by G. K. Datlow
“You see,” said Father Brown to his companion, “it was one of those cases where a motive really is too weak to convict a man and yet strong enough to acquit him. A little nervous fellow like that would be the last man really to kill a big strong man for a tiff about money. But he would be the first man to fear that he would be accused of having done it.… Ah, there was a thundering difference in the motive of the man who did do it.” And he relapsed into reflection, staring and almost glaring at vacancy.
“It is simply awful,” groaned Evan Smith. “I was abusing Dalmon as a blackmailer and a blackguard an hour or two ago, and yet it breaks me all up to hear he really did this, after all.”
The priest still seemed to be in a sort of trance, like a man staring down into an abyss. At last his lips moved and he murmured, more as if it were a prayer than an oath: “Merciful God, what a horrible revenge!”
His friend questioned him, but he continued as if talking to himself.
“What a horrible tale of hatred! What a vengeance for one mortal worm to take on another! Shall we ever get to the bottom of this bottomless human heart, where such abominable imaginations can abide? God save us all from pride; but I cannot yet make any picture in my mind of hate and vengeance like that.”
“Yes,” said Smith; “and I can’t quite picture why he should kill Vaudrey at all. If Dalmon was a blackmailer, it would seem more natural for Vaudrey to kill him. As you say, the throat-cutting was a horrid business, but—”
Father Brown started, and blinked like a man awakened from sleep.
“Oh, that!” he corrected hastily. “I wasn’t thinking about that. I didn’t mean the murder in the barber’s shop, when—when I said a horrible tale of vengeance. I was thinking of a much more horrible tale than that; though, of course, that was horrible enough, in its way. But that was much more comprehensible; almost anybody might have done it. In fact, it was very nearly an act of self-defence.”
“What?” exclaimed the secretary incredulously. “A man creeps up behind another man and cuts his throat, while he is smiling pleasantly at the ceiling in a barber’s chair, and you say it was self-defence!”
“I do not say it was justifiable self-defence,” replied the other. “I only say that many a man would have been driven to it, to defend himself against an appalling calamity—which was also an appalling crime. It was that other crime that I was thinking about. To begin with, about that question you asked just now—why should the blackmailer be the murderer? Well, there are a good many conventional confusions and errors on a point like that.” He paused, as if collecting his thoughts after his recent trance of horror, and went on in ordinary tones.
“You observe that two men, an older and a younger, go about together and agree on a matrimonial project; but the origin of their intimacy is old and concealed. One is rich and the other poor; and you guess at blackmail. You are quite right, at least to that extent. Where you are quite wrong is in guessing which is which. You assume that the poor man was blackmailing the rich man. As a matter of fact, the rich man was blackmailing the poor man.”
“But that seems nonsense,” objected the secretary.
“It is much worse than nonsense; but it is not at all uncommon,” replied the other. “Half modern politics consists of rich men blackmailing people. Your notion that it’s nonsense rests on two illusions which are both nonsensical. One is, that rich men never want to be richer; the other is, that a man can only be blackmailed for money. It’s the last that is in question here. Sir Arthur Vaudrey was acting not for avarice, but for vengeance. And he planned the most hideous vengeance I ever heard of.”
“But why should he plan vengeance on John Dalmon?” inquired Smith.
“It wasn’t on John Dalmon that he planned vengeance,” replied the priest, gravely.
There was a silence; and he resumed, almost as if changing the subject. “When we found the body, you remember, we saw the face upside down; and you said it looked like the face of a fiend. Has it occurred to you that the murderer also saw the face upside down, coming behind the barber’s chair?”
“But that’s all morbid extravagance,” remonstrated his companion. “I was quite used to the face when it was the right way up.”
“Perhaps you have never seen it the right way up,” said Father Brown. “I told you that artists turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to see it the right way up. Perhaps, over all those breakfasts and tea-tables, you had got used to the face of a fiend.”
“What on earth are you driving at?” demanded Smith, impatiently.
“I speak in parables,” replied the other in a rather sombre tone. “Of course, Sir Arthur was not actually a fiend; he was a man with a character which he had made out of a temperament that might also have been turned to good. But those goggling, suspicious eyes; that tight, yet quivering mouth, might have told you something if you had not been so used to them. You know, there are physical bodies on which a wound will not heal. Sir Arthur had a mind of that sort. It was as if it lacked a skin; he had a feverish vigilance of vanity; those strained eyes were open with an insomnia of egoism. Sensibility need not be selfishness. Sybil Rye, for instance, has the same thin skin and manages to be a sort of saint. But Vaudrey had turned it all to poisonous pride; a pride that was not even secure and self-satisfied. Every scratch on the surface of his soul festered. And that is the meaning of that old story about throwing the man into the pig-sty. If he’d thrown him then and there, after being called a pig, it might have been a pardonable burst of passion. But there was no pig-sty; and that is just the point. Vaudrey remembered the silly insult for years and years, till he could get the Oriental into the improbable neighbourhood of a pig-sty; and then he took, what he considered the only appropriate and artistic revenge.… Oh, my God! he liked his revenges to be appropriate and artistic.”
Smith looked at him curiously. “You are not thinking of the pig-sty story,” he said.
“No,” said Father Brown; “of the other story.” He controlled the shudder in his voice, and went on:
“Remembering that story of a fantastic and yet patient plot to make the vengeance fit the crime, consider the other story before us. Had anybody else, to your knowledge, ever insulted Vaudrey, or offered him what he thought a mortal insult? Yes; a woman insulted him.”
A sort of vague horror began to dawn in Evan’s eyes; he was listening intently.
“A girl, little more than a child, refused to marry him, because he had once been a sort of criminal; had, indeed, been in prison for a short time for the outrage on the Egyptian. And that madman said, in the hell of his heart: ‘She shall marry a murderer.’”
They took the road towards the great house and went along by the river for some time in silence, before he resumed: “Vaudrey was in a position to blackmail Dalmon, who had committed a murder long ago; probably he knew of several crimes among the wild comrades of his youth. Probably it was a wild crime with some redeeming features; for the wildest murders are never the worst. And Dalmon looks to me like a man who knows remorse, even for killing Vaudrey. But he was in Vaudrey’s power and, between them, they entrapped the girl very cleverly into an engagement; letting the lover try his luck first, for instance, and the other only encouraging magnificently. But Dalmon himself did not know, nobody but the Devil himself did know, what was really in that old man’s mind.
“Then, a few days ago, Dalmon made a dreadful discovery. He had obeyed, not altogether unwillingly; he had been a tool; and he suddenly found how the tool was to be broken and thrown away. He came upon certain notes of Vaudrey’s in the library which, disguised as they were, told of preparations for giving information to the police. He understood the whole plot and stood stunned as I did when I first understood it. The moment the bride and bridegroom were married, the bridegroom would be arrested and hanged. The fastidious lady, who objected to a husband who had been in prison, should have no husband except a husband on the gallows. That is what Sir Arthur Vaudrey considered an artistic rounding off
of the story.”
Evan Smith, deadly pale, was silent; and, far away, down the perspective of the road, they saw the large figure and wide hat of Dr. Abbott advancing towards them; even in the outline there was a certain agitation. But they were still shaken with their own private apocalypse.
“As you say, hate is a hateful thing,” said Evan at last; “and, do you know, one thing gives me a sort of relief. All my hatred of poor Dalmon is gone out of me—now I know how he was twice a murderer.”
It was in silence that they covered the rest of the distance and met the big doctor coming towards them, with his large gloved hands thrown out in a sort of despairing gesture and his grey beard tossing in the wind.
“There is dreadful news,” he said. “Arthur’s body has been found. He seems to have died in his garden.”
“Dear me,” said Father Brown, rather mechanically. “How dreadful!”
“And there is more,” cried the doctor breathlessly. “John Dalmon went off to see Vernon Vaudrey, the nephew; but Vernon Vaudrey hasn’t heard of him and Dalmon seems to have disappeared entirely.”
“Dear me,” said Father Brown. “How strange!”
The Worst Crime in the World
Father Brown was wandering through a picture gallery with an expression that suggested that he had not come there to look at the pictures. Indeed, he did not want to look at the pictures, though he liked pictures well enough. Not that there was anything immoral or improper about those highly modern pictorial designs. He would indeed be of an inflammable temperament who was stirred to any of the more pagan passions by the display of interrupted spirals, inverted cones and broken cylinders with which the art of the future inspired or menaced mankind. The truth is that Father Brown was looking for a young friend who had appointed that somewhat incongruous meeting-place, being herself of a more futuristic turn. The young friend was also a young relative; one of the few relatives that he had. Her name was Elizabeth Fane, simplified into Betty, and she was the child of a sister who had married into a race of refined but impoverished squires. As the squire was dead as well as impoverished, Father Brown stood in the relation of a protector as well as a priest, and in some sense a guardian as well as an uncle. At the moment, however, he was blinking about at the groups in the gallery without catching sight of the familiar brown hair and bright face of his niece. Nevertheless, he saw some people he knew and a number of people he did not know, including some that, as a mere matter of taste, he did not much want to know.
Among the people the priest did not know and who yet aroused his interest was a lithe and alert young man, very beautifully dressed and looking rather like a foreigner, because, while his beard was cut in a spade shape like an old Spaniard’s, his dark hair was cropped so close as to look like a tight black skull-cap. Among the people the priest did not particularly want to know was a very dominant-looking lady, sensationally clad in scarlet, with a mane of yellow hair too long to be called bobbed, but too loose to be called anything else. She had a powerful and rather heavy face of a pale and rather unwholesome complexion, and when she looked at anybody she cultivated the fascinations of a basilisk. She towed in attendance behind her a short man with a big beard and a very broad face, with long sleepy slits of eyes. The expression of his face was beaming and benevolent, if only partially awake; but his bull neck, when seen from behind, looked a little brutal.
Father Brown gazed at the lady, feeling that the appearance and approach of his niece would be an agreeable contrast. Yet he continued to gaze, for some reason, until he reached the point of feeling that the appearance of anybody would be an agreeable contrast. It was therefore with a certain relief, though with a slight start as of awakening, that he turned at the sound of his name and saw another face that he knew.
It was the sharp but not unfriendly face of a lawyer named Granby, whose patches of grey hair might almost have been the powder from a wig, so incongruous were they with his youthful energy of movement. He was one of those men in the City who run about like schoolboys in and out of their offices. He could not run round the fashionable picture gallery quite in that fashion; but he looked as if he wanted to, and fretted as he glanced to left and right, seeking somebody he knew.
“I didn’t know,” said Father Brown, smiling, “that you were a patron of the New Art.”
“I didn’t know that you were,” retorted the other. “I came here to catch a man.”
“I hope you will have good sport,” answered the priest. “I’m doing much the same.”
“Said he was passing through to the Continent,” snorted the solicitor, “and could I meet him in this cranky place.” He ruminated a moment, and said abruptly: “Look here, I know you can keep a secret. Do you know Sir John Musgrave?”
“No,” answered the priest; “but I should hardly have thought he was a secret, though they say he does hide himself in a castle. Isn’t he the old man they tell all those tales about—how he lives in a tower with a real portcullis and drawbridge, and generally refuses to emerge from the Dark Ages? Is he one of your clients?”
“No,” replied Granby shortly: “it’s his son, Captain Musgrave, who has come to us. But the old man counts for a good deal in the affair, and I don’t know him; that’s the point. Look here, this is confidential, as I say, but I can confide in you.” He dropped his voice and drew his friend apart into a side gallery containing representations of various real objects, which was comparatively empty.
“This young Musgrave,” he said, “wants to raise a big sum from us on a post obit on his old father in Northumberland. The old man’s long past seventy and presumably will obit some time or other; but what about the post, so to speak? What will happen afterwards to his cash and castles and portcullises and all the rest? It’s a very fine old estate, and still worth a lot, but strangely enough it isn’t entailed. So you see how we stand. The question is, as the man said in Dickens, is the old man friendly?”
“If he’s friendly to his son you’ll feel all the friendlier,” observed Father Brown. “No, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I never met Sir John Musgrave, and I understand very few people do meet him nowadays. But it seems obvious you have a right to an answer on that point before you lend the young gentleman your firm’s money. Is he the sort that people cut off with a shilling?”
“Well, I’m doubtful,” answered the other. “He’s very popular and brilliant and a great figure in society; but he’s a great deal abroad, and he’s been a journalist.”
“Well,” said Father Brown, “that’s not a crime. At least not always.”
“Nonsense!” said Granby curtly. “You know what I mean—he’s rather a rolling stone, who’s been a journalist and a lecturer and an actor, and all sorts of things. I’ve got to know where I stand.… Why, there he is.”
And the solicitor, who had been stamping impatiently about the emptier gallery, turned suddenly and darted into the more crowded room at a run. He was running towards the tall and well-dressed young man with the short hair and the foreign-looking beard.
The two walked away together talking, and for some moments afterwards Father Brown followed them with his screwed, short-sighted eyes. His gaze was shifted and recalled, however, by the breathless and even boisterous arrival of his niece, Betty. Rather to the surprise of her uncle, she led him back into the emptier room and planted him on a seat that was like an island in that sea of floor.
“I’ve got something I must tell you,” she said. “It’s so silly that nobody else will understand it.”
“You overwhelm me,” said Father Brown. “Is it about this business your mother started telling me about? Engagements and all that; not what the military historians call a general engagement.”
“You know,” she said, “that she wants me to be engaged to Captain Musgrave.”
“I didn’t,” said Father Brown with resignation; “but Captain Musgrave seems to be quite a fashionable topic.”
“Of course we’re very poor,” she said, “and it’s no good saying
it makes no difference.”
“Do you want to marry him?” asked Father Brown, looking at her through his half-closed eyes.
She frowned at the floor, and answered in a lower tone:
“I thought I did. At least I think I thought I did. But I’ve just had rather a shock.”
“Then tell us all about it.”
“I heard him laugh,” she said.
“It is an excellent social accomplishment,” he replied.
“You don’t understand,” said the girl. “It wasn’t social at all. That was just the point of it—that it wasn’t social.”
She paused a moment, and then went on firmly: “I came here quite early, and saw him sitting quite alone in the middle of that gallery with the new pictures, that was quite empty then. He had no idea I or anybody was near; he was sitting quite alone, and he laughed.”
“Well, no wonder,” said Father Brown. “I’m not an art critic myself, but as a general view of the pictures taken as a whole—”
“Oh, you won’t understand,” she said almost angrily. “It wasn’t a bit like that. He wasn’t looking at the pictures. He was staring right up at the ceiling; but his eyes seemed to be turned inwards, and he laughed so that my blood ran cold.”
The priest had risen and was pacing the room with his hands behind him. “You mustn’t be hasty in a case of this sort,” he began. “There are two kinds of men—but we can hardly discuss him just now, for here he is.”
Captain Musgrave entered the room swiftly and swept it with a smile. Granby, the lawyer, was just behind him, and his legal face bore a new expression of relief and satisfaction.
“I must apologize for everything I said about the Captain,” he said to the priest as they drifted together towards the door. “He’s a thoroughly sensible fellow and quite sees my point. He asked me himself why I didn’t go north and see his old father; I could hear from the old man’s own lips how it stood about the inheritance. Well, he couldn’t say fairer than that, could he? But he’s so anxious to get the thing settled that he offered to take me up in his own car to Musgrave Moss. That’s the name of the estate. I suggested that, if he was so kind, we might go together; and we’re starting to-morrow morning.”
