“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 garden-paths.”
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 co-operancy, 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.
“It is remarkable enough,” the prelate conceded, smiling. He asked the name of the personage whom coincidence linked with him, and being told it, chuckled. “I do not think it very odd he carried a mirror,” the prelate considered. “He lives before a mirror, and behind a megaphone. I confess—mea culpa!—I often find my little looking-glass a convenience, in making sure all is right before I go into the pulpit. Not a few men in public life, I believe, carry such mirrors,” he said, slowly. “But you, I take it, have no taste for public life?”
“I can assure you—” Kennaston began.
“Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad instant, that your wild imaginings were not wholly insane? suppose that you had accidentally stumbled upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler to tell you the whole mystery? Cannot a trained romancer conceive what you might hope for then?”
Very still it was in the dark room....
Kennaston was horribly frightened. “I can assure you, sir, that even then I would prefer my peaceful lazy life and my dreams. I have not any aptitude for action.”
“Ah, well,” the prelate estimated; “it is scarcely a churchman’s part to play advocatus mundi. Believe me, I would not tempt you from your books. And for our dreams, I have always held heretically, we are more responsible than for our actions, since it is what we are, uninfluenced, that determines our dreams.” He seemed to meditate. “I will not tempt you, therefore, to tell me the whole truth concerning that bit of metal. I suspect, quite candidly, you are keeping something back, my son. But you exercise a privilege common to all of us.”