Chương Chương 9 · The Hammer of God

. The Hammer of God

The little village of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep

that the tall spire of its church seemed only like the peak of a small

mountain. At the foot of the church stood a smithy, generally red with

fires and always littered with hammers and scraps of iron; opposite to

this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was “The Blue Boar,” the only

inn of the place. It was upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden

and silver daybreak, that two brothers met in the street and spoke;

though one was beginning the day and the other finishing it. The Rev.

and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was making his way to some

austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the Hon.

Norman Bohun, his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting

in evening dress on the bench outside “The Blue Boar,” drinking what

the philosophic observer was free to regard either as his last glass on

Tuesday or his first on Wednesday. The colonel was not particular.

The Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating

from the Middle Ages, and their pennon had actually seen Palestine.

But it is a great mistake to suppose that such houses stand high

in chivalric tradition. Few except the poor preserve traditions.

Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions. The Bohuns had been

Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under Queen Victoria. But like more

than one of the really ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two

centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even

come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly

human about the colonel’s wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic

resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous

clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with

hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked merely blonde and

leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they

looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long

yellow moustaches; on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to

jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into his face. Over his evening clothes

he wore a curious pale yellow coat that looked more like a very light

dressing gown than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck an

extraordinary broad-brimmed hat of a bright green colour, evidently some

oriental curiosity caught up at random. He was proud of appearing in

such incongruous attires--proud of the fact that he always made them

look congruous.

His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but

he was buttoned up to the chin in black, and his face was clean-shaven,

cultivated, and a little nervous. He seemed to live for nothing but his

religion; but there were some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was

a Presbyterian) that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of

God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another

and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his

brother raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful, while the

man’s practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was mostly an

ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer, and

was founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but

in peculiar places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry.

He was at the moment about to enter the church through the yard of

the smithy, but stopped and frowned a little as he saw his brother’s

cavernous eyes staring in the same direction. On the hypothesis that the

colonel was interested in the church he did not waste any speculations.

There only remained the blacksmith’s shop, and though the blacksmith was

a Puritan and none of his people, Wilfred Bohun had heard some scandals

about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He flung a suspicious look

across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing to speak to him.

“Good morning, Wilfred,” he said. “Like a good landlord I am watching

sleeplessly over my people. I am going to call on the blacksmith.”

Wilfred looked at the ground, and said: “The blacksmith is out. He is

over at Greenford.”

“I know,” answered the other with silent laughter; “that is why I am

calling on him.”

“Norman,” said the cleric, with his eye on a pebble in the road, “are

you ever afraid of thunderbolts?”

“What do you mean?” asked the colonel. “Is your hobby meteorology?”

“I mean,” said Wilfred, without looking up, “do you ever think that God

might strike you in the street?”

“I beg your pardon,” said the colonel; “I see your hobby is folk-lore.”

“I know your hobby is blasphemy,” retorted the religious man, stung in

the one live place of his nature. “But if you do not fear God, you have

good reason to fear man.”

The elder raised his eyebrows politely. “Fear man?” he said.

“Barnes the blacksmith is the biggest and strongest man for forty

miles round,” said the clergyman sternly. “I know you are no coward or

weakling, but he could throw you over the wall.”

This struck home, being true, and the lowering line by mouth and nostril

darkened and deepened. For a moment he stood with the heavy sneer on his

face. But in an instant Colonel Bohun had recovered his own cruel good

humour and laughed, showing two dog-like front teeth under his yellow

moustache. “In that case, my dear Wilfred,” he said quite carelessly,

“it was wise for the last of the Bohuns to come out partially in

armour.”

And he took off the queer round hat covered with green, showing that

it was lined within with steel. Wilfred recognised it indeed as a light

Japanese or Chinese helmet torn down from a trophy that hung in the old

family hall.

“It was the first hat to hand,” explained his brother airily; “always

the nearest hat--and the nearest woman.”

“The blacksmith is away at Greenford,” said Wilfred quietly; “the time

of his return is unsettled.”

And with that he turned and went into the church with bowed head,

crossing himself like one who wishes to be quit of an unclean spirit.

He was anxious to forget such grossness in the cool twilight of his tall

Gothic cloisters; but on that morning it was fated that his still round

of religious exercises should be everywhere arrested by small shocks.

As he entered the church, hitherto always empty at that hour, a kneeling

figure rose hastily to its feet and came towards the full daylight of

the doorway. When the curate saw it he stood still with surprise. For

the early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a nephew of

the blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the church or

for anything else. He was always called “Mad Joe,” and seemed to have

no other name; he was a dark, strong, slouching lad, with a heavy white

face, dark straight hair, and a mouth always open. As he passed the

priest, his moon-calf countenance gave no hint of what he had been doing

or thinking of. He had never been known to pray before. What sort of

prayers was he saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.

Wilfred Bohun stood rooted to the spot long enough to see the idiot go

out into the sunshine, and even to see his dissolute brother hail him

with a sort of avuncular jocularity. The last thing he saw was the

colonel throwing pennies at the open mouth of Joe, with the serious

appearance of trying to hit it.

This ugly sunlit picture of the stupidity and cruelty of the earth sent

the ascetic finally to his prayers for purification and new thoughts.

He went up to a pew in the gallery, which brought him under a coloured

window which he loved and always quieted his spirit; a blue window

with an angel carrying lilies. There he began to think less about the

half-wit, with his livid face and mouth like a fish. He began to think

less of his evil brother, pacing like a lean lion in his horrible

hunger. He sank deeper and deeper into those cold and sweet colours of

silver blossoms and sapphire sky.

In this place half an hour afterwards he was found by Gibbs, the village

cobbler, who had been sent for him in some haste. He got to his feet

with promptitude, for he knew that no small matter would have brought

Gibbs into such a place at all. The cobbler was, as in many villages,

an atheist, and his appearance in church was a shade more extraordinary

than Mad Joe’s. It was a morning of theological enigmas.

“What is it?” asked Wilfred Bohun rather stiffly, but putting out a

trembling hand for his hat.

The atheist spoke in a tone that, coming from him, was quite startlingly

respectful, and even, as it were, huskily sympathetic.

“You must excuse me, sir,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “but we didn’t

think it right not to let you know at once. I’m afraid a rather dreadful

thing has happened, sir. I’m afraid your brother--”

Wilfred clenched his frail hands. “What devilry has he done now?” he

cried in voluntary passion.

“Why, sir,” said the cobbler, coughing, “I’m afraid he’s done nothing,

and won’t do anything. I’m afraid he’s done for. You had really better

come down, sir.”

The curate followed the cobbler down a short winding stair which brought

them out at an entrance rather higher than the street. Bohun saw the

tragedy in one glance, flat underneath him like a plan. In the yard

of the smithy were standing five or six men mostly in black, one in

an inspector’s uniform. They included the doctor, the Presbyterian

minister, and the priest from the Roman Catholic chapel, to which the

blacksmith’s wife belonged. The latter was speaking to her, indeed,

very rapidly, in an undertone, as she, a magnificent woman with red-gold

hair, was sobbing blindly on a bench. Between these two groups, and

just clear of the main heap of hammers, lay a man in evening dress,

spread-eagled and flat on his face. From the height above Wilfred could

have sworn to every item of his costume and appearance, down to the

Bohun rings upon his fingers; but the skull was only a hideous splash,

like a star of blackness and blood.

Wilfred Bohun gave but one glance, and ran down the steps into the yard.

The doctor, who was the family physician, saluted him, but he scarcely

took any notice. He could only stammer out: “My brother is dead. What

does it mean? What is this horrible mystery?” There was an unhappy

silence; and then the cobbler, the most outspoken man present, answered:

“Plenty of horror, sir,” he said; “but not much mystery.”

“What do you mean?” asked Wilfred, with a white face.

“It’s plain enough,” answered Gibbs. “There is only one man for forty

miles round that could have struck such a blow as that, and he’s the man

that had most reason to.”

“We must not prejudge anything,” put in the doctor, a tall,

black-bearded man, rather nervously; “but it is competent for me to

corroborate what Mr. Gibbs says about the nature of the blow, sir; it

is an incredible blow. Mr. Gibbs says that only one man in this district

could have done it. I should have said myself that nobody could have

done it.”

A shudder of superstition went through the slight figure of the curate.

“I can hardly understand,” he said.

“Mr. Bohun,” said the doctor in a low voice, “metaphors literally fail

me. It is inadequate to say that the skull was smashed to bits like an

eggshell. Fragments of bone were driven into the body and the ground

like bullets into a mud wall. It was the hand of a giant.”

He was silent a moment, looking grimly through his glasses; then he

added: “The thing has one advantage--that it clears most people of

suspicion at one stroke. If you or I or any normally made man in the

country were accused of this crime, we should be acquitted as an infant

would be acquitted of stealing the Nelson column.”

“That’s what I say,” repeated the cobbler obstinately; “there’s only one

man that could have done it, and he’s the man that would have done it.

Where’s Simeon Barnes, the blacksmith?”

“He’s over at Greenford,” faltered the curate.

“More likely over in France,” muttered the cobbler.

“No; he is in neither of those places,” said a small and colourless

voice, which came from the little Roman priest who had joined the group.

“As a matter of fact, he is coming up the road at this moment.”

The little priest was not an interesting man to look at, having stubbly

brown hair and a round and stolid face. But if he had been as splendid

as Apollo no one would have looked at him at that moment. Everyone

turned round and peered at the pathway which wound across the plain

below, along which was indeed walking, at his own huge stride and with

a hammer on his shoulder, Simeon the smith. He was a bony and gigantic

man, with deep, dark, sinister eyes and a dark chin beard. He was

walking and talking quietly with two other men; and though he was never

specially cheerful, he seemed quite at his ease.

“My God!” cried the atheistic cobbler, “and there’s the hammer he did it

with.”

“No,” said the inspector, a sensible-looking man with a sandy moustache,

speaking for the first time. “There’s the hammer he did it with over

there by the church wall. We have left it and the body exactly as they

are.”

All glanced round and the short priest went across and looked down in

silence at the tool where it lay. It was one of the smallest and the

lightest of the hammers, and would not have caught the eye among the

rest; but on the iron edge of it were blood and yellow hair.

After a silence the short priest spoke without looking up, and there was

a new note in his dull voice. “Mr. Gibbs was hardly right,” he said, “in

saying that there is no mystery. There is at least the mystery of why so

big a man should attempt so big a blow with so little a hammer.”

“Oh, never mind that,” cried Gibbs, in a fever. “What are we to do with

Simeon Barnes?”

“Leave him alone,” said the priest quietly. “He is coming here of

himself. I know those two men with him. They are very good fellows from

Greenford, and they have come over about the Presbyterian chapel.”

Even as he spoke the tall smith swung round the corner of the church,

and strode into his own yard. Then he stood there quite still, and the

hammer fell from his hand. The inspector, who had preserved impenetrable

propriety, immediately went up to him.

“I won’t ask you, Mr. Barnes,” he said, “whether you know anything about

what has happened here. You are not bound to say. I hope you don’t know,

and that you will be able to prove it. But I must go through the form

of arresting you in the King’s name for the murder of Colonel Norman

Bohun.”

“You are not bound to say anything,” said the cobbler in officious

excitement. “They’ve got to prove everything. They haven’t proved yet

that it is Colonel Bohun, with the head all smashed up like that.”

“That won’t wash,” said the doctor aside to the priest. “That’s out of

the detective stories. I was the colonel’s medical man, and I knew his

body better than he did. He had very fine hands, but quite peculiar

ones. The second and third fingers were the same length. Oh, that’s the

colonel right enough.”

As he glanced at the brained corpse upon the ground the iron eyes of the

motionless blacksmith followed them and rested there also.

“Is Colonel Bohun dead?” said the smith quite calmly. “Then he’s

damned.”

“Don’t say anything! Oh, don’t say anything,” cried the atheist cobbler,

dancing about in an ecstasy of admiration of the English legal system.

For no man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

The blacksmith turned on him over his shoulder the august face of a

fanatic.

“It’s well for you infidels to dodge like foxes because the world’s law

favours you,” he said; “but God guards His own in His pocket, as you

shall see this day.”

Then he pointed to the colonel and said: “When did this dog die in his

sins?”

“Moderate your language,” said the doctor.

“Moderate the Bible’s language, and I’ll moderate mine. When did he

die?”

“I saw him alive at six o’clock this morning,” stammered Wilfred Bohun.

“God is good,” said the smith. “Mr. Inspector, I have not the slightest

objection to being arrested. It is you who may object to arresting me.

I don’t mind leaving the court without a stain on my character. You do

mind perhaps leaving the court with a bad set-back in your career.”

The solid inspector for the first time looked at the blacksmith with a

lively eye; as did everybody else, except the short, strange priest, who

was still looking down at the little hammer that had dealt the dreadful

blow.

“There are two men standing outside this shop,” went on the blacksmith

with ponderous lucidity, “good tradesmen in Greenford whom you all know,

who will swear that they saw me from before midnight till daybreak and

long after in the committee room of our Revival Mission, which sits all

night, we save souls so fast. In Greenford itself twenty people could

swear to me for all that time. If I were a heathen, Mr. Inspector, I

would let you walk on to your downfall. But as a Christian man I feel

bound to give you your chance, and ask you whether you will hear my

alibi now or in court.”

The inspector seemed for the first time disturbed, and said, “Of course

I should be glad to clear you altogether now.”

The smith walked out of his yard with the same long and easy stride, and

returned to his two friends from Greenford, who were indeed friends of

nearly everyone present. Each of them said a few words which no one ever

thought of disbelieving. When they had spoken, the innocence of Simeon

stood up as solid as the great church above them.

One of those silences struck the group which are more strange and

insufferable than any speech. Madly, in order to make conversation, the

curate said to the Catholic priest:

“You seem very much interested in that hammer, Father Brown.”

“Yes, I am,” said Father Brown; “why is it such a small hammer?”

The doctor swung round on him.

“By George, that’s true,” he cried; “who would use a little hammer with

ten larger hammers lying about?”

Then he lowered his voice in the curate’s ear and said: “Only the kind

of person that can’t lift a large hammer. It is not a question of force

or courage between the sexes. It’s a question of lifting power in the

shoulders. A bold woman could commit ten murders with a light hammer and

never turn a hair. She could not kill a beetle with a heavy one.”

Wilfred Bohun was staring at him with a sort of hypnotised horror,

while Father Brown listened with his head a little on one side, really

interested and attentive. The doctor went on with more hissing emphasis:

“Why do these idiots always assume that the only person who hates the

wife’s lover is the wife’s husband? Nine times out of ten the person

who most hates the wife’s lover is the wife. Who knows what insolence or

treachery he had shown her--look there!”

He made a momentary gesture towards the red-haired woman on the bench.

She had lifted her head at last and the tears were drying on her

splendid face. But the eyes were fixed on the corpse with an electric

glare that had in it something of idiocy.

The Rev. Wilfred Bohun made a limp gesture as if waving away all desire

to know; but Father Brown, dusting off his sleeve some ashes blown from

the furnace, spoke in his indifferent way.

“You are like so many doctors,” he said; “your mental science is really

suggestive. It is your physical science that is utterly impossible. I

agree that the woman wants to kill the co-respondent much more than the

petitioner does. And I agree that a woman will always pick up a small

hammer instead of a big one. But the difficulty is one of physical

impossibility. No woman ever born could have smashed a man’s skull

out flat like that.” Then he added reflectively, after a pause: “These

people haven’t grasped the whole of it. The man was actually wearing an

iron helmet, and the blow scattered it like broken glass. Look at that

woman. Look at her arms.”

Silence held them all up again, and then the doctor said rather sulkily:

“Well, I may be wrong; there are objections to everything. But I stick

to the main point. No man but an idiot would pick up that little hammer

if he could use a big hammer.”

With that the lean and quivering hands of Wilfred Bohun went up to his

head and seemed to clutch his scanty yellow hair. After an instant they

dropped, and he cried: “That was the word I wanted; you have said the

word.”

Then he continued, mastering his discomposure: “The words you said were,

‘No man but an idiot would pick up the small hammer.’”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “Well?”

“Well,” said the curate, “no man but an idiot did.” The rest stared

at him with eyes arrested and riveted, and he went on in a febrile and

feminine agitation.

“I am a priest,” he cried unsteadily, “and a priest should be no shedder

of blood. I--I mean that he should bring no one to the gallows. And I

thank God that I see the criminal clearly now--because he is a criminal

who cannot be brought to the gallows.”

“You will not denounce him?” inquired the doctor.

“He would not be hanged if I did denounce him,” answered Wilfred with

a wild but curiously happy smile. “When I went into the church this

morning I found a madman praying there--that poor Joe, who has been

wrong all his life. God knows what he prayed; but with such strange folk

it is not incredible to suppose that their prayers are all upside down.

Very likely a lunatic would pray before killing a man. When I last saw

poor Joe he was with my brother. My brother was mocking him.”

“By Jove!” cried the doctor, “this is talking at last. But how do you

explain--”

The Rev. Wilfred was almost trembling with the excitement of his

own glimpse of the truth. “Don’t you see; don’t you see,” he cried

feverishly; “that is the only theory that covers both the queer things,

that answers both the riddles. The two riddles are the little hammer and

the big blow. The smith might have struck the big blow, but would not

have chosen the little hammer. His wife would have chosen the little

hammer, but she could not have struck the big blow. But the madman might

have done both. As for the little hammer--why, he was mad and might have

picked up anything. And for the big blow, have you never heard, doctor,

that a maniac in his paroxysm may have the strength of ten men?”

The doctor drew a deep breath and then said, “By golly, I believe you’ve

got it.”

Father Brown had fixed his eyes on the speaker so long and steadily

as to prove that his large grey, ox-like eyes were not quite so

insignificant as the rest of his face. When silence had fallen he said

with marked respect: “Mr. Bohun, yours is the only theory yet propounded

which holds water every way and is essentially unassailable. I think,

therefore, that you deserve to be told, on my positive knowledge, that

it is not the true one.” And with that the old little man walked away

and stared again at the hammer.

“That fellow seems to know more than he ought to,” whispered the doctor

peevishly to Wilfred. “Those popish priests are deucedly sly.”

“No, no,” said Bohun, with a sort of wild fatigue. “It was the lunatic.

It was the lunatic.”

The group of the two clerics and the doctor had fallen away from

the more official group containing the inspector and the man he had

arrested. Now, however, that their own party had broken up, they heard

voices from the others. The priest looked up quietly and then looked

down again as he heard the blacksmith say in a loud voice:

“I hope I’ve convinced you, Mr. Inspector. I’m a strong man, as you say,

but I couldn’t have flung my hammer bang here from Greenford. My hammer

hasn’t got wings that it should come flying half a mile over hedges and

fields.”

The inspector laughed amicably and said: “No, I think you can be

considered out of it, though it’s one of the rummiest coincidences I

ever saw. I can only ask you to give us all the assistance you can in

finding a man as big and strong as yourself. By George! you might be

useful, if only to hold him! I suppose you yourself have no guess at the

man?”

“I may have a guess,” said the pale smith, “but it is not at a man.”

Then, seeing the scared eyes turn towards his wife on the bench, he put

his huge hand on her shoulder and said: “Nor a woman either.”

“What do you mean?” asked the inspector jocularly. “You don’t think cows

use hammers, do you?”

“I think no thing of flesh held that hammer,” said the blacksmith in a

stifled voice; “mortally speaking, I think the man died alone.”

Wilfred made a sudden forward movement and peered at him with burning

eyes.

“Do you mean to say, Barnes,” came the sharp voice of the cobbler, “that

the hammer jumped up of itself and knocked the man down?”

“Oh, you gentlemen may stare and snigger,” cried Simeon; “you clergymen

who tell us on Sunday in what a stillness the Lord smote Sennacherib. I

believe that One who walks invisible in every house defended the honour

of mine, and laid the defiler dead before the door of it. I believe the

force in that blow was just the force there is in earthquakes, and no

force less.”

Wilfred said, with a voice utterly undescribable: “I told Norman myself

to beware of the thunderbolt.”

“That agent is outside my jurisdiction,” said the inspector with a

slight smile.

“You are not outside His,” answered the smith; “see you to it,” and,

turning his broad back, he went into the house.

The shaken Wilfred was led away by Father Brown, who had an easy and

friendly way with him. “Let us get out of this horrid place, Mr. Bohun,”

he said. “May I look inside your church? I hear it’s one of the oldest

in England. We take some interest, you know,” he added with a comical

grimace, “in old English churches.”

Wilfred Bohun did not smile, for humour was never his strong point. But

he nodded rather eagerly, being only too ready to explain the

Gothic splendours to someone more likely to be sympathetic than the

Presbyterian blacksmith or the atheist cobbler.

“By all means,” he said; “let us go in at this side.” And he led the way

into the high side entrance at the top of the flight of steps. Father

Brown was mounting the first step to follow him when he felt a hand on

his shoulder, and turned to behold the dark, thin figure of the doctor,

his face darker yet with suspicion.

“Sir,” said the physician harshly, “you appear to know some secrets

in this black business. May I ask if you are going to keep them to

yourself?”

“Why, doctor,” answered the priest, smiling quite pleasantly, “there is

one very good reason why a man of my trade should keep things to himself

when he is not sure of them, and that is that it is so constantly his

duty to keep them to himself when he is sure of them. But if you think

I have been discourteously reticent with you or anyone, I will go to the

extreme limit of my custom. I will give you two very large hints.”

“Well, sir?” said the doctor gloomily.

“First,” said Father Brown quietly, “the thing is quite in your

own province. It is a matter of physical science. The blacksmith is

mistaken, not perhaps in saying that the blow was divine, but certainly

in saying that it came by a miracle. It was no miracle, doctor, except

in so far as man is himself a miracle, with his strange and wicked and

yet half-heroic heart. The force that smashed that skull was a force

well known to scientists--one of the most frequently debated of the laws

of nature.”

The doctor, who was looking at him with frowning intentness, only said:

“And the other hint?”

“The other hint is this,” said the priest. “Do you remember the

blacksmith, though he believes in miracles, talking scornfully of the

impossible fairy tale that his hammer had wings and flew half a mile

across country?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “I remember that.”

“Well,” added Father Brown, with a broad smile, “that fairy tale was the

nearest thing to the real truth that has been said today.” And with that

he turned his back and stumped up the steps after the curate.

The Reverend Wilfred, who had been waiting for him, pale and impatient,

as if this little delay were the last straw for his nerves, led him

immediately to his favourite corner of the church, that part of the

gallery closest to the carved roof and lit by the wonderful window

with the angel. The little Latin priest explored and admired everything

exhaustively, talking cheerfully but in a low voice all the time.

When in the course of his investigation he found the side exit and the

winding stair down which Wilfred had rushed to find his brother dead,

Father Brown ran not down but up, with the agility of a monkey, and his

clear voice came from an outer platform above.

“Come up here, Mr. Bohun,” he called. “The air will do you good.”

Bohun followed him, and came out on a kind of stone gallery or balcony

outside the building, from which one could see the illimitable plain

in which their small hill stood, wooded away to the purple horizon

and dotted with villages and farms. Clear and square, but quite small

beneath them, was the blacksmith’s yard, where the inspector still stood

taking notes and the corpse still lay like a smashed fly.

“Might be the map of the world, mightn’t it?” said Father Brown.

“Yes,” said Bohun very gravely, and nodded his head.

Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building

plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to

suicide. There is that element of Titan energy in the architecture of

the Middle Ages that, from whatever aspect it be seen, it always seems

to be rushing away, like the strong back of some maddened horse. This

church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with old

fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it

from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw

it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit.

For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible

aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the

dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things

great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air. Details of stone,

enormous by their proximity, were relieved against a pattern of fields

and farms, pygmy in their distance. A carved bird or beast at a corner

seemed like some vast walking or flying dragon wasting the pastures and

villages below. The whole atmosphere was dizzy and dangerous, as if men

were upheld in air amid the gyrating wings of colossal genii; and the

whole of that old church, as tall and rich as a cathedral, seemed to sit

upon the sunlit country like a cloudburst.

“I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these

high places even to pray,” said Father Brown. “Heights were made to be

looked at, not to be looked from.”

“Do you mean that one may fall over,” asked Wilfred.

“I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,” said the other

priest.

“I scarcely understand you,” remarked Bohun indistinctly.

“Look at that blacksmith, for instance,” went on Father Brown calmly; “a

good man, but not a Christian--hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his

Scotch religion was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags,

and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven.

Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley;

only small things from the peak.”

“But he--he didn’t do it,” said Bohun tremulously.

“No,” said the other in an odd voice; “we know he didn’t do it.”

After a moment he resumed, looking tranquilly out over the plain with

his pale grey eyes. “I knew a man,” he said, “who began by worshipping

with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely

places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And

once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn

under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was

God. So that, though he was a good man, he committed a great crime.”

Wilfred’s face was turned away, but his bony hands turned blue and white

as they tightened on the parapet of stone.

“He thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the

sinner. He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling

with other men upon a floor. But he saw all men walking about like

insects. He saw one especially strutting just below him, insolent and

evident by a bright green hat--a poisonous insect.”

Rooks cawed round the corners of the belfry; but there was no other

sound till Father Brown went on.

“This also tempted him, that he had in his hand one of the most awful

engines of nature; I mean gravitation, that mad and quickening rush by

which all earth’s creatures fly back to her heart when released. See,

the inspector is strutting just below us in the smithy. If I were to

toss a pebble over this parapet it would be something like a bullet

by the time it struck him. If I were to drop a hammer--even a small

hammer--”

Wilfred Bohun threw one leg over the parapet, and Father Brown had him

in a minute by the collar.

“Not by that door,” he said quite gently; “that door leads to hell.”

Bohun staggered back against the wall, and stared at him with frightful

eyes.

“How do you know all this?” he cried. “Are you a devil?”

“I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all

devils in my heart. Listen to me,” he said after a short pause. “I know

what you did--at least, I can guess the great part of it. When you left

your brother you were racked with no unrighteous rage, to the extent

even that you snatched up a small hammer, half inclined to kill him with

his foulness on his mouth. Recoiling, you thrust it under your buttoned

coat instead, and rushed into the church. You pray wildly in many

places, under the angel window, upon the platform above, and a higher

platform still, from which you could see the colonel’s Eastern hat like

the back of a green beetle crawling about. Then something snapped in

your soul, and you let God’s thunderbolt fall.”

Wilfred put a weak hand to his head, and asked in a low voice: “How did

you know that his hat looked like a green beetle?”

“Oh, that,” said the other with the shadow of a smile, “that was common

sense. But hear me further. I say I know all this; but no one else shall

know it. The next step is for you; I shall take no more steps; I will

seal this with the seal of confession. If you ask me why, there are many

reasons, and only one that concerns you. I leave things to you because

you have not yet gone very far wrong, as assassins go. You did not help

to fix the crime on the smith when it was easy; or on his wife, when

that was easy. You tried to fix it on the imbecile because you knew that

he could not suffer. That was one of the gleams that it is my business

to find in assassins. And now come down into the village, and go your

own way as free as the wind; for I have said my last word.”

They went down the winding stairs in utter silence, and came out into

the sunlight by the smithy. Wilfred Bohun carefully unlatched the wooden

gate of the yard, and going up to the inspector, said: “I wish to give

myself up; I have killed my brother.”