The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (126 page)

‘
Be
it so!’ he cried. ‘I will not deceive you now, by saying I have discovered the truth.
I will only confess the truth.’

‘
Then
you can confess it to your own priest,’ said Father Brown, and strode towards the
garden gate, followed by his staring friend. Before he reached the gate, another
figure had rushed athwart him like the wind; and Dunn the gardener was shouting
at him some unintelligible derision at detectives who were running away from
their job. Then the priest ducked just in time to dodge a blow from the
horse-pistol, wielded like a club. But Dunn was just not in time to dodge a blow
from the fist of Flambeau, which was like the club of Hercules. The two left Mr
Dunn spread flat behind them on the path, and, passing out of the gate, went
out and got into their car in silence. Flambeau only asked one brief question
and Father Brown only answered: ‘Casterbury.’

At
last, after a long silence, the priest observed: ‘I could almost believe the storm
belonged only to that garden, and came out of a storm in the soul.’

‘
My
friend,’ said Flambeau. ‘I have known you a long time, and when you show certain
signs of certainty, I follow your lead. But I hope you are not going to tell me
that you took me away from that fascinating job, because you did not like the
atmosphere.’

‘
Well,
it was certainly a terrible atmosphere,’ replied Father Brown, calmly. ‘Dreadful
and passionate and oppressive. And the most dreadful thing about it was this —
that there was no hate in it at all.’

‘
Somebody,’
suggested Flambeau, ‘seems to have had a slight dislike of grandpapa.’

‘
Nobody
had any dislike of anybody,’ said Father Brown with a groan. ‘That was the dreadful
thing in that darkness. It was love.’

‘
Curious
way of expressing love — to strangle somebody and stick him with a sword,’ observed
the other.

‘
It
was love,’ repeated the priest, ‘and it filled the house with terror.’

‘
Don’t
tell me,’ protested Flambeau, ‘that that beautiful woman is in love with that spider
in spectacles.’

‘
No,’
said Father Brown and groaned again. ‘She is in love with her husband. It is ghastly.’

‘
It
is a state of things that I have often heard you recommend,’ replied Flambeau. ‘You
cannot call that lawless love.’

‘
Not
lawless in that sense,’ answered Father Brown; then he turned sharply on his elbow
and spoke with a new warmth: ‘Do you think I don’t know that the love of a man
and a woman was the first command of God and is glorious for ever? Are you one
of those idiots who think we don’t admire love and marriage? Do I need to be
told of the Garden of Eden or the wine of Cana? It is just because the strength
in the thing was the strength of God, that it rages with that awful energy even
when it breaks loose from God. When the Garden becomes a jungle, but still a
glorious jungle; when the second fermentation turns the wine of Cana into the
vinegar of Calvary. Do you think I don’t know all that?’

‘
I’m
sure you do,’ said Flambeau, ‘but I don’t yet know much about my problem of the
murder.’

‘
The
murder cannot be solved,’ said Father Brown.

‘
And
why not?’ demanded his friend.

‘
Because
there is no murder to solve,’ said Father Brown.

Flambeau
was silent with sheer surprise; and it was his friend who resumed in a quiet tone:

‘
I’ll
tell you a curious thing. I talked with that woman when she was wild with grief;
but she never said anything about the murder. She never mentioned murder, or
even alluded to murder. What she did mention repeatedly was sacrilege.’ Then,
with another jerk of verbal disconnection, he added: ‘Have you ever heard of
Tiger Tyrone?’

‘
Haven’t
I!’ cried Flambeau. ‘Why, that’s the very man who’s supposed to be after the reliquary,
and whom I’ve been commissioned specially to circumvent. He’s the most violent
and daring gangster who ever visited this country; Irish, of course, but the
sort that goes quite crazily anti-clerical. Perhaps he’s dabbled in a little
diabolism in these secret societies; anyhow, he has a macabre taste for playing
all sorts of wild tricks that look wickeder than they are. Otherwise he’s not
the wickedest; he seldom kills, and never for cruelty; but he loves doing
anything to shock people, especially his own people; robbing churches or
digging up skeletons or what not.’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown, ‘it all fits in. I ought to have seen it all long before.’

‘
I
don’t see how we could have seen anything, after only an hour’s investigation,’
said the detective defensively.

‘
I
ought to have seen it before there was anything to investigate,’ said the priest.
‘I ought to have known it before you arrived this morning.’

‘
What
on earth do you mean?’

‘
It
only shows how wrong voices sound on the telephone,’ said Father Brown reflectively.
‘I heard all three stages of the thing this morning; and I thought they were
trifles. First, a woman rang me up and asked me to go to that inn as soon as
possible. What did that mean? Of course it meant that the old grandfather was
dying. Then she rang up to say that I needn’t go, after all. What did that
mean? Of course it meant that the old grandfather was dead. He had died quite
peaceably in his bed; probably heart failure from sheer old age. And then she
rang up a third time and said I was to go, after all. What did that mean? Ah,
that is rather more interesting!’

He
went on after a moment’s pause: ‘Tiger Tyrone, whose wife worships him, took hold
of one of his mad ideas, and yet it was a crafty idea, too. He had just heard
that you were tracking him down, that you knew him and his methods and were
coming to save the reliquary; he may have heard that I have sometimes been of
some assistance. He wanted to stop us on the road; and his trick for doing it
was to stage a murder. It was a pretty horrible thing to do; but it wasn’t a murder.
Probably he bullied his wife with an air of brutal common sense, saying he
could only escape penal servitude by using a dead body that couldn’t suffer anything
from such use. Anyhow, his wife would do anything for him; but she felt all the
unnatural hideousness of that hanging masquerade; and that’s why she talked
about sacrilege. She was thinking of the desecration of the relic; but also of
the desecration of the death-bed. The brother’s one of those shoddy “scientific”
rebels who tinker with dud bombs; an idealist run to seed. But he’s devoted to
Tiger; and so is the gardener. Perhaps it’s a point in his favour that so many
people seem devoted to him.

‘
There
was one little point that set me guessing very early. Among the old books the doctor
was turning over, was a bundle of seventeeth-century pamphlets; and I caught
one title: True Declaration of the Trial and Execution of My Lord Stafford. Now
Stafford was executed in the Popish Plot business, which began with one of
history’s detective stories; the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Godfrey was
found dead in a ditch, and part of the mystery was that he had marks of
strangulation, but was also transfixed with his own sword. I thought at once
that somebody in the house might have got the idea from here. But he couldn’t
have wanted it as a way of committing a murder. He can only have wanted it as a
way of creating a mystery. Then I saw that this applied to all the other
outrageous details. They were devilish enough; but it wasn’t mere devilry;
there was a rag of excuse; because they had to make the mystery as contradictory
and complicated as possible, to make sure that we should be a long time solving
it — or rather seeing through it. So they dragged the poor old man off his
deathbed and made the corpse hop and turn cartwheels and do everything that it
couldn’t have done. They had to give us an Insoluble Problem. They swept their
own tracks off the path, leaving the broom. Fortunately we did see through it
in time.’

‘
You
saw through it in time,’ said Flambeau. ‘I might have lingered a little longer over
the second trail they left, sprinkled with assorted pills.’

‘
Well,
anyhow, we got away,’ said Father Brown, comfortably.

‘
And
that, I presume,’ said Flambeau, ‘is the reason I am driving at this rate along
the road to Casterbury.’

That
night in the monastery and church at Casterbury there were events calculated to
stagger monastic seclusion. The reliquary of St Dorothy, in a casket gorgeous with
gold and rubies, was temporarily placed in a side room near the chapel of the
monastery, to be brought in with a procession for a special service at the end
of Benediction. It was guarded for the moment by one monk, who watched it in a
tense and vigilant manner; for he and his brethren knew all about the shadow of
peril from the prowling of Tiger Tyrone. Thus it was that the monk was on his
feet in a flash, when he saw one of the low-latticed windows beginning to open
and a dark object crawling like a black serpent through the crack. Rushing across,
he gripped it and found it was the arm and sleeve of a man, terminating with a
handsome cuff and a smart dark-grey glove. Laying hold of it, he shouted for
help, and even as he did so, a man darted into the room through the door behind
his back and snatched the casket he had left behind him on the table. Almost at
the same instant, the arm wedged in the window came away in his hand, and he
stood holding the stuffed limb of a dummy.

Tiger
Tyrone had played that trick before, but to the monk it was a novelty. Fortunately,
there was at least one person to whom the Tiger’s tricks were not a novelty;
and that person appeared with militant moustaches, gigantically framed in the doorway,
at the very moment when the Tiger turned to escape by it. Flambeau and Tiger
Tyrone looked at each other with steady eyes and exchanged something that was
almost like a military salute.

Meanwhile
Father Brown had slipped into the chapel, to say a prayer for several persons involved
in these unseemly events. But he was rather smiling than otherwise, and, to
tell the truth, he was not by any means hopeless about Mr Tyrone and his
deplorable family; but rather more hopeful than he was for many more respectable
people. Then his thoughts widened with the grander perspectives of the place
and the occasion. Against black and green marbles at the end of the rather
rococo chapel, the dark-red vestments of the festival of a martyr were in their
turn a background for a fierier red; a red like red-hot coals; the rubies of
the reliquary; the roses of St Dorothy. And he had again a thought to throw
back to the strange events of that day, and the woman who had shuddered at the
sacrilege she had helped. After all, he thought, St Dorothy also had a Pagan
lover; but he had not dominated her or destroyed her faith. She had died free
and for the truth; and then had sent him roses from Paradise.

He
raised his eyes and saw through the veil of incense smoke and of twinkling lights
that Benediction was drawing to its end while the procession waited. The sense
of accumulated riches of time and tradition pressed past him like a crowd moving
in rank after rank, through unending centuries; and high above them all, like a
garland of unfading flames, like the sun of our mortal midnight, the great
monstrance blazed against the darkness of the vaulted shadows, as it blazed
against the black enigma of the universe. For some are convinced that this
enigma also is an Insoluble Problem. And others have equal certitude that it
has but one solution.

At
the twist of a path in the hills, where two poplars stood up like pyramids dwarfing
the tiny village of Potter’s Pond, a mere huddle of houses, there once walked a
man in a costume of a very conspicuous cut and colour, wearing a vivid magenta
coat and a white hat tilted upon black ambrosial curls, which ended with a sort
of Byronic flourish of whisker.

The
riddle of why he was wearing clothes of such fantastic antiquity, yet wearing them
with an air of fashion and even swagger, was but one of the many riddles that
were eventually solved in solving the mystery of his fate. The point here is
that when he had passed the poplars he seemed to have vanished; as if he had faded
into the wan and widening dawn or been blown away upon the wind of morning.

It
was only about a week afterwards that his body was found a quarter of a mile away,
broken upon the steep rockeries of a terraced garden leading up to a gaunt and
shuttered house called The Grange. Just before he had vanished, he had been
accidentally overheard apparently quarrelling with some bystanders, and
especially abusing their village as ‘a wretched little hamlet’; and it was supposed
that he had aroused some extreme passions of local patriotism and eventually
been their victim. At least the local doctor testified that the skull had
suffered a crushing blow that might have caused death, though probably only
inflicted with some sort of club or cudgel. This fitted in well enough with the
notion of an attack by rather savage yokels. But nobody ever found any means of
tracing any particular yokel; and the inquest returned a verdict of murder by
some persons unknown.

A
year or two afterwards the question was re-opened in a curious way; a series of
events which led a certain Dr Mulborough, called by his intimates Mulberry in
apt allusion to something rich and fruity about his dark rotundity and rather empurpled
visage, travelling by train down to Potter’s Pond, with a friend whom he had
often consulted upon problems of the kind. In spite of the somewhat port-winy
and ponderous exterior of the doctor, he had a shrewd eye and was really a man
of very remarkable sense; which he considered that he showed in consulting a
little priest named Brown, whose acquaintance he had made over a poisoning case
long ago. The little priest was sitting opposite to him, with the air of a
patient baby absorbing instruction; and the doctor was explaining at length the
real reasons for the journey.

‘
I
cannot agree with the gentleman in the magenta coat that Potter’s Pond is only a
wretched little hamlet. But it is certainly a very remote and secluded village;
so that it seems quite outlandish, like a village of a hundred years ago. The
spinsters are really spinsters — damn it, you could almost imagine you saw them
spin. The ladies are not just ladies. They are gentlewomen; and their chemist
is not a chemist, but an apothecary; pronounced potecary. They do just admit
the existence of an ordinary doctor like myself to assist the apothecary. But I
am considered rather a juvenile innovation, because I am only fifty-seven years
old and have only been in the county for twenty-eight years. The solicitor
looks as if he had known it for twenty-eight thousand years. Then there is the
old Admiral, who is just like a Dickens illustration; with a house full of
cutlasses and cuttle-fish and equipped with a telescope.’

‘
I
suppose,’ said Father Brown, ‘there are always a certain number of Admirals washed
up on the shore. But I never understood why they get stranded so far inland.’

‘
Certainly
no dead-alive place in the depths of the country is complete without one of these
little creatures,’ said the doctor. ‘And then, of course, there is the proper
sort of clergyman; Tory and High Church in a dusty fashion dating from Archbishop
Laud; more of an old woman than any of the old women. He’s a white-haired
studious old bird, more easily shocked than the spinsters. Indeed, the
gentlewomen, though Puritan in their principles, are sometimes pretty plain in
their speech; as the real Puritans were. Once or twice I have known old Miss Carstairs-Carew
use expressions as lively as anything in the Bible. The dear old clergyman is
assiduous in reading the Bible; but I almost fancy he shuts his eyes when he
comes to those words. Well, you know I’m not particularly modern. I don’t enjoy
this jazzing and joy-riding of the Bright Young Things — ’

‘
The
Bright Young Things don’t enjoy it,’ said Father Brown. ‘That is the real tragedy.’

‘
But
I am naturally rather more in touch with the world than the people in this prehistoric
village,’ pursued the doctor. ‘And I had reached a point when I almost welcomed
the Great Scandal.’

‘
Don’t
say the Bright Young Things have found Potter’s Pond after all,’ observed the priest,
smiling.

‘
Oh,
even our scandal is on old-established melodramatic lines. Need I say that the clergyman’s
son promises to be our problem? It would be almost irregular, if the
clergyman’s son were quite regular. So far as I can see, he is very mildly and
almost feebly irregular. He was first seen drinking ale outside the Blue Lion.
Only it seems he is a poet, which in those parts is next door to being a poacher.’

‘
Surely,’
said Father Brown, ‘even in Potter’s Pond that cannot be the Great Scandal.’

‘
No,’
replied the doctor gravely. ‘The Great Scandal began thus. In the house called The
Grange, situated at the extreme end of The Grove, there lives a lady. A Lonely
Lady. She calls herself Mrs Maltravers (that is how we put it); but she only
came a year or two ago and nobody knows anything about her. “I can’t think why
she wants to live here,” said Miss Carstairs-Carew; “we do not visit her.”’

‘
Perhaps
that’s why she wants to live there,’ said Father Brown.

‘
Well,
her seclusion is considered suspicious. She annoys them by being good-looking and
even what is called good style. And all the young men are warned against her as
a vamp.’

‘
People
who lose all their charity generally lose all their logic,’ remarked Father Brown.
‘It’s rather ridiculous to complain that she keeps to herself; and then accuse
her of vamping the whole male population.’

‘
That
is true,’ said the doctor. ‘And yet she is really rather a puzzling person. I saw
her and found her intriguing; one of those brown women, long and elegant and
beautifully ugly, if you know what I mean. She is rather witty, and though young
enough certainly gives me an impression of what they call — well, experience.
What the old ladies call a Past.’

‘
All
the old ladies having been born this very minute,’ observed Father Brown. ‘I think
I can assume she is supposed to have vamped the parson’s son.’

‘
Yes,
and it seems to be a very awful problem to the poor old parson. She is supposed
to be a widow.’

Father
Brown’s face had a flash and spasm of his rare irritation. ‘She is supposed to be
a widow, as the parson’s son is supposed to be the parson’s son, and the solicitor
is supposed to be a solicitor and you are supposed to be a doctor. Why in
thunder shouldn’t she be a widow? Have they one speck of prima facie evidence
for doubting that she is what she says she is?’

Dr
Mulborough abruptly squared his broad shoulders and sat up. ‘Of course you’re right
again,’ he said. ‘But we haven’t come to the scandal yet. Well, the scandal is
that she is a widow.’

‘
Oh,’
said Father Brown; and his face altered and he said something soft and faint, that
might almost have been ‘My God!’

‘
First
of all,’ said the doctor, ‘they have made one discovery about Mrs Maltravers. She
is an actress.’

‘
I
fancied so,’ said Father Brown. ‘Never mind why. I had another fancy about her,
that would seem even more irrelevant.’

‘
Well,
at that instant it was scandal enough that she was an actress. The dear old clergyman
of course is heartbroken, to think that his white hairs should be brought in
sorrow to the grave by an actress and adventuress. The spinsters shriek in
chorus. The Admiral admits he has sometimes been to a theatre in town; but
objects to such things in what he calls “our midst”. Well, of course I’ve no particular
objections of that kind. This actress is certainly a lady, if a bit of a Dark
Lady, in the manner of the Sonnets; the young man is very much in love with
her; and I am no doubt a sentimental old fool in having a sneaking sympathy
with the misguided youth who is sneaking round the Moated Grange; and I was
getting into quite a pastoral frame of mind about this idyll, when suddenly the
thunderbolt fell. And I, who am the only person who ever had any sympathy with
these people, am sent down to be the messenger of doom.’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown, ‘and why were you sent down?’

The
doctor answered with a sort of groan:

‘
Mrs
Maltravers is not only a widow, but she is the widow of Mr Maltravers.’

‘
It
sounds like a shocking revelation, as you state it,’ acknowledged the priest seriously.

‘
And
Mr Maltravers,’ continued his medical friend, ‘was the man who was apparently murdered
in this very village a year or two ago; supposed to have been bashed on the
head by one of the simple villagers.’

‘
I
remember you told me,’ said Father Brown. ‘The doctor, or some doctor, said he had
probably died of being clubbed on the head with a cudgel.’

Dr
Mulborough was silent for a moment in frowning embarrassment, and then said curtly:

‘
Dog
doesn’t eat dog, and doctors don’t bite doctors, not even when they are mad doctors.
I shouldn’t care to cast any reflection on my eminent predecessor in Potter’s
Pond, if I could avoid it; but I know you are really safe for secrets. And,
speaking in confidence, my eminent predecessor at Potter’s Pond was a blasted
fool; a drunken old humbug and absolutely incompetent. I was asked, originally
by the Chief Constable of the County (for I’ve lived a long time in the county,
though only recently in the village), to look into the whole business; the depositions
and reports of the inquest and so on. And there simply isn’t any question about
it. Maltravers may have been hit on the head; he was a strolling actor passing
through the place; and Potter’s Pond probably thinks it is all in the natural
order that such people should be hit on the head. But whoever hit him on the
head did not kill him; it is simply impossible for the injury, as described, to
do more than knock him out for a few hours. But lately I have managed to turn
up some other facts bearing on the matter; and the result of it is pretty
grim.’

He
sat louring at the landscape as it slid past the window, and then said more
curtly: ‘I am coming down here, and asking your help, because there’s going to
be an exhumation. There is very strong suspicion of poison.’

‘
And
here we are at the station,’ said Father Brown cheerfully. ‘I suppose your idea
is that poisoning the poor man would naturally fall among the household duties of
his wife.’

‘
Well,
there never seems to have been anyone else here who had any particular connection
with him,’ replied Mulborough, as they alighted from the train. ‘At least there
is one queer old crony of his, a broken-down actor, hanging around; but the
police and the local solicitor seem convinced he is an unbalanced busybody;
with some idee fixe about a quarrel with an actor who was his enemy; but who
certainly wasn’t Maltravers. A wandering accident, I should say, and certainly
nothing to do with the problem of the poison.’

Father
Brown had heard the story. But he knew that he never knew a story until he knew
the characters in the story. He spent the next two or three days in going the rounds,
on one polite excuse or another, to visit the chief actors of the drama. His
first interview with the mysterious widow was brief but bright. He brought away
from it at least two facts; one that Mrs Maltravers sometimes talked in a way
which the Victorian village would call cynical; and, second, that like not a
few actresses, she happened to belong to his own religious communion.

He
was not so illogical (nor so unorthodox) as to infer from this alone that she was
innocent of the alleged crime. He was well aware that his old religious communion
could boast of several distinguished poisoners. But he had no difficulty in
understanding its connection, in this sort of case, with a certain intellectual
liberty which these Puritans would call laxity; and which would certainly seem
to this parochial patch of an older England to be almost cosmopolitan. Anyhow,
he was sure she could count for a great deal, whether for good or evil. Her
brown eyes were brave to the point of battle, and her enigmatic mouth, humorous
and rather large, suggested that her purposes touching the parson’s poetical
son, whatever they might be, were planted pretty deep.

The
parson’s poetical son himself, interviewed amid vast village scandal on a bench
outside the Blue Lion, gave an impression of pure sulks. Hurrel Horner, a son of
the Rev. Samuel Horner, was a square-built young man in a pale grey suit with a
touch of something arty in a pale green tie, otherwise mainly notable for a
mane of auburn hair and a permanent scowl. But Father Brown had a way with him
in getting people to explain at considerable length why they refused to say a
single word. About the general scandalmongering in the village, the young man began
to curse freely. He even added a little scandalmongering of his own. He referred
bitterly to alleged past flirtations between the Puritan Miss Carstairs-Carew
and Mr Carver the solicitor. He even accused that legal character of having
attempted to force himself upon the acquaintance of Mrs Maltravers. But when he
came to speak of his own father, whether out of an acid decency or piety, or
because his anger was too deep for speech, he snapped out only a few words.