Lord Stanes was just stepping back from his examination of the paper, and, looking across at his partner, he said with rather a curious intonation: ‘Well, it’s you they want to murder. Evidently I’m not considered worth murdering.’
One of those still electric shocks of fancy that sometimes thrilled Father Brown’s mind in an almost meaningless way shot through him at that particular instant. He had a queer notion that the man who was speaking could not now be murdered, because he was already dead. It was, he cheerfully admitted, a perfectly senseless idea. But there was something that always gave him the creeps about the cold disenchanted detachment of the noble senior partner; about his cadaverous colour and inhospitable eyes. ‘The fellow,’ he thought in the same perverse mood, ‘has green eyes and looks as if he had green blood.’
Anyhow, it was certain that Sir Hubert Sand had not got green blood. His blood, which was red enough in every sense, was creeping up into his withered or weather-beaten cheeks with all the warm fullness of life that belongs to the natural and innocent indignation of the good-natured.
‘In all my life,’ he said, in a strong voice and yet shakily, ‘I have never had such a thing said or done about me. I may have differed—‘
‘We can none of us differ about this,’ struck in his nephew impetuously. ‘I’ve tried to get on with them, but this is a bit too thick.’
‘You don’t really think,’ began Father Brown, ‘that your workmen—‘
‘I say we may have differed,’ said old Sand, still a little tremulously, ‘God knows I never like the idea of threatening English workmen with cheaper labour—‘
‘We none of us liked it,’ said the young man, ‘but if I know you, uncle, this has about settled it.’
Then after a pause he added, ‘I suppose, as you say, we did disagree about details; but as to real policy—‘
‘My dear fellow,’ said his uncle, comfortably. ‘I hoped there would never be any real disagreement.’ From which anybody who understands the English nation may rightly infer that there had been very considerable disagreement. Indeed the uncle and nephew differed almost as much as an Englishman and an American. The uncle had the English ideal of getting outside the business, and setting up a sort of an alibi as a country gentleman. The nephew had the American ideal of getting inside the business; of getting inside the very mechanism like a mechanic. And, indeed, he had worked with most of the mechanics and was familiar with most of the processes and tricks of the trade. And he was American again, in the fact that he did this partly as an employer to keep his men up to the mark, but in some vague way also as an equal, or at least with a pride in showing himself also as a worker. For this reason he had often appeared almost as a representative of the workers, on technical points which were a hundred miles away from his uncle’s popular eminence in politics or sport. The memory of those many occasions, when young Henry had practically come out of the workshop in his shirt-sleeves, to demand some concession about the conditions of the work, lent a peculiar force and even violence to his present reaction the other way.
‘Well, they’ve damned-well locked themselves out this time,’ he cried. ‘After a threat like that there’s simply nothing left but to defy them. There’s nothing left but to sack them all now; instanter; on the spot. Otherwise we’ll be the laughing-stock of the world.’
Old Sand frowned with equal indignation, but began slowly: ‘I shall be very much criticized—‘
‘Criticized!’ cried the young man shrilly. ‘Criticized if you defy a threat of murder! Have you any notion how you’ll be criticized if you don’t defy it? Won’t you enjoy the headlines? “Great Capitalist Terrorized”—“Employer Yields to Murder Threat.”
‘Particularly,’ said Lord Stanes, with something faintly unpleasant in his tone. ‘Particularly when he has been in so many headlines already as “The Strong Man of Steel-Building.” ‘
Sand had gone very red again and his voice came thickly from under his thick moustache. ‘Of course you’re right there. If these brutes think I’m afraid—‘
At this point there was an interruption in the conversation of the group; and a slim young man came towards them swiftly. The first notable thing about him was that he was one of those whom men, and women too, think are just a little too nice-looking to look nice. He had beautiful dark curly hair and a silken moustache and he spoke like a gentleman, but with almost too refined and exactly modulated an accent. Father Brown knew him at once as Rupert Rae, the secretary of Sir Hubert, whom he had often seen pottering about in Sir Hubert’s house; but never with such impatience in his movements or such a wrinkle on his brow.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said to his employer, ‘but there’s a man been hanging about over there. I’ve done my best to get rid of him. He’s only got a letter, but he swears he must give it to you personally.’
‘You mean he went first to my house?’ said Sand, glancing swiftly at his secretary. ‘I suppose you’ve been there all the morning.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr Rupert Rae.
There was a short silence; and then Sir Hubert Sand curtly intimated that the man had better be brought along; and the man duly appeared.
Nobody, not even the least fastidious lady, would have said that the newcomer was too nice-looking. He had very large ears and a face like a frog, and he stared before him with an almost ghastly fixity, which Father Brown attributed to his having a glass eye. In fact, his fancy was tempted to equip the man with two glass eyes; with so glassy a stare did he contemplate the company. But the priest’s experience, as distinct from his fancy, was able to suggest several natural causes for that unnatural waxwork glare; one of them being an abuse of the divine gift of fermented liquor. The man was short and shabby and carried a large bowler hat in one hand and a large sealed letter in the other.
Sir Hubert Sand looked at him; and then said quietly enough, but in a voice that somehow seemed curiously small, coming out of the fullness of his bodily presence: ‘Oh—it’s you.’
He held out his hand for the letter; and then looked around apologetically, with poised finger, before ripping it open and reading it. When he had read it, he stuffed it into his inside pocket and said hastily and a little harshly: ‘Well, I suppose all this business is over, as you say. No more negotiations possible now; we couldn’t pay the wages they want anyhow. But I shall want to see you again, Henry, about—about winding things up generally.’
‘All right,’ said Henry, a little sulkily perhaps, as if he would have preferred to wind them up by himself. ‘I shall be up in number 188 after lunch; got to know how far they’ve got up there.’
The man with the glass eye, if it was a glass eye, stumped stiffly away; and the eye of Father Brown (which was by no means a glass eye) followed him thoughtfully as he threaded his way through the ladders and disappeared into the street.
It was on the following morning that Father Brown had the unusual experience of over-sleeping himself; or at least of starting from sleep with a subjective conviction that he must be late. This was partly due to his remembering, as a man may remember a dream, the fact of having been half-awakened at a more regular hour and fallen asleep again; a common enough occurrence with most of us, but a very uncommon occurrence with Father Brown. And he was afterwards oddly convinced, with that mystic side of him which was normally turned away from the world, that in that detached dark islet of dreamland, between the two wakings, there lay like buried treasure the truth of this tale.
As it was, he jumped up with great promptitude, plunged into his clothes, seized his big knobby umbrella and bustled out into the street, where the bleak white morning was breaking like splintered ice about the huge black building facing him. He was surprised to find that the streets shone almost empty in the cold crystalline light; the very look of it told him it could hardly be so late as he had feared. Then suddenly the stillness was cloven by the arrowlike swiftness of a long grey car which halted before the big deserted flats. Lord Stanes unfolded himself from within and a
pproached the door, carrying (rather languidly) two large suitcases. At the same moment the door opened, and somebody seemed to step back instead of stepping out into the street. Stanes called twice to the man within, before that person seemed to complete his original gesture by coming out on to the doorstep; then the two held a brief colloquy, ending in the nobleman carrying his suitcases upstairs, and the other coming out into full daylight and revealing the heavy shoulders and peering head of young Henry Sand.
Father Brown made no more of this rather odd meeting, until two days later the young man drove up in his own car, and implored the priest to enter it. ‘Something awful has happened,’ he said, ‘and I’d rather talk to you than Stanes. You know Stanes arrived the other day with some mad idea of camping in one of the flats that’s just finished. That’s why I had to go there early and open the door to him. But all that will keep. I want you to come up to my uncle’s place at once.’
‘Is he ill?’ inquired the priest quickly.
‘I think he’s dead,’ answered the nephew.
‘What do you mean by saying you think he’s dead?’ asked Father Brown a little briskly. ‘Have you got a doctor?’
‘No,’ answered the other. ‘I haven’t got a doctor or a patient either…It’s no good calling in doctors to examine the body; because the body has run away. But I’m afraid I know where it has run to… the truth is—we kept it dark for two days; but he’s disappeared.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better,’ said Father Brown mildly, ‘if you told me what has really happened from the beginning?’
‘I know,’ answered Henry Sand; ‘it’s an infernal shame to talk flippantly like this about the poor old boy; but people get like that when they’re rattled. I’m not much good at hiding things; the long and the short of it is—well, I won’t tell you the long of it now. It’s what some people would call rather a long shot; shooting suspicions at random and so on. But the short of it is that my unfortunate uncle has committed suicide.’
They were by this time skimming along in the car through the last fringes of the town and the first fringes of the forest and park beyond it; the lodge gates of Sir Hubert Sand’s small estate were about a half mile farther on amid the thickening throng of the beeches. The estate consisted chiefly of a small park and a large ornamental garden, which descended in terraces of a certain classical pomp to the very edge of the chief river of the district. As soon as they arrived at the house, Henry took the priest somewhat hastily through the old Georgian rooms and out upon the other side; where they silently descended the slope, a rather steep slope embanked with flowers, from which they could see the pale river spread out before them almost as flat as in a bird’s-eye view. They were just turning the corner of the path under an enormous classical urn crowned with a somewhat incongruous garland of geraniums, when Father Brown saw a movement in the bushes and thin trees just below him, that seemed as swift as a movement of startled birds.
In the tangle of thin trees by the river two figures seemed to divide or scatter; one of them glided swiftly into the shadows and the other came forward to face them; bringing them to a halt and an abrupt and rather unaccountable silence. Then Henry Sand said in his heavy way: ‘I think you know Father Brown… Lady Sand.’
Father Brown did know her; but at that moment he might almost have said that he did not know her. The pallor and constriction of her face was like a mask of tragedy; she was much younger than her husband, but at that moment she looked somehow older than everything in that old house and garden. And the priest remembered, with a subconscious thrill, that she was indeed older in type and lineage and was the true possessor of the place. For her own family had owned it as impoverished aristocrats, before she had restored its fortunes by marrying a successful business man. As she stood there, she might have been a family picture, or even a family ghost. Her pale face was of that pointed yet oval type seen in some old pictures of Mary Queen of Scots; and its expression seemed almost to go beyond the natural unnaturalness of a situation, in which her husband had vanished under suspicion of suicide. Father Brown, with the same subconscious movement of the mind, wondered who it was with whom she had been talking among the trees.
‘I suppose you know all this dreadful news,’ she said, with a comfortless composure. ‘Poor Hubert must have broken down under all this revolutionary persecution, and been just maddened into taking his own life. I don’t know whether you can do anything; or whether these horrible Bolsheviks can be made responsible for hounding him to death.’
‘I am terribly distressed, Lady Sand,’ said Father Brown. ‘And still, I must own, a little bewildered. You speak of persecution; do you think that anybody could hound him to death merely by pinning up that paper on the wall?’
‘I fancy,’ answered the lady, with a darkening brow, ‘that there were other persecutions besides the paper.’
‘It shows what mistakes one may make,’ said the priest sadly. ‘I never should have thought he would be so illogical as to die in order to avoid death.’
‘I know,’ she answered, gazing at him gravely. ‘I should never have believed it, if it hadn’t been written with his own hand.’
‘What?’ cried Father Brown, with a little jump like a rabbit that has been shot at.
‘Yes,’ said Lady Sand calmly. ‘He left a confession of suicide; so I fear there is no doubt about it.’ And she passed on up the slope alone, with all the inviolable isolation of the family ghost.
The spectacles of Father Brown were turned in mute inquiry to the eyeglasses of Mr Henry Sand. And the latter gentleman, after an instant’s hesitation, spoke again in his rather blind and plunging fashion: ‘Yes, you see, it seems pretty clear now what he did. He was always a great swimmer and used to come down in his dressing-gown every morning for a dip in the river. Well, he came down as usual, and left his dressing-gown on the bank; it’s lying there still. But he also left a message saying he was going for his last swim and then death, or something like that.’
‘Where did he leave the message?’ asked Father Brown.
‘He scrawled it on that tree there, overhanging the water, I suppose the last thing he took hold of; just below where the dressing-gown’s lying. Come and see for yourself.’
Father Brown ran down the last short slope to the shore and peered under the hanging tree, whose plumes were almost dipping in the stream. Sure enough, he saw on the smooth bark the words scratched conspicuously and unmistakably: ‘One more swim and then drowning. Good-bye. Hubert Sand.’ Father Brown’s gaze travelled slowly up the bank till it rested on a gorgeous rag of raiment, all red and yellow with gilded tassels. It was the dressing-gown and the priest picked it up and began to turn it over. Almost as he did so he was conscious that a figure had flashed across his field of vision; a tall dark figure that slipped from one clump of trees to another, as if following the trail of the vanishing lady. He had little doubt that it was the companion from whom she had lately parted. He had still less doubt that it was the dead man’s secretary, Mr Rupert Rae.
‘Of course, it might be a final afterthought to leave the message,’ said Father Brown, without looking up, his eye riveted on the red and gold garment. ‘We’ve all heard of love-messages written on trees; and I suppose there might be death-messages written on trees too.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t have anything in the pockets of his dressing-gown, I suppose,’ said young Sand. ‘And a man might naturally scratch his message on a tree if he had no pens, ink or paper.’
‘Sounds like French exercises,’ said the priest dismally. ‘But I wasn’t thinking of that.’ Then, after a silence, he said in a rather altered voice:
‘To tell the truth, I was thinking whether a man might not naturally scratch his message on a tree, even if he had stacks of pens, and quarts of ink, and reams of paper.’
Henry was looking at him with a rather startled air, his eyeglasses crooked on his pug-nose. ‘And what do you mean by that?’ he asked sharply.
‘Well,’ said Father Brown slowly,
‘I don’t exactly mean that postmen will carry letters in the form of logs, or that you will ever drop a line to a friend by putting a postage stamp on a pinetree. It would have to be a particular sort of position—in fact, it would have to be a particular sort of person, who really preferred this sort of arboreal correspondence. But, given the position and the person, I repeat what I said. He would still write on a tree, as the song says, if all the world were paper and all the sea were ink; if that river flowed with everlasting ink or all these woods were a forest of quills and fountain-pens.’
It was evident that Sand felt something creepy about the priest’s fanciful imagery; whether because he found it incomprehensible or because he was beginning to comprehend.
‘You see,’ said Father Brown, turning the dressing-gown over slowly as he spoke, ‘a man isn’t expected to write his very best handwriting when he chips it on a tree. And if the man were not the man, if I make myself clear—Hullo!’
He was looking down at the red dressing-gown, and it seemed for the moment as if some of the red had come off on his finger; but both the faces turned towards it were already a shade paler.
‘Blood!’ said Father Brown; and for the instant there was a deadly stillness save for the melodious noises of the river.
Henry Sand cleared his throat and nose with noises that were by no means melodious. Then he said rather hoarsely: ‘Whose blood?’
‘Oh, mine,’ said Father Brown; but he did not smile.
A moment after he said: ‘There was a pin in this thing and I pricked myself. But I don’t think you quite appreciate the point… the point of the pin, I do’; and he sucked his finger like a child.
‘You see,’ he said after another silence, ‘the gown was folded up and pinned together; nobody could have unfolded it—at least without scratching himself. In plain words, Hubert Sand never wore this dressing-gown. Any more than Hubert Sand ever wrote on that tree. Or drowned himself in that river.’
Father Brown Omnibus Page 97
