Incredulity

The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926)

G. K. Chesterton

ONE: The Resurrection of Father Brown

THERE was a brief period during which Father Brown enjoyed, or rather did not enjoy, something like fame. He was a nine days’ wonder in the newspapers; he was even a common topic of controversy in the weekly reviews; his exploits were narrated eagerly and inaccurately in any number of clubs and drawing—rooms, especially in America. Incongruous and indeed incredible as it may seem to any one who knew him, his adventures as a detective were even made the subject of short stories appearing in magazines.

Strangely enough, this wandering limelight struck him in the most obscure, or at least the most remote, of his many places of residence. He had been sent out to officiate, as something between a missionary and a parish priest, in one of those sections of the northern coast of South America, where strips of country still cling insecurely to European powers, or are continually threatening to become independent republics, under the gigantic shadow of President Monroe. The population was red and brown with pink spots; that is, it was Spanish—American, and largely Spanish—American—Indian, but there was a considerable and increasing infiltration of Americans of the northern sort—Englishmen, Germans, and the rest. And the trouble seems to have begun when one of these visitors, very recently landed and very much annoyed at having lost one of his bags, approached the first building of which he came in sight—which happened to be the mission—house and chapel attached to it, in front of which ran a long veranda and a long row of stakes, up which were trained the black twisted vines, their square leaves red with autumn. Behind them, also in a row, a number of human beings sat almost as rigid as the stakes, and coloured in some fashion like the vines. For while their broad—brimmed hats were as black as their unblinking eyes, the complexions of many of them might have been made out of the dark red timber of those transatlantic forests. Many of them were smoking very long, thin black cigars; and in all that group the smoke was almost the only moving thing. The visitor would probably have described them as natives, though some of them were very proud of Spanish blood. But he was not one to draw any fine distinction between Spaniards and Red Indians, being rather disposed to dismiss people from the scene when once he had convicted them of being native to it.

He was a newspaper man from Kansas City, a lean, light— haired man with what Meredith called an adventurous nose; one could almost fancy it found its way by feeling its way and moved like the proboscis of an ant—eater. His name was Snaith, and his parents, after some obscure meditation, had called him Saul, a fact which he had the good feeling to conceal as far as possible. Indeed, he had ultimately compromised by calling himself Paul, though by no means for the same reason that had affected the Apostle of the Gentiles. On the contrary, so far as he had any views on such things, the name of the persecutor would have been more appropriate; for he regarded organized religion with the conventional contempt which can be learnt more easily from Ingersoll than from Voltaire. And this was, as it happened, the not very important side of his character which he turned towards the mission— station and the groups in front of the veranda. Something in their shameless repose and indifference inflamed his own fury of efficiency; and, as he could get no particular answer to his first questions, he began to do all the talking himself.

Standing out there in the strong sunshine, a spick—and—span figure in his Panama hat and neat clothes, his grip—sack held m a steely grip, he began to shout at the people in the shadow. He began to explain to them very loudly why they were lazy and filthy, and bestially ignorant and lower than the beasts that perish, in case this problem should have previously exercised their minds. In his opinion it was the deleterious influence of priests that had made them so miserably poor and so hopelessly oppressed that they were able to sit in the shade and smoke and do nothing.

‘And a mighty soft crowd you must be at that,’ he said, ‘to be bullied by these stuck—up josses because they walk about in their mitres and their tiaras and their gold copes and other glad rags, looking down on everybody else like dirt— being bamboozled by crowns and canopies and sacred umbrellas like a kid at a pantomime; just because a pompous old High Priest of Mumbo—Jumbo looks as if he was the lord of the earth. What about you? What do you look like, you poor simps? I tell you, that’s why you’re way—back in barbarism and can’t read or write and—‘

At this point the High Priest of Mumbo—Jumbo came in an undignified hurry out of the door of the mission—house, not looking very like a lord of the earth, but rather like a bundle of black second— hand clothes buttoned round a short bolster in the semblance of a guy. He was not wearing his tiara, supposing him to possess one, but a shabby broad hat not very dissimilar from those of the Spanish Indians, and it was thrust to the back of his head with a gesture of botheration. He seemed just about to speak to the motionless natives when he caught sight of the stranger and said quickly:

‘Oh, can I be of any assistance? Would you like to come inside?’

Mr Paul Snaith came inside; and it was the beginning of a considerable increase of that journalist’s information on many things. Presumably his journalistic instinct was stronger than his prejudices, as, indeed, it often is in clever journalists; and he asked a good many questions, the answers to which interested and surprised him. He discovered that the Indians could read and write, for the simple reason that the priest had taught them; but that they did not read or write any more than they could help, from a natural preference for more direct communications. He learned that these strange people, who sat about in heaps on the veranda without stirring a hair, could work quite hard on their own patches of land; especially those of them who were more than half Spanish; and he learned with still more astonishment that they all had patches of land that were really their own. That much was part of a stubborn tradition that seemed quite native to natives. But in that also the priest had played a certain part, and by doing so had taken perhaps what was his first and last part in politics, if it was only local politics.

There had recently swept through that region one of those fevers of atheist and almost anarchist Radicalism which break out periodically in countries of the Latin culture, generally beginning in a secret society and generally ending in a civil war and in very little else. The local leader of the iconoclastic party was a certain Alvarez, a rather picturesque adventurer of Portuguese nationality but, as his enemies said, of partly Negro origin, the head of any number of lodges and temples of initiation of the sort that in such places clothe even atheism with something mystical. The leader on the more conservative side was a much more commonplace person, a very wealthy man named Mendoza, the owner of many factories and quite respectable, but not very exciting. It was the general opinion that the cause of law and order would have been entirely lost if it had not adopted a more popular policy of its own, in the form of securing land for the peasants; and this movement had mainly originated from the little mission— station of Father Brown.

While he was talking to the journalist, Mendoza, the Conservative leader, came in. He was a stout, dark man, with a bald head like a pear and a round body also like a pear; he was smoking a very fragrant cigar, but he threw it away, perhaps a little theatrically, when he came into the presence of the priest, as if he had been entering church; and bowed with a curve that in so corpulent a gentleman seemed quite improbable. He was always exceedingly serious in his social gestures, especially towards religious institutions. He was one of those laymen who are much more ecclesiastical than ecclesiastics. It embarrassed Father Brown a good deal, especially when carried thus into private life.

‘I think I am an anti—clerical,’ Father Brown would say with a faint smile; ‘but there wouldn’t be half so much clericalism if they would only leave things to the clerics.’

‘Why Mr Mendoza,’ exclaimed the journalist with a new animation,’ I think we have met before. Weren’t you at the Trade Congress in Mexico last year?’

The heavy eyelids of Mr Mendoza showed a flutter of recognition, and he smiled in his slow way. ‘I remember.’

‘Pretty big business done there in an hour or two,’ said Snaith with relish.’ Made a good deal of difference to you, too, I guess.’

‘I have been very fortunate,’ said Mendoza modestly.

‘Don’t you believe it!’ cried the enthusiastic Snaith.’ Good fortune comes to the people who know when to catch hold; and you caught hold good and sure. But I hope I’m not interrupting your business?’

‘Not at all,’ said the other. ‘I often have the honour of calling on the padre for a little talk. Merely for a little talk.’

It seemed as if this familiarity between Father Brown and a successful and even famous man of business completed the reconciliation between the priest and the practical Mr Snaith. He felt, it might be supposed, a new respectability clothe the station and the mission, and was ready to overlook such occasional reminders of the existence of religion as a chapel and a presbytery can seldom wholly avoid. He became quite enthusiastic about the priest’s programme— at least on its secular and social side—and announced himself ready at any moment to act in the capacity of a live wire for its communication to the world at large. And it was at this point that Father Brown began to find the journalist rather more troublesome in his sympathy than in his hostility.

Mr Paul Snaith set out vigorously to feature Father Brown. He sent long and loud eulogies on him across the continent to his newspaper in the Middle West. He took snapshots of the unfortunate cleric in the most commonplace occupations, and exhibited them in gigantic photographs in the gigantic Sunday papers of the United States. He turned his sayings into slogans, and was continually presenting the world with ‘A message’ from the reverend gentleman in South America. Any stock less strong and strenuously receptive than the American race would have become very much bored with Father Brown. As it was, he received handsome and eager offers to go on a lecturing tour in the States; and when he declined, the terms were raised with expressions of respectful wonder. A series of stories about him, like the stories of Sherlock Holmes, were, by the instrumentality of Mr Snaith, planned out and put before the hero with requests for his assistance and encouragement. As the priest found they had started, he could offer no suggestion except that they should stop. And this in turn was taken by Mr Snaith as the text for a discussion on whether Father Brown should disappear temporarily over a cliff, in the manner of Dr Watson’s hero. To all these demands the priest had patiently to reply in writing, saying that he would consent on such terms to the temporary cessation of the stories and begging that a considerable interval might occur before they began again. The notes he wrote grew shorter and shorter; and as he wrote the last of them, he sighed.

Needless to say, this strange boom in the North reacted on the little outpost in the South where he had expected to live in so lonely an exile. The considerable English and American population already on the spot began to be proud of possessing so widely advertised a person. American tourists, of the sort who land with a loud demand for Westminster Abbey, landed on that distant coast with a loud demand for Father Brown. They were within measurable distance of running excursion trains named after him, and bringing crowds to see him as if he were a public monument. He was especially troubled by the active and ambitious new traders and shopkeepers of the place, who were perpetually pestering him to try their wares and to give them testimonials. Even if the testimonials were not forthcoming, they would prolong the correspondence for the purpose of collecting autographs. As he was a good—natured person they got a good deal of what they wanted out of him; and it was in answer to a particular request from a Frankfort wine—merchant named Eckstein that he wrote hastily a few words on a card, which were to prove a terrible turning— point in his life.

Eckstein was a fussy little man with fuzzy hair and pince— nez, who was wildly anxious that the priest should not only try some of his celebrated medicinal port, but should let him know where and when he would drink it, in acknowledging its receipt. The priest was not particularly surprised at the request, for he was long past surprise at the lunacies of advertisement. So he scribbled something down and turned to other business which seemed a little more sensible. He was again interrupted, by a note from no less a person than his political enemy Alvarez, asking him to come to a conference at which it was hoped that a compromise on an outstanding question might be reached; and suggesting an appointment that evening at a cafe just outside the walls of the little town. To this also he sent a message of acceptance by the rather florid and military messenger who was waiting for it; and then, having an hour or two before him, sat down to attempt to get through a little of his own legitimate business. At the end of the time he poured himself out a glass of Mr Eckstein’s remarkable wine and, glancing at the clock with a humorous expression, drank it and went out into the night.

Strong moonlight lay on the little Spanish town, so that when he came to the picturesque gateway, with its rather rococo arch and the fantastic fringe of palms beyond it, it looked rather like a scene in a Spanish opera. One long leaf of palm with jagged edges, black against the moon, hung down on the other side of the arch, visible through the archway, and had something of the look of the jaw of a black crocodile. The fancy would not have lingered in his imagination but for something else that caught his naturally alert eye. The air was deathly still, and there was not a stir of wind; but he distinctly saw the pendent palm—leaf move.

He looked around him and realized that he was alone. He had left behind the last houses, which were mostly closed and shuttered, and was walking between two long blank walls built of large and shapeless but flattened stones, tufted here and there with the queer prickly weeds of that region— walls which ran parallel all the way to the gateway. He could not see the lights of the cafe outside the gate; probably it was too far away. Nothing could be seen under the arch but a wider expanse of large—flagged pavement, pale in the moon, with the straggling prickly pear here and there. He had a strong sense of the smell of evil; he felt queer physical oppression; but he did not think of stopping. His courage, which was considerable, was perhaps even less strong a part of him than his curiosity. All his life he had been led by an intellectual hunger for the truth, even of trifles. He often controlled it in the name of proportion; but it was always there. He walked straight through the gateway, and on the other side a man sprang like a monkey out of the tree— top and struck at him with a knife. At the same moment another man came crawling swiftly along the wall and, whirling a cudgel round his head, brought it down. Father Brown turned, staggered, and sank in a heap, but as he sank there dawned on his round face an expression of mild and immense surprise.

There was living in the same little town at this time another young American, particularly different from Mr Paul Snaith. His name was John Adams Race, and he was an electrical engineer, employed by Mendoza to fit out the old town with all the new conveniences. He was a figure far less familiar in satire and international gossip than that of the American journalist. Yet, as a matter of fact, America contains a million men of the moral type of Race to one of the moral type of Snaith. He was exceptional in being exceptionally good at his job, but in every other way he was very simple. He had begun life as a druggist’s assistant in a Western village, and risen by sheer work and merit; but he still regarded his home town as the natural heart of the habitable world. He had been taught a very Puritan, or purely Evangelical, sort of Christianity from the Family Bible at his mother’s knee; and in so far as he had time to have any religion, that was still his religion. Amid all the dazzling lights of the latest and even wildest discoveries, when he was at the very edge and extreme of experiment, working miracles of light and sound like a god creating new stars and solar systems, he never for a moment doubted that the things ‘back home’ were the best things in the world; his mother and the Family Bible and the quiet and quaint morality of his village. He had as serious and noble a sense of the sacredness of his mother as if he had been a frivolous Frenchman. He was quite sure the Bible religion was really the right thing; only he vaguely missed it wherever he went in the modern world. He could hardly be expected to sympathize with the religious externals of Catholic countries; and in a dislike of mitres and croziers he sympathized with Mr Snaith, though not in so cocksure a fashion. He had no liking for the public bowings and scrapings of Mendoza and certainly no temptation to the masonic mysticism of the atheist Alvarez. Perhaps all that semi—tropical life was too coloured for him, shot with Indian red and Spanish gold. Anyhow, when he said there was nothing to touch his home town, he was not boasting. He really meant that there was somewhere something plain and unpretentious and touching, which he really respected more than anything else in the world. Such being the mental attitude of John Adams Race in a South American station, there had been growing on him for some time a curious feeling, which contradicted all his prejudices and for which he could not account. For the truth was this: that the only thing he had ever met in his travels that in the least reminded him of the old wood— pile and the provincial proprieties and the Bible on his mother’s knee was (for some inscrutable reason) the round face and black clumsy umbrella of Father Brown.

He found himself insensibly watching that commonplace and even comic black figure as it went bustling about; watching it with an almost morbid fascination, as if it were a walking riddle or contradiction. He had found something he could not help liking in the heart of everything he hated; it was as if he had been horribly tormented by lesser demons and then found that the Devil was quite an ordinary person.

Thus it happened that, looking out of his window on that moonlit night, he saw the Devil go by, the demon of unaccountable blamelessness, in his broad black hat and long black coat, shuffling along the street towards the gateway, and saw it with an interest which he could not himself understand. He wondered where the priest was going, and what he was really up to; and remained gazing out into the moonlit street long after the little black figure had passed. And then he saw something else that intrigued him further. Two other men whom he recognized passed across his window as across a lighted stage. A sort of blue limelight of the moon ran in a spectral halo round the big bush of hair that stood erect on the head of little Eckstein, the wine—seller, and it outlined a taller and darker figure with an eagle profile and a queer old— fashioned and very top—heavy black hat, which seemed to make the whole outline still more bizarre, like a shape in a shadow pantomime. Race rebuked himself for allowing the moon to play such tricks with his fancy; for on a second glance he recognized the black Spanish sidewhiskers and high—featured face of Dr Calderon, a worthy medical man of the town, whom he had once found attending professionally on Mendoza. Still, there was something in the way the men were whispering to each other and peering up the street that struck him as peculiar. On a sudden impulse he leapt over the low window— sill and himself went bareheaded up the road, following their trail. He saw them disappear under the dark archway, and a moment after there came a dreadful cry from beyond; curiously loud and piercing, and all the more blood—curdling to Race because it said something very distinctly in some tongue that he did not know.

The next moment there was a rushing of feet, more cries, and then a confused roar of rage or grief that shook the turrets and tall palm trees of the place; there was a movement in the mob that had gathered, as if they were sweeping backwards through the gateway. And then the dark archway resounded with a new voice, this time intelligible to him and falling with the note of doom, as someone shouted through the gateway:

‘Father Brown is dead!’

He never knew what prop gave way in his mind, or why something on which he had been counting suddenly failed him; but he ran towards the gateway and was just in time to meet his countryman, the journalist Snaith, coming out of the dark entrance, deadly pale and snapping his fingers nervously.

‘It’s quite true,’ said Snaith, with something which for him approached to reverence. ‘He’s a goner. The doctor’s been looking at him, and there’s no hope. Some of these damned Dagos clubbed him as he came through the gate—God knows why. It’ll be a great loss to the place.’

Race did not or perhaps could not reply, but ran on under the arch to the scene beyond. The small black figure lay where it had fallen on the wilderness of wide stones starred here and there with green thorn; and the great crowd was being kept back, chiefly by the mere gestures of one gigantic figure in the foreground. For there were many there who swayed hither and thither at the mere movement of his hand, as if he had been a magician.

Alvarez, the dictator and demagogue, was a tall, swaggering figure, always rather flamboyantly clad, and on this occasion he wore a green uniform with embroideries like silver snakes crawling all over it, with an order round his neck hung on a very vivid maroon ribbon. His close curling hair was already grey, and in contrast his complexion, which his friends called olive and his foes octoroon, looked almost literally golden, as if it were a mask moulded in gold. But his large—featured face, which was powerful and humorous, was at this moment properly grave and grim. He had been waiting, he explained, for Father Brown at the cafe when he had heard a rustle and a fall and, coming out, had found the corpse lying on the flagstones.

‘I know what some of you are thinking,’ he said, looking round proudly, ‘and if you are afraid of me—as you are—I will say it for you. I am an atheist; I have no god to call on for those who will not take my word. But I tell you in the name of every root of honour that may be left to a soldier and a man, that I had no part in this. If I had the men here that did it, I would rejoice to hang them on that tree.’

‘Naturally we are glad to hear you say so,’ said old Mendoza stiffly and solemnly, standing by the body of his fallen coadjutor. ‘This blow has been too appalling for us to say what else we feel at present. I suggest that it will be more decent and proper if we remove my friend’s body and break up this irregular meeting. I understand,’ he added gravely to the doctor, ‘that there is unfortunately no doubt.’

‘There is no doubt,’ said Dr Calderon.

John Race went back to his lodgings sad and with a singular sense of emptiness. It seemed impossible that he should miss a man whom he never knew. He learned that the funeral was to take place next day; for all felt that the crisis should be past as quickly as possible, for fear of riots that were hourly growing more probable. When Snaith had seen the row of Red Indians sitting on the veranda, they might have been a row of ancient Aztec images carved in red wood. But he had not seen them as they were when they heard that the priest was dead.

Indeed they would certainly have risen in revolution and lynched the republican leader, if they had not been immediately blocked by the direct necessity of behaving respectfully to the coffin of their own religious leader. The actual assassins, whom it would have been most natural to lynch, seemed to have vanished into thin air. Nobody knew their names; and nobody would ever know whether the dying man had even seen their faces. That strange look of surprise that was apparently his last look on earth might have been the recognition of their faces. Alvarez repeated violently that it was no work of his, and attended the funeral, walking behind the coffin in his splendid silver and green uniform with a sort of bravado of reverence.

Behind the veranda a flight of stone steps scaled a very steep green bank, fenced by a cactus—hedge, and up this the coffin was laboriously lifted to the ground above, and placed temporarily at the foot of the great gaunt crucifix that dominated the road and guarded the consecrated ground. Below in the road were great seas of people lamenting and telling their beads—an orphan population that had lost a father. Despite all these symbols that were provocative enough to him, Alvarez behaved with restraint and respect; and all would have gone well—as Race told himself—had the others only let him alone.

Race told himself bitterly that old Mendoza had always looked like an old fool and had now very conspicuously and completely behaved like an old fool. By a custom common in simpler societies, the coffin was left open and the face uncovered, bringing the pathos to the point of agony for all those simple people. This, being consonant to tradition, need have done no harm; but some officious person had added to it the custom of the French freethinkers, of having speeches by the graveside. Mendoza proceeded to make a speech—a rather long speech, and the longer it was, the longer and lower sank John Race’s spirits and sympathies with the religious ritual involved. A list of saintly attributes, apparently of the most antiquated sort, was rolled out with the dilatory dullness of an after—dinner speaker who does not know how to sit down. That was bad enough; but Mendoza had also the ineffable stupidity to start reproaching and even taunting his political opponents. In three minutes he had succeeded in making a scene, and a very extraordinary scene it was.

‘We may well ask,’ he said, looking around him pompously; ‘we may well ask where such virtues can be found among those who have madly abandoned the creed of their fathers. It is when we have atheists among us, atheist leaders, nay sometimes even atheist rulers, that we find their infamous philosophy bearing fruit in crimes like this. If we ask who murdered this holy man, we shall assuredly find—‘

Africa of the forests looked out of the eyes of Alvarez the hybrid adventurer; and Race fancied he could see suddenly that the man was after all a barbarian, who could not control himself to the end; one might guess that all his ‘illuminated’ transcendentalism had a touch of Voodoo. Anyhow, Mendoza could not continue, for Alvarez had sprung up and was shouting back at him and shouting him down, with infinitely superior lungs.

‘Who murdered him?’ he roared. ‘Your God murdered him! His own God murdered him! According to you, he murders all his faithful and foolish servants—as he murdered that one,’ and he made a violent gesture, not towards the coffin but the crucifix. Seeming to control himself a little, he went on in a tone still angry but more argumentative: ‘I don’t believe it, but you do. Isn’t it better to have no God than one that robs you in this fashion? I, at least, am not afraid to say that there is none. There is no power in all this blind and brainless universe that can hear your prayer or return your friend. Though you beg Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Though I dare Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Here and now I will put it to the test—I defy the God who is not there to waken the man who sleeps for ever.’

There was a shock of silence, and the demagogue had made his sensation.

‘We might have known,’ cried Mendoza in a thick gobbling voice, ‘when we allowed such men as you—‘

A new voice cut into his speech; a high and shrill voice with a Yankee accent.

‘Stop! Stop!’ cried Snaith the journalist; ‘something’s up! I swear I saw him move.’

He went racing up the steps and rushed to the coffin, while the mob below swayed with indescribable frenzies. The next moment he had turned a face of amazement over his shoulder and made a signal with his finger to Dr Calderon, who hastened forward to confer with him. When the two men stepped away again from the coffin, all could see that the position of the head had altered. A roar of excitement rose from the crowd and seemed to stop suddenly, as if cut off in mid—air; for the priest in the coffin gave a groan and raised himself on one elbow, looking with bleared and blinking eyes at the crowd.

John Adams Race, who had hitherto known only miracles of science, never found himself able in after—years to describe the topsy— turvydom of the next few days. He seemed to have burst out of the world of time and space, and to be living in the impossible. In half an hour the whole of that town and district had been transformed into something never known for a thousand years; a medieval people turned to a mob of monks by a staggering miracle; a Greek city where the god had descended among men. Thousands prostrated themselves in the road; hundreds took vows on the spot; and even the outsiders, like the two Americans, were able to think and speak of nothing but the prodigy. Alvarez himself was shaken, as well he might be; and sat down, with his head upon his hands.

And in the midst of all this tornado of beatitude was a little man struggling to be heard. His voice was small and faint, and the noise was deafening. He made weak little gestures that seemed more those of irritation than anything else. He came to the edge of the parapet above the crowd, waving it to be quiet, with movements rather like the flap of the short wings of a penguin. There was something a little more like a lull in the noise; and then Father Brown for the first time reached the utmost stretch of the indignation that he could launch against his children.

‘Oh, you silly people,’ he said in a high and quavering voice; ‘Oh, you silly, silly people.’

Then he suddenly seemed to pull himself together, made a bolt for the steps with his more normal gait, and began hurriedly to descend.

‘Where are you going, Father?’ said Mendoza, with more than his usual veneration.

‘To the telegraph office,’ said Father Brown hastily. ‘What? No; of course it’s not a miracle. Why should there be a miracle? Miracles are not so cheap as all that.’

And he came tumbling down the steps, the people flinging themselves before him to implore his blessing.

‘Bless you, bless you,’ said Father Brown hastily. ‘God bless you all and give you more sense.’

And he scuttled away with extraordinary rapidity to the telegraph office, where he wired to his Bishop’s secretary: ‘There is some mad story about a miracle here; hope his lordship not give authority. Nothing in it.’

As he turned away from his effort, he tottered a little with the reaction, and John Race caught him by the arm.

‘Let me see you home,’ he said; ‘you deserve more than these people are giving you.’

John Race and the priest were seated in the presbytery; the table was still piled up with the papers with which the latter had been wrestling the day before; the bottle of wine and the emptied wine— glass still stood where he had left them.

‘And now,’ said Father Brown almost grimly, ‘I can begin to think.’

‘I shouldn’t think too hard just yet,’ said the American. ‘You must be wanting a rest. Besides, what are you going to think about?’

‘I have pretty often had the task of investigating murders, as it happens,’ said Father Brown. ‘Now I have got to investigate my own murder.’

‘If I were you,’ said Race, ‘I should take a little wine first.’

Father Brown stood up and filled himself another glass, lifted it, looked thoughtfully into vacancy, and put it down again. Then he sat down once more and said:

‘Do you know what I felt like when I died? You may not believe it, but my feeling was one of overwhelming astonishment.’

‘Well,’ answered Race, ‘I suppose you were astonished at being knocked on the head.’

Father Brown leaned over to him and said in a low voice, ‘I was astonished at not being knocked on the head.’

Race looked at him for a moment as if he thought the knock on the head had been only too effective; but he only said: ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that when that man brought his bludgeon down with a great swipe, it stopped at my head and did not even touch it. In the same way, the other fellow made as if to strike me with a knife, but he never gave me a scratch. It was just like play—acting. I think it was. But then followed the extraordinary thing.’

He looked thoughtfully at the papers on the table for a moment and then went on:

‘Though I had not even been touched with knife or stick, I began to feel my legs doubling up under me and my very life failing. I knew I was being struck down by something, but it was not by those weapons. Do you know what I think it was?’ And he pointed to the wine on the table.

Race picked up the wine—glass and looked at it and smelt it.

‘I think you are right,’ he said. ‘I began as a druggist and studied chemistry. I couldn’t say for certain without an analysis; but I think there’s something very unusual in this stuff. There are drugs by which the Asiatics produce a temporary sleep that looks like death.’

‘Quite so,’ said the priest calmly.’ The whole of this miracle was faked, for some reason or other. That funeral scene was staged—and timed. I think it is part of that raving madness of publicity that has got hold of Snaith; but I can hardly believe he would go quite so far, merely for that. After all, it’s one thing to make copy out of me and run me as a sort of sham Sherlock Holmes, and—‘

Even as the priest spoke his face altered. His blinking eyelids shut suddenly and he stood up as if he were choking. Then he put one wavering hand as if groping his way towards the door.

‘Where are you going?’ asked the other in some wonder.

‘If you ask me,’ said Father Brown, who was quite white, ‘I was going to pray. Or rather, to praise.’

‘I’m not sure I understand. What is the matter with you?’

‘I was going to praise God for having so strangely and so incredibly saved me—saved me by an inch.’

‘Of course,’ said Race, ‘I am not of your religion; but believe me, I have religion enough to understand that. Of course, you would thank God for saving you from death.’

‘No,’ said the priest. ‘Not from death. From disgrace.’

The other sat staring; and the priest’s next words broke out of him with a sort of cry. ‘And if it had only been my disgrace! But it was the disgrace of all I stand for; the disgrace of the Faith that they went about to encompass. What it might have been! The most huge and horrible scandal ever launched against us since the last lie was choked in the throat of Titus Oates.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ demanded his companion.

‘Well, I had better tell you at once,’ said the priest; and sitting down, he went on more composedly: ‘It came to me in a flash when I happened to mention Snaith and Sherlock Holmes. Now I happen to remember what I wrote about his absurd scheme; it was the natural thing to write, and yet I think they had ingeniously manoeuvred me into writing just those words. They were something like ‘I am ready to die and come to life again like Sherlock Holmes, if that is the best way.’ And the moment I thought of that, I realized that I had been made to write all sorts of things of that kind, all pointing to the same idea. I wrote, as if to an accomplice, saying that I would drink the drugged wine at a particular time. Now, don’t you see?’

Race sprang to his feet still staring: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I began to see.’

‘They would have boomed the miracle. Then they would have bust up the miracle. And what is the worst, they would have proved that I was in the conspiracy. It would have been our sham miracle. That’s all there is to it; and about as near hell as you and I will ever be, I hope.’

Then he said, after a pause, in quite a mild voice: ‘They certainly would have got quite a lot of good copy out of me.’

Race looked at the table and said darkly: ‘How many of these brutes were in it?’

Father Brown shook his head. ‘More than I like to think of,’ he said; ‘but I hope some of them were only tools. Alvarez might think that all’s fair in war, perhaps; he has a queer mind. I’m very much afraid that Mendoza is an old hypocrite; I never trusted him, and he hated my action in an industrial matter. But all that will wait; I have only got to thank God for the escape. And especially that I wired at once to the Bishop.’

John Race appeared to be very thoughtful. ‘You’ve told me a lot I didn’t know,’ he said at last, ‘and I feel inclined to tell you the only thing you don’t know. I can imagine how those fellows calculated well enough. They thought any man alive, waking up in a coffin to find himself canonized like a saint, and made into a walking miracle for everyone to admire, would be swept along with his worshippers and accept the crown of glory that fell on him out the sky. And I reckon their calculation was pretty practical psychology, as men go. I’ve seen all sorts of men in all sorts of places; and I tell you frankly I don’t believe there’s one man in a thousand who could wake up like that with all his wits about him; and while he was still almost talking in his sleep, would have the sanity and the simplicity and the humility to—‘ He was much surprised to find himself moved, and his level voice wavering.

Father Brown was gazing abstractedly, and in a rather cockeyed fashion, at the bottle on the table. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘ what about a bottle of real wine?’

TWO: The Arrow of Heaven

IT is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. This story, I am happy to say, has to begin with a murdered millionaire; in one sense, indeed, it has to begin with three murdered millionaires, which some may regard as an cmbarras de richesse. But it was chiefly this coincidence or continuity of criminal policy that took the whole affair out of the ordinary run of criminal cases and made it the extraordinary problem that it was.

It was very generally said that they had all fallen victims to some vendetta or curse attaching to the possession of a relic of great value both intrinsically and historically: a sort of chalice inlaid with precious stones and commonly called the Coptic Cup. Its origin was obscure, but its use was conjectured to be religious; and some attributed the fate that followed its possessors to the fanaticism of some Oriental Christian horrified at its passing through such materialistic hands. But the mysterious slayer, whether or no he was such a fanatic, was already a figure of lurid and sensational interest in the world of journalism and gossip. The nameless being was provided with a name, or a nickname. But it is only with the story of the third victim that we are now concerned; for it was only in this case that a certain Father Brown, who is the subject of these sketches, had an opportunity of making his presence felt.

When Father Brown first stepped off an Atlantic liner on to American soil, he discovered as many other Englishman has done, that he was a much more important person than he had ever supposed. His short figure, his short—sighted and undistinguished countenance, his rather rusty—black clerical clothes, could pass through any crowd in his own country without being noticed as anything unusual, except perhaps unusually insignificant. But America has a genius for the encouragement of fame; and his appearance in one or two curious criminal problems, together with his long association with Flambeau, the ex— criminal and detective, had consolidated a reputation in America out of what was little more than a rumour in England. His round face was blank with surprise when he found himself held up on the quay by a group of journalists, as by a gang of brigands, who asked him questions about all the subjects on which he was least likely to regard himself as an authority, such as the details of female dress and the criminal statistics of the country that he had only that moment clapped his eyes on. Perhaps it was the contrast with the black embattled solidarity of this group that made more vivid another figure that stood apart from it, equally black against the burning white daylight of that brilliant place and season, but entirely solitary; a tall, rather yellow—faced man in great goggles, who arrested him with a gesture when the journalists had finished and said: ‘Excuse me, but maybe you are looking for Captain Wain.’

Some apology may be made for Father Brown; for he himself would have been sincerely apologetic. It must be remembered that he had never seen America before, and more especially that he had never seen that sort of tortoise—shell spectacles before; for the fashion at this time had not spread to England. His first sensation was that of gazing at some goggling sea— monster with a faint suggestion of a diver’s helmet. Otherwise the man was exquisitely dressed; and to Brown, in his innocence, the spectacles seemed the queerest disfigurement for a dandy. It was as if a dandy had adorned himself with a wooden leg as an extra touch of elegance. The question also embarrassed him. An American aviator of the name of Wain, a friend of some friends of his own in France, was indeed one of a long list of people he had some hope of seeing during his American visit; but he had never expected to hear of him so soon.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said doubtfully, ‘are you Captain Wain? Do you— do you know him?’

‘Well, I’m pretty confident I’m not Captain Wain,’ said the man in goggles, with a face of wood. ‘I was pretty clear about that when I saw him waiting for you over there in the car. But the other question’s a bit more problematical. I reckon I know Wain and his uncle, and old man Merton, too. I know old man Merton, but old man Merton don’t know me. And he thinks he has the advantage, and I think I have the advantage. See?’

Father Brown did not quite see. He blinked at the glittering seascape and the pinnacles of the city, and then at the man in goggles. It was not only the masking of the man’s eyes that produced the impression of something impenetrable. Something in his yellow face was almost Asiatic, even Chinese; and his conversation seemed to consist of stratified layers of irony. He was a type to be found here and there in that hearty and sociable population; he was the inscrutable American.

‘My name’s Drage,’ he said, ‘Norman Drage, and I’m an American citizen, which explains everything. At least I imagine your friend Wain would like to explain the rest; so we’ll postpone The Fourth of July till another date.’

Father Brown was dragged in a somewhat dazed condition towards a car at some little distance, in which a young man with tufts of untidy yellow hair and a rather harassed and haggard expression, hailed him from afar, and presented himself as Peter Wain. Before he knew where he was he was stowed in the car and travelling with considerable speed through and beyond the city. He was unused to the impetuous practicality of such American action, and felt about as bewildered as if a chariot drawn by dragons had carried him away into fairyland. It was under these disconcerting conditions that he heard for the first time, in long monologues from Wain, and short sentences from Drage, the story of the Coptic Cup and the two crimes already connected with it.

It seemed that Wain had an uncle named Crake who had a partner named Merton, who was number three in the series of rich business men to whom the cup had belonged. The first of them, Titus P. Trant, the Copper King, had received threatening letters from somebody signing himself Daniel Doom. The name was presumably a pseudonym, but it had come to stand for a very public if not a very popular character; for somebody as well known as Robin Hood and Jack the Ripper combined. For it soon became clear that the writer of the threatening letter did not confine himself to threatening. Anyhow, the upshot was that old Trant was found one morning with his head in his own lily—pond, and there was not the shadow of a clue. The cup was, fortunately, safe in the bank; and it passed with the rest of Trant’s property to his cousin, Brian Horder, who was also a man of great wealth and who was also threatened by the nameless enemy. Brian Horder was picked up dead at the foot of a cliff outside his seaside residence, at which there was a burglary, this time on a large scale. For though the cup apparently again escaped, enough bonds and securities were stolen to leave Horder’s financial affairs in confusion.

‘Brian Horder’s widow,’ explained Wain, ‘had to sell most of his valuables, I believe, and Brander Merton must have purchased the cup at that time, for he had it when I first knew him. But you can guess for yourself that it’s not a very comfortable thing to have.’

‘Has Mr Merton ever had any of the threatening letters?’ asked Father Brown, after a pause.

‘I imagine he has,’ said Mr Drage; and something in his voice made the priest look at him curiously, until he realized that the man in goggles was laughing silently, in a fashion that gave the newcomer something of a chill.

‘I’m pretty sure he has,’ said Peter Wain, frowning. ‘I’ve not seen the letters, only his secretary sees any of his letters, for he is pretty reticent about business matters, as big business men have to be. But I’ve seen him real upset and annoyed with letters; and letters that he tore up, too, before even his secretary saw them. The secretary himself is getting nervous and says he is sure somebody is laying for the old man; and the long and the short of it is, that we’d be very grateful for a little advice in the matter. Everybody knows your great reputation. Father Brown, and the secretary asked me to see if you’d mind coming straight out to the Merton house at once.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Father Brown, on whom the meaning of this apparent kidnapping began to dawn at last. ‘But, really, I don’t see that I can do any more than you can. You’re on the spot, and must have a hundred times more data for a scientific conclusion than a chance visitor.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Drage dryly; ‘our conclusions are much too scientific to be true. I reckon if anything hit a man like Titus P. Trant, it just came out of the sky without waiting for any scientific explanation. What they call a bolt from the blue.’

‘You can’t possibly mean,’ cried Wain, ‘that it was supernatural!’

But it was by no means easy at any time to discover what Mr Drage could possibly mean; except that if he said somebody was a real smart man, he very probably meant he was a fool. Mr Drage maintained an Oriental immobility until the car stopped, a little while after, at what was obviously their destination. It was rather a singular place. They had been driving through a thinly—wooded country that opened into a wide plain, and just in front of them was a building consisting of a single wall or very high fence, round, like a Roman camp, and having rather the appearance of an aerodrome. The barrier did not look like wood or stone, and closer inspection proved it to be of metal.

They all alighted from the car, and one small door in the wall was slid open with considerable caution, after manipulations resembling the opening of a safe. But, much to Father Brown’s surprise, the man called Norman Drage showed no disposition to enter, but took leave of them with sinister gaiety.

‘I won’t come in,’ he said. ‘It ‘ud be too much pleasurable excitement for old man Merton, I reckon. He loves the sight of me so much that he’d die of joy.’

And he strode away, while Father Brown, with increasing wonder, was admitted through the steel door which instantly clicked behind him. Inside was a large and elaborate garden of gay and varied colours, but entirely without any trees or tall shrubs or flowers. In the centre of it rose a house of handsome and even striking architecture, but so high and narrow as rather to resemble a tower. The burning sunlight gleamed on glass roofing here and there at the top, but there seemed to be no windows at all in the lower part of it. Over everything was that spotless and sparkling cleanliness that seemed so native to the clear American air. When they came inside the portal, they stood amid resplendent marble and metals and enamels of brilliant colours, but there was no staircase. Nothing but a single shaft for a lift went up the centre between the solid walls, and the approach to it was guarded by heavy, powerful men like plain—clothes policemen.

‘Pretty elaborate protection, I know,’ said Wain. ‘Maybe it makes you smile a little, Father Brown, to find Merton has to live in a fortress like this without even a tree in the garden for anyone to hide behind. But you don’t know what sort of proposition we’re up against in this country. And perhaps you don’t know just what the name of Brander Merton means. He’s a quiet—looking man enough, and anybody might pass him in the street; not that they get much chance nowadays, for he can only go out now and then in a closed car. But if anything happened to Brander Merton there’d be earthquakes from Alaska to the Cannibal Islands. I fancy there was never a king or emperor who had such power over the nations as he has. After all, I suppose if you’d been asked to visit the tsar, or the king of England, you’d have had the curiosity to go. You mayn’t care much for tsars or millionaires; but it just means that power like that is always interesting. And I hope it’s not against your principles to visit a modern sort of emperor like Merton.’

‘Not at all,’ said Father Brown, quietly. ‘It is my duty to visit prisoners and all miserable men in captivity.’

There was a silence, and the young man frowned with a strange and almost shifty look on his lean face. Then he said, abruptly:

‘Well, you’ve got to remember it isn’t only common crooks or the Black Hand that’s against him. This Daniel Doom is pretty much like the devil. Look how he dropped Trant in his own gardens and Horder outside his house, and got away with it.’

The top floor of the mansion, inside the enormously thick walls, consisted of two rooms; an outer room which they entered, and an inner room that was the great millionaire’s sanctum. They entered the outer room just as two other visitors were coming out of the inner one. One was hailed by Peter Wain as his uncle— a small but very stalwart and active man with a shaven head that looked bald, and a brown face that looked almost too brown to have ever been white. This was old Crake, commonly called Hickory Crake in reminiscence of the more famous Old Hickory, because of his fame in the last Red Indian wars. His companion was a singular contrast—a very dapper gentleman with dark hair like a black varnish and a broad, black ribbon to his monocle: Barnard Blake, who was old Merton’s lawyer and had been discussing with the partners the business of the firm. The four men met in the middle of the outer room and paused for a little polite conversation, in the act of respectively going and coming. And through all goings and comings another figure sat at the back of the room near the inner door, massive and motionless in the half—light from the inner window; a man with a Negro face and enormous shoulders. This was what the humorous self—criticism of America playfully calls the Bad Man; whom his friends might call a bodyguard and his enemies a bravo.

This man never moved or stirred to greet anybody; but the sight of him in the outer room seemed to move Peter Wain to his first nervous query.

‘Is anybody with the chief?’ he asked.

‘Don’t get rattled, Peter,’ chuckled his uncle. ‘Wilton the secretary is with him, and I hope that’s enough for anybody. I don’t believe Wilton ever sleeps for watching Merton. He is better than twenty bodyguards. And he’s quick and quiet as an Indian.’

‘Well, you ought to know,’ said his nephew, laughing. ‘I remember the Red Indian tricks you used to teach me when I was a boy and liked to read Red Indian stories. But in my Red Indian stories Red Indians seemed always to have the worst of it.’

‘They didn’t in real life,’ said the old frontiersman grimly.

‘Indeed?’ inquired the bland Mr Blake. ‘I should have thought they could do very little against our firearms.’

‘I’ve seen an Indian stand under a hundred guns with nothing but a little scalping—knife and kill a white man standing on the top of a fort,’ said Crake.

‘Why, what did he do with it?’ asked the other.

‘Threw it,’ replied Crake, ‘threw it in a flash before a shot could be fired. I don’t know where he learnt the trick.’

‘Well, I hope you didn’t learn it,’ said his nephew, laughing.

‘It seems to me,’ said Father Brown, thoughtfully, ‘that the story might have a moral.’

While they were speaking Mr Wilton, the secretary, had come out of the inner room and stood waiting; a pale, fair—haired man with a square chin and steady eyes with a look like a dog’s; it was not difficult to believe that he had the single— eye of a watchdog.

He only said, ‘Mr Merton can see you in about ten minutes,’ but it served for a signal to break up the gossiping group. Old Crake said he must be off, and his nephew went out with him and his legal companion, leaving Father Brown for the moment alone with his secretary; for the negroid giant at the other end of the room could hardly be felt as if he were human or alive; he sat so motionless with his broad back to them, staring towards the inner room.

‘Arrangements rather elaborate here, I’m afraid,’ said the secretary. ‘You’ve probably heard all about this Daniel Doom, and why it isn’t safe to leave the boss very much alone.’

‘But he is alone just now, isn’t he?’ said Father Brown.

The secretary looked at him with grave, grey eyes. ‘For fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘For fifteen minutes out of the twenty—four hours. That is all the real solitude he has; and that he insists on, for a pretty remarkable reason.’

‘And what is the reason?’ inquired the visitor. Wilton, the secretary, continued his steady gaze, but his mouth, that had been merely grave, became grim.

‘The Coptic Cup,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten the Coptic Cup; but he hasn’t forgotten that or anything else. He doesn’t trust any of us about the Coptic Cup. It’s locked up somewhere and somehow in that room so that only he can find it; and he won’t take it out till we’re all out of the way. So we have to risk that quarter of an hour while he sits and worships it; I reckon it’s the only worshipping he does. Not that there’s any risk really; for I’ve turned all this place into a trap I don’t believe the devil himself could get into— or at any rate, get out of. If this infernal Daniel Doom pays us a visit, he’ll stay to dinner and a good bit later, by God! I sit here on hot bricks for the fifteen minutes, and the instant I heard a shot or a sound of struggle I’d press this button and an electrocuting current would run in a ring round that garden wall, so that it ‘ud be death to cross or climb it. Of course, there couldn’t be a shot, for this is the only way in; and the only window he sits at is away up on the top of a tower as smooth as a greasy pole. But, anyhow, we’re all armed here, of course; and if Doom did get into that room he’d be dead before he got out.’

Father Brown was blinking at the carpet in a brown study. Then he said suddenly, with something like a jerk: ‘I hope you won’t mind my mentioning it, but a kind of a notion came into my head just this minute. It’s about you.’

‘Indeed,’ remarked Wilton, ‘and what about me?’

‘I think you are a man of one idea,’ said Father Brown, ‘and you will forgive me for saying that it seems to be even more the idea of catching Daniel Doom than of defending Brander Merton.’

Wilton started a little and continued to stare at his companion; then very slowly his grim mouth took on a rather curious smile. ‘How did you—what makes you think that?’ he asked.

‘You said that if you heard a shot you could instantly electrocute the escaping enemy,’ remarked the priest. ‘I suppose it occurred to you that the shot might be fatal to your employer before the shock was fatal to his foe. I don’t mean that you wouldn’t protect Mr Merton if you could, but it seems to come rather second in your thoughts. The arrangements are very elaborate, as you say, and you seem to have elaborated them. But they seem even more designed to catch a murderer than to save a man.’

‘Father Brown,’ said the secretary, who had recovered his quiet tone, ‘you’re very smart, but there’s something more to you than smartness. Somehow you’re the sort of man to whom one wants to tell the truth; and besides, you’ll probably hear it, anyhow, for in one way it’s a joke against me already. They all say I’m a monomaniac about running down this big crook, and perhaps I am. But I’ll tell you one thing that none of them know. My full name is John Wilton Border.’ Father Brown nodded as if he were completely enlightened, but the other went on.

‘This fellow who calls himself Doom killed my father and uncle and ruined my mother. When Merton wanted a secretary I took the job, because I thought that where the cup was the criminal might sooner or later be. But I didn’t know who the criminal was and could only wait for him; and I meant to serve Merton faithfully.’

‘I understand,’ said Father Brown gently; ‘and, by the way, isn’t it time that we attended on him?’

‘Why, yes,’ answered Wilton, again starting a little out of his brooding so that the priest concluded that his vindictive mania had again absorbed him for a moment.’ Go in now by all means.’

Father Brown walked straight into the inner room. No sound of greetings followed, but only a dead silence; and a moment after the priest reappeared in the doorway.

At the same moment the silent bodyguard sitting near the door moved suddenly; and it was as if a huge piece of furniture had come to life. It seemed as though something in the very attitude of the priest had been a signal; for his head was against the light from the inner window and his face was in shadow.

‘I suppose you will press that button,’ he said with a sort of sigh.

Wilton seemed to awake from his savage brooding with a bound and leapt up with a catch in his voice.

‘There was no shot,’ he cried.

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, ‘it depends what you mean by a shot.’

Wilton rushed forward, and they plunged into the inner room together. It was a comparatively small room and simply though elegantly furnished. Opposite to them one wide window stood open, over—looking the garden and the wooded plain. Close up against the window stood a chair and a small table, as if the captive desired as much air and light as was allowed him during his brief luxury of loneliness.

On the little table under the window stood the Coptic Cup; its owner had evidently been looking at it in the best light. It was well worth looking at, for that white and brilliant daylight turned its precious stones to many—coloured flames so that it might have been a model of the Holy Grail. It was well worth looking at; but Brander Merton was not looking at it. For his head had fallen back over his chair, his mane of white hair hanging towards the floor, and his spike of grizzled beard thrust up towards the ceiling, and out of his throat stood a long, brown—painted arrow with red leathers at the other end.

‘A silent shot,’ said Father Brown, in a low voice; ‘I was just wondering about those new inventions for silencing firearms. But this is a very old invention, and quite as silent.’

Then, after a moment, he added: ‘I’m afraid he is dead. What are you going to do?’

The pale secretary roused himself with abrupt resolution. ‘I’m going to press that button, of course,’ he said, ‘and if that doesn’t do for Daniel Doom, I’m going to hunt him through the world till I find him.’

‘Take care it doesn’t do for any of our friends,’ observed Father Brown; ‘they can hardly be far off; we’d better call them.’

‘That lot know all about the wall,’ answered Wilton. ‘None of them will try to climb it, unless one of them … is in a great hurry.’

Father Brown went to the window by which the arrow had evidently entered and looked out. The garden, with its flat flower— beds, lay far below like a delicately coloured map of the world. The whole vista seemed so vast and empty, the tower seemed set so far up in the sky that as he stared out a strange phrase came back to his memory.

‘A bolt from the blue,’ he said. ‘What was that somebody said about a bolt from the blue and death coming out of the sky? Look how far away everything looks; it seems extraordinary that an arrow could come so far, unless it were an arrow from heaven.’

Wilton had returned, but did not reply, and the priest went on as in soliloquy. ‘One thinks of aviation. We must ask young Wain … about aviation.’

‘There’s a lot of it round here,’ said the secretary.

‘Case of very old or very new weapons,’ observed Father Brown. ‘Some would be quite familiar to his old uncle, I suppose; we must ask him about arrows. This looks rather like a Red Indian arrow. I don’t know where the Red Indian shot it from; but you remember the story the old man told. I said it had a moral.’

‘If it had a moral,’ said Wilton warmly, ‘it was only that a real ‘Red Indian might shoot a thing farther than you’d fancy. It’s nonsense your suggesting a parallel.’

‘I don’t think you’ve got the moral quite right,’ said Father Brown.

Although the little priest appeared to melt into the millions of New York next day, without any apparent attempt to be anything but a number in a numbered street, he was, in fact, unobtrusively busy for the next fortnight with the commission that had been given him, for he was filled with profound fear about a possible miscarriage of justice. Without having any particular air of singling them out from his other new acquaintances, he found it easy to fall into talk with the two or three men recently involved in the mystery; and with old Hickory Crake especially he had a curious and interesting conversation. It took place on a seat in Central Park, where the veteran sat with his bony hands and hatchet face resting on the oddly— shaped head of a walking—stick of dark red wood, possibly modelled on a tomahawk.

‘Well, it may be a long shot,’ he said, wagging his head, ‘but I wouldn’t advise you to be too positive about how far an Indian arrow could go. I’ve known some bow—shots that seemed to go straighter than any bullets, and hit the mark to amazement, considering how long they had been travelling. Of course, you practically never hear now of a Red Indian with a bow and arrows, still less of a Red Indian hanging about here. But if by any chance there were one of the old Indian marksmen, with one of the old Indian bows, hiding in those trees hundreds of yards beyond the Merton outer wall—why, then I wouldn’t put it past the noble savage to be able to send an arrow over the wall and into the top window of Merton’s house; no, nor into Merton, either. I’ve seen things quite as wonderful as that done in the old days.’

‘No doubt,’ said the priest, ‘you have done things quite as wonderful, as well as seen them.’

Old Crake chuckled, and then said gruffly: ‘Oh, that’s all ancient history.’

‘Some people have a way of studying ancient history,’ the priest said. ‘I suppose we may take it there is nothing in your old record In make people talk unpleasantly about this affair.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Crake, his eyes shifting sharply for the first time, in his red, wooden face, that was rather like I he head of a tomahawk.

‘Well, since you were so well acquainted with all the arts and crafts of the Redskin—‘ began Father Brown slowly.

Crake had had a hunched and almost shrunken appearance as he sat with his chin propped on its queer—shaped crutch. But the next instant he stood erect in the path like a fighting bravo with the crutch clutched like a cudgel.

‘What?’ he cried—in something like a raucous screech—‘what the hell! Are you standing up to me to tell me I might happen to have murdered my own brother—in—law?’

From a dozen seats dotted about the path people looked to— wards the disputants, as they stood facing each other in the middle of the path, the bald—headed energetic little man brandishing his outlandish stick like a club, and the black, dumpy figure of the little cleric looking at him without moving a muscle, save for his hinging eyelids. For a moment it looked as if the black, dumpy figure would be knocked on the head, and laid out with true Red Indian promptitude and dispatch; and the large form of an Irish policeman could be seen heaving up in the distance and bearing down on the group. But the priest only said, quite placidly, like one answering an ordinary query:

‘I have formed certain conclusions about it, but I do not think I will mention them till I make my report.’

Whether under the influence of the footsteps of the policeman or of the eyes of the priest, old Hickory tucked his stick under his arm and put his hat on again, grunting. The priest bade him a placid good morning, and passed in an unhurried fashion out of the park, making his way to the lounge of the hotel where he knew that young Wain was to be found. The young man sprang up with a greeting; he looked even more haggard and harassed than before, as if some worry were eating him away; and the priest had a suspicion that his young friend had recently been engaged, with only too conspicuous success, in evading the last Amendment to the American Constitution. But at the first word about his hobby or favourite science he was vigilant and concentrated enough. For Father Brown had asked, in an idle and conversational fashion, whether much flying was done in that district, and had told how he had at first mistaken Mr Merton’s circular wall for an aerodrome.

‘It’s a wonder you didn’t see any while we were there,’ answered Captain Wain. ‘Sometimes they’re as thick as flies; that open plain is a great place for them, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were the chief breeding—ground, so to speak, for my sort of birds in the future. I’ve flown a good deal there myself, of course, and I know most of the fellows about here who flew in the war; but there are a whole lot of people taking to it out there now whom I never heard of in my life. I suppose it will be like motoring soon, and every man in the States will have one.’

‘Being endowed by his Creator,’ said Father Brown with a smile, ‘with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of motoring— not to mention aviation. So I suppose we may take it that one strange aeroplane passing over that house, at certain times, wouldn’t be noticed much.’

‘No,’ replied the young man; ‘I don’t suppose it would.’

‘Or even if the man were known,’ went on the other, ‘I suppose he might get hold of a machine that wouldn’t be recognized as his. If you, for instance, flew in the ordinary way, Mr Merton and his friends might recognize the rig—out, perhaps; but you might pass pretty near that window on a different pattern of plane, or whatever you call it; near enough for practical purposes.’

‘Well, yes,’ began the young man, almost automatically, and then ceased, and remained staring at the cleric with an open mouth and eyes standing out of his head.

‘My God!’ he said, in a low voice;’ my God!’

Then he rose from the lounge seat, pale and shaking from head to foot and still staring at the priest.

‘Are you mad?’ he said;’ are you raving mad?’

There was a silence and then he spoke again in a swift hissing fashion. ‘You positively come here to suggest—‘

‘No; only to collect suggestions,’ said Father Brown, rising. ‘I may have formed some conclusions provisionally, but I had better reserve them for the present.’

And then saluting the other with the same stiff civility, he passed out of the hotel to continue his curious peregrinations.

By the dusk of that day they had led him down the dingy streets and steps that straggled and tumbled towards the river in the the oldest and most irregular part of the city. Immediately under the coloured lantern that marked the entrance to a rather low Chinese restaurant he encountered a figure he had seen before, though by no means presenting itself to the eye as he had seen it.

Mr Norman Drage still confronted the world grimly behind his great goggles, which seemed somehow to cover his face like a dark musk of glass. But except for the goggles, his appearance had undergone a strange transformation in the month that had elapsed since the murder. He had then, as Father Brown had noted, been dressed up to the nines— up to that point, indeed, where there begins to be too fine a distinction between the dandy and the dummy outside a tailor’s shop. But now all those externals were mysteriously altered for the worse; as if the tailor’s dummy had been turned into a scarecrow. His top hat still existed, but it was battered and shabby; his clothes were dilapidated; his watch—chain and minor ornaments were gone. Father Brown, however, addressed him as if they had met yesterday, and made no demur to silting down with him on a bench in the cheap eating—house whither he was bound. It was not he, however, who began the conversation.

‘Well?’ growled Drage, ‘and have you succeeded in avenging your holy and sainted millionaire? We know all millionaires are holy and sainted; you can find it all in the papers next day, about how they lived by the light of the Family Bible they read at their mother’s knee. Gee! if they’d only read out some of the things there are in the Family Bible, the mother might have been startled some. And the millionaire, too, I reckon. The old Book’s full of a lot of grand fierce old notions they don’t grow nowadays; sort of wisdom of the Stone Age and buried under the Pyramids. Suppose somebody had flung old man Merton from the top of that tower of his, and let him be eaten by dogs at the bottom, it would be no worse than what happened to Jezebel. Wasn’t Agag hacked into little pieces, for all he went walking delicately? Merton walked delicately all his life, damn him—until he got too delicate to walk at all. But the shaft of the Lord found him out, as it might have done in the old Book, and struck him dead on the top of his tower to be a spectacle to the people.

‘The shaft was material, at least,’ said his companion.

‘The Pyramids are mighty material, and they hold down the dead kings all right,’ grinned the man in the goggles. ‘I think there’s a lot to be said for these old material religions. There’s old carvings that have lasted for thousands of years, showing their gods and emperors with bended bows; with hands that look as if they could really bend bows of stone. Material, perhaps—but what materials! Don’t you sometimes stand staring at those old Eastern patterns and things, till you have a hunch that old Lord God is still driving like a dark Apollo, and shooting black rays of death?’

‘If he is,’ replied Father Brown, ‘I might call him by another name. But I doubt whether Merton died by a dark ray or even a stone arrow.’

‘I guess you think he’s St Sebastian,’ sneered Drage, ‘killed with an arrow. A millionaire must be a martyr. How do you know he didn’t deserve it? You don’t know much about your millionaire, I fancy. Well, let me tell you he deserved it a hundred times over.’

‘Well,’ asked Father Brown gently, ‘why didn’t you murder him?’

‘You want to know why I didn’t?’ said the other, staring. ‘Well, you’re a nice sort of clergyman.’

‘Not at all,’ said the other, as if waving away a compliment.

‘I suppose it’s your way of saying I did,’ snarled Drage. ‘Well, prove it, that’s all. As for him, I reckon he was no loss.’

‘Yes, he was,’ said Father Brown, sharply. ‘He was a loss to you. That’s why you didn’t kill him.’

And he walked out of the room, leaving the man in goggles gaping after him.

It was nearly a month later that Father Brown revisited the house where the third millionaire had suffered from the vendetta of Daniel Doom. A sort of council was held of the persons most interested. Old Crake sat at the head of the table with his nephew at his right hand, the lawyer on his left; the big man with the African features, whose name appeared to be Harris, was ponderously present, if only as a material witness; a red—haired, sharp -nosed individual addressed as Dixon seemed to be the representative of Pinkerton’s or some such private agency; and Father Brown slipped unobtrusively into an empty seat beside him.

Every newspaper in the world was full of the catastrophe of the colossus of finance, of the great organizer of the Big Business that bestrides the modern world; but from the tiny group that had been nearest to him at the very instant of his death very little could be learned. The uncle, nephew, and attendant solicitor declared they were well outside the outer wall before the alarm was raised; and inquiries of the official guardians at both barriers brought answers that were rather confused, but on the whole confirmatory. Only one other complication seemed to call for consideration. It seemed that round about the time of the death, before or after, a stranger had been found hanging mysteriously round the entrance and asking to see Mr Merton. The servants had some difficulty in understanding what he meant, for his language was very obscure; but it was afterwards considered to be also very suspicious, since he had said something about a wicked man being destroyed by a word out of the sky.

Peter Wain leaned forward, the eyes bright in his haggard face, and said:

‘I’ll bet on that, anyhow. Norman Drage.’

‘And who in the world is Norman Drage?’ asked his uncle.

‘That’s what I want to know,’ replied the young man. ‘I practically asked him, but he has got a wonderful trick of twisting every straight question crooked; it’s like lunging at a fencer. He hooked on to me with hints about the flying—ship of the future; but I never trusted him much.’

‘But what sort of a man is he?’ asked Crake.

‘He’s a mystagogue,’ said Father Brown, with innocent promptitude. ‘There are quite a lot of them about; the sort of men about town who hint to you in Paris cafes and cabarets that they’ve lifted the veil of Isis or know the secret of Stonehenge. In a case like this they’re sure to have some sort of mystical explanations.’

The smooth, dark head of Mr Barnard Blake, the lawyer, was inclined politely towards the speaker, but his smile was faintly hostile.

‘I should hardly have thought, sir,’ he said, ‘that you had any quarrel with mystical explanations.’

‘On the contrary,’ replied Father Brown, blinking amiably at him. ‘That’s just why I can quarrel with ‘em. Any sham lawyer could bamboozle me, but he couldn’t bamboozle you; because you’re a lawyer yourself. Any fool could dress up as a Red Indian and I’d swallow him whole as the only original Hiawatha; but Mr Crake would see through him at once. A swindler could pretend to me that he knew all about aeroplanes, but not to Captain Wain. And it’s just the same with the other, don’t you see? It’s just because I have picked up a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you’ve seen it it’s still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it’s a platitude. But in the case of Drage, I admit he had also another and more practical notion in talking about fire from heaven or bolts from the blue.’

‘And what was his notion?’ asked Wain. ‘I think it wants watching whatever it is.’

‘Well,’ replied the priest, slowly, ‘he wanted us to think the murders were miracles because … well, because he knew they weren’t.’

‘Ah,’ said Wain, with a sort of hiss, ‘I was waiting for that. In plain words, he is the criminal.’

‘In plain words, he is the criminal who didn’t commit the crime,’ answered Father Brown calmly.

‘Is that your conception of plain words?’ inquired Blake politely.

‘You’ll be saying I’m the mystagogue now,’ said Father Brown somewhat abashed, but with a broad smile, ‘but it was really quite accidental. Drage didn’t commit the crime—I mean this crime. His only crime was blackmailing somebody, and he hung about here to do it; but he wasn’t likely to want the secret to be public property or the whole business to be cut short by death. We can talk about him afterwards. Just at the moment, I only want him cleared out of the way.’

‘Out of the way of what?’ asked the other.

‘Out of the way of the truth,’ replied the priest, looking at him tranquilly, with level eyelids.

‘Do you mean,’ faltered the other, ‘that you know the truth?’

‘I rather think so,’ said Father Brown modestly.

There was an abrupt silence, after which Crake cried out suddenly and irrelevantly in a rasping voice:

‘Why, where is that secretary fellow? Wilton! He ought to be here.’

‘I am in communication with Mr Wilton,’ said Father Brown gravely; ‘in fact, I asked him to ring me up here in a few minutes from now. I may say that we’ve worked the thing out together, in a manner of speaking.’

‘If you’re working together, I suppose it’s all right,’ grumbled Crake. ‘I know he was always a sort of bloodhound on the trail of his vanishing crook, so perhaps it was well to hunt in couples with him. But if you know the truth about this, where the devil did you get it from?’

‘I got it from you,’ answered the priest, quietly, and continued to gaze mildly at the glaring veteran.’ I mean I made the first guess from a hint in a story of yours about an Indian who threw a knife and hit a man on the top of a fortress.’

‘You’ve said that several times,’ said Wain, with a puzzled air; ‘but I can’t see any inference, except that this murderer threw an arrow and hit a man on the top of a house very like a fortress. But of course the arrow wasn’t thrown but shot, and would go much further. Certainly it went uncommonly far; but I don’t see how it brings us any farther.’

‘I’m afraid you missed the point of the story,’ said Father Brown. ‘It isn’t that if one thing cap go far another can go farther. It is that the wrong use of a tool can cut both ways. The men on Crake’s fort thought of a knife as a thing for a hand—to— hand fight and forgot that it could be a missile like a javelin. Some other people I know thought of a thing as a missile like a javelin and forgot that, after all, it could be used hand—to—hand as a spear. In short, the moral of the story is that since a dagger can be turned into an arrow, so can an arrow be turned into a dagger.’

They were all looking at him now; but he continued in the same casual and unconscious tone: ‘Naturally we wondered and worried a good deal about who shot that arrow through the window and whether it came from far away, and so on. But the truth is that nobody shot the arrow at all. It never came in at the window at all.’

‘Then how did it come there?’ asked the swarthy lawyer, with a rather lowering face.

‘Somebody brought it with him, I suppose,’ said Father Brown; ‘it wouldn’t be hard to carry or conceal. Somebody had it in his hand as he stood with Merton in Merton’s own room. Somebody thrust it into Merton’s throat like a poignard, and then had the highly intelligent idea of placing the whole thing at such a place and angle that we all assumed in a flash that it had flown in at the window like a bird.’

‘Somebody,’ said old Crake, in a voice as heavy as stone.

The telephone bell rang with a strident and horrible clamour of insistence. It was in the adjoining room, and Father Brown had darted there before anybody else could move.

‘What the devil is it all about?’ cried Peter Wain, who seemed all shaken and distracted.

‘He said he expected to be rung up by Wilton, the secretary,’ replied his uncle in the same dead voice.

‘I suppose it is Wilton?’ observed the lawyer, like one speaking to fill up a silence. But nobody answered the question until Father Brown reappeared suddenly and silently in the room, bringing the answer.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, when he had resumed his seat,’ it was you who asked me to look into the truth about this puzzle; and having found the truth, I must tell it, without any pretence of softening the shock. I’m afraid anybody who pokes his nose into things like this can’t afford to be a respecter of persons.’

‘I suppose,’ said Crake, breaking the silence that followed, ‘that means that some of us are accused, or suspected.’

‘All of us are suspected,’ answered Father Brown. ‘I may be suspected myself, for I found the body.’

‘Of course we’re suspected,’ snapped Wain. ‘Father Brown kindly explained to me how I could have besieged the tower in a flying—machine.’

‘No,’ replied the priest, with a smile; ‘you described to me how you could have done it. That was just the interesting part of it.’

‘He seemed to think it likely,’ growled Crake, ‘that I killed him myself with a Red Indian arrow.’

‘I thought it most unlikely,’ said Father Brown, making rather a wry face. I’m sorry if I did wrong, but I couldn’t think of any other way of testing the matter. I can hardly think of anything more improbable than the notion that Captain Wain went careering in a huge machine past the window, at the very moment of the murder, and nobody noticed it; unless, perhaps, it were the notion that a respectable old gentleman should play at Red Indians with a bow and arrow behind the bushes, to kill somebody he could have killed in twenty much simpler ways. But I had to find out if they had had anything to do with it; and so I had to accuse them in order to prove their innocence.’

‘And how have you proved their innocence?’ asked Blake the lawyer, leaning forward eagerly.

‘Only by the agitation they showed when they were accused,’ answered the other.

‘What do you mean, exactly?’

‘If you will permit me to say so,’ remarked Father Brown, composedly enough, ‘I did undoubtedly think it my duty to suspect them and everybody else. I did suspect Mr Crake and I did suspect Captain Wain, in the sense that I considered the possibility or probability of their guilt. I told them I had formed conclusions about it; and I will now tell them what those conclusions were. I was sure they were innocent, because of the manner and the moment in which they passed from unconsciousness to indignation. So long as they never thought they were accused, they went on giving me materials to support the accusation. They practically explained to me how they might have committed the crime. Then they suddenly realized with a shock and a shout of rage that they were accused; they realized it long after they might well have expected to be accused, but long before I had accused them. Now no guilty person could possibly do that. He might be snappy and suspicious from the first; or he might simulate unconsciousness and innocence up to the end. But he wouldn’t begin by making things worse for himself and then give a great jump and begin furiously denying the notion he had himself helped to suggest. That could only come by his having really failed to realize what he was suggesting. The self—consciousness of a murderer would always be at least morbidly vivid enough to prevent him first forgetting his relation with the thing and then remembering to deny it. So I ruled you both out and others for other reasons I needn’t discuss now. For instance, there was the secretary—

‘But I’m not talking about that just now. Look here, I’ve just heard from Wilton on the phone, and he’s given me permission to tell you some rather serious news. Now I suppose you all know by this time who Wilton was, and what he was after.’

‘I know he was after Daniel Doom and wouldn’t be happy till he got him,’ answered Peter Wain; ‘and I’ve heard the story that he’s the son of old Horder, and that’s why he’s the avenger of blood. Anyhow, he’s certainly looking for the man called Doom.’

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, ‘he has found him.’

Peter Wain sprang to his feet in excitement.

‘The murderer!’ he cried. ‘Is the murderer in the lock—up already?’

‘No,’ said Father Brown, gravely; ‘I said the news was serious, and it’s more serious than that. I’m afraid poor Wilton has taken a terrible responsibility. I’m afraid he’s going to put a terrible responsibility on us. He hunted the criminal down, and just when he had him cornered at last—well, he has taken the law into his own hands.’

‘You mean that Daniel Doom—‘ began the lawyer.

‘I mean that Daniel Doom is dead,’ said the priest. ‘There was some sort of wild struggle, and Wilton killed him.’

‘Serve him right,’ growled Mr Hickory Crake.

‘Can’t blame Wilton for downing a crook like that, especially considering the feud,’ assented Wain; ‘it was like stepping on a viper.’

‘I don’t agree with you,’ said Father Brown. ‘I suppose we all talk romantic stuff at random in defence of lynching and lawlessness; but I have a suspicion that if we lose our laws and liberties we shall regret it. Besides, it seems to me illogical to say there is something to be said for Wilton committing murder, without even inquiring whether there was anything to be said for Doom committing it. I rather doubt whether Doom was merely a vulgar assassin; he may have been a sort of outlaw with a mania about the cup, demanding it with threats and only killing after a struggle; both victims were thrown down just outside their houses. The objection to Wilton’s way of doing it is that we shall never hear Doom’s side of the case.’

‘Oh, I’ve no patience with all this sentimental whitewashing of worthless, murderous blackguards,’ cried Wain, heatedly. ‘If Wilton croaked the criminal he did a jolly good day’s work, and there’s an end of it.’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said his uncle, nodding vigorously.

Father Brown’s face had a yet heavier gravity as he looked slowly round the semicircle effaces. ‘Is that really what you all think?’ he asked. Even as he did so he realized that he was an Englishman and an exile. He realized that he was among foreigners, even if he was among friends. Around that ring of foreigners ran a restless fire that was not native to his own breed; the fiercer spirit of the western nation that can rebel and lynch, and above all, combine. He knew that they had already combined.

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, with a sigh, ‘I am to understand, then, that you do definitely condone this unfortunate man’s crime, or act of private justice, or whatever you call it. In that case it will not hurt him if I tell you a little more about it.’

He rose suddenly to his feet; and though they saw no meaning in his movement, it seemed in some way to change or chill the very air in the room.

‘Wilton killed Doom in a rather curious way,’ he began.

‘How did Wilton kill him?’ asked Crake, abruptly.

‘With an arrow,’ said Father Brown.

Twilight was gathering in the long room, and daylight dwindling to a gleam from the great window in the inner room, where the great millionaire had died. Almost automatically the eyes of the group turned slowly towards it, but as yet there was no sound. Then the voice of Crake came cracked and high and senile in a sort of crowing gabble.

‘What you mean? What you mean? Brander Merton killed by an arrow. This crook killed by an arrow—‘

‘By the same arrow,’ said the priest, ‘and at the same moment.’

Again there was a sort of strangled and yet swollen and bursting silence, and young Wain began: ‘You mean—‘

‘I mean that your friend Merton was Daniel Doom,’ said Father Brown firmly;’ and the only Daniel Doom you’ll ever find. Your friend Merton was always crazy after that Coptic Cup that he used to worship like an idol every day; and in his wild youth he had really killed two men to get it, though I still think the deaths may have been in a sense accidents of the robbery. Anyhow, he had it; and that man Drage knew the story and was blackmailing him. But Wilton was after him for a very different purpose; I fancy he only discovered the truth when he’d got into this house. But anyhow, it was in this house, and in that room, that this hunt ended, and he slew the slayer of his father.’

For a long time nobody answered. Then old Crake could be heard drumming with his fingers on the table and muttering:

‘Brander must have been mad. He must have been mad.’

‘But, good Lord!’ burst out Peter Wain;’ what are we to do? What are we to say? Oh, it’s all quite different! What about the papers and the big business people? Brander Merton is a thing like the President or the Pope of Rome.’

‘I certainly think it is rather different,’ began Barnard Blake, the lawyer, in a low voice. ‘The difference involves a whole—‘

Father Brown struck the table so that the glasses on it rang; and they could almost fancy a ghostly echo from the mysterious chalice that still stood in the room beyond.

‘No!’ he cried, in a voice like a pistol—shot. ‘There shall be no difference. I gave you your chance of pitying the poor devil when you thought he was a common criminal. You wouldn’t listen then; you were all for private vengeance then. You were all for letting him be butchered like a wild beast without a hearing or a public trial, and said he had only got his deserts. Very well then, if Daniel Doom has got his deserts, Brander Merton has got his deserts. If that was good enough for Doom, by all that is holy it is good enough for Merton. Take your wild justice or our dull legality; but in the name of Almighty God, let there be an equal lawlessness or an equal law.’

Nobody answered except the lawyer, and he answered with something like a snarl: ‘What will the police say if we tell them we mean to condone a crime?’

‘What will they say if I tell them you did condone it?’ replied Father Brown. ‘Your respect for the law comes rather late, Mr Barnard Blake.’

After a pause he resumed in a milder tone: ‘I, for one, am ready to tell the truth if the proper authorities ask me; and the rest of you can do as you like. But as a fact, it will make very little difference. Wilton only rang me up to tell me that I was now free to lay his confession before you; for when you heard it, he would be beyond pursuit.’

He walked slowly into the inner room and stood there by the little table beside which the millionaire had died. The Coptic Cup still stood in the same place, and he remained there for a space staring at its cluster of all the colours of the rainbow, and beyond it into a blue abyss of sky.

THREE: The Oracle of the Dog

‘YES,’ said Father Brown, ‘I always like a dog, so long as he isn’t spelt backwards.’

Those who are quick in talking are not always quick in listening. Sometimes even their brilliancy produces a sort of stupidity. Father Brown’s friend and companion was a young man with a stream of ideas and stories, an enthusiastic young man named Fiennes, with eager blue eyes and blond hair that seemed to be brushed back, not merely with a hair— brush but with the wind of the world as be rushed through it. But he stopped in the torrent of his talk in a momentary bewilderment before he saw the priest’s very simple meaning.

‘You mean that people make too much of them?’ he said. ‘Well, I don’t know. They’re marvellous creatures. Sometimes I think they know a lot more than we do.’

Father Brown said nothing, but continued to stroke the head of the big retriever in a half—abstracted but apparently soothing fashion.

‘Why,’ said Fiennes, warming again to his monologue, ‘there was a dog in the case I’ve come to see you about: what they call the ‘Invisible Murder Case’, you know. It’s a strange story, but from my point of view the dog is about the strangest thing in it. Of course, there’s the mystery of the crime itself, and how old Druce can have been killed by somebody else when he was all alone in the summer—house—‘

The hand stroking the dog stopped for a moment in its rhythmic movement, and Father Brown said calmly: ‘Oh, it was a summer—house, was it?’

‘I thought you’d read all about it in the papers,’ answered Fiennes.’ Stop a minute; I believe I’ve got a cutting that will give you all the particulars.’ He produced a strip of newspaper from his pocket and handed it to the priest, who began to read it, holding it close to his blinking eyes with one hand while the other continued its half—conscious caresses of the dog. It looked like the parable of a man not letting his right hand know what his left hand did.

---

Many mystery stories, about men murdered behind locked doors and windows, and murderers escaping without means of entrance and exit, have come true in the course of the extraordinary events at Cranston on the coast of Yorkshire, where Colonel Druce was found stabbed from behind by a dagger that has entirely disappeared from the scene, and apparently even from the neighbourhood.

The summer—house in which he died was indeed accessible at one entrance, the ordinary doorway which looked down the central walk of the garden towards the house. But, by a combination of events almost to be called a coincidence, it appears that both the path and the entrance were watched during the crucial time, and there is a chain of witnesses who confirm each other. The summer—house stands at the extreme end of the garden, where there is no exit or entrance of any kind. The central garden path is a lane between two ranks of tall delphiniums, planted so close that any stray step off the path would leave its traces; and both path and plants run right up to the very mouth of the summer—house, so that no straying from that straight path could fail to be observed, and no other mode of entrance can be imagined.

Patrick Floyd, secretary of the murdered man, testified that he had been in a position to overlook the whole garden from the time when Colonel Druce last appeared alive in the doorway to the time when he was found dead; as he, Floyd, had been on the top of a step—ladder clipping the garden hedge. Janet Druce, the dead man’s daughter, confirmed this, saying that she had sat on the terrace of the house throughout that time and had seen Floyd at his work. Touching some part of the time, this is again supported by Donald Druce, her brother—who overlooked the garden—standing at his bedroom window in his dressing—gown, for he had risen late. Lastly, the account is consistent with that given by Dr Valentine, a neighbour, who called for a time to talk with Miss Druce on the terrace, and by the Colonel’s solicitor, Mr Aubrey Traill, who was apparently the last to see the murdered man alive— presumably with the exception of the murderer.

All are agreed that the course of events was as follows: About half past three in the afternoon, Miss Druce went down the path to ask her father when he would like tea; but he said he did not want any and was waiting to see Traill, his lawyer, who was to be sent to him in the summer—house. The girl then came away and met Traill coming down the path; she directed him to her father and he went in as directed. About half an hour afterwards he came out again, the Colonel coming with him to the door and showing himself to all appearance in health and even high spirits. He had been somewhat annoyed earlier in the day by his son’s irregular hours, but seemed to recover his temper in a perfectly normal fashion, and had been rather markedly genial in receiving other visitors, including two of his nephews, who came over for the day. But as these were out walking during the whole period of the tragedy, they had no evidence to give. It is said, indeed, that the Colonel was not on very good terms with Dr Valentine, but that gentleman only had a brief interview with the daughter of the house, to whom he is supposed to be paying serious attentions.

Trail, the solicitor, says he left the Colonel entirely alone in the summer—house, and this is confirmed by Floyd’s bird’s—eye view of the garden, which showed nobody else passing the only entrance. Ten minutes later. Miss Druce again went down the garden and had not reached the end of the path when she saw her father, who was conspicuous by his white linen coat, lying in a heap on the floor. She uttered a scream which brought others to the spot, and on entering the place they found the Colonel lying dead beside his basket—chair, which was also upset. Dr Valentine, who was still in the immediate neighbourhood, testified that the wound was made by some sort of stiletto, entering under the shoulder—blade and piercing the heart. The police have searched the neighbourhood for such a weapon, but no trace of it can be found.

‘So Colonel Druce wore a white coat, did he?’ said Father Brown as he put down the paper.

‘Trick he learnt in the tropics,’ replied Fiennes, with some wonder. ‘He’d had some queer adventures there, by his own account; and I fancy his dislike of Valentine was connected with the doctor coming from the tropics, too. But it’s all an infernal puzzle. The account there is pretty accurate. I didn’t see the tragedy, in the sense of the discovery; I was out walking with the young nephews and the dog—the dog I wanted to tell you about. But I saw the stage set for it as described; the straight lane between the blue flowers right up to the dark entrance, and the lawyer going down it in his blacks and his silk hat, and the red head of the secretary showing high above the green hedge as he worked on it with his shears. Nobody could have mistaken that red head at any distance; and if people say they saw it there all the time, you may be sure they did.

This red—haired secretary, Floyd, is quite a character; a breathless bounding sort of fellow, always doing everybody’s work as he was doing the gardener’s. I think he is an American; he’s certainly got the American view of life—what they call the view—point, bless ‘em.’

‘What about the lawyer?’ asked Father Brown. There was a silence and then Fiennes spoke quite slowly for him. ‘Traill struck me as a singular man. In his fine black clothes he was almost foppish, yet you can hardly call him fashionable. For he wore a pair of long, luxuriant black whiskers such as haven’t been seen since Victorian times. He had rather a fine grave face and a fine grave manner, but every now and then he seemed to remember to smile. And when he showed his white teeth he seemed to lose a little of his dignity, and there was something faintly fawning about him. It may have been only embarrassment, for he would also fidget with his cravat and his tie—pin, which were at once handsome and unusual, like himself. If I could think of anybody— but what’s the good, when the whole thing’s impossible? Nobody knows who did it. Nobody knows how it could be done. At least there’s only one exception I’d make, and that’s why I really mentioned the whole thing. The dog knows.’

Father Brown sighed and then said absently: ‘You were there as a friend of young Donald, weren’t you? He didn’t go on your walk with you?’

‘No,’ replied Fiennes smiling. ‘The young scoundrel had gone to bed that morning and got up that afternoon. I went with his cousins, two young officers from India, and our conversation was trivial enough. I remember the elder, whose name I think is Herbert Druce and who is an authority on horse—breeding, talked about nothing but a mare he had bought and the moral character of the man who sold her; while his brother Harry seemed to be brooding on his bad luck at Monte Carlo. I only mention it to show you, in the light of what happened on our walk, that there was nothing psychic about us. The dog was the only mystic in our company.’

‘What sort of a dog was he?’ asked the priest.

‘Same breed as that one,’ answered Fiennes. ‘That’s what started me off on the story, your saying you didn’t believe in believing in a dog. He’s a big black retriever, named Nox, and a suggestive name, too; for I think what he did a darker mystery than the murder. You know Druce’s house and garden are by the sea; we walked about a mile from it along the sands and then turned back, going the other way. We passed a rather curious rock called the Rock of Fortune, famous in the neighbourhood because it’s one of those examples of one stone barely balanced on another, so that a touch would knock it over. It is not really very high but the hanging outline of it makes it look a little wild and sinister; at least it made it look so to me, for I don’t imagine my jolly young companions were afflicted with the picturesque. But it may be that I was beginning to feel an atmosphere; for just then the question arose of whether it was time to go back to tea, and even then I think I had a premonition that time counted for a good deal in the business. Neither Herbert Druce nor I had a watch, so we called out to his brother, who was some paces behind, having stopped to light his pipe under the hedge. Hence it happened that he shouted out the hour, which was twenty past four, in his big voice through the growing twilight; and somehow the loudness of it made it sound like the proclamation of something tremendous. His unconsciousness seemed to make it all the more so; but that was always the way with omens; and particular ticks of the clock were really very ominous things that afternoon. According to Dr Valentine’s testimony, poor Druce had actually died just about half past four.

‘Well, they said we needn’t go home for ten minutes, and we walked a little farther along the sands, doing nothing in particular— throwing stones for the dog and throwing sticks into the sea for, him to swim after. But to me the twilight seemed to grow oddly oppressive, and the very shadow of the top—heavy Rock of Fortune lay on me like a load. And then the curious thing happened. Nox had just brought back Herbert’s walking— stick out of the sea and his brother had thrown his in also. The dog swam out again, but just about what must have been the stroke of the half—hour, he stopped swimming. He came back again on to the shore and stood in front of us. Then he suddenly threw up his head and sent up a howl or wail of woe—if ever I heard one in the world.

‘‘What the devil’s the matter with the dog?‘ asked Herbert; but none of us could answer. There was a long silence after the brute’s wailing and whining died away on the desolate shore; and then the silence was broken. As I live, it was broken by a faint and far—off shriek, like the shriek of a woman from beyond the hedges inland. We didn’t know what it was then; but we knew afterwards. It was the cry the girl gave when she first saw the body of her father.’

‘You went back, I suppose,’ said Father Brown patiently. ‘What happened then?’

‘I’ll tell you what happened then,’ said Fiennes with a grim emphasis. ‘When we got back into that garden the first thing we saw was Traill, the lawyer; I can see him now with his black hat and black whiskers relieved against the perspective of the blue flowers stretching down to the summer—house, with the sunset and the strange outline of the Rock of Fortune in the distance. His face and figure were in shadow against the sunset; but I swear the white teeth were showing in his head and he was smiling. The moment Nox saw that man the dog dashed forward and stood in the middle of the path barking at him madly, murderously, volleying out curses that were almost verbal in their dreadful distinctness of hatred. And the man doubled up and fled, along the path between the flowers.’

Father Brown sprang to his feet with a startling impatience. ‘So the dog denounced him, did he?’ he cried. ‘The oracle of the dog condemned him. Did you see what birds were flying, and are you sure whether they were on the right hand or the left? Did you consult the augurs about the sacrifices? Surely you didn’t omit to cut open the dog and examine his entrails. That is the sort of scientific test you heathen humanitarians seem to trust when you are thinking of taking away the life and honour of a man.’

Fiennes sat gaping for an instant before he found breath to say: ‘Why, what’s the matter with you? What have I done now?’ A sort of anxiety came back into the priest’s eyes—the anxiety of a man who has run against a post in the dark and wonders for a moment whether he has hurt it.

‘I’m most awfully sorry,’ he said with sincere distress. ‘I beg your pardon for being so rude; pray forgive me.’

Fiennes looked at him curiously. ‘I sometimes think you are more of a mystery than any of the mysteries,’ he said. ‘But anyhow, if you don’t believe in the mystery of the dog, at least you can’t get over the mystery of the man. You can’t deny that at the very moment when the beast came back from the sea and bellowed, his master’s soul was driven out of his body by the blow of some unseen power that no mortal man can trace or even imagine. And as for the lawyer— I don’t go only by the dog—there are other curious details, too. He struck me as a smooth, smiling, equivocal sort of person; and one of his tricks seemed like a sort of hint. You know the doctor and the police were on the spot very quickly; Valentine was brought back when walking away from the house, and he telephoned instantly. That, with the secluded house, small numbers, and enclosed space, made it pretty possible to search everybody who could have been near; and everybody was thoroughly searched—for a weapon. The whole house, garden, and shore were combed for a weapon. The disappearance of the dagger is almost as crazy as the disappearance of the man.’

‘The disappearance of the dagger,’ said Father Brown, nodding. He seemed to have become suddenly attentive.

‘Well,’ continued Fiennes, ‘I told you that man Traill had a trick of fidgeting with his tie and tie—pin—especially his tie—pin. His pin, like himself, was at once showy and old—fashioned. It had one of those stones with concentric coloured rings that look like an eye; and his own concentration on it got on my nerves, as if he had been a Cyclops with one eye in the middle of his body. But the pin was not only large but long; and it occurred to me that his anxiety about its adjustment was because it was even longer than it looked; as long as a stiletto in fact.’

Father Brown nodded thoughtfully. ‘Was any other instrument ever suggested?’ he asked.

‘There was another suggestion,’ answered Fiennes, ‘from one of the young Druces—the cousins, I mean. Neither Herbert nor Harry Druce would have struck one at first as likely to be of assistance in scientific detection; but while Herbert was really the traditional type of heavy Dragoon, caring for nothing but horses and being an ornament to the Horse Guards, his younger brother Harry had been in the Indian Police and knew something about such things. Indeed, in his own way he was quite clever; and I rather fancy he had been too clever; I mean he had left the police through breaking some red—tape regulations and taking some sort of risk and responsibility of his own. Anyhow, he was in some sense a detective out of work, and threw himself into this business with more than the ardour of an amateur. And it was with him that I had an argument about the weapon— an argument that led—to something new. It began by his countering my description of the dog barking at Traill; and he said that a dog at his worst didn’t bark, but growled.’

‘He was quite right there,’ observed the priest.

‘This young fellow went on to say that, if it came to that, he’d heard Nox growling at other people before then; and among others at Floyd, the secretary. I retorted that his own argument answered itself; for the crime couldn’t be brought home to two or three people, and least of all to Floyd, who was as innocent as a harum—scarum schoolboy, and had been seen by everybody all the time perched above the garden hedge with his fan of red hair as conspicuous as a scarlet cockatoo.

‘I know there’s difficulties anyhow,’ said my colleague, ‘but I wish you’d come with me down the garden a minute. I want to show you something I don’t think any one else has seen.’ This was on the very day of the discovery, and the garden was just as it had been. The step—ladder was still standing by the hedge, and just under the hedge my guide stopped and disentangled something from the deep grass. It was the sheers used for clipping the hedge, and on the point of one of them was a smear of blood.’

There was a short silence, and then Father Brown said suddenly; ‘What was the lawyer there for?’

‘He fold us the Colonel sent for him to alter his will,’ answered Fiennes. ‘And, by the way, there was another thing about the business of the will that I ought to mention. You see, the will wasn’t actually signed in the summer— house that afternoon.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Father Brown; ‘there would have to be two witnesses.’

‘The lawyer actually came down the day before and it was signed then; but he was sent for again next day because the old man had a doubt about one of the witnesses and had to be reassured.’

‘Who were the witnesses?’ asked Father Brown.

‘That’s just the point,’ replied his informant eagerly, ‘the witnesses were Floyd, the secretary, and this Dr Valentine, the foreign sort of surgeon or whatever he is; and the two had a quarrel. Now I’m bound to say that the secretary is something of a busybody. He’s one of those hot and headlong people whose warmth of temperament has unfortunately turned mostly to pugnacity and bristling suspicion; to distrusting people instead of to trusting them. That sort of red— haired red—hot fellow is always either universally credulous or universally incredulous; and sometimes both. He was not only a Jack—of—all—trades, but he knew better than all tradesmen. He not only knew everything, but he warned everybody against everybody. All that must be taken into account in his suspicions about Valentine; but in that particular case there seems to have been something behind it. He said the name of Valentine was not really Valentine. He said he had seen him elsewhere known by the name of De Villon. He said it would invalidate the will; of course he was kind enough to explain to the lawyer what the law was on that point. They were both in a frightful wax.’

Father Brown laughed. ‘People often are when they are to witness a will,’ he said; ‘for one thing, it means that they can’t have any legacy under it. But what did Dr Valentine say? No doubt the universal secretary knew more about the doctor’s name than the doctor did. But even the doctor might have some information about his own name.’

Fiennes paused a moment before he replied. ‘Dr Valentine took it in a curious way. Dr Valentine is a curious man. His appearance is rather striking but very foreign. He is young but wears a beard cut square; and his face is very pale, dreadfully pale—and dreadfully serious. His eyes have a sort of ache in them, as if he ought to wear glasses, or had given himself a headache with thinking; but he is quite handsome and always very formally dressed, with a top hat and a dark coat and a little red rosette. His manner is rather cold and haughty, and he has a way of staring at you which is very disconcerting. When thus charged with having changed his name, he merely stared like a sphinx and then said with a little laugh that he supposed Americans had no names to change. At that I think the Colonel also got into a fuss and said all sorts of angry things to the doctor; all the more angry because of the doctor’s pretensions to a future place in his family. But I shouldn’t have thought much of that but for a few words that I happened to hear later, early in the afternoon of the tragedy. I don’t want to make a lot of them, for they weren’t the sort of words on which one would like, in the ordinary way, to play the eavesdropper. As I was passing out towards the front gate with my two companions and the dog, I heard voices which told me that Dr Valentine and Miss Druce had withdrawn for a moment in the shadow of the house, in an angle behind a row of flowering plants, and were talking to each other in passionate whisperings—sometimes almost like hissings; for it was something of a lovers’ quarrel as well as a lovers’ tryst. Nobody repeats the sort of things they said for the most part; but in an unfortunate business like this I’m bound to say that there was repeated more than once a phrase about killing somebody. In fact, the girl seemed to be begging him not to kill somebody, or saying that no provocation could justify killing anybody; which seems an unusual sort of talk to address to a gentleman who has dropped in to tea.’

‘Do you know,’ asked the priest, ‘whether Dr Valentine seemed to be very angry after the scene with the secretary and the Colonel—I mean about witnessing the will?’

‘By all accounts,’ replied the other, ‘he wasn’t half so angry as the secretary was. It was the secretary who went away raging after witnessing the will.’

‘And now,’ said Father Brown,’ what about the will itself?’

‘The Colonel was a very wealthy man, and his will was important. Traill wouldn’t tell us the alteration at that stage, but I have since heard only this morning in fact—that most of the money was transferred from the son to the daughter. I told you that Druce was wild with my friend Donald over his dissipated hours.’

‘The question of motive has been rather over—shadowed by the question of method,’ observed Father Brown thoughtfully. ‘At that moment, apparently, Miss Druce was the immediate gainer by the death.’

‘Good God! What a cold—blooded way of talking,’ cried Fiennes, staring at him. ‘You don’t really mean to hint that she—‘

‘Is she going to marry that Dr Valentine?’ asked the other.

‘Some people are against it,’ answered his friend. ‘But he is liked and respected in the place and is a skilled and devoted surgeon.’

‘So devoted a surgeon,’ said Father Brown, ‘that he had surgical instruments with him when he went to call on the young lady at teatime. For he must have used a lancet or something, and he never seems to have gone home.’

Fiennes sprang to his feet and looked at him in a heat of inquiry. ‘You suggest he might have used the very same lancet—‘

Father Brown shook his head. ‘All these suggestions are fancies just now,’ he said. ‘The problem is not who did it or what did it, but how it was done. We might find many men and even many tools— pins and shears and lancets. But how did a man get into the room? How did even a pin get into it?’

He was staring reflectively at the ceiling as he spoke, but as he said the last words his eye cocked in an alert fashion as if he had suddenly seen a curious fly on the ceiling.

‘Well, what would you do about it?’ asked the young man. ‘You have a lot of experience; what would you advise now?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not much use,’ said Father Brown with a sigh. ‘I can’t suggest very much without having ever been near the place or the people. For the moment you can only go on with local inquiries. I gather that your friend from the Indian Police is more or less in charge of your inquiry down there. I should run down and see how he is getting on. See what he’s been doing in the way of amateur detection. There may be news already.’

As his guests, the biped and the quadruped, disappeared, Father Brown took up his pen and went back to his interrupted occupation of planning a course of lectures on the Encyclical Rerum Novarum. The subject was a large one and he had to recast it more than once, so that he was somewhat similarly employed some two days later when the big black dog again came bounding into the room and sprawled all over him with enthusiasm and excitement. The master who followed the dog shared the excitement if not the enthusiasm. He had been excited in a less pleasant fashion, for his blue eyes seemed to start from his head and his eager face was even a little pale.

‘You told me,’ he said abruptly and without preface, ‘to find out what Harry Druce was doing. Do you know what he’s done?’ The priest did not reply, and the young man went on in jerky tones: I’ll tell you what he’s done. He’s killed himself.’

Father Brown’s lips moved only faintly, and there was nothing practical about what he was saying—nothing that has anything to do with this story or this world.

‘You give me the creeps sometimes,’ said Fiennes. ‘Did you— did you expect this?’

‘I thought it possible,’ said Father Brown; ‘that was why I asked you to go and see what he was doing. I hoped you might not be too late.’

‘It was I who found him,’ said Fiennes rather huskily. ‘It was the ugliest and most uncanny thing fever knew. I went down that old garden again, and I knew there was something new and unnatural about it besides the murder. The flowers still tossed about in blue masses on each side of the black entrance into the old grey summer—house; but to me the blue flowers looked like blue devils dancing before some dark cavern of the underworld. I looked all round, everything seemed to be in its ordinary place. But the queer notion grew on me that there was something wrong with the very shape of the sky. And then I saw what it was. The Rock of Fortune always rose in the background beyond the garden hedge and against the sea. The Rock of Fortune was gone.’

Father Brown had lifted his head and was listening intently.

‘It was as if a mountain had walked away out of a landscape or a moon fallen from the sky; though I knew, of course, that a touch at any time would have tipped the thing over. Something possessed me and I rushed down that garden path like the wind and went crashing through that hedge as if it were a spider’s web. It was a thin hedge really, though its undisturbed trimness had made it serve all the purposes of a wall. On the shore I found the loose rock fallen from its pedestal; and poor Harry Druce lay like a wreck underneath it. One arm was thrown round it in a sort of embrace as if he had pulled it down on himself; and on the broad brown sands beside it, in large crazy lettering, he had scrawled the words: ‘The Rock of Fortune falls on the Fool’.’—

‘It was the Colonel’s will that did that,’ observed Father Brown. ‘The young man had staked everything on profiting himself by Donald’s disgrace, especially when his uncle sent for him on the same day as the lawyer, and welcomed him with so much warmth. Otherwise he was done; he’d lost his police job; he was beggared at Monte Carlo. And he killed himself when he found he’d killed his kinsman for nothing.’

‘Here, stop a minute!’ cried the staring Fiennes. ‘You’re going too fast for me.’

‘Talking about the will, by the way,’ continued Father Brown calmly,’ before I forget it, or we go on to bigger things, there was a simple explanation, I think, of all that business about the doctor’s name. I rather fancy I have heard both names before somewhere. The doctor is really a French nobleman with the title of the Marquis de Villon. But he is also an ardent Republican and has abandoned his title and fallen back on the forgotten family surname. ‘With your Citizen Riquetti you have puzzled Europe for ten days.’

‘What is that?’ asked the young man blankly.

‘Never mind,’ said the priest. ‘Nine times out of ten it is a rascally thing to change one’s name; but this was a piece of fine fanaticism. That’s the point of his sarcasm about Americans having no names—that is, no titles. Now in England the Marquis of Hartington is never called Mr Hartington; but in France the Marquis de Villon is called M. de Villon. So it might well look like a change of name. As for the talk about killing, I fancy that also was a point of French etiquette. The doctor was talking about challenging Floyd to a duel, and the girl was trying to dissuade him.’

‘Oh, I see,’ cried Fiennes slowly. ‘Now I understand what she meant.’

‘And what is that about?’ asked his companion, smiling.

‘Well,’ said the young man, ‘it was something that happened to me just before I found that poor fellow’s body; only the catastrophe drove it out of my head. I suppose it’s hard to remember a little romantic idyll when you’ve just come on top of a tragedy. But as I went down the lanes leading to the Colonel’s old place I met his daughter walking with Dr Valentine. She was in mourning, of course, and he always wore black as if he were going to a funeral; but I can’t say that their faces were very funereal. Never have I seen two people looking in their own way more respectably radiant and cheerful. They stopped and saluted me, and then she told me they were married and living in a little house on the outskirts of the town, where the doctor was continuing his practice. This rather surprised me, because I knew that her old father’s will had left her his property; and I hinted at it delicately by saying I was going along to her father’s old place and had half expected to meet her there. But she only laughed and said: ‘Oh, we’ve given up all that. My husband doesn’t like heiresses.’ And I discovered with some astonishment they really had insisted on restoring the property to poor Donald; so I hope he’s had a healthy shock and will treat it sensibly. There was never much really the matter with him; he was very young and his father was not very wise. But it was in connexion with that that she said something I didn’t understand at the time; but now I’m sure it must be as you say. She said with a sort of sudden and splendid arrogance that was entirely altruistic:

‘‘I hope it’ll stop that red—haired fool from fussing any more about the will. Does he think my husband, who has given up a crest and a coronet as old as the Crusades for his principles, would kill an old man in a summer—house for a legacy like that?’ Then she laughed again and said, ‘My husband isn’t killing anybody except in the way of business. Why, he didn’t even ask his friends to call on the secretary.’ Now, of course, I see what she meant.’

‘I see part of what she meant, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘What did she mean exactly by the secretary fussing about the will?’

Fiennes smiled as he answered, ‘I wish you knew the secretary, Father Brown. It would be a joy to you to watch him make things hum, as he calls it. He made the house of mourning hum. He filled the funeral with all the snap and zip of the brightest sporting event. There was no holding him, after something had really happened. I’ve told you how he used to oversee the gardener as he did the garden, and how he instructed the lawyer in the law. Needless to say, he also instructed the surgeon in the practice of surgery; and as the surgeon was Dr Valentine, you may be sure it ended in accusing him of something worse than bad surgery. The secretary got it fixed in his red head that the doctor had committed the crime, and when the police arrived he was perfectly sublime. Need I say that he became, on the spot, the greatest of all amateur detectives? Sherlock Holmes never towered over Scotland Yard with more Titanic intellectual pride and scorn than Colonel Druce’s private secretary over the police investigating Colonel Druce’s death. I tell you it was a joy to see him. He strode about with an abstracted air, tossing his scarlet crest of hair and giving curt impatient replies. Of course it was his demeanour during these days that made Druce’s daughter so wild with him. Of course he had a theory. It’s just the sort of theory a man would have in a book; and Floyd is the sort of man who ought to be in a book. He’d be better fun and less bother in a book.’

‘What was his theory?’ asked the other.

‘Oh, it was full of pep,’ replied Fiennes gloomily. ‘It would have been glorious copy if it could have held together for ten minutes longer. He said the Colonel was still alive when they found him in the summer— house, and the doctor killed him with the surgical instrument on pretence of cutting the clothes.’

‘I see,’ said the priest. ‘I suppose he was lying flat on his face on the mud floor as a form of siesta.’

‘It’s wonderful what hustle will do,’ continued his informant. ‘ I believe Floyd would have got his great theory into the papers at any rate, and perhaps had the doctor attested, when all these things were blown sky high as if by dynamite by the discovery of that dead body lying under the Rock of Fortune. And that’s what we come back to after all. I suppose the suicide is almost a confession. But nobody will ever know the whole story.’

There was a silence, and then the priest said modestly: ‘I rather think I know the whole story.’

Fiennes stared. ‘But look here,’ he cried; ‘how do you come to know the whole story, or to be sure it’s the true story? You’ve been sitting here a hundred miles away writing a sermon; do you mean to tell me you really know what happened already? If you’ve really come to the end, where in the world do you begin? What started you off with your own story?’

Father Brown jumped up with a very unusual excitement and his first exclamation was like an explosion.

‘The dog!’ he cried. ‘The dog, of course! You had the whole story in your hands in the business of the dog on the beach, if you’d only noticed the dog properly.’

Fiennes stared still more. ‘But you told me before that my feelings about the dog were all nonsense, and the dog had nothing to do with it.’

‘The dog had everything to do with it,’ said Father Brown, ‘as you’d have found out if you’d only treated the dog as a dog, and not as God Almighty judging the souls of men.’

He paused in an embarrassed way for a moment, and then said, with a rather pathetic air of apology: ‘The truth is, I happen to be awfully fond of dogs. And it seemed to me that in all this lurid halo of dog superstitions nobody was really thinking about the poor dog at all. To begin with a small point, about his barking at the lawyer or growling at the secretary. You asked how I could guess things a hundred miles away; but honestly it’s mostly to your credit, for you described people so well that I know the types. A man like Traill, who frowns usually and smiles suddenly, a man who fiddles with things, especially at his throat, is a nervous, easily embarrassed man. I shouldn’t wonder if Floyd, the efficient secretary, is nervy and jumpy, too; those Yankee hustlers often are. Otherwise he wouldn’t have cut his fingers on the shears and dropped them when he heard Janet Druce scream.

‘Now dogs hate nervous people. I don’t know whether they make the dog nervous, too; or whether, being after all a brute, he is a bit of a bully; or whether his canine vanity (which is colossal) is simply offended at not being liked. But anyhow there was nothing in poor Nox protesting against those people, except that he disliked them for being afraid of him. Now I know you’re awfully clever, and nobody of sense sneers at cleverness. But I sometimes fancy, for instance, that you are too clever to understand animals. Sometimes you are too clever to understand men, especially when they act almost as simply as animals. Animals are very literal; they live in a world of truisms. Take this case: a dog barks at a man and a man runs away from a dog. Now you do not seem to be quite simple enough to see the fact: that the dog barked because he disliked the man and the man fled because he was frightened of the dog. They had no other motives and they needed none; but you must read psychological mysteries into it and suppose the dog had super— normal vision, and was a mysterious mouthpiece of doom. You must suppose the man was running away, not from the dog but from the hangman. And yet, if you come to think if it, all this deeper psychology is exceedingly improbable. If the dog really could completely and consciously realize the murderer of his master he wouldn’t stand yapping as he might at a curate at a tea—party; he’s much more likely to fly at his throat. And on the other hand, do you really think a man who had hardened his heart to murder an old friend and then walk about smiling at the old friend’s family, under the eyes of his old friend’s daughter and post—mortem doctor— do you think a man like that would be doubled up by mere remorse because a dog barked? He might feel the tragic irony of it; it might shake his soul, like any other tragic trifle. But he wouldn’t rush madly the length of a garden to escape from the only witness whom he knew to be unable to talk. People have a panic like that when they are frightened, not of tragic ironies, but of teeth. The whole thing is simpler than you can understand.

‘But when we come to that business by the seashore, things are much more interesting. As you stated them, they were much more puzzling. I didn’t understand that tale of the dog going in and out of the water; it didn’t seem to me a doggy thing to do. If Nox had been very much upset about something else, he might possibly have refused to go after the stick at all. He’d probably go off nosing in whatever direction he suspected the mischief. But when once a dog is actually chasing a thing, a stone or a stick or a rabbit, my experience is that he won’t stop for anything but the most peremptory command, and not always for that. That he should turn round because his mood changed seems to me unthinkable.’

‘But he did turn round,’ insisted Fiennes; ‘and came back without the stick.’

‘He came back without the stick for the best reason in the world,’ replied the priest. ‘He came back because he couldn’t find it. He whined because be couldn’t find it. That’s the sort of thing a dog really does whine about. A dog is a devil of a ritualist. He is as particular about the precise routine of a game as a child about the precise repetition of a fairy—tale. In this case something had gone wrong with the game. He came back to complain seriously of the conduct of the stick. Never had such a thing happened before. Never had an eminent and distinguished dog been so treated by a rotten old walking—stick.’

‘Why, what had the walking—stick done?’ inquired the young man.

‘It had sunk,’ said Father Brown.

Fiennes said nothing, but continued to stare; and it was the priest who continued: ‘It had sunk because it was not really a stick, but a rod of steel with a very thin shell of cane and a sharp point. In other words, it was a sword stick. I suppose a murderer never gets rid of a bloody weapon so oddly and yet so naturally as by throwing it into the sea for a retriever.’

‘I begin to see what you mean,’ admitted Fiennes;’ but even if a sword— stick was used, I have no guess of how it was used.’

‘I had a sort of guess,’ said Father Brown, ‘right at the beginning when you said the word summer—house. And another when you said that Druce wore a white coat. As long as everybody was looking for a short dagger, nobody thought of it; but if we admit a rather long blade like a rapier, it’s not so impossible.’

He was leaning back, looking at the ceiling, and began like one going back to his own first thoughts and fundamentals.

‘All that discussion about detective stories like the Yellow Room, about a man found dead in sealed chambers which no one could enter, does not apply to the present case, because it is a summer—house. When we talk of a Yellow Room, or any room, we imply walls that are really homogeneous and impenetrable. But a summer—house is not made like that; it is often made, as it was in this case, of closely interlaced but separate boughs and strips of wood, in which there are chinks here and there. There was one of them just behind Druce’s back as he sat in his chair up against the wall. But just as the room was a summer— house, so the chair was a basket—chair. That also was a lattice of loopholes. Lastly, the summer—house was close up under the hedge; and you have just told me that it was really a thin hedge. A man standing outside it could easily see, amid a network of twigs and branches and canes, one white spot of the Colonel’s coat as plain as the white of a target.

‘Now, you left the geography a little vague; but it was possible to put two and two together. You said the Rock of Fortune was not really high; but you also said it could be seen dominating the garden like a mountain—peak. In other words, it was very near the end of the garden, though your walk had taken you a long way round to it. Also, it isn’t likely the young lady really howled so as to be heard half a mile. She gave an ordinary involuntary cry, and yet you heard it on the shore. And among other interesting things that you told me, may I remind you that you said Harry Druce had fallen behind to light his pipe under a hedge.’

Fiennes shuddered slightly. ‘You mean he drew his blade there and sent it through the hedge at the white spot. But surely it was a very odd chance and a very sudden choice. Besides, he couldn’t be certain the old man’s money had passed to him, and as a fact it hadn’t.’

Father Brown’s face became animated. ‘You misunderstand the man’s character,’ he said, as if he himself had known the man all his life. ‘A curious but not unknown type of character. If he had really known the money would come to him, I seriously believe he wouldn’t have done it. He would have seen it as the dirty thing it was.’

‘Isn’t that rather paradoxical?’ asked the other.

‘This man was a gambler,’ said the priest, ‘and a man in disgrace for having taken risks and anticipated orders. It was probably for something pretty unscrupulous, for every imperial police is more like a Russian secret police than we like to think. But he had gone beyond the line and failed. Now, the temptation of that type of man is to do a mad thing precisely because the risk will be wonderful in retrospect. He wants to say, ‘Nobody but I could have seized that chance or seen that it was then or never. What a wild and wonderful guess it was, when I put all those things together; Donald in disgrace; and the lawyer being sent for; and Herbert and I sent for at the same time—and then nothing more but the way the old man grinned at me and shook hands. Anybody would say I was mad to risk it; but that is how fortunes are made, by the man mad enough to have a little foresight.’ In short, it is the vanity of guessing. It is the megalomania of the gambler. The more incongruous the coincidence, the more instantaneous the decision, the more likely he is to snatch the chance. The accident, the very triviality of the white speck and the hole in the hedge intoxicated him like a vision of the world’s desire. Nobody clever enough to see such a combination of accidents could be cowardly enough not to use them! That is how the devil talks to the gambler. But the devil himself would hardly have induced that unhappy man to go down in a dull, deliberate way and kill an old uncle from whom he’d always had expectations. It would be too respectable.’

He paused a moment, and then went on with a certain quiet emphasis.

‘And now try to call up the scene, even as you saw it yourself. As he stood there, dizzy with his diabolical opportunity, he looked up and saw that strange outline that might have been the image of his own tottering soul; the one great crag poised perilously on the other like a pyramid on its point, and remembered that it was called the Rock of Fortune. Can you guess how such a man at such a moment would read such a signal? I think it strung him up to action and even to vigilance. He who would be a tower must not fear to be a toppling tower. Anyhow, he acted; his next difficulty was to cover his tracks. To be found with a sword—stick, let alone a blood—stained sword— stick, would be fatal in the search that was certain to follow. If he left it anywhere, it would be found and probably traced. Even if he threw it into the sea the action might be noticed, and thought noticeable—unless indeed he could think of some more natural way of covering the action. As you know, he did think of one, and a very good one. Being the only one of you with a watch, he told you it was not yet time to return, strolled a little farther, and started the game of throwing in sticks for the retriever. But how his eyes must have rolled darkly over all that desolate sea— shore before they alighted on the dog!’

Fiennes nodded, gazing thoughtfully into space. His mind seemed to have drifted back to a less practical part of the narrative.

‘It’s queer,’ he said, ‘that the dog really was in the story after all.’

‘The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk,’ said the priest. ‘All I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational catchwords; something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.’ He stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of frown, and went on talking almost as if he were alone. ‘It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery, and a pig is a mascot, and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green— eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words:

‘He was made Man’.’

The young man got up with a little embarrassment, almost as if he had overheard a soliloquy. He called to the dog and left the room with vague but breezy farewells. But he had to call the dog twice, for the dog had remained behind quite motionless for a moment, looking up steadily at Father Brown as the wolf looked at St Francis.

FOUR: The Miracle of Moon Crescent

MOON CRESCENT was meant in a sense to be as romantic as its name; and the things that happened there were romantic enough in their way. At least it had been an expression of that genuine element of sentiment—historic and almost heroic—which manages to remain side by side with commercialism in the elder cities on the eastern coast of America. It was originally a curve of classical architecture really recalling that eighteenth— century atmosphere in which men like Washington and Jefferson had seemed to be all the more republicans for being aristocrats. Travellers faced with the recurrent query of what they thought of our city were understood to be specially answerable for what they thought of our Moon Crescent. The very contrasts that confuse its original harmony were characteristic of its survival. At one extremity or horn of the crescent its last windows looked over an enclosure like a strip of a gentleman’s park, with trees and hedges as formal as a Queen Anne garden. But immediately round the corner, the other windows, even of the same rooms, or rather ‘apartments’, looked out on the blank, unsightly wall of a huge warehouse attached to some ugly industry. The apartments of Moon Crescent itself were at that end remodelled on the monotonous pattern of an American hotel, and rose to a height, which, though lower than the colossal warehouse, would have been called a skyscraper in London. But the colonnade that ran round the whole frontage upon the street had a grey and weather— stained stateliness suggesting that the ghosts of the Fathers of the Republic might still be walking to and fro in it. The insides of the rooms, however, were as neat and new as the last New York fittings could make them, especially at the northern end between the neat garden and the blank warehouse wall. They were a system of very small flats, as we should say in England, each consisting of a sitting—room, bedroom, and bathroom, as identical as the hundred cells of a hive. In one of these the celebrated Warren Wynd sat at his desk sorting letters and scattering orders with wonderful rapidity and exactitude. He could only be compared to a tidy whirlwind.

Warren Wynd was a very little man with loose grey hair and a pointed beard, seemingly frail but fierily active. He had very wonderful eyes, brighter than stars and stronger than magnets, which nobody who had ever seen them could easily forget. And indeed in his work as a reformer and regulator of many good works he had shown at least that he had a pair of eyes in his head. All sorts of stories and even legends were told of the miraculous rapidity with which he could form a sound judgement, especially of human character. It was said that he selected the wife who worked with him so long in so charitable a fashion, by picking her out of a whole regiment of women in uniform marching past at some official celebration, some said of the Girl Guides and some of the Women Police. Another story was told of how three tramps, indistinguishable from each other in their community of filth and rags, had presented themselves before him asking for charity. Without a moment’s hesitation he had sent one of them to a particular hospital devoted to a certain nervous disorder, had recommended the second to an inebriates’ home, and had engaged the third at a handsome salary as his own private servant, a position which he filled successfully for years afterwards. There were, of course, the inevitable anecdotes of his prompt criticisms and curt repartees when brought in contact with Roosevelt, with Henry Ford, and with Mrs Asquith and all other persons with whom an American public man ought to have a historic interview, if only in the newspapers. Certainly he was not likely to be overawed by such personages; and at the moment here in question he continued very calmly his centrifugal whirl of papers, though the man confronting him was a personage of almost equal importance.

Silas T. Vandam, the millionaire and oil magnate, was a lean man with a long, yellow face and blue—black hair, colours which were the less conspicuous yet somehow the more sinister because his face and figure showed dark against the window and the white warehouse wall outside it; he was buttoned up tight in an elegant overcoat with strips of astrakhan. The eager face and brilliant eyes of Wynd, on the other hand, were in the full light from the other window over— looking the little garden, for his chair and—desk stood facing it; and though the face was preoccupied, it did not seem unduly preoccupied about the millionaire. Wynd’s valet or personal servant, a big, powerful man with flat fair hair, was standing behind his master’s desk holding a sheaf of letters; and Wynd’s private secretary, a neat, red— haired youth with a sharp face, had his hand already on the door handle, as if guessing some purpose or obeying some gesture of his employer. The room was not only neat, but austere to the point of emptiness; for Wynd, with characteristic thoroughness, had rented the whole floor above, and turned it into a loft or storeroom, where all his other papers and possessions were stacked in boxes and corded bales.

‘Give these to the floor—clerk, Wilson,’ said Wynd to the servant holding the letters, ‘and then get me the pamphlet on the Minneapolis Night Clubs; you’ll find it in the bundle marked ‘G’. I shall want it in half an hour, but don’t disturb me till then. Well, Mr Vandam, I think your proposition sounds very promising; but I can’t give a final answer till I’ve seen the report. It ought to reach me to—morrow afternoon, and I’ll phone you at once. I’m sorry I can’t say anything more definite just now.’

Mr Vandam seemed to feel that this was something like a polite dismissal; and his sallow, saturnine face suggested that he found a certain irony in the fact.

‘Well, I suppose I must be going,’ he said.

‘Very good of you to call, Mr Vandam,’ said Wynd, politely; ‘you will excuse my not coming out, as I’ve something here I must fix at once. Fenner,’ he added to the secretary,’ show Mr Vandam to his car, and don’t come back again for half an hour. I’ve something here I want to work out by myself; after that I shall want you.’

The three men went out into the hallway together, closing the door behind them. The big servant, Wilson, was turning down the hallway in the direction of the floor—clerk, and the other two moving in the opposite direction towards the lift; for Wynd’s apartment was high up on the fourteenth floor. They had hardly gone a yard from the closed door when they became conscious that the corridor was filled with a marching and even magnificent figure. The man was very tall and broad—shouldered, his bulk being the more conspicuous for being clad in white, or a light grey that looked like it, with a very wide white panama hat and an almost equally wide fringe or halo of almost equally white hair. Set in this aureole his face was strong and handsome, like that of a Roman emperor, save that there was something more than boyish, something a little childish, about the brightness of his eyes and the beatitude of his smile. ‘Mr Warren Wynd in?’ he asked, in hearty tones.

‘Mr Warren Wynd is engaged,’ said Fenner; ‘he must not be disturbed on any account. I may say I am his secretary and can take any message.’

‘Mr Warren Wynd is not at home to the Pope or the Crowned Heads,’ said Vandam, the oil magnate, with sour satire. ‘Mr Warren Wynd is mighty particular. I went in there to hand him over a trifle of twenty thousand dollars on certain conditions, and, he told me to call again like as if I was a call—boy.’

‘It’s a fine thing to be a boy,’ said the stranger, ‘and a finer to have a call; and I’ve got a call he’s just got to listen to. It’s a call of the great good country out West, where the real American is being made while you’re all snoring. Just tell him that Art Alboin of Oklahoma City has come to convert him.’

‘I tell you nobody can see him,’ said the red—haired secretary sharply. ‘He has given orders that he is not to be disturbed for half an hour.’

‘You folks down East are all against being disturbed,’ said the breezy Mr Alboin, ‘but I calculate there’s a big breeze getting up in the West that will have to disturb you. He’s been figuring out how much money must go to this and that stuffy old religion; but I tell you any scheme that leaves out the new Great Spirit movement in Texas and Oklahoma, is leaving out the religion of the future.’

‘Oh; I’ve sized up those religions of the future,’ said the millionaire, contemptuously. ‘I’ve been through them with a tooth— comb and they’re as mangy as yellow dogs. There was that woman called herself Sophia: ought to have called herself Sapphira, I reckon. Just a plum fraud. Strings tied to all the tables and tambourines. Then there were the Invisible Life bunch; said they could vanish when they liked, and they did vanish, too, and a hundred thousand of my dollars vanished with them. I knew Jupiter Jesus out in Denver; saw him for weeks on end; and he was just a common crook. So was the Patagonian Prophet; you bet he’s made a bolt for Patagonia. No, I’m through with all that; from now on I only believe what I see. I believe they call it being an atheist.’

‘I guess you got me wrong,’ said the man from Oklahoma, almost eagerly. ‘I guess I’m as much of an atheist as you are. No supernatural or superstitious stuff in our movement; just plain science. The only real right science is just health, and the only real right health is just breathing. Fill your lungs with the wide air of the prairie and you could blow all your old eastern cities into the sea. You could just puff away their biggest men like thistledown. That’s what we do in the new movement out home: we breathe. We don’t pray; we breathe.’

‘Well, I suppose you do,’ said the secretary, wearily. He had a keen, intelligent face which could hardly conceal the weariness; but he had listened to the two monologues with the admirable patience and politeness (so much in contrast with the legends of impatience and insolence) with which such monologues are listened to in America.

‘Nothing supernatural,’ continued Alboin, ‘just the great natural fact behind all the supernatural fancies. What did the Jews want with a God except to breathe into man’s nostrils the breath of life? We do the breathing into our own nostrils out in Oklahoma. What’s the meaning of the very word Spirit? It’s just the Greek for breathing exercises. Life, progress, prophecy; it’s all breath.’

‘Some would allow it’s all wind,’ said Vandam; ‘but I’m glad you’ve got rid of the divinity stunt, anyhow.’

The keen face of the secretary, rather pale against his red hair, showed a flicker of some odd feeling suggestive of a secret bitterness.

‘I’m not glad,’ he said, ‘I’m just sure. You seem to like being atheists; so you may be just believing what you like to believe. But. I wish to God there were a God; and there ain’t. It’s just my luck.’

Without a sound or stir they all became almost creepily conscious at this moment that the group, halted outside Wynd’s door, had silently grown from three figures to four. How long the fourth figure had stood there none of the earnest disputants could tell, but he had every appearance of waiting respectfully and even timidly for the opportunity to say something urgent. But to their nervous sensibility he seemed to have sprung up suddenly and silently like a mushroom. And indeed, he looked rather like a big, black mushroom, for he was quite short and his small, stumpy figure was eclipsed by his big, black clerical hat; the resemblance might have been more complete if mushrooms were in the habit of carrying umbrellas, even of a shabby and shapeless sort.

Fenner, the secretary, was conscious of a curious additional surprise at recognizing the figure of a priest; but when the priest turned up a round face under the round hat and innocently asked for Mr Warren Wynd, he gave the regular negative answer rather more curtly than before. But the priest stood his ground.

‘I do really want to see Mr Wynd,’ he said. ‘It seems odd, but that’s exactly what I do want to do. I don’t want to speak to him. I just want to see him. I just want to see if he’s there to be seen.’

‘Well, I tell you he’s there and can’t be seen,’ said Fenner, with increasing annoyance. ‘What do you mean by saying you want to see if he’s there to be seen? Of course he’s there. We all left him there five minutes ago, and we’ve stood outside this door ever since.’

‘Well, I want to see if he’s all right,’ said the priest.

‘Why?’ demanded the secretary, in exasperation. ‘Because I have a serious, I might say solemn, reason,’ said the cleric, gravely, ‘for doubting whether he is all right.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ cried Vandam, in a sort of fury; ‘not more superstitions.’

‘I see I shall have to give my reasons,’ observed the little cleric, gravely. ‘I suppose I can’t expect you even to let me look through the crack of a door till I tell you the whole story.’ He was silent a moment as in reflection, and then went on without noticing the wondering faces around him. ‘I was walking outside along the front of the colonnade when I saw a very ragged man running hard round the corner at the end of the crescent. He came pounding along the pavement towards me, revealing a great raw—boned figure and a face I knew. It was the face of a wild Irish fellow I once helped a little; I will not tell you his name. When he saw me he staggered, calling me by mine and saying, ‘Saints alive, it’s Father Brown; you’re the only man whose face could frighten me to—day.’

‘I knew he meant he’d been doing some wild thing or other, and I don’t think my face frightened him much, for he was soon telling me about it. And a very strange thing it was. He asked me if I knew Warren Wynd, and I said no, though I knew he lived near the top of these flats. He said, ‘That’s a man who thinks he’s a saint of God; but if he knew what I was saying of him he should be ready to hang himself.’ And he repeated hysterically more than once, ‘Yes, ready to hang himself.’ I asked him if he’d done any harm to Wynd, and his answer was rather a queer one. He said: ‘I took a pistol and I loaded it with neither shot nor slug, but only with a curse.’ As far as I could make out, all he had done was to go down that little alley between this building and the big warehouse, with an old pistol loaded with a blank charge, and merely fire it against the wall, as if that would bring down the building. ‘But as I did it,’ he said, ‘I cursed him with the great curse, that the justice of God should take him by the hair and the vengeance of hell by the heels, and he should be torn asunder like Judas and the world know him no more.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter now what else I said to the poor, crazy fellow; he went away quieted down a little, and I went round to the back of the building to inspect. And sure enough, in the little alley at the foot of this wall there lay a rusty antiquated pistol; I know enough about pistols to know it had been loaded only with a little powder, there were the black marks of powder and smoke on the wall, and even the mark of the muzzle, but not even a dent of any bullet. He had left no trace of destruction; he had left no trace of anything, except those black marks and that black curse he had hurled into heaven. So I came back here to ask for this Warren Wynd and find out if he’s all right.’

Penner the secretary laughed. ‘I can soon settle that difficulty for you. I assure you he’s quite all right; we left him writing at his desk only a few minutes ago. He was alone in his flat; it’s a hundred feet up from the street, and so placed that no shot could have reached him, even if your friend hadn’t fired blank. There’s no other entrance to this place but this door, and we’ve been standing outside it ever since.’

‘All the same,’ said Father Brown, gravely, ‘I should like to look in and see.’

‘Well, you can’t,’ retorted the other. ‘Good Lord, you don’t tell me you think anything of the curse.’

‘You forget,’ said the millionaire, with a slight sneer, ‘the reverend gentleman’s whole business is blessings and cursings. Come, sir, if he’s been cursed to hell, why don’t you bless him back again? What’s the good of your blessings if they can’t beat an Irish larrykin’s curse?’

‘Does anybody believe such things now?’ protested the Westerner.

‘Father Brown believes a good number of things, I take it,’ said Vandam, whose temper was suffering from the past snub and the present bickering. ‘Father Brown believes a hermit crossed a river on a crocodile conjured out of nowhere, and then he told the crocodile to die, and it sure did. Father Brown believes that some blessed saint or other died, and had his dead body turned into three dead bodies, to be served out to three parishes that were all I bent on figuring as his home—town. Father Brown believes that a saint hung his cloak on a sunbeam, and another used his for a boat to cross the Atlantic. Father Brown believes the holy donkey had six legs and the house of Loretto flew through the air. He believes in hundreds of stone virgins winking and weeping all day long. It’s nothing to him to believe that a man might escape through the keyhole or vanish out of a locked room. I reckon he doesn’t take much stock of the laws of nature.’

‘Anyhow, I have to take stock in the laws of Warren Wynd,’ said the secretary, wearily, ‘and it’s his rule that he’s to be left alone when he says so. Wilson will tell you just the same,’ for the large servant who had been sent for the pamphlet, passed placidly down the corridor even as he spoke, carrying the pamphlet, but serenely passing the door. ‘He’ll go and sit on the bench by the floor—clerk and twiddle his thumbs till he’s wanted; but he won’t go in before then; and nor will I. I reckon we both know which side our bread is buttered, and it’d take a good many of Father Brown’s saint and angels to make us forget it.’

‘As for saints and angels—‘ began the priest.

‘It’s all nonsense,’ repeated Fenner. ‘I don’t want to say anything offensive, but that sort of thing may be very well for crypts and cloisters and all sorts of moonshiny places. But ghosts can’t get through a closed door in an American hotel.’

‘But men can open a door, even in an American hotel,’ replied Father Brown, patiently. ‘And it seems to me the simplest thing would be to open it.’

‘It would be simple enough to lose me my job,’ answered the secretary, ‘and Warren Wynd doesn’t like his secretaries so simple as that. Not simple enough to believe in the sort of fairy tales you seem to believe in.’

‘Well,’ said the priest gravely, ‘it is true enough that I believe in a good many things that you probably don’t. But it would take a considerable time to explain all the things I believe in, and all the reasons I have for thinking I’m right. It would take about two seconds to open that door and prove I am wrong.’

Something in the phrase seemed to please the more wild and restless spirit of the man from the West.

‘I’ll allow I’d love to prove you wrong,’ said Alboin, striding suddenly past them, ‘and I will.’

He threw open the door of the flat and looked in. The first glimpse showed that Warren Wynd’s chair was empty. The second glance showed that his room was empty also.

Fenner, electrified with energy in his turn, dashed past the other into the apartment.

‘He’s in his bedroom,’ be said curtly, ‘he must be.’

As he disappeared into the inner chamber the other men stood in the empty outer room staring about them. The severity and simplicity of its fittings, which had already been noted, returned on them with a rigid challenge. Certainly in this room there was no question of hiding a mouse, let alone a man. There were no curtains and, what is rare in American arrangements, no cupboards. Even the desk was no more than a plain table with a shallow drawer and a tilted lid. The chairs were hard and high— backed skeletons. A moment after the secretary reappeared at the inner door, having searched the two inner rooms. A staring negation stood in his eyes, and his mouth seemed to move in a mechanical detachment from it as he said sharply: ‘He didn’t come out through here?’

Somehow the others did not even think it necessary to answer that negation in the negative. Their minds had come up against something like the blank wall of the warehouse that stared in at the opposite window, gradually turning from white to grey as dusk slowly descended with the advancing afternoon. Vandam walked over to the window—sill against which he had leant half an hour before and looked out of the open window. There was no pipe or fire—escape, no shelf or foothold of any kind on the sheer fall to the little by—street below, there was nothing on the similar expanse of wall that rose many stories above. There was even less variation on the other side of the street; there was nothing whatever but the wearisome expanse of whitewashed wall. He peered downwards, as if expecting to see the vanished philanthropist lying in a suicidal wreck on the path. He could see nothing but one small dark object which, though diminished by distance, might well be the pistol that the priest had found lying there. Meanwhile, Fenner had walked to the other window, which looked out from a wall equally blank and inaccessible, but looking out over a small ornamental park instead of a side street. Here a clump of trees interrupted the actual view of the ground; but they reached but a little way up the huge human cliff. Both turned back into the room and faced each other in the gathering twilight where the last silver gleams of daylight on the shiny tops of desks and tables were rapidly turning grey. As if the twilight itself irritated him, Fenner touched the switch and the scene sprang into the startling distinctness of electric light.

‘As you said just now,’ said Vandam grimly, ‘there’s no shot from down there could bit him, even if there was a shot in the gun. But even if he was hit with a bullet he wouldn’t have just burst like a bubble.’

The secretary, who was paler than ever, glanced irritably at the bilious visage of the millionaire. ‘What’s got you started on those morbid notions? Who’s talking about bullets and bubbles? Why shouldn’t he be alive?’

‘Why not indeed?’ replied Vandam smoothly. ‘If you’ll tell me where he is, I’ll tell you how he got there.’

After a pause the secretary muttered, rather sulkily: ‘I suppose you’re right. We’re right up against the very thing we were talking about. It’d be a queer thing if you or I ever came to think there was anything in cursing. But who could have harmed Wynd shut up in here?’

Mr Alboin, of Oklahoma, had been standing rather astraddle in the middle of the room, his white, hairy halo as well as his round eyes seeming to radiate astonishment. At this point he said, abstractedly, with something of the irrelevant impudence of an enfant terrible: ‘You didn’t cotton to him much, did you, Mr Vandam?’

Mr Vandam’s long yellow face seemed to grow longer as it grew more sinister, while he smiled and answered quietly: ‘If it comes to these coincidences, it was you, I think, who said that a wind from the West would blow away out big men like thistledown.’

‘I know I said it would,’ said the Westerner, with candour; ‘but all the same, how the devil could it?’

The silence was broken by Fenner saying with an abruptness amounting to violence: ‘There’s only one thing to say about this affair. It simply hasn’t happened. It can’t have happened.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Father Brown out of the corner; ‘it has happened all right.’

They all jumped; for the truth was they had all forgotten the insignificant little man who had originally induced them to open the door. And the recovery of memory went with a sharp reversal of mood; it came back to them with a rush that they had all dismissed him as a superstitious dreamer for even hinting at the very thing that had since happened before their eyes.

‘Snakes!’ cried the impetuous Westerner, like one speaking before he could stop himself; ‘suppose there were something in it, after all!’

‘I must confess,’ said Fenner, frowning at the table, ‘that his reverence’s anticipations were apparently well founded. I don’t know whether he has anything else to tell us.’

‘He might possibly tell us,’ said Vandam, sardonically, ‘what the devil we are to do now.’

The little priest seemed to accept the position in a modest, but matter—of—fact manner. ‘The only thing I can think of,’ he said, ‘is first to tell the authorities of this place, and then to see if there were any more traces of my man who let off the pistol. He vanished round the other end of the Crescent where the little garden is. There are seats there, and it’s a favourite place for tramps.’

Direct consultations with the headquarters of the hotel, leading to indirect consultations with the authorities of the police, occupied them for a considerable time; and it was already nightfall when they went out under the long, classical curve of the colonnade. The crescent looked as cold and hollow as the moon after which it was named, and the moon itself was rising luminous but spectral behind the black tree—tops when they turned the corner by the little public garden. Night veiled much of what was merely urban and artificial about the place, and as they melted into the shadows of the trees they had a strange feeling of having suddenly travelled many hundred miles from their homes. When they had walked in silence for a little, Alboin, who had something elemental about him, suddenly exploded.

‘I give up,’ he cried; ‘I hand in my checks. I never thought I should come to such things; but what happens when the things come to you? I beg your pardon, Father Brown; I reckon I’ll just come across, so far as you and your fairy—tales are concerned. After this, it’s me for the fairy—tales. Why, you said yourself, Mr Vandam, that you’re an atheist and only believe what you see. Well, what was it you did see? Or rather, what was it you didn’t see?’

‘I know,’ said Vandam and nodded in a gloomy fashion.

‘Oh, it’s partly all this moon and trees that get on one’s nerves,’ said Fenner obstinately. ‘Trees always look queer by moonlight, with their branches crawling about. Look at that—‘

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, standing still and peering at the moon through a tangle of trees. ‘That’s a very queer branch up there.’

When he spoke again he only said: ‘I thought it was a broken branch.’

But this time there was a catch in his voice that unaccountably turned his hearers cold. Something that looked rather like a dead branch was certainly dependent in a limp fashion from the tree that showed dark against the moon; but it was not a dead branch. When they came close to it to see what it was Fenner sprang away again with a ringing oath. Then he ran in again and loosened a rope from the neck of the dingy little body dangling with drooping plumes of grey hair. Somehow he knew that the body was a dead body before he managed to take it down from the tree. A very long coil of rope was wrapped round and round the branches, and a comparatively short length of it hung from the fork of the branch to the body. A long garden tub was rolled a yard or so from under the feet, like the stool kicked away from the feet of a suicide.

‘Oh, my God!’ said Alboin, so that it seemed as much a prayer as an oath.’ What was it that man said about him?—‘If he knew, he would be ready to hang himself.’ Wasn’t that what he said, Father Brown?’

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown.

‘Well,’ said Vandam in a hollow voice, ‘I never thought to see or say such a thing. But what can one say except that the curse has worked?’

Fenner was standing with hands covering his face; and the priest laid a hand on his arm and said, gently, ‘Were you very fond of him?’

The secretary dropped his hands and his white face was ghastly under the moon.

‘I hated him like hell,’ he said; ‘and if he died by a curse it might have been mine.’

The pressure of the priest’s hand on his arm tightened; and the priest said, with an earnestness he had hardly yet shown: ‘It wasn’t your curse; pray be comforted.’

The police of the district had considerable difficulty in dealing with the four witnesses who were involved in the case. All of them were reputable, and even reliable people in the ordinary sense; and one of them was a person of considerable power and importance: Silas Vandam of the Oil Trust. The first police—officer who tried to express scepticism about his story struck sparks from the steel of that magnate’s mind very rapidly indeed.

‘Don’t you talk to me about sticking to the facts,’ said the millionaire with asperity. ‘I’ve stuck to a good many facts before you were born and a few of the facts have stuck to me. I’ll give you the facts all right if you’ve got the sense to take ‘em down correctly.’

The policeman in question was youthful and subordinate, and had a hazy idea that the millionaire was too political to be treated as an ordinary citizen; so he passed him and his companions on to a more stolid superior, one Inspector Collins, a grizzled man with a grimly comfortable way of talking; as one who was genial but would stand no nonsense.

‘Well, well,’ he said, looking at the three figures before him with twinkling eyes, ‘this seems to be a funny sort of a tale.’

Father Brown had already gone about his daily business; but Silas Vandam had suspended even the gigantic business of the markets for an hour or so to testify to his remarkable experience. Fenner’s business as secretary had ceased in a sense with his employer’s life; and the great Art Alboin, having no business in New York or anywhere else, except the spreading of the Breath of Life religion or the Great Spirit, had nothing to draw him away at the moment from the immediate affair. So they stood in a row in the inspector’s office, prepared to corroborate each other.

‘Now I’d better tell you to start with,’ said the inspector cheerfully, ‘that it’s no good for anybody to come to me with any miraculous stuff. I’m a practical man and a policeman, and that sort of thing is all very well for priests and parsons. This priest of yours seems to have got you all worked up about some story of a dreadful death and judgement; but I’m going to leave him and his religion out of it altogether. If Wynd came out of that room, somebody let him out. And if Wynd was found hanging on that tree, somebody hung him there.’

‘Quite so,’ said Fenner; ‘but as out evidence is that nobody let him out, the question is how could anybody have hung him there?’

‘How could anybody have a nose on his face?’ asked the inspector. ‘He had a nose on his face, and he had a noose round his neck. Those are facts; and, as I say, I’m a practical man and go by the facts. It can’t have been done by a miracle, so it must have been done by a man.’

Alboin had been standing rather in the background; and indeed his broad figure seemed to form a natural background to the leaner and more vivacious men in front of him. His white head was bowed with a certain abstraction; but as the inspector said the last sentence, he lifted it, shaking his hoary mane in a leonine fashion, and looking dazed but awakened. He moved forward into the centre of the group, and they had a vague feeling that he was even vaster than before. They had been only too prone to take him for a fool or a mountebank; but he was not altogether wrong when he said that there was in him a certain depth of lungs and life, like a west wind stored up in its strength, which might some day puff lighter things away.

‘So you’re a practical man, Mr Collins,’ he said, in a voice at once soft and heavy. ‘It must be the second or third time you’ve mentioned in this little conversation that you are a practical man; so I can’t be mistaken about that. And a very interesting little fact it is for anybody engaged in writing your life, letters, and table—talk, with portrait at the age of five, daguerreotype of your grandmother and views of the old home—town; and I’m sure your biographer won’t forget to mention it along with the fact that you had a pug nose with a pimple on it, and were nearly too fat to walk. And as you’re a practical man, perhaps you would just go on practising till you’ve brought Warren Wynd to life again, and found out exactly how a practical man gets through a deal door. But I think you’ve got it wrong. You’re not a practical man. You’re a practical joke; that’s what you are. The Almighty was having a bit of fun with us when he thought of you.’

With a characteristic sense of drama he went sailing towards the door before the astonished inspector could reply; and no after— recriminations could rob him of a certain appearance of triumph.

‘I think you were perfectly right,’ said Fenner. ‘If those are practical men, give me priests.’

Another attempt was made to reach an official version of the event when the authorities fully realized who were the backers of the story, and what were the implications of it. Already it had broken out in the Press in its most sensationally and even shamelessly psychic form. Interviews with Vandam on his marvellous adventure, articles about Father Brown and his mystical intuitions, soon led those who feel responsible for guiding the public, to wish to guide it into a wiser channel. Next time the inconvenient witnesses were approached in a more indirect and tactful manner. They were told, almost in an airy fashion, that Professor Vair was very much interested in such abnormal experiences; was especially interested in their own astonishing case. Professor Vair was a psychologist of great distinction; he had been known to take a detached interest in criminology; it was only some little time afterwards that they discovered that he was in any way connected with the police.

Professor Vair was a courteous gentleman, quietly dressed in pale grey clothes, with an artistic tie and a fair, pointed beard; he looked more like a landscape painter to anyone not acquainted with a certain special type of don. He had an air not only of courtesy, but of frankness.

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he said smiling; ‘I can guess what you must have gone through. The police do not shine in inquiries of a psychic sort, do they? Of course, dear old Collins said he only wanted the facts. What an absurd blunder! In a case of this kind we emphatically do not only want the facts. It is even more essential to have the fancies.’

‘Do you mean,’ asked Vandam gravely, ‘that all that we thought facts were merely fancies?’

‘Not at all,’ said the professor; ‘I only mean that the police are stupid in thinking they can leave out the psychological element in these things. Well, of course, the psychological element is everything in everything, though it is only just beginning to be understood. To begin with, take the element called personality. Now I have heard of this priest, Father Brown, before; and he is one of the most remarkable men of our time. Men of that sort carry a sort of atmosphere with them; and nobody knows how much his nerves and even his very senses are affected by it for the time being. People are hypnotized— yes, hypnotized; for hypnotism, like everything else, is a matter of degree; it enters slightly into all daily conversation: it is not necessarily conducted by a man in evening— dress on a platform in a public hall. Father Brown’s religion has always understood the psychology of atmospheres, and knows bow to appeal to everything simultaneously; even, for instance, to the sense of smell. It understands those curious effects produced by music on animals and human beings; it can—‘

‘Hang it,’ protested Fenner, ‘you don’t think he walked down the corridor carrying a church organ?’

‘He knows better than to do that,’ said Professor Vair laughing. ‘He knows how to concentrate the essence of all these spiritual sounds and sights, and even smells, in a few restrained gestures; in an art or school of manners. He could contrive so to concentrate your minds on the supernatural by his mere presence, that natural things slipped off your minds to left and right unnoticed. Now you know,’ he proceeded with a return to cheerful good sense, ‘that the more we study it the more queer the whole question of human evidence becomes. There is not one man in twenty who really observes things at all. There is not one man in a hundred who observes them with real precision; certainly not one in a hundred who can first observe, then remember, and finally describe. Scientific experiments have been made again and again showing that men under strain have thought a door was shut when it was open, or open when it was shut. Men have differed about the number of doors or windows in a wall just in front of them. They have suffered optical illusions in broad daylight. They have done this even without the hypnotic effect of personality; but here we have a very powerful and persuasive personality bent upon fixing only one picture on your minds; the picture of the wild Irish rebel shaking his pistol at the sky and firing that vain volley, whose echoes were the thunders of heaven.’

‘Professor,’ cried Fenner, ‘I’d swear on my deathbed that door never opened.’

‘Recent experiments,’ went on the professor, quietly, ‘have suggested that our consciousness is not continuous, but is a succession of very rapid impressions like a cinema; it is possible that somebody or something may, so to speak, slip in or out between the scenes. It acts only in the instant while the curtain is down. Probably the patter of conjurors and all forms of sleight of hand depend on what we may call these black flashes of blindness between the flashes of sight. Now this priest and preacher of transcendental notions had filled you with a transcendental imagery; the image of the Celt like a Titan shaking the tower with his curse. Probably he accompanied it with some slight but compelling gesture, pointing your eyes and minds in the direction of the unknown destroyer below. Or perhaps something else happened, or somebody else passed by.’

‘Wilson, the servant,’ grunted Alboin, ‘went down the hallway to wait on the bench, but I guess he didn’t distract us much.’

‘You never know how much,’ replied Vair; ‘it might have been that or more likely your eyes following some gesture of the priest as he told his tale of magic. It was in one of those black flashes that Mr Warren Wynd slipped out of his door and went to his death. That is the most probable explanation. It is an illustration of the new discovery. The mind is not a continuous line, but rather a dotted line.’

‘Very dotted,’ said Fenner feebly. ‘Not to say dotty.’

‘You don’t really believe,’ asked Vair, ‘that your employer was shut up in a room like a box?’

‘It’s better than believing that I ought to be shut up in a room like a padded cell,’ answered Fenner. ‘That’s what I complain of in your suggestions, professor. I’d as soon believe in a priest who believes in a miracle, as disbelieve in any man having any right to believe in a fact. The priest tells me that a man can appeal to a God I know nothing about to avenge him by the laws of some higher justice that I know nothing about. There’s nothing for me to say except that I know nothing about it. But, at least, if the poor Paddy’s prayer and pistol could be heard in a higher world, that higher world might act in some way that seems odd to us. But you ask me to disbelieve the facts of this world as they appear to my own five wits. According to you, a whole procession of Irishmen carrying blunderbusses may have walked through this room while we were talking, so long as they took care to tread on the blind spots in our minds. Miracles of the monkish sort, like materializing a crocodile or hanging a cloak on a sunbeam, seem quite sane compared to you.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Professor Vair, rather curtly, ‘if you are resolved to believe in your priest and his miraculous Irishman I can say no more. I’m afraid you have not had an opportunity of studying psychology.’

‘No,’ said Fenner dryly; ‘but I’ve had an opportunity of studying psychologists.’

And, bowing politely, he led his deputation out of the room and did not speak till he got into the street; then he addressed them rather explosively.

‘Raving lunatics!’ cried Fenner in a fume. ‘What the devil do they think is to happen to the world if nobody knows whether he’s seen anything or not? I wish I’d blown his silly head off with a blank charge, and then explained that I did it in a blind flash. Father Brown’s miracle may be miraculous or no, but he said it would happen and it did happen. All these blasted cranks can do is to see a thing happen and then say it didn’t. Look here, I think we owe it to the padre to testify to his little demonstration. We’re all sane, solid men who never believed in anything. We weren’t drunk. We weren’t devout. It simply happened just as he said it would.’

‘I quite agree,’ said the millionaire. ‘It may be the beginning of mighty big things in the spiritual line; but anyhow, the man who’s in the spiritual line himself, Father Brown, has certainly scored over this business.’

A few days afterwards Father Brown received a very polite note signed Silas T. Vandam, and asking him if he would attend at a stated hour at the apartment which was the scene of the disappearance, in order to take steps for the establishment of that marvellous occurrence. The occurrence itself had already begun to break out in the newspapers, and was being taken up everywhere by the enthusiasts of occultism. Father Brown saw the flaring posters inscribed ‘Suicide of Vanishing Man’, and ‘Man’s Curse Hangs Philanthropist’, as he passed towards Moon Crescent and mounted the steps on the way to the elevator. He found the little group much as he left it, Vandam, Alboin, and the secretary; but there was an entirely new respectfulness and even reverence in their tone towards himself. They were standing by Wynd’s desk, on which lay a large paper and writing materials; they turned to greet him.

‘Father Brown,’ said the spokesman, who was the white—haired Westerner, somewhat sobered with his responsibility, ‘we asked you here in the first place to offer our apologies and our thanks. We recognize that it was you that spotted the spiritual manifestation from the first. We were hard—shell sceptics, all of us; but we realize now that a man must break that shell to get at the great things behind the world. You stand for those things; you stand for the super—normal explanation of things; and we have to hand it to you. And in the second place, we feel that this document would not be complete without your signature. We are notifying the exact facts to the Psychical Research Society, because the newspaper accounts are not what you might call exact. We’ve stated how the curse was spoken out in the street; how the man was sealed up here in a room like a box; how the curse dissolved him straight into thin air, and in some unthinkable way materialized him as a suicide hoisted on a gallows. That’s all we can say about it; but all that we know, and have seen with our own eyes. And as you were the first to believe in the miracle, we all feel that you ought to be the first to sign.’

‘No, really,’ said Father Brown, in embarrassment. ‘I don’t think I should like to do that.’

‘You mean you’d rather not sign first?’

‘I mean I’d rather not sign at all,’ said Father Brown, modestly. ‘You see, it doesn’t quite do for a man in my position to joke about miracles.’

‘But it was you who said it was a miracle,’ said Alboin, staring.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Father Brown; ‘I’m afraid there’s some mistake. I don’t think I ever said it was a miracle. All I said was that it might happen. What you said was that it couldn’t happen, because it would be a miracle if it did. And then it did. And so you said it was a miracle. But I never said a word about miracles or magic, or anything of the sort from beginning to end.’

‘But I thought you believed in miracles,’ broke out the secretary.

‘Yes,’ answered Father Brown, ‘I believe in miracles. I believe in man— eating tigers, but I don’t see them running about everywhere. If I want any miracles, I know where to get them.’

‘I can’t understand your taking this line, Father Brown,’ said Vandam, earnestly. ‘It seems so narrow; and you don’t look narrow to me, though you are a parson. Don’t you see, a miracle like this will knock all materialism endways? It will just tell the whole world in big print that spiritual powers can work and do work. You’ll be serving religion as no parson ever served it yet.’

The priest had stiffened a little and seemed in some strange way clothed with unconscious and impersonal dignity, for all his stumpy figure. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t suggest I should serve religion by what I know to be a lie? I don’t know precisely what you mean by the phrase; and, to be quite candid, I’m not sure you do. Lying may be serving religion; I’m sure it’s not serving God. And since you are harping so insistently on what I believe, wouldn’t it be as well if you had some sort of notion of what it is?’

‘I don’t think I quite understand,’ observed the millionaire, curiously.

‘I don’t think you do,’ said Father Brown, with simplicity. ‘You say this thing was done by spiritual powers. What spiritual powers? You don’t think the holy angels took him and hung him on a garden tree, do you? And as for the unholy angels—no, no, no. The men who did this did a wicked thing, but they went no further than their own wickedness; they weren’t wicked enough to be dealing with spiritual powers. I know something about Satanism, for my sins; I’ve been forced to know. I know what it is, what it practically always is. It’s proud and it’s sly. It likes to be superior; it loves to horrify the innocent with things half understood, to make children’s flesh creep. That’s why it’s so fond of mysteries and initiations and secret societies and all the rest of it. Its eyes are turned inwards, and however grand and grave it may look, it’s always hiding a small, mad smile.’ He shuddered suddenly, as if caught in an icy draught of air. ‘Never mind about them; they’ve got nothing to do with this, believe me. Do you think that poor, wild Irishman of mine, who ran raving down the street, who blurted out half of it when he first saw my face, and ran away for fear he should blurt out more, do you think Satan confides any secrets to him? I admit he joined in a plot, probably in a plot with two other men worse than himself; but for all that, he was just in an everlasting rage when he rushed down the lane and let off his pistol and his curse.’

‘But what on earth does all this mean?’ demanded Vandam. ‘Letting off a toy pistol and a twopenny curse wouldn’t do what was done, except by a miracle. It wouldn’t make Wynd disappear like a fairy. It wouldn’t make him reappear a quarter of a mile away with a rope round his neck.’

‘No,’ said Father Brown sharply; ‘but what would it do?’

‘And still I don’t follow you,’ said the millionaire gravely.

‘I say, what would it do?’ repeated the priest; showing, for the first time, a sort of animation verging on annoyance. ‘You keep on repeating that a blank pistol—shot wouldn’t do this and wouldn’t do that; that if that was all, the murder wouldn’t happen or the miracle wouldn’t happen. It doesn’t seem to occur to you to ask what would happen. What would happen to you if a lunatic let off a firearm without rhyme or reason right under your window? What’s the very first thing that would happen?’

Vandam looked thoughtful. ‘I guess I should look out of the window,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘you’d look out of the window. That’s the whole story. It’s a sad story, but it’s finished now; and there were extenuating circumstances.’

‘Why should looking out of the window hurt him?’ asked Alboin. ‘He didn’t fall out, or he’d have been found in the lane.’

‘No,’ said Father Brown, in a low voice. ‘He didn’t fall. He rose.’

There was something in his voice like the groan of a gong, a note of doom, but otherwise he went on steadily: ‘He rose, but not on wings; not on the wings of any holy or unholy angels. He rose at the end of a rope, exactly as you saw him in the garden; a noose dropped over his head the moment it was poked out of the window. Don’t you remember Wilson, that big servant of his, a man of huge strength, while Wynd was the lightest of little shrimps? Didn’t Wilson go to the floor above to get a pamphlet, to a room full of luggage corded in coils and coils of rope? Has Wilson been seen since that day? I fancy not.’

‘Do you mean,’ asked the secretary, ‘that Wilson whisked him clean out of his own window like a trout on a line?’

‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘and let him down again out of the other window into the park, where the third accomplice hooked him on to a tree. Remember the lane was always empty; remember the wall opposite was quite blank; remember it was all over in five minutes after the Irishman gave the signal with the pistol. There were three of them in it of course; and I wonder whether you can all guess who they were.’

They were all three staring at the plain, square window and the blank, white wall beyond; and nobody answered.

‘By the way,’ went on Father Brown, ‘don’t think I blame you for jumping to preternatural conclusions. The reason’s very simple, really. You all swore you were hard—shelled materialists; and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the very edge of belief— of belief in almost anything. There are thousands balanced on it today; but it’s a sharp, uncomfortable edge to sit on. You won’t rest till you believe something; that’s why Mr Vandam went through new religions with a tooth—comb, and Mr Alboin quotes Scripture for his religion of breathing exercises, and Mr Fenner grumbles at the very God he denies. That’s where you all split; it’s natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things. But though it wanted only a touch to tip you into preternaturalism about these things, these things really were only natural things. They were not only natural, they were almost unnaturally simple. I suppose there never was quite so simple a story as this.’

Fenner laughed and then looked puzzled. ‘I don’t understand one thing,’ he said. ‘If it was Wilson, how did Wynd come to have a man like that on such intimate terms? How did he come to be killed by a man he’d seen every day for years? He was famous as being a judge of men.’

Father Brown thumped his umbrella on the ground with an emphasis he rarely showed.

‘Yes,’ he said, almost fiercely; ‘that was how he came to be killed. He was killed for just that. He was killed for being a judge of men.’

They all stared at him, but he went on, almost as if they were not there.

‘What is any man that he should be a judge of men?’ he demanded. ‘These three were the tramps that once stood before him and were dismissed rapidly right and left to one place or another; as if for them there were no cloak of courtesy, no stages of intimacy, no free—will in friendship. And twenty years has not exhausted the indignation born of that unfathomable insult in that moment when he dared to know them at a glance.’

‘Yes,’ said the secretary; ‘I understand … and I understand how it is that you understand—all sorts of things.’

‘Well, I’m blamed if I understand,’ cried the breezy Western gentleman boisterously. ‘Your Wilson and your Irishman seem to be just a couple of cut—throat murderers who killed their benefactor. I’ve no use for a black and bloody assassin of that sort, in my morality, whether it’s religion or not.’

‘He was a black and bloody assassin, no doubt,’ said Fenner quietly. ‘I’m not defending him; but I suppose it’s Father Brown’s business to pray for all men, even for a man like—‘

‘Yes,’ assented Father Brown, ‘it’s my business to pray for all men, even for a man like Warren Wynd.’

FIVE: The Curse of the Golden Cross

Six people sat around a small table, seeming almost as incongruous and accidental as if they had been shipwrecked separately on the same small desert island. At least the sea surrounded them; for in one sense their island was enclosed in another island, a large and flying island like Laputa. For the little table was one of many little tables dotted about in the dining saloon of that monstrous ship the Moravia, speeding through the night and the everlasting emptiness of the Atlantic. The little company had nothing in common except that all were travelling from America to England. Two of them at least might be called celebrities; others might be called obscure, and in one or two cases even dubious.

The first was the famous Professor Smaill, an authority on certain archaeological studies touching the later Byzantine Empire. His lectures, delivered in an American University, were accepted as of the first authority even in the most authoritative seats of learning in Europe. His literary works were so steeped in a mellow and imaginative sympathy with the European past, that it often gave strangers a start to hear him speak with an American accent. Yet he was, in his way, very American; he had long fair hair brushed back from a big square forehead, long straight features and a curious mixture of preoccupation with a poise of potential swiftness, like a lion pondering absent— mindedly on his next leap.

There was only one lady in the group; and she was (as the journalists often said of her) a host in herself; being quite prepared to play hostess, not to say empress, at that or any other table. She was Lady Diana Wales, the celebrated lady traveller in tropical and other countries; but there was nothing rugged or masculine about her appearance at dinner. She was herself handsome in an almost tropical fashion, with a mass of hot and heavy red hair; she was dressed in what the journalists call a daring fashion, but her face was intelligent and her eyes had that bright and rather prominent appearance which belongs to the eyes of ladies who ask questions at political meetings.

The other four figures seemed at first like shadows in this shining presence; but they showed differences on a close view. One of them was a young man entered on the ship’s register as Paul T. Tarrant. He was an American type which might be more truly called an American antitype. Every nation probably has an antitype; a sort of extreme exception that proves the national rule. Americans really respect work, rather as Europeans respect war. There is a halo of heroism about it; and he who shrinks from it is less than a man. The antitype is evident through being exceedingly rare. He is the dandy or dude: the wealthy waster who makes a weak villain for so many American novels. Paul Tarrant seemed to have nothing whatever to do but change his clothes, which he did about six times a day; passing into paler or richer shades of his suit of exquisite light grey, like the delicate silver changes of the twilight. Unlike most Americans, he cultivated very carefully a short, curly beard; and unlike most dandies, even of his own type, he seemed rather sulky than showy. Perhaps there was something almost Byronic about his silence and his gloom.

The next two travellers were naturally classed together; merely because they were both English lecturers returning from an American tour. One of them was described as Leonard Smyth, apparently a minor poet, but something of a major journalist; long—headed, light—haired, perfectly dressed, and perfectly capable of looking after himself. The other was a rather comic contrast, being short and broad, with a black, walrus moustache, and as taciturn as the other was talkative. But as he had been both charged with robbing and praised for rescuing a Roumanian Princess threatened by a jaguar in his travelling menagerie, and had thus figured in a fashionable case, it was naturally felt that his views on God, progress, his own early life, and the future of Anglo—American relations would be of great interest and value to the inhabitants of Minneapolis and Omaha. The sixth and most insignificant figure was that of a little English priest going by the name of Brown. He listened to the conversation with respectful attention, and he was at that moment forming the impression that there was one rather curious thing about it.

‘I suppose those Byzantine studies of yours, Professor,’ Leonard Smyth was saying, ‘would throw some light on this story of a tomb found somewhere on the south coast; near Brighton, isn’t it? Brighton’s a long way from Byzantium, of course. But I read something about the style of burying or embalming or something being supposed to be Byzantine.’

‘Byzantine studies certainly have to reach a long way,’ replied the Professor dryly. ‘They talk about specialists; but I think the hardest thing on earth is to specialize. In this case, for instance: how can a man know anything about Byzantium till he knows everything about Rome before it and about Islam after it? Most Arab arts were old Byzantine arts. Why, take algebra—‘

‘But I won’t take algebra,’ cried the lady decisively. ‘I never did, and I never do. But I’m awfully interested in embalming. I was with Gatton, you know, when he opened the Babylonian tombs. Ever since then I found mummies and preserved bodies and all that perfectly thrilling. Do tell us about this one.’

‘Gatton was an interesting man,’ said the Professor. ‘They were an interesting family. That brother of his who went into Parliament was much more than an ordinary politician. I never understood the Fascisti till he made that speech about Italy.’

‘Well, we’re not going to Italy on this trip,’ said Lady Diana persistently, ‘and I believe you’re going to that little place where they’ve found the tomb. In Sussex, isn’t it?’

‘Sussex is pretty large, as these little English sections go,’ replied the Professor. ‘One might wander about in it for a goodish time; and it’s a good place to wander in. It’s wonderful how large those low hills seem when you’re on them.’

There was an abrupt accidental silence; and then the lady said, ‘Oh, I’m going on deck,’ and rose, the men rising with her. But the Professor lingered and the little priest was the last to leave the table, carefully folding up his napkin. And as they were thus left alone together the Professor said suddenly to his companion:

‘What would you say was the point of that little talk?’

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, smiling, ‘since you ask me, there was something that amused me a little. I may be wrong; but it seemed to me that the company made three attempts to get you to talk about an embalmed body said to be found in Sussex. And you, on your side, very courteously offered to talk— first about algebra, and then about the Fascisti, and then about the landscape of the Downs.’

‘In short,’ replied the Professor, ‘you thought I was ready to talk about any subject but that one. You were quite right.’

The Professor was silent for a little time, looking down at the tablecloth; then he looked up and spoke with that swift impulsiveness that suggested the lion’s leap.

‘See here. Father Brown,’ he said, ‘I consider you about wisest and whitest man I ever met.’

Father Brown was very English. He had all the normal nation helplessness about what to do with a serious and sincere compliment suddenly handed to him to his face in the American manner. His reply was a meaningless murmur; and it was the Professor who proceeded, with the same staccato earnestness: ‘You see, up to a point it’s all simple enough. A Christian tomb of the Dark Ages, apparently that of a bishop, has been found under a little church at Dulham on the Sussex coast. The Vicar happens to be a good bit of an archaeologist himself and has been able to find a good deal more than I know yet. There was a rumour of the corpse being embalmed in a way peculiar to Greeks and Egyptians but unknown in the West, especially at that date. So Mr Walters (that is the Vicar) naturally wonders about Byzantine influences. But he also mentions something else, that is of even more personal interest to me.’

His long grave face seemed to grow even longer and graver as he frowned down at the tablecloth. His long finger seemed to be tracing patterns on it like the plans of dead cities and their temples and tombs.

‘So I’m going to tell you, and nobody else, why it is I have to be careful about mentioning that matter in mixed company; and why, the more eager they are to talk about it, the more cautious I have to be. It is also stated that in the coffin is a chain with a cross, common enough to look at, but with a certain secret symbol on the back found on only one other cross in the world. It is from the arcana of the very earliest Church, and is supposed to indicate St Peter setting up his See at Antioch before he came to Rome. Anyhow, I believe there is but one other like it, and it belongs to me. I hear there is some story about a curse on it; but I take no notice of that. But whether or no there is a curse, there really is, in one sense, a conspiracy; though the conspiracy should only consist of one man.’

‘Of one man?’ repeated Father Brown almost mechanically.

‘Of one madman, for all I know,’ said Professor Smaill. ‘It’s a long story and in some ways a silly one.’

He paused again, tracing plans like architectural drawings with his finger on the cloth, and then resumed: ‘Perhaps I had better tell you about it from the beginning, in case you see some little point in the story that is meaningless to me. It began years and years ago, when I was conducting some investigations on my own account in the antiquities of Crete and the Greek islands. I did a great deal of it practically single—handed; sometimes with the most rude and temporary help from the inhabitants of the place, and sometimes literally alone. It was under the latter circumstances that I found a maze of subterranean passages which led at last to a heap of rich refuse, broken ornaments and scattered gems which I took to be the ruins of some sunken altar, and in which I found the curious gold cross. I turned it over, and on the back of it I saw the Ichthus or fish, which was an early Christian symbol, but of a shape and pattern rather different from that commonly found; and, as it seemed to me, more realistic—more as if the archaic designer had meant it to be not merely a conventional enclosure or nimbus, but to look a little more like a real fish. It seemed to me that there was a flattening towards one end of it that was not like mere mathematical decoration, but rather like a sort of rude or even savage zoology.

‘In order to explain very briefly why I thought this find important, I must tell you the point of the excavation. For one thing, it had something of the nature of an excavation of an excavation. We were on the track not only of antiquities, but of the antiquarians of antiquity. We had reason to believe, or some of us thought we had reason to believe, that these underground passages, mostly of the Minoan period, like that famous one which is actually identified with the labyrinth of the Minotaur, had not really been lost and left undisturbed for all the ages between the Minotaur and the modern explorer. We believed that these underground places, I might almost say these underground towns and villages, had already been penetrated during the intervening period by some persons prompted by some motive. About the motive there were different schools of thought: some holding that the Emperors had ordered an official exploration out of mere scientific curiosity; others that the furious fashion in the later Roman Empire for all sorts of lurid Asiatic superstitions had started some nameless Manichaean sect or other rioting in the caverns in orgies that had to be hidden from the face of the sun. I belong to the group which believed that these caverns had been used in the same way as the catacombs. That is, we believed that, during some of the persecutions which spread like a fire over the whole Empire, the Christians had concealed themselves in these ancient pagan labyrinths of stone. It was therefore with a thrill as sharp I as a thunderclap that I found and picked up the fallen golden cross and saw the design upon it; and it was with still more of a shock of felicity that, on turning to make my way once more outwards and upwards into the light of day, I looked up at the walls of bare rock that extended endlessly along the low passages, and saw scratched in yet ruder outline, but if possible more unmistakable, the shape of the Fish.

‘Something about it made it seem as if it might be a fossil fish or some rudimentary organism fixed for ever in a frozen sea. I could not analyse this analogy, otherwise unconnected with a mere drawing scratched upon the stone, till I realized that I was saying in my sub—conscious mind that the first Christians must have seemed something like fish, dumb and dwelling in a fallen world of twilight and silence, dropped far below the feet of men and moving in dark and twilight and a soundless world.

‘Everyone walking along stone passages knows what it is to be followed by phantom feet. The echo follows flapping or clapping behind or in front, so that it is almost impossible for the man who is really lonely to believe in his loneliness. I had got used to the effects of this echo and had not noticed it much for some time past, when I caught sight of the symbolical shape scrawled on the wall of rock. I stopped, and at the same instant it seemed as if my heart stopped, too; for my own feet had halted, but the echo went marching on.

‘I ran forward, and it seemed as if the ghostly footsteps ran also, but not with that exact imitation which marks the material reverberation of a sound. I stopped again, and the steps stopped also; but I could have sworn they stopped an instant too late; I called out a question; and my cry was answered; but the voice was not my own.

‘It came round the corner of a rock just in front of me; and throughout that uncanny chase I noticed that it was always at some such angle of the crooked path that it paused and spoke. The little space in front of me that could be illuminated by my small electric torch was always as empty as an empty room. Under these conditions I had a conversation with I know not whom, which lasted all the way to the first white gleam of daylight, and even there I could not see in what fashion he vanished into the light of day. But the mouth of the labyrinth was full of many openings and cracks and chasms, and it would not have been difficult for him to have somehow darted back and disappeared again into the underworld of the caves. I only know that I came out on the lonely steps of a great mountain like a marble terrace, varied only with a green vegetation that seemed somehow more tropical than the purity of the rock, like the Oriental invasion that has spread sporadically over the fall of classic Hellas. I looked out on a sea of stainless blue, and the sun shone steadily on utter loneliness and silence; and there was not a blade of grass stirred with a whisper of flight nor the shadow of a shadow of man.

‘It had been a terrible conversation; so intimate and so individual and in a sense so casual. This being, bodiless, faceless, nameless and yet calling me by my name, had talked to me in those crypts and cracks where we were buried alive with no more passion or melodrama than if we had been sitting in two armchairs at a club. But he had told me also that he would unquestionably kill me or any other man who came into the possession of the cross with the mark of the fish. He told me frankly he was not fool enough to attack me there in the labyrinth, knowing I had a loaded revolver, and that he ran as much risk as I. But he told me, equally calmly, that he would plan my murder with the certainty of success, with every detail developed and every danger warded off, with the sort of artistic perfection that a Chinese craftsman or an Indian embroiderer gives to the artistic work of a life—time. Yet he was no Oriental; I am certain be was a white man. I suspect that he was a countryman of my own.

‘Since then I have received from time to time signs and symbols and queer impersonal messages that have made me certain, at least, that if the man is a maniac he is a monomaniac. He is always telling me, in this airy and detached way, that the preparations for my death and burial are proceeding satisfactorily; and that the only way in which I can prevent their being crowned with a comfortable success is to give up the relic in my possession—the unique cross that I found in the cavern. He does not seem to have any religious sentiment or fanaticism on the point; he seems to have no passion but the passion of a collector of curiosities. That is one of the things that makes me feel sure he is a man of the West and not of the East. But this particular curiosity seems to have driven him quite crazy.

‘And then came this report, as yet unsubstantiated, about the duplicate relic found on an embalmed body in a Sussex tomb. If he had been a maniac before, this news turned him into a demoniac possessed of seven devils. That there should be one of them belonging to another man was bad enough, but that there should be two of them and neither belonging to him was a torture not to be borne. His mad messages began to come thick and fast like showers of poisoned arrows, and each cried out more confidently than the last that death would strike me at the moment when I stretched out my unworthy hand towards the cross in the tomb.

‘‘You will never know me,’ he wrote, ‘you will never say my name; you will never see my face; you will die, and never know who has killed you. I may be in any form among those about you; but I shall be in that alone at which you have forgotten to look.’

‘From those threats I deduce that he is quite likely to shadow me on this expedition; and try to steal the relic or do me some mischief for possessing it. But as I never saw the man in my life, he may be almost any man I meet. Logically speaking, he may be any of the waiters who wait on me at table. He may be any of the passengers who sit with me at table.’

‘He may be me,’ said Father Brown, with cheerful contempt for grammar.

‘He may be anybody else,’ answered Smaill seriously. ‘That is what I meant by what I said just now. You are the only man I feel sure is not the enemy.’

Father Brown again looked embarrassed; then he smiled and said: ‘Well, oddly enough, I’m not. What we have to consider is any chance of finding out if he really is here before he— before he makes himself unpleasant.’

‘There is one chance of finding out, I think,’ remarked the Professor rather grimly. ‘When we get to Southampton I shall take a car at once along the coast; I should be glad if you would come with me, but in the ordinary sense, of course, our little party will break up. If any one of them turns up again in that little churchyard on the Sussex coast, we shall know who he really is.’

The Professor’s programme was duly carried out, at least to the extent of the car and its cargo in the form of Father Brown. They coasted along the road with the sea on one side and the hills of Hampshire and Sussex on the other; nor was there visible to the eye any shadow of pursuit. As they approached the village of Dulham only one man crossed their path who had any connexion with the matter in hand; a journalist who had just visited the church and been courteously escorted by the vicar through the new excavated chapel; but his remarks and notes seemed to be of the ordinary newspaper sort. But Professor Smaill was perhaps a little fanciful, and could not dismiss the sense of something odd and discouraging in the attitude and appearance of the man, who was tall and shabby, hook— nosed and hollow—eyed, with moustaches that drooped with depression. He seemed anything but enlivened by his late experiment as a sightseer; indeed, he seemed to be striding as fast as possible from the sight, when they stopped him with a question.

‘It’s all about a curse,’ he said; ‘a curse on the place, according to the guide—book or the parson, or the oldest inhabitant or whoever is the authority; and really, it feels jolly like it. Curse or curse, I’m glad to have got out of it.’

‘Do you believe in curses?’ asked Smaill curiously.

‘I don’t believe in anything; I’m a journalist,’ answered the melancholy being—‘Boon, of the Daily Wire. But there’s a some—thing creepy about that crypt; and I’ll never deny I felt a chill.’ And he strode on towards the railway station with a further accelerated pace.

‘Looks like a raven or a crow, that fellow,’ observed Smaill as they turned towards the churchyard. ‘What is it they say about a bird of ill omen?’

They entered the churchyard slowly, the eyes of the American antiquary lingering luxuriantly over the isolated roof of the lynch— gate and the large unfathomable black growth of the yew looking like night itself defying the broad daylight. The path climbed up amid heaving levels of turf in which the gravestones were tilted at all angles like stone rafts tossed on a green sea, till it came to the ridge beyond which the great sea itself ran like an iron bar, with pale lights in it like steel. Almost at their feet the tough rank grass turned into a tuft of sea— holly and ended in grey and yellow sand; and a foot or two from the holly, and outlined darkly against the steely sea, stood a motionless figure. But for its dark—grey clothing it might almost have been the statue on some sepulchral monument. But Father Brown instantly recognized something in the elegant stoop of the shoulders and the rather sullen outward thrust of the short beard.

‘Gee!’ exclaimed the professor of archaeology; ‘it’s that man Tarrant, if you call him a man. Did you think, when I spoke on the boat, that I should ever get so quick an answer to my question?’

‘I thought you might get too many answers to it,’ answered Father Brown.

‘Why, how do you mean?’ inquired the Professor, darting a look at him over his shoulder.

‘I mean,’ answered the other mildly, ‘that I thought I heard voices behind the yew—tree. I don’t think Mr Tarrant is so solitary as he looks; I might even venture to say, so solitary as he likes to look.’

Even as Tarrant turned slowly round in his moody manner, the confirmation came. Another voice, high and rather hard, but none the less feminine, was saying with experienced raillery: ‘And how was I to know he would be here?’ It was borne in upon Professor Smaill that this gay observation was not addressed to him; so he was forced to conclude in some bewilderment, that yet a third person was present. As Lady Diana Wales came out, radiant and resolute as ever, from the shadow of the yew, he noted grimly that she had a living shadow of her own. The lean dapper figure of Leonard Smyth, that insinuating man of letters, appeared immediately behind her own flamboyant form, smiling, his head a little on one side like a dog’s.

‘Snakes!’ muttered Smaill; ‘why, they’re all here! Or all except that little showman with the walrus whiskers.’

He heard Father Brown laughing softly beside him; and indeed the situation was becoming something more than laughable. It seemed to be turning topsy—turvy and tumbling about their ears like a pantomime trick; for even while the Professor had been speaking, his words had received the most comical contradiction. The round head with the grotesque black crescent of moustache had appeared suddenly and seemingly out of a hole in the ground. An instant afterwards they realized that the hole was in fact a very large hole, leading to a ladder which descended into the bowels of the earth; that it was in fact the entrance to the subterranean scene they had come to visit. The little man had been the first to find the entrance and had already descended a rung or two of the ladder before he put his head out again to address his fellow—travellers. He looked like some particularly preposterous Grave—digger in a burlesque of Hamlet. He only said thickly behind his thick moustaches, ‘It is down here.’ But it came to the rest of the company with a start of realization that, though they had sat opposite him at meal— times for a week, they had hardly ever heard him speak before; and that though he was supposed to be an English lecturer, he spoke with a rather occult foreign accent.

‘You see, my dear Professor,’ cried Lady Diana with trenchant cheerfulness, ‘your Byzantine mummy was simply too exciting to be missed. I simply had to come along and see it; and I’m sure the gentlemen felt just the same. Now you must tell us all about it.’

‘I do not know all about it,’ said the Professor gravely, not to say grimly, ‘In some respects I don’t even know what it’s all about. It certainly seems odd that we should have all met again so soon, but I suppose there are no limits to the modern thirst for information. But if we are all to visit the place it must be done in a responsible way and, if you will forgive me, under responsible leadership. We must notify whoever is in charge of the excavations; we shall probably at least have to put our names in a book.’

Something rather like a wrangle followed on this collision between the impatience of the lady and the suspicions of the archaeologist; but the latter’s insistence on the official rights of the Vicar and the local investigation ultimately prevailed; the little man with the moustaches came reluctantly out of his grave again and silently acquiesced in a less impetuous descent. Fortunately, the clergyman himself appeared at this stage— a grey—haired, good—looking gentleman with a droop accentuated by doublet eyeglasses; and while rapidly establishing sympathetic relations with the Professor as a fellow—antiquarian, he did not seem to regard his rather motley group of companions with anything more hostile than amusement.

‘I hope you are none of you superstitious,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I ought to tell you, to start with, that there are supposed to be all sorts of bad omens and curses hanging over our devoted heads in this business. I have just been deciphering a Latin inscription which was found over the entrance to the chapel; and it would seem that there are no less than three curses involved; a curse for entering the sealed chamber, a double curse for opening the coffin, and a triple and most terrible curse for touching the gold relic found inside it. The two first maledictions I have already incurred myself,’ he added with a smile; ‘but I fear that even you will have to incur the first and mildest of them if you are to see anything at all. According to the story, the curses descend in a rather lingering fashion, at long intervals and on later occasions. I don’t know whether that is any comfort to you.’ And the Reverend Mr Walters smiled once more in his drooping and benevolent manner.

‘Story,’ repeated Professor Smaill, ‘why, what story is that?’

‘It is rather a long story and varies, like other local legends,’ answered the Vicar. ‘But it is undoubtedly contemporary with the time of the tomb; and the substance of it is embodied in the inscription and is roughly this: Guy de Gisors, a lord of the manor here early in the thirteenth century, had set his heart on a beautiful black horse in the possession of an envoy from Genoa, which that practical merchant prince would not sell except for a huge price. Guy was driven by avarice to the crime of pillaging the shrine and, according to one story, even killing the bishop, who was then resident there. Anyhow, the bishop uttered a curse which was to fall on anybody who should continue to withhold the gold cross from its resting— place in his tomb, or should take steps to disturb it when it had returned there. The feudal lord raised the money for the horse by selling the gold relic to a goldsmith in the town; but on the first day he mounted the horse the animal reared and threw him in front of the church porch, breaking his neck. Meanwhile the goldsmith, hitherto wealthy and prosperous, was ruined by a series of inexplicable accidents, and fell into the power of a Jew money—lender living in the manor. Eventually the unfortunate goldsmith, faced with nothing but starvation, hanged himself on an apple—tree. The gold cross with all his other goods, his house, shop, and tools, had long ago passed into the possession of the money—lender. Meanwhile, the son and heir of the feudal lord, shocked by the judgement on his blasphemous sire, had become a religious devotee in the dark and stern spirit of those times, and conceived it his duty to persecute all heresy and unbelief among his vassals. Thus the Jew, in his turn, who had been cynically tolerated by the father, was ruthlessly burnt by order of the son; so that he, in his turn, suffered for the possession of the relic; and after these three judgements, it was returned to the bishop’s tomb; since when no eye has seen and no hand has touched it.’

Lady Diana Wales seemed to be more impressed than might have been expected. ‘It really gives one rather a shiver,’ she said, ‘to think that we are going to be the first, except the vicar.’

The pioneer with the big moustaches and the broken English did not descend after all by his favourite ladder, which indeed had only been used by some of the workmen conducting the excavation; for the clergyman led them round to a larger and more convenient entrance about a hundred yards away, out of which he himself had just emerged from his investigations underground. Here the descent was by a fairly gradual slope with no difficulties save the increasing darkness; for they soon found themselves moving in single file down a tunnel as black as pitch, and it was some little time before they saw a glimmer of light ahead of them. Once during that silent march there was a sound like a catch in somebody’s breath, it was impossible to say whose; and once there was an oath like a dull explosion, and it was in an unknown tongue.

They came out in a circular chamber like a basilica in a ring of round arches; for that chapel had been built before the first pointed arch of the Gothic had pierced our civilization like a spear. A glimmer of greenish light between some of the pillars marked the place of the other opening into the world above, and gave a vague sense of being under the sea, which was intensified by one or two other incidental and perhaps fanciful resemblances. For the dog—tooth pattern of the Norman was faintly traceable round all the arches, giving them, above the cavernous darkness, something of the look of the mouths of monstrous sharks. And in the centre the dark bulk of the tomb itself, with its lifted lid of stone, might almost have been the jaws of some such leviathan.

Whether out of the sense of fitness or from the lack of more modern appliances, the clerical antiquary had arranged for the illumination of the chapel only by four tall candles in big wooden candlesticks standing on the floor. Of these only one was alight when they entered, casting a faint glimmer over the mighty architectural forms. When they had all assembled, the clergyman proceeded to light the three others, and the appearance and contents of the great sarcophagus came more clearly into view.

All eyes went first to the face of the dead, preserved across all those ages in the lines of life by some secret Eastern process, it was said, inherited from heathen antiquity and unknown to the simple graveyards of our own island. The Professor could hardly repress an exclamation of wonder; for, though the face was as pale as a mask of wax, it looked otherwise like a sleeping man, who had but that moment closed his eyes. The face was of the ascetic, perhaps even the fanatical type, with a high framework of bones; the figure was clad in a golden cope and gorgeous vestments, and high up on the breast, at the base of the throat, glittered the famous gold cross upon a short gold chain, or rather necklace. The stone coffin had been opened by lifting the lid of it at the head and propping it aloft upon two strong wooden shafts or poles, hitched above under the edge of the upper slab and wedged below into the corners of the coffin behind the head of the corpse. Less could therefore be seen of the feet or the lower part of the figure, but the candle—light shone full on the face; and in contrast with its tones of dead ivory the cross of gold seemed to stir and sparkle like a fire.

Professor Smaill’s big forehead had carried a big furrow of reflection, or possibly of worry, ever since the clergyman had told the story of the curse. But feminine intuition, not untouched by feminine hysteria, understood the meaning of his brooding immobility better than did the men around him. In the silence of that candle—lit cavern Lady Diana cried out suddenly: ‘Don’t touch it, I tell you!’

But the man had already made one of his swift leonine movements, leaning forward over the body. The next instant they all darted, some forward and some backward, but all with a dreadful ducking motion as if the sky were falling.

As the Professor laid a finger on the gold cross, the wooden props, that bent very slightly in supporting the lifted lid of stone, seemed to jump and straighten themselves with a jerk. The lip of the stone slab slipped from its wooden perch; and in all their souls and stomachs came a sickening sense of down— rushing ruin, as if they had all been flung off a precipice. Smaill had withdrawn his head swiftly, but not in time; and he lay senseless beside the coffin, in a red puddle of blood from scalp or skull. And the old stone coffin was once more closed as it had been for centuries; save that one or two sticks or splinters stuck in the crevice, horribly suggestive of bones crunched by an ogre. The leviathan had snapped its jaws of stone.

Lady Diana was looking at the wreck with eyes that had an electric glare as of lunacy; her red hair looked scarlet against the pallor of her face in the greenish twilight. Smyth was looking at her, still with something dog—like in the turn of his head; but it was the expression of a god who looks at a master whose catastrophe he can only partly understand. Tarrant and the foreigner had stiffened in their usual sullen attitudes, but their faces had turned the colour of clay. The Vicar seemed to have fainted. Father Brown was kneeling beside the fallen figure, trying to test its condition.

Rather to the general surprise, the Byronic lounger, Paul Tarrant, came forward to help him.

‘He’d better be carried up into the air,’ he said. ‘I suppose there’s just a chance for him.’

‘He isn’t dead,’ said Father Brown in a low voice, ‘but I think it’s pretty bad; you aren’t a doctor by any chance?’

‘No; but I’ve had to pick up a good many things in my time,’ said the other. ‘But never mind about me just now. My real profession would probably surprise you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ replied Father Brown, with a slight smile. ‘I thought of it about halfway through the voyage. You are a detective shadowing somebody. Well, the cross is safe from thieves now, anyhow.’

While they were speaking Tarrant had lifted the frail figure of the fallen man with easy strength and dexterity, and was carefully carrying him towards the exit. He answered over his shoulder:

‘Yes, the cross is safe enough.’

‘You mean that nobody else is,’ replied Brown. ‘Are you thinking of the curse, too?’

Father Brown went about for the next hour or two under a burden of frowning perplexity that was something beyond the shock of the tragic accident. He assisted in carrying the victim to the little inn opposite the church, interviewed the doctor, who reported the injury as serious and threatening, though not certainly fatal, and carried the news to the little group of travellers who had gathered round the table in the inn parlour. But whereever he went the cloud of mystification rested on him and seemed to grow darker the more deeply he pondered. For the central mystery was growing more and more mysterious, actually in proportion as many of the minor mysteries began to clear themselves up in his mind. Exactly in proportion as the meaning of individual figures in that motley group began to explain itself, the thing that had happened grew more and more difficult to explain. Leonard Smyth had come merely because Lady Diana had come; and Lady Diana had come merely because she chose. They were engaged in one of those floating Society flirtations that are all the more silly for being semi—intellectual. But the lady’s romanticism had a superstitious side to it; and she was pretty well prostrated by the terrible end of her adventure. Paul Tarrant was a private detective, possibly watching the flirtation, for some wife or husband; possibly shadowing the foreign lecturer with the moustaches, who had much the air of an undesirable alien. But if he or anybody else had intended to steal the relic, the intention had been finally frustrated. And to all mortal appearance, what had frustrated it was either an incredible coincidence or the intervention of the ancient curse.

As he stood in unusual perplexity in the middle of the village street, between the inn and the church, he felt a mild shock of surprise at seeing a recently familiar but rather unexpected figure advancing up the street. Mr Boon, the journalist, looking very haggard in the sunshine, which showed up his shabby raiment like that of a scarecrow, had his dark and deep—set eyes (rather close together on either side of the long drooping nose) fixed on the priest. The latter looked twice before he realized that the heavy dark moustache hid something like a grin or at least a grim smile.

‘I thought you were going away,’ said Father Brown a little sharply. ‘I thought you left by that train two hours ago.’

‘Well, you see I didn’t,’ said Boon.

‘Why have you come back?’ asked the priest almost sternly.

‘This is not the sort of little rural paradise for a journalist to leave in a hurry,’ replied the other. ‘Things happen too fast here to make it worth while to go back to a dull place like London. Besides, they can’t keep me out of the affair—I mean this second affair. It was I that found the body, or at any rate the clothes. Quite suspicious conduct on my part, wasn’t it? Perhaps you; think I wanted to dress up in his clothes. Shouldn’t I make a lovely parson?’

And the lean and long—nosed mountebank suddenly made an extravagant gesture in the middle of the market—place, stretching out his arms and spreading out his dark—gloved hands in a sort of burlesque benediction and saying: ‘Oh, my dear brethren and sisters, for I would embrace you all…’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ cried Father Brown, and rapped the stones slightly with his stumpy umbrella, for he was a little less patient than usual.

‘Oh, you’ll find out all about it if you ask that picnic party of yours at the inn,’ replied Boon scornfully. ‘That man Tarrant seems to suspect me merely because I found the clothes; though he only came up a minute too late to find them himself. But there are all sorts of mysteries in this business. The little man with the big moustaches may have more in him than meets the eye. For that matter I don’t see why you shouldn’t have killed the poor fellow yourself.’

Father Brown did not seem in the least annoyed at the suggestion, but he seemed exceedingly bothered and bewildered by the remark. ‘Do you mean,’ he asked with simplicity, ‘that it was I who tried to kill Professor Smaill?’

‘Not at all,’ said the other, waving his hand with the air of one making a handsome concession. ‘Plenty of dead people for you to choose among. Not limited to Professor Smaill. Why, didn’t you know somebody else had turned up, a good deal deader than Professor Smaill? And I don’t see why you shouldn’t have done him in, in a quiet way. Religious differences, you know… lamentable disunion of Christendom. … I suppose you’ve always wanted to get the English parishes back.’

‘I’m going back to the inn,’ said the priest quietly; ‘you say the people there know what you mean, and perhaps they may be able to say it.’

In truth, just afterwards his private perplexities suffered a momentary dispersal at the news of a new calamity. The moment he entered the little parlour where the rest of the company were collected, something in their pale faces told him they were shaken by something yet more recent than the accident at the tomb. Even as he entered, Leonard Smyth was saying:’ Where is all this going to end?’

‘It will never end, I tell you,’ repeated Lady Diana, gazing into vacancy with glassy eyes; ‘it will never end till we all end. One after another the curse will take us; perhaps slowly, as the poor vicar said; but it will take us all as it has taken him.’

‘What in the world has happened now?’ asked Father Brown.

There was a silence, and then Tarrant said in a voice that sounded a little hollow: ‘Mr Walters, the Vicar, has committed suicide. I suppose it was the shock unhinged him. But I fear there can be no doubt about it. We’ve just found his black hat and clothes on a rock jutting out from the shore. He seems to have jumped into the sea. I thought he looked as if it had knocked him half—witted, and perhaps we ought to have looked after him; but there was so much to look after.’

‘You could have done nothing,’ said the lady. ‘Don’t you see the thing is dealing doom in a sort of dreadful order? The Professor touched the cross, and he went first; the Vicar had opened the tomb, and he went second; we only entered the chapel, and we—‘

‘Hold on,’ said Father Brown, in a sharp voice he very seldom used; ‘this has got to stop.’

He still wore a heavy though unconscious frown, but in his eyes was no longer the cloud of mystification, but a light of almost terrible understanding. ‘What a fool I am!’ he muttered. ‘I ought to have seen it long ago. The tale of the curse ought to have told me.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ demanded Tarrant, ‘that we can really be killed now by something that happened in the thirteenth century?’

Father Brown shook his head and answered with quiet emphasis: ‘I won’t discuss whether we can be killed by something that happened in the thirteenth century; but I’m jolly certain that we can’t be killed by something that never happened in the thirteenth century, something that never happened at all.’

‘Well,’ said Tarrant, ‘it’s refreshing to find a priest so sceptical of the supernatural as all that.’

‘Not at all,’ replied the priest calmly; ‘it’s not the supernatural part I doubt. It’s the natural part. I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, ‘I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.’‘

‘That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?’ asked the other.

‘It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,’ replied Father Brown. ‘It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing—room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It isn’t the legend that I disbelieve—it’s the history.’

Lady Diana had recovered a little from her trance of Cassandra, and her perennial curiosity about new things began to peer once more out of her bright and prominent eyes.

‘What a curious man you are!’ she said. ‘Why should you disbelieve the history?’

‘I disbelieve the history because it isn’t history,’ answered Father Brown. ‘To anybody who happens to know a little about the Middle Ages, the whole story was about as probable as Gladstone offering Queen Victoria a cigar. But does anybody know anything about the Middle Ages? Do you know what a Guild was? Have you ever heard of salvo managio suo? Do you know what sort of people were Servi Regis?

‘No, of course I don’t,’ said the lady, rather crossly. ‘What a lot of Latin words!’

‘No, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘If it had been Tutankhamen and a set of dried—up Africans preserved, Heaven knows why, at the other end of the world; if it had been Babylonia or China; if it had been some race as remote and mysterious as the Man in the Moon, your newspapers would have told you all about it, down to the last discovery of a tooth—brush or a collar—stud. But the men who built your own parish churches, and gave the names to your own towns and trades, and the very roads you walk on— it has never occurred to you to know anything about them. I don’t claim to know a lot myself; but I know enough to see that story is stuff and nonsense from beginning to end. It was illegal for a money—lender to distrain on a man’s shop and tools. It’s exceedingly unlikely that the Guild would not have saved a man from such utter ruin, especially if he were ruined by a Jew. Those people had vices and tragedies of their own; they sometimes tortured and burned people. But that idea of a man, without God or hope in the world, crawling away to die because nobody cared whether he lived—that isn’t a medieval idea. That’s a product of our economic science and progress. The Jew wouldn’t have been a vassal of the feudal lord. The Jews normally had a special position as servants of the King. Above all, the Jew couldn’t possibly have been burned for his religion.’

‘The paradoxes are multiplying,’ observed Tarrant; ‘but surely , you won’t deny that Jews were persecuted in the Middle Ages?’

‘It would be nearer the truth,’ said Father Brown, ‘to say they were the only people who weren’t persecuted in the Middle Ages. If you want to satirize medievalism, you could make a good case by saying that some poor Christian might be burned alive for ‘making a mistake about the Homoousion, while a rich Jew might walk down the street openly sneering at Christ and the Mother of God. Well, that’s what the story is like. It was never a story of the Middle Ages; it was never even a legend about the Middle Ages. It was made up by somebody whose notions came from novels and newspapers, and probably made up on the spur of the moment.’

The others seemed a little dazed by the historical digression, and seemed to wonder vaguely why the priest emphasized it and made it so important a part of the puzzle. But Tarrant, whose trade it was to pick the practical detail out of many tangles of digression, had suddenly become alert. His bearded chin was thrust forward farther than ever, out his sullen eyes were wide awake. ‘Ah,’ he said; ‘made up on the spur of the moment!’

‘Perhaps that is an exaggeration,’ admitted Father Brown calmly. ‘I should rather say made up more casually and carelessly than the rest of an uncommonly careful plot. But the plotter did not think the details of medieval history would matter much to anybody. And his calculation in a general way was pretty nearly right, like most of his other calculations.’

‘Whose calculations? Who was right?’ demanded the lady with a sudden passion of impatience. ‘Who is this person you are talking about? Haven’t we gone through enough, without your making our flesh creep with your he’s and him’s?’

‘I am talking about the murderer,’ said Father Brown.

‘What murderer?’ she asked sharply. ‘Do you mean that the poor Professor was murdered?’

‘Well,’ said the staring Tarrant gruffly into his beard, ‘we can’t say ‘murdered’, for we don’t know he’s killed.’

‘The murderer killed somebody else, who was not Professor Smaill,’ said the priest gravely.

‘Why, whom else could he kill?’ asked the other. ‘He killed the Reverend John Walters, the Vicar of Dulham,’ replied Father Brown with precision. ‘He only wanted to kill those two, because they both had got hold of relics of one rare pattern. The murderer was a sort of monomaniac on the point.’

‘It all sounds very strange,’ muttered Tarrant. ‘Of course we can’t swear that the Vicar’s really dead either. We haven’t seen his body.’

‘Oh yes, you have,’ said Father Brown.

There was a silence as sudden as the stroke of a gong; a silence in which that sub—conscious guesswork that was so active and accurate in the woman moved her almost to a shriek.

‘That is exactly what you have seen,’ went on the priest. ‘You have seen his body. You haven’t seen him— the real living man; but you have seen his body all right. You have stared at it hard by the light of four great candles; and it was not tossing suicidally in the sea but lying in state like a Prince of the Church in a shrine built before the Crusade.’

‘In plain words,’ said Tarrant, ‘you actually ask us to believe that the embalmed body was really the corpse of a murdered man.’

Father Brown was silent for a moment; then he said almost with an air of irrelevance: ‘The first thing I noticed about it was the cross; or rather the string suspending the cross. Naturally, for most of you, it was only a string of beads and nothing else in particular; but, naturally also, it was rather more in my line than yours. You remember it lay close up to the chin, with only a few beads showing, as if the whole necklet were quite short. But the beads that showed were arranged in a special way, first one and then three, and so on; in fact, I knew at a glance that it was a rosary, an ordinary rosary with a cross at the end of it. But a rosary has at least five decades and additional beads as well; and I naturally wondered where all the rest of it was. It would go much more than once round the old man’s neck. I couldn’t understand it at the time; and it was only afterwards I guessed where the extra length had gone to. It was coiled round and round the foot of the wooden prop that was fixed in the corner of the coffin, holding up the lid. So that when poor Smaill merely plucked at the cross it jerked the prop out of its place and the lid fell on his skull like a club of stone.’

‘By George!’ said Tarrant; ‘I’m beginning to think there’s something in what you say. This is a queer story if it’s true.’

‘When I realized that,’ went on Father Brown, ‘I could manage more or less to guess the rest. Remember, first of all, that there never was any responsible archaeological authority for anything more than investigation. Poor old Walters was an honest antiquary, who was engaged in opening the tomb to find out if there was any truth in the legend about embalmed bodies. The rest was all rumour, of the sort that often anticipates or exaggerates such finds. As a fact, he found the body had not been embalmed, but had fallen into dust long ago. Only while he was working there by the light of his lonely candle in that sunken chapel, the candlelight threw another shadow that was not his own.’

‘Ah!’ cried Lady Diana with a catch in her breath; ‘and I know what you mean now. You mean to tell us we have met the murderer, talked and joked with the murderer, let him tell us a romantic tale, and let him depart untouched.’

‘Leaving his clerical disguise on a rock,’ assented Brown. ‘It is all dreadfully simple. This man got ahead of the Professor in the race to the churchyard and chapel, possibly while the Professor was talking to that lugubrious journalist. He came on the old clergyman beside the empty coffin and killed him. Then he dressed himself in the black clothes from the corpse, wrapped it in an old cope which had been among the real finds of the exploration, and put it in the coffin, arranging the rosary and the wooden support as I have described. Then, having thus set the trap for his second enemy, he went up into the daylight and greeted us all with the most amiable politeness of a country clergyman.’

‘He ran a considerable risk,’ objected Tarrant, ‘of somebody knowing Walters by sight.’

‘I admit he was half—mad,’ agreed Father Brown; ‘and I think you will admit that the risk was worth taking, for he has got off, after all.’

‘I’ll admit he was very lucky,’ growled Tarrant. ‘And who the devil was he?’

‘As you say, he was very lucky,’ answered Father Brown, ‘and not least in that respect. For that is the one thing we may never know.’ He frowned at the table for a moment and then went on: ‘This fellow has been hovering round and threatening for years, but the one thing he was careful of was to keep the secret of who he was; and he has kept it still. But if poor Smaill recovers, as I think he will, it is pretty safe to say that you will hear more of it.’

‘Why, what will Professor Smaill do, do you think?’ asked Lady Diana.

‘I should think the first thing he would do,’ said Tarrant, ‘would be to put the detectives on like dogs after this murdering devil. I should like to have a go at him myself.’

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, smiling suddenly after his long fit of frowning perplexity, ‘I think I know the very first thing he ought to do.’

‘And what is that?’ asked Lady Diana with graceful eagerness.

‘He ought to apologize to all of you,’ said Father Brown.

It was not upon this point, however, that Father Brown found himself talking to Professor Smaill as he sat by the bedside during the slow convalescence of that eminent archaeologist. Nor, indeed, was it chiefly Father Brown who did the talking; for though the Professor was limited to small doses of the stimulant of conversation, he concentrated most of it upon these interviews with his clerical friend. Father Brown had a talent for being silent in an encouraging way and Smaill was encouraged by it to talk about many strange things not always easy to talk about; such as the morbid phases of recovery and the monstrous dreams that often accompany delirium. It is often rather an unbalancing business to recover slowly from a bad knock on the head; and when the head is as interesting a head as that of Professor Smaill even its disturbances and distortions are apt to be original and curious. His dreams were like bold and big designs rather out of drawing, as they can be seen in the strong but stiff archaic arts that he had studied; they were full of strange saints with square and triangular haloes, of golden out— standing crowns and glories round dark and flattened faces, of eagles out of the east and the high headdresses of bearded men with their hair bound like women. Only, as he told his friend, there was one much simpler and less entangled type, that continually recurred to his imaginative memory. Again and again all these Byzantine patterns would fade away like the fading gold on which they were traced as upon fire; and nothing remained but the dark bare wall of rock on which the shining shape of the fish was traced as with a finger dipped in the phosphorescence of fishes. For that was the sign which he once looked up and saw, in the moment when he first heard round the corner of the dark passage the voice of his enemy.

‘And at last,’ he said, ‘I think I have seen a meaning in the picture and the voice; and one that I never understood before. Why should I worry because one madman among a million of sane men, leagued in a great society against him, chooses to brag of persecuting me or pursuing me to death? The man who drew in the dark catacomb the secret symbol of Christ was persecuted in a very different fashion. He was the solitary madman; the whole sane society was leagued together not to save but to slay him. I have sometimes fussed and fidgeted and wondered whether this or that man was my persecutor; whether it was Tarrant; whether it was Leonard Smyth; whether it was any one of them. Suppose it had been all of them? Suppose it had been all the men on the boat and the men on the train and the men in the village. Suppose, so far as I was concerned, they were all murderers. I thought I had a right to be alarmed because I was creeping through the bowels of the earth in the dark and there was a man who would destroy me. What would it have been like, if the destroyer had been up in the daylight and had owned all the earth and commanded all the armies and the crowds? How if he had been able to stop all the earths or smoke me out of my hole, or kill me the moment I put my nose out in the daylight? What was it like to deal with murder on that scale? The world has forgotten these things, as until a little while ago it had forgotten war.’

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘but the war came. The fish may be driven underground again, but it will come up into the daylight once more. As St Antony of Padua humorously remarked, ‘It is only fishes who survive the Deluge.’‘

SIX: The Dagger with Wings

FATHER BROWN, at one period of his life, found it difficult to hang his hat on a hat—peg without repressing a slight shudder. The origin of this idiosyncrasy was indeed a mere detail in much more complicated events; but it was perhaps the only detail that remained to him in his busy life to remind him of the whole business. Its remote origin was to be found in the facts which led Dr Boyne, the medical officer attached to the police force, to send for the priest on a particular frosty morning in December.

Dr Boyne was a big dark Irishman, one of those rather baffling Irishmen to be found all over the world, who will talk scientific scepticism, materialism, and cynicism at length and at large, but who never dream of referring anything touching the ritual of religion to anything except the traditional religion of their native land. It would be hard to say whether their creed is a very superficial varnish or a very fundamental substratum; but most probably it is both, with a mass of materialism in between. Anyhow, when he thought that matters of that sort might be involved, he asked Father Brown to call, though he made no pretence of preference for that aspect of them.

‘I’m not sure I want you, you know,’ was his greeting. ‘I’m not sure about anything yet. I’m hanged if I can make out whether it’s a case for a doctor, or a policeman, or a priest.’

‘Well,’ said Father Brown with a smile, ‘as I suppose you’re both a policeman and a doctor, I seem to be rather in a minority.’

‘I admit you’re what politicians call an instructed minority,’ replied the doctor. ‘I mean, I know you’ve had to do a little in our line as well as your own. But it’s precious hard to say whether this business is in your line or ours, or merely in the line of the Commissioners in Lunacy. We’ve just had a message from a man living near here, in that white house on the hill, asking for protection against a murderous persecution. We’ve gone into the facts as far as we could, and perhaps I’d better tell you the story as it is supposed to have happened, from the beginning.

‘It seems that a man named Aylmer, who was a wealthy landowner in the West Country, married rather late in life and had three sons, Philip, Stephen, and Arnold. But in his bachelor days, when he thought he would have no heir, he had adopted a boy whom he thought very brilliant and promising, who went by the name of John Strake. His origin seems to be vague; they say he was a foundling; some say he was a gipsy. I think the last notion is mixed up with the fact that Aylmer in his old age dabbled in all sorts of dingy occultism, including palmistry and astrology, and his three sons say that Strake encouraged him in it. But they said a great many other things besides that. They said Strake was an amazing scoundrel, and especially an amazing liar; a genius in inventing lies on the spur of the moment, and telling them so as to deceive a detective. But that might very well be a natural prejudice, in the light of what happened.

Perhaps you can more or less imagine what happened. The old man left practically everything to the adopted son; and when he died the three real sons disputed the will. They said their father had been frightened into surrender and, not to put too fine a point on it, into gibbering idiocy. They said Strake had the strangest and most cunning ways of getting at him, in spite of the nurses and the family, and terrorizing him on his death—bed. Anyhow, they seemed to have proved something about the dead man’s mental condition, for the courts set aside the will and the sons inherited. Strake is said to have broken out in the most dreadful fashion, and sworn he would kill all three of them, one after another, and that nothing could hide them from his vengeance. It is the third or last of the brothers, Arnold Aylmer, who is asking for police protection.’

‘Third and last,’ said the priest, looking at him gravely.

‘Yes,’ said Boyne. ‘The other two are dead.’ There was a silence before he continued. ‘That is where the doubt comes in. There is no proof they were murdered, but they might possibly have been. The eldest, who took up his position as squire, was supposed to have committed suicide in his garden. The second, who went into trade as a manufacturer, was knocked onthe head by the machinery in his factory; he might very well have taken a false step and fallen. But if Strake did kill them, he is certainly very cunning in his way of getting to work and getting away. On the other hand, it’s more than likely that the whole thing is a mania of conspiracy founded on a coincidence. Look here, what I want is this. I want somebody of sense, who isn’t an official, to go up and have a talk with this Mr Arnold Aylmer and form an impression of him. You know what a man with a delusion is like, and how a man looks when he is telling the truth. I want you to be the advance guard, before we take the matter up.’

‘It seems rather odd,’ said Father Brown, ‘that you haven’t had to take it up before. If there is anything in this business, it seems to have been going on for a good time. Is there any particular reason why he should send for you just now, any more than any other time?’

‘That had occurred to me, as you may imagine,’ answered Dr Boyne. ‘He does give a reason, but I confess it is one of the things that make me wonder whether the whole thing isn’t only the whim of some half— witted crank. He declared that all his servants have suddenly gone on strike and left him, so that he is obliged to call on the police to look after his house. And on making inquiries, I certainly do find that there has been a general exodus of servants from that house on the hill; and of course the town is full of tales, very one—sided tales I dare say. Their account of it seems to be that their employer had become quite impossible in his fidgets and fears and exactions; that he wanted them to guard the house like sentries, or sit up like night nurses in a hospital; that they could never be left alone because he must never be left alone. So they all announced in a loud voice that he was a lunatic, and left. Of course that does not prove he is a lunatic; but it seems rather rum nowadays for a man to expect his valet or his parlour—maid to act as an armed guard.’

‘And so,’ said the priest with a smile, ‘he wants a policeman to act as his parlour—maid because his parlour—maid won’t act as a policeman.’

‘I thought that rather thick, too,’ agreed the doctor; ‘but I can’t take the responsibility of a flat refusal till I’ve tried a compromise. You are the compromise.’

‘Very well,’ said Father Brown simply. ‘I’ll go and call on him now if you like.’

The rolling country round the little town was sealed and bound with frost, and the sky was as clear and cold as steel, except in the north— east where clouds with lurid haloes were beginning to climb up the sky. It was against these darker and more sinister colours that the house on the hill gleamed with a row of pale pillars, forming a short colonnade of the classical sort. A winding road led up to it across the curve of the down, and plunged into a mass of dark bushes. Just before it reached the bushes the air seemed to grow colder and colder, as if he were approaching an ice—house or the North Pole. But he was a highly practical person, never entertaining such fancies except as fancies. And he merely cocked his eye at the great livid cloud crawling up over the house, and remarked cheerfully: ‘It’s going to snow.’

Through a low ornamental iron gateway of the Italianate pattern he entered a garden having something of that desolation which only belongs to the disorder of orderly things. Deep—green growths were grey with the faint powder of the frost, large weeds—had fringed the fading pattern of the flower—beds as if in a ragged frame; and the house stood as if waist—high in a stunted forest of shrubs and bushes. The vegetation consisted largely of evergreens or very hardy plants; and though it was thus thick and heavy, it was too northern to be called luxuriant. It might be described as an Arctic jungle. So it was in some sense with the house itself, which had a row of columns and a classical facade, which might have looked out on the Mediterranean; but which seemed now to be withering in the wind of the North Sea. Classical ornament here and there accentuated the contrast; caryatides and carved masks of comedy or tragedy looked down from corners of the building upon the grey confusion of the garden paths; but the faces seemed to be frost—bitten. The very volutes of the capitals might have curled up with the cold.

Father Brown went up the grassy steps to a square porch flanked by big pillars and knocked at the door. About four minutes afterwards he knocked again. Then he stood still patiently waiting with his back to the door and looked out on the slowly darkening landscape. It was darkening under the shadow of that one great continent of cloud that had come flying out of the north; and even as he looked out beyond the pillars of the porch, which seemed huge and black above him in the twilight, he saw the opalescent crawling rim of the great cloud as it sailed over the roof and bowed over the porch like a canopy. The great canopy with its faintly coloured fringes seemed to sink lower and lower upon the garden beyond, until what had recently been a clear and pale—hued winter sky was left in a few silver ribbons and rags like a sickly sunset. Father Brown waited, and there was no sound within.

Then he betook himself briskly down the steps and round the house to look for another entrance. He eventually found one, a side door in the flat wall, and on this also he hammered and outside this also he waited. Then he tried the handle and found the door apparently bolted or fastened in some fashion; and then he moved along that side of the house, musing on the possibilities of the position, and wondering whether the eccentric Mr Aylmer had barricaded himself too deep in the house to hear any kind of summons; or whether perhaps he would barricade himself all the more, on the assumption that any summons must be the challenge of the avenging Strake. It might be that the decamping servants had only unlocked one door when they left in the morning, and that their master had locked that; but whatever he might have done it was unlikely that they, in the mood of that moment, had looked so carefully to the defences. He continued his prowl round the place: it was not really a large place, though perhaps a little pretentious; and in a few moments he found he had made the complete circuit. A moment after he found what he suspected and sought. The french window of one room, curtained and shadowed with creeper, stood open by a crack, doubtless accidentally left ajar, and he found himself in a central room, comfortably upholstered in a rather old—fashioned way, with a staircase leading up from it on one side and a door leading out of it on the other. Immediately opposite him was another door with red glass let into it, a little gaudily for later tastes; something that looked like a red—robed figure in cheap stained glass. On a round table to the right stood a sort of aquarium— a great bowl full of greenish water, in which fishes and similar things moved about as in a tank; and just opposite it a plant of the palm variety with very large green leaves. All this looked so very dusty and Early Victorian that the telephone, visible in the curtained alcove, was almost a surprise.

‘Who is that?’ a voice called out sharply and rather suspiciously from behind the stained—glass door.

‘Could I see Mr Aylmer?’ asked the priest apologetically.

The door opened and a gentleman in a peacock—green dressing—gown came out with an inquiring look. His hair was rather rough and untidy, as if he had been in bed or lived in a state of slowly getting up, but his eyes were not only awake but alert, and some would have said alarmed. Father Brown knew that the contradiction was likely enough in a man who had rather run to seed under the shadow either of a delusion or a danger. He had a fine aquiline face when seen in profile, but when seen full face the first impression was that of the untidiness and even the wilderness of his loose brown beard.

‘I am Mr Aylmer,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got out of the way of expecting visitors.’

Something about Mr Aylmer’s unrestful eye prompted the priest to go straight to the point. If the man’s persecution was only a monomania, he would be the less likely to resent it.

‘I was wondering,’ said Father Brown softly, ‘whether it is quite true that you never expect visitors.’

‘You are right,’ replied his host steadily. ‘I always expect one visitor. And he may be the last.’

‘I hope not,’ said Father Brown, ‘but at least I am relieved to infer that I do not look very like him.’

Mr Aylmer shook himself with a sort of savage laugh. ‘You certainly do not,’ he said.

‘Mr Aylmer,’ said Father Brown frankly, ‘I apologize for the liberty, but some friends of mine have told me about your trouble, and asked me to see if I could do anything for you. The truth is, I have some little experience in affairs like this.’

‘There are no affairs like this,’ said Aylmer.

‘You mean,’ observed Father Brown, ‘that the tragedies in your unfortunate family were not normal deaths?’

‘I mean they were not even normal murders,’ answered the other. ‘The man who is hounding us all to death is a hell—hound, and his power is from hell.’

‘All evil has one origin,’ said the priest gravely. ‘But how do you know they were not normal murders?’

Aylmer answered with a gesture which offered his guest a chair; then he seated himself slowly in another, frowning, with his hands on his knees; but when he looked up his expression had grown milder and more thoughtful, and his voice was quite cordial and composed.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I don’t want you to imagine that I’m in the least an unreasonable person. I have come to these conclusions by reason, because unfortunately reason really leads there. I have read a great deal on these subjects; for I was the only one who inherited my father’s scholarship in somewhat obscure matters, and I have since inherited his library. But what I tell you does not rest on what I have read but on what I have seen.’

Father Brown nodded, and the other proceeded, as if picking his words: ‘In my elder brother’s case I was not certain at first. There were no marks or footprints where he was found shot, and the pistol was left beside him. But he had just received a threatening letter certainly from our enemy, for it was marked with a sign like a winged dagger, which was one of his infernal cabalistic tricks. And a servant said she had seen something moving along the garden wall in the twilight that was much too large to be a cat. I leave it there; all I can say is that if the murderer came, he managed to leave no traces of his coming. But when my brother Stephen died it was different; and since then I have known. A machine was working in an open scaffolding under the factory tower; I scaled the platform a moment after he had fallen under the iron hammer that struck him; I did not see anything else strike him, but I saw what I saw.

‘A great drift of factory smoke was rolling between me and the factory tower; but through a rift of it I saw on the top of it a dark human figure wrapped in what looked like a black cloak. Then the sulphurous smoke drove between us again; and when it cleared I looked up at the distant chimney—there was nobody there. I am a rational man, and I will ask all rational men how he had reached that dizzy unapproachable turret, and how he left it.’

He stared across at the priest with a sphinx—like challenge; then after a silence he said abruptly: ‘My brother’s brains were knocked out, but his body was not much damaged. And in his pocket we found one of those warning messages dated the day before and stamped with the flying dagger.

‘I am sure,’ he went on gravely, ‘that the symbol of the winged dagger is not merely arbitrary or accidental. Nothing about that abominable man is accidental. He is all design; though it is indeed a most dark and intricate design. His mind is woven not only out of elaborate schemes but out of all sorts of secret languages and signs, and dumb signals and wordless pictures which are the names of nameless things. He is the worst sort of man that the world knows: he is the wicked mystic. Now, I don’t pretend to penetrate all that is conveyed by this symbol; but it seems surely that it must have a relation to all that was most remarkable, or even incredible, in his movements as he had hovered round my unfortunate family. Is there no connexion between the idea of a winged weapon and the mystery by which Philip was struck dead on his own lawn without the lightest touch of any footprint having disturbed the dust or grass? Is there no connexion between the plumed poignard flying like a feathered arrow and that figure which hung on the far top of the toppling chimney, clad in a cloak for pinions?’

‘You mean,’ said Father Brown thoughtfully, ‘that he is in a perpetual state of levitation.’

‘Simon Magus did it,’ replied Aylmer, ‘and it was one of the commonest predictions of the Dark Ages that Antichrist would be able to fly. Anyhow, there was the flying dagger on the document; and whether or no it could fly, it could certainly strike.’

‘Did you notice what sort of paper it was on?’ asked Father Brown. ‘Common paper?’

The sphinx—like face broke abruptly into a harsh laugh.

‘You can see what they’re like,’ said Aylmer grimly, ‘for I got one myself this morning.’

He was leaning back in his chair now, with his long legs thrust out from under the green dressing—gown, which was a little short for him, and his bearded chin pillowed on his chest. Without moving otherwise, he thrust his hand deep in the dressing— gown pocket and held out a fluttering scrap of paper at the end of a rigid arm. His whole attitude was suggestive of a sort of paralysis, that was both rigidity and collapse. But the next remark of the priest had a curious effect of rousing him.

Father Brown was blinking in his short—sighted way at the paper presented to him. It was a singular sort of paper, rough without being common, as from an artist’s sketch—book; and on it was drawn boldly in red ink a dagger decorated with wings like the rod of Hermes, with the written words, ‘Death comes the day after this, as it came to your brothers.’

Father Brown tossed the paper on the floor and sat bolt upright in his chair.

‘You mustn’t let that sort of stuff stupefy you,’ he said sharply. ‘These devils always try to make us helpless by making us hopeless.’

Rather to his surprise, an awakening wave went over the prostrate figure, which sprang from its chair as if startled out of a dream.

‘You’re right, you’re right!’ cried Aylmer with a rather uncanny animation; ‘and the devils shall find that I’m not so hopeless after all, nor so helpless either. Perhaps I have more hope and better help than you fancy.’

He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the priest, who had a momentary doubt, during that strained silence, about whether the man’s long peril had not touched his brain. But when he spoke it was quite soberly.

‘I believe my unfortunate brothers failed because they used the wrong weapons. Philip carried a revolver, and that was how his death came to be called suicide. Stephen had police protection, but he also had a sense of what made him ridiculous; and he could not allow a policeman to climb up a ladder after him to a scaffolding where he stood only a moment. They were both scoffers, reacting into scepticism from the strange mysticism of my father’s last days. But I always knew there was more in my father than they understood. It is true that by studying magic he fell at last under the blight of black magic; the black magic of this scoundrel Strake. But my brothers were wrong about the antidote. The antidote to black magic is not brute materialism or worldly wisdom. The antidote to black magic is white magic.’

‘It rather depends,’ said Father Brown, ‘what you mean by white magic.’

‘I mean silver magic,’ said the other, in a low voice, like one speaking of a secret revelation. Then after a silence he said: ‘Do you know what I mean by silver magic? Excuse me a moment.’

He turned and opened the central door with the red glass and went into a passage beyond it. The house had less depth than Brown had supposed; instead of the door opening into interior rooms, the corridor it revealed ended in another door on the garden. The door of one room was on one side of the passage; doubtless, the priest told himself, the proprietor’s bedroom whence he had rushed out in his dressing—gown. There was nothing else on that side but an ordinary hat— stand with the ordinary dingy cluster of old hats and overcoats; but on the other side was something more interesting: a very dark old oak sideboard laid out with some old silver, and overhung by a trophy or ornament of old weapons. It was by that that Arnold Aylmer halted, looking up at a long antiquated pistol with a bell—shaped mouth.

The door at the end of the passage was barely open, and through the crack came a streak of white daylight. The priest had very quick instincts about natural things, and something in the unusual brilliancy of that white line told him what had happened outside. It was indeed what he had prophesied when he was approaching the house. He ran past his rather startled host and opened the door, to face something that was at once a blank and a blaze. What he had seen shining through the crack was not only the most negative whiteness of daylight but the positive whiteness of snow. All round, the sweeping fall of the country was covered with that shining pallor that seems at once hoary and innocent.

‘Here is white magic anyhow,’ said Father Brown in his cheerful voice. Then, as he turned back into the hall, he murmured, ‘And silver magic too, I suppose,’ for the white lustre touched the silver with splendour and lit up the old steel here and there in the darkling armoury. The shaggy head of the brooding Aylmer seemed to have a halo of silver fire, as he turned with his face in shadow and the outlandish pistol in his hand.

‘Do you know why I chose this sort of old blunderbuss?’ he asked. ‘Because I can load it with this sort of bullet.’

He had picked up a small apostle spoon from the sideboard and by sheer violence broke off the small figure at the top. ‘Let us go back into the other room,’ he added.

‘Did you ever read about the death of Dundee?’ he asked when they had reseated themselves. He had recovered from his momentary annoyance at the priest’s restlessness. ‘Graham of Claverhouse, you know, who persecuted the Covenanters and had a black horse that could ride straight up a precipice. Don’t you know he could only be shot with a silver bullet, because he had sold himself to the Devil? That’s one comfort about you; at least you know enough to believe in the Devil.’

‘Oh, yes,’ replied Father Brown, ‘I believe in the Devil. What I don’t believe in is the Dundee. I mean the Dundee of Covenanting legends, with his nightmare of a horse. John Graham was simply a seventeenth—century professional soldier, rather better than most. If he dragooned them it was because he was a dragoon, but not a dragon. Now my experience is that it’s not that sort of swaggering blade who sells himself to the Devil. The devil—worshippers I’ve known were quite different. Not to mention names, which might cause a social flutter, I’ll take a man in Dundee’s own day. Have you ever heard of Dalrymple of Stair?’

‘No,’ replied the other gruffly.

‘You’ve heard of what he did,’ said Father Brown, ‘and it was worse than anything Dundee ever did; yet he escapes the infamy by oblivion. He was the man who made the Massacre of Glencoe. He was a very learned man and lucid lawyer, a statesman with very serious and enlarged ideas of statesmanship, a quiet man with a very refined and intellectual face. That’s the sort of man who sells himself to the Devil.’

Aylmer half started from his chair with an enthusiasm of eager assent.

‘By God! you are right,’ he cried. ‘A refined intellectual face! That is the face of John Strake.’

Then he raised himself and stood looking at the priest with a curious concentration. ‘If you will wait here a little while,’ he said, ‘I will show you something.’

He went back through the central door, closing it after him; going, the priest presumed, to the old sideboard or possibly to his bedroom. Father Brown remained seated, gazing abstractedly at the carpet, where a faint red glimmer shone from the glass in the doorway. Once it seemed to brighten like a ruby and then darkened again, as if the sun of that stormy day had passed from cloud to cloud. Nothing moved except the aquatic creatures which floated to and fro in the dim green bowl. Father Brown was thinking hard.

A minute or two afterwards he got up and slipped quietly to the alcove of the telephone, where he rang up his friend Dr Boyne, at the official headquarters. ‘I wanted to tell you about Aylmer and his affairs,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s a queer story, but I rather think there’s something in it. If I were you I’d send some men up here straight away; four or five men, I think, and surround the house. If anything does happen there’ll probably be something startling in the way of an escape.’

Then he went back and sat down again, staring at the dark carpet, which again glowed blood—red with the light from the glass door. Something in the filtered light set his mind drifting on certain borderlands of thought, with the first white daybreak before the coming of colour, and all that mystery which is alternately veiled and revealed in the symbol of windows and of doors.

An inhuman howl in a human voice came from beyond the closed doors, almost simultaneously with the noise of firing. Before the echoes of the shot had died away the door was violently flung open and his host staggered into the room, the dressing—gown half torn from his shoulder and the long pistol smoking in his hand. He seemed to be shaking in every limb, yet he was shaken in part with an unnatural laughter.

‘Glory be to the White Magic!’ he cried. ‘Glory be to the silver bullet! The hell—hound had hunted once too often, and my brothers are avenged at last.’

He sank into a chair and the pistol slid from his hand and fell on the floor. Father Brown darted past him, slipped through the glass door and went down the passage. As he did so he put his hand on the handle of the bedroom door, as if half intending to enter; then he stooped a moment, as if examining something—and then he ran to the outer door and opened it.

On the field of snow, which had been so blank a little while before, lay one black object. At the first glance it looked a little like an enormous bat. A second glance showed that it was, after all, a human figure; fallen on its face, the whole head covered by a broad black hat having something of a Latin—American look; while the appearance of black—wings came from the two flaps or loose sleeves of a very vast black cloak spread out, perhaps by accident, to their utmost length on either side. Both the hands were hidden, though Father Brown thought he could detect the position of one of them, and saw close to it, under the edge of the cloak, the glimmer of some metallic weapon. The main effect, however, was curiously like that of the simple extravagances of heraldry; like a black eagle displayed on a white ground. But by walking round it and peering under the hat the priest got a glimpse of the face, which was indeed what his host had called refined and intellectual; even sceptical and austere: the face of John Strake.

‘Well, I’m jiggered,’ muttered Father Brown. ‘It really does look like some vast vampire that has swooped down like a bird.’

‘How else could he have come?’ came a voice from the doorway, and Father Brown looked up to see Aylmer once more standing there.

‘Couldn’t he have walked?’ replied Father Brown evasively.

Aylmer stretched out his arm and swept the white landscape with a gesture.

‘Look at the snow,’ he said in a deep voice that had a sort of roll and thrill in it. ‘Is not the snow unspotted—pure as the white magic you yourself called it? Is there a speck on it for miles, save that one foul black blot that has fallen there? There are no footprints, but a few of yours and mine; there are none approaching the house from anywhere.’

Then he looked at the little priest for a moment with a concentrated and curious expression, and said: ‘I will tell you something else. That cloak he flies with is too long to walk with. He was not a very tall man, and it would trail behind him like a royal train. Stretch it out over his body, if you like, and see.’

‘What happened to you both?’ asked Father Brown abruptly.

‘It was too swift to describe,’ answered Aylmer. ‘I had looked out of the door and was turning back when there came a kind of rushing of wind all around me, as if I were being buffeted by a wheel revolving in mid—air. I spun round somehow and fired blindly; and then I saw nothing but what you see now. But I am morally certain that you wouldn’t see it if I had not had a silver shot in my gun. It would have been a different body lying there in the snow.’

‘By the way,’ remarked Father Brown, ‘shall we leave it lying there in the snow? Or would you like it taken into your room— I suppose that’s your bedroom in the passage?’

‘No, no,’ replied Aylmer hastily, ‘we must leave it here till the police have seen it. Besides, I’ve had as much of such things as I can stand for the moment. Whatever else happens, I’m going to have a drink. After that, they can hang me if they like.’

Inside the central apartment, between the palm plant and the bowl of fishes, Aylmer tumbled into a chair. He had nearly knocked the bowl over as he lurched into the room, but he had managed to find the decanter of brandy after plunging his hand rather blindly into several cupboards and corners. He did not at any time look like a methodical person, but at this moment his distraction must have been extreme. He drank with a long gulp and began to talk rather feverishly, as if to fill up a silence.

‘I see you are still doubtful,’ he said, ‘though you have seen the thing with your own eyes. Believe me, there was something more behind the quarrel between the spirit of Strake and the spirit of the house of Aylmer. Besides, you have no business to be an unbeliever. You ought to stand for all the things these stupid people call superstitions. Come now, don’t you think there’s a lot in those old wives’ tales about luck and charms and so on, silver bullets included? What do you say about them as a Catholic?’

‘I say I’m an agnostic,’ replied Father Brown, smiling.

‘Nonsense,’ said Aylmer impatiently. ‘It’s your business to believe things.’

‘Well, I do believe some things, of course,’ conceded Father Brown; ‘and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.’

Aylmer was leaning forward, and looking at him with a strange intensity that was almost like that of a mesmerist.

‘You do believe it,’ he said. ‘You do believe everything. We all believe everything, even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don’t you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?’

‘No,’ said Father Brown.

Outside, twilight had begun to fall, in that phase of such a snow— laden evening when the land looks brighter than the sky. In the porch of the main entrance, visible through a half— curtained window. Father Brown could dimly see a bulky figure standing. He glanced casually at the french windows through which he had originally entered, and saw they were darkened with two equally motionless figures. The inner door with the coloured glass stood slightly ajar; and he could see in the short corridor beyond, the ends of two long shadows, exaggerated and distorted by the level light of evening, but still like grey caricatures of the figures of men. Dr Boyne had already obeyed the telephone message. The house was surrounded.

‘What is the good of saying no?’ insisted his host, still with the same hypnotic stare. ‘You have seen part of that eternal drama with your own eyes. You have seen the threat of John Strake to slay Arnold Aylmer by black magic. You have seen Arnold Aylmer slay John Strake by white magic. You see Arnold Aylmer alive and talking to you now. And yet you don’t believe it.’

‘No, I do not believe it,’ said Father Brown, and rose from his chair like one terminating a visit.

‘Why not?’ asked the other.

The priest only lifted his voice a little, but it sounded in every corner of the room like a bell. ‘Because you are not Arnold Aylmer,’ he said. ‘I know who you are. Your name is John Strake; and you have murdered the last of the brothers, who is lying outside in the snow.’

A ring of white showed round the iris of the other man’s eyes; he seemed to be making, with bursting eyeballs, a last effort to mesmerize and master his companion. Then he made a sudden movement sideways; and even as he did so the door behind him opened and a big detective in plain clothes put one hand quietly on his shoulder. The other hand hung down, but it held a revolver. The man looked wildly round, and saw plain—clothes men in all corners of the quiet room.

That evening Father Brown had another and longer conversation with Dr Boyne about the tragedy of the Aylmer family. By that time there was no longer any doubt of the central fact of the case, for John Strake had confessed his identity and even confessed his crimes; only it would be truer to say that he boasted of his victories. Compared to the fact that he had rounded off his life’s work with the last Aylmer lying dead, everything else, including existence itself, seemed to be indifferent to him.

‘The man is a sort of monomaniac,’ said Father Brown. ‘He is not interested in any other matter; not even in any other murder. I owe him something for that; for I had to comfort myself with the reflection a good many times this afternoon. As has doubtless occurred to you, instead of weaving all that wild but ingenious romance about winged vampires and silver bullets, he might have put an ordinary leaden bullet into me, and walked out of the house. I assure you it occurred quite frequently to me.’

‘I wonder why he didn’t,’ observed Boyne. ‘I don’t understand it; but I don’t understand anything yet. How on earth did you discover it, and what in the world did you discover?’

‘Oh, you provided me with very valuable information,’ replied Father Brown modestly, ‘especially the one piece of information that really counted. I mean the statement that Strake was a very inventive and imaginative liar, with great presence of mind in producing his lies. This afternoon he needed it; but he rose to the occasion. Perhaps his only mistake was in choosing a preternatural story; he had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.’

‘But I can’t make head or tail of it,’ said the doctor. ‘You must really begin at the beginning.’

‘The beginning of it was a dressing—gown,’ said Father Brown simply. ‘It was the one really good disguise I’ve ever known. When you meet a man in a house with a dressing—gown on, you assume quite automatically that he’s in his own house. I assumed it myself; but afterwards queer little things began to happen. When he took the pistol down he clicked it at arm’s length, as a man does to make sure a strange weapon isn’t loaded; of course he would know whether the pistols in his own hall were loaded or not. I didn’t like the way he looked for the brandy, or the way he nearly barged into the bowl of fishes. For a man who has a fragile thing of that sort as a fixture in his rooms gets a quite mechanical habit of avoiding it. But these things might possibly have been fancies; the first real point was this. He came out from the little passage between the two doors; and in that passage there’s only one other door leading to a room; so I assumed it was the bedroom he had just come from. I tried the handle; but it was locked. I thought this odd; and looked through the keyhole. It was an utterly bare room, obviously deserted; no bed, no anything. Therefore he had not come from inside any room, but from outside the house. And when I saw that, I think I saw the whole picture.

‘Poor Arnold Aylmer doubtless slept and perhaps lived upstairs, and came down in his dressing—gown and passed through the red glass door. At the end of the passage, black against the winter daylight, he saw the enemy of his house. He saw a tall bearded man in a broad—brimmed black hat and a large flapping black cloak. He did not see much more in this world. Strake sprang at him, throttling or stabbing him; we cannot be sure till the inquest. Then Strake, standing in the narrow passage between the hat— stand and the old sideboard, and looking down in triumph on the last of his foes heard something he had not expected. He heard footsteps in the parlour beyond. It was myself entering by the french windows.

‘His masquerade was a miracle of promptitude. It involved not only a disguise but a romance—an impromptu romance. He took off his big black hat and cloak and put on the dead man’s dressing—gown. Then he did a rather grisly thing; at least a thing that affects my fancy as more grisly than the rest. He hung the corpse like a coat on one of the hat pegs. He draped it in his own long cloak, and found it hung well below the heels; he covered the head entirely with his own wide hat. It was the only possible way of hiding it in that little passage with the locked door; but it was really a very clever one. I myself walked past the hat—stand once without knowing it was anything but a hat—stand. I think that unconsciousness of mine will always give me a shiver.

‘He might perhaps have left it at that; but I might have discovered the corpse at any minute; and, hung where it was, it was a corpse calling for what you might call an explanation. He adopted the bolder stroke of discovering it himself and explaining it himself.

‘Then there dawned on this strange and frightfully fertile mind the conception of a story of substitution; the reversal of the parts. He had already assumed the part of Arnold Aylmer. Why should not his dead enemy assume the part of John Strake? There must have been something in that topsy—turyydom to take the fancy of that darkly fanciful man. It was like some frightful fancy—dress ball to which the two mortal enemies were to go dressed up as each other. Only, the fancy—dress ball was to be a dance of death: and one of the dancers would be dead. That is why I can imagine that man putting it in his own mind, and I can imagine him smiling.’

Father Brown was gazing into vacancy with his large grey eyes, which, when not blurred by his trick of blinking, were the one notable thing in his face. He went on speaking simply and seriously: ‘All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion. Now this man had in him a very noble power to be perverted; the power of telling stories. He was a great novelist; only he had twisted his fictive power to practical and to evil ends; to deceiving men with false fact instead of with true fiction. It began with his deceiving old Aylmer with elaborate excuses and ingeniously detailed lies; but even that may have been, at the beginning, little more than the tall stories and tarradiddles of the child who may say equally he has seen the King of England or the King of the Fairies. It grew strong in him through the vice that perpetuates all vices, pride; he grew more and more vain of his promptitude in producing stories of his originality, and subtlety in developing them. That is what the young Aylmers meant by saying that he could always cast a spell over their father; and it was true. It was the sort of spell that the storyteller cast over the tyrant in the Arabian Nights. And to the last he walked the world with the pride of a poet, and with the false yet unfathomable courage of a great liar. He could always produce more Arabian Nights if ever his neck was in danger. And today his neck was in danger.

‘But I am sure, as I say, that he enjoyed it as a fantasy as well as a conspiracy. He set about the task of telling the true story the wrong way round: of treating the dead man as living and the live man as dead. He had already got into Aylmer’s dressing—gown; he proceeded to get into Aylmer’s body and soul. He looked at the corpse as if it were his own corpse lying cold in the snow. Then he spread—eagled it in that strange fashion to suggest the sweeping descent of a bird of prey, and decked it out not only in his own dark and flying garments but in a whole dark fairy— tale about the black bird that could only fall by the silver bullet. I do not know whether it was the silver glittering on the sideboard or the snow shining beyond the door that suggested to his intensely artistic temperament the theme of white magic and the white metal used against magicians. But whatever its origin, he made it his own like a poet; and did it very promptly, like a practical man. He completed the exchange and reversal of parts by flinging the corpse out on to the snow as the corpse of Strake. He did his best to work up a creepy conception of Strake as something hovering in the air everywhere, a harpy with wings of speed and claws of death; to explain the absence of footprints and other things. For one piece of artistic impudence I hugely admire him. He actually turned one of the contradictions in his case into an argument for it; and said that the man’s cloak being too long for him proved that he never walked on the ground like an ordinary mortal. But he looked at me very hard while he said that; and something told me that he was at that moment trying a very big bluff.’

Dr Boyne looked thoughtful. ‘Had you discovered the truth by then?’ he asked. ‘There is something very queer and close to the nerves, I think, about notions affecting identity. I don’t know whether it would be more weird to get a guess like that swiftly or slowly. I wonder when you suspected and when you were sure.’

‘I think I really suspected when I telephoned to you,’ replied his friend. ‘And it was nothing more than the red light from the closed door brightening and darkening on the carpet. It looked like a splash of blood that grew vivid as it cried for vengeance. Why should it change like that? I knew the sun had not come out; it could only be because the second door behind it had been opened and shut on the garden. But if he had gone out and seen his enemy then, he would have raised the alarm then; and it was some time afterwards that the fracas occurred. I began to feel he had gone out to do something … to prepare something … but as to when I was certain, that is a different matter. I knew that right at the end he was trying to hypnotize me, to master me by the black art of eyes like talismans and a voice like an incantation. That’s what he used to do with old Aylmer, no doubt. But it wasn’t only the way he said it, it was what he said. It was the religion and philosophy of it.’

‘I’m afraid I’m a practical man,’ said the doctor with gruff humour, ‘and I don’t bother much about religion and philosophy.’

‘You’ll never be a practical man till you do,’ said Father Brown. ‘Look here, doctor; you know me pretty well; I think you know I’m not a bigot. You know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones. But there’s just one little fact I’ve learned simply as a practical man, an entirely practical point, that I’ve picked up by experience, like the tricks of an animal or the trade— mark of a good wine. I’ve scarcely ever met a criminal who philosophized at all, who didn’t philosophize along those lines of orientalism and recurrence and reincarnation, and the wheel of destiny and the serpent biting its own tail. I have found merely in practice that there is a curse on the servants of that serpent; on their belly shall they go and the dust shall they eat; and there was never a blackguard or a profligate born who could not talk that sort of spirituality. It may not be like that in its real religious origins; but here in our working world it is the religion of rascals; and I knew it was a rascal who was speaking.’

‘Why,’ said Boyne, ‘I should have thought that a rascal could pretty well profess any religion he chose.’

‘Yes,’ assented the other; ‘he could profess any religion; that is he could pretend to any religion, if it was all a pretence. If it was mere mechanical hypocrisy and nothing else, no doubt it could be done by a mere mechanical hypocrite. Any sort of mask can be put on any sort of face. Anybody can learn certain phrases or state verbally that he holds certain views. I can go out into the street and state that I am a Wesleyan Methodist or a Sandemanian, though I fear in no very convincing accent. But we are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul. I suppose he could have said he was a Wesleyan Methodist; but he could never be an eloquent Methodist as he can be an eloquent mystic and fatalist. I am talking of the sort of ideal such a man thinks of if he really tries to be idealistic. It was his whole game with me to be as idealistic as possible; and whenever that is attempted by that sort of man, you will generally find it is that sort of ideal. That sort of man may be dripping with gore; but he will always be able to tell you quite sincerely that Buddhism is better than Christianity. Nay, he will tell you quite sincerely that Buddhism is more Christian than Christianity. That alone is enough to throw a hideous and ghastly ray of light on his notion of Christianity.’

‘Upon my soul,’ said the doctor, laughing, ‘I can’t make out whether you’re denouncing or defending him.’

‘It isn’t defending a man to say he is a genius,’ said Father Brown. ‘Far from it. And it is simply a psychological fact that an artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity. Leonardo da Vinci cannot draw as if he couldn’t draw. Even if he tried, it will always be a strong parody of a weak thing. This man would have made something much too fearful and wonderful out of the Wesleyan Methodist.’

When the priest went forth again and set his face homeward, the cold had grown more intense and yet was somehow intoxicating. The trees stood up like silver candelabra of some incredible cold candlemas of purification. It was a piercing cold, like that silver sword of pure pain that once pierced the very he of purity. But it was not a killing cold, save in the sense of seeming to kill all the mortal obstructions to our immortal and immeasurable vitality. The pale green sky of twilight, with one star like the star of Bethlehem, seemed by some strange contradiction to be a cavern of clarity. It was as if there could be a green furnace of cold which wakened all things to life like warmth, and that the deeper they went into those cold crystalline colours the more were they light like winged creatures and clear like coloured glass! It tingled with truth and it divided truth from error with a blade like ice; but all that was left had never felt so much alive. It was as if all joy were a jewel in the heart of an iceberg. The priest hardly understood his own mood as he advanced deeper and, deeper into the green gloaming, drinking deeper and deeper draughts of that virginal vivacity of the air. Some forgotten muddle and morbidity seemed to be left behind, or wiped out as the snow had painted out the footprints of the man of blood. As he shuffled homewards through the snow, he muttered to himself: ‘And yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.’

SEVEN: The Doom of the Darnaways

Two landscape—painters stood looking at one landscape, which was also a seascape, and both were curiously impressed by it, though their impressions were not exactly the same. To one of them, who was a rising artist from London, it was new as well as strange. To the other, who was a local artist but with something more than a local celebrity, it was better known; but perhaps all the more strange for what he knew of it.

In terms of tone and form, as these men saw it, it was a stretch of sands against a stretch of sunset, the whole scene lying in strips of sombre colour, dead green and bronze and brown and a drab that was not merely dull but in that gloaming in some way more mysterious than gold. All that broke these level lines was a long building which ran out from the fields into the sands of the sea, so that its fringe of dreary weeds and rushes seemed almost to meet the seaweed. But its most singular feature was that the upper part of it had the ragged outlines of a ruin, pierced by so many wide windows and large rents as to be a mere dark skeleton against the dying light; while the lower bulk of the building had hardly any windows at all, most of them being blind and bricked up and their outlines only faintly traceable in the twilight. But one window at least was still a window; and it seemed strangest of all that it showed a light.

‘Who on earth can live in that old shell?’ exclaimed the Londoner, who was a big, bohemian—looking man, young but with a shaggy red beard that made him look older; Chelsea knew him familiarly as Harry Payne.

‘Ghosts, you might suppose,’ replied his friend Martin Wood. ‘Well, the people who live there really are rather like ghosts.’

It was perhaps rather a paradox that the London artist seemed almost bucolic in his boisterous freshness and wonder, while the local artist seemed a more shrewd and experienced person, regarding him with mature and amiable amusement; indeed, the latter was altogether a quieter and more conventional figure, wearing darker clothes and with his square and stolid face clean shaven.

‘It is only a sign of the times, of course,’ he went on,’ or of the passing of old times and old families with them. The last of the great Darnaways live in that house, and not many of the new poor are as poor as they are. They can’t even afford to make their own top—storey habitable; but have to live in the lower rooms of a ruin, like bats and owls. Yet they have family portraits that go back to the Wars of the Roses and the first portrait—painting in England, and very fine some of them are; I happen to know, because they asked for my professional advice in overhauling them. There’s one of them especially, and one of the earliest, but it’s so good that it gives you the creeps.’

‘The whole place gives you the creeps, I should think by the look of it,’ replied Payne.

‘Well,’ said his friend, ‘to tell you the truth, it does.’

The silence that followed was stirred by a faint rustle among the rushes by the moat; and it gave them, rationally enough, a slight nervous start when a dark figure brushed along the bank, moving rapidly and almost like a startled bird. But it was only a man walking briskly with a black bag in his hand: a man with a long sallow face and sharp eyes that glanced at the London stranger in a slightly darkling and suspicious manner.

‘It’s only Dr Barnet,’ said Wood with a sort of relief. ‘Good evening, Doctor. Are you going up to the house? I hope nobody’s ill.’

‘Everybody’s always ill in a place like that,’ growled the doctor; ‘only sometimes they’re too ill to know it. The very air of the place is a blight and a pestilence. I don’t envy the young man from Australia.’

‘And who,’ asked Payne abruptly and rather absently, ‘may the young man from Australia be?’

‘Ah!’ snorted the doctor; ‘hasn’t your friend told you about him? As a matter of fact I believe he is arriving today. Quite a romance in the old style of melodrama: the heir back from the colonies to his ruined castle, all complete even down to an old family compact for his marrying the lady watching in the ivied tower. Queer old stuff, isn’t it? but it really happens sometimes. He’s even got a little money, which is the only bright spot there ever was in this business.’

‘What does Miss Darnaway herself, in her ivied tower, think of the business?’ asked Martin Wood dryly.

‘What she thinks of everything else by this time,’ replied the doctor. ‘They don’t think in this weedy old den of superstitions, they only dream and drift. I think she accepts the family contract and the colonial husband as part of the Doom of the Darnaways, don’t you know. I really think that if he turned out to be a humpbacked Negro with one eye and a homicidal mania, she would only think it added a finishing touch and fitted in with the twilight scenery.’

‘You’re not giving my friend from London a very lively picture of my friends in the country,’ said Wood, laughing. ‘I had intended taking him there to call; no artist ought to miss those Darnaway portraits if he gets the chance. But perhaps I’d better postpone it if they’re in the middle of the Australian invasion.’

‘Oh, do go in and see them, for the Lord’s sake,’ said Dr Barnet warmly. ‘Anything that will brighten their blighted lives will make my task easier. It will need a good many colonial cousins to cheer things up, I should think; and the more the merrier. Come, I’ll take you in myself.’

As they drew nearer to the house it was seen to be isolated like an island in a moat of brackish water which they crossed by a bridge. On the other side spread a fairly wide stony floor or embankment with great cracks across it, in which little tufts of weed and thorn sprouted here and there. This rock platform looked large and bare in the grey twilight, and Payne could hardly have believed that such a corner of space could have contained so much of the soul of a wilderness. This platform only jutted out on one side, like a giant door— step and beyond it was the door; a very low—browed Tudor archway standing open, but dark like a cave.

When the brisk doctor led them inside without ceremony, Payne had, as it were, another shock of depression. He could have expected to find himself mounting to a very ruinous tower, by very narrow winding staircases; but in this case the first steps into the house were actually steps downwards. They went down several short and broken stairways into large twilit rooms which but for their lines of dark pictures and dusty bookshelves, might have been the traditional dungeons beneath the castle moat. Here and there a candle in an old candlestick lit up some dusty accidental detail of a dead elegance; but the visitor was not so much impressed or depressed by this artificial light as by the one pale gleam of natural light. As he passed down the long room he saw the only window in that wall— a curious low oval window of a late—seventeenth—century fashion. But the strange thing about it was that it did not look out directly on any space of sky but only on a reflection of sky; a pale strip of daylight merely mirrored in the moat, under the hanging shadow of the bank. Payne had a memory of the Lady of Shallot who never saw the world outside except in a mirror. The lady of this Shallot not only in some sense saw the world in a mirror, but even saw the world upside—down.

‘It’s as if the house of Darnaway were falling literally as well as metaphorically,’ said Wood in a low voice; ‘as if it were sinking slowly into a swamp or a quicksand, until the sea goes over it like a green roof.’

Even the sturdy Dr Barnet started a little at the silent approach of the figure that came to receive them. Indeed, the room was so silent that they were all startled to realize that it was not empty. There were three people in it when they entered: three dim figures motionless in the dim room; all three dressed in black and looking like dark shadows. As the foremost figure drew nearer the grey light from the window, he showed a face that looked almost as grey as its frame of hair. This was old Vine, the steward, long left in loco parentis since the death of that eccentric parent, the last Lord Darnaway. He would have been a handsome old man if he had had no teeth. As it was, he had one which showed every now and then and gave him a rather sinister appearance. He received the doctor and his friends with a fine courtesy and escorted them to where the other two figures in black were seated. One of them seemed to Payne to give another appropriate touch of gloomy antiquity to the castle by the mere fact of being a Roman Catholic priest, who might have come out of a priest’s hole in the dark old days. Payne could imagine him muttering prayers or telling beads, or tolling bells or doing a number of indistinct and melancholy things in that melancholy place. Just then he might be supposed to have been giving religious consolation to the lady; but it could hardly be supposed that the consolation was very consoling, or at any rate that it was very cheering. For the rest, the priest was personally insignificant enough, with plain and rather expressionless features; but the lady was a very different matter. Her face was very far from being plain or insignificant; it stood out from the darkness of her dress and hair and background with a pallor that was almost awful, but a beauty that was almost awfully alive. Payne looked at it as long as he dared; and he was to look at it a good deal longer before he died.

Wood merely exchanged with his friends such pleasant and polite phrases as would lead up to his purpose of revisiting the portraits. He apologized for calling on the day which he heard was to be one of family welcome; but he was soon convinced that the family was rather mildly relieved to have visitors to distract them or break the shock. He did not hesitate, therefore, to lead Payne through the central reception—room into the library beyond, where hung the portrait, for there was one which he was especially bent on showing, not only as a picture but almost as a puzzle. The little priest trudged along with them; he seemed to know something about old pictures as well as about old prayers.

‘I’m rather proud of having spotted this,’ said Wood.’ I believe it’s a Holbein. If it isn’t, there was somebody living in Holbein’s time who was as great as Holbein.’

It was a portrait in the hard but sincere and living fashion of the period, representing a man clad in black trimmed with gold and fur, with a heavy, full, rather pale face but watchful eyes.

‘What a pity art couldn’t have stopped for ever at just that transition stage,’ cried Wood, ‘and never transitioned any more. Don’t you see it’s just realistic enough to be real? Don’t you see the face speaks all the more because it stands out from a rather stiffer framework of less essential things? And the eyes are even more real than the face. On my soul, I think the eyes are too real for the face! It’s just as if those sly, quick eyeballs were protruding out of a great pale mask.’

‘The stiffness extends to the figure a little, I think,’ said Payne. ‘They hadn’t quite mastered anatomy when medievalism ended, at least in the north. That left leg looks to me a good deal out of drawing.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ replied Wood quietly. ‘Those fellows who painted just when realism began to be done, and before it began to be overdone, were often more realistic than we think. They put real details of portraiture into things that are thought merely conventional. You might say this fellow’s eyebrows or eye— sockets are a little lop—sided; but I bet if you knew him you’d find that one of his eyebrows did really stick up more than the other. And I shouldn’t wonder if he was lame or something, and that black leg was meant to be crooked.’

‘What an old devil he looks!’ burst out Payne suddenly. ‘I trust his reverence will excuse my language.’

‘I believe in the devil, thank you,’ said the priest with an inscrutable face. ‘Curiously enough there was a legend that the devil was lame.’

‘I say,’ protested Payne, ‘you can’t really mean that he was the devil; but who the devil was he?’

‘He was the Lord Darnaway under Henry VII and Henry VIII,’ replied his companion. ‘But there are curious legends about him, too; one of them is referred to in that inscription round the frame, and further developed in some notes left by somebody in a book I found here. They are both rather curious reading.’

Payne leaned forward, craning his head so as to follow the archaic inscription round the frame. Leaving out the antiquated lettering and spelling, it seemed to be a sort of rhyme running somewhat thus:

In the seventh heir I shall return: In the seventh hour I shall depart: None in that hour shall hold my hand: And woe to her that holds my heart.

‘It sounds creepy somehow,’ said Payne, ‘but that may be partly because I don’t understand a word of it.’

‘It’s pretty creepy even when you do,’ said Wood in a low voice. ‘The record made at a later date, in the old book I found, is all about how this beauty deliberately killed himself in such a way that his wife was executed for his murder. Another note commemorates a later tragedy, seven successions later— under the Georges—in which another Darnaway committed suicide, having first thoughtfully left poison in his wife’s wine. It’s said that both suicides took place at seven in the evening. I suppose the inference is that he does really return with every seventh inheritor and makes things unpleasant, as the rhyme suggests, for any lady unwise enough to marry him.’

‘On that argument,’ replied Payne, ‘it would be a trifle uncomfortable for the next seventh gentleman.’

Wood’s voice was lower still as he said: ‘The new heir will be the seventh.’

Harry Payne suddenly heaved up his great chest and shoulders like a man flinging off a burden.

‘What crazy stuff are we all talking?’ he cried. ‘We’re all educated men in an enlightened age, I suppose. Before I came into this damned dank atmosphere I’d never have believed I should be talking of such things, except to laugh at them.’

‘You are right,’ said Wood. ‘If you lived long enough in this underground palace you’d begin to feel differently about things. I’ve begun to feel very curiously about that picture, having had so much to do with handling and hanging it. It sometimes seems to me that the painted face is more alive than the dead faces of the people living here; that it is a sort of talisman or magnet: that it commands the elements and draws out the destinies of men and things. I suppose you would call it very fanciful.’

‘What is that noise?’ cried Payne suddenly.

They all listened, and there seemed to be no noise except the dull boom of the distant sea; then they began to have the sense of something mingling with it; something like a voice calling through the sound of the surf, dulled by it at first, but coming nearer and nearer. The next moment they were certain: someone was shouting outside in the dusk.

Payne turned to the low window behind him and bent to look out. It was the window from which nothing could be seen except the moat with its reflection of bank and sky. But that inverted vision was not the same that he had seen before. From the hanging shadow of the bank in the water depended two dark shadows reflected from the feet and legs of a figure standing above upon the bank. Through that limited aperture they could see nothing but the two legs black against the reflection of a pale and livid sunset. But somehow that very fact of the head being invisible, as if in the clouds, gave something dreadful to the sound that followed; the voice of a man crying aloud what they could not properly hear or understand. Payne especially was peering out of the little window with an altered face, and he spoke with an altered voice:

‘How queerly he’s standing!’

‘No, no,’ said Wood, in a sort of soothing whisper. ‘Things often look like that in reflection. It’s the wavering of the water that makes you think that.’

‘Think what?’ asked the priest shortly.

‘That his left leg is crooked,’ said Wood.

Payne had thought of the oval window as a sort of mystical mirror; and it seemed to him that there were in it other inscrutable images of doom. There was something else beside the figure that he did not understand; three thinner legs showing in dark lines against the light, as if some monstrous three—legged spider or bird were standing beside the stranger. Then he had the less crazy thought of a tripod like that of the heathen oracles; and the next moment the thing had vanished and the legs of the human figure passed out of the picture.

He turned to meet the pale face of old Vine, the steward, with his mouth open, eager to speak, and his single tooth showing. ‘He has come,’ he said. ‘The boat arrived from Australia this morning.’

Even as they went back out of the library into the central salon they heard the footsteps of the newcomer clattering down the entrance steps, with various items of light luggage trailed behind him. When Payne saw one of them, he laughed with a reaction of relief. His tripod was nothing but the telescopic legs of a portable camera, easily packed and unpacked; and the man who was carrying it seemed so far to take on equally solid and normal qualities. He was dressed in dark clothes, but of a careless and holiday sort; his shirt was of grey flannel, and his boots echoed uncompromisingly enough in those still chambers. As he strode forward to greet his new circle his stride had scarcely more than the suggestion of a limp. But Payne and his companions were looking at his face, and could scarcely take their eyes from it.

He evidently felt there was something curious and uncomfortable about his reception; but they could have sworn that he did not himself know the cause of it. The lady, supposed to be in some sense already betrothed to him, was certainly beautiful enough to attract him; but she evidently also frightened him. The old steward brought him a sort of feudal homage, yet treated him as if he were the family ghost. The priest still looked at him with a face which was quite indecipherable, and therefore perhaps all the more unnerving. A new sort of irony, more like the Greek irony, began to pass over Payne’s mind. He had dreamed of the stranger as a devil, but it seemed almost worse that he was an unconscious destiny. He seemed to march towards crime with the monstrous innocence of Oedipus. He had approached the family mansion in so blindly buoyant a spirit as to have set up his camera to photograph his first sight of it; and even the camera had taken on the semblance of the tripod of a tragic pythoness.

Payne was surprised, when taking his leave a little while after, at something which showed that the Australian was already less unconscious of his surroundings. He said in a low voice:

‘Don’t go … or come again soon. You look like a human being. This place fairly gives me the jumps.’

When Payne emerged out of those almost subterranean halls and came into the night air and the smell of the sea, he felt as if he had come out of that underworld of dreams in which events jumble on top of each other in a way at once unrestful and unreal.

The arrival of the strange relative had been somehow unsatisfying and, as it were, unconvincing. The doubling of the same face in the old portrait and the new arrival troubled him like a two headed monster. And yet it was not altogether a nightmare; nor was it that face, perhaps, that he saw most vividly.

‘Did you say?’ he asked of the doctor, as they strode together across the striped dark sands by the darkening sea; ‘did you say that young man was betrothed to Miss Darnaway by a family compact or something? Sounds rather like a novel.’

‘But an historical novel,’ answered Dr Barnet. ‘The Darnaways all went to sleep a few centuries ago, when things were really done that we only read of in romances. Yes; I believe there’s some family tradition by which second or third cousins always marry when they stand in a certain relation of age, in order to unite the property. A damned silly tradition, I should say; and if they often married in and in, in that fashion, it may account on principles of heredity for their having gone so rotten.’

‘I should hardly say,’ answered Payne a little stuffily, ‘that they had all gone rotten.’

‘Well,’ replied the doctor, ‘the young man doesn’t look rotten, of course, though he’s certainly lame.’

‘The young man!’ cried Payne, who was suddenly and unreasonably angry. ‘Well, if you think the young lady looks rotten, I think it’s you who have rotten taste.’

The doctor’s face grew dark and bitter. ‘I fancy I know more about it than you do,’ he snapped.

They completed the walk in silence, each feeling that he had been irrationally rude and had suffered equally irrational rudeness; and Payne was left to brood alone on the matter, for his friend Wood had remained behind to attend to some of his business in connexion with the pictures.

Payne took very full advantage of the invitation extended by the colonial cousin, who wanted somebody to cheer him up. During the next few weeks he saw a good deal of the dark interior of the Darnaway home; though it might be said that he did not confine himself entirely to cheering up the colonial cousin. The lady’s melancholy was of longer standing and perhaps needed more lifting; anyhow, he showed a laborious readiness to lift it. He was not without a conscience, however, and the situation made him doubtful and uncomfortable. Weeks went by and nobody could discover from the demeanour of the new Darnaway whether he considered himself engaged according to the old compact or no. He went mooning about the dark galleries and stood staring vacantly at the dark and sinister picture. The shades of that prison— house were certainly beginning to close on him, and there was little of his Australian assurance left. But Payne could discover nothing upon the point that concerned him most. Once he attempted to confide in his friend Martin Wood, as he was pottering about in his capacity of picture—hanger; but even out of him he got very little satisfaction.

‘It seems to me you can’t butt in,’ said Wood shortly, ‘because of the engagement.’

‘Of course I shan’t butt in if there is an engagement,’ retorted his friend; ‘but is there? I haven’t said a word to her of course; but I’ve seen enough of her to be pretty certain she doesn’t think there is, even if she thinks there may be. He doesn’t say there is, or even hint that there ought to be. It seems to me this shillyshallying is rather unfair on everybody.’

‘Especially on you, I suppose,’ said Wood a little harshly. ‘But if you ask me, I’ll tell you what I think—I think he’s afraid.’

‘Afraid of being refused?’ asked Payne.

‘No; afraid of being accepted,’ answered the other. ‘Don’t bite my head off—I don’t mean afraid of the lady. I mean afraid of the picture.’

‘Afraid of the picture!’ repeated Payne.

‘I mean afraid of the curse,’ said Wood. ‘Don’t you remember the rhyme about the Darnaway doom falling on him and her.’

‘Yes, but look here,’ cried Payne; ‘even the Darnaway doom can’t have it both ways. You tell me first that I mustn’t have my own way because of the compact, and then that the compact mustn’t have its own way because of the curse. But if the curse can destroy the compact, why should she be tied to the compact? If they’re frightened of marrying each other, they’re free to marry anybody else, and there’s an end of it. Why should I suffer for the observance of something they don’t propose to observe? It seems to me your position is very unreasonable.’

‘Of course it’s all a tangle,’ said Wood rather crossly, and went on hammering at the frame of a canvas.

Suddenly, one morning, the new heir broke his long and baffling silence. He did it in a curious fashion, a little crude, as was his way, but with an obvious anxiety to do the right thing. He asked frankly for advice, not of this or that individual as Payne had done, but collectively as of a crowd. When he did speak he threw himself on the whole company like a statesman going to the country. He called it ‘a show—down’. Fortunately the lady was not included in this large gesture; and Payne shuddered when he thought of her feelings. But the Australian was quite honest; he thought the natural thing was to ask for help and for information, calling a sort of family council at which he put his cards on the table. It might be said that he flung down his cards on the table, for he did it with a rather desperate air, like one who had been harassed for days and nights by the increasing pressure of a problem. In that short time the shadows of that place of low windows and sinking pavements had curiously changed him, and increased a certain resemblance that crept through all their memories.

The five men, including the doctor, were sitting round a table; and Payne was idly reflecting that his own light tweeds and red hair must be the only colours in the room, for the priest and the steward were in black, and Wood and Darnaway habitually wore dark grey suits that looked almost like black. Perhaps this incongruity had been what the young man had meant by calling him a human being. At that moment the young man himself turned abruptly in his chair and began to talk. A moment after the dazed artist knew that he was talking about the most tremendous thing in the world.

‘Is there anything in it?’ he was saying. ‘That is what I’ve come to asking myself till I’m nearly crazy. I’d never have believed I should come to thinking of such things; but I think of the portrait and the rhyme and the coincidences or whatever you call them, and I go cold. Is there anything in it? Is there any Doom of the Darnaways or only a damned queer accident? Have I got a right to marry, or shall I bring something big and black out of the sky, that I know nothing about, on myself and somebody else?’

His rolling eye had roamed round the table and rested on the plain face of the priest, to whom he now seemed to be speaking. Payne’s submerged practicality rose in protest against the problem of superstition being brought before that supremely superstitious tribunal. He was sitting next to Darnaway and struck in before the priest could answer.

‘Well, the coincidences are curious, I admit,’ he said, rather forcing a note of cheerfulness; ‘but surely we—‘ and then he stopped as if he had been struck by lightning. For Darnaway had turned his head sharply over his shoulder at the interruption, and with the movement, his left eyebrow jerked up far above its fellow and for an instant the face of the portrait glared at him with a ghastly exaggeration of exactitude. The rest saw it; and all had the air of having been dazzled by an instant of light. The old steward gave a hollow groan.

‘It is no good,’ he said hoarsely;’ we are dealing with something too terrible.’

‘Yes,’ assented the priest in a low voice, ‘we are dealing with something terrible; with the most terrible thing I know, and the name of it is nonsense.’

‘What did you say?’ said Darnaway, still looking towards him.

‘I said nonsense,’ repeated the priest. ‘I have not said anything in particular up to now, for it was none of my business; I was only taking temporary duty in the neighbourhood and Miss Darnaway wanted to see me. But since you’re asking me personally and point—blank, why, it’s easy enough to answer. Of course there’s no Doom of the Darnaways to prevent your marrying anybody you have any decent reason for marrying. A man isn’t fated to fall into the smallest venial sin, let alone into crimes like suicide and murder. You can’t be made to do wicked things against your will because your name is Darnaway, any more than I can because my name is Brown. The Doom of the Browns,’ he added with relish—‘the Weird of the Browns would sound even better.’

‘And you of all people,’ repeated the Australian, staring, ‘tell me to think like that about it.’

‘I tell you to think about something else,’ replied the priest cheerfully. ‘What has become of the rising art of photography? How is the camera getting on? I know it’s rather dark downstairs, but those hollow arches on the floor above could easily be turned into a first—rate photographic studio. A few workmen could fit it out with a glass roof in no time.’

‘Really,’ protested Martin Wood, ‘I do think you should be the last man in the world to tinker about with those beautiful Gothic arches, which are about the best work your own religion has ever done in the world. I should have thought you’d have had some feeling for that sort of art; but I can’t see why you should be so uncommonly keen on photography.’

‘I’m uncommonly keen on daylight,’ answered Father Brown, ‘especially in this dingy business; and photography has the virtue of depending on daylight. And if you don’t know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don’t know so much about my religion as you think you do.’

The young Australian had sprung to his feet like a man rejuvenated. ‘By George! that’s the talk,’ he cried; ‘though I never thought to hear it from that quarter. I’ll tell you what, reverend sir, I’ll do something that will show I haven’t lost my courage after all.’

The old steward was still looking at him with quaking watchfulness, as if he felt something fey about the young man’s defiance. ‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘what are you going to do now?’

‘I am going to photograph the portrait,’ replied Darnaway.

Yet it was barely a week afterwards that the storm of the catastrophe seemed to stoop out of the sky, darkening that sun of sanity to which the priest had appealed in vain, and plunging the mansion once more in the darkness of the Darnaway doom. It had been easy enough to fit up the new studio; and seen from inside it looked very like any other such studio, empty except for the fullness of the white light. A man coming from the gloomy rooms below had more than normally the sense of stepping into a more than modern brilliancy, as blank as the future. At the suggestion of Wood, who knew the castle well and had got over his first aesthetic grumblings, a small room remaining intact in the upper ruins was easily turned into a dark room, into which Darnaway went out of the white daylight to grope by the crimson gleams of a red lamp. Wood said, laughing, that the red lamp had reconciled him to the vandalism; as that bloodshot darkness was as romantic as an alchemist’s cave.

Darnaway had risen at daybreak on the day that he meant to photograph the mysterious portrait, and had it carried up from the library by the single corkscrew staircase that connected the two floors. There he had set it up in the wide white daylight on a sort of easel and planted his photographic tripod in front of it. He said he was anxious to send a reproduction of it to a great antiquary who had written on the antiquities of the house; but the others knew that this was an excuse covering much deeper things. It was, if not exactly a spiritual duel between Darnaway and the demoniac picture, at least a duel between Darnaway and his own doubts. He wanted to bring the daylight of photography face to face with that dark masterpiece of painting; and to see whether the sunshine of the new art would not drive out the shadows of the old.

Perhaps this was why he preferred to do it by himself, even if some of the details seemed to take longer and involve more than normal delay. Anyhow, he rather discouraged the few who visited his studio during the day of the experiment, and who found him focusing and fussing about in a very isolated and impenetrable fashion. The steward had left a meal for him, as he refused to come down; the old gentleman also returned some hours afterwards and found the meal more or less normally disposed of; but when he brought it he got no more gratitude than a grunt. Payne went up once to see how he was getting on, but finding the photographer disinclined for conversation came down again. Father Brown had wandered that way in an unobtrusive style to lake Darnaway a letter from the expert to whom the photograph was to be sent. But he left the letter on a tray, and whatever he thought of that great glasshouse full of daylight and devotion to a hobby, a world he had himself in some sense created, he kept it to himself and came down. He had reason to remember very soon that he was the last to come down the solitary staircase connecting the floors, leaving a lonely man and an empty room behind him. The others were standing in the salon that led into the library, just under the great black ebony clock that looked like a titanic coffin.

‘How was Darnaway getting on,’ asked Payne, a little later, ‘when you last went up?’

The priest passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Don’t tell me I’m getting psychic,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘I believe I’m quite dazzled with daylight up in that room and couldn’t see things straight. Honestly, I felt for a flash as if there were something uncanny about Darnaway’s figure standing before that portrait.’

‘Oh, that’s the lame leg,’ said Barnet promptly. ‘We know all about that.’

‘Do you know,’ said Payne abruptly, but lowering his voice, ‘l don’t think we do know all about it or anything about it. What’s the matter with his leg? What was the matter with his ancestor’s leg?’

‘Oh, there’s something about that in the book I was reading in there, in the family archives,’ said Wood; ‘I’ll fetch it for you.’ And he stepped into the library just beyond.

‘I think,’ said Father Brown quietly, ‘Mr Payne must have some particular reason for asking that.’

‘I may as well blurt it out once and for all,’ said Payne, but in a yet lower voice. ‘After all, there is a rational explanation. A man from anywhere might have made up to look like the portrait. What do we know about Darnaway? He is behaving rather oddly—‘

The others were staring at him in a rather startled fashion; but the priest seemed to take it very calmly.

‘I don’t think the old portrait’s ever been photographed,’ he said. ‘That’s why he wants to do it. I don’t think there’s anything odd about that.’

‘Quite an ordinary state of things, in fact,’ said Wood with a smile; he had just returned with the book in his hand. And even as he spoke there was a stir in the clockwork of the great dark clock behind him and successive strokes thrilled through the room up to the number of seven. With the last stroke there came a crash from the floor above that shook the house like a thunderbolt; and Father Brown was already two steps up the winding staircase before the sound had ceased.

‘My God!’ cried Payne involuntarily; ‘he is alone up there.’

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown without turning, as he vanished up the stairway. ‘We shall find him alone.’

When the rest recovered from their first paralysis and ran helter— skelter up the stone steps and found their way to the new studio, it was true in that sense that they found him alone. They found him lying in a wreck of his tall camera, with its long splintered legs standing out grotesquely at three different angles; and Darnaway had fallen on top of it with one black crooked leg lying at a fourth angle along the floor. For the moment the dark heap looked as if he were entangled with some huge and horrible spider. Little more than a glance and a touch were needed to tell them that he was dead. Only the portrait stood untouched upon the easel, and one could fancy the smiling eyes shone.

An hour afterwards Father Brown in helping to calm the confusion of the stricken household, came upon the old steward muttering almost as mechanically as the clock had ticked and struck the terrible hour. Almost without hearing them, he knew what the muttered words must be.

In the seventh heir I shall return In the seventh hour I shall depart.

As he was about to say something soothing, the old man seemed suddenly to start awake and stiffen into anger; his mutterings changed to a fierce cry.

‘You!’ he cried; ‘you and your daylight! Even you won’t say now there is no Doom for the Darnaways.’

‘My opinion about that is unchanged,’ said Father Brown mildly. Then after a pause he added: ‘I hope you will observe poor Darnaway’s last wish, and see the photograph is sent off.’

‘The photograph!’ cried the doctor sharply. ‘What’s the good of that? As a matter of fact, it’s rather curious; but there isn’t any photograph. It seems he never took it after all, after pottering about all day.’

Father Brown swung round sharply. ‘Then take it yourselves,’ he said. ‘Poor Darnaway was perfectly right. It’s most important that the photograph should be taken.’

As all the visitors, the doctor, the priest, and the two artists trailed away in a black and dismal procession across the brown and yellow sands, they were at first more or less silent, rather as if they had been stunned. And certainly there had been something like a crack of thunder in a clear sky about the fulfilment of that forgotten superstition at the very time when they had most forgotten it; when the doctor and the priest had both filled their minds with rationalism as the photographer had filled his rooms with daylight. They might be as rationalistic as they liked; but in broad daylight the seventh heir had returned, and in broad daylight at the seventh hour he had perished.

‘I’m afraid everybody will always believe in the Darnaway superstition now,’ said Martin Wood.

‘I know one who won’t,’ said the doctor sharply. ‘Why should I indulge in superstition because somebody else indulges in suicide?’

‘You think poor Mr Darnaway committed suicide?’ asked the priest.

‘I’m sure he committed suicide,’ replied the doctor.

‘It is possible,’ agreed the other.

‘He was quite alone up there, and he had a whole drug— store of poisons in the dark room. Besides, it’s just the sort of thing that Darnaways do.’

‘You don’t think there’s anything in the fulfilment of the family curse?’

‘Yes,’ said the doctor; ‘I believe in one family curse, and that is the family constitution. I told you it was heredity, and they are all half mad. If you stagnate and breed in and brood in your own swamp like that, you’re bound to degenerate whether you like it or not. The laws of heredity can’t be dodged; the truths of science can’t be denied. The minds of the Darnaways are falling to pieces, as their blighted old sticks and stones are falling to pieces, eaten away by the sea and the salt air. Suicide—of course he committed suicide; I dare say all the rest will commit suicide. Perhaps the best thing they could do.’

As the man of science spoke there sprang suddenly and with startling clearness into Payne’s memory the face of the daughter of the Darnaways, a tragic mask pale against an unfathomable blackness, but itself of a blinding and more than mortal beauty. He opened his mouth to speak and found himself speechless.

‘I see,’ said Father Brown to the doctor; ‘so you do believe in the superstition after all?’

‘What do you mean—believe in the superstition? I believe in the suicide as a matter of scientific necessity.’

‘Well,’ replied the priest, ‘I don’t see a pin to choose between your scientific superstition and the other magical superstition. They both seem to end in turning people into paralytics, who can’t move their own legs or arms or save their own lives or souls. The rhyme said it was the Doom of the Darnaways to be killed, and the scientific textbook says it is the Doom of the Darnaways to kill themselves. Both ways they seem to be slaves.’

‘But I thought you said you believed in rational views of these things,’ said Dr Barnet. ‘Don’t you believe in heredity?’

‘I said I believed in daylight,’ replied the priest in a loud and clear voice, ‘and I won’t choose between two tunnels of subterranean superstition that both end in the dark. And the proof of it is this: that you are all entirely in the dark about what really happened in that house.’

‘Do you mean about the suicide?’ asked Payne.

‘I mean about the murder,’ said Father Brown; and his voice, though only slightly lifted to a louder note, seemed somehow to resound over the whole shore.’ It was murder; but murder is of the will, which God made free.’

What the other said at the moment in answer to it Payne never knew. For the word had a rather curious effect on him; stirring him like the blast of a trumpet and yet bringing him to a halt. He stood still in the middle of the sandy waste and let the others go on in front of him; he felt the blood crawling through all his veins and the sensation that is called the hair standing on end; and yet he felt a new and unnatural happiness. A psychological process too quick and too complicated for himself to follow had already reached a conclusion that he could not analyse; but the conclusion was one of relief. After standing still for a moment he turned and went back slowly across the sands to the house of the Darnaways.

He crossed the moat with a stride that shook the bridge, descended the stairs and traversed the long rooms with a resounding tread, till he came to the place where Adelaide Darnaway sat haloed with the low light of the oval window, almost like some forgotten saint left behind in the land of death. She looked up, and an expression of wonder made her face yet more wonderful.

‘What is it?’ she said.’ Why have you come back?’

‘I have come for the Sleeping Beauty,’ he said in a tone that had the resonance of a laugh. ‘This old house went to sleep long ago, as the doctor said; but it is silly for you to pretend to be old. Come up into the daylight and hear the truth. I have brought you a word; it is a terrible word, but it breaks the spell of your captivity.’

She did not understand a word he said, but something made her rise and let him lead her down the long hall and up the stairs and out under the evening sky. The ruins of a dead garden stretched towards the sea, and an old fountain with the figure of a triton, green with rust, remained poised there, pouring nothing out of a dried horn into an empty basin. He had often seen that desolate outline against the evening sky as he passed, and it had seemed to him a type of fallen fortunes in more ways than one. Before long, doubtless, those hollow fonts would be filled, but it would be with the pale green bitter waters of the sea and the flowers would be drowned and strangled in seaweed. So, he had told himself, the daughter of the Darnaways might indeed be wedded; but she would be wedded to death and a doom as deaf and ruthless as the sea. But now he laid a hand on the bronze triton that was like the hand of a giant, and shook it as if he meant to hurl it over like an idol or an evil god of the garden.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked steadily. ‘What is this word that will set us free?’

‘The word is murder,’ he said, ‘and the freedom it brings is as fresh as the flowers of spring. No; I do not mean I have murdered anybody. But the fact that anybody can be murdered is itself good news, after the evil dreams you have been living in. Don’t you understand? In that dream of yours everything that happened to you came from inside you; the Doom of the Darnaways was stored up in the Darnaways; it unfolded itself like a horrible flower. There was no escape even by happy accident; it was all inevitable; whether it was Vine and his old—wives’ tales, or Barnet and his new—fangled heredity. But this man who died was not the victim of a magic curse or an inherited madness. He was murdered; and for us that murder is simply an accident; yes, requiescat in pace: but a happy accident. It is a ray of daylight, because it comes from outside.’

She suddenly smiled. ‘Yes, I believe I understand. I suppose you are talking like a lunatic, but I understand. But who murdered him?’

‘I do not know,’ he answered calmly, ‘but Father Brown knows. And as Father Brown says, murder is at least done by the will, free as that wind from the sea.’

‘Father Brown is a wonderful person,’ she said after a pause; ‘he was the only person who ever brightened my existence in any way at all until—‘

‘Until what?’ asked Payne, and made a movement almost impetuous, leaning towards her and thrusting away the bronze monster so that it seemed to rock on its pedestal.

‘Well, until you did,’ she said and smiled again.

So was the sleeping palace awakened, and it is no part of this story to describe the stages of its awakening, though much of it had come to pass before the dark of that evening had fallen upon the shore. As Harry Payne strode homewards once more, across those dark sands that he had crossed in so many moods, he was at the highest turn of happiness that is given in this mortal life,— and the whole red sea within him was at the top of its tide. He would have had no difficulty in picturing all that place again in flower, and the bronze triton bright as a golden god and the fountain flowing with water or with wine. But all this brightness and blossoming had been unfolded for him by the one word ‘murder’, and it was still a word that he did not understand. He had taken it on trust, and he was not unwise; for he was one of those who have a sense of the sound of truth.

It was more than a month later that Payne returned to his London house to keep an appointment with Father Brown, taking the required photograph with him. His personal romance had prospered as well as was fitting under the shadow of such a tragedy, and the shadow itself therefore lay rather more lightly on him; but it was hard to view it as anything but the shadow of a family fatality. In many ways he had been much occupied; and it was not until the Darnaway household had resumed its somewhat stern routine, and the portrait had long been restored to its place in the library, that he had managed to photograph it with a magnesium flare. Before sending it to the antiquary, as originally arranged, he brought it to the priest who had so pressingly demanded it.

‘I can’t understand your attitude about all this. Father Brown,’ he said.’ You act as if you had already solved the problem in some way of your own.’

The priest shook his head mournfully. ‘Not a bit of it,’ he answered. ‘I must be very stupid, but I’m quite stuck; stuck about the most practical point of all. It’s a queer business; so simple up to a point and then— Let me have a look at that photograph, will you?’

He held it close to his screwed, short—sighted eyes for a moment, and then said: ‘Have you got a magnifying glass?’

Payne produced one, and the priest looked through it intently for some time and then said:’ Look at the title of that book at the edge of the bookshelf beside the frame; it’s ‘The History of Pope Joan’. Now, I wonder … yes, by George; and the one above is something or other of Iceland. Lord! what a queer way to find it out! What a dolt and donkey I was not to notice it when I was there!’

‘But what have you found out?’ asked Payne impatiently.

‘The last link,’ said Father Brown, ‘and I’m not stuck any longer. Yes; I think I know how that unhappy story went from first to last now.’

‘But why?’ insisted the other.

‘Why, because,’ said the priest with a smile, ‘the Darnaway library contained books about Pope Joan and Iceland, not to mention another I see with the title beginning ‘The Religion of Frederick’, which is not so very hard to fill up.’ Then, seeing the other’s annoyance, his smile faded and he said more earnestly: ‘As a matter of fact, this last point, though it is the last link, is not the main business. There were much more curious things in the case than that. One of them is rather a curiosity of evidence. Let me begin by saying something that may surprise you. Darnaway did not die at seven o’clock that evening. He had been already dead for a whole day.’

‘Surprise is rather a mild word,’ said Payne grimly, ‘since you and I both saw him walking about afterwards.’

‘No, we did not,’ replied Father Brown quietly. ‘I think we both saw him, or thought we saw him, fussing about with the focusing of his camera. Wasn’t his head under that black cloak when you passed through the room? It was when I did. And that’s why I felt there was something queer about the room and the figure. It wasn’t that the leg was crooked, but rather that it wasn’t crooked. It was dressed in the same sort of dark clothes; but if you see what you believe to be one man standing in the way that another man stands, you will think he’s in a strange and strained attitude.’

‘Do you really mean,’ cried Payne with something like a shudder, ‘that it was some unknown man?’

‘It was the murderer,’ said Father Brown. ‘He had already killed Darnaway at daybreak and hid the corpse and himself in the dark room—an excellent hiding—place, because nobody normally goes into it or can see much if he does. But he let it fall out on the floor at seven o’clock, of course, that the whole thing might be explained by the curse.’

‘But I don’t understand’ observed Payne. ‘Why didn’t he kill him at seven o’clock then, instead of loading himself with a corpse for fourteen hours?’

‘Let me ask you another question,’ said the priest. ‘Why was there no photograph taken? Because the murderer made sure of killing him when he first got up, and before he could take it. It was essential to the murderer to prevent that photograph reaching the expert on the Darnaway antiquities.’

There was a sudden silence for a moment, and then the priest went on in a lower tone: ‘Don’t you see how simple it is? Why, you yourself saw one side of the possibility; but it’s simpler even than you thought. You said a man might be faked to resemble an old picture. Surely it’s simpler that a picture should be faked to resemble a man. In plain words, it’s true in a rather special way that there was no Doom of the Darnaways. There was no old picture; there was no old rhyme; there was no legend of a man who caused his wife’s death. But there was a very wicked and a very clever man who was willing to cause another man’s death in order to rob him of his promised wife.’

The priest suddenly gave Payne a sad smile, as if in reassurance. ‘For the moment I believe you thought I meant you,’ he said,’ but you were not the only person who haunted that house for sentimental reasons. You know the man, or rather you think you do. But there were depths in the man called Martin Wood, artist and antiquary, which none of his mere artistic acquaintances were likely to guess. Remember that he was called in to criticize and catalogue the pictures; in an aristocratic dustbin of that sort that practically means simply to tell the Darnaways what art treasures they had got. They would not be surprised at things turning up they had never noticed before. It had to be done well, and it was; perhaps he was right when he said that if it wasn’t Holbein it was somebody of the same genius.’

‘I feel rather stunned,’ said Payne; ‘and there are twenty things I don’t see yet. How did he know what Darnaway looked like? How did he actually kill him? The doctors seem rather puzzled at present.’

‘I saw a photograph the lady had which the Australian sent on before him,’ said the priest, ‘and there are several ways in which he could have learned things when the new heir was once recognized. We may not know these details; but they are not difficulties. You remember he used to help in the dark room; it seems to me an ideal place, say, to prick a man with a poisoned pin, with the poison’s all handy. No; I say these were not difficulties. The difficulty that stumped me was how Wood could be in two places at once. How could he take the corpse from the dark—room and prop it against the camera so that it would fall in a few seconds, without coming downstairs, when he was in the library looking out a book? And I was such a fool that I never looked at the books in the library; and it was only in this photograph, by very undeserved good luck, that I saw the simple fact of a book about Pope Joan.’

‘You’ve kept your best riddle for the end,’ said Payne grimly. ‘What on earth can Pope Joan have to do with it?’

‘Don’t forget the book about the Something of Iceland,’ advised the priest, ‘or the religion of somebody called Frederick. It only remains to ask what sort of man was the late Lord Darnaway.’

‘Oh, does it?’ observed Payne heavily.

‘He was a cultivated, humorous sort of eccentric, I believe,’ went on Father Brown. ‘Being cultivated, he knew there was no such person as Pope Joan. Being humorous, he was very likely to have thought of the title of ‘The Snakes of Iceland’ or something else that didn’t exist. I venture to reconstruct the third title as ‘The Religion of Frederick the Great’— which also doesn’t exist. Now, doesn’t it strike you that those would be just the titles to put on the backs of books that didn’t exist; or in other words on a bookcase that wasn’t a book—case?’

‘Ah!’ cried Payne; ‘I see what you mean now. There was some hidden staircase—‘

‘Up to the room Wood himself selected as a dark room,’ said the priest nodding. ‘I’m sorry. It couldn’t be helped. It’s dreadfully banal and stupid, as stupid as I have been on this pretty banal case. But we were mixed up in a real musty old romance of decayed gentility and a fallen family mansion; and it was too much to hope that we could escape having a secret passage. It was a priest’s hole; and I deserve to be put in it.’

EIGHT: The Ghost of Gideon Wise

FATHER BROWN always regarded the case as the queerest example of the theory of an alibi: the theory by which it is maintained, in defiance of the mythological Irish bird, that it is impossible for anybody to be in two places at once. To begin with, James Byrne, being an Irish journalist, was perhaps the nearest approximation to the Irish bird. He came as near as anybody could to being in two places at once: for he was in two places at the opposite extremes of the social and political world within the space of twenty minutes. The first was in the Babylonian halls of the big hotel, which was the meeting place of the three commercial magnates concerned with arranging for a coal lock—out and denouncing it as a coal—strike, the second was in a curious tavern, having the facade of a grocery store, where met the more subterranean triumvirate of those who would have been very glad to turn the lock—out into a strike—and the strike into a revolution. The reporter passed to and fro between the three millionaires and the three Bolshevist leaders with the immunity of the modern herald or the new ambassador.

He found the three mining magnates hidden in a jungle of flowering plants and a forest of fluted and florid columns of gilded plaster; gilded birdcages hung high under the painted domes amid the highest leaves of the palms; and in them were birds of motley colours and varied cries. No bird in the wilderness ever sang more unheeded, and no flower ever wasted its sweetness on the desert air more completely than the blossoms of those tall plants wasted theirs upon the brisk and breathless business men, mostly American, who talked and ran to and fro in that place. And there, amid a riot of rococo ornament that nobody ever looked at, and a chatter of expensive foreign birds that nobody ever heard, and a mass of gorgeous upholstery and a labyrinth of luxurious architecture, the three men sat and talked of how success was founded on thought and thrift and a vigilance of economy and self—control.

One of them indeed did not talk so much as the others; but he watched with very bright and motionless eyes, which seemed to be pinched together by his pince—nez, and the permanent smile under his small black moustache was rather like a permanent sneer. This was the famous Jacob P. Stein, and he did not speak till he had something to say. But his companion, old Gallup the Pennsylvanian, a huge fat fellow with reverend grey hair but a face like a pugilist, talked a great deal. He was in a jovial mood and was half rallying, half bullying the third millionaire, Gideon Wise—a hard, dried, angular old bird of the type that his countrymen compare to hickory, with a stiff grey chin—beard and the manners and clothes of any old farmer from the central plains. There was an old argument between Wise and Gallup about combination and competition. For old Wise still retained, with the manners of the old backwoodsman, something of his opinions of the old individualist; he belonged, as we should say in England, to the Manchester School; and Gallup was always trying to persuade him to cut out competition and pool the resources of the world.

‘You’ll have to come in, old fellow, sooner or later,’ Gallup was saying genially as Byrne entered. ‘It’s the way the world is going, and we can’t go back to the one—man—business now. We’ve all got to stand together.’

‘If I might say a word,’ said Stein, in his tranquil way, ‘I would say there is something a little more urgent even than standing together commercially. Anyhow, we must stand together politically; and that’s why I’ve asked Mr Byrne to meet us here today. On the political issue we must combine; for the simple reason that all our most dangerous enemies are already combined.’

‘Oh, I quite agree about political combination,’ grumbled Gideon Wise.

‘See here,’ said Stein to the journalist; ‘I know you have the run of these queer places, Mr Byrne, and I want you to do something for us unofficially. You know where these men meet; there are only two or three of them that count, John Elias and Jake Halket, who does all the spouting, and perhaps that poet fellow Home.’

‘Why Home used to be a friend of Gideon,’ said the jeering Mr Gallup; ‘used to be in his Sunday School class or something.’

‘He was a Christian, then,’ said old Gideon solemnly; ‘but when a man takes up with atheists you never know. I still meet him now and then. I was quite ready to back him against war and conscription and all that, of course, but when it comes to all the goddam bolshies in creation—‘

‘Excuse me,’ interposed Stein, ‘the matter is rather urgent, so I hope you will excuse me putting it before Mr Byrne at once. Mr Byrne, I may tell you in confidence that I hold information, or rather evidence that would land at least two of those men in prison for long terms, in connexion with conspiracies during the late war. I don’t want to use that evidence. But I want you to go to them quietly and tell them that I shall use it, and use it tomorrow, unless they alter their attitude.’

‘Well,’ replied Byrne, ‘what you propose would certainly be called compounding a felony and might be called blackmail, Don’t you think it is rather dangerous?’

‘I think it is rather dangerous for them,’ said Stein with a snap; ‘and I want you to go and tell them so.’

‘Oh, very well,’ said Byrne standing up, with a half humorous sigh. ‘It’s all in the day’s work; but if I get into trouble, I warn you I shall try to drag you into it.’

‘You will try, boy,’ said old Gallup with a hearty laugh.

For so much still lingers of that great dream of Jefferson and, the thing that men have called Democracy that in his country, while the rich rule like tyrants, the poor do not talk like slaves; but there is candour between the oppressor and the oppressed.

The meeting—place of the revolutionists was a queer, bare, whitewashed place, on the walls of which were one or two distorted uncouth sketches in black and white, in the style of something that was supposed to be Proletarian Art, of which not one proletarian in a million could have made head or tail. Perhaps the one point in common to the two council chambers was that both violated the American Constitution by the display of strong drink. Cocktails of various colours had stood before the three millionaires. Halket, the most violent of the Bolshevists, thought it only appropriate to drink vodka. He was a long, hulking fellow with a menacing stoop, and his very profile was aggressive like a dog’s, the nose and lips thrust out together, the latter carrying a ragged red moustache and the whole curling outwards with perpetual scorn. John Elias was a dark watchful man in spectacles, with a black pointed beard; and he had learnt in many European cafes a taste for absinthe. The journalist’s first and last feeling was how very like each other, after all, were John Elias and Jacob P. Stein. They were so like in face and mind and manner, that the millionaire might have disappeared down a trap—door in the Babylon Hotel and come up again in the stronghold of the Bolshevists.

The third man also had a curious taste in drinks, and his drink was symbolic of him. For what stood in front of the poet Home was a glass of milk, and its very mildness seemed in that setting to have something sinister about it, as if its opaque and colourless colour were of some leprous paste more poisonous than the dead sick green of absinthe. Yet in truth the mildness was so far genuine enough; for Henry Home came to the camp of revolution along a very different road and from very different origins from those of Jake, the common tub— thumper, and Elias, the cosmopolitan wire—puller. He had had what is called a careful upbringing, had gone to chapel in his childhood, and carried through life a teetotalism which he could not shake off when he cast away such trifles as Christianity and marriage. He had fair hair and a fine face that might have looked like Shelley, if he had not weakened the chin with a little foreign fringe of beard. Somehow the beard made him look more like a woman; it was as if those few golden hairs were all he could do.

When the journalist entered, the notorious Jake was talking, as he generally was. Home had uttered some casual and conventional phrase about ‘Heaven forbid’ something or other, and this was quite enough to set Jake off with a torrent of profanity.

‘Heaven forbid! and that’s about all it bally well does do,’ he said. ‘Heaven never does anything but forbid this, that and the other; forbids us to strike, and forbids us to fight, and forbids us to shoot the damned usurers and blood—suckers where they sit. Why doesn’t Heaven forbid them something for a bit? Why don’t the damned priests and parsons stand up and tell the truth about those brutes for a change? Why doesn’t their precious God—‘

Elias allowed a gentle sigh, as of faint fatigue, to escape him.

‘Priests,’ he said, ‘belonged, as Marx has shown, to the feudal stage of economic development and are therefore no longer really any part of the problem. The part once played by the priest is now played by the capitalist expert and—‘

‘Yes,’ interrupted the journalist, with his grim and ironic implacability, ‘and it’s about time you knew that some of them are jolly expert in playing it.’ And without moving his own eyes from the bright but dead eyes of Elias, he told him of the threat of Stein.

‘I was prepared for something of that sort,’ said the smiling Elias without moving; ‘I may say quite prepared.’

‘Dirty dogs!’ exploded Jake. ‘If a poor man said a thing like that he’d go to penal servitude. But I reckon they’ll go somewhere worse before they guess. If they don’t go to hell, I don’t know where the hell they’ll go to—‘

Home made a movement of protest, perhaps not so much at what the man was saying as at what he was going to say, and Elias cut the speech short with cold exactitude.

‘It is quite unnecessary for us,’ he said, looking at Byrne steadily through his spectacles, ‘to bandy threats with the other side. It is quite sufficient that their threats are quite ineffective so far as we are concerned. We also have made all our own arrangements, and some of them will not appear until they appear in motion. So far as we are concerned, an immediate rupture and an extreme trial of strength will be quite according to plan.’

As he spoke in a quite quiet and dignified fashion, something in his motionless yellow face and his great goggles started a faint fear creeping up the journalist’s spine. Halket’s savage face might seem to have a snarl in its very silhouette when seen sideways; but when seen face to face, the smouldering rage in his eyes had also something of anxiety, as if the ethical and economic riddle were after all a little too much for him; and Home seemed even more hanging on wires of worry and self—criticism. But about this third man with the goggles, who spoke so sensibly and simply, there was something uncanny; it was like a dead man talking at the table.

As Byrne went out with his message of defiance, and passed along the very narrow passage beside the grocery store, he found the end of it blocked by a strange though strangely familiar figure: short and sturdy, and looking rather quaint when seen in dark outline with its round head and wide hat.

‘Father Brown!’ cried the astonished journalist. ‘I think you must have come into the wrong door. You’re not likely to be in this little conspiracy.’

‘Mine is a rather older conspiracy,’ replied Father Brown smiling,’ but it is quite a widespread conspiracy.’

‘Well,’ replied Byrne,’ you can’t imagine any of the people here being within a thousand miles of your concern.’

‘It is not always easy to tell,’ replied the priest equably; ‘but as a matter of fact, there is one person here who’s within an inch of it.’

He disappeared into the dark entrance and the journalist went on his way very much puzzled. He was still more puzzled by a small incident that happened to him as he turned into the hotel to make his report to his capitalist clients. The bower of blossoms and bird—cages in which those crabbed old gentlemen were embosomed was approached by a flight of marble steps, flanked by gilded nymphs and tritons. Down these steps ran an active young man with black hair, a snub nose, and a flower in his buttonhole, who seized him and drew him aside before he could ascend the stair.

‘I say,’ whispered the young man, ‘I’m Potter—old Gid’s secretary, you know: now, between ourselves, there is a sort of a thunderbolt being forged, isn’t there, now?’

‘I came to the conclusion,’ replied Byrne cautiously, ‘that the Cyclops had something on the anvil. But always remember that the Cyclops is a giant, but he has only one eye. I think Bolshevism is—‘

While he was speaking the secretary listened with a face that had a certain almost Mongolian immobility, despite the liveliness of his legs and his attire. But when Byrne said the word ‘Bolshevism’, the young man’s sharp eyes shifted and he said quickly:

‘What has that—oh yes, that sort of thunderbolt; so sorry, my mistake. So easy to say anvil when you mean ice—box.’

With which the extraordinary young man disappeared down the steps and Byrne continued to mount them, more and more mystification clouding his mind.

He found the group of three augmented to four by the presence of a hatchet—faced person with very thin straw—coloured hair and a monocle, who appeared to be a sort of adviser to old Gallup, possibly his solicitor, though he was not definitely so called. His name was Nares, and the questions which he directed towards Byrne referred chiefly, for some reason or other, to the number of those probably enrolled in the revolutionary organization. Of this, as Byrne knew little, he said less; and the four men eventually rose from their seats, the last word being with the man who had been most silent.

‘Thank you, Mr Byrne,’ said Stein, folding up his eyeglasses. ‘It only remains to say that everything is ready; on that point I quite agree with Mr Elias. Tomorrow, before noon, the police will have arrested Mr Elias, on evidence I shall by then have put before them, and those three at least will be in jail before night. As you know, I attempted to avoid this course. I think that is all, gentlemen.’

But Mr Jacob P. Stein did not lay his formal information next day, for a reason that has often interrupted the activities of such industrious characters. He did not do it because he happened to be dead; and none of the rest of the programme was carried out, for a reason which Byrne found displayed in gigantic letters when he opened his morning paper: ‘Terrific Triple Murder: Three Millionaires Slain in One Night.’ Other exclamatory phrases followed in smaller letters, only about four times the size of normal type, which insisted on the special feature of the mystery: the fact that the three men had been killed not only simultaneously but in three widely separated places— Stein in his artistic and luxurious country seat a hundred miles inland, Wise outside the little bungalow on the coast where he lived on sea breezes and the simple life, and old Gallup in a thicket just outside the lodge—gates of his great house at the other end of the county. In all three cases there could be no doubt about the scenes of violence that had preceded death, though the actual body of Gallup was not found till the second day, where it hung, huge and horrible, amid the broken forks and branches of the little wood into which its weight had crashed, like a bison rushing on the spears: while Wise had clearly been flung over the cliff into the sea, not without a struggle, for his scraping and slipping footprints could still be traced upon the very brink. But the first signal of the tragedy had been the sight of his large limp straw hat, floating far out upon the waves and conspicuous from the cliffs above. Stein’s body also had at first eluded search, till a faint trail of blood led the investigators to a bath on the ancient Roman model he had been constructing in his garden; for he had been a man of an experimental turn of mind with a taste for antiquities.

Whatever he might think, Byrne was bound to admit that there was no legal evidence against anybody as things stood. A motive for murder was not enough. Even a moral aptitude for murder was not enough. And he could not conceive that pale young pacifist, Henry Home, butchering another man by brutal violence, though he might imagine the blaspheming Jake and even the sneering Jew as capable of anything. The police, and the man who appeared to be assisting them (who was no other than the rather mysterious man with the monocle, who had been introduced as Mr Nares), realized the position quite as clearly as the journalist.

They knew that at the moment the Bolshevist conspirators could not be prosecuted and convicted, and that it would be a highly sensational failure if they were prosecuted and acquitted. Nares started with an artful candour by calling them in some sense to the council, inviting them to a private conclave and asking them to give their opinions freely in the interests of humanity. He had started his investigations at the nearest scene of tragedy, the bungalow by the sea; and Byrne was permitted to be present at a curious scene, which was at once a peaceful parley of diplomatists and a veiled inquisition or putting of suspects to the question. Rather to Byrne’s surprise the incongruous company, seated round the table in the seaside bungalow, included the dumpy figure and owlish head of Father Brown, though his connexion with the affair did not appear until some time afterwards. The presence of young Potter, the dead man’s secretary, was more natural; yet somehow his demeanour was not quite so natural. He alone was quite familiar with their meeting—place, and was even in some grim sense their host; yet he offered little assistance or information. His round snub—nosed face wore an expression more like sulks than sorrow.

Jake Halket as usual talked most; and a man of his type could not be expected to keep up the polite fiction that he and his friends were not accused. Young Home, in his more refined way, tried to restrain him when he began to abuse the men who had been murdered; but Jake was always quite as ready to roar down his friends as his foes. In a spout of blasphemies he relieved his soul of a very unofficial obituary notice of the late Gideon Wise. Elias sat quite still and apparently indifferent behind those spectacles that masked his eyes.

‘It would be useless, I suppose,’ said Nares coldly, ‘to tell you that your remarks are indecent. It may affect you more if I tell you they are imprudent. You practically admit that you hated the dead man.’

‘Going to put me in quod for that, are you?’ jeered the demagogue. ‘All right. Only you’ll have to build a prison for a million men if you’re going to jail all the poor people who had reason to hate Gid Wise. And you know it’s God truth as well as I do.’

Nares was silent; and nobody spoke until Elias interposed with his clear though faintly lisping drawl.

‘This appears to me to be a highly unprofitable discussion on both sides,’ he said. ‘You have summoned us here either to ask us for information or to subject us to cross—examination. If you trust us, we tell you we have no information. If you distrust us, you must tell us of what we are accused, or have the politeness to keep the fact to yourselves. Nobody has been able to suggest the faintest trace of evidence connecting any one of us with these tragedies any more than with the murder of Julius Caesar. You dare not arrest us, and you will not believe us. What is the good of our remaining here?’

And he rose, calmly buttoning his coat, his friends following his example. As they went towards the door, young Home turned back and faced the investigators for a moment with his pale fanatical face.

‘I wish to say,’ he said, ‘that I went to a filthy jail during the whole war because I would not consent to kill a man.’

With that they passed out, and the members of the group remaining looked grimly at each other.

‘I hardly think,’ said Father Brown, ‘that we remain entirely victorious, in spite of the retreat.’

‘I don’t mind anything,’ said Nares, ‘except being bullyragged by that blasphemous blackguard Halket. Home is a gentleman, anyhow. But whatever they say, I am dead certain they know; they are in it, or most of them are. They almost admitted it. They taunted us with not being able to prove we’re right, much more than with being wrong. What do you think, Father Brown?’

The person addressed looked across at Nares with a gaze almost disconcertingly mild and meditative.

‘It is quite true,’ he said, ‘that I have formed an idea that one particular person knows more than he has told us. But I think it would be well if I did not mention his name just yet.’

Nares’ eyeglass dropped from his eye, and he looked up sharply. ‘This is unofficial so far,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that at a later stage if you withhold information, your position may be serious.’

‘My position is simple,’ replied the priest. ‘I am here to look after the legitimate interests of my friend Halket. I think it will be in his interest, under the circumstances, if I tell you I think he will before long sever his connexion with this organization, and cease to be a Socialist in that sense. I have every reason to believe he will probably end as a Catholic.’

‘Halket!’ exploded the other incredulously. ‘Why he curses priests from morning till night!’

‘I don’t think you quite understand that kind of man,’ said Father Brown mildly. ‘He curses priests for failing (in his opinion) to defy the whole world for justice. Why should he expect them to defy the whole world for justice, unless he had already begun to assume they were—what they are? But we haven’t met here to discuss the psychology of conversion. I only mention this because it may simplify your task— perhaps narrow your search.’

‘If it is true, it would jolly well narrow it to that narrow— faced rascal Elias—and I shouldn’t wonder, for a more creepy, coldblooded, sneering devil I never saw.’

Father Brown sighed. ‘He always reminded me of poor Stein,’ he said, ‘in fact I think he was some relation.’

‘Oh, I say,’ began Nares, when his protest was cut short by the door being flung open, revealing once more the long loose figure and pale face of young Home; but it seemed as if he had not merely his natural, but a new and unnatural pallor.

‘Hullo,’ cried Nares, putting up his single eyeglass, ‘why have you come back again?’

Home crossed the room rather shakily without a word and sat down heavily in a chair. Then he said, as in a sort of daze: ‘I missed the others … I lost my way. I thought I’d better come back.’

The remains of evening refreshments were on the table, and Henry Home, that lifelong Prohibitionist, poured himself out a wine—glassful of liqueur brandy and drank it at a gulp. ‘You seem upset,’ said Father Brown.

Home had put his hands to his forehead and spoke as from under the shadow of it: he seemed to be speaking to the priest only, in a low voice.

‘I may as well tell you. I have seen a ghost.’

‘A ghost!’ repeated Nares in astonishment. ‘Whose ghost?’

‘The ghost of Gideon Wise, the master of this house,’ answered Home more firmly, ‘standing over the abyss into which he fell.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Nares; ‘no sensible person believes in ghosts.’

‘That is hardly exact,’ said Father Brown, smiling a little. ‘There is really quite as good evidence for many ghosts as there is for most crimes.’

‘Well, it’s my business to run after the criminals,’ said Nares rather roughly, ‘and I will leave other people to run away from the ghosts. If anybody at this time of day chooses to be frightened of ghosts it’s his affair.’

‘I didn’t say I was frightened of them, though I dare say I might be,’ said Father Brown. ‘Nobody knows till he tries. I said I believed in them, at any rate, enough to want to hear more about this one. What, exactly, did you see, Mr Home?’

‘It was over there on the brink of those crumbling cliffs; you know there is a sort of gap or crevice just about the spot where he was thrown over. The others had gone on ahead, and I was crossing the moor towards the path along the cliff. I often went that way, for I liked seeing the high seas dash up against the crags. I thought little of it to—night, beyond wondering that the sea should be so rough on this sort of clear moonlight night. I could see the pale crests of spray appear and disappear as the great waves leapt up at the headland. Thrice I saw the momentary flash of foam in the moonlight and then I saw something inscrutable. The fourth flash of the silver foam seemed to be fixed in the sky. It did not fall; I waited with insane intensity for it to fall. I fancied I was mad, and that time had been for me mysteriously arrested or prolonged. Then I drew nearer, and then I think I screamed aloud. For that suspended spray, like unfallen snowflakes, had fitted together into a face and a figure, white as the shining leper in a legend, and terrible as the fixed lightning.’

‘And it was Gideon Wise, you say?’

Home nodded without speech. There was a silence broken abruptly by Nares rising to his feet; so abruptly indeed that he knocked a chair over.

‘Oh, this is all nonsense,’ he said, ‘but we’d better go out and see.’

‘I won’t go,’ said Home with sudden violence. ‘I’ll never walk by that path again.’

‘I think we must all walk by that path tonight,’ said the priest gravely; ‘though I will never deny it has been a perilous path … to more people than one.’

‘I will not… God, how you all goad me,’ cried Home, and his eyes began to roll in a strange fashion. He had risen with the rest, hut he made no motion towards the door.

‘Mr Home,’ said Nares firmly, ‘I am a police—officer, and this house, though you may not know it, is surrounded by the police. I have tried to investigate in a friendly fashion, but I must investigate everything, even anything so silly as a ghost. I must ask you to take me to the spot you speak of.’

There was another silence while Home stood heaving and panting as with indescribable fears. Then he suddenly sat down on his chair again and said with an entirely new and much more composed voice:

‘I can’t do it. You may just as well know why. You will know it sooner or later. I killed him.’

For an instant there was the stillness of a house struck by a thunderbolt and full of corpses. Then the voice of Father Brown sounded in that enormous silence strangely small like the squeak of a mouse.

‘Did you kill him deliberately?’ he asked.

‘How can one answer such a question?’ answered the man in the chair, moodily gnawing his finger. ‘I was mad, I suppose. He was intolerable and insolent, I know. I was on his land and I believe he struck me; anyhow, we came to a grapple and he went over the cliff. When I was well away from the scene it burst upon me that I had done a crime that cut me off from men; the brand of Cain throbbed on my brow and my very brain; I realized for the first time that I had indeed killed a man. I knew I should have to confess it sooner or later.’ He sat suddenly erect in his chair. ‘But I will say nothing against anybody else. It is no use asking me about plots or accomplices—I will say nothing.’

‘In the light of the other murders,’ said Nares, ‘it is difficult to believe that the quarrel was quite so unpremeditated. Surely somebody sent you there?’

‘I will say nothing against anybody I worked with,’ said Home proudly. ‘I am a murderer, but I will not be a traitor.’

Nares stepped between the man and the door and called out in an official fashion to someone outside.

‘We will all go to the place, anyhow,’ he said in a low voice to the secretary; ‘but this man must go in custody.’

The company generally felt that to go spook—hunting on a seacliff was a very silly anti—climax after the confession of the murderer. But Nares, though the most sceptical and scornful of all, thought it his duty to leave no stone unturned; as one might say, no gravestone unturned. For, after all, that crumbling cliff was the only gravestone over the watery grave of poor Gideon Wise. Nares locked the door, being the last out of the house, and followed the rest across the moor to the cliff, when he was astonished to see young Potter, the secretary, coming back quickly towards them, his face in the moonlight looking white as a moon.

‘By God, sir,’ he said, speaking for the first time that night, ‘there really is something there. It—it’s just like him.’

‘Why, you’re raving,’ gasped the detective. ‘Everybody’s raving.’

‘Do you think I don’t know him when I see him?’ cried the secretary with singular bitterness. ‘I have reason to.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the detective sharply, ‘you are one of those who had reason to hate him, as Halket said.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the secretary; ‘anyhow, I know him, and I tell you I can see him standing there stark and staring under this hellish moon.’

And he pointed towards the crack in the cliffs, where they could already see something that might have been a moonbeam or a streak of foam, but which was already beginning to look a little more solid. They had crept a hundred yards nearer, and it was still motionless; but it looked like a statue in silver.

Nares himself looked a little pale and seemed to stand debating what to do. Potter was frankly as much frightened as Home himself; and even Byrne, who was a hardened reporter, was rather reluctant to go any nearer if he could help it. He could not help considering it a little quaint, therefore, that the only man who did not seem to be frightened of a ghost was the man who had said openly that he might be. For Father Brown was advancing as steadily, at his stumping pace, as if he were going to consult a notice—board.

‘It don’t seem to bother you much,’ said Byrne to the priest; ‘and yet I thought you were the only one who believed in spooks.’

‘If it comes to that,’ replied Father Brown, ‘I thought you were one who didn’t believe in them. But believing in ghosts is one thing, and believing in a ghost is quite another.’

Byrne looked rather ashamed of himself, and glanced almost covertly at the crumbling headlands in the cold moonlight which were the haunts of the vision or delusion. ‘I didn’t believe in it till I saw it,’ he said.

‘And I did believe in it till I saw it,’ said Father Brown. The journalist stared after him as he went stumping across the great waste ground that rose towards the cloven headland like the sloping side of a hill cut in two. Under the discolouring moon the grass looked like long grey hair all combed one way by the wind, and seeming to point towards the place where the breaking cliff showed pale gleams of chalk in the grey—green turf, and where stood the pale figure or shining shade that none could yet understand. As yet that pale figure dominated a desolate landscape that was empty except for the black square back and business— like figure of the priest advancing alone towards it. Then the prisoner Home broke suddenly from his captors with a piercing cry and ran ahead of the priest, falling on his knees before the spectre.

‘I have confessed,’ they heard him crying. ‘Why have you come to tell them I killed you?’

‘I have come to tell them you did not,’ said the ghost, and stretched forth a hand to him. Then the kneeling man sprang up with quite a new kind of scream; and they knew it was the hand of flesh.

It was the most remarkable escape from death in recent records, said the experienced detective and the no less experienced journalist. Yet, in a sense, it had been very simple after all. Flakes and shards of the cliff were continually falling away, and some had caught in the gigantic crevice, so as to form what was really a ledge or pocket in what was supposed to be a sheer drop through darkness to the sea. The old man, who was a very tough and wiry old man, had fallen on this lower shoulder of rock and had passed a pretty terrible twenty—four hours in trying to climb back by crags that constantly collapsed under him, but at length formed by their very ruins a sort of stairway of escape. This might be the explanation of Home’s optical illusion about a white wave that appeared and disappeared, and finally came to stay. But anyhow there was Gideon Wise, solid in bone and sinew, with his white hair and white dusty country clothes and harsh country features, which were, however, a great deal less harsh than usual. Perhaps it is good for millionaires to spend twenty— four hours on a ledge of rock within a foot of eternity. Anyhow, he not only disclaimed all malice against the criminal, but gave an account of the matter which considerably modified the crime. He declared that Home had not thrown him over at all; that the continually breaking ground had given way under him, and that Home had even made some movement as of attempted rescue.

‘On that providential bit of rock down there,’ he said solemnly, ‘I promised the Lord to forgive my enemies; and the Lord would think it mighty mean if I didn’t forgive a little accident like that.’

Home had to depart under police supervision, of course, but the detective did not disguise from himself that the prisoner’s detention would probably be short, and his punishment, if any, trifling. It is not every murderer who can put the murdered man in the witness— box to give him a testimonial.

‘It’s a strange case,’ said Byrne, as the detective and the others hastened along the cliff path towards the town.

‘It is,’ said Father Brown. ‘It’s no business of ours; but I wish you’d stop with me and talk it over.’

There was a silence and then Byrne complied by saying suddenly: ‘I suppose you were thinking of Home already, when you said somebody wasn’t telling all he knew.’

‘When I said that,’ replied his friend, ‘I was thinking of the exceedingly silent Mr Potter, the secretary of the no longer late or (shall we say) lamented Mr Gideon Wise.’

‘Well, the only time Potter ever spoke to me I thought he was a lunatic,’ said Byrne, staring, ‘but I never thought of his being a criminal. He said something about it all having to do with an icebox.’

‘Yes, I thought he knew something about it,’ said Father Brown reflectively. ‘I never said he had anything to do with it … I suppose old Wise really is strong enough to have climbed out of that chasm.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the astonished reporter. ‘Why, of course he got out of that chasm; for there he is.’

The priest did not answer the question but asked abruptly: ‘What do you think of Home?’

‘Well, one can’t call him a criminal exactly,’ answered Byrne. ‘He never was at all like any criminal I ever knew, and I’ve had some experience; and, of course, Nares has had much more. I don’t think we ever quite believed him a criminal.’

‘And I never believed in him in another capacity,’ said the priest quietly. ‘You may know more about criminals. But there’s one class of people I probably do know more about than you do, or even Nares for that matter. I’ve known quite a lot of them, and I know their little ways.’

‘Another class of people,’ repeated Byrne, mystified.’ Why, what class do you know about?’

‘Penitents,’ said Father Brown.

‘I don’t quite understand,’ objected Byrne. ‘Do you mean you don’t believe in his crime?’

‘I don’t believe in his confession,’ said Father Brown. ‘I’ve heard a good many confessions, and there was never a genuine one like that. It was romantic; it was all out of books. Look how he talked about having the brand of Cain. That’s out of books. It’s not what anyone would feel who had in his own person done a thing hitherto horrible to him. Suppose you were an honest clerk or shop— boy shocked to feel that for the first time you’d stolen money. Would you immediately reflect that your action was the same as that of Barabbas? Suppose you’d killed a child in some ghastly anger. Would you go back through history, till you could identify your action with that of an Idumean potentate named Herod? Believe me, our own crimes are far too hideously private and prosaic to make our first thoughts turn towards historical parallels, however apt. And why did he go out of his way to say he would not give his colleagues away? Even in saying so, he was giving them away. Nobody had asked him so far to give away anything or anybody. No; I don’t think he was genuine, and I wouldn’t give him absolution. A nice state of things, if people started getting absolved for what they hadn’t done.’ And Father Brown, his head turned away, looked steadily out to sea.

‘But I don’t understand what you’re driving at,’ cried Byrne. ‘What’s the good of buzzing round him with suspicions when he’s pardoned? He’s out of it anyhow. He’s quite safe.’

Father Brown spun round like a teetotum and caught his friend by the coat with unexpected and inexplicable excitement.

‘That’s it,’ he cried emphatically.’ Freeze on to that! He’s quite safe. He’s out of it. That’s why he’s the key of the whole puzzle.’

‘Oh, help,’ said Byrne feebly.

‘I mean,’ persisted the little priest, ‘he’s in it because he’s out of it. That’s the whole explanation.’

‘And a very lucid explanation too,’ said the journalist with feeling.

They stood looking out to sea for a time in silence, and then Father Brown said cheerfully: ‘And so we come back to the ice—box. Where you have all gone wrong from the first in this business is where a good many of the papers and the public men do go wrong. It’s because you assumed that there is nothing whatever in the modern world to fight about except Bolshevism. This story has nothing whatever to do with Bolshevism; except perhaps as a blind.’

‘I don’t see how that can be,’ remonstrated Byrne. ‘Here you have the three millionaires in that one business murdered—‘

‘No!’ said the priest in a sharp ringing voice. ‘You do not. That is just the point. You do not have three millionaires murdered. You have two millionaires murdered; and you have the third millionaire very much alive and kicking and quite ready to kick. And you have that third millionaire freed for ever from the threat that was thrown at his head before your very face, in playfully polite terms, and in that conversation you described as taking place in the hotel. Gallup and Stein threatened the more old— fashioned and independent old huckster that if he would not come into their combine they would freeze him out. Hence the ice—box, of course.’

After a pause he went on. ‘There is undoubtedly a Bolshevist movement in the modern world, and it must undoubtedly be resisted, though I do not believe very much in your way of resisting it. But what nobody notices is that there is another movement equally modern and equally moving: the great movement towards monopoly or the turning of all trades into trusts. That also is a revolution. That also produces what all revolutions produce. Men will kill for that and against that, as they do for and against Bolshevism. It has its ultimatums and its invasions and its executions. These trust magnates have their courts like kings; they have their bodyguard and bravos; they have their spies in the enemy camp. Home was one of old Gideon’s spies in one of the enemy camps; but he was used here against another enemy: the rivals who were ruining him for standing out.’

‘I still don’t quite see how he was used,’ said Byrne, ‘or what was the good of it.’

‘Don’t you see,’ cried Father Brown sharply, ‘that they gave each other an alibi?’

Byrne still looked at him a little doubtfully, though understanding was dawning on his face.

‘That’s what I mean,’ continued the other, ‘when I say they were in it because they were out of it. Most people would say they must be out of the other two crimes, because they were in this one. As a fact, they were in the other two because they were out of this one; because this one never happened at all. A very queer, improbable sort of alibi, of course; improbable and therefore impenetrable. Most people would say a man who confesses a murder must be sincere; a man who forgives his murderer must be sincere. Nobody would think of the notion that the thing never happened, so that one man had nothing to forgive and the other nothing to fear. They were fixed here for that night by a story against themselves. But they were not here that night; for Home was murdering old Gallup in the Wood, while Wise was strangling that little Jew in his Roman bath. That’s why I ask whether Wise was really strong enough for the climbing adventure.’

‘It was quite a good adventure,’ said Byrne regretfully. ‘It fitted into the landscape, and was really very convincing.’

‘Too convincing to convince,’ said Father Brown, shaking his head. ‘How very vivid was that moonlit foam flung up and turning to a ghost. And how very literary! Home is a sneak and a skunk, but do not forget that, like many other sneaks and skunks in history, he is also a poet.’

ONE: The Resurrection of Father Brown

THERE was a brief period during which Father Brown enjoyed, or rather did not enjoy, something like fame. He was a nine days’ wonder in the newspapers; he was even a common topic of controversy in the weekly reviews; his exploits were narrated eagerly and inaccurately in any number of clubs and drawing—rooms, especially in America. Incongruous and indeed incredible as it may seem to any one who knew him, his adventures as a detective were even made the subject of short stories appearing in magazines.

Strangely enough, this wandering limelight struck him in the most obscure, or at least the most remote, of his many places of residence. He had been sent out to officiate, as something between a missionary and a parish priest, in one of those sections of the northern coast of South America, where strips of country still cling insecurely to European powers, or are continually threatening to become independent republics, under the gigantic shadow of President Monroe. The population was red and brown with pink spots; that is, it was Spanish—American, and largely Spanish—American—Indian, but there was a considerable and increasing infiltration of Americans of the northern sort—Englishmen, Germans, and the rest. And the trouble seems to have begun when one of these visitors, very recently landed and very much annoyed at having lost one of his bags, approached the first building of which he came in sight—which happened to be the mission—house and chapel attached to it, in front of which ran a long veranda and a long row of stakes, up which were trained the black twisted vines, their square leaves red with autumn. Behind them, also in a row, a number of human beings sat almost as rigid as the stakes, and coloured in some fashion like the vines. For while their broad—brimmed hats were as black as their unblinking eyes, the complexions of many of them might have been made out of the dark red timber of those transatlantic forests. Many of them were smoking very long, thin black cigars; and in all that group the smoke was almost the only moving thing. The visitor would probably have described them as natives, though some of them were very proud of Spanish blood. But he was not one to draw any fine distinction between Spaniards and Red Indians, being rather disposed to dismiss people from the scene when once he had convicted them of being native to it.

He was a newspaper man from Kansas City, a lean, light— haired man with what Meredith called an adventurous nose; one could almost fancy it found its way by feeling its way and moved like the proboscis of an ant—eater. His name was Snaith, and his parents, after some obscure meditation, had called him Saul, a fact which he had the good feeling to conceal as far as possible. Indeed, he had ultimately compromised by calling himself Paul, though by no means for the same reason that had affected the Apostle of the Gentiles. On the contrary, so far as he had any views on such things, the name of the persecutor would have been more appropriate; for he regarded organized religion with the conventional contempt which can be learnt more easily from Ingersoll than from Voltaire. And this was, as it happened, the not very important side of his character which he turned towards the mission— station and the groups in front of the veranda. Something in their shameless repose and indifference inflamed his own fury of efficiency; and, as he could get no particular answer to his first questions, he began to do all the talking himself.

Standing out there in the strong sunshine, a spick—and—span figure in his Panama hat and neat clothes, his grip—sack held m a steely grip, he began to shout at the people in the shadow. He began to explain to them very loudly why they were lazy and filthy, and bestially ignorant and lower than the beasts that perish, in case this problem should have previously exercised their minds. In his opinion it was the deleterious influence of priests that had made them so miserably poor and so hopelessly oppressed that they were able to sit in the shade and smoke and do nothing.

‘And a mighty soft crowd you must be at that,’ he said, ‘to be bullied by these stuck—up josses because they walk about in their mitres and their tiaras and their gold copes and other glad rags, looking down on everybody else like dirt— being bamboozled by crowns and canopies and sacred umbrellas like a kid at a pantomime; just because a pompous old High Priest of Mumbo—Jumbo looks as if he was the lord of the earth. What about you? What do you look like, you poor simps? I tell you, that’s why you’re way—back in barbarism and can’t read or write and—‘

At this point the High Priest of Mumbo—Jumbo came in an undignified hurry out of the door of the mission—house, not looking very like a lord of the earth, but rather like a bundle of black second— hand clothes buttoned round a short bolster in the semblance of a guy. He was not wearing his tiara, supposing him to possess one, but a shabby broad hat not very dissimilar from those of the Spanish Indians, and it was thrust to the back of his head with a gesture of botheration. He seemed just about to speak to the motionless natives when he caught sight of the stranger and said quickly:

‘Oh, can I be of any assistance? Would you like to come inside?’

Mr Paul Snaith came inside; and it was the beginning of a considerable increase of that journalist’s information on many things. Presumably his journalistic instinct was stronger than his prejudices, as, indeed, it often is in clever journalists; and he asked a good many questions, the answers to which interested and surprised him. He discovered that the Indians could read and write, for the simple reason that the priest had taught them; but that they did not read or write any more than they could help, from a natural preference for more direct communications. He learned that these strange people, who sat about in heaps on the veranda without stirring a hair, could work quite hard on their own patches of land; especially those of them who were more than half Spanish; and he learned with still more astonishment that they all had patches of land that were really their own. That much was part of a stubborn tradition that seemed quite native to natives. But in that also the priest had played a certain part, and by doing so had taken perhaps what was his first and last part in politics, if it was only local politics.

UNO: La resurrezione di Padre Brown

CI FU un breve periodo durante il quale Padre Brown godette, o piuttosto non godette, di qualcosa di simile alla fama. Fu, per nove giorni, la meraviglia dei giornali; fu perfino un consueto argomento di controversia nelle riviste settimanali; le sue imprese venivano narrate con avidità e inesattezza in un’infinità di circoli e di salotti, specialmente in America. Per quanto incongruo e davvero incredibile possa sembrare a chiunque lo conoscesse, le sue avventure di investigatore furono persino fatte oggetto di racconti apparsi sulle riviste.

Stranamente, questa vagabonda luce della ribalta lo colpì nel più oscuro, o almeno nel più remoto, dei suoi molti luoghi di residenza. Era stato mandato a officiare, in una condizione a metà tra il missionario e il parroco, in una di quelle fasce della costa settentrionale del Sud America, dove certi lembi di territorio ancora si aggrappano malfermi alle potenze europee, o minacciano di continuo di diventare repubbliche indipendenti, sotto la gigantesca ombra del presidente Monroe. La popolazione era rossa e bruna con macchie rosee; vale a dire, era ispano-americana, e in gran parte ispano-americana-india, ma vi era una considerevole e crescente infiltrazione di americani del tipo settentrionale: inglesi, tedeschi e via dicendo. E i guai sembra siano cominciati quando uno di questi visitatori, sbarcato da pochissimo e assai contrariato per aver smarrito una delle proprie valigie, si avvicinò al primo edificio che gli capitò sotto gli occhi, che si dava il caso fosse la casa della missione con la cappella annessa, davanti alla quale correvano una lunga veranda e una lunga fila di pali, su cui erano allevate le nere viti contorte, le loro foglie quadrangolari rosse d’autunno. Dietro di essi, anch’essi in fila, alcuni esseri umani sedevano quasi rigidi come i pali, e colorati in certo modo come le viti. Poiché, mentre i loro cappelli a tesa larga erano neri come i loro occhi che non ammiccavano, la carnagione di molti di loro avrebbe potuto essere fatta del legno rosso scuro di quelle foreste transatlantiche. Molti fumavano sigari neri, lunghissimi e sottili; e in tutto quel gruppo il fumo era quasi l’unica cosa in movimento. Il visitatore li avrebbe probabilmente descritti come indigeni, benché alcuni fossero molto fieri del proprio sangue spagnolo. Ma egli non era uomo da tracciare sottili distinzioni tra spagnoli e pellirosse, essendo piuttosto incline a congedare la gente dalla scena una volta che l’avesse dichiarata colpevole di esservi indigena.

Era un giornalista di Kansas City, un uomo magro, dai capelli chiari, con quello che Meredith chiamava un naso avventuroso; si sarebbe quasi immaginato che trovasse la strada tastandola, e che si muovesse come la proboscide di un formichiere. Si chiamava Snaith, e i suoi genitori, dopo qualche oscura meditazione, lo avevano chiamato Saul, fatto che egli aveva il buon gusto di celare per quanto possibile. Anzi, alla fine aveva raggiunto un compromesso chiamandosi Paul, benché non certo per la stessa ragione che aveva riguardato l’Apostolo dei Gentili. Al contrario, per quel poco che aveva idee su simili faccende, il nome del persecutore sarebbe stato più appropriato; poiché guardava alla religione organizzata con quel convenzionale disprezzo che si apprende più facilmente da Ingersoll che da Voltaire. E questo era, guarda caso, il lato non molto importante del suo carattere che egli rivolgeva alla stazione missionaria e ai gruppi davanti alla veranda. Qualcosa nel loro sfrontato riposo e nella loro indifferenza infiammava la sua stessa furia di efficienza; e, poiché non riusciva a ottenere risposta precisa alle sue prime domande, cominciò a fare tutto da sé il discorso.

Ritto là fuori nel sole forte, figura lustra e impeccabile nel suo panama e nei suoi abiti ordinati, la borsa da viaggio stretta in una morsa d’acciaio, cominciò a gridare alla gente nell’ombra. Prese a spiegare loro a gran voce perché fossero pigri e sudici, e bestialmente ignoranti e più in basso delle bestie che periscono, caso mai il problema avesse in precedenza occupato le loro menti. A suo parere era la deleteria influenza dei preti che li aveva resi così miserabilmente poveri e così irrimediabilmente oppressi da poter starsene seduti all’ombra a fumare senza far nulla.

«E che gente rammollita dovete essere per giunta» disse «per lasciarvi tiranneggiare da questi idoli tronfi solo perché vanno in giro con le loro mitre e le loro tiare e i loro piviali d’oro e altri ninnoli sgargianti, guardando tutti gli altri dall’alto in basso come fango; per lasciarvi abbindolare da corone e baldacchini e sacri ombrelli come un bambino a una pantomima; solo perché un pomposo vecchio Sommo Sacerdote di Mumbo-Jumbo ha l’aria di essere il signore della terra. E voi? Voi che aria avete, poveri sciocchi? Ve lo dico io, ecco perché siete rimasti indietro nella barbarie e non sapete né leggere né scrivere e…»

A questo punto il Sommo Sacerdote di Mumbo-Jumbo uscì con fretta poco dignitosa dalla porta della casa della missione, con un’aria non molto simile a quella di un signore della terra, ma piuttosto a quella di un fagotto di neri abiti smessi abbottonati intorno a un corto guanciale a somiglianza di un fantoccio. Non portava la tiara, ammesso che ne possedesse una, ma un logoro cappellaccio a tesa larga non molto dissimile da quelli degli indios spagnoli, e se l’era spinto sulla nuca con un gesto di stizza. Sembrava sul punto di parlare agli indigeni immobili quando scorse lo straniero e disse in fretta:

«Oh, posso esservi d’aiuto? Volete accomodarvi dentro?»

Il signor Paul Snaith si accomodò dentro; e fu l’inizio di un notevole accrescimento delle informazioni di quel giornalista su molte cose. Presumibilmente il suo istinto giornalistico era più forte dei suoi pregiudizi, come, in verità, spesso accade nei giornalisti in gamba; e fece parecchie domande, le cui risposte lo interessarono e lo sorpresero. Scoprì che gli indios sapevano leggere e scrivere, per la semplice ragione che il prete glielo aveva insegnato; ma che non leggevano né scrivevano più dello stretto necessario, per una naturale preferenza verso comunicazioni più dirette. Apprese che quella strana gente, che se ne stava seduta a mucchi sulla veranda senza muovere un capello, sapeva lavorare piuttosto sodo sui propri appezzamenti di terra; specialmente quelli tra loro che erano per più di metà spagnoli; e apprese con ancor maggiore stupore che tutti possedevano appezzamenti di terra realmente propri. Ciò faceva parte di una tenace tradizione che pareva del tutto indigena degli indigeni. Ma anche in questo il prete aveva avuto una certa parte, e così facendo aveva forse preso la sua prima e ultima parte nella politica, se pure si trattava soltanto di politica locale.

There had recently swept through that region one of those fevers of atheist and almost anarchist Radicalism which break out periodically in countries of the Latin culture, generally beginning in a secret society and generally ending in a civil war and in very little else. The local leader of the iconoclastic party was a certain Alvarez, a rather picturesque adventurer of Portuguese nationality but, as his enemies said, of partly Negro origin, the head of any number of lodges and temples of initiation of the sort that in such places clothe even atheism with something mystical. The leader on the more conservative side was a much more commonplace person, a very wealthy man named Mendoza, the owner of many factories and quite respectable, but not very exciting. It was the general opinion that the cause of law and order would have been entirely lost if it had not adopted a more popular policy of its own, in the form of securing land for the peasants; and this movement had mainly originated from the little mission— station of Father Brown.

While he was talking to the journalist, Mendoza, the Conservative leader, came in. He was a stout, dark man, with a bald head like a pear and a round body also like a pear; he was smoking a very fragrant cigar, but he threw it away, perhaps a little theatrically, when he came into the presence of the priest, as if he had been entering church; and bowed with a curve that in so corpulent a gentleman seemed quite improbable. He was always exceedingly serious in his social gestures, especially towards religious institutions. He was one of those laymen who are much more ecclesiastical than ecclesiastics. It embarrassed Father Brown a good deal, especially when carried thus into private life.

‘I think I am an anti—clerical,’ Father Brown would say with a faint smile; ‘but there wouldn’t be half so much clericalism if they would only leave things to the clerics.’

‘Why Mr Mendoza,’ exclaimed the journalist with a new animation,’ I think we have met before. Weren’t you at the Trade Congress in Mexico last year?’

The heavy eyelids of Mr Mendoza showed a flutter of recognition, and he smiled in his slow way. ‘I remember.’

‘Pretty big business done there in an hour or two,’ said Snaith with relish.’ Made a good deal of difference to you, too, I guess.’

‘I have been very fortunate,’ said Mendoza modestly.

‘Don’t you believe it!’ cried the enthusiastic Snaith.’ Good fortune comes to the people who know when to catch hold; and you caught hold good and sure. But I hope I’m not interrupting your business?’

‘Not at all,’ said the other. ‘I often have the honour of calling on the padre for a little talk. Merely for a little talk.’

It seemed as if this familiarity between Father Brown and a successful and even famous man of business completed the reconciliation between the priest and the practical Mr Snaith. He felt, it might be supposed, a new respectability clothe the station and the mission, and was ready to overlook such occasional reminders of the existence of religion as a chapel and a presbytery can seldom wholly avoid. He became quite enthusiastic about the priest’s programme— at least on its secular and social side—and announced himself ready at any moment to act in the capacity of a live wire for its communication to the world at large. And it was at this point that Father Brown began to find the journalist rather more troublesome in his sympathy than in his hostility.

Mr Paul Snaith set out vigorously to feature Father Brown. He sent long and loud eulogies on him across the continent to his newspaper in the Middle West. He took snapshots of the unfortunate cleric in the most commonplace occupations, and exhibited them in gigantic photographs in the gigantic Sunday papers of the United States. He turned his sayings into slogans, and was continually presenting the world with ‘A message’ from the reverend gentleman in South America. Any stock less strong and strenuously receptive than the American race would have become very much bored with Father Brown. As it was, he received handsome and eager offers to go on a lecturing tour in the States; and when he declined, the terms were raised with expressions of respectful wonder. A series of stories about him, like the stories of Sherlock Holmes, were, by the instrumentality of Mr Snaith, planned out and put before the hero with requests for his assistance and encouragement. As the priest found they had started, he could offer no suggestion except that they should stop. And this in turn was taken by Mr Snaith as the text for a discussion on whether Father Brown should disappear temporarily over a cliff, in the manner of Dr Watson’s hero. To all these demands the priest had patiently to reply in writing, saying that he would consent on such terms to the temporary cessation of the stories and begging that a considerable interval might occur before they began again. The notes he wrote grew shorter and shorter; and as he wrote the last of them, he sighed.

Needless to say, this strange boom in the North reacted on the little outpost in the South where he had expected to live in so lonely an exile. The considerable English and American population already on the spot began to be proud of possessing so widely advertised a person. American tourists, of the sort who land with a loud demand for Westminster Abbey, landed on that distant coast with a loud demand for Father Brown. They were within measurable distance of running excursion trains named after him, and bringing crowds to see him as if he were a public monument. He was especially troubled by the active and ambitious new traders and shopkeepers of the place, who were perpetually pestering him to try their wares and to give them testimonials. Even if the testimonials were not forthcoming, they would prolong the correspondence for the purpose of collecting autographs. As he was a good—natured person they got a good deal of what they wanted out of him; and it was in answer to a particular request from a Frankfort wine—merchant named Eckstein that he wrote hastily a few words on a card, which were to prove a terrible turning— point in his life.

Aveva di recente attraversato quella regione una di quelle febbri di radicalismo ateo e quasi anarchico che scoppiano periodicamente nei paesi di cultura latina, cominciando in genere in una società segreta e finendo in genere in una guerra civile e in ben poco altro. Il capo locale del partito iconoclasta era un certo Alvarez, un avventuriero piuttosto pittoresco di nazionalità portoghese ma, come dicevano i suoi nemici, di origine in parte negra, il capo di un’infinità di logge e di templi d’iniziazione del genere che in tali luoghi rivestono perfino l’ateismo di qualcosa di mistico. Il capo dello schieramento più conservatore era una persona assai più comune, un uomo molto ricco di nome Mendoza, proprietario di numerose fabbriche e del tutto rispettabile, ma non molto entusiasmante. Era opinione generale che la causa dell’ordine e della legge sarebbe stata interamente perduta se non avesse adottato una politica propria più popolare, nella forma di assicurare la terra ai contadini; e questo movimento aveva avuto origine principalmente dalla piccola stazione missionaria di Padre Brown.

Mentre parlava col giornalista, entrò Mendoza, il capo conservatore. Era un uomo tozzo e bruno, con una testa calva a forma di pera e un corpo rotondo anch’esso a forma di pera; fumava un sigaro assai profumato, ma lo gettò via, forse un po’ teatralmente, quando venne alla presenza del prete, come se stesse entrando in chiesa; e s’inchinò con una curva che, in un signore tanto corpulento, appariva del tutto inverosimile. Era sempre estremamente serio nei suoi gesti sociali, specialmente verso le istituzioni religiose. Era uno di quei laici che sono assai più ecclesiastici degli ecclesiastici. Ciò imbarazzava non poco Padre Brown, specialmente quando veniva così trasportato nella vita privata.

«Credo di essere un anticlericale» soleva dire Padre Brown con un lieve sorriso; «ma non ci sarebbe neppure la metà del clericalismo, se soltanto lasciassero le cose ai chierici.»

«Ma guarda, signor Mendoza» esclamò il giornalista con nuova animazione «credo che ci siamo già incontrati. Non era lei al Congresso del Commercio in Messico, l’anno scorso?»

Le palpebre pesanti del signor Mendoza ebbero un fremito di riconoscimento, ed egli sorrise nel suo modo lento. «Ricordo.»

«Un bell’affare, e grosso, concluso là in un’ora o due» disse Snaith con gusto. «Ha fatto una bella differenza anche per lei, immagino.»

«Sono stato molto fortunato» disse Mendoza con modestia.

«Non ci creda!» esclamò l’entusiasta Snaith. «La buona sorte arride a chi sa quando afferrare l’occasione; e lei l’ha afferrata ben salda e sicura. Ma spero di non interrompere i suoi affari?»

«Niente affatto» disse l’altro. «Ho spesso l’onore di far visita al padre per una piccola conversazione. Nient’altro che una piccola conversazione.»

Sembrava che questa familiarità tra Padre Brown e un uomo d’affari di successo e persino famoso completasse la riconciliazione tra il prete e il pratico signor Snaith. Egli sentì, si può supporre, una nuova rispettabilità rivestire la stazione e la missione, e fu pronto a passar sopra a quegli occasionali richiami all’esistenza della religione che una cappella e una canonica possono di rado evitare del tutto. Divenne addirittura entusiasta del programma del prete — almeno nel suo aspetto laico e sociale — e si dichiarò pronto in qualsiasi momento ad agire in veste di filo conduttore per trasmetterlo al mondo intero. E fu a questo punto che Padre Brown cominciò a trovare il giornalista più molesto nella sua simpatia di quanto lo fosse stato nella sua ostilità.

Il signor Paul Snaith si mise vigorosamente a dare risalto a Padre Brown. Inviò lunghi e clamorosi elogi su di lui attraverso il continente, al suo giornale del Medio Ovest. Scattò istantanee dello sventurato ecclesiastico nelle occupazioni più comuni, e le esibì in fotografie giganteggianti sui giganteschi giornali domenicali degli Stati Uniti. Trasformò i suoi detti in slogan, e presentava di continuo al mondo «Un messaggio» dal reverendo signore del Sud America. Qualsiasi stirpe meno robusta e strenuamente ricettiva della razza americana si sarebbe assai annoiata di Padre Brown. Così invece egli ricevette offerte generose e sollecite di intraprendere un giro di conferenze negli Stati; e quando rifiutò, le condizioni furono innalzate con espressioni di rispettoso stupore. Una serie di racconti su di lui, sul modello di quelli di Sherlock Holmes, furono, per opera del signor Snaith, progettati e sottoposti all’eroe con richieste del suo aiuto e del suo incoraggiamento. Quando il prete si accorse che li avevano avviati, non poté offrire altro suggerimento se non che li interrompessero. E questo a sua volta fu preso dal signor Snaith come spunto per una discussione sull’opportunità che Padre Brown scomparisse temporaneamente oltre un dirupo, alla maniera dell’eroe del dottor Watson. A tutte queste richieste il prete dovette pazientemente rispondere per iscritto, dicendo che avrebbe acconsentito a tali condizioni alla temporanea sospensione dei racconti e supplicando che intercorresse un intervallo considerevole prima che ricominciassero. I biglietti che scriveva si facevano sempre più brevi; e mentre scriveva l’ultimo di essi, sospirò.

Inutile dire che questo strano clamore al Nord si ripercosse sul piccolo avamposto al Sud, dove egli aveva sperato di vivere in un esilio tanto solitario. La considerevole popolazione inglese e americana già presente sul posto cominciò a inorgoglirsi di possedere una persona tanto largamente pubblicizzata. Turisti americani, del genere che sbarca reclamando a gran voce l’Abbazia di Westminster, sbarcarono su quella costa remota reclamando a gran voce Padre Brown. Erano a un passo dal far circolare treni d’escursione intitolati a lui, e dal portare folle a vederlo come se fosse un monumento pubblico. Era particolarmente tormentato dai nuovi commercianti e bottegai del luogo, attivi e ambiziosi, che lo assillavano di continuo perché provasse le loro mercanzie e desse loro attestati. E se anche gli attestati non arrivavano, essi prolungavano la corrispondenza allo scopo di collezionare autografi. Poiché era una persona di buon carattere, ottenevano da lui buona parte di ciò che volevano; e fu in risposta a una particolare richiesta di un mercante di vini di Francoforte, di nome Eckstein, che egli scrisse in fretta poche parole su un biglietto, parole che si sarebbero rivelate una terribile svolta nella sua vita.

Eckstein was a fussy little man with fuzzy hair and pince— nez, who was wildly anxious that the priest should not only try some of his celebrated medicinal port, but should let him know where and when he would drink it, in acknowledging its receipt. The priest was not particularly surprised at the request, for he was long past surprise at the lunacies of advertisement. So he scribbled something down and turned to other business which seemed a little more sensible. He was again interrupted, by a note from no less a person than his political enemy Alvarez, asking him to come to a conference at which it was hoped that a compromise on an outstanding question might be reached; and suggesting an appointment that evening at a cafe just outside the walls of the little town. To this also he sent a message of acceptance by the rather florid and military messenger who was waiting for it; and then, having an hour or two before him, sat down to attempt to get through a little of his own legitimate business. At the end of the time he poured himself out a glass of Mr Eckstein’s remarkable wine and, glancing at the clock with a humorous expression, drank it and went out into the night.

Strong moonlight lay on the little Spanish town, so that when he came to the picturesque gateway, with its rather rococo arch and the fantastic fringe of palms beyond it, it looked rather like a scene in a Spanish opera. One long leaf of palm with jagged edges, black against the moon, hung down on the other side of the arch, visible through the archway, and had something of the look of the jaw of a black crocodile. The fancy would not have lingered in his imagination but for something else that caught his naturally alert eye. The air was deathly still, and there was not a stir of wind; but he distinctly saw the pendent palm—leaf move.

He looked around him and realized that he was alone. He had left behind the last houses, which were mostly closed and shuttered, and was walking between two long blank walls built of large and shapeless but flattened stones, tufted here and there with the queer prickly weeds of that region— walls which ran parallel all the way to the gateway. He could not see the lights of the cafe outside the gate; probably it was too far away. Nothing could be seen under the arch but a wider expanse of large—flagged pavement, pale in the moon, with the straggling prickly pear here and there. He had a strong sense of the smell of evil; he felt queer physical oppression; but he did not think of stopping. His courage, which was considerable, was perhaps even less strong a part of him than his curiosity. All his life he had been led by an intellectual hunger for the truth, even of trifles. He often controlled it in the name of proportion; but it was always there. He walked straight through the gateway, and on the other side a man sprang like a monkey out of the tree— top and struck at him with a knife. At the same moment another man came crawling swiftly along the wall and, whirling a cudgel round his head, brought it down. Father Brown turned, staggered, and sank in a heap, but as he sank there dawned on his round face an expression of mild and immense surprise.

There was living in the same little town at this time another young American, particularly different from Mr Paul Snaith. His name was John Adams Race, and he was an electrical engineer, employed by Mendoza to fit out the old town with all the new conveniences. He was a figure far less familiar in satire and international gossip than that of the American journalist. Yet, as a matter of fact, America contains a million men of the moral type of Race to one of the moral type of Snaith. He was exceptional in being exceptionally good at his job, but in every other way he was very simple. He had begun life as a druggist’s assistant in a Western village, and risen by sheer work and merit; but he still regarded his home town as the natural heart of the habitable world. He had been taught a very Puritan, or purely Evangelical, sort of Christianity from the Family Bible at his mother’s knee; and in so far as he had time to have any religion, that was still his religion. Amid all the dazzling lights of the latest and even wildest discoveries, when he was at the very edge and extreme of experiment, working miracles of light and sound like a god creating new stars and solar systems, he never for a moment doubted that the things ‘back home’ were the best things in the world; his mother and the Family Bible and the quiet and quaint morality of his village. He had as serious and noble a sense of the sacredness of his mother as if he had been a frivolous Frenchman. He was quite sure the Bible religion was really the right thing; only he vaguely missed it wherever he went in the modern world. He could hardly be expected to sympathize with the religious externals of Catholic countries; and in a dislike of mitres and croziers he sympathized with Mr Snaith, though not in so cocksure a fashion. He had no liking for the public bowings and scrapings of Mendoza and certainly no temptation to the masonic mysticism of the atheist Alvarez. Perhaps all that semi—tropical life was too coloured for him, shot with Indian red and Spanish gold. Anyhow, when he said there was nothing to touch his home town, he was not boasting. He really meant that there was somewhere something plain and unpretentious and touching, which he really respected more than anything else in the world. Such being the mental attitude of John Adams Race in a South American station, there had been growing on him for some time a curious feeling, which contradicted all his prejudices and for which he could not account. For the truth was this: that the only thing he had ever met in his travels that in the least reminded him of the old wood— pile and the provincial proprieties and the Bible on his mother’s knee was (for some inscrutable reason) the round face and black clumsy umbrella of Father Brown.

Eckstein era un ometto agitato, dai capelli crespi e con le pince-nez, follemente ansioso che il prete non solo assaggiasse un po’ del suo celebre porto medicinale, ma gli facesse sapere dove e quando l’avrebbe bevuto, nell’accusarne ricevuta. Il prete non fu particolarmente sorpreso dalla richiesta, poiché aveva da tempo smesso di stupirsi delle follie della pubblicità. Così scarabocchiò qualcosa e passò ad altre faccende che parevano un po’ più sensate. Fu di nuovo interrotto, da un biglietto niente meno che del suo nemico politico Alvarez, che gli chiedeva di recarsi a un incontro nel quale si sperava di raggiungere un compromesso su una questione ancora aperta; e proponeva un appuntamento per quella sera in un caffè appena fuori le mura della cittadina. Anche a questo egli inviò un messaggio d’accettazione tramite il messaggero, piuttosto vistoso e marziale, che lo aspettava; e poi, avendo un’ora o due davanti a sé, si sedette a tentare di sbrigare un poco dei propri legittimi affari. Al termine di quel tempo si versò un bicchiere del notevole vino del signor Eckstein e, lanciando un’occhiata all’orologio con un’espressione divertita, lo bevve e uscì nella notte.

Una luna forte posava sulla cittadina spagnola, sicché quando egli giunse al pittoresco portale, con il suo arco piuttosto rococò e la fantastica frangia di palme al di là, esso sembrava quasi una scena di un’opera spagnola. Una lunga foglia di palma dai bordi frastagliati, nera contro la luna, pendeva dall’altro lato dell’arco, visibile attraverso l’archivolto, e aveva qualcosa dell’aspetto della mascella di un nero coccodrillo. La fantasticheria non sarebbe indugiata nella sua immaginazione se non fosse stato per qualcos’altro che colpì il suo occhio, per natura vigile. L’aria era mortalmente immobile, e non c’era un alito di vento; ma egli vide distintamente muoversi la foglia di palma pendente.

Si guardò attorno e si rese conto di essere solo. Si era lasciato alle spalle le ultime case, per lo più chiuse e sprangate, e camminava tra due lunghi muri ciechi, costruiti con pietre grandi e informi ma appiattite, irte qua e là delle strane erbacce spinose di quella regione; muri che correvano paralleli per tutto il tragitto fino al portale. Non riusciva a vedere le luci del caffè fuori della porta; probabilmente era troppo lontano. Sotto l’arco non si scorgeva nulla se non una più ampia distesa di lastricato a grandi lastre, pallida al chiaro di luna, con qua e là il fico d’India sparso e spinoso. Ebbe una forte sensazione dell’odore del male; provò una strana oppressione fisica; ma non pensò di fermarsi. Il suo coraggio, che era considerevole, era forse in lui una parte perfino meno forte della sua curiosità. Per tutta la vita era stato guidato da una fame intellettuale della verità, anche delle inezie. Spesso la teneva a freno in nome della misura; ma essa era sempre lì. Attraversò dritto il portale, e dall’altra parte un uomo balzò come una scimmia dalla cima dell’albero e lo colpì con un coltello. Nello stesso istante un altro uomo venne strisciando rapido lungo il muro e, roteando un randello sopra il capo, lo abbatté. Padre Brown si voltò, barcollò e cadde in un mucchio, ma mentre cadeva sul suo volto rotondo spuntò un’espressione di mite e immenso stupore.

In quella stessa cittadina viveva a quel tempo un altro giovane americano, particolarmente diverso dal signor Paul Snaith. Si chiamava John Adams Race, ed era un ingegnere elettrotecnico, assunto da Mendoza per dotare la vecchia città di tutte le nuove comodità. Era una figura assai meno familiare alla satira e al pettegolezzo internazionale di quella del giornalista americano. Eppure, di fatto, l’America contiene un milione di uomini del tipo morale di Race per uno del tipo morale di Snaith. Era eccezionale nell’essere eccezionalmente bravo nel suo mestiere, ma in ogni altro senso era molto semplice. Aveva cominciato la vita come garzone di farmacista in un villaggio dell’Ovest, ed era salito per puro lavoro e merito; ma continuava a considerare la sua città natale come il cuore naturale del mondo abitabile. Gli era stata insegnata una sorta di cristianesimo assai puritano, o puramente evangelico, dalla Bibbia di famiglia sulle ginocchia della madre; e nella misura in cui aveva tempo di avere una religione, quella era ancora la sua religione. In mezzo a tutte le luci abbaglianti delle più recenti e persino più audaci scoperte, quando era proprio sull’orlo estremo dell’esperimento, operando miracoli di luce e di suono come un dio che crea nuove stelle e nuovi sistemi solari, non dubitò mai neppure per un istante che le cose «a casa» fossero le migliori del mondo; sua madre e la Bibbia di famiglia e la quieta e bizzarra moralità del suo villaggio. Aveva un senso della sacralità della madre tanto serio e nobile quanto ne avrebbe avuto un frivolo francese. Era ben certo che la religione della Bibbia fosse davvero la cosa giusta; solo che ne sentiva vagamente la mancanza ovunque andasse nel mondo moderno. Difficilmente ci si poteva aspettare che simpatizzasse con gli aspetti esteriori della religione nei paesi cattolici; e nell’avversione per le mitre e i pastorali simpatizzava col signor Snaith, benché non in maniera così sfrontatamente sicura. Non aveva alcuna simpatia per i pubblici inchini e strisciamenti di Mendoza e certamente nessuna tentazione verso il misticismo massonico dell’ateo Alvarez. Forse tutta quella vita semitropicale era troppo colorita per lui, striata di rosso indiano e d’oro spagnolo. Comunque, quando diceva che non c’era nulla che potesse eguagliare la sua città natale, non si vantava. Voleva davvero dire che da qualche parte esisteva qualcosa di semplice e senza pretese e commovente, che egli rispettava davvero più di ogni altra cosa al mondo. Tale essendo l’atteggiamento mentale di John Adams Race in una stazione sudamericana, era andato crescendo in lui per qualche tempo un curioso sentimento, che contraddiceva tutti i suoi pregiudizi e di cui non sapeva rendersi conto. Poiché la verità era questa: che l’unica cosa che avesse mai incontrato nei suoi viaggi che gli ricordasse anche minimamente la vecchia catasta di legna e le convenienze provinciali e la Bibbia sulle ginocchia della madre era (per qualche imperscrutabile ragione) il volto rotondo e il nero e goffo ombrello di Padre Brown.

He found himself insensibly watching that commonplace and even comic black figure as it went bustling about; watching it with an almost morbid fascination, as if it were a walking riddle or contradiction. He had found something he could not help liking in the heart of everything he hated; it was as if he had been horribly tormented by lesser demons and then found that the Devil was quite an ordinary person.

Thus it happened that, looking out of his window on that moonlit night, he saw the Devil go by, the demon of unaccountable blamelessness, in his broad black hat and long black coat, shuffling along the street towards the gateway, and saw it with an interest which he could not himself understand. He wondered where the priest was going, and what he was really up to; and remained gazing out into the moonlit street long after the little black figure had passed. And then he saw something else that intrigued him further. Two other men whom he recognized passed across his window as across a lighted stage. A sort of blue limelight of the moon ran in a spectral halo round the big bush of hair that stood erect on the head of little Eckstein, the wine—seller, and it outlined a taller and darker figure with an eagle profile and a queer old— fashioned and very top—heavy black hat, which seemed to make the whole outline still more bizarre, like a shape in a shadow pantomime. Race rebuked himself for allowing the moon to play such tricks with his fancy; for on a second glance he recognized the black Spanish sidewhiskers and high—featured face of Dr Calderon, a worthy medical man of the town, whom he had once found attending professionally on Mendoza. Still, there was something in the way the men were whispering to each other and peering up the street that struck him as peculiar. On a sudden impulse he leapt over the low window— sill and himself went bareheaded up the road, following their trail. He saw them disappear under the dark archway, and a moment after there came a dreadful cry from beyond; curiously loud and piercing, and all the more blood—curdling to Race because it said something very distinctly in some tongue that he did not know.

The next moment there was a rushing of feet, more cries, and then a confused roar of rage or grief that shook the turrets and tall palm trees of the place; there was a movement in the mob that had gathered, as if they were sweeping backwards through the gateway. And then the dark archway resounded with a new voice, this time intelligible to him and falling with the note of doom, as someone shouted through the gateway:

‘Father Brown is dead!’

He never knew what prop gave way in his mind, or why something on which he had been counting suddenly failed him; but he ran towards the gateway and was just in time to meet his countryman, the journalist Snaith, coming out of the dark entrance, deadly pale and snapping his fingers nervously.

‘It’s quite true,’ said Snaith, with something which for him approached to reverence. ‘He’s a goner. The doctor’s been looking at him, and there’s no hope. Some of these damned Dagos clubbed him as he came through the gate—God knows why. It’ll be a great loss to the place.’

Race did not or perhaps could not reply, but ran on under the arch to the scene beyond. The small black figure lay where it had fallen on the wilderness of wide stones starred here and there with green thorn; and the great crowd was being kept back, chiefly by the mere gestures of one gigantic figure in the foreground. For there were many there who swayed hither and thither at the mere movement of his hand, as if he had been a magician.

Alvarez, the dictator and demagogue, was a tall, swaggering figure, always rather flamboyantly clad, and on this occasion he wore a green uniform with embroideries like silver snakes crawling all over it, with an order round his neck hung on a very vivid maroon ribbon. His close curling hair was already grey, and in contrast his complexion, which his friends called olive and his foes octoroon, looked almost literally golden, as if it were a mask moulded in gold. But his large—featured face, which was powerful and humorous, was at this moment properly grave and grim. He had been waiting, he explained, for Father Brown at the cafe when he had heard a rustle and a fall and, coming out, had found the corpse lying on the flagstones.

‘I know what some of you are thinking,’ he said, looking round proudly, ‘and if you are afraid of me—as you are—I will say it for you. I am an atheist; I have no god to call on for those who will not take my word. But I tell you in the name of every root of honour that may be left to a soldier and a man, that I had no part in this. If I had the men here that did it, I would rejoice to hang them on that tree.’

‘Naturally we are glad to hear you say so,’ said old Mendoza stiffly and solemnly, standing by the body of his fallen coadjutor. ‘This blow has been too appalling for us to say what else we feel at present. I suggest that it will be more decent and proper if we remove my friend’s body and break up this irregular meeting. I understand,’ he added gravely to the doctor, ‘that there is unfortunately no doubt.’

‘There is no doubt,’ said Dr Calderon.

John Race went back to his lodgings sad and with a singular sense of emptiness. It seemed impossible that he should miss a man whom he never knew. He learned that the funeral was to take place next day; for all felt that the crisis should be past as quickly as possible, for fear of riots that were hourly growing more probable. When Snaith had seen the row of Red Indians sitting on the veranda, they might have been a row of ancient Aztec images carved in red wood. But he had not seen them as they were when they heard that the priest was dead.

Indeed they would certainly have risen in revolution and lynched the republican leader, if they had not been immediately blocked by the direct necessity of behaving respectfully to the coffin of their own religious leader. The actual assassins, whom it would have been most natural to lynch, seemed to have vanished into thin air. Nobody knew their names; and nobody would ever know whether the dying man had even seen their faces. That strange look of surprise that was apparently his last look on earth might have been the recognition of their faces. Alvarez repeated violently that it was no work of his, and attended the funeral, walking behind the coffin in his splendid silver and green uniform with a sort of bravado of reverence.

Si sorprendeva a osservare senza volerlo quella comune e persino comica figura nera mentre si affaccendava di qua e di là; a osservarla con un fascino quasi morboso, come se fosse un enigma ambulante o una contraddizione. Aveva trovato qualcosa che non poteva fare a meno di amare nel cuore di tutto ciò che odiava; era come se fosse stato orribilmente tormentato da demoni minori e avesse poi scoperto che il Diavolo era una persona del tutto ordinaria.

Fu così che, guardando fuori dalla sua finestra in quella notte illuminata dalla luna, egli vide passare il Diavolo, il demone dell’inspiegabile innocenza, col suo largo cappello nero e il lungo cappotto nero, che si trascinava lungo la strada verso il portale, e lo vide con un interesse che egli stesso non sapeva comprendere. Si domandò dove andasse il prete, e che cosa avesse realmente in mente; e rimase a fissare la strada illuminata dalla luna a lungo, dopo che la piccola figura nera era passata. E poi vide qualcos’altro che lo incuriosì ulteriormente. Altri due uomini che riconobbe attraversarono la sua finestra come attraverso un palcoscenico illuminato. Una specie di azzurra luce di ribalta della luna correva in un alone spettrale intorno al gran cespuglio di capelli che si drizzava sul capo del piccolo Eckstein, il venditore di vino, e delineava una figura più alta e più scura, dal profilo d’aquila e con uno strano cappello nero all’antica e assai sbilanciato verso l’alto, che pareva rendere l’intera sagoma ancor più bizzarra, come una forma in una pantomima d’ombre. Race si rimproverò di lasciare che la luna giocasse simili scherzi alla sua fantasia; poiché a un secondo sguardo riconobbe i neri favoriti spagnoli e il volto dai lineamenti marcati del dottor Calderon, degno medico della città, che una volta aveva trovato mentre assisteva professionalmente Mendoza. Eppure c’era qualcosa nel modo in cui i due uomini bisbigliavano tra loro e scrutavano su per la strada che lo colpì come singolare. Su un improvviso impulso scavalcò il basso davanzale della finestra e s’incamminò lui stesso a capo scoperto su per la strada, seguendone le tracce. Li vide sparire sotto l’oscuro archivolto, e un momento dopo giunse da oltre un grido terribile; stranamente forte e penetrante, e che tanto più agghiacciava il sangue a Race in quanto diceva qualcosa in modo assai distinto in una lingua che egli non conosceva.

Un attimo dopo vi fu un accorrere di piedi, altre grida, e poi un confuso ruggito di rabbia o di dolore che scosse le torrette e le alte palme del luogo; vi fu un movimento nella folla che si era radunata, come se stesse rifluendo all’indietro attraverso il portale. E poi l’oscuro archivolto risuonò di una nuova voce, questa volta a lui comprensibile e che cadeva con la nota della condanna, mentre qualcuno gridava attraverso il portale:

«Padre Brown è morto!»

Non seppe mai quale sostegno cedette nella sua mente, o perché qualcosa su cui aveva contato improvvisamente gli venne meno; ma corse verso il portale e giunse appena in tempo per incontrare il suo connazionale, il giornalista Snaith, che usciva dall’oscuro ingresso, mortalmente pallido e schioccando nervosamente le dita.

«È proprio vero» disse Snaith, con qualcosa che per lui rasentava la reverenza. «È spacciato. Il dottore l’ha esaminato, e non c’è speranza. Alcuni di questi maledetti dagos l’hanno accoppato col bastone mentre passava dalla porta — Dio sa perché. Sarà una grande perdita per il posto.»

Race non rispose, o forse non poté rispondere, ma proseguì la corsa sotto l’arco fino alla scena che stava al di là. La piccola figura nera giaceva dov’era caduta sulla distesa desolata di larghe pietre punteggiate qua e là di verdi spine; e la gran folla veniva tenuta indietro, principalmente dai soli gesti di una figura gigantesca in primo piano. Poiché molti là oscillavano di qua e di là al solo movimento della sua mano, come se fosse un mago.

Alvarez, il dittatore e demagogo, era una figura alta e spavalda, sempre vestita in modo piuttosto sgargiante, e in quell’occasione indossava un’uniforme verde con ricami come serpenti d’argento che vi strisciavano dappertutto, con un’onorificenza appesa al collo a un nastro d’un vivido rosso granata. I suoi capelli fitti e ricciuti erano già grigi, e per contrasto la sua carnagione, che gli amici chiamavano olivastra e i nemici da ottavo di sangue negro, appariva quasi letteralmente dorata, come se fosse una maschera plasmata nell’oro. Ma il suo volto dai lineamenti marcati, che era potente e faceto, era in quel momento debitamente grave e arcigno. Aveva atteso, spiegò, Padre Brown al caffè, quando aveva udito un fruscio e un tonfo e, uscendo, aveva trovato il cadavere disteso sul lastricato.

«So che cosa alcuni di voi stanno pensando» disse, guardandosi intorno con fierezza «e se avete paura di me — come l’avete — lo dirò io per voi. Sono un ateo; non ho alcun dio da invocare per coloro che non vogliono credere alla mia parola. Ma vi dico, nel nome di ogni radice d’onore che possa restare a un soldato e a un uomo, che non ho avuto parte in questo. Se avessi qui gli uomini che l’hanno fatto, godrei a impiccarli a quell’albero.»

«Naturalmente siamo lieti di sentirvelo dire» disse il vecchio Mendoza, rigido e solenne, ritto accanto al corpo del suo caduto collaboratore. «Questo colpo è stato troppo spaventoso perché possiamo dire che altro proviamo al momento. Suggerisco che sia più decoroso e conveniente rimuovere il corpo del mio amico e sciogliere questa riunione irregolare. Comprendo» aggiunse gravemente rivolto al dottore «che purtroppo non vi è alcun dubbio.»

«Non vi è alcun dubbio» disse il dottor Calderon.

John Race tornò al suo alloggio triste e con un singolare senso di vuoto. Gli pareva impossibile poter rimpiangere un uomo che non aveva mai conosciuto. Apprese che il funerale si sarebbe svolto l’indomani; poiché tutti sentivano che la crisi doveva essere superata il più rapidamente possibile, per timore dei tumulti che di ora in ora si facevano più probabili. Quando Snaith aveva visto la fila di pellirosse seduti sulla veranda, essi avrebbero potuto essere una fila di antiche immagini azteche scolpite nel legno rosso. Ma non li aveva visti com’erano quando udirono che il prete era morto.

In verità si sarebbero certamente sollevati in rivolta e avrebbero linciato il capo repubblicano, se non fossero stati immediatamente trattenuti dalla diretta necessità di comportarsi rispettosamente davanti alla bara del loro stesso capo religioso. Gli assassini veri e propri, che sarebbe stato quanto mai naturale linciare, parevano essersi dileguati nel nulla. Nessuno conosceva i loro nomi; e nessuno avrebbe mai saputo se il moribondo avesse anche solo visto i loro volti. Quello strano sguardo di sorpresa che era stato, a quanto pareva, il suo ultimo sguardo sulla terra, poteva essere stato il riconoscimento dei loro volti. Alvarez ripeté con violenza che non era opera sua, e presenziò al funerale, camminando dietro la bara nella sua splendida uniforme d’argento e verde con una sorta di spavalda ostentazione di reverenza.

Behind the veranda a flight of stone steps scaled a very steep green bank, fenced by a cactus—hedge, and up this the coffin was laboriously lifted to the ground above, and placed temporarily at the foot of the great gaunt crucifix that dominated the road and guarded the consecrated ground. Below in the road were great seas of people lamenting and telling their beads—an orphan population that had lost a father. Despite all these symbols that were provocative enough to him, Alvarez behaved with restraint and respect; and all would have gone well—as Race told himself—had the others only let him alone.

Race told himself bitterly that old Mendoza had always looked like an old fool and had now very conspicuously and completely behaved like an old fool. By a custom common in simpler societies, the coffin was left open and the face uncovered, bringing the pathos to the point of agony for all those simple people. This, being consonant to tradition, need have done no harm; but some officious person had added to it the custom of the French freethinkers, of having speeches by the graveside. Mendoza proceeded to make a speech—a rather long speech, and the longer it was, the longer and lower sank John Race’s spirits and sympathies with the religious ritual involved. A list of saintly attributes, apparently of the most antiquated sort, was rolled out with the dilatory dullness of an after—dinner speaker who does not know how to sit down. That was bad enough; but Mendoza had also the ineffable stupidity to start reproaching and even taunting his political opponents. In three minutes he had succeeded in making a scene, and a very extraordinary scene it was.

‘We may well ask,’ he said, looking around him pompously; ‘we may well ask where such virtues can be found among those who have madly abandoned the creed of their fathers. It is when we have atheists among us, atheist leaders, nay sometimes even atheist rulers, that we find their infamous philosophy bearing fruit in crimes like this. If we ask who murdered this holy man, we shall assuredly find—‘

Africa of the forests looked out of the eyes of Alvarez the hybrid adventurer; and Race fancied he could see suddenly that the man was after all a barbarian, who could not control himself to the end; one might guess that all his ‘illuminated’ transcendentalism had a touch of Voodoo. Anyhow, Mendoza could not continue, for Alvarez had sprung up and was shouting back at him and shouting him down, with infinitely superior lungs.

‘Who murdered him?’ he roared. ‘Your God murdered him! His own God murdered him! According to you, he murders all his faithful and foolish servants—as he murdered that one,’ and he made a violent gesture, not towards the coffin but the crucifix. Seeming to control himself a little, he went on in a tone still angry but more argumentative: ‘I don’t believe it, but you do. Isn’t it better to have no God than one that robs you in this fashion? I, at least, am not afraid to say that there is none. There is no power in all this blind and brainless universe that can hear your prayer or return your friend. Though you beg Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Though I dare Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Here and now I will put it to the test—I defy the God who is not there to waken the man who sleeps for ever.’

There was a shock of silence, and the demagogue had made his sensation.

‘We might have known,’ cried Mendoza in a thick gobbling voice, ‘when we allowed such men as you—‘

A new voice cut into his speech; a high and shrill voice with a Yankee accent.

‘Stop! Stop!’ cried Snaith the journalist; ‘something’s up! I swear I saw him move.’

He went racing up the steps and rushed to the coffin, while the mob below swayed with indescribable frenzies. The next moment he had turned a face of amazement over his shoulder and made a signal with his finger to Dr Calderon, who hastened forward to confer with him. When the two men stepped away again from the coffin, all could see that the position of the head had altered. A roar of excitement rose from the crowd and seemed to stop suddenly, as if cut off in mid—air; for the priest in the coffin gave a groan and raised himself on one elbow, looking with bleared and blinking eyes at the crowd.

John Adams Race, who had hitherto known only miracles of science, never found himself able in after—years to describe the topsy— turvydom of the next few days. He seemed to have burst out of the world of time and space, and to be living in the impossible. In half an hour the whole of that town and district had been transformed into something never known for a thousand years; a medieval people turned to a mob of monks by a staggering miracle; a Greek city where the god had descended among men. Thousands prostrated themselves in the road; hundreds took vows on the spot; and even the outsiders, like the two Americans, were able to think and speak of nothing but the prodigy. Alvarez himself was shaken, as well he might be; and sat down, with his head upon his hands.

And in the midst of all this tornado of beatitude was a little man struggling to be heard. His voice was small and faint, and the noise was deafening. He made weak little gestures that seemed more those of irritation than anything else. He came to the edge of the parapet above the crowd, waving it to be quiet, with movements rather like the flap of the short wings of a penguin. There was something a little more like a lull in the noise; and then Father Brown for the first time reached the utmost stretch of the indignation that he could launch against his children.

‘Oh, you silly people,’ he said in a high and quavering voice; ‘Oh, you silly, silly people.’

Then he suddenly seemed to pull himself together, made a bolt for the steps with his more normal gait, and began hurriedly to descend.

‘Where are you going, Father?’ said Mendoza, with more than his usual veneration.

‘To the telegraph office,’ said Father Brown hastily. ‘What? No; of course it’s not a miracle. Why should there be a miracle? Miracles are not so cheap as all that.’

Dietro la veranda una rampa di gradini di pietra saliva lungo una ripidissima scarpata verde, cinta da una siepe di cactus, e su per essa la bara fu faticosamente issata al terreno soprastante, e collocata provvisoriamente ai piedi del grande e scarno crocifisso che dominava la strada e vegliava sul suolo consacrato. In basso sulla strada c’erano grandi mari di gente che si lamentava e sgranava i rosari: una popolazione orfana che aveva perduto un padre. Nonostante tutti questi simboli, che per lui erano abbastanza provocatori, Alvarez si comportò con ritegno e rispetto; e tutto sarebbe andato bene — come Race si disse — se solo gli altri lo avessero lasciato in pace.

Race si disse con amarezza che il vecchio Mendoza aveva sempre avuto l’aria di un vecchio sciocco e che ora si era comportato, in modo assai vistoso e completo, da vecchio sciocco. Per un’usanza comune nelle società più semplici, la bara era stata lasciata aperta e il volto scoperto, portando il pathos al culmine dell’angoscia per tutta quella gente semplice. Ciò, essendo conforme alla tradizione, non avrebbe fatto alcun male; ma qualche persona invadente vi aveva aggiunto l’usanza dei liberi pensatori francesi, quella dei discorsi sul ciglio della fossa. Mendoza si accinse a fare un discorso — un discorso piuttosto lungo, e quanto più era lungo, tanto più a lungo e in basso sprofondavano lo spirito di John Race e la sua simpatia per il rituale religioso in questione. Un elenco di attributi santi, apparentemente del genere più antiquato, veniva srotolato con la tediosa lentezza di un oratore da dopo-cena che non sa come sedersi. Già questo era abbastanza spiacevole; ma Mendoza ebbe anche l’ineffabile stupidità di cominciare a rimproverare e persino a schernire i suoi avversari politici. In tre minuti era riuscito a fare una scenata, e una scenata davvero straordinaria.

«Possiamo ben chiederci» disse, guardandosi intorno con pomposità «possiamo ben chiederci dove tali virtù possano trovarsi tra coloro che hanno follemente abbandonato la fede dei loro padri. È quando abbiamo tra noi degli atei, capi atei, anzi talvolta persino governanti atei, che vediamo la loro infame filosofia dare frutto in delitti come questo. Se ci chiediamo chi abbia assassinato questo sant’uomo, troveremo di certo…»

L’Africa delle foreste guardava fuori dagli occhi di Alvarez, l’avventuriero meticcio; e a Race parve di poter d’un tratto vedere che quell’uomo era, dopo tutto, un barbaro, incapace di controllarsi fino in fondo; si poteva supporre che tutto il suo trascendentalismo «illuminato» avesse un tocco di Voodoo. Comunque, Mendoza non poté continuare, poiché Alvarez era balzato in piedi e gli gridava di rimando e lo sovrastava con la voce, con polmoni infinitamente superiori.

«Chi l’ha assassinato?» ruggì. «Il vostro Dio l’ha assassinato! Il suo stesso Dio l’ha assassinato! Secondo voi, egli assassina tutti i suoi servi fedeli e sciocchi — come ha assassinato costui» e fece un gesto violento, non verso la bara ma verso il crocifisso. Sembrando controllarsi un poco, proseguì con un tono ancora adirato ma più argomentativo: «Io non ci credo, ma voi sì. Non è meglio non avere alcun Dio che averne uno che vi deruba a questo modo? Io, almeno, non ho paura di dire che non ce n’è alcuno. Non c’è potere in tutto questo universo cieco e senza cervello che possa udire la vostra preghiera o restituirvi l’amico. Per quanto imploriate il Cielo di risuscitarlo, egli non risorgerà. Per quanto io sfidi il Cielo a risuscitarlo, egli non risorgerà. Qui e ora lo metterò alla prova: sfido il Dio che non c’è a risvegliare l’uomo che dorme per sempre.»

Vi fu un urto di silenzio, e il demagogo aveva ottenuto il suo effetto sensazionale.

«Avremmo dovuto immaginarlo» esclamò Mendoza con voce spessa e gorgogliante «quando abbiamo permesso a uomini come voi…»

Una nuova voce s’intromise nel suo discorso; una voce alta e stridula con accento yankee.

«Fermi! Fermi!» gridò Snaith il giornalista; «sta succedendo qualcosa! Giuro di averlo visto muoversi.»

Salì di corsa i gradini e si precipitò alla bara, mentre la folla in basso ondeggiava in frenesie indescrivibili. Un attimo dopo aveva voltato al di sopra della spalla un volto attonito e fatto un cenno col dito al dottor Calderon, che si affrettò avanti a confabulare con lui. Quando i due uomini si allontanarono di nuovo dalla bara, tutti poterono vedere che la posizione della testa era mutata. Un ruggito d’eccitazione si levò dalla folla e parve arrestarsi di colpo, come reciso a mezz’aria; poiché il prete nella bara emise un gemito e si sollevò su un gomito, guardando con occhi velati e ammiccanti la folla.

John Adams Race, che fino ad allora aveva conosciuto solo i miracoli della scienza, non riuscì mai, negli anni successivi, a descrivere il sottosopra di quei pochi giorni. Gli pareva d’essere sbucato fuori dal mondo del tempo e dello spazio, e di vivere nell’impossibile. In mezz’ora l’intera città e l’intero distretto erano stati trasformati in qualcosa di mai visto da mille anni; un popolo medievale mutato in una folla di monaci da uno sbalorditivo miracolo; una città greca dove il dio era disceso tra gli uomini. Migliaia si prostravano sulla strada; centinaia facevano voti sul posto; e persino gli estranei, come i due americani, non riuscivano a pensare e a parlare d’altro che del prodigio. Lo stesso Alvarez era scosso, come ben poteva esserlo; e si sedette, con la testa tra le mani.

E in mezzo a tutto questo turbine di beatitudine c’era un ometto che lottava per farsi udire. La sua voce era piccola e fioca, e il fracasso era assordante. Faceva deboli gesti che parevano più d’irritazione che d’altro. Venne all’orlo del parapetto sopra la folla, agitando la mano perché facesse silenzio, con movimenti piuttosto simili al battito delle corte ali di un pinguino. Vi fu qualcosa d’un po’ più simile a una tregua nel fracasso; e allora Padre Brown per la prima volta raggiunse la massima estensione dell’indignazione che potesse scagliare contro i suoi figli.

«Oh, gente sciocca» disse con voce alta e tremula; «oh, gente sciocca, sciocca.»

Poi d’un tratto parve riprendersi, si slanciò verso i gradini con la sua andatura più normale, e cominciò a scendere in fretta.

«Dove andate, Padre?» disse Mendoza, con più della sua consueta venerazione.

«All’ufficio del telegrafo» disse Padre Brown in fretta. «Come? No; certo che non è un miracolo. Perché mai dovrebbe esserci un miracolo? I miracoli non sono così a buon mercato.»

And he came tumbling down the steps, the people flinging themselves before him to implore his blessing.

‘Bless you, bless you,’ said Father Brown hastily. ‘God bless you all and give you more sense.’

And he scuttled away with extraordinary rapidity to the telegraph office, where he wired to his Bishop’s secretary: ‘There is some mad story about a miracle here; hope his lordship not give authority. Nothing in it.’

As he turned away from his effort, he tottered a little with the reaction, and John Race caught him by the arm.

‘Let me see you home,’ he said; ‘you deserve more than these people are giving you.’

John Race and the priest were seated in the presbytery; the table was still piled up with the papers with which the latter had been wrestling the day before; the bottle of wine and the emptied wine— glass still stood where he had left them.

‘And now,’ said Father Brown almost grimly, ‘I can begin to think.’

‘I shouldn’t think too hard just yet,’ said the American. ‘You must be wanting a rest. Besides, what are you going to think about?’

‘I have pretty often had the task of investigating murders, as it happens,’ said Father Brown. ‘Now I have got to investigate my own murder.’

‘If I were you,’ said Race, ‘I should take a little wine first.’

Father Brown stood up and filled himself another glass, lifted it, looked thoughtfully into vacancy, and put it down again. Then he sat down once more and said:

‘Do you know what I felt like when I died? You may not believe it, but my feeling was one of overwhelming astonishment.’

‘Well,’ answered Race, ‘I suppose you were astonished at being knocked on the head.’

Father Brown leaned over to him and said in a low voice, ‘I was astonished at not being knocked on the head.’

Race looked at him for a moment as if he thought the knock on the head had been only too effective; but he only said: ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that when that man brought his bludgeon down with a great swipe, it stopped at my head and did not even touch it. In the same way, the other fellow made as if to strike me with a knife, but he never gave me a scratch. It was just like play—acting. I think it was. But then followed the extraordinary thing.’

He looked thoughtfully at the papers on the table for a moment and then went on:

‘Though I had not even been touched with knife or stick, I began to feel my legs doubling up under me and my very life failing. I knew I was being struck down by something, but it was not by those weapons. Do you know what I think it was?’ And he pointed to the wine on the table.

Race picked up the wine—glass and looked at it and smelt it.

‘I think you are right,’ he said. ‘I began as a druggist and studied chemistry. I couldn’t say for certain without an analysis; but I think there’s something very unusual in this stuff. There are drugs by which the Asiatics produce a temporary sleep that looks like death.’

‘Quite so,’ said the priest calmly.’ The whole of this miracle was faked, for some reason or other. That funeral scene was staged—and timed. I think it is part of that raving madness of publicity that has got hold of Snaith; but I can hardly believe he would go quite so far, merely for that. After all, it’s one thing to make copy out of me and run me as a sort of sham Sherlock Holmes, and—‘

Even as the priest spoke his face altered. His blinking eyelids shut suddenly and he stood up as if he were choking. Then he put one wavering hand as if groping his way towards the door.

‘Where are you going?’ asked the other in some wonder.

‘If you ask me,’ said Father Brown, who was quite white, ‘I was going to pray. Or rather, to praise.’

‘I’m not sure I understand. What is the matter with you?’

‘I was going to praise God for having so strangely and so incredibly saved me—saved me by an inch.’

‘Of course,’ said Race, ‘I am not of your religion; but believe me, I have religion enough to understand that. Of course, you would thank God for saving you from death.’

‘No,’ said the priest. ‘Not from death. From disgrace.’

The other sat staring; and the priest’s next words broke out of him with a sort of cry. ‘And if it had only been my disgrace! But it was the disgrace of all I stand for; the disgrace of the Faith that they went about to encompass. What it might have been! The most huge and horrible scandal ever launched against us since the last lie was choked in the throat of Titus Oates.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ demanded his companion.

‘Well, I had better tell you at once,’ said the priest; and sitting down, he went on more composedly: ‘It came to me in a flash when I happened to mention Snaith and Sherlock Holmes. Now I happen to remember what I wrote about his absurd scheme; it was the natural thing to write, and yet I think they had ingeniously manoeuvred me into writing just those words. They were something like ‘I am ready to die and come to life again like Sherlock Holmes, if that is the best way.’ And the moment I thought of that, I realized that I had been made to write all sorts of things of that kind, all pointing to the same idea. I wrote, as if to an accomplice, saying that I would drink the drugged wine at a particular time. Now, don’t you see?’

Race sprang to his feet still staring: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I began to see.’

‘They would have boomed the miracle. Then they would have bust up the miracle. And what is the worst, they would have proved that I was in the conspiracy. It would have been our sham miracle. That’s all there is to it; and about as near hell as you and I will ever be, I hope.’

Then he said, after a pause, in quite a mild voice: ‘They certainly would have got quite a lot of good copy out of me.’

Race looked at the table and said darkly: ‘How many of these brutes were in it?’

Father Brown shook his head. ‘More than I like to think of,’ he said; ‘but I hope some of them were only tools. Alvarez might think that all’s fair in war, perhaps; he has a queer mind. I’m very much afraid that Mendoza is an old hypocrite; I never trusted him, and he hated my action in an industrial matter. But all that will wait; I have only got to thank God for the escape. And especially that I wired at once to the Bishop.’

John Race appeared to be very thoughtful. ‘You’ve told me a lot I didn’t know,’ he said at last, ‘and I feel inclined to tell you the only thing you don’t know. I can imagine how those fellows calculated well enough. They thought any man alive, waking up in a coffin to find himself canonized like a saint, and made into a walking miracle for everyone to admire, would be swept along with his worshippers and accept the crown of glory that fell on him out the sky. And I reckon their calculation was pretty practical psychology, as men go. I’ve seen all sorts of men in all sorts of places; and I tell you frankly I don’t believe there’s one man in a thousand who could wake up like that with all his wits about him; and while he was still almost talking in his sleep, would have the sanity and the simplicity and the humility to—‘ He was much surprised to find himself moved, and his level voice wavering.

Father Brown was gazing abstractedly, and in a rather cockeyed fashion, at the bottle on the table. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘ what about a bottle of real wine?’

E scese ruzzolando i gradini, mentre la gente si gettava davanti a lui per implorarne la benedizione.

«Vi benedico, vi benedico» disse Padre Brown in fretta. «Dio vi benedica tutti e vi dia più giudizio.»

E se ne andò via a passettini con straordinaria rapidità fino all’ufficio del telegrafo, dove telegrafò al segretario del suo Vescovo: «Qui circola una folle storia di miracolo; spero che Sua Eccellenza non conceda autorizzazione. Non c’è nulla di vero.»

Mentre si allontanava da quella fatica, vacillò un poco per il contraccolpo, e John Race lo afferrò per il braccio.

«Lasciate che vi accompagni a casa» disse; «meritate più di quanto questa gente vi stia dando.»

John Race e il prete sedevano nella canonica; il tavolo era ancora ingombro delle carte con cui quest’ultimo si era accapigliato il giorno prima; la bottiglia di vino e il bicchiere vuotato stavano ancora dove li aveva lasciati.

«E ora» disse Padre Brown quasi torvo «posso cominciare a pensare.»

«Non penserei troppo intensamente per ora» disse l’americano. «Dovete aver bisogno di riposo. E poi, a che cosa volete pensare?»

«Mi è capitato piuttosto spesso di dovermi occupare di indagini su omicidi, guarda caso» disse Padre Brown. «Ora mi tocca indagare sul mio stesso assassinio.»

«Se fossi in voi» disse Race «prima berrei un po’ di vino.»

Padre Brown si alzò e si riempì un altro bicchiere, lo sollevò, guardò pensoso nel vuoto, e lo posò di nuovo. Poi si sedette ancora una volta e disse:

«Sapete che cosa provai quando morii? Forse non ci crederete, ma la mia sensazione fu di uno stupore travolgente.»

«Be’» rispose Race «immagino foste stupito d’esser stato colpito alla testa.»

Padre Brown si chinò verso di lui e disse a bassa voce: «Ero stupito di non essere stato colpito alla testa.»

Race lo guardò per un momento come se pensasse che il colpo alla testa fosse stato fin troppo efficace; ma disse soltanto: «Che cosa intendete?»

«Intendo che, quando quell’uomo abbatté il suo randello con un gran fendente, esso si fermò alla mia testa e non la toccò nemmeno. Allo stesso modo, l’altro tizio fece come per colpirmi con un coltello, ma non mi procurò neppure un graffio. Era proprio come una recita. Credo che lo fosse. Ma poi seguì la cosa straordinaria.»

Guardò pensoso per un momento le carte sul tavolo e poi proseguì:

«Benché non fossi stato neppure sfiorato da coltello o bastone, cominciai a sentire le gambe piegarmisi sotto e la vita stessa venir meno. Sapevo di essere abbattuto da qualcosa, ma non da quelle armi. Sapete che cosa penso fosse?» E indicò il vino sul tavolo.

Race prese il bicchiere di vino e lo osservò e lo annusò.

«Credo abbiate ragione» disse. «Ho cominciato come farmacista e ho studiato chimica. Non saprei dirlo con certezza senza un’analisi; ma credo che ci sia qualcosa di assai insolito in questa roba. Esistono droghe con cui gli asiatici producono un sonno temporaneo che ha l’aspetto della morte.»

«Proprio così» disse il prete con calma. «Tutto questo miracolo è stato architettato, per una ragione o per l’altra. Quella scena funebre è stata inscenata — e cronometrata. Credo faccia parte di quella delirante follia della pubblicità che ha preso Snaith; ma stento a credere che si sarebbe spinto fino a tanto, per quello soltanto. Dopo tutto, un conto è fare articoli su di me e presentarmi come una sorta di finto Sherlock Holmes, e…»

Proprio mentre il prete parlava, il suo volto mutò. Le palpebre che ammiccavano si chiusero di colpo ed egli si alzò come se stesse soffocando. Poi tese una mano vacillante, come cercando a tastoni la strada verso la porta.

«Dove andate?» chiese l’altro con una certa meraviglia.

«Se proprio volete saperlo» disse Padre Brown, che era tutto bianco «stavo andando a pregare. O meglio, a lodare.»

«Non sono sicuro di capire. Che cosa avete?»

«Stavo andando a lodare Dio per avermi salvato così stranamente e così incredibilmente — per avermi salvato per un pelo.»

«Certo» disse Race «io non sono della vostra religione; ma credetemi, ho abbastanza religione da capirlo. Naturalmente ringraziereste Dio per avervi salvato dalla morte.»

«No» disse il prete. «Non dalla morte. Dall’infamia.»

L’altro rimase seduto a fissarlo; e le parole successive del prete gli proruppero con una sorta di grido. «E se fosse stata soltanto la mia infamia! Ma era l’infamia di tutto ciò che rappresento; l’infamia della Fede che essi manovravano per circuire. Che cosa avrebbe potuto essere! Il più enorme e orribile scandalo mai scagliato contro di noi da quando l’ultima menzogna fu soffocata nella gola di Titus Oates.»

«Ma di che diavolo state parlando?» domandò il suo compagno.

«Ebbene, meglio che ve lo dica subito» disse il prete; e sedendosi, proseguì più padrone di sé: «Mi venne in mente in un lampo, quando mi capitò di menzionare Snaith e Sherlock Holmes. Ora, mi ricordo per l’appunto ciò che scrissi a proposito del suo assurdo progetto; era la cosa naturale da scrivere, eppure credo che mi avessero ingegnosamente manovrato perché scrivessi proprio quelle parole. Erano qualcosa come: “Sono pronto a morire e a tornare in vita come Sherlock Holmes, se questa è la maniera migliore.” E nell’istante in cui pensai a ciò, mi resi conto che mi avevano fatto scrivere ogni sorta di cose di quel genere, tutte volte alla stessa idea. Scrissi, come a un complice, dicendo che avrei bevuto il vino drogato a un determinato momento. Ora, non capite?»

Race balzò in piedi ancora fissandolo: «Sì» disse «credo di cominciare a capire.»

«Avrebbero gonfiato il miracolo. Poi avrebbero fatto scoppiare il miracolo. E, cosa peggiore, avrebbero provato che io ero nella cospirazione. Sarebbe stato il nostro falso miracolo. È tutto qui; e press’a poco il più vicino all’inferno che io e voi mai saremo, spero.»

Poi disse, dopo una pausa, con voce del tutto mite: «Di certo avrebbero ricavato da me parecchia buona materia da giornale.»

Race guardò il tavolo e disse cupamente: «Quanti di questi bruti c’erano dentro?»

Padre Brown scosse il capo. «Più di quanti mi piaccia pensare» disse; «ma spero che alcuni di loro fossero soltanto strumenti. Alvarez potrebbe pensare che in guerra tutto è lecito, forse; ha una mente bizzarra. Temo molto che Mendoza sia un vecchio ipocrita; non mi sono mai fidato di lui, e detestava il mio operato in una questione industriale. Ma tutto questo può attendere; non mi resta che ringraziare Dio per lo scampato pericolo. E specialmente per aver telegrafato subito al Vescovo.»

John Race appariva molto pensieroso. «Mi avete detto molte cose che non sapevo» disse alla fine «e mi sento incline a dirvi l’unica cosa che voi non sapete. Riesco a immaginare abbastanza bene come calcolarono quei tizi. Pensavano che qualsiasi uomo vivente, svegliandosi in una bara per trovarsi canonizzato come un santo, e trasformato in un miracolo ambulante da ammirare per tutti, sarebbe stato travolto insieme ai suoi adoratori e avrebbe accettato la corona di gloria che gli cadeva addosso dal cielo. E ritengo che il loro calcolo fosse una psicologia piuttosto pratica, per come sono fatti gli uomini. Ho visto ogni sorta di uomini in ogni sorta di luoghi; e vi dico francamente che non credo ci sia un uomo su mille capace di svegliarsi a quel modo con tutto il suo senno; e che, mentre stava ancora quasi parlando nel sonno, avesse la lucidità e la semplicità e l’umiltà di…» Fu assai sorpreso di scoprirsi commosso, e la sua voce piana vacillare.

Padre Brown fissava distrattamente, e in maniera piuttosto storta, la bottiglia sul tavolo. «Sentite un po’» disse «che ne direste di una bottiglia di vino vero?»

TWO: The Arrow of Heaven

IT is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. This story, I am happy to say, has to begin with a murdered millionaire; in one sense, indeed, it has to begin with three murdered millionaires, which some may regard as an cmbarras de richesse. But it was chiefly this coincidence or continuity of criminal policy that took the whole affair out of the ordinary run of criminal cases and made it the extraordinary problem that it was.

It was very generally said that they had all fallen victims to some vendetta or curse attaching to the possession of a relic of great value both intrinsically and historically: a sort of chalice inlaid with precious stones and commonly called the Coptic Cup. Its origin was obscure, but its use was conjectured to be religious; and some attributed the fate that followed its possessors to the fanaticism of some Oriental Christian horrified at its passing through such materialistic hands. But the mysterious slayer, whether or no he was such a fanatic, was already a figure of lurid and sensational interest in the world of journalism and gossip. The nameless being was provided with a name, or a nickname. But it is only with the story of the third victim that we are now concerned; for it was only in this case that a certain Father Brown, who is the subject of these sketches, had an opportunity of making his presence felt.

When Father Brown first stepped off an Atlantic liner on to American soil, he discovered as many other Englishman has done, that he was a much more important person than he had ever supposed. His short figure, his short—sighted and undistinguished countenance, his rather rusty—black clerical clothes, could pass through any crowd in his own country without being noticed as anything unusual, except perhaps unusually insignificant. But America has a genius for the encouragement of fame; and his appearance in one or two curious criminal problems, together with his long association with Flambeau, the ex— criminal and detective, had consolidated a reputation in America out of what was little more than a rumour in England. His round face was blank with surprise when he found himself held up on the quay by a group of journalists, as by a gang of brigands, who asked him questions about all the subjects on which he was least likely to regard himself as an authority, such as the details of female dress and the criminal statistics of the country that he had only that moment clapped his eyes on. Perhaps it was the contrast with the black embattled solidarity of this group that made more vivid another figure that stood apart from it, equally black against the burning white daylight of that brilliant place and season, but entirely solitary; a tall, rather yellow—faced man in great goggles, who arrested him with a gesture when the journalists had finished and said: ‘Excuse me, but maybe you are looking for Captain Wain.’

Some apology may be made for Father Brown; for he himself would have been sincerely apologetic. It must be remembered that he had never seen America before, and more especially that he had never seen that sort of tortoise—shell spectacles before; for the fashion at this time had not spread to England. His first sensation was that of gazing at some goggling sea— monster with a faint suggestion of a diver’s helmet. Otherwise the man was exquisitely dressed; and to Brown, in his innocence, the spectacles seemed the queerest disfigurement for a dandy. It was as if a dandy had adorned himself with a wooden leg as an extra touch of elegance. The question also embarrassed him. An American aviator of the name of Wain, a friend of some friends of his own in France, was indeed one of a long list of people he had some hope of seeing during his American visit; but he had never expected to hear of him so soon.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said doubtfully, ‘are you Captain Wain? Do you— do you know him?’

‘Well, I’m pretty confident I’m not Captain Wain,’ said the man in goggles, with a face of wood. ‘I was pretty clear about that when I saw him waiting for you over there in the car. But the other question’s a bit more problematical. I reckon I know Wain and his uncle, and old man Merton, too. I know old man Merton, but old man Merton don’t know me. And he thinks he has the advantage, and I think I have the advantage. See?’

Father Brown did not quite see. He blinked at the glittering seascape and the pinnacles of the city, and then at the man in goggles. It was not only the masking of the man’s eyes that produced the impression of something impenetrable. Something in his yellow face was almost Asiatic, even Chinese; and his conversation seemed to consist of stratified layers of irony. He was a type to be found here and there in that hearty and sociable population; he was the inscrutable American.

‘My name’s Drage,’ he said, ‘Norman Drage, and I’m an American citizen, which explains everything. At least I imagine your friend Wain would like to explain the rest; so we’ll postpone The Fourth of July till another date.’

Father Brown was dragged in a somewhat dazed condition towards a car at some little distance, in which a young man with tufts of untidy yellow hair and a rather harassed and haggard expression, hailed him from afar, and presented himself as Peter Wain. Before he knew where he was he was stowed in the car and travelling with considerable speed through and beyond the city. He was unused to the impetuous practicality of such American action, and felt about as bewildered as if a chariot drawn by dragons had carried him away into fairyland. It was under these disconcerting conditions that he heard for the first time, in long monologues from Wain, and short sentences from Drage, the story of the Coptic Cup and the two crimes already connected with it.

DUE: La freccia del cielo

C’è da temere che un centinaio circa di racconti polizieschi abbiano avuto inizio con la scoperta che un milionario americano è stato assassinato; un evento che, per qualche ragione, viene trattato alla stregua di una pubblica sciagura. Questa storia, sono lieto di dirlo, deve cominciare con un milionario assassinato; anzi, in un certo senso, deve cominciare con tre milionari assassinati, cosa che taluni potranno giudicare un vero e proprio embarras de richesse. Ma fu soprattutto questa coincidenza, o continuità, di disegno criminoso che sottrasse l’intera faccenda al corso ordinario dei casi delittuosi e ne fece lo straordinario enigma che essa era.

Si diceva assai comunemente che tutti fossero caduti vittime di una vendetta o di una maledizione legata al possesso di una reliquia di gran valore, tanto intrinseco quanto storico: una sorta di calice tempestato di pietre preziose e comunemente chiamato la Coppa Copta. La sua origine era oscura, ma se ne congetturava un uso religioso; e alcuni attribuivano la sorte che perseguitava i suoi possessori al fanatismo di qualche cristiano orientale, inorridito nel vederla passare per mani tanto materialistiche. Ma il misterioso assassino, fosse o no un simile fanatico, era già una figura di sinistro e sensazionale interesse nel mondo del giornalismo e delle chiacchiere. All’essere senza nome venne fornito un nome, o un soprannome. È però soltanto della vicenda della terza vittima che ora ci occupiamo; poiché fu solo in questo caso che un certo Father Brown, il quale è il soggetto di questi schizzi, ebbe l’occasione di far sentire la propria presenza.

Quando Father Brown mise per la prima volta il piede giù da un transatlantico sul suolo americano, scoprì, come tanti altri inglesi prima di lui, di essere una persona assai più importante di quanto avesse mai supposto. La sua corta figura, il suo volto miope e privo di distinzione, i suoi abiti clericali di un nero piuttosto stinto, avrebbero potuto attraversare qualsiasi folla nel suo paese senza esser notati come alcunché di insolito, tranne forse per una insolita insignificanza. Ma l’America ha il genio dell’incoraggiamento della fama; e la sua comparsa in uno o due curiosi problemi criminali, unita alla sua lunga frequentazione di Flambeau, l’ex criminale e investigatore, aveva consolidato in America una reputazione a partire da ciò che in Inghilterra era poco più d’una diceria. Il suo viso rotondo era vacuo per la sorpresa quando si trovò trattenuto sulla banchina da un gruppo di giornalisti, come da una banda di briganti, i quali gli rivolgevano domande su tutti gli argomenti riguardo ai quali era meno probabile che si considerasse un’autorità, quali i particolari dell’abbigliamento femminile e le statistiche criminali del paese sul quale aveva posato gli occhi soltanto in quell’istante. Fu forse il contrasto con la nera, schierata solidarietà di quel gruppo a rendere più vivida un’altra figura che se ne stava in disparte, egualmente nera contro l’ardente luce bianca di quel luogo e di quella stagione splendenti, ma del tutto solitaria: un uomo alto, dal volto piuttosto giallastro, con grandi occhialoni, che lo fermò con un gesto quando i giornalisti ebbero terminato e disse: «Mi scusi, ma forse sta cercando il capitano Wain».

Qualche scusa si può addurre in favore di Padre Brown; ché egli stesso si sarebbe sinceramente scusato. Bisogna ricordare che non aveva mai visto l’America prima d’allora, e più ancora che non aveva mai visto prima quel genere di occhiali di tartaruga; giacché la moda, a quel tempo, non si era ancora diffusa in Inghilterra. La sua prima sensazione fu quella di fissare qualche mostro marino dagli occhi sporgenti, con una vaga suggestione di elmo da palombaro. Per il resto l’uomo era vestito in modo squisito; e a Brown, nella sua innocenza, gli occhiali parvero la più strana delle deturpazioni per un damerino. Era come se un damerino si fosse adornato di una gamba di legno quale ulteriore tocco d’eleganza. Anche la domanda lo mise in imbarazzo. Un aviatore americano di nome Wain, amico di alcuni suoi amici in Francia, era in effetti uno di una lunga lista di persone che sperava in qualche modo di incontrare durante la sua visita americana; ma non si era mai aspettato di sentirne parlare tanto presto.

«Le chiedo scusa», disse esitando, «è lei il capitano Wain? Lo… lo conosce?»

«Be’, sono abbastanza sicuro di non essere il capitano Wain», disse l’uomo dagli occhialoni, con una faccia di legno. «Su questo avevo le idee piuttosto chiare quando l’ho visto che l’aspettava laggiù, in macchina. Ma l’altra domanda è un po’ più problematica. Direi di conoscere Wain e suo zio, e anche il vecchio Merton. Conosco il vecchio Merton, ma il vecchio Merton non conosce me. E lui crede di essere in vantaggio, e io credo di essere in vantaggio io. Capisce?»

Padre Brown non capiva del tutto. Sbatté le palpebre davanti allo scintillante panorama marino e ai pinnacoli della città, e poi davanti all’uomo dagli occhialoni. Non era soltanto il mascheramento degli occhi dell’uomo a produrre l’impressione di qualcosa d’impenetrabile. Qualcosa nel suo viso giallo era quasi asiatico, addirittura cinese; e la sua conversazione pareva consistere di strati sovrapposti d’ironia. Era un tipo che si incontra qua e là in quella popolazione cordiale e socievole: era l’americano imperscrutabile.

«Il mio nome è Drage», disse, «Norman Drage, e sono un cittadino americano, il che spiega ogni cosa. O almeno immagino che il suo amico Wain vorrà spiegare il resto; sicché rimanderemo il Quattro Luglio a un’altra data».

Padre Brown fu trascinato, in uno stato alquanto stordito, verso un’automobile a poca distanza, dalla quale un giovane con ciuffi di capelli gialli e scomposti e un’espressione piuttosto affannata e smunta lo salutò da lontano e si presentò come Peter Wain. Prima ancora di rendersi conto di dove fosse, era stato caricato nell’automobile e viaggiava a considerevole velocità attraverso e oltre la città. Non era avvezzo all’impetuosa concretezza di simili modi di agire americani, e si sentiva sconcertato press’a poco come se un carro tirato da draghi lo avesse rapito e portato in una terra fatata. Fu in queste condizioni sconcertanti che udì per la prima volta, in lunghi monologhi di Wain e in brevi frasi di Drage, la storia della Coppa Copta e dei due delitti già a essa collegati.

It seemed that Wain had an uncle named Crake who had a partner named Merton, who was number three in the series of rich business men to whom the cup had belonged. The first of them, Titus P. Trant, the Copper King, had received threatening letters from somebody signing himself Daniel Doom. The name was presumably a pseudonym, but it had come to stand for a very public if not a very popular character; for somebody as well known as Robin Hood and Jack the Ripper combined. For it soon became clear that the writer of the threatening letter did not confine himself to threatening. Anyhow, the upshot was that old Trant was found one morning with his head in his own lily—pond, and there was not the shadow of a clue. The cup was, fortunately, safe in the bank; and it passed with the rest of Trant’s property to his cousin, Brian Horder, who was also a man of great wealth and who was also threatened by the nameless enemy. Brian Horder was picked up dead at the foot of a cliff outside his seaside residence, at which there was a burglary, this time on a large scale. For though the cup apparently again escaped, enough bonds and securities were stolen to leave Horder’s financial affairs in confusion.

‘Brian Horder’s widow,’ explained Wain, ‘had to sell most of his valuables, I believe, and Brander Merton must have purchased the cup at that time, for he had it when I first knew him. But you can guess for yourself that it’s not a very comfortable thing to have.’

‘Has Mr Merton ever had any of the threatening letters?’ asked Father Brown, after a pause.

‘I imagine he has,’ said Mr Drage; and something in his voice made the priest look at him curiously, until he realized that the man in goggles was laughing silently, in a fashion that gave the newcomer something of a chill.

‘I’m pretty sure he has,’ said Peter Wain, frowning. ‘I’ve not seen the letters, only his secretary sees any of his letters, for he is pretty reticent about business matters, as big business men have to be. But I’ve seen him real upset and annoyed with letters; and letters that he tore up, too, before even his secretary saw them. The secretary himself is getting nervous and says he is sure somebody is laying for the old man; and the long and the short of it is, that we’d be very grateful for a little advice in the matter. Everybody knows your great reputation. Father Brown, and the secretary asked me to see if you’d mind coming straight out to the Merton house at once.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Father Brown, on whom the meaning of this apparent kidnapping began to dawn at last. ‘But, really, I don’t see that I can do any more than you can. You’re on the spot, and must have a hundred times more data for a scientific conclusion than a chance visitor.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Drage dryly; ‘our conclusions are much too scientific to be true. I reckon if anything hit a man like Titus P. Trant, it just came out of the sky without waiting for any scientific explanation. What they call a bolt from the blue.’

‘You can’t possibly mean,’ cried Wain, ‘that it was supernatural!’

But it was by no means easy at any time to discover what Mr Drage could possibly mean; except that if he said somebody was a real smart man, he very probably meant he was a fool. Mr Drage maintained an Oriental immobility until the car stopped, a little while after, at what was obviously their destination. It was rather a singular place. They had been driving through a thinly—wooded country that opened into a wide plain, and just in front of them was a building consisting of a single wall or very high fence, round, like a Roman camp, and having rather the appearance of an aerodrome. The barrier did not look like wood or stone, and closer inspection proved it to be of metal.

They all alighted from the car, and one small door in the wall was slid open with considerable caution, after manipulations resembling the opening of a safe. But, much to Father Brown’s surprise, the man called Norman Drage showed no disposition to enter, but took leave of them with sinister gaiety.

‘I won’t come in,’ he said. ‘It ‘ud be too much pleasurable excitement for old man Merton, I reckon. He loves the sight of me so much that he’d die of joy.’

And he strode away, while Father Brown, with increasing wonder, was admitted through the steel door which instantly clicked behind him. Inside was a large and elaborate garden of gay and varied colours, but entirely without any trees or tall shrubs or flowers. In the centre of it rose a house of handsome and even striking architecture, but so high and narrow as rather to resemble a tower. The burning sunlight gleamed on glass roofing here and there at the top, but there seemed to be no windows at all in the lower part of it. Over everything was that spotless and sparkling cleanliness that seemed so native to the clear American air. When they came inside the portal, they stood amid resplendent marble and metals and enamels of brilliant colours, but there was no staircase. Nothing but a single shaft for a lift went up the centre between the solid walls, and the approach to it was guarded by heavy, powerful men like plain—clothes policemen.

‘Pretty elaborate protection, I know,’ said Wain. ‘Maybe it makes you smile a little, Father Brown, to find Merton has to live in a fortress like this without even a tree in the garden for anyone to hide behind. But you don’t know what sort of proposition we’re up against in this country. And perhaps you don’t know just what the name of Brander Merton means. He’s a quiet—looking man enough, and anybody might pass him in the street; not that they get much chance nowadays, for he can only go out now and then in a closed car. But if anything happened to Brander Merton there’d be earthquakes from Alaska to the Cannibal Islands. I fancy there was never a king or emperor who had such power over the nations as he has. After all, I suppose if you’d been asked to visit the tsar, or the king of England, you’d have had the curiosity to go. You mayn’t care much for tsars or millionaires; but it just means that power like that is always interesting. And I hope it’s not against your principles to visit a modern sort of emperor like Merton.’

Pareva che Wain avesse uno zio di nome Crake, il quale aveva un socio di nome Merton, che era il terzo della serie di ricchi uomini d’affari cui la coppa era appartenuta. Il primo di essi, Titus P. Trant, il Re del Rame, aveva ricevuto lettere minatorie da qualcuno che si firmava Daniel Doom. Il nome era con ogni probabilità uno pseudonimo, ma era arrivato a designare un personaggio assai pubblico, se non molto popolare; qualcuno noto quanto Robin Hood e Jack lo Squartatore messi insieme. Ben presto infatti apparve chiaro che l’autore della lettera minatoria non si limitava a minacciare. Comunque fosse, il risultato fu che il vecchio Trant venne trovato una mattina con la testa nel proprio stagno delle ninfee, e non c’era l’ombra di un indizio. La coppa era, per fortuna, al sicuro in banca; e passò insieme al resto delle sostanze di Trant al cugino di lui, Brian Horder, che era anch’egli un uomo di grande ricchezza e che fu anch’egli minacciato dal nemico senza nome. Brian Horder fu raccolto cadavere ai piedi di una scogliera, fuori dalla sua residenza sul mare, dove ci fu un furto con scasso, questa volta su vasta scala. Perché, sebbene la coppa fosse a quanto pare di nuovo scampata, furono trafugati titoli e obbligazioni a sufficienza da lasciare in scompiglio gli affari finanziari di Horder.

«La vedova di Brian Horder», spiegò Wain, «dovette vendere la maggior parte dei suoi oggetti di valore, credo, e Brander Merton dev’essersi procurato la coppa in quell’occasione, perché la possedeva già quando lo conobbi. Ma potete immaginare da voi che non è cosa molto piacevole da avere.»

«Il signor Merton ha mai ricevuto qualcuna di quelle lettere minatorie?» chiese Padre Brown, dopo una pausa.

«Immagino di sì», disse il signor Drage; e qualcosa nella sua voce indusse il prete a guardarlo con curiosità, finché non si accorse che l’uomo dagli occhiali stava ridendo in silenzio, in un modo che comunicò al nuovo venuto una sorta di brivido.

«Sono quasi certo di sì», disse Peter Wain, aggrottando la fronte. «Non ho visto le lettere: solo il suo segretario vede la sua corrispondenza, perché è assai riservato in materia d’affari, come devono esserlo i grandi uomini d’affari. Ma l’ho visto davvero sconvolto e irritato da certe lettere; lettere che per giunta ha stracciato, prima ancora che le vedesse il segretario. Il segretario stesso comincia a innervosirsi e dice di essere sicuro che qualcuno stia tramando contro il vecchio; e, per farla breve, gli saremmo molto grati di un piccolo consiglio in proposito. La vostra grande fama è nota a tutti, Padre Brown, e il segretario mi ha chiesto di vedere se vi dispiacerebbe venire subito, senza indugio, fino a casa Merton.»

«Oh, capisco», disse Padre Brown, al quale il significato di questo apparente rapimento cominciava finalmente ad albeggiare. «Ma, davvero, non vedo che io possa fare più di quanto possiate voi. Voi siete sul posto, e dovete avere cento volte più dati per una conclusione scientifica di quanti ne abbia un visitatore capitato per caso.»

«Sì», disse il signor Drage seccamente; «le nostre conclusioni sono fin troppo scientifiche per essere vere. Ritengo che, se qualcosa ha colpito un uomo come Titus P. Trant, sia semplicemente venuto giù dal cielo senza aspettare alcuna spiegazione scientifica. Quello che si chiama un fulmine a ciel sereno.»

«Non vorrete davvero dire», esclamò Wain, «che è stato soprannaturale!»

Ma non era affatto facile, in nessun momento, scoprire che cosa mai il signor Drage potesse voler dire; salvo che, se diceva di qualcuno che era un uomo davvero in gamba, molto probabilmente intendeva che era uno sciocco. Il signor Drage mantenne un’immobilità orientale finché l’automobile non si fermò, poco dopo, a quella che era palesemente la loro meta. Era un luogo piuttosto singolare. Avevano attraversato una regione scarsamente boscosa che si apriva in una vasta pianura, e proprio davanti a loro sorgeva un edificio costituito da un unico muro, o altissima palizzata, circolare, come un accampamento romano, e con l’aspetto piuttosto di un aerodromo. La barriera non pareva né di legno né di pietra, e un esame più ravvicinato rivelò che era di metallo.

Scesero tutti dall’automobile, e una porticina nel muro fu fatta scorrere con notevole cautela, dopo manovre simili all’apertura di una cassaforte. Ma, con gran sorpresa di Padre Brown, l’uomo chiamato Norman Drage non mostrò alcuna intenzione di entrare, e prese congedo da loro con sinistra allegria.

«Io non entro», disse. «Sarebbe un’emozione troppo piacevole per il vecchio Merton, immagino. Gli è così caro il vedermi che morirebbe di gioia.»

E se ne andò a grandi passi, mentre Padre Brown, con crescente meraviglia, veniva ammesso attraverso la porta d’acciaio che si richiuse all’istante dietro di lui con uno scatto. All’interno c’era un ampio ed elaborato giardino dai colori vivaci e svariati, ma del tutto privo di alberi o di alti arbusti o di fiori. Al centro si ergeva una casa di architettura raffinata e persino imponente, ma tanto alta e stretta da somigliare piuttosto a una torre. Il sole cocente scintillava qua e là su tettoie di vetro in cima, ma non pareva esserci finestra alcuna nella parte inferiore. Su ogni cosa regnava quella pulizia immacolata e sfavillante che sembrava così connaturata alla limpida aria americana. Quando furono entrati dal portale, si trovarono in mezzo a marmi risplendenti e a metalli e a smalti dai colori brillanti, ma non c’era scala alcuna. Nient’altro che un unico pozzo per un ascensore saliva nel mezzo, fra le solide pareti, e l’accesso ad esso era sorvegliato da uomini poderosi e robusti, simili a poliziotti in borghese.

«Una protezione piuttosto elaborata, lo so», disse Wain. «Forse vi fa un po’ sorridere, Padre Brown, scoprire che Merton debba vivere in una fortezza come questa, senza nemmeno un albero nel giardino dietro cui qualcuno possa nascondersi. Ma voi non sapete con che genere di gente abbiamo a che fare in questo paese. E forse non sapete che cosa significhi esattamente il nome di Brander Merton. È un uomo dall’aspetto abbastanza dimesso, e chiunque potrebbe incrociarlo per strada; non che ne abbiano molte occasioni al giorno d’oggi, perché ormai può uscire solo di tanto in tanto, in un’automobile chiusa. Ma se accadesse qualcosa a Brander Merton ci sarebbero terremoti dall’Alaska alle Isole dei Cannibali. Credo che non ci sia mai stato re o imperatore che avesse sulle nazioni un potere pari al suo. Dopotutto, immagino che, se vi avessero invitato a far visita allo zar, o al re d’Inghilterra, avreste avuto la curiosità di andarci. Può darsi che non v’importi granché di zar o di milionari; ma questo significa proprio che un potere simile è sempre interessante. E spero che non sia contro i vostri principi far visita a una sorta di imperatore moderno come Merton.»

‘Not at all,’ said Father Brown, quietly. ‘It is my duty to visit prisoners and all miserable men in captivity.’

There was a silence, and the young man frowned with a strange and almost shifty look on his lean face. Then he said, abruptly:

‘Well, you’ve got to remember it isn’t only common crooks or the Black Hand that’s against him. This Daniel Doom is pretty much like the devil. Look how he dropped Trant in his own gardens and Horder outside his house, and got away with it.’

The top floor of the mansion, inside the enormously thick walls, consisted of two rooms; an outer room which they entered, and an inner room that was the great millionaire’s sanctum. They entered the outer room just as two other visitors were coming out of the inner one. One was hailed by Peter Wain as his uncle— a small but very stalwart and active man with a shaven head that looked bald, and a brown face that looked almost too brown to have ever been white. This was old Crake, commonly called Hickory Crake in reminiscence of the more famous Old Hickory, because of his fame in the last Red Indian wars. His companion was a singular contrast—a very dapper gentleman with dark hair like a black varnish and a broad, black ribbon to his monocle: Barnard Blake, who was old Merton’s lawyer and had been discussing with the partners the business of the firm. The four men met in the middle of the outer room and paused for a little polite conversation, in the act of respectively going and coming. And through all goings and comings another figure sat at the back of the room near the inner door, massive and motionless in the half—light from the inner window; a man with a Negro face and enormous shoulders. This was what the humorous self—criticism of America playfully calls the Bad Man; whom his friends might call a bodyguard and his enemies a bravo.

This man never moved or stirred to greet anybody; but the sight of him in the outer room seemed to move Peter Wain to his first nervous query.

‘Is anybody with the chief?’ he asked.

‘Don’t get rattled, Peter,’ chuckled his uncle. ‘Wilton the secretary is with him, and I hope that’s enough for anybody. I don’t believe Wilton ever sleeps for watching Merton. He is better than twenty bodyguards. And he’s quick and quiet as an Indian.’

‘Well, you ought to know,’ said his nephew, laughing. ‘I remember the Red Indian tricks you used to teach me when I was a boy and liked to read Red Indian stories. But in my Red Indian stories Red Indians seemed always to have the worst of it.’

‘They didn’t in real life,’ said the old frontiersman grimly.

‘Indeed?’ inquired the bland Mr Blake. ‘I should have thought they could do very little against our firearms.’

‘I’ve seen an Indian stand under a hundred guns with nothing but a little scalping—knife and kill a white man standing on the top of a fort,’ said Crake.

‘Why, what did he do with it?’ asked the other.

‘Threw it,’ replied Crake, ‘threw it in a flash before a shot could be fired. I don’t know where he learnt the trick.’

‘Well, I hope you didn’t learn it,’ said his nephew, laughing.

‘It seems to me,’ said Father Brown, thoughtfully, ‘that the story might have a moral.’

While they were speaking Mr Wilton, the secretary, had come out of the inner room and stood waiting; a pale, fair—haired man with a square chin and steady eyes with a look like a dog’s; it was not difficult to believe that he had the single— eye of a watchdog.

He only said, ‘Mr Merton can see you in about ten minutes,’ but it served for a signal to break up the gossiping group. Old Crake said he must be off, and his nephew went out with him and his legal companion, leaving Father Brown for the moment alone with his secretary; for the negroid giant at the other end of the room could hardly be felt as if he were human or alive; he sat so motionless with his broad back to them, staring towards the inner room.

‘Arrangements rather elaborate here, I’m afraid,’ said the secretary. ‘You’ve probably heard all about this Daniel Doom, and why it isn’t safe to leave the boss very much alone.’

‘But he is alone just now, isn’t he?’ said Father Brown.

The secretary looked at him with grave, grey eyes. ‘For fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘For fifteen minutes out of the twenty—four hours. That is all the real solitude he has; and that he insists on, for a pretty remarkable reason.’

‘And what is the reason?’ inquired the visitor. Wilton, the secretary, continued his steady gaze, but his mouth, that had been merely grave, became grim.

‘The Coptic Cup,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten the Coptic Cup; but he hasn’t forgotten that or anything else. He doesn’t trust any of us about the Coptic Cup. It’s locked up somewhere and somehow in that room so that only he can find it; and he won’t take it out till we’re all out of the way. So we have to risk that quarter of an hour while he sits and worships it; I reckon it’s the only worshipping he does. Not that there’s any risk really; for I’ve turned all this place into a trap I don’t believe the devil himself could get into— or at any rate, get out of. If this infernal Daniel Doom pays us a visit, he’ll stay to dinner and a good bit later, by God! I sit here on hot bricks for the fifteen minutes, and the instant I heard a shot or a sound of struggle I’d press this button and an electrocuting current would run in a ring round that garden wall, so that it ‘ud be death to cross or climb it. Of course, there couldn’t be a shot, for this is the only way in; and the only window he sits at is away up on the top of a tower as smooth as a greasy pole. But, anyhow, we’re all armed here, of course; and if Doom did get into that room he’d be dead before he got out.’

Father Brown was blinking at the carpet in a brown study. Then he said suddenly, with something like a jerk: ‘I hope you won’t mind my mentioning it, but a kind of a notion came into my head just this minute. It’s about you.’

«Niente affatto» disse padre Brown, con calma. «È mio dovere far visita ai prigionieri e a tutti gli uomini miseri tenuti in cattività.»

Vi fu un silenzio, e il giovane aggrottò la fronte con un’espressione strana e quasi sfuggente sul volto scarno. Poi disse, di scatto:

«Be’, tenga presente che non sono soltanto i ladri comuni o la Mano Nera ad avercela con lui. Questo Daniel Doom somiglia parecchio al diavolo. Guardi come ha steso Trant nei suoi stessi giardini e Horder davanti a casa sua, e l’ha fatta franca.»

L’ultimo piano del palazzo, dentro le mura enormemente spesse, si componeva di due stanze: una stanza esterna, nella quale entrarono, e una stanza interna che era il sancta sanctorum del grande milionario. Entrarono nella stanza esterna proprio mentre altri due visitatori uscivano da quella interna. In uno di essi Peter Wain salutò lo zio: un uomo piccolo ma quanto mai robusto e vigoroso, con il capo rasato che pareva calvo e un volto bruno che pareva troppo bruno per essere mai stato bianco. Era il vecchio Crake, comunemente chiamato Hickory Crake in memoria del più celebre Old Hickory, per via della sua fama nelle ultime guerre contro i Pellirosse. Il suo compagno gli faceva singolare contrasto: un gentiluomo assai azzimato, con i capelli scuri come vernice nera e un largo nastro nero al monocolo, Barnard Blake, che era l’avvocato del vecchio Merton e aveva discusso con i soci gli affari della ditta. I quattro uomini si incontrarono nel mezzo della stanza esterna e si fermarono per un breve, cortese scambio di parole, nell’atto di andare e di venire rispettivamente. E attraverso tutti quegli andirivieni un’altra figura sedeva in fondo alla stanza, presso la porta interna, massiccia e immobile nella penombra proveniente dalla finestra interna: un uomo dal volto di negro e dalle spalle enormi. Era ciò che l’umoristica autocritica dell’America chiama scherzosamente il Bad Man, l’uomo cattivo, che gli amici avrebbero potuto chiamare guardia del corpo e i nemici sicario.

Quest’uomo non si mosse né si scompose mai per salutare nessuno; ma la sua vista nella stanza esterna parve spingere Peter Wain alla sua prima, nervosa domanda.

«C’è qualcuno con il capo?» chiese.

«Non agitarti, Peter» ridacchiò lo zio. «Wilton, il segretario, è con lui, e spero che questo basti a chiunque. Non credo che Wilton dorma mai, tanto sta a guardia di Merton. Vale più di venti guardie del corpo. Ed è svelto e silenzioso come un Indiano.»

«Be’, tu te ne intendi» disse il nipote, ridendo. «Mi ricordo i trucchi da Pellirossa che mi insegnavi quando ero ragazzo e mi piaceva leggere le storie di Pellirossa. Solo che nelle mie storie i Pellirossa parevano avere sempre la peggio.»

«Nella vita vera non l’avevano» disse cupo il vecchio uomo di frontiera.

«Davvero?» domandò il mellifluo signor Blake. «Avrei creduto che potessero far ben poco contro le nostre armi da fuoco.»

«Ho visto un Indiano stare sotto il tiro di cento fucili con nient’altro che un piccolo coltello da scotennare e uccidere un uomo bianco ritto in cima a un forte» disse Crake.

«E come, che cosa ne fece?» chiese l’altro.

«Lo scagliò» rispose Crake, «lo scagliò in un lampo, prima che si potesse sparare un colpo. Non so dove abbia imparato il trucco.»

«Be’!, spero che tu non l’abbia imparato» disse il nipote, ridendo.

«Mi pare» disse padre Brown, pensieroso, «che la storia potrebbe avere una morale.»

Mentre parlavano, il signor Wilton, il segretario, era uscito dalla stanza interna e stava ad attendere: un uomo pallido, dai capelli chiari, con il mento quadrato e occhi fermi dallo sguardo simile a quello di un cane; non era difficile credere che avesse l’occhio vigile di un cane da guardia.

Disse soltanto: «Il signor Merton può riceverla fra una decina di minuti», ma bastò come segnale a sciogliere il crocchio di chiacchieroni. Il vecchio Crake disse che doveva andare, e il nipote uscì con lui e con il suo compagno legale, lasciando padre Brown per un momento solo con il segretario; poiché il gigante negroide all’altro capo della stanza a stento poteva essere sentito come umano o vivo: sedeva così immobile, con le larghe spalle voltate verso di loro, lo sguardo fisso verso la stanza interna.

«Precauzioni piuttosto elaborate qui, temo» disse il segretario. «Avrà probabilmente sentito parlare di questo Daniel Doom, e del perché non sia prudente lasciare il capo troppo a lungo da solo.»

«Ma proprio adesso è solo, non è vero?» disse Father Brown.

Il segretario lo guardò con gravi occhi grigi. «Per quindici minuti» disse. «Per quindici minuti sulle ventiquattr’ore. È tutta la vera solitudine che ha; e su quella insiste, per una ragione piuttosto notevole.»

«E qual è la ragione?» domandò il visitatore. Wilton, il segretario, continuò a fissarlo con lo sguardo fermo, ma la bocca, che era stata semplicemente grave, si fece torva.

«La Coppa Copta» disse. «Forse lei ha dimenticato la Coppa Copta; ma lui non ha dimenticato quella né alcun’altra cosa. Non si fida di nessuno di noi riguardo alla Coppa Copta. È chiusa da qualche parte e in qualche modo in quella stanza, cosicché soltanto lui possa trovarla; e non la tira fuori finché non ci siamo tolti tutti di mezzo. Così dobbiamo rischiare quel quarto d’ora mentre lui siede e la adora; suppongo sia la sola adorazione che gli riesca. Non che vi sia davvero un rischio; perché ho trasformato tutto questo posto in una trappola in cui non credo che nemmeno il diavolo in persona riuscirebbe a entrare… o, per lo meno, a uscire. Se questo infernale Daniel Doom ci fa una visita, resterà a cena e a lungo dopo, per Dio! Io me ne sto qui sui carboni ardenti per i quindici minuti, e nell’istante in cui sentissi uno sparo o un rumore di lotta premerei questo bottone e una corrente da sedia elettrica correrebbe in cerchio lungo tutto il muro di quel giardino, così che sarebbe la morte a varcarlo o a scalarlo. Naturalmente non ci potrebbe essere uno sparo, perché questa è l’unica via d’ingresso; e la sola finestra a cui egli siede è lassù, in cima a una torre liscia come un palo insaponato. Ma, a ogni modo, qui siamo tutti armati, si capisce; e se Doom riuscisse a entrare in quella stanza sarebbe morto prima di uscirne.»

Father Brown guardava sbattendo le palpebre verso il tappeto, immerso in profonde riflessioni. Poi disse all’improvviso, con qualcosa che somigliava a un sussulto: «Spero non le dispiaccia che io lo faccia notare, ma proprio in questo momento mi è balenata in testa una specie di idea. Riguarda lei.»

‘Indeed,’ remarked Wilton, ‘and what about me?’

‘I think you are a man of one idea,’ said Father Brown, ‘and you will forgive me for saying that it seems to be even more the idea of catching Daniel Doom than of defending Brander Merton.’

Wilton started a little and continued to stare at his companion; then very slowly his grim mouth took on a rather curious smile. ‘How did you—what makes you think that?’ he asked.

‘You said that if you heard a shot you could instantly electrocute the escaping enemy,’ remarked the priest. ‘I suppose it occurred to you that the shot might be fatal to your employer before the shock was fatal to his foe. I don’t mean that you wouldn’t protect Mr Merton if you could, but it seems to come rather second in your thoughts. The arrangements are very elaborate, as you say, and you seem to have elaborated them. But they seem even more designed to catch a murderer than to save a man.’

‘Father Brown,’ said the secretary, who had recovered his quiet tone, ‘you’re very smart, but there’s something more to you than smartness. Somehow you’re the sort of man to whom one wants to tell the truth; and besides, you’ll probably hear it, anyhow, for in one way it’s a joke against me already. They all say I’m a monomaniac about running down this big crook, and perhaps I am. But I’ll tell you one thing that none of them know. My full name is John Wilton Border.’ Father Brown nodded as if he were completely enlightened, but the other went on.

‘This fellow who calls himself Doom killed my father and uncle and ruined my mother. When Merton wanted a secretary I took the job, because I thought that where the cup was the criminal might sooner or later be. But I didn’t know who the criminal was and could only wait for him; and I meant to serve Merton faithfully.’

‘I understand,’ said Father Brown gently; ‘and, by the way, isn’t it time that we attended on him?’

‘Why, yes,’ answered Wilton, again starting a little out of his brooding so that the priest concluded that his vindictive mania had again absorbed him for a moment.’ Go in now by all means.’

Father Brown walked straight into the inner room. No sound of greetings followed, but only a dead silence; and a moment after the priest reappeared in the doorway.

At the same moment the silent bodyguard sitting near the door moved suddenly; and it was as if a huge piece of furniture had come to life. It seemed as though something in the very attitude of the priest had been a signal; for his head was against the light from the inner window and his face was in shadow.

‘I suppose you will press that button,’ he said with a sort of sigh.

Wilton seemed to awake from his savage brooding with a bound and leapt up with a catch in his voice.

‘There was no shot,’ he cried.

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, ‘it depends what you mean by a shot.’

Wilton rushed forward, and they plunged into the inner room together. It was a comparatively small room and simply though elegantly furnished. Opposite to them one wide window stood open, over—looking the garden and the wooded plain. Close up against the window stood a chair and a small table, as if the captive desired as much air and light as was allowed him during his brief luxury of loneliness.

On the little table under the window stood the Coptic Cup; its owner had evidently been looking at it in the best light. It was well worth looking at, for that white and brilliant daylight turned its precious stones to many—coloured flames so that it might have been a model of the Holy Grail. It was well worth looking at; but Brander Merton was not looking at it. For his head had fallen back over his chair, his mane of white hair hanging towards the floor, and his spike of grizzled beard thrust up towards the ceiling, and out of his throat stood a long, brown—painted arrow with red leathers at the other end.

‘A silent shot,’ said Father Brown, in a low voice; ‘I was just wondering about those new inventions for silencing firearms. But this is a very old invention, and quite as silent.’

Then, after a moment, he added: ‘I’m afraid he is dead. What are you going to do?’

The pale secretary roused himself with abrupt resolution. ‘I’m going to press that button, of course,’ he said, ‘and if that doesn’t do for Daniel Doom, I’m going to hunt him through the world till I find him.’

‘Take care it doesn’t do for any of our friends,’ observed Father Brown; ‘they can hardly be far off; we’d better call them.’

‘That lot know all about the wall,’ answered Wilton. ‘None of them will try to climb it, unless one of them … is in a great hurry.’

Father Brown went to the window by which the arrow had evidently entered and looked out. The garden, with its flat flower— beds, lay far below like a delicately coloured map of the world. The whole vista seemed so vast and empty, the tower seemed set so far up in the sky that as he stared out a strange phrase came back to his memory.

‘A bolt from the blue,’ he said. ‘What was that somebody said about a bolt from the blue and death coming out of the sky? Look how far away everything looks; it seems extraordinary that an arrow could come so far, unless it were an arrow from heaven.’

Wilton had returned, but did not reply, and the priest went on as in soliloquy. ‘One thinks of aviation. We must ask young Wain … about aviation.’

‘There’s a lot of it round here,’ said the secretary.

‘Case of very old or very new weapons,’ observed Father Brown. ‘Some would be quite familiar to his old uncle, I suppose; we must ask him about arrows. This looks rather like a Red Indian arrow. I don’t know where the Red Indian shot it from; but you remember the story the old man told. I said it had a moral.’

‘If it had a moral,’ said Wilton warmly, ‘it was only that a real ‘Red Indian might shoot a thing farther than you’d fancy. It’s nonsense your suggesting a parallel.’

‘I don’t think you’ve got the moral quite right,’ said Father Brown.

Although the little priest appeared to melt into the millions of New York next day, without any apparent attempt to be anything but a number in a numbered street, he was, in fact, unobtrusively busy for the next fortnight with the commission that had been given him, for he was filled with profound fear about a possible miscarriage of justice. Without having any particular air of singling them out from his other new acquaintances, he found it easy to fall into talk with the two or three men recently involved in the mystery; and with old Hickory Crake especially he had a curious and interesting conversation. It took place on a seat in Central Park, where the veteran sat with his bony hands and hatchet face resting on the oddly— shaped head of a walking—stick of dark red wood, possibly modelled on a tomahawk.

‘Well, it may be a long shot,’ he said, wagging his head, ‘but I wouldn’t advise you to be too positive about how far an Indian arrow could go. I’ve known some bow—shots that seemed to go straighter than any bullets, and hit the mark to amazement, considering how long they had been travelling. Of course, you practically never hear now of a Red Indian with a bow and arrows, still less of a Red Indian hanging about here. But if by any chance there were one of the old Indian marksmen, with one of the old Indian bows, hiding in those trees hundreds of yards beyond the Merton outer wall—why, then I wouldn’t put it past the noble savage to be able to send an arrow over the wall and into the top window of Merton’s house; no, nor into Merton, either. I’ve seen things quite as wonderful as that done in the old days.’

‘No doubt,’ said the priest, ‘you have done things quite as wonderful, as well as seen them.’

Old Crake chuckled, and then said gruffly: ‘Oh, that’s all ancient history.’

‘Some people have a way of studying ancient history,’ the priest said. ‘I suppose we may take it there is nothing in your old record In make people talk unpleasantly about this affair.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Crake, his eyes shifting sharply for the first time, in his red, wooden face, that was rather like I he head of a tomahawk.

‘Well, since you were so well acquainted with all the arts and crafts of the Redskin—‘ began Father Brown slowly.

Crake had had a hunched and almost shrunken appearance as he sat with his chin propped on its queer—shaped crutch. But the next instant he stood erect in the path like a fighting bravo with the crutch clutched like a cudgel.

‘What?’ he cried—in something like a raucous screech—‘what the hell! Are you standing up to me to tell me I might happen to have murdered my own brother—in—law?’

From a dozen seats dotted about the path people looked to— wards the disputants, as they stood facing each other in the middle of the path, the bald—headed energetic little man brandishing his outlandish stick like a club, and the black, dumpy figure of the little cleric looking at him without moving a muscle, save for his hinging eyelids. For a moment it looked as if the black, dumpy figure would be knocked on the head, and laid out with true Red Indian promptitude and dispatch; and the large form of an Irish policeman could be seen heaving up in the distance and bearing down on the group. But the priest only said, quite placidly, like one answering an ordinary query:

‘I have formed certain conclusions about it, but I do not think I will mention them till I make my report.’

Whether under the influence of the footsteps of the policeman or of the eyes of the priest, old Hickory tucked his stick under his arm and put his hat on again, grunting. The priest bade him a placid good morning, and passed in an unhurried fashion out of the park, making his way to the lounge of the hotel where he knew that young Wain was to be found. The young man sprang up with a greeting; he looked even more haggard and harassed than before, as if some worry were eating him away; and the priest had a suspicion that his young friend had recently been engaged, with only too conspicuous success, in evading the last Amendment to the American Constitution. But at the first word about his hobby or favourite science he was vigilant and concentrated enough. For Father Brown had asked, in an idle and conversational fashion, whether much flying was done in that district, and had told how he had at first mistaken Mr Merton’s circular wall for an aerodrome.

‘It’s a wonder you didn’t see any while we were there,’ answered Captain Wain. ‘Sometimes they’re as thick as flies; that open plain is a great place for them, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were the chief breeding—ground, so to speak, for my sort of birds in the future. I’ve flown a good deal there myself, of course, and I know most of the fellows about here who flew in the war; but there are a whole lot of people taking to it out there now whom I never heard of in my life. I suppose it will be like motoring soon, and every man in the States will have one.’

‘Being endowed by his Creator,’ said Father Brown with a smile, ‘with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of motoring— not to mention aviation. So I suppose we may take it that one strange aeroplane passing over that house, at certain times, wouldn’t be noticed much.’

‘No,’ replied the young man; ‘I don’t suppose it would.’

‘Or even if the man were known,’ went on the other, ‘I suppose he might get hold of a machine that wouldn’t be recognized as his. If you, for instance, flew in the ordinary way, Mr Merton and his friends might recognize the rig—out, perhaps; but you might pass pretty near that window on a different pattern of plane, or whatever you call it; near enough for practical purposes.’

‘Well, yes,’ began the young man, almost automatically, and then ceased, and remained staring at the cleric with an open mouth and eyes standing out of his head.

«Non credo che abbiate colto del tutto la morale», disse Padre Brown.

Sebbene il giorno seguente il piccolo prete paresse dissolversi nei milioni di New York, senza alcun apparente tentativo di essere qualcosa di più d’un numero in una via numerata, egli fu in realtà, per la quindicina successiva, discretamente indaffarato intorno all’incarico che gli era stato affidato, poiché lo colmava un profondo timore d’un possibile errore giudiziario. Senza dare a vedere in modo particolare di distinguerli dalle altre sue nuove conoscenze, gli riuscì agevole intavolare discorsi con i due o tre uomini di recente coinvolti nel mistero; e proprio col vecchio Hickory Crake ebbe una conversazione curiosa e interessante. Avvenne su una panchina di Central Park, dove il veterano sedeva con le mani ossute e il volto a scure appoggiati sull’impugnatura dalla foggia bizzarra d’un bastone da passeggio di legno rosso scuro, forse modellato su un tomahawk.

«Beh, sarà pure un tiro azzardato», disse, scuotendo il capo, «ma non vi consiglierei d’essere troppo perentorio su quanto lontano possa arrivare una freccia indiana. Ho conosciuto certi colpi d’arco che parevano andare più dritti d’ogni pallottola, e cogliere il bersaglio in modo prodigioso, se si pensa a quanto a lungo avevano viaggiato. Certo, oggigiorno non si sente praticamente mai parlare d’un Pellerossa con arco e frecce, e ancor meno d’un Pellerossa che se ne stia a bighellonare da queste parti. Ma se per un qualsiasi caso ci fosse uno dei vecchi tiratori indiani, con uno dei vecchi archi indiani, nascosto fra quegli alberi centinaia di metri oltre il muro esterno di casa Merton… ebbene, allora non lo escluderei affatto che il nobile selvaggio fosse capace di scoccare una freccia oltre il muro e fin nella finestra più alta della casa di Merton; no, e nemmeno dentro Merton. Ho visto compiere cose altrettanto meravigliose ai vecchi tempi.»

«Senza dubbio», disse il prete, «voi avete compiuto cose altrettanto meravigliose, oltre ad averle viste.»

Il vecchio Crake fece una risatina, poi disse con voce arcigna: «Oh, sono tutte faccende di antica storia.»

«C’è chi ha l’abitudine di studiarla, l’antica storia», disse il prete. «Suppongo si possa ritenere che nei vostri vecchi trascorsi non ci sia nulla che induca la gente a sparlare di questa faccenda.»

«Che cosa intendete?», domandò Crake, e per la prima volta gli occhi guizzarono acuti nel volto rosso e legnoso, che somigliava piuttosto alla lama d’un tomahawk.

«Ecco, dato che eravate così ferrato in tutte le arti e i mestieri del Pellerossa…», cominciò lentamente Father Brown.

Crake aveva assunto un aspetto curvo e quasi rattrappito, seduto com’era col mento puntellato sulla sua stampella dalla foggia bizzarra. Ma un istante dopo era ritto in piedi sul sentiero come un bravo pronto alla rissa, la stampella stretta come un randello.

«Cosa?», gridò, con qualcosa di simile a uno strido rauco, «che diavolo! State forse tenendomi testa per dirmi che potrei aver assassinato mio cognato?»

Da una dozzina di panchine sparse lungo il sentiero la gente volse lo sguardo verso i due contendenti, mentre stavano l’uno di fronte all’altro in mezzo al viale: l’omino calvo ed energico che brandiva il suo bastone stravagante come una clava, e la figura nera e tozza del piccolo chierico che lo fissava senza muovere un muscolo, se non per le palpebre che gli si abbassavano. Per un momento parve che la figura nera e tozza dovesse essere colpita al capo e stesa a terra con la prontezza e la spicciativa risolutezza d’un autentico Pellerossa; e in lontananza si scorgeva la corpulenta sagoma d’un poliziotto irlandese sollevarsi e piombare verso il gruppo. Ma il prete disse soltanto, con perfetta placidezza, come chi risponde a una domanda qualsiasi:

«Mi sono fatto certe conclusioni al riguardo, ma non credo che le esporrò prima di stendere la mia relazione.»

Fosse per l’influsso dei passi del poliziotto o per quello degli occhi del prete, il vecchio Hickory si ficcò il bastone sotto il braccio e si rimise il cappello, borbottando. Il prete gli augurò un placido buongiorno e uscì dal parco senza affrettarsi, dirigendosi verso il salone dell’albergo dove sapeva di poter trovare il giovane Wain. Il giovane balzò in piedi con un saluto; appariva ancor più sparuto e tormentato di prima, come se qualche preoccupazione lo stesse consumando; e il prete ebbe il sospetto che il suo giovane amico si fosse di recente adoperato, con successo fin troppo vistoso, a eludere l’ultimo Emendamento alla Costituzione americana. Ma alla prima parola sul suo passatempo, o scienza prediletta, si fece abbastanza vigile e concentrato. Padre Brown gli aveva infatti chiesto, in tono ozioso e discorsivo, se in quel distretto si volasse molto, e gli aveva raccontato come dapprima avesse scambiato il muro circolare del signor Merton per un aerodromo.

«È una meraviglia che non ne abbiate visto nemmeno uno mentre eravamo lì», rispose il capitano Wain. «A volte sono fitti come mosche; quella pianura aperta è un gran posto per loro, e non mi stupirei se in futuro diventasse il principale vivaio, per così dire, dei volatili della mia specie. Anch’io, naturalmente, ho volato parecchio da quelle parti, e conosco quasi tutti quelli di qui che hanno volato durante la guerra; ma c’è tutta una gran quantità di gente che adesso ci si dedica laggiù e di cui in vita mia non avevo mai sentito parlare. Suppongo che presto sarà come con l’automobile, e ogni uomo negli Stati ne avrà una.»

«Essendo stato dotato dal suo Creatore», disse Father Brown con un sorriso, «del diritto alla vita, alla libertà e alla ricerca dell’automobilismo… per non parlare dell’aviazione. Sicché suppongo si possa ritenere che un aeroplano sconosciuto in transito sopra quella casa, in certi momenti, non desterebbe molta attenzione.»

«No», replicò il giovane; «suppongo di no.»

«O anche se l’uomo fosse conosciuto», proseguì l’altro, «suppongo potrebbe procurarsi una macchina che non venisse riconosciuta come sua. Se voi, per esempio, voleste nel modo consueto, il signor Merton e i suoi amici riconoscerebbero forse l’attrezzatura; ma potreste passare assai vicino a quella finestra su un modello diverso di aeroplano, o come lo chiamate voi; abbastanza vicino per gli scopi pratici.»

«Beh, sì», cominciò il giovane, quasi meccanicamente, poi tacque, e rimase a fissare il chierico a bocca aperta e con gli occhi sbarrati fuori dalle orbite.

‘My God!’ he said, in a low voice;’ my God!’

Then he rose from the lounge seat, pale and shaking from head to foot and still staring at the priest.

‘Are you mad?’ he said;’ are you raving mad?’

There was a silence and then he spoke again in a swift hissing fashion. ‘You positively come here to suggest—‘

‘No; only to collect suggestions,’ said Father Brown, rising. ‘I may have formed some conclusions provisionally, but I had better reserve them for the present.’

And then saluting the other with the same stiff civility, he passed out of the hotel to continue his curious peregrinations.

By the dusk of that day they had led him down the dingy streets and steps that straggled and tumbled towards the river in the the oldest and most irregular part of the city. Immediately under the coloured lantern that marked the entrance to a rather low Chinese restaurant he encountered a figure he had seen before, though by no means presenting itself to the eye as he had seen it.

Mr Norman Drage still confronted the world grimly behind his great goggles, which seemed somehow to cover his face like a dark musk of glass. But except for the goggles, his appearance had undergone a strange transformation in the month that had elapsed since the murder. He had then, as Father Brown had noted, been dressed up to the nines— up to that point, indeed, where there begins to be too fine a distinction between the dandy and the dummy outside a tailor’s shop. But now all those externals were mysteriously altered for the worse; as if the tailor’s dummy had been turned into a scarecrow. His top hat still existed, but it was battered and shabby; his clothes were dilapidated; his watch—chain and minor ornaments were gone. Father Brown, however, addressed him as if they had met yesterday, and made no demur to silting down with him on a bench in the cheap eating—house whither he was bound. It was not he, however, who began the conversation.

‘Well?’ growled Drage, ‘and have you succeeded in avenging your holy and sainted millionaire? We know all millionaires are holy and sainted; you can find it all in the papers next day, about how they lived by the light of the Family Bible they read at their mother’s knee. Gee! if they’d only read out some of the things there are in the Family Bible, the mother might have been startled some. And the millionaire, too, I reckon. The old Book’s full of a lot of grand fierce old notions they don’t grow nowadays; sort of wisdom of the Stone Age and buried under the Pyramids. Suppose somebody had flung old man Merton from the top of that tower of his, and let him be eaten by dogs at the bottom, it would be no worse than what happened to Jezebel. Wasn’t Agag hacked into little pieces, for all he went walking delicately? Merton walked delicately all his life, damn him—until he got too delicate to walk at all. But the shaft of the Lord found him out, as it might have done in the old Book, and struck him dead on the top of his tower to be a spectacle to the people.

‘The shaft was material, at least,’ said his companion.

‘The Pyramids are mighty material, and they hold down the dead kings all right,’ grinned the man in the goggles. ‘I think there’s a lot to be said for these old material religions. There’s old carvings that have lasted for thousands of years, showing their gods and emperors with bended bows; with hands that look as if they could really bend bows of stone. Material, perhaps—but what materials! Don’t you sometimes stand staring at those old Eastern patterns and things, till you have a hunch that old Lord God is still driving like a dark Apollo, and shooting black rays of death?’

‘If he is,’ replied Father Brown, ‘I might call him by another name. But I doubt whether Merton died by a dark ray or even a stone arrow.’

‘I guess you think he’s St Sebastian,’ sneered Drage, ‘killed with an arrow. A millionaire must be a martyr. How do you know he didn’t deserve it? You don’t know much about your millionaire, I fancy. Well, let me tell you he deserved it a hundred times over.’

‘Well,’ asked Father Brown gently, ‘why didn’t you murder him?’

‘You want to know why I didn’t?’ said the other, staring. ‘Well, you’re a nice sort of clergyman.’

‘Not at all,’ said the other, as if waving away a compliment.

‘I suppose it’s your way of saying I did,’ snarled Drage. ‘Well, prove it, that’s all. As for him, I reckon he was no loss.’

‘Yes, he was,’ said Father Brown, sharply. ‘He was a loss to you. That’s why you didn’t kill him.’

And he walked out of the room, leaving the man in goggles gaping after him.

It was nearly a month later that Father Brown revisited the house where the third millionaire had suffered from the vendetta of Daniel Doom. A sort of council was held of the persons most interested. Old Crake sat at the head of the table with his nephew at his right hand, the lawyer on his left; the big man with the African features, whose name appeared to be Harris, was ponderously present, if only as a material witness; a red—haired, sharp -nosed individual addressed as Dixon seemed to be the representative of Pinkerton’s or some such private agency; and Father Brown slipped unobtrusively into an empty seat beside him.

Every newspaper in the world was full of the catastrophe of the colossus of finance, of the great organizer of the Big Business that bestrides the modern world; but from the tiny group that had been nearest to him at the very instant of his death very little could be learned. The uncle, nephew, and attendant solicitor declared they were well outside the outer wall before the alarm was raised; and inquiries of the official guardians at both barriers brought answers that were rather confused, but on the whole confirmatory. Only one other complication seemed to call for consideration. It seemed that round about the time of the death, before or after, a stranger had been found hanging mysteriously round the entrance and asking to see Mr Merton. The servants had some difficulty in understanding what he meant, for his language was very obscure; but it was afterwards considered to be also very suspicious, since he had said something about a wicked man being destroyed by a word out of the sky.

«Dio mio!» disse a bassa voce; «Dio mio!».

Poi si alzò dal divanetto, pallido e tremante da capo a piedi, sempre fissando il sacerdote.

«Siete pazzo?» disse; «siete pazzo furioso?».

Vi fu un silenzio, poi riprese a parlare con un rapido sibilo. «Voi venite qui apposta per insinuare…».

«No; solo per raccogliere insinuazioni» disse Father Brown, alzandosi. «Può darsi che mi sia fatto qualche conclusione provvisoria, ma farò meglio a riservarmela per il momento».

E allora, salutando l’altro con la medesima rigida cortesia, uscì dall’albergo per proseguire le sue curiose peregrinazioni.

Sul far della sera di quel giorno esse lo avevano condotto giù per le stradine sudicie e le scalinate che degradavano disordinatamente verso il fiume, nella parte più antica e più irregolare della città. Proprio sotto la lanterna colorata che segnalava l’ingresso di un ristorante cinese piuttosto malfamato, s’imbatté in una figura che aveva già veduto, benché non gli si presentasse affatto all’occhio così come l’aveva veduta.

Il signor Norman Drage affrontava ancora il mondo con aria arcigna dietro i suoi grandi occhialoni, che parevano in qualche modo coprirgli il volto come una cupa maschera di vetro. Ma, a parte gli occhialoni, il suo aspetto aveva subìto una strana trasformazione nel mese trascorso dal delitto. Allora, come Padre Brown aveva notato, era vestito con ogni ricercatezza fino all’inverosimile, fino a quel punto, invero, in cui comincia a farsi troppo sottile la distinzione fra il dandy e il manichino esposto nella vetrina d’un sarto. Ma ora tutti quegli ornamenti esteriori erano misteriosamente mutati in peggio, come se il manichino del sarto fosse stato trasformato in uno spaventapasseri. Il suo cilindro esisteva ancora, ma era ammaccato e liso; gli abiti erano sdruciti; la catena dell’orologio e i piccoli fronzoli erano scomparsi. Padre Brown, tuttavia, gli si rivolse come se si fossero incontrati il giorno prima, e non ebbe difficoltà a sedersi accanto a lui su una panca nella misera bettola verso la quale l’altro era diretto. Non fu però lui a cominciare la conversazione.

«Ebbene?» brontolò Drage, «e siete riuscito a vendicare il vostro santo e beato milionario? Sappiamo bene che tutti i milionari sono santi e beati; potete leggere tutto nei giornali il giorno dopo, di come vivessero al lume della Bibbia di famiglia che leggevano sulle ginocchia della madre. Perbacco! se avessero letto ad alta voce certe cose che stanno nella Bibbia di famiglia, la madre forse ne avrebbe avuto qualche sussulto. E anche il milionario, immagino. Quel vecchio Libro è pieno d’un mucchio di antiche idee grandiose e feroci che oggigiorno non crescono più; una specie di saggezza dell’età della pietra, sepolta sotto le Piramidi. Supponete che qualcuno avesse scagliato il vecchio Merton dalla cima di quella sua torre, lasciandolo divorare dai cani in fondo: non sarebbe stato peggio di ciò che accadde a Iezabele. E Agag non fu forse fatto a pezzettini, per quanto camminasse con delicatezza? Merton camminò con delicatezza per tutta la vita, maledetto lui, finché non divenne troppo delicato per camminare del tutto. Ma la freccia del Signore lo scovò, come sarebbe potuto accadere nel vecchio Libro, e lo colpì a morte in cima alla sua torre, a spettacolo del popolo».

«La freccia, quanto meno, era materiale» disse il suo compagno.

«Le Piramidi sono ben materiali, eppure tengono giù i re morti come si deve» ghignò l’uomo dagli occhialoni. «Credo che ci sia molto da dire in favore di queste vecchie religioni materiali. Ci sono antichi intagli che sono durati per migliaia d’anni, e mostrano i loro dèi e i loro imperatori con archi tesi; con mani che paiono capaci di tendere davvero archi di pietra. Materiali, forse, ma che materiali! Non vi capita, a volte, di restare a fissare quegli antichi motivi orientali e simili cose, finché non vi coglie il sospetto che quell’antico Signore Iddio stia ancora guidando il carro come un cupo Apollo, scoccando neri raggi di morte?».

«Se è così» replicò Padre Brown, «potrei chiamarlo con un altro nome. Ma dubito che Merton sia morto per un raggio oscuro, o anche per una freccia di pietra».

«Immagino che lo crediate un san Sebastiano» sogghignò Drage, «ucciso da una freccia. Un milionario dev’essere per forza un martire. Come sapete che non se lo meritava? Non sapete granché del vostro milionario, mi pare. Ebbene, lasciate che ve lo dica: se lo meritava cento volte».

«Ebbene» chiese Padre Brown con dolcezza, «perché allora non lo avete ammazzato voi?».

«Volete sapere perché non l’ho fatto?» disse l’altro, fissandolo. «Bel tipo di ecclesiastico che siete».

«Niente affatto» disse l’altro, come per respingere un complimento.

«Suppongo sia il vostro modo di dire che l’ho fatto» ringhiò Drage. «Ebbene, provatelo, ecco tutto. Quanto a lui, ritengo che non sia stata una gran perdita».

«Sì, invece» disse Father Brown, secco. «È stata una perdita per voi. Ecco perché non lo avete ucciso».

E uscì dalla stanza, lasciando l’uomo dagli occhialoni a guardarlo a bocca aperta.

Era passato quasi un mese quando Padre Brown tornò a visitare la casa in cui il terzo milionario aveva patito la vendetta di Daniel Doom. Si tenne una sorta di consiglio fra le persone più direttamente interessate. Il vecchio Crake sedeva a capotavola, con il nipote alla sua destra e l’avvocato alla sinistra; l’omone dai tratti africani, il cui nome pareva essere Harris, era pesantemente presente, non fosse che a titolo di testimone materiale; un individuo dai capelli rossi e dal naso aguzzo, chiamato Dixon, sembrava il rappresentante dell’agenzia Pinkerton o di qualche altra simile agenzia privata; e Padre Brown scivolò senza dar nell’occhio in un seggio vuoto accanto a lui.

Ogni giornale del mondo era pieno della catastrofe del colosso della finanza, del grande organizzatore di quel Grande Affare che soggioga il mondo moderno; ma dal minuscolo gruppo che gli era stato più vicino nell’istante stesso della sua morte ben poco si poté apprendere. Lo zio, il nipote e il procuratore che li accompagnava dichiararono di trovarsi già ben oltre il muro esterno prima che venisse dato l’allarme; e le indagini presso i guardiani ufficiali di entrambe le barriere fornirono risposte piuttosto confuse, ma nell’insieme concordi. Solo un’altra complicazione pareva richiedere attenzione. Sembrava che, all’incirca all’ora della morte, prima o dopo, uno sconosciuto fosse stato sorpreso ad aggirarsi misteriosamente intorno all’ingresso, chiedendo di vedere il signor Merton. I servitori avevano avuto qualche difficoltà a capire ciò che intendeva, giacché il suo linguaggio era assai oscuro; ma in seguito lo si giudicò anche assai sospetto, poiché aveva detto qualcosa a proposito di un uomo malvagio distrutto da una parola venuta dal cielo.

Peter Wain leaned forward, the eyes bright in his haggard face, and said:

‘I’ll bet on that, anyhow. Norman Drage.’

‘And who in the world is Norman Drage?’ asked his uncle.

‘That’s what I want to know,’ replied the young man. ‘I practically asked him, but he has got a wonderful trick of twisting every straight question crooked; it’s like lunging at a fencer. He hooked on to me with hints about the flying—ship of the future; but I never trusted him much.’

‘But what sort of a man is he?’ asked Crake.

‘He’s a mystagogue,’ said Father Brown, with innocent promptitude. ‘There are quite a lot of them about; the sort of men about town who hint to you in Paris cafes and cabarets that they’ve lifted the veil of Isis or know the secret of Stonehenge. In a case like this they’re sure to have some sort of mystical explanations.’

The smooth, dark head of Mr Barnard Blake, the lawyer, was inclined politely towards the speaker, but his smile was faintly hostile.

‘I should hardly have thought, sir,’ he said, ‘that you had any quarrel with mystical explanations.’

‘On the contrary,’ replied Father Brown, blinking amiably at him. ‘That’s just why I can quarrel with ‘em. Any sham lawyer could bamboozle me, but he couldn’t bamboozle you; because you’re a lawyer yourself. Any fool could dress up as a Red Indian and I’d swallow him whole as the only original Hiawatha; but Mr Crake would see through him at once. A swindler could pretend to me that he knew all about aeroplanes, but not to Captain Wain. And it’s just the same with the other, don’t you see? It’s just because I have picked up a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you’ve seen it it’s still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it’s a platitude. But in the case of Drage, I admit he had also another and more practical notion in talking about fire from heaven or bolts from the blue.’

‘And what was his notion?’ asked Wain. ‘I think it wants watching whatever it is.’

‘Well,’ replied the priest, slowly, ‘he wanted us to think the murders were miracles because … well, because he knew they weren’t.’

‘Ah,’ said Wain, with a sort of hiss, ‘I was waiting for that. In plain words, he is the criminal.’

‘In plain words, he is the criminal who didn’t commit the crime,’ answered Father Brown calmly.

‘Is that your conception of plain words?’ inquired Blake politely.

‘You’ll be saying I’m the mystagogue now,’ said Father Brown somewhat abashed, but with a broad smile, ‘but it was really quite accidental. Drage didn’t commit the crime—I mean this crime. His only crime was blackmailing somebody, and he hung about here to do it; but he wasn’t likely to want the secret to be public property or the whole business to be cut short by death. We can talk about him afterwards. Just at the moment, I only want him cleared out of the way.’

‘Out of the way of what?’ asked the other.

‘Out of the way of the truth,’ replied the priest, looking at him tranquilly, with level eyelids.

‘Do you mean,’ faltered the other, ‘that you know the truth?’

‘I rather think so,’ said Father Brown modestly.

There was an abrupt silence, after which Crake cried out suddenly and irrelevantly in a rasping voice:

‘Why, where is that secretary fellow? Wilton! He ought to be here.’

‘I am in communication with Mr Wilton,’ said Father Brown gravely; ‘in fact, I asked him to ring me up here in a few minutes from now. I may say that we’ve worked the thing out together, in a manner of speaking.’

‘If you’re working together, I suppose it’s all right,’ grumbled Crake. ‘I know he was always a sort of bloodhound on the trail of his vanishing crook, so perhaps it was well to hunt in couples with him. But if you know the truth about this, where the devil did you get it from?’

‘I got it from you,’ answered the priest, quietly, and continued to gaze mildly at the glaring veteran.’ I mean I made the first guess from a hint in a story of yours about an Indian who threw a knife and hit a man on the top of a fortress.’

‘You’ve said that several times,’ said Wain, with a puzzled air; ‘but I can’t see any inference, except that this murderer threw an arrow and hit a man on the top of a house very like a fortress. But of course the arrow wasn’t thrown but shot, and would go much further. Certainly it went uncommonly far; but I don’t see how it brings us any farther.’

‘I’m afraid you missed the point of the story,’ said Father Brown. ‘It isn’t that if one thing cap go far another can go farther. It is that the wrong use of a tool can cut both ways. The men on Crake’s fort thought of a knife as a thing for a hand—to— hand fight and forgot that it could be a missile like a javelin. Some other people I know thought of a thing as a missile like a javelin and forgot that, after all, it could be used hand—to—hand as a spear. In short, the moral of the story is that since a dagger can be turned into an arrow, so can an arrow be turned into a dagger.’

They were all looking at him now; but he continued in the same casual and unconscious tone: ‘Naturally we wondered and worried a good deal about who shot that arrow through the window and whether it came from far away, and so on. But the truth is that nobody shot the arrow at all. It never came in at the window at all.’

‘Then how did it come there?’ asked the swarthy lawyer, with a rather lowering face.

‘Somebody brought it with him, I suppose,’ said Father Brown; ‘it wouldn’t be hard to carry or conceal. Somebody had it in his hand as he stood with Merton in Merton’s own room. Somebody thrust it into Merton’s throat like a poignard, and then had the highly intelligent idea of placing the whole thing at such a place and angle that we all assumed in a flash that it had flown in at the window like a bird.’

‘Somebody,’ said old Crake, in a voice as heavy as stone.

Peter Wain si sporse in avanti, gli occhi accesi nel volto scavato, e disse:

«Su questo, comunque, ci scommetto. Norman Drage».

«E chi diavolo è Norman Drage?» domandò lo zio.

«È proprio quello che vorrei sapere» rispose il giovane. «Gliel’ho chiesto, praticamente; ma ha un talento straordinario nel torcere ogni domanda diretta e renderla obliqua: è come menare una stoccata a uno schermidore. Mi si è appiccicato con allusioni alla nave volante dell’avvenire; ma non mi sono mai fidato granché di lui».

«Ma che razza d’uomo è?» chiese Crake.

«È un mistagogo» disse Padre Brown, con innocente prontezza. «Ce n’è parecchi in giro; quel genere di uomini di mondo che nei caffè e nei cabaret di Parigi ti lasciano intendere di aver sollevato il velo di Iside o di conoscere il segreto di Stonehenge. In un caso come questo di sicuro hanno pronta qualche spiegazione mistica».

Il capo liscio e bruno del signor Barnard Blake, l’avvocato, si chinò cortesemente verso chi parlava, ma il suo sorriso era vagamente ostile.

«Non avrei mai pensato, signore» disse, «che lei avesse qualcosa da ridire sulle spiegazioni mistiche».

«Al contrario» rispose Padre Brown, sbattendo le palpebre con aria amabile. «È proprio per questo che posso ridirci. Un finto avvocato qualunque potrebbe imbrogliarmi, ma non imbroglierebbe lei, perché lei l’avvocato lo fa davvero. Un imbecille qualunque potrebbe travestirsi da pellerossa e io me lo berrei tutto d’un fiato come l’unico e autentico Hiawatha; ma il signor Crake lo smaschererebbe all’istante. Un truffatore potrebbe darmi a intendere di sapere tutto degli aeroplani, ma non lo darebbe a intendere al capitano Wain. E con l’altra faccenda è esattamente lo stesso, non capisce? È proprio perché ho raccattato un po’ di nozioni sui mistici che non so che farmene dei mistagoghi. I mistici veri non nascondono i misteri, li rivelano. Espongono una cosa in piena luce, e quando l’hai vista è ancora un mistero. I mistagoghi, invece, nascondono una cosa nel buio e nel segreto, e quando la trovi è una banalità. Ma nel caso di Drage, ammetto che nel parlare di fuoco dal cielo e di saette a ciel sereno aveva anche un’altra idea, più pratica».

«E qual era la sua idea?» chiese Wain. «Comunque sia, credo che la si debba tener d’occhio».

«Ebbene» rispose il prete, lentamente, «voleva farci credere che i delitti fossero miracoli perché… ebbene, perché sapeva che non lo erano».

«Ah» fece Wain, con una specie di sibilo, «me l’aspettavo. In parole povere, è lui il criminale».

«In parole povere, è il criminale che non ha commesso il delitto» rispose Padre Brown con calma.

«Sarebbe questa la sua idea di parole povere?» s’informò Blake garbatamente.

«Adesso dirà che il mistagogo sono io» disse Padre Brown, un po’ confuso ma con un largo sorriso, «eppure è stato del tutto casuale. Drage non ha commesso il delitto… voglio dire questo delitto. Il suo unico delitto era ricattare qualcuno, e bighellonava qui intorno per farlo; ma difficilmente avrebbe voluto che il segreto diventasse di dominio pubblico, o che tutta la faccenda venisse troncata da una morte. Di lui potremo parlare dopo. Per il momento, voglio soltanto toglierlo di mezzo».

«Di mezzo a che cosa?» chiese l’altro.

«Di mezzo alla verità» rispose il prete, guardandolo tranquillo, con le palpebre immobili.

«Vuol dire» balbettò l’altro, «che lei conosce la verità?»

«Direi di sì» disse Padre Brown modestamente.

Ci fu un silenzio improvviso, dopo il quale Crake proruppe di scatto, in tono stridente e fuori luogo:

«Ma insomma, dov’è finito quel segretario? Wilton! Dovrebbe essere qui».

«Sono in contatto con il signor Wilton» disse Padre Brown con gravità; «anzi, gli ho chiesto di telefonarmi qui tra pochi minuti. Posso dire che abbiamo sbrogliato la cosa insieme, per così dire».

«Se lavorate insieme, allora suppongo vada bene» brontolò Crake. «So che è sempre stato una specie di segugio sulle tracce di quel suo furfante inafferrabile, sicché forse era il caso di dar la caccia in coppia con lui. Ma se lei sa la verità su tutto questo, dove diamine l’ha pescata?»

«L’ho pescata da lei» rispose il prete, con pacatezza, continuando a fissare mitemente il vecchio veterano dallo sguardo di fuoco. «Voglio dire che la prima ipotesi l’ho ricavata da un’allusione in un suo racconto, quello di un indiano che scagliò un coltello e colpì un uomo in cima a una fortezza».

«L’ha detto parecchie volte» disse Wain, con aria perplessa; «ma non ci vedo alcuna deduzione, se non che questo assassino ha scagliato una freccia e colpito un uomo in cima a una casa molto simile a una fortezza. Ma la freccia, s’intende, non è stata scagliata bensì tirata con l’arco, e sarebbe andata molto più lontano. Di certo è andata straordinariamente lontano; ma non vedo come questo ci porti più avanti».

«Temo che lei abbia mancato il senso del racconto» disse Padre Brown. «Non si tratta del fatto che, se una cosa può andar lontano, un’altra può andare più lontano. Si tratta del fatto che l’uso sbagliato di uno strumento può tagliare da entrambe le parti. Gli uomini sulla fortezza di Crake pensavano al coltello come a un’arma da combattimento corpo a corpo e dimenticavano che poteva essere un proiettile come un giavellotto. Certe altre persone che conosco pensavano a una cosa come a un proiettile simile a un giavellotto e dimenticavano che, in fin dei conti, poteva essere adoperata corpo a corpo come una lancia. In breve, la morale del racconto è che, così come un pugnale può essere trasformato in una freccia, allo stesso modo una freccia può essere trasformata in un pugnale».

Ora lo guardavano tutti; ma egli proseguì nello stesso tono casuale e distratto: «Naturalmente ci siamo lambiccati e tormentati non poco intorno a chi avesse scoccato quella freccia attraverso la finestra, e se venisse da lontano, e via dicendo. Ma la verità è che nessuno ha scoccato affatto la freccia. Non è affatto entrata dalla finestra».

«E allora come è arrivata lì?» chiese l’avvocato dalla carnagione scura, con volto piuttosto accigliato.

«Qualcuno ce l’ha portata con sé, suppongo» disse Padre Brown; «non sarebbe stato difficile trasportarla o nasconderla. Qualcuno l’aveva in mano mentre stava con Merton nella stanza di Merton. Qualcuno l’ha conficcata nella gola di Merton come un pugnale, e poi ha avuto l’idea quanto mai ingegnosa di collocare il tutto in un punto e con un’angolatura tali da farci supporre in un lampo che fosse volata dentro dalla finestra come un uccello».

«Qualcuno» disse il vecchio Crake, con voce pesante come la pietra.

The telephone bell rang with a strident and horrible clamour of insistence. It was in the adjoining room, and Father Brown had darted there before anybody else could move.

‘What the devil is it all about?’ cried Peter Wain, who seemed all shaken and distracted.

‘He said he expected to be rung up by Wilton, the secretary,’ replied his uncle in the same dead voice.

‘I suppose it is Wilton?’ observed the lawyer, like one speaking to fill up a silence. But nobody answered the question until Father Brown reappeared suddenly and silently in the room, bringing the answer.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, when he had resumed his seat,’ it was you who asked me to look into the truth about this puzzle; and having found the truth, I must tell it, without any pretence of softening the shock. I’m afraid anybody who pokes his nose into things like this can’t afford to be a respecter of persons.’

‘I suppose,’ said Crake, breaking the silence that followed, ‘that means that some of us are accused, or suspected.’

‘All of us are suspected,’ answered Father Brown. ‘I may be suspected myself, for I found the body.’

‘Of course we’re suspected,’ snapped Wain. ‘Father Brown kindly explained to me how I could have besieged the tower in a flying—machine.’

‘No,’ replied the priest, with a smile; ‘you described to me how you could have done it. That was just the interesting part of it.’

‘He seemed to think it likely,’ growled Crake, ‘that I killed him myself with a Red Indian arrow.’

‘I thought it most unlikely,’ said Father Brown, making rather a wry face. I’m sorry if I did wrong, but I couldn’t think of any other way of testing the matter. I can hardly think of anything more improbable than the notion that Captain Wain went careering in a huge machine past the window, at the very moment of the murder, and nobody noticed it; unless, perhaps, it were the notion that a respectable old gentleman should play at Red Indians with a bow and arrow behind the bushes, to kill somebody he could have killed in twenty much simpler ways. But I had to find out if they had had anything to do with it; and so I had to accuse them in order to prove their innocence.’

‘And how have you proved their innocence?’ asked Blake the lawyer, leaning forward eagerly.

‘Only by the agitation they showed when they were accused,’ answered the other.

‘What do you mean, exactly?’

‘If you will permit me to say so,’ remarked Father Brown, composedly enough, ‘I did undoubtedly think it my duty to suspect them and everybody else. I did suspect Mr Crake and I did suspect Captain Wain, in the sense that I considered the possibility or probability of their guilt. I told them I had formed conclusions about it; and I will now tell them what those conclusions were. I was sure they were innocent, because of the manner and the moment in which they passed from unconsciousness to indignation. So long as they never thought they were accused, they went on giving me materials to support the accusation. They practically explained to me how they might have committed the crime. Then they suddenly realized with a shock and a shout of rage that they were accused; they realized it long after they might well have expected to be accused, but long before I had accused them. Now no guilty person could possibly do that. He might be snappy and suspicious from the first; or he might simulate unconsciousness and innocence up to the end. But he wouldn’t begin by making things worse for himself and then give a great jump and begin furiously denying the notion he had himself helped to suggest. That could only come by his having really failed to realize what he was suggesting. The self—consciousness of a murderer would always be at least morbidly vivid enough to prevent him first forgetting his relation with the thing and then remembering to deny it. So I ruled you both out and others for other reasons I needn’t discuss now. For instance, there was the secretary—

‘But I’m not talking about that just now. Look here, I’ve just heard from Wilton on the phone, and he’s given me permission to tell you some rather serious news. Now I suppose you all know by this time who Wilton was, and what he was after.’

‘I know he was after Daniel Doom and wouldn’t be happy till he got him,’ answered Peter Wain; ‘and I’ve heard the story that he’s the son of old Horder, and that’s why he’s the avenger of blood. Anyhow, he’s certainly looking for the man called Doom.’

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, ‘he has found him.’

Peter Wain sprang to his feet in excitement.

‘The murderer!’ he cried. ‘Is the murderer in the lock—up already?’

‘No,’ said Father Brown, gravely; ‘I said the news was serious, and it’s more serious than that. I’m afraid poor Wilton has taken a terrible responsibility. I’m afraid he’s going to put a terrible responsibility on us. He hunted the criminal down, and just when he had him cornered at last—well, he has taken the law into his own hands.’

‘You mean that Daniel Doom—‘ began the lawyer.

‘I mean that Daniel Doom is dead,’ said the priest. ‘There was some sort of wild struggle, and Wilton killed him.’

‘Serve him right,’ growled Mr Hickory Crake.

‘Can’t blame Wilton for downing a crook like that, especially considering the feud,’ assented Wain; ‘it was like stepping on a viper.’

‘I don’t agree with you,’ said Father Brown. ‘I suppose we all talk romantic stuff at random in defence of lynching and lawlessness; but I have a suspicion that if we lose our laws and liberties we shall regret it. Besides, it seems to me illogical to say there is something to be said for Wilton committing murder, without even inquiring whether there was anything to be said for Doom committing it. I rather doubt whether Doom was merely a vulgar assassin; he may have been a sort of outlaw with a mania about the cup, demanding it with threats and only killing after a struggle; both victims were thrown down just outside their houses. The objection to Wilton’s way of doing it is that we shall never hear Doom’s side of the case.’

Lo squillo del telefono risuonò con un clamore stridulo e orribile di insistenza. Veniva dalla stanza attigua, e Padre Brown vi si era precipitato prima che chiunque altro potesse muoversi.

«Che diavolo succede?» gridò Peter Wain, che pareva tutto scosso e sconvolto.

«Ha detto che si aspettava una chiamata da Wilton, il segretario» rispose lo zio con la stessa voce spenta.

«Immagino sia Wilton?» osservò l’avvocato, come chi parla per riempire un silenzio. Ma nessuno rispose alla domanda, finché Padre Brown non ricomparve d’improvviso e in silenzio nella stanza, portando la risposta.

«Signori» disse, dopo aver ripreso il suo posto, «siete stati voi a chiedermi di indagare sulla verità di questo rompicapo; e, avendone trovata la verità, devo dirla, senza alcuna finzione che ne attenui il colpo. Temo che chiunque ficchi il naso in faccende simili non possa permettersi di avere riguardo per le persone.»

«Immagino» disse Crake, rompendo il silenzio che ne era seguito, «che questo significhi che alcuni di noi sono accusati, o sospettati.»

«Tutti noi siamo sospettati» rispose Padre Brown. «Posso essere sospettato io stesso, poiché sono stato io a trovare il corpo.»

«Naturalmente siamo sospettati» sbottò Wain. «Padre Brown ha avuto la cortesia di spiegarmi come avrei potuto assediare la torre con una macchina volante.»

«No» ribatté il sacerdote con un sorriso; «siete stato voi a descrivermi come avreste potuto farlo. Ed è proprio questa la parte interessante della faccenda.»

«Pareva ritenesse verosimile» ringhiò Crake «che l’avessi ucciso io stesso con una freccia da pellerossa.»

«L’ho ritenuto quanto mai improbabile» disse Padre Brown, facendo una smorfia piuttosto storta. «Mi dispiace se ho agito male, ma non riuscivo a pensare a nessun altro modo per mettere alla prova la cosa. Difficilmente potrei immaginare qualcosa di più inverosimile dell’idea che il capitano Wain sia passato sfrecciando su un’enorme macchina davanti alla finestra, proprio nell’istante del delitto, senza che nessuno se ne accorgesse; a meno che, forse, non lo sia l’idea che un rispettabile vecchio signore si metta a giocare ai pellerossa con arco e frecce dietro i cespugli, per uccidere qualcuno che avrebbe potuto uccidere in venti modi assai più semplici. Ma dovevo scoprire se avessero avuto qualcosa a che fare con la faccenda; e così ho dovuto accusarli per provare la loro innocenza.»

«E come avete provato la loro innocenza?» chiese Blake, l’avvocato, chinandosi in avanti con impazienza.

«Solo dall’agitazione che hanno mostrato quando sono stati accusati» rispose l’altro.

«Che cosa intendete, esattamente?»

«Se mi permettete di dirlo» osservò Padre Brown con sufficiente compostezza, «ritenni senza dubbio mio dovere sospettare di loro e di tutti gli altri. Sospettai del signor Crake e sospettai del capitano Wain, nel senso che presi in considerazione la possibilità o la probabilità della loro colpevolezza. Dissi loro che avevo tratto delle conclusioni al riguardo; e ora dirò loro quali fossero quelle conclusioni. Ero certo della loro innocenza, per il modo e il momento in cui passarono dall’inconsapevolezza all’indignazione. Finché non pensarono di essere accusati, continuarono a fornirmi materiali per sostenere l’accusa. Praticamente mi spiegarono come avrebbero potuto commettere il delitto. Poi, d’un tratto, si resero conto, con un sussulto e un grido di rabbia, di essere accusati; se ne resero conto molto tempo dopo il momento in cui avrebbero ben potuto aspettarsi di essere accusati, ma molto prima che io li accusassi. Ora, nessun colpevole potrebbe mai comportarsi così. Potrebbe mostrarsi irritabile e sospettoso fin dall’inizio; oppure potrebbe simulare inconsapevolezza e innocenza sino alla fine. Ma non comincerebbe col peggiorare la propria situazione per poi fare un gran balzo e prendere a negare furiosamente l’idea che egli stesso aveva contribuito a suggerire. Ciò potrebbe accadere soltanto se davvero non si fosse reso conto di ciò che stava suggerendo. La coscienza di sé di un assassino sarebbe sempre almeno tanto morbosamente viva da impedirgli prima di dimenticare il proprio legame con la cosa, e poi di ricordarsi di negarlo. Così ho escluso entrambi voi, e altri per altre ragioni di cui non occorre discutere ora. Per esempio, c’era il segretario…

«Ma non è di questo che sto parlando adesso. Ecco: ho appena avuto notizie da Wilton al telefono, e mi ha dato il permesso di riferirvi qualche notizia piuttosto grave. Ora immagino che a questo punto sappiate tutti chi fosse Wilton, e che cosa cercasse.»

«So che dava la caccia a Daniel Doom e che non avrebbe avuto pace finché non l’avesse preso» rispose Peter Wain; «e ho sentito la storia che sarebbe il figlio del vecchio Horder, e che per questo è il vendicatore del sangue. In ogni caso, di sicuro sta cercando l’uomo chiamato Doom.»

«Ebbene» disse Padre Brown, «lo ha trovato.»

Peter Wain balzò in piedi per l’eccitazione.

«L’assassino!» gridò. «L’assassino è già in gattabuia?»

«No» disse Padre Brown, con gravità; «ho detto che la notizia era grave, ed è più grave di così. Temo che il povero Wilton si sia preso una responsabilità terribile. Temo che stia per far ricadere su di noi una responsabilità terribile. Ha dato la caccia al criminale, e proprio quando finalmente lo aveva messo alle strette… ebbene, si è fatto giustizia da sé.»

«Volete dire che Daniel Doom…» cominciò l’avvocato.

«Voglio dire che Daniel Doom è morto» disse il sacerdote. «C’è stata una sorta di lotta furiosa, e Wilton lo ha ucciso.»

«Ben gli sta» ringhiò il signor Hickory Crake.

«Non si può biasimare Wilton per aver abbattuto una canaglia simile, specie considerando la faida» convenne Wain; «era come schiacciare una vipera.»

«Non sono d’accordo con voi» disse Padre Brown. «Suppongo che tutti noi ci abbandoniamo a discorsi romantici, a casaccio, in difesa del linciaggio e dell’illegalità; ma ho il sospetto che, se perdiamo le nostre leggi e le nostre libertà, ce ne pentiremo. Del resto, mi pare illogico dire che qualcosa si possa dire a favore di Wilton che commette un omicidio, senza nemmeno domandarsi se qualcosa si potesse dire a favore di Doom che ne commetteva uno. Dubito piuttosto che Doom fosse un semplice, volgare assassino; può darsi che fosse una sorta di fuorilegge con una mania per il calice, che lo esigeva con minacce e uccideva soltanto dopo una lotta; entrambe le vittime furono abbattute proprio davanti alle loro case. L’obiezione al modo di agire di Wilton è che non udremo mai la versione di Doom.»

‘Oh, I’ve no patience with all this sentimental whitewashing of worthless, murderous blackguards,’ cried Wain, heatedly. ‘If Wilton croaked the criminal he did a jolly good day’s work, and there’s an end of it.’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said his uncle, nodding vigorously.

Father Brown’s face had a yet heavier gravity as he looked slowly round the semicircle effaces. ‘Is that really what you all think?’ he asked. Even as he did so he realized that he was an Englishman and an exile. He realized that he was among foreigners, even if he was among friends. Around that ring of foreigners ran a restless fire that was not native to his own breed; the fiercer spirit of the western nation that can rebel and lynch, and above all, combine. He knew that they had already combined.

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, with a sigh, ‘I am to understand, then, that you do definitely condone this unfortunate man’s crime, or act of private justice, or whatever you call it. In that case it will not hurt him if I tell you a little more about it.’

He rose suddenly to his feet; and though they saw no meaning in his movement, it seemed in some way to change or chill the very air in the room.

‘Wilton killed Doom in a rather curious way,’ he began.

‘How did Wilton kill him?’ asked Crake, abruptly.

‘With an arrow,’ said Father Brown.

Twilight was gathering in the long room, and daylight dwindling to a gleam from the great window in the inner room, where the great millionaire had died. Almost automatically the eyes of the group turned slowly towards it, but as yet there was no sound. Then the voice of Crake came cracked and high and senile in a sort of crowing gabble.

‘What you mean? What you mean? Brander Merton killed by an arrow. This crook killed by an arrow—‘

‘By the same arrow,’ said the priest, ‘and at the same moment.’

Again there was a sort of strangled and yet swollen and bursting silence, and young Wain began: ‘You mean—‘

‘I mean that your friend Merton was Daniel Doom,’ said Father Brown firmly;’ and the only Daniel Doom you’ll ever find. Your friend Merton was always crazy after that Coptic Cup that he used to worship like an idol every day; and in his wild youth he had really killed two men to get it, though I still think the deaths may have been in a sense accidents of the robbery. Anyhow, he had it; and that man Drage knew the story and was blackmailing him. But Wilton was after him for a very different purpose; I fancy he only discovered the truth when he’d got into this house. But anyhow, it was in this house, and in that room, that this hunt ended, and he slew the slayer of his father.’

For a long time nobody answered. Then old Crake could be heard drumming with his fingers on the table and muttering:

‘Brander must have been mad. He must have been mad.’

‘But, good Lord!’ burst out Peter Wain;’ what are we to do? What are we to say? Oh, it’s all quite different! What about the papers and the big business people? Brander Merton is a thing like the President or the Pope of Rome.’

‘I certainly think it is rather different,’ began Barnard Blake, the lawyer, in a low voice. ‘The difference involves a whole—‘

Father Brown struck the table so that the glasses on it rang; and they could almost fancy a ghostly echo from the mysterious chalice that still stood in the room beyond.

‘No!’ he cried, in a voice like a pistol—shot. ‘There shall be no difference. I gave you your chance of pitying the poor devil when you thought he was a common criminal. You wouldn’t listen then; you were all for private vengeance then. You were all for letting him be butchered like a wild beast without a hearing or a public trial, and said he had only got his deserts. Very well then, if Daniel Doom has got his deserts, Brander Merton has got his deserts. If that was good enough for Doom, by all that is holy it is good enough for Merton. Take your wild justice or our dull legality; but in the name of Almighty God, let there be an equal lawlessness or an equal law.’

Nobody answered except the lawyer, and he answered with something like a snarl: ‘What will the police say if we tell them we mean to condone a crime?’

‘What will they say if I tell them you did condone it?’ replied Father Brown. ‘Your respect for the law comes rather late, Mr Barnard Blake.’

After a pause he resumed in a milder tone: ‘I, for one, am ready to tell the truth if the proper authorities ask me; and the rest of you can do as you like. But as a fact, it will make very little difference. Wilton only rang me up to tell me that I was now free to lay his confession before you; for when you heard it, he would be beyond pursuit.’

He walked slowly into the inner room and stood there by the little table beside which the millionaire had died. The Coptic Cup still stood in the same place, and he remained there for a space staring at its cluster of all the colours of the rainbow, and beyond it into a blue abyss of sky.

«Oh, non ho pazienza per tutto questo sentimentale sbiancare di canaglie sanguinarie e senza valore» esclamò Wain, con foga. «Se Wilton ha fatto secco il criminale, ha compiuto un’ottima giornata di lavoro, e la questione finisce lì.»

«Proprio così, proprio così» disse suo zio, annuendo con vigore.

Il volto di Father Brown si fece di una gravità ancora più pesante mentre girava lentamente lo sguardo intorno al semicerchio dei volti. «È davvero questo che pensate tutti?» domandò. E proprio mentre lo diceva si rese conto di essere un inglese e un esule. Si rese conto di trovarsi tra stranieri, per quanto si trovasse tra amici. Attorno a quell’anello di stranieri correva un fuoco inquieto che non apparteneva alla sua stirpe: lo spirito più feroce della nazione occidentale che sa ribellarsi e linciare, e soprattutto coalizzarsi. Sapeva che si erano già coalizzati.

«Ebbene» disse Father Brown, con un sospiro, «devo dunque intendere che voi condonate senza riserve il delitto di questo sventurato, o il suo atto di giustizia privata, o comunque lo vogliate chiamare. In tal caso non gli farà alcun male se vi racconto qualcosa di più al riguardo.»

Si alzò improvvisamente in piedi; e per quanto essi non vedessero alcun significato nel suo gesto, questo parve in qualche modo mutare o raffreddare l’aria stessa della stanza.

«Wilton uccise Doom in un modo piuttosto curioso» esordì.

«Come lo uccise, Wilton?» chiese Crake, bruscamente.

«Con una freccia» disse Father Brown.

Il crepuscolo si andava addensando nella lunga sala, e la luce del giorno si riduceva a un barlume proveniente dalla grande finestra della stanza interna, dove il grande milionario era morto. Quasi automaticamente gli occhi del gruppo si volsero lentamente in quella direzione, ma per il momento non si udì alcun suono. Poi la voce di Crake giunse incrinata, acuta e senile, in una sorta di gracchiante farfuglio.

«Che intende dire? Che intende dire? Brander Merton ucciso da una freccia. Questo furfante ucciso da una freccia…»

«Dalla stessa freccia» disse il prete, «e nel medesimo istante.»

Di nuovo si fece una sorta di silenzio strozzato eppure gonfio e prossimo a scoppiare — un silenzio soffocato —, e il giovane Wain cominciò: «Volete dire…»

«Voglio dire che il vostro amico Merton era Daniel Doom» disse Father Brown con fermezza, «e l’unico Daniel Doom che riuscirete mai a trovare. Il vostro amico Merton è sempre stato pazzo per quella Coppa Copta che soleva adorare come un idolo ogni giorno; e nella sua giovinezza sfrenata aveva realmente ucciso due uomini per averla, sebbene io continui a credere che quelle morti possano essere state, in un certo senso, incidenti della rapina. Comunque sia, egli la possedeva; e quell’uomo, Drage, conosceva la storia e lo ricattava. Ma Wilton gli dava la caccia per uno scopo assai diverso; immagino che scoprì la verità soltanto una volta entrato in questa casa. Ma comunque sia, fu in questa casa, e in quella stanza, che questa caccia ebbe fine, ed egli abbatté l’assassino di suo padre.»

Per lungo tempo nessuno rispose. Poi si udì il vecchio Crake tamburellare con le dita sul tavolo e mormorare:

«Brander doveva essere pazzo. Doveva essere pazzo.»

«Ma, santo cielo!» proruppe Peter Wain, «che dobbiamo fare? Che dobbiamo dire? Oh, è tutto completamente diverso! E i giornali, e i grandi uomini d’affari? Brander Merton è una cosa come il Presidente o il Papa di Roma.»

«Sono certamente d’avviso che la faccenda sia piuttosto diversa» cominciò Barnard Blake, l’avvocato, a bassa voce. «La differenza implica un intero…»

Father Brown batté un pugno sul tavolo tanto che i bicchieri sopra tintinnarono; e quasi si poté immaginare un’eco spettrale provenire dal misterioso calice che ancora si ergeva nella stanza al di là.

«No!» gridò, con una voce simile a un colpo di pistola. «Non vi sarà alcuna differenza. Vi ho offerto la possibilità di aver pietà del povero diavolo quando lo credevate un comune criminale. Allora non avete voluto ascoltare; allora eravate tutti per la vendetta privata. Eravate tutti per lasciarlo macellare come una bestia feroce senza un’udienza né un pubblico processo, e dicevate che aveva avuto soltanto ciò che meritava. Ebbene, molto bene, se Daniel Doom ha avuto ciò che meritava, allora Brander Merton ha avuto ciò che meritava. Se quello era abbastanza buono per Doom, per tutto ciò che è santo è abbastanza buono per Merton. Prendetevi la vostra giustizia selvaggia oppure la nostra ottusa legalità; ma nel nome di Dio Onnipotente, che vi sia un’eguale illegalità o un’eguale legge.»

Nessuno rispose tranne l’avvocato, e rispose con qualcosa di simile a un ringhio: «Che diranno gli agenti di polizia se raccontiamo loro che intendiamo condonare un delitto?»

«Che diranno se io racconto loro che voi lo avete condonato?» replicò Father Brown. «Il vostro rispetto per la legge arriva piuttosto tardi, signor Barnard Blake.»

Dopo una pausa riprese in tono più mite: «Io, per parte mia, sono pronto a dire la verità se le autorità competenti me lo chiederanno; e il resto di voi può fare come crede. Ma di fatto la cosa non farà gran differenza. Wilton mi ha telefonato soltanto per dirmi che ora ero libero di esporvi la sua confessione; poiché, quando l’aveste udita, egli sarebbe stato al di fuori di ogni inseguimento.»

Si incamminò lentamente verso la stanza interna e vi rimase in piedi accanto al piccolo tavolo presso il quale il milionario era morto. La Coppa Copta si ergeva ancora nello stesso posto, ed egli restò lì per un poco a fissarne il grappolo di tutti i colori dell’arcobaleno, e, al di là di essa, un azzurro abisso di cielo.

THREE: The Oracle of the Dog

‘YES,’ said Father Brown, ‘I always like a dog, so long as he isn’t spelt backwards.’

Those who are quick in talking are not always quick in listening. Sometimes even their brilliancy produces a sort of stupidity. Father Brown’s friend and companion was a young man with a stream of ideas and stories, an enthusiastic young man named Fiennes, with eager blue eyes and blond hair that seemed to be brushed back, not merely with a hair— brush but with the wind of the world as be rushed through it. But he stopped in the torrent of his talk in a momentary bewilderment before he saw the priest’s very simple meaning.

‘You mean that people make too much of them?’ he said. ‘Well, I don’t know. They’re marvellous creatures. Sometimes I think they know a lot more than we do.’

Father Brown said nothing, but continued to stroke the head of the big retriever in a half—abstracted but apparently soothing fashion.

‘Why,’ said Fiennes, warming again to his monologue, ‘there was a dog in the case I’ve come to see you about: what they call the ‘Invisible Murder Case’, you know. It’s a strange story, but from my point of view the dog is about the strangest thing in it. Of course, there’s the mystery of the crime itself, and how old Druce can have been killed by somebody else when he was all alone in the summer—house—‘

The hand stroking the dog stopped for a moment in its rhythmic movement, and Father Brown said calmly: ‘Oh, it was a summer—house, was it?’

‘I thought you’d read all about it in the papers,’ answered Fiennes.’ Stop a minute; I believe I’ve got a cutting that will give you all the particulars.’ He produced a strip of newspaper from his pocket and handed it to the priest, who began to read it, holding it close to his blinking eyes with one hand while the other continued its half—conscious caresses of the dog. It looked like the parable of a man not letting his right hand know what his left hand did.

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Many mystery stories, about men murdered behind locked doors and windows, and murderers escaping without means of entrance and exit, have come true in the course of the extraordinary events at Cranston on the coast of Yorkshire, where Colonel Druce was found stabbed from behind by a dagger that has entirely disappeared from the scene, and apparently even from the neighbourhood.

The summer—house in which he died was indeed accessible at one entrance, the ordinary doorway which looked down the central walk of the garden towards the house. But, by a combination of events almost to be called a coincidence, it appears that both the path and the entrance were watched during the crucial time, and there is a chain of witnesses who confirm each other. The summer—house stands at the extreme end of the garden, where there is no exit or entrance of any kind. The central garden path is a lane between two ranks of tall delphiniums, planted so close that any stray step off the path would leave its traces; and both path and plants run right up to the very mouth of the summer—house, so that no straying from that straight path could fail to be observed, and no other mode of entrance can be imagined.

Patrick Floyd, secretary of the murdered man, testified that he had been in a position to overlook the whole garden from the time when Colonel Druce last appeared alive in the doorway to the time when he was found dead; as he, Floyd, had been on the top of a step—ladder clipping the garden hedge. Janet Druce, the dead man’s daughter, confirmed this, saying that she had sat on the terrace of the house throughout that time and had seen Floyd at his work. Touching some part of the time, this is again supported by Donald Druce, her brother—who overlooked the garden—standing at his bedroom window in his dressing—gown, for he had risen late. Lastly, the account is consistent with that given by Dr Valentine, a neighbour, who called for a time to talk with Miss Druce on the terrace, and by the Colonel’s solicitor, Mr Aubrey Traill, who was apparently the last to see the murdered man alive— presumably with the exception of the murderer.

All are agreed that the course of events was as follows: About half past three in the afternoon, Miss Druce went down the path to ask her father when he would like tea; but he said he did not want any and was waiting to see Traill, his lawyer, who was to be sent to him in the summer—house. The girl then came away and met Traill coming down the path; she directed him to her father and he went in as directed. About half an hour afterwards he came out again, the Colonel coming with him to the door and showing himself to all appearance in health and even high spirits. He had been somewhat annoyed earlier in the day by his son’s irregular hours, but seemed to recover his temper in a perfectly normal fashion, and had been rather markedly genial in receiving other visitors, including two of his nephews, who came over for the day. But as these were out walking during the whole period of the tragedy, they had no evidence to give. It is said, indeed, that the Colonel was not on very good terms with Dr Valentine, but that gentleman only had a brief interview with the daughter of the house, to whom he is supposed to be paying serious attentions.

Trail, the solicitor, says he left the Colonel entirely alone in the summer—house, and this is confirmed by Floyd’s bird’s—eye view of the garden, which showed nobody else passing the only entrance. Ten minutes later. Miss Druce again went down the garden and had not reached the end of the path when she saw her father, who was conspicuous by his white linen coat, lying in a heap on the floor. She uttered a scream which brought others to the spot, and on entering the place they found the Colonel lying dead beside his basket—chair, which was also upset. Dr Valentine, who was still in the immediate neighbourhood, testified that the wound was made by some sort of stiletto, entering under the shoulder—blade and piercing the heart. The police have searched the neighbourhood for such a weapon, but no trace of it can be found.

TRE: L’oracolo del cane

«Sì», disse Padre Brown, «un cane mi piace sempre, a patto che non lo si scriva a rovescio.»

Chi parla in fretta non sempre ascolta in fretta. Talora perfino la loro brillantezza genera una specie di ottusità. L’amico e compagno di Padre Brown era un giovane con un fiume di idee e di racconti, un giovane entusiasta di nome Fiennes, dagli occhi azzurri e ardenti e dai capelli biondi che parevano ravviati all’indietro non da una semplice spazzola, ma dal vento del mondo mentre vi si slanciava attraverso. Ma s’arrestò nel torrente delle sue parole, in un momentaneo sconcerto, prima di afferrare il senso semplicissimo del prete.

«Vuol dire che se ne fa troppo caso?», disse. «Be’, non saprei. Sono creature meravigliose. A volte penso che sappiano molto più di noi.»

Padre Brown non disse nulla, ma seguitò ad accarezzare la testa del grosso retriever in una maniera distratta eppure, a quanto pareva, blanda e tranquillizzante.

«Ecco», disse Fiennes, riscaldandosi di nuovo al suo monologo, «c’era un cane nel caso per cui sono venuto a trovarla: quello che chiamano il «Caso dell’Omicidio Invisibile», sa. È una storia curiosa, ma dal mio punto di vista il cane è quasi la cosa più curiosa che contenga. Certo, c’è il mistero del delitto in sé, e di come il vecchio Druce possa essere stato ucciso da qualcun altro mentre se ne stava tutto solo nel padiglione estivo…»

La mano che carezzava il cane si arrestò un istante nel suo movimento ritmico, e Padre Brown disse con calma: «Oh, era un padiglione estivo, dunque?»

«Credevo che avesse letto tutto sui giornali», rispose Fiennes. «Aspetti un momento; mi pare di avere un ritaglio che le darà tutti i particolari.» Trasse dalla tasca una striscia di giornale e la porse al prete, che cominciò a leggerla, tenendola vicina ai suoi occhi socchiusi con una mano mentre l’altra proseguiva le sue carezze semiconsapevoli al cane. Pareva la parabola dell’uomo che non lascia sapere alla mano destra ciò che fa la sinistra.

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Molte storie misteriose, di uomini assassinati dietro porte e finestre sprangate, e di assassini svaniti senza via d’entrata né d’uscita, si sono avverate nel corso degli straordinari avvenimenti di Cranston, sulla costa dello Yorkshire, dove il colonnello Druce fu trovato pugnalato alle spalle da un pugnale scomparso interamente dalla scena, e a quanto pare persino dai dintorni.

Il padiglione estivo in cui morì era in verità accessibile da un solo ingresso, la porta ordinaria che guardava giù lungo il viale centrale del giardino verso la casa. Ma, per un concorso di circostanze quasi da potersi dire una coincidenza, risulta che tanto il sentiero quanto l’ingresso furono sorvegliati durante il tempo cruciale, e vi è una catena di testimoni che si confermano a vicenda. Il padiglione sorge all’estremità più remota del giardino, dove non v’è uscita né entrata di sorta. Il viale centrale del giardino è una corsia fra due file di alti delphinium, piantati così fitti che qualsiasi passo fuori dal sentiero ne lascerebbe le tracce; e sentiero e piante corrono fin proprio all’imboccatura del padiglione, sicché nessuna deviazione da quel dritto sentiero potrebbe sfuggire all’osservazione, né si può immaginare altro modo d’ingresso.

Patrick Floyd, segretario dell’ucciso, testimoniò di essere stato in condizione di dominare con lo sguardo l’intero giardino dal momento in cui il colonnello Druce apparve vivo per l’ultima volta sulla soglia fino al momento in cui fu trovato morto; giacché egli, Floyd, si trovava in cima a una scala a pioli a potare la siepe del giardino. Janet Druce, la figlia del morto, confermò la cosa, dicendo di essere rimasta seduta sulla terrazza della casa per tutto quel tempo e di aver visto Floyd al suo lavoro. Per una parte di quel tempo, ciò è di nuovo avvalorato da Donald Druce, il fratello di lei — che pure dominava il giardino — ritto alla finestra della sua camera in vestaglia, poiché s’era alzato tardi. Infine, il racconto concorda con quello reso dal dottor Valentine, un vicino, che passò per un poco a conversare con la signorina Druce sulla terrazza, e con quello dell’avvocato del colonnello, il signor Aubrey Traill, che fu a quanto pare l’ultimo a vedere vivo l’ucciso — salvo, presumibilmente, l’assassino.

Tutti concordano che il corso degli eventi fu il seguente. Verso le tre e mezzo del pomeriggio, la signorina Druce scese lungo il sentiero per chiedere al padre a che ora desiderasse il tè; ma egli rispose che non ne voleva e che aspettava di vedere Traill, il suo legale, che gli sarebbe stato mandato nel padiglione. La ragazza allora si allontanò e incontrò Traill che scendeva per il sentiero; lo indirizzò al padre ed egli entrò come indicato. Circa mezz’ora dopo ne uscì di nuovo, e il colonnello lo accompagnò fino alla porta, mostrandosi a ogni apparenza in salute e persino di ottimo umore. Era stato alquanto contrariato, prima nella giornata, dagli orari irregolari del figlio, ma parve riprendere il buonumore in maniera del tutto normale, e fu anzi assai marcatamente cordiale nel ricevere altri visitatori, compresi due suoi nipoti, venuti a passare la giornata. Ma poiché costoro erano fuori a passeggio durante l’intero periodo della tragedia, non ebbero testimonianza da rendere. Si dice, in verità, che il colonnello non fosse in ottimi rapporti col dottor Valentine, ma quel signore ebbe soltanto un breve colloquio con la figlia di casa, cui si suppone rivolga serie attenzioni.

Traill, l’avvocato, dice di aver lasciato il colonnello del tutto solo nel padiglione, e ciò è confermato dalla veduta a volo d’uccello del giardino che aveva Floyd, la quale mostrava che nessun altro passò per l’unico ingresso. Dieci minuti più tardi, la signorina Druce scese di nuovo nel giardino, e non aveva ancora raggiunto la fine del sentiero quando vide il padre, ben riconoscibile per la sua giacca di lino bianco, giacere ammucchiato sul pavimento. Emise un grido che fece accorrere gli altri sul posto, ed entrando trovarono il colonnello disteso morto accanto alla sua poltrona di vimini, anch’essa rovesciata. Il dottor Valentine, che era ancora nelle immediate vicinanze, testimoniò che la ferita era stata inferta da una sorta di stiletto, penetrato sotto la scapola e trafiggente il cuore. La polizia ha frugato i dintorni in cerca di una tale arma, ma non se ne trova traccia.

‘So Colonel Druce wore a white coat, did he?’ said Father Brown as he put down the paper.

‘Trick he learnt in the tropics,’ replied Fiennes, with some wonder. ‘He’d had some queer adventures there, by his own account; and I fancy his dislike of Valentine was connected with the doctor coming from the tropics, too. But it’s all an infernal puzzle. The account there is pretty accurate. I didn’t see the tragedy, in the sense of the discovery; I was out walking with the young nephews and the dog—the dog I wanted to tell you about. But I saw the stage set for it as described; the straight lane between the blue flowers right up to the dark entrance, and the lawyer going down it in his blacks and his silk hat, and the red head of the secretary showing high above the green hedge as he worked on it with his shears. Nobody could have mistaken that red head at any distance; and if people say they saw it there all the time, you may be sure they did.

This red—haired secretary, Floyd, is quite a character; a breathless bounding sort of fellow, always doing everybody’s work as he was doing the gardener’s. I think he is an American; he’s certainly got the American view of life—what they call the view—point, bless ‘em.’

‘What about the lawyer?’ asked Father Brown. There was a silence and then Fiennes spoke quite slowly for him. ‘Traill struck me as a singular man. In his fine black clothes he was almost foppish, yet you can hardly call him fashionable. For he wore a pair of long, luxuriant black whiskers such as haven’t been seen since Victorian times. He had rather a fine grave face and a fine grave manner, but every now and then he seemed to remember to smile. And when he showed his white teeth he seemed to lose a little of his dignity, and there was something faintly fawning about him. It may have been only embarrassment, for he would also fidget with his cravat and his tie—pin, which were at once handsome and unusual, like himself. If I could think of anybody— but what’s the good, when the whole thing’s impossible? Nobody knows who did it. Nobody knows how it could be done. At least there’s only one exception I’d make, and that’s why I really mentioned the whole thing. The dog knows.’

Father Brown sighed and then said absently: ‘You were there as a friend of young Donald, weren’t you? He didn’t go on your walk with you?’

‘No,’ replied Fiennes smiling. ‘The young scoundrel had gone to bed that morning and got up that afternoon. I went with his cousins, two young officers from India, and our conversation was trivial enough. I remember the elder, whose name I think is Herbert Druce and who is an authority on horse—breeding, talked about nothing but a mare he had bought and the moral character of the man who sold her; while his brother Harry seemed to be brooding on his bad luck at Monte Carlo. I only mention it to show you, in the light of what happened on our walk, that there was nothing psychic about us. The dog was the only mystic in our company.’

‘What sort of a dog was he?’ asked the priest.

‘Same breed as that one,’ answered Fiennes. ‘That’s what started me off on the story, your saying you didn’t believe in believing in a dog. He’s a big black retriever, named Nox, and a suggestive name, too; for I think what he did a darker mystery than the murder. You know Druce’s house and garden are by the sea; we walked about a mile from it along the sands and then turned back, going the other way. We passed a rather curious rock called the Rock of Fortune, famous in the neighbourhood because it’s one of those examples of one stone barely balanced on another, so that a touch would knock it over. It is not really very high but the hanging outline of it makes it look a little wild and sinister; at least it made it look so to me, for I don’t imagine my jolly young companions were afflicted with the picturesque. But it may be that I was beginning to feel an atmosphere; for just then the question arose of whether it was time to go back to tea, and even then I think I had a premonition that time counted for a good deal in the business. Neither Herbert Druce nor I had a watch, so we called out to his brother, who was some paces behind, having stopped to light his pipe under the hedge. Hence it happened that he shouted out the hour, which was twenty past four, in his big voice through the growing twilight; and somehow the loudness of it made it sound like the proclamation of something tremendous. His unconsciousness seemed to make it all the more so; but that was always the way with omens; and particular ticks of the clock were really very ominous things that afternoon. According to Dr Valentine’s testimony, poor Druce had actually died just about half past four.

‘Well, they said we needn’t go home for ten minutes, and we walked a little farther along the sands, doing nothing in particular— throwing stones for the dog and throwing sticks into the sea for, him to swim after. But to me the twilight seemed to grow oddly oppressive, and the very shadow of the top—heavy Rock of Fortune lay on me like a load. And then the curious thing happened. Nox had just brought back Herbert’s walking— stick out of the sea and his brother had thrown his in also. The dog swam out again, but just about what must have been the stroke of the half—hour, he stopped swimming. He came back again on to the shore and stood in front of us. Then he suddenly threw up his head and sent up a howl or wail of woe—if ever I heard one in the world.

‘‘What the devil’s the matter with the dog?‘ asked Herbert; but none of us could answer. There was a long silence after the brute’s wailing and whining died away on the desolate shore; and then the silence was broken. As I live, it was broken by a faint and far—off shriek, like the shriek of a woman from beyond the hedges inland. We didn’t know what it was then; but we knew afterwards. It was the cry the girl gave when she first saw the body of her father.’

«Dunque il colonnello Druce indossava una giacca bianca?», disse Padre Brown posando il giornale.

«Un vezzo che aveva imparato ai tropici», rispose Fiennes con una certa meraviglia. «Laggiù aveva avuto strane avventure, a suo dire; e ho idea che la sua antipatia per Valentine fosse legata anche al fatto che il dottore veniva dai tropici. Ma è tutto un rompicapo infernale. Il resoconto lì è abbastanza esatto. Io non vidi la tragedia, nel senso della scoperta; ero fuori a passeggio coi giovani nipoti e col cane — il cane di cui volevo parlarle. Ma vidi la scena allestita com’è descritta: la dritta corsia fra i fiori azzurri fin proprio all’oscuro ingresso, e l’avvocato che vi scendeva nel suo nero e col suo cilindro di seta, e la testa rossa del segretario che spiccava alta sopra la verde siepe mentre vi lavorava con le cesoie. Nessuno avrebbe potuto scambiare quella testa rossa a nessuna distanza; e se la gente dice di averla vista lì per tutto il tempo, potete star certi che è così.

Questo segretario dai capelli rossi, Floyd, è proprio un personaggio; un tipo trafelato e sempre in movimento, che fa in continuazione il lavoro di tutti, come faceva quello del giardiniere. Credo sia americano; di certo ha la visione americana della vita — quello che chiamano il «punto di vista», Dio li benedica.»

«E l’avvocato?», chiese Padre Brown. Vi fu un silenzio, e poi Fiennes parlò, per lui, assai lentamente. «Traill mi fece l’impressione di un uomo singolare. Nei suoi bei panni neri era quasi lezioso, eppure non lo si direbbe elegante. Perché portava un paio di lunghe, folte fedine nere quali non se ne vedevano più dai tempi vittoriani. Aveva un viso piuttosto bello e grave e un contegno bello e grave, ma ogni tanto pareva ricordarsi di sorridere. E quando mostrava i denti bianchi pareva perdere un po’ della sua dignità, e c’era in lui qualcosa di vagamente adulatorio. Poteva essere solo imbarazzo, perché armeggiava di continuo anche con la cravatta e con lo spillo, che erano insieme belli e insoliti, come lui. Se solo potessi pensare a qualcuno… ma a che pro, quando l’intera faccenda è impossibile? Nessuno sa chi l’abbia fatto. Nessuno sa come possa essere stato fatto. C’è almeno una sola eccezione che farei, ed è per questo che ho tirato fuori tutta la storia. Il cane lo sa.»

Padre Brown sospirò e poi disse distrattamente: «Lei era lì come amico del giovane Donald, non è vero? Non venne a passeggio con voi?»

«No», rispose Fiennes sorridendo. «Il giovane mascalzone era andato a letto quella mattina e s’era alzato quel pomeriggio. Andai coi suoi cugini, due giovani ufficiali venuti dall’India, e la nostra conversazione fu abbastanza banale. Ricordo che il maggiore, che credo si chiami Herbert Druce e che è un’autorità in fatto di allevamento di cavalli, non parlò d’altro che di una giumenta comprata e del carattere morale dell’uomo che gliela vendette; mentre suo fratello Harry pareva rimuginare sulla sua malasorte a Monte Carlo. Lo dico solo per mostrarle, alla luce di ciò che accadde durante la nostra passeggiata, che non c’era nulla di psichico in noi. Il cane era l’unico mistico della compagnia.»

«Che razza di cane era?», chiese il prete.

«Della stessa razza di quello», rispose Fiennes. «È ciò che mi ha avviato la storia, il suo dire che non credeva nel credere in un cane. È un grosso retriever nero, di nome Nox, e nome suggestivo anche questo; perché credo che ciò che fece sia un mistero più cupo del delitto stesso. Sa che la casa e il giardino dei Druce sono in riva al mare; camminammo per circa un miglio lungo la sabbia e poi tornammo indietro, prendendo l’altra via. Passammo accanto a una roccia piuttosto curiosa chiamata la Rupe della Fortuna, famosa nei dintorni perché è uno di quegli esempi d’un masso appena in equilibrio su un altro, tanto che un tocco basterebbe a rovesciarlo. Non è in realtà molto alta, ma il suo profilo a strapiombo le dà un che di selvaggio e sinistro; almeno a me parve tale, giacché non immagino che i miei allegri giovani compagni fossero afflitti dal senso del pittoresco. Ma può darsi che cominciassi a percepire un’atmosfera; perché proprio allora sorse la questione se fosse ora di tornare per il tè, e già allora, credo, ebbi il presentimento che il tempo contasse parecchio in quella faccenda. Né Herbert Druce né io avevamo un orologio, così chiamammo suo fratello, che era qualche passo indietro, essendosi fermato ad accendere la pipa sotto la siepe. Fu così che egli gridò l’ora, che erano le quattro e venti, con la sua voce possente attraverso il crepuscolo crescente; e in qualche modo la sonorità di quella voce le diede il suono d’un proclama di qualcosa di tremendo. La sua inconsapevolezza pareva renderlo ancor più tale; ma così è sempre stato con i presagi; e certi rintocchi dell’orologio furono davvero cose assai sinistre quel pomeriggio. Secondo la testimonianza del dottor Valentine, il povero Druce morì in effetti proprio verso le quattro e mezzo.

«Be’, dissero che non occorreva tornare a casa per dieci minuti, e camminammo un poco oltre lungo la sabbia, senza far nulla di preciso — lanciando sassi al cane e gettando bastoni in mare perché li andasse a riprendere a nuoto. Ma a me il crepuscolo parve farsi stranamente opprimente, e la stessa ombra della Rupe della Fortuna, tutta sbilanciata in alto, mi pesava addosso come un fardello. E poi accadde la cosa curiosa. Nox aveva appena riportato dal mare il bastone da passeggio di Herbert e il fratello vi gettò anche il suo. Il cane nuotò di nuovo al largo, ma proprio all’incirca quando doveva battere la mezz’ora, smise di nuotare. Tornò a riva e ci si piantò davanti. Poi d’improvviso levò il capo ed emise un ululato, un lamento di dolore quale mai ne udii al mondo.

«Che diavolo ha il cane?», chiese Herbert; ma nessuno di noi seppe rispondere. Vi fu un lungo silenzio dopo che il guaito e il lamento della bestia si spensero sulla riva desolata; e poi il silenzio fu rotto. Com’è vero che vivo, fu rotto da un grido fioco e lontano, come il grido d’una donna al di là delle siepi, verso l’interno. Allora non sapevamo che cosa fosse; ma lo sapemmo dopo. Era il grido che la ragazza emise quando vide per la prima volta il corpo di suo padre.»

‘You went back, I suppose,’ said Father Brown patiently. ‘What happened then?’

‘I’ll tell you what happened then,’ said Fiennes with a grim emphasis. ‘When we got back into that garden the first thing we saw was Traill, the lawyer; I can see him now with his black hat and black whiskers relieved against the perspective of the blue flowers stretching down to the summer—house, with the sunset and the strange outline of the Rock of Fortune in the distance. His face and figure were in shadow against the sunset; but I swear the white teeth were showing in his head and he was smiling. The moment Nox saw that man the dog dashed forward and stood in the middle of the path barking at him madly, murderously, volleying out curses that were almost verbal in their dreadful distinctness of hatred. And the man doubled up and fled, along the path between the flowers.’

Father Brown sprang to his feet with a startling impatience. ‘So the dog denounced him, did he?’ he cried. ‘The oracle of the dog condemned him. Did you see what birds were flying, and are you sure whether they were on the right hand or the left? Did you consult the augurs about the sacrifices? Surely you didn’t omit to cut open the dog and examine his entrails. That is the sort of scientific test you heathen humanitarians seem to trust when you are thinking of taking away the life and honour of a man.’

Fiennes sat gaping for an instant before he found breath to say: ‘Why, what’s the matter with you? What have I done now?’ A sort of anxiety came back into the priest’s eyes—the anxiety of a man who has run against a post in the dark and wonders for a moment whether he has hurt it.

‘I’m most awfully sorry,’ he said with sincere distress. ‘I beg your pardon for being so rude; pray forgive me.’

Fiennes looked at him curiously. ‘I sometimes think you are more of a mystery than any of the mysteries,’ he said. ‘But anyhow, if you don’t believe in the mystery of the dog, at least you can’t get over the mystery of the man. You can’t deny that at the very moment when the beast came back from the sea and bellowed, his master’s soul was driven out of his body by the blow of some unseen power that no mortal man can trace or even imagine. And as for the lawyer— I don’t go only by the dog—there are other curious details, too. He struck me as a smooth, smiling, equivocal sort of person; and one of his tricks seemed like a sort of hint. You know the doctor and the police were on the spot very quickly; Valentine was brought back when walking away from the house, and he telephoned instantly. That, with the secluded house, small numbers, and enclosed space, made it pretty possible to search everybody who could have been near; and everybody was thoroughly searched—for a weapon. The whole house, garden, and shore were combed for a weapon. The disappearance of the dagger is almost as crazy as the disappearance of the man.’

‘The disappearance of the dagger,’ said Father Brown, nodding. He seemed to have become suddenly attentive.

‘Well,’ continued Fiennes, ‘I told you that man Traill had a trick of fidgeting with his tie and tie—pin—especially his tie—pin. His pin, like himself, was at once showy and old—fashioned. It had one of those stones with concentric coloured rings that look like an eye; and his own concentration on it got on my nerves, as if he had been a Cyclops with one eye in the middle of his body. But the pin was not only large but long; and it occurred to me that his anxiety about its adjustment was because it was even longer than it looked; as long as a stiletto in fact.’

Father Brown nodded thoughtfully. ‘Was any other instrument ever suggested?’ he asked.

‘There was another suggestion,’ answered Fiennes, ‘from one of the young Druces—the cousins, I mean. Neither Herbert nor Harry Druce would have struck one at first as likely to be of assistance in scientific detection; but while Herbert was really the traditional type of heavy Dragoon, caring for nothing but horses and being an ornament to the Horse Guards, his younger brother Harry had been in the Indian Police and knew something about such things. Indeed, in his own way he was quite clever; and I rather fancy he had been too clever; I mean he had left the police through breaking some red—tape regulations and taking some sort of risk and responsibility of his own. Anyhow, he was in some sense a detective out of work, and threw himself into this business with more than the ardour of an amateur. And it was with him that I had an argument about the weapon— an argument that led—to something new. It began by his countering my description of the dog barking at Traill; and he said that a dog at his worst didn’t bark, but growled.’

‘He was quite right there,’ observed the priest.

‘This young fellow went on to say that, if it came to that, he’d heard Nox growling at other people before then; and among others at Floyd, the secretary. I retorted that his own argument answered itself; for the crime couldn’t be brought home to two or three people, and least of all to Floyd, who was as innocent as a harum—scarum schoolboy, and had been seen by everybody all the time perched above the garden hedge with his fan of red hair as conspicuous as a scarlet cockatoo.

‘I know there’s difficulties anyhow,’ said my colleague, ‘but I wish you’d come with me down the garden a minute. I want to show you something I don’t think any one else has seen.’ This was on the very day of the discovery, and the garden was just as it had been. The step—ladder was still standing by the hedge, and just under the hedge my guide stopped and disentangled something from the deep grass. It was the sheers used for clipping the hedge, and on the point of one of them was a smear of blood.’

There was a short silence, and then Father Brown said suddenly; ‘What was the lawyer there for?’

«Immagino che siate tornati indietro», disse Padre Brown con pazienza. «Che accadde poi?»

«Le dirò io che accadde poi», disse Fiennes con cupa enfasi. «Quando rientrammo in quel giardino, la prima cosa che vedemmo fu Traill, l’avvocato; lo vedo ancora col suo cappello nero e le sue fedine nere che si stagliavano contro la prospettiva dei fiori azzurri digradanti fino al padiglione, col tramonto e lo strano profilo della Rupe della Fortuna in lontananza. Il volto e la figura erano in ombra contro il tramonto; ma giuro che i denti bianchi gli spiccavano in bocca e stava sorridendo. Nell’istante in cui Nox vide quell’uomo, il cane si slanciò in avanti e si piantò in mezzo al sentiero abbaiandogli contro come impazzito, con furia omicida, vomitando maledizioni quasi verbali nella loro spaventosa nitidezza d’odio. E l’uomo si piegò in due e fuggì, lungo il sentiero fra i fiori.»

Padre Brown balzò in piedi con una impazienza sorprendente. «Dunque il cane lo denunciò?», esclamò. «L’oracolo del cane lo condannò. Avete guardato quali uccelli volavano, e siete sicuri se fossero a destra o a sinistra? Avete consultato gli àuguri sui sacrifici? Di certo non avrete tralasciato di sventrare il cane e di esaminarne le viscere. È il genere di prova scientifica cui voi umanitari pagani sembrate affidarvi quando pensate di togliere la vita e l’onore a un uomo.»

Fiennes rimase un istante a bocca aperta prima di trovare il fiato per dire: «Ma insomma, che cos’ha? Che cosa ho fatto ora?» Una specie d’ansia tornò negli occhi del prete — l’ansia di chi ha urtato contro un palo nel buio e per un momento si domanda se non gli abbia fatto male.

«Mi dispiace moltissimo», disse con sincero rammarico. «Le chiedo scusa d’essere stato così sgarbato; la prego, mi perdoni.»

Fiennes lo guardò incuriosito. «A volte penso che lei sia più misterioso di tutti i misteri», disse. «Ma comunque, se anche non crede al mistero del cane, per lo meno non può scavalcare il mistero dell’uomo. Non può negare che, nell’istante stesso in cui la bestia tornò dal mare e muggì, l’anima del suo padrone fu scacciata dal suo corpo dal colpo di qualche potenza invisibile che nessun mortale può rintracciare né pure immaginare. E quanto all’avvocato — non mi baso solo sul cane — ci sono anche altri particolari curiosi. Mi fece l’impressione di un tipo liscio, sorridente, ambiguo; e uno dei suoi vezzi pareva quasi un indizio. Sa che il dottore e la polizia furono sul posto assai in fretta; Valentine fu richiamato mentre si allontanava dalla casa, e telefonò all’istante. Ciò, con la casa appartata, il piccolo numero di persone e lo spazio chiuso, rese abbastanza possibile perquisire chiunque potesse essere stato nei paraggi; e chiunque fu perquisito accuratamente — in cerca di un’arma. L’intera casa, il giardino e la riva furono passati al setaccio in cerca di un’arma. La scomparsa del pugnale è quasi altrettanto folle quanto la scomparsa dell’uomo.»

«La scomparsa del pugnale», disse Padre Brown annuendo. Pareva d’un tratto divenuto attento.

«Be’», proseguì Fiennes, «le ho detto che quel Traill aveva il vezzo di trafficare con la cravatta e con lo spillo — specialmente con lo spillo. Il suo spillo, come lui, era insieme vistoso e antiquato. Aveva una di quelle pietre con anelli concentrici di colore che paiono un occhio; e la sua stessa concentrazione su di esso mi dava ai nervi, come se fosse stato un Ciclope con un occhio in mezzo al corpo. Ma lo spillo non era solo grosso: era lungo; e mi venne in mente che la sua ansia nell’aggiustarlo dipendesse dal fatto che era ancora più lungo di quanto sembrasse; lungo, in effetti, quanto uno stiletto.»

Padre Brown annuì pensieroso. «Fu mai suggerito qualche altro strumento?», chiese.

«Ci fu un altro suggerimento», rispose Fiennes, «da parte di uno dei giovani Druce — i cugini, intendo. Né Herbert né Harry Druce, a prima vista, sarebbero parsi tipi capaci di dare una mano in un’indagine scientifica; ma mentre Herbert era davvero il tradizionale tipo del pesante dragone, che non si cura d’altro che di cavalli ed è un ornamento delle Horse Guards, il fratello minore Harry era stato nella Polizia indiana e s’intendeva un poco di simili cose. Anzi, a modo suo era piuttosto in gamba; e ho idea che fosse stato troppo in gamba; voglio dire che aveva lasciato la polizia per aver infranto qualche regola burocratica e per essersi preso, di sua iniziativa, un certo rischio e una certa responsabilità. Comunque, era in un certo senso un investigatore senza impiego, e si gettò in questa faccenda con più dell’ardore d’un dilettante. E fu con lui che ebbi una discussione sull’arma — una discussione che condusse a qualcosa di nuovo. Cominciò col ribattere alla mia descrizione del cane che abbaiava a Traill; e disse che un cane, al peggio, non abbaia, ma ringhia.»

«Aveva ragione in questo», osservò il prete.

«Questo giovanotto proseguì dicendo che, se era per quello, aveva sentito Nox ringhiare ad altre persone prima d’allora; e fra gli altri a Floyd, il segretario. Ribattei che il suo stesso argomento si smentiva da sé; giacché il delitto non poteva essere fatto ricadere addosso a due o tre persone, e meno che mai a Floyd, che era innocente come uno scolaretto scavezzacollo, ed era stato visto da tutti per tutto il tempo appollaiato sopra la siepe del giardino col suo ciuffo di capelli rossi cospicuo come un cacatua scarlatto.

«So che comunque ci sono delle difficoltà», disse il mio collega, «ma vorrei che venisse con me giù in giardino un momento. Voglio mostrarle una cosa che non credo abbia visto nessun altro.» Era il giorno stesso della scoperta, e il giardino era proprio com’era stato. La scala a pioli era ancora appoggiata alla siepe, e proprio sotto la siepe la mia guida si fermò e districò qualcosa dall’erba folta. Erano le cesoie usate per potare la siepe, e sulla punta di una delle lame c’era una macchia di sangue.»

Vi fu un breve silenzio, e poi Padre Brown disse d’improvviso: «Per che cosa era venuto l’avvocato?»

‘He fold us the Colonel sent for him to alter his will,’ answered Fiennes. ‘And, by the way, there was another thing about the business of the will that I ought to mention. You see, the will wasn’t actually signed in the summer— house that afternoon.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Father Brown; ‘there would have to be two witnesses.’

‘The lawyer actually came down the day before and it was signed then; but he was sent for again next day because the old man had a doubt about one of the witnesses and had to be reassured.’

‘Who were the witnesses?’ asked Father Brown.

‘That’s just the point,’ replied his informant eagerly, ‘the witnesses were Floyd, the secretary, and this Dr Valentine, the foreign sort of surgeon or whatever he is; and the two had a quarrel. Now I’m bound to say that the secretary is something of a busybody. He’s one of those hot and headlong people whose warmth of temperament has unfortunately turned mostly to pugnacity and bristling suspicion; to distrusting people instead of to trusting them. That sort of red— haired red—hot fellow is always either universally credulous or universally incredulous; and sometimes both. He was not only a Jack—of—all—trades, but he knew better than all tradesmen. He not only knew everything, but he warned everybody against everybody. All that must be taken into account in his suspicions about Valentine; but in that particular case there seems to have been something behind it. He said the name of Valentine was not really Valentine. He said he had seen him elsewhere known by the name of De Villon. He said it would invalidate the will; of course he was kind enough to explain to the lawyer what the law was on that point. They were both in a frightful wax.’

Father Brown laughed. ‘People often are when they are to witness a will,’ he said; ‘for one thing, it means that they can’t have any legacy under it. But what did Dr Valentine say? No doubt the universal secretary knew more about the doctor’s name than the doctor did. But even the doctor might have some information about his own name.’

Fiennes paused a moment before he replied. ‘Dr Valentine took it in a curious way. Dr Valentine is a curious man. His appearance is rather striking but very foreign. He is young but wears a beard cut square; and his face is very pale, dreadfully pale—and dreadfully serious. His eyes have a sort of ache in them, as if he ought to wear glasses, or had given himself a headache with thinking; but he is quite handsome and always very formally dressed, with a top hat and a dark coat and a little red rosette. His manner is rather cold and haughty, and he has a way of staring at you which is very disconcerting. When thus charged with having changed his name, he merely stared like a sphinx and then said with a little laugh that he supposed Americans had no names to change. At that I think the Colonel also got into a fuss and said all sorts of angry things to the doctor; all the more angry because of the doctor’s pretensions to a future place in his family. But I shouldn’t have thought much of that but for a few words that I happened to hear later, early in the afternoon of the tragedy. I don’t want to make a lot of them, for they weren’t the sort of words on which one would like, in the ordinary way, to play the eavesdropper. As I was passing out towards the front gate with my two companions and the dog, I heard voices which told me that Dr Valentine and Miss Druce had withdrawn for a moment in the shadow of the house, in an angle behind a row of flowering plants, and were talking to each other in passionate whisperings—sometimes almost like hissings; for it was something of a lovers’ quarrel as well as a lovers’ tryst. Nobody repeats the sort of things they said for the most part; but in an unfortunate business like this I’m bound to say that there was repeated more than once a phrase about killing somebody. In fact, the girl seemed to be begging him not to kill somebody, or saying that no provocation could justify killing anybody; which seems an unusual sort of talk to address to a gentleman who has dropped in to tea.’

‘Do you know,’ asked the priest, ‘whether Dr Valentine seemed to be very angry after the scene with the secretary and the Colonel—I mean about witnessing the will?’

‘By all accounts,’ replied the other, ‘he wasn’t half so angry as the secretary was. It was the secretary who went away raging after witnessing the will.’

‘And now,’ said Father Brown,’ what about the will itself?’

‘The Colonel was a very wealthy man, and his will was important. Traill wouldn’t tell us the alteration at that stage, but I have since heard only this morning in fact—that most of the money was transferred from the son to the daughter. I told you that Druce was wild with my friend Donald over his dissipated hours.’

‘The question of motive has been rather over—shadowed by the question of method,’ observed Father Brown thoughtfully. ‘At that moment, apparently, Miss Druce was the immediate gainer by the death.’

‘Good God! What a cold—blooded way of talking,’ cried Fiennes, staring at him. ‘You don’t really mean to hint that she—‘

‘Is she going to marry that Dr Valentine?’ asked the other.

‘Some people are against it,’ answered his friend. ‘But he is liked and respected in the place and is a skilled and devoted surgeon.’

‘So devoted a surgeon,’ said Father Brown, ‘that he had surgical instruments with him when he went to call on the young lady at teatime. For he must have used a lancet or something, and he never seems to have gone home.’

Fiennes sprang to his feet and looked at him in a heat of inquiry. ‘You suggest he might have used the very same lancet—‘

Father Brown shook his head. ‘All these suggestions are fancies just now,’ he said. ‘The problem is not who did it or what did it, but how it was done. We might find many men and even many tools— pins and shears and lancets. But how did a man get into the room? How did even a pin get into it?’

«Ci disse che il colonnello l’aveva mandato a chiamare per modificare il testamento», rispose Fiennes. «E, a proposito, c’era un’altra cosa nella faccenda del testamento che dovrei accennare. Vede, il testamento non fu propriamente firmato nel padiglione quel pomeriggio.»

«Immagino di no», disse Padre Brown; «ci sarebbero voluti due testimoni.»

«L’avvocato era in realtà sceso il giorno prima e allora fu firmato; ma fu mandato a chiamare di nuovo il giorno dopo perché il vecchio aveva un dubbio su uno dei testimoni e bisognava rassicurarlo.»

«Chi erano i testimoni?», chiese Padre Brown.

«È proprio questo il punto», replicò con ardore il suo informatore, «i testimoni erano Floyd, il segretario, e questo dottor Valentine, la specie di chirurgo straniero o quel che è; e i due ebbero un litigio. Ora, sono costretto a dire che il segretario è un po’ un ficcanaso. È uno di quei tipi caldi e impetuosi il cui calore di temperamento si è purtroppo mutato per lo più in litigiosità e in sospettosità irta di spine; nel diffidare della gente anziché nel fidarsene. Quel genere di tipo dai capelli rossi e dal sangue caldo è sempre o universalmente credulo o universalmente incredulo; e talora entrambe le cose. Non era soltanto un factotum tuttofare, ma la sapeva più lunga di tutti i mestieranti. Non solo sapeva tutto, ma metteva in guardia ciascuno contro chiunque. Di tutto ciò bisogna tener conto nei suoi sospetti su Valentine; ma in quel caso particolare pare che ci fosse qualcosa sotto. Disse che il nome di Valentine non era in realtà Valentine. Disse di averlo visto altrove conosciuto col nome di De Villon. Disse che ciò avrebbe invalidato il testamento; naturalmente ebbe la bontà di spiegare all’avvocato che cosa dicesse la legge su quel punto. Erano entrambi in una furia spaventosa.»

Padre Brown rise. «La gente lo è spesso quando deve fare da testimone a un testamento», disse; «se non altro, significa che non può ricavarne alcun lascito. Ma il dottor Valentine che cosa disse? Senza dubbio l’universale segretario ne sapeva più del dottore sul nome del dottore. Ma anche il dottore poteva avere qualche informazione sul proprio nome.»

Fiennes esitò un momento prima di rispondere. «Il dottor Valentine la prese in maniera curiosa. Il dottor Valentine è un uomo curioso. Il suo aspetto è piuttosto notevole ma molto straniero. È giovane ma porta la barba tagliata a quadro; e il viso è pallidissimo, spaventosamente pallido — e spaventosamente serio. Nei suoi occhi c’è come un dolore, quasi dovesse portare gli occhiali, o si fosse procurato un mal di capo a furia di pensare; ma è piuttosto bello e sempre vestito con molta formalità, con un cilindro e una redingote scura e una piccola rosetta rossa. I suoi modi sono piuttosto freddi e altezzosi, e ha un modo di fissarti che mette molto a disagio. Quando gli fu così contestato d’aver mutato nome, si limitò a fissare come una sfinge e poi disse con una risatina che immaginava gli Americani non avessero nomi da mutare. A quel punto credo che anche il colonnello si adombrasse e dicesse ogni sorta di cose irose al dottore; tanto più irose per via delle pretese del dottore a un posto futuro nella sua famiglia. Ma non ci avrei fatto gran caso, se non fosse per alcune parole che mi capitò di udire più tardi, nel primo pomeriggio della tragedia. Non voglio darvi troppo peso, perché non erano il genere di parole su cui, in circostanze normali, si vorrebbe fare l’origliatore. Mentre passavo verso il cancello d’ingresso coi miei due compagni e col cane, udii delle voci che mi rivelarono come il dottor Valentine e la signorina Druce si fossero ritirati un momento nell’ombra della casa, in un angolo dietro una fila di piante fiorite, e stessero parlando fra loro in appassionati bisbigli — a tratti quasi sibili; perché era tanto una lite d’amanti quanto un convegno d’amanti. Nessuno riferisce, per la maggior parte, il genere di cose che si dissero; ma in una faccenda sventurata come questa sono costretto a dire che vi fu ripetuta più d’una volta una frase sull’uccidere qualcuno. Anzi, la ragazza pareva scongiurarlo di non uccidere qualcuno, o dirgli che nessuna provocazione poteva giustificare l’uccidere alcuno; il che pare un genere di discorso insolito da rivolgere a un signore capitato per il tè.»

«Sa», chiese il prete, «se il dottor Valentine parve molto adirato dopo la scena col segretario e col colonnello — intendo a proposito del testimoniare il testamento?»

«A quanto pare», rispose l’altro, «non era neppure lontanamente adirato quanto lo era il segretario. Fu il segretario ad andarsene su tutte le furie dopo aver testimoniato il testamento.»

«E ora», disse Padre Brown, «che mi dice del testamento stesso?»

«Il colonnello era uomo assai facoltoso, e il suo testamento era importante. Traill non volle dirci la modifica a quel punto, ma ho poi saputo — proprio stamattina, in effetti — che la maggior parte del denaro veniva trasferita dal figlio alla figlia. Le ho detto che Druce era fuori di sé col mio amico Donald per via delle sue ore dissipate.»

«La questione del movente è stata alquanto messa in ombra dalla questione del metodo», osservò Padre Brown pensieroso. «In quel momento, a quanto pare, la signorina Druce era l’immediata beneficiaria della morte.»

«Buon Dio! Che modo di parlare a sangue freddo», esclamò Fiennes, fissandolo. «Non vorrà davvero insinuare che lei…»

«Sposerà quel dottor Valentine?», chiese l’altro.

«Qualcuno è contrario», rispose l’amico. «Ma lui è benvoluto e stimato nel luogo, ed è un chirurgo abile e devoto.»

«Un chirurgo tanto devoto», disse Padre Brown, «da avere con sé strumenti chirurgici quando andò a far visita alla giovane signora all’ora del tè. Perché deve aver usato una lancetta o qualcosa di simile, e non pare essere mai tornato a casa.»

Fiennes balzò in piedi e lo guardò in un ardore di domande. «Vuol dire che potrebbe aver usato proprio la stessa lancetta…»

Padre Brown scosse il capo. «Tutti questi suggerimenti per ora sono fantasie», disse. «Il problema non è chi l’abbia fatto o con che cosa, ma come sia stato fatto. Potremmo trovare molti uomini e persino molti arnesi — spilli e cesoie e lancette. Ma come fece un uomo a entrare nella stanza? Come vi entrò anche solo uno spillo?»

He was staring reflectively at the ceiling as he spoke, but as he said the last words his eye cocked in an alert fashion as if he had suddenly seen a curious fly on the ceiling.

‘Well, what would you do about it?’ asked the young man. ‘You have a lot of experience; what would you advise now?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not much use,’ said Father Brown with a sigh. ‘I can’t suggest very much without having ever been near the place or the people. For the moment you can only go on with local inquiries. I gather that your friend from the Indian Police is more or less in charge of your inquiry down there. I should run down and see how he is getting on. See what he’s been doing in the way of amateur detection. There may be news already.’

As his guests, the biped and the quadruped, disappeared, Father Brown took up his pen and went back to his interrupted occupation of planning a course of lectures on the Encyclical Rerum Novarum. The subject was a large one and he had to recast it more than once, so that he was somewhat similarly employed some two days later when the big black dog again came bounding into the room and sprawled all over him with enthusiasm and excitement. The master who followed the dog shared the excitement if not the enthusiasm. He had been excited in a less pleasant fashion, for his blue eyes seemed to start from his head and his eager face was even a little pale.

‘You told me,’ he said abruptly and without preface, ‘to find out what Harry Druce was doing. Do you know what he’s done?’ The priest did not reply, and the young man went on in jerky tones: I’ll tell you what he’s done. He’s killed himself.’

Father Brown’s lips moved only faintly, and there was nothing practical about what he was saying—nothing that has anything to do with this story or this world.

‘You give me the creeps sometimes,’ said Fiennes. ‘Did you— did you expect this?’

‘I thought it possible,’ said Father Brown; ‘that was why I asked you to go and see what he was doing. I hoped you might not be too late.’

‘It was I who found him,’ said Fiennes rather huskily. ‘It was the ugliest and most uncanny thing fever knew. I went down that old garden again, and I knew there was something new and unnatural about it besides the murder. The flowers still tossed about in blue masses on each side of the black entrance into the old grey summer—house; but to me the blue flowers looked like blue devils dancing before some dark cavern of the underworld. I looked all round, everything seemed to be in its ordinary place. But the queer notion grew on me that there was something wrong with the very shape of the sky. And then I saw what it was. The Rock of Fortune always rose in the background beyond the garden hedge and against the sea. The Rock of Fortune was gone.’

Father Brown had lifted his head and was listening intently.

‘It was as if a mountain had walked away out of a landscape or a moon fallen from the sky; though I knew, of course, that a touch at any time would have tipped the thing over. Something possessed me and I rushed down that garden path like the wind and went crashing through that hedge as if it were a spider’s web. It was a thin hedge really, though its undisturbed trimness had made it serve all the purposes of a wall. On the shore I found the loose rock fallen from its pedestal; and poor Harry Druce lay like a wreck underneath it. One arm was thrown round it in a sort of embrace as if he had pulled it down on himself; and on the broad brown sands beside it, in large crazy lettering, he had scrawled the words: ‘The Rock of Fortune falls on the Fool’.’—

‘It was the Colonel’s will that did that,’ observed Father Brown. ‘The young man had staked everything on profiting himself by Donald’s disgrace, especially when his uncle sent for him on the same day as the lawyer, and welcomed him with so much warmth. Otherwise he was done; he’d lost his police job; he was beggared at Monte Carlo. And he killed himself when he found he’d killed his kinsman for nothing.’

‘Here, stop a minute!’ cried the staring Fiennes. ‘You’re going too fast for me.’

‘Talking about the will, by the way,’ continued Father Brown calmly,’ before I forget it, or we go on to bigger things, there was a simple explanation, I think, of all that business about the doctor’s name. I rather fancy I have heard both names before somewhere. The doctor is really a French nobleman with the title of the Marquis de Villon. But he is also an ardent Republican and has abandoned his title and fallen back on the forgotten family surname. ‘With your Citizen Riquetti you have puzzled Europe for ten days.’

‘What is that?’ asked the young man blankly.

‘Never mind,’ said the priest. ‘Nine times out of ten it is a rascally thing to change one’s name; but this was a piece of fine fanaticism. That’s the point of his sarcasm about Americans having no names—that is, no titles. Now in England the Marquis of Hartington is never called Mr Hartington; but in France the Marquis de Villon is called M. de Villon. So it might well look like a change of name. As for the talk about killing, I fancy that also was a point of French etiquette. The doctor was talking about challenging Floyd to a duel, and the girl was trying to dissuade him.’

‘Oh, I see,’ cried Fiennes slowly. ‘Now I understand what she meant.’

‘And what is that about?’ asked his companion, smiling.

‘Well,’ said the young man, ‘it was something that happened to me just before I found that poor fellow’s body; only the catastrophe drove it out of my head. I suppose it’s hard to remember a little romantic idyll when you’ve just come on top of a tragedy. But as I went down the lanes leading to the Colonel’s old place I met his daughter walking with Dr Valentine. She was in mourning, of course, and he always wore black as if he were going to a funeral; but I can’t say that their faces were very funereal. Never have I seen two people looking in their own way more respectably radiant and cheerful. They stopped and saluted me, and then she told me they were married and living in a little house on the outskirts of the town, where the doctor was continuing his practice. This rather surprised me, because I knew that her old father’s will had left her his property; and I hinted at it delicately by saying I was going along to her father’s old place and had half expected to meet her there. But she only laughed and said: ‘Oh, we’ve given up all that. My husband doesn’t like heiresses.’ And I discovered with some astonishment they really had insisted on restoring the property to poor Donald; so I hope he’s had a healthy shock and will treat it sensibly. There was never much really the matter with him; he was very young and his father was not very wise. But it was in connexion with that that she said something I didn’t understand at the time; but now I’m sure it must be as you say. She said with a sort of sudden and splendid arrogance that was entirely altruistic:

Fissava riflessivo il soffitto mentre parlava, ma nel dire le ultime parole l’occhio gli si drizzò all’erta come se avesse d’improvviso scorto una curiosa mosca sul soffitto.

«Be’, che farebbe lei al riguardo?», chiese il giovane. «Lei ha molta esperienza; che cosa consiglierebbe ora?»

«Temo di non esserle di grande aiuto», disse Padre Brown con un sospiro. «Non posso suggerire molto senza essere mai stato vicino né al luogo né alle persone. Per il momento non può che proseguire con le indagini sul posto. Deduco che il suo amico della Polizia indiana sia più o meno a capo della sua inchiesta laggiù. Io ci farei un salto per vedere come se la cava. Guarderei che cosa ha combinato in fatto d’indagine dilettantesca. Potrebbero già esserci novità.»

Come i suoi ospiti, il bipede e il quadrupede, scomparvero, Padre Brown prese la penna e tornò alla sua occupazione interrotta, la preparazione d’un ciclo di conferenze sull’enciclica Rerum Novarum. L’argomento era vasto ed egli dovette rifonderlo più d’una volta, sicché era pressappoco similmente occupato quando, un due giorni dopo, il grosso cane nero venne di nuovo saltellando nella stanza e gli si sdraiò addosso tutto entusiasmo ed eccitazione. Il padrone che seguiva il cane condivideva l’eccitazione se non l’entusiasmo. Era eccitato in modo meno piacevole, perché i suoi occhi azzurri parevano schizzargli dalla testa e il suo viso ardente era persino un po’ pallido.

«Lei mi disse», esordì bruscamente e senza preamboli, «di scoprire che cosa stesse facendo Harry Druce. Sa che cosa ha fatto?» Il prete non rispose, e il giovane proseguì con tono spezzato: «Le dirò io che cosa ha fatto. Si è ucciso.»

Le labbra di Padre Brown si mossero appena, e non c’era nulla di pratico in ciò che diceva — nulla che abbia a che fare con questa storia o con questo mondo.

«A volte mi fa venire i brividi», disse Fiennes. «Se lo… se lo aspettava?»

«Lo ritenevo possibile», disse Padre Brown; «per questo le chiesi di andare a vedere che cosa stesse facendo. Speravo che non arrivasse troppo tardi.»

«Fui io a trovarlo», disse Fiennes con voce piuttosto roca. «Fu la cosa più orribile e più sinistra che abbia mai conosciuto. Scesi di nuovo in quel vecchio giardino, e sapevo che c’era in esso qualcosa di nuovo e d’innaturale, oltre al delitto. I fiori ondeggiavano ancora in masse azzurre da ciascun lato del nero ingresso nel vecchio grigio padiglione; ma a me i fiori azzurri parevano diavoli azzurri danzanti dinanzi a qualche oscura caverna degli inferi. Mi guardai attorno, tutto pareva al suo posto consueto. Ma la strana idea mi crebbe dentro che ci fosse qualcosa di sbagliato nella forma stessa del cielo. E poi vidi che cos’era. La Rupe della Fortuna s’era sempre elevata sullo sfondo, oltre la siepe del giardino e contro il mare. La Rupe della Fortuna era sparita.»

Padre Brown aveva alzato il capo e ascoltava intento.

«Era come se una montagna se ne fosse andata via da un paesaggio o una luna fosse caduta dal cielo; benché sapessi, s’intende, che un tocco in qualunque momento avrebbe rovesciato la cosa. Qualcosa m’invase e mi precipitai giù per quel giardino come il vento, sfondando quella siepe come se fosse una ragnatela. Era una siepe davvero sottile, benché la sua intatta compostezza le avesse permesso di servire a tutti gli scopi d’un muro. Sulla riva trovai la roccia mobile caduta dal suo piedistallo; e il povero Harry Druce giaceva come un rottame là sotto. Un braccio le era gettato intorno in una sorta d’abbraccio, come se se l’avesse tirata addosso; e sull’ampia sabbia bruna accanto ad essa, in grandi lettere sconnesse, aveva scarabocchiato le parole: «La Rupe della Fortuna cade sullo Sciocco».»

«Fu il testamento del colonnello a produrre tutto ciò», osservò Padre Brown. «Il giovane aveva puntato tutto sul trarre profitto dal disonore di Donald, specie quando lo zio lo mandò a chiamare lo stesso giorno dell’avvocato, e lo accolse con tanto calore. Altrimenti era rovinato; aveva perduto il posto in polizia; era ridotto sul lastrico a Monte Carlo. E si uccise quando scoprì d’aver ucciso il proprio congiunto per nulla.»

«Un momento, si fermi!», gridò Fiennes con gli occhi sbarrati. «Va troppo in fretta per me.»

«A proposito del testamento», proseguì con calma Padre Brown, «prima che me ne dimentichi, o che passiamo a cose più grosse, c’era una spiegazione semplice, credo, di tutta quella faccenda del nome del dottore. Ho idea d’aver già sentito entrambi i nomi da qualche parte. Il dottore è in realtà un nobile francese col titolo di marchese de Villon. Ma è anche un ardente repubblicano e ha abbandonato il titolo, ripiegando sul dimenticato cognome di famiglia. «Col vostro Cittadino Riquetti avete tenuto in scacco l’Europa per dieci giorni.»»

«Che cos’è?», chiese il giovane con aria smarrita.

«Non importa», disse il prete. «Nove volte su dieci mutare il proprio nome è una cosa da mascalzoni; ma questo era un tratto di nobile fanatismo. È qui il senso del suo sarcasmo sugli Americani che non hanno nomi — cioè, titoli. Ora, in Inghilterra il marchese di Hartington non è mai chiamato signor Hartington; ma in Francia il marchese de Villon è chiamato M. de Villon. Sicché potrebbe ben sembrare un cambiamento di nome. Quanto ai discorsi sull’uccidere, ho idea che anche quello fosse un punto d’etichetta francese. Il dottore parlava di sfidare Floyd a duello, e la ragazza cercava di dissuaderlo.»

«Oh, capisco», esclamò lentamente Fiennes. «Ora capisco che cosa intendeva.»

«E di che si tratta?», chiese il compagno, sorridendo.

«Be’», disse il giovane, «è una cosa che mi accadde poco prima che trovassi il corpo di quel pover’uomo; solo che la catastrofe me la scacciò dalla mente. Immagino sia difficile ricordare un piccolo idillio romantico quando si è appena inciampati in una tragedia. Ma mentre scendevo per i viottoli che portano alla vecchia dimora del colonnello, incontrai sua figlia a passeggio col dottor Valentine. Era in lutto, s’intende, e lui vestiva sempre di nero come se andasse a un funerale; ma non posso dire che i loro volti fossero molto funerei. Mai ho visto due persone dall’aria, a modo loro, più dignitosamente raggiante e lieta. Si fermarono e mi salutarono, e poi lei mi disse che erano sposati e vivevano in una casetta ai margini della città, dove il dottore continuava a esercitare. La cosa mi sorprese piuttosto, perché sapevo che il testamento del suo vecchio padre le aveva lasciato le sue proprietà; e vi alludei con delicatezza dicendo che mi recavo appunto alla vecchia dimora del padre e mezzo m’aspettavo di incontrarla lì. Ma lei si limitò a ridere e disse: «Oh, abbiamo rinunciato a tutto ciò. A mio marito non piacciono le ereditiere.» E scoprii con una certa meraviglia che avevano davvero insistito per restituire le proprietà al povero Donald; sicché spero che abbia avuto un sano scossone e la tratti con giudizio. Non c’è mai stato molto di male in lui, in fondo; era giovanissimo e suo padre non era molto saggio. Ma fu a proposito di ciò che lei disse una cosa che sul momento non compresi; ma ora sono sicuro che dev’essere come dice lei. Disse con una sorta d’improvvisa e splendida arroganza che era del tutto altruistica:

‘‘I hope it’ll stop that red—haired fool from fussing any more about the will. Does he think my husband, who has given up a crest and a coronet as old as the Crusades for his principles, would kill an old man in a summer—house for a legacy like that?’ Then she laughed again and said, ‘My husband isn’t killing anybody except in the way of business. Why, he didn’t even ask his friends to call on the secretary.’ Now, of course, I see what she meant.’

‘I see part of what she meant, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘What did she mean exactly by the secretary fussing about the will?’

Fiennes smiled as he answered, ‘I wish you knew the secretary, Father Brown. It would be a joy to you to watch him make things hum, as he calls it. He made the house of mourning hum. He filled the funeral with all the snap and zip of the brightest sporting event. There was no holding him, after something had really happened. I’ve told you how he used to oversee the gardener as he did the garden, and how he instructed the lawyer in the law. Needless to say, he also instructed the surgeon in the practice of surgery; and as the surgeon was Dr Valentine, you may be sure it ended in accusing him of something worse than bad surgery. The secretary got it fixed in his red head that the doctor had committed the crime, and when the police arrived he was perfectly sublime. Need I say that he became, on the spot, the greatest of all amateur detectives? Sherlock Holmes never towered over Scotland Yard with more Titanic intellectual pride and scorn than Colonel Druce’s private secretary over the police investigating Colonel Druce’s death. I tell you it was a joy to see him. He strode about with an abstracted air, tossing his scarlet crest of hair and giving curt impatient replies. Of course it was his demeanour during these days that made Druce’s daughter so wild with him. Of course he had a theory. It’s just the sort of theory a man would have in a book; and Floyd is the sort of man who ought to be in a book. He’d be better fun and less bother in a book.’

‘What was his theory?’ asked the other.

‘Oh, it was full of pep,’ replied Fiennes gloomily. ‘It would have been glorious copy if it could have held together for ten minutes longer. He said the Colonel was still alive when they found him in the summer— house, and the doctor killed him with the surgical instrument on pretence of cutting the clothes.’

‘I see,’ said the priest. ‘I suppose he was lying flat on his face on the mud floor as a form of siesta.’

‘It’s wonderful what hustle will do,’ continued his informant. ‘ I believe Floyd would have got his great theory into the papers at any rate, and perhaps had the doctor attested, when all these things were blown sky high as if by dynamite by the discovery of that dead body lying under the Rock of Fortune. And that’s what we come back to after all. I suppose the suicide is almost a confession. But nobody will ever know the whole story.’

There was a silence, and then the priest said modestly: ‘I rather think I know the whole story.’

Fiennes stared. ‘But look here,’ he cried; ‘how do you come to know the whole story, or to be sure it’s the true story? You’ve been sitting here a hundred miles away writing a sermon; do you mean to tell me you really know what happened already? If you’ve really come to the end, where in the world do you begin? What started you off with your own story?’

Father Brown jumped up with a very unusual excitement and his first exclamation was like an explosion.

‘The dog!’ he cried. ‘The dog, of course! You had the whole story in your hands in the business of the dog on the beach, if you’d only noticed the dog properly.’

Fiennes stared still more. ‘But you told me before that my feelings about the dog were all nonsense, and the dog had nothing to do with it.’

‘The dog had everything to do with it,’ said Father Brown, ‘as you’d have found out if you’d only treated the dog as a dog, and not as God Almighty judging the souls of men.’

He paused in an embarrassed way for a moment, and then said, with a rather pathetic air of apology: ‘The truth is, I happen to be awfully fond of dogs. And it seemed to me that in all this lurid halo of dog superstitions nobody was really thinking about the poor dog at all. To begin with a small point, about his barking at the lawyer or growling at the secretary. You asked how I could guess things a hundred miles away; but honestly it’s mostly to your credit, for you described people so well that I know the types. A man like Traill, who frowns usually and smiles suddenly, a man who fiddles with things, especially at his throat, is a nervous, easily embarrassed man. I shouldn’t wonder if Floyd, the efficient secretary, is nervy and jumpy, too; those Yankee hustlers often are. Otherwise he wouldn’t have cut his fingers on the shears and dropped them when he heard Janet Druce scream.

‘Now dogs hate nervous people. I don’t know whether they make the dog nervous, too; or whether, being after all a brute, he is a bit of a bully; or whether his canine vanity (which is colossal) is simply offended at not being liked. But anyhow there was nothing in poor Nox protesting against those people, except that he disliked them for being afraid of him. Now I know you’re awfully clever, and nobody of sense sneers at cleverness. But I sometimes fancy, for instance, that you are too clever to understand animals. Sometimes you are too clever to understand men, especially when they act almost as simply as animals. Animals are very literal; they live in a world of truisms. Take this case: a dog barks at a man and a man runs away from a dog. Now you do not seem to be quite simple enough to see the fact: that the dog barked because he disliked the man and the man fled because he was frightened of the dog. They had no other motives and they needed none; but you must read psychological mysteries into it and suppose the dog had super— normal vision, and was a mysterious mouthpiece of doom. You must suppose the man was running away, not from the dog but from the hangman. And yet, if you come to think if it, all this deeper psychology is exceedingly improbable. If the dog really could completely and consciously realize the murderer of his master he wouldn’t stand yapping as he might at a curate at a tea—party; he’s much more likely to fly at his throat. And on the other hand, do you really think a man who had hardened his heart to murder an old friend and then walk about smiling at the old friend’s family, under the eyes of his old friend’s daughter and post—mortem doctor— do you think a man like that would be doubled up by mere remorse because a dog barked? He might feel the tragic irony of it; it might shake his soul, like any other tragic trifle. But he wouldn’t rush madly the length of a garden to escape from the only witness whom he knew to be unable to talk. People have a panic like that when they are frightened, not of tragic ironies, but of teeth. The whole thing is simpler than you can understand.

«Spero che ciò impedisca a quello sciocco dai capelli rossi di continuare a impicciarsi del testamento. Crede forse che mio marito, che ha rinunciato a uno stemma e a una corona antichi quanto le Crociate per i suoi princìpi, ucciderebbe un vecchio in un padiglione estivo per un lascito simile?» Poi rise di nuovo e disse: «Mio marito non uccide nessuno, se non per motivi professionali. Ma via, non ha neppure chiesto ai suoi amici di far visita al segretario.» Ora, s’intende, capisco che cosa intendeva.»

«Capisco in parte che cosa intendeva, s’intende», disse Padre Brown. «Che cosa intendeva esattamente col segretario che s’impiccia del testamento?»

Fiennes sorrise nel rispondere: «Vorrei che conoscesse il segretario, Padre Brown. Sarebbe una gioia per lei vederlo «far girare le cose», come dice lui. Fece girare la casa in lutto. Riempì il funerale di tutto lo scatto e la verve del più brillante evento sportivo. Non c’era modo di trattenerlo, dopo che qualcosa era davvero accaduto. Le ho raccontato come soprintendeva al giardiniere come faceva col giardino, e come istruiva l’avvocato in fatto di legge. Inutile dire che istruì anche il chirurgo nella pratica della chirurgia; e poiché il chirurgo era il dottor Valentine, potete star certi che finì con l’accusarlo di qualcosa di peggio della cattiva chirurgia. Il segretario si ficcò in quella sua testa rossa che il dottore avesse commesso il delitto, e quando arrivò la polizia fu perfettamente sublime. C’è bisogno che dica che divenne, su due piedi, il più grande di tutti gli investigatori dilettanti? Sherlock Holmes non torreggiò mai su Scotland Yard con più titanico orgoglio intellettuale e sdegno di quanto facesse il segretario privato del colonnello Druce sulla polizia che indagava sulla morte del colonnello Druce. Le dico che era una gioia vederlo. Se ne andava a grandi passi con aria assorta, scuotendo la sua scarlatta cresta di capelli e dando risposte secche e impazienti. Naturalmente fu il suo contegno in quei giorni a rendere la figlia di Druce così esasperata con lui. Naturalmente aveva una teoria. È proprio il genere di teoria che uno avrebbe in un libro; e Floyd è il genere di uomo che dovrebbe stare in un libro. Sarebbe più divertente e meno seccante in un libro.»

«Qual era la sua teoria?», chiese l’altro.

«Oh, era piena di brio», rispose Fiennes con aria tetra. «Sarebbe stata una copia gloriosa, se avesse potuto reggere ancora dieci minuti. Diceva che il colonnello era ancora vivo quando lo trovarono nel padiglione, e che il dottore lo uccise con lo strumento chirurgico col pretesto di tagliargli i vestiti.»

«Capisco», disse il prete. «Immagino giacesse bocconi sul pavimento di fango a mo’ di siesta.»

«È straordinario ciò che sa fare la frenesia», proseguì il suo informatore. «Credo che Floyd avrebbe comunque fatto arrivare la sua grande teoria sui giornali, e forse fatto arrestare il dottore, quando tutte queste cose furono fatte saltare in aria come per dinamite dalla scoperta di quel cadavere disteso sotto la Rupe della Fortuna. Ed è a questo che torniamo, dopotutto. Immagino che il suicidio sia quasi una confessione. Ma nessuno conoscerà mai l’intera storia.»

Vi fu un silenzio, e poi il prete disse con modestia: «Credo piuttosto di conoscere l’intera storia.»

Fiennes lo fissò. «Ma senta un po’», esclamò; «come mai lei conosce l’intera storia, o è sicuro che sia la storia vera? È rimasto seduto qui a cento miglia di distanza a scrivere un sermone; vuol dirmi che sa già davvero che cosa è accaduto? Se è davvero arrivato alla fine, da dove diamine comincia? Che cosa l’ha avviata con la sua storia?»

Padre Brown balzò in piedi con un’eccitazione assai insolita, e la sua prima esclamazione fu come un’esplosione.

«Il cane!», gridò. «Il cane, naturalmente! Aveva l’intera storia fra le mani nella faccenda del cane sulla spiaggia, se solo avesse osservato il cane come si deve.»

Fiennes lo fissò ancor più. «Ma prima mi ha detto che le mie sensazioni sul cane erano tutte sciocchezze, e che il cane non c’entrava nulla.»

«Il cane c’entrava in tutto», disse Padre Brown, «come avrebbe scoperto se solo avesse trattato il cane come un cane, e non come Dio Onnipotente che giudica le anime degli uomini.»

S’interruppe imbarazzato per un momento, e poi disse, con un’aria di scusa piuttosto patetica: «La verità è che mi capita d’essere terribilmente affezionato ai cani. E mi pareva che, in tutto questo lurido alone di superstizioni canine, nessuno pensasse davvero al povero cane. Per cominciare da un piccolo particolare, quello del suo abbaiare all’avvocato o ringhiare al segretario. Lei mi ha chiesto come potessi indovinare le cose a cento miglia di distanza; ma onestamente è merito soprattutto suo, perché ha descritto le persone così bene che ne riconosco i tipi. Un uomo come Traill, che di solito corruga la fronte e sorride d’improvviso, un uomo che gingilla con gli oggetti, specie alla gola, è un uomo nervoso, facile all’imbarazzo. Non mi stupirei se anche Floyd, l’efficiente segretario, fosse nervoso e scattante; quegli affannati yankee spesso lo sono. Altrimenti non si sarebbe tagliato le dita sulle cesoie lasciandole cadere quando udì Janet Druce gridare.

«Ora, i cani detestano le persone nervose. Non so se siano esse a rendere nervoso anche il cane; o se, essendo dopotutto una bestia, egli sia un po’ un prepotente; o se la sua vanità canina (che è colossale) resti semplicemente offesa dal non essere amata. Ma comunque non c’era altro, nel povero Nox che protestava contro quelle persone, se non che le detestava perché avevano paura di lui. Ora, so che lei è terribilmente intelligente, e nessuna persona di buon senso irride all’intelligenza. Ma a volte immagino, per esempio, che lei sia troppo intelligente per capire gli animali. A volte è troppo intelligente per capire gli uomini, specie quando agiscono quasi con la stessa semplicità degli animali. Gli animali sono molto letterali; vivono in un mondo di truismi. Prenda questo caso: un cane abbaia a un uomo e un uomo fugge da un cane. Ora, lei non sembra abbastanza semplice da vedere il fatto: che il cane abbaiò perché l’uomo gli era antipatico e l’uomo fuggì perché aveva paura del cane. Non avevano altri moventi e non ne avevano bisogno; ma lei deve leggervi dentro misteri psicologici e supporre che il cane avesse una vista sovrannaturale e fosse un misterioso portavoce del destino. Deve supporre che l’uomo stesse fuggendo non dal cane, ma dal boia. Eppure, se ci pensa bene, tutta questa psicologia più profonda è oltremodo improbabile. Se il cane avesse potuto davvero, in modo completo e consapevole, riconoscere l’assassino del suo padrone, non se ne starebbe a guaire come farebbe con un curato a un ricevimento; è molto più probabile che gli sarebbe volato alla gola. E d’altra parte, crede davvero che un uomo che aveva indurito il cuore fino ad assassinare un vecchio amico e poi a passeggiare sorridente fra la famiglia del vecchio amico, sotto gli occhi della figlia del vecchio amico e del medico legale — crede che un uomo simile si piegherebbe in due per il puro rimorso perché un cane ha abbaiato? Potrebbe sentirne la tragica ironia; potrebbe scuotergli l’anima, come qualsiasi altra tragica inezia. Ma non si precipiterebbe come un pazzo per tutta la lunghezza d’un giardino per sfuggire all’unico testimone che sapeva incapace di parlare. La gente ha un panico simile quando ha paura non delle tragiche ironie, ma dei denti. L’intera faccenda è più semplice di quanto lei sappia comprendere.

‘But when we come to that business by the seashore, things are much more interesting. As you stated them, they were much more puzzling. I didn’t understand that tale of the dog going in and out of the water; it didn’t seem to me a doggy thing to do. If Nox had been very much upset about something else, he might possibly have refused to go after the stick at all. He’d probably go off nosing in whatever direction he suspected the mischief. But when once a dog is actually chasing a thing, a stone or a stick or a rabbit, my experience is that he won’t stop for anything but the most peremptory command, and not always for that. That he should turn round because his mood changed seems to me unthinkable.’

‘But he did turn round,’ insisted Fiennes; ‘and came back without the stick.’

‘He came back without the stick for the best reason in the world,’ replied the priest. ‘He came back because he couldn’t find it. He whined because be couldn’t find it. That’s the sort of thing a dog really does whine about. A dog is a devil of a ritualist. He is as particular about the precise routine of a game as a child about the precise repetition of a fairy—tale. In this case something had gone wrong with the game. He came back to complain seriously of the conduct of the stick. Never had such a thing happened before. Never had an eminent and distinguished dog been so treated by a rotten old walking—stick.’

‘Why, what had the walking—stick done?’ inquired the young man.

‘It had sunk,’ said Father Brown.

Fiennes said nothing, but continued to stare; and it was the priest who continued: ‘It had sunk because it was not really a stick, but a rod of steel with a very thin shell of cane and a sharp point. In other words, it was a sword stick. I suppose a murderer never gets rid of a bloody weapon so oddly and yet so naturally as by throwing it into the sea for a retriever.’

‘I begin to see what you mean,’ admitted Fiennes;’ but even if a sword— stick was used, I have no guess of how it was used.’

‘I had a sort of guess,’ said Father Brown, ‘right at the beginning when you said the word summer—house. And another when you said that Druce wore a white coat. As long as everybody was looking for a short dagger, nobody thought of it; but if we admit a rather long blade like a rapier, it’s not so impossible.’

He was leaning back, looking at the ceiling, and began like one going back to his own first thoughts and fundamentals.

‘All that discussion about detective stories like the Yellow Room, about a man found dead in sealed chambers which no one could enter, does not apply to the present case, because it is a summer—house. When we talk of a Yellow Room, or any room, we imply walls that are really homogeneous and impenetrable. But a summer—house is not made like that; it is often made, as it was in this case, of closely interlaced but separate boughs and strips of wood, in which there are chinks here and there. There was one of them just behind Druce’s back as he sat in his chair up against the wall. But just as the room was a summer— house, so the chair was a basket—chair. That also was a lattice of loopholes. Lastly, the summer—house was close up under the hedge; and you have just told me that it was really a thin hedge. A man standing outside it could easily see, amid a network of twigs and branches and canes, one white spot of the Colonel’s coat as plain as the white of a target.

‘Now, you left the geography a little vague; but it was possible to put two and two together. You said the Rock of Fortune was not really high; but you also said it could be seen dominating the garden like a mountain—peak. In other words, it was very near the end of the garden, though your walk had taken you a long way round to it. Also, it isn’t likely the young lady really howled so as to be heard half a mile. She gave an ordinary involuntary cry, and yet you heard it on the shore. And among other interesting things that you told me, may I remind you that you said Harry Druce had fallen behind to light his pipe under a hedge.’

Fiennes shuddered slightly. ‘You mean he drew his blade there and sent it through the hedge at the white spot. But surely it was a very odd chance and a very sudden choice. Besides, he couldn’t be certain the old man’s money had passed to him, and as a fact it hadn’t.’

Father Brown’s face became animated. ‘You misunderstand the man’s character,’ he said, as if he himself had known the man all his life. ‘A curious but not unknown type of character. If he had really known the money would come to him, I seriously believe he wouldn’t have done it. He would have seen it as the dirty thing it was.’

‘Isn’t that rather paradoxical?’ asked the other.

‘This man was a gambler,’ said the priest, ‘and a man in disgrace for having taken risks and anticipated orders. It was probably for something pretty unscrupulous, for every imperial police is more like a Russian secret police than we like to think. But he had gone beyond the line and failed. Now, the temptation of that type of man is to do a mad thing precisely because the risk will be wonderful in retrospect. He wants to say, ‘Nobody but I could have seized that chance or seen that it was then or never. What a wild and wonderful guess it was, when I put all those things together; Donald in disgrace; and the lawyer being sent for; and Herbert and I sent for at the same time—and then nothing more but the way the old man grinned at me and shook hands. Anybody would say I was mad to risk it; but that is how fortunes are made, by the man mad enough to have a little foresight.’ In short, it is the vanity of guessing. It is the megalomania of the gambler. The more incongruous the coincidence, the more instantaneous the decision, the more likely he is to snatch the chance. The accident, the very triviality of the white speck and the hole in the hedge intoxicated him like a vision of the world’s desire. Nobody clever enough to see such a combination of accidents could be cowardly enough not to use them! That is how the devil talks to the gambler. But the devil himself would hardly have induced that unhappy man to go down in a dull, deliberate way and kill an old uncle from whom he’d always had expectations. It would be too respectable.’

«Ma quando arriviamo a quella faccenda in riva al mare, le cose sono molto più interessanti. Come lei le ha esposte, erano molto più sconcertanti. Non capivo quel racconto del cane che entrava e usciva dall’acqua; non mi pareva una cosa da cane. Se Nox fosse stato molto turbato per qualcos’altro, avrebbe forse potuto rifiutarsi del tutto di andare a prendere il bastone. Probabilmente sarebbe andato a fiutare in qualunque direzione sospettasse il guaio. Ma una volta che un cane sta davvero inseguendo qualcosa, un sasso o un bastone o un coniglio, la mia esperienza è che non si ferma per nulla, se non per l’ordine più perentorio, e non sempre neppure per quello. Che si voltasse perché il suo umore era cambiato mi pare impensabile.»

«Eppure si voltò», insisté Fiennes; «e tornò senza il bastone.»

«Tornò senza il bastone per la migliore ragione del mondo», replicò il prete. «Tornò perché non riusciva a trovarlo. Guaì perché non riusciva a trovarlo. È proprio il genere di cosa per cui un cane davvero guaisce. Un cane è un ritualista indiavolato. È scrupoloso sulla precisa routine d’un gioco come un bambino sulla precisa ripetizione d’una fiaba. In questo caso qualcosa nel gioco era andato storto. Tornò a lamentarsi seriamente della condotta del bastone. Mai era accaduta una cosa simile. Mai un cane eminente e distinto era stato trattato così da un marcio vecchio bastone da passeggio.»

«Ma perché, che cosa aveva fatto il bastone da passeggio?», domandò il giovane.

«Era affondato», disse Padre Brown.

Fiennes non disse nulla, ma continuò a fissarlo; e fu il prete a proseguire: «Era affondato perché non era in realtà un bastone, ma una verga d’acciaio con un sottilissimo guscio di canna e una punta aguzza. In altre parole, era un bastone animato. Immagino che un assassino non si sbarazzi mai d’un’arma insanguinata in modo così bizzarro e insieme così naturale come gettandola in mare per un retriever.»

«Comincio a capire che cosa intende», ammise Fiennes; «ma anche se fu usato un bastone da spada, non ho idea di come sia stato usato.»

«Ne ebbi una specie d’intuizione», disse Padre Brown, «proprio all’inizio, quando lei disse le parole «padiglione estivo». E un’altra quando disse che Druce indossava una giacca bianca. Finché tutti cercavano un corto pugnale, nessuno vi pensò; ma se ammettiamo una lama piuttosto lunga come uno stocco, non è poi così impossibile.»

Se ne stava reclinato all’indietro, guardando il soffitto, e cominciò come chi risale ai propri primi pensieri e ai fondamenti.

«Tutta quella discussione sui romanzi polizieschi come La Camera Gialla, su un uomo trovato morto in stanze sigillate in cui nessuno poteva entrare, non si applica al caso presente, perché si tratta d’un padiglione estivo. Quando parliamo d’una Camera Gialla, o d’una qualsiasi stanza, sottintendiamo pareti davvero omogenee e impenetrabili. Ma un padiglione estivo non è fatto così; è fatto spesso, com’era in questo caso, di rami intrecciati fitti ma separati e di strisce di legno, in cui qua e là ci sono delle fessure. Ce n’era una proprio dietro la schiena di Druce mentre sedeva sulla sua poltrona addossato alla parete. Ma come la stanza era un padiglione estivo, così la poltrona era una poltrona di vimini. Anch’essa era un intreccio di feritoie. Infine, il padiglione era addossato alla siepe; e lei mi ha appena detto che era una siepe davvero sottile. Un uomo fermo all’esterno avrebbe potuto facilmente scorgere, in mezzo a una rete di ramoscelli e rami e canne, una macchia bianca della giacca del colonnello, netta come il bianco d’un bersaglio.

«Ora, lei ha lasciato la geografia un po’ vaga; ma era possibile fare due più due. Ha detto che la Rupe della Fortuna non era in realtà alta; ma ha detto anche che la si vedeva dominare il giardino come una vetta di montagna. In altre parole, era assai vicina alla fine del giardino, benché la vostra passeggiata vi avesse portati a farne un lungo giro. Inoltre, non è probabile che la giovane signora abbia davvero urlato tanto da farsi udire a mezzo miglio. Emise un ordinario grido involontario, eppure lei lo udì sulla riva. E fra le altre cose interessanti che mi ha raccontato, posso rammentarle che ha detto come Harry Druce fosse rimasto indietro ad accendere la pipa sotto una siepe.»

Fiennes rabbrividì lievemente. «Vuol dire che estrasse lì la sua lama e la spinse attraverso la siepe verso la macchia bianca. Ma di certo fu un caso ben strano e una scelta ben improvvisa. Del resto, non poteva essere sicuro che il denaro del vecchio fosse passato a lui, e di fatto non era così.»

Il volto di Padre Brown si animò. «Lei fraintende il carattere dell’uomo», disse, come se egli stesso avesse conosciuto quell’uomo tutta la vita. «Un tipo di carattere curioso ma non ignoto. Se avesse davvero saputo che il denaro sarebbe toccato a lui, credo sul serio che non l’avrebbe fatto. L’avrebbe vista per la cosa sordida che era.»

«Non è piuttosto paradossale?», chiese l’altro.

«Quest’uomo era un giocatore d’azzardo», disse il prete, «e un uomo in disgrazia per aver corso rischi e anticipato ordini. Fu probabilmente per qualcosa di alquanto spregiudicato, perché ogni polizia imperiale somiglia più a una polizia segreta russa di quanto ci piaccia pensare. Ma aveva oltrepassato il segno ed era fallito. Ora, la tentazione di quel tipo d’uomo è di fare una cosa folle proprio perché il rischio, a ripensarci, sarà mirabile. Vuole poter dire: «Nessuno tranne me avrebbe potuto cogliere quell’occasione, o vedere che era allora o mai più. Che azzardo sfrenato e mirabile fu, quando misi insieme tutte quelle cose: Donald in disgrazia; e l’avvocato mandato a chiamare; e Herbert e io mandati a chiamare nello stesso momento — e poi nient’altro che il modo in cui il vecchio mi sogghignò e mi strinse la mano. Chiunque direbbe che ero pazzo a rischiare; ma è così che si fanno le fortune, dall’uomo abbastanza pazzo da avere un po’ di preveggenza.» In breve, è la vanità dell’indovinare. È la megalomania del giocatore. Più incongrua è la coincidenza, più istantanea la decisione, più è probabile che egli afferri l’occasione. Il caso, la stessa banalità della macchia bianca e del buco nella siepe l’inebriò come una visione del desiderio del mondo. Nessuno abbastanza intelligente da scorgere una simile combinazione di casi poteva essere abbastanza vile da non servirsene! È così che il diavolo parla al giocatore. Ma il diavolo stesso ben difficilmente avrebbe indotto quell’infelice a scendere in modo scialbo e deliberato a uccidere un vecchio zio dal quale aveva sempre avuto aspettative. Sarebbe stato troppo rispettabile.»

He paused a moment, and then went on with a certain quiet emphasis.

‘And now try to call up the scene, even as you saw it yourself. As he stood there, dizzy with his diabolical opportunity, he looked up and saw that strange outline that might have been the image of his own tottering soul; the one great crag poised perilously on the other like a pyramid on its point, and remembered that it was called the Rock of Fortune. Can you guess how such a man at such a moment would read such a signal? I think it strung him up to action and even to vigilance. He who would be a tower must not fear to be a toppling tower. Anyhow, he acted; his next difficulty was to cover his tracks. To be found with a sword—stick, let alone a blood—stained sword— stick, would be fatal in the search that was certain to follow. If he left it anywhere, it would be found and probably traced. Even if he threw it into the sea the action might be noticed, and thought noticeable—unless indeed he could think of some more natural way of covering the action. As you know, he did think of one, and a very good one. Being the only one of you with a watch, he told you it was not yet time to return, strolled a little farther, and started the game of throwing in sticks for the retriever. But how his eyes must have rolled darkly over all that desolate sea— shore before they alighted on the dog!’

Fiennes nodded, gazing thoughtfully into space. His mind seemed to have drifted back to a less practical part of the narrative.

‘It’s queer,’ he said, ‘that the dog really was in the story after all.’

‘The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk,’ said the priest. ‘All I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational catchwords; something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.’ He stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of frown, and went on talking almost as if he were alone. ‘It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery, and a pig is a mascot, and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green— eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words:

‘He was made Man’.’

The young man got up with a little embarrassment, almost as if he had overheard a soliloquy. He called to the dog and left the room with vague but breezy farewells. But he had to call the dog twice, for the dog had remained behind quite motionless for a moment, looking up steadily at Father Brown as the wolf looked at St Francis.

S’interruppe un momento, e poi proseguì con una certa quieta enfasi.

«E ora provi a rievocare la scena, così come lei stesso la vide. Mentre stava lì, stordito dalla sua diabolica opportunità, alzò lo sguardo e vide quello strano profilo che avrebbe potuto essere l’immagine della sua stessa anima vacillante; l’unico grande masso poggiato pericolosamente sull’altro come una piramide sulla punta, e ricordò che si chiamava la Rupe della Fortuna. Riesce a indovinare come un uomo simile, in un momento simile, leggerebbe un simile segnale? Credo che lo esaltasse all’azione e persino alla vigilanza. Chi vuol essere una torre non deve temere d’essere una torre traballante. Comunque, agì; la difficoltà successiva era coprire le proprie tracce. Essere trovato con un bastone da spada, per non dire con un bastone da spada macchiato di sangue, sarebbe stato fatale nella perquisizione che di certo sarebbe seguita. Se l’avesse lasciato in qualche luogo, sarebbe stato trovato e probabilmente rintracciato. Anche gettandolo in mare, l’atto avrebbe potuto essere notato, e ritenuto degno di nota — a meno che davvero non gli venisse in mente un modo più naturale di mascherare l’atto. Come lei sa, un modo gliene venne, e assai buono. Essendo l’unico di voi con un orologio, vi disse che non era ancora ora di rientrare, si spinse un poco oltre, e cominciò il gioco di gettare bastoni per il retriever. Ma come devono avergli roteato cupamente gli occhi su tutta quella desolata riva marina prima di posarsi sul cane!»

Fiennes annuì, fissando pensieroso nel vuoto. La sua mente pareva essere tornata a una parte meno pratica del racconto.

«È strano», disse, «che il cane fosse davvero nella storia, dopotutto.»

«Il cane avrebbe quasi potuto raccontarle la storia, se avesse saputo parlare», disse il prete. «Tutto ciò di cui mi lagno è che, poiché non sapeva parlare, lei gli inventò la storia al posto suo, e lo fece parlare con le lingue degli uomini e degli angeli. È parte di qualcosa che ho notato sempre più nel mondo moderno, che affiora in ogni sorta di dicerie giornalistiche e di slogan da conversazione; qualcosa di arbitrario senza essere autorevole. La gente inghiotte prontamente le pretese non verificate di questo, di quello e di quell’altro. Sta annegando tutto il vostro vecchio razionalismo e scetticismo, sta montando come un mare; e il suo nome è superstizione.» Si alzò bruscamente, il volto grave d’una sorta d’accigliamento, e proseguì a parlare quasi come se fosse solo. «È il primo effetto del non credere in Dio, che si perde il buon senso e non si riescono a vedere le cose come sono. Qualunque cosa di cui uno parli, dicendo che c’è del buono in essa, si dilata indefinitamente come una prospettiva in un incubo. E un cane è un presagio, e un gatto è un mistero, e un maiale è un portafortuna, e uno scarabeo è uno scarabeo sacro, che evoca tutto il serraglio del politeismo dall’Egitto e dall’antica India; il Cane Anubi e la grande Pasht dagli occhi verdi e tutti i sacri muggenti Tori di Basan; ruzzolando all’indietro verso le bestiali divinità del principio, sfuggendo in elefanti e serpenti e coccodrilli; e tutto perché avete paura di quattro parole:

«Si fece Uomo».»

Il giovane si alzò con un lieve imbarazzo, quasi avesse origliato un soliloquio. Chiamò il cane e lasciò la stanza con vaghi ma spigliati saluti. Ma dovette chiamare il cane due volte, perché il cane era rimasto indietro del tutto immobile per un momento, guardando fisso in su verso Padre Brown come il lupo guardò san Francesco.

FOUR: The Miracle of Moon Crescent

MOON CRESCENT was meant in a sense to be as romantic as its name; and the things that happened there were romantic enough in their way. At least it had been an expression of that genuine element of sentiment—historic and almost heroic—which manages to remain side by side with commercialism in the elder cities on the eastern coast of America. It was originally a curve of classical architecture really recalling that eighteenth— century atmosphere in which men like Washington and Jefferson had seemed to be all the more republicans for being aristocrats. Travellers faced with the recurrent query of what they thought of our city were understood to be specially answerable for what they thought of our Moon Crescent. The very contrasts that confuse its original harmony were characteristic of its survival. At one extremity or horn of the crescent its last windows looked over an enclosure like a strip of a gentleman’s park, with trees and hedges as formal as a Queen Anne garden. But immediately round the corner, the other windows, even of the same rooms, or rather ‘apartments’, looked out on the blank, unsightly wall of a huge warehouse attached to some ugly industry. The apartments of Moon Crescent itself were at that end remodelled on the monotonous pattern of an American hotel, and rose to a height, which, though lower than the colossal warehouse, would have been called a skyscraper in London. But the colonnade that ran round the whole frontage upon the street had a grey and weather— stained stateliness suggesting that the ghosts of the Fathers of the Republic might still be walking to and fro in it. The insides of the rooms, however, were as neat and new as the last New York fittings could make them, especially at the northern end between the neat garden and the blank warehouse wall. They were a system of very small flats, as we should say in England, each consisting of a sitting—room, bedroom, and bathroom, as identical as the hundred cells of a hive. In one of these the celebrated Warren Wynd sat at his desk sorting letters and scattering orders with wonderful rapidity and exactitude. He could only be compared to a tidy whirlwind.

Warren Wynd was a very little man with loose grey hair and a pointed beard, seemingly frail but fierily active. He had very wonderful eyes, brighter than stars and stronger than magnets, which nobody who had ever seen them could easily forget. And indeed in his work as a reformer and regulator of many good works he had shown at least that he had a pair of eyes in his head. All sorts of stories and even legends were told of the miraculous rapidity with which he could form a sound judgement, especially of human character. It was said that he selected the wife who worked with him so long in so charitable a fashion, by picking her out of a whole regiment of women in uniform marching past at some official celebration, some said of the Girl Guides and some of the Women Police. Another story was told of how three tramps, indistinguishable from each other in their community of filth and rags, had presented themselves before him asking for charity. Without a moment’s hesitation he had sent one of them to a particular hospital devoted to a certain nervous disorder, had recommended the second to an inebriates’ home, and had engaged the third at a handsome salary as his own private servant, a position which he filled successfully for years afterwards. There were, of course, the inevitable anecdotes of his prompt criticisms and curt repartees when brought in contact with Roosevelt, with Henry Ford, and with Mrs Asquith and all other persons with whom an American public man ought to have a historic interview, if only in the newspapers. Certainly he was not likely to be overawed by such personages; and at the moment here in question he continued very calmly his centrifugal whirl of papers, though the man confronting him was a personage of almost equal importance.

Silas T. Vandam, the millionaire and oil magnate, was a lean man with a long, yellow face and blue—black hair, colours which were the less conspicuous yet somehow the more sinister because his face and figure showed dark against the window and the white warehouse wall outside it; he was buttoned up tight in an elegant overcoat with strips of astrakhan. The eager face and brilliant eyes of Wynd, on the other hand, were in the full light from the other window over— looking the little garden, for his chair and—desk stood facing it; and though the face was preoccupied, it did not seem unduly preoccupied about the millionaire. Wynd’s valet or personal servant, a big, powerful man with flat fair hair, was standing behind his master’s desk holding a sheaf of letters; and Wynd’s private secretary, a neat, red— haired youth with a sharp face, had his hand already on the door handle, as if guessing some purpose or obeying some gesture of his employer. The room was not only neat, but austere to the point of emptiness; for Wynd, with characteristic thoroughness, had rented the whole floor above, and turned it into a loft or storeroom, where all his other papers and possessions were stacked in boxes and corded bales.

‘Give these to the floor—clerk, Wilson,’ said Wynd to the servant holding the letters, ‘and then get me the pamphlet on the Minneapolis Night Clubs; you’ll find it in the bundle marked ‘G’. I shall want it in half an hour, but don’t disturb me till then. Well, Mr Vandam, I think your proposition sounds very promising; but I can’t give a final answer till I’ve seen the report. It ought to reach me to—morrow afternoon, and I’ll phone you at once. I’m sorry I can’t say anything more definite just now.’

Mr Vandam seemed to feel that this was something like a polite dismissal; and his sallow, saturnine face suggested that he found a certain irony in the fact.

‘Well, I suppose I must be going,’ he said.

‘Very good of you to call, Mr Vandam,’ said Wynd, politely; ‘you will excuse my not coming out, as I’ve something here I must fix at once. Fenner,’ he added to the secretary,’ show Mr Vandam to his car, and don’t come back again for half an hour. I’ve something here I want to work out by myself; after that I shall want you.’

QUATTRO: Il miracolo di Moon Crescent

MOON CRESCENT era destinato, in un certo senso, a essere romantico quanto il suo nome; e le cose che vi accaddero furono, a modo loro, abbastanza romantiche. Almeno era stato l’espressione di quel genuino elemento di sentimento — storico e quasi eroico — che riesce a sopravvivere fianco a fianco con il mercantilismo nelle città più antiche della costa orientale d’America. In origine era una curva di architettura classica che davvero rievocava quell’atmosfera del Settecento in cui uomini come Washington e Jefferson sembravano tanto più repubblicani quanto più erano aristocratici. I viaggiatori, messi di fronte alla ricorrente domanda di che cosa pensassero della nostra città, erano ritenuti specialmente responsabili di ciò che pensavano del nostro Moon Crescent. Gli stessi contrasti che confondono la sua armonia originaria erano caratteristici della sua sopravvivenza. A un’estremità, o corno, della mezzaluna le ultime finestre davano su un recinto simile a una striscia del parco di un gentiluomo, con alberi e siepi formali come un giardino alla Queen Anne. Ma subito dietro l’angolo, le altre finestre, perfino delle medesime stanze, o piuttosto «appartamenti», si affacciavano sul muro cieco e disadorno di un enorme magazzino annesso a qualche brutta industria. Gli appartamenti di Moon Crescent stessi, a quel capo, erano stati rimodellati sul monotono schema di un albergo americano, e si innalzavano fino a un’altezza che, pur essendo inferiore al colossale magazzino, sarebbe stata chiamata un grattacielo a Londra. Ma il colonnato che correva lungo tutta la facciata sulla strada aveva una solennità grigia e scolorita dalle intemperie, tale da suggerire che i fantasmi dei Padri della Repubblica potessero ancora passeggiarvi avanti e indietro. L’interno delle stanze, tuttavia, era lindo e nuovo quanto potevano renderlo gli ultimi arredi newyorkesi, specialmente all’estremità settentrionale, tra il lindo giardino e il muro cieco del magazzino. Erano un sistema di appartamentini piccolissimi, come diremmo noi in Inghilterra, ciascuno composto di un salotto, una camera da letto e un bagno, identici come le cento cellette di un alveare. In uno di essi il celebre Warren Wynd sedeva alla sua scrivania a smistare lettere e a diramare ordini con mirabile rapidità ed esattezza. Non lo si poteva paragonare che a un ordinato turbine.

Warren Wynd era un uomo piccolissimo, dai radi capelli grigi e dalla barba a punta, apparentemente fragile ma di ardente attività. Aveva occhi assai straordinari, più luminosi delle stelle e più forti delle calamite, che nessuno di quanti li avevano visti poteva facilmente dimenticare. E in effetti, nel suo lavoro di riformatore e regolatore di molte opere buone, aveva mostrato per lo meno di avere un paio di occhi in testa. Si raccontavano ogni sorta di storie e perfino di leggende sulla miracolosa rapidità con cui sapeva formulare un giudizio fondato, specialmente sul carattere umano. Si diceva che avesse scelto la moglie, che lavorò con lui così a lungo in modo così caritatevole, individuandola in tutto un reggimento di donne in uniforme che sfilavano a qualche celebrazione ufficiale, alcuni dicevano delle Girl Guides e altri della Polizia Femminile. Un’altra storia si narrava di come tre vagabondi, indistinguibili l’uno dall’altro nella comune sozzura e nei comuni stracci, si fossero presentati davanti a lui a chiedere l’elemosina. Senza un attimo di esitazione ne aveva mandato uno a un particolare ospedale dedicato a un certo disturbo nervoso, aveva raccomandato il secondo a un istituto per alcolizzati, e aveva assunto il terzo, con un lauto stipendio, come proprio domestico privato, posizione che quello ricoprì con successo per anni a venire. C’erano, naturalmente, gli inevitabili aneddoti sulle sue pronte critiche e sulle sue secche battute quando veniva a contatto con Roosevelt, con Henry Ford, e con la signora Asquith e con tutte le altre persone con cui un uomo pubblico americano deve avere un colloquio storico, non fosse che sui giornali. Certamente non era tipo da lasciarsi intimidire da simili personaggi; e nel momento qui in questione egli proseguiva con grande calma il suo centrifugo turbinare di carte, benché l’uomo che gli stava di fronte fosse un personaggio di importanza quasi pari alla sua.

Silas T. Vandam, il milionario e magnate del petrolio, era un uomo asciutto dal lungo volto giallastro e dai capelli nero-bluastri, colori che risultavano tanto meno cospicui quanto in qualche modo più sinistri perché il suo volto e la sua figura si stagliavano scuri contro la finestra e il bianco muro del magazzino là fuori; era abbottonato ben stretto in un elegante soprabito con bordi di astrakan. Il volto ansioso e gli occhi brillanti di Wynd, invece, erano nella piena luce dell’altra finestra, quella che dava sul giardinetto, poiché la sua sedia e la sua scrivania le stavano di fronte; e benché il volto fosse assorto, non sembrava indebitamente assorto a proposito del milionario. Il valletto, ossia il domestico personale di Wynd, un uomo grande e vigoroso dai capelli biondi e lisci, stava in piedi dietro la scrivania del padrone reggendo un mazzo di lettere; e il segretario privato di Wynd, un giovane lindo, dai capelli rossi e dal volto acuto, aveva già la mano sulla maniglia della porta, come indovinando qualche intenzione o obbedendo a qualche gesto del suo datore di lavoro. La stanza non era soltanto linda, ma austera fino al punto di parere vuota; poiché Wynd, con la sua caratteristica meticolosità, aveva affittato l’intero piano di sopra e l’aveva trasformato in un soppalco o ripostiglio, dove tutte le sue altre carte e cose erano ammucchiate in casse e balle legate con corde.

«Dia queste all’impiegato di piano, Wilson», disse Wynd al domestico che reggeva le lettere, «e poi mi porti l’opuscolo sui Night Clubs di Minneapolis; lo troverà nel fascio contrassegnato con la «G». Mi servirà tra mezz’ora, ma non mi disturbi fino allora. Ebbene, signor Vandam, credo che la sua proposta suoni molto promettente; ma non posso darle una risposta definitiva finché non avrò visto la relazione. Dovrebbe arrivarmi domani pomeriggio, e le telefonerò subito. Mi spiace di non poter dire nulla di più preciso per il momento.»

Il signor Vandam parve sentire che questo somigliava a un cortese congedo; e il suo volto giallastro e saturnino lasciava intendere che vi trovava una certa ironia.

«Bene, suppongo che debba andare», disse.

«Molto gentile da parte sua a essere passato, signor Vandam», disse Wynd, cortese; «mi scuserà se non l’accompagno fuori, ma ho qui una cosa che devo sistemare all’istante. Fenner», aggiunse rivolto al segretario, «accompagni il signor Vandam alla sua automobile, e non tornare per mezz’ora. Ho qui una cosa che voglio risolvere da solo; dopo di che avrò bisogno di te.»

The three men went out into the hallway together, closing the door behind them. The big servant, Wilson, was turning down the hallway in the direction of the floor—clerk, and the other two moving in the opposite direction towards the lift; for Wynd’s apartment was high up on the fourteenth floor. They had hardly gone a yard from the closed door when they became conscious that the corridor was filled with a marching and even magnificent figure. The man was very tall and broad—shouldered, his bulk being the more conspicuous for being clad in white, or a light grey that looked like it, with a very wide white panama hat and an almost equally wide fringe or halo of almost equally white hair. Set in this aureole his face was strong and handsome, like that of a Roman emperor, save that there was something more than boyish, something a little childish, about the brightness of his eyes and the beatitude of his smile. ‘Mr Warren Wynd in?’ he asked, in hearty tones.

‘Mr Warren Wynd is engaged,’ said Fenner; ‘he must not be disturbed on any account. I may say I am his secretary and can take any message.’

‘Mr Warren Wynd is not at home to the Pope or the Crowned Heads,’ said Vandam, the oil magnate, with sour satire. ‘Mr Warren Wynd is mighty particular. I went in there to hand him over a trifle of twenty thousand dollars on certain conditions, and, he told me to call again like as if I was a call—boy.’

‘It’s a fine thing to be a boy,’ said the stranger, ‘and a finer to have a call; and I’ve got a call he’s just got to listen to. It’s a call of the great good country out West, where the real American is being made while you’re all snoring. Just tell him that Art Alboin of Oklahoma City has come to convert him.’

‘I tell you nobody can see him,’ said the red—haired secretary sharply. ‘He has given orders that he is not to be disturbed for half an hour.’

‘You folks down East are all against being disturbed,’ said the breezy Mr Alboin, ‘but I calculate there’s a big breeze getting up in the West that will have to disturb you. He’s been figuring out how much money must go to this and that stuffy old religion; but I tell you any scheme that leaves out the new Great Spirit movement in Texas and Oklahoma, is leaving out the religion of the future.’

‘Oh; I’ve sized up those religions of the future,’ said the millionaire, contemptuously. ‘I’ve been through them with a tooth— comb and they’re as mangy as yellow dogs. There was that woman called herself Sophia: ought to have called herself Sapphira, I reckon. Just a plum fraud. Strings tied to all the tables and tambourines. Then there were the Invisible Life bunch; said they could vanish when they liked, and they did vanish, too, and a hundred thousand of my dollars vanished with them. I knew Jupiter Jesus out in Denver; saw him for weeks on end; and he was just a common crook. So was the Patagonian Prophet; you bet he’s made a bolt for Patagonia. No, I’m through with all that; from now on I only believe what I see. I believe they call it being an atheist.’

‘I guess you got me wrong,’ said the man from Oklahoma, almost eagerly. ‘I guess I’m as much of an atheist as you are. No supernatural or superstitious stuff in our movement; just plain science. The only real right science is just health, and the only real right health is just breathing. Fill your lungs with the wide air of the prairie and you could blow all your old eastern cities into the sea. You could just puff away their biggest men like thistledown. That’s what we do in the new movement out home: we breathe. We don’t pray; we breathe.’

‘Well, I suppose you do,’ said the secretary, wearily. He had a keen, intelligent face which could hardly conceal the weariness; but he had listened to the two monologues with the admirable patience and politeness (so much in contrast with the legends of impatience and insolence) with which such monologues are listened to in America.

‘Nothing supernatural,’ continued Alboin, ‘just the great natural fact behind all the supernatural fancies. What did the Jews want with a God except to breathe into man’s nostrils the breath of life? We do the breathing into our own nostrils out in Oklahoma. What’s the meaning of the very word Spirit? It’s just the Greek for breathing exercises. Life, progress, prophecy; it’s all breath.’

‘Some would allow it’s all wind,’ said Vandam; ‘but I’m glad you’ve got rid of the divinity stunt, anyhow.’

The keen face of the secretary, rather pale against his red hair, showed a flicker of some odd feeling suggestive of a secret bitterness.

‘I’m not glad,’ he said, ‘I’m just sure. You seem to like being atheists; so you may be just believing what you like to believe. But. I wish to God there were a God; and there ain’t. It’s just my luck.’

Without a sound or stir they all became almost creepily conscious at this moment that the group, halted outside Wynd’s door, had silently grown from three figures to four. How long the fourth figure had stood there none of the earnest disputants could tell, but he had every appearance of waiting respectfully and even timidly for the opportunity to say something urgent. But to their nervous sensibility he seemed to have sprung up suddenly and silently like a mushroom. And indeed, he looked rather like a big, black mushroom, for he was quite short and his small, stumpy figure was eclipsed by his big, black clerical hat; the resemblance might have been more complete if mushrooms were in the habit of carrying umbrellas, even of a shabby and shapeless sort.

Fenner, the secretary, was conscious of a curious additional surprise at recognizing the figure of a priest; but when the priest turned up a round face under the round hat and innocently asked for Mr Warren Wynd, he gave the regular negative answer rather more curtly than before. But the priest stood his ground.

‘I do really want to see Mr Wynd,’ he said. ‘It seems odd, but that’s exactly what I do want to do. I don’t want to speak to him. I just want to see him. I just want to see if he’s there to be seen.’

I tre uomini uscirono insieme nel corridoio, chiudendosi la porta alle spalle. Wilson, il grosso domestico, imboccava il corridoio in direzione dell’impiegato di piano, mentre gli altri due si muovevano nella direzione opposta, verso l’ascensore; giacché l’appartamento di Wynd era là in alto, al quattordicesimo piano. Non si erano allontanati d’una iarda dalla porta chiusa quando s’accorsero che il corridoio era invaso da una figura incedente e persino magnifica. L’uomo era altissimo e dalle larghe spalle, e la sua mole appariva tanto più cospicua per essere ammantata di bianco, o d’un grigio chiaro che gli somigliava, con un panama bianco assai largo e una frangia o aureola quasi altrettanto larga di capelli quasi altrettanto bianchi. Incastonato in quell’aureola, il suo volto era forte e bello, come quello d’un imperatore romano, salvo che v’era qualcosa di più che fanciullesco, qualcosa d’un poco puerile, nel fulgore dei suoi occhi e nella beatitudine del suo sorriso. «C’è il signor Warren Wynd?» domandò, con tono cordiale.

«Il signor Warren Wynd è occupato», disse Fenner; «non deve essere disturbato per nessuna ragione. Le dirò che sono il suo segretario e posso riferire qualunque messaggio.»

«Il signor Warren Wynd non riceve né il Papa né le Teste Coronate», disse Vandam, il magnate del petrolio, con acida ironia. «Il signor Warren Wynd è terribilmente schizzinoso. Sono entrato là dentro per consegnargli una bazzecola di ventimila dollari a certe condizioni, e lui mi ha detto di ripassare, come se io fossi un fattorino.»

«È una bella cosa essere un ragazzo», disse lo sconosciuto, «e più bella ancora avere una vocazione; e io ho una chiamata che lui non potrà non ascoltare. È la chiamata del grande, buon paese laggiù nell’Ovest, dove il vero americano si viene forgiando mentre voialtri ve ne state a russare. Ditegli soltanto che Art Alboin di Oklahoma City è venuto a convertirlo.»

«Le ripeto che nessuno può vederlo», disse tagliente il segretario dai capelli rossi. «Ha dato ordine di non essere disturbato per mezz’ora.»

«Voialtri dell’Est siete tutti contro il farvi disturbare», disse il gioviale signor Alboin, «ma calcolo che sta montando un gran vento laggiù nell’Ovest che vi dovrà pur disturbare. Lui sta lì a calcolare quanto denaro deve andare a questa e a quella soffocante vecchia religione; ma io le dico che qualunque piano escluda il nuovo movimento del Grande Spirito nel Texas e nell’Oklahoma esclude la religione dell’avvenire.»

«Oh, li ho già soppesati io codesti culti dell’avvenire», disse il milionario, con disprezzo. «Li ho passati al pettine fitto e sono rognosi come cani gialli. C’era quella donna che si faceva chiamare Sophia: avrebbe dovuto chiamarsi Saffira, mi sa. Una frode bell’e buona. Fili legati a tutti i tavolini e ai tamburelli. Poi c’era la combriccola della Vita Invisibile; dicevano di potersi far dileguare a piacere, e si dileguarono davvero, e centomila dei miei dollari si dileguarono con loro. Conobbi Giove Gesù laggiù a Denver; lo frequentai per settimane intere; ed era soltanto un truffatore volgare. Come lo era il Profeta della Patagonia; ci scommetto che è filato a gambe in Patagonia. No, ho chiuso con tutta questa roba; d’ora in poi credo solo a ciò che vedo. Credo che lo chiamino essere ateo.»

«Mi sa che m’ha frainteso», disse l’uomo dell’Oklahoma, quasi con foga. «Mi sa che sono ateo tanto quanto lei. Niente roba soprannaturale o superstiziosa nel nostro movimento; soltanto pura scienza. L’unica vera, giusta scienza è la salute, e l’unica vera, giusta salute è il respiro. Riempitevi i polmoni dell’aria sconfinata della prateria e potreste soffiar via nel mare tutte le vostre vecchie città dell’Est. Potreste sbuffar via i vostri uomini più grandi come lanugine di cardo. Ecco cosa facciamo nel nuovo movimento laggiù a casa: respiriamo. Non preghiamo; respiriamo.»

«Be’, immagino di sì», disse il segretario, con stanchezza. Aveva un volto acuto, intelligente, che a stento riusciva a celare la stanchezza; ma aveva ascoltato i due monologhi con quell’ammirevole pazienza e cortesia (così in contrasto con le leggende d’impazienza e insolenza) con cui simili monologhi vengono ascoltati in America.

«Niente di soprannaturale», proseguì Alboin, «soltanto il grande fatto naturale che sta dietro a tutte le fantasie soprannaturali. Che se ne facevano gli Ebrei d’un Dio, se non per soffiare nelle narici dell’uomo il soffio della vita? Noi ce lo soffiamo da noi, nelle nostre narici, laggiù in Oklahoma. Che significa infatti la parola stessa Spirito? Non è che il greco per esercizi di respirazione. Vita, progresso, profezia: è tutto respiro.»

«C’è chi direbbe che è tutto vento», disse Vandam; «ma sono contento che tu ti sia sbarazzato della trovata della divinità, in ogni caso.»

Il volto acuto del segretario, piuttosto pallido contro i capelli rossi, tradì un guizzo di qualche strano sentimento, indizio d’un’amarezza segreta.

«Io non sono contento», disse, «sono soltanto certo. A voi pare che piaccia essere atei; sicché forse credete semplicemente a ciò che vi piace credere. Ma. Vorrei per Dio che ci fosse un Dio; e non c’è. È proprio la mia fortuna.»

Senza un suono né un moto, in quell’istante s’avvidero tutti, con un brivido quasi sinistro, che il gruppo fermo davanti alla porta di Wynd era silenziosamente cresciuto da tre figure a quattro. Da quanto la quarta figura fosse là ritta, nessuno di quei ferventi disputanti avrebbe saputo dirlo, ma aveva tutta l’aria di aspettare rispettosamente, e persino timidamente, l’occasione di dire qualcosa d’urgente. Alla loro sensibilità già scossa, tuttavia, parve ch’egli fosse spuntato d’improvviso e in silenzio come un fungo. E in effetti somigliava piuttosto a un grosso fungo nero, poiché era assai basso e la sua piccola, tozza figura era eclissata dal suo grande, nero cappello ecclesiastico; la somiglianza sarebbe stata ancor più compiuta se i funghi avessero l’abitudine di portare ombrelli, foss’anche d’una specie lisa e sformata.

Fenner, il segretario, provò una curiosa sorpresa in più riconoscendo la figura d’un prete; ma quando il prete sollevò un volto tondo di sotto il tondo cappello e domandò con candore del signor Warren Wynd, gli diede la consueta risposta negativa in modo ancor più brusco di prima. Ma il prete non si mosse d’un passo.

«Desidero davvero vedere il signor Wynd», disse. «Sembra strano, ma è proprio questo che desidero fare. Non voglio parlargli. Voglio soltanto vederlo. Voglio soltanto vedere se è là, da poter esser visto.»

‘Well, I tell you he’s there and can’t be seen,’ said Fenner, with increasing annoyance. ‘What do you mean by saying you want to see if he’s there to be seen? Of course he’s there. We all left him there five minutes ago, and we’ve stood outside this door ever since.’

‘Well, I want to see if he’s all right,’ said the priest.

‘Why?’ demanded the secretary, in exasperation. ‘Because I have a serious, I might say solemn, reason,’ said the cleric, gravely, ‘for doubting whether he is all right.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ cried Vandam, in a sort of fury; ‘not more superstitions.’

‘I see I shall have to give my reasons,’ observed the little cleric, gravely. ‘I suppose I can’t expect you even to let me look through the crack of a door till I tell you the whole story.’ He was silent a moment as in reflection, and then went on without noticing the wondering faces around him. ‘I was walking outside along the front of the colonnade when I saw a very ragged man running hard round the corner at the end of the crescent. He came pounding along the pavement towards me, revealing a great raw—boned figure and a face I knew. It was the face of a wild Irish fellow I once helped a little; I will not tell you his name. When he saw me he staggered, calling me by mine and saying, ‘Saints alive, it’s Father Brown; you’re the only man whose face could frighten me to—day.’

‘I knew he meant he’d been doing some wild thing or other, and I don’t think my face frightened him much, for he was soon telling me about it. And a very strange thing it was. He asked me if I knew Warren Wynd, and I said no, though I knew he lived near the top of these flats. He said, ‘That’s a man who thinks he’s a saint of God; but if he knew what I was saying of him he should be ready to hang himself.’ And he repeated hysterically more than once, ‘Yes, ready to hang himself.’ I asked him if he’d done any harm to Wynd, and his answer was rather a queer one. He said: ‘I took a pistol and I loaded it with neither shot nor slug, but only with a curse.’ As far as I could make out, all he had done was to go down that little alley between this building and the big warehouse, with an old pistol loaded with a blank charge, and merely fire it against the wall, as if that would bring down the building. ‘But as I did it,’ he said, ‘I cursed him with the great curse, that the justice of God should take him by the hair and the vengeance of hell by the heels, and he should be torn asunder like Judas and the world know him no more.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter now what else I said to the poor, crazy fellow; he went away quieted down a little, and I went round to the back of the building to inspect. And sure enough, in the little alley at the foot of this wall there lay a rusty antiquated pistol; I know enough about pistols to know it had been loaded only with a little powder, there were the black marks of powder and smoke on the wall, and even the mark of the muzzle, but not even a dent of any bullet. He had left no trace of destruction; he had left no trace of anything, except those black marks and that black curse he had hurled into heaven. So I came back here to ask for this Warren Wynd and find out if he’s all right.’

Penner the secretary laughed. ‘I can soon settle that difficulty for you. I assure you he’s quite all right; we left him writing at his desk only a few minutes ago. He was alone in his flat; it’s a hundred feet up from the street, and so placed that no shot could have reached him, even if your friend hadn’t fired blank. There’s no other entrance to this place but this door, and we’ve been standing outside it ever since.’

‘All the same,’ said Father Brown, gravely, ‘I should like to look in and see.’

‘Well, you can’t,’ retorted the other. ‘Good Lord, you don’t tell me you think anything of the curse.’

‘You forget,’ said the millionaire, with a slight sneer, ‘the reverend gentleman’s whole business is blessings and cursings. Come, sir, if he’s been cursed to hell, why don’t you bless him back again? What’s the good of your blessings if they can’t beat an Irish larrykin’s curse?’

‘Does anybody believe such things now?’ protested the Westerner.

‘Father Brown believes a good number of things, I take it,’ said Vandam, whose temper was suffering from the past snub and the present bickering. ‘Father Brown believes a hermit crossed a river on a crocodile conjured out of nowhere, and then he told the crocodile to die, and it sure did. Father Brown believes that some blessed saint or other died, and had his dead body turned into three dead bodies, to be served out to three parishes that were all I bent on figuring as his home—town. Father Brown believes that a saint hung his cloak on a sunbeam, and another used his for a boat to cross the Atlantic. Father Brown believes the holy donkey had six legs and the house of Loretto flew through the air. He believes in hundreds of stone virgins winking and weeping all day long. It’s nothing to him to believe that a man might escape through the keyhole or vanish out of a locked room. I reckon he doesn’t take much stock of the laws of nature.’

‘Anyhow, I have to take stock in the laws of Warren Wynd,’ said the secretary, wearily, ‘and it’s his rule that he’s to be left alone when he says so. Wilson will tell you just the same,’ for the large servant who had been sent for the pamphlet, passed placidly down the corridor even as he spoke, carrying the pamphlet, but serenely passing the door. ‘He’ll go and sit on the bench by the floor—clerk and twiddle his thumbs till he’s wanted; but he won’t go in before then; and nor will I. I reckon we both know which side our bread is buttered, and it’d take a good many of Father Brown’s saint and angels to make us forget it.’

‘As for saints and angels—‘ began the priest.

‘It’s all nonsense,’ repeated Fenner. ‘I don’t want to say anything offensive, but that sort of thing may be very well for crypts and cloisters and all sorts of moonshiny places. But ghosts can’t get through a closed door in an American hotel.’

«Beh, vi dico che è là e che non lo si può vedere», disse Fenner, con crescente irritazione. «Che intendete quando dite di voler vedere se è là da vedere? Certo che è là. L’abbiamo lasciato tutti lì cinque minuti fa, e da allora siamo rimasti fuori da questa porta.»

«Beh, voglio vedere se sta bene», disse il prete.

«Perché?» domandò il segretario, esasperato. «Perché ho una ragione seria, direi solenne», disse il chierico, con gravità, «per dubitare che stia bene.»

«Oh, Signore!» gridò Vandam, in una specie di furia; «non altre superstizioni.»

«Vedo che dovrò esporre le mie ragioni», osservò il piccolo chierico, con gravità. «Suppongo di non poter pretendere che mi lasciate nemmeno sbirciare dalla fessura di una porta prima che vi abbia raccontato tutta la storia.» Rimase un istante in silenzio, come assorto, e poi riprese senza badare ai volti attoniti che lo circondavano. «Passeggiavo là fuori, lungo la facciata del colonnato, quando vidi un uomo assai cencioso correre a rotta di collo doppiando l’angolo in fondo alla mezzaluna. Venne avanti a gran passi sul marciapiede verso di me, rivelando una figura ossuta e massiccia e un volto che conoscevo. Era il volto di un focoso irlandese che un tempo avevo un poco aiutato; non vi dirò il suo nome. Quando mi scorse barcollò, chiamandomi per nome e dicendo: “Santi del cielo, è Father Brown; siete l’unico uomo il cui volto potrebbe farmi paura, oggi.”

«Capii che intendeva d’aver commesso qualche follia o l’altra, e non credo che il mio volto lo spaventasse granché, perché di lì a poco già me ne parlava. Ed era una faccenda ben strana. Mi chiese se conoscessi Warren Wynd, e risposi di no, benché sapessi che abitava vicino alla cima di questi appartamenti. Disse: “È un uomo che si crede un santo di Dio; ma se sapesse ciò che vado dicendo di lui, dovrebbe esser pronto a impiccarsi.” E ripeté più volte, istericamente: “Sì, pronto a impiccarsi.” Gli domandai se avesse fatto del male a Wynd, e la sua risposta fu piuttosto singolare. Disse: “Ho preso una pistola e non l’ho caricata né a pallini né a pallottola, ma soltanto con una maledizione.” Per quanto potei capire, tutto ciò che aveva fatto era stato scendere in quel vicoletto tra questo edificio e il grande magazzino, con una vecchia pistola caricata a salve, e semplicemente scaricarla contro il muro, come se ciò dovesse far crollare l’edificio. “Ma mentre lo facevo”, disse, “lo maledissi con la grande maledizione: che la giustizia di Dio lo afferrasse per i capelli e la vendetta dell’inferno per i calcagni, e che fosse dilaniato come Giuda e il mondo non sapesse più di lui.”

«Ebbene, non importa ora che altro dissi al povero pazzo; se ne andò un poco rasserenato, e io girai sul retro dell’edificio per ispezionare. E difatti, nel vicoletto ai piedi di questo muro giaceva una pistola arrugginita e antiquata; me ne intendo abbastanza di pistole per sapere che era stata caricata soltanto con un po’ di polvere: c’erano i segni neri della polvere e del fumo sul muro, e perfino l’impronta della bocca da fuoco, ma neppure l’ammaccatura d’una pallottola. Non aveva lasciato traccia di distruzione; non aveva lasciato traccia di nulla, tranne quei segni neri e quella nera maledizione che aveva scagliato verso il cielo. Così sono tornato qui a chiedere di questo Warren Wynd e a scoprire se sta bene.»

Penner, il segretario, rise. «Posso risolvervi in un attimo questa difficoltà. Vi assicuro che sta benissimo; l’abbiamo lasciato che scriveva alla sua scrivania appena pochi minuti fa. Era solo nel suo appartamento; sta a cento piedi dalla strada, e collocato in modo tale che nessun colpo avrebbe potuto raggiungerlo, anche se il vostro amico non avesse sparato a salve. Non v’è altro ingresso a questo luogo se non questa porta, e noi le siamo rimasti davanti da allora.»

«Ciò nondimeno», disse Father Brown, con gravità, «vorrei dare un’occhiata dentro e vedere.»

«Beh, non potete», ribatté l’altro. «Buon Dio, non vorrete dirmi che date qualche peso alla maledizione.»

«Dimenticate», disse il milionario, con un lieve ghigno, «che l’intero mestiere del reverendo signore sono le benedizioni e le maledizioni. Suvvia, signore, se è stato maledetto all’inferno, perché non lo ribenedite? A che valgono le vostre benedizioni, se non riescono a battere la maledizione d’un monellaccio irlandese?»

«C’è ancora qualcuno che crede a simili cose, oggi?» protestò l’uomo dell’Ovest.

«Father Brown crede a un buon numero di cose, a quanto pare», disse Vandam, il cui umore soffriva per lo smacco di poco prima e per l’attuale battibecco. «Father Brown crede che un eremita abbia attraversato un fiume su un coccodrillo evocato dal nulla, e che poi abbia ordinato al coccodrillo di morire, e quello morì sul serio. Father Brown crede che un qualche beato santo o l’altro sia morto, e che il suo corpo morto sia stato tramutato in tre corpi morti, da spartirsi fra tre parrocchie tutte accanite nel volersi figurare come la sua città natale. Father Brown crede che un santo abbia appeso il proprio mantello a un raggio di sole, e che un altro se ne sia servito come barca per attraversare l’Atlantico. Father Brown crede che il sacro asino avesse sei zampe e che la casa di Loreto abbia volato per l’aria. Crede in centinaia di vergini di pietra che ammiccano e lacrimano tutto il giorno. Per lui è cosa da nulla credere che un uomo possa fuggire attraverso il buco della serratura o svanire da una stanza chiusa a chiave. Direi che non fa gran conto delle leggi della natura.»

«Comunque sia, io devo far conto delle leggi di Warren Wynd», disse il segretario, stancamente, «ed è sua regola che lo si lasci solo quando lo comanda. Wilson vi dirà esattamente lo stesso», giacché il corpulento domestico che era stato mandato a prendere l’opuscolo passò placidamente lungo il corridoio proprio mentre egli parlava, recando l’opuscolo, ma oltrepassando serenamente la porta. «Andrà a sedersi sulla panca accanto all’impiegato di piano e si girerà i pollici finché non sarà richiesto; ma non entrerà prima d’allora; e nemmeno io lo farò. Direi che sappiamo entrambi da che parte è imburrato il nostro pane, e ci vorrebbe un bel po’ dei santi e degli angeli di Father Brown per farcelo dimenticare.»

«Quanto ai santi e agli angeli…» cominciò il prete.

«Sono tutte sciocchezze», ripeté Fenner. «Non voglio dire nulla di offensivo, ma quel genere di cose può andar benissimo per cripte e chiostri e ogni sorta di luoghi da chiaro di luna. Ma i fantasmi non possono passare attraverso una porta chiusa in un albergo americano.»

‘But men can open a door, even in an American hotel,’ replied Father Brown, patiently. ‘And it seems to me the simplest thing would be to open it.’

‘It would be simple enough to lose me my job,’ answered the secretary, ‘and Warren Wynd doesn’t like his secretaries so simple as that. Not simple enough to believe in the sort of fairy tales you seem to believe in.’

‘Well,’ said the priest gravely, ‘it is true enough that I believe in a good many things that you probably don’t. But it would take a considerable time to explain all the things I believe in, and all the reasons I have for thinking I’m right. It would take about two seconds to open that door and prove I am wrong.’

Something in the phrase seemed to please the more wild and restless spirit of the man from the West.

‘I’ll allow I’d love to prove you wrong,’ said Alboin, striding suddenly past them, ‘and I will.’

He threw open the door of the flat and looked in. The first glimpse showed that Warren Wynd’s chair was empty. The second glance showed that his room was empty also.

Fenner, electrified with energy in his turn, dashed past the other into the apartment.

‘He’s in his bedroom,’ be said curtly, ‘he must be.’

As he disappeared into the inner chamber the other men stood in the empty outer room staring about them. The severity and simplicity of its fittings, which had already been noted, returned on them with a rigid challenge. Certainly in this room there was no question of hiding a mouse, let alone a man. There were no curtains and, what is rare in American arrangements, no cupboards. Even the desk was no more than a plain table with a shallow drawer and a tilted lid. The chairs were hard and high— backed skeletons. A moment after the secretary reappeared at the inner door, having searched the two inner rooms. A staring negation stood in his eyes, and his mouth seemed to move in a mechanical detachment from it as he said sharply: ‘He didn’t come out through here?’

Somehow the others did not even think it necessary to answer that negation in the negative. Their minds had come up against something like the blank wall of the warehouse that stared in at the opposite window, gradually turning from white to grey as dusk slowly descended with the advancing afternoon. Vandam walked over to the window—sill against which he had leant half an hour before and looked out of the open window. There was no pipe or fire—escape, no shelf or foothold of any kind on the sheer fall to the little by—street below, there was nothing on the similar expanse of wall that rose many stories above. There was even less variation on the other side of the street; there was nothing whatever but the wearisome expanse of whitewashed wall. He peered downwards, as if expecting to see the vanished philanthropist lying in a suicidal wreck on the path. He could see nothing but one small dark object which, though diminished by distance, might well be the pistol that the priest had found lying there. Meanwhile, Fenner had walked to the other window, which looked out from a wall equally blank and inaccessible, but looking out over a small ornamental park instead of a side street. Here a clump of trees interrupted the actual view of the ground; but they reached but a little way up the huge human cliff. Both turned back into the room and faced each other in the gathering twilight where the last silver gleams of daylight on the shiny tops of desks and tables were rapidly turning grey. As if the twilight itself irritated him, Fenner touched the switch and the scene sprang into the startling distinctness of electric light.

‘As you said just now,’ said Vandam grimly, ‘there’s no shot from down there could bit him, even if there was a shot in the gun. But even if he was hit with a bullet he wouldn’t have just burst like a bubble.’

The secretary, who was paler than ever, glanced irritably at the bilious visage of the millionaire. ‘What’s got you started on those morbid notions? Who’s talking about bullets and bubbles? Why shouldn’t he be alive?’

‘Why not indeed?’ replied Vandam smoothly. ‘If you’ll tell me where he is, I’ll tell you how he got there.’

After a pause the secretary muttered, rather sulkily: ‘I suppose you’re right. We’re right up against the very thing we were talking about. It’d be a queer thing if you or I ever came to think there was anything in cursing. But who could have harmed Wynd shut up in here?’

Mr Alboin, of Oklahoma, had been standing rather astraddle in the middle of the room, his white, hairy halo as well as his round eyes seeming to radiate astonishment. At this point he said, abstractedly, with something of the irrelevant impudence of an enfant terrible: ‘You didn’t cotton to him much, did you, Mr Vandam?’

Mr Vandam’s long yellow face seemed to grow longer as it grew more sinister, while he smiled and answered quietly: ‘If it comes to these coincidences, it was you, I think, who said that a wind from the West would blow away out big men like thistledown.’

‘I know I said it would,’ said the Westerner, with candour; ‘but all the same, how the devil could it?’

The silence was broken by Fenner saying with an abruptness amounting to violence: ‘There’s only one thing to say about this affair. It simply hasn’t happened. It can’t have happened.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Father Brown out of the corner; ‘it has happened all right.’

They all jumped; for the truth was they had all forgotten the insignificant little man who had originally induced them to open the door. And the recovery of memory went with a sharp reversal of mood; it came back to them with a rush that they had all dismissed him as a superstitious dreamer for even hinting at the very thing that had since happened before their eyes.

‘Snakes!’ cried the impetuous Westerner, like one speaking before he could stop himself; ‘suppose there were something in it, after all!’

«Ma una porta si può aprire, anche in un albergo americano», replicò padre Brown con pazienza. «E mi pare che la cosa più semplice sarebbe aprirla.»

«Sarebbe abbastanza semplice farmi perdere il posto», rispose il segretario, «e a Warren Wynd i suoi segretari non piacciono così semplici. Né tanto semplici da credere al genere di fiabe a cui pare che crediate voi.»

«Beh», disse il prete con gravità, «è vero abbastanza che io credo in un buon numero di cose in cui probabilmente voi non credete. Ma ci vorrebbe parecchio tempo per spiegare tutte le cose in cui credo, e tutte le ragioni che ho per pensare di aver ragione. Ci vorranno all’incirca due secondi per aprire quella porta e provare che ho torto.»

Qualcosa in quella frase parve solleticare lo spirito più selvaggio e inquieto dell’uomo dell’Ovest.

«Ammetto che mi piacerebbe provare che avete torto», disse Alboin, passando loro davanti a grandi falcate d’un tratto, «e lo farò.»

Spalancò la porta dell’appartamento e guardò dentro. La prima occhiata mostrò che la poltrona di Warren Wynd era vuota. La seconda occhiata mostrò che era vuota anche la stanza.

Fenner, elettrizzato di energia a sua volta, si precipitò oltre l’altro dentro l’appartamento.

«È in camera da letto», disse secco, «per forza.»

Mentre spariva nella camera interna gli altri uomini rimasero nella stanza esterna, vuota, a girare lo sguardo intorno. La severità e la semplicità dell’arredo, già notate, tornarono su di loro come una sfida inflessibile. Di certo in quella stanza non c’era modo di nascondere un topo, e tanto meno un uomo. Non c’erano tende e, cosa rara nelle disposizioni americane, non c’erano armadi. Perfino lo scrittoio non era che un semplice tavolo con un cassetto poco profondo e un piano inclinato. Le sedie erano scheletri duri e dallo schienale alto. Un momento dopo il segretario ricomparve sulla porta interna, avendo perlustrato le due stanze di dentro. Nei suoi occhi stava fissa una negazione attonita, e la bocca pareva muoversi con un distacco meccanico da essa quando disse bruscamente: «Non è uscito di qui?»

In qualche modo gli altri non ritennero nemmeno necessario rispondere a quella negazione in senso negativo. Le loro menti si erano scontrate con qualcosa di simile al muro cieco del magazzino che occhieggiava dalla finestra di fronte, virando a poco a poco dal bianco al grigio mentre il crepuscolo scendeva lento con l’avanzare del pomeriggio. Vandam attraversò la stanza fino al davanzale della finestra contro cui si era appoggiato mezz’ora prima e guardò fuori dalla finestra aperta. Non c’era né tubo né scala antincendio, né sporgenza né appiglio d’alcun genere sulla parete a strapiombo che precipitava fino alla stradicciola sottostante, e nulla c’era sulla pari distesa di muro che si levava per molti piani più in alto. C’era ancor meno varietà dall’altra parte della strada; non c’era proprio nulla se non la tediosa distesa di muro imbiancato a calce. Scrutò in basso, come aspettandosi di scorgere lo svanito filantropo giacere in un rottame suicida sul selciato. Non riuscì a vedere nulla se non un piccolo oggetto scuro che, per quanto rimpicciolito dalla distanza, poteva ben essere la pistola che il prete aveva trovato lì per terra. Nel frattempo Fenner si era avvicinato all’altra finestra, che dava su una parete altrettanto cieca e inaccessibile, ma affacciata su un piccolo parco ornamentale invece che su una via laterale. Qui un boschetto interrompeva la vista effettiva del suolo; ma gli alberi salivano solo per un breve tratto lungo l’enorme rupe umana. Entrambi si voltarono di nuovo verso l’interno e si fronteggiarono nel crepuscolo che si addensava, dove gli ultimi bagliori argentei della luce del giorno sui lucidi ripiani di scrittoi e tavoli viravano rapidamente al grigio. Come se il crepuscolo stesso lo irritasse, Fenner toccò l’interruttore e la scena balzò nella nitidezza sorprendente della luce elettrica.

«Come avete detto poco fa», disse Vandam cupamente, «non c’è sparo che da laggiù potesse colpirlo, anche se ci fosse stato un colpo nell’arma. Ma anche se fosse stato colpito da una pallottola non sarebbe scoppiato di netto come una bolla di sapone.»

Il segretario, più pallido che mai, gettò un’occhiata irritata sul volto biliardo del milionario. «Che cosa vi ha messo in testa quelle idee morbose? Chi parla di pallottole e di bolle? Perché non dovrebbe essere vivo?»

«Perché no, in effetti?» replicò Vandam con scorrevolezza. «Se mi direte dov’è, io vi dirò come ci è arrivato.»

Dopo una pausa il segretario borbottò, piuttosto imbronciato: «Immagino che abbiate ragione. Siamo proprio davanti alla cosa stessa di cui stavamo parlando. Sarebbe strano se voi o io arrivassimo mai a credere che ci fosse qualcosa nel maledire. Ma chi avrebbe potuto far del male a Wynd, chiuso qui dentro?»

Il signor Alboin, dell’Oklahoma, era rimasto piuttosto a gambe larghe in mezzo alla stanza, con la sua bianca aureola ispida non meno degli occhi tondi che parevano irradiare stupore. A questo punto disse, distrattamente, con qualcosa dell’impudenza sconclusionata di un enfant terrible: «Non è che vi andasse molto a genio, eh, signor Vandam?»

Il lungo volto giallo del signor Vandam parve allungarsi ancor più mentre si faceva più sinistro, ed egli sorrise e rispose con calma: «Se si vuol parlare di coincidenze, mi pare foste voi a dire che un vento dall’Ovest avrebbe spazzato via i nostri grandi uomini come pappi di cardo.»

«Lo so, ho detto che l’avrebbe fatto», disse l’uomo dell’Ovest, con candore; «ma comunque, come diavolo avrebbe potuto?»

Il silenzio fu rotto da Fenner che disse con una bruschezza che rasentava la violenza: «C’è una sola cosa da dire su questa faccenda. Semplicemente non è accaduta. Non può essere accaduta.»

«Oh, sì», disse padre Brown dal suo angolo; «è accaduta eccome.»

Sobbalzarono tutti; perché la verità era che avevano tutti dimenticato l’insignificante omino che li aveva in origine indotti ad aprire la porta. E il recupero della memoria si accompagnò a un brusco rovesciamento d’umore; tornò loro alla mente d’un tratto che avevano tutti liquidato quell’uomo come un sognatore superstizioso per aver solo accennato alla cosa stessa che da allora era accaduta sotto i loro occhi.

«Serpenti!» gridò l’impetuoso uomo dell’Ovest, come chi parla prima di potersi trattenere; «e se ci fosse qualcosa di vero, dopotutto!»

‘I must confess,’ said Fenner, frowning at the table, ‘that his reverence’s anticipations were apparently well founded. I don’t know whether he has anything else to tell us.’

‘He might possibly tell us,’ said Vandam, sardonically, ‘what the devil we are to do now.’

The little priest seemed to accept the position in a modest, but matter—of—fact manner. ‘The only thing I can think of,’ he said, ‘is first to tell the authorities of this place, and then to see if there were any more traces of my man who let off the pistol. He vanished round the other end of the Crescent where the little garden is. There are seats there, and it’s a favourite place for tramps.’

Direct consultations with the headquarters of the hotel, leading to indirect consultations with the authorities of the police, occupied them for a considerable time; and it was already nightfall when they went out under the long, classical curve of the colonnade. The crescent looked as cold and hollow as the moon after which it was named, and the moon itself was rising luminous but spectral behind the black tree—tops when they turned the corner by the little public garden. Night veiled much of what was merely urban and artificial about the place, and as they melted into the shadows of the trees they had a strange feeling of having suddenly travelled many hundred miles from their homes. When they had walked in silence for a little, Alboin, who had something elemental about him, suddenly exploded.

‘I give up,’ he cried; ‘I hand in my checks. I never thought I should come to such things; but what happens when the things come to you? I beg your pardon, Father Brown; I reckon I’ll just come across, so far as you and your fairy—tales are concerned. After this, it’s me for the fairy—tales. Why, you said yourself, Mr Vandam, that you’re an atheist and only believe what you see. Well, what was it you did see? Or rather, what was it you didn’t see?’

‘I know,’ said Vandam and nodded in a gloomy fashion.

‘Oh, it’s partly all this moon and trees that get on one’s nerves,’ said Fenner obstinately. ‘Trees always look queer by moonlight, with their branches crawling about. Look at that—‘

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, standing still and peering at the moon through a tangle of trees. ‘That’s a very queer branch up there.’

When he spoke again he only said: ‘I thought it was a broken branch.’

But this time there was a catch in his voice that unaccountably turned his hearers cold. Something that looked rather like a dead branch was certainly dependent in a limp fashion from the tree that showed dark against the moon; but it was not a dead branch. When they came close to it to see what it was Fenner sprang away again with a ringing oath. Then he ran in again and loosened a rope from the neck of the dingy little body dangling with drooping plumes of grey hair. Somehow he knew that the body was a dead body before he managed to take it down from the tree. A very long coil of rope was wrapped round and round the branches, and a comparatively short length of it hung from the fork of the branch to the body. A long garden tub was rolled a yard or so from under the feet, like the stool kicked away from the feet of a suicide.

‘Oh, my God!’ said Alboin, so that it seemed as much a prayer as an oath.’ What was it that man said about him?—‘If he knew, he would be ready to hang himself.’ Wasn’t that what he said, Father Brown?’

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown.

‘Well,’ said Vandam in a hollow voice, ‘I never thought to see or say such a thing. But what can one say except that the curse has worked?’

Fenner was standing with hands covering his face; and the priest laid a hand on his arm and said, gently, ‘Were you very fond of him?’

The secretary dropped his hands and his white face was ghastly under the moon.

‘I hated him like hell,’ he said; ‘and if he died by a curse it might have been mine.’

The pressure of the priest’s hand on his arm tightened; and the priest said, with an earnestness he had hardly yet shown: ‘It wasn’t your curse; pray be comforted.’

The police of the district had considerable difficulty in dealing with the four witnesses who were involved in the case. All of them were reputable, and even reliable people in the ordinary sense; and one of them was a person of considerable power and importance: Silas Vandam of the Oil Trust. The first police—officer who tried to express scepticism about his story struck sparks from the steel of that magnate’s mind very rapidly indeed.

‘Don’t you talk to me about sticking to the facts,’ said the millionaire with asperity. ‘I’ve stuck to a good many facts before you were born and a few of the facts have stuck to me. I’ll give you the facts all right if you’ve got the sense to take ‘em down correctly.’

The policeman in question was youthful and subordinate, and had a hazy idea that the millionaire was too political to be treated as an ordinary citizen; so he passed him and his companions on to a more stolid superior, one Inspector Collins, a grizzled man with a grimly comfortable way of talking; as one who was genial but would stand no nonsense.

‘Well, well,’ he said, looking at the three figures before him with twinkling eyes, ‘this seems to be a funny sort of a tale.’

Father Brown had already gone about his daily business; but Silas Vandam had suspended even the gigantic business of the markets for an hour or so to testify to his remarkable experience. Fenner’s business as secretary had ceased in a sense with his employer’s life; and the great Art Alboin, having no business in New York or anywhere else, except the spreading of the Breath of Life religion or the Great Spirit, had nothing to draw him away at the moment from the immediate affair. So they stood in a row in the inspector’s office, prepared to corroborate each other.

‘Now I’d better tell you to start with,’ said the inspector cheerfully, ‘that it’s no good for anybody to come to me with any miraculous stuff. I’m a practical man and a policeman, and that sort of thing is all very well for priests and parsons. This priest of yours seems to have got you all worked up about some story of a dreadful death and judgement; but I’m going to leave him and his religion out of it altogether. If Wynd came out of that room, somebody let him out. And if Wynd was found hanging on that tree, somebody hung him there.’

«Devo confessare», disse Fenner, accigliato verso il tavolo, «che le previsioni di sua reverenza sembrano essere state ben fondate. Non so se abbia qualcos’altro da dirci.»

«Potrebbe forse dirci», intervenne Vandam, sardonico, «che diavolo dovremmo fare adesso.»

Il piccolo prete parve accettare la situazione con modestia, ma anche con concretezza. «L’unica cosa che mi viene in mente», disse, «è anzitutto avvertire le autorità del posto, e poi vedere se ci siano altre tracce del mio uomo, quello che ha sparato con la pistola. È sparito all’altra estremità del Crescent, dove c’è il giardinetto. Là ci sono delle panchine, ed è un luogo prediletto dai vagabondi.»

Le consultazioni dirette con la direzione dell’albergo, che condussero a consultazioni indirette con le autorità di polizia, li occuparono per un tempo considerevole; ed era già calata la notte quando uscirono sotto la lunga, classica curva del colonnato. Il Crescent appariva freddo e vuoto come la luna da cui prendeva nome, e la luna stessa sorgeva luminosa ma spettrale dietro le nere cime degli alberi, mentre svoltavano l’angolo presso il giardinetto pubblico. La notte velava gran parte di ciò che nel luogo era meramente urbano e artificiale, e via via che si fondevano nell’ombra degli alberi provarono la strana sensazione di aver percorso all’improvviso molte centinaia di miglia lontano dalle proprie case. Dopo aver camminato per un poco in silenzio, Alboin, che aveva in sé qualcosa di elementare, esplose di colpo.

«Mi arrendo», gridò; «getto la spugna. Non avrei mai creduto di arrivare a cose simili; ma che si fa quando le cose arrivano a te? Le chiedo scusa, padre Brown; credo proprio che passerò dalla vostra parte, per quel che riguarda lei e le sue favole. D’ora in poi, io sto con le favole. Ma via, lei stesso ha detto, signor Vandam, di essere ateo e di credere soltanto a ciò che vede. Bene, che cosa ha visto? O piuttosto: che cosa non ha visto?»

«Lo so», disse Vandam, e annuì cupo.

«Oh, è in parte tutta questa faccenda della luna e degli alberi che dà ai nervi», disse Fenner ostinato. «Gli alberi hanno sempre un’aria strana al chiaro di luna, con i rami che si contorcono come se strisciassero. Guardate quello là…»

«Sì», disse padre Brown, fermandosi immobile e scrutando la luna attraverso un groviglio di alberi. «È un ramo davvero molto strano, lassù.»

Quando riprese a parlare, disse soltanto: «Credevo fosse un ramo spezzato.»

Ma questa volta c’era nella sua voce un’esitazione che, senza spiegazione, gelò il sangue a chi lo ascoltava. Qualcosa che assomigliava piuttosto a un ramo secco pendeva infatti, in modo floscio, dall’albero che si stagliava scuro contro la luna; ma non era un ramo secco. Quando gli si avvicinarono per vedere di che si trattasse, Fenner scattò di nuovo indietro con una bestemmia squillante. Poi accorse di nuovo e allentò una corda dal collo del misero corpicino che penzolava, con i suoi ciuffi cadenti di capelli grigi. In qualche modo seppe che quel corpo era un corpo senza vita prima ancora di riuscire a tirarlo giù dall’albero. Una lunghissima matassa di corda era avvolta più e più volte intorno ai rami, e un tratto relativamente breve pendeva dalla biforcazione del ramo fino al corpo. Un lungo mastello da giardino era rotolato un metro o poco più da sotto i piedi, come lo sgabello scalciato via da sotto i piedi di un suicida.

«Oh, mio Dio!», disse Alboin, in modo che parve tanto una preghiera quanto una bestemmia. «Che cosa aveva detto di lui, quell’uomo?… “Se sapesse, sarebbe pronto a impiccarsi.” Non era così che aveva detto, padre Brown?»

«Sì», disse padre Brown.

«Ebbene», disse Vandam con voce cava, «non avrei mai creduto di vedere o dire una cosa simile. Ma che cosa si può dire, se non che la maledizione ha funzionato?»

Fenner stava in piedi con le mani a coprirsi il volto; e il prete gli posò una mano sul braccio e disse, con dolcezza: «Gli voleva molto bene?»

Il segretario lasciò cadere le mani, e il suo volto bianco era spettrale sotto la luna.

«Lo odiavo a morte», disse; «e se è morto per una maledizione, poteva ben essere la mia.»

La stretta della mano del prete sul suo braccio si fece più salda; e il prete disse, con una gravità che fino a quel momento non aveva quasi mai mostrato: «Non è stata la sua maledizione; si consoli, la prego.»

La polizia del distretto ebbe non poche difficoltà a trattare con i quattro testimoni coinvolti nel caso. Erano tutti persone rispettabili, e persino attendibili nel senso comune del termine; e uno di loro era un personaggio di notevole potere e importanza: Silas Vandam dell’Oil Trust. Il primo agente di polizia che tentò di esprimere scetticismo sul suo racconto trasse scintille dall’acciaio della mente di quel magnate assai rapidamente, in verità.

«Non venga a parlarmi di attenersi ai fatti», disse il milionario con asprezza. «Io mi sono attenuto a un bel po’ di fatti prima ancora che lei nascesse, e qualcuno di quei fatti si è attenuto a me. Le darò i fatti come si deve, se avrà il buon senso di trascriverli correttamente.»

L’agente in questione era giovane e di grado subalterno, e aveva la vaga idea che il milionario fosse troppo influente in politica per essere trattato come un comune cittadino; così passò lui e i suoi compagni a un superiore più flemmatico, un certo ispettore Collins, un uomo brizzolato dal modo di parlare torvamente bonario, come chi è cordiale ma non tollera sciocchezze.

«Bene, bene», disse, guardando le tre figure davanti a sé con occhi scintillanti, «pare proprio una storia piuttosto buffa, questa.»

Padre Brown era già andato ad occuparsi delle sue faccende quotidiane; ma Silas Vandam aveva sospeso perfino i giganteschi affari dei mercati per un’oretta o giù di lì, per testimoniare la sua straordinaria esperienza. L’attività di Fenner come segretario era in un certo senso cessata con la vita del suo datore di lavoro; e il grande Art Alboin, non avendo alcun affare né a New York né altrove, tranne la diffusione della religione del Soffio della Vita, ovvero del Grande Spirito, non aveva in quel momento nulla che lo distogliesse dalla vicenda immediata. Così se ne stavano schierati in fila nell’ufficio dell’ispettore, pronti a confermarsi a vicenda.

«Allora, è meglio che le dica subito, tanto per cominciare», disse l’ispettore allegramente, «che non serve a niente venire da me con storie di miracoli. Io sono un uomo pratico e un poliziotto, e quella roba lì va benissimo per i preti e i pastori. Questo vostro prete pare avervi messo tutti in agitazione con non so quale storia di una morte spaventosa e di un castigo divino; ma io ho intenzione di lasciare completamente da parte lui e la sua religione. Se Wynd è uscito da quella stanza, qualcuno ce l’ha fatto uscire. E se Wynd è stato trovato appeso a quell’albero, qualcuno ce l’ha appeso.»

‘Quite so,’ said Fenner; ‘but as out evidence is that nobody let him out, the question is how could anybody have hung him there?’

‘How could anybody have a nose on his face?’ asked the inspector. ‘He had a nose on his face, and he had a noose round his neck. Those are facts; and, as I say, I’m a practical man and go by the facts. It can’t have been done by a miracle, so it must have been done by a man.’

Alboin had been standing rather in the background; and indeed his broad figure seemed to form a natural background to the leaner and more vivacious men in front of him. His white head was bowed with a certain abstraction; but as the inspector said the last sentence, he lifted it, shaking his hoary mane in a leonine fashion, and looking dazed but awakened. He moved forward into the centre of the group, and they had a vague feeling that he was even vaster than before. They had been only too prone to take him for a fool or a mountebank; but he was not altogether wrong when he said that there was in him a certain depth of lungs and life, like a west wind stored up in its strength, which might some day puff lighter things away.

‘So you’re a practical man, Mr Collins,’ he said, in a voice at once soft and heavy. ‘It must be the second or third time you’ve mentioned in this little conversation that you are a practical man; so I can’t be mistaken about that. And a very interesting little fact it is for anybody engaged in writing your life, letters, and table—talk, with portrait at the age of five, daguerreotype of your grandmother and views of the old home—town; and I’m sure your biographer won’t forget to mention it along with the fact that you had a pug nose with a pimple on it, and were nearly too fat to walk. And as you’re a practical man, perhaps you would just go on practising till you’ve brought Warren Wynd to life again, and found out exactly how a practical man gets through a deal door. But I think you’ve got it wrong. You’re not a practical man. You’re a practical joke; that’s what you are. The Almighty was having a bit of fun with us when he thought of you.’

With a characteristic sense of drama he went sailing towards the door before the astonished inspector could reply; and no after— recriminations could rob him of a certain appearance of triumph.

‘I think you were perfectly right,’ said Fenner. ‘If those are practical men, give me priests.’

Another attempt was made to reach an official version of the event when the authorities fully realized who were the backers of the story, and what were the implications of it. Already it had broken out in the Press in its most sensationally and even shamelessly psychic form. Interviews with Vandam on his marvellous adventure, articles about Father Brown and his mystical intuitions, soon led those who feel responsible for guiding the public, to wish to guide it into a wiser channel. Next time the inconvenient witnesses were approached in a more indirect and tactful manner. They were told, almost in an airy fashion, that Professor Vair was very much interested in such abnormal experiences; was especially interested in their own astonishing case. Professor Vair was a psychologist of great distinction; he had been known to take a detached interest in criminology; it was only some little time afterwards that they discovered that he was in any way connected with the police.

Professor Vair was a courteous gentleman, quietly dressed in pale grey clothes, with an artistic tie and a fair, pointed beard; he looked more like a landscape painter to anyone not acquainted with a certain special type of don. He had an air not only of courtesy, but of frankness.

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he said smiling; ‘I can guess what you must have gone through. The police do not shine in inquiries of a psychic sort, do they? Of course, dear old Collins said he only wanted the facts. What an absurd blunder! In a case of this kind we emphatically do not only want the facts. It is even more essential to have the fancies.’

‘Do you mean,’ asked Vandam gravely, ‘that all that we thought facts were merely fancies?’

‘Not at all,’ said the professor; ‘I only mean that the police are stupid in thinking they can leave out the psychological element in these things. Well, of course, the psychological element is everything in everything, though it is only just beginning to be understood. To begin with, take the element called personality. Now I have heard of this priest, Father Brown, before; and he is one of the most remarkable men of our time. Men of that sort carry a sort of atmosphere with them; and nobody knows how much his nerves and even his very senses are affected by it for the time being. People are hypnotized— yes, hypnotized; for hypnotism, like everything else, is a matter of degree; it enters slightly into all daily conversation: it is not necessarily conducted by a man in evening— dress on a platform in a public hall. Father Brown’s religion has always understood the psychology of atmospheres, and knows bow to appeal to everything simultaneously; even, for instance, to the sense of smell. It understands those curious effects produced by music on animals and human beings; it can—‘

‘Hang it,’ protested Fenner, ‘you don’t think he walked down the corridor carrying a church organ?’

‘He knows better than to do that,’ said Professor Vair laughing. ‘He knows how to concentrate the essence of all these spiritual sounds and sights, and even smells, in a few restrained gestures; in an art or school of manners. He could contrive so to concentrate your minds on the supernatural by his mere presence, that natural things slipped off your minds to left and right unnoticed. Now you know,’ he proceeded with a return to cheerful good sense, ‘that the more we study it the more queer the whole question of human evidence becomes. There is not one man in twenty who really observes things at all. There is not one man in a hundred who observes them with real precision; certainly not one in a hundred who can first observe, then remember, and finally describe. Scientific experiments have been made again and again showing that men under strain have thought a door was shut when it was open, or open when it was shut. Men have differed about the number of doors or windows in a wall just in front of them. They have suffered optical illusions in broad daylight. They have done this even without the hypnotic effect of personality; but here we have a very powerful and persuasive personality bent upon fixing only one picture on your minds; the picture of the wild Irish rebel shaking his pistol at the sky and firing that vain volley, whose echoes were the thunders of heaven.’

«Verissimo» disse Fenner; «ma poiché la nostra testimonianza è che nessuno lo fece uscire, la domanda è: come avrebbe potuto qualcuno appenderlo lassù?»

«E come mai qualcuno ha un naso in mezzo alla faccia?» ribatté l’ispettore. «Lui aveva un naso in mezzo alla faccia, e aveva un cappio intorno al collo. Questi sono fatti; e, come dico io, sono un uomo pratico e mi attengo ai fatti. Non può essere stato fatto da un miracolo, dunque deve essere stato fatto da un uomo.»

Alboin era rimasto piuttosto in disparte, sullo sfondo; e in effetti la sua figura massiccia pareva costituire uno sfondo naturale agli uomini più asciutti e più vivaci che gli stavano davanti. La testa canuta era china in una certa astrazione; ma quando l’ispettore pronunciò l’ultima frase, egli la sollevò, scuotendo la sua bianca criniera alla maniera di un leone, con un’aria stordita eppure ridesta. Avanzò fino al centro del gruppo, e tutti ebbero la vaga sensazione che fosse persino più imponente di prima. Fin troppo facilmente lo avevano preso per uno sciocco o un ciarlatano; ma non aveva tutti i torti quando diceva che c’era in lui una certa profondità di polmoni e di vita, come un vento di ponente accumulato nella sua forza, che un giorno o l’altro avrebbe potuto spazzar via, con un soffio, le cose più leggere.

«Così lei è un uomo pratico, signor Collins» disse, con una voce insieme molle e greve. «Dev’essere la seconda o la terza volta che, in questa breve conversazione, accenna al fatto di essere un uomo pratico; sicché su questo non posso sbagliarmi. E per chiunque si accingesse a scrivere la sua vita, le sue lettere e i suoi discorsi da tavola, corredati del ritratto all’età di cinque anni, del dagherrotipo di sua nonna e di vedute del vecchio paese natale, è un particolare davvero interessante; e son certo che il suo biografo non mancherà di menzionarlo, insieme al fatto che lei aveva un naso camuso con un foruncolo sopra, ed era così grasso da quasi non poter camminare. E poiché è un uomo pratico, forse potrebbe continuare a esercitarsi finché non abbia riportato in vita Warren Wynd, scoprendo esattamente come un uomo pratico attraversi una porta di tavole massicce. Ma io credo che lei l’abbia intesa male. Lei non è un uomo pratico. Lei è uno scherzo pratico, ecco cos’è. L’Onnipotente si stava prendendo un po’ di svago alle nostre spalle quando la ideò.»

Con un caratteristico senso del dramma, veleggiò verso la porta prima che l’attonito ispettore potesse replicare; e nessuna successiva recriminazione poté privarlo di una certa aria di trionfo.

«Credo che lei avesse perfettamente ragione» disse Fenner. «Se quelli sono uomini pratici, datemi i preti.»

Un altro tentativo fu fatto per giungere a una versione ufficiale dell’accaduto, quando le autorità compresero appieno chi fossero i sostenitori della storia, e quali ne fossero le implicazioni. La cosa era già scoppiata sulla stampa nella forma più sensazionalistica, e persino sfacciatamente medianica. Interviste a Vandam sulla sua meravigliosa avventura, articoli su Padre Brown e le sue mistiche intuizioni, indussero presto coloro che si sentono responsabili di guidare il pubblico a desiderare di guidarlo lungo un canale più assennato. Questa volta gli scomodi testimoni furono avvicinati in modo più indiretto e cauto. Fu detto loro, quasi con noncuranza, che il professor Vair era molto interessato a simili esperienze anomale; ed era interessato in modo particolare al loro stesso caso sbalorditivo. Il professor Vair era uno psicologo di grande fama; era noto per avere nutrito un distaccato interesse per la criminologia; fu solo qualche tempo dopo che essi scoprirono ch’egli era in qualche modo legato alla polizia.

Il professor Vair era un gentiluomo cortese, vestito con sobrietà di grigio pallido, con una cravatta di gusto artistico e una barba bionda e appuntita; a chiunque non conoscesse un certo tipo particolare di accademico, aveva l’aria piuttosto di un paesaggista. C’era in lui un’aria non soltanto di cortesia, ma di franchezza.

«Sì, sì, lo so» disse sorridendo; «posso immaginare quel che dovete aver passato. La polizia non brilla certo nelle indagini di natura medianica, non è vero? Naturalmente il caro vecchio Collins diceva di volere soltanto i fatti. Che sciocco abbaglio! In un caso di questo genere noi, con la massima decisione, non vogliamo soltanto i fatti. È persino più essenziale possedere le fantasie.»

«Intende dire» chiese Vandam con gravità «che tutto ciò che noi credevamo fatti erano semplici fantasie?»

«Niente affatto» disse il professore; «intendo soltanto che la polizia è ottusa nel credere di poter tralasciare l’elemento psicologico in queste faccende. Ebbene, s’intende, l’elemento psicologico è tutto in ogni cosa, per quanto si cominci appena adesso a comprenderlo. Cominciamo col prendere l’elemento chiamato personalità. Ora, io avevo già sentito parlare di questo prete, Padre Brown; ed è uno degli uomini più notevoli del nostro tempo. Gli uomini di quella tempra si portano dietro una sorta di atmosfera; e nessuno sa quanto i nervi, e persino i sensi stessi, ne restino influenzati per il momento. La gente viene ipnotizzata… sì, ipnotizzata; perché l’ipnotismo, come ogni altra cosa, è una questione di grado; s’insinua, in misura lieve, in ogni conversazione quotidiana: non è necessariamente condotto da un uomo in abito da sera su un palco, in una sala pubblica. La religione di Padre Brown ha sempre compreso la psicologia delle atmosfere, e sa come rivolgersi a tutto simultaneamente; persino, per esempio, al senso dell’olfatto. Comprende quei curiosi effetti prodotti dalla musica sugli animali e sugli esseri umani; sa…»

«Al diavolo» protestò Fenner, «non penserà mica che egli abbia percorso il corridoio portandosi appresso un organo da chiesa?»

«Sa bene di non doverlo fare» disse il professor Vair ridendo. «Sa come concentrare l’essenza di tutti questi suoni, e visioni, e persino odori spirituali, in pochi gesti misurati; in un’arte, o scuola, di maniere. Saprebbe fare in modo di concentrare a tal punto le vostre menti sul soprannaturale con la sua mera presenza, che le cose naturali vi sfuggirebbero dalla mente, a destra e a sinistra, inosservate. Ora, sappiate» proseguì, con un ritorno alla lieta assennatezza, «che quanto più la studiamo, tanto più bizzarra si fa l’intera questione della testimonianza umana. Non c’è un uomo su venti che osservi davvero le cose. Non c’è un uomo su cento che le osservi con vera precisione; e certo non uno su cento capace prima di osservare, poi di ricordare, e infine di descrivere. Esperimenti scientifici sono stati condotti più e più volte, a dimostrare che uomini sotto tensione hanno creduto chiusa una porta quando era aperta, o aperta quando era chiusa. Certi uomini hanno discordato sul numero di porte o di finestre in una parete proprio davanti a loro. Hanno sofferto illusioni ottiche in pieno giorno. E hanno fatto tutto questo persino senza l’effetto ipnotico di una personalità; ma qui abbiamo una personalità potentissima e persuasiva, tutta protesa a fissare una sola immagine nelle vostre menti: l’immagine del feroce ribelle irlandese che scuote la pistola verso il cielo e spara quella vana scarica, i cui echi furono i tuoni del firmamento.»

‘Professor,’ cried Fenner, ‘I’d swear on my deathbed that door never opened.’

‘Recent experiments,’ went on the professor, quietly, ‘have suggested that our consciousness is not continuous, but is a succession of very rapid impressions like a cinema; it is possible that somebody or something may, so to speak, slip in or out between the scenes. It acts only in the instant while the curtain is down. Probably the patter of conjurors and all forms of sleight of hand depend on what we may call these black flashes of blindness between the flashes of sight. Now this priest and preacher of transcendental notions had filled you with a transcendental imagery; the image of the Celt like a Titan shaking the tower with his curse. Probably he accompanied it with some slight but compelling gesture, pointing your eyes and minds in the direction of the unknown destroyer below. Or perhaps something else happened, or somebody else passed by.’

‘Wilson, the servant,’ grunted Alboin, ‘went down the hallway to wait on the bench, but I guess he didn’t distract us much.’

‘You never know how much,’ replied Vair; ‘it might have been that or more likely your eyes following some gesture of the priest as he told his tale of magic. It was in one of those black flashes that Mr Warren Wynd slipped out of his door and went to his death. That is the most probable explanation. It is an illustration of the new discovery. The mind is not a continuous line, but rather a dotted line.’

‘Very dotted,’ said Fenner feebly. ‘Not to say dotty.’

‘You don’t really believe,’ asked Vair, ‘that your employer was shut up in a room like a box?’

‘It’s better than believing that I ought to be shut up in a room like a padded cell,’ answered Fenner. ‘That’s what I complain of in your suggestions, professor. I’d as soon believe in a priest who believes in a miracle, as disbelieve in any man having any right to believe in a fact. The priest tells me that a man can appeal to a God I know nothing about to avenge him by the laws of some higher justice that I know nothing about. There’s nothing for me to say except that I know nothing about it. But, at least, if the poor Paddy’s prayer and pistol could be heard in a higher world, that higher world might act in some way that seems odd to us. But you ask me to disbelieve the facts of this world as they appear to my own five wits. According to you, a whole procession of Irishmen carrying blunderbusses may have walked through this room while we were talking, so long as they took care to tread on the blind spots in our minds. Miracles of the monkish sort, like materializing a crocodile or hanging a cloak on a sunbeam, seem quite sane compared to you.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Professor Vair, rather curtly, ‘if you are resolved to believe in your priest and his miraculous Irishman I can say no more. I’m afraid you have not had an opportunity of studying psychology.’

‘No,’ said Fenner dryly; ‘but I’ve had an opportunity of studying psychologists.’

And, bowing politely, he led his deputation out of the room and did not speak till he got into the street; then he addressed them rather explosively.

‘Raving lunatics!’ cried Fenner in a fume. ‘What the devil do they think is to happen to the world if nobody knows whether he’s seen anything or not? I wish I’d blown his silly head off with a blank charge, and then explained that I did it in a blind flash. Father Brown’s miracle may be miraculous or no, but he said it would happen and it did happen. All these blasted cranks can do is to see a thing happen and then say it didn’t. Look here, I think we owe it to the padre to testify to his little demonstration. We’re all sane, solid men who never believed in anything. We weren’t drunk. We weren’t devout. It simply happened just as he said it would.’

‘I quite agree,’ said the millionaire. ‘It may be the beginning of mighty big things in the spiritual line; but anyhow, the man who’s in the spiritual line himself, Father Brown, has certainly scored over this business.’

A few days afterwards Father Brown received a very polite note signed Silas T. Vandam, and asking him if he would attend at a stated hour at the apartment which was the scene of the disappearance, in order to take steps for the establishment of that marvellous occurrence. The occurrence itself had already begun to break out in the newspapers, and was being taken up everywhere by the enthusiasts of occultism. Father Brown saw the flaring posters inscribed ‘Suicide of Vanishing Man’, and ‘Man’s Curse Hangs Philanthropist’, as he passed towards Moon Crescent and mounted the steps on the way to the elevator. He found the little group much as he left it, Vandam, Alboin, and the secretary; but there was an entirely new respectfulness and even reverence in their tone towards himself. They were standing by Wynd’s desk, on which lay a large paper and writing materials; they turned to greet him.

‘Father Brown,’ said the spokesman, who was the white—haired Westerner, somewhat sobered with his responsibility, ‘we asked you here in the first place to offer our apologies and our thanks. We recognize that it was you that spotted the spiritual manifestation from the first. We were hard—shell sceptics, all of us; but we realize now that a man must break that shell to get at the great things behind the world. You stand for those things; you stand for the super—normal explanation of things; and we have to hand it to you. And in the second place, we feel that this document would not be complete without your signature. We are notifying the exact facts to the Psychical Research Society, because the newspaper accounts are not what you might call exact. We’ve stated how the curse was spoken out in the street; how the man was sealed up here in a room like a box; how the curse dissolved him straight into thin air, and in some unthinkable way materialized him as a suicide hoisted on a gallows. That’s all we can say about it; but all that we know, and have seen with our own eyes. And as you were the first to believe in the miracle, we all feel that you ought to be the first to sign.’

«Professore» esclamò Fenner, «giurerei sul mio letto di morte che quella porta non si è mai aperta.»

«Esperimenti recenti» proseguì il professore, con calma, «hanno suggerito che la nostra coscienza non è continua, ma è una successione di impressioni rapidissime, come un cinematografo; è possibile che qualcuno o qualcosa possa, per così dire, insinuarsi dentro o fuori tra una scena e l’altra. Agisce soltanto nell’istante in cui il sipario è calato. Probabilmente le chiacchiere dei prestigiatori e ogni forma di gioco di mano dipendono da ciò che potremmo chiamare questi neri lampi di cecità tra un lampo di visione e l’altro. Ora, questo prete e predicatore di nozioni trascendentali vi aveva riempiti di un’immagine trascendentale: l’immagine del Celta simile a un Titano che scuoteva la torre con la sua maledizione. Probabilmente l’accompagnò con qualche gesto lieve ma imperioso, indirizzando gli occhi e le menti nella direzione dell’ignoto distruttore, laggiù. O forse accadde qualcos’altro, o qualcun altro passò di lì.»

«Wilson, il domestico» grugnì Alboin, «scese lungo il corridoio ad aspettare sulla panca, ma direi che non ci distrasse granché.»

«Non si sa mai quanto» ribatté Vair; «potrebbe essere stato quello, o più probabilmente i vostri occhi che seguivano qualche gesto del prete mentre raccontava la sua storia di magia. Fu in uno di quei neri lampi che il signor Warren Wynd sgusciò fuori dalla sua porta e andò incontro alla morte. È la spiegazione più probabile. È un’illustrazione della nuova scoperta. La mente non è una linea continua, ma piuttosto una linea tratteggiata.»

«Molto tratteggiata» disse Fenner fiaccamente. «Per non dire scombinata.»

«Non crederà davvero» chiese Vair, «che il suo datore di lavoro fosse chiuso in una stanza come in una scatola?»

«È meglio che credere di dover essere chiuso io in una stanza come in una cella imbottita» rispose Fenner. «È di questo che mi lamento nelle sue supposizioni, professore. Sarei disposto a credere in un prete che crede in un miracolo, piuttosto che a non credere che un uomo abbia il diritto di credere in un fatto. Il prete mi dice che un uomo può appellarsi a un Dio di cui non so nulla perché lo vendichi secondo le leggi di una giustizia superiore di cui non so nulla. Non ho altro da dire se non che non ne so nulla. Ma, almeno, se la preghiera e la pistola del povero irlandese potessero essere udite in un mondo più alto, quel mondo più alto potrebbe agire in qualche modo che a noi appare bizzarro. Lei invece mi chiede di non credere ai fatti di questo mondo così come appaiono ai miei cinque sensi. Secondo lei, un’intera processione di irlandesi con gli archibugi potrebbe aver attraversato questa stanza mentre parlavamo, purché avessero cura di posare i piedi sui punti ciechi delle nostre menti. I miracoli di stampo monacale, come materializzare un coccodrillo o appendere un mantello a un raggio di sole, sembrano del tutto assennati in confronto a lei.»

«Oh, be’» disse il professor Vair, piuttosto seccamente, «se è deciso a credere nel suo prete e nel suo irlandese miracoloso, non ho altro da aggiungere. Temo che lei non abbia avuto occasione di studiare la psicologia.»

«No» disse Fenner asciutto; «ma ho avuto occasione di studiare gli psicologi.»

E, inchinandosi cortesemente, condusse la sua delegazione fuori dalla stanza e non parlò finché non fu in strada; allora si rivolse a loro in modo piuttosto esplosivo.

«Pazzi furiosi!» gridò Fenner infuriato. «Che diavolo credono che accadrà al mondo se nessuno sa più se ha visto qualcosa oppure no? Vorrei avergli fatto saltare la sciocca testa con una cartuccia a salve, e poi spiegargli che l’ho fatto in un lampo di cecità. Il miracolo di Father Brown sarà miracoloso o no, ma lui disse che sarebbe accaduto, e accadde. Tutto ciò che quei maledetti fissati sanno fare è vedere accadere una cosa e poi dire che non è accaduta. Sentite, credo che dobbiamo al padre di testimoniare la sua piccola dimostrazione. Siamo tutti uomini sani, solidi, che non hanno mai creduto a nulla. Non eravamo ubriachi. Non eravamo devoti. Accadde semplicemente proprio come aveva detto.»

«Sono pienamente d’accordo» disse il milionario. «Potrebbe essere l’inizio di cose grandiose sul piano spirituale; ma comunque sia, l’uomo che è lui stesso del ramo spirituale, Father Brown, ha di certo segnato un punto in tutta questa faccenda.»

Pochi giorni dopo Father Brown ricevette un biglietto assai cortese firmato Silas T. Vandam, che gli chiedeva se volesse presentarsi a un’ora stabilita nell’appartamento che era stato teatro della scomparsa, allo scopo di prendere provvedimenti per la constatazione di quel prodigioso avvenimento. L’avvenimento stesso aveva già cominciato a esplodere sui giornali, ed era ripreso ovunque dagli entusiasti dell’occultismo. Father Brown vide i manifesti sgargianti che recavano la scritta «Suicidio dell’uomo scomparso» e «La maledizione di un uomo impicca il filantropo», mentre si dirigeva verso Mezzaluna Crescent e saliva i gradini in direzione dell’ascensore. Trovò il piccolo gruppo pressappoco come lo aveva lasciato, Vandam, Alboin e il segretario; ma vi era un rispetto interamente nuovo, e persino una riverenza, nel loro tono verso di lui. Erano in piedi accanto alla scrivania di Wynd, sulla quale giaceva un grande foglio e l’occorrente per scrivere; si voltarono per salutarlo.

«Padre Brown» disse il portavoce, che era l’uomo dell’Ovest dai capelli bianchi, alquanto rinsavito dalla propria responsabilità, «l’abbiamo pregata di venire qui anzitutto per offrirle le nostre scuse e i nostri ringraziamenti. Riconosciamo che fu lei a individuare fin dal principio la manifestazione spirituale. Eravamo scettici dalla dura scorza, tutti quanti; ma ora comprendiamo che un uomo deve spezzare quella scorza per giungere alle grandi cose che stanno dietro il mondo. Lei rappresenta quelle cose; lei rappresenta la spiegazione sovrannaturale delle cose; e dobbiamo rendergliene merito. E in secondo luogo, sentiamo che questo documento non sarebbe completo senza la sua firma. Stiamo notificando i fatti esatti alla Society for Psychical Research, perché i resoconti dei giornali non sono quel che si direbbe esatti. Abbiamo dichiarato come la maledizione fu pronunciata in strada; come l’uomo fu sigillato qui dentro, in una stanza come in una scatola; come la maledizione lo dissolse dritto nell’aria sottile, e in qualche modo inconcepibile lo materializzò come un suicida issato su una forca. È tutto quel che possiamo dirne; ma è tutto ciò che sappiamo, e abbiamo visto con i nostri occhi. E poiché lei fu il primo a credere nel miracolo, sentiamo tutti che dovrebbe essere il primo a firmare.»

‘No, really,’ said Father Brown, in embarrassment. ‘I don’t think I should like to do that.’

‘You mean you’d rather not sign first?’

‘I mean I’d rather not sign at all,’ said Father Brown, modestly. ‘You see, it doesn’t quite do for a man in my position to joke about miracles.’

‘But it was you who said it was a miracle,’ said Alboin, staring.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Father Brown; ‘I’m afraid there’s some mistake. I don’t think I ever said it was a miracle. All I said was that it might happen. What you said was that it couldn’t happen, because it would be a miracle if it did. And then it did. And so you said it was a miracle. But I never said a word about miracles or magic, or anything of the sort from beginning to end.’

‘But I thought you believed in miracles,’ broke out the secretary.

‘Yes,’ answered Father Brown, ‘I believe in miracles. I believe in man— eating tigers, but I don’t see them running about everywhere. If I want any miracles, I know where to get them.’

‘I can’t understand your taking this line, Father Brown,’ said Vandam, earnestly. ‘It seems so narrow; and you don’t look narrow to me, though you are a parson. Don’t you see, a miracle like this will knock all materialism endways? It will just tell the whole world in big print that spiritual powers can work and do work. You’ll be serving religion as no parson ever served it yet.’

The priest had stiffened a little and seemed in some strange way clothed with unconscious and impersonal dignity, for all his stumpy figure. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t suggest I should serve religion by what I know to be a lie? I don’t know precisely what you mean by the phrase; and, to be quite candid, I’m not sure you do. Lying may be serving religion; I’m sure it’s not serving God. And since you are harping so insistently on what I believe, wouldn’t it be as well if you had some sort of notion of what it is?’

‘I don’t think I quite understand,’ observed the millionaire, curiously.

‘I don’t think you do,’ said Father Brown, with simplicity. ‘You say this thing was done by spiritual powers. What spiritual powers? You don’t think the holy angels took him and hung him on a garden tree, do you? And as for the unholy angels—no, no, no. The men who did this did a wicked thing, but they went no further than their own wickedness; they weren’t wicked enough to be dealing with spiritual powers. I know something about Satanism, for my sins; I’ve been forced to know. I know what it is, what it practically always is. It’s proud and it’s sly. It likes to be superior; it loves to horrify the innocent with things half understood, to make children’s flesh creep. That’s why it’s so fond of mysteries and initiations and secret societies and all the rest of it. Its eyes are turned inwards, and however grand and grave it may look, it’s always hiding a small, mad smile.’ He shuddered suddenly, as if caught in an icy draught of air. ‘Never mind about them; they’ve got nothing to do with this, believe me. Do you think that poor, wild Irishman of mine, who ran raving down the street, who blurted out half of it when he first saw my face, and ran away for fear he should blurt out more, do you think Satan confides any secrets to him? I admit he joined in a plot, probably in a plot with two other men worse than himself; but for all that, he was just in an everlasting rage when he rushed down the lane and let off his pistol and his curse.’

‘But what on earth does all this mean?’ demanded Vandam. ‘Letting off a toy pistol and a twopenny curse wouldn’t do what was done, except by a miracle. It wouldn’t make Wynd disappear like a fairy. It wouldn’t make him reappear a quarter of a mile away with a rope round his neck.’

‘No,’ said Father Brown sharply; ‘but what would it do?’

‘And still I don’t follow you,’ said the millionaire gravely.

‘I say, what would it do?’ repeated the priest; showing, for the first time, a sort of animation verging on annoyance. ‘You keep on repeating that a blank pistol—shot wouldn’t do this and wouldn’t do that; that if that was all, the murder wouldn’t happen or the miracle wouldn’t happen. It doesn’t seem to occur to you to ask what would happen. What would happen to you if a lunatic let off a firearm without rhyme or reason right under your window? What’s the very first thing that would happen?’

Vandam looked thoughtful. ‘I guess I should look out of the window,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘you’d look out of the window. That’s the whole story. It’s a sad story, but it’s finished now; and there were extenuating circumstances.’

‘Why should looking out of the window hurt him?’ asked Alboin. ‘He didn’t fall out, or he’d have been found in the lane.’

‘No,’ said Father Brown, in a low voice. ‘He didn’t fall. He rose.’

There was something in his voice like the groan of a gong, a note of doom, but otherwise he went on steadily: ‘He rose, but not on wings; not on the wings of any holy or unholy angels. He rose at the end of a rope, exactly as you saw him in the garden; a noose dropped over his head the moment it was poked out of the window. Don’t you remember Wilson, that big servant of his, a man of huge strength, while Wynd was the lightest of little shrimps? Didn’t Wilson go to the floor above to get a pamphlet, to a room full of luggage corded in coils and coils of rope? Has Wilson been seen since that day? I fancy not.’

‘Do you mean,’ asked the secretary, ‘that Wilson whisked him clean out of his own window like a trout on a line?’

‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘and let him down again out of the other window into the park, where the third accomplice hooked him on to a tree. Remember the lane was always empty; remember the wall opposite was quite blank; remember it was all over in five minutes after the Irishman gave the signal with the pistol. There were three of them in it of course; and I wonder whether you can all guess who they were.’

«No, davvero» disse padre Brown, imbarazzato. «Non credo che mi andrebbe di farlo.»

«Vuol dire che preferirebbe non firmare per primo?»

«Voglio dire che preferirei non firmare affatto» disse Father Brown, con modestia. «Vede, non sta troppo bene, per un uomo nella mia posizione, scherzare sui miracoli.»

«Ma è stato lei a dire che era un miracolo» disse Alboin, fissandolo.

«Mi dispiace tanto» disse padre Brown; «temo che ci sia qualche equivoco. Non credo di aver mai detto che fosse un miracolo. Ho detto soltanto che poteva accadere. Siete stati voi a dire che non poteva accadere, perché sarebbe stato un miracolo se fosse accaduto. E poi è accaduto. E allora avete detto che era un miracolo. Ma io non ho mai detto una parola sui miracoli o sulla magia, o su qualcosa del genere, dall’inizio alla fine.»

«Ma credevo che lei credesse nei miracoli» proruppe il segretario.

«Sì» rispose Father Brown, «credo nei miracoli. Credo nelle tigri mangiatrici d’uomini, ma non le vedo scorrazzare dappertutto. Se voglio dei miracoli, so dove trovarli.»

«Non riesco a capire come possa prendere questa posizione, Father Brown» disse Vandam, con serietà. «Sembra così gretta; e lei non mi pare un uomo gretto, per quanto sia un prete. Non capisce, un miracolo come questo manderebbe tutto il materialismo a gambe all’aria? Direbbe al mondo intero, a caratteri cubitali, che le potenze spirituali possono agire e agiscono davvero. Renderebbe alla religione un servizio quale nessun prete le ha mai reso finora.»

Il sacerdote si era irrigidito un poco e pareva rivestito, in qualche strano modo, di una dignità inconsapevole e impersonale, nonostante la sua figura tozza. «Ebbene» disse, «non vorrà suggerirmi di servire la religione con quella che io so essere una menzogna? Non so con precisione che cosa intenda con quella frase; e, per essere del tutto sincero, non sono sicuro che lo sappia lei. Mentire può essere servire la religione; di certo non è servire Dio. E poiché insiste tanto ossessivamente su ciò in cui credo, non sarebbe bene che lei avesse una qualche idea di che cosa si tratti?»

«Non credo di capire bene» osservò il milionario, incuriosito.

«Non credo che lei capisca» disse padre Brown, con semplicità. «Lei dice che questa cosa è stata fatta da potenze spirituali. Quali potenze spirituali? Non penserà mica che i santi angeli l’abbiano preso e appeso a un albero del giardino, vero? E quanto agli angeli non santi… no, no, no. Gli uomini che hanno fatto questo hanno commesso una cosa malvagia, ma non sono andati oltre la loro stessa malvagità; non erano abbastanza malvagi da trattare con potenze spirituali. Qualcosa di satanismo la so, Dio mi perdoni; sono stato costretto a saperla. So che cos’è, che cosa in pratica è sempre. È superbo ed è subdolo. Ama sentirsi superiore; ama inorridire l’innocente con cose comprese a metà, far venire la pelle d’oca ai bambini. Ecco perché è così ghiotto di misteri e iniziazioni e società segrete e tutto il resto. I suoi occhi sono rivolti all’interno, e per quanto grande e solenne possa apparire, nasconde sempre un piccolo, folle sorriso.» Rabbrividì all’improvviso, come colto da una gelida corrente d’aria. «Non pensate a loro; non hanno nulla a che vedere con questo, credetemi. Pensate forse che quel povero, sfrenato irlandese, che è corso urlando giù per la strada, che ne ha spiattellato metà quando ha visto per la prima volta la mia faccia, ed è fuggito per paura di spiattellarne ancora, pensate forse che Satana confidi a lui qualche segreto? Ammetto che abbia preso parte a un complotto, probabilmente a un complotto con altri due uomini peggiori di lui; ma nonostante tutto, era soltanto in una collera senza fine quando è corso giù per il vicolo e ha scaricato la pistola e la sua maledizione.»

«Ma che diavolo significa tutto questo?» domandò Vandam. «Scaricare una pistola giocattolo e una maledizione da due soldi non poteva fare ciò che è stato fatto, se non per miracolo. Non poteva far sparire Wynd come una fata. Non poteva farlo riapparire a un quarto di miglio di distanza con una corda al collo.»

«No» disse Father Brown bruscamente; «ma che cosa poteva fare?»

«E continuo a non seguirla» disse il milionario, gravemente.

«Dico, che cosa poteva fare?» ripeté il sacerdote; mostrando, per la prima volta, una sorta di animazione che rasentava l’irritazione. «Voi continuate a ripetere che uno sparo a salve di pistola non poteva fare questo e non poteva fare quello; che, se non c’era altro, l’omicidio non poteva accadere o il miracolo non poteva accadere. Non vi viene in mente di chiedervi che cosa poteva accadere. Che cosa vi accadrebbe se un pazzo scaricasse un’arma da fuoco senza capo né coda proprio sotto la vostra finestra? Qual è la primissima cosa che accadrebbe?»

Vandam parve pensieroso. «Immagino che guarderei fuori dalla finestra» disse.

«Sì» disse Father Brown, «guardereste fuori dalla finestra. È tutta qui la storia. È una storia triste, ma ormai è finita; e c’erano circostanze attenuanti.»

«Perché guardare fuori dalla finestra avrebbe dovuto fargli del male?» chiese Alboin. «Non è caduto, altrimenti l’avrebbero trovato nel vicolo.»

«No» disse Father Brown, a voce bassa. «Non è caduto. Si è alzato.»

C’era nella sua voce qualcosa come il gemito di un gong, una nota di fatalità, ma per il resto proseguì con fermezza: «Si alzò, ma non su ali; non sulle ali di angeli santi o non santi. Si alzò all’estremità di una corda, esattamente come l’avete visto nel giardino; un cappio calato sulla sua testa nell’istante in cui la sporgeva dalla finestra. Non ricordate Wilson, quel suo grosso domestico, un uomo di forza smisurata, mentre Wynd era il più minuto dei gamberetti? Non era salito Wilson al piano di sopra per prendere un opuscolo, in una stanza piena di bagagli legati con matasse e matasse di corda? È stato più visto Wilson da quel giorno? Mi sa di no.»

«Vuol dire» chiese il segretario, «che Wilson lo ha tirato su di netto dalla sua stessa finestra come una trota all’amo?»

«Sì» disse l’altro, «e lo ha calato di nuovo dall’altra finestra giù nel parco, dove il terzo complice lo ha agganciato a un albero. Ricordate che il vicolo era sempre deserto; ricordate che il muro di fronte era del tutto nudo; ricordate che tutto si concluse in cinque minuti dopo che l’irlandese diede il segnale con la pistola. Erano in tre, naturalmente; e mi domando se riuscite tutti a indovinare chi fossero.»

They were all three staring at the plain, square window and the blank, white wall beyond; and nobody answered.

‘By the way,’ went on Father Brown, ‘don’t think I blame you for jumping to preternatural conclusions. The reason’s very simple, really. You all swore you were hard—shelled materialists; and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the very edge of belief— of belief in almost anything. There are thousands balanced on it today; but it’s a sharp, uncomfortable edge to sit on. You won’t rest till you believe something; that’s why Mr Vandam went through new religions with a tooth—comb, and Mr Alboin quotes Scripture for his religion of breathing exercises, and Mr Fenner grumbles at the very God he denies. That’s where you all split; it’s natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things. But though it wanted only a touch to tip you into preternaturalism about these things, these things really were only natural things. They were not only natural, they were almost unnaturally simple. I suppose there never was quite so simple a story as this.’

Fenner laughed and then looked puzzled. ‘I don’t understand one thing,’ he said. ‘If it was Wilson, how did Wynd come to have a man like that on such intimate terms? How did he come to be killed by a man he’d seen every day for years? He was famous as being a judge of men.’

Father Brown thumped his umbrella on the ground with an emphasis he rarely showed.

‘Yes,’ he said, almost fiercely; ‘that was how he came to be killed. He was killed for just that. He was killed for being a judge of men.’

They all stared at him, but he went on, almost as if they were not there.

‘What is any man that he should be a judge of men?’ he demanded. ‘These three were the tramps that once stood before him and were dismissed rapidly right and left to one place or another; as if for them there were no cloak of courtesy, no stages of intimacy, no free—will in friendship. And twenty years has not exhausted the indignation born of that unfathomable insult in that moment when he dared to know them at a glance.’

‘Yes,’ said the secretary; ‘I understand … and I understand how it is that you understand—all sorts of things.’

‘Well, I’m blamed if I understand,’ cried the breezy Western gentleman boisterously. ‘Your Wilson and your Irishman seem to be just a couple of cut—throat murderers who killed their benefactor. I’ve no use for a black and bloody assassin of that sort, in my morality, whether it’s religion or not.’

‘He was a black and bloody assassin, no doubt,’ said Fenner quietly. ‘I’m not defending him; but I suppose it’s Father Brown’s business to pray for all men, even for a man like—‘

‘Yes,’ assented Father Brown, ‘it’s my business to pray for all men, even for a man like Warren Wynd.’

Fissavano tutti e tre la finestra semplice e quadrata e il muro bianco e nudo che si stendeva al di là; e nessuno rispose.

«A proposito», riprese Padre Brown, «non crediate che vi rimproveri di essere saltati a conclusioni soprannaturali. La ragione è molto semplice, in verità. Giuravate tutti di essere materialisti dalla scorza dura; e a dire il vero eravate tutti in equilibrio sull’orlo stesso della fede… della fede in quasi ogni cosa. Ce ne sono migliaia in bilico su quell’orlo, oggigiorno; ma è un orlo tagliente e scomodo su cui stare seduti. Non troverete pace finché non crederete in qualcosa; ecco perché il signor Vandam ha passato al setaccio le religioni nuove, e il signor Alboin cita la Scrittura a sostegno della sua religione degli esercizi di respirazione, e il signor Fenner brontola contro quel Dio stesso che nega. È lì che vi dividete tutti; è naturale credere nel soprannaturale. Non sembra mai naturale accettare soltanto le cose naturali. Ma benché bastasse un tocco per farvi cadere nel preternaturale a proposito di questi fatti, questi fatti erano davvero soltanto cose naturali. Non erano soltanto naturali, erano quasi innaturalmente semplici. Suppongo che non ci sia mai stata una storia tanto semplice quanto questa.»

Fenner rise e poi parve perplesso. «Una cosa non la capisco», disse. «Se è stato Wilson, come mai Wynd aveva un uomo simile in rapporti così intimi? Come mai si è fatto uccidere da un uomo che vedeva ogni giorno da anni? Era famoso come conoscitore di uomini.»

Padre Brown batté l’ombrello a terra con un’enfasi che di rado mostrava.

«Sì», disse, quasi con ferocia; «è proprio così che si è fatto uccidere. È stato ucciso proprio per questo. È stato ucciso per essere un conoscitore di uomini.»

Lo fissarono tutti, ma egli proseguì, quasi come se non fossero presenti.

«Chi mai è un uomo perché debba giudicare gli uomini?», domandò. «Quei tre erano i vagabondi che un giorno gli erano comparsi davanti e furono congedati in fretta, l’uno di qua l’altro di là, verso questo o quel destino; come se per loro non esistesse alcun manto di cortesia, nessuna gradazione di intimità, nessun libero arbitrio nell’amicizia. E vent’anni non hanno esaurito lo sdegno nato da quell’insondabile insulto, nell’istante in cui egli osò riconoscerli a colpo d’occhio.»

«Sì», disse il segretario; «capisco… e capisco come mai voi capiate… ogni sorta di cose.»

«Be’, che io sia dannato se ci capisco qualcosa», esclamò rumorosamente l’espansivo gentiluomo dell’Ovest. «Il vostro Wilson e il vostro irlandese mi sembrano proprio un paio di assassini tagliagole che hanno ammazzato il loro benefattore. Non so che farmene di un sicario nero e sanguinario di quella specie, nella mia morale, che sia religione o no.»

«Era un assassino nero e sanguinario, non c’è dubbio», disse Fenner con calma. «Non lo difendo; ma suppongo che sia compito di Padre Brown pregare per tutti gli uomini, perfino per uno come…»

«Sì», assentì Padre Brown, «è mio compito pregare per tutti gli uomini, perfino per uno come Warren Wynd.»

FIVE: The Curse of the Golden Cross

Six people sat around a small table, seeming almost as incongruous and accidental as if they had been shipwrecked separately on the same small desert island. At least the sea surrounded them; for in one sense their island was enclosed in another island, a large and flying island like Laputa. For the little table was one of many little tables dotted about in the dining saloon of that monstrous ship the Moravia, speeding through the night and the everlasting emptiness of the Atlantic. The little company had nothing in common except that all were travelling from America to England. Two of them at least might be called celebrities; others might be called obscure, and in one or two cases even dubious.

The first was the famous Professor Smaill, an authority on certain archaeological studies touching the later Byzantine Empire. His lectures, delivered in an American University, were accepted as of the first authority even in the most authoritative seats of learning in Europe. His literary works were so steeped in a mellow and imaginative sympathy with the European past, that it often gave strangers a start to hear him speak with an American accent. Yet he was, in his way, very American; he had long fair hair brushed back from a big square forehead, long straight features and a curious mixture of preoccupation with a poise of potential swiftness, like a lion pondering absent— mindedly on his next leap.

There was only one lady in the group; and she was (as the journalists often said of her) a host in herself; being quite prepared to play hostess, not to say empress, at that or any other table. She was Lady Diana Wales, the celebrated lady traveller in tropical and other countries; but there was nothing rugged or masculine about her appearance at dinner. She was herself handsome in an almost tropical fashion, with a mass of hot and heavy red hair; she was dressed in what the journalists call a daring fashion, but her face was intelligent and her eyes had that bright and rather prominent appearance which belongs to the eyes of ladies who ask questions at political meetings.

The other four figures seemed at first like shadows in this shining presence; but they showed differences on a close view. One of them was a young man entered on the ship’s register as Paul T. Tarrant. He was an American type which might be more truly called an American antitype. Every nation probably has an antitype; a sort of extreme exception that proves the national rule. Americans really respect work, rather as Europeans respect war. There is a halo of heroism about it; and he who shrinks from it is less than a man. The antitype is evident through being exceedingly rare. He is the dandy or dude: the wealthy waster who makes a weak villain for so many American novels. Paul Tarrant seemed to have nothing whatever to do but change his clothes, which he did about six times a day; passing into paler or richer shades of his suit of exquisite light grey, like the delicate silver changes of the twilight. Unlike most Americans, he cultivated very carefully a short, curly beard; and unlike most dandies, even of his own type, he seemed rather sulky than showy. Perhaps there was something almost Byronic about his silence and his gloom.

The next two travellers were naturally classed together; merely because they were both English lecturers returning from an American tour. One of them was described as Leonard Smyth, apparently a minor poet, but something of a major journalist; long—headed, light—haired, perfectly dressed, and perfectly capable of looking after himself. The other was a rather comic contrast, being short and broad, with a black, walrus moustache, and as taciturn as the other was talkative. But as he had been both charged with robbing and praised for rescuing a Roumanian Princess threatened by a jaguar in his travelling menagerie, and had thus figured in a fashionable case, it was naturally felt that his views on God, progress, his own early life, and the future of Anglo—American relations would be of great interest and value to the inhabitants of Minneapolis and Omaha. The sixth and most insignificant figure was that of a little English priest going by the name of Brown. He listened to the conversation with respectful attention, and he was at that moment forming the impression that there was one rather curious thing about it.

‘I suppose those Byzantine studies of yours, Professor,’ Leonard Smyth was saying, ‘would throw some light on this story of a tomb found somewhere on the south coast; near Brighton, isn’t it? Brighton’s a long way from Byzantium, of course. But I read something about the style of burying or embalming or something being supposed to be Byzantine.’

‘Byzantine studies certainly have to reach a long way,’ replied the Professor dryly. ‘They talk about specialists; but I think the hardest thing on earth is to specialize. In this case, for instance: how can a man know anything about Byzantium till he knows everything about Rome before it and about Islam after it? Most Arab arts were old Byzantine arts. Why, take algebra—‘

‘But I won’t take algebra,’ cried the lady decisively. ‘I never did, and I never do. But I’m awfully interested in embalming. I was with Gatton, you know, when he opened the Babylonian tombs. Ever since then I found mummies and preserved bodies and all that perfectly thrilling. Do tell us about this one.’

‘Gatton was an interesting man,’ said the Professor. ‘They were an interesting family. That brother of his who went into Parliament was much more than an ordinary politician. I never understood the Fascisti till he made that speech about Italy.’

‘Well, we’re not going to Italy on this trip,’ said Lady Diana persistently, ‘and I believe you’re going to that little place where they’ve found the tomb. In Sussex, isn’t it?’

‘Sussex is pretty large, as these little English sections go,’ replied the Professor. ‘One might wander about in it for a goodish time; and it’s a good place to wander in. It’s wonderful how large those low hills seem when you’re on them.’

QUINTO: La maledizione della Croce d’oro

Sei persone sedevano attorno a un tavolino, con un’aria quasi tanto stonata e casuale quanto se fossero naufragate ciascuna per proprio conto sulla medesima piccola isola deserta. Almeno il mare le circondava; giacché, in un certo senso, la loro isola era racchiusa dentro un’altra isola, un’isola grande e volante come Laputa. Poiché il tavolino era uno dei molti tavolini disseminati per la sala da pranzo di quel colossale piroscafo, il Moravia, che filava attraverso la notte e l’eterno vuoto dell’Atlantico. La piccola compagnia non aveva nulla in comune, se non che tutti facevano rotta dall’America verso l’Inghilterra. Due di loro, almeno, potevano dirsi celebrità; altri potevano dirsi oscuri, e in un caso o due persino equivoci.

Il primo era il celebre professor Smaill, un’autorità in certi studi archeologici concernenti il tardo Impero bizantino. Le sue lezioni, tenute in un’università americana, erano accolte come di prim’ordine perfino nelle più autorevoli sedi del sapere europee. Le sue opere letterarie erano così pervase da una matura e fantasiosa simpatia per il passato europeo, che spesso faceva trasalire gli estranei sentirlo parlare con accento americano. Eppure, a suo modo, era assai americano; portava lunghi capelli biondi ravviati all’indietro da una grande fronte quadrata, aveva lineamenti lunghi e diritti e una curiosa mescolanza di assorto raccoglimento e di prontezza pronta a scattare, come un leone che rimugini distrattamente sul suo prossimo balzo.

Nel gruppo vi era una sola signora; ed ella era (come i giornalisti dicevano spesso di lei) una folla in una persona sola, sempre pronta a fare da padrona di casa, per non dire da imperatrice, a quel tavolo come a qualunque altro. Era Lady Diana Wales, la celebre viaggiatrice per paesi tropicali e non; ma non v’era nulla di rude o di mascolino nel suo aspetto a tavola. Era bella, di una bellezza quasi tropicale, con una massa di capelli rossi, caldi e pesanti; era vestita in quella che i giornalisti chiamano una foggia ardita, ma il suo viso era intelligente e i suoi occhi avevano quell’aria vivace e piuttosto sporgente che appartiene agli occhi delle signore che fanno domande alle riunioni politiche.

Le altre quattro figure parvero dapprima come ombre in questa presenza sfolgorante; ma, a guardarle da vicino, mostravano le loro differenze. Uno di loro era un giovane iscritto sul registro della nave come Paul T. Tarrant. Era un tipo americano che si potrebbe più giustamente chiamare un antitipo americano. Ogni nazione ha probabilmente il suo antitipo: una sorta di eccezione estrema che conferma la regola nazionale. Gli americani rispettano davvero il lavoro, un po’ come gli europei rispettano la guerra. Vi è attorno ad esso un’aureola di eroismo; e chi se ne ritrae è meno di un uomo. L’antitipo risalta appunto per la sua estrema rarità. È il dandy, il bellimbusto: il ricco scioperato che offre un debole cattivo a tanti romanzi americani. Paul Tarrant pareva non avere assolutamente nulla da fare se non cambiarsi d’abito, cosa che faceva circa sei volte al giorno; passando a sfumature più pallide o più intense del suo completo di squisito grigio chiaro, come le delicate variazioni argentee del crepuscolo. Diversamente dalla maggior parte degli americani, coltivava con gran cura una barba corta e riccia; e, diversamente dalla maggior parte dei dandy, anche del suo stesso genere, pareva più imbronciato che vanesio. Forse v’era qualcosa di quasi byroniano nel suo silenzio e nella sua tetraggine.

I due viaggiatori seguenti venivano naturalmente accomunati; e ciò per il solo fatto che erano entrambi conferenzieri inglesi di ritorno da una tournée americana. Uno di loro era indicato come Leonard Smyth, a quanto pareva un poeta minore, ma qualcosa come un giornalista maggiore; testa allungata, capelli chiari, vestito alla perfezione e perfettamente in grado di badare a sé stesso. L’altro offriva un contrasto piuttosto comico, essendo basso e tozzo, con un nero paio di baffi da tricheco, e taciturno tanto quanto l’altro era loquace. Ma poiché era stato tanto accusato di aver derubato quanto lodato per aver salvato una principessa rumena minacciata da un giaguaro del suo serraglio ambulante, e aveva così figurato in un processo mondano, si riteneva naturalmente che le sue opinioni su Dio, sul progresso, sulla propria giovinezza e sull’avvenire dei rapporti anglo-americani sarebbero riuscite di grande interesse e valore per gli abitanti di Minneapolis e di Omaha. La sesta e più insignificante figura era quella di un piccolo prete inglese che rispondeva al nome di Brown. Egli ascoltava la conversazione con rispettosa attenzione, e proprio in quel momento andava formandosi l’impressione che vi fosse una cosa piuttosto curiosa a suo riguardo.

«Immagino che questi vostri studi bizantini, professore» stava dicendo Leonard Smyth, «getterebbero un po’ di luce su questa storia di una tomba scoperta chissà dove sulla costa meridionale; vicino a Brighton, non è così? Brighton è ben lontana da Bisanzio, s’intende. Ma ho letto qualcosa a proposito dello stile di sepoltura, o di imbalsamazione, o che so io, che si suppone sia bizantino.»

«Gli studi bizantini devono di certo spingersi molto lontano» rispose il professore con tono asciutto. «Parlano tanto di specialisti; ma io credo che la cosa più difficile al mondo sia specializzarsi. Prendete questo caso, per esempio: come può un uomo sapere qualcosa di Bisanzio, finché non sa tutto di Roma che la precedette e dell’Islam che la seguì? La maggior parte delle arti arabe erano antiche arti bizantine. Ma via, prendete l’algebra…»

«Ma io non prenderò affatto l’algebra» esclamò la signora con tono risoluto. «Non l’ho mai fatto, e non lo farò mai. Sono però tremendamente interessata all’imbalsamazione. Ero con Gatton, sapete, quando aprì le tombe babilonesi. Da allora ho trovato mummie e corpi conservati e tutto quel genere di cose semplicemente elettrizzanti. Raccontateci di questa, vi prego.»

«Gatton era un uomo interessante» disse il professore. «Erano una famiglia interessante. Quel suo fratello che entrò in Parlamento fu ben più di un comune politicante. Non capii mai i fascisti finché egli non tenne quel discorso sull’Italia.»

«Be’, in questo viaggio non andiamo mica in Italia» disse Lady Diana con insistenza, «e credo che voi siate diretto a quel paesino dove hanno trovato la tomba. Nel Sussex, non è vero?»

«Il Sussex è piuttosto vasto, per queste piccole contrade inglesi» rispose il professore. «Ci si potrebbe girovagare per un bel po’ di tempo; ed è un buon luogo dove girovagare. È straordinario come sembrino grandi quelle basse colline, quando ci si sta sopra.»

There was an abrupt accidental silence; and then the lady said, ‘Oh, I’m going on deck,’ and rose, the men rising with her. But the Professor lingered and the little priest was the last to leave the table, carefully folding up his napkin. And as they were thus left alone together the Professor said suddenly to his companion:

‘What would you say was the point of that little talk?’

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, smiling, ‘since you ask me, there was something that amused me a little. I may be wrong; but it seemed to me that the company made three attempts to get you to talk about an embalmed body said to be found in Sussex. And you, on your side, very courteously offered to talk— first about algebra, and then about the Fascisti, and then about the landscape of the Downs.’

‘In short,’ replied the Professor, ‘you thought I was ready to talk about any subject but that one. You were quite right.’

The Professor was silent for a little time, looking down at the tablecloth; then he looked up and spoke with that swift impulsiveness that suggested the lion’s leap.

‘See here. Father Brown,’ he said, ‘I consider you about wisest and whitest man I ever met.’

Father Brown was very English. He had all the normal nation helplessness about what to do with a serious and sincere compliment suddenly handed to him to his face in the American manner. His reply was a meaningless murmur; and it was the Professor who proceeded, with the same staccato earnestness: ‘You see, up to a point it’s all simple enough. A Christian tomb of the Dark Ages, apparently that of a bishop, has been found under a little church at Dulham on the Sussex coast. The Vicar happens to be a good bit of an archaeologist himself and has been able to find a good deal more than I know yet. There was a rumour of the corpse being embalmed in a way peculiar to Greeks and Egyptians but unknown in the West, especially at that date. So Mr Walters (that is the Vicar) naturally wonders about Byzantine influences. But he also mentions something else, that is of even more personal interest to me.’

His long grave face seemed to grow even longer and graver as he frowned down at the tablecloth. His long finger seemed to be tracing patterns on it like the plans of dead cities and their temples and tombs.

‘So I’m going to tell you, and nobody else, why it is I have to be careful about mentioning that matter in mixed company; and why, the more eager they are to talk about it, the more cautious I have to be. It is also stated that in the coffin is a chain with a cross, common enough to look at, but with a certain secret symbol on the back found on only one other cross in the world. It is from the arcana of the very earliest Church, and is supposed to indicate St Peter setting up his See at Antioch before he came to Rome. Anyhow, I believe there is but one other like it, and it belongs to me. I hear there is some story about a curse on it; but I take no notice of that. But whether or no there is a curse, there really is, in one sense, a conspiracy; though the conspiracy should only consist of one man.’

‘Of one man?’ repeated Father Brown almost mechanically.

‘Of one madman, for all I know,’ said Professor Smaill. ‘It’s a long story and in some ways a silly one.’

He paused again, tracing plans like architectural drawings with his finger on the cloth, and then resumed: ‘Perhaps I had better tell you about it from the beginning, in case you see some little point in the story that is meaningless to me. It began years and years ago, when I was conducting some investigations on my own account in the antiquities of Crete and the Greek islands. I did a great deal of it practically single—handed; sometimes with the most rude and temporary help from the inhabitants of the place, and sometimes literally alone. It was under the latter circumstances that I found a maze of subterranean passages which led at last to a heap of rich refuse, broken ornaments and scattered gems which I took to be the ruins of some sunken altar, and in which I found the curious gold cross. I turned it over, and on the back of it I saw the Ichthus or fish, which was an early Christian symbol, but of a shape and pattern rather different from that commonly found; and, as it seemed to me, more realistic—more as if the archaic designer had meant it to be not merely a conventional enclosure or nimbus, but to look a little more like a real fish. It seemed to me that there was a flattening towards one end of it that was not like mere mathematical decoration, but rather like a sort of rude or even savage zoology.

‘In order to explain very briefly why I thought this find important, I must tell you the point of the excavation. For one thing, it had something of the nature of an excavation of an excavation. We were on the track not only of antiquities, but of the antiquarians of antiquity. We had reason to believe, or some of us thought we had reason to believe, that these underground passages, mostly of the Minoan period, like that famous one which is actually identified with the labyrinth of the Minotaur, had not really been lost and left undisturbed for all the ages between the Minotaur and the modern explorer. We believed that these underground places, I might almost say these underground towns and villages, had already been penetrated during the intervening period by some persons prompted by some motive. About the motive there were different schools of thought: some holding that the Emperors had ordered an official exploration out of mere scientific curiosity; others that the furious fashion in the later Roman Empire for all sorts of lurid Asiatic superstitions had started some nameless Manichaean sect or other rioting in the caverns in orgies that had to be hidden from the face of the sun. I belong to the group which believed that these caverns had been used in the same way as the catacombs. That is, we believed that, during some of the persecutions which spread like a fire over the whole Empire, the Christians had concealed themselves in these ancient pagan labyrinths of stone. It was therefore with a thrill as sharp I as a thunderclap that I found and picked up the fallen golden cross and saw the design upon it; and it was with still more of a shock of felicity that, on turning to make my way once more outwards and upwards into the light of day, I looked up at the walls of bare rock that extended endlessly along the low passages, and saw scratched in yet ruder outline, but if possible more unmistakable, the shape of the Fish.

Vi fu un silenzio improvviso e casuale; poi la signora disse: «Oh, salgo in coperta», e si alzò, mentre gli uomini si alzavano con lei. Ma il Professore si attardò e il piccolo prete fu l’ultimo a lasciare la tavola, ripiegando con cura il tovagliolo. E quando furono così rimasti soli, il Professore disse d’un tratto al suo commensale:

«Che cosa direbbe fosse il senso di quella nostra piccola conversazione?»

«Ebbene», rispose padre Brown sorridendo, «giacché me lo chiede, c’è stato qualcosa che mi ha un poco divertito. Posso sbagliarmi; ma mi è parso che la compagnia abbia fatto tre tentativi per indurla a parlare di un certo corpo imbalsamato che si dice sia stato ritrovato nel Sussex. E lei, dal canto suo, si è offerto con somma cortesia di discorrere: prima di algebra, poi dei Fascisti, e infine del paesaggio delle Downs.»

«In breve», replicò il Professore, «lei ha pensato che io fossi pronto a parlare di qualsiasi argomento fuorché di quello. Aveva perfettamente ragione.»

Il Professore rimase in silenzio per un poco di tempo, lo sguardo abbassato sulla tovaglia; poi alzò gli occhi e parlò con quella rapida impulsività che faceva pensare al balzo del leone.

«Mi ascolti, padre Brown», disse, «io la considero l’uomo più saggio e più candido che io abbia mai incontrato.»

Father Brown era molto inglese. Possedeva tutta la normale impotenza nazionale sul da farsi quando un complimento serio e sincero gli viene d’improvviso rivolto in faccia, alla maniera americana. La sua risposta fu un mormorio privo di senso; e fu il Professore a proseguire, con la medesima serietà staccata: «Vede, fino a un certo punto la faccenda è abbastanza semplice. Una tomba cristiana dell’Alto Medioevo, apparentemente quella di un vescovo, è stata rinvenuta sotto una chiesetta a Dulham, sulla costa del Sussex. Il vicario si dà il caso sia egli stesso un discreto archeologo, ed è riuscito a scoprire ben più di quanto io sappia ancora. Correva voce che il cadavere fosse imbalsamato in una maniera propria dei Greci e degli Egizi, ma ignota in Occidente, e specialmente a quell’epoca. Sicché il signor Walters (è questi il vicario) si interroga naturalmente su eventuali influssi bizantini. Ma egli menziona anche qualcos’altro, che riveste per me un interesse persino più personale.»

Il suo lungo volto grave parve farsi ancor più lungo e più grave mentre aggrottava la fronte fissando la tovaglia. Il suo lungo dito pareva tracciarvi sopra dei disegni, come le piante di città morte con i loro templi e i loro sepolcri.

«Le dirò dunque, e a nessun altro, perché io debba andar cauto nel menzionare quella faccenda in compagnia mista; e perché, quanto più gli altri smaniano di parlarne, tanto più io debba stare in guardia. Si afferma inoltre che nella bara vi sia una catena con una croce, abbastanza comune a vedersi, ma recante sul retro un certo simbolo segreto che si ritrova su una sola altra croce al mondo. Proviene dagli arcani della Chiesa delle primissime origini, e si suppone indichi san Pietro nell’atto di fondare la sua Sede ad Antiochia, prima di venire a Roma. In ogni modo, credo non ve ne sia che un’altra simile, ed essa appartiene a me. Ho sentito dire che vi sia intorno una storia di maledizione; ma non ci bado. Comunque, che ci sia o no una maledizione, c’è davvero, in un certo senso, una cospirazione; per quanto la cospirazione possa consistere in un uomo solo.»

«In un uomo solo?» ripeté padre Brown quasi meccanicamente.

«In un pazzo solo, per quel che ne so», disse il professor Smaill. «È una lunga storia, e per certi versi una storia sciocca.»

Tornò a fare una pausa, tracciando piante come disegni architettonici col dito sulla tovaglia, e poi riprese: «Forse è meglio che gliela racconti dal principio, nel caso lei scorga nella vicenda qualche particolare che a me sfugge di senso. Cominciò tanti e tanti anni fa, quando conducevo per conto mio certe indagini sulle antichità di Creta e delle isole greche. Feci gran parte del lavoro praticamente da solo; talora col più rozzo e provvisorio aiuto degli abitanti del luogo, e talora letteralmente solo. Fu in quest’ultima circostanza che scoprii un dedalo di passaggi sotterranei che conducevano infine a un cumulo di ricche rovine, ornamenti spezzati e gemme sparse, che presi per i resti di un qualche altare sprofondato, e fra i quali rinvenni la curiosa croce d’oro. La rigirai, e sul retro vidi l’Ichthys, ovvero il pesce, che era un antico simbolo cristiano, ma di forma e disegno alquanto diversi da quelli comunemente riscontrati; e, a quanto mi parve, più realistici: quasi che l’arcaico disegnatore avesse inteso farne non già un mero recinto o nimbo convenzionale, ma qualcosa che rassomigliasse un poco di più a un pesce vero. Mi parve di scorgere, verso un’estremità, uno schiacciamento che non aveva nulla della semplice decorazione matematica, ma somigliava piuttosto a una sorta di zoologia rozza, anzi selvaggia.

«Per spiegarle in poche parole perché ritenni importante questo ritrovamento, devo dirle il fine di quello scavo. Anzitutto, esso aveva qualcosa della natura di uno scavo di uno scavo. Non eravamo sulle tracce soltanto delle antichità, ma degli antiquari dell’antichità. Avevamo ragione di credere, o alcuni di noi credevano di aver ragione di credere, che quei passaggi sotterranei, per lo più del periodo minoico, come quel famoso che è addirittura identificato col labirinto del Minotauro, non fossero realmente rimasti perduti e indisturbati per tutti i secoli intercorsi tra il Minotauro e l’esploratore moderno. Credevamo che quei luoghi sotterranei, direi quasi quelle città e villaggi sotterranei, fossero già stati penetrati, nel periodo frapposto, da alcune persone spinte da un qualche movente. Sul movente si contrapponevano diverse scuole di pensiero: alcuni sostenevano che gli Imperatori avessero ordinato un’esplorazione ufficiale per mera curiosità scientifica; altri che la furiosa moda, nel tardo Impero romano, per ogni sorta di torbide superstizioni asiatiche avesse spinto qualche innominata setta manichea o simile a darsi al baccano in quelle caverne, in orge che bisognava tenere nascoste alla faccia del sole. Io appartengo al gruppo che credeva quelle caverne fossero state usate nello stesso modo delle catacombe. Vale a dire, credevamo che, durante alcune delle persecuzioni che si propagavano come un incendio su tutto l’Impero, i Cristiani si fossero nascosti in quegli antichi labirinti pagani di pietra. Fu dunque con un brivido acuto come un tuono che trovai e raccolsi la croce d’oro caduta a terra e ne vidi il disegno; e fu con un fremito di felicità ancor più forte che, voltandomi per riprendere il cammino verso l’esterno e verso l’alto, verso la luce del giorno, alzai lo sguardo alle pareti di nuda roccia che si estendevano senza fine lungo i bassi passaggi, e vidi, graffiata in un contorno ancor più rozzo, ma se possibile ancor più inconfondibile, la forma del Pesce.

‘Something about it made it seem as if it might be a fossil fish or some rudimentary organism fixed for ever in a frozen sea. I could not analyse this analogy, otherwise unconnected with a mere drawing scratched upon the stone, till I realized that I was saying in my sub—conscious mind that the first Christians must have seemed something like fish, dumb and dwelling in a fallen world of twilight and silence, dropped far below the feet of men and moving in dark and twilight and a soundless world.

‘Everyone walking along stone passages knows what it is to be followed by phantom feet. The echo follows flapping or clapping behind or in front, so that it is almost impossible for the man who is really lonely to believe in his loneliness. I had got used to the effects of this echo and had not noticed it much for some time past, when I caught sight of the symbolical shape scrawled on the wall of rock. I stopped, and at the same instant it seemed as if my heart stopped, too; for my own feet had halted, but the echo went marching on.

‘I ran forward, and it seemed as if the ghostly footsteps ran also, but not with that exact imitation which marks the material reverberation of a sound. I stopped again, and the steps stopped also; but I could have sworn they stopped an instant too late; I called out a question; and my cry was answered; but the voice was not my own.

‘It came round the corner of a rock just in front of me; and throughout that uncanny chase I noticed that it was always at some such angle of the crooked path that it paused and spoke. The little space in front of me that could be illuminated by my small electric torch was always as empty as an empty room. Under these conditions I had a conversation with I know not whom, which lasted all the way to the first white gleam of daylight, and even there I could not see in what fashion he vanished into the light of day. But the mouth of the labyrinth was full of many openings and cracks and chasms, and it would not have been difficult for him to have somehow darted back and disappeared again into the underworld of the caves. I only know that I came out on the lonely steps of a great mountain like a marble terrace, varied only with a green vegetation that seemed somehow more tropical than the purity of the rock, like the Oriental invasion that has spread sporadically over the fall of classic Hellas. I looked out on a sea of stainless blue, and the sun shone steadily on utter loneliness and silence; and there was not a blade of grass stirred with a whisper of flight nor the shadow of a shadow of man.

‘It had been a terrible conversation; so intimate and so individual and in a sense so casual. This being, bodiless, faceless, nameless and yet calling me by my name, had talked to me in those crypts and cracks where we were buried alive with no more passion or melodrama than if we had been sitting in two armchairs at a club. But he had told me also that he would unquestionably kill me or any other man who came into the possession of the cross with the mark of the fish. He told me frankly he was not fool enough to attack me there in the labyrinth, knowing I had a loaded revolver, and that he ran as much risk as I. But he told me, equally calmly, that he would plan my murder with the certainty of success, with every detail developed and every danger warded off, with the sort of artistic perfection that a Chinese craftsman or an Indian embroiderer gives to the artistic work of a life—time. Yet he was no Oriental; I am certain be was a white man. I suspect that he was a countryman of my own.

‘Since then I have received from time to time signs and symbols and queer impersonal messages that have made me certain, at least, that if the man is a maniac he is a monomaniac. He is always telling me, in this airy and detached way, that the preparations for my death and burial are proceeding satisfactorily; and that the only way in which I can prevent their being crowned with a comfortable success is to give up the relic in my possession—the unique cross that I found in the cavern. He does not seem to have any religious sentiment or fanaticism on the point; he seems to have no passion but the passion of a collector of curiosities. That is one of the things that makes me feel sure he is a man of the West and not of the East. But this particular curiosity seems to have driven him quite crazy.

‘And then came this report, as yet unsubstantiated, about the duplicate relic found on an embalmed body in a Sussex tomb. If he had been a maniac before, this news turned him into a demoniac possessed of seven devils. That there should be one of them belonging to another man was bad enough, but that there should be two of them and neither belonging to him was a torture not to be borne. His mad messages began to come thick and fast like showers of poisoned arrows, and each cried out more confidently than the last that death would strike me at the moment when I stretched out my unworthy hand towards the cross in the tomb.

‘‘You will never know me,’ he wrote, ‘you will never say my name; you will never see my face; you will die, and never know who has killed you. I may be in any form among those about you; but I shall be in that alone at which you have forgotten to look.’

‘From those threats I deduce that he is quite likely to shadow me on this expedition; and try to steal the relic or do me some mischief for possessing it. But as I never saw the man in my life, he may be almost any man I meet. Logically speaking, he may be any of the waiters who wait on me at table. He may be any of the passengers who sit with me at table.’

‘He may be me,’ said Father Brown, with cheerful contempt for grammar.

‘He may be anybody else,’ answered Smaill seriously. ‘That is what I meant by what I said just now. You are the only man I feel sure is not the enemy.’

Father Brown again looked embarrassed; then he smiled and said: ‘Well, oddly enough, I’m not. What we have to consider is any chance of finding out if he really is here before he— before he makes himself unpleasant.’

«Qualcosa in esso lo faceva sembrare un pesce fossile o un qualche organismo rudimentale fissato per sempre in un mare gelato. Non riuscivo ad analizzare questa analogia, per il resto priva di ogni legame con un semplice disegno graffiato sulla pietra, finché non compresi che nel mio subconscio andavo ripetendo che i primi cristiani dovevano essere apparsi qualcosa di simile a pesci, muti e abitanti di un mondo decaduto, fatto di penombra e silenzio, sprofondati assai al di sotto dei piedi degli uomini e moventisi in un mondo oscuro, crepuscolare e senza suono.

«Chiunque cammini lungo corridoi di pietra sa che cosa significhi essere seguìto da passi fantasma. L’eco insegue, battendo o schioccando dietro o davanti, così che è quasi impossibile, per l’uomo veramente solo, credere alla propria solitudine. Mi ero abituato agli effetti di quest’eco e da qualche tempo non vi facevo più molto caso, quando scorsi la forma simbolica scarabocchiata sulla parete di roccia. Mi fermai, e nello stesso istante mi parve che anche il cuore mi si arrestasse; perché i miei piedi si erano fermati, ma l’eco continuava a marciare.

«Mi lanciai in avanti, e parve che anche i passi spettrali si mettessero a correre, ma non con quell’esatta imitazione che contraddistingue la ripercussione materiale di un suono. Mi fermai di nuovo, e anche i passi si fermarono; ma avrei giurato che si fermassero un istante troppo tardi; gridai una domanda, e al mio grido fu data risposta; ma la voce non era la mia.

«Veniva da dietro lo spigolo di una roccia proprio dinanzi a me; e per tutta quella caccia sinistra notai che era sempre a un simile angolo del sentiero tortuoso che essa si arrestava e parlava. Il piccolo spazio davanti a me che la mia minuscola torcia elettrica riusciva a illuminare era sempre vuoto come una stanza vuota. In tali condizioni ebbi una conversazione con non so chi, che durò per tutto il tragitto fino al primo bianco baluginare della luce del giorno, e nemmeno là riuscii a vedere in che modo egli svanisse nella luce del giorno. Ma la bocca del labirinto era piena di aperture, di fenditure e di voragini, e non gli sarebbe stato difficile guizzare in qualche modo all’indietro e sparire di nuovo nel mondo sotterraneo delle caverne. So soltanto che sbucai sui gradini solitari di una gran montagna, simili a una terrazza di marmo, variata unicamente da una verde vegetazione che pareva in qualche modo più tropicale della purezza della roccia, come l’invasione orientale che si è diffusa sporadicamente sulla caduta della classica Ellade. Mi affacciai su un mare d’azzurro immacolato, e il sole splendeva costante su una solitudine e un silenzio assoluti; e non c’era un filo d’erba mosso da un sussurro di fuga, né l’ombra dell’ombra di un uomo.

«Era stata una conversazione terribile; così intima e così personale e, in un certo senso, così noncurante. Questo essere, senza corpo, senza volto, senza nome, e che pure mi chiamava per nome, mi aveva parlato in quelle cripte e in quelle fenditure dove eravamo sepolti vivi con non più passione o melodramma che se fossimo stati seduti in due poltrone di un club. Ma mi aveva anche detto che avrebbe indubbiamente ucciso me, o qualunque altro uomo fosse entrato in possesso della croce con il segno del pesce. Mi disse francamente che non era così sciocco da assalirmi lì nel labirinto, sapendo che avevo una rivoltella carica, e che egli correva tanto rischio quanto me. Ma mi disse, con eguale calma, che avrebbe pianificato il mio assassinio con la certezza del successo, con ogni dettaglio elaborato e ogni pericolo scongiurato, con quella sorta di perfezione artistica che un artigiano cinese o un ricamatore indiano conferisce all’opera artistica di un’intera vita. Eppure non era un orientale; sono certo che fosse un uomo bianco. Sospetto che fosse un mio connazionale.

«Da allora ho ricevuto di tanto in tanto segni e simboli e strani messaggi impersonali che mi hanno reso certo, quanto meno, che se quell’uomo è un maniaco, è un monomaniaco. Continua a dirmi, in quel modo aereo e distaccato, che i preparativi per la mia morte e la mia sepoltura procedono in maniera soddisfacente; e che l’unico modo in cui posso impedire che siano coronati da un comodo successo è cedere la reliquia in mio possesso — la croce unica che trovai nella caverna. Non pare nutrire alcun sentimento religioso o fanatismo in proposito; pare non avere altra passione che quella di un collezionista di curiosità. È una delle cose che mi fanno sentire sicuro che sia un uomo dell’Occidente e non dell’Oriente. Ma questa particolare curiosità pare averlo fatto impazzire del tutto.

«E poi giunse questa notizia, ancora non confermata, riguardo alla reliquia gemella rinvenuta su un corpo imbalsamato in una tomba del Sussex. Se prima era stato un maniaco, questa notizia lo trasformò in un indemoniato posseduto da sette diavoli. Che ve ne fosse una appartenente a un altro uomo era già abbastanza grave, ma che ve ne fossero due e nessuna delle due appartenesse a lui era una tortura insopportabile. I suoi folli messaggi cominciarono a giungere fitti e rapidi come rovesci di frecce avvelenate, e ciascuno gridava con più sicurezza del precedente che la morte mi avrebbe colpito nell’istante in cui avessi teso la mia indegna mano verso la croce nella tomba.

«“Non mi conoscerai mai,” scrisse, “non pronuncerai mai il mio nome; non vedrai mai il mio volto; morirai, e non saprai mai chi ti ha ucciso. Posso trovarmi in qualunque forma tra quelle che ti circondano; ma sarò in quella soltanto verso cui ti sei dimenticato di guardare.”

«Da queste minacce deduco che è assai probabile che mi pedini in questa spedizione, e che cerchi di rubare la reliquia o di farmi qualche danno per il fatto che la possiedo. Ma poiché non ho mai visto quell’uomo in vita mia, egli può essere quasi chiunque io incontri. Logicamente parlando, può essere uno qualunque dei camerieri che mi servono a tavola. Può essere uno qualunque dei passeggeri che siedono con me a tavola.»

«Può essere me» disse Padre Brown, con allegro disprezzo per la grammatica.

«Può essere chiunque altro» rispose Smaill con serietà. «È questo che intendevo con ciò che ho detto poco fa. Lei è l’unico uomo di cui mi senta sicuro che non sia il nemico.»

Padre Brown parve di nuovo imbarazzato; poi sorrise e disse: «Ebbene, per quanto strano possa sembrare, non lo sono. Ciò che dobbiamo considerare è se vi sia qualche possibilità di scoprire se egli è davvero qui prima che — prima che si renda sgradevole.»

‘There is one chance of finding out, I think,’ remarked the Professor rather grimly. ‘When we get to Southampton I shall take a car at once along the coast; I should be glad if you would come with me, but in the ordinary sense, of course, our little party will break up. If any one of them turns up again in that little churchyard on the Sussex coast, we shall know who he really is.’

The Professor’s programme was duly carried out, at least to the extent of the car and its cargo in the form of Father Brown. They coasted along the road with the sea on one side and the hills of Hampshire and Sussex on the other; nor was there visible to the eye any shadow of pursuit. As they approached the village of Dulham only one man crossed their path who had any connexion with the matter in hand; a journalist who had just visited the church and been courteously escorted by the vicar through the new excavated chapel; but his remarks and notes seemed to be of the ordinary newspaper sort. But Professor Smaill was perhaps a little fanciful, and could not dismiss the sense of something odd and discouraging in the attitude and appearance of the man, who was tall and shabby, hook— nosed and hollow—eyed, with moustaches that drooped with depression. He seemed anything but enlivened by his late experiment as a sightseer; indeed, he seemed to be striding as fast as possible from the sight, when they stopped him with a question.

‘It’s all about a curse,’ he said; ‘a curse on the place, according to the guide—book or the parson, or the oldest inhabitant or whoever is the authority; and really, it feels jolly like it. Curse or curse, I’m glad to have got out of it.’

‘Do you believe in curses?’ asked Smaill curiously.

‘I don’t believe in anything; I’m a journalist,’ answered the melancholy being—‘Boon, of the Daily Wire. But there’s a some—thing creepy about that crypt; and I’ll never deny I felt a chill.’ And he strode on towards the railway station with a further accelerated pace.

‘Looks like a raven or a crow, that fellow,’ observed Smaill as they turned towards the churchyard. ‘What is it they say about a bird of ill omen?’

They entered the churchyard slowly, the eyes of the American antiquary lingering luxuriantly over the isolated roof of the lynch— gate and the large unfathomable black growth of the yew looking like night itself defying the broad daylight. The path climbed up amid heaving levels of turf in which the gravestones were tilted at all angles like stone rafts tossed on a green sea, till it came to the ridge beyond which the great sea itself ran like an iron bar, with pale lights in it like steel. Almost at their feet the tough rank grass turned into a tuft of sea— holly and ended in grey and yellow sand; and a foot or two from the holly, and outlined darkly against the steely sea, stood a motionless figure. But for its dark—grey clothing it might almost have been the statue on some sepulchral monument. But Father Brown instantly recognized something in the elegant stoop of the shoulders and the rather sullen outward thrust of the short beard.

‘Gee!’ exclaimed the professor of archaeology; ‘it’s that man Tarrant, if you call him a man. Did you think, when I spoke on the boat, that I should ever get so quick an answer to my question?’

‘I thought you might get too many answers to it,’ answered Father Brown.

‘Why, how do you mean?’ inquired the Professor, darting a look at him over his shoulder.

‘I mean,’ answered the other mildly, ‘that I thought I heard voices behind the yew—tree. I don’t think Mr Tarrant is so solitary as he looks; I might even venture to say, so solitary as he likes to look.’

Even as Tarrant turned slowly round in his moody manner, the confirmation came. Another voice, high and rather hard, but none the less feminine, was saying with experienced raillery: ‘And how was I to know he would be here?’ It was borne in upon Professor Smaill that this gay observation was not addressed to him; so he was forced to conclude in some bewilderment, that yet a third person was present. As Lady Diana Wales came out, radiant and resolute as ever, from the shadow of the yew, he noted grimly that she had a living shadow of her own. The lean dapper figure of Leonard Smyth, that insinuating man of letters, appeared immediately behind her own flamboyant form, smiling, his head a little on one side like a dog’s.

‘Snakes!’ muttered Smaill; ‘why, they’re all here! Or all except that little showman with the walrus whiskers.’

He heard Father Brown laughing softly beside him; and indeed the situation was becoming something more than laughable. It seemed to be turning topsy—turvy and tumbling about their ears like a pantomime trick; for even while the Professor had been speaking, his words had received the most comical contradiction. The round head with the grotesque black crescent of moustache had appeared suddenly and seemingly out of a hole in the ground. An instant afterwards they realized that the hole was in fact a very large hole, leading to a ladder which descended into the bowels of the earth; that it was in fact the entrance to the subterranean scene they had come to visit. The little man had been the first to find the entrance and had already descended a rung or two of the ladder before he put his head out again to address his fellow—travellers. He looked like some particularly preposterous Grave—digger in a burlesque of Hamlet. He only said thickly behind his thick moustaches, ‘It is down here.’ But it came to the rest of the company with a start of realization that, though they had sat opposite him at meal— times for a week, they had hardly ever heard him speak before; and that though he was supposed to be an English lecturer, he spoke with a rather occult foreign accent.

‘You see, my dear Professor,’ cried Lady Diana with trenchant cheerfulness, ‘your Byzantine mummy was simply too exciting to be missed. I simply had to come along and see it; and I’m sure the gentlemen felt just the same. Now you must tell us all about it.’

«C’è un modo per scoprirlo, credo» osservò il Professore con una certa cupezza. «Quando arriveremo a Southampton, prenderò subito un’automobile e mi dirigerò lungo la costa; sarei lieto se voleste accompagnarmi, ma in senso ordinario, s’intende, la nostra piccola compagnia si scioglierà. Se qualcuno di loro dovesse ricomparire in quel piccolo cimitero sulla costa del Sussex, sapremo chi egli sia davvero.»

Il programma del Professore fu debitamente eseguito, almeno per quanto riguardava l’automobile e il suo carico nella persona di Padre Brown. Costeggiarono la strada con il mare da un lato e le colline dell’Hampshire e del Sussex dall’altro; né apparve all’occhio ombra alcuna d’inseguimento. Mentre si avvicinavano al villaggio di Dulham, un solo uomo incrociò il loro cammino che avesse qualche legame con la questione in corso: un giornalista che aveva appena visitato la chiesa ed era stato cortesemente accompagnato dal vicario attraverso la cappella di recente scavata; ma le sue osservazioni e i suoi appunti parevano del comune genere giornalistico. Eppure il Professor Smaill era forse un po’ fantasioso, e non riusciva a scacciare la sensazione di qualcosa di strano e scoraggiante nell’atteggiamento e nell’aspetto di quell’uomo, alto e trasandato, dal naso adunco e dagli occhi infossati, con i baffi che pendevano avviliti. Sembrava tutt’altro che rallegrato dal suo recente esperimento di turista; anzi, pareva allontanarsi il più rapidamente possibile da quella vista, quando lo fermarono con una domanda.

«Si tratta tutto di una maledizione» disse; «una maledizione sul luogo, secondo la guida o il parroco o l’abitante più anziano o chiunque sia l’autorità in materia; e per la verità, ci si sente proprio così. Maledizione o non maledizione, sono contento di esserne uscito.»

«Credete alle maledizioni?» chiese Smaill incuriosito.

«Non credo a nulla; sono un giornalista» rispose quell’essere malinconico. «Boon, del Daily Wire. Ma c’è qualcosa di raccapricciante in quella cripta; e non negherò mai d’aver sentito un brivido.» E proseguì a grandi passi verso la stazione ferroviaria, accelerando ancora l’andatura.

«Sembra un corvo o una cornacchia, quel tale» osservò Smaill mentre si volgevano verso il cimitero. «Come si dice, a proposito di un uccello di malaugurio?»

Entrarono lentamente nel cimitero, gli occhi dell’antiquario americano che indugiavano con voluttà sul tetto isolato del portale coperto e sull’enorme, imperscrutabile massa nera del tasso, simile alla notte stessa che sfidasse la piena luce del giorno. Il sentiero saliva tra ondulati ripiani d’erba in cui le lapidi erano inclinate a ogni angolazione, come zattere di pietra sballottate su un mare verde, finché non giunse al crinale oltre il quale il grande mare stesso correva come una sbarra di ferro, con pallidi bagliori dentro simili all’acciaio. Quasi ai loro piedi la dura erba ispida si mutava in un ciuffo d’agrifoglio marino e finiva in sabbia grigia e gialla; e a un piede o due dall’agrifoglio, stagliata scura contro il mare d’acciaio, si ergeva una figura immobile. Se non fosse stato per le sue vesti grigio scuro, avrebbe potuto quasi essere la statua di qualche monumento sepolcrale. Ma Padre Brown riconobbe all’istante qualcosa nell’elegante curva delle spalle e nella sporgenza piuttosto imbronciata della corta barba in fuori.

«Perbacco!» esclamò il professore d’archeologia; «è quel tale, Tarrant, se lo si può chiamare un uomo. Avreste mai pensato, quando ne parlai sul piroscafo, che avrei ottenuto una risposta così pronta alla mia domanda?»

«Temevo che poteste ottenerne fin troppe» rispose Padre Brown.

«Come, che cosa intendete dire?» s’informò il Professore, lanciandogli un’occhiata al di sopra della spalla.

«Intendo» rispose l’altro con dolcezza «che mi è parso di udire delle voci dietro il tasso. Non credo che il signor Tarrant sia così solitario come sembra; oserei perfino dire, così solitario come ama sembrare.»

Proprio mentre Tarrant si voltava lentamente col suo fare accigliato, ne venne la conferma. Un’altra voce, acuta e piuttosto dura, ma non per questo meno femminile, diceva con esperta ironia: «E come potevo sapere che sarebbe stato qui?» Al Professor Smaill fu chiaro che quell’allegra osservazione non era rivolta a lui; sicché fu costretto a concludere, con un certo sconcerto, che era presente addirittura una terza persona. Quando Lady Diana Wales uscì, raggiante e risoluta come sempre, dall’ombra del tasso, egli notò con cupezza che aveva un’ombra vivente tutta sua. La figura magra e azzimata di Leonard Smyth, quell’insinuante uomo di lettere, apparve immediatamente dietro la sagoma sgargiante di lei, sorridente, la testa un poco reclinata da un lato come quella d’un cane.

«Diamine!» borbottò Smaill; «ma allora ci sono proprio tutti! O tutti tranne quel piccolo imbonitore dai baffi di tricheco.»

Sentì Padre Brown ridere sommessamente al suo fianco; e in verità la situazione stava diventando qualcosa di più che ridicolo. Sembrava capovolgersi e rovinare loro attorno alle orecchie come un gioco di pantomima; poiché, proprio mentre il Professore stava parlando, le sue parole avevano ricevuto la più comica delle smentite. La testa tonda con il grottesco nero mezzaluna di baffi era apparsa d’improvviso, e a quanto pareva da un buco nel terreno. Un istante dopo si resero conto che il buco era in realtà un buco assai grande, che immetteva in una scala a pioli discendente nelle viscere della terra; che era, di fatto, l’ingresso alla scena sotterranea che erano venuti a visitare. Il piccolo uomo era stato il primo a trovare l’ingresso, e aveva già disceso uno o due pioli della scala prima di sporgere di nuovo la testa per rivolgersi ai compagni di viaggio. Aveva l’aria di qualche becchino particolarmente assurdo in una parodia dell’Amleto. Disse soltanto, con voce impastata dietro i folti baffi: «È quaggiù.» Ma agli altri della comitiva venne, con un sussulto di consapevolezza, che, per quanto gli fossero seduti di fronte a tavola per una settimana, quasi mai l’avevano udito parlare prima; e che, benché lo si supponesse conferenziere inglese, egli parlava con un accento straniero piuttosto occulto.

«Vedete, mio caro Professore» esclamò Lady Diana con incisiva allegria, «la vostra mummia bizantina era semplicemente troppo eccitante per lasciarsela sfuggire. Non potevo far altro che venire a vederla; e sono certa che i signori provavano esattamente lo stesso. Ora dovete raccontarci tutto quanto.»

‘I do not know all about it,’ said the Professor gravely, not to say grimly, ‘In some respects I don’t even know what it’s all about. It certainly seems odd that we should have all met again so soon, but I suppose there are no limits to the modern thirst for information. But if we are all to visit the place it must be done in a responsible way and, if you will forgive me, under responsible leadership. We must notify whoever is in charge of the excavations; we shall probably at least have to put our names in a book.’

Something rather like a wrangle followed on this collision between the impatience of the lady and the suspicions of the archaeologist; but the latter’s insistence on the official rights of the Vicar and the local investigation ultimately prevailed; the little man with the moustaches came reluctantly out of his grave again and silently acquiesced in a less impetuous descent. Fortunately, the clergyman himself appeared at this stage— a grey—haired, good—looking gentleman with a droop accentuated by doublet eyeglasses; and while rapidly establishing sympathetic relations with the Professor as a fellow—antiquarian, he did not seem to regard his rather motley group of companions with anything more hostile than amusement.

‘I hope you are none of you superstitious,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I ought to tell you, to start with, that there are supposed to be all sorts of bad omens and curses hanging over our devoted heads in this business. I have just been deciphering a Latin inscription which was found over the entrance to the chapel; and it would seem that there are no less than three curses involved; a curse for entering the sealed chamber, a double curse for opening the coffin, and a triple and most terrible curse for touching the gold relic found inside it. The two first maledictions I have already incurred myself,’ he added with a smile; ‘but I fear that even you will have to incur the first and mildest of them if you are to see anything at all. According to the story, the curses descend in a rather lingering fashion, at long intervals and on later occasions. I don’t know whether that is any comfort to you.’ And the Reverend Mr Walters smiled once more in his drooping and benevolent manner.

‘Story,’ repeated Professor Smaill, ‘why, what story is that?’

‘It is rather a long story and varies, like other local legends,’ answered the Vicar. ‘But it is undoubtedly contemporary with the time of the tomb; and the substance of it is embodied in the inscription and is roughly this: Guy de Gisors, a lord of the manor here early in the thirteenth century, had set his heart on a beautiful black horse in the possession of an envoy from Genoa, which that practical merchant prince would not sell except for a huge price. Guy was driven by avarice to the crime of pillaging the shrine and, according to one story, even killing the bishop, who was then resident there. Anyhow, the bishop uttered a curse which was to fall on anybody who should continue to withhold the gold cross from its resting— place in his tomb, or should take steps to disturb it when it had returned there. The feudal lord raised the money for the horse by selling the gold relic to a goldsmith in the town; but on the first day he mounted the horse the animal reared and threw him in front of the church porch, breaking his neck. Meanwhile the goldsmith, hitherto wealthy and prosperous, was ruined by a series of inexplicable accidents, and fell into the power of a Jew money—lender living in the manor. Eventually the unfortunate goldsmith, faced with nothing but starvation, hanged himself on an apple—tree. The gold cross with all his other goods, his house, shop, and tools, had long ago passed into the possession of the money—lender. Meanwhile, the son and heir of the feudal lord, shocked by the judgement on his blasphemous sire, had become a religious devotee in the dark and stern spirit of those times, and conceived it his duty to persecute all heresy and unbelief among his vassals. Thus the Jew, in his turn, who had been cynically tolerated by the father, was ruthlessly burnt by order of the son; so that he, in his turn, suffered for the possession of the relic; and after these three judgements, it was returned to the bishop’s tomb; since when no eye has seen and no hand has touched it.’

Lady Diana Wales seemed to be more impressed than might have been expected. ‘It really gives one rather a shiver,’ she said, ‘to think that we are going to be the first, except the vicar.’

The pioneer with the big moustaches and the broken English did not descend after all by his favourite ladder, which indeed had only been used by some of the workmen conducting the excavation; for the clergyman led them round to a larger and more convenient entrance about a hundred yards away, out of which he himself had just emerged from his investigations underground. Here the descent was by a fairly gradual slope with no difficulties save the increasing darkness; for they soon found themselves moving in single file down a tunnel as black as pitch, and it was some little time before they saw a glimmer of light ahead of them. Once during that silent march there was a sound like a catch in somebody’s breath, it was impossible to say whose; and once there was an oath like a dull explosion, and it was in an unknown tongue.

They came out in a circular chamber like a basilica in a ring of round arches; for that chapel had been built before the first pointed arch of the Gothic had pierced our civilization like a spear. A glimmer of greenish light between some of the pillars marked the place of the other opening into the world above, and gave a vague sense of being under the sea, which was intensified by one or two other incidental and perhaps fanciful resemblances. For the dog—tooth pattern of the Norman was faintly traceable round all the arches, giving them, above the cavernous darkness, something of the look of the mouths of monstrous sharks. And in the centre the dark bulk of the tomb itself, with its lifted lid of stone, might almost have been the jaws of some such leviathan.

«Non so tutto di questa faccenda», disse il Professore con gravità, per non dire con cupezza, «e sotto certi aspetti non so nemmeno di che cosa si tratti. Certo pare strano che ci siamo ritrovati tutti insieme così presto, ma suppongo che non vi siano limiti alla moderna sete di sapere. Se però dobbiamo davvero visitare tutti quel luogo, la cosa va fatta in maniera responsabile e, se mi permettete, sotto una guida responsabile. Dobbiamo avvertire chiunque sia incaricato degli scavi; con ogni probabilità dovremo perlomeno mettere il nostro nome su un registro.»

A questo scontro fra l’impazienza della signora e i sospetti dell’archeologo seguì qualcosa che assomigliava assai a un battibecco; ma alla fine prevalse l’insistenza di quest’ultimo sui diritti ufficiali del Vicario e sull’indagine locale; l’ometto dai baffi uscì di malavoglia una seconda volta dalla sua fossa e acconsentì in silenzio a una discesa meno impetuosa. Per fortuna, a questo punto comparve il pastore in persona: un gentiluomo dai capelli grigi e di bell’aspetto, con una cadenza melanconica accentuata da un paio di occhiali a doppia lente; e mentre stabiliva rapidamente rapporti cordiali con il Professore in quanto collega antiquario, non sembrava considerare quel suo gruppo di compagni piuttosto variopinto con nulla di più ostile del divertimento.

«Spero che nessuno di voi sia superstizioso», disse in tono affabile. «Devo dirvi, tanto per cominciare, che si suppone incombano ogni sorta di malaugurî e maledizioni sulle nostre devote teste in questa impresa. Ho appena finito di decifrare un’iscrizione latina rinvenuta sopra l’ingresso della cappella; e parrebbe che le maledizioni coinvolte non siano meno di tre: una maledizione per chi entra nella camera sigillata, una doppia maledizione per chi apre il feretro, e una tripla e terribilissima maledizione per chi tocca la reliquia d’oro trovata al suo interno. Le prime due maledizioni le ho già attirate su di me», soggiunse con un sorriso; «ma temo che perfino voi dovrete incorrere nella prima e più mite di esse, se volete vedere alcunché. Stando alla leggenda, le maledizioni scendono in modo piuttosto indugiante, a lunghi intervalli e in occasioni successive. Non so se questo vi sia di qualche conforto.» E il reverendo signor Walters sorrise ancora una volta nella sua maniera melanconica e benevola.

«Leggenda», ripeté il professor Smaill, «ma insomma, quale leggenda?»

«È una storia piuttosto lunga e mutevole, come le altre leggende locali», rispose il Vicario. «Ma è senza dubbio contemporanea all’epoca della tomba; e la sua sostanza è racchiusa nell’iscrizione, e in linea di massima è questa. Guido de Gisors, signore di questo maniero nei primi anni del tredicesimo secolo, si era invaghito di un bel cavallo nero appartenente a un inviato genovese, cavallo che quel pratico principe mercante non voleva vendere se non a un prezzo enorme. L’avarizia spinse Guido al delitto di saccheggiare il santuario e, secondo una versione, perfino di uccidere il vescovo che allora vi risiedeva. Comunque sia, il vescovo pronunciò una maledizione che sarebbe caduta su chiunque avesse continuato a sottrarre la croce d’oro dal suo luogo di riposo nella tomba, o avesse osato turbarla una volta che vi fosse tornata. Il signore feudale raccolse il denaro per il cavallo vendendo la reliquia d’oro a un orefice della città; ma il primo giorno in cui montò il cavallo, l’animale si impennò e lo disarcionò davanti al portico della chiesa, spezzandogli il collo. Nel frattempo l’orefice, fino allora ricco e prospero, fu rovinato da una serie di incidenti inspiegabili, e cadde in balìa di un usuraio ebreo che viveva nel maniero. Alla fine lo sventurato orefice, ridotto a non avere davanti a sé che la fame, si impiccò a un melo. La croce d’oro, insieme a tutti gli altri suoi beni, la sua casa, la bottega e gli arnesi, era da tempo passata in possesso dell’usuraio. Frattanto il figlio ed erede del signore feudale, sconvolto dalla condanna che aveva colpito il suo empio genitore, era diventato un fervente devoto nello spirito tetro e severo di quei tempi, e si era convinto che fosse suo dovere perseguitare ogni eresia e miscredenza fra i suoi vassalli. Così l’ebreo, a sua volta, che il padre aveva cinicamente tollerato, fu spietatamente arso per ordine del figlio; sicché anch’egli, a sua volta, patì per il possesso della reliquia; e dopo queste tre condanne, la reliquia fu restituita alla tomba del vescovo; da allora nessun occhio l’ha veduta e nessuna mano l’ha toccata.»

Lady Diana Wales parve più colpita di quanto ci si sarebbe potuti aspettare. «Fa davvero venire un certo brivido», disse, «pensare che saremo i primi, tranne il vicario.»

Il pioniere dai grandi baffi e dall’inglese stentato non discese, dopo tutto, per la sua scala prediletta, che in realtà era stata usata soltanto da alcuni degli operai addetti agli scavi; poiché il pastore li condusse in giro fino a un ingresso più ampio e più comodo, un centinaio di metri più in là, dal quale egli stesso era appena riemerso dalle sue indagini sotterranee. Qui la discesa avveniva lungo un pendio abbastanza dolce, senza altre difficoltà che l’oscurità crescente; ben presto infatti si trovarono a procedere in fila indiana giù per una galleria nera come la pece, e passò un certo tempo prima che scorgessero un barlume di luce davanti a sé. Una volta, durante quella marcia silenziosa, si udì un suono simile a un respiro trattenuto in gola, ed era impossibile dire di chi; e una volta risuonò un’imprecazione come una sorda esplosione, in una lingua sconosciuta.

Sbucarono in una camera circolare, simile a una basilica, entro un anello di archi a tutto sesto; giacché quella cappella era stata edificata prima che il primo arco a sesto acuto del gotico trafiggesse come una lancia la nostra civiltà. Un barlume di luce verdastra fra alcuni dei pilastri segnava il punto dell’altra apertura sul mondo di sopra, e dava una vaga impressione di trovarsi sott’acqua, impressione accresciuta da una o due altre somiglianze accessorie e forse fantasiose. Il motivo a dente di cane dei Normanni si distingueva infatti debolmente intorno a tutti gli archi, conferendo loro, al di sopra della tenebra cavernosa, qualcosa dell’aspetto delle fauci di mostruosi squali. E al centro la mole oscura della tomba stessa, con il suo coperchio di pietra sollevato, avrebbe potuto quasi essere le mascelle di un simile leviatano.

Whether out of the sense of fitness or from the lack of more modern appliances, the clerical antiquary had arranged for the illumination of the chapel only by four tall candles in big wooden candlesticks standing on the floor. Of these only one was alight when they entered, casting a faint glimmer over the mighty architectural forms. When they had all assembled, the clergyman proceeded to light the three others, and the appearance and contents of the great sarcophagus came more clearly into view.

All eyes went first to the face of the dead, preserved across all those ages in the lines of life by some secret Eastern process, it was said, inherited from heathen antiquity and unknown to the simple graveyards of our own island. The Professor could hardly repress an exclamation of wonder; for, though the face was as pale as a mask of wax, it looked otherwise like a sleeping man, who had but that moment closed his eyes. The face was of the ascetic, perhaps even the fanatical type, with a high framework of bones; the figure was clad in a golden cope and gorgeous vestments, and high up on the breast, at the base of the throat, glittered the famous gold cross upon a short gold chain, or rather necklace. The stone coffin had been opened by lifting the lid of it at the head and propping it aloft upon two strong wooden shafts or poles, hitched above under the edge of the upper slab and wedged below into the corners of the coffin behind the head of the corpse. Less could therefore be seen of the feet or the lower part of the figure, but the candle—light shone full on the face; and in contrast with its tones of dead ivory the cross of gold seemed to stir and sparkle like a fire.

Professor Smaill’s big forehead had carried a big furrow of reflection, or possibly of worry, ever since the clergyman had told the story of the curse. But feminine intuition, not untouched by feminine hysteria, understood the meaning of his brooding immobility better than did the men around him. In the silence of that candle—lit cavern Lady Diana cried out suddenly: ‘Don’t touch it, I tell you!’

But the man had already made one of his swift leonine movements, leaning forward over the body. The next instant they all darted, some forward and some backward, but all with a dreadful ducking motion as if the sky were falling.

As the Professor laid a finger on the gold cross, the wooden props, that bent very slightly in supporting the lifted lid of stone, seemed to jump and straighten themselves with a jerk. The lip of the stone slab slipped from its wooden perch; and in all their souls and stomachs came a sickening sense of down— rushing ruin, as if they had all been flung off a precipice. Smaill had withdrawn his head swiftly, but not in time; and he lay senseless beside the coffin, in a red puddle of blood from scalp or skull. And the old stone coffin was once more closed as it had been for centuries; save that one or two sticks or splinters stuck in the crevice, horribly suggestive of bones crunched by an ogre. The leviathan had snapped its jaws of stone.

Lady Diana was looking at the wreck with eyes that had an electric glare as of lunacy; her red hair looked scarlet against the pallor of her face in the greenish twilight. Smyth was looking at her, still with something dog—like in the turn of his head; but it was the expression of a god who looks at a master whose catastrophe he can only partly understand. Tarrant and the foreigner had stiffened in their usual sullen attitudes, but their faces had turned the colour of clay. The Vicar seemed to have fainted. Father Brown was kneeling beside the fallen figure, trying to test its condition.

Rather to the general surprise, the Byronic lounger, Paul Tarrant, came forward to help him.

‘He’d better be carried up into the air,’ he said. ‘I suppose there’s just a chance for him.’

‘He isn’t dead,’ said Father Brown in a low voice, ‘but I think it’s pretty bad; you aren’t a doctor by any chance?’

‘No; but I’ve had to pick up a good many things in my time,’ said the other. ‘But never mind about me just now. My real profession would probably surprise you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ replied Father Brown, with a slight smile. ‘I thought of it about halfway through the voyage. You are a detective shadowing somebody. Well, the cross is safe from thieves now, anyhow.’

While they were speaking Tarrant had lifted the frail figure of the fallen man with easy strength and dexterity, and was carefully carrying him towards the exit. He answered over his shoulder:

‘Yes, the cross is safe enough.’

‘You mean that nobody else is,’ replied Brown. ‘Are you thinking of the curse, too?’

Father Brown went about for the next hour or two under a burden of frowning perplexity that was something beyond the shock of the tragic accident. He assisted in carrying the victim to the little inn opposite the church, interviewed the doctor, who reported the injury as serious and threatening, though not certainly fatal, and carried the news to the little group of travellers who had gathered round the table in the inn parlour. But whereever he went the cloud of mystification rested on him and seemed to grow darker the more deeply he pondered. For the central mystery was growing more and more mysterious, actually in proportion as many of the minor mysteries began to clear themselves up in his mind. Exactly in proportion as the meaning of individual figures in that motley group began to explain itself, the thing that had happened grew more and more difficult to explain. Leonard Smyth had come merely because Lady Diana had come; and Lady Diana had come merely because she chose. They were engaged in one of those floating Society flirtations that are all the more silly for being semi—intellectual. But the lady’s romanticism had a superstitious side to it; and she was pretty well prostrated by the terrible end of her adventure. Paul Tarrant was a private detective, possibly watching the flirtation, for some wife or husband; possibly shadowing the foreign lecturer with the moustaches, who had much the air of an undesirable alien. But if he or anybody else had intended to steal the relic, the intention had been finally frustrated. And to all mortal appearance, what had frustrated it was either an incredible coincidence or the intervention of the ancient curse.

Sia per un senso di convenienza, sia per mancanza di apparecchiature più moderne, l’antiquario in abito talare aveva disposto che la cappella fosse illuminata soltanto da quattro alte candele infilate in grossi candelieri di legno posati sul pavimento. Di queste una sola era accesa quando essi entrarono, e spandeva un debole barlume sulle possenti forme architettoniche. Quando furono tutti radunati, l’ecclesiastico si accinse ad accendere le altre tre, e l’aspetto e il contenuto del grande sarcofago si offrirono più chiaramente alla vista.

Tutti gli sguardi corsero dapprima al volto del morto, conservato attraverso tutti quei secoli nelle linee della vita per mezzo di qualche segreto procedimento orientale, si diceva, ereditato dall’antichità pagana e ignoto agli umili cimiteri della nostra isola. The Professor a stento riuscì a trattenere un’esclamazione di meraviglia; poiché, sebbene il volto fosse pallido come una maschera di cera, per il resto sembrava quello di un uomo addormentato, che in quello stesso istante avesse chiuso gli occhi. Era un volto del tipo ascetico, forse persino fanatico, con un’alta impalcatura di ossa; la figura era ammantata in un piviale d’oro e in sontuosi paramenti, e in alto sul petto, alla base della gola, luccicava la famosa croce d’oro appesa a una corta catenella d’oro, o meglio a una collana. La bara di pietra era stata aperta sollevandone il coperchio dal lato del capo e puntellandolo in alto su due robuste stanghe o pertiche di legno, agganciate in cima sotto l’orlo della lastra superiore e incuneate in basso negli angoli della bara, dietro il capo del cadavere. Si potevano dunque scorgere meno i piedi o la parte inferiore della figura, ma la luce delle candele batteva in pieno sul volto; e, in contrasto con le sue tinte d’avorio morto, la croce d’oro pareva agitarsi e scintillare come un fuoco.

L’ampia fronte del professor Smaill portava un profondo solco di riflessione, o forse di preoccupazione, fin da quando l’ecclesiastico aveva raccontato la storia della maledizione. Ma l’intuito femminile, non immune da un’isteria pure femminile, comprese il senso di quella sua immobilità meditabonda meglio di quanto lo comprendessero gli uomini che gli stavano intorno. Nel silenzio di quella caverna illuminata dalle candele Lady Diana gridò a un tratto: «Non toccarla, ti dico!»

Ma l’uomo aveva già compiuto uno dei suoi rapidi movimenti leonini, chinandosi in avanti sopra il corpo. L’istante seguente scattarono tutti, chi in avanti chi indietro, ma tutti con un terribile gesto di chi si abbassa di scatto, come se il cielo stesse crollando.

Non appena il professore posò un dito sulla croce d’oro, i puntelli di legno, che si piegavano lievissimamente nel sostenere il coperchio di pietra sollevato, parvero sobbalzare e raddrizzarsi con uno strappo. L’orlo della lastra di pietra scivolò dal suo appoggio di legno; e in tutte le loro anime e in tutti i loro stomaci si insinuò una nauseante sensazione di rovina precipitante, come se fossero stati tutti scaraventati giù da un precipizio. Smaill aveva ritratto il capo con prontezza, ma non in tempo; e giaceva privo di sensi accanto alla bara, in una rossa pozza di sangue sgorgato dal cuoio capelluto o dal cranio. E l’antica bara di pietra era di nuovo chiusa come lo era stata per secoli; salvo che uno o due bastoni o schegge sporgevano dalla fessura, orribilmente evocatori di ossa stritolate da un orco. Il leviatano aveva serrato le sue fauci di pietra.

Lady Diana fissava lo scempio con occhi che avevano un bagliore elettrico come di follia; i suoi capelli rossi parevano scarlatti contro il pallore del viso in quel crepuscolo verdastro. Smyth guardava lei, sempre con qualcosa di canino nell’inclinazione del capo; ma era l’espressione di un cane che guarda un padrone la cui catastrofe egli può comprendere solo in parte. Tarrant e lo straniero si erano irrigiditi nei loro consueti atteggiamenti imbronciati, ma i loro volti avevano assunto il colore dell’argilla. Il vicario pareva essere svenuto. Padre Brown era inginocchiato accanto alla figura caduta, e cercava di saggiarne le condizioni.

Con sorpresa generale, il fannullone byroniano, Paul Tarrant, si fece avanti per aiutarlo.

«Sarà meglio portarlo su, all’aria aperta» disse. «Suppongo che gli resti giusto una possibilità.»

«Non è morto» disse Father Brown a voce bassa «ma temo che sia piuttosto grave; non sarà per caso un medico?»

«No; ma nella mia vita ho dovuto imparare parecchie cose» rispose l’altro. «Ma non pensi a me adesso. La mia vera professione probabilmente la sorprenderebbe.»

«Non credo» replicò Father Brown con un lieve sorriso. «Ci ho pensato circa a metà della traversata. Lei è un investigatore che pedina qualcuno. Be’, a ogni modo la croce è ormai al sicuro dai ladri.»

Mentre parlavano, Tarrant aveva sollevato la fragile figura dell’uomo caduto con disinvolta forza e destrezza, e la trasportava con cautela verso l’uscita. Rispose voltando appena il capo:

«Sì, la croce è abbastanza al sicuro.»

«Vuol dire che nessun altro lo è» replicò Brown. «Pensa anche lei alla maledizione?»

Father Brown andò in giro, per le due ore che seguirono, sotto un peso di accigliata perplessità che era qualcosa di più dello sconvolgimento per il tragico incidente. Aiutò a trasportare la vittima alla piccola locanda di fronte alla chiesa, interpellò il medico, che giudicò la ferita grave e minacciosa, benché non certamente mortale, e portò la notizia al piccolo gruppo di viaggiatori che si era radunato attorno al tavolo nella saletta della locanda. Ma ovunque andasse la nube della perplessità si posava su di lui e pareva farsi più cupa quanto più a fondo egli rifletteva. Poiché il mistero centrale si faceva sempre più misterioso, e proprio nella stessa misura in cui molti dei misteri minori cominciavano a chiarirsi nella sua mente. Esattamente nella misura in cui il significato delle singole figure di quel gruppo variopinto cominciava a spiegarsi, ciò che era accaduto diventava sempre più difficile da spiegare. Leonard Smyth era venuto soltanto perché era venuta Lady Diana; e Lady Diana era venuta soltanto perché così le piaceva. Erano impegnati in uno di quei fluttuanti flirt mondani che sono tanto più sciocchi quanto più si atteggiano a semi-intellettuali. Ma il romanticismo della dama aveva un suo lato superstizioso; ed ella era rimasta piuttosto ben prostrata dal terribile epilogo della sua avventura. Paul Tarrant era un investigatore privato, forse incaricato di sorvegliare il flirt per conto di qualche moglie o marito; forse di pedinare il conferenziere straniero dai baffi, che aveva tutta l’aria di uno straniero indesiderabile. Ma se lui o chiunque altro avesse avuto l’intenzione di rubare la reliquia, tale intenzione era stata definitivamente frustrata. E, a ogni umana apparenza, ciò che l’aveva frustrata era o un’incredibile coincidenza o l’intervento dell’antica maledizione.

As he stood in unusual perplexity in the middle of the village street, between the inn and the church, he felt a mild shock of surprise at seeing a recently familiar but rather unexpected figure advancing up the street. Mr Boon, the journalist, looking very haggard in the sunshine, which showed up his shabby raiment like that of a scarecrow, had his dark and deep—set eyes (rather close together on either side of the long drooping nose) fixed on the priest. The latter looked twice before he realized that the heavy dark moustache hid something like a grin or at least a grim smile.

‘I thought you were going away,’ said Father Brown a little sharply. ‘I thought you left by that train two hours ago.’

‘Well, you see I didn’t,’ said Boon.

‘Why have you come back?’ asked the priest almost sternly.

‘This is not the sort of little rural paradise for a journalist to leave in a hurry,’ replied the other. ‘Things happen too fast here to make it worth while to go back to a dull place like London. Besides, they can’t keep me out of the affair—I mean this second affair. It was I that found the body, or at any rate the clothes. Quite suspicious conduct on my part, wasn’t it? Perhaps you; think I wanted to dress up in his clothes. Shouldn’t I make a lovely parson?’

And the lean and long—nosed mountebank suddenly made an extravagant gesture in the middle of the market—place, stretching out his arms and spreading out his dark—gloved hands in a sort of burlesque benediction and saying: ‘Oh, my dear brethren and sisters, for I would embrace you all…’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ cried Father Brown, and rapped the stones slightly with his stumpy umbrella, for he was a little less patient than usual.

‘Oh, you’ll find out all about it if you ask that picnic party of yours at the inn,’ replied Boon scornfully. ‘That man Tarrant seems to suspect me merely because I found the clothes; though he only came up a minute too late to find them himself. But there are all sorts of mysteries in this business. The little man with the big moustaches may have more in him than meets the eye. For that matter I don’t see why you shouldn’t have killed the poor fellow yourself.’

Father Brown did not seem in the least annoyed at the suggestion, but he seemed exceedingly bothered and bewildered by the remark. ‘Do you mean,’ he asked with simplicity, ‘that it was I who tried to kill Professor Smaill?’

‘Not at all,’ said the other, waving his hand with the air of one making a handsome concession. ‘Plenty of dead people for you to choose among. Not limited to Professor Smaill. Why, didn’t you know somebody else had turned up, a good deal deader than Professor Smaill? And I don’t see why you shouldn’t have done him in, in a quiet way. Religious differences, you know… lamentable disunion of Christendom. … I suppose you’ve always wanted to get the English parishes back.’

‘I’m going back to the inn,’ said the priest quietly; ‘you say the people there know what you mean, and perhaps they may be able to say it.’

In truth, just afterwards his private perplexities suffered a momentary dispersal at the news of a new calamity. The moment he entered the little parlour where the rest of the company were collected, something in their pale faces told him they were shaken by something yet more recent than the accident at the tomb. Even as he entered, Leonard Smyth was saying:’ Where is all this going to end?’

‘It will never end, I tell you,’ repeated Lady Diana, gazing into vacancy with glassy eyes; ‘it will never end till we all end. One after another the curse will take us; perhaps slowly, as the poor vicar said; but it will take us all as it has taken him.’

‘What in the world has happened now?’ asked Father Brown.

There was a silence, and then Tarrant said in a voice that sounded a little hollow: ‘Mr Walters, the Vicar, has committed suicide. I suppose it was the shock unhinged him. But I fear there can be no doubt about it. We’ve just found his black hat and clothes on a rock jutting out from the shore. He seems to have jumped into the sea. I thought he looked as if it had knocked him half—witted, and perhaps we ought to have looked after him; but there was so much to look after.’

‘You could have done nothing,’ said the lady. ‘Don’t you see the thing is dealing doom in a sort of dreadful order? The Professor touched the cross, and he went first; the Vicar had opened the tomb, and he went second; we only entered the chapel, and we—‘

‘Hold on,’ said Father Brown, in a sharp voice he very seldom used; ‘this has got to stop.’

He still wore a heavy though unconscious frown, but in his eyes was no longer the cloud of mystification, but a light of almost terrible understanding. ‘What a fool I am!’ he muttered. ‘I ought to have seen it long ago. The tale of the curse ought to have told me.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ demanded Tarrant, ‘that we can really be killed now by something that happened in the thirteenth century?’

Father Brown shook his head and answered with quiet emphasis: ‘I won’t discuss whether we can be killed by something that happened in the thirteenth century; but I’m jolly certain that we can’t be killed by something that never happened in the thirteenth century, something that never happened at all.’

‘Well,’ said Tarrant, ‘it’s refreshing to find a priest so sceptical of the supernatural as all that.’

‘Not at all,’ replied the priest calmly; ‘it’s not the supernatural part I doubt. It’s the natural part. I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, ‘I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.’‘

‘That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?’ asked the other.

‘It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,’ replied Father Brown. ‘It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing—room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It isn’t the legend that I disbelieve—it’s the history.’

Mentre se ne stava in preda a un’insolita perplessità in mezzo alla strada del villaggio, fra la locanda e la chiesa, provò un lieve sussulto di sorpresa nel vedere avanzare lungo la via una figura da poco divenuta familiare, ma piuttosto inattesa. Il signor Boon, il giornalista, dall’aria assai sparuta sotto il sole, che ne metteva in risalto le vesti sdrucite come quelle di uno spaventapasseri, teneva gli occhi scuri e infossati (piuttosto ravvicinati ai due lati del lungo naso cadente) fissi sul prete. Questi dovette guardarlo due volte prima di rendersi conto che i folti baffi scuri celavano qualcosa di simile a un ghigno, o quantomeno a un sorriso arcigno.

«Credevo che se ne stesse andando» disse Padre Brown con una punta di asprezza. «Credevo fosse partito con quel treno due ore fa.»

«Be’, come vede, non l’ho fatto» disse Boon.

«Perché è tornato?» chiese il prete quasi severamente.

«Non è il genere di piccolo paradiso rurale che un giornalista abbandoni in fretta» rispose l’altro. «Qui le cose accadono troppo in fretta perché valga la pena tornarsene in un posto tetro come Londra. Del resto, non possono tenermi fuori da questa faccenda… intendo dire da questa seconda faccenda. Sono stato io a trovare il corpo, o quantomeno gli abiti. Condotta assai sospetta da parte mia, non trova? Forse pensa che volessi indossare io i suoi vestiti. Non farei un curato incantevole?»

E il magro saltimbanco dal naso lungo compì d’un tratto un gesto stravagante in mezzo alla piazza del mercato, tendendo le braccia e spalancando le mani inguantate di scuro in una sorta di benedizione burlesca, dicendo: «Oh, miei cari fratelli e sorelle, poiché vorrei abbracciarvi tutti…»

«Ma di che diamine sta parlando?» esclamò Father Brown, e picchiettò leggermente le pietre col suo tozzo ombrello, poiché era un po’ meno paziente del solito.

«Oh, scoprirà ogni cosa se lo chiede a quella sua brigata da picnic alla locanda» rispose Boon con disprezzo. «Quel tale Tarrant pare sospettare di me solo perché ho trovato gli abiti; benché sia arrivato con appena un minuto di ritardo per trovarli lui stesso. Ma in questa storia ci sono misteri d’ogni sorta. Il piccoletto dai grossi baffi potrebbe nascondere ben più di quanto appaia. E se è per questo, non vedo perché non dovrebbe essere stato lei stesso a uccidere quel povero diavolo.»

Father Brown non parve minimamente seccato dall’insinuazione, ma sembrò oltremodo turbato e sconcertato dall’osservazione. «Vuol dire» chiese con semplicità «che sarei stato io a tentare di uccidere il professor Smaill?»

«Niente affatto» disse l’altro, agitando la mano con l’aria di chi fa una magnanima concessione. «Ha morti in abbondanza fra cui scegliere. Non deve limitarsi al professor Smaill. Come, non sapeva che era saltato fuori qualcun altro, ben più morto del professor Smaill? E non vedo perché non dovrebbe averlo fatto fuori lei, alla chetichella. Divergenze religiose, sa… deplorevole disunione della cristianità… Immagino che abbia sempre desiderato riavere le parrocchie inglesi.»

«Torno alla locanda» disse il prete con calma; «lei dice che quelli là dentro sanno cosa intende, e forse sapranno anche dirlo.»

In verità, subito dopo le sue private perplessità conobbero una momentanea dispersione alla notizia di una nuova sciagura. Nell’istante in cui entrò nel piccolo salottino dove il resto della compagnia era radunato, qualcosa nei loro volti pallidi gli disse che erano scossi da qualcosa di ancor più recente dell’incidente al sepolcro. Proprio mentre entrava, Leonard Smyth stava dicendo: «Dove andrà a finire tutto questo?»

«Non finirà mai, ve lo dico io» ripeté Lady Diana, fissando il vuoto con occhi vitrei; «non finirà finché non finiremo tutti quanti. A uno a uno la maledizione ci prenderà; lentamente, forse, come diceva il povero vicario; ma ci prenderà tutti, come ha preso lui.»

«Che cosa mai è successo adesso?» chiese Padre Brown.

Vi fu un silenzio, poi Tarrant disse con una voce che suonava un po’ cava: «Il signor Walters, il vicario, si è tolto la vita con un suicidio. Immagino sia stato lo choc a fargli perdere la ragione. Ma temo che non ci possa essere alcun dubbio al riguardo. Abbiamo appena trovato il suo cappello nero e i suoi abiti su uno scoglio che sporge dalla riva. Pare si sia gettato in mare. Mi era sembrato che la cosa l’avesse ridotto mezzo scemo, e forse avremmo dovuto tenerlo d’occhio; ma c’era tanto di cui occuparsi.»

«Non avreste potuto far nulla» disse la dama. «Non vedete che la cosa dispensa la sua condanna secondo un ordine spaventoso? Il professore toccò la croce, e se ne andò per primo; il vicario aveva aperto la tomba, e se ne andò per secondo; noi non abbiamo fatto che entrare nella cappella, e noi…»

«Un momento» disse Father Brown, con una voce tagliente che usava assai di rado; «questo deve finire.»

Recava ancora sul volto un cipiglio pesante, benché inconsapevole, ma nei suoi occhi non c’era più la nube della perplessità, bensì una luce di comprensione quasi terribile. «Che sciocco sono stato!» mormorò. «Avrei dovuto capirlo da un pezzo. Il racconto della maledizione avrebbe dovuto dirmelo.»

«Vuol dire» incalzò Tarrant «che davvero possiamo essere uccisi ora da qualcosa accaduto nel tredicesimo secolo?»

Padre Brown scosse il capo e rispose con tranquilla enfasi: «Non discuterò se possiamo essere uccisi da qualcosa accaduto nel tredicesimo secolo; ma sono più che certo che non possiamo essere uccisi da qualcosa che nel tredicesimo secolo non è mai accaduto, qualcosa che non è mai accaduto affatto.»

«Be’» disse Tarrant «fa piacere trovare un prete così scettico riguardo al soprannaturale a tal punto.»

«Niente affatto» replicò il prete con calma; «non è della parte soprannaturale che dubito. È della parte naturale. Mi trovo esattamente nella posizione di quell’uomo che diceva: “Posso credere all’impossibile, ma non all’improbabile”.»

«E questo è ciò che lei chiama un paradosso, non è vero?» chiese l’altro.

«È ciò che io chiamo buon senso, inteso a dovere» rispose Father Brown. «È davvero più naturale credere a una storia prodigiosa, che tratta di cose che non comprendiamo, che a una storia naturale che contraddice cose che invece comprendiamo. Ditemi che il grande signor Gladstone, nelle sue ultime ore, fu perseguitato dal fantasma di Parnell, e sarò agnostico al riguardo. Ma ditemi che il signor Gladstone, la prima volta che fu presentato alla regina Vittoria, tenne il cappello in testa nel suo salotto, le diede una pacca sulla schiena e le offrì un sigaro, e allora non sono affatto agnostico. Questo non è impossibile; è soltanto incredibile. Eppure sono assai più certo che ciò non sia accaduto di quanto lo sia che il fantasma di Parnell non sia apparso; perché viola le leggi del mondo che io comprendo. Così è con quel racconto della maledizione. Non è la leggenda che io non credo… è la storia.»

Lady Diana had recovered a little from her trance of Cassandra, and her perennial curiosity about new things began to peer once more out of her bright and prominent eyes.

‘What a curious man you are!’ she said. ‘Why should you disbelieve the history?’

‘I disbelieve the history because it isn’t history,’ answered Father Brown. ‘To anybody who happens to know a little about the Middle Ages, the whole story was about as probable as Gladstone offering Queen Victoria a cigar. But does anybody know anything about the Middle Ages? Do you know what a Guild was? Have you ever heard of salvo managio suo? Do you know what sort of people were Servi Regis?

‘No, of course I don’t,’ said the lady, rather crossly. ‘What a lot of Latin words!’

‘No, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘If it had been Tutankhamen and a set of dried—up Africans preserved, Heaven knows why, at the other end of the world; if it had been Babylonia or China; if it had been some race as remote and mysterious as the Man in the Moon, your newspapers would have told you all about it, down to the last discovery of a tooth—brush or a collar—stud. But the men who built your own parish churches, and gave the names to your own towns and trades, and the very roads you walk on— it has never occurred to you to know anything about them. I don’t claim to know a lot myself; but I know enough to see that story is stuff and nonsense from beginning to end. It was illegal for a money—lender to distrain on a man’s shop and tools. It’s exceedingly unlikely that the Guild would not have saved a man from such utter ruin, especially if he were ruined by a Jew. Those people had vices and tragedies of their own; they sometimes tortured and burned people. But that idea of a man, without God or hope in the world, crawling away to die because nobody cared whether he lived—that isn’t a medieval idea. That’s a product of our economic science and progress. The Jew wouldn’t have been a vassal of the feudal lord. The Jews normally had a special position as servants of the King. Above all, the Jew couldn’t possibly have been burned for his religion.’

‘The paradoxes are multiplying,’ observed Tarrant; ‘but surely , you won’t deny that Jews were persecuted in the Middle Ages?’

‘It would be nearer the truth,’ said Father Brown, ‘to say they were the only people who weren’t persecuted in the Middle Ages. If you want to satirize medievalism, you could make a good case by saying that some poor Christian might be burned alive for ‘making a mistake about the Homoousion, while a rich Jew might walk down the street openly sneering at Christ and the Mother of God. Well, that’s what the story is like. It was never a story of the Middle Ages; it was never even a legend about the Middle Ages. It was made up by somebody whose notions came from novels and newspapers, and probably made up on the spur of the moment.’

The others seemed a little dazed by the historical digression, and seemed to wonder vaguely why the priest emphasized it and made it so important a part of the puzzle. But Tarrant, whose trade it was to pick the practical detail out of many tangles of digression, had suddenly become alert. His bearded chin was thrust forward farther than ever, out his sullen eyes were wide awake. ‘Ah,’ he said; ‘made up on the spur of the moment!’

‘Perhaps that is an exaggeration,’ admitted Father Brown calmly. ‘I should rather say made up more casually and carelessly than the rest of an uncommonly careful plot. But the plotter did not think the details of medieval history would matter much to anybody. And his calculation in a general way was pretty nearly right, like most of his other calculations.’

‘Whose calculations? Who was right?’ demanded the lady with a sudden passion of impatience. ‘Who is this person you are talking about? Haven’t we gone through enough, without your making our flesh creep with your he’s and him’s?’

‘I am talking about the murderer,’ said Father Brown.

‘What murderer?’ she asked sharply. ‘Do you mean that the poor Professor was murdered?’

‘Well,’ said the staring Tarrant gruffly into his beard, ‘we can’t say ‘murdered’, for we don’t know he’s killed.’

‘The murderer killed somebody else, who was not Professor Smaill,’ said the priest gravely.

‘Why, whom else could he kill?’ asked the other. ‘He killed the Reverend John Walters, the Vicar of Dulham,’ replied Father Brown with precision. ‘He only wanted to kill those two, because they both had got hold of relics of one rare pattern. The murderer was a sort of monomaniac on the point.’

‘It all sounds very strange,’ muttered Tarrant. ‘Of course we can’t swear that the Vicar’s really dead either. We haven’t seen his body.’

‘Oh yes, you have,’ said Father Brown.

There was a silence as sudden as the stroke of a gong; a silence in which that sub—conscious guesswork that was so active and accurate in the woman moved her almost to a shriek.

‘That is exactly what you have seen,’ went on the priest. ‘You have seen his body. You haven’t seen him— the real living man; but you have seen his body all right. You have stared at it hard by the light of four great candles; and it was not tossing suicidally in the sea but lying in state like a Prince of the Church in a shrine built before the Crusade.’

‘In plain words,’ said Tarrant, ‘you actually ask us to believe that the embalmed body was really the corpse of a murdered man.’

Father Brown was silent for a moment; then he said almost with an air of irrelevance: ‘The first thing I noticed about it was the cross; or rather the string suspending the cross. Naturally, for most of you, it was only a string of beads and nothing else in particular; but, naturally also, it was rather more in my line than yours. You remember it lay close up to the chin, with only a few beads showing, as if the whole necklet were quite short. But the beads that showed were arranged in a special way, first one and then three, and so on; in fact, I knew at a glance that it was a rosary, an ordinary rosary with a cross at the end of it. But a rosary has at least five decades and additional beads as well; and I naturally wondered where all the rest of it was. It would go much more than once round the old man’s neck. I couldn’t understand it at the time; and it was only afterwards I guessed where the extra length had gone to. It was coiled round and round the foot of the wooden prop that was fixed in the corner of the coffin, holding up the lid. So that when poor Smaill merely plucked at the cross it jerked the prop out of its place and the lid fell on his skull like a club of stone.’

Lady Diana si era un poco riavuta dalla sua trance di Cassandra, e la sua perenne curiosità per le cose nuove tornava ad affacciarsi dai suoi occhi vividi e sporgenti.

«Che uomo curioso siete!» disse. «Perché mai dovreste dubitare della storia?»

«Non credo alla storia perché non è storia», rispose Padre Brown. «Per chiunque si dia il caso di conoscere un poco il Medioevo, tutta la vicenda era all’incirca tanto probabile quanto Gladstone che offre alla regina Vittoria un sigaro. Ma qualcuno sa qualcosa del Medioevo? Sapete che cos’era una Gilda? Avete mai sentito parlare del salvo managio suo? Sapete che genere di persone fossero i Servi Regis?

«No, certo che non lo so», disse la dama, piuttosto stizzita. «Quante parole latine!»

«No, certo», disse Padre Brown. «Se si fosse trattato di Tutankhamon e di un manipolo di Africani rinsecchiti, conservati Dio sa perché all’altro capo del mondo; se si fosse trattato di Babilonia o della Cina; se si fosse trattato di qualche razza remota e misteriosa come l’Uomo nella Luna, i vostri giornali vi avrebbero raccontato ogni cosa, fino all’ultima scoperta di uno spazzolino da denti o di un bottone da colletto. Ma gli uomini che costruirono le chiese delle vostre parrocchie, e diedero i nomi alle vostre città e ai vostri mestieri, e alle strade stesse su cui camminate… non vi è mai passato per la mente di saperne qualcosa. Non pretendo di saperne molto neppure io; ma ne so abbastanza per capire che quella storia è fandonia e assurdità dal principio alla fine. Era illegale, per un usuraio, pignorare la bottega e gli arnesi di un uomo. È oltremodo improbabile che la Gilda non avrebbe salvato un uomo da una simile rovina totale, specie se rovinato da un ebreo. Quella gente aveva vizi e tragedie tutte sue; talvolta torturava e bruciava la gente. Ma quell’idea di un uomo, senza Dio né speranza al mondo, che si trascina via a morire perché a nessuno importa se vive o no… non è un’idea medievale. È un prodotto della nostra scienza economica e del nostro progresso. L’ebreo non sarebbe stato vassallo del signore feudale. Gli ebrei di norma avevano una posizione speciale come servi del Re. Soprattutto, l’ebreo non avrebbe potuto in alcun modo essere bruciato per la sua religione.»

«I paradossi si moltiplicano», osservò Tarrant; «ma di certo non negherete che gli ebrei fossero perseguitati nel Medioevo?»

«Sarebbe più vicino alla verità», disse Padre Brown, «dire che furono l’unico popolo a non essere perseguitato nel Medioevo. Se volete fare la satira del medievalismo, potreste costruire un buon caso dicendo che un povero cristiano poteva essere arso vivo per aver commesso un errore sull’Homoousion, mentre un ricco ebreo poteva passeggiare per strada sogghignando apertamente su Cristo e sulla Madre di Dio. Ebbene, ecco a che cosa somiglia quella storia. Non fu mai una storia del Medioevo; non fu mai nemmeno una leggenda sul Medioevo. Fu inventata da qualcuno le cui nozioni venivano da romanzi e giornali, e probabilmente inventata lì per lì, sul momento.»

Gli altri parevano un po’ storditi da quella digressione storica, e sembravano domandarsi vagamente perché il prete vi ponesse tanta enfasi e ne facesse una parte così importante dell’enigma. Ma Tarrant, il cui mestiere era estrarre il dettaglio pratico da molti grovigli di digressione, si era d’un tratto fatto attento. Il mento barbuto era proteso in avanti più che mai, ma i suoi occhi tetri erano ben desti. «Ah», disse; «inventata lì per lì, sul momento!»

«Forse è un’esagerazione», ammise Padre Brown con calma. «Direi piuttosto inventata con più noncuranza e trascuratezza del resto di una trama insolitamente accurata. Ma il macchinatore non pensò che i dettagli della storia medievale avrebbero contato granché per chicchessia. E il suo calcolo, in linea generale, era pressoché esatto, come la maggior parte degli altri suoi calcoli.»

«Il calcolo di chi? Chi aveva ragione?» incalzò la dama con un’improvvisa vampata d’impazienza. «Chi è questa persona di cui state parlando? Non ne abbiamo passate abbastanza, senza che voi ci facciate accapponare la pelle con i vostri “lui” e i vostri “egli”?»

«Sto parlando dell’assassino», disse Padre Brown.

«Quale assassino?» chiese lei bruscamente. «Volete dire che il povero Professore è stato assassinato?»

«Be’», disse Tarrant con voce roca, fissando la propria barba, «non possiamo dire “assassinato”, perché non sappiamo che sia stato ucciso.»

«L’assassino ha ucciso qualcun altro, che non era il Professor Smaill», disse il prete con gravità.

«E chi altri poteva uccidere?» chiese l’altro. «Ha ucciso il reverendo John Walters, vicario di Dulham», replicò Padre Brown con precisione. «Voleva uccidere soltanto quei due, perché entrambi avevano messo le mani su reliquie di un unico raro modello. L’assassino era una specie di monomaniaco su quel punto.»

«Suona tutto molto strano», mormorò Tarrant. «Certo, non possiamo neppure giurare che il vicario sia davvero morto. Non abbiamo visto il suo corpo.»

«Oh, invece sì che l’avete visto», disse Padre Brown.

Ci fu un silenzio improvviso come il colpo di un gong; un silenzio in cui quel congetturare inconscio che era tanto vivo e infallibile nella donna la spinse quasi a un grido.

«È esattamente ciò che avete visto», proseguì il prete. «Avete visto il suo corpo. Non avete visto lui… l’uomo vero e vivo; ma il suo corpo l’avete visto eccome. L’avete fissato a lungo alla luce di quattro grandi ceri; e non si dibatteva suicida nel mare, ma giaceva in stato solenne come un Principe della Chiesa in un reliquiario eretto prima della Crociata.»

«In parole povere», disse Tarrant, «voi ci chiedete davvero di credere che quel corpo imbalsamato fosse in realtà la salma di un uomo assassinato.»

Padre Brown tacque per un istante; poi disse quasi con un’aria di irrilevanza: «La prima cosa che notai fu la croce; o meglio la cordicella che la sosteneva. Naturalmente, per la maggior parte di voi, era solo un filo di grani e nient’altro di particolare; ma, altrettanto naturalmente, era faccenda più di mia competenza che vostra. Ricorderete che stava aderente al mento, con solo pochi grani in vista, come se l’intera collana fosse assai corta. Ma i grani che si vedevano erano disposti in un modo speciale, prima uno e poi tre, e così via; di fatto, capii a colpo d’occhio che era un rosario, un comune rosario con una croce all’estremità. Ma un rosario ha almeno cinque poste e altri grani in aggiunta; e mi domandai naturalmente dove fosse finito tutto il resto. Avrebbe fatto ben più di un giro intorno al collo del vecchio. Sul momento non riuscii a spiegarmelo; e fu solo in seguito che indovinai dove fosse andata a finire la lunghezza in più. Era avvolta e riavvolta intorno alla base del sostegno di legno fissato nell’angolo della bara, che reggeva su il coperchio. Cosicché, quando il povero Smaill diede appena uno strattone alla croce, questa fece scattare il sostegno fuori posto e il coperchio gli piombò sul cranio come una mazza di pietra.»

‘By George!’ said Tarrant; ‘I’m beginning to think there’s something in what you say. This is a queer story if it’s true.’

‘When I realized that,’ went on Father Brown, ‘I could manage more or less to guess the rest. Remember, first of all, that there never was any responsible archaeological authority for anything more than investigation. Poor old Walters was an honest antiquary, who was engaged in opening the tomb to find out if there was any truth in the legend about embalmed bodies. The rest was all rumour, of the sort that often anticipates or exaggerates such finds. As a fact, he found the body had not been embalmed, but had fallen into dust long ago. Only while he was working there by the light of his lonely candle in that sunken chapel, the candlelight threw another shadow that was not his own.’

‘Ah!’ cried Lady Diana with a catch in her breath; ‘and I know what you mean now. You mean to tell us we have met the murderer, talked and joked with the murderer, let him tell us a romantic tale, and let him depart untouched.’

‘Leaving his clerical disguise on a rock,’ assented Brown. ‘It is all dreadfully simple. This man got ahead of the Professor in the race to the churchyard and chapel, possibly while the Professor was talking to that lugubrious journalist. He came on the old clergyman beside the empty coffin and killed him. Then he dressed himself in the black clothes from the corpse, wrapped it in an old cope which had been among the real finds of the exploration, and put it in the coffin, arranging the rosary and the wooden support as I have described. Then, having thus set the trap for his second enemy, he went up into the daylight and greeted us all with the most amiable politeness of a country clergyman.’

‘He ran a considerable risk,’ objected Tarrant, ‘of somebody knowing Walters by sight.’

‘I admit he was half—mad,’ agreed Father Brown; ‘and I think you will admit that the risk was worth taking, for he has got off, after all.’

‘I’ll admit he was very lucky,’ growled Tarrant. ‘And who the devil was he?’

‘As you say, he was very lucky,’ answered Father Brown, ‘and not least in that respect. For that is the one thing we may never know.’ He frowned at the table for a moment and then went on: ‘This fellow has been hovering round and threatening for years, but the one thing he was careful of was to keep the secret of who he was; and he has kept it still. But if poor Smaill recovers, as I think he will, it is pretty safe to say that you will hear more of it.’

‘Why, what will Professor Smaill do, do you think?’ asked Lady Diana.

‘I should think the first thing he would do,’ said Tarrant, ‘would be to put the detectives on like dogs after this murdering devil. I should like to have a go at him myself.’

‘Well,’ said Father Brown, smiling suddenly after his long fit of frowning perplexity, ‘I think I know the very first thing he ought to do.’

‘And what is that?’ asked Lady Diana with graceful eagerness.

‘He ought to apologize to all of you,’ said Father Brown.

It was not upon this point, however, that Father Brown found himself talking to Professor Smaill as he sat by the bedside during the slow convalescence of that eminent archaeologist. Nor, indeed, was it chiefly Father Brown who did the talking; for though the Professor was limited to small doses of the stimulant of conversation, he concentrated most of it upon these interviews with his clerical friend. Father Brown had a talent for being silent in an encouraging way and Smaill was encouraged by it to talk about many strange things not always easy to talk about; such as the morbid phases of recovery and the monstrous dreams that often accompany delirium. It is often rather an unbalancing business to recover slowly from a bad knock on the head; and when the head is as interesting a head as that of Professor Smaill even its disturbances and distortions are apt to be original and curious. His dreams were like bold and big designs rather out of drawing, as they can be seen in the strong but stiff archaic arts that he had studied; they were full of strange saints with square and triangular haloes, of golden out— standing crowns and glories round dark and flattened faces, of eagles out of the east and the high headdresses of bearded men with their hair bound like women. Only, as he told his friend, there was one much simpler and less entangled type, that continually recurred to his imaginative memory. Again and again all these Byzantine patterns would fade away like the fading gold on which they were traced as upon fire; and nothing remained but the dark bare wall of rock on which the shining shape of the fish was traced as with a finger dipped in the phosphorescence of fishes. For that was the sign which he once looked up and saw, in the moment when he first heard round the corner of the dark passage the voice of his enemy.

‘And at last,’ he said, ‘I think I have seen a meaning in the picture and the voice; and one that I never understood before. Why should I worry because one madman among a million of sane men, leagued in a great society against him, chooses to brag of persecuting me or pursuing me to death? The man who drew in the dark catacomb the secret symbol of Christ was persecuted in a very different fashion. He was the solitary madman; the whole sane society was leagued together not to save but to slay him. I have sometimes fussed and fidgeted and wondered whether this or that man was my persecutor; whether it was Tarrant; whether it was Leonard Smyth; whether it was any one of them. Suppose it had been all of them? Suppose it had been all the men on the boat and the men on the train and the men in the village. Suppose, so far as I was concerned, they were all murderers. I thought I had a right to be alarmed because I was creeping through the bowels of the earth in the dark and there was a man who would destroy me. What would it have been like, if the destroyer had been up in the daylight and had owned all the earth and commanded all the armies and the crowds? How if he had been able to stop all the earths or smoke me out of my hole, or kill me the moment I put my nose out in the daylight? What was it like to deal with murder on that scale? The world has forgotten these things, as until a little while ago it had forgotten war.’

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘but the war came. The fish may be driven underground again, but it will come up into the daylight once more. As St Antony of Padua humorously remarked, ‘It is only fishes who survive the Deluge.’‘

«Perbacco!» disse Tarrant; «comincio a credere che ci sia del vero in quello che dite. È una storia ben strana, se è vera.»

«Quando compresi tutto ciò,» proseguì padre Brown, «riuscii, più o meno, a indovinare il resto. Ricordate, anzitutto, che non vi fu mai alcuna autorità archeologica responsabile per nulla che andasse oltre una semplice indagine. Il povero vecchio Walters era un onesto antiquario, impegnato ad aprire la tomba per accertare se ci fosse qualcosa di vero nella leggenda dei corpi imbalsamati. Il resto era tutto diceria, di quella specie che spesso anticipa o esagera simili ritrovamenti. Di fatto, egli scoprì che il corpo non era stato affatto imbalsamato, ma da tempo si era ridotto in polvere. Se non che, mentre lavorava là al lume della sua candela solitaria, in quella cappella infossata, la fiamma proiettò un’altra ombra che non era la sua.»

«Ah!» esclamò Lady Diana con un soffio mozzato nel respiro; «e ora so cosa intendete. Volete dirci che abbiamo incontrato l’assassino, che abbiamo chiacchierato e scherzato con l’assassino, che gli abbiamo lasciato raccontare una storia romantica e lo abbiamo lasciato andare senza torcergli un capello.»

«Abbandonando il suo travestimento clericale su uno scoglio,» confermò Brown. «È tutto spaventosamente semplice. Quest’uomo giunse prima del Professore nella corsa verso il camposanto e la cappella, forse mentre il Professore stava parlando con quel lugubre giornalista. Sorprese il vecchio ecclesiastico accanto alla bara vuota e lo uccise. Poi si rivestì delle nere vesti tolte al cadavere, lo avvolse in un antico piviale che era tra i veri ritrovamenti della spedizione, e lo depose nella bara, disponendovi il rosario e il sostegno di legno come ho descritto. Quindi, avendo così teso la trappola per il suo secondo nemico, risalì alla luce del giorno e ci accolse tutti con la cortesia più amabile di un parroco di campagna.»

«Correva un rischio considerevole,» obiettò Tarrant, «che qualcuno riconoscesse Walters di vista.»

«Ammetto che era mezzo pazzo,» convenne padre Brown; «e credo che ammetterete anche voi che valeva la pena correre il rischio, giacché, dopotutto, l’ha fatta franca.»

«Ammetto che è stato molto fortunato,» borbottò Tarrant. «E chi diavolo era costui?»

«Come dite, è stato molto fortunato,» rispose padre Brown, «e non da ultimo proprio in questo. Poiché è l’unica cosa che forse non sapremo mai.» Aggrottò la fronte fissando la tavola per un istante, poi riprese: «Questo individuo si aggira minaccioso ormai da anni, ma l’unica cosa di cui si è preoccupato è stata custodire il segreto di chi fosse; e lo custodisce ancora. Ma se il povero Smaill si rimette, come credo che sarà, si può dire con buona certezza che ne sentirete ancora parlare.»

«Ma perché, cosa credete che farà il professor Smaill?» domandò Lady Diana.

«Direi che la prima cosa che farà,» disse Tarrant, «sarà lanciare i detective come segugi alle calcagna di quel demonio assassino. Mi piacerebbe dargli la caccia io stesso.»

«Ebbene,» disse padre Brown, sorridendo d’improvviso dopo il suo lungo accesso di perplessità corrucciata, «credo di sapere qual è la primissima cosa che dovrebbe fare.»

«E quale sarebbe?» chiese Lady Diana con aggraziata impazienza.

«Dovrebbe chiedere scusa a tutti voi,» disse padre Brown.

Non fu tuttavia su questo punto che padre Brown si trovò a conversare col professor Smaill, seduto al suo capezzale durante la lenta convalescenza di quell’eminente archeologo. E nemmeno fu principalmente padre Brown a tenere le fila del discorso; ché, per quanto il Professore fosse costretto a piccole dosi dello stimolante della conversazione, egli ne concentrava la maggior parte su questi colloqui con l’amico prete. Padre Brown aveva il talento di tacere in modo incoraggiante, e Smaill ne traeva l’incoraggiamento a parlare di molte cose strane, non sempre facili a dirsi; come le fasi morbose della guarigione e i mostruosi sogni che spesso accompagnano il delirio. È spesso un’esperienza che scombussola alquanto riprendersi lentamente da una brutta botta in testa; e quando la testa è interessante come quella del professor Smaill, persino i suoi turbamenti e le sue distorsioni tendono a essere originali e curiosi. I suoi sogni erano come disegni arditi e ampi, un po’ fuori squadra, quali si vedono nelle arti arcaiche, vigorose ma rigide, che egli aveva studiato; erano gremiti di strani santi dalle aureole quadrate e triangolari, di corone e glorie d’oro sporgenti attorno a volti scuri e appiattiti, di aquile venute dall’oriente e degli alti copricapi di uomini barbuti con i capelli acconciati come quelli delle donne. Se non che, come raccontava all’amico, ve n’era uno assai più semplice e meno intricato, che ricorreva di continuo alla sua memoria fervida d’immagini. Di continuo tutti quei motivi bizantini svanivano, come svaniva l’oro su cui erano tracciati, quasi fosse sul fuoco; e nulla restava se non la nuda e scura parete di roccia su cui la fulgida forma del pesce era disegnata come da un dito intinto nella fosforescenza dei pesci. Poiché quello era il segno che una volta, alzando lo sguardo, egli aveva veduto, nell’istante in cui udì per la prima volta, dietro l’angolo dell’oscuro corridoio, la voce del suo nemico.

«E finalmente,» disse, «credo di aver scorto un significato in quell’immagine e in quella voce; un significato che prima non avevo mai compreso. Perché mai dovrei tormentarmi solo perché un pazzo, tra un milione di uomini savi coalizzati in una grande società contro di lui, sceglie di vantarsi di perseguitarmi o di braccarmi fino alla morte? L’uomo che tracciò nella buia catacomba il simbolo segreto di Cristo fu perseguitato in maniera ben diversa. Egli era il pazzo solitario; l’intera società dei savi era coalizzata non per salvarlo, ma per ucciderlo. A volte mi sono agitato, ho smaniato e mi sono chiesto se questo o quell’uomo fosse il mio persecutore; se fosse Tarrant; se fosse Leonard Smyth; se fosse uno qualunque di loro. E se fossero stati tutti quanti? E se fossero stati tutti gli uomini sul battello e gli uomini sul treno e gli uomini nel villaggio? Supponiamo che, per quanto mi riguardava, fossero tutti assassini. Credevo di aver diritto a essere allarmato perché strisciavo nelle viscere della terra, nel buio, e c’era un uomo che voleva la mia rovina. Come sarebbe stato, se il distruttore si fosse trovato lassù, alla luce del giorno, e avesse posseduto tutta la terra e comandato tutti gli eserciti e le folle? Che sarebbe stato se avesse potuto sbarrare tutte le tane, o stanarmi col fumo dal mio nascondiglio, o uccidermi nel momento stesso in cui mettevo il naso fuori, alla luce del giorno? Cosa significa avere a che fare con un delitto di tali proporzioni? Il mondo ha dimenticato queste cose, come fino a poco tempo fa aveva dimenticato la guerra.»

«Sì,» disse padre Brown, «ma la guerra è venuta. Il pesce può essere ricacciato di nuovo sottoterra, ma tornerà ancora una volta alla luce del giorno. Come osservò argutamente sant’Antonio da Padova: “Sono soltanto i pesci a sopravvivere al Diluvio”.»

SIX: The Dagger with Wings

FATHER BROWN, at one period of his life, found it difficult to hang his hat on a hat—peg without repressing a slight shudder. The origin of this idiosyncrasy was indeed a mere detail in much more complicated events; but it was perhaps the only detail that remained to him in his busy life to remind him of the whole business. Its remote origin was to be found in the facts which led Dr Boyne, the medical officer attached to the police force, to send for the priest on a particular frosty morning in December.

Dr Boyne was a big dark Irishman, one of those rather baffling Irishmen to be found all over the world, who will talk scientific scepticism, materialism, and cynicism at length and at large, but who never dream of referring anything touching the ritual of religion to anything except the traditional religion of their native land. It would be hard to say whether their creed is a very superficial varnish or a very fundamental substratum; but most probably it is both, with a mass of materialism in between. Anyhow, when he thought that matters of that sort might be involved, he asked Father Brown to call, though he made no pretence of preference for that aspect of them.

‘I’m not sure I want you, you know,’ was his greeting. ‘I’m not sure about anything yet. I’m hanged if I can make out whether it’s a case for a doctor, or a policeman, or a priest.’

‘Well,’ said Father Brown with a smile, ‘as I suppose you’re both a policeman and a doctor, I seem to be rather in a minority.’

‘I admit you’re what politicians call an instructed minority,’ replied the doctor. ‘I mean, I know you’ve had to do a little in our line as well as your own. But it’s precious hard to say whether this business is in your line or ours, or merely in the line of the Commissioners in Lunacy. We’ve just had a message from a man living near here, in that white house on the hill, asking for protection against a murderous persecution. We’ve gone into the facts as far as we could, and perhaps I’d better tell you the story as it is supposed to have happened, from the beginning.

‘It seems that a man named Aylmer, who was a wealthy landowner in the West Country, married rather late in life and had three sons, Philip, Stephen, and Arnold. But in his bachelor days, when he thought he would have no heir, he had adopted a boy whom he thought very brilliant and promising, who went by the name of John Strake. His origin seems to be vague; they say he was a foundling; some say he was a gipsy. I think the last notion is mixed up with the fact that Aylmer in his old age dabbled in all sorts of dingy occultism, including palmistry and astrology, and his three sons say that Strake encouraged him in it. But they said a great many other things besides that. They said Strake was an amazing scoundrel, and especially an amazing liar; a genius in inventing lies on the spur of the moment, and telling them so as to deceive a detective. But that might very well be a natural prejudice, in the light of what happened.

Perhaps you can more or less imagine what happened. The old man left practically everything to the adopted son; and when he died the three real sons disputed the will. They said their father had been frightened into surrender and, not to put too fine a point on it, into gibbering idiocy. They said Strake had the strangest and most cunning ways of getting at him, in spite of the nurses and the family, and terrorizing him on his death—bed. Anyhow, they seemed to have proved something about the dead man’s mental condition, for the courts set aside the will and the sons inherited. Strake is said to have broken out in the most dreadful fashion, and sworn he would kill all three of them, one after another, and that nothing could hide them from his vengeance. It is the third or last of the brothers, Arnold Aylmer, who is asking for police protection.’

‘Third and last,’ said the priest, looking at him gravely.

‘Yes,’ said Boyne. ‘The other two are dead.’ There was a silence before he continued. ‘That is where the doubt comes in. There is no proof they were murdered, but they might possibly have been. The eldest, who took up his position as squire, was supposed to have committed suicide in his garden. The second, who went into trade as a manufacturer, was knocked onthe head by the machinery in his factory; he might very well have taken a false step and fallen. But if Strake did kill them, he is certainly very cunning in his way of getting to work and getting away. On the other hand, it’s more than likely that the whole thing is a mania of conspiracy founded on a coincidence. Look here, what I want is this. I want somebody of sense, who isn’t an official, to go up and have a talk with this Mr Arnold Aylmer and form an impression of him. You know what a man with a delusion is like, and how a man looks when he is telling the truth. I want you to be the advance guard, before we take the matter up.’

‘It seems rather odd,’ said Father Brown, ‘that you haven’t had to take it up before. If there is anything in this business, it seems to have been going on for a good time. Is there any particular reason why he should send for you just now, any more than any other time?’

‘That had occurred to me, as you may imagine,’ answered Dr Boyne. ‘He does give a reason, but I confess it is one of the things that make me wonder whether the whole thing isn’t only the whim of some half— witted crank. He declared that all his servants have suddenly gone on strike and left him, so that he is obliged to call on the police to look after his house. And on making inquiries, I certainly do find that there has been a general exodus of servants from that house on the hill; and of course the town is full of tales, very one—sided tales I dare say. Their account of it seems to be that their employer had become quite impossible in his fidgets and fears and exactions; that he wanted them to guard the house like sentries, or sit up like night nurses in a hospital; that they could never be left alone because he must never be left alone. So they all announced in a loud voice that he was a lunatic, and left. Of course that does not prove he is a lunatic; but it seems rather rum nowadays for a man to expect his valet or his parlour—maid to act as an armed guard.’

SEI: Il pugnale con le ali

PADRE BROWN, in un certo periodo della sua vita, trovava difficile appendere il cappello a un attaccapanni senza reprimere un lieve brivido. L’origine di questa fissazione era in verità un semplice particolare nell’ambito di eventi assai più complicati; ma era forse l’unico particolare che gli fosse rimasto, nella sua vita indaffarata, a rammentargli l’intera faccenda. La sua origine remota andava cercata nei fatti che indussero il dottor Boyne, l’ufficiale medico aggregato alle forze di polizia, a mandare a chiamare il sacerdote in una certa gelida mattina di dicembre.

Il dottor Boyne era un irlandese grande e bruno, uno di quegli irlandesi piuttosto sconcertanti che si incontrano per tutto il mondo, i quali discorrono di scetticismo scientifico, di materialismo e di cinismo a lungo e con dovizia, ma che non si sognerebbero mai di rimettere qualsiasi cosa tocchi il rituale della religione ad altro che non sia la religione tradizionale della loro terra natale. Sarebbe difficile dire se il loro credo sia una verniciatura assai superficiale o un fondamentale substrato; ma con ogni probabilità è l’una e l’altra cosa, con una massa di materialismo nel mezzo. Comunque sia, quando pensò che potessero esservi implicate faccende di quel genere, chiese a Father Brown di passare, benché non fingesse alcuna predilezione per quell’aspetto di esse.

«Non sono affatto sicuro di volerla qui, sa,» fu il suo saluto. «Non sono ancora sicuro di nulla. Che io sia impiccato se riesco a capire se sia un caso da medico, o da poliziotto, o da sacerdote.»

«Ebbene,» disse Padre Brown con un sorriso, «dato che, suppongo, lei è al tempo stesso poliziotto e medico, mi pare di essere piuttosto in minoranza.»

«Ammetto che lei è ciò che i politici chiamano una minoranza istruita,» replicò il dottore. «Voglio dire, so che ha dovuto occuparsi un poco del nostro mestiere tanto quanto del suo. Ma è maledettamente difficile dire se questa faccenda sia di sua competenza o della nostra, o semplicemente di competenza dei Commissari per l’Infermità Mentale. Abbiamo appena ricevuto un messaggio da un uomo che abita qui vicino, in quella casa bianca sulla collina, che chiede protezione contro una persecuzione omicida. Abbiamo indagato sui fatti per quanto ci è stato possibile, e forse è meglio che io le racconti la storia così come si suppone sia avvenuta, dal principio.

«Pare che un uomo di nome Aylmer, ricco proprietario terriero nel West Country, si sia sposato piuttosto tardi nella vita e abbia avuto tre figli, Philip, Stephen e Arnold. Ma ai tempi del suo celibato, quando pensava che non avrebbe avuto eredi, aveva adottato un ragazzo che gli sembrava assai brillante e promettente, che rispondeva al nome di John Strake. La sua origine pare essere incerta; dicono fosse un trovatello; alcuni dicono fosse uno zingaro. Credo che quest’ultima idea si mescoli al fatto che Aylmer, nella sua vecchiaia, si dilettava di ogni sorta di squallido occultismo, chiromanzia e astrologia comprese, e i suoi tre figli dicono che Strake ve lo incoraggiava. Ma dissero anche molte altre cose, oltre a questa. Dissero che Strake era un mascalzone straordinario, e in particolare uno straordinario bugiardo; un genio nell’inventare menzogne su due piedi, e nel raccontarle in modo da ingannare un investigatore. Ma potrebbe benissimo trattarsi di un pregiudizio naturale, alla luce di quanto accadde.

Forse lei può più o meno immaginare che cosa accadde. Il vecchio lasciò praticamente ogni cosa al figlio adottivo; e quando morì i tre figli veri impugnarono il testamento. Dissero che il padre era stato intimidito fino a cedere e, per non mettere troppo puntiglio, fino a un’idiozia farfugliante. Dissero che Strake aveva i modi più strani e più subdoli per raggiungerlo, malgrado le infermiere e la famiglia, e per terrorizzarlo sul letto di morte. Comunque sia, parevano aver provato qualcosa circa la condizione mentale del defunto, poiché i tribunali annullarono il testamento e i figli ereditarono. Si dice che Strake sia esploso nel modo più spaventoso, giurando che li avrebbe uccisi tutti e tre, uno dopo l’altro, e che nulla avrebbe potuto sottrarli alla sua vendetta. È il terzo e ultimo dei fratelli, Arnold Aylmer, a chiedere la protezione della polizia.»

«Terzo e ultimo,» disse il sacerdote, guardandolo con gravità.

«Sì,» disse Boyne. «Gli altri due sono morti.» Vi fu un silenzio prima che egli riprendesse. «È qui che entra in gioco il dubbio. Non vi è prova che siano stati assassinati, ma è possibile che lo siano stati. Il maggiore, che aveva assunto la posizione di signorotto, si suppone si sia suicidato nel suo giardino. Il secondo, che si era dato al commercio come fabbricante, fu colpito alla testa dai macchinari della sua fabbrica; potrebbe benissimo aver messo un piede in fallo ed essere caduto. Ma se Strake li ha davvero uccisi, è certo assai scaltro nel suo modo di agire e di dileguarsi. D’altra parte, è più che probabile che l’intera faccenda sia una mania di cospirazione fondata su una coincidenza. Senta, ecco che cosa voglio. Voglio qualcuno di buon senso, che non sia un funzionario, che salga a fare quattro chiacchiere con questo signor Arnold Aylmer e si formi un’impressione di lui. Lei sa com’è fatto un uomo in preda a un delirio, e come appare un uomo quando dice la verità. Voglio che lei sia l’avanguardia, prima che noi prendiamo in mano la faccenda.»

«Pare piuttosto strano,» disse Father Brown, «che lei non abbia dovuto prenderla in mano prima. Se c’è qualcosa in questa faccenda, sembra andare avanti da parecchio tempo. C’è qualche ragione particolare per cui egli dovrebbe mandare a chiamarla proprio adesso, più che in qualsiasi altro momento?»

«Ci avevo pensato, come può immaginare,» rispose il dottor Boyne. «Una ragione la dà, ma confesso che è una di quelle cose che mi fanno domandare se l’intera storia non sia soltanto il capriccio di qualche mezzo matto svitato. Ha dichiarato che tutta la sua servitù se n’è andata all’improvviso in sciopero, abbandonandolo, sicché egli è costretto a ricorrere alla polizia perché custodisca la sua casa. E, facendo indagini, trovo per l’appunto che vi è stato un vero e proprio esodo generale di servitori da quella casa sulla collina; e naturalmente la città è piena di dicerie, dicerie assai unilaterali, oserei dire. Il loro resoconto pare essere che il loro datore di lavoro fosse diventato del tutto insopportabile nelle sue smanie, nelle sue paure e nelle sue pretese; che volesse che gli facessero la guardia alla casa come sentinelle, o che vegliassero come infermiere notturne in un ospedale; che non potessero mai essere lasciati soli, perché egli non doveva mai essere lasciato solo. Così tutti proclamarono a gran voce che era un pazzo, e se ne andarono. Naturalmente ciò non prova che sia un pazzo; ma pare piuttosto bizzarro di questi tempi che un uomo si aspetti che il suo cameriere o la sua domestica facciano da guardia armata.»

‘And so,’ said the priest with a smile, ‘he wants a policeman to act as his parlour—maid because his parlour—maid won’t act as a policeman.’

‘I thought that rather thick, too,’ agreed the doctor; ‘but I can’t take the responsibility of a flat refusal till I’ve tried a compromise. You are the compromise.’

‘Very well,’ said Father Brown simply. ‘I’ll go and call on him now if you like.’

The rolling country round the little town was sealed and bound with frost, and the sky was as clear and cold as steel, except in the north— east where clouds with lurid haloes were beginning to climb up the sky. It was against these darker and more sinister colours that the house on the hill gleamed with a row of pale pillars, forming a short colonnade of the classical sort. A winding road led up to it across the curve of the down, and plunged into a mass of dark bushes. Just before it reached the bushes the air seemed to grow colder and colder, as if he were approaching an ice—house or the North Pole. But he was a highly practical person, never entertaining such fancies except as fancies. And he merely cocked his eye at the great livid cloud crawling up over the house, and remarked cheerfully: ‘It’s going to snow.’

Through a low ornamental iron gateway of the Italianate pattern he entered a garden having something of that desolation which only belongs to the disorder of orderly things. Deep—green growths were grey with the faint powder of the frost, large weeds—had fringed the fading pattern of the flower—beds as if in a ragged frame; and the house stood as if waist—high in a stunted forest of shrubs and bushes. The vegetation consisted largely of evergreens or very hardy plants; and though it was thus thick and heavy, it was too northern to be called luxuriant. It might be described as an Arctic jungle. So it was in some sense with the house itself, which had a row of columns and a classical facade, which might have looked out on the Mediterranean; but which seemed now to be withering in the wind of the North Sea. Classical ornament here and there accentuated the contrast; caryatides and carved masks of comedy or tragedy looked down from corners of the building upon the grey confusion of the garden paths; but the faces seemed to be frost—bitten. The very volutes of the capitals might have curled up with the cold.

Father Brown went up the grassy steps to a square porch flanked by big pillars and knocked at the door. About four minutes afterwards he knocked again. Then he stood still patiently waiting with his back to the door and looked out on the slowly darkening landscape. It was darkening under the shadow of that one great continent of cloud that had come flying out of the north; and even as he looked out beyond the pillars of the porch, which seemed huge and black above him in the twilight, he saw the opalescent crawling rim of the great cloud as it sailed over the roof and bowed over the porch like a canopy. The great canopy with its faintly coloured fringes seemed to sink lower and lower upon the garden beyond, until what had recently been a clear and pale—hued winter sky was left in a few silver ribbons and rags like a sickly sunset. Father Brown waited, and there was no sound within.

Then he betook himself briskly down the steps and round the house to look for another entrance. He eventually found one, a side door in the flat wall, and on this also he hammered and outside this also he waited. Then he tried the handle and found the door apparently bolted or fastened in some fashion; and then he moved along that side of the house, musing on the possibilities of the position, and wondering whether the eccentric Mr Aylmer had barricaded himself too deep in the house to hear any kind of summons; or whether perhaps he would barricade himself all the more, on the assumption that any summons must be the challenge of the avenging Strake. It might be that the decamping servants had only unlocked one door when they left in the morning, and that their master had locked that; but whatever he might have done it was unlikely that they, in the mood of that moment, had looked so carefully to the defences. He continued his prowl round the place: it was not really a large place, though perhaps a little pretentious; and in a few moments he found he had made the complete circuit. A moment after he found what he suspected and sought. The french window of one room, curtained and shadowed with creeper, stood open by a crack, doubtless accidentally left ajar, and he found himself in a central room, comfortably upholstered in a rather old—fashioned way, with a staircase leading up from it on one side and a door leading out of it on the other. Immediately opposite him was another door with red glass let into it, a little gaudily for later tastes; something that looked like a red—robed figure in cheap stained glass. On a round table to the right stood a sort of aquarium— a great bowl full of greenish water, in which fishes and similar things moved about as in a tank; and just opposite it a plant of the palm variety with very large green leaves. All this looked so very dusty and Early Victorian that the telephone, visible in the curtained alcove, was almost a surprise.

‘Who is that?’ a voice called out sharply and rather suspiciously from behind the stained—glass door.

‘Could I see Mr Aylmer?’ asked the priest apologetically.

The door opened and a gentleman in a peacock—green dressing—gown came out with an inquiring look. His hair was rather rough and untidy, as if he had been in bed or lived in a state of slowly getting up, but his eyes were not only awake but alert, and some would have said alarmed. Father Brown knew that the contradiction was likely enough in a man who had rather run to seed under the shadow either of a delusion or a danger. He had a fine aquiline face when seen in profile, but when seen full face the first impression was that of the untidiness and even the wilderness of his loose brown beard.

«E così», disse il prete con un sorriso, «vuole che un poliziotto gli faccia da cameriera perché la sua cameriera non vuole fargli da poliziotto.»

«Anche a me parve un po’ esagerato», convenne il dottore; «ma non me la sento di assumermi la responsabilità di un rifiuto netto prima di aver tentato un compromesso. Il compromesso siete voi.»

«Benissimo», disse Padre Brown con semplicità. «Andrò a fargli visita ora, se volete.»

La campagna ondulata intorno alla cittadina era sigillata e serrata dal gelo, e il cielo era limpido e freddo come l’acciaio, salvo a nord-est, dove nuvole dagli aloni lividi cominciavano ad arrampicarsi lungo la volta. Era contro quei colori più cupi e più sinistri che la casa sulla collina brillava con una fila di pallidi pilastri, formando un breve colonnato di gusto classico. Una strada tortuosa vi saliva attraversando la curva del poggio, per poi tuffarsi in una massa di cespugli scuri. Proprio prima di raggiungere i cespugli l’aria pareva farsi sempre più fredda, come se egli si avvicinasse a una ghiacciaia o al Polo Nord. Ma era un uomo eminentemente pratico, che mai coltivava simili fantasie se non come fantasie. E si limitò a lanciare un’occhiata alla grande nuvola livida che avanzava strisciando sopra la casa, e osservò allegramente: «Sta per nevicare.»

Attraverso un basso cancello di ferro battuto ornamentale, di foggia italianeggiante, entrò in un giardino che aveva qualcosa di quella desolazione che appartiene soltanto al disordine delle cose ordinate. I germogli verde cupo erano grigi per la lieve polvere del gelo, grosse erbacce avevano orlato il disegno sbiadito delle aiuole come in una cornice sfilacciata; e la casa stava come immersa fino alla cintola in una foresta stentata di arbusti e cespugli. La vegetazione consisteva in gran parte di sempreverdi o di piante assai resistenti; e sebbene fosse così fitta e pesante, era troppo nordica per potersi dire lussureggiante. La si sarebbe potuta definire una giungla artica. E così era, in un certo senso, anche la casa stessa, che con la sua fila di colonne e la sua facciata classica avrebbe potuto affacciarsi sul Mediterraneo; ma che ora pareva avvizzire nel vento del Mare del Nord. Qua e là l’ornamento classico accentuava il contrasto; cariatidi e maschere scolpite di Commedia o di Tragedia guardavano dall’alto, dagli angoli dell’edificio, la grigia confusione dei sentieri del giardino; ma quei volti sembravano morsi dal gelo. Perfino le volute dei capitelli parevano essersi raggomitolate per il freddo.

Padre Brown salì gli erbosi gradini fino a un portico quadrato fiancheggiato da grandi pilastri e bussò alla porta. Circa quattro minuti dopo, bussò di nuovo. Poi rimase immobile, ad attendere pazientemente con le spalle alla porta, e volse lo sguardo sul paesaggio che lentamente si oscurava. Si oscurava sotto l’ombra di quell’unico grande continente di nuvola giunto in volo dal nord; e proprio mentre guardava oltre i pilastri del portico, che parevano enormi e neri sopra di lui nel crepuscolo, vide l’orlo opalescente e strisciante della grande nuvola mentre veleggiava sopra il tetto e si inarcava sul portico come un baldacchino. Il grande baldacchino, con le sue frange dai tenui colori, pareva calare sempre più giù sul giardino al di là, finché di quello che poco prima era stato un cielo d’inverno limpido e dai toni pallidi non rimasero che poche nastri e brandelli d’argento, come un tramonto malaticcio. Padre Brown attese, e dall’interno non venne alcun suono.

Allora scese lestamente i gradini e girò intorno alla casa in cerca di un altro ingresso. Alla fine ne trovò uno, una porta laterale nel muro piano, e anche su questa martellò, e anche fuori da questa attese. Poi provò la maniglia e trovò la porta apparentemente sprangata o assicurata in qualche modo; e allora si mosse lungo quel lato della casa, rimuginando sulle possibilità della situazione, e domandandosi se l’eccentrico signor Aylmer si fosse barricato troppo in profondità nella casa per udire qualsiasi richiamo; oppure se forse si sarebbe barricato tanto più saldamente, nella supposizione che ogni richiamo dovesse essere la sfida del vendicatore Strake. Poteva darsi che i domestici in fuga avessero soltanto aperto una porta al momento di andarsene, al mattino, e che il padrone l’avesse poi chiusa; ma qualunque cosa egli avesse fatto, era improbabile che essi, nello stato d’animo di quel momento, avessero badato con tanta cura alle difese. Egli proseguì il suo giro furtivo intorno al luogo: non era davvero un luogo grande, benché forse un po’ pretenzioso; e in pochi istanti si accorse di averne compiuto l’intero circuito. Un momento dopo trovò ciò che sospettava e cercava. La portafinestra di una stanza, velata e ombreggiata dal rampicante, stava aperta di uno spiraglio, indubbiamente lasciata socchiusa per caso, ed egli si ritrovò in una stanza centrale, comodamente tappezzata in una maniera piuttosto all’antica, con una scala che ne saliva da un lato e una porta che ne usciva dall’altro. Immediatamente di fronte a lui c’era un’altra porta con un vetro rosso incastonato, un po’ troppo sgargiante per i gusti più recenti; qualcosa che somigliava a una figura in veste rossa in vetro colorato dozzinale. Su un tavolino rotondo alla sua destra c’era una sorta di acquario — una grande ampolla piena d’acqua verdastra, in cui pesci e cose simili si muovevano come in una vasca; e proprio di fronte una pianta della varietà delle palme dalle grandi foglie verdi. Tutto ciò appariva così polveroso e primo-vittoriano che il telefono, visibile nell’alcova velata da una tenda, riusciva quasi una sorpresa.

«Chi è?» chiamò una voce, secca e piuttosto sospettosa, da dietro la porta a vetri colorati.

«Potrei vedere il signor Aylmer?» chiese il prete in tono di scusa.

La porta si aprì e ne uscì un gentiluomo in vestaglia verde pavone, con aria interrogativa. I capelli erano piuttosto ruvidi e in disordine, come se fosse stato a letto o vivesse in uno stato di perenne, lento levarsi; ma i suoi occhi non erano soltanto svegli, bensì all’erta, e taluni li avrebbero detti allarmati. Padre Brown sapeva che quella contraddizione era abbastanza probabile in un uomo che s’era piuttosto lasciato andare sotto l’ombra di un’illusione o di un pericolo. Aveva un bel volto aquilino visto di profilo, ma visto di fronte la prima impressione era quella del disordine e persino della selvatichezza della sua sciolta barba castana.

‘I am Mr Aylmer,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got out of the way of expecting visitors.’

Something about Mr Aylmer’s unrestful eye prompted the priest to go straight to the point. If the man’s persecution was only a monomania, he would be the less likely to resent it.

‘I was wondering,’ said Father Brown softly, ‘whether it is quite true that you never expect visitors.’

‘You are right,’ replied his host steadily. ‘I always expect one visitor. And he may be the last.’

‘I hope not,’ said Father Brown, ‘but at least I am relieved to infer that I do not look very like him.’

Mr Aylmer shook himself with a sort of savage laugh. ‘You certainly do not,’ he said.

‘Mr Aylmer,’ said Father Brown frankly, ‘I apologize for the liberty, but some friends of mine have told me about your trouble, and asked me to see if I could do anything for you. The truth is, I have some little experience in affairs like this.’

‘There are no affairs like this,’ said Aylmer.

‘You mean,’ observed Father Brown, ‘that the tragedies in your unfortunate family were not normal deaths?’

‘I mean they were not even normal murders,’ answered the other. ‘The man who is hounding us all to death is a hell—hound, and his power is from hell.’

‘All evil has one origin,’ said the priest gravely. ‘But how do you know they were not normal murders?’

Aylmer answered with a gesture which offered his guest a chair; then he seated himself slowly in another, frowning, with his hands on his knees; but when he looked up his expression had grown milder and more thoughtful, and his voice was quite cordial and composed.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I don’t want you to imagine that I’m in the least an unreasonable person. I have come to these conclusions by reason, because unfortunately reason really leads there. I have read a great deal on these subjects; for I was the only one who inherited my father’s scholarship in somewhat obscure matters, and I have since inherited his library. But what I tell you does not rest on what I have read but on what I have seen.’

Father Brown nodded, and the other proceeded, as if picking his words: ‘In my elder brother’s case I was not certain at first. There were no marks or footprints where he was found shot, and the pistol was left beside him. But he had just received a threatening letter certainly from our enemy, for it was marked with a sign like a winged dagger, which was one of his infernal cabalistic tricks. And a servant said she had seen something moving along the garden wall in the twilight that was much too large to be a cat. I leave it there; all I can say is that if the murderer came, he managed to leave no traces of his coming. But when my brother Stephen died it was different; and since then I have known. A machine was working in an open scaffolding under the factory tower; I scaled the platform a moment after he had fallen under the iron hammer that struck him; I did not see anything else strike him, but I saw what I saw.

‘A great drift of factory smoke was rolling between me and the factory tower; but through a rift of it I saw on the top of it a dark human figure wrapped in what looked like a black cloak. Then the sulphurous smoke drove between us again; and when it cleared I looked up at the distant chimney—there was nobody there. I am a rational man, and I will ask all rational men how he had reached that dizzy unapproachable turret, and how he left it.’

He stared across at the priest with a sphinx—like challenge; then after a silence he said abruptly: ‘My brother’s brains were knocked out, but his body was not much damaged. And in his pocket we found one of those warning messages dated the day before and stamped with the flying dagger.

‘I am sure,’ he went on gravely, ‘that the symbol of the winged dagger is not merely arbitrary or accidental. Nothing about that abominable man is accidental. He is all design; though it is indeed a most dark and intricate design. His mind is woven not only out of elaborate schemes but out of all sorts of secret languages and signs, and dumb signals and wordless pictures which are the names of nameless things. He is the worst sort of man that the world knows: he is the wicked mystic. Now, I don’t pretend to penetrate all that is conveyed by this symbol; but it seems surely that it must have a relation to all that was most remarkable, or even incredible, in his movements as he had hovered round my unfortunate family. Is there no connexion between the idea of a winged weapon and the mystery by which Philip was struck dead on his own lawn without the lightest touch of any footprint having disturbed the dust or grass? Is there no connexion between the plumed poignard flying like a feathered arrow and that figure which hung on the far top of the toppling chimney, clad in a cloak for pinions?’

‘You mean,’ said Father Brown thoughtfully, ‘that he is in a perpetual state of levitation.’

‘Simon Magus did it,’ replied Aylmer, ‘and it was one of the commonest predictions of the Dark Ages that Antichrist would be able to fly. Anyhow, there was the flying dagger on the document; and whether or no it could fly, it could certainly strike.’

‘Did you notice what sort of paper it was on?’ asked Father Brown. ‘Common paper?’

The sphinx—like face broke abruptly into a harsh laugh.

‘You can see what they’re like,’ said Aylmer grimly, ‘for I got one myself this morning.’

He was leaning back in his chair now, with his long legs thrust out from under the green dressing—gown, which was a little short for him, and his bearded chin pillowed on his chest. Without moving otherwise, he thrust his hand deep in the dressing— gown pocket and held out a fluttering scrap of paper at the end of a rigid arm. His whole attitude was suggestive of a sort of paralysis, that was both rigidity and collapse. But the next remark of the priest had a curious effect of rousing him.

Father Brown was blinking in his short—sighted way at the paper presented to him. It was a singular sort of paper, rough without being common, as from an artist’s sketch—book; and on it was drawn boldly in red ink a dagger decorated with wings like the rod of Hermes, with the written words, ‘Death comes the day after this, as it came to your brothers.’

«Sono il signor Aylmer» disse «ma ho perso l’abitudine di aspettarmi visite.»

Qualcosa nell’occhio inquieto del signor Aylmer indusse il prete ad andare dritto al punto. Se la persecuzione di quell’uomo non era che una monomania, egli sarebbe stato tanto meno propenso a risentirsene.

«Mi domandavo» disse dolcemente Padre Brown «se sia proprio vero che lei non aspetta mai visite.»

«Ha ragione» rispose l’ospite con fermezza. «Aspetto sempre un visitatore. E potrebbe essere l’ultimo.»

«Spero di no» disse Padre Brown «ma almeno mi conforta dedurre che io non gli assomiglio granché.»

Il signor Aylmer si scosse con una specie di risata feroce. «Di certo no» disse.

«Signor Aylmer» disse Padre Brown con franchezza «mi scuso per la libertà che mi prendo, ma alcuni miei amici mi hanno parlato dei suoi guai e mi hanno pregato di vedere se potevo fare qualcosa per lei. La verità è che ho una certa piccola esperienza in faccende come questa.»

«Non ci sono faccende come questa» disse Aylmer.

«Vuol dire» osservò Padre Brown «che le tragedie della sua sventurata famiglia non furono morti normali?»

«Voglio dire che non furono nemmeno omicidi normali» rispose l’altro. «L’uomo che sta braccando tutti noi verso la morte è un mastino infernale, e la sua potenza viene dall’inferno.»

«Ogni male ha un’unica origine» disse gravemente il prete. «Ma come sa che non furono omicidi normali?»

Aylmer rispose con un gesto che offriva all’ospite una sedia; poi si sedette lentamente su un’altra, aggrottando le sopracciglia, con le mani sulle ginocchia; ma quando alzò lo sguardo la sua espressione si era fatta più mite e più pensosa, e la sua voce era del tutto cordiale e pacata.

«Signore» disse «non voglio che lei mi immagini per nulla una persona irragionevole. Sono giunto a queste conclusioni con la ragione, perché purtroppo la ragione conduce davvero là. Ho letto moltissimo su questi argomenti; poiché fui l’unico a ereditare l’erudizione di mio padre in materie alquanto oscure, e da allora ne ho ereditato anche la biblioteca. Ma ciò che le dico non poggia su quel che ho letto, bensì su quel che ho visto.»

Padre Brown annuì, e l’altro proseguì, come scegliendo con cura le parole: «Nel caso del mio fratello maggiore, dapprima non ero certo. Non c’erano tracce né impronte là dove lo trovarono ucciso da un colpo d’arma da fuoco, e la pistola era rimasta accanto a lui. Ma aveva appena ricevuto una lettera minatoria, certamente del nostro nemico, poiché recava un segno simile a un pugnale alato, che era uno dei suoi infernali trucchi cabalistici. E una serva disse di aver visto qualcosa muoversi lungo il muro del giardino nel crepuscolo, qualcosa di troppo grande per essere un gatto. Su questo mi fermo; tutto ciò che posso dire è che, se l’assassino venne, riuscì a non lasciare traccia del suo venire. Ma quando morì mio fratello Stephen fu diverso; e da allora ho saputo. Una macchina lavorava su un’impalcatura aperta sotto la torre della fabbrica; io salii sulla piattaforma un attimo dopo che egli era caduto sotto il maglio di ferro che lo colpì; non vidi nient’altro colpirlo, ma vidi ciò che vidi.

«Una gran ventata di fumo di fabbrica stava rotolando tra me e la torre; ma attraverso uno squarcio di esso vidi, in cima ad essa, una scura figura umana avvolta in quello che pareva un mantello nero. Poi il fumo sulfureo tornò a spingersi fra noi; e quando si diradò alzai lo sguardo verso il lontano comignolo: non c’era nessuno. Sono un uomo razionale, e domanderò a tutti gli uomini razionali come avesse raggiunto quel torrione vertiginoso e inavvicinabile, e come lo avesse lasciato.»

Fissava il prete con una sfida da sfinge; poi, dopo un silenzio, disse bruscamente: «A mio fratello sfondarono il cranio, ma il corpo non subì gran danno. E nella sua tasca trovammo uno di quei messaggi d’avvertimento, datato del giorno prima e recante il timbro del pugnale volante.

«Sono certo» proseguì con gravità «che il simbolo del pugnale alato non sia semplicemente arbitrario o casuale. Nulla, in quell’uomo abominevole, è casuale. Egli è tutto disegno; anche se è invero un disegno oscurissimo e intricato. La sua mente è intessuta non solo di elaborati stratagemmi, ma di ogni sorta di linguaggi e segni segreti, di muti segnali e figure senza parole che sono i nomi di cose senza nome. Egli è la peggior specie d’uomo che il mondo conosca: è il mistico malvagio. Ora, io non pretendo di penetrare tutto ciò che questo simbolo racchiude; ma pare certo che debba avere una relazione con tutto ciò che vi fu di più notevole, o persino d’incredibile, nei suoi movimenti mentre aleggiava attorno alla mia sventurata famiglia. Non c’è forse un legame fra l’idea di un’arma alata e il mistero per cui Philip fu colpito a morte sul proprio prato senza che il più lieve tocco d’impronta avesse turbato la polvere o l’erba? Non c’è forse un legame fra il pugnale piumato che vola come una freccia impennata e quella figura appesa in cima al vacillante comignolo, ammantata di un mantello a mo’ di penne?»

«Lei vuol dire» disse Padre Brown pensosamente «che egli si trova in un perpetuo stato di levitazione.»

«Simon Mago lo fece» rispose Aylmer «e una delle predizioni più comuni dei Secoli Bui era che l’Anticristo avrebbe saputo volare. Comunque sia, sul documento c’era il pugnale volante; e, potesse volare o no, di certo poteva colpire.»

«Ha notato di che tipo di carta si trattasse?» chiese Padre Brown. «Carta comune?»

Il volto da sfinge proruppe d’improvviso in una risata aspra.

«Può vedere lei stesso come sono fatti» disse Aylmer cupamente «perché stamattina ne ho ricevuto uno anch’io.»

Ora si era abbandonato all’indietro sulla sedia, con le lunghe gambe protese fuori dalla veste da camera verde, che gli stava un po’ corta, e il mento barbuto affondato nel petto. Senza muoversi altrimenti, cacciò la mano in fondo alla tasca della veste da camera e porse, all’estremità di un braccio rigido, un frammento di carta che tremolava. Tutto il suo atteggiamento suggeriva una sorta di paralisi, che era insieme rigidità e collasso. Ma l’osservazione successiva del prete ebbe il curioso effetto di ridestarlo.

Padre Brown sbatteva le palpebre, alla sua maniera di miope, davanti alla carta che gli veniva porta. Era una carta di tipo singolare, ruvida senza essere comune, come tratta dall’album di schizzi di un artista; e su di essa era disegnato arditamente, in inchiostro rosso, un pugnale ornato di ali come la verga di Ermes, con queste parole scritte: «La morte viene il giorno dopo questo, come venne ai tuoi fratelli.»

Father Brown tossed the paper on the floor and sat bolt upright in his chair.

‘You mustn’t let that sort of stuff stupefy you,’ he said sharply. ‘These devils always try to make us helpless by making us hopeless.’

Rather to his surprise, an awakening wave went over the prostrate figure, which sprang from its chair as if startled out of a dream.

‘You’re right, you’re right!’ cried Aylmer with a rather uncanny animation; ‘and the devils shall find that I’m not so hopeless after all, nor so helpless either. Perhaps I have more hope and better help than you fancy.’

He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the priest, who had a momentary doubt, during that strained silence, about whether the man’s long peril had not touched his brain. But when he spoke it was quite soberly.

‘I believe my unfortunate brothers failed because they used the wrong weapons. Philip carried a revolver, and that was how his death came to be called suicide. Stephen had police protection, but he also had a sense of what made him ridiculous; and he could not allow a policeman to climb up a ladder after him to a scaffolding where he stood only a moment. They were both scoffers, reacting into scepticism from the strange mysticism of my father’s last days. But I always knew there was more in my father than they understood. It is true that by studying magic he fell at last under the blight of black magic; the black magic of this scoundrel Strake. But my brothers were wrong about the antidote. The antidote to black magic is not brute materialism or worldly wisdom. The antidote to black magic is white magic.’

‘It rather depends,’ said Father Brown, ‘what you mean by white magic.’

‘I mean silver magic,’ said the other, in a low voice, like one speaking of a secret revelation. Then after a silence he said: ‘Do you know what I mean by silver magic? Excuse me a moment.’

He turned and opened the central door with the red glass and went into a passage beyond it. The house had less depth than Brown had supposed; instead of the door opening into interior rooms, the corridor it revealed ended in another door on the garden. The door of one room was on one side of the passage; doubtless, the priest told himself, the proprietor’s bedroom whence he had rushed out in his dressing—gown. There was nothing else on that side but an ordinary hat— stand with the ordinary dingy cluster of old hats and overcoats; but on the other side was something more interesting: a very dark old oak sideboard laid out with some old silver, and overhung by a trophy or ornament of old weapons. It was by that that Arnold Aylmer halted, looking up at a long antiquated pistol with a bell—shaped mouth.

The door at the end of the passage was barely open, and through the crack came a streak of white daylight. The priest had very quick instincts about natural things, and something in the unusual brilliancy of that white line told him what had happened outside. It was indeed what he had prophesied when he was approaching the house. He ran past his rather startled host and opened the door, to face something that was at once a blank and a blaze. What he had seen shining through the crack was not only the most negative whiteness of daylight but the positive whiteness of snow. All round, the sweeping fall of the country was covered with that shining pallor that seems at once hoary and innocent.

‘Here is white magic anyhow,’ said Father Brown in his cheerful voice. Then, as he turned back into the hall, he murmured, ‘And silver magic too, I suppose,’ for the white lustre touched the silver with splendour and lit up the old steel here and there in the darkling armoury. The shaggy head of the brooding Aylmer seemed to have a halo of silver fire, as he turned with his face in shadow and the outlandish pistol in his hand.

‘Do you know why I chose this sort of old blunderbuss?’ he asked. ‘Because I can load it with this sort of bullet.’

He had picked up a small apostle spoon from the sideboard and by sheer violence broke off the small figure at the top. ‘Let us go back into the other room,’ he added.

‘Did you ever read about the death of Dundee?’ he asked when they had reseated themselves. He had recovered from his momentary annoyance at the priest’s restlessness. ‘Graham of Claverhouse, you know, who persecuted the Covenanters and had a black horse that could ride straight up a precipice. Don’t you know he could only be shot with a silver bullet, because he had sold himself to the Devil? That’s one comfort about you; at least you know enough to believe in the Devil.’

‘Oh, yes,’ replied Father Brown, ‘I believe in the Devil. What I don’t believe in is the Dundee. I mean the Dundee of Covenanting legends, with his nightmare of a horse. John Graham was simply a seventeenth—century professional soldier, rather better than most. If he dragooned them it was because he was a dragoon, but not a dragon. Now my experience is that it’s not that sort of swaggering blade who sells himself to the Devil. The devil—worshippers I’ve known were quite different. Not to mention names, which might cause a social flutter, I’ll take a man in Dundee’s own day. Have you ever heard of Dalrymple of Stair?’

‘No,’ replied the other gruffly.

‘You’ve heard of what he did,’ said Father Brown, ‘and it was worse than anything Dundee ever did; yet he escapes the infamy by oblivion. He was the man who made the Massacre of Glencoe. He was a very learned man and lucid lawyer, a statesman with very serious and enlarged ideas of statesmanship, a quiet man with a very refined and intellectual face. That’s the sort of man who sells himself to the Devil.’

Aylmer half started from his chair with an enthusiasm of eager assent.

‘By God! you are right,’ he cried. ‘A refined intellectual face! That is the face of John Strake.’

Padre Brown gettò il foglio a terra e si drizzò a sedere, rigido, sulla poltrona.

«Non deve lasciarsi stordire da simili fandonie», disse con tono tagliente. «Questi demoni cercano sempre di renderci inermi rendendoci disperati.»

Con sua non piccola sorpresa, un’onda di risveglio percorse la figura prostrata, che balzò dalla poltrona come strappata di soprassalto a un sogno.

«Ha ragione, ha ragione!» esclamò Aylmer con un’animazione alquanto perturbante; «e i demoni scopriranno che, dopo tutto, non sono poi così disperato, né tanto meno così inerme. Forse ho più speranza e un aiuto migliore di quanto lei immagini.»

Se ne stava con le mani in tasca, aggrottando la fronte verso il prete, il quale ebbe, durante quel silenzio teso, un momentaneo dubbio: che il lungo pericolo di quell’uomo non gli avesse toccato il cervello. Ma quando parlò lo fece con tutta pacatezza.

«Credo che i miei sventurati fratelli abbiano fallito perché adoperarono le armi sbagliate. Philip portava una rivoltella, ed è così che la sua morte finì per essere chiamata suicidio. Stephen aveva la protezione della polizia, ma aveva anche il senso di ciò che lo rendeva ridicolo; e non poteva permettere che un poliziotto gli si arrampicasse dietro su una scala fino a un’impalcatura dove egli sostava soltanto un istante. Erano entrambi degli schernitori, ripiegati nello scetticismo per reazione allo strano misticismo degli ultimi giorni di mio padre. Ma io ho sempre saputo che in mio padre c’era più di quanto essi comprendessero. È vero che, studiando la magia, egli cadde infine sotto il flagello della magia nera; la magia nera di quella canaglia di Strake. Ma i miei fratelli si sbagliavano sull’antidoto. L’antidoto alla magia nera non è il brutale materialismo né la saggezza mondana. L’antidoto alla magia nera è la magia bianca.»

«Dipende piuttosto», disse Padre Brown, «da che cosa intende per magia bianca.»

«Intendo la magia d’argento», disse l’altro, a voce bassa, come chi parla di una rivelazione segreta. Poi, dopo un silenzio, soggiunse: «Sa che cosa intendo per magia d’argento? Mi scusi un istante.»

Si voltò, aprì la porta centrale dal vetro rosso ed entrò in un corridoio al di là di essa. La casa aveva meno profondità di quanto Brown avesse supposto; anziché aprirsi su stanze interne, il corridoio che la porta rivelava terminava in un’altra porta che dava sul giardino. La porta di una stanza si trovava su un lato del passaggio; senza dubbio, si disse il prete, la camera da letto del padrone di casa, donde egli era uscito precipitosamente in veste da camera. Su quel lato non c’era null’altro che un’ordinaria attaccapanni con l’ordinario, sbiadito grappolo di vecchi cappelli e soprabiti; ma sull’altro lato c’era qualcosa di più interessante: una credenza di quercia antica, molto scura, sulla quale era disposto del vecchio argento, e sormontata da un trofeo, o ornamento, di antiche armi. Fu proprio lì che Arnold Aylmer si fermò, alzando lo sguardo verso una lunga pistola antiquata dalla bocca a campana.

La porta in fondo al passaggio era appena socchiusa, e attraverso la fessura filtrava una striscia di bianca luce diurna. Il prete aveva istinti prontissimi riguardo alle cose naturali, e qualcosa nell’insolito splendore di quella linea bianca gli disse ciò che era accaduto fuori. Era proprio quanto egli aveva profetizzato mentre si avvicinava alla casa. Corse oltre il suo ospite alquanto sbigottito e aprì la porta, per trovarsi di fronte a qualcosa che era insieme un vuoto e una vampata. Ciò che aveva visto brillare attraverso la fessura non era soltanto il più negativo dei biancori, quello della luce del giorno, ma il biancore positivo della neve. Tutt’intorno, l’ampio digradare della campagna era coperto da quel pallore lucente che pare a un tempo canuto e innocente.

«Ecco qui, comunque, la magia bianca», disse Padre Brown con la sua voce allegra. Poi, mentre rientrava nell’ingresso, mormorò: «E anche la magia d’argento, immagino», poiché il bianco lustro toccava l’argento di splendore e faceva luccicare qua e là il vecchio acciaio nell’oscura armeria. L’ispida testa del meditabondo Aylmer pareva cinta da un’aureola di fuoco d’argento, mentre egli si voltava, il volto in ombra e la stravagante pistola in pugno.

«Sa perché ho scelto questa specie di vecchio archibugio?» domandò. «Perché posso caricarlo con questa specie di pallottola.»

Aveva raccolto dalla credenza un piccolo cucchiaino da apostolo e, con pura violenza, ne aveva spezzato la figurina in cima. «Torniamo nell’altra stanza», soggiunse.

«Ha mai letto della morte di Dundee?» chiese quando si furono di nuovo seduti. Si era ripreso dalla momentanea irritazione per l’irrequietezza del prete. «Graham di Claverhouse, sa, colui che perseguitò i Covenanters e aveva un cavallo nero capace di risalire diritto un precipizio. Non sa che poteva essere ucciso soltanto con una pallottola d’argento, perché si era venduto al Diavolo? Questo è un conforto, quanto a lei: almeno ne sa abbastanza da credere nel Diavolo.»

«Oh, sì», rispose Father Brown, «credo nel Diavolo. Ciò in cui non credo è il Dundee. Intendo il Dundee delle leggende dei Covenanters, con quel suo cavallo da incubo. John Graham era semplicemente un soldato di mestiere del Seicento, un po’ migliore dei più. Se li dragonò, fu perché era un dragone, non un drago. Ora, la mia esperienza è che non è quel genere di spadaccino spavaldo a vendersi al Diavolo. Gli adoratori del demonio che ho conosciuto erano ben diversi. Per non fare nomi, che potrebbero suscitare un certo scompiglio mondano, prenderò un uomo dei tempi stessi di Dundee. Ha mai sentito parlare di Dalrymple di Stair?»

«No», rispose l’altro in tono burbero.

«Ha sentito parlare di ciò che fece», disse Padre Brown, «e fu peggio di qualunque cosa Dundee abbia mai fatto; eppure egli sfugge all’infamia grazie all’oblio. Fu l’uomo che ordì il Massacro di Glencoe. Era un uomo dottissimo e un lucido giurista, uno statista dalle idee assai serie e vaste sull’arte del governo, un uomo tranquillo dal volto raffinato e intellettuale. Ecco il genere d’uomo che si vende al Diavolo.»

Aylmer si sollevò a metà dalla poltrona con l’entusiasmo di un fervido assenso.

«Per Dio! ha ragione», esclamò. «Un volto raffinato e intellettuale! È il volto di John Strake.»

Then he raised himself and stood looking at the priest with a curious concentration. ‘If you will wait here a little while,’ he said, ‘I will show you something.’

He went back through the central door, closing it after him; going, the priest presumed, to the old sideboard or possibly to his bedroom. Father Brown remained seated, gazing abstractedly at the carpet, where a faint red glimmer shone from the glass in the doorway. Once it seemed to brighten like a ruby and then darkened again, as if the sun of that stormy day had passed from cloud to cloud. Nothing moved except the aquatic creatures which floated to and fro in the dim green bowl. Father Brown was thinking hard.

A minute or two afterwards he got up and slipped quietly to the alcove of the telephone, where he rang up his friend Dr Boyne, at the official headquarters. ‘I wanted to tell you about Aylmer and his affairs,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s a queer story, but I rather think there’s something in it. If I were you I’d send some men up here straight away; four or five men, I think, and surround the house. If anything does happen there’ll probably be something startling in the way of an escape.’

Then he went back and sat down again, staring at the dark carpet, which again glowed blood—red with the light from the glass door. Something in the filtered light set his mind drifting on certain borderlands of thought, with the first white daybreak before the coming of colour, and all that mystery which is alternately veiled and revealed in the symbol of windows and of doors.

An inhuman howl in a human voice came from beyond the closed doors, almost simultaneously with the noise of firing. Before the echoes of the shot had died away the door was violently flung open and his host staggered into the room, the dressing—gown half torn from his shoulder and the long pistol smoking in his hand. He seemed to be shaking in every limb, yet he was shaken in part with an unnatural laughter.

‘Glory be to the White Magic!’ he cried. ‘Glory be to the silver bullet! The hell—hound had hunted once too often, and my brothers are avenged at last.’

He sank into a chair and the pistol slid from his hand and fell on the floor. Father Brown darted past him, slipped through the glass door and went down the passage. As he did so he put his hand on the handle of the bedroom door, as if half intending to enter; then he stooped a moment, as if examining something—and then he ran to the outer door and opened it.

On the field of snow, which had been so blank a little while before, lay one black object. At the first glance it looked a little like an enormous bat. A second glance showed that it was, after all, a human figure; fallen on its face, the whole head covered by a broad black hat having something of a Latin—American look; while the appearance of black—wings came from the two flaps or loose sleeves of a very vast black cloak spread out, perhaps by accident, to their utmost length on either side. Both the hands were hidden, though Father Brown thought he could detect the position of one of them, and saw close to it, under the edge of the cloak, the glimmer of some metallic weapon. The main effect, however, was curiously like that of the simple extravagances of heraldry; like a black eagle displayed on a white ground. But by walking round it and peering under the hat the priest got a glimpse of the face, which was indeed what his host had called refined and intellectual; even sceptical and austere: the face of John Strake.

‘Well, I’m jiggered,’ muttered Father Brown. ‘It really does look like some vast vampire that has swooped down like a bird.’

‘How else could he have come?’ came a voice from the doorway, and Father Brown looked up to see Aylmer once more standing there.

‘Couldn’t he have walked?’ replied Father Brown evasively.

Aylmer stretched out his arm and swept the white landscape with a gesture.

‘Look at the snow,’ he said in a deep voice that had a sort of roll and thrill in it. ‘Is not the snow unspotted—pure as the white magic you yourself called it? Is there a speck on it for miles, save that one foul black blot that has fallen there? There are no footprints, but a few of yours and mine; there are none approaching the house from anywhere.’

Then he looked at the little priest for a moment with a concentrated and curious expression, and said: ‘I will tell you something else. That cloak he flies with is too long to walk with. He was not a very tall man, and it would trail behind him like a royal train. Stretch it out over his body, if you like, and see.’

‘What happened to you both?’ asked Father Brown abruptly.

‘It was too swift to describe,’ answered Aylmer. ‘I had looked out of the door and was turning back when there came a kind of rushing of wind all around me, as if I were being buffeted by a wheel revolving in mid—air. I spun round somehow and fired blindly; and then I saw nothing but what you see now. But I am morally certain that you wouldn’t see it if I had not had a silver shot in my gun. It would have been a different body lying there in the snow.’

‘By the way,’ remarked Father Brown, ‘shall we leave it lying there in the snow? Or would you like it taken into your room— I suppose that’s your bedroom in the passage?’

‘No, no,’ replied Aylmer hastily, ‘we must leave it here till the police have seen it. Besides, I’ve had as much of such things as I can stand for the moment. Whatever else happens, I’m going to have a drink. After that, they can hang me if they like.’

Inside the central apartment, between the palm plant and the bowl of fishes, Aylmer tumbled into a chair. He had nearly knocked the bowl over as he lurched into the room, but he had managed to find the decanter of brandy after plunging his hand rather blindly into several cupboards and corners. He did not at any time look like a methodical person, but at this moment his distraction must have been extreme. He drank with a long gulp and began to talk rather feverishly, as if to fill up a silence.

Poi si drizzò e rimase a guardare il prete con una curiosa concentrazione. «Se vuole aspettare qui un momento», disse, «le mostrerò una cosa.»

Ripassò dalla porta centrale, richiudendola dietro di sé; diretto, suppose il prete, alla vecchia credenza o forse alla propria camera da letto. Father Brown rimase seduto, lo sguardo perso sul tappeto, dove un fioco bagliore rosso scendeva dal vetro della porta. Una volta parve avvivarsi come un rubino e poi tornò a spegnersi, come se il sole di quel giorno tempestoso fosse passato da una nuvola all’altra. Nulla si muoveva, salvo le creature acquatiche che galleggiavano avanti e indietro nella boccia di un verde smorto. Father Brown stava pensando intensamente.

Un minuto o due dopo si alzò e scivolò senza rumore fino alla nicchia del telefono, dove chiamò il suo amico dottor Boyne, alla sede ufficiale. «Volevo parlarle di Aylmer e delle sue faccende», disse a bassa voce. «È una storia bizzarra, ma sono piuttosto propenso a credere che ci sia qualcosa di vero. Se fossi in lei, manderei subito quassù alcuni uomini; quattro o cinque, direi, e circonderei la casa. Se qualcosa accadrà, ci sarà probabilmente qualcosa di sensazionale in fatto di fuga.»

Poi tornò a sedersi, fissando il tappeto scuro, che di nuovo ardeva rosso sangue alla luce della porta a vetri. Qualcosa in quella luce filtrata mise la sua mente a vagare per certe terre di confine del pensiero, con la prima bianca alba che precede il sopraggiungere del colore, e tutto quel mistero che è alternativamente velato e svelato nel simbolo delle finestre e delle porte.

Un ululato disumano in voce umana giunse da oltre le porte chiuse, quasi simultaneamente al rumore di uno sparo. Prima ancora che gli echi del colpo si fossero spenti, la porta fu spalancata con violenza e il suo ospite entrò barcollando nella stanza, la vestaglia mezza strappata dalla spalla e la lunga pistola fumante in mano. Sembrava tremare in ogni membro, eppure era scosso in parte da un riso innaturale.

«Gloria alla Magia Bianca!» esclamò. «Gloria al proiettile d’argento! Il mastino infernale ha dato la caccia una volta di troppo, e i miei fratelli sono finalmente vendicati.»

Sprofondò in una poltrona e la pistola gli scivolò di mano e cadde sul pavimento. Father Brown gli sfrecciò accanto, s’infilò per la porta a vetri e percorse il corridoio. Facendolo, posò la mano sulla maniglia della porta della camera da letto, come se avesse una mezza intenzione di entrare; poi si chinò un istante, come per esaminare qualcosa, e infine corse alla porta esterna e l’aprì.

Sul campo di neve, che poco prima era stato così immacolato, giaceva un unico oggetto nero. A prima vista somigliava un po’ a un enorme pipistrello. A un secondo sguardo si vedeva che era, dopo tutto, una figura umana; caduta bocconi, l’intera testa coperta da un ampio cappello nero che aveva un che di latino-americano; mentre l’apparenza di ali nere derivava dai due lembi o maniche larghe di un vastissimo mantello nero, spiegate, forse per caso, in tutta la loro lunghezza ai due lati. Entrambe le mani erano nascoste, sebbene Father Brown credesse di poter individuare la posizione di una di esse, e vide, vicino a questa, sotto l’orlo del mantello, il luccichio di qualche arma metallica. L’effetto principale, tuttavia, era curiosamente simile a quello delle semplici stravaganze dell’araldica; come un’aquila nera spiegata su un campo bianco. Ma girandovi intorno e spiando sotto il cappello il prete riuscì a intravedere il volto, che era davvero quello che il suo ospite aveva definito raffinato e intellettuale; perfino scettico e austero: il volto di John Strake.

«Be’, che io sia impiccato», mormorò padre Brown. «Sembra davvero un enorme vampiro calato in picchiata come un uccello.»

«E in che altro modo avrebbe potuto arrivare?» giunse una voce dalla soglia, e padre Brown alzò lo sguardo per vedere Aylmer di nuovo là ritto.

«Non avrebbe potuto venire a piedi?» rispose Father Brown evasivo.

Aylmer tese il braccio e con un gesto spazzò il bianco paesaggio.

«Guardi la neve», disse con una voce profonda che aveva in sé una sorta di rullo e di fremito. «Non è forse la neve intatta, pura come la magia bianca che lei stesso ha nominato? C’è forse una macchia su di essa per miglia e miglia, tranne quell’unica lorda chiazza nera che vi è caduta? Non ci sono orme, salvo poche, sue e mie; non ce n’è alcuna che si avvicini alla casa da nessuna parte.»

Poi guardò il piccolo prete per un momento con un’espressione concentrata e curiosa, e disse: «Le dirò un’altra cosa. Quel mantello con cui vola è troppo lungo per camminarci. Non era un uomo molto alto, e gli si sarebbe trascinato dietro come uno strascico regale. Lo distenda pure sul suo corpo, se vuole, e veda.»

«Che cosa è accaduto a voi due?» chiese Father Brown a bruciapelo.

«È stato troppo rapido per descriverlo», rispose Aylmer. «Avevo guardato fuori dalla porta e mi stavo voltando quando venne una sorta di impeto di vento tutt’intorno a me, come se fossi sballottato da una ruota che girasse a mezz’aria. In qualche modo mi girai su me stesso e sparai alla cieca; e poi non vidi altro che quel che vede adesso. Ma sono moralmente certo che lei non lo vedrebbe se non avessi avuto un proiettile d’argento nel fucile. Sarebbe stato un corpo diverso quello disteso là nella neve.»

«A proposito», osservò padre Brown, «lo lasciamo lì disteso nella neve? Oppure preferirebbe farlo portare nella sua stanza… suppongo che quella nel corridoio sia la sua camera da letto?»

«No, no», rispose Aylmer in fretta, «dobbiamo lasciarlo qui finché la polizia non l’avrà visto. E poi, ne ho avuto abbastanza di simili cose per il momento. Qualunque altra cosa accada, ho intenzione di bermi qualcosa. Dopodiché, possono impiccarmi, se vogliono.»

Dentro l’appartamento centrale, tra la palma e la boccia dei pesci, Aylmer si lasciò cadere in una poltrona. Aveva quasi rovesciato la boccia mentre entrava barcollando nella stanza, ma era riuscito a trovare la caraffa di brandy dopo aver ficcato la mano piuttosto alla cieca in vari armadietti e angoli. In nessun momento aveva l’aria di una persona metodica, ma in quell’istante il suo smarrimento doveva essere estremo. Bevve con un lungo sorso e cominciò a parlare in modo piuttosto febbrile, come per colmare un silenzio.

‘I see you are still doubtful,’ he said, ‘though you have seen the thing with your own eyes. Believe me, there was something more behind the quarrel between the spirit of Strake and the spirit of the house of Aylmer. Besides, you have no business to be an unbeliever. You ought to stand for all the things these stupid people call superstitions. Come now, don’t you think there’s a lot in those old wives’ tales about luck and charms and so on, silver bullets included? What do you say about them as a Catholic?’

‘I say I’m an agnostic,’ replied Father Brown, smiling.

‘Nonsense,’ said Aylmer impatiently. ‘It’s your business to believe things.’

‘Well, I do believe some things, of course,’ conceded Father Brown; ‘and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.’

Aylmer was leaning forward, and looking at him with a strange intensity that was almost like that of a mesmerist.

‘You do believe it,’ he said. ‘You do believe everything. We all believe everything, even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don’t you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?’

‘No,’ said Father Brown.

Outside, twilight had begun to fall, in that phase of such a snow— laden evening when the land looks brighter than the sky. In the porch of the main entrance, visible through a half— curtained window. Father Brown could dimly see a bulky figure standing. He glanced casually at the french windows through which he had originally entered, and saw they were darkened with two equally motionless figures. The inner door with the coloured glass stood slightly ajar; and he could see in the short corridor beyond, the ends of two long shadows, exaggerated and distorted by the level light of evening, but still like grey caricatures of the figures of men. Dr Boyne had already obeyed the telephone message. The house was surrounded.

‘What is the good of saying no?’ insisted his host, still with the same hypnotic stare. ‘You have seen part of that eternal drama with your own eyes. You have seen the threat of John Strake to slay Arnold Aylmer by black magic. You have seen Arnold Aylmer slay John Strake by white magic. You see Arnold Aylmer alive and talking to you now. And yet you don’t believe it.’

‘No, I do not believe it,’ said Father Brown, and rose from his chair like one terminating a visit.

‘Why not?’ asked the other.

The priest only lifted his voice a little, but it sounded in every corner of the room like a bell. ‘Because you are not Arnold Aylmer,’ he said. ‘I know who you are. Your name is John Strake; and you have murdered the last of the brothers, who is lying outside in the snow.’

A ring of white showed round the iris of the other man’s eyes; he seemed to be making, with bursting eyeballs, a last effort to mesmerize and master his companion. Then he made a sudden movement sideways; and even as he did so the door behind him opened and a big detective in plain clothes put one hand quietly on his shoulder. The other hand hung down, but it held a revolver. The man looked wildly round, and saw plain—clothes men in all corners of the quiet room.

That evening Father Brown had another and longer conversation with Dr Boyne about the tragedy of the Aylmer family. By that time there was no longer any doubt of the central fact of the case, for John Strake had confessed his identity and even confessed his crimes; only it would be truer to say that he boasted of his victories. Compared to the fact that he had rounded off his life’s work with the last Aylmer lying dead, everything else, including existence itself, seemed to be indifferent to him.

‘The man is a sort of monomaniac,’ said Father Brown. ‘He is not interested in any other matter; not even in any other murder. I owe him something for that; for I had to comfort myself with the reflection a good many times this afternoon. As has doubtless occurred to you, instead of weaving all that wild but ingenious romance about winged vampires and silver bullets, he might have put an ordinary leaden bullet into me, and walked out of the house. I assure you it occurred quite frequently to me.’

‘I wonder why he didn’t,’ observed Boyne. ‘I don’t understand it; but I don’t understand anything yet. How on earth did you discover it, and what in the world did you discover?’

‘Oh, you provided me with very valuable information,’ replied Father Brown modestly, ‘especially the one piece of information that really counted. I mean the statement that Strake was a very inventive and imaginative liar, with great presence of mind in producing his lies. This afternoon he needed it; but he rose to the occasion. Perhaps his only mistake was in choosing a preternatural story; he had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.’

‘But I can’t make head or tail of it,’ said the doctor. ‘You must really begin at the beginning.’

‘The beginning of it was a dressing—gown,’ said Father Brown simply. ‘It was the one really good disguise I’ve ever known. When you meet a man in a house with a dressing—gown on, you assume quite automatically that he’s in his own house. I assumed it myself; but afterwards queer little things began to happen. When he took the pistol down he clicked it at arm’s length, as a man does to make sure a strange weapon isn’t loaded; of course he would know whether the pistols in his own hall were loaded or not. I didn’t like the way he looked for the brandy, or the way he nearly barged into the bowl of fishes. For a man who has a fragile thing of that sort as a fixture in his rooms gets a quite mechanical habit of avoiding it. But these things might possibly have been fancies; the first real point was this. He came out from the little passage between the two doors; and in that passage there’s only one other door leading to a room; so I assumed it was the bedroom he had just come from. I tried the handle; but it was locked. I thought this odd; and looked through the keyhole. It was an utterly bare room, obviously deserted; no bed, no anything. Therefore he had not come from inside any room, but from outside the house. And when I saw that, I think I saw the whole picture.

«Vedo che siete ancora dubbioso», disse, «benché abbiate visto la cosa con i vostri stessi occhi. Credetemi, dietro la contesa tra lo spirito di Strake e lo spirito della casa degli Aylmer c’era qualcosa di più. E poi, non avete alcun diritto di essere un miscredente. Dovreste stare dalla parte di tutte quelle cose che questa gente sciocca chiama superstizioni. Suvvia, non credete che ci sia molto di vero in quelle vecchie storielle sulla fortuna e i talismani e via dicendo, pallottole d’argento comprese? Che cosa ne dite, voi che siete cattolico?»

«Dico che sono un agnostico», rispose Padre Brown sorridendo.

«Sciocchezze», disse Aylmer spazientito. «È vostro mestiere credere alle cose.»

«Beh, certe cose le credo, naturalmente», concesse Padre Brown; «e perciò, naturalmente, altre cose non le credo.»

Aylmer si era sporto in avanti e lo fissava con una strana intensità, quasi da ipnotizzatore.

«Voi ci credete», disse. «Voi credete a tutto. Tutti crediamo a tutto, anche quando neghiamo tutto. I negatori credono. Gli increduli credono. Non sentite forse nel vostro cuore che queste contraddizioni non si contraddicono davvero: che esiste un cosmo capace di contenerle tutte? L’anima gira su una ruota di stelle e ogni cosa ritorna; forse Strake e io abbiamo lottato in molte forme, bestia contro bestia e uccello contro uccello, e forse lotteremo in eterno. Ma poiché ci cerchiamo e abbiamo bisogno l’uno dell’altro, persino quell’odio eterno è un amore eterno. Il bene e il male girano su una ruota che è una cosa sola e non molte. Non vi rendete conto, nel vostro cuore, non credete, dietro tutte le vostre credenze, che vi sia un’unica realtà e che noi ne siamo le ombre; e che tutte le cose non siano se non aspetti di una sola cosa: un centro dove gli uomini si fondono nell’Uomo e l’Uomo in Dio?»

«No», disse Padre Brown.

Fuori il crepuscolo aveva cominciato a calare, in quella fase di una sera così carica di neve in cui la terra appare più luminosa del cielo. Nel portico dell’ingresso principale, visibile attraverso una finestra a mezzo velata da una tenda, Padre Brown poteva scorgere confusamente una figura massiccia in piedi. Gettò uno sguardo distratto alle portefinestre da cui in origine era entrato, e vide che erano oscurate da due figure altrettanto immobili. La porta interna dal vetro colorato era leggermente socchiusa; e poteva vedere, nel breve corridoio al di là, le estremità di due lunghe ombre, ingigantite e deformate dalla luce radente della sera, ma ancora simili a grigie caricature di figure d’uomini. Il dottor Boyne aveva già obbedito al messaggio telefonico. La casa era circondata.

«A che pro dire di no?» insisté il suo ospite, sempre con lo stesso sguardo ipnotico. «Avete visto parte di quell’eterno dramma con i vostri stessi occhi. Avete visto la minaccia di John Strake di uccidere Arnold Aylmer con la magia nera. Avete visto Arnold Aylmer uccidere John Strake con la magia bianca. Vedete Arnold Aylmer vivo che vi parla in questo momento. Eppure non ci credete.»

«No, non ci credo», disse Padre Brown, e si alzò dalla sedia come chi pone fine a una visita.

«E perché no?» chiese l’altro.

Il prete si limitò ad alzare un poco la voce, ma essa risuonò in ogni angolo della stanza come una campana. «Perché voi non siete Arnold Aylmer», disse. «So chi siete. Il vostro nome è John Strake; e avete assassinato l’ultimo dei fratelli, che giace là fuori nella neve.»

Un cerchio di bianco apparve intorno all’iride dell’altro; pareva compiere, con gli occhi sbarrati fino a scoppiare, un ultimo sforzo per ipnotizzare e soggiogare il suo interlocutore. Poi fece un brusco movimento di lato; e proprio mentre lo faceva la porta dietro di lui si aprì e un grosso poliziotto in borghese gli posò con calma una mano sulla spalla. L’altra mano gli pendeva lungo il fianco, ma stringeva una rivoltella. L’uomo si guardò intorno con aria stravolta, e vide uomini in borghese in ogni angolo della quieta stanza.

Quella sera Padre Brown ebbe un’altra e più lunga conversazione con il dottor Boyne sulla tragedia della famiglia Aylmer. A quel momento non v’era più alcun dubbio sul fatto centrale del caso, poiché John Strake aveva confessato la propria identità e persino i propri delitti; solo che sarebbe più esatto dire che si vantava delle proprie vittorie. In confronto al fatto di aver coronato l’opera della sua vita con l’ultimo Aylmer steso morto, ogni altra cosa, compresa l’esistenza stessa, gli pareva indifferente.

«Quell’uomo è una specie di monomaniaco», disse Padre Brown. «Non gli interessa nient’altro; nemmeno un altro delitto. Gli devo qualcosa per questo; perché parecchie volte, questo pomeriggio, ho dovuto consolarmi con tale riflessione. Come di certo vi sarà venuto in mente, invece di intessere tutto quell’ingegnoso ma stravagante romanzo su vampiri alati e pallottole d’argento, avrebbe potuto piantarmi addosso un’ordinaria pallottola di piombo, e uscirsene dalla casa. Vi assicuro che la cosa mi è venuta in mente assai di frequente.»

«Mi domando perché non l’abbia fatto», osservò Boyne. «Non lo capisco; ma finora non capisco nulla. Come diamine avete fatto a scoprirlo, e che cosa mai avete scoperto?»

«Oh, siete stato voi a fornirmi informazioni preziosissime», rispose Padre Brown modestamente, «e in particolare l’unica informazione che davvero contava. Intendo l’affermazione che Strake era un bugiardo assai inventivo e fantasioso, dotato di grande prontezza di spirito nel confezionare le sue menzogne. Questo pomeriggio ne aveva bisogno; e si mostrò all’altezza della situazione. Forse il suo unico errore fu scegliere una storia soprannaturale; aveva l’idea che, essendo io un sacerdote, avrei creduto a qualunque cosa. Molte persone hanno ideucce di questo genere.»

«Ma io non ci capisco un’acca», disse il dottore. «Dovete proprio cominciare dal principio.»

«Il principio di tutto fu una vestaglia», disse Padre Brown con semplicità. «È il solo travestimento davvero riuscito che io abbia mai conosciuto. Quando incontrate un uomo in una casa con addosso una vestaglia, date per scontato, in modo del tutto automatico, che sia in casa propria. L’ho dato per scontato anch’io; ma poi cominciarono ad accadere piccole cose strane. Quando tirò giù la pistola, la fece scattare tenendola a distanza di braccio, come fa chi vuole accertarsi che un’arma sconosciuta non sia carica; naturalmente lui avrebbe saputo se le pistole del proprio atrio fossero cariche o no. Non mi piacque il modo in cui cercò il brandy, né il modo in cui per poco non andò a sbattere contro la boccia dei pesci. Perché un uomo che tiene un oggetto tanto fragile come suppellettile fissa nelle proprie stanze acquista l’abitudine del tutto meccanica di evitarlo. Ma queste cose potevano forse essere fantasie; il primo punto davvero concreto fu questo. Uscì dal breve passaggio fra le due porte; e in quel passaggio non c’è che un’altra porta, che conduce a una stanza; perciò supposi che fosse la camera da letto da cui era appena uscito. Provai la maniglia; ma era chiusa a chiave. La cosa mi parve strana; e guardai dal buco della serratura. Era una stanza del tutto spoglia, evidentemente abbandonata; nessun letto, niente di niente. Dunque non era uscito dall’interno di alcuna stanza, ma dall’esterno della casa. E quando vidi ciò, credo di aver visto l’intero quadro.

‘Poor Arnold Aylmer doubtless slept and perhaps lived upstairs, and came down in his dressing—gown and passed through the red glass door. At the end of the passage, black against the winter daylight, he saw the enemy of his house. He saw a tall bearded man in a broad—brimmed black hat and a large flapping black cloak. He did not see much more in this world. Strake sprang at him, throttling or stabbing him; we cannot be sure till the inquest. Then Strake, standing in the narrow passage between the hat— stand and the old sideboard, and looking down in triumph on the last of his foes heard something he had not expected. He heard footsteps in the parlour beyond. It was myself entering by the french windows.

‘His masquerade was a miracle of promptitude. It involved not only a disguise but a romance—an impromptu romance. He took off his big black hat and cloak and put on the dead man’s dressing—gown. Then he did a rather grisly thing; at least a thing that affects my fancy as more grisly than the rest. He hung the corpse like a coat on one of the hat pegs. He draped it in his own long cloak, and found it hung well below the heels; he covered the head entirely with his own wide hat. It was the only possible way of hiding it in that little passage with the locked door; but it was really a very clever one. I myself walked past the hat—stand once without knowing it was anything but a hat—stand. I think that unconsciousness of mine will always give me a shiver.

‘He might perhaps have left it at that; but I might have discovered the corpse at any minute; and, hung where it was, it was a corpse calling for what you might call an explanation. He adopted the bolder stroke of discovering it himself and explaining it himself.

‘Then there dawned on this strange and frightfully fertile mind the conception of a story of substitution; the reversal of the parts. He had already assumed the part of Arnold Aylmer. Why should not his dead enemy assume the part of John Strake? There must have been something in that topsy—turyydom to take the fancy of that darkly fanciful man. It was like some frightful fancy—dress ball to which the two mortal enemies were to go dressed up as each other. Only, the fancy—dress ball was to be a dance of death: and one of the dancers would be dead. That is why I can imagine that man putting it in his own mind, and I can imagine him smiling.’

Father Brown was gazing into vacancy with his large grey eyes, which, when not blurred by his trick of blinking, were the one notable thing in his face. He went on speaking simply and seriously: ‘All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion. Now this man had in him a very noble power to be perverted; the power of telling stories. He was a great novelist; only he had twisted his fictive power to practical and to evil ends; to deceiving men with false fact instead of with true fiction. It began with his deceiving old Aylmer with elaborate excuses and ingeniously detailed lies; but even that may have been, at the beginning, little more than the tall stories and tarradiddles of the child who may say equally he has seen the King of England or the King of the Fairies. It grew strong in him through the vice that perpetuates all vices, pride; he grew more and more vain of his promptitude in producing stories of his originality, and subtlety in developing them. That is what the young Aylmers meant by saying that he could always cast a spell over their father; and it was true. It was the sort of spell that the storyteller cast over the tyrant in the Arabian Nights. And to the last he walked the world with the pride of a poet, and with the false yet unfathomable courage of a great liar. He could always produce more Arabian Nights if ever his neck was in danger. And today his neck was in danger.

‘But I am sure, as I say, that he enjoyed it as a fantasy as well as a conspiracy. He set about the task of telling the true story the wrong way round: of treating the dead man as living and the live man as dead. He had already got into Aylmer’s dressing—gown; he proceeded to get into Aylmer’s body and soul. He looked at the corpse as if it were his own corpse lying cold in the snow. Then he spread—eagled it in that strange fashion to suggest the sweeping descent of a bird of prey, and decked it out not only in his own dark and flying garments but in a whole dark fairy— tale about the black bird that could only fall by the silver bullet. I do not know whether it was the silver glittering on the sideboard or the snow shining beyond the door that suggested to his intensely artistic temperament the theme of white magic and the white metal used against magicians. But whatever its origin, he made it his own like a poet; and did it very promptly, like a practical man. He completed the exchange and reversal of parts by flinging the corpse out on to the snow as the corpse of Strake. He did his best to work up a creepy conception of Strake as something hovering in the air everywhere, a harpy with wings of speed and claws of death; to explain the absence of footprints and other things. For one piece of artistic impudence I hugely admire him. He actually turned one of the contradictions in his case into an argument for it; and said that the man’s cloak being too long for him proved that he never walked on the ground like an ordinary mortal. But he looked at me very hard while he said that; and something told me that he was at that moment trying a very big bluff.’

Dr Boyne looked thoughtful. ‘Had you discovered the truth by then?’ he asked. ‘There is something very queer and close to the nerves, I think, about notions affecting identity. I don’t know whether it would be more weird to get a guess like that swiftly or slowly. I wonder when you suspected and when you were sure.’

‘I think I really suspected when I telephoned to you,’ replied his friend. ‘And it was nothing more than the red light from the closed door brightening and darkening on the carpet. It looked like a splash of blood that grew vivid as it cried for vengeance. Why should it change like that? I knew the sun had not come out; it could only be because the second door behind it had been opened and shut on the garden. But if he had gone out and seen his enemy then, he would have raised the alarm then; and it was some time afterwards that the fracas occurred. I began to feel he had gone out to do something … to prepare something … but as to when I was certain, that is a different matter. I knew that right at the end he was trying to hypnotize me, to master me by the black art of eyes like talismans and a voice like an incantation. That’s what he used to do with old Aylmer, no doubt. But it wasn’t only the way he said it, it was what he said. It was the religion and philosophy of it.’

‘I’m afraid I’m a practical man,’ said the doctor with gruff humour, ‘and I don’t bother much about religion and philosophy.’

‘You’ll never be a practical man till you do,’ said Father Brown. ‘Look here, doctor; you know me pretty well; I think you know I’m not a bigot. You know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones. But there’s just one little fact I’ve learned simply as a practical man, an entirely practical point, that I’ve picked up by experience, like the tricks of an animal or the trade— mark of a good wine. I’ve scarcely ever met a criminal who philosophized at all, who didn’t philosophize along those lines of orientalism and recurrence and reincarnation, and the wheel of destiny and the serpent biting its own tail. I have found merely in practice that there is a curse on the servants of that serpent; on their belly shall they go and the dust shall they eat; and there was never a blackguard or a profligate born who could not talk that sort of spirituality. It may not be like that in its real religious origins; but here in our working world it is the religion of rascals; and I knew it was a rascal who was speaking.’

‘Why,’ said Boyne, ‘I should have thought that a rascal could pretty well profess any religion he chose.’

‘Yes,’ assented the other; ‘he could profess any religion; that is he could pretend to any religion, if it was all a pretence. If it was mere mechanical hypocrisy and nothing else, no doubt it could be done by a mere mechanical hypocrite. Any sort of mask can be put on any sort of face. Anybody can learn certain phrases or state verbally that he holds certain views. I can go out into the street and state that I am a Wesleyan Methodist or a Sandemanian, though I fear in no very convincing accent. But we are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul. I suppose he could have said he was a Wesleyan Methodist; but he could never be an eloquent Methodist as he can be an eloquent mystic and fatalist. I am talking of the sort of ideal such a man thinks of if he really tries to be idealistic. It was his whole game with me to be as idealistic as possible; and whenever that is attempted by that sort of man, you will generally find it is that sort of ideal. That sort of man may be dripping with gore; but he will always be able to tell you quite sincerely that Buddhism is better than Christianity. Nay, he will tell you quite sincerely that Buddhism is more Christian than Christianity. That alone is enough to throw a hideous and ghastly ray of light on his notion of Christianity.’

‘Upon my soul,’ said the doctor, laughing, ‘I can’t make out whether you’re denouncing or defending him.’

‘It isn’t defending a man to say he is a genius,’ said Father Brown. ‘Far from it. And it is simply a psychological fact that an artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity. Leonardo da Vinci cannot draw as if he couldn’t draw. Even if he tried, it will always be a strong parody of a weak thing. This man would have made something much too fearful and wonderful out of the Wesleyan Methodist.’

When the priest went forth again and set his face homeward, the cold had grown more intense and yet was somehow intoxicating. The trees stood up like silver candelabra of some incredible cold candlemas of purification. It was a piercing cold, like that silver sword of pure pain that once pierced the very he of purity. But it was not a killing cold, save in the sense of seeming to kill all the mortal obstructions to our immortal and immeasurable vitality. The pale green sky of twilight, with one star like the star of Bethlehem, seemed by some strange contradiction to be a cavern of clarity. It was as if there could be a green furnace of cold which wakened all things to life like warmth, and that the deeper they went into those cold crystalline colours the more were they light like winged creatures and clear like coloured glass! It tingled with truth and it divided truth from error with a blade like ice; but all that was left had never felt so much alive. It was as if all joy were a jewel in the heart of an iceberg. The priest hardly understood his own mood as he advanced deeper and, deeper into the green gloaming, drinking deeper and deeper draughts of that virginal vivacity of the air. Some forgotten muddle and morbidity seemed to be left behind, or wiped out as the snow had painted out the footprints of the man of blood. As he shuffled homewards through the snow, he muttered to himself: ‘And yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.’

«Credo di aver sospettato davvero nel momento in cui vi ho telefonato», rispose l’amico. «E non fu nulla di più che la luce rossa proveniente dalla porta chiusa, che si ravvivava e si oscurava sul tappeto. Sembrava una macchia di sangue che si faceva viva a mano a mano che gridava vendetta. Perché avrebbe dovuto mutare a quel modo? Sapevo che il sole non era spuntato; poteva accadere soltanto perché la seconda porta dietro di essa era stata aperta e richiusa sul giardino. Ma se lui fosse uscito e avesse veduto allora il proprio nemico, avrebbe dato l’allarme in quel momento; e fu qualche tempo più tardi che avvenne la zuffa. Cominciai a sentire che era uscito per fare qualcosa… per preparare qualcosa… ma quanto al momento in cui ne fui certo, questa è tutt’altra faccenda. Sapevo che proprio alla fine egli tentava di ipnotizzarmi, di soggiogarmi con l’arte nera di occhi simili a talismani e di una voce simile a un incantesimo. È ciò che soleva fare col vecchio Aylmer, senza dubbio. Ma non era soltanto il modo in cui lo diceva, era ciò che diceva. Era la religione e la filosofia che vi stavano dentro.»

«Temo di essere un uomo pratico», disse il dottore con burbero umorismo, «e non mi curo granché di religione e filosofia.»

«Non sarete mai un uomo pratico finché non lo farete», disse Padre Brown. «Sentite, dottore; voi mi conoscete piuttosto bene; credo che sappiate ch’io non sono un bigotto. Sapete che so bene esservi ogni sorta di gente in tutte le religioni; uomini buoni in quelle cattive e uomini cattivi in quelle buone. Ma c’è un piccolo fatto che ho appreso semplicemente da uomo pratico, un punto interamente pratico, che ho colto per esperienza, come i trucchi di un animale o il marchio di fabbrica di un buon vino. Non ho quasi mai incontrato un criminale che filosofeggiasse, che non filosofeggiasse lungo quelle linee dell’orientalismo, della ricorrenza e della reincarnazione, e della ruota del destino e del serpente che si morde la coda. Ho scoperto, semplicemente in pratica, che v’è una maledizione sopra i servi di quel serpente; sul loro ventre andranno e polvere mangeranno; e non nacque mai furfante o dissoluto che non sapesse discorrere di quella sorta di spiritualità. Può darsi che non sia così nelle sue vere origini religiose; ma qui, nel nostro mondo di ogni giorno, è la religione dei mascalzoni; e io sapevo che a parlare era un mascalzone.»

«Diamine», disse Boyne, «avrei creduto che un mascalzone potesse piuttosto bene professare qualunque religione gli piacesse.»

«Sì», convenne l’altro; «poteva professare qualunque religione; vale a dire, poteva fingere qualunque religione, se tutto era finzione. Se si fosse trattato di mera ipocrisia meccanica e nient’altro, senza dubbio avrebbe potuto compierlo un mero ipocrita meccanico. Ogni sorta di maschera può essere posta su ogni sorta di volto. Chiunque può imparare certe frasi, o dichiarare a parole di sostenere certe opinioni. Posso uscire per strada e dichiarare di essere un metodista wesleyano o un sandemaniano, benché temo con accento poco convincente. Ma noi stiamo parlando di un artista; e per il godimento dell’artista la maschera deve, in una certa misura, essere modellata sul volto. Ciò che egli plasma al di fuori di sé deve corrispondere a qualcosa dentro di sé; egli può trarre i propri effetti soltanto da alcune delle materie della sua anima. Suppongo che avrebbe potuto dire d’essere un metodista wesleyano; ma non avrebbe mai potuto essere un eloquente metodista come sa essere un eloquente mistico e fatalista. Parlo di quella sorta d’ideale a cui un tale uomo pensa se davvero cerca d’essere idealista. Fu tutto il suo gioco, con me, essere quanto più idealista possibile; e ogniqualvolta ciò viene tentato da un uomo di quella specie, troverete di solito che è quella la specie d’ideale. Un uomo di quella specie può grondare di sangue; ma sarà sempre in grado di dirvi con tutta sincerità che il buddismo è migliore del cristianesimo. Anzi, vi dirà con tutta sincerità che il buddismo è più cristiano del cristianesimo. Questo solo basta a gettare un raggio orrendo e spettrale di luce sulla sua idea del cristianesimo.»

«Sull’anima mia», disse il dottore ridendo, «non riesco a capire se lo stiate denunciando o difendendo.»

«Non è difendere un uomo dire che è un genio», disse Padre Brown. «Tutt’altro. Ed è semplicemente un fatto psicologico che un artista tradisce se stesso con una qualche sorta di sincerità. Leonardo da Vinci non può disegnare come se non sapesse disegnare. Anche se ci provasse, ne verrebbe sempre una vigorosa parodia di una cosa debole. Quest’uomo avrebbe ricavato qualcosa di troppo terribile e meraviglioso dal metodista wesleyano.»

Quando il prete si rimise in cammino e volse il viso verso casa, il freddo si era fatto più intenso e pure, in qualche modo, inebriante. Gli alberi si ergevano come candelabri d’argento di qualche incredibile, gelida candelora di purificazione. Era un freddo pungente, come quella spada d’argento di puro dolore che una volta trafisse il cuore stesso della purezza. Ma non era un freddo che uccide, se non nel senso di parer voler uccidere tutti gli ostacoli mortali alla nostra immortale e incommensurabile vitalità. Il cielo verde pallido del crepuscolo, con una stella simile alla stella di Betlemme, sembrava, per qualche strana contraddizione, essere una caverna di limpidezza. Era come se potesse esistere una verde fornace di freddo che destasse tutte le cose alla vita come fa il calore, e come se, quanto più addentro esse penetravano in quei freddi colori cristallini, tanto più si facessero lievi come creature alate e limpide come vetro colorato! Vibrava di verità e separava la verità dall’errore con una lama di ghiaccio; ma tutto ciò che rimaneva non si era mai sentito tanto vivo. Era come se ogni gioia fosse un gioiello nel cuore di un ghiacciaio. Il prete a stento comprendeva il proprio stato d’animo mentre si inoltrava sempre più addentro nel verde imbrunire, bevendo sorsi sempre più profondi di quella verginale vivacità dell’aria. Qualche dimenticato groviglio e morbosità pareva restare indietro, o cancellato come la neve aveva cancellato le orme dell’uomo di sangue. Mentre trascinava i passi verso casa attraverso la neve, mormorava tra sé: «E tuttavia ha proprio ragione quanto all’esistere di una magia bianca, purché sappia dove cercarla.»

SEVEN: The Doom of the Darnaways

Two landscape—painters stood looking at one landscape, which was also a seascape, and both were curiously impressed by it, though their impressions were not exactly the same. To one of them, who was a rising artist from London, it was new as well as strange. To the other, who was a local artist but with something more than a local celebrity, it was better known; but perhaps all the more strange for what he knew of it.

In terms of tone and form, as these men saw it, it was a stretch of sands against a stretch of sunset, the whole scene lying in strips of sombre colour, dead green and bronze and brown and a drab that was not merely dull but in that gloaming in some way more mysterious than gold. All that broke these level lines was a long building which ran out from the fields into the sands of the sea, so that its fringe of dreary weeds and rushes seemed almost to meet the seaweed. But its most singular feature was that the upper part of it had the ragged outlines of a ruin, pierced by so many wide windows and large rents as to be a mere dark skeleton against the dying light; while the lower bulk of the building had hardly any windows at all, most of them being blind and bricked up and their outlines only faintly traceable in the twilight. But one window at least was still a window; and it seemed strangest of all that it showed a light.

‘Who on earth can live in that old shell?’ exclaimed the Londoner, who was a big, bohemian—looking man, young but with a shaggy red beard that made him look older; Chelsea knew him familiarly as Harry Payne.

‘Ghosts, you might suppose,’ replied his friend Martin Wood. ‘Well, the people who live there really are rather like ghosts.’

It was perhaps rather a paradox that the London artist seemed almost bucolic in his boisterous freshness and wonder, while the local artist seemed a more shrewd and experienced person, regarding him with mature and amiable amusement; indeed, the latter was altogether a quieter and more conventional figure, wearing darker clothes and with his square and stolid face clean shaven.

‘It is only a sign of the times, of course,’ he went on,’ or of the passing of old times and old families with them. The last of the great Darnaways live in that house, and not many of the new poor are as poor as they are. They can’t even afford to make their own top—storey habitable; but have to live in the lower rooms of a ruin, like bats and owls. Yet they have family portraits that go back to the Wars of the Roses and the first portrait—painting in England, and very fine some of them are; I happen to know, because they asked for my professional advice in overhauling them. There’s one of them especially, and one of the earliest, but it’s so good that it gives you the creeps.’

‘The whole place gives you the creeps, I should think by the look of it,’ replied Payne.

‘Well,’ said his friend, ‘to tell you the truth, it does.’

The silence that followed was stirred by a faint rustle among the rushes by the moat; and it gave them, rationally enough, a slight nervous start when a dark figure brushed along the bank, moving rapidly and almost like a startled bird. But it was only a man walking briskly with a black bag in his hand: a man with a long sallow face and sharp eyes that glanced at the London stranger in a slightly darkling and suspicious manner.

‘It’s only Dr Barnet,’ said Wood with a sort of relief. ‘Good evening, Doctor. Are you going up to the house? I hope nobody’s ill.’

‘Everybody’s always ill in a place like that,’ growled the doctor; ‘only sometimes they’re too ill to know it. The very air of the place is a blight and a pestilence. I don’t envy the young man from Australia.’

‘And who,’ asked Payne abruptly and rather absently, ‘may the young man from Australia be?’

‘Ah!’ snorted the doctor; ‘hasn’t your friend told you about him? As a matter of fact I believe he is arriving today. Quite a romance in the old style of melodrama: the heir back from the colonies to his ruined castle, all complete even down to an old family compact for his marrying the lady watching in the ivied tower. Queer old stuff, isn’t it? but it really happens sometimes. He’s even got a little money, which is the only bright spot there ever was in this business.’

‘What does Miss Darnaway herself, in her ivied tower, think of the business?’ asked Martin Wood dryly.

‘What she thinks of everything else by this time,’ replied the doctor. ‘They don’t think in this weedy old den of superstitions, they only dream and drift. I think she accepts the family contract and the colonial husband as part of the Doom of the Darnaways, don’t you know. I really think that if he turned out to be a humpbacked Negro with one eye and a homicidal mania, she would only think it added a finishing touch and fitted in with the twilight scenery.’

‘You’re not giving my friend from London a very lively picture of my friends in the country,’ said Wood, laughing. ‘I had intended taking him there to call; no artist ought to miss those Darnaway portraits if he gets the chance. But perhaps I’d better postpone it if they’re in the middle of the Australian invasion.’

‘Oh, do go in and see them, for the Lord’s sake,’ said Dr Barnet warmly. ‘Anything that will brighten their blighted lives will make my task easier. It will need a good many colonial cousins to cheer things up, I should think; and the more the merrier. Come, I’ll take you in myself.’

As they drew nearer to the house it was seen to be isolated like an island in a moat of brackish water which they crossed by a bridge. On the other side spread a fairly wide stony floor or embankment with great cracks across it, in which little tufts of weed and thorn sprouted here and there. This rock platform looked large and bare in the grey twilight, and Payne could hardly have believed that such a corner of space could have contained so much of the soul of a wilderness. This platform only jutted out on one side, like a giant door— step and beyond it was the door; a very low—browed Tudor archway standing open, but dark like a cave.

SETTE: La condanna dei Darnaway

Due paesaggisti stavano contemplando un medesimo paesaggio, che era insieme una veduta di mare, e l’uno e l’altro ne ricevevano una strana impressione, benché le loro impressioni non fossero esattamente le stesse. Per il primo, un artista emergente venuto da Londra, quel luogo era nuovo oltre che singolare. Per il secondo, un artista di provincia ma dotato di una fama che oltrepassava i confini della provincia, era più familiare; e forse tanto più strano proprio per quel che ne sapeva.

Quanto a tono e forma, così come quei due lo vedevano, era una distesa di sabbie contro una distesa di tramonto, l’intera scena giacendo in strisce di colore cupo, verde spento e bronzo e bruno e un grigiastro che non era soltanto smorto, ma che in quel crepuscolo appariva in qualche modo più misterioso dell’oro. Tutto ciò che rompeva quelle linee piatte era un lungo edificio che si protendeva dai campi fin dentro le sabbie del mare, sicché la sua frangia di malinconiche erbe e di giunchi pareva quasi congiungersi con le alghe. Ma il suo tratto più singolare era che la parte superiore aveva i contorni frastagliati di una rovina, trafitta da tante ampie finestre e da così larghi squarci da ridursi a un mero scheletro scuro contro la luce morente; mentre la mole inferiore dell’edificio non aveva quasi finestra alcuna, essendo la maggior parte di esse cieche e murate, e i loro profili appena rintracciabili nel crepuscolo. Ma almeno una finestra era ancora una finestra; e la cosa più strana di tutte pareva questa: che essa mostrava un lume.

«Chi diamine può abitare in quel vecchio guscio?» esclamò il londinese, un uomo grande, dall’aria bohémien, giovane ma con una ispida barba rossa che lo faceva sembrare più anziano; a Chelsea lo conoscevano confidenzialmente come Harry Payne.

«Fantasmi, si direbbe» replicò il suo amico Martin Wood. «Ecco, la gente che ci vive somiglia davvero un po’ ai fantasmi.»

Era forse un certo paradosso che l’artista di Londra apparisse quasi bucolico nella sua fresca e chiassosa esuberanza e meraviglia, mentre l’artista del luogo sembrasse una persona più accorta ed esperta, e lo osservasse con un divertimento maturo e benevolo; il secondo, in verità, era in tutto una figura più quieta e più convenzionale, vestito di panni più scuri e col volto squadrato e placido perfettamente rasato.

«È solo un segno dei tempi, si capisce» proseguì, «o del trapasso dei vecchi tempi e, con essi, delle vecchie famiglie. Gli ultimi dei grandi Darnaway vivono in quella casa, e non molti fra i nuovi poveri sono poveri come loro. Non possono nemmeno permettersi di rendere abitabile il loro ultimo piano; e devono vivere nelle stanze inferiori di una rovina, come pipistrelli e civette. Eppure posseggono ritratti di famiglia che risalgono alla Guerra delle Due Rose e alla prima ritrattistica in Inghilterra, e alcuni di essi sono davvero bellissimi; lo so per caso, perché mi hanno chiesto il mio parere professionale per restaurarli. Ce n’è uno in particolare, e fra i più antichi, ma è così bello che ti fa venire i brividi.»

«L’intero posto fa venire i brividi, direi, a giudicare dall’aspetto» replicò Payne.

«Beh» disse l’amico, «a dirti la verità, è proprio così.»

Il silenzio che seguì fu turbato da un lieve fruscio tra i giunchi presso il fossato; e diede loro, con ragione, un piccolo trasalimento nervoso, quando una figura scura scivolò lungo l’argine, muovendosi rapida e quasi come un uccello spaventato. Ma era soltanto un uomo che camminava di buon passo con una borsa nera in mano: un uomo dal viso lungo e giallastro e dagli occhi acuti, che lanciò allo straniero di Londra uno sguardo un poco torvo e sospettoso.

«È solo il dottor Barnet» disse Wood con una sorta di sollievo. «Buonasera, dottore. Salite alla casa? Spero che nessuno stia male.»

«Tutti stanno sempre male in un posto simile» borbottò il dottore; «solo che a volte stanno troppo male per accorgersene. La stessa aria di quel luogo è una piaga e una pestilenza. Non invidio il giovanotto venuto dall’Australia.»

«E chi» chiese Payne d’un tratto e piuttosto distrattamente, «sarebbe mai il giovanotto venuto dall’Australia?»

«Ah!» sbuffò il dottore; «il vostro amico non vi ha parlato di lui? A dire il vero credo che arrivi oggi. Un vero romanzo alla vecchia maniera del melodramma: l’erede che torna dalle colonie al suo castello in rovina, il tutto completo persino di un antico patto familiare che lo destina a sposare la dama in vedetta nella torre coperta d’edera. Roba vecchia e curiosa, non è vero? eppure a volte accade davvero. Ha perfino un po’ di denaro, che è l’unico punto luminoso mai apparso in tutta questa faccenda.»

«E che ne pensa la stessa signorina Darnaway, nella sua torre coperta d’edera, di tutta la faccenda?» chiese Martin Wood asciutto.

«Quel che ormai pensa di ogni altra cosa» rispose il dottore. «In quella vecchia tana infestata di superstizioni non si pensa, si sogna soltanto e si va alla deriva. Credo che accetti il patto di famiglia e il marito coloniale come parte della Condanna dei Darnaway, capite. Penso davvero che, se lui si rivelasse un negro gobbo con un occhio solo e una mania omicida, lei giudicherebbe soltanto che vi si aggiunge un tocco finale e che ben si accorda con lo scenario crepuscolare.»

«Non state offrendo al mio amico di Londra un ritratto molto allegro dei miei amici di campagna» disse Wood, ridendo. «Avevo intenzione di condurlo là in visita; nessun artista dovrebbe lasciarsi sfuggire quei ritratti dei Darnaway, se gliene capita l’occasione. Ma forse è meglio che rimandi, se sono in piena invasione australiana.»

«Oh, andate pure a vederli, per l’amor del cielo» disse il dottor Barnet con calore. «Qualsiasi cosa possa rischiarare le loro vite tenebrose renderà più facile il mio compito. Ci vorranno parecchi cugini coloniali per rallegrare un poco le cose, immagino; e più siamo, meglio è. Venite, vi accompagno io stesso.»

Man mano che si avvicinavano alla casa, la si vide isolata come un’isola in un fossato di acqua salmastra, che essi attraversarono su un ponte. Dall’altra parte si stendeva una piattaforma di pietra o terrapieno assai ampio, solcato da grandi crepe, in cui qua e là spuntavano ciuffetti di erbacce e di spine. Quella terrazza di roccia appariva vasta e nuda nel grigio crepuscolo, e Payne stentava a credere che un simile angolo di spazio potesse racchiudere tanta anima di solitudine selvaggia. La piattaforma si protendeva soltanto da un lato, come un gigantesco gradino di soglia, e oltre di essa c’era la porta; un arco Tudor dalla fronte assai bassa, spalancato, ma buio come una caverna.

When the brisk doctor led them inside without ceremony, Payne had, as it were, another shock of depression. He could have expected to find himself mounting to a very ruinous tower, by very narrow winding staircases; but in this case the first steps into the house were actually steps downwards. They went down several short and broken stairways into large twilit rooms which but for their lines of dark pictures and dusty bookshelves, might have been the traditional dungeons beneath the castle moat. Here and there a candle in an old candlestick lit up some dusty accidental detail of a dead elegance; but the visitor was not so much impressed or depressed by this artificial light as by the one pale gleam of natural light. As he passed down the long room he saw the only window in that wall— a curious low oval window of a late—seventeenth—century fashion. But the strange thing about it was that it did not look out directly on any space of sky but only on a reflection of sky; a pale strip of daylight merely mirrored in the moat, under the hanging shadow of the bank. Payne had a memory of the Lady of Shallot who never saw the world outside except in a mirror. The lady of this Shallot not only in some sense saw the world in a mirror, but even saw the world upside—down.

‘It’s as if the house of Darnaway were falling literally as well as metaphorically,’ said Wood in a low voice; ‘as if it were sinking slowly into a swamp or a quicksand, until the sea goes over it like a green roof.’

Even the sturdy Dr Barnet started a little at the silent approach of the figure that came to receive them. Indeed, the room was so silent that they were all startled to realize that it was not empty. There were three people in it when they entered: three dim figures motionless in the dim room; all three dressed in black and looking like dark shadows. As the foremost figure drew nearer the grey light from the window, he showed a face that looked almost as grey as its frame of hair. This was old Vine, the steward, long left in loco parentis since the death of that eccentric parent, the last Lord Darnaway. He would have been a handsome old man if he had had no teeth. As it was, he had one which showed every now and then and gave him a rather sinister appearance. He received the doctor and his friends with a fine courtesy and escorted them to where the other two figures in black were seated. One of them seemed to Payne to give another appropriate touch of gloomy antiquity to the castle by the mere fact of being a Roman Catholic priest, who might have come out of a priest’s hole in the dark old days. Payne could imagine him muttering prayers or telling beads, or tolling bells or doing a number of indistinct and melancholy things in that melancholy place. Just then he might be supposed to have been giving religious consolation to the lady; but it could hardly be supposed that the consolation was very consoling, or at any rate that it was very cheering. For the rest, the priest was personally insignificant enough, with plain and rather expressionless features; but the lady was a very different matter. Her face was very far from being plain or insignificant; it stood out from the darkness of her dress and hair and background with a pallor that was almost awful, but a beauty that was almost awfully alive. Payne looked at it as long as he dared; and he was to look at it a good deal longer before he died.

Wood merely exchanged with his friends such pleasant and polite phrases as would lead up to his purpose of revisiting the portraits. He apologized for calling on the day which he heard was to be one of family welcome; but he was soon convinced that the family was rather mildly relieved to have visitors to distract them or break the shock. He did not hesitate, therefore, to lead Payne through the central reception—room into the library beyond, where hung the portrait, for there was one which he was especially bent on showing, not only as a picture but almost as a puzzle. The little priest trudged along with them; he seemed to know something about old pictures as well as about old prayers.

‘I’m rather proud of having spotted this,’ said Wood.’ I believe it’s a Holbein. If it isn’t, there was somebody living in Holbein’s time who was as great as Holbein.’

It was a portrait in the hard but sincere and living fashion of the period, representing a man clad in black trimmed with gold and fur, with a heavy, full, rather pale face but watchful eyes.

‘What a pity art couldn’t have stopped for ever at just that transition stage,’ cried Wood, ‘and never transitioned any more. Don’t you see it’s just realistic enough to be real? Don’t you see the face speaks all the more because it stands out from a rather stiffer framework of less essential things? And the eyes are even more real than the face. On my soul, I think the eyes are too real for the face! It’s just as if those sly, quick eyeballs were protruding out of a great pale mask.’

‘The stiffness extends to the figure a little, I think,’ said Payne. ‘They hadn’t quite mastered anatomy when medievalism ended, at least in the north. That left leg looks to me a good deal out of drawing.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ replied Wood quietly. ‘Those fellows who painted just when realism began to be done, and before it began to be overdone, were often more realistic than we think. They put real details of portraiture into things that are thought merely conventional. You might say this fellow’s eyebrows or eye— sockets are a little lop—sided; but I bet if you knew him you’d find that one of his eyebrows did really stick up more than the other. And I shouldn’t wonder if he was lame or something, and that black leg was meant to be crooked.’

‘What an old devil he looks!’ burst out Payne suddenly. ‘I trust his reverence will excuse my language.’

Quando il dottore, sbrigativo, li condusse dentro senza cerimonie, Payne provò, per così dire, un altro soprassalto di sconforto. Si sarebbe aspettato di doversi arrampicare su una torre in rovina, per stretti scaloni a chiocciola; ma in questo caso i primi passi dentro la casa furono invece passi verso il basso. Scesero per parecchie brevi e sconnesse rampe di scale fino a vaste stanze immerse nella penombra, che, se non fosse stato per le loro file di quadri scuri e per le scaffalature polverose, avrebbero potuto essere le tradizionali segrete al di sotto del fossato del castello. Qua e là una candela in un vecchio candeliere rischiarava qualche polveroso, casuale dettaglio di una eleganza ormai morta; ma il visitatore non fu tanto colpito o depresso da quella luce artificiale quanto dall’unico pallido barlume di luce naturale. Percorrendo la lunga sala, egli scorse l’unica finestra in quella parete: una curiosa e bassa finestra ovale, di foggia tardo-seicentesca. Ma la cosa strana era che essa non dava direttamente su alcun tratto di cielo, bensì soltanto su un riflesso di cielo; una pallida striscia di luce diurna semplicemente rispecchiata nel fossato, sotto l’ombra incombente della sponda. Payne ebbe un ricordo della Dama di Shallot, che non vide mai il mondo esterno se non in uno specchio. La dama di questa Shallot non solo, in un certo senso, vedeva il mondo in uno specchio, ma addirittura lo vedeva capovolto.

«È come se la casa dei Darnaway stesse cadendo davvero, e non soltanto in senso metaforico», disse Wood a bassa voce; «come se stesse sprofondando lentamente in una palude o in una sabbia mobile, finché il mare non le passi sopra come un tetto verde».

Perfino il robusto dottor Barnet trasalì un poco all’avvicinarsi silenzioso della figura che venne a riceverli. Anzi, la stanza era così silenziosa che tutti sussultarono nell’accorgersi che non era vuota. C’erano tre persone, quando entrarono: tre figure indistinte, immobili nella stanza in penombra; tutte e tre vestite di nero e simili a ombre scure. Man mano che la figura più avanzata si accostava alla grigia luce della finestra, mostrava un volto che appariva quasi grigio quanto la cornice dei suoi capelli. Costui era il vecchio Vine, l’amministratore, rimasto a lungo in loco parentis fin dalla morte di quel padre eccentrico, l’ultimo Lord Darnaway. Sarebbe stato un bell’uomo, da vecchio, se non avesse avuto denti. Così com’era, gliene restava uno, che di quando in quando si mostrava e gli conferiva un aspetto piuttosto sinistro. Egli accolse il dottore e i suoi amici con squisita cortesia e li accompagnò là dove sedevano le altre due figure vestite di nero. Una di esse parve a Payne aggiungere un altro tocco appropriato di cupa antichità al castello, per il solo fatto di essere un prete cattolico romano, che avrebbe potuto uscire da un nascondiglio per preti in quei tenebrosi giorni antichi. Payne poteva immaginarlo mentre borbottava preghiere o sgranava il rosario, o suonava a morto le campane o compiva un gran numero di indistinte e malinconiche cose in quel luogo malinconico. Proprio in quel momento si sarebbe potuto supporre che stesse porgendo conforto religioso alla dama; ma difficilmente si sarebbe potuto supporre che il conforto fosse molto confortante, o comunque molto rallegrante. Del resto, il prete era di per sé abbastanza insignificante, con lineamenti dimessi e piuttosto inespressivi; ma la dama era tutt’altra faccenda. Il suo volto era ben lungi dall’essere dimesso o insignificante; spiccava dall’oscurità del suo abito, dei suoi capelli e dello sfondo con un pallore quasi terribile, ma di una bellezza quasi terribilmente viva. Payne lo contemplò quanto a lungo osò; ed era destinato a contemplarlo assai più a lungo prima di morire.

Wood si limitò a scambiare con i suoi ospiti quelle frasi cortesi e garbate che avrebbero condotto al suo scopo di tornare a osservare i ritratti. Si scusò di aver fatto visita nel giorno che aveva saputo dover essere di accoglienza familiare; ma si convinse ben presto che la famiglia era anzi lievemente sollevata di avere visitatori che la distraessero o attenuassero lo shock. Non esitò, dunque, a guidare Payne attraverso il salone centrale di ricevimento fino alla biblioteca al di là, dove pendeva il ritratto, giacché ce n’era uno che egli era particolarmente intenzionato a mostrare, non solo come dipinto ma quasi come un enigma. Il piccolo prete arrancava con loro; sembrava saperne bene di vecchi quadri non meno che di vecchie preghiere.

«Vado piuttosto fiero di aver individuato questo», disse Wood. «Credo sia un Holbein. Se non lo è, allora c’era qualcuno, ai tempi di Holbein, che era grande quanto Holbein.»

Era un ritratto nella maniera dura ma sincera e viva del periodo, che raffigurava un uomo vestito di nero, guarnito d’oro e di pelliccia, dal volto pesante, pieno, piuttosto pallido, ma dagli occhi vigili.

«Che peccato che l’arte non abbia potuto fermarsi per sempre proprio a quello stadio di transizione», esclamò Wood, «e non transitare mai più oltre. Non vedete che è realistico quanto basta per essere reale? Non vedete che il volto parla tanto più proprio perché si staglia da una impalcatura piuttosto più rigida di cose meno essenziali? E gli occhi sono ancora più reali del volto. Sull’anima mia, credo che gli occhi siano troppo reali per il volto! È proprio come se quei bulbi oculari sornioni e guizzanti sporgessero da una grande maschera pallida.»

«La rigidità si estende un poco anche alla figura, mi pare», disse Payne. «Non avevano ancora del tutto padroneggiato l’anatomia, quando finì il medioevo, almeno nel nord. Quella gamba sinistra mi sembra parecchio sbagliata nel disegno.»

«Non ne sono così sicuro», replicò Wood pacatamente. «Quei tali che dipingevano proprio quando il realismo cominciava a farsi, e prima che cominciasse a essere esagerato, erano spesso più realistici di quanto pensiamo. Mettevano dettagli veri, da ritrattista, in cose che si crederebbero puramente convenzionali. Potreste dire che le sopracciglia o le orbite di costui sono un po’ storte; ma scommetto che, se lo aveste conosciuto, avreste scoperto che uno dei suoi sopraccigli si rizzava davvero più dell’altro. E non mi stupirei se fosse stato zoppo o qualcosa del genere, e se quella gamba nera fosse stata intesa storta.»

«Che vecchio demonio, all’aspetto!», sbottò all’improvviso Payne. «Confido che sua reverenza vorrà scusare il mio linguaggio.»

‘I believe in the devil, thank you,’ said the priest with an inscrutable face. ‘Curiously enough there was a legend that the devil was lame.’

‘I say,’ protested Payne, ‘you can’t really mean that he was the devil; but who the devil was he?’

‘He was the Lord Darnaway under Henry VII and Henry VIII,’ replied his companion. ‘But there are curious legends about him, too; one of them is referred to in that inscription round the frame, and further developed in some notes left by somebody in a book I found here. They are both rather curious reading.’

Payne leaned forward, craning his head so as to follow the archaic inscription round the frame. Leaving out the antiquated lettering and spelling, it seemed to be a sort of rhyme running somewhat thus:

In the seventh heir I shall return: In the seventh hour I shall depart: None in that hour shall hold my hand: And woe to her that holds my heart.

‘It sounds creepy somehow,’ said Payne, ‘but that may be partly because I don’t understand a word of it.’

‘It’s pretty creepy even when you do,’ said Wood in a low voice. ‘The record made at a later date, in the old book I found, is all about how this beauty deliberately killed himself in such a way that his wife was executed for his murder. Another note commemorates a later tragedy, seven successions later— under the Georges—in which another Darnaway committed suicide, having first thoughtfully left poison in his wife’s wine. It’s said that both suicides took place at seven in the evening. I suppose the inference is that he does really return with every seventh inheritor and makes things unpleasant, as the rhyme suggests, for any lady unwise enough to marry him.’

‘On that argument,’ replied Payne, ‘it would be a trifle uncomfortable for the next seventh gentleman.’

Wood’s voice was lower still as he said: ‘The new heir will be the seventh.’

Harry Payne suddenly heaved up his great chest and shoulders like a man flinging off a burden.

‘What crazy stuff are we all talking?’ he cried. ‘We’re all educated men in an enlightened age, I suppose. Before I came into this damned dank atmosphere I’d never have believed I should be talking of such things, except to laugh at them.’

‘You are right,’ said Wood. ‘If you lived long enough in this underground palace you’d begin to feel differently about things. I’ve begun to feel very curiously about that picture, having had so much to do with handling and hanging it. It sometimes seems to me that the painted face is more alive than the dead faces of the people living here; that it is a sort of talisman or magnet: that it commands the elements and draws out the destinies of men and things. I suppose you would call it very fanciful.’

‘What is that noise?’ cried Payne suddenly.

They all listened, and there seemed to be no noise except the dull boom of the distant sea; then they began to have the sense of something mingling with it; something like a voice calling through the sound of the surf, dulled by it at first, but coming nearer and nearer. The next moment they were certain: someone was shouting outside in the dusk.

Payne turned to the low window behind him and bent to look out. It was the window from which nothing could be seen except the moat with its reflection of bank and sky. But that inverted vision was not the same that he had seen before. From the hanging shadow of the bank in the water depended two dark shadows reflected from the feet and legs of a figure standing above upon the bank. Through that limited aperture they could see nothing but the two legs black against the reflection of a pale and livid sunset. But somehow that very fact of the head being invisible, as if in the clouds, gave something dreadful to the sound that followed; the voice of a man crying aloud what they could not properly hear or understand. Payne especially was peering out of the little window with an altered face, and he spoke with an altered voice:

‘How queerly he’s standing!’

‘No, no,’ said Wood, in a sort of soothing whisper. ‘Things often look like that in reflection. It’s the wavering of the water that makes you think that.’

‘Think what?’ asked the priest shortly.

‘That his left leg is crooked,’ said Wood.

Payne had thought of the oval window as a sort of mystical mirror; and it seemed to him that there were in it other inscrutable images of doom. There was something else beside the figure that he did not understand; three thinner legs showing in dark lines against the light, as if some monstrous three—legged spider or bird were standing beside the stranger. Then he had the less crazy thought of a tripod like that of the heathen oracles; and the next moment the thing had vanished and the legs of the human figure passed out of the picture.

He turned to meet the pale face of old Vine, the steward, with his mouth open, eager to speak, and his single tooth showing. ‘He has come,’ he said. ‘The boat arrived from Australia this morning.’

Even as they went back out of the library into the central salon they heard the footsteps of the newcomer clattering down the entrance steps, with various items of light luggage trailed behind him. When Payne saw one of them, he laughed with a reaction of relief. His tripod was nothing but the telescopic legs of a portable camera, easily packed and unpacked; and the man who was carrying it seemed so far to take on equally solid and normal qualities. He was dressed in dark clothes, but of a careless and holiday sort; his shirt was of grey flannel, and his boots echoed uncompromisingly enough in those still chambers. As he strode forward to greet his new circle his stride had scarcely more than the suggestion of a limp. But Payne and his companions were looking at his face, and could scarcely take their eyes from it.

He evidently felt there was something curious and uncomfortable about his reception; but they could have sworn that he did not himself know the cause of it. The lady, supposed to be in some sense already betrothed to him, was certainly beautiful enough to attract him; but she evidently also frightened him. The old steward brought him a sort of feudal homage, yet treated him as if he were the family ghost. The priest still looked at him with a face which was quite indecipherable, and therefore perhaps all the more unnerving. A new sort of irony, more like the Greek irony, began to pass over Payne’s mind. He had dreamed of the stranger as a devil, but it seemed almost worse that he was an unconscious destiny. He seemed to march towards crime with the monstrous innocence of Oedipus. He had approached the family mansion in so blindly buoyant a spirit as to have set up his camera to photograph his first sight of it; and even the camera had taken on the semblance of the tripod of a tragic pythoness.

«Io credo nel diavolo, grazie tante» disse il prete con volto imperscrutabile. «E, cosa abbastanza curiosa, esisteva una leggenda secondo cui il diavolo era zoppo.»

«Insomma» protestò Payne «non vorrete mica dire sul serio che era il diavolo; ma chi diavolo era, allora?»

«Fu il lord Darnaway sotto Enrico VII ed Enrico VIII» rispose il compagno. «Ma anche su di lui corrono leggende curiose; una è richiamata da quell’iscrizione che gira attorno alla cornice, e ulteriormente sviluppata in certe annotazioni lasciate da qualcuno in un libro che ho trovato qui. Sono entrambe letture piuttosto singolari.»

Payne si sporse in avanti, allungando il collo per seguire l’arcaica iscrizione che correva attorno alla cornice. Tralasciando i caratteri e l’ortografia antiquati, pareva una sorta di filastrocca in rima che suonava all’incirca così:

Nel settimo erede farò ritorno: nella settima ora me ne andrò via: nessuno in quell’ora mi terrà la mano: e guai a colei che mi tiene il cuore.

«In qualche modo mette i brividi» disse Payne «ma sarà anche perché non ne capisco una parola.»

«Mette i brividi anche quando la si capisce» disse Wood a voce bassa. «Il resoconto redatto in epoca posteriore, nel vecchio libro che ho trovato, racconta per filo e per segno come questo bell’uomo si tolse deliberatamente la vita in modo tale che sua moglie fu giustiziata per il suo omicidio. Un’altra annotazione commemora una tragedia successiva, sette successioni più tardi — sotto i Giorgi — in cui un altro Darnaway si suicidò, non prima di aver premurosamente lasciato del veleno nel vino della moglie. Si dice che entrambi i suicidi avvennero alle sette di sera. Suppongo se ne debba dedurre che egli ritorni davvero a ogni settimo erede e renda la vita spiacevole, come suggerisce la filastrocca, a qualsiasi dama tanto imprudente da sposarlo.»

«A rigor di questo ragionamento» replicò Payne «sarebbe un tantino scomodo per il prossimo settimo gentiluomo.»

La voce di Wood si fece ancora più bassa mentre diceva: «Il nuovo erede sarà il settimo.»

Harry Payne d’un tratto sollevò l’ampio petto e le spalle come chi si scrolla di dosso un fardello.

«Ma che discorsi assurdi stiamo facendo?» esclamò. «Siamo tutti uomini istruiti in un’epoca illuminata, mi pare. Prima di entrare in questa maledetta atmosfera umida non avrei mai creduto che mi sarei ritrovato a parlare di simili cose, se non per riderne.»

«Avete ragione» disse Wood. «Se viveste abbastanza a lungo in questo palazzo sotterraneo, comincereste a sentire le cose in modo diverso. Io ho cominciato a nutrire sensazioni assai singolari riguardo a quel quadro, avendo avuto tanto a che fare col maneggiarlo e appenderlo. A volte mi pare che il volto dipinto sia più vivo dei volti spenti di coloro che abitano qui; che sia una sorta di talismano o di calamita: che comandi gli elementi e attiri a sé i destini degli uomini e delle cose. Suppongo che lo definireste un’idea molto fantasiosa.»

«Che cos’è quel rumore?» esclamò Payne all’improvviso.

Tesero tutti l’orecchio, e non parve esserci alcun rumore se non il sordo rombo del mare lontano; poi cominciarono ad avvertire il senso di qualcosa che vi si mescolava; qualcosa come una voce che chiamava attraverso il frastuono della risacca, dapprima da esso attutita, ma che si faceva sempre più vicina. Un istante dopo ne furono certi: qualcuno gridava fuori, nell’oscurità del crepuscolo.

Payne si volse verso la bassa finestra alle sue spalle e si chinò a guardar fuori. Era la finestra dalla quale nulla si poteva scorgere se non il fossato, con il suo riflesso di riva e di cielo. Ma quella visione capovolta non era la medesima che aveva veduto prima. Dall’ombra sospesa della riva, nell’acqua, pendevano due ombre scure riflesse dai piedi e dalle gambe di una figura che stava ritta là sopra, sulla riva. Attraverso quella feritoia angusta non potevano vedere altro che le due gambe nere contro il riflesso di un tramonto pallido e livido. Ma in qualche modo proprio il fatto che il capo fosse invisibile, come tra le nubi, conferiva qualcosa di terribile al suono che seguì: la voce di un uomo che gridava a gran voce ciò che essi non riuscivano a udire né a comprendere come si deve. Payne in particolare scrutava fuori dalla piccola finestra con volto mutato, e parlò con voce mutata:

«Come sta ritto in modo strano!»

«No, no» disse Wood, in una sorta di sussurro rassicurante. «Le cose spesso appaiono così nei riflessi. È l’ondeggiare dell’acqua che ve lo fa pensare.»

«Pensare cosa?» chiese il prete secco.

«Che la sua gamba sinistra sia storta» disse Wood.

Payne aveva immaginato la finestra ovale come una sorta di specchio mistico; e gli parve che vi fossero, dentro, altre imperscrutabili immagini di sventura. C’era qualcos’altro, accanto alla figura, che egli non comprendeva; tre gambe più sottili che si stagliavano in linee scure contro la luce, come se un mostruoso ragno o uccello a tre zampe stesse in piedi accanto allo straniero. Poi ebbe il pensiero meno folle di un tripode come quello degli oracoli pagani; e l’istante dopo la cosa era svanita e le gambe della figura umana uscivano dal quadro.

Si voltò e incontrò il volto pallido del vecchio Vine, il maggiordomo, con la bocca aperta, smanioso di parlare, e il suo unico dente in mostra. «È arrivato» disse. «Il piroscafo dall’Australia è giunto stamane.»

Mentre ancora tornavano indietro dalla biblioteca al salone centrale, udirono i passi del nuovo venuto risuonare per la scalinata d’ingresso, con svariati bagagli leggeri trascinati dietro di sé. Quando Payne ne vide uno, rise in una reazione di sollievo. Il suo tripode non era altro che le gambe telescopiche di una macchina fotografica portatile, facile da imballare e da sballare; e l’uomo che la portava pareva, fin lì, assumere qualità altrettanto solide e normali. Era vestito di scuro, ma con un’aria trascurata e vacanziera; la sua camicia era di flanella grigia, e i suoi stivali echeggiavano in modo abbastanza perentorio in quelle stanze silenziose. Mentre avanzava a grandi passi per salutare la nuova cerchia, la sua andatura tradiva a malapena l’accenno di una zoppia. Ma Payne e i suoi compagni gli guardavano il volto, e a stento riuscivano a distoglierne gli occhi.

Egli sentiva evidentemente che c’era qualcosa di curioso e di sgradevole nella sua accoglienza; ma avrebbero potuto giurare che egli stesso non ne conoscesse la ragione. La dama, che si supponeva già in qualche modo a lui promessa, era certo abbastanza bella da attrarlo; ma evidentemente lo spaventava anche. Il vecchio maggiordomo gli rendeva una sorta di omaggio feudale, eppure lo trattava come se fosse il fantasma di famiglia. Il prete continuava a guardarlo con un volto del tutto indecifrabile, e perciò forse tanto più sconcertante. Una nuova specie d’ironia, più simile all’ironia greca, cominciò ad attraversare la mente di Payne. Egli aveva sognato lo straniero come un demonio, ma pareva quasi peggio che egli fosse un destino inconsapevole. Sembrava marciare verso il delitto con la mostruosa innocenza di Edipo. Si era accostato alla dimora avita con animo così ciecamente esuberante da aver piantato la macchina fotografica per immortalare la sua prima veduta di essa; e persino la macchina aveva assunto le sembianze del tripode di una tragica pizia.

Payne was surprised, when taking his leave a little while after, at something which showed that the Australian was already less unconscious of his surroundings. He said in a low voice:

‘Don’t go … or come again soon. You look like a human being. This place fairly gives me the jumps.’

When Payne emerged out of those almost subterranean halls and came into the night air and the smell of the sea, he felt as if he had come out of that underworld of dreams in which events jumble on top of each other in a way at once unrestful and unreal.

The arrival of the strange relative had been somehow unsatisfying and, as it were, unconvincing. The doubling of the same face in the old portrait and the new arrival troubled him like a two headed monster. And yet it was not altogether a nightmare; nor was it that face, perhaps, that he saw most vividly.

‘Did you say?’ he asked of the doctor, as they strode together across the striped dark sands by the darkening sea; ‘did you say that young man was betrothed to Miss Darnaway by a family compact or something? Sounds rather like a novel.’

‘But an historical novel,’ answered Dr Barnet. ‘The Darnaways all went to sleep a few centuries ago, when things were really done that we only read of in romances. Yes; I believe there’s some family tradition by which second or third cousins always marry when they stand in a certain relation of age, in order to unite the property. A damned silly tradition, I should say; and if they often married in and in, in that fashion, it may account on principles of heredity for their having gone so rotten.’

‘I should hardly say,’ answered Payne a little stuffily, ‘that they had all gone rotten.’

‘Well,’ replied the doctor, ‘the young man doesn’t look rotten, of course, though he’s certainly lame.’

‘The young man!’ cried Payne, who was suddenly and unreasonably angry. ‘Well, if you think the young lady looks rotten, I think it’s you who have rotten taste.’

The doctor’s face grew dark and bitter. ‘I fancy I know more about it than you do,’ he snapped.

They completed the walk in silence, each feeling that he had been irrationally rude and had suffered equally irrational rudeness; and Payne was left to brood alone on the matter, for his friend Wood had remained behind to attend to some of his business in connexion with the pictures.

Payne took very full advantage of the invitation extended by the colonial cousin, who wanted somebody to cheer him up. During the next few weeks he saw a good deal of the dark interior of the Darnaway home; though it might be said that he did not confine himself entirely to cheering up the colonial cousin. The lady’s melancholy was of longer standing and perhaps needed more lifting; anyhow, he showed a laborious readiness to lift it. He was not without a conscience, however, and the situation made him doubtful and uncomfortable. Weeks went by and nobody could discover from the demeanour of the new Darnaway whether he considered himself engaged according to the old compact or no. He went mooning about the dark galleries and stood staring vacantly at the dark and sinister picture. The shades of that prison— house were certainly beginning to close on him, and there was little of his Australian assurance left. But Payne could discover nothing upon the point that concerned him most. Once he attempted to confide in his friend Martin Wood, as he was pottering about in his capacity of picture—hanger; but even out of him he got very little satisfaction.

‘It seems to me you can’t butt in,’ said Wood shortly, ‘because of the engagement.’

‘Of course I shan’t butt in if there is an engagement,’ retorted his friend; ‘but is there? I haven’t said a word to her of course; but I’ve seen enough of her to be pretty certain she doesn’t think there is, even if she thinks there may be. He doesn’t say there is, or even hint that there ought to be. It seems to me this shillyshallying is rather unfair on everybody.’

‘Especially on you, I suppose,’ said Wood a little harshly. ‘But if you ask me, I’ll tell you what I think—I think he’s afraid.’

‘Afraid of being refused?’ asked Payne.

‘No; afraid of being accepted,’ answered the other. ‘Don’t bite my head off—I don’t mean afraid of the lady. I mean afraid of the picture.’

‘Afraid of the picture!’ repeated Payne.

‘I mean afraid of the curse,’ said Wood. ‘Don’t you remember the rhyme about the Darnaway doom falling on him and her.’

‘Yes, but look here,’ cried Payne; ‘even the Darnaway doom can’t have it both ways. You tell me first that I mustn’t have my own way because of the compact, and then that the compact mustn’t have its own way because of the curse. But if the curse can destroy the compact, why should she be tied to the compact? If they’re frightened of marrying each other, they’re free to marry anybody else, and there’s an end of it. Why should I suffer for the observance of something they don’t propose to observe? It seems to me your position is very unreasonable.’

‘Of course it’s all a tangle,’ said Wood rather crossly, and went on hammering at the frame of a canvas.

Suddenly, one morning, the new heir broke his long and baffling silence. He did it in a curious fashion, a little crude, as was his way, but with an obvious anxiety to do the right thing. He asked frankly for advice, not of this or that individual as Payne had done, but collectively as of a crowd. When he did speak he threw himself on the whole company like a statesman going to the country. He called it ‘a show—down’. Fortunately the lady was not included in this large gesture; and Payne shuddered when he thought of her feelings. But the Australian was quite honest; he thought the natural thing was to ask for help and for information, calling a sort of family council at which he put his cards on the table. It might be said that he flung down his cards on the table, for he did it with a rather desperate air, like one who had been harassed for days and nights by the increasing pressure of a problem. In that short time the shadows of that place of low windows and sinking pavements had curiously changed him, and increased a certain resemblance that crept through all their memories.

Nel congedarsi poco dopo, Payne fu sorpreso da qualcosa che rivelava come l’australiano fosse ormai un po’ meno inconsapevole di quanto lo circondava. Disse a voce bassa:

«Non andate… o tornate presto. Voi avete l’aria di un essere umano. Questo posto mi mette addosso una vera inquietudine.»

Quando Payne emerse da quelle sale quasi sotterranee e uscì nell’aria della notte e nell’odore del mare, ebbe la sensazione di essere sbucato da quel mondo sotterraneo dei sogni in cui gli avvenimenti si accavallano l’uno sull’altro in un modo insieme inquieto e irreale.

L’arrivo dello strano parente lo aveva in qualche modo lasciato insoddisfatto e, per così dire, poco persuaso. Il raddoppiarsi del medesimo volto nell’antico ritratto e nel nuovo arrivato lo turbava come un mostro bicipite. Eppure non era del tutto un incubo; né era forse quel volto, tra tutti, quello che gli si affacciava con maggiore vividezza.

«Avete detto?» domandò al dottore, mentre insieme percorrevano a lunghi passi le sabbie scure e striate lungo il mare che si oscurava; «avete detto che quel giovane era promesso alla signorina Darnaway per una sorta di patto di famiglia, o qualcosa del genere? Sembra roba da romanzo.»

«Ma da romanzo storico,» rispose il dottor Barnet. «I Darnaway andarono tutti a dormire qualche secolo fa, quando si facevano davvero le cose che noi non leggiamo se non nei racconti cavallereschi. Sì; credo esista una certa tradizione di famiglia secondo cui i cugini di secondo o terzo grado si sposano sempre quando si trovano in un dato rapporto d’età, allo scopo di riunire le proprietà. Una tradizione maledettamente stupida, direi; e se spesso si sposarono così, tra consanguinei e riconsanguinei, ciò potrebbe spiegare, in base ai princìpi dell’eredità, come mai siano andati tanto in malora.»

«Non direi proprio,» ribatté Payne un po’ impettito, «che siano andati tutti in malora.»

«Be’,» replicò il dottore, «il giovane non ha certo l’aria di essere in malora, si capisce, per quanto sia decisamente zoppo.»

«Il giovane!» esclamò Payne, colto d’improvviso e senza ragione dall’ira. «Ebbene, se pensate che sia la giovane signora ad avere una cattiva cera, io penso che siate voi ad avere un cattivo gusto.»

Il volto del dottore si fece cupo e amaro. «M’immagino di saperne più di voi,» scattò.

Completarono la passeggiata in silenzio, ciascuno sentendo di essere stato irragionevolmente scortese e di avere subìto una scortesia altrettanto irragionevole; e Payne fu lasciato a rimuginare da solo sulla faccenda, poiché il suo amico Wood era rimasto indietro a sbrigare certi suoi affari relativi ai quadri.

Payne approfittò largamente dell’invito che gli aveva rivolto il cugino coloniale, il quale cercava qualcuno che gli tirasse su il morale. Nelle settimane che seguirono egli conobbe a fondo il buio interno della dimora dei Darnaway; anche se si potrebbe dire che non si limitasse per intero a tirar su il morale del cugino coloniale. La malinconia della signorina era di più antica data e forse aveva bisogno di essere sollevata con maggiore impegno; comunque fosse, egli mostrò una laboriosa prontezza a sollevarla. Non era però privo di coscienza, e la situazione lo rendeva dubbioso e a disagio. Passavano le settimane e nessuno riusciva a scoprire dal contegno del nuovo Darnaway se egli si considerasse impegnato secondo l’antico patto oppure no. Se ne andava vagando trasognato per le buie gallerie e restava a fissare con occhio assente il quadro tetro e sinistro. Le ombre di quella casa-prigione cominciavano di certo a stringersi intorno a lui, e poco rimaneva della sua sicurezza australiana. Ma Payne non riusciva a scoprire nulla sul punto che più gli premeva. Una volta tentò di confidarsi con il suo amico Martin Wood, mentre questi trafficava nella sua veste di appenditore di quadri; ma nemmeno da lui ottenne gran soddisfazione.

«Mi pare che tu non possa metterti in mezzo,» disse Wood seccamente, «a causa del fidanzamento.»

«Certo che non mi metterò in mezzo se c’è un fidanzamento,» ribatté l’amico; «ma c’è davvero? Non le ho detto una parola, naturalmente; però l’ho frequentata abbastanza da essere pressoché certo che lei non creda che ci sia, anche se pensa che potrebbe esserci. Lui non dice che ci sia, né lascia neppure intendere che ci dovrebbe essere. Mi pare che tutto questo tergiversare sia piuttosto ingiusto verso tutti.»

«Verso di te soprattutto, immagino,» disse Wood un po’ aspramente. «Ma se vuoi il mio parere, ti dirò quel che penso: penso che abbia paura.»

«Paura di essere respinto?» chiese Payne.

«No; paura di essere accettato,» rispose l’altro. «Non saltarmi addosso: non intendo dire che abbia paura della signora. Intendo dire che ha paura del quadro.»

«Paura del quadro!» ripeté Payne.

«Intendo dire che ha paura della maledizione,» disse Wood. «Non ricordi la filastrocca sulla condanna dei Darnaway che ricadrà su lui e su lei?»

«Sì, ma senti un po’,» esclamò Payne; «neppure la condanna dei Darnaway può avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca. Prima mi dici che non devo fare a modo mio a causa del patto, e poi che il patto non deve fare a modo suo a causa della maledizione. Ma se la maledizione può distruggere il patto, perché mai lei dovrebbe essere legata al patto? Se hanno paura di sposarsi l’un l’altra, sono liberi di sposare chiunque altro, e non se ne parla più. Perché dovrei soffrire io per l’osservanza di qualcosa che essi non hanno intenzione di osservare? Mi sembra che la tua posizione sia del tutto irragionevole.»

«Certo che è tutto un garbuglio,» disse Wood piuttosto stizzito, e riprese a martellare la cornice di una tela.

Un mattino, all’improvviso, il nuovo erede ruppe il suo lungo e sconcertante silenzio. Lo fece in modo curioso, un po’ rozzo, come era nel suo stile, ma con un’evidente ansia di fare la cosa giusta. Chiese francamente consiglio, non a questo o a quell’individuo come aveva fatto Payne, ma collettivamente, come a una folla. Quando si decise a parlare, si gettò sull’intera compagnia come un uomo di Stato che si rivolge al Paese. La chiamò «una resa dei conti». Per fortuna la signora non fu inclusa in quell’ampio gesto; e Payne rabbrividì al pensiero di ciò che lei avrebbe provato. Ma l’australiano era del tutto sincero; riteneva che la cosa naturale fosse chiedere aiuto e informazioni, convocando una specie di consiglio di famiglia in cui mise le carte in tavola. Si potrebbe dire che scagliò le carte sul tavolo, poiché lo fece con aria alquanto disperata, come chi sia stato tormentato giorno e notte dalla pressione crescente di un problema. In quel breve tempo le ombre di quel luogo dalle finestre basse e dai pavimenti che sprofondavano lo avevano curiosamente mutato, accentuando una certa somiglianza che si insinuava attraverso tutti i loro ricordi.

The five men, including the doctor, were sitting round a table; and Payne was idly reflecting that his own light tweeds and red hair must be the only colours in the room, for the priest and the steward were in black, and Wood and Darnaway habitually wore dark grey suits that looked almost like black. Perhaps this incongruity had been what the young man had meant by calling him a human being. At that moment the young man himself turned abruptly in his chair and began to talk. A moment after the dazed artist knew that he was talking about the most tremendous thing in the world.

‘Is there anything in it?’ he was saying. ‘That is what I’ve come to asking myself till I’m nearly crazy. I’d never have believed I should come to thinking of such things; but I think of the portrait and the rhyme and the coincidences or whatever you call them, and I go cold. Is there anything in it? Is there any Doom of the Darnaways or only a damned queer accident? Have I got a right to marry, or shall I bring something big and black out of the sky, that I know nothing about, on myself and somebody else?’

His rolling eye had roamed round the table and rested on the plain face of the priest, to whom he now seemed to be speaking. Payne’s submerged practicality rose in protest against the problem of superstition being brought before that supremely superstitious tribunal. He was sitting next to Darnaway and struck in before the priest could answer.

‘Well, the coincidences are curious, I admit,’ he said, rather forcing a note of cheerfulness; ‘but surely we—‘ and then he stopped as if he had been struck by lightning. For Darnaway had turned his head sharply over his shoulder at the interruption, and with the movement, his left eyebrow jerked up far above its fellow and for an instant the face of the portrait glared at him with a ghastly exaggeration of exactitude. The rest saw it; and all had the air of having been dazzled by an instant of light. The old steward gave a hollow groan.

‘It is no good,’ he said hoarsely;’ we are dealing with something too terrible.’

‘Yes,’ assented the priest in a low voice, ‘we are dealing with something terrible; with the most terrible thing I know, and the name of it is nonsense.’

‘What did you say?’ said Darnaway, still looking towards him.

‘I said nonsense,’ repeated the priest. ‘I have not said anything in particular up to now, for it was none of my business; I was only taking temporary duty in the neighbourhood and Miss Darnaway wanted to see me. But since you’re asking me personally and point—blank, why, it’s easy enough to answer. Of course there’s no Doom of the Darnaways to prevent your marrying anybody you have any decent reason for marrying. A man isn’t fated to fall into the smallest venial sin, let alone into crimes like suicide and murder. You can’t be made to do wicked things against your will because your name is Darnaway, any more than I can because my name is Brown. The Doom of the Browns,’ he added with relish—‘the Weird of the Browns would sound even better.’

‘And you of all people,’ repeated the Australian, staring, ‘tell me to think like that about it.’

‘I tell you to think about something else,’ replied the priest cheerfully. ‘What has become of the rising art of photography? How is the camera getting on? I know it’s rather dark downstairs, but those hollow arches on the floor above could easily be turned into a first—rate photographic studio. A few workmen could fit it out with a glass roof in no time.’

‘Really,’ protested Martin Wood, ‘I do think you should be the last man in the world to tinker about with those beautiful Gothic arches, which are about the best work your own religion has ever done in the world. I should have thought you’d have had some feeling for that sort of art; but I can’t see why you should be so uncommonly keen on photography.’

‘I’m uncommonly keen on daylight,’ answered Father Brown, ‘especially in this dingy business; and photography has the virtue of depending on daylight. And if you don’t know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don’t know so much about my religion as you think you do.’

The young Australian had sprung to his feet like a man rejuvenated. ‘By George! that’s the talk,’ he cried; ‘though I never thought to hear it from that quarter. I’ll tell you what, reverend sir, I’ll do something that will show I haven’t lost my courage after all.’

The old steward was still looking at him with quaking watchfulness, as if he felt something fey about the young man’s defiance. ‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘what are you going to do now?’

‘I am going to photograph the portrait,’ replied Darnaway.

Yet it was barely a week afterwards that the storm of the catastrophe seemed to stoop out of the sky, darkening that sun of sanity to which the priest had appealed in vain, and plunging the mansion once more in the darkness of the Darnaway doom. It had been easy enough to fit up the new studio; and seen from inside it looked very like any other such studio, empty except for the fullness of the white light. A man coming from the gloomy rooms below had more than normally the sense of stepping into a more than modern brilliancy, as blank as the future. At the suggestion of Wood, who knew the castle well and had got over his first aesthetic grumblings, a small room remaining intact in the upper ruins was easily turned into a dark room, into which Darnaway went out of the white daylight to grope by the crimson gleams of a red lamp. Wood said, laughing, that the red lamp had reconciled him to the vandalism; as that bloodshot darkness was as romantic as an alchemist’s cave.

Darnaway had risen at daybreak on the day that he meant to photograph the mysterious portrait, and had it carried up from the library by the single corkscrew staircase that connected the two floors. There he had set it up in the wide white daylight on a sort of easel and planted his photographic tripod in front of it. He said he was anxious to send a reproduction of it to a great antiquary who had written on the antiquities of the house; but the others knew that this was an excuse covering much deeper things. It was, if not exactly a spiritual duel between Darnaway and the demoniac picture, at least a duel between Darnaway and his own doubts. He wanted to bring the daylight of photography face to face with that dark masterpiece of painting; and to see whether the sunshine of the new art would not drive out the shadows of the old.

I cinque uomini, compreso il medico, sedevano attorno a un tavolo; e Payne rifletteva oziosamente che il proprio abito di tweed chiaro e i propri capelli rossi dovevano essere gli unici colori nella stanza, giacché il prete e l’amministratore erano vestiti di nero, e Wood e Darnaway indossavano d’abitudine completi di un grigio scuro che sembrava quasi nero. Forse era stata questa incongruità ciò che il giovane aveva inteso chiamandolo un essere umano. In quel momento il giovane stesso si voltò bruscamente sulla sedia e prese a parlare. Un attimo dopo l’artista stordito capì che stava parlando della cosa più tremenda del mondo.

«C’è qualcosa di vero in tutto questo?» diceva. «È ciò che ho finito col domandarmi, fino quasi a impazzire. Non avrei mai creduto che sarei arrivato a pensare a simili cose; eppure penso al ritratto e alla filastrocca e alle coincidenze, o comunque le si voglia chiamare, e mi vengono i brividi. C’è qualcosa di vero? Esiste davvero una maledizione dei Darnaway, o è soltanto un caso maledettamente strano? Ho il diritto di sposarmi, o farò piombare qualcosa di grande e nero giù dal cielo, qualcosa di cui non so nulla, su me stesso e su qualcun altro?»

Il suo occhio roteante aveva percorso il tavolo e si era fermato sul volto dimesso del prete, al quale ora sembrava rivolgersi. Il senso pratico sommerso di Payne insorse in segno di protesta contro il fatto che il problema della superstizione venisse posto davanti a quel tribunale supremamente superstizioso. Sedeva accanto a Darnaway e intervenne prima che il prete potesse rispondere.

«Ebbene, le coincidenze sono curiose, lo ammetto,» disse, forzando un poco una nota di allegria; «ma di sicuro noi…» e allora si fermò come fulminato. Poiché Darnaway aveva voltato di scatto la testa oltre la spalla a quell’interruzione, e con il movimento il suo sopracciglio sinistro guizzò in alto, ben oltre il compagno, e per un istante il volto del ritratto lo fissò con una spettrale, esagerata esattezza. Gli altri lo videro; e tutti ebbero l’aria di essere stati abbagliati da un lampo di luce. Il vecchio amministratore emise un gemito cavo.

«Non serve a niente,» disse con voce roca; «abbiamo a che fare con qualcosa di troppo terribile.»

«Sì,» assentì il prete a bassa voce, «abbiamo a che fare con qualcosa di terribile; con la cosa più terribile che io conosca, e il suo nome è sciocchezza.»

«Che cosa avete detto?» domandò Darnaway, ancora rivolto verso di lui.

«Ho detto sciocchezza,» ripeté il prete. «Finora non ho detto nulla di particolare, perché non erano affari miei; mi trovavo qui solo in servizio temporaneo nei dintorni, e la signorina Darnaway desiderava vedermi. Ma dal momento che me lo chiedete di persona e a bruciapelo, ebbene, è abbastanza facile rispondere. Naturalmente non esiste nessuna maledizione dei Darnaway capace di impedirvi di sposare chiunque abbiate una ragione decente di sposare. Un uomo non è destinato a cadere nel più piccolo peccato veniale, e tanto meno in crimini come il suicidio e l’omicidio. Non vi si può costringere a compiere azioni malvagie contro la vostra volontà perché vi chiamate Darnaway, così come non vi si potrebbe costringere me perché mi chiamo Brown. La maledizione dei Brown,» aggiunse con gusto — «il Fato dei Brown suonerebbe persino meglio.»

«E proprio voi,» ripeté l’australiano, fissandolo, «mi dite di pensarla così.»

«Vi dico di pensare a qualcos’altro,» rispose il prete allegramente. «Che ne è stato della nascente arte della fotografia? Come procede la faccenda della macchina fotografica? So che al piano di sotto è piuttosto buio, ma quelle arcate cave del piano superiore potrebbero facilmente essere trasformate in uno studio fotografico di prim’ordine. Pochi operai potrebbero attrezzarlo con un tetto di vetro in un batter di tempo.»

«Davvero,» protestò Martin Wood, «credo proprio che voi dovreste essere l’ultimo uomo al mondo a mettere le mani su quelle magnifiche arcate gotiche, che sono più o meno la migliore opera che la vostra religione abbia mai prodotto al mondo. Avrei pensato che nutriste qualche sentimento per quel genere d’arte; ma non capisco perché dobbiate essere così straordinariamente appassionato di fotografia.»

«Sono straordinariamente appassionato di luce del giorno,» rispose Padre Brown, «specialmente in questa tetra faccenda; e la fotografia ha la virtù di dipendere dalla luce del giorno. E se non sapete che ridurrei in polvere tutte le arcate gotiche del mondo per salvare la sanità mentale di una sola anima umana, allora non sapete della mia religione tanto quanto credete di sapere.»

Il giovane australiano era balzato in piedi come un uomo ringiovanito. «Perbacco! ecco come si parla,» gridò; «anche se non avrei mai pensato di sentirlo proprio da quella parte. Ecco cosa vi dico, reverendo: farò qualcosa che dimostrerà che, dopotutto, non ho perso il mio coraggio.»

Il vecchio amministratore lo guardava ancora con una vigilanza tremante, come se avvertisse qualcosa di funesto nella sfida del giovane. «Oh,» esclamò, «che cosa avete intenzione di fare adesso?»

«Ho intenzione di fotografare il ritratto,» rispose Darnaway.

Eppure non era passata neppure una settimana che la tempesta della catastrofe parve calare giù dal cielo, oscurando quel sole della ragione al quale il prete si era invano appellato, e sprofondando ancora una volta la dimora nelle tenebre della maledizione dei Darnaway. Era stato abbastanza facile allestire il nuovo studio; e visto dall’interno somigliava molto a un qualsiasi altro studio del genere, vuoto se non per la pienezza della luce bianca. Un uomo che salisse dalle stanze tetre di sotto aveva più che mai la sensazione di entrare in uno splendore più che moderno, bianco e vuoto come il futuro. Su suggerimento di Wood, che conosceva bene il castello e aveva superato i suoi primi brontolii estetici, una piccola stanza rimasta intatta tra le rovine superiori fu facilmente trasformata in una camera oscura, nella quale Darnaway usciva dalla bianca luce del giorno per andare a tentoni tra i bagliori cremisi di una lampada rossa. Wood diceva, ridendo, che la lampada rossa lo aveva riconciliato con il vandalismo; poiché quell’oscurità venata di sangue era romantica quanto la caverna di un alchimista.

Darnaway si era alzato all’alba il giorno in cui intendeva fotografare il misterioso ritratto, e lo aveva fatto portare su dalla biblioteca per l’unica scala a chiocciola che collegava i due piani. Là lo aveva sistemato nell’ampia bianca luce del giorno su una specie di cavalletto e aveva piantato davanti ad esso il treppiede fotografico. Diceva di essere ansioso di inviare una riproduzione dell’opera a un grande antiquario che aveva scritto sulle antichità della casa; ma gli altri sapevano che questa era una scusa dietro cui si celavano cose ben più profonde. Era, se non proprio un duello spirituale tra Darnaway e il quadro demoniaco, quanto meno un duello tra Darnaway e i propri dubbi. Voleva mettere la luce del giorno della fotografia faccia a faccia con quel cupo capolavoro della pittura; e vedere se il chiarore solare della nuova arte non avrebbe scacciato le ombre di quella antica.

Perhaps this was why he preferred to do it by himself, even if some of the details seemed to take longer and involve more than normal delay. Anyhow, he rather discouraged the few who visited his studio during the day of the experiment, and who found him focusing and fussing about in a very isolated and impenetrable fashion. The steward had left a meal for him, as he refused to come down; the old gentleman also returned some hours afterwards and found the meal more or less normally disposed of; but when he brought it he got no more gratitude than a grunt. Payne went up once to see how he was getting on, but finding the photographer disinclined for conversation came down again. Father Brown had wandered that way in an unobtrusive style to lake Darnaway a letter from the expert to whom the photograph was to be sent. But he left the letter on a tray, and whatever he thought of that great glasshouse full of daylight and devotion to a hobby, a world he had himself in some sense created, he kept it to himself and came down. He had reason to remember very soon that he was the last to come down the solitary staircase connecting the floors, leaving a lonely man and an empty room behind him. The others were standing in the salon that led into the library, just under the great black ebony clock that looked like a titanic coffin.

‘How was Darnaway getting on,’ asked Payne, a little later, ‘when you last went up?’

The priest passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Don’t tell me I’m getting psychic,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘I believe I’m quite dazzled with daylight up in that room and couldn’t see things straight. Honestly, I felt for a flash as if there were something uncanny about Darnaway’s figure standing before that portrait.’

‘Oh, that’s the lame leg,’ said Barnet promptly. ‘We know all about that.’

‘Do you know,’ said Payne abruptly, but lowering his voice, ‘l don’t think we do know all about it or anything about it. What’s the matter with his leg? What was the matter with his ancestor’s leg?’

‘Oh, there’s something about that in the book I was reading in there, in the family archives,’ said Wood; ‘I’ll fetch it for you.’ And he stepped into the library just beyond.

‘I think,’ said Father Brown quietly, ‘Mr Payne must have some particular reason for asking that.’

‘I may as well blurt it out once and for all,’ said Payne, but in a yet lower voice. ‘After all, there is a rational explanation. A man from anywhere might have made up to look like the portrait. What do we know about Darnaway? He is behaving rather oddly—‘

The others were staring at him in a rather startled fashion; but the priest seemed to take it very calmly.

‘I don’t think the old portrait’s ever been photographed,’ he said. ‘That’s why he wants to do it. I don’t think there’s anything odd about that.’

‘Quite an ordinary state of things, in fact,’ said Wood with a smile; he had just returned with the book in his hand. And even as he spoke there was a stir in the clockwork of the great dark clock behind him and successive strokes thrilled through the room up to the number of seven. With the last stroke there came a crash from the floor above that shook the house like a thunderbolt; and Father Brown was already two steps up the winding staircase before the sound had ceased.

‘My God!’ cried Payne involuntarily; ‘he is alone up there.’

‘Yes,’ said Father Brown without turning, as he vanished up the stairway. ‘We shall find him alone.’

When the rest recovered from their first paralysis and ran helter— skelter up the stone steps and found their way to the new studio, it was true in that sense that they found him alone. They found him lying in a wreck of his tall camera, with its long splintered legs standing out grotesquely at three different angles; and Darnaway had fallen on top of it with one black crooked leg lying at a fourth angle along the floor. For the moment the dark heap looked as if he were entangled with some huge and horrible spider. Little more than a glance and a touch were needed to tell them that he was dead. Only the portrait stood untouched upon the easel, and one could fancy the smiling eyes shone.

An hour afterwards Father Brown in helping to calm the confusion of the stricken household, came upon the old steward muttering almost as mechanically as the clock had ticked and struck the terrible hour. Almost without hearing them, he knew what the muttered words must be.

In the seventh heir I shall return In the seventh hour I shall depart.

As he was about to say something soothing, the old man seemed suddenly to start awake and stiffen into anger; his mutterings changed to a fierce cry.

‘You!’ he cried; ‘you and your daylight! Even you won’t say now there is no Doom for the Darnaways.’

‘My opinion about that is unchanged,’ said Father Brown mildly. Then after a pause he added: ‘I hope you will observe poor Darnaway’s last wish, and see the photograph is sent off.’

‘The photograph!’ cried the doctor sharply. ‘What’s the good of that? As a matter of fact, it’s rather curious; but there isn’t any photograph. It seems he never took it after all, after pottering about all day.’

Father Brown swung round sharply. ‘Then take it yourselves,’ he said. ‘Poor Darnaway was perfectly right. It’s most important that the photograph should be taken.’

As all the visitors, the doctor, the priest, and the two artists trailed away in a black and dismal procession across the brown and yellow sands, they were at first more or less silent, rather as if they had been stunned. And certainly there had been something like a crack of thunder in a clear sky about the fulfilment of that forgotten superstition at the very time when they had most forgotten it; when the doctor and the priest had both filled their minds with rationalism as the photographer had filled his rooms with daylight. They might be as rationalistic as they liked; but in broad daylight the seventh heir had returned, and in broad daylight at the seventh hour he had perished.

Forse era per questo che preferiva sbrigarsela da solo, anche se qualcuno dei preparativi pareva richiedere più tempo e comportare indugi maggiori del normale. Comunque fosse, non incoraggiava affatto i pochi che visitarono il suo studio nel giorno dell’esperimento, e che lo trovarono intento a mettere a fuoco e ad affaccendarsi in un’aria del tutto isolata e impenetrabile. L’amministratore gli aveva lasciato un pasto, giacché egli si rifiutava di scendere; il vecchio gentiluomo tornò poi qualche ora dopo e trovò il pasto smaltito più o meno normalmente; ma quando glielo aveva portato non aveva ottenuto altra gratitudine che un grugnito. Payne salì una volta a vedere come procedesse, ma trovando il fotografo poco disposto alla conversazione ridiscese. Padre Brown si era incamminato da quella parte, con la sua discrezione consueta, per portare a Darnaway una lettera dell’esperto al quale la fotografia doveva essere spedita. Ma lasciò la lettera su un vassoio, e qualunque cosa pensasse di quella grande serra colma di luce del giorno e di dedizione a un passatempo, un mondo che egli stesso in un certo senso aveva creato, se lo tenne per sé e discese. Ebbe ben presto motivo di ricordare che era stato l’ultimo a scendere per la solitaria scala che collegava i piani, lasciandosi dietro un uomo solo e una stanza vuota. Gli altri stavano nel salotto che dava sulla biblioteca, proprio sotto il grande orologio di ebano nero che pareva una bara titanica.

«Come procedeva Darnaway» chiese Payne poco dopo «l’ultima volta che siete salito?»

Il sacerdote si passò una mano sulla fronte. «Non ditemi che sto diventando sensitivo» disse con un sorriso mesto. «Credo di essere del tutto abbagliato dalla luce del giorno lassù in quella stanza, e di non aver visto bene le cose. In tutta onestà, per un istante ho avuto la sensazione che vi fosse qualcosa di sinistro nella figura di Darnaway ritto davanti a quel ritratto.»

«Oh, è la gamba zoppa» disse Barnet con prontezza. «Sappiamo tutto di quella.»

«Sapete» disse Payne di scatto, ma abbassando la voce «io non credo che ne sappiamo tutto, né alcunché. Che cos’ha quella sua gamba? Che cos’aveva la gamba del suo antenato?»

«Oh, c’è qualcosa in proposito nel libro che stavo leggendo là dentro, negli archivi di famiglia» disse Wood; «ve lo vado a prendere.» E fece un passo nella biblioteca lì accanto.

«Credo» disse Padre Brown con calma «che il signor Payne debba avere qualche ragione particolare per chiederlo.»

«Tanto vale che lo dica una volta per tutte» disse Payne, ma a voce ancor più bassa. «Dopotutto, c’è una spiegazione razionale. Un uomo venuto da chissà dove potrebbe essersi truccato per somigliare al ritratto. Che cosa sappiamo di Darnaway? Si sta comportando in modo piuttosto strano…»

Gli altri lo fissavano con un’aria alquanto sconcertata; ma il sacerdote parve prenderla con grande calma.

«Non credo che il vecchio ritratto sia mai stato fotografato» disse. «È per questo che vuole farlo. Non ci vedo nulla di strano.»

«Uno stato di cose del tutto ordinario, in fondo» disse Wood con un sorriso; era appena tornato col libro in mano. E proprio mentre parlava vi fu un fremito nel meccanismo del grande orologio scuro alle sue spalle, e rintocchi successivi vibrarono per la stanza fino al numero di sette. All’ultimo rintocco venne dal piano di sopra uno schianto che scosse la casa come una folgore; e Padre Brown era già due gradini su per la scala a chiocciola prima che il suono si fosse spento.

«Dio mio!» gridò Payne senza volerlo; «è solo lassù.»

«Sì» disse Padre Brown senza voltarsi, mentre spariva su per la scala. «Lo troveremo solo.»

Quando gli altri si riebbero dalla prima paralisi e si precipitarono alla rinfusa su per i gradini di pietra e trovarono la via del nuovo studio, era vero in quel senso che lo trovarono solo. Lo trovarono disteso tra i rottami della sua alta macchina fotografica, con le lunghe gambe scheggiate che sporgevano grottescamente in tre diverse angolazioni; e Darnaway era caduto sopra di essa, con una gamba nera e storta distesa a un quarto angolo lungo il pavimento. Per un istante quel mucchio oscuro sembrò che egli fosse impigliato in un qualche ragno enorme e orribile. Bastarono poco più di un’occhiata e di un tocco per dire loro che era morto. Solo il ritratto se ne stava intatto sul cavalletto, e si sarebbe potuto immaginare che gli occhi sorridenti splendessero.

Un’ora più tardi Padre Brown, mentre aiutava a placare lo sgomento della casa colpita, s’imbatté nel vecchio amministratore che borbottava quasi in modo altrettanto meccanico di quanto l’orologio aveva ticchettato e battuto l’ora terribile. Quasi senza udirle, sapeva quali dovessero essere le parole borbottate.

Nel settimo erede tornerò, nella settima ora me ne andrò.

Mentre stava per dire qualcosa di consolatorio, il vecchio parve d’un tratto ridestarsi e irrigidirsi nell’ira; il suo borbottio si mutò in un grido feroce.

«Voi!» gridò; «voi e la vostra luce del giorno! Neppure voi direte adesso che non c’è nessuna Maledizione per i Darnaway.»

«La mia opinione in proposito non è mutata» disse Padre Brown con dolcezza. Poi, dopo una pausa, aggiunse: «Spero che rispetterete l’ultimo desiderio del povero Darnaway, e che la fotografia venga spedita.»

«La fotografia!» gridò il dottore aspramente. «A che serve? A dire il vero, è piuttosto curioso; ma non c’è nessuna fotografia. Pare che alla fine non l’abbia mai scattata, dopo aver gingillato tutto il giorno.»

Padre Brown si voltò di scatto. «Allora scattatela voi» disse. «Il povero Darnaway aveva perfettamente ragione. È della massima importanza che la fotografia sia scattata.»

Mentre tutti i visitatori, il dottore, il sacerdote e i due artisti si allontanavano in una nera e desolata processione attraverso le sabbie brune e gialle, dapprima rimasero più o meno silenziosi, quasi fossero stati storditi. E certo vi era stato qualcosa come un tuono in un cielo sereno nel compiersi di quella dimenticata superstizione proprio nel momento in cui l’avevano più che mai dimenticata; quando il dottore e il sacerdote avevano entrambi riempito la mente di razionalismo come il fotografo aveva riempito le sue stanze di luce del giorno. Potevano essere razionalisti quanto volevano; ma in pieno giorno il settimo erede era tornato, e in pieno giorno alla settima ora era perito.

‘I’m afraid everybody will always believe in the Darnaway superstition now,’ said Martin Wood.

‘I know one who won’t,’ said the doctor sharply. ‘Why should I indulge in superstition because somebody else indulges in suicide?’

‘You think poor Mr Darnaway committed suicide?’ asked the priest.

‘I’m sure he committed suicide,’ replied the doctor.

‘It is possible,’ agreed the other.

‘He was quite alone up there, and he had a whole drug— store of poisons in the dark room. Besides, it’s just the sort of thing that Darnaways do.’

‘You don’t think there’s anything in the fulfilment of the family curse?’

‘Yes,’ said the doctor; ‘I believe in one family curse, and that is the family constitution. I told you it was heredity, and they are all half mad. If you stagnate and breed in and brood in your own swamp like that, you’re bound to degenerate whether you like it or not. The laws of heredity can’t be dodged; the truths of science can’t be denied. The minds of the Darnaways are falling to pieces, as their blighted old sticks and stones are falling to pieces, eaten away by the sea and the salt air. Suicide—of course he committed suicide; I dare say all the rest will commit suicide. Perhaps the best thing they could do.’

As the man of science spoke there sprang suddenly and with startling clearness into Payne’s memory the face of the daughter of the Darnaways, a tragic mask pale against an unfathomable blackness, but itself of a blinding and more than mortal beauty. He opened his mouth to speak and found himself speechless.

‘I see,’ said Father Brown to the doctor; ‘so you do believe in the superstition after all?’

‘What do you mean—believe in the superstition? I believe in the suicide as a matter of scientific necessity.’

‘Well,’ replied the priest, ‘I don’t see a pin to choose between your scientific superstition and the other magical superstition. They both seem to end in turning people into paralytics, who can’t move their own legs or arms or save their own lives or souls. The rhyme said it was the Doom of the Darnaways to be killed, and the scientific textbook says it is the Doom of the Darnaways to kill themselves. Both ways they seem to be slaves.’

‘But I thought you said you believed in rational views of these things,’ said Dr Barnet. ‘Don’t you believe in heredity?’

‘I said I believed in daylight,’ replied the priest in a loud and clear voice, ‘and I won’t choose between two tunnels of subterranean superstition that both end in the dark. And the proof of it is this: that you are all entirely in the dark about what really happened in that house.’

‘Do you mean about the suicide?’ asked Payne.

‘I mean about the murder,’ said Father Brown; and his voice, though only slightly lifted to a louder note, seemed somehow to resound over the whole shore.’ It was murder; but murder is of the will, which God made free.’

What the other said at the moment in answer to it Payne never knew. For the word had a rather curious effect on him; stirring him like the blast of a trumpet and yet bringing him to a halt. He stood still in the middle of the sandy waste and let the others go on in front of him; he felt the blood crawling through all his veins and the sensation that is called the hair standing on end; and yet he felt a new and unnatural happiness. A psychological process too quick and too complicated for himself to follow had already reached a conclusion that he could not analyse; but the conclusion was one of relief. After standing still for a moment he turned and went back slowly across the sands to the house of the Darnaways.

He crossed the moat with a stride that shook the bridge, descended the stairs and traversed the long rooms with a resounding tread, till he came to the place where Adelaide Darnaway sat haloed with the low light of the oval window, almost like some forgotten saint left behind in the land of death. She looked up, and an expression of wonder made her face yet more wonderful.

‘What is it?’ she said.’ Why have you come back?’

‘I have come for the Sleeping Beauty,’ he said in a tone that had the resonance of a laugh. ‘This old house went to sleep long ago, as the doctor said; but it is silly for you to pretend to be old. Come up into the daylight and hear the truth. I have brought you a word; it is a terrible word, but it breaks the spell of your captivity.’

She did not understand a word he said, but something made her rise and let him lead her down the long hall and up the stairs and out under the evening sky. The ruins of a dead garden stretched towards the sea, and an old fountain with the figure of a triton, green with rust, remained poised there, pouring nothing out of a dried horn into an empty basin. He had often seen that desolate outline against the evening sky as he passed, and it had seemed to him a type of fallen fortunes in more ways than one. Before long, doubtless, those hollow fonts would be filled, but it would be with the pale green bitter waters of the sea and the flowers would be drowned and strangled in seaweed. So, he had told himself, the daughter of the Darnaways might indeed be wedded; but she would be wedded to death and a doom as deaf and ruthless as the sea. But now he laid a hand on the bronze triton that was like the hand of a giant, and shook it as if he meant to hurl it over like an idol or an evil god of the garden.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked steadily. ‘What is this word that will set us free?’

‘The word is murder,’ he said, ‘and the freedom it brings is as fresh as the flowers of spring. No; I do not mean I have murdered anybody. But the fact that anybody can be murdered is itself good news, after the evil dreams you have been living in. Don’t you understand? In that dream of yours everything that happened to you came from inside you; the Doom of the Darnaways was stored up in the Darnaways; it unfolded itself like a horrible flower. There was no escape even by happy accident; it was all inevitable; whether it was Vine and his old—wives’ tales, or Barnet and his new—fangled heredity. But this man who died was not the victim of a magic curse or an inherited madness. He was murdered; and for us that murder is simply an accident; yes, requiescat in pace: but a happy accident. It is a ray of daylight, because it comes from outside.’

«Temo che ormai tutti crederanno per sempre alla superstizione dei Darnaway» disse Martin Wood.

«Io conosco qualcuno che non ci crederà» ribatté il dottore in tono aspro. «Perché mai dovrei indulgere alla superstizione solo perché qualcun altro indulge al suicidio?»

«Pensa che il povero signor Darnaway abbia commesso un suicidio?» chiese il prete.

«Sono certo che si sia suicidato» rispose il dottore.

«È possibile» convenne l’altro.

«Era completamente solo lassù, e nella camera oscura aveva un intero arsenale di veleni. E poi, è proprio il genere di cose che fanno i Darnaway.»

«Non crede che ci sia qualcosa nel compimento della maledizione di famiglia?»

«Sì» disse il dottore; «credo in una sola maledizione di famiglia, ed è la costituzione della famiglia. Gliel’ho detto, è questione di eredità, e sono tutti mezzo matti. Se ristagni, ti riproduci in consanguineità e rimugini nella tua palude come loro, sei destinato a degenerare, che ti piaccia o no. Le leggi dell’eredità non si possono aggirare; le verità della scienza non si possono negare. Le menti dei Darnaway vanno in pezzi, come vanno in pezzi le loro vecchie pietre e travi corrotte, corrose dal mare e dall’aria salmastra. Suicidio — ovviamente ha commesso suicidio; oserei dire che tutti gli altri commetteranno il suicidio. Forse la cosa migliore che potrebbero fare.»

Mentre l’uomo di scienza parlava, balzò all’improvviso e con sorprendente nitidezza nella memoria di Payne il volto della figlia dei Darnaway, tragica maschera pallida contro un buio insondabile, eppure di una bellezza abbagliante e più che mortale. Aprì la bocca per parlare e si scoprì senza parole.

«Capisco» disse padre Brown al dottore; «dunque, in fondo, alla superstizione ci crede davvero?»

«Che intende dire… credere alla superstizione? Io credo al suicidio come necessità scientifica.»

«Ebbene» ribatté il prete, «non vedo un briciolo di differenza tra la sua superstizione scientifica e l’altra, quella magica. Entrambe sembrano finire col ridurre gli uomini a paralitici, incapaci di muovere le proprie gambe o le proprie braccia, di salvare la propria vita o la propria anima. La filastrocca diceva che la Maledizione dei Darnaway era di essere uccisi, e il manuale scientifico dice che la Maledizione dei Darnaway è di uccidersi. In entrambi i casi sembrano schiavi.»

«Ma credevo avesse detto di credere in una visione razionale di queste cose» disse il dottor Barnet. «Non crede nell’eredità?»

«Ho detto che credo nella luce del giorno» replicò il prete con voce alta e chiara, «e mi rifiuto di scegliere tra due gallerie di superstizione sotterranea che finiscono entrambe nel buio. E la prova è questa: che siete tutti completamente all’oscuro di ciò che è realmente accaduto in quella casa.»

«Intende a proposito del suicidio?» chiese Payne.

«Intendo a proposito dell’assassinio» disse padre Brown; e la sua voce, benché appena sollevata a una nota più alta, parve in qualche modo risuonare per tutta la spiaggia. «Fu un assassinio; ma l’assassinio appartiene alla volontà, che Dio ha creato libera.»

Che cosa rispose l’altro in quel momento, Payne non lo seppe mai. Poiché la parola ebbe su di lui un effetto piuttosto curioso: lo scosse come lo squillo di una tromba, e insieme lo inchiodò sul posto. Rimase immobile in mezzo alla distesa di sabbia e lasciò che gli altri proseguissero davanti a lui; sentì il sangue strisciargli per tutte le vene e quella sensazione che si dice faccia rizzare i capelli sul capo; eppure provò una felicità nuova e innaturale. Un processo psicologico troppo rapido e troppo complicato perché lui stesso potesse seguirlo era già giunto a una conclusione che non sapeva analizzare; ma la conclusione era di sollievo. Dopo essere rimasto immobile un istante, si voltò e tornò lentamente attraverso la sabbia verso la casa dei Darnaway.

Attraversò il fossato con un passo che fece tremare il ponte, discese le scale e percorse le lunghe sale con un’andatura fragorosa, finché non giunse al luogo in cui Adelaide Darnaway sedeva aureolata dalla luce fioca della finestra ovale, quasi come una santa dimenticata, lasciata indietro nella terra della morte. Ella alzò lo sguardo, e un’espressione di stupore rese il suo volto ancora più meraviglioso.

«Che cosa c’è?» disse. «Perché siete tornato?»

«Sono venuto per la Bella Addormentata» disse, con un tono che aveva la risonanza di una risata. «Questa vecchia casa si è addormentata molto tempo fa, come ha detto il dottore; ma è sciocco che voi fingiate di essere vecchia. Salite alla luce del giorno e ascoltate la verità. Vi ho portato una parola; è una parola terribile, ma spezza l’incantesimo della vostra prigionia.»

Ella non capì una sola parola di ciò che diceva, ma qualcosa la spinse ad alzarsi e a lasciarsi condurre giù per il lungo salone, su per le scale e fuori, sotto il cielo della sera. Le rovine di un giardino morto si stendevano verso il mare, e una vecchia fontana con la figura di un tritone, verde di ruggine, restava là sospesa, senza versare nulla da un corno inaridito in una vasca vuota. Passando, aveva visto spesso quel profilo desolato contro il cielo della sera, ed esso gli era parso l’emblema di fortune cadute in più di un senso. Di lì a poco, senza dubbio, quelle conche vuote si sarebbero riempite, ma delle pallide, verdi, amare acque del mare, e i fiori sarebbero annegati e strangolati tra le alghe. Così, si era detto, la figlia dei Darnaway avrebbe forse potuto andare sposa; ma sarebbe andata sposa alla morte e a una condanna sorda e spietata come il mare. Ma ora egli posò una mano sul tritone di bronzo, una mano che pareva quella di un gigante, e lo scosse come se volesse rovesciarlo al pari di un idolo o di un dio malvagio del giardino.

«Che cosa intendete?» chiese lei con fermezza. «Qual è questa parola che ci renderà liberi?»

«La parola è assassinio» disse, «e la libertà che porta è fresca come i fiori di primavera. No; non intendo dire di aver ucciso qualcuno. Ma il fatto stesso che qualcuno possa essere assassinato è di per sé una buona notizia, dopo i sogni malvagi in cui avete vissuto. Non capite? In quel vostro sogno tutto ciò che vi accadeva veniva dal di dentro di voi; la Maledizione dei Darnaway era racchiusa nei Darnaway; si dischiudeva come un fiore orribile. Non c’era scampo nemmeno per un caso fortunato; era tutto inevitabile; fosse Vine con le sue storie da vecchie comari, o Barnet con la sua eredità dell’ultima moda. Ma quest’uomo che è morto non fu vittima di una maledizione magica né di una follia ereditaria. Fu assassinato; e per noi quell’assassinio è semplicemente un caso; sì, requiescat in pace: ma un caso fortunato. È un raggio di luce del giorno, perché viene da fuori.»

She suddenly smiled. ‘Yes, I believe I understand. I suppose you are talking like a lunatic, but I understand. But who murdered him?’

‘I do not know,’ he answered calmly, ‘but Father Brown knows. And as Father Brown says, murder is at least done by the will, free as that wind from the sea.’

‘Father Brown is a wonderful person,’ she said after a pause; ‘he was the only person who ever brightened my existence in any way at all until—‘

‘Until what?’ asked Payne, and made a movement almost impetuous, leaning towards her and thrusting away the bronze monster so that it seemed to rock on its pedestal.

‘Well, until you did,’ she said and smiled again.

So was the sleeping palace awakened, and it is no part of this story to describe the stages of its awakening, though much of it had come to pass before the dark of that evening had fallen upon the shore. As Harry Payne strode homewards once more, across those dark sands that he had crossed in so many moods, he was at the highest turn of happiness that is given in this mortal life,— and the whole red sea within him was at the top of its tide. He would have had no difficulty in picturing all that place again in flower, and the bronze triton bright as a golden god and the fountain flowing with water or with wine. But all this brightness and blossoming had been unfolded for him by the one word ‘murder’, and it was still a word that he did not understand. He had taken it on trust, and he was not unwise; for he was one of those who have a sense of the sound of truth.

It was more than a month later that Payne returned to his London house to keep an appointment with Father Brown, taking the required photograph with him. His personal romance had prospered as well as was fitting under the shadow of such a tragedy, and the shadow itself therefore lay rather more lightly on him; but it was hard to view it as anything but the shadow of a family fatality. In many ways he had been much occupied; and it was not until the Darnaway household had resumed its somewhat stern routine, and the portrait had long been restored to its place in the library, that he had managed to photograph it with a magnesium flare. Before sending it to the antiquary, as originally arranged, he brought it to the priest who had so pressingly demanded it.

‘I can’t understand your attitude about all this. Father Brown,’ he said.’ You act as if you had already solved the problem in some way of your own.’

The priest shook his head mournfully. ‘Not a bit of it,’ he answered. ‘I must be very stupid, but I’m quite stuck; stuck about the most practical point of all. It’s a queer business; so simple up to a point and then— Let me have a look at that photograph, will you?’

He held it close to his screwed, short—sighted eyes for a moment, and then said: ‘Have you got a magnifying glass?’

Payne produced one, and the priest looked through it intently for some time and then said:’ Look at the title of that book at the edge of the bookshelf beside the frame; it’s ‘The History of Pope Joan’. Now, I wonder … yes, by George; and the one above is something or other of Iceland. Lord! what a queer way to find it out! What a dolt and donkey I was not to notice it when I was there!’

‘But what have you found out?’ asked Payne impatiently.

‘The last link,’ said Father Brown, ‘and I’m not stuck any longer. Yes; I think I know how that unhappy story went from first to last now.’

‘But why?’ insisted the other.

‘Why, because,’ said the priest with a smile, ‘the Darnaway library contained books about Pope Joan and Iceland, not to mention another I see with the title beginning ‘The Religion of Frederick’, which is not so very hard to fill up.’ Then, seeing the other’s annoyance, his smile faded and he said more earnestly: ‘As a matter of fact, this last point, though it is the last link, is not the main business. There were much more curious things in the case than that. One of them is rather a curiosity of evidence. Let me begin by saying something that may surprise you. Darnaway did not die at seven o’clock that evening. He had been already dead for a whole day.’

‘Surprise is rather a mild word,’ said Payne grimly, ‘since you and I both saw him walking about afterwards.’

‘No, we did not,’ replied Father Brown quietly. ‘I think we both saw him, or thought we saw him, fussing about with the focusing of his camera. Wasn’t his head under that black cloak when you passed through the room? It was when I did. And that’s why I felt there was something queer about the room and the figure. It wasn’t that the leg was crooked, but rather that it wasn’t crooked. It was dressed in the same sort of dark clothes; but if you see what you believe to be one man standing in the way that another man stands, you will think he’s in a strange and strained attitude.’

‘Do you really mean,’ cried Payne with something like a shudder, ‘that it was some unknown man?’

‘It was the murderer,’ said Father Brown. ‘He had already killed Darnaway at daybreak and hid the corpse and himself in the dark room—an excellent hiding—place, because nobody normally goes into it or can see much if he does. But he let it fall out on the floor at seven o’clock, of course, that the whole thing might be explained by the curse.’

‘But I don’t understand’ observed Payne. ‘Why didn’t he kill him at seven o’clock then, instead of loading himself with a corpse for fourteen hours?’

‘Let me ask you another question,’ said the priest. ‘Why was there no photograph taken? Because the murderer made sure of killing him when he first got up, and before he could take it. It was essential to the murderer to prevent that photograph reaching the expert on the Darnaway antiquities.’

There was a sudden silence for a moment, and then the priest went on in a lower tone: ‘Don’t you see how simple it is? Why, you yourself saw one side of the possibility; but it’s simpler even than you thought. You said a man might be faked to resemble an old picture. Surely it’s simpler that a picture should be faked to resemble a man. In plain words, it’s true in a rather special way that there was no Doom of the Darnaways. There was no old picture; there was no old rhyme; there was no legend of a man who caused his wife’s death. But there was a very wicked and a very clever man who was willing to cause another man’s death in order to rob him of his promised wife.’

D’improvviso ella sorrise. «Sì, credo di capire. Immagino che parliate come un pazzo, eppure capisco. Ma chi lo ha ucciso?»

«Non lo so» rispose lui con calma «ma padre Brown lo sa. E, come dice padre Brown, l’assassinio è quantomeno opera della volontà, libera come quel vento che viene dal mare.»

«Padre Brown è una persona straordinaria» disse ella dopo una pausa; «è stato l’unico che abbia mai rischiarato la mia esistenza in un modo qualsiasi, fino a quando…»

«Fino a quando?» chiese Payne, e fece un gesto quasi impetuoso, chinandosi verso di lei e spingendo via il mostro di bronzo, così che parve oscillare sul suo piedistallo.

«Ebbene, fino a quando lo avete fatto voi» disse ella, e sorrise di nuovo.

Così fu ridestato il palazzo addormentato, e non è compito di questo racconto descrivere le fasi del suo risveglio, per quanto molto ne fosse già accaduto prima che il buio di quella sera calasse sulla riva. Mentre Harry Payne muoveva ancora una volta a gran passi verso casa, attraverso quelle sabbie oscure che aveva percorso in tanti stati d’animo diversi, egli si trovava al punto più alto della felicità che sia concessa in questa vita mortale, e l’intero mare rosso che aveva dentro era al culmine della sua marea. Non avrebbe avuto difficoltà a immaginare tutto quel luogo di nuovo in fiore, e il tritone di bronzo splendente come un dio d’oro, e la fontana che sgorgava acqua o vino. Ma tutto questo splendore e questo fiorire gli erano stati dischiusi da quell’unica parola, «assassinio», e restava pur sempre una parola che egli non comprendeva. L’aveva accolta per fede, e non fu insensato; poiché era uno di quelli che hanno il senso del suono della verità.

Fu più di un mese dopo che Payne fece ritorno alla sua Londra, alla casa, per un appuntamento con padre Brown, portando con sé la fotografia richiesta. La sua personale storia d’amore era prosperata tanto bene quanto si conveniva sotto l’ombra di una simile tragedia, e l’ombra stessa perciò gravava su di lui un po’ più lieve; ma era difficile considerarla altrimenti che come l’ombra di una fatalità di famiglia. In molti modi era stato assai occupato; e fu soltanto quando la casa dei Darnaway ebbe ripreso la sua routine alquanto severa, e il ritratto era da tempo tornato al suo posto nella biblioteca, che egli riuscì a fotografarlo con un lampo al magnesio. Prima di inviarlo all’antiquario, come inizialmente stabilito, lo portò al sacerdote che con tanta insistenza lo aveva reclamato.

«Non riesco a capire il vostro atteggiamento in tutta questa faccenda, padre Brown» disse. «Vi comportate come se aveste già risolto il problema in qualche modo tutto vostro.»

Il sacerdote scosse il capo con mestizia. «Neanche per sogno» rispose. «Devo essere molto sciocco, ma sono del tutto arenato; arenato sul punto più pratico di tutti. È una faccenda bizzarra: tanto semplice fino a un certo punto, e poi… Fatemi dare un’occhiata a quella fotografia, volete?»

La tenne per un istante vicino agli occhi socchiusi e miopi, e poi disse: «Avete una lente d’ingrandimento?»

Payne ne produsse una, e il sacerdote vi guardò attraverso attentamente per qualche tempo, poi disse: «Guardate il titolo di quel libro all’estremità dello scaffale accanto alla cornice; è La storia della papessa Giovanna. Ora, mi domando… sì, perbacco; e quello sopra è qualcosa che riguarda l’Islanda. Signore! che modo curioso di scoprirlo! Che stupido e che asino sono stato a non notarlo quando ero là!»

«Ma che cosa avete scoperto?» chiese Payne con impazienza.

«L’ultimo anello» disse padre Brown «e non sono più arenato. Sì; credo di sapere ora come andò quella infelice storia dal principio alla fine.»

«Ma perché?» insistette l’altro.

«Perché, ecco» disse il sacerdote con un sorriso «la biblioteca dei Darnaway conteneva libri sulla papessa Giovanna e sull’Islanda, per non parlare di un altro che vedo, col titolo che comincia con La religione di Federico, che non è poi tanto difficile da completare.» Poi, vedendo il fastidio dell’altro, il sorriso gli si spense ed egli disse con maggiore serietà: «A dire il vero, quest’ultimo punto, per quanto sia l’ultimo anello, non è la questione principale. Vi erano cose ben più curiose in questo caso. Una di esse è piuttosto una curiosità in fatto di prove. Lasciate che cominci col dirvi qualcosa che potrà sorprendervi. Darnaway non morì alle sette di quella sera. Era già morto da un giorno intero.»

«Sorprendere è una parola un po’ blanda» disse Payne cupamente «visto che voi e io lo vedemmo entrambi camminare in giro dopo quell’ora.»

«No, non lo vedemmo» replicò padre Brown con calma. «Credo che entrambi vedemmo lui, o credemmo di vederlo, affaccendarsi attorno alla messa a fuoco della sua macchina fotografica. Non aveva forse il capo sotto quel panno nero quando attraversaste la stanza? Lo aveva quando la attraversai io. Ed è per questo che sentii che c’era qualcosa di strano nella stanza e nella figura. Non era che la gamba fosse storta, ma piuttosto che non era storta. Era vestito con lo stesso tipo di abiti scuri; ma se vedete quello che credete essere un uomo, in piedi nel modo in cui sta un altro uomo, penserete che egli si trovi in un atteggiamento strano e forzato.»

«Volete davvero dire» esclamò Payne con qualcosa di simile a un brivido «che era un uomo sconosciuto?»

«Era l’assassino» disse padre Brown. «Aveva già ucciso Darnaway all’alba e nascosto il cadavere e se stesso nella camera oscura: un eccellente nascondiglio, perché di norma nessuno vi entra, né può vedere granché se pure vi entra. Ma lo lasciò cadere sul pavimento alle sette, s’intende, affinché tutta la faccenda potesse spiegarsi con la maledizione.»

«Ma non capisco» osservò Payne. «Perché allora non lo uccise alle sette, invece di caricarsi di un cadavere per quattordici ore?»

«Lasciate che vi ponga un’altra domanda» disse il sacerdote. «Perché non fu scattata alcuna fotografia? Perché l’assassino volle esser certo di ucciderlo appena si fosse alzato, e prima che potesse scattarla. Era essenziale per l’assassino impedire che quella fotografia giungesse all’esperto delle antichità dei Darnaway.»

Vi fu un improvviso silenzio per un momento, poi il sacerdote riprese con tono più sommesso: «Non vedete quanto è semplice? Ma se voi stesso avete visto uno dei lati della possibilità; solo che è ancora più semplice di quanto pensaste. Avete detto che si sarebbe potuto truccare un uomo perché somigliasse a un vecchio quadro. È certo più semplice che si trucchi un quadro perché somigli a un uomo. In parole povere, è vero in un senso piuttosto particolare che non vi fu alcuna Condanna dei Darnaway. Non vi fu alcun vecchio quadro; non vi fu alcuna vecchia filastrocca; non vi fu alcuna leggenda di un uomo che causò la morte della propria moglie. Ma vi fu un uomo assai malvagio e assai astuto, disposto a causare la morte di un altro uomo per derubarlo della sposa promessa.»

The priest suddenly gave Payne a sad smile, as if in reassurance. ‘For the moment I believe you thought I meant you,’ he said,’ but you were not the only person who haunted that house for sentimental reasons. You know the man, or rather you think you do. But there were depths in the man called Martin Wood, artist and antiquary, which none of his mere artistic acquaintances were likely to guess. Remember that he was called in to criticize and catalogue the pictures; in an aristocratic dustbin of that sort that practically means simply to tell the Darnaways what art treasures they had got. They would not be surprised at things turning up they had never noticed before. It had to be done well, and it was; perhaps he was right when he said that if it wasn’t Holbein it was somebody of the same genius.’

‘I feel rather stunned,’ said Payne; ‘and there are twenty things I don’t see yet. How did he know what Darnaway looked like? How did he actually kill him? The doctors seem rather puzzled at present.’

‘I saw a photograph the lady had which the Australian sent on before him,’ said the priest, ‘and there are several ways in which he could have learned things when the new heir was once recognized. We may not know these details; but they are not difficulties. You remember he used to help in the dark room; it seems to me an ideal place, say, to prick a man with a poisoned pin, with the poison’s all handy. No; I say these were not difficulties. The difficulty that stumped me was how Wood could be in two places at once. How could he take the corpse from the dark—room and prop it against the camera so that it would fall in a few seconds, without coming downstairs, when he was in the library looking out a book? And I was such a fool that I never looked at the books in the library; and it was only in this photograph, by very undeserved good luck, that I saw the simple fact of a book about Pope Joan.’

‘You’ve kept your best riddle for the end,’ said Payne grimly. ‘What on earth can Pope Joan have to do with it?’

‘Don’t forget the book about the Something of Iceland,’ advised the priest, ‘or the religion of somebody called Frederick. It only remains to ask what sort of man was the late Lord Darnaway.’

‘Oh, does it?’ observed Payne heavily.

‘He was a cultivated, humorous sort of eccentric, I believe,’ went on Father Brown. ‘Being cultivated, he knew there was no such person as Pope Joan. Being humorous, he was very likely to have thought of the title of ‘The Snakes of Iceland’ or something else that didn’t exist. I venture to reconstruct the third title as ‘The Religion of Frederick the Great’— which also doesn’t exist. Now, doesn’t it strike you that those would be just the titles to put on the backs of books that didn’t exist; or in other words on a bookcase that wasn’t a book—case?’

‘Ah!’ cried Payne; ‘I see what you mean now. There was some hidden staircase—‘

‘Up to the room Wood himself selected as a dark room,’ said the priest nodding. ‘I’m sorry. It couldn’t be helped. It’s dreadfully banal and stupid, as stupid as I have been on this pretty banal case. But we were mixed up in a real musty old romance of decayed gentility and a fallen family mansion; and it was too much to hope that we could escape having a secret passage. It was a priest’s hole; and I deserve to be put in it.’

Il sacerdote rivolse a un tratto a Payne un sorriso mesto, quasi a rassicurarlo. «Per un momento avete creduto che alludessi a voi» disse; «ma non eravate l’unico a frequentare quella casa per ragioni sentimentali. Conoscete l’uomo, o per lo meno credete di conoscerlo. Eppure in colui che si faceva chiamare Martin Wood, artista e antiquario, si celavano profondità che nessuna delle sue semplici conoscenze artistiche avrebbe mai potuto sospettare. Ricordate che era stato chiamato a giudicare e a catalogare i quadri; e in una pattumiera aristocratica di quel genere ciò significa in pratica soltanto dire ai Darnaway quali tesori d’arte possiedano. Non si sarebbero stupiti se fossero saltate fuori cose che non avevano mai notato prima. Bisognava farlo bene, e fu fatto bene; forse aveva ragione quando diceva che, se non era un Holbein, era qualcuno del medesimo genio.»

«Mi sento piuttosto sbalordito» disse Payne; «e ci sono venti cose che ancora non riesco a spiegarmi. Come faceva a sapere che aspetto avesse Darnaway? E come lo uccise davvero? I medici sembrano al momento piuttosto perplessi.»

«Ho visto una fotografia che la signora possedeva e che l’australiano aveva spedito prima di sé» disse il sacerdote, «e vi sono parecchi modi in cui egli poté apprendere certe cose, una volta che il nuovo erede fu riconosciuto. Forse questi particolari non li conosceremo mai; ma non sono difficoltà. Ricordate che soleva dare una mano nella camera oscura; mi pare un luogo ideale, poniamo, per pungere un uomo con uno spillo avvelenato, avendo il veleno bell’e pronto sottomano. No; vi dico che queste non erano difficoltà. La difficoltà che mi lasciò interdetto era come Wood potesse trovarsi in due luoghi contemporaneamente. Come poteva prendere il cadavere dalla camera oscura e appoggiarlo alla macchina fotografica in modo che cadesse dopo pochi secondi, senza scendere le scale, mentre si trovava in biblioteca a cercare un libro? E fui tanto sciocco da non guardare mai i libri della biblioteca; e fu solo in questa fotografia, per un colpo di fortuna del tutto immeritato, che scorsi il semplice fatto di un libro sulla papessa Giovanna.»

«Vi siete tenuto il migliore indovinello per la fine» disse Payne cupo. «Che diamine può avere a che fare la papessa Giovanna con tutto questo?»

«Non dimenticate il libro sul Non-so-che d’Islanda» consigliò il sacerdote, «né quello sulla religione di un tale Federico. Non resta che chiedersi che genere d’uomo fosse il defunto Lord Darnaway.»

«Ah, davvero?» osservò Payne con gravità.

«Era un eccentrico colto e spiritoso, a quanto pare» proseguì Padre Brown. «Essendo colto, sapeva che non era mai esistita una persona come la papessa Giovanna. Essendo spiritoso, è probabilissimo che avesse pensato a un titolo come “I serpenti d’Islanda” o a qualcos’altro che non esisteva affatto. Mi arrischio a ricostruire il terzo titolo come “La religione di Federico il Grande” — che parimenti non esiste. Ora, non vi colpisce che questi sarebbero proprio i titoli da mettere sui dorsi di libri inesistenti; o, in altre parole, su una libreria che non era una libreria?»

«Ah!» esclamò Payne; «adesso capisco che cosa intendete. C’era una scala nascosta…»

«Che saliva fino alla stanza che Wood in persona aveva scelto come camera oscura» disse il sacerdote annuendo. «Mi dispiace. Non si poteva farci nulla. È spaventosamente banale e stupido, stupido quanto sono stato io in questo caso tanto banale. Ma eravamo immischiati in un autentico, stantìo vecchio romanzo di nobiltà decaduta e di una dimora avita in rovina; ed era troppo sperare di poter sfuggire a un passaggio segreto. Era un nascondiglio da prete; e meriterei di esservi cacciato dentro.»

EIGHT: The Ghost of Gideon Wise

FATHER BROWN always regarded the case as the queerest example of the theory of an alibi: the theory by which it is maintained, in defiance of the mythological Irish bird, that it is impossible for anybody to be in two places at once. To begin with, James Byrne, being an Irish journalist, was perhaps the nearest approximation to the Irish bird. He came as near as anybody could to being in two places at once: for he was in two places at the opposite extremes of the social and political world within the space of twenty minutes. The first was in the Babylonian halls of the big hotel, which was the meeting place of the three commercial magnates concerned with arranging for a coal lock—out and denouncing it as a coal—strike, the second was in a curious tavern, having the facade of a grocery store, where met the more subterranean triumvirate of those who would have been very glad to turn the lock—out into a strike—and the strike into a revolution. The reporter passed to and fro between the three millionaires and the three Bolshevist leaders with the immunity of the modern herald or the new ambassador.

He found the three mining magnates hidden in a jungle of flowering plants and a forest of fluted and florid columns of gilded plaster; gilded birdcages hung high under the painted domes amid the highest leaves of the palms; and in them were birds of motley colours and varied cries. No bird in the wilderness ever sang more unheeded, and no flower ever wasted its sweetness on the desert air more completely than the blossoms of those tall plants wasted theirs upon the brisk and breathless business men, mostly American, who talked and ran to and fro in that place. And there, amid a riot of rococo ornament that nobody ever looked at, and a chatter of expensive foreign birds that nobody ever heard, and a mass of gorgeous upholstery and a labyrinth of luxurious architecture, the three men sat and talked of how success was founded on thought and thrift and a vigilance of economy and self—control.

One of them indeed did not talk so much as the others; but he watched with very bright and motionless eyes, which seemed to be pinched together by his pince—nez, and the permanent smile under his small black moustache was rather like a permanent sneer. This was the famous Jacob P. Stein, and he did not speak till he had something to say. But his companion, old Gallup the Pennsylvanian, a huge fat fellow with reverend grey hair but a face like a pugilist, talked a great deal. He was in a jovial mood and was half rallying, half bullying the third millionaire, Gideon Wise—a hard, dried, angular old bird of the type that his countrymen compare to hickory, with a stiff grey chin—beard and the manners and clothes of any old farmer from the central plains. There was an old argument between Wise and Gallup about combination and competition. For old Wise still retained, with the manners of the old backwoodsman, something of his opinions of the old individualist; he belonged, as we should say in England, to the Manchester School; and Gallup was always trying to persuade him to cut out competition and pool the resources of the world.

‘You’ll have to come in, old fellow, sooner or later,’ Gallup was saying genially as Byrne entered. ‘It’s the way the world is going, and we can’t go back to the one—man—business now. We’ve all got to stand together.’

‘If I might say a word,’ said Stein, in his tranquil way, ‘I would say there is something a little more urgent even than standing together commercially. Anyhow, we must stand together politically; and that’s why I’ve asked Mr Byrne to meet us here today. On the political issue we must combine; for the simple reason that all our most dangerous enemies are already combined.’

‘Oh, I quite agree about political combination,’ grumbled Gideon Wise.

‘See here,’ said Stein to the journalist; ‘I know you have the run of these queer places, Mr Byrne, and I want you to do something for us unofficially. You know where these men meet; there are only two or three of them that count, John Elias and Jake Halket, who does all the spouting, and perhaps that poet fellow Home.’

‘Why Home used to be a friend of Gideon,’ said the jeering Mr Gallup; ‘used to be in his Sunday School class or something.’

‘He was a Christian, then,’ said old Gideon solemnly; ‘but when a man takes up with atheists you never know. I still meet him now and then. I was quite ready to back him against war and conscription and all that, of course, but when it comes to all the goddam bolshies in creation—‘

‘Excuse me,’ interposed Stein, ‘the matter is rather urgent, so I hope you will excuse me putting it before Mr Byrne at once. Mr Byrne, I may tell you in confidence that I hold information, or rather evidence that would land at least two of those men in prison for long terms, in connexion with conspiracies during the late war. I don’t want to use that evidence. But I want you to go to them quietly and tell them that I shall use it, and use it tomorrow, unless they alter their attitude.’

‘Well,’ replied Byrne, ‘what you propose would certainly be called compounding a felony and might be called blackmail, Don’t you think it is rather dangerous?’

‘I think it is rather dangerous for them,’ said Stein with a snap; ‘and I want you to go and tell them so.’

‘Oh, very well,’ said Byrne standing up, with a half humorous sigh. ‘It’s all in the day’s work; but if I get into trouble, I warn you I shall try to drag you into it.’

‘You will try, boy,’ said old Gallup with a hearty laugh.

For so much still lingers of that great dream of Jefferson and, the thing that men have called Democracy that in his country, while the rich rule like tyrants, the poor do not talk like slaves; but there is candour between the oppressor and the oppressed.

The meeting—place of the revolutionists was a queer, bare, whitewashed place, on the walls of which were one or two distorted uncouth sketches in black and white, in the style of something that was supposed to be Proletarian Art, of which not one proletarian in a million could have made head or tail. Perhaps the one point in common to the two council chambers was that both violated the American Constitution by the display of strong drink. Cocktails of various colours had stood before the three millionaires. Halket, the most violent of the Bolshevists, thought it only appropriate to drink vodka. He was a long, hulking fellow with a menacing stoop, and his very profile was aggressive like a dog’s, the nose and lips thrust out together, the latter carrying a ragged red moustache and the whole curling outwards with perpetual scorn. John Elias was a dark watchful man in spectacles, with a black pointed beard; and he had learnt in many European cafes a taste for absinthe. The journalist’s first and last feeling was how very like each other, after all, were John Elias and Jacob P. Stein. They were so like in face and mind and manner, that the millionaire might have disappeared down a trap—door in the Babylon Hotel and come up again in the stronghold of the Bolshevists.

OTTO: Il fantasma di Gideon Wise

PADRE BROWN considerò sempre quel caso come l’esempio più bizzarro della teoria dell’alibi: la teoria per cui si sostiene, a dispetto del mitologico uccello irlandese, che è impossibile per chiunque trovarsi in due luoghi contemporaneamente. Tanto per cominciare, James Byrne, essendo un giornalista irlandese, era forse ciò che più si avvicinava all’uccello irlandese. Egli riuscì ad approssimarsi, quanto è dato a chiunque, all’essere in due luoghi nello stesso momento: poiché si trovò in due luoghi collocati agli opposti estremi del mondo sociale e politico nel giro di venti minuti. Il primo erano le sale babilonesi del grande albergo, luogo d’incontro dei tre magnati del commercio impegnati a organizzare una serrata delle miniere di carbone e a denunciarla come uno sciopero del carbone; il secondo era una curiosa taverna, con la facciata di una drogheria, dove si riuniva il più sotterraneo triumvirato di coloro che sarebbero stati ben lieti di trasformare la serrata in uno sciopero — e lo sciopero in una rivoluzione. Il cronista andava e veniva tra i tre milionari e i tre capi bolscevichi con l’immunità dell’araldo moderno o del nuovo ambasciatore.

Trovò i tre magnati delle miniere nascosti in una giungla di piante fiorite e in una foresta di colonne scanalate e sgargianti di stucco dorato; gabbie dorate pendevano in alto sotto le cupole dipinte, tra le foglie più elevate delle palme, e vi stavano dentro uccelli dai colori variopinti e dai versi disparati. Nessun uccello nel deserto cantò mai più inascoltato, e nessun fiore sprecò mai la propria dolcezza nell’aria del deserto più compiutamente di quanto i fiori di quelle alte piante sprecassero la loro su quegli uomini d’affari svelti e trafelati, per lo più americani, che parlavano e correvano avanti e indietro in quel luogo. E là, in mezzo a un tripudio di ornamenti rococò che nessuno guardava mai, a un cinguettio di costosi uccelli esotici che nessuno udiva mai, a una massa di sfarzose tappezzerie e a un labirinto di architetture lussuose, i tre uomini sedevano e discorrevano di come il successo si fondasse sul pensiero, sulla parsimonia, su una vigile economia e sull’autocontrollo.

Uno di loro, per la verità, non parlava tanto quanto gli altri; ma osservava con occhi lucidissimi e immobili, che parevano stretti insieme dal suo pince-nez, e il sorriso perpetuo sotto i piccoli baffi neri somigliava piuttosto a un ghigno perpetuo. Costui era il famoso Jacob P. Stein, e non parlava se non quando aveva qualcosa da dire. Ma il suo compagno, il vecchio Gallup della Pennsylvania, un omone grasso e imponente dai venerandi capelli grigi ma con una faccia da pugile, parlava moltissimo. Era di umore gioviale e per metà stuzzicava, per metà tiranneggiava il terzo milionario, Gideon Wise — un vecchio uccello duro, secco e spigoloso, del tipo che i suoi connazionali paragonano al noce americano, con una rigida barba grigia sul mento e i modi e gli abiti di un qualsiasi vecchio contadino delle pianure centrali. C’era un’antica disputa tra Wise e Gallup a proposito di combinazione e concorrenza. Il vecchio Wise conservava ancora, con i modi del vecchio uomo dei boschi, qualcosa delle opinioni del vecchio individualista; apparteneva, come diremmo in Inghilterra, alla Scuola di Manchester; e Gallup cercava sempre di persuaderlo a eliminare la concorrenza e a mettere in comune le risorse del mondo.

«Dovrai entrarci anche tu, vecchio mio, prima o poi», stava dicendo Gallup con affabilità mentre Byrne entrava. «È così che va il mondo, e non possiamo più tornare all’impresa a conduzione unica. Dobbiamo tutti fare fronte comune.»

«Se posso dire una parola», disse Stein, nel suo modo tranquillo, «direi che c’è qualcosa di ancor più urgente che fare fronte comune sul piano commerciale. In ogni caso, dobbiamo fare fronte comune sul piano politico; ed è per questo che ho chiesto al signor Byrne di incontrarci qui oggi. Sulla questione politica dobbiamo unirci; per la semplice ragione che tutti i nostri nemici più pericolosi sono già uniti.»

«Oh, sono pienamente d’accordo sull’unione politica», borbottò Gideon Wise.

«Sentite», disse Stein al giornalista; «so che voi avete libero accesso a questi strani ambienti, signor Byrne, e vorrei che faceste qualcosa per noi in via ufficiosa. Voi sapete dove s’incontrano quegli uomini; ce ne sono solo due o tre che contano, John Elias e Jake Halket, che è quello che fa tutte le arringhe, e forse quel tale poeta, Home.»

«Ma se Home era un tempo amico di Gideon», disse il beffardo signor Gallup; «stava nella sua classe della scuola domenicale o qualcosa del genere.»

«Era un cristiano, allora», disse solennemente il vecchio Gideon; «ma quando un uomo si mette con gli atei non si sa mai. Lo incontro ancora ogni tanto. Ero prontissimo a sostenerlo contro la guerra e la coscrizione e tutto quel genere di cose, naturalmente, ma quando si arriva a tutti i maledetti bolscevichi del creato…»

«Scusatemi», s’interpose Stein, «la faccenda è piuttosto urgente, sicché spero mi perdonerete se la sottopongo subito al signor Byrne. Signor Byrne, posso dirvi in confidenza che sono in possesso di informazioni, o meglio di prove, che manderebbero almeno due di quegli uomini in prigione per lunghe pene, in relazione a cospirazioni durante l’ultima guerra. Non voglio servirmi di quelle prove. Ma voglio che andiate da loro con discrezione e diciate loro che me ne servirò, e me ne servirò domani, a meno che non mutino atteggiamento.»

«Ebbene», replicò Byrne, «ciò che proponete verrebbe di certo definito occultamento di un reato e potrebbe essere definito ricatto. Non pensate che sia piuttosto pericoloso?»

«Penso che sia piuttosto pericoloso per loro», disse Stein con uno scatto; «e voglio che andiate a dirglielo.»

«Oh, molto bene», disse Byrne alzandosi, con un sospiro semiironico. «Fa tutto parte del mestiere; ma se mi caccio nei guai, vi avverto che cercherò di trascinarci anche voi.»

«Puoi provarci, ragazzo», disse il vecchio Gallup con una risata cordiale.

Poiché tanto ancora sopravvive di quel grande sogno di Jefferson, e di quella cosa che gli uomini hanno chiamato Democrazia, che nel suo paese, mentre i ricchi governano da tiranni, i poveri non parlano da schiavi; ma tra l’oppressore e l’oppresso vi è schiettezza.

Il luogo d’incontro dei rivoluzionari era uno strano ambiente spoglio e imbiancato a calce, sulle cui pareti stavano uno o due schizzi deformi e rozzi in bianco e nero, nello stile di qualcosa che doveva essere Arte Proletaria, di cui non un proletario su un milione avrebbe saputo cavare né capo né coda. Forse l’unico punto in comune tra le due sale del consiglio era che entrambe violavano la Costituzione americana con l’esposizione di bevande alcoliche. Cocktail di vari colori erano stati posti dinanzi ai tre milionari. Halket, il più violento dei bolscevichi, ritenne opportuno bere soltanto vodka. Era un tipo lungo e goffo, con una curva minacciosa delle spalle, e il suo stesso profilo era aggressivo come quello di un cane, il naso e le labbra spinti in avanti insieme, queste ultime ornate da baffi rossi arruffati, e il tutto arricciato all’infuori in un perpetuo disprezzo. John Elias era un uomo bruno e vigile, con gli occhiali e una barba nera a punta; e aveva appreso in molti caffè europei il gusto dell’assenzio. Il primo e ultimo pensiero del giornalista fu quanto, in fin dei conti, John Elias e Jacob P. Stein si somigliassero. Erano tanto simili nel volto, nella mente e nei modi, che il milionario avrebbe potuto sparire per una botola nel Babylon Hotel e riemergere nella roccaforte dei bolscevichi.

The third man also had a curious taste in drinks, and his drink was symbolic of him. For what stood in front of the poet Home was a glass of milk, and its very mildness seemed in that setting to have something sinister about it, as if its opaque and colourless colour were of some leprous paste more poisonous than the dead sick green of absinthe. Yet in truth the mildness was so far genuine enough; for Henry Home came to the camp of revolution along a very different road and from very different origins from those of Jake, the common tub— thumper, and Elias, the cosmopolitan wire—puller. He had had what is called a careful upbringing, had gone to chapel in his childhood, and carried through life a teetotalism which he could not shake off when he cast away such trifles as Christianity and marriage. He had fair hair and a fine face that might have looked like Shelley, if he had not weakened the chin with a little foreign fringe of beard. Somehow the beard made him look more like a woman; it was as if those few golden hairs were all he could do.

When the journalist entered, the notorious Jake was talking, as he generally was. Home had uttered some casual and conventional phrase about ‘Heaven forbid’ something or other, and this was quite enough to set Jake off with a torrent of profanity.

‘Heaven forbid! and that’s about all it bally well does do,’ he said. ‘Heaven never does anything but forbid this, that and the other; forbids us to strike, and forbids us to fight, and forbids us to shoot the damned usurers and blood—suckers where they sit. Why doesn’t Heaven forbid them something for a bit? Why don’t the damned priests and parsons stand up and tell the truth about those brutes for a change? Why doesn’t their precious God—‘

Elias allowed a gentle sigh, as of faint fatigue, to escape him.

‘Priests,’ he said, ‘belonged, as Marx has shown, to the feudal stage of economic development and are therefore no longer really any part of the problem. The part once played by the priest is now played by the capitalist expert and—‘

‘Yes,’ interrupted the journalist, with his grim and ironic implacability, ‘and it’s about time you knew that some of them are jolly expert in playing it.’ And without moving his own eyes from the bright but dead eyes of Elias, he told him of the threat of Stein.

‘I was prepared for something of that sort,’ said the smiling Elias without moving; ‘I may say quite prepared.’

‘Dirty dogs!’ exploded Jake. ‘If a poor man said a thing like that he’d go to penal servitude. But I reckon they’ll go somewhere worse before they guess. If they don’t go to hell, I don’t know where the hell they’ll go to—‘

Home made a movement of protest, perhaps not so much at what the man was saying as at what he was going to say, and Elias cut the speech short with cold exactitude.

‘It is quite unnecessary for us,’ he said, looking at Byrne steadily through his spectacles, ‘to bandy threats with the other side. It is quite sufficient that their threats are quite ineffective so far as we are concerned. We also have made all our own arrangements, and some of them will not appear until they appear in motion. So far as we are concerned, an immediate rupture and an extreme trial of strength will be quite according to plan.’

As he spoke in a quite quiet and dignified fashion, something in his motionless yellow face and his great goggles started a faint fear creeping up the journalist’s spine. Halket’s savage face might seem to have a snarl in its very silhouette when seen sideways; but when seen face to face, the smouldering rage in his eyes had also something of anxiety, as if the ethical and economic riddle were after all a little too much for him; and Home seemed even more hanging on wires of worry and self—criticism. But about this third man with the goggles, who spoke so sensibly and simply, there was something uncanny; it was like a dead man talking at the table.

As Byrne went out with his message of defiance, and passed along the very narrow passage beside the grocery store, he found the end of it blocked by a strange though strangely familiar figure: short and sturdy, and looking rather quaint when seen in dark outline with its round head and wide hat.

‘Father Brown!’ cried the astonished journalist. ‘I think you must have come into the wrong door. You’re not likely to be in this little conspiracy.’

‘Mine is a rather older conspiracy,’ replied Father Brown smiling,’ but it is quite a widespread conspiracy.’

‘Well,’ replied Byrne,’ you can’t imagine any of the people here being within a thousand miles of your concern.’

‘It is not always easy to tell,’ replied the priest equably; ‘but as a matter of fact, there is one person here who’s within an inch of it.’

He disappeared into the dark entrance and the journalist went on his way very much puzzled. He was still more puzzled by a small incident that happened to him as he turned into the hotel to make his report to his capitalist clients. The bower of blossoms and bird—cages in which those crabbed old gentlemen were embosomed was approached by a flight of marble steps, flanked by gilded nymphs and tritons. Down these steps ran an active young man with black hair, a snub nose, and a flower in his buttonhole, who seized him and drew him aside before he could ascend the stair.

‘I say,’ whispered the young man, ‘I’m Potter—old Gid’s secretary, you know: now, between ourselves, there is a sort of a thunderbolt being forged, isn’t there, now?’

‘I came to the conclusion,’ replied Byrne cautiously, ‘that the Cyclops had something on the anvil. But always remember that the Cyclops is a giant, but he has only one eye. I think Bolshevism is—‘

While he was speaking the secretary listened with a face that had a certain almost Mongolian immobility, despite the liveliness of his legs and his attire. But when Byrne said the word ‘Bolshevism’, the young man’s sharp eyes shifted and he said quickly:

Anche il terzo uomo aveva un gusto singolare in fatto di bevande, e la sua bevanda era il simbolo di lui. Ciò che stava dinanzi al poeta Home era infatti un bicchiere di latte, e la sua stessa mitezza pareva avere, in quello scenario, qualcosa di sinistro, come se quel colore opaco e scolorito fosse d’una pasta lebbrosa più velenosa del verde morto e malsano dell’assenzio. Eppure, in verità, la mitezza era abbastanza genuina; poiché Henry Home era giunto al campo della rivoluzione lungo una strada assai diversa e da origini assai diverse da quelle di Jake, il comune agitatore da comizio, e di Elias, il cosmopolita tessitore d’intrighi. Aveva avuto quella che si dice un’educazione accurata, da bambino era andato alla cappella nella sua infanzia, e portava attraverso la vita un astinenzialismo di cui non riuscì a liberarsi neppure quando gettò via bagatelle come il Cristianesimo e il matrimonio. Aveva capelli biondi e un bel viso che avrebbe potuto rassomigliare a quello di Shelley, se non avesse indebolito il mento con una piccola frangia di barba forestiera. In qualche modo la barba lo faceva sembrare più simile a una donna; era come se quei pochi peli dorati fossero tutto ciò che egli sapeva fare.

Quando il giornalista entrò, il famigerato Jake stava parlando, come faceva quasi sempre. Home aveva pronunciato una qualche frase casuale e convenzionale sul «Cielo non voglia» questo o quello, e ciò fu più che sufficiente a scatenare in Jake un torrente di bestemmie.

«Il Cielo non voglia! ed è più o meno proprio tutto quel che diamine sa fare», disse. «Il Cielo non fa mai altro che proibire questo, quello e quell’altro; ci proibisce di scioperare, e ci proibisce di batterci, e ci proibisce di far fuori quei maledetti usurai e sanguisughe là dove se ne stanno seduti. Perché il Cielo non proibisce qualcosa a loro, tanto per cambiare? Perché quei maledetti preti e parroci non si alzano in piedi e non dicono la verità su quelle bestie, per una volta? Perché il loro prezioso Dio non…»

Elias si concesse un lieve sospiro, come di tenue stanchezza.

«I preti», disse, «appartenevano, come ha dimostrato Marx, alla fase feudale dello sviluppo economico e non sono dunque più realmente parte del problema. La parte un tempo recitata dal prete è oggi recitata dall’esperto capitalista e…»

«Sì», interruppe il giornalista, con la sua torva e ironica implacabilità, «ed è ora che sappiate che alcuni di loro sono maledettamente esperti nel recitarla». E senza distogliere i propri occhi dagli occhi luminosi ma spenti di Elias, gli riferì della minaccia di Stein.

«Ero preparato a qualcosa del genere», disse il sorridente Elias senza muoversi; «direi anzi del tutto preparato».

«Sudici cani!» esplose Jake. «Se un pover’uomo dicesse una cosa simile, finirebbe ai lavori forzati. Ma scommetto che loro finiranno in un posto peggiore prima ancora di rendersene conto. Se non vanno all’inferno, non so proprio dove diavolo andranno a finire…»

Home fece un gesto di protesta, forse non tanto per ciò che l’uomo stava dicendo quanto per ciò che stava per dire, ed Elias troncò il discorso con fredda esattezza.

«È del tutto superfluo, per noi», disse, guardando Byrne fisso attraverso gli occhiali, «scambiare minacce con l’altra parte. Ci basta che le loro minacce siano del tutto inefficaci per quanto ci riguarda. Anche noi abbiamo preso tutte le nostre disposizioni, e alcune di esse non appariranno finché non appariranno in movimento. Per quanto ci riguarda, una rottura immediata e una prova di forza estrema saranno del tutto conformi al piano».

Mentre egli parlava in maniera assai quieta e dignitosa, qualcosa nel suo viso giallo e immobile e nei suoi grandi occhialoni fece salire un vago timore lungo la schiena del giornalista. Il viso selvaggio di Halket poteva sembrare che avesse un ringhio nella sua stessa sagoma, visto di profilo; ma visto in faccia, la rabbia covante nei suoi occhi aveva anche qualcosa d’ansioso, come se l’enigma etico ed economico fosse dopo tutto un po’ troppo per lui; e Home pareva ancora più sospeso ai fili dell’affanno e dell’autocritica. Ma in quel terzo uomo dagli occhialoni, che parlava con tanto buonsenso e semplicità, c’era qualcosa di perturbante; era come un morto che parlasse a tavola.

Mentre Byrne usciva con il suo messaggio di sfida, e passava lungo lo stretto corridoio accanto alla drogheria, ne trovò l’estremità sbarrata da una figura strana eppure stranamente familiare: bassa e tozza, e dall’aria piuttosto bizzarra vista in scuro controluce, con la testa tonda e il cappello a larghe tese.

«Padre Brown!» esclamò il giornalista stupito. «Credo che dobbiate essere entrato dalla porta sbagliata. Non è probabile che voi facciate parte di questa piccola cospirazione».

«La mia è una cospirazione piuttosto più antica», replicò Padre Brown sorridendo, «ma è una cospirazione assai diffusa».

«Beh», replicò Byrne, «non riesco a immaginare che qualcuna delle persone qui dentro sia a mille miglia da ciò che vi riguarda».

«Non è sempre facile dirlo», replicò il prete con calma; «ma, in verità, c’è qui una persona che ne è distante appena un pollice».

Scomparve nell’ingresso buio e il giornalista proseguì per la sua strada assai perplesso. Fu ancor più perplesso per un piccolo incidente che gli capitò mentre svoltava verso l’albergo per fare rapporto ai suoi clienti capitalisti. Il pergolato di fiori e di gabbie d’uccelli in cui quei vecchi signori scontrosi stavano annidati si raggiungeva per una rampa di gradini di marmo, fiancheggiata da ninfe e tritoni dorati. Giù per quei gradini scendeva di corsa un giovane sveglio dai capelli neri, il naso all’insù e un fiore all’occhiello, il quale lo afferrò e lo tirò da parte prima che potesse salire la scala.

«Sentite un po’», sussurrò il giovane, «io sono Potter, il segretario del vecchio Gid, sapete: ora, detto fra noi, c’è una specie di fulmine che si sta forgiando, non è vero, eh?»

«Sono giunto alla conclusione», rispose Byrne con cautela, «che il Ciclope avesse qualcosa sull’incudine. Ma ricordatevi sempre che il Ciclope è un gigante, ma ha un occhio solo. Io credo che il bolscevismo sia…»

Mentre parlava, il segretario ascoltava con un volto che aveva una certa immobilità quasi mongolica, nonostante la vivacità delle gambe e dell’abbigliamento. Ma quando Byrne pronunciò la parola «bolscevismo», gli occhi acuti del giovane guizzarono ed egli disse rapidamente:

‘What has that—oh yes, that sort of thunderbolt; so sorry, my mistake. So easy to say anvil when you mean ice—box.’

With which the extraordinary young man disappeared down the steps and Byrne continued to mount them, more and more mystification clouding his mind.

He found the group of three augmented to four by the presence of a hatchet—faced person with very thin straw—coloured hair and a monocle, who appeared to be a sort of adviser to old Gallup, possibly his solicitor, though he was not definitely so called. His name was Nares, and the questions which he directed towards Byrne referred chiefly, for some reason or other, to the number of those probably enrolled in the revolutionary organization. Of this, as Byrne knew little, he said less; and the four men eventually rose from their seats, the last word being with the man who had been most silent.

‘Thank you, Mr Byrne,’ said Stein, folding up his eyeglasses. ‘It only remains to say that everything is ready; on that point I quite agree with Mr Elias. Tomorrow, before noon, the police will have arrested Mr Elias, on evidence I shall by then have put before them, and those three at least will be in jail before night. As you know, I attempted to avoid this course. I think that is all, gentlemen.’

But Mr Jacob P. Stein did not lay his formal information next day, for a reason that has often interrupted the activities of such industrious characters. He did not do it because he happened to be dead; and none of the rest of the programme was carried out, for a reason which Byrne found displayed in gigantic letters when he opened his morning paper: ‘Terrific Triple Murder: Three Millionaires Slain in One Night.’ Other exclamatory phrases followed in smaller letters, only about four times the size of normal type, which insisted on the special feature of the mystery: the fact that the three men had been killed not only simultaneously but in three widely separated places— Stein in his artistic and luxurious country seat a hundred miles inland, Wise outside the little bungalow on the coast where he lived on sea breezes and the simple life, and old Gallup in a thicket just outside the lodge—gates of his great house at the other end of the county. In all three cases there could be no doubt about the scenes of violence that had preceded death, though the actual body of Gallup was not found till the second day, where it hung, huge and horrible, amid the broken forks and branches of the little wood into which its weight had crashed, like a bison rushing on the spears: while Wise had clearly been flung over the cliff into the sea, not without a struggle, for his scraping and slipping footprints could still be traced upon the very brink. But the first signal of the tragedy had been the sight of his large limp straw hat, floating far out upon the waves and conspicuous from the cliffs above. Stein’s body also had at first eluded search, till a faint trail of blood led the investigators to a bath on the ancient Roman model he had been constructing in his garden; for he had been a man of an experimental turn of mind with a taste for antiquities.

Whatever he might think, Byrne was bound to admit that there was no legal evidence against anybody as things stood. A motive for murder was not enough. Even a moral aptitude for murder was not enough. And he could not conceive that pale young pacifist, Henry Home, butchering another man by brutal violence, though he might imagine the blaspheming Jake and even the sneering Jew as capable of anything. The police, and the man who appeared to be assisting them (who was no other than the rather mysterious man with the monocle, who had been introduced as Mr Nares), realized the position quite as clearly as the journalist.

They knew that at the moment the Bolshevist conspirators could not be prosecuted and convicted, and that it would be a highly sensational failure if they were prosecuted and acquitted. Nares started with an artful candour by calling them in some sense to the council, inviting them to a private conclave and asking them to give their opinions freely in the interests of humanity. He had started his investigations at the nearest scene of tragedy, the bungalow by the sea; and Byrne was permitted to be present at a curious scene, which was at once a peaceful parley of diplomatists and a veiled inquisition or putting of suspects to the question. Rather to Byrne’s surprise the incongruous company, seated round the table in the seaside bungalow, included the dumpy figure and owlish head of Father Brown, though his connexion with the affair did not appear until some time afterwards. The presence of young Potter, the dead man’s secretary, was more natural; yet somehow his demeanour was not quite so natural. He alone was quite familiar with their meeting—place, and was even in some grim sense their host; yet he offered little assistance or information. His round snub—nosed face wore an expression more like sulks than sorrow.

Jake Halket as usual talked most; and a man of his type could not be expected to keep up the polite fiction that he and his friends were not accused. Young Home, in his more refined way, tried to restrain him when he began to abuse the men who had been murdered; but Jake was always quite as ready to roar down his friends as his foes. In a spout of blasphemies he relieved his soul of a very unofficial obituary notice of the late Gideon Wise. Elias sat quite still and apparently indifferent behind those spectacles that masked his eyes.

‘It would be useless, I suppose,’ said Nares coldly, ‘to tell you that your remarks are indecent. It may affect you more if I tell you they are imprudent. You practically admit that you hated the dead man.’

‘Going to put me in quod for that, are you?’ jeered the demagogue. ‘All right. Only you’ll have to build a prison for a million men if you’re going to jail all the poor people who had reason to hate Gid Wise. And you know it’s God truth as well as I do.’

«Cosa c’entra quel… ah, sì, quella specie di fulmine; mi scusi tanto, errore mio. È così facile dire incudine quando si intende ghiacciaia.»

E con ciò lo straordinario giovanotto scomparve giù per i gradini, e Byrne continuò a salirli, mentre la sua mente si andava velando di sempre più fitta perplessità.

Trovò il gruppo dei tre accresciuto a quattro dalla presenza di un individuo dal volto affilato come una scure, con capelli radissimi color paglia e un monocolo, che pareva fungere da una sorta di consigliere per il vecchio Gallup, forse il suo legale, benché non fosse propriamente indicato come tale. Si chiamava Nares, e le domande che rivolgeva a Byrne vertevano principalmente, per una ragione o per l’altra, sul numero di coloro che erano probabilmente iscritti all’organizzazione rivoluzionaria. Poiché di questo Byrne sapeva poco, ancor meno ne disse; e i quattro uomini alla fine si levarono dai loro posti, e l’ultima parola spettò all’uomo che era stato il più taciturno.

«La ringrazio, signor Byrne» disse Stein, ripiegando gli occhiali. «Non resta che dire che tutto è pronto; su questo punto concordo pienamente con il signor Elias. Domani, prima di mezzogiorno, la polizia avrà arrestato il signor Elias, sulla base delle prove che per allora avrò messo davanti a loro, e quei tre, almeno, saranno in carcere prima di notte. Come sapete, ho tentato di evitare questa strada. Credo sia tutto, signori.»

Ma il signor Jacob P. Stein non depose la sua formale denuncia il giorno dopo, per una ragione che ha spesso interrotto le attività di caratteri tanto industriosi. Non lo fece perché si dava il caso che fosse morto; e nulla del resto del programma venne portato a compimento, per una ragione che Byrne trovò esposta in lettere giganti quando aprì il suo giornale del mattino: «Tremendo Triplice Omicidio: Tre Milionari Trucidati in Una Sola Notte.» Seguivano altre frasi esclamative in caratteri più piccoli, appena quattro volte la dimensione dei caratteri normali, che insistevano sul tratto singolare del mistero: il fatto che i tre uomini fossero stati uccisi non solo simultaneamente, ma in tre luoghi assai distanti tra loro: Stein nella sua raffinata e lussuosa villa di campagna, a centocinquanta chilometri nell’entroterra; Wise fuori dal piccolo bungalow sulla costa dove viveva di brezze marine e di vita semplice; e il vecchio Gallup in un boschetto proprio davanti al cancello del guardiano della sua grande dimora, all’altro capo della contea. In tutti e tre i casi non poteva esservi alcun dubbio sulle scene di violenza che avevano preceduto la morte, sebbene il corpo vero e proprio di Gallup non fosse stato ritrovato che il secondo giorno, dove pendeva, enorme e orribile, tra le forcelle e i rami spezzati del boschetto in cui il suo peso era precipitato, come un bisonte che si getta contro le lance; mentre Wise era stato chiaramente scaraventato oltre la scogliera nel mare, non senza lotta, poiché le impronte dei suoi piedi che scivolavano e raspavano si potevano ancora seguire sull’orlo stesso del precipizio. Ma il primo segnale della tragedia era stato la vista del suo largo e floscio cappello di paglia, che galleggiava lontano sulle onde e ben visibile dalle scogliere sovrastanti. Anche il corpo di Stein aveva dapprima sfuggito le ricerche, finché una debole traccia di sangue non condusse gli investigatori a una vasca da bagno su antico modello romano che egli stava facendo costruire nel suo giardino; giacché era stato un uomo dall’indole incline all’esperimento e con un gusto per le antichità.

Qualunque cosa potesse pensare, Byrne era costretto ad ammettere che, per come stavano le cose, non vi era alcuna prova legale contro chicchessia. Un movente per l’omicidio non bastava. Nemmeno una disposizione morale all’omicidio bastava. E non riusciva a concepire quel pallido giovane pacifista, Henry Home, che macellava un altro uomo con brutale violenza, per quanto potesse immaginare il bestemmiatore Jake e persino l’ebreo dal ghigno sarcastico capaci di qualsiasi cosa. La polizia, e l’uomo che pareva coadiuvarla (che non era altri che il piuttosto misterioso individuo dal monocolo, presentato come il signor Nares), si rendevano conto della situazione con la medesima chiarezza del giornalista.

Sapevano che, per il momento, i cospiratori bolscevichi non potevano essere perseguiti e condannati, e che sarebbe stato un fallimento altamente clamoroso se fossero stati perseguiti e assolti. Nares esordì con astuto candore chiamandoli, in un certo senso, a consiglio, invitandoli a un conciliabolo privato e chiedendo loro di esprimere liberamente le proprie opinioni nell’interesse dell’umanità. Aveva iniziato le sue indagini sulla scena più vicina della tragedia, il bungalow in riva al mare; e a Byrne fu concesso di assistere a una scena curiosa, che era al tempo stesso un pacifico colloquio di diplomatici e una velata inquisizione, ovvero la messa alla prova dei sospetti. Con non poca sorpresa di Byrne, l’incongrua compagnia, seduta intorno al tavolo nel bungalow sul mare, comprendeva la tozza figura e la testa da civetta di Father Brown, benché il suo legame con la faccenda non venisse alla luce se non qualche tempo dopo. La presenza del giovane Potter, il segretario del defunto, era più naturale; eppure, in qualche modo, il suo contegno non era altrettanto naturale. Lui soltanto conosceva bene il luogo del loro incontro, ed era persino, in un certo tetro senso, il loro anfitrione; e tuttavia offriva ben poco aiuto o informazione. Il suo viso rotondo dal naso camuso portava un’espressione più simile al broncio che al dolore.

Jake Halket, come al solito, parlava più di tutti; e da un uomo del suo stampo non ci si poteva aspettare che sostenesse la cortese finzione secondo cui lui e i suoi amici non erano accusati. Il giovane Home, nella sua maniera più raffinata, cercava di trattenerlo quando prese a insultare gli uomini che erano stati assassinati; ma Jake era sempre pronto a strapazzare a suon di urla i suoi amici quanto i suoi nemici. In un fiotto di bestemmie sgravò la propria anima di un necrologio assai poco ufficiale del defunto Gideon Wise. Elias sedeva perfettamente immobile e apparentemente indifferente dietro quegli occhiali che gli mascheravano gli occhi.

«Sarebbe inutile, suppongo» disse Nares con freddezza, «dirle che le sue osservazioni sono indecenti. Forse la toccherà di più se le dico che sono imprudenti. Lei praticamente ammette di aver odiato il morto.»

«Mi volete sbattere in gattabuia per questo, eh?» sghignazzò il demagogo. «E va bene. Solo che dovrete costruire una prigione per un milione di uomini, se avete intenzione di incarcerare tutti i poveracci che avevano ragione di odiare Gid Wise. E lo sapete bene quanto lo so io che è sacrosanta verità.»

Nares was silent; and nobody spoke until Elias interposed with his clear though faintly lisping drawl.

‘This appears to me to be a highly unprofitable discussion on both sides,’ he said. ‘You have summoned us here either to ask us for information or to subject us to cross—examination. If you trust us, we tell you we have no information. If you distrust us, you must tell us of what we are accused, or have the politeness to keep the fact to yourselves. Nobody has been able to suggest the faintest trace of evidence connecting any one of us with these tragedies any more than with the murder of Julius Caesar. You dare not arrest us, and you will not believe us. What is the good of our remaining here?’

And he rose, calmly buttoning his coat, his friends following his example. As they went towards the door, young Home turned back and faced the investigators for a moment with his pale fanatical face.

‘I wish to say,’ he said, ‘that I went to a filthy jail during the whole war because I would not consent to kill a man.’

With that they passed out, and the members of the group remaining looked grimly at each other.

‘I hardly think,’ said Father Brown, ‘that we remain entirely victorious, in spite of the retreat.’

‘I don’t mind anything,’ said Nares, ‘except being bullyragged by that blasphemous blackguard Halket. Home is a gentleman, anyhow. But whatever they say, I am dead certain they know; they are in it, or most of them are. They almost admitted it. They taunted us with not being able to prove we’re right, much more than with being wrong. What do you think, Father Brown?’

The person addressed looked across at Nares with a gaze almost disconcertingly mild and meditative.

‘It is quite true,’ he said, ‘that I have formed an idea that one particular person knows more than he has told us. But I think it would be well if I did not mention his name just yet.’

Nares’ eyeglass dropped from his eye, and he looked up sharply. ‘This is unofficial so far,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that at a later stage if you withhold information, your position may be serious.’

‘My position is simple,’ replied the priest. ‘I am here to look after the legitimate interests of my friend Halket. I think it will be in his interest, under the circumstances, if I tell you I think he will before long sever his connexion with this organization, and cease to be a Socialist in that sense. I have every reason to believe he will probably end as a Catholic.’

‘Halket!’ exploded the other incredulously. ‘Why he curses priests from morning till night!’

‘I don’t think you quite understand that kind of man,’ said Father Brown mildly. ‘He curses priests for failing (in his opinion) to defy the whole world for justice. Why should he expect them to defy the whole world for justice, unless he had already begun to assume they were—what they are? But we haven’t met here to discuss the psychology of conversion. I only mention this because it may simplify your task— perhaps narrow your search.’

‘If it is true, it would jolly well narrow it to that narrow— faced rascal Elias—and I shouldn’t wonder, for a more creepy, coldblooded, sneering devil I never saw.’

Father Brown sighed. ‘He always reminded me of poor Stein,’ he said, ‘in fact I think he was some relation.’

‘Oh, I say,’ began Nares, when his protest was cut short by the door being flung open, revealing once more the long loose figure and pale face of young Home; but it seemed as if he had not merely his natural, but a new and unnatural pallor.

‘Hullo,’ cried Nares, putting up his single eyeglass, ‘why have you come back again?’

Home crossed the room rather shakily without a word and sat down heavily in a chair. Then he said, as in a sort of daze: ‘I missed the others … I lost my way. I thought I’d better come back.’

The remains of evening refreshments were on the table, and Henry Home, that lifelong Prohibitionist, poured himself out a wine—glassful of liqueur brandy and drank it at a gulp. ‘You seem upset,’ said Father Brown.

Home had put his hands to his forehead and spoke as from under the shadow of it: he seemed to be speaking to the priest only, in a low voice.

‘I may as well tell you. I have seen a ghost.’

‘A ghost!’ repeated Nares in astonishment. ‘Whose ghost?’

‘The ghost of Gideon Wise, the master of this house,’ answered Home more firmly, ‘standing over the abyss into which he fell.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Nares; ‘no sensible person believes in ghosts.’

‘That is hardly exact,’ said Father Brown, smiling a little. ‘There is really quite as good evidence for many ghosts as there is for most crimes.’

‘Well, it’s my business to run after the criminals,’ said Nares rather roughly, ‘and I will leave other people to run away from the ghosts. If anybody at this time of day chooses to be frightened of ghosts it’s his affair.’

‘I didn’t say I was frightened of them, though I dare say I might be,’ said Father Brown. ‘Nobody knows till he tries. I said I believed in them, at any rate, enough to want to hear more about this one. What, exactly, did you see, Mr Home?’

‘It was over there on the brink of those crumbling cliffs; you know there is a sort of gap or crevice just about the spot where he was thrown over. The others had gone on ahead, and I was crossing the moor towards the path along the cliff. I often went that way, for I liked seeing the high seas dash up against the crags. I thought little of it to—night, beyond wondering that the sea should be so rough on this sort of clear moonlight night. I could see the pale crests of spray appear and disappear as the great waves leapt up at the headland. Thrice I saw the momentary flash of foam in the moonlight and then I saw something inscrutable. The fourth flash of the silver foam seemed to be fixed in the sky. It did not fall; I waited with insane intensity for it to fall. I fancied I was mad, and that time had been for me mysteriously arrested or prolonged. Then I drew nearer, and then I think I screamed aloud. For that suspended spray, like unfallen snowflakes, had fitted together into a face and a figure, white as the shining leper in a legend, and terrible as the fixed lightning.’

Nares taceva; e nessuno parlò finché Elias non intervenne con quel suo strascicato eloquio, così nitido eppure lievemente blesato.

«Questa mi sembra una discussione del tutto improduttiva da entrambe le parti», disse. «Ci avete convocati qui o per chiederci informazioni o per sottoporci a un interrogatorio serrato. Se avete fiducia in noi, vi diciamo che non abbiamo informazioni. Se diffidate di noi, dovete dirci di che cosa siamo accusati, oppure avere la cortesia di tenervi il fatto per voi. Nessuno è stato in grado di indicare la benché minima traccia di prova che colleghi qualcuno di noi a queste tragedie, non più di quanto ci colleghi all’assassinio di Julius Caesar. Non osate arrestarci, e non volete crederci. Che senso ha che rimaniamo qui?»

E si alzò, abbottonandosi con calma la giacca, seguito dall’esempio degli amici. Mentre si dirigevano verso la porta, il giovane Home si voltò e per un istante affrontò gli inquirenti con il suo pallido volto fanatico.

«Desidero dire», disse, «che sono stato in un lurido carcere per tutta la durata della guerra perché non ho voluto acconsentire a uccidere un uomo.»

Con ciò uscirono, e i membri del gruppo rimasti si guardarono l’un l’altro con aria torva.

«Non credo proprio», disse Padre Brown, «che restiamo del tutto vittoriosi, malgrado la ritirata.»

«Non m’importa di nulla», disse Nares, «tranne di essere stato malmenato da quel bestemmiatore d’un mascalzone di Halket. Home è comunque un gentiluomo. Ma checché ne dicano, sono più che certo che sanno; sono coinvolti, o almeno la maggior parte di loro. L’hanno quasi ammesso. Ci hanno schernito perché non siamo in grado di provare di aver ragione, molto più che di aver torto. Che cosa ne pensa, Padre Brown?»

L’interpellato guardò verso Nares con uno sguardo di una mitezza e di una meditabondità quasi sconcertanti.

«È verissimo», disse, «che mi sono fatto l’idea che una persona in particolare sappia più di quanto ci abbia detto. Ma penso che sarebbe bene che non facessi il suo nome, per ora.»

Il monocolo cadde dall’occhio di Nares, che alzò lo sguardo di scatto. «Per il momento questo è ufficioso», disse. «Suppongo lei sappia che, in una fase successiva, se lei trattiene informazioni, la sua posizione potrebbe farsi seria.»

«La mia posizione è semplice», rispose il prete. «Sono qui per tutelare i legittimi interessi del mio amico Halket. Penso che, date le circostanze, sarà nel suo interesse se le dico che, a mio avviso, egli reciderà tra non molto i suoi legami con questa organizzazione, e cesserà di essere socialista in quel senso. Ho ogni motivo di credere che finirà probabilmente come cattolico.»

«Halket!» esplose l’altro incredulo. «Ma se maledice i preti dalla mattina alla sera!»

«Non credo che lei capisca bene quel genere di uomo», disse Padre Brown con dolcezza. «Egli maledice i preti perché essi non riescono (a suo giudizio) a sfidare il mondo intero in nome della giustizia. Perché mai dovrebbe aspettarsi che essi sfidino il mondo intero in nome della giustizia, se non avesse già cominciato a presumere che essi fossero — ciò che sono? Ma non ci siamo riuniti qui per discutere la psicologia della conversione. Lo accenno soltanto perché potrebbe semplificarle il compito — restringere, forse, il campo delle ricerche.»

«Se fosse vero, lo restringerebbe di bella forza a quel farabutto dalla faccia stretta di Elias — e non me ne meraviglierei, ché un diavolo più raccapricciante, più freddo di sangue e più sogghignante non l’ho mai visto.»

Padre Brown sospirò. «Mi ha sempre ricordato il povero Stein», disse, «anzi credo fossero in qualche modo imparentati.»

«Oh, senta un po’», cominciò Nares, quando la sua protesta fu troncata dallo spalancarsi della porta, che rivelò di nuovo la figura lunga e sciolta e il pallido volto del giovane Home; ma sembrava che egli avesse non soltanto il suo pallore naturale, bensì un nuovo e innaturale pallore.

«Ehilà», gridò Nares, inforcando il suo unico monocolo, «perché è tornato indietro?»

Home attraversò la stanza con passo piuttosto malfermo, senza una parola, e si lasciò cadere pesantemente su una sedia. Poi disse, come in una specie di stordimento: «Ho perso di vista gli altri… Mi sono smarrito. Ho pensato che fosse meglio tornare indietro.»

Sul tavolo c’erano gli avanzi dei rinfreschi serali, ed Henry Home, quel proibizionista di tutta una vita, si versò un bicchiere da vino colmo di brandy da liquore e lo trangugiò d’un fiato. «Sembra sconvolto», disse Padre Brown.

Home si era portato le mani alla fronte e parlava come da sotto la sua ombra: sembrava rivolgersi soltanto al prete, a voce bassa.

«Tanto vale che ve lo dica. Ho visto un fantasma.»

«Un fantasma!» ripeté Nares stupefatto. «Il fantasma di chi?»

«Il fantasma di Gideon Wise, il padrone di questa casa», rispose Home con maggiore fermezza, «ritto sull’abisso in cui è precipitato.»

«Oh, sciocchezze!» disse Nares; «nessuna persona assennata crede ai fantasmi.»

«Non è esattamente così», disse Padre Brown, con un lieve sorriso. «In realtà vi sono prove altrettanto buone a favore di molti fantasmi quante ve ne sono a favore della maggior parte dei delitti.»

«Be’, è mio mestiere correre dietro ai criminali», disse Nares piuttosto bruscamente, «e lascerò che altri corrano via dai fantasmi. Se di questi tempi qualcuno sceglie di aver paura dei fantasmi, sono affari suoi.»

«Non ho detto di averne paura, per quanto oserei dire che potrei averne», disse Padre Brown. «Nessuno lo sa finché non ci prova. Ho detto che ci credo, in ogni caso, abbastanza da voler saperne di più su questo. Che cosa ha visto, esattamente, signor Home?»

«Era laggiù, sull’orlo di quelle scogliere sgretolate; sa che c’è una specie di varco o fenditura proprio nel punto in cui egli fu gettato di sotto. Gli altri erano andati avanti, e io stavo attraversando la brughiera verso il sentiero lungo la scogliera. Andavo spesso da quella parte, perché mi piaceva vedere l’alto mare frangersi contro le rupi. Non ci ho badato molto, stanotte, oltre a stupirmi che il mare fosse così agitato in una notte di chiaro di luna come questa. Vedevo le pallide creste degli spruzzi apparire e scomparire mentre le grandi onde balzavano contro il promontorio. Tre volte vidi il momentaneo baluginio della schiuma al chiaro di luna, e poi vidi qualcosa di imperscrutabile. Il quarto lampo della schiuma d’argento parve fissarsi nel cielo. Non ricadde; attesi con folle intensità che ricadesse. Immaginai di essere impazzito, e che il tempo fosse stato per me misteriosamente arrestato o prolungato. Poi mi avvicinai, e allora credo di aver gridato forte. Poiché quello spruzzo sospeso, come fiocchi di neve non ancora caduti, si era ricomposto in un volto e in una figura, bianca come il lebbroso splendente d’una leggenda, e terribile come la folgore immobile.»

‘And it was Gideon Wise, you say?’

Home nodded without speech. There was a silence broken abruptly by Nares rising to his feet; so abruptly indeed that he knocked a chair over.

‘Oh, this is all nonsense,’ he said, ‘but we’d better go out and see.’

‘I won’t go,’ said Home with sudden violence. ‘I’ll never walk by that path again.’

‘I think we must all walk by that path tonight,’ said the priest gravely; ‘though I will never deny it has been a perilous path … to more people than one.’

‘I will not… God, how you all goad me,’ cried Home, and his eyes began to roll in a strange fashion. He had risen with the rest, hut he made no motion towards the door.

‘Mr Home,’ said Nares firmly, ‘I am a police—officer, and this house, though you may not know it, is surrounded by the police. I have tried to investigate in a friendly fashion, but I must investigate everything, even anything so silly as a ghost. I must ask you to take me to the spot you speak of.’

There was another silence while Home stood heaving and panting as with indescribable fears. Then he suddenly sat down on his chair again and said with an entirely new and much more composed voice:

‘I can’t do it. You may just as well know why. You will know it sooner or later. I killed him.’

For an instant there was the stillness of a house struck by a thunderbolt and full of corpses. Then the voice of Father Brown sounded in that enormous silence strangely small like the squeak of a mouse.

‘Did you kill him deliberately?’ he asked.

‘How can one answer such a question?’ answered the man in the chair, moodily gnawing his finger. ‘I was mad, I suppose. He was intolerable and insolent, I know. I was on his land and I believe he struck me; anyhow, we came to a grapple and he went over the cliff. When I was well away from the scene it burst upon me that I had done a crime that cut me off from men; the brand of Cain throbbed on my brow and my very brain; I realized for the first time that I had indeed killed a man. I knew I should have to confess it sooner or later.’ He sat suddenly erect in his chair. ‘But I will say nothing against anybody else. It is no use asking me about plots or accomplices—I will say nothing.’

‘In the light of the other murders,’ said Nares, ‘it is difficult to believe that the quarrel was quite so unpremeditated. Surely somebody sent you there?’

‘I will say nothing against anybody I worked with,’ said Home proudly. ‘I am a murderer, but I will not be a traitor.’

Nares stepped between the man and the door and called out in an official fashion to someone outside.

‘We will all go to the place, anyhow,’ he said in a low voice to the secretary; ‘but this man must go in custody.’

The company generally felt that to go spook—hunting on a seacliff was a very silly anti—climax after the confession of the murderer. But Nares, though the most sceptical and scornful of all, thought it his duty to leave no stone unturned; as one might say, no gravestone unturned. For, after all, that crumbling cliff was the only gravestone over the watery grave of poor Gideon Wise. Nares locked the door, being the last out of the house, and followed the rest across the moor to the cliff, when he was astonished to see young Potter, the secretary, coming back quickly towards them, his face in the moonlight looking white as a moon.

‘By God, sir,’ he said, speaking for the first time that night, ‘there really is something there. It—it’s just like him.’

‘Why, you’re raving,’ gasped the detective. ‘Everybody’s raving.’

‘Do you think I don’t know him when I see him?’ cried the secretary with singular bitterness. ‘I have reason to.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the detective sharply, ‘you are one of those who had reason to hate him, as Halket said.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the secretary; ‘anyhow, I know him, and I tell you I can see him standing there stark and staring under this hellish moon.’

And he pointed towards the crack in the cliffs, where they could already see something that might have been a moonbeam or a streak of foam, but which was already beginning to look a little more solid. They had crept a hundred yards nearer, and it was still motionless; but it looked like a statue in silver.

Nares himself looked a little pale and seemed to stand debating what to do. Potter was frankly as much frightened as Home himself; and even Byrne, who was a hardened reporter, was rather reluctant to go any nearer if he could help it. He could not help considering it a little quaint, therefore, that the only man who did not seem to be frightened of a ghost was the man who had said openly that he might be. For Father Brown was advancing as steadily, at his stumping pace, as if he were going to consult a notice—board.

‘It don’t seem to bother you much,’ said Byrne to the priest; ‘and yet I thought you were the only one who believed in spooks.’

‘If it comes to that,’ replied Father Brown, ‘I thought you were one who didn’t believe in them. But believing in ghosts is one thing, and believing in a ghost is quite another.’

Byrne looked rather ashamed of himself, and glanced almost covertly at the crumbling headlands in the cold moonlight which were the haunts of the vision or delusion. ‘I didn’t believe in it till I saw it,’ he said.

‘And I did believe in it till I saw it,’ said Father Brown. The journalist stared after him as he went stumping across the great waste ground that rose towards the cloven headland like the sloping side of a hill cut in two. Under the discolouring moon the grass looked like long grey hair all combed one way by the wind, and seeming to point towards the place where the breaking cliff showed pale gleams of chalk in the grey—green turf, and where stood the pale figure or shining shade that none could yet understand. As yet that pale figure dominated a desolate landscape that was empty except for the black square back and business— like figure of the priest advancing alone towards it. Then the prisoner Home broke suddenly from his captors with a piercing cry and ran ahead of the priest, falling on his knees before the spectre.

«E dite che era Gideon Wise?»

Home annuì senza parlare. Ci fu un silenzio, rotto di colpo da Nares che balzava in piedi; e con tale violenza, invero, che rovesciò una sedia.

«Oh, sono tutte sciocchezze» disse; «ma faremmo meglio a uscire e vedere.»

«Io non ci vado» disse Home con improvvisa veemenza. «Non camminerò mai più per quel sentiero.»

«Credo che dovremo tutti camminare per quel sentiero, questa notte» disse il sacerdote con gravità; «anche se non negherò mai che sia stato un sentiero pericoloso… e per più d’una persona.»

«Non lo farò… Dio, come mi tormentate tutti quanti» gridò Home, e gli occhi presero a roteargli in modo strano. Si era alzato con gli altri, ma non accennava a muoversi verso la porta.

«Signor Home» disse Nares con fermezza, «io sono un agente di polizia, e questa casa, per quanto voi non lo sappiate, è circondata dalla polizia. Ho cercato di indagare in maniera amichevole, ma devo indagare su ogni cosa, anche su una cosa sciocca come un fantasma. Devo pregarvi di condurmi sul luogo di cui parlate.»

Ci fu un altro silenzio, mentre Home stava lì ansimando e ansando come in preda a un indicibile terrore. Poi tutt’a un tratto si rimise seduto sulla sedia e disse con voce affatto nuova e assai più composta:

«Non posso farlo. Tanto vale che sappiate il perché. Lo saprete prima o poi. L’ho ucciso io.»

Per un istante ci fu l’immobilità di una casa colpita da un fulmine e piena di cadaveri. Poi la voce di Padre Brown risuonò in quell’enorme silenzio stranamente esile, come il guaito d’un topo.

«L’avete ucciso deliberatamente?» chiese.

«Come si può rispondere a una simile domanda?» rispose l’uomo sulla sedia, mordicchiandosi cupamente il dito. «Ero pazzo, suppongo. Era insopportabile e insolente, lo so. Ero sulla sua terra e credo che mi abbia colpito; comunque sia, venimmo alle mani ed egli precipitò dalla scogliera. Quando fui ben lontano dal luogo, mi si palesò d’un tratto che avevo commesso un delitto che mi recideva dal consorzio degli uomini; il marchio di Caino mi pulsava sulla fronte e nel cervello stesso; compresi per la prima volta che avevo davvero ucciso un uomo. Sapevo che prima o poi avrei dovuto confessarlo.» Si drizzò all’improvviso sulla sedia. «Ma non dirò nulla contro nessun altro. È inutile interrogarmi su complotti o complici… non dirò nulla.»

«Alla luce degli altri omicidi» disse Nares, «è difficile credere che la lite fosse tanto premeditata da fuggirvi di mente. Di certo qualcuno vi ha mandato là?»

«Non dirò nulla contro coloro con cui ho lavorato» disse Home con fierezza. «Sono un assassino, ma non sarò un traditore.»

Nares si frappose tra l’uomo e la porta e chiamò, con tono ufficiale, qualcuno di fuori.

«In ogni caso andremo tutti sul posto» disse a bassa voce al segretario; «ma quest’uomo dev’essere tenuto in custodia.»

I presenti, nel complesso, sentirono che andare a caccia di spettri su una scogliera marina era un anticlimax assai sciocco, dopo la confessione dell’assassino. Ma Nares, benché il più scettico e sprezzante di tutti, ritenne suo dovere non lasciare nulla di intentato; non lasciare, per così dire, alcuna pietra tombale non rivoltata. Ché, in fin dei conti, quella scogliera friabile era l’unica pietra tombale sopra la fossa d’acqua del povero Gideon Wise. Nares chiuse a chiave la porta, essendo l’ultimo a uscire dalla casa, e seguì gli altri attraverso la brughiera fino alla scogliera, quando si stupì di vedere il giovane Potter, il segretario, tornare in fretta verso di loro, il volto che al chiaro di luna appariva bianco come una luna.

«Per Dio, signore» disse, parlando per la prima volta quella notte, «c’è davvero qualcosa laggiù. È… è proprio come lui.»

«Ma tu deliri» ansimò il detective. «Tutti quanti delirano.»

«Credete che io non lo riconosca quando lo vedo?» gridò il segretario con singolare amarezza. «Ho le mie buone ragioni.»

«Forse» disse il detective in tono tagliente, «siete uno di quelli che avevano ragione di odiarlo, come diceva Halket.»

«Forse» disse il segretario; «comunque sia, lo riconosco, e vi dico che lo vedo starsene lì ritto e sbarrato sotto questa luna infernale.»

E indicò la fenditura nelle scogliere, dove già si scorgeva qualcosa che avrebbe potuto essere un raggio di luna o una striscia di spuma, ma che cominciava già a parere un po’ più solido. Si erano avvicinati strisciando di un centinaio di metri, e quella cosa era ancora immobile; ma pareva una statua d’argento.

Lo stesso Nares appariva un po’ pallido e sembrava indugiare, dibattendo sul da farsi. Potter era spaventato, francamente, quanto lo stesso Home; e persino Byrne, che era un cronista incallito, era piuttosto restio ad avvicinarsi, potendone fare a meno. Non poteva pertanto fare a meno di trovare un po’ curioso che l’unico uomo il quale non pareva spaventato da un fantasma fosse l’uomo che aveva dichiarato apertamente che avrebbe potuto esserci. Ché Padre Brown avanzava con lo stesso passo saldo e pesante, come se andasse a consultare una bacheca di avvisi.

«Non pare che vi turbi granché» disse Byrne al sacerdote; «eppure credevo che foste l’unico a credere negli spettri.»

«Se è per questo» rispose Padre Brown, «io credevo che voi foste uno di quelli che non ci credono. Ma credere nei fantasmi è una cosa, e credere in un fantasma è tutt’altra faccenda.»

Byrne parve alquanto vergognarsi di sé, e lanciò quasi di soppiatto un’occhiata ai promontori frananti nel freddo chiaro di luna, che erano il ritrovo della visione o dell’illusione. «Non ci ho creduto finché non l’ho visto» disse.

«E io ci ho creduto finché non l’ho visto» disse Padre Brown. Il giornalista lo seguì con lo sguardo mentre se ne andava, arrancando pesante, attraverso la grande distesa deserta che saliva verso il promontorio spaccato come il fianco in pendio d’una collina tagliata in due. Sotto la luna scolorita l’erba pareva una lunga capigliatura grigia tutta pettinata da una parte dal vento, e sembrava indicare il luogo dove la scogliera che si sgretolava mostrava pallidi bagliori di gesso nel verde-grigio della cotica, e dove sorgeva la pallida figura o l’ombra lucente che nessuno ancora sapeva spiegarsi. Per il momento quella pallida figura dominava un paesaggio desolato, vuoto tranne che per la nera sagoma squadrata e sbrigativa del sacerdote che avanzava solo verso di essa. Poi il prigioniero Home si strappò all’improvviso ai suoi custodi con un grido lacerante e corse avanti al sacerdote, cadendo in ginocchio dinanzi allo spettro.

‘I have confessed,’ they heard him crying. ‘Why have you come to tell them I killed you?’

‘I have come to tell them you did not,’ said the ghost, and stretched forth a hand to him. Then the kneeling man sprang up with quite a new kind of scream; and they knew it was the hand of flesh.

It was the most remarkable escape from death in recent records, said the experienced detective and the no less experienced journalist. Yet, in a sense, it had been very simple after all. Flakes and shards of the cliff were continually falling away, and some had caught in the gigantic crevice, so as to form what was really a ledge or pocket in what was supposed to be a sheer drop through darkness to the sea. The old man, who was a very tough and wiry old man, had fallen on this lower shoulder of rock and had passed a pretty terrible twenty—four hours in trying to climb back by crags that constantly collapsed under him, but at length formed by their very ruins a sort of stairway of escape. This might be the explanation of Home’s optical illusion about a white wave that appeared and disappeared, and finally came to stay. But anyhow there was Gideon Wise, solid in bone and sinew, with his white hair and white dusty country clothes and harsh country features, which were, however, a great deal less harsh than usual. Perhaps it is good for millionaires to spend twenty— four hours on a ledge of rock within a foot of eternity. Anyhow, he not only disclaimed all malice against the criminal, but gave an account of the matter which considerably modified the crime. He declared that Home had not thrown him over at all; that the continually breaking ground had given way under him, and that Home had even made some movement as of attempted rescue.

‘On that providential bit of rock down there,’ he said solemnly, ‘I promised the Lord to forgive my enemies; and the Lord would think it mighty mean if I didn’t forgive a little accident like that.’

Home had to depart under police supervision, of course, but the detective did not disguise from himself that the prisoner’s detention would probably be short, and his punishment, if any, trifling. It is not every murderer who can put the murdered man in the witness— box to give him a testimonial.

‘It’s a strange case,’ said Byrne, as the detective and the others hastened along the cliff path towards the town.

‘It is,’ said Father Brown. ‘It’s no business of ours; but I wish you’d stop with me and talk it over.’

There was a silence and then Byrne complied by saying suddenly: ‘I suppose you were thinking of Home already, when you said somebody wasn’t telling all he knew.’

‘When I said that,’ replied his friend, ‘I was thinking of the exceedingly silent Mr Potter, the secretary of the no longer late or (shall we say) lamented Mr Gideon Wise.’

‘Well, the only time Potter ever spoke to me I thought he was a lunatic,’ said Byrne, staring, ‘but I never thought of his being a criminal. He said something about it all having to do with an icebox.’

‘Yes, I thought he knew something about it,’ said Father Brown reflectively. ‘I never said he had anything to do with it … I suppose old Wise really is strong enough to have climbed out of that chasm.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the astonished reporter. ‘Why, of course he got out of that chasm; for there he is.’

The priest did not answer the question but asked abruptly: ‘What do you think of Home?’

‘Well, one can’t call him a criminal exactly,’ answered Byrne. ‘He never was at all like any criminal I ever knew, and I’ve had some experience; and, of course, Nares has had much more. I don’t think we ever quite believed him a criminal.’

‘And I never believed in him in another capacity,’ said the priest quietly. ‘You may know more about criminals. But there’s one class of people I probably do know more about than you do, or even Nares for that matter. I’ve known quite a lot of them, and I know their little ways.’

‘Another class of people,’ repeated Byrne, mystified.’ Why, what class do you know about?’

‘Penitents,’ said Father Brown.

‘I don’t quite understand,’ objected Byrne. ‘Do you mean you don’t believe in his crime?’

‘I don’t believe in his confession,’ said Father Brown. ‘I’ve heard a good many confessions, and there was never a genuine one like that. It was romantic; it was all out of books. Look how he talked about having the brand of Cain. That’s out of books. It’s not what anyone would feel who had in his own person done a thing hitherto horrible to him. Suppose you were an honest clerk or shop— boy shocked to feel that for the first time you’d stolen money. Would you immediately reflect that your action was the same as that of Barabbas? Suppose you’d killed a child in some ghastly anger. Would you go back through history, till you could identify your action with that of an Idumean potentate named Herod? Believe me, our own crimes are far too hideously private and prosaic to make our first thoughts turn towards historical parallels, however apt. And why did he go out of his way to say he would not give his colleagues away? Even in saying so, he was giving them away. Nobody had asked him so far to give away anything or anybody. No; I don’t think he was genuine, and I wouldn’t give him absolution. A nice state of things, if people started getting absolved for what they hadn’t done.’ And Father Brown, his head turned away, looked steadily out to sea.

‘But I don’t understand what you’re driving at,’ cried Byrne. ‘What’s the good of buzzing round him with suspicions when he’s pardoned? He’s out of it anyhow. He’s quite safe.’

Father Brown spun round like a teetotum and caught his friend by the coat with unexpected and inexplicable excitement.

‘That’s it,’ he cried emphatically.’ Freeze on to that! He’s quite safe. He’s out of it. That’s why he’s the key of the whole puzzle.’

‘Oh, help,’ said Byrne feebly.

‘I mean,’ persisted the little priest, ‘he’s in it because he’s out of it. That’s the whole explanation.’

«Ho confessato», lo sentirono gridare. «Perché sei venuto a dir loro che ti ho ucciso?»

«Sono venuto a dir loro che non l’hai fatto», disse il fantasma, e gli tese una mano. Allora l’uomo inginocchiato balzò in piedi con un urlo di tutt’altra specie; e capirono che era una mano di carne.

Fu la più straordinaria salvezza dalla morte che si ricordasse negli annali recenti, dissero l’esperto investigatore e il non meno esperto giornalista. Eppure, in un certo senso, era stata semplicissima, dopotutto. Schegge e frammenti della rupe si staccavano di continuo, e alcuni si erano impigliati nell’enorme fenditura, così da formare quello che in realtà era un cornicione, o una tasca, in ciò che si supponeva fosse un salto a picco, giù nelle tenebre, fino al mare. Il vecchio, che era un vecchio assai coriaceo e nerboruto, era caduto su questa più bassa spalla di roccia e aveva trascorso un paio di ore terribili — ventiquattro, per la precisione — nel tentativo di risalire per rupi che gli franavano sotto senza tregua, ma che alla fine, con le loro stesse rovine, formarono una sorta di scala di salvezza. Poteva essere questa la spiegazione dell’illusione ottica di Home circa un’onda bianca che appariva e scompariva, e che infine venne a fermarsi. Comunque fosse, ecco lì Gideon Wise, saldo d’ossa e di tendini, coi suoi capelli bianchi e i suoi abiti bianchi e polverosi da campagna e i suoi lineamenti rudi da campagnolo, che erano tuttavia molto meno rudi del solito. Forse fa bene ai milionari passare ventiquattro ore su un cornicione di roccia, a un palmo dall’eternità. Comunque fosse, non solo disconobbe ogni rancore verso il criminale, ma diede dell’accaduto un resoconto che attenuava considerevolmente il delitto. Dichiarò che Home non l’aveva affatto gettato di sotto; che il terreno, sgretolandosi di continuo, aveva ceduto sotto di lui, e che Home aveva perfino accennato a un gesto, come per tentare di salvarlo.

«Su quel provvidenziale scoglio, laggiù», disse solennemente, «ho promesso al Signore di perdonare i miei nemici; e il Signore mi giudicherebbe ben meschino se non perdonassi un piccolo incidente come questo.»

Home dovette naturalmente allontanarsi sotto la sorveglianza della polizia, ma l’investigatore non si nascondeva che la detenzione del prigioniero sarebbe stata probabilmente breve, e la pena, ammesso che ve ne fosse, irrilevante. Non a ogni assassino capita di poter mettere l’assassinato al banco dei testimoni a rilasciargli un attestato di buona condotta.

«È un caso strano», disse Byrne, mentre l’investigatore e gli altri s’affrettavano lungo il sentiero della scogliera verso la città.

«Lo è», disse Father Brown. «Non ci riguarda affatto; ma vorrei che restaste con me a ragionarci sopra.»

Vi fu un silenzio, poi Byrne acconsentì dicendo d’improvviso: «Immagino che pensaste già a Home, quando diceste che qualcuno non stava dicendo tutto ciò che sapeva.»

«Quando dissi quello», replicò l’amico, «pensavo all’oltremodo silenzioso signor Potter, il segretario del non più defunto né (diciamo così) compianto signor Gideon Wise.»

«Be’, l’unica volta che Potter mi rivolse la parola lo credetti un pazzo», disse Byrne, sgranando gli occhi, «ma non pensai mai che fosse un criminale. Disse qualcosa a proposito del fatto che tutto quanto aveva a che vedere con una ghiacciaia.»

«Sì, pensavo che ne sapesse qualcosa», disse Padre Brown pensieroso. «Non ho mai detto che c’entrasse… Suppongo che il vecchio Wise sia davvero abbastanza robusto da essere risalito da quella voragine.»

«Che cosa intendete?» chiese il cronista stupito. «Ma certo che è uscito da quella voragine; eccolo lì.»

Il prete non rispose alla domanda, ma chiese bruscamente: «Che cosa pensate di Home?»

«Be’, non lo si può definire propriamente un criminale», rispose Byrne. «Non ha mai avuto nulla di alcun criminale che io abbia conosciuto, e qualche esperienza ce l’ho; e Nares, naturalmente, ne ha molta di più. Non credo che l’abbiamo mai davvero creduto un criminale.»

«E io non ho mai creduto in lui in un’altra veste», disse il prete con calma. «Voi ne saprete di più sui criminali. Ma c’è una categoria di persone su cui probabilmente ne so più io di voi, o perfino di Nares, se è per questo. Ne ho conosciuti parecchi, e conosco le loro piccole abitudini.»

«Un’altra categoria di persone», ripeté Byrne, sconcertato. «Ma insomma, quale categoria conoscete?»

«I penitenti», disse Padre Brown.

«Non capisco bene», obiettò Byrne. «Volete dire che non credete al suo delitto?»

«Non credo alla sua confessione», disse Father Brown. «Ne ho udite parecchie di confessioni, e non ce n’è mai stata una autentica come quella. Era romantica; era tutta presa dai libri. Guardate come ha parlato di portare il marchio di Caino. Roba da libri. Non è ciò che proverebbe chi avesse compiuto di persona un’azione fino allora orribile ai suoi occhi. Supponete di essere un onesto scrivano o un garzone di bottega, sconvolto nel sentire che per la prima volta avete rubato del denaro. Rifletteresti subito che la vostra azione è identica a quella di Barabba? Supponete di aver ucciso un bambino in un accesso di collera spaventoso. Risalireste la storia, fino a poter identificare la vostra azione con quella di un potentato idumeo di nome Erode? Credetemi, i nostri delitti sono fin troppo orribilmente privati e prosaici perché i nostri primi pensieri corrano a paralleli storici, per quanto calzanti. E perché mai si è dato tanta pena di dire che non avrebbe tradito i suoi colleghi? Proprio dicendolo, li tradiva. Nessuno gli aveva ancora chiesto di tradire alcunché o alcuno. No; non credo che fosse sincero, e non gli darei l’assoluzione. Un bel modo di procedere, se la gente cominciasse a farsi assolvere di ciò che non ha commesso.» E Padre Brown, il capo voltato altrove, fissava immoto il mare aperto.

«Ma non capisco dove volete arrivare», esclamò Byrne. «Che senso ha ronzargli intorno coi sospetti, quando è ormai perdonato? È fuori dai guai comunque. È perfettamente al sicuro.»

Padre Brown girò su se stesso come una trottola e afferrò l’amico per la giacca con un’eccitazione inattesa e inspiegabile.

«Ecco», gridò con enfasi. «Attaccatevi a questo! È perfettamente al sicuro. È fuori dai guai. Ecco perché è la chiave di tutto l’enigma.»

«Oh, misericordia», disse Byrne fiaccamente.

«Voglio dire», insisté il piccolo prete, «che c’è dentro proprio perché ne è fuori. È tutta qui la spiegazione.»

‘And a very lucid explanation too,’ said the journalist with feeling.

They stood looking out to sea for a time in silence, and then Father Brown said cheerfully: ‘And so we come back to the ice—box. Where you have all gone wrong from the first in this business is where a good many of the papers and the public men do go wrong. It’s because you assumed that there is nothing whatever in the modern world to fight about except Bolshevism. This story has nothing whatever to do with Bolshevism; except perhaps as a blind.’

‘I don’t see how that can be,’ remonstrated Byrne. ‘Here you have the three millionaires in that one business murdered—‘

‘No!’ said the priest in a sharp ringing voice. ‘You do not. That is just the point. You do not have three millionaires murdered. You have two millionaires murdered; and you have the third millionaire very much alive and kicking and quite ready to kick. And you have that third millionaire freed for ever from the threat that was thrown at his head before your very face, in playfully polite terms, and in that conversation you described as taking place in the hotel. Gallup and Stein threatened the more old— fashioned and independent old huckster that if he would not come into their combine they would freeze him out. Hence the ice—box, of course.’

After a pause he went on. ‘There is undoubtedly a Bolshevist movement in the modern world, and it must undoubtedly be resisted, though I do not believe very much in your way of resisting it. But what nobody notices is that there is another movement equally modern and equally moving: the great movement towards monopoly or the turning of all trades into trusts. That also is a revolution. That also produces what all revolutions produce. Men will kill for that and against that, as they do for and against Bolshevism. It has its ultimatums and its invasions and its executions. These trust magnates have their courts like kings; they have their bodyguard and bravos; they have their spies in the enemy camp. Home was one of old Gideon’s spies in one of the enemy camps; but he was used here against another enemy: the rivals who were ruining him for standing out.’

‘I still don’t quite see how he was used,’ said Byrne, ‘or what was the good of it.’

‘Don’t you see,’ cried Father Brown sharply, ‘that they gave each other an alibi?’

Byrne still looked at him a little doubtfully, though understanding was dawning on his face.

‘That’s what I mean,’ continued the other, ‘when I say they were in it because they were out of it. Most people would say they must be out of the other two crimes, because they were in this one. As a fact, they were in the other two because they were out of this one; because this one never happened at all. A very queer, improbable sort of alibi, of course; improbable and therefore impenetrable. Most people would say a man who confesses a murder must be sincere; a man who forgives his murderer must be sincere. Nobody would think of the notion that the thing never happened, so that one man had nothing to forgive and the other nothing to fear. They were fixed here for that night by a story against themselves. But they were not here that night; for Home was murdering old Gallup in the Wood, while Wise was strangling that little Jew in his Roman bath. That’s why I ask whether Wise was really strong enough for the climbing adventure.’

‘It was quite a good adventure,’ said Byrne regretfully. ‘It fitted into the landscape, and was really very convincing.’

‘Too convincing to convince,’ said Father Brown, shaking his head. ‘How very vivid was that moonlit foam flung up and turning to a ghost. And how very literary! Home is a sneak and a skunk, but do not forget that, like many other sneaks and skunks in history, he is also a poet.’

«E anche una spiegazione lucidissima» disse il giornalista con trasporto.

Rimasero per un po’ a contemplare il mare in silenzio, poi Father Brown riprese con tono allegro: «E così eccoci di nuovo alla ghiacciaia. Il punto in cui, fin dal principio, in questa faccenda avete preso tutti la strada sbagliata è lo stesso in cui la prende buona parte dei giornali e degli uomini pubblici. Ed è perché avete dato per scontato che nel mondo moderno non ci sia nulla per cui valga la pena battersi, tranne il bolscevismo. Questa storia non ha nulla a che vedere con il bolscevismo; se non forse come paravento.»

«Non vedo come sia possibile» obiettò Byrne. «Qui abbiamo i tre milionari di quell’unica impresa assassinati…»

«No!» disse il prete con voce acuta e squillante. «Non è così. È proprio questo il punto. Non avete tre milionari assassinati. Ne avete due assassinati; e avete il terzo milionario vivo e vegeto, pronto a scalciare e prontissimo a farlo. E avete quel terzo milionario liberato per sempre dalla minaccia che gli era stata scagliata contro sotto i vostri stessi occhi, in termini scherzosamente cortesi, in quella conversazione che avete descritto come avvenuta in albergo. Gallup e Stein minacciarono il più vecchio stampo e più indipendente dei bottegai, dicendogli che, se non fosse entrato nel loro cartello, l’avrebbero messo al gelo. Da qui la ghiacciaia, naturalmente.»

Dopo una pausa proseguì. «C’è indubbiamente un movimento bolscevico nel mondo moderno, e indubbiamente gli si deve resistere, per quanto io non creda granché nel vostro modo di resistergli. Ma ciò che nessuno nota è che esiste un altro movimento altrettanto moderno e altrettanto in marcia: il grande movimento verso il monopolio, ossia la trasformazione di tutti i commerci in trust. Anche quella è una rivoluzione. Anche quella produce ciò che producono tutte le rivoluzioni. Per quella, e contro quella, gli uomini uccidono, come fanno per il bolscevismo e contro di esso. Ha i suoi ultimatum, le sue invasioni e le sue esecuzioni. Questi magnati dei trust hanno le loro corti come i re; hanno le loro guardie del corpo e i loro sicari; hanno le loro spie nel campo nemico. Home era una delle spie del vecchio Gideon in uno dei campi nemici; ma qui venne usato contro un altro nemico: i rivali che lo stavano rovinando perché non si piegava.»

«Continuo a non capire bene in che modo sia stato usato» disse Byrne, «né a che cosa servisse.»

«Ma non capite» esclamò Father Brown in tono aspro, «che si fornirono l’un l’altro un alibi?»

Byrne continuava a guardarlo con una punta di dubbio, benché sul suo volto stesse albeggiando la comprensione.

«È questo che intendo» proseguì l’altro, «quando dico che erano dentro perché ne erano fuori. Quasi tutti direbbero che dovevano essere estranei agli altri due delitti, perché erano implicati in questo. In realtà erano implicati negli altri due proprio perché erano estranei a questo; perché questo non è mai avvenuto affatto. Un genere di alibi molto strano e improbabile, certo; improbabile, e perciò impenetrabile. Quasi tutti direbbero che un uomo il quale confessa un omicidio dev’essere sincero; che un uomo il quale perdona il proprio assassino dev’essere sincero. A nessuno verrebbe in mente l’idea che la cosa non sia mai avvenuta, sicché l’uno non aveva nulla da perdonare e l’altro nulla da temere. Furono inchiodati qui per quella notte da una storia che li accusava. Ma quella notte non erano qui; perché Home stava assassinando il vecchio Gallup nel bosco, mentre Wise strangolava quel piccolo ebreo nel suo bagno romano. Ecco perché mi domando se Wise fosse davvero abbastanza robusto per l’impresa dell’arrampicata.»

«Era proprio una bella impresa» disse Byrne con rammarico. «Si incastonava nel paesaggio, ed era davvero assai convincente.»

«Troppo convincente per convincere» disse Father Brown, scuotendo il capo. «Com’era vivida quella schiuma illuminata dalla luna, scagliata in alto e mutata in un fantasma. E com’era letteraria! Home è un vigliacco e una carogna, ma non dimenticate che, come tanti altri vigliacchi e carogne nella storia, è anche un poeta.»