The Incredulity of Father Brown

of the car and its cargo in the form of Father Brown. They coasted along the road with the sea on one side and the hills of Hampshire and Sussex on the other; nor was there visible to the eye any shadow of pursuit. As they approached the village of Dulham only one man crossed their path who had any connection with the matter in hand; a journalist who had just visited the church and been courteously escorted by the vicar through the new excavated chapel; but his remarks and notes seemed to be of the ordinary newspaper sort. But Professor Smaill was perhaps a little fanciful, and could not dismiss the sense of something odd and discouraging in the attitude and appearance of the man, who was tall and shabby, hook-nosed and hollow-eyed, with moustaches that drooped with depression. He seemed anything but enlivened by his late experiment as a sightseer; indeed, he seemed to be striding as fast as possible from the sight, when they stopped him with a question.

“It’s all about a curse,” he said; “a curse on the place, according to the guidebook or the parson or the oldest inhabitant or whoever is the authority; and really, it feels jolly like it. Curse or no curse, I’m glad to have got out of it.”

“Do you believe in curses?” asked Smaill curiously.

“I don’t believe in anything; I’m a journalist,” answered the melancholy being⁠—“Boon, of the Daily Wire. But there’s a something creepy about that crypt; and I’ll never deny I felt a chill.” And he strode on towards the railway station with a further accelerated pace.

“Looks like a raven or a crow, that fellow,” observed Smaill as they turned towards the churchyard. “What is it they say about a bird of ill omen?”

They entered the churchyard slowly, the eyes of the American antiquary lingering luxuriantly over the isolated roof of the lychgate and the large unfathomable black growth of the yew looking like night itself defying the broad daylight. The path climbed up amid heaving levels of turf in which the gravestones were tilted at all angles like stone rafts tossed on a green sea, till it came to the ridge beyond which the great sea itself ran like an iron bar, with pale lights in it like steel. Almost at their feet the tough rank grass turned into a tuft of sea-holly and ended in grey and yellow sand; and a foot or two from the holly, and outlined darkly against the steely sea, stood a motionless figure. But for its dark-grey clothing it might almost have been the statue on some sepulchral monument. But Father Brown instantly recognized something in the elegant stoop of the shoulders and the rather sullen outward thrust of the short beard.

“Gee!” exclaimed the professor of archaeology; “it’s that man Tarrant, if you call him a man. Did you think, when I spoke on the boat, that I should ever get so quick an answer to my question.”

“I thought you might get too many answers to it,” answered Father Brown.

“Why, how do you mean?” inquired the Professor, darting a look at him over his shoulder.

“I mean,” answered the other mildly, “that I thought I heard voices behind the yew-tree. I don’t think Mr. Tarrant is so solitary as he looks; I might even venture to say, so solitary as he likes to look.”

Even as Tarrant turned slowly round in his moody manner, the confirmation came. Another voice, high and rather hard, but none the less feminine, was saying with experienced raillery:

“And how was I to know he would be here?”

It was borne in upon Professor Smaill that this gay observation was not addressed to him; so he was forced to conclude in some bewilderment, that yet a third person was present. As Lady Diana Wales came out, radiant and resolute as ever, from the shadow of the yew, he noted grimly that she had a living shadow of her own. The lean dapper figure of Leonard Smyth, that insinuating man of letters, appeared immediately behind her own flamboyant form, smiling, his head a little on one side like a dog’s.

“Snakes!” muttered Smaill; “why, they’re all here! Or all except that little showman with the walrus whiskers.”

He heard Father Brown laughing softly beside him; and indeed the situation was becoming something more than laughable. It seemed to be turning topsy-turvy and tumbling about their ears like a pantomime trick; for even while the Professor had been speaking, his words had received the most comical contradiction. The round head with the grotesque black crescent of moustache had appeared suddenly and seemingly out of a hole in the ground. An instant afterwards they realized that the hole was in fact a very large hole, leading to a ladder which descended into the bowels of the earth; that it was in fact the entrance to the subterranean scene they had come to visit. The little man had been the first to find the entrance and had already descended a rung or two of the ladder before he put his head out again to address his fellow-travellers. He looked like some particularly preposterous Gravedigger in a burlesque of Hamlet. He only said thickly behind his thick moustaches, “It is down here.” But it came to the rest of the company with a start of realization that, though they had sat opposite him at mealtimes for a week, they had hardly ever heard him speak before; and that though he was supposed to be an English lecturer, he spoke with a rather occult foreign accent.

“You see, my dear Professor,” cried Lady Diana with trenchant cheerfulness, “your Byzantine mummy was simply too exciting to be missed. I simply had to come along and see it; and I’m sure the gentlemen felt just the same. Now you must tell us all about it.”

“I do not know all about it,” said the Professor gravely, not to say grimly. “In some respects I don’t even know what it’s all