The Secret of Father Brown

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  “If you are still interested in my son,” he said, using the term with an icy indifference, “you will not see very much of him. He has just left the country. Between ourselves, I might say fled the country.”

  “Indeed,” said Father Brown with a grave stare.

  “Some people I never heard of, called Grunov, have been pestering me, of all people, about his whereabouts,” said Sir John; “and I’ve just come in to send off a wire to tell them that, so far as I know, he’s living in the Poste Restante, Riga. Even that has been a nuisance. I came in yesterday to do it, but was five minutes too late for the post office. Are you staying long? I hope you will pay me another visit.”

  When the priest recounted to the lawyer his little interview with old Musgrave in the village, the lawyer was both puzzled and interested. “Why has the Captain bolted?” he asked. “Who are the other people who want him? Who on earth are the Grunovs?”

  “For the first, I don’t know,” replied Father Brown. “Possibly his mysterious sin has come to light. I should rather guess that the other people are blackmailing him about it. For the third, I think I do know. That horrible fat woman with yellow hair is called Madame Grunov, and that little man passes as her husband.”

  The next day Father Brown came in rather wearily, and threw down his black bundle of an umbrella with the air of a pilgrim laying down his staff. He had an air of some depression. But it was as it was so often in his criminal investigations. It was not the depression of failure, but the depression of success.

  “It’s rather a shock,” he said in a dull voice; “but I ought to have guessed it. I ought to have guessed it when I first went in and saw the thing standing there.”

  “When you saw what?” asked Granby impatiently.

  “When I saw there was only one suit of armour,” answered Father Brown. There was a silence during which the lawyer only stared at his friend, and then the friend resumed.

  “Only the other day I was just going to tell my niece that there are two types of men who can laugh when they are alone. One might almost say the man who does it is either very good or very bad. You see, he is either confiding the joke to God or confiding it to the Devil. But anyhow he has an inner life. Well, there really is a kind of man who confides the joke to the Devil. He does not mind if nobody sees the joke; if nobody can safely be allowed even to know the joke. The joke is enough in itself, if it is sufficiently sinister and malignant.”

  “But what are you talking about?” demanded Granby. “Whom are you talking about? Which of them, I mean? Who is this person who is having a sinister joke with his Satanic Majesty?”

  Father Brown looked across at him with a ghastly smile.

  “Ah,” he said, “that’s the joke.”

  There was another silence, but this time the silence seemed to be rather full and oppressive than merely empty; it seemed to settle down on them like the twilight that was gradually turning from dusk to dark. Father Brown went on speaking in a level voice, sitting stolidly with his elbows on the table.

  “I’ve been looking up the Musgrave family,” he said. “They are vigorous and long-lived stock, and even in the ordinary way I should think you would wait a good time for your money.”

  “We’re quite prepared for that,” answered the solicitor; “but anyhow it can’t last indefinitely. The old man is nearly eighty, though he still walks about, and the people at the inn here laugh and say they don’t believe he will ever die.”

  Father Brown jumped up with one of his rare but rapid movements, but remained with his hands on the table, leaning forward and looking his friend in the face.

  “That’s it,” he cried in a low but excited voice. “That’s the only problem. That’s the only real difficulty. How will he die? How on earth is he to die?”

  “What on earth do you mean?” asked Granby.

  “I mean,” came the voice of the priest out of the darkening room, “that I know the crime that James Musgrave committed.”

  His tones had such a chill in them that Granby could hardly repress a shiver; he murmured a further question.

  “It was really the worst crime in the world,” said Father Brown. “At least, many communities and civilizations have accounted it so. It was always from the earliest times marked out in tribe and village for tremendous punishment. But anyhow, I know now what young Musgrave really did and why he did it.”

  “And what did he do?” asked the lawyer.

  “He killed his father,” answered the priest.

  The lawyer in his turn rose from his seat and gazed across the table with wrinkled brows.

  “But his father is at the castle,” he cried in sharp tones.

  “His father is in the moat,” said the priest, “and I was a fool not to have known it from the first when something bothered me about that suit of armour. Don’t you remember the look of that room? How very carefully it was arranged and decorated? There were two crossed battle-axes hung on one side of the fire-place, two crossed battle-axes on the other. There was a round Scottish shield on one wall, a round Scottish shield on the other. And there was a stand of armour guarding one side of the hearth, and an empty space on the other. Nothing will make me believe that a man who arranged all the rest of that room with that exaggerated symmetry left that one feature of it lopsided. There was almost certainly another man in armour. And what has become of him?”

  He paused a moment, and then went on in a more matter-of-fact tone; “When you come to think of it, it’s a very good plan for a murder, and meets the permanent problem of the disposal of the body. The body could stand inside that complete tilting-armour for hours, or even days, while servants came and went, until the murderer could simply drag it out in the dead of night and lower it into the moat, without even crossing the bridge. And then what a good chance he ran! As soon as the body was at all decayed in the stagnant water there would sooner or later be nothing but a skeleton in fourteenth-century armour, a thing very likely to be found in the moat of an old Border castle. It was unlikely that anybody would look for anything there, but if they did, that would soon be all they would find. And I got some confirmation of that. That was when you said I was looking for a rare plant; it was a plant in a good many senses, if you’ll excuse the jest. I saw the marks of two feet sunk so deep into the solid bank I was sure that the man was either very heavy or was carrying something very heavy. Also, by the way, there’s another moral from that little incident when I made my celebrated graceful and cat-like leap.”

  “My brain is rather reeling,” said Granby, “but I begin to have some notion of what all this nightmare is about. What about you and your cat-like leap?”

  “At the post office to-day,” said Father Brown, “I casually confirmed the statement the baronet made to me yesterday, that he had been there just after closing-time on the day previous – that is, not only on the very day we arrived, but at the very time we arrived. Don’t you see what that means? It means that he was actually out when we called, and came back while we were waiting; and that was why we had to wait so long. And when I saw that, I suddenly saw a picture that told the whole story.”

  “Well,” asked the other impatiently, “and what about it?”

  “An old man of eighty can walk,” said Father Brown. “An old man can even walk a good deal, pottering about in country lanes. But an old man can’t jump. He would be an even less graceful jumper than I was. Yet, if the baronet came back while we were waiting, he must have come in as we came in – by jumping the moat – for the bridge wasn’t lowered till later. I rather guess he had hampered it himself to delay inconvenient visitors, to judge by the rapidity with which it was repaired. But that doesn’t matter. When I saw that fancy picture of the black figure with the grey hair taking a flying leap across the moat I knew instantly that it was a young man dressed up as an old man. And there you have the whole story.”

  “You mean,” said Granby slowly, “that this pleasing youth killed his father, hid the corpse first in the armour and then
in the moat, disguised himself and so on?”

  “They happened to be almost exactly alike,” said the priest. “You could see from the family portraits how strong the likeness ran. And then you talk of his disguising himself. But in a sense everybody’s dress is a disguise. The old man disguised himself in a wig, and the young man in a foreign beard. When he shaved and put the wig on his cropped head he was exactly like his father, with a little make-up. Of course, you understand now why he was so very polite about getting you to come up next day here by car. It was because he himself was coming up that night by train. He got in front of you, committed his crime, assumed his disguise, and was ready for the legal negotiations.”

  “Ah,” said Granby thoughtfully, “the legal negotiations! You mean, of course, that the real old baronet would have negotiated very differently.

  “He would have told you plainly that the Captain would never get a penny,” said Father Brown. “The plot, queer as it sounds, was really the only way of preventing his telling you so. But I want you to appreciate the cunning of what the fellow did tell you. His plan answered several purposes at once. He was being blackmailed by these Russians for some villainy; I suspect for treason during the war. He escaped from them at a stroke, and probably sent them chasing off to Riga after him. But the most beautiful refinement of all was that theory he enunciated about recognizing his son as an heir, but not as a human being. Don’t you see that while it secured the post obit, it also provided some sort of answer to what would soon be the greatest difficulty of all?”

  “I see several difficulties,” said Granby; “which one do you mean?”

  “I mean that if the son was not even disinherited, it would look rather odd that the father and son never met. The theory of a private repudiation answered that. So there only remained one difficulty, as I say, which is probably perplexing the gentleman now. How on earth is the old man to die?”

  “I know how he ought to die,” said Granby.

  Father Brown seemed to be a little bemused, and went on in a more abstracted fashion.

  “And yet there is something more in it than that,” he said. “There was something about that theory that he liked in a way that is more – well, more theoretical. It gave him an insane intellectual pleasure to tell you in one character that he had committed a crime in another character – when he really had. That is what I mean by the infernal irony; by the joke shared with the Devil. Shall I tell you something that sounds like what they call a paradox? Sometimes it is a joy in the very heart of hell to tell the truth. And above all, to tell it so that everybody misunderstands it. That is why he liked that antic of pretending to be somebody else, and then painting himself as black – as he was. And that was why my niece heard him laughing to himself all alone in the picture gallery.”

  Granby gave a slight start, like a person brought back to common things with a bump.

  “Your niece,” he cried. “Didn’t her mother want her to marry Musgrave? A question of wealth and position, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” said Father Brown dryly; “her mother was all in favour of a prudent marriage.”

  Chapter VIII. The Red Moon of Meru

  Everyone agreed that the bazaar at Mallowood Abbey (by kind permission of Lady Mounteagle) was a great success; there were roundabouts and swings and side-shows, which the people greatly enjoyed; I would also mention the Charity, which was the excellent object of the proceedings, if any of them could tell me what it was. However, it is only with a few of them that we are here concerned; and especially with three of them, a lady and two gentlemen, who passed between two of the principal tents or pavilions, their voices high in argument. On their right was the tent of the Master of the Mountain, that world-famous fortune-teller by crystals and chiromancy; a rich purple tent, all over which were traced, in black and gold, the sprawling outlines of Asiatic gods waving any number of arms like octopods. Perhaps they symbolized the readiness of divine help to be had within; perhaps they merely implied that the ideal being of a pious palmist would have as many hands as possible. On the other side stood the plainer tent of Phroso the Phrenologist; more austerely decorated with diagrams of the heads of Socrates and Shakespeare, which were apparently of a lumpy sort. But these were presented merely in black and white, with numbers and notes, as became the rigid dignity of a purely rationalistic science. The purple tent had an opening like a black cavern, and all was fittingly silent within. But Phroso the Phrenologist, a lean, shabby, sunburnt person, with an almost improbably fierce black moustache and whiskers, was standing outside his own temple, and talking, at the top of his voice, to nobody in particular, explaining that the head of any passer-by would doubtless prove, on examination, to be every bit as knobbly as Shakespeare’s. Indeed, the moment the lady appeared between the tents, the vigilant Phroso leapt on her and offered, with a pantomime of old-world courtesy, to feel her bumps.

  She refused with civility that was rather like rudeness; but she must be excused, because she was in the middle of an argument. She also had to be excused, or at any rate was excused, because she was Lady Mounteagle. She was not a nonentity, however, in any sense; she was at once handsome and haggard, with a hungry look in her deep, dark eyes and something eager and almost fierce about her smile. Her dress was bizarre for the period; for it was before the Great War had left us in our present mood of gravity and recollection. Indeed, the dress was rather like the purple tent; being of a semi-oriental sort, covered with exotic and esoteric emblems. But everyone knew that the Mounteagles were mad; which was the popular way of saying that she and her husband were interested in the creeds and culture of the East.

  The eccentricity of the lady was a great contrast to the conventionality of the two gentlemen, who were braced and buttoned up in all the stiffer fashion of that far-off day, from the tips of their gloves to their bright top hats. Yet even here there was a difference; for James Hardcastle managed at once to look correct and distinguished, while Tommy Hunter only looked correct and commonplace. Hardcastle was a promising politician; who seemed in society to be interested in everything except politics. It may be answered gloomily that every politician is emphatically a promising politician. But to do him justice, he had often exhibited himself as a performing politician. No purple tent in the bazaar, however, had been provided for him to perform in.

  “For my part,” he said, screwing in the monocle that was the only gleam in his hard, legal face, “I think we must exhaust the possibilities of mesmerism before we talk about magic. Remarkable psychological powers undoubtedly exist, even in apparently backward peoples. Marvellous things have been done by fakirs.”

  “Did you say done by fakers?” asked the other young man, with doubtful innocence.

  “Tommy, you are simply silly,” said the lady. “Why will you keep barging in on things you don’t understand? You’re like a schoolboy screaming out that he knows how a conjuring trick is done. It’s all so Early Victorian – that schoolboy scepticism. As for mesmerism, I doubt whether you can stretch it to – ”

  At this point Lady Mounteagle seemed to catch sight of somebody she wanted; a black stumpy figure standing at a booth where children were throwing hoops at hideous table ornaments. She darted across and cried:

  “Father Brown, I’ve been looking for you. I want to ask you something: Do you believe in fortune-telling?”

  The person addressed looked rather helplessly at the little hoop in his hand and said at last:

  “I wonder in which sense you’re using the word ‘believe.’ Of course, if it’s all a fraud – ”

  “Oh, but the Master of the Mountain isn’t a bit of a fraud,” she cried. “He isn’t a common conjurer or a fortune-teller at all. It’s really a great honour for him to condescend to tell fortunes at my parties; he’s a great religious leader in his own country; a Prophet and a Seer. And even his fortune-telling isn’t vulgar stuff about coming into a fortune. He tells you great spiritual truths about yourself, about your ideals.”

  “Quite so,” s
aid Father Brown. “That’s what I object to. I was just going to say that if it’s all a fraud, I don’t mind it so much. It can’t be much more of a fraud than most things at fancy bazaars; and there, in a way, it’s a sort of practical joke. But if it’s a religion and reveals spiritual truths – then it’s all as false as hell and I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.”

  “That is something of a paradox,” said Hardcastle, with a smile.

  “I wonder what a paradox is,” remarked the priest in a ruminant manner. “It seems to me obvious enough. I suppose it wouldn’t do very much harm if somebody dressed up as a German spy and pretended to have told all sorts of lies to the Germans. But if a man is trading in the truth with the Germans – well! So I think if a fortune-teller is trading in truth like that – ”

  “You really think,” began Hardcastle grimly.

  “Yes,” said the other; “I think he is trading with the enemy.”

  Tommy Hunter broke into a chuckle. “Well,” he said, “if Father Brown thinks they’re good so long as they’re frauds, I should think he’d consider this copper-coloured prophet a sort of saint.”

  “My cousin Tom is incorrigible,” said Lady Mounteagle. “He’s always going about showing up adepts, as he calls it. He only came down here in a hurry when he heard the Master was to be here, I believe. He’d have tried to show up Buddha or Moses.”

  “Thought you wanted looking after a bit,” said the young man, with a grin on his round face. “So I toddled down. Don’t like this brown monkey crawling about.”

  “There you go again!” said Lady Mounteagle. “Years ago, when I was in India, I suppose we all had that sort of prejudice against brown people. But now I know something about their wonderful spiritual powers, I’m glad to say I know better.”