The innocence of Father Brown
consulted with the prince decorously, but somewhat unbendingly--rather
as if he were the prince’s solicitor. The sombre housekeeper was a mere
shadow in comparison; indeed, she seemed to efface herself and wait only
on the butler, and Brown heard no more of those volcanic whispers which
had half told him of the younger brother who blackmailed the elder.
Whether the prince was really being thus bled by the absent captain,
he could not be certain, but there was something insecure and secretive
about Saradine that made the tale by no means incredible.
When they went once more into the long hall with the windows and the
mirrors, yellow evening was dropping over the waters and the willowy
banks; and a bittern sounded in the distance like an elf upon his
dwarfish drum. The same singular sentiment of some sad and evil
fairyland crossed the priest’s mind again like a little grey cloud. “I
wish Flambeau were back,” he muttered.
“Do you believe in doom?” asked the restless Prince Saradine suddenly.
“No,” answered his guest. “I believe in Doomsday.”
The prince turned from the window and stared at him in a singular
manner, his face in shadow against the sunset. “What do you mean?” he
asked.
“I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,” answered
Father Brown. “The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything;
they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come
on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”
The prince made an inexplicable noise like an animal; in his shadowed
face the eyes were shining queerly. A new and shrewd thought exploded
silently in the other’s mind. Was there another meaning in Saradine’s
blend of brilliancy and abruptness? Was the prince--Was he perfectly
sane? He was repeating, “The wrong person--the wrong person,” many more
times than was natural in a social exclamation.
Then Father Brown awoke tardily to a second truth. In the mirrors before
him he could see the silent door standing open, and the silent Mr. Paul
standing in it, with his usual pallid impassiveness.
“I thought it better to announce at once,” he said, with the same stiff
respectfulness as of an old family lawyer, “a boat rowed by six men
has come to the landing-stage, and there’s a gentleman sitting in the
stern.”
“A boat!” repeated the prince; “a gentleman?” and he rose to his feet.
There was a startled silence punctuated only by the odd noise of the
bird in the sedge; and then, before anyone could speak again, a new
face and figure passed in profile round the three sunlit windows, as
the prince had passed an hour or two before. But except for the accident
that both outlines were aquiline, they had little in common. Instead
of the new white topper of Saradine, was a black one of antiquated or
foreign shape; under it was a young and very solemn face, clean shaven,
blue about its resolute chin, and carrying a faint suggestion of the
young Napoleon. The association was assisted by something old and odd
about the whole get-up, as of a man who had never troubled to change
the fashions of his fathers. He had a shabby blue frock coat, a red,
soldierly looking waistcoat, and a kind of coarse white trousers common
among the early Victorians, but strangely incongruous today. From all
this old clothes-shop his olive face stood out strangely young and
monstrously sincere.
“The deuce!” said Prince Saradine, and clapping on his white hat he went
to the front door himself, flinging it open on the sunset garden.
By that time the new-comer and his followers were drawn up on the lawn
like a small stage army. The six boatmen had pulled the boat well up on
shore, and were guarding it almost menacingly, holding their oars erect
like spears. They were swarthy men, and some of them wore earrings. But
one of them stood forward beside the olive-faced young man in the red
waistcoat, and carried a large black case of unfamiliar form.
“Your name,” said the young man, “is Saradine?”
Saradine assented rather negligently.
The new-comer had dull, dog-like brown eyes, as different as possible
from the restless and glittering grey eyes of the prince. But once
again Father Brown was tortured with a sense of having seen somewhere a
replica of the face; and once again he remembered the repetitions of
the glass-panelled room, and put down the coincidence to that. “Confound
this crystal palace!” he muttered. “One sees everything too many times.
It’s like a dream.”
“If you are Prince Saradine,” said the young man, “I may tell you that
my name is Antonelli.”
“Antonelli,” repeated the prince languidly. “Somehow I remember the
name.”
“Permit me to present myself,” said the young Italian.
With his left hand he politely took off his old-fashioned top-hat; with
his right he caught Prince Saradine so ringing a crack across the
face that the white top hat rolled down the steps and one of the blue
flower-pots rocked upon its pedestal.
The prince, whatever he was, was evidently not a coward; he sprang at
his enemy’s throat and almost bore him backwards to the grass. But his
enemy extricated himself with a singularly inappropriate air of hurried
politeness.
“That is all right,” he said, panting and in halting English. “I have
insulted. I will give satisfaction. Marco, open the case.”
The man beside him with the earrings and the big black case proceeded
to unlock it. He took out of it two long Italian rapiers, with splendid
steel hilts and blades, which he planted point downwards in the lawn.
The strange young man standing facing the entrance with his yellow and
vindictive face, the two swords standing up in the turf like two crosses
in a cemetery, and the line of the ranked towers behind, gave it all an
odd appearance of being some barbaric court of justice. But everything
else was unchanged, so sudden had been the interruption. The sunset gold
still glowed on the lawn, and the bittern still boomed as announcing
some small but dreadful destiny.
“Prince Saradine,” said the man called Antonelli, “when I was an infant
in the cradle you killed my father and stole my mother; my father was
the more fortunate. You did not kill him fairly, as I am going to kill
you. You and my wicked mother took him driving to a lonely pass in
Sicily, flung him down a cliff, and went on your way. I could imitate
you if I chose, but imitating you is too vile. I have followed you all
over the world, and you have always fled from me. But this is the end
of the world--and of you. I have you now, and I give you the chance you
never gave my father. Choose one of those swords.”
Prince Saradine, with contracted brows, seemed to hesitate a moment,
but his ears were still singing with the blow, and he sprang forward
and snatched at one of the hilts. Father Brown had also sprung forward,
striving to compose the dispute; but he soon found his personal presence
made matters worse. Saradine was a French freemason and a fierce
atheist, and a priest moved him by the law of contraries. And for the
other man neither priest nor layman moved him at all. This young man
with the Bonaparte face and the brown eyes was something far sterner
than a puritan--a pagan. He was a simple slayer from the morning of the
earth; a man of the stone age--a man of stone.
One hope remained, the summoning of the household; and Father Brown ran
back into the house. He found, however, that all the under servants
had been given a holiday ashore by the autocrat Paul, and that only the
sombre Mrs. Anthony moved uneasily about the long rooms. But the moment
she turned a ghastly face upon him, he resolved one of the riddles of
the house of mirrors. The heavy brown eyes of Antonelli were the heavy
brown eyes of Mrs. Anthony; and in a flash he saw half the story.
“Your son is outside,” he said without wasting words; “either he or the
prince will be killed. Where is Mr. Paul?”
“He is at the landing-stage,” said the woman faintly. “He is--he
is--signalling for help.”
“Mrs. Anthony,” said Father Brown seriously, “there is no time for
nonsense. My friend has his boat down the river fishing. Your son’s boat
is guarded by your son’s men. There is only this one canoe; what is Mr.
Paul doing with it?”
“Santa Maria! I do not know,” she said; and swooned all her length on
the matted floor.
Father Brown lifted her to a sofa, flung a pot of water over her,
shouted for help, and then rushed down to the landing-stage of the
little island. But the canoe was already in mid-stream, and old Paul
was pulling and pushing it up the river with an energy incredible at his
years.
“I will save my master,” he cried, his eyes blazing maniacally. “I will
save him yet!”
Father Brown could do nothing but gaze after the boat as it struggled
up-stream and pray that the old man might waken the little town in time.
“A duel is bad enough,” he muttered, rubbing up his rough dust-coloured
hair, “but there’s something wrong about this duel, even as a duel. I
feel it in my bones. But what can it be?”
As he stood staring at the water, a wavering mirror of sunset, he
heard from the other end of the island garden a small but unmistakable
sound--the cold concussion of steel. He turned his head.
Away on the farthest cape or headland of the long islet, on a strip of
turf beyond the last rank of roses, the duellists had already crossed
swords. Evening above them was a dome of virgin gold, and, distant as
they were, every detail was picked out. They had cast off their coats,
but the yellow waistcoat and white hair of Saradine, the red waistcoat
and white trousers of Antonelli, glittered in the level light like the
colours of the dancing clockwork dolls. The two swords sparkled from
point to pommel like two diamond pins. There was something frightful
in the two figures appearing so little and so gay. They looked like two
butterflies trying to pin each other to a cork.
Father Brown ran as hard as he could, his little legs going like a
wheel. But when he came to the field of combat he found he was born too
late and too early--too late to stop the strife, under the shadow of the
grim Sicilians leaning on their oars, and too early to anticipate any
disastrous issue of it. For the two men were singularly well matched,
the prince using his skill with a sort of cynical confidence, the
Sicilian using his with a murderous care. Few finer fencing matches can
ever have been seen in crowded amphitheatres than that which tinkled and
sparkled on that forgotten island in the reedy river. The dizzy fight
was balanced so long that hope began to revive in the protesting priest;
by all common probability Paul must soon come back with the police. It
would be some comfort even if Flambeau came back from his fishing, for
Flambeau, physically speaking, was worth four other men. But there was
no sign of Flambeau, and, what was much queerer, no sign of Paul or the
police. No other raft or stick was left to float on; in that lost
island in that vast nameless pool, they were cut off as on a rock in the
Pacific.
Almost as he had the thought the ringing of the rapiers quickened to a
rattle, the prince’s arms flew up, and the point shot out behind between
his shoulder-blades. He went over with a great whirling movement, almost
like one throwing the half of a boy’s cart-wheel. The sword flew from
his hand like a shooting star, and dived into the distant river. And
he himself sank with so earth-shaking a subsidence that he broke a
big rose-tree with his body and shook up into the sky a cloud of red
earth--like the smoke of some heathen sacrifice. The Sicilian had made
blood-offering to the ghost of his father.
The priest was instantly on his knees by the corpse; but only to make
too sure that it was a corpse. As he was still trying some last hopeless