He spoke like a man who had once captured a divine vision.
Grandison Chace was still looking at him with a frown of mingled mystification and interest. It must be confessed that there did flash once beneath his heavy frown a look of something almost like alarm. It was as if the shock of the first strange confession of the priest still thrilled faintly through him like the last vibration of a thunderclap in the room. Under the surface he was saying to himself that the mistake had only been a temporary madness; that, of course, Father Brown could not really be the monster and murderer he had beheld for that blinding and bewildering instant. But was there not something wrong with the man who talked in that calm way about being a murderer? Was it possible that the priest was a little mad?
“Don’t you think,” he said, abruptly; “that this notion of yours, of a man trying to feel like a criminal, might make him a little too tolerant of crime?”
Father Brown sat up and spoke in a more staccato style.
“I know it does just the opposite. It solves the whole problem of time and sin. It gives a man his remorse beforehand.”
There was a silence; the American looked at the high and steep roof that stretched half across the enclosure; his host gazed into the fire without moving; and then the priest’s voice came on a different note, as if from lower down.
“There are two ways of renouncing the devil,” he said; “and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues.”
They did not answer and he went on in the same heavy tone, as if he were dropping words like molten lead.
“You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it horrible because I could commit it. You think of it as something like an eruption of Vesuvius; but that would not really be so terrible as this house catching fire. If a criminal suddenly appeared in this room—”
“If a criminal appeared in this room,” said Chace, smiling, “I think you would be a good deal too favourable to him. Apparently you would start by telling him that you were a criminal yourself and explaining how perfectly natural it was that he should have picked his father’s pocket or cut his mother’s throat. Frankly, I don’t think it’s practical. I think that the practical effect would be that no criminal would ever reform. It’s easy enough to theorize and take hypothetical cases; but we all know we’re only talking in the air. Sitting here in M. Duroc’s nice, comfortable house, conscious of our respectability and all the rest of it, it just gives us a theatrical thrill to talk about thieves and murderers and the mysteries of their souls. But the people who really have to deal with thieves and murderers have to deal with them differently. We are safe by the fireside; and we know the house is not on fire. We know there is not a criminal in the room.”
The M. Duroc to whom allusion had been made rose slowly from what had been called his fireside, and his huge shadow flung from the fire seemed to cover everything and darken even the very night above him.
“There is a criminal in this room,” he said. “I am one. I am Flambeau, and the police of two hemispheres are still hunting for me.”
The American remained gazing at him with eyes of a stony brightness; he seemed unable to speak or move.
“There is nothing mystical or metaphorical or vicarious about my confession,” said Flambeau. “I stole for twenty years with these two hands; I fled from the police on these two feet. I hope you will admit that my activities were practical. I hope you will admit that my judges and pursuers really had to deal with crime. Do you think I do not know all about their way of reprehending it? Have I not heard the sermons of the righteous and seen the cold stare of the respectable; have I not been lectured in the lofty and distant style, asked how it was possible for anyone to fall so low, told that no decent person could ever have dreamed of such depravity? Do you think all that ever did anything but make me laugh? Only my friend told me that he knew exactly why I stole; and I have never stolen since.”
Father Brown made a gesture as of deprecation; and Grandison Chace at last let out a long breath like a whistle.
“I have told you the exact truth,” said Flambeau; “and it is open to you to hand me over to the police.”
There was an instant of profound stillness, in which could be faintly heard the belated laughter of Flambeau’s children in the high, dark house above them, and the crunching and snorting of the great grey pigs in the twilight. And then it was cloven by a high voice, vibrant and with a touch of offence, almost surprising for those who do not understand the sensitive American spirit and how near, in spite of commonplace contrasts, it can sometimes come to the chivalry of Spain.
“Monsieur Duroc,” he said rather stiffly. “We have been friends, I hope, for some considerable period; and I should be pretty much pained to suppose you thought me capable of playing you such a trick while I was enjoying your hospitality and the society of your family, merely because you chose to tell me a little of your own autobiography of your own free will. And when you spoke merely in
