“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 what not, 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.

  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 breeze rustled the reeds round the island and sang in the strange ribbed house as in a giant pan-pipe.

  “By George!” cried Flambeau; “here is the place, after all! Here is Reed Island, if ever there was one. Here is Reed House, if it is anywhere. I believe that fat man with whiskers was a fairy.”

  “Perhaps,” remarked Father Brown impartially. “If he was, he was a bad fairy.”

  But even as he spoke the impetuous Flambeau had run his boat ashore in the rattling reeds, and they stood in the long, quaint islet beside the odd and silent house.

  The house stood with its back, as it were, to the river and the only landing-stage; the main entrance was on the other side, and looked down the long island garden. The visitors approached it, therefore, by a small path running round nearly three sides of the house, close under the low eaves. Through three different windows on three different sides they looked in on the same long, well-lit room, panelled in light wood, with a large number of looking-glasses, and laid out as for an elegant lunch. The front door, when they came round to it at last, was flanked by two turquoise-blue flower pots. It was opened by a butler of the drearier type — long, lean, grey and listless — who murmured that Prince Saradine was from home at present, but was expected hourly; the house being kept ready for him and his guests. The exhibition of the card with the scrawl of green ink awoke a flicker of life in the parchment face of the depressed retainer, and it was with a certain shaky courtesy that he suggested that the strangers should remain. “His Highness may be here any minute,” he said, “and would be distressed to have just missed any gentleman he had invited. We have orders always to keep a little cold lunch for him and his friends, and I am sure he would wish it to be offered.”

  Moved with curiosity to this minor adventure, Flambeau assented gracefully, and followed the old man, who ushered him ceremoniously into the long, lightly panelled room. There was nothing very notable about it, except the rather unusual alternation of many long, low windows with many long, low oblongs of looking-glass, which gave a singular air of lightness and unsubstantialness to the place. It was somehow like lunching out of doors. One or two pictures of a quiet kind hung in the corners, one a large grey photograph of a very young man in uniform, another a red chalk sketch of two long-haired boys. Asked by Flambeau whether the soldierly person was the prince, the butler answered shortly in the negative; it was the prince’s younger brother, Captain Stephen Saradine, he said. And with that the old man seemed to dry up suddenly and lose all taste for conversation.