The innocence of Father Brown
this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was “The Blue Boar,” the only
inn of the place. It was upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden
and silver daybreak, that two brothers met in the street and spoke;
though one was beginning the day and the other finishing it. The Rev.
and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was making his way to some
austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the Hon.
Norman Bohun, his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting
in evening dress on the bench outside “The Blue Boar,” drinking what
the philosophic observer was free to regard either as his last glass on
Tuesday or his first on Wednesday. The colonel was not particular.
The Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating
from the Middle Ages, and their pennon had actually seen Palestine.
But it is a great mistake to suppose that such houses stand high
in chivalric tradition. Few except the poor preserve traditions.
Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions. The Bohuns had been
Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under Queen Victoria. But like more
than one of the really ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two
centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even
come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly
human about the colonel’s wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic
resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous
clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with
hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked merely blonde and
leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they
looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long
yellow moustaches; on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to
jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into his face. Over his evening clothes
he wore a curious pale yellow coat that looked more like a very light
dressing gown than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck an
extraordinary broad-brimmed hat of a bright green colour, evidently some
oriental curiosity caught up at random. He was proud of appearing in
such incongruous attires--proud of the fact that he always made them
look congruous.
His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but
he was buttoned up to the chin in black, and his face was clean-shaven,
cultivated, and a little nervous. He seemed to live for nothing but his
religion; but there were some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was
a Presbyterian) that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of
God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another
and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his
brother raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful, while the
man’s practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was mostly an
ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer, and
was founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but
in peculiar places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry.
He was at the moment about to enter the church through the yard of
the smithy, but stopped and frowned a little as he saw his brother’s
cavernous eyes staring in the same direction. On the hypothesis that the
colonel was interested in the church he did not waste any speculations.
There only remained the blacksmith’s shop, and though the blacksmith was
a Puritan and none of his people, Wilfred Bohun had heard some scandals
about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He flung a suspicious look
across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing to speak to him.
“Good morning, Wilfred,” he said. “Like a good landlord I am watching
sleeplessly over my people. I am going to call on the blacksmith.”
Wilfred looked at the ground, and said: “The blacksmith is out. He is
over at Greenford.”
“I know,” answered the other with silent laughter; “that is why I am
calling on him.”
“Norman,” said the cleric, with his eye on a pebble in the road, “are
you ever afraid of thunderbolts?”
“What do you mean?” asked the colonel. “Is your hobby meteorology?”
“I mean,” said Wilfred, without looking up, “do you ever think that God
might strike you in the street?”
“I beg your pardon,” said the colonel; “I see your hobby is folk-lore.”
“I know your hobby is blasphemy,” retorted the religious man, stung in
the one live place of his nature. “But if you do not fear God, you have
good reason to fear man.”
The elder raised his eyebrows politely. “Fear man?” he said.
“Barnes the blacksmith is the biggest and strongest man for forty
miles round,” said the clergyman sternly. “I know you are no coward or
weakling, but he could throw you over the wall.”
This struck home, being true, and the lowering line by mouth and nostril
darkened and deepened. For a moment he stood with the heavy sneer on his
face. But in an instant Colonel Bohun had recovered his own cruel good
humour and laughed, showing two dog-like front teeth under his yellow
moustache. “In that case, my dear Wilfred,” he said quite carelessly,
“it was wise for the last of the Bohuns to come out partially in
armour.”
And he took off the queer round hat covered with green, showing that
it was lined within with steel. Wilfred recognised it indeed as a light
Japanese or Chinese helmet torn down from a trophy that hung in the old
family hall.
“It was the first hat to hand,” explained his brother airily; “always
the nearest hat--and the nearest woman.”
“The blacksmith is away at Greenford,” said Wilfred quietly; “the time
of his return is unsettled.”
And with that he turned and went into the church with bowed head,
crossing himself like one who wishes to be quit of an unclean spirit.
He was anxious to forget such grossness in the cool twilight of his tall
Gothic cloisters; but on that morning it was fated that his still round
of religious exercises should be everywhere arrested by small shocks.
As he entered the church, hitherto always empty at that hour, a kneeling
figure rose hastily to its feet and came towards the full daylight of
the doorway. When the curate saw it he stood still with surprise. For
the early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a nephew of
the blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the church or
for anything else. He was always called “Mad Joe,” and seemed to have
no other name; he was a dark, strong, slouching lad, with a heavy white
face, dark straight hair, and a mouth always open. As he passed the
priest, his moon-calf countenance gave no hint of what he had been doing
or thinking of. He had never been known to pray before. What sort of
prayers was he saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.
Wilfred Bohun stood rooted to the spot long enough to see the idiot go
out into the sunshine, and even to see his dissolute brother hail him
with a sort of avuncular jocularity. The last thing he saw was the
colonel throwing pennies at the open mouth of Joe, with the serious
appearance of trying to hit it.
This ugly sunlit picture of the stupidity and cruelty of the earth sent
the ascetic finally to his prayers for purification and new thoughts.
He went up to a pew in the gallery, which brought him under a coloured
window which he loved and always quieted his spirit; a blue window
with an angel carrying lilies. There he began to think less about the
half-wit, with his livid face and mouth like a fish. He began to think
less of his evil brother, pacing like a lean lion in his horrible
hunger. He sank deeper and deeper into those cold and sweet colours of
silver blossoms and sapphire sky.
In this place half an hour afterwards he was found by Gibbs, the village
cobbler, who had been sent for him in some haste. He got to his feet
with promptitude, for he knew that no small matter would have brought
Gibbs into such a place at all. The cobbler was, as in many villages,
an atheist, and his appearance in church was a shade more extraordinary
than Mad Joe’s. It was a morning of theological enigmas.
“What is it?” asked Wilfred Bohun rather stiffly, but putting out a
trembling hand for his hat.
The atheist spoke in a tone that, coming from him, was quite startlingly
respectful, and even, as it were, huskily sympathetic.
“You must excuse me, sir,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “but we didn’t
think it right not to let you know at once. I’m afraid a rather dreadful
thing has happened, sir. I’m afraid your brother--”
Wilfred clenched his frail hands. “What devilry has he done now?” he
cried in voluntary passion.
“Why, sir,” said the cobbler, coughing, “I’m afraid he’s done nothing,
and won’t do anything. I’m afraid he’s done for. You had really better
come down, sir.”
The curate followed the cobbler down a short winding stair which brought
them out at an entrance rather higher than the street. Bohun saw the
tragedy in one glance, flat underneath him like a plan. In the yard
of the smithy were standing five or six men mostly in black, one in
an inspector’s uniform. They included the doctor, the Presbyterian
minister, and the priest from the Roman Catholic chapel, to which the
blacksmith’s wife belonged. The latter was speaking to her, indeed,
very rapidly, in an undertone, as she, a magnificent woman with red-gold
hair, was sobbing blindly on a bench. Between these two groups, and
just clear of the main heap of hammers, lay a man in evening dress,
spread-eagled and flat on his face. From the height above Wilfred could
have sworn to every item of his costume and appearance, down to the
Bohun rings upon his fingers; but the skull was only a hideous splash,
like a star of blackness and blood.
Wilfred Bohun gave but one glance, and ran down the steps into the yard.
The doctor, who was the family physician, saluted him, but he scarcely
took any notice. He could only stammer out: “My brother is dead. What
does it mean? What is this horrible mystery?” There was an unhappy
silence; and then the cobbler, the most outspoken man present, answered:
“Plenty of horror, sir,” he said; “but not much mystery.”
“What do you mean?” asked Wilfred, with a white face.
“It’s plain enough,” answered Gibbs. “There is only one man for forty
miles round that could have struck such a blow as that, and he’s the man
that had most reason to.”
“We must not prejudge anything,” put in the doctor, a tall,
black-bearded man, rather nervously; “but it is competent for me to
corroborate what Mr. Gibbs says about the nature of the blow, sir; it
is an incredible blow. Mr. Gibbs says that only one man in this district
could have done it. I should have said myself that nobody could have
done it.”
A shudder of superstition went through the slight figure of the curate.
“I can hardly understand,” he said.
“Mr. Bohun,” said the doctor in a low voice, “metaphors literally fail
me. It is inadequate to say that the skull was smashed to bits like an
eggshell. Fragments of bone were driven into the body and the ground
like bullets into a mud wall. It was the hand of a giant.”
He was silent a moment, looking grimly through his glasses; then he
added: “The thing has one advantage--that it clears most people of
suspicion at one stroke. If you or I or any normally made man in the
country were accused of this crime, we should be acquitted as an infant
would be acquitted of stealing the Nelson column.”
“That’s what I say,” repeated the cobbler obstinately; “there’s only one
man that could have done it, and he’s the man that would have done it.
Where’s Simeon Barnes, the blacksmith?”
“He’s over at Greenford,” faltered the curate.
“More likely over in France,” muttered the cobbler.
“No; he is in neither of those places,” said a small and colourless