The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (16 page)

“
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.

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.