Two Priests

Valentin stood triumphantly pointing his finger towards a window on the left side of the road. It was a large window labelled "Restaurant."

"Our cue at last," cried Valentin, waving his stick; "the place with the broken window."

He banged his way into the restaurant, followed by his companions, and they were soon seated at a late luncheon at a little table.

"Got your window broken, I see," said Valentin to the waiter as he paid the bill.

"Well, two gents in black came in," said the waiter; "two of those foreign parsons that are running about. They had a cheap and quiet little lunch, and one of them paid for it and went out. The other was just going out to join him when I looked at my change again and found he'd paid me more than three times too much.

'Here,' I says to the chap who was nearly out of the door, 'you've paid too much.'"

"The parson at the door he says all serene, 'Sorry to confuse your accounts, but it'll pay for the window.' 'What window?' I says. 'The one I'm going to break,' he says, and smashed that blessed pane with his umbrella."

"I was so knocked silly for a second, I couldn't do anything. Then they went so quick up Bullock Street that I couldn't catch them, though I ran round the bars to do it."

"Bullock Street," said the detective, and shot up that street as quickly as the strange couple he pursued.

Abruptly one gas-lit window broke the blue twilight like a bull's-eye lantern; and Valentin stopped an instant before a little showy sweetstuff shop. After an instant's hesitation he went in; he stood amid the extravagant colours of the confectionery with entire gravity and bought thirteen chocolate cigars with a certain care.

An angular, elderly young woman in the shop had regarded his elegant appearance with a merely automatic inquiry.

"Oh," she said, "if you've come about that parcel, I've sent it off already."

"Parcel?" repeated Valentin; and it was his turn to look inquiring.

"I mean the parcel the gentleman left—the clergyman gentleman."

"Well," said the woman a little doubtfully, "the clergymen came in about half an hour ago and bought some peppermints and talked a bit, and then went off towards the Heath. But a second after, one of them runs back into the shop and says, 'Have I left a parcel!' Well, I looked everywhere and couldn't see one; so he says, 'Never mind; but if it should turn up, please post it to this address,' and he left me the address and a shilling for my trouble. And sure enough, though I thought I'd looked everywhere, I found he'd left a brown paper parcel, so I posted it to the place he said. I can't remember the address now; it was somewhere in Westminster. But as the thing seemed so important, I thought perhaps the police had come about it."

"So they have," said Valentin shortly. "Is Hampstead Heath near here?"

"Straight on for fifteen minutes," said the woman, "and you'll come right out on the open." Valentin sprang out of the shop and began to run. The other detectives followed him at a reluctant trot.

Among the black and breaking groups in that distance was one especially black which did not break—a group of two figures clerically dressed. Though they seemed as small as insects, Valentin could see that one of them was much smaller than the other. By the time he had substantially diminished the distance and magnified the two black figures as in a vast microscope, he had perceived something else; something which startled him, and yet which he had somehow expected. Whoever was the tall priest, there could be no doubt about the identity of the short one. It was his friend of the Harwich train, the short cure of Essex whom he had warned about his brown paper parcels.

Valentin had learned by his inquiries that morning that a Father Brown from Essex was bringing up a silver cross with sapphires, a relic of considerable value, to show some of the foreign priests at the congress. Now there was nothing wonderful about the fact that what Valentin had found out Flambeau had also found out; Flambeau found out everything.

Vocabulary

Parson: An Anglican cleric with full legal control of a parish under ecclesiastical law Confectionery:  candy and other sweets considered collectively

The Blue Cross was first published on 23 June 1910, under the title "Valentin Follows a Curious Trail", in the Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia.

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