The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (80 page)

‘
It
is no good,’ he said hoarsely;’ we are dealing with something too terrible.’

‘
Yes,’
assented the priest in a low voice, ‘we are dealing with something terrible; with
the most terrible thing I know, and the name of it is nonsense.’

‘
What
did you say?’ said Darnaway, still looking towards him.

‘
I
said nonsense,’ repeated the priest. ‘I have not said anything in particular up
to now, for it was none of my business; I was only taking temporary duty in the
neighbourhood and Miss Darnaway wanted to see me. But since you’re asking me personally
and point-blank, why, it’s easy enough to answer. Of course there’s no Doom of
the Darnaways to prevent your marrying anybody you have any decent reason for
marrying. A man isn’t fated to fall into the smallest venial sin, let alone
into crimes like suicide and murder. You can’t be made to do wicked things
against your will because your name is Darnaway, any more than I can because my
name is Brown. The Doom of the Browns,’ he added with relish — ‘the Weird of
the Browns would sound even better.’

‘
And
you of all people,’ repeated the Australian, staring, ‘tell me to think like that
about it.’

‘
I
tell you to think about something else,’ replied the priest cheerfully. ‘What
has become of the rising art of photography? How is the camera getting on? I
know it’s rather dark downstairs, but those hollow arches on the floor above
could easily be turned into a first-rate photographic studio. A few workmen could
fit it out with a glass roof in no time.’

‘
Really,’
protested Martin Wood, ‘I do think you should be the last man in the world to tinker
about with those beautiful Gothic arches, which are about the best work your
own religion has ever done in the world. I should have thought you’d have had
some feeling for that sort of art; but I can’t see why you should be so uncommonly
keen on photography.’

‘
I’m
uncommonly keen on daylight,’ answered Father Brown, ‘especially in this dingy business;
and photography has the virtue of depending on daylight. And if you don’t know
that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the
sanity of a single human soul, you don’t know so much about my religion as you
think you do.’

The
young Australian had sprung to his feet like a man rejuvenated. ‘By George! that’s
the talk,’ he cried; ‘though I never thought to hear it from that quarter. I’ll
tell you what, reverend sir, I’ll do something that will show I haven’t lost my
courage after all.’

The
old steward was still looking at him with quaking watchfulness, as if he felt something
fey about the young man’s defiance. ‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘what are you going to do
now?’

‘
I
am going to photograph the portrait,’ replied Darnaway.

Yet
it was barely a week afterwards that the storm of the catastrophe seemed to stoop
out of the sky, darkening that sun of sanity to which the priest had appealed
in vain, and plunging the mansion once more in the darkness of the Darnaway
doom. It had been easy enough to fit up the new studio; and seen from inside it
looked very like any other such studio, empty except for the fullness of the
white light. A man coming from the gloomy rooms below had more than normally
the sense of stepping into a more than modern brilliancy, as blank as the
future. At the suggestion of Wood, who knew the castle well and had got over
his first aesthetic grumblings, a small room remaining intact in the upper ruins
was easily turned into a dark room, into which Darnaway went out of the white
daylight to grope by the crimson gleams of a red lamp. Wood said, laughing,
that the red lamp had reconciled him to the vandalism; as that bloodshot
darkness was as romantic as an alchemist’s cave.

Darnaway
had risen at daybreak on the day that he meant to photograph the mysterious portrait,
and had it carried up from the library by the single corkscrew staircase that
connected the two floors. There he had set it up in the wide white daylight on
a sort of easel and planted his photographic tripod in front of it. He said he was
anxious to send a reproduction of it to a great antiquary who had written on
the antiquities of the house; but the others knew that this was an excuse
covering much deeper things. It was, if not exactly a spiritual duel between
Darnaway and the demoniac picture, at least a duel between Darnaway and his own
doubts. He wanted to bring the daylight of photography face to face with that
dark masterpiece of painting; and to see whether the sunshine of the new art
would not drive out the shadows of the old.

Perhaps
this was why he preferred to do it by himself, even if some of the details seemed
to take longer and involve more than normal delay. Anyhow, he rather discouraged
the few who visited his studio during the day of the experiment, and who found
him focusing and fussing about in a very isolated and impenetrable fashion. The
steward had left a meal for him, as he refused to come down; the old gentleman
also returned some hours afterwards and found the meal more or less normally
disposed of; but when he brought it he got no more gratitude than a grunt.
Payne went up once to see how he was getting on, but finding the photographer
disinclined for conversation came down again. Father Brown had wandered that
way in an unobtrusive style to take Darnaway a letter from the expert to whom
the photograph was to be sent. But he left the letter on a tray, and whatever
he thought of that great glasshouse full of daylight and devotion to a hobby, a
world he had himself in some sense created, he kept it to himself and came
down. He had reason to remember very soon that he was the last to come down the
solitary staircase connecting the floors, leaving a lonely man and an empty
room behind him. The others were standing in the salon that led into the library,
just under the great black ebony clock that looked like a titanic coffin.

‘
How
was Darnaway getting on,’ asked Payne, a little later, ‘when you last went up?’

The
priest passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Don’t tell me I’m getting psychic,’ he
said with a sad smile. ‘I believe I’m quite dazzled with daylight up in that room
and couldn’t see things straight. Honestly, I felt for a flash as if there were
something uncanny about Darnaway’s figure standing before that portrait.’

‘
Oh,
that’s the lame leg,’ said Barnet promptly. ‘We know all about that.’

‘
Do
you know,’ said Payne abruptly, but lowering his voice, ‘l don’t think we do know
all about it or anything about it. What’s the matter with his leg? What was the
matter with his ancestor’s leg?’

‘
Oh,
there’s something about that in the book I was reading in there, in the family archives,’
said Wood; ‘I’ll fetch it for you.’ And he stepped into the library just
beyond.

‘
I
think,’ said Father Brown quietly, ‘Mr Payne must have some particular reason for
asking that.’

‘
I
may as well blurt it out once and for all,’ said Payne, but in a yet lower voice.
‘After all, there is a rational explanation. A man from anywhere might have
made up to look like the portrait. What do we know about Darnaway? He is behaving
rather oddly — ’

The
others were staring at him in a rather startled fashion; but the priest seemed to
take it very calmly.

‘
I
don’t think the old portrait’s ever been photographed,’ he said. ‘That’s why he
wants to do it. I don’t think there’s anything odd about that.’

‘
Quite
an ordinary state of things, in fact,’ said Wood with a smile; he had just returned
with the book in his hand. And even as he spoke there was a stir in the
clockwork of the great dark clock behind him and successive strokes thrilled
through the room up to the number of seven. With the last stroke there came a
crash from the floor above that shook the house like a thunderbolt; and Father
Brown was already two steps up the winding staircase before the sound had
ceased.

‘
My
God!’ cried Payne involuntarily; ‘he is alone up there.’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown without turning, as he vanished up the stairway. ‘We shall find
him alone.’

When
the rest recovered from their first paralysis and ran helter-skelter up the stone
steps and found their way to the new studio, it was true in that sense that
they found him alone. They found him lying in a wreck of his tall camera, with
its long splintered legs standing out grotesquely at three different angles;
and Darnaway had fallen on top of it with one black crooked leg lying at a
fourth angle along the floor. For the moment the dark heap looked as if he were
entangled with some huge and horrible spider. Little more than a glance and a
touch were needed to tell them that he was dead. Only the portrait stood untouched
upon the easel, and one could fancy the smiling eyes shone.

An
hour afterwards Father Brown in helping to calm the confusion of the stricken household,
came upon the old steward muttering almost as mechanically as the clock had
ticked and struck the terrible hour. Almost without hearing them, he knew what
the muttered words must be.

In
the seventh heir I shall return
In the seventh hour I shall depart.

As
he was about to say something soothing, the old man seemed suddenly to start awake
and stiffen into anger; his mutterings changed to a fierce cry.

‘
You!’
he cried; ‘you and your daylight! Even you won’t say now there is no Doom for the
Darnaways.’

‘
My
opinion about that is unchanged,’ said Father Brown mildly. Then after a pause he
added: ‘I hope you will observe poor Darnaway’s last wish, and see the photograph
is sent off.’

‘
The
photograph!’ cried the doctor sharply. ‘What’s the good of that? As a matter of
fact, it’s rather curious; but there isn’t any photograph. It seems he never took
it after all, after pottering about all day.’

Father
Brown swung round sharply. ‘Then take it yourselves,’ he said. ’Poor Darnaway was
perfectly right. It’s most important that the photograph should be taken.’

As
all the visitors, the doctor, the priest, and the two artists trailed away in a
black and dismal procession across the brown and yellow sands, they were at first
more or less silent, rather as if they had been stunned. And certainly there
had been something like a crack of thunder in a clear sky about the fulfilment
of that forgotten superstition at the very time when they had most forgotten
it; when the doctor and the priest had both filled their minds with rationalism
as the photographer had filled his rooms with daylight. They might be as
rationalistic as they liked; but in broad daylight the seventh heir had returned,
and in broad daylight at the seventh hour he had perished.

‘
I’m
afraid everybody will always believe in the Darnaway superstition now,’ said Martin
Wood.

‘
I
know one who won’t,’ said the doctor sharply. ‘Why should I indulge in superstition
because somebody else indulges in suicide?’

‘
You
think poor Mr Darnaway committed suicide?’ asked the priest.

‘
I’m
sure he committed suicide,’ replied the doctor.

‘
It
is possible,’ agreed the other.

‘
He
was quite alone up there, and he had a whole drug-store of poisons in the dark room.
Besides, it’s just the sort of thing that Darnaways do.’

‘
You
don’t think there’s anything in the fulfilment of the family curse?’

‘
Yes,’
said the doctor; ‘I believe in one family curse, and that is the family constitution.
I told you it was heredity, and they are all half mad. If you stagnate and
breed in and brood in your own swamp like that, you’re bound to degenerate
whether you like it or not. The laws of heredity can’t be dodged; the truths of
science can’t be denied. The minds of the Darnaways are falling to pieces, as
their blighted old sticks and stones are falling to pieces, eaten away by the
sea and the salt air. Suicide — of course he committed suicide; I dare say all
the rest will commit suicide. Perhaps the best thing they could do.’

As
the man of science spoke there sprang suddenly and with startling clearness into
Payne’s memory the face of the daughter of the Darnaways, a tragic mask pale
against an unfathomable blackness, but itself of a blinding and more than mortal
beauty. He opened his mouth to speak and found himself speechless.

‘
I
see,’ said Father Brown to the doctor; ‘so you do believe in the superstition after
all?’

‘
What
do you mean — believe in the superstition? I believe in the suicide as a matter
of scientific necessity.’

‘
Well,’
replied the priest, ‘I don’t see a pin to choose between your scientific superstition
and the other magical superstition. They both seem to end in turning people
into paralytics, who can’t move their own legs or arms or save their own lives
or souls. The rhyme said it was the Doom of the Darnaways to be killed, and the
scientific textbook says it is the Doom of the Darnaways to kill themselves.
Both ways they seem to be slaves.’

‘
But
I thought you said you believed in rational views of these things,’ said Dr Barnet.
‘Don’t you believe in heredity?’

‘
I
said I believed in daylight,’ replied the priest in a loud and clear voice, ‘and
I won’t choose between two tunnels of subterranean superstition that both end
in the dark. And the proof of it is this: that you are all entirely in the dark
about what really happened in that house.’