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Updated: May 8, 2025
"I shan't inflict any penance," said the clerical gentleman, collecting his heavy hat and umbrella with an air of some amusement; "quite the contrary. I came here specially to let you off the little penance which would otherwise have followed your little offence." "And what," asked Boulnois, smiling, "is the little penance I have so luckily been let off?" "Being hanged," said Father Brown.
I know your husband only slightly, but I think this crime of his, as generally conceived, something very like a moral impossibility. Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not be so wicked. Anybody can be wicked as wicked as he chooses. We can direct our moral wills; but we can't generally change our instinctive tastes and ways of doing things.
Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this murder. He would not snatch Romeo's sword from its romantic scabbard; or slay his foe on the sundial as on a kind of altar; or leave his body among the roses, or fling the sword away among the pines. If Boulnois killed anyone he'd do it quietly and heavily, as he'd do any other doubtful thing take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek poet.
Boulnois looked at him steadily, but a red bar began to show across his broad brow; and he seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the first time. "I know it was a strange crime," assented Brown in a low voice. "Stranger than murder perhaps to you. The little sins are sometimes harder to confess than the big ones but that's why it's so important to confess them.
Once more he seemed to hear phantasmal footsteps, and started to find another figure already near him. He knew the figure, and yet it terrified him. The dissipated youth who had called himself Dalroy had a horribly quiet way with him; if Boulnois failed to keep appointments that had been made, Dalroy had a sinister air of keeping appointments that hadn't.
Kidd bent his head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the words: "Boulnois...with my own sword...he threw it..." Again the failing hand waved towards the sword, and then fell rigid with a thud. In Kidd rose from its depth all that acrid humour that is the strange salt of the seriousness of his race. "See here," he said sharply and with command, "you must fetch a doctor. This man's dead."
Then Dr Oman said grimly: "The Major is a long time looking for the police." "Or the police in looking for the Major?" said the priest. "Well, good-bye." ELEVEN The Strange Crime of John Boulnois MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black butterfly tie.
A decanter of port and a wineglass were at his elbow; and the instant the priest entered he noted the long ash stand out unbroken on his cigar. "He has been here for half an hour at least," thought Father Brown. In fact, he had the air of sitting where he had sat when his dinner was cleared away. "Don't get up, Mr Boulnois," said the priest in his pleasant, prosaic way.
"And who was the assassin?" asked the doctor, drawing his eyebrows together. "Boulnois," said Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly. The doctor stared at him gloomily with a reddening brow , but he did not contradict. Then the priest, a shorter figure in the background, said mildly: "I understood that Mr Boulnois was not coming to Pendragon Park this evening."
I think we hold what the all-wise police call a clue have you sent for them?" "Yes," said the doctor, "but we haven't alarmed anyone else yet." "Does Mrs Boulnois know?" asked James Dalroy, and again Kidd was conscious of an irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth. "I have not told her," said the doctor gruffly , "but here come the police."
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