“You ask me if I believe in an Antichrist, thereby betraying your slender knowledge of the Scriptures—­you will pardon the liberty!  I may refer you not only to John’s Epistles, to the revelations of the dreamer of Patmos, but to so many learned doctors of the faith that it would take a week merely to enumerate the titles of their works all bearing on the mysterious subject.  Our Holy Mother the Church has held aloof from any doctrinal pronouncements.  The Antichrist has been predicted for the past thousand years.  I recall as a boy poring over the map of the world which a friend of my mother had left with her.  This lady my father called ‘the angel with the moulting wings,’ because she was always in an ecstatic tremor over the second coming of the Messiah.  She would go to the housetop at least once every six months, and there, with a band of pious deluded geese dressed in white flowing robes, would inspect the firmament for favourable signs.  Nothing ever happened, as we know, yet the predictions sown about the borders of that strange-looking chart have in a measure come true.

“There were the grimmest and most resounding quotations from the Apocalypse.  ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen!’ hummed in my ears for many a day.  And the pale horse also haunted me.  What would I have given to hear the music of that ’voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of great thunder.’  I mean the ’harpers harping with their harps’ the ’new song before the throne, before the four beasts and the elders.’  It is recorded that ’no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth.’  That is a goodly multitude.  Let us hope we shall be of it.  Learned Sir Thomas Browne asked what songs the sirens sang.  I prefer to hear that wonderful ‘harped’ song.

“But I wander.  The fault lies in that wondrous map of the world, with its pictured hordes of Russians sweeping down upon Europe and America like a plague of locusts, the wicked unbaptized Antichrist at the head of them, waving a cross held in reversed fashion.  Don’t ask me the meaning of this crazy symbolism.  The sect to which my mother’s friend belonged—­God bless her, for she was a dear weak-minded lady—­must have set great store by these signs.  I admit that as a boy they scared me.  Sitting here now, after forty years, I can still see those cryptograms.  However, to my tale.  About ten years ago I was in Paris, and in my capacity as Monsignor I had to attend a significant gathering at the embassy of the Russian ambassador in this city of light.”  He waved his left hand, from which I caught the purple fire of amethyst.

“It was a notable affair, and I don’t mind telling you now that it was largely political.  I had just returned from a secret mission at Rome, and I was forced to mingle with diplomatic people.  Prince Wronsky was the representative of the Czar at that time in France, a charming man with a flavour of diablerie in his speech.  He was a fervent Greek Catholic, like most of his countrymen, and it pleased him to fence mischievously with me on the various dogmas of our respective faiths.  He called himself the Catholic; I was only a Roman Catholic.  I told him I was satisfied.