The innocence of Father Brown
Flambeau drove the blade of his spade through the whistling grass into
the wet clay below. Then he seemed to stop and lean on it as on a staff.
“Go on,” said the priest very gently. “We are only trying to find the
truth. What are you afraid of?”
“I am afraid of finding it,” said Flambeau.
The London detective spoke suddenly in a high crowing voice that was
meant to be conversational and cheery. “I wonder why he really did hide
himself like that. Something nasty, I suppose; was he a leper?”
“Something worse than that,” said Flambeau.
“And what do you imagine,” asked the other, “would be worse than a
leper?”
“I don’t imagine it,” said Flambeau.
He dug for some dreadful minutes in silence, and then said in a choked
voice, “I’m afraid of his not being the right shape.”
“Nor was that piece of paper, you know,” said Father Brown quietly, “and
we survived even that piece of paper.”
Flambeau dug on with a blind energy. But the tempest had shouldered away
the choking grey clouds that clung to the hills like smoke and revealed
grey fields of faint starlight before he cleared the shape of a rude
timber coffin, and somehow tipped it up upon the turf. Craven stepped
forward with his axe; a thistle-top touched him, and he flinched. Then
he took a firmer stride, and hacked and wrenched with an energy like
Flambeau’s till the lid was torn off, and all that was there lay
glimmering in the grey starlight.
“Bones,” said Craven; and then he added, “but it is a man,” as if that
were something unexpected.
“Is he,” asked Flambeau in a voice that went oddly up and down, “is he
all right?”
“Seems so,” said the officer huskily, bending over the obscure and
decaying skeleton in the box. “Wait a minute.”
A vast heave went over Flambeau’s huge figure. “And now I come to think
of it,” he cried, “why in the name of madness shouldn’t he be all right?
What is it gets hold of a man on these cursed cold mountains? I think
it’s the black, brainless repetition; all these forests, and over all
an ancient horror of unconsciousness. It’s like the dream of an atheist.
Pine-trees and more pine-trees and millions more pine-trees--”
“God!” cried the man by the coffin, “but he hasn’t got a head.”
While the others stood rigid the priest, for the first time, showed a
leap of startled concern.
“No head!” he repeated. “No head?” as if he had almost expected some
other deficiency.
Half-witted visions of a headless baby born to Glengyle, of a headless
youth hiding himself in the castle, of a headless man pacing those
ancient halls or that gorgeous garden, passed in panorama through their
minds. But even in that stiffened instant the tale took no root in them
and seemed to have no reason in it. They stood listening to the loud
woods and the shrieking sky quite foolishly, like exhausted animals.
Thought seemed to be something enormous that had suddenly slipped out of
their grasp.
“There are three headless men,” said Father Brown, “standing round this
open grave.”
The pale detective from London opened his mouth to speak, and left it
open like a yokel, while a long scream of wind tore the sky; then he
looked at the axe in his hands as if it did not belong to him, and
dropped it.
“Father,” said Flambeau in that infantile and heavy voice he used very
seldom, “what are we to do?”
His friend’s reply came with the pent promptitude of a gun going off.
“Sleep!” cried Father Brown. “Sleep. We have come to the end of the
ways. Do you know what sleep is? Do you know that every man who sleeps
believes in God? It is a sacrament; for it is an act of faith and it is
a food. And we need a sacrament, if only a natural one. Something has
fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps the worst thing that
can fall on them.”
Craven’s parted lips came together to say, “What do you mean?”
The priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered: “We have
found the truth; and the truth makes no sense.”
He went down the path in front of them with a plunging and reckless
step very rare with him, and when they reached the castle again he threw
himself upon sleep with the simplicity of a dog.
Despite his mystic praise of slumber, Father Brown was up earlier than
anyone else except the silent gardener; and was found smoking a big
pipe and watching that expert at his speechless labours in the kitchen
garden. Towards daybreak the rocking storm had ended in roaring rains,
and the day came with a curious freshness. The gardener seemed even
to have been conversing, but at sight of the detectives he planted
his spade sullenly in a bed and, saying something about his breakfast,
shifted along the lines of cabbages and shut himself in the kitchen.
“He’s a valuable man, that,” said Father Brown. “He does the potatoes
amazingly. Still,” he added, with a dispassionate charity, “he has his
faults; which of us hasn’t? He doesn’t dig this bank quite regularly.
There, for instance,” and he stamped suddenly on one spot. “I’m really
very doubtful about that potato.”
“And why?” asked Craven, amused with the little man’s hobby.
“I’m doubtful about it,” said the other, “because old Gow was doubtful
about it himself. He put his spade in methodically in every place but
just this. There must be a mighty fine potato just here.”
Flambeau pulled up the spade and impetuously drove it into the place.
He turned up, under a load of soil, something that did not look like a
potato, but rather like a monstrous, over-domed mushroom. But it struck
the spade with a cold click; it rolled over like a ball, and grinned up
at them.
“The Earl of Glengyle,” said Brown sadly, and looked down heavily at the
skull.
Then, after a momentary meditation, he plucked the spade from Flambeau,
and, saying “We must hide it again,” clamped the skull down in the
earth. Then he leaned his little body and huge head on the great handle
of the spade, that stood up stiffly in the earth, and his eyes were
empty and his forehead full of wrinkles. “If one could only conceive,”
he muttered, “the meaning of this last monstrosity.” And leaning on
the large spade handle, he buried his brows in his hands, as men do in
church.
All the corners of the sky were brightening into blue and silver; the
birds were chattering in the tiny garden trees; so loud it seemed as if
the trees themselves were talking. But the three men were silent enough.
“Well, I give it all up,” said Flambeau at last boisterously. “My brain
and this world don’t fit each other; and there’s an end of it. Snuff,
spoilt Prayer Books, and the insides of musical boxes--what--”
Brown threw up his bothered brow and rapped on the spade handle with an
intolerance quite unusual with him. “Oh, tut, tut, tut, tut!” he
cried. “All that is as plain as a pikestaff. I understood the snuff
and clockwork, and so on, when I first opened my eyes this morning. And
since then I’ve had it out with old Gow, the gardener, who is neither so
deaf nor so stupid as he pretends. There’s nothing amiss about the loose
items. I was wrong about the torn mass-book, too; there’s no harm in
that. But it’s this last business. Desecrating graves and stealing dead
men’s heads--surely there’s harm in that? Surely there’s black magic
still in that? That doesn’t fit in to the quite simple story of the
snuff and the candles.” And, striding about again, he smoked moodily.
“My friend,” said Flambeau, with a grim humour, “you must be careful
with me and remember I was once a criminal. The great advantage of that
estate was that I always made up the story myself, and acted it as quick
as I chose. This detective business of waiting about is too much for my
French impatience. All my life, for good or evil, I have done things at
the instant; I always fought duels the next morning; I always paid bills
on the nail; I never even put off a visit to the dentist--”
Father Brown’s pipe fell out of his mouth and broke into three pieces
on the gravel path. He stood rolling his eyes, the exact picture of
an idiot. “Lord, what a turnip I am!” he kept saying. “Lord, what a
turnip!” Then, in a somewhat groggy kind of way, he began to laugh.
“The dentist!” he repeated. “Six hours in the spiritual abyss, and all
because I never thought of the dentist! Such a simple, such a beautiful
and peaceful thought! Friends, we have passed a night in hell; but now
the sun is risen, the birds are singing, and the radiant form of the
dentist consoles the world.”
“I will get some sense out of this,” cried Flambeau, striding forward,
“if I use the tortures of the Inquisition.”
Father Brown repressed what appeared to be a momentary disposition to
dance on the now sunlit lawn and cried quite piteously, like a child,
“Oh, let me be silly a little. You don’t know how unhappy I have been.
And now I know that there has been no deep sin in this business at all.
Only a little lunacy, perhaps--and who minds that?”
He spun round once more, then faced them with gravity.
“This is not a story of crime,” he said; “rather it is the story of a
strange and crooked honesty. We are dealing with the one man on earth,
perhaps, who has taken no more than his due. It is a study in the savage
living logic that has been the religion of this race.
“That old local rhyme about the house of Glengyle--
As green sap to the simmer trees
Is red gold to the Ogilvies--
was literal as well as metaphorical. It did not merely mean that the
Glengyles sought for wealth; it was also true that they literally
gathered gold; they had a huge collection of ornaments and utensils in
that metal. They were, in fact, misers whose mania took that turn.
In the light of that fact, run through all the things we found in the
castle. Diamonds without their gold rings; candles without their gold
candlesticks; snuff without the gold snuff-boxes; pencil-leads without
the gold pencil-cases; a walking stick without its gold top; clockwork
without the gold clocks--or rather watches. And, mad as it sounds,
because the halos and the name of God in the old missals were of real
gold; these also were taken away.”
The garden seemed to brighten, the grass to grow gayer in the
strengthening sun, as the crazy truth was told. Flambeau lit a cigarette
as his friend went on.
“Were taken away,” continued Father Brown; “were taken away--but not
stolen. Thieves would never have left this mystery. Thieves would have
taken the gold snuff-boxes, snuff and all; the gold pencil-cases, lead
and all. We have to deal with a man with a peculiar conscience, but
certainly a conscience. I found that mad moralist this morning in the
kitchen garden yonder, and I heard the whole story.
“The late Archibald Ogilvie was the nearest approach to a good man
ever born at Glengyle. But his bitter virtue took the turn of the
misanthrope; he moped over the dishonesty of his ancestors, from which,
somehow, he generalised a dishonesty of all men. More especially he
distrusted philanthropy or free-giving; and he swore if he could
find one man who took his exact rights he should have all the gold of
Glengyle. Having delivered this defiance to humanity he shut himself
up, without the smallest expectation of its being answered. One day,
however, a deaf and seemingly senseless lad from a distant village
brought him a belated telegram; and Glengyle, in his acrid pleasantry,
gave him a new farthing. At least he thought he had done so, but when
he turned over his change he found the new farthing still there and a
sovereign gone. The accident offered him vistas of sneering speculation.
Either way, the boy would show the greasy greed of the species. Either
he would vanish, a thief stealing a coin; or he would sneak back with
it virtuously, a snob seeking a reward. In the middle of that night Lord