The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (67 page)

‘
It
was the Colonel’s will that did that,’ observed Father Brown. ‘The young man had
staked everything on profiting himself by Donald’s disgrace, especially when
his uncle sent for him on the same day as the lawyer, and welcomed him with so
much warmth. Otherwise he was done; he’d lost his police job; he was beggared
at Monte Carlo. And he killed himself when he found he’d killed his kinsman for
nothing.’

‘
Here,
stop a minute!’ cried the staring Fiennes. ‘You’re going too fast for me.’

‘
Talking
about the will, by the way,’ continued Father Brown calmly, ‘before I forget it,
or we go on to bigger things, there was a simple explanation, I think, of all
that business about the doctor’s name. I rather fancy I have heard both names
before somewhere. The doctor is really a French nobleman with the title of the
Marquis de Villon. But he is also an ardent Republican and has abandoned his
title and fallen back on the forgotten family surname. With your Citizen Riquetti
you have puzzled Europe for ten days.’

‘
What
is that?’ asked the young man blankly.

‘
Never
mind,’ said the priest. ‘Nine times out of ten it is a rascally thing to change
one’s name; but this was a piece of fine fanaticism. That’s the point of his sarcasm
about Americans having no names — that is, no titles. Now in England the
Marquis of Hartington is never called Mr Hartington; but in France the Marquis
de Villon is called M. de Villon. So it might well look like a change of name.
As for the talk about killing, I fancy that also was a point of French etiquette.
The doctor was talking about challenging Floyd to a duel, and the girl was
trying to dissuade him.’

‘
Oh,
I see,’ cried Fiennes slowly. ‘Now I understand what she meant.’

‘
And
what is that about?’ asked his companion, smiling.

‘
Well,’
said the young man, ‘it was something that happened to me just before I found that
poor fellow’s body; only the catastrophe drove it out of my head. I suppose
it’s hard to remember a little romantic idyll when you’ve just come on top of a
tragedy. But as I went down the lanes leading to the Colonel’s old place I met
his daughter walking with Dr Valentine. She was in mourning, of course, and he
always wore black as if he were going to a funeral; but I can’t say that their
faces were very funereal. Never have I seen two people looking in their own way
more respectably radiant and cheerful. They stopped and saluted me, and then
she told me they were married and living in a little house on the outskirts of
the town, where the doctor was continuing his practice. This rather surprised
me, because I knew that her old father’s will had left her his property; and I
hinted at it delicately by saying I was going along to her father’s old place
and had half expected to meet her there. But she only laughed and said: ‘Oh,
we’ve given up all that. My husband doesn’t like heiresses.’ And I discovered
with some astonishment they really had insisted on restoring the property to
poor Donald; so I hope he’s had a healthy shock and will treat it sensibly.
There was never much really the matter with him; he was very young and his
father was not very wise. But it was in connexion with that that she said
something I didn’t understand at the time; but now I’m sure it must be as you
say. She said with a sort of sudden and splendid arrogance that was entirely
altruistic:

‘‘
I
hope it’ll stop that red-haired fool from fussing any more about the will. Does
he think my husband, who has given up a crest and a coronet as old as the Crusades
for his principles, would kill an old man in a summer-house for a legacy like
that?’ Then she laughed again and said, ‘My husband isn’t killing anybody
except in the way of business. Why, he didn’t even ask his friends to call on
the secretary.’ Now, of course, I see what she meant.’

‘
I
see part of what she meant, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘What did she mean exactly
by the secretary fussing about the will?’

Fiennes
smiled as he answered, ‘I wish you knew the secretary, Father Brown. It would be
a joy to you to watch him make things hum, as he calls it. He made the house of
mourning hum. He filled the funeral with all the snap and zip of the brightest
sporting event. There was no holding him, after something had really happened.
I’ve told you how he used to oversee the gardener as he did the garden, and how
he instructed the lawyer in the law. Needless to say, he also instructed the
surgeon in the practice of surgery; and as the surgeon was Dr Valentine, you
may be sure it ended in accusing him of something worse than bad surgery. The
secretary got it fixed in his red head that the doctor had committed the crime,
and when the police arrived he was perfectly sublime. Need I say that he became,
on the spot, the greatest of all amateur detectives? Sherlock Holmes never
towered over Scotland Yard with more Titanic intellectual pride and scorn than
Colonel Druce’s private secretary over the police investigating Colonel Druce’s
death. I tell you it was a joy to see him. He strode about with an abstracted
air, tossing his scarlet crest of hair and giving curt impatient replies. Of
course it was his demeanour during these days that made Druce’s daughter so
wild with him. Of course he had a theory. It’s just the sort of theory a man
would have in a book; and Floyd is the sort of man who ought to be in a book.
He’d be better fun and less bother in a book.’

‘
What
was his theory?’ asked the other.

‘
Oh,
it was full of pep,’ replied Fiennes gloomily. ‘It would have been glorious copy
if it could have held together for ten minutes longer. He said the Colonel was
still alive when they found him in the summer-house, and the doctor killed him
with the surgical instrument on pretence of cutting the clothes.’

‘
I
see,’ said the priest. ‘I suppose he was lying flat on his face on the mud floor
as a form of siesta.’

‘
It’s
wonderful what hustle will do,’ continued his informant. ‘I believe Floyd would
have got his great theory into the papers at any rate, and perhaps had the doctor
attested, when all these things were blown sky high as if by dynamite by the
discovery of that dead body lying under the Rock of Fortune. And that’s what we
come back to after all. I suppose the suicide is almost a confession. But nobody
will ever know the whole story.’

There
was a silence, and then the priest said modestly: ‘I rather think I know the whole
story.’

Fiennes
stared. ‘But look here,’ he cried; ‘how do you come to know the whole story, or
to be sure it’s the true story? You’ve been sitting here a hundred miles away writing
a sermon; do you mean to tell me you really know what happened already? If
you’ve really come to the end, where in the world do you begin? What started you
off with your own story?’

Father
Brown jumped up with a very unusual excitement and his first exclamation was like
an explosion.

‘
The
dog!’ he cried. ‘The dog, of course! You had the whole story in your hands in the
business of the dog on the beach, if you’d only noticed the dog properly.’

Fiennes
stared still more. ‘But you told me before that my feelings about the dog were all
nonsense, and the dog had nothing to do with it.’

‘
The
dog had everything to do with it,’ said Father Brown, ‘as you’d have found out if
you’d only treated the dog as a dog, and not as God Almighty judging the souls
of men.’

He
paused in an embarrassed way for a moment, and then said, with a rather pathetic
air of apology: ‘The truth is, I happen to be awfully fond of dogs. And it
seemed to me that in all this lurid halo of dog superstitions nobody was really
thinking about the poor dog at all. To begin with a small point, about his
barking at the lawyer or growling at the secretary. You asked how I could guess
things a hundred miles away; but honestly it’s mostly to your credit, for you
described people so well that I know the types. A man like Traill, who frowns
usually and smiles suddenly, a man who fiddles with things, especially at his
throat, is a nervous, easily embarrassed man. I shouldn’t wonder if Floyd, the
efficient secretary, is nervy and jumpy, too; those Yankee hustlers often are.
Otherwise he wouldn’t have cut his fingers on the shears and dropped them when
he heard Janet Druce scream.

‘
Now
dogs hate nervous people. I don’t know whether they make the dog nervous, too; or
whether, being after all a brute, he is a bit of a bully; or whether his canine
vanity (which is colossal) is simply offended at not being liked. But anyhow
there was nothing in poor Nox protesting against those people, except that he
disliked them for being afraid of him. Now I know you’re awfully clever, and
nobody of sense sneers at cleverness. But I sometimes fancy, for instance, that
you are too clever to understand animals. Sometimes you are too clever to
understand men, especially when they act almost as simply as animals. Animals
are very literal; they live in a world of truisms. Take this case: a dog barks
at a man and a man runs away from a dog. Now you do not seem to be quite simple
enough to see the fact: that the dog barked because he disliked the man and the
man fled because he was frightened of the dog. They had no other motives and
they needed none; but you must read psychological mysteries into it and suppose
the dog had super-normal vision, and was a mysterious mouthpiece of doom. You
must suppose the man was running away, not from the dog but from the hangman.
And yet, if you come to think if it, all this deeper psychology is exceedingly
improbable. If the dog really could completely and consciously realize the
murderer of his master he wouldn’t stand yapping as he might at a curate at a
tea-party; he’s much more likely to fly at his throat. And on the other hand,
do you really think a man who had hardened his heart to murder an old friend
and then walk about smiling at the old friend’s family, under the eyes of his
old friend’s daughter and post-mortem doctor — do you think a man like that
would be doubled up by mere remorse because a dog barked? He might feel the
tragic irony of it; it might shake his soul, like any other tragic trifle. But
he wouldn’t rush madly the length of a garden to escape from the only witness
whom he knew to be unable to talk. People have a panic like that when they are
frightened, not of tragic ironies, but of teeth. The whole thing is simpler
than you can understand.

‘
But
when we come to that business by the seashore, things are much more interesting.
As you stated them, they were much more puzzling. I didn’t understand that tale
of the dog going in and out of the water; it didn’t seem to me a doggy thing to
do. If Nox had been very much upset about something else, he might possibly
have refused to go after the stick at all. He’d probably go off nosing in
whatever direction he suspected the mischief. But when once a dog is actually
chasing a thing, a stone or a stick or a rabbit, my experience is that he won’t
stop for anything but the most peremptory command, and not always for that.
That he should turn round because his mood changed seems to me unthinkable.’

‘
But
he did turn round,’ insisted Fiennes; ‘and came back without the stick.’

‘
He
came back without the stick for the best reason in the world,’ replied the priest.
‘He came back because he couldn’t find it. He whined because be couldn’t find
it. That’s the sort of thing a dog really does whine about. A dog is a devil of
a ritualist. He is as particular about the precise routine of a game as a child
about the precise repetition of a fairy-tale. In this case something had gone
wrong with the game. He came back to complain seriously of the conduct of the
stick. Never had such a thing happened before. Never had an eminent and
distinguished dog been so treated by a rotten old walking-stick.’

‘
Why,
what had the walking-stick done?’ inquired the young man.

‘
It
had sunk,’ said Father Brown.

Fiennes
said nothing, but continued to stare; and it was the priest who continued: ‘It had
sunk because it was not really a stick, but a rod of steel with a very thin shell
of cane and a sharp point. In other words, it was a sword stick. I suppose a
murderer never gets rid of a bloody weapon so oddly and yet so naturally as by
throwing it into the sea for a retriever.’

‘
I
begin to see what you mean,’ admitted Fiennes, ‘but even if a sword-stick was used,
I have no guess of how it was used.’

‘
I
had a sort of guess,’ said Father Brown, ‘right at the beginning when you said the
word summer-house. And another when you said that Druce wore a white coat. As
long as everybody was looking for a short dagger, nobody thought of it; but if
we admit a rather long blade like a rapier, it’s not so impossible.’

He
was leaning back, looking at the ceiling, and began like one going back to his own
first thoughts and fundamentals.

‘
All
that discussion about detective stories like the Yellow Room, about a man found
dead in sealed chambers which no one could enter, does not apply to the present
case, because it is a summer-house. When we talk of a Yellow Room, or any room,
we imply walls that are really homogeneous and impenetrable. But a summer-house
is not made like that; it is often made, as it was in this case, of closely interlaced
but separate boughs and strips of wood, in which there are chinks here and
there. There was one of them just behind Druce’s back as he sat in his chair up
against the wall. But just as the room was a summer-house, so the chair was a
basket-chair. That also was a lattice of loopholes. Lastly, the summer-house
was close up under the hedge; and you have just told me that it was really a
thin hedge. A man standing outside it could easily see, amid a network of twigs
and branches and canes, one white spot of the Colonel’s coat as plain as the
white of a target.