Silent Nights by Martin Edwards

themselves.”
    â€œI won’t have you talking like that,” cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. “You’ve only talked like that since you became a horrid what’s-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?”
    â€œA saint,” said Father Brown.
    â€œI think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a Socialist.”
    â€œA Radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes,” remarked Crook, with some impatience; “and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.”
    â€œBut who won’t allow you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot.”
    Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. “Does one want to own soot?” he asked.
    â€œOne might,” answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. “I’ve heard that gardeners use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn’t come, entirely with soot—applied externally.”
    â€œOh, splendid,” cried Ruby. “Oh, I wish you’d do it to this company.”
    The boisterous Canadian, Mr Blount, was lifting his loud voice in applause, and the astonished financier his (in some considerable deprecation), when a knock sounded at the double front doors. The priest opened them, and they showed again the front garden of evergreens, monkey-tree and all, now gathering gloom against a gorgeous violet sunset. The scene thus framed was so coloured and quaint, like a back scene in a play, that they forgot for a moment the insignificant figure standing in the door. He was dusty-looking and in a frayed coat, evidently a common messenger. “Any of you gentlemen Mr Blount?” he asked, and held forward a letter doubtfully. Mr Blount started, and stopped in his shout of assent. Ripping up the envelope with evident astonishment he read it; his face clouded a little, and then cleared, and he turned to his brother-in-law and host.
    â€œI’m sick at being such a nuisance, colonel,” he said, with the cheery colonial convention; “but would it upset you if an old acquaintance called on me here tonight on business? In point of fact it’s Florian, that famous French acrobat and comic actor; I knew him years ago out West (he was a French-Canadian by birth), and he seems to have business for me, though I hardly guess what.”
    â€œOf course, of course,” replied the colonel carelessly. “My dear chap, any friend of yours. No doubt he will prove an acquisition.”
    â€œHe’ll black his face, if that’s what you mean,” cried Blount, laughing. “I don’t doubt he’d black everyone else’s eyes. I don’t care; I’m not refined. I like the jolly old pantomime where a man sits on his top hat.”
    â€œNot on mine, please,” said Sir Leopold Fischer, with dignity.
    â€œWell, well,” observed Crook, airily, “don’t let’s quarrel. There are lower jokes than sitting on a top hat.”
    Dislike of the red-tied youth, born of his predatory opinions and evident intimacy with the pretty godchild, led Fischer to say, in his most sarcastic, magisterial manner: “No doubt you have found something much lower than sitting on a top hat. What is it, pray?”
    â€œLetting a top hat sit on you, for instance,” said the Socialist.
    â€œNow, now, now,” cried the Canadian farmer with his barbarian benevolence, “don’t let’s spoil a jolly evening. What I say is, let’s do something for the company tonight. Not blacking faces or sitting on hats, if you don’t like those—but something of the sort. Why couldn’t we have a