“I admit,” said Father Brown dully, “that I take a more serious view of his offence.”
“God soften your hard heart,” said the strange lady speaking for the first time. “I am going to speak to my old friend.”
Almost as if her voice had raised a ghost in that great grey house, something stirred within and a figure stood in the dark doorway at the top of the great stone flight of steps. It was clad in dead black, but there was something wild about the blanched hair and something in the pale features that was like the wreck of a marble statue.
Viola Grayson began calmly to move up the great flight of steps; and Outram muttered in his thick black moustache: “He won’t cut her dead as he did my wife, I fancy.”
Father Brown, who seemed in a collapse of resignation, looked up at him for a moment.
“Poor Marne has enough on his conscience,” he said. “Let us acquit him of what we can. At least he never cut your wife.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“He never knew her,” said Father Brown.
As they spoke, the tall lady proudly mounted the last step and came face to face with the Marquis of Marne. His lips moved, but something happened before he could speak.
A scream rang across the open space and went wailing away in echoes along those hollow walls. By the abruptness and agony with which it broke from the woman’s lips it might have been a mere inarticulate cry. But it was an articulated word; and they all heard it with a horrible distinctness.
“Maurice!”
“What is it, dear?” cried Lady Outram, and began to run up the steps; for the other woman was swaying as if she might fall down the whole stone flight. Then she faced about and began to descend, all bowed and shrunken and shuddering. “Oh, my God,” she was saying. “Oh, my God … it isn’t Jim at all … it’s Maurice!”
“I think, Lady Outram,” said the priest gravely, “you had better go with your friend.”
As they turned, a voice fell on them like a stone from the top of the stone stair, a voice that might have come out of an open grave. It was hoarse and unnatural, like the voices of men who are left alone with wild birds on desert islands. It was the voice of the Marquis of Marne, and it said: “Stop!”
“Father Brown,” he said, “before your friends disperse I authorize you to tell them all I have told you. Whatever follows, I will hide from it no longer.”
“You are right,” said the priest, “and it shall be counted to you.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown quietly to the questioning company afterwards. “He has given me the right to speak; but I will not tell it as he told me, but as I found it out for myself. Well, I knew from the first that the blighting monkish influence was all nonsense out of novels. Our people might possibly in certain cases encourage a man to go regularly into a monastery, but certainly not to hang about in a medieval castle. In the same way, they certainly wouldn’t want him to dress up as a monk when he wasn’t a monk. But it struck me that he might himself want to wear a monk’s hood or even a mask. I had heard of him as a mourner, and then as a murderer; but already I had hazy suspicions that his reason for hiding might not only be concerned with what he was, but with who he was.
“Then came the general’s vivid description of the duel; and the most vivid thing in it to me was the figure of Mr. Romaine in the background; it was vivid because it was in the background. Why did the general leave behind him on the sand a dead man, whose friend stood yards away from him like a stock or a stone? Then I heard something, a mere trifle, about a trick habit that Romaine has of standing quite still when he is waiting for something to happen; as he waited for the thunder to follow the lightning. Well, that automatic trick in this case betrayed everything. Hugo Romaine, on that old occasion, also was waiting for something.”
“But it was all over,” said the general. “What could he have been waiting for?”
“He was waiting for the duel,” said Father Brown.
“But I tell you I saw the duel!” cried the general.
“And I tell you you didn’t see the duel,” said the priest.
“Are you mad?” demanded the other. “Or why should you think I am blind?”
“Because you were blinded—that you might not see,” said the priest. “Because you are a good man and God had mercy on your innocence, and he turned your face away from that unnatural strife. He set a wall of sand and silence between you and what really happened on that horrible red shore, abandoned to the raging spirits of Judas and of Cain.”
“Tell us what happened!” gasped the lady impatiently.
“I will tell it as I found it,” proceeded the priest. “The next thing I found was that Romaine, the actor, had been training Maurice Mair in all the tricks of the trade of acting. I once had a friend who went in for acting. He gave me a very amusing account of how his first week’s training consisted entirely of falling down; of learning how to fall flat without a stagger, as if he were stone dead.”
“God have mercy on us!” cried the general, and gripped the arms of his chair as if to rise.
“Amen,” said Father Brown. “You told me how quickly it seemed to come; in fact, Maurice fell before the bullet flew, and lay perfectly still, waiting. And his wicked friend and teacher stood also in the background, waiting.”
“We are waiting,” said Cockspur, “and I feel
