The Wisdom of Father Brown | Page 2

sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most startling opposite of them and
their master. In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards and there
shambled into the room a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and
umbrella as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic
bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common in
England; the man was the very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless.
The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not unlike that he
would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless sea-beast had crawled into his
room. The new-comer regarded the doctor with that beaming but breathless geniality
which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an
omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat
tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud; he
reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with an unimpaired smile on his
round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about that business of the MacNabs. I
have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong."
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd little bobbing bow
over it, as if setting everything quite right.
"I hardly understand you," replied the scientist, with a cold intensity of manner. "I fear
you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary
and educational. It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of
peculiar difficulty and importance, but--"
"Oh, this is of the greatest importance," broke in the little man called Brown. "Why, her
mother won't let them get engaged." And he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.
The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them were bright
with something that might be anger or might be amusement. "And still," he said, "I do not

quite understand."
"You see, they want to get married," said the man with the clerical hat. "Maggie MacNab
and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can be more important than that?"
The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him of many things--some said
of his health, others of his God; but they had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the
absurd. At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside,
and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting physician.
"Mr Brown," he said gravely, "it is quite fourteen and a half years since I was personally
asked to test a personal problem: then it was the case of an attempt to poison the French
President at a Lord Mayor's Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether some
friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend of hers called
Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will give the MacNab
family my best advice, as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of
England--no, better: fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell
me your story."
The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable warmth, but still
with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as if he were thanking a stranger in a
smoking-room for some trouble in passing the matches, than as if he were (as he was)
practically thanking the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field to find
a four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon after his hearty thanks, the little man
began his recital:
"I told you my name was Brown; well, that's the fact, and I'm the priest of the little
Catholic Church I dare say you've seen beyond those straggly streets, where the town
ends towards the north. In the last and straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea
like a sea-wall there is a very honest but rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a
widow called MacNab. She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and between her and
the daughter, and between her and the lodgers--well, I dare say there is a great deal to be
said on both sides. At present she has only one lodger, the young man called Todhunter;
but he has given more trouble than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of
the house."
"And the young woman