His voice was lost, as he ran on across the wide lawn, faint

THE SECRET OF

FATHER BROWN.

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD

London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney

First Published in 1927

To

FATHER JOHN O'CONNOR

OF ST. CUTHBERT'S, BRADFORD

WHOSE TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION

WITH A GRATITUDE GREATER THAN

THE WORLD

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN

1. THE MIRROR OF THE MAGISTRATE

2. THE MAN WITH TWO BEARDS

3. THE SONG OF THE FLYING FISH

4. THE ACTOR AND THE ALIBI

5. THE VANISHING OF VAUDREY

6. THE WORST CRIME IN THE WORLD

7. THE RED MOON OF MERU

8. THE CHIEF MOURNER OF MARNE

THE SECRET OF FLAMBEAU

THE

SECRET OF FATHER BROWN

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

_nom 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 Lecocq, 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 psychology----"

Father Brown rapped sharply on the stove with the short pipe he was

about to fill; one or 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."

"I'm afraid," said the American, in tones that were still doubtful, and

keeping his eye on the priest rather as if he were a wild animal, "that

you'd have to explain a lot to me before I knew what you were talking

about. The science of detection----"

Father Brown snapped his fingers with the same animated annoyance.

"That's it," he cried; "that's just where we part company. Science is a

grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest

words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out often,

when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When

they say criminology is a science? They mean getting _outside_ a man and

studying him as if he were a gigantic insect: in what they would call a

dry impartial light, in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light.

They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant

prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his 'criminal skull' as if

it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros's nose.

When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but

always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don't deny the

dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it's the very

reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it's actually

suppression of what we know. It's treating a friend as a stranger, and

pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It's

like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he

falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours. Well,

what you call 'the secret' is exactly the opposite. I don't try to get

outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer.... Indeed it's

much more than that, don't you see? I _am_ inside a man. I am always

inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am

inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions;

till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering

hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes,

looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking

up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of

blood. Till I am really a murderer."

"Oh," said Mr. Chace, regarding him with a long, grim face, and added:

"And that is what you call a religious exercise."

"Yes," said Father Brown; "that is what I call a religious exercise."

After an instant's silence he resumed: "It's so real a religious

exercise that I'd rather not have said anything about it. But I simply

couldn't have you going off and telling all your countrymen that I had a

secret magic connected with Thought-Forms, could I? I've put it badly,

but it's true. No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or

might be; till he's realized exactly how much right he has to all this

snobbery, and sneering, and talking about 'criminals,' as if they were

apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the

dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls;

till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the

Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one

criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."

Flambeau came forward and filled a great goblet with Spanish wine and

set it before his friend, as he had already set one before his fellow

guest. Then he himself spoke for the first time:

"I believe Father Brown has had a new batch of mysteries. We were

talking about them the other day, I fancy. He has been dealing with some

queer people since we last met."

"Yes; I know the stories more or less--but not the application," said

Chace, lifting his glass thoughtfully. "Can you give me any examples, I

wonder.... I mean, did you deal with this last batch in that

introspective style?"

Father Brown also lifted his glass, and the glow of the fire turned the

red wine transparent, like the glorious blood-red glass of a martyr's

window. The red flame seemed to hold his eyes and absorb his gaze that

sank deeper and deeper into it, as if that single cup held a red sea of

the blood of all men, and his soul were a diver, ever plunging in dark

humility and inverted imagination, lower than its lowest monsters and

its most ancient slime. In that cup, as in a red mirror, he saw many

things; the doings of his last days moved in crimson shadows; the

examples that his companions demanded danced in symbolic shapes; and

there passed before him all the stories that are told here. Now, the

luminous wine was like a vast red sunset upon dark red sands, where

stood dark figures of men; one was fallen and another running towards

him. Then the sunset seemed to break up into patches: red lanterns

swinging from garden trees and a pond gleaming red with reflection; and

then all the colour seemed to cluster again into a great rose of red

crystal, a jewel that irradiated the world like a red sun, save for the

shadow of a tall figure with a high head-dress as of some prehistoric

priest; and then faded again till nothing was left but a flame of wild

red beard blowing in the wind upon a wild grey moor. All these things,

which may be seen later from other angles and in other moods than his

own, rose up in his memory at the challenge and began to form themselves

into anecdotes and arguments.

"Yes," he said, as he raised the wine cup slowly to his lips, "I can

remember pretty well----"

II

THE MIRROR OF THE MAGISTRATE

JAMES BAGSHAW and Wilfred Underhill were old friends,

and were fond of rambling through the streets at night, talking

interminably as they turned corner after corner in the silent and

seemingly lifeless labyrinth of the large suburb in which they lived.

The former, a big, dark, good-humoured man with a strip of black

moustache, was a professional police detective; the latter, a

sharp-faced, sensitive-looking gentleman with light hair, was an

amateur interested in detection. It will come as a shock to the readers

of the best scientific romance to learn that it was the policeman who

was talking and the amateur who was listening, even with a certain

respect.

"Ours is the only trade," said Bagshaw, "in which the professional is

always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don't write stories in

which hairdressers can't cut hair and have to be helped by a customer;

or in which a cabman can't drive a cab until his fare explains to him

the philosophy of cab-driving. For all that, I'd never deny that we

often tend to get into a rut: or, in other words, have the disadvantages

of going by a rule. Where the romancers are wrong is, that they don't

allow us even the advantages of going by a rule."

"Surely," said Underhill, "Sherlock Holmes would say that he went by a

logical rule."

"He may be right," answered the other; "but I mean a collective rule.

It's like the staff work of an army. We pool our information."

"And you don't think detective stories allow for that?" asked his

friend.

"Well, let's take any imaginary case of Sherlock Holmes, and Lestrade,

the official detective. Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a

total stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely because he

seems to look for the traffic to go to the right instead of the left.

I'm quite ready to admit Holmes might guess that. I'm quite sure

Lestrade wouldn't guess anything of the kind. But what they leave out is

the fact that the policeman, who couldn't guess, might very probably

know. Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner merely because his

department has to keep an eye on all foreigners; some would say on all

natives, too. As a policeman I'm glad the police know so much; for every

man wants to do his own job well. But as a citizen, I sometimes wonder

whether they don't know too much."

"You don't seriously mean to say," cried Underhill incredulously, "that

you know anything about strange people in a strange street. That if a

man walked out of that house over there, you would know anything about

him?"

"I should if he was the householder," answered Bagshaw. "That house is

rented by a literary man of Anglo-Roumanian extraction, who generally

lives in Paris, but is over here in connexion with some poetical play of

his. His name's Osric Orm, one of the new poets, and pretty steep to

read, I believe."

"But I mean all the people down the road," said his companion. "I was

thinking how strange and new and nameless everything looks, with these

high blank walls and these houses lost in large gardens. You can't know

all of them."

"I know a few," answered Bagshaw. "This garden wall we're walking under

is at the end of the grounds of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, better known as Mr.

Justice Gwynne, the old judge who made such a row about spying during

the war. The house next door to it belongs to a wealthy cigar merchant.

He comes from Spanish-America and looks very swarthy and Spanish

himself; but he bears the very English name of Buller. The house beyond

that--did you hear that noise?"

"I heard something," said Underhill, "but I really don't know what it

was."

"I know what it was," replied the detective, "it was a rather heavy

revolver, fired twice, followed by a cry for help. And it came straight

out of the back garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne, that paradise of peace and

legality."

He looked up and down the street sharply and then added:

"And the only gate of the back garden is half a mile round on the other

side. I wish this wall were a little lower, or I were a little lighter;

but it's got to be tried."

"It is lower a little farther on," said Underhill, "and there seems to

be a tree that looks helpful."

They moved hastily along and found a place where the wall seemed to

stoop abruptly, almost as if it had half-sunk into the earth; and a

garden tree, flamboyant with the gayest garden blossom, straggled out of

the dark enclosure and was gilded by the gleam of a solitary street-lamp.

Bagshaw caught the crooked branch and threw one leg over the low

wall; and the next moment they stood knee-deep amid the snapping plants

of a garden border.

The garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne by night was rather a singular

spectacle. It was large and lay on the empty edge of the suburb, in the

shadow of a tall, dark house that was the last in its line of houses.

The house was literally dark, being shuttered and unlighted, at least on

the side overlooking the garden. But the garden itself, which lay in its

shadow: and should have been a tract of absolute darkness, showed a

random glitter, like that of fading fireworks; as if a giant rocket had

fallen in fire among the trees. As they advanced they were able to

locate it as the light of several coloured lamps, entangled in the trees

like the jewel fruits of Aladdin, and especially as the light from a

small, round lake or pond, which gleamed, with pale colours as if a lamp

were kindled under it.

"Is he having a party?" asked Underhill. "The garden seems to be

illuminated."

"No," answered Bagshaw. "It's a hobby of his, and I believe he prefers

to do it when he's alone. He likes playing with a little plant of

electricity that he works from that bungalow or hut over there, where he

does his work and keeps his papers. Buller, who knows him very well,

says the coloured lamps are rather more often a sign he's not to be

disturbed."

"Sort of red danger signals," suggested the other.

"Good Lord! I'm afraid they are danger signals!" and he began suddenly

to run.

A moment after Underhill saw what he had seen. The opalescent ring of

light, like the halo of the moon, round the sloping sides of the pond,

was broken by two black stripes or streaks which soon proved themselves

to be the long, black legs of a figure fallen head downwards into the

hollow, with the head in the pond.

"Come on," cried the detective sharply, "that looks to me like----"

His voice was lost, as he ran on across the wide lawn, faintly luminous

in the artificial light, making a bee-line across the big garden for the

pool and the fallen figure. Underhill was trotting steadily in that

straight track, when something happened that startled him for the

moment. Bagshaw, who was travelling as steadily as a bullet towards the

black figure by the luminous pool, suddenly turned at a sharp angle and

began to run even more rapidly towards the shadow of the house.

Underhill could not imagine what he meant by the altered direction. The

next moment, when the detective had vanished into the shadow of the

house, there came out of that obscurity the sound of a scuffle and a

curse; and Bagshaw returned lugging with him a little struggling man

with red hair. The captive had evidently been escaping under the shelter

of the building, when the quicker ears of the detective had heard him

rustling like a bird among the bushes.

"Underhill," said the detective, "I wish you'd run on and see what's up

by the pool. And now, who are you?" he asked, coming to a halt. "What's

your name?"

"Michael Flood," said the stranger in a snappy fashion. He was an

unnaturally lean little man, with a hooked nose too large for his face,

which was colourless, like parchment, in contrast with the ginger colour

of his hair. "I've got nothing to do with this. I found him lying dead

and I was scared; but I only came to interview him for a paper."

"When you interview celebrities for the Press," said Bagshaw, "do you

generally climb over the garden wall?"

And he pointed grimly to a trail of footprints coming and going along

the path towards the flower bed.

The man calling himself Flood wore an expression equally grim.

"An interviewer might very well get over the wall," he said, "for I

couldn't make anybody hear at the front door. The servant had gone out."

"How do you know he'd gone out?" asked the detective suspiciously.

"Because," said Flood, with an almost unnatural calm, "I'm not the only

person who gets over garden walls. It seems just possible that you did

it yourself. But, anyhow, the servant did; for I've just this moment

seen him drop over the wall, away on the other side of the garden, just

by the garden door."

"Then why didn't he use the garden door?" demanded the cross-examiner.

"How should I know?" retorted Flood. "Because it was shut, I suppose.

But you'd better ask him, not me; he's coming towards the house at this

minute."

There was, indeed, another shadowy figure beginning to be visible

through the fire-shot gloaming, a squat, square-headed figure, wearing a

red waistcoat as the most conspicuous part of a rather shabby livery. He

appeared to be making with unobtrusive haste towards a side-door in the

house, until Bagshaw halloed to him to halt. He drew nearer to them very

reluctantly, revealing a heavy, yellow face, with a touch of something

Asiatic which was consonant with his flat, blue-black hair.

Bagshaw turned abruptly to the man called Flood. "Is there anybody in

this place," he said, "who can testify to your identity?"

"Not many, even in this country," growled Flood. "I've only just come

from Ireland; the only man I know round here is the priest at St.

Dominic's Church--Father Brown."

"Neither of you must leave this place," said Bagshaw, and then added to

the servant: "But you can go into the house and ring up St. Dominic's

Presbytery and ask Father Brown if he would mind coming round here at

once. No tricks, mind."

While the energetic detective was securing the potential fugitives, his

companion, at his direction, had hastened on to the actual scene of the

tragedy. It was a strange enough scene; and, indeed, if the tragedy had

not been tragic it would have been highly fantastic. The dead man (for

the briefest examination proved him to be dead) lay with his head in the

pond, where the glow of the artificial illumination encircled the head

with something of the appearance of an unholy halo. The face was gaunt

and rather sinister, the brow bald, and the scanty curls dark grey, like

iron rings; and, despite the damage done by the bullet wound in the

temple, Underhill had no difficulty in recognizing the features he had

seen in the many portraits of Sir Humphrey Gwynne. The dead man was in

evening-dress, and his long, black legs, so thin as to be almost

spidery, were sprawling at different angles up the steep bank from which

he had fallen. As by some weird whim of diabolical arabesque, blood was

eddying out, very slowly, into the luminous water in snaky rings, like

the transparent crimson of sunset clouds.

Underhill did not know how long he stood staring down at this macabre

figure, when he looked up and saw a group of four figures standing above

him on the bank. He was prepared for Bagshaw and his Irish captive, and

he had no difficulty in guessing the status of the servant in the red

waistcoat. But the fourth figure had a sort of grotesque solemnity that

seemed strangely congruous to that incongruity. It was a stumpy figure

with a round face and a hat like a black halo. He realized that it was,

in fact, a priest; but there was something about it that reminded him of

some quaint old black woodcut at the end of a Dance of Death.

Then he heard Bagshaw saying to the priest:

"I'm glad you can identify this man; but you must realize that he's to

some extent under suspicion. Of course, he may be innocent; but he did

enter the garden in an irregular fashion."

"Well, I think he's innocent myself," said the little priest in a

colourless voice. "But, of course, I may be wrong."

"Why do you think he is innocent?"

"Because he entered the garden in an irregular fashion," answered the

cleric. "You see, I entered it in a regular fashion myself. But I seem

to be almost the only person who did. All the best people seem to get

over garden walls nowadays."

"What do you mean by a regular fashion?" asked the detective.

"Well," said Father Brown, looking at him with limpid gravity, "I came

in by the front door. I often come into houses that way."

"Excuse me," said Bagshaw, "but does it matter very much how you came

in, unless you propose to confess to the murder?"

"Yes, I think it does," said the priest mildly. "The truth is, that when

I came in at the front door I saw something I don't think any of the

rest of you have seen. It seems to me it might have something to do with

it."

"What did you see?"

"I saw a sort of general smash-up," said Father Brown in his mild voice.

"A big looking-glass broken, and a small palm tree knocked over, and the

pot smashed all over the floor. Somehow, it looked to me as if something

had happened."

"You are right," said Bagshaw after a pause. "If you saw that, it

certainly looks as if it had something to do with it."

"And if it had anything to do with it," said the priest very gently, "it

looks as if there was one person who had nothing to do with it; and that

is Mr. Michael Flood, who entered the garden over the wall in an

irregular fashion, and then tried to leave it in the same irregular

fashion. It is his irregularity that makes me believe in his innocence."

"Let us go into the house," said Bagshaw abruptly.

As they passed in at the side-door, the servant leading the way, Bagshaw

fell back a pace or two and spoke to his friend.

"Something odd about that servant," he said. "Says his name is Green,

though he doesn't look it; but there seems no doubt he's really Gwynne's

servant, apparently the only regular servant he had. But the queer thing

is, that he flatly denied that his master was in the garden at all, dead

or alive. Said the old judge had gone out to a grand legal dinner and

couldn't be home for hours, and gave that as his excuse for slipping

out."

"Did he," asked Underhill, "give any excuse for his curious way of

slipping in?"

"No, none that I can make sense of," answered the detective. "I can't

make him out. He seems to be scared of something."

Entering by the side-door, they found themselves at the inner end of the

entrance hall, which ran along the side of the house and ended with the

front door, surmounted by a dreary fanlight of the old-fashioned

pattern. A faint, grey light was beginning to outline its radiation upon

the darkness, like some dismal and discoloured sunrise; but what light

there was in the hall came from a single, shaded lamp, also of an

antiquated sort, that stood on a bracket in a corner. By the light of

this Bagshaw could distinguish the debris of which Brown had spoken. A

tall palm, with long sweeping leaves, had fallen full length, and its

dark red pot was shattered into shards. They lay littered on the carpet,

along with pale and gleaming fragments of a broken mirror, of which the

almost empty frame hung behind them on the wall at the end of the

vestibule. At right angles to this entrance, and directly opposite the

side-door as they entered, was another and similar passage leading into

the rest of the house. At the other end of it could be seen the

telephone which the servant had used to summon the priest; and a half-open

door, showing, even through the crack, the serried ranks of great

leather-bound books, marked the entrance to the judge's study.

Bagshaw stood looking down at the fallen pot and the mingled fragments

at his feet.

"You're quite right," he said to the priest; "there's been a struggle

here. And it must have been a struggle between Gwynne and his murderer."

"It seemed to me," said Father Brown modestly, "that something had

happened here."

"Yes; it's pretty clear what happened," assented the detective. "The

murderer entered by the front door and found Gwynne; probably Gwynne let

him in. There was a death grapple, possibly a chance shot, that hit the

glass, though they might have broken it with a stray kick or anything.

Gwynne managed to free himself and fled into the garden, where he was

pursued and shot finally by the pond. I fancy that's the whole story of

the crime itself; but, of course, I must look round the other rooms."

The other rooms, however, revealed very little, though Bagshaw pointed

significantly to the loaded automatic pistol that he found in a drawer

of the library desk.

"Looks as if he was expecting this," he said; "yet it seems queer he

didn't take it with him when he went out into the hall."

Eventually they returned to the hall, making their way towards the front

door. Father Brown letting his eye rove around in a rather absent-minded

fashion. The two corridors, monotonously papered in the same grey

and faded pattern, seemed to emphasize the dust and dingy floridity of

the few early Victorian ornaments, the green rust that devoured the

bronze of the lamp, the dull gold that glimmered in the frame of the

broken mirror.

"They say it's bad luck to break a looking-glass," he said. "This looks

like the very house of ill-luck. There's something about the very

furniture----"

"That's rather odd," said Bagshaw sharply. "I thought the front door

would be shut, but it's left on the latch."

There was no reply; and they passed out of the front door into the front

garden, a narrower and more formal plot of flowers, having at one end a

curiously clipped hedge with a hole in it, like a green cave, under the

shadow of which some broken steps peeped out.

Father Brown strolled up to the hole and ducked his head under it. A few

moments after he had disappeared they were astonished to hear his quiet

voice in conversation above their heads, as if he were talking to

somebody at the top of a tree. The detective followed, and found that

the curious covered stairway led to what looked like a broken bridge,

over-hanging the darker and emptier spaces of the garden. It just curled

round the corner of the house, bringing in sight the field of coloured

lights beyond and beneath. Probably it was the relic of some abandoned

architectural fancy of building a sort of terrace on arches across the

lawn. Bagshaw thought it a curious cul-de-sac in which to find anybody

in the small hours between night and morning; but he was not looking at

the details of it just then. He was looking at the man who was found.

As the man stood with his back turned, a small man in light grey

clothes, the one outstanding feature about him was a wonderful head of

hair, as yellow and radiant as the head of a huge dandelion. It was

literally outstanding like a halo, and something in that association

made the face, when it was slowly and sulkily turned on them, rather a

shock of contrast. That halo should have enclosed an oval face of the

mildly angelic sort; but the face was crabbed and elderly with a

powerful jowl and a short nose that somehow suggested the broken nose of

a pugilist.

"This is Mr. Orm, the celebrated poet, I understand," said Father Brown,

as calmly as if he were introducing two people in a drawing-room.

"Whoever he is," said Bagshaw, "I must trouble him to come with me and

answer a few questions."

Mr. Osric Orm, the poet, was not a model of self-expression when it came

to the answering of questions. There, in that corner of the old garden,

as the grey twilight before dawn began to creep over the heavy hedges

and the broken bridge, and afterwards in a succession of circumstances

and stages of legal inquiry that grew more and more ominous, he refused

to say anything except that he had intended to call on Sir Humphrey

Gwynne, but had not done so because he could not get anyone to answer

the bell. When it was pointed out that the door was practically open, he

snorted. When it was hinted that the hour was somewhat late, he snarled.

The little that he said was obscure, either because he really knew

hardly any English, or because he knew better than to know any. His

opinions seemed to be of a nihilistic and destructive sort, as was

indeed the tendency of his poetry for those who could follow it; and it

seemed possible that his business with the judge, and perhaps his

quarrel with the judge, had been something in the anarchist line. Gwynne

was known to have had something of a mania about Bolshevist spies, as he

had about German spies. Anyhow, one coincidence, only a few moments

after his capture, confirmed Bagshaw in the impression that the case

must be taken seriously. As they went out of the front gate into the

street, they so happened to encounter yet another neighbour, Buller, the

cigar merchant from next door, conspicuous by his brown, shrewd face and

the unique orchid in his buttonhole; for he had a name in that branch of

horticulture. Rather to the surprise of the rest, he hailed his

neighbour, the poet, in a matter-of-fact manner, almost as if he had

expected to see him.

"Hallo, here we are again," he said. "Had a long talk with old Gwynne, I

suppose?"

"Sir Humphrey Gwynne is dead," said Bagshaw. "I am investigating the

case and I must ask you to explain."

Buller stood as still as the lamp-post beside him, possibly stiffened

with surprise. The red end of his cigar brightened and darkened

rhythmically, but his brown face was in shadow; when he spoke it was

with quite a new voice.

"I only mean," he said, "that when I passed two hours ago Mr. Orm was

going in at this gate to see Sir Humphrey."

"He says he hasn't seen him yet," observed Bagshaw, "or even been into

the house."

"It's a long time to stand on the door-step," observed Buller.

"Yes," said Father Brown; "it's rather a long time to stand in the

street."

"I've been home since then," said the cigar merchant. "Been writing

letters and came out again to post them."

"You'll have to tell all that later," said Bagshaw. "Good night--or

good morning."

The trial of Osric Orm for the murder of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, which

filled the newspapers for so many weeks, really turned entirely on the

same crux as that little talk under the lamp-post, when the grey-green

dawn was breaking about the dark streets and gardens. Everything came

back to the enigma of those two empty hours between the time when Buller

saw Orm going in at the garden gate, and the time when Father Brown

found him apparently still lingering in the garden. He had certainly had

the time to commit six murders, and might almost have committed them for

want of something to do; for he could give no coherent account of what

he was doing. It was argued by the prosecution that he had also the

opportunity, as the front door was unlatched, and the side-door into the

larger garden left standing open. The court followed, with considerable

interest, Bagshaw's clear reconstruction of the struggle in the passage,

of which the traces were so evident; indeed, the police had since found

the shot that had shattered the glass. Finally, the hole in the hedge to

which he had been tracked, had very much the appearance of a

hiding-place. On the other hand. Sir Matthew Blake, the very able

counsel for the defence, turned this last argument the other way: asking

why any man should entrap himself in a place without possible exit, when

it would obviously be much more sensible to slip out into the street.

Sir Matthew Blake also made effective use of the mystery that still

rested upon the motive for the murder. Indeed, upon this point, the

passages between Sir Matthew Blake and Sir Arthur Travers, the equally

brilliant advocate for the prosecution, turned rather to the advantage

of the prisoner. Sir Arthur could only throw out suggestions about a

Bolshevist conspiracy which sounded a little thin. But when it came to

investigating the facts of Orm's mysterious behaviour that night he was

considerably more effective.

The prisoner went into the witness-box, chiefly because his astute

counsel calculated that it would create a bad impression if he did not.

But he was almost as uncommunicative to his own counsel as to the

prosecuting counsel. Sir Arthur Travers made all possible capital out of

his stubborn silence, but did not succeed in breaking it. Sir Arthur was

a long, gaunt man, with a long, cadaverous face, in striking contrast to

the sturdy figure and bright, bird-like eye of Sir Matthew Blake. But if

Sir Matthew suggested a very cocksure sort of cock-sparrow, Sir Arthur

might more truly have been compared to a crane or stork; as he leaned

forward, prodding the poet with questions, his long nose might have been

a long beak.

"Do you mean to tell the jury," he asked, in tones of grating

incredulity, "that you never went in to see the deceased gentleman at

all?"

"No!" replied Orm shortly.

"You wanted to see him, I suppose. You must have been very anxious to

see him. Didn't you wait two whole hours in front of his front door?"

"Yes," replied the other.

"And yet you never even noticed the door was open?"

"No," said Orm.

"What in the world were you doing for two hours in somebody's else's

front garden?" insisted the barrister; "You were doing something, I

suppose?"

"Yes."

"Is it a secret?" asked Sir Arthur, with adamantine jocularity.

"It's a secret from you," answered the poet.

It was upon this suggestion of a secret that Sir Arthur seized in

developing his line of accusation. With a boldness which some thought

unscrupulous, he turned the very mystery of the motive, which was the

strongest part of his opponent's case, into an argument for his own. He

gave it as the first fragmentary hint of some far-flung and elaborate

conspiracy, in which a patriot had perished like one caught in the coils

of an octopus.

"Yes," he cried in a vibrating voice, "my learned friend is perfectly

right! We do not know the exact reason why this honourable public

servant was murdered. We shall not know the reason why the next public

servant is murdered. If my learned friend himself falls a victim to his

eminence, and the hatred which the hellish powers of destruction feel

for the guardians of law, he will be murdered, and he will not know the

reason. Half the decent people in this court will be butchered in their

beds, and we shall not know the reason. And we shall never know the

reason and never arrest the massacre, until it has depopulated our

country, so long as the defence is permitted to stop all proceedings

with this stale tag about 'motive,' when every other fact in the case,

every glaring incongruity, every gaping silence, tells us that we stand

in the presence of Cain."

"I never knew Sir Arthur so excited," said Bagshaw to his group of

companions afterwards. "Some people are saying he went beyond the usual

limit and that the prosecutor in a murder case oughtn't to be so

vindictive. But I must say there was something downright creepy about

that little goblin with the yellow hair, that seemed to play up to the

impression. I was vaguely recalling, all the time, something that De

Quincey says about Mr. Williams, that ghastly criminal who slaughtered

two whole families almost in silence. I think he says that Williams had

hair of a vivid unnatural yellow; and that he thought it had been dyed

by a trick learned in India, where they dye horses green or blue. Then

there was his queer, stony silence, like a troglodyte's; I'll never deny

that it all worked me up until I felt there was a sort of monster in the

dock. If that was only Sir Arthur's eloquence, then he certainly took a

heavy responsibility in putting so much passion into it."

"He was a friend of poor Gwynne's, as a matter of fact," said Underhill,

more gently; "a man I know saw them hobnobbing together after a great

legal dinner lately. I dare say that's why he feels so strongly in this

case. I suppose it's doubtful whether a man ought to act in such a case

on mere personal feeling."

"He wouldn't," said Bagshaw. "I bet Sir Arthur Travers wouldn't act only

on feeling, however strongly he felt. He's got a very stiff sense of his

own professional position. He's one of those men who are ambitious even

when they've satisfied their ambition. I know nobody who'd take more

trouble to keep his position in the world. No; you've got hold of the

wrong moral to his rather thundering sermon. If he lets himself go like

that, it's because he thinks he can get a conviction, anyhow, and wants

to put himself at the head of some political movement against the

conspiracy he talks about. He must have some very good reason for

wanting to convict Orm and some very good reason for thinking he can do

it. That means that the facts will support him. His confidence doesn't

look well for the prisoner." He became conscious of an insignificant

figure in the group.

"Well, Father Brown," he said with a smile; "what do you think of our

judicial procedure?"

"Well," replied the priest rather absently, "I think the thing that

struck me most was how different men look in their wigs. You talk about

the prosecuting barrister being so tremendous. But I happened to see him

take his wig off for a minute, and he really looks quite a different

man. He's quite bald, for one thing."

"I'm afraid that won't prevent his being tremendous," answered Bagshaw.

"You don't propose to found the defence on the fact that the prosecuting

counsel is bald, do you?"

"Not exactly," said Father Brown good-humouredly. "To tell the truth, I

was thinking how little some kinds of people know about other kinds of

people. Suppose I went among some remote people who had never even heard

of England. Suppose I told them that there is a man in my country who

won't ask a question of life and death, until he has put an erection

made of horse-hair on the top of his head, with little tails behind, and

grey corkscrew curls at the side, like an Early Victorian old woman.

They would think he must be rather eccentric; but he isn't at all

eccentric, he's only conventional. They would think so, because they

don't know anything about English barristers; because they don't know

what a barrister is. Well, that barrister doesn't know what a poet is.

He doesn't understand that a poet's eccentricities wouldn't seem

eccentric to other poets. He thinks it odd that Orm should walk about in

a beautiful garden for two hours, with nothing to do. God bless my soul!

a poet would think nothing of walking about in the same backyard for ten

hours if he had a poem to do. Orm's own counsel was quite as stupid. It

never occurred to him to ask Orm the obvious question."

"What question do you mean?" asked the other.