The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (27 page)

“
Well,”
said the large man, “my stock of evil imagination is used up.”

The
priest seemed really doubtful where to begin, and at last he said again:

“
Where
would a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.”

The
other did not answer.

“
If
there were no forest, he would make a forest. And if he wished to hide a dead leaf,
he would make a dead forest.”

There
was still no reply, and the priest added still more mildly and quietly:

“
And
if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make a field of dead bodies to hide it
in.”

Flambeau
began to stamp forward with an intolerance of delay in time or space; but Father
Brown went on as if he were continuing the last sentence:

“
Sir
Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was
what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for
a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A printer
reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a
Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare
was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might
mean; and, for Heaven’s sake, don’t cant about it. It might mean a man physically
formidable living under a tropic sun in an Oriental society, and soaking
himself without sense or guidance in an Oriental Book. Of course, he read the
Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament
anything that he wanted — lust, tyranny, treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest,
as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of
dishonesty?

“
In
each of the hot and secret countries to which the man went he kept a harem, he tortured
witnesses, he amassed shameful gold; but certainly he would have said with
steady eyes that he did it to the glory of the Lord. My own theology is sufficiently
expressed by asking which Lord? Anyhow, there is this about such evil, that it
opens door after door in hell, and always into smaller and smaller chambers.
This is the real case against crime, that a man does not become wilder and
wilder, but only meaner and meaner. St. Clare was soon suffocated by
difficulties of bribery and blackmail; and needed more and more cash. And by
the time of the Battle of the Black River he had fallen from world to world to
that place which Dante makes the lowest floor of the universe.”

“
What
do you mean?” asked his friend again.

“
I
mean that,” retorted the cleric, and suddenly pointed at a puddle sealed with ice
that shone in the moon. “Do you remember whom Dante put in the last circle of
ice?”

“
The
traitors,” said Flambeau, and shuddered. As he looked around at the inhuman landscape
of trees, with taunting and almost obscene outlines, he could almost fancy he
was Dante, and the priest with the rivulet of a voice was, indeed, a Virgil leading
him through a land of eternal sins.

The
voice went on: “Olivier, as you know, was quixotic, and would not permit a secret
service and spies. The thing, however, was done, like many other things, behind
his back. It was managed by my old friend Espado; he was the bright-clad fop,
whose hook nose got him called the Vulture. Posing as a sort of philanthropist
at the front, he felt his way through the English Army, and at last got his
fingers on its one corrupt man — please God! — and that man at the top. St.
Clare was in foul need of money, and mountains of it. The discredited family
doctor was threatening those extraordinary exposures that afterwards began and
were broken off; tales of monstrous and prehistoric things in Park Lane; things
done by an English Evangelist that smelt like human sacrifice and hordes of
slaves. Money was wanted, too, for his daughter’s dowry; for to him the fame of
wealth was as sweet as wealth itself. He snapped the last thread, whispered the
word to Brazil, and wealth poured in from the enemies of England. But another
man had talked to Espado the Vulture as well as he. Somehow the dark, grim
young major from Ulster had guessed the hideous truth; and when they walked
slowly together down that road towards the bridge Murray was telling the general
that he must resign instantly, or be court-martialled and shot. The general
temporised with him till they came to the fringe of tropic trees by the bridge;
and there by the singing river and the sunlit palms (for I can see the picture)
the general drew his sabre and plunged it through the body of the major.”

The
wintry road curved over a ridge in cutting frost, with cruel black shapes of bush
and thicket; but Flambeau fancied that he saw beyond it faintly the edge of an
aureole that was not starlight and moonlight, but some fire such as is made by
men. He watched it as the tale drew to its close.

“
St.
Clare was a hell-hound, but he was a hound of breed. Never, I’ll swear, was he so
lucid and so strong as when poor Murray lay a cold lump at his feet. Never in all
his triumphs, as Captain Keith said truly, was the great man so great as he was
in this last world-despised defeat. He looked coolly at his weapon to wipe off
the blood; he saw the point he had planted between his victim’s shoulders had
broken off in the body. He saw quite calmly, as through a club windowpane, all
that must follow. He saw that men must find the unaccountable corpse; must extract
the unaccountable sword-point; must notice the unaccountable broken sword — or
absence of sword. He had killed, but not silenced. But his imperious intellect
rose against the facer; there was one way yet. He could make the corpse less
unaccountable. He could create a hill of corpses to cover this one. In twenty
minutes eight hundred English soldiers were marching down to their death.”

The
warmer glow behind the black winter wood grew richer and brighter, and Flambeau
strode on to reach it. Father Brown also quickened his stride; but he seemed merely
absorbed in his tale.

“
Such
was the valour of that English thousand, and such the genius of their commander,
that if they had at once attacked the hill, even their mad march might have met
some luck. But the evil mind that played with them like pawns had other aims
and reasons. They must remain in the marshes by the bridge at least till
British corpses should be a common sight there. Then for the last grand scene;
the silver-haired soldier-saint would give up his shattered sword to save
further slaughter. Oh, it was well organised for an impromptu. But I think (I
cannot prove), I think that it was while they stuck there in the bloody mire
that someone doubted — and someone guessed.”

He
was mute a moment, and then said: “There is a voice from nowhere that tells me the
man who guessed was the lover . . . the man to wed the old man’s child.”

“
But
what about Olivier and the hanging?” asked Flambeau.

“
Olivier,
partly from chivalry, partly from policy, seldom encumbered his march with captives,”
explained the narrator. “He released everybody in most cases. He released
everybody in this case.

“
Everybody
but the general,” said the tall man.

“
Everybody,”
said the priest.

Flambeau
knit his black brows. “I don’t grasp it all yet,” he said.

“
There
is another picture, Flambeau,” said Brown in his more mystical undertone. “I can’t
prove it; but I can do more — I can see it. There is a camp breaking up on the
bare, torrid hills at morning, and Brazilian uniforms massed in blocks and
columns to march. There is the red shirt and long black beard of Olivier, which
blows as he stands, his broad-brimmed hat in his hand. He is saying farewell to
the great enemy he is setting free — the simple, snow-headed English veteran,
who thanks him in the name of his men. The English remnant stand behind at
attention; beside them are stores and vehicles for the retreat. The drums roll;
the Brazilians are moving; the English are still like statues. So they abide
till the last hum and flash of the enemy have faded from the tropic horizon.
Then they alter their postures all at once, like dead men coming to life; they
turn their fifty faces upon the general — faces not to be forgotten.”

Flambeau
gave a great jump. “Ah,” he cried, “you don’t mean —”

“
Yes,”
said Father Brown in a deep, moving voice. “It was an English hand that put the
rope round St. Clare’s neck; I believe the hand that put the ring on his daughter’s
finger. They were English hands that dragged him up to the tree of shame; the
hands of men that had adored him and followed him to victory. And they were
English souls (God pardon and endure us all!) who stared at him swinging in
that foreign sun on the green gallows of palm, and prayed in their hatred that
he might drop off it into hell.”

As
the two topped the ridge there burst on them the strong scarlet light of a red-curtained
English inn. It stood sideways in the road, as if standing aside in the
amplitude of hospitality. Its three doors stood open with invitation; and even
where they stood they could hear the hum and laughter of humanity happy for a
night.

“
I
need not tell you more,” said Father Brown. “They tried him in the wilderness and
destroyed him; and then, for the honour of England and of his daughter, they
took an oath to seal up forever the story of the traitor’s purse and the assassin’s
sword blade. Perhaps — Heaven help them — they tried to forget it. Let us try
to forget it, anyhow; here is our inn.”

“
With
all my heart,” said Flambeau, and was just striding into the bright, noisy bar when
he stepped back and almost fell on the road.

“
Look
there, in the devil’s name!” he cried, and pointed rigidly at the square wooden
sign that overhung the road. It showed dimly the crude shape of a sabre hilt and
a shortened blade; and was inscribed in false archaic lettering, “The Sign of
the Broken Sword.”

“
Were
you not prepared?” asked Father Brown gently. “He is the god of this country; half
the inns and parks and streets are named after him and his story.”

“
I
thought we had done with the leper,” cried Flambeau, and spat on the road.

“
You
will never have done with him in England,” said the priest, looking down, “while
brass is strong and stone abides. His marble statues will erect the souls of
proud, innocent boys for centuries, his village tomb will smell of loyalty as
of lilies. Millions who never knew him shall love him like a father — this man
whom the last few that knew him dealt with like dung. He shall be a saint; and
the truth shall never be told of him, because I have made up my mind at last.
There is so much good and evil in breaking secrets, that I put my conduct to a
test. All these newspapers will perish; the anti-Brazil boom is already over;
Olivier is already honoured everywhere. But I told myself that if anywhere, by
name, in metal or marble that will endure like the pyramids, Colonel Clancy, or
Captain Keith, or President Olivier, or any innocent man was wrongly blamed,
then I would speak. If it were only that St. Clare was wrongly praised, I would
be silent. And I will.”

They
plunged into the red-curtained tavern, which was not only cosy, but even luxurious
inside. On a table stood a silver model of the tomb of St. Clare, the silver
head bowed, the silver sword broken. On the walls were coloured photographs of
the same scene, and of the system of wagonettes that took tourists to see it.
They sat down on the comfortable padded benches.

“
Come,
it’s cold,” cried Father Brown; “let’s have some wine or beer.”

“
Or
brandy,” said Flambeau.

Both
by calling and conviction Father Brown knew better than most of us, that every man
is dignified when he is dead. But even he felt a pang of incongruity when he
was knocked up at daybreak and told that Sir Aaron Armstrong had been murdered.
There was something absurd and unseemly about secret violence in connection
with so entirely entertaining and popular a figure. For Sir Aaron Armstrong was
entertaining to the point of being comic; and popular in such a manner as to be
almost legendary. It was like hearing that Sunny Jim had hanged himself; or
that Mr. Pickwick had died in Hanwell. For though Sir Aaron was a philanthropist,
and thus dealt with the darker side of our society, he prided himself on
dealing with it in the brightest possible style. His political and social
speeches were cataracts of anecdotes and “loud laughter”; his bodily health was
of a bursting sort; his ethics were all optimism; and he dealt with the Drink
problem (his favourite topic) with that immortal or even monotonous gaiety
which is so often a mark of the prosperous total abstainer.

The
established story of his conversion was familiar on the more puritanic
platforms and pulpits, how he had been, when only a boy, drawn away from Scotch
theology to Scotch whisky, and how he had risen out of both and become (as he
modestly put it) what he was. Yet his wide white beard, cherubic face, and
sparkling spectacles, at the numberless dinners and congresses where they
appeared, made it hard to believe, somehow, that he had ever been anything so
morbid as either a dram-drinker or a Calvinist. He was, one felt, the most
seriously merry of all the sons of men.

He
had lived on the rural skirt of Hampstead in a handsome house, high but not broad,
a modern and prosaic tower. The narrowest of its narrow sides overhung the
steep green bank of a railway, and was shaken by passing trains. Sir Aaron Armstrong,
as he boisterously explained, had no nerves. But if the train had often given a
shock to the house, that morning the tables were turned, and it was the house
that gave a shock to the train.

The
engine slowed down and stopped just beyond that point where an angle of the house
impinged upon the sharp slope of turf. The arrest of most mechanical things
must be slow; but the living cause of this had been very rapid. A man clad
completely in black, even (it was remembered) to the dreadful detail of black
gloves, appeared on the ridge above the engine, and waved his black hands like
some sable windmill. This in itself would hardly have stopped even a lingering
train. But there came out of him a cry which was talked of afterwards as
something utterly unnatural and new. It was one of those shouts that are horridly
distinct even when we cannot hear what is shouted. The word in this case was
“Murder!”

But
the engine-driver swears he would have pulled up just the same if he had heard only
the dreadful and definite accent and not the word.

The
train once arrested, the most superficial stare could take in many features of the
tragedy. The man in black on the green bank was Sir Aaron Armstrong’s man-servant
Magnus. The baronet in his optimism had often laughed at the black gloves of
this dismal attendant; but no one was likely to laugh at him just now.

So
soon as an inquirer or two had stepped off the line and across the smoky hedge,
they saw, rolled down almost to the bottom of the bank, the body of an old man in
a yellow dressing-gown with a very vivid scarlet lining. A scrap of rope seemed
caught about his leg, entangled presumably in a struggle. There was a smear or
so of blood, though very little; but the body was bent or broken into a posture
impossible to any living thing. It was Sir Aaron Armstrong. A few more
bewildered moments brought out a big fair-bearded man, whom some travellers
could salute as the dead man’s secretary, Patrick Royce, once well known in
Bohemian society and even famous in the Bohemian arts. In a manner more vague,
but even more convincing, he echoed the agony of the servant. By the time the
third figure of that household, Alice Armstrong, daughter of the dead man, had
come already tottering and waving into the garden, the engine-driver had put a
stop to his stoppage. The whistle had blown and the train had panted on to get
help from the next station.

Father
Brown had been thus rapidly summoned at the request of Patrick Royce, the big ex-Bohemian
secretary. Royce was an Irishman by birth; and that casual kind of Catholic
that never remembers his religion until he is really in a hole. But Royce’s
request might have been less promptly complied with if one of the official
detectives had not been a friend and admirer of the unofficial Flambeau; and it
was impossible to be a friend of Flambeau without hearing numberless stories
about Father Brown. Hence, while the young detective (whose name was Merton)
led the little priest across the fields to the railway, their talk was more
confidential than could be expected between two total strangers.

“
As
far as I can see,” said Mr. Merton candidly, “there is no sense to be made of it
at all. There is nobody one can suspect. Magnus is a solemn old fool; far too
much of a fool to be an assassin. Royce has been the baronet’s best friend for
years; and his daughter undoubtedly adored him. Besides, it’s all too absurd.
Who would kill such a cheery old chap as Armstrong? Who could dip his hands in
the gore of an after-dinner speaker? It would be like killing Father Christmas.”

“
Yes,
it was a cheery house,” assented Father Brown. “It was a cheery house while he was
alive. Do you think it will be cheery now he is dead?”

Merton
started a little and regarded his companion with an enlivened eye. “Now he is dead?”
he repeated.

“
Yes,”
continued the priest stolidly, “he was cheerful. But did he communicate his cheerfulness?
Frankly, was anyone else in the house cheerful but he?”

A
window in Merton’s mind let in that strange light of surprise in which we see for
the first time things we have known all along. He had often been to the Armstrongs’,
on little police jobs of the philanthropist; and, now he came to think of it,
it was in itself a depressing house. The rooms were very high and very cold;
the decoration mean and provincial; the draughty corridors were lit by
electricity that was bleaker than moonlight. And though the old man’s scarlet
face and silver beard had blazed like a bonfire in each room or passage in
turn, it did not leave any warmth behind it. Doubtless this spectral discomfort
in the place was partly due to the very vitality and exuberance of its owner;
he needed no stoves or lamps, he would say, but carried his own warmth with
him. But when Merton recalled the other inmates, he was compelled to confess
that they also were as shadows of their lord. The moody man-servant, with his
monstrous black gloves, was almost a nightmare; Royce, the secretary, was solid
enough, a big bull of a man, in tweeds, with a short beard; but the straw-coloured
beard was startlingly salted with grey like the tweeds, and the broad forehead
was barred with premature wrinkles. He was good-natured enough also, but it was
a sad sort of good-nature, almost a heart-broken sort — he had the general air
of being some sort of failure in life. As for Armstrong’s daughter, it was
almost incredible that she was his daughter; she was so pallid in colour and
sensitive in outline. She was graceful, but there was a quiver in the very
shape of her that was like the lines of an aspen. Merton had sometimes wondered
if she had learnt to quail at the crash of the passing trains.

“
You
see,” said Father Brown, blinking modestly, “I’m not sure that the Armstrong cheerfulness
is so very cheerful — for other people. You say that nobody could kill such a
happy old man, but I’m not sure; ne nos inducas in tentationem. If ever I
murdered somebody,” he added quite simply, “I dare say it might be an Optimist.”

“
Why?”
cried Merton amused. “Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?”

“
People
like frequent laughter,” answered Father Brown, “but I don’t think they like a permanent
smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing.”

They
walked some way in silence along the windy grassy bank by the rail, and just as
they came under the far-flung shadow of the tall Armstrong house, Father Brown said
suddenly, like a man throwing away a troublesome thought rather than offering
it seriously: “Of course, drink is neither good nor bad in itself. But I can’t
help sometimes feeling that men like Armstrong want an occasional glass of wine
to sadden them.”

Merton’s
official superior, a grizzled and capable detective named Gilder, was standing on
the green bank waiting for the coroner, talking to Patrick Royce, whose big shoulders
and bristly beard and hair towered above him. This was the more noticeable
because Royce walked always with a sort of powerful stoop, and seemed to be
going about his small clerical and domestic duties in a heavy and humbled
style, like a buffalo drawing a go-cart.

He
raised his head with unusual pleasure at the sight of the priest, and took him a
few paces apart. Meanwhile Merton was addressing the older detective respectfully
indeed, but not without a certain boyish impatience.

“
Well,
Mr. Gilder, have you got much farther with the mystery?”

“
There
is no mystery,” replied Gilder, as he looked under dreamy eyelids at the rooks.

“
Well,
there is for me, at any rate,” said Merton, smiling.

“
It
is simple enough, my boy,” observed the senior investigator, stroking his grey,
pointed beard. “Three minutes after you’d gone for Mr. Royce’s parson the whole
thing came out. You know that pasty-faced servant in the black gloves who stopped
the train?”

“
I
should know him anywhere. Somehow he rather gave me the creeps.”

“
Well,”
drawled Gilder, “when the train had gone on again, that man had gone too.
Rather a cool criminal, don’t you think, to escape by the very train that went
off for the police?”

“
You’re
pretty sure, I suppose,” remarked the young man, “that he really did kill his master?”

“
Yes,
my son, I’m pretty sure,” replied Gilder drily, “for the trifling reason that he
has gone off with twenty thousand pounds in papers that were in his master’s desk.
No, the only thing worth calling a difficulty is how he killed him. The skull
seems broken as with some big weapon, but there’s no weapon at all lying about,
and the murderer would have found it awkward to carry it away, unless the
weapon was too small to be noticed.”

“
Perhaps
the weapon was too big to be noticed,” said the priest, with an odd little giggle.

Gilder
looked round at this wild remark, and rather sternly asked Brown what he meant.

“
Silly
way of putting it, I know,” said Father Brown apologetically. “Sounds like a fairy
tale. But poor Armstrong was killed with a giant’s club, a great green club,
too big to be seen, and which we call the earth. He was broken against this
green bank we are standing on.”

“
How
do you mean?” asked the detective quickly.

Father
Brown turned his moon face up to the narrow facade of the house and blinked hopelessly
up. Following his eyes, they saw that right at the top of this otherwise blind
back quarter of the building, an attic window stood open.

“
Don’t
you see,” he explained, pointing a little awkwardly like a child, “he was thrown
down from there?”

Gilder
frowningly scrutinised the window, and then said: “Well, it is certainly possible.
But I don’t see why you are so sure about it.”

Brown
opened his grey eyes wide. “Why,” he said, “there’s a bit of rope round the dead
man’s leg. Don’t you see that other bit of rope up there caught at the corner
of the window?”

At
that height the thing looked like the faintest particle of dust or hair, but the
shrewd old investigator was satisfied. “You’re quite right, sir,” he said to
Father Brown; “that is certainly one to you.”

Almost
as he spoke a special train with one carriage took the curve of the line on their
left, and, stopping, disgorged another group of policemen, in whose midst was
the hangdog visage of Magnus, the absconded servant.

“
By
Jove! they’ve got him,” cried Gilder, and stepped forward with quite a new alertness.

“
Have
you got the money!” he cried to the first policeman.

The
man looked him in the face with a rather curious expression and said: “No.” Then
he added: “At least, not here.”

“
Which
is the inspector, please?” asked the man called Magnus.

When
he spoke everyone instantly understood how this voice had stopped a train. He was
a dull-looking man with flat black hair, a colourless face, and a faint suggestion
of the East in the level slits in his eyes and mouth. His blood and name,
indeed, had remained dubious, ever since Sir Aaron had “rescued” him from a
waitership in a London restaurant, and (as some said) from more infamous things.
But his voice was as vivid as his face was dead. Whether through exactitude in
a foreign language, or in deference to his master (who had been somewhat deaf),
Magnus’s tones had a peculiarly ringing and piercing quality, and the whole
group quite jumped when he spoke.

“
I
always knew this would happen,” he said aloud with brazen blandness. “My poor old
master made game of me for wearing black; but I always said I should be ready
for his funeral.”