The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (14 page)

“
God!”
cried Angus involuntarily, “the Invisible Man!”

Without
another word he turned and dashed up the stairs, with Flambeau following; but Father
Brown still stood looking about him in the snow-clad street as if he had lost
interest in his query.

Flambeau
was plainly in a mood to break down the door with his big shoulders; but the Scotchman,
with more reason, if less intuition, fumbled about on the frame of the door
till he found the invisible button; and the door swung slowly open.

It
showed substantially the same serried interior; the hall had grown darker, though
it was still struck here and there with the last crimson shafts of sunset, and
one or two of the headless machines had been moved from their places for this
or that purpose, and stood here and there about the twilit place. The green and
red of their coats were all darkened in the dusk; and their likeness to human
shapes slightly increased by their very shapelessness. But in the middle of
them all, exactly where the paper with the red ink had lain, there lay
something that looked like red ink spilt out of its bottle. But it was not red
ink.

With
a French combination of reason and violence Flambeau simply said “Murder!” and,
plunging into the flat, had explored, every corner and cupboard of it in five minutes.
But if he expected to find a corpse he found none. Isidore Smythe was not in
the place, either dead or alive. After the most tearing search the two men met
each other in the outer hall, with streaming faces and staring eyes. “My
friend,” said Flambeau, talking French in his excitement, “not only is your murderer
invisible, but he makes invisible also the murdered man.”

Angus
looked round at the dim room full of dummies, and in some Celtic corner of his Scotch
soul a shudder started. One of the life-size dolls stood immediately overshadowing
the blood stain, summoned, perhaps, by the slain man an instant before he fell.
One of the high-shouldered hooks that served the thing for arms, was a little
lifted, and Angus had suddenly the horrid fancy that poor Smythe’s own iron
child had struck him down. Matter had rebelled, and these machines had killed
their master. But even so, what had they done with him?

“
Eaten
him?” said the nightmare at his ear; and he sickened for an instant at the idea
of rent, human remains absorbed and crushed into all that acephalous clockwork.

He
recovered his mental health by an emphatic effort, and said to Flambeau, “Well,
there it is. The poor fellow has evaporated like a cloud and left a red streak on
the floor. The tale does not belong to this world.”

“
There
is only one thing to be done,” said Flambeau, “whether it belongs to this world
or the other. I must go down and talk to my friend.”

They
descended, passing the man with the pail, who again asseverated that he had let
no intruder pass, down to the commissionaire and the hovering chestnut man, who
rigidly reasserted their own watchfulness. But when Angus looked round for his fourth
confirmation he could not see it, and called out with some nervousness, “Where
is the policeman?”

“
I
beg your pardon,” said Father Brown; “that is my fault. I just sent him down the
road to investigate something — that I just thought worth investigating.”

“
Well,
we want him back pretty soon,” said Angus abruptly, “for the wretched man upstairs
has not only been murdered, but wiped out.”

“
How?”
asked the priest.

“
Father,”
said Flambeau, after a pause, “upon my soul I believe it is more in your department
than mine. No friend or foe has entered the house, but Smythe is gone, as if
stolen by the fairies. If that is not supernatural, I —”

As
he spoke they were all checked by an unusual sight; the big blue policeman came
round the corner of the crescent, running. He came straight up to Brown.

“
You’re
right, sir,” he panted, “They’ve just found poor Mr. Smythe’s body in the canal
down below.”

Angus
put his hand wildly to his head. “Did he run down and drown himself?” he asked.

“
He
never came down, I’ll swear,” said the constable, “and he wasn’t drowned either,
for he died of a great stab over the heart.”

“
And
yet you saw no one enter?” said Flambeau in a grave voice.

“
Let
us walk down the road a little,” said the priest.

As
they reached the other end of the crescent he observed abruptly, “Stupid of me!
I forgot to ask the policeman something. I wonder if they found a light brown sack.”

“
Why
a light brown sack?” asked Angus, astonished.

“
Because
if it was any other coloured sack, the case must begin over again,” said Father
Brown; “but if it was a light brown sack, why, the case is finished.”

“
I
am pleased to hear it,” said Angus with hearty irony. “It hasn’t begun, so far as
I am concerned.”

“
You
must tell us all about it,” said Flambeau with a strange heavy simplicity, like
a child.

Unconsciously
they were walking with quickening steps down the long sweep of road on the other
side of the high crescent, Father Brown leading briskly, though in silence. At
last he said with an almost touching vagueness, “Well, I’m afraid you’ll think
it so prosy. We always begin at the abstract end of things, and you can’t begin
this story anywhere else.

“
Have
you ever noticed this — that people never answer what you say? They answer what
you mean — or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country
house, ‘Is anybody staying with you?’ the lady doesn’t answer ‘Yes; the butler,
the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and so on,’ though the parlourmaid may be
in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says ‘There is nobody staying
with us,’ meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring
into an epidemic asks, ‘Who is staying in the house?’ then the lady will
remember the butler, the parlourmaid, and the rest. All language is used like
that; you never get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered
truly. When those four quite honest men said that no man had gone into the
Mansions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them. They meant
no man whom they could suspect of being your man. A man did go into the house,
and did come out of it, but they never noticed him.”

“
An
invisible man?” inquired Angus, raising his red eyebrows. “A mentally invisible
man,” said Father Brown.

A
minute or two after he resumed in the same unassuming voice, like a man thinking
his way. “Of course you can’t think of such a man, until you do think of him.
That’s where his cleverness comes in. But I came to think of him through two or
three little things in the tale Mr. Angus told us. First, there was the fact
that this Welkin went for long walks. And then there was the vast lot of stamp
paper on the window. And then, most of all, there were the two things the young
lady said — things that couldn’t be true. Don’t get annoyed,” he added hastily,
noting a sudden movement of the Scotchman’s head; “she thought they were true.
A person can’t be quite alone in a street a second before she receives a
letter. She can’t be quite alone in a street when she starts reading a letter
just received. There must be somebody pretty near her; he must be mentally
invisible.”

“
Why
must there be somebody near her?” asked Angus.

“
Because,”
said Father Brown, “barring carrier-pigeons, somebody must have brought her the
letter.”

“
Do
you really mean to say,” asked Flambeau, with energy, “that Welkin carried his rival’s
letters to his lady?”

“
Yes,”
said the priest. “Welkin carried his rival’s letters to his lady. You see, he had
to.”

“
Oh,
I can’t stand much more of this,” exploded Flambeau. “Who is this fellow? What does
he look like? What is the usual get-up of a mentally invisible man?”

“
He
is dressed rather handsomely in red, blue and gold,” replied the priest promptly
with precision, “and in this striking, and even showy, costume he entered
Himylaya Mansions under eight human eyes; he killed Smythe in cold blood, and
came down into the street again carrying the dead body in his arms —”

“
Reverend
sir,” cried Angus, standing still, “are you raving mad, or am I?”

“
You
are not mad,” said Brown, “only a little unobservant. You have not noticed such
a man as this, for example.”

He
took three quick strides forward, and put his hand on the shoulder of an ordinary
passing postman who had bustled by them unnoticed under the shade of the trees.

“
Nobody
ever notices postmen somehow,” he said thoughtfully; “yet they have passions like
other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite
easily.”

The
postman, instead of turning naturally, had ducked and tumbled against the garden
fence. He was a lean fair-bearded man of very ordinary appearance, but as he
turned an alarmed face over his shoulder, all three men were fixed with an
almost fiendish squint.

*

Flambeau
went back to his sabres, purple rugs and Persian cat, having many things to attend
to. John Turnbull Angus went back to the lady at the shop, with whom that
imprudent young man contrives to be extremely comfortable. But Father Brown
walked those snow-covered hills under the stars for many hours with a murderer,
and what they said to each other will never be known.

A
stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown, wrapped in a
grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley and beheld the strange
castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the glen or hollow like a blind
alley; and it looked like the end of the world. Rising in steep roofs and spires
of seagreen slate in the manner of the old French-Scotch chateaux, it reminded
an Englishman of the sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the
pine woods that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black
as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy devilry,
was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on the place one of
those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow which lie more heavily
on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other of the children of men. For
Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in
the aristocrat, and the sense of doom in the Calvinist.

The
priest had snatched a day from his business at Glasgow to meet his friend Flambeau,
the amateur detective, who was at Glengyle Castle with another more formal
officer investigating the life and death of the late Earl of Glengyle. That
mysterious person was the last representative of a race whose valour, insanity,
and violent cunning had made them terrible even among the sinister nobility of
their nation in the sixteenth century. None were deeper in that labyrinthine
ambition, in chamber within chamber of that palace of lies that was built up
around Mary Queen of Scots.

The
rhyme in the country-side attested the motive and the result of their machinations
candidly:

As
green sap to the simmer trees
Is red gold to the Ogilvies.

For
many centuries there had never been a decent lord in Glengyle Castle; and with the
Victorian era one would have thought that all eccentricities were exhausted.
The last Glengyle, however, satisfied his tribal tradition by doing the only
thing that was left for him to do; he disappeared. I do not mean that he went
abroad; by all accounts he was still in the castle, if he was anywhere. But
though his name was in the church register and the big red Peerage, nobody ever
saw him under the sun.

If
anyone saw him it was a solitary man-servant, something between a groom and a
gardener. He was so deaf that the more business-like assumed him to be dumb;
while the more penetrating declared him to be half-witted. A gaunt, red-haired
labourer, with a dogged jaw and chin, but quite blank blue eyes, he went by the
name of Israel Gow, and was the one silent servant on that deserted estate. But
the energy with which he dug potatoes, and the regularity with which he
disappeared into the kitchen gave people an impression that he was providing
for the meals of a superior, and that the strange earl was still concealed in
the castle. If society needed any further proof that he was there, the servant
persistently asserted that he was not at home. One morning the provost and the
minister (for the Glengyles were Presbyterian) were summoned to the castle.
There they found that the gardener, groom and cook had added to his many
professions that of an undertaker, and had nailed up his noble master in a
coffin. With how much or how little further inquiry this odd fact was passed,
did not as yet very plainly appear; for the thing had never been legally
investigated till Flambeau had gone north two or three days before. By then the
body of Lord Glengyle (if it was the body) had lain for some time in the little
churchyard on the hill.

As
Father Brown passed through the dim garden and came under the shadow of the chateau,
the clouds were thick and the whole air damp and thundery. Against the last
stripe of the green-gold sunset he saw a black human silhouette; a man in a
chimney-pot hat, with a big spade over his shoulder. The combination was queerly
suggestive of a sexton; but when Brown remembered the deaf servant who dug
potatoes, he thought it natural enough. He knew something of the Scotch peasant;
he knew the respectability which might well feel it necessary to wear “blacks”
for an official inquiry; he knew also the economy that would not lose an hour’s
digging for that. Even the man’s start and suspicious stare as the priest went
by were consonant enough with the vigilance and jealousy of such a type.

The
great door was opened by Flambeau himself, who had with him a lean man with iron-grey
hair and papers in his hand: Inspector Craven from Scotland Yard. The entrance
hall was mostly stripped and empty; but the pale, sneering faces of one or two
of the wicked Ogilvies looked down out of black periwigs and blackening canvas.

Following
them into an inner room, Father Brown found that the allies had been seated at a
long oak table, of which their end was covered with scribbled papers, flanked with
whisky and cigars. Through the whole of its remaining length it was occupied by
detached objects arranged at intervals; objects about as inexplicable as any
objects could be. One looked like a small heap of glittering broken glass.
Another looked like a high heap of brown dust. A third appeared to be a plain
stick of wood.

“
You
seem to have a sort of geological museum here,” he said, as he sat down, jerking
his head briefly in the direction of the brown dust and the crystalline fragments.

“
Not
a geological museum,” replied Flambeau; “say a psychological museum.”

“
Oh,
for the Lord’s sake,” cried the police detective laughing, “don’t let’s begin with
such long words.”

“
Don’t
you know what psychology means?” asked Flambeau with friendly surprise. “Psychology
means being off your chump.”

“
Still
I hardly follow,” replied the official.

“
Well,”
said Flambeau, with decision, “I mean that we’ve only found out one thing about
Lord Glengyle. He was a maniac.”

The
black silhouette of Gow with his top hat and spade passed the window, dimly outlined
against the darkening sky. Father Brown stared passively at it and answered:

“
I
can understand there must have been something odd about the man, or he wouldn’t
have buried himself alive — nor been in such a hurry to bury himself dead. But
what makes you think it was lunacy?”

“
Well,”
said Flambeau, “you just listen to the list of things Mr. Craven has found in the
house.”

“
We
must get a candle,” said Craven, suddenly. “A storm is getting up, and it’s too
dark to read.”

“
Have
you found any candles,” asked Brown smiling, “among your oddities?”

Flambeau
raised a grave face, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend.

“
That
is curious, too,” he said. “Twenty-five candles, and not a trace of a candlestick.”

In
the rapidly darkening room and rapidly rising wind, Brown went along the table to
where a bundle of wax candles lay among the other scrappy exhibits. As he did
so he bent accidentally over the heap of red-brown dust; and a sharp sneeze cracked
the silence.

“
Hullo!”
he said, “snuff!”

He
took one of the candles, lit it carefully, came back and stuck it in the neck of
the whisky bottle. The unrestful night air, blowing through the crazy window,
waved the long flame like a banner. And on every side of the castle they could
hear the miles and miles of black pine wood seething like a black sea around a
rock.

“
I
will read the inventory,” began Craven gravely, picking up one of the papers, “the
inventory of what we found loose and unexplained in the castle. You are to understand
that the place generally was dismantled and neglected; but one or two rooms had
plainly been inhabited in a simple but not squalid style by somebody; somebody
who was not the servant Gow. The list is as follows:

“
First
item. A very considerable hoard of precious stones, nearly all diamonds, and all
of them loose, without any setting whatever. Of course, it is natural that the
Ogilvies should have family jewels; but those are exactly the jewels that are
almost always set in particular articles of ornament. The Ogilvies would seem
to have kept theirs loose in their pockets, like coppers.

“
Second
item. Heaps and heaps of loose snuff, not kept in a horn, or even a pouch, but lying
in heaps on the mantelpieces, on the sideboard, on the piano, anywhere. It
looks as if the old gentleman would not take the trouble to look in a pocket or
lift a lid.

“
Third
item. Here and there about the house curious little heaps of minute pieces of metal,
some like steel springs and some in the form of microscopic wheels. As if they
had gutted some mechanical toy.

“
Fourth
item. The wax candles, which have to be stuck in bottle necks because there is nothing
else to stick them in. Now I wish you to note how very much queerer all this is
than anything we anticipated. For the central riddle we are prepared; we have
all seen at a glance that there was something wrong about the last earl. We
have come here to find out whether he really lived here, whether he really died
here, whether that red-haired scarecrow who did his burying had anything to do
with his dying. But suppose the worst in all this, the most lurid or
melodramatic solution you like. Suppose the servant really killed the master, or
suppose the master isn’t really dead, or suppose the master is dressed up as
the servant, or suppose the servant is buried for the master; invent what
Wilkie Collins’ tragedy you like, and you still have not explained a candle
without a candlestick, or why an elderly gentleman of good family should
habitually spill snuff on the piano. The core of the tale we could imagine; it
is the fringes that are mysterious. By no stretch of fancy can the human mind
connect together snuff and diamonds and wax and loose clockwork.”

“
I
think I see the connection,” said the priest. “This Glengyle was mad against the
French Revolution. He was an enthusiast for the ancien regime, and was trying
to re-enact literally the family life of the last Bourbons. He had snuff because
it was the eighteenth century luxury; wax candles, because they were the
eighteenth century lighting; the mechanical bits of iron represent the locksmith
hobby of Louis XVI; the diamonds are for the Diamond Necklace of Marie
Antoinette.”

Both
the other men were staring at him with round eyes. “What a perfectly extraordinary
notion!” cried Flambeau. “Do you really think that is the truth?”

“
I
am perfectly sure it isn’t,” answered Father Brown, “only you said that nobody could
connect snuff and diamonds and clockwork and candles. I give you that connection
off-hand. The real truth, I am very sure, lies deeper.”

He
paused a moment and listened to the wailing of the wind in the turrets. Then he
said, “The late Earl of Glengyle was a thief. He lived a second and darker life
as a desperate housebreaker. He did not have any candlesticks because he only used
these candles cut short in the little lantern he carried. The snuff he employed
as the fiercest French criminals have used pepper: to fling it suddenly in
dense masses in the face of a captor or pursuer. But the final proof is in the
curious coincidence of the diamonds and the small steel wheels. Surely that
makes everything plain to you? Diamonds and small steel wheels are the only two
instruments with which you can cut out a pane of glass.”

The
bough of a broken pine tree lashed heavily in the blast against the windowpane behind
them, as if in parody of a burglar, but they did not turn round. Their eyes
were fastened on Father Brown.

“
Diamonds
and small wheels,” repeated Craven ruminating. “Is that all that makes you think
it the true explanation?”

“
I
don’t think it the true explanation,” replied the priest placidly; “but you said
that nobody could connect the four things. The true tale, of course, is something
much more humdrum. Glengyle had found, or thought he had found, precious stones
on his estate. Somebody had bamboozled him with those loose brilliants, saying
they were found in the castle caverns. The little wheels are some
diamond-cutting affair. He had to do the thing very roughly and in a small way,
with the help of a few shepherds or rude fellows on these hills. Snuff is the
one great luxury of such Scotch shepherds; it’s the one thing with which you
can bribe them. They didn’t have candlesticks because they didn’t want them;
they held the candles in their hands when they explored the caves.”

“
Is
that all?” asked Flambeau after a long pause. “Have we got to the dull truth at
last?”

“
Oh,
no,” said Father Brown.

As
the wind died in the most distant pine woods with a long hoot as of mockery Father
Brown, with an utterly impassive face, went on:

“
I
only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly connect snuff with
clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false philosophies will fit the universe;
ten false theories will fit Glengyle Castle. But we want the real explanation
of the castle and the universe. But are there no other exhibits?”

Craven
laughed, and Flambeau rose smiling to his feet and strolled down the long table.

“
Items
five, six, seven, etc.,” he said, “and certainly more varied than instructive. A
curious collection, not of lead pencils, but of the lead out of lead pencils. A
senseless stick of bamboo, with the top rather splintered. It might be the instrument
of the crime. Only, there isn’t any crime. The only other things are a few old
missals and little Catholic pictures, which the Ogilvies kept, I suppose, from
the Middle Ages — their family pride being stronger than their Puritanism. We
only put them in the museum because they seem curiously cut about and defaced.”