Chapter 2

Whoever was the tall priest, there could
be no doubt about the identity of the short one. It was his friend of
the Harwich train, the stumpy little cure of Essex whom he had warned
about his brown paper parcels.

Now, so far as this went, everything fitted in finally and rationally
enough. Valentin had learned by his inquiries that morning that a Father
Brown from Essex was bringing up a silver cross with sapphires, a
relic of considerable value, to show some of the foreign priests at the
congress. This undoubtedly was the “silver with blue stones”; and Father
Brown undoubtedly was the little greenhorn in the train. Now there
was nothing wonderful about the fact that what Valentin had found out
Flambeau had also found out; Flambeau found out everything. Also there
was nothing wonderful in the fact that when Flambeau heard of a sapphire
cross he should try to steal it; that was the most natural thing in all
natural history. And most certainly there was nothing wonderful about
the fact that Flambeau should have it all his own way with such a silly
sheep as the man with the umbrella and the parcels. He was the sort of
man whom anybody could lead on a string to the North Pole; it was not
surprising that an actor like Flambeau, dressed as another priest, could
lead him to Hampstead Heath. So far the crime seemed clear enough; and
while the detective pitied the priest for his helplessness, he almost
despised Flambeau for condescending to so gullible a victim. But when
Valentin thought of all that had happened in between, of all that had
led him to his triumph, he racked his brains for the smallest rhyme or
reason in it. What had the stealing of a blue-and-silver cross from a
priest from Essex to do with chucking soup at wall paper? What had it
to do with calling nuts oranges, or with paying for windows first and
breaking them afterwards? He had come to the end of his chase; yet
somehow he had missed the middle of it. When he failed (which was
seldom), he had usually grasped the clue, but nevertheless missed the
criminal. Here he had grasped the criminal, but still he could not grasp
the clue.

The two figures that they followed were crawling like black flies
across the huge green contour of a hill. They were evidently sunk in
conversation, and perhaps did not notice where they were going; but they
were certainly going to the wilder and more silent heights of the Heath.
As their pursuers gained on them, the latter had to use the undignified
attitudes of the deer-stalker, to crouch behind clumps of trees and
even to crawl prostrate in deep grass. By these ungainly ingenuities the
hunters even came close enough to the quarry to hear the murmur of the
discussion, but no word could be distinguished except the word “reason”
recurring frequently in a high and almost childish voice. Once over
an abrupt dip of land and a dense tangle of thickets, the detectives
actually lost the two figures they were following. They did not find the
trail again for an agonising ten minutes, and then it led round the brow
of a great dome of hill overlooking an amphitheatre of rich and desolate
sunset scenery. Under a tree in this commanding yet neglected spot was
an old ramshackle wooden seat. On this seat sat the two priests still in
serious speech together. The gorgeous green and gold still clung to
the darkening horizon; but the dome above was turning slowly from
peacock-green to peacock-blue, and the stars detached themselves more
and more like solid jewels. Mutely motioning to his followers, Valentin
contrived to creep up behind the big branching tree, and, standing there
in deathly silence, heard the words of the strange priests for the first
time.

After he had listened for a minute and a half, he was gripped by a
devilish doubt. Perhaps he had dragged the two English policemen to the
wastes of a nocturnal heath on an errand no saner than seeking figs on
its thistles. For the two priests were talking exactly like priests,
piously, with learning and leisure, about the most aerial enigmas of
theology. The little Essex priest spoke the more simply, with his round
face turned to the strengthening stars; the other talked with his
head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to look at them. But no more
innocently clerical conversation could have been heard in any white
Italian cloister or black Spanish cathedral.

The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown’s sentences,
which ended: “... what they really meant in the Middle Ages by the
heavens being incorruptible.”

The taller priest nodded his bowed head and said:

“Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but who can
look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be
wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?”

“No,” said the other priest; “reason is always reasonable, even in the
last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge
the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone
on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the
Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason.”

The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky and said:

“Yet who knows if in that infinite universe--?”

“Only infinite physically,” said the little priest, turning sharply
in his seat, “not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of
truth.”

Valentin behind his tree was tearing his fingernails with silent fury.
He seemed almost to hear the sniggers of the English detectives whom
he had brought so far on a fantastic guess only to listen to the
metaphysical gossip of two mild old parsons. In his impatience he lost
the equally elaborate answer of the tall cleric, and when he listened
again it was again Father Brown who was speaking:

“Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look
at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and
sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please.
Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon
is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all
that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason
and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of
pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’”

Valentin was just in the act of rising from his rigid and crouching
attitude and creeping away as softly as might be, felled by the one
great folly of his life. But something in the very silence of the tall
priest made him stop until the latter spoke. When at last he did speak,
he said simply, his head bowed and his hands on his knees:

“Well, I think that other worlds may perhaps rise higher than our
reason. The mystery of heaven is unfathomable, and I for one can only
bow my head.”

Then, with brow yet bent and without changing by the faintest shade his
attitude or voice, he added:

“Just hand over that sapphire cross of yours, will you? We’re all alone
here, and I could pull you to pieces like a straw doll.”

The utterly unaltered voice and attitude added a strange violence to
that shocking change of speech. But the guarder of the relic only seemed
to turn his head by the smallest section of the compass. He seemed still
to have a somewhat foolish face turned to the stars. Perhaps he had not
understood. Or, perhaps, he had understood and sat rigid with terror.

“Yes,” said the tall priest, in the same low voice and in the same still
posture, “yes, I am Flambeau.”

Then, after a pause, he said:

“Come, will you give me that cross?”

“No,” said the other, and the monosyllable had an odd sound.

Flambeau suddenly flung off all his pontifical pretensions. The great
robber leaned back in his seat and laughed low but long.

“No,” he cried, “you won’t give it me, you proud prelate. You won’t give
it me, you little celibate simpleton. Shall I tell you why you won’t
give it me? Because I’ve got it already in my own breast-pocket.”

The small man from Essex turned what seemed to be a dazed face in the
dusk, and said, with the timid eagerness of “The Private Secretary”:

“Are--are you sure?”

Flambeau yelled with delight.

“Really, you’re as good as a three-act farce,” he cried. “Yes, you
turnip, I am quite sure. I had the sense to make a duplicate of the
right parcel, and now, my friend, you’ve got the duplicate and I’ve got
the jewels. An old dodge, Father Brown--a very old dodge.”

“Yes,” said Father Brown, and passed his hand through his hair with the
same strange vagueness of manner. “Yes, I’ve heard of it before.”

The colossus of crime leaned over to the little rustic priest with a
sort of sudden interest.

“You have heard of it?” he asked. “Where have you heard of it?”

“Well, I mustn’t tell you his name, of course,” said the little man
simply. “He was a penitent, you know. He had lived prosperously for
about twenty years entirely on duplicate brown paper parcels. And so,
you see, when I began to suspect you, I thought of this poor chap’s way
of doing it at once.”

“Began to suspect me?” repeated the outlaw with increased intensity.
“Did you really have the gumption to suspect me just because I brought
you up to this bare part of the heath?”

“No, no,” said Brown with an air of apology. “You see, I suspected you
when we first met. It’s that little bulge up the sleeve where you people
have the spiked bracelet.”

“How in Tartarus,” cried Flambeau, “did you ever hear of the spiked
bracelet?”

“Oh, one’s little flock, you know!” said Father Brown, arching his
eyebrows rather blankly. “When I was a curate in Hartlepool, there were
three of them with spiked bracelets. So, as I suspected you from the
first, don’t you see, I made sure that the cross should go safe, anyhow.
I’m afraid I watched you, you know. So at last I saw you change the
parcels. Then, don’t you see, I changed them back again. And then I left
the right one behind.”

“Left it behind?” repeated Flambeau, and for the first time there was
another note in his voice beside his triumph.

“Well, it was like this,” said the little priest, speaking in the same
unaffected way. “I went back to that sweet-shop and asked if I’d left a
parcel, and gave them a particular address if it turned up. Well, I knew
I hadn’t; but when I went away again I did. So, instead of running after
me with that valuable parcel, they have sent it flying to a friend of
mine in Westminster.” Then he added rather sadly: “I learnt that, too,
from a poor fellow in Hartlepool. He used to do it with handbags he
stole at railway stations, but he’s in a monastery now. Oh, one gets to
know, you know,” he added, rubbing his head again with the same sort of
desperate apology. “We can’t help being priests. People come and tell us
these things.”

Flambeau tore a brown-paper parcel out of his inner pocket and rent it
in pieces. There was nothing but paper and sticks of lead inside it. He
sprang to his feet with a gigantic gesture, and cried:

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a bumpkin like you could manage
all that. I believe you’ve still got the stuff on you, and if you don’t
give it up--why, we’re all alone, and I’ll take it by force!”

“No,” said Father Brown simply, and stood up also, “you won’t take it
by force. First, because I really haven’t still got it. And, second,
because we are not alone.”

Flambeau stopped in his stride forward.

“Behind that tree,” said Father Brown, pointing, “are two strong
policemen and the greatest detective alive. How did they come here, do
you ask? Why, I brought them, of course! How did I do it? Why, I’ll tell
you if you like! Lord bless you, we have to know twenty such things
when we work among the criminal classes! Well, I wasn’t sure you were
a thief, and it would never do to make a scandal against one of our
own clergy. So I just tested you to see if anything would make you show
yourself. A man generally makes a small scene if he finds salt in his
coffee; if he doesn’t, he has some reason for keeping quiet. I changed
the salt and sugar, and you kept quiet. A man generally objects if
his bill is three times too big. If he pays it, he has some motive for
passing unnoticed. I altered your bill, and you paid it.”

The world seemed waiting for Flambeau to leap like a tiger. But he was
held back as by a spell; he was stunned with the utmost curiosity.

“Well,” went on Father Brown, with lumbering lucidity, “as you wouldn’t
leave any tracks for the police, of course somebody had to. At every
place we went to, I took care to do something that would get us talked
about for the rest of the day. I didn’t do much harm--a splashed wall,
spilt apples, a broken window; but I saved the cross, as the cross will
always be saved. It is at Westminster by now. I rather wonder you didn’t
stop it with the Donkey’s Whistle.”

“With the what?” asked Flambeau.

“I’m glad you’ve never heard of it,” said the priest, making a face.
“It’s a foul thing. I’m sure you’re too good a man for a Whistler. I
couldn’t have countered it even with the Spots myself; I’m not strong
enough in the legs.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” asked the other.

“Well, I did think you’d know the Spots,” said Father Brown, agreeably
surprised. “Oh, you can’t have gone so very wrong yet!”

“How in blazes do you know all these horrors?” cried Flambeau.

The shadow of a smile crossed the round, simple face of his clerical
opponent.

“Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose,” he said. “Has it never
struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins
is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil? But, as a matter of
fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a priest.”

“What?” asked the thief, almost gaping.

“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.”

And even as he turned away to collect his property, the three policemen
came out from under the twilight trees. Flambeau was an artist and a
sportsman. He stepped back and swept Valentin a great bow.

“Do not bow to me, mon ami,” said Valentin with silver clearness. “Let
us both bow to our master.”

And they both stood an instant uncovered while the little Essex priest
blinked about for his umbrella.

The Secret Garden

Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, was late for his dinner,
and some of his guests began to arrive before him. These were, however,
reassured by his confidential servant, Ivan, the old man with a scar,
and a face almost as grey as his moustaches, who always sat at a table
in the entrance hall--a hall hung with weapons. Valentin’s house was
perhaps as peculiar and celebrated as its master. It was an old house,
with high walls and tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the
oddity--and perhaps the police value--of its architecture was this: that
there was no ultimate exit at all except through this front door, which
was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The garden was large and elaborate,
and there were many exits from the house into the garden. But there was
no exit from the garden into the world outside; all round it ran a tall,
smooth, unscalable wall with special spikes at the top; no bad garden,
perhaps, for a man to reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn
to kill.

As Ivan explained to the guests, their host had telephoned that he
was detained for ten minutes. He was, in truth, making some last
arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though these
duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with
precision. Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about
their punishment. Since he had been supreme over French--and largely
over European--policial methods, his great influence had been honourably
used for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.
He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only
thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes and the
red rosette--an elegant figure, his dark beard already streaked with
grey. He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on
the grounds behind. The garden door of it was open, and after he had
carefully locked his box in its official place, he stood for a few
seconds at the open door looking out upon the garden. A sharp moon
was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin
regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as
his. Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the
most tremendous problem of their lives. From any such occult mood,
at least, he quickly recovered, for he knew he was late, and that his
guests had already begun to arrive. A glance at his drawing-room when he
entered it was enough to make certain that his principal guest was not
there, at any rate. He saw all the other pillars of the little party;
he saw Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador--a choleric old man with a
russet face like an apple, wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter. He
saw Lady Galloway, slim and threadlike, with silver hair and a face
sensitive and superior. He saw her daughter, Lady Margaret Graham, a
pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair. He
saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and with
her her two daughters, black-eyed and opulent also. He saw Dr. Simon,
a typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and a
forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty
of superciliousness, since they come through constantly elevating
the eyebrows. He saw Father Brown, of Cobhole, in Essex, whom he had
recently met in England. He saw--perhaps with more interest than any
of these--a tall man in uniform, who had bowed to the Galloways without
receiving any very hearty acknowledgment, and who now advanced alone to
pay his respects to his host. This was Commandant O’Brien, of the
French Foreign Legion. He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure,
clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an
officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures and successful
suicides, he had an air at once dashing and melancholy. He was by birth
an Irish gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways--especially
Margaret Graham. He had left his country after some crash of debts, and
now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging
about in uniform, sabre and spurs. When he bowed to the Ambassador’s
family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked
away.

But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in each
other, their distinguished host was not specially interested in them. No
one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening. Valentin
was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose
friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and
triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that
multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small
religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for
the American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr.
Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was
ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was
an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American
Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman,
but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more “progressive”
than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought “progressive.”
He thought Valentin “progressive,” thereby doing him a grave injustice.

The solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as decisive
as a dinner bell. He had this great quality, which very few of us
can claim, that his presence was as big as his absence. He was a huge
fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without
so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well
brushed back like a German’s; his face was red, fierce and cherubic,
with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise
infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean. Not
long, however, did that salon merely stare at the celebrated American;
his lateness had already become a domestic problem, and he was sent with
all speed into the dining-room with Lady Galloway on his arm.

Except on one point the Galloways were genial and casual enough. So long
as Lady Margaret did not take the arm of that adventurer O’Brien, her
father was quite satisfied; and she had not done so, she had decorously
gone in with Dr. Simon. Nevertheless, old Lord Galloway was restless and
almost rude. He was diplomatic enough during dinner, but when, over the
cigars, three of the younger men--Simon the doctor, Brown the priest,
and the detrimental O’Brien, the exile in a foreign uniform--all melted
away to mix with the ladies or smoke in the conservatory, then the
English diplomatist grew very undiplomatic indeed. He was stung
every sixty seconds with the thought that the scamp O’Brien might be
signalling to Margaret somehow; he did not attempt to imagine how. He
was left over the coffee with Brayne, the hoary Yankee who believed
in all religions, and Valentin, the grizzled Frenchman who believed in
none. They could argue with each other, but neither could appeal to
him. After a time this “progressive” logomachy had reached a crisis of
tedium; Lord Galloway got up also and sought the drawing-room. He lost
his way in long passages for some six or eight minutes: till he heard
the high-pitched, didactic voice of the doctor, and then the dull voice
of the priest, followed by general laughter. They also, he thought with
a curse, were probably arguing about “science and religion.” But the
instant he opened the salon door he saw only one thing--he saw what
was not there. He saw that Commandant O’Brien was absent, and that Lady
Margaret was absent too.

Rising impatiently from the drawing-room, as he had from the
dining-room, he stamped along the passage once more. His notion of
protecting his daughter from the Irish-Algerian n’er-do-well had become
something central and even mad in his mind. As he went towards the back
of the house, where was Valentin’s study, he was surprised to meet his
daughter, who swept past with a white, scornful face, which was a second
enigma. If she had been with O’Brien, where was O’Brien! If she had
not been with O’Brien, where had she been? With a sort of senile and
passionate suspicion he groped his way to the dark back parts of the
mansion, and eventually found a servants’ entrance that opened on to the
garden. The moon with her scimitar had now ripped up and rolled away all
the storm-wrack. The argent light lit up all four corners of the garden.
A tall figure in blue was striding across the lawn towards the study
door; a glint of moonlit silver on his facings picked him out as
Commandant O’Brien.

He vanished through the French windows into the house, leaving Lord
Galloway in an indescribable temper, at once virulent and vague. The
blue-and-silver garden, like a scene in a theatre, seemed to taunt him
with all that tyrannic tenderness against which his worldly authority
was at war. The length and grace of the Irishman’s stride enraged him as
if he were a rival instead of a father; the moonlight maddened him.
He was trapped as if by magic into a garden of troubadours, a Watteau
fairyland; and, willing to shake off such amorous imbecilities by
speech, he stepped briskly after his enemy. As he did so he tripped over
some tree or stone in the grass; looked down at it first with irritation
and then a second time with curiosity. The next instant the moon and the
tall poplars looked at an unusual sight--an elderly English diplomatist
running hard and crying or bellowing as he ran.

His hoarse shouts brought a pale face to the study door, the beaming
glasses and worried brow of Dr. Simon, who heard the nobleman’s first
clear words. Lord Galloway was crying: “A corpse in the grass--a
blood-stained corpse.” O’Brien at last had gone utterly out of his mind.

“We must tell Valentin at once,” said the doctor, when the other had
brokenly described all that he had dared to examine. “It is fortunate
that he is here;” and even as he spoke the great detective entered the
study, attracted by the cry. It was almost amusing to note his typical
transformation; he had come with the common concern of a host and a
gentleman, fearing that some guest or servant was ill. When he was
told the gory fact, he turned with all his gravity instantly bright and
businesslike; for this, however abrupt and awful, was his business.

“Strange, gentlemen,” he said as they hurried out into the garden, “that
I should have hunted mysteries all over the earth, and now one comes and
settles in my own back-yard. But where is the place?” They crossed the
lawn less easily, as a slight mist had begun to rise from the river; but
under the guidance of the shaken Galloway they found the body sunken
in deep grass--the body of a very tall and broad-shouldered man. He lay
face downwards, so they could only see that his big shoulders were clad
in black cloth, and that his big head was bald, except for a wisp or
two of brown hair that clung to his skull like wet seaweed. A scarlet
serpent of blood crawled from under his fallen face.

“At least,” said Simon, with a deep and singular intonation, “he is none
of our party.”

“Examine him, doctor,” cried Valentin rather sharply. “He may not be
dead.”

The doctor bent down. “He is not quite cold, but I am afraid he is dead
enough,” he answered. “Just help me to lift him up.”

They lifted him carefully an inch from the ground, and all doubts as
to his being really dead were settled at once and frightfully. The head
fell away. It had been entirely sundered from the body; whoever had
cut his throat had managed to sever the neck as well. Even Valentin
was slightly shocked. “He must have been as strong as a gorilla,” he
muttered.

Not without a shiver, though he was used to anatomical abortions, Dr.
Simon lifted the head. It was slightly slashed about the neck and jaw,
but the face was substantially unhurt. It was a ponderous, yellow face,
at once sunken and swollen, with a hawk-like nose and heavy lids--a face
of a wicked Roman emperor, with, perhaps, a distant touch of a Chinese
emperor. All present seemed to look at it with the coldest eye of
ignorance. Nothing else could be noted about the man except that, as
they had lifted his body, they had seen underneath it the white gleam of
a shirt-front defaced with a red gleam of blood. As Dr. Simon said,
the man had never been of their party. But he might very well have been
trying to join it, for he had come dressed for such an occasion.

Valentin went down on his hands and knees and examined with his closest
professional attention the grass and ground for some twenty yards round
the body, in which he was assisted less skillfully by the doctor, and
quite vaguely by the English lord. Nothing rewarded their grovellings
except a few twigs, snapped or chopped into very small lengths, which
Valentin lifted for an instant’s examination and then tossed away.

“Twigs,” he said gravely; “twigs, and a total stranger with his head cut
off; that is all there is on this lawn.”

There was an almost creepy stillness, and then the unnerved Galloway
called out sharply:

“Who’s that! Who’s that over there by the garden wall!”

A small figure with a foolishly large head drew waveringly near them in
the moonlit haze; looked for an instant like a goblin, but turned out to
be the harmless little priest whom they had left in the drawing-room.