FOUR -- The Man in the Passage
TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passagerunning along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The eveningdaylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty.The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see theother as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, eachman knew the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men ofstriking appearance and they hated each other.
The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of theAdelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-colouredriver. One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building itsupported was an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. Theother side of the passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neitherwas what was commonly called the stage door; they were a sort of specialand private stage doors used by very special performers, and in thiscase by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance ofthe day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exitsand entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.
The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men whoevidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for eachapproached the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence.Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who walked fast was the manfrom the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived before the secretstage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other withcivility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker whoseemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.
In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither couldbe called inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable andpopular. As public persons, both were in the first public rank. Buteverything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of adiverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of manwhose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixedwith the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more oftenyou met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twentyunintelligent committees--on every sort of subject, from the reform ofthe Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain.In the Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobodycould quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken upArt, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you couldnot meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really beenruled by him all your life.
His appearance was "distinguished" in exactly the same sense; it was atonce conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with hishigh silk hat--, yet it was unlike anyone else's hat--a little higher,perhaps, and adding something to his natural height. His tall, slenderfigure had a slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hairwas silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was worn longer than thecommon yet he did not look effeminate; it was curly but it did notlook curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look more manly andmilitant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of Velazquezwith whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were ashade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores ofsuch gloves and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and therestaurants.
The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short,but merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair andcropped close to a strong, massive head--the sort of head you break adoor with, as Chaucer said of the Miller's. His military moustache andthe carriage of his shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pairof those peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which are more common insailors. His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square, his shoulderswere square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild schoolof caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as aproposition in the fourth book of Euclid.
For he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success.You did not have to be in the best society to have heard of CaptainCutler, of the siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. Youcould not get away from hearing of him wherever you were; his portraitwas on every other postcard; his maps and battles in every otherillustrated paper; songs in his honour in every other music-hall turn oron every other barrel-organ. His fame, though probably more temporary,was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous than the other man's.In thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England, likeNelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in England than Sir WilsonSeymour.
The door was opened to them by an aged servant or "dresser", whosebroken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trouserscontrasted queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress'sdressing-room. It was fitted and filled with looking-glasses at everyangle of refraction, so that they looked like the hundred facets of onehuge diamond--if one could get inside a diamond. The other features ofluxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few scraps of stagecostume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of theArabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as theshuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back againstthe wall.
They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, andasking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in theother room, but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow ofboth visitors; for the other room was the private room of the greatactor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was of the kind thatdoes not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about halfa minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she alwaysdid, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roarof applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strangegarb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blueand green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy,hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous toall men, but especially to boys and to men growing grey. In company withher male colleague, the great American actor, Isidore Bruno, she wasproducing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation ofMidsummer Night's Dream: in which the artistic prominence was givento Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set indreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, thegreen costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusiveindividuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in whatwas still broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman's face.
She greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept somany males at the same just dangerous distance from her. She acceptedsome flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as hisvictories; and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offeredlater on and more nonchalantly by that gentleman. For it was againsthis breeding to show eagerness, and against his conventionalunconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had pickedup a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancientGreek dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn inthe time of Theseus and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all theHeroic weapons, but, oddly enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still.He had really been attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it was asperfect as a Greek vase. If it was of any interest to Miss Rome or couldcome in anywhere in the play, he hoped she would--
The inner door burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more ofa contrast to the explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearlysix-foot-six, and of more than theatrical thews and muscles, IsidoreBruno, in the gorgeous leopard skin and golden-brown garments of Oberon,looked like a barbaric god. He leaned on a sort of hunting-spear, whichacross a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand, but which in the smalland comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a pike-staff--and asmenacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzedface, handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination ofhigh cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled certain Americanconjectures about his origin in the Southern plantations.
/> "Aurora," he began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that hadmoved so many audiences, "will you--"
He stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presenteditself just inside the doorway--a figure so incongruous in the scene asto be almost comic. It was a very short man in the black uniform ofthe Roman secular clergy, and looking (especially in such a presence asBruno's and Aurora's) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark. Hedid not, however, seem conscious of any contrast, but said with dullcivility: "I believe Miss Rome sent for me."
A shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperaturerather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of aprofessional celibate seemed to reveal to the others that they stoodround the woman as a ring of amorous rivals; just as a stranger comingin with frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a furnace. Thepresence of the one man who did not care about her increased Miss Rome'ssense that everybody else was in love with her, and each in a somewhatdangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a spoiltchild; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of willrather than mind; Sir Wilson with that daily hardening concentrationwith which old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay, even the abjectParkinson, who had known her before her triumphs, and who followed herabout the room with eyes or feet, with the dumb fascination of a dog.
A shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like ablack wooden Noah (who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it witha considerable but contained amusement. It was evident that the greatAurora, though by no means indifferent to the admiration of the othersex, wanted at this moment to get rid of all the men who admired her andbe left alone with the man who did not--did not admire her in thatsense at least; for the little priest did admire and even enjoy thefirm feminine diplomacy with which she set about her task. There was,perhaps, only one thing that Aurora Rome was clever about, and that wasone half of humanity--the other half. The little priest watched, like aNapoleonic campaign, the swift precision of her policy for expelling allwhile banishing none. Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that itwas easy to send him off in brute sulks, banging the door. Cutler, theBritish officer, was pachydermatous to ideas, but punctilious aboutbehaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he would die rather thanignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he had tobe treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The only way tomove him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to let himinto the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss Romeas she achieved all these three objects in one selected action.
She went across to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner:"I shall value all these flowers, because they must be your favouriteflowers. But they won't be complete, you know, without my favouriteflower. Do go over to that shop round the corner and get me somelilies-of-the-valley, and then it will be quite lovely."
The first object of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was atonce achieved. He had already handed his spear in a lordly style, likea sceptre, to the piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one ofthe cushioned seats like a throne. But at this open appeal to his rivalthere glowed in his opal eyeballs all the sensitive insolence of theslave; he knotted his enormous brown fists for an instant, and then,dashing open the door, disappeared into his own apartments beyond. Butmeanwhile Miss Rome's experiment in mobilizing the British Army had notsucceeded so simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stifflyand suddenly, and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word ofcommand. But perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant aboutthe languid figure of Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glassesthat brought him up short at the entrance, turning his head this way andthat like a bewildered bulldog.
"I must show this stupid man where to go," said Aurora in a whisper toSeymour, and ran out to the threshold to speed the parting guest.
Seymour seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was hisposture, and he seemed relieved when he heard the lady call out somelast instructions to the Captain, and then turn sharply and run laughingdown the passage towards the other end, the end on the terrace above theThames. Yet a second or two after Seymour's brow darkened again. A manin his position has so many rivals, and he remembered that at the otherend of the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno's privateroom. He did not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to FatherBrown about the revival of Byzantine architecture in the WestminsterCathedral, and then, quite naturally, strolled out himself into theupper end of the passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were leftalone, and they were neither of them men with a taste for superfluousconversation. The dresser went round the room, pulling outlooking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark coat andtrousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding thefestive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frameof a new glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurdglass chamber was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air likeangels, turning somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs toeverybody like very rude persons.
Father Brown seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, butfollowed Parkinson with an idly attentive eye till he took himselfand his absurd spear into the farther room of Bruno. Then he abandonedhimself to such abstract meditations as always amused him--calculatingthe angles of the mirrors, the angles of each refraction, the angle atwhich each must fit into the wall...when he heard a strong but strangledcry.
He sprang to his feet and stood rigidly listening. At the same instantSir Wilson Seymour burst back into the room, white as ivory. "Who's thatman in the passage?" he cried. "Where's that dagger of mine?"
Before Father Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was plungingabout the room looking for the weapon. And before he could possiblyfind that weapon or any other, a brisk running of feet broke upon thepavement outside, and the square face of Cutler was thrust into thesame doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a bunch oflilies-of-the-valley. "What's this?" he cried. "What's that creaturedown the passage? Is this some of your tricks?"
"My tricks!" hissed his pale rival, and made a stride towards him.
In the instant of time in which all this happened Father Brown steppedout into the top of the passage, looked down it, and at once walkedbriskly towards what he saw.
At this the other two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him,Cutler calling out: "What are you doing? Who are you?"
"My name is Brown," said the priest sadly, as he bent over somethingand straightened himself again. "Miss Rome sent for me, and I came asquickly as I could. I have come too late."
The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died inthat late light of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path ofgold, and in the midst of it Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes ofgreen and gold, with her dead face turned upwards. Her dress was tornaway as in a struggle, leaving the right shoulder bare, but the woundfrom which the blood was welling was on the other side. The brass daggerlay flat and gleaming a yard or so away.
There was a blank stillness for a measurable time, so that they couldhear far off a flower-girl's laugh outside Charing Cross, and someonewhistling furiously for a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand.Then the Captain, with a movement so sudden that it might have beenpassion or play-acting, took Sir Wilson Seymour by the throat.
Seymour looked at him steadily without either fight or fear. "You neednot kill me," he said in a voice quite cold; "I shall do that on my ownaccount."
The Captain's hand hesitated and dropped; and the other added with thesame icy candour: "If I find I haven't the nerve to do it with thatdagger I can do it in a month with drink."
"Drink isn't good enough for me," replied Cutler, "but I'll have bloodfor this before I die. Not yours--but I think I know whose."
And before the others could appreciate his intention he snatched up thedagger, sprang at the other door at the lower end of the passage, burstit open, bolt and all, and co
nfronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As hedid so, old Parkinson tottered in his wavering way out of the doorand caught sight of the corpse lying in the passage. He moved shakilytowards it; looked at it weakly with a working face; then moved shakilyback into the dressing-room again, and sat down suddenly on one ofthe richly cushioned chairs. Father Brown instantly ran across to him,taking no notice of Cutler and the colossal actor, though the roomalready rang with their blows and they began to struggle for the dagger.Seymour, who retained some practical sense, was whistling for the policeat the end of the passage.
When the police arrived it was to tear the two men from an almostape-like grapple; and, after a few formal inquiries, to arrest IsidoreBruno upon a charge of murder, brought against him by his furiousopponent. The idea that the great national hero of the hour had arresteda wrongdoer with his own hand doubtless had its weight with the police,who are not without elements of the journalist. They treated Cutler witha certain solemn attention, and pointed out that he had got a slightslash on the hand. Even as Cutler bore him back across tilted chair andtable, Bruno had twisted the dagger out of his grasp and disabled himjust below the wrist. The injury was really slight, but till he wasremoved from the room the half-savage prisoner stared at the runningblood with a steady smile.
"Looks a cannibal sort of chap, don't he?" said the constableconfidentially to Cutler.
Cutler made no answer, but said sharply a moment after: "We must attendto the...the death..." and his voice escaped from articulation.
"The two deaths," came in the voice of the priest from the farther sideof the room. "This poor fellow was gone when I got across to him." Andhe stood looking down at old Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on thegorgeous chair. He also had paid his tribute, not without eloquence, tothe woman who had died.
The silence was first broken by Cutler, who seemed not untouched by arough tenderness. "I wish I was him," he said huskily. "I remember heused to watch her wherever she walked more than--anybody. She was hisair, and he's dried up. He's just dead."
"We are all dead," said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down theroad.
They took leave of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with somerandom apologies for any rudeness they might have shown. Both theirfaces were tragic, but also cryptic.
The mind of the little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wildthoughts that jumped too quickly for him to catch them. Like the whitetail of a rabbit he had the vanishing thought that he was certain oftheir grief, but not so certain of their innocence.
"We had better all be going," said Seymour heavily; "we have done all wecan to help."
"Will you understand my motives," asked Father Brown quietly, "if I sayyou have done all you can to hurt?"
They both started as if guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: "To hurtwhom?"
"To hurt yourselves," answered the priest. "I would not add to yourtroubles if it weren't common justice to warn you. You've done nearlyeverything you could do to hang yourselves, if this actor should beacquitted. They'll be sure to subpoena me; I shall be bound to say thatafter the cry was heard each of you rushed into the room in a wild stateand began quarrelling about a dagger. As far as my words on oath can go,you might either of you have done it. You hurt yourselves with that; andthen Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the dagger."
"Hurt myself!" exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. "A silly littlescratch."
"Which drew blood," replied the priest, nodding. "We know there's bloodon the brass now. And so we shall never know whether there was blood onit before."
There was a silence; and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite aliento his daily accent: "But I saw a man in the passage."
"I know you did," answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, "so didCaptain Cutler. That's what seems so improbable."
Before either could make sufficient sense of it even to answer, FatherBrown had politely excused himself and gone stumping up the road withhis stumpy old umbrella.
As modern newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most importantnews is the police news. If it be true that in the twentieth centurymore space is given to murder than to politics, it is for the excellentreason that murder is a more serious subject. But even this would hardlyexplain the enormous omnipresence and widely distributed detail of "TheBruno Case," or "The Passage Mystery," in the Press of London and theprovinces. So vast was the excitement that for some weeks thePress really told the truth; and the reports of examination andcross-examination, if interminable, even if intolerable are at leastreliable. The true reason, of course, was the coincidence of persons.The victim was a popular actress; the accused was a popular actor; andthe accused had been caught red-handed, as it were, by the most popularsoldier of the patriotic season. In those extraordinary circumstancesthe Press was paralysed into probity and accuracy; and the rest of thissomewhat singular business can practically be recorded from reports ofBruno's trial.
The trial was presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of thosewho are jeered at as humorous judges, but who are generally much moreserious than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a livingimpatience of professional solemnity; while the serious judge is reallyfilled with frivolity, because he is filled with vanity. All the chiefactors being of a worldly importance, the barristers were well balanced;the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy, butweighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem English andtrustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner wasdefended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who was mistaken for a mere flaneurby those who misunderstood the Irish character--and those who had notbeen examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions,the doctor, whom Seymour had summoned on the spot, agreeing with theeminent surgeon who had later examined the body. Aurora Rome had beenstabbed with some sharp instrument such as a knife or dagger; someinstrument, at least, of which the blade was short. The wound was justover the heart, and she had died instantly. When the doctor first sawher she could hardly have been dead for twenty minutes. Therefore whenFather Brown found her she could hardly have been dead for three.
Some official detective evidence followed, chiefly concerned with thepresence or absence of any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion ofthis was the tearing of the dress at the shoulder, and this did not seemto fit in particularly well with the direction and finality of the blow.When these details had been supplied, though not explained, the first ofthe important witnesses was called.
Sir Wilson Seymour gave evidence as he did everything else that he didat all--not only well, but perfectly. Though himself much more ofa public man than the judge, he conveyed exactly the fine shade ofself-effacement before the King's justice; and though everyone looked athim as they would at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury,they could have said nothing of his part in it but that it was that of aprivate gentleman, with an accent on the noun. He was also refreshinglylucid, as he was on the committees. He had been calling on Miss Rome atthe theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had been joined fora short time by the accused, who had then returned to his owndressing-room; they had then been joined by a Roman Catholic priest, whoasked for the deceased lady and said his name was Brown. Miss Rome hadthen gone just outside the theatre to the entrance of the passage, inorder to point out to Captain Cutler a flower-shop at which he was tobuy her some more flowers; and the witness had remained in the room,exchanging a few words with the priest. He had then distinctly heard thedeceased, having sent the Captain on his errand, turn round laughingand run down the passage towards its other end, where was the prisoner'sdressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid movement of hisfriends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself andlooked down it towards the prisoner's door. Did he see anything in thepassage? Yes; he saw something in the passage.
Sir Walter Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which thewitness looked down, and for all his usual composure seemed to have morethan his usual pallor. Then the barrister said in a low
er voice, whichseemed at once sympathetic and creepy: "Did you see it distinctly?"
Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains in fullworking-order. "Very distinctly as regards its outline, but quiteindistinctly, indeed not at all, as regards the details inside theoutline. The passage is of such length that anyone in the middle of itappears quite black against the light at the other end." The witnesslowered his steady eyes once more and added: "I had noticed the factbefore, when Captain Cutler first entered it." There was anothersilence, and the judge leaned forward and made a note.
"Well," said Sir Walter patiently, "what was the outline like? Was it,for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?"
"Not in the least," answered Seymour quietly.
"What did it look like to you?"
"It looked to me," replied the witness, "like a tall man."
Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or hisumbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to belooking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisonerby main force; but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt itas gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to swell taller andtaller when an eyes had been torn away from him.
Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing hisblack silk robes, and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving thewitness-box, after a few final particulars to which there were manyother witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up and stoppedhim.
"I shall only detain you a moment," said Mr Butler, who was arustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partialslumber. "Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?"
A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour's features. "I'mafraid it is the vulgar test of trousers," he said. "When I saw daylightbetween the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all."
Butler's sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. "Afterall!" he repeated slowly. "So you did think at first it was a woman?"
Seymour looked troubled for the first time. "It is hardly a point offact," he said, "but if his lordship would like me to answer for myimpression, of course I shall do so. There was something about the thingthat was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man; somehow thecurves were different. And it had something that looked like long hair."
"Thank you," said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he hadgot what he wanted.
Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than SirWilson, but his account of the opening incidents was solidly the same.He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatchingof himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to theupper end of the passage, the thing he saw in the passage, his suspicionof Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could give littleartistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen.Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic--with a somewhattoo obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he saidit looked more like a beast--with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner.But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, andCowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts that were alreadyfairly clear.
The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination;although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take along time about it. "You used a rather remarkable expression," he said,looking at Cutler sleepily. "What do you mean by saying that it lookedmore like a beast than a man or a woman?"
Cutler seemed seriously agitated. "Perhaps I oughtn't to have saidthat," he said; "but when the brute has huge humped shoulders like achimpanzee, and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig--"
Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. "Never mindwhether its hair was like a pig's," he said, "was it like a woman's?"
"A woman's!" cried the soldier. "Great Scott, no!"
"The last witness said it was," commented the counsel, with unscrupulousswiftness. "And did the figure have any of those serpentine andsemi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No? Nofeminine curves? The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy andsquare than otherwise?"
"He may have been bending forward," said Cutler, in a hoarse and ratherfaint voice.
"Or again, he may not," said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for thesecond time.
The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholicclergyman, so little, compared with the others, that his head seemedhardly to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining achild. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head(mostly by some ramifications of his family's religion) that FatherBrown was on the side of the prisoner, because the prisoner was wickedand foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father Brown upsharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and toldhim to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry.When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought theman in the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want histheories.
"A black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the blackshape. Well, what shape was it?"
Father Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literalnature of obedience. "The shape," he said, "was short and thick, but hadtwo sharp, black projections curved upwards on each side of the head ortop, rather like horns, and--"
"Oh! the devil with horns, no doubt," ejaculated Cowdray, sitting downin triumphant jocularity. "It was the devil come to eat Protestants."
"No," said the priest dispassionately; "I know who it was."
Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense ofsome monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thoughtonly of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage,described by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, wasa shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, andthe other a devil....
The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes."You are a most extraordinary witness," he said; "but there is somethingabout you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well,who was the man you saw in the passage?"
"He was myself," said Father Brown.
Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and saidquite calmly: "Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?" And then,without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question:"You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crimewas committed with a short blade?"
"A short blade," assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, "but avery long hilt."
Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest hadreally seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt(which seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurriedon to explain.
"I mean daggers aren't the only things with short blades. Spearshave short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just likedaggers, if they're that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; likethe spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she'd sentfor me to settle their family troubles--and I came just too late, Godforgive me! But he died penitent--he just died of being penitent. Hecouldn't bear what he'd done."
The general impression in court was that the little priest, who wasgobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge stilllooked at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counselfor the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.
"If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear," said Butler, "hemust have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs ofstruggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?" He had slipped intotreating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.
"The poor lady's dress was torn," said the witness, "because it wascaught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to freeherself, and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner's room andlunged with the spear."
"A panel?" repeated the barrister in a curious voice.
"It was a looking-glass on the other side," explained Father Brown."When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them couldprobably be slid out into the passage."
There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was thejudge who spoke. "So you really mean that when you looked down thatpassage, the man you saw was yourself--in a mirror?"
"Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say," said Brown, "but theyasked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, andso I--"
The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and saidin specially distinct tones: "Do you really mean to say that when SirWilson Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman'shair and a man's trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?"
"Yes, my lord," said Father Brown.
"And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee withhumped shoulders and hog's bristles, he simply saw himself?"
"Yes, my lord."
The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it washard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. "And can you tell uswhy," he asked, "you should know your own figure in a looking-glass,when two such distinguished men don't?"
Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered:"Really, my lord, I don't know unless it's because I don't look at it sooften."
The Wisdom of Father Brown Page 5