“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 is with you, 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 her will 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.