The Secret of Father Brown

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  Father Brown moved off in company with the man who had brought him in, who happened, indeed, to be a friend and person of a similar persuasion, which is not uncommon among actors. As he moved off, however, he heard Mrs. Mandeville give quiet directions to Mrs. Sands that she should take up the post of watcher beside the closed door.

  “Mrs. Mandeville seems to be an intelligent woman,” said the priest to his companion, “though she keeps so much in the background.”

  “She was once a highly intellectual woman,” said Jarvis sadly; “rather washed-out and wasted, some would say, by marrying a bounder like Mandeville. She has the very highest ideals of the drama, you know; but, of course, it isn’t often she can get her lord and master to look at anything in that light. Do you know, he actually wanted a woman like that to act as a pantomime boy? Admitted that she was a fine actress, but said pantomimes paid better. That will give you about a measure of his psychological insight and sensibility. But she never complained. As she said to me once: ‘Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.’ If only she were married to somebody who understood her ideas she might have been one of the great actresses of the age; indeed, the highbrow critics still think a lot of her. As it is, she is married to that.”

  And he pointed to where the big black bulk of Mandeville stood with his back to them, talking to the ladies who had summoned him forth into the vestibule. Lady Miriam was a very long and languid and elegant lady, handsome in a recent fashion largely modelled on Egyptian mummies; her dark hair cut low and square, like a sort of helmet, and her lips very painted and prominent and giving her a permanent expression of contempt. Her companion was a very vivacious lady with an ugly attractive face and hair powdered with grey. She was a Miss Theresa Talbot and she talked a great deal, while her companion seemed too tired to talk at all. Only, just as the two men passed. Lady Miriam summoned up the energy to say:

  “Plays are a bore; but I’ve never seen a rehearsal in ordinary clothes. Might be a bit funny. Somehow, nowadays, one can never find a thing one’s never seen.”

  “Now, Mr. Mandeville,” said Miss Talbot, tapping him on the arm with animated persistence, “you simply must let us see that rehearsal. We can’t come to-night, and we don’t want to. We want to see all the funny people in the wrong clothes.”

  “Of course I can give you a box if you wish it,” said Mandeville hastily. “Perhaps your ladyship would come this way.” And he led them off down another corridor.

  “I wonder,” said Jarvis in a meditative manner, “whether even Mandeville prefers that sort of woman.”

  “Well,” asked his clerical companion, “have you any reason to suppose that Mandeville does prefer her?”

  Jarvis looked at him steadily for an instant before answering.

  “Mandeville is a mystery,” he said gravely. “Oh, yes, I know that he looks about as commonplace a cad as ever walked down Piccadilly. But he really is a mystery for all that. There’s something on his conscience. There’s a shadow in his life. And I doubt whether it has anything more to do with a few fashionable flirtations than it has with his poor neglected wife. If it has, there’s something more in them than meets the eye. As a matter of fact, I happen to know rather more about it than anyone else does, merely by accident. But even I can’t make anything of what I know, except a mystery.”

  He looked around him in the vestibule to see that they were alone and then added, lowering his voice:

  “I don’t mind telling you, because I know you are a tower of silence where secrets are concerned. But I had a curious shock the other day; and it has been repeated several times since. You know that Mandeville always works in that little room at the end of the passage, just under the stage. Well, twice over I happened to pass by there when everyone thought he was alone; and what’s more, when I myself happened to be able to account for all the women in the company, and all the women likely to have to do with him, being absent or at their usual posts.”

  “All the women?” remarked Father Brown inquiringly.

  “There was a woman with him,” said Jarvis almost in a whisper. “There is some woman who is always visiting him; somebody that none of us knows. I don’t even know how she comes there, since it isn’t down the passage to the door; but I think I once saw a veiled or cloaked figure passing out into the twilight at the back of the theatre, like a ghost. But she can’t be a ghost. And I don’t believe she’s even an ordinary ‘affair’. I don’t think it’s love-making. I think it’s blackmail.”

  “What makes you think that?” asked the other.

  “Because,” said Jarvis, his face turning from grave to grim, “I once heard sounds like a quarrel; and then the strange woman said in a metallic, menacing voice, four words: ‘I am your wife.’”

  “You think he’s a bigamist,” said Father Brown reflectively. “Well, bigamy and blackmail often go together, of course. But she may be bluffing as well as blackmailing. She may be mad. These theatrical people often have monomaniacs running after them. You may be right, but I shouldn’t jump to conclusions… And talking about theatrical people, isn’t the rehearsal going to begin, and aren’t you a theatrical person?”

  “I’m not on in this scene,” said Jarvis with a smile. “They’re only doing one act, you know, until your Italian friend comes to her senses.”

  “Talking about my Italian friend,” observed the priest, “I should rather like to know whether she has come to her senses.”

  “We can go back and see, if you like,” said Jarvis; and they descended again to the basement and the long passage, at one end of which was Mandeville’s study and at the other the closed door of Signora Maroni. The door seemed to be still closed; and Mrs. Sands sat grimly outside it, as motionless as a wooden idol.

  Near the other end of the passage they caught a glimpse of some of the other actors in the scene mounting the stairs to the stage just above. Vernon and old Randall went ahead, running rapidly up the stairs; but Mrs. Mandeville went more slowly, in her quietly dignified fashion, and Norman Knight seemed to linger a little to speak to her. A few words fell on the ears of the unintentional eavesdroppers as they passed.

  “I tell you a woman visits him,” Knight was saying violently.

  “Hush!” said the lady in her voice of silver that still had in it something of steel. “You must not talk like this. Remember, he is my husband.”

  “I wish to God I could forget it,” said Knight, and rushed up the stairs to the stage.

  The lady followed him, still pale and calm, to take up her own position there.

  “Somebody else knows it,” said the priest quietly; “but I doubt whether it is any business of ours.”

  “Yes,” muttered Jarvis; “it seems as if everybody knows it and nobody knows anything about it.”

  They proceeded along the passage to the other end, where the rigid attendant sat outside the Italian’s door.

  “No; she ain’t come out yet,” said the woman in her sullen way; “and she ain’t dead, for I heard her moving about now and then. I dunno what tricks she’s up to.”

  “Do you happen to know, ma’am,” said Father Brown with abrupt politeness, “where Mr. Mandeville is just now?”

  “Yes,” she replied promptly. “Saw him go into his little room at the end of the passage a minute or two ago; just before the prompter called and the curtain went up – Must be there still, for I ain’t seen him come out.”

  “There’s no other door to his office, you mean,” said Father Brown in an off-hand way. “Well, I suppose the rehearsal’s going in full swing now, for all the Signora’s sulking.”

  “Yes,” said Jarvis after a moment’s silence; “I can just hear the voices on the stage from here. Old Randall has a splendid carrying voice.”

  They both remained for an instant in a listening attitude, so that the booming voice of the actor on the stage could indeed be heard rolling faintly down the stairs and along the passage. Before they had spoken again or
resumed their normal poise, their ears were filled with another sound. It was a dull but heavy crash and it came from behind the closed door of Mundon Mandeville’s private room.

  Father Brown went racing along the passage like an arrow from the bow and was struggling with the door-handle before Jarvis had wakened with a start and begun to follow him.

  “The door is locked,” said the priest, turning a face that was a little pale. “And I am all in favour of breaking down this door.”

  “Do you mean,” asked Jarvis with a rather ghastly look, “that the unknown visitor has got in here again? Do you think it’s anything serious?” After a moment he added: “I may be able to push back the bolt; I know the fastening on these doors.”

  He knelt down and pulled out a pocket-knife with a long steel implement, manipulated it for a moment, and the door swung open on the manager’s study. Almost the first thing they noticed was that there was no other door and even no window, but a great electric lamp stood on the table. But it was not quite the first thing that they noticed; for even before that they had seen that Mandeville was lying flat on his face in the middle of the room and the blood was crawling out from under his fallen face like a pattern of scarlet snakes that glittered evilly in that unnatural subterranean light.

  They did not know how long they had been staring at each other when Jarvis said, like one letting loose something that he had held back with his breath:

  “If the stranger got in somehow, she has gone somehow.”

  “Perhaps we think too much about the stranger,” said Father Brown. “There are so many strange things in this strange theatre that you rather tend to forget some of them.”

  “Why, which things do you mean?” asked his friend quickly.

  “There are many,” said the priest. “There is the other locked door, for instance.”

  “But the other door is locked,” cried Jarvis staring.

  “But you forgot it all the same,” said Father Brown. A few moments afterwards he said thoughtfully: “That Mrs. Sands is a grumpy and gloomy sort of card.”

  “Do you mean,” asked the other in a lowered voice, “that she’s lying and the Italian did come out?”

  “No,” said the priest calmly; “I think I meant it more or less as a detached study of character.”

  “You can’t mean,” cried the actor, “that Mrs. Sands did it herself?”

  “I didn’t mean a study of her character,” said Father Brown.

  While they had been exchanging these abrupt reflections, Father Brown had knelt down by the body and ascertained that it was beyond any hope or question a dead body. Lying beside it, though not immediately visible from the doorway, was a dagger of the theatrical sort; lying as if it had fallen from the wound or from the hand of the assassin. According to Jarvis, who recognized the instrument, there was not very much to be learned from it, unless the experts could find some finger-prints. It was a property dagger; that is, it was nobody’s property; it had been kicking about the theatre for a long time, and anybody might have picked it up. Then the priest rose and looked gravely round the room.

  “We must send for the police,” he said; “and for a doctor, though the doctor comes too late. Looking at this room, by the way, I don’t see how our Italian friend could manage it.”

  “The Italian!” cried his friend; “I should think not. I should have thought she had an alibi, if anybody had. Two separate rooms, both locked, at opposite ends of a long passage, with a fixed witness watching it.”

  “No,” said Father Brown. “Not quite. The difficulty is how she could have got in this end. I think she might have got out the other end.”

  “And why?” asked the other.

  “I told you,” said Father Brown, “that it sounded as if she was breaking glass – mirrors or windows. Stupidly enough I forgot something I knew quite well; that she is pretty superstitious. She wouldn’t be likely to break a mirror; so I suspect she broke a window. It’s true that all this is under the ground floor; but it might be a skylight or a window opening on an area. But there don’t seem to be any skylights or areas here.” And he stared at the ceiling very intently for a considerable time.

  Suddenly he came back to conscious life again with a start. “We must go upstairs and telephone and tell everybody. It is pretty painful… My God, can you hear those actors still shouting and ranting upstairs? The play is still going on. I suppose that’s what they mean by tragic irony.”

  When it was fated that the theatre should be turned into a house of mourning, an opportunity was given to the actors to show many of the real virtues of their type and trade. They did, as the phrase goes, behave like gentlemen; and not only like first walking gentlemen. They had not all of them liked or trusted Mandeville, but they knew exactly the right things to say about him; they showed not only sympathy but delicacy in their attitude to his widow. She had become, in a new and very different sense, a tragedy queen – her lightest word was law and while she moved about slowly and sadly, they ran her many errands.

  “She was always a strong character,” said old Randall rather huskily; “and had the best brains of any of us. Of course poor Mandeville was never on her level in education and so on; but she always did her duty splendidly. It was quite pathetic the way she would sometimes say she wished she had more intellectual life; but Mandeville – well, nil nisi bonum, as they say.” And the old gentleman went away wagging his head sadly.

  “Nil nisi bonum indeed,” said Jarvis grimly. “I don’t think Randall at any rate has heard of the story of the strange lady visitor. By the way, don’t you think it probably was the strange woman?”

  “It depends,” said the priest, “whom you mean by the strange woman.”

  “Oh! I don’t mean the Italian woman,” said Jarvis hastily. “Though, as a matter of fact, you were quite right about her, too. When they went in the skylight was smashed and the room was empty; but so far as the police can discover, she simply went home in the most harmless fashion. No, I mean the woman who was heard threatening him at that secret meeting; the woman who said she was his wife. Do you think she really was his wife?”

  “It is possible,” said Father Brown, staring blankly into the void, “that she really was his wife.”

  “That would give us the motive of jealousy over his bigamous remarriage,” reflected Jarvis, “for the body was not robbed in any way. No need to poke about for thieving servants or even impecunious actors. But as for that, of course, you’ve noticed the outstanding and peculiar thing about the case?”

  “I have noticed several peculiar things,” said Father Brown. “Which one do you mean?”

  “I mean the corporate alibi,” said Jarvis gravely. “It’s not often that practically a whole company has a public alibi like that; an alibi on a lighted stage and all witnessing to each other. As it turns out it is jolly lucky for our friends here that poor Mandeville did put those two silly society women in the box to watch the rehearsal. They can bear witness that the whole act was performed without a hitch, with the characters on the stage all the time. They began long before Mandeville was last seen going into his room. They went on at least five or ten minutes after you and I found his dead body. And, by a lucky coincidence, the moment we actually heard him fall was during the time when all the characters were on the stage together.”

  “Yes, that is certainly very important and simplifies everything,” agreed Father Brown. “Let us count the people covered by the alibi. There was Randall: I rather fancy Randall practically hated the manager, though he is very properly covering his feelings just now. But he is ruled out; it was his voice we heard thundering over our heads from the stage. There is our jeune premier, Mr. Knight: I have rather good reason to suppose he was in love with Mandeville’s wife and not concealing that sentiment so much as he might; but he is out of it, for he was on the stage at the same time, being thundered at. There was that amiable Jew who calls himself Aubrey Vernon, he’s out of it; and there’s Mrs. Mandeville, she’s out of it. Thei
r corporate alibi, as you say, depends chiefly on Lady Miriam and her friend in the box; though there is the general common-sense corroboration that the act had to be gone through and the routine of the theatre seems to have suffered no interruption. The legal witnesses, however, are Lady Miriam and her friend, Miss Talbot. I suppose you feel sure they are all right?”

  “Lady Miriam?” said Jarvis in surprise. “Oh, yes… I suppose you mean that she looks a queer sort of vamp. But you’ve no notion what even the ladies of the best families are looking like nowadays. Besides, is there any particular reason for doubting their evidence?”

  “Only that it brings us up against a blank wall,” said Father Brown. “Don’t you see that this collective alibi practically covers everybody? Those four were the only performers in the theatre at the time; and there were scarcely any servants in the theatre; none indeed, except old Sam, who guards the only regular entrance, and the woman who guarded Miss Maroni’s door. There is nobody else left available but you and me. We certainly might be accused of the crime, especially as we found the body. There seems nobody else who can be accused. You didn’t happen to kill him when I wasn’t looking, I suppose?”

  Jarvis looked up with a slight start and stared a moment, then the broad grin returned to his swarthy face. He shook his head.

  “You didn’t do it,” said Father Brown; “and we will assume for the moment, merely for the sake of argument, that I didn’t do it. The people on the stage being out of it, it really leaves the Signora behind her locked door, the sentinel in front of her door, and old Sam. Or are you thinking of the two ladies in the box? Of course they might have slipped out of the box.”

  “No,” said Jarvis; “I am thinking of the unknown woman who came and told Mandeville she was his wife.”

  “Perhaps she was,” said the priest; and this time there was a note in his steady voice that made his companion start to his feet once more and lean across the table.

  “We said,” he observed in a low, eager voice, “that this first wife might have been jealous of the other wife.”