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Title:      The Secret of Father Brown
Author:     G. K. Chesterton
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0201041.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          December 2002
Date most recently updated: December 2002

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Title:      The Secret of Father Brown
Author:     G. K. Chesterton




To father John O'Connor, of St. Cuthbert's Bradford, whose truth is
stranger than fiction, with a gratitude greater than the world

THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN

FLAMBEAU, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very
private detective in England, had long retired from both professions.
Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a
career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks
of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider an appropriate
address: in a castle in Spain. The castle, however, was solid though
relatively small; and the black vineyard and green stripes of kitchen
garden covered a respectable square on the brown hillside. For Flambeau,
after all his violent adventures, still possessed what is possessed by
so many Latins, what is absent (for instance) in so many Americans, the
energy to retire. It can be seen in many a large hotel-proprietor
whose one ambition is to be a small peasant. It can be seen in many a
French provincial shopkeeper, who pauses at the moment when he might
develop into a detestable millionaire and buy a street of shops, to fall
back quietly and comfortably on domesticity and dominoes. Flambeau had
casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a Spanish Lady, married
and brought up a large family on a Spanish estate, without displaying
any apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders. But on one
particular morning he was observed by his family to be unusually
restless and excited; and he outran the little boys and descended the
greater part of the long mountain slope to meet the visitor who was
coming across the valley; even when the visitor was still a black dot in
the distance.

The black dot gradually increased in size without very much altering in
the shape; for it continued, roughly speaking, to be both round and
black. The black clothes of clerics were not unknown upon those hills;
but these clothes, however clerical, had about them something at once
commonplace and yet almost jaunty in comparison with the cassock or
soutane, and marked the wearer as a man from the northwestern islands,
as clearly as if he had been labelled Clapham Junction. He carried a
short thick umbrella with a knob like a club, at the sight of which his
Latin friend almost shed tears of sentiment; for it had figured in many
adventures that they shared long ago. For this was the Frenchman's
English friend. Father Brown, paying a long-desired but long-delayed
visit. They had corresponded constantly, but they had not met for years.

Father Brown was soon established in the family circle, which was quite
large enough to give the general sense of company or a community. He was
introduced to the big wooden images of the Three Kings, of painted and
gilded wood, who bring the gifts to the children at Christmas; for Spain
is a country where the affairs of the children bulk large in the life of
the home. He was introduced to the dog and the cat and the live-stock
on the farm. But he was also, as it happened, introduced to one
neighbour who, like himself, had brought into that valley the garb and
manners of distant lands.

It was on the third night of the priest's stay at the little chateau
that he beheld a stately stranger who paid his respects to the Spanish
household with bows that no Spanish grandee could emulate. He was a
tall, thin grey-haired and very handsome gentleman, and his hands,
cuffs and cuff-links had something overpowering in their polish. But
his long face had nothing of that languor which is associated with long
cuffs and manicuring in the caricatures of our own country. It was
rather arrestingly alert and keen; and the eyes had an innocent
intensity of inquiry that does not go often with grey hairs. That alone
might have marked the man's nationality, as well the nasal note in his
refined voice and his rather too ready assumption of the vast antiquity
of all the European things around him. This was, indeed, no less a
person than Mr. Grandison Chace, of Boston, an American traveller who
had halted for a time in his American travels by taking a lease of the
adjoining estate; a somewhat similar castle on a somewhat similar hill.
He delighted in his old castle, and he regarded his friendly neighbour
as a local antiquity of the same type. For Flambeau managed, as we have
said, really to look retired in the sense of rooted. He might have grown
there with his own vine and fig-tree for ages. He had resumed his real
family name of Duroc; for the other title of "The Torch" had only been a
title de guerre, like that under which such a man will often wage war on
society. He was fond of his wife and family; he never went farther
afield than was needed for a little shooting; and he seemed, to the
American globe-trotter, the embodiment of that cult of a sunny
respectability and a temperate luxury, which the American was wise
enough to see and admire in the Mediterranean peoples. The rolling stone
from the West was glad to rest for a moment on this rock in the South
that had gathered so very much moss. But Mr. Chace had heard of Father
Brown, and his tone faintly changed, as towards a celebrity. The
interviewing instinct awoke, tactful but tense. If he did try to draw
Father Brown, as if he were a tooth, it was done with the most dexterous
and painless American dentistry.

They were sitting in a sort of partly unroofed outer court of the house,
such as often forms the entrance to Spanish houses. It was dusk turning
to dark; and as all that mountain air sharpens suddenly after sunset, a
small stove stood on the flagstones, glowing with red eyes like a
goblin, and painting a red pattern on the pavement; but scarcely a ray
of it reached the lower bricks of the great bare, brown brick wall that
went soaring up above them into the deep blue night. Flambeau's big
broad-shouldered figure and great moustaches, like sabres, could be
traced dimly in the twilight, as he moved about, drawing dark wine from
a great cask and handing it round. In his shadow, the priest looked very
shrunken and small, as if huddled over the stove; but the American
visitor leaned forward elegantly with his elbow on his knee and his fine
pointed features in the full light; his eyes shone with inquisitive
intelligence.

"I can assure you, sir," he was saying, "we consider your achievement in
the matter of the Moonshine Murder the most remarkable triumph in the
history of detective science."

Father Brown murmured something; some might have imagined that the
murmur was a little like a moan.

"We are well acquainted," went on the stranger firmly, "with the alleged
achievements of Dupin and others; and with those of Lecocq, Sherlock
Holmes, Nicholas Carter, and other imaginative incarnations of the
craft. But we observe there is in many ways, a marked difference between
your own method, of approach and that of these other thinkers, whether
fictitious or actual. Some have spec'lated, sir, as to whether the
difference of method may perhaps involve rather the absence of method."

Father Brown was silent; then he started a little, almost as if he had
been nodding over the stove, and said: "I beg your pardon. Yes. . ..
Absence of method. . . . Absence of mind, too, I'm afraid."

"I should say of strictly tabulated scientific method," went on the
inquirer. "Edgar Poe throws off several little essays in a
conversational form, explaining Dupin's method, with its fine links of
logic. Dr. Watson had to listen to some pretty exact expositions of
Holmes's method with its observation of material details. But nobody
seems to have got on to any full account of your method. Father Brown,
and I was informed you declined the offer to give a series of lectures
in the States on the matter."

"Yes," said the priest, frowning at the stove; "I declined."

"Your refusal gave rise to a remarkable lot of interesting talk,"
remarked Chace. "I may say that some of our people are saying your
science can't be expounded, because it's something more than just
natural science. They say your secret's not to be divulged, as being
occult in its character."

"Being what?" asked Father Brown, rather sharply.

"Why, kind of esoteric," replied the other. "I can tell you, people got
considerably worked up about Gallup's murder, and Stein's murder, and
then old man Merton's murder, and now Judge Gwynne's murder, and a
double murder by Dalmon, who was well known in the States. And there
were you, on the spot every time, slap in the middle of it; telling
everybody how it was done and never telling anybody how you knew. So
some people got to think you knew without looking, so to speak. And
Carlotta Brownson gave a lecture on Thought-Forms with illustrations
from these cases of yours. The Second Sight Sisterhood of
Indianapolis----"

Father Brown, was still staring at the stove; then he said quite loud
yet as if hardly aware that anyone heard him: "Oh, I say. This will
never do."

"I don't exactly know how it's to be helped," said Mr. Chace humorously.
"The Second Sight Sisterhood want a lot of holding down. The only way I
can think of stopping it is for you to tell us the secret after all."

Father Brown groaned. He put his head on his hands and remained a
moment, as if full of a silent convulsion of thought. Then he lifted his
head and said in a dull voice:

"Very well. I must tell the secret."

His eyes rolled darkly over the whole darkling scene, from the red eyes
of the little stove to the stark expanse of the ancient wall, over which
were standing out, more and more brightly, the strong stars of the
south.

"The secret is," he said; and then stopped as if unable to go on. Then
he began again and said:

"You see, it was I who killed all those people."

"What?" repeated the other, in a small voice out of a vast silence.

"You see, I had murdered them all myself," explained Father Brown
patiently. "So, of course, I knew how it was done."

Grandison Chace had risen to his great height like a man lifted to the
ceiling by a sort of slow explosion. Staring down at the other he
repeated his incredulous question.

"I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully," went on Father
Brown, "I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done,
and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I
was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I
knew who he was."

Chace gradually released a sort of broken sigh.

"You frightened me all right," he said. "For the minute I really did
think you meant you were the murderer. Just for the minute I kind of saw
it splashed over all the papers in the States: "Saintly Sleuth Exposed
as Killer: Hundred Crimes of Father Brown.' Why, of course, if it's just
a figure of speech and means you tried to reconstruct the psychogy--"

Father Brown rapped sharply on the stove with the short pipe he was
about to fill; one or his very rare spasms of annoyance contracted his
face.

"No, no, no," he said, almost angrily; "I don't mean just a figure of
speech. This is what comes of trying to talk about deep things. . . .
What's the good of words . . .? If you try to talk about a truth that's
merely moral, people always think it's merely metaphorical. A real live
man with two legs once said to me: 'I only believe in the Holy Ghost in
a spiritual sense.' Naturally, I said: 'In what other sense could you
believe it?' And then he thought I meant he needn't believe in anything
except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge. . . . I mean
that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders.
I didn't actually kill the men by material means; but that's not the
point. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material
means. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to
be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in
everything except actual final consent to the action. It was once
suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a sort of religious exercise. I
believe he got it from Pope Leo XIII, who was always rather a hero of
mine."

"I'm afraid," said the American, in tones that were still doubtful, and
keeping his eye on the priest rather as if he were a wild animal, "that
you'd have to explain a lot to me before I knew what you were talking
about. The science of detection----"

Father Brown snapped his fingers with the same animated annoyance.
"That's it," he cried; "that's just where we part company. Science is a
grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest
words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out often,
when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When
they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and
studying him as if he were a gigantic insect: in what they would call a
dry impartial light, in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light.
They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant
prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his 'criminal skull' as if
it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros's nose.
When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but
always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don't deny the
dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it's the very
reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it's actually
suppression of what we know. It's treating a friend as a stranger, and
pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It's
like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he
falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours.
Well, what you call 'the secret' is exactly the opposite. I don't try to
get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. . . . Indeed it's
much more than that, don't you see? I am inside a man. I am always
inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am
inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions;
till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering
hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes,
looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking
up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of
blood. Till I am really a murderer."

"Oh," said Mr. Chace, regarding him with a long, grim face, and added:
"And that is what you call a religious exercise."

"Yes," said Father Brown; "that is what I call a religious exercise."

After an instant's silence he resumed: "It's so real a religious
exercise that I'd rather not have said anything about it. But I simply
couldn't have you going off and telling all your countrymen that I had a
secret magic connected with Thought-Forms, could I? I've put it badly,
but it's true. No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or
might be; till he's realized exactly how much right he has to all this
snobbery, and sneering, and talking about 'criminals,' as if they were
apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the
dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls;
till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the
Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one
criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."

Flambeau came forward and filled a great goblet with Spanish wine and
set it before his friend, as he had already set one before his fellow
guest. Then he himself spoke for the first time:

"I believe Father Brown has had a new batch of mysteries. We were
talking about them the other day, I fancy. He has been dealing with some
queer people since we last met."

"Yes; I know the stories more or less--but not the application," said
Chace, lifting his glass thoughtfully. "Can you give me any examples, I
wonder. ... I mean, did you deal with this last batch in that
introspective style?"

Father Brown also lifted his glass, and the glow of the fire turned the
red wine transparent, like the glorious blood-red glass of a martyr's
window. The red flame seemed to hold his eyes and absorb his gaze that
sank deeper and deeper into it, as if that single cup held a red sea of
the blood of all men, and his soul were a diver, ever plunging in dark
humility and inverted imagination, lower than its lowest monsters and
its most ancient slime. In that cup, as in a red mirror, he saw many
things; the doings of his last days moved in crimson shadows; the
examples that his companions demanded danced in symbolic shapes; and
there passed before him all the stories that are told here. Now, the
luminous wine was like a vast red sunset upon dark red sands, where
stood dark figures of men; one was fallen and another running towards
him. Then the sunset seemed to break up into patches: red lanterns
swinging from garden trees and a pond gleaming red with reflection; and
then all the colour seemed to cluster again into a great rose of red
crystal, a jewel that irradiated the world like a red sun, save for the
shadow of a tall figure with a high head-dress as of some prehistoric
priest; and then faded again till nothing was left but a flame of wild
red beard blowing in the wind upon a wild grey moor. All these things,
which may be seen later from other angles and in other moods than his
own, rose up in his memory at the challenge and began to form themselves
into anecdotes and arguments.

"Yes," he said, as he raised the wine cup slowly to his lips, "I can
remember pretty well----"

I. THE MIRROR OF THE MAGISTRATE

JAMES BAGSHAW and Wilfred Underhill were old friends, and were fond of
rambling through the streets at night, talking interminably as they
turned corner after corner in the silent and seemingly lifeless
labyrinth of the large suburb in which they lived. The former, a big,
dark, good-humoured man with a strip of black moustache, was a
professional police detective; the latter, a sharp-faced, sensitive-
looking gentleman with light hair, was an amateur interested in
detection. It will come as a shock to the readers of the best scientific
romance to learn that it was the policeman who was talking and the
amateur who was listening, even with a certain respect.

"Ours is the only trade," said Bagshaw, "in which the professional is
always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don't write stories in
which hairdressers can't cut hair and have to be helped by a customer;
or in which a cabman can't drive a cab until his fare explains to him
the philosophy of cab-driving. For all that, I'd never deny that we
often tend to get into a rut: or, in other words, have the disadvantages
of going by a rule. Where the romancers are wrong is, that they don't
allow us even the advantages of going by a rule."

"Surely," said Underhill, "Sherlock Holmes would say that he went by a
logical rule."

"He may be right," answered the other; "but I mean a collective rule.
It's like the staff work of an army. We pool our information."

"And you don't think detective stories allow for that?" asked his
friend.

"Well, let's take any imaginary case of Sherlock Holmes, and Lestrade,
the official detective. Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a
total stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely because he
seems to look for the traffic to go to the right instead of the left.
I'm quite ready to admit Holmes might guess that. I'm quite sure
Lestrade wouldn't guess anything of the kind. But what they leave out is
the fact that the policeman, who couldn't guess, might very probably
know. Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner merely because his
department has to keep an eye on all foreigners; some would say on all
natives, too. As a policeman I'm glad the police know so much; for every
man wants to do his own job well. But as a citizen, I sometimes wonder
whether they don't know too much."

"You don't seriously mean to say," cried Underhill incredulously, "that
you know anything about strange people in a strange street. That if a
man walked out of that house over there, you would know anything about
him?"

"I should if he was the householder," answered Bagshaw. "That house is
rented by a literary man of Anglo-Roumanian extraction, who generally
lives in Paris, but is over here in connexion with some poetical play of
his. His name's Osric Orm, one of the new poets, and pretty steep to
read, I believe."

"But I mean all the people down the road," said his companion. "I was
thinking how strange and new and nameless everything looks, with these
high blank walls and these houses lost in large gardens. You can't know
all of them."

"I know a few," answered Bagshaw. "This garden wall we're walking under
is at the end of the grounds of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, better known as Mr.
Justice Gwynne, the old judge who made such a row about spying during
the war. The house next door to it belongs to a wealthy cigar merchant.
He comes from Spanish-America and looks very swarthy and Spanish
himself; but he bears the very English name of Buller. The house beyond
that--did you hear that noise?"

"I heard something," said Underhill, "but I really don't know what it
was."

"I know what it was," replied the detective, "it was a rather heavy
revolver, fired twice, followed by a cry for help. And it came straight
out of the back garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne, that paradise of peace and
legality."

He looked up and down the street sharply and then added:

"And the only gate of the back garden is half a mile round on the other
side. I wish this wall were a little lower, or I were a little lighter;
but it's got to be tried."

"It is lower a little farther on," said Underhill, "and there seems to
be a tree that looks helpful."

They moved hastily along and found a place where the wall seemed to
stoop abruptly, almost as if it had half-sunk into the earth; and a
garden tree, flamboyant with the gayest garden blossom, straggled out of
the dark enclosure and was gilded by the gleam of a solitary street-
lamp. Bagshaw caught the crooked branch and threw one leg over the low
wall; and the next moment they stood knee-deep amid the snapping
plants of a garden border.

The garden of Mr. Justice Gwynne by night was rather a singular
spectacle. It was large and lay on the empty edge of the suburb, in the
shadow of a tall, dark house that was the last in its line of houses.
The house was literally dark, being shuttered and unlighted, at least on
the side overlooking the garden. But the garden itself, which lay in its
shadow: and should have been a tract of absolute darkness, showed a
random glitter, like that of fading fireworks; as if a giant rocket had
fallen in fire among the trees. As they advanced they were able to
locate it as the light of several coloured lamps, entangled in the trees
like the jewel fruits of Aladdin, and especially as the light from a
small, round lake or pond, which gleamed, with pale colours as if a lamp
were kindled under it.

"Is he having a party?" asked Underhill. "The garden seems to be
illuminated."

"No," answered Bagshaw. "It's a hobby of his, and I believe he prefers
to do it when he's alone. He likes playing with a little plant of
electricity that he works from that bungalow or hut over there, where he
does his work and keeps his papers. Buller, who knows him very well,
says the coloured lamps are rather more often a sign he's not to be
disturbed."

"Sort of red danger signals," suggested the other.

"Good Lord! I'm afraid they are danger signals!" and he began suddenly
to run.

A moment after Underhill saw what he had seen. The opalescent ring of
light, like the halo of the moon, round the sloping sides of the pond,
was broken by two black stripes or streaks which soon proved themselves
to be the long, black legs of a figure fallen head downwards into the
hollow, with the head in the pond.

"Come on," cried the detective sharply, "that looks to me like----"

His voice was lost, as he ran on across the wide lawn, faintly luminous
in the artificial light, making a bee-line across the big garden for
the pool and the fallen figure. Underhill was trotting steadily in that
straight track, when something happened that startled him for the
moment. Bagshaw, who was travelling as steadily as a bullet towards the
black figure by the luminous pool, suddenly turned at a sharp angle and
began to run even more rapidly towards the shadow of the house.
Underhill could not imagine what he meant by the altered direction. The
next moment, when the detective had vanished into the shadow of the
house, there came out of that obscurity the sound of a scuffle and a
curse; and Bagshaw returned lugging with him a little struggling man
with red hair. The captive had evidently been escaping under the shelter
of the building, when the quicker ears of the detective had heard him
rustling like a bird among the bushes.

"Underhill," said the detective, "I wish you'd run on and see what's up
by the pool. And now, who are you?" he asked, coming to a halt. "What's
your name?"

"Michael Flood," said the stranger in a snappy fashion. He was an
unnaturally lean little man, with a hooked nose too large for his face,
which was colourless, like parchment, in contrast with the ginger colour
of his hair. "I've got nothing to do with this. I found him lying dead
and I was scared; but I only came to interview him for a paper."

"When you interview celebrities for the Press," said Bagshaw, "do you
generally climb over the garden wall?"

And he pointed grimly to a trail of footprints coming and going along
the path towards the flower bed.

The man calling himself Flood wore an expression equally grim.

"An interviewer might very well get over the wall," he said, "for I
couldn't make anybody hear at the front door. The servant had gone out."

"How do you know he'd gone out?" asked the detective suspiciously.

"Because," said Flood, with an almost unnatural calm, "I'm not the only
person who gets over garden walls. It seems just possible that you did
it yourself. But, anyhow, the servant did; for I've just this moment
seen him drop over the wall, away on the other side of the garden, just
by the garden door."

"Then why didn't he use the garden door?" demanded the cross-examiner.

"How should I know?" retorted Flood. "Because it was shut, I suppose.
But you'd better ask him, not me; he's coming towards the house at this
minute."

There was, indeed, another shadowy figure beginning to be visible
through the fire-shot gloaming, a squat, square-headed figure,
wearing a red waistcoat as the most conspicuous part of a rather shabby
livery. He appeared to be making with unobtrusive haste towards a side-
door in the house, until Bagshaw halloed to him to halt. He drew nearer
to them very reluctantly, revealing a heavy, yellow face, with a touch
of something Asiatic which was consonant with his flat, blue-black
hair.

Bagshaw turned abruptly to the man called Flood. "Is there anybody in
this place," he said, "who can testify to your identity?"

"Not many, even in this country," growled Flood. "I've only just come
from Ireland; the only man I know round here is the priest at St.
Dominic's Church--Father Brown."

"Neither of you must leave this place," said Bagshaw, and then added to
the servant: "But you can go into the house and ring up St. Dominic's
Presbytery and ask Father Brown if he would mind coming round here at
once. No tricks, mind."

While the energetic detective was securing the potential fugitives, his
companion, at his direction, had hastened on to the actual scene of the
tragedy. It was a strange enough scene; and, indeed, if the tragedy had
not been tragic it would have been highly fantastic. The dead man (for
the briefest examination proved him to be dead) lay with his head in the
pond, where the glow of the artificial illumination encircled the head
with something of the appearance of an unholy halo. The face was gaunt
and rather sinister, the brow bald, and the scanty curls dark grey, like
iron rings; and, despite the damage done by the bullet wound in the
temple, Underhill had no difficulty in recognizing the features he had
seen in the many portraits of Sir Humphrey Gwynne. The dead man was in
evening-dress, and his long, black legs, so thin as to be almost
spidery, were sprawling at different angles up the steep bank from which
he had fallen. As by some weird whim of diabolical arabesque, blood was
eddying out, very slowly, into the luminous water in snaky rings, like
the transparent crimson of sunset clouds.

Underhill did not know how long he stood staring down at this macabre
figure, when he looked up and saw a group of four figures standing above
him on the bank. He was prepared for Bagshaw and his Irish captive, and
he had no difficulty in guessing the status of the servant in the red
waistcoat. But the fourth figure had a sort of grotesque solemnity that
seemed strangely congruous to that incongruity. It was a stumpy figure
with a round face and a hat like a black halo. He realized that it was,
in fact, a priest; but there was something about it that reminded him of
some quaint old black woodcut at the end of a Dance of Death.

Then he heard Bagshaw saying to the priest:

"I'm glad you can identify this man; but you must realize that he's to
some extent under suspicion. Of course, he may be innocent; but he did
enter the garden in an irregular fashion."

"Well, I think he's innocent myself," said the little priest in a
colourless voice. "But, of course, I may be wrong."

"Why do you think he is innocent?"

"Because he entered the garden in an irregular fashion," answered the
cleric. "You see, I entered it in a regular fashion myself. But I seem
to be almost the only person who did. All the best people seem to get
over garden walls nowadays."

"What do you mean by a regular fashion?" asked the detective.

"Well," said Father Brown, looking at him with limpid gravity, "I came
in by the front door. I often come into houses that way."

"Excuse me," said Bagshaw, "but does it matter very much how you came
in, unless you propose to confess to the murder?"

"Yes, I think it does," said the priest mildly. "The truth is, that when
I came in at the front door I saw something I don't think any of the
rest of you have seen. It seems to me it might have something to do with
it."

"What did you see?"

"I saw a sort of general smash-up," said Father Brown in his mild
voice. "A big looking-glass broken, and a small palm tree knocked
over, and the pot smashed all over the floor. Somehow, it looked to me
as if something had happened."

"You are right," said Bagshaw after a pause. "If you saw that, it
certainly looks as if it had something to do with it."

"And if it had anything to do with it," said the priest very gently, "it
looks as if there was one person who had nothing to do with it; and that
is Mr. Michael Flood, who entered the garden over the wall in an
irregular fashion, and then tried to leave it in the same irregular
fashion. It is his irregularity that makes me believe in his innocence."

"Let us go into the house," said Bagshaw abruptly.

As they passed in at the side-door, the servant leading the way,
Bagshaw fell back a pace or two and spoke to his friend.

"Something odd about that servant," he said. "Says his name is Green,
though he doesn't look it; but there seems no doubt he's really Gwynne's
servant, apparently the only regular servant he had. But the queer thing
is, that he flatly denied that his master was in the garden at all, dead
or alive. Said the old judge had gone out to a grand legal dinner and
couldn't be home for hours, and gave that as his excuse for slipping
out."

"Did he," asked Underhill, "give any excuse for his curious way of
slipping in?"

'No, none that I can make sense of," answered the detective. "I can't
make him out. He seems to be scared of something."

Entering by the side-door, they found themselves at the inner end of
the entrance hall, which ran along the side of the house and ended with
the front door, surmounted by a dreary fanlight of the old-fashioned
pattern. A faint, grey light was beginning to outline its radiation upon
the darkness, like some dismal and discoloured sunrise; but what light
there was in the hall came from a single, shaded lamp, also of an
antiquated sort, that stood on a bracket in a corner. By the light of
this Bagshaw could distinguish the debris of which Brown had spoken. A
tall palm, with long sweeping leaves, had fallen full length, and its
dark red pot was shattered into shards. They lay littered on the carpet,
along with pale and gleaming fragments of a broken mirror, of which the
almost empty frame hung behind them on the wall at the end of the
vestibule. At right angles to this entrance, and directly opposite the
side-door as they entered, was another and similar passage leading
into the rest of the house. At the other end of it could be seen the
telephone which the servant had used to summon the priest; and a half-
open door, showing, even through the crack, the serried ranks of great
leather-bound books, marked the entrance to the judge's study.

Bagshaw stood looking down at the fallen pot and the mingled fragments
at his feet.

"You're quite right," he said to the priest; "there's been a struggle
here. And it must have been a struggle between Gwynne and his murderer."

"It seemed to me," said Father Brown modestly, "that something had
happened here."

"Yes; it's pretty clear what happened," assented the detective. "The
murderer entered by the front door and found Gwynne; probably Gwynne let
him in. There was a death grapple, possibly a chance shot, that hit the
glass, though they might have broken it with a stray kick or anything.
Gwynne managed to free himself and fled into the garden, where he was
pursued and shot finally by the pond. I fancy that's the whole story of
the crime itself; but, of course, I must look round the other rooms."

The other rooms, however, revealed very little, though Bagshaw pointed
significantly to the loaded automatic pistol that he found in a drawer
of the library desk.

"Looks as if he was expecting this," he said; "yet it seems queer he
didn't take it with him when he went out into the hall."

Eventually they returned to the hall, making their way towards the front
door. Father Brown letting his eye rove around in a rather absent-
minded fashion. The two corridors, monotonously papered in the same grey
and faded pattern, seemed to emphasize the dust and dingy floridity of
the few early Victorian ornaments, the green rust that devoured the
bronze of the lamp, the dull gold that glimmered in the frame of the
broken mirror.

"They say it's bad luck to break a looking-glass," he said. "This
looks like the very house of ill-luck. There's something about the
very furniture – "

"That's rather odd," said Bagshaw sharply. "I thought the front door
would be shut, but it's left on the latch."

There was no reply; and they passed out of the front door into the front
garden, a narrower and more formal plot of flowers, having at one end a
curiously clipped hedge with a hole in it, like a green cave, under the
shadow of which some broken steps peeped out.

Father Brown strolled up to the hole and ducked his head under it. A few
moments after he had disappeared they were astonished to hear his quiet
voice in conversation above their heads, as if he were talking to
somebody at the top of a tree. The detective followed, and found that
the curious covered stairway led to what looked like a broken bridge,
over-hanging the darker and emptier spaces of the garden. It just
curled round the corner of the house, bringing in sight the field of
coloured lights beyond and beneath. Probably it was the relic of some
abandoned architectural fancy of building a sort of terrace on arches
across the lawn. Bagshaw thought it a curious cul-de-sac in which to
find anybody in the small hours between night and morning; but he was
not looking at the details of it just then. He was looking at the man
who was found.

As the man stood with his back turned--a small man in light grey
clothes--the one outstanding feature about him was a wonderful head of
hair, as yellow and radiant as the head of a huge dandelion. It was
literally outstanding like a halo, and something in that association
made the face, when it was slowly and sulkily turned on them, rather a
shock of contrast. That halo should have enclosed an oval face of the
mildly angelic sort; but the face was crabbed and elderly with a
powerful jowl and a short nose that somehow suggested the broken nose of
a pugilist.

"This is Mr. Orm, the celebrated poet, I understand," said Father Brown,
as calmly as if he were introducing two people in a drawing-room.

"Whoever he is," said Bagshaw, "I must trouble him to come with me and
answer a few questions."

Mr. Osric Orm, the poet, was not a model of self-expression when it
came to the answering of questions. There, in that corner of the old
garden, as the grey twilight before dawn began to creep over the heavy
hedges and the broken bridge, and afterwards in a succession of
circumstances and stages of legal inquiry that grew more and more
ominous, he refused to say anything except that he had intended to call
on Sir Humphrey Gwynne, but had not done so because he could not get
anyone to answer the bell. When it was pointed out that the door was
practically open, he snorted. When it was hinted that the hour was
somewhat late, he snarled. The little that he said was obscure, either
because he really knew hardly any English, or because he knew better
than to know any. His opinions seemed to be of a nihilistic and
destructive sort, as was indeed the tendency of his poetry for those who
could follow it; and it seemed possible that his business with the
judge, and perhaps his quarrel with the judge, had been something in the
anarchist line. Gwynne was known to have had something of a mania about
Bolshevist spies, as he had about German spies. Anyhow, one coincidence,
only a few moments after his capture, confirmed Bagshaw in the
impression that the case must be taken seriously. As they went out of
the front gate into the street, they so happened to encounter yet
another neighbour, Duller, the cigar merchant from next door,
conspicuous by his brown, shrewd face and the unique orchid in his
buttonhole; for he had a name in that branch of horticulture. Rather to
the surprise of the rest, he hailed his neighbour, the poet, in a matter
-of-fact manner, almost as if he had expected to see him.

"Hallo, here we are again," he said. "Had a long talk with old Gwynne, I
suppose?"

"Sir Humphrey Gwynne is dead," said Bagshaw. "I am investigating the
case and I must ask you to explain."

Buller stood as still as the lamp-post beside him, possibly stiffened
with surprise. The red end of his cigar brightened and darkened
rhythmically, but his brown face was in shadow; when he spoke it was
with quite a new voice.

"I only mean," he said, "that when I passed two hours ago Mr. Orm was
going in at this gate to see Sir Humphrey."

"He says he hasn't seen him yet," observed Bagshaw, "or even been into
the house."

"It's a long time to stand on the door-step," observed Buller.

"Yes," said Father Brown; "it's rather a long time to stand in the
street."

"I've been home since then," said the cigar merchant. "Been writing
letters and came out again to post them."

"You'll have to tell all that later," said Bagshaw. "Good night--or good
morning."

The trial of Osric Orm for the murder of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, which
filled the newspapers for so many weeks, really turned entirely on the
same crux as that little talk under the lamp-post, when the grey-
green dawn was breaking about the dark streets and gardens. Everything
came back to the enigma of those two empty hours between the time when
Buller saw Orm going in at the garden gate, and the time when Father
Brown found him apparently still lingering in the garden. He had
certainly had the time to commit six murders, and might almost have
committed them for want of something to do; for he could give no
coherent account of what he was doing. It was argued by the prosecution
that he had also the opportunity, as the front door was unlatched, and
the side-door into the larger garden left standing open. The court
followed, with considerable interest, Bagshaw's clear reconstruction of
the struggle in the passage, of which the traces were so evident;
indeed, the police had since found the shot that had shattered the
glass. Finally, the hole in the hedge to which he had been tracked, had
very much the appearance of a hiding-place. On the other hand. Sir
Matthew Blake, the very able counsel for the defence, turned this last
argument the other way: asking why any man should entrap himself in a
place without possible exit, when it would obviously be much more
sensible to slip out into the street. Sir Matthew Blake also made
effective use of the mystery that still rested upon the motive for the
murder. Indeed, upon this point, the passages between Sir Matthew Blake
and Sir Arthur Travers, the equally brilliant advocate for the
prosecution, turned rather to the advantage of the prisoner. Sir Arthur
could only throw out suggestions about a Bolshevist conspiracy which
sounded a little thin. But when it came to investigating the facts of
Orm's mysterious behaviour that night he was considerably more
effective.

The prisoner went into the witness-box, chiefly because his astute
counsel calculated that it would create a bad impression if he did not.
But he was almost as uncommunicative to his own counsel as to the
prosecuting counsel. Sir Arthur Travers made all possible capital out of
his stubborn silence, but did not succeed in breaking it. Sir Arthur was
a long, gaunt man, with a long, cadaverous face, in striking contrast to
the sturdy figure and bright, bird-like eye of Sir Matthew Blake. But
if Sir Matthew suggested a very cocksure sort of cock – sparrow, Sir
Arthur might more truly have been compared to a crane or stork; as he
leaned forward, prodding the poet with questions, his long nose might
have been a long beak.

"Do you mean to tell the jury," he asked, in tones of grating
incredulity, "that you never went in to see the deceased gentleman at
all?"

"No!" replied Orm shortly.

"You wanted to see him, I suppose. You must have been very anxious to
see him. Didn't you wait two whole hours in front of his front door?"

"Yes," replied the other.

"And yet you never even noticed the door was open?"

"No," said Orm.

"What in the world were you doing for two hours in somebody's else's
front garden?" insisted the barrister; "You were doing something, I
suppose?"

"Yes."

"Is it a secret?" asked Sir Arthur, with adamantine jocularity.

"It's a secret from you," answered the poet.

It was upon this suggestion of a secret that Sir Arthur seized in
developing his line of accusation. With a boldness which some thought
unscrupulous, he turned the very mystery of the motive, which was the
strongest part of his opponent's case, into an argument for his own. He
gave it as the first fragmentary hint of some far-flung and elaborate
conspiracy, in which a patriot had perished like one caught in the coils
of an octopus.

"Yes," he cried in a vibrating voice, "my learned friend is perfectly
right! We do not know the exact reason why this honourable public
servant was murdered. We shall not know the reason why the next public
servant is murdered. If my learned friend himself falls a victim to his
eminence, and the hatred which the hellish powers of destruction feel
for the guardians of law, he will be murdered, and he will not know the
reason. Half the decent people in this court will be butchered in their
beds, and we shall not know the reason. And we shall never know the
reason and never arrest the massacre, until it has depopulated our
country, so long as the defence is permitted to stop all proceedings
with this stale tag about 'motive,' when every other fact in the case,
every glaring incongruity, every gaping silence, tells us that we stand
in the presence of Cain."

"I never knew Sir Arthur so excited," said Bagshaw to his group of
companions afterwards. "Some people are saying he went beyond the usual
limit and that the prosecutor in a murder case oughtn't to be so
vindictive. But I must say there was something downright creepy about
that little goblin with the yellow hair, that seemed to play up to the
impression. I was vaguely recalling, all the time, something that De
Quincey says about Mr. Williams, that ghastly criminal who slaughtered
two whole families almost in silence. I think he says that Williams had
hair of a vivid unnatural yellow; and that he thought it had been dyed
by a trick learned in India, where they dye horses green or blue. Then
there was his queer, stony silence, like a troglodyte's; I'll never deny
that it all worked me up until I felt there was a sort of monster in the
dock. If that was only Sir Arthur's eloquence, then he certainly took a
heavy responsibility in putting so much passion into it."

"He was a friend of poor Gwynne's, as a matter of fact," said Underhill,
more gently; "a man I know saw them hobnobbing together after a great
legal dinner lately. I dare say that's why he feels so strongly in this
case. I suppose it's doubtful whether a man ought to act in such a case
on mere personal feeling."

"He wouldn't," said Bagshaw. "I bet Sir Arthur Travers wouldn't act only
on feeling, however strongly he felt. He's got a very stiff sense of his
own professional position. He's one of those men who are ambitious even
when they've satisfied their ambition. I know nobody who'd take more
trouble to keep his position in the world. No; you've got hold of the
wrong moral to his rather thundering sermon. If he lets himself go like
that, it's because he thinks he can get a conviction, anyhow, and wants
to put himself at the head of some political movement against the
conspiracy he talks about. He must have some very good reason for
wanting to convict Orm and some very good reason for thinking he can do
it. That means that the facts will support him. His confidence doesn't
look well for the prisoner." He became conscious of an insignificant
figure in the group.

"Well, Father Brown," he said with a smile; "what do you think of our
judicial procedure?"

"Well," replied the priest rather absently, "I think the thing that
struck me most was how different men look in their wigs. You talk about
the prosecuting barrister being so tremendous. But I happened to see him
take his wig off for a minute, and he really looks quite a different
man. He's quite bald, for one thing."

"I'm afraid that won't prevent his being tremendous," answered Bagshaw.
"You don't propose to found the defence on the fact that the prosecuting
counsel is bald, do you?"

"Not exactly," said Father Brown good-humouredly. "To tell the truth,
I was thinking how little some kinds of people know about other kinds of
people. Suppose I went among some remote people who had never even heard
of England. Suppose I told them that there is a man in my country who
won't ask a question of life and death, until he has put an erection
made of horse-hair on the top of his head, with little tails behind,
and grey corkscrew curls at the side, like an Early Victorian old woman.
They would think he must be rather eccentric; but he isn't at all
eccentric, he's only conventional. They would think so, because they
don't know anything about English barristers; because they don't know
what a barrister is. Well, that barrister doesn't know what a poet is.
He doesn't understand that a poet's eccentricities wouldn't seem
eccentric to other poets. He thinks it odd that Orm should walk about in
a beautiful garden for two hours, with nothing to do. God bless my soul!
a poet would think nothing of walking about in the same backyard for ten
hours if he had a poem to do. Orm's own counsel was quite as stupid. It
never occurred to him to ask Orm the obvious question."

"What question do you mean?" asked the other.

"Why, what poem he was making up, of course," said Father Brown rather
impatiently. "What line he was stuck at, what epithet he was looking
for, what climax he was trying to work up to. If there were any educated
people in court, who know what literature is, they would have known well
enough whether he had had anything genuine to do. You'd have asked a
manufacturer about the conditions of his factory; but nobody seems to
consider the conditions under which poetry is manufactured. It's done by
doing nothing."

"That's all very well," replied the detective; "but why did he hide? Why
did he climb up that crooked little stairway and stop there; it led
nowhere."

"Why, because it led nowhere, of course," cried Father Brown
explosively. "Anybody who clapped eyes on that blind alley ending in mid
-air might have known an artist would want to go there, just as a child
would."

He stood blinking for a moment, and then said apologetically: "I beg
your pardon; but it seems odd that none of them understand these things.
And then there was another thing. Don't you know that everything has,
for an artist, one aspect or angle that is exactly right? A tree, a cow,
and a cloud, in a certain relation only, mean something; as three
letters, in one order only, mean a word. Well, the view of that
illuminated garden from that unfinished bridge was the right view of it.
It was as unique as the fourth dimension. It was a sort of fairy
foreshortening; it was like looking down at heaven and seeing all the
stars growing on trees and that luminous pond like a moon fallen flat on
the fields in some happy nursery talc. He could have looked at it for
ever. If you told him the path led nowhere, he would tell you it had led
him to the country at the end of the world. But do you expect him to
tell you that in the witness – is box? What would you say to him if he
did? You talk about a man having a jury of his peers. Why don't you have
a jury of poets?"

"You talk as if you were a poet yourself," said Bagshaw.

"Thank your stars I'm not," said Father Brown. "Thank your lucky stars a
priest has to be more charitable than a poet. Lord have mercy on us, if
you knew what a crushing, what a cruel contempt he feels for the lot of
you, you'd feel as if you were under Niagara."

"You may know more about the artistic temperament than I do," said
Bagshaw after a pause; "but, after all, the answer is simple. You can
only show that he might have done what he did, without committing the
crime. But it's equally true that he might have committed the crime. And
who else could have committed it?"

"Have you thought about the servant, Green?" asked Father Brown,
reflectively. "He told a rather queer story."

"Ah," cried Bagshaw quickly, "you think Green did it, after all."

"I'm quite sure he didn't," replied the other. "I only asked if you'd
thought about his queer story. He only went out for some trifle, a drink
or an assignation or what not. But he went out by the garden door and
came back over the garden wall. In other words, he left the door open,
but he came back to find it shut. Why? Because Somebody Else had already
passed out that way."

"The murderer," muttered the detective doubtfully. "Do you know who he
was?"

"I know what he looked like," answered Father Brown quietly. "That's the
only thing I do know. I can almost see him as he came in at the front
door, in the gleam of the hall lamp; his figure, his clothes, even his
face!"

"What's all this?"

"He looked like Sir Humphrey Gwynne," said the priest.

"What the devil do you mean?" demanded Bagshaw. "Gwynne was lying dead
with his head in the pond."

"Oh, yes," said Father Brown.

After a moment he went on: "Let's go back to that theory of yours, which
was a very good one, though I don't quite agree with it. You suppose the
murderer came in at the front door, met the Judge in the front hall,
struggling with him and breaking the mirror; that the judge then
retreated into the garden, where he was finally shot. Somehow, it
doesn't sound natural to me. Granted he retreated down the hall, there
are two exits at the end, one into the garden and one into the house.
Surely, he would be more likely to retreat into the house? His gun was
there; his telephone was there; his servant, so far as he knew, was
there. Even the nearest neighbours were in that direction. Why should he
stop to open the garden door and go out alone on the deserted side of
the house?"

"But we know he did go out of the house," replied his companion,
puzzled. "We know he went out of the house, because he was found in the
garden."

"He never went out of the house, because he never was in the house,"
said Father Brown. "Not that evening, I mean. He was sitting in that
bungalow. I read that lesson in the dark, at the beginning, in red and
golden stars across the garden. They were worked from the hut; they
wouldn't have been burning at all if he hadn't been in the hut. He was
trying to run across to the house and the telephone, when the murderer
shot him beside the pond."

"But what about the pot and the palm and the broken mirror?" cried
Bagshaw. "Why, it was you who found them! It was you yourself who said
there must have been a struggle in the hall."

The priest blinked rather painfully. "Did I?" he muttered. "Surely, I
didn't say that. I never thought that. What I think I said, was that
something had happened in the hall. And something did happen; but it
wasn't a struggle."

"Then what broke the mirror?" asked Bagshaw shortly.

"A bullet broke the mirror," answered Father Brown gravely; "a bullet
fired by the criminal. The big fragments of falling glass were quite
enough to knock over the pot and the palm."

"Well, what else could he have been firing at except Gwynne?" asked the
detective.

"It's rather a fine metaphysical point," answered his clerical companion
almost dreamily. "In one sense, of course, he was firing at Gwynne. But
Gwynne wasn't there to be fired at. The criminal was alone in the hall."

He was silent for a moment, and then went on quietly. "Imagine the
looking-glass at the end of the passage, before it was broken, and the
tall palm arching over it. In the half-light, reflecting these
monochrome walls, it would, look like the end of the passage. A man
reflected in it would look like a man coming from inside the house. It
would look like the master of the house--if only the reflection were a
little like him."

"Stop a minute," cried Bagshaw. "I believe I begin----"

"You begin to see," said Father Brown. "You begin to see why all the
suspects in this case must be innocent. Not one of them could possibly
have mistaken his own reflection for old Gwynne. Orm would have known at
once that his bush of yellow hair was not a bald head. Flood would have
seen his own red head, and Green his own red waistcoat. Besides, they're
all short and shabby; none of them could have thought his own image was
a tall, thin, old gentleman in evening-dress. We want another, equally
tall and thin, to match him. That's what I meant by saying that I knew
what the murderer looked like."

"And what do you argue from that?" asked Bagshaw, looking at him
steadily.

The priest uttered a sort of sharp, crisp laugh, oddly different from
his ordinary mild manner of speech.

"I am going to argue," he said, "the very thing that you said was so
ludicrous and impossible."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm going to base the defence," said Father Brown, "on the fact that
the prosecuting counsel has a bald head."

"Oh, my God!" said the detective quietly, and got to his feet, staring.

Father Brown had resumed his monologue in an unruffled manner.

"You've been following the movements of a good many people in this
business; you policemen were prodigiously interested in the movements of
the poet, and the servant, and the Irishman. The man whose movements
seem to have been rather forgotten is the dead man himself. His servant
was quite honestly astonished at finding his master had returned. His
master had gone to a great dinner of all the leaders of the legal
profession, but had left it abruptly and come home. He was not ill, for
he summoned no assistance; he had almost certainly quarrelled with some
leader of the legal profession. It's among the leaders of that
profession that we should have looked first for his enemy. He returned,
and shut himself up in the bungalow, where he kept all his private
documents about treasonable practices. But the leader of the legal
profession, who knew there was something against him in those documents,
was thoughtful enough to follow his accuser home; he also being in
evening-dress, but with a pistol in his pocket. That is all; and
nobody could ever have guessed it except for the mirror."

He seemed to be gazing into vacancy for a moment, and then added:

"A queer thing is a mirror; a picture frame that holds hundreds of
different pictures, all vivid and all vanished for ever. Yet, there was
something specially strange about the glass that hung at the end of that
grey corridor under that green palm. It is as if it was a magic glass
and had a different fate from others, as if its picture could somehow
survive it, hanging in the air of that twilight house like a spectre; or
at least like an abstract diagram, the skeleton of an argument. We
could, at least, conjure out of the void the thing that Sir Arthur
Travers saw. And by the way, there was one very true thing that you said
about him."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Bagshaw with grim good – nature. "what was
it?"

"You said," observed the priest, "that Sir Arthur must have some good
reason for wanting to get Orm hanged."

A week later the priest met the police detective once more, and learned
that the authorities had already been moving on the new lines of inquiry
when they were interrupted by a sensational event.

"Sir Arthur Travers," began Father Brown.

"Sir Arthur Travers is dead," said Bagshaw, briefly.

"Ah!" said the other, with a little catch in his voice; "you mean that
he--"

"Yes," said Bagshaw, "he shot at the same man again, but not in a
mirror."

II. THE MAN WITH TWO BEARDS

THIS tale was told by Father Brown to Professor Crake, the celebrated
criminologist, after dinner at a club, where the two were introduced to
each other as sharing a harmless hobby of murder and robbery. But, as
Father Brown's version rather minimized his own part in the matter, it
is here re-told in a more impartial style. It arose out of a playful
passage of arms, in which the professor was very scientific and the
priest rather sceptical.

"My good sir," said the professor in remonstrance, "don't you believe
that criminology is a science?"

"I'm not sure," replied Father Brown. "Do you believe that hagiology is
a science?"

"What's that?" asked the specialist sharply.

"No; it's not the study of hags, and has nothing to do with burning
witches," said the priest, smiling. "It's the study of holy things,
saints and so on. You see, the Dark Ages tried to make a science about
good people. But our own humane and enlightened age is only interested
in a science about bad ones. Yet I think our general experience is that
every conceivable sort of man has been a saint. And I suspect you will
find, too, that every conceivable sort of man has been a murderer."

"Well, we believe murderers can be pretty well classified," observed
Crake. "The list sounds rather long and dull; but I think it's
exhaustive. First, all killing can be divided into rational and
irrational, and we'll take the last first, because they are much fewer.
There is such a thing as homicidal mania, or love of butchery in the
abstract. There is such a thing as irrational antipathy, though it's
very seldom homicidal. Then we come to the true motives: of these, some
are less rational in the sense of being merely romantic and
retrospective. Acts of pure revenge are acts of hopeless revenge. Thus a
lover will sometimes kill a rival he could never supplant, or a rebel
assassinate a tyrant after the conquest is complete. But, more often,
even these acts have a rational explanation. They are hopeful murders.
They fall into the larger section of the second division, of what we may
call prudential crimes. These, again, fall chiefly under two
descriptions. A man kills either in order to obtain what the other man
possesses, either by theft or inheritance, or to stop the other man from
acting in some way: as in the case of killing a blackmailer or a
political opponent; or, in the case of a rather more passive obstacle, a
husband or wife whose continued functioning, as such, interferes with
other things. We believe that classification is pretty thoroughly
thought out and, properly applied, covers the whole ground-But I'm
afraid that it perhaps sounds rather dull; I hope I'm not boring you."

"Not at all," said Father Brown. "If I seemed a little absent-minded I
must apologize; the truth is, I was thinking of a man I once knew. He
was a murderer; but I can't see where he fits into your museum of
murderers. He was not mad, nor did he like killing. He did not hate the
man he killed; he hardly knew him, and certainly had nothing to avenge
on him. The other man did not possess anything that he could possibly
want. The other man was not behaving in any way which the murderer
wanted to stop. The murdered man was not in a position to hurt, or
hinder, or even affect the murderer in any way. There was no woman in
the case. There were no politics in the case. This man killed a fellow-
creature who was practically a stranger, and that for a very strange
reason; which is possibly unique in human history."

And so, in his own more conversational fashion, he told the story. The
story may well begin in a sufficiently respectable setting, at the
breakfast table of a worthy though wealthy suburban family named Bankes,
where the normal discussion of the newspaper had, for once, been
silenced by the discussion about a mystery nearer home. Such people are
sometimes accused of gossip about their neighbours, but they are in that
matter almost inhumanly innocent. Rustic villagers tell tales about
their neighbours, true and false; but the curious culture of the modern
suburb will believe anything it is told in the papers about the
wickedness of the Pope, or the martyrdom of the King of the Cannibal
Islands, and, in the excitement of these topics, never knows what is
happening next door. In this case, however, the two forms of interest
actually coincided in a coincidence of thrilling intensity. Their own
suburb had actually been mentioned in their favourite newspaper. It
seemed to them like a new proof of their own existence when they saw the
name in print. It was almost as if they had been unconscious and
invisible before; and now they were as real as the King of the Cannibal
Islands.

It was stated in the paper that a once famous criminal, known as Michael
Moonshine, and many other names that were presumably not his own, had
recently been released after a long term of imprisonment for his
numerous burglaries; that his whereabouts was being kept quiet, but that
he was believed to have settled down in the suburb in question, which we
will call for convenience Chisham. A resume of some of his famous and
daring exploits and escapes was given in the same issue. For it is a
character of that kind of press, intended for that kind of public, that
it assumes that its reader have no memories. While the peasant will
remember an outlaw like Robin Hood or Rob Roy for centuries, the clerk
will hardly remember the name of the criminal about whom he argued in
trams and tubes two years before. Yet, Michael Moonshine had really
shown some of the heroic rascality of Rob Roy or Robin Hood. He was
worthy to be turned into legend and not merely into news. He was far too
capable a burglar to be a murderer. But his terrific strength and the
ease with which he knocked policemen over like ninepins, stunned people,
and bound and gagged them, gave something almost like a final touch of
fear or mystery to the fact that he never killed them. People almost
felt that he would have been more human if he had.

Mr. Simon Bankes, the father of the family, was at once better read and
more old-fashioned than the rest. He was a sturdy man, with a short
grey beard and a brow barred with wrinkles. He had a turn for anecdotes
and reminiscence, and he distinctly remembered the days when Londoners
had lain awake listening for Mike Moonshine as they did for Spring-
heeled Jack. Then there was his wife, a thin, dark lady. There was a
sort of acid elegance about her, for her family had much more money than
her husband's, if rather less education; and she even possessed a very
valuable emerald necklace upstairs, that gave her a right to prominence
in a discussion about thieves. There was his daughter. Opal, who was
also thin and dark and supposed to be psychic--at any rate, by herself;
for she had little domestic encouragement. Spirits of an ardently astral
turn will be well advised not to materialize as members of a large
family. There was her brother John, a burly youth, particularly
boisterous in his indifference to her spiritual development; and
otherwise distinguishable only by his interest in motor-cars. He
seemed to be always in the act of selling one car and buying another;
and by some process, hard for the economic theorist to follow, it was
always possible to buy a much better article by selling the one that was
damaged or discredited. There was his brother Philip, a young man with
dark curly hair, distinguished by his attention to dress; which is
doubtless part of the duty of a stockbroker's clerk, but, as the
stockbroker was prone to hint, hardly the whole of it. Finally, there
was present at this family scene his friend, Daniel Devine, who was also
dark and exquisitely dressed, but bearded in a fashion that was somewhat
foreign, and therefore, for many, slightly menacing.

It was Devine who had introduced the topic of the newspaper paragraph,
tactfully insinuating so effective an instrument of distraction at what
looked like the beginning of a small family quarrel; for the psychic
lady had begun the description of a vision she had had of pale faces
floating in empty night outside her window, and John Bankes was trying
to roar down this revelation of a higher state with more than his usual
heartiness.

But the newspaper reference to their new and possibly alarming neighbour
soon put both controversialists out of court.

"How frightful," cried Mrs. Bankes. "He must be quite a new-comer; but
who can he possibly be?"

"I don't know any particularly new-comers," said her husband, "except
Sir Leopold Pulman, at Beechwood House."

"My dear," said the lady, "how absurd you are--Sir Leopold!" Then, after
a pause, she added: "If anybody suggested his secretary now-- that man
with the whiskers; I've always said, ever since he got the place Philip
ought to have had----"

"Nothing doing," said Philip languidly, making his sole contribution to
the conversation. "Not good enough."

"The only one I know," observed Devine, "is that man called Carver, who
is stopping at Smith's Farm. He lives a very quiet life, but he's quite
interesting to talk to. I think John has had some business with him."

"Knows a bit about cars," conceded the monomaniac John. "He'll know a
bit more when he's been in my new car."

Devine smiled slightly; everybody had been threatened with the
hospitality of John's new car. Then he added reflectively:

"That's a little what I feel about him. He knows a lot about motoring
and travelling, and the active ways of the world, and yet he always
stays at home pottering about round old Smith's beehives. Says he's only
interested in bee culture, and that's why he's staying with Smith. It
seems a very quiet hobby for a man of his sort. However, I've no doubt
John's car will shake him up a bit."

As Devine walked away from the house that evening his dark face wore an
expression of concentrated thought. His thoughts would, perhaps, have
been worthy of our attention, even at this stage; but it is enough to
say that their practical upshot was a resolution to pay an immediate
visit to Mr. Carver at the house of Mr. Smith. As he was making his way
thither he encountered Barnard, the secretary at Beechwood House,
conspicuous by his lanky figure and the large side whiskers which Mrs.
Bankes counted among her private wrongs. Their acquaintance was slight,
and their conversation brief and casual; but Devine seemed to find in it
food for further cogitation.

"Look here," he said abruptly, "excuse my asking, but is it true that
Lady Pulman has some very famous jewellery up at the House? I'm not a
professional thief, but I've just heard there's one hanging about."

"I'll get her to give an eye to them," answered the secretary. "To tell
the truth, I've ventured to warn her about them already myself. I hope
she has attended to it."

As they spoke, there came the hideous cry of a motor-horn just behind,
and John Bankes came to a stop beside them, radiant at his own steering
-wheel. When he heard of Devine's destination he claimed it as his own,
though his tone suggested rather an abstract relish for offering people
a ride. The ride was consumed in continuous praises of the car, now
mostly in the matter of its adaptability to weather.

"Shuts up as tight as a box," he said, "and opens as easy--as easy as
opening your mouth."

Devine's mouth, at the moment, did not seem so easy to open, and they
arrived at Smith's farm to the sound of a soliloquy. Passing the outer
gate, Devine found the man he was looking for without going into the
house. The man was walking about in the garden, with his hands in his
pockets, wearing a large, limp straw hat; a man with a long face and a
large chin. The wide brim cut off the upper part of his face with a
shadow that looked a little like a mask. In the background was a row of
sunny beehives, along which an elderly man, presumably Mr. Smith, was
moving accompanied by a short, commonplace-looking companion in black
clerical costume.

"I say," burst in the irrepressible John, before Devine could offer any
polite greeting, "I've brought her round to give you a little run. You
see if she isn't better than a 'Thunderbolt.'"

Mr Carver's mouth set into a smile that may have been meant to be
gracious, but looked rather grim. "I'm afraid I shall be too busy for
pleasure this evening," he said.

"How doth the little busy bee," observed Devine, equally enigmatically.
"Your bees must be very busy if they keep you at it all night. I was
wondering if----"

"Well," demanded Carver, with a certain cool defiance.

"Well, they say we should make hay while the sun shines," said Devine.
"Perhaps you make honey while the moon shines."

There came a flash from the shadow of the broad-brimmed hat, as the
whites of the man's eyes shifted and shone.

"Perhaps there is a good deal of moonshine in the business," he said:
"but I warn you my bees do not only make honey. They sting."

"Are you coming along in the car?" insisted the staring John. But
Carver, though he threw off the momentary air of sinister significance
with which he had been answering Devine, was still positive in his
polite refusal.

"I can't possibly go," he said. "Got a lot of writing to do. Perhaps
you'd be kind enough to give some-of my friends a run, if you want a
companion. This is my friend, Mr. Smith, Father Brown-"

"Of course," cried Bankes; "let 'em all come."

"Thank you very much," said Father Brown. "I'm afraid I shall have to
decline; I've got to go on to Benediction in a few minutes."

"Mr. Smith is your man, then," said Carver, with something almost like
impatience. "I'm sure Smith is longing for a motor ride."

Smith, who wore a broad grin, bore no appearance of longing for
anything. He was an active little old man with a very honest wig; one of
those wigs that look no more natural than a hat. Its tinge of yellow was
out of keeping with his colourless complexion. He shook his head and
answered with amiable obstinacy:

"I remember I went over this road ten years ago--in one of those
contraptions. Came over in it from my sister's place at Holmgate, and
never been over that road in a car since. It was rough going I can tell
you,"

"Ten years ago!" scoffed John Bankes. "Two thousand years ago you went
in an ox wagon. Do you think cars haven't changed in ten years --and
roads, too, for that matter? In my little bus you don't know the wheels
are going round. You think you're just flying."

"I'm sure Smith wants to go flying," urged Carver. "It's the dream of
his life. Come, Smith, go over to Holmgate and see your sister. You know
you ought to go and see your sister. Go over and stay the night if you
like."

"Well, I generally walk over, so I generally do stay the night," said
old Smith. "No need to trouble the gentleman to-day, particularly."

"But think what fun it will be for your sister to see you arrive in a
car!" cried Carver. "You really ought to go. Don't be so selfish."

"That's it," assented Bankes, with buoyant benevolence. "Don't you be
selfish. It won't hurt you. You aren't afraid of it, are you?"

"Well," said Mr. Smith, blinking thoughtfully, "I don't want to be
selfish, and I don't think I'm afraid-I'll come with you if you put it
that way."

The pair drove off, amid waving salutations that seemed somehow to give
the little group the appearance of a cheering crowd. Yet Devine and the
priest only joined in out of courtesy, and they both felt it was the
dominating gesture of their host that gave it its final air of farewell.
The detail gave them a curious sense of the pervasive force of his
personality.

The moment the car was out of sight he turned to them with a sort of
boisterous apology and said: "Well!"

He said it with that curious heartiness which is the reverse of
hospitality. That extreme geniality is the same as a dismissal.

"I must be going," said Devine. "We must not interrupt the busy bee. I'm
afraid I know very little about bees; sometimes I can hardly tell a bee
from a wasp."

"I've kept wasps, too," answered the mysterious Mr. Carver. When his
guests were a few yards down the street, Devine said rather impulsively
to his companion: "Rather an odd scene that, don't you think?"

"Yes," replied Father Brown. "And what do you think about it?"

Devine looked at the little man in black, and something in the gaze of
his great, grey eyes seemed to renew his impulse.

"I think," he said, "that Carver was very anxious to have the house to
himself tonight. I don't know whether you had any such suspicions?"

"I may have my suspicions," replied the priest, "but I'm not sure
whether they're the same as yours."

That evening, when the last dusk was turning into dark in the gardens
round the family mansion, Opal Bankes was moving through some of the dim
and empty rooms with even more than her usual abstraction; and anyone
who had looked at her closely would have noted that her pale face had
more than its usual pallor. Despite its bourgeois luxury, the house as a
whole had a rather unique shade of melancholy. It was the sort of
immediate sadness that belongs to things that are old rather than
ancient. It was full of faded fashions, rather than historic customs; of
the order and ornament that is just recent enough to be recognized as
dead. Here and there, Early Victorian coloured glass tinted the
twilight; the high ceilings made the long rooms look narrow; and at the
end of the long room down which she was walking was one of those round
windows, to be found in the buildings of its period. As she came to
about the middle of the room, she stopped, and then suddenly swayed a
little, as if some invisible hand had struck her on the face.

An instant after there was the noise or knocking on the front door,
dulled by the closed doors between. She knew that the rest of the
household were in the upper parts of the house, but she could not have
analysed the motive that made her go to the front door herself. On the
doorstep stood a dumpy and dingy figure in black, which she recognized
as the Roman Catholic priest, whose name was Brown. She knew him only
slightly; but she liked him. He did not encourage her psychic views;
quite the contrary; but he discouraged them as if they mattered and not
as if they did not matter. It was not so much that he did not sympathize
with her opinions, as that he did sympathize but did not agree. All this
was in some sort of chaos in her mind as she found herself saying,
without greeting, or waiting to hear his business:

"I'm so glad you've come. I've seen a ghost."

"There's no need to be distressed about that," he said. "It often
happens. Most of the ghosts aren't ghosts, and the few that may be won't
do you any harm. Was it any ghost in particular?"

"No," she admitted, with a vague feeling of relief, "it wasn't so much
the thing itself as an atmosphere of awful decay, a sort of luminous
ruin. It was a face. A face at the window. But it was pale and goggling,
and looked like the picture of Judas."

"Well, some people do look like that," reflected the priest, "and I dare
say they look in at windows, sometimes. May I come in and see where it
happened?"

When she returned to the room with the visitor, however, other members
of the family had assembled, and those of a less psychic habit had
thought it convenient to light the lamps. In the presence of Mrs.
Bankes, Father Brown assumed a more conventional civility, and
apologized for his intrusion.

"I'm afraid it is taking a liberty with your house, Mrs. Bankes," he
said. "But I think I can explain how the business happens to concern
you. I was up at the Pulmans' place just now, when I was rung up and
asked to come round here to meet a man who is coming to communicate
something that may be of some moment to you. I should not have added
myself to the party, only I am wanted, apparently, because I am a
witness to what has happened up at Beechwood. In fact, it was I who had
to give the alarm."

"What has happened?" repeated the lady.

"There has been a robbery up, at Beechwood House," said Father Brown,
gravely; "a robbery, and what I fear is worse, Lady Pulman's jewels have
gone; and her unfortunate secretary, Mr. Barnard, was picked up in the
garden, having evidently been shot by the escaping burglar."

"That man," ejaculated the lady of the house. "I believe he was----"

She encountered the grave gaze of the priest, and her words suddenly
went from her; she never knew why.

"I communicated with the police," he went on, "and with another
authority interested in this case; and they say that even a superficial
examination has revealed foot-prints and finger-prints and other
indications of a well-known criminal."

At this point, the conference was for a moment disturbed, by the return
of John Bankes, from what appeared to be an abortive expedition in the
car. Old Smith seemed to have been a disappointing passenger, after all.

"Funked it, after all, at the last minute," he announced with noisy
disgust. "Bolted off while I was looking at what I thought was a
puncture. Last time I'll take one of these yokels----"

But his complaints received small attention in the general excitement
that gathered round Father Brown and his news.

"Somebody will arrive in a moment," went on the priest, with the same
air of weighty reserve, "who will relieve me of this responsibility.
When I have confronted, you with him I shall have done my duty as a
witness in a serious business. It only remains for me to say that a
servant up at Beechwood House told me that she had seen a face at one of
the windows----"

"I saw a face," said Opal, "at one of our windows."

"Oh, you are always seeing faces," said her brother John roughly.

"It is as well to see facts even if they are faces," said Father Brown
equably, "and I think the face you saw----"

Another knock at the front door sounded through the house, and a minute
afterwards the door of the room opened and another figure appeared.
Devine half-rose from his chair at the sight of it.

It was a tall, erect figure, with a long, rather cadaverous face, ending
in a formidable chin. The brow was rather bald, and the eyes bright and
blue, which Devine had last seen obscured with a broad straw hat.

"Pray don't let anybody move," said the man called Carver, in clear and
courteous tones. But to Devine's disturbed mind the courtesy had an
ominous resemblance to that of a brigand who holds a company motionless
with a pistol.

"Please sit down, Mr. Devine," said Carver; "and, with Mrs. Bankes's
permission, I will follow your example. My presence here necessitates an
explanation. I rather fancy you suspected me of being an eminent and
distinguished burglar."

"I did," said Devine grimly.

"As you remarked," said Carver, "it is not always easy to know a wasp
from a bee."

After a pause, he continued: "I can claim to be one of the more useful,
though equally annoying, insects. I am a detective, and I have come down
to investigate an alleged renewal of the activities of the criminal
calling himself Michael Moonshine. Jewel robberies were his speciality;
and there has just been one of them at Beechwood House, which, by all
the technical tests, is obviously his work. Not only do the prints
correspond, but you may possibly know that when he was last arrested,
and it is believed on other occasions also, he wore a simple but
effective disguise of a red beard and a pair of large horn-rimmed
spectacles."

Opal Bankes leaned forward fiercely.

"That was it," she cried in excitement, "that was the face I saw, with
great goggles and a red, ragged beard like Judas. I thought it was a
ghost."

"That was also the ghost the servant at Beechwood saw," said Carver
dryly.

He laid some papers and packages on the table, and began carefully to
unfold them. "As I say," he continued, "I was sent down here to make
inquiries about the criminal plans of this man, Moonshine. That is why I
interested myself in bee-keeping and went to stay with Mr. Smith."

There was a silence, and then Devine started and spoke: "You don't
seriously mean to say that nice old man----"

"Come, Mr. Devine," said Carver, with a smile, "you believed a beehive
was only a hiding-place for me. Why shouldn't it be a hiding-place
for him?"

Devine nodded gloomily, and the detective turned back to his papers.
"Suspecting Smith, I wanted to get him out of the way and go through his
belongings; so I took advantage of Mr. Bankes's kindness in giving him a
joy ride. Searching his house, I found some curious things to be owned
by an innocent old rustic interested only in bees. This is one of them."

From the unfolded paper he lifted a long, hairy object almost scarlet in
colour--the sort of sham beard that is worn in theatricals.

Beside it lay an old pair of heavy horn-rimmed spectacles.

"But I also found something," continued Carver, "that more directly
concerns this house, and must be my excuse for intruding to-night. I
found a memorandum, with notes of the names and conjectural value of
various pieces of jewellery in the neighbourhood. Immediately after the
note of Lady Pulman's tiara was the mention of an emerald necklace
belonging to Mrs. Bankes."

Mrs. Bankes, who had hitherto regarded the invasion of her house with an
air of supercilious bewilderment, suddenly grew attentive. Her face
suddenly looked ten years older and much more intelligent. But before
she could speak the impetuous John had risen to his full height like a
trumpeting elephant.

"And the tiara's gone already," he roared; "and the necklace--I'm going
to see about that necklace!"

"Not a bad idea," said Carver, as the young man rushed from the room;
"though, of course, we've been keeping our eyes open since we've been
here. Well, it took me a little time to make out the memorandum, which
was in cipher, and Father Brown's telephone message from the House came
as I was near the end. I asked him to run round here first with the
news, and I would follow; and so----"

His speech was sundered by a scream. Opal was standing up and pointing
rigidly at the round window.

"There it is again!" she cried.

For a moment they all saw something--something that cleared the lady of
the charges of lying and hysteria not uncommonly brought against her.
Thrust out of the slate-blue darkness without, the face was pale, or,
perhaps, blanched by pressure against the glass; and the great, glaring
eyes, encircled as with rings, gave it rather the look of a great fish
out of the dark-blue sea nosing at the port-hole of a ship. But the
gills or fins of the fish were a coppery red; they were, in truth,
fierce red whiskers and the upper part of a red beard. The next moment
it had vanished.

Devine had taken a single stride towards the window when a shout
resounded through the house, a shout that seemed to shake it. It seemed
almost too deafening to be distinguishable as words; yet it was enough
to stop Devine in his stride, and he knew what had happened.

"Necklace gone!" shouted John Bankes, appearing huge and heaving in the
doorway, and almost instantly vanishing again with the plunge of a
pursuing hound.

"Thief was at the window just now!" cried the detective, who had already
darted to the door, following the headlong John, who was already in the
garden.

"Be careful," wailed the lady, "they have pistols and things."

"So have I," boomed the distant voice of the dauntless John out of the
dark garden.

Devine had, indeed, noticed as the young man plunged past him that he
was defiantly brandishing a revolver, and hoped there would be no need
for him to so defend himself. But even as he had the thought, came the
shock of two shots, as if one answered the other, and awakened a wild
flock of echoes in that still suburban garden. They flapped into
silence.

"Is John dead?" asked Opal in a low, shuddering voice.

Father Brown had already advanced deeper into the darkness, and stood
with his back to them, looking down at something. It was he who answered
her.

"No," he said; "it is the other."

Carver had joined him, and for a moment the two figures, the tall and
the short, blocked out what view the fitful and stormy moonlight would
allow. Then they moved to one side and, the others saw the small, wiry
figure lying slightly twisted, as if with its last struggle. The false
red beard was thrust upwards, as if scornfully at the sky, and the moon
shone on the great sham spectacles of the man who had been called
Moonshine.

"What an end," muttered the detective, Carver. "After all his
adventures, to be shot almost by accident by a stockbroker in a suburban
garden."

The stockbroker himself naturally regarded his own triumph with more
solemnity, though not without nervousness.

"I had to do it," he gasped, still panting with exertion. "I'm sorry, he
fired at me."

"There will have to be an inquest, of course," said Carver, gravely.
"But I think there will be nothing for you to worry about. There's a
revolver fallen from his hand with one shot discharged; and he certainly
didn't fire after he'd got yours."

By this time they had assembled again in the room, and the detective was
getting his papers together for departure. Father Brown was standing
opposite to him, looking down at the table, as if in a brown study. Then
he spoke abruptly:

"Mr. Carver, you have certainly worked out a very complete case in a
very masterly way. I rather suspected your professional business; but I
never guessed you would link everything up together so quickly--the bees
and the beard and the spectacles and the cipher and the necklace and
everything."

"Always satisfactory to get a case really rounded off." said Carver.

"Yes," said Father Brown, still looking at the table. "I admire it very
much." Then he added with a modesty verging on nervousness: "It's only
fair to you to say that I don't believe a word of it."

Devine leaned forward with sudden interest. "Do you mean you don't
believe he is Moonshine, the burglar?"

"I know he is the burglar, but he didn't burgle," answered Father Brown.
"I know he didn't come here, or to the great house, to steal jewels, or
get shot getting away with them. Where are the jewels?"

"Where they generally are in such cases," said Carver. "He's either
hidden them or passed them on to a confederate. This was not a one – man
job. Of course, my people are searching the garden and warning the
district."

"Perhaps," suggested Mrs. Bankes, "the confederate stole the necklace
while Moonshine was looking in at the window."

"Why was Moonshine looking in at the window?" asked Father Brown
quietly. "Why should he want to look in at the window?"

"Well, what do you think?" cried the cheery John.

"I think," said Father Brown, "that he never did want to look in at the
window."

"Then why did he do it?" demanded Carver. "What's the good of talking in
the air like that? We've seen the whole thing acted before our very
eyes."

"I've seen a good many things acted before my eyes that I didn't believe
in," replied the priest. "So have you, on the stage and off."

"Father Brown," said Devine, with a certain respect in his tones, "will
you tell us why you can't believe your eyes?"

"Yes, I will try to tell you," answered the priest. Then he said gently:

"You know what I am and what we are. We don't bother you much. We try to
be friends with all our neighbours. But you can't think we do nothing.
You can't think we know nothing. We mind our own business; but we know
our own people. I knew this dead man very well indeed; I was his
confessor, and his friend. So far as a man can, I knew his mind when he
left that garden to-day; and his mind was like a glass hive full of
golden bees. It's an under-statement to say his reformation was
sincere. He was one of those great penitents who manage to make more out
of penitence than others can make out of virtue. I say I was his
confessor; but, indeed, it was I who went to him for comfort. It did me
good to be near so good a man. And when I saw him lying there dead in
the garden, it seemed to me as if certain strange words that were said
of old were spoken over him aloud in my ear. They might well be; for if
ever a man went straight to heaven, it might be he."

"Hang it all," said John Bankes restlessly, "after all, he was a
convicted thief."

"Yes," said Father Brown; "and only a convicted thief has ever in this
world heard that assurance: 'This night shalt thou be with Me in
Paradise.'"

Nobody seemed to know what to do with the silence that followed, until
Devine said, abruptly, at last:

"Then how in the world would you explain it all?"

The priest shook his head. "I can't explain it at all, just yet," he
said, simply. "I can see one or two odd things, but I don't understand
them. As yet I've nothing to go on to prove the man's innocence, except
the man. But I'm quite sure I'm right."

He sighed, and put out his hand for his big, black hat. As he removed it
he remained gazing at the table with rather a new expression, his round,
straight-haired head cocked at a new angle. It was rather as if some
curious animal had come out of his hat, as out of the hat of a conjurer.
But the others, looking at the table, could see nothing there but the
detective's documents and the tawdry old property beard and spectacles.

"Lord bless us," muttered Father Brown, "and he's lying outside dead, in
a beard and spectacles." He swung round suddenly upon Devine. "Here's
something to follow up, if you want to know. Why did he have two
beards?"

With that he bustled in his undignified way out of the room; but Devine
was now devoured with curiosity, and pursued him into the front garden.

"I can't tell you now,"-said Father Brown. "I'm not sure, and I'm
bothered about what to do. Come round and see me to-morrow, and I may
be able to tell you the whole tiling. It may already be settled for me,
and--did you hear that noise?"

"A motor-car starting," remarked Devine.

"Mr. John Bankes's motor-car," said the priest. "I believe it goes
very fast."

"He certainly is of that opinion." said Devine, with a smile.

"It will go far, as well as fast, to-night," said Father Brown.

"And what do you mean by that?" demanded the other.

"I mean it will not return," replied the priest. "John Bankes suspected
something of what I knew from what I said. John Bankes has gone and the
emeralds and all the other jewels with him."

Next day, Devine found. Father Brown moving to and fro in front of the
row of beehives, sadly, but with a certain serenity.

"I've been telling the bees," he said. "You know one has to tell the
bees!" Those singing masons building roofs of gold.' What a line!" Then
more abruptly. "He would like the bees looked after."

"I hope he doesn't want the human beings neglected, when the whole swarm
is buzzing with curiosity," observed the young man. "You were quite
right when you said that Bankes was gone with the jewels; but I don't
know how you knew, or even what there was to be known."

Father Brown blinked benevolently at the bee-hives and said:

"One sort of stumbles on things, and there was one stumbling-block at
the start. I was puzzled by poor Barnard being shot up at Beechwood
House. Now, even when Michael was a master criminal, he made it a point
of honour, even a point of vanity, to succeed without any killing. It
seemed extraordinary that when he had become a sort of saint he should
go out of his way to commit the sin he had despised when he was a
sinner. The rest of the business puzzled me to the last; I could make
nothing out of it, except that it wasn't true. Then I had a belated
gleam of sense when I saw the beard and goggles and remembered the thief
had come in another beard with other goggles. Now, of course, it was
just possible that he had duplicates; but it was at least a coincidence
that he used neither the old glasses nor the old beard, both in good
repair. Again, it was just possible that he went out without them and
had to procure new ones; but it was unlikely. There was nothing to make
him go motoring with Bankes at all; if he was really going burgling, he
could have taken his outfit easily in his pocket. Besides, beards don't
grow on bushes. He would have found it hard to get such things anywhere
in the time.

"No, the more I thought of it the more I felt there was something funny
about his having a completely new outfit. And then the truth began to
dawn on me by reason, which I knew already by instinct. He never did go
out with Bankes with any intention of putting on the disguise. He never
did put on the disguise. Somebody else manufactured the disguise at
leisure, and then put it on him."

"Put it on him!" repeated Devine. "How the devil could they?"

"Let us go back," said Father Brown, "and look at the thing through
another window--the window through which the young lady saw the ghost."

"The ghost!" repeated the other, with a slight start.

"She called it the ghost," said the little man, with composure, "and
perhaps she was not so far wrong. It's quite true that she is what they
call psychic. Her only mistake is in thinking that being psychic is
being spiritual. Some animals are psychic; anyhow, she is a sensitive,
and she was right when she felt that the face at the window had a son of
horrible halo of deathly things."

"You mean----" began Devine.

"I mean it was a dead man who looked in at the window," said Father
Brown. "It was a dead man who crawled round more than one house, looking
in at more than one window. Creepy, wasn't it? But in one way it was the
reverse of a ghost; for it was not the antic of the soul freed from the
body. It was the antic of the body freed from the soul."

He blinked again at the beehive and continued: "But, I suppose, the
shortest explanation is to take it from the standpoint of the man who
did it. You know the man who did it. John Bankes."

"The very last man I should have thought of," said Devine.

"The very first man I thought of," said Father Brown; "in so far as I
had any right to think of anybody. My friend, there are no good or bad
social types or trades. Any man can be a murderer like poor John; any
man, even the same man, can be a saint like poor Michael. But if there
is one type that tends at times to be more utterly godless than another,
it is that rather brutal sort of business man. He has no social ideal,
let alone religion; he has neither the gentleman's traditions nor the
trade unionist's class loyalty. All his boasts about getting good
bargains were practically boasts of having cheated people. His snubbing
of his sister's poor little attempts at mysticism was detestable. Her
mysticism was all nonsense; but he only hated spiritualism because it
was spirituality. Anyhow, there's no doubt he was the villain of the
piece; the only interest is in a rather original piece of villainy. It
was really a new and unique motive for murder. It was the motive of
using the corpse as a stage property--a sort of hideous doll or dummy. At
the start he conceived a plan of killing Michael in the motor, merely to
take him home and pretend to have killed him in the garden. But ail
sorts of fantastic finishing touches followed quite naturally from the
primary fact; that he had at his disposal in a closed car at night the
dead body of a recognized and recognizable burglar. He could leave his
finger-prints and foot-prints; he could lean the familiar face
against windows and take it away. You will notice that Moonshine
ostensibly appeared and vanished while Bankes was ostensibly out of the
room looking for the emerald necklace.

"Finally, he had only to tumble the corpse on to the lawn, fire a shot
from each pistol, and there he was. It might never have been found out
but for a guess about the two beards."

"Why had your friend Michael kept the old beard?" Devine said
thoughtfully. "That seems to me questionable."

"To me, who knew him, it seems quite inevitable," replied Father Brown.
"His whole attitude was like that wig that he wore. There was no
disguise about his disguises. He didn't want the old disguise any more,
but he wasn't frightened of it; he would have felt it false to destroy
the false beard. It would have been like hiding; and he was not hiding.
He was not hiding from God; he was not hiding from himself. He was in
the broad daylight. If they'd taken him back to prison, he'd still have
been quite happy. He was not whitewashed, but washed white. There was
something very strange about him; almost as strange as the grotesque
dance of death through which he was dragged after he was dead. When he
moved to and fro smiling among these beehives, even then, in a most
radiant and shining sense, he was dead. He was out of the judgment of
this world."

There was a short pause, and then Devine shrugged his shoulders and
said: "It all comes back to bees and wasps looking very much alike in
this world, doesn't it?"

III THE SONG OF THE FLYING FISH

THE soul of Mr. Peregrine Smart hovered like a fly round one possession
and one joke. It might be considered a mild joke, for it consisted
merely of asking people if they had seen his goldfish. It might also be
considered an expensive joke; but it is doubtful whether he was not
secretly more attached to the joke than to the evidence of expenditure.
In talking to his neighbours in the little group of new houses that had
grown up round the old village green, he lost no time in turning the
conversation in the direction of his hobby. To Dr. Burdock, a rising
biologist with a resolute chin and hair brushed back like a German's,
Mr. Smart made the easy transition. "You are interested in natural
history; have you seen my goldfish?" To so orthodox an evolutionist as
Dr. Burdock doubtless all nature was one; but at first sight the link
was not close, as he was a specialist who had concentrated entirely upon
the primitive ancestry of the giraffe. To Father Brown, from a church in
the neighbouring provincial town, he traced a rapid train of thought
which touched on the topics of "Rome--St. Peter--fisherman--fish--goldfish."
In talking to Mr. Imlack Smith, the bank manager, a slim and sallow
gentleman of dressy appearance but quiet demeanour, he violently
wrenched the conversation to the subject of the gold standard, from
which it was merely a step to goldfish. In talking to that brilliant
Oriental traveller and scholar. Count Yvon de Lara (whose title was
French and his face rather Russian, not to say Tartar), the versatile
conversationalist showed an intense and intelligent interest in the
Ganges and the Indian Ocean, leading naturally to the possible presence
of goldfish in those waters.

From Mr. Harry Hartopp, the very rich but very shy and silent young
gentleman who had recently come down from London, he had at last
extorted the information that the embarrassed youth in question was not
interested in fishing, and had then added: "Talking about fishing, have
you seen my goldfish?"

The peculiar thing about the goldfish was that they were made of gold.
They were part of an eccentric but expensive toy, said to have been made
by the freak of some rich Eastern prince, and Mr. Smart had picked it up
at some sale or in some curiosity shop, such as he frequented for the
purpose of lumbering up his house with unique and useless things. From
the other end of the room it looked like a rather unusually large bowl
containing rather unusually large living fish; a closer inspection
showed it to be a huge bubble of beautifully blown Venetian glass, very
thin and delicately clouded with faintly iridescent colour, in the
tinted twilight of which hung grotesque golden fishes with great rubies
for eyes. The whole thing was undoubtedly worth a great deal in solid
material; how much more would depend upon the waves of lunacy passing
over the world of collectors. Mr. Smart's new secretary, a young man
named Francis Boyle, though an Irishman and not credited with caution,
was mildly surprised at his talking so freely of the gems of his
collection to the group of comparative strangers who happened to have
alighted in a rather nomadic fashion in the neighbourhood; for
collectors are commonly vigilant and sometimes secretive. In the course
of settling down to his new duties, Mr. Boyle found he was not alone in
this sentiment, and that in others, it passed from a mild wonder to a
grave disapproval.

"It's a wonder his throat isn't cut," said Mr. Smart's valet, Harris,
not without a hypothetical relish, almost as if he had said, in a purely
artistic sense: "It's a pity."

"It's extraordinary how he leaves things about," said Mr. Smart's head
clerk, Jameson, who had come up from the office to assist the new
secretary, "and he won't even put up those ramshackle old bars across
his ramshackle old door."

"It's all very well with Father Brown and the doctor," said Mr. Smart's
housekeeper, with a certain vigorous vagueness that marked her opinions,
"but when it comes to foreigners, I call it tempting providence. It
isn't only the Count, either; that man at the bank looks to me much too
yellow to be English."

"Well, that young Hartopp is English enough," said Boyle good-
humouredly, "to the extent of not having a word to say for himself."

"He thinks the more," said the housekeeper. "He may not be exactly a
foreigner, but he is not such a fool as he looks. Foreign is as foreign
does, I say," she added darkly.

Her disapproval would probably have deepened if she had heard the
conversation, in her master's drawing-room that afternoon, a
conversation of which the goldfish were the text, though the offensive
foreigner tended more and more to be the central figure. It was not that
he spoke so very much; but even his silences had something positive
about them. He looked the more massive for sitting in a sort of heap on
a heap of cushions, and in the deepening twilight his wide Mongolian
face seemed faintly luminous, like a moon. Perhaps his background
brought out something atmospherically Asiatic about his face and figure,
for the room was a chaos of more or less costly curiosities, amid which
could be seen the crooked curves and burning colours of countless
Eastern weapons, Eastern pipes and vessels, Eastern musical instruments
and illuminated manuscripts. Anyhow, as the conversation proceeded,
Boyle felt more and more that the figure seated on the cushions and dark
against the twilight had the exact outline of a huge image of Buddha.

The conversation was general enough, for all the little local group were
present. They were, indeed, often in the habit of dropping in at each
other's houses, and by this time constituted a sort of club, of people
coming from the four or five houses standing round the green. Of these
houses Peregrine Smart's was the oldest, largest, and most picturesque;
it straggled down almost the whole of one side of the square, leaving
only room for a small villa, inhabited by a retired colonel named
Varney, who was reported to be an invalid, and certainly was never seen
to go abroad. At right angles to these stood two or three shops that
served the simpler needs of the hamlet, and at the corner the inn of the
Blue Dragon, at which Mr. Hartopp, the stranger from London, was
staying. On the opposite side were three houses, one rented by the Count
de Lara, one by Dr. Burdock, and the third still standing empty. On the
fourth side was the bank, with an adjoining house for the bank manager,
and a line offence enclosing some land that was let for building. It was
thus a very self-contained group, and the comparative emptiness of the
open ground for miles round it threw the members more and more on each
other's society. That afternoon, one stranger had indeed broken into the
magic circle: a hatchet-faced fellow with fierce tufts of eyebrows and
moustache, and so shabbily dressed that he must have been a millionaire
or a duke if he had really (as was alleged) come down to do business
with the old collector. But he was known, at the Blue Dragon at least,
as Mr. Harmer.

To him had been recounted anew the glories of the gilded fish and the
criticisms regarding their custody.

"People are always telling me I ought to lock them up more carefully,"
observed Mr. Smart, cocking an eyebrow over his shoulder at the
dependant who stood there holding some papers from the office. Smart was
a round-faced, round-bodied little old man rather like a bald
parrot. "Jameson and Harris and the rest are always at me to bar the
doors as if it were a mediaeval fortress, though really these rotten old
rusty bars are too mediaeval to keep anybody out, I should think. I
prefer to trust to luck and the local police."

"It is not always the best bars that keep people out," said the Count.
"It all depends on who's trying to get in. There was an ancient Hindu
hermit who lived naked in a cave and passed through the three armies
that encircled the Mogul and took the great ruby out of the tyrant's
turban, and went back unscathed like a shadow. For he wished to teach
the great how small are the laws of space and time."

"When we really study the small laws of space and time," said Dr.
Burdock dryly, "we generally find out how those tricks are done. Western
science has let in daylight on a good deal of Eastern magic. Doubtless a
great deal can be done with hypnotism and suggestion, to say nothing of
sleight-of-hand."

"The ruby was not in the royal tent," observed the Count in his dream
fashion; "but he found it among a hundred tents."

"Can't all that be explained by telepathy?" asked the doctor sharply.
The question sounded the sharper because it was followed by a heavy
silence, almost as if the distinguished Oriental traveller had, with
imperfect politeness, gone to sleep.

"I beg your pardon," he said rousing himself with a sudden smile. "I had
forgotten we were talking with words. In the east we talk with thoughts,
and so we never misunderstand each other. It is strange how you people
worship words and are satisfied with words. What difference does it make
to a thing that you now call it telepathy, as you once called it
tomfoolery? If a man climbs into the sky on a mango-tree, how is it
altered by saying it is only levitation, instead of saying it is only
lies. If a medieval witch waved a wand and turned me into a blue baboon,
you would say it was only atavism."

The doctor looked for a moment as if he might say that it would not be
so great a change after all. But before his irritation could find that
or any other vent, the man called Harmer interrupted gruffly:

"It's true enough those Indian conjurers can do queer tilings, but I
notice they generally do them in India. Confederates, perhaps, or merely
mass psychology. I don't think those tricks have ever been played in an
English village, and I should say our friend's goldfish were quite
safe."

"I will tell you a story," said de Lara, in his motionless way, "which
happened not in India, but outside an English barrack in the most
modernized part of Cairo. A sentinel was standing inside the grating of
an iron gateway looking out between the bars on to the street. There
appeared outside the gate a beggar, barefoot and in native rags, who
asked him, in English that was startlingly distinct and refined, for a
certain official document kept in the building for safety. The soldier
told the man, of that he could not come inside; and the man answered,
smiling: course, 'What is inside and what is outside?' The soldier was
still staring scornfully through the iron grating when he gradually
realized that, though neither he nor the gate had moved, he was actually
standing in the street and looking in at the barrack yard, where the
beggar stood still and smiling and equally motionless. Then, when the
beggar turned towards the building, the sentry awoke to such sense as he
had left, and shouted a warning to all the soldiers within the gated
enclosure to hold the prisoner fast. 'You won't get out of there
anyhow,' he said vindictively. Then the beggar said in his silvery
voice: 'What is outside and what is inside?' And the soldier, still
glaring through the same bars, saw that they were once more between him
and the street, where the beggar stood free and smiling with a paper in
his hand."

Mr. Imlack Smith, the bank manager, was looking at the carpet with his
dark sleek head bowed, and he spoke for the first time.

"Did anything happen about the paper?" he asked.

"Your professional instincts are correct, sir," said the Count with grim
affability. "It was a paper of considerable financial importance. Its
consequences were international."

"I hope they don't occur often," said young Hartopp gloomily.

"I do not touch the political side," said the Count serenely, "but only
the philosophical. It illustrates how the wise man can get behind time
and space and turn the levers of them, so to speak, so that the whole
world turns round before our eyes. But is it so hard for you people to
believe that spiritual powers are really more powerful than material
ones."

"Well," said old Smart cheerfully, "I don't profess to be an authority
on spiritual powers. What do you say, Father Brown?"

"The only thing that strikes me," answered the little priest, "is that
all the supernatural acts we have yet heard of seem to be thefts. And
stealing by spiritual methods seem to me much the same as stealing by
material ones."

"Father Brown is a Philistine," said the smiling Smith.

"I have a sympathy with the tribe," said Father Brown. "A Philistine is
only a man who is right without knowing why."

"All this is too clever for me," said Hartopp heartily.

"Perhaps," said Father Brown with a smile, "you would like to speak
without words, as the Count suggests. He would begin by saying nothing
in a pointed fashion, and you would retort with a burst of taciturnity."

"Something might be done with music," murmured the Count dreamily. "It
would be better than all these words."

"Yes, I might understand that better," said the young man in a low
voice.

Boyle had followed the conversation with curious attention, for there
was something in the demeanour of more than one of the talkers that
seemed to him significant or even odd. As the talk drifted to music,
with an appeal to the dapper bank manager (who was an amateur musician
of some merit), the young secretary awoke with a start to his
secretarial duties, and reminded his employer that the head clerk was
still standing patiently with the papers in his hand.

"Oh, never mind about those just now, Jameson," said Smart rather
hurriedly. "Only something about my account; I'll see Mr. Smith about it
later. You were saying that the 'cello, Mr. Smith----"

But the cold breath of business had sufficed to disperse the fumes of
transcendental talk, and the guests began one after another to say
farewell. Only Mr. Imlack Smith, bank manager and musician, remained to
the last; and when the rest were gone he and his host went into the
inner room, where the goldfish were kept, and closed the door.

The house was long and narrow, with a covered balcony running along the
first floor, which consisted mostly of a sort of suite of rooms used by
the householder himself, his bedroom and dressing-room, and an inner
room in which his very valuable treasures were sometimes stored for the
night instead of being left in the rooms below. This balcony, like the
insufficiently barred door below it, was a matter of concern to the
housekeeper and the head clerk and the others who lamented the
carelessness of the collector; but, in truth, that cunning old gentleman
was more careful than he seemed. He professed no great belief in the
antiquated fastenings of the old house, which the housekeeper lamented
to see rusting in idleness, but he had an eye to the more important
point of strategy. He always put his favourite goldfish in the room at
the back of his bedroom for the night, and slept in front of it, as it
were, with a pistol under his pillow. And when Boyle and Jameson,
awaiting his return from the tete-a-tete, at length saw the door
open and their employer reappear, he was carrying the great glass bowl
as reverently as it if had been the relic of a saint.

Outside, the last edges of the sunset still clung to the corners of the
green square; but inside, a lamp had already been kindled; and in the
mingling of the two lights the coloured globe glowed like some monstrous
jewel, and the fantastic outlines of the fiery fishes seemed to give it,
indeed, something of the mystery of a talisman, like strange shapes seen
by a seer in the crystal of doom. Over the old man's shoulder the olive
face of Imlack Smith stared like a sphinx.

"I am going up to London to-night, Mr. Boyle," said old Smart, with
more gravity than he commonly showed. "Mr. Smith and I are catching the
six-forty-five. I should prefer you, Jameson, to sleep upstairs in
my room to-night; if you put the bowl in the back room as usual, it
will be quite safe then. Not that I suppose anything could possibly
happen."

"Anything may happen anywhere," said the smiling Mr. Smith. "I think you
generally take a gun to bed with you. Perhaps you had better leave it
behind in this case."

Peregrine Smart did not reply, and they passed out of the house on to
the road round the village green.

The secretary and the head clerk slept that night as directed in their
employer's bedroom. To speak more strictly, Jameson, the head clerk,
slept in a bed in the dressing-room, but the door stood open between,
and the two rooms running along the front were practically one. Only the
bedroom had a long French window giving on the balcony, and an entrance
at the back into the inner apartment where the goldfish bowl had been
placed for safety. Boyle dragged his bed right across so as to bar this
entrance, put the revolver under his pillow, and then undressed and went
to bed, feeling that he had taken all possible precautions against an
impossible or improbable event. He did not see why there should be any
particular danger of normal burglary; and as for the spiritual burglary
that figured in the traveller's tales of the Count de Lara, if his
thoughts ran on them so near to sleep it was because they were such
stuff as dreams are made of. They soon turned into dreams with intervals
of dreamless slumber. The old clerk was a little more restless as usual;
but after fussing about a little longer and repeating some of his
favourite regrets and warnings, he also retired to his bed in the same
manner and slept. The moon brightened and grew dim again above the green
square and the grey blocks of houses in a solitude and silence that
seemed to have no human witness; and it was when the white cracks of
daybreak had already appeared in the corners of the grey sky that the
thing happened.

Boyle, being young, was naturally both the healthier and the heavier
sleeper of the two. Though active enough when he was once awake, he
always had a load to lift in waking. Moreover, he had dreams of the sort
that cling to the emerging minds like the dim tentacles of an octopus.
They were a medley of many things, including his last look from the
balcony across the four grey roads and the green square. But the pattern
of them changed and shifted and turned dizzily, to the accompaniment of
a low grinding noise, which sounded somehow like a subterranean river,
and may have been no more than old Mr. Jameson snoring in the dressing-
room. But in the dreamer's mind all that murmur and motion was vaguely
connected with the words of the Count de Lara, about a wisdom that could
hold the levers of time and space and turn the world. In the dream it
seemed as if a vast murmuring machinery under the world were really
moving whole landscapes hither and thither, so that the ends of the
earth might appear in a man's front-garden, or his own front-garden
be exiled beyond the sea.

The first complete impressions he had were the words of a song, with a
rather thin metallic accompaniment; they were sung in a foreign accent
and a voice that was still strange and yet faintly familiar. And yet he
could hardly feel sure that he was not making up poetry in his sleep.

Over the land and over the sea

My flying fishes will come to me,

For the note is not of the world that wakes them,

But in----

He struggled to his feet and saw that his fellow-guardian was already
out of bed; Jameson was peering out of the long window on to the balcony
and calling out sharply to someone in the street below.

"Who's that?" he called out sharply. "What do you want?"

He turned to Boyle in agitation, saying: "There's somebody prowling
about just outside. I knew it wasn't safe. I'm going down to bar that
front door, whatever they say."

He ran downstairs in a flutter and Boyle could hear the clattering of
the bars upon the front door; but Boyle himself stepped out upon the
balcony and looked out on the long grey road that led up to the house,
and he thought he was still dreaming.

Upon that grey road leading across that empty moor and through that
little English hamlet, there had appeared a figure that might have
stepped straight out of the jungle or the bazaar--a figure out of one of
the Count's fantastic stories; a figure out of the "Arabian Nights." The
rather ghostly grey twilight which begins to define and yet to discolour
everything when the light in the east has ceased to be localized, lifted
slowly like a veil of grey gauze and showed him a figure wrapped in
outlandish raiment. A scarf of a strange sea-blue, vast and
voluminous, went round the head like a turban, and then again round the
chin, giving rather the general character of a hood; so far as the face
was concerned it had a the effects of a mask. For the raiment round the
head was drawn close as a veil; and the head itself was bowed over a
queer-looking musical instrument made of silver or steel, and shaped
like a deformed or crooked violin. It was played with something like a
silver comb, and the notes were curiously thin and keen. Before Boyle
could open his mouth, the same haunting alien accent came from under the
shadow of the burnous, singing-words of the same sort:

As the golden birds go back to the tree

My golden fishes return to me.

Return----

"You've no right here," called out Boyle in exasperation, hardly knowing
what he said.

"I have a right to the goldfish," said the stranger, speaking more like
King Solomon than an unsandalled Bedouin in a ragged blue cloak. "And
they will come to me. Come!"

He struck his strange fiddle as his voice rose sharply on the word.
There was a pang of sound that seemed to pierce the mind, and then there
came a fainter sound, like an answer: a vibrant whisper. It came from
the dark room behind where the bowl of goldfish was standing.

Boyle turned towards it; and even as he turned the echo in the inner
room changed to a long tingling sound like an electric bell, and then to
a faint crash. It was still a matter of seconds since he had challenged
the man from the balcony; but the old clerk had already regained the top
of the stairs, panting a little, for he was an elderly gentleman.

"I've locked up the door, anyhow," he said.

"The stable door," said Boyle out of the darkness of the inner room.

Jameson followed him into that apartment and found him staring down at
the floor, which was covered with a litter of coloured glass like the
curved bits of a broken rainbow.

"What do you mean by the stable door?" began Jameson.

"I mean that the steed is stolen," answered Boyle. "The flying steeds.
The flying fishes our Arab friend outside has just whistled to like so
many performing puppies."

"But how could he?" exploded the old clerk, as if such events were
hardly respectable.

"Well, they're gone," said Boyle shortly. "The broken bowl is here,
which would have taken a long time to open properly, but only a second
to smash. But the fish are gone, God knows how, though I think our
friend ought to be asked."

"We are wasting time," said the distracted Jameson. "We ought to be
after him at once."

"Much better be telephoning the police at once," answered Boyle. "They
ought to outstrip him in a flash with motors and telephones that go a
good deal farther than we should ever get, running through the village
in our nightgowns. But it may be there are things even the police cars
and wires won't outstrip."

While Jameson was talking to the police-station through the telephone
in an agitated voice, Boyle went out again on to the balcony and hastily
scanned that grey landscape of daybreak. There was no trace of the man
in the turban, and no other sign of life, except some faint stirrings an
expert might have recognized in the hotel of the Blue Dragon. Only
Boyle, for the first time, noted consciously something that he had all
along been noting unconsciously. It was like a fact struggling in the
submerged mind and demanding its own meaning. It was simply the fact
that the grey landscape had never been entirely grey; there was one gold
spot amid its stripes of colourless colour, a lamp lighted in one of the
houses on the other side of the green-Something, perhaps irrational,
told him that it had been burning through all the hours of the darkness
and was only fading with the dawn. He counted the houses, and his
calculation brought out a result which seemed to fit in with something,
he knew not what. Anyhow, it was apparently the house of the Count Yvon
de Lara.

Inspector Pinner had arrived with several policemen, and done several
things of a rapid and resolute sort, being conscious that the very
absurdity of the costly trinkets might give the case considerable
prominence in the newspapers. He had examined everything, measured,
everything, taken down everybody's deposition, taken everybody's finger
-prints, put everybody's back up, and found himself at the end left
facing a fact which he could not believe. An Arab from the desert had
walked up the public road and stopped in front of the house of Mr.
Peregrine Smart, where a bowl of artificial goldfish was kept in an
inner room; he had then sung or recited a little poem, and the bowl had
exploded like a bomb and the fishes vanished into thin air. Nor did it
soothe the inspector to be told by a foreign Count--in a soft, purring
voice--that the bounds of experience were being enlarged.

Indeed, the attitude of each member of the little group was
characteristic enough. Peregrine Smart himself had come back from London
the next morning to hear the news of his loss. Naturally he admitted a
shock; but it was typical of something sporting and spirited in the
little old gentleman, something that always made his small strutting
figure look like a cock-sparrow's, that he showed more vivacity in the
search than depression at the loss. The man named Harmer, who had come
to the village on purpose to buy the goldfish, might be excused for
being a little testy on learning they were not there to be bought. But,
in truth, his rather aggressive moustache and eyebrows seemed to bristle
with something more definite than disappointment, and the eyes that
darted over the company were bright with a vigilance that might well be
suspicion. The sallow face of the bank manager, who had also returned
from London though by a later train, seemed again and again to attract
those shining and shifting eyes like a magnet. Of the two remaining
figures of the original circle. Father Brown was generally silent when
he was not spoken to, and the dazed Hartopp was often silent even when
he was.

But the Count was not a man to let anything pass that gave an apparent
advantage to his views. He smiled at his rationalistic rival, the
doctor, in the manner of one who knows how it is possible to be
irritating by being ingratiating.

"You will admit, doctor," he said, "that at least some of the stories
you thought so improbable look a little more realistic to-day than
they did yesterday. When a man as ragged as those I described is able,
by speaking a word, to dissolve a solid vessel inside the four walls of
the house he stands outside, it might perhaps be called an example of
what I said about spiritual powers and material barriers."

"And it might be called an example of what I said," said the doctor
sharply, "about a little scientific knowledge being enough to show how
the tricks are done."

"Do you really mean, doctor," asked Smart in some excitement, "that you
can throw any scientific light on this mystery?"

"I can throw light on what the Count calls a mystery," said the doctor,
"because it is not a mystery at all. That part of it is plain enough. A
sound