It wasn’t on John Dalmon that he planned vengeance,
replied the priest, gravely.
Father Brown went on speaking in a level voice,
sitting stolidly with his elbows on the table. Well, there are a good many
conventional confusions and errors on a point like that.
She frowned at the floor, and answered in a lower
tone:I thought I did. He didn’t come here at all, said Father Brown.
You mustn’t be hasty in a case of this sort, he
began. At least, many communities and civilizations have accounted it
so.
Musgrave shall leave it to Musgrave till the
heavens fall.
Perhaps you have never seen it the right way up,
said Father Brown.
How very carefully it was arranged and decorated?
Engagements and all that; not what the military historians call a general
engagement.
You hated him; and that’s how I know you didn’t
kill him. Granby, but I find I can’t come north with you to - morrow.
After all, that’s the most obvious sort of escape,
and fits in with our theory very well. The joke is enough in itself, if it is
sufficiently sinister and malignant. It was always from the earliest times marked
out in tribe and village for tremendous punishment. The victim would not even be
alarmed at the razor and the hand.
It’s a very fine old estate, and still worth a lot,
but strangely enough it isn’t entailed.
He began to draw rough designs with the point of
his stumpy umbrella on the strip of sand. Sir Arthur Vaudrey was shaved here
yesterday morning, I think, said Father Brown in a level voice.
You see, he is either confiding the joke to God or
confiding it to the Devil.
But the old man counts for a good deal in the
affair, and I don’t know him; that’s the point.
I didn’t know that you were, retorted the other.
The lawyer in his turn rose from his seat and gazed across the table with wrinkled
brows.
Then comes the tobacconist, who is certainly a man,
but I am told quite a small and timid one.
Captain Musgrave entered the room swiftly and swept
it with a smile.
I ought to have guessed it when I first went in and
saw the thing standing there. Then, a few days ago, Dalmon made a dreadful
discovery.