Free The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] by G.K. Chesterton

edge of the table,
like a man trying to learn a tune on the piano.
    First,
there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a light man might make in
winning a walking race. At a certain point they stopped and changed to a sort of
slow, swinging stamp, numbering not a quarter of the steps, but occupying about
the same time. The moment the last echoing stamp had died away would come again
the run or ripple of light, hurrying feet, and then again the thud of the heavier
walking. It was certainly the same pair of boots, partly because (as has been
said) there were no other boots about, and partly because they had a small but
unmistakable creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help
asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question his head almost split.
He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen men run in order to slide.
But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or, again, why should he
walk in order to run? Yet no other description would cover the antics of this
invisible pair of legs. The man was either walking very fast down one-half of
the corridor in order to walk very slowly down the other half; or he was
walking very slow at one end to have the rapture of walking fast at the other.
Neither suggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing darker and
darker, like his room.
    Yet,
as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his cell seemed to make his
thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in a kind of vision the fantastic feet
capering along the corridor in unnatural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen
religious dance? Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown
began to ask himself with more exactness what the steps suggested. Taking the
slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his
type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit still. It could not be any servant
or messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer
orders (in an oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightly drunk, but
generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand or sit in
constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step, with a kind of careless
emphasis, not specially noisy, yet not caring what noise it made, belonged to
only one of the animals of this earth. It was a gentleman of western Europe,
and probably one who had never worked for his living.
    Just
as he came to this solid certainty, the step changed to the quicker one, and ran
past the door as feverishly as a rat. The listener remarked that though this
step was much swifter it was also much more noiseless, almost as if the man
were walking on tiptoe. Yet it was not associated in his mind with secrecy, but
with something else — something that he could not remember. He was maddened by
one of those half-memories that make a man feel half-witted. Surely he had heard
that strange, swift walking somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a
new idea in his head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct outlet on
the passage, but let on one side into the glass office, and on the other into
the cloak room beyond. He tried the door into the office, and found it locked.
Then he looked at the window, now a square pane full of purple cloud cleft by
livid sunset, and for an instant he smelt evil as a dog smells rats.
    The
rational part of him (whether the wiser or not) regained its supremacy. He remembered
that the proprietor had told him that he should lock the door, and would come
later to release him. He told himself that twenty things he had not thought of
might explain the eccentric sounds outside; he reminded himself that there was
just enough light left to finish his own proper work. Bringing his paper to the
window so as to catch the last stormy evening light, he resolutely plunged once
more into the almost completed record. He had written for about twenty minutes,
bending closer and closer to his paper in the lessening