The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (17 page)

“
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.”