TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage
running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening
daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty.
The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see the
other as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each
man knew the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of
striking appearance and they hated each other.
The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the
Adelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured
river. One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building it
supported was an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. The
other side of the passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neither
was what was commonly called the stage door; they were a sort of special
and private stage doors used by very special performers, and in this
case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance of
the day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits
and entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.
The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who
evidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each
approached the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence.
Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who walked fast was the man
from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived before the secret
stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other with
civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker who
seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.
In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could
be called inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable and
popular. As public persons, both were in the first public rank. But
everything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of a
diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man
whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixed
with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often
you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty
unintelligent committees--on every sort of subject, from the reform of
the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain.
In the Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody
could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up
Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could
not meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really been
ruled by him all your life.
His appearance was “distinguished” in exactly the same sense; it was at
once conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his
high silk hat--, yet it was unlike anyone else’s hat--a little higher,
perhaps, and adding something to his natural height. His tall, slender
figure had a slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair
was silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was worn longer than the
common yet he did not look effeminate; it was curly but it did not
look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look more manly and
militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of Velazquez
with whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were a
shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of
such gloves and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and the
restaurants.
The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short,
but merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and
cropped close to a strong, massive head--the sort of head you break a
door with, as Chaucer said of the Miller’s. His military moustache and
the carriage of his shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pair
of those peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which are more common in
sailors. His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square, his shoulders
were square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild school
of caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as a
proposition in the fourth book of Euclid.
For he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success.
You did not have to be in the best society to have heard of Captain
Cutler, of the siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. You
could not get away from hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait
was on every other postcard; his maps and battles in every other
illustrated paper; songs in his honour in every other music-hall turn or
on every other barrel-organ. His fame, though probably more temporary,
was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous than the other man’s.
In thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England, like
Nelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson
Seymour.
The door was opened to them by an aged servant or “dresser”, whose
broken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trousers
contrasted queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress’s
dressing-room. It was fitted and filled with looking-glasses at every
angle of refraction, so that they looked like the hundred facets of one
huge diamond--if one could get inside a diamond. The other features of
luxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few scraps of stage
costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of the
Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the
shuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against
the wall.
They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and
asking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the
other room, but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of
both visitors; for the other room was the private room of the great
actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was of the kind that
does not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about half
a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she always
did, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar
of applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strange
garb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue
and green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy,
hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to
all men, but especially to boys and to men growing grey. In company with
her male colleague, the great American actor, Isidore Bruno, she was
producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation of
Midsummer Night’s Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given
to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in
dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the
green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive
individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what
was still broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman’s face.
She greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so
many males at the same just dangerous distance from her. She accepted
some flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as his
victories; and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered
later on and more nonchalantly by that gentleman. For it was against
his breeding to show eagerness, and against his conventional
unconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had picked
up a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient
Greek dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in
the time of Theseus and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the
Heroic weapons, but, oddly enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still.
He had really been attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it was as
perfect as a Greek vase. If it was of any interest to Miss Rome or could
come in anywhere in the play, he hoped she would--
The inner door burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more of
a contrast to the explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearly
six-foot-six, and of more than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore
Bruno, in the gorgeous leopard skin and golden-brown garments of Oberon,
looked like a barbaric god. He leaned on a sort of hunting-spear, which
across a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand, but which in the small
and comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a pike-staff--and as
menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzed
face, handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination of
high cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled certain American
conjectures about his origin in the Southern plantations.
“Aurora,” he began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had
moved so many audiences, “will you--”
He stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented
itself just inside the doorway--a figure so incongruous in the scene as
to be almost comic. It was a very short man in the black uniform of
the Roman secular clergy, and looking (especially in such a presence as
Bruno’s and Aurora’s) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark. He
did not, however, seem conscious of any contrast, but said with dull
civility: “I believe Miss Rome sent for me.”
A shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperature
rather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a
professional celibate seemed to reveal to the others that they stood
round the woman as a ring of amorous rivals; just as a stranger coming
in with frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a furnace. The
presence of the one man who did not care about her increased Miss Rome’s
sense that everybody else was in love with her, and each in a somewhat
dangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a spoilt
child; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of will
rather than mind; Sir Wilson with that daily hardening concentration
with which old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay, even the abject
Parkinson, who had known her before her triumphs, and who followed her
about the room with eyes or feet, with the dumb fascination of a dog.
A shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a
black wooden Noah (who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with
a considerable but contained amusement. It was evident that the great
Aurora, though by no means indifferent to the admiration of the other
sex, wanted at this moment to get rid of all the men who admired her and
be left alone with the man who did not--did not admire her in that
sense at least; for the little priest did admire and even enjoy the
firm feminine diplomacy with which she set about her task. There was,
perhaps, only one thing that Aurora Rome was clever about, and that was
one half of humanity--the other half. The little priest watched, like a
Napoleonic campaign, the swift precision of her policy for expelling all
while banishing none. Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that it
was easy to send him off in brute sulks, banging the door. Cutler, the
British officer, was pachydermatous to ideas, but punctilious about
behaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he would die rather than
ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he had to
be treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The only way to
move him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to let him
into the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss Rome
as she achieved all these three objects in one selected action.
She went across to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner:
“I shall value all these flowers, because they must be your favourite
flowers. But they won’t be complete, you know, without my favourite
flower. Do go over to that shop round the corner and get me some
lilies-of-the-valley, and then it will be quite lovely.”
The first object of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was at
once achieved. He had already handed his spear in a lordly style, like
a sceptre, to the piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one of
the cushioned seats like a throne. But at this open appeal to his rival
there glowed in his opal eyeballs all the sensitive insolence of the
slave; he knotted his enormous brown fists for an instant, and then,
dashing open the door, disappeared into his own apartments beyond. But
meanwhile Miss Rome’s experiment in mobilizing the British Army had not
succeeded so simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stiffly
and suddenly, and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word of
command. But perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant about
the languid figure of Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glasses
that brought him up short at the entrance, turning his head this way and
that like a bewildered bulldog.
“I must show this stupid man where to go,” said Aurora in a whisper to
Seymour, and ran out to the threshold to speed the parting guest.
Seymour seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his
posture, and he seemed relieved when he heard the lady call out some
last instructions to the Captain, and then turn sharply and run laughing
down the passage towards the other end, the end on the terrace above the
Thames. Yet a second or two after Seymour’s brow darkened again. A man
in his position has so many rivals, and he remembered that at the other
end of the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno’s private
room. He did not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to Father
Brown about the revival of Byzantine architecture in the Westminster
Cathedral, and then, quite naturally, strolled out himself into the
upper end of the passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were left
alone, and they were neither of them men with a taste for superfluous
conversation. The dresser went round the room, pulling out
looking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark coat and
trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding the
festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame
of a new glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd
glass chamber was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air like
angels, turning somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to
everybody like very rude persons.
Father Brown seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, but
followed Parkinson with an idly attentive eye till he took himself
and his absurd spear into the farther room of Bruno. Then he abandoned
himself to such abstract meditations as always amused him--calculating
the angles of the mirrors, the angles of each refraction, the angle at
which each must fit into the wall...when he heard a strong but strangled
cry.
He sprang to his feet and stood rigidly listening. At the same instant
Sir Wilson Seymour burst back into the room, white as ivory. “Who’s that
man in the passage?” he cried. “Where’s that dagger of mine?”
Before Father Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was plunging
about the room looking for the weapon. And before he could possibly
find that weapon or any other, a brisk running of feet broke upon the
pavement outside, and the square face of Cutler was thrust into the
same doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a bunch of
lilies-of-the-valley. “What’s this?” he cried. “What’s that creature
down the passage? Is this some of your tricks?”
“My tricks!” hissed his pale rival, and made a stride towards him.
In the instant of time in which all this happened Father Brown stepped
out into the top of the passage, looked down it, and at once walked
briskly towards what he saw.
At this the other two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him,
Cutler calling out: “What are you doing? Who are you?”
“My name is Brown,” said the priest sadly, as he bent over something
and straightened himself again. “Miss Rome sent for me, and I came as
quickly as I could. I have come too late.”
The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in
that late light of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of
gold, and in the midst of it Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes of
green and gold, with her dead face turned upwards. Her dress was torn
away as in a struggle, leaving the right shoulder bare, but the wound
from which the blood was welling was on the other side. The brass dagger
lay flat and gleaming a yard or so away.
There was a blank stillness for a measurable time, so that they could
hear far off a flower-girl’s laugh outside Charing Cross, and someone
whistling furiously for a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand.
Then the Captain, with a movement so sudden that it might have been
passion or play-acting, took Sir Wilson Seymour by the throat.
Seymour looked at him steadily without either fight or fear. “You need
not kill me,” he said in a voice quite cold; “I shall do that on my own
account.”
The Captain’s hand hesitated and dropped; and the other added with the
same icy candour: “If I find I haven’t the nerve to do it with that
dagger I can do it in a month with drink.”
“Drink isn’t good enough for me,” replied Cutler, “but I’ll have blood
for this before I die. Not yours--but I think I know whose.”
And before the others could appreciate his intention he snatched up the
dagger, sprang at the other door at the lower end of the passage, burst
it open, bolt and all, and confronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As he
did so, old Parkinson tottered in his wavering way out of the door
and caught sight of the corpse lying in the passage. He moved shakily
towards it; looked at it weakly with a working face; then moved shakily
back into the dressing-room again, and sat down suddenly on one of
the richly cushioned chairs. Father Brown instantly ran across to him,
taking no notice of Cutler and the colossal actor, though the room
already rang with their blows and they began to struggle for the dagger.
Seymour, who retained some practical sense, was whistling for the police
at the end of the passage.
When the police arrived it was to tear the two men from an almost
ape-like grapple; and, after a few formal inquiries, to arrest Isidore
Bruno upon a charge of murder, brought against him by his furious
opponent. The idea that the great national hero of the hour had arrested
a wrongdoer with his own hand doubtless had its weight with the police,
who are not without elements of the journalist. They treated Cutler with
a certain solemn attention, and pointed out that he had got a slight
slash on the hand. Even as Cutler bore him back across tilted chair and
table, Bruno had twisted the dagger out of his grasp and disabled him
just below the wrist. The injury was really slight, but till he was
removed from the room the half-savage prisoner stared at the running
blood with a steady smile.
“Looks a cannibal sort of chap, don’t he?” said the constable
confidentially to Cutler.
Cutler made no answer, but said sharply a moment after: “We must attend
to the...the death...” and his voice escaped from articulation.
“The two deaths,” came in the voice of the priest from the farther side
of the room. “This poor fellow was gone when I got across to him.” And
he stood looking down at old Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on the
gorgeous chair. He also had paid his tribute, not without eloquence, to
the woman who had died.
The silence was first broken by Cutler, who seemed not untouched by a
rough tenderness. “I wish I was him,” he said huskily. “I remember he
used to watch her wherever she walked more than--anybody. She was his
air, and he’s dried up. He’s just dead.”
“We are all dead,” said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down the
road.
They took leave of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with some
random apologies for any rudeness they might have shown. Both their
faces were tragic, but also cryptic.
The mind of the little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wild
thoughts that jumped too quickly for him to catch them. Like the white
tail of a rabbit he had the vanishing thought that he was certain of
their grief, but not so certain of their innocence.
“We had better all be going,” said Seymour heavily; “we have done all we
can to help.”
“Will you understand my motives,” asked Father Brown quietly, “if I say
you have done all you can to hurt?”
They both started as if guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: “To hurt
whom?”
“To hurt yourselves,” answered the priest. “I would not add to your
troubles if it weren’t common justice to warn you. You’ve done nearly
everything you could do to hang yourselves, if this actor should be
acquitted. They’ll be sure to subpoena me; I shall be bound to say that
after the cry was heard each of you rushed into the room in a wild state
and began quarrelling about a dagger. As far as my words on oath can go,
you might either of you have done it. You hurt yourselves with that; and
then Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the dagger.”
“Hurt myself!” exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. “A silly little
scratch.”
“Which drew blood,” replied the priest, nodding. “We know there’s blood
on the brass now. And so we shall never know whether there was blood on
it before.”
There was a silence; and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite alien
to his daily accent: “But I saw a man in the passage.”
“I know you did,” answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, “so did
Captain Cutler. That’s what seems so improbable.”
Before either could make sufficient sense of it even to answer, Father
Brown had politely excused himself and gone stumping up the road with
his stumpy old umbrella.
As modern newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most important
news is the police news. If it be true that in the twentieth century
more space is given to murder than to politics, it is for the excellent
reason that murder is a more serious subject. But even this would hardly
explain the enormous omnipresence and widely distributed detail of “The
Bruno Case,” or “The Passage Mystery,” in the Press of London and the
provinces. So vast was the excitement that for some weeks the
Press really told the truth; and the reports of examination and
cross-examination, if interminable, even if intolerable are at least
reliable. The true reason, of course, was the coincidence of persons.
The victim was a popular actress; the accused was a popular actor; and
the accused had been caught red-handed, as it were, by the most popular
soldier of the patriotic season. In those extraordinary circumstances
the Press was paralysed into probity and accuracy; and the rest of this
somewhat singular business can practically be recorded from reports of
Bruno’s trial.
The trial was presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those
who are jeered at as humorous judges, but who are generally much more
serious than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a living
impatience of professional solemnity; while the serious judge is really
filled with frivolity, because he is filled with vanity. All the chief
actors being of a worldly importance, the barristers were well balanced;
the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy, but
weighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem English and
trustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner was
defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who was mistaken for a mere flaneur
by those who misunderstood the Irish character--and those who had not
been examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions,
the doctor, whom Seymour had summoned on the spot, agreeing with the
eminent surgeon who had later examined the body. Aurora Rome had been
stabbed with some sharp instrument such as a knife or dagger; some
instrument, at least, of which the blade was short. The wound was just
over the heart, and she had died instantly. When the doctor first saw
her she could hardly have been dead for twenty minutes. Therefore when
Father Brown found her she could hardly have been dead for three.
Some official detective evidence followed, chiefly concerned with the
presence or absence of any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion of
this was the tearing of the dress at the shoulder, and this did not seem
to fit in particularly well with the direction and finality of the blow.
When these details had been supplied, though not explained, the first of
the important witnesses was called.
Sir Wilson Seymour gave evidence as he did everything else that he did
at all--not only well, but perfectly. Though himself much more of
a public man than the judge, he conveyed exactly the fine shade of
self-effacement before the King’s justice; and though everyone looked at
him as they would at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury,
they could have said nothing of his part in it but that it was that of a
private gentleman, with an accent on the noun. He was also refreshingly
lucid, as he was on the committees. He had been calling on Miss Rome at
the theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had been joined for
a short time by the accused, who had then returned to his own
dressing-room; they had then been joined by a Roman Catholic priest, who
asked for the deceased lady and said his name was Brown. Miss Rome had
then gone just outside the theatre to the entrance of the passage, in
order to point out to Captain Cutler a flower-shop at which he was to
buy her some more flowers; and the witness had remained in the room,
exchanging a few words with the priest. He had then distinctly heard the
deceased, having sent the Captain on his errand, turn round laughing
and run down the passage towards its other end, where was the prisoner’s
dressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid movement of his
friends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself and
looked down it towards the prisoner’s door. Did he see anything in the
passage? Yes; he saw something in the passage.
Sir Walter Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which the
witness looked down, and for all his usual composure seemed to have more
than his usual pallor. Then the barrister said in a lower voice, which
seemed at once sympathetic and creepy: “Did you see it distinctly?”
Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains in full
working-order. “Very distinctly as regards its outline, but quite
indistinctly, indeed not at all, as regards the details inside the
outline. The passage is of such length that anyone in the middle of it
appears quite black against the light at the other end.” The witness
lowered his steady eyes once more and added: “I had noticed the fact
before, when Captain Cutler first entered it.” There was another
silence, and the judge leaned forward and made a note.
“Well,” said Sir Walter patiently, “what was the outline like? Was it,
for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?”
“Not in the least,” answered Seymour quietly.
“What did it look like to you?”
“It looked to me,” replied the witness, “like a tall man.”
Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or his
umbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to be
looking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisoner
by main force; but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt it
as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to swell taller and
taller when an eyes had been torn away from him.
Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his
black silk robes, and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the
witness-box, after a few final particulars to which there were many
other witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up and stopped
him.
“I shall only detain you a moment,” said Mr Butler, who was a
rustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial
slumber. “Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?”
A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour’s features. “I’m
afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers,” he said. “When I saw daylight
between the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all.”
Butler’s sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. “After
all!” he repeated slowly. “So you did think at first it was a woman?”
Seymour looked troubled for the first time. “It is hardly a point of
fact,” he said, “but if his lordship would like me to answer for my
impression, of course I shall do so. There was something about the thing
that was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man; somehow the
curves were different. And it had something that looked like long hair.”
“Thank you,” said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had
got what he wanted.
Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir
Wilson, but his account of the opening incidents was solidly the same.
He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatching
of himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the
upper end of the passage, the thing he saw in the passage, his suspicion
of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could give little
artistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen.
Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic--with a somewhat
too obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said
it looked more like a beast--with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner.
But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, and
Cowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts that were already
fairly clear.
The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination;
although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a
long time about it. “You used a rather remarkable expression,” he said,
looking at Cutler sleepily. “What do you mean by saying that it looked
more like a beast than a man or a woman?”
Cutler seemed seriously agitated. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said
that,” he said; “but when the brute has huge humped shoulders like a
chimpanzee, and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig--”
Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. “Never mind
whether its hair was like a pig’s,” he said, “was it like a woman’s?”
“A woman’s!” cried the soldier. “Great Scott, no!”
“The last witness said it was,” commented the counsel, with unscrupulous
swiftness. “And did the figure have any of those serpentine and
semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No? No
feminine curves? The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy and
square than otherwise?”
“He may have been bending forward,” said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather
faint voice.
“Or again, he may not,” said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the
second time.
The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic
clergyman, so little, compared with the others, that his head seemed
hardly to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining a
child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head
(mostly by some ramifications of his family’s religion) that Father
Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the prisoner was wicked
and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father Brown up
sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and told
him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry.
When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the
man in the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want his
theories.
“A black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black
shape. Well, what shape was it?”
Father Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal
nature of obedience. “The shape,” he said, “was short and thick, but had
two sharp, black projections curved upwards on each side of the head or
top, rather like horns, and--”
“Oh! the devil with horns, no doubt,” ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down
in triumphant jocularity. “It was the devil come to eat Protestants.”
“No,” said the priest dispassionately; “I know who it was.”
Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of
some monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought
only of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage,
described by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, was
a shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, and
the other a devil....
The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes.
“You are a most extraordinary witness,” he said; “but there is something
about you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well,
who was the man you saw in the passage?”
“He was myself,” said Father Brown.
Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said
quite calmly: “Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?” And then,
without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question:
“You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime
was committed with a short blade?”
“A short blade,” assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, “but a
very long hilt.”
Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had
really seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt
(which seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurried
on to explain.
“I mean daggers aren’t the only things with short blades. Spears
have short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just like
daggers, if they’re that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like
the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she’d sent
for me to settle their family troubles--and I came just too late, God
forgive me! But he died penitent--he just died of being penitent. He
couldn’t bear what he’d done.”
The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was
gobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still
looked at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel
for the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.
“If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear,” said Butler, “he
must have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs of
struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?” He had slipped into
treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.
“The poor lady’s dress was torn,” said the witness, “because it was
caught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free
herself, and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner’s room and
lunged with the spear.”
“A panel?” repeated the barrister in a curious voice.
“It was a looking-glass on the other side,” explained Father Brown.
“When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could
probably be slid out into the passage.”
There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the
judge who spoke. “So you really mean that when you looked down that
passage, the man you saw was yourself--in a mirror?”
“Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say,” said Brown, “but they
asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and
so I--”
The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said
in specially distinct tones: “Do you really mean to say that when Sir
Wilson Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman’s
hair and a man’s trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?”
“Yes, my lord,” said Father Brown.
“And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with
humped shoulders and hog’s bristles, he simply saw himself?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was
hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. “And can you tell us
why,” he asked, “you should know your own figure in a looking-glass,
when two such distinguished men don’t?”
Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered:
“Really, my lord, I don’t know unless it’s because I don’t look at it so
often.”