The red-bearded man obeyed. "I am—" he began. "I have come—ah, perhaps I had better show you my papers. I have a letter from my Patriarch." This in excellent English, with just a trace of a foreign accent.
From his capacious pocket he drew out a bundle of papers. He abstracted a letter therefrom, and handed it with evident pride to the Bishop.
It was apparently Greek, yet it was not the language his lordship of Bister had learnt at school and college. Here and there he saw a word he almost knew, yet the next one to it was a perfect stranger. He glanced at the end. There was a big seal, an extraordinary date, an impossible name.
His visitor seemed to appreciate the position. "Our Patriarch is old," he said. "He is no longer facile to read. I sometimes have difficulty myself, though I know his writing well. May I read it to you?"
He did this with great fluency and emphasis; but the Bishop understood nothing, though occasionally he thought he caught the sound of a fleeting particle.
The letter was finished. "And this," said the reader, producing a blue document, "is more earthy." It was, being from Scotland Yard, informing all and sundry that the bearer, Georgiowitch Kassala, a Christian priest, was authorised to collect subscriptions for the church of Saint Barnabas at Mush, in Khurdistan.
"Ah!" said the Bishop, with perhaps a shade of disappointment in his voice. "I hope you have been successful."
"Your Grace, I have travelled far, and not without recompense. To all I have said, 'If you give me money it is well, but if you do not it is still well.' Some have replied, 'Then we'll leave it at that,' but many have responded. See—here is my subscription book. I have begged from Batoum to Bister. I have received money in fifteen different coinages, of which the English is the finest and difficultest. Perhaps my most interesting contribution is this—see, a kopeck from Lassitudino Hospidar, the heathen cook of a Bulgarian wind-jammer, in memory of his maternal uncle, who died from the bite of a mad dog at Varna. And now, being in Bister, I thought, although it is late, I will at once call upon his Grace the Bishop, whose fame has reached our little town of Mush, whose name is known by the deep waters of Van."
His lordship sighed. The west end of his cathedral was sinking below the surface. At the present rate of subsidence the Dean had calculated that only the gargoyles would be above ground in the year 3000. This had to be stopped. There was a matter of underpinning for a start, but it costs money to underpin the west end of a cathedral. And all the while the usual subscription lists had to be headed from the Palace, and there was more than the usual depression in agriculture. The Bishop felt that it was a singularly inappropriate moment to contribute to a church in Khurdistan, yet it would not do to discount his own fair fame in that far distant land. He must think the matter over. Meantime he would offer his guest such hospitality as would compensate for the smallness of his contribution.