‘Going to put me in quod for that, are you?’ jeered the demagogue. ‘All right. Only you’ll have to build a prison for a million men if you’re going to jail all the poor people who had reason to hate Gid Wise. And you know it’s God truth as well as I do.’
Nares was silent; and nobody spoke until Elias interposed with his clear though faintly lisping drawl.
‘This appears to me to be a highly unprofitable discussion on both sides,’ he said. ‘You have summoned us here either to ask us for information or to subject us to cross-examination. If you trust us, we tell you we have no information. If you distrust us, you must tell us of what we are accused, or have the politeness to keep the fact to yourselves. Nobody has been able to suggest the faintest trace of evidence connecting any one of us with these tragedies any more than with the murder of Julius Caesar. You dare not arrest us, and you will not believe us. What is the good of our remaining here?’
And he rose, calmly buttoning his coat, his friends following his example. As they went towards the door, young Home turned back and faced the investigators for a moment with his pale fanatical face.
‘I wish to say,’ he said, ‘that I went to a filthy jail during the whole war because I would not consent to kill a man.’
With that they passed out, and the members of the group remaining looked grimly at each other.
‘I hardly think,’ said Father Brown, ‘that we remain entirely victorious, in spite of the retreat.’
‘I don’t mind anything,’ said Nares, ‘except being bullyragged by that blasphemous blackguard Halket. Home is a gentleman, anyhow. But whatever they say, I am dead certain they know; they are in it, or most of them are. They almost admitted it. They taunted us with not being able to prove we’re right, much more than with being wrong. What do you think, Father Brown?’
The person addressed looked across at Nares with a gaze almost disconcertingly mild and meditative.
‘It is quite true,’ he said, ‘that I have formed an idea that one particular person knows more than he has told us. But I think it would be well if I did not mention his name just yet.’
Nares’ eyeglass dropped from his eye, and he looked up sharply. ‘This is unofficial so far,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that at a later stage if you withhold information, your position may be serious.’
‘My position is simple,’ replied the priest. ‘I am here to look after the legitimate interests of my friend Halket. I think it will be in his interest, under the circumstances, if I tell you I think he will before long sever his connexion with this organization, and cease to be a Socialist in that sense. I have every reason to believe he will probably end as a Catholic.’
‘Halket!’ exploded the other incredulously. ‘Why he curses priests from morning till night!’
‘I don’t think you quite understand that kind of man,’ said Father Brown mildly. ’He curses priests for failing (in his opinion) to defy the whole world for justice. Why should he expect them to defy the whole world for justice, unless he had already begun to assume they were — what they are? But we haven’t met here to discuss the psychology of conversion. I only mention this because it may simplify your task — perhaps narrow your search.’
‘If it is true, it would jolly well narrow it to that narrow-faced rascal Elias — and I shouldn’t wonder, for a more creepy, coldblooded, sneering devil I never saw.’
Father Brown sighed. ‘He always reminded me of poor Stein,’ he said, ’in fact I think he was some relation.’
‘Oh, I say,’ began Nares, when his protest was cut short by the door being flung open, revealing once more the long loose figure and pale face of young Home; but it seemed as if he had not merely his natural, but a new and unnatural pallor.
‘Hullo,’ cried Nares, putting up his single eyeglass, ‘why have you come back again?’
Home crossed the room rather shakily without a word and sat down heavily in a chair. Then he said, as in a sort of daze: ‘I missed the others ... I lost my way. I thought I’d better come back.’
The remains of evening refreshments were on the table, and Henry Home, that lifelong Prohibitionist, poured himself out a wine-glassful of liqueur brandy and drank it at a gulp. ‘You seem upset,’ said Father Brown.
Home had put his hands to his forehead and spoke as from under the shadow of it: he seemed to be speaking to the priest only, in a low voice.
‘I may as well tell you. I have seen a ghost.’
‘A ghost!’ repeated Nares in astonishment. ‘Whose ghost?’
‘The ghost of Gideon Wise, the master of this house,’ answered Home more firmly, ‘standing over the abyss into which he fell.’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Nares; ‘no sensible person believes in ghosts.’
‘That is hardly exact,’ said Father Brown, smiling a little. ‘There is really quite as good evidence for many ghosts as there is for most crimes.’
‘Well, it’s my business to run after the criminals,’ said Nares rather roughly, ‘and I will leave other people to run away from the ghosts. If anybody at this time of day chooses to be frightened of ghosts it’s his affair.’
‘I didn’t say I was frightened of them, though I dare say I might be,’ said Father Brown. ‘Nobody knows till he tries. I said I believed in them, at any rate, enough to want to hear more about this one. What, exactly, did you see, Mr Home?’
‘It was over there on the brink of those crumbling cliffs; you know there is a sort of gap or crevice just about the spot where he was thrown over. The others had gone on ahead, and I was crossing the moor towards the path along the cliff. I often went that way, for I liked seeing the high seas dash up against the crags. I thought little of it to-night, beyond wondering that the sea should be so rough on this sort of clear moonlight night. I could see the pale crests of spray appear and disappear as the great waves leapt up at the headland. Thrice I saw the momentary flash of foam in the moonlight and then I saw something inscrutable. The fourth flash of the silver foam seemed to be fixed in the sky. It did not fall; I waited with insane intensity for it to fall. I fancied I was mad, and that time had been for me mysteriously arrested or prolonged. Then I drew nearer, and then I think I screamed aloud. For that suspended spray, like unfallen snowflakes, had fitted together into a face and a figure, white as the shining leper in a legend, and terrible as the fixed lightning.’
‘And it was Gideon Wise, you say?’
Home nodded without speech. There was a silence broken abruptly by Nares rising to his feet; so abruptly indeed that he knocked a chair over.
‘Oh, this is all nonsense,’ he said, ‘but we’d better go out and see.’
‘I won’t go,’ said Home with sudden violence. ‘I’ll never walk by that path again.’
‘I think we must all walk by that path tonight,’ said the priest gravely; ’though I will never deny it has been a perilous path ... to more people than one.’
‘I will not... God, how you all goad me,’ cried Home, and his eyes began to roll in a strange fashion. He had risen with the rest, but he made no motion towards the door.
‘Mr Home,’ said Nares firmly, ‘I am a police-officer, and this house, though you may not know it, is surrounded by the police. I have tried to investigate in a friendly fashion, but I must investigate everything, even anything so silly as a ghost. I must ask you to take me to the spot you speak of.’
There was another silence while Home stood heaving and panting as with indescribable fears. Then he suddenly sat down on his chair again and said with an entirely new and much more composed voice:
‘I can’t do it. You may just as well know why. You will know it sooner or later. I killed him.’
For an instant there was the stillness of a house struck by a thunderbolt and full of corpses. Then the voice of Father Brown sounded in that enormous silence strangely small like the squeak of a mouse.
‘Did you kill him deliberately?’ he asked.
‘How can one answer such a question?’ answered the m
an in the chair, moodily gnawing his finger. ‘I was mad, I suppose. He was intolerable and insolent, I know. I was on his land and I believe he struck me; anyhow, we came to a grapple and he went over the cliff. When I was well away from the scene it burst upon me that I had done a crime that cut me off from men; the brand of Cain throbbed on my brow and my very brain; I realized for the first time that I had indeed killed a man. I knew I should have to confess it sooner or later.’ He sat suddenly erect in his chair. ‘But I will say nothing against anybody else. It is no use asking me about plots or accomplices — I will say nothing.’
‘In the light of the other murders,’ said Nares, ‘it is difficult to believe that the quarrel was quite so unpremeditated. Surely somebody sent you there?’
‘I will say nothing against anybody I worked with,’ said Home proudly. ‘I am a murderer, but I will not be a traitor.’
Nares stepped between the man and the door and called out in an official fashion to someone outside.
‘We will all go to the place, anyhow,’ he said in a low voice to the secretary; ’but this man must go in custody.’
The company generally felt that to go spook-hunting on a seacliff was a very silly anti-climax after the confession of the murderer. But Nares, though the most sceptical and scornful of all, thought it his duty to leave no stone unturned; as one might say, no gravestone unturned. For, after all, that crumbling cliff was the only gravestone over the watery grave of poor Gideon Wise. Nares locked the door, being the last out of the house, and followed the rest across the moor to the cliff, when he was astonished to see young Potter, the secretary, coming back quickly towards them, his face in the moonlight looking white as a moon.
‘By God, sir,’ he said, speaking for the first time that night, ‘there really is something there. It — it’s just like him.’
‘Why, you’re raving,’ gasped the detective. ‘Everybody’s raving.’
‘Do you think I don’t know him when I see him?’ cried the secretary with singular bitterness. ‘I have reason to.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the detective sharply, ‘you are one of those who had reason to hate him, as Halket said.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the secretary; ‘anyhow, I know him, and I tell you I can see him standing there stark and staring under this hellish moon.’
And he pointed towards the crack in the cliffs, where they could already see something that might have been a moonbeam or a streak of foam, but which was already beginning to look a little more solid. They had crept a hundred yards nearer, and it was still motionless; but it looked like a statue in silver.
Nares himself looked a little pale and seemed to stand debating what to do. Potter was frankly as much frightened as Home himself; and even Byrne, who was a hardened reporter, was rather reluctant to go any nearer if he could help it. He could not help considering it a little quaint, therefore, that the only man who did not seem to be frightened of a ghost was the man who had said openly that he might be. For Father Brown was advancing as steadily, at his stumping pace, as if he were going to consult a notice-board.
‘It don’t seem to bother you much,’ said Byrne to the priest; ‘and yet I thought you were the only one who believed in spooks.’
‘If it comes to that,’ replied Father Brown, ‘I thought you were one who didn’t believe in them. But believing in ghosts is one thing, and believing in a ghost is quite another.’
Byrne looked rather ashamed of himself, and glanced almost covertly at the crumbling headlands in the cold moonlight which were the haunts of the vision or delusion. ‘I didn’t believe in it till I saw it,’ he said.
‘And I did believe in it till I saw it,’ said Father Brown. The journalist stared after him as he went stumping across the great waste ground that rose towards the cloven headland like the sloping side of a hill cut in two. Under the discolouring moon the grass looked like long grey hair all combed one way by the wind, and seeming to point towards the place where the breaking cliff showed pale gleams of chalk in the grey-green turf, and where stood the pale figure or shining shade that none could yet understand. As yet that pale figure dominated a desolate landscape that was empty except for the black square back and business-like figure of the priest advancing alone towards it. Then the prisoner Home broke suddenly from his captors with a piercing cry and ran ahead of the priest, falling on his knees before the spectre.
‘I have confessed,’ they heard him crying. ‘Why have you come to tell them I killed you?’
‘I have come to tell them you did not,’ said the ghost, and stretched forth a hand to him. Then the kneeling man sprang up with quite a new kind of scream; and they knew it was the hand of flesh.
It was the most remarkable escape from death in recent records, said the experienced detective and the no less experienced journalist. Yet, in a sense, it had been very simple after all. Flakes and shards of the cliff were continually falling away, and some had caught in the gigantic crevice, so as to form what was really a ledge or pocket in what was supposed to be a sheer drop through darkness to the sea. The old man, who was a very tough and wiry old man, had fallen on this lower shoulder of rock and had passed a pretty terrible twenty-four hours in trying to climb back by crags that constantly collapsed under him, but at length formed by their very ruins a sort of stairway of escape. This might be the explanation of Home’s optical illusion about a white wave that appeared and disappeared, and finally came to stay. But anyhow there was Gideon Wise, solid in bone and sinew, with his white hair and white dusty country clothes and harsh country features, which were, however, a great deal less harsh than usual. Perhaps it is good for millionaires to spend twenty-four hours on a ledge of rock within a foot of eternity. Anyhow, he not only disclaimed all malice against the criminal, but gave an account of the matter which considerably modified the crime. He declared that Home had not thrown him over at all; that the continually breaking ground had given way under him, and that Home had even made some movement as of attempted rescue.
‘On that providential bit of rock down there,’ he said solemnly, ‘I promised the Lord to forgive my enemies; and the Lord would think it mighty mean if I didn’t forgive a little accident like that.’
Home had to depart under police supervision, of course, but the detective did not disguise from himself that the prisoner’s detention would probably be short, and his punishment, if any, trifling. It is not every murderer who can put the murdered man in the witness-box to give him a testimonial.
‘It’s a strange case,’ said Byrne, as the detective and the others hastened along the cliff path towards the town.
‘It is,’ said Father Brown. ‘It’s no business of ours; but I wish you’d stop with me and talk it over.’
There was a silence and then Byrne complied by saying suddenly: ‘I suppose you were thinking of Home already, when you said somebody wasn’t telling all he knew.’
‘When I said that,’ replied his friend, ‘I was thinking of the exceedingly silent Mr Potter, the secretary of the no longer late or (shall we say) lamented Mr Gideon Wise.’
‘Well, the only time Potter ever spoke to me I thought he was a lunatic,’ said Byrne, staring, ‘but I never thought of his being a criminal. He said something about it all having to do with an icebox.’
‘Yes, I thought he knew something about it,’ said Father Brown reflectively. ‘I never said he had anything to do with it ... I suppose old Wise really is strong enough to have climbed out of that chasm.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked the astonished reporter. ‘Why, of course he got out of that chasm; for there he is.’
The priest did not answer the question but asked abruptly: ‘What do you think of Home?’
‘Well, one can’t call him a criminal exactly,’ answered Byrne. ‘He never was at all like any criminal I ever knew, and I’ve had some experience; and, of course, Nares has had much more. I don’t think we ever quite believed him a criminal.’
‘And I never believed in him in another capacity,’ sa
id the priest quietly. ‘You may know more about criminals. But there’s one class of people I probably do know more about than you do, or even Nares for that matter. I’ve known quite a lot of them, and I know their little ways.’
‘Another class of people,’ repeated Byrne, mystified. ‘Why, what class do you know about?’
‘Penitents,’ said Father Brown.
‘I don’t quite understand,’ objected Byrne. ‘Do you mean you don’t believe in his crime?’
‘I don’t believe in his confession,’ said Father Brown. ‘I’ve heard a good many confessions, and there was never a genuine one like that. It was romantic; it was all out of books. Look how he talked about having the brand of Cain. That’s out of books. It’s not what anyone would feel who had in his own person done a thing hitherto horrible to him. Suppose you were an honest clerk or shop-boy shocked to feel that for the first time you’d stolen money. Would you immediately reflect that your action was the same as that of Barabbas? Suppose you’d killed a child in some ghastly anger. Would you go back through history, till you could identify your action with that of an Idumean potentate named Herod? Believe me, our own crimes are far too hideously private and prosaic to make our first thoughts turn towards historical parallels, however apt. And why did he go out of his way to say he would not give his colleagues away? Even in saying so, he was giving them away. Nobody had asked him so far to give away anything or anybody. No; I don’t think he was genuine, and I wouldn’t give him absolution. A nice state of things, if people started getting absolved for what they hadn’t done.’ And Father Brown, his head turned away, looked steadily out to sea.
‘But I don’t understand what you’re driving at,’ cried Byrne. ‘What’s the good of buzzing round him with suspicions when he’s pardoned? He’s out of it anyhow. He’s quite safe.’
Father Brown spun round like a teetotum and caught his friend by the coat with unexpected and inexplicable excitement.
The Complete Father Brown Mysteries Collection Page 69
