The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (37 page)

“
I
shall only detain you a moment,” said Mr Butler, who was a rustic-looking
person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial slumber. “Will you tell
his lordship how you knew it was a man?”

A
faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour’s features. “I’m afraid it is the
vulgar test of trousers,” he said. “When I saw daylight between the long legs I
was sure it was a man, after all.”

Butler’s
sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. “After all!” he repeated
slowly. “So you did think at first it was a woman?”

Seymour
looked troubled for the first time. “It is hardly a point of fact,” he said, “but
if his lordship would like me to answer for my impression, of course I shall do
so. There was something about the thing that was not exactly a woman and yet
was not quite a man; somehow the curves were different. And it had something
that looked like long hair.”

“
Thank
you,” said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had got what he wanted.

Captain
Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir Wilson, but his account
of the opening incidents was solidly the same. He described the return of Bruno
to his dressing-room, the dispatching of himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley,
his return to the upper end of the passage, the thing he saw in the passage,
his suspicion of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could give little
artistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen. Asked
about its outline, he said he was no art critic — with a somewhat too obvious
sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said it looked more like
a beast — with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner. But the man was plainly
shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, and Cowdray quickly excused him from
confirming facts that were already fairly clear.

The
defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination; although (as was
his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a long time about it. “You
used a rather remarkable expression,” he said, looking at Cutler sleepily. “What
do you mean by saying that it looked more like a beast than a man or a woman?”

Cutler
seemed seriously agitated. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said that,” he said; “but
when the brute has huge humped shoulders like a chimpanzee, and bristles sticking
out of its head like a pig —”

Mr
Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. “Never mind whether its hair
was like a pig’s,” he said, “was it like a woman’s?”

“
A
woman’s!” cried the soldier. “Great Scott, no!”

“
The
last witness said it was,” commented the counsel, with unscrupulous swiftness. “And
did the figure have any of those serpentine and semi-feminine curves to which
eloquent allusion has been made? No? No feminine curves? The figure, if I understand
you, was rather heavy and square than otherwise?”

“
He
may have been bending forward,” said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather faint voice.

“
Or
again, he may not,” said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the second time.

The
third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic clergyman, so
little, compared with the others, that his head seemed hardly to come above the
box, so that it was like cross-examining a child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had
somehow got it into his head (mostly by some ramifications of his family’s
religion) that Father Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the
prisoner was wicked and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father
Brown up sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and
told him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry.
When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the man in
the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want his theories.

“
A
black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black shape. Well,
what shape was it?”

Father
Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal nature of obedience.
“The shape,” he said, “was short and thick, but had two sharp, black projections
curved upwards on each side of the head or top, rather like horns, and —”

“
Oh!
the devil with horns, no doubt,” ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down in triumphant
jocularity. “It was the devil come to eat Protestants.”

“
No,”
said the priest dispassionately; “I know who it was.”

Those
in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of some monstrosity.
They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought only of the figure in the
passage. And the figure in the passage, described by three capable and
respectable men who had all seen it, was a shifting nightmare: one called it a
woman, and the other a beast, and the other a devil . . .

The
judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes. “You are a most
extraordinary witness,” he said; “but there is something about you that makes me
think you are trying to tell the truth. Well, who was the man you saw in the passage?”

“
He
was myself,” said Father Brown.

Butler,
K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said quite calmly: “Your
lordship will allow me to cross-examine?” And then, without stopping, he shot
at Brown the apparently disconnected question: “You have heard about this dagger;
you know the experts say the crime was committed with a short blade?”

“
A
short blade,” assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, “but a very long hilt.”

Before
the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had really seen himself
doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt (which seemed somehow to make
it more horrible), he had himself hurried on to explain.

“
I
mean daggers aren’t the only things with short blades. Spears have short blades.
And spears catch at the end of the steel just like daggers, if they’re that
sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like the spear poor old Parkinson
killed his wife with, just when she’d sent for me to settle their family
troubles — and I came just too late, God forgive me! But he died penitent — he
just died of being penitent. He couldn’t bear what he’d done.”

The
general impression in court was that the little priest, who was gobbling away, had
literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still looked at him with bright
and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel for the defence went on with his
questions unperturbed.

“
If
Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear,” said Butler, “he must have thrust from
four yards away. How do you account for signs of struggle, like the dress dragged
off the shoulder?” He had slipped into treating his mere witness as an expert;
but no one noticed it now.

“
The
poor lady’s dress was torn,” said the witness, “because it was caught in a
panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free herself, and as she
did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner’s room and lunged with the spear.”

“
A
panel?” repeated the barrister in a curious voice.

“
It
was a looking-glass on the other side,” explained Father Brown. “When I was in the
dressing-room I noticed that some of them could probably be slid out into the
passage.”

There
was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the judge who spoke.
“So you really mean that when you looked down that passage, the man you saw was
yourself — in a mirror?”

“
Yes,
my lord; that was what I was trying to say,” said Brown, “but they asked me for
the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and so I —”

The
judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said in specially distinct
tones: “Do you really mean to say that when Sir Wilson Seymour saw that wild
what-you-call-him with curves and a woman’s hair and a man’s trousers, what he
saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?”

“
Yes,
my lord,” said Father Brown.

“
And
you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with humped shoulders
and hog’s bristles, he simply saw himself?”

“
Yes,
my lord.”

The
judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was hard to separate
the cynicism and the admiration. “And can you tell us why,” he asked, “you
should know your own figure in a looking-glass, when two such distinguished men
don’t?”

Father
Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered: “Really, my lord,
I don’t know unless it’s because I don’t look at it so often.”

FLAMBEAU
and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens about sunset; and their
neighbourhood or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to matters
of legal process. From the problem of the licence in cross-examination, their
talk strayed to Roman and mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in
France and the Third Degree in America.

“
I’ve
been reading,” said Flambeau, “of this new psychometric method they talk about so
much, especially in America. You know what I mean; they put a pulsometer on a
man’s wrist and judge by how his heart goes at the pronunciation of certain words.
What do you think of it?”

“
I
think it very interesting,” replied Father Brown; “it reminds me of that interesting
idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a corpse if the murderer
touched it.”

“
Do
you really mean,” demanded his friend, “that you think the two methods equally valuable?”

“
I
think them equally valueless,” replied Brown. “Blood flows, fast or slow, in dead
folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we can ever know. Blood
will have to flow very funnily; blood will have to flow up the Matterhorn,
before I will take it as a sign that I am to shed it.”

“
The
method,” remarked the other, “has been guaranteed by some of the greatest American
men of science.”

“
What
sentimentalists men of science are!” exclaimed Father Brown, “and how much more
sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a Yankee would think of proving
anything from heart-throbs? Why, they must be as sentimental as a man who
thinks a woman is in love with him if she blushes. That’s a test from the circulation
of the blood, discovered by the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too.”

“
But
surely,” insisted Flambeau, “it might point pretty straight at something or other.”

“
There’s
a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the other. “What is it? Why,
the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether
you get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing done once and I’ve
never believed in it since.” And he proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment.

It
happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his
co-religionists in a prison in Chicago — where the Irish population displayed a
capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him tolerably busy. The
official second-in-command under the Governor was an ex-detective named
Greywood Usher, a cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee philosopher, occasionally
varying a very rigid visage with an odd apologetic grimace. He liked Father
Brown in a slightly patronizing way; and Father Brown liked him, though he
heartily disliked his theories. His theories were extremely complicated and
were held with extreme simplicity.

One
evening he had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom, took a seat in
silence at a table piled and littered with papers, and waited. The official selected
from the papers a scrap of newspaper cutting, which he handed across to the
cleric, who read it gravely. It appeared to be an extract from one of the
pinkest of American Society papers, and ran as follows:

“
Society’s
brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive citizens
will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his
palatial home at Pilgrim’s Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes to
look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and
large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick’s show the year previous, the
popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round were
sarcastically moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which
more than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his
partner. The witticism which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr Todd’s
pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city’s
gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the simple manners and
customs at the other end of Society’s scale. This would be all the more
telling, as hospitable Todd is entertaining in Lord Falconroy, the famous traveller,
a true-blooded aristocrat fresh from England’s oak-groves. Lord Falconroy’s
travels began before his ancient feudal title was resurrected, he was in the
Republic in his youth, and fashion murmurs a sly reason for his return. Miss
Etta Todd is one of our deep-souled New Yorkers, and comes into an income of
nearly twelve hundred million dollars.”

“
Well,”
asked Usher, “does that interest you?”

“
Why,
words rather fail me,” answered Father Brown. “I cannot think at this moment of
anything in this world that would interest me less. And, unless the just anger of
the Republic is at last going to electrocute journalists for writing like that,
I don’t quite see why it should interest you either.”

“
Ah!”
said Mr Usher dryly, and handing across another scrap of newspaper. “Well, does
that interest you?”

The
paragraph was headed “Savage Murder of a Warder. Convict Escapes,” and ran: “Just
before dawn this morning a shout for help was heard in the Convict Settlement
at Sequah in this State. The authorities, hurrying in the direction of the cry,
found the corpse of the warder who patrols the top of the north wall of the
prison, the steepest and most difficult exit, for which one man has always been
found sufficient. The unfortunate officer had, however, been hurled from the
high wall, his brains beaten out as with a club, and his gun was missing.
Further inquiries showed that one of the cells was empty; it had been occupied
by a rather sullen ruffian giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only temporarily
detained for some comparatively trivial assault; but he gave everyone the
impression of a man with a black past and a dangerous future. Finally, when
daylight had fully revealed the scene of murder, it was found that he had
written on the wall above the body a fragmentary sentence, apparently with a
finger dipped in blood: ‘This was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no
harm to him or any man but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim’s Pond —
O.R.’ A man must have used most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing
bodily daring to have stormed such a wall in spite of an armed man.”

“
Well,
the literary style is somewhat improved,” admitted the priest cheerfully, “but still
I don’t see what I can do for you. I should cut a poor figure, with my short
legs, running about this State after an athletic assassin of that sort. I doubt
whether anybody could find him. The convict settlement at Sequah is thirty
miles from here; the country between is wild and tangled enough, and the country
beyond, where he will surely have the sense to go, is a perfect no-man’s land
tumbling away to the prairies. He may be in any hole or up any tree.”

“
He
isn’t in any hole,” said the governor; “he isn’t up any tree.”

“
Why,
how do you know?” asked Father Brown, blinking.

“
Would
you like to speak to him?” inquired Usher.

Father
Brown opened his innocent eyes wide. “He is here?” he exclaimed. “Why, how did your
men get hold of him?”

“
I
got hold of him myself,” drawled the American, rising and lazily stretching his
lanky legs before the fire. “I got hold of him with the crooked end of a walking-stick.
Don’t look so surprised. I really did. You know I sometimes take a turn in the
country lanes outside this dismal place; well, I was walking early this evening
up a steep lane with dark hedges and grey-looking ploughed fields on both
sides; and a young moon was up and silvering the road. By the light of it I saw
a man running across the field towards the road; running with his body bent and
at a good mile-race trot. He appeared to be much exhausted; but when he came to
the thick black hedge he went through it as if it were made of spiders’ webs; —
or rather (for I heard the strong branches breaking and snapping like bayonets)
as if he himself were made of stone. In the instant in which he appeared up
against the moon, crossing the road, I slung my hooked cane at his legs,
tripping him and bringing him down. Then I blew my whistle long and loud, and our
fellows came running up to secure him.”

“
It
would have been rather awkward,” remarked Brown, “if you had found he was a popular
athlete practising a mile race.”

“
He
was not,” said Usher grimly. “We soon found out who he was; but I had guessed it
with the first glint of the moon on him.”

“
You
thought it was the runaway convict,” observed the priest simply, “because you had
read in the newspaper cutting that morning that a convict had run away.”

“
I
had somewhat better grounds,” replied the governor coolly. “I pass over the first
as too simple to be emphasized — I mean that fashionable athletes do not run
across ploughed fields or scratch their eyes out in bramble hedges. Nor do they
run all doubled up like a crouching dog. There were more decisive details to a
fairly well-trained eye. The man was clad in coarse and ragged clothes, but
they were something more than merely coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting
as to be quite grotesque; even as he appeared in black outline against the
moonrise, the coat-collar in which his head was buried made him look like a
hunchback, and the long loose sleeves looked as if he had no hands. It at once
occurred to me that he had somehow managed to change his convict clothes for
some confederate’s clothes which did not fit him. Second, there was a pretty
stiff wind against which he was running; so that I must have seen the streaky
look of blowing hair, if the hair had not been very short. Then I remembered
that beyond these ploughed fields he was crossing lay Pilgrim’s Pond, for which
(you will remember) the convict was keeping his bullet; and I sent my
walking-stick flying.”

“
A
brilliant piece of rapid deduction,” said Father Brown; “but had he got a gun?”

As
Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically: “I’ve been told
a bullet is not half so useful without it.”

“
He
had no gun,” said the other gravely; “but that was doubtless due to some very natural
mischance or change of plans. Probably the same policy that made him change the
clothes made him drop the gun; he began to repent the coat he had left behind
him in the blood of his victim.”

“
Well,
that is possible enough,” answered the priest.

“
And
it’s hardly worth speculating on,” said Usher, turning to some other papers, “for
we know it’s the man by this time.”

His
clerical friend asked faintly: “But how?” And Greywood Usher threw down the newspapers
and took up the two press-cuttings again.

“
Well,
since you are so obstinate,” he said, “let’s begin at the beginning. You will notice
that these two cuttings have only one thing in common, which is the mention of
Pilgrim’s Pond, the estate, as you know, of the millionaire Ireton Todd. You
also know that he is a remarkable character; one of those that rose on
stepping-stones —”

“
Of
our dead selves to higher things,” assented his companion. “Yes; I know that. Petroleum,
I think.”

“
Anyhow,”
said Usher, “Last-Trick Todd counts for a great deal in this rum affair.”

He
stretched himself once more before the fire and continued talking in his expansive,
radiantly explanatory style.

“
To
begin with, on the face of it, there is no mystery here at all. It is not mysterious,
it is not even odd, that a jailbird should take his gun to Pilgrim’s Pond. Our
people aren’t like the English, who will forgive a man for being rich if he
throws away money on hospitals or horses. Last-Trick Todd has made himself big
by his own considerable abilities; and there’s no doubt that many of those on
whom he has shown his abilities would like to show theirs on him with a
shot-gun. Todd might easily get dropped by some man he’d never even heard of;
some labourer he’d locked out, or some clerk in a business he’d busted.
Last-Trick is a man of mental endowments and a high public character; but in
this country the relations of employers and employed are considerably strained.

“
That’s
how the whole thing looks supposing this Rian made for Pilgrim’s Pond to kill Todd.
So it looked to me, till another little discovery woke up what I have of the
detective in me. When I had my prisoner safe, I picked up my cane again and strolled
down the two or three turns of country road that brought me to one of the side
entrances of Todd’s grounds, the one nearest to the pool or lake after which
the place is named. It was some two hours ago, about seven by this time; the
moonlight was more luminous, and I could see the long white streaks of it lying
on the mysterious mere with its grey, greasy, half-liquid shores in which they
say our fathers used to make witches walk until they sank. I’d forgotten the
exact tale; but you know the place I mean; it lies north of Todd’s house towards
the wilderness, and has two queer wrinkled trees, so dismal that they look more
like huge fungoids than decent foliage. As I stood peering at this misty pool,
I fancied I saw the faint figure of a man moving from the house towards it, but
it was all too dim and distant for one to be certain of the fact, and still
less of the details. Besides, my attention was very sharply arrested by
something much closer. I crouched behind the fence which ran not more than two
hundred yards from one wing of the great mansion, and which was fortunately
split in places, as if specially for the application of a cautious eye. A door
had opened in the dark bulk of the left wing, and a figure appeared black
against the illuminated interior — a muffled figure bending forward, evidently
peering out into the night. It closed the door behind it, and I saw it was
carrying a lantern, which threw a patch of imperfect light on the dress and
figure of the wearer. It seemed to be the figure of a woman, wrapped up in a
ragged cloak and evidently disguised to avoid notice; there was something very
strange both about the rags and the furtiveness in a person coming out of those
rooms lined with gold. She took cautiously the curved garden path which brought
her within half a hundred yards of me — then she stood up for an instant on the
terrace of turf that looks towards the slimy lake, and holding her flaming
lantern above her head she deliberately swung it three times to and fro as for
a signal. As she swung it the second time a flicker of its light fell for a
moment on her own face, a face that I knew. She was unnaturally pale, and her
head was bundled in her borrowed plebeian shawl; but I am certain it was Etta
Todd, the millionaire’s daughter.