The secret of Father Brown
whirlwind had struck the sand. With the very crack of sound Maurice Mair
seemed to spin like a teetotum and pitch upon his face like a ninepin.
And queerly enough, while I'd been worrying about him up to that moment,
the instant he was dead all my pity was for the man who killed him; as
it is to this day and hour. I knew that with that, the whole huge
terrible pendulum of my friend's lifelong love would swing back; and
that whatever cause others might find to pardon him, he would never
pardon himself for ever and ever. And so, somehow, the really vivid
thing, the picture that burns in my memory so that I can't forget it, is
not that of the catastrophe, the smoke and the flash and the falling
figure. That seemed to be all over, like the noise that wakes a man up.
What I saw, what I shall always see, is poor Jim hurrying across towards
his fallen friend and foe; his brown beard looking black against the
ghastly pallor of his face, with its high features cut out against the
sea; and the frantic gestures with which he waved me to run for the
surgeon in the hamlet behind the sandhills. He had dropped his pistol as
he ran; he had a glove in one hand and the loose and fluttering fingers
of it seemed to elongate and emphasize his wild pantomime of pointing or
hailing for help. That is the picture that really remains with me; and
there is nothing else in that picture, except the striped background of
sands and sea and the dark, dead body lying still as a stone, and the
dark figure of the dead man's second standing grim and motionless
against the horizon."
"Did Romaine stand motionless?" asked the priest. "I should have thought
he would have run even quicker towards the corpse."
"Perhaps he did when I had left," replied the general. "I took in that
undying picture in an instant and the next instant I had dived among the
sandhills, and was far out of sight of the others. Well, poor Maurice
had made a good choice in the matter of doctors; though the doctor came
too late, he came quicker than I should have thought possible. This
village surgeon was a very remarkable man, red-haired, irascible, but
extraordinarily strong in promptitude and presence of mind. I saw him
but for a flash as he leapt on his horse and went thundering away to the
scene of death, leaving me far behind. But in that flash I had so strong
a sense of his personality that I wished to God he had really been
called in before the duel began; for I believe on my soul he would have
prevented it somehow. As it was, he cleaned up the mess with marvellous
swiftness; long before I could trail back to the sea-shore on my two
feet his impetuous practicality had managed everything; the corpse was
temporarily buried in the sandhills and the unhappy homicide had been
persuaded to do the only thing he could do--to flee for his life. He
slipped along the coast till he came to a port and managed to get out of
the country. You know the rest; poor Jim remained abroad for many years;
later, when the whole thing had been hushed up or forgotten, he returned
to his dismal castle and automatically inherited the title. I have never
seen him from that day to this, and yet I know what is written in red
letters in the inmost darkness of his brain."
"I understand," said Father Brown, "that some of you have made efforts
to see him?"
"My wife never relaxed her efforts," said the general. "She refuses to
admit that such a crime ought to cut a man off for ever; and I confess I
am inclined to agree with her. Eighty years before it would have been
thought quite normal; and really it was manslaughter rather than murder.
My wife is a great friend of the unfortunate lady who was the occasion
of the quarrel and she has an idea that if Jim would consent to see
Viola Grayson once again, and receive her assurance that old quarrels
are buried, it might restore his sanity. My wife is calling a sort of
council of old friends to-morrow, I believe. She is very energetic."
Father Brown was playing with the pins that lay beside the general's
map; he seemed to listen rather absent-mindedly. He had the sort of mind
that sees things in pictures; and the picture which had coloured even
the prosaic mind of the practical soldier took on tints yet more
significant and sinister in the more mystical mind of the priest. He saw
the dark red desolation of sand, the very hue of Aceldama, and the dead
man lying in a dark heap, and the slayer, stooping as he ran,
gesticulating with a glove in demented remorse, and always his
imagination came back to the third thing that he could not yet fit into
any human picture: the second of the slain man standing motionless and
mysterious, like a dark statue on the edge of the sea. It might seem to
some a detail; but for him it was that stiff figure that stood up like a
standing note of interrogation.
Why had not Romaine moved instantly? It was the natural thing for a
second to do, in common humanity, let alone friendship. Even if there
were some double-dealing or darker motive not yet understood, one would
think it would be done for the sake of appearances. Anyhow, when the
thing was all over, it would be natural for the second to stir long
before the other second had vanished beyond the sandhills.
"Does this man Romanic move very slowly?" he asked.
"It's queer you should ask that," answered. Outram, with a sharp glance.
"No, as a matter of fact he moves very quickly when he moves at all.
But, curiously enough, I was just thinking that only this afternoon I
saw him stand exactly like that, during the thunderstorm. He stood in
that silver-clasped cape of his, and with one hand on his hip, exactly
and in every line as he stood on those bloody sands long ago. The
lightning blinded us all, but he did not blink. When it was dark again
he was standing there still."
"I suppose he isn't standing there now?" inquired Father Brown. "I mean,
I suppose he moved sometime?"
"No, he moved quite sharply when the thunder came," replied the other.
"He seemed to have been waiting for it, for he told us the exact time of
the interval.... Is anything the matter?"
"I've pricked myself with one of your pins," said Father Brown. "I hope
I haven't damaged it." But his eyes had snapped and his mouth abruptly
shut.
"Are you ill?" inquired the general, staring at him.
"No," answered the priest; "I'm only not quite so stoical as your friend
Romaine. I can't help blinking when I see light."
He turned to gather up his hat and umbrella; but when he had got to the
door he seemed to remember something and turned back. Coming up close to
Outram, he gazed up into his face with a rather helpless expression, as
of a dying fish, and made a motion as if to hold him by the waistcoat.
"General," he almost whispered, "for God's sake don't let your wife and
that other woman insist on seeing Marne again. Let sleeping dogs lie, or
you'll unleash all the hounds of hell."
The general was left alone with a look of bewilderment in his brown
eyes, as he sat down again to play with his pins.
Even greater, however, was the bewilderment which attended the
successive stages of the benevolent conspiracy of the general's wife,
who had assembled her little group of sympathizers to storm the castle
of the misanthrope. The first surprise she encountered was the
unexplained absence of one of the actors in the ancient tragedy. When
they assembled by agreement at a quiet hotel quite near the castle,
there was no sign of Hugo Romaine, until a belated telegram from a
lawyer told them that the great actor had suddenly left the country. The
second surprise, when they began the bombardment by sending up word to
the castle with an urgent request for an interview, was the figure which
came forth from those gloomy gates to receive the deputation in the name
of the noble owner. It was no such figure as they would have conceived
suitable to those sombre avenues or those almost feudal formalities. It
was not some stately steward or major-domo, nor even a dignified butler
or tall and ornamental footman. The only figure that came out of the
cavernous castle doorway was the short and shabby figure of Father
Brown.
"Look here," he said, in his simple, bothered fashion. "I told you you'd
much better leave him alone. He knows what he's doing and it'll only
make everybody unhappy."
Lady Outram, who was accompanied by a tall and quietly-dressed lady,
still very handsome, presumably the original Miss Grayson, looked at the
little priest with cold contempt.
"Really, sir," she said; "this is a very private occasion, and I don't
understand what you have to do with it.'
"Trust a priest to have to do with a private occasion," snarled Sir John
Cockspur. "Don't you know they live behind the scenes like rats behind a
wainscot burrowing their way into everybody's private rooms. See how
he's already in possession of poor Marne." Sir John was slightly sulky,
as his aristocratic friends had persuaded him to give up the great scoop
of publicity in return for the privilege of being really inside a
society secret. It never occurred to him to ask himself whether _he_ was
at all like a rat in a wainscot.
"Oh, that's all right," said Father Brown, with the impatience of
anxiety. "I've talked it over with the marquis and the only priest he's
ever had anything to do with; his clerical tastes have been much
exaggerated. I tell you he knows what he's about; and I do implore you
all to leave him alone."
"You mean to leave him to this living death of moping and going mad in a
ruin!" cried Lady Outram, in a voice that shook a little. "And all
because he had the bad luck to shoot a man in a duel more than a quarter
of a century ago. Is that what you call Christian charity?"
"Yes," answered the priest stolidly; "that is what I call Christian
charity."
"It's about all the Christian charity you'll ever get out of these
priests," cried Cockspur bitterly. "That's their only idea of pardoning
a poor fellow for a piece of folly; to wall him up alive and starve him
to death with fasts and penances and pictures of hell-fire. And all
because a bullet went wrong."
"Really, Father Brown," said General Outram, "do you honestly think he
deserves this? Is that your Christianity?"
"Surely the true Christianity," pleaded his wife more gently, "is that
which knows all and pardons all; the love that can remember--and
forget."
"Father Brown," said young Mallow, very earnestly, "I generally agree
with what you say; but I'm hanged if I can follow you here. A shot in a
duel, followed instantly by remorse, is not such an awful offence."
"I admit." said Father Brown dully, "that I take a more serious view of
his offence."
"God soften your hard heart," said the strange lady speaking for the
first time. "I am going to speak to my old friend."
Almost as if her voice had raised a ghost in that great grey house,
something stirred within and a figure stood in the dark doorway at the
top of the great stone flight of steps. It was clad in dead black, but
there was something wild about the blanched hair and something in the
pale features that was like the wreck of a marble statue.
Viola Grayson began calmly to move up the great flight of steps; and
Outram muttered in his thick black moustache: "He won't cut her dead as
he did my wife, I fancy."
Father Brown, who seemed in a collapse of resignation, looked up at him
for a moment.
"Poor Marne has enough on his conscience," he said. "Let us acquit him
of what we can. At least he never cut your wife."
"What do you mean by that?"
"He never knew her," said Father Brown.
As they spoke, the tall lady proudly mounted the last step and came face
to face with the Marquis of Marne. His lips moved, but something
happened before he could speak.