The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (85 page)

To
Father John O’Connor, of St. Cuthbert’s Bradford, whose truth is stranger than fiction,
with a gratitude greater than the world.

FLAMBEAU,
once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England,
had long retired from both professions. Some say a career of crime had left him
with too many scruples for a career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of
romantic escapes and tricks of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider
an appropriate address: in a castle in Spain. The castle, however, was solid
though relatively small; and the black vineyard and green stripes of kitchen
garden covered a respectable square on the brown hillside. For Flambeau, after
all his violent adventures, still possessed what is possessed by so many
Latins, what is absent (for instance) in so many Americans, the energy to
retire. It can be seen in many a large hotel-proprietor whose one ambition is
to be a small peasant. It can be seen in many a French provincial shopkeeper,
who pauses at the moment when he might develop into a detestable millionaire
and buy a street of shops, to fall back quietly and comfortably on domesticity
and dominoes. Flambeau had casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a
Spanish Lady, married and brought up a large family on a Spanish estate,
without displaying any apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders. But
on one particular morning he was observed by his family to be unusually
restless and excited; and he outran the little boys and descended the greater
part of the long mountain slope to meet the visitor who was coming across the
valley; even when the visitor was still a black dot in the distance.

The
black dot gradually increased in size without very much altering in the shape; for
it continued, roughly speaking, to be both round and black. The black clothes
of clerics were not unknown upon those hills; but these clothes, however
clerical, had about them something at once commonplace and yet almost jaunty in
comparison with the cassock or soutane, and marked the wearer as a man from the
northwestern islands, as clearly as if he had been labelled Clapham Junction.
He carried a short thick umbrella with a knob like a club, at the sight of
which his Latin friend almost shed tears of sentiment; for it had figured in
many adventures that they shared long ago. For this was the Frenchman’s English
friend, Father Brown, paying a long-desired but long-delayed visit. They had
corresponded constantly, but they had not met for years.

Father
Brown was soon established in the family circle, which was quite large enough to
give the general sense of company or a community. He was introduced to the big
wooden images of the Three Kings, of painted and gilded wood, who bring the gifts
to the children at Christmas; for Spain is a country where the affairs of the
children bulk large in the life of the home. He was introduced to the dog and
the cat and the live-stock on the farm. But he was also, as it happened, introduced
to one neighbour who, like himself, had brought into that valley the garb and
manners of distant lands.

It
was on the third night of the priest’s stay at the little chateau that he beheld
a stately stranger who paid his respects to the Spanish household with bows
that no Spanish grandee could emulate. He was a tall, thin grey-haired and very
handsome gentleman, and his hands, cuffs and cuff-links had something overpowering
in their polish. But his long face had nothing of that languor which is
associated with long cuffs and manicuring in the caricatures of our own
country. It was rather arrestingly alert and keen; and the eyes had an innocent
intensity of inquiry that does not go often with grey hairs. That alone might
have marked the man’s nationality, as well the nasal note in his refined voice
and his rather too ready assumption of the vast antiquity of all the European
things around him. This was, indeed, no less a person than Mr. Grandison Chace,
of Boston, an American traveller who had halted for a time in his American
travels by taking a lease of the adjoining estate; a somewhat similar castle on
a somewhat similar hill. He delighted in his old castle, and he regarded his
friendly neighbour as a local antiquity of the same type. For Flambeau managed,
as we have said, really to look retired in the sense of rooted. He might have
grown there with his own vine and fig-tree for ages. He had resumed his real
family name of Duroc; for the other title of “The Torch” had only been a title
de guerre, like that under which such a man will often wage war on society. He
was fond of his wife and family; he never went farther afield than was needed
for a little shooting; and he seemed, to the American globe-trotter, the
embodiment of that cult of a sunny respectability and a temperate luxury, which
the American was wise enough to see and admire in the Mediterranean peoples.
The rolling stone from the West was glad to rest for a moment on this rock in
the South that had gathered so very much moss. But Mr. Chace had heard of
Father Brown, and his tone faintly changed, as towards a celebrity. The
interviewing instinct awoke, tactful but tense. If he did try to draw Father
Brown, as if he were a tooth, it was done with the most dexterous and painless
American dentistry.

They
were sitting in a sort of partly unroofed outer court of the house, such as often
forms the entrance to Spanish houses. It was dusk turning to dark; and as all
that mountain air sharpens suddenly after sunset, a small stove stood on the
flagstones, glowing with red eyes like a goblin, and painting a red pattern on
the pavement; but scarcely a ray of it reached the lower bricks of the great bare,
brown brick wall that went soaring up above them into the deep blue night.
Flambeau’s big broad-shouldered figure and great moustaches, like sabres, could
be traced dimly in the twilight, as he moved about, drawing dark wine from a
great cask and handing it round. In his shadow, the priest looked very shrunken
and small, as if huddled over the stove; but the American visitor leaned
forward elegantly with his elbow on his knee and his fine pointed features in
the full light; his eyes shone with inquisitive intelligence.

“
I
can assure you, sir,” he was saying, “we consider your achievement in the matter
of the Moonshine Murder the most remarkable triumph in the history of detective
science.”

Father
Brown murmured something; some might have imagined that the murmur was a little
like a moan.

“
We
are well acquainted,” went on the stranger firmly, “with the alleged achievements
of Dupin and others; and with those of Lecoq, Sherlock Holmes, Nicholas Carter,
and other imaginative incarnations of the craft. But we observe there is in
many ways, a marked difference between your own method of approach and that of
these other thinkers, whether fictitious or actual. Some have spec’lated, sir,
as to whether the difference of method may perhaps involve rather the absence
of method.”

Father
Brown was silent; then he started a little, almost as if he had been nodding over
the stove, and said: “I beg your pardon. Yes. . .. Absence of method. . . .
Absence of mind, too, I’m afraid.”

“
I
should say of strictly tabulated scientific method,” went on the inquirer. “Edgar
Poe throws off several little essays in a conversational form, explaining
Dupin’s method, with its fine links of logic. Dr. Watson had to listen to some
pretty exact expositions of Holmes’s method with its observation of material
details. But nobody seems to have got on to any full account of your method,
Father Brown, and I was informed you declined the offer to give a series of
lectures in the States on the matter.”

“
Yes,”
said the priest, frowning at the stove; “I declined.”

“
Your
refusal gave rise to a remarkable lot of interesting talk,” remarked Chace. “I may
say that some of our people are saying your science can’t be expounded, because
it’s something more than just natural science. They say your secret’s not to be
divulged, as being occult in its character.”

“
Being
what?” asked Father Brown, rather sharply.

“
Why,
kind of esoteric,” replied the other. “I can tell you, people got considerably worked
up about Gallup’s murder, and Stein’s murder, and then old man Merton’s murder,
and now Judge Gwynne’s murder, and a double murder by Dalmon, who was well
known in the States. And there were you, on the spot every time, slap in the
middle of it; telling everybody how it was done and never telling anybody how
you knew. So some people got to think you knew without looking, so to speak.
And Carlotta Brownson gave a lecture on Thought-Forms with illustrations from
these cases of yours. The Second Sight Sisterhood of Indianapolis — —”

Father
Brown, was still staring at the stove; then he said quite loud yet as if hardly
aware that anyone heard him: “Oh, I say. This will never do.”

“
I
don’t exactly know how it’s to be helped,” said Mr. Chace humorously. “The Second
Sight Sisterhood want a lot of holding down. The only way I can think of stopping
it is for you to tell us the secret after all.”

Father
Brown groaned. He put his head on his hands and remained a moment, as if full of
a silent convulsion of thought. Then he lifted his head and said in a dull voice:

“
Very
well. I must tell the secret.”

His
eyes rolled darkly over the whole darkling scene, from the red eyes of the little
stove to the stark expanse of the ancient wall, over which were standing out,
more and more brightly, the strong stars of the south.

“
The
secret is,” he said; and then stopped as if unable to go on. Then he began again
and said:

“
You
see, it was I who killed all those people.”

“
What?”
repeated the other, in a small voice out of a vast silence.

“
You
see, I had murdered them all myself,” explained Father Brown patiently. “So, of
course, I knew how it was done.”

Grandison
Chace had risen to his great height like a man lifted to the ceiling by a sort of
slow explosion. Staring down at the other he repeated his incredulous question.

“
I
had planned out each of the crimes very carefully,” went on Father Brown, “I had
thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or
state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt
exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.”

Chace
gradually released a sort of broken sigh.

“
You
frightened me all right,” he said. “For the minute I really did think you meant
you were the murderer. Just for the minute I kind of saw it splashed over all the
papers in the States: ‘Saintly Sleuth Exposed as Killer: Hundred Crimes of Father
Brown.’ Why, of course, if it’s just a figure of speech and means you tried to
reconstruct the psychogy —”

Father
Brown rapped sharply on the stove with the short pipe he was about to fill; one
of his very rare spasms of annoyance contracted his face.

“
No,
no, no,” he said, almost angrily; “I don’t mean just a figure of speech. This is
what comes of trying to talk about deep things. . . . What’s the good of words
. . .? If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always
think it’s merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs once said to me:
‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In
what other sense could you believe it?’ And then he thought I meant he needn’t
believe in anything except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge. . .
. I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the
murders. I didn’t actually kill the men by material means; but that’s not the
point. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material means.
I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that,
until I realized that I really was like that, in everything except actual final
consent to the action. It was once suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a
sort of religious exercise. I believe he got it from Pope Leo XIII, who was
always rather a hero of mine.”