The secret of Father Brown
And he glanced across at the opalescent eyes and smiling bearded mouth
of the Master, and saw that the smile was just a shade broader. There
was something in it that made the others jump to their feet with an air
of sudden relaxation and general, gasping relief.
"This is a very fortunate escape for us all," said Lord Mounteagle,
smiling rather nervously. "There cannot be the least doubt it is as you
say. It has been a most painful episode and I really don't know what
apologies----"
"I have no complaints," said the Master or the Mountain, still smiling.
"You have never touched Me at all."
While the rest went off rejoicing, with Hardcastle for the hero of the
hour, the little Phrenologist with the whiskers sauntered back towards
his preposterous tent. Looking over his shoulder he was surprised to
find Father Brown following him.
"Can I feel your bumps?" asked the expert, in his mildly sarcastic tone.
"I don't think you want to feel any more, do you?" said the priest
good-humouredly. "You're a detective, aren't you?"
"Yep," replied the other. "Lady Mounteagle asked me to keep an eye on
the Master, being no fool, for all her mysticism; and when he left his
tent, I could only follow by behaving like a nuisance and a monomaniac.
If anybody had come into my tent, I'd have had to look up Bumps in an
encyclopaædia."
"Bumps, What Ho She; see Folk-Lore," observed Father Brown, dreamily.
"Well, you were quite in the part in pestering people--at a bazaar."
"Rum case, wasn't it?" remarked the fallacious Phrenologist. "Queer to
think the thing was there all the time."
"Very queer," said the priest.
Something in his voice made the other man stop and stare.
"Look here!" he cried; "what's the matter with you? What are you looking
like that for! Don't you _believe_ that it was there all the time?"
Father Brown blinked rather as if he had received a buffet; then he said
slowly and with hesitation: "No ... the fact is ... I can't--I can't quite
bring myself to believe it."
"You're not the sort of chap," said the other shrewdly, "who'd say that
without reason. Why don't you think the ruby had been there all the
time?"
"Only because I put it back myself," said Father Brown.
The other man stood rooted to the spot, like one whose hair was standing
on end. He opened his mouth without speech.
"Or rather," went on the priest, "I persuaded the thief to let me put it
back. I told him what I'd guessed and showed him there was still time
for repentance. I don't mind telling you in professional confidence;
besides, I don't think the Mounteagles would prosecute, now they've got
the thing back, especially considering who stole it."
"Do you mean the Master?" asked the late Phroso.
"No," said Father Brown, "the Master didn't steal it."
"But I don't understand," objected the other. "Nobody was outside the
window except the Master; and a hand certainly came from outside."
"The hand came from outside, but the thief came from the inside," said
Father Brown.
"We seem to be back among the mystics again. Look here, I'm a practical
man: I only wanted to know if it is all right with the ruby----"
"I knew it was all wrong," said Father Brown, "before I even knew there
was a ruby."
After a pause he went on thoughtfully. "Right away back in that argument
of theirs, by the tents, I knew things were going wrong. People will
tell you that theories don't matter and that logic and philosophy aren't
practical. Don't you believe them. Reason is from God, and when things
are unreasonable there is something the matter. Now, that quite abstract
argument ended with something funny. Consider what the theories were.
Hardcastle was a trifle superior and said that all things were perfectly
possible; but they were mostly done merely by mesmerism, or
clairvoyance; scientific names for philosophical puzzles, in the usual
style. But Hunter thought it all sheer fraud and wanted to show it up.
By Lady Mounteagle's testimony, he not only went about showing up
fortune-tellers and such like, but he had actually come down specially
to confront this one. He didn't often come; he didn't get on with
Mounteagle, from whom, being a spendthrift, he always tried to borrow;
but when he heard the Master was coming, he came hurrying down. Very
well. In spite of that, it was Hardcastle who went to consult the wizard
and Hunter who refused. He said he'd waste no time on such nonsense;
having apparently wasted a lot of his life on proving it to be nonsense.
That seems inconsistent. He thought in this case it was crystal-gazing;
but he found it was palmistry."
"Do you mean he made that an excuse?" asked his companion, puzzled.
"I thought so at first," replied the priest; "but I know now it was not
an excuse, but a reason. He really was put off by finding it was a
palmist, because----"
"Well," demanded the other impatiently.
"Because he didn't want to take his glove off," said Father Brown.
"Take his glove off?" repeated the inquirer.
"If he had," said Father Brown mildly, "we should all have seen that his
hand was painted pale brown already.... Oh, yes, he did come down
specially because the Master was here. He came down very fully
prepared."
"You mean," cried Phroso, "that it was Hunter's hand, painted brown,
that came in at the window? Why, he was with us all the time!"
"Go and try it on the spot and you'll find it's quite possible," said
the priest. "Hunter leapt forward and leaned out of the window; in a
flash he could tear off his glove, tuck up his sleeve, and thrust his
hand back round the other side of the pillar, while he gripped the
Indian with the other hand and halloed out that he'd caught the thief. I
remarked at the time that he held the thief with one hand, where any
sane man would have used two. But the other hand was slipping the jewel
into his trouser pocket."
There was a long pause and then the ex-Phrenologist said slowly. "Well,
that's a staggerer. But the thing stumps me still. For one thing, it
doesn't explain the queer behaviour of the old magician himself. If he
was entirely innocent, why the devil didn't he say so? Why wasn't he
indignant at being accused and searched? Why did he only sit smiling and
hinting in a sly way what wild and wonderful things he could do?"
"Ah!" cried Father Brown, with a sharp note in his voice: "there you
come up against it! Against everything these people don't and won't
understand. All religions are the same, says Lady Mounteagle. Are they,
by George! I tell you some of them are so different that the best man of
one creed will be callous, where the worst man of another will be
sensitive. I told you I didn't like spiritual power, because the accent
is on the word power. I don't say the Master would steal a ruby, very
likely he wouldn't; very likely he wouldn't think it worth stealing. It
wouldn't be specially his temptation to take jewels; but it would be his
temptation to take credit for miracles that didn't belong to him any
more than the jewels. It was to that sort of temptation, to _that_ sort of
stealing that he yielded to-day. He liked us to think that he had
marvellous mental powers that could make a material object fly through
space; and even when he hadn't done it, he allowed us to think he had.
The point about private property wouldn't occur primarily to him at all.
The question wouldn't present itself in the form: 'Shall I _steal_ this
pebble?' but only in the form: 'Could I make a pebble vanish and reappear
on a distant mountain?' The question of _whose_ pebble would strike
him as irrelevant. That is what I mean by religious being different. He
is very proud of having what he calls spiritual powers. But what he
calls spiritual doesn't mean what we call moral. It means rather mental;
the power of the mind over matter; the magician controlling the
elements. Now we are not like that, even when we are no better; even
when we are worse. We, whose fathers at least were Christians, who have
grown up under those mediæval arches even if we bedizen them with all
the demons in Asia--we have the very opposite ambition and the very
opposite shame. We should all be anxious that nobody should think we had
done it. He was actually anxious that everybody should think he
had--even when he hadn't. He actually stole the credit of stealing.
While we were all casting the crime from us like a snake, he was
actually luring it to him like a snake-charmer. But snakes are not pets
in this country! Here the traditions of Christendom tell at once under a
test like this. Look at old Mounteagle himself, for instance! Ah, you
may be as Eastern and esoteric as you like, and wear a turban and a long
robe and live on messages from Mahatmas; but if a bit of stone is stolen
in your house, and your friends are suspected, you will jolly soon find
out that you're an ordinary English gentleman in a fuss. The man who
really did it would never want us to think he did it, for he also was an
English gentleman. He was also something very much better; he was a
Christian thief. I hope and believe he was a penitent thief."
"By your account," said his companion laughing, "the Christian thief and
the heathen fraud went by contraries. One was sorry he'd done it and the
other was sorry he hadn't."
"We mustn't be too hard on either of them," said Father Brown. "Other
English gentlemen have stolen before now, and been covered by legal and
political protection; and the West also has its own way of covering
theft with sophistry. After all, the ruby is not the only kind of
valuable stone in the world that has changed owners; it is true of other
precious stones; often carved like cameos and coloured like flowers."
The other looked at him inquiringly; and the priest's finger was pointed
to the Gothic outline of the great Abbey.
"A great graven stone," he said, "and that was also stolen."
VIII
THE CHIEF MOURNER OF MARNE
A BLAZE of lightning blanched the grey woods tracing all the
wrinkled foliage down to the last curled leaf, as if every detail were
drawn in silverpoint or graven in silver. The same strange trick of
lightning by which it seems to record millions of minute things in an
instant of time, picked out everything, from the elegant litter of the
picnic spread under the spreading tree to the pale lengths of winding
road, at the end of which a white car was waiting. In the distance a
melancholy mansion with four towers like a castle, which in the grey
evening had been but a dim and distant huddle of walls like a crumbling
cloud, seemed to spring into the foreground, and stood up with all its
embattled, roofs and blank and staring windows. And in this, at least,
the light had something in it of revelation. For to some of those
grouped under the tree that castle was, indeed, a thing faded and almost
forgotten, which was to prove its power to spring up again in the
foreground of their lives.
The light also clothed for an instant, in the same silver splendour, at
least one human figure that stood up as motionless as one of the towers.
It was that of a tall man standing on a rise of ground above the rest,
who were mostly sitting on the grass or stooping to gather up the hamper
and crockery. He wore a picturesque short cloak or cape clasped with a
silver clasp and chain, which blazed like a star when the flash touched
it; and something metallic in his motionless figure was emphasized by
the fact that his closely-curled hair was of the burnished yellow that
can be really called gold; and had the look of being younger than his
face, which was handsome in a hard aquiline fashion, but looked, under
the strong light, a little wrinkled and withered. Possibly it had
suffered from wearing a mask of make-up, for Hugo Romaine was the