Father Brown tossed the paper on the floor and sat bolt upright in his chair.
“You mustn’t let that sort of stuff stupefy you,” he said sharply. “These devils always try to make us helpless by making us hopeless.”
Rather to his surprise, an awakening wave went over the prostrate figure, which sprang from its chair as if startled out of a dream.
“You’re right, you’re right!” cried Aylmer with a rather uncanny animation; “and the devils shall find I’m not so hopeless after all, nor so helpless either. Perhaps I have more hope and better help than you fancy.”
He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the priest, who had a momentary doubt, during that strained silence, about whether the man’s long peril had not touched the man’s brain. But when he spoke it was quite soberly.
“I believe my unfortunate brothers failed because they used the wrong weapons. Philip carried a revolver, and that was how his death came to be called suicide. Stephen had police protection, but he also had a sense of what made him ridiculous; and he could not allow a policeman to climb up a ladder after him to a scaffolding where he stood only a moment. They were both scoffers, reacting into scepticism from the strange mysticism of my father’s last days. But I always knew there was more in my father than they understood. It is true that by studying magic he fell at last under the blight of black magic; the black magic of this scoundrel Strake. But my brothers were wrong about the antidote. The antidote to black magic is not brute materialism or worldly wisdom. The antidote to black magic is white magic.”
“It rather depends,” said Father Brown, “what you mean by white magic.”
“I mean silver magic,” said the other, in a low voice, like one speaking of a secret revelation. Then after a silence he said: “Do you know what I mean by silver magic? Excuse me a moment.”
He turned and opened the central door with the red glass and went into a passage beyond it. The house had less depth than Brown had supposed; instead of the door opening into interior rooms, the corridor it revealed ended in another door on the garden. The door of one room was on one side of the passage; doubtless, the priest told himself, the proprietor’s bedroom whence he had rushed out in his dressing-gown. There was nothing else on that side but an ordinary hatstand with the ordinary dingy cluster of old hats and overcoats; but on the other side was something more interesting; a very dark old oak sideboard laid out with some old silver, and overhung by a trophy or ornament of old weapons. It was by that that Arnold Aylmer halted, looking up at a long, antiquated pistol with a bell-shaped mouth.
The door at the end of the passage was barely open, and through the crack came a streak of white daylight. The priest had very quick instincts about natural things, and something in the unusual brilliancy of that white line told him what had happened outside. It was indeed what he had prophesied when he was approaching the house. He ran past his rather startled host and opened the door, to face something that was at once a blank and a blaze. What he had seen shining through the crack was not only the more negative whiteness of daylight but the positive whiteness of snow. All round, the sweeping fall of the country was covered with that shining pallor that seems at once hoary and innocent.
“Here is white magic anyhow,” said Father Brown in his cheerful voice. Then as he turned back into the hall he murmured, “And silver magic too, I suppose,” for the white lustre touched the silver with splendour and lit up the old steel here and there in the darkling armoury. The shaggy head of the brooding Aylmer seemed to have a halo of silver fire, as he turned with his face in shadow and the outlandish pistol in his hand.
“Do you know why I choose this sort of old blunderbuss?” he asked. “Because I can load it with this sort of bullet.”
He had picked up a small apostle spoon from the sideboard, and by sheer violence broke off the small figure at the top. “Let us go back into the other room,” he added.
“Did you ever read about the death of Dundee?” he asked when they had reseated themselves. He had recovered from his momentary annoyance at the priest’s restlessness. “Graham of Claverhouse, you know, who persecuted the Covenanters and had a black horse that could ride straight up a precipice. Don’t you know he could only be shot with a silver bullet, because he had sold himself to the Devil? That’s one comfort about you; at least you know enough to believe in the Devil.”
“Oh, yes,” replied Father Brown, “I believe in the Devil. What I don’t believe in is the Dundee. I mean the Dundee of Covenanting legends, with his nightmare of a horse. John Graham was simply a seventeenth-century professional soldier, rather better than most. If he dragooned them it was because he was a dragoon, but not a dragon. Now my experience is that it’s not that sort of swaggering blade who sells himself to the Devil. The devil-worshippers I’ve known were quite different. Not to mention names, which might cause a social flutter, I’ll take a man in Dundee’s own day. Have you ever heard of Dalrymple of Stair?”
“No,” replied the other gruffly.
“You’ve heard of what he did,” said Father Brown, “and it was worse than anything Dundee ever did; yet he escapes the infamy by oblivion. He was the man who made the Massacre of Glencoe. He was a very learned man and lucid lawyer, a statesman with very
