“Look!”
They had come down as far as Farm Cove—skirted it, turning off along Lady Macquarie’s Walk—then mounted up onto the drive, and, having passed by the Chair, were now standing on the brow of the slope with an open view of Garden Island (Clark Island being hidden), the harbour, and the woody hills behind it. 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. Light and shade lay everywhere in alternate streaks or patches. One round piece of water to the left was like a burnished blazing mirror of steel. Other parts were blue, gray, or dark, reflecting the cloud-colours above them. The anchored ships rose and fell gently, their flags fluttering. A steamer came stealing out of one of the harbour arms into the open. The only sounds of life were the far-off hammer-strokes of the builders, the occasional cry of the white fleeting sea-gulls, the striking of a ship’s bells, the cricket humming at their feet.
“And,” Maddock said, in his deep voice of earnestness, “in the face of such a scene as this—the free glory of nature so great and so glad, the wonderful toil and effort and happiness of mankind—you will say to yourself: ‘There is no soul in me, for there is no God to give it!’ Ah, my dear Sir Horace, you surprise and grieve me! Are you not—you, oh heavens, you!—at heart an atheist? are you not guilty of that grossest of anthropomorphisms yourself?”
Gildea smiled, a fine sweet smile of sadness that made even the strong steady heart of his companion turn faint for a moment and sick. There was something so absolutely inevitably hopeless, as it seemed to Maddock, in this strange soul that he saw before him, now for the first time laid bare. Here was a patient for which the physician felt he had no power of healing or even alleviation. What view of christian faith and hope and love did not this strange soul know? Maddock, for the first time in his life, felt himself in the presence of one, the breadth and depth and height of whose spiritual experience encompassed him like an ocean. The words of remonstrance died on his lips: exhortation lay lifeless in him: silence and sorrow possessed him. He turned away with a heavy sigh, a sigh which was the unconscious acknowledgment to himself that life and death, time and eternity, man and God, could indeed be read in two diametrically different ways. For the first time in his life he realized the truth of “the Everlasting No” in a human soul greater than his own.
They walked on together for a little in silence. Then Gildea said as simply and naturally as if nothing unusual had happened:
“Now, Doctor, tell me will you come and have lunch with me? Mrs. Maddock, you say, has shaken you off for the sake of a long morning with Lady Whitfield, and why should you not retort on her spinster’s déjeuner with a bachelor’s lunch? I ought to have thought of it before.”
The Doctor again suddenly regained his humour.
“Thank you,” he said, “I shall be charmed.”
“Nay,” said Gildea, smiling, “but I must bid you pause a moment, aimless dreamer that I am, and tell you who you will meet there. Perhaps you will want your assent back again.”
“Speak on,” said Maddock, “and, provided it is not some one who will object to my smoking afterwards, I ... I don’t think I shall!”