‘But there are other careers open to you—literature, for example! We all know your talents—you would soon win an eminence from which you might laugh at your persecutors.’
‘Literature, my dear Cholmondeley, is simply empiricism—I see nothing in it to attract an earnest man.’
‘You are complimentary!’ cried Cholmondeley, with a laugh.
‘Oh!—you are different! You carry into journalism an amount of secular conviction which I could never emulate; and, moreover, you are one of those who, like Harry the Smith, always fight “for your own hand.” Now, I do not fight for my own hand; I repeat emphatically, all my care is for the Church. She may persecute me, she may despise me, but still I love her and believe in her, and shall pray till my last breath for the time when she will become reorganised.’
‘I see how all this will end,’ said the journalist, half seriously. ‘Some of these days you will go over to Rome!’
‘Do you think so? Well, I might do worse even than that, for in Rome, now as ever, I should find excellent company. But no, I don’t fancy that I shall go even halfway thither, unless—which is scarcely possible—I discover signs that the doting mother of Christianity accepts the new scientific miracle and puts Darwin out of the Index. Frankly, my difficulty is a social, or rather a personal, one. Ought I, a social outcast, to accept the devotion of one who would follow me, not merely out of the Church, but down into the very Hell of atheism, if I gave her the requisite encouragement?’
Cholmondeley did not reply, but after reflecting quietly for some moments he said:—
‘You have not told me the name of the lady.’
‘Miss Alma Craik.’
‘Not the heiress?’