The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (99 page)

Father
Brown’s eye roamed round the room, which seemed to have been just recently cleaned
and tidied, till his gaze found something in a dusty corner just behind the
door. It was a hat hanging on a hat-peg. It was a white hat, and one very well
known to all that village. And yet, conspicuous as it had always seemed in the
street, it seemed only an example of the sort of little thing a certain sort of
man often entirely forgets, when he has most carefully washed floors or destroyed
stained rags.

“
Sir
Arthur Vaudrey was shaved here yesterday morning, I think,” said Father Brown in
a level voice.

To
the barber, a small, bald-headed, spectacled man whose name was Wicks, the sudden
appearance of these two figures out of his own back premises was like the
appearance of two ghosts risen out of a grave under the floor. But it was at
once apparent that he had more to frighten him than any fancy of superstition.
He shrank, we might almost say that he shrivelled, into a corner of the dark
room; and everything about him seemed to dwindle, except his great goblin
spectacles.

“
Tell
me one thing,” continued the priest, quietly. “You had a reason for hating the squire?”

The
man in the corner babbled something that Smith could not hear; but the priest nodded.

“
I
know you had,” he said. “You hated him; and that’s how I know you didn’t kill him.
Will you tell us what happened, or shall I?”

There
was a silence filled with the faint ticking of a clock in the back kitchen; and
then Father Brown went on.

“
What
happened was this. When Mr. Dalmon stepped inside your outer shop, he asked for
some cigarettes that were in the window. You stepped outside for a moment, as shopmen
often do, to make sure of what he meant; and in that moment of time he perceived
in the inner room the razor you had just laid down, and the yellow-white head
of Sir Arthur in the barber’s chair; probably both glimmering in the light of
that little window beyond. It took but an instant for him to pick up the razor
and cut the throat and come back to the counter. The victim would not even be
alarmed at the razor and the hand. He died smiling at his own thoughts. And
what thoughts! Nor, I think, was Dalmon alarmed. He had done it so quickly and
quietly that Mr. Smith here could have sworn in court that the two were
together all the time. But there was somebody who was alarmed, very legitimately,
and that was you. You had quarrelled with your landlord about arrears of rent
and so on; you came back into your own shop and found your enemy murdered in
your own chair, with your own razor. It was not altogether unnatural that you
despaired of clearing yourself, and preferred to clear up the mess; to clean
the floor and throw the corpse into the river at night, in a potato sack rather
loosely tied. It was rather lucky that there were fixed hours after which your
barber’s shop was shut; so you had plenty of time. You seem to have remembered
everything but the hat. . . . Oh, don’t be frightened; I shall forget
everything, including the hat.”

And
he passed placidly through the outer shop into the street beyond, followed by the
wondering Smith, and leaving behind the barber stunned and staring.

“
You
see,” said Father Brown to his companion, “it was one of those cases where a motive
really is too weak to convict a man and yet strong enough to acquit him. A
little nervous fellow like that would be the last man really to kill a big strong
man for a tiff about money. But he would be the first man to fear that he would
be accused of having done it. ... Ah, there was a thundering difference in the
motive of the man who did do it.” And he relapsed into reflection, staring and
almost glaring at vacancy.

“
It
is simply awful,” groaned Evan Smith. “I was abusing Dalmon as a blackmailer and
a blackguard an hour or two ago, and yet it breaks me all up to hear he really
did this, after all.”

The
priest still seemed to be in a sort of trance, like a man staring down into an abyss.
At last his lips moved and he murmured, more as if it were a prayer than an
oath: “Merciful God, what a horrible revenge!”

His
friend questioned him, but he continued as if talking to himself.

“
What
a horrible tale of hatred! What a vengeance for one mortal worm to take on another!
Shall we ever get to the bottom of this bottomless human heart, where such
abominable imaginations can abide? God save us all from pride; but I cannot yet
make any picture in my mind of hate and vengeance like that.”

“
Yes,”
said Smith; “and I can’t quite picture why he should kill Vaudrey at all. If Dalmon
was a blackmailer, it would seem more natural for Vaudrey to kill him. As you
say, the throat-cutting was a horrid business, but — —”

Father
Brown started, and blinked like a man awakened from sleep.

“
Oh,
that!” he corrected hastily. “I wasn’t thinking about that. I didn’t mean the murder
in the barber’s shop, when — when I said a horrible tale of vengeance. I was
thinking of a much more horrible tale than that; though, of course, that was
horrible enough, in its way. But that was much more comprehensible; almost anybody
might have done it. In fact, it was very nearly an act of self-defence.”

“
What?”
exclaimed the secretary incredulously. “A man creeps up behind another man and cuts
his throat, while he is smiling pleasantly at the ceiling in a barber’s chair,
and you say it was self-defence!”

“
I
do not say it was justifiable self-defence,” replied the other. “I only say
that many a man would have been driven to it, to defend himself against an
appalling calamity — which was also an appalling crime. It was that other crime
that I was thinking about. To begin with, about that question you asked just
now — why should the blackmailer be the murderer? Well, there are a good many conventional
confusions and errors on a point like that.” He paused, as if collecting his
thoughts after his recent trance of horror, and went on in ordinary tones.

“
You
observe that two men, an older and a younger, go about together and agree on a matrimonial
project; but the origin of their intimacy is old and concealed. One is rich and
the other poor; and you guess at blackmail. You are quite right, at least to
that extent. Where you are quite wrong is in guessing which is which. You
assume that the poor man was blackmailing the rich man. As a matter of fact,
the rich man was blackmailing the poor man.”

“
But
that seems nonsense,” objected the secretary.

“
It
is much worse than nonsense; but it is not at all uncommon,” replied the other.
“Half modern politics consists of rich men blackmailing people. Your notion that
it’s nonsense rests on two illusions which are both nonsensical. One is, that
rich men never want to be richer; the other is, that a man can only be blackmailed
for money. It’s the last that is in question here. Sir Arthur Vaudrey was
acting not for avarice, but for vengeance. And he planned the most hideous
vengeance I ever heard of.”

“
But
why should he plan vengeance on John Dalmon?” inquired Smith.

“
It
wasn’t on John Dalmon that he planned vengeance,” replied the priest, gravely.

There
was a silence; and he resumed, almost as if changing the subject. “When we found
the body, you remember, we saw the face upside down; and you said it looked
like the face of a fiend. Has it occurred to you that the murderer also saw the
face upside down, coming behind the barber’s chair?”

“
But
that’s all morbid extravagance,” remonstrated his companion. “I was quite used to
the face when it was the right way up.”

“
Perhaps
you have never seen it the right way up,” said Father Brown. “I told you that artists
turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to see it the right way up.
Perhaps, over all those breakfasts and tea-tables, you had got used to the face
of a fiend.”

“
What
on earth are you driving at?” demanded Smith, impatiently.

“
I
speak in parables,” replied the other in a rather sombre tone. “Of course, Sir Arthur
was not actually a fiend; he was a man with a character which he had made out
of a temperament that might also have been turned to good. But those goggling,
suspicious eyes; that tight, yet quivering mouth, might have told you something
if you had not been so used to them. You know, there are physical bodies on
which a wound will not heal. Sir Arthur had a mind of that sort. It was as if
it lacked a skin; he had a feverish vigilance of vanity; those strained eyes
were open with an insomnia of egoism. Sensibility need not be selfishness.
Sybil Rye, for instance, has the same thin skin and manages to be a sort of
saint. But Vaudrey had turned it all to poisonous pride; a pride that was not
even secure and self-satisfied. Every scratch on the surface of his soul
festered. And that is the meaning of that old story about throwing the man into
the pig-sty. If he’d thrown him then and there, after being called a pig, it
might have been a pardonable burst of passion. But there was no pig-sty; and that
is just the point. Vaudrey remembered the silly insult for years and years,
till he could get the Oriental into the improbable neighbourhood of a pig-sty;
and then he took, what he considered the only appropriate and artistic revenge.
. . . Oh, my God! he liked his revenges to be appropriate and artistic.”

Smith
looked at him curiously. “You are not thinking of the pig-sty story,” he said.

“
No,”
said Father Brown; “of the other story.” He controlled the shudder in his voice,
and went on:

“
Remembering
that story of a fantastic and yet patient plot to make the vengeance fit the crime,
consider the other story before us. Had anybody else, to your knowledge, ever
insulted Vaudrey, or offered him what he thought a mortal insult? Yes; a woman
insulted him.”

A
sort of vague horror began to dawn in Evan’s eyes; he was listening intently.

“
A
girl, little more than a child, refused to marry him, because he had once been a
sort of criminal; had, indeed, been in prison for a short time for the outrage
on the Egyptian. And that madman said, in the hell of his heart: ‘She shall
marry a murderer.’”

They
took the road towards the great house and went along by the river for some time
in silence, before he resumed: “Vaudrey was in a position to blackmail Dalmon, who
had committed a murder long ago; probably he knew of several crimes among the
wild comrades of his youth. Probably it was a wild crime with some redeeming
features; for the wildest murders are never the worst. And Dalmon looks to me
like a man who knows remorse, even for killing Vaudrey. But he was in Vaudrey’s
power and, between them, they entrapped the girl very cleverly into an engagement;
letting the lover try his luck first, for instance, and the other only
encouraging magnificently. But Dalmon himself did not know, nobody but the
Devil himself did know, what was really in that old man’s mind.

“
Then,
a few days ago, Dalmon made a dreadful discovery. He had obeyed, not altogether
unwillingly; he had been a tool; and he suddenly found how the tool was to be broken
and thrown away. He came upon certain notes of Vaudrey’s in the library which,
disguised as they were, told of preparations for giving information to the
police. He understood the whole plot and stood stunned as I did when I first
understood it. The moment the bride and bridegroom were married, the bridegroom
would be arrested and hanged. The fastidious lady, who objected to a husband
who had been in prison, should have no husband except a husband on the gallows.
That is what Sir Arthur Vaudrey considered an artistic rounding off of the
story.”

Evan
Smith, deadly pale, was silent; and, far away, down the perspective of the road,
they saw the large figure and wide hat of Dr. Abbott advancing towards them;
even in the outline there was a certain agitation. But they were still shaken
with their own private apocalypse.

“
As
you say, hate is a hateful thing,” said Evan at last; “and, do you know, one thing
gives me a sort of relief. All my hatred of poor Dalmon is gone out of me — now
I know how he was twice a murderer.”

It
was in silence that they covered the rest of the distance and met the big doctor
coming towards them, with his large gloved hands thrown out in a sort of despairing
gesture and his grey beard tossing in the wind.

“
There
is dreadful news,” he said. “Arthur’s body has been found. He seems to have died
in his garden.”

“
Dear
me,” said Father Brown, rather mechanically. “How dreadful!”

“
And
there is more,” cried the doctor breathlessly. “John Dalmon went off to see Vernon
Vaudrey, the nephew; but Vernon Vaudrey hasn’t heard of him and Dalmon seems to
have disappeared entirely.”

“
Dear
me,” said Father Brown. “How strange!”

FATHER
BROWN was wandering through a picture gallery with an expression that suggested
that he had not come there to look at the pictures. Indeed, he did not want to look
at the pictures, though he liked pictures well enough. Not that there was anything
immoral or improper about those highly modern pictorial designs. He would
indeed be of an inflammable temperament who was stirred to any of the more
pagan passions by the display of interrupted spirals, inverted cones and broken
cylinders with which the art of the future inspired or menaced mankind. The
truth is that Father Brown was looking for a young friend who had appointed that
somewhat incongruous meeting-place, being herself of a more futuristic turn.
The young friend was also a young relative; one of the few relatives that he
had. Her name was Elizabeth Fane, simplified into Betty, and she was the child
of a sister who had married into a race of refined but impoverished squires. As
the squire was dead as well as impoverished, Father Brown stood in the relation
of a protector as well as a priest, and in some sense a guardian as well as an
uncle. At the moment, however, he was blinking about at the groups in the
gallery without catching sight of the familiar brown hair and bright face of
his niece. Nevertheless, he saw some people he knew and a number of people he
did not know, including some that, as a mere matter of taste, he did not much
want to know.

Among
the people the priest did not know and who yet aroused his interest was a lithe
and alert young man, very beautifully dressed and looking rather like a foreigner,
because, while his beard was cut in a spade shape like an old Spaniard’s, his
dark hair was cropped so close as to look like a tight black skull-cap. Among
the people the priest did not particularly want to know was a very
dominant-looking lady, sensationally clad in scarlet, with a mane of yellow
hair too long to be called bobbed, but too loose to be called anything else.
She had a powerful and rather heavy face of a pale and rather unwholesome complexion,
and when she looked at anybody she cultivated the fascinations of a basilisk.
She towed in attendance behind her a short man with a big beard and a very
broad face, with long sleepy slits of eyes. The expression of his face was beaming
and benevolent, if only partially awake; but his bull neck, when seen from
behind, looked a little brutal.

Father
Brown gazed at the lady, feeling that the appearance and approach of his niece would
be an agreeable contrast. Yet he continued to gaze, for some reason, until he
reached the point of feeling that the appearance of anybody would be an
agreeable contrast. It was therefore with a certain relief, though with a slight
start as of awakening, that he turned at the sound of his name and saw another
face that he knew.

It
was the sharp but not unfriendly face of a lawyer named Granby, whose patches of
grey hair might almost have been the powder from a wig, so incongruous were they
with his youthful energy of movement. He was one of those men in the City who
run about like schoolboys in and out of their offices. He could not run round
the fashionable picture gallery quite in that fashion; but he looked as if he
wanted to, and fretted as he glanced to left and right, seeking somebody he
knew.

“
I
didn’t know,” said Father Brown, smiling, “that you were a patron of the New Art.”

“
I
didn’t know that you were,” retorted the other. “I came here to catch a man.”

“
I
hope you will have good sport,” answered the priest. “I’m doing much the same.”

“
Said
he was passing through to the Continent,” snorted the solicitor, “and could I meet
him in this cranky place.” He ruminated a moment, and said abruptly: “Look here,
I know you can keep a secret. Do you know Sir John Musgrave?”

“
No,”
answered the priest; “but I should hardly have thought he was a secret, though they
say he does hide himself in a castle. Isn’t he the old man they tell all those
tales about — how he lives in a tower with a real portcullis and drawbridge,
and generally refuses to emerge from the Dark Ages? Is he one of your clients?”

“
No,”
replied Granby shortly: “it’s his son, Captain Musgrave, who has come to us. But
the old man counts for a good deal in the affair, and I don’t know him; that’s
the point. Look here, this is confidential, as I say, but I can confide in
you.“ He dropped his voice and drew his friend apart into a side gallery containing
representations of various real objects, which was comparatively empty.

“
This
young Musgrave,” he said, “wants to raise a big sum from us on a post obit on his
old father in Northumberland. The old man’s long past seventy and presumably
will obit some time or other; but what about the post, so to speak? What will
happen afterwards to his cash and castles and portcullises and all the rest?
It’s a very fine old estate, and still worth a lot, but strangely enough it
isn’t entailed. So you see how we stand. The question is, as the man said in
Dickens, is the old man friendly?”

“
If
he’s friendly to his son you’ll feel all the friendlier,” observed Father Brown.
“No, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I never met Sir John Musgrave, and I understand
very few people do meet him nowadays. But it seems obvious you have a right to
an answer on that point before you lend the young gentleman your firm’s money.
Is he the sort that people cut off with a shilling?”

“
Well,
I’m doubtful,” answered the other. “He’s very popular and brilliant and a great
figure in society; but he’s a great deal abroad, and he’s been a journalist.”

“
Well,”
said Father Brown, “that’s not a crime. At least not always.”

“
Nonsense!”
said Granby curtly. “You know what I mean — he’s rather a rolling stone, who’s been
a journalist and a lecturer and an actor, and all sorts of things. I’ve got to
know where I stand. . . . Why, there he is.”

And
the solicitor, who had been stamping impatiently about the emptier gallery, turned
suddenly and darted into the more crowded room at a run. He was running towards
the tall and well-dressed young man with the short hair and the foreign-looking
beard.

The
two walked away together talking, and for some moments afterwards Father Brown followed
them with his screwed, short-sighted eyes. His gaze was shifted and recalled,
however, by the breathless and even boisterous arrival of his niece, Betty.
Rather to the surprise of her uncle, she led him back into the emptier room and
planted him on a seat that was like an island in that sea of floor.

“
I’ve
got something I must tell you,” she said. “It’s so silly that nobody else will understand
it.”

“
You
overwhelm me,” said Father Brown. “Is it about this business your mother started
telling me about? Engagements and all that; not what the military historians
call a general engagement.”

“
You
know,” she said, “that she wants me to be engaged to Captain Musgrave.”

“
I
didn’t,” said Father Brown with resignation; “but Captain Musgrave seems to be quite
a fashionable topic.”

“
Of
course we’re very poor,” she said, “and it’s no good saying it makes no difference.”

“
Do
you want to marry him?” asked Father Brown, looking at her through his half-closed
eyes.

She
frowned at the floor, and answered in a lower tone:

“
I
thought I did. At least I think I thought I did. But I’ve just had rather a shock.”

“
Then
tell us all about it.”

“
I
heard him laugh,” she said.

“
It
is an excellent social accomplishment,” he replied.

“
You
don’t understand,” said the girl. “It wasn’t social at all. That was just the point
of it — that it wasn’t social.”

She
paused a moment, and then went on firmly: “I came here quite early, and saw him
sitting quite alone in the middle of that gallery with the new pictures, that was
quite empty then. He had no idea I or anybody was near; he was sitting quite
alone, and he laughed.”

“
Well,
no wonder,” said Father Brown. “I’m not an art critic myself, but as a general view
of the pictures taken as a whole — —”

“
Oh,
you won’t understand,” she said almost angrily. “It wasn’t a bit like that. He wasn’t
looking at the pictures. He was staring right up at the ceiling; but his eyes
seemed to be turned inwards, and he laughed so that my blood ran cold.”

The
priest had risen and was pacing the room with his hands behind him. “You mustn’t
be hasty in a case of this sort,” he began. “There are two kinds of men — but
we can hardly discuss him just now, for here he is.”

Captain
Musgrave entered the room swiftly and swept it with a smile. Granby, the lawyer,
was just behind him, and his legal face bore a new expression of relief and
satisfaction.

“
I
must apologize for everything I said about the Captain,” he said to the priest as
they drifted together towards the door. “He’s a thoroughly sensible fellow and
quite sees my point. He asked me himself why I didn’t go north and see his old
father; I could hear from the old man’s own lips how it stood about the inheritance.
Well, he couldn’t say fairer than that, could he? But he’s so anxious to get
the thing settled that he offered to take me up in his own car to Musgrave
Moss. That’s the name of the estate. I suggested that, if he was so kind, we
might go together; and we’re starting to-morrow morning.”

As
they spoke Betty and the Captain came through the doorway together, making in that
framework at least a sort of picture that some would be sentimental enough to
prefer to cones and cylinders. Whatever their other affinities, they were both very
good-looking; and the lawyer was moved to a remark on the fact, when the picture
abruptly altered.

Captain
James Musgrave looked out into the main gallery, and his laughing and triumphant
eyes were riveted on something that seemed to change him from head to foot.
Father Brown looked round as under an advancing shadow of premonition; and he
saw the lowering, almost livid face of the large woman in scarlet under its
leonine yellow hair. She always stood with a slight stoop, like a bull lowering
its horns, and the expression of her pale pasty face was so oppressive and
hypnotic that they hardly saw the little man with the large beard standing beside
her.

Musgrave
advanced into the centre of the room towards her, almost like a beautifully dressed
wax-work wound up to walk. He said a few words to her that could not be heard.
She did not answer; but they turned away together, walking down the long gallery
as if in debate, the short, bull-necked man with the beard bringing up the rear
like some grotesque goblin page.

“
Heaven
help us!” muttered Father Brown, frowning after them. “Who in the world is that
woman?”

“
No
pal of mine, I’m happy to say,” replied Granby with grim flippancy. “Looks as if
a little flirtation with her might end fatally, doesn’t it?”

“
I
don’t think he’s flirting with her,” said Father Brown.

Even
as he spoke the group in question turned at the end of the gallery and broke up,
and Captain Musgrave came back to them in hasty strides.

“
Look
here,” he cried, speaking naturally enough, though they fancied his colour was changed.
“I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Granby, but I find I can’t come north with you to-morrow.
Of course, you will take the car all the same. Please do; I shan’t want it. I —
I have to be in London for some days. Take a friend with you if you like.”

“
My
friend, Father Brown — —” began the lawyer.

“
If
Captain Musgrave is really so kind,” said Father Brown gravely. “I may explain that
I have some status in Mr. Granby’s inquiry, and it would be a great relief to
my mind if I could go.”

Which
was how it came about that a very elegant car, with an equally elegant chauffeur,
shot north the next day over the Yorkshire moors, bearing the incongruous
burden of a priest who looked rather like a black bundle, and a lawyer who had
the habit of running about on his feet instead of racing on somebody else’s
wheels.

They
broke their journey very agreeably in one of the great dales of the West Riding,
dining and sleeping at a comfortable inn, and starting early next day, began to
run along the Northumbrian coast till they reached a country that was a maze of
sand dunes and rank sea meadows, somewhere in the heart of which lay the old
Border castle which had remained so unique and yet so secretive a monument of
the old Border wars. They found it at last, by following a path running beside
a long arm of the sea that ran inland, and turned eventually into a sort of
rude canal ending in the moat of the castle. The castle really was a castle, of
the square, embattled plan that the Normans built everywhere from Galilee to
the Grampians. It did really and truly have a portcullis and a drawbridge, and
they were very realistically reminded of the fact by an accident that delayed
their entrance.

They
waded amid long coarse grass and thistle to the bank of the moat which ran in a
ribbon of black with dead leaves and scum upon it, like ebony inlaid with a pattern
of gold. Barely a yard or two beyond the black ribbon was the other green bank
and the big stone pillars of the gateway. But so little, it would seem, had
this lonely fastness been approached from outside that when the impatient
Granby halloed across to the dim figures behind the portcullis, they seemed, to
have considerable difficulty even in lowering the great rusty drawbridge. It
started on its way, turning over like a great falling tower above them, and
then stuck, sticking out in mid-air at a threatening angle.