The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (81 page)

‘
Do
you mean about the suicide?’ asked Payne.

‘
I
mean about the murder,’ said Father Brown; and his voice, though only slightly lifted
to a louder note, seemed somehow to resound over the whole shore. ‘It was
murder; but murder is of the will, which God made free.’

What
the other said at the moment in answer to it Payne never knew. For the word had
a rather curious effect on him; stirring him like the blast of a trumpet and yet
bringing him to a halt. He stood still in the middle of the sandy waste and let
the others go on in front of him; he felt the blood crawling through all his
veins and the sensation that is called the hair standing on end; and yet he felt
a new and unnatural happiness. A psychological process too quick and too complicated
for himself to follow had already reached a conclusion that he could not
analyse; but the conclusion was one of relief. After standing still for a
moment he turned and went back slowly across the sands to the house of the
Darnaways.

He
crossed the moat with a stride that shook the bridge, descended the stairs and traversed
the long rooms with a resounding tread, till he came to the place where
Adelaide Darnaway sat haloed with the low light of the oval window, almost like
some forgotten saint left behind in the land of death. She looked up, and an
expression of wonder made her face yet more wonderful.

‘
What
is it?’ she said.’ Why have you come back?’

‘
I
have come for the Sleeping Beauty,’ he said in a tone that had the resonance of
a laugh. ’This old house went to sleep long ago, as the doctor said; but it is silly
for you to pretend to be old. Come up into the daylight and hear the truth. I
have brought you a word; it is a terrible word, but it breaks the spell of your
captivity.’

She
did not understand a word he said, but something made her rise and let him lead
her down the long hall and up the stairs and out under the evening sky. The ruins
of a dead garden stretched towards the sea, and an old fountain with the figure
of a triton, green with rust, remained poised there, pouring nothing out of a
dried horn into an empty basin. He had often seen that desolate outline against
the evening sky as he passed, and it had seemed to him a type of fallen fortunes
in more ways than one. Before long, doubtless, those hollow fonts would be
filled, but it would be with the pale green bitter waters of the sea and the
flowers would be drowned and strangled in seaweed. So, he had told himself, the
daughter of the Darnaways might indeed be wedded; but she would be wedded to
death and a doom as deaf and ruthless as the sea. But now he laid a hand on the
bronze triton that was like the hand of a giant, and shook it as if he meant to
hurl it over like an idol or an evil god of the garden.

‘
What
do you mean?’ she asked steadily. ‘What is this word that will set us free?’

‘
The
word is murder,’ he said, ‘and the freedom it brings is as fresh as the flowers
of spring. No; I do not mean I have murdered anybody. But the fact that anybody
can be murdered is itself good news, after the evil dreams you have been living
in. Don’t you understand? In that dream of yours everything that happened to you
came from inside you; the Doom of the Darnaways was stored up in the Darnaways;
it unfolded itself like a horrible flower. There was no escape even by happy accident;
it was all inevitable; whether it was Vine and his old wives’ tales, or Barnet
and his new-fangled heredity. But this man who died was not the victim of a
magic curse or an inherited madness. He was murdered; and for us that murder is
simply an accident; yes, requiescat in pace: but a happy accident. It is a ray
of daylight, because it comes from outside.’

She
suddenly smiled. ‘Yes, I believe I understand. I suppose you are talking like a
lunatic, but I understand. But who murdered him?’

‘
I
do not know,’ he answered calmly, ‘but Father Brown knows. And as Father Brown says,
murder is at least done by the will, free as that wind from the sea.’

‘
Father
Brown is a wonderful person,’ she said after a pause; ‘he was the only person who
ever brightened my existence in any way at all until — ’

‘
Until
what?’ asked Payne, and made a movement almost impetuous, leaning towards her and
thrusting away the bronze monster so that it seemed to rock on its pedestal.

‘
Well,
until you did,’ she said and smiled again.

So
was the sleeping palace awakened, and it is no part of this story to describe the
stages of its awakening, though much of it had come to pass before the dark of
that evening had fallen upon the shore. As Harry Payne strode homewards once more,
across those dark sands that he had crossed in so many moods, he was at the
highest turn of happiness that is given in this mortal life, — and the whole
red sea within him was at the top of its tide. He would have had no difficulty
in picturing all that place again in flower, and the bronze triton bright as a
golden god and the fountain flowing with water or with wine. But all this
brightness and blossoming had been unfolded for him by the one word ‘murder’,
and it was still a word that he did not understand. He had taken it on trust,
and he was not unwise; for he was one of those who have a sense of the sound of
truth.

It
was more than a month later that Payne returned to his London house to keep an appointment
with Father Brown, taking the required photograph with him. His personal
romance had prospered as well as was fitting under the shadow of such a
tragedy, and the shadow itself therefore lay rather more lightly on him; but it
was hard to view it as anything but the shadow of a family fatality. In many ways
he had been much occupied; and it was not until the Darnaway household had resumed
its somewhat stern routine, and the portrait had long been restored to its place
in the library, that he had managed to photograph it with a magnesium flare.
Before sending it to the antiquary, as originally arranged, he brought it to
the priest who had so pressingly demanded it.

‘
I
can’t understand your attitude about all this. Father Brown,’ he said.’ You act
as if you had already solved the problem in some way of your own.’

The
priest shook his head mournfully. ‘Not a bit of it,’ he answered. ‘I must be very
stupid, but I’m quite stuck; stuck about the most practical point of all. It’s
a queer business; so simple up to a point and then — Let me have a look at that
photograph, will you?’

He
held it close to his screwed, short-sighted eyes for a moment, and then said: ‘Have
you got a magnifying glass?’

Payne
produced one, and the priest looked through it intently for some time and then said:
‘Look at the title of that book at the edge of the bookshelf beside the frame;
it’s ‘The History of Pope Joan’. Now, I wonder ... yes, by George; and the one
above is something or other of Iceland. Lord! what a queer way to find it out!
What a dolt and donkey I was not to notice it when I was there!’

‘
But
what have you found out?’ asked Payne impatiently.

‘
The
last link,’ said Father Brown, ‘and I’m not stuck any longer. Yes; I think I know
how that unhappy story went from first to last now.’

‘
But
why?’ insisted the other.

‘
Why,
because,’ said the priest with a smile, ‘the Darnaway library contained books about
Pope Joan and Iceland, not to mention another I see with the title beginning
‘The Religion of Frederick’, which is not so very hard to fill up.’ Then,
seeing the other’s annoyance, his smile faded and he said more earnestly: ‘As a
matter of fact, this last point, though it is the last link, is not the main
business. There were much more curious things in the case than that. One of
them is rather a curiosity of evidence. Let me begin by saying something that
may surprise you. Darnaway did not die at seven o’clock that evening. He had
been already dead for a whole day.’

‘
Surprise
is rather a mild word,’ said Payne grimly, ‘since you and I both saw him walking
about afterwards.’

‘
No,
we did not,’ replied Father Brown quietly. ‘I think we both saw him, or thought
we saw him, fussing about with the focusing of his camera. Wasn’t his head under
that black cloak when you passed through the room? It was when I did. And that’s
why I felt there was something queer about the room and the figure. It wasn’t
that the leg was crooked, but rather that it wasn’t crooked. It was dressed in
the same sort of dark clothes; but if you see what you believe to be one man
standing in the way that another man stands, you will think he’s in a strange
and strained attitude.’

‘
Do
you really mean,’ cried Payne with something like a shudder, ‘that it was some unknown
man?’

‘
It
was the murderer,’ said Father Brown. ‘He had already killed Darnaway at daybreak
and hid the corpse and himself in the dark room — an excellent hiding-place,
because nobody normally goes into it or can see much if he does. But he let it
fall out on the floor at seven o’clock, of course, that the whole thing might
be explained by the curse.’

‘
But
I don’t understand’ observed Payne. ‘Why didn’t he kill him at seven o’clock then,
instead of loading himself with a corpse for fourteen hours?’

‘
Let
me ask you another question,’ said the priest. ‘Why was there no photograph taken?
Because the murderer made sure of killing him when he first got up, and before
he could take it. It was essential to the murderer to prevent that photograph
reaching the expert on the Darnaway antiquities.’

There
was a sudden silence for a moment, and then the priest went on in a lower tone:
‘Don’t you see how simple it is? Why, you yourself saw one side of the possibility;
but it’s simpler even than you thought. You said a man might be faked to
resemble an old picture. Surely it’s simpler that a picture should be faked to
resemble a man. In plain words, it’s true in a rather special way that there
was no Doom of the Darnaways. There was no old picture; there was no old rhyme;
there was no legend of a man who caused his wife’s death. But there was a very
wicked and a very clever man who was willing to cause another man’s death in
order to rob him of his promised wife.’

The
priest suddenly gave Payne a sad smile, as if in reassurance. ‘For the moment I
believe you thought I meant you,’ he said,’ but you were not the only person who
haunted that house for sentimental reasons. You know the man, or rather you think
you do. But there were depths in the man called Martin Wood, artist and
antiquary, which none of his mere artistic acquaintances were likely to guess.
Remember that he was called in to criticize and catalogue the pictures; in an aristocratic
dustbin of that sort that practically means simply to tell the Darnaways what
art treasures they had got. They would not be surprised at things turning up
they had never noticed before. It had to be done well, and it was; perhaps he
was right when he said that if it wasn’t Holbein it was somebody of the same
genius.’

‘
I
feel rather stunned,’ said Payne; ‘and there are twenty things I don’t see yet.
How did he know what Darnaway looked like? How did he actually kill him? The doctors
seem rather puzzled at present.’

‘
I
saw a photograph the lady had which the Australian sent on before him,’ said
the priest, ‘and there are several ways in which he could have learned things
when the new heir was once recognized. We may not know these details; but they
are not difficulties. You remember he used to help in the dark room; it seems
to me an ideal place, say, to prick a man with a poisoned pin, with the
poison’s all handy. No; I say these were not difficulties. The difficulty that
stumped me was how Wood could be in two places at once. How could he take the
corpse from the dark-room and prop it against the camera so that it would fall
in a few seconds, without coming downstairs, when he was in the library looking
out a book? And I was such a fool that I never looked at the books in the
library; and it was only in this photograph, by very undeserved good luck, that
I saw the simple fact of a book about Pope Joan.’

‘
You’ve
kept your best riddle for the end,’ said Payne grimly. ‘What on earth can Pope Joan
have to do with it?’

‘
Don’t
forget the book about the Something of Iceland,’ advised the priest, ‘or the
religion of somebody called Frederick. It only remains to ask what sort of man
was the late Lord Darnaway.’

‘
Oh,
does it?’ observed Payne heavily.

‘
He
was a cultivated, humorous sort of eccentric, I believe,’ went on Father Brown.
‘Being cultivated, he knew there was no such person as Pope Joan. Being humorous,
he was very likely to have thought of the title of ‘The Snakes of Iceland’ or
something else that didn’t exist. I venture to reconstruct the third title as
‘The Religion of Frederick the Great’ — which also doesn’t exist. Now, doesn’t
it strike you that those would be just the titles to put on the backs of books
that didn’t exist; or in other words on a bookcase that wasn’t a book-case?’

‘
Ah!’
cried Payne; ‘I see what you mean now. There was some hidden staircase — ’

‘
Up
to the room Wood himself selected as a dark room,’ said the priest nodding. ‘I’m
sorry. It couldn’t be helped. It’s dreadfully banal and stupid, as stupid as I
have been on this pretty banal case. But we were mixed up in a real musty old
romance of decayed gentility and a fallen family mansion; and it was too much
to hope that we could escape having a secret passage. It was a priest’s hole;
and I deserve to be put in it.’