“It always is!” said El-Râmi with a slight dubious smile.
“I was at Lady Melthorpe’s the other day, and I told her my difficulty. She spoke of you, and said she felt certain you would be able to clear up my doubts——”
“Not at all. I am too busy clearing up my own,” said El-Râmi brusquely.
The clergyman looked surprised.
“Dear me!—I thought, from what her ladyship said, that you were scientifically certain of——”
“Of what?” interrupted El-Râmi—“Of myself? Nothing more uncertain in the world than my own humour, I assure you! Of others? I am not a student of human caprice. Of life?—of death? Neither. I am simply trying to prove the existence of a ‘something after death’—but I am certain of nothing, and I believe in nothing, unless proved.”
“But,” said Mr. Anstruther anxiously—“you will, I hope, allow me to explain that you leave a very different impression on the minds of those to whom you speak, from the one you now suggest. Lady Melthorpe, for instance——”
“Lady Melthorpe believes what it pleases her to believe,”—said El-Râmi quietly—“All pretty, sensitive, imaginative women do. That accounts for the immense success of Roman Catholicism with women. It is a graceful, pleasing, comforting religion,—moreover, it is really becoming to a woman,—she looks charming with a rosary in her hand, or a quaint old missal,—and she knows it. Lady Melthorpe is a believer in ideals,—well, there is no harm in ideals,—long may she be able to indulge in them.”
“But Lady Melthorpe declares that you are able to tell the past and the future,” persisted the clergyman—“And that you can also read the present;—if that is so, you must surely possess visionary power?”
El-Râmi looked at him steadfastly.