The secret of Father Brown
greatest actor of his day. For that instant of illumination the golden
curls and ivory mask and silver ornament made his figure gleam like that
of a man in armour; the next instant his figure was a dark and even
black silhouette against the sickly grey of the rainy evening sky.
But there was something about its stillness, like that of a statue, that
distinguished it from the group at his feet. All the other figures
around him had made the ordinary involuntary movement at the unexpected
shock of light; for though the skies were rainy it was the first flash
of the storm. The only lady present, whose air of carrying grey hair
gracefully, as if she were really proud of it, marked her a matron of
the United States, unaffectedly shut her eyes and uttered a sharp cry.
Her English husband, General Outram, a very stolid Anglo-Indian, with a
bald head and black moustache and whiskers of antiquated pattern, looked
up with one stiff movement and then resumed his occupation of tidying
up. A young man of the name of Mallow, very big and shy, with brown eyes
like a dog's, dropped a cup and apologized awkwardly. A third man, much
more dressy, with a resolute head, like an inquisitive terrier's, and
grey hair brushed stiffly back, was no other than the great newspaper
proprietor, Sir John Cockspur; he cursed freely, but not in an English
idiom or accent, for he came from Toronto. But the tall man in the short
cloak stood up literally like a statue in the twilight; his eagle face
under the full glare had been like the bust of a Roman Emperor, and the
carved eyelids had not moved.
A moment after, the dark dome cracked across with thunder, and the
statue seemed to come to life. He turned his head over his shoulder and
said casually:
"About a minute and half between the flash and the bang, but I think the
storm's coming nearer. A tree is not supposed to be a good umbrella for
the lightning, but we shall want it soon for the rain. I think it will
be a deluge."
The young man glanced at the lady a little anxiously and said: "Can't we
get shelter anywhere? There seems to be a house over there."
"There is a house over there," remarked the general, rather grimly; "but
not quite what you'd call a hospitable hotel."
"It's curious," said his wife sadly, "that we should be caught in a
storm with no house near but that one, of all others."
Something in her tone seemed to check the younger man, who was both
sensitive and comprehending; but nothing of that sort daunted the man
from Toronto.
"What's the matter with it?" he asked. "Looks rather like a ruin."
"That place," said the general dryly, "belongs to the Marquis of Marne."
"Gee!" said Sir John Cockspur. "I've heard all about that bird, anyhow;
and a queer bird, too. Ran him as a front-page mystery in the _Comet_ last
year. 'The Nobleman Nobody Knows.'"
"Yes, I've heard of him, too," said young Mallow in a low voice. "There
seem to be all sorts of weird stories about why he hides himself like
that. I've heard that he wears a mask because he's a leper. But somebody
else told me quite seriously that there's a curse on the family; a child
born with some frightful deformity that's kept in a dark room."
"The Marquis of Marne has three heads," remarked Romaine quite gravely.
"Once in every three hundred years a three-headed nobleman adorns the
family tree. No human being dares approach the accursed house except a
silent procession of hatters, sent to provide an abnormal number of
hats. But,"--and his voice took one of those deep and terrible turns,
that could cause such a thrill in the theatre--"my friends, _those hats
are of no human shape_."
The American lady looked at him with a frown and a slight air of
distrust, as if that trick of voice had moved her in spite of herself.
"I don't like your ghoulish jokes," she said; "and I'd rather you didn't
joke about this, anyhow."
"I hear and obey," replied the actor; "but am I, like the Light Brigade,
forbidden even to reason why?"
"The reason," she replied, "is that he isn't the Nobleman Nobody Knows.
I know him myself, or, at least, I knew him very well when he was an
attaché at Washington thirty years ago, when we were all young. And he
didn't wear a mask, at least, he didn't wear it with me. He wasn't a
leper, though he may he almost as lonely. And he had only one head and
only one heart, and that was broken."
"Unfortunate love affair, of course," said Cockspur. "I should like that
for the _Comet_."
"I suppose it's a compliment to us," she replied thoughtfully, "that you
always assume a man's heart is broken by a woman. But there are other
kinds of love and bereavement. Have you never read 'In Memoriam'? Have
you never heard of David and Jonathan? What broke poor Marne up was the
death of his brother; at least, he was really a first cousin, but had
been brought up with him like a brother, and was much nearer than most
brothers. James Mair, as the marquis was called when I knew him, was the
elder of the two, but he always played the part of worshipper, with
Maurice Mair as a god. And, by his account, Maurice Mair was certainly a
wonder. James was no fool, and very good at his own political job; but
it seems that Maurice could do that and everything else; that he was a
brilliant artist and amateur actor and musician, and all the rest of it.
James was very good-looking himself, long and strong and strenuous, with
a high-bridged nose; though I suppose the young people would think he
looked very quaint with his beard divided into two bushy whiskers in the
fashion of those Victorian times. But Maurice was clean-shaven, and, by
the portraits shown to me, certainly quite beautiful; though he looked a
little more like a tenor than a gentleman ought to look. James was
always asking me again and again whether his friend was not a marvel,
whether any woman wouldn't fall in love with him, and so on, until it
became rather a bore, except that it turned so suddenly into a tragedy.
His whole life seemed to be in that idolatry, and one day the idol
tumbled down, and was broken like any china doll. A chill caught at the
seaside, and it was all over."
"And after that," asked the young man, "did he shut himself up like
this?"
"He went abroad at first," she answered; "away to Asia and the cannibal
Islands and Lord knows where. These deadly strokes take different people
in different ways. It took him in the way of an utter sundering or
severance from everything, even from tradition and as far as possible
from memory. He could not bear a reference to the old tie; a portrait or
an anecdote or even an association. He couldn't bear the business of a
great public funeral. He longed to get away. He stayed away for ten
years. I heard some rumour that he had begun to revive a little at the
end of the exile; but when he came back to his own home he relapsed
completely. He settled down into religious melancholia, and that's
practically madness."
"The priests got hold of him, they say," grumbled the old general. "I
know he gave thousands to found a monastery, and lives himself rather
like a monk--or, at any rate, a hermit. Can't understand what good they
think that will do."
"Goddarned superstition," snorted Cockspur; "that sort of thing ought to
be shown up. Here's a man that might have been useful to the Empire and
the world, and these vampires get hold of him and suck him dry. I bet
with their unnatural notions they haven't even let him marry."
"No, he has never married," said the lady. "He was engaged when I knew
him, as a matter of fact, but I don't think it ever came first with him,
and I think it went with the rest when everything else went. Like Hamlet
and Ophelia--he lost hold of love because he lost hold of life. But I
knew the girl; indeed, I know her still. Between ourselves, it was Viola
Grayson, daughter of the old admiral. She's never married either."
"It's infamous! It's infernal!" cried Sir John, bounding up. "It's not
only a tragedy, but a crime. I've got a duty to the public, and I mean
to see all this nonsensical nightmare.... In the twentieth century----"
He was almost choked with his own protest, and then, after a silence,
the old soldier said:
"Well, I don't profess to know much about those things, but I think
these religious people need to study a text which says: 'Let the dead
bury their dead.'"
"Only, unfortunately, that's just what it looks like," said his wife
with a sigh. "It's just like some creepy story of a dead man burying
another dead man, over and over again for ever."
"The storm has passed over us," said Romaine, with a rather inscrutable
smile. "You will not have to visit the inhospitable house after all."
She suddenly shuddered.
"Oh, I'll never do that again!" she exclaimed.
Mallow was staring at her.
"Again! Have you tried it before?" he cried.
"Well, I did once," she said, with a lightness not without a touch of
pride; "but we needn't go back on all that. It's not raining now, but I
think we'd better be moving back to the car."
As they moved off in procession, Mallow and the general brought up the
rear; and the latter said abruptly, lowering his voice:
"I don't want that little cad Cockspur to hear but as you've asked you'd
better know. It's the one thing I can't forgive Marne; but I suppose
these monks have drilled him that way. My wife, who had been the best
friend he ever had in America, actually came to that house when he was
walking in the garden. He was looking at the ground like a monk, and
hidden in a black hood that was really as ridiculous as any mask. She
had sent her card in, and stood there in his very path. And he walked
past her without a word or a glance, as if she had been a stone. He
wasn't human; he was like some horrible automaton. She may well call him
a dead man."
"It's all very strange," said the young man rather vaguely. "It isn't
like--like what I should have expected."
Young Mr. Mallow, when he left that rather dismal picnic, took himself
thoughtfully in search of a friend. He did not know any monks, but he
knew one priest, whom he was very much concerned to confront with the
curious revelations he had heard that afternoon. He felt he would very
much like to know the truth about the cruel superstition that hung over
the house of Marne, like the black thundercloud he had seen hovering
over it.
After being referred from one place to another, he finally ran his
friend Father Brown to earth in the house of another friend, a Roman
Catholic friend, with a large family. He entered somewhat abruptly to
find Father Brown sitting on the floor with a serious expression, and
attempting to pin the somewhat florid hat belonging to a wax doll on to
the head of a teddy bear.
Mallow felt a faint sense of incongruity; but he was far too full of his
problem to put off the conversation if he could, help it. He was
staggering from a sort of set-back in a subconscious process that had
been going on for some time. He poured out the whole tragedy of the
house of Marne as he had heard it from the general's wife, along with
most of the comments of the general and the newspaper proprietor. A new
atmosphere of attention seemed to be created with the mention of the
newspaper proprietor.
Father Brown neither knew nor cared that his attitudes were comic or
commonplace. He continued to sit on the floor, where his large head and
short legs made him look very like a baby playing with toys. But there
came into his great grey eyes a certain expression that has been seen in
the eyes of many men in many centuries through the story of nineteen
hundred years; only the men were not generally sitting on floors, but at
council tables, or on the seats of chapters, or the thrones of bishops
and cardinals; a far-off, watchful look, heavy with the humility of a