III.—THE DUEL OF DR. HIRSCH
I.—THE ABSENCE OF MR GLASS
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist
and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at
Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french
windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of
blue-green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the
monotony of a blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled
throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of
the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood's apartments excluded
luxury, or even poetry. These things were there, in their place; but
one felt that they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was
there: there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the
best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest
were always nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A
tantalus containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur
excellence, stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful
have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand
at the same level. Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room
was lined with as complete a set of English classics as the right
hand could show of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took
a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated
the mind like a gap in a man's front teeth. One could not say the
books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of
their being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old
churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a
public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility steeped
even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables laden
with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet more of such
heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the
specialist's library, and the other tables that sustained the frail
and even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.
Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded—
as the boys' geographies say—on the east by the North Sea and on
the west by the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist
library. He was clad in an artist's velvet, but with none of an
artist's negligence; his hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing
thick and healthy; his face was lean, but sanguine and expectant.
Everything about him and his room indicated something at once rigid
and restless, like that great northern sea by which (on pure
principles of hygiene) he had built his home.
Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced
into those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps
the most startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a
curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled
into the room a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own
hat and umbrella as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella
was a black and prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a
broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common in England; the man
was the very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless.
The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment,
not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously
harmless sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded
the doctor with that beaming but breathless geniality which
characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff
herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-
congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet,
his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud; he reached
after the one and ducked after the other, but with an unimpaired
smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about that
business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of
such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong."
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd
little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.
"I hardly understand you," replied the scientist, with a
cold intensity of manner. "I fear you have mistaken the
chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary and
educational. It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the
police in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but— "
"Oh, this is of the greatest importance," broke in the
little man called Brown. "Why, her mother won't let them get
engaged." And he leaned back in his chair in radiant
rationality.
The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under
them were bright with something that might be anger or might be
amusement. "And still," he said, "I do not quite
understand."
"You see, they want to get married," said the man with
the clerical hat. "Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get
married. Now, what can be more important than that?"
The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him of
many things— some said of his health, others of his God; but they
had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last
plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside,
and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the
consulting physician.
"Mr Brown," he said gravely, "it is quite fourteen
and a half years since I was personally asked to test a personal
problem: then it was the case of an attempt to poison the French
President at a Lord Mayor's Banquet. It is now, I understand, a
question of whether some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable
fiancee for some friend of hers called Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I
am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my
best advice, as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of
England—no, better: fourteen years better. I have nothing else to
do this afternoon. Tell me your story."
The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable
warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as
if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in
passing the matches, than as if he were (as he was) practically
thanking the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field
to find a four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi- colon after his
hearty thanks, the little man began his recital:
"I told you my name was Brown; well, that's the fact, and I'm
the priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you've seen
beyond those straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north.
In the last and straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea
like a sea-wall there is a very honest but rather sharp-tempered
member of my flock, a widow called MacNab. She has one daughter, and
she lets lodgings, and between her and the daughter, and between her
and the lodgers—well, I dare say there is a great deal to be said
on both sides. At present she has only one lodger, the young man
called Todhunter; but he has given more trouble than all the rest,
for he wants to marry the young woman of the house."
"And the young woman of the house," asked Dr Hood, with
huge and silent amusement, "what does she want?"
"Why, she wants to marry him," cried Father Brown,
sitting up eagerly. "That is just the awful complication."
"It is indeed a hideous enigma," said Dr Hood.
"This young James Todhunter," continued the cleric, "is
a very decent man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much.
He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey,
clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier. He
seems to have quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what his
trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being of a pessimistic turn), is
quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably connected with
dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and noiseless sort, for the
poor fellow only shuts himself up for several hours of the day and
studies something behind a locked door. He declares his privacy is
temporary and justified, and promises to explain before the wedding.
That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell
you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know how the
tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that. There are
tales of two voices heard talking in the room; though, when the door
is opened, Todhunter is always found alone. There are tales of a
mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists
and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy
fields and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was
heard talking to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed
to end in a quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence,
and the man in the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story
is told by the family with the fiercest mystification; but I really
think Mrs MacNab prefers her own original tale: that the Other Man
(or whatever it is) crawls out every night from the big box in the
corner, which is kept locked all day. You see, therefore, how this
sealed door of Todhunter's is treated as the gate of all the fancies
and monstrosities of the 'Thousand and One Nights'. And yet there is
the little fellow in his respectable black jacket, as punctual and
innocent as a parlour clock. He pays his rent to the tick; he is
practically a teetotaller; he is tirelessly kind with the younger
children, and can keep them amused for a day on end; and, last and
most urgent of all, he has made himself equally popular with the
eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow."
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish
for applying them to any triviality. The great specialist having
condescended to the priest's simplicity, condescended expansively. He
settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in
the tone of a somewhat absent- minded lecturer:
"Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the
main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in
early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may
never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the
scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements,
destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or
the return of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all history is
Race. Race produces religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars.
There is no stronger case than that of the wild, unworldly and
perishing stock which we commonly call the Celts, of whom your
friends the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy
and drifting blood, they accept easily the superstitious explanation
of any incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for
saying) that superstitious explanation of all incidents which you and
your Church represent. It is not remarkable that such people, with
the sea moaning behind them and the Church (excuse me again) droning
in front of them, should put fantastic features into what are
probably plain events. You, with your small parochial
responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab, terrified with
this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the sea. But
the man with the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole
clans of MacNab scattered over the whole world, in its ultimate
average as uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands of Mrs
MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of
morbidity in the tea-cups of their friends; he sees—"
Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more
impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts
was marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a
young girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste.
She had sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful
if her cheek-bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little high
in relief as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as a
command.
"I'm sorry to interrupt you, sir," she said, "but I
had to follow Father Brown at once; it's nothing less than life or
death."
Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. "Why,
what has happened, Maggie?" he said.
"James has been murdered, for all I can make out,"
answered the girl, still breathing hard from her rush. "That man
Glass has been with him again; I heard them talking through the door
quite plain. Two separate voices: for James speaks low, with a burr,
and the other voice was high and quavery."
"That man Glass?" repeated the priest in some
perplexity.
"I know his name is Glass," answered the girl, in great
impatience. "I heard it through the door. They were
quarrelling—about money, I think—for I heard James say again and
again, 'That's right, Mr Glass,' or 'No, Mr Glass,' and then, 'Two or
three, Mr Glass.' But we're talking too much; you must come at once,
and there may be time yet."
"But time for what?" asked Dr Hood, who had been
studying the young lady with marked interest. "What is there
about Mr Glass and his money troubles that should impel such
urgency?"
"I tried to break down the door and couldn't," answered
the girl shortly, "Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to
climb on to the window-sill that looks into the room. It was an dim,
and seemed to be empty, but I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a
corner, as if he were drugged or strangled."
"This is very serious," said Father Brown, gathering his
errant hat and umbrella and standing up; "in point of fact I was
just putting your case before this gentleman, and his view—"
"Has been largely altered," said the scientist gravely.
"I do not think this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed.
As I have nothing else to do, I will put on my hat and stroll down
town with you."
In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of the
MacNabs' street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the
mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was not
without a certain leopard- like swiftness), and the priest at an
energetic trot entirely devoid of distinction. The aspect of this
edge of the town was not entirely without justification for the
doctor's hints about desolate moods and environments. The scattered
houses stood farther and farther apart in a broken string along the
seashore; the afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid
twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously. In
the scrappy back garden of the MacNabs which ran down towards the
sand, two black, barren- looking trees stood up like demon hands held
up in astonishment, and as Mrs MacNab ran down the street to meet
them with lean hands similarly spread, and her fierce face in shadow,
she was a little like a demon herself. The doctor and the priest made
scant reply to her shrill reiterations of her daughter's story, with
more disturbing details of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance
against Mr Glass for murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being
murdered, or against the latter for having dared to want to marry her
daughter, and for not having lived to do it. They passed through the
narrow passage in the front of the house until they came to the
lodger's door at the back, and there Dr Hood, with the trick of an
old detective, put his shoulder sharply to the panel and burst in the
door.
It opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing it, even
for a flash, could doubt that the room had been the theatre of some
thrilling collision between two, or perhaps more, persons.
Playing-cards lay littered across the table or fluttered about the
floor as if a game had been interrupted. Two wine glasses stood ready
for wine on a side-table, but a third lay smashed in a star of
crystal upon the carpet. A few feet from it lay what looked like a
long knife or short sword, straight, but with an ornamental and
pictured handle, its dull blade just caught a grey glint from the
dreary window behind, which showed the black trees against the leaden
level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of the room was rolled
a gentleman's silk top hat, as if it had just been knocked off his
head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked to see it still
rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack of potatoes,
but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter, with a scarf
across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round his elbows and
ankles. His brown eyes were alive and shifted alertly.
Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in
the whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across
the carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the
head of the yet pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large for him
that it almost slipped down on to his shoulders.
"Mr Glass's hat," said the doctor, returning with it and
peering into the inside with a pocket lens. "How to explain the
absence of Mr Glass and the presence of Mr Glass's hat? For Mr Glass
is not a careless man with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish
shape and systematically brushed and burnished, though not very new.
An old dandy, I should think."
"But, good heavens!" called out Miss MacNab, "aren't
you going to untie the man first?"
"I say 'old' with intention, though not with certainty"
continued the expositor; "my reason for it might seem a little
far-fetched. The hair of human beings falls out in very varying
degrees, but almost always falls out slightly, and with the lens I
should see the tiny hairs in a hat recently worn. It has none, which
leads me to guess that Mr Glass is bald. Now when this is taken with
the high-pitched and querulous voice which Miss MacNab described so
vividly (patience, my dear lady, patience), when we take the hairless
head together with the tone common in senile anger, I should think we
may deduce some advance in years. Nevertheless, he was probably
vigorous, and he was almost certainly tall. I might rely in some
degree on the story of his previous appearance at the window, as a
tall man in a silk hat, but I think I have more exact indication.
This wineglass has been smashed all over the place, but one of its
splinters lies on the high bracket beside the mantelpiece. No such
fragment could have fallen there if the vessel had been smashed in
the hand of a comparatively short man like Mr Todhunter."
"By the way," said Father Brown, "might it not be
as well to untie Mr Todhunter?"
"Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here,"
proceeded the specialist. "I may say at once that it is possible
that the man Glass was bald or nervous through dissipation rather
than age. Mr Todhunter, as has been remarked, is a quiet thrifty
gentleman, essentially an abstainer. These cards and wine-cups are no
part of his normal habit; they have been produced for a particular
companion. But, as it happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter may or
may not possess this wine-service, but there is no appearance of his
possessing any wine. What, then, were these vessels to contain? I
would at once suggest some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a luxurious
sort, from a flask in the pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus something
like a picture of the man, or at least of the type: tall, elderly,
fashionable, but somewhat frayed, certainly fond of play and strong
waters, perhaps rather too fond of them Mr Glass is a gentleman not
unknown on the fringes of society."
"Look here," cried the young woman, "if you don't
let me pass to untie him I'll run outside and scream for the police."
"I should not advise you, Miss MacNab," said Dr Hood
gravely, "to be in any hurry to fetch the police. Father Brown,
I seriously ask you to compose your flock, for their sakes, not for
mine. Well, we have seen something of the figure and quality of Mr
Glass; what are the chief facts known of Mr Todhunter? They are
substantially three: that he is economical, that he is more or less
wealthy, and that he has a secret. Now, surely it is obvious that
there are the three chief marks of the kind of man who is
blackmailed. And surely it is equally obvious that the faded finery,
the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr Glass are the
unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him. We have the
two typical figures of a tragedy of hush money: on the one hand, the
respectable man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end vulture
with a scent for a mystery. These two men have met here today and
have quarrelled, using blows and a bare weapon."
"Are you going to take those ropes off?" asked the girl
stubbornly.
Dr Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table, and
went across to the captive. He studied him intently, even moving him
a little and half- turning him round by the shoulders, but he only
answered:
"No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends
the police bring the handcuffs."
Father Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet, lifted his
round face and said: "What do you mean?"
The man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword from
the carpet and was examining it intently as he answered:
"Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up," he said, "you
all jump to the conclusion that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I
suppose, escaped. There are four objections to this: First, why
should a gentleman so dressy as our friend Glass leave his hat behind
him, if he left of his own free will? Second," he continued,
moving towards the window, "this is the only exit, and it is
locked on the inside. Third, this blade here has a tiny touch of
blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass
took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary
probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would
try to kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try
to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have a
pretty complete story."
"But the ropes?" inquired the priest, whose eyes had
remained open with a rather vacant admiration.
"Ah, the ropes," said the expert with a singular
intonation. "Miss MacNab very much wanted to know why I did not
set Mr Todhunter free from his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did
not do it because Mr Todhunter can set himself free from them at any
minute he chooses."
"What?" cried the audience on quite different notes of
astonishment.
"I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter,"
reiterated Hood quietly. "I happen to know something about
knots; they are quite a branch of criminal science. Every one of
those knots he has made himself and could loosen himself; not one of
them would have been made by an enemy really trying to pinion him.
The whole of this affair of the ropes is a clever fake, to make us
think him the victim of the struggle instead of the wretched Glass,
whose corpse may be hidden in the garden or stuffed up the chimney."
There was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening, the
sea- blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and blacker
than ever, yet they seemed to have come nearer to the window. One
could almost fancy they were sea-monsters like krakens or cuttlefish,
writhing polypi who had crawled up from the sea to see the end of
this tragedy, even as he, the villain and victim of it, the terrible
man in the tall hat, had once crawled up from the sea. For the whole
air was dense with the morbidity of blackmail, which is the most
morbid of human things, because it is a crime concealing a crime; a
black plaster on a blacker wound.
The face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly
complacent and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious
frown. It was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was
rather that creative curiosity which comes when a man has the
beginnings of an idea. "Say it again, please," he said in a
simple, bothered manner; "do you mean that Todhunter can tie
himself up all alone and untie himself all alone?"
"That is what I mean," said the doctor.
"Jerusalem!" ejaculated Brown suddenly, "I wonder
if it could possibly be that!"
He scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with
quite a new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the
captive. Then he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company.
"Yes, that's it!" he cried in a certain excitement. "Can't
you see it in the man's face? Why, look at his eyes!"
Both the Professor and the girl followed the direction of his
glance. And though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower
half of Todhunter's visage, they did grow conscious of something
struggling and intense about the upper part of it.
"His eyes do look queer," cried the young woman,
strongly moved. "You brutes; I believe it's hurting him!"
"Not that, I think," said Dr Hood; "the eyes have
certainly a singular expression. But I should interpret those
transverse wrinkles as expressing rather such slight psychological
abnormality—"
"Oh, bosh!" cried Father Brown: "can't you see he's
laughing?"
"Laughing!" repeated the doctor, with a start; "but
what on earth can he be laughing at?"
"Well," replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, "not
to put too fine a point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And
indeed, I'm a little inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about
it."
"Now you know about what?" asked Hood, in some
exasperation.
"Now I know," replied the priest, "the profession
of Mr Todhunter."
He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another
with what seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting
into an equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those
who had to watch it. He laughed very much over the hat, still more
uproariously over the broken glass, but the blood on the sword point
sent him into mortal convulsions of amusement. Then he turned to the
fuming specialist.
"Dr Hood," he cried enthusiastically, "you are a
great poet! You have called an uncreated being out of the void. How
much more godlike that is than if you had only ferreted out the mere
facts! Indeed, the mere facts are rather commonplace and comic by
comparison."
"I have no notion what you are talking about," said Dr
Hood rather haughtily; "my facts are all inevitable, though
necessarily incomplete. A place may be permitted to intuition,
perhaps (or poetry if you prefer the term), but only because the
corresponding details cannot as yet be ascertained. In the absence of
Mr Glass—"
"That's it, that's it," said the little priest, nodding
quite eagerly, "that's the first idea to get fixed; the absence
of Mr Glass. He is so extremely absent. I suppose," he added
reflectively, "that there was never anybody so absent as Mr
Glass."
"Do you mean he is absent from the town?" demanded the
doctor.
"I mean he is absent from everywhere," answered Father
Brown; "he is absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak."
"Do you seriously mean," said the specialist with a
smile, "that there is no such person?"
The priest made a sign of assent. "It does seem a pity,"
he said.
Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. "Well," he
said, "before we go on to the hundred and one other evidences,
let us take the first proof we found; the first fact we fell over
when we fell into this room. If there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is
this?"
"It is Mr Todhunter's," replied Father Brown.
"But it doesn't fit him," cried Hood impatiently. "He
couldn't possibly wear it!"
Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. "I never
said he could wear it," he answered. "I said it was his
hat. Or, if you insist on a shade of difference, a hat that is his."
"And what is the shade of difference?" asked the
criminologist with a slight sneer.
"My good sir," cried the mild little man, with his first
movement akin to impatience, "if you will walk down the street
to the nearest hatter's shop, you will see that there is, in common
speech, a difference between a man's hat and the hats that are his."
"But a hatter," protested Hood, "can get money out
of his stock of new hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one
old hat?"
"Rabbits," replied Father Brown promptly.
"What?" cried Dr Hood.
"Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured
paper," said the reverend gentleman with rapidity. "Didn't
you see it all when you found out the faked ropes? It's just the same
with the sword. Mr Todhunter hasn't got a scratch on him, as you say;
but he's got a scratch in him, if you follow me."
"Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter's clothes?" inquired
Mrs MacNab sternly.
"I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter's clothes," said
Father Brown. "I mean inside Mr Todhunter."
"Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?"
"Mr Todhunter," explained Father Brown placidly, "is
learning to be a professional conjurer, as well as juggler,
ventriloquist, and expert in the rope trick. The conjuring explains
the hat. It is without traces of hair, not because it is worn by the
prematurely bald Mr Glass, but because it has never been worn by
anybody. The juggling explains the three glasses, which Todhunter was
teaching himself to throw up and catch in rotation. But, being only
at the stage of practice, he smashed one glass against the ceiling.
And the juggling also explains the sword, which it was Mr Todhunter's
professional pride and duty to swallow. But, again, being at the
stage of practice, he very slightly grazed the inside of his throat
with the weapon. Hence he has a wound inside him, which I am sure
(from the expression on his face) is not a serious one. He was also
practising the trick of a release from ropes, like the Davenport
Brothers, and he was just about to free himself when we all burst
into the room. The cards, of course, are for card tricks, and they
are scattered on the floor because he had just been practising one of
those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He merely kept
his trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any
other conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having
once looked in at his back window, and been driven away by him with
great indignation, was enough to set us all on a wrong track of
romance, and make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the
silk-hatted spectre of Mr Glass."
"But What about the two voices?" asked Maggie, staring.
"Have you never heard a ventriloquist?" asked Father
Brown. "Don't you know they speak first in their natural voice,
and then answer themselves in just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural
voice that you heard?"
There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little man who
had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. "You are certainly a
very ingenious person," he said; "it could not have been
done better in a book. But there is just one part of Mr Glass you
have not succeeded in explaining away, and that is his name. Miss
MacNab distinctly heard him so addressed by Mr Todhunter."
The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. "Well,
that," he said, "that's the silliest part of the whole
silly story. When our juggling friend here threw up the three glasses
in turn, he counted them aloud as he caught them, and also commented
aloud when he failed to catch them. What he really said was: 'One,
two and three—missed a glass one, two—missed a glass.' And so
on."
There was a second of stillness in the room, and then everyone
with one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the
corner complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a
flourish. Then, advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he
produced from his pocket a big bill printed in blue and red, which
announced that ZALADIN, the World's Greatest Conjurer, Contortionist,
Ventriloquist and Human Kangaroo would be ready with an entirely new
series of Tricks at the Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, on Monday next
at eight o'clock precisely.