the long loose figure and pale face of young Home; but it seemed as if he had not merely his natural, but a new and unnatural pallor.
'Hullo,' cried Nares, putting up his single eyeglass, 'why have you come back again?'
Home crossed the room rather shakily without a word and sat down heavily in a chair. Then he said, as in a sort of daze: 'I missed the others … I lost my way. I thought I'd better come back.'
The remains of evening refreshments were on the table, and Henry Home , that lifelong Prohibitionist, poured himself out a wine–glassful of liqueur brandy and drank it at a gulp. 'You seem upset,' said Father Brown.
Home had put his hands to his forehead and spoke as from under the shadow of it: he seemed to be speaking to the priest only, in a low voice.
'I may as well tell you. I have seen a ghost.'
'A ghost!' repeated Nares in astonishment. 'Whose ghost?'
'The ghost of Gideon Wise, the master of this house,' answered Home more firmly, 'standing over the abyss into which he fell.'
'Oh, nonsense!' said Nares; 'no sensible person believes in ghosts.'
'That is hardly exact,' said Father Brown, smiling a little. 'There is really quite as good evidence for many ghosts as there is for most crimes.'
'Well, it's my business to run after the criminals,' said Nares rather roughly, 'and I will leave other people to run away from the ghosts. If anybody at this time of day chooses to be frightened of ghosts it's his affair.'
'I didn't say I was frightened of them, though I dare say I might be,' said Father Brown. 'Nobody knows till he tries. I said I believed in them, at any rate, enough to want to hear more about this one. What, exactly, did you see, Mr Home?'
'It was over there on the brink of those crumbling cliffs; you know there is a sort of gap or crevice just about the spot where he was thrown over. The others had gone on ahead, and I was crossing the moor towards the path along the cliff. I often went that way, for I liked seeing the high seas dash up against the crags. I thought little of it to–night, beyond wondering that the sea should be so rough on this sort of clear moonlight night. I could see the pale crests of spray appear and disappear as the great waves leapt up at the headland. Thrice I saw the momentary flash of foam in the moonlight and then I saw something inscrutable. The fourth flash of the silver foam seemed to be fixed in the sky. It did not fall; I waited with insane intensity for it to fall. I fancied I was mad, and that time had been for me mysteriously arrested or prolonged. Then I drew nearer, and then I think I screamed aloud. For that suspended spray, like unfallen snowflakes, had fitted together into a face and a figure, white as the shining leper in a legend, and terrible as the fixed lightning.'
'And it was Gideon Wise, you say?'
Home nodded without speech. There was a silence broken abruptly by Nares rising to his feet; so abruptly indeed that he knocked a chair over.
'Oh, this is all nonsense,' he said, 'but we'd better go out and see.'
'I won't go,' said Home with sudden violence. 'I'll never walk by that path again.'
'I think we must all walk by that path tonight,' said the priest gravely; 'though I will never deny it has been a perilous path … to more people than one.'
'I will not… God, how you all goad me,' cried Home, and his eyes began to roll in a strange fashion. He had risen with the rest, hut he made no motion towards the door.
'Mr Home,' said Nares firmly, 'I am a police–officer, and this house, though you may not know it, is surrounded by the police. I have tried to investigate in a friendly fashion, but I must investigate everything, even anything so silly as a ghost. I must ask you to take me to the spot you speak of.'
There was another silence while Home stood heaving and panting as with indescribable fears. Then he suddenly sat down on his chair again and said with an entirely new and much more composed voice:
'I can't do it. You may just as well know why. You will know it sooner or later. I killed him.'
For an instant there was the stillness of a house struck by a thunderbolt and full of corpses. Then the voice of Father Brown sounded in that enormous silence strangely small like the squeak of a mouse.
'Did you kill him deliberately?' he asked.
'How can one answer such a question?' answered the man in the chair, moodily gnawing his finger. 'I was mad, I suppose. He was intolerable and insolent, I know. I was on his land and I believe he struck me; anyhow, we came to a grapple and he went over the cliff. When I was well away from the scene it burst upon me that I had done a crime that cut me off from men; the brand of Cain throbbed on my brow and my very brain; I realized for the first time that I had indeed killed a man. I knew I should have to confess it sooner or later.' He sat suddenly erect in his chair. 'But I will say nothing against anybody else. It is no use asking me about plots or accomplices–I will say nothing.'
'In the light of the other murders,' said Nares, 'it is difficult to believe that the quarrel was quite so unpremeditated. Surely somebody sent you there?'
'I will say nothing against anybody I worked with,' said Home proudly. 'I am a murderer, but I will not be a traitor.'
Nares stepped between the man and the door and called out in an official fashion to someone outside.
'We will all go to the place, anyhow,' he said in a low voice to the secretary; 'but this man must go in custody.'
The company generally felt that to go spook–hunting on a seacliff was a very silly anti–climax after the confession of the murderer. But Nares, though the most sceptical and scornful of all, thought it his duty to leave no stone unturned; as one might say, no gravestone unturned. For, after all, that crumbling cliff was the only gravestone over the watery grave of poor Gideon Wise. Nares locked the door, being the last out of the house, and followed the rest across the moor to the cliff, when he was astonished to see young Potter, the secretary, coming back quickly towards them, his face in the moonlight looking white as a moon.
'By God, sir,' he said, speaking for the first time that night, 'there really is something there. It–it's just like him.'
'Why, you're raving,' gasped the detective. 'Everybody's raving.'
'Do you think I don't know him when I see him?' cried the secretary with singular bitterness. 'I have reason to.'
'Perhaps,' said the detective sharply, 'you are one of those who had reason to hate him, as Halket said.'
'Perhaps,' said the secretary; 'anyhow, I know him, and I tell you I can see him standing there stark and staring under this hellish moon.'
And he pointed towards the crack in the cliffs, where they could already see something that might have been a moonbeam or a streak of foam, but which was already beginning to look a little more solid. They had crept a hundred yards nearer, and it was still motionless; but it looked like a statue in silver.
Nares himself looked a little pale and seemed to stand debating what to do. Potter was frankly as much frightened as Home himself; and even Byrne, who was a hardened reporter, was rather reluctant to go any nearer if he could help it. He could not help considering it a little quaint, therefore, that the only man who did not seem to be frightened of a ghost was the man who had said openly that he might be. For Father Brown was advancing as steadily, at his stumping pace, as if he were going to consult a notice–board.
'It don't seem to bother you much,' said Byrne to the priest; 'and yet I thought you were the only one who believed in spooks.'
'If it comes to that,' replied Father Brown, 'I thought you were one who didn't believe in them. But believing in ghosts is one thing, and believing in a ghost is quite another.'
Byrne looked rather ashamed of himself, and glanced almost covertly at the crumbling headlands in the cold moonlight which were the haunts of the vision or delusion. 'I didn't believe in it till I saw it,' he said.
'And I did believe in it till I saw it,' said Father Brown. The journalist stared after him as he went stumping across the great waste ground that rose towards the cloven headland like the sloping side of a hill cut in two. Under the discolouring moon the grass looked like long grey hair all combed one way by the wind, and seeming to point towards the place where the breaking cliff showed pale gleams of chalk in the grey–green turf, and where stood the pale figure or shining shade that none could yet understand. As yet that pale figure dominated a desolate landscape that was empty except for the black square back and business–like figure of the priest advancing alone towards it. Then the prisoner Home broke suddenly from his captors with a piercing cry and ran ahead of the priest, falling on his knees before the spectre.
