‘Oh, all right,’ said the breathless secretary as he vanished from the room. ‘Let him come to the lawyer’s too.’
Thus it happened that, when they hurried across to the neighbouring town to meet Dr Straker at the solicitor’s office, they found Father Brown already seated there, with his hands folded on his heavy umbrella, chatting pleasantly to the only available member of the firm. Dr Straker also had arrived, but apparently only at that moment, as he was carefully placing his gloves in his top-hat and his top-hat on a side-table. And the mild and beaming expression of the priest’s moonlike face and spectacles, together with the silent chuckles of the jolly old grizzled lawyer, to whom he was talking, were enough to show that the doctor had not yet opened his mouth to bring the news of death.
‘A beautiful morning after all,’ Father Brown was saying. ‘That storm seems to have passed over us. There were some big black clouds, but I notice that not a drop of rain fell.’
‘Not a drop,’ agreed the solicitor toying with a pen; he was the third partner, Mr. Dyke; ‘there’s not a cloud in the sky now. It’s the sort of day for a holiday.’ Then he realized the newcomers and looked up, laying down the pen and rising. ‘Ah, Mr. Harker, how are you? I hear the Admiral is expected home soon.’ Then Harker spoke, and his voice rang hollow in the room.
‘I am sorry to say we are the bearers of bad news. Admiral Craven was drowned before reaching home.’
There was a change in the very air of the still office, though not in the attitudes of the motionless figures; both were staring at the speaker as if a joke had been frozen on their lips. Both repeated the word ‘drowned’ and looked at each other, and then again at their informant. Then there was a small hubbub of questions.
‘When did this happen?’ asked the priest.
‘Where was he found?’ asked the lawyer.
‘He was found,’ said the Inspector, ‘in that pool by the coast, not far from the Green Man, and dragged out all covered with green scum and weeds so as to be almost unrecognizable. But Dr Straker here has—What is the matter. Father Brown? Are you ill?’
‘The Green Man,’ said Father Brown with a shudder. ‘I’m so sorry… I beg your pardon for being upset.’
‘Upset by what?’ asked the staring officer.
‘By his being covered with green scum, I suppose,’ said the priest, with a rather shaky laugh. Then he added rather more firmly, ‘I thought it might have been seaweed.’
By this time everybody was looking at the priest, with a not unnatural suspicion that he was mad; and yet the next crucial surprise was not to come from him. After a dead silence, it was the doctor who spoke.
Dr Straker was a remarkable man, even to look at. He was very tall and angular, formal and professional in his dress; yet retaining a fashion that has hardly been known since Mid-Victorian times. Though comparatively young, he wore his brown beard, very long and spreading over his waistcoat; in contrast with it, his features, which were both harsh and handsome, looked singularly pale. His good looks were also diminished by something in his deep eyes that was not squinting, but like the shadow of a squint. Everybody noticed these things about him, because the moment he spoke, he gave forth an indescribable air of authority. But all he said was:
‘There is one more thing to be said, if you come to details, about Admiral Craven being drowned.’ Then he added reflectively, ‘Admiral Craven was not drowned.’
The Inspector turned with quite a new promptitude and shot a question at him.
‘I have just examined the body,’ said Dr Straker, ‘the cause of death was a stab through the heart with some pointed blade like a stiletto. It was after death, and even some little time after, that the body was hidden in the pool.’
Father Brown was regarding Dr Straker with a very lively eye, such as he seldom turned upon anybody; and when the group in the office began to break up, he managed to attach himself to the medical man for a little further conversation, as they went back down the street. There had not been very much else to detain them except the rather formal question of the will. The impatience of the young secretary had been somewhat tried by the professional etiquette of the old lawyer. But the latter was ultimately induced, rather by the tact of the priest than the authority of the policeman, to refrain from making a mystery where there was no mystery at all. Mr Dyke admitted, with a smile, that the Admiral’s will was a very normal and ordinary document, leaving everything to his only child Olive; and that there really was no particular reason for concealing the fact.
The doctor and the priest walked slowly down the street that struck out of the town in the direction of Craven House. Harker had plunged on ahead of him with all his native eagerness to get somewhere; but the two behind seemed more interested in their discussion than their direction. It was in rather an enigmatic tone that the tall doctor said to the short cleric beside him:
‘Well, Father Brown, what do you think of a thing like this?’
Father Brown looked at. him rather intently for an instant, and then said:
‘Well, I’ve begun to think of one or two things; but my chief difficulty is that I only knew the Admiral slightly; though I’ve seen something of his daughter.’
‘The Admiral,’ said the doctor with a grim immobility of feature, ‘was the sort of man of whom it is said that he had not an enemy in the world.’
‘I suppose you mean,’ answered the priest, ‘that there’s something else that will not be said.’
‘Oh, it’s no affair of mine,’ said Straker hastily but rather harshly. ‘He had his moods, I suppose. He once threatened me with a legal action about an operation; but I think he thought better of it. I can imagine his being rather rough with a subordinate.’
Father Brown’s eyes were fixed on the figure of the secretary striding far ahead; and as he gazed he realized the special cause of his hurry. Some fifty yards farther ahead the Admiral’s daughter was dawdling along the road towards the Admiral’s house. The secretary soon came abreast of her; and for the remainder of the time Father Brown watched the silent drama of two human backs as they diminished into the distance. The secretary was evidently very much excited about something; but if the priest guessed what it was, he kept it to himself. When he came to the corner leading to the doctor’s house, he only said briefly: ‘I don’t know if you have anything more to tell us.’
‘Why should I?’ answered the doctor very abruptly; and striding off, left it uncertain whether he was asking why he should have anything to tell, or why he should tell it.
Father Brown went stumping on alone, in the track of the two young people; but when he came to the entrance and avenues of the Admiral’s park, he was arrested by the action of the girl, who turned suddenly and came straight towards him; her face unusually pale and her eyes bright with some new and as yet nameless emotion.
‘Father Brown,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I must talk to you as soon as possible. You must listen to me, I can’t see any other way out.’
‘Why certainly,’ he replied, as coolly as if a gutter-boy had asked him the time. ‘Where shall we go and talk?’
The girl led him at random to one of the rather tumbledown arbours in the grounds; and they sat down behind a screen of large ragged leaves. She began instantly, as if she must relieve her feelings or faint.
‘Harold Harker,’ she said, ‘has been talking to me about things. Terrible things.’
The priest nodded and the girl went on hastily. ‘About Roger Rook. Do you know about Roger?’
‘I’ve been told,’ he answered, ‘that his fellow-seamen call him The Jolly Roger, because he is never jolly; and looks like the pirate’s skull and crossbones.’
‘He was not always like that,’ said Olive in a low voice. ‘Something very queer must have happened to him. I knew him well when we were children; we used to play over there on the sands. He was harum-scarum and always talking about being a pirate; I dare say he was the sort they say might take to crime through reading shockers; but there was so
mething poetical in his way of being piratical. He really was a Jolly Roger then. I suppose he was the last boy who kept up the old legend of really running away to sea; and at last his family had to agree to his joining the Navy. Well… ‘
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown patiently.
‘Well,’ she admitted, caught in one of her rare moments of mirth, ‘I suppose poor Roger found it disappointing. Naval officers so seldom carry knives in their teeth or wave bloody cutlasses and black flags. But that doesn’t explain the change in him. He just stiffened; grew dull and dumb, like a dead man walking about. He always avoids me; but that doesn’t matter. I supposed some great grief that’s no business of mine had broken him up. And now—well, if what Harold says is true, the grief is neither more nor less than going mad; or being possessed of a devil.’
‘And what does Harold say?’ asked the priest.
‘It’s so awful I can hardly say it,’ she answered. ‘He swears he saw Roger creeping behind my father that night; hesitating and then drawing his sword… and the doctor says father was stabbed with a steel point… I can’t believe Roger Rook had anything to do with it. His sulks and my father’s temper sometimes led to quarrels; but what are quarrels? I can’t exactly say I’m standing up for an old friend; because he isn’t even friendly. But you can’t help feeling sure of some things, even about an old acquaintance. And yet Harold swears that he—‘
‘Harold seems to swear a great deal,’ said Father Brown.
There was a sudden silence; after which she said in a different tone: ‘Well, he does swear other things too. Harold Harker proposed to me just now.’
‘Am I to congratulate you, or rather him?’ inquired her companion.
‘I told him he must wait. He isn’t good at waiting.’ She was caught again in a ripple of her incongruous sense of the comic: ‘He said I was his ideal and his ambition and so on. He has lived in the States; but somehow I never remember it when he is talking about dollars; only when he is talking about ideals.’
‘And I suppose,’ said Father Brown very softy, ‘that it is because you have to decide about Harold that you want to know the truth about Roger.’
She stiffened and frowned, and then equally abruptly smiled, saying: ‘Oh, you know too much.’
‘I know very little, especially in this affair,’ said the priest gravely. ‘I only know who murdered your father.’ She started up and stood staring down at him stricken white. Father Brown made a wry face as he went on: ‘I made a fool of myself when I first realized it; when they’d just been asking where he was found, and went on talking about green scum and the Green Man.’
Then he also rose; clutching his clumsy umbrella with a new resolution, he addressed the girl with a new gravity.
‘There is something else that I know, which is the key to all these riddles of yours; but I won’t tell you yet. I suppose it’s bad news; but it’s nothing like so bad as the things you have been fancying.’ He buttoned up his coat and turned towards the gate. ‘I’m going to see this Mr Rook of yours. In a shed by the shore, near where Mr Harker saw him walking. I rather think he lives there.’ And he went bustling off in the direction of the beach.
Olive was an imaginative person; perhaps too imaginative to be safely left to brood over such hints as her friend had thrown out; but he was in rather a hurry to find the best relief for her broodings. The mysterious connection between Father Brown’s first shock of enlightenment and the chance language about the pool and the inn, hag-rode her fancy in a hundred forms of ugly symbolism. The Green Man became a ghost trailing loathsome weeds and walking the countryside under the moon; the sign of the Green Man became a human figure hanging as from a gibbet; and the tarn itself became a tavern, a dark subaqueous tavern for the dead sailors. And yet he had taken the most rapid method to overthrow all such nightmares, with a burst of blinding daylight which seemed more mysterious than the night.
For before the sun had set, something had come back into her life that turned her whole world topsy-turvy once more; something she had hardly known that she desired until it was abruptly granted; something that was, like a dream, old and familiar, and yet remained incomprehensible and incredible. For Roger Rook had come striding across the sands, and even when he was a dot in the distance, she knew he was transfigured; and as he came nearer and nearer, she saw that his dark face was alive with laughter and exultation. He came straight toward her, as if they had never parted, and seized her shoulders saying: ‘Now I can look after you, thank God.’
She hardly knew what she answered; but she heard herself questioning rather wildly why he seemed so changed and so happy.
‘Because I am happy,’ he answered. ‘I have heard the bad news.’
All parties concerned, including some who seemed rather unconcerned, found themselves assembled on the garden-path leading to Craven House, to hear the formality, now truly formal, of the lawyer’s reading of the will; and the probable, and more practical sequel of the lawyer’s advice upon the crisis. Besides the grey-haired solicitor himself, armed with the testamentary document, there was the Inspector armed with more direct authority touching the crime, and Lieutenant Rook in undisguised attendance on the lady; some were rather mystified on seeing the tall figure of the doctor, some smiled a little on seeing the dumpy figure of the priest. Mr Harker, that Flying Mercury, had shot down to the lodge-gates to meet them, led them back on to the lawn, and then dashed ahead of them again to prepare their reception. He said he would be back in a jiffy; and anyone observing his piston-rod of energy could well believe it; but, for the moment, they were left rather stranded on the lawn outside the house.
‘Reminds me of somebody making runs at cricket’, said the Lieutenant.
‘That young man,’ said the lawyer, ‘is rather annoyed that the law cannot move quite so quickly as he does. Fortunately Miss Craven understands our professional difficulties and delays. She has kindly assured me that she still has confidence in my slowness.’
‘I wish,’ said the doctor, suddenly, ‘that I had as much confidence in his quickness.’
‘Why, what do you mean?’ asked Rook, knitting his brows; ‘do you mean that Harker is too quick?’
‘Too quick and too slow,’ said Dr Straker, in his rather cryptic fashion. ‘I know one occasion at least when he was not so very quick. Why was he hanging about half the night by the pond and the Green Man, before the Inspector came down and found the body? Why did he meet the Inspector? Why should he expect to meet the Inspector outside the Green Man?’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Rook. ‘Do you mean that Harker wasn’t telling the truth?’
Dr Straker was silent. The grizzled lawyer laughed with grim good humour. ‘I have nothing more serious to say against the young man,’ he said, ‘than that he made a prompt and praiseworthy attempt to teach me my own business.’
‘For that matter, he made an attempt to teach me mine,’ said the Inspector, who had just joined the group in front. ‘But that doesn’t matter. If Dr Straker means anything by his hints, they do matter. I must ask you to speak plainly, doctor. It may be my duty to question him at once.’
‘Well, here he comes,’ said Rook, as the alert figure of the secretary appeared once more in the doorway.
At this point Father Brown, who had remained silent and inconspicuous at the tail of the procession, astonished everybody very much; perhaps especially those who knew him. He not only walked rapidly to the front, but turned facing the whole group with an arresting and almost threatening expression, like a sergeant bringing soldiers to the halt.
‘Stop!’ he said almost sternly. ‘I apologize to everybody; but it’s absolutely necessary that I should see Mr Harker first. I’ve got to tell him something I know; and I don’t think anybody else knows; something he’s got to hear. It may save a very tragic misunderstanding with somebody later on.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked old Dyke the lawyer.
‘I mean the bad news,’ said Father Brown.
‘Here, I say,’ began the Inspector indignantly; and then suddenly caught the priest’s eye and remembered strange things he had seen in other days. ‘Well, if it were anyone in the world but you I should say of all the infernal cheek—‘
But Father Brown was already out of hearing, and a moment afterwards was plunged in talk with Harker in the porch. They walked to and fro together for a few paces and then disappeared into the dark interior. It was about twelve minutes afterwards that Father Brown came out alone.
To their surprise he showed no dispostion to re-enter the house, now that the whole company were at last about to enter it. He threw himself down on the rather rickety seat in the leafy arbour, and as the procession disappeared through the doorway, lit a pipe and proceeded to stare vacantly at the long ragged leaves about his head and to listen to the birds. There was no man who had a more hearty and enduring appetite for doing nothing.
He was, apparently, in a cloud of smoke and a dream of abstraction, when the front doors were once more flung open and two or three figures came out helter-skelter, running towards him, the daughter of the house and her young admirer Mr Rook being easily winners in the race. Their faces were alight with astonishment; and the face of Inspector Burns, who advanced more heavily behind them, like an elephant shaking the garden, was inflamed with some indignation as well.
‘What can all this mean?’ cried Olive, as she came panting to a halt. ‘He’s gone!’
‘Bolted!’ said the Lieutenant explosively. ‘Harker’s just managed to pack a suitcase and bolted! Gone clean out of the back door and over the garden-wall to God knows where. What did you say to him?’
‘Don’t be silly!’ said Olive, with a more worried expression. ‘Of course you told him you’d found him out, and now he’s gone. I never could have believed he was wicked like that!’
‘Well!’ gasped the Inspector, bursting into their midst. ‘What have you done now? What have you let me down like this for?’
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