run even quicker towards the corpse.”

“
Perhaps
he did when I had left,” replied the general. “I took in that undying picture in
an instant and the next instant I had dived among the sandhills, and was far out
of sight of the others. Well, poor Maurice had made a good choice in the matter
of doctors; though the doctor came too late, he came quicker than I should have
thought possible. This village surgeon was a very remarkable man, redhaired,
irascible, but extraordinarily strong in promptitude and presence of mind. I
saw him but for a flash as he leapt on his horse and went thundering away to
the scene of death, leaving me far behind. But in that flash I had so strong a
sense of his personality that I wished to God he had really been called in
before the duel began; for I believe on my soul he would have prevented it
somehow. As it was, he cleaned up the mess with marvellous swiftness; long
before I could trail back to the sea-shore on my two feet his impetuous
practicality had managed everything; the corpse was temporarily buried in the
sandhills and the unhappy homicide had been persuaded to do the only thing he
could do — to flee for his life. He slipped along the coast till he came to a
port and managed to get out of the country. You know the rest; poor Jim
remained abroad for many years; later, when the whole thing had been hushed up
or forgotten, he returned to his dismal castle and automatically inherited the
title. I have never seen him from that day to this, and yet I know what is
written in red letters in the inmost darkness of his brain.”

“
I
understand,” said Father Brown, “that some of you have made efforts to see him?”

“
My
wife never relaxed her efforts,” said the general. “She refuses to admit that such
a crime ought to cut a man off for ever; and I confess I am inclined to agree
with her. Eighty years before it would have been thought quite normal; and
really it was manslaughter rather than murder. My wife is a great friend of the
unfortunate lady who was the occasion of the quarrel and she has an idea that
if Jim would consent to see Viola Grayson once again, and receive her assurance
that old quarrels are buried, it might restore his sanity. My wife is calling a
sort of council of old friends to-morrow, I believe. She is very energetic.”

Father
Brown was playing with the pins that lay beside the general’s map; he seemed to
listen rather absent-mindedly. He had the sort of mind that sees things in pictures;
and the picture which had coloured even the prosaic mind of the practical
soldier took on tints yet more significant and sinister in the more mystical
mind of the priest. He saw the dark-red desolation of sand, the very hue of
Aceldama, and the dead man lying in a dark heap, and the slayer, stooping as he
ran, gesticulating with a glove in demented remorse, and always his imagination
came back to the third thing that he could not yet fit into any human picture:
the second of the slain man standing motionless and mysterious, like a dark
statue on the edge of the sea. It might seem to some a detail; but for him it
was that stiff figure that stood up like a standing note of interrogation.

Why
had not Romaine moved instantly? It was the natural thing for a second to do, in
common humanity, let alone friendship. Even if there were some double-dealing or
darker motive not yet understood, one would think it would be done for the sake
of appearances. Anyhow, when the thing was all over, it would be natural for
the second to stir long before the other second had vanished beyond the
sandhills.

“
Does
this man Romanic move very slowly?” he asked.

“
It’s
queer you should ask that,” answered. Outram, with a sharp glance. “No, as a matter
of fact he moves very quickly when he moves at all. But, curiously enough, I
was just thinking that only this afternoon I saw him stand exactly like that,
during the thunderstorm. He stood in that silver-clasped cape of his, and with
one hand on his hip, exactly and in every line as he stood on those bloody
sands long ago. The lightning blinded us all, but he did not blink. When it was
dark again he was standing there still.”

“
I
suppose he isn’t standing there now?” inquired Father Brown. “I mean, I suppose
he moved sometime?”

“
No,
he moved quite sharply when the thunder came,” replied the other. “He seemed to
have been waiting for it, for he told us the exact time of the interval. Is anything
the matter?”

“
I’ve
pricked myself with one of your pins,” said Father Brown. “I hope I haven’t damaged
it.” But his eyes had snapped and his mouth abruptly shut.

“
Are
you ill?” inquired the general, staring at him.

“
No,”
answered the priest; “I’m only not quite so stoical as your friend Romaine. I can’t
help blinking when I see light.”

He
turned to gather up his hat and umbrella; but when he had got to the door he seemed
to remember something and turned back. Coming up close to Outram, he gazed up
into his face with a rather helpless expression, as of a dying fish, and made a
motion as if to hold him by the waistcoat.

“
General,”
he almost whispered, “for God’s sake don’t let your wife and that other woman insist
on seeing Marne again. Let sleeping dogs lie, or you’ll unleash all the hounds
of hell.”

The
general was left alone with a look of bewilderment in his brown eyes, as he sat
down again to play with his pins.

Even
greater, however, was the bewilderment which attended the successive stages of the
benevolent conspiracy of the general’s wife, who had assembled her little group
of sympathizers to storm the castle of the misanthrope. The first surprise she
encountered was the unexplained absence of one of the actors in the ancient
tragedy. When they assembled by agreement at a quiet hotel quite near the
castle, there was no sign of Hugo Romaine, until a belated telegram from a
lawyer told them that the great actor had suddenly left the country. The second
surprise, when they began the bombardment by sending up word to the castle with
an urgent request for an interview, was the figure which came forth from those
gloomy gates to receive the deputation in the name of the noble owner. It was
no such figure as they would have conceived suitable to those sombre avenues or
those almost feudal formalities. It was not some stately steward or major-domo,
nor even a dignified butler or tall and ornamental footman. The only figure
that came out of the cavernous castle doorway was the short and shabby figure
of Father Brown.

“
Look
here,” he said, in his simple, bothered fashion. “I told you you’d much better leave
him alone. He knows what he’s doing and it’ll only make everybody unhappy.”

Lady
Outram, who was accompanied by a tall and quietly-dressed lady, still very handsome,
presumably the original Miss Grayson, looked at the little priest with cold
contempt.

“
Really,
sir,” she said; “this is a very private occasion, and I don’t understand what you
have to do with it.’

“
Trust
a priest to have to do with a private occasion,” snarled Sir John Cockspur. “Don’t
you know they live behind the scenes like rats behind a wainscot burrowing
their way into everybody’s private rooms. See how he’s already in possession of
poor Marne.” Sir John was slightly sulky, as his aristocratic friends had
persuaded him to give up the great scoop of publicity in return for the
privilege of being really inside a Society secret. It never occurred to him to
ask himself whether he was at all like a rat in a wainscot.

“
Oh,
that’s all right,” said Father Brown, with the impatience of anxiety. “I’ve talked
it over with the marquis and the only priest he’s ever had anything to do with;
his clerical tastes have been much exaggerated. I tell you he knows what he’s
about; and I do implore you all to leave him alone.”

“
You
mean to leave him to this living death of moping and going mad in a ruin!” cried
Lady Outram, in a voice that shook a little. “And all because he had the bad
luck to shoot a man in a duel more than a quarter of a century ago. Is that what
you call Christian charity?”

“
Yes,”
answered the priest stolidly; “that is what I call Christian charity.”

“
It’s
about all the Christian charity you’ll ever get out of these priests,” cried Cockspur
bitterly. “That’s their only idea of pardoning a poor fellow for a piece of
folly; to wall him up alive and starve him to death with fasts and penances and
pictures of hell-fire. And all because a bullet went wrong.”

“
Really,
Father Brown,” said General Outram, “do you honestly think he deserves this? Is
that your Christianity?”

“
Surely
the true Christianity,” pleaded his wife more gently, “is that which knows all and
pardons all; the love that can remember — and forget.”

“
Father
Brown,” said young Mallow, very earnestly, “I generally agree with what you say;
but I’m hanged if I can follow you here. A shot in a duel, followed instantly
by remorse, is not such an awful offence.”

“
I
admit.” said Father Brown dully, “that I take a more serious view of his offence.”

“
God
soften your hard heart,” said the strange lady speaking for the first time. “I am
going to speak to my old friend.”

Almost
as if her voice had raised a ghost in that great grey house, something stirred within
and a figure stood in the dark doorway at the top of the great stone flight of
steps. It was clad in dead black, but there was something wild about the
blanched hair and something in the pale features that was like the wreck of a
marble statue.

Viola
Grayson began calmly to move up the great flight of steps; and Outram muttered in
his thick black moustache: “He won’t cut her dead as he did my wife, I fancy.”

Father
Brown, who seemed in a collapse of resignation, looked up at him for a moment.

“
Poor
Marne has enough on his conscience,” he said. “Let us acquit him of what we can.
At least he never cut your wife.”

“
What
do you mean by that?”

“
He
never knew her,” said Father Brown.

As
they spoke, the tall lady proudly mounted the last step and came face to face with
the Marquis of Marne. His lips moved, but something happened before he could
speak.

A
scream rang across the open space and went wailing away in echoes along those hollow
walls. By the abruptness and agony with which it broke from the woman’s lips it
might have been a mere inarticulate cry. But it was an articulated word; and
they all heard it with a horrible distinctness.

“
Maurice!”

“
What
is it, dear?” cried Lady Outram, and began to run up the steps; for the other woman
was swaying as if she might fall down the whole stone flight. Then she faced
about and began to descend, all bowed and shrunken and shuddering. “Oh, my
God,” she was saying. “Oh, my God, it isn’t Jim at all. it’s Maurice!”

“
I
think, Lady Outram,” said the priest gravely, “you had better go with your friend.”

As
they turned, a voice fell on them like a stone from the top of the stone stair,
a voice that might have come out of an open grave. It was hoarse and unnatural,
like the voices of men who are left alone with wild birds on desert islands. It
was the voice of the Marquis of Marne, and it said: “Stop!”

“
Father
Brown,” he said, “before your friends disperse I authorize you to tell them all
I have told you. Whatever follows, I will hide from it no longer.”

“
You
are right,” said the priest, “and it shall be counted to you.”

“
Yes,”
said Father Brown quietly to the questioning company afterwards. “He has given me
the right to speak; but I will not tell it as he told me, but as I found it out
for myself. Well, I knew from the first that the blighting monkish influence
was all nonsense out of novels. Our people might possibly, in certain cases,
encourage a man to go regularly into a monastery, but certainly not to hang
about in a mediaeval castle. In the same way, they certainly wouldn’t want him
to dress up as a monk when he wasn’t a monk. But it struck me that he might himself
want to wear a monk’s hood or even a mask. I had heard of him as a mourner, and
then as a murderer; but already I had hazy suspicions that his reason for
hiding might not only be concerned with what he was, but with who he was.

“
Then
came the general’s vivid description of the duel; and the most vivid thing in it
to me was the figure of Mr. Romaine in the background; it was vivid because it
was in the background. Why did the general leave behind him on the sand a dead
man, whose friend stood yards away from him like a stock or a stone? Then I
heard something, a mere trifle, about a trick habit that Romaine has of standing
quite still when he is waiting for something to happen; as he waited for the
thunder to follow the lightning. Well, that automatic trick in this case
betrayed everything. Hugo Romaine on that old occasion, also, was waiting for
something.”

“
But
it was all over,” said the general. “What could he have been waiting for?”

“
He
was waiting for the duel,” said Father Brown.

“
But
I tell you I saw the duel!” cried the general.