Page:Chesterton - The Wisdom of Father Brown.djvu/183

THE PURPLE WIG what the Exmoor family has done to him? Who is he?'

"The big man in black was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled bull; he did not at first seem to take it in. Then he said at last, 'Don't you know who he is?'

"I reaffirmed my ignorance, and there was another silence; then the little priest said, still looking at the table, 'That is the Duke of Exmoor.' "Then, before I could collect my scattered senses, he added equally quietly, but with an air of regularising things: 'My friend here is Doctor Mull, the Duke's librarian. My name is Brown.'

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 169