The secret of Father Brown
it.... Ah, there was a thundering difference in the motive of the man
who did do it." And he relapsed into reflection, staring and almost
glaring at vacancy.
"It is simply awful," groaned Evan Smith. "I was abusing Dalmon as a
blackmailer and a blackguard an hour or two ago, and yet it breaks me
all up to hear he really did this, after all."
The priest still seemed to be in a sort of trance, like a man staring
down into an abyss. At last his lips moved and he murmured, more as if
it were a prayer than an oath: "Merciful God, what a horrible revenge!"
His friend questioned him, but he continued as if talking to himself.
"What a horrible tale of hatred! What a vengeance for one mortal worm to
take on another! Shall we ever get to the bottom of this bottomless
human heart, where such abominable imaginations can abide? God save us
all from pride; but I cannot yet make any picture in my mind of hate and
vengeance like that."
"Yes," said Smith; "and I can't quite picture why he should kill Vaudrey
at all. If Dalmon was a blackmailer, it would seem more natural for
Vaudrey to kill him. As you say, the throat-cutting was a horrid
business, but----"
Father Brown started, and blinked like a man awakened from sleep.
"Oh, _that_!" he corrected hastily. "I wasn't thinking about that. I
didn't mean the murder in the barber's shop, when--when I said a
horrible tale of vengeance. I was thinking of a much more horrible tale
than that; though, of course, that was horrible enough, in its way. But
that was much more comprehensible; almost anybody might have done it. In
fact, it was very nearly an act of self-defence."
"_What_?" exclaimed the secretary incredulously. "A man creeps up behind
another man and cuts his throat, while he is smiling pleasantly at the
ceiling in a barber's chair, and you say it was self-defence!"
"I do not say it was justifiable self-defence," replied the other. "I
only say that many a man would have been driven to it, to defend himself
against an appalling calamity--which was also an appalling crime. It
was that other crime that I was thinking about. To begin with, about
that question you asked just now; why should the blackmailer be the
murderer? Well, there are a good many conventional confusions and errors
on a point like that." He paused, as if collecting his thoughts after
his recent trance of horror, and went on in ordinary tones.
"You observe that two men, an older and a younger, go about together and
agree on a matrimonial project; but the origin of their intimacy is old
and concealed. One is rich and the other poor; and you guess at
blackmail. You are quite right, at least to that extent. Where you are
quite wrong is in guessing which is which. You assume that the poor man
was blackmailing the rich man. As a matter offset, the rich man was
blackmailing the poor man."
"But that seems nonsense," objected the secretary.
"It is much worse than nonsense; but it is not at all uncommon," replied
the other. "Half modern politics consists of rich men blackmailing
people. Your notion that it's nonsense rests on two illusions which are
both nonsensical. One is, that rich men never want to be richer; the
other is, that a man can only be blackmailed for money. It's the last
that is in question here. Sir Arthur Vaudrey was acting not for avarice,
but for vengeance. And he planned the most hideous vengeance I ever
heard of."
"But why should he plan vengeance on John Dalmon?" inquired Smith.
"It wasn't on John Dalmon that he planned vengeance," replied the
priest, gravely.
There was a silence; and he resumed, almost as if changing the subject.
"When we found the body, you remember, we saw the face upside down; and
you said it looked like the face of a fiend. Has it occurred to you that
the murderer also saw the face upside down, coming behind the barber's
chair?"
"But that's all morbid extravagance," remonstrated his companion. "I was
quite used to the face when it was the right way up."
"Perhaps you have never seen it the right way up," said Father Brown. "I
told you that artists turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to
see it the right way up. Perhaps, over all those breakfasts and tea-tables,
you had got used to the face of a fiend."
"What on earth are you driving at?" demanded Smith, impatiently.
"I speak in parables," replied the other in a rather sombre tone "Of
course. Sir Arthur was not actually a fiend; he was a man with a
character which he had made out of a temperament that might also have
been turned to good. But those goggling, suspicious eyes; that tight,
yet quivering mouth, might have told you something if you had not been
so used to them. You know, there are physical bodies on which a wound
will not heal. Sir Arthur had a mind of that sort. It was as if it
lacked a skin; he had a feverish vigilance of vanity; those strained
eyes were open with an insomnia of egoism. Sensibility need not be
selfishness. Sybil Rye, for instance, has the same thin skin and manages
to be a sort of saint. But Vaudrey had turned it all to poisonous pride;
a pride that was not even secure and self-satisfied. Every scratch on
the surface of his soul festered. And _that_ is the meaning of that old
story about throwing the man into the pig-sty. If he'd thrown him then
and there, after being called a pig, it might have been a pardonable
burst of passion. But there was no pig-sty; and that is just the point.
Vaudrey remembered the silly insult for years and years, till he could
get the Oriental into the improbable neighbourhood of a pig-sty; and
then he took, what he considered the only appropriate and artistic
revenge.... Oh, my God! he liked his revenges to be appropriate and
artistic."
Smith looked at him curiously. "You are not thinking of the pig-sty
story," he said.
"No," said Father Brown; "of the other story." He controlled the shudder
in his voice, and went on.
"Remembering that story of a fantastic and yet patient plot to make the
vengeance fit the crime, consider the other story before us. Had anybody
else, to your knowledge, ever insulted Vaudrey, or offered him what he
thought a mortal insult? Yes; a woman insulted him."
A sort of vague horror began to dawn in Evan's eyes; he was listening
intently.
"A girl, little more than a child, refused to marry him, because he had
once been a sort of criminal; had, indeed, been in prison for a short
time for the outrage on the Egyptian. And that madman said, in the hell
of his heart: 'She shall marry a murderer.'"
They took the road towards the great house and went along by the river
for some time in silence, before he resumed: "Vaudrey was in a position
to blackmail Dalmon, who had committed a murder long ago; probably he
knew of several crimes among the wild comrades of his youth. Probably it
was a wild crime with some redeeming features; for the wildest murders
are never the worst. And Dalmon looks to me like a man who knows
remorse, even for killing Vaudrey. But he was in Vaudrey's power and,
between them, they entrapped the girl very cleverly into an engagement;
letting the lover try his luck first, for instance, and the other only
encouraging magnificently. But Dalmon himself did not know, nobody but
the Devil himself did know, what was really in that old man's mind.
"Then, a few days ago, Dalmon made a dreadful discovery. He had obeyed,
not altogether unwillingly; he had been a tool; and he suddenly found
how the tool was to be broken and thrown away. He came upon certain
notes of Vaudrey's in the library which, disguised as they were, told of
preparations for giving information to the police. He understood the
whole plot and stood stunned as I did when I first understood it. The
moment the bride and bridegroom were married, the bridegroom would be
arrested and hanged. The fastidious lady, who objected to a husband who
had been in prison, should have no husband except a husband on the
gallows. That is what Sir Arthur Vaudrey considered an artistic rounding
off of the story."
Evan Smith, deadly pale, was silent; and, far away, down the perspective
of the road, they saw the large figure and wide hat of Dr. Abbott
advancing towards them; even in the outline there was a certain
agitation. But they were still shaken with their own private apocalypse.
"As you say, hate is a hateful thing," said Evan at last; "and, do you
know, one thing gives me a sort of relief. All my hatred of poor Dalmon
is gone out of me--now I know how he was twice a murderer."
It was in silence that they covered the rest of the distance and met the
big doctor coming towards them, with his large gloved hands thrown out
in a sort of despairing gesture and his grey beard tossing in the wind.
"There is dreadful news," he said. "Arthur's body has been found. He
seems to have died in his garden."
"Dear me," said Father Brown, rather mechanically. "How dreadful!"
"And there is more," cried the doctor breathlessly. "John Dalmon went
off to see Vernon Vaudrey, the nephew; but Vernon Vaudrey hasn't heard
of him and Dalmon seems to have disappeared entirely."
"Dear me," said Father Brown. "How strange!"
VI
THE WORST CRIME IN THE WORLD
FATHER BROWN was wandering through a picture gallery with an expression
that suggested that he had not come there to look at the pictures.
Indeed, he did not want to look at the pictures, though he liked
pictures well enough. Not that there was anything immoral or improper
about those highly modern pictorial designs. He would indeed be of an
inflammable temperament who was stirred to any of the more pagan
passions by the display of interrupted spirals, inverted cones and
broken cylinders with which the art of the future inspired or menaced
mankind. The truth is that Father Brown was looking for a young friend
who had appointed that somewhat incongruous meeting-place, being herself
of a more futuristic turn. The young friend was also a young relative;
one of the few relatives that he had. Her name was Elizabeth Fane,
simplified into Betty, and she was the child of a sister who had married
into a race of refined but impoverished squires. As the squire was dead
as well as impoverished. Father Brown stood in the relation of a
protector as well as a priest, and in some sense a guardian as well is
an uncle. At the moment, however, he was blinking about at the groups in
the gallery without catching sight of the familiar brown hair and bright
face of his niece. Nevertheless, he saw some people he knew and a number
of people he did not know, including some that, as a mere matter of
taste, he did not much want to know.
Among the people the priest did not know and who yet aroused his
interest was a lithe and alert young man, very beautifully dressed and
looking rather like a foreigner, because, while his beard was cut in a
spade shape like an old Spaniard's, his dark hair was cropped so close
as to look like a tight black skull-cap. Among the people the priest did
not particularly want to know was a very dominant-looking lady,
sensationally clad in scarlet, with a mane of yellow hair too long to be
called bobbed, but too loose to be called anything else. She had a
powerful and rather heavy face of a pale and rather unwholesome
complexion, and when she looked at anybody she cultivated the
fascinations of a basilisk. She towed in attendance behind her a short
man with a big beard and a very broad face, with long sleepy slits of
eyes. The expression of his face was beaming and benevolent, if only
partially awake; but his bull neck, when seen from behind, looked a
little brutal.
Father Brown gazed at the lady, feeling that the appearance and approach
of his niece would be an agreeable contrast. Yet he continued to gaze,