The wisdom of Father Brown
for the headlines, the sensational proclamations--they will come at the
end.
I was walking along a public path that threads through a private
Devonshire orchard and seems to point towards Devonshire cider, when
I came suddenly upon just such a place as the path suggested. It was a
long, low inn, consisting really of a cottage and two barns; thatched
all over with the thatch that looks like brown and grey hair grown
before history. But outside the door was a sign which called it the Blue
Dragon; and under the sign was one of those long rustic tables that used
to stand outside most of the free English inns, before teetotallers
and brewers between them destroyed freedom. And at this table sat three
gentlemen, who might have lived a hundred years ago.
Now that I know them all better, there is no difficulty about
disentangling the impressions; but just then they looked like three very
solid ghosts. The dominant figure, both because he was bigger in all
three dimensions, and because he sat centrally in the length of the
table, facing me, was a tall, fat man dressed completely in black,
with a rubicund, even apoplectic visage, but a rather bald and rather
bothered brow. Looking at him again, more strictly, I could not exactly
say what it was that gave me the sense of antiquity, except the antique
cut of his white clerical necktie and the barred wrinkles across his
brow.
It was even less easy to fix the impression in the case of the man at
the right end of the table, who, to say truth, was as commonplace a
person as could be seen anywhere, with a round, brown-haired head and a
round snub nose, but also clad in clerical black, of a stricter cut. It
was only when I saw his broad curved hat lying on the table beside him
that I realized why I connected him with anything ancient. He was a
Roman Catholic priest.
Perhaps the third man, at the other end of the table, had really more
to do with it than the rest, though he was both slighter in physical
presence and more inconsiderate in his dress. His lank limbs were clad,
I might also say clutched, in very tight grey sleeves and pantaloons;
he had a long, sallow, aquiline face which seemed somehow all the more
saturnine because his lantern jaws were imprisoned in his collar and
neck-cloth more in the style of the old stock; and his hair (which ought
to have been dark brown) was of an odd dim, russet colour which, in
conjunction with his yellow face, looked rather purple than red. The
unobtrusive yet unusual colour was all the more notable because his hair
was almost unnaturally healthy and curling, and he wore it full. But,
after all analysis, I incline to think that what gave me my first
old-fashioned impression was simply a set of tall, old-fashioned
wine-glasses, one or two lemons and two churchwarden pipes. And also,
perhaps, the old-world errand on which I had come.
Being a hardened reporter, and it being apparently a public inn, I did
not need to summon much of my impudence to sit down at the long
table and order some cider. The big man in black seemed very learned,
especially about local antiquities; the small man in black, though he
talked much less, surprised me with a yet wider culture. So we got on
very well together; but the third man, the old gentleman in the tight
pantaloons, seemed rather distant and haughty, until I slid into the
subject of the Duke of Exmoor and his ancestry.
I thought the subject seemed to embarrass the other two a little; but it
broke the spell of the third man’s silence most successfully. Speaking
with restraint and with the accent of a highly educated gentleman, and
puffing at intervals at his long churchwarden pipe, he proceeded to tell
me some of the most horrible stories I have ever heard in my life:
how one of the Eyres in the former ages had hanged his own father; and
another had his wife scourged at the cart tail through the village; and
another had set fire to a church full of children, and so on.
Some of the tales, indeed, are not fit for public print--, such as the
story of the Scarlet Nuns, the abominable story of the Spotted Dog,
or the thing that was done in the quarry. And all this red roll of
impieties came from his thin, genteel lips rather primly than otherwise,
as he sat sipping the wine out of his tall, thin glass.
I could see that the big man opposite me was trying, if anything,
to stop him; but he evidently held the old gentleman in considerable
respect, and could not venture to do so at all abruptly. And the little
priest at the other end of the-table, though free from any such air of
embarrassment, looked steadily at the table, and seemed to listen to the
recital with great pain--as well as he might.
“You don’t seem,” I said to the narrator, “to be very fond of the Exmoor
pedigree.”
He looked at me a moment, his lips still prim, but whitening and
tightening; then he deliberately broke his long pipe and glass on the
table and stood up, the very picture of a perfect gentleman with the
framing temper of a fiend.
“These gentlemen,” he said, “will tell you whether I have cause to like
it. The curse of the Eyres of old has lain heavy on this country, and
many have suffered from it. They know there are none who have suffered
from it as I have.” And with that he crushed a piece of the fallen
glass under his heel, and strode away among the green twilight of the
twinkling apple-trees.
“That is an extraordinary old gentleman,” I said to the other two; “do
you happen to know what the Exmoor family has done to him? Who is he?”
The big man in black was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled
bull; he did not at first seem to take it in. Then he said at last,
“Don’t you know who he is?”
I reaffirmed my ignorance, and there was another silence; then the
little priest said, still looking at the table, “That is the Duke of
Exmoor.”
Then, before I could collect my scattered senses, he added equally
quietly, but with an air of regularizing things: “My friend here is
Doctor Mull, the Duke’s librarian. My name is Brown.”
“But,” I stammered, “if that is the Duke, why does he damn all the old
dukes like that?”
“He seems really to believe,” answered the priest called Brown, “that
they have left a curse on him.” Then he added, with some irrelevance,
“That’s why he wears a wig.”
It was a few moments before his meaning dawned on me. “You don’t mean
that fable about the fantastic ear?” I demanded. “I’ve heard of it, of
course, but surely it must be a superstitious yarn spun out of something
much simpler. I’ve sometimes thought it was a wild version of one of
those mutilation stories. They used to crop criminals’ ears in the
sixteenth century.”
“I hardly think it was that,” answered the little man thoughtfully, “but
it is not outside ordinary science or natural law for a family to have
some deformity frequently reappearing--such as one ear bigger than the
other.”
The big librarian had buried his big bald brow in his big red hands,
like a man trying to think out his duty. “No,” he groaned. “You do the
man a wrong after all. Understand, I’ve no reason to defend him, or even
keep faith with him. He has been a tyrant to me as to everybody else.
Don’t fancy because you see him sitting here that he isn’t a great lord
in the worst sense of the word. He would fetch a man a mile to ring a
bell a yard off--if it would summon another man three miles to fetch
a matchbox three yards off. He must have a footman to carry his
walking-stick; a body servant to hold up his opera-glasses--”
“But not a valet to brush his clothes,” cut in the priest, with a
curious dryness, “for the valet would want to brush his wig, too.”
The librarian turned to him and seemed to forget my presence; he was
strongly moved and, I think, a little heated with wine. “I don’t know
how you know it, Father Brown,” he said, “but you are right. He lets the
whole world do everything for him--except dress him. And that he insists
on doing in a literal solitude like a desert. Anybody is kicked out
of the house without a character who is so much as found near his
dressing-room door.
“He seems a pleasant old party,” I remarked.
“No,” replied Dr Mull quite simply; “and yet that is just what I mean by
saying you are unjust to him after all. Gentlemen, the Duke does really
feel the bitterness about the curse that he uttered just now. He does,
with sincere shame and terror, hide under that purple wig something he
thinks it would blast the sons of man to see. I know it is so; and I
know it is not a mere natural disfigurement, like a criminal mutilation,
or a hereditary disproportion in the features. I know it is worse than
that; because a man told me who was present at a scene that no man could
invent, where a stronger man than any of us tried to defy the secret,
and was scared away from it.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Mull went on in oblivion of me, speaking
out of the cavern of his hands. “I don’t mind telling you, Father,
because it’s really more defending the poor Duke than giving him away.
Didn’t you ever hear of the time when he very nearly lost all the
estates?”
The priest shook his head; and the librarian proceeded to tell the tale
as he had heard it from his predecessor in the same post, who had been
his patron and instructor, and whom he seemed to trust implicitly. Up
to a certain point it was a common enough tale of the decline of a great
family’s fortunes--the tale of a family lawyer. His lawyer, however, had
the sense to cheat honestly, if the expression explains itself. Instead
of using funds he held in trust, he took advantage of the Duke’s
carelessness to put the family in a financial hole, in which it might be
necessary for the Duke to let him hold them in reality.
The lawyer’s name was Isaac Green, but the Duke always called him
Elisha; presumably in reference to the fact that he was quite bald,
though certainly not more than thirty. He had risen very rapidly, but
from very dirty beginnings; being first a “nark” or informer, and then a
money-lender: but as solicitor to the Eyres he had the sense, as I say,
to keep technically straight until he was ready to deal the final blow.
The blow fell at dinner; and the old librarian said he should never
forget the very look of the lampshades and the decanters, as the little
lawyer, with a steady smile, proposed to the great landlord that they
should halve the estates between them. The sequel certainly could not
be overlooked; for the Duke, in dead silence, smashed a decanter on the
man’s bald head as suddenly as I had seen him smash the glass that day
in the orchard. It left a red triangular scar on the scalp, and the
lawyer’s eyes altered, but not his smile.
He rose tottering to his feet, and struck back as such men do strike. “I
am glad of that,” he said, “for now I can take the whole estate. The law
will give it to me.”
Exmoor, it seems, was white as ashes, but his eyes still blazed. “The
law will give it you,” he said; “but you will not take it.... Why not?
Why? because it would mean the crack of doom for me, and if you take it
I shall take off my wig.... Why, you pitiful plucked fowl, anyone can
see your bare head. But no man shall see mine and live.”
Well, you may say what you like and make it mean what you like. But Mull
swears it is the solemn fact that the lawyer, after shaking his knotted
fists in the air for an instant, simply ran from the room and never
reappeared in the countryside; and since then Exmoor has been feared
more for a warlock than even for a landlord and a magistrate.
Now Dr Mull told his story with rather wild theatrical gestures, and
with a passion I think at least partisan. I was quite conscious of the
possibility that the whole was the extravagance of an old braggart and