Chương Chương 6 · The Honour of Israel Gow

. The Honour of Israel Gow

A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown,

wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley

and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the

glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the

world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner

of the old French-Scotch chateaux, it reminded an Englishman of the

sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods

that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black

as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy

devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on

the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow

which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other

of the children of men. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison

called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of

doom in the Calvinist.

The priest had snatched a day from his business at Glasgow to meet his

friend Flambeau, the amateur detective, who was at Glengyle Castle with

another more formal officer investigating the life and death of the late

Earl of Glengyle. That mysterious person was the last representative

of a race whose valour, insanity, and violent cunning had made them

terrible even among the sinister nobility of their nation in the

sixteenth century. None were deeper in that labyrinthine ambition, in

chamber within chamber of that palace of lies that was built up around

Mary Queen of Scots.

The rhyme in the country-side attested the motive and the result of

their machinations candidly:

As green sap to the simmer trees

Is red gold to the Ogilvies.

For many centuries there had never been a decent lord in Glengyle

Castle; and with the Victorian era one would have thought that all

eccentricities were exhausted. The last Glengyle, however, satisfied his

tribal tradition by doing the only thing that was left for him to do; he

disappeared. I do not mean that he went abroad; by all accounts he was

still in the castle, if he was anywhere. But though his name was in the

church register and the big red Peerage, nobody ever saw him under the

sun.

If anyone saw him it was a solitary man-servant, something between a

groom and a gardener. He was so deaf that the more business-like

assumed him to be dumb; while the more penetrating declared him to be

half-witted. A gaunt, red-haired labourer, with a dogged jaw and chin,

but quite blank blue eyes, he went by the name of Israel Gow, and was

the one silent servant on that deserted estate. But the energy with

which he dug potatoes, and the regularity with which he disappeared

into the kitchen gave people an impression that he was providing for the

meals of a superior, and that the strange earl was still concealed in

the castle. If society needed any further proof that he was there, the

servant persistently asserted that he was not at home. One morning the

provost and the minister (for the Glengyles were Presbyterian) were

summoned to the castle. There they found that the gardener, groom and

cook had added to his many professions that of an undertaker, and had

nailed up his noble master in a coffin. With how much or how little

further inquiry this odd fact was passed, did not as yet very plainly

appear; for the thing had never been legally investigated till Flambeau

had gone north two or three days before. By then the body of Lord

Glengyle (if it was the body) had lain for some time in the little

churchyard on the hill.

As Father Brown passed through the dim garden and came under the

shadow of the chateau, the clouds were thick and the whole air damp

and thundery. Against the last stripe of the green-gold sunset he saw

a black human silhouette; a man in a chimney-pot hat, with a big spade

over his shoulder. The combination was queerly suggestive of a sexton;

but when Brown remembered the deaf servant who dug potatoes, he thought

it natural enough. He knew something of the Scotch peasant; he knew the

respectability which might well feel it necessary to wear “blacks” for

an official inquiry; he knew also the economy that would not lose an

hour’s digging for that. Even the man’s start and suspicious stare as

the priest went by were consonant enough with the vigilance and jealousy

of such a type.

The great door was opened by Flambeau himself, who had with him a lean

man with iron-grey hair and papers in his hand: Inspector Craven from

Scotland Yard. The entrance hall was mostly stripped and empty; but the

pale, sneering faces of one or two of the wicked Ogilvies looked down

out of black periwigs and blackening canvas.

Following them into an inner room, Father Brown found that the allies

had been seated at a long oak table, of which their end was covered with

scribbled papers, flanked with whisky and cigars. Through the whole of

its remaining length it was occupied by detached objects arranged at

intervals; objects about as inexplicable as any objects could be. One

looked like a small heap of glittering broken glass. Another looked like

a high heap of brown dust. A third appeared to be a plain stick of wood.

“You seem to have a sort of geological museum here,” he said, as he sat

down, jerking his head briefly in the direction of the brown dust and

the crystalline fragments.

“Not a geological museum,” replied Flambeau; “say a psychological

museum.”

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake,” cried the police detective laughing, “don’t

let’s begin with such long words.”

“Don’t you know what psychology means?” asked Flambeau with friendly

surprise. “Psychology means being off your chump.”

“Still I hardly follow,” replied the official.

“Well,” said Flambeau, with decision, “I mean that we’ve only found out

one thing about Lord Glengyle. He was a maniac.”

The black silhouette of Gow with his top hat and spade passed the

window, dimly outlined against the darkening sky. Father Brown stared

passively at it and answered:

“I can understand there must have been something odd about the man, or

he wouldn’t have buried himself alive--nor been in such a hurry to bury

himself dead. But what makes you think it was lunacy?”

“Well,” said Flambeau, “you just listen to the list of things Mr. Craven

has found in the house.”

“We must get a candle,” said Craven, suddenly. “A storm is getting up,

and it’s too dark to read.”

“Have you found any candles,” asked Brown smiling, “among your

oddities?”

Flambeau raised a grave face, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend.

“That is curious, too,” he said. “Twenty-five candles, and not a trace

of a candlestick.”

In the rapidly darkening room and rapidly rising wind, Brown went along

the table to where a bundle of wax candles lay among the other scrappy

exhibits. As he did so he bent accidentally over the heap of red-brown

dust; and a sharp sneeze cracked the silence.

“Hullo!” he said, “snuff!”

He took one of the candles, lit it carefully, came back and stuck it in

the neck of the whisky bottle. The unrestful night air, blowing through

the crazy window, waved the long flame like a banner. And on every side

of the castle they could hear the miles and miles of black pine wood

seething like a black sea around a rock.

“I will read the inventory,” began Craven gravely, picking up one of

the papers, “the inventory of what we found loose and unexplained in the

castle. You are to understand that the place generally was dismantled

and neglected; but one or two rooms had plainly been inhabited in a

simple but not squalid style by somebody; somebody who was not the

servant Gow. The list is as follows:

“First item. A very considerable hoard of precious stones, nearly

all diamonds, and all of them loose, without any setting whatever. Of

course, it is natural that the Ogilvies should have family jewels; but

those are exactly the jewels that are almost always set in particular

articles of ornament. The Ogilvies would seem to have kept theirs loose

in their pockets, like coppers.

“Second item. Heaps and heaps of loose snuff, not kept in a horn, or

even a pouch, but lying in heaps on the mantelpieces, on the sideboard,

on the piano, anywhere. It looks as if the old gentleman would not take

the trouble to look in a pocket or lift a lid.

“Third item. Here and there about the house curious little heaps of

minute pieces of metal, some like steel springs and some in the form of

microscopic wheels. As if they had gutted some mechanical toy.

“Fourth item. The wax candles, which have to be stuck in bottle necks

because there is nothing else to stick them in. Now I wish you to note

how very much queerer all this is than anything we anticipated. For the

central riddle we are prepared; we have all seen at a glance that there

was something wrong about the last earl. We have come here to find out

whether he really lived here, whether he really died here, whether that

red-haired scarecrow who did his burying had anything to do with his

dying. But suppose the worst in all this, the most lurid or melodramatic

solution you like. Suppose the servant really killed the master, or

suppose the master isn’t really dead, or suppose the master is dressed

up as the servant, or suppose the servant is buried for the master;

invent what Wilkie Collins’ tragedy you like, and you still have not

explained a candle without a candlestick, or why an elderly gentleman of

good family should habitually spill snuff on the piano. The core of

the tale we could imagine; it is the fringes that are mysterious. By no

stretch of fancy can the human mind connect together snuff and diamonds

and wax and loose clockwork.”

“I think I see the connection,” said the priest. “This Glengyle was

mad against the French Revolution. He was an enthusiast for the ancien

regime, and was trying to re-enact literally the family life of the last

Bourbons. He had snuff because it was the eighteenth century luxury;

wax candles, because they were the eighteenth century lighting; the

mechanical bits of iron represent the locksmith hobby of Louis XVI; the

diamonds are for the Diamond Necklace of Marie Antoinette.”

Both the other men were staring at him with round eyes. “What a

perfectly extraordinary notion!” cried Flambeau. “Do you really think

that is the truth?”

“I am perfectly sure it isn’t,” answered Father Brown, “only you said

that nobody could connect snuff and diamonds and clockwork and candles.

I give you that connection off-hand. The real truth, I am very sure,

lies deeper.”

He paused a moment and listened to the wailing of the wind in the

turrets. Then he said, “The late Earl of Glengyle was a thief. He lived

a second and darker life as a desperate housebreaker. He did not have

any candlesticks because he only used these candles cut short in the

little lantern he carried. The snuff he employed as the fiercest French

criminals have used pepper: to fling it suddenly in dense masses in

the face of a captor or pursuer. But the final proof is in the curious

coincidence of the diamonds and the small steel wheels. Surely that

makes everything plain to you? Diamonds and small steel wheels are the

only two instruments with which you can cut out a pane of glass.”

The bough of a broken pine tree lashed heavily in the blast against the

windowpane behind them, as if in parody of a burglar, but they did not

turn round. Their eyes were fastened on Father Brown.

“Diamonds and small wheels,” repeated Craven ruminating. “Is that all

that makes you think it the true explanation?”

“I don’t think it the true explanation,” replied the priest placidly;

“but you said that nobody could connect the four things. The true

tale, of course, is something much more humdrum. Glengyle had found,

or thought he had found, precious stones on his estate. Somebody had

bamboozled him with those loose brilliants, saying they were found in

the castle caverns. The little wheels are some diamond-cutting affair.

He had to do the thing very roughly and in a small way, with the help of

a few shepherds or rude fellows on these hills. Snuff is the one great

luxury of such Scotch shepherds; it’s the one thing with which you can

bribe them. They didn’t have candlesticks because they didn’t want them;

they held the candles in their hands when they explored the caves.”

“Is that all?” asked Flambeau after a long pause. “Have we got to the

dull truth at last?”

“Oh, no,” said Father Brown.

As the wind died in the most distant pine woods with a long hoot as of

mockery Father Brown, with an utterly impassive face, went on:

“I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly

connect snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false

philosophies will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle

Castle. But we want the real explanation of the castle and the universe.

But are there no other exhibits?”

Craven laughed, and Flambeau rose smiling to his feet and strolled down

the long table.

“Items five, six, seven, etc.,” he said, “and certainly more varied than

instructive. A curious collection, not of lead pencils, but of the lead

out of lead pencils. A senseless stick of bamboo, with the top rather

splintered. It might be the instrument of the crime. Only, there isn’t

any crime. The only other things are a few old missals and little

Catholic pictures, which the Ogilvies kept, I suppose, from the Middle

Ages--their family pride being stronger than their Puritanism. We

only put them in the museum because they seem curiously cut about and

defaced.”

The heady tempest without drove a dreadful wrack of clouds across

Glengyle and threw the long room into darkness as Father Brown picked up

the little illuminated pages to examine them. He spoke before the drift

of darkness had passed; but it was the voice of an utterly new man.

“Mr. Craven,” said he, talking like a man ten years younger, “you have

got a legal warrant, haven’t you, to go up and examine that grave?

The sooner we do it the better, and get to the bottom of this horrible

affair. If I were you I should start now.”

“Now,” repeated the astonished detective, “and why now?”

“Because this is serious,” answered Brown; “this is not spilt snuff or

loose pebbles, that might be there for a hundred reasons. There is only

one reason I know of for this being done; and the reason goes down to

the roots of the world. These religious pictures are not just dirtied

or torn or scrawled over, which might be done in idleness or bigotry, by

children or by Protestants. These have been treated very carefully--and

very queerly. In every place where the great ornamented name of God

comes in the old illuminations it has been elaborately taken out. The

only other thing that has been removed is the halo round the head of the

Child Jesus. Therefore, I say, let us get our warrant and our spade and

our hatchet, and go up and break open that coffin.”

“What do you mean?” demanded the London officer.

“I mean,” answered the little priest, and his voice seemed to rise

slightly in the roar of the gale. “I mean that the great devil of the

universe may be sitting on the top tower of this castle at this moment,

as big as a hundred elephants, and roaring like the Apocalypse. There is

black magic somewhere at the bottom of this.”

“Black magic,” repeated Flambeau in a low voice, for he was too

enlightened a man not to know of such things; “but what can these other

things mean?”

“Oh, something damnable, I suppose,” replied Brown impatiently. “How

should I know? How can I guess all their mazes down below? Perhaps you

can make a torture out of snuff and bamboo. Perhaps lunatics lust after

wax and steel filings. Perhaps there is a maddening drug made of lead

pencils! Our shortest cut to the mystery is up the hill to the grave.”

His comrades hardly knew that they had obeyed and followed him till a

blast of the night wind nearly flung them on their faces in the garden.

Nevertheless they had obeyed him like automata; for Craven found

a hatchet in his hand, and the warrant in his pocket; Flambeau was

carrying the heavy spade of the strange gardener; Father Brown was

carrying the little gilt book from which had been torn the name of God.

The path up the hill to the churchyard was crooked but short; only under

that stress of wind it seemed laborious and long. Far as the eye could

see, farther and farther as they mounted the slope, were seas beyond

seas of pines, now all aslope one way under the wind. And that universal

gesture seemed as vain as it was vast, as vain as if that wind were

whistling about some unpeopled and purposeless planet. Through all that

infinite growth of grey-blue forests sang, shrill and high, that ancient

sorrow that is in the heart of all heathen things. One could fancy that

the voices from the under world of unfathomable foliage were cries of

the lost and wandering pagan gods: gods who had gone roaming in that

irrational forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.

“You see,” said Father Brown in low but easy tone, “Scotch people before

Scotland existed were a curious lot. In fact, they’re a curious lot

still. But in the prehistoric times I fancy they really worshipped

demons. That,” he added genially, “is why they jumped at the Puritan

theology.”

“My friend,” said Flambeau, turning in a kind of fury, “what does all

that snuff mean?”

“My friend,” replied Brown, with equal seriousness, “there is one mark

of all genuine religions: materialism. Now, devil-worship is a perfectly

genuine religion.”

They had come up on the grassy scalp of the hill, one of the few bald

spots that stood clear of the crashing and roaring pine forest. A mean

enclosure, partly timber and partly wire, rattled in the tempest to tell

them the border of the graveyard. But by the time Inspector Craven had

come to the corner of the grave, and Flambeau had planted his spade

point downwards and leaned on it, they were both almost as shaken as the

shaky wood and wire. At the foot of the grave grew great tall

thistles, grey and silver in their decay. Once or twice, when a ball

of thistledown broke under the breeze and flew past him, Craven jumped

slightly as if it had been an arrow.

Flambeau drove the blade of his spade through the whistling grass into

the wet clay below. Then he seemed to stop and lean on it as on a staff.

“Go on,” said the priest very gently. “We are only trying to find the

truth. What are you afraid of?”

“I am afraid of finding it,” said Flambeau.

The London detective spoke suddenly in a high crowing voice that was

meant to be conversational and cheery. “I wonder why he really did hide

himself like that. Something nasty, I suppose; was he a leper?”

“Something worse than that,” said Flambeau.

“And what do you imagine,” asked the other, “would be worse than a

leper?”

“I don’t imagine it,” said Flambeau.

He dug for some dreadful minutes in silence, and then said in a choked

voice, “I’m afraid of his not being the right shape.”

“Nor was that piece of paper, you know,” said Father Brown quietly, “and

we survived even that piece of paper.”

Flambeau dug on with a blind energy. But the tempest had shouldered away

the choking grey clouds that clung to the hills like smoke and revealed

grey fields of faint starlight before he cleared the shape of a rude

timber coffin, and somehow tipped it up upon the turf. Craven stepped

forward with his axe; a thistle-top touched him, and he flinched. Then

he took a firmer stride, and hacked and wrenched with an energy like

Flambeau’s till the lid was torn off, and all that was there lay

glimmering in the grey starlight.

“Bones,” said Craven; and then he added, “but it is a man,” as if that

were something unexpected.

“Is he,” asked Flambeau in a voice that went oddly up and down, “is he

all right?”

“Seems so,” said the officer huskily, bending over the obscure and

decaying skeleton in the box. “Wait a minute.”

A vast heave went over Flambeau’s huge figure. “And now I come to think

of it,” he cried, “why in the name of madness shouldn’t he be all right?

What is it gets hold of a man on these cursed cold mountains? I think

it’s the black, brainless repetition; all these forests, and over all

an ancient horror of unconsciousness. It’s like the dream of an atheist.

Pine-trees and more pine-trees and millions more pine-trees--”

“God!” cried the man by the coffin, “but he hasn’t got a head.”

While the others stood rigid the priest, for the first time, showed a

leap of startled concern.

“No head!” he repeated. “No head?” as if he had almost expected some

other deficiency.

Half-witted visions of a headless baby born to Glengyle, of a headless

youth hiding himself in the castle, of a headless man pacing those

ancient halls or that gorgeous garden, passed in panorama through their

minds. But even in that stiffened instant the tale took no root in them

and seemed to have no reason in it. They stood listening to the loud

woods and the shrieking sky quite foolishly, like exhausted animals.

Thought seemed to be something enormous that had suddenly slipped out of

their grasp.

“There are three headless men,” said Father Brown, “standing round this

open grave.”

The pale detective from London opened his mouth to speak, and left it

open like a yokel, while a long scream of wind tore the sky; then he

looked at the axe in his hands as if it did not belong to him, and

dropped it.

“Father,” said Flambeau in that infantile and heavy voice he used very

seldom, “what are we to do?”

His friend’s reply came with the pent promptitude of a gun going off.

“Sleep!” cried Father Brown. “Sleep. We have come to the end of the

ways. Do you know what sleep is? Do you know that every man who sleeps

believes in God? It is a sacrament; for it is an act of faith and it is

a food. And we need a sacrament, if only a natural one. Something has

fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps the worst thing that

can fall on them.”

Craven’s parted lips came together to say, “What do you mean?”

The priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered: “We have

found the truth; and the truth makes no sense.”

He went down the path in front of them with a plunging and reckless

step very rare with him, and when they reached the castle again he threw

himself upon sleep with the simplicity of a dog.

Despite his mystic praise of slumber, Father Brown was up earlier than

anyone else except the silent gardener; and was found smoking a big

pipe and watching that expert at his speechless labours in the kitchen

garden. Towards daybreak the rocking storm had ended in roaring rains,

and the day came with a curious freshness. The gardener seemed even

to have been conversing, but at sight of the detectives he planted

his spade sullenly in a bed and, saying something about his breakfast,

shifted along the lines of cabbages and shut himself in the kitchen.

“He’s a valuable man, that,” said Father Brown. “He does the potatoes

amazingly. Still,” he added, with a dispassionate charity, “he has his

faults; which of us hasn’t? He doesn’t dig this bank quite regularly.

There, for instance,” and he stamped suddenly on one spot. “I’m really

very doubtful about that potato.”

“And why?” asked Craven, amused with the little man’s hobby.

“I’m doubtful about it,” said the other, “because old Gow was doubtful

about it himself. He put his spade in methodically in every place but

just this. There must be a mighty fine potato just here.”

Flambeau pulled up the spade and impetuously drove it into the place.

He turned up, under a load of soil, something that did not look like a

potato, but rather like a monstrous, over-domed mushroom. But it struck

the spade with a cold click; it rolled over like a ball, and grinned up

at them.

“The Earl of Glengyle,” said Brown sadly, and looked down heavily at the

skull.

Then, after a momentary meditation, he plucked the spade from Flambeau,

and, saying “We must hide it again,” clamped the skull down in the

earth. Then he leaned his little body and huge head on the great handle

of the spade, that stood up stiffly in the earth, and his eyes were

empty and his forehead full of wrinkles. “If one could only conceive,”

he muttered, “the meaning of this last monstrosity.” And leaning on

the large spade handle, he buried his brows in his hands, as men do in

church.

All the corners of the sky were brightening into blue and silver; the

birds were chattering in the tiny garden trees; so loud it seemed as if

the trees themselves were talking. But the three men were silent enough.

“Well, I give it all up,” said Flambeau at last boisterously. “My brain

and this world don’t fit each other; and there’s an end of it. Snuff,

spoilt Prayer Books, and the insides of musical boxes--what--”

Brown threw up his bothered brow and rapped on the spade handle with an

intolerance quite unusual with him. “Oh, tut, tut, tut, tut!” he

cried. “All that is as plain as a pikestaff. I understood the snuff

and clockwork, and so on, when I first opened my eyes this morning. And

since then I’ve had it out with old Gow, the gardener, who is neither so

deaf nor so stupid as he pretends. There’s nothing amiss about the loose

items. I was wrong about the torn mass-book, too; there’s no harm in

that. But it’s this last business. Desecrating graves and stealing dead

men’s heads--surely there’s harm in that? Surely there’s black magic

still in that? That doesn’t fit in to the quite simple story of the

snuff and the candles.” And, striding about again, he smoked moodily.

“My friend,” said Flambeau, with a grim humour, “you must be careful

with me and remember I was once a criminal. The great advantage of that

estate was that I always made up the story myself, and acted it as quick

as I chose. This detective business of waiting about is too much for my

French impatience. All my life, for good or evil, I have done things at

the instant; I always fought duels the next morning; I always paid bills

on the nail; I never even put off a visit to the dentist--”

Father Brown’s pipe fell out of his mouth and broke into three pieces

on the gravel path. He stood rolling his eyes, the exact picture of

an idiot. “Lord, what a turnip I am!” he kept saying. “Lord, what a

turnip!” Then, in a somewhat groggy kind of way, he began to laugh.

“The dentist!” he repeated. “Six hours in the spiritual abyss, and all

because I never thought of the dentist! Such a simple, such a beautiful

and peaceful thought! Friends, we have passed a night in hell; but now

the sun is risen, the birds are singing, and the radiant form of the

dentist consoles the world.”

“I will get some sense out of this,” cried Flambeau, striding forward,

“if I use the tortures of the Inquisition.”

Father Brown repressed what appeared to be a momentary disposition to

dance on the now sunlit lawn and cried quite piteously, like a child,

“Oh, let me be silly a little. You don’t know how unhappy I have been.

And now I know that there has been no deep sin in this business at all.

Only a little lunacy, perhaps--and who minds that?”

He spun round once more, then faced them with gravity.

“This is not a story of crime,” he said; “rather it is the story of a

strange and crooked honesty. We are dealing with the one man on earth,

perhaps, who has taken no more than his due. It is a study in the savage

living logic that has been the religion of this race.

“That old local rhyme about the house of Glengyle--

As green sap to the simmer trees

Is red gold to the Ogilvies--

was literal as well as metaphorical. It did not merely mean that the

Glengyles sought for wealth; it was also true that they literally

gathered gold; they had a huge collection of ornaments and utensils in

that metal. They were, in fact, misers whose mania took that turn.

In the light of that fact, run through all the things we found in the

castle. Diamonds without their gold rings; candles without their gold

candlesticks; snuff without the gold snuff-boxes; pencil-leads without

the gold pencil-cases; a walking stick without its gold top; clockwork

without the gold clocks--or rather watches. And, mad as it sounds,

because the halos and the name of God in the old missals were of real

gold; these also were taken away.”

The garden seemed to brighten, the grass to grow gayer in the

strengthening sun, as the crazy truth was told. Flambeau lit a cigarette

as his friend went on.

“Were taken away,” continued Father Brown; “were taken away--but not

stolen. Thieves would never have left this mystery. Thieves would have

taken the gold snuff-boxes, snuff and all; the gold pencil-cases, lead

and all. We have to deal with a man with a peculiar conscience, but

certainly a conscience. I found that mad moralist this morning in the

kitchen garden yonder, and I heard the whole story.

“The late Archibald Ogilvie was the nearest approach to a good man

ever born at Glengyle. But his bitter virtue took the turn of the

misanthrope; he moped over the dishonesty of his ancestors, from which,

somehow, he generalised a dishonesty of all men. More especially he

distrusted philanthropy or free-giving; and he swore if he could

find one man who took his exact rights he should have all the gold of

Glengyle. Having delivered this defiance to humanity he shut himself

up, without the smallest expectation of its being answered. One day,

however, a deaf and seemingly senseless lad from a distant village

brought him a belated telegram; and Glengyle, in his acrid pleasantry,

gave him a new farthing. At least he thought he had done so, but when

he turned over his change he found the new farthing still there and a

sovereign gone. The accident offered him vistas of sneering speculation.

Either way, the boy would show the greasy greed of the species. Either

he would vanish, a thief stealing a coin; or he would sneak back with

it virtuously, a snob seeking a reward. In the middle of that night Lord

Glengyle was knocked up out of his bed--for he lived alone--and forced

to open the door to the deaf idiot. The idiot brought with him, not

the sovereign, but exactly nineteen shillings and eleven-pence

three-farthings in change.

“Then the wild exactitude of this action took hold of the mad lord’s

brain like fire. He swore he was Diogenes, that had long sought an

honest man, and at last had found one. He made a new will, which I have

seen. He took the literal youth into his huge, neglected house, and

trained him up as his solitary servant and--after an odd manner--his

heir. And whatever that queer creature understands, he understood

absolutely his lord’s two fixed ideas: first, that the letter of right

is everything; and second, that he himself was to have the gold of

Glengyle. So far, that is all; and that is simple. He has stripped the

house of gold, and taken not a grain that was not gold; not so much as

a grain of snuff. He lifted the gold leaf off an old illumination, fully

satisfied that he left the rest unspoilt. All that I understood; but I

could not understand this skull business. I was really uneasy about that

human head buried among the potatoes. It distressed me--till Flambeau

said the word.

“It will be all right. He will put the skull back in the grave, when he

has taken the gold out of the tooth.”

And, indeed, when Flambeau crossed the hill that morning, he saw that

strange being, the just miser, digging at the desecrated grave, the

plaid round his throat thrashing out in the mountain wind; the sober top

hat on his head.