The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (78 page)

‘
But
I am sure, as I say, that he enjoyed it as a fantasy as well as a conspiracy. He
set about the task of telling the true story the wrong way round: of treating
the dead man as living and the live man as dead. He had already got into
Aylmer’s dressing-gown; he proceeded to get into Aylmer’s body and soul. He
looked at the corpse as if it were his own corpse lying cold in the snow. Then
he spread-eagled it in that strange fashion to suggest the sweeping descent of
a bird of prey, and decked it out not only in his own dark and flying garments
but in a whole dark fairy-tale about the black bird that could only fall by the
silver bullet. I do not know whether it was the silver glittering on the
sideboard or the snow shining beyond the door that suggested to his intensely
artistic temperament the theme of white magic and the white metal used against
magicians. But whatever its origin, he made it his own like a poet; and did it
very promptly, like a practical man. He completed the exchange and reversal of
parts by flinging the corpse out on to the snow as the corpse of Strake. He did
his best to work up a creepy conception of Strake as something hovering in the
air everywhere, a harpy with wings of speed and claws of death; to explain the
absence of footprints and other things. For one piece of artistic impudence I
hugely admire him. He actually turned one of the contradictions in his case
into an argument for it; and said that the man’s cloak being too long for him
proved that he never walked on the ground like an ordinary mortal. But he
looked at me very hard while he said that; and something told me that he was at
that moment trying a very big bluff.’

Dr
Boyne looked thoughtful. ‘Had you discovered the truth by then?’ he asked. ‘There
is something very queer and close to the nerves, I think, about notions affecting
identity. I don’t know whether it would be more weird to get a guess like that
swiftly or slowly. I wonder when you suspected and when you were sure.’

‘
I
think I really suspected when I telephoned to you,’ replied his friend. ‘And it
was nothing more than the red light from the closed door brightening and darkening
on the carpet. It looked like a splash of blood that grew vivid as it cried for
vengeance. Why should it change like that? I knew the sun had not come out; it
could only be because the second door behind it had been opened and shut on the
garden. But if he had gone out and seen his enemy then, he would have raised
the alarm then; and it was some time afterwards that the fracas occurred. I
began to feel he had gone out to do something ... to prepare something ... but
as to when I was certain, that is a different matter. I knew that right at the end
he was trying to hypnotize me, to master me by the black art of eyes like
talismans and a voice like an incantation. That’s what he used to do with old
Aylmer, no doubt. But it wasn’t only the way he said it, it was what he said.
It was the religion and philosophy of it.’

‘
I’m
afraid I’m a practical man,’ said the doctor with gruff humour, ‘and I don’t bother
much about religion and philosophy.’

‘
You’ll
never be a practical man till you do,’ said Father Brown. ‘Look here, doctor; you
know me pretty well; I think you know I’m not a bigot. You know I know there
are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones.
But there’s just one little fact I’ve learned simply as a practical man, an
entirely practical point, that I’ve picked up by experience, like the tricks of
an animal or the trade-mark of a good wine. I’ve scarcely ever met a criminal
who philosophized at all, who didn’t philosophize along those lines of orientalism
and recurrence and reincarnation, and the wheel of destiny and the serpent
biting its own tail. I have found merely in practice that there is a curse on
the servants of that serpent; on their belly shall they go and the dust shall
they eat; and there was never a blackguard or a profligate born who could not
talk that sort of spirituality. It may not be like that in its real religious
origins; but here in our working world it is the religion of rascals; and I
knew it was a rascal who was speaking.’

‘
Why,’
said Boyne, ‘I should have thought that a rascal could pretty well profess any religion
he chose.’

‘
Yes,’
assented the other; ‘he could profess any religion; that is he could pretend to
any religion, if it was all a pretence. If it was mere mechanical hypocrisy and
nothing else, no doubt it could be done by a mere mechanical hypocrite. Any sort
of mask can be put on any sort of face. Anybody can learn certain phrases or
state verbally that he holds certain views. I can go out into the street and state
that I am a Wesleyan Methodist or a Sandemanian, though I fear in no very convincing
accent. But we are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist
the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him
must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of
some of the materials of his soul. I suppose he could have said he was a
Wesleyan Methodist; but he could never be an eloquent Methodist as he can be an
eloquent mystic and fatalist. I am talking of the sort of ideal such a man
thinks of if he really tries to be idealistic. It was his whole game with me to
be as idealistic as possible; and whenever that is attempted by that sort of
man, you will generally find it is that sort of ideal. That sort of man may be
dripping with gore; but he will always be able to tell you quite sincerely that
Buddhism is better than Christianity. Nay, he will tell you quite sincerely
that Buddhism is more Christian than Christianity. That alone is enough to
throw a hideous and ghastly ray of light on his notion of Christianity.’

‘
Upon
my soul,’ said the doctor, laughing, ‘I can’t make out whether you’re denouncing
or defending him.’

‘
It
isn’t defending a man to say he is a genius,’ said Father Brown. ‘Far from it. And
it is simply a psychological fact that an artist will betray himself by some
sort of sincerity. Leonardo da Vinci cannot draw as if he couldn’t draw. Even
if he tried, it will always be a strong parody of a weak thing. This man would
have made something much too fearful and wonderful out of the Wesleyan Methodist.’

When
the priest went forth again and set his face homeward, the cold had grown more intense
and yet was somehow intoxicating. The trees stood up like silver candelabra of
some incredible cold candlemas of purification. It was a piercing cold, like
that silver sword of pure pain that once pierced the very heart of purity. But
it was not a killing cold, save in the sense of seeming to kill all the mortal
obstructions to our immortal and immeasurable vitality. The pale green sky of
twilight, with one star like the star of Bethlehem, seemed by some strange
contradiction to be a cavern of clarity. It was as if there could be a green
furnace of cold which wakened all things to life like warmth, and that the
deeper they went into those cold crystalline colours the more were they light
like winged creatures and clear like coloured glass! It tingled with truth and
it divided truth from error with a blade like ice; but all that was left had
never felt so much alive. It was as if all joy were a jewel in the heart of an
iceberg. The priest hardly understood his own mood as he advanced deeper and
deeper into the green gloaming, drinking deeper and deeper draughts of that
virginal vivacity of the air. Some forgotten muddle and morbidity seemed to be
left behind, or wiped out as the snow had painted out the footprints of the man
of blood. As he shuffled homewards through the snow, he muttered to himself:
‘And yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows
where to look for it.’

Two
landscape-painters stood looking at one landscape, which was also a seascape, and
both were curiously impressed by it, though their impressions were not exactly
the same. To one of them, who was a rising artist from London, it was new as
well as strange. To the other, who was a local artist but with something more
than a local celebrity, it was better known; but perhaps all the more strange
for what he knew of it.

In
terms of tone and form, as these men saw it, it was a stretch of sands against a
stretch of sunset, the whole scene lying in strips of sombre colour, dead green
and bronze and brown and a drab that was not merely dull but in that gloaming in
some way more mysterious than gold. All that broke these level lines was a long
building which ran out from the fields into the sands of the sea, so that its
fringe of dreary weeds and rushes seemed almost to meet the seaweed. But its
most singular feature was that the upper part of it had the ragged outlines of
a ruin, pierced by so many wide windows and large rents as to be a mere dark skeleton
against the dying light; while the lower bulk of the building had hardly any
windows at all, most of them being blind and bricked up and their outlines only
faintly traceable in the twilight. But one window at least was still a window;
and it seemed strangest of all that it showed a light.

‘
Who
on earth can live in that old shell?’ exclaimed the Londoner, who was a big, bohemian-looking
man, young but with a shaggy red beard that made him look older; Chelsea knew
him familiarly as Harry Payne.

‘
Ghosts,
you might suppose,’ replied his friend Martin Wood. ‘Well, the people who live there
really are rather like ghosts.’

It
was perhaps rather a paradox that the London artist seemed almost bucolic in his
boisterous freshness and wonder, while the local artist seemed a more shrewd
and experienced person, regarding him with mature and amiable amusement; indeed,
the latter was altogether a quieter and more conventional figure, wearing
darker clothes and with his square and stolid face clean shaven.

‘
It
is only a sign of the times, of course,’ he went on,’ or of the passing of old times
and old families with them. The last of the great Darnaways live in that house,
and not many of the new poor are as poor as they are. They can’t even afford to
make their own top-storey habitable; but have to live in the lower rooms of a
ruin, like bats and owls. Yet they have family portraits that go back to the
Wars of the Roses and the first portrait-painting in England, and very fine
some of them are; I happen to know, because they asked for my professional
advice in overhauling them. There’s one of them especially, and one of the
earliest, but it’s so good that it gives you the creeps.’

‘
The
whole place gives you the creeps, I should think by the look of it,’ replied Payne.

‘
Well,’
said his friend, ‘to tell you the truth, it does.’

The
silence that followed was stirred by a faint rustle among the rushes by the moat;
and it gave them, rationally enough, a slight nervous start when a dark figure
brushed along the bank, moving rapidly and almost like a startled bird. But it
was only a man walking briskly with a black bag in his hand: a man with a long
sallow face and sharp eyes that glanced at the London stranger in a slightly
darkling and suspicious manner.

‘
It’s
only Dr Barnet,’ said Wood with a sort of relief. ’Good evening, Doctor. Are you
going up to the house? I hope nobody’s ill.’

‘
Everybody’s
always ill in a place like that,’ growled the doctor; ‘only sometimes they’re too
ill to know it. The very air of the place is a blight and a pestilence. I don’t
envy the young man from Australia.’

‘
And
who,’ asked Payne abruptly and rather absently, ‘may the young man from Australia
be?’

‘
Ah!’
snorted the doctor; ‘hasn’t your friend told you about him? As a matter of fact
I believe he is arriving today. Quite a romance in the old style of melodrama: the
heir back from the colonies to his ruined castle, all complete even down to an
old family compact for his marrying the lady watching in the ivied tower. Queer
old stuff, isn’t it? but it really happens sometimes. He’s even got a little
money, which is the only bright spot there ever was in this business.’

‘
What
does Miss Darnaway herself, in her ivied tower, think of the business?’ asked Martin
Wood dryly.

‘
What
she thinks of everything else by this time,’ replied the doctor. ‘They don’t think
in this weedy old den of superstitions, they only dream and drift. I think she
accepts the family contract and the colonial husband as part of the Doom of the
Darnaways, don’t you know. I really think that if he turned out to be a
humpbacked Negro with one eye and a homicidal mania, she would only think it added
a finishing touch and fitted in with the twilight scenery.’

‘
You’re
not giving my friend from London a very lively picture of my friends in the country,’
said Wood, laughing. ‘I had intended taking him there to call; no artist ought
to miss those Darnaway portraits if he gets the chance. But perhaps I’d better postpone
it if they’re in the middle of the Australian invasion.’

‘
Oh,
do go in and see them, for the Lord’s sake,’ said Dr Barnet warmly. ‘Anything that
will brighten their blighted lives will make my task easier. It will need a
good many colonial cousins to cheer things up, I should think; and the more the
merrier. Come, I’ll take you in myself.’

As
they drew nearer to the house it was seen to be isolated like an island in a moat
of brackish water which they crossed by a bridge. On the other side spread a
fairly wide stony floor or embankment with great cracks across it, in which little
tufts of weed and thorn sprouted here and there. This rock platform looked
large and bare in the grey twilight, and Payne could hardly have believed that
such a corner of space could have contained so much of the soul of a
wilderness. This platform only jutted out on one side, like a giant door-step
and beyond it was the door; a very low-browed Tudor archway standing open, but
dark like a cave.

When
the brisk doctor led them inside without ceremony, Payne had, as it were, another
shock of depression. He could have expected to find himself mounting to a very
ruinous tower, by very narrow winding staircases; but in this case the first
steps into the house were actually steps downwards. They went down several
short and broken stairways into large twilit rooms which but for their lines of
dark pictures and dusty bookshelves, might have been the traditional dungeons
beneath the castle moat. Here and there a candle in an old candlestick lit up
some dusty accidental detail of a dead elegance; but the visitor was not so
much impressed or depressed by this artificial light as by the one pale gleam
of natural light. As he passed down the long room he saw the only window in
that wall — a curious low oval window of a late-seventeenth-century fashion. But
the strange thing about it was that it did not look out directly on any space
of sky but only on a reflection of sky; a pale strip of daylight merely mirrored
in the moat, under the hanging shadow of the bank. Payne had a memory of the
Lady of Shallot who never saw the world outside except in a mirror. The lady of
this Shallot not only in some sense saw the world in a mirror, but even saw the
world upside-down.

‘
It’s
as if the house of Darnaway were falling literally as well as metaphorically,’ said
Wood in a low voice; ‘as if it were sinking slowly into a swamp or a quicksand,
until the sea goes over it like a green roof.’

Even
the sturdy Dr Barnet started a little at the silent approach of the figure that
came to receive them. Indeed, the room was so silent that they were all startled
to realize that it was not empty. There were three people in it when they
entered: three dim figures motionless in the dim room; all three dressed in
black and looking like dark shadows. As the foremost figure drew nearer the grey
light from the window, he showed a face that looked almost as grey as its frame
of hair. This was old Vine, the steward, long left in loco parentis since the
death of that eccentric parent, the last Lord Darnaway. He would have been a
handsome old man if he had had no teeth. As it was, he had one which showed every
now and then and gave him a rather sinister appearance. He received the doctor
and his friends with a fine courtesy and escorted them to where the other two
figures in black were seated. One of them seemed to Payne to give another
appropriate touch of gloomy antiquity to the castle by the mere fact of being a
Roman Catholic priest, who might have come out of a priest’s hole in the dark
old days. Payne could imagine him muttering prayers or telling beads, or
tolling bells or doing a number of indistinct and melancholy things in that melancholy
place. Just then he might be supposed to have been giving religious consolation
to the lady; but it could hardly be supposed that the consolation was very
consoling, or at any rate that it was very cheering. For the rest, the priest
was personally insignificant enough, with plain and rather expressionless
features; but the lady was a very different matter. Her face was very far from
being plain or insignificant; it stood out from the darkness of her dress and
hair and background with a pallor that was almost awful, but a beauty that was
almost awfully alive. Payne looked at it as long as he dared; and he was to
look at it a good deal longer before he died.

Wood
merely exchanged with his friends such pleasant and polite phrases as would lead
up to his purpose of revisiting the portraits. He apologized for calling on the
day which he heard was to be one of family welcome; but he was soon convinced
that the family was rather mildly relieved to have visitors to distract them or
break the shock. He did not hesitate, therefore, to lead Payne through the
central reception-room into the library beyond, where hung the portrait, for
there was one which he was especially bent on showing, not only as a picture
but almost as a puzzle. The little priest trudged along with them; he seemed to
know something about old pictures as well as about old prayers.

‘
I’m
rather proud of having spotted this,’ said Wood. ‘I believe it’s a Holbein. If it
isn’t, there was somebody living in Holbein’s time who was as great as Holbein.’

It
was a portrait in the hard but sincere and living fashion of the period, representing
a man clad in black trimmed with gold and fur, with a heavy, full, rather pale
face but watchful eyes.

‘
What
a pity art couldn’t have stopped for ever at just that transition stage,’ cried
Wood, ‘and never transitioned any more. Don’t you see it’s just realistic enough
to be real? Don’t you see the face speaks all the more because it stands out
from a rather stiffer framework of less essential things? And the eyes are even
more real than the face. On my soul, I think the eyes are too real for the face!
It’s just as if those sly, quick eyeballs were protruding out of a great pale
mask.’

‘
The
stiffness extends to the figure a little, I think,’ said Payne. ‘They hadn’t quite
mastered anatomy when medievalism ended, at least in the north. That left leg
looks to me a good deal out of drawing.’

‘
I’m
not so sure,’ replied Wood quietly. ‘Those fellows who painted just when realism
began to be done, and before it began to be overdone, were often more realistic
than we think. They put real details of portraiture into things that are
thought merely conventional. You might say this fellow’s eyebrows or eye-sockets
are a little lop-sided; but I bet if you knew him you’d find that one of his
eyebrows did really stick up more than the other. And I shouldn’t wonder if he
was lame or something, and that black leg was meant to be crooked.’

‘
What
an old devil he looks!’ burst out Payne suddenly. ‘I trust his reverence will excuse
my language.’

‘
I
believe in the devil, thank you,’ said the priest with an inscrutable face. ‘Curiously
enough there was a legend that the devil was lame.’

‘
I
say,’ protested Payne, ‘you can’t really mean that he was the devil; but who the
devil was he?’

‘
He
was the Lord Darnaway under Henry VII and Henry VIII,’ replied his companion. ‘But
there are curious legends about him, too; one of them is referred to in that
inscription round the frame, and further developed in some notes left by somebody
in a book I found here. They are both rather curious reading.’

Payne
leaned forward, craning his head so as to follow the archaic inscription round the
frame. Leaving out the antiquated lettering and spelling, it seemed to be a sort
of rhyme running somewhat thus:

In
the seventh hour I shall return:
In the seventh hour I shall depart:
None in that hour shall hold my hand:
And woe to her that holds my heart.

‘
It
sounds creepy somehow,’ said Payne, ‘but that may be partly because I don’t understand
a word of it.’

‘
It’s
pretty creepy even when you do,’ said Wood in a low voice. ‘The record made at a
later date, in the old book I found, is all about how this beauty deliberately
killed himself in such a way that his wife was executed for his murder. Another
note commemorates a later tragedy, seven successions later — under the Georges
— in which another Darnaway committed suicide, having first thoughtfully left
poison in his wife’s wine. It’s said that both suicides took place at seven in
the evening. I suppose the inference is that he does really return with every
seventh inheritor and makes things unpleasant, as the rhyme suggests, for any
lady unwise enough to marry him.’