The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (76 page)

‘
All
evil has one origin,’ said the priest gravely. ‘But how do you know they were not
normal murders?’

Aylmer
answered with a gesture which offered his guest a chair; then he seated himself
slowly in another, frowning, with his hands on his knees; but when he looked up
his expression had grown milder and more thoughtful, and his voice was quite cordial
and composed.

‘
Sir,’
he said, ‘I don’t want you to imagine that I’m in the least an unreasonable person.
I have come to these conclusions by reason, because unfortunately reason really
leads there. I have read a great deal on these subjects; for I was the only one
who inherited my father’s scholarship in somewhat obscure matters, and I have
since inherited his library. But what I tell you does not rest on what I have
read but on what I have seen.’

Father
Brown nodded, and the other proceeded, as if picking his words: ‘In my elder brother’s
case I was not certain at first. There were no marks or footprints where he was
found shot, and the pistol was left beside him. But he had just received a
threatening letter certainly from our enemy, for it was marked with a sign like
a winged dagger, which was one of his infernal cabalistic tricks. And a servant
said she had seen something moving along the garden wall in the twilight that
was much too large to be a cat. I leave it there; all I can say is that if the
murderer came, he managed to leave no traces of his coming. But when my brother
Stephen died it was different; and since then I have known. A machine was
working in an open scaffolding under the factory tower; I scaled the platform a
moment after he had fallen under the iron hammer that struck him; I did not see
anything else strike him, but I saw what I saw.

‘
A
great drift of factory smoke was rolling between me and the factory tower; but through
a rift of it I saw on the top of it a dark human figure wrapped in what looked
like a black cloak. Then the sulphurous smoke drove between us again; and when
it cleared I looked up at the distant chimney — there was nobody there. I am a
rational man, and I will ask all rational men how he had reached that dizzy
unapproachable turret, and how he left it.’

He
stared across at the priest with a sphinx-like challenge; then after a silence he
said abruptly: ‘My brother’s brains were knocked out, but his body was not much
damaged. And in his pocket we found one of those warning messages dated the day
before and stamped with the flying dagger.

‘
I
am sure,’ he went on gravely, ‘that the symbol of the winged dagger is not merely
arbitrary or accidental. Nothing about that abominable man is accidental. He is
all design; though it is indeed a most dark and intricate design. His mind is
woven not only out of elaborate schemes but out of all sorts of secret
languages and signs, and dumb signals and wordless pictures which are the names
of nameless things. He is the worst sort of man that the world knows: he is the
wicked mystic. Now, I don’t pretend to penetrate all that is conveyed by this
symbol; but it seems surely that it must have a relation to all that was most
remarkable, or even incredible, in his movements as he had hovered round my
unfortunate family. Is there no connexion between the idea of a winged weapon
and the mystery by which Philip was struck dead on his own lawn without the
lightest touch of any footprint having disturbed the dust or grass? Is there no
connexion between the plumed poignard flying like a feathered arrow and that
figure which hung on the far top of the toppling chimney, clad in a cloak for
pinions?’

‘
You
mean,’ said Father Brown thoughtfully, ‘that he is in a perpetual state of levitation.’

‘
Simon
Magus did it,’ replied Aylmer, ‘and it was one of the commonest predictions of the
Dark Ages that Antichrist would be able to fly. Anyhow, there was the flying
dagger on the document; and whether or no it could fly, it could certainly
strike.’

‘
Did
you notice what sort of paper it was on?’ asked Father Brown. ’Common paper?’

The
sphinx-like face broke abruptly into a harsh laugh.

‘
You
can see what they’re like,’ said Aylmer grimly, ‘for I got one myself this morning.’

He
was leaning back in his chair now, with his long legs thrust out from under the
green dressing-gown, which was a little short for him, and his bearded chin pillowed
on his chest. Without moving otherwise, he thrust his hand deep in the dressing-gown
pocket and held out a fluttering scrap of paper at the end of a rigid arm. His
whole attitude was suggestive of a sort of paralysis, that was both rigidity
and collapse. But the next remark of the priest had a curious effect of rousing
him.

Father
Brown was blinking in his short-sighted way at the paper presented to him. It was
a singular sort of paper, rough without being common, as from an artist’s sketch-book;
and on it was drawn boldly in red ink a dagger decorated with wings like the
rod of Hermes, with the written words, ‘Death comes the day after this, as it
came to your brothers.’

Father
Brown tossed the paper on the floor and sat bolt upright in his chair.

‘
You
mustn’t let that sort of stuff stupefy you,’ he said sharply. ‘These devils always
try to make us helpless by making us hopeless.’

Rather
to his surprise, an awakening wave went over the prostrate figure, which sprang
from its chair as if startled out of a dream.

‘
You’re
right, you’re right!’ cried Aylmer with a rather uncanny animation; ‘and the devils
shall find that I’m not so hopeless after all, nor so helpless either. Perhaps
I have more hope and better help than you fancy.’

He
stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the priest, who had a momentary
doubt, during that strained silence, about whether the man’s long peril had not
touched his brain. But when he spoke it was quite soberly.

‘
I
believe my unfortunate brothers failed because they used the wrong weapons. Philip
carried a revolver, and that was how his death came to be called suicide.
Stephen had police protection, but he also had a sense of what made him
ridiculous; and he could not allow a policeman to climb up a ladder after him
to a scaffolding where he stood only a moment. They were both scoffers, reacting
into scepticism from the strange mysticism of my father’s last days. But I
always knew there was more in my father than they understood. It is true that
by studying magic he fell at last under the blight of black magic; the black
magic of this scoundrel Strake. But my brothers were wrong about the antidote.
The antidote to black magic is not brute materialism or worldly wisdom. The
antidote to black magic is white magic.’

‘
It
rather depends,’ said Father Brown, ‘what you mean by white magic.’

‘
I
mean silver magic,’ said the other, in a low voice, like one speaking of a secret
revelation. Then after a silence he said: ‘Do you know what I mean by silver
magic? Excuse me a moment.’

He
turned and opened the central door with the red glass and went into a passage beyond
it. The house had less depth than Brown had supposed; instead of the door
opening into interior rooms, the corridor it revealed ended in another door on
the garden. The door of one room was on one side of the passage; doubtless, the
priest told himself, the proprietor’s bedroom whence he had rushed out in his
dressing-gown. There was nothing else on that side but an ordinary hat-stand
with the ordinary dingy cluster of old hats and overcoats; but on the other
side was something more interesting: a very dark old oak sideboard laid out
with some old silver, and overhung by a trophy or ornament of old weapons. It
was by that that Arnold Aylmer halted, looking up at a long antiquated pistol
with a bell-shaped mouth.

The
door at the end of the passage was barely open, and through the crack came a streak
of white daylight. The priest had very quick instincts about natural things,
and something in the unusual brilliancy of that white line told him what had
happened outside. It was indeed what he had prophesied when he was approaching
the house. He ran past his rather startled host and opened the door, to face
something that was at once a blank and a blaze. What he had seen shining
through the crack was not only the most negative whiteness of daylight but the
positive whiteness of snow. All round, the sweeping fall of the country was
covered with that shining pallor that seems at once hoary and innocent.

‘
Here
is white magic anyhow,’ said Father Brown in his cheerful voice. Then, as he turned
back into the hall, he murmured, ‘And silver magic too, I suppose,’ for the
white lustre touched the silver with splendour and lit up the old steel here
and there in the darkling armoury. The shaggy head of the brooding Aylmer seemed
to have a halo of silver fire, as he turned with his face in shadow and the
outlandish pistol in his hand.

‘
Do
you know why I chose this sort of old blunderbuss?’ he asked. ‘Because I can load
it with this sort of bullet.’

He
had picked up a small apostle spoon from the sideboard and by sheer violence broke
off the small figure at the top. ‘Let us go back into the other room,’ he added.

‘
Did
you ever read about the death of Dundee?’ he asked when they had reseated themselves.
He had recovered from his momentary annoyance at the priest’s restlessness.
‘Graham of Claverhouse, you know, who persecuted the Covenanters and had a
black horse that could ride straight up a precipice. Don’t you know he could
only be shot with a silver bullet, because he had sold himself to the Devil?
That’s one comfort about you; at least you know enough to believe in the Devil.’

‘
Oh,
yes,’ replied Father Brown, ‘I believe in the Devil. What I don’t believe in is
the Dundee. I mean the Dundee of Covenanting legends, with his nightmare of a horse.
John Graham was simply a seventeenth-century professional soldier, rather better
than most. If he dragooned them it was because he was a dragoon, but not a
dragon. Now my experience is that it’s not that sort of swaggering blade who
sells himself to the Devil. The devil-worshippers I’ve known were quite
different. Not to mention names, which might cause a social flutter, I’ll take
a man in Dundee’s own day. Have you ever heard of Dalrymple of Stair?’

‘
No,’
replied the other gruffly.

‘
You’ve
heard of what he did,’ said Father Brown, ‘and it was worse than anything Dundee
ever did; yet he escapes the infamy by oblivion. He was the man who made the
Massacre of Glencoe. He was a very learned man and lucid lawyer, a statesman
with very serious and enlarged ideas of statesmanship, a quiet man with a very
refined and intellectual face. That’s the sort of man who sells himself to the
Devil.’

Aylmer
half started from his chair with an enthusiasm of eager assent.

‘
By
God! you are right,’ he cried. ‘A refined intellectual face! That is the face of
John Strake.’

Then
he raised himself and stood looking at the priest with a curious concentration.
‘If you will wait here a little while,’ he said, ‘I will show you something.’

He
went back through the central door, closing it after him; going, the priest presumed,
to the old sideboard or possibly to his bedroom. Father Brown remained seated,
gazing abstractedly at the carpet, where a faint red glimmer shone from the
glass in the doorway. Once it seemed to brighten like a ruby and then darkened
again, as if the sun of that stormy day had passed from cloud to cloud. Nothing
moved except the aquatic creatures which floated to and fro in the dim green
bowl. Father Brown was thinking hard.

A
minute or two afterwards he got up and slipped quietly to the alcove of the telephone,
where he rang up his friend Dr Boyne, at the official headquarters. ‘I wanted
to tell you about Aylmer and his affairs,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s a queer
story, but I rather think there’s something in it. If I were you I’d send some
men up here straight away; four or five men, I think, and surround the house.
If anything does happen there’ll probably be something startling in the way of
an escape.’

Then
he went back and sat down again, staring at the dark carpet, which again glowed
blood-red with the light from the glass door. Something in the filtered light set
his mind drifting on certain borderlands of thought, with the first white daybreak
before the coming of colour, and all that mystery which is alternately veiled
and revealed in the symbol of windows and of doors.

An
inhuman howl in a human voice came from beyond the closed doors, almost simultaneously
with the noise of firing. Before the echoes of the shot had died away the door
was violently flung open and his host staggered into the room, the
dressing-gown half torn from his shoulder and the long pistol smoking in his
hand. He seemed to be shaking in every limb, yet he was shaken in part with an
unnatural laughter.

‘
Glory
be to the White Magic!’ he cried. ‘Glory be to the silver bullet! The hell-hound
had hunted once too often, and my brothers are avenged at last.’

He
sank into a chair and the pistol slid from his hand and fell on the floor. Father
Brown darted past him, slipped through the glass door and went down the passage.
As he did so he put his hand on the handle of the bedroom door, as if half
intending to enter; then he stooped a moment, as if examining something — and
then he ran to the outer door and opened it.