Chapter 2

“But it doesn’t fit him,” cried Hood impatiently. “He couldn’t possibly
wear it!”

Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. “I never said he
could wear it,” he answered. “I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist
on a shade of difference, a hat that is his.”

“And what is the shade of difference?” asked the criminologist with a
slight sneer.

“My good sir,” cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin
to impatience, “if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter’s
shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between
a man’s hat and the hats that are his.”

“But a hatter,” protested Hood, “can get money out of his stock of new
hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?”

“Rabbits,” replied Father Brown promptly.

“What?” cried Dr Hood.

“Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper,” said
the reverend gentleman with rapidity. “Didn’t you see it all when
you found out the faked ropes? It’s just the same with the sword.
Mr Todhunter hasn’t got a scratch on him, as you say; but he’s got a
scratch in him, if you follow me.”

“Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes?” inquired Mrs MacNab
sternly.

“I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes,” said Father Brown. “I
mean inside Mr Todhunter.”

“Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?”

“Mr Todhunter,” explained Father Brown placidly, “is learning to be a
professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist, and expert in
the rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat. It is without traces
of hair, not because it is worn by the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but
because it has never been worn by anybody. The juggling explains the
three glasses, which Todhunter was teaching himself to throw up and
catch in rotation. But, being only at the stage of practice, he smashed
one glass against the ceiling. And the juggling also explains the sword,
which it was Mr Todhunter’s professional pride and duty to swallow.
But, again, being at the stage of practice, he very slightly grazed the
inside of his throat with the weapon. Hence he has a wound inside him,
which I am sure (from the expression on his face) is not a serious
one. He was also practising the trick of a release from ropes, like the
Davenport Brothers, and he was just about to free himself when we all
burst into the room. The cards, of course, are for card tricks, and they
are scattered on the floor because he had just been practising one of
those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He merely kept his
trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other
conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once
looked in at his back window, and been driven away by him with great
indignation, was enough to set us all on a wrong track of romance, and
make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted spectre
of Mr Glass.”

“But what about the two voices?” asked Maggie, staring.

“Have you never heard a ventriloquist?” asked Father Brown. “Don’t you
know they speak first in their natural voice, and then answer themselves
in just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice that you heard?”

There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little man who
had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. “You are certainly a very
ingenious person,” he said; “it could not have been done better in a
book. But there is just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded in
explaining away, and that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly heard him
so addressed by Mr Todhunter.”

The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. “Well, that,”
he said, “that’s the silliest part of the whole silly story. When our
juggling friend here threw up the three glasses in turn, he counted
them aloud as he caught them, and also commented aloud when he failed to
catch them. What he really said was: ‘One, two and three--missed a glass
one, two--missed a glass.’ And so on.”

There was a second of stillness in the room, and then everyone with
one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the corner
complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a flourish.
Then, advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he produced
from his pocket a big bill printed in blue and red, which announced that
ZALADIN, the World’s Greatest Conjurer, Contortionist, Ventriloquist and
Human Kangaroo would be ready with an entirely new series of Tricks
at the Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o’clock
precisely.

TWO. -- The Paradise of Thieves

THE great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets,
walked swiftly into his favourite restaurant, which overlooked the
Mediterranean, was covered by an awning and fenced by little lemon and
orange trees. Waiters in white aprons were already laying out on white
tables the insignia of an early and elegant lunch; and this seemed to
increase a satisfaction that already touched the top of swagger. Muscari
had an eagle nose like Dante; his hair and neckerchief were dark and
flowing; he carried a black cloak, and might almost have carried a black
mask, so much did he bear with him a sort of Venetian melodrama. He
acted as if a troubadour had still a definite social office, like a
bishop. He went as near as his century permitted to walking the world
literally like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.

For he never travelled without a case of swords, with which he had
fought many brilliant duels, or without a corresponding case for his
mandolin, with which he had actually serenaded Miss Ethel Harrogate, the
highly conventional daughter of a Yorkshire banker on a holiday. Yet he
was neither a charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked
a certain thing and was it. His poetry was as straightforward as anyone
else’s prose. He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with
a torrid directness inconceivable among the cloudy ideals or cloudy
compromises of the north; to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger
or even crime. Like fire or the sea, he was too simple to be trusted.

The banker and his beautiful English daughter were staying at the hotel
attached to Muscari’s restaurant; that was why it was his favourite
restaurant. A glance flashed around the room told him at once, however,
that the English party had not descended. The restaurant was glittering,
but still comparatively empty. Two priests were talking at a table in
a corner, but Muscari (an ardent Catholic) took no more notice of them
than of a couple of crows. But from a yet farther seat, partly concealed
behind a dwarf tree golden with oranges, there rose and advanced towards
the poet a person whose costume was the most aggressively opposite to
his own.

This figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a pink tie, a
sharp collar and protuberant yellow boots. He contrived, in the
true tradition of ‘Arry at Margate, to look at once startling and
commonplace. But as the Cockney apparition drew nearer, Muscari was
astounded to observe that the head was distinctly different from the
body. It was an Italian head: fuzzy, swarthy and very vivacious, that
rose abruptly out of the standing collar like cardboard and the comic
pink tie. In fact it was a head he knew. He recognized it, above all
the dire erection of English holiday array, as the face of an old but
forgotten friend name Ezza. This youth had been a prodigy at college,
and European fame was promised him when he was barely fifteen; but when
he appeared in the world he failed, first publicly as a dramatist and a
demagogue, and then privately for years on end as an actor, a traveller,
a commission agent or a journalist. Muscari had known him last behind
the footlights; he was but too well attuned to the excitements of that
profession, and it was believed that some moral calamity had swallowed
him up.

“Ezza!” cried the poet, rising and shaking hands in a pleasant
astonishment. “Well, I’ve seen you in many costumes in the green room;
but I never expected to see you dressed up as an Englishman.”

“This,” answered Ezza gravely, “is not the costume of an Englishman, but
of the Italian of the future.”

“In that case,” remarked Muscari, “I confess I prefer the Italian of the
past.”

“That is your old mistake, Muscari,” said the man in tweeds, shaking
his head; “and the mistake of Italy. In the sixteenth century we Tuscans
made the morning: we had the newest steel, the newest carving, the
newest chemistry. Why should we not now have the newest factories, the
newest motors, the newest finance--the newest clothes?”

“Because they are not worth having,” answered Muscari. “You cannot make
Italians really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see the
short cut to good living will never go by the new elaborate roads.”

“Well, to me Marconi, or D’Annunzio, is the star of Italy” said the
other. “That is why I have become a Futurist--and a courier.”

“A courier!” cried Muscari, laughing. “Is that the last of your list of
trades? And whom are you conducting?”

“Oh, a man of the name of Harrogate, and his family, I believe.”

“Not the banker in this hotel?” inquired the poet, with some eagerness.

“That’s the man,” answered the courier.

“Does it pay well?” asked the troubadour innocently.

“It will pay me,” said Ezza, with a very enigmatic smile. “But I am a
rather curious sort of courier.” Then, as if changing the subject, he
said abruptly: “He has a daughter--and a son.”

“The daughter is divine,” affirmed Muscari, “the father and son are, I
suppose, human. But granted his harmless qualities doesn’t that banker
strike you as a splendid instance of my argument? Harrogate has millions
in his safes, and I have--the hole in my pocket. But you daren’t
say--you can’t say--that he’s cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even
more energetic. He’s not clever, he’s got eyes like blue buttons; he’s
not energetic, he moves from chair to chair like a paralytic. He’s a
conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he’s got money simply because
he collects money, as a boy collects stamps. You’re too strong-minded
for business, Ezza. You won’t get on. To be clever enough to get all
that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

“I’m stupid enough for that,” said Ezza gloomily. “But I should suggest
a suspension of your critique of the banker, for here he comes.”

Mr Harrogate, the great financier, did indeed enter the room, but nobody
looked at him. He was a massive elderly man with a boiled blue eye and
faded grey-sandy moustaches; but for his heavy stoop he might have been
a colonel. He carried several unopened letters in his hand. His son
Frank was a really fine lad, curly-haired, sun-burnt and strenuous; but
nobody looked at him either. All eyes, as usual, were riveted, for
the moment at least, upon Ethel Harrogate, whose golden Greek head and
colour of the dawn seemed set purposely above that sapphire sea, like
a goddess’s. The poet Muscari drew a deep breath as if he were drinking
something, as indeed he was. He was drinking the Classic; which his
fathers made. Ezza studied her with a gaze equally intense and far more
baffling.

Miss Harrogate was specially radiant and ready for conversation on this
occasion; and her family had fallen into the easier Continental habit,
allowing the stranger Muscari and even the courier Ezza to share their
table and their talk. In Ethel Harrogate conventionality crowned itself
with a perfection and splendour of its own. Proud of her father’s
prosperity, fond of fashionable pleasures, a fond daughter but an arrant
flirt, she was all these things with a sort of golden good-nature that
made her very pride pleasing and her worldly respectability a fresh and
hearty thing.

They were in an eddy of excitement about some alleged peril in the
mountain path they were to attempt that week. The danger was not from
rock and avalanche, but from something yet more romantic. Ethel had
been earnestly assured that brigands, the true cut-throats of the modern
legend, still haunted that ridge and held that pass of the Apennines.

“They say,” she cried, with the awful relish of a schoolgirl, “that
all that country isn’t ruled by the King of Italy, but by the King of
Thieves. Who is the King of Thieves?”

“A great man,” replied Muscari, “worthy to rank with your own Robin
Hood, signorina. Montano, the King of Thieves, was first heard of in the
mountains some ten years ago, when people said brigands were extinct.
But his wild authority spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution.
Men found his fierce proclamations nailed in every mountain village; his
sentinels, gun in hand, in every mountain ravine. Six times the Italian
Government tried to dislodge him, and was defeated in six pitched
battles as if by Napoleon.”

“Now that sort of thing,” observed the banker weightily, “would never
be allowed in England; perhaps, after all, we had better choose another
route. But the courier thought it perfectly safe.”

“It is perfectly safe,” said the courier contemptuously. “I have been
over it twenty times. There may have been some old jailbird called a
King in the time of our grandmothers; but he belongs to history if not
to fable. Brigandage is utterly stamped out.”

“It can never be utterly stamped out,” Muscari answered; “because armed
revolt is a recreation natural to southerners. Our peasants are like
their mountains, rich in grace and green gaiety, but with the fires
beneath. There is a point of human despair where the northern poor take
to drink--and our own poor take to daggers.”

“A poet is privileged,” replied Ezza, with a sneer. “If Signor Muscari
were English he would still be looking for highwaymen in Wandsworth.
Believe me, there is no more danger of being captured in Italy than of
being scalped in Boston.”

“Then you propose to attempt it?” asked Mr Harrogate, frowning.

“Oh, it sounds rather dreadful,” cried the girl, turning her glorious
eyes on Muscari. “Do you really think the pass is dangerous?”

Muscari threw back his black mane. “I know it is dangerous:” he said. “I
am crossing it tomorrow.”

The young Harrogate was left behind for a moment emptying a glass of
white wine and lighting a cigarette, as the beauty retired with the
banker, the courier and the poet, distributing peals of silvery satire.
At about the same instant the two priests in the corner rose; the
taller, a white-haired Italian, taking his leave. The shorter priest
turned and walked towards the banker’s son, and the latter was
astonished to realize that though a Roman priest the man was an
Englishman. He vaguely remembered meeting him at the social crushes
of some of his Catholic friends. But the man spoke before his memories
could collect themselves.

“Mr Frank Harrogate, I think,” he said. “I have had an introduction, but
I do not mean to presume on it. The odd thing I have to say will come
far better from a stranger. Mr Harrogate, I say one word and go: take
care of your sister in her great sorrow.”

Even for Frank’s truly fraternal indifference the radiance and derision
of his sister still seemed to sparkle and ring; he could hear her
laughter still from the garden of the hotel, and he stared at his sombre
adviser in puzzledom.

“Do you mean the brigands?” he asked; and then, remembering a vague fear
of his own, “or can you be thinking of Muscari?”

“One is never thinking of the real sorrow,” said the strange priest.
“One can only be kind when it comes.”

And he passed promptly from the room, leaving the other almost with his
mouth open.

A day or two afterwards a coach containing the company was really
crawling and staggering up the spurs of the menacing mountain range.
Between Ezza’s cheery denial of the danger and Muscari’s boisterous
defiance of it, the financial family were firm in their original
purpose; and Muscari made his mountain journey coincide with theirs. A
more surprising feature was the appearance at the coast-town station of
the little priest of the restaurant; he alleged merely that business
led him also to cross the mountains of the midland. But young Harrogate
could not but connect his presence with the mystical fears and warnings
of yesterday.

The coach was a kind of commodious wagonette, invented by the modernist
talent of the courier, who dominated the expedition with his scientific
activity and breezy wit. The theory of danger from thieves was banished
from thought and speech; though so far conceded in formal act that some
slight protection was employed. The courier and the young banker carried
loaded revolvers, and Muscari (with much boyish gratification) buckled
on a kind of cutlass under his black cloak.

He had planted his person at a flying leap next to the lovely
Englishwoman; on the other side of her sat the priest, whose name was
Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the
father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits,
seriously believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have
made her think him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and
gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards,
that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous
heavens with wheeling suns. The white road climbed like a white cat;
it spanned sunless chasms like a tight-rope; it was flung round far-off
headlands like a lasso.

And yet, however high they went, the desert still blossomed like the
rose. The fields were burnished in sun and wind with the colour of
kingfisher and parrot and humming-bird, the hues of a hundred flowering
flowers. There are no lovelier meadows and woodlands than the English,
no nobler crests or chasms than those of Snowdon and Glencoe. But
Ethel Harrogate had never before seen the southern parks tilted on the
splintered northern peaks; the gorge of Glencoe laden with the fruits
of Kent. There was nothing here of that chill and desolation that in
Britain one associates with high and wild scenery. It was rather like a
mosaic palace, rent with earthquakes; or like a Dutch tulip garden blown
to the stars with dynamite.

“It’s like Kew Gardens on Beachy Head,” said Ethel.

“It is our secret,” answered he, “the secret of the volcano; that is
also the secret of the revolution--that a thing can be violent and yet
fruitful.”

“You are rather violent yourself,” and she smiled at him.

“And yet rather fruitless,” he admitted; “if I die tonight I die
unmarried and a fool.”

“It is not my fault if you have come,” she said after a difficult
silence.

“It is never your fault,” answered Muscari; “it was not your fault that
Troy fell.”

As they spoke they came under overwhelming cliffs that spread almost
like wings above a corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow
on the narrow ledge, the horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to
the earth to hold their heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse
reared up to his full height--the titanic and terrifying height of
a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the
equilibrium; the whole coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through
the fringe of bushes over the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel,
who clung to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments that he
lived.

At the moment when the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet’s
head like a purple windmill a thing happened which was superficially
even more startling. The elderly and lethargic banker sprang erect in
the coach and leapt over the precipice before the tilted vehicle could
take him there. In the first flash it looked as wild as suicide; but in
the second it was as sensible as a safe investment. The Yorkshireman had
evidently more promptitude, as well as more sagacity, than Muscari had
given him credit for; for he landed in a lap of land which might
have been specially padded with turf and clover to receive him. As
it happened, indeed, the whole company were equally lucky, if less
dignified in their form of ejection. Immediately under this abrupt turn
of the road was a grassy and flowery hollow like a sunken meadow; a
sort of green velvet pocket in the long, green, trailing garments of
the hills. Into this they were all tipped or tumbled with little damage,
save that their smallest baggage and even the contents of their pockets
were scattered in the grass around them. The wrecked coach still hung
above, entangled in the tough hedge, and the horses plunged painfully
down the slope. The first to sit up was the little priest, who scratched
his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank Harrogate heard him say to
himself: “Now why on earth have we fallen just here?”

He blinked at the litter around him, and recovered his own very clumsy
umbrella. Beyond it lay the broad sombrero fallen from the head of
Muscari, and beside it a sealed business letter which, after a glance
at the address, he returned to the elder Harrogate. On the other side of
him the grass partly hid Miss Ethel’s sunshade, and just beyond it lay a
curious little glass bottle hardly two inches long. The priest picked it
up; in a quick, unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed it, and his
heavy face turned the colour of clay.

“Heaven deliver us!” he muttered; “it can’t be hers! Has her sorrow come
on her already?” He slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket. “I think
I’m justified,” he said, “till I know a little more.”

He gazed painfully at the girl, at that moment being raised out of the
flowers by Muscari, who was saying: “We have fallen into heaven; it is
a sign. Mortals climb up and they fall down; but it is only gods and
goddesses who can fall upwards.”

And indeed she rose out of the sea of colours so beautiful and happy
a vision that the priest felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. “After
all,” he thought, “perhaps the poison isn’t hers; perhaps it’s one of
Muscari’s melodramatic tricks.”

Muscari set the lady lightly on her feet, made her an absurdly
theatrical bow, and then, drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut
reins of the horses, so that they scrambled to their feet and stood
in the grass trembling. When he had done so, a most remarkable thing
occurred. A very quiet man, very poorly dressed and extremely sunburnt,
came out of the bushes and took hold of the horses’ heads. He had a
queer-shaped knife, very broad and crooked, buckled on his belt; there
was nothing else remarkable about him, except his sudden and silent
appearance. The poet asked him who he was, and he did not answer.

Looking around him at the confused and startled group in the hollow,
Muscari then perceived that another tanned and tattered man, with a
short gun under his arm, was looking at them from the ledge just below,
leaning his elbows on the edge of the turf. Then he looked up at the
road from which they had fallen and saw, looking down on them, the
muzzles of four other carbines and four other brown faces with bright
but quite motionless eyes.

“The brigands!” cried Muscari, with a kind of monstrous gaiety. “This
was a trap. Ezza, if you will oblige me by shooting the coachman first,
we can cut our way out yet. There are only six of them.”

“The coachman,” said Ezza, who was standing grimly with his hands in his
pockets, “happens to be a servant of Mr Harrogate’s.”

“Then shoot him all the more,” cried the poet impatiently; “he was
bribed to upset his master. Then put the lady in the middle, and we will
break the line up there--with a rush.”

And, wading in wild grass and flowers, he advanced fearlessly on the
four carbines; but finding that no one followed except young Harrogate,
he turned, brandishing his cutlass to wave the others on. He beheld
the courier still standing slightly astride in the centre of the grassy
ring, his hands in his pockets; and his lean, ironical Italian face
seemed to grow longer and longer in the evening light.

“You thought, Muscari, I was the failure among our schoolfellows,” he
said, “and you thought you were the success. But I have succeeded more
than you and fill a bigger place in history. I have been acting epics
while you have been writing them.”

“Come on, I tell you!” thundered Muscari from above. “Will you stand
there talking nonsense about yourself with a woman to save and three
strong men to help you? What do you call yourself?”

“I call myself Montano,” cried the strange courier in a voice equally
loud and full. “I am the King of Thieves, and I welcome you all to my
summer palace.”

And even as he spoke five more silent men with weapons ready came out of
the bushes, and looked towards him for their orders. One of them held a
large paper in his hand.

“This pretty little nest where we are all picnicking,” went on the
courier-brigand, with the same easy yet sinister smile, “is, together
with some caves underneath it, known by the name of the Paradise of
Thieves. It is my principal stronghold on these hills; for (as you have
doubtless noticed) the eyrie is invisible both from the road above and
from the valley below. It is something better than impregnable; it is
unnoticeable. Here I mostly live, and here I shall certainly die, if
the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not the kind of criminal that
‘reserves his defence,’ but the better kind that reserves his last
bullet.”

All were staring at him thunderstruck and still, except Father Brown,
who heaved a huge sigh as of relief and fingered the little phial in his
pocket. “Thank God!” he muttered; “that’s much more probable. The poison
belongs to this robber-chief, of course. He carries it so that he may
never be captured, like Cato.”

The King of Thieves was, however, continuing his address with the same
kind of dangerous politeness. “It only remains for me,” he said,
“to explain to my guests the social conditions upon which I have the
pleasure of entertaining them. I need not expound the quaint old ritual
of ransom, which it is incumbent upon me to keep up; and even this only
applies to a part of the company. The Reverend Father Brown and the
celebrated Signor Muscari I shall release tomorrow at dawn and escort
to my outposts. Poets and priests, if you will pardon my simplicity
of speech, never have any money. And so (since it is impossible to
get anything out of them), let us, seize the opportunity to show our
admiration for classic literature and our reverence for Holy Church.”

He paused with an unpleasing smile; and Father Brown blinked repeatedly
at him, and seemed suddenly to be listening with great attention. The
brigand captain took the large paper from the attendant brigand and,
glancing over it, continued: “My other intentions are clearly set forth
in this public document, which I will hand round in a moment; and which
after that will be posted on a tree by every village in the valley, and
every cross-road in the hills. I will not weary you with the verbalism,
since you will be able to check it; the substance of my proclamation is
this: I announce first that I have captured the English millionaire, the
colossus of finance, Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have
found on his person notes and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he
has given up to me. Now since it would be really immoral to announce
such a thing to a credulous public if it had not occurred, I suggest it
should occur without further delay. I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior
should now give me the two thousand pounds in his pocket.”

The banker looked at him under lowering brows, red-faced and sulky, but
seemingly cowed. That leap from the failing carriage seemed to have used
up his last virility. He had held back in a hang-dog style when his son
and Muscari had made a bold movement to break out of the brigand
trap. And now his red and trembling hand went reluctantly to his
breast-pocket, and passed a bundle of papers and envelopes to the
brigand.

“Excellent!” cried that outlaw gaily; “so far we are all cosy. I resume
the points of my proclamation, so soon to be published to all Italy.
The third item is that of ransom. I am asking from the friends of the
Harrogate family a ransom of three thousand pounds, which I am sure
is almost insulting to that family in its moderate estimate of their
importance. Who would not pay triple this sum for another day’s
association with such a domestic circle?