The innocence of Father Brown
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.
The Sins of Prince Saradine
When Flambeau took his month’s holiday from his office in Westminster
he took it in a small sailing-boat, so small that it passed much of its
time as a rowing-boat. He took it, moreover, in little rivers in the
Eastern counties, rivers so small that the boat looked like a magic
boat, sailing on land through meadows and cornfields. The vessel was
just comfortable for two people; there was room only for necessities,
and Flambeau had stocked it with such things as his special philosophy
considered necessary. They reduced themselves, apparently, to four
essentials: tins of salmon, if he should want to eat; loaded revolvers,
if he should want to fight; a bottle of brandy, presumably in case he
should faint; and a priest, presumably in case he should die. With this
light luggage he crawled down the little Norfolk rivers, intending to
reach the Broads at last, but meanwhile delighting in the overhanging
gardens and meadows, the mirrored mansions or villages, lingering to
fish in the pools and corners, and in some sense hugging the shore.
Like a true philosopher, Flambeau had no aim in his holiday; but, like a
true philosopher, he had an excuse. He had a sort of half purpose, which
he took just so seriously that its success would crown the holiday, but
just so lightly that its failure would not spoil it. Years ago, when he
had been a king of thieves and the most famous figure in Paris, he had
often received wild communications of approval, denunciation, or even
love; but one had, somehow, stuck in his memory. It consisted simply of
a visiting-card, in an envelope with an English postmark. On the back of
the card was written in French and in green ink: “If you ever retire and
become respectable, come and see me. I want to meet you, for I have met
all the other great men of my time. That trick of yours of getting one
detective to arrest the other was the most splendid scene in French
history.” On the front of the card was engraved in the formal fashion,
“Prince Saradine, Reed House, Reed Island, Norfolk.”
He had not troubled much about the prince then, beyond ascertaining that
he had been a brilliant and fashionable figure in southern Italy. In his
youth, it was said, he had eloped with a married woman of high rank; the
escapade was scarcely startling in his social world, but it had clung to
men’s minds because of an additional tragedy: the alleged suicide of the
insulted husband, who appeared to have flung himself over a precipice in
Sicily. The prince then lived in Vienna for a time, but his more recent
years seemed to have been passed in perpetual and restless travel. But
when Flambeau, like the prince himself, had left European celebrity
and settled in England, it occurred to him that he might pay a surprise
visit to this eminent exile in the Norfolk Broads. Whether he should
find the place he had no idea; and, indeed, it was sufficiently small
and forgotten. But, as things fell out, he found it much sooner than he
expected.
They had moored their boat one night under a bank veiled in high grasses
and short pollarded trees. Sleep, after heavy sculling, had come to them
early, and by a corresponding accident they awoke before it was light.
To speak more strictly, they awoke before it was daylight; for a large
lemon moon was only just setting in the forest of high grass above their
heads, and the sky was of a vivid violet-blue, nocturnal but bright.
Both men had simultaneously a reminiscence of childhood, of the elfin
and adventurous time when tall weeds close over us like woods. Standing
up thus against the large low moon, the daisies really seemed to
be giant daisies, the dandelions to be giant dandelions. Somehow it
reminded them of the dado of a nursery wall-paper. The drop of the
river-bed sufficed to sink them under the roots of all shrubs and
flowers and make them gaze upwards at the grass. “By Jove!” said
Flambeau, “it’s like being in fairyland.”
Father Brown sat bolt upright in the boat and crossed himself. His
movement was so abrupt that his friend asked him, with a mild stare,
what was the matter.
“The people who wrote the mediaeval ballads,” answered the priest, “knew
more about fairies than you do. It isn’t only nice things that happen in
fairyland.”
“Oh, bosh!” said Flambeau. “Only nice things could happen under such an
innocent moon. I am for pushing on now and seeing what does really come.
We may die and rot before we ever see again such a moon or such a mood.”
“All right,” said Father Brown. “I never said it was always wrong to
enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous.”
They pushed slowly up the brightening river; the glowing violet of the
sky and the pale gold of the moon grew fainter and fainter, and faded
into that vast colourless cosmos that precedes the colours of the dawn.
When the first faint stripes of red and gold and grey split the horizon
from end to end they were broken by the black bulk of a town or village
which sat on the river just ahead of them. It was already an easy
twilight, in which all things were visible, when they came under the
hanging roofs and bridges of this riverside hamlet. The houses, with
their long, low, stooping roofs, seemed to come down to drink at the
river, like huge grey and red cattle. The broadening and whitening
dawn had already turned to working daylight before they saw any living
creature on the wharves and bridges of that silent town. Eventually they
saw a very placid and prosperous man in his shirt sleeves, with a face
as round as the recently sunken moon, and rays of red whisker around the
low arc of it, who was leaning on a post above the sluggish tide. By
an impulse not to be analysed, Flambeau rose to his full height in the
swaying boat and shouted at the man to ask if he knew Reed Island or
Reed House. The prosperous man’s smile grew slightly more expansive,
and he simply pointed up the river towards the next bend of it. Flambeau
went ahead without further speech.
The boat took many such grassy corners and followed many such reedy and
silent reaches of river; but before the search had become monotonous
they had swung round a specially sharp angle and come into the silence
of a sort of pool or lake, the sight of which instinctively arrested
them. For in the middle of this wider piece of water, fringed on every
side with rushes, lay a long, low islet, along which ran a long, low
house or bungalow built of bamboo or some kind of tough tropic cane.
The upstanding rods of bamboo which made the walls were pale yellow, the
sloping rods that made the roof were of darker red or brown, otherwise
the long house was a thing of repetition and monotony. The early morning