“Is there anything in it?” he was saying. “That is what I’ve come to asking myself till I’m nearly crazy. I’d never have believed I should come to thinking of such things; but I think of the portrait and the rhyme and the coincidences or whatever you call them, and I go cold. Is there anything in it? Is there any Doom of the Darnaways or only a damned queer accident? Have I got a right to marry, or shall I bring something big and black out of the sky, that I know nothing about, on myself and somebody else?”
His rolling eye had roamed round the table and rested on the plain face of the priest, to whom he now seemed to be speaking. Payne’s submerged practicality rose in protest against the problem of superstition being brought before that supremely superstitious tribunal. He was sitting next to Darnaway and struck in before the priest could answer.
“Well, the coincidences are curious, I admit,” he said, rather forcing a note of cheerfulness; “but surely we—” and then he stopped as if he had been struck by lightning. For Darnaway had turned his head sharply over his shoulder at the interruption, and with the movement his left eyebrow jerked up far above its fellow and for an instant the face of the portrait glared at him with a ghastly exaggeration of exactitude. The rest saw it; and all had the air of having been dazzled by an instant of light. The old steward gave a hollow groan.
“It is no good,” he said hoarsely; “we are dealing with something too terrible.”
“Yes,” assented the priest in a low voice, “we are dealing with something terrible; with the most terrible thing I know; and the name of it is nonsense.”
“What did you say?” said Darnaway, still looking towards him.
“I said nonsense,” repeated the priest. “I have not said anything in particular up to now, for it was none of my business; I was only taking temporary duty in the neighbourhood and Miss Darnaway wanted to see me. But since you’re asking me personally and point-blank, why, it’s easy enough to answer. Of course there’s no Doom of the Darnaways to prevent your marrying anybody you have any decent reason for marrying. A man isn’t fated to fall into the smallest venial sin, let alone into crimes like suicide and murder. You can’t be made to do wicked things against your will because your name is Darnaway, any more than I can because my name is Brown. The Doom of the Browns,” he added with relish—“the Weird of the Browns would sound even better.”
“And you of all people,” repeated the Australian, staring, “tell me to think like that about it.”
“I tell you to think about something else,” replied the priest cheerfully. “What has become of the rising art of photography? How is the camera getting on? I know it’s rather dark downstairs, but those hollow arches on the floor above could easily be turned into a first-rate photographic studio. A few workmen could fit it out with a glass roof in no time.”
“Really,” protested Martin Wood, “I do think you should be the last man in the world to tinker about with those beautiful Gothic arches, which are about the best work your own religion has ever done in the world. I should have thought you’d have had some feeling for that sort of art; but I can’t see why you should be so uncommonly keen on photography.”
“I’m uncommonly keen on daylight,” answered Father Brown, “especially in this dingy business; and photography has the virtue of depending on daylight. And if you don’t know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don’t know so much about my religion as you think you do.”
The young Australian had sprung to his feet like a man rejuvenated. “By George! that’s the talk,” he cried; “though I never thought to hear it from that quarter. I’ll tell you what, reverend sir, I’ll do something that will show I haven’t lost my courage after all.”
The old steward was still looking at him with quaking watchfulness, as if he felt something fey about the young man’s defiance. “Oh,” he cried, “what are you going to do now?”
“I am going to photograph the portrait,” replied Darnaway.
Yet it was barely a week afterwards that the storm of the catastrophe seemed to stoop out of the sky, darkening that sun of sanity to which the priest had appealed in vain, and plunging the mansion once more in the darkness of the Darnaway doom. It had been easy enough to fit up the new studio; and seen from inside it looked very like any other such studio, empty except for the fullness of the white light. A man coming from the gloomy rooms below had more than normally the sense of stepping into a more than modern brilliancy, as blank as the future. At the suggestion of Wood, who knew the castle well and had got over his first aesthetic grumblings, a small room remaining intact in the upper ruins was easily turned into a dark room, into which Darnaway went out of the white daylight to grope by the crimson gleams of a red lamp. Wood said, laughing, that the red lamp had reconciled him to the vandalism; as that bloodshot darkness was as
