The innocence of Father Brown
saw her writing as I went up in the lift to my own room.”
“Was her door open then?” asked the priest, with his eye on the corner
of the matting.
“Yes,” said Kalon calmly.
“Ah! it has been open ever since,” said the other, and resumed his
silent study of the mat.
“There is a paper over here,” said the grim Miss Joan, in a somewhat
singular voice. She had passed over to her sister’s desk by the doorway,
and was holding a sheet of blue foolscap in her hand. There was a sour
smile on her face that seemed unfit for such a scene or occasion, and
Flambeau looked at her with a darkening brow.
Kalon the prophet stood away from the paper with that loyal
unconsciousness that had carried him through. But Flambeau took it
out of the lady’s hand, and read it with the utmost amazement. It did,
indeed, begin in the formal manner of a will, but after the words “I
give and bequeath all of which I die possessed” the writing abruptly
stopped with a set of scratches, and there was no trace of the name of
any legatee. Flambeau, in wonder, handed this truncated testament to his
clerical friend, who glanced at it and silently gave it to the priest of
the sun.
An instant afterwards that pontiff, in his splendid sweeping draperies,
had crossed the room in two great strides, and was towering over Joan
Stacey, his blue eyes standing from his head.
“What monkey tricks have you been playing here?” he cried. “That’s not
all Pauline wrote.”
They were startled to hear him speak in quite a new voice, with a Yankee
shrillness in it; all his grandeur and good English had fallen from him
like a cloak.
“That is the only thing on her desk,” said Joan, and confronted him
steadily with the same smile of evil favour.
Of a sudden the man broke out into blasphemies and cataracts of
incredulous words. There was something shocking about the dropping of
his mask; it was like a man’s real face falling off.
“See here!” he cried in broad American, when he was breathless with
cursing, “I may be an adventurer, but I guess you’re a murderess. Yes,
gentlemen, here’s your death explained, and without any levitation. The
poor girl is writing a will in my favour; her cursed sister comes in,
struggles for the pen, drags her to the well, and throws her down before
she can finish it. Sakes! I reckon we want the handcuffs after all.”
“As you have truly remarked,” replied Joan, with ugly calm, “your clerk
is a very respectable young man, who knows the nature of an oath; and
he will swear in any court that I was up in your office arranging some
typewriting work for five minutes before and five minutes after my
sister fell. Mr. Flambeau will tell you that he found me there.”
There was a silence.
“Why, then,” cried Flambeau, “Pauline was alone when she fell, and it
was suicide!”
“She was alone when she fell,” said Father Brown, “but it was not
suicide.”
“Then how did she die?” asked Flambeau impatiently.
“She was murdered.”
“But she was alone,” objected the detective.
“She was murdered when she was all alone,” answered the priest.
All the rest stared at him, but he remained sitting in the same
old dejected attitude, with a wrinkle in his round forehead and an
appearance of impersonal shame and sorrow; his voice was colourless and
sad.
“What I want to know,” cried Kalon, with an oath, “is when the police
are coming for this bloody and wicked sister. She’s killed her flesh and
blood; she’s robbed me of half a million that was just as sacredly mine
as--”
“Come, come, prophet,” interrupted Flambeau, with a kind of sneer;
“remember that all this world is a cloudland.”
The hierophant of the sun-god made an effort to climb back on his
pedestal. “It is not the mere money,” he cried, “though that would equip
the cause throughout the world. It is also my beloved one’s wishes. To
Pauline all this was holy. In Pauline’s eyes--”
Father Brown suddenly sprang erect, so that his chair fell over flat
behind him. He was deathly pale, yet he seemed fired with a hope; his
eyes shone.
“That’s it!” he cried in a clear voice. “That’s the way to begin. In
Pauline’s eyes--”
The tall prophet retreated before the tiny priest in an almost mad
disorder. “What do you mean? How dare you?” he cried repeatedly.
“In Pauline’s eyes,” repeated the priest, his own shining more and more.
“Go on--in God’s name, go on. The foulest crime the fiends ever prompted
feels lighter after confession; and I implore you to confess. Go on, go
on--in Pauline’s eyes--”
“Let me go, you devil!” thundered Kalon, struggling like a giant in
bonds. “Who are you, you cursed spy, to weave your spiders’ webs round
me, and peep and peer? Let me go.”
“Shall I stop him?” asked Flambeau, bounding towards the exit, for Kalon
had already thrown the door wide open.
“No; let him pass,” said Father Brown, with a strange deep sigh that
seemed to come from the depths of the universe. “Let Cain pass by, for
he belongs to God.”
There was a long-drawn silence in the room when he had left it, which
was to Flambeau’s fierce wits one long agony of interrogation. Miss Joan
Stacey very coolly tidied up the papers on her desk.
“Father,” said Flambeau at last, “it is my duty, not my curiosity
only--it is my duty to find out, if I can, who committed the crime.”
“Which crime?” asked Father Brown.
“The one we are dealing with, of course,” replied his impatient friend.
“We are dealing with two crimes,” said Brown, “crimes of very different
weight--and by very different criminals.”
Miss Joan Stacey, having collected and put away her papers, proceeded to
lock up her drawer. Father Brown went on, noticing her as little as she
noticed him.
“The two crimes,” he observed, “were committed against the same weakness
of the same person, in a struggle for her money. The author of the
larger crime found himself thwarted by the smaller crime; the author of
the smaller crime got the money.”
“Oh, don’t go on like a lecturer,” groaned Flambeau; “put it in a few
words.”
“I can put it in one word,” answered his friend.
Miss Joan Stacey skewered her business-like black hat on to her head
with a business-like black frown before a little mirror, and, as the
conversation proceeded, took her handbag and umbrella in an unhurried
style, and left the room.
“The truth is one word, and a short one,” said Father Brown. “Pauline
Stacey was blind.”
“Blind!” repeated Flambeau, and rose slowly to his whole huge stature.
“She was subject to it by blood,” Brown proceeded. “Her sister would
have started eyeglasses if Pauline would have let her; but it was her
special philosophy or fad that one must not encourage such diseases by
yielding to them. She would not admit the cloud; or she tried to dispel
it by will. So her eyes got worse and worse with straining; but the
worst strain was to come. It came with this precious prophet, or
whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with
the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans
would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans
knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew
that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind.”
There was a pause, and the priest went on in a gentle and even broken
voice. “Whether or no that devil deliberately made her blind, there is
no doubt that he deliberately killed her through her blindness. The very
simplicity of the crime is sickening. You know he and she went up and
down in those lifts without official help; you know also how smoothly
and silently the lifts slide. Kalon brought the lift to the girl’s
landing, and saw her, through the open door, writing in her slow,
sightless way the will she had promised him. He called out to her
cheerily that he had the lift ready for her, and she was to come out
when she was ready. Then he pressed a button and shot soundlessly up to
his own floor, walked through his own office, out on to his own balcony,
and was safely praying before the crowded street when the poor girl,
having finished her work, ran gaily out to where lover and lift were to
receive her, and stepped--”
“Don’t!” cried Flambeau.
“He ought to have got half a million by pressing that button,” continued
the little father, in the colourless voice in which he talked of such
horrors. “But that went smash. It went smash because there happened
to be another person who also wanted the money, and who also knew the
secret about poor Pauline’s sight. There was one thing about that will
that I think nobody noticed: although it was unfinished and without
signature, the other Miss Stacey and some servant of hers had already
signed it as witnesses. Joan had signed first, saying Pauline could
finish it later, with a typical feminine contempt for legal forms.
Therefore, Joan wanted her sister to sign the will without real
witnesses. Why? I thought of the blindness, and felt sure she had wanted
Pauline to sign in solitude because she had wanted her not to sign at
all.
“People like the Staceys always use fountain pens; but this was
specially natural to Pauline. By habit and her strong will and memory
she could still write almost as well as if she saw; but she could not
tell when her pen needed dipping. Therefore, her fountain pens were
carefully filled by her sister--all except this fountain pen. This was
carefully not filled by her sister; the remains of the ink held out
for a few lines and then failed altogether. And the prophet lost
five hundred thousand pounds and committed one of the most brutal and
brilliant murders in human history for nothing.”
Flambeau went to the open door and heard the official police ascending
the stairs. He turned and said: “You must have followed everything
devilish close to have traced the crime to Kalon in ten minutes.”
Father Brown gave a sort of start.
“Oh! to him,” he said. “No; I had to follow rather close to find out
about Miss Joan and the fountain pen. But I knew Kalon was the criminal
before I came into the front door.”
“You must be joking!” cried Flambeau.
“I’m quite serious,” answered the priest. “I tell you I knew he had done
it, even before I knew what he had done.”
“But why?”
“These pagan stoics,” said Brown reflectively, “always fail by their
strength. There came a crash and a scream down the street, and the
priest of Apollo did not start or look round. I did not know what it
was. But I knew that he was expecting it.”
The Sign of the Broken Sword
The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers
silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak
and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely
tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The
black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless,
black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold.
Even the square stone tower of the church looked northern to the point
of heathenry, as if it were some barbaric tower among the sea rocks of
Iceland. It was a queer night for anyone to explore a churchyard. But,
on the other hand, perhaps it was worth exploring.
It rose abruptly out of the ashen wastes of forest in a sort of hump or
shoulder of green turf that looked grey in the starlight. Most of the
graves were on a slant, and the path leading up to the church was
as steep as a staircase. On the top of the hill, in the one flat and
prominent place, was the monument for which the place was famous. It
contrasted strangely with the featureless graves all round, for it was
the work of one of the greatest sculptors of modern Europe; and yet his
fame was at once forgotten in the fame of the man whose image he had
made. It showed, by touches of the small silver pencil of starlight, the