Gilbert Chesterton - The Secret of Father Brown

“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.