The innocence of Father Brown
“Have you found any candles,” asked Brown smiling, “among your
oddities?”
Flambeau raised a grave face, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend.
“That is curious, too,” he said. “Twenty-five candles, and not a trace
of a candlestick.”
In the rapidly darkening room and rapidly rising wind, Brown went along
the table to where a bundle of wax candles lay among the other scrappy
exhibits. As he did so he bent accidentally over the heap of red-brown
dust; and a sharp sneeze cracked the silence.
“Hullo!” he said, “snuff!”
He took one of the candles, lit it carefully, came back and stuck it in
the neck of the whisky bottle. The unrestful night air, blowing through
the crazy window, waved the long flame like a banner. And on every side
of the castle they could hear the miles and miles of black pine wood
seething like a black sea around a rock.
“I will read the inventory,” began Craven gravely, picking up one of
the papers, “the inventory of what we found loose and unexplained in the
castle. You are to understand that the place generally was dismantled
and neglected; but one or two rooms had plainly been inhabited in a
simple but not squalid style by somebody; somebody who was not the
servant Gow. The list is as follows:
“First item. A very considerable hoard of precious stones, nearly
all diamonds, and all of them loose, without any setting whatever. Of
course, it is natural that the Ogilvies should have family jewels; but
those are exactly the jewels that are almost always set in particular
articles of ornament. The Ogilvies would seem to have kept theirs loose
in their pockets, like coppers.
“Second item. Heaps and heaps of loose snuff, not kept in a horn, or
even a pouch, but lying in heaps on the mantelpieces, on the sideboard,
on the piano, anywhere. It looks as if the old gentleman would not take
the trouble to look in a pocket or lift a lid.
“Third item. Here and there about the house curious little heaps of
minute pieces of metal, some like steel springs and some in the form of
microscopic wheels. As if they had gutted some mechanical toy.
“Fourth item. The wax candles, which have to be stuck in bottle necks
because there is nothing else to stick them in. Now I wish you to note
how very much queerer all this is than anything we anticipated. For the
central riddle we are prepared; we have all seen at a glance that there
was something wrong about the last earl. We have come here to find out
whether he really lived here, whether he really died here, whether that
red-haired scarecrow who did his burying had anything to do with his
dying. But suppose the worst in all this, the most lurid or melodramatic
solution you like. Suppose the servant really killed the master, or
suppose the master isn’t really dead, or suppose the master is dressed
up as the servant, or suppose the servant is buried for the master;
invent what Wilkie Collins’ tragedy you like, and you still have not
explained a candle without a candlestick, or why an elderly gentleman of
good family should habitually spill snuff on the piano. The core of
the tale we could imagine; it is the fringes that are mysterious. By no
stretch of fancy can the human mind connect together snuff and diamonds
and wax and loose clockwork.”
“I think I see the connection,” said the priest. “This Glengyle was
mad against the French Revolution. He was an enthusiast for the ancien
regime, and was trying to re-enact literally the family life of the last
Bourbons. He had snuff because it was the eighteenth century luxury;
wax candles, because they were the eighteenth century lighting; the
mechanical bits of iron represent the locksmith hobby of Louis XVI; the
diamonds are for the Diamond Necklace of Marie Antoinette.”
Both the other men were staring at him with round eyes. “What a
perfectly extraordinary notion!” cried Flambeau. “Do you really think
that is the truth?”
“I am perfectly sure it isn’t,” answered Father Brown, “only you said
that nobody could connect snuff and diamonds and clockwork and candles.
I give you that connection off-hand. The real truth, I am very sure,
lies deeper.”
He paused a moment and listened to the wailing of the wind in the
turrets. Then he said, “The late Earl of Glengyle was a thief. He lived
a second and darker life as a desperate housebreaker. He did not have
any candlesticks because he only used these candles cut short in the
little lantern he carried. The snuff he employed as the fiercest French
criminals have used pepper: to fling it suddenly in dense masses in
the face of a captor or pursuer. But the final proof is in the curious
coincidence of the diamonds and the small steel wheels. Surely that
makes everything plain to you? Diamonds and small steel wheels are the
only two instruments with which you can cut out a pane of glass.”
The bough of a broken pine tree lashed heavily in the blast against the
windowpane behind them, as if in parody of a burglar, but they did not
turn round. Their eyes were fastened on Father Brown.
“Diamonds and small wheels,” repeated Craven ruminating. “Is that all
that makes you think it the true explanation?”
“I don’t think it the true explanation,” replied the priest placidly;
“but you said that nobody could connect the four things. The true
tale, of course, is something much more humdrum. Glengyle had found,
or thought he had found, precious stones on his estate. Somebody had
bamboozled him with those loose brilliants, saying they were found in
the castle caverns. The little wheels are some diamond-cutting affair.
He had to do the thing very roughly and in a small way, with the help of
a few shepherds or rude fellows on these hills. Snuff is the one great
luxury of such Scotch shepherds; it’s the one thing with which you can
bribe them. They didn’t have candlesticks because they didn’t want them;
they held the candles in their hands when they explored the caves.”
“Is that all?” asked Flambeau after a long pause. “Have we got to the
dull truth at last?”
“Oh, no,” said Father Brown.
As the wind died in the most distant pine woods with a long hoot as of
mockery Father Brown, with an utterly impassive face, went on:
“I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly
connect snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false
philosophies will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle
Castle. But we want the real explanation of the castle and the universe.
But are there no other exhibits?”
Craven laughed, and Flambeau rose smiling to his feet and strolled down
the long table.
“Items five, six, seven, etc.,” he said, “and certainly more varied than
instructive. A curious collection, not of lead pencils, but of the lead
out of lead pencils. A senseless stick of bamboo, with the top rather
splintered. It might be the instrument of the crime. Only, there isn’t
any crime. The only other things are a few old missals and little
Catholic pictures, which the Ogilvies kept, I suppose, from the Middle
Ages--their family pride being stronger than their Puritanism. We
only put them in the museum because they seem curiously cut about and
defaced.”
The heady tempest without drove a dreadful wrack of clouds across
Glengyle and threw the long room into darkness as Father Brown picked up
the little illuminated pages to examine them. He spoke before the drift
of darkness had passed; but it was the voice of an utterly new man.
“Mr. Craven,” said he, talking like a man ten years younger, “you have
got a legal warrant, haven’t you, to go up and examine that grave?
The sooner we do it the better, and get to the bottom of this horrible
affair. If I were you I should start now.”
“Now,” repeated the astonished detective, “and why now?”
“Because this is serious,” answered Brown; “this is not spilt snuff or
loose pebbles, that might be there for a hundred reasons. There is only
one reason I know of for this being done; and the reason goes down to
the roots of the world. These religious pictures are not just dirtied
or torn or scrawled over, which might be done in idleness or bigotry, by
children or by Protestants. These have been treated very carefully--and
very queerly. In every place where the great ornamented name of God
comes in the old illuminations it has been elaborately taken out. The
only other thing that has been removed is the halo round the head of the
Child Jesus. Therefore, I say, let us get our warrant and our spade and
our hatchet, and go up and break open that coffin.”
“What do you mean?” demanded the London officer.
“I mean,” answered the little priest, and his voice seemed to rise
slightly in the roar of the gale. “I mean that the great devil of the
universe may be sitting on the top tower of this castle at this moment,
as big as a hundred elephants, and roaring like the Apocalypse. There is
black magic somewhere at the bottom of this.”
“Black magic,” repeated Flambeau in a low voice, for he was too
enlightened a man not to know of such things; “but what can these other
things mean?”
“Oh, something damnable, I suppose,” replied Brown impatiently. “How
should I know? How can I guess all their mazes down below? Perhaps you
can make a torture out of snuff and bamboo. Perhaps lunatics lust after
wax and steel filings. Perhaps there is a maddening drug made of lead
pencils! Our shortest cut to the mystery is up the hill to the grave.”
His comrades hardly knew that they had obeyed and followed him till a
blast of the night wind nearly flung them on their faces in the garden.
Nevertheless they had obeyed him like automata; for Craven found
a hatchet in his hand, and the warrant in his pocket; Flambeau was
carrying the heavy spade of the strange gardener; Father Brown was
carrying the little gilt book from which had been torn the name of God.
The path up the hill to the churchyard was crooked but short; only under
that stress of wind it seemed laborious and long. Far as the eye could
see, farther and farther as they mounted the slope, were seas beyond
seas of pines, now all aslope one way under the wind. And that universal
gesture seemed as vain as it was vast, as vain as if that wind were
whistling about some unpeopled and purposeless planet. Through all that
infinite growth of grey-blue forests sang, shrill and high, that ancient
sorrow that is in the heart of all heathen things. One could fancy that
the voices from the under world of unfathomable foliage were cries of
the lost and wandering pagan gods: gods who had gone roaming in that
irrational forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.
“You see,” said Father Brown in low but easy tone, “Scotch people before
Scotland existed were a curious lot. In fact, they’re a curious lot
still. But in the prehistoric times I fancy they really worshipped
demons. That,” he added genially, “is why they jumped at the Puritan
theology.”
“My friend,” said Flambeau, turning in a kind of fury, “what does all
that snuff mean?”
“My friend,” replied Brown, with equal seriousness, “there is one mark
of all genuine religions: materialism. Now, devil-worship is a perfectly
genuine religion.”
They had come up on the grassy scalp of the hill, one of the few bald
spots that stood clear of the crashing and roaring pine forest. A mean
enclosure, partly timber and partly wire, rattled in the tempest to tell
them the border of the graveyard. But by the time Inspector Craven had
come to the corner of the grave, and Flambeau had planted his spade
point downwards and leaned on it, they were both almost as shaken as the
shaky wood and wire. At the foot of the grave grew great tall
thistles, grey and silver in their decay. Once or twice, when a ball
of thistledown broke under the breeze and flew past him, Craven jumped
slightly as if it had been an arrow.