THERE is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of
tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs.
The very steps up to the dark front doors seem as steep as the side of
pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be
opened by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey facade
is its telescopic length and changeless continuity. The pilgrim walking
down it begins to think he will never come to a break or a corner; but
there is one exception--a very small one, but hailed by the pilgrim
almost with a shout. There is a sort of mews between two of the tall
mansions, a mere slit like the crack of a door by comparison with
the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or
eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to
stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess,
and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of
those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted house of dwarfs.
Anyone passing the place during a certain autumn evening, itself almost
fairylike, might have seen a hand pull aside the red half-blind which
(along with some large white lettering) half hid the interior from the
street, and a face peer out not unlike a rather innocent goblin’s. It
was, in fact, the face of one with the harmless human name of Brown,
formerly priest of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London. His
friend, Flambeau, a semi-official investigator, was sitting opposite
him, making his last notes of a case he had cleared up in the
neighbourhood. They were sitting at a small table, close up to the
window, when the priest pulled the curtain back and looked out. He
waited till a stranger in the street had passed the window, to let the
curtain fall into its place again. Then his round eyes rolled to the
large white lettering on the window above his head, and then strayed to
the next table, at which sat only a navvy with beer and cheese, and a
young girl with red hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing his friend
put away the pocket-book), he said softly:
“If you’ve got ten minutes, I wish you’d follow that man with the false
nose.”
Flambeau looked up in surprise; but the girl with the red hair also
looked up, and with something that was stronger than astonishment. She
was simply and even loosely dressed in light brown sacking stuff;
but she was a lady, and even, on a second glance, a rather needlessly
haughty one. “The man with the false nose!” repeated Flambeau. “Who’s
he?”
“I haven’t a notion,” answered Father Brown. “I want you to find out;
I ask it as a favour. He went down there”--and he jerked his thumb over
his shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures--“and can’t have
passed three lamp-posts yet. I only want to know the direction.”
Flambeau gazed at his friend for some time, with an expression between
perplexity and amusement; and then, rising from the table; squeezed his
huge form out of the little door of the dwarf tavern, and melted into
the twilight.
Father Brown took a small book out of his pocket and began to read
steadily; he betrayed no consciousness of the fact that the red-haired
lady had left her own table and sat down opposite him. At last she
leaned over and said in a low, strong voice: “Why do you say that? How
do you know it’s false?”
He lifted his rather heavy eyelids, which fluttered in considerable
embarrassment. Then his dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering
on the glass front of the public-house. The young woman’s eyes followed
his, and rested there also, but in pure puzzledom.
“No,” said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. “It doesn’t say ‘Sela’,
like the thing in the Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was
wool-gathering just now; it says ‘Ales.’”
“Well?” inquired the staring young lady. “What does it matter what it
says?”
His ruminating eye roved to the girl’s light canvas sleeve, round the
wrist of which ran a very slight thread of artistic pattern, just enough
to distinguish it from a working-dress of a common woman and make it
more like the working-dress of a lady art-student. He seemed to find
much food for thought in this; but his reply was very slow and hesitant.
“You see, madam,” he said, “from outside the place looks--well, it is a
perfectly decent place--but ladies like you don’t--don’t generally think
so. They never go into such places from choice, except--”
“Well?” she repeated.
“Except an unfortunate few who don’t go in to drink milk.”
“You are a most singular person,” said the young lady. “What is your
object in all this?”
“Not to trouble you about it,” he replied, very gently. “Only to arm
myself with knowledge enough to help you, if ever you freely ask my
help.”
“But why should I need help?”
He continued his dreamy monologue. “You couldn’t have come in to see
protegees, humble friends, that sort of thing, or you’d have gone
through into the parlour... and you couldn’t have come in because
you were ill, or you’d have spoken to the woman of the place, who’s
obviously respectable... besides, you don’t look ill in that way, but
only unhappy.... This street is the only original long lane that has
no turning; and the houses on both sides are shut up.... I could only
suppose that you’d seen somebody coming whom you didn’t want to meet;
and found the public-house was the only shelter in this wilderness
of stone.... I don’t think I went beyond the licence of a stranger
in glancing at the only man who passed immediately after.... And as I
thought he looked like the wrong sort... and you looked like the right
sort.... I held myself ready to help if he annoyed you; that is all.
As for my friend, he’ll be back soon; and he certainly can’t find out
anything by stumping down a road like this.... I didn’t think he could.”
“Then why did you send him out?” she cried, leaning forward with yet
warmer curiosity. She had the proud, impetuous face that goes with
reddish colouring, and a Roman nose, as it did in Marie Antoinette.
He looked at her steadily for the first time, and said: “Because I hoped
you would speak to me.”
She looked back at him for some time with a heated face, in which there
hung a red shadow of anger; then, despite her anxieties, humour broke
out of her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and she answered almost
grimly: “Well, if you’re so keen on my conversation, perhaps you’ll
answer my question.” After a pause she added: “I had the honour to ask
you why you thought the man’s nose was false.”
“The wax always spots like that just a little in this weather,” answered
Father Brown with entire simplicity.
“But it’s such a crooked nose,” remonstrated the red-haired girl.
The priest smiled in his turn. “I don’t say it’s the sort of nose one
would wear out of mere foppery,” he admitted. “This man, I think, wears
it because his real nose is so much nicer.”
“But why?” she insisted.
“What is the nursery-rhyme?” observed Brown absent-mindedly. “There was
a crooked man and he went a crooked mile.... That man, I fancy, has gone
a very crooked road--by following his nose.”
“Why, what’s he done?” she demanded, rather shakily.
“I don’t want to force your confidence by a hair,” said Father Brown,
very quietly. “But I think you could tell me more about that than I can
tell you.”
The girl sprang to her feet and stood quite quietly, but with clenched
hands, like one about to stride away; then her hands loosened slowly,
and she sat down again. “You are more of a mystery than all the others,”
she said desperately, “but I feel there might be a heart in your
mystery.”
“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze
with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.” “I will tell
you everything,” said the red-haired girl doggedly, “except why I am
telling you; and that I don’t know.”
She picked at the darned table-cloth and went on: “You look as if you
knew what isn’t snobbery as well as what is; and when I say that ours
is a good old family, you’ll understand it is a necessary part of the
story; indeed, my chief danger is in my brother’s high-and-dry notions,
noblesse oblige and all that. Well, my name is Christabel Carstairs; and
my father was that Colonel Carstairs you’ve probably heard of, who made
the famous Carstairs Collection of Roman coins. I could never describe
my father to you; the nearest I can say is that he was very like a Roman
coin himself. He was as handsome and as genuine and as valuable and as
metallic and as out-of-date. He was prouder of his Collection than of
his coat-of-arms--nobody could say more than that. His extraordinary
character came out most in his will. He had two sons and one daughter.
He quarrelled with one son, my brother Giles, and sent him to Australia
on a small allowance. He then made a will leaving the Carstairs
Collection, actually with a yet smaller allowance, to my brother Arthur.
He meant it as a reward, as the highest honour he could offer, in
acknowledgement of Arthur’s loyalty and rectitude and the distinctions
he had already gained in mathematics and economics at Cambridge. He left
me practically all his pretty large fortune; and I am sure he meant it
in contempt.
“Arthur, you may say, might well complain of this; but Arthur is my
father over again. Though he had some differences with my father in
early youth, no sooner had he taken over the Collection than he became
like a pagan priest dedicated to a temple. He mixed up these Roman
halfpence with the honour of the Carstairs family in the same stiff,
idolatrous way as his father before him. He acted as if Roman money
must be guarded by all the Roman virtues. He took no pleasures; he spent
nothing on himself; he lived for the Collection. Often he would not
trouble to dress for his simple meals; but pattered about among the
corded brown-paper parcels (which no one else was allowed to touch) in
an old brown dressing-gown. With its rope and tassel and his pale, thin,
refined face, it made him look like an old ascetic monk. Every now
and then, though, he would appear dressed like a decidedly fashionable
gentleman; but that was only when he went up to the London sales or
shops to make an addition to the Carstairs Collection.
“Now, if you’ve known any young people, you won’t be shocked if I say
that I got into rather a low frame of mind with all this; the frame of
mind in which one begins to say that the Ancient Romans were all very
well in their way. I’m not like my brother Arthur; I can’t help enjoying
enjoyment. I got a lot of romance and rubbish where I got my red hair,
from the other side of the family. Poor Giles was the same; and I think
the atmosphere of coins might count in excuse for him; though he really
did wrong and nearly went to prison. But he didn’t behave any worse than
I did; as you shall hear.
“I come now to the silly part of the story. I think a man as clever as
you can guess the sort of thing that would begin to relieve the monotony
for an unruly girl of seventeen placed in such a position. But I am so
rattled with more dreadful things that I can hardly read my own feeling;
and don’t know whether I despise it now as a flirtation or bear it as a
broken heart. We lived then at a little seaside watering-place in South
Wales, and a retired sea-captain living a few doors off had a son about
five years older than myself, who had been a friend of Giles before he
went to the Colonies. His name does not affect my tale; but I tell you
it was Philip Hawker, because I am telling you everything. We used to
go shrimping together, and said and thought we were in love with each
other; at least he certainly said he was, and I certainly thought I was.
If I tell you he had bronzed curly hair and a falconish sort of face,
bronzed by the sea also, it’s not for his sake, I assure you, but for
the story; for it was the cause of a very curious coincidence.
“One summer afternoon, when I had promised to go shrimping along
the sands with Philip, I was waiting rather impatiently in the front
drawing-room, watching Arthur handle some packets of coins he had just
purchased and slowly shunt them, one or two at a time, into his own dark
study and museum which was at the back of the house. As soon as I heard
the heavy door close on him finally, I made a bolt for my shrimping-net
and tam-o’-shanter and was just going to slip out, when I saw that my
brother had left behind him one coin that lay gleaming on the long bench
by the window. It was a bronze coin, and the colour, combined with the
exact curve of the Roman nose and something in the very lift of the
long, wiry neck, made the head of Caesar on it the almost precise
portrait of Philip Hawker. Then I suddenly remembered Giles telling
Philip of a coin that was like him, and Philip wishing he had it.
Perhaps you can fancy the wild, foolish thoughts with which my head went
round; I felt as if I had had a gift from the fairies. It seemed to me
that if I could only run away with this, and give it to Philip like a
wild sort of wedding-ring, it would be a bond between us for ever; I
felt a thousand such things at once. Then there yawned under me, like
the pit, the enormous, awful notion of what I was doing; above all, the
unbearable thought, which was like touching hot iron, of what Arthur
would think of it. A Carstairs a thief; and a thief of the Carstairs
treasure! I believe my brother could see me burned like a witch for such
a thing, But then, the very thought of such fanatical cruelty heightened
my old hatred of his dingy old antiquarian fussiness and my longing for
the youth and liberty that called to me from the sea. Outside was strong
sunlight with a wind; and a yellow head of some broom or gorse in the
garden rapped against the glass of the window. I thought of that living
and growing gold calling to me from all the heaths of the world--and
then of that dead, dull gold and bronze and brass of my brother’s
growing dustier and dustier as life went by. Nature and the Carstairs
Collection had come to grips at last.
“Nature is older than the Carstairs Collection. As I ran down the
streets to the sea, the coin clenched tight in my fist, I felt all the
Roman Empire on my back as well as the Carstairs pedigree. It was not
only the old lion argent that was roaring in my ear, but all the eagles
of the Caesars seemed flapping and screaming in pursuit of me. And yet
my heart rose higher and higher like a child’s kite, until I came over
the loose, dry sand-hills and to the flat, wet sands, where Philip stood
already up to his ankles in the shallow shining water, some hundred
yards out to sea. There was a great red sunset; and the long stretch of
low water, hardly rising over the ankle for half a mile, was like a lake
of ruby flame. It was not till I had torn off my shoes and stockings and
waded to where he stood, which was well away from the dry land, that I
turned and looked round. We were quite alone in a circle of sea-water
and wet sand, and I gave him the head of Caesar.
“At the very instant I had a shock of fancy: that a man far away on
the sand-hills was looking at me intently. I must have felt immediately
after that it was a mere leap of unreasonable nerves; for the man was
only a dark dot in the distance, and I could only just see that he was
standing quite still and gazing, with his head a little on one side.
There was no earthly logical evidence that he was looking at me; he
might have been looking at a ship, or the sunset, or the sea-gulls,
or at any of the people who still strayed here and there on the shore
between us. Nevertheless, whatever my start sprang from was prophetic;
for, as I gazed, he started walking briskly in a bee-line towards us
across the wide wet sands. As he drew nearer and nearer I saw that
he was dark and bearded, and that his eyes were marked with dark
spectacles. He was dressed poorly but respectably in black, from the old
black top hat on his head to the solid black boots on his feet. In spite
of these he walked straight into the sea without a flash of hesitation,
and came on at me with the steadiness of a travelling bullet.
“I can’t tell you the sense of monstrosity and miracle I had when he
thus silently burst the barrier between land and water. It was as if he
had walked straight off a cliff and still marched steadily in mid-air.
It was as if a house had flown up into the sky or a man’s head had
fallen off. He was only wetting his boots; but he seemed to be a demon
disregarding a law of Nature. If he had hesitated an instant at the
water’s edge it would have been nothing. As it was, he seemed to look so
much at me alone as not to notice the ocean. Philip was some yards away
with his back to me, bending over his net. The stranger came on till
he stood within two yards of me, the water washing half-way up to
his knees. Then he said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing
articulation: ‘Would it discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin
with a somewhat different superscription?’
“With one exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him. His
tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough,
nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark
beard was not really long or wild--, but he looked rather hairy, because
the beard began very high up in his face, just under the cheek-bones.
His complexion was neither sallow nor livid, but on the contrary rather
clear and youthful; yet this gave a pink-and-white wax look which
somehow (I don’t know why) rather increased the horror. The only oddity
one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of a good shape,
was just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was soft,
it had been tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly
a deformity; yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to
me. As he stood there in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some
hellish sea-monster just risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don’t
know why a touch on the nose should affect my imagination so much. I
think it seemed as if he could move his nose like a finger. And as if he
had just that moment moved it.
“‘Any little assistance,’ he continued with the same queer, priggish
accent, ‘that may obviate the necessity of my communicating with the
family.’
“Then it rushed over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of
the bronze piece; and all my merely superstitious fears and doubts were
swallowed up in one overpowering, practical question. How could he
have found out? I had stolen the thing suddenly and on impulse; I was
certainly alone; for I always made sure of being unobserved when I
slipped out to see Philip in this way. I had not, to all appearance,
been followed in the street; and if I had, they could not ‘X-ray’ the
coin in my closed hand. The man standing on the sand-hills could no more
have seen what I gave Philip than shoot a fly in one eye, like the man
in the fairy-tale.
“‘Philip,’ I cried helplessly, ‘ask this man what he wants.’
“When Philip lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked
rather red, as if sulky or ashamed; but it may have been only the
exertion of stooping and the red evening light; I may have only had
another of the morbid fancies that seemed to be dancing about me. He
merely said gruffly to the man: ‘You clear out of this.’ And, motioning
me to follow, set off wading shoreward without paying further attention
to him. He stepped on to a stone breakwater that ran out from among the
roots of the sand-hills, and so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our
incubus would find it less easy to walk on such rough stones, green and
slippery with seaweed, than we, who were young and used to it. But my
persecutor walked as daintily as he talked; and he still followed
me, picking his way and picking his phrases. I heard his delicate,
detestable voice appealing to me over my shoulder, until at last, when
we had crested the sand-hills, Philip’s patience (which was by no means
so conspicuous on most occasions) seemed to snap. He turned suddenly,
saying, ‘Go back. I can’t talk to you now.’ And as the man hovered and
opened his mouth, Philip struck him a buffet on it that sent him flying
from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the bottom. I saw him crawling
out below, covered with sand.
“This stroke comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my
peril; but Philip showed none of his usual elation at his own prowess.
Though as affectionate as ever, he still seemed cast down; and before
I could ask him anything fully, he parted with me at his own gate,
with two remarks that struck me as strange. He said that, all things
considered, I ought to put the coin back in the Collection; but that
he himself would keep it ‘for the present’. And then he added quite
suddenly and irrelevantly: ‘You know Giles is back from Australia?’”
The door of the tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the
investigator Flambeau fell across the table. Father Brown presented him
to the lady in his own slight, persuasive style of speech, mentioning
his knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and almost without knowing,
the girl was soon reiterating her story to two listeners. But Flambeau,
as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small slip of paper. Brown
accepted it with some surprise and read on it: “Cab to Wagga Wagga, 379,
Mafeking Avenue, Putney.” The girl was going on with her story.
“I went up the steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it
had not begun to clear when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a
milk-can--and the man with the twisted nose. The milk-can told me the
servants were all out; for, of course, Arthur, browsing about in his
brown dressing-gown in a brown study, would not hear or answer a bell.
Thus there was no one to help me in the house, except my brother, whose
help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into the
horrid thing’s hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I
had thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had
expected--perhaps he had been shaken by his fall--and I watched the
star of sand splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid
vindictive pleasure. He turned a corner some six houses down.
“Then I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out.
I sat at the drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still
glowed with the last full evening light. But I was too distracted and
dreamy to look at the lawns and flower-pots and flower-beds with any
concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply because I’d seen it
so slowly.
“The man or monster I’d sent away was standing quite still in the middle
of the garden. Oh, we’ve all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the
dark; but this was more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever
be. Because, though he cast a long evening shadow, he still stood in
warm sunlight. And because his face was not pale, but had that waxen
bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber’s dummy. He stood quite
still, with his face towards me; and I can’t tell you how horrid
he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost
hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we’d stuck up a waxwork
instead of a statue in the centre of our garden.
“Yet almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran
out of the garden by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had
undoubtedly entered. This renewed timidity on his part was so different
from the impudence with which he had walked into the sea, that I felt
vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur
more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at last, and had a quiet
dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb Arthur when he was
rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little released, fled to
Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly,
but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained,
but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed
to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane.
But when I stared harder, it was more like a man’s thumb pressed on the
pane; it had that curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage
re-awakened together, I rushed at the window and then recoiled with a
strangled scream that any man but Arthur must have heard.
“For it was not a thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip
of a crooked nose, crushed against the glass; it looked white with
the pressure; and the staring face and eyes behind it were at first
invisible and afterwards grey like a ghost. I slammed the shutters
together somehow, rushed up to my room and locked myself in. But, even
as I passed, I could swear I saw a second black window with something on
it that was like a snail.
“It might be best to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling
close all around the house like a cat, it might have purposes worse even
than blackmail. My brother might cast me out and curse me for ever, but
he was a gentleman, and would defend me on the spot. After ten minutes’
curious thinking, I went down, knocked on the door and then went in: to
see the last and worst sight.
“My brother’s chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man
with the crooked nose was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat
still insolently on his head, and actually reading one of my brother’s
books under my brother’s lamp. His face was composed and occupied, but
his nose-tip still had the air of being the most mobile part of his
face, as if it had just turned from left to right like an elephant’s
proboscis. I had thought him poisonous enough while he was pursuing and
watching me; but I think his unconsciousness of my presence was more
frightful still.
“I think I screamed loud and long; but that doesn’t matter. What I did
next does matter: I gave him all the money I had, including a good deal
in paper which, though it was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch.
He went off at last, with hateful, tactful regrets all in long words;
and I sat down, feeling ruined in every sense. And yet I was saved that
very night by a pure accident. Arthur had gone off suddenly to London,
as he so often did, for bargains; and returned, late but radiant, having
nearly secured a treasure that was an added splendour even to the
family Collection. He was so resplendent that I was almost emboldened to
confess the abstraction of the lesser gem--, but he bore down all other
topics with his over-powering projects. Because the bargain might still
misfire any moment, he insisted on my packing at once and going up
with him to lodgings he had already taken in Fulham, to be near the
curio-shop in question. Thus in spite of myself, I fled from my foe
almost in the dead of night--but from Philip also.... My brother was
often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to make some sort of
secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the Art Schools.
I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the abomination of
desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the rest is
as this gentleman has said.
“I’ve got only one thing to say. I don’t deserve to be helped; and I
don’t question or complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to
have happened. But I still question, with bursting brains, how it can
have happened. Am I punished by miracle? or how can anyone but Philip
and myself know I gave him a tiny coin in the middle of the sea?”
“It is an extraordinary problem,” admitted Flambeau.
“Not so extraordinary as the answer,” remarked Father Brown rather
gloomily. “Miss Carstairs, will you be at home if we call at your Fulham
place in an hour and a half hence?”
The girl looked at him, and then rose and put her gloves on. “Yes,” she
said, “I’ll be there”; and almost instantly left the place.
That night the detective and the priest were still talking of the matter
as they drew near the Fulham house, a tenement strangely mean even for a
temporary residence of the Carstairs family.
“Of course the superficial, on reflection,” said Flambeau, “would think
first of this Australian brother who’s been in trouble before,
who’s come back so suddenly and who’s just the man to have shabby
confederates. But I can’t see how he can come into the thing by any
process of thought, unless...”
“Well?” asked his companion patiently.
Flambeau lowered his voice. “Unless the girl’s lover comes in, too,
and he would be the blacker villain. The Australian chap did know that
Hawker wanted the coin. But I can’t see how on earth he could know that
Hawker had got it, unless Hawker signalled to him or his representative
across the shore.”
“That is true,” assented the priest, with respect.
“Have you noted another thing?” went on Flambeau eagerly, “this Hawker
hears his love insulted, but doesn’t strike till he’s got to the soft
sand-hills, where he can be victor in a mere sham-fight. If he’d struck
amid rocks and sea, he might have hurt his ally.”
“That is true again,” said Father Brown, nodding.
“And now, take it from the start. It lies between few people, but at
least three. You want one person for suicide; two people for murder; but
at least three people for blackmail”
“Why?” asked the priest softly.
“Well, obviously,” cried his friend, “there must be one to be exposed;
one to threaten exposure; and one at least whom exposure would horrify.”
After a long ruminant pause, the priest said: “You miss a logical step.
Three persons are needed as ideas. Only two are needed as agents.”
“What can you mean?” asked the other.
“Why shouldn’t a blackmailer,” asked Brown, in a low voice, “threaten
his victim with himself? Suppose a wife became a rigid teetotaller in
order to frighten her husband into concealing his pub-frequenting, and
then wrote him blackmailing letters in another hand, threatening to
tell his wife! Why shouldn’t it work? Suppose a father forbade a son to
gamble and then, following him in a good disguise, threatened the boy
with his own sham paternal strictness! Suppose--but, here we are, my
friend.”
“My God!” cried Flambeau; “you don’t mean--”
An active figure ran down the steps of the house and showed under the
golden lamplight the unmistakable head that resembled the Roman coin.
“Miss Carstairs,” said Hawker without ceremony, “wouldn’t go in till you
came.”
“Well,” observed Brown confidently, “don’t you think it’s the best
thing she can do to stop outside--with you to look after her? You see, I
rather guess you have guessed it all yourself.”
“Yes,” said the young man, in an undertone, “I guessed on the sands and
now I know; that was why I let him fall soft.”
Taking a latchkey from the girl and the coin from Hawker, Flambeau let
himself and his friend into the empty house and passed into the outer
parlour. It was empty of all occupants but one. The man whom Father
Brown had seen pass the tavern was standing against the wall as if
at bay; unchanged, save that he had taken off his black coat and was
wearing a brown dressing-gown.
“We have come,” said Father Brown politely, “to give back this coin to
its owner.” And he handed it to the man with the nose.
Flambeau’s eyes rolled. “Is this man a coin-collector?” he asked.
“This man is Mr Arthur Carstairs,” said the priest positively, “and he
is a coin-collector of a somewhat singular kind.”
The man changed colour so horribly that the crooked nose stood out on
his face like a separate and comic thing. He spoke, nevertheless, with a
sort of despairing dignity. “You shall see, then,” he said, “that I have
not lost all the family qualities.” And he turned suddenly and strode
into an inner room, slamming the door.
“Stop him!” shouted Father Brown, bounding and half falling over a
chair; and, after a wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it
was too late. In dead silence Flambeau strode across and telephoned for
doctor and police.
An empty medicine bottle lay on the floor. Across the table the body
of the man in the brown dressing-gown lay amid his burst and gaping
brown-paper parcels; out of which poured and rolled, not Roman, but very
modern English coins.
The priest held up the bronze head of Caesar. “This,” he said, “was all
that was left of the Carstairs Collection.”
After a silence he went on, with more than common gentleness: “It was
a cruel will his wicked father made, and you see he did resent it a
little. He hated the Roman money he had, and grew fonder of the real
money denied him. He not only sold the Collection bit by bit, but sank
bit by bit to the basest ways of making money--even to blackmailing his
own family in a disguise. He blackmailed his brother from Australia for
his little forgotten crime (that is why he took the cab to Wagga Wagga
in Putney), he blackmailed his sister for the theft he alone could have
noticed. And that, by the way, is why she had that supernatural guess
when he was away on the sand-dunes. Mere figure and gait, however
distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up
face quite close.”
There was another silence. “Well,” growled the detective, “and so this
great numismatist and coin-collector was nothing but a vulgar miser.”
“Is there so great a difference?” asked Father Brown, in the same
strange, indulgent tone. “What is there wrong about a miser that is not
often as wrong about a collector? What is wrong, except... thou shalt
not make to thyself any graven image; thou shalt not bow down to them
nor serve them, for I...but we must go and see how the poor young people
are getting on.”
“I think,” said Flambeau, “that in spite of everything, they are
probably getting on very well.”