The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (72 page)

‘
I
ran forward, and it seemed as if the ghostly footsteps ran also, but not with that
exact imitation which marks the material reverberation of a sound. I stopped
again, and the steps stopped also; but I could have sworn they stopped an
instant too late; I called out a question; and my cry was answered; but the voice
was not my own.

‘
It
came round the corner of a rock just in front of me; and throughout that uncanny
chase I noticed that it was always at some such angle of the crooked path that
it paused and spoke. The little space in front of me that could be illuminated
by my small electric torch was always as empty as an empty room. Under these
conditions I had a conversation with I know not whom, which lasted all the way
to the first white gleam of daylight, and even there I could not see in what
fashion he vanished into the light of day. But the mouth of the labyrinth was
full of many openings and cracks and chasms, and it would not have been
difficult for him to have somehow darted back and disappeared again into the
underworld of the caves. I only know that I came out on the lonely steps of a
great mountain like a marble terrace, varied only with a green vegetation that
seemed somehow more tropical than the purity of the rock, like the Oriental
invasion that has spread sporadically over the fall of classic Hellas. I looked
out on a sea of stainless blue, and the sun shone steadily on utter loneliness
and silence; and there was not a blade of grass stirred with a whisper of
flight nor the shadow of a shadow of man.

‘
It
had been a terrible conversation; so intimate and so individual and in a sense so
casual. This being, bodiless, faceless, nameless and yet calling me by my name,
had talked to me in those crypts and cracks where we were buried alive with no
more passion or melodrama than if we had been sitting in two armchairs at a
club. But he had told me also that he would unquestionably kill me or any other
man who came into the possession of the cross with the mark of the fish. He
told me frankly he was not fool enough to attack me there in the labyrinth, knowing
I had a loaded revolver, and that he ran as much risk as I. But he told me,
equally calmly, that he would plan my murder with the certainty of success, with
every detail developed and every danger warded off, with the sort of artistic
perfection that a Chinese craftsman or an Indian embroiderer gives to the
artistic work of a life-time. Yet he was no Oriental; I am certain he was a white
man. I suspect that he was a countryman of my own.

‘
Since
then I have received from time to time signs and symbols and queer impersonal messages
that have made me certain, at least, that if the man is a maniac he is a
monomaniac. He is always telling me, in this airy and detached way, that the preparations
for my death and burial are proceeding satisfactorily; and that the only way in
which I can prevent their being crowned with a comfortable success is to give
up the relic in my possession — the unique cross that I found in the cavern. He
does not seem to have any religious sentiment or fanaticism on the point; he
seems to have no passion but the passion of a collector of curiosities. That is
one of the things that makes me feel sure he is a man of the West and not of
the East. But this particular curiosity seems to have driven him quite crazy.

‘
And
then came this report, as yet unsubstantiated, about the duplicate relic found on
an embalmed body in a Sussex tomb. If he had been a maniac before, this news turned
him into a demoniac possessed of seven devils. That there should be one of them
belonging to another man was bad enough, but that there should be two of them
and neither belonging to him was a torture not to be borne. His mad messages
began to come thick and fast like showers of poisoned arrows, and each cried
out more confidently than the last that death would strike me at the moment
when I stretched out my unworthy hand towards the cross in the tomb.

‘‘
You
will never know me,’ he wrote, ‘you will never say my name; you will never see my
face; you will die, and never know who has killed you. I may be in any form among
those about you; but I shall be in that alone at which you have forgotten to
look.’

‘
From
those threats I deduce that he is quite likely to shadow me on this expedition;
and try to steal the relic or do me some mischief for possessing it. But as I never
saw the man in my life, he may be almost any man I meet. Logically speaking, he
may be any of the waiters who wait on me at table. He may be any of the
passengers who sit with me at table.’

‘
He
may be me,’ said Father Brown, with cheerful contempt for grammar.

‘
He
may be anybody else,’ answered Smaill seriously. ‘That is what I meant by what I
said just now. You are the only man I feel sure is not the enemy.’

Father
Brown again looked embarrassed; then he smiled and said: ‘Well, oddly enough, I’m
not. What we have to consider is any chance of finding out if he really is here
before he — before he makes himself unpleasant.’

‘
There
is one chance of finding out, I think,’ remarked the Professor rather grimly. ‘When
we get to Southampton I shall take a car at once along the coast; I should be
glad if you would come with me, but in the ordinary sense, of course, our
little party will break up. If any one of them turns up again in that little
churchyard on the Sussex coast, we shall know who he really is.’

The
Professor’s programme was duly carried out, at least to the extent of the car and
its cargo in the form of Father Brown. They coasted along the road with the sea
on one side and the hills of Hampshire and Sussex on the other; nor was there
visible to the eye any shadow of pursuit. As they approached the village of
Dulham only one man crossed their path who had any connexion with the matter in
hand; a journalist who had just visited the church and been courteously
escorted by the vicar through the new excavated chapel; but his remarks and
notes seemed to be of the ordinary newspaper sort. But Professor Smaill was
perhaps a little fanciful, and could not dismiss the sense of something odd and
discouraging in the attitude and appearance of the man, who was tall and
shabby, hook-nosed and hollow-eyed, with moustaches that drooped with
depression. He seemed anything but enlivened by his late experiment as a
sightseer; indeed, he seemed to be striding as fast as possible from the sight,
when they stopped him with a question.

‘
It’s
all about a curse,’ he said; ‘a curse on the place, according to the guide-book
or the parson, or the oldest inhabitant or whoever is the authority; and really,
it feels jolly like it. Curse or curse, I’m glad to have got out of it.’

‘
Do
you believe in curses?’ asked Smaill curiously.

‘
I
don’t believe in anything; I’m a journalist,’ answered the melancholy being — ‘Boon,
of the Daily Wire. But there’s a something creepy about that crypt; and I’ll
never deny I felt a chill.’ And he strode on towards the railway station with a
further accelerated pace.

‘
Looks
like a raven or a crow, that fellow,’ observed Smaill as they turned towards the
churchyard. ‘What is it they say about a bird of ill omen?’

They
entered the churchyard slowly, the eyes of the American antiquary lingering luxuriantly
over the isolated roof of the lynch-gate and the large unfathomable black
growth of the yew looking like night itself defying the broad daylight. The
path climbed up amid heaving levels of turf in which the gravestones were tilted
at all angles like stone rafts tossed on a green sea, till it came to the ridge
beyond which the great sea itself ran like an iron bar, with pale lights in it
like steel. Almost at their feet the tough rank grass turned into a tuft of
sea-holly and ended in grey and yellow sand; and a foot or two from the holly,
and outlined darkly against the steely sea, stood a motionless figure. But for
its dark-grey clothing it might almost have been the statue on some sepulchral
monument. But Father Brown instantly recognized something in the elegant stoop
of the shoulders and the rather sullen outward thrust of the short beard.

‘
Gee!’
exclaimed the professor of archaeology; ‘it’s that man Tarrant, if you call him
a man. Did you think, when I spoke on the boat, that I should ever get so quick
an answer to my question?’

‘
I
thought you might get too many answers to it,’ answered Father Brown.

‘
Why,
how do you mean?’ inquired the Professor, darting a look at him over his shoulder.

‘
I
mean,’ answered the other mildly, ‘that I thought I heard voices behind the yew-tree.
I don’t think Mr Tarrant is so solitary as he looks; I might even venture to
say, so solitary as he likes to look.’

Even
as Tarrant turned slowly round in his moody manner, the confirmation came. Another
voice, high and rather hard, but none the less feminine, was saying with
experienced raillery: ‘And how was I to know he would be here?’ It was borne in
upon Professor Smaill that this gay observation was not addressed to him; so he
was forced to conclude in some bewilderment, that yet a third person was
present. As Lady Diana Wales came out, radiant and resolute as ever, from the
shadow of the yew, he noted grimly that she had a living shadow of her own. The
lean dapper figure of Leonard Smyth, that insinuating man of letters, appeared
immediately behind her own flamboyant form, smiling, his head a little on one
side like a dog’s.

‘
Snakes!’
muttered Smaill; ‘why, they’re all here! Or all except that little showman with
the walrus whiskers.’

He
heard Father Brown laughing softly beside him; and indeed the situation was becoming
something more than laughable. It seemed to be turning topsy-turvy and tumbling
about their ears like a pantomime trick; for even while the Professor had been
speaking, his words had received the most comical contradiction. The round head
with the grotesque black crescent of moustache had appeared suddenly and
seemingly out of a hole in the ground. An instant afterwards they realized that
the hole was in fact a very large hole, leading to a ladder which descended
into the bowels of the earth; that it was in fact the entrance to the subterranean
scene they had come to visit. The little man had been the first to find the
entrance and had already descended a rung or two of the ladder before he put
his head out again to address his fellow-travellers. He looked like some particularly
preposterous Grave-digger in a burlesque of Hamlet. He only said thickly behind
his thick moustaches, ‘It is down here.’ But it came to the rest of the company
with a start of realization that, though they had sat opposite him at
meal-times for a week, they had hardly ever heard him speak before; and that
though he was supposed to be an English lecturer, he spoke with a rather occult
foreign accent.

‘
You
see, my dear Professor,’ cried Lady Diana with trenchant cheerfulness, ‘your Byzantine
mummy was simply too exciting to be missed. I simply had to come along and see
it; and I’m sure the gentlemen felt just the same. Now you must tell us all
about it.’

‘
I
do not know all about it,’ said the Professor gravely, not to say grimly, ‘In some
respects I don’t even know what it’s all about. It certainly seems odd that we
should have all met again so soon, but I suppose there are no limits to the
modern thirst for information. But if we are all to visit the place it must be
done in a responsible way and, if you will forgive me, under responsible leadership.
We must notify whoever is in charge of the excavations; we shall probably at
least have to put our names in a book.’

Something
rather like a wrangle followed on this collision between the impatience of the lady
and the suspicions of the archaeologist; but the latter’s insistence on the
official rights of the Vicar and the local investigation ultimately prevailed;
the little man with the moustaches came reluctantly out of his grave again and
silently acquiesced in a less impetuous descent. Fortunately, the clergyman
himself appeared at this stage — a grey-haired, good-looking gentleman with a
droop accentuated by doublet eyeglasses; and while rapidly establishing
sympathetic relations with the Professor as a fellow-antiquarian, he did not
seem to regard his rather motley group of companions with anything more hostile
than amusement.

‘
I
hope you are none of you superstitious,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I ought to tell you,
to start with, that there are supposed to be all sorts of bad omens and curses
hanging over our devoted heads in this business. I have just been deciphering a
Latin inscription which was found over the entrance to the chapel; and it would
seem that there are no less than three curses involved; a curse for entering
the sealed chamber, a double curse for opening the coffin, and a triple and
most terrible curse for touching the gold relic found inside it. The two first
maledictions I have already incurred myself,’ he added with a smile; ‘but I
fear that even you will have to incur the first and mildest of them if you are
to see anything at all. According to the story, the curses descend in a rather
lingering fashion, at long intervals and on later occasions. I don’t know
whether that is any comfort to you.’ And the Reverend Mr Walters smiled once
more in his drooping and benevolent manner.

‘
Story,’
repeated Professor Smaill, ‘why, what story is that?’

‘
It
is rather a long story and varies, like other local legends,’ answered the Vicar.
‘But it is undoubtedly contemporary with the time of the tomb; and the substance
of it is embodied in the inscription and is roughly this: Guy de Gisors, a lord
of the manor here early in the thirteenth century, had set his heart on a
beautiful black horse in the possession of an envoy from Genoa, which that
practical merchant prince would not sell except for a huge price. Guy was
driven by avarice to the crime of pillaging the shrine and, according to one
story, even killing the bishop, who was then resident there. Anyhow, the bishop
uttered a curse which was to fall on anybody who should continue to withhold
the gold cross from its resting-place in his tomb, or should take steps to
disturb it when it had returned there. The feudal lord raised the money for the
horse by selling the gold relic to a goldsmith in the town; but on the first
day he mounted the horse the animal reared and threw him in front of the church
porch, breaking his neck. Meanwhile the goldsmith, hitherto wealthy and
prosperous, was ruined by a series of inexplicable accidents, and fell into the
power of a Jew money-lender living in the manor. Eventually the unfortunate
goldsmith, faced with nothing but starvation, hanged himself on an apple-tree.
The gold cross with all his other goods, his house, shop, and tools, had long
ago passed into the possession of the money-lender. Meanwhile, the son and heir
of the feudal lord, shocked by the judgement on his blasphemous sire, had
become a religious devotee in the dark and stern spirit of those times, and
conceived it his duty to persecute all heresy and unbelief among his vassals.
Thus the Jew, in his turn, who had been cynically tolerated by the father, was
ruthlessly burnt by order of the son; so that he, in his turn, suffered for the
possession of the relic; and after these three judgements, it was returned to
the bishop’s tomb; since when no eye has seen and no hand has touched it.’