“And now,” said Gildea, looking up with yet another change of tone and manner, “and now we have done with the negative side of the good Judge’s criticism and can turn to the affirmative.—But that,” he added, “must, I am afraid, be after lunch—if you will, Doctor?”
“I will,” said Maddock, “and you shall not then find me so passive, for your treachery and malice are now quite laid bare to me.”
Gildea smiled.
“But not my loyalty and admiration? Believe me, Doctor, that, if it were only for this one remark of yours, I could never fail in my interest and gratitude to you. ‘Our blackfellows,’ you say, ‘had no punishment for offences against their elementary ideas of purity but spearing. And it was infinitely better that they should spear for impurity than lose their first step towards a higher life.’ ... But here we are,” he said, “This is the house. Fitzgerald and Hawkesbury have to leave us soon after lunch. Mrs. Medwin and her niece, Miss Medwin, are coming later to make tea for me, and then we are going out for a sail in the yacht. Mr. Medwin is thinking of a legislative career, and so Alcock is to be cultivated. Can you come with us? You know how pleased it would make us all.”
The Doctor explained that he was due at his hotel at half-past three to meet Mrs. Maddock, and both he and Gildea expressed their due regrets at his not being able to make one of the party on the yacht.
III.
Gildea led the way upstairs and ushered Maddock into the sitting-room. It was in reality two rooms joined together by a large folding-door, which was now thrown open and draped with four looped-up curtains, two of some dark-red material behind two of delicately-wrought muslin. The two rooms were of the whole depth of the house, the large bay-windows, open and with a glass-door in the middle of them open also, at one end looking out over the city, at the other over the harbour. A grass-slope, and a garden with flower-beds and rustling trees, spread all round and down to the water’s edge; while, a little way out, the “Petrel” rode at peaceful anchorage, her boat behind her. Maddock was for the moment so taken up with the beauty of the place within and without—the room with all its harmonies of form and colour, the garden and harbour scene—that he did not notice that someone was standing, half hidden by the curtains, in the next room on the hearth-rug. Then Gildea passed through and greeted this person whom he brought forward and introduced to Maddock as Mr. Hawkesbury.
Hawkesbury was a small but well-made man with a tendency to muscular leanness. His face was striking and interesting, and betrayed a strongly-defined individuality. At one moment he might have been called handsome, and his manner frank, free, and open: at another his features took such a contracted intensified look, and his movements were so nervously acute, that the whole man seemed to have suffered distortion. It seemed as if he were suddenly seized by some keen pain, spiritual and physical, and was being racked by it. When Gildea entered, there was for a moment a trace of this latter manner in Hawkesbury: his sensitive pride found something antagonistic in, what seemed to him, the consummate luxury which surrounded him and even in the consummate culture of its owner: he was almost asking himself what right this man had to spend so much money and care in decorating a few rooms for a few months, this man whose life was so radically selfish? Hawkesbury’s was, he might have said, the feeling of one who was a socialist and worker by intense conviction, finding himself opposed to one who was an aristocrat and hedonist by the mere chance of birth and fortune. But, when Gildea met and greeted him with the frank sweet unconscious cordiality of an equal whose acquaintance is pleasant, the dark look passed from Hawkesbury’s face and he gave himself up to the simple pleasure of the situation. His unexpected introduction to Maddock, who represented to him the more or less sumptuous aristocrat of religion, for a moment, it is true, threatened to bring back the evil spirit to him; but Maddock, with his fine social tact, almost divining the state of affairs, was equally frank, sweet, unconscious and cordial in his manner, and Hawkesbury was at his ease.
The three men stood talking together, Maddock in the middle, in the bay-window that looked out over the harbour.
“Why, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “you will never be able to get away from this enchanting place again! Are you sure you do not intend to make it into a home? You did not honour your Melbourne rooms with such care—such choice of furniture, and....” (He raised his arm and outspread hand, smiling humorously).