Father Brown Omnibus

by G. K. Chesterton

  "By your account," said his companion laughing, "the Christian thief and the heathen fraud went by contraries. One was sorry he’d done it and the other was sorry he hadn’t."

  "We mustn’t be too hard on either of them," said Father Brown. "Other English gentlemen have stolen before now, and been covered by legal and political protection; and the West also has its own way of covering theft with sophistry. After all, the ruby is not the only kind of valuable stone in the world that has changed owners; it is true of other precious stones; often carved like cameos and coloured like flowers." The other looked at him inquiringly; and the priest’s finger was pointed to the Gothic outline of the great Abbey. "A great graven stone," he said, "and that was also stolen."

  VIII. The Chief Mourner of Marne

  A BLAZE of lightning blanched the grey woods tracing all the wrinkled foliage down to the last curled leaf, as if every detail were drawn in silverpoint or graven in silver. The same strange trick of lightning by which it seems to record millions of minute things in an instant of time, picked out everything, from the elegant litter of the picnic spread under the spreading tree to the pale lengths of winding road, at the end of which a white car was waiting. In the distance a melancholy mansion with four towers like a castle, which in the grey evening had been but a dim and distant huddle of walls like a crumbling cloud, seemed to spring into the foreground, and stood up with all its embattled, roofs and blank and staring windows. And in this, at least, the light had something in it of revelation. For to some of those grouped under the tree that castle was, indeed, a thing faded and almost forgotten, which was to prove its power to spring up again in the foreground of their lives.

  The light also clothed for an instant, in the same silver splendour, at least one human figure that stood up as motionless as one of the towers. It was that of a tall man standing on a rise of ground above the rest, who were mostly sitting on the grass or stooping to gather up the hamper and crockery. He wore a picturesque short cloak or cape clasped with a silver clasp and chain, which blazed like a star when the flash touched it; and something metallic in his motionless figure was emphasized by the fact that his closely-curled hair was of the burnished yellow that can be really called gold; and had the look of being younger than his face, which was handsome in a hard aquiline fashion, but looked, under the strong light, a little wrinkled and withered. Possibly it had suffered from wearing a mask of make-up, for Hugo Romaine was the greatest actor of his day. For that instant of illumination the golden curls and ivory mask—and silver ornament made his figure gleam like that of a man in armour; the next instant his figure was a dark and even black silhouette against the sickly grey of the rainy evening sky.

  But there was something about its stillness, like that of a statue, that distinguished it from the group at his feet. All the other figures around him had made the ordinary involuntary movement at the unexpected shock of light; for though the skies were rainy it was the first flash of the storm. The only lady present, whose air of carrying grey hair gracefully, as if she were really proud of it, marked her a matron of the United States, unaffectedly shut her eyes and uttered a sharp cry. Her English husband, General Outram, a very stolid Anglo-Indian, with a bald head and black moustache and whiskers of antiquated pattern, looked up with one stiff movement and then resumed his occupation of tidying up. A young man of the name of Mallow, very big and shy, with brown eyes like a dog’s, dropped a cup and apologized awkwardly. A third man, much more dressy, with a resolute head, like an inquisitive terrier’s, and grey hair brushed stiffly back, was no other than the great newspaper proprietor, Sir John Cockspur; he cursed freely, but not in an English idiom or accent, for he came from Toronto. But the tall man in the short cloak stood up literally like a statue in the twilight; his eagle face under the full glare had been like the bust of a Roman Emperor, and the carved eyelids had not moved.

  A moment after, the dark dome cracked across with thunder, and the statue seemed to come to life. He turned his head over his shoulder and said casually;

  "About a minute and half between the flash and the bang, but I think the storm’s coming nearer. A tree is not supposed to be a good umbrella for the lightning, but we shall want it soon for the rain. I think it will be a deluge.’

  The young man glanced at the lady a little anxiously and said: "Can’t we get shelter anywhere? There seems to be a house over there."

  "There is a house over there," remarked the general, rather grimly; "but not quite what you’d call a hospitable hotel."

  "It’s curious," said his wife sadly, "that we should be caught in a storm with no house near but that one, of all others."

  Something in her tone seemed to check the younger man, who was both sensitive and comprehending; but nothing of that sort daunted the man from Toronto.

  "What’s the matter with it?" he asked. "Looks rather like a ruin."

  "That place," said the general dryly, "belongs to the Marquis of Marne."

  "Gee!" said Sir John Cockspur. "I’ve heard all about that bird, anyhow; and a queer bird, too. Ran him as a front-page mystery in the Comet last year. ‘The Nobleman Nobody Knows.’"

  "Yes, I’ve heard of him, too," said young Mallow in a low voice. "There seem to be all sorts of weird stories about why he hides himself like that. I’ve heard that he wears a mask because he’s a leper. But somebody else told me quite seriously that there’s a curse on the family; a child born with some frightful deformity that’s kept in a dark room."

  "The Marquis of Marne has three heads," remarked Romaine quite gravely. "Once in every three hundred years a three-headed nobleman adorns the family tree. No human being dares approach the accursed house except a silent procession of hatters, sent to provide an abnormal number of hats. But," —and his voice took one of those deep and terrible turns, that could cause such a thrill in the theatre—"my friends, those hats are of no human shape."

  The American lady looked at him with a frown and a slight air of distrust, as if that trick of voice had moved her in spite of herself.

  "I don’t like your ghoulish jokes," she said; "and I’d rather you didn’t joke about this, anyhow."

  "I hear and obey," replied the actor; "but am I, like the Light Brigade, forbidden even to reason why?"

  "The reason," she replied, "is that he isn’t the Nobleman Nobody Knows. I know him myself, or, at least, I knew him very well when he was an attache at Washington thirty years ago, when we were all young. And he didn’t wear a mask, at least, he didn’t wear it with me. He wasn’t a leper, though he may he almost as lonely. And he had only one head and only one heart, and that was broken.’

  "Unfortunate love affair, of course," said Cockspur. "I should like that for the Comet."

  "I suppose it’s a compliment to us," she replied thoughtfully, "that you always assume a man’s heart is broken by a woman. But there are other kinds of love and bereavement. Have you never read ‘In Memoriam’? Have you never heard of David and Jonathan? What broke poor Marne up was the death of his brother; at least, he was really a first cousin, but had been brought up with him like a brother, and was much nearer than most brothers. James Mair, as the marquis was called when I knew him, was the elder of the two, but he always played the part of worshipper, with Maurice Mair as a god. And, by his account, Maurice Mair was certainly a wonder. James was no fool, and very good at his own political job; but it seems that Maurice could do that and everything else; that he was a brilliant artist and amateur actor and musician, and all the rest of it. James was very good-looking himself, long and strong and strenuous, with a high-bridged nose; though I suppose the young people would think he looked very quaint with his beard divided into two bushy whiskers in the fashion of those Victorian times. But Maurice was clean-shaven, and, by the portraits shown to me, certainly quite beautiful; though he looked a little more like a tenor than a gentleman ought to look. James was always asking me again and again whether his friend was not a marvel, whether any woman wouldn’t fall in love with him, and s
o on, until it became rather a bore, except that it turned so suddenly into a tragedy. His whole life seemed to be in that idolatry, and one day the idol tumbled down, and was broken like any china doll. A chill caught at the seaside, and it was all over."

  "And after that," asked the young man, "did he shut himself up like this?"

  "He went abroad at first," she answered; "away to Asia and the cannibal Islands and Lord knows where. These deadly strokes take different people in different ways. It took him in the way of an utter sundering or severance from everything, even from tradition and as far as possible from memory. He could not bear a reference to the old tie; a portrait or an anecdote or even an association. He couldn’t bear the business of a great public funeral. He longed to get away. He stayed away for ten years. I heard some rumour that lie had begun to revive a little at the end of the exile; but when he came back to his own home he relapsed completely. He settled down into religious melancholia, and that’s practically madness."

  "The priests got hold of him, they say," grumbled the old general. "I know he gave thousands to found a monastery, and lives himself rather like a monk—or, at any rate, a hermit. Can’t understand what good they think that will do."

  "Goddarned superstition," snorted Cockspur; "that sort of thing ought to be shown up. Here’s a man that might have been useful to the Empire and the world, and these vampires get hold of him and suck him dry. I bet with their unnatural notions they haven’t even let him marry."

  "No, he has never married," said the lady. "He was engaged when I knew him, as a matter of fact, but I don’t think it ever came first with him, and I think it went with the rest when everything else went. Like Hamlet and Ophelia—he lost hold of love because he lost hold of life. But I knew the girl; indeed, I know her still. Between ourselves, it was Viola Grayson, daughter of the old admiral. She’s never married either."

  "It’s infamous! It’s infernal!" cried Sir John, bounding up. "It’s not only a tragedy, but a crime. I’ve got a duty to the public, and I mean to see all this nonsensical nightmare. In the twentieth century——"

  He was almost choked with his own protest, and then, after a silence, the old soldier said:

  "Well, I don’t profess to know much about those things, but I think these religious people need to study a text which says: ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’"

  "Only, unfortunately, that’s just what it looks like," said his wife with a sigh. "It’s just like some creepy story of a dead man burying another dead man, over and over again for ever."

  "The storm has passed over us," said Romaine, with a rather inscrutable smile. "You will not have to visit the inhospitable house after all."

  She suddenly shuddered.

  "Oh, I’ll never do that again!" she exclaimed.

  Mallow was staring at her.

  "Again! Have you tried it before?" he cried.

  "Well, I did once," she said, with a lightness not without a touch of pride; "but we needn’t go back on all that. It’s not raining now, but I think we’d better be moving back to the car."

  As they moved off in procession, Mallow and the general brought up the rear; and the latter said abruptly, lowering his voice:

  "I don’t want that little cad Cockspur to hear but as you’ve asked you’d better know. It’s the one thing I can’t forgive Marne; but I suppose these monks have drilled him that way. My wife, who had been the best friend he ever had in America, actually came to that house when he was walking in the garden. He was looking at the ground like a monk, and hidden in a black hood that was really as ridiculous as any mask. She had sent her card in, and stood there in his very path. And lie walked past her without a word or a glance, as if she had been a stone. He wasn’t human; he was like some horrible automaton. She may well call him a dead man."

  "It’s all very strange," said the young man rather vaguely. "It isn’t like—like what I should have expected."

  Young Mr. Mallow, when he left that rather dismal picnic, took himself thoughtfully in search of a friend. He did not know any monks, but he knew one priest, whom he was very much concerned to confront with the curious revelations he had heard that afternoon. He felt he would very much like to know the truth about the cruel superstition that hung over the house of Marne, like the black thundercloud he had seen hovering over it.

  After being referred from one place to another, he finally ran his friend Father Brown to earth in the house of another friend, a Roman Catholic friend, with a large family. He entered somewhat abruptly to find Father Brown sitting on the floor with a serious expression, and attempting to pin the somewhat florid hat belonging to a wax doll on to the head of a teddy bear.

  Mallow felt a faint sense of incongruity; but he was far too full of his problem to put off the conversation if he could, help it. He was staggering from a sort of set-back in a subconscious process that had been going on for some time. He poured out the whole tragedy of the house of Marne as he had heard it from the general’s wife, along with most of the comments of the general and the newspaper proprietor. A new atmosphere of attention seemed to be created with the mention of the newspaper proprietor.

  Father Brown neither knew nor cared that his attitudes were comic or commonplace. He continued to sit on the floor, where his large head and short legs made him look very like a baby playing with toys. But there came into his great grey eyes a certain expression that has been seen in the eyes of many men in many centuries through the story of nineteen hundred years; only the men were not generally sitting on floors, but at council tables, or on the seats of chapters, or the thrones of bishops and cardinals; a far-off, watchful look, heavy with the humility of a charge too great for men. Something of that anxious and far-reaching look is found in the eyes of sailors and of those who have steered through so many storms the ship of St. Peter.

  "It’s very good of you to tell me this," he said. "I’m really awfully grateful, for we may have to do something about it. If it were only people like you and the general, it might be only a private matter; but if Sir John Cockspur is going to spread some sort or scare in his papers —well, he’s a Toronto Orangeman, and we can hardly keep out of it."

  "But what will you say about it?" asked Mallow anxiously.

  "The first thing I should say about it," said Father Brown, "is that, as you tell it, it doesn’t sound like life. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are all pessimistic vampires blighting all human happiness. Suppose I’m a pessimistic vampire," He scratched his nose with the teddy bear, became faintly conscious of the incongruity, and put it down. "Suppose we do destroy all human and family ties. Why should we entangle a man again in an old family tie just when he showed signs of getting loose from it? Surely it’s a little unfair to charge us both with crushing such affection and encouraging such infatuation. I don’t see why even a religious maniac should be that particular sort of monomaniac, or how religion could increase that mania, except by brightening it with a little hope."

  Then he said, after a pause: "I should like to talk to that general of yours."

  "It was his wife who told me," said Mallow.

  "Yes," replied the other; "but I’m more interested in what he didn’t tell you than in what she did."

  "You think he knows more than she does?"

  "I think he knows more than she says," answered Father Brown. "You tell me he used a phrase about forgiving everything except the rudeness to his wife. After all, what else was there to forgive?"

  Father Brown had risen and shaken his shapeless clothes, and stood looking at the young man with screwed up eyes and slightly quizzical expression. The next moment he had turned, and picking up his equally shapeless umbrella and large shabby hat, went stumping down the street.

  He plodded through a variety of wide streets and squares till he came to a handsome old-fashioned house in the West End, where he asked the servant if he could see General Outram. After some little palaver he was shown into a study, fitted out less with books than with maps and globes, where the b
ald-headed, black-whiskered Anglo-Indian sat smoking a long, thin, black cigar and playing with pins on a chart.

  "I am sorry to intrude," said the priest, "and all the more because I can’t help the intrusion looking like interference. I want to speak to you about a private matter, but only in the hope of keeping it private. Unfortunately, some people are likely to make it public. I think, general, that you know Sir John Cockspur."

  The mass of black moustache and whisker served as a sort of mask for the lower half of the old general’s face; it was always hard to see whether he smiled, but his brown eyes often had a certain twinkle.

  "Everybody knows him, I suppose," he said. "I don’t know him very well.."

  "Well, you know everybody knows whatever he knows," said Father Brown, smiling, "when he thinks it convenient to print it. And I understand from my friend Mr. Mallow, whom, I think, you know, that Sir John is going to print some scorching anti-clerical articles founded on what he would call the Marne Mystery. "Monks Drive Marquis Mad,’ etc."