"Chesterton, G.K. - The Wisdom of Father Brown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud;
he reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with
an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:

"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about
that business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people
out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong."

By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made
an odd little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.

"I hardly understand you," replied the scientist, with
a cold intensity of manner. "I fear you have mistaken the chambers.
I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary and educational.
It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the police
in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but--"

"Oh, this is of the greatest importance," broke in the little man
called Brown. "Why, her mother won't let them get engaged."
And he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.

The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes
under them were bright with something that might be anger or
might be amusement. "And still," he said, "I do not quite understand."

"You see, they want to get married," said the man with the
clerical hat. "Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married.
Now, what can be more important than that?"

The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him
of many things--some said of his health, others of his God;
but they had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd.
At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him
from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude
of the consulting physician.

"Mr Brown," he said gravely, "it is quite fourteen and a half years
since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was
the case of an attempt to poison the French President at
a Lord Mayor's Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether
some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend
of hers called Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman.
I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my best advice,
as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of England--no, better:
fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon.
Tell me your story."

The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with
unquestionable warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity.
It was rather as if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room