“Then, why don’t you proselytise?” she asked. “As you are convinced of the truth of your doctrine, isn’t it your duty to spread it?”
Cochrane let his eyes wander from her face over the hillside, fragrant with heather and murmurous with bees. Then they looked at her again, and for the first time she saw that they were different from any eyes she had ever seen in the face of man or woman, for they were unmistakably a child’s eyes, full of a child’s disarming frankness, and almost terrible honesty.
“You can spread a thing in many ways,” he said. “But preaching was not the primary way He chose. ‘He went about doing good.’”
Maud felt herself suddenly seized with that shyness which is instinctive to most Anglo-Saxons when “religion” puts in its appearance in conversation, and she was suddenly tongue-tied. With many people, no doubt, reticence on religious subjects is due to the fact that, since they have no religion, there is nothing for them to talk about. But it was not so with her. Religion formed a very vital and essential part of her life, but it was not a thing to be publicly trotted out like this. So, since the subject had so unexpectedly and profoundly deepened with this last remark, it was she who rather precipitately changed it now.
“I see,” she said. “But please don’t leave me the gaff. I should immensely like, since you are so kind, to try for another sea-trout or two, but having poached one salmon without your leave, I couldn’t contemplate poaching another, even with it. So if I hook another he shall break me, and so I shall present your river with a fly and a cast by way of amende.”
Maud felt vexed and annoyed with herself. She was not managing well; she thought she must be giving a quite false impression by chattering this stupid nonsense in order to get away from the subject of religion. But then a rather more natural topic suggested itself—namely, the idea of offering him hospitality, which had occurred to and been rejected by Thurso.
“And do come and dine with us to-morrow,” she said, “and eat some of your own fish. Thurso and I would be delighted. We are just squatting in the house, you know, and eat and live in one room, and the caretaker’s wife cooks. Ah, how stupid of me! I forgot. Thurso is turning the rest of the house into a typhoid hospital, and by evening the place will be full of patients. So please say ‘No’ point-blank if you don’t like the thought. I shall quite understand.”
Those childlike eyes looked at her in frank, unveiled admiration.
“Why, that’s just splendid of you both,” he said; “and as for coming to dinner, I shall be delighted. We Scientists are often told we are inconsistent, but we are not quite so bad as to mind coming to a house where a few poor souls think they are ill. So, au revoir, Lady Maud, and many thanks.”
Maud was a girl of great singleness of purpose, and generally, when she was out for a day’s fishing, the number of moments in which she thought about things unconnected in any way with fishing scarcely made any total at all, while any other subject that was present in her mind was there only in a very dim and distant fashion. But to-day, during the hour’s fishing which she indulged in between Mr. Cochrane’s departure and lunch, her thoughts persistently strayed from fishing, and when eventually she made herself a windless seat in the heather, overlooking the pool which she had just fished, even the brace of silvery sea-trout she had already caught, and the prospective brace or two that she promised herself before evening, occupied but a very small part of her meditations.