I.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning of a day late in april. The sun shone with bright warmth, a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea. Great deep masses of cloud, luminous-white or here and there shaded with that slaty black which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue vault of the heavens. Gildea was descending the steps of the entrance to St. Mary’s Cathedral, accompanied by a young man of about his own age. At the foot of the steps they both paused.
“Well,” said Gildea with a look, “You will be at my rooms in time for lunch, you say?”
The other nodded, and, in a few moments, saluting one another with a movement of the hand, they parted. The young man went with a quick firm step in the direction of St. James’ Church, while Gildea sauntered across the road into the Domain. He was thinking of the young man, Francis Fitzgerald, a young Jesuit whom he had met years ago at a seaside place in the south of France, and who, as he said, for the sake of his health, had come out on a voyage to Australia.
“It is wonderful,” said Gildea to himself, “how quickly and thoroughly the religious bodies are waking up to the intellectual necessities of the time. Romans—Anglicans—Lutherans, and even Calvinists are sucking lustily at the two paps of the Modern Spirit which we call Science and Culture. It is the instinct of self-preservation. If they do not suck they will starve. But ah, how many of us are cross-tempered enough to prefer to starve rather than imbibe the milk of a cross-tempered mother!” He looked up with a fine smile, suddenly realizing his humour of thought. “I am quite serious,” he said to himself, the smile deepening and broadening, lighting up his face with amusement, “which shows how adaptive I am. Really now, I listened to Fitzgerald’s hopes and beliefs in the future of Romanism with quite as much interest as if I were a Romanist myself. I can quite conceive of myself taking very considerable pains to forward a cause in which somebody else believed. This surely was the central idea of my attachment to Olivia Bruce? I used to think I should be quite satisfied to live the life of a poet in that of my poetess? So far, this power of living your own life in the life of one you love has been a female gift. And indeed I have often thought that I should have been better as a woman. I can quite imagine myself as Lady Bellfield or d’Israeli’s delightful Berengaria; whereas now, I am but an aimless wanderer on the face of an aimless planet, a pilgrim without a shrine.”
He walked on half-thoughtful half-amused, till he had crossed the Domain and found himself opposite the Picture Gallery and the Botanical Gardens. He entered the gardens, and was proceeding down one of the walks when, some fifteen yards before him, he beheld a well-known figure. It was Maddock, Maddock standing at the side of the walk, observing a plant through his pince-nez with serene interest. Gildea came up to him with pleasure.
“Ah, Doctor,” he said, “you here! This is a surprise!”
They shook hands: greeted one another, and exchanged health notes both of themselves and Mrs. Maddock, as they went on down the walk together, the Doctor rubbing his glasses with his silk handkerchief and keeping step.
“The truth is, my dear fellow,” he said, his head up and moving from side to side as he drew into himself the enjoyment of the fine morning air and scene, “the truth is, I am here for a holiday—or rather, for half a holiday. Sydney is a favourite place of mine.—But,” he added in his humorous confidential way, “you know I don’t care for the people! They are not in earnest enough! I would sooner, I believe, have an earnest atheist than a lukewarm orthodox man. Isn’t it your friend Renan who says somewhere, that the atheist has an idea of things, a quite inadequate idea, it is true, but still an idea, whereas ‘the average sensual man’ has none?—or something to that effect.”