The Cream of the Jest

Now it befell that this spring died Bishop Arkwright –of the Cathedral of the Bleeding Heart – and many dignitaries of his faith journeyed to Lichfield to attend the funeral. Chief among these was a prelate who very long ago had lived in Lichfield, when he was merely a bishop. Kennaston was no little surprised to receive a note informing him that this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. Felix Kennaston that evening at the Bishop's House.

The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, rather dark, and noticeably dusty room. He was like a lean effigy carved in time-yellowed ivory, and his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston recognized with joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, in completed sentences and picked phrases, instead of employing the fragmentary verbal shorthand of ordinary Lichfieldian conversation: and Kennaston, to whom the slovenliness of fairly cultured people's daily talk was always a mystery and an irritant, fell with promptitude into the same tone.

The prelate, it developed, had when he lived in Lichfield known Kennaston's dead uncle -"for whom I had the highest esteem, and whose friendship I valued most dearly." He hoped that Kennaston would pardon the foibles of old age and overlook this trespass upon Kennaston's time. For the prelate had, he said, really a personal interest in the only surviving relative of his dead friend.

"There is a portrait of you, sir, in my library – very gorgeous, in full canonicals – just as my uncle left the room," said Kennaston, all at sea. But the prelate had begun to talk – amiably, and in the most commonplace fashion conceivable – of his former life in Lichfield, and of the folk who had lived there then, and to ask questions about their descendants, which Kennaston answered as he best could. The whole affair was puzzling Kennaston, for he could think of no reason why this frail ancient gentleman should have sent for a stranger, even though that stranger were the nephew of a dead friend, just that they might discuss trivialities.

So their talking veered, as it seemed, at random…

"Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid – a very beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise white pigeons, my son?"

Kennaston saw that the prelate now held a small square mirror in his left hand. "No, sir," Kennaston answered evenly; "there were a great many about the place when it came into our possession; but we have never gone in very seriously for farming."

"The pigeon has so many literary associations that I should have thought it would appeal to a man of letters," the prelate continued. "I ought to have said earlier perhaps that I read Men Who Loved Alison with great interest and enjoyment. It is a notable book. Yet in dealing with the sigil of Scoteia – or so at least it seemed to me – you touched upon subjects which had better be left undisturbed. There are drugs, my son, which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot be intrusted without danger to the vulgar."

He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a threat was voiced.

"Sir," Kennaston began, "I must tell you that in writing of the sigil – as I called it – I designed to employ only such general terms as romance ordinarily accords to talismans. All I wrote – I thought – was sheer invention. It is true I found by accident a bit of metal, from which I derived the idea of my so-called sigil's appearance. That bit of metal was to me then just a bit of metal; nor have I any notion, even to-day, as to how it came to be lying in one of my own gardenpaths."

He paused. The prelate nodded. "It is always interesting to hear whence makers of creative literature draw their material," he stated.

"Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the identical words you employed this evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allusion to white pigeons which the personage too made, and the little mirror which he too held as he spoke. Can you not see, sir," Kennaston asked gaily, "to what wild imaginings the coincidence tempts a weaver of romance? I could find it in my heart to believe it the cream of an ironic jest that you great ones of the earth have tested me with a password, mistakenly supposing that I, also, was initiate. I am tempted to imagine some secret understanding, some hidden cooperancy, by which you strengthen or, possibly, have attained your power. Confess, sir, is not the coincidence a droll one?"

He spoke lightly, but his heart was beating fast.