The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (79 page)

‘
On
that argument,’ replied Payne, ‘it would be a trifle uncomfortable for the next
seventh gentleman.’

Wood’s
voice was lower still as he said: ‘The new heir will be the seventh.’

Harry
Payne suddenly heaved up his great chest and shoulders like a man flinging off a
burden.

‘
What
crazy stuff are we all talking?’ he cried. ‘We’re all educated men in an enlightened
age, I suppose. Before I came into this damned dank atmosphere I’d never have
believed I should be talking of such things, except to laugh at them.’

‘
You
are right,’ said Wood. ‘If you lived long enough in this underground palace you’d
begin to feel differently about things. I’ve begun to feel very curiously about
that picture, having had so much to do with handling and hanging it. It sometimes
seems to me that the painted face is more alive than the dead faces of the
people living here; that it is a sort of talisman or magnet: that it commands the
elements and draws out the destinies of men and things. I suppose you would call
it very fanciful.’

‘
What
is that noise?’ cried Payne suddenly.

They
all listened, and there seemed to be no noise except the dull boom of the distant
sea; then they began to have the sense of something mingling with it; something
like a voice calling through the sound of the surf, dulled by it at first, but
coming nearer and nearer. The next moment they were certain: someone was
shouting outside in the dusk.

Payne
turned to the low window behind him and bent to look out. It was the window from
which nothing could be seen except the moat with its reflection of bank and
sky. But that inverted vision was not the same that he had seen before. From
the hanging shadow of the bank in the water depended two dark shadows reflected
from the feet and legs of a figure standing above upon the bank. Through that
limited aperture they could see nothing but the two legs black against the
reflection of a pale and livid sunset. But somehow that very fact of the head
being invisible, as if in the clouds, gave something dreadful to the sound that
followed; the voice of a man crying aloud what they could not properly hear or
understand. Payne especially was peering out of the little window with an
altered face, and he spoke with an altered voice:

’
How
queerly he’s standing!’

‘
No,
no,’ said Wood, in a sort of soothing whisper. ‘Things often look like that in reflection.
It’s the wavering of the water that makes you think that.’

‘
Think
what?’ asked the priest shortly.

‘
That
his left leg is crooked,’ said Wood.

Payne
had thought of the oval window as a sort of mystical mirror; and it seemed to him
that there were in it other inscrutable images of doom. There was something else
beside the figure that he did not understand; three thinner legs showing in
dark lines against the light, as if some monstrous three-legged spider or bird
were standing beside the stranger. Then he had the less crazy thought of a tripod
like that of the heathen oracles; and the next moment the thing had vanished
and the legs of the human figure passed out of the picture.

He
turned to meet the pale face of old Vine, the steward, with his mouth open, eager
to speak, and his single tooth showing. ‘He has come,’ he said. ‘The boat arrived
from Australia this morning.’

Even
as they went back out of the library into the central salon they heard the footsteps
of the newcomer clattering down the entrance steps, with various items of light
luggage trailed behind him. When Payne saw one of them, he laughed with a
reaction of relief. His tripod was nothing but the telescopic legs of a
portable camera, easily packed and unpacked; and the man who was carrying it
seemed so far to take on equally solid and normal qualities. He was dressed in
dark clothes, but of a careless and holiday sort; his shirt was of grey
flannel, and his boots echoed uncompromisingly enough in those still chambers.
As he strode forward to greet his new circle his stride had scarcely more than
the suggestion of a limp. But Payne and his companions were looking at his
face, and could scarcely take their eyes from it.

He
evidently felt there was something curious and uncomfortable about his reception;
but they could have sworn that he did not himself know the cause of it. The
lady, supposed to be in some sense already betrothed to him, was certainly
beautiful enough to attract him; but she evidently also frightened him. The old
steward brought him a sort of feudal homage, yet treated him as if he were the
family ghost. The priest still looked at him with a face which was quite
indecipherable, and therefore perhaps all the more unnerving. A new sort of
irony, more like the Greek irony, began to pass over Payne’s mind. He had dreamed
of the stranger as a devil, but it seemed almost worse that he was an unconscious
destiny. He seemed to march towards crime with the monstrous innocence of
Oedipus. He had approached the family mansion in so blindly buoyant a spirit as
to have set up his camera to photograph his first sight of it; and even the
camera had taken on the semblance of the tripod of a tragic pythoness.

Payne
was surprised, when taking his leave a little while after, at something which showed
that the Australian was already less unconscious of his surroundings. He said
in a low voice:

‘
Don’t
go ... or come again soon. You look like a human being. This place fairly gives
me the jumps.’

When
Payne emerged out of those almost subterranean halls and came into the night air
and the smell of the sea, he felt as if he had come out of that underworld of
dreams in which events jumble on top of each other in a way at once unrestful
and unreal.

The
arrival of the strange relative had been somehow unsatisfying and, as it were, unconvincing.
The doubling of the same face in the old portrait and the new arrival troubled
him like a two headed monster. And yet it was not altogether a nightmare; nor
was it that face, perhaps, that he saw most vividly.

‘
Did
you say?’ he asked of the doctor, as they strode together across the striped dark
sands by the darkening sea; ‘did you say that young man was betrothed to Miss
Darnaway by a family compact or something? Sounds rather like a novel.’

‘
But
an historical novel,’ answered Dr Barnet. ‘The Darnaways all went to sleep a few
centuries ago, when things were really done that we only read of in romances.
Yes; I believe there’s some family tradition by which second or third cousins
always marry when they stand in a certain relation of age, in order to unite
the property. A damned silly tradition, I should say; and if they often married
in and in, in that fashion, it may account on principles of heredity for their
having gone so rotten.’

‘
I
should hardly say,’ answered Payne a little stuffily, ‘that they had all gone rotten.’

‘
Well,’
replied the doctor, ‘the young man doesn’t look rotten, of course, though he’s certainly
lame.’

‘
The
young man!’ cried Payne, who was suddenly and unreasonably angry. ‘Well, if you
think the young lady looks rotten, I think it’s you who have rotten taste.’

The
doctor’s face grew dark and bitter. ‘I fancy I know more about it than you do,’
he snapped.

They
completed the walk in silence, each feeling that he had been irrationally rude and
had suffered equally irrational rudeness; and Payne was left to brood alone on
the matter, for his friend Wood had remained behind to attend to some of his business
in connexion with the pictures.

Payne
took very full advantage of the invitation extended by the colonial cousin, who
wanted somebody to cheer him up. During the next few weeks he saw a good deal of
the dark interior of the Darnaway home; though it might be said that he did not
confine himself entirely to cheering up the colonial cousin. The lady’s melancholy
was of longer standing and perhaps needed more lifting; anyhow, he showed a
laborious readiness to lift it. He was not without a conscience, however, and
the situation made him doubtful and uncomfortable. Weeks went by and nobody
could discover from the demeanour of the new Darnaway whether he considered
himself engaged according to the old compact or no. He went mooning about the
dark galleries and stood staring vacantly at the dark and sinister picture. The
shades of that prison-house were certainly beginning to close on him, and there
was little of his Australian assurance left. But Payne could discover nothing
upon the point that concerned him most. Once he attempted to confide in his
friend Martin Wood, as he was pottering about in his capacity of picture-hanger;
but even out of him he got very little satisfaction.

‘
It
seems to me you can’t butt in,’ said Wood shortly, ‘because of the engagement.’

‘
Of
course I shan’t butt in if there is an engagement,’ retorted his friend; ‘but is
there? I haven’t said a word to her of course; but I’ve seen enough of her to
be pretty certain she doesn’t think there is, even if she thinks there may be.
He doesn’t say there is, or even hint that there ought to be. It seems to me
this shillyshallying is rather unfair on everybody.’

‘
Especially
on you, I suppose,’ said Wood a little harshly. ‘But if you ask me, I’ll tell you
what I think — I think he’s afraid.’

‘
Afraid
of being refused?’ asked Payne.

‘
No;
afraid of being accepted,’ answered the other. ‘Don’t bite my head off — I don’t
mean afraid of the lady. I mean afraid of the picture.’

‘
Afraid
of the picture!’ repeated Payne.

‘
I
mean afraid of the curse,’ said Wood. ‘Don’t you remember the rhyme about the Darnaway
doom falling on him and her.’

‘
Yes,
but look here,’ cried Payne; ‘even the Darnaway doom can’t have it both ways. You
tell me first that I mustn’t have my own way because of the compact, and then
that the compact mustn’t have its own way because of the curse. But if the curse
can destroy the compact, why should she be tied to the compact? If they’re
frightened of marrying each other, they’re free to marry anybody else, and
there’s an end of it. Why should I suffer for the observance of something they
don’t propose to observe? It seems to me your position is very unreasonable.’

‘
Of
course it’s all a tangle,’ said Wood rather crossly, and went on hammering at the
frame of a canvas.

Suddenly,
one morning, the new heir broke his long and baffling silence. He did it in a curious
fashion, a little crude, as was his way, but with an obvious anxiety to do the
right thing. He asked frankly for advice, not of this or that individual as
Payne had done, but collectively as of a crowd. When he did speak he threw himself
on the whole company like a statesman going to the country. He called it ‘a
show-down’. Fortunately the lady was not included in this large gesture; and
Payne shuddered when he thought of her feelings. But the Australian was quite
honest; he thought the natural thing was to ask for help and for information,
calling a sort of family council at which he put his cards on the table. It
might be said that he flung down his cards on the table, for he did it with a
rather desperate air, like one who had been harassed for days and nights by the
increasing pressure of a problem. In that short time the shadows of that place
of low windows and sinking pavements had curiously changed him, and increased a
certain resemblance that crept through all their memories.

The
five men, including the doctor, were sitting round a table; and Payne was idly reflecting
that his own light tweeds and red hair must be the only colours in the room,
for the priest and the steward were in black, and Wood and Darnaway habitually
wore dark grey suits that looked almost like black. Perhaps this incongruity
had been what the young man had meant by calling him a human being. At that
moment the young man himself turned abruptly in his chair and began to talk. A
moment after the dazed artist knew that he was talking about the most tremendous
thing in the world.

‘
Is
there anything in it?’ he was saying. ’That is what I’ve come to asking myself till
I’m nearly crazy. I’d never have believed I should come to thinking of such
things; but I think of the portrait and the rhyme and the coincidences or whatever
you call them, and I go cold. Is there anything in it? Is there any Doom of the
Darnaways or only a damned queer accident? Have I got a right to marry, or
shall I bring something big and black out of the sky, that I know nothing
about, on myself and somebody else?’

His
rolling eye had roamed round the table and rested on the plain face of the priest,
to whom he now seemed to be speaking. Payne’s submerged practicality rose in
protest against the problem of superstition being brought before that supremely
superstitious tribunal. He was sitting next to Darnaway and struck in before
the priest could answer.

‘
Well,
the coincidences are curious, I admit,’ he said, rather forcing a note of cheerfulness;
‘but surely we — ’ and then he stopped as if he had been struck by lightning.
For Darnaway had turned his head sharply over his shoulder at the interruption,
and with the movement, his left eyebrow jerked up far above its fellow and for
an instant the face of the portrait glared at him with a ghastly exaggeration
of exactitude. The rest saw it; and all had the air of having been dazzled by
an instant of light. The old steward gave a hollow groan.