‘And twenty carriages besides, I don’t doubt?’
‘The street was blocked up with them. There! Look round the corner now.—Chariots, litters, slaves, and fops.—When shall we see such a concourse as that where it ought to be?’
Cyril made no answer; and Peter went on—‘Where it ought to be, my father—in front of your door at the Serapeium?’
‘The world, the flesh, and the devil know their own, Peter: and as long as they have their own to go to, we cannot expect them to come to us.’
‘But what if their own were taken out of the way?’
‘They might come to us for want of better amusement.... devil and all. Well—if I could get a fair hold of the two first, I would take the third into the bargain, and see what could be done with him. But never, while these lecture-rooms last—these Egyptian chambers of imagery—these theatres of Satan, where the devil transforms himself into an angel of light, and apes Christian virtue, and bedizens his ministers like ministers of righteousness, as long as that lecture-room stands and the great and the powerful flock to it, to learn excuses for their own tyrannies and atheisms, so long will the kingdom of God be trampled under foot in Alexandria; so long will the princes of this world, with their gladiators, and parasites, and money-lenders, be masters here, and not the bishops and priests of the living God.’
It was now Peter’s turn to be silent; and as the two, with their little knot of district-visitors behind them, walk moodily along the great esplanade which overlooked the harbour, and then vanish suddenly up some dingy alley into the crowded misery of the sailors’ quarter, we will leave them to go about their errand of mercy, and, like fashionable people, keep to the grand parade, and listen again to our two fashionable friends in the carved and gilded curricle with four white blood-horses.
‘A fine sparkling breeze outside the Pharos, Raphael—fair for the wheat-ships too.’
‘Are they gone yet?
‘Yes—why? I sent the first fleet off three days ago; and the rest are clearing outwards to-day.’