The Incredulity of Father Brown

that motley group began to explain itself, the thing that had happened grew more and more difficult to explain. Leonard Smyth had come merely because Lady Diana had come; and Lady Diana had come merely because she chose. They were engaged in one of those floating Society flirtations that are all the more silly for being semi-intellectual. But the lady’s romanticism had a superstitious side to it; and she was pretty well prostrated by the terrible end of her adventure. Paul Tarrant was a private detective, possibly watching the flirtation, for some wife or husband; possibly shadowing the foreign lecturer with the moustaches, who had much the air of an undesirable alien. But if he or anybody else had intended to steal the relic, the intention had been finally frustrated. And, to all mortal appearance, what had frustrated it was either an incredible coincidence or the intervention of the ancient curse.

As he stood in unusual perplexity in the middle of the village street, between the inn and the church, he felt a mild shock of surprise at seeing a recently familiar but rather unexpected figure advancing up the street. Mr. Boon, the journalist, looking very haggard in the sunshine, which showed up his shabby raiment like that of a scarecrow, had his dark and deep-set eyes (rather close together on either side of the long drooping nose) fixed on the priest. The latter looked twice before he realized that the heavy dark moustache hid something like a grin or at least a grim smile.

“I thought you were going away,” said Father Brown a little sharply. “I thought you left by that train two hours ago.”

“Well, you see I didn’t,” said Boon.

“Why have you come back?” asked the priest almost sternly.

“This is not the sort of little rural paradise for a journalist to leave in a hurry,” replied the other. “Things happen too fast here to make it worth while to go back to a dull place like London. Besides, they can’t keep me out of the affair⁠—I mean this second affair. It was I that found the body, or at any rate the clothes. Quite suspicious conduct on my part, wasn’t it? Perhaps you think I wanted to dress up in his clothes. Shouldn’t I make a lovely parson?”

And the lean and long-nosed mountebank suddenly made an extravagant gesture in the middle of the marketplace, stretching out his arms and spreading out his dark-gloved hands in a sort of burlesque benediction and saying: “Oh, my dear brethren and sisters, for I would embrace you all⁠ ⁠…”

“What on earth are you talking about?” cried Father Brown, and rapped the stones slightly with his stumpy umbrella, for he was a little less patient than usual.

“Oh, you’ll find out all about it if you ask that picnic party of yours at the inn,” replied Boon scornfully. “That man Tarrant seems to suspect me merely because I found the clothes; though he only came up a minute too late to find them himself. But there are all sorts of mysteries in this business. The little man with the big moustaches may have more in him than meets the eye. For that matter I don’t see why you shouldn’t have killed the poor fellow yourself.”

Father Brown did not seem in the least annoyed at the suggestion, but he seemed exceedingly bothered and bewildered by the remark.

“Do you mean,” he asked with simplicity, “that it was I who tried to kill Professor Smaill?”

“Not at all,” said the other, waving his hand with the air of one making a handsome concession. “Plenty of dead people for you to choose among. Not limited to Professor Smaill. Why, didn’t you know somebody else had turned up, a good deal deader than Professor Smaill? And I don’t see why you should have done him in, in a quiet way. Religious differences, you know⁠ ⁠… lamentable disunion of Christendom.⁠ ⁠… I suppose you’ve always wanted to get the English parishes back.”

“I’m going back to the inn,” said the priest quietly; “you say the people there know what you mean, and perhaps they may be able to say it.”

In truth, just afterwards his private perplexities suffered a momentary dispersal at the news of a new calamity. The moment he entered the little parlour where the rest of the company were collected, something in their pale faces told him they were shaken by something yet more recent than the accident at the tomb. Even as he entered, Leonard Smyth was saying: “Where is all this going to end?”

“It will never end, I tell you,” repeated Lady Diana, gazing into vacancy with glassy eyes; “it will never end till we all end. One after another the curse will take us; perhaps slowly, as the poor vicar said; but it will take us all as it has taken him.”

“What in the world has happened now?” asked Father Brown.

There was a silence, and then Tarrant said in a voice that sounded a little hollow:

“Mr. Walters, the Vicar, has committed suicide. I suppose it was the shock unhinged him. But I fear there can be no doubt about it. We’ve just found his black hat and clothes on a rock jutting out from the shore. He seems to have jumped into the sea. I thought he looked as if it had knocked him half-witted, and perhaps we ought to have looked after him; but there was so much to look after.”

“You could have done nothing,” said the lady. “Don’t you see the thing is dealing doom in a sort of dreadful order? The Professor touched the cross, and he went first; the Vicar had opened the tomb, and he went second; we only entered the chapel, and we⁠—”

“Hold on,” said Father Brown, in a sharp voice he very seldom used; “this has got to stop.”

He still wore a heavy though unconscious frown, but in his eyes was no longer the cloud of mystification, but a light of almost terrible understanding.

“What a fool I am!” he muttered. “I ought to have