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The simple splendour of stars could not compare with the eerie magic of the night before last, but somehow it was able to provide some much-needed calming effect of a tale in a children's book – not a fairy-tale, though.
Still not feeling very hungry after the meals befitting the table of a nobleman and the nightmares befitting a fable about fiendish noblemen, Father Brown sat on the point of the bow of Flambeau's boat, absent-mindedly dangling his short legs in the air, not even touching the water, and poking the salmon with his collapsible fork. He looked at the tin as if it just told him its tragic life story, but he couldn't concentrate on it enough to demonstrate enough compassion.
Flambeau, however, had no problem with eating, let alone with showing sympathy to the canned fish – he simply didn't bother. He was already done with supper and lay stretched across, or, rather, along the deck, his long legs half inside the little cabin (which was the only way he could fit).
"Father," he said upon hearing the priest sigh for the fifth time in an hour, "I hope you aren't thinking about those, erm, events again."
"Well," Father Brown sighed again for good measure, "I simply couldn't help it."
He took the last bite of the fish, closed the fork and wrapped it all in the napkin that was protecting his lap.
"Perhaps, you need another, nice story to occupy your mind," Flambeau suggested.
"Do you have one?" Father Brown asked with a tint of dubiousness.
The ex-criminal considered his colourful experience and didn't reply.
The priest climbed back into the boat proper, only by miracle avoiding getting caught up in the hem of his clerical uniform, and lay down and snuggled on the deck next to Flambeau.
"Sometimes," he began, seemingly out of nowhere, "it is useful to look at the world in black and white. Like the night sky and the stars. What can be simpler than this monochromaticity?"
"Even though the sky is really deep blue and the light of stars is a rainbow flowing through a prism," Flambeau retorted poetically and a bit derisively.
The priest was quiet for a moment, and some could have assumed that it was because he wasn't able to come up with a witty enough reply, when in fact, he wasn't trying to do that and was lost in the complex net of his mind, as he often was.
"I never said the world is black and white, or, for that matter, should be," he said simply. "But there's no harm in a mental exercise."
He took another pause, and Flambeau, quite familiar with his friend's rhetorical style, didn't press him.
"Things stand out when in black and white. You can clearly see letters when they are not painted among trees of an oil landscape. Or, pardon me for abusing the comparison, the stars in the sky," finally said the priest. He took off and put away his glasses – and it might've been only the second or third time Flambeau saw him doing that in a situation that didn't imply immediately falling asleep.
"Can you see the stars without glasses on?" the ex-thief asked, putting additional effort into not being rude.
"My mind tells me they are there, and at the moment, I'm too tired to prove otherwise."
The silence of the night surrounded them – that deceiving sort of silence when everything makes sounds, be it insects, birds or other critters, never mind the elements: waves under the boat, swinging of grass.
"Lost souls can be found anywhere," Father Brown said again, for an even less obvious reason, and it startled Flambeau.
"Hm?"
"I'm trying to prove my mind otherwise. Not about the stars," the priest blinked sleepily as an illustration, "souls."
"Sinners?" Flambeau asked, grasping the implication far more quickly he would expect of himself at such an hour and place.
"Lost souls can be found anywhere," Brown repeated, "sometimes they find me. There are always happy endings, blessed be God. At least, I hope you will not disappoint me by straying back into the embrace of sin."
The newly righteous snorted, not a bit elegantly, but somehow still distinctly French.
Father Brown lifted his hand a little to look at it as an instrument of his trade, "I assume, I can lead people in the right direction, even though there are some for whom it is too late."
Flambeau took the priest's hand without being fully aware of it.
"My gratitude attests it."