The Incredulity of Father Brown

and the two have a quarrel. Now I’m bound to say that the secretary is something of a busybody. He’s one of those hot and headlong people whose warmth of temperament has unfortunately turned mostly to pugnacity and bristling suspicion; to distrusting people instead of to trusting them. That sort of red-haired red-hot fellow is always either universally credulous or universally incredulous; and sometimes both. He was not only a Jack-of-all-trades, but he knew better than all tradesmen. He not only knew everything, but he warned everybody against everybody. All that must be taken into account in his suspicions about Valentine; but in that particular case there seems to have been something behind it. He said the name of Valentine was not really Valentine. He said he had seen him elsewhere known by the name of De Villon. He said it would invalidate the will; of course he was kind enough to explain to the lawyer what the law was on that point. They were both in a frightful wax.”

Father Brown laughed. “People often are when they are to witness a will,” he said; “for one thing, it means that they can’t have any legacy under it. But what did Dr. Valentine say? No doubt the universal secretary knew more about the doctor’s name than the doctor did. But even the doctor might have some information about his own name.”

Fiennes paused a moment before he replied.

“Dr. Valentine took it in a curious way. Dr. Valentine is a curious man. His appearance is rather striking but very foreign. He is young but wears a beard cut square; and his face is very pale, dreadfully pale and dreadfully serious. His eyes have a sort of ache in them, as if he ought to wear glasses or had given himself a headache with thinking; but he is quite handsome and always very formally dressed, with a top hat and a dark coat and a little red rosette. His manner is rather cold and haughty, and he has a way of staring at you which is very disconcerting. When thus charged with having changed his name, he merely stared like a sphinx and then said with a little laugh that he supposed Americans had no names to change. At that I think the Colonel also got into a fuss and said all sorts of angry things to the doctor; all the more angry because of the doctor’s pretensions to a future place in his family. But I shouldn’t have thought much of that but for a few words that I happened to hear later, early in the afternoon of the tragedy. I don’t want to make a lot of them, for they weren’t the sort of words on which one would like, in the ordinary way, to play the eavesdropper. As I was passing out towards the front gate with my two companions and the dog, I heard voices which told me that Dr. Valentine and Miss Druce had withdrawn for a moment into the shadow of the house, in an angle behind a row of flowering plants, and were talking to each other in passionate whisperings⁠—sometimes almost like hissings; for it was something of a lovers’ quarrel as well as a lovers’ tryst. Nobody repeats the sort of things they said for the most part; but in an unfortunate business like this I’m bound to say that there was repeated more than once a phrase about killing somebody. In fact, the girl seemed to be begging him not to kill somebody, or saying that no provocation could justify killing anybody; which seems an unusual sort of talk to address to a gentleman who has dropped in to tea.”

“Do you know,” asked the priest, “whether Dr. Valentine seemed to be very angry after the scene with the secretary and the Colonel⁠—I mean about witnessing the will?”

“By all accounts,” replied the other, “he wasn’t half so angry as the secretary was. It was the secretary who went away raging after witnessing the will.”

“And now,” said Father Brown, “what about the will itself?”

“The Colonel was a very wealthy man, and his will was important. Traill wouldn’t tell us the alteration at that stage, but I have since heard, only this morning in fact, that most of the money was transferred from the son to the daughter. I told you that Druce was wild with my friend Donald over his dissipated hours.”

“The question of motive has been rather overshadowed by the question of method,” observed Father Brown thoughtfully. “At that moment, apparently, Miss Druce was the immediate gainer by the death.”

“Good God! What a cold-blooded way of talking,” cried Fiennes, staring at him. “You don’t really mean to hint that she⁠—”

“Is she going to marry that Dr. Valentine?” asked the other.

“Some people are against it,” answered his friend. “But he is liked and respected in the place and is a skilled and devoted surgeon.

“So devoted a surgeon,” said Father Brown, “that he had surgical instruments with him when he went to call on the young lady at teatime. For he must have used a lancet or something, and he never seems to have gone home.”

Fiennes sprang to his feet and looked at him in a heat of inquiry. “You suggest he might have used the very same lancet⁠—”

Father Brown shook his head. “All these suggestions are fancies just now,” he said. “The problem is not who did it or what did it, but how it was done. We might find many men and even many tools⁠—pins and shears and lancets. But how did a man get into the room? How did even a pin get into it?”

He was staring reflectively at the ceiling as he spoke, but as he said the last words his eye cocked in an alert fashion as if he had suddenly seen a curious fly on the ceiling.

“Well, what would you do about it?” asked the young man. “You have a lot of experience, what would you advise now?”

“I’m afraid I’m not much