"But," I stammered, "if that is the Duke, why does he damn all the old dukes like that?"
"He seems really to believe," answered the priest called Brown, "that they have left a curse on him." Then he added, with some irrelevance, "That's why he wears a wig."
It was a few moments before his meaning dawned on me.
"You don't mean that fable about the fantastic ear?" I demanded.
"I've heard of it, of course, but surely it must be a superstitious yarn spun out of something much simpler. I've sometimes thought it was a wild version of one of those mutilation stories. They used to crop criminals' ears in the sixteenth century."
"I hardly think it was that," answered the little man thoughtfully, "but it is not outside ordinary science or natural law for a family to have some deformity frequently reappearing--such as one ear bigger than the other."
The big librarian had buried his big bald brow in his big red hands, like a man trying to think out his duty. "No," he groaned.
"You do the man a wrong after all. Understand, I've no reason to defend him, or even keep faith with him. He has been a tyrant to me as to everybody else. Don't fancy because you see him sitting here that he isn't a great lord in the worst sense of the word.
He would fetch a man a mile to ring a bell a yard off--if it would summon another man three miles to fetch a matchbox three yards off.
He must have a footman to carry his walking-stick; a body servant to hold up his opera-glasses--"
"But not a valet to brush his clothes," cut in the priest, with a curious dryness, "for the valet would want to brush his wig, too."
The librarian turned to him and seemed to forget my presence; he was strongly moved and, I think, a little heated with wine.
"I don't know how you know it, Father Brown," he said, "but you are right.
He lets the whole world do everything for him--except dress him.
And that he insists on doing in a literal solitude like a desert.
Anybody is kicked out of the house without a character who is so much as found near his dressing-room door., "He seems a pleasant old party," I remarked.
"No," replied Dr Mull quite simply; "and yet that is just what I mean by saying you are unjust to him after all. Gentlemen, the Duke does really feel the bitterness about the curse that he uttered just now.
He does, with sincere shame and terror, hide under that purple wig something he thinks it would blast the sons of man to see.
I know it is so; and I know it is not a mere natural disfigurement, like a criminal mutilation, or a hereditary disproportion in the features.
I know it is worse than that; because a man told me who was present at a scene that no man could invent, where a stronger man than any of us tried to defy the secret, and was scared away from it."
I opened my mouth to speak, but Mull went on in oblivion of me, speaking out of the cavern of his hands. "I don't mind telling you, Father, because it's really more defending the poor Duke than giving him away. Didn't you ever hear of the time when he very nearly lost all the estates?"
The priest shook his head; and the librarian proceeded to tell the tale as he had heard it from his predecessor in the same post, who had been his patron and instructor, and whom he seemed to trust implicitly. Up to a certain point it was a common enough tale of the decline of a great family's fortunes--the tale of a family lawyer.
His lawyer, however, had the sense to cheat honestly, if the expression explains itself. Instead of using funds he held in trust, he took advantage of the Duke's carelessness to put the family in a financial hole, in which it might be necessary for the Duke to let him hold them in reality.
The lawyer's name was Isaac Green, but the Duke always called him Elisha; presumably in reference to the fact that he was quite bald, though certainly not more than thirty. He had risen very rapidly, but from very dirty beginnings; being first a "nark" or informer, and then a money-lender: but as solicitor to the Eyres he had the sense, as I say, to keep technically straight until he was ready to deal the final blow. The blow fell at dinner; and the old librarian said he should never forget the very look of the lampshades and the decanters, as the little lawyer, with a steady smile, proposed to the great landlord that they should halve the estates between them. The sequel certainly could not be overlooked; for the Duke, in dead silence, smashed a decanter on the man's bald head as suddenly as I had seen him smash the glass that day in the orchard. It left a red triangular scar on the scalp, and the lawyer's eyes altered, but not his smile.
He rose tottering to his feet, and struck back as such men do strike.
"I am glad of that," he said, "for now I can take the whole estate.
The law will give it to me."
Exmoor, it seems, was white as ashes, but his eyes still blazed.
"The law will give it you," he said; "but you will not take it....
Why not? Why? because it would mean the crack of doom for me, and if you take it I shall take off my wig.... Why, you pitiful plucked fowl, anyone can see your bare head. But no man shall see mine and live."
Well, you may say what you like and make it mean what you like.
But Mull swears it is the solemn fact that the lawyer, after shaking his knotted fists in the air for an instant, simply ran from the room and never reappeared in the countryside; and since then Exmoor has been feared more for a warlock than even for a landlord and a magistrate.
