The Innocence of Father Brown G. K. Chesterton (dar e dil novel online reading .TXT) š
- Author: G. K. Chesterton
Book online Ā«The Innocence of Father Brown G. K. Chesterton (dar e dil novel online reading .TXT) šĀ». Author G. K. Chesterton
But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in each other, their distinguished host was not specially interested in them. No one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening. Valentin was expecting, for special reasons, a man of worldwide fame, whose friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for the American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr. Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeareā āa hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, PA, was more āprogressiveā than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought āprogressive.ā He thought Valentin āprogressive,ā thereby doing him a grave injustice.
The solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as decisive as a dinner bell. He had this great quality, which very few of us can claim, that his presence was as big as his absence. He was a huge fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well brushed back like a Germanās; his face was red, fierce and cherubic, with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean. Not long, however, did that salon merely stare at the celebrated American; his lateness had already become a domestic problem, and he was sent with all speed into the dining-room with Lady Galloway on his arm.
Except on one point the Galloways were genial and casual enough. So long as Lady Margaret did not take the arm of that adventurer OāBrien, her father was quite satisfied; and she had not done so, she had decorously gone in with Dr. Simon. Nevertheless, old Lord Galloway was restless and almost rude. He was diplomatic enough during dinner, but when, over the cigars, three of the younger menā āSimon the doctor, Brown the priest, and the detrimental OāBrien, the exile in a foreign uniformā āall melted away to mix with the ladies or smoke in the conservatory, then the English diplomatist grew very undiplomatic indeed. He was stung every sixty seconds with the thought that the scamp OāBrien might be signalling to Margaret somehow; he did not attempt to imagine how. He was left over the coffee with Brayne, the hoary Yankee who believed in all religions, and Valentin, the grizzled Frenchman who believed in none. They could argue with each other, but neither could appeal to him. After a time this āprogressiveā logomachy had reached a crisis of tedium; Lord Galloway got up also and sought the drawing-room. He lost his way in long passages for some six or eight minutes: till he heard the high-pitched, didactic voice of the doctor, and then the dull voice of the priest, followed by general laughter. They also, he thought with a curse, were probably arguing about āscience and religion.ā But the instant he opened the salon door he saw only one thingā āhe saw what was not there. He saw that Commandant OāBrien was absent, and that Lady Margaret was absent too.
Rising impatiently from the drawing-room, as he had from the dining-room, he stamped along the passage once more. His notion of protecting his daughter from the Irish-Algerian nāer-do-well had become something central and even mad in his mind. As he went towards the back of the house, where was Valentinās study, he was surprised to meet his daughter, who
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