The three tools of death chesterton

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Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. Short Stories. About G. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He was educated at St. In , he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time.

He wrote a hundred books, contributions to more, hundreds of Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse , five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown.

In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G. Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. Books by G.

Related Articles. Meet the Authors of Spring's Biggest Mysteries. Royce," Gilder had called out authoritatively. Gilder threw an alarmed glance at the man knocked down; but since that outraged person was already sitting up and wiping a little blood off a substantially uninjured face, he only said shortly: "What do you mean? But she had not snatched the knife to attack her father, but to defend him. Alice looked at him with a complex and baffling face; then she said in a low voice: "After it all, I am still glad you are brave.

The attic, which was the secretary's private place and rather a small cell for so large a hermit , had indeed all the vestiges of a violent drama. Near the centre of the floor lay a large revolver as if flung away; nearer to the left was rolled a whisky bottle, open but not quite empty. The cloth of the little table lay dragged and trampled, and a length of cord, like that found on the corpse, was cast wildly across the windowsill. Two vases were smashed on the mantelpiece and one on the carpet.

I was called a clever man once, and might have been a happy one; Armstrong saved the remains of a brain and body from the taverns, and was always kind to me in his own way, poor fellow! Only he wouldn't let me marry Alice here; and it will always be said that he was right enough. That is my whisky bottle half emptied in the corner; that is my revolver quite emptied on the carpet. It was the rope from my box that was found on the corpse, and it was from my window the corpse was thrown.

You need not set detectives to grub up my tragedy; it is a common enough weed in this world. I give myself to the gallows; and, by God, that is enough! At a sufficiently delicate sign, the police gathered round the large man to lead him away; but their unobtrusiveness was somewhat staggered by the remarkable appearance of Father Brown, who was on his hands and knees on the carpet in the doorway, as if engaged in some kind of undignified prayers.

Being a person utterly insensible to the social figure he cut, he remained in this posture, but turned a bright round face up at the company, presenting the appearance of a quadruped with a very comic human head. At the beginning you said we'd found no weapon. But now we're finding too many; there's the knife to stab, and the rope to strangle, and the pistol to shoot; and after all he broke his neck by falling out of a window! It won't do. It's not economical. First, these holes in the carpet, where the six bullets have gone in.

Why on earth should anybody fire at the carpet? A drunken man lets fly at his enemy's head, the thing that's grinning at him. He doesn't pick a quarrel with his feet, or lay siege to his slippers. And then there's the rope"—and having done with the carpet the speaker lifted his hands and put them in his pocket, but continued unaffectedly on his knees—"in what conceivable intoxication would anybody try to put a rope round a man's neck and finally put it round his leg?

Royce, anyhow, was not so drunk as that, or he would be sleeping like a log by now. And, plainest of all, the whisky bottle. You suggest a dipsomaniac fought for the whisky bottle, and then having won, rolled it away in a corner, spilling one half and leaving the other.

That is the very last thing a dipsomaniac would do. He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and said to the self-accused murderer in tones of limpid penitence: "I'm awfully sorry, my dear sir, but your tale is really rubbish.

But it's no use. The core of all this is black, and the more things you find out the more there will be against the miserable man I love. Thrice again the thing banged before I got the two doors open and found the room full of smoke; but the pistol was smoking in my poor, mad Patrick's hand; and I saw him fire the last murderous volley with my own eyes.

Then he leapt on my father, who was clinging in terror to the window-sill, and, grappling, tried to strangle him with the rope, which he threw over his head, but which slipped over his struggling shoulders to his feet. Then it tightened round one leg and Patrick dragged him along like a maniac.

As the girl collapsed under her memories, the priest passed stiffly into the next room, where he found Gilder and Merton alone with Patrick Royce, who sat in a chair, handcuffed. There he said to the Inspector submissively:. I am going to save the living, and let the dead bury their dead. All those grisly tools, the noose, the bloody knife, the exploding pistol, were instruments of a curious mercy.

The arrest of most mechanical things must be slow; but the living cause of this had been very rapid. A man clad completely in black, even it was remembered to the dreadful detail of black gloves, appeared on the ridge above the engine, and waved his black hands like some sable windmill.

This in itself would hardly have stopped even a lingering train. But there came out of him a cry which was talked of afterwards as something utterly unnatural and new. It was one of those shouts that are horridly distinct even when we cannot hear what is shouted. But the engine-driver swears he would have pulled up just the same if he had heard only the dreadful and definite accent and not the word. The train once arrested, the most superficial stare could take in many features of the tragedy.

The baronet in his optimism had often laughed at the black gloves of this dismal attendant; but no one was likely to laugh at him just now. So soon as an inquirer or two had stepped off the line and across the smoky hedge, they saw, rolled down almost to the bottom of the bank, the body of an old man in a yellow dressing-gown with a very vivid scarlet lining.

A scrap of rope seemed caught about his leg, entangled presumably in a struggle. There was a smear or so of blood, though very little; but the body was bent or broken into a posture impossible to any living thing. It was Sir Aaron Armstrong. In a manner more vague, but even more convincing, he echoed the agony of the servant.

By the time the third figure of that household, Alice Armstrong, daughter of the dead man, had come already tottering and waving into the garden, the engine-driver had put a stop to his stoppage. The whistle had blown and the train had panted on to get help from the next station. Father Brown had been thus rapidly summoned at the request of Patrick Royce, the big ex-Bohemian secretary. Royce was an Irishman by birth; and that casual kind of Catholic that never remembers his religion until he is really in a hole.

Hence, while the young detective whose name was Merton led the little priest across the fields to the railway, their talk was more confidential than could be expected between two total strangers. There is nobody one can suspect. Magnus is a solemn old fool; far too much of a fool to be an assassin. Who would kill such a cheery old chap as Armstrong?

Who could dip his hands in the gore of an after-dinner speaker? It would be like killing Father Christmas. Do you think it will be cheery now he is dead? Merton started a little and regarded his companion with an enlivened eye. But did he communicate his cheerfulness? Frankly, was anyone else in the house cheerful but he? The rooms were very high and very cold; the decoration mean and provincial; the draughty corridors were lit by electricity that was bleaker than moonlight.

Doubtless this spectral discomfort in the place was partly due to the very vitality and exuberance of its owner; he needed no stoves or lamps, he would say, but carried his own warmth with him. But when Merton recalled the other inmates, he was compelled to confess that they also were as shadows of their lord. The moody man-servant, with his monstrous black gloves, was almost a nightmare; Royce, the secretary, was solid enough, a big bull of a man, in tweeds, with a short beard; but the straw-coloured beard was startlingly salted with grey like the tweeds, and the broad forehead was barred with premature wrinkles.

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