第 二 章 · The Secret Garden

. The Secret Garden

Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, was late for his dinner,

and some of his guests began to arrive before him. These were, however,

reassured by his confidential servant, Ivan, the old man with a scar,

and a face almost as grey as his moustaches, who always sat at a table

in the entrance hall--a hall hung with weapons. Valentin’s house was

perhaps as peculiar and celebrated as its master. It was an old house,

with high walls and tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the

oddity--and perhaps the police value--of its architecture was this: that

there was no ultimate exit at all except through this front door, which

was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The garden was large and elaborate,

and there were many exits from the house into the garden. But there was

no exit from the garden into the world outside; all round it ran a tall,

smooth, unscalable wall with special spikes at the top; no bad garden,

perhaps, for a man to reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn

to kill.

As Ivan explained to the guests, their host had telephoned that he

was detained for ten minutes. He was, in truth, making some last

arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though these

duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with

precision. Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about

their punishment. Since he had been supreme over French--and largely

over European--policial methods, his great influence had been honourably

used for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.

He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only

thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes and the

red rosette--an elegant figure, his dark beard already streaked with

grey. He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on

the grounds behind. The garden door of it was open, and after he had

carefully locked his box in its official place, he stood for a few

seconds at the open door looking out upon the garden. A sharp moon

was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin

regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as

his. Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the

most tremendous problem of their lives. From any such occult mood,

at least, he quickly recovered, for he knew he was late, and that his

guests had already begun to arrive. A glance at his drawing-room when he

entered it was enough to make certain that his principal guest was not

there, at any rate. He saw all the other pillars of the little party;

he saw Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador--a choleric old man with a

russet face like an apple, wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter. He

saw Lady Galloway, slim and threadlike, with silver hair and a face

sensitive and superior. He saw her daughter, Lady Margaret Graham, a

pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair. He

saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and with

her her two daughters, black-eyed and opulent also. He saw Dr. Simon,

a typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and a

forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty

of superciliousness, since they come through constantly elevating

the eyebrows. He saw Father Brown, of Cobhole, in Essex, whom he had

recently met in England. He saw--perhaps with more interest than any

of these--a tall man in uniform, who had bowed to the Galloways without

receiving any very hearty acknowledgment, and who now advanced alone to

pay his respects to his host. This was Commandant O’Brien, of the

French Foreign Legion. He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure,

clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an

officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures and successful

suicides, he had an air at once dashing and melancholy. He was by birth

an Irish gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways--especially

Margaret Graham. He had left his country after some crash of debts, and

now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging

about in uniform, sabre and spurs. When he bowed to the Ambassador’s

family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked

away.

But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in each

other, their distinguished host was not specially interested in them. No

one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening. Valentin

was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose

friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and

triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that

multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small

religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for

the American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr.

Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was

ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was

an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American

Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman,

but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more “progressive”

than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought “progressive.”

He thought Valentin “progressive,” thereby doing him a grave injustice.

The solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as decisive

as a dinner bell. He had this great quality, which very few of us

can claim, that his presence was as big as his absence. He was a huge

fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without

so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well

brushed back like a German’s; his face was red, fierce and cherubic,

with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise

infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean. Not

long, however, did that salon merely stare at the celebrated American;

his lateness had already become a domestic problem, and he was sent with

all speed into the dining-room with Lady Galloway on his arm.

Except on one point the Galloways were genial and casual enough. So long

as Lady Margaret did not take the arm of that adventurer O’Brien, her

father was quite satisfied; and she had not done so, she had decorously

gone in with Dr. Simon. Nevertheless, old Lord Galloway was restless and

almost rude. He was diplomatic enough during dinner, but when, over the

cigars, three of the younger men--Simon the doctor, Brown the priest,

and the detrimental O’Brien, the exile in a foreign uniform--all melted

away to mix with the ladies or smoke in the conservatory, then the

English diplomatist grew very undiplomatic indeed. He was stung

every sixty seconds with the thought that the scamp O’Brien might be

signalling to Margaret somehow; he did not attempt to imagine how. He

was left over the coffee with Brayne, the hoary Yankee who believed

in all religions, and Valentin, the grizzled Frenchman who believed in

none. They could argue with each other, but neither could appeal to

him. After a time this “progressive” logomachy had reached a crisis of

tedium; Lord Galloway got up also and sought the drawing-room. He lost

his way in long passages for some six or eight minutes: till he heard

the high-pitched, didactic voice of the doctor, and then the dull voice

of the priest, followed by general laughter. They also, he thought with

a curse, were probably arguing about “science and religion.” But the

instant he opened the salon door he saw only one thing--he saw what

was not there. He saw that Commandant O’Brien was absent, and that Lady

Margaret was absent too.

Rising impatiently from the drawing-room, as he had from the

dining-room, he stamped along the passage once more. His notion of

protecting his daughter from the Irish-Algerian n’er-do-well had become

something central and even mad in his mind. As he went towards the back

of the house, where was Valentin’s study, he was surprised to meet his

daughter, who swept past with a white, scornful face, which was a second

enigma. If she had been with O’Brien, where was O’Brien! If she had

not been with O’Brien, where had she been? With a sort of senile and

passionate suspicion he groped his way to the dark back parts of the

mansion, and eventually found a servants’ entrance that opened on to the

garden. The moon with her scimitar had now ripped up and rolled away all

the storm-wrack. The argent light lit up all four corners of the garden.

A tall figure in blue was striding across the lawn towards the study

door; a glint of moonlit silver on his facings picked him out as

Commandant O’Brien.

He vanished through the French windows into the house, leaving Lord

Galloway in an indescribable temper, at once virulent and vague. The

blue-and-silver garden, like a scene in a theatre, seemed to taunt him

with all that tyrannic tenderness against which his worldly authority

was at war. The length and grace of the Irishman’s stride enraged him as

if he were a rival instead of a father; the moonlight maddened him.

He was trapped as if by magic into a garden of troubadours, a Watteau

fairyland; and, willing to shake off such amorous imbecilities by

speech, he stepped briskly after his enemy. As he did so he tripped over

some tree or stone in the grass; looked down at it first with irritation

and then a second time with curiosity. The next instant the moon and the

tall poplars looked at an unusual sight--an elderly English diplomatist

running hard and crying or bellowing as he ran.

His hoarse shouts brought a pale face to the study door, the beaming

glasses and worried brow of Dr. Simon, who heard the nobleman’s first

clear words. Lord Galloway was crying: “A corpse in the grass--a

blood-stained corpse.” O’Brien at last had gone utterly out of his mind.

“We must tell Valentin at once,” said the doctor, when the other had

brokenly described all that he had dared to examine. “It is fortunate

that he is here;” and even as he spoke the great detective entered the

study, attracted by the cry. It was almost amusing to note his typical

transformation; he had come with the common concern of a host and a

gentleman, fearing that some guest or servant was ill. When he was

told the gory fact, he turned with all his gravity instantly bright and

businesslike; for this, however abrupt and awful, was his business.

“Strange, gentlemen,” he said as they hurried out into the garden, “that

I should have hunted mysteries all over the earth, and now one comes and

settles in my own back-yard. But where is the place?” They crossed the

lawn less easily, as a slight mist had begun to rise from the river; but

under the guidance of the shaken Galloway they found the body sunken

in deep grass--the body of a very tall and broad-shouldered man. He lay

face downwards, so they could only see that his big shoulders were clad

in black cloth, and that his big head was bald, except for a wisp or

two of brown hair that clung to his skull like wet seaweed. A scarlet

serpent of blood crawled from under his fallen face.

“At least,” said Simon, with a deep and singular intonation, “he is none

of our party.”

“Examine him, doctor,” cried Valentin rather sharply. “He may not be

dead.”

The doctor bent down. “He is not quite cold, but I am afraid he is dead

enough,” he answered. “Just help me to lift him up.”

They lifted him carefully an inch from the ground, and all doubts as

to his being really dead were settled at once and frightfully. The head

fell away. It had been entirely sundered from the body; whoever had

cut his throat had managed to sever the neck as well. Even Valentin

was slightly shocked. “He must have been as strong as a gorilla,” he

muttered.

Not without a shiver, though he was used to anatomical abortions, Dr.

Simon lifted the head. It was slightly slashed about the neck and jaw,

but the face was substantially unhurt. It was a ponderous, yellow face,

at once sunken and swollen, with a hawk-like nose and heavy lids--a face

of a wicked Roman emperor, with, perhaps, a distant touch of a Chinese

emperor. All present seemed to look at it with the coldest eye of

ignorance. Nothing else could be noted about the man except that, as

they had lifted his body, they had seen underneath it the white gleam of

a shirt-front defaced with a red gleam of blood. As Dr. Simon said,

the man had never been of their party. But he might very well have been

trying to join it, for he had come dressed for such an occasion.

Valentin went down on his hands and knees and examined with his closest

professional attention the grass and ground for some twenty yards round

the body, in which he was assisted less skillfully by the doctor, and

quite vaguely by the English lord. Nothing rewarded their grovellings

except a few twigs, snapped or chopped into very small lengths, which

Valentin lifted for an instant’s examination and then tossed away.

“Twigs,” he said gravely; “twigs, and a total stranger with his head cut

off; that is all there is on this lawn.”

There was an almost creepy stillness, and then the unnerved Galloway

called out sharply:

“Who’s that! Who’s that over there by the garden wall!”

A small figure with a foolishly large head drew waveringly near them in

the moonlit haze; looked for an instant like a goblin, but turned out to

be the harmless little priest whom they had left in the drawing-room.

“I say,” he said meekly, “there are no gates to this garden, do you

know.”

Valentin’s black brows had come together somewhat crossly, as they did

on principle at the sight of the cassock. But he was far too just a man

to deny the relevance of the remark. “You are right,” he said. “Before

we find out how he came to be killed, we may have to find out how he

came to be here. Now listen to me, gentlemen. If it can be done without

prejudice to my position and duty, we shall all agree that certain

distinguished names might well be kept out of this. There are ladies,

gentlemen, and there is a foreign ambassador. If we must mark it down as

a crime, then it must be followed up as a crime. But till then I can use

my own discretion. I am the head of the police; I am so public that I

can afford to be private. Please Heaven, I will clear everyone of my own

guests before I call in my men to look for anybody else. Gentlemen, upon

your honour, you will none of you leave the house till tomorrow at noon;

there are bedrooms for all. Simon, I think you know where to find my

man, Ivan, in the front hall; he is a confidential man. Tell him to

leave another servant on guard and come to me at once. Lord Galloway,

you are certainly the best person to tell the ladies what has happened,

and prevent a panic. They also must stay. Father Brown and I will remain

with the body.”

When this spirit of the captain spoke in Valentin he was obeyed like a

bugle. Dr. Simon went through to the armoury and routed out Ivan, the

public detective’s private detective. Galloway went to the drawing-room

and told the terrible news tactfully enough, so that by the time the

company assembled there the ladies were already startled and already

soothed. Meanwhile the good priest and the good atheist stood at the

head and foot of the dead man motionless in the moonlight, like symbolic

statues of their two philosophies of death.

Ivan, the confidential man with the scar and the moustaches, came out

of the house like a cannon ball, and came racing across the lawn to

Valentin like a dog to his master. His livid face was quite lively

with the glow of this domestic detective story, and it was with almost

unpleasant eagerness that he asked his master’s permission to examine

the remains.

“Yes; look, if you like, Ivan,” said Valentin, “but don’t be long. We

must go in and thrash this out in the house.”

Ivan lifted the head, and then almost let it drop.

“Why,” he gasped, “it’s--no, it isn’t; it can’t be. Do you know this

man, sir?”

“No,” said Valentin indifferently; “we had better go inside.”

Between them they carried the corpse to a sofa in the study, and then

all made their way to the drawing-room.

The detective sat down at a desk quietly, and even without hesitation;

but his eye was the iron eye of a judge at assize. He made a few rapid

notes upon paper in front of him, and then said shortly: “Is everybody

here?”

“Not Mr. Brayne,” said the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, looking round.

“No,” said Lord Galloway in a hoarse, harsh voice. “And not Mr. Neil

O’Brien, I fancy. I saw that gentleman walking in the garden when the

corpse was still warm.”

“Ivan,” said the detective, “go and fetch Commandant O’Brien and Mr.

Brayne. Mr. Brayne, I know, is finishing a cigar in the dining-room;

Commandant O’Brien, I think, is walking up and down the conservatory. I

am not sure.”

The faithful attendant flashed from the room, and before anyone could

stir or speak Valentin went on with the same soldierly swiftness of

exposition.

“Everyone here knows that a dead man has been found in the garden, his

head cut clean from his body. Dr. Simon, you have examined it. Do you

think that to cut a man’s throat like that would need great force? Or,

perhaps, only a very sharp knife?”

“I should say that it could not be done with a knife at all,” said the

pale doctor.

“Have you any thought,” resumed Valentin, “of a tool with which it could

be done?”

“Speaking within modern probabilities, I really haven’t,” said the

doctor, arching his painful brows. “It’s not easy to hack a neck through

even clumsily, and this was a very clean cut. It could be done with a

battle-axe or an old headsman’s axe, or an old two-handed sword.”

“But, good heavens!” cried the Duchess, almost in hysterics, “there

aren’t any two-handed swords and battle-axes round here.”

Valentin was still busy with the paper in front of him. “Tell me,” he

said, still writing rapidly, “could it have been done with a long French

cavalry sabre?”

A low knocking came at the door, which, for some unreasonable reason,

curdled everyone’s blood like the knocking in Macbeth. Amid that frozen

silence Dr. Simon managed to say: “A sabre--yes, I suppose it could.”

“Thank you,” said Valentin. “Come in, Ivan.”

The confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant Neil

O’Brien, whom he had found at last pacing the garden again.

The Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the threshold.

“What do you want with me?” he cried.

“Please sit down,” said Valentin in pleasant, level tones. “Why, you

aren’t wearing your sword. Where is it?”

“I left it on the library table,” said O’Brien, his brogue deepening in

his disturbed mood. “It was a nuisance, it was getting--”

“Ivan,” said Valentin, “please go and get the Commandant’s sword from

the library.” Then, as the servant vanished, “Lord Galloway says he saw

you leaving the garden just before he found the corpse. What were you

doing in the garden?”

The Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair. “Oh,” he cried in

pure Irish, “admirin’ the moon. Communing with Nature, me bhoy.”

A heavy silence sank and endured, and at the end of it came again that

trivial and terrible knocking. Ivan reappeared, carrying an empty steel

scabbard. “This is all I can find,” he said.

“Put it on the table,” said Valentin, without looking up.

There was an inhuman silence in the room, like that sea of inhuman

silence round the dock of the condemned murderer. The Duchess’s weak

exclamations had long ago died away. Lord Galloway’s swollen hatred was

satisfied and even sobered. The voice that came was quite unexpected.

“I think I can tell you,” cried Lady Margaret, in that clear, quivering

voice with which a courageous woman speaks publicly. “I can tell you

what Mr. O’Brien was doing in the garden, since he is bound to

silence. He was asking me to marry him. I refused; I said in my family

circumstances I could give him nothing but my respect. He was a little

angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my respect. I wonder,”

she added, with rather a wan smile, “if he will care at all for it now.

For I offer it him now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing

like this.”

Lord Galloway had edged up to his daughter, and was intimidating her in

what he imagined to be an undertone. “Hold your tongue, Maggie,” he said

in a thunderous whisper. “Why should you shield the fellow? Where’s his

sword? Where’s his confounded cavalry--”

He stopped because of the singular stare with which his daughter was

regarding him, a look that was indeed a lurid magnet for the whole

group.

“You old fool!” she said in a low voice without pretence of piety, “what

do you suppose you are trying to prove? I tell you this man was innocent

while with me. But if he wasn’t innocent, he was still with me. If he

murdered a man in the garden, who was it who must have seen--who must

at least have known? Do you hate Neil so much as to put your own

daughter--”

Lady Galloway screamed. Everyone else sat tingling at the touch of those

satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now. They saw

the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish

adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was

full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous

paramours.

In the centre of this morbid silence an innocent voice said: “Was it a

very long cigar?”

The change of thought was so sharp that they had to look round to see

who had spoken.

“I mean,” said little Father Brown, from the corner of the room, “I

mean that cigar Mr. Brayne is finishing. It seems nearly as long as a

walking-stick.”

Despite the irrelevance there was assent as well as irritation in

Valentin’s face as he lifted his head.

“Quite right,” he remarked sharply. “Ivan, go and see about Mr. Brayne

again, and bring him here at once.”

The instant the factotum had closed the door, Valentin addressed the

girl with an entirely new earnestness.

“Lady Margaret,” he said, “we all feel, I am sure, both gratitude

and admiration for your act in rising above your lower dignity and

explaining the Commandant’s conduct. But there is a hiatus still.

Lord Galloway, I understand, met you passing from the study to the

drawing-room, and it was only some minutes afterwards that he found the

garden and the Commandant still walking there.”

“You have to remember,” replied Margaret, with a faint irony in her

voice, “that I had just refused him, so we should scarcely have come

back arm in arm. He is a gentleman, anyhow; and he loitered behind--and

so got charged with murder.”

“In those few moments,” said Valentin gravely, “he might really--”

The knock came again, and Ivan put in his scarred face.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but Mr. Brayne has left the house.”

“Left!” cried Valentin, and rose for the first time to his feet.

“Gone. Scooted. Evaporated,” replied Ivan in humorous French. “His hat

and coat are gone, too, and I’ll tell you something to cap it all. I ran

outside the house to find any traces of him, and I found one, and a big

trace, too.”

“What do you mean?” asked Valentin.

“I’ll show you,” said his servant, and reappeared with a flashing naked

cavalry sabre, streaked with blood about the point and edge. Everyone in

the room eyed it as if it were a thunderbolt; but the experienced Ivan

went on quite quietly:

“I found this,” he said, “flung among the bushes fifty yards up the road

to Paris. In other words, I found it just where your respectable Mr.

Brayne threw it when he ran away.”

There was again a silence, but of a new sort. Valentin took the sabre,

examined it, reflected with unaffected concentration of thought, and

then turned a respectful face to O’Brien. “Commandant,” he said, “we

trust you will always produce this weapon if it is wanted for police

examination. Meanwhile,” he added, slapping the steel back in the

ringing scabbard, “let me return you your sword.”

At the military symbolism of the action the audience could hardly

refrain from applause.

For Neil O’Brien, indeed, that gesture was the turning-point of

existence. By the time he was wandering in the mysterious garden again

in the colours of the morning the tragic futility of his ordinary mien

had fallen from him; he was a man with many reasons for happiness. Lord

Galloway was a gentleman, and had offered him an apology. Lady Margaret

was something better than a lady, a woman at least, and had perhaps

given him something better than an apology, as they drifted among the

old flowerbeds before breakfast. The whole company was more lighthearted

and humane, for though the riddle of the death remained, the load of

suspicion was lifted off them all, and sent flying off to Paris with the

strange millionaire--a man they hardly knew. The devil was cast out of

the house--he had cast himself out.

Still, the riddle remained; and when O’Brien threw himself on a garden

seat beside Dr. Simon, that keenly scientific person at once resumed

it. He did not get much talk out of O’Brien, whose thoughts were on

pleasanter things.

“I can’t say it interests me much,” said the Irishman frankly,

“especially as it seems pretty plain now. Apparently Brayne hated this

stranger for some reason; lured him into the garden, and killed him with

my sword. Then he fled to the city, tossing the sword away as he went.

By the way, Ivan tells me the dead man had a Yankee dollar in his

pocket. So he was a countryman of Brayne’s, and that seems to clinch it.

I don’t see any difficulties about the business.”

“There are five colossal difficulties,” said the doctor quietly; “like

high walls within walls. Don’t mistake me. I don’t doubt that Brayne

did it; his flight, I fancy, proves that. But as to how he did it.

First difficulty: Why should a man kill another man with a great hulking

sabre, when he can almost kill him with a pocket knife and put it back

in his pocket? Second difficulty: Why was there no noise or outcry?

Does a man commonly see another come up waving a scimitar and offer

no remarks? Third difficulty: A servant watched the front door all the

evening; and a rat cannot get into Valentin’s garden anywhere. How did

the dead man get into the garden? Fourth difficulty: Given the same

conditions, how did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“And the fifth,” said Neil, with eyes fixed on the English priest who

was coming slowly up the path.

“Is a trifle, I suppose,” said the doctor, “but I think an odd one. When

I first saw how the head had been slashed, I supposed the assassin had

struck more than once. But on examination I found many cuts across the

truncated section; in other words, they were struck after the head was

off. Did Brayne hate his foe so fiendishly that he stood sabring his

body in the moonlight?”

“Horrible!” said O’Brien, and shuddered.

The little priest, Brown, had arrived while they were talking, and had

waited, with characteristic shyness, till they had finished. Then he

said awkwardly:

“I say, I’m sorry to interrupt. But I was sent to tell you the news!”

“News?” repeated Simon, and stared at him rather painfully through his

glasses.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” said Father Brown mildly. “There’s been another

murder, you know.”

Both men on the seat sprang up, leaving it rocking.

“And, what’s stranger still,” continued the priest, with his dull eye

on the rhododendrons, “it’s the same disgusting sort; it’s another

beheading. They found the second head actually bleeding into the river,

a few yards along Brayne’s road to Paris; so they suppose that he--”

“Great Heaven!” cried O’Brien. “Is Brayne a monomaniac?”

“There are American vendettas,” said the priest impassively. Then he

added: “They want you to come to the library and see it.”

Commandant O’Brien followed the others towards the inquest, feeling

decidedly sick. As a soldier, he loathed all this secretive carnage;

where were these extravagant amputations going to stop? First one

head was hacked off, and then another; in this case (he told himself

bitterly) it was not true that two heads were better than one. As he

crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon

Valentin’s table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head;

and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it

was only a Nationalist paper, called _The Guillotine_, which every week

showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing

features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some

note. But O’Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his

sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect

which belongs only to France. He felt Paris as a whole, from the

grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the

newspapers. He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw

the whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on

Valentin’s table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles,

the great devil grins on Notre Dame.

The library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from

under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning.

Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at the upper end of

a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the mortal remains, looking

enormous in the twilight. The big black figure and yellow face of the

man found in the garden confronted them essentially unchanged. The

second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds that

morning, lay streaming and dripping beside it; Valentin’s men were still

seeking to recover the rest of this second corpse, which was supposed

to be afloat. Father Brown, who did not seem to share O’Brien’s

sensibilities in the least, went up to the second head and examined it

with his blinking care. It was little more than a mop of wet white hair,

fringed with silver fire in the red and level morning light; the face,

which seemed of an ugly, empurpled and perhaps criminal type, had been

much battered against trees or stones as it tossed in the water.

“Good morning, Commandant O’Brien,” said Valentin, with quiet

cordiality. “You have heard of Brayne’s last experiment in butchery, I

suppose?”

Father Brown was still bending over the head with white hair, and he

said, without looking up:

“I suppose it is quite certain that Brayne cut off this head, too.”

“Well, it seems common sense,” said Valentin, with his hands in his

pockets. “Killed in the same way as the other. Found within a few yards

of the other. And sliced by the same weapon which we know he carried

away.”

“Yes, yes; I know,” replied Father Brown submissively. “Yet, you know, I

doubt whether Brayne could have cut off this head.”

“Why not?” inquired Dr. Simon, with a rational stare.

“Well, doctor,” said the priest, looking up blinking, “can a man cut off

his own head? I don’t know.”

O’Brien felt an insane universe crashing about his ears; but the doctor

sprang forward with impetuous practicality and pushed back the wet white

hair.

“Oh, there’s no doubt it’s Brayne,” said the priest quietly. “He had

exactly that chip in the left ear.”

The detective, who had been regarding the priest with steady and

glittering eyes, opened his clenched mouth and said sharply: “You seem

to know a lot about him, Father Brown.”

“I do,” said the little man simply. “I’ve been about with him for some

weeks. He was thinking of joining our church.”

The star of the fanatic sprang into Valentin’s eyes; he strode towards

the priest with clenched hands. “And, perhaps,” he cried, with a

blasting sneer, “perhaps he was also thinking of leaving all his money

to your church.”

“Perhaps he was,” said Brown stolidly; “it is possible.”

“In that case,” cried Valentin, with a dreadful smile, “you may indeed

know a great deal about him. About his life and about his--”

Commandant O’Brien laid a hand on Valentin’s arm. “Drop that slanderous

rubbish, Valentin,” he said, “or there may be more swords yet.”

But Valentin (under the steady, humble gaze of the priest) had already

recovered himself. “Well,” he said shortly, “people’s private opinions

can wait. You gentlemen are still bound by your promise to stay; you

must enforce it on yourselves--and on each other. Ivan here will tell

you anything more you want to know; I must get to business and write to

the authorities. We can’t keep this quiet any longer. I shall be writing

in my study if there is any more news.”

“Is there any more news, Ivan?” asked Dr. Simon, as the chief of police

strode out of the room.

“Only one more thing, I think, sir,” said Ivan, wrinkling up his grey

old face, “but that’s important, too, in its way. There’s that old

buffer you found on the lawn,” and he pointed without pretence of

reverence at the big black body with the yellow head. “We’ve found out

who he is, anyhow.”

“Indeed!” cried the astonished doctor, “and who is he?”

“His name was Arnold Becker,” said the under-detective, “though he went

by many aliases. He was a wandering sort of scamp, and is known to have

been in America; so that was where Brayne got his knife into him. We

didn’t have much to do with him ourselves, for he worked mostly in

Germany. We’ve communicated, of course, with the German police. But,

oddly enough, there was a twin brother of his, named Louis Becker,

whom we had a great deal to do with. In fact, we found it necessary to

guillotine him only yesterday. Well, it’s a rum thing, gentlemen, but

when I saw that fellow flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my

life. If I hadn’t seen Louis Becker guillotined with my own eyes,

I’d have sworn it was Louis Becker lying there in the grass. Then, of

course, I remembered his twin brother in Germany, and following up the

clue--”

The explanatory Ivan stopped, for the excellent reason that nobody was

listening to him. The Commandant and the doctor were both staring at

Father Brown, who had sprung stiffly to his feet, and was holding his

temples tight like a man in sudden and violent pain.

“Stop, stop, stop!” he cried; “stop talking a minute, for I see half.

Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all?

Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking. I could paraphrase

any page in Aquinas once. Will my head split--or will it see? I see

half--I only see half.”

He buried his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of rigid torture

of thought or prayer, while the other three could only go on staring at

this last prodigy of their wild twelve hours.

When Father Brown’s hands fell they showed a face quite fresh and

serious, like a child’s. He heaved a huge sigh, and said: “Let us get

this said and done with as quickly as possible. Look here, this will

be the quickest way to convince you all of the truth.” He turned to the

doctor. “Dr. Simon,” he said, “you have a strong head-piece, and I heard

you this morning asking the five hardest questions about this business.

Well, if you will ask them again, I will answer them.”

Simon’s pince-nez dropped from his nose in his doubt and wonder, but

he answered at once. “Well, the first question, you know, is why a man

should kill another with a clumsy sabre at all when a man can kill with

a bodkin?”

“A man cannot behead with a bodkin,” said Brown calmly, “and for this

murder beheading was absolutely necessary.”

“Why?” asked O’Brien, with interest.

“And the next question?” asked Father Brown.

“Well, why didn’t the man cry out or anything?” asked the doctor;

“sabres in gardens are certainly unusual.”

“Twigs,” said the priest gloomily, and turned to the window which looked

on the scene of death. “No one saw the point of the twigs. Why should

they lie on that lawn (look at it) so far from any tree? They were not

snapped off; they were chopped off. The murderer occupied his enemy

with some tricks with the sabre, showing how he could cut a branch in

mid-air, or what-not. Then, while his enemy bent down to see the result,

a silent slash, and the head fell.”

“Well,” said the doctor slowly, “that seems plausible enough. But my

next two questions will stump anyone.”

The priest still stood looking critically out of the window and waited.

“You know how all the garden was sealed up like an air-tight chamber,”

went on the doctor. “Well, how did the strange man get into the garden?”

Without turning round, the little priest answered: “There never was any

strange man in the garden.”

There was a silence, and then a sudden cackle of almost childish

laughter relieved the strain. The absurdity of Brown’s remark moved Ivan

to open taunts.

“Oh!” he cried; “then we didn’t lug a great fat corpse on to a sofa last

night? He hadn’t got into the garden, I suppose?”

“Got into the garden?” repeated Brown reflectively. “No, not entirely.”

“Hang it all,” cried Simon, “a man gets into a garden, or he doesn’t.”

“Not necessarily,” said the priest, with a faint smile. “What is the

nest question, doctor?”

“I fancy you’re ill,” exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply; “but I’ll ask the

next question if you like. How did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“He didn’t get out of the garden,” said the priest, still looking out of

the window.

“Didn’t get out of the garden?” exploded Simon.

“Not completely,” said Father Brown.

Simon shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic. “A man gets out of a

garden, or he doesn’t,” he cried.

“Not always,” said Father Brown.

Dr. Simon sprang to his feet impatiently. “I have no time to spare on

such senseless talk,” he cried angrily. “If you can’t understand a man

being on one side of a wall or the other, I won’t trouble you further.”

“Doctor,” said the cleric very gently, “we have always got on very

pleasantly together. If only for the sake of old friendship, stop and

tell me your fifth question.”

The impatient Simon sank into a chair by the door and said briefly: “The

head and shoulders were cut about in a queer way. It seemed to be done

after death.”

“Yes,” said the motionless priest, “it was done so as to make you assume

exactly the one simple falsehood that you did assume. It was done to

make you take for granted that the head belonged to the body.”

The borderland of the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved

horribly in the Gaelic O’Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all

the horse-men and fish-women that man’s unnatural fancy has begotten. A

voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear: “Keep out

of the monstrous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid

the evil garden where died the man with two heads.” Yet, while these

shameful symbolic shapes passed across the ancient mirror of his Irish

soul, his Frenchified intellect was quite alert, and was watching the

odd priest as closely and incredulously as all the rest.

Father Brown had turned round at last, and stood against the window,

with his face in dense shadow; but even in that shadow they could see

it was pale as ashes. Nevertheless, he spoke quite sensibly, as if there

were no Gaelic souls on earth.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you did not find the strange body of Becker in

the garden. You did not find any strange body in the garden. In face

of Dr. Simon’s rationalism, I still affirm that Becker was only partly

present. Look here!” (pointing to the black bulk of the mysterious

corpse) “you never saw that man in your lives. Did you ever see this

man?”

He rapidly rolled away the bald, yellow head of the unknown, and put in

its place the white-maned head beside it. And there, complete, unified,

unmistakable, lay Julius K. Brayne.

“The murderer,” went on Brown quietly, “hacked off his enemy’s head and

flung the sword far over the wall. But he was too clever to fling the

sword only. He flung the head over the wall also. Then he had only to

clap on another head to the corpse, and (as he insisted on a private

inquest) you all imagined a totally new man.”

“Clap on another head!” said O’Brien staring. “What other head? Heads

don’t grow on garden bushes, do they?”

“No,” said Father Brown huskily, and looking at his boots; “there

is only one place where they grow. They grow in the basket of the

guillotine, beside which the chief of police, Aristide Valentin, was

standing not an hour before the murder. Oh, my friends, hear me a minute

more before you tear me in pieces. Valentin is an honest man, if being

mad for an arguable cause is honesty. But did you never see in that

cold, grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do anything, anything, to

break what he calls the superstition of the Cross. He has fought for

it and starved for it, and now he has murdered for it. Brayne’s crazy

millions had hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did

little to alter the balance of things. But Valentin heard a whisper that

Brayne, like so many scatter-brained sceptics, was drifting to us; and

that was quite a different thing. Brayne would pour supplies into the

impoverished and pugnacious Church of France; he would support six

Nationalist newspapers like _The Guillotine_. The battle was already

balanced on a point, and the fanatic took flame at the risk. He resolved

to destroy the millionaire, and he did it as one would expect the

greatest of detectives to commit his only crime. He abstracted the

severed head of Becker on some criminological excuse, and took it home

in his official box. He had that last argument with Brayne, that Lord

Galloway did not hear the end of; that failing, he led him out into the

sealed garden, talked about swordsmanship, used twigs and a sabre for

illustration, and--”

Ivan of the Scar sprang up. “You lunatic,” he yelled; “you’ll go to my

master now, if I take you by--”

“Why, I was going there,” said Brown heavily; “I must ask him to

confess, and all that.”

Driving the unhappy Brown before them like a hostage or sacrifice, they

rushed together into the sudden stillness of Valentin’s study.

The great detective sat at his desk apparently too occupied to hear

their turbulent entrance. They paused a moment, and then something in

the look of that upright and elegant back made the doctor run forward

suddenly. A touch and a glance showed him that there was a small box of

pills at Valentin’s elbow, and that Valentin was dead in his chair; and

on the blind face of the suicide was more than the pride of Cato.