The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (44 page)

Flambeau,
who like all Frenchmen had been a soldier, bent over it and said in a startled voice:
“Why, it’s a sabre! I believe I know the sort, heavy and curved, but shorter
than the cavalry; they used to have them in artillery and the —”

As
he spoke the blade plucked itself out of the crack it had made and came down again
with a more ponderous slash, splitting the fissiparous fence to the bottom with
a rending noise. Then it was pulled out again, flashed above the fence some
feet further along, and again split it halfway down with the first stroke; and
after waggling a little to extricate itself (accompanied with curses in the
darkness) split it down to the ground with a second. Then a kick of devilish
energy sent the whole loosened square of thin wood flying into the pathway, and
a great gap of dark coppice gaped in the paling.

Fanshaw
peered into the dark opening and uttered an exclamation of astonishment. “My dear
Admiral!” he exclaimed, “do you — er — do you generally cut out a new front
door whenever you want to go for a walk?”

The
voice in the gloom swore again, and then broke into a jolly laugh. “No,” it said;
“I’ve really got to cut down this fence somehow; it’s spoiling all the plants,
and no one else here can do it. But I’ll only carve another bit off the front
door, and then come out and welcome you.”

And
sure enough, he heaved up his weapon once more, and, hacking twice, brought down
another and similar strip of fence, making the opening about fourteen feet wide
in all. Then through this larger forest gateway he came out into the evening
light, with a chip of grey wood sticking to his sword-blade.

He
momentarily fulfilled all Fanshaw’s fable of an old piratical Admiral; though the
details seemed afterwards to decompose into accidents. For instance, he wore a
broad-brimmed hat as protection against the sun; but the front flap of it was
turned up straight to the sky, and the two corners pulled down lower than the
ears, so that it stood across his forehead in a crescent like the old cocked
hat worn by Nelson. He wore an ordinary dark-blue jacket, with nothing special
about the buttons, but the combination of it with white linen trousers somehow
had a sailorish look. He was tall and loose, and walked with a sort of swagger,
which was not a sailor’s roll, and yet somehow suggested it; and he held in his
hand a short sabre which was like a navy cutlass, but about twice as big. Under
the bridge of the hat his eagle face looked eager, all the more because it was
not only clean-shaven, but without eyebrows. It seemed almost as if all the
hair had come off his face from his thrusting it through a throng of elements.
His eyes were prominent and piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while
partly tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while
it was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no way sickly,
but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the Hesperides — Father Brown
thought he had never seen a figure so expressive of all the romances about the
countries of the Sun.

When
Fanshaw had presented his two friends to their host he fell again into a tone of
rallying the latter about his wreckage of the fence and his apparent rage of profanity.
The Admiral pooh-poohed it at first as a piece of necessary but annoying garden
work; but at length the ring of real energy came back into his laughter, and he
cried with a mixture of impatience and good humour:

“
Well,
perhaps I do go at it a bit rabidly, and feel a kind of pleasure in smashing anything.
So would you if your only pleasure was in cruising about to find some new
Cannibal Islands, and you had to stick on this muddy little rockery in a sort
of rustic pond. When I remember how I’ve cut down a mile and a half of green
poisonous jungle with an old cutlass half as sharp as this; and then remember I
must stop here and chop this matchwood, because of some confounded old bargain
scribbled in a family Bible, why, I —”

He
swung up the heavy steel again; and this time sundered the wall of wood from top
to bottom at one stroke.

“
I
feel like that,” he said laughing, but furiously flinging the sword some yards down
the path, “and now let’s go up to the house; you must have some dinner.”

The
semicircle of lawn in front of the house was varied by three circular garden beds,
one of red tulips, a second of yellow tulips, and the third of some white,
waxen-looking blossoms that the visitors did not know and presumed to be exotic.
A heavy, hairy and rather sullen-looking gardener was hanging up a heavy coil
of garden hose. The corners of the expiring sunset which seemed to cling about
the corners of the house gave glimpses here and there of the colours of remoter
flowerbeds; and in a treeless space on one side of the house opening upon the
river stood a tall brass tripod on which was tilted a big brass telescope. Just
outside the steps of the porch stood a little painted green garden table, as if
someone had just had tea there. The entrance was flanked with two of those
half-featured lumps of stone with holes for eyes that are said to be South Sea
idols; and on the brown oak beam across the doorway were some confused carvings
that looked almost as barbaric.

As
they passed indoors, the little cleric hopped suddenly on to the table, and standing
on it peered unaffectedly through his spectacles at the mouldings in the oak.
Admiral Pendragon looked very much astonished, though not particularly annoyed;
while Fanshaw was so amused with what looked like a performing pigmy on his
little stand, that he could not control his laughter. But Father Brown was not
likely to notice either the laughter or the astonishment.

He
was gazing at three carved symbols, which, though very worn and obscure, seemed
still to convey some sense to him. The first seemed to be the outline of some tower
or other building, crowned with what looked like curly-pointed ribbons. The
second was clearer: an old Elizabethan galley with decorative waves beneath it,
but interrupted in the middle by a curious jagged rock, which was either a fault
in the wood or some conventional representation of the water coming in. The
third represented the upper half of a human figure, ending in an escalloped line
like the waves; the face was rubbed and featureless, and both arms were held
very stiffly up in the air.

“
Well,”
muttered Father Brown, blinking, “here is the legend of the Spaniard plain enough.
Here he is holding up his arms and cursing in the sea; and here are the two
curses: the wrecked ship and the burning of Pendragon Tower.”

Pendragon
shook his head with a kind of venerable amusement. “And how many other things might
it not be?” he said. “Don’t you know that that sort of half-man, like a half-lion
or half-stag, is quite common in heraldry? Might not that line through the ship
be one of those parti-per-pale lines, indented, I think they call it? And
though the third thing isn’t so very heraldic, it would be more heraldic to
suppose it a tower crowned with laurel than with fire; and it looks just as
like it.”

“
But
it seems rather odd,” said Flambeau, “that it should exactly confirm the old legend.”

“
Ah,”
replied the sceptical traveller, “but you don’t know how much of the old legend
may have been made up from the old figures. Besides, it isn’t the only old legend.
Fanshaw, here, who is fond of such things, will tell you there are other
versions of the tale, and much more horrible ones. One story credits my unfortunate
ancestor with having had the Spaniard cut in two; and that will fit the pretty
picture also. Another obligingly credits our family with the possession of a
tower full of snakes and explains those little, wriggly things in that way. And
a third theory supposes the crooked line on the ship to be a conventionalized
thunderbolt; but that alone, if seriously examined, would show what a very
little way these unhappy coincidences really go.”

“
Why,
how do you mean?” asked Fanshaw.

“
It
so happens,” replied his host coolly, “that there was no thunder and lightning at
all in the two or three shipwrecks I know of in our family.”

“
Oh!”
said Father Brown, and jumped down from the little table.

There
was another silence in which they heard the continuous murmur of the river; then
Fanshaw said, in a doubtful and perhaps disappointed tone: “Then you don’t think
there is anything in the tales of the tower in flames?”

“
There
are the tales, of course,” said the Admiral, shrugging his shoulders; “and some
of them, I don’t deny, on evidence as decent as one ever gets for such things. Someone
saw a blaze hereabout, don’t you know, as he walked home through a wood;
someone keeping sheep on the uplands inland thought he saw a flame hovering
over Pendragon Tower. Well, a damp dab of mud like this confounded island seems
the last place where one would think of fires.”

“
What
is that fire over there?” asked Father Brown with a gentle suddenness, pointing
to the woods on the left river-bank. They were all thrown a little off their balance,
and the more fanciful Fanshaw had even some difficulty in recovering his, as
they saw a long, thin stream of blue smoke ascending silently into the end of
the evening light.

Then
Pendragon broke into a scornful laugh again. “Gipsies!” he said; “they’ve been camping
about here for about a week. Gentlemen, you want your dinner,” and he turned as
if to enter the house.

But
the antiquarian superstition in Fanshaw was still quivering, and he said hastily:
“But, Admiral, what’s that hissing noise quite near the island? It’s very like
fire.”

“
It’s
more like what it is,” said the Admiral, laughing as he led the way; “it’s only
some canoe going by.”

Almost
as he spoke, the butler, a lean man in black, with very black hair and a very long,
yellow face, appeared in the doorway and told him that dinner was served.

The
dining-room was as nautical as the cabin of a ship; but its note was rather that
of the modern than the Elizabethan captain. There were, indeed, three antiquated
cutlasses in a trophy over the fireplace, and one brown sixteenth-century map
with Tritons and little ships dotted about a curly sea. But such things were
less prominent on the white panelling than some cases of quaint-coloured South
American birds, very scientifically stuffed, fantastic shells from the Pacific,
and several instruments so rude and queer in shape that savages might have used
them either to kill their enemies or to cook them. But the alien colour
culminated in the fact that, besides the butler, the Admiral’s only servants
were two negroes, somewhat quaintly clad in tight uniforms of yellow. The
priest’s instinctive trick of analysing his own impressions told him that the
colour and the little neat coat-tails of these bipeds had suggested the word
“Canary,” and so by a mere pun connected them with southward travel. Towards
the end of the dinner they took their yellow clothes and black faces out of the
room, leaving only the black clothes and yellow face of the butler.

“
I’m
rather sorry you take this so lightly,” said Fanshaw to the host; “for the truth
is, I’ve brought these friends of mine with the idea of their helping you, as
they know a good deal of these things. Don’t you really believe in the family
story at all?”

“
I
don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked
at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”

Rather
to Flambeau’s surprise, his clerical friend, who seemed to have entirely woken up,
took up the digression and talked natural history with his host with a flow of
words and much unexpected information, until the dessert and decanters were set
down and the last of the servants vanished. Then he said, without altering his
tone.

“
Please
don’t think me impertinent, Admiral Pendragon. I don’t ask for curiosity, but really
for my guidance and your convenience. Have I made a bad shot if I guess you
don’t want these old things talked of before your butler?”

The
Admiral lifted the hairless arches over his eyes and exclaimed: “Well, I don’t know
where you got it, but the truth is I can’t stand the fellow, though I’ve no
excuse for discharging a family servant. Fanshaw, with his fairy tales, would
say my blood moved against men with that black, Spanish-looking hair.”

Flambeau
struck the table with his heavy fist. “By Jove!” he cried; “and so had that girl!”

“
I
hope it’ll all end tonight,” continued the Admiral, “when my nephew comes back safe
from his ship. You looked surprised. You won’t understand, I suppose, unless I
tell you the story. You see, my father had two sons; I remained a bachelor, but
my elder brother married, and had a son who became a sailor like all the rest
of us, and will inherit the proper estate. Well, my father was a strange man;
he somehow combined Fanshaw’s superstition with a good deal of my scepticism —
they were always fighting in him; and after my first voyages, he developed a
notion which he thought somehow would settle finally whether the curse was
truth or trash. If all the Pendragons sailed about anyhow, he thought there
would be too much chance of natural catastrophes to prove anything. But if we
went to sea one at a time in strict order of succession to the property, he
thought it might show whether any connected fate followed the family as a
family. It was a silly notion, I think, and I quarrelled with my father pretty heartily;
for I was an ambitious man and was left to the last, coming, by succession,
after my own nephew.”