Page:Chesterton - The Wisdom of Father Brown.djvu/298

THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN school; he admired him as he would admire a conjuring trick done at the dinner table. But he couldn't be got to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be envied. He went mad and killed himself for that."

"Yes," said Father Brown. "I think I begin to understand."

"Oh, don't you see?" she cried. "The whole picture is made for that—the place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very door, like a dependent—to make him feel a failure. He never felt it. He thinks no more about such things than—than an absent-minded lion. Champion would burst in on John's shabbiest hours or homeliest meals with some dazzling present or announcement or expedition that made it like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse amiably, with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not turned a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac."

"And Haman began to tell them," said Father Brown, "of all the things wherein the king had honoured him; and he said, 'All these things profit me nothing while I see Mordecai the Jew sitting in the gate.'

"The crisis came," Mrs. Boulnois continued, "when I persuaded John to let me take down some 284