"Everyone here knows that a dead man has been found in the garden, his head cut clean from his body. Dr. Simon, you have examined it. Do you think that to cut a man's throat like that would need great force? Or, perhaps, only a very sharp knife?""I should say that it could not be done with a knife at all,"said the pale doctor.
"Have you any thought," resumed Valentin, "of a tool with which it could be done?""Speaking within modern probabilities, I really haven't," said the doctor, arching his painful brows. "It's not easy to hack a neck through even clumsily, and this was a very clean cut. It could be done with a battle-axe or an old headsman's axe, or an old two-handed sword.""But, good heavens!" cried the Duchess, almost in hysterics, "there aren't any two-handed swords and battle-axes round here."Valentin was still busy with the paper in front of him. "Tell me," he said, still writing rapidly, "could it have been done with a long French cavalry sabre?"A low knocking came at the door, which, for some unreasonable reason, curdled everyone's blood like the knocking in Macbeth.
Amid that frozen silence Dr. Simon managed to say: "A sabre--yes, I suppose it could."
"Thank you," said Valentin. "Come in, Ivan."The confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant Neil O'Brien, whom he had found at last pacing the garden again.
The Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the threshold. "What do you want with me?" he cried.
"Please sit down," said Valentin in pleasant, level tones.
"Why, you aren't wearing your sword. Where is it?""I left it on the library table," said O'Brien, his brogue deepening in his disturbed mood. "It was a nuisance, it was getting--""Ivan," said Valentin, "please go and get the Commandant's sword from the library." Then, as the servant vanished, "Lord Galloway says he saw you leaving the garden just before he found the corpse. What were you doing in the garden?"The Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair. "Oh,"he cried in pure Irish, "admirin' the moon. Communing with Nature, me bhoy."A heavy silence sank and endured, and at the end of it came again that trivial and terrible knocking. Ivan reappeared, carrying an empty steel scabbard. "This is all I can find," he said.
"Put it on the table," said Valentin, without looking up.
There was an inhuman silence in the room, like that sea of inhuman silence round the dock of the condemned murderer. The Duchess's weak exclamations had long ago died away. Lord Galloway's swollen hatred was satisfied and even sobered. The voice that came was quite unexpected.
"I think I can tell you," cried Lady Margaret, in that clear, quivering voice with which a courageous woman speaks publicly. "Ican tell you what Mr. O'Brien was doing in the garden, since he is bound to silence. He was asking me to marry him. I refused; Isaid in my family circumstances I could give him nothing but my respect. He was a little angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my respect. I wonder," she added, with rather a wan smile, "if he will care at all for it now. For I offer it him now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing like this."Lord Galloway had edged up to his daughter, and was intimidating her in what he imagined to be an undertone. "Hold your tongue, Maggie," he said in a thunderous whisper. "Why should you shield the fellow? Where's his sword? Where's his confounded cavalry--"He stopped because of the singular stare with which his daughter was regarding him, a look that was indeed a lurid magnet for the whole group.
"You old fool!" she said in a low voice without pretence of piety, "what do you suppose you are trying to prove? I tell you this man was innocent while with me. But if he wasn't innocent, he was still with me. If he murdered a man in the garden, who was it who must have seen--who must at least have known? Do you hate Neil so much as to put your own daughter--"Lady Galloway screamed. Everyone else sat tingling at the touch of those satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now. They saw the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous paramours.
In the centre of this morbid silence an innocent voice said:
"Was it a very long cigar?"
The change of thought was so sharp that they had to look round to see who had spoken.
"I mean," said little Father Brown, from the corner of the room, "I mean that cigar Mr. Brayne is finishing. It seems nearly as long as a walking-stick."Despite the irrelevance there was assent as well as irritation in Valentin's face as he lifted his head.
"Quite right," he remarked sharply. "Ivan, go and see about Mr. Brayne again, and bring him here at once."The instant the factotum had closed the door, Valentin addressed the girl with an entirely new earnestness.
"Lady Margaret," he said, "we all feel, I am sure, both gratitude and admiration for your act in rising above your lower dignity and explaining the Commandant's conduct. But there is a hiatus still. Lord Galloway, I understand, met you passing from the study to the drawing-room, and it was only some minutes afterwards that he found the garden and the Commandant still walking there.""You have to remember," replied Margaret, with a faint irony in her voice, "that I had just refused him, so we should scarcely have come back arm in arm. He is a gentleman, anyhow; and he loitered behind--and so got charged with murder.""In those few moments," said Valentin gravely, "he might really--"The knock came again, and Ivan put in his scarred face.
"Beg pardon, sir," he said, "but Mr. Brayne has left the house.""Left!" cried Valentin, and rose for the first time to his feet.
