The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (19 page)

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
halls 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!”