‘No, no,’ said Wood, in a sort of soothing whisper. ‘Things often look like that in reflection. It’s the wavering of the water that makes you think that.’
‘Think what?’ asked the priest shortly.
‘That his left leg is crooked,’ said Wood.
Payne had thought of the oval window as a sort of mystical mirror; and it seemed to him that there were in it other inscrutable images of doom. There was something else beside the figure that he did not understand; three thinner legs showing in dark lines against the light, as if some monstrous three-legged spider or bird were standing beside the stranger. Then he had the less crazy thought of a tripod like that of the heathen oracles; and the next moment the thing had vanished and the legs of the human figure passed out of the picture.
He turned to meet the pale face of old Vine, the steward, with his mouth open, eager to speak, and his single tooth showing. ‘He has come,’ he said. ‘The boat arrived from Australia this morning.’
Even as they went back out of the library into the central salon they heard the footsteps of the newcomer clattering down the entrance steps, with various items of light luggage trailed behind him. When Payne saw one of them, he laughed with a reaction of relief. His tripod was nothing but the telescopic legs of a portable camera, easily packed and unpacked; and the man who was carrying it seemed so far to take on equally solid and normal qualities. He was dressed in dark clothes, but of a careless and holiday sort; his shirt was of grey flannel, and his boots echoed uncompromisingly enough in those still chambers. As he strode forward to greet his new circle his stride had scarcely more than the suggestion of a limp. But Payne and his companions were looking at his face, and could scarcely take their eyes from it.
He evidently felt there was something curious and uncomfortable about his reception; but they could have sworn that he did not himself know the cause of it. The lady, supposed to be in some sense already betrothed to him, was certainly beautiful enough to attract him; but she evidently also frightened him. The old steward brought him a sort of feudal homage, yet treated him as if he were the family ghost. The priest still looked at him with a face which was quite indecipherable, and therefore perhaps all the more unnerving. A new sort of irony, more like the Greek irony, began to pass over Payne’s mind. He had dreamed of the stranger as a devil, but it seemed almost worse that he was an unconscious destiny. He seemed to march towards crime with the monstrous innocence of Oedipus. He had approached the family mansion in so blindly buoyant a spirit as to have set up his camera to photograph his first sight of it; and even the camera had taken on the semblance of the tripod of a tragic pythoness.
Payne was surprised, when taking his leave a little while after, at something which showed that the Australian was already less unconscious of his surroundings. He said in a low voice:
‘Don’t go ... or come again soon. You look like a human being. This place fairly gives me the jumps.’
When Payne emerged out of those almost subterranean halls and came into the night air and the smell of the sea, he felt as if he had come out of that underworld of dreams in which events jumble on top of each other in a way at once unrestful and unreal.
The arrival of the strange relative had been somehow unsatisfying and, as it were, unconvincing. The doubling of the same face in the old portrait and the new arrival troubled him like a two headed monster. And yet it was not altogether a nightmare; nor was it that face, perhaps, that he saw most vividly.
‘Did you say?’ he asked of the doctor, as they strode together across the striped dark sands by the darkening sea; ‘did you say that young man was betrothed to Miss Darnaway by a family compact or something? Sounds rather like a novel.’
‘But an historical novel,’ answered Dr Barnet. ‘The Darnaways all went to sleep a few centuries ago, when things were really done that we only read of in romances. Yes; I believe there’s some family tradition by which second or third cousins always marry when they stand in a certain relation of age, in order to unite the property. A damned silly tradition, I should say; and if they often married in and in, in that fashion, it may account on principles of heredity for their having gone so rotten.’
‘I should hardly say,’ answered Payne a little stuffily, ‘that they had all gone rotten.’
‘Well,’ replied the doctor, ‘the young man doesn’t look rotten, of course, though he’s certainly lame.’
‘The young man!’ cried Payne, who was suddenly and unreasonably angry. ‘Well, if you think the young lady looks rotten, I think it’s you who have rotten taste.’
The doctor’s face grew dark and bitter. ‘I fancy I know more about it than you do,’ he snapped.
They completed the walk in silence, each feeling that he had been irrationally rude and had suffered equally irrational rudeness; and Payne was left to brood alone on the matter, for his friend Wood had remained behind to attend to some of his business in connexion with the pictures.
Payne took very full advantage of the invitation extended by the colonial cousin, who wanted somebody to cheer him up. During the next few weeks he saw a good deal of the dark interior of the Darnaway home; though it might be said that he did not confine himself entirely to cheering up the colonial cousin. The lady’s melancholy was of longer standing and perhaps needed more lifting; anyhow, he showed a laborious readiness to lift it. He was not without a conscience, however, and the situation made him doubtful and uncomfortable. Weeks went by and nobody could discover from the demeanour of the new Darnaway whether he considered himself engaged according to the old compact or no. He went mooning about the dark galleries and stood staring vacantly at the dark and sinister picture. The shades of that prison-house were certainly beginning to close on him, and there was little of his Australian assurance left. But Payne could discover nothing upon the point that concerned him most. Once he attempted to confide in his friend Martin Wood, as he was pottering about in his capacity of picture-hanger; but even out of him he got very little satisfaction.
‘It seems to me you can’t butt in,’ said Wood shortly, ‘because of the engagement.’
‘Of course I shan’t butt in if there is an engagement,’ retorted his friend; ‘but is there? I haven’t said a word to her of course; but I’ve seen enough of her to be pretty certain she doesn’t think there is, even if she thinks there may be. He doesn’t say there is, or even hint that there ought to be. It seems to me this shillyshallying is rather unfair on everybody.’
‘Especially on you, I suppose,’ said Wood a little harshly. ‘But if you ask me, I’ll tell you what I think — I think he’s afraid.’
‘Afraid of being refused?’ asked Payne.
‘No; afraid of being accepted,’ answered the other. ‘Don’t bite my head off — I don’t mean afraid of the lady. I mean afraid of the picture.’
‘Afraid of the picture!’ repeated Payne.
‘I mean afraid of the curse,’ said Wood. ‘Don’t you remember the rhyme about the Darnaway doom falling on him and her.’
‘Yes, but look here,’ cried Payne; ‘even the Darnaway doom can’t have it both ways. You tell me first that I mustn’t have my own way because of the compact, and then that the compact mustn’t have its own way because of the curse. But if the curse can destroy the compact, why should she be tied to the compact? If they’re frightened of marrying each other, they’re free to marry anybody else, and there’s an end of it. Why should I suffer for the observance of something they don’t propose to observe? It seems to me your position is very unreasonable.’
‘Of course it’s all a tangle,’ said Wood rather crossly, and went on hammering at the frame of a canvas.
Suddenly, one morning, the new heir broke his long and baffling silence. He did it in a curious fashion, a little crude, as was his way, but with an obvious anxiety to do the right thing. He asked frankly for advice, not of this or that individual as Payne had done, but collectively as of a crowd. When he did speak he threw himself on the whole company like a states
man going to the country. He called it ‘a show-down’. Fortunately the lady was not included in this large gesture; and Payne shuddered when he thought of her feelings. But the Australian was quite honest; he thought the natural thing was to ask for help and for information, calling a sort of family council at which he put his cards on the table. It might be said that he flung down his cards on the table, for he did it with a rather desperate air, like one who had been harassed for days and nights by the increasing pressure of a problem. In that short time the shadows of that place of low windows and sinking pavements had curiously changed him, and increased a certain resemblance that crept through all their memories.
The five men, including the doctor, were sitting round a table; and Payne was idly reflecting that his own light tweeds and red hair must be the only colours in the room, for the priest and the steward were in black, and Wood and Darnaway habitually wore dark grey suits that looked almost like black. Perhaps this incongruity had been what the young man had meant by calling him a human being. At that moment the young man himself turned abruptly in his chair and began to talk. A moment after the dazed artist knew that he was talking about the most tremendous thing in the world.
‘Is there anything in it?’ he was saying. ’That is what I’ve come to asking myself till I’m nearly crazy. I’d never have believed I should come to thinking of such things; but I think of the portrait and the rhyme and the coincidences or whatever you call them, and I go cold. Is there anything in it? Is there any Doom of the Darnaways or only a damned queer accident? Have I got a right to marry, or shall I bring something big and black out of the sky, that I know nothing about, on myself and somebody else?’
His rolling eye had roamed round the table and rested on the plain face of the priest, to whom he now seemed to be speaking. Payne’s submerged practicality rose in protest against the problem of superstition being brought before that supremely superstitious tribunal. He was sitting next to Darnaway and struck in before the priest could answer.
‘Well, the coincidences are curious, I admit,’ he said, rather forcing a note of cheerfulness; ‘but surely we — ’ and then he stopped as if he had been struck by lightning. For Darnaway had turned his head sharply over his shoulder at the interruption, and with the movement, his left eyebrow jerked up far above its fellow and for an instant the face of the portrait glared at him with a ghastly exaggeration of exactitude. The rest saw it; and all had the air of having been dazzled by an instant of light. The old steward gave a hollow groan.
‘It is no good,’ he said hoarsely;’ we are dealing with something too terrible.’
‘Yes,’ assented the priest in a low voice, ‘we are dealing with something terrible; with the most terrible thing I know, and the name of it is nonsense.’
‘What did you say?’ said Darnaway, still looking towards him.
‘I said nonsense,’ repeated the priest. ‘I have not said anything in particular up to now, for it was none of my business; I was only taking temporary duty in the neighbourhood and Miss Darnaway wanted to see me. But since you’re asking me personally and point-blank, why, it’s easy enough to answer. Of course there’s no Doom of the Darnaways to prevent your marrying anybody you have any decent reason for marrying. A man isn’t fated to fall into the smallest venial sin, let alone into crimes like suicide and murder. You can’t be made to do wicked things against your will because your name is Darnaway, any more than I can because my name is Brown. The Doom of the Browns,’ he added with relish — ‘the Weird of the Browns would sound even better.’
‘And you of all people,’ repeated the Australian, staring, ‘tell me to think like that about it.’
‘I tell you to think about something else,’ replied the priest cheerfully. ‘What has become of the rising art of photography? How is the camera getting on? I know it’s rather dark downstairs, but those hollow arches on the floor above could easily be turned into a first-rate photographic studio. A few workmen could fit it out with a glass roof in no time.’
‘Really,’ protested Martin Wood, ‘I do think you should be the last man in the world to tinker about with those beautiful Gothic arches, which are about the best work your own religion has ever done in the world. I should have thought you’d have had some feeling for that sort of art; but I can’t see why you should be so uncommonly keen on photography.’
‘I’m uncommonly keen on daylight,’ answered Father Brown, ‘especially in this dingy business; and photography has the virtue of depending on daylight. And if you don’t know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don’t know so much about my religion as you think you do.’
The young Australian had sprung to his feet like a man rejuvenated. ‘By George! that’s the talk,’ he cried; ‘though I never thought to hear it from that quarter. I’ll tell you what, reverend sir, I’ll do something that will show I haven’t lost my courage after all.’
The old steward was still looking at him with quaking watchfulness, as if he felt something fey about the young man’s defiance. ‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘what are you going to do now?’
‘I am going to photograph the portrait,’ replied Darnaway.
Yet it was barely a week afterwards that the storm of the catastrophe seemed to stoop out of the sky, darkening that sun of sanity to which the priest had appealed in vain, and plunging the mansion once more in the darkness of the Darnaway doom. It had been easy enough to fit up the new studio; and seen from inside it looked very like any other such studio, empty except for the fullness of the white light. A man coming from the gloomy rooms below had more than normally the sense of stepping into a more than modern brilliancy, as blank as the future. At the suggestion of Wood, who knew the castle well and had got over his first aesthetic grumblings, a small room remaining intact in the upper ruins was easily turned into a dark room, into which Darnaway went out of the white daylight to grope by the crimson gleams of a red lamp. Wood said, laughing, that the red lamp had reconciled him to the vandalism; as that bloodshot darkness was as romantic as an alchemist’s cave.
Darnaway had risen at daybreak on the day that he meant to photograph the mysterious portrait, and had it carried up from the library by the single corkscrew staircase that connected the two floors. There he had set it up in the wide white daylight on a sort of easel and planted his photographic tripod in front of it. He said he was anxious to send a reproduction of it to a great antiquary who had written on the antiquities of the house; but the others knew that this was an excuse covering much deeper things. It was, if not exactly a spiritual duel between Darnaway and the demoniac picture, at least a duel between Darnaway and his own doubts. He wanted to bring the daylight of photography face to face with that dark masterpiece of painting; and to see whether the sunshine of the new art would not drive out the shadows of the old.
Perhaps this was why he preferred to do it by himself, even if some of the details seemed to take longer and involve more than normal delay. Anyhow, he rather discouraged the few who visited his studio during the day of the experiment, and who found him focusing and fussing about in a very isolated and impenetrable fashion. The steward had left a meal for him, as he refused to come down; the old gentleman also returned some hours afterwards and found the meal more or less normally disposed of; but when he brought it he got no more gratitude than a grunt. Payne went up once to see how he was getting on, but finding the photographer disinclined for conversation came down again. Father Brown had wandered that way in an unobtrusive style to take Darnaway a letter from the expert to whom the photograph was to be sent. But he left the letter on a tray, and whatever he thought of that great glasshouse full of daylight and devotion to a hobby, a world he had himself in some sense created, he kept it to himself and came down. He had reason to remember very soon that he was the last to come down the solitary staircase connecting the floors, leaving a lonely man and an empty room behind him. The others were standing in the salon that led into the librar
y, just under the great black ebony clock that looked like a titanic coffin.
‘How was Darnaway getting on,’ asked Payne, a little later, ‘when you last went up?’
The priest passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Don’t tell me I’m getting psychic,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘I believe I’m quite dazzled with daylight up in that room and couldn’t see things straight. Honestly, I felt for a flash as if there were something uncanny about Darnaway’s figure standing before that portrait.’
‘Oh, that’s the lame leg,’ said Barnet promptly. ‘We know all about that.’
‘Do you know,’ said Payne abruptly, but lowering his voice, ‘l don’t think we do know all about it or anything about it. What’s the matter with his leg? What was the matter with his ancestor’s leg?’
‘Oh, there’s something about that in the book I was reading in there, in the family archives,’ said Wood; ‘I’ll fetch it for you.’ And he stepped into the library just beyond.
‘I think,’ said Father Brown quietly, ‘Mr Payne must have some particular reason for asking that.’
‘I may as well blurt it out once and for all,’ said Payne, but in a yet lower voice. ‘After all, there is a rational explanation. A man from anywhere might have made up to look like the portrait. What do we know about Darnaway? He is behaving rather oddly — ’
The others were staring at him in a rather startled fashion; but the priest seemed to take it very calmly.
‘I don’t think the old portrait’s ever been photographed,’ he said. ‘That’s why he wants to do it. I don’t think there’s anything odd about that.’
‘Quite an ordinary state of things, in fact,’ said Wood with a smile; he had just returned with the book in his hand. And even as he spoke there was a stir in the clockwork of the great dark clock behind him and successive strokes thrilled through the room up to the number of seven. With the last stroke there came a crash from the floor above that shook the house like a thunderbolt; and Father Brown was already two steps up the winding staircase before the sound had ceased.
The Complete Father Brown Mysteries Collection Page 66