distinguished it from the group at his feet. All the other figures
around him had made the ordinary involuntary movement at the unexpected
shock of light; for though the skies were rainy it was the first flash
of the storm. The only lady present, whose air of carrying grey hair
gracefully, as if she were really proud of it, marked her a matron of
the United States, unaffectedly shut her eyes and uttered a sharp cry.
Her English husband, General Outram, a very stolid Anglo-Indian, with a
bald head and black moustache and whiskers of antiquated pattern, looked
up with one stiff movement and then resumed his occupation of tidying
up. A young man of the name of Mallow, very big and shy, with brown eyes
like a dog's, dropped a cup and apologized awkwardly. A third man, much
more dressy, with a resolute head, like an inquisitive terrier's, and
grey hair brushed stiffly back, was no other than the great newspaper
proprietor, Sir John Cockspur; he cursed freely, but not in an English
idiom or accent, for he came from Toronto. But the tall man in the short
cloak stood up literally like a statue in the twilight; his eagle face
under the full glare had been like the bust of a Roman Emperor, and the
carved eyelids had not moved.
A moment after, the dark dome cracked across with thunder, and the
statue seemed to come to life. He turned his head over his shoulder and
said casually:
"About a minute and half between the flash and the bang, but I think the
storm's coming nearer. A tree is not supposed to be a good umbrella for
the lightning, but we shall want it soon for the rain. I think it will
be a deluge."
The young man glanced at the lady a little anxiously and said: "Can't we
get shelter anywhere? There seems to be a house over there."
"There is a house over there," remarked the general, rather grimly; "but
not quite what you'd call a hospitable hotel."
"It's curious," said his wife sadly, "that we should be caught in a
storm with no house near but that one, of all others."
Something in her tone seemed to check the younger man, who was both
sensitive and comprehending; but nothing of that sort daunted the man
from Toronto.
"What's the matter with it?" he asked. "Looks rather like a ruin."
"That place," said the general dryly, "belongs to the Marquis of Marne."
"Gee!" said Sir John Cockspur. "I've heard all about that bird, anyhow;
and a queer bird, too. Ran him as a front-page mystery in the _Comet_ last
year. 'The Nobleman Nobody Knows.'"
"Yes, I've heard of him, too," said young Mallow in a low voice. "There
seem to be all sorts of weird stories about why he hides himself like
that. I've heard that he wears a mask because he's a leper. But somebody
else told me quite seriously that there's a curse on the family; a child
born with some frightful deformity that's kept in a dark room."
"The Marquis of Marne has three heads," remarked Romaine quite gravely.
"Once in every three hundred years a three-headed nobleman adorns the
family tree. No human being dares approach the accursed house except a
silent procession of hatters, sent to provide an abnormal number of
hats. But,"--and his voice took one of those deep and terrible turns,
that could cause such a thrill in the theatre--"my friends, _those hats
are of no human shape_."
The American lady looked at him with a frown and a slight air of
distrust, as if that trick of voice had moved her in spite of herself.
"I don't like your ghoulish jokes," she said; "and I'd rather you didn't
joke about this, anyhow."
"I hear and obey," replied the actor; "but am I, like the Light Brigade,
forbidden even to reason why?"
"The reason," she replied, "is that he isn't the Nobleman Nobody Knows.
I know him myself, or, at least, I knew him very well when he was an
attaché at Washington thirty years ago, when we were all young. And he
didn't wear a mask, at least, he didn't wear it with me. He wasn't a
leper, though he may he almost as lonely. And he had only one head and
only one heart, and that was broken."
"Unfortunate love affair, of course," said Cockspur. "I should like that
for the _Comet_."
"I suppose it's a compliment to us," she replied thoughtfully, "that you
always assume a man's heart is broken by a woman. But there are other
kinds of love and bereavement. Have you never read 'In Memoriam'? Have
you never heard of David and Jonathan? What broke poor Marne up was the
death of his brother; at least, he was really a first cousin, but had
been brought up with him like a brother, and was much nearer than most
brothers. James Mair, as the marquis was called when I knew him, was the
elder of the two, but he always played the part of worshipper, with
Maurice Mair as a god. And, by his account, Maurice Mair was certainly a
wonder. James was no fool, and very good at his own political job; but
it seems that Maurice could do that and everything else; that he was a
brilliant artist and amateur actor and musician, and all the rest of it.
James was very good-looking himself, long and strong and strenuous, with
a high-bridged nose; though I suppose the young people would think he
looked very quaint with his beard divided into two bushy whiskers in the
fashion of those Victorian times. But Maurice was clean-shaven, and, by
the portraits shown to me, certainly quite beautiful; though he looked a
little more like a tenor than a gentleman ought to look. James was
always asking me again and again whether his friend was not a marvel,
whether any woman wouldn't fall in love with him, and so on, until it
became rather a bore, except that it turned so suddenly into a tragedy.
His whole life seemed to be in that idolatry, and one day the idol
tumbled down, and was broken like any china doll. A chill caught at the
seaside, and it was all over."
"And after that," asked the young man, "did he shut himself up like
this?"
"He went abroad at first," she answered; "away to Asia and the cannibal
Islands and Lord knows where. These deadly strokes take different people
in different ways. It took him in the way of an utter sundering or
severance from everything, even from tradition and as far as possible
from memory. He could not bear a reference to the old tie; a portrait or
an anecdote or even an association. He couldn't bear the business of a
great public funeral. He longed to get away. He stayed away for ten
years. I heard some rumour that he had begun to revive a little at the
end of the exile; but when he came back to his own home he relapsed
completely. He settled down into religious melancholia, and that's
practically madness."
"The priests got hold of him, they say," grumbled the old general. "I
know he gave thousands to found a monastery, and lives himself rather
like a monk--or, at any rate, a hermit. Can't understand what good they
think that will do."
"Goddarned superstition," snorted Cockspur; "that sort of thing ought to
be shown up. Here's a man that might have been useful to the Empire and
the world, and these vampires get hold of him and suck him dry. I bet
with their unnatural notions they haven't even let him marry."
"No, he has never married," said the lady. "He was engaged when I knew
him, as a matter of fact, but I don't think it ever came first with him,
and I think it went with the rest when everything else went. Like Hamlet
and Ophelia--he lost hold of love because he lost hold of life. But I
knew the girl; indeed, I know her still. Between ourselves, it was Viola
Grayson, daughter of the old admiral. She's never married either."
"It's infamous! It's infernal!" cried Sir John, bounding up. "It's not
only a tragedy, but a crime. I've got a duty to the public, and I mean
to see all this nonsensical nightmare.... In the twentieth century----"
He was almost choked with his own protest, and then, after a silence,
the old soldier said:
"Well, I don't profess to know much about those things, but I think
these religious people need to study a text which says: 'Let the dead
bury their dead.'"
"Only, unfortunately, that's just what it looks like," said his wife
with a sigh. "It's just like some creepy story of a dead man burying
another dead man, over and over again for ever."
"The storm has passed over us," said Romaine, with a rather inscrutable
smile. "You will not have to visit the inhospitable house after all."
She suddenly shuddered.
"Oh, I'll never do that again!" she exclaimed.
Mallow was staring at her.
"Again! Have you tried it before?" he cried.
"Well, I did once," she said, with a lightness not without a touch of
pride; "but we needn't go back on all that. It's not raining now, but I
think we'd better be moving back to the car."
As they moved off in procession, Mallow and the general brought up the
rear; and the latter said abruptly, lowering his voice:
"I don't want that little cad Cockspur to hear but as you've asked you'd
better know. It's the one thing I can't forgive Marne; but I suppose
these monks have drilled him that way. My wife, who had been the best
friend he ever had in America, actually came to that house when he was
walking in the garden. He was looking at the ground like a monk, and
hidden in a black hood that was really as ridiculous as any mask. She
had sent her card in, and stood there in his very path. And he walked
past her without a word or a glance, as if she had been a stone. He
wasn't human; he was like some horrible automaton. She may well call him
a dead man."
"It's all very strange," said the young man rather vaguely. "It isn't
like--like what I should have expected."
Young Mr. Mallow, when he left that rather dismal picnic, took himself
thoughtfully in search of a friend. He did not know any monks, but he
knew one priest, whom he was very much concerned to confront with the
curious revelations he had heard that afternoon. He felt he would very
much like to know the truth about the cruel superstition that hung over
the house of Marne, like the black thundercloud he had seen hovering
over it.
After being referred from one place to another, he finally ran his
friend Father Brown to earth in the house of another friend, a Roman
Catholic friend, with a large family. He entered somewhat abruptly to
find Father Brown sitting on the floor with a serious expression, and
attempting to pin the somewhat florid hat belonging to a wax doll on to
the head of a teddy bear.
Mallow felt a faint sense of incongruity; but he was far too full of his
problem to put off the conversation if he could, help it. He was
staggering from a sort of set-back in a subconscious process that had
been going on for some time. He poured out the whole tragedy of the
house of Marne as he had heard it from the general's wife, along with
most of the comments of the general and the newspaper proprietor. A new
atmosphere of attention seemed to be created with the mention of the
newspaper proprietor.
Father Brown neither knew nor cared that his attitudes were comic or
commonplace. He continued to sit on the floor, where his large head and
short legs made him look very like a baby playing with toys. But there
came into his great grey eyes a certain expression that has been seen in
the eyes of many men in many centuries through the story of nineteen
hundred years; only the men were not generally sitting on floors, but at
council tables, or on the seats of chapters, or the thrones of bishops
and cardinals; a far-off, watchful look, heavy with the humility of a
charge too great for men. Something of that anxious and far-reaching
look is found in the eyes of sailors and of those who have steered
through so many storms the ship of St. Peter.
"It's very good of you to tell me this," he said. "I'm really awfully
grateful, for we may have to do something about it. If it were only
people like you and the general, it might be only a private matter; but
if Sir John Cockspur is going to spread some sort or scare in his
papers--well, he's a Toronto Orangeman, and we can hardly keep out of it."
"But what will you say about it?" asked Mallow anxiously.
"The first thing I should say about it," said Father Brown, "is that, as
you tell it, it doesn't sound like life. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, that we are all pessimistic vampires blighting all human
happiness. Suppose I'm a pessimistic vampire," He scratched his nose
with the teddy bear, became faintly conscious of the incongruity, and
put it down. "Suppose we do destroy all human and family ties. Why
should we entangle a man again in an old family tie just when he showed
signs of getting loose from it? Surely it's a little unfair to charge us
both with crushing such affection and encouraging such infatuation. I
don't see why even a religious maniac should be that particular sort of
monomaniac, or how religion could increase that mania, except by
brightening it with a little hope."
Then he said, after a pause: "I should like to talk to that general of
yours."
"It was his wife who told me," said Mallow.
"Yes," replied the other; "but I'm more interested in what he didn't
tell you than in what she did."
"You think he knows more than she does?"
"I think he knows more than she says," answered Father Brown. "You tell
me he used a phrase about forgiving everything except the rudeness to
his wife. After all, what else was there to forgive?"
Father Brown had risen and shaken his shapeless clothes, and stood
looking at the young man with screwed up eyes and slightly quizzical
expression. The next moment he had turned, and picking up his equally
shapeless umbrella and large shabby hat, went stumping down the street.
He plodded through a variety of wide streets and squares till he came to
a handsome old-fashioned house in the West End, where he asked the
servant if he could see General Outram. After some little palaver he was
shown into a study, fitted out less with books than with maps and
globes, where the bald-headed, black-whiskered Anglo-Indian sat smoking
a long, thin, black cigar and playing with pins on a chart.
"I am sorry to intrude," said the priest, "and all the more because I
can't help the intrusion looking like interference. I want to speak to
you about a private matter, but only in the hope of keeping it private.
Unfortunately, some people are likely to make it public. I think,
general, that you know Sir John Cockspur."
The mass of black moustache and whisker served as a sort of mask for the
lower half of the old general's face; it was always hard to see whether
he smiled, but his brown eyes often had a certain twinkle.
"Everybody knows him, I suppose," he said. "I don't know him very
well."
"Well, you know everybody knows whatever he knows," said Father Brown,
smiling, "when he thinks it convenient to print it. And I understand
from my friend Mr. Mallow, whom, I think, you know, that Sir John is
going to print some scorching anti-clerical articles founded on what he
would call the Marne Mystery. 'Monks Drive Marquis Mad,' etc."
"If he is," replied the general, "I don't see why you should come to me
about it. I ought to tell you I'm a strong Protestant."
"I'm very fond of strong Protestants," said Father Brown. "I came to you
because I was sure you would tell the truth. I hope it is not
uncharitable to feel less sure of Sir John Cockspur."
The brown eyes twinkled again, but the general said nothing.
"General," said Father Brown, "suppose Cockspur or his sort were going
to make the world ring with tales against your country and your flag.
Suppose he said your regiment ran away in battle, or your staff were in
the pay of the enemy. Would you let anything stand between you and the
facts that would refute him? Wouldn't you get on the track of the truth
at all costs to anybody? Well, I have a regiment, and I belong to an
army. It is being discredited by what I am certain is a fictitious
story; but I don't know the true story. Can you blame me for trying to
find it out?"
The soldier was silent, and the priest continued:
"I have heard the story Mallow was told yesterday, about Marne retiring
with a broken heart through the death of his more than brother. I am
sure there was more in it than that. I came to ask you if you know any
more."
"No," said the general shortly; "I cannot tell you any more."
"General," said Father Brown with a broad grin, "you would have called
me a Jesuit if I had used that equivocation."
The soldier laughed gruffly, and then growled with much greater
hostility.
"Well, I won't tell you, then," he said. "What do you say to that?"
"I only say," said the priest mildly, "that in that case I shall have to
tell you."
The brown eyes stared at him; but there was no twinkle in them now. He
went on:
"You compel me to state, less sympathetically perhaps than you could,
why it is obvious that there is more behind. I am quite sure the marquis
has better cause for his brooding and secretiveness than merely having
lost an old friend. I doubt whether priests have anything to do with it;
I don't even know if he's a convert or merely a man comforting his
conscience with charities; but I'm sure he's something more than a chief
mourner. Since you insist, I will tell you one or two of the things that
made me think so.
"First, it was stated that James Mair was engaged to be married, but
somehow became unattached again after the death of Maurice Mair. Why
should an honourable man break off his engagement merely because he was
depressed by the death of a third party? He's much more likely to have
turned for consolation to it; but, anyhow, he was bound in decency to go
through with it."
The general was biting his black moustache, and his brown eyes had
become very watchful and even anxious, but he did not answer.
"A second point," said Father Brown, frowning at the table. "James Mair
was always asking his lady friend whether his cousin Maurice was not
very fascinating, and whether women would not admire him. I don't know
if it occurred to the lady that there might be another meaning to that
inquiry."
The general got to his feet and began to walk or stamp about the room.
"Oh, damn it all," he said, but without any air of animosity.
"The third point," went on Father Brown, "is James Mair's curious manner
of mourning--destroying all relics, veiling all portraits, and so on.
It does sometimes happen, I admit; it might mean mere affectionate
bereavement. But it might mean something else."
"Confound you," said the other. "How long are you going on piling this
up?"
"The fourth and fifth points are pretty conclusive," said the priest
calmly, "especially if you take them together. The first is that Maurice
Mair seems to have had no funeral in particular, considering he was a
cadet of a great family. He must have been buried hurriedly; perhaps
secretly. And the last point is, that James Mair instantly disappeared
to foreign parts; fled, in fact, to the ends of the earth.
"And so," he went on, still in the same soft voice, "when you would
blacken my religion to brighten the story of the pure and perfect
affection of two brothers, it seems----"
"Stop!" cried Outram in a tone like a pistol shot. "I must tell you
more, or you will fancy worse. Let me tell you one thing to start with.
It was a fair fight."
"Ah," said Father Brown, and seemed to exhale a huge breath.
"It was a duel," said the other. "It was probably the last duel fought
in England, and it is long ago now."
"That's better," said Father Brown. "Thank God; that's a great deal
better."
"Better than the ugly things you thought of, I suppose?" said the
general gruffly. "Well, it's all very well for you to sneer at the pure
and perfect affection; but it was true for all that. James Mair really
was devoted to his cousin, who'd grown up with him like a younger
brother. Elder brothers and sisters do sometimes devote themselves to a
child like that, especially when he's a sort of infant phenomenon. But
James Mair was the sort of simple character in whom even hate is in a
sense unselfish. I mean that even when his tenderness turns to rage it
is still objective, directed outwards to its object; he isn't conscious
of himself. Now poor Maurice Mair was just the opposite. He was far more
friendly and popular; but his success had made him live in a house of
mirrors. He was first in every sort of sport and art and accomplishment;
he nearly always won and took his winning amiably. But if ever, by any
chance, he lost, there was just a glimpse of something not so amiable;
he was a little jealous. I needn't tell you the whole miserable story of
how he was a little jealous of his cousin's engagement; how he couldn't
keep his restless vanity from interfering. It's enough to say that one
of the few things in which James Mair was admittedly ahead of him was
marksmanship with a pistol; and with that the tragedy ended."
"You mean the tragedy began," replied the priest. "The tragedy of the
survivor. I thought he did not need any monkish vampires to make him
miserable."
"To my mind he's more miserable than he need be," said the general.
"After all, as I say, it was a ghastly tragedy, but it was a fair fight.
And Jim had great provocation."
"How do you know all this?" asked the priest.
"I know it because I saw it," answered Outram stolidly. "I was James
Mair's second, and I saw Maurice Mair shot dead on the sands before my
very eyes."
"I wish you would tell me more about it," said Father Brown
reflectively. "Who was Maurice Mair's second?"
"He had a more distinguished backing," replied the general grimly. "Hugo
Romaine was his second; the great actor, you know. Maurice was mad on
acting and had taken up Romaine (who was then a rising but still a
struggling man), and financed the fellow and his ventures in return for
taking lessons from the professional in his own hobby of amateur acting.
But Romaine was then, I suppose, practically dependent on his rich
friend; though he's richer now than any aristocrat. So his serving as
second proves very little about what he thought of the quarrel. They
fought in the English fashion, with only one second apiece; I wanted at
least to have a surgeon, but Maurice boisterously refused it, saying the
fewer people who knew, the better; and at the worst we could immediately
get help. 'There's a doctor in the village not half a mile away,' he
said; 'I know him and he's got the fastest horse in the country. He
could be brought here in no time; but there's no need to bring him here
till we know.' Well, we all knew that Maurice ran most risk, as the
pistol was not his weapon; so when he refused aid nobody liked to ask
for it. The duel was fought on a flat stretch of sand on the east coast
of Scotland; and both the sight and sound of it were masked from the
hamlets inland by a long rampart of sandhills patched with rank grass;
probably part of the links, though in those days no Englishman had heard
of golf. There was one deep, crooked cranny in the sandhills through
which we came out on the sands. I can see them now; first a wide strip
of dead yellow, and beyond, a narrower strip of dark red; a dark red
that seemed already like the long shadow of a deed of blood.
"The thing itself seemed to happen with horrible speed; as if a
whirlwind had struck the sand. With the very crack of sound Maurice Mair
seemed to spin like a teetotum and pitch upon his face like a ninepin.
And queerly enough, while I'd been worrying about him up to that moment,
the instant he was dead all my pity was for the man who killed him; as
it is to this day and hour. I knew that with that, the whole huge
terrible pendulum of my friend's lifelong love would swing back; and
that whatever cause others might find to pardon him, he would never
pardon himself for ever and ever. And so, somehow, the really vivid
thing, the picture that burns in my memory so that I can't forget it, is
not that of the catastrophe, the smoke and the flash and the falling
figure. That seemed to be all over, like the noise that wakes a man up.
What I saw, what I shall always see, is poor Jim hurrying across towards
his fallen friend and foe; his brown beard looking black against the
ghastly pallor of his face, with its high features cut out against the
sea; and the frantic gestures with which he waved me to run for the
surgeon in the hamlet behind the sandhills. He had dropped his pistol as
he ran; he had a glove in one hand and the loose and fluttering fingers
of it seemed to elongate and emphasize his wild pantomime of pointing or
hailing for help. That is the picture that really remains with me; and
there is nothing else in that picture, except the striped background of
sands and sea and the dark, dead body lying still as a stone, and the
dark figure of the dead man's second standing grim and motionless
against the horizon."
"Did Romaine stand motionless?" asked the priest. "I should have thought
he would have run even quicker towards the corpse."