The Secret of Father Brown

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  “Did Romaine stand motionless?” asked the priest. “I should have thought he would have run even quicker towards the corpse.”

  “Perhaps he did when I had left,” replied the general. “I took in that undying picture in an instant and the next instant I had dived among the sandhills, and was far out of sight of the others. Well, poor Maurice had made a good choice in the matter of doctors; though the doctor came too late, he came quicker than I should have thought possible. This village surgeon was a very remarkable man, redhaired, irascible, but extraordinarily strong in promptitude and presence of mind. I saw him but for a flash as he leapt on his horse and went thundering away to the scene of death, leaving me far behind. But in that flash I had so strong a sense of his personality that I wished to God he had really been called in before the duel began; for I believe on my soul he would have prevented it somehow. As it was, he cleaned up the mess with marvellous swiftness; long before I could trail back to the sea-shore on my two feet his impetuous practicality had managed everything; the corpse was temporarily buried in the sandhills and the unhappy homicide had been persuaded to do the only thing he could do – to flee for his life. He slipped along the coast till he came to a port and managed to get out of the country. You know the rest; poor Jim remained abroad for many years; later, when the whole thing had been hushed up or forgotten, he returned to his dismal castle and automatically inherited the title. I have never seen him from that day to this, and yet I know what is written in red letters in the inmost darkness of his brain.”

  “I understand,” said Father Brown, “that some of you have made efforts to see him?”

  “My wife never relaxed her efforts,” said the general. “She refuses to admit that such a crime ought to cut a man off for ever; and I confess I am inclined to agree with her. Eighty years before it would have been thought quite normal; and really it was manslaughter rather than murder. My wife is a great friend of the unfortunate lady who was the occasion of the quarrel and she has an idea that if Jim would consent to see Viola Grayson once again, and receive her assurance that old quarrels are buried, it might restore his sanity. My wife is calling a sort of council of old friends to-morrow, I believe. She is very energetic.”

  Father Brown was playing with the pins that lay beside the general’s map; he seemed to listen rather absent-mindedly. He had the sort of mind that sees things in pictures; and the picture which had coloured even the prosaic mind of the practical soldier took on tints yet more significant and sinister in the more mystical mind of the priest. He saw the dark-red desolation of sand, the very hue of Aceldama, and the dead man lying in a dark heap, and the slayer, stooping as he ran, gesticulating with a glove in demented remorse, and always his imagination came back to the third thing that he could not yet fit into any human picture: the second of the slain man standing motionless and mysterious, like a dark statue on the edge of the sea. It might seem to some a detail; but for him it was that stiff figure that stood up like a standing note of interrogation.

  Why had not Romaine moved instantly? It was the natural thing for a second to do, in common humanity, let alone friendship. Even if there were some double-dealing or darker motive not yet understood, one would think it would be done for the sake of appearances. Anyhow, when the thing was all over, it would be natural for the second to stir long before the other second had vanished beyond the sandhills.

  “Does this man Romanic move very slowly?” he asked.

  “It’s queer you should ask that,” answered. Outram, with a sharp glance. “No, as a matter of fact he moves very quickly when he moves at all. But, curiously enough, I was just thinking that only this afternoon I saw him stand exactly like that, during the thunderstorm. He stood in that silver-clasped cape of his, and with one hand on his hip, exactly and in every line as he stood on those bloody sands long ago. The lightning blinded us all, but he did not blink. When it was dark again he was standing there still.”

  “I suppose he isn’t standing there now?” inquired Father Brown. “I mean, I suppose he moved sometime?”

  “No, he moved quite sharply when the thunder came,” replied the other. “He seemed to have been waiting for it, for he told us the exact time of the interval. Is anything the matter?”

  “I’ve pricked myself with one of your pins,” said Father Brown. “I hope I haven’t damaged it.” But his eyes had snapped and his mouth abruptly shut.

  “Are you ill?” inquired the general, staring at him.

  “No,” answered the priest; “I’m only not quite so stoical as your friend Romaine. I can’t help blinking when I see light.”

  He turned to gather up his hat and umbrella; but when he had got to the door he seemed to remember something and turned back. Coming up close to Outram, he gazed up into his face with a rather helpless expression, as of a dying fish, and made a motion as if to hold him by the waistcoat.

  “General,” he almost whispered, “for God’s sake don’t let your wife and that other woman insist on seeing Marne again. Let sleeping dogs lie, or you’ll unleash all the hounds of hell.”

  The general was left alone with a look of bewilderment in his brown eyes, as he sat down again to play with his pins.

  Even greater, however, was the bewilderment which attended the successive stages of the benevolent conspiracy of the general’s wife, who had assembled her little group of sympathizers to storm the castle of the misanthrope. The first surprise she encountered was the unexplained absence of one of the actors in the ancient tragedy. When they assembled by agreement at a quiet hotel quite near the castle, there was no sign of Hugo Romaine, until a belated telegram from a lawyer told them that the great actor had suddenly left the country. The second surprise, when they began the bombardment by sending up word to the castle with an urgent request for an interview, was the figure which came forth from those gloomy gates to receive the deputation in the name of the noble owner. It was no such figure as they would have conceived suitable to those sombre avenues or those almost feudal formalities. It was not some stately steward or major-domo, nor even a dignified butler or tall and ornamental footman. The only figure that came out of the cavernous castle doorway was the short and shabby figure of Father Brown.

  “Look here,” he said, in his simple, bothered fashion. “I told you you’d much better leave him alone. He knows what he’s doing and it’ll only make everybody unhappy.”

  Lady Outram, who was accompanied by a tall and quietly-dressed lady, still very handsome, presumably the original Miss Grayson, looked at the little priest with cold contempt.

  “Really, sir,” she said; “this is a very private occasion, and I don’t understand what you have to do with it.’

  “Trust a priest to have to do with a private occasion,” snarled Sir John Cockspur. “Don’t you know they live behind the scenes like rats behind a wainscot burrowing their way into everybody’s private rooms. See how he’s already in possession of poor Marne.” Sir John was slightly sulky, as his aristocratic friends had persuaded him to give up the great scoop of publicity in return for the privilege of being really inside a Society secret. It never occurred to him to ask himself whether he was at all like a rat in a wainscot.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Father Brown, with the impatience of anxiety. “I’ve talked it over with the marquis and the only priest he’s ever had anything to do with; his clerical tastes have been much exaggerated. I tell you he knows what he’s about; and I do implore you all to leave him alone.”

  “You mean to leave him to this living death of moping and going mad in a ruin!” cried Lady Outram, in a voice that shook a little. “And all because he had the bad luck to shoot a man in a duel more than a quarter of a century ago. Is that what you call Christian charity?”

  “Yes,” answered the priest stolidly; “that is what I call Christian charity.”

  “It’s about all the Christian charity you’ll ever get out of these priests,” cried Cockspur bitterly. “That’s their only idea of pardoning a poor
fellow for a piece of folly; to wall him up alive and starve him to death with fasts and penances and pictures of hell-fire. And all because a bullet went wrong.”

  “Really, Father Brown,” said General Outram, “do you honestly think he deserves this? Is that your Christianity?”

  “Surely the true Christianity,” pleaded his wife more gently, “is that which knows all and pardons all; the love that can remember – and forget.”

  “Father Brown,” said young Mallow, very earnestly, “I generally agree with what you say; but I’m hanged if I can follow you here. A shot in a duel, followed instantly by remorse, is not such an awful offence.”

  “I admit.” said Father Brown dully, “that I take a more serious view of his offence.”

  “God soften your hard heart,” said the strange lady speaking for the first time. “I am going to speak to my old friend.”

  Almost as if her voice had raised a ghost in that great grey house, something stirred within and a figure stood in the dark doorway at the top of the great stone flight of steps. It was clad in dead black, but there was something wild about the blanched hair and something in the pale features that was like the wreck of a marble statue.

  Viola Grayson began calmly to move up the great flight of steps; and Outram muttered in his thick black moustache: “He won’t cut her dead as he did my wife, I fancy.”

  Father Brown, who seemed in a collapse of resignation, looked up at him for a moment.

  “Poor Marne has enough on his conscience,” he said. “Let us acquit him of what we can. At least he never cut your wife.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “He never knew her,” said Father Brown.

  As they spoke, the tall lady proudly mounted the last step and came face to face with the Marquis of Marne. His lips moved, but something happened before he could speak.

  A scream rang across the open space and went wailing away in echoes along those hollow walls. By the abruptness and agony with which it broke from the woman’s lips it might have been a mere inarticulate cry. But it was an articulated word; and they all heard it with a horrible distinctness.

  “Maurice!”

  “What is it, dear?” cried Lady Outram, and began to run up the steps; for the other woman was swaying as if she might fall down the whole stone flight. Then she faced about and began to descend, all bowed and shrunken and shuddering. “Oh, my God,” she was saying. “Oh, my God, it isn’t Jim at all. it’s Maurice!”

  “I think, Lady Outram,” said the priest gravely, “you had better go with your friend.”

  As they turned, a voice fell on them like a stone from the top of the stone stair, a voice that might have come out of an open grave. It was hoarse and unnatural, like the voices of men who are left alone with wild birds on desert islands. It was the voice of the Marquis of Marne, and it said: “Stop!”

  “Father Brown,” he said, “before your friends disperse I authorize you to tell them all I have told you. Whatever follows, I will hide from it no longer.”

  “You are right,” said the priest, “and it shall be counted to you.”

  “Yes,” said Father Brown quietly to the questioning company afterwards. “He has given me the right to speak; but I will not tell it as he told me, but as I found it out for myself. Well, I knew from the first that the blighting monkish influence was all nonsense out of novels. Our people might possibly, in certain cases, encourage a man to go regularly into a monastery, but certainly not to hang about in a mediaeval castle. In the same way, they certainly wouldn’t want him to dress up as a monk when he wasn’t a monk. But it struck me that he might himself want to wear a monk’s hood or even a mask. I had heard of him as a mourner, and then as a murderer; but already I had hazy suspicions that his reason for hiding might not only be concerned with what he was, but with who he was.

  “Then came the general’s vivid description of the duel; and the most vivid thing in it to me was the figure of Mr. Romaine in the background; it was vivid because it was in the background. Why did the general leave behind him on the sand a dead man, whose friend stood yards away from him like a stock or a stone? Then I heard something, a mere trifle, about a trick habit that Romaine has of standing quite still when he is waiting for something to happen; as he waited for the thunder to follow the lightning. Well, that automatic trick in this case betrayed everything. Hugo Romaine on that old occasion, also, was waiting for something.”

  “But it was all over,” said the general. “What could he have been waiting for?”

  “He was waiting for the duel,” said Father Brown.

  “But I tell you I saw the duel!” cried the general.

  “And I tell you you didn’t see the duel,” said the priest.

  “Are you mad?” demanded the other. “Or why should you think I am blind?”

  “Because you were blinded – that you might not see,” said the priest. “Because you are a good man and God had mercy on your innocence, and he turned your face away from that unnatural strife. He set a wall of sand and silence between you and what really happened on that horrible red shore, abandoned to the raging spirits of Judas and of Cain.”

  “Tell us what happened!” gasped the lady impatiently.

  “I will tell it as I found it,” proceeded the priest. “The next thing I found was that Romaine the actor had been training Maurice Mair in all the tricks of the trade of acting. I once had a friend who went in for acting. He gave me a very amusing account of how his first week’s training consisted entirely of falling down; of learning how to fall flat without a stagger, as if he were stone dead.”

  “God have mercy on us!” cried the general, and gripped the arms of his chair as if to rise.

  “Amen,” said Father Brown. “You told me how quickly it seemed to come; in fact, Maurice fell before the bullet flew, and lay perfectly still, waiting. And his wicked friend and teacher stood also in the background, waiting.”

  “We are waiting,” said Cockspur, “and I feel as if I couldn’t wait.”

  “James Mair, already broken with remorse, rushed across to the fallen man and bent over to lift him up. He had thrown away his pistol like an unclean thing; but Maurice’s pistol still lay under his hand and it was undischarged. Then as the elder man bent over the younger, the younger lifted himself on his left arm and shot the elder through the body. He knew he was not so good a shot, but there was no question of missing the heart at that distance.”

  The rest of the company had risen and stood staring down at the narrator with pale faces. “Are you sure of this?” asked Sir John at last, in a thick voice.

  “I am sure of it,” said Father Brown, “and now I leave Maurice Mair, the present Marquis of Marne, to your Christian charity. You have told me something to-day about Christian charity. You seemed to me to give it almost too large a place; but how fortunate it is for poor sinners like this man that you err so much on the side of mercy, and are ready to be reconciled to all mankind.”

  “Hang it all,” exploded the general; “if you think I’m going to be reconciled to a filthy viper like that, I tell you I wouldn’t say a word to save him from hell. I said I could pardon a regular decent duel, but of all the treacherous assassins -”

  “He ought to be lynched,” cried Cockspur excitedly. “He ought to burn alive like a nigger in the States. And if there is such a thing as burning for ever, he jolly well – ”

  “I wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole myself,” said Mallow.

  “There is a limit to human charity,” said Lady Outram, trembling all over.

  “There is,” said Father Brown dryly; “and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness to-day; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as convention
s. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.”

  “But, hang it all,” cried Mallow, “you don’t expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing like this?”

  “No,” said the priest; “but we have to be able to pardon it.”

  He stood up abruptly and looked round at them.

  “We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction,” he said. “We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real crimes; mean as St. Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came.”

  “The dawn,” repeated Mallow doubtfully. “You mean hope – for him?”

  “Yes,” replied the other. “Let me ask you one question. You are great ladies and men of honour and secure of yourselves; you would never, you can tell yourselves, stoop to such squalid reason as that. But tell me this. If any of you had so stooped, which of you, years afterwards, when you were old and rich and safe, would have been driven by conscience or confessor to tell such a story of yourself? You say you could not commit so base a crime. Could you confess so base a crime?” The others gathered their possessions together and drifted by twos and threes out of the room in silence. And Father Brown, also in silence, went back to the melancholy castle of Marne.