The Incredulity of Father Brown
behaved with restraint and respect; and all would have gone well, as Race told himself, had the others only let him alone.
Race told himself bitterly that old Mendoza had always looked like an old fool and had now very conspicuously and completely behaved like an old fool. By a custom common in simpler societies, the coffin was left open and the face uncovered, bringing the pathos to the point of agony for all those simple people. This, being consonant to tradition, need have done no harm; but some officious person had added to it the custom of the French free-thinkers, of having speeches by the graveside. Mendoza proceeded to make a speech; a rather long speech, and the longer it was the lower and lower sank John Race's spirits and sympathies with the religious ritual involved. A list of saintly attributes, apparently of the most antiquated sort, was rolled out with the dilatory dullness of an after-dinner speaker who does not know how to sit down. That was bad enough; but Mendoza had also the ineffable stupidity to start reproaching and even taunting his political opponents. In three minutes he had succeeded in making a scene; and a very extraordinary scene it was.
"We may well ask," he said, looking around him pompously, "We may well ask where such virtues can be found among those who have madly abandoned the creed of their fathers. It is when we
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