The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (74 page)

‘
Well,’
said Tarrant, ‘it’s refreshing to find a priest so sceptical of the supernatural
as all that.’

‘
Not
at all,’ replied the priest calmly; ‘it’s not the supernatural part I doubt. It’s
the natural part. I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, ‘I can believe
the impossible, but not the improbable.’’

‘
That’s
what you call a paradox, isn’t it?’ asked the other.

‘
It’s
what I call common sense, properly understood,’ replied Father Brown. ’It really
is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we
don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand.
Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the
ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone,
when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and
slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all.
That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it
didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the
laws of the world I do understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It
isn’t the legend that I disbelieve — it’s the history.’

Lady
Diana had recovered a little from her trance of Cassandra, and her perennial curiosity
about new things began to peer once more out of her bright and prominent eyes.

‘
What
a curious man you are!’ she said. ‘Why should you disbelieve the history?’

‘
I
disbelieve the history because it isn’t history,’ answered Father Brown. ‘To anybody
who happens to know a little about the Middle Ages, the whole story was about
as probable as Gladstone offering Queen Victoria a cigar. But does anybody know
anything about the Middle Ages? Do you know what a Guild was? Have you ever
heard of salvo managio suo? Do you know what sort of people were Servi Regis?

‘
No,
of course I don’t,’ said the lady, rather crossly. ‘What a lot of Latin words!’

‘
No,
of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘If it had been Tutankhamen and a set of dried-up
Africans preserved, Heaven knows why, at the other end of the world; if it had
been Babylonia or China; if it had been some race as remote and mysterious as
the Man in the Moon, your newspapers would have told you all about it, down to
the last discovery of a tooth-brush or a collar-stud. But the men who built
your own parish churches, and gave the names to your own towns and trades, and
the very roads you walk on — it has never occurred to you to know anything
about them. I don’t claim to know a lot myself; but I know enough to see that
story is stuff and nonsense from beginning to end. It was illegal for a
money-lender to distrain on a man’s shop and tools. It’s exceedingly unlikely
that the Guild would not have saved a man from such utter ruin, especially if
he were ruined by a Jew. Those people had vices and tragedies of their own;
they sometimes tortured and burned people. But that idea of a man, without God
or hope in the world, crawling away to die because nobody cared whether he
lived — that isn’t a medieval idea. That’s a product of our economic science
and progress. The Jew wouldn’t have been a vassal of the feudal lord. The Jews
normally had a special position as servants of the King. Above all, the Jew
couldn’t possibly have been burned for his religion.’

‘
The
paradoxes are multiplying,’ observed Tarrant; ’but surely, you won’t deny that Jews
were persecuted in the Middle Ages?’

‘
It
would be nearer the truth,’ said Father Brown, ’to say they were the only people
who weren’t persecuted in the Middle Ages. If you want to satirize medievalism,
you could make a good case by saying that some poor Christian might be burned
alive for ‘making a mistake about the Homoousion, while a rich Jew might walk
down the street openly sneering at Christ and the Mother of God. Well, that’s
what the story is like. It was never a story of the Middle Ages; it was never
even a legend about the Middle Ages. It was made up by somebody whose notions
came from novels and newspapers, and probably made up on the spur of the
moment.’

The
others seemed a little dazed by the historical digression, and seemed to wonder
vaguely why the priest emphasized it and made it so important a part of the puzzle.
But Tarrant, whose trade it was to pick the practical detail out of many
tangles of digression, had suddenly become alert. His bearded chin was thrust
forward farther than ever, but his sullen eyes were wide awake. ‘Ah,’ he said;
‘made up on the spur of the moment!’

‘
Perhaps
that is an exaggeration,’ admitted Father Brown calmly. ‘I should rather say made
up more casually and carelessly than the rest of an uncommonly careful plot.
But the plotter did not think the details of medieval history would matter much
to anybody. And his calculation in a general way was pretty nearly right, like
most of his other calculations.’

‘
Whose
calculations? Who was right?’ demanded the lady with a sudden passion of impatience.
‘Who is this person you are talking about? Haven’t we gone through enough,
without your making our flesh creep with your he’s and him’s?’

‘
I
am talking about the murderer,’ said Father Brown.

‘
What
murderer?’ she asked sharply. ‘Do you mean that the poor Professor was murdered?’

‘
Well,’
said the staring Tarrant gruffly into his beard, ‘we can’t say ‘murdered’, for we
don’t know he’s killed.’

‘
The
murderer killed somebody else, who was not Professor Smaill,’ said the priest gravely.

‘
Why,
whom else could he kill?’ asked the other. ‘He killed the Reverend John
Walters, the Vicar of Dulham,’ replied Father Brown with precision. ‘He only
wanted to kill those two, because they both had got hold of relics of one rare
pattern. The murderer was a sort of monomaniac on the point.’

‘
It
all sounds very strange,’ muttered Tarrant. ‘Of course we can’t swear that the Vicar’s
really dead either. We haven’t seen his body.’

‘
Oh
yes, you have,’ said Father Brown.

There
was a silence as sudden as the stroke of a gong; a silence in which that sub-conscious
guesswork that was so active and accurate in the woman moved her almost to a
shriek.

‘
That
is exactly what you have seen,’ went on the priest. ‘You have seen his body. You
haven’t seen him — the real living man; but you have seen his body all right.
You have stared at it hard by the light of four great candles; and it was not
tossing suicidally in the sea but lying in state like a Prince of the Church in
a shrine built before the Crusade.’

‘
In
plain words,’ said Tarrant, ‘you actually ask us to believe that the embalmed body
was really the corpse of a murdered man.’

Father
Brown was silent for a moment; then he said almost with an air of irrelevance: ‘The
first thing I noticed about it was the cross; or rather the string suspending
the cross. Naturally, for most of you, it was only a string of beads and
nothing else in particular; but, naturally also, it was rather more in my line
than yours. You remember it lay close up to the chin, with only a few beads
showing, as if the whole necklet were quite short. But the beads that showed
were arranged in a special way, first one and then three, and so on; in fact, I
knew at a glance that it was a rosary, an ordinary rosary with a cross at the
end of it. But a rosary has at least five decades and additional beads as well;
and I naturally wondered where all the rest of it was. It would go much more
than once round the old man’s neck. I couldn’t understand it at the time; and
it was only afterwards I guessed where the extra length had gone to. It was
coiled round and round the foot of the wooden prop that was fixed in the corner
of the coffin, holding up the lid. So that when poor Smaill merely plucked at
the cross it jerked the prop out of its place and the lid fell on his skull
like a club of stone.’

‘
By
George!’ said Tarrant; ‘I’m beginning to think there’s something in what you say.
This is a queer story if it’s true.’

‘
When
I realized that,’ went on Father Brown, ‘I could manage more or less to guess the
rest. Remember, first of all, that there never was any responsible archaeological
authority for anything more than investigation. Poor old Walters was an honest
antiquary, who was engaged in opening the tomb to find out if there was any
truth in the legend about embalmed bodies. The rest was all rumour, of the sort
that often anticipates or exaggerates such finds. As a fact, he found the body
had not been embalmed, but had fallen into dust long ago. Only while he was
working there by the light of his lonely candle in that sunken chapel, the
candlelight threw another shadow that was not his own.’

‘
Ah!’
cried Lady Diana with a catch in her breath; ’and I know what you mean now. You
mean to tell us we have met the murderer, talked and joked with the murderer, let
him tell us a romantic tale, and let him depart untouched.’

‘
Leaving
his clerical disguise on a rock,’ assented Brown. ‘It is all dreadfully simple.
This man got ahead of the Professor in the race to the churchyard and chapel, possibly
while the Professor was talking to that lugubrious journalist. He came on the
old clergyman beside the empty coffin and killed him. Then he dressed himself
in the black clothes from the corpse, wrapped it in an old cope which had been
among the real finds of the exploration, and put it in the coffin, arranging
the rosary and the wooden support as I have described. Then, having thus set
the trap for his second enemy, he went up into the daylight and greeted us all
with the most amiable politeness of a country clergyman.’

‘
He
ran a considerable risk,’ objected Tarrant, ‘of somebody knowing Walters by sight.’

‘
I
admit he was half-mad,’ agreed Father Brown; ‘and I think you will admit that the
risk was worth taking, for he has got off, after all.’

‘
I’ll
admit he was very lucky,’ growled Tarrant. ‘And who the devil was he?’

‘
As
you say, he was very lucky,’ answered Father Brown, ‘and not least in that respect.
For that is the one thing we may never know.’ He frowned at the table for a
moment and then went on: ‘This fellow has been hovering round and threatening
for years, but the one thing he was careful of was to keep the secret of who he
was; and he has kept it still. But if poor Smaill recovers, as I think he will,
it is pretty safe to say that you will hear more of it.’

‘
Why,
what will Professor Smaill do, do you think?’ asked Lady Diana.

‘
I
should think the first thing he would do,’ said Tarrant, ‘would be to put the detectives
on like dogs after this murdering devil. I should like to have a go at him
myself.’

‘
Well,’
said Father Brown, smiling suddenly after his long fit of frowning perplexity, ‘I
think I know the very first thing he ought to do.’

‘
And
what is that?’ asked Lady Diana with graceful eagerness.

‘
He
ought to apologize to all of you,’ said Father Brown.

It
was not upon this point, however, that Father Brown found himself talking to Professor
Smaill as he sat by the bedside during the slow convalescence of that eminent
archaeologist. Nor, indeed, was it chiefly Father Brown who did the talking;
for though the Professor was limited to small doses of the stimulant of
conversation, he concentrated most of it upon these interviews with his clerical
friend. Father Brown had a talent for being silent in an encouraging way and
Smaill was encouraged by it to talk about many strange things not always easy
to talk about; such as the morbid phases of recovery and the monstrous dreams
that often accompany delirium. It is often rather an unbalancing business to
recover slowly from a bad knock on the head; and when the head is as interesting
a head as that of Professor Smaill even its disturbances and distortions are
apt to be original and curious. His dreams were like bold and big designs
rather out of drawing, as they can be seen in the strong but stiff archaic arts
that he had studied; they were full of strange saints with square and
triangular haloes, of golden out-standing crowns and glories round dark and flattened
faces, of eagles out of the east and the high headdresses of bearded men with their
hair bound like women. Only, as he told his friend, there was one much simpler
and less entangled type, that continually recurred to his imaginative memory.
Again and again all these Byzantine patterns would fade away like the fading
gold on which they were traced as upon fire; and nothing remained but the dark
bare wall of rock on which the shining shape of the fish was traced as with a
finger dipped in the phosphorescence of fishes. For that was the sign which he
once looked up and saw, in the moment when he first heard round the corner of
the dark passage the voice of his enemy.

‘
And
at last,’ he said, ‘I think I have seen a meaning in the picture and the voice;
and one that I never understood before. Why should I worry because one madman among
a million of sane men, leagued in a great society against him, chooses to brag
of persecuting me or pursuing me to death? The man who drew in the dark catacomb
the secret symbol of Christ was persecuted in a very different fashion. He was
the solitary madman; the whole sane society was leagued together not to save
but to slay him. I have sometimes fussed and fidgeted and wondered whether this
or that man was my persecutor; whether it was Tarrant; whether it was Leonard
Smyth; whether it was any one of them. Suppose it had been all of them? Suppose
it had been all the men on the boat and the men on the train and the men in the
village. Suppose, so far as I was concerned, they were all murderers. I thought
I had a right to be alarmed because I was creeping through the bowels of the
earth in the dark and there was a man who would destroy me. What would it have
been like, if the destroyer had been up in the daylight and had owned all the
earth and commanded all the armies and the crowds? How if he had been able to
stop all the earths or smoke me out of my hole, or kill me the moment I put my
nose out in the daylight? What was it like to deal with murder on that scale?
The world has forgotten these things, as until a little while ago it had
forgotten war.’