The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (75 page)

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown, ‘but the war came. The fish may be driven underground again,
but it will come up into the daylight once more. As St Antony of Padua humorously
remarked, ‘It is only fishes who survive the Deluge.’’

FATHER
BROWN, at one period of his life, found it difficult to hang his hat on a hat-peg
without repressing a slight shudder. The origin of this idiosyncrasy was indeed
a mere detail in much more complicated events; but it was perhaps the only
detail that remained to him in his busy life to remind him of the whole business.
Its remote origin was to be found in the facts which led Dr Boyne, the medical
officer attached to the police force, to send for the priest on a particular
frosty morning in December.

Dr
Boyne was a big dark Irishman, one of those rather baffling Irishmen to be found
all over the world, who will talk scientific scepticism, materialism, and cynicism
at length and at large, but who never dream of referring anything touching the
ritual of religion to anything except the traditional religion of their native
land. It would be hard to say whether their creed is a very superficial varnish
or a very fundamental substratum; but most probably it is both, with a mass of
materialism in between. Anyhow, when he thought that matters of that sort might
be involved, he asked Father Brown to call, though he made no pretence of
preference for that aspect of them.

‘
I’m
not sure I want you, you know,’ was his greeting. ‘I’m not sure about anything yet.
I’m hanged if I can make out whether it’s a case for a doctor, or a policeman,
or a priest.’

‘
Well,’
said Father Brown with a smile, ‘as I suppose you’re both a policeman and a doctor,
I seem to be rather in a minority.’

‘
I
admit you’re what politicians call an instructed minority,’ replied the doctor.
‘I mean, I know you’ve had to do a little in our line as well as your own. But it’s
precious hard to say whether this business is in your line or ours, or merely
in the line of the Commissioners in Lunacy. We’ve just had a message from a man
living near here, in that white house on the hill, asking for protection
against a murderous persecution. We’ve gone into the facts as far as we could,
and perhaps I’d better tell you the story as it is supposed to have happened,
from the beginning.

‘
It
seems that a man named Aylmer, who was a wealthy landowner in the West Country,
married rather late in life and had three sons, Philip, Stephen, and Arnold. But
in his bachelor days, when he thought he would have no heir, he had adopted a
boy whom he thought very brilliant and promising, who went by the name of John
Strake. His origin seems to be vague; they say he was a foundling; some say he
was a gipsy. I think the last notion is mixed up with the fact that Aylmer in
his old age dabbled in all sorts of dingy occultism, including palmistry and
astrology, and his three sons say that Strake encouraged him in it. But they
said a great many other things besides that. They said Strake was an amazing
scoundrel, and especially an amazing liar; a genius in inventing lies on the
spur of the moment, and telling them so as to deceive a detective. But that
might very well be a natural prejudice, in the light of what happened.

Perhaps
you can more or less imagine what happened. The old man left practically everything
to the adopted son; and when he died the three real sons disputed the will.
They said their father had been frightened into surrender and, not to put too
fine a point on it, into gibbering idiocy. They said Strake had the strangest
and most cunning ways of getting at him, in spite of the nurses and the family,
and terrorizing him on his death-bed. Anyhow, they seemed to have proved
something about the dead man’s mental condition, for the courts set aside the
will and the sons inherited. Strake is said to have broken out in the most
dreadful fashion, and sworn he would kill all three of them, one after another,
and that nothing could hide them from his vengeance. It is the third or last of
the brothers, Arnold Aylmer, who is asking for police protection.’

‘
Third
and last,’ said the priest, looking at him gravely.

‘
Yes,’
said Boyne. ‘The other two are dead.’ There was a silence before he continued. ‘That
is where the doubt comes in. There is no proof they were murdered, but they
might possibly have been. The eldest, who took up his position as squire, was
supposed to have committed suicide in his garden. The second, who went into trade
as a manufacturer, was knocked on the head by the machinery in his factory; he
might very well have taken a false step and fallen. But if Strake did kill
them, he is certainly very cunning in his way of getting to work and getting
away. On the other hand, it’s more than likely that the whole thing is a mania
of conspiracy founded on a coincidence. Look here, what I want is this. I want
somebody of sense, who isn’t an official, to go up and have a talk with this Mr
Arnold Aylmer and form an impression of him. You know what a man with a delusion
is like, and how a man looks when he is telling the truth. I want you to be the
advance guard, before we take the matter up.’

‘
It
seems rather odd,’ said Father Brown, ‘that you haven’t had to take it up before.
If there is anything in this business, it seems to have been going on for a
good time. Is there any particular reason why he should send for you just now,
any more than any other time?’

‘
That
had occurred to me, as you may imagine,’ answered Dr Boyne. ‘He does give a reason,
but I confess it is one of the things that make me wonder whether the whole
thing isn’t only the whim of some half-witted crank. He declared that all his
servants have suddenly gone on strike and left him, so that he is obliged to
call on the police to look after his house. And on making inquiries, I certainly
do find that there has been a general exodus of servants from that house on the
hill; and of course the town is full of tales, very one-sided tales I dare say.
Their account of it seems to be that their employer had become quite impossible
in his fidgets and fears and exactions; that he wanted them to guard the house
like sentries, or sit up like night nurses in a hospital; that they could never
be left alone because he must never be left alone. So they all announced in a
loud voice that he was a lunatic, and left. Of course that does not prove he is
a lunatic; but it seems rather rum nowadays for a man to expect his valet or
his parlour-maid to act as an armed guard.’

‘
And
so,’ said the priest with a smile, ‘he wants a policeman to act as his parlour-maid
because his parlour-maid won’t act as a policeman.’

‘
I
thought that rather thick, too,’ agreed the doctor; ‘but I can’t take the responsibility
of a flat refusal till I’ve tried a compromise. You are the compromise.’

‘
Very
well,’ said Father Brown simply. ‘I’ll go and call on him now if you like.’

The
rolling country round the little town was sealed and bound with frost, and the sky
was as clear and cold as steel, except in the north-east where clouds with lurid
haloes were beginning to climb up the sky. It was against these darker and more
sinister colours that the house on the hill gleamed with a row of pale pillars,
forming a short colonnade of the classical sort. A winding road led up to it
across the curve of the down, and plunged into a mass of dark bushes. Just
before it reached the bushes the air seemed to grow colder and colder, as if he
were approaching an ice-house or the North Pole. But he was a highly practical
person, never entertaining such fancies except as fancies. And he merely cocked
his eye at the great livid cloud crawling up over the house, and remarked
cheerfully: ‘It’s going to snow.’

Through
a low ornamental iron gateway of the Italianate pattern he entered a garden having
something of that desolation which only belongs to the disorder of orderly
things. Deep-green growths were grey with the faint powder of the frost, large
weeds — had fringed the fading pattern of the flower-beds as if in a ragged
frame; and the house stood as if waist-high in a stunted forest of shrubs and
bushes. The vegetation consisted largely of evergreens or very hardy plants;
and though it was thus thick and heavy, it was too northern to be called
luxuriant. It might be described as an Arctic jungle. So it was in some sense
with the house itself, which had a row of columns and a classical facade, which
might have looked out on the Mediterranean; but which seemed now to be withering
in the wind of the North Sea. Classical ornament here and there accentuated the
contrast; caryatides and carved masks of comedy or tragedy looked down from corners
of the building upon the grey confusion of the garden paths; but the faces
seemed to be frost-bitten. The very volutes of the capitals might have curled
up with the cold.

Father
Brown went up the grassy steps to a square porch flanked by big pillars and knocked
at the door. About four minutes afterwards he knocked again. Then he stood
still patiently waiting with his back to the door and looked out on the slowly
darkening landscape. It was darkening under the shadow of that one great continent
of cloud that had come flying out of the north; and even as he looked out beyond
the pillars of the porch, which seemed huge and black above him in the
twilight, he saw the opalescent crawling rim of the great cloud as it sailed
over the roof and bowed over the porch like a canopy. The great canopy with its
faintly coloured fringes seemed to sink lower and lower upon the garden beyond,
until what had recently been a clear and pale-hued winter sky was left in a few
silver ribbons and rags like a sickly sunset. Father Brown waited, and there
was no sound within.

Then
he betook himself briskly down the steps and round the house to look for another
entrance. He eventually found one, a side door in the flat wall, and on this
also he hammered and outside this also he waited. Then he tried the handle and
found the door apparently bolted or fastened in some fashion; and then he moved
along that side of the house, musing on the possibilities of the position, and
wondering whether the eccentric Mr Aylmer had barricaded himself too deep in
the house to hear any kind of summons; or whether perhaps he would barricade
himself all the more, on the assumption that any summons must be the challenge
of the avenging Strake. It might be that the decamping servants had only
unlocked one door when they left in the morning, and that their master had locked
that; but whatever he might have done it was unlikely that they, in the mood of
that moment, had looked so carefully to the defences. He continued his prowl
round the place: it was not really a large place, though perhaps a little pretentious;
and in a few moments he found he had made the complete circuit. A moment after
he found what he suspected and sought. The french window of one room, curtained
and shadowed with creeper, stood open by a crack, doubtless accidentally left
ajar, and he found himself in a central room, comfortably upholstered in a
rather old-fashioned way, with a staircase leading up from it on one side and a
door leading out of it on the other. Immediately opposite him was another door
with red glass let into it, a little gaudily for later tastes; something that
looked like a red-robed figure in cheap stained glass. On a round table to the
right stood a sort of aquarium — a great bowl full of greenish water, in which
fishes and similar things moved about as in a tank; and just opposite it a plant
of the palm variety with very large green leaves. All this looked so very dusty
and Early Victorian that the telephone, visible in the curtained alcove, was
almost a surprise.

‘
Who
is that?’ a voice called out sharply and rather suspiciously from behind the stained-glass
door.

‘
Could
I see Mr Aylmer?’ asked the priest apologetically.

The
door opened and a gentleman in a peacock-green dressing-gown came out with an inquiring
look. His hair was rather rough and untidy, as if he had been in bed or lived
in a state of slowly getting up, but his eyes were not only awake but alert,
and some would have said alarmed. Father Brown knew that the contradiction was
likely enough in a man who had rather run to seed under the shadow either of a
delusion or a danger. He had a fine aquiline face when seen in profile, but
when seen full face the first impression was that of the untidiness and even
the wilderness of his loose brown beard.

‘
I
am Mr Aylmer,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got out of the way of expecting visitors.’

Something
about Mr Aylmer’s unrestful eye prompted the priest to go straight to the point.
If the man’s persecution was only a monomania, he would be the less likely to
resent it.

‘
I
was wondering,’ said Father Brown softly, ‘whether it is quite true that you never
expect visitors.’

‘
You
are right,’ replied his host steadily. ‘I always expect one visitor. And he may
be the last.’

‘
I
hope not,’ said Father Brown, ‘but at least I am relieved to infer that I do not
look very like him.’

Mr
Aylmer shook himself with a sort of savage laugh. ‘You certainly do not,’ he said.

‘
Mr
Aylmer,’ said Father Brown frankly, ‘I apologize for the liberty, but some friends
of mine have told me about your trouble, and asked me to see if I could do
anything for you. The truth is, I have some little experience in affairs like
this.’

‘
There
are no affairs like this,’ said Aylmer.

‘
You
mean,’ observed Father Brown, ‘that the tragedies in your unfortunate family were
not normal deaths?’

‘
I
mean they were not even normal murders,’ answered the other. ‘The man who is hounding
us all to death is a hell-hound, and his power is from hell.’