"And the fifth, " said Neil, with eyes fixed on the English priest who was coming slowly up the path.
"Is a trifle, I suppose, " said the doctor, "but I think an odd one. When I first saw how the head had been slashed, I supposed the assassin had struck more than once. But on examination I found many cuts across the truncated section; in other words, they were struck after the head was off. Did Brayne hate his foe so fiendishly that he stood sabring his body in the moonlight? "
"Horrible!" said O' Brien, and shuddered.
The little priest, Brown, had arrived while they were talking, and had waited, with characteristic shyness, till they had finished. Then he said awkwardly:
"I say, I' m sorry to interrupt. But I was sent to tell you the news!"
"News? " repeated Simon, and stared at him rather painfully through his glasses.
"Yes, I' m sorry, " said Father Brown mildly. "There' s been another murder, you know."
Both men on the seat sprang up, leaving it rocking.
"And, what' s stranger still, " continued the priest, with his dull eye on the rhododendrons, "it' s the same disgusting sort; it' s another beheading. They found the second head actually bleeding into the river, a few yards along Brayne' s road to Paris; so they suppose that he— "
"Great Heaven!" cried O' Brien. "Is Brayne a monomaniac? "
"There are American vendettas," said the priest impassively. Then he added: "They want you to come to the library and see it."
Commandant O' Brien followed the others towards the inquest, feeling decidedly sick. As a soldier, he loathed all this secretive carnage; where were these extravagant amputations going to stop? First one head was hacked off, and then another; in this case (he told himself bitterly) it was not true that two heads were better than one. As he crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon Valentin' s table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head; and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it was only a Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some note. But O' Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect which belongs only to France. He felt Paris as a whole, from the grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the newspapers. He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw the whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on Valentin's table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles, the great devil grins on Notre Dame.