THE picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy
kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist. It
had come under the Prussian hegemony quite late in history--hardly fifty
years before the fine summer day when Flambeau and Father Brown found
themselves sitting in its gardens and drinking its beer. There had been
not a little of war and wild justice there within living memory, as soon
will be shown. But in merely looking at it one could not dismiss
that impression of childishness which is the most charming side of
Germany--those little pantomime, paternal monarchies in which a king
seems as domestic as a cook. The German soldiers by the innumerable
sentry-boxes looked strangely like German toys, and the clean-cut
battlements of the castle, gilded by the sunshine, looked the more
like the gilt gingerbread. For it was brilliant weather. The sky was
as Prussian a blue as Potsdam itself could require, but it was yet more
like that lavish and glowing use of the colour which a child extracts
from a shilling paint-box. Even the grey-ribbed trees looked young, for
the pointed buds on them were still pink, and in a pattern against the
strong blue looked like innumerable childish figures.
Despite his prosaic appearance and generally practical walk of life,
Father Brown was not without a certain streak of romance in his
composition, though he generally kept his daydreams to himself, as many
children do. Amid the brisk, bright colours of such a day, and in the
heraldic framework of such a town, he did feel rather as if he had
entered a fairy tale. He took a childish pleasure, as a younger brother
might, in the formidable sword-stick which Flambeau always flung as he
walked, and which now stood upright beside his tall mug of Munich. Nay,
in his sleepy irresponsibility, he even found himself eyeing the knobbed
and clumsy head of his own shabby umbrella, with some faint memories of
the ogre’s club in a coloured toy-book. But he never composed anything
in the form of fiction, unless it be the tale that follows:
“I wonder,” he said, “whether one would have real adventures in a place
like this, if one put oneself in the way? It’s a splendid back-scene for
them, but I always have a kind of feeling that they would fight you with
pasteboard sabres more than real, horrible swords.”
“You are mistaken,” said his friend. “In this place they not only fight
with swords, but kill without swords. And there’s worse than that.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked Father Brown.
“Why,” replied the other, “I should say this was the only place in
Europe where a man was ever shot without firearms.”
“Do you mean a bow and arrow?” asked Brown in some wonder.
“I mean a bullet in the brain,” replied Flambeau. “Don’t you know the
story of the late Prince of this place? It was one of the great police
mysteries about twenty years ago. You remember, of course, that this
place was forcibly annexed at the time of Bismarck’s very earliest
schemes of consolidation--forcibly, that is, but not at all easily. The
empire (or what wanted to be one) sent Prince Otto of Grossenmark to
rule the place in the Imperial interests. We saw his portrait in
the gallery there--a handsome old gentleman if he’d had any hair or
eyebrows, and hadn’t been wrinkled all over like a vulture; but he had
things to harass him, as I’ll explain in a minute. He was a soldier of
distinguished skill and success, but he didn’t have altogether an easy
job with this little place. He was defeated in several battles by
the celebrated Arnhold brothers--the three guerrilla patriots to whom
Swinburne wrote a poem, you remember:
Wolves with the hair of the ermine,
Crows that are crowned and kings--
These things be many as vermin,
Yet Three shall abide these things.
Or something of that kind. Indeed, it is by no means certain that the
occupation would ever have been successful had not one of the three
brothers, Paul, despicably, but very decisively declined to abide
these things any longer, and, by surrendering all the secrets of the
insurrection, ensured its overthrow and his own ultimate promotion to
the post of chamberlain to Prince Otto. After this, Ludwig, the one
genuine hero among Mr Swinburne’s heroes, was killed, sword in hand,
in the capture of the city; and the third, Heinrich, who, though not a
traitor, had always been tame and even timid compared with his active
brothers, retired into something like a hermitage, became converted to a
Christian quietism which was almost Quakerish, and never mixed with men
except to give nearly all he had to the poor. They tell me that not long
ago he could still be seen about the neighbourhood occasionally, a man
in a black cloak, nearly blind, with very wild, white hair, but a face
of astonishing softness.”
“I know,” said Father Brown. “I saw him once.”
His friend looked at him in some surprise. “I didn’t know you’d been
here before,” he said. “Perhaps you know as much about it as I do.
Anyhow, that’s the story of the Arnholds, and he was the last survivor
of them. Yes, and of all the men who played parts in that drama.”
“You mean that the Prince, too, died long before?”
“Died,” repeated Flambeau, “and that’s about as much as we can say. You
must understand that towards the end of his life he began to have
those tricks of the nerves not uncommon with tyrants. He multiplied the
ordinary daily and nightly guard round his castle till there seemed to
be more sentry-boxes than houses in the town, and doubtful characters
were shot without mercy. He lived almost entirely in a little room that
was in the very centre of the enormous labyrinth of all the other rooms,
and even in this he erected another sort of central cabin or cupboard,
lined with steel, like a safe or a battleship. Some say that under the
floor of this again was a secret hole in the earth, no more than large
enough to hold him, so that, in his anxiety to avoid the grave, he was
willing to go into a place pretty much like it. But he went further yet.
The populace had been supposed to be disarmed ever since the suppression
of the revolt, but Otto now insisted, as governments very seldom
insist, on an absolute and literal disarmament. It was carried out,
with extraordinary thoroughness and severity, by very well-organized
officials over a small and familiar area, and, so far as human strength
and science can be absolutely certain of anything, Prince Otto was
absolutely certain that nobody could introduce so much as a toy pistol
into Heiligwaldenstein.”
“Human science can never be quite certain of things like that,” said
Father Brown, still looking at the red budding of the branches over
his head, “if only because of the difficulty about definition and
connotation. What is a weapon? People have been murdered with the
mildest domestic comforts; certainly with tea-kettles, probably with
tea-cosies. On the other hand, if you showed an Ancient Briton a
revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a weapon--until it was fired
into him, of course. Perhaps somebody introduced a firearm so new that
it didn’t even look like a firearm. Perhaps it looked like a thimble or
something. Was the bullet at all peculiar?”
“Not that I ever heard of,” answered Flambeau; “but my information is
fragmentary, and only comes from my old friend Grimm. He was a very able
detective in the German service, and he tried to arrest me; I arrested
him instead, and we had many interesting chats. He was in charge here
of the inquiry about Prince Otto, but I forgot to ask him anything about
the bullet. According to Grimm, what happened was this.” He paused a
moment to drain the greater part of his dark lager at a draught, and
then resumed:
“On the evening in question, it seems, the Prince was expected to appear
in one of the outer rooms, because he had to receive certain visitors
whom he really wished to meet. They were geological experts sent to
investigate the old question of the alleged supply of gold from the
rocks round here, upon which (as it was said) the small city-state
had so long maintained its credit and been able to negotiate with
its neighbours even under the ceaseless bombardment of bigger armies.
Hitherto it had never been found by the most exacting inquiry which
could--”
“Which could be quite certain of discovering a toy pistol,” said Father
Brown with a smile. “But what about the brother who ratted? Hadn’t he
anything to tell the Prince?”
“He always asseverated that he did not know,” replied Flambeau; “that
this was the one secret his brothers had not told him. It is only right
to say that it received some support from fragmentary words--spoken by
the great Ludwig in the hour of death, when he looked at Heinrich but
pointed at Paul, and said, ‘You have not told him...’ and was soon
afterwards incapable of speech. Anyhow, the deputation of distinguished
geologists and mineralogists from Paris and Berlin were there in the
most magnificent and appropriate dress, for there are no men who like
wearing their decorations so much as the men of science--as anybody
knows who has ever been to a soiree of the Royal Society. It was a
brilliant gathering, but very late, and gradually the Chamberlain--you
saw his portrait, too: a man with black eyebrows, serious eyes, and a
meaningless sort of smile underneath--the Chamberlain, I say, discovered
there was everything there except the Prince himself. He searched all
the outer salons; then, remembering the man’s mad fits of fear, hurried
to the inmost chamber. That also was empty, but the steel turret or
cabin erected in the middle of it took some time to open. When it did
open it was empty, too. He went and looked into the hole in the ground,
which seemed deeper and somehow all the more like a grave--that is his
account, of course. And even as he did so he heard a burst of cries and
tumult in the long rooms and corridors without.
“First it was a distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the
horizon of the crowd, even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless
clamour startlingly close, and loud enough to be distinct if each word
had not killed the other. Next came words of a terrible clearness,
coming nearer, and next one man, rushing into the room and telling the
news as briefly as such news is told.
“Otto, Prince of Heiligwaldenstein and Grossenmark, was lying in the
dews of the darkening twilight in the woods beyond the castle, with his
arms flung out and his face flung up to the moon. The blood still pulsed
from his shattered temple and jaw, but it was the only part of him that
moved like a living thing. He was clad in his full white and yellow
uniform, as to receive his guests within, except that the sash or scarf
had been unbound and lay rather crumpled by his side. Before he could
be lifted he was dead. But, dead or alive, he was a riddle--he who had
always hidden in the inmost chamber out there in the wet woods, unarmed
and alone.”
“Who found his body?” asked Father Brown.
“Some girl attached to the Court named Hedwig von something or other,”
replied his friend, “who had been out in the wood picking wild flowers.”
“Had she picked any?” asked the priest, staring rather vacantly at the
veil of the branches above him.
“Yes,” replied Flambeau. “I particularly remember that the Chamberlain,
or old Grimm or somebody, said how horrible it was, when they came up
at her call, to see a girl holding spring flowers and bending over
that--that bloody collapse. However, the main point is that before help
arrived he was dead, and the news, of course, had to be carried back to
the castle. The consternation it created was something beyond even that
natural in a Court at the fall of a potentate. The foreign visitors,
especially the mining experts, were in the wildest doubt and excitement,
as well as many important Prussian officials, and it soon began to be
clear that the scheme for finding the treasure bulked much bigger in
the business than people had supposed. Experts and officials had been
promised great prizes or international advantages, and some even said
that the Prince’s secret apartments and strong military protection were
due less to fear of the populace than to the pursuit of some private
investigation of--”
“Had the flowers got long stalks?” asked Father Brown.
Flambeau stared at him. “What an odd person you are!” he said. “That’s
exactly what old Grimm said. He said the ugliest part of it, he
thought--uglier than the blood and bullet--was that the flowers were
quite short, plucked close under the head.”
“Of course,” said the priest, “when a grown up girl is really picking
flowers, she picks them with plenty of stalk. If she just pulled their
heads off, as a child does, it looks as if--” And he hesitated.
“Well?” inquired the other.
“Well, it looks rather as if she had snatched them nervously, to make an
excuse for being there after--well, after she was there.”
“I know what you’re driving at,” said Flambeau rather gloomily. “But
that and every other suspicion breaks down on the one point--the want
of a weapon. He could have been killed, as you say, with lots of other
things--even with his own military sash; but we have to explain not how
he was killed, but how he was shot. And the fact is we can’t. They had
the girl most ruthlessly searched; for, to tell the truth, she was a
little suspect, though the niece and ward of the wicked old Chamberlain,
Paul Arnhold. But she was very romantic, and was suspected of sympathy
with the old revolutionary enthusiasm in her family. All the same,
however romantic you are, you can’t imagine a big bullet into a man’s
jaw or brain without using a gun or pistol. And there was no pistol,
though there were two pistol shots. I leave it to you, my friend.”
“How do you know there were two shots?” asked the little priest.
“There was only one in his head,” said his companion, “but there was
another bullet-hole in the sash.”
Father Brown’s smooth brow became suddenly constricted. “Was the other
bullet found?” he demanded.
Flambeau started a little. “I don’t think I remember,” he said.
“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” cried Brown, frowning more and more, with
a quite unusual concentration of curiosity. “Don’t think me rude. Let me
think this out for a moment.”
“All right,” said Flambeau, laughing, and finished his beer. A slight
breeze stirred the budding trees and blew up into the sky cloudlets of
white and pink that seemed to make the sky bluer and the whole coloured
scene more quaint. They might have been cherubs flying home to the
casements of a sort of celestial nursery. The oldest tower of the
castle, the Dragon Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug, but as
homely. Only beyond the tower glimmered the wood in which the man had
lain dead.
“What became of this Hedwig eventually?” asked the priest at last.
“She is married to General Schwartz,” said Flambeau. “No doubt you’ve
heard of his career, which was rather romantic. He had distinguished
himself even, before his exploits at Sadowa and Gravelotte; in fact, he
rose from the ranks, which is very unusual even in the smallest of the
German...”
Father Brown sat up suddenly.
“Rose from the ranks!” he cried, and made a mouth as if to whistle.
“Well, well, what a queer story! What a queer way of killing a man;
but I suppose it was the only one possible. But to think of hate so
patient--”
“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “In what way did they kill the
man?”
“They killed him with the sash,” said Brown carefully; and then, as
Flambeau protested: “Yes, yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought
to say he died of having a sash. I know it doesn’t sound like having a
disease.”
“I suppose,” said Flambeau, “that you’ve got some notion in your head,
but it won’t easily get the bullet out of his. As I explained before, he
might easily have been strangled. But he was shot. By whom? By what?”
“He was shot by his own orders,” said the priest.
“You mean he committed suicide?”
“I didn’t say by his own wish,” replied Father Brown. “I said by his own
orders.”
“Well, anyhow, what is your theory?”
Father Brown laughed. “I am only on my holiday,” he said. “I haven’t got
any theories. Only this place reminds me of fairy stories, and, if you
like, I’ll tell you a story.”
The little pink clouds, that looked rather like sweet-stuff, had floated
up to crown the turrets of the gilt gingerbread castle, and the pink
baby fingers of the budding trees seemed spreading and stretching to
reach them; the blue sky began to take a bright violet of evening, when
Father Brown suddenly spoke again:
“It was on a dismal night, with rain still dropping from the trees
and dew already clustering, that Prince Otto of Grossenmark stepped
hurriedly out of a side door of the castle and walked swiftly into the
wood. One of the innumerable sentries saluted him, but he did not notice
it. He had no wish to be specially noticed himself. He was glad when the
great trees, grey and already greasy with rain, swallowed him up like
a swamp. He had deliberately chosen the least frequented side of his
palace, but even that was more frequented than he liked. But there was
no particular chance of officious or diplomatic pursuit, for his exit
had been a sudden impulse. All the full-dressed diplomatists he left
behind were unimportant. He had realized suddenly that he could do
without them.
“His great passion was not the much nobler dread of death, but the
strange desire of gold. For this legend of the gold he had left
Grossenmark and invaded Heiligwaldenstein. For this and only this he
had bought the traitor and butchered the hero, for this he had long
questioned and cross-questioned the false Chamberlain, until he had come
to the conclusion that, touching his ignorance, the renegade really
told the truth. For this he had, somewhat reluctantly, paid and promised
money on the chance of gaining the larger amount; and for this he had
stolen out of his palace like a thief in the rain, for he had thought of
another way to get the desire of his eyes, and to get it cheap.
“Away at the upper end of a rambling mountain path to which he was
making his way, among the pillared rocks along the ridge that hangs
above the town, stood the hermitage, hardly more than a cavern fenced
with thorn, in which the third of the great brethren had long hidden
himself from the world. He, thought Prince Otto, could have no real
reason for refusing to give up the gold. He had known its place for
years, and made no effort to find it, even before his new ascetic creed
had cut him off from property or pleasures. True, he had been an enemy,
but he now professed a duty of having no enemies. Some concession to his
cause, some appeal to his principles, would probably get the mere
money secret out of him. Otto was no coward, in spite of his network of
military precautions, and, in any case, his avarice was stronger than
his fears. Nor was there much cause for fear. Since he was certain there
were no private arms in the whole principality, he was a hundred times
more certain there were none in the Quaker’s little hermitage on the
hill, where he lived on herbs, with two old rustic servants, and with
no other voice of man for year after year. Prince Otto looked down
with something of a grim smile at the bright, square labyrinths of the
lamp-lit city below him. For as far as the eye could see there ran the
rifles of his friends, and not one pinch of powder for his enemies.
Rifles ranked so close even to that mountain path that a cry from him
would bring the soldiers rushing up the hill, to say nothing of the fact
that the wood and ridge were patrolled at regular intervals; rifles so
far away, in the dim woods, dwarfed by distance, beyond the river, that
an enemy could not slink into the town by any detour. And round the
palace rifles at the west door and the east door, at the north door and
the south, and all along the four facades linking them. He was safe.
“It was all the more clear when he had crested the ridge and found
how naked was the nest of his old enemy. He found himself on a small
platform of rock, broken abruptly by the three corners of precipice.
Behind was the black cave, masked with green thorn, so low that it was
hard to believe that a man could enter it. In front was the fall of the
cliffs and the vast but cloudy vision of the valley. On the small rock
platform stood an old bronze lectern or reading-stand, groaning under a
great German Bible. The bronze or copper of it had grown green with the
eating airs of that exalted place, and Otto had instantly the thought,
‘Even if they had arms, they must be rusted by now.’ Moonrise had
already made a deathly dawn behind the crests and crags, and the rain
had ceased.
“Behind the lectern, and looking across the valley, stood a very old
man in a black robe that fell as straight as the cliffs around him, but
whose white hair and weak voice seemed alike to waver in the wind.
He was evidently reading some daily lesson as part of his religious
exercises. ‘They trust in their horses...’
“‘Sir,’ said the Prince of Heiligwaldenstein, with quite unusual
courtesy, ‘I should like only one word with you.’
“‘...and in their chariots,’ went on the old man weakly, ‘but we
will trust in the name of the Lord of Hosts....’ His last words were
inaudible, but he closed the book reverently and, being nearly blind,
made a groping movement and gripped the reading-stand. Instantly his two
servants slipped out of the low-browed cavern and supported him. They
wore dull-black gowns like his own, but they had not the frosty silver
on the hair, nor the frost-bitten refinement of the features. They were
peasants, Croat or Magyar, with broad, blunt visages and blinking eyes.
For the first time something troubled the Prince, but his courage and
diplomatic sense stood firm.
“‘I fear we have not met,’ he said, ‘since that awful cannonade in which
your poor brother died.’
“‘All my brothers died,’ said the old man, still looking across the
valley. Then, for one instant turning on Otto his drooping, delicate
features, and the wintry hair that seemed to drip over his eyebrows like
icicles, he added: ‘You see, I am dead, too.’
“‘I hope you’ll understand,’ said the Prince, controlling himself almost
to a point of conciliation, ‘that I do not come here to haunt you, as a
mere ghost of those great quarrels. We will not talk about who was right
or wrong in that, but at least there was one point on which we were
never wrong, because you were always right. Whatever is to be said of
the policy of your family, no one for one moment imagines that you were
moved by the mere gold; you have proved yourself above the suspicion
that...’
“The old man in the black gown had hitherto continued to gaze at him
with watery blue eyes and a sort of weak wisdom in his face. But
when the word ‘gold’ was said he held out his hand as if in arrest of
something, and turned away his face to the mountains.
“‘He has spoken of gold,’ he said. ‘He has spoken of things not lawful.
Let him cease to speak.’
“Otto had the vice of his Prussian type and tradition, which is to
regard success not as an incident but as a quality. He conceived himself
and his like as perpetually conquering peoples who were perpetually
being conquered. Consequently, he was ill acquainted with the emotion
of surprise, and ill prepared for the next movement, which startled and
stiffened him. He had opened his mouth to answer the hermit, when the
mouth was stopped and the voice strangled by a strong, soft gag suddenly
twisted round his head like a tourniquet. It was fully forty seconds
before he even realized that the two Hungarian servants had done it, and
that they had done it with his own military scarf.
“The old man went again weakly to his great brazen-supported Bible,
turned over the leaves, with a patience that had something horrible
about it, till he came to the Epistle of St James, and then began to
read: ‘The tongue is a little member, but--’
“Something in the very voice made the Prince turn suddenly and plunge
down the mountain-path he had climbed. He was half-way towards the
gardens of the palace before he even tried to tear the strangling scarf
from his neck and jaws. He tried again and again, and it was impossible;
the men who had knotted that gag knew the difference between what a man
can do with his hands in front of him and what he can do with his hands
behind his head. His legs were free to leap like an antelope on the
mountains, his arms were free to use any gesture or wave any signal, but
he could not speak. A dumb devil was in him.
“He had come close to the woods that walled in the castle before he had
quite realized what his wordless state meant and was meant to mean.
Once more he looked down grimly at the bright, square labyrinths of
the lamp-lit city below him, and he smiled no more. He felt himself
repeating the phrases of his former mood with a murderous irony. Far as
the eye could see ran the rifles of his friends, every one of whom would
shoot him dead if he could not answer the challenge. Rifles were so
near that the wood and ridge could be patrolled at regular intervals;
therefore it was useless to hide in the wood till morning. Rifles were
ranked so far away that an enemy could not slink into the town by
any detour; therefore it was vain to return to the city by any remote
course. A cry from him would bring his soldiers rushing up the hill. But
from him no cry would come.
“The moon had risen in strengthening silver, and the sky showed in
stripes of bright, nocturnal blue between the black stripes of the pines
about the castle. Flowers of some wide and feathery sort--for he had
never noticed such things before--were at once luminous and discoloured
by the moonshine, and seemed indescribably fantastic as they clustered,
as if crawling about the roots of the trees. Perhaps his reason had been
suddenly unseated by the unnatural captivity he carried with him, but in
that wood he felt something unfathomably German--the fairy tale. He knew
with half his mind that he was drawing near to the castle of an ogre--he
had forgotten that he was the ogre. He remembered asking his mother if
bears lived in the old park at home. He stooped to pick a flower, as
if it were a charm against enchantment. The stalk was stronger than he
expected, and broke with a slight snap. Carefully trying to place it in
his scarf, he heard the halloo, ‘Who goes there?’ Then he remembered the
scarf was not in its usual place.
“He tried to scream and was silent. The second challenge came; and then
a shot that shrieked as it came and then was stilled suddenly by impact.
Otto of Grossenmark lay very peacefully among the fairy trees, and would
do no more harm either with gold or steel; only the silver pencil of the
moon would pick out and trace here and there the intricate ornament of
his uniform, or the old wrinkles on his brow. May God have mercy on his
soul.
“The sentry who had fired, according to the strict orders of the
garrison, naturally ran forward to find some trace of his quarry. He was
a private named Schwartz, since not unknown in his profession, and what
he found was a bald man in uniform, but with his face so bandaged by a
kind of mask made of his own military scarf that nothing but open, dead
eyes could be seen, glittering stonily in the moonlight. The bullet had
gone through the gag into the jaw; that is why there was a shot-hole
in the scarf, but only one shot. Naturally, if not correctly, young
Schwartz tore off the mysterious silken mask and cast it on the grass;
and then he saw whom he had slain.
“We cannot be certain of the next phase. But I incline to believe that
there was a fairy tale, after all, in that little wood, horrible as
was its occasion. Whether the young lady named Hedwig had any previous
knowledge of the soldier she saved and eventually married, or whether
she came accidentally upon the accident and their intimacy began that
night, we shall probably never know. But we can know, I fancy, that this
Hedwig was a heroine, and deserved to marry a man who became something
of a hero. She did the bold and the wise thing. She persuaded the sentry
to go back to his post, in which place there was nothing to connect him
with the disaster; he was but one of the most loyal and orderly of fifty
such sentries within call. She remained by the body and gave the alarm;
and there was nothing to connect her with the disaster either, since she
had not got, and could not have, any firearms.
“Well,” said Father Brown rising cheerfully “I hope they’re happy.”
“Where are you going?” asked his friend.
“I’m going to have another look at that portrait of the Chamberlain, the
Arnhold who betrayed his brethren,” answered the priest. “I wonder what
part--I wonder if a man is less a traitor when he is twice a traitor?”
And he ruminated long before the portrait of a white-haired man
with black eyebrows and a pink, painted sort of smile that seemed to
contradict the black warning in his eyes.