FIVE
The Mistake of the Machine
FLAMBEAU and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens
about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence
had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem
of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and
mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and
the Third Degree in America.
"I've been reading," said Flambeau, "of this new psychometric method
they talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean;
they put a pulsometer on a man's wrist and judge by how his heart goes
at the pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?"
"I think it very interesting," replied Father Brown;
"it reminds me of that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood
would flow from a corpse if the murderer touched it."
"Do you really mean," demanded his friend, "that you think
the two methods equally valuable?"
"I think them equally valueless," replied Brown. "Blood flows,
fast or slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons
than we can ever know. Blood will have to flow very funnily;
blood will have to flow up the Matterhorn, before I will take it
as a sign that I am to shed it."
"The method," remarked the other, "has been guaranteed
by some of the greatest American men of science."
"What sentimentalists men of science are!" exclaimed Father Brown,
"and how much more sentimental must American men of science be!
Who but a Yankee would think of proving anything from heart-throbs?
Why, they must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman
is in love with him if she blushes. That's a test from
the circulation of the blood, discovered by the immortal Harvey;
and a jolly rotten test, too."
"But surely," insisted Flambeau, "it might point pretty straight
at something or other."
"There's a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,"
answered the other. "What is it? Why, the other end of the stick
always points the opposite way. It depends whether you
get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing done once
and I've never believed in it since." And he proceeded to tell
the story of his disillusionment.
It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain
to his co-religionists in a prison in Chicago--where the Irish population
displayed a capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him
tolerably busy. The official second-in-command under the Governor
was an ex-detective named Greywood Usher, a cadaverous, careful-spoken
Yankee philosopher, occasionally varying a very rigid visage
with an odd apologetic grimace. He liked Father Brown in
a slightly patronizing way; and Father Brown liked him,
though he heartily disliked his theories. His theories were
extremely complicated and were held with extreme simplicity.
One evening he had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom,
took a seat in silence at a table piled and littered with papers,
and waited. The official selected from the papers a scrap of
newspaper cutting, which he handed across to the cleric,
who read it gravely. It appeared to be an extract from one of
the pinkest of American Society papers, and ran as follows:
"Society's brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt.
All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner,
in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim's Pond,
caused so many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger
than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and
large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick's show the year previous,
the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round
were sarcastically moulded in the forms of human arms and legs,
and during which more than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard
offering to eat his partner. The witticism which will inspire
this evening is as yet in Mr Todd's pretty reticent intellect,
or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city's gayest leaders;
but there is talk of a pretty parody of the simple manners and customs
at the other end of Society's scale. This would be all the more telling,
as hospitable Todd is entertaining in Lord Falconroy, the famous traveller,
a true-blooded aristocrat fresh from England's oak-groves.
Lord Falconroy's travels began before his ancient feudal title
was resurrected, he was in the Republic in his youth, and fashion murmurs
a sly reason for his return. Miss Etta Todd is one of our
deep-souled New Yorkers, and comes into an income of nearly
twelve hundred million dollars."
"Well," asked Usher, "does that interest you?"
"Why, words rather fail me," answered Father Brown.
"I cannot think at this moment of anything in this world that would
interest me less. And, unless the just anger of the Republic is
at last going to electrocute journalists for writing like that,
I don't quite see why it should interest you either."
"Ah!" said Mr Usher dryly, and handing across another
scrap of newspaper. "Well, does that interest you?"
The paragraph was headed "Savage Murder of a Warder.
Convict Escapes," and ran: "Just before dawn this morning
a shout for help was heard in the Convict Settlement at Sequah
in this State. The authorities, hurrying in the direction of the cry,
found the corpse of the warder who patrols the top of the north wall
of the prison, the steepest and most difficult exit, for which one man
has always been found sufficient. The unfortunate officer had,
however, been hurled from the high wall, his brains beaten out
as with a club, and his gun was missing. Further inquiries showed that
one of the cells was empty; it had been occupied by a rather sullen ruffian
giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only temporarily detained
for some comparatively trivial assault; but he gave everyone the impression
of a man with a black past and a dangerous future. Finally,
when daylight bad fully revealed the scene of murder, it was found
that he had written on the wall above the body a fragmentary sentence,
apparently with a finger dipped in blood: `This was self-defence and
he had the gun. I meant no harm to him or any man but one.
I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim's Pond--O.R.' A man must have used
most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing bodily daring
to have stormed such a wall in spite of an armed man."
"Well, the literary style is somewhat improved," admitted the priest
cheerfully, "but still I don't see what I can do for you.
I should cut a poor figure, with my short legs, running about this State
after an athletic assassin of that sort. I doubt whether
anybody could find him. The convict settlement at Sequah
is thirty miles from here; the country between is wild and tangled enough,
and the country beyond, where he will surely have the sense to go,
is a perfect no-man's land tumbling away to the prairies.
He may be in any hole or up any tree."
"He isn't in any hole," said the governor; "he isn't up any tree."
"Why, how do you know?" asked Father Brown, blinking.
"Would you like to speak to him?" inquired Usher.
Father Brown opened his innocent eyes wide. "He is here?"
he exclaimed. "Why, how did your men get hold of him?"
"I got hold of him myself," drawled the American, rising and
lazily stretching his lanky legs before the fire. "I got hold of him
with the crooked end of a walking-stick. Don't look so surprised.
I really did. You know I sometimes take a turn in the country lanes
outside this dismal place; well, I was walking early this evening
up a steep lane with dark hedges and grey-looking ploughed fields
on both sides; and a young moon was up and silvering the road.
By the light of it I saw a man running across the field towards the road;
running with his body bent and at a good mile-race trot.
He appeared to be much exhausted; but when he came to the thick black hedge
he went through it as if it were made of spiders' webs; --or rather
(for I heard the strong branches breaking and snapping like bayonets)
as if he himself were made of stone. In the instant in which
he appeared up against the moon, crossing the road, I slung my hooked cane
at his legs, tripping him and bringing him down. Then I blew my whistle
long and loud, and our fellows came running up to secure him."
"It would have been rather awkward," remarked Brown,
"if you had found he was a popular athlete practising a mile race."
"He was not," said Usher grimly. "We soon found out who he was;
but I had guessed it with the first glint of the moon on him."
"You thought it was the runaway convict," observed the priest simply,
"because you had read in the newspaper cutting that morning that
a convict had run away."
"I had somewhat better grounds," replied the governor coolly.
"I pass over the first as too simple to be emphasized--
I mean that fashionable athletes do not run across ploughed fields
or scratch their eyes out in bramble hedges. Nor do they run
all doubled up like a crouching dog. There were more decisive details
to a fairly well-trained eye. The man was clad in coarse
and ragged clothes, but they were something more than merely
coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting as to be quite grotesque;
even as he appeared in black outline against the moonrise,
the coat-collar in which his head was buried made him look
like a hunchback, and the long loose sleeves looked as if he had no hands.
It at once occurred to me that he had somehow managed to change
his convict clothes for some confederate's clothes which did not fit him.
Second, there was a pretty stiff wind against which he was running;
so that I must have seen the streaky look of blowing hair, if the hair
had not been very short. Then I remembered that beyond these
ploughed fields he was crossing lay Pilgrim's Pond, for which
(you will remember) the convict was keeping his bullet;
and I sent my walking-stick flying."
"A brilliant piece of rapid deduction," said Father Brown;
"but had he got a gun?"
As Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically:
"I've been told a bullet is not half so useful without it."
"He had no gun," said the other gravely; "but that was doubtless
due to some very natural mischance or change of plans. Probably the
same policy that made him change the clothes made him drop the gun;
he began to repent the coat he had left behind him in the blood
of his victim."
"Well, that is possible enough," answered the priest.
"And it's hardly worth speculating on," said Usher,
turning to some other papers, "for we know it's the man by this time."
His clerical friend asked faintly: "But how?" And Greywood Usher
threw down the newspapers and took up the two press-cuttings again.
"Well, since you are so obstinate," he said, "let's begin
at the beginning. You will notice that these two cuttings have only
one thing in common, which is the mention of Pilgrim's Pond,
the estate, as you know, of the millionaire Ireton Todd.
You also know that he is a remarkable character; one of those
that rose on stepping-stones--"
"Of our dead selves to higher things," assented his companion.
"Yes; I know that. Petroleum, I think."
"Anyhow," said Usher, "Last-Trick Todd counts for a great deal
in this rum affair."
He stretched himself once more before the fire and continued talking
in his expansive, radiantly explanatory style.
"To begin with, on the face of it, there is no mystery here at all.
It is not mysterious, it is not even odd, that a jailbird should
take his gun to Pilgrim's Pond. Our people aren't like the English,
who will forgive a man for being rich if he throws away money
on hospitals or horses. Last-Trick Todd has made himself big
by his own considerable abilities; and there's no doubt that
many of those on whom he has shown his abilities would like to
show theirs on him with a shot-gun. Todd might easily get dropped
by some man he'd never even heard of; some labourer he'd locked out,
or some clerk in a business he'd busted. Last-Trick is a man
of mental endowments and a high public character; but in this country
the relations of employers and employed are considerably strained.
"That's how the whole thing looks supposing this Rian
made for Pilgrim's Pond to kill Todd. So it looked to me,
till another little discovery woke up what I have of the detective in me.
When I had my prisoner safe, I picked up my cane again and strolled down
the two or three turns of country road that brought me to one of
the side entrances of Todd's grounds, the one nearest to the pool
or lake after which the place is named. It was some two hours ago,
about seven by this time; the moonlight was more luminous,
and I could see the long white streaks of it lying on the mysterious mere
with its grey, greasy, half-liquid shores in which they say
our fathers used to make witches walk until they sank.
I'd forgotten the exact tale; but you know the place I mean;
it lies north of Todd's house towards the wilderness, and has two queer
wrinkled trees, so dismal that they look more like huge fungoids
than decent foliage. As I stood peering at this misty pool,
I fancied I saw the faint figure of a man moving from the house towards it,
but it was all too dim and distant for one to be certain of the fact,
and still less of the details. Besides, my attention was very sharply
arrested by something much closer. I crouched behind the fence
which ran not more than two hundred yards from one wing of
the great mansion, and which was fortunately split in places,
as if specially for the application of a cautious eye. A door had opened
in the dark bulk of the left wing, and a figure appeared black against
the illuminated interior--a muffled figure bending forward,
evidently peering out into the night. It closed the door behind it,
and I saw it was carrying a lantern, which threw a patch of imperfect light
on the dress and figure of the wearer. It seemed to be
the figure of a woman, wrapped up in a ragged cloak and
evidently disguised to avoid notice; there was something very strange
both about the rags and the furtiveness in a person coming out of
those rooms lined with gold. She took cautiously the curved garden path
which brought her within half a hundred yards of me--, then she stood up
for an instant on the terrace of turf that looks towards the slimy lake,
and holding her flaming lantern above her head she deliberately swung it
three times to and fro as for a signal. As she swung it the second time
a flicker of its light fell for a moment on her own face,
a face that I knew. She was unnaturally pale, and her head was bundled
in her borrowed plebeian shawl; but I am certain it was Etta Todd,
the millionaire's daughter.
"She retraced her steps in equal secrecy and the door
closed behind her again. I was about to climb the fence and follow,
when I realized that the detective fever that had lured me
into the adventure was rather undignified; and that in a more
authoritative capacity I already held all the cards in my hand.
I was just turning away when a new noise broke on the night.
A window was thrown up in one of the upper floors, but just round
the corner of the house so that I could not see it; and a voice
of terrible distinctness was heard shouting across the dark garden
to know where Lord Falconroy was, for he was missing from every room
in the house. There was no mistaking that voice. I have
heard it on many a political platform or meeting of directors;
it was Ireton Todd himself. Some of the others seemed to have gone
to the lower windows or on to the steps, and were calling up to him
that Falconroy had gone for a stroll down to the Pilgrim's Pond
an hour before, and could not be traced since. Then Todd cried
`Mighty Murder!' and shut down the window violently; and I could hear him
plunging down the stairs inside. Repossessing myself of my former
and wiser purpose, I whipped out of the way of the general search
that must follow; and returned here not later than eight o'clock.
"I now ask you to recall that little Society paragraph
which seemed to you so painfully lacking in interest. If the convict
was not keeping the shot for Todd, as he evidently wasn't,
it is most likely that he was keeping it for Lord Falconroy;
and it looks as if he had delivered the goods. No more handy place
to shoot a man than in the curious geological surroundings of that pool,
where a body thrown down would sink through thick slime to a depth
practically unknown. Let us suppose, then, that our friend
with the cropped hair came to kill Falconroy and not Todd.
But, as I have pointed out, there are many reasons why people in America
might want to kill Todd. There is no reason why anybody in America
should want to kill an English lord newly landed, except for the one reason
mentioned in the pink paper--that the lord is paying his attentions
to the millionaire's daughter. Our crop-haired friend,
despite his ill-fitting clothes, must be an aspiring lover.
"I know the notion will seem to you jarring and even comic;
but that's because you are English. It sounds to you like saying
the Archbishop of Canterbury's daughter will be married in
St George's, Hanover Square, to a crossing-sweeper on ticket-of-leave.
You don't do justice to the climbing and aspiring power of our
more remarkable citizens. You see a good-looking grey-haired man
in evening-dress with a sort of authority about him, you know he is
a pillar of the State, and you fancy he had a father. You are in error.
You do not realize that a comparatively few years ago he may have been
in a tenement or (quite likely) in a jail. You don't allow for our
national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential citizens
have not only risen recently, but risen comparatively late in life.
Todd's daughter was fully eighteen when her father first made his pile;
so there isn't really anything impossible in her having a hanger-on
in low life; or even in her hanging on to him, as I think
she must be doing, to judge by the lantern business. If so,
the hand that held the lantern may not be unconnected with the hand
that held the gun. This case, sir, will make a noise."
"Well," said the priest patiently, "and what did you do next?"
"I reckon you'll be shocked," replied Greywood Usher,
"as I know you don't cotton to the march of science in these matters.
I am given a good deal of discretion here, and perhaps take a little more
than I'm given; and I thought it was an excellent opportunity to test
that Psychometric Machine I told you about. Now, in my opinion,
that machine can't lie."
"No machine can lie," said Father Brown; "nor can it tell the truth."
"It did in this case, as I'll show you," went on Usher positively.
"I sat the man in the ill-fitting clothes in a comfortable chair,
and simply wrote words on a blackboard; and the machine simply
recorded the variations of his pulse; and I simply observed his manner.
The trick is to introduce some word connected with the supposed crime
in a list of words connected with something quite different,
yet a list in which it occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote `heron' and
`eagle' and `owl', and when I wrote `falcon' he was tremendously agitated;
and when I began to make an `r' at the end of the word,
that machine just bounded. Who else in this republic has any reason
to jump at the name of a newly-arrived Englishman like Falconroy
except the man who's shot him? Isn't that better evidence than
a lot of gabble from witnesses--if the evidence of a reliable machine?"
"You always forget," observed his companion, "that the reliable machine
always has to be worked by an unreliable machine."
"Why, what do you mean?" asked the detective.
"I mean Man," said Father Brown, "the most unreliable machine
I know of. I don't want to be rude; and I don't think you will consider
Man to be an offensive or inaccurate description of yourself.
You say you observed his manner; but how do you know you observed it right?
You say the words have to come in a natural way; but how do you know
that you did it naturally? How do you know, if you come to that,
that he did not observe your manner? Who is to prove that you were not
tremendously agitated? There was no machine tied on to your pulse."
"I tell you," cried the American in the utmost excitement,
"I was as cool as a cucumber."
"Criminals also can be as cool as cucumbers," said Brown
with a smile. "And almost as cool as you."
"Well, this one wasn't," said Usher, throwing the papers about.
"Oh, you make me tired!"
"I'm sorry," said the other. "I only point out what seems
a reasonable possibility. If you could tell by his manner when
the word that might hang him had come, why shouldn't he tell
from your manner that the word that might hang him was coming?
I should ask for more than words myself before I hanged anybody."
Usher smote the table and rose in a sort of angry triumph.
"And that," he cried, "is just what I'm going to give you.
I tried the machine first just in order to test the thing in other ways
afterwards and the machine, sir, is right."
He paused a moment and resumed with less excitement.
"I rather want to insist, if it comes to that, that so far
I had very little to go on except the scientific experiment.
There was really nothing against the man at all. His clothes were
ill-fitting, as I've said, but they were rather better, if anything,
than those of the submerged class to which he evidently belonged.
Moreover, under all the stains of his plunging through ploughed fields
or bursting through dusty hedges, the man was comparatively clean.
This might mean, of course, that he had only just broken prison;
but it reminded me more of the desperate decency of the comparatively
respectable poor. His demeanour was, I am bound to confess,
quite in accordance with theirs. He was silent and dignified as they are;
he seemed to have a big, but buried, grievance, as they do.
He professed total ignorance of the crime and the whole question;
and showed nothing but a sullen impatience for something sensible
that might come to take him out of his meaningless scrape.
He asked me more than once if he could telephone for a lawyer
who had helped him a long time ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense
acted as you would expect an innocent man to act. There was nothing
against him in the world except that little finger on the dial
that pointed to the change of his pulse.
"Then, sir, the machine was on its trial; and the machine was right.
By the time I came with him out of the private room into the vestibule
where all sorts of other people were awaiting examination,
I think he had already more or less made up his mind to clear things up
by something like a confession. He turned to me and began to say
in a low voice: `Oh, I can't stick this any more. If you must know
all about me--'
"At the same instant one of the poor women sitting on the long bench
stood up, screaming aloud and pointing at him with her finger.
I have never in my life heard anything more demoniacally distinct.
Her lean finger seemed to pick him out as if it were a pea-shooter.
Though the word was a mere howl, every syllable was as clear
as a separate stroke on the clock.
"`Drugger Davis!' she shouted. `They've got Drugger Davis!'
"Among the wretched women, mostly thieves and streetwalkers,
twenty faces were turned, gaping with glee and hate. If I had never
heard the words, I should have known by the very shock upon his features
that the so-called Oscar Rian had heard his real name. But I'm not quite
so ignorant, you may be surprised to hear. Drugger Davis was
one of the most terrible and depraved criminals that ever
baffled our police. It is certain he had done murder more than once
long before his last exploit with the warder. But he was never entirely
fixed for it, curiously enough because he did it in the same manner
as those milder--or meaner--crimes for which he was fixed pretty often.
He was a handsome, well-bred-looking brute, as he still is, to some extent;
and he used mostly to go about with barmaids or shop-girls and do them
out of their money. Very often, though, he went a good deal farther;
and they were found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates and
their whole property missing. Then came one case where the girl
was found dead; but deliberation could not quite be proved, and,
what was more practical still, the criminal could not be found.
I heard a rumour of his having reappeared somewhere in the opposite
character this time, lending money instead of borrowing it;
but still to such poor widows as he might personally fascinate,
but still with the same bad result for them. Well, there is
your innocent man, and there is his innocent record. Even, since then,
four criminals and three warders have identified him and confirmed the story.
Now what have you got to say to my poor little machine after that?
Hasn't the machine done for him? Or do you prefer to say that the woman
and I have done for him?"
"As to what you've done for him," replied Father Brown,
rising and shaking himself in a floppy way, "you've saved him from
the electrical chair. I don't think they can kill Drugger Davis
on that old vague story of the poison; and as for the convict
who killed the warder, I suppose it's obvious that you haven't got him.
Mr Davis is innocent of that crime, at any rate."
"What do you mean?" demanded the other. "Why should he be
innocent of that crime?"
"Why, bless us all!" cried the small man in one of his rare
moments of animation, "why, because he's guilty of the other crimes!
I don't know what you people are made of. You seem to think that
all sins are kept together in a bag. You talk as if a miser on Monday
were always a spendthrift on Tuesday. You tell me this man you have here
spent weeks and months wheedling needy women out of small sums of money;
that he used a drug at the best, and a poison at the worst;
that he turned up afterwards as the lowest kind of moneylender,
and cheated most poor people in the same patient and pacific style.
Let it be granted--let us admit, for the sake of argument,
that he did all this. If that is so, I will tell you what he didn't do.
He didn't storm a spiked wall against a man with a loaded gun.
He didn't write on the wall with his own hand, to say he had done it.
He didn't stop to state that his justification was self-defence.
He didn't explain that he had no quarrel with the poor warder.
He didn't name the house of the rich man to which he was going with the gun.
He didn't write his own, initials in a man's blood. Saints alive!
Can't you see the whole character is different, in good and evil?
Why, you don't seem to be like I am a bit. One would think
you'd never had any vices of your own."
The amazed American had already parted his lips in protest
when the door of his private and official room was hammered
and rattled in an unceremonious way to which he was totally unaccustomed.
The door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been
coming to the conclusion that Father Brown might possibly be mad.
The moment after he began to think he was mad himself.
There burst and fell into his private room a man in the filthiest rags,
with a greasy squash hat still askew on his head, and a shabby green shade
shoved up from one of his eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger's.
The rest of his face was almost undiscoverable, being masked with
a matted beard and whiskers through which the nose could barely
thrust itself, and further buried in a squalid red scarf or handkerchief.
Mr Usher prided himself on having seen most of the roughest specimens
in the State, but he thought he had never seen such a baboon dressed
as a scarecrow as this. But, above all, he had never in all his
placid scientific existence heard a man like that speak to him first.
"See here, old man Usher," shouted the being in the red handkerchief,
"I'm getting tired. Don't you try any of your hide-and-seek on me;
I don't get fooled any. Leave go of my guests, and I'll let up
on the fancy clockwork. Keep him here for a split instant and you'll
feel pretty mean. I reckon I'm not a man with no pull."
The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster
with an amazement which had dried up all other sentiments.
The mere shock to his eyes had rendered his ears, almost useless.
At last he rang a bell with a hand of violence. While the bell was
still strong and pealing, the voice of Father Brown fell soft but distinct.
"I have a suggestion to make," he said, "but it seems
a little confusing. I don't know this gentleman--but--
but I think I know him. Now, you know him--you know him quite well--
but you don't know him--naturally. Sounds paradoxical, I know."
"I reckon the Cosmos is cracked," said Usher, and fell asprawl
in his round office chair.
"Now, see here," vociferated the stranger, striking the table,
but speaking in a voice that was all the more mysterious
because it was comparatively mild and rational though still resounding.
"I won't let you in. I want--"
"Who in hell are you?" yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.
"I think the gentleman's name is Todd," said the priest.
Then he picked up the pink slip of newspaper.
"I fear you don't read the Society papers properly," he said,
and began to read out in a monotonous voice, "`Or locked in
the jewelled bosoms of our city's gayest leaders; but there is talk
of a pretty parody of the manners and customs of the other end
of Society's scale.' There's been a big Slum Dinner up at
Pilgrim's Pond tonight; and a man, one of the guests, disappeared.
Mr Ireton Todd is a good host, and has tracked him here,
without even waiting to take off his fancy-dress."
"What man do you mean?"
"I mean the man with comically ill-fitting clothes you saw
running across the ploughed field. Hadn't you better go and
investigate him? He will be rather impatient to get back to his champagne,
from which he ran away in such a hurry, when the convict with the gun
hove in sight."
"Do you seriously mean--" began the official.
"Why, look here, Mr Usher," said Father Brown quietly,
"you said the machine couldn't make a mistake; and in one sense it didn't.
But the other machine did; the machine that worked it.
You assumed that the man in rags jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy,
because he was Lord Falconroy's murderer. He jumped at the name
of Lord Falconroy because he is Lord Falconroy."
"Then why the blazes didn't he say so?" demanded the staring Usher.
"He felt his plight and recent panic were hardly patrician,"
replied the priest, "so he tried to keep the name back at first.
But he was just going to tell it you, when"--and Father Brown looked
down at his boots--"when a woman found another name for him."
"But you can't be so mad as to say," said Greywood Usher,
very white, "that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis."
The priest looked at him very earnestly, but with a baffling
and undecipherable face.
"I am not saying anything about it," he said. "I leave
all the rest to you. Your pink paper says that the title
was recently revived for him; but those papers are very unreliable.
It says he was in the States in youth; but the whole story seems
very strange. Davis and Falconroy are both pretty considerable cowards,
but so are lots of other men. I would not hang a dog on my own opinion
about this. But I think," he went on softly and reflectively,
"I think you Americans are too modest. I think you idealize
the English aristocracy--even in assuming it to be so aristocratic.
You see a good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you know
he's in the House of Lords; and you fancy he has a father.
You don't allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our
most influential noblemen have not only risen recently, but--"
"Oh, stop it!" cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean hand
in impatience against a shade of irony in the other's face.
"Don't stay talking to this lunatic!" cried Todd brutally.
"Take me to my friend."
Next morning Father Brown appeared with the same demure expression,
carrying yet another piece of pink newspaper.
"I'm afraid you neglect the fashionable press rather," he said,
"but this cutting may interest you."
Usher read the headlines, "Last-Trick's Strayed Revellers:
Mirthful Incident near Pilgrim's Pond." The paragraph went on:
"A laughable occurrence took place outside Wilkinson's Motor Garage
last night. A policeman on duty had his attention drawn by larrikins
to a man in prison dress who was stepping with considerable coolness
into the steering-seat of a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was accompanied
by a girl wrapped in a ragged shawl. On the police interfering,
the young woman threw back the shawl, and all recognized
Millionaire Todd's daughter, who had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner
at the Pond, where all the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille.
She and the gentleman who had donned prison uniform were going for
the customary joy-ride."
Under the pink slip Mr Usher found a strip of a later paper,
headed, "Astounding Escape of Millionaire's Daughter with Convict.
She had Arranged Freak Dinner. Now Safe in--"
Mr Greenwood Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was gone.
