The wisdom of Father Brown
brigand-courier warn his patron, even by a hint, when it was his whole
purpose to lure him into the mountain-mousetrap? It could not have
meant that. But if not, what is this disaster, known both to courier and
banker, which hangs over Miss Harrogate’s head?”
“Disaster to Miss Harrogate!” ejaculated the poet, sitting up with some
ferocity. “Explain yourself; go on.”
“All my riddles, however, revolve round our bandit chief,” resumed the
priest reflectively. “And here is the second of them. Why did he put
so prominently in his demand for ransom the fact that he had taken two
thousand pounds from his victim on the spot? It had no faintest tendency
to evoke the ransom. Quite the other way, in fact. Harrogate’s friends
would be far likelier to fear for his fate if they thought the thieves
were poor and desperate. Yet the spoliation on the spot was emphasized
and even put first in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want so
specially to tell all Europe that he had picked the pocket before he
levied the blackmail?”
“I cannot imagine,” said Muscari, rubbing up his black hair for once
with an unaffected gesture. “You may think you enlighten me, but you are
leading me deeper in the dark. What may be the third objection to the
King of the Thieves?” “The third objection,” said Father Brown, still
in meditation, “is this bank we are sitting on. Why does our
brigand-courier call this his chief fortress and the Paradise of
Thieves? It is certainly a soft spot to fall on and a sweet spot to look
at. It is also quite true, as he says, that it is invisible from valley
and peak, and is therefore a hiding-place. But it is not a fortress. It
never could be a fortress. I think it would be the worst fortress in the
world. For it is actually commanded from above by the common high-road
across the mountains--the very place where the police would most
probably pass. Why, five shabby short guns held us helpless here about
half an hour ago. The quarter of a company of any kind of soldiers could
have blown us over the precipice. Whatever is the meaning of this odd
little nook of grass and flowers, it is not an entrenched position. It
is something else; it has some other strange sort of importance; some
value that I do not understand. It is more like an accidental theatre or
a natural green-room; it is like the scene for some romantic comedy; it
is like....”
As the little priest’s words lengthened and lost themselves in a dull
and dreamy sincerity, Muscari, whose animal senses were alert and
impatient, heard a new noise in the mountains. Even for him the sound
was as yet very small and faint; but he could have sworn the evening
breeze bore with it something like the pulsation of horses’ hoofs and a
distant hallooing.
At the same moment, and long before the vibration had touched the
less-experienced English ears, Montano the brigand ran up the bank above
them and stood in the broken hedge, steadying himself against a tree and
peering down the road. He was a strange figure as he stood there, for he
had assumed a flapped fantastic hat and swinging baldric and cutlass in
his capacity of bandit king, but the bright prosaic tweed of the courier
showed through in patches all over him.
The next moment he turned his olive, sneering face and made a movement
with his hand. The brigands scattered at the signal, not in confusion,
but in what was evidently a kind of guerrilla discipline. Instead of
occupying the road along the ridge, they sprinkled themselves along the
side of it behind the trees and the hedge, as if watching unseen for an
enemy. The noise beyond grew stronger, beginning to shake the mountain
road, and a voice could be clearly heard calling out orders. The
brigands swayed and huddled, cursing and whispering, and the evening
air was full of little metallic noises as they cocked their pistols, or
loosened their knives, or trailed their scabbards over the stones. Then
the noises from both quarters seemed to meet on the road above; branches
broke, horses neighed, men cried out.
“A rescue!” cried Muscari, springing to his feet and waving his hat;
“the gendarmes are on them! Now for freedom and a blow for it! Now to
be rebels against robbers! Come, don’t let us leave everything to
the police; that is so dreadfully modern. Fall on the rear of these
ruffians. The gendarmes are rescuing us; come, friends, let us rescue
the gendarmes!”
And throwing his hat over the trees, he drew his cutlass once more and
began to escalade the slope up to the road. Frank Harrogate jumped up
and ran across to help him, revolver in hand, but was astounded to hear
himself imperatively recalled by the raucous voice of his father, who
seemed to be in great agitation.
“I won’t have it,” said the banker in a choking voice; “I command you
not to interfere.”
“But, father,” said Frank very warmly, “an Italian gentleman has led the
way. You wouldn’t have it said that the English hung back.”
“It is useless,” said the older man, who was trembling violently, “it is
useless. We must submit to our lot.”
Father Brown looked at the banker; then he put his hand instinctively as
if on his heart, but really on the little bottle of poison; and a great
light came into his face like the light of the revelation of death.
Muscari meanwhile, without waiting for support, had crested the bank
up to the road, and struck the brigand king heavily on the shoulder,
causing him to stagger and swing round. Montano also had his cutlass
unsheathed, and Muscari, without further speech, sent a slash at his
head which he was compelled to catch and parry. But even as the two
short blades crossed and clashed the King of Thieves deliberately
dropped his point and laughed.
“What’s the good, old man?” he said in spirited Italian slang; “this
damned farce will soon be over.”
“What do you mean, you shuffler?” panted the fire-eating poet. “Is your
courage a sham as well as your honesty?”
“Everything about me is a sham,” responded the ex-courier in complete
good humour. “I am an actor; and if I ever had a private character, I
have forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine
courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and you can’t fight a duel
with that.” And he laughed with boyish pleasure and fell into his old
straddling attitude, with his back to the skirmish up the road.
Darkness was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to
discern much of the progress of the struggle, save that tall men were
pushing their horses’ muzzles through a clinging crowd of brigands,
who seemed more inclined to harass and hustle the invaders than to kill
them. It was more like a town crowd preventing the passage of the police
than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last stand of doomed and
outlawed men of blood. Just as he was rolling his eyes in bewilderment
he felt a touch on his elbow, and found the odd little priest standing
there like a small Noah with a large hat, and requesting the favour of a
word or two.
“Signor Muscari,” said the cleric, “in this queer crisis personalities
may be pardoned. I may tell you without offence of a way in which you
will do more good than by helping the gendarmes, who are bound to break
through in any case. You will permit me the impertinent intimacy, but do
you care about that girl? Care enough to marry her and make her a good
husband, I mean?”
“Yes,” said the poet quite simply.
“Does she care about you?”
“I think so,” was the equally grave reply.
“Then go over there and offer yourself,” said the priest: “offer her
everything you can; offer her heaven and earth if you’ve got them. The
time is short.”
“Why?” asked the astonished man of letters.
“Because,” said Father Brown, “her Doom is coming up the road.”
“Nothing is coming up the road,” argued Muscari, “except the rescue.”
“Well, you go over there,” said his adviser, “and be ready to rescue her
from the rescue.”
Almost as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush
of the escaping brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass
like defeated men pursued; and the great cocked hats of the mounted
gendarmerie were seen passing along above the broken hedge. Another
order was given; there was a noise of dismounting, and a tall officer
with cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand appeared
in the gap that was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves. There was a
momentary silence, broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who
cried out in a hoarse and strangled voice: “Robbed! I’ve been robbed!”
“Why, that was hours ago,” cried his son in astonishment: “when you were
robbed of two thousand pounds.”
“Not of two thousand pounds,” said the financier, with an abrupt and
terrible composure, “only of a small bottle.”
The policeman with the grey imperial was striding across the green
hollow. Encountering the King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him
on the shoulder with something between a caress and a buffet and gave
him a push that sent him staggering away. “You’ll get into trouble,
too,” he said, “if you play these tricks.”
Again to Muscari’s artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of
a great outlaw at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the
Harrogate group and said: “Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name
of the law for embezzlement of the funds of the Hull and Huddersfield
Bank.”
The great banker nodded with an odd air of business assent, seemed to
reflect a moment, and before they could interpose took a half turn and
a step that brought him to the edge of the outer mountain wall. Then,
flinging up his hands, he leapt exactly as he leapt out of the coach.
But this time he did not fall into a little meadow just beneath; he fell
a thousand feet below, to become a wreck of bones in the valley.
The anger of the Italian policeman, which he expressed volubly to Father
Brown, was largely mixed with admiration. “It was like him to escape us
at last,” he said. “He was a great brigand if you like. This last
trick of his I believe to be absolutely unprecedented. He fled with
the company’s money to Italy, and actually got himself captured by sham
brigands in his own pay, so as to explain both the disappearance of
the money and the disappearance of himself. That demand for ransom was
really taken seriously by most of the police. But for years he’s been
doing things as good as that, quite as good as that. He will be a
serious loss to his family.”
Muscari was leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him, as
she did for many a year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could
not help having a smile and a hand of half-mocking friendship for the
indefensible Ezza Montano. “And where are you going next?” he asked him
over his shoulder.
“Birmingham,” answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. “Didn’t I tell
you I was a Futurist? I really do believe in those things if I believe
in anything. Change, bustle and new things every morning. I am going to
Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield, Glasgow, Chicago--in
short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!”
“In short,” said Muscari, “to the real Paradise of Thieves.”
THREE -- The Duel of Dr Hirsch
M. MAURICE BRUN and M. Armand Armagnac were crossing the sunlit Champs
Elysee with a kind of vivacious respectability. They were both short,
brisk and bold. They both had black beards that did not seem to belong
to their faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair
look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark wedge of beard apparently
affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two
beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They
were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of