The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (21 page)

“
Don’t
you remember his original invitation to you?” he asked, “and the compliment to your
criminal exploit? ‘That trick of yours,’ he says, ‘of getting one detective to
arrest the other’? He has just copied your trick. With an enemy on each side of
him, he slipped swiftly out of the way and let them collide and kill each
other.”

Flambeau
tore Prince Saradine’s card from the priest’s hands and rent it savagely in small
pieces.

“
There’s
the last of that old skull and crossbones,” he said as he scattered the pieces upon
the dark and disappearing waves of the stream; “but I should think it would
poison the fishes.”

The
last gleam of white card and green ink was drowned and darkened; a faint and vibrant
colour as of morning changed the sky, and the moon behind the grasses grew
paler. They drifted in silence.

“
Father,”
said Flambeau suddenly, “do you think it was all a dream?”

The
priest shook his head, whether in dissent or agnosticism, but remained mute. A smell
of hawthorn and of orchards came to them through the darkness, telling them
that a wind was awake; the next moment it swayed their little boat and swelled
their sail, and carried them onward down the winding river to happier places
and the homes of harmless men.

The
little village of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep that the tall spire
of its church seemed only like the peak of a small mountain. At the foot of the
church stood a smithy, generally red with fires and always littered with hammers
and scraps of iron; opposite to this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was
“The Blue Boar,” the only inn of the place. It was upon this crossway, in the
lifting of a leaden and silver daybreak, that two brothers met in the street
and spoke; though one was beginning the day and the other finishing it. The
Rev. and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was making his way to some
austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the Hon. Norman Bohun,
his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting in evening dress on
the bench outside “The Blue Boar,” drinking what the philosophic observer was
free to regard either as his last glass on Tuesday or his first on Wednesday.
The colonel was not particular.

The
Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating from the Middle
Ages, and their pennon had actually seen Palestine. But it is a great mistake
to suppose that such houses stand high in chivalric tradition. Few except the
poor preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions.
The Bohuns had been Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under Queen Victoria.
But like more than one of the really ancient houses, they had rotted in the
last two centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had
even come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly human about
the colonel’s wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic resolution not to go
home till morning had a touch of the hideous clarity of insomnia. He was a
tall, fine animal, elderly, but with hair still startlingly yellow. He would have
looked merely blonde and leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his
face that they looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very
long yellow moustaches; on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to
jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into his face. Over his evening clothes he wore
a curious pale yellow coat that looked more like a very light dressing gown
than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck an extraordinary broad-brimmed
hat of a bright green colour, evidently some oriental curiosity caught up at
random. He was proud of appearing in such incongruous attires — proud of the
fact that he always made them look congruous.

His
brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but he was buttoned
up to the chin in black, and his face was clean-shaven, cultivated, and a
little nervous. He seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were
some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was a Presbyterian) that it was a
love of Gothic architecture rather than of God, and that his haunting of the church
like a ghost was only another and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty
which sent his brother raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful,
while the man’s practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was mostly
an ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer, and was
founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but in
peculiar places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry. He was at the
moment about to enter the church through the yard of the smithy, but stopped
and frowned a little as he saw his brother’s cavernous eyes staring in the same
direction. On the hypothesis that the colonel was interested in the church he
did not waste any speculations. There only remained the blacksmith’s shop, and
though the blacksmith was a Puritan and none of his people, Wilfred Bohun had
heard some scandals about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He flung a
suspicious look across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing to speak to
him.

“
Good
morning, Wilfred,” he said. “Like a good landlord I am watching sleeplessly over
my people. I am going to call on the blacksmith.”

Wilfred
looked at the ground, and said: “The blacksmith is out. He is over at Greenford.”

“
I
know,” answered the other with silent laughter; “that is why I am calling on him.”

“
Norman,”
said the cleric, with his eye on a pebble in the road, “are you ever afraid of thunderbolts?”

“
What
do you mean?” asked the colonel. “Is your hobby meteorology?”

“
I
mean,” said Wilfred, without looking up, “do you ever think that God might strike
you in the street?”

“
I
beg your pardon,” said the colonel; “I see your hobby is folk-lore.”

“
I
know your hobby is blasphemy,” retorted the religious man, stung in the one live
place of his nature. “But if you do not fear God, you have good reason to fear
man.”

The
elder raised his eyebrows politely. “Fear man?” he said.

“
Barnes
the blacksmith is the biggest and strongest man for forty miles round,” said the
clergyman sternly. “I know you are no coward or weakling, but he could throw
you over the wall.”

This
struck home, being true, and the lowering line by mouth and nostril darkened and
deepened. For a moment he stood with the heavy sneer on his face. But in an instant
Colonel Bohun had recovered his own cruel good humour and laughed, showing two
dog-like front teeth under his yellow moustache. “In that case, my dear
Wilfred,” he said quite carelessly, “it was wise for the last of the Bohuns to
come out partially in armour.”

And
he took off the queer round hat covered with green, showing that it was lined within
with steel. Wilfred recognised it indeed as a light Japanese or Chinese helmet
torn down from a trophy that hung in the old family hall.

“
It
was the first hat to hand,” explained his brother airily; “always the nearest hat
— and the nearest woman.”

“
The
blacksmith is away at Greenford,” said Wilfred quietly; “the time of his return
is unsettled.”

And
with that he turned and went into the church with bowed head, crossing himself like
one who wishes to be quit of an unclean spirit. He was anxious to forget such
grossness in the cool twilight of his tall Gothic cloisters; but on that morning
it was fated that his still round of religious exercises should be everywhere
arrested by small shocks. As he entered the church, hitherto always empty at
that hour, a kneeling figure rose hastily to its feet and came towards the full
daylight of the doorway. When the curate saw it he stood still with surprise.
For the early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a nephew of the
blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the church or for anything
else. He was always called “Mad Joe,” and seemed to have no other name; he was
a dark, strong, slouching lad, with a heavy white face, dark straight hair, and
a mouth always open. As he passed the priest, his moon-calf countenance gave no
hint of what he had been doing or thinking of. He had never been known to pray
before. What sort of prayers was he saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.

Wilfred
Bohun stood rooted to the spot long enough to see the idiot go out into the sunshine,
and even to see his dissolute brother hail him with a sort of avuncular
jocularity. The last thing he saw was the colonel throwing pennies at the open
mouth of Joe, with the serious appearance of trying to hit it.

This
ugly sunlit picture of the stupidity and cruelty of the earth sent the ascetic finally
to his prayers for purification and new thoughts. He went up to a pew in the
gallery, which brought him under a coloured window which he loved and always
quieted his spirit; a blue window with an angel carrying lilies. There he began
to think less about the half-wit, with his livid face and mouth like a fish. He
began to think less of his evil brother, pacing like a lean lion in his
horrible hunger. He sank deeper and deeper into those cold and sweet colours of
silver blossoms and sapphire sky.

In
this place half an hour afterwards he was found by Gibbs, the village cobbler, who
had been sent for him in some haste. He got to his feet with promptitude, for
he knew that no small matter would have brought Gibbs into such a place at all.
The cobbler was, as in many villages, an atheist, and his appearance in church
was a shade more extraordinary than Mad Joe’s. It was a morning of theological
enigmas.

“
What
is it?” asked Wilfred Bohun rather stiffly, but putting out a trembling hand for
his hat.

The
atheist spoke in a tone that, coming from him, was quite startlingly respectful,
and even, as it were, huskily sympathetic.

“
You
must excuse me, sir,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “but we didn’t think it right
not to let you know at once. I’m afraid a rather dreadful thing has happened,
sir. I’m afraid your brother —”

Wilfred
clenched his frail hands. “What devilry has he done now?” he cried in voluntary
passion.

“
Why,
sir,” said the cobbler, coughing, “I’m afraid he’s done nothing, and won’t do anything.
I’m afraid he’s done for. You had really better come down, sir.”

The
curate followed the cobbler down a short winding stair which brought them out at
an entrance rather higher than the street. Bohun saw the tragedy in one glance,
flat underneath him like a plan. In the yard of the smithy were standing five
or six men mostly in black, one in an inspector’s uniform. They included the
doctor, the Presbyterian minister, and the priest from the Roman Catholic
chapel, to which the blacksmith’s wife belonged. The latter was speaking to
her, indeed, very rapidly, in an undertone, as she, a magnificent woman with
red-gold hair, was sobbing blindly on a bench. Between these two groups, and
just clear of the main heap of hammers, lay a man in evening dress, spread-eagled
and flat on his face. From the height above Wilfred could have sworn to every
item of his costume and appearance, down to the Bohun rings upon his fingers;
but the skull was only a hideous splash, like a star of blackness and blood.

Wilfred
Bohun gave but one glance, and ran down the steps into the yard. The doctor, who
was the family physician, saluted him, but he scarcely took any notice. He could
only stammer out: “My brother is dead. What does it mean? What is this horrible
mystery?” There was an unhappy silence; and then the cobbler, the most outspoken
man present, answered: “Plenty of horror, sir,” he said; “but not much
mystery.”

“
What
do you mean?” asked Wilfred, with a white face.

“
It’s
plain enough,” answered Gibbs. “There is only one man for forty miles round that
could have struck such a blow as that, and he’s the man that had most reason
to.”

“
We
must not prejudge anything,” put in the doctor, a tall, black-bearded man, rather
nervously; “but it is competent for me to corroborate what Mr. Gibbs says about
the nature of the blow, sir; it is an incredible blow. Mr. Gibbs says that only
one man in this district could have done it. I should have said myself that
nobody could have done it.”

A
shudder of superstition went through the slight figure of the curate. “I can hardly
understand,” he said.

“
Mr.
Bohun,” said the doctor in a low voice, “metaphors literally fail me. It is inadequate
to say that the skull was smashed to bits like an eggshell. Fragments of bone
were driven into the body and the ground like bullets into a mud wall. It was
the hand of a giant.”

He
was silent a moment, looking grimly through his glasses; then he added: “The thing
has one advantage — that it clears most people of suspicion at one stroke. If
you or I or any normally made man in the country were accused of this crime, we
should be acquitted as an infant would be acquitted of stealing the Nelson
column.”

“
That’s
what I say,” repeated the cobbler obstinately; “there’s only one man that could
have done it, and he’s the man that would have done it. Where’s Simeon Barnes, the
blacksmith?”

“
He’s
over at Greenford,” faltered the curate.

“
More
likely over in France,” muttered the cobbler.

“
No;
he is in neither of those places,” said a small and colourless voice, which came
from the little Roman priest who had joined the group. “As a matter of fact, he
is coming up the road at this moment.”

The
little priest was not an interesting man to look at, having stubbly brown hair and
a round and stolid face. But if he had been as splendid as Apollo no one would
have looked at him at that moment. Everyone turned round and peered at the
pathway which wound across the plain below, along which was indeed walking, at
his own huge stride and with a hammer on his shoulder, Simeon the smith. He was
a bony and gigantic man, with deep, dark, sinister eyes and a dark chin beard.
He was walking and talking quietly with two other men; and though he was never
specially cheerful, he seemed quite at his ease.

“
My
God!” cried the atheistic cobbler, “and there’s the hammer he did it with.”

“
No,”
said the inspector, a sensible-looking man with a sandy moustache, speaking for
the first time. “There’s the hammer he did it with over there by the church wall.
We have left it and the body exactly as they are.”

All
glanced round and the short priest went across and looked down in silence at the
tool where it lay. It was one of the smallest and the lightest of the hammers,
and would not have caught the eye among the rest; but on the iron edge of it
were blood and yellow hair.