The wisdom of Father Brown
with him from London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical
negligence from the dapper dryness of the young American; but something
in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his
alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a brother
journalist.
“Could you do me the favour,” asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his
nation, “of directing me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives,
as I understand?”
“It’s a few yards down the road,” said the red-haired man, removing his
cigar; “I shall be passing it myself in a minute, but I’m going on to
Pendragon Park to try and see the fun.”
“What is Pendragon Park?” asked Calhoun Kidd.
“Sir Claude Champion’s place--haven’t you come down for that, too?”
asked the other pressman, looking up. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”
“I have come to see Mr Boulnois,” said Kidd.
“I’ve come to see Mrs Boulnois,” replied the other. “But I shan’t catch
her at home.” And he laughed rather unpleasantly.
“Are you interested in Catastrophism?” asked the wondering Yankee.
“I’m interested in catastrophes; and there are going to be some,”
replied his companion gloomily. “Mine’s a filthy trade, and I never
pretend it isn’t.”
With that he spat on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant
one could realize that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.
The American pressman considered him with more attention. His face was
pale and dissipated, with the promise of formidable passions yet to be
loosed; but it was a clever and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse
and careless, but he had a good seal ring on one of his long, thin
fingers. His name, which came out in the course of talk, was James
Dalroy; he was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and attached to
a pink paper which he heartily despised, called Smart Society, in the
capacity of reporter and of something painfully like a spy.
Smart Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois
on Darwin which was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western
Sun. Dalroy had come down, it seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal
which might very well end in the Divorce Court, but which was at present
hovering between Grey Cottage and Pendragon Park.
Sir Claude Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well
as Mr Boulnois. So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea
of their intimate acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally
incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely pretended
to know) Sir Claude Champion, as “one of the brightest and wealthiest of
England’s Upper Ten”; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the
world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as
the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory
Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and,
above all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other
than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about
his omnivorous culture and restless publicity--, he was not only a great
amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian
frivolity that we convey by the word “dilettante”.
That faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had
been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun,
gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire,
or even a disease. But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude--a
great deal more, in fact, than there was to know--it would never have
crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the
newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude
Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according
to Dalroy’s account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in
couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had
been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a
millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately,
an unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other.
Indeed, Boulnois’s cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon
Park.
But whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a
dark and ugly question. A year or two before, Boulnois had married a
beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted in his
own shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of the household to
Champion’s had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving
in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement.
Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he
seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an
intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon
were perpetually leaving bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and
motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois;
balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the
baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and Beauty at a
tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of
Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air
rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet
it was needless to name.
“I don’t think it can go on without a smash,” said the young man
with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. “Old Boulnois may be
squared--or he may be square. But if he’s square he’s thick--what you
might call cubic. But I don’t believe it’s possible.”
“He is a man of grand intellectual powers,” said Calhoun Kidd in a deep
voice.
“Yes,” answered Dalroy; “but even a man of grand intellectual powers
can’t be such a blighted fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall
be following myself in a minute or two.”
But Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda, betook himself
smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical
informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had faded;
the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate, studded here and there
with a star, but lighter on the left side of the sky, with the promise
of a rising moon.
The Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of
stiff, high thorn-hedges, was so close under the pines and palisades of
the Park that Kidd at first mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the
name on the narrow wooden gate, however, and seeing by his watch that
the hour of the “Thinker’s” appointment had just struck, he went in and
knocked at the front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see that
the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious
than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place from a
porter’s lodge. A dog-kennel and a beehive stood outside, like symbols
of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation
of prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was
reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly
man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified.
“Mr Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir,” he said, “but he has
been obliged to go out suddenly.”
“But see here, I had an appointment,” said the interviewer, with a
rising voice. “Do you know where he went to?”
“To Pendragon Park, sir,” said the servant, rather sombrely, and began
to close the door.
Kidd started a little.
“Did he go with Mrs--with the rest of the party?” he asked rather
vaguely.
“No, sir,” said the man shortly; “he stayed behind, and then went out
alone.” And he shut the door, brutally, but with an air of duty not
done.
The American, that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness,
was annoyed. He felt a strong desire to hustle them all along a bit
and teach them business habits; the hoary old dog and the grizzled,
heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric shirt-front, and the drowsy
old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old philosopher who couldn’t
keep an appointment.
“If that’s the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife’s purest
devotion,” said Mr Calhoun Kidd. “But perhaps he’s gone over to make
a row. In that case I reckon a man from the Western Sun will be on the
spot.”
And turning the corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up
the long avenue of black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective
towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and
orderly as plumes upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was
a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word
“Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven
colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere
almost described in Scott’s great tragedy; the smell of something that
died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken
urns, of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is
none the less incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.
More than once, as he went up that strange, black road of tragic
artifice, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him.
He could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and
the wedge of starlit sky above them. At first he thought he must have
fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo of his own tramp. But as he
went on he was more and more inclined to conclude, with the remains of
his reason, that there really were other feet upon the road. He thought
hazily of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see the
image of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as
Pierrot’s, but patched with black. The apex of the triangle of dark-blue
sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that
this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house
and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense,
there was in the sadness more violence and secrecy--more--he hesitated
for the word, and then said it with a jerk of laughter--Catastrophism.
More pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by
a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a
dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book.
For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed
to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to
sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of
a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such
a place in a forgotten tale.
Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon a naked
sword--such a slender and sparkling rapier as may have fought many an
unjust duel in that ancient park. It fell on the pathway far in front of
him and lay there glistening like a large needle. He ran like a hare and
bent to look at it. Seen at close quarters it had rather a showy look:
the big red jewels in the hilt and guard were a little dubious. But
there were other red drops upon the blade which were not dubious.
He looked round wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile
had come, and saw that at this point the sable facade of fir and pine
was interrupted by a smaller road at right angles; which, when he turned
it, brought him in full view of the long, lighted house, with a lake and
fountains in front of it. Nevertheless, he did not look at this, having
something more interesting to look at.
Above him, at the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden,
was one of those small picturesque surprises common in the old landscape
gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass, like a giant