THE SECRET OF
FATHER BROWN.
BY
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney
First Published in 1927
To
FATHER JOHN O'CONNOR
OF ST. CUTHBERT'S, BRADFORD
WHOSE TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION
WITH A GRATITUDE GREATER THAN
THE WORLD
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN
1. THE MIRROR OF THE MAGISTRATE
2. THE MAN WITH TWO BEARDS
3. THE SONG OF THE FLYING FISH
4. THE ACTOR AND THE ALIBI
5. THE VANISHING OF VAUDREY
6. THE WORST CRIME IN THE WORLD
7. THE RED MOON OF MERU
8. THE CHIEF MOURNER OF MARNE
THE SECRET OF FLAMBEAU
THESECRET OF FATHER BROWN
FLAMBEAU, once the most famous criminal in France and later avery private detective in England, had long retired from bothprofessions. Some say a career of crime had left him with too manyscruples for a career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of romanticescapes and tricks of evasion, he had ended at what some might consideran appropriate address: in a castle in Spain. The castle, however, wassolid though relatively small; and the black vineyard and green stripesof kitchen garden covered a respectable square on the brown hillside.For Flambeau, after all his violent adventures, still possessed what ispossessed by so many Latins, what is absent (for instance) in so manyAmericans, the energy to retire. It can be seen in many a largehotel-proprietor whose one ambition is to be a small peasant. It can beseen in many a French provincial shopkeeper, who pauses at the momentwhen he might develop into a detestable millionaire and buy a street ofshops, to fall back quietly and comfortably on domesticity and dominoes.Flambeau had casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a SpanishLady, married and brought up a large family on a Spanish estate, withoutdisplaying any apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders. But onone particular morning he was observed by his family to be unusuallyrestless and excited; and he outran the little boys and descended thegreater part of the long mountain slope to meet the visitor who wascoming across the valley; even when the visitor was still a black dot inthe distance.
The black dot gradually increased in size without very much altering inthe shape; for it continued, roughly speaking, to be both round andblack. The black clothes of clerics were not unknown upon those hills;but these clothes, however clerical, had about them something at oncecommonplace and yet almost jaunty in comparison with the cassock orsoutane, and marked the wearer as a man from the northwestern islands,as clearly as if he had been labelled Clapham Junction. He carried ashort thick umbrella with a knob