“But why should he plan vengeance on John Dalmon?” inquired Smith.
“It wasn’t on John Dalmon that he planned vengeance,” replied the priest, gravely.
There was a silence; and he resumed, almost as if changing the subject. “When we found the body, you remember, we saw the face upside down; and you said it looked like the face of a fiend. Has it occurred to you that the murderer also saw the face upside down, coming behind the barber’s chair?”
“But that’s all morbid extravagance,” remonstrated his companion. “I was quite used to the face when it was the right way up.”
“Perhaps you have never seen it the right way up,” said Father Brown. “I told you that artists turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to see it the right way up. Perhaps, over all those breakfasts and tea-tables, you had got used to the face of a fiend.”
“What on earth are you driving at?” demanded Smith, impatiently.
“I speak in parables,” replied the other in a rather sombre tone. “Of course, Sir Arthur was not actually a fiend; he was a man with a character which he had made out of a temperament that might also have been turned to good. But those goggling, suspicious eyes, that tight, yet quivering mouth, might have told you something if you had not been so used to them. You know, there are physical bodies on which a wound will not heal. Sir Arthur had a mind of that sort. It was as if it lacked a skin; he had a feverish vigilance of vanity; those strained eyes were open with an insomnia of egoism. Sensibility need not be selfishness; Sybil Rye, for instance, has the same thin skin and manages to be a sort of saint. But Vaudrey had turned it all to poisonous pride; a pride that was not even secure and self-satisfied. Every scratch on the surface of his soul festered. And that is the meaning of that old story about throwing the man into the pigsty. If he’d thrown him then and there, after being called a pig, it might have been a pardonable burst of passion. But there was no pigsty; and that is just the point. Vaudrey remembered the silly insult for years and years; till he could get the Oriental into the improbable neighbourhood of a pigsty; and then he took, what he considered the only appropriate and artistic revenge. … Oh, my God, he liked his revenges to be appropriate and artistic.”
Smith looked at him curiously. “You are not thinking of the pigsty story,” he said.
“No,” said Father Brown; “of the other story.” He controlled the shudder in his voice, and went on.
“Remembering that story of a fantastic and yet patient plot to make the vengeance fit the crime, consider the other story before us. Had anybody else, to your knowledge, ever insulted Vaudrey, or offered him what he though a mortal insult? Yes. A woman insulted him.”
A sort of vague horror began to dawn in Evan’s eyes; he was listening intently.
“A girl, little more than a child, refused to marry him, because he had once been a sort of criminal; had, indeed, been in prison for a short time for the outrage on the Egyptian. And that madman said, in the hell of his heart: ‘She shall marry a murderer.’ ”
They took the road towards the great house and went along by the river for some time in silence, before he resumed:
“Vaudrey was in a position to blackmail Dalmon, who had committed a murder long ago; probably he knew of several crimes among the wild comrades of his youth. Probably it was a wild crime with some redeeming features; for the wildest murders are never the worst. And Dalmon looks to me like a man who knows remorse, even for killing Vaudrey. But he was in Vaudrey’s power and, between them, they entrapped the girl very cleverly into an engagement; letting the lover try his luck first, for instance, and the other only encouraging magnificently. But Dalmon himself did not know, nobody but the Devil himself did know, what was really in that old man’s mind.
“Then, a few days ago, Dalmon made a dreadful discovery. He had obeyed, not altogether unwillingly; he had been a tool; and he suddenly found how the tool was to be broken and thrown away. He came upon certain notes of Vaudrey’s in the library which, disguised as they were, told of preparations for giving information to the police. He understood the whole plot and stood stunned as I did when I first understood it. The moment the bride and bridegroom were married, the bridegroom would be arrested and hanged. The fastidious lady, who objected to a husband who had been in prison, should have no husband except a husband on the gallows. That is what Sir Arthur Vaudrey considered an artistic rounding off of the story.”
Evan Smith, deadly pale, was silent; and, far away, down the perspective of the road, they saw the large figure and wide hat of Dr. Abbott advancing towards them; even in the outline there was a certain agitation. But they were still shaken with their own private apocalypse.
“As you say, hate is a hateful thing,” said Evan at last; “and, do you know, one thing gives me a sort of relief. All my hatred of poor Dalmon is gone out of me—now I know how he was twice a murderer.”
It was in silence that they covered the rest of the distance and met
