FullReads

“His eyes do look queer,” cried the young woman, strongly moved. “You brutes; I believe it’s hurting him!”

“Not that, I think,” said Dr Hood; “the eyes have certainly a singular expression. But I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as expressing rather such slight psychological abnormality–“

“Oh, bosh!” cried Father Brown: “can’t you see he’s laughing?”

“Laughing!” repeated the doctor, with a start; “but what on earth can he be laughing at?”

“Well,” replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, “not to put too fine a point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I’m a little inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about it.”

“Now you know about what?” asked Hood, in some exasperation.

“Now I know,” replied the priest, “the profession of Mr Todhunter.”

He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another with what seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting into an equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those who had to watch it. He laughed very much over the hat, still more uproariously over the broken glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him into mortal convulsions of amusement. Then he turned to the fuming specialist.

“Dr Hood,” he cried enthusiastically, “you are a great poet! You have called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that is than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts are rather commonplace and comic by comparison.”

“I have no notion what you are talking about,” said Dr Hood rather haughtily; “my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete. A place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer the term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as yet be ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass–“

“That’s it, that’s it,” said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly, “that’s the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He is so extremely absent. I suppose,” he added reflectively, “that there was never anybody so absent as Mr Glass.”

“Do you mean he is absent from the town?” demanded the doctor.

“I mean he is absent from everywhere,” answered Father Brown; “he is absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak.”

“Do you seriously mean,” said the specialist with a smile, “that there is no such person?”

The priest made a sign of assent. “It does seem a pity,” he said.

Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. “Well,” he said, “before we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first proof we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell into this room. If there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?”

“It is Mr Todhunter’s,” replied Father Brown.

“But it doesn’t fit him,” cried Hood impatiently. “He couldn’t possibly wear it!”

Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. “I never said he could wear it,” he answered. “I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist on a shade of difference, a hat that is his.”

“And what is the shade of difference?” asked the criminologist with a slight sneer.

“My good sir,” cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin to impatience, “if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter’s shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between a man’s hat and the hats that are his.”

“But a hatter,” protested Hood, “can get money out of his stock of new hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?”

“Rabbits,” replied Father Brown promptly.

“What?” cried Dr Hood.

“Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper,” said the reverend gentleman with rapidity. “Didn’t you see it all when you found out the faked ropes? It’s just the same with the sword. Mr Todhunter hasn’t got a scratch on him, as you say; but he’s got a scratch in him, if you follow me.”

“Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes?” inquired Mrs MacNab sternly.