Gilbert Chesterton - The Secret of Father Brown

“By your account,” said his companion laughing, “the Christian thief and the heathen fraud went by contraries. One was sorry he’d done it and the other was sorry he hadn’t.”

“We mustn’t be too hard on either of them,” said Father Brown. “Other English gentlemen have stolen before now, and been covered by legal and political protection; and the West also has its own way of covering theft with sophistry. After all, the ruby is not the only kind of valuable stone in the world that has changed owners; it is true of other precious stones; often carved like cameos and coloured like flowers.” The other looked at him inquiringly; and the priest’s finger was pointed to the Gothic outline of the great Abbey. “A great graven stone,” he said, “and that was also stolen.”

A blaze of lightning blanched the grey woods tracing all the wrinkled foliage down to the last curled leaf, as if every detail were drawn in silverpoint or graven in silver. The same strange trick of lightning by which it seems to record millions of minute things in an instant of time, picked out everything, from the elegant litter of the picnic spread under the spreading tree to the pale lengths of winding road, at the end of which a white car was waiting. In the distance a melancholy mansion with four towers like a castle, which in the grey evening had been but a dim and distant huddle of walls like a crumbling cloud, seemed to spring into the foreground, and stood up with all its embattled, roofs and blank and staring windows. And in this, at least, the light had something in it of revelation. For to some of those grouped under the tree that castle was, indeed, a thing faded and almost forgotten, which was to prove its power to spring up again in the foreground of their lives.

The light also clothed for an instant, in the same silver splendour, at least one human figure that stood up as motionless as one of the towers. It was that of a tall man standing on a rise of ground above the rest, who were mostly sitting on the grass or stooping to gather up the hamper and crockery. He wore a picturesque short cloak or cape clasped with a silver clasp and chain, which blazed like a star when the flash touched it; and something metallic in his motionless figure was emphasized by the fact that his closely-curled hair was of the burnished yellow that can be really called gold; and had the look of being younger than his face, which was handsome in a hard aquiline fashion, but looked, under the strong light, a little wrinkled and withered. Possibly it had suffered from wearing a mask of make-up, for Hugo Romaine was the greatest actor of his day. For that instant of illumination the golden curls and ivory mask and silver ornament made his figure gleam like that of a man in armour; the next instant his figure was a dark and even black silhouette against the sickly grey of the rainy evening sky.

But there was something about its stillness, like that of a statue, that distinguished it from the group at his feet. All the other figures around him had made the ordinary involuntary movement at the unexpected shock of light; for though the skies were rainy it was the first flash of the storm. The only lady present, whose air of carrying grey hair gracefully, as if she were really proud of it, marked her a matron of the United States, unaffectedly shut her eyes and uttered a sharp cry. Her English husband, General Outram, a very stolid Anglo-Indian, with a bald head and black moustache and whiskers of antiquated pattern, looked up with one stiff movement and then resumed his occupation of tidying up. A young man of the name of Mallow, very big and shy, with brown eyes like a dog’s, dropped a cup and apologized awkwardly. A third man, much more dressy, with a resolute head, like an inquisitive terrier’s, and grey hair brushed stiffly back, was no other than the great newspaper proprietor, Sir John Cockspur; he cursed freely, but not in an English idiom or accent, for he came from Toronto. But the tall man in the short cloak stood up literally like a statue in the twilight; his eagle face under the full glare had been like the bust of a Roman Emperor, and the carved eyelids had not moved.

A moment after, the dark dome cracked across with thunder, and the statue seemed to come to life. He turned his head over his shoulder and said casually;

“About a minute and half between the flash and the bang, but I think the storm’s coming nearer. A tree is not supposed to be a good umbrella for the lightning, but we shall want it soon for the rain. I think it will be a deluge.”

The young man glanced at the lady a little anxiously and said: “Can’t we get shelter anywhere? There seems to be a house over there.”

“There is a house over there,” remarked the general, rather grimly; “but not quite what you’d call a hospitable hotel.”

“It’s curious,” said his wife sadly, “that we should be caught in a storm with no house near but that one, of all others.”

Something in her tone seemed to check the younger man, who was both sensitive and comprehending; but nothing of that sort daunted the man from Toronto.

“What’s the matter with it?” he asked. “Looks rather like a ruin.”

“That place,” said the general dryly, “belongs to the Marquis of Marne.”

“Gee!” said Sir John Cockspur. “I’ve heard all about that bird, anyhow; and a queer bird, too. Ran him as a front-page mystery in the Comet last year. ‘The Nobleman Nobody Knows.’”

“Yes, I’ve heard of him, too,” said young Mallow in a low voice. “There seem to be all sorts of weird stories about why he hides himself like that. I’ve heard that he wears a mask because he’s a leper. But somebody else told me quite seriously that there’s a curse on the family; a child born with some frightful deformity that’s kept in a dark room.”

“The Marquis of Marne has three heads,” remarked Romaine quite gravely. “Once in every three hundred years a three-headed nobleman adorns the family tree. No human being dares approach the accursed house except a silent procession of hatters, sent to provide an abnormal number of hats. But,” – and his voice took one of those deep and terrible turns, that could cause such a thrill in the theatre – “my friends, those hats are of no human shape.”

The American lady looked at him with a frown and a slight air of distrust, as if that trick of voice had moved her in spite of herself.

“I don’t like your ghoulish jokes,” she said; “and I’d rather you didn’t joke about this, anyhow.”

“I hear and obey,” replied the actor; “but am I, like the Light Brigade, forbidden even to reason why?”

“The reason,” she replied, “is that he isn’t the Nobleman Nobody Knows. I know him myself, or, at least, I knew him very well when he was an attache at Washington thirty years ago, when we were all young. And he didn’t wear a mask, at least, he didn’t wear it with me. He wasn’t a leper, though he may be almost as lonely. And he had only one head and only one heart, and that was broken.”

“Unfortunate love affair, of course,” said Cockspur. “I should like that for the Comet.”

“I suppose it’s a compliment to us,” she replied thoughtfully, “that you always assume a man’s heart is broken by a woman. But there are other kinds of love and bereavement. Have you never read ‘In Memoriam’? Have you never heard of David and Jonathan? What broke poor Marne up was the death of his brother; at least, he was really a first cousin, but had been brought up with him like a brother, and was much nearer than most brothers. James Mair, as the marquis was called when I knew him, was the elder of the two, but he always played the part of worshipper, with Maurice Mair as a god. And, by his account, Maurice Mair was certainly a wonder. James was no fool, and very good at his own political job; but it seems that Maurice could do that and everything else; that he was a brilliant artist and amateur actor and musician, and all the rest of it. James was very good-looking himself, long and strong and strenuous, with a high-bridged nose; though I suppose the young people would think he looked very quaint with his beard divided into two bushy whiskers in the fashion of those Victorian times. But Maurice was clean-shaven, and, by the portraits shown to me, certainly quite beautiful; though he looked a little more like a tenor than a gentleman ought to look. James was always asking me again and again whether his friend was not a marvel, whether any woman wouldn’t fall in love with him, and so on, until it became rather a bore, except that it turned so suddenly into a tragedy. His whole life seemed to be in that idolatry, and one day the idol tumbled down, and was broken like any china doll. A chill caught at the seaside, and it was all over.”