He was silent, but the dreamy smile remained still on his lips.
“Come, speak!” I said roughly—“You can be frank with me, you know,—angel or devil—which?”
“My dear Geoffrey!” he remonstrated gently and with gravity—“A woman is always an angel,—both here and hereafter!”
I laughed bitterly. “If that is part of your faith I am sorry for you!”
“I have not spoken of my faith,”—he rejoined in colder accents, lifting his brilliant eyes to the darkening heaven—“I am not a Salvationist, that I should bray forth a creed to the sound of trump and drum.”
“All the same, you have a creed;”—I persisted—“And I fancy it must be a strange one! If you remember, you promised to explain it to me——”
“Are you ready to receive such an explanation?” he asked in a somewhat ironical tone—“No, my dear friend!—permit me to say you are not ready—not yet! My beliefs are too positive to be brought even into contact with your contradictions,—too frightfully real to submit to your doubts for a moment. You would at once begin to revert to the puny, used-up old arguments of Voltaire, Schopenhauer and Huxley,—little atomic theories like grains of dust in the whirlwind of My knowledge! I can tell you I believe in God as a very Actual and Positive Being,—and that is presumably the first of the Church articles.”
“You believe in God!” I echoed his words, staring at him stupidly. He seemed in earnest. In fact he had always [p 440] seemed in earnest on the subject of Deity. Vaguely I thought of a woman in society whom I slightly knew,—an ugly woman, unattractive and mean-minded, who passed her time in entertaining semi-Royalties and pushing herself amongst them,—she had said to me one day—[4] “I hate people who believe in God, don’t you? The idea of a God makes me sick!”
“You believe in God!” I repeated again dubiously.
“Look!” he said, raising his hand towards the sky—“There a few drifting clouds cover millions of worlds, impenetrable, mysterious, yet actual;—down there—” and he pointed to the sea, “lurk a thousand things of which, though the ocean is a part of earth, human beings have not yet learned the nature. Between these upper and lower spaces of the Incomprehensible yet Absolute, you, a finite atom of limited capabilities stand, uncertain how long the frail thread of your life shall last, yet arrogantly balancing the question with your own poor brain, as to whether you,—you in your utter littleness and incompetency shall condescend to accept a God or not! I confess, that of all astonishing things in the Universe, this particular attitude of modern mankind is the most astonishing to me!”