They both remained for an instant in a listening attitude, so that the booming voice of the actor on the stage could indeed be heard rolling faintly down the stairs and along the passage. Before they had spoken again or resumed their normal poise, their ears were filled with another sound. It was a dull but heavy crash and it came from behind the closed door of Mundon Mandeville’s private room.
Father Brown went racing along the passage like an arrow from the bow and was struggling with the door-handle before Jarvis had wakened with a start and begun to follow him.
“The door is locked,” said the priest, turning a face that was a little pale. “And I am all in favour of breaking down this door.”
“Do you mean,” asked Jarvis with a rather ghastly look, “that the unknown visitor has got in here again? Do you think it’s … anything serious?” After a moment he added: “I may be able to push back the bolt; I know the fastening on these doors.”
He knelt down and pulled out a pocketknife with a long steel implement; manipulated it for a moment, and the door swung open on the manager’s study. Almost the first thing they noticed was that there was no other door and even no window; but a great electric lamp stood on the table. But it was not quite the first thing that they noticed; for even before that they had seen that Mandeville was lying flat on his face in the middle of the room and the blood was crawling out from under his fallen face like a pattern of scarlet snakes that glittered evilly in that unnatural subterranean light.
They did not know how long they had been staring at each other when Jarvis said, like one letting loose something that he had held back with his breath:
“If the stranger got in somehow, she has gone somehow.”
“Perhaps we think too much about the stranger,” said Father Brown. “There are so many strange things in this strange theatre that you rather tend to forget some of them.”
“Why, which things do you mean?” asked his friend quickly.
“There are many,” said the priest. “There is the other locked door, for instance.”
“But the other door is locked,” cried Jarvis staring.
“But you forgot it all the same,” said Father Brown.
A few moments afterwards he said thoughtfully:
“That Mrs. Sands is a grumpy and gloomy sort of card.”
“Do you mean?” asked the other in a lowered voice, “that she’s lying and the Italian did come out?”
“No,” said the priest calmly; “I think I meant it more or less as a detached study of character.”
“You can’t mean,” cried the actor, “that Mrs. Sands did it herself?”
“I didn’t mean a study of her character,” said Father Brown.
While they had been exchanging these abrupt reflections, Father Brown had knelt down by the body and ascertained that it was beyond any hope or question a dead body. Lying beside it, though not immediately visible from the doorway, was a dagger of the theatrical sort; lying as if it had fallen from the wound or the hand of the assassin. According to Jarvis, who recognized the instrument, there was not very much to be learned from it, unless the experts could find some fingerprints. It was a property dagger; that is, it was nobody’s property. It had been kicking about the theatre for a long time; and anybody might have picked it up. Then the priest rose and looked gravely round the room.
“We must send for the police,” he said, “and for a doctor, though the doctor comes too late … looking at this room, by the way, I don’t see how our Italian friend could manage it.”
“The Italian!” cried his friend; “I should think not. I should have thought she had an alibi, if anybody had. Two separate rooms, both locked, at opposite ends of a long passage, with a fixed witness watching it.”
“No,” said Father Brown. “Not quite. The difficulty is how she could have got in this end. I think she might have got out the other end.”
“And why?” asked the other.
“I told you,” said Father Brown, “that it sounded as if she was breaking glass; mirrors or windows. Stupidly enough I forgot something I knew quite well; that she is pretty superstitious. She wouldn’t be likely to break a mirror; so I suspect she broke a window. It’s true that all this is under the ground floor; but it might be a skylight or a window opening on an area. But there don’t seem to be any skylights or areas here.” And he stared at the ceiling very intently for a considerable time.
Suddenly he came back to conscious life again with a start. “We must go upstairs and telephone and tell everybody. It is pretty painful. … My God, can you hear those actors still shouting and ranting upstairs? The play is still going on. I suppose that’s what they mean by tragic irony.”
When it was fated that the theatre should be turned into a house of mourning, an opportunity was given to the actors to show many of the real virtues of their type and trade. They did, as the phrase goes, behave like gentlemen; and not only like first walking gentlemen. They had not all of them liked or trusted Mandeville, but they knew exactly the right things to say about him; they showed not only sympathy but delicacy in their attitude to his widow. She had become in a new and very different sense a tragedy queen, her lightest word was law, and while she moved about slowly and sadly, they ran her many errands.
“She was always a strong character,” said old Randall rather huskily. “And had the best brains of any of us. Of course poor Mandeville was never on her level in education and so on; but she always did her duty splendidly. It was quite pathetic the way she would
