The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (45 page)

“
And
your father and brother,” said the priest, very gently, “died at sea, I fear.”

“
Yes,”
groaned the Admiral; “by one of those brutal accidents on which are built all the
lying mythologies of mankind, they were both shipwrecked. My father, coming up
this coast out of the Atlantic, was washed up on these Cornish rocks. My
brother’s ship was sunk, no one knows where, on the voyage home from Tasmania.
His body was never found. I tell you it was from perfectly natural mishap; lots
of other people besides Pendragons were drowned; and both disasters are
discussed in a normal way by navigators. But, of course, it set this forest of
superstition on fire; and men saw the flaming tower everywhere. That’s why I
say it will be all right when Walter returns. The girl he’s engaged to was
coming today; but I was so afraid of some chance delay frightening her that I
wired her not to come till she heard from me. But he’s practically sure to be
here some time tonight, and then it’ll all end in smoke — tobacco smoke. We’ll
crack that old lie when we crack a bottle of this wine.”

“
Very
good wine,” said Father Brown, gravely lifting his glass, “but, as you see, a very
bad wine-bibber. I most sincerely beg your pardon”: for he had spilt a small
spot of wine on the table-cloth. He drank and put down the glass with a composed
face; but his hand had started at the exact moment when he became conscious of
a face looking in through the garden window just behind the Admiral — the face
of a woman, swarthy, with southern hair and eyes, and young, but like a mask of
tragedy.

After
a pause the priest spoke again in his mild manner. “Admiral,” he said, “will you
do me a favour? Let me, and my friends if they like, stop in that tower of yours
just for tonight? Do you know that in my business you’re an exorcist almost
before anything else?”

Pendragon
sprang to his feet and paced swiftly to and fro across the window, from which the
face had instantly vanished. “I tell you there is nothing in it,” he cried, with
ringing violence. “There is one thing I know about this matter. You may call me
an atheist. I am an atheist.” Here he swung round and fixed Father Brown with a
face of frightful concentration. “This business is perfectly natural. There is
no curse in it at all.”

Father
Brown smiled. “In that case,” he said, “there can’t be any objection to my sleeping
in your delightful summer-house.”

“
The
idea is utterly ridiculous,” replied the Admiral, beating a tattoo on the back of
his chair.

“
Please
forgive me for everything,” said Brown in his most sympathetic tone, “including
spilling the wine. But it seems to me you are not quite so easy about the flaming
tower as you try to be.”

Admiral
Pendragon sat down again as abruptly as he had risen; but he sat quite still, and
when he spoke again it was in a lower voice. “You do it at your own peril,” he
said; “but wouldn’t you be an atheist to keep sane in all this devilry?”

Some
three hours afterwards Fanshaw, Flambeau and the priest were still dawdling about
the garden in the dark; and it began to dawn on the other two that Father Brown
had no intention of going to bed either in the tower or the house.

“
I
think the lawn wants weeding,” said he dreamily. “If I could find a spud or something
I’d do it myself.”

They
followed him, laughing and half remonstrating; but he replied with the utmost solemnity,
explaining to them, in a maddening little sermon, that one can always find some
small occupation that is helpful to others. He did not find a spud; but he
found an old broom made of twigs, with which he began energetically to brush
the fallen leaves off the grass.

“
Always
some little thing to be done,” he said with idiotic cheerfulness; “as George Herbert
says: ‘Who sweeps an Admiral’s garden in Cornwall as for Thy laws makes that
and the action fine.’ And now,” he added, suddenly slinging the broom away,
“Let’s go and water the flowers.”

With
the same mixed emotions they watched him uncoil some considerable lengths of the
large garden hose, saying with an air of wistful discrimination: “The red tulips
before the yellow, I think. Look a bit dry, don’t you think?”

He
turned the little tap on the instrument, and the water shot out straight and solid
as a long rod of steel.

“
Look
out, Samson,” cried Flambeau; “why, you’ve cut off the tulip’s head.”

Father
Brown stood ruefully contemplating the decapitated plant.

“
Mine
does seem to be a rather kill or cure sort of watering,” he admitted, scratching
his head. “I suppose it’s a pity I didn’t find the spud. You should have seen
me with the spud! Talking of tools, you’ve got that swordstick, Flambeau, you
always carry? That’s right; and Sir Cecil could have that sword the Admiral
threw away by the fence here. How grey everything looks!”

“
The
mist’s rising from the river,” said the staring Flambeau.

Almost
as he spoke the huge figure of the hairy gardener appeared on a higher ridge of
the trenched and terraced lawn, hailing them with a brandished rake and a horribly
bellowing voice. “Put down that hose,” he shouted; “put down that hose and go
to your —”

“
I
am fearfully clumsy,” replied the reverend gentleman weakly; “do you know, I upset
some wine at dinner.” He made a wavering half-turn of apology towards the gardener,
with the hose still spouting in his hand. The gardener caught the cold crash of
the water full in his face like the crash of a cannon-ball; staggered, slipped
and went sprawling with his boots in the air.

“
How
very dreadful!” said Father Brown, looking round in a sort of wonder. “Why, I’ve
hit a man!”

He
stood with his head forward for a moment as if looking or listening; and then set
off at a trot towards the tower, still trailing the hose behind him. The tower
was quite close, but its outline was curiously dim.

“
Your
river mist,” he said, “has a rum smell.”

“
By
the Lord it has,” cried Fanshaw, who was very white. “But you can’t mean —”

“
I
mean,” said Father Brown, “that one of the Admiral’s scientific predictions is coming
true tonight. This story is going to end in smoke.”

As
he spoke a most beautiful rose-red light seemed to burst into blossom like a gigantic
rose; but accompanied with a crackling and rattling noise that was like the
laughter of devils.

“
My
God! what is this?” cried Sir Cecil Fanshaw.

“
The
sign of the flaming tower,” said Father Brown, and sent the driving water from his
hose into the heart of the red patch.

“
Lucky
we hadn’t gone to bed!” ejaculated Fanshaw. “I suppose it can’t spread to the house.”

“
You
may remember,” said the priest quietly, “that the wooden fence that might have carried
it was cut away.”

Flambeau
turned electrified eyes upon his friend, but Fanshaw only said rather absently:
“Well, nobody can be killed, anyhow.”

“
This
is rather a curious kind of tower,” observed Father Brown, “when it takes to killing
people, it always kills people who are somewhere else.”

At
the same instant the monstrous figure of the gardener with the streaming beard stood
again on the green ridge against the sky, waving others to come on; but now
waving not a rake but a cutlass. Behind him came the two negroes, also with the
old crooked cutlasses out of the trophy. But in the blood-red glare, with their
black faces and yellow figures, they looked like devils carrying instruments of
torture. In the dim garden behind them a distant voice was heard calling out
brief directions. When the priest heard the voice, a terrible change came over
his countenance.

But
he remained composed; and never took his eye off the patch of flame which had begun
by spreading, but now seemed to shrink a little as it hissed under the torch of
the long silver spear of water. He kept his finger along the nozzle of the pipe
to ensure the aim, and attended to no other business, knowing only by the noise
and that semi-conscious corner of the eye, the exciting incidents that began to
tumble themselves about the island garden. He gave two brief directions to his
friends. One was: “Knock these fellows down somehow and tie them up, whoever
they are; there’s rope down by those faggots. They want to take away my nice
hose.” The other was: “As soon as you get a chance, call out to that canoeing
girl; she’s over on the bank with the gipsies. Ask her if they could get some
buckets across and fill them from the river.” Then he closed his mouth and
continued to water the new red flower as ruthlessly as he had watered the red
tulip.

He
never turned his head to look at the strange fight that followed between the foes
and friends of the mysterious fire. He almost felt the island shake when Flambeau
collided with the huge gardener; he merely imagined how it would whirl round
them as they wrestled. He heard the crashing fall; and his friend’s gasp of
triumph as he dashed on to the first negro; and the cries of both the blacks as
Flambeau and Fanshaw bound them. Flambeau’s enormous strength more than redressed
the odds in the fight, especially as the fourth man still hovered near the
house, only a shadow and a voice. He heard also the water broken by the paddles
of a canoe; the girl’s voice giving orders, the voices of gipsies answering and
coming nearer, the plumping and sucking noise of empty buckets plunged into a
full stream; and finally the sound of many feet around the fire. But all this
was less to him than the fact that the red rent, which had lately once more
increased, had once more slightly diminished.

Then
came a cry that very nearly made him turn his head. Flambeau and Fanshaw, now reinforced
by some of the gipsies, had rushed after the mysterious man by the house; and
he heard from the other end of the garden the Frenchman’s cry of horror and
astonishment. It was echoed by a howl not to be called human, as the being
broke from their hold and ran along the garden. Three times at least it raced
round the whole island, in a way that was as horrible as the chase of a lunatic,
both in the cries of the pursued and the ropes carried by the pursuers; but was
more horrible still, because it somehow suggested one of the chasing games of
children in a garden. Then, finding them closing in on every side, the figure
sprang upon one of the higher river banks and disappeared with a splash into
the dark and driving river.

“
You
can do no more, I fear,” said Brown in a voice cold with pain. “He has been washed
down to the rocks by now, where he has sent so many others. He knew the use of
a family legend.”

“
Oh,
don’t talk in these parables,” cried Flambeau impatiently. “Can’t you put it simply
in words of one syllable?”

“
Yes,”
answered Brown, with his eye on the hose. “‘Both eyes bright, she’s all right; one
eye blinks, down she sinks.’”

The
fire hissed and shrieked more and more, like a strangled thing, as it grew narrower
and narrower under the flood from the pipe and buckets, but Father Brown still
kept his eye on it as he went on speaking:

“
I
thought of asking this young lady, if it were morning yet, to look through that
telescope at the river mouth and the river. She might have seen something to interest
her: the sign of the ship, or Mr Walter Pendragon coming home, and perhaps even
the sign of the half-man, for though he is certainly safe by now, he may very
well have waded ashore. He has been within a shave of another shipwreck; and
would never have escaped it, if the lady hadn’t had the sense to suspect the
old Admiral’s telegram and come down to watch him. Don’t let’s talk about the
old Admiral. Don’t let’s talk about anything. It’s enough to say that whenever
this tower, with its pitch and resin-wood, really caught fire, the spark on the
horizon always looked like the twin light to the coast light-house.”

“
And
that,” said Flambeau, “is how the father and brother died. The wicked uncle of the
legends very nearly got his estate after all.”

Father
Brown did not answer; indeed, he did not speak again, save for civilities, till
they were all safe round a cigar-box in the cabin of the yacht. He saw that the
frustrated fire was extinguished; and then refused to linger, though he actually
heard young Pendragon, escorted by an enthusiastic crowd, come tramping up the
river bank; and might (had he been moved by romantic curiosities) have received
the combined thanks of the man from the ship and the girl from the canoe. But
his fatigue had fallen on him once more, and he only started once, when
Flambeau abruptly told him he had dropped cigar-ash on his trousers.

“
That’s
no cigar-ash,” he said rather wearily. “That’s from the fire, but you don’t think
so because you’re all smoking cigars. That’s just the way I got my first faint
suspicion about the chart.”

“
Do
you mean Pendragon’s chart of his Pacific Islands?” asked Fanshaw.

“
You
thought it was a chart of the Pacific Islands,” answered Brown. “Put a feather with
a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it’s a specimen. Put the
same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it’s
for a lady’s hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack
of writing-paper, and most men will swear they’ve seen a quill pen. So you saw
that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific
Islands. It was the map of this river.”