The Incredulity of Father Brown

going to a funeral; but I can’t say that their faces were very funereal. Never have I seen two people looking in their own way more respectably radiant and cheerful. They stopped and saluted me and then she told me they were married and living in a little house on the outskirts of the town, where the doctor was continuing his practice. This rather surprised me, because I knew that her old father’s will had left her his property; and I hinted at it delicately by saying I was going along to her father’s old place and had half expected to meet her there. But she only laughed and said: ‘Oh, we’ve given up all that. My husband doesn’t like heiresses.’ And I discovered with some astonishment they really had insisted on restoring the property to poor Donald; so I hope he’s had a healthy shock and will treat it sensibly. There was never much really the matter with him; he was very young and his father was not very wise. But it was in connection with that that she said something I didn’t understand at the time; but now I’m sure it must be as you say. She said with a sort of sudden and splendid arrogance that was entirely altruistic:

“ ‘I hope it’ll stop that red-haired fool from fussing any more about the will. Does he think my husband, who has given up a crest and a coronet as old as the Crusades for his principles, would kill an old man in a summerhouse for a legacy like that?’ Then she laughed again and said, ‘My husband isn’t killing anybody except in the way of business. Why, he didn’t even ask his friends to call on the secretary.’ Now, of course, I see what she meant.”

“I see part of what she meant, of course,” said Father Brown. “What did she mean exactly by the secretary fussing about the will?”

Fiennes smiled as he answered. “I wish you knew the secretary, Father Brown. It would be a joy to you to watch him make things hum, as he calls it. He made the house of mourning hum. He filled the funeral with all the snap and zip of the brightest sporting event. There was no holding him, after something had really happened. I’ve told you how he used to oversee the gardener as he did the garden, and how he instructed the lawyer in the law. Needless to say, he also instructed the surgeon in the practice of surgery; and as the surgeon was Dr. Valentine, you may be sure it ended in accusing him of something worse than bad surgery. The secretary got it fixed in his red head that the doctor had committed the crime; and when the police arrived he was perfectly sublime. Need I say that he became on the spot the greatest of all amateur detectives? Sherlock Holmes never towered over Scotland Yard with more Titanic intellectual pride and scorn than Colonel Druce’s private secretary over the police investigating Colonel Druce’s death. I tell you it was a joy to see him. He strode about with an abstracted air, tossing his scarlet crest of hair and giving curt impatient replies. Of course it was his demeanour during these days that made Druce’s daughter so wild with him. Of course he had a theory. It’s just the sort of theory a man would have in a book; and Floyd is the sort of man who ought to be in a book. He’d be better fun and less bother in a book.”

“What was his theory?” asked the other.

“Oh, it was full of pep,” replied Fiennes gloomily. “It would have been glorious copy if it could have held together for ten minutes longer. He said the Colonel was still alive when they found him in the summerhouse and the doctor killed him with the surgical instrument on pretence of cutting the clothes.”

“I see,” said the priest. “I suppose he was lying flat on his face on the mud floor as a form of siesta.”

“It’s wonderful what hustle will do,” continued his informant. “I believe Floyd would have got his great theory into the papers at any rate, and perhaps had the doctor arrested, when all these things were blown sky high as if by dynamite by the discovery of that dead body lying under the Rock of Fortune. And that’s what we come back to after all. I suppose the suicide is almost a confession. But nobody will ever know the whole story.”

There was a silence, and then the priest said modestly: “I rather think I know the whole story.”

Fiennes stared. “But look here,” he cried; “how do you come to know the whole story, or to be sure it’s the true story? You’ve been sitting here a hundred miles away writing a sermon; do you mean to tell me you really know what happened already? If you’ve really come to the end, where in the world do you begin? What started you off with your own story?”

Father Brown jumped up with a very unusual excitement and his first exclamation was like an explosion.

“The dog!” he cried. “The dog, of course! You had the whole story in your hands in the business of the dog on the beach, if you’d only noticed the dog properly.”

Fiennes stared still more. “But you told me before that my feelings about the dog were all nonsense, and the dog had nothing to do with it.”

“The dog had everything to do with it,” said Father Brown, “as you’d have found out if you’d only treated the dog as a dog and not as God Almighty judging the souls of men.”

He paused in an embarrassed way for a moment, and then said, with a rather pathetic air of apology:

“The truth is, I happen to be awfully fond of dogs. And it seemed to me that in all this lurid halo of dog superstitions nobody was really thinking about the poor dog at all. To begin