The innocence of Father Brown
tests he heard for the first time voices from farther up the river, and
saw a police boat shoot up to the landing-stage, with constables and
other important people, including the excited Paul. The little priest
rose with a distinctly dubious grimace.
“Now, why on earth,” he muttered, “why on earth couldn’t he have come
before?”
Some seven minutes later the island was occupied by an invasion
of townsfolk and police, and the latter had put their hands on the
victorious duellist, ritually reminding him that anything he said might
be used against him.
“I shall not say anything,” said the monomaniac, with a wonderful and
peaceful face. “I shall never say anything more. I am very happy, and I
only want to be hanged.”
Then he shut his mouth as they led him away, and it is the strange but
certain truth that he never opened it again in this world, except to say
“Guilty” at his trial.
Father Brown had stared at the suddenly crowded garden, the arrest of
the man of blood, the carrying away of the corpse after its examination
by the doctor, rather as one watches the break-up of some ugly dream; he
was motionless, like a man in a nightmare. He gave his name and address
as a witness, but declined their offer of a boat to the shore, and
remained alone in the island garden, gazing at the broken rose bush
and the whole green theatre of that swift and inexplicable tragedy. The
light died along the river; mist rose in the marshy banks; a few belated
birds flitted fitfully across.
Stuck stubbornly in his sub-consciousness (which was an unusually
lively one) was an unspeakable certainty that there was something still
unexplained. This sense that had clung to him all day could not be fully
explained by his fancy about “looking-glass land.” Somehow he had not
seen the real story, but some game or masque. And yet people do not get
hanged or run through the body for the sake of a charade.
As he sat on the steps of the landing-stage ruminating he grew conscious
of the tall, dark streak of a sail coming silently down the shining
river, and sprang to his feet with such a backrush of feeling that he
almost wept.
“Flambeau!” he cried, and shook his friend by both hands again and
again, much to the astonishment of that sportsman, as he came on shore
with his fishing tackle. “Flambeau,” he said, “so you’re not killed?”
“Killed!” repeated the angler in great astonishment. “And why should I
be killed?”
“Oh, because nearly everybody else is,” said his companion rather
wildly. “Saradine got murdered, and Antonelli wants to be hanged, and
his mother’s fainted, and I, for one, don’t know whether I’m in this
world or the next. But, thank God, you’re in the same one.” And he took
the bewildered Flambeau’s arm.
As they turned from the landing-stage they came under the eaves of the
low bamboo house, and looked in through one of the windows, as they
had done on their first arrival. They beheld a lamp-lit interior well
calculated to arrest their eyes. The table in the long dining-room
had been laid for dinner when Saradine’s destroyer had fallen like a
stormbolt on the island. And the dinner was now in placid progress, for
Mrs. Anthony sat somewhat sullenly at the foot of the table, while at
the head of it was Mr. Paul, the major domo, eating and drinking of the
best, his bleared, bluish eyes standing queerly out of his face, his
gaunt countenance inscrutable, but by no means devoid of satisfaction.
With a gesture of powerful impatience, Flambeau rattled at the window,
wrenched it open, and put an indignant head into the lamp-lit room.
“Well,” he cried. “I can understand you may need some refreshment,
but really to steal your master’s dinner while he lies murdered in the
garden--”
“I have stolen a great many things in a long and pleasant life,” replied
the strange old gentleman placidly; “this dinner is one of the few
things I have not stolen. This dinner and this house and garden happen
to belong to me.”
A thought flashed across Flambeau’s face. “You mean to say,” he began,
“that the will of Prince Saradine--”
“I am Prince Saradine,” said the old man, munching a salted almond.
Father Brown, who was looking at the birds outside, jumped as if he were
shot, and put in at the window a pale face like a turnip.
“You are what?” he repeated in a shrill voice.
“Paul, Prince Saradine, A vos ordres,” said the venerable person
politely, lifting a glass of sherry. “I live here very quietly, being
a domestic kind of fellow; and for the sake of modesty I am called Mr.
Paul, to distinguish me from my unfortunate brother Mr. Stephen. He
died, I hear, recently--in the garden. Of course, it is not my fault
if enemies pursue him to this place. It is owing to the regrettable
irregularity of his life. He was not a domestic character.”
He relapsed into silence, and continued to gaze at the opposite wall
just above the bowed and sombre head of the woman. They saw plainly
the family likeness that had haunted them in the dead man. Then his old
shoulders began to heave and shake a little, as if he were choking, but
his face did not alter.
“My God!” cried Flambeau after a pause, “he’s laughing!”
“Come away,” said Father Brown, who was quite white. “Come away from
this house of hell. Let us get into an honest boat again.”
Night had sunk on rushes and river by the time they had pushed off from
the island, and they went down-stream in the dark, warming themselves
with two big cigars that glowed like crimson ships’ lanterns. Father
Brown took his cigar out of his mouth and said:
“I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it’s a
primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he
discovered that two enemies are better than one.”
“I do not follow that,” answered Flambeau.
“Oh, it’s really simple,” rejoined his friend. “Simple, though anything
but innocent. Both the Saradines were scamps, but the prince, the
elder, was the sort of scamp that gets to the top, and the younger, the
captain, was the sort that sinks to the bottom. This squalid officer
fell from beggar to blackmailer, and one ugly day he got his hold upon
his brother, the prince. Obviously it was for no light matter, for
Prince Paul Saradine was frankly ‘fast,’ and had no reputation to lose
as to the mere sins of society. In plain fact, it was a hanging matter,
and Stephen literally had a rope round his brother’s neck. He had
somehow discovered the truth about the Sicilian affair, and could prove
that Paul murdered old Antonelli in the mountains. The captain raked in
the hush money heavily for ten years, until even the prince’s splendid
fortune began to look a little foolish.
“But Prince Saradine bore another burden besides his blood-sucking
brother. He knew that the son of Antonelli, a mere child at the time of
the murder, had been trained in savage Sicilian loyalty, and lived only
to avenge his father, not with the gibbet (for he lacked Stephen’s legal
proof), but with the old weapons of vendetta. The boy had practised arms
with a deadly perfection, and about the time that he was old enough to
use them Prince Saradine began, as the society papers said, to travel.
The fact is that he began to flee for his life, passing from place
to place like a hunted criminal; but with one relentless man upon his
trail. That was Prince Paul’s position, and by no means a pretty one.
The more money he spent on eluding Antonelli the less he had to silence
Stephen. The more he gave to silence Stephen the less chance there was
of finally escaping Antonelli. Then it was that he showed himself a
great man--a genius like Napoleon.
“Instead of resisting his two antagonists, he surrendered suddenly to
both of them. He gave way like a Japanese wrestler, and his foes fell
prostrate before him. He gave up the race round the world, and he gave
up his address to young Antonelli; then he gave up everything to his
brother. He sent Stephen money enough for smart clothes and easy travel,
with a letter saying roughly: ‘This is all I have left. You have cleaned
me out. I still have a little house in Norfolk, with servants and a
cellar, and if you want more from me you must take that. Come and take
possession if you like, and I will live there quietly as your friend
or agent or anything.’ He knew that the Sicilian had never seen the
Saradine brothers save, perhaps, in pictures; he knew they were somewhat
alike, both having grey, pointed beards. Then he shaved his own face
and waited. The trap worked. The unhappy captain, in his new clothes,
entered the house in triumph as a prince, and walked upon the Sicilian’s
sword.
“There was one hitch, and it is to the honour of human nature. Evil
spirits like Saradine often blunder by never expecting the virtues of
mankind. He took it for granted that the Italian’s blow, when it came,
would be dark, violent and nameless, like the blow it avenged; that the
victim would be knifed at night, or shot from behind a hedge, and so
die without speech. It was a bad minute for Prince Paul when Antonelli’s
chivalry proposed a formal duel, with all its possible explanations. It
was then that I found him putting off in his boat with wild eyes. He was
fleeing, bareheaded, in an open boat before Antonelli should learn who
he was.
“But, however agitated, he was not hopeless. He knew the adventurer and
he knew the fanatic. It was quite probable that Stephen, the adventurer,
would hold his tongue, through his mere histrionic pleasure in playing a
part, his lust for clinging to his new cosy quarters, his rascal’s
trust in luck, and his fine fencing. It was certain that Antonelli, the
fanatic, would hold his tongue, and be hanged without telling tales
of his family. Paul hung about on the river till he knew the fight
was over. Then he roused the town, brought the police, saw his two
vanquished enemies taken away forever, and sat down smiling to his
dinner.”
“Laughing, God help us!” said Flambeau with a strong shudder. “Do they
get such ideas from Satan?”
“He got that idea from you,” answered the priest.
“God forbid!” ejaculated Flambeau. “From me! What do you mean!”
The priest pulled a visiting-card from his pocket and held it up in the
faint glow of his cigar; it was scrawled with green ink.
“Don’t you remember his original invitation to you?” he asked, “and the
compliment to your criminal exploit? ‘That trick of yours,’ he says,
‘of getting one detective to arrest the other’? He has just copied your
trick. With an enemy on each side of him, he slipped swiftly out of the
way and let them collide and kill each other.”
Flambeau tore Prince Saradine’s card from the priest’s hands and rent it
savagely in small pieces.
“There’s the last of that old skull and crossbones,” he said as he
scattered the pieces upon the dark and disappearing waves of the stream;
“but I should think it would poison the fishes.”
The last gleam of white card and green ink was drowned and darkened;
a faint and vibrant colour as of morning changed the sky, and the moon
behind the grasses grew paler. They drifted in silence.
“Father,” said Flambeau suddenly, “do you think it was all a dream?”
The priest shook his head, whether in dissent or agnosticism, but
remained mute. A smell of hawthorn and of orchards came to them through
the darkness, telling them that a wind was awake; the next moment it
swayed their little boat and swelled their sail, and carried them onward
down the winding river to happier places and the homes of harmless men.
The Hammer of God
The little village of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep
that the tall spire of its church seemed only like the peak of a small
mountain. At the foot of the church stood a smithy, generally red with
fires and always littered with hammers and scraps of iron; opposite to