The innocence of Father Brown
Flambeau spoke quietly to him in answer. “The Father sometimes gets this
mystic’s cloud on him,” he said; “but I give you fair warning that I
have never known him to have it except when there was some evil quite
near.”
“Oh, rats!” said the scientist.
“Why, look at it,” cried Father Brown, holding out the crooked knife at
arm’s length, as if it were some glittering snake. “Don’t you see it is
the wrong shape? Don’t you see that it has no hearty and plain purpose?
It does not point like a spear. It does not sweep like a scythe. It does
not look like a weapon. It looks like an instrument of torture.”
“Well, as you don’t seem to like it,” said the jolly Harris, “it had
better be taken back to its owner. Haven’t we come to the end of this
confounded conservatory yet? This house is the wrong shape, if you
like.”
“You don’t understand,” said Father Brown, shaking his head. “The shape
of this house is quaint--it is even laughable. But there is nothing
wrong about it.”
As they spoke they came round the curve of glass that ended the
conservatory, an uninterrupted curve, for there was neither door nor
window by which to enter at that end. The glass, however, was clear, and
the sun still bright, though beginning to set; and they could see not
only the flamboyant blossoms inside, but the frail figure of the poet
in a brown velvet coat lying languidly on the sofa, having, apparently,
fallen half asleep over a book. He was a pale, slight man, with loose,
chestnut hair and a fringe of beard that was the paradox of his face,
for the beard made him look less manly. These traits were well known
to all three of them; but even had it not been so, it may be doubted
whether they would have looked at Quinton just then. Their eyes were
riveted on another object.
Exactly in their path, immediately outside the round end of the glass
building, was standing a tall man, whose drapery fell to his feet in
faultless white, and whose bare, brown skull, face, and neck gleamed in
the setting sun like splendid bronze. He was looking through the glass
at the sleeper, and he was more motionless than a mountain.
“Who is that?” cried Father Brown, stepping back with a hissing intake
of his breath.
“Oh, it is only that Hindoo humbug,” growled Harris; “but I don’t know
what the deuce he’s doing here.”
“It looks like hypnotism,” said Flambeau, biting his black moustache.
“Why are you unmedical fellows always talking bosh about hypnotism?”
cried the doctor. “It looks a deal more like burglary.”
“Well, we will speak to it, at any rate,” said Flambeau, who was always
for action. One long stride took him to the place where the Indian
stood. Bowing from his great height, which overtopped even the
Oriental’s, he said with placid impudence:
“Good evening, sir. Do you want anything?”
Quite slowly, like a great ship turning into a harbour, the great yellow
face turned, and looked at last over its white shoulder. They were
startled to see that its yellow eyelids were quite sealed, as in sleep.
“Thank you,” said the face in excellent English. “I want nothing.” Then,
half opening the lids, so as to show a slit of opalescent eyeball,
he repeated, “I want nothing.” Then he opened his eyes wide with a
startling stare, said, “I want nothing,” and went rustling away into the
rapidly darkening garden.
“The Christian is more modest,” muttered Father Brown; “he wants
something.”
“What on earth was he doing?” asked Flambeau, knitting his black brows
and lowering his voice.
“I should like to talk to you later,” said Father Brown.
The sunlight was still a reality, but it was the red light of evening,
and the bulk of the garden trees and bushes grew blacker and blacker
against it. They turned round the end of the conservatory, and walked in
silence down the other side to get round to the front door. As they went
they seemed to wake something, as one startles a bird, in the deeper
corner between the study and the main building; and again they saw the
white-robed fakir slide out of the shadow, and slip round towards the
front door. To their surprise, however, he had not been alone.
They found themselves abruptly pulled up and forced to banish their
bewilderment by the appearance of Mrs. Quinton, with her heavy golden
hair and square pale face, advancing on them out of the twilight. She
looked a little stern, but was entirely courteous.
“Good evening, Dr. Harris,” was all she said.
“Good evening, Mrs. Quinton,” said the little doctor heartily. “I am
just going to give your husband his sleeping draught.”
“Yes,” she said in a clear voice. “I think it is quite time.” And she
smiled at them, and went sweeping into the house.
“That woman’s over-driven,” said Father Brown; “that’s the kind of woman
that does her duty for twenty years, and then does something dreadful.”
The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye of
interest. “Did you ever study medicine?” he asked.
“You have to know something of the mind as well as the body,” answered
the priest; “we have to know something of the body as well as the mind.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “I think I’ll go and give Quinton his stuff.”
They had turned the corner of the front façade, and were approaching the
front doorway. As they turned into it they saw the man in the white robe
for the third time. He came so straight towards the front door that
it seemed quite incredible that he had not just come out of the study
opposite to it. Yet they knew that the study door was locked.
Father Brown and Flambeau, however, kept this weird contradiction to
themselves, and Dr. Harris was not a man to waste his thoughts on the
impossible. He permitted the omnipresent Asiatic to make his exit, and
then stepped briskly into the hall. There he found a figure which he had
already forgotten. The inane Atkinson was still hanging about, humming
and poking things with his knobby cane. The doctor’s face had a spasm of
disgust and decision, and he whispered rapidly to his companion: “I must
lock the door again, or this rat will get in. But I shall be out again
in two minutes.”
He rapidly unlocked the door and locked it again behind him, just
balking a blundering charge from the young man in the billycock. The
young man threw himself impatiently on a hall chair. Flambeau looked at
a Persian illumination on the wall; Father Brown, who seemed in a sort
of daze, dully eyed the door. In about four minutes the door was opened
again. Atkinson was quicker this time. He sprang forward, held the door
open for an instant, and called out: “Oh, I say, Quinton, I want--”
From the other end of the study came the clear voice of Quinton, in
something between a yawn and a yell of weary laughter.
“Oh, I know what you want. Take it, and leave me in peace. I’m writing a
song about peacocks.”
Before the door closed half a sovereign came flying through the
aperture; and Atkinson, stumbling forward, caught it with singular
dexterity.
“So that’s settled,” said the doctor, and, locking the door savagely, he
led the way out into the garden.
“Poor Leonard can get a little peace now,” he added to Father Brown;
“he’s locked in all by himself for an hour or two.”
“Yes,” answered the priest; “and his voice sounded jolly enough when we
left him.” Then he looked gravely round the garden, and saw the loose
figure of Atkinson standing and jingling the half-sovereign in his
pocket, and beyond, in the purple twilight, the figure of the Indian
sitting bolt upright upon a bank of grass with his face turned towards
the setting sun. Then he said abruptly: “Where is Mrs. Quinton!”
“She has gone up to her room,” said the doctor. “That is her shadow on
the blind.”
Father Brown looked up, and frowningly scrutinised a dark outline at the
gas-lit window.
“Yes,” he said, “that is her shadow,” and he walked a yard or two and
threw himself upon a garden seat.
Flambeau sat down beside him; but the doctor was one of those energetic
people who live naturally on their legs. He walked away, smoking, into
the twilight, and the two friends were left together.
“My father,” said Flambeau in French, “what is the matter with you?”
Father Brown was silent and motionless for half a minute, then he said:
“Superstition is irreligious, but there is something in the air of this
place. I think it’s that Indian--at least, partly.”
He sank into silence, and watched the distant outline of the Indian, who
still sat rigid as if in prayer. At first sight he seemed motionless,
but as Father Brown watched him he saw that the man swayed ever so
slightly with a rhythmic movement, just as the dark tree-tops swayed
ever so slightly in the wind that was creeping up the dim garden paths
and shuffling the fallen leaves a little.
The landscape was growing rapidly dark, as if for a storm, but they
could still see all the figures in their various places. Atkinson was
leaning against a tree with a listless face; Quinton’s wife was still
at her window; the doctor had gone strolling round the end of the
conservatory; they could see his cigar like a will-o’-the-wisp; and the
fakir still sat rigid and yet rocking, while the trees above him began
to rock and almost to roar. Storm was certainly coming.
“When that Indian spoke to us,” went on Brown in a conversational
undertone, “I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his
universe. Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he
said ‘I want nothing,’ it meant only that he was impenetrable, that Asia
does not give itself away. Then he said again, ‘I want nothing,’ and
I knew that he meant that he was sufficient to himself, like a cosmos,
that he needed no God, neither admitted any sins. And when he said the
third time, ‘I want nothing,’ he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew
that he meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and
his home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation,
the mere destruction of everything or anything--”
Two drops of rain fell; and for some reason Flambeau started and looked
up, as if they had stung him. And the same instant the doctor down by
the end of the conservatory began running towards them, calling out
something as he ran.
As he came among them like a bombshell the restless Atkinson happened to
be taking a turn nearer to the house front; and the doctor clutched him
by the collar in a convulsive grip. “Foul play!” he cried; “what have
you been doing to him, you dog?”
The priest had sprung erect, and had the voice of steel of a soldier in
command.
“No fighting,” he cried coolly; “we are enough to hold anyone we want
to. What is the matter, doctor?”
“Things are not right with Quinton,” said the doctor, quite white. “I
could just see him through the glass, and I don’t like the way he’s
lying. It’s not as I left him, anyhow.”
“Let us go in to him,” said Father Brown shortly. “You can leave Mr.
Atkinson alone. I have had him in sight since we heard Quinton’s voice.”
“I will stop here and watch him,” said Flambeau hurriedly. “You go in
and see.”
The doctor and the priest flew to the study door, unlocked it, and fell
into the room. In doing so they nearly fell over the large mahogany
table in the centre at which the poet usually wrote; for the place was
lit only by a small fire kept for the invalid. In the middle of this
table lay a single sheet of paper, evidently left there on purpose. The
doctor snatched it up, glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and
crying, “Good God, look at that!” plunged toward the glass room beyond,
where the terrible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crimson memory
of the sunset.
Father Brown read the words three times before he put down the paper.
The words were: “I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!” They were