‘My God!’ cried Payne involuntarily; ‘he is alone up there.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown without turning, as he vanished up the stairway. ‘We shall find him alone.’
When the rest recovered from their first paralysis and ran helter-skelter up the stone steps and found their way to the new studio, it was true in that sense that they found him alone. They found him lying in a wreck of his tall camera, with its long splintered legs standing out grotesquely at three different angles; and Darnaway had fallen on top of it with one black crooked leg lying at a fourth angle along the floor. For the moment the dark heap looked as if he were entangled with some huge and horrible spider. Little more than a glance and a touch were needed to tell them that he was dead. Only the portrait stood untouched upon the easel, and one could fancy the smiling eyes shone.
An hour afterwards Father Brown in helping to calm the confusion of the stricken household, came upon the old steward muttering almost as mechanically as the clock had ticked and struck the terrible hour. Almost without hearing them, he knew what the muttered words must be.
In the seventh heir I shall return
In the seventh hour I shall depart.
As he was about to say something soothing, the old man seemed suddenly to start awake and stiffen into anger; his mutterings changed to a fierce cry.
‘You!’ he cried; ‘you and your daylight! Even you won’t say now there is no Doom for the Darnaways.’
‘My opinion about that is unchanged,’ said Father Brown mildly. Then after a pause he added: ‘I hope you will observe poor Darnaway’s last wish, and see the photograph is sent off.’
‘The photograph!’ cried the doctor sharply. ‘What’s the good of that? As a matter of fact, it’s rather curious; but there isn’t any photograph. It seems he never took it after all, after pottering about all day.’
Father Brown swung round sharply. ‘Then take it yourselves,’ he said. ’Poor Darnaway was perfectly right. It’s most important that the photograph should be taken.’
As all the visitors, the doctor, the priest, and the two artists trailed away in a black and dismal procession across the brown and yellow sands, they were at first more or less silent, rather as if they had been stunned. And certainly there had been something like a crack of thunder in a clear sky about the fulfilment of that forgotten superstition at the very time when they had most forgotten it; when the doctor and the priest had both filled their minds with rationalism as the photographer had filled his rooms with daylight. They might be as rationalistic as they liked; but in broad daylight the seventh heir had returned, and in broad daylight at the seventh hour he had perished.
‘I’m afraid everybody will always believe in the Darnaway superstition now,’ said Martin Wood.
‘I know one who won’t,’ said the doctor sharply. ‘Why should I indulge in superstition because somebody else indulges in suicide?’
‘You think poor Mr Darnaway committed suicide?’ asked the priest.
‘I’m sure he committed suicide,’ replied the doctor.
‘It is possible,’ agreed the other.
‘He was quite alone up there, and he had a whole drug-store of poisons in the dark room. Besides, it’s just the sort of thing that Darnaways do.’
‘You don’t think there’s anything in the fulfilment of the family curse?’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor; ‘I believe in one family curse, and that is the family constitution. I told you it was heredity, and they are all half mad. If you stagnate and breed in and brood in your own swamp like that, you’re bound to degenerate whether you like it or not. The laws of heredity can’t be dodged; the truths of science can’t be denied. The minds of the Darnaways are falling to pieces, as their blighted old sticks and stones are falling to pieces, eaten away by the sea and the salt air. Suicide — of course he committed suicide; I dare say all the rest will commit suicide. Perhaps the best thing they could do.’
As the man of science spoke there sprang suddenly and with startling clearness into Payne’s memory the face of the daughter of the Darnaways, a tragic mask pale against an unfathomable blackness, but itself of a blinding and more than mortal beauty. He opened his mouth to speak and found himself speechless.
‘I see,’ said Father Brown to the doctor; ‘so you do believe in the superstition after all?’
‘What do you mean — believe in the superstition? I believe in the suicide as a matter of scientific necessity.’
‘Well,’ replied the priest, ‘I don’t see a pin to choose between your scientific superstition and the other magical superstition. They both seem to end in turning people into paralytics, who can’t move their own legs or arms or save their own lives or souls. The rhyme said it was the Doom of the Darnaways to be killed, and the scientific textbook says it is the Doom of the Darnaways to kill themselves. Both ways they seem to be slaves.’
‘But I thought you said you believed in rational views of these things,’ said Dr Barnet. ‘Don’t you believe in heredity?’
‘I said I believed in daylight,’ replied the priest in a loud and clear voice, ‘and I won’t choose between two tunnels of subterranean superstition that both end in the dark. And the proof of it is this: that you are all entirely in the dark about what really happened in that house.’
‘Do you mean about the suicide?’ asked Payne.
‘I mean about the murder,’ said Father Brown; and his voice, though only slightly lifted to a louder note, seemed somehow to resound over the whole shore. ‘It was murder; but murder is of the will, which God made free.’
What the other said at the moment in answer to it Payne never knew. For the word had a rather curious effect on him; stirring him like the blast of a trumpet and yet bringing him to a halt. He stood still in the middle of the sandy waste and let the others go on in front of him; he felt the blood crawling through all his veins and the sensation that is called the hair standing on end; and yet he felt a new and unnatural happiness. A psychological process too quick and too complicated for himself to follow had already reached a conclusion that he could not analyse; but the conclusion was one of relief. After standing still for a moment he turned and went back slowly across the sands to the house of the Darnaways.
He crossed the moat with a stride that shook the bridge, descended the stairs and traversed the long rooms with a resounding tread, till he came to the place where Adelaide Darnaway sat haloed with the low light of the oval window, almost like some forgotten saint left behind in the land of death. She looked up, and an expression of wonder made her face yet more wonderful.
‘What is it?’ she said.’ Why have you come back?’
‘I have come for the Sleeping Beauty,’ he said in a tone that had the resonance of a laugh. ’This old house went to sleep long ago, as the doctor said; but it is silly for you to pretend to be old. Come up into the daylight and hear the truth. I have brought you a word; it is a terrible word, but it breaks the spell of your captivity.’
She did not understand a word he said, but something made her rise and let him lead her down the long hall and up the stairs and out under the evening sky. The ruins of a dead garden stretched towards the sea, and an old fountain with the figure of a triton, green with rust, remained poised there, pouring nothing out of a dried horn into an empty basin. He had often seen that desolate outline against the evening sky as he passed, and it had seemed to him a type of fallen fortunes in more ways than one. Before long, doubtless, those hollow fonts would be filled, but it would be with the pale green bitter waters of the sea and the flowers would be drowned and strangled in seaweed. So, he had told himself, the daughter of the Darnaways might indeed be wedded; but she would be wedded to death and a doom as deaf and ruthless as the sea. But now he laid a hand on the bronze triton that was like the hand of a giant, and shook it as if he meant to hurl it over like an idol or an evil god of the garden.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked steadily. ‘What is this word that will set us free?’
/> ‘The word is murder,’ he said, ‘and the freedom it brings is as fresh as the flowers of spring. No; I do not mean I have murdered anybody. But the fact that anybody can be murdered is itself good news, after the evil dreams you have been living in. Don’t you understand? In that dream of yours everything that happened to you came from inside you; the Doom of the Darnaways was stored up in the Darnaways; it unfolded itself like a horrible flower. There was no escape even by happy accident; it was all inevitable; whether it was Vine and his old wives’ tales, or Barnet and his new-fangled heredity. But this man who died was not the victim of a magic curse or an inherited madness. He was murdered; and for us that murder is simply an accident; yes, requiescat in pace: but a happy accident. It is a ray of daylight, because it comes from outside.’
She suddenly smiled. ‘Yes, I believe I understand. I suppose you are talking like a lunatic, but I understand. But who murdered him?’
‘I do not know,’ he answered calmly, ‘but Father Brown knows. And as Father Brown says, murder is at least done by the will, free as that wind from the sea.’
‘Father Brown is a wonderful person,’ she said after a pause; ‘he was the only person who ever brightened my existence in any way at all until — ’
‘Until what?’ asked Payne, and made a movement almost impetuous, leaning towards her and thrusting away the bronze monster so that it seemed to rock on its pedestal.
‘Well, until you did,’ she said and smiled again.
So was the sleeping palace awakened, and it is no part of this story to describe the stages of its awakening, though much of it had come to pass before the dark of that evening had fallen upon the shore. As Harry Payne strode homewards once more, across those dark sands that he had crossed in so many moods, he was at the highest turn of happiness that is given in this mortal life, — and the whole red sea within him was at the top of its tide. He would have had no difficulty in picturing all that place again in flower, and the bronze triton bright as a golden god and the fountain flowing with water or with wine. But all this brightness and blossoming had been unfolded for him by the one word ‘murder’, and it was still a word that he did not understand. He had taken it on trust, and he was not unwise; for he was one of those who have a sense of the sound of truth.
It was more than a month later that Payne returned to his London house to keep an appointment with Father Brown, taking the required photograph with him. His personal romance had prospered as well as was fitting under the shadow of such a tragedy, and the shadow itself therefore lay rather more lightly on him; but it was hard to view it as anything but the shadow of a family fatality. In many ways he had been much occupied; and it was not until the Darnaway household had resumed its somewhat stern routine, and the portrait had long been restored to its place in the library, that he had managed to photograph it with a magnesium flare. Before sending it to the antiquary, as originally arranged, he brought it to the priest who had so pressingly demanded it.
‘I can’t understand your attitude about all this. Father Brown,’ he said.’ You act as if you had already solved the problem in some way of your own.’
The priest shook his head mournfully. ‘Not a bit of it,’ he answered. ‘I must be very stupid, but I’m quite stuck; stuck about the most practical point of all. It’s a queer business; so simple up to a point and then — Let me have a look at that photograph, will you?’
He held it close to his screwed, short-sighted eyes for a moment, and then said: ‘Have you got a magnifying glass?’
Payne produced one, and the priest looked through it intently for some time and then said: ‘Look at the title of that book at the edge of the bookshelf beside the frame; it’s ‘The History of Pope Joan’. Now, I wonder ... yes, by George; and the one above is something or other of Iceland. Lord! what a queer way to find it out! What a dolt and donkey I was not to notice it when I was there!’
‘But what have you found out?’ asked Payne impatiently.
‘The last link,’ said Father Brown, ‘and I’m not stuck any longer. Yes; I think I know how that unhappy story went from first to last now.’
‘But why?’ insisted the other.
‘Why, because,’ said the priest with a smile, ‘the Darnaway library contained books about Pope Joan and Iceland, not to mention another I see with the title beginning ‘The Religion of Frederick’, which is not so very hard to fill up.’ Then, seeing the other’s annoyance, his smile faded and he said more earnestly: ‘As a matter of fact, this last point, though it is the last link, is not the main business. There were much more curious things in the case than that. One of them is rather a curiosity of evidence. Let me begin by saying something that may surprise you. Darnaway did not die at seven o’clock that evening. He had been already dead for a whole day.’
‘Surprise is rather a mild word,’ said Payne grimly, ‘since you and I both saw him walking about afterwards.’
‘No, we did not,’ replied Father Brown quietly. ‘I think we both saw him, or thought we saw him, fussing about with the focusing of his camera. Wasn’t his head under that black cloak when you passed through the room? It was when I did. And that’s why I felt there was something queer about the room and the figure. It wasn’t that the leg was crooked, but rather that it wasn’t crooked. It was dressed in the same sort of dark clothes; but if you see what you believe to be one man standing in the way that another man stands, you will think he’s in a strange and strained attitude.’
‘Do you really mean,’ cried Payne with something like a shudder, ‘that it was some unknown man?’
‘It was the murderer,’ said Father Brown. ‘He had already killed Darnaway at daybreak and hid the corpse and himself in the dark room — an excellent hiding-place, because nobody normally goes into it or can see much if he does. But he let it fall out on the floor at seven o’clock, of course, that the whole thing might be explained by the curse.’
‘But I don’t understand’ observed Payne. ‘Why didn’t he kill him at seven o’clock then, instead of loading himself with a corpse for fourteen hours?’
‘Let me ask you another question,’ said the priest. ‘Why was there no photograph taken? Because the murderer made sure of killing him when he first got up, and before he could take it. It was essential to the murderer to prevent that photograph reaching the expert on the Darnaway antiquities.’
There was a sudden silence for a moment, and then the priest went on in a lower tone: ‘Don’t you see how simple it is? Why, you yourself saw one side of the possibility; but it’s simpler even than you thought. You said a man might be faked to resemble an old picture. Surely it’s simpler that a picture should be faked to resemble a man. In plain words, it’s true in a rather special way that there was no Doom of the Darnaways. There was no old picture; there was no old rhyme; there was no legend of a man who caused his wife’s death. But there was a very wicked and a very clever man who was willing to cause another man’s death in order to rob him of his promised wife.’
The priest suddenly gave Payne a sad smile, as if in reassurance. ‘For the moment I believe you thought I meant you,’ he said,’ but you were not the only person who haunted that house for sentimental reasons. You know the man, or rather you think you do. But there were depths in the man called Martin Wood, artist and antiquary, which none of his mere artistic acquaintances were likely to guess. Remember that he was called in to criticize and catalogue the pictures; in an aristocratic dustbin of that sort that practically means simply to tell the Darnaways what art treasures they had got. They would not be surprised at things turning up they had never noticed before. It had to be done well, and it was; perhaps he was right when he said that if it wasn’t Holbein it was somebody of the same genius.’
‘I feel rather stunned,’ said Payne; ‘and there are twenty things I don’t see yet. How did he know what Darnaway looked like? How did he actually kill him? The doctors seem rather puzzled at present.’
‘I saw a photograph the lady had which the Australia
n sent on before him,’ said the priest, ‘and there are several ways in which he could have learned things when the new heir was once recognized. We may not know these details; but they are not difficulties. You remember he used to help in the dark room; it seems to me an ideal place, say, to prick a man with a poisoned pin, with the poison’s all handy. No; I say these were not difficulties. The difficulty that stumped me was how Wood could be in two places at once. How could he take the corpse from the dark-room and prop it against the camera so that it would fall in a few seconds, without coming downstairs, when he was in the library looking out a book? And I was such a fool that I never looked at the books in the library; and it was only in this photograph, by very undeserved good luck, that I saw the simple fact of a book about Pope Joan.’
‘You’ve kept your best riddle for the end,’ said Payne grimly. ‘What on earth can Pope Joan have to do with it?’
‘Don’t forget the book about the Something of Iceland,’ advised the priest, ‘or the religion of somebody called Frederick. It only remains to ask what sort of man was the late Lord Darnaway.’
‘Oh, does it?’ observed Payne heavily.
‘He was a cultivated, humorous sort of eccentric, I believe,’ went on Father Brown. ‘Being cultivated, he knew there was no such person as Pope Joan. Being humorous, he was very likely to have thought of the title of ‘The Snakes of Iceland’ or something else that didn’t exist. I venture to reconstruct the third title as ‘The Religion of Frederick the Great’ — which also doesn’t exist. Now, doesn’t it strike you that those would be just the titles to put on the backs of books that didn’t exist; or in other words on a bookcase that wasn’t a book-case?’
‘Ah!’ cried Payne; ‘I see what you mean now. There was some hidden staircase — ’
‘Up to the room Wood himself selected as a dark room,’ said the priest nodding. ‘I’m sorry. It couldn’t be helped. It’s dreadfully banal and stupid, as stupid as I have been on this pretty banal case. But we were mixed up in a real musty old romance of decayed gentility and a fallen family mansion; and it was too much to hope that we could escape having a secret passage. It was a priest’s hole; and I deserve to be put in it.’
The Complete Father Brown Mysteries Collection Page 67
