The Innocence of Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton [ebook reader online .txt] 📗

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.

 

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