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"Stop him!" shouted Father Brown, bounding and half falling over a chair; and, after a wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it was too late. In dead silence Flambeau strode across and telephoned for doctor and police. An empty medicine bottle lay on the floor.
"Know the river?" she exclaimed, in answer to my question. "I know it as well as I know Gracious Street. I have shot the arches of London Bridge with the spring tide going out, and there is many a waterman who would not dare try it. If need be, I'll take you through the middle arch, where the flambeau hangs, and land you at Deptford or Sheerness, or Holland, I care not which."
In his haste he had left Flambeau without weapon of any kind, for in his mind such things were superfluous, and he had never fought with any but those God gave him, nor found any living thing that his hands could not master. Therefore, he had rushed headlong against this armed and waiting man, reaching for him ever closer and closer till the burning powder stung his eyes.
For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century. Flambeau was in England.
Father Brown presented him to the lady in his own slight, persuasive style of speech, mentioning his knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and almost without knowing, the girl was soon reiterating her story to two listeners. But Flambeau, as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small slip of paper.
A perturbing silence had succeeded the noisy summons on the oak, and Mungo, with a bold aspect well essayed, but in no accord with the tremour of his knees and the pallor of his countenance, stood, in dragging pantaloons and the gaudy Kilmarnock cap cocked upon his bald head, at the stair-foot with a flambeau in his hand. He seemed hugely relieved to have the company of Count Victor.
The oldest tower of the castle, the Dragon Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug, but as homely. Only beyond the tower glimmered the wood in which the man had lain dead. "What became of this Hedwig eventually?" asked the priest at last. "She is married to General Schwartz," said Flambeau. "No doubt you've heard of his career, which was rather romantic.
On the very first onset of all this glittering clatter thou art reduced to an atom; seek, seek some winding alley, with a tourniquet at the end of it, where chariot never rolled or flambeau shot its rays; there thou mayest solace thy soul in converse sweet with some kind grisette of a barber's wife, and get into such coteries!
I shall always call it heroic failure for the advance of science and the slow scaling of heaven." It was the first time Flambeau had ever seen Father Brown vanquished. He still sat looking at the ground, with a painful and corrugated brow, as if in shame.
"Well, I think it goes far enough!" said Flambeau; "but if the popular story is true, what is the mystery?" They had passed many hundreds of grey and ghostly trees before the little priest answered. Then he bit his finger reflectively and said: "Why, the mystery is a mystery of psychology. Or, rather, it is a mystery of two psychologies.
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