"That'll be all right," he said. "I shall be at work, and Hands will be in his own room. What a man Ripon is! He's just the incarnation of breezy energy. Brusque, unconventional as Dr. Parker himself, but one of the sincerest Christians and best men I ever met or ever shall meet. He signs his note like that because he means it. He hates cant, and what in some men would appear cant, or at least a rather unnecessary form of ending, is to him just an ordinary every-day fact. You will get on with Father Ripon, Basil, I'm sure. You'll get to love the man as we all do. I never knew any one so absolutely joyous as he is. He's about the happiest man in town, I should say. His private income is nearly two thousand a year, and his living's worth something too, and yet I don't suppose his own expenses are fifty pounds. He lives more or less on porridge—when he remembers to eat at all—and his only extravagance is hansom cabs, so that he can cram more work into the day."
They all laughed, and Spence began to tell anecdotes of the famous "ritualistic" parson who daily filled more stomachs, saved more souls, and shocked more narrow-minded people than any two men in Crockford.
At seven o'clock they all went out together—Spence to his adjacent office in Fleet Street, the other two to dine quietly at the University Club.
"London depresses me," said Hands, when they were seated on the top of an omnibus and rolling westward through the Strand. "I am afraid that I shall never be in love with London any more. I always dislike my vacations, or rather my business visits to town. It's necessary that I attend the annual meeting of the Society and see people in authority, and I have to give a few lectures too. But I hate it all the same. I love the simple life of the East, the sun, the deep blue shadows, my silent Arabs. I know of no more beautiful sight than the Holy City—why do they call Rome the 'Holy City'? Jerusalem is the Holy City—when the hills are covered with the January snows. It is a wonderful, immemorial land, Gortre, a silent, beautiful country. Just before I came over here I spent a fortnight working at some inscriptions in a very ancient Latin monastery. I never knew such peace. The monks are all sad-faced, courteous Syrians, and they move along the rock balconies like benignant ghosts. And then one comes back and is plunged into this!"
He threw out his hand over the side of the omnibus with a note of disgust in his rather dreamy voice. The Strand was all brilliantly lit and waiting crowds stood by all the theatre doors. Men and women passed in and out of the bright orange light of bars and restaurants, and small filthy boys stabbed the deep roar of the traffic with their shrill voices as they called out the evening papers.
They dined quietly and simply at the big warm club in Piccadilly. Hands did most of the talking and Gortre was content to listen to the pleasant monotony of the low, level voice and to fall under the man's peculiar spell or charm—a charm that he always exercised upon another artistic temperament.
Hands was a poet by nature and sentiment. His strange, lonely life among the evidences of the past under the Eastern sky had toned, mellowed, and orientalised his vision.
As he listened Gortre also began to feel something of the mystery and magic influence of that country of God's birth.
It was half-past nine when they got back to the chambers again. Hands went at once to his own room to work and Basil sat down in front of a red, glowing fire, gazing into the hot caverns, lost in reverie. It was as though he had taken some opiate and there was nothing better in life than to sit thus and dream in the warm silence of the firelit room.
A few minutes after ten he was suddenly called out of the clouds by a furious knocking at the door of the chambers.