The wisdom of Father Brown
Almost as he spoke, the butler, a lean man in black, with very black
hair and a very long, yellow face, appeared in the doorway and told him
that dinner was served.
The dining-room was as nautical as the cabin of a ship; but its note
was rather that of the modern than the Elizabethan captain. There were,
indeed, three antiquated cutlasses in a trophy over the fireplace, and
one brown sixteenth-century map with Tritons and little ships dotted
about a curly sea. But such things were less prominent on the white
panelling than some cases of quaint-coloured South American birds, very
scientifically stuffed, fantastic shells from the Pacific, and several
instruments so rude and queer in shape that savages might have used
them either to kill their enemies or to cook them. But the alien colour
culminated in the fact that, besides the butler, the Admiral’s only
servants were two negroes, somewhat quaintly clad in tight uniforms of
yellow. The priest’s instinctive trick of analysing his own impressions
told him that the colour and the little neat coat-tails of these bipeds
had suggested the word “Canary,” and so by a mere pun connected them
with southward travel. Towards the end of the dinner they took their
yellow clothes and black faces out of the room, leaving only the black
clothes and yellow face of the butler.
“I’m rather sorry you take this so lightly,” said Fanshaw to the host;
“for the truth is, I’ve brought these friends of mine with the idea of
their helping you, as they know a good deal of these things. Don’t you
really believe in the family story at all?”
“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a
bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”
Rather to Flambeau’s surprise, his clerical friend, who seemed to have
entirely woken up, took up the digression and talked natural history
with his host with a flow of words and much unexpected information,
until the dessert and decanters were set down and the last of the
servants vanished. Then he said, without altering his tone.
“Please don’t think me impertinent, Admiral Pendragon. I don’t ask for
curiosity, but really for my guidance and your convenience. Have I made
a bad shot if I guess you don’t want these old things talked of before
your butler?”
The Admiral lifted the hairless arches over his eyes and exclaimed:
“Well, I don’t know where you got it, but the truth is I can’t stand the
fellow, though I’ve no excuse for discharging a family servant. Fanshaw,
with his fairy tales, would say my blood moved against men with that
black, Spanish-looking hair.”
Flambeau struck the table with his heavy fist. “By Jove!” he cried; “and
so had that girl!”
“I hope it’ll all end tonight,” continued the Admiral, “when my
nephew comes back safe from his ship. You looked surprised. You won’t
understand, I suppose, unless I tell you the story. You see, my father
had two sons; I remained a bachelor, but my elder brother married, and
had a son who became a sailor like all the rest of us, and will inherit
the proper estate. Well, my father was a strange man; he somehow
combined Fanshaw’s superstition with a good deal of my scepticism--they
were always fighting in him; and after my first voyages, he developed a
notion which he thought somehow would settle finally whether the curse
was truth or trash. If all the Pendragons sailed about anyhow, he
thought there would be too much chance of natural catastrophes to
prove anything. But if we went to sea one at a time in strict order
of succession to the property, he thought it might show whether any
connected fate followed the family as a family. It was a silly notion,
I think, and I quarrelled with my father pretty heartily; for I was an
ambitious man and was left to the last, coming, by succession, after my
own nephew.”
“And your father and brother,” said the priest, very gently, “died at
sea, I fear.”
“Yes,” groaned the Admiral; “by one of those brutal accidents on
which are built all the lying mythologies of mankind, they were both
shipwrecked. My father, coming up this coast out of the Atlantic, was
washed up on these Cornish rocks. My brother’s ship was sunk, no one
knows where, on the voyage home from Tasmania. His body was never found.
I tell you it was from perfectly natural mishap; lots of other people
besides Pendragons were drowned; and both disasters are discussed in
a normal way by navigators. But, of course, it set this forest of
superstition on fire; and men saw the flaming tower everywhere. That’s
why I say it will be all right when Walter returns. The girl he’s
engaged to was coming today; but I was so afraid of some chance delay
frightening her that I wired her not to come till she heard from me. But
he’s practically sure to be here some time tonight, and then it’ll all
end in smoke--tobacco smoke. We’ll crack that old lie when we crack a
bottle of this wine.”
“Very good wine,” said Father Brown, gravely lifting his glass, “but, as
you see, a very bad wine-bibber. I most sincerely beg your pardon”: for
he had spilt a small spot of wine on the table-cloth. He drank and put
down the glass with a composed face; but his hand had started at the
exact moment when he became conscious of a face looking in through the
garden window just behind the Admiral--the face of a woman, swarthy,
with southern hair and eyes, and young, but like a mask of tragedy.
After a pause the priest spoke again in his mild manner. “Admiral,” he
said, “will you do me a favour? Let me, and my friends if they like,
stop in that tower of yours just for tonight? Do you know that in my
business you’re an exorcist almost before anything else?”
Pendragon sprang to his feet and paced swiftly to and fro across the
window, from which the face had instantly vanished. “I tell you there is
nothing in it,” he cried, with ringing violence. “There is one thing I
know about this matter. You may call me an atheist. I am an atheist.”
Here he swung round and fixed Father Brown with a face of frightful
concentration. “This business is perfectly natural. There is no curse in
it at all.”
Father Brown smiled. “In that case,” he said, “there can’t be any
objection to my sleeping in your delightful summer-house.”
“The idea is utterly ridiculous,” replied the Admiral, beating a tattoo
on the back of his chair.
“Please forgive me for everything,” said Brown in his most sympathetic
tone, “including spilling the wine. But it seems to me you are not quite
so easy about the flaming tower as you try to be.”
Admiral Pendragon sat down again as abruptly as he had risen; but he sat
quite still, and when he spoke again it was in a lower voice. “You do
it at your own peril,” he said; “but wouldn’t you be an atheist to keep
sane in all this devilry?”
Some three hours afterwards Fanshaw, Flambeau and the priest were still
dawdling about the garden in the dark; and it began to dawn on the other
two that Father Brown had no intention of going to bed either in the
tower or the house.
“I think the lawn wants weeding,” said he dreamily. “If I could find a
spud or something I’d do it myself.”
They followed him, laughing and half remonstrating; but he replied with
the utmost solemnity, explaining to them, in a maddening little sermon,
that one can always find some small occupation that is helpful to
others. He did not find a spud; but he found an old broom made of twigs,
with which he began energetically to brush the fallen leaves off the
grass.
“Always some little thing to be done,” he said with idiotic
cheerfulness; “as George Herbert says: ‘Who sweeps an Admiral’s garden
in Cornwall as for Thy laws makes that and the action fine.’ And now,”
he added, suddenly slinging the broom away, “Let’s go and water the
flowers.”
With the same mixed emotions they watched him uncoil some considerable
lengths of the large garden hose, saying with an air of wistful
discrimination: “The red tulips before the yellow, I think. Look a bit
dry, don’t you think?”
He turned the little tap on the instrument, and the water shot out
straight and solid as a long rod of steel.
“Look out, Samson,” cried Flambeau; “why, you’ve cut off the tulip’s
head.”
Father Brown stood ruefully contemplating the decapitated plant.
“Mine does seem to be a rather kill or cure sort of watering,” he
admitted, scratching his head. “I suppose it’s a pity I didn’t find the
spud. You should have seen me with the spud! Talking of tools, you’ve
got that swordstick, Flambeau, you always carry? That’s right; and Sir
Cecil could have that sword the Admiral threw away by the fence here.
How grey everything looks!”
“The mist’s rising from the river,” said the staring Flambeau.
Almost as he spoke the huge figure of the hairy gardener appeared on
a higher ridge of the trenched and terraced lawn, hailing them with a
brandished rake and a horribly bellowing voice. “Put down that hose,” he
shouted; “put down that hose and go to your--”
“I am fearfully clumsy,” replied the reverend gentleman weakly; “do
you know, I upset some wine at dinner.” He made a wavering half-turn of
apology towards the gardener, with the hose still spouting in his hand.
The gardener caught the cold crash of the water full in his face like
the crash of a cannon-ball; staggered, slipped and went sprawling with
his boots in the air.
“How very dreadful!” said Father Brown, looking round in a sort of
wonder. “Why, I’ve hit a man!”
He stood with his head forward for a moment as if looking or listening;
and then set off at a trot towards the tower, still trailing the hose
behind him. The tower was quite close, but its outline was curiously
dim.
“Your river mist,” he said, “has a rum smell.”
“By the Lord it has,” cried Fanshaw, who was very white. “But you can’t
mean--”
“I mean,” said Father Brown, “that one of the Admiral’s scientific
predictions is coming true tonight. This story is going to end in
smoke.”
As he spoke a most beautiful rose-red light seemed to burst into blossom
like a gigantic rose; but accompanied with a crackling and rattling
noise that was like the laughter of devils.
“My God! what is this?” cried Sir Cecil Fanshaw.
“The sign of the flaming tower,” said Father Brown, and sent the driving
water from his hose into the heart of the red patch.
“Lucky we hadn’t gone to bed!” ejaculated Fanshaw. “I suppose it can’t
spread to the house.”
“You may remember,” said the priest quietly, “that the wooden fence that
might have carried it was cut away.”
Flambeau turned electrified eyes upon his friend, but Fanshaw only said
rather absently: “Well, nobody can be killed, anyhow.”
“This is rather a curious kind of tower,” observed Father Brown, “when
it takes to killing people, it always kills people who are somewhere
else.”
At the same instant the monstrous figure of the gardener with the
streaming beard stood again on the green ridge against the sky, waving
others to come on; but now waving not a rake but a cutlass. Behind him
came the two negroes, also with the old crooked cutlasses out of the
trophy. But in the blood-red glare, with their black faces and yellow
figures, they looked like devils carrying instruments of torture. In
the dim garden behind them a distant voice was heard calling out brief
directions. When the priest heard the voice, a terrible change came over
his countenance.
But he remained composed; and never took his eye off the patch of flame
which had begun by spreading, but now seemed to shrink a little as it
hissed under the torch of the long silver spear of water. He kept his
finger along the nozzle of the pipe to ensure the aim, and attended to
no other business, knowing only by the noise and that semi-conscious
corner of the eye, the exciting incidents that began to tumble