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ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no way sickly,
but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the Hesperides--
Father Brown thought he had never seen a figure so expressive
of all the romances about the countries of the Sun.
When Fanshaw had presented his two friends to their host
he fell again into a tone of rallying the latter about his wreckage
of the fence and his apparent rage of profanity. The Admiral pooh-poohed
it at first as a piece of necessary but annoying garden work;
but at length the ring of real energy came back into his laughter,
and he cried with a mixture of impatience and good humour:
"Well, perhaps I do go at it a bit rabidly, and feel
a kind of pleasure in smashing anything. So would you if your
only pleasure was in cruising about to find some new Cannibal Islands,
and you had to stick on this muddy little rockery in a sort of rustic pond.
When I remember how I've cut down a mile and a half of green poisonous
jungle with an old cutlass half as sharp as this; and then remember
I must stop here and chop this matchwood, because of some confounded
old bargain scribbled in a family Bible, why, I--"
He swung up the heavy steel again; and this time sundered
the wall of wood from top to bottom at one stroke.
"I feel like that," he said laughing, but furiously flinging
the sword some yards down the path, "and now let's go up to the house;
you must have some dinner."
The semicircle of lawn in front of the house was varied by
three circular garden beds, one of red tulips, a second of
yellow tulips, and the third of some white, waxen-looking blossoms
that the visitors did not know and presumed to be exotic.
A heavy, hairy and rather sullen-looking gardener was hanging up
a heavy coil of garden hose. The corners of the expiring sunset,
which seemed to cling about the corners of the house, gave glimpses
here and there of the colours of remoter flowerbeds; and in
a treeless space on one side of the house opening upon the river
stood a tall brass tripod on which was tilted a big brass telescope.
Just outside the steps of the porch stood a little painted
green garden table, as if someone had just had tea there.
The entrance was flanked with two of those half-featured lumps of stone
with holes for eyes that are said to be South Sea idols; and on
the brown oak beam across the doorway were some confused carvings
that looked almost as barbaric.
As they passed indoors, the little cleric hopped suddenly
on to the table, and standing on it peered unaffectedly
through his spectacles at the mouldings in the oak. Admiral Pendragon
looked very much astonished, though not particularly annoyed;
while Fanshaw was so amused with what looked like a performing pigmy
on his little stand, that he could not control his laughter.
But Father Brown was not likely to notice either the laughter
or the astonishment.
He was gazing at three carved symbols, which, though very worn
and obscure, seemed still to convey some sense to him. The first
seemed to be the outline of some tower or other building, crowned with
what looked like curly-pointed ribbons. The second was clearer:
an old Elizabethan galley with decorative waves beneath it,
but interrupted in the middle by a curious jagged rock, which was either
a fault in the wood or some conventional representation of the water
coming in. The third represented the upper half of a human figure,
ending in an escalloped line like the waves; the face was rubbed
and featureless, and both arms were held very stiffly up in the air.
"Well," muttered Father Brown, blinking, "here is the legend
of the Spaniard plain enough. Here he is holding up his arms
and cursing in the sea; and here are the two curses: the wrecked ship
and the burning of Pendragon Tower."
Pendragon shook his head with a kind of venerable amusement.
"And how many other things might it not be?" he said. "Don't you know
that that sort of half-man, like a half-lion or half-stag,
is quite common in heraldry? Might not that line through the ship
be one of those parti-per-pale lines, indented, I think they call it?
And though the third thing isn't so very heraldic, it would be
more heraldic to suppose it a tower crowned with laurel than with fire;
and it looks just as like it."
"But it seems rather odd," said Flambeau, "that it should
exactly confirm the old legend."
"Ah," replied the sceptical traveller, "but you don't know
how much of the old legend may have been made up from the old figures.
Besides, it isn't the only old legend. Fanshaw, here, who is
fond of such things, will tell you there are other versions of the tale,
and much more horrible ones. One story credits my unfortunate ancestor
with having had the Spaniard cut in two; and that will fit
the pretty picture also. Another obligingly credits our family
with the possession of a tower full of snakes and explains those little,
wriggly things in that way. And a third theory supposes the crooked line
on the ship to be a conventionalized thunderbolt; but that alone,
if seriously examined, would show what a very little way these
unhappy coincidences really go."
"Why, how do you mean?" asked Fanshaw.
"It so happens," replied his host coolly, "that there was
no thunder and lightning at all in the two or three shipwrecks
I know of in our family."
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