undying picture in an instant and the next instant I had dived among the
sandhills, and was far out of sight of the others. Well, poor Maurice
had made a good choice in the matter of doctors; though the doctor came
too late, he came quicker than I should have thought possible. This
village surgeon was a very remarkable man, red-haired, irascible, but
extraordinarily strong in promptitude and presence of mind. I saw him
but for a flash as he leapt on his horse and went thundering away to the
scene of death, leaving me far behind. But in that flash I had so strong
a sense of his personality that I wished to God he had really been
called in before the duel began; for I believe on my soul he would have
prevented it somehow. As it was, he cleaned up the mess with marvellous
swiftness; long before I could trail back to the sea-shore on my two
feet his impetuous practicality had managed everything; the corpse was
temporarily buried in the sandhills and the unhappy homicide had been
persuaded to do the only thing he could do--to flee for his life. He
slipped along the coast till he came to a port and managed to get out of
the country. You know the rest; poor Jim remained abroad for many years;
later, when the whole thing had been hushed up or forgotten, he returned
to his dismal castle and automatically inherited the title. I have never
seen him from that day to this, and yet I know what is written in red
letters in the inmost darkness of his brain."
"I understand," said Father Brown, "that some of you have made efforts
to see him?"
"My wife never relaxed her efforts," said the general. "She refuses to
admit that such a crime ought to cut a man off for ever; and I confess I
am inclined to agree with her. Eighty years before it would have been
thought quite normal; and really it was manslaughter rather than murder.
My wife is a great friend of the unfortunate lady who was the occasion
of the quarrel and she has an idea that if Jim would consent to see
Viola Grayson once again, and receive her assurance that old quarrels
are buried, it might restore his sanity. My wife is calling a sort of
council of old friends to-morrow, I believe. She is very energetic."
Father Brown was playing with the pins that lay beside the general's
map; he seemed to listen rather absent-mindedly. He had the sort of mind
that sees things in pictures; and the picture which had coloured even
the prosaic mind of the practical soldier took on tints yet more
significant and sinister in the more mystical mind of the priest. He saw
the dark red desolation of sand, the very hue of Aceldama, and the dead
man lying in a dark heap, and the slayer, stooping as he ran,
gesticulating with a glove in demented remorse, and always his
imagination came back to the third thing that he could not yet fit into
any human picture: the second of the slain man standing motionless and
mysterious, like a dark statue on the edge of the sea. It might seem to
some a detail; but for him it was that stiff figure that stood up like a
standing note of interrogation.
Why had not Romaine moved instantly? It was the natural thing for a
second to do, in common humanity, let alone friendship. Even if there
were some double-dealing or darker motive not yet understood, one would
think it would be done for the sake of appearances. Anyhow, when the
thing was all over, it would be natural for the second to stir long
before the other second had vanished beyond the sandhills.
"Does this man Romanic move very slowly?" he asked.
"It's queer you should ask that," answered. Outram, with a sharp glance.
"No, as a matter of fact he moves very quickly when he moves at all.
But, curiously enough, I was just thinking that only this afternoon I
saw him stand exactly like that, during the thunderstorm. He stood in
that silver-clasped cape of his, and with one hand on his hip, exactly
and in every line as he stood on those bloody sands long ago. The
lightning blinded us all, but he did not blink. When it was dark again
he was standing there still."
"I suppose he isn't standing there now?" inquired Father Brown. "I mean,
I suppose he moved sometime?"
"No, he moved quite sharply when the thunder came," replied the other.
"He seemed to have been waiting for it, for he told us the exact time of
the interval.... Is anything the matter?"
"I've pricked myself with one of your pins," said Father Brown. "I hope
I haven't damaged it." But his eyes had snapped and his mouth abruptly
shut.
"Are you ill?" inquired the general, staring at him.
"No," answered the priest; "I'm only not quite so stoical as your friend
Romaine. I can't help blinking when I see light."
He turned to gather up his hat and umbrella; but when he had got to the
door he seemed to remember something and turned back. Coming up close to
Outram, he gazed up into his face with a rather helpless expression, as
of a dying fish, and made a motion as if to hold him by the waistcoat.
"General," he almost whispered, "for God's sake don't let your wife and
that other woman insist on seeing Marne again. Let sleeping dogs lie, or
you'll unleash all the hounds of hell."
The general was left alone with a look of bewilderment in his brown
eyes, as he sat down again to play with his pins.
Even greater, however, was the bewilderment which attended the
successive stages of the benevolent conspiracy of the general's wife,
who had assembled her little group of sympathizers to storm the castle
of the misanthrope. The first surprise she encountered was the
unexplained absence of one of the actors in the ancient tragedy. When
they assembled by agreement at a quiet hotel quite near the castle,
there was no sign of Hugo Romaine, until a belated telegram from a
lawyer told them that the great actor had suddenly left the country. The
second surprise, when they began the bombardment by sending up word to
the castle with an urgent request for an interview, was the figure which
came forth from those gloomy gates to receive the deputation in the name
of the noble owner. It was no such figure as they would have conceived
suitable to those sombre avenues or those almost feudal formalities. It
was not some stately steward or major-domo, nor even a dignified butler
or tall and ornamental footman. The only figure that came out of the
cavernous castle doorway was the short and shabby figure of Father
Brown.
"Look here," he said, in his simple, bothered fashion. "I told you you'd
much better leave him alone. He knows what he's doing and it'll only
make everybody unhappy."
Lady Outram, who was accompanied by a tall and quietly-dressed lady,
still very handsome, presumably the original Miss Grayson, looked at the
little priest with cold contempt.
"Really, sir," she said; "this is a very private occasion, and I don't
understand what you have to do with it.'
"Trust a priest to have to do with a private occasion," snarled Sir John
Cockspur. "Don't you know they live behind the scenes like rats behind a
wainscot burrowing their way into everybody's private rooms. See how
he's already in possession of poor Marne." Sir John was slightly sulky,
as his aristocratic friends had persuaded him to give up the great scoop
of publicity in return for the privilege of being really inside a
society secret. It never occurred to him to ask himself whether _he_ was
at all like a rat in a wainscot.
"Oh, that's all right," said Father Brown, with the impatience of
anxiety. "I've talked it over with the marquis and the only priest he's
ever had anything to do with; his clerical tastes have been much
exaggerated. I tell you he knows what he's about; and I do implore you
all to leave him alone."
"You mean to leave him to this living death of moping and going mad in a
ruin!" cried Lady Outram, in a voice that shook a little. "And all
because he had the bad luck to shoot a man in a duel more than a quarter
of a century ago. Is that what you call Christian charity?"
"Yes," answered the priest stolidly; "that is what I call Christian
charity."
"It's about all the Christian charity you'll ever get out of these
priests," cried Cockspur bitterly. "That's their only idea of pardoning
a poor fellow for a piece of folly; to wall him up alive and starve him
to death with fasts and penances and pictures of hell-fire. And all
because a bullet went wrong."
"Really, Father Brown," said General Outram, "do you honestly think he
deserves this? Is that your Christianity?"
"Surely the true Christianity," pleaded his wife more gently, "is that
which knows all and pardons all; the love that can remember--and
forget."
"Father Brown," said young Mallow, very earnestly, "I generally agree
with what you say; but I'm hanged if I can follow you here. A shot in a
duel, followed instantly by remorse, is not such an awful offence."
"I admit." said Father Brown dully, "that I take a more serious view of
his offence."
"God soften your hard heart," said the strange lady speaking for the
first time. "I am going to speak to my old friend."
Almost as if her voice had raised a ghost in that great grey house,
something stirred within and a figure stood in the dark doorway at the
top of the great stone flight of steps. It was clad in dead black, but
there was something wild about the blanched hair and something in the
pale features that was like the wreck of a marble statue.
Viola Grayson began calmly to move up the great flight of steps; and
Outram muttered in his thick black moustache: "He won't cut her dead as
he did my wife, I fancy."
Father Brown, who seemed in a collapse of resignation, looked up at him
for a moment.
"Poor Marne has enough on his conscience," he said. "Let us acquit him
of what we can. At least he never cut your wife."
"What do you mean by that?"
"He never knew her," said Father Brown.
As they spoke, the tall lady proudly mounted the last step and came face
to face with the Marquis of Marne. His lips moved, but something
happened before he could speak.
A scream rang across the open space and went wailing away in echoes
along those hollow walls. By the abruptness and agony with which it
broke from the woman's lips it might have been a mere inarticulate cry.
But it was an articulated word; and they all heard it with a horrible
distinctness.
"Maurice!"
"What is it, dear?" cried Lady Outram, and began to run up the steps;
for the other woman was swaying as if she might fall down the whole
stone flight. Then she faced about and began to descend, all bowed and
shrunken and shuddering. "Oh, my God," she was saying. "Oh, my God ... it
isn't Jim at all ... it's Maurice!"
"I think, Lady Outram," said the priest gravely, "you had better go with
your friend."
As they turned, a voice fell on them like a stone from the top of the
stone stair, a voice that might have come out of an open grave. It was
hoarse and unnatural, like the voices of men who are left alone with
wild birds on desert islands. It was the voice of the Marquis of Marne,
and it said: "Stop!"
"Father Brown," he said, "before your friends disperse I authorize you
to tell them all I have told you. Whatever follows, I will hide from it
no longer."
"You are right," said the priest, "and it shall be counted to you."
"Yes," said Father Brown quietly to the questioning company afterwards.
"He has given me the right to speak; but I will not tell it as he told
me, but as I found it out for myself. Well, I knew from the first that
the blighting monkish influence was all nonsense out of novels. Our
people might possibly, in certain cases, encourage a man to go regularly
into a monastery, but certainly not to hang about in a mediæval castle.
In the same way, they certainly wouldn't want him to dress up as a monk
when he wasn't a monk. But it struck me that he might himself want to
wear a monk's hood or even a mask. I had heard of him as a mourner, and
then as a murderer; but already I had hazy suspicions that his reason
for hiding might not only be concerned with what he was, but with who
he was.
"Then came the general's vivid description of the duel; and the most
vivid thing in it to me was the figure of Mr. Romaine in the background;
it was vivid because it was in the background. Why did the general leave
behind him on the sand a dead man, whose friend stood yards away from
him like a stock or a stone? Then I heard something, a mere trifle,
about a trick habit that Romaine has of standing quite still when he is
waiting for something to happen; as he waited for the thunder to follow
the lightning. Well, that automatic trick in this case betrayed
everything. Hugo Romaine on that old occasion, also, was waiting for
something."
"But it was all over," said the general. "What could he have been
waiting for?"
"He was waiting for the duel," said Father Brown.
"But I tell you I saw the duel!" cried the general.
"And I tell you you didn't see the duel," said the priest.
"Are you mad?" demanded the other. "Or why should you think I am blind?"
"Because you were blinded--that you might not see," said the priest.
"Because you are a good man and God had mercy on your innocence, and he
turned your face away from that unnatural strife. He set a wall of sand
and silence between you and what really happened on that horrible red
shore, abandoned to the raging spirits of Judas and of Cain."
"Tell us what happened!" gasped the lady impatiently.
"I will tell it as I found it," proceeded the priest. "The next thing I
found was that Romaine the actor had been training Maurice Mair in all
the tricks of the trade of acting. I once had a friend who went in for
acting. He gave me a very amusing account of how his first week's
training consisted entirely of falling down; of learning how to fall
flat without a stagger, as if he were stone dead."
"God have mercy on us!" cried the general, and gripped the arms of his
chair as if to rise.
"Amen," said Father Brown. "You told me how quickly it seemed to come;
in fact, Maurice fell before the bullet flew, and lay perfectly still,
waiting. And his wicked friend and teacher stood also in the background,
waiting."
"We are waiting," said Cockspur, "and I feel as if I couldn't wait."
"James Mair, already broken with remorse, rushed across to the fallen
man and bent over to lift him up. He had thrown away his pistol like an
unclean thing; but Maurice's pistol still lay under his hand and it was
undischarged. Then as the elder man bent over the younger, the younger
lifted himself on his left arm and shot the elder through the body. He
knew he was not so good a shot, but there was no question of missing the
heart at that distance."
The rest of the company had risen and stood staring down at the narrator
with pale faces. "Are you sure of this?" asked Sir John at last, in a
thick voice.
"I am sure of it," said Father Brown, "and now I leave Maurice Mair, the
present Marquis of Marne, to your Christian charity. You have told me
something to-day about Christian charity. You seemed to me to give it
almost too large a place; but how fortunate it is for poor sinners like
this man that you err so much on the side of mercy, and are ready to be
reconciled to all mankind."
"Hang it all," exploded the general; "if you think I'm going to be
reconciled to a filthy viper like that, I tell you I wouldn't say a word
to save him from hell. I said I could pardon a regular decent duel, but
of all the treacherous assassins----"
"He ought to be lynched," cried Cockspur excitedly. "He ought to burn
alive like a nigger in the States. And if there is such a thing as
burning for ever, he jolly well----"
"I wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole myself," said Mallow.
"There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all
over.
"There is," said Father Brown dryly; "and that is the real difference
between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I
was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness to-day;
or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For
it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think
sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't
regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a
conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You
forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven."
"But, hang it all," cried Mallow, "you don't expect us to be able to
pardon a vile thing like this?"
"No," said the priest; "but we have to be able to pardon it."
He stood up abruptly and looked round at them.
"We have to touch such men, not with a barge-pole, but with a
benediction," he said. "We have to say the word that will save them from
hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human
charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your
favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave
us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really
need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither
the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will
pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real
crimes; mean as St. Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came."
"The dawn," repeated Mallow doubtfully. "You mean hope--for _him_?"
"Yes," replied the other. "Let me ask you one question. You are great
ladies and men of honour and secure of yourselves; you would never, you
can tell yourselves, stoop to such squalid reason as that. But tell me
this. If any of you had so stooped, which of you, years afterwards, when
you were old and rich and safe, would have been driven by conscience or
confessor to tell such a story of yourself? You say you could not commit
so base a crime. Could you confess so base a crime?"
The others gathered their possessions together and drifted by twos and
threes out of the room in silence. And Father Brown, also in silence,
went back to the melancholy castle of Marne.
THE SECRET OF FLAMBEAU
"----the sort of murders in which I played the part of the murderer,"
said Father Brown, putting down the wineglass. The row of red pictures
of crime had passed before him in that moment.
"It is true," he resumed, after a momentary pause, "that somebody else
had played the part of the murderer before me and done me out of the
actual experience. I was a sort of understudy; always in a state of
being ready to act the assassin. I always made it my business, at least,
to know the part thoroughly. What I mean is that, when I tried to
imagine the state of mind in which such a thing would be done, I always
realized that I might have done it myself under certain mental
conditions, but not under others; and not generally under the obvious
ones. And then, of course, I knew who really had done it; and he was not
generally the obvious person.
"For instance, it seemed obvious to say that the revolutionary poet had
killed the old judge who saw red about red revolutionaries. But that
isn't really a reason for the revolutionary poet _killing_ him. It isn't,
if you think what it would really be like to be a revolutionary poet.
Now I set myself conscientiously down to _be_ a revolutionary poet. I mean
that particular sort of pessimistic anarchial lover of revolt, not as
reform, but rather as destruction. I tried to clear my mind of such
elements of sanity and constructive common sense as I have had the luck
to learn or inherit. I shut down and darkened all the skylights through
which comes the good daylight out of heaven; I imagined a mind lit only
by a red light from below; a fire rending rocks and cleaving abysses
_upwards_. And even with the vision at its wildest and worst, I could not
see why such a visionary should cut short his own career by colliding
with a common policeman, for killing one out of a million conventional
old fools, as he would have called them. He wouldn't do it; however much
he wrote songs of violence. He wouldn't do it, because he wrote songs of
violence. A man who can express himself in song need not express himself
in suicide. A poem was an event to him; and he would want to have more
of them. Then I thought of another sort of heathen; the sort that is not
destroying the world but entirely depending on the world. I thought
that, save for the grace of God, I might have been a man for whom the
world was a blaze of electric lights, with nothing but utter darkness
beyond and around it. The worldly man, who really lives only for this
world and believes in no other, whose worldly success and pleasure are
all he can ever snatch out of nothingness--_that_ is the man who will
really do anything, when he is in danger of losing the whole world and
saving nothing. It is not the revolutionary man but the respectable man
who would commit any crime--to save his respectability. Think what
exposure would mean to a man like that fashionable barrister; and
exposure of the one crime still really hated by his fashionable
world--treason against patriotism. If I had been in his position, and had
nothing better than his philosophy, heaven alone knows what I might have
done. That is just where this little religious exercise is so
wholesome."
"Some people would think it was rather morbid," said Grandison Chace
dubiously.
"Some people," said Father Brown gravely, "undoubtedly _do_ think that
charity and humility are morbid. Our friend the poet probably would. But
I'm not arguing those questions; I'm only trying to answer your question
about how I generally go to work. Some of your countrymen have
apparently done me the honour to ask how I managed to frustrate a few
miscarriages of justice. Well, you can go back and tell them that I do
it by morbidity. But I most certainly don't want them to think I do it
by magic."
Chace continued to look at him with a reflective frown; he was too
intelligent not to understand the idea; he would also have said that he
was too healthy-minded to like it. He felt as if he were talking to one
man and yet to a hundred murderers. There was something uncanny about
that very small figure, perched like a goblin beside the goblin stove;
and the sense that its round head had held such a universe of wild
unreason and imaginative injustice. It was as if the vast void of dark
behind it were a throng of dark gigantic figures, the ghosts of great
criminals held at bay by the magic circle of the red stove, but ready to
tear their master in pieces.
"Well, I'm afraid I do think it's morbid," he said frankly. "And I'm not
sure it isn't almost as morbid as magic. But morbidity or no, there's
one thing to be said; it must be an interesting experience." Then he
added, after reflection: "I don't know whether you would make a really
good criminal. But you ought to make a rattling good novelist."
"I only have to deal with real events," said Father Brown. "But it's
sometimes harder to imagine real things than unreal ones."
"Especially," said the other, "when they are the great crimes of the
world."
"It's not the great crimes but the small crimes that are really hard to
imagine," replied the priest.
"I don't quite know what you mean by that," said Chace.
"I mean commonplace crimes like stealing jewels," said Father Brown;
"like that affair of the emerald necklace or the Ruby of Meru or the
artificial goldfish. The difficulty in those cases is that you've got to
make your mind small. High and mighty humbugs, who deal in big ideas,
don't do those obvious things. I was sure the Prophet hadn't taken the
ruby; or the Count the goldfish; though a man like Bankes might easily
take the emeralds. For them, a jewel is a piece of glass: and they can
see through the glass. But the little, literal people take it at its
market value.
"For that you've got to have a small mind. It's awfully hard to get;
like focusing smaller and sharper in a wobbling camera. But some things
helped; and they threw a lot of light on the mystery, too. For instance,
the sort of man who brags about having 'shown up' sham magicians or poor
quacks of any sort--he's _always_ got a small mind. He is the sort of man
who 'sees through' tramps and trips them up in telling lies. I dare say
it might sometimes be a painful duty. It's an uncommonly base pleasure.
The moment I realized what a small mind meant, I knew where to look for
it--in the man who wanted to expose the Prophet--and it was he that
sneaked the ruby; in the man who jeered at his sister's psychic
fancies--and it was he who nabbed the emeralds. Men like that always
have their eye on jewels; they never could rise, with the higher
humbugs, to _despising_ jewels. Those criminals with small minds are
always quite conventional. They become criminals out of sheer
conventionality.