The Incredulity of Father Brown
neck of the dingy little body dangling with drooping plumes of grey hair. Somehow he knew that the body was a dead body before he managed to take it down from the tree. A very long coil of rope was wrapped round and round the branches, and a comparatively short length of it hung from the fork of the branch to the body. A long garden tub was rolled a yard or so from under the feet, like the stool kicked away from the feet of a suicide.
"Oh, my God!" said Alboin, so that it seemed as much a prayer as an oath." What was it that man said about him?-'If he knew, he would be ready to hang himself.' Wasn't that what he said, Father Brown?"
"Yes," said Father Brown.
"Well," said Vandam in a hollow voice, "I never thought to see or say such a thing. But what can one say except that the curse has worked?"
Fenner was standing with hands covering his face; and the priest laid a hand on his arm and said, gently, "Were you very fond of him?"
The secretary dropped his hands and his white face was ghastly under the moon.
"I hated him like hell," he said; "and if he died by a curse it might have been mine."
The pressure of the priest's hand on his arm tightened; and the priest said, with an earnestness he had hardly yet shown:
"It wasn't your curse; pray be comforted."
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