“what was before we know not,and we know not what shall succeed.“Haply the river of Time—as it grows, as the towns on its margefling their wavering lightson a wider, statelier stream—may acquire, if not the calmof its early mountainous shore,yet a solemn peace of its own.”
“what was before we know not,and we know not what shall succeed.“Haply the river of Time—as it grows, as the towns on its margefling their wavering lightson a wider, statelier stream—may acquire, if not the calmof its early mountainous shore,yet a solemn peace of its own.”
“what was before we know not,and we know not what shall succeed.
“what was before we know not,
and we know not what shall succeed.
“Haply the river of Time—as it grows, as the towns on its margefling their wavering lightson a wider, statelier stream—may acquire, if not the calmof its early mountainous shore,yet a solemn peace of its own.”
“Haply the river of Time—
as it grows, as the towns on its marge
fling their wavering lights
on a wider, statelier stream—
may acquire, if not the calm
of its early mountainous shore,
yet a solemn peace of its own.”
Little more was said after this of the chief subjects of their talk, and presently both Fitzgerald and Hawkesbury took their leave, Maddock and Fitzgerald, and Alcock and Hawkesbury, expressing mutual hopes of seeing one another again.
Maddock went out into the balcony and stood there, leaning on the rails, reflectively smoking his cigar and looking out at the scene stretched before him like a panorama. Alcock held quiet converse with Gildea for a few moments, apologetically asking permission to go and write a letter, the importance of which he would have explained at length, had not Gildea interposed.
“By all means,” said he; and, with a word of excuse to and gesture of acknowledgment from Maddock, took Alcock off into a room opposite, a study, where he ensconced him at the desk and, having pointed out the position of all the epistolatory necessities and told him to ring the bell for Edgar who would see that the letter was posted at once, withdrew and rejoined Maddock on the balcony.
“You will excuse Alcock,” Gildea said, lighting a cigarette, “He has a letter of importance to write, which he does not care to leave till we come back.”
Maddock at once acquiesced. There was a pause, both smoking with leisure.
At last:
“Well,” said Gildea, taking his cigarette from his lips, “and how did you like the happy family? You were a very quiet member of it.”
“Yes,” said Maddock, “I refrained from mewing and sat still, purring and pleasantly watching the others. It struck me, shortly after Alcock came in, that we were a very representative happy family.”
“We only wanted a genial Theist to make the pile complete. Your good Judge is a Theist. Now if we could only....”
“Ay, ay,” said Maddock with something like a chuckle, “Judge Parker is a Theist! As your friend theArgussaid, he was ‘the learned gentleman who discovered Unitarianism in the early months of 1885.’—Come now,” he proceeded with a sudden concentration of interest, “what are you going to say of the affirmative side of this man’s criticism, after your remark that there was not, in modern times, one man of real intellectual power that has believed in a personal God and not believed in a divine Christ? Are you going to turn upon me again with your precious purely intellectual view of things, and say: ‘The question that now arises is, has not Theism, after all,’ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?”
“Certainly I am,” said Gildea laughing, “but all hope of utilizing the purely intellectual view seems lost after my unwary committal of myself.—No,” he added more seriously, “I have of course little more left to do than to try and get you to join me in abuse of the good Judge for his superstition, that is to say his Theism, and that other egregious vice of his—his ludicrously inadequate conception of what is ‘good and ennobling.’ To take the last first, I will say, as I once heard Hawkesbury say on a like occasion, that I would far sooner believe in the Orthodox Christ than in the Unitarian Jesus. Indeed I might broaden my saying, and declare to the whole Rationalistic conception of Christ and Christianity generally, what Carlyle declared to Voltaire: ‘Cease, my much respected Herr Von Voltaire, shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth.... Take our thanks, then, and—thyself away.’”
“Judge Parker’s view of Our Lord,” said Maddock frowning, “is,—not to say blasphemous,—simplyfatuous! I do not know whether indignation at impudence or contempt at stupidity the most possesses a man, when he is told, by such an one as this, that ‘the Christian Theist, who regards Jesus as man, considers, and rightly from his point of view, that itiswithin his power to attain to the life of, and to follow the example of, Christ.’ Imagine Judge Parker attaining to the life of anyone but a blatantly successful lawyer in the truculent spiritual quagmires of a colonial capital!”
“Our good Judge’s discovery and investigation of the character of Jesus,” said Gildea, almost ready to laugh outright atMaddock’s concluding dythramb, “are certainly not unlike those of a man who should charter a penny steam-boat for a trip up the Nile, and proceed, on his return to England, to give a lengthy description of certain large triangular-shaped buildings which, he should say, bore considerable resemblance to the common-sense conception of pyramids! And itispossible perhaps to denominate such a description as fatuous. His conception of Jesusis, we are agreed—inadequate: ‘an exemplar ... who merits all praise, all esteem, and love, and admiration for that,being human, he led so pure, so blameless, so noble and unselfish a life.’ This, what this with our good Judgemeans, is an inadequate conception of Jesus. He perceives nothing of the real essence of Jesus. Anything that Arnold, whom he quotes so often, may have said of ‘the mildness and sweet reasonableness’ of Jesus, or that Renan may have said of the wonderful powers of personal attraction that are in Jesus—all this has fallen like water on the judicial back of our duck here! It is for none of these that our good Judge, our typical man of common-sense, goes to his New Testament. ‘Mildness and sweet reasonableness,’ the yearning of a consuming personal love, are not clear solid spiritual qualities which his mind can see and touch and handle. They have no place in the copy-books of the soul, nor yet in the sum-books thereof, and you shall search its ‘Little Arthur’s History’ from beginning to end and find no mention of them. Their only place is in the thoughts, words, and actions of the men and women who have moved thousands and millions of their fellows, in the radiant days of high civilizations, in the agonies of the travail or the destruction of peoples and races. ‘It is apparent,’ says he, ‘that we can collect from the Christian Bible, a purer, more beautiful, and more advanced ethical code, than is to be obtained from any other book or books.’ O good Judge, O belovèd Judge, if all that is to be got out of the Christian Bible is an ‘ethical code,’ then the sooner Martin Tupper and Mr. Harrison are deified, the sooner will the human soul have reached its apogee!”
“That is well,” said Maddock, “but, at the same time, there are few things that disgust me more than the man of the opposite sort—he who, like so many of these Socialists of yours, will sing the love of Christ with passion, and then go out and commit a hundred of the grossest sins. Christ is morality.”
“Ah no,” said Gildea, “he is something better; he is religion! It is immoral to commit adultery: it is moral to punish it: (‘Infinitely better that they should atone for it, than lose a step towards a higher life’): it is religious, not to condemn it, but to bid go and sin no more. It is immoral to take your share in your father’s substance and waste it in violent living: it is moral to punish this prodigal, to whom repentance has only come with a belly that was fain to fill itself with the husks of the swine: it is religious to kill the fatted calf for such a penitent, and rejoice and make glad. Jesus’ sole criticism on practical morality, on the realization of an ethical code in everyday life, is, that ‘it was not so from the beginning.’”
“Just so; but this is precisely the difference of the ethical code of the Old and of the New Dispensation.”
“Will you let me say, that it has nothing to do with any ethical code at all? For, surely, the essence of ethical codes is justice, and the essence of the religious code, of the code of Jesus, is love. The Amazon may be a big river, but you shall compass all time in trying to put into it the unspeakable ocean.—No, it is just here that, as Fitzgerald would say, all these good people are superstitious. They believe that the spiritual progress of humanity is synonymous with the progress of one portion of the spirit of humanity, namely the ethical portion; and this, being a belief in a thing not worthy of that belief, may justly, as it seems to me, be denominated a superstition. It is superstition without religion.”
“And what, then,” asked Maddock, “do you call the belief of men like your friend Hawkesbury?”
“Those who are immoral? men and women who, as most of these Socialists, work in the spirit of Jesus and act (as a polemist would say) in the manner of Bradlaugh?—what istheirbelief?”
“Yes,” said Maddock.
“Why, clearly,” answered Gildea smiling, “religionwithsuperstition! The men of enthusiasm like Hawkesbury, and the men of morality like Judge Parker, are surely both of them right, and surely both of them wrong: right in their appreciation of the truth of one portion of the spiritual life, wrong in their ignorance of another portion. They both possess truth, and they both possess superstition.”
“And what of a man like our friend Alcock here, who is ignorant of religion and more or less lax as regards morality?”
“He too,” answered Gildea, “as Fitzgerald clearly demonstrated, is a victim of superstition. But he is not, for all that, without his belief, without his appreciation of truth. He believes in that portion of the spiritual life which we call intellect. Men like him have their enthusiasm, for which they are ready to suffer and do suffer all things; and that enthusiasm is the enthusiasm for that portion of truth which we call Science.”
“And your Fitzgerald—is he too both right and wrong?”
“Of course he is; for has he not both belief and negation? All belief is truth, notthe wholetruth, buta partof the truth. There is but one thing that is the whole truth.”
“God?”
“No, not God, for God does not include Nature, from which He is the outcome—not God, not Nature, but that which contains them both, Everything, the All!”
“Pooh,” said Maddock, “flat Pantheism!”
“And suppose,” cried Gildea, “it werePot-theism, if the thing is true!” (He laughed outright.) “—That answer of Carlyle’s,” he said, “is immortal.”
“Oh, it was Carlyle said it?” said Maddock, “I had forgotten.—And so,” he proceeded, “the secret is out, and Sir Horace Gildea ‘stands confessed a Pantheist in all his charms!’”
“Two of the happy family still remain unaccounted for,” Gildea said, “although they too have not probably attained to perfect truth.”
“Oh, that is you and I. As for me, I can describe myself without your aid. I believe in morality and religion, with a touch of superstition in both.”
“Worse,” said Gildea, “worse!”
“What, then?”
“You believe in theology which is as bad a superstition as, what Judge Parker calls, ‘the calm blissful sea of puretheisticbelief.’ (You notice how emphatic he is about his superstition and casual about his truth?)”
“Stop a moment now, my bright Apollo, and explain to me, what you have not yet attempted to, what the superstition of Theism is?”
“What is Theism?—‘It is a faith,’ answers our good Judge, ‘which isthefaith of all others’ (that is to say the faith of Judge Parker and all the ‘celebrated unitarian ministers’), ‘to be clung to, cherished and maintained as long as man exists—belief,trust in, and love for the All-loving, All-righteous, All-wise Universal Spirit of God.’ Now observe that this faith, this unique faith of faiths, is ‘refreshing, and invigorating in its simplicity’—(as, we might add, is also its formulator, if we did not shun flippancy as we would the pest)—‘warm and glowing in its absolute unclouded devotion to, love for, and perfect trust in God alone—proclaimed byNature!’ O wise Judge, O upright Judge, O Judge much more elder than thy looks, where, when, and how, in the name of all observers of Nature from Darwin through Haeckel to Tennyson, did you discover therein either this love or righteousness of which you make such mention? ‘The struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,’ the parent of theistic righteousness and love! ‘Proclaimed byNature!’—and Nature in italics! O immemorial phrase that eats up all the others even as Aaron’s rod swallowed up all the rods of the magicians!—Who, after this, would care to trouble himself with all the other potent items of this faith of faiths? The idea of God, God ‘the All-loving, All-righteous, All-wise Universal Spirit’ ‘originated in instinct,’ and is not the slow and painful growth of time? Think of the love of Jehovah! the righteousness of Baal! the wisdom of Moloch!—The beauty and sympathy and warmth of the theistic form of belief,” he added, “are recognizable as a half-hearted mixture of the clap-trap of Religion and Science—Superstition, which knows that it is naked, and sews fig-leaves together, and make itself an apron!”
Maddock, however, could have no confidence in the expressed views of this man, from whose face the light of amusement, amusement at others and himself, seemed never to be absent long. There had, indeed, been moments when it required all Maddock’s intuition to prevent his perception rising in absolute revolt against what seemed Gildea’s flagrant insincerity: then his perception had said to him that this was but a youth, endowed with brilliant abilities, the mere exercise of which was a pleasure and satisfaction to him, caring too little for any one thing to owe it loyalty. Whereto his intuition had replied that this was not a youth but a man, and a man whose secret could not thus be read. And the feeling that Maddock had, once before that day, felt towards Gildea returned now with an intensity and strangeness that seemed to Maddock, when he afterwards considered it, as little short of wonderful. Maddock’s profundity was often beyond theaverage, and herein indeed lay his secret, herein nestled “the heart of his mystery.”
“And yet,” said Gildea, “here, as in the other case, the common-sense view of belief has, of course, its excellence. ‘To take nothing else,’ says the Judge, ‘the very idea of “space” and “distance” that astronomy has given us fills the mind with wonder and with awe, clothing nature with a sublimity, a majesty, and a beauty which, otherwise, we had never known.’ For observe thatSpaceandTime, these two inexhaustible ideas, are not, to our average intelligent secular view of things, the mere words that they are to the orthodox: they are realities thus far, that they help us to perceive that ‘there exists throughout space,—throughout the vast limitless universe,—motion, order, beauty; that there is behind all motion, all order, all beauty, a force that produces the motion, the order, and the beauty.’ And further. They are realities thus far, that they help us to be (whatever Dr. Maddock, in a polemico-theological spirit, may declare) earnest in our life and earnest in our wish to bring home to others the truth of that life, a ‘most serious and difficult task!’ They help us to all this, and an unrecognized intuitional belief in the essence which, in other forms and other men whom we fail to appreciate, not to say understand, we condemn—our intuitional belief, I say, in the Faith, Hope, and Love, which are the great movers of the progress of Humanity both upward and onward, will not let the forms that portions of this belief may take in us make the whole grow cold, lifeless, petrified, but the beauty and melody of our acts will often be found to contradict the deformity and discord of our words.”
“I confess, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “that you are a puzzle to me. I really should not be surprised to see you some day walking side by side with the Judge, the best friends in the world!”
“And perhaps,” said Gildea, “the Judge would not subsequently be surprised to see me doing the same with yourself! For that indeed is the only use of such poor creatures as I: we see the good in opponents and serve as links in the spiritual bridge of Humanity.”
“I should very much like,” said Maddock, “to hear how you would abuse me to him. I think I see the urbane expression with which you would delight him by shewing how, in this ecclesiastical, metaphysical, theological polemist here, habemus confitentem asinum; and then turn upon him and say: ‘Thequestion that now arises, my dear Judge, is, has this man nothing but faults—has he no excellencies? does there remain, after the attack on him of so eminent a biblical critic as Judge Parker is, no residuum of real and vital truth? Let us see.’”
“Doctor, Doctor,” said Gildea, “to make me laugh so, is cruel!”
“You do not consider me,” said Maddock, “in the least.”
They both laughed heartily.
“And now,” said Maddock, “in order to complete the matter, tell me, what isyoursuperstition? Here are Alcock and Parker with their respective superstitions of Atheism and Theism, of purely scientific and purely ethical progress. Here is Hawkesbury with his superstition about the unselfishness of the People and the practical neglect of Morality. Here is Fitzgerald with his superstitious belief in a Church whose splendid logical consistency will prove its ruin. Here am I, a member of a sect that more nearly approaches ideal Christianity than any other sect in existence, and is a logical absurdity—blessed with the superstition of theology and, worse, of polemical theology, with.... But I cannot express all my superstitions: they seem more in number than the hairs of my head!”
“Let us say broadly, then, that Alcock and the Judge are those who have superstitionwithout, and Fitzgerald, you, and to a certain degree Hawkesbury, those who have superstitionwith, Religion.”
“And that you?”
“And thatIam he who unites in my proper person the superstitions of all with the actualities of none.”
There was a pause. Then:
“Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “I take you seriously. And I will confess that I would sooner, far sooner, be any one of us than you.—Verily and indeed,” he added, solemnly, “I cannot see why you should care to live.”
“Nor yet,” said Gildea, “why I should care to die?”
Maddock was possessed by sadness. The absolute, inevitable hopelessness of this man made him again turn faint and sick at heart.
“Nor yet,” he said, “why you should care to die.”
There was a long pause. Never again could Maddock be illuded into momentary misunderstanding of this man: he hadnow not only seen this strange soul laid bare before him and felt the influence of that sight, but had felt as if he had, as it were, almost received it into his own, almost made it a part of himself.
At last:
“I asked you to believe,” he said with a touch of wistfulness in face and tone, “that I was your true friend. You will perhaps, forgive me if I ... if I offer you the one token of it that seems left to me to offer. Some day—I cannot tell, but so I trust—you may care to think that, each night you close your eyes in sleep, there is one whose prayers for you are rising, as he believes, to the God and Father of us all, to bless and keep you, to lift up the light of his countenance upon you, and to give you peace.”
The two men stood facing each other for a few moments in silence: then their hands met in a close, long clasp, and parted; and they turned, standing almost touching each other, looking out over the lovely scene of earth and water and sky.
At last:
“Those clouds,” said Gildea softly, “they have a peerless radiancy. One seems to understand how the men of the past days saw a spirit therein, and held converse with it with wonder and delight and awe. Those were days of a music and beauty and sweetness such as we shall never know again.”
“If not,” said Maddock as softly,
“if not the calmof its early mountainous shore,yet a solemn peace of its own.”
“if not the calmof its early mountainous shore,yet a solemn peace of its own.”
“if not the calmof its early mountainous shore,yet a solemn peace of its own.”
“if not the calm
of its early mountainous shore,
yet a solemn peace of its own.”
A footstep was heard behind them. It was Edgar, come to say that Mrs. and Miss Medwin had arrived and were up in the drawing-room with Mr. Alcock.
Gildea stepped out onto the lawn.
“Let us go up by the balcony,” he said to Maddock.
Mrs. Medwin was the only native-born australian lady who was “good style.” So at least a Governor’s wife, about the “goodness” of whose “style” there could be no question, had declared. It was not, this Governor’s wife had explained, that there were no ladies in Australia, (There were not however many, par parenthèse, and such style as they had was at best but second-rate american), but they none of them had thatmanner of dressing, moving, and speaking which characterizes what (to use this rather objectional term again, for want of a better) we call “good style.” This Governor’s wife, with her usual delicate feminine instinct, had felt on the occasion of this now socially celebrated description of Mrs. Medwin, that she had not quite satisfied herself, that the description did not contain the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth, of the matter; and she was right, it did not. Mrs. Medwin undoubtedly possessed that serene refinement of movement and speech which go so far to making up that all but defunct individuality, a “lady,” but she was wanting in the final gift of a “lady,” social charm. The flower was scentless, or rather the scent it had was of another description. Her life had not, indeed, been favourable to the development of this final gift. She had been married early, a ready enough victim to the convenience of her family, to a man with whom she had little in common and much in opposition. He was liked by none and feared by all those who had any personal dealings with him: his savage outbursts of passion recalled to memory the dark stories that were told of his father who had, as the Australians euphemistically put it, come out at the government expense. But she, having calmly decided to accept Medwin and life with him, set herself by the sheer intrepidity of her sweet high beauty, to dominate them. She succeeded. And she won, not only the control, but the deep, admiring love, of the man. Then came the catastrophe which those who knew him had prophesied and recanted. In one of his savage outbursts of passion, he struck her. The blow was a cruel one and its results life-long. Much as she then suffered in body and soul, she could have no other feeling for him than that of pity. For days he would take no food, but sat in a chair outside her door, like a dog that waits in silence on an idolized master; and, when he was first permitted to enter, flung himself onto his knees by the bedside, sobbing and moaning and covering her hand with kisses. And she, who had had little or no care for him before, save as the principal incident in her life, now to her own surprise found that from out this appalling misery was born affection for him and even love. Her life from then onwards had been spent in a struggle far more terrible than that which she had waged with him. At first the idea of wasting away inch by inch on a diseased sick-bed almost overwhelmed her: she longed, she prayed for death.But death did not come; and then her spiritual pride began to reassert itself, and, like the captain of a battered ship, she once more thought how she could rule these waters that had ruled her. For long it seemed as if the effort would be too much for her: she said to herself one sleepless horrible night that she was being consumed alive. Her very latest gift seemed but as an added thorn to her; for now that she had affection and even love, she had also jealousy. The spell of her sweet, fearless health and strength and beauty was passed from him save as a memory: his love, deepened it might be by his abiding remorse, was (as she thought) deprived of that admiration which had been her first and strongest hold on him. Nothing more pitiful, than to see the womanliness in her assert itself against her pride and speak in jealousy! With wonderful intuition, however, she divined and with wonderful determination carried out, what was the only plan of still keeping for herself his admiration. She, who since she had married him had not given his business affairs a thought, now gave herself up to the mastery of them. She had herself taught all arithmetic thoroughly, and, in little less than three years after her misfortune, knew more of all his business affairs than he did himself. And more. She stirred up in him the ambition to become the leader of that great amorphous section of colonial society of which he was a member, the land-owners, the “squatters.” She had a certain liking for society, and when she was in England went into it as much as her extremely delicate health would permit her: in Australia, however, where, as she said, there was no society, or only of a sort which she did not like, she yet entertained a good deal, as she wished her husband to be popular in view of his entering parliament and attempting to organize his party. But her entertainment was more after the fashion of a listless social empress than an interested hostess: she did not care enough about these people to make, what would have been to her, a painful physical effort to attract them. She had indeed something of the feeling of one of the old aristocrats forced by the pressure of the time to open their houses to the Middle-class; she acknowledged the salute of her guests, and provided them with fine rooms, music, amusement, foods and drinks, and what more could they want? Her coldness was generally ascribed to her notorious ill-health, but the young people felt instinctively that she condemned them, and were not drawn to her. Between her and Gildea, however, therewas an understanding that was not without either charm or brightness to both. He understood her, and she half-felt this and, never having been really understood before, was in a way pleased at it and drawn to him. She amused him and at times, thanks to the pity with which her sweet courage inspired him, affected him. He was not too without respect for her intuitional capacities. He said once to Sydney Medwin, who was complaining that his mother was fifty years behind the time, (Mrs. Medwin supported her husband in his views for their elder son), that, on the contrary, she was fifty years before; for she was the only person he had met or heard of in the Colony who clearly saw that the Land Question was upon them. Mrs. Medwin indeed, as has been noticed, saw that the attempt of the Australian land-owners to repeat the performance of those of England and form a dominant aristocracy, would be met with keen opposition, and that the only hope of success lay in creating out of an amorphous class a party, and organizing it. The feeling of possession and caste had grown a strong one in her, in her more or less absorbed in the life of her husband. Hers, then, with all its powers of passionate attachment to an individual, was one of those not frequent female souls that see beyond a man into the cause which he represents. Her elder son she looked upon as a failure, as useless, as worth no more than making behave himself. Her younger son, Stephen, she was training with some care, and to him the far greater bulk of his father’s wealth and property was at present destined. Miss Medwin, whom Mrs. Medwin called her niece, and who called Mr. and Mrs. Medwin respectively uncle and aunt, but who was in reality no such relation, being the daughter of Mr. Medwin’s father’s brother’s son; of Miss Medwin it will perhaps be enough to state, that the report which Gildea had unexpectedly received of her from the Private Enquiry Office was correct, and that she was the possessor of a moderate fortune who had come out to Australia, half for a change from her English life of which she was weary, half in search of an old schoolfellow to whom she was much attached.
Gildea and Maddock stepped out together along the lawn and mounted the steps that led up to the sitting-room balcony. The sunlight, intercepted by an angle of the house, covered half of this portion of it, almost so exactly half that the glass door, open in the middle of the bay window, waspartly in the sun and partly in the shade. As they reached the balcony, Gildea, with the gesture of a courteous host, indicated to Maddock to enter first, but he, with the no less courteous gesture of a guest, refused and returned the indication. Gildea stepped into the open doorway and, as he stood there for a moment with the sunlight and shade playing upon him, met the gaze of Miss Medwin, seated upright, looking almost proudly before her. Behind her was the dark red of the curtain with its subdued white of delicately wrought muslin. Two rays of sunlight lay along the rich variegated colours of the carpet, diffusing a little light about her. She was very beautiful. They had recognized one another at once. And more. They both were undergoing that feeling of half-forgotten recollection that affects us with such unprepared and mystic strangeness. Had they, then, seen one another before that day when she had almost ridden over him under the Domain trees? had they met in some way similar to their meeting now? At such moments the past, the present, and the future, all half unknown, seem to join hands, and kiss, and part with eyes dimmed with a regretless regret.
It had passed in a few moments. Gildea, with something that might be called a sudden freak of tact, stepped into the room, turning a quite self-possessed face to Mrs. Medwin. She was sitting on a sofa dispensing serene little nothings to Alcock, whose face and manner beamed with social polish. Gildea came straight to her and made his greetings with winning grace: then, obeying a slight gesture of hers, moved aside and she introduced him to her niece, Miss Medwin. With the same winning grace, head courteously bowed, he stepped to Miss Medwin, and lightly raised the hand she held up to him. Maddock was greeting Mrs. Medwin.
“I think,” said Gildea smiling slightly, “I think, Miss Medwin, that we are not quite strangers.”
“And how is Mrs. Maddock?” asked Mrs. Medwin, “I hope she is quite well.” Gildea sat down in a chair by Miss Medwin.
“No,” answered Miss Medwin gravely, “I was careless enough to have almost ridden onto you.”
“The carelessness was mine. I was dreaming. Day-dreamers should be awakened.” Maddock was assuring Mrs. Medwin that Mrs. Maddock was in excellent health, and at this very moment enjoying herself quite satisfactorily without the society of her lord and master.
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Medwin, “I hope we shall be able to see her before we leave Sydney. We are stopping at Winslow’s.”
“That,” Miss Medwin said gravely again, “seems to me to depend a good deal on the day.”
“Mr. Medwin iswithyou, Mrs. Medwin?” interrogated Alcock with his politest manner, “I understood that I should not have the pleasure of seeing him till monday or tuesday?”
“It is true,” said Gildea, “that to-day the reality of things is so troubling to the peace and pleasure of many of us, that it is cruel to wake us from our dreams.”
“Oh no!” said Mrs. Medwin with her usual unruffled serenity, “Mr. Medwin is not coming up till tuesday or perhaps wednesday.”
A swift sense of the humour of a social scene like this, where the tendency of things is for the dramatis personæ to beat unlimited time with musical voices, graceful gestures, and a charming expression of countenance, dawned upon Gildea as a memory of almost distant days. The poetry of society is mostly expended in its common-places. To be able to do this is an art, an art of which provincial and colonial society is ignorant. Hence Gildea’s sense of the humour of the present scene was as an almost distant memory. “Here,” he thought, “we have four excellent musicians who would make the most charmingly meaningless quartet possible, Alcock being reduced to the part of accidental audience.” It was not, of course, that Gildea’s talk with Miss Medwin was social time-beating: it was, rather, spiritual time-beating, rendered in a manner that partook of the social. Miss Medwin had not recovered from the to her strange sensations of this second sudden meeting with him: she was neither as consummate a master of her emotions as he was, nor careful of becoming one, nor yet was she prepared, as he was, for their meeting: she was left by it as one is who has had some swift revelation of good or evil in himself—considering himself if he really was this, is that, and will be something that contains them both. The individualities of other men she had known had touched her as much, or almost as much, as his had on that day in the Domain, but none had ever entered into her and, as it were, “blown a thrilling summons to her will” as his had, as he stood looking at her in the shadowy sunlit doorway there. And herwill had answered that summons, and instantaneously. To him that sight of her, sitting upright, looking almost proudly before her, was ever to be as the sight of an Antigone, one who felt “it was better not to be than not be noble,” the depth of whose scorn for unworthiness was equal to her love, high as the everlasting hills, deep as the unplumbed sea.
“Yes,” she said, “it is sometimes cruel to wake us from our dreams, and yet it is best, I think.”
“—You think it is best to modify our poetry with prose? Was it better to have awakened Shelley, and given us his ‘Prometheus’ with wooden limbs of a day’s social dogmatism, than to have let him make delicate music in the italian woods and by the italian shores, for ever sweet and fair?”
“So he told me,” said Alcock, “and I was very glad to hear it. The interests of all wealth, whether in land or in money, is identic. But we have no organization.—And Labour,” he added with a look to Maddock, “as Mr. Hawkesbury just told us, is organizing, if it is not already organized.”
If it had been possible for Mrs. Medwin to be amazed at anything, she would have been amazed at this. Hawkesbury had a few years ago been an employé on one of Medwin’s stations, the very station to which she was now on her road. This was a reflection which was positively annoying to her. “It would,” she had once simply remarked, “have been as well perhaps, if he had eaten some poisoned meat when he was there, as they used to say the troublesome blacks did. He is a danger to society.” Sydney Medwin, who liked to do his best to ruffle his mother’s serenity now and then, used not unfrequently to speak in praise of Hawkesbury (his friend Hawkesbury, a clever fellow too, and who would make his mark out here yet!) and had once even, as Gildea told Maddock, offered to introduce him to her. “You know, Sydney,” said Mrs. Medwin simply, “I am not interested in Mr. Hawkesbury. If you like to make up a shooting-party at Lathong,” (a station of Medwin’s in Victoria), “with all the men on the station, I daresay he would be pleased to join you.”—What, then, was the meaning of Mr. Alcock’s remark that this firebrand socialist, this impertinent journalist and pamphleteer, had beenjust tellingsomething to Mr. Alcock, Dr. Maddock, and presumably Sir Horace?
“I’m sure,” said Alcock with his politest manner again, “that we all of us cannot be too—too pleased to have found alady who realized this, and could help us to what we so much want—a ... a sort of general rallying-point.—Nothing,” he proceeded, “struck me so much in England as the use that the political parties made of their social gatherings, and they tell me that this was much more the case once than it is at present.” Alcock found a certain amount of difficulty in saying that he thought women might, after all, be made of some use in political life, in a manner that should be pleasing tothiswoman.
The talk progressed more or less easily, Maddock, with a humorous perception of the effect Alcock’s innocent allusion to Hawkesbury had produced on Mrs. Medwin, playing the part of conversational mediator between the two.
“You are not, then,” said Gildea, in answer to a remark of Miss Medwin’s, “in sympathy with dreams and dreamers?”
“No,” she answered shaking her head, “not if they take their dreams for realities. It is just, I think, because we have been dreaming so long and dreaming so much, that our waking is so miserable.—You speak of prose and poetry,” she continued, turning her head a little and looking at him, “as if the prose had something disagreeable in it. Well, so it may have—to the dreamers. I too am a dreamer, of course, in my way; but I dream about the earth and the things of the earth, and so my dreams are real as the wind is real, or the sunlight, or the moonlight, or the light of the stars, none of which fear the contact of the earth or the water. But these people seem to me to dream of the things of heaven, filling all space with them. But space is empty—at any rate of things like theirs.”
“You do not believe,” he said, “as Taine does, that ‘at bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in our life but our dreams?’”
“Yes,” she said, “yes and no! But what does it matterwhatI believe? I have no opinion of my own in this way. You would make me dogmatic. Now I shall always try not to be dogmatic. I rebel against defining things, especially things that I like; they are never the same afterwards. But I am often doing this, and I have to suffer for it. This comes of being born in an age which can describe everything and do nothing.—You see, you make me petulant!”
It flashed across Gildea’s mind as she finished speaking that there was a great difference between the manner of his talk with this girl and with that bright intelligent girl in Melbourne.He perceived the difference, and the greatness of the difference, but not much farther. It was many years, and in point of spiritual time many ages, since Gildea had been blind to the fact that another nature was influencing and being influenced by his own with the force of fatality. It is the distinguishing mark of the moderns that they are not blind in this respect. None of Shakspere’s men, not even the intellectual Hamlet, get beyond a suspicion that Fate is playing upon them. The chief cause of Hamlet’s delay lies in this suspicion and his antagonism to it: the others submit blindly, and only recognise fatality when the “wheel has come full circle,” butthe processof fatality is all unknown to them, not even a mystery. Miss Medwin too was in the same state as Gildea but even deeper in it. She spoke to him as she had never spoken to anyone else in her life, as to a comrade, without leaning, without supporting, with complete simplicity. The spell that compels a mutual truthfulness is the perception that you understand and are understood.
“I see,” he said, “thatyoucomplain of your age because its senses are deranged, and idlers like me because the gifts that it assigns to the doers, as opposed to the thinkers, are not gold but tinsel.”
“No, no,” she said, “I do not complain of my age! If I complained of anything, it would be of myself who am unfit for my age. And I do not think that the gifts of our actions are tinsel.”
“Perhaps you are right, and the fault is mine becausemysenses are deranged?”
“There is great room for action now, as it seems to me. If a man appeared to-morrow with the secret of attraction in him—the secret that Napoleon had or Byron—he would control us as much as they did. They are ours too, these men.”
“But we think too much? we can describe everything, and do nothing?”
“I do not know,” she said, “I have no opinion!”
“Alice,” said Mrs. Medwin.
“Yes, aunt,” answered Miss Medwin.
“Will you please make the tea?” she said.
Miss Medwin rose at once, Gildea rising too, smiling. It was Mrs. Medwin’s peculiar charm that, at certain apparently eccentric moments, she would speak and act with the pretty spontaneous sweetness of a young girl. This was the scentthis wonderful flower had retained, despite all the terrible heats of the noontide and frosts of the dawn that had fallen upon its life. She had spoken in this manner now.
Miss Medwin went behind the tea-table which Edgar had just brought in and on which he was placing the bright silver tea-urn, and the water-can with its blue-violet-flamed spirit-lamp; then, at a nod from Gildea, disappeared. Miss Medwin poured out a cup of tea which Gildea took to Mrs. Medwin, returning for the milk and sugar, while Miss Medwin took the second cup to Maddock, who received it with suave and charming thanks. Mrs. Medwin thanked Gildea, who passed on with the milk and sugar to Maddock, and, as he returned to the tea-table for the cakes and biscuits, passed Miss Medwin with the third cup on her way to Alcock. Alcock received her with thanks profuse and jocular.
“Do you take milk and sugar?” asked Miss Medwin.
“No, no, thank you, Miss Medwin,” returned Alcock, “I take neither!”
Gildea arrived, with a plate of cakes in one hand and a plate of biscuits in the other. Mrs. Medwin recognised in the biscuits those of a sort to which she was somewhat addicted, and divined that Gildea had noticed the fact.
“Thank you, Sir Horace,” she said, with her manner of pretty spontaneous sweetness, “And presently Alice shall play for you. I know you will find her style of playing a treat.”
Sir Horace made a suitable reply and passed on with the cakes and biscuits. Mrs. Medwin and Maddock began to talk together, Alcock playing the part of silent member.
“There is your tea,” Miss Medwin said to Gildea as he came back to the tea-table. She was standing with her own cup in her hand as if about to move away to a seat. Gildea proffered the biscuits. She took one. He put down the plates and took up his cup.
“You are an epicure in tea,” she said, sipping a little of hers from her tea-spoon, “are you not?”
“I do not know,” he answered with a slightly amused look, “but I believe that the Russians are the only people in Europe who understand it.”
“They take neither sugar nor milk, do they? and a slice of lemon floating in the tea?”
They were moving back to their places. He assented.
“And who are the only people in Europe who understand coffee?” she asked.
“Undoubtedly the French.”
“Ah, you mean the café au lait—with the milk and coffee both boiling and poured in together? I like it that way, but not with too much milk. We had a french cook once who used to make it for us, and, as I liked it, of course I found out how to make it myself.”
“Yes,” he said, “certainly coffee with cold milk is a barbarism; but the shape in which I like coffee best is as, what the French call, café noir.”
Miss Medwin said she had never seen it in that way, and, in answer to Gildea’s slight expression of surprise, explained that she had never been in France. Gildea described the café noir and the proper manner in which to drink it.
“You fill the spoon with cognac,” he said, “into which you put a lump of sugar—In France the sugar is in little thin slabs, not, as with us, in squares—and then you set the cognac alight. This melts down the sugar and, when all the spirit is burnt up, except that which saturates the sugar, and goes out, you put in your spoon. The flavour of burnt sugar and cognac is pleasant.”
“It is indeed, Sir Horace,” said Alcock, tired of playing the part of silent member in the other conversation, “I drank it that way myself in Paris. A friend of mine, an American told me of it. Paris is a very pleasant place. You have a treat in store for you, going there, Miss Medwin.”
“Yes,” she answered, “I should like to go to Paris; the Louvre is there.”
“A very fine collection,” said Alcock, “I was much struck with it! Unfortunately all the best works of art are now either in collections, or so expensive that they are out of the reach of us Australians who have claims upon us more pressing. You saw the Picture Gallery in Melbourne?”
“Yes, I saw it. I think it is rather painful. I liked the Library better.”
“The building—the room, you mean?”
“No, I meant the books. I used to go and sit there and read.”
“Oh indeed?” said Alcock. “And what now do you think of the Picture Gallery here?”
“Alice,” said Mrs. Medwin, “you are not to say! I won’t have you say that the things in Sydney are better than in Melbourne!”
“Very well, aunt,” said Alice, “then I will not say it.”
“And now,” said Mrs. Medwin, “I want you to play for us.”
Miss Medwin rose at once with a look for the piano, which was on the other side of the curtains. Both she and Gildea were amused and delighted by Mrs. Medwin’s characteristic interruption and command: Maddock was amused: even Alcock, who did not yet know her ways, was too much influenced by the charm of this her happiest manner to think it rude or imperious. “She is such an invalid,” he said, recounting this incident as an anecdote to a friend of his at the Melbourne Club, “and rules everyone about her like a little empress. But her manner is irresistible, really irresistible; and it doesn’t offend you in the least—in fact you rather like it. There is no woman in Melbourne who could help us to consolidate a party in the english social manner asshecould. And I really attach—I really do!—considerable importance to the idea.” Such was the subsequent expression of the thoughts which were passing through the mind of Alcock as Gildea, having held back the curtain for Miss Medwin to pass, was opening the piano for her. Mrs. Medwin sat in serene unconsciousness of the possibility of her manners being considered as otherwise than her own, and would have been surprised if she had heard that anyone thought they were open to question.
“Is there any piece, aunt,” asked Miss Medwin, bending back so as to see Mrs. Medwin through the curtains, “that you would like me to play?”
“Oh no!” Mrs. Medwin said, “Why, I wanted you to play for Sir Horace, not for me!”
Miss Medwin smiled assent, and, after a few moments’ pause to consider what piece she would play and to collect her thoughts, began. The piece was the one which she considered would most please her audience, and which of course she knew. It was Chopin’s Eleventh Nocturne. It suited her humour at many times, but particularly at the present. The Nocturne is divided into two parts: passionate and half-weary wandering, and rest in which passion is merged in peace. To her it conjured up the vision of a twilight road winding up between woody rolling fields and a plantation. The dark figure of the man, whose passionate and half-weary wandering is here expressing itself, is coming slowly up the road. Low down and far away behind the close straight stems of the plantation lie afew pallid veins of sunset light. The shadows are stealing swiftly around him. He is near to hopelessness, near to the wish to