"Signor Muscari," said the cleric, "in this queer crisis personalities may be pardoned. I may tell you without offence of a way in which you will do more good than by helping the gendarmes, who are bound to break through in any case. You will permit me the impertinent intimacy, but do you care about that girl?
Care enough to marry her and make her a good husband, I mean?"
"Yes," said the poet quite simply.
"Does she care about you?"
"I think so," was the equally grave reply.
"Then go over there and offer yourself," said the priest:
"offer her everything you can; offer her heaven and earth if you've got them. The time is short."
"Why?" asked the astonished man of letters.
"Because," said Father Brown, "her Doom is coming up the road."
"Nothing is coming up the road," argued Muscari, "except the rescue."
"Well, you go over there," said his adviser, "and be ready to rescue her from the rescue."
Almost as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush of the escaping brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass like defeated men pursued; and the great cocked hats of the mounted gendarmerie were seen passing along above the broken hedge.
Another order was given; there was a noise of dismounting, and a tall officer with cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand appeared in the gap that was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves.
There was a momentary silence, broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who cried out in a hoarse and strangled voice: "Robbed! I've been robbed!"
"Why, that was hours ago," cried his son in astonishment:
"when you were robbed of two thousand pounds."
"Not of two thousand pounds," said the financier, with an abrupt and terrible composure, "only of a small bottle."
The policeman with the grey imperial was striding across the green hollow. Encountering the King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him on the shoulder with something between a caress and a buffet and gave him a push that sent him staggering away.
"You'll get into trouble, too," he said, "if you play these tricks."
Again to Muscari's artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of a great outlaw at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the Harrogate group and said: "Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name of the law for embezzlement of the funds of the Hull and Huddersfield Bank."
The great banker nodded with an odd air of business assent, seemed to reflect a moment, and before they could interpose took a half turn and a step that brought him to the edge of the outer mountain wall. Then, flinging up his hands, he leapt exactly as he leapt out of the coach. But this time he did not fall into a little meadow just beneath; he fell a thousand feet below, to become a wreck of bones in the valley.
The anger of the Italian policeman, which he expressed volubly to Father Brown, was largely mixed with admiration. "It was like him to escape us at last," he said. "He was a great brigand if you like.
This last trick of his I believe to be absolutely unprecedented.
He fled with the company's money to Italy, and actually got himself captured by sham brigands in his own pay, so as to explain both the disappearance of the money and the disappearance of himself.
That demand for ransom was really taken seriously by most of the police.
But for years he's been doing things as good as that, quite as good as that. He will be a serious loss to his family."
Muscari was leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him, as she did for many a year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could not help having a smile and a hand of half-mocking friendship for the indefensible Ezza Montano. "And where are you going next?" he asked him over his shoulder.
"Birmingham," answered the actor, puffing a cigarette.
"Didn't I tell you I was a Futurist? I really do believe in those things if I believe in anything. Change, bustle and new things every morning.
I am going to Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield, Glasgow, Chicago--in short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!"
"In short," said Muscari, "to the real Paradise of Thieves."
