The wisdom of Father Brown
mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and
having a sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the
finger of the dial stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal fin of
a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to that idle clock. But he saw
something else clinging to it also, for one wild moment--the figure of a
man.
Though he saw it there only for a moment, though it was outlandish and
incredible in costume, being clad from neck to heel in tight crimson,
with glints of gold, yet he knew in one flash of moonlight who it was.
That white face flung up to heaven, clean-shaven and so unnaturally
young, like Byron with a Roman nose, those black curls already
grizzled--he had seen the thousand public portraits of Sir Claude
Champion. The wild red figure reeled an instant against the sundial; the
next it had rolled down the steep bank and lay at the American’s feet,
faintly moving one arm. A gaudy, unnatural gold ornament on the arm
suddenly reminded Kidd of Romeo and Juliet; of course the tight crimson
suit was part of the play. But there was a long red stain down the bank
from which the man had rolled--that was no part of the play. He had been
run through the body.
Mr Calhoun Kidd shouted and shouted again. Once more he seemed to hear
phantasmal footsteps, and started to find another figure already near
him. He knew the figure, and yet it terrified him. The dissipated youth
who had called himself Dalroy had a horribly quiet way with him; if
Boulnois failed to keep appointments that had been made, Dalroy had
a sinister air of keeping appointments that hadn’t. The moonlight
discoloured everything, against Dalroy’s red hair his wan face looked
not so much white as pale green.
All this morbid impressionism must be Kidd’s excuse for having cried
out, brutally and beyond all reason: “Did you do this, you devil?”
James Dalroy smiled his unpleasing smile; but before he could speak, the
fallen figure made another movement of the arm, waving vaguely towards
the place where the sword fell; then came a moan, and then it managed to
speak.
“Boulnois.... Boulnois, I say.... Boulnois did it... jealous of me...he
was jealous, he was, he was...”
Kidd bent his head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the
words:
“Boulnois...with my own sword...he threw it...”
Again the failing hand waved towards the sword, and then fell rigid with
a thud. In Kidd rose from its depth all that acrid humour that is the
strange salt of the seriousness of his race.
“See here,” he said sharply and with command, “you must fetch a doctor.
This man’s dead.”
“And a priest, too, I suppose,” said Dalroy in an undecipherable manner.
“All these Champions are papists.”
The American knelt down by the body, felt the heart, propped up the
head and used some last efforts at restoration; but before the other
journalist reappeared, followed by a doctor and a priest, he was already
prepared to assert they were too late.
“Were you too late also?” asked the doctor, a solid prosperous-looking
man, with conventional moustache and whiskers, but a lively eye, which
darted over Kidd dubiously.
“In one sense,” drawled the representative of the Sun. “I was too
late to save the man, but I guess I was in time to hear something of
importance. I heard the dead man denounce his assassin.”
“And who was the assassin?” asked the doctor, drawing his eyebrows
together.
“Boulnois,” said Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly.
The doctor stared at him gloomily with a reddening brow--, but he did
not contradict. Then the priest, a shorter figure in the background,
said mildly: “I understood that Mr Boulnois was not coming to Pendragon
Park this evening.”
“There again,” said the Yankee grimly, “I may be in a position to give
the old country a fact or two. Yes, sir, John Boulnois was going to stay
in all this evening; he fixed up a real good appointment there with me.
But John Boulnois changed his mind; John Boulnois left his home abruptly
and all alone, and came over to this darned Park an hour or so ago.
His butler told me so. I think we hold what the all-wise police call a
clue--have you sent for them?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “but we haven’t alarmed anyone else yet.”
“Does Mrs Boulnois know?” asked James Dalroy, and again Kidd was
conscious of an irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth.
“I have not told her,” said the doctor gruffly--, “but here come the
police.”
The little priest had stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned
with the fallen sword, which looked ludicrously large and theatrical
when attached to his dumpy figure, at once clerical and commonplace.
“Just before the police come,” he said apologetically, “has anyone got a
light?”
The Yankee journalist took an electric torch from his pocket, and the
priest held it close to the middle part of the blade, which he examined
with blinking care. Then, without glancing at the point or pommel, he
handed the long weapon to the doctor.
“I fear I’m no use here,” he said, with a brief sigh. “I’ll say good
night to you, gentlemen.” And he walked away up the dark avenue towards
the house, his hands clasped behind him and his big head bent in
cogitation.
The rest of the group made increased haste towards the lodge-gates,
where an inspector and two constables could already be seen in
consultation with the lodge-keeper. But the little priest only walked
slower and slower in the dim cloister of pine, and at last stopped dead,
on the steps of the house. It was his silent way of acknowledging an
equally silent approach; for there came towards him a presence that
might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd’s demands for a lovely and
aristocratic ghost. It was a young woman in silvery satins of a
Renascence design; she had golden hair in two long shining ropes, and
a face so startingly pale between them that she might have been
chryselephantine--made, that is, like some old Greek statues, out of
ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her voice, though
low, was confident.
“Father Brown?” she said.
“Mrs Boulnois?” he replied gravely. Then he looked at her and
immediately said: “I see you know about Sir Claude.”
“How do you know I know?” she asked steadily.
He did not answer the question, but asked another: “Have you seen your
husband?”
“My husband is at home,” she said. “He has nothing to do with this.”
Again he did not answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a
curiously intense expression on her face.
“Shall I tell you something more?” she said, with a rather fearful
smile. “I don’t think he did it, and you don’t either.” Father Brown
returned her gaze with a long, grave stare, and then nodded, yet more
gravely.
“Father Brown,” said the lady, “I am going to tell you all I know, but
I want you to do me a favour first. Will you tell me why you haven’t
jumped to the conclusion of poor John’s guilt, as all the rest have
done? Don’t mind what you say: I--I know about the gossip and the
appearances that are against me.”
Father Brown looked honestly embarrassed, and passed his hand across
his forehead. “Two very little things,” he said. “At least, one’s very
trivial and the other very vague. But such as they are, they don’t fit
in with Mr Boulnois being the murderer.”
He turned his blank, round face up to the stars and continued
absentmindedly: “To take the vague idea first. I attach a good deal of
importance to vague ideas. All those things that ‘aren’t evidence’
are what convince me. I think a moral impossibility the biggest of all
impossibilities. I know your husband only slightly, but I think this
crime of his, as generally conceived, something very like a moral
impossibility. Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not be so
wicked. Anybody can be wicked--as wicked as he chooses. We can direct
our moral wills; but we can’t generally change our instinctive tastes
and ways of doing things. Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this
murder. He would not snatch Romeo’s sword from its romantic scabbard;
or slay his foe on the sundial as on a kind of altar; or leave his body
among the roses, or fling the sword away among the pines. If Boulnois
killed anyone he’d do it quietly and heavily, as he’d do any other
doubtful thing--take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek poet.
No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It’s more like Champion.”
“Ah!” she said, and looked at him with eyes like diamonds.
“And the trivial thing was this,” said Brown. “There were finger-prints
on that sword; finger-prints can be detected quite a time after they are
made if they’re on some polished surface like glass or steel. These were
on a polished surface. They were half-way down the blade of the sword.
Whose prints they were I have no earthly clue; but why should anybody
hold a sword half-way down? It was a long sword, but length is an
advantage in lunging at an enemy. At least, at most enemies. At all
enemies except one.”
“Except one,” she repeated.
“There is only one enemy,” said Father Brown, “whom it is easier to kill
with a dagger than a sword.”
“I know,” said the woman. “Oneself.”
There was a long silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly:
“Am I right, then? Did Sir Claude kill himself?”
“Yes” she said, with a face like marble. “I saw him do it.”
“He died,” said Father Brown, “for love of you?”
An extraordinary expression flashed across her face, very different
from pity, modesty, remorse, or anything her companion had expected: her
voice became suddenly strong and full. “I don’t believe,” she said, “he
ever cared about me a rap. He hated my husband.”
“Why?” asked the other, and turned his round face from the sky to the
lady.
“He hated my husband because...it is so strange I hardly know how to say
it...because...”
“Yes?” said Brown patiently.
“Because my husband wouldn’t hate him.”
Father Brown only nodded, and seemed still to be listening; he differed
from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small point--he never
pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well.
Mrs Boulnois drew near once more with the same contained glow of
certainty. “My husband,” she said, “is a great man. Sir Claude Champion
was not a great man: he was a celebrated and successful man. My husband
has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn truth that
he has never dreamed of being so. He no more expects to be famous for
thinking than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of
splendid stupidity. He has never grown up. He still liked Champion
exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him as he would admire
a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table. But he couldn’t be got
to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be
envied. He went mad and killed himself for that.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown; “I think I begin to understand.”
“Oh, don’t you see?” she cried; “the whole picture is made for that--the
place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very
door, like a dependant--to make him feel a failure. He never felt it.
He thinks no more about such things than--than an absent-minded lion.
Champion would burst in on John’s shabbiest hours or homeliest meals
with some dazzling present or announcement or expedition that made it
like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse
amiably with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing
or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not turned
a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac.”
“And Haman began to tell them,” said Father Brown, “of all the things
wherein the king had honoured him; and he said: ‘All these things profit