The Incredulity of Father Brown

let him lead her down the long hall and up the stairs and out under the evening sky. The ruins of a dead garden stretched towards the sea; and an old fountain with the figure of a triton, green with rust, remained poised there, pouring nothing out of a dried horn into an empty basin. He had often seen that desolate outline against the evening sky as he passed, and it had seemed to him a type of fallen fortunes in more ways than one. Before long, doubtless, those hollow fonts would be filled, but it would be with the pale green bitter waters of the sea and the flowers would be drowned and strangled in seaweed. So, he had told himself, the daughter of the Darnaways might indeed be wedded, but she would be wedded to death and a doom as deaf and ruthless as the sea. But now he laid a hand on the bronze triton that was like the hand of a giant, and shook it as if he meant to hurl it over like an idol or an evil god of the garden.

“What do you mean?” she asked steadily. “What is this word that will set us free?”

“The word is murder,” he said, “and the freedom it brings is as fresh as the flowers of spring. No; I do not mean I have murdered anybody. But the fact that anybody can be murdered is itself good news, after the evil dreams you have been living in. Don’t you understand? In that dream of yours everything that happened to you came from inside you; the doom of the Darnaways was stored up in the Darnaways; it unfolded itself like a horrible flower. There was no escape even by happy accident; it was all inevitable; whether it was Vine and his oldwives tales or Barnet and his newfangled heredity. But this man who died was not the victim of a magic curse or an inherited madness. He was murdered; and for us that murder is simply an accident; yes, requiescat in pace, but a happy accident. It is a ray of daylight, because it comes from outside.”

She suddenly smiled. “Yes, I believe I understand. I suppose you are talking like a lunatic; but I understand. But who murdered him?”

“I do not know,” he answered calmly, “but Father Brown knows. And as Father Brown says, murder is at least done by the will, free as that wind from the sea.”

“Father Brown is a wonderful person,” she said after a pause; “he was the only person who ever brightened my existence in any way at all until⁠—”

“Until what?” asked Payne, and made a movement almost impetuous, leaning towards her and thrusting away the bronze monster so that it seemed to rock on its pedestal.

“Well, until you did,” she said and smiled again.

So was the sleeping palace awakened, and it is no part of this story to describe the stages of its awakening, though much of it had come to pass before the dark of that evening had fallen upon the shore. As Harry Payne strode homewards once more, across those dark sands that he had crossed in so many moods, he was at the highest turn of happiness that is given in this mortal life, and the whole red sea within him was at the top of its tide. He would have had no difficulty in picturing all that place again in flower, and the bronze triton bright as a golden god and the fountain flowing with water or with wine. But all this brightness and blossoming had been unfolded for him by the one word “murder,” and it was still a word that he did not understand. He had taken it on trust, and he was not unwise; for he was one of those who have a sense of the sound of truth.

It was more than a month later that Payne returned to his London house to keep an appointment with Father Brown, taking the required photograph with him. His personal romance had prospered as well as was fitting under the shadow of such a tragedy, and the shadow itself therefore lay rather more lightly on him; but it was hard to view it as anything but the shadow of a family fatality. In many ways he had been much occupied, and it was not until the Darnaway household had resumed its somewhat stern routine and the portrait had long been restored to its place in the library that he had managed to photograph it with a magnesium flare. Before sending it to the antiquary, as originally arranged, he brought it to the priest who had so pressingly demanded it.

“I can’t understand your attitude about all this, Father Brown,” he said. “You act as if you had already solved the problem in some way of your own.”

The priest shook his head mournfully. “Not a bit of it,” he answered. “I must be very stupid, but I’m quite stuck; stuck about the most practical point of all. It’s a queer business; so simple up to a point, and then⁠—Let me have a look at that photograph, will you?”

He held it close to his screwed, shortsighted eyes for a moment, and then said: “Have you got a magnifying glass?”

Payne produced one, and the priest looked through it intently for some time and then said: “Look at the title of that book at the edge of the bookshelf beside the frame; it’s The History of Pope Joan. Now, I wonder⁠ ⁠… yes, by George; and the one above is something or other of Iceland. Lord! what a queer way to find it out! What a dolt and donkey I was not to notice it when I was there!”

“But what have you found out?” asked Payne impatiently.

“The last link,” said Father Brown, “and I’m not stuck any longer. Yes; I think I know how that unhappy story went from first to last now.”

“But why?” insisted the other.

“Why, because,” said the priest