“My opinion about that is unchanged,” said Father Brown mildly.
Then after a pause he added: “I hope you will observe poor Darnaway’s last wish, and see the photograph is sent off.”
“The photograph!” cried the doctor sharply. “What’s the good of that? As a matter of fact, it’s rather curious; but there isn’t any photograph. It seems he never took it after all, after pottering about all day.”
Father Brown swung round sharply. “Then take it yourselves,” he said. “Poor Darnaway was perfectly right. It’s most important that the photograph should be taken.”
As all the visitors, the doctor, the priest and the two artists trailed away in a black and dismal procession across the brown and yellow sands, they were at first more or less silent, rather as if they had been stunned. And certainly there had been something like a crack of thunder in a clear sky about the fulfilment of that forgotten superstition at the very time when they had most forgotten it; when the doctor and the priest had both filled their minds with rationalism as the photographer had filled his rooms with daylight. They might be as rationalistic as they liked; but in broad daylight the seventh heir had returned, and in broad daylight at the seventh hour he had perished.
“I’m afraid everybody will always believe in the Darnaway superstition now,” said Martin Wood.
“I know one who won’t,” said the doctor sharply. “Why should I indulge in superstition because somebody else indulges in suicide?”
“You think poor Mr. Darnaway committed suicide?” asked the priest.
“I’m sure he committed suicide,” replied the doctor.
“It is possible,” agreed the other.
“He was quite alone up there, and he had a whole drugstore of poisons in the dark room. Besides, it’s just the sort of thing that Darnaways do.”
“You don’t think there’s anything in the fulfilment of the family curse?”
“Yes,” said the doctor; “I believe in one family curse, and that is the family constitution. I told you it was heredity, and they are all half mad. If you stagnate and breed in and brood in your own swamp like that, you’re bound to degenerate whether you like it or not. The laws of heredity can’t be dodged; the truths of science can’t be denied. The minds of the Darnaways are falling to pieces, as their blighted old sticks and stones are falling to pieces, eaten away by the sea and the salt air. Suicide—of course he committed suicide; I dare say all the rest will commit suicide. Perhaps the best thing they could do.”
As the man of science spoke there sprang suddenly and with startling clearness into Payne’s memory the face of the daughter of the Darnaways, a tragic mask pale against an unfathomable blackness, but itself of a blinding and more than mortal beauty. He opened his mouth to speak and found himself speechless.
“I see,” said Father Brown to the doctor; “so you do believe in the superstition after all?”
“What do you mean—believe in the superstition? I believe in the suicide as a matter of scientific necessity.”
“Well,” replied the priest, “I don’t see a pin to choose between your scientific superstition and the other magical superstition. They both seem to end in turning people into paralytics, who can’t move their own legs or arms or save their own lives or souls. The rhyme said it was the doom of the Darnaways to be killed, and the scientific textbook says it is the doom of the Darnaways to kill themselves. Both ways they seem to be slaves.”
“But I thought you said you believed in rational views of these things,” said Dr. Barnet. “Don’t you believe in heredity?”
“I said I believed in daylight,” replied the priest in a loud and clear voice, “and I won’t choose between two tunnels of subterranean superstition that both end in the dark. And the proof of it is this: that you are all entirely in the dark about what really happened in that house.”
“Do you mean about the suicide?” asked Payne.
“I mean about the murder,” said Father Brown; and his voice, though only slightly lifted to a louder note, seemed somehow to resound over the whole shore. “It was murder: but murder is of the will, which God made free.”
What the others said at the moment in answer to it Payne never knew. For the word had a rather curious effect on him; stirring him like the blast of a trumpet and yet bringing him to a halt. He stood still in the middle of the sandy waste and let the others go on in front of him; he felt the blood crawling through all his veins and the sensation that is called the hair standing on end; and yet he felt a new and unnatural happiness. A psychological process too quick and too complicated for himself to follow had already reached a conclusion that he could not analyse; but the conclusion was one of relief. After standing still for a moment he turned and went back slowly across the sands to the house of the Darnaways.
He crossed the moat with a stride that shook the bridge, descended the stairs and traversed the long rooms with a resounding tread, till he came to the place where Adelaide Darnaway sat haloed with the low light of the oval window, almost like some forgotten saint left behind in the land of death. She looked up, and an expression of wonder made her face yet more wonderful.
“What is it?” she said. “Why have you come back?”
“I have come for the Sleeping Beauty,” he said in a tone that had the resonance of a laugh. “This old house went to sleep long ago, as the doctor said; but it is silly for you to pretend to be old. Come up into the daylight and hear the truth. I have brought you a word; it is a terrible word, but it breaks the spell of your captivity.”
She did not understand a word he said, but something made her rise and
