"Г.К.Честертон. The Scandal of Father Brown " - читать интересную книгу автора

'You call yourself a minister of Jesus Christ,' cried Rock, 'and you
boast of a crime.'
'I have been mixed up with several crimes,' said the priest gently.
'Happily for once this is a story without a crime. This is a simple fire -
side idyll; that ends with a glow of domesticity.'
'And ends with a rope - ladder instead of a rope,' said Rock. 'Isn't
she a married woman?'
'Oh, yes,' said Father Brown.
'Well, oughtn't she to be with her husband?' demanded Rock.
'She is with her husband,' said Father Brown.
The other was startled into anger. 'You lie,' he said. 'The poor little
man is still snoring in bed.'
'You seem to know a lot about his private affairs,' said Father Brown
plaintively. 'You could almost write a life of the Man with a Beard. The
only thing you don't seem ever to have found out about him is his name.'
'Nonsense,' said Rock. 'His name is in the hotel book.'
'I know it is,' answered the priest, nodding gravely, 'in very large
letters; the name of Rudel Romanes. Hypatia Potter, who met him here, put
her name boldly under his, when she meant to elope with him; and her husband
put his name under that, when he pursued them to this place. He put it very
close under hers, by way of protest. The Romanes (who has pots of money, as
a popular misanthrope despising men) bribed the brutes in this hotel to bar
and bolt it and keep the lawful husband out. And I, as you truly say, helped
him to get in.'
When a man is told something that turns things upside - down; that the
tail wags the dog; that the fish has caught the fisherman; that the earth
goes round the moon; he takes some little time before he even asks seriously
if it is true. He is still content with the consciousness that it is the
opposite of the obvious truth. Rock said at last: 'You don't mean that
little fellow is the romantic Rudel we're always reading about; and that
curly haired fellow is Mr Potter of Pittsburgh.'
'Yes,' said Father Brown. 'I knew it the moment I clapped eyes on both
of them. But I verified it afterwards.'
Rock ruminated for a time and said at last: 'I suppose it's barely
possible you're right. But how did you come to have such a notion, in the
face of the facts?'
Father Brown looked rather abashed; subsided into a chair, and stared
into vacancy, until a faint smile began to dawn on his round and rather
foolish face.
'Well,' he said, 'you see - the truth is, I'm not romantic.'
'I don't know what the devil you are,' said Rock roughly.
'Now you are romantic,' said Father Brown helpfully. 'For instance, you
see somebody looking poetical, and you assume he is a poet. Do you know what
the majority of poets look like? What a wild confusion was created by that
coincidence of three good - looking aristocrats at the beginning of the
nineteenth century: Byron and Goethe and Shelley! Believe me, in the common
way, a man may write: "Beauty has laid her flaming lips on mine," or
whatever that chap wrote, without being himself particularly beautiful.
Besides, do you realize how old a man generally is by the time his fame has
filled the world? Watts painted Swinburne with a halo of hair; but Swinburne