To Waldo and Mil­dred D’Avig­dor

The Innocence of Father Brown

The Blue Cross

Between the sil­ver rib­bon of morn­ing and the green glit­ter­ing rib­bon of sea, the boat touched Har­wich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must fol­low was by no means con­spicu­ous—nor wished to be. There was noth­ing not­able about him, ex­cept a slight con­trast between the hol­i­day gaiety of his clothes and the of­fi­cial grav­ity of his face. His clothes in­cluded a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waist­coat, and a sil­ver straw hat with a grey-blue rib­bon. His lean face was dark by con­trast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Span­ish and sug­ges­ted an El­iza­bethan ruff. He was smoking a ci­gar­ette with the ser­i­ous­ness of an idler. There was noth­ing about him to in­dic­ate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded re­volver, that the white waist­coat covered a po­lice card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most power­ful in­tel­lects in Europe. For this was Valentin him­self, the head of the Paris po­lice and the most fam­ous in­vest­ig­ator of the world; and he was com­ing from Brus­sels to Lon­don to make the greatest ar­rest of the cen­tury.

Flam­beau was in Eng­land. The po­lice of three coun­tries had tracked the great crim­inal at last from Ghent to Brus­sels, from Brus­sels to the Hook of Hol­land; and it was con­jec­tured that he would take some ad­vant­age of the un­fa­mili­ar­ity and con­fu­sion of the Euchar­istic Con­gress, then tak­ing place in Lon­don. Prob­ably he would travel as some minor clerk or sec­ret­ary con­nec­ted with it; but, of course, Valentin could not be cer­tain; nobody could be cer­tain about Flam­beau.

It is many years now since this co­los­sus of crime sud­denly ceased keep­ing the world in a tur­moil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Ro­land, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flam­beau was a fig­ure as statuesque and in­ter­na­tional as the Kaiser. Al­most every morn­ing the daily pa­per an­nounced that he had es­caped the con­sequences of one ex­traordin­ary crime by com­mit­ting an­other. He was a Gas­con of gi­gantic stature and bod­ily dar­ing; and the wild­est tales were told of his out­bursts of ath­letic hu­mour; how he turned the juge d’in­struc­tion up­side down and stood him on his head, “to clear his mind”; how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli with a po­lice­man un­der each arm. It is due to him to say that his fant­astic phys­ical strength was gen­er­ally em­ployed in such blood­less though un­dig­ni­fied scenes; his real crimes were chiefly those of in­geni­ous and whole­sale rob­bery. But each of his thefts was al­most a new sin, and would make a story by it­self. It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Com­pany in Lon­don, with no dair­ies, no cows, no carts, no milk, but with some thou­sand sub­scribers. These he served by the simple op­er­a­tion of mov­ing the little milk cans out­side people’s doors to the doors of his own cus­tom­ers. It was he who had kept up an un­ac­count­able and close cor­res­pond­ence with a young lady whose whole let­ter-bag was in­ter­cep­ted, by the ex­traordin­ary trick of pho­to­graph­ing his mes­sages in­fin­ites­im­ally small upon the slides of a mi­cro­scope. A sweep­ing sim­pli­city, how­ever, marked many of his ex­per­i­ments. It is said that he once re­painted all the num­bers in a street in the dead of night merely to di­vert one trav­el­ler into a trap. It is quite cer­tain that he in­ven­ted a port­able pil­lar-box, which he put up at corners in quiet sub­urbs on the chance of strangers drop­ping postal or­ders into it. Lastly, he was known to be a start­ling ac­robat; des­pite his huge fig­ure, he could leap like a grasshop­per and melt into the tree­tops like a mon­key. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to find Flam­beau, was per­fectly aware that his ad­ven­tures would not end when he had found him.

But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin’s ideas were still in pro­cess of set­tle­ment.

There was one thing which Flam­beau, with all his dex­ter­ity of dis­guise, could not cover, and that was his sin­gu­lar height. If Valentin’s quick eye had caught a tall apple-wo­man, a tall gren­adier, or even a tol­er­ably tall duch­ess, he might have ar­res­ted them on the spot. But all along his train there was nobody that could be a dis­guised Flam­beau, any more than a cat could be a dis­guised gir­affe. About the people on the boat he had already sat­is­fied him­self; and the people picked up at Har­wich or on the jour­ney lim­ited them­selves with cer­tainty to six. There was a short rail­way of­fi­cial trav­el­ling up to the ter­minus, three fairly short mar­ket garden­ers picked up two sta­tions af­ter­wards, one very short widow lady go­ing up from a small Es­sex town, and a very short Ro­man Cath­olic priest go­ing up from a small Es­sex vil­lage. When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and al­most laughed. The little priest was so much the es­sence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Nor­folk dump­ling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had sev­eral brown pa­per par­cels, which he was quite in­cap­able of col­lect­ing. The Euchar­istic Con­gress had doubt­less sucked out of their local stag­na­tion many such creatures, blind and help­less, like moles dis­in­terred. Valentin was a scep­tic in the severe style of France, and could have no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and this one might have pro­voked pity in any­body. He had a large, shabby um­brella, which con­stantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his re­turn ticket. He ex­plained with a moon-calf sim­pli­city to every­body in the car­riage that he had to be care­ful, be­cause he had some­thing made of real sil­ver “with blue stones” in one of his brown-pa­per par­cels. His quaint blend­ing of Es­sex flat­ness with saintly sim­pli­city con­tinu­ously amused the French­man till the priest ar­rived (some­how) at Tot­ten­ham with all his par­cels, and came back for his um­brella. When he did the last, Valentin even had the good nature to warn him not to take care of the sil­ver by telling every­body about it. But to whomever he talked, Valentin kept his eye open for someone else; he looked out stead­ily for any­one, rich or poor, male or fe­male, who was well up to six feet; for Flam­beau was four inches above it.

He alighted at Liver­pool Street, how­ever, quite con­scien­tiously se­cure that he had not missed the crim­inal so far. He then went to Scot­land Yard to reg­u­lar­ise his po­s­i­tion and ar­range for help in case of need; he then lit an­other ci­gar­ette and went for a long stroll in the streets of Lon­don. As he was walk­ing in the streets and squares bey­ond Vict­oria, he paused sud­denly and stood. It was a quaint, quiet square, very typ­ical of Lon­don, full of an ac­ci­dental still­ness. The tall, flat houses round looked at once pros­per­ous and un­in­hab­ited; the square of shrub­bery in the centre looked as deser­ted as a green Pa­cific is­let. One of the four sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of this side was broken by one of Lon­don’s ad­mir­able ac­ci­dents—a res­taur­ant that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an un­reas­on­ably at­tract­ive ob­ject, with dwarf plants in pots and long, striped blinds of lemon yel­low and white. It stood spe­cially high above the street, and in the usual patch­work way of Lon­don, a flight of steps from the street ran up to meet the front door al­most as a fire-es­cape might run up to a first-floor win­dow. Valentin stood and smoked in front of the yel­low-white blinds and con­sidered them long.

The most in­cred­ible thing about mir­acles is that they hap­pen. A few clouds in heaven do come to­gether into the star­ing shape of one hu­man eye. A tree does stand up in the land­scape of a doubt­ful jour­ney in the ex­act and elab­or­ate shape of a note of in­ter­rog­a­tion. I have seen both these things my­self within the last few days. Nel­son does die in the in­stant of vic­tory; and a man named Wil­li­ams does quite ac­ci­dent­ally murder a man named Wil­li­am­son; it sounds like a sort of in­fant­i­cide. In short, there is in life an ele­ment of elfin co­in­cid­ence which people reck­on­ing on the pro­saic may per­petu­ally miss. As it has been well ex­pressed in the para­dox of Poe, wis­dom should reckon on the un­fore­seen.

Aristide Valentin was un­fathom­ably French; and the French in­tel­li­gence is in­tel­li­gence spe­cially and solely. He was not “a think­ing ma­chine”; for that is a brain­less phrase of mod­ern fa­tal­ism and ma­ter­i­al­ism. A ma­chine only is a ma­chine be­cause it can­not think. But he was a think­ing man, and a plain man at the same time. All his won­der­ful suc­cesses, that looked like con­jur­ing, had been gained by plod­ding lo­gic, by clear and com­mon­place French thought. The French elec­trify the world not by start­ing any para­dox, they elec­trify it by car­ry­ing out a tru­ism. They carry a tru­ism so far—as in the French Re­volu­tion. But ex­actly be­cause Valentin un­der­stood reason, he un­der­stood the lim­its of reason. Only a man who knows noth­ing of mo­tors talks of mo­tor­ing without pet­rol; only a man who knows noth­ing of reason talks of reas­on­ing without strong, un­dis­puted first prin­ciples. Here he had no strong first prin­ciples. Flam­beau had been missed at Har­wich; and if he was in Lon­don at all, he might be any­thing from a tall tramp on Wimble­don Com­mon to a tall toast­mas­ter at the Hôtel Métro­pole. In such a na­ked state of nes­ci­ence, Valentin had a view and a method of his own.

In such cases he reckoned on the un­fore­seen. In such cases, when he could not fol­low the train of the reas­on­able, he coldly and care­fully fol­lowed the train of the un­reas­on­able. In­stead of go­ing to the right places—banks, po­lice sta­tions, ren­dez­vous—he sys­tem­at­ic­ally went to the wrong places; knocked at every empty house, turned down every cul de sac, went up every lane blocked with rub­bish, went round every cres­cent that led him use­lessly out of the way. He de­fen­ded this crazy course quite lo­gic­ally. He said that if one had a clue this was the worst way; but if one had no clue at all it was the best, be­cause there was just the chance that any oddity that caught the eye of the pur­suer might be the same that had caught the eye of the pur­sued. Some­where a man must be­gin, and it had bet­ter be just where an­other man might stop. So­mething about that flight of steps up to the shop, some­thing about the quiet­ude and quaint­ness of the res­taur­ant, roused all the de­tect­ive’s rare ro­mantic fancy and made him re­solve to strike at ran­dom. He went up the steps, and sit­ting down at a table by the win­dow, asked for a cup of black cof­fee.

It was halfway through the morn­ing, and he had not break­fas­ted; the slight lit­ter of other break­fasts stood about on the table to re­mind him of his hun­ger; and adding a poached egg to his or­der, he pro­ceeded mus­ingly to shake some white sugar into his cof­fee, think­ing all the time about Flam­beau. He re­membered how Flam­beau had es­caped, once by a pair of nail scis­sors, and once by a house on fire; once by hav­ing to pay for an un­stamped let­ter, and once by get­ting people to look through a tele­scope at a comet that might des­troy the world. He thought his de­tect­ive brain as good as the crim­inal’s, which was true. But he fully real­ised the dis­ad­vant­age. “The crim­inal is the cre­at­ive artist; the de­tect­ive only the critic,” he said with a sour smile, and lif­ted his cof­fee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.

He looked at the ves­sel from which the sil­very powder had come; it was cer­tainly a sugar-basin; as un­mis­tak­ably meant for sugar as a cham­pagne-bottle for cham­pagne. He wondered why they should keep salt in it. He looked to see if there were any more or­tho­dox ves­sels. Yes; there were two salt­cel­lars quite full. Per­haps there was some spe­ci­al­ity in the con­di­ment in the salt­cel­lars. He tasted it; it was sugar. Then he looked round at the res­taur­ant with a re­freshed air of in­terest, to see if there were any other traces of that sin­gu­lar artistic taste which puts the sugar in the salt­cel­lars and the salt in the sugar-basin. Ex­cept for an odd splash of some dark fluid on one of the white-papered walls, the whole place ap­peared neat, cheer­ful and or­din­ary. He rang the bell for the waiter.

When that of­fi­cial hur­ried up, fuzzy-haired and some­what blear-eyed at that early hour, the de­tect­ive (who was not without an ap­pre­ci­ation of the sim­pler forms of hu­mour) asked him to taste the sugar and see if it was up to the high repu­ta­tion of the hotel. The res­ult was that the waiter yawned sud­denly and woke up.

“Do you play this del­ic­ate joke on your cus­tom­ers every morn­ing?” in­quired Valentin. “Does chan­ging the salt and sugar never pall on you as a jest?”

The waiter, when this irony grew clearer, stam­mer­ingly as­sured him that the es­tab­lish­ment had cer­tainly no such in­ten­tion; it must be a most curi­ous mis­take. He picked up the sugar-basin and looked at it; he picked up the salt­cel­lar and looked at that, his face grow­ing more and more be­wildered. At last he ab­ruptly ex­cused him­self, and hur­ry­ing away, re­turned in a few seconds with the pro­pri­etor. The pro­pri­etor also ex­amined the sugar-basin and then the salt­cel­lar; the pro­pri­etor also looked be­wildered.

Sud­denly the waiter seemed to grow in­ar­tic­u­late with a rush of words.

“I zink,” he stuttered eagerly, “I zink it is those two cler­gy­men.”

“What two cler­gy­men?”

“The two cler­gy­men,” said the waiter, “that threw soup at the wall.”

“Threw soup at the wall?” re­peated Valentin, feel­ing sure this must be some sin­gu­lar Italian meta­phor.

“Yes, yes,” said the at­tend­ant ex­citedly, and poin­ted at the dark splash on the white pa­per; “threw it over there on the wall.”

Valentin looked his query at the pro­pri­etor, who came to his res­cue with fuller re­ports.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “it’s quite true, though I don’t sup­pose it has any­thing to do with the sugar and salt. Two cler­gy­men came in and drank soup here very early, as soon as the shut­ters were taken down. They were both very quiet, re­spect­able people; one of them paid the bill and went out; the other, who seemed a slower coach al­to­gether, was some minutes longer get­ting his things to­gether. But he went at last. Only, the in­stant be­fore he stepped into the street he de­lib­er­ately picked up his cup, which he had only half emp­tied, and threw the soup slap on the wall. I was in the back room my­self, and so was the waiter; so I could only rush out in time to find the wall splashed and the shop empty. It don’t do any par­tic­u­lar dam­age, but it was con­foun­ded cheek; and I tried to catch the men in the street. They were too far off though; I only no­ticed they went round the next corner into Carstairs Street.”

The de­tect­ive was on his feet, hat settled and stick in hand. He had already de­cided that in the uni­ver­sal dark­ness of his mind he could only fol­low the first odd fin­ger that poin­ted; and this fin­ger was odd enough. Pay­ing his bill and clash­ing the glass doors be­hind him, he was soon swinging round into the other street.

It was for­tu­nate that even in such fevered mo­ments his eye was cool and quick. So­mething in a shop­front went by him like a mere flash; yet he went back to look at it. The shop was a pop­u­lar green­gro­cer and fruit­erer’s, an ar­ray of goods set out in the open air and plainly tick­eted with their names and prices. In the two most prom­in­ent com­part­ments were two heaps, of or­anges and of nuts re­spect­ively. On the heap of nuts lay a scrap of card­board, on which was writ­ten in bold, blue chalk, “Best tan­ger­ine or­anges, two a penny.” On the or­anges was the equally clear and ex­act de­scrip­tion, “Fin­est Brazil nuts, 4d. a lb.” M. Valentin looked at these two plac­ards and fan­cied he had met this highly subtle form of hu­mour be­fore, and that some­what re­cently. He drew the at­ten­tion of the red-faced fruit­erer, who was look­ing rather sul­lenly up and down the street, to this in­ac­cur­acy in his ad­vert­ise­ments. The fruit­erer said noth­ing, but sharply put each card into its proper place. The de­tect­ive, lean­ing el­eg­antly on his walk­ing-cane, con­tin­ued to scru­tin­ise the shop. At last he said, “Pray ex­cuse my ap­par­ent ir­rel­ev­ance, my good sir, but I should like to ask you a ques­tion in ex­per­i­mental psy­cho­logy and the as­so­ci­ation of ideas.”

The red-faced shop­man re­garded him with an eye of men­ace; but he con­tin­ued gaily, swinging his cane, “Why,” he pur­sued, “why are two tick­ets wrongly placed in a green­gro­cer’s shop like a shovel hat that has come to Lon­don for a hol­i­day? Or, in case I do not make my­self clear, what is the mys­tical as­so­ci­ation which con­nects the idea of nuts marked as or­anges with the idea of two cler­gy­men, one tall and the other short?”

The eyes of the trades­man stood out of his head like a snail’s; he really seemed for an in­stant likely to fling him­self upon the stranger. At last he stammered an­grily: “I don’t know what you ’ave to do with it, but if you’re one of their friends, you can tell ’em from me that I’ll knock their silly ’eads off, par­sons or no par­sons, if they up­set my apples again.”

“Indeed?” asked the de­tect­ive, with great sym­pathy. “Did they up­set your apples?”

“One of ’em did,” said the heated shop­man; “rolled ’em all over the street. I’d ’ave caught the fool but for havin’ to pick ’em up.”

“Which way did these par­sons go?” asked Valentin.

“Up that second road on the left-hand side, and then across the square,” said the other promptly.

“Thanks,” replied Valentin, and van­ished like a fairy. On the other side of the second square he found a po­lice­man, and said: “This is ur­gent, con­stable; have you seen two cler­gy­men in shovel hats?”

The po­lice­man began to chuckle heav­ily. “I ’ave, sir; and if you arst me, one of ’em was drunk. He stood in the middle of the road that be­wildered that—”

“Which way did they go?” snapped Valentin.

“They took one of them yel­low buses over there,” answered the man; “them that go to Hamp­stead.”

Valentin pro­duced his of­fi­cial card and said very rap­idly: “Call up two of your men to come with me in pur­suit,” and crossed the road with such con­ta­gious en­ergy that the pon­der­ous po­lice­man was moved to al­most agile obed­i­ence. In a minute and a half the French de­tect­ive was joined on the op­pos­ite pave­ment by an in­spector and a man in plain clothes.

“Well, sir,” began the former, with smil­ing im­port­ance, “and what may—?”

Valentin poin­ted sud­denly with his cane. “I’ll tell you on the top of that om­ni­bus,” he said, and was dart­ing and dodging across the tangle of the traffic. When all three sank pant­ing on the top seats of the yel­low vehicle, the in­spector said: “We could go four times as quick in a taxi.”

“Quite true,” replied their leader pla­cidly, “if we only had an idea of where we were go­ing.”

“Well, where are you go­ing?” asked the other, star­ing.

Valentin smoked frown­ingly for a few seconds; then, re­mov­ing his ci­gar­ette, he said: “If you know what a man’s do­ing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he’s do­ing, keep be­hind him. Stray when he strays; stop when he stops; travel as slowly as he. Then you may see what he saw and may act as he ac­ted. All we can do is to keep our eyes skinned for a queer thing.”

“What sort of queer thing do you mean?” asked the in­spector.

“Any sort of queer thing,” answered Valentin, and re­lapsed into ob­stin­ate si­lence.

The yel­low om­ni­bus crawled up the north­ern roads for what seemed like hours on end; the great de­tect­ive would not ex­plain fur­ther, and per­haps his as­sist­ants felt a si­lent and grow­ing doubt of his er­rand. Per­haps, also, they felt a si­lent and grow­ing de­sire for lunch, for the hours crept long past the nor­mal lunch­eon hour, and the long roads of the North Lon­don sub­urbs seemed to shoot out into length after length like an in­fernal tele­scope. It was one of those jour­neys on which a man per­petu­ally feels that now at last he must have come to the end of the uni­verse, and then finds he has only come to the be­gin­ning of Tufnell Park. Lon­don died away in draggled tav­erns and dreary scrubs, and then was un­ac­count­ably born again in blaz­ing high streets and blatant ho­tels. It was like passing through thir­teen sep­ar­ate vul­gar cit­ies all just touch­ing each other. But though the winter twi­light was already threat­en­ing the road ahead of them, the Parisian de­tect­ive still sat si­lent and watch­ful, eye­ing the front­age of the streets that slid by on either side. By the time they had left Cam­den Town be­hind, the po­lice­men were nearly asleep; at least, they gave some­thing like a jump as Valentin leapt erect, struck a hand on each man’s shoulder, and shouted to the driver to stop.

They tumbled down the steps into the road without real­ising why they had been dis­lodged; when they looked round for en­light­en­ment they found Valentin tri­umphantly point­ing his fin­ger to­wards a win­dow on the left side of the road. It was a large win­dow, form­ing part of the long façade of a gilt and pala­tial pub­lic-house; it was the part re­served for re­spect­able din­ing, and la­belled “Res­taur­ant.” This win­dow, like all the rest along the front­age of the hotel, was of fros­ted and figured glass; but in the middle of it was a big, black smash, like a star in the ice.

“Our cue at last,” cried Valentin, wav­ing his stick; “the place with the broken win­dow.”

“What win­dow? What cue?” asked his prin­cipal as­sist­ant. “Why, what proof is there that this has any­thing to do with them?”

Valentin al­most broke his bam­boo stick with rage.

“Proof!” he cried. “Good God! the man is look­ing for proof! Why, of course, the chances are twenty to one that it has noth­ing to do with them. But what else can we do? Don’t you see we must either fol­low one wild pos­sib­il­ity or else go home to bed?” He banged his way into the res­taur­ant, fol­lowed by his com­pan­ions, and they were soon seated at a late lunch­eon at a little table, and looked at the star of smashed glass from the in­side. Not that it was very in­form­at­ive to them even then.

“Got your win­dow broken, I see,” said Valentin to the waiter as he paid the bill.

“Yes, sir,” answered the at­tend­ant, bend­ing busily over the change, to which Valentin si­lently ad­ded an enorm­ous tip. The waiter straightened him­self with mild but un­mis­tak­able an­im­a­tion.

“Ah, yes, sir,” he said. “Very odd thing, that, sir.”

“Indeed?” Tell us about it,” said the de­tect­ive with care­less curi­os­ity.

“Well, two gents in black came in,” said the waiter; “two of those for­eign par­sons that are run­ning about. They had a cheap and quiet little lunch, and one of them paid for it and went out. The other was just go­ing out to join him when I looked at my change again and found he’d paid me more than three times too much. ‘Here,’ I says to the chap who was nearly out of the door, ‘you’ve paid too much.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, very cool, ‘have we?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, and picks up the bill to show him. Well, that was a knock­out.”

“What do you mean?” asked his in­ter­locutor.

“Well, I’d have sworn on seven Bibles that I’d put 4s. on that bill. But now I saw I’d put 14s., as plain as paint.”

“Well?” cried Valentin, mov­ing slowly, but with burn­ing eyes, “and then?”

“The par­son at the door he says all se­rene, ‘Sorry to con­fuse your ac­counts, but it’ll pay for the win­dow.’ ‘What win­dow?’ I says. ‘The one I’m go­ing to break,’ he says, and smashed that blessed pane with his um­brella.”

All three in­quirers made an ex­clam­a­tion; and the in­spector said un­der his breath, “Are we after es­caped lun­at­ics?” The waiter went on with some rel­ish for the ri­dicu­lous story:

“I was so knocked silly for a second, I couldn’t do any­thing. The man marched out of the place and joined his friend just round the corner. Then they went so quick up Bul­lock Street that I couldn’t catch them, though I ran round the bars to do it.”

“Bul­lock Street,” said the de­tect­ive, and shot up that thor­ough­fare as quickly as the strange couple he pur­sued.

Their jour­ney now took them through bare brick ways like tun­nels; streets with few lights and even with few win­dows; streets that seemed built out of the blank backs of everything and every­where. Dusk was deep­en­ing, and it was not easy even for the Lon­don po­lice­men to guess in what ex­act dir­ec­tion they were tread­ing. The in­spector, how­ever, was pretty cer­tain that they would even­tu­ally strike some part of Hamp­stead Heath. Abruptly one bul­ging gas-lit win­dow broke the blue twi­light like a bull’s-eye lan­tern; and Valentin stopped an in­stant be­fore a little gar­ish sweet­stuff shop. After an in­stant’s hes­it­a­tion he went in; he stood amid the gaudy col­ours of the con­fec­tion­ery with en­tire grav­ity and bought thir­teen chocol­ate ci­gars with a cer­tain care. He was clearly pre­par­ing an open­ing; but he did not need one.

An an­gu­lar, eld­erly young wo­man in the shop had re­garded his el­eg­ant ap­pear­ance with a merely auto­matic in­quiry; but when she saw the door be­hind him blocked with the blue uni­form of the in­spector, her eyes seemed to wake up.

“Oh,” she said, “if you’ve come about that par­cel, I’ve sent it off already.”

“Par­cel?” re­peated Valentin; and it was his turn to look in­quir­ing.

“I mean the par­cel the gen­tle­man left—the cler­gy­man gen­tle­man.”

“For good­ness’ sake,” said Valentin, lean­ing for­ward with his first real con­fes­sion of eager­ness, “for Heaven’s sake tell us what happened ex­actly.”

“Well,” said the wo­man a little doubt­fully, “the cler­gy­men came in about half an hour ago and bought some pep­per­mints and talked a bit, and then went off to­wards the Heath. But a second after, one of them runs back into the shop and says, ‘Have I left a par­cel!’ Well, I looked every­where and couldn’t see one; so he says, ‘Never mind; but if it should turn up, please post it to this ad­dress,’ and he left me the ad­dress and a shil­ling for my trouble. And sure enough, though I thought I’d looked every­where, I found he’d left a brown pa­per par­cel, so I pos­ted it to the place he said. I can’t re­mem­ber the ad­dress now; it was some­where in West­min­ster. But as the thing seemed so im­port­ant, I thought per­haps the po­lice had come about it.”

“So they have,” said Valentin shortly. “Is Hamp­stead Heath near here?”

“Straight on for fif­teen minutes,” said the wo­man, “and you’ll come right out on the open.” Valentin sprang out of the shop and began to run. The other de­tect­ives fol­lowed him at a re­luct­ant trot.

The street they threaded was so nar­row and shut in by shad­ows that when they came out un­ex­pec­tedly into the void com­mon and vast sky they were startled to find the even­ing still so light and clear. A per­fect dome of pea­cock-green sank into gold amid the black­en­ing trees and the dark vi­olet dis­tances. The glow­ing green tint was just deep enough to pick out in points of crys­tal one or two stars. All that was left of the day­light lay in a golden glit­ter across the edge of Hamp­stead and that pop­u­lar hol­low which is called the Vale of Health. The hol­i­day makers who roam this re­gion had not wholly dis­persed; a few couples sat shape­lessly on benches; and here and there a dis­tant girl still shrieked in one of the swings. The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around the sub­lime vul­gar­ity of man; and stand­ing on the slope and look­ing across the val­ley, Valentin be­held the thing which he sought.

Among the black and break­ing groups in that dis­tance was one es­pe­cially black which did not break—a group of two fig­ures cler­ic­ally clad. Though they seemed as small as in­sects, Valentin could see that one of them was much smal­ler than the other. Though the other had a stu­dent’s stoop and an in­con­spicu­ous man­ner, he could see that the man was well over six feet high. He shut his teeth and went for­ward, whirl­ing his stick im­pa­tiently. By the time he had sub­stan­tially di­min­ished the dis­tance and mag­ni­fied the two black fig­ures as in a vast mi­cro­scope, he had per­ceived some­thing else; some­thing which startled him, and yet which he had some­how ex­pec­ted. Who­ever was the tall priest, there could be no doubt about the iden­tity of the short one. It was his friend of the Har­wich train, the stumpy little curé of Es­sex whom he had warned about his brown pa­per par­cels.

Now, so far as this went, everything fit­ted in fi­nally and ra­tion­ally enough. Valentin had learned by his in­quir­ies that morn­ing that a Father Brown from Es­sex was bring­ing up a sil­ver cross with sap­phires, a relic of con­sid­er­able value, to show some of the for­eign priests at the con­gress. This un­doubtedly was the “sil­ver with blue stones”; and Father Brown un­doubtedly was the little green­horn in the train. Now there was noth­ing won­der­ful about the fact that what Valentin had found out Flam­beau had also found out; Flam­beau found out everything. Also there was noth­ing won­der­ful in the fact that when Flam­beau heard of a sap­phire cross he should try to steal it; that was the most nat­ural thing in all nat­ural his­tory. And most cer­tainly there was noth­ing won­der­ful about the fact that Flam­beau should have it all his own way with such a silly sheep as the man with the um­brella and the par­cels. He was the sort of man whom any­body could lead on a string to the North Pole; it was not sur­pris­ing that an actor like Flam­beau, dressed as an­other priest, could lead him to Hamp­stead Heath. So far the crime seemed clear enough; and while the de­tect­ive pit­ied the priest for his help­less­ness, he al­most des­pised Flam­beau for con­des­cend­ing to so gull­ible a vic­tim. But when Valentin thought of all that had happened in between, of all that had led him to his tri­umph, he racked his brains for the smal­lest rhyme or reason in it. What had the steal­ing of a blue-and-sil­ver cross from a priest from Es­sex to do with chuck­ing soup at wall­pa­per? What had it to do with call­ing nuts or­anges, or with pay­ing for win­dows first and break­ing them af­ter­wards? He had come to the end of his chase; yet some­how he had missed the middle of it. When he failed (which was sel­dom), he had usu­ally grasped the clue, but nev­er­the­less missed the crim­inal. Here he had grasped the crim­inal, but still he could not grasp the clue.

The two fig­ures that they fol­lowed were crawl­ing like black flies across the huge green con­tour of a hill. They were evid­ently sunk in con­ver­sa­tion, and per­haps did not no­tice where they were go­ing; but they were cer­tainly go­ing to the wilder and more si­lent heights of the Heath. As their pur­suers gained on them, the lat­ter had to use the un­dig­ni­fied at­ti­tudes of the deer­stalker, to crouch be­hind clumps of trees and even to crawl pros­trate in deep grass. By these un­gainly in­genu­it­ies the hunters even came close enough to the quarry to hear the mur­mur of the dis­cus­sion, but no word could be dis­tin­guished ex­cept the word “reason” re­cur­ring fre­quently in a high and al­most child­ish voice. Once over an ab­rupt dip of land and a dense tangle of thick­ets, the de­tect­ives ac­tu­ally lost the two fig­ures they were fol­low­ing. They did not find the trail again for an ag­on­ising ten minutes, and then it led round the brow of a great dome of hill over­look­ing an am­phi­theatre of rich and des­ol­ate sun­set scenery. Under a tree in this com­mand­ing yet neg­lected spot was an old ram­shackle wooden seat. On this seat sat the two priests still in ser­i­ous speech to­gether. The gor­geous green and gold still clung to the dark­en­ing ho­ri­zon; but the dome above was turn­ing slowly from pea­cock-green to pea­cock-blue, and the stars de­tached them­selves more and more like solid jew­els. Mutely mo­tion­ing to his fol­low­ers, Valentin con­trived to creep up be­hind the big branch­ing tree, and, stand­ing there in deathly si­lence, heard the words of the strange priests for the first time.

After he had listened for a minute and a half, he was gripped by a dev­il­ish doubt. Per­haps he had dragged the two Eng­lish po­lice­men to the wastes of a noc­turnal heath on an er­rand no saner than seek­ing figs on its thistles. For the two priests were talk­ing ex­actly like priests, pi­ously, with learn­ing and leis­ure, about the most aer­ial en­ig­mas of theo­logy. The little Es­sex priest spoke the more simply, with his round face turned to the strength­en­ing stars; the other talked with his head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to look at them. But no more in­no­cently cler­ical con­ver­sa­tion could have been heard in any white Italian cloister or black Span­ish cathed­ral.

The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown’s sen­tences, which ended: “… what they really meant in the Middle Ages by the heav­ens be­ing in­cor­rupt­ible.”

The taller priest nod­ded his bowed head and said:

“Ah, yes, these mod­ern in­fi­dels ap­peal to their reason; but who can look at those mil­lions of worlds and not feel that there may well be won­der­ful uni­verses above us where reason is ut­terly un­reas­on­able?”

“No,” said the other priest; “reason is al­ways reas­on­able, even in the last limbo, in the lost bor­der­land of things. I know that people charge the Church with lower­ing reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really su­preme. Alone on earth, the Church af­firms that God him­self is bound by reason.”

The other priest raised his aus­tere face to the spangled sky and said:

“Yet who knows if in that in­fin­ite uni­verse—?”

“Only in­fin­ite phys­ic­ally,” said the little priest, turn­ing sharply in his seat, “not in­fin­ite in the sense of es­cap­ing from the laws of truth.”

Valentin be­hind his tree was tear­ing his fin­ger­nails with si­lent fury. He seemed al­most to hear the snig­gers of the Eng­lish de­tect­ives whom he had brought so far on a fant­astic guess only to listen to the meta­phys­ical gos­sip of two mild old par­sons. In his im­pa­tience he lost the equally elab­or­ate an­swer of the tall cleric, and when he listened again it was again Father Brown who was speak­ing:

“Reason and justice grip the re­motest and the lone­li­est star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single dia­monds and sap­phires? Well, you can ima­gine any mad bot­any or geo­logy you please. Think of forests of adam­ant with leaves of bril­liants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single ele­phant­ine sap­phire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic as­tro­nomy would make the smal­lest dif­fer­ence to the reason and justice of con­duct. On plains of opal, un­der cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a no­tice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ ”

Valentin was just in the act of rising from his ri­gid and crouch­ing at­ti­tude and creep­ing away as softly as might be, felled by the one great folly of his life. But some­thing in the very si­lence of the tall priest made him stop un­til the lat­ter spoke. When at last he did speak, he said simply, his head bowed and his hands on his knees:

“Well, I think that other worlds may per­haps rise higher than our reason. The mys­tery of heaven is un­fathom­able, and I for one can only bow my head.”

Then, with brow yet bent and without chan­ging by the faintest shade his at­ti­tude or voice, he ad­ded:

“Just hand over that sap­phire cross of yours, will you? We’re all alone here, and I could pull you to pieces like a straw doll.”

The ut­terly un­altered voice and at­ti­tude ad­ded a strange vi­ol­ence to that shock­ing change of speech. But the guarder of the relic only seemed to turn his head by the smal­lest sec­tion of the com­pass. He seemed still to have a some­what fool­ish face turned to the stars. Per­haps he had not un­der­stood. Or, per­haps, he had un­der­stood and sat ri­gid with ter­ror.

“Yes,” said the tall priest, in the same low voice and in the same still pos­ture, “yes, I am Flam­beau.”

Then, after a pause, he said:

“Come, will you give me that cross?”

“No,” said the other, and the mono­syl­lable had an odd sound.

Flam­beau sud­denly flung off all his pon­ti­fical pre­ten­sions. The great rob­ber leaned back in his seat and laughed low but long.

“No,” he cried, “you won’t give it me, you proud pre­l­ate. You won’t give it me, you little cel­ib­ate sim­pleton. Shall I tell you why you won’t give it me? Be­cause I’ve got it already in my own breast-pocket.”

The small man from Es­sex turned what seemed to be a dazed face in the dusk, and said, with the timid eager­ness of “The Priv­ate Sec­ret­ary”:

“Are—are you sure?”

Flam­beau yelled with de­light.

“Really, you’re as good as a three-act farce,” he cried. “Yes, you turnip, I am quite sure. I had the sense to make a du­plic­ate of the right par­cel, and now, my friend, you’ve got the du­plic­ate and I’ve got the jew­els. An old dodge, Father Brown—a very old dodge.”

“Yes,” said Father Brown, and passed his hand through his hair with the same strange vague­ness of man­ner. “Yes, I’ve heard of it be­fore.”

The co­los­sus of crime leaned over to the little rus­tic priest with a sort of sud­den in­terest.

“You have heard of it?” he asked. “Where have you heard of it?”

“Well, I mustn’t tell you his name, of course,” said the little man simply. “He was a pen­it­ent, you know. He had lived pros­per­ously for about twenty years en­tirely on du­plic­ate brown pa­per par­cels. And so, you see, when I began to sus­pect you, I thought of this poor chap’s way of do­ing it at once.”

“Began to sus­pect me?” re­peated the out­law with in­creased in­tens­ity. “Did you really have the gump­tion to sus­pect me just be­cause I brought you up to this bare part of the heath?”

“No, no,” said Brown with an air of apo­logy. “You see, I sus­pec­ted you when we first met. It’s that little bulge up the sleeve where you people have the spiked brace­let.”

“How in Tar­tarus,” cried Flam­beau, “did you ever hear of the spiked brace­let?”

“Oh, one’s little flock, you know!” said Father Brown, arch­ing his eye­brows rather blankly. “When I was a cur­ate in Hartle­pool, there were three of them with spiked brace­lets. So, as I sus­pec­ted you from the first, don’t you see, I made sure that the cross should go safe, any­how. I’m afraid I watched you, you know. So at last I saw you change the par­cels. Then, don’t you see, I changed them back again. And then I left the right one be­hind.”

“Left it be­hind?” re­peated Flam­beau, and for the first time there was an­other note in his voice be­side his tri­umph.

“Well, it was like this,” said the little priest, speak­ing in the same un­af­fected way. “I went back to that sweet-shop and asked if I’d left a par­cel, and gave them a par­tic­u­lar ad­dress if it turned up. Well, I knew I hadn’t; but when I went away again I did. So, in­stead of run­ning after me with that valu­able par­cel, they have sent it fly­ing to a friend of mine in West­min­ster.” Then he ad­ded rather sadly: “I learnt that, too, from a poor fel­low in Hartle­pool. He used to do it with hand­bags he stole at rail­way sta­tions, but he’s in a mon­as­tery now. Oh, one gets to know, you know,” he ad­ded, rub­bing his head again with the same sort of des­per­ate apo­logy. “We can’t help be­ing priests. People come and tell us these things.”

Flam­beau tore a brown-pa­per par­cel out of his in­ner pocket and rent it in pieces. There was noth­ing but pa­per and sticks of lead in­side it. He sprang to his feet with a gi­gantic ges­ture, and cried:

“I don’t be­lieve you. I don’t be­lieve a bump­kin like you could man­age all that. I be­lieve you’ve still got the stuff on you, and if you don’t give it up—why, we’re all alone, and I’ll take it by force!”

“No,” said Father Brown simply, and stood up also, “you won’t take it by force. First, be­cause I really haven’t still got it. And, second, be­cause we are not alone.”

Flam­beau stopped in his stride for­ward.

“Be­hind that tree,” said Father Brown, point­ing, “are two strong po­lice­men and the greatest de­tect­ive alive. How did they come here, do you ask? Why, I brought them, of course! How did I do it? Why, I’ll tell you if you like! Lord bless you, we have to know twenty such things when we work among the crim­inal classes! Well, I wasn’t sure you were a thief, and it would never do to make a scan­dal against one of our own clergy. So I just tested you to see if any­thing would make you show your­self. A man gen­er­ally makes a small scene if he finds salt in his cof­fee; if he doesn’t, he has some reason for keep­ing quiet. I changed the salt and sugar, and you kept quiet. A man gen­er­ally ob­jects if his bill is three times too big. If he pays it, he has some motive for passing un­noticed. I altered your bill, and you paid it.”

The world seemed wait­ing for Flam­beau to leap like a ti­ger. But he was held back as by a spell; he was stunned with the ut­most curi­os­ity.

“Well,” went on Father Brown, with lum­ber­ing lu­cid­ity, “as you wouldn’t leave any tracks for the po­lice, of course some­body had to. At every place we went to, I took care to do some­thing that would get us talked about for the rest of the day. I didn’t do much harm—a splashed wall, spilt apples, a broken win­dow; but I saved the cross, as the cross will al­ways be saved. It is at West­min­ster by now. I rather won­der you didn’t stop it with the Don­key’s Whistle.”

“With the what?” asked Flam­beau.

“I’m glad you’ve never heard of it,” said the priest, mak­ing a face. “It’s a foul thing. I’m sure you’re too good a man for a Whist­ler. I couldn’t have countered it even with the Spots my­self; I’m not strong enough in the legs.”

“What on earth are you talk­ing about?” asked the other.

“Well, I did think you’d know the Spots,” said Father Brown, agree­ably sur­prised. “Oh, you can’t have gone so very wrong yet!”

“How in blazes do you know all these hor­rors?” cried Flam­beau.

The shadow of a smile crossed the round, simple face of his cler­ical op­pon­ent.

“Oh, by be­ing a cel­ib­ate sim­pleton, I sup­pose,” he said. “Has it never struck you that a man who does next to noth­ing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly un­aware of hu­man evil? But, as a mat­ter of fact, an­other part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a priest.”

“What?” asked the thief, al­most gap­ing.

“You at­tacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theo­logy.”

And even as he turned away to col­lect his prop­erty, the three po­lice­men came out from un­der the twi­light trees. Flam­beau was an artist and a sports­man. He stepped back and swept Valentin a great bow.

“Do not bow to me, mon ami,” said Valentin with sil­ver clear­ness. “Let us both bow to our mas­ter.”

And they both stood an in­stant un­covered while the little Es­sex priest blinked about for his um­brella.

The Secret Garden

Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Po­lice, was late for his din­ner, and some of his guests began to ar­rive be­fore him. These were, how­ever, re­as­sured by his con­fid­en­tial ser­vant, Ivan, the old man with a scar, and a face al­most as grey as his mous­taches, who al­ways sat at a table in the en­trance hall—a hall hung with weapons. Valentin’s house was per­haps as pe­cu­liar and cel­eb­rated as its mas­ter. It was an old house, with high walls and tall pop­lars al­most over­hanging the Seine; but the oddity—and per­haps the po­lice value—of its ar­chi­tec­ture was this: that there was no ul­ti­mate exit at all ex­cept through this front door, which was guarded by Ivan and the ar­moury. The garden was large and elab­or­ate, and there were many exits from the house into the garden. But there was no exit from the garden into the world out­side; all round it ran a tall, smooth, un­scal­able wall with spe­cial spikes at the top; no bad garden, per­haps, for a man to re­flect in whom some hun­dred crim­in­als had sworn to kill.

As Ivan ex­plained to the guests, their host had tele­phoned that he was de­tained for ten minutes. He was, in truth, mak­ing some last ar­range­ments about ex­e­cu­tions and such ugly things; and though these du­ties were rootedly re­puls­ive to him, he al­ways per­formed them with pre­ci­sion. Ruth­less in the pur­suit of crim­in­als, he was very mild about their pun­ish­ment. Since he had been su­preme over French—and largely over European—poli­cial meth­ods, his great in­flu­ence had been hon­our­ably used for the mit­ig­a­tion of sen­tences and the puri­fic­a­tion of pris­ons. He was one of the great hu­man­it­arian French free­thinkers; and the only thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

When Valentin ar­rived he was already dressed in black clothes and the red rosette—an el­eg­ant fig­ure, his dark beard already streaked with grey. He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on the grounds be­hind. The garden door of it was open, and after he had care­fully locked his box in its of­fi­cial place, he stood for a few seconds at the open door look­ing out upon the garden. A sharp moon was fight­ing with the fly­ing rags and tat­ters of a storm, and Valentin re­garded it with a wist­ful­ness un­usual in such sci­entific natures as his. Per­haps such sci­entific natures have some psychic pre­vi­sion of the most tre­mend­ous prob­lem of their lives. From any such oc­cult mood, at least, he quickly re­covered, for he knew he was late, and that his guests had already be­gun to ar­rive. A glance at his draw­ing-room when he entered it was enough to make cer­tain that his prin­cipal guest was not there, at any rate. He saw all the other pil­lars of the little party; he saw Lord Gal­lo­way, the Eng­lish Am­bas­sador—a choleric old man with a rus­set face like an apple, wear­ing the blue rib­bon of the Garter. He saw Lady Gal­lo­way, slim and thread­like, with sil­ver hair and a face sens­it­ive and su­per­ior. He saw her daugh­ter, Lady Mar­garet Gra­ham, a pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and cop­per-col­oured hair. He saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and op­u­lent, and with her her two daugh­ters, black-eyed and op­u­lent also. He saw Dr. Si­mon, a typ­ical French sci­ent­ist, with glasses, a poin­ted brown beard, and a fore­head barred with those par­al­lel wrinkles which are the pen­alty of su­per­cili­ous­ness, since they come through con­stantly el­ev­at­ing the eye­brows. He saw Father Brown, of Cob­hole, in Es­sex, whom he had re­cently met in Eng­land. He saw—per­haps with more in­terest than any of these—a tall man in uni­form, who had bowed to the Gal­lo­ways without re­ceiv­ing any very hearty ac­know­ledg­ment, and who now ad­vanced alone to pay his re­spects to his host. This was Com­mand­ant O’Brien, of the French For­eign Le­gion. He was a slim yet some­what swag­ger­ing fig­ure, clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and, as seemed nat­ural in an of­ficer of that fam­ous re­gi­ment of vic­tori­ous fail­ures and suc­cess­ful sui­cides, he had an air at once dash­ing and mel­an­choly. He was by birth an Irish gen­tle­man, and in boy­hood had known the Gal­lo­ways—es­pe­cially Mar­garet Gra­ham. He had left his coun­try after some crash of debts, and now ex­pressed his com­plete free­dom from Brit­ish etiquette by swinging about in uni­form, sabre and spurs. When he bowed to the Am­bas­sador’s fam­ily, Lord and Lady Gal­lo­way bent stiffly, and Lady Mar­garet looked away.

But for whatever old causes such people might be in­ter­ested in each other, their dis­tin­guished host was not spe­cially in­ter­ested in them. No one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the even­ing. Valentin was ex­pect­ing, for spe­cial reas­ons, a man of world­wide fame, whose friend­ship he had se­cured dur­ing some of his great de­tect­ive tours and tri­umphs in the Un­ited States. He was ex­pect­ing Julius K. Brayne, that multi-mil­lion­aire whose co­lossal and even crush­ing en­dow­ments of small re­li­gions have oc­ca­sioned so much easy sport and easier solem­nity for the Amer­ican and Eng­lish pa­pers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr. Brayne was an athe­ist or a Mor­mon or a Chris­tian Scient­ist; but he was ready to pour money into any in­tel­lec­tual ves­sel, so long as it was an un­tried ves­sel. One of his hob­bies was to wait for the Amer­ican Shakespeare—a hobby more pa­tient than angling. He ad­mired Walt Whit­man, but thought that Luke P. Tan­ner, of Paris, PA, was more “pro­gress­ive” than Whit­man any day. He liked any­thing that he thought “pro­gress­ive.” He thought Valentin “pro­gress­ive,” thereby do­ing him a grave in­justice.

The solid ap­pear­ance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as de­cis­ive as a din­ner bell. He had this great qual­ity, which very few of us can claim, that his pres­ence was as big as his ab­sence. He was a huge fel­low, as fat as he was tall, clad in com­plete even­ing black, without so much re­lief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well brushed back like a Ger­man’s; his face was red, fierce and cher­ubic, with one dark tuft un­der the lower lip that threw up that oth­er­wise in­fant­ile vis­age with an ef­fect the­at­rical and even Mephis­tophelean. Not long, how­ever, did that salon merely stare at the cel­eb­rated Amer­ican; his late­ness had already be­come a do­mestic prob­lem, and he was sent with all speed into the din­ing-room with Lady Gal­lo­way on his arm.

Ex­cept on one point the Gal­lo­ways were gen­ial and cas­ual enough. So long as Lady Mar­garet did not take the arm of that ad­ven­turer O’Brien, her father was quite sat­is­fied; and she had not done so, she had dec­or­ously gone in with Dr. Si­mon. Never­the­less, old Lord Gal­lo­way was rest­less and al­most rude. He was dip­lo­matic enough dur­ing din­ner, but when, over the ci­gars, three of the younger men—Si­mon the doc­tor, Brown the priest, and the det­ri­mental O’Brien, the ex­ile in a for­eign uni­form—all melted away to mix with the ladies or smoke in the con­ser­vat­ory, then the Eng­lish dip­lo­mat­ist grew very un­dip­lo­matic in­deed. He was stung every sixty seconds with the thought that the scamp O’Brien might be sig­nalling to Mar­garet some­how; he did not at­tempt to ima­gine how. He was left over the cof­fee with Brayne, the hoary Yan­kee who be­lieved in all re­li­gions, and Valentin, the grizzled French­man who be­lieved in none. They could ar­gue with each other, but neither could ap­peal to him. After a time this “pro­gress­ive” lo­go­machy had reached a crisis of te­dium; Lord Gal­lo­way got up also and sought the draw­ing-room. He lost his way in long pas­sages for some six or eight minutes: till he heard the high-pitched, di­dactic voice of the doc­tor, and then the dull voice of the priest, fol­lowed by gen­eral laughter. They also, he thought with a curse, were prob­ably ar­guing about “sci­ence and re­li­gion.” But the in­stant he opened the salon door he saw only one thing—he saw what was not there. He saw that Com­mand­ant O’Brien was ab­sent, and that Lady Mar­garet was ab­sent too.

Rising im­pa­tiently from the draw­ing-room, as he had from the din­ing-room, he stamped along the pas­sage once more. His no­tion of pro­tect­ing his daugh­ter from the Irish-Al­gerian n’er-do-well had be­come some­thing cent­ral and even mad in his mind. As he went to­wards the back of the house, where was Valentin’s study, he was sur­prised to meet his daugh­ter, who swept past with a white, scorn­ful face, which was a second en­igma. If she had been with O’Brien, where was O’Brien! If she had not been with O’Brien, where had she been? With a sort of senile and pas­sion­ate sus­pi­cion he groped his way to the dark back parts of the man­sion, and even­tu­ally found a ser­vants’ en­trance that opened on to the garden. The moon with her scim­itar had now ripped up and rolled away all the storm-wrack. The ar­gent light lit up all four corners of the garden. A tall fig­ure in blue was strid­ing across the lawn to­wards the study door; a glint of moon­lit sil­ver on his fa­cings picked him out as Com­mand­ant O’Brien.

He van­ished through the French win­dows into the house, leav­ing Lord Gal­lo­way in an in­des­crib­able tem­per, at once vir­u­lent and vague. The blue-and-sil­ver garden, like a scene in a theatre, seemed to taunt him with all that tyr­an­nic ten­der­ness against which his worldly au­thor­ity was at war. The length and grace of the Irish­man’s stride en­raged him as if he were a rival in­stead of a father; the moon­light maddened him. He was trapped as if by ma­gic into a garden of troubadours, a Wat­teau fairy­land; and, will­ing to shake off such amor­ous im­be­cil­it­ies by speech, he stepped briskly after his en­emy. As he did so he tripped over some tree or stone in the grass; looked down at it first with ir­rit­a­tion and then a second time with curi­os­ity. The next in­stant the moon and the tall pop­lars looked at an un­usual sight—an eld­erly Eng­lish dip­lo­mat­ist run­ning hard and cry­ing or bel­low­ing as he ran.

His hoarse shouts brought a pale face to the study door, the beam­ing glasses and wor­ried brow of Dr. Si­mon, who heard the no­ble­man’s first clear words. Lord Gal­lo­way was cry­ing: “A corpse in the grass—a blood­stained corpse.” O’Brien at last had gone ut­terly out of his mind.

“We must tell Valentin at once,” said the doc­tor, when the other had brokenly de­scribed all that he had dared to ex­am­ine. “It is for­tu­nate that he is here;” and even as he spoke the great de­tect­ive entered the study, at­trac­ted by the cry. It was al­most amus­ing to note his typ­ical trans­form­a­tion; he had come with the com­mon con­cern of a host and a gen­tle­man, fear­ing that some guest or ser­vant was ill. When he was told the gory fact, he turned with all his grav­ity in­stantly bright and busi­ness­like; for this, how­ever ab­rupt and aw­ful, was his busi­ness.

“Strange, gen­tle­men,” he said as they hur­ried out into the garden, “that I should have hunted mys­ter­ies all over the earth, and now one comes and settles in my own back­yard. But where is the place?” They crossed the lawn less eas­ily, as a slight mist had be­gun to rise from the river; but un­der the guid­ance of the shaken Gal­lo­way they found the body sunken in deep grass—the body of a very tall and broad-shouldered man. He lay face down­wards, so they could only see that his big shoulders were clad in black cloth, and that his big head was bald, ex­cept for a wisp or two of brown hair that clung to his skull like wet sea­weed. A scar­let ser­pent of blood crawled from un­der his fallen face.

“At least,” said Si­mon, with a deep and sin­gu­lar in­ton­a­tion, “he is none of our party.”

“Ex­am­ine him, doc­tor,” cried Valentin rather sharply. “He may not be dead.”

The doc­tor bent down. “He is not quite cold, but I am afraid he is dead enough,” he answered. “Just help me to lift him up.”

They lif­ted him care­fully an inch from the ground, and all doubts as to his be­ing really dead were settled at once and fright­fully. The head fell away. It had been en­tirely sundered from the body; who­ever had cut his throat had man­aged to sever the neck as well. Even Valentin was slightly shocked. “He must have been as strong as a gor­illa,” he muttered.

Not without a shiver, though he was used to ana­tom­ical abor­tions, Dr. Si­mon lif­ted the head. It was slightly slashed about the neck and jaw, but the face was sub­stan­tially un­hurt. It was a pon­der­ous, yel­low face, at once sunken and swollen, with a hawk-like nose and heavy lids—a face of a wicked Ro­man em­peror, with, per­haps, a dis­tant touch of a Chinese em­peror. All present seemed to look at it with the cold­est eye of ig­nor­ance. Noth­ing else could be noted about the man ex­cept that, as they had lif­ted his body, they had seen un­der­neath it the white gleam of a shirt­front de­faced with a red gleam of blood. As Dr. Si­mon said, the man had never been of their party. But he might very well have been try­ing to join it, for he had come dressed for such an oc­ca­sion.

Valentin went down on his hands and knees and ex­amined with his closest pro­fes­sional at­ten­tion the grass and ground for some twenty yards round the body, in which he was as­sisted less skill­fully by the doc­tor, and quite vaguely by the Eng­lish lord. Noth­ing re­war­ded their grov­el­lings ex­cept a few twigs, snapped or chopped into very small lengths, which Valentin lif­ted for an in­stant’s ex­am­in­a­tion and then tossed away.

“Twigs,” he said gravely; “twigs, and a total stranger with his head cut off; that is all there is on this lawn.”

There was an al­most creepy still­ness, and then the un­nerved Gal­lo­way called out sharply:

“Who’s that! Who’s that over there by the garden wall!”

A small fig­ure with a fool­ishly large head drew waver­ingly near them in the moon­lit haze; looked for an in­stant like a gob­lin, but turned out to be the harm­less little priest whom they had left in the draw­ing-room.

“I say,” he said meekly, “there are no gates to this garden, do you know.”

Valentin’s black brows had come to­gether some­what crossly, as they did on prin­ciple at the sight of the cas­sock. But he was far too just a man to deny the rel­ev­ance of the re­mark. “You are right,” he said. “Be­fore we find out how he came to be killed, we may have to find out how he came to be here. Now listen to me, gen­tle­men. If it can be done without pre­ju­dice to my po­s­i­tion and duty, we shall all agree that cer­tain dis­tin­guished names might well be kept out of this. There are ladies, gen­tle­men, and there is a for­eign am­bas­sador. If we must mark it down as a crime, then it must be fol­lowed up as a crime. But till then I can use my own dis­cre­tion. I am the head of the po­lice; I am so pub­lic that I can af­ford to be private. Please Heaven, I will clear every­one of my own guests be­fore I call in my men to look for any­body else. Gen­tle­men, upon your hon­our, you will none of you leave the house till to­mor­row at noon; there are bed­rooms for all. Si­mon, I think you know where to find my man, Ivan, in the front hall; he is a con­fid­en­tial man. Tell him to leave an­other ser­vant on guard and come to me at once. Lord Gal­lo­way, you are cer­tainly the best per­son to tell the ladies what has happened, and pre­vent a panic. They also must stay. Father Brown and I will re­main with the body.”

When this spirit of the cap­tain spoke in Valentin he was obeyed like a bugle. Dr. Si­mon went through to the ar­moury and routed out Ivan, the pub­lic de­tect­ive’s private de­tect­ive. Gal­lo­way went to the draw­ing-room and told the ter­rible news tact­fully enough, so that by the time the com­pany as­sembled there the ladies were already startled and already soothed. Mean­while the good priest and the good athe­ist stood at the head and foot of the dead man mo­tion­less in the moon­light, like sym­bolic statues of their two philo­sophies of death.

Ivan, the con­fid­en­tial man with the scar and the mous­taches, came out of the house like a can­non ball, and came ra­cing across the lawn to Valentin like a dog to his mas­ter. His livid face was quite lively with the glow of this do­mestic de­tect­ive story, and it was with al­most un­pleas­ant eager­ness that he asked his mas­ter’s per­mis­sion to ex­am­ine the re­mains.

“Yes; look, if you like, Ivan,” said Valentin, “but don’t be long. We must go in and thrash this out in the house.”

Ivan lif­ted the head, and then al­most let it drop.

“Why,” he gasped, “it’s—no, it isn’t; it can’t be. Do you know this man, sir?”

“No,” said Valentin in­dif­fer­ently; “we had bet­ter go in­side.”

Between them they car­ried the corpse to a sofa in the study, and then all made their way to the draw­ing-room.

The de­tect­ive sat down at a desk quietly, and even without hes­it­a­tion; but his eye was the iron eye of a judge at as­size. He made a few rapid notes upon pa­per in front of him, and then said shortly: “Is every­body here?”

“Not Mr. Brayne,” said the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, look­ing round.

“No,” said Lord Gal­lo­way in a hoarse, harsh voice. “And not Mr. Neil O’Brien, I fancy. I saw that gen­tle­man walk­ing in the garden when the corpse was still warm.”

“Ivan,” said the de­tect­ive, “go and fetch Com­mand­ant O’Brien and Mr. Brayne. Mr. Brayne, I know, is fin­ish­ing a ci­gar in the din­ing-room; Com­mand­ant O’Brien, I think, is walk­ing up and down the con­ser­vat­ory. I am not sure.”

The faith­ful at­tend­ant flashed from the room, and be­fore any­one could stir or speak Valentin went on with the same sol­dierly swift­ness of ex­pos­i­tion.

“Every­one here knows that a dead man has been found in the garden, his head cut clean from his body. Dr. Si­mon, you have ex­amined it. Do you think that to cut a man’s throat like that would need great force? Or, per­haps, only a very sharp knife?”

“I should say that it could not be done with a knife at all,” said the pale doc­tor.

“Have you any thought,” re­sumed Valentin, “of a tool with which it could be done?”

“Speak­ing within mod­ern prob­ab­il­it­ies, I really haven’t,” said the doc­tor, arch­ing his pain­ful brows. “It’s not easy to hack a neck through even clum­sily, and this was a very clean cut. It could be done with a battle-axe or an old heads­man’s axe, or an old two-handed sword.”

“But, good heav­ens!” cried the Duchess, al­most in hys­ter­ics, “there aren’t any two-handed swords and battle-axes round here.”

Valentin was still busy with the pa­per in front of him. “Tell me,” he said, still writ­ing rap­idly, “could it have been done with a long French cav­alry sabre?”

A low knock­ing came at the door, which, for some un­reas­on­able reason, curdled every­one’s blood like the knock­ing in Macbeth. Amid that frozen si­lence Dr. Si­mon man­aged to say: “A sabre—yes, I sup­pose it could.”

“Thank you,” said Valentin. “Come in, Ivan.”

The con­fid­en­tial Ivan opened the door and ushered in Com­mand­ant Neil O’Brien, whom he had found at last pa­cing the garden again.

The Irish of­ficer stood up dis­ordered and de­fi­ant on the threshold. “What do you want with me?” he cried.

“Please sit down,” said Valentin in pleas­ant, level tones. “Why, you aren’t wear­ing your sword. Where is it?”

“I left it on the lib­rary table,” said O’Brien, his brogue deep­en­ing in his dis­turbed mood. “It was a nuis­ance, it was get­ting—”

“Ivan,” said Valentin, “please go and get the Com­mand­ant’s sword from the lib­rary.” Then, as the ser­vant van­ished, “Lord Gal­lo­way says he saw you leav­ing the garden just be­fore he found the corpse. What were you do­ing in the garden?”

The Com­mand­ant flung him­self reck­lessly into a chair. “Oh,” he cried in pure Irish, “ad­mirin’ the moon. Com­mun­ing with Nature, me bhoy.”

A heavy si­lence sank and en­dured, and at the end of it came again that trivial and ter­rible knock­ing. Ivan re­appeared, car­ry­ing an empty steel scab­bard. “This is all I can find,” he said.

“Put it on the table,” said Valentin, without look­ing up.

There was an in­hu­man si­lence in the room, like that sea of in­hu­man si­lence round the dock of the con­demned mur­derer. The Duchess’s weak ex­clam­a­tions had long ago died away. Lord Gal­lo­way’s swollen hatred was sat­is­fied and even sobered. The voice that came was quite un­ex­pec­ted.

“I think I can tell you,” cried Lady Mar­garet, in that clear, quiv­er­ing voice with which a cour­ageous wo­man speaks pub­licly. “I can tell you what Mr. O’Brien was do­ing in the garden, since he is bound to si­lence. He was ask­ing me to marry him. I re­fused; I said in my fam­ily cir­cum­stances I could give him noth­ing but my re­spect. He was a little angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my re­spect. I won­der,” she ad­ded, with rather a wan smile, “if he will care at all for it now. For I of­fer it him now. I will swear any­where that he never did a thing like this.”

Lord Gal­lo­way had edged up to his daugh­ter, and was in­tim­id­at­ing her in what he ima­gined to be an un­der­tone. “Hold your tongue, Mag­gie,” he said in a thun­der­ous whis­per. “Why should you shield the fel­low? Where’s his sword? Where’s his con­foun­ded cav­alry—”

He stopped be­cause of the sin­gu­lar stare with which his daugh­ter was re­gard­ing him, a look that was in­deed a lurid mag­net for the whole group.

“You old fool!” she said in a low voice without pre­tence of piety, “what do you sup­pose you are try­ing to prove? I tell you this man was in­no­cent while with me. But if he wasn’t in­no­cent, he was still with me. If he murdered a man in the garden, who was it who must have seen—who must at least have known? Do you hate Neil so much as to put your own daugh­ter—”

Lady Gal­lo­way screamed. Every­one else sat tingling at the touch of those satanic tra­gedies that have been between lov­ers be­fore now. They saw the proud, white face of the Scotch ar­is­to­crat and her lover, the Irish ad­ven­turer, like old por­traits in a dark house. The long si­lence was full of form­less his­tor­ical memor­ies of murdered hus­bands and pois­on­ous para­mours.

In the centre of this mor­bid si­lence an in­no­cent voice said: “Was it a very long ci­gar?”

The change of thought was so sharp that they had to look round to see who had spoken.

“I mean,” said little Father Brown, from the corner of the room, “I mean that ci­gar Mr. Brayne is fin­ish­ing. It seems nearly as long as a walk­ing-stick.”

Des­pite the ir­rel­ev­ance there was as­sent as well as ir­rit­a­tion in Valentin’s face as he lif­ted his head.

“Quite right,” he re­marked sharply. “Ivan, go and see about Mr. Brayne again, and bring him here at once.”

The in­stant the factotum had closed the door, Valentin ad­dressed the girl with an en­tirely new earn­est­ness.

“Lady Mar­garet,” he said, “we all feel, I am sure, both grat­it­ude and ad­mir­a­tion for your act in rising above your lower dig­nity and ex­plain­ing the Com­mand­ant’s con­duct. But there is a hi­atus still. Lord Gal­lo­way, I un­der­stand, met you passing from the study to the draw­ing-room, and it was only some minutes af­ter­wards that he found the garden and the Com­mand­ant still walk­ing there.”

“You have to re­mem­ber,” replied Mar­garet, with a faint irony in her voice, “that I had just re­fused him, so we should scarcely have come back arm in arm. He is a gen­tle­man, any­how; and he loitered be­hind—and so got charged with murder.”

“In those few mo­ments,” said Valentin gravely, “he might really—”

The knock came again, and Ivan put in his scarred face.

“Beg par­don, sir,” he said, “but Mr. Brayne has left the house.”

“Left!” cried Valentin, and rose for the first time to his feet.

“Gone. Scooted. Eva­por­ated,” replied Ivan in hu­mor­ous French. “His hat and coat are gone, too, and I’ll tell you some­thing to cap it all. I ran out­side the house to find any traces of him, and I found one, and a big trace, too.”

“What do you mean?” asked Valentin.

“I’ll show you,” said his ser­vant, and re­appeared with a flash­ing na­ked cav­alry sabre, streaked with blood about the point and edge. Every­one in the room eyed it as if it were a thun­der­bolt; but the ex­per­i­enced Ivan went on quite quietly:

“I found this,” he said, “flung among the bushes fifty yards up the road to Paris. In other words, I found it just where your re­spect­able Mr. Brayne threw it when he ran away.”

There was again a si­lence, but of a new sort. Valentin took the sabre, ex­amined it, re­flec­ted with un­af­fected con­cen­tra­tion of thought, and then turned a re­spect­ful face to O’Brien. “Com­mand­ant,” he said, “we trust you will al­ways pro­duce this weapon if it is wanted for po­lice ex­am­in­a­tion. Mean­while,” he ad­ded, slap­ping the steel back in the ringing scab­bard, “let me re­turn you your sword.”

At the mil­it­ary sym­bol­ism of the ac­tion the audi­ence could hardly re­frain from ap­plause.

For Neil O’Brien, in­deed, that ges­ture was the turn­ing-point of ex­ist­ence. By the time he was wan­der­ing in the mys­ter­i­ous garden again in the col­ours of the morn­ing the tra­gic fu­til­ity of his or­din­ary mien had fallen from him; he was a man with many reas­ons for hap­pi­ness. Lord Gal­lo­way was a gen­tle­man, and had offered him an apo­logy. Lady Mar­garet was some­thing bet­ter than a lady, a wo­man at least, and had per­haps given him some­thing bet­ter than an apo­logy, as they drif­ted among the old flower­beds be­fore break­fast. The whole com­pany was more light­hearted and hu­mane, for though the riddle of the death re­mained, the load of sus­pi­cion was lif­ted off them all, and sent fly­ing off to Paris with the strange mil­lion­aire—a man they hardly knew. The devil was cast out of the house—he had cast him­self out.

Still, the riddle re­mained; and when O’Brien threw him­self on a garden seat be­side Dr. Si­mon, that keenly sci­entific per­son at once re­sumed it. He did not get much talk out of O’Brien, whose thoughts were on pleas­anter things.

“I can’t say it in­terests me much,” said the Irish­man frankly, “es­pe­cially as it seems pretty plain now. Ap­par­ently Brayne hated this stranger for some reason; lured him into the garden, and killed him with my sword. Then he fled to the city, toss­ing the sword away as he went. By the way, Ivan tells me the dead man had a Yan­kee dol­lar in his pocket. So he was a coun­try­man of Brayne’s, and that seems to clinch it. I don’t see any dif­fi­culties about the busi­ness.”

“There are five co­lossal dif­fi­culties,” said the doc­tor quietly; “like high walls within walls. Don’t mis­take me. I don’t doubt that Brayne did it; his flight, I fancy, proves that. But as to how he did it. First dif­fi­culty: Why should a man kill an­other man with a great hulk­ing sabre, when he can al­most kill him with a pocket knife and put it back in his pocket? Se­cond dif­fi­culty: Why was there no noise or out­cry? Does a man com­monly see an­other come up wav­ing a scim­itar and of­fer no re­marks? Third dif­fi­culty: A ser­vant watched the front door all the even­ing; and a rat can­not get into Valentin’s garden any­where. How did the dead man get into the garden? Fourth dif­fi­culty: Given the same con­di­tions, how did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“And the fifth,” said Neil, with eyes fixed on the Eng­lish priest who was com­ing slowly up the path.

“Is a trifle, I sup­pose,” said the doc­tor, “but I think an odd one. When I first saw how the head had been slashed, I sup­posed the as­sas­sin had struck more than once. But on ex­am­in­a­tion I found many cuts across the trun­cated sec­tion; in other words, they were struck after the head was off. Did Brayne hate his foe so fiendishly that he stood sab­ring his body in the moon­light?”

“Hor­rible!” said O’Brien, and shuddered.

The little priest, Brown, had ar­rived while they were talk­ing, and had waited, with char­ac­ter­istic shy­ness, till they had fin­ished. Then he said awk­wardly:

“I say, I’m sorry to in­ter­rupt. But I was sent to tell you the news!”

“News?” re­peated Si­mon, and stared at him rather pain­fully through his glasses.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” said Father Brown mildly. “There’s been an­other murder, you know.”

Both men on the seat sprang up, leav­ing it rock­ing.

“And, what’s stranger still,” con­tin­ued the priest, with his dull eye on the rhodo­den­drons, “it’s the same dis­gust­ing sort; it’s an­other be­head­ing. They found the second head ac­tu­ally bleed­ing into the river, a few yards along Brayne’s road to Paris; so they sup­pose that he—”

“Great Heaven!” cried O’Brien. “Is Brayne a mono­ma­niac?”

“There are Amer­ican ven­det­tas,” said the priest im­pass­ively. Then he ad­ded: “They want you to come to the lib­rary and see it.”

Com­mand­ant O’Brien fol­lowed the oth­ers to­wards the in­quest, feel­ing de­cidedly sick. As a sol­dier, he loathed all this se­cret­ive carnage; where were these ex­tra­vag­ant am­pu­ta­tions go­ing to stop? First one head was hacked off, and then an­other; in this case (he told him­self bit­terly) it was not true that two heads were bet­ter than one. As he crossed the study he al­most staggered at a shock­ing co­in­cid­ence. Upon Valentin’s table lay the col­oured pic­ture of yet a third bleed­ing head; and it was the head of Valentin him­self. A second glance showed him it was only a Na­tion­al­ist pa­per, called The Guil­lot­ine, which every week showed one of its polit­ical op­pon­ents with rolling eyes and writh­ing fea­tures just after ex­e­cu­tion; for Valentin was an anti-cler­ical of some note. But O’Brien was an Irish­man, with a kind of chastity even in his sins; and his gorge rose against that great bru­tal­ity of the in­tel­lect which be­longs only to France. He felt Paris as a whole, from the grot­esques on the Gothic churches to the gross ca­ri­ca­tures in the news­pa­pers. He re­membered the gi­gantic jests of the Re­volu­tion. He saw the whole city as one ugly en­ergy, from the san­guin­ary sketch ly­ing on Valentin’s table up to where, above a moun­tain and forest of gar­goyles, the great devil grins on Notre Dame.

The lib­rary was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from un­der low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morn­ing. Valentin and his ser­vant Ivan were wait­ing for them at the up­per end of a long, slightly-slop­ing desk, on which lay the mor­tal re­mains, look­ing enorm­ous in the twi­light. The big black fig­ure and yel­low face of the man found in the garden con­fron­ted them es­sen­tially un­changed. The second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds that morn­ing, lay stream­ing and drip­ping be­side it; Valentin’s men were still seek­ing to re­cover the rest of this second corpse, which was sup­posed to be afloat. Father Brown, who did not seem to share O’Brien’s sens­ib­il­it­ies in the least, went up to the second head and ex­amined it with his blink­ing care. It was little more than a mop of wet white hair, fringed with sil­ver fire in the red and level morn­ing light; the face, which seemed of an ugly, em­purpled and per­haps crim­inal type, had been much battered against trees or stones as it tossed in the wa­ter.

“Good morn­ing, Com­mand­ant O’Brien,” said Valentin, with quiet cor­di­al­ity. “You have heard of Brayne’s last ex­per­i­ment in butchery, I sup­pose?”

Father Brown was still bend­ing over the head with white hair, and he said, without look­ing up:

“I sup­pose it is quite cer­tain that Brayne cut off this head, too.”

“Well, it seems com­mon sense,” said Valentin, with his hands in his pock­ets. “Killed in the same way as the other. Found within a few yards of the other. And sliced by the same weapon which we know he car­ried away.”

“Yes, yes; I know,” replied Father Brown sub­missively. “Yet, you know, I doubt whether Brayne could have cut off this head.”

“Why not?” in­quired Dr. Si­mon, with a ra­tional stare.

“Well, doc­tor,” said the priest, look­ing up blink­ing, “can a man cut off his own head? I don’t know.”

O’Brien felt an in­sane uni­verse crash­ing about his ears; but the doc­tor sprang for­ward with im­petu­ous prac­tic­al­ity and pushed back the wet white hair.

“Oh, there’s no doubt it’s Brayne,” said the priest quietly. “He had ex­actly that chip in the left ear.”

The de­tect­ive, who had been re­gard­ing the priest with steady and glit­ter­ing eyes, opened his clenched mouth and said sharply: “You seem to know a lot about him, Father Brown.”

“I do,” said the little man simply. “I’ve been about with him for some weeks. He was think­ing of join­ing our church.”

The star of the fan­atic sprang into Valentin’s eyes; he strode to­wards the priest with clenched hands. “And, per­haps,” he cried, with a blast­ing sneer, “per­haps he was also think­ing of leav­ing all his money to your church.”

“Per­haps he was,” said Brown stolidly; “it is pos­sible.”

“In that case,” cried Valentin, with a dread­ful smile, “you may in­deed know a great deal about him. About his life and about his—”

Com­mand­ant O’Brien laid a hand on Valentin’s arm. “Drop that slan­der­ous rub­bish, Valentin,” he said, “or there may be more swords yet.”

But Valentin (un­der the steady, humble gaze of the priest) had already re­covered him­self. “Well,” he said shortly, “people’s private opin­ions can wait. You gen­tle­men are still bound by your prom­ise to stay; you must en­force it on yourselves—and on each other. Ivan here will tell you any­thing more you want to know; I must get to busi­ness and write to the au­thor­it­ies. We can’t keep this quiet any longer. I shall be writ­ing in my study if there is any more news.”

“Is there any more news, Ivan?” asked Dr. Si­mon, as the chief of po­lice strode out of the room.

“Only one more thing, I think, sir,” said Ivan, wrink­ling up his grey old face, “but that’s im­port­ant, too, in its way. There’s that old buf­fer you found on the lawn,” and he poin­ted without pre­tence of rev­er­ence at the big black body with the yel­low head. “We’ve found out who he is, any­how.”

“Indeed!” cried the as­ton­ished doc­tor, “and who is he?”

“His name was Arnold Becker,” said the un­der-de­tect­ive, “though he went by many ali­ases. He was a wan­der­ing sort of scamp, and is known to have been in Amer­ica; so that was where Brayne got his knife into him. We didn’t have much to do with him ourselves, for he worked mostly in Ger­many. We’ve com­mu­nic­ated, of course, with the Ger­man po­lice. But, oddly enough, there was a twin brother of his, named Louis Becker, whom we had a great deal to do with. In fact, we found it ne­ces­sary to guil­lot­ine him only yes­ter­day. Well, it’s a rum thing, gen­tle­men, but when I saw that fel­low flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my life. If I hadn’t seen Louis Becker guil­lotined with my own eyes, I’d have sworn it was Louis Becker ly­ing there in the grass. Then, of course, I re­membered his twin brother in Ger­many, and fol­low­ing up the clue—”

The ex­plan­at­ory Ivan stopped, for the ex­cel­lent reason that nobody was listen­ing to him. The Com­mand­ant and the doc­tor were both star­ing at Father Brown, who had sprung stiffly to his feet, and was hold­ing his temples tight like a man in sud­den and vi­ol­ent pain.

“Stop, stop, stop!” he cried; “stop talk­ing a minute, for I see half. Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all? Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at think­ing. I could para­phrase any page in Aqui­nas once. Will my head split—or will it see? I see half—I only see half.”

He bur­ied his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of ri­gid tor­ture of thought or prayer, while the other three could only go on star­ing at this last prodigy of their wild twelve hours.

When Father Brown’s hands fell they showed a face quite fresh and ser­i­ous, like a child’s. He heaved a huge sigh, and said: “Let us get this said and done with as quickly as pos­sible. Look here, this will be the quick­est way to con­vince you all of the truth.” He turned to the doc­tor. “Dr. Si­mon,” he said, “you have a strong head­piece, and I heard you this morn­ing ask­ing the five hard­est ques­tions about this busi­ness. Well, if you will ask them again, I will an­swer them.”

Si­mon’s pince-nez dropped from his nose in his doubt and won­der, but he answered at once. “Well, the first ques­tion, you know, is why a man should kill an­other with a clumsy sabre at all when a man can kill with a bodkin?”

“A man can­not be­head with a bodkin,” said Brown calmly, “and for this murder be­head­ing was ab­so­lutely ne­ces­sary.”

“Why?” asked O’Brien, with in­terest.

“And the next ques­tion?” asked Father Brown.

“Well, why didn’t the man cry out or any­thing?” asked the doc­tor; “sabres in gar­dens are cer­tainly un­usual.”

“Twigs,” said the priest gloomily, and turned to the win­dow which looked on the scene of death. “No one saw the point of the twigs. Why should they lie on that lawn (look at it) so far from any tree? They were not snapped off; they were chopped off. The mur­derer oc­cu­pied his en­emy with some tricks with the sabre, show­ing how he could cut a branch in midair, or what­not. Then, while his en­emy bent down to see the res­ult, a si­lent slash, and the head fell.”

“Well,” said the doc­tor slowly, “that seems plaus­ible enough. But my next two ques­tions will stump any­one.”

The priest still stood look­ing crit­ic­ally out of the win­dow and waited.

“You know how all the garden was sealed up like an air­tight cham­ber,” went on the doc­tor. “Well, how did the strange man get into the garden?”

Without turn­ing round, the little priest answered: “There never was any strange man in the garden.”

There was a si­lence, and then a sud­den cackle of al­most child­ish laughter re­lieved the strain. The ab­surdity of Brown’s re­mark moved Ivan to open taunts.

“Oh!” he cried; “then we didn’t lug a great fat corpse on to a sofa last night? He hadn’t got into the garden, I sup­pose?”

“Got into the garden?” re­peated Brown re­flect­ively. “No, not en­tirely.”

“Hang it all,” cried Si­mon, “a man gets into a garden, or he doesn’t.”

“Not ne­ces­sar­ily,” said the priest, with a faint smile. “What is the next ques­tion, doc­tor?”

“I fancy you’re ill,” ex­claimed Dr. Si­mon sharply; “but I’ll ask the next ques­tion if you like. How did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“He didn’t get out of the garden,” said the priest, still look­ing out of the win­dow.

“Didn’t get out of the garden?” ex­ploded Si­mon.

“Not com­pletely,” said Father Brown.

Si­mon shook his fists in a frenzy of French lo­gic. “A man gets out of a garden, or he doesn’t,” he cried.

“Not al­ways,” said Father Brown.

Dr. Si­mon sprang to his feet im­pa­tiently. “I have no time to spare on such sense­less talk,” he cried an­grily. “If you can’t un­der­stand a man be­ing on one side of a wall or the other, I won’t trouble you fur­ther.”

“Doc­tor,” said the cleric very gently, “we have al­ways got on very pleas­antly to­gether. If only for the sake of old friend­ship, stop and tell me your fifth ques­tion.”

The im­pa­tient Si­mon sank into a chair by the door and said briefly: “The head and shoulders were cut about in a queer way. It seemed to be done after death.”

“Yes,” said the mo­tion­less priest, “it was done so as to make you as­sume ex­actly the one simple false­hood that you did as­sume. It was done to make you take for gran­ted that the head be­longed to the body.”

The bor­der­land of the brain, where all the mon­sters are made, moved hor­ribly in the Gaelic O’Brien. He felt the chaotic pres­ence of all the horse­men and fish-wo­men that man’s un­nat­ural fancy has be­got­ten. A voice older than his first fath­ers seemed say­ing in his ear: “Keep out of the mon­strous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid the evil garden where died the man with two heads.” Yet, while these shame­ful sym­bolic shapes passed across the an­cient mir­ror of his Irish soul, his French­i­fied in­tel­lect was quite alert, and was watch­ing the odd priest as closely and in­cred­u­lously as all the rest.

Father Brown had turned round at last, and stood against the win­dow, with his face in dense shadow; but even in that shadow they could see it was pale as ashes. Never­the­less, he spoke quite sens­ibly, as if there were no Gaelic souls on earth.

“Gen­tle­men,” he said, “you did not find the strange body of Becker in the garden. You did not find any strange body in the garden. In face of Dr. Si­mon’s ra­tion­al­ism, I still af­firm that Becker was only partly present. Look here!” (point­ing to the black bulk of the mys­ter­i­ous corpse) “you never saw that man in your lives. Did you ever see this man?”

He rap­idly rolled away the bald, yel­low head of the un­known, and put in its place the white-maned head be­side it. And there, com­plete, uni­fied, un­mis­tak­able, lay Julius K. Brayne.

“The mur­derer,” went on Brown quietly, “hacked off his en­emy’s head and flung the sword far over the wall. But he was too clever to fling the sword only. He flung the head over the wall also. Then he had only to clap on an­other head to the corpse, and (as he in­sisted on a private in­quest) you all ima­gined a totally new man.”

“Clap on an­other head!” said O’Brien star­ing. “What other head? Heads don’t grow on garden bushes, do they?”

“No,” said Father Brown husk­ily, and look­ing at his boots; “there is only one place where they grow. They grow in the bas­ket of the guil­lot­ine, be­side which the chief of po­lice, Aristide Valentin, was stand­ing not an hour be­fore the murder. Oh, my friends, hear me a minute more be­fore you tear me in pieces. Valentin is an hon­est man, if be­ing mad for an ar­gu­able cause is hon­esty. But did you never see in that cold, grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do any­thing, any­thing, to break what he calls the su­per­sti­tion of the Cross. He has fought for it and starved for it, and now he has murdered for it. Brayne’s crazy mil­lions had hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did little to al­ter the bal­ance of things. But Valentin heard a whis­per that Brayne, like so many scat­ter­brained scep­tics, was drift­ing to us; and that was quite a dif­fer­ent thing. Brayne would pour sup­plies into the im­pov­er­ished and pug­na­cious Church of France; he would sup­port six Na­tion­al­ist news­pa­pers like The Guil­lot­ine. The battle was already bal­anced on a point, and the fan­atic took flame at the risk. He re­solved to des­troy the mil­lion­aire, and he did it as one would ex­pect the greatest of de­tect­ives to com­mit his only crime. He ab­strac­ted the severed head of Becker on some crim­in­o­lo­gical ex­cuse, and took it home in his of­fi­cial box. He had that last ar­gu­ment with Brayne, that Lord Gal­lo­way did not hear the end of; that fail­ing, he led him out into the sealed garden, talked about swords­man­ship, used twigs and a sabre for il­lus­tra­tion, and—”

Ivan of the Scar sprang up. “You lun­atic,” he yelled; “you’ll go to my mas­ter now, if I take you by—”

“Why, I was go­ing there,” said Brown heav­ily; “I must ask him to con­fess, and all that.”

Driv­ing the un­happy Brown be­fore them like a host­age or sac­ri­fice, they rushed to­gether into the sud­den still­ness of Valentin’s study.

The great de­tect­ive sat at his desk ap­par­ently too oc­cu­pied to hear their tur­bu­lent en­trance. They paused a mo­ment, and then some­thing in the look of that up­right and el­eg­ant back made the doc­tor run for­ward sud­denly. A touch and a glance showed him that there was a small box of pills at Valentin’s el­bow, and that Valentin was dead in his chair; and on the blind face of the sui­cide was more than the pride of Cato.

The Queer Feet

If you meet a mem­ber of that se­lect club, “The Twelve True Fish­er­men,” en­ter­ing the Vernon Hotel for the an­nual club din­ner, you will ob­serve, as he takes off his over­coat, that his even­ing coat is green and not black. If (sup­pos­ing that you have the star-de­fy­ing au­da­city to ad­dress such a be­ing) you ask him why, he will prob­ably an­swer that he does it to avoid be­ing mis­taken for a waiter. You will then re­tire crushed. But you will leave be­hind you a mys­tery as yet un­solved and a tale worth telling.

If (to pur­sue the same vein of im­prob­able con­jec­ture) you were to meet a mild, hard­work­ing little priest, named Father Brown, and were to ask him what he thought was the most sin­gu­lar luck of his life, he would prob­ably reply that upon the whole his best stroke was at the Vernon Hotel, where he had aver­ted a crime and, per­haps, saved a soul, merely by listen­ing to a few foot­steps in a pas­sage. He is per­haps a little proud of this wild and won­der­ful guess of his, and it is pos­sible that he might refer to it. But since it is im­meas­ur­ably un­likely that you will ever rise high enough in the so­cial world to find “The Twelve True Fish­er­men,” or that you will ever sink low enough among slums and crim­in­als to find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at all un­less you hear it from me.

The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fish­er­men held their an­nual din­ners was an in­sti­tu­tion such as can only ex­ist in an ol­ig­arch­ical so­ci­ety which has al­most gone mad on good man­ners. It was that topsy-turvy product—an “ex­clus­ive” com­mer­cial en­ter­prise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by at­tract­ing people, but ac­tu­ally by turn­ing people away. In the heart of a plu­to­cracy trades­men be­come cun­ning enough to be more fas­ti­di­ous than their cus­tom­ers. They pos­it­ively cre­ate dif­fi­culties so that their wealthy and weary cli­ents may spend money and dip­lomacy in over­com­ing them. If there were a fash­ion­able hotel in Lon­don which no man could enter who was un­der six foot, so­ci­ety would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an ex­pens­ive res­taur­ant which by a mere caprice of its pro­pri­etor was only open on Thursday af­ter­noon, it would be crowded on Thursday af­ter­noon. The Vernon Hotel stood, as if by ac­ci­dent, in the corner of a square in Bel­gravia. It was a small hotel; and a very in­con­veni­ent one. But its very in­con­veni­ences were con­sidered as walls pro­tect­ing a par­tic­u­lar class. One in­con­veni­ence, in par­tic­u­lar, was held to be of vi­tal im­port­ance: the fact that prac­tic­ally only twenty-four people could dine in the place at once. The only big din­ner table was the cel­eb­rated ter­race table, which stood open to the air on a sort of ver­anda over­look­ing one of the most ex­quis­ite old gar­dens in Lon­don. Thus it happened that even the twenty-four seats at this table could only be en­joyed in warm weather; and this mak­ing the en­joy­ment yet more dif­fi­cult made it yet more de­sired. The ex­ist­ing owner of the hotel was a Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a mil­lion out of it, by mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to get into. Of course he com­bined with this lim­it­a­tion in the scope of his en­ter­prise the most care­ful pol­ish in its per­form­ance. The wines and cook­ing were really as good as any in Europe, and the de­mean­our of the at­tend­ants ex­actly mirrored the fixed mood of the Eng­lish up­per class. The pro­pri­etor knew all his waiters like the fin­gers on his hand; there were only fif­teen of them all told. It was much easier to be­come a Mem­ber of Parlia­ment than to be­come a waiter in that hotel. Each waiter was trained in ter­rible si­lence and smooth­ness, as if he were a gen­tle­man’s ser­vant. And, in­deed, there was gen­er­ally at least one waiter to every gen­tle­man who dined.

The club of The Twelve True Fish­er­men would not have con­sen­ted to dine any­where but in such a place, for it in­sisted on a lux­uri­ous pri­vacy; and would have been quite up­set by the mere thought that any other club was even din­ing in the same build­ing. On the oc­ca­sion of their an­nual din­ner the Fish­er­men were in the habit of ex­pos­ing all their treas­ures, as if they were in a private house, es­pe­cially the cel­eb­rated set of fish knives and forks which were, as it were, the in­signia of the so­ci­ety, each be­ing ex­quis­itely wrought in sil­ver in the form of a fish, and each loaded at the hilt with one large pearl. These were al­ways laid out for the fish course, and the fish course was al­ways the most mag­ni­fi­cent in that mag­ni­fi­cent re­past. The so­ci­ety had a vast num­ber of ce­re­mon­ies and ob­serv­ances, but it had no his­tory and no ob­ject; that was where it was so very ar­is­to­cratic. You did not have to be any­thing in or­der to be one of the Twelve Fish­ers; un­less you were already a cer­tain sort of per­son, you never even heard of them. It had been in ex­ist­ence twelve years. Its pres­id­ent was Mr. Aud­ley. Its vice-pres­id­ent was the Duke of Chester.

If I have in any de­gree con­veyed the at­mo­sphere of this ap­palling hotel, the reader may feel a nat­ural won­der as to how I came to know any­thing about it, and may even spec­u­late as to how so or­din­ary a per­son as my friend Father Brown came to find him­self in that golden gal­ley. As far as that is con­cerned, my story is simple, or even vul­gar. There is in the world a very aged ri­oter and dem­agogue who breaks into the most re­fined re­treats with the dread­ful in­form­a­tion that all men are broth­ers, and wherever this lev­el­ler went on his pale horse it was Father Brown’s trade to fol­low. One of the waiters, an Italian, had been struck down with a para­lytic stroke that af­ter­noon; and his Jew­ish em­ployer, mar­vel­ling mildly at such su­per­sti­tions, had con­sen­ted to send for the nearest Pop­ish priest. With what the waiter con­fessed to Father Brown we are not con­cerned, for the ex­cel­lent reason that that cleric kept it to him­self; but ap­par­ently it in­volved him in writ­ing out a note or state­ment for the con­vey­ing of some mes­sage or the right­ing of some wrong. Father Brown, there­fore, with a meek im­pudence which he would have shown equally in Buck­ing­ham Palace, asked to be provided with a room and writ­ing ma­ter­i­als. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind man, and had also that bad im­it­a­tion of kind­ness, the dis­like of any dif­fi­culty or scene. At the same time the pres­ence of one un­usual stranger in his hotel that even­ing was like a speck of dirt on some­thing just cleaned. There was never any bor­der­land or ante­room in the Vernon Hotel, no people wait­ing in the hall, no cus­tom­ers com­ing in on chance. There were fif­teen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as start­ling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find a new brother tak­ing break­fast or tea in one’s own fam­ily. Moreover, the priest’s ap­pear­ance was second-rate and his clothes muddy; a mere glimpse of him afar off might pre­cip­it­ate a crisis in the club. Mr. Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not ob­lit­er­ate, the dis­grace. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass down a short pas­sage dec­or­ated with a few dingy but im­port­ant pic­tures, and come to the main ves­ti­bule and lounge which opens on your right into pas­sages lead­ing to the pub­lic rooms, and on your left to a sim­ilar pas­sage point­ing to the kit­chens and of­fices of the hotel. Im­me­di­ately on your left hand is the corner of a glass of­fice, which abuts upon the lounge—a house within a house, so to speak, like the old hotel bar which prob­ably once oc­cu­pied its place.

In this of­fice sat the rep­res­ent­at­ive of the pro­pri­etor (nobody in this place ever ap­peared in per­son if he could help it), and just bey­ond the of­fice, on the way to the ser­vants’ quar­ters, was the gen­tle­men’s cloak room, the last bound­ary of the gen­tle­men’s do­main. But between the of­fice and the cloak room was a small private room without other out­let, some­times used by the pro­pri­etor for del­ic­ate and im­port­ant mat­ters, such as lend­ing a duke a thou­sand pounds or de­clin­ing to lend him six­pence. It is a mark of the mag­ni­fi­cent tol­er­ance of Mr. Lever that he per­mit­ted this holy place to be for about half an hour pro­faned by a mere priest, scrib­bling away on a piece of pa­per. The story which Father Brown was writ­ing down was very likely a much bet­ter story than this one, only it will never be known. I can merely state that it was very nearly as long, and that the last two or three para­graphs of it were the least ex­cit­ing and ab­sorb­ing.

For it was by the time that he had reached these that the priest began a little to al­low his thoughts to wander and his an­imal senses, which were com­monly keen, to awaken. The time of dark­ness and din­ner was draw­ing on; his own for­got­ten little room was without a light, and per­haps the gath­er­ing gloom, as oc­ca­sion­ally hap­pens, sharpened the sense of sound. As Father Brown wrote the last and least es­sen­tial part of his doc­u­ment, he caught him­self writ­ing to the rhythm of a re­cur­rent noise out­side, just as one some­times thinks to the tune of a rail­way train. When he be­came con­scious of the thing he found what it was: only the or­din­ary pat­ter of feet passing the door, which in an hotel was no very un­likely mat­ter. Never­the­less, he stared at the darkened ceil­ing, and listened to the sound. After he had listened for a few seconds dream­ily, he got to his feet and listened in­tently, with his head a little on one side. Then he sat down again and bur­ied his brow in his hands, now not merely listen­ing, but listen­ing and think­ing also.

The foot­steps out­side at any given mo­ment were such as one might hear in any hotel; and yet, taken as a whole, there was some­thing very strange about them. There were no other foot­steps. It was al­ways a very si­lent house, for the few fa­mil­iar guests went at once to their own apart­ments, and the well-trained waiters were told to be al­most in­vis­ible un­til they were wanted. One could not con­ceive any place where there was less reason to ap­pre­hend any­thing ir­reg­u­lar. But these foot­steps were so odd that one could not de­cide to call them reg­u­lar or ir­reg­u­lar. Father Brown fol­lowed them with his fin­ger on the edge of the table, like a man try­ing to learn a tune on the pi­ano.

First, there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a light man might make in win­ning a walk­ing race. At a cer­tain point they stopped and changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp, num­ber­ing not a quarter of the steps, but oc­cupy­ing about the same time. The mo­ment the last echo­ing stamp had died away would come again the run or ripple of light, hur­ry­ing feet, and then again the thud of the heav­ier walk­ing. It was cer­tainly the same pair of boots, partly be­cause (as has been said) there were no other boots about, and partly be­cause they had a small but un­mis­tak­able creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that can­not help ask­ing ques­tions; and on this ap­par­ently trivial ques­tion his head al­most split. He had seen men run in or­der to jump. He had seen men run in or­der to slide. But why on earth should a man run in or­der to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in or­der to run? Yet no other de­scrip­tion would cover the antics of this in­vis­ible pair of legs. The man was either walk­ing very fast down one-half of the cor­ridor in or­der to walk very slow down the other half; or he was walk­ing very slow at one end to have the rap­ture of walk­ing fast at the other. Neither sug­ges­tion seemed to make much sense. His brain was grow­ing darker and darker, like his room.

Yet, as he began to think stead­ily, the very black­ness of his cell seemed to make his thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in a kind of vis­ion the fant­astic feet caper­ing along the cor­ridor in un­nat­ural or sym­bolic at­ti­tudes. Was it a hea­then re­li­gious dance? Or some en­tirely new kind of sci­entific ex­er­cise? Father Brown began to ask him­self with more ex­act­ness what the steps sug­ges­ted. Tak­ing the slow step first: it cer­tainly was not the step of the pro­pri­etor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit still. It could not be any ser­vant or mes­sen­ger wait­ing for dir­ec­tions. It did not sound like it. The poorer or­ders (in an ol­ig­archy) some­times lurch about when they are slightly drunk, but gen­er­ally, and es­pe­cially in such gor­geous scenes, they stand or sit in con­strained at­ti­tudes. No; that heavy yet springy step, with a kind of care­less em­phasis, not spe­cially noisy, yet not caring what noise it made, be­longed to only one of the an­im­als of this earth. It was a gen­tle­man of west­ern Europe, and prob­ably one who had never worked for his liv­ing.

Just as he came to this solid cer­tainty, the step changed to the quicker one, and ran past the door as fe­ver­ishly as a rat. The listener re­marked that though this step was much swifter it was also much more noise­less, al­most as if the man were walk­ing on tip­toe. Yet it was not as­so­ci­ated in his mind with secrecy, but with some­thing else—some­thing that he could not re­mem­ber. He was maddened by one of those half-memor­ies that make a man feel half-wit­ted. Surely he had heard that strange, swift walk­ing some­where. Sud­denly he sprang to his feet with a new idea in his head, and walked to the door. His room had no dir­ect out­let on the pas­sage, but let on one side into the glass of­fice, and on the other into the cloak room bey­ond. He tried the door into the of­fice, and found it locked. Then he looked at the win­dow, now a square pane full of purple cloud cleft by livid sun­set, and for an in­stant he smelt evil as a dog smells rats.

The ra­tional part of him (whether the wiser or not) re­gained its su­prem­acy. He re­membered that the pro­pri­etor had told him that he should lock the door, and would come later to re­lease him. He told him­self that twenty things he had not thought of might ex­plain the ec­cent­ric sounds out­side; he re­minded him­self that there was just enough light left to fin­ish his own proper work. Bringing his pa­per to the win­dow so as to catch the last stormy even­ing light, he res­ol­utely plunged once more into the al­most com­pleted re­cord. He had writ­ten for about twenty minutes, bend­ing closer and closer to his pa­per in the lessen­ing light; then sud­denly he sat up­right. He had heard the strange feet once more.

This time they had a third oddity. Pre­vi­ously the un­known man had walked, with lev­ity in­deed and light­ning quick­ness, but he had walked. This time he ran. One could hear the swift, soft, bound­ing steps com­ing along the cor­ridor, like the pads of a flee­ing and leap­ing pan­ther. Who­ever was com­ing was a very strong, act­ive man, in still yet tear­ing ex­cite­ment. Yet, when the sound had swept up to the of­fice like a sort of whis­per­ing whirl­wind, it sud­denly changed again to the old slow, swag­ger­ing stamp.

Father Brown flung down his pa­per, and, know­ing the of­fice door to be locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side. The at­tend­ant of this place was tem­por­ar­ily ab­sent, prob­ably be­cause the only guests were at din­ner and his of­fice was a sine­cure. After grop­ing through a grey forest of over­coats, he found that the dim cloak room opened on the lighted cor­ridor in the form of a sort of counter or half-door, like most of the coun­ters across which we have all handed um­brel­las and re­ceived tick­ets. There was a light im­me­di­ately above the semi­cir­cu­lar arch of this open­ing. It threw little il­lu­min­a­tion on Father Brown him­self, who seemed a mere dark out­line against the dim sun­set win­dow be­hind him. But it threw an al­most the­at­rical light on the man who stood out­side the cloak room in the cor­ridor.

He was an el­eg­ant man in very plain even­ing dress; tall, but with an air of not tak­ing up much room; one felt that he could have slid along like a shadow where many smal­ler men would have been ob­vi­ous and ob­struct­ive. His face, now flung back in the lamp­light, was swarthy and vi­va­cious, the face of a for­eigner. His fig­ure was good, his man­ners good hu­moured and con­fid­ent; a critic could only say that his black coat was a shade be­low his fig­ure and man­ners, and even bulged and bagged in an odd way. The mo­ment he caught sight of Brown’s black sil­hou­ette against the sun­set, he tossed down a scrap of pa­per with a num­ber and called out with ami­able au­thor­ity: “I want my hat and coat, please; I find I have to go away at once.”

Father Brown took the pa­per without a word, and obed­i­ently went to look for the coat; it was not the first menial work he had done in his life. He brought it and laid it on the counter; mean­while, the strange gen­tle­man who had been feel­ing in his waist­coat pocket, said laugh­ing: “I haven’t got any sil­ver; you can keep this.” And he threw down half a sov­er­eign, and caught up his coat.

Father Brown’s fig­ure re­mained quite dark and still; but in that in­stant he had lost his head. His head was al­ways most valu­able when he had lost it. In such mo­ments he put two and two to­gether and made four mil­lion. Often the Cath­olic Church (which is wed­ded to com­mon sense) did not ap­prove of it. Often he did not ap­prove of it him­self. But it was real in­spir­a­tion—im­port­ant at rare crises—when who­so­ever shall lose his head the same shall save it.

“I think, sir,” he said civilly, “that you have some sil­ver in your pocket.”

The tall gen­tle­man stared. “Hang it,” he cried, “if I choose to give you gold, why should you com­plain?”

“Be­cause sil­ver is some­times more valu­able than gold,” said the priest mildly; “that is, in large quant­it­ies.”

The stranger looked at him curi­ously. Then he looked still more curi­ously up the pas­sage to­wards the main en­trance. Then he looked back at Brown again, and then he looked very care­fully at the win­dow bey­ond Brown’s head, still col­oured with the af­ter­glow of the storm. Then he seemed to make up his mind. He put one hand on the counter, vaul­ted over as eas­ily as an ac­robat and towered above the priest, put­ting one tre­mend­ous hand upon his col­lar.

“Stand still,” he said, in a hack­ing whis­per. “I don’t want to threaten you, but—”

“I do want to threaten you,” said Father Brown, in a voice like a rolling drum, “I want to threaten you with the worm that di­eth not, and the fire that is not quenched.”

“You’re a rum sort of cloak­room clerk,” said the other.

“I am a priest, Mon­sieur Flam­beau,” said Brown, “and I am ready to hear your con­fes­sion.”

The other stood gasp­ing for a few mo­ments, and then staggered back into a chair.

The first two courses of the din­ner of The Twelve True Fish­er­men had pro­ceeded with pla­cid suc­cess. I do not pos­sess a copy of the menu; and if I did it would not con­vey any­thing to any­body. It was writ­ten in a sort of su­per-French em­ployed by cooks, but quite un­in­tel­li­gible to French­men. There was a tra­di­tion in the club that the hors d’oeuvres should be vari­ous and man­i­fold to the point of mad­ness. They were taken ser­i­ously be­cause they were avowedly use­less ex­tras, like the whole din­ner and the whole club. There was also a tra­di­tion that the soup course should be light and un­pre­tend­ing—a sort of simple and aus­tere vi­gil for the feast of fish that was to come. The talk was that strange, slight talk which gov­erns the Brit­ish Em­pire, which gov­erns it in secret, and yet would scarcely en­lighten an or­din­ary Eng­lish­man even if he could over­hear it. Cabinet min­is­ters on both sides were al­luded to by their Chris­tian names with a sort of bored be­nig­nity. The Rad­ical Chan­cel­lor of the Ex­chequer, whom the whole Tory party was sup­posed to be curs­ing for his ex­tor­tions, was praised for his minor po­etry, or his saddle in the hunt­ing field. The Tory leader, whom all Lib­er­als were sup­posed to hate as a tyr­ant, was dis­cussed and, on the whole, praised—as a Lib­eral. It seemed some­how that politi­cians were very im­port­ant. And yet, any­thing seemed im­port­ant about them ex­cept their polit­ics. Mr. Aud­ley, the chair­man, was an ami­able, eld­erly man who still wore Glad­stone col­lars; he was a kind of sym­bol of all that phant­as­mal and yet fixed so­ci­ety. He had never done any­thing—not even any­thing wrong. He was not fast; he was not even par­tic­u­larly rich. He was simply in the thing; and there was an end of it. No party could ig­nore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he cer­tainly would have been put there. The Duke of Chester, the vice-pres­id­ent, was a young and rising politi­cian. That is to say, he was a pleas­ant youth, with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with mod­er­ate in­tel­li­gence and enorm­ous es­tates. In pub­lic his ap­pear­ances were al­ways suc­cess­ful and his prin­ciple was simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called bril­liant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for tri­fling, and was called able. In private, in a club of his own class, he was simply quite pleas­antly frank and silly, like a school­boy. Mr. Aud­ley, never hav­ing been in polit­ics, treated them a little more ser­i­ously. So­me­times he even em­bar­rassed the com­pany by phrases sug­gest­ing that there was some dif­fer­ence between a Lib­eral and a Con­ser­vat­ive. He him­self was a Con­ser­vat­ive, even in private life. He had a roll of grey hair over the back of his col­lar, like cer­tain old-fash­ioned states­men, and seen from be­hind he looked like the man the em­pire wants. Seen from the front he looked like a mild, self-in­dul­gent bach­elor, with rooms in the Al­bany—which he was.

As has been re­marked, there were twenty-four seats at the ter­race table, and only twelve mem­bers of the club. Thus they could oc­cupy the ter­race in the most lux­uri­ous style of all, be­ing ranged along the in­ner side of the table, with no one op­pos­ite, com­mand­ing an un­in­ter­rup­ted view of the garden, the col­ours of which were still vivid, though even­ing was clos­ing in some­what lur­idly for the time of year. The chair­man sat in the centre of the line, and the vice-pres­id­ent at the right-hand end of it. When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it was the cus­tom (for some un­known reason) for all the fif­teen waiters to stand lin­ing the wall like troops present­ing arms to the king, while the fat pro­pri­etor stood and bowed to the club with ra­di­ant sur­prise, as if he had never heard of them be­fore. But be­fore the first chink of knife and fork this army of re­tain­ers had van­ished, only the one or two re­quired to col­lect and dis­trib­ute the plates dart­ing about in deathly si­lence. Mr. Lever, the pro­pri­etor, of course had dis­ap­peared in con­vul­sions of cour­tesy long be­fore. It would be ex­ag­ger­at­ive, in­deed ir­rev­er­ent, to say that he ever pos­it­ively ap­peared again. But when the im­port­ant course, the fish course, was be­ing brought on, there was—how shall I put it?—a vivid shadow, a pro­jec­tion of his per­son­al­ity, which told that he was hov­er­ing near. The sac­red fish course con­sisted (to the eyes of the vul­gar) in a sort of mon­strous pud­ding, about the size and shape of a wed­ding cake, in which some con­sid­er­able num­ber of in­ter­est­ing fishes had fi­nally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The Twelve True Fish­er­men took up their cel­eb­rated fish knives and fish forks, and ap­proached it as gravely as if every inch of the pud­ding cost as much as the sil­ver fork it was eaten with. So it did, for all I know. This course was dealt with in eager and de­vour­ing si­lence; and it was only when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritual re­mark: “They can’t do this any­where but here.”

“Nowhere,” said Mr. Aud­ley, in a deep bass voice, turn­ing to the speaker and nod­ding his ven­er­able head a num­ber of times. “Nowhere, as­suredly, ex­cept here. It was rep­res­en­ted to me that at the Café Anglais—”

Here he was in­ter­rup­ted and even agit­ated for a mo­ment by the re­moval of his plate, but he re­cap­tured the valu­able thread of his thoughts. “It was rep­res­en­ted to me that the same could be done at the Café Anglais. Noth­ing like it, sir,” he said, shak­ing his head ruth­lessly, like a hanging judge. “Noth­ing like it.”

“Over­rated place,” said a cer­tain Co­l­onel Pound, speak­ing (by the look of him) for the first time for some months.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Duke of Chester, who was an op­tim­ist, “it’s jolly good for some things. You can’t beat it at—”

A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His stop­page was as si­lent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly gen­tle­men were so used to the ut­ter smooth­ness of the un­seen ma­chinery which sur­roun­ded and sup­por­ted their lives, that a waiter do­ing any­thing un­ex­pec­ted was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if the in­an­im­ate world dis­obeyed—if a chair ran away from us.

The waiter stood star­ing a few seconds, while there deepened on every face at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time. It is the com­bin­a­tion of mod­ern hu­man­it­ari­an­ism with the hor­rible mod­ern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor. A genu­ine his­toric ar­is­to­crat would have thrown things at the waiter, be­gin­ning with empty bottles, and very prob­ably end­ing with money. A genu­ine demo­crat would have asked him, with com­rade-like clear­ness of speech, what the devil he was do­ing. But these mod­ern plu­to­crats could not bear a poor man near to them, either as a slave or as a friend. That some­thing had gone wrong with the ser­vants was merely a dull, hot em­bar­rass­ment. They did not want to be bru­tal, and they dreaded the need to be be­ne­vol­ent. They wanted the thing, whatever it was, to be over. It was over. The waiter, after stand­ing for some seconds ri­gid, like a cata­leptic, turned round and ran madly out of the room.

When he re­appeared in the room, or rather in the door­way, it was in com­pany with an­other waiter, with whom he whispered and ges­tic­u­lated with south­ern fierce­ness. Then the first waiter went away, leav­ing the second waiter, and re­appeared with a third waiter. By the time a fourth waiter had joined this hur­ried synod, Mr. Aud­ley felt it ne­ces­sary to break the si­lence in the in­terests of Tact. He used a very loud cough, in­stead of a pres­id­en­tial ham­mer, and said: “Splen­did work young Moocher’s do­ing in Burmah. Now, no other na­tion in the world could have—”

A fifth waiter had sped to­wards him like an ar­row, and was whis­per­ing in his ear: “So sorry. Im­port­ant! Might the pro­pri­etor speak to you?”

The chair­man turned in dis­order, and with a dazed stare saw Mr. Lever com­ing to­wards them with his lum­ber­ing quick­ness. The gait of the good pro­pri­etor was in­deed his usual gait, but his face was by no means usual. Gen­er­ally it was a gen­ial cop­per-brown; now it was a sickly yel­low.

“You will par­don me, Mr. Aud­ley,” he said, with asth­matic breath­less­ness. “I have great ap­pre­hen­sions. Your fish-plates, they are cleared away with the knife and fork on them!”

“Well, I hope so,” said the chair­man, with some warmth.

“You see him?” panted the ex­cited hotel keeper; “you see the waiter who took them away? You know him?”

“Know the waiter?” answered Mr. Aud­ley in­dig­nantly. “Cer­tainly not!”

Mr. Lever opened his hands with a ges­ture of agony. “I never send him,” he said. “I know not when or why he come. I send my waiter to take away the plates, and he find them already away.”

Mr. Aud­ley still looked rather too be­wildered to be really the man the em­pire wants; none of the com­pany could say any­thing ex­cept the man of wood—Co­l­onel Pound—who seemed gal­van­ised into an un­nat­ural life. He rose ri­gidly from his chair, leav­ing all the rest sit­ting, screwed his eye­glass into his eye, and spoke in a rauc­ous un­der­tone as if he had half-for­got­ten how to speak. “Do you mean,” he said, “that some­body has stolen our sil­ver fish ser­vice?”

The pro­pri­etor re­peated the open­han­ded ges­ture with even greater help­less­ness and in a flash all the men at the table were on their feet.

“Are all your waiters here?” de­man­ded the col­onel, in his low, harsh ac­cent.

“Yes; they’re all here. I no­ticed it my­self,” cried the young duke, push­ing his boy­ish face into the in­most ring. “Al­ways count ’em as I come in; they look so queer stand­ing up against the wall.”

“But surely one can­not ex­actly re­mem­ber,” began Mr. Aud­ley, with heavy hes­it­a­tion.

“I re­mem­ber ex­actly, I tell you,” cried the duke ex­citedly. “There never have been more than fif­teen waiters at this place, and there were no more than fif­teen to­night, I’ll swear; no more and no less.”

The pro­pri­etor turned upon him, quak­ing in a kind of palsy of sur­prise. “You say—you say,” he stammered, “that you see all my fif­teen waiters?”

“As usual,” as­sen­ted the duke. “What is the mat­ter with that!”

“Noth­ing,” said Lever, with a deep­en­ing ac­cent, “only you did not. For one of zem is dead up­stairs.”

There was a shock­ing still­ness for an in­stant in that room. It may be (so su­per­nat­ural is the word death) that each of those idle men looked for a second at his soul, and saw it as a small dried pea. One of them—the duke, I think—even said with the idi­otic kind­ness of wealth: “Is there any­thing we can do?”

“He has had a priest,” said the Jew, not un­touched.

Then, as to the clang of doom, they awoke to their own po­s­i­tion. For a few weird seconds they had really felt as if the fif­teenth waiter might be the ghost of the dead man up­stairs. They had been dumb un­der that op­pres­sion, for ghosts were to them an em­bar­rass­ment, like beg­gars. But the re­mem­brance of the sil­ver broke the spell of the mi­ra­cu­lous; broke it ab­ruptly and with a bru­tal re­ac­tion. The col­onel flung over his chair and strode to the door. “If there was a fif­teenth man here, friends,” he said, “that fif­teenth fel­low was a thief. Down at once to the front and back doors and se­cure everything; then we’ll talk. The twenty-four pearls of the club are worth re­cov­er­ing.”

Mr. Aud­ley seemed at first to hes­it­ate about whether it was gen­tle­manly to be in such a hurry about any­thing; but, see­ing the duke dash down the stairs with youth­ful en­ergy, he fol­lowed with a more ma­ture mo­tion.

At the same in­stant a sixth waiter ran into the room, and de­clared that he had found the pile of fish plates on a side­board, with no trace of the sil­ver.

The crowd of diners and at­tend­ants that tumbled hel­ter-skel­ter down the pas­sages di­vided into two groups. Most of the Fish­er­men fol­lowed the pro­pri­etor to the front room to de­mand news of any exit. Co­l­onel Pound, with the chair­man, the vice-pres­id­ent, and one or two oth­ers dar­ted down the cor­ridor lead­ing to the ser­vants’ quar­ters, as the more likely line of es­cape. As they did so they passed the dim al­cove or cav­ern of the cloak room, and saw a short, black-coated fig­ure, pre­sum­ably an at­tend­ant, stand­ing a little way back in the shadow of it.

“Hallo, there!” called out the duke. “Have you seen any­one pass?”

The short fig­ure did not an­swer the ques­tion dir­ectly, but merely said: “Per­haps I have got what you are look­ing for, gen­tle­men.”

They paused, waver­ing and won­der­ing, while he quietly went to the back of the cloak room, and came back with both hands full of shin­ing sil­ver, which he laid out on the counter as calmly as a sales­man. It took the form of a dozen quaintly shaped forks and knives.

“You—you—” began the col­onel, quite thrown off his bal­ance at last. Then he peered into the dim little room and saw two things: first, that the short, black-clad man was dressed like a cler­gy­man; and, second, that the win­dow of the room be­hind him was burst, as if someone had passed vi­ol­ently through. “Valu­able things to de­posit in a cloak room, aren’t they?” re­marked the cler­gy­man, with cheer­ful com­pos­ure.

“Did—did you steal those things?” stammered Mr. Aud­ley, with star­ing eyes.

“If I did,” said the cleric pleas­antly, “at least I am bring­ing them back again.”

“But you didn’t,” said Co­l­onel Pound, still star­ing at the broken win­dow.

“To make a clean breast of it, I didn’t,” said the other, with some hu­mour. And he seated him­self quite gravely on a stool. “But you know who did,” said the, col­onel.

“I don’t know his real name,” said the priest pla­cidly, “but I know some­thing of his fight­ing weight, and a great deal about his spir­itual dif­fi­culties. I formed the phys­ical es­tim­ate when he was try­ing to throttle me, and the moral es­tim­ate when he re­pen­ted.”

“Oh, I say—re­pen­ted!” cried young Chester, with a sort of crow of laughter.

Father Brown got to his feet, put­ting his hands be­hind him. “Odd, isn’t it,” he said, “that a thief and a vag­a­bond should re­pent, when so many who are rich and se­cure re­main hard and frivol­ous, and without fruit for God or man? But there, if you will ex­cuse me, you tres­pass a little upon my province. If you doubt the pen­it­ence as a prac­tical fact, there are your knives and forks. You are The Twelve True Fish­ers, and there are all your sil­ver fish. But He has made me a fisher of men.”

“Did you catch this man?” asked the col­onel, frown­ing.

Father Brown looked him full in his frown­ing face. “Yes,” he said, “I caught him, with an un­seen hook and an in­vis­ible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

There was a long si­lence. All the other men present drif­ted away to carry the re­covered sil­ver to their com­rades, or to con­sult the pro­pri­etor about the queer con­di­tion of af­fairs. But the grim-faced col­onel still sat side­ways on the counter, swinging his long, lank legs and bit­ing his dark mous­tache.

At last he said quietly to the priest: “He must have been a clever fel­low, but I think I know a cleverer.”

“He was a clever fel­low,” answered the other, “but I am not quite sure of what other you mean.”

“I mean you,” said the col­onel, with a short laugh. “I don’t want to get the fel­low jailed; make your­self easy about that. But I’d give a good many sil­ver forks to know ex­actly how you fell into this af­fair, and how you got the stuff out of him. I reckon you’re the most up-to-date devil of the present com­pany.”

Father Brown seemed rather to like the sat­urnine cand­our of the sol­dier. “Well,” he said, smil­ing, “I mustn’t tell you any­thing of the man’s iden­tity, or his own story, of course; but there’s no par­tic­u­lar reason why I shouldn’t tell you of the mere out­side facts which I found out for my­self.”

He hopped over the bar­rier with un­ex­pec­ted activ­ity, and sat be­side Co­l­onel Pound, kick­ing his short legs like a little boy on a gate. He began to tell the story as eas­ily as if he were telling it to an old friend by a Christ­mas fire.

“You see, col­onel,” he said, “I was shut up in that small room there do­ing some writ­ing, when I heard a pair of feet in this pas­sage do­ing a dance that was as queer as the dance of death. First came quick, funny little steps, like a man walk­ing on tip­toe for a wager; then came slow, care­less, creak­ing steps, as of a big man walk­ing about with a ci­gar. But they were both made by the same feet, I swear, and they came in ro­ta­tion; first the run and then the walk, and then the run again. I wondered at first idly and then wildly why a man should act these two parts at once. One walk I knew; it was just like yours, col­onel. It was the walk of a well-fed gen­tle­man wait­ing for some­thing, who strolls about rather be­cause he is phys­ic­ally alert than be­cause he is men­tally im­pa­tient. I knew that I knew the other walk, too, but I could not re­mem­ber what it was. What wild creature had I met on my travels that tore along on tip­toe in that ex­traordin­ary style? Then I heard a clink of plates some­where; and the an­swer stood up as plain as St. Peter’s. It was the walk of a waiter—that walk with the body slanted for­ward, the eyes look­ing down, the ball of the toe spurn­ing away the ground, the coat tails and nap­kin fly­ing. Then I thought for a minute and a half more. And I be­lieve I saw the man­ner of the crime, as clearly as if I were go­ing to com­mit it.”

Co­l­onel Pound looked at him keenly, but the speaker’s mild grey eyes were fixed upon the ceil­ing with al­most empty wist­ful­ness.

“A crime,” he said slowly, “is like any other work of art. Don’t look sur­prised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from an in­fernal work­shop. But every work of art, di­vine or diabolic, has one in­dis­pens­able mark—I mean, that the centre of it is simple, how­ever much the ful­fil­ment may be com­plic­ated. Thus, in Ham­let, let us say, the grot­esque­ness of the gravedig­ger, the flowers of the mad girl, the fant­astic finery of Os­ric, the pal­lor of the ghost and the grin of the skull are all oddit­ies in a sort of tangled wreath round one plain tra­gic fig­ure of a man in black. Well, this also,” he said, get­ting slowly down from his seat with a smile, “this also is the plain tragedy of a man in black. Yes,” he went on, see­ing the col­onel look up in some won­der, “the whole of this tale turns on a black coat. In this, as in Ham­let, there are the ro­coco ex­cres­cences—yourselves, let us say. There is the dead waiter, who was there when he could not be there. There is the in­vis­ible hand that swept your table clear of sil­ver and melted into air. But every clever crime is foun­ded ul­ti­mately on some one quite simple fact—some fact that is not it­self mys­ter­i­ous. The mys­ti­fic­a­tion comes in cov­er­ing it up, in lead­ing men’s thoughts away from it. This large and subtle and (in the or­din­ary course) most prof­it­able crime, was built on the plain fact that a gen­tle­man’s even­ing dress is the same as a waiter’s. All the rest was act­ing, and thun­der­ing good act­ing, too.”

“Still,” said the col­onel, get­ting up and frown­ing at his boots, “I am not sure that I un­der­stand.”

“Co­l­onel,” said Father Brown, “I tell you that this archangel of im­pudence who stole your forks walked up and down this pas­sage twenty times in the blaze of all the lamps, in the glare of all the eyes. He did not go and hide in dim corners where sus­pi­cion might have searched for him. He kept con­stantly on the move in the lighted cor­ridors, and every­where that he went he seemed to be there by right. Don’t ask me what he was like; you have seen him your­self six or seven times to­night. You were wait­ing with all the other grand people in the re­cep­tion room at the end of the pas­sage there, with the ter­race just bey­ond. Whenever he came among you gen­tle­men, he came in the light­ning style of a waiter, with bent head, flap­ping nap­kin and fly­ing feet. He shot out on to the ter­race, did some­thing to the table cloth, and shot back again to­wards the of­fice and the waiters’ quar­ters. By the time he had come un­der the eye of the of­fice clerk and the waiters he had be­come an­other man in every inch of his body, in every in­stinct­ive ges­ture. He strolled among the ser­vants with the ab­sent­minded in­solence which they have all seen in their pat­rons. It was no new thing to them that a swell from the din­ner party should pace all parts of the house like an an­imal at the Zoo; they know that noth­ing marks the Smart Set more than a habit of walk­ing where one chooses. When he was mag­ni­fi­cently weary of walk­ing down that par­tic­u­lar pas­sage he would wheel round and pace back past the of­fice; in the shadow of the arch just bey­ond he was altered as by a blast of ma­gic, and went hur­ry­ing for­ward again among the Twelve Fish­er­men, an ob­sequious at­tend­ant. Why should the gen­tle­men look at a chance waiter? Why should the waiters sus­pect a first-rate walk­ing gen­tle­man? Once or twice he played the coolest tricks. In the pro­pri­etor’s private quar­ters he called out breez­ily for a sy­phon of soda wa­ter, say­ing he was thirsty. He said gen­i­ally that he would carry it him­self, and he did; he car­ried it quickly and cor­rectly through the thick of you, a waiter with an ob­vi­ous er­rand. Of course, it could not have been kept up long, but it only had to be kept up till the end of the fish course.

“His worst mo­ment was when the waiters stood in a row; but even then he con­trived to lean against the wall just round the corner in such a way that for that im­port­ant in­stant the waiters thought him a gen­tle­man, while the gen­tle­men thought him a waiter. The rest went like wink­ing. If any waiter caught him away from the table, that waiter caught a lan­guid ar­is­to­crat. He had only to time him­self two minutes be­fore the fish was cleared, be­come a swift ser­vant, and clear it him­self. He put the plates down on a side­board, stuffed the sil­ver in his breast pocket, giv­ing it a bulgy look, and ran like a hare (I heard him com­ing) till he came to the cloak room. There he had only to be a plu­to­crat again—a plu­to­crat called away sud­denly on busi­ness. He had only to give his ticket to the cloak­room at­tend­ant, and go out again el­eg­antly as he had come in. Only—only I happened to be the cloak­room at­tend­ant.”

“What did you do to him?” cried the col­onel, with un­usual in­tens­ity. “What did he tell you?”

“I beg your par­don,” said the priest im­mov­ably, “that is where the story ends.”

“And the in­ter­est­ing story be­gins,” muttered Pound. “I think I un­der­stand his pro­fes­sional trick. But I don’t seem to have got hold of yours.”

“I must be go­ing,” said Father Brown.

They walked to­gether along the pas­sage to the en­trance hall, where they saw the fresh, freckled face of the Duke of Chester, who was bound­ing buoy­antly along to­wards them.

“Come along, Pound,” he cried breath­lessly. “I’ve been look­ing for you every­where. The din­ner’s go­ing again in spank­ing style, and old Aud­ley has got to make a speech in hon­our of the forks be­ing saved. We want to start some new ce­re­mony, don’t you know, to com­mem­or­ate the oc­ca­sion. I say, you really got the goods back, what do you sug­gest?”

“Why,” said the col­onel, eye­ing him with a cer­tain sar­donic ap­proval, “I should sug­gest that hence­for­ward we wear green coats, in­stead of black. One never knows what mis­takes may arise when one looks so like a waiter.”

“Oh, hang it all!” said the young man, “a gen­tle­man never looks like a waiter.”

“Nor a waiter like a gen­tle­man, I sup­pose,” said Co­l­onel Pound, with the same lower­ing laughter on his face. “Rev­er­end sir, your friend must have been very smart to act the gen­tle­man.”

Father Brown buttoned up his com­mon­place over­coat to the neck, for the night was stormy, and took his com­mon­place um­brella from the stand.

“Yes,” he said; “it must be very hard work to be a gen­tle­man; but, do you know, I have some­times thought that it may be al­most as la­bor­i­ous to be a waiter.”

And say­ing “Good even­ing,” he pushed open the heavy doors of that palace of pleas­ures. The golden gates closed be­hind him, and he went at a brisk walk through the damp, dark streets in search of a penny om­ni­bus.

The Flying Stars

“The most beau­ti­ful crime I ever com­mit­ted,” Flam­beau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a sin­gu­lar co­in­cid­ence, my last. It was com­mit­ted at Christ­mas. As an artist I had al­ways at­temp­ted to provide crimes suit­able to the spe­cial sea­son or land­scapes in which I found my­self, choos­ing this or that ter­race or garden for a cata­strophe, as if for a statu­ary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long rooms pan­elled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather find them­selves un­ex­pec­tedly pen­ni­less among the lights and screens of the Café Riche. Thus, in Eng­land, if I wished to re­lieve a dean of his riches (which is not so easy as you might sup­pose), I wished to frame him, if I make my­self clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some cathed­ral town. Sim­il­arly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich and wicked peas­ant (which is al­most im­possible), it grat­i­fied me to get his in­dig­nant head re­lieved against a grey line of clipped pop­lars, and those sol­emn plains of Gaul over which broods the mighty spirit of Mil­let.

“Well, my last crime was a Christ­mas crime, a cheery, cosy, Eng­lish middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dick­ens. I did it in a good old middle-class house near Put­ney, a house with a cres­cent of car­riage drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name on the two outer gates, a house with a mon­key tree. Enough, you know the spe­cies. I really think my im­it­a­tion of Dick­ens’s style was dex­ter­ous and lit­er­ary. It seems al­most a pity I re­pen­ted the same even­ing.”

Flam­beau would then pro­ceed to tell the story from the in­side; and even from the in­side it was odd. Seen from the out­side it was per­fectly in­com­pre­hens­ible, and it is from the out­side that the stranger must study it. From this stand­point the drama may be said to have be­gun when the front doors of the house with the stable opened on the garden with the mon­key tree, and a young girl came out with bread to feed the birds on the af­ter­noon of Box­ing Day. She had a pretty face, with brave brown eyes; but her fig­ure was bey­ond con­jec­ture, for she was so wrapped up in brown furs that it was hard to say which was hair and which was fur. But for the at­tract­ive face she might have been a small tod­dling bear.

The winter af­ter­noon was red­den­ing to­wards even­ing, and already a ruby light was rolled over the bloom­less beds, filling them, as it were, with the ghosts of the dead roses. On one side of the house stood the stable, on the other an al­ley or cloister of laurels led to the lar­ger garden be­hind. The young lady, hav­ing scattered bread for the birds (for the fourth or fifth time that day, be­cause the dog ate it), passed un­ob­trus­ively down the lane of laurels and into a glim­mer­ing plant­a­tion of ever­greens be­hind. Here she gave an ex­clam­a­tion of won­der, real or ritual, and look­ing up at the high garden wall above her, be­held it fant­ast­ic­ally be­strid­den by a some­what fant­astic fig­ure.

“Oh, don’t jump, Mr. Crook,” she called out in some alarm; “it’s much too high.”

The in­di­vidual rid­ing the party wall like an aer­ial horse was a tall, an­gu­lar young man, with dark hair stick­ing up like a hair brush, in­tel­li­gent and even dis­tin­guished lin­ea­ments, but a sal­low and al­most alien com­plex­ion. This showed the more plainly be­cause he wore an ag­gress­ive red tie, the only part of his cos­tume of which he seemed to take any care. Per­haps it was a sym­bol. He took no no­tice of the girl’s alarmed ad­jur­a­tion, but leapt like a grasshop­per to the ground be­side her, where he might very well have broken his legs.

“I think I was meant to be a burg­lar,” he said pla­cidly, “and I have no doubt I should have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice house next door. I can’t see any harm in it, any­how.”

“How can you say such things!” she re­mon­strated.

“Well,” said the young man, “if you’re born on the wrong side of the wall, I can’t see that it’s wrong to climb over it.”

“I never know what you will say or do next,” she said.

“I don’t of­ten know my­self,” replied Mr. Crook; “but then I am on the right side of the wall now.”

“And which is the right side of the wall?” asked the young lady, smil­ing.

“Whichever side you are on,” said the young man named Crook.

As they went to­gether through the laurels to­wards the front garden a mo­tor horn soun­ded thrice, com­ing nearer and nearer, and a car of splen­did speed, great el­eg­ance, and a pale green col­our swept up to the front doors like a bird and stood throb­bing.

“Hullo, hullo!” said the young man with the red tie, “here’s some­body born on the right side, any­how. I didn’t know, Miss Adams, that your Santa Claus was so mod­ern as this.”

“Oh, that’s my god­father, Sir Leo­pold Fis­cher. He al­ways comes on Box­ing Day.”

Then, after an in­no­cent pause, which un­con­sciously be­trayed some lack of en­thu­si­asm, Ruby Adams ad­ded:

“He is very kind.”

John Crook, journ­al­ist, had heard of that em­in­ent City mag­nate; and it was not his fault if the City mag­nate had not heard of him; for in cer­tain art­icles in The Clarion or The New Age Sir Leo­pold had been dealt with aus­terely. But he said noth­ing and grimly watched the un­load­ing of the mo­tor­car, which was rather a long pro­cess. A large, neat chauf­feur in green got out from the front, and a small, neat manser­vant in grey got out from the back, and between them they de­pos­ited Sir Leo­pold on the door­step and began to un­pack him, like some very care­fully pro­tec­ted par­cel. Rugs enough to stock a bazaar, furs of all the beasts of the forest, and scarves of all the col­ours of the rain­bow were un­wrapped one by one, till they re­vealed some­thing re­sem­bling the hu­man form; the form of a friendly, but for­eign-look­ing old gen­tle­man, with a grey goat-like beard and a beam­ing smile, who rubbed his big fur gloves to­gether.

Long be­fore this rev­el­a­tion was com­plete the two big doors of the porch had opened in the middle, and Co­l­onel Adams (father of the furry young lady) had come out him­self to in­vite his em­in­ent guest in­side. He was a tall, sun­burnt, and very si­lent man, who wore a red smoking-cap like a fez, mak­ing him look like one of the Eng­lish Sirdars or Pashas in Egypt. With him was his brother-in-law, lately come from Canada, a big and rather bois­ter­ous young gen­tle­man-farmer, with a yel­low beard, by name James Blount. With him also was the more in­sig­ni­fic­ant fig­ure of the priest from the neigh­bour­ing Ro­man Church; for the col­onel’s late wife had been a Cath­olic, and the chil­dren, as is com­mon in such cases, had been trained to fol­low her. Everything seemed un­dis­tin­guished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the col­onel had al­ways found some­thing com­pan­ion­able about him, and fre­quently asked him to such fam­ily gath­er­ings.

In the large en­trance hall of the house there was ample room even for Sir Leo­pold and the re­moval of his wraps. Porch and ves­ti­bule, in­deed, were un­duly large in pro­por­tion to the house, and formed, as it were, a big room with the front door at one end, and the bot­tom of the stair­case at the other. In front of the large hall fire, over which hung the col­onel’s sword, the pro­cess was com­pleted and the com­pany, in­clud­ing the sat­urnine Crook, presen­ted to Sir Leo­pold Fis­cher. That ven­er­able fin­an­cier, how­ever, still seemed strug­gling with por­tions of his well-lined at­tire, and at length pro­duced from a very in­terior tail­coat pocket, a black oval case which he ra­di­antly ex­plained to be his Christ­mas present for his god­daugh­ter. With an un­af­fected vain­glory that had some­thing dis­arm­ing about it he held out the case be­fore them all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a crys­tal foun­tain had spur­ted in their eyes. In a nest of or­ange vel­vet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid dia­monds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fis­cher stood beam­ing be­ne­vol­ently and drink­ing deep of the as­ton­ish­ment and ec­stasy of the girl, the grim ad­mir­a­tion and gruff thanks of the col­onel, the won­der of the whole group.

“I’ll put ’em back now, my dear,” said Fis­cher, re­turn­ing the case to the tails of his coat. “I had to be care­ful of ’em com­ing down. They’re the three great African dia­monds called ‘The Fly­ing Stars,’ be­cause they’ve been stolen so of­ten. All the big crim­in­als are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and ho­tels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might have lost them on the road here. It was quite pos­sible.”

“Quite nat­ural, I should say,” growled the man in the red tie. “I shouldn’t blame ’em if they had taken ’em. When they ask for bread, and you don’t even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for them­selves.”

“I won’t have you talk­ing like that,” cried the girl, who was in a curi­ous glow. “You’ve only talked like that since you be­came a hor­rid what’s-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to em­brace the chim­ney-sweep?”

“A saint,” said Father Brown.

“I think,” said Sir Leo­pold, with a su­per­cili­ous smile, “that Ruby means a So­cial­ist.”

“A rad­ical does not mean a man who lives on radishes,” re­marked Crook, with some im­pa­tience; “and a Con­ser­vat­ive does not mean a man who pre­serves jam. Neither, I as­sure you, does a So­cial­ist mean a man who de­sires a so­cial even­ing with the chim­ney-sweep. A So­cial­ist means a man who wants all the chim­neys swept and all the chim­ney-sweeps paid for it.”

“But who won’t al­low you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot.”

Crook looked at him with an eye of in­terest and even re­spect. “Does one want to own soot?” he asked.

“One might,” answered Brown, with spec­u­la­tion in his eye. “I’ve heard that garden­ers use it. And I once made six chil­dren happy at Christ­mas when the con­juror didn’t come, en­tirely with soot—ap­plied ex­tern­ally.”

“Oh, splen­did,” cried Ruby. “Oh, I wish you’d do it to this com­pany.”

The bois­ter­ous Ca­na­dian, Mr. Blount, was lift­ing his loud voice in ap­plause, and the as­ton­ished fin­an­cier his (in some con­sid­er­able de­prec­a­tion), when a knock soun­ded at the double front doors. The priest opened them, and they showed again the front garden of ever­greens, mon­key-tree and all, now gath­er­ing gloom against a gor­geous vi­olet sun­set. The scene thus framed was so col­oured and quaint, like a back scene in a play, that they for­got a mo­ment the in­sig­ni­fic­ant fig­ure stand­ing in the door. He was dusty-look­ing and in a frayed coat, evid­ently a com­mon mes­sen­ger. “Any of you gen­tle­men Mr. Blount?” he asked, and held for­ward a let­ter doubt­fully. Mr. Blount star­ted, and stopped in his shout of as­sent. Rip­ping up the en­vel­ope with evid­ent as­ton­ish­ment he read it; his face clouded a little, and then cleared, and he turned to his brother-in-law and host.

“I’m sick at be­ing such a nuis­ance, col­onel,” he said, with the cheery co­lo­nial con­ven­tions; “but would it up­set you if an old ac­quaint­ance called on me here to­night on busi­ness? In point of fact it’s Florian, that fam­ous French ac­robat and comic actor; I knew him years ago out West (he was a French-Ca­na­dian by birth), and he seems to have busi­ness for me, though I hardly guess what.”

“Of course, of course,” replied the col­onel care­lessly—“My dear chap, any friend of yours. No doubt he will prove an ac­quis­i­tion.”

“He’ll black his face, if that’s what you mean,” cried Blount, laugh­ing. “I don’t doubt he’d black every­one else’s eyes. I don’t care; I’m not re­fined. I like the jolly old pan­to­mime where a man sits on his top hat.”

“Not on mine, please,” said Sir Leo­pold Fis­cher, with dig­nity.

“Well, well,” ob­served Crook, air­ily, “don’t let’s quar­rel. There are lower jokes than sit­ting on a top hat.”

Dis­like of the red-tied youth, born of his pred­at­ory opin­ions and evid­ent in­tim­acy with the pretty god­child, led Fis­cher to say, in his most sar­castic, ma­gis­terial man­ner: “No doubt you have found some­thing much lower than sit­ting on a top hat. What is it, pray?”

“Let­ting a top hat sit on you, for in­stance,” said the So­cial­ist.

“Now, now, now,” cried the Ca­na­dian farmer with his bar­bar­ian be­ne­vol­ence, “don’t let’s spoil a jolly even­ing. What I say is, let’s do some­thing for the com­pany to­night. Not black­ing faces or sit­ting on hats, if you don’t like those—but some­thing of the sort. Why couldn’t we have a proper old Eng­lish pan­to­mime—clown, columbine, and so on. I saw one when I left Eng­land at twelve years old, and it’s blazed in my brain like a bon­fire ever since. I came back to the old coun­try only last year, and I find the thing’s ex­tinct. Noth­ing but a lot of sniv­el­ling fairy plays. I want a hot poker and a po­lice­man made into saus­ages, and they give me prin­cesses mor­al­ising by moon­light, Blue Birds, or some­thing. Blue Beard’s more in my line, and him I like best when he turned into the pan­ta­loon.”

“I’m all for mak­ing a po­lice­man into saus­ages,” said John Crook. “It’s a bet­ter defin­i­tion of So­cial­ism than some re­cently given. But surely the getup would be too big a busi­ness.”

“Not a scrap,” cried Blount, quite car­ried away. “A har­le­quinade’s the quick­est thing we can do, for two reas­ons. First, one can gag to any de­gree; and, second, all the ob­jects are house­hold things—tables and towel-horses and wash­ing bas­kets, and things like that.”

“That’s true,” ad­mit­ted Crook, nod­ding eagerly and walk­ing about. “But I’m afraid I can’t have my po­lice­man’s uni­form? Haven’t killed a po­lice­man lately.”

Blount frowned thought­fully a space, and then smote his thigh. “Yes, we can!” he cried. “I’ve got Florian’s ad­dress here, and he knows every cos­tumier in Lon­don. I’ll phone him to bring a po­lice dress when he comes.” And he went bound­ing away to the tele­phone.

“Oh, it’s glor­i­ous, god­father,” cried Ruby, al­most dan­cing. “I’ll be columbine and you shall be pan­ta­loon.”

The mil­lion­aire held him­self stiff with a sort of hea­then solem­nity. “I think, my dear,” he said, “you must get someone else for pan­ta­loon.”

“I will be pan­ta­loon, if you like,” said Co­l­onel Adams, tak­ing his ci­gar out of his mouth, and speak­ing for the first and last time.

“You ought to have a statue,” cried the Ca­na­dian, as he came back, ra­di­ant, from the tele­phone. “There, we are all fit­ted. Mr. Crook shall be clown; he’s a journ­al­ist and knows all the old­est jokes. I can be har­le­quin, that only wants long legs and jump­ing about. My friend Florian ’phones he’s bring­ing the po­lice cos­tume; he’s chan­ging on the way. We can act it in this very hall, the audi­ence sit­ting on those broad stairs op­pos­ite, one row above an­other. These front doors can be the back scene, either open or shut. Shut, you see an Eng­lish in­terior. Open, a moon­lit garden. It all goes by ma­gic.” And snatch­ing a chance piece of bil­liard chalk from his pocket, he ran it across the hall floor, halfway between the front door and the stair­case, to mark the line of the foot­lights.

How even such a ban­quet of bosh was got ready in the time re­mained a riddle. But they went at it with that mix­ture of reck­less­ness and in­dustry that lives when youth is in a house; and youth was in that house that night, though not all may have isol­ated the two faces and hearts from which it flamed. As al­ways hap­pens, the in­ven­tion grew wilder and wilder through the very tame­ness of the bour­geois con­ven­tions from which it had to cre­ate. The columbine looked charm­ing in an out­stand­ing skirt that strangely re­sembled the large lamp­shade in the draw­ing-room. The clown and pan­ta­loon made them­selves white with flour from the cook, and red with rouge from some other do­mestic, who re­mained (like all true Chris­tian be­ne­fact­ors) an­onym­ous. The har­le­quin, already clad in sil­ver pa­per out of ci­gar boxes, was, with dif­fi­culty, pre­ven­ted from smash­ing the old Victorian lustre chan­deliers, that he might cover him­self with resplen­dent crys­tals. In fact he would cer­tainly have done so, had not Ruby un­earthed some old pan­to­mime paste jew­els she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Dia­monds. Indeed, her uncle, James Blount, was get­ting al­most out of hand in his ex­cite­ment; he was like a school­boy. He put a pa­per don­key’s head un­ex­pec­tedly on Father Brown, who bore it pa­tiently, and even found some private man­ner of mov­ing his ears. He even es­sayed to put the pa­per don­key’s tail to the coat­tails of Sir Leo­pold Fis­cher. This, how­ever, was frowned down. “Uncle is too ab­surd,” cried Ruby to Crook, round whose shoulders she had ser­i­ously placed a string of saus­ages. “Why is he so wild?”

“He is har­le­quin to your columbine,” said Crook. “I am only the clown who makes the old jokes.”

“I wish you were the har­le­quin,” she said, and left the string of saus­ages swinging.

Father Brown, though he knew every de­tail done be­hind the scenes, and had even evoked ap­plause by his trans­form­a­tion of a pil­low into a pan­to­mime baby, went round to the front and sat among the audi­ence with all the sol­emn ex­pect­a­tion of a child at his first mat­inee. The spec­tat­ors were few, re­la­tions, one or two local friends, and the ser­vants; Sir Leo­pold sat in the front seat, his full and still fur-collared fig­ure largely ob­scur­ing the view of the little cleric be­hind him; but it has never been settled by artistic au­thor­it­ies whether the cleric lost much. The pan­to­mime was ut­terly chaotic, yet not con­tempt­ible; there ran through it a rage of im­pro­visa­tion which came chiefly from Crook the clown. Com­monly he was a clever man, and he was in­spired to­night with a wild om­ni­science, a folly wiser than the world, that which comes to a young man who has seen for an in­stant a par­tic­u­lar ex­pres­sion on a par­tic­u­lar face. He was sup­posed to be the clown, but he was really al­most everything else, the au­thor (so far as there was an au­thor), the prompter, the scene-painter, the scene-shifter, and, above all, the or­ches­tra. At ab­rupt in­ter­vals in the out­rageous per­form­ance he would hurl him­self in full cos­tume at the pi­ano and bang out some pop­u­lar mu­sic equally ab­surd and ap­pro­pri­ate.

The cli­max of this, as of all else, was the mo­ment when the two front doors at the back of the scene flew open, show­ing the lovely moon­lit garden, but show­ing more prom­in­ently the fam­ous pro­fes­sional guest; the great Florian, dressed up as a po­lice­man. The clown at the pi­ano played the con­stabu­lary chorus in the Pir­ates of Pen­zance, but it was drowned in the deaf­en­ing ap­plause, for every ges­ture of the great comic actor was an ad­mir­able though re­strained ver­sion of the car­riage and man­ner of the po­lice. The har­le­quin leapt upon him and hit him over the hel­met; the pi­an­ist play­ing “Where did you get that hat?” he faced about in ad­mir­ably sim­u­lated as­ton­ish­ment, and then the leap­ing har­le­quin hit him again (the pi­an­ist sug­gest­ing a few bars of “Then we had an­other one”). Then the har­le­quin rushed right into the arms of the po­lice­man and fell on top of him, amid a roar of ap­plause. Then it was that the strange actor gave that cel­eb­rated im­it­a­tion of a dead man, of which the fame still lingers round Put­ney. It was al­most im­possible to be­lieve that a liv­ing per­son could ap­pear so limp.

The ath­letic har­le­quin swung him about like a sack or twis­ted or tossed him like an In­dian club; all the time to the most mad­den­ingly ludicrous tunes from the pi­ano. When the har­le­quin heaved the comic con­stable heav­ily off the floor the clown played “I arise from dreams of thee.” When he shuffled him across his back, “With my bundle on my shoulder,” and when the har­le­quin fi­nally let fall the po­lice­man with a most con­vin­cing thud, the lun­atic at the in­stru­ment struck into a jingling meas­ure with some words which are still be­lieved to have been, “I sent a let­ter to my love and on the way I dropped it.”

At about this limit of men­tal an­archy Father Brown’s view was ob­scured al­to­gether; for the City mag­nate in front of him rose to his full height and thrust his hands sav­agely into all his pock­ets. Then he sat down nervously, still fum­bling, and then stood up again. For an in­stant it seemed ser­i­ously likely that he would stride across the foot­lights; then he turned a glare at the clown play­ing the pi­ano; and then he burst in si­lence out of the room.

The priest had only watched for a few more minutes the ab­surd but not in­el­eg­ant dance of the am­a­teur har­le­quin over his splen­didly un­con­scious foe. With real though rude art, the har­le­quin danced slowly back­wards out of the door into the garden, which was full of moon­light and still­ness. The vamped dress of sil­ver pa­per and paste, which had been too glar­ing in the foot­lights, looked more and more ma­gical and sil­very as it danced away un­der a bril­liant moon. The audi­ence was clos­ing in with a catar­act of ap­plause, when Brown felt his arm ab­ruptly touched, and he was asked in a whis­per to come into the col­onel’s study.

He fol­lowed his sum­moner with in­creas­ing doubt, which was not dis­pelled by a sol­emn com­ic­al­ity in the scene of the study. There sat Co­l­onel Adams, still un­af­fectedly dressed as a pan­ta­loon, with the knobbed whale­bone nod­ding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough to have sobered a Saturnalia. Sir Leo­pold Fis­cher was lean­ing against the man­tel­piece and heav­ing with all the im­port­ance of panic.

“This is a very pain­ful mat­ter, Father Brown,” said Adams. “The truth is, those dia­monds we all saw this af­ter­noon seem to have van­ished from my friend’s tail­coat pocket. And as you—”

“As I,” sup­ple­men­ted Father Brown, with a broad grin, “was sit­ting just be­hind him—”

“Noth­ing of the sort shall be sug­ges­ted,” said Co­l­onel Adams, with a firm look at Fis­cher, which rather im­plied that some such thing had been sug­ges­ted. “I only ask you to give me the as­sist­ance that any gen­tle­man might give.”

“Which is turn­ing out his pock­ets,” said Father Brown, and pro­ceeded to do so, dis­play­ing seven and six­pence, a re­turn ticket, a small sil­ver cru­ci­fix, a small brevi­ary, and a stick of chocol­ate.

The col­onel looked at him long, and then said, “Do you know, I should like to see the in­side of your head more than the in­side of your pock­ets. My daugh­ter is one of your people, I know; well, she has lately—” and he stopped.

“She has lately,” cried out old Fis­cher, “opened her father’s house to a cut­throat So­cial­ist, who says openly he would steal any­thing from a richer man. This is the end of it. Here is the richer man—and none the richer.”

“If you want the in­side of my head you can have it,” said Brown rather wear­ily. “What it’s worth you can say af­ter­wards. But the first thing I find in that dis­used pocket is this: that men who mean to steal dia­monds don’t talk So­cial­ism. They are more likely,” he ad­ded de­murely, “to de­nounce it.”

Both the oth­ers shif­ted sharply and the priest went on:

“You see, we know these people, more or less. That So­cial­ist would no more steal a dia­mond than a Pyr­amid. We ought to look at once to the one man we don’t know. The fel­low act­ing the po­lice­man—Florian. Where is he ex­actly at this minute, I won­der.”

The pan­ta­loon sprang erect and strode out of the room. An in­ter­lude en­sued, dur­ing which the mil­lion­aire stared at the priest, and the priest at his brevi­ary; then the pan­ta­loon re­turned and said, with stac­cato grav­ity, “The po­lice­man is still ly­ing on the stage. The cur­tain has gone up and down six times; he is still ly­ing there.”

Father Brown dropped his book and stood star­ing with a look of blank men­tal ruin. Very slowly a light began to creep in his grey eyes, and then he made the scarcely ob­vi­ous an­swer.

“Please for­give me, col­onel, but when did your wife die?”

“Wife!” replied the star­ing sol­dier, “she died this year two months. Her brother James ar­rived just a week too late to see her.”

The little priest bounded like a rab­bit shot. “Come on!” he cried in quite un­usual ex­cite­ment. “Come on! We’ve got to go and look at that po­lice­man!”

They rushed on to the now cur­tained stage, break­ing rudely past the columbine and clown (who seemed whis­per­ing quite con­ten­tedly), and Father Brown bent over the pros­trate comic po­lice­man.

“Chlo­ro­form,” he said as he rose; “I only guessed it just now.”

There was a startled still­ness, and then the col­onel said slowly, “Please say ser­i­ously what all this means.”

Father Brown sud­denly shouted with laughter, then stopped, and only struggled with it for in­stants dur­ing the rest of his speech. “Gen­tle­men,” he gasped, “there’s not much time to talk. I must run after the crim­inal. But this great French actor who played the po­lice­man—this clever corpse the har­le­quin waltzed with and dandled and threw about—he was—” His voice again failed him, and he turned his back to run.

“He was?” called Fis­cher in­quir­ingly.

“A real po­lice­man,” said Father Brown, and ran away into the dark.

There were hol­lows and bowers at the ex­treme end of that leafy garden, in which the laurels and other im­mor­tal shrubs showed against sap­phire sky and sil­ver moon, even in that mid­winter, warm col­ours as of the south. The green gaiety of the wav­ing laurels, the rich purple in­digo of the night, the moon like a mon­strous crys­tal, make an al­most ir­re­spons­ible ro­mantic pic­ture; and among the top branches of the garden trees a strange fig­ure is climb­ing, who looks not so much ro­mantic as im­possible. He sparkles from head to heel, as if clad in ten mil­lion moons; the real moon catches him at every move­ment and sets a new inch of him on fire. But he swings, flash­ing and suc­cess­ful, from the short tree in this garden to the tall, ram­bling tree in the other, and only stops there be­cause a shade has slid un­der the smal­ler tree and has un­mis­tak­ably called up to him.

“Well, Flam­beau,” says the voice, “you really look like a Fly­ing Star; but that al­ways means a Falling Star at last.”

The sil­ver, spark­ling fig­ure above seems to lean for­ward in the laurels and, con­fid­ent of es­cape, listens to the little fig­ure be­low.

“You never did any­thing bet­ter, Flam­beau. It was clever to come from Canada (with a Paris ticket, I sup­pose) just a week after Mrs. Adams died, when no one was in a mood to ask ques­tions. It was cleverer to have marked down the Fly­ing Stars and the very day of Fis­cher’s com­ing. But there’s no clev­erness, but mere genius, in what fol­lowed. Steal­ing the stones, I sup­pose, was noth­ing to you. You could have done it by sleight of hand in a hun­dred other ways be­sides that pre­tence of put­ting a pa­per don­key’s tail to Fis­cher’s coat. But in the rest you ec­lipsed your­self.”

The sil­very fig­ure among the green leaves seems to linger as if hyp­not­ised, though his es­cape is easy be­hind him; he is star­ing at the man be­low.

“Oh, yes,” says the man be­low, “I know all about it. I know you not only forced the pan­to­mime, but put it to a double use. You were go­ing to steal the stones quietly; news came by an ac­com­plice that you were already sus­pec­ted, and a cap­able po­lice of­ficer was com­ing to rout you up that very night. A com­mon thief would have been thank­ful for the warn­ing and fled; but you are a poet. You already had the clever no­tion of hid­ing the jew­els in a blaze of false stage jew­ellery. Now, you saw that if the dress were a har­le­quin’s the ap­pear­ance of a po­lice­man would be quite in keep­ing. The worthy of­ficer star­ted from Put­ney po­lice sta­tion to find you, and walked into the queerest trap ever set in this world. When the front door opened he walked straight on to the stage of a Christ­mas pan­to­mime, where he could be kicked, clubbed, stunned and drugged by the dan­cing har­le­quin, amid roars of laughter from all the most re­spect­able people in Put­ney. Oh, you will never do any­thing bet­ter. And now, by the way, you might give me back those dia­monds.”

The green branch on which the glit­ter­ing fig­ure swung, rustled as if in as­ton­ish­ment; but the voice went on:

“I want you to give them back, Flam­beau, and I want you to give up this life. There is still youth and hon­our and hu­mour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I’ve known star­ted like you to be an hon­est out­law, a merry rob­ber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime. Maurice Blum star­ted out as an an­arch­ist of prin­ciple, a father of the poor; he ended a greasy spy and tale­bearer that both sides used and des­pised. Harry Burke star­ted his free money move­ment sin­cerely enough; now he’s spon­ging on a half-starved sis­ter for end­less brandies and so­das. Lord Am­ber went into wild so­ci­ety in a sort of chiv­alry; now he’s pay­ing black­mail to the low­est vul­tures in Lon­don. Cap­tain Baril­lon was the great gen­tle­man-Apache be­fore your time; he died in a mad­house, scream­ing with fear of the “narks” and re­ceiv­ers that had be­trayed him and hunted him down. I know the woods look very free be­hind you, Flam­beau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a mon­key. But some day you will be an old grey mon­key, Flam­beau. You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree­tops will be very bare.”

Everything con­tin­ued still, as if the small man be­low held the other in the tree in some long in­vis­ible leash; and he went on:

“Your down­ward steps have be­gun. You used to boast of do­ing noth­ing mean, but you are do­ing some­thing mean to­night. You are leav­ing sus­pi­cion on an hon­est boy with a good deal against him already; you are sep­ar­at­ing him from the wo­man he loves and who loves him. But you will do meaner things than that be­fore you die.”

Three flash­ing dia­monds fell from the tree to the turf. The small man stooped to pick them up, and when he looked up again the green cage of the tree was emp­tied of its sil­ver bird.

The res­tor­a­tion of the gems (ac­ci­dent­ally picked up by Father Brown, of all people) ended the even­ing in up­roari­ous tri­umph; and Sir Leo­pold, in his height of good hu­mour, even told the priest that though he him­self had broader views, he could re­spect those whose creed re­quired them to be cloistered and ig­nor­ant of this world.

The Invisible Man

In the cool blue twi­light of two steep streets in Cam­den Town, the shop at the corner, a con­fec­tioner’s, glowed like the butt of a ci­gar. One should rather say, per­haps, like the butt of a fire­work, for the light was of many col­ours and some com­plex­ity, broken up by many mir­rors and dan­cing on many gilt and gaily-col­oured cakes and sweet­meats. Against this one fiery glass were glued the noses of many gut­ter­snipes, for the chocol­ates were all wrapped in those red and gold and green metal­lic col­ours which are al­most bet­ter than chocol­ate it­self; and the huge white wed­ding-cake in the win­dow was some­how at once re­mote and sat­is­fy­ing, just as if the whole North Pole were good to eat. Such rain­bow pro­voca­tions could nat­ur­ally col­lect the youth of the neigh­bour­hood up to the ages of ten or twelve. But this corner was also at­tract­ive to youth at a later stage; and a young man, not less than twenty-four, was star­ing into the same shop win­dow. To him, also, the shop was of fiery charm, but this at­trac­tion was not wholly to be ex­plained by chocol­ates; which, how­ever, he was far from des­pising.

He was a tall, burly, red-haired young man, with a res­ol­ute face but a list­less man­ner. He car­ried un­der his arm a flat, grey port­fo­lio of black-and-white sketches, which he had sold with more or less suc­cess to pub­lish­ers ever since his uncle (who was an ad­miral) had dis­in­her­ited him for So­cial­ism, be­cause of a lec­ture which he had de­livered against that eco­nomic the­ory. His name was John Turn­bull An­gus.

En­ter­ing at last, he walked through the con­fec­tioner’s shop to the back room, which was a sort of pastry-cook res­taur­ant, merely rais­ing his hat to the young lady who was serving there. She was a dark, el­eg­ant, alert girl in black, with a high col­our and very quick, dark eyes; and after the or­din­ary in­ter­val she fol­lowed him into the in­ner room to take his or­der.

His or­der was evid­ently a usual one. “I want, please,” he said with pre­ci­sion, “one half­penny bun and a small cup of black cof­fee.” An in­stant be­fore the girl could turn away he ad­ded, “Also, I want you to marry me.”

The young lady of the shop stiffened sud­denly and said, “Those are jokes I don’t al­low.”

The red-haired young man lif­ted grey eyes of an un­ex­pec­ted grav­ity.

“Really and truly,” he said, “it’s as ser­i­ous—as ser­i­ous as the half­penny bun. It is ex­pens­ive, like the bun; one pays for it. It is in­di­gest­ible, like the bun. It hurts.”

The dark young lady had never taken her dark eyes off him, but seemed to be study­ing him with al­most tra­gic ex­actitude. At the end of her scru­tiny she had some­thing like the shadow of a smile, and she sat down in a chair.

“Don’t you think,” ob­served An­gus, ab­sently, “that it’s rather cruel to eat these half­penny buns? They might grow up into penny buns. I shall give up these bru­tal sports when we are mar­ried.”

The dark young lady rose from her chair and walked to the win­dow, evid­ently in a state of strong but not un­sym­path­etic co­git­a­tion. When at last she swung round again with an air of res­ol­u­tion she was be­wildered to ob­serve that the young man was care­fully lay­ing out on the table vari­ous ob­jects from the shop­win­dow. They in­cluded a pyr­amid of highly col­oured sweets, sev­eral plates of sand­wiches, and the two de­canters con­tain­ing that mys­ter­i­ous port and sherry which are pe­cu­liar to pastry-cooks. In the middle of this neat ar­range­ment he had care­fully let down the enorm­ous load of white sugared cake which had been the huge or­na­ment of the win­dow.

“What on earth are you do­ing?” she asked.

“Duty, my dear Laura,” he began.

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake, stop a minute,” she cried, “and don’t talk to me in that way. I mean, what is all that?”

“A ce­re­mo­nial meal, Miss Hope.”

“And what is that?” she asked im­pa­tiently, point­ing to the moun­tain of sugar.

“The wed­ding-cake, Mrs. An­gus,” he said.

The girl marched to that art­icle, re­moved it with some clat­ter, and put it back in the shop win­dow; she then re­turned, and, put­ting her el­eg­ant el­bows on the table, re­garded the young man not un­fa­vour­ably but with con­sid­er­able ex­as­per­a­tion.

“You don’t give me any time to think,” she said.

“I’m not such a fool,” he answered; “that’s my Chris­tian hu­mil­ity.”

She was still look­ing at him; but she had grown con­sid­er­ably graver be­hind the smile.

“Mr. An­gus,” she said stead­ily, “be­fore there is a minute more of this non­sense I must tell you some­thing about my­self as shortly as I can.’ ”

“De­lighted,” replied An­gus gravely. “You might tell me some­thing about my­self, too, while you are about it.”

“Oh, do hold your tongue and listen,” she said. “It’s noth­ing that I’m ashamed of, and it isn’t even any­thing that I’m spe­cially sorry about. But what would you say if there were some­thing that is no busi­ness of mine and yet is my night­mare?”

“In that case,” said the man ser­i­ously, “I should sug­gest that you bring back the cake.”

“Well, you must listen to the story first,” said Laura, per­sist­ently. “To be­gin with, I must tell you that my father owned the inn called the Red Fish at Lud­bury, and I used to serve people in the bar.”

“I have of­ten wondered,” he said, “why there was a kind of a Chris­tian air about this one con­fec­tioner’s shop.”

“Lud­bury is a sleepy, grassy little hole in the Eastern Counties, and the only kind of people who ever came to the Red Fish were oc­ca­sional com­mer­cial trav­el­lers, and for the rest, the most aw­ful people you can see, only you’ve never seen them. I mean little, loungy men, who had just enough to live on and had noth­ing to do but lean about in bar­rooms and bet on horses, in bad clothes that were just too good for them. Even these wretched young rot­ters were not very com­mon at our house; but there were two of them that were a lot too com­mon—com­mon in every sort of way. They both lived on money of their own, and were wear­i­somely idle and over­dressed. But yet I was a bit sorry for them, be­cause I half be­lieve they slunk into our little empty bar be­cause each of them had a slight de­form­ity; the sort of thing that some yokels laugh at. It wasn’t ex­actly a de­form­ity either; it was more an oddity. One of them was a sur­pris­ingly small man, some­thing like a dwarf, or at least like a jockey. He was not at all jock­ey­ish to look at, though; he had a round black head and a well-trimmed black beard, bright eyes like a bird’s; he jingled money in his pock­ets; he jangled a great gold watch chain; and he never turned up ex­cept dressed just too much like a gen­tle­man to be one. He was no fool though, though a fu­tile idler; he was curi­ously clever at all kinds of things that couldn’t be the slight­est use; a sort of im­promptu con­jur­ing; mak­ing fif­teen matches set fire to each other like a reg­u­lar fire­work; or cut­ting a ba­nana or some such thing into a dan­cing doll. His name was Isidore Smythe; and I can see him still, with his little dark face, just com­ing up to the counter, mak­ing a jump­ing kangaroo out of five ci­gars.

“The other fel­low was more si­lent and more or­din­ary; but some­how he alarmed me much more than poor little Smythe. He was very tall and slight, and light-haired; his nose had a high bridge, and he might al­most have been hand­some in a spec­tral sort of way; but he had one of the most ap­palling squints I have ever seen or heard of. When he looked straight at you, you didn’t know where you were your­self, let alone what he was look­ing at. I fancy this sort of dis­fig­ure­ment em­bittered the poor chap a little; for while Smythe was ready to show off his mon­key tricks any­where, James Welkin (that was the squint­ing man’s name) never did any­thing ex­cept soak in our bar par­lour, and go for great walks by him­self in the flat, grey coun­try all round. All the same, I think Smythe, too, was a little sens­it­ive about be­ing so small, though he car­ried it off more smartly. And so it was that I was really puzzled, as well as startled, and very sorry, when they both offered to marry me in the same week.

“Well, I did what I’ve since thought was per­haps a silly thing. But, after all, these freaks were my friends in a way; and I had a hor­ror of their think­ing I re­fused them for the real reason, which was that they were so im­possibly ugly. So I made up some gas of an­other sort, about never mean­ing to marry any­one who hadn’t carved his way in the world. I said it was a point of prin­ciple with me not to live on money that was just in­her­ited like theirs. Two days after I had talked in this well-mean­ing sort of way, the whole trouble began. The first thing I heard was that both of them had gone off to seek their for­tunes, as if they were in some silly fairy tale.

“Well, I’ve never seen either of them from that day to this. But I’ve had two let­ters from the little man called Smythe, and really they were rather ex­cit­ing.”

“Ever heard of the other man?” asked An­gus.

“No, he never wrote,” said the girl, after an in­stant’s hes­it­a­tion. “Smythe’s first let­ter was simply to say that he had star­ted out walk­ing with Welkin to Lon­don; but Welkin was such a good walker that the little man dropped out of it, and took a rest by the road­side. He happened to be picked up by some trav­el­ling show, and, partly be­cause he was nearly a dwarf, and partly be­cause he was really a clever little wretch, he got on quite well in the show busi­ness, and was soon sent up to the Aquar­ium, to do some tricks that I for­get. That was his first let­ter. His second was much more of a startler, and I only got it last week.”

The man called An­gus emp­tied his cof­fee-cup and re­garded her with mild and pa­tient eyes. Her own mouth took a slight twist of laughter as she re­sumed, “I sup­pose you’ve seen on the hoard­ings all about this ‘Smythe’s Si­lent Ser­vice’? Or you must be the only per­son that hasn’t. Oh, I don’t know much about it, it’s some clock­work in­ven­tion for do­ing all the house­work by ma­chinery. You know the sort of thing: ‘Press a But­ton—A But­ler who Never Drinks.’ ‘Turn a Handle—Ten House­maids who Never Flirt.’ You must have seen the ad­vert­ise­ments. Well, whatever these ma­chines are, they are mak­ing pots of money; and they are mak­ing it all for that little imp whom I knew down in Lud­bury. I can’t help feel­ing pleased the poor little chap has fallen on his feet; but the plain fact is, I’m in ter­ror of his turn­ing up any minute and telling me he’s carved his way in the world—as he cer­tainly has.”

“And the other man?” re­peated An­gus with a sort of ob­stin­ate quiet­ude.

Laura Hope got to her feet sud­denly. “My friend,” she said, “I think you are a witch. Yes, you are quite right. I have not seen a line of the other man’s writ­ing; and I have no more no­tion than the dead of what or where he is. But it is of him that I am frightened. It is he who is all about my path. It is he who has half driven me mad. Indeed, I think he has driven me mad; for I have felt him where he could not have been, and I have heard his voice when he could not have spoken.”

“Well, my dear,” said the young man, cheer­fully, “if he were Satan him­self, he is done for now you have told some­body. One goes mad all alone, old girl. But when was it you fan­cied you felt and heard our squint­ing friend?”

“I heard James Welkin laugh as plainly as I hear you speak,” said the girl, stead­ily. “There was nobody there, for I stood just out­side the shop at the corner, and could see down both streets at once. I had for­got­ten how he laughed, though his laugh was as odd as his squint. I had not thought of him for nearly a year. But it’s a sol­emn truth that a few seconds later the first let­ter came from his rival.”

“Did you ever make the spectre speak or squeak, or any­thing?” asked An­gus, with some in­terest.

Laura sud­denly shuddered, and then said, with an un­shaken voice, “Yes. Just when I had fin­ished read­ing the second let­ter from Isidore Smythe an­noun­cing his suc­cess. Just then, I heard Welkin say, ‘He shan’t have you, though.’ It was quite plain, as if he were in the room. It is aw­ful, I think I must be mad.”

“If you really were mad,” said the young man, “you would think you must be sane. But cer­tainly there seems to me to be some­thing a little rum about this un­seen gen­tle­man. Two heads are bet­ter than one—I spare you al­lu­sions to any other or­gans and really, if you would al­low me, as a sturdy, prac­tical man, to bring back the wed­ding-cake out of the win­dow—”

Even as he spoke, there was a sort of steely shriek in the street out­side, and a small mo­tor, driven at dev­il­ish speed, shot up to the door of the shop and stuck there. In the same flash of time a small man in a shiny top hat stood stamp­ing in the outer room.

An­gus, who had hitherto main­tained hil­ari­ous ease from motives of men­tal hy­giene, re­vealed the strain of his soul by strid­ing ab­ruptly out of the in­ner room and con­front­ing the new­comer. A glance at him was quite suf­fi­cient to con­firm the sav­age guess­work of a man in love. This very dap­per but dwarfish fig­ure, with the spike of black beard car­ried in­solently for­ward, the clever un­rest­ful eyes, the neat but very nervous fin­gers, could be none other than the man just de­scribed to him: Isidore Smythe, who made dolls out of ba­nana skins and match­boxes; Isidore Smythe, who made mil­lions out of un­drink­ing but­lers and un­f­lirt­ing house­maids of metal. For a mo­ment the two men, in­stinct­ively un­der­stand­ing each other’s air of pos­ses­sion, looked at each other with that curi­ous cold gen­er­os­ity which is the soul of rivalry.

Mr. Smythe, how­ever, made no al­lu­sion to the ul­ti­mate ground of their ant­ag­on­ism, but said simply and ex­plos­ively, “Has Miss Hope seen that thing on the win­dow?”

“On the win­dow?” re­peated the star­ing An­gus.

“There’s no time to ex­plain other things,” said the small mil­lion­aire shortly. “There’s some tom­fool­ery go­ing on here that has to be in­vest­ig­ated.”

He poin­ted his pol­ished walk­ing-stick at the win­dow, re­cently de­pleted by the bridal pre­par­a­tions of Mr. An­gus; and that gen­tle­man was as­ton­ished to see along the front of the glass a long strip of pa­per pas­ted, which had cer­tainly not been on the win­dow when he looked through it some time be­fore. Fol­low­ing the en­er­getic Smythe out­side into the street, he found that some yard and a half of stamp pa­per had been care­fully gummed along the glass out­side, and on this was writ­ten in strag­gly char­ac­ters, “If you marry Smythe, he will die.”

“Laura,” said An­gus, put­ting his big red head into the shop, “you’re not mad.”

“It’s the writ­ing of that fel­low Welkin,” said Smythe gruffly. “I haven’t seen him for years, but he’s al­ways both­er­ing me. Five times in the last fort­night he’s had threat­en­ing let­ters left at my flat, and I can’t even find out who leaves them, let alone if it is Welkin him­self. The porter of the flats swears that no sus­pi­cious char­ac­ters have been seen, and here he has pas­ted up a sort of dado on a pub­lic shop win­dow, while the people in the shop—”

“Quite so,” said An­gus mod­estly, “while the people in the shop were hav­ing tea. Well, sir, I can as­sure you I ap­pre­ci­ate your com­mon sense in deal­ing so dir­ectly with the mat­ter. We can talk about other things af­ter­wards. The fel­low can­not be very far off yet, for I swear there was no pa­per there when I went last to the win­dow, ten or fif­teen minutes ago. On the other hand, he’s too far off to be chased, as we don’t even know the dir­ec­tion. If you’ll take my ad­vice, Mr. Smythe, you’ll put this at once in the hands of some en­er­getic in­quiry man, private rather than pub­lic. I know an ex­tremely clever fel­low, who has set up in busi­ness five minutes from here in your car. His name’s Flam­beau, and though his youth was a bit stormy, he’s a strictly hon­est man now, and his brains are worth money. He lives in Luc­know Man­sions, Hamp­stead.”

“That is odd,” said the little man, arch­ing his black eye­brows. “I live, my­self, in Himylaya Man­sions, round the corner. Per­haps you might care to come with me; I can go to my rooms and sort out these queer Welkin doc­u­ments, while you run round and get your friend the de­tect­ive.”

“You are very good,” said An­gus po­litely. “Well, the sooner we act the bet­ter.”

Both men, with a queer kind of im­promptu fair­ness, took the same sort of formal farewell of the lady, and both jumped into the brisk little car. As Smythe took the handles and they turned the great corner of the street, An­gus was amused to see a gi­gant­esque poster of “Smythe’s Si­lent Ser­vice,” with a pic­ture of a huge head­less iron doll, car­ry­ing a sauce­pan with the le­gend, “A Cook Who is Never Cross.”

“I use them in my own flat,” said the little black-bearded man, laugh­ing, “partly for ad­vert­ise­ments, and partly for real con­veni­ence. Hon­estly, and all above board, those big clock­work dolls of mine do bring your coals or claret or a timetable quicker than any live ser­vants I’ve ever known, if you know which knob to press. But I’ll never deny, between ourselves, that such ser­vants have their dis­ad­vant­ages, too.”

“Indeed?” said An­gus; “is there some­thing they can’t do?”

“Yes,” replied Smythe coolly; “they can’t tell me who left those threat­en­ing let­ters at my flat.”

The man’s mo­tor was small and swift like him­self; in fact, like his do­mestic ser­vice, it was of his own in­ven­tion. If he was an ad­vert­ising quack, he was one who be­lieved in his own wares. The sense of some­thing tiny and fly­ing was ac­cen­tu­ated as they swept up long white curves of road in the dead but open day­light of even­ing. Soon the white curves came sharper and diz­zier; they were upon as­cend­ing spir­als, as they say in the mod­ern re­li­gions. For, in­deed, they were crest­ing a corner of Lon­don which is al­most as pre­cip­it­ous as Ed­in­burgh, if not quite so pic­tur­esque. Ter­race rose above ter­race, and the spe­cial tower of flats they sought, rose above them all to al­most Egyp­tian height, gilt by the level sun­set. The change, as they turned the corner and entered the cres­cent known as Himylaya Man­sions, was as ab­rupt as the open­ing of a win­dow; for they found that pile of flats sit­ting above Lon­don as above a green sea of slate. Op­pos­ite to the man­sions, on the other side of the gravel cres­cent, was a bushy en­clos­ure more like a steep hedge or dyke than a garden, and some way be­low that ran a strip of ar­ti­fi­cial wa­ter, a sort of canal, like the moat of that em­bowered fort­ress. As the car swept round the cres­cent it passed, at one corner, the stray stall of a man selling chest­nuts; and right away at the other end of the curve, An­gus could see a dim blue po­lice­man walk­ing slowly. These were the only hu­man shapes in that high sub­urban solitude; but he had an ir­ra­tional sense that they ex­pressed the speech­less po­etry of Lon­don. He felt as if they were fig­ures in a story.

The little car shot up to the right house like a bul­let, and shot out its owner like a bomb shell. He was im­me­di­ately in­quir­ing of a tall com­mis­sion­aire in shin­ing braid, and a short porter in shirt sleeves, whether any­body or any­thing had been seek­ing his apart­ments. He was as­sured that nobody and noth­ing had passed these of­fi­cials since his last in­quir­ies; whereupon he and the slightly be­wildered An­gus were shot up in the lift like a rocket, till they reached the top floor.

“Just come in for a minute,” said the breath­less Smythe. “I want to show you those Welkin let­ters. Then you might run round the corner and fetch your friend.” He pressed a but­ton con­cealed in the wall, and the door opened of it­self.

It opened on a long, com­mo­di­ous ante­room, of which the only ar­rest­ing fea­tures, or­din­ar­ily speak­ing, were the rows of tall half-hu­man mech­an­ical fig­ures that stood up on both sides like tail­ors’ dum­mies. Like tail­ors’ dum­mies they were head­less; and like tail­ors’ dum­mies they had a hand­some un­ne­ces­sary hump­i­ness in the shoulders, and a pi­geon-breasted pro­tuber­ance of chest; but bar­ring this, they were not much more like a hu­man fig­ure than any auto­matic ma­chine at a sta­tion that is about the hu­man height. They had two great hooks like arms, for car­ry­ing trays; and they were painted pea-green, or ver­mil­ion, or black for con­veni­ence of dis­tinc­tion; in every other way they were only auto­matic ma­chines and nobody would have looked twice at them. On this oc­ca­sion, at least, nobody did. For between the two rows of these do­mestic dum­mies lay some­thing more in­ter­est­ing than most of the mech­an­ics of the world. It was a white, tattered scrap of pa­per scrawled with red ink; and the agile in­ventor had snatched it up al­most as soon as the door flew open. He handed it to An­gus without a word. The red ink on it ac­tu­ally was not dry, and the mes­sage ran, “If you have been to see her today, I shall kill you.”

There was a short si­lence, and then Isidore Smythe said quietly, “Would you like a little whis­key? I rather feel as if I should.”

“Thank you; I should like a little Flam­beau,” said An­gus, gloomily. “This busi­ness seems to me to be get­ting rather grave. I’m go­ing round at once to fetch him.”

“Right you are,” said the other, with ad­mir­able cheer­ful­ness. “Bring him round here as quick as you can.”

But as An­gus closed the front door be­hind him he saw Smythe push back a but­ton, and one of the clock­work im­ages glided from its place and slid along a groove in the floor car­ry­ing a tray with sy­phon and de­canter. There did seem some­thing a trifle weird about leav­ing the little man alone among those dead ser­vants, who were com­ing to life as the door closed.

Six steps down from Smythe’s land­ing the man in shirt sleeves was do­ing some­thing with a pail. An­gus stopped to ex­tract a prom­ise, for­ti­fied with a pro­spect­ive bribe, that he would re­main in that place un­til the re­turn with the de­tect­ive, and would keep count of any kind of stranger com­ing up those stairs. Dash­ing down to the front hall he then laid sim­ilar charges of vi­gil­ance on the com­mis­sion­aire at the front door, from whom he learned the sim­pli­fy­ing cir­cum­stances that there was no back door. Not con­tent with this, he cap­tured the float­ing po­lice­man and in­duced him to stand op­pos­ite the en­trance and watch it; and fi­nally paused an in­stant for a penny­worth of chest­nuts, and an in­quiry as to the prob­able length of the mer­chant’s stay in the neigh­bour­hood.

The chest­nut seller, turn­ing up the col­lar of his coat, told him he should prob­ably be mov­ing shortly, as he thought it was go­ing to snow. Indeed, the even­ing was grow­ing grey and bit­ter, but An­gus, with all his elo­quence, pro­ceeded to nail the chest­nut man to his post.

“Keep your­self warm on your own chest­nuts,” he said earn­estly. “Eat up your whole stock; I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll give you a sov­er­eign if you’ll wait here till I come back, and then tell me whether any man, wo­man, or child has gone into that house where the com­mis­sion­aire is stand­ing.”

He then walked away smartly, with a last look at the be­sieged tower.

“I’ve made a ring round that room, any­how,” he said. “They can’t all four of them be Mr. Welkin’s ac­com­plices.”

Luc­know Man­sions were, so to speak, on a lower plat­form of that hill of houses, of which Himylaya Man­sions might be called the peak. Mr. Flam­beau’s se­mi­of­fi­cial flat was on the ground floor, and presen­ted in every way a marked con­trast to the Amer­ican ma­chinery and cold hotel-like lux­ury of the flat of the Si­lent Ser­vice. Flam­beau, who was a friend of An­gus, re­ceived him in a ro­coco artistic den be­hind his of­fice, of which the or­na­ments were sabres, har­que­buses, Eastern curi­os­it­ies, flasks of Italian wine, sav­age cook­ing-pots, a plumy Per­sian cat, and a small dusty-look­ing Ro­man Cath­olic priest, who looked par­tic­u­larly out of place.

“This is my friend Father Brown,” said Flam­beau. “I’ve of­ten wanted you to meet him. Splen­did weather, this; a little cold for South­ern­ers like me.”

“Yes, I think it will keep clear,” said An­gus, sit­ting down on a vi­olet-striped Eastern ot­to­man.

“No,” said the priest quietly, “it has be­gun to snow.”

And, in­deed, as he spoke, the first few flakes, fore­seen by the man of chest­nuts, began to drift across the dark­en­ing win­dowpane.

“Well,” said An­gus heav­ily. “I’m afraid I’ve come on busi­ness, and rather jumpy busi­ness at that. The fact is, Flam­beau, within a stone’s throw of your house is a fel­low who badly wants your help; he’s per­petu­ally be­ing haunted and threatened by an in­vis­ible en­emy—a scoun­drel whom nobody has even seen.” As An­gus pro­ceeded to tell the whole tale of Smythe and Welkin, be­gin­ning with Laura’s story, and go­ing on with his own, the su­per­nat­ural laugh at the corner of two empty streets, the strange dis­tinct words spoken in an empty room, Flam­beau grew more and more vividly con­cerned, and the little priest seemed to be left out of it, like a piece of fur­niture. When it came to the scribbled stamp-pa­per pas­ted on the win­dow, Flam­beau rose, seem­ing to fill the room with his huge shoulders.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I think you had bet­ter tell me the rest on the nearest road to this man’s house. It strikes me, some­how, that there is no time to be lost.”

“De­lighted,” said An­gus, rising also, “though he’s safe enough for the present, for I’ve set four men to watch the only hole to his bur­row.”

They turned out into the street, the small priest trundling after them with the do­cil­ity of a small dog. He merely said, in a cheer­ful way, like one mak­ing con­ver­sa­tion, “How quick the snow gets thick on the ground.”

As they threaded the steep side streets already powdered with sil­ver, An­gus fin­ished his story; and by the time they reached the cres­cent with the tower­ing flats, he had leis­ure to turn his at­ten­tion to the four sen­tinels. The chest­nut seller, both be­fore and after re­ceiv­ing a sov­er­eign, swore stub­bornly that he had watched the door and seen no vis­itor enter. The po­lice­man was even more em­phatic. He said he had had ex­per­i­ence of crooks of all kinds, in top hats and in rags; he wasn’t so green as to ex­pect sus­pi­cious char­ac­ters to look sus­pi­cious; he looked out for any­body, and, so help him, there had been nobody. And when all three men gathered round the gil­ded com­mis­sion­aire, who still stood smil­ing astride of the porch, the ver­dict was more fi­nal still.

“I’ve got a right to ask any man, duke or dust­man, what he wants in these flats,” said the gen­ial and gold-laced gi­ant, “and I’ll swear there’s been nobody to ask since this gen­tle­man went away.”

The un­im­port­ant Father Brown, who stood back, look­ing mod­estly at the pave­ment, here ven­tured to say meekly, “Has nobody been up and down stairs, then, since the snow began to fall? It began while we were all round at Flam­beau’s.”

“Nobody’s been in here, sir, you can take it from me,” said the of­fi­cial, with beam­ing au­thor­ity.

“Then I won­der what that is?” said the priest, and stared at the ground blankly like a fish.

The oth­ers all looked down also; and Flam­beau used a fierce ex­clam­a­tion and a French ges­ture. For it was un­ques­tion­ably true that down the middle of the en­trance guarded by the man in gold lace, ac­tu­ally between the ar­rog­ant, stretched legs of that co­los­sus, ran a stringy pat­tern of grey foot­prints stamped upon the white snow.

“God!” cried An­gus in­vol­un­tar­ily, “the In­vis­ible Man!”

Without an­other word he turned and dashed up the stairs, with Flam­beau fol­low­ing; but Father Brown still stood look­ing about him in the snow-clad street as if he had lost in­terest in his query.

Flam­beau was plainly in a mood to break down the door with his big shoulders; but the Scotch­man, with more reason, if less in­tu­ition, fumbled about on the frame of the door till he found the in­vis­ible but­ton; and the door swung slowly open.

It showed sub­stan­tially the same ser­ried in­terior; the hall had grown darker, though it was still struck here and there with the last crim­son shafts of sun­set, and one or two of the head­less ma­chines had been moved from their places for this or that pur­pose, and stood here and there about the twi­lit place. The green and red of their coats were all darkened in the dusk; and their like­ness to hu­man shapes slightly in­creased by their very shape­less­ness. But in the middle of them all, ex­actly where the pa­per with the red ink had lain, there lay some­thing that looked like red ink spilt out of its bottle. But it was not red ink.

With a French com­bin­a­tion of reason and vi­ol­ence Flam­beau simply said “Murder!” and, plunging into the flat, had ex­plored, every corner and cup­board of it in five minutes. But if he ex­pec­ted to find a corpse he found none. Isidore Smythe was not in the place, either dead or alive. After the most tear­ing search the two men met each other in the outer hall, with stream­ing faces and star­ing eyes. “My friend,” said Flam­beau, talk­ing French in his ex­cite­ment, “not only is your mur­derer in­vis­ible, but he makes in­vis­ible also the murdered man.”

An­gus looked round at the dim room full of dum­mies, and in some Celtic corner of his Scotch soul a shud­der star­ted. One of the life-size dolls stood im­me­di­ately over­shad­ow­ing the blood stain, summoned, per­haps, by the slain man an in­stant be­fore he fell. One of the high-shouldered hooks that served the thing for arms, was a little lif­ted, and An­gus had sud­denly the hor­rid fancy that poor Smythe’s own iron child had struck him down. Mat­ter had re­belled, and these ma­chines had killed their mas­ter. But even so, what had they done with him?

“Eaten him?” said the night­mare at his ear; and he sickened for an in­stant at the idea of rent, hu­man re­mains ab­sorbed and crushed into all that aceph­al­ous clock­work.

He re­covered his men­tal health by an em­phatic ef­fort, and said to Flam­beau, “Well, there it is. The poor fel­low has evap­or­ated like a cloud and left a red streak on the floor. The tale does not be­long to this world.”

“There is only one thing to be done,” said Flam­beau, “whether it be­longs to this world or the other. I must go down and talk to my friend.”

They des­cen­ded, passing the man with the pail, who again as­sev­er­ated that he had let no in­truder pass, down to the com­mis­sion­aire and the hov­er­ing chest­nut man, who ri­gidly re­as­ser­ted their own watch­ful­ness. But when An­gus looked round for his fourth con­firm­a­tion he could not see it, and called out with some nervous­ness, “Where is the po­lice­man?”

“I beg your par­don,” said Father Brown; “that is my fault. I just sent him down the road to in­vest­ig­ate some­thing—that I just thought worth in­vest­ig­at­ing.”

“Well, we want him back pretty soon,” said An­gus ab­ruptly, “for the wretched man up­stairs has not only been murdered, but wiped out.”

“How?” asked the priest.

“Father,” said Flam­beau, after a pause, “upon my soul I be­lieve it is more in your de­part­ment than mine. No friend or foe has entered the house, but Smythe is gone, as if stolen by the fair­ies. If that is not su­per­nat­ural, I—”

As he spoke they were all checked by an un­usual sight; the big blue po­lice­man came round the corner of the cres­cent, run­ning. He came straight up to Brown.

“You’re right, sir,” he panted, “they’ve just found poor Mr. Smythe’s body in the canal down be­low.”

An­gus put his hand wildly to his head. “Did he run down and drown him­self?” he asked.

“He never came down, I’ll swear,” said the con­stable, “and he wasn’t drowned either, for he died of a great stab over the heart.”

“And yet you saw no one enter?” said Flam­beau in a grave voice.

“Let us walk down the road a little,” said the priest.

As they reached the other end of the cres­cent he ob­served ab­ruptly, “Stu­pid of me! I for­got to ask the po­lice­man some­thing. I won­der if they found a light brown sack.”

“Why a light brown sack?” asked An­gus, as­ton­ished.

“Be­cause if it was any other col­oured sack, the case must be­gin over again,” said Father Brown; “but if it was a light brown sack, why, the case is fin­ished.”

“I am pleased to hear it,” said An­gus with hearty irony. “It hasn’t be­gun, so far as I am con­cerned.”

“You must tell us all about it,” said Flam­beau with a strange heavy sim­pli­city, like a child.

Un­con­sciously they were walk­ing with quick­en­ing steps down the long sweep of road on the other side of the high cres­cent, Father Brown lead­ing briskly, though in si­lence. At last he said with an al­most touch­ing vague­ness, “Well, I’m afraid you’ll think it so prosy. We al­ways be­gin at the ab­stract end of things, and you can’t be­gin this story any­where else.

“Have you ever no­ticed this—that people never an­swer what you say? They an­swer what you mean—or what they think you mean. Sup­pose one lady says to an­other in a coun­try house, ‘Is any­body stay­ing with you?’ the lady doesn’t an­swer ‘Yes; the but­ler, the three foot­men, the par­lour­maid, and so on,’ though the par­lour­maid may be in the room, or the but­ler be­hind her chair. She says ‘There is nobody stay­ing with us,’ mean­ing nobody of the sort you mean. But sup­pose a doc­tor in­quir­ing into an epi­demic asks, ‘Who is stay­ing in the house?’ then the lady will re­mem­ber the but­ler, the par­lour­maid, and the rest. All lan­guage is used like that; you never get a ques­tion answered lit­er­ally, even when you get it answered truly. When those four quite hon­est men said that no man had gone into the Man­sions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them. They meant no man whom they could sus­pect of be­ing your man. A man did go into the house, and did come out of it, but they never no­ticed him.”

“An in­vis­ible man?” in­quired An­gus, rais­ing his red eye­brows.

“A men­tally in­vis­ible man,” said Father Brown.

A minute or two after he re­sumed in the same un­as­sum­ing voice, like a man think­ing his way. “Of course you can’t think of such a man, un­til you do think of him. That’s where his clev­erness comes in. But I came to think of him through two or three little things in the tale Mr. An­gus told us. First, there was the fact that this Welkin went for long walks. And then there was the vast lot of stamp pa­per on the win­dow. And then, most of all, there were the two things the young lady said—things that couldn’t be true. Don’t get an­noyed,” he ad­ded hast­ily, not­ing a sud­den move­ment of the Scotch­man’s head; “she thought they were true. A per­son can’t be quite alone in a street a second be­fore she re­ceives a let­ter. She can’t be quite alone in a street when she starts read­ing a let­ter just re­ceived. There must be some­body pretty near her; he must be men­tally in­vis­ible.”

“Why must there be some­body near her?” asked An­gus.

“Be­cause,” said Father Brown, “bar­ring car­rier-pi­geons, some­body must have brought her the let­ter.”

“Do you really mean to say,” asked Flam­beau, with en­ergy, “that Welkin car­ried his rival’s let­ters to his lady?”

“Yes,” said the priest. “Welkin car­ried his rival’s let­ters to his lady. You see, he had to.”

“Oh, I can’t stand much more of this,” ex­ploded Flam­beau. “Who is this fel­low? What does he look like? What is the usual getup of a men­tally in­vis­ible man?”

“He is dressed rather hand­somely in red, blue and gold,” replied the priest promptly with pre­ci­sion, “and in this strik­ing, and even showy, cos­tume he entered Himylaya Man­sions un­der eight hu­man eyes; he killed Smythe in cold blood, and came down into the street again car­ry­ing the dead body in his arms—”

“Rev­er­end sir,” cried An­gus, stand­ing still, “are you rav­ing mad, or am I?”

“You are not mad,” said Brown, “only a little un­ob­serv­ant. You have not no­ticed such a man as this, for ex­ample.”

He took three quick strides for­ward, and put his hand on the shoulder of an or­din­ary passing post­man who had bustled by them un­noticed un­der the shade of the trees.

“Nobody ever no­tices post­men some­how,” he said thought­fully; “yet they have pas­sions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite eas­ily.”

The post­man, in­stead of turn­ing nat­ur­ally, had ducked and tumbled against the garden fence. He was a lean fair-bearded man of very or­din­ary ap­pear­ance, but as he turned an alarmed face over his shoulder, all three men were fixed with an al­most fiendish squint.

Flam­beau went back to his sabres, purple rugs and Per­sian cat, hav­ing many things to at­tend to. John Turn­bull An­gus went back to the lady at the shop, with whom that im­prudent young man con­trives to be ex­tremely com­fort­able. But Father Brown walked those snow-covered hills un­der the stars for many hours with a mur­derer, and what they said to each other will never be known.

The Honour of Israel Gow

A stormy even­ing of olive and sil­ver was clos­ing in, as Father Brown, wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch val­ley and be­held the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the glen or hol­low like a blind al­ley; and it looked like the end of the world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the man­ner of the old French-Scotch châteaux, it re­minded an Eng­lish­man of the sin­is­ter steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods that rocked round the green tur­rets looked, by com­par­ison, as black as num­ber­less flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, al­most a sleepy dev­ilry, was no mere fancy from the land­scape. For there did rest on the place one of those clouds of pride and mad­ness and mys­ter­i­ous sor­row which lie more heav­ily on the noble houses of Scot­land than on any other of the chil­dren of men. For Scot­land has a double dose of the poison called hered­ity; the sense of blood in the ar­is­to­crat, and the sense of doom in the Calvin­ist.

The priest had snatched a day from his busi­ness at Glas­gow to meet his friend Flam­beau, the am­a­teur de­tect­ive, who was at Glengyle Castle with an­other more formal of­ficer in­vest­ig­at­ing the life and death of the late Earl of Glengyle. That mys­ter­i­ous per­son was the last rep­res­ent­at­ive of a race whose valour, in­san­ity, and vi­ol­ent cun­ning had made them ter­rible even among the sin­is­ter no­bil­ity of their na­tion in the six­teenth cen­tury. None were deeper in that labyrinth­ine am­bi­tion, in cham­ber within cham­ber of that palace of lies that was built up around Mary Queen of Scots.

The rhyme in the coun­tryside at­tested the motive and the res­ult of their mach­in­a­tions can­didly:

As green sap to the sim­mer trees
Is red gold to the Ogilvies.

For many cen­tur­ies there had never been a de­cent lord in Glengyle Castle; and with the Victorian era one would have thought that all ec­cent­ri­cit­ies were ex­hausted. The last Glengyle, how­ever, sat­is­fied his tri­bal tra­di­tion by do­ing the only thing that was left for him to do; he dis­ap­peared. I do not mean that he went abroad; by all ac­counts he was still in the castle, if he was any­where. But though his name was in the church re­gister and the big red Peer­age, nobody ever saw him un­der the sun.

If any­one saw him it was a sol­it­ary manser­vant, some­thing between a groom and a gardener. He was so deaf that the more busi­ness­like as­sumed him to be dumb; while the more pen­et­rat­ing de­clared him to be half-wit­ted. A gaunt, red-haired la­bourer, with a dogged jaw and chin, but quite blank blue eyes, he went by the name of Is­rael Gow, and was the one si­lent ser­vant on that deser­ted es­tate. But the en­ergy with which he dug pota­toes, and the reg­u­lar­ity with which he dis­ap­peared into the kit­chen gave people an im­pres­sion that he was provid­ing for the meals of a su­per­ior, and that the strange earl was still con­cealed in the castle. If so­ci­ety needed any fur­ther proof that he was there, the ser­vant per­sist­ently as­ser­ted that he was not at home. One morn­ing the prov­ost and the min­is­ter (for the Glengyles were Pres­by­terian) were summoned to the castle. There they found that the gardener, groom and cook had ad­ded to his many pro­fes­sions that of an un­der­taker, and had nailed up his noble mas­ter in a coffin. With how much or how little fur­ther in­quiry this odd fact was passed, did not as yet very plainly ap­pear; for the thing had never been leg­ally in­vest­ig­ated till Flam­beau had gone north two or three days be­fore. By then the body of Lord Glengyle (if it was the body) had lain for some time in the little church­yard on the hill.

As Father Brown passed through the dim garden and came un­der the shadow of the château, the clouds were thick and the whole air damp and thun­dery. Against the last stripe of the green-gold sun­set he saw a black hu­man sil­hou­ette; a man in a chim­ney-pot hat, with a big spade over his shoulder. The com­bin­a­tion was queerly sug­gest­ive of a sex­ton; but when Brown re­membered the deaf ser­vant who dug pota­toes, he thought it nat­ural enough. He knew some­thing of the Scotch peas­ant; he knew the re­spect­ab­il­ity which might well feel it ne­ces­sary to wear “blacks” for an of­fi­cial in­quiry; he knew also the eco­nomy that would not lose an hour’s dig­ging for that. Even the man’s start and sus­pi­cious stare as the priest went by were con­son­ant enough with the vi­gil­ance and jeal­ousy of such a type.

The great door was opened by Flam­beau him­self, who had with him a lean man with iron-grey hair and pa­pers in his hand: In­spector Craven from Scot­land Yard. The en­trance hall was mostly stripped and empty; but the pale, sneer­ing faces of one or two of the wicked Ogilvies looked down out of black peri­wigs and black­en­ing can­vas.

Fol­low­ing them into an in­ner room, Father Brown found that the al­lies had been seated at a long oak table, of which their end was covered with scribbled pa­pers, flanked with whisky and ci­gars. Through the whole of its re­main­ing length it was oc­cu­pied by de­tached ob­jects ar­ranged at in­ter­vals; ob­jects about as in­ex­plic­able as any ob­jects could be. One looked like a small heap of glit­ter­ing broken glass. Another looked like a high heap of brown dust. A third ap­peared to be a plain stick of wood.

“You seem to have a sort of geo­lo­gical mu­seum here,” he said, as he sat down, jerking his head briefly in the dir­ec­tion of the brown dust and the crys­tal­line frag­ments.

“Not a geo­lo­gical mu­seum,” replied Flam­beau; “say a psy­cho­lo­gical mu­seum.”

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake,” cried the po­lice de­tect­ive laugh­ing, “don’t let’s be­gin with such long words.”

“Don’t you know what psy­cho­logy means?” asked Flam­beau with friendly sur­prise. “Psy­cho­logy means be­ing off your chump.”

“Still I hardly fol­low,” replied the of­fi­cial.

“Well,” said Flam­beau, with de­cision, “I mean that we’ve only found out one thing about Lord Glengyle. He was a ma­niac.”

The black sil­hou­ette of Gow with his top hat and spade passed the win­dow, dimly out­lined against the dark­en­ing sky. Father Brown stared pass­ively at it and answered:

“I can un­der­stand there must have been some­thing odd about the man, or he wouldn’t have bur­ied him­self alive—nor been in such a hurry to bury him­self dead. But what makes you think it was lun­acy?”

“Well,” said Flam­beau, “you just listen to the list of things Mr. Craven has found in the house.”

“We must get a candle,” said Craven, sud­denly. “A storm is get­ting up, and it’s too dark to read.”

“Have you found any candles,” asked Brown smil­ing, “among your oddit­ies?”

Flam­beau raised a grave face, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend.

“That is curi­ous, too,” he said. “Twenty-five candles, and not a trace of a can­dle­stick.”

In the rap­idly dark­en­ing room and rap­idly rising wind, Brown went along the table to where a bundle of wax candles lay among the other scrappy ex­hib­its. As he did so he bent ac­ci­dent­ally over the heap of red-brown dust; and a sharp sneeze cracked the si­lence.

“Hullo!” he said, “snuff!”

He took one of the candles, lit it care­fully, came back and stuck it in the neck of the whisky bottle. The un­rest­ful night air, blow­ing through the crazy win­dow, waved the long flame like a ban­ner. And on every side of the castle they could hear the miles and miles of black pine wood seeth­ing like a black sea around a rock.

“I will read the in­vent­ory,” began Craven gravely, pick­ing up one of the pa­pers, “the in­vent­ory of what we found loose and un­ex­plained in the castle. You are to un­der­stand that the place gen­er­ally was dis­mantled and neg­lected; but one or two rooms had plainly been in­hab­ited in a simple but not squalid style by some­body; some­body who was not the ser­vant Gow. The list is as fol­lows:

“First item. A very con­sid­er­able hoard of pre­cious stones, nearly all dia­monds, and all of them loose, without any set­ting whatever. Of course, it is nat­ural that the Ogilvies should have fam­ily jew­els; but those are ex­actly the jew­els that are al­most al­ways set in par­tic­u­lar art­icles of or­na­ment. The Ogilvies would seem to have kept theirs loose in their pock­ets, like cop­pers.

“Se­cond item. Heaps and heaps of loose snuff, not kept in a horn, or even a pouch, but ly­ing in heaps on the man­tel­pieces, on the side­board, on the pi­ano, any­where. It looks as if the old gen­tle­man would not take the trouble to look in a pocket or lift a lid.

“Third item. Here and there about the house curi­ous little heaps of minute pieces of metal, some like steel springs and some in the form of mi­cro­scopic wheels. As if they had gut­ted some mech­an­ical toy.

“Fourth item. The wax candles, which have to be stuck in bottle necks be­cause there is noth­ing else to stick them in. Now I wish you to note how very much queerer all this is than any­thing we an­ti­cip­ated. For the cent­ral riddle we are pre­pared; we have all seen at a glance that there was some­thing wrong about the last earl. We have come here to find out whether he really lived here, whether he really died here, whether that red-haired scare­crow who did his bury­ing had any­thing to do with his dy­ing. But sup­pose the worst in all this, the most lurid or me­lo­dra­matic solu­tion you like. Sup­pose the ser­vant really killed the mas­ter, or sup­pose the mas­ter isn’t really dead, or sup­pose the mas­ter is dressed up as the ser­vant, or sup­pose the ser­vant is bur­ied for the mas­ter; in­vent what Wilkie Collins’ tragedy you like, and you still have not ex­plained a candle without a can­dle­stick, or why an eld­erly gen­tle­man of good fam­ily should ha­bitu­ally spill snuff on the pi­ano. The core of the tale we could ima­gine; it is the fringes that are mys­ter­i­ous. By no stretch of fancy can the hu­man mind con­nect to­gether snuff and dia­monds and wax and loose clock­work.”

“I think I see the con­nec­tion,” said the priest. “This Glengyle was mad against the French Re­volu­tion. He was an en­thu­si­ast for the an­cien ré­gime, and was try­ing to reen­act lit­er­ally the fam­ily life of the last Bour­bons. He had snuff be­cause it was the eight­eenth cen­tury lux­ury; wax candles, be­cause they were the eight­eenth cen­tury light­ing; the mech­an­ical bits of iron rep­res­ent the lock­smith hobby of Louis XVI; the dia­monds are for the Dia­mond Neck­lace of Marie An­toinette.”

Both the other men were star­ing at him with round eyes. “What a per­fectly ex­traordin­ary no­tion!” cried Flam­beau. “Do you really think that is the truth?”

“I am per­fectly sure it isn’t,” answered Father Brown, “only you said that nobody could con­nect snuff and dia­monds and clock­work and candles. I give you that con­nec­tion off­hand. The real truth, I am very sure, lies deeper.”

He paused a mo­ment and listened to the wail­ing of the wind in the tur­rets. Then he said, “The late Earl of Glengyle was a thief. He lived a second and darker life as a des­per­ate house­breaker. He did not have any can­dle­sticks be­cause he only used these candles cut short in the little lan­tern he car­ried. The snuff he em­ployed as the fiercest French crim­in­als have used pep­per: to fling it sud­denly in dense masses in the face of a captor or pur­suer. But the fi­nal proof is in the curi­ous co­in­cid­ence of the dia­monds and the small steel wheels. Surely that makes everything plain to you? Dia­monds and small steel wheels are the only two in­stru­ments with which you can cut out a pane of glass.”

The bough of a broken pine tree lashed heav­ily in the blast against the win­dowpane be­hind them, as if in par­ody of a burg­lar, but they did not turn round. Their eyes were fastened on Father Brown.

“Dia­monds and small wheels,” re­peated Craven ru­min­at­ing. “Is that all that makes you think it the true ex­plan­a­tion?”

“I don’t think it the true ex­plan­a­tion,” replied the priest pla­cidly; “but you said that nobody could con­nect the four things. The true tale, of course, is some­thing much more hum­drum. Glengyle had found, or thought he had found, pre­cious stones on his es­tate. Some­body had bam­boozled him with those loose bril­liants, say­ing they were found in the castle cav­erns. The little wheels are some dia­mond-cut­ting af­fair. He had to do the thing very roughly and in a small way, with the help of a few shep­herds or rude fel­lows on these hills. Snuff is the one great lux­ury of such Scotch shep­herds; it’s the one thing with which you can bribe them. They didn’t have can­dle­sticks be­cause they didn’t want them; they held the candles in their hands when they ex­plored the caves.”

“Is that all?” asked Flam­beau after a long pause. “Have we got to the dull truth at last?”

“Oh, no,” said Father Brown.

As the wind died in the most dis­tant pine woods with a long hoot as of mock­ery Father Brown, with an ut­terly im­pass­ive face, went on:

“I only sug­ges­ted that be­cause you said one could not plaus­ibly con­nect snuff with clock­work or candles with bright stones. Ten false philo­sophies will fit the uni­verse; ten false the­or­ies will fit Glengyle Castle. But we want the real ex­plan­a­tion of the castle and the uni­verse. But are there no other ex­hib­its?”

Craven laughed, and Flam­beau rose smil­ing to his feet and strolled down the long table.

“Items five, six, seven, etc.,” he said, “and cer­tainly more var­ied than in­struct­ive. A curi­ous col­lec­tion, not of lead pen­cils, but of the lead out of lead pen­cils. A sense­less stick of bam­boo, with the top rather splintered. It might be the in­stru­ment of the crime. Only, there isn’t any crime. The only other things are a few old missals and little Cath­olic pic­tures, which the Ogilvies kept, I sup­pose, from the Middle Ages—their fam­ily pride be­ing stronger than their Pur­it­an­ism. We only put them in the mu­seum be­cause they seem curi­ously cut about and de­faced.”

The heady tem­pest without drove a dread­ful wrack of clouds across Glengyle and threw the long room into dark­ness as Father Brown picked up the little il­lu­min­ated pages to ex­am­ine them. He spoke be­fore the drift of dark­ness had passed; but it was the voice of an ut­terly new man.

“Mr. Craven,” said he, talk­ing like a man ten years younger, “you have got a legal war­rant, haven’t you, to go up and ex­am­ine that grave? The sooner we do it the bet­ter, and get to the bot­tom of this hor­rible af­fair. If I were you I should start now.”

“Now,” re­peated the as­ton­ished de­tect­ive, “and why now?”

“Be­cause this is ser­i­ous,” answered Brown; “this is not spilt snuff or loose pebbles, that might be there for a hun­dred reas­ons. There is only one reason I know of for this be­ing done; and the reason goes down to the roots of the world. These re­li­gious pic­tures are not just dirtied or torn or scrawled over, which might be done in idle­ness or bigotry, by chil­dren or by Prot­est­ants. These have been treated very care­fully—and very queerly. In every place where the great or­na­men­ted name of God comes in the old il­lu­min­a­tions it has been elab­or­ately taken out. The only other thing that has been re­moved is the halo round the head of the Child Je­sus. There­fore, I say, let us get our war­rant and our spade and our hatchet, and go up and break open that coffin.”

“What do you mean?” de­man­ded the Lon­don of­ficer.

“I mean,” answered the little priest, and his voice seemed to rise slightly in the roar of the gale. “I mean that the great devil of the uni­verse may be sit­ting on the top tower of this castle at this mo­ment, as big as a hun­dred ele­phants, and roar­ing like the Apo­ca­lypse. There is black ma­gic some­where at the bot­tom of this.”

“Black ma­gic,” re­peated Flam­beau in a low voice, for he was too en­lightened a man not to know of such things; “but what can these other things mean?”

“Oh, some­thing dam­nable, I sup­pose,” replied Brown im­pa­tiently. “How should I know? How can I guess all their mazes down be­low? Per­haps you can make a tor­ture out of snuff and bam­boo. Per­haps lun­at­ics lust after wax and steel fil­ings. Per­haps there is a mad­den­ing drug made of lead pen­cils! Our shortest cut to the mys­tery is up the hill to the grave.”

His com­rades hardly knew that they had obeyed and fol­lowed him till a blast of the night wind nearly flung them on their faces in the garden. Never­the­less they had obeyed him like auto­mata; for Craven found a hatchet in his hand, and the war­rant in his pocket; Flam­beau was car­ry­ing the heavy spade of the strange gardener; Father Brown was car­ry­ing the little gilt book from which had been torn the name of God.

The path up the hill to the church­yard was crooked but short; only un­der that stress of wind it seemed la­bor­i­ous and long. Far as the eye could see, farther and farther as they moun­ted the slope, were seas bey­ond seas of pines, now all aslope one way un­der the wind. And that uni­ver­sal ges­ture seemed as vain as it was vast, as vain as if that wind were whist­ling about some un­peopled and pur­pose­less planet. Through all that in­fin­ite growth of grey-blue forests sang, shrill and high, that an­cient sor­row that is in the heart of all hea­then things. One could fancy that the voices from the un­der world of un­fathom­able fo­liage were cries of the lost and wan­der­ing pa­gan gods: gods who had gone roam­ing in that ir­ra­tional forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.

“You see,” said Father Brown in low but easy tone, “Scotch people be­fore Scot­land ex­is­ted were a curi­ous lot. In fact, they’re a curi­ous lot still. But in the pre­his­toric times I fancy they really wor­shipped demons. That,” he ad­ded gen­i­ally, “is why they jumped at the Pur­itan theo­logy.”

“My friend,” said Flam­beau, turn­ing in a kind of fury, “what does all that snuff mean?”

“My friend,” replied Brown, with equal ser­i­ous­ness, “there is one mark of all genu­ine re­li­gions: ma­ter­i­al­ism. Now, devil-wor­ship is a per­fectly genu­ine re­li­gion.”

They had come up on the grassy scalp of the hill, one of the few bald spots that stood clear of the crash­ing and roar­ing pine forest. A mean en­clos­ure, partly tim­ber and partly wire, rattled in the tem­pest to tell them the bor­der of the grave­yard. But by the time In­spector Craven had come to the corner of the grave, and Flam­beau had planted his spade point down­wards and leaned on it, they were both al­most as shaken as the shaky wood and wire. At the foot of the grave grew great tall thistles, grey and sil­ver in their de­cay. Once or twice, when a ball of thistle­down broke un­der the breeze and flew past him, Craven jumped slightly as if it had been an ar­row.

Flam­beau drove the blade of his spade through the whist­ling grass into the wet clay be­low. Then he seemed to stop and lean on it as on a staff.

“Go on,” said the priest very gently. “We are only try­ing to find the truth. What are you afraid of?”

“I am afraid of find­ing it,” said Flam­beau.

The Lon­don de­tect­ive spoke sud­denly in a high crow­ing voice that was meant to be con­ver­sa­tional and cheery. “I won­der why he really did hide him­self like that. So­mething nasty, I sup­pose; was he a leper?”

“So­mething worse than that,” said Flam­beau.

“And what do you ima­gine,” asked the other, “would be worse than a leper?”

“I don’t ima­gine it,” said Flam­beau.

He dug for some dread­ful minutes in si­lence, and then said in a choked voice, “I’m afraid of his not be­ing the right shape.”

“Nor was that piece of pa­per, you know,” said Father Brown quietly, “and we sur­vived even that piece of pa­per.”

Flam­beau dug on with a blind en­ergy. But the tem­pest had shouldered away the chok­ing grey clouds that clung to the hills like smoke and re­vealed grey fields of faint star­light be­fore he cleared the shape of a rude tim­ber coffin, and some­how tipped it up upon the turf. Craven stepped for­ward with his axe; a thistle-top touched him, and he flinched. Then he took a firmer stride, and hacked and wrenched with an en­ergy like Flam­beau’s till the lid was torn off, and all that was there lay glim­mer­ing in the grey star­light.

“Bones,” said Craven; and then he ad­ded, “but it is a man,” as if that were some­thing un­ex­pec­ted.

“Is he,” asked Flam­beau in a voice that went oddly up and down, “is he all right?”

“Seems so,” said the of­ficer husk­ily, bend­ing over the ob­scure and de­cay­ing skel­eton in the box. “Wait a minute.”

A vast heave went over Flam­beau’s huge fig­ure. “And now I come to think of it,” he cried, “why in the name of mad­ness shouldn’t he be all right? What is it gets hold of a man on these cursed cold moun­tains? I think it’s the black, brain­less re­pe­ti­tion; all these forests, and over all an an­cient hor­ror of un­con­scious­ness. It’s like the dream of an athe­ist. Pine-trees and more pine-trees and mil­lions more pine-trees—”

“God!” cried the man by the coffin, “but he hasn’t got a head.”

While the oth­ers stood ri­gid the priest, for the first time, showed a leap of startled con­cern.

“No head!” he re­peated. “No head?” as if he had al­most ex­pec­ted some other de­fi­ciency.

Half-wit­ted vis­ions of a head­less baby born to Glengyle, of a head­less youth hid­ing him­self in the castle, of a head­less man pa­cing those an­cient halls or that gor­geous garden, passed in pan­or­ama through their minds. But even in that stiffened in­stant the tale took no root in them and seemed to have no reason in it. They stood listen­ing to the loud woods and the shriek­ing sky quite fool­ishly, like ex­hausted an­im­als. Thought seemed to be some­thing enorm­ous that had sud­denly slipped out of their grasp.

“There are three head­less men,” said Father Brown, “stand­ing round this open grave.”

The pale de­tect­ive from Lon­don opened his mouth to speak, and left it open like a yokel, while a long scream of wind tore the sky; then he looked at the axe in his hands as if it did not be­long to him, and dropped it.

“Father,” said Flam­beau in that in­fant­ile and heavy voice he used very sel­dom, “what are we to do?”

His friend’s reply came with the pent promptitude of a gun go­ing off.

“Sleep!” cried Father Brown. “Sleep. We have come to the end of the ways. Do you know what sleep is? Do you know that every man who sleeps be­lieves in God? It is a sac­ra­ment; for it is an act of faith and it is a food. And we need a sac­ra­ment, if only a nat­ural one. So­mething has fallen on us that falls very sel­dom on men; per­haps the worst thing that can fall on them.”

Craven’s par­ted lips came to­gether to say, “What do you mean?”

The priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered: “We have found the truth; and the truth makes no sense.”

He went down the path in front of them with a plunging and reck­less step very rare with him, and when they reached the castle again he threw him­self upon sleep with the sim­pli­city of a dog.

Des­pite his mys­tic praise of slum­ber, Father Brown was up earlier than any­one else ex­cept the si­lent gardener; and was found smoking a big pipe and watch­ing that ex­pert at his speech­less la­bours in the kit­chen garden. Towards day­break the rock­ing storm had ended in roar­ing rains, and the day came with a curi­ous fresh­ness. The gardener seemed even to have been con­vers­ing, but at sight of the de­tect­ives he planted his spade sul­lenly in a bed and, say­ing some­thing about his break­fast, shif­ted along the lines of cab­bages and shut him­self in the kit­chen. “He’s a valu­able man, that,” said Father Brown. “He does the pota­toes amaz­ingly. Still,” he ad­ded, with a dis­pas­sion­ate char­ity, “he has his faults; which of us hasn’t? He doesn’t dig this bank quite reg­u­larly. There, for in­stance,” and he stamped sud­denly on one spot. “I’m really very doubt­ful about that potato.”

“And why?” asked Craven, amused with the little man’s hobby.

“I’m doubt­ful about it,” said the other, “be­cause old Gow was doubt­ful about it him­self. He put his spade in meth­od­ic­ally in every place but just this. There must be a mighty fine potato just here.”

Flam­beau pulled up the spade and im­petu­ously drove it into the place. He turned up, un­der a load of soil, some­thing that did not look like a potato, but rather like a mon­strous, over-domed mush­room. But it struck the spade with a cold click; it rolled over like a ball, and grinned up at them.

“The Earl of Glengyle,” said Brown sadly, and looked down heav­ily at the skull.

Then, after a mo­ment­ary med­it­a­tion, he plucked the spade from Flam­beau, and, say­ing “We must hide it again,” clamped the skull down in the earth. Then he leaned his little body and huge head on the great handle of the spade, that stood up stiffly in the earth, and his eyes were empty and his fore­head full of wrinkles. “If one could only con­ceive,” he muttered, “the mean­ing of this last mon­stros­ity.” And lean­ing on the large spade handle, he bur­ied his brows in his hands, as men do in church.

All the corners of the sky were bright­en­ing into blue and sil­ver; the birds were chat­ter­ing in the tiny garden trees; so loud it seemed as if the trees them­selves were talk­ing. But the three men were si­lent enough.

“Well, I give it all up,” said Flam­beau at last bois­ter­ously. “My brain and this world don’t fit each other; and there’s an end of it. Snuff, spoilt Prayer Books, and the in­sides of mu­sical boxes—what—”

Brown threw up his bothered brow and rapped on the spade handle with an in­tol­er­ance quite un­usual with him. “Oh, tut, tut, tut, tut!” he cried. “All that is as plain as a pikestaff. I un­der­stood the snuff and clock­work, and so on, when I first opened my eyes this morn­ing. And since then I’ve had it out with old Gow, the gardener, who is neither so deaf nor so stu­pid as he pre­tends. There’s noth­ing amiss about the loose items. I was wrong about the torn mass-book, too; there’s no harm in that. But it’s this last busi­ness. Desec­rat­ing graves and steal­ing dead men’s heads—surely there’s harm in that? Surely there’s black ma­gic still in that? That doesn’t fit in to the quite simple story of the snuff and the candles.” And, strid­ing about again, he smoked moodily.

“My friend,” said Flam­beau, with a grim hu­mour, “you must be care­ful with me and re­mem­ber I was once a crim­inal. The great ad­vant­age of that es­tate was that I al­ways made up the story my­self, and ac­ted it as quick as I chose. This de­tect­ive busi­ness of wait­ing about is too much for my French im­pa­tience. All my life, for good or evil, I have done things at the in­stant; I al­ways fought duels the next morn­ing; I al­ways paid bills on the nail; I never even put off a visit to the dent­ist—”

Father Brown’s pipe fell out of his mouth and broke into three pieces on the gravel path. He stood rolling his eyes, the ex­act pic­ture of an idiot. “Lord, what a turnip I am!” he kept say­ing. “Lord, what a turnip!” Then, in a some­what groggy kind of way, he began to laugh.

“The dent­ist!” he re­peated. “Six hours in the spir­itual abyss, and all be­cause I never thought of the dent­ist! Such a simple, such a beau­ti­ful and peace­ful thought! Friends, we have passed a night in hell; but now the sun is risen, the birds are singing, and the ra­di­ant form of the dent­ist con­soles the world.”

“I will get some sense out of this,” cried Flam­beau, strid­ing for­ward, “if I use the tor­tures of the In­quis­i­tion.”

Father Brown repressed what ap­peared to be a mo­ment­ary dis­pos­i­tion to dance on the now sun­lit lawn and cried quite piteously, like a child, “Oh, let me be silly a little. You don’t know how un­happy I have been. And now I know that there has been no deep sin in this busi­ness at all. Only a little lun­acy, per­haps—and who minds that?”

He spun round once more, then faced them with grav­ity.

“This is not a story of crime,” he said; “rather it is the story of a strange and crooked hon­esty. We are deal­ing with the one man on earth, per­haps, who has taken no more than his due. It is a study in the sav­age liv­ing lo­gic that has been the re­li­gion of this race.

“That old local rhyme about the house of Glengyle—

As green sap to the sim­mer trees
Is red gold to the Ogilvies—

was lit­eral as well as meta­phor­ical. It did not merely mean that the Glengyles sought for wealth; it was also true that they lit­er­ally gathered gold; they had a huge col­lec­tion of or­na­ments and utensils in that metal. They were, in fact, misers whose mania took that turn. In the light of that fact, run through all the things we found in the castle. Dia­monds without their gold rings; candles without their gold can­dle­sticks; snuff without the gold snuff­boxes; pen­cil-leads without the gold pen­cil-cases; a walk­ing stick without its gold top; clock­work without the gold clocks—or rather watches. And, mad as it sounds, be­cause the halos and the name of God in the old missals were of real gold; these also were taken away.”

The garden seemed to brighten, the grass to grow gayer in the strength­en­ing sun, as the crazy truth was told. Flam­beau lit a ci­gar­ette as his friend went on.

“Were taken away,” con­tin­ued Father Brown; “were taken away—but not stolen. Thieves would never have left this mys­tery. Thieves would have taken the gold snuff­boxes, snuff and all; the gold pen­cil-cases, lead and all. We have to deal with a man with a pe­cu­liar con­science, but cer­tainly a con­science. I found that mad mor­al­ist this morn­ing in the kit­chen garden yon­der, and I heard the whole story.

“The late Archibald Ogilvie was the nearest ap­proach to a good man ever born at Glengyle. But his bit­ter vir­tue took the turn of the mis­an­thrope; he moped over the dis­hon­esty of his an­cest­ors, from which, some­how, he gen­er­al­ised a dis­hon­esty of all men. More es­pe­cially he dis­trus­ted phil­an­thropy or free-giv­ing; and he swore if he could find one man who took his ex­act rights he should have all the gold of Glengyle. Hav­ing de­livered this de­fi­ance to hu­man­ity he shut him­self up, without the smal­lest ex­pect­a­tion of its be­ing answered. One day, how­ever, a deaf and seem­ingly sense­less lad from a dis­tant vil­lage brought him a be­lated tele­gram; and Glengyle, in his ac­rid pleas­antry, gave him a new farth­ing. At least he thought he had done so, but when he turned over his change he found the new farth­ing still there and a sov­er­eign gone. The ac­ci­dent offered him vis­tas of sneer­ing spec­u­la­tion. Either way, the boy would show the greasy greed of the spe­cies. Either he would van­ish, a thief steal­ing a coin; or he would sneak back with it vir­tu­ously, a snob seek­ing a re­ward. In the middle of that night Lord Glengyle was knocked up out of his bed—for he lived alone—and forced to open the door to the deaf idiot. The idiot brought with him, not the sov­er­eign, but ex­actly nine­teen shil­lings and el­even-pence three-farthings in change.

“Then the wild ex­actitude of this ac­tion took hold of the mad lord’s brain like fire. He swore he was Dio­genes, that had long sought an hon­est man, and at last had found one. He made a new will, which I have seen. He took the lit­eral youth into his huge, neg­lected house, and trained him up as his sol­it­ary ser­vant and—after an odd man­ner—his heir. And whatever that queer creature un­der­stands, he un­der­stood ab­so­lutely his lord’s two fixed ideas: first, that the let­ter of right is everything; and second, that he him­self was to have the gold of Glengyle. So far, that is all; and that is simple. He has stripped the house of gold, and taken not a grain that was not gold; not so much as a grain of snuff. He lif­ted the gold leaf off an old il­lu­min­a­tion, fully sat­is­fied that he left the rest un­spoilt. All that I un­der­stood; but I could not un­der­stand this skull busi­ness. I was really un­easy about that hu­man head bur­ied among the pota­toes. It dis­tressed me—till Flam­beau said the word.

“It will be all right. He will put the skull back in the grave, when he has taken the gold out of the tooth.”

And, in­deed, when Flam­beau crossed the hill that morn­ing, he saw that strange be­ing, the just miser, dig­ging at the de­sec­rated grave, the plaid round his throat thrash­ing out in the moun­tain wind; the sober top hat on his head.

The Wrong Shape

Cer­tain of the great roads go­ing north out of Lon­don con­tinue far into the coun­try a sort of at­ten­u­ated and in­ter­rup­ted spectre of a street, with great gaps in the build­ing, but pre­serving the line. Here will be a group of shops, fol­lowed by a fenced field or pad­dock, and then a fam­ous pub­lic-house, and then per­haps a mar­ket garden or a nurs­ery garden, and then one large private house, and then an­other field and an­other inn, and so on. If any­one walks along one of these roads he will pass a house which will prob­ably catch his eye, though he may not be able to ex­plain its at­trac­tion. It is a long, low house, run­ning par­al­lel with the road, painted mostly white and pale green, with a ver­anda and sun-blinds, and porches capped with those quaint sort of cu­polas like wooden um­brel­las that one sees in some old-fash­ioned houses. In fact, it is an old-fash­ioned house, very Eng­lish and very sub­urban in the good old wealthy Clapham sense. And yet the house has a look of hav­ing been built chiefly for the hot weather. Look­ing at its white paint and sun-blinds one thinks vaguely of pugar­ees and even of palm trees. I can­not trace the feel­ing to its root; per­haps the place was built by an An­glo-In­dian.

Anyone passing this house, I say, would be name­lessly fas­cin­ated by it; would feel that it was a place about which some story was to be told. And he would have been right, as you shall shortly hear. For this is the story—the story of the strange things that did really hap­pen in it in the Whit­sun­tide of the year 18—:

Anyone passing the house on the Thursday be­fore Whit-Sunday at about half-past four p.m. would have seen the front door open, and Father Brown, of the small church of St. Mungo, come out smoking a large pipe in com­pany with a very tall French friend of his called Flam­beau, who was smoking a very small ci­gar­ette. These per­sons may or may not be of in­terest to the reader, but the truth is that they were not the only in­ter­est­ing things that were dis­played when the front door of the white-and-green house was opened. There are fur­ther pe­cu­li­ar­it­ies about this house, which must be de­scribed to start with, not only that the reader may un­der­stand this tra­gic tale, but also that he may real­ise what it was that the open­ing of the door re­vealed.

The whole house was built upon the plan of a T, but a T with a very long cross piece and a very short tail piece. The long cross piece was the front­age that ran along in face of the street, with the front door in the middle; it was two stor­ies high, and con­tained nearly all the im­port­ant rooms. The short tail piece, which ran out at the back im­me­di­ately op­pos­ite the front door, was one story high, and con­sisted only of two long rooms, the one lead­ing into the other. The first of these two rooms was the study in which the cel­eb­rated Mr. Quin­ton wrote his wild Ori­ental poems and ro­mances. The farther room was a glass con­ser­vat­ory full of trop­ical blos­soms of quite unique and al­most mon­strous beauty, and on such af­ter­noons as these glow­ing with gor­geous sun­light. Thus when the hall door was open, many a passerby lit­er­ally stopped to stare and gasp; for he looked down a per­spect­ive of rich apart­ments to some­thing really like a trans­form­a­tion scene in a fairy play: purple clouds and golden suns and crim­son stars that were at once scorch­ingly vivid and yet trans­par­ent and far away.

Leonard Quin­ton, the poet, had him­self most care­fully ar­ranged this ef­fect; and it is doubt­ful whether he so per­fectly ex­pressed his per­son­al­ity in any of his poems. For he was a man who drank and bathed in col­ours, who in­dulged his lust for col­our some­what to the neg­lect of form—even of good form. This it was that had turned his genius so wholly to east­ern art and im­agery; to those be­wil­der­ing car­pets or blind­ing em­broid­er­ies in which all the col­ours seem fallen into a for­tu­nate chaos, hav­ing noth­ing to typify or to teach. He had at­temp­ted, not per­haps with com­plete artistic suc­cess, but with ac­know­ledged ima­gin­a­tion and in­ven­tion, to com­pose epics and love stor­ies re­flect­ing the riot of vi­ol­ent and even cruel col­our; tales of trop­ical heav­ens of burn­ing gold or blood-red cop­per; of east­ern her­oes who rode with twelve-turbaned mitres upon ele­phants painted purple or pea­cock green; of gi­gantic jew­els that a hun­dred negroes could not carry, but which burned with an­cient and strange-hued fires.

In short (to put the mat­ter from the more com­mon point of view), he dealt much in east­ern heav­ens, rather worse than most west­ern hells; in east­ern mon­archs, whom we might pos­sibly call ma­ni­acs; and in east­ern jew­els which a Bond Street jew­eller (if the hun­dred stag­ger­ing negroes brought them into his shop) might pos­sibly not re­gard as genu­ine. Quin­ton was a genius, if a mor­bid one; and even his mor­bid­ity ap­peared more in his life than in his work. In tem­pera­ment he was weak and waspish, and his health had suffered heav­ily from ori­ental ex­per­i­ments with opium. His wife—a hand­some, hard­work­ing, and, in­deed, over­worked wo­man ob­jec­ted to the opium, but ob­jec­ted much more to a live In­dian her­mit in white and yel­low robes, whom her hus­band in­sisted on en­ter­tain­ing for months to­gether, a Vir­gil to guide his spirit through the heav­ens and the hells of the east.

It was out of this artistic house­hold that Father Brown and his friend stepped on to the door­step; and to judge from their faces, they stepped out of it with much re­lief. Flam­beau had known Quin­ton in wild stu­dent days in Paris, and they had re­newed the ac­quaint­ance for a week­end; but apart from Flam­beau’s more re­spons­ible de­vel­op­ments of late, he did not get on well with the poet now. Chok­ing one­self with opium and writ­ing little erotic verses on vel­lum was not his no­tion of how a gen­tle­man should go to the devil. As the two paused on the door­step, be­fore tak­ing a turn in the garden, the front garden gate was thrown open with vi­ol­ence, and a young man with a bil­ly­cock hat on the back of his head tumbled up the steps in his eager­ness. He was a dis­sip­ated-look­ing youth with a gor­geous red neck­tie all awry, as if he had slept in it, and he kept fid­get­ing and lash­ing about with one of those little join­ted canes.

“I say,” he said breath­lessly, “I want to see old Quin­ton. I must see him. Has he gone?”

“Mr. Quin­ton is in, I be­lieve,” said Father Brown, clean­ing his pipe, “but I do not know if you can see him. The doc­tor is with him at present.”

The young man, who seemed not to be per­fectly sober, stumbled into the hall; and at the same mo­ment the doc­tor came out of Quin­ton’s study, shut­ting the door and be­gin­ning to put on his gloves.

“See Mr. Quin­ton?” said the doc­tor coolly. “No, I’m afraid you can’t. In fact, you mustn’t on any ac­count. Nobody must see him; I’ve just given him his sleep­ing draught.”

“No, but look here, old chap,” said the youth in the red tie, try­ing af­fec­tion­ately to cap­ture the doc­tor by the lapels of his coat. “Look here. I’m simply sewn up, I tell you. I—”

“It’s no good, Mr. Atkin­son,” said the doc­tor, for­cing him to fall back; “when you can al­ter the ef­fects of a drug I’ll al­ter my de­cision,” and, set­tling on his hat, he stepped out into the sun­light with the other two. He was a bull-necked, good-tempered little man with a small mous­tache, in­ex­press­ibly or­din­ary, yet giv­ing an im­pres­sion of ca­pa­city.

The young man in the bil­ly­cock, who did not seem to be gif­ted with any tact in deal­ing with people bey­ond the gen­eral idea of clutch­ing hold of their coats, stood out­side the door, as dazed as if he had been thrown out bod­ily, and si­lently watched the other three walk away to­gether through the garden.

“That was a sound, spank­ing lie I told just now,” re­marked the med­ical man, laugh­ing. “In point of fact, poor Quin­ton doesn’t have his sleep­ing draught for nearly half an hour. But I’m not go­ing to have him bothered with that little beast, who only wants to bor­row money that he wouldn’t pay back if he could. He’s a dirty little scamp, though he is Mrs. Quin­ton’s brother, and she’s as fine a wo­man as ever walked.”

“Yes,” said Father Brown. “She’s a good wo­man.”

“So I pro­pose to hang about the garden till the creature has cleared off,” went on the doc­tor, “and then I’ll go in to Quin­ton with the medi­cine. Atkin­son can’t get in, be­cause I locked the door.”

“In that case, Dr. Har­ris,” said Flam­beau, “we might as well walk round at the back by the end of the con­ser­vat­ory. There’s no en­trance to it that way, but it’s worth see­ing, even from the out­side.”

“Yes, and I might get a squint at my pa­tient,” laughed the doc­tor, “for he prefers to lie on an ot­to­man right at the end of the con­ser­vat­ory amid all those blood-red poin­set­tias; it would give me the creeps. But what are you do­ing?”

Father Brown had stopped for a mo­ment, and picked up out of the long grass, where it had al­most been wholly hid­den, a queer, crooked Ori­ental knife, in­laid ex­quis­itely in col­oured stones and metals.

“What is this?” asked Father Brown, re­gard­ing it with some dis­fa­vour.

“Oh, Quin­ton’s, I sup­pose,” said Dr. Har­ris care­lessly; “he has all sorts of Chinese knick­knacks about the place. Or per­haps it be­longs to that mild Hindu of his whom he keeps on a string.”

“What Hindu?” asked Father Brown, still star­ing at the dag­ger in his hand.

“Oh, some In­dian con­juror,” said the doc­tor lightly; “a fraud, of course.”

“You don’t be­lieve in ma­gic?” asked Father Brown, without look­ing up.

“O crickey! ma­gic!” said the doc­tor.

“It’s very beau­ti­ful,” said the priest in a low, dream­ing voice; “the col­ours are very beau­ti­ful. But it’s the wrong shape.”

“What for?” asked Flam­beau, star­ing.

“For any­thing. It’s the wrong shape in the ab­stract. Don’t you ever feel that about Eastern art? The col­ours are in­tox­ic­at­ingly lovely; but the shapes are mean and bad—de­lib­er­ately mean and bad. I have seen wicked things in a Tur­key car­pet.”

“Mon Dieu!” cried Flam­beau, laugh­ing.

“They are let­ters and sym­bols in a lan­guage I don’t know; but I know they stand for evil words,” went on the priest, his voice grow­ing lower and lower. “The lines go wrong on pur­pose—like ser­pents doub­ling to es­cape.”

“What the devil are you talk­ing about?” said the doc­tor with a loud laugh.

Flam­beau spoke quietly to him in an­swer. “The Father some­times gets this mys­tic’s cloud on him,” he said; “but I give you fair warn­ing that I have never known him to have it ex­cept when there was some evil quite near.”

“Oh, rats!” said the sci­ent­ist.

“Why, look at it,” cried Father Brown, hold­ing out the crooked knife at arm’s length, as if it were some glit­ter­ing snake. “Don’t you see it is the wrong shape? Don’t you see that it has no hearty and plain pur­pose? It does not point like a spear. It does not sweep like a scythe. It does not look like a weapon. It looks like an in­stru­ment of tor­ture.”

“Well, as you don’t seem to like it,” said the jolly Har­ris, “it had bet­ter be taken back to its owner. Haven’t we come to the end of this con­foun­ded con­ser­vat­ory yet? This house is the wrong shape, if you like.”

“You don’t un­der­stand,” said Father Brown, shak­ing his head. “The shape of this house is quaint—it is even laugh­able. But there is noth­ing wrong about it.”

As they spoke they came round the curve of glass that ended the con­ser­vat­ory, an un­in­ter­rup­ted curve, for there was neither door nor win­dow by which to enter at that end. The glass, how­ever, was clear, and the sun still bright, though be­gin­ning to set; and they could see not only the flam­boy­ant blos­soms in­side, but the frail fig­ure of the poet in a brown vel­vet coat ly­ing lan­guidly on the sofa, hav­ing, ap­par­ently, fallen half asleep over a book. He was a pale, slight man, with loose, chest­nut hair and a fringe of beard that was the para­dox of his face, for the beard made him look less manly. These traits were well known to all three of them; but even had it not been so, it may be doubted whether they would have looked at Quin­ton just then. Their eyes were riv­eted on an­other ob­ject.

Ex­actly in their path, im­me­di­ately out­side the round end of the glass build­ing, was stand­ing a tall man, whose drapery fell to his feet in fault­less white, and whose bare, brown skull, face, and neck gleamed in the set­ting sun like splen­did bronze. He was look­ing through the glass at the sleeper, and he was more mo­tion­less than a moun­tain.

“Who is that?” cried Father Brown, step­ping back with a hiss­ing in­take of his breath.

“Oh, it is only that Hindu hum­bug,” growled Har­ris; “but I don’t know what the deuce he’s do­ing here.”

“It looks like hyp­not­ism,” said Flam­beau, bit­ing his black mous­tache.

“Why are you un­med­ical fel­lows al­ways talk­ing bosh about hyp­not­ism?” cried the doc­tor. “It looks a deal more like burg­lary.”

“Well, we will speak to it, at any rate,” said Flam­beau, who was al­ways for ac­tion. One long stride took him to the place where the In­dian stood. Bow­ing from his great height, which over­topped even the Ori­ental’s, he said with pla­cid im­pudence:

“Good even­ing, sir. Do you want any­thing?”

Quite slowly, like a great ship turn­ing into a har­bour, the great yel­low face turned, and looked at last over its white shoulder. They were startled to see that its yel­low eye­lids were quite sealed, as in sleep. “Thank you,” said the face in ex­cel­lent Eng­lish. “I want noth­ing.” Then, half open­ing the lids, so as to show a slit of opales­cent eye­ball, he re­peated, “I want noth­ing.” Then he opened his eyes wide with a start­ling stare, said, “I want noth­ing,” and went rust­ling away into the rap­idly dark­en­ing garden.

“The Chris­tian is more mod­est,” muttered Father Brown; “he wants some­thing.”

“What on earth was he do­ing?” asked Flam­beau, knit­ting his black brows and lower­ing his voice.

“I should like to talk to you later,” said Father Brown.

The sun­light was still a real­ity, but it was the red light of even­ing, and the bulk of the garden trees and bushes grew blacker and blacker against it. They turned round the end of the con­ser­vat­ory, and walked in si­lence down the other side to get round to the front door. As they went they seemed to wake some­thing, as one startles a bird, in the deeper corner between the study and the main build­ing; and again they saw the white-robed fakir slide out of the shadow, and slip round to­wards the front door. To their sur­prise, how­ever, he had not been alone. They found them­selves ab­ruptly pulled up and forced to ban­ish their be­wil­der­ment by the ap­pear­ance of Mrs. Quin­ton, with her heavy golden hair and square pale face, ad­van­cing on them out of the twi­light. She looked a little stern, but was en­tirely cour­teous.

“Good even­ing, Dr. Har­ris,” was all she said.

“Good even­ing, Mrs. Quin­ton,” said the little doc­tor heart­ily. “I am just go­ing to give your hus­band his sleep­ing draught.”

“Yes,” she said in a clear voice. “I think it is quite time.” And she smiled at them, and went sweep­ing into the house.

“That wo­man’s over-driven,” said Father Brown; “that’s the kind of wo­man that does her duty for twenty years, and then does some­thing dread­ful.”

The little doc­tor looked at him for the first time with an eye of in­terest. “Did you ever study medi­cine?” he asked.

“You have to know some­thing of the mind as well as the body,” answered the priest; “we have to know some­thing of the body as well as the mind.”

“Well,” said the doc­tor, “I think I’ll go and give Quin­ton his stuff.”

They had turned the corner of the front façade, and were ap­proach­ing the front door­way. As they turned into it they saw the man in the white robe for the third time. He came so straight to­wards the front door that it seemed quite in­cred­ible that he had not just come out of the study op­pos­ite to it. Yet they knew that the study door was locked.

Father Brown and Flam­beau, how­ever, kept this weird con­tra­dic­tion to them­selves, and Dr. Har­ris was not a man to waste his thoughts on the im­possible. He per­mit­ted the om­ni­present Asi­atic to make his exit, and then stepped briskly into the hall. There he found a fig­ure which he had already for­got­ten. The in­ane Atkin­son was still hanging about, hum­ming and pok­ing things with his knobby cane. The doc­tor’s face had a spasm of dis­gust and de­cision, and he whispered rap­idly to his com­pan­ion: “I must lock the door again, or this rat will get in. But I shall be out again in two minutes.”

He rap­idly un­locked the door and locked it again be­hind him, just balk­ing a blun­der­ing charge from the young man in the bil­ly­cock. The young man threw him­self im­pa­tiently on a hall chair. Flam­beau looked at a Per­sian il­lu­min­a­tion on the wall; Father Brown, who seemed in a sort of daze, dully eyed the door. In about four minutes the door was opened again. Atkin­son was quicker this time. He sprang for­ward, held the door open for an in­stant, and called out: “Oh, I say, Quin­ton, I want—”

From the other end of the study came the clear voice of Quin­ton, in some­thing between a yawn and a yell of weary laughter.

“Oh, I know what you want. Take it, and leave me in peace. I’m writ­ing a song about pea­cocks.”

Be­fore the door closed half a sov­er­eign came fly­ing through the aper­ture; and Atkin­son, stum­bling for­ward, caught it with sin­gu­lar dex­ter­ity.

“So that’s settled,” said the doc­tor, and, lock­ing the door sav­agely, he led the way out into the garden.

“Poor Leonard can get a little peace now,” he ad­ded to Father Brown; “he’s locked in all by him­self for an hour or two.”

“Yes,” answered the priest; “and his voice soun­ded jolly enough when we left him.” Then he looked gravely round the garden, and saw the loose fig­ure of Atkin­son stand­ing and jingling the half-sov­er­eign in his pocket, and bey­ond, in the purple twi­light, the fig­ure of the In­dian sit­ting bolt up­right upon a bank of grass with his face turned to­wards the set­ting sun. Then he said ab­ruptly: “Where is Mrs. Quin­ton!”

“She has gone up to her room,” said the doc­tor. “That is her shadow on the blind.”

Father Brown looked up, and frown­ingly scru­tin­ised a dark out­line at the gas-lit win­dow.

“Yes,” he said, “that is her shadow,” and he walked a yard or two and threw him­self upon a garden seat.

Flam­beau sat down be­side him; but the doc­tor was one of those en­er­getic people who live nat­ur­ally on their legs. He walked away, smoking, into the twi­light, and the two friends were left to­gether.

“My father,” said Flam­beau in French, “what is the mat­ter with you?”

Father Brown was si­lent and mo­tion­less for half a minute, then he said: “Su­per­sti­tion is ir­re­li­gious, but there is some­thing in the air of this place. I think it’s that In­dian—at least, partly.”

He sank into si­lence, and watched the dis­tant out­line of the In­dian, who still sat ri­gid as if in prayer. At first sight he seemed mo­tion­less, but as Father Brown watched him he saw that the man swayed ever so slightly with a rhythmic move­ment, just as the dark tree­tops swayed ever so slightly in the wind that was creep­ing up the dim garden paths and shuff­ling the fallen leaves a little.

The land­scape was grow­ing rap­idly dark, as if for a storm, but they could still see all the fig­ures in their vari­ous places. Atkin­son was lean­ing against a tree with a list­less face; Quin­ton’s wife was still at her win­dow; the doc­tor had gone strolling round the end of the con­ser­vat­ory; they could see his ci­gar like a will-o’-the-wisp; and the fakir still sat ri­gid and yet rock­ing, while the trees above him began to rock and al­most to roar. Storm was cer­tainly com­ing.

“When that In­dian spoke to us,” went on Brown in a con­ver­sa­tional un­der­tone, “I had a sort of vis­ion, a vis­ion of him and all his uni­verse. Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he said ‘I want noth­ing,’ it meant only that he was im­pen­et­rable, that Asia does not give it­self away. Then he said again, ‘I want noth­ing,’ and I knew that he meant that he was suf­fi­cient to him­self, like a cos­mos, that he needed no God, neither ad­mit­ted any sins. And when he said the third time, ‘I want noth­ing,’ he said it with blaz­ing eyes. And I knew that he meant lit­er­ally what he said; that noth­ing was his de­sire and his home; that he was weary for noth­ing as for wine; that an­ni­hil­a­tion, the mere de­struc­tion of everything or any­thing—”

Two drops of rain fell; and for some reason Flam­beau star­ted and looked up, as if they had stung him. And the same in­stant the doc­tor down by the end of the con­ser­vat­ory began run­ning to­wards them, call­ing out some­thing as he ran.

As he came among them like a bomb­shell the rest­less Atkin­son happened to be tak­ing a turn nearer to the house front; and the doc­tor clutched him by the col­lar in a con­vuls­ive grip. “Foul play!” he cried; “what have you been do­ing to him, you dog?”

The priest had sprung erect, and had the voice of steel of a sol­dier in com­mand.

“No fight­ing,” he cried coolly; “we are enough to hold any­one we want to. What is the mat­ter, doc­tor?”

“Th­ings are not right with Quin­ton,” said the doc­tor, quite white. “I could just see him through the glass, and I don’t like the way he’s ly­ing. It’s not as I left him, any­how.”

“Let us go in to him,” said Father Brown shortly. “You can leave Mr. Atkin­son alone. I have had him in sight since we heard Quin­ton’s voice.”

“I will stop here and watch him,” said Flam­beau hur­riedly. “You go in and see.”

The doc­tor and the priest flew to the study door, un­locked it, and fell into the room. In do­ing so they nearly fell over the large ma­hogany table in the centre at which the poet usu­ally wrote; for the place was lit only by a small fire kept for the in­valid. In the middle of this table lay a single sheet of pa­per, evid­ently left there on pur­pose. The doc­tor snatched it up, glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and cry­ing, “Good God, look at that!” plunged to­ward the glass room bey­ond, where the ter­rible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crim­son memory of the sun­set.

Father Brown read the words three times be­fore he put down the pa­per. The words were: “I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!” They were in the quite in­im­it­able, not to say il­legible, hand­writ­ing of Leonard Quin­ton.

Then Father Brown, still keep­ing the pa­per in his hand, strode to­wards the con­ser­vat­ory, only to meet his med­ical friend com­ing back with a face of as­sur­ance and col­lapse. “He’s done it,” said Har­ris.

They went to­gether through the gor­geous un­nat­ural beauty of cac­tus and aza­lea and found Leonard Quin­ton, poet and ro­man­cer, with his head hanging down­ward off his ot­to­man and his red curls sweep­ing the ground. Into his left side was thrust the queer dag­ger that they had picked up in the garden, and his limp hand still res­ted on the hilt.

Out­side the storm had come at one stride, like the night in Col­eridge, and garden and glass roof were darkened with driv­ing rain. Father Brown seemed to be study­ing the pa­per more than the corpse; he held it close to his eyes; and seemed try­ing to read it in the twi­light. Then he held it up against the faint light, and, as he did so, light­ning stared at them for an in­stant so white that the pa­per looked black against it.

Dark­ness full of thun­der fol­lowed, and after the thun­der Father Brown’s voice said out of the dark: “Doc­tor, this pa­per is the wrong shape.”

“What do you mean?” asked Doc­tor Har­ris, with a frown­ing stare.

“It isn’t square,” answered Brown. “It has a sort of edge snipped off at the corner. What does it mean?”

“How the deuce should I know?” growled the doc­tor. “Shall we move this poor chap, do you think? He’s quite dead.”

“No,” answered the priest; “we must leave him as he lies and send for the po­lice.” But he was still scru­tin­ising the pa­per.

As they went back through the study he stopped by the table and picked up a small pair of nail scis­sors. “Ah,” he said, with a sort of re­lief, “this is what he did it with. But yet—” And he knit­ted his brows.

“Oh, stop fool­ing with that scrap of pa­per,” said the doc­tor em­phat­ic­ally. “It was a fad of his. He had hun­dreds of them. He cut all his pa­per like that,” as he poin­ted to a stack of ser­mon pa­per still un­used on an­other and smal­ler table. Father Brown went up to it and held up a sheet. It was the same ir­reg­u­lar shape.

“Quite so,” he said. “And here I see the corners that were snipped off.” And to the in­dig­na­tion of his col­league he began to count them.

“That’s all right,” he said, with an apo­lo­getic smile. “Twenty-three sheets cut and twenty-two corners cut off them. And as I see you are im­pa­tient we will re­join the oth­ers.”

“Who is to tell his wife?” asked Dr. Har­ris. “Will you go and tell her now, while I send a ser­vant for the po­lice?”

“As you will,” said Father Brown in­dif­fer­ently. And he went out to the hall door.

Here also he found a drama, though of a more grot­esque sort. It showed noth­ing less than his big friend Flam­beau in an at­ti­tude to which he had long been un­ac­cus­tomed, while upon the path­way at the bot­tom of the steps was sprawl­ing with his boots in the air the ami­able Atkin­son, his bil­ly­cock hat and walk­ing cane sent fly­ing in op­pos­ite dir­ec­tions along the path. Atkin­son had at length wear­ied of Flam­beau’s al­most pa­ternal cus­tody, and had en­deav­oured to knock him down, which was by no means a smooth game to play with the Roi des Apaches, even after that mon­arch’s ab­dic­a­tion.

Flam­beau was about to leap upon his en­emy and se­cure him once more, when the priest pat­ted him eas­ily on the shoulder.

“Make it up with Mr. Atkin­son, my friend,” he said. “Beg a mu­tual par­don and say ‘Good night.’ We need not de­tain him any longer.” Then, as Atkin­son rose some­what doubt­fully and gathered his hat and stick and went to­wards the garden gate, Father Brown said in a more ser­i­ous voice: “Where is that In­dian?”

They all three (for the doc­tor had joined them) turned in­vol­un­tar­ily to­wards the dim grassy bank amid the toss­ing trees purple with twi­light, where they had last seen the brown man sway­ing in his strange pray­ers. The In­dian was gone.

“Con­found him,” cried the doc­tor, stamp­ing furi­ously. “Now I know that it was that nig­ger that did it.”

“I thought you didn’t be­lieve in ma­gic,” said Father Brown quietly.

“No more I did,” said the doc­tor, rolling his eyes. “I only know that I loathed that yel­low devil when I thought he was a sham wiz­ard. And I shall loathe him more if I come to think he was a real one.”

“Well, his hav­ing es­caped is noth­ing,” said Flam­beau. “For we could have proved noth­ing and done noth­ing against him. One hardly goes to the par­ish con­stable with a story of sui­cide im­posed by witch­craft or auto­sug­ges­tion.”

Mean­while Father Brown had made his way into the house, and now went to break the news to the wife of the dead man.

When he came out again he looked a little pale and tra­gic, but what passed between them in that in­ter­view was never known, even when all was known.

Flam­beau, who was talk­ing quietly with the doc­tor, was sur­prised to see his friend re­appear so soon at his el­bow; but Brown took no no­tice, and merely drew the doc­tor apart. “You have sent for the po­lice, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Har­ris. “They ought to be here in ten minutes.”

“Will you do me a fa­vour?” said the priest quietly. “The truth is, I make a col­lec­tion of these curi­ous stor­ies, which of­ten con­tain, as in the case of our Hindu friend, ele­ments which can hardly be put into a po­lice re­port. Now, I want you to write out a re­port of this case for my private use. Yours is a clever trade,” he said, look­ing the doc­tor gravely and stead­ily in the face. “I some­times think that you know some de­tails of this mat­ter which you have not thought fit to men­tion. Mine is a con­fid­en­tial trade like yours, and I will treat any­thing you write for me in strict con­fid­ence. But write the whole.”

The doc­tor, who had been listen­ing thought­fully with his head a little on one side, looked the priest in the face for an in­stant, and said: “All right,” and went into the study, clos­ing the door be­hind him.

“Flam­beau,” said Father Brown, “there is a long seat there un­der the ver­anda, where we can smoke out of the rain. You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, per­haps, be si­lent with you.”

They es­tab­lished them­selves com­fort­ably in the ver­anda seat; Father Brown, against his com­mon habit, ac­cep­ted a good ci­gar and smoked it stead­ily in si­lence, while the rain shrieked and rattled on the roof of the ver­anda.

“My friend,” he said at length, “this is a very queer case. A very queer case.”

“I should think it was,” said Flam­beau, with some­thing like a shud­der.

“You call it queer, and I call it queer,” said the other, “and yet we mean quite op­pos­ite things. The mod­ern mind al­ways mixes up two dif­fer­ent ideas: mys­tery in the sense of what is mar­vel­lous, and mys­tery in the sense of what is com­plic­ated. That is half its dif­fi­culty about mir­acles. A mir­acle is start­ling; but it is simple. It is simple be­cause it is a mir­acle. It is power com­ing dir­ectly from God (or the devil) in­stead of in­dir­ectly through nature or hu­man wills. Now, you mean that this busi­ness is mar­vel­lous be­cause it is mi­ra­cu­lous, be­cause it is witch­craft worked by a wicked In­dian. Under­stand, I do not say that it was not spir­itual or diabolic. Heaven and hell only know by what sur­round­ing in­flu­ences strange sins come into the lives of men. But for the present my point is this: If it was pure ma­gic, as you think, then it is mar­vel­lous; but it is not mys­ter­i­ous—that is, it is not com­plic­ated. The qual­ity of a mir­acle is mys­ter­i­ous, but its man­ner is simple. Now, the man­ner of this busi­ness has been the re­verse of simple.”

The storm that had slackened for a little seemed to be swell­ing again, and there came heavy move­ments as of faint thun­der. Father Brown let fall the ash of his ci­gar and went on:

“There has been in this in­cid­ent,” he said, “a twis­ted, ugly, com­plex qual­ity that does not be­long to the straight bolts either of heaven or hell. As one knows the crooked track of a snail, I know the crooked track of a man.”

The white light­ning opened its enorm­ous eye in one wink, the sky shut up again, and the priest went on:

“Of all these crooked things, the crook­ed­est was the shape of that piece of pa­per. It was crook­eder than the dag­ger that killed him.”

“You mean the pa­per on which Quin­ton con­fessed his sui­cide,” said Flam­beau.

“I mean the pa­per on which Quin­ton wrote, ‘I die by my own hand,’ ” answered Father Brown. “The shape of that pa­per, my friend, was the wrong shape; the wrong shape, if ever I have seen it in this wicked world.”

“It only had a corner snipped off,” said Flam­beau, “and I un­der­stand that all Quin­ton’s pa­per was cut that way.”

“It was a very odd way,” said the other, “and a very bad way, to my taste and fancy. Look here, Flam­beau, this Quin­ton—God re­ceive his soul!—was per­haps a bit of a cur in some ways, but he really was an artist, with the pen­cil as well as the pen. His hand­writ­ing, though hard to read, was bold and beau­ti­ful. I can’t prove what I say; I can’t prove any­thing. But I tell you with the full force of con­vic­tion that he could never have cut that mean little piece off a sheet of pa­per. If he had wanted to cut down pa­per for some pur­pose of fit­ting in, or bind­ing up, or what­not, he would have made quite a dif­fer­ent slash with the scis­sors. Do you re­mem­ber the shape? It was a mean shape. It was a wrong shape. Like this. Don’t you re­mem­ber?”

And he waved his burn­ing ci­gar be­fore him in the dark­ness, mak­ing ir­reg­u­lar squares so rap­idly that Flam­beau really seemed to see them as fiery hiero­glyph­ics upon the dark­ness—hiero­glyph­ics such as his friend had spoken of, which are un­de­cipher­able, yet can have no good mean­ing.

“But,” said Flam­beau, as the priest put his ci­gar in his mouth again and leaned back, star­ing at the roof, “sup­pose some­body else did use the scis­sors. Why should some­body else, cut­ting pieces off his ser­mon pa­per, make Quin­ton com­mit sui­cide?”

Father Brown was still lean­ing back and star­ing at the roof, but he took his ci­gar out of his mouth and said: “Quin­ton never did com­mit sui­cide.”

Flam­beau stared at him. “Why, con­found it all,” he cried, “then why did he con­fess to sui­cide?”

The priest leant for­ward again, settled his el­bows on his knees, looked at the ground, and said, in a low, dis­tinct voice: “He never did con­fess to sui­cide.”

Flam­beau laid his ci­gar down. “You mean,” he said, “that the writ­ing was forged?”

“No,” said Father Brown. “Quin­ton wrote it all right.”

“Well, there you are,” said the ag­grav­ated Flam­beau; “Quin­ton wrote, ‘I die by my own hand,’ with his own hand on a plain piece of pa­per.”

“Of the wrong shape,” said the priest calmly.

“Oh, the shape be damned!” cried Flam­beau. “What has the shape to do with it?”

“There were twenty-three snipped pa­pers,” re­sumed Brown un­moved, “and only twenty-two pieces snipped off. There­fore one of the pieces had been des­troyed, prob­ably that from the writ­ten pa­per. Does that sug­gest any­thing to you?”

A light dawned on Flam­beau’s face, and he said: “There was some­thing else writ­ten by Quin­ton, some other words. ‘They will tell you I die by my own hand,’ or ‘Do not be­lieve that—’ ”

“Hot­ter, as the chil­dren say,” said his friend. “But the piece was hardly half an inch across; there was no room for one word, let alone five. Can you think of any­thing hardly big­ger than a comma which the man with hell in his heart had to tear away as a testi­mony against him?”

“I can think of noth­ing,” said Flam­beau at last.

“What about quo­ta­tion marks?” said the priest, and flung his ci­gar far into the dark­ness like a shoot­ing star.

All words had left the other man’s mouth, and Father Brown said, like one go­ing back to fun­da­ment­als:

“Leonard Quin­ton was a ro­man­cer, and was writ­ing an Ori­ental ro­mance about wiz­ardry and hyp­not­ism. He—”

At this mo­ment the door opened briskly be­hind them, and the doc­tor came out with his hat on. He put a long en­vel­ope into the priest’s hands.

“That’s the doc­u­ment you wanted,” he said, “and I must be get­ting home. Good night.”

“Good night,” said Father Brown, as the doc­tor walked briskly to the gate. He had left the front door open, so that a shaft of gas­light fell upon them. In the light of this Brown opened the en­vel­ope and read the fol­low­ing words:

Dear Father Brown—

Vi­cisti Ga­lilee. Other­wise, damn your eyes, which are very pen­et­rat­ing ones. Can it be pos­sible that there is some­thing in all that stuff of yours after all?

I am a man who has ever since boy­hood be­lieved in Nature and in all nat­ural func­tions and in­stincts, whether men called them moral or im­moral. Long be­fore I be­came a doc­tor, when I was a school­boy keep­ing mice and spiders, I be­lieved that to be a good an­imal is the best thing in the world. But just now I am shaken; I have be­lieved in Nature; but it seems as if Nature could be­tray a man. Can there be any­thing in your bosh? I am really get­ting mor­bid.

I loved Quin­ton’s wife. What was there wrong in that? Nature told me to, and it’s love that makes the world go round. I also thought quite sin­cerely that she would be hap­pier with a clean an­imal like me than with that tor­ment­ing little lun­atic. What was there wrong in that? I was only fa­cing facts, like a man of sci­ence. She would have been hap­pier.

Ac­cord­ing to my own creed I was quite free to kill Quin­ton, which was the best thing for every­body, even him­self. But as a healthy an­imal I had no no­tion of killing my­self. I re­solved, there­fore, that I would never do it un­til I saw a chance that would leave me scot free. I saw that chance this morn­ing.

I have been three times, all told, into Quin­ton’s study today. The first time I went in he would talk about noth­ing but the weird tale, called “The Cure of a Saint,” which he was writ­ing, which was all about how some In­dian her­mit made an Eng­lish col­onel kill him­self by think­ing about him. He showed me the last sheets, and even read me the last para­graph, which was some­thing like this: “The con­queror of the Pun­jab, a mere yel­low skel­eton, but still gi­gantic, man­aged to lift him­self on his el­bow and gasp in his nephew’s ear: ‘I die by my own hand, yet I die murdered!’ ” It so happened by one chance out of a hun­dred, that those last words were writ­ten at the top of a new sheet of pa­per. I left the room, and went out into the garden in­tox­ic­ated with a fright­ful op­por­tun­ity.

We walked round the house; and two more things happened in my fa­vour. You sus­pec­ted an In­dian, and you found a dag­ger which the In­dian might most prob­ably use. Tak­ing the op­por­tun­ity to stuff it in my pocket I went back to Quin­ton’s study, locked the door, and gave him his sleep­ing draught. He was against an­swer­ing Atkin­son at all, but I urged him to call out and quiet the fel­low, be­cause I wanted a clear proof that Quin­ton was alive when I left the room for the second time. Quin­ton lay down in the con­ser­vat­ory, and I came through the study. I am a quick man with my hands, and in a minute and a half I had done what I wanted to do. I had emp­tied all the first part of Quin­ton’s ro­mance into the fire­place, where it burnt to ashes. Then I saw that the quo­ta­tion marks wouldn’t do, so I snipped them off, and to make it seem like­lier, snipped the whole quire to match. Then I came out with the know­ledge that Quin­ton’s con­fes­sion of sui­cide lay on the front table, while Quin­ton lay alive but asleep in the con­ser­vat­ory bey­ond.

The last act was a des­per­ate one; you can guess it: I pre­ten­ded to have seen Quin­ton dead and rushed to his room. I delayed you with the pa­per, and, be­ing a quick man with my hands, killed Quin­ton while you were look­ing at his con­fes­sion of sui­cide. He was half-asleep, be­ing drugged, and I put his own hand on the knife and drove it into his body. The knife was of so queer a shape that no one but an op­er­ator could have cal­cu­lated the angle that would reach his heart. I won­der if you no­ticed this.

When I had done it, the ex­traordin­ary thing happened. Nature deser­ted me. I felt ill. I felt just as if I had done some­thing wrong. I think my brain is break­ing up; I feel some sort of des­per­ate pleas­ure in think­ing I have told the thing to some­body; that I shall not have to be alone with it if I marry and have chil­dren. What is the mat­ter with me? … Mad­ness … or can one have re­morse, just as if one were in Byron’s poems! I can­not write any more.

James Er­skine Har­ris.

Father Brown care­fully fol­ded up the let­ter, and put it in his breast pocket just as there came a loud peal at the gate bell, and the wet wa­ter­proofs of sev­eral po­lice­men gleamed in the road out­side.