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Father Brown blinked rather as if he had received a buffet; then he said
slowly and with hesitation:  No, the fact is& I can t I can t quite bring
myself to believe it.
 You re not the sort of chap, said the other shrewdly,  who d say that
without reason. Why don t you think the ruby had been there all the time?
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 Only because I put it back myself, said Father Brown.
The other man stood rooted to the spot, like one whose hair was standing on
end. He opened his mouth without speech.
 Or rather, went on the priest,  I persuaded the thief to let me put it
back. I told him what I d guessed and showed him there was still time for
repentance. I don t mind telling you in professional confidence; besides, I
don t think the Mounteagles would prosecute, now they ve got the thing back,
especially considering who stole it.
 Do you mean the Master? asked the late Phroso.
 No, said Father Brown,  the Master didn t steal it.
 But I don t understand, objected the other.  Nobody was outside the window
except the Master; and a hand certainly came from outside.
 The hand came from outside, but the thief came from the inside, said Father
Brown.
 We seem to be back among the mystics again. Look here, I m a practical man;
I only wanted to know if it is all right with the ruby 
 I knew it was all wrong, said Father Brown,  before I even knew there was a
ruby.
After a pause he went on thoughtfully.  Right away back in that argument of
theirs, by the tents, I knew things were going wrong. People will tell you
that theories don t matter and that logic and philosophy aren t practical.
Don t you believe them. Reason is from God, and when things are unreasonable
there is something the matter. Now, that quite abstract argument ended with
something funny. Consider what the theories were. Hardcastle was a trifle
superior and said that all things were perfectly possible; but they were
mostly done merely by mesmerism, or clairvoyance; scientific names for
philosophical puzzles, in the usual style. But Hunter thought it all sheer
fraud and wanted to show it up. By Lady Mounteagle s testimony, he not only
went about showing up fortune tellers and such like, but he had actually come
down specially to confront this one. He didn t often come; he didn t get on
with Mounteagle, from whom, being a spendthrift, he always tried to borrow;
but when he heard the Master was coming, he came hurrying down. Very well. In
spite of that, it was Hardcastle who went to consult the wizard and Hunter who
refused. He said he d waste no time on such nonsense; having apparently wasted
a lot of his life on proving it to be nonsense. That seems inconsistent. He
thought in this case it was crystal gazing; but he found it was palmistry.
 Do you mean he made that an excuse? asked his companion, puzzled.
 I thought so at first, replied the priest;  but I know now it was not an
excuse, but a reason. He really was put off by finding it was a palmist,
because 
 Well, demanded the other impatiently.
 Because he didn t want to take his glove off, said Father Brown.
 Take his glove off? repeated the inquirer.
 If he had, said Father Brown mildly,  we should all have seen that his hand
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was painted pale brown already& Oh, yes, he did come down specially because
the Master was here. He came down very fully prepared.
 You mean, cried Phroso,  that it was Hunter s hand, painted brown, that
came in at the window? Why, he was with us all the time!
 Go and try it on the spot and you ll find it s quite possible, said the
priest.  Hunter leapt forward and leaned out of the window; in a flash he
could tear off his glove, tuck up his sleeve, and thrust his hand back round
the other side of the pillar, while he gripped the Indian with the other hand
and hallooed out that he d caught the thief. I remarked at the time that he
held the thief with one hand, where any sane man would have used two. But the
other hand was slipping the jewel into his trouser pocket.
There was a long pause and then the ex-Phrenologist said slowly.  Well,
that s a staggerer. But the thing stumps me still. For one thing, it doesn t
explain the queer behavior of the old magician himself. If he was entirely
innocent, why the devil didn t he say so? Why wasn t he indignant at being
accused and searched? Why did he only sit smiling and hinting in a sly way
what wild and wonderful things he could do?
 Ah! cried Father Brown, with a sharp note in his voice:  there you come up
against it! Against everything these people don t and won t understand. All
religions are the same, says Lady Mounteagle. Are they, by George! I tell you
some of them are so different that the best man of one creed will be callous,
where the worst man of another will be sensitive. I told you I didn t like
spiritual power, because the accent is on the word power. I don t say the
Master would steal a ruby, very likely he wouldn t; very likely he wouldn t
think it worth stealing. It wouldn t be specially his temptation to take
jewels; but it would be his temptation to take credit for miracles that didn t
belong to him any more than the jewels. It was to that sort of temptation, to
that sort of stealing that he yielded today. He liked us to think that he had
Marvelous mental powers that could make a material object fly through space;
and even when he hadn t done it, he allowed us to think he had. The point
about private property wouldn t occur primarily to him at all. The question
wouldn t present itself in the form:  Shall I steal this pebble? but only in
the form:  Could I make a pebble vanish and reappear on a distant mountain?
The question of whose pebble would strike him as irrelevant. That is what I
mean by religious being different. He is very proud of having what he calls
spiritual powers. But what he calls spiritual doesn t mean what we call moral.
It means rather mental; the power of the mind over matter; the magician
controlling the elements. Now we are not like that, even when we are no
better; even when we are worse. We, whose fathers at least were Christians,
who have grown up under those mediaeval arches even if we bedizen them with
all the demons in Asia we have the very opposite ambition and the very
opposite shame. We should all be anxious that nobody should think we had done
it. He was actually anxious that everybody should think he had even when he
hadn t. He actually stole the credit of stealing. While we were all casting
the crime from us like a snake, he was actually luring it to him like a snake
charmer. But snakes are not pets in this country! Here the traditions of
Christendom tell at once under a test like this. Look at old Mounteagle
himself, for instance! Ah, you may be as Eastern and esoteric as you like, and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]