“And after that,” asked the young man, “did he shut himself up like this?”
“He went abroad at first,” she answered; “away to Asia and the Cannibal Islands and Lord knows where. These deadly strokes take different people in different ways. It took him in the way of an utter sundering or severance from everything, even from tradition and as far as possible from memory. He could not bear a reference to the old tie; a portrait or an anecdote or even an association. He couldn’t bear the business of a great public funeral. He longed to get away. He stayed away for ten years. I heard some rumour that he had begun to revive a little at the end of the exile; but when he came back to his own home he relapsed completely. He settled down into religious melancholia, and that’s practically madness.”
“The priests got hold of him, they say,” grumbled the old general. “I know he gave thousands to found a monastery, and lives himself rather like a monk—or, at any rate, a hermit. Can’t understand what good they think that will do.”
“Goddarned superstition,” snorted Cockspur; “that sort of thing ought to be shown up. Here’s a man that might have been useful to the Empire and the world, and these vampires get hold of him and suck him dry. I bet with their unnatural notions they haven’t even let him marry.”
“No, he has never married,” said the lady. “He was engaged when I knew him, as a matter of fact, but I don’t think it ever came first with him, and I think it went with the rest when everything else went. Like Hamlet and Ophelia—he lost hold of love because he lost hold of life. But I knew the girl; indeed, I know her still. Between ourselves, it was Viola Grayson, daughter of the old admiral. She’s never married either.”
“It’s infamous! It’s infernal!” cried Sir John, bounding up. “It’s not only a tragedy, but a crime. I’ve got a duty to the public, and I mean to see all this nonsensical nightmare … in the twentieth century—”
He was almost choked with his own protest, and then, after a silence, the old soldier said:
“Well, I don’t profess to know much about those things, but I think these religious people need to study a text which says: ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ ”
“Only, unfortunately, that’s just what it looks like,” said his wife with a sigh. “It’s just like some creepy story of a dead man burying another dead man, over and over again forever.”
“The storm has passed over us,” said Romaine, with a rather inscrutable smile. “You will not have to visit the inhospitable house after all.”
She suddenly shuddered.
“Oh, I’ll never do that again!” she exclaimed.
Mallow was staring at her.
“Again! Have you tried it before?” he cried.
“Well, I did once,” she said, with a lightness not without a touch of pride; “but we needn’t go back on all that. It’s not raining now, but I think we’d better be moving back to the car.”
As they moved off in procession, Mallow and the general brought up the rear; and the latter said abruptly, lowering his voice:
“I don’t want that little cad Cockspur to hear but as you’ve asked you’d better know. It’s the one thing I can’t forgive Marne; but I suppose these monks have drilled him that way. My wife, who had been the best friend he ever had in America, actually came to that house when he was walking in the garden. He was looking at the ground like a monk, and hidden in a black hood that was really as ridiculous as any mask. She had sent her card in, and stood there in his very path. And he walked past her without a word or a glance, as if she had been a stone. He wasn’t human; he was like some horrible automaton. She may well call him a dead man.”
“It’s all very strange,” said the young man rather vaguely. “It isn’t like—like what I should have expected.”
Young Mr. Mallow, when he left that rather dismal picnic, took himself thoughtfully in search of a friend. He did not know any monks, but he knew one priest, whom he was very much concerned to confront with the curious revelations he had heard that afternoon. He felt he would very much like to know the truth about the cruel superstition that hung over the house of Marne, like the black thundercloud he had seen hovering over it.
After being referred from one place to another, he finally ran his friend Father Brown to earth in the house of another friend, a Roman Catholic friend with a large family. He entered somewhat abruptly to find Father Brown sitting on the floor with a serious expression, and attempting to pin the somewhat florid hat belonging to a wax doll on to the head of a teddy bear.
Mallow felt a faint sense of incongruity; but he was far too full of his problem to put off the conversation if he could help it. He was staggering from a sort of setback in a subconscious process that had been going on for some time. He poured out the whole tragedy of the house of Marne as he had heard it from the general’s wife, along with most of the comments of the general and the newspaper proprietor. A new atmosphere of attention seemed to be created with the mention of the newspaper proprietor.
Father Brown neither knew nor cared that his attitudes were comic or commonplace. He continued to sit on the floor, where his large head and short legs made him look very like a baby playing with toys. But there came into his great grey eyes a certain expression that has been seen in the eyes of
