The innocence of Father Brown
The detective sat down at a desk quietly, and even without hesitation;
but his eye was the iron eye of a judge at assize. He made a few rapid
notes upon paper in front of him, and then said shortly: “Is everybody
here?”
“Not Mr. Brayne,” said the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, looking round.
“No,” said Lord Galloway in a hoarse, harsh voice. “And not Mr. Neil
O’Brien, I fancy. I saw that gentleman walking in the garden when the
corpse was still warm.”
“Ivan,” said the detective, “go and fetch Commandant O’Brien and Mr.
Brayne. Mr. Brayne, I know, is finishing a cigar in the dining-room;
Commandant O’Brien, I think, is walking up and down the conservatory. I
am not sure.”
The faithful attendant flashed from the room, and before anyone could
stir or speak Valentin went on with the same soldierly swiftness of
exposition.
“Everyone here knows that a dead man has been found in the garden, his
head cut clean from his body. Dr. Simon, you have examined it. Do you
think that to cut a man’s throat like that would need great force? Or,
perhaps, only a very sharp knife?”
“I should say that it could not be done with a knife at all,” said the
pale doctor.
“Have you any thought,” resumed Valentin, “of a tool with which it could
be done?”
“Speaking within modern probabilities, I really haven’t,” said the
doctor, arching his painful brows. “It’s not easy to hack a neck through
even clumsily, and this was a very clean cut. It could be done with a
battle-axe or an old headsman’s axe, or an old two-handed sword.”
“But, good heavens!” cried the Duchess, almost in hysterics, “there
aren’t any two-handed swords and battle-axes round here.”
Valentin was still busy with the paper in front of him. “Tell me,” he
said, still writing rapidly, “could it have been done with a long French
cavalry sabre?”
A low knocking came at the door, which, for some unreasonable reason,
curdled everyone’s blood like the knocking in Macbeth. Amid that frozen
silence Dr. Simon managed to say: “A sabre--yes, I suppose it could.”
“Thank you,” said Valentin. “Come in, Ivan.”
The confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant Neil
O’Brien, whom he had found at last pacing the garden again.
The Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the threshold.
“What do you want with me?” he cried.
“Please sit down,” said Valentin in pleasant, level tones. “Why, you
aren’t wearing your sword. Where is it?”
“I left it on the library table,” said O’Brien, his brogue deepening in
his disturbed mood. “It was a nuisance, it was getting--”
“Ivan,” said Valentin, “please go and get the Commandant’s sword from
the library.” Then, as the servant vanished, “Lord Galloway says he saw
you leaving the garden just before he found the corpse. What were you
doing in the garden?”
The Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair. “Oh,” he cried in
pure Irish, “admirin’ the moon. Communing with Nature, me bhoy.”
A heavy silence sank and endured, and at the end of it came again that
trivial and terrible knocking. Ivan reappeared, carrying an empty steel
scabbard. “This is all I can find,” he said.
“Put it on the table,” said Valentin, without looking up.
There was an inhuman silence in the room, like that sea of inhuman
silence round the dock of the condemned murderer. The Duchess’s weak
exclamations had long ago died away. Lord Galloway’s swollen hatred was
satisfied and even sobered. The voice that came was quite unexpected.
“I think I can tell you,” cried Lady Margaret, in that clear, quivering
voice with which a courageous woman speaks publicly. “I can tell you
what Mr. O’Brien was doing in the garden, since he is bound to
silence. He was asking me to marry him. I refused; I said in my family
circumstances I could give him nothing but my respect. He was a little
angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my respect. I wonder,”
she added, with rather a wan smile, “if he will care at all for it now.
For I offer it him now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing
like this.”
Lord Galloway had edged up to his daughter, and was intimidating her in
what he imagined to be an undertone. “Hold your tongue, Maggie,” he said
in a thunderous whisper. “Why should you shield the fellow? Where’s his
sword? Where’s his confounded cavalry--”
He stopped because of the singular stare with which his daughter was
regarding him, a look that was indeed a lurid magnet for the whole
group.
“You old fool!” she said in a low voice without pretence of piety, “what
do you suppose you are trying to prove? I tell you this man was innocent
while with me. But if he wasn’t innocent, he was still with me. If he
murdered a man in the garden, who was it who must have seen--who must
at least have known? Do you hate Neil so much as to put your own
daughter--”
Lady Galloway screamed. Everyone else sat tingling at the touch of those
satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now. They saw
the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish
adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was
full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous
paramours.
In the centre of this morbid silence an innocent voice said: “Was it a
very long cigar?”
The change of thought was so sharp that they had to look round to see
who had spoken.
“I mean,” said little Father Brown, from the corner of the room, “I
mean that cigar Mr. Brayne is finishing. It seems nearly as long as a
walking-stick.”
Despite the irrelevance there was assent as well as irritation in
Valentin’s face as he lifted his head.
“Quite right,” he remarked sharply. “Ivan, go and see about Mr. Brayne
again, and bring him here at once.”
The instant the factotum had closed the door, Valentin addressed the
girl with an entirely new earnestness.
“Lady Margaret,” he said, “we all feel, I am sure, both gratitude
and admiration for your act in rising above your lower dignity and
explaining the Commandant’s conduct. But there is a hiatus still.
Lord Galloway, I understand, met you passing from the study to the
drawing-room, and it was only some minutes afterwards that he found the
garden and the Commandant still walking there.”
“You have to remember,” replied Margaret, with a faint irony in her
voice, “that I had just refused him, so we should scarcely have come
back arm in arm. He is a gentleman, anyhow; and he loitered behind--and
so got charged with murder.”
“In those few moments,” said Valentin gravely, “he might really--”
The knock came again, and Ivan put in his scarred face.
“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but Mr. Brayne has left the house.”
“Left!” cried Valentin, and rose for the first time to his feet.
“Gone. Scooted. Evaporated,” replied Ivan in humorous French. “His hat
and coat are gone, too, and I’ll tell you something to cap it all. I ran
outside the house to find any traces of him, and I found one, and a big
trace, too.”
“What do you mean?” asked Valentin.
“I’ll show you,” said his servant, and reappeared with a flashing naked
cavalry sabre, streaked with blood about the point and edge. Everyone in
the room eyed it as if it were a thunderbolt; but the experienced Ivan
went on quite quietly:
“I found this,” he said, “flung among the bushes fifty yards up the road
to Paris. In other words, I found it just where your respectable Mr.
Brayne threw it when he ran away.”
There was again a silence, but of a new sort. Valentin took the sabre,
examined it, reflected with unaffected concentration of thought, and
then turned a respectful face to O’Brien. “Commandant,” he said, “we
trust you will always produce this weapon if it is wanted for police
examination. Meanwhile,” he added, slapping the steel back in the
ringing scabbard, “let me return you your sword.”
At the military symbolism of the action the audience could hardly
refrain from applause.
For Neil O’Brien, indeed, that gesture was the turning-point of
existence. By the time he was wandering in the mysterious garden again
in the colours of the morning the tragic futility of his ordinary mien
had fallen from him; he was a man with many reasons for happiness. Lord
Galloway was a gentleman, and had offered him an apology. Lady Margaret
was something better than a lady, a woman at least, and had perhaps
given him something better than an apology, as they drifted among the
old flowerbeds before breakfast. The whole company was more lighthearted
and humane, for though the riddle of the death remained, the load of
suspicion was lifted off them all, and sent flying off to Paris with the
strange millionaire--a man they hardly knew. The devil was cast out of
the house--he had cast himself out.
Still, the riddle remained; and when O’Brien threw himself on a garden
seat beside Dr. Simon, that keenly scientific person at once resumed
it. He did not get much talk out of O’Brien, whose thoughts were on
pleasanter things.
“I can’t say it interests me much,” said the Irishman frankly,
“especially as it seems pretty plain now. Apparently Brayne hated this
stranger for some reason; lured him into the garden, and killed him with
my sword. Then he fled to the city, tossing the sword away as he went.
By the way, Ivan tells me the dead man had a Yankee dollar in his
pocket. So he was a countryman of Brayne’s, and that seems to clinch it.
I don’t see any difficulties about the business.”
“There are five colossal difficulties,” said the doctor quietly; “like
high walls within walls. Don’t mistake me. I don’t doubt that Brayne
did it; his flight, I fancy, proves that. But as to how he did it.
First difficulty: Why should a man kill another man with a great hulking
sabre, when he can almost kill him with a pocket knife and put it back
in his pocket? Second difficulty: Why was there no noise or outcry?
Does a man commonly see another come up waving a scimitar and offer
no remarks? Third difficulty: A servant watched the front door all the
evening; and a rat cannot get into Valentin’s garden anywhere. How did
the dead man get into the garden? Fourth difficulty: Given the same
conditions, how did Brayne get out of the garden?”
“And the fifth,” said Neil, with eyes fixed on the English priest who
was coming slowly up the path.
“Is a trifle, I suppose,” said the doctor, “but I think an odd one. When
I first saw how the head had been slashed, I supposed the assassin had
struck more than once. But on examination I found many cuts across the
truncated section; in other words, they were struck after the head was
off. Did Brayne hate his foe so fiendishly that he stood sabring his
body in the moonlight?”
“Horrible!” said O’Brien, and shuddered.
The little priest, Brown, had arrived while they were talking, and had
waited, with characteristic shyness, till they had finished. Then he
said awkwardly:
“I say, I’m sorry to interrupt. But I was sent to tell you the news!”
“News?” repeated Simon, and stared at him rather painfully through his
glasses.
“Yes, I’m sorry,” said Father Brown mildly. “There’s been another
murder, you know.”
Both men on the seat sprang up, leaving it rocking.
“And, what’s stranger still,” continued the priest, with his dull eye
on the rhododendrons, “it’s the same disgusting sort; it’s another
beheading. They found the second head actually bleeding into the river,
a few yards along Brayne’s road to Paris; so they suppose that he--”
“Great Heaven!” cried O’Brien. “Is Brayne a monomaniac?”
“There are American vendettas,” said the priest impassively. Then he
added: “They want you to come to the library and see it.”
Commandant O’Brien followed the others towards the inquest, feeling
decidedly sick. As a soldier, he loathed all this secretive carnage;