The Secret of Father Brown

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  “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 he 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 he 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 of 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 bald-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.”

  “If he is,” replied the general, “I don’t see why you should come to me about it. I ought to tell you I’m a strong Protestant.”

  “I’m very fond of strong Protestants,” said Father Brown. “I came to you because I was sure you would tell the truth. I hope it is not uncharitable to feel less sure of Sir John Cockspur.”

  The brown eyes twinkled again, but the general said nothing.

  “General,” said Father Brown, “suppose Cockspur or his sort were going to make the world ring with tales against your country and your flag. Suppose he said your regiment ran away in battle, or your staff were in the pay of the enemy. Would you let anything stand between you and the facts that would refute him? Wouldn’t you get on the track of the truth at all costs to anybody? Well, I have a regiment, and I belong to an army. It is being discredited by what I am certain is a fictitious story; but I don’t know the true story. Can you blame me for trying to find it out?”

  The soldier was silent, and the priest continued:

  “I have heard the story Mallow was told yesterday, about Marne retiring with a broken heart through the death of his more than brother. I am sure there was more in it than that. I came to ask you if you know any more.”

  “No,” said the general shortly; “I cannot tell you any more.”

  “General,” said Father Brown with a broad grin, “you would have called me a Jesuit if I had used that equivocation.”

  The soldier laughed gruffly, and then growled with much greater hostility.

  “Well, I won’t tell you, then,” he said. “What do you say to that?”

  “I only say,” said the priest mildly, “that in that case I shall have to tell you.”

  The brown eyes stared at him; but there was no twinkle in them now. He went on:

  “You compel me to state, less sympathetically perhaps than you could, why it is obvious that there is more behind. I am quite sure the marquis has better cause for his brooding and secretiveness than merely having lost an old friend. I doubt whether priests have anything to do with it; I don’t even know if he’s a convert or merely a man comforting his conscience with charities; but I’m sure he’s something more than a chief mourner. Since you insist, I will tell you one or two of the things that made me think so.

  “First, it was stated that James Mair was engaged to be married, but somehow became unattached again after the death of Maurice Mair. Why should an honourable man break off his engagement merely because he was depressed by the death of a third party? He’s much more likely to have turned for consolation to it; but, anyhow, he was bound in decency to go through with it.”

  The general was biting his black moustache, and his brown eyes had become very watchful and even anxious, but he did not answer.

  “A second point,” said Father Brown, frowning at the table. “James Mair was always asking his lady friend whether his cousin Maurice was not very fascinating, and whether women would not admire him. I don’t know if it occurred to the lady that there might be another meaning to that inquiry.”

  The general got to his feet and began to walk or stamp about the room.

  “Oh, damn it all,” he said, but without any air of animosity.

  “The third point,” went on Father Brown, “is James Mair’s curious manner of mourning – destroying all relics, veiling all portraits, and so on. It does sometimes happen, I admit; it might mean mere affectionate bereavement. But it might mean something else.”

  “Confound you,” said the other. “How long are you going on piling this up?”

  “The fourth and fifth points are pretty conclusive,” said the priest calmly, “especially if you take them together. The first is that Maurice Mair seems to have had no funeral in particular, considering he was a cadet of a great family. He must have been buried hurriedly; perhaps secretly. And the last point is, that James Mair instantly disappeared to foreign parts; fled, in fact, to the ends of the earth.

  “And so,” he went on, still in the same soft voice, “when you would blacken my religion to brighten the story of the pure and perfect affection of two brothers, it seems -”

  “Stop!” cried Outram in a tone like a pistol shot. “I must tell you more, or you will fancy worse. Let me tell you one thing to start with. It was a fair fight.”

  “Ah,” said Father Brown, and seemed to exhale a huge breath.

  “It was a duel,” said the other. “It was probably the last duel fought in England, and it is long ago now.”

  “That’s better,” said Father Brown. “Thank God; that’s a great deal better.”

  “Better than the ugly things you thought of, I suppose?” said the general gruffly. “Well, it’s all very well for you to sneer at the pure and perfect affection; but it was true for all that. James Mair really was devoted to his cousin, who’d grown up with him like a younger brother. Elder brothers and sisters do sometimes devote themselves to a child like that, especially when he’s a sort of infant phenomenon. But James Mair was the sort of simple character in whom even hate is in a sense unselfish. I mean that even when his tenderness turns to rage it is still objective, directed outwards to its object; he isn’t conscious of himself. Now poor Maurice Mair was just the opposite. He was far more friendly and popular; but his success had made him live in a house of mirrors. He was first in every sort of sport and art and accomplishment; he nearly always won and took his winning amiably. But if ever, by any chance, he lost, there was just a glimpse of something not so amiable; he was a little jealous. I needn’t tell you the whole miserable story of how he was a little jealous of his cousin’s engagement; how he couldn’t keep his restless vanity from interfering. It’s enough to say that one of the few things in which James Mair was admittedly ahead of him was marksmanship with a pistol; and with that the tragedy ended.”

  “You mean the tragedy began,” replied the priest. “The tragedy of the survivor. I thought he did not need any monkish vampires to make him miserable.”

  “To my mind he’s more miserable than he need be,” said the general. “After all, as I say, it was a ghastly tragedy, but it was a fair fight. And Jim had great provocation.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked the priest.

  “I know it because I saw it,” answered Outram stolidly. “I was James Mair’s second, and I saw Maurice Mair shot dead on the sands before my very eyes.”

  “I wish you would tell me more about it,” said Father Brown reflectively. “Who was Maurice Mair’s second?”

  “He had a more distinguished backing,” replied the general grimly. “Hugo Romaine was his second; the great actor, you know. Maurice was mad on acting and had taken up Romaine (who was then a rising but still a struggling man), and financed the fellow and his ventures in return for taking lessons from the professional in his own hobby of amateur acting. But Romaine was then, I suppose, practically dependent on his rich friend; though he’s richer now than any aristocrat. So his serving as second proves very little about what he thought of the quarrel. They fought in the English fashion, with only one second apiece;
I wanted at least to have a surgeon, but Maurice boisterously refused it, saying the fewer people who knew, the better; and at the worst we could immediately get help. ‘There’s a doctor in the village not half a mile away,’ he said; ‘I know him and he’s got the fastest horse in the country. He could be brought here in no time; but there’s no need to bring him here till we know.’ Well, we all knew that Maurice ran most risk, as the pistol was not his weapon; so when he refused aid nobody liked to ask for it. The duel was fought on a flat stretch of sand on the east coast of Scotland; and both the sight and sound of it were masked from the hamlets inland by a long rampart of sandhills patched with rank grass; probably part of the links, though in those days no Englishman had heard of golf. There was one deep, crooked cranny in the sandhills through which we came out on the sands. I can see them now; first a wide strip of dead yellow, and beyond, a narrower strip of dark red; a dark red that seemed already like the long shadow of a deed of blood.

  “The thing itself seemed to happen with horrible speed; as if a whirlwind had struck the sand. With the very crack of sound Maurice Mair seemed to spin like a teetotum and pitch upon his face like a ninepin. And queerly enough, while I’d been worrying about him up to that moment, the instant he was dead all my pity was for the man who killed him; as it is to this day and hour. I knew that with that, the whole huge terrible pendulum of my friend’s life-long love would swing back; and that whatever cause others might find to pardon him, he would never pardon himself for ever and ever. And so, somehow, the really vivid thing, the picture that burns in my memory so that I can’t forget it, is not that of the catastrophe, the smoke and the flash and the falling figure. That seemed to be all over, like the noise that wakes a man up. What I saw, what I shall always see, is poor Jim hurrying across towards his fallen friend and foe; his brown beard looking black against the ghastly pallor of his face, with its high features cut out against the sea; and the frantic gestures with which he waved me to run for the surgeon in the hamlet behind the sandhills. He had dropped his pistol as he ran; he had a glove in one hand and the loose and fluttering fingers of it seemed to elongate and emphasize his wild pantomime of pointing or hailing for help. That is the picture that really remains with me; and there is nothing else in that picture, except the striped background of sands and sea and the dark, dead body lying still as a stone, and the dark figure of the dead man’s second standing grim and motionless against the horizon.”