Part 16

Gildea and Maddock stepped out together along the lawn and mounted the steps that led up to the sitting-room balcony. The sunlight, intercepted by an angle of the house, covered half of this portion of it, almost so exactly half that the glass door, open in the middle of the bay window, was partly in the sun and partly in the shade. As they reached the balcony, Gildea, with the gesture of a courteous host, indicated to Maddock to enter first, but he, with the no less courteous gesture of a guest, refused and returned the indication. Gildea stepped into the open doorway and, as he stood there for a moment with the sunlight and shade playing upon him, met the gaze of Miss Medwin, seated upright, looking almost proudly before her. Behind her was the dark red of the curtain with its subdued white of delicately wrought muslin. Two rays of sunlight lay along the rich variegated colours of the carpet, diffusing a little light about her. She was very beautiful. They had recognized one another at once. And more. They both were undergoing that feeling of half-forgotten recollection that affects us with such unprepared and mystic strangeness. Had they, then, seen one another before that day when she had almost ridden over him under the Domain trees? had they met in some way similar to their meeting now? At such moments the past, the present, and the future, all half unknown, seem to join hands, and kiss, and part with eyes dimmed with a regretless regret.

It had passed in a few moments. Gildea, with something that might be called a sudden freak of tact, stepped into the room, turning a quite self-possessed face to Mrs. Medwin. She was sitting on a sofa dispensing serene little nothings to Alcock, whose face and manner beamed with social polish. Gildea came straight to her and made his greetings with winning grace: then, obeying a slight gesture of hers, moved aside and she introduced him to her niece, Miss Medwin. With the same winning grace, head courteously bowed, he stepped to Miss Medwin, and lightly raised the hand she held up to him. Maddock was greeting Mrs. Medwin.

“I think,” said Gildea smiling slightly, “I think, Miss Medwin, that we are not quite strangers.”

“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.

“Yes,” she said, “it is sometimes cruel to wake us from our dreams, and yet it is best, I think.”

“—You think it is best to modify our poetry with prose? Was it better to have awakened Shelley, and given us his ‘Prometheus’ with wooden limbs of a day’s social dogmatism, than to have let him make delicate music in the italian woods and by the italian shores, for ever sweet and fair?”

“So he told me,” said Alcock, “and I was very glad to hear it. The interests of all wealth, whether in land or in money, is identic. But we have no organization.—And Labour,” he added with a look to Maddock, “as Mr. Hawkesbury just told us, is organizing, if it is not already organized.”

If it had been possible for Mrs. Medwin to be amazed at anything, she would have been amazed at this. Hawkesbury had a few years ago been an employé on one of Medwin’s stations, the very station to which she was now on her road. This was a reflection which was positively annoying to her. “It would,” she had once simply remarked, “have been as well perhaps, if he had eaten some poisoned meat when he was there, as they used to say the troublesome blacks did. He is a danger to society.” Sydney Medwin, who liked to do his best to ruffle his mother’s serenity now and then, used not unfrequently to speak in praise of Hawkesbury (his friend Hawkesbury, a clever fellow too, and who would make his mark out here yet!) and had once even, as Gildea told Maddock, offered to introduce him to her. “You know, Sydney,” said Mrs. Medwin simply, “I am not interested in Mr. Hawkesbury. If you like to make up a shooting-party at Lathong,” (a station of Medwin’s in Victoria), “with all the men on the station, I daresay he would be pleased to join you.”—What, then, was the meaning of Mr. Alcock’s remark that this firebrand socialist, this impertinent journalist and pamphleteer, had been _just telling_ something to Mr. Alcock, Dr. Maddock, and presumably Sir Horace?

“I’m sure,” said Alcock with his politest manner again, “that we all of us cannot be too—too pleased to have found a lady who realized this, and could help us to what we so much want—a ... a sort of general rallying-point.—Nothing,” he proceeded, “struck me so much in England as the use that the political parties made of their social gatherings, and they tell me that this was much more the case once than it is at present.” Alcock found a certain amount of difficulty in saying that he thought women might, after all, be made of some use in political life, in a manner that should be pleasing to _this_ woman.

The talk progressed more or less easily, Maddock, with a humorous perception of the effect Alcock’s innocent allusion to Hawkesbury had produced on Mrs. Medwin, playing the part of conversational mediator between the two.

“You are not, then,” said Gildea, in answer to a remark of Miss Medwin’s, “in sympathy with dreams and dreamers?”

“No,” she answered shaking her head, “not if they take their dreams for realities. It is just, I think, because we have been dreaming so long and dreaming so much, that our waking is so miserable.—You speak of prose and poetry,” she continued, turning her head a little and looking at him, “as if the prose had something disagreeable in it. Well, so it may have—to the dreamers. I too am a dreamer, of course, in my way; but I dream about the earth and the things of the earth, and so my dreams are real as the wind is real, or the sunlight, or the moonlight, or the light of the stars, none of which fear the contact of the earth or the water. But these people seem to me to dream of the things of heaven, filling all space with them. But space is empty—at any rate of things like theirs.”

“You do not believe,” he said, “as Taine does, that ‘at bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in our life but our dreams?’”

“Yes,” she said, “yes and no! But what does it matter _what_ I believe? I have no opinion of my own in this way. You would make me dogmatic. Now I shall always try not to be dogmatic. I rebel against defining things, especially things that I like; they are never the same afterwards. But I am often doing this, and I have to suffer for it. This comes of being born in an age which can describe everything and do nothing.—You see, you make me petulant!”

It flashed across Gildea’s mind as she finished speaking that there was a great difference between the manner of his talk with this girl and with that bright intelligent girl in Melbourne. He perceived the difference, and the greatness of the difference, but not much farther. It was many years, and in point of spiritual time many ages, since Gildea had been blind to the fact that another nature was influencing and being influenced by his own with the force of fatality. It is the distinguishing mark of the moderns that they are not blind in this respect. None of Shakspere’s men, not even the intellectual Hamlet, get beyond a suspicion that Fate is playing upon them. The chief cause of Hamlet’s delay lies in this suspicion and his antagonism to it: the others submit blindly, and only recognise fatality when the “wheel has come full circle,” but _the process_ of fatality is all unknown to them, not even a mystery. Miss Medwin too was in the same state as Gildea but even deeper in it. She spoke to him as she had never spoken to anyone else in her life, as to a comrade, without leaning, without supporting, with complete simplicity. The spell that compels a mutual truthfulness is the perception that you understand and are understood.

“I see,” he said, “that _you_ complain of your age because its senses are deranged, and idlers like me because the gifts that it assigns to the doers, as opposed to the thinkers, are not gold but tinsel.”

“No, no,” she said, “I do not complain of my age! If I complained of anything, it would be of myself who am unfit for my age. And I do not think that the gifts of our actions are tinsel.”

“Perhaps you are right, and the fault is mine because _my_ senses are deranged?”

“There is great room for action now, as it seems to me. If a man appeared to-morrow with the secret of attraction in him—the secret that Napoleon had or Byron—he would control us as much as they did. They are ours too, these men.”

“But we think too much? we can describe everything, and do nothing?”

“I do not know,” she said, “I have no opinion!”

“Alice,” said Mrs. Medwin.

“Yes, aunt,” answered Miss Medwin.

“Will you please make the tea?” she said.

Miss Medwin rose at once, Gildea rising too, smiling. It was Mrs. Medwin’s peculiar charm that, at certain apparently eccentric moments, she would speak and act with the pretty spontaneous sweetness of a young girl. This was the scent this wonderful flower had retained, despite all the terrible heats of the noontide and frosts of the dawn that had fallen upon its life. She had spoken in this manner now.

Miss Medwin went behind the tea-table which Edgar had just brought in and on which he was placing the bright silver tea-urn, and the water-can with its blue-violet-flamed spirit-lamp; then, at a nod from Gildea, disappeared. Miss Medwin poured out a cup of tea which Gildea took to Mrs. Medwin, returning for the milk and sugar, while Miss Medwin took the second cup to Maddock, who received it with suave and charming thanks. Mrs. Medwin thanked Gildea, who passed on with the milk and sugar to Maddock, and, as he returned to the tea-table for the cakes and biscuits, passed Miss Medwin with the third cup on her way to Alcock. Alcock received her with thanks profuse and jocular.

“Do you take milk and sugar?” asked Miss Medwin.

“No, no, thank you, Miss Medwin,” returned Alcock, “I take neither!”

Gildea arrived, with a plate of cakes in one hand and a plate of biscuits in the other. Mrs. Medwin recognised in the biscuits those of a sort to which she was somewhat addicted, and divined that Gildea had noticed the fact.

“Thank you, Sir Horace,” she said, with her manner of pretty spontaneous sweetness, “And presently Alice shall play for you. I know you will find her style of playing a treat.”

Sir Horace made a suitable reply and passed on with the cakes and biscuits. Mrs. Medwin and Maddock began to talk together, Alcock playing the part of silent member.

“There is your tea,” Miss Medwin said to Gildea as he came back to the tea-table. She was standing with her own cup in her hand as if about to move away to a seat. Gildea proffered the biscuits. She took one. He put down the plates and took up his cup.

“You are an epicure in tea,” she said, sipping a little of hers from her tea-spoon, “are you not?”

“I do not know,” he answered with a slightly amused look, “but I believe that the Russians are the only people in Europe who understand it.”

“They take neither sugar nor milk, do they? and a slice of lemon floating in the tea?”

They were moving back to their places. He assented.

“And who are the only people in Europe who understand coffee?” she asked.

“Undoubtedly the French.”

“Ah, you mean the café au lait—with the milk and coffee both boiling and poured in together? I like it that way, but not with too much milk. We had a french cook once who used to make it for us, and, as I liked it, of course I found out how to make it myself.”

“Yes,” he said, “certainly coffee with cold milk is a barbarism; but the shape in which I like coffee best is as, what the French call, café noir.”

Miss Medwin said she had never seen it in that way, and, in answer to Gildea’s slight expression of surprise, explained that she had never been in France. Gildea described the café noir and the proper manner in which to drink it.

“You fill the spoon with cognac,” he said, “into which you put a lump of sugar—In France the sugar is in little thin slabs, not, as with us, in squares—and then you set the cognac alight. This melts down the sugar and, when all the spirit is burnt up, except that which saturates the sugar, and goes out, you put in your spoon. The flavour of burnt sugar and cognac is pleasant.”

“It is indeed, Sir Horace,” said Alcock, tired of playing the part of silent member in the other conversation, “I drank it that way myself in Paris. A friend of mine, an American told me of it. Paris is a very pleasant place. You have a treat in store for you, going there, Miss Medwin.”

“Yes,” she answered, “I should like to go to Paris; the Louvre is there.”

“A very fine collection,” said Alcock, “I was much struck with it! Unfortunately all the best works of art are now either in collections, or so expensive that they are out of the reach of us Australians who have claims upon us more pressing. You saw the Picture Gallery in Melbourne?”

“Yes, I saw it. I think it is rather painful. I liked the Library better.”

“The building—the room, you mean?”

“No, I meant the books. I used to go and sit there and read.”

“Oh indeed?” said Alcock. “And what now do you think of the Picture Gallery here?”

“Alice,” said Mrs. Medwin, “you are not to say! I won’t have you say that the things in Sydney are better than in Melbourne!”

“Very well, aunt,” said Alice, “then I will not say it.”

“And now,” said Mrs. Medwin, “I want you to play for us.”

Miss Medwin rose at once with a look for the piano, which was on the other side of the curtains. Both she and Gildea were amused and delighted by Mrs. Medwin’s characteristic interruption and command: Maddock was amused: even Alcock, who did not yet know her ways, was too much influenced by the charm of this her happiest manner to think it rude or imperious. “She is such an invalid,” he said, recounting this incident as an anecdote to a friend of his at the Melbourne Club, “and rules everyone about her like a little empress. But her manner is irresistible, really irresistible; and it doesn’t offend you in the least—in fact you rather like it. There is no woman in Melbourne who could help us to consolidate a party in the english social manner as _she_ could. And I really attach—I really do!—considerable importance to the idea.” Such was the subsequent expression of the thoughts which were passing through the mind of Alcock as Gildea, having held back the curtain for Miss Medwin to pass, was opening the piano for her. Mrs. Medwin sat in serene unconsciousness of the possibility of her manners being considered as otherwise than her own, and would have been surprised if she had heard that anyone thought they were open to question.

“Is there any piece, aunt,” asked Miss Medwin, bending back so as to see Mrs. Medwin through the curtains, “that you would like me to play?”

“Oh no!” Mrs. Medwin said, “Why, I wanted you to play for Sir Horace, not for me!”

Miss Medwin smiled assent, and, after a few moments’ pause to consider what piece she would play and to collect her thoughts, began. The piece was the one which she considered would most please her audience, and which of course she knew. It was Chopin’s Eleventh Nocturne. It suited her humour at many times, but particularly at the present. The Nocturne is divided into two parts: passionate and half-weary wandering, and rest in which passion is merged in peace. To her it conjured up the vision of a twilight road winding up between woody rolling fields and a plantation. The dark figure of the man, whose passionate and half-weary wandering is here expressing itself, is coming slowly up the road. Low down and far away behind the close straight stems of the plantation lie a few pallid veins of sunset light. The shadows are stealing swiftly around him. He is near to hopelessness, near to the wish to

lie down like a tired child, and weep away the life of care which he has borne and yet must bear:

but passion and yearning are still too strong in him for self-abandonment. Then he hears sounds—a strain of music and voices—the nuns or monks perhaps, singing an evening hymn to the blessèd Mary, mother of passion and of peace! He moves on slowly and softly, listening. His hopelessness, his weariness are soothed into rest: trust enters into him, trust in the aims of life, that general life in which his own is now merged, even as the yearning of passion is lost in the sweetness of peace....

When she had finished, there was a long pause, and then Gildea thanked her for the pleasure she had given him. Mrs. Medwin and Maddock began to speak of the piece, Maddock expressing his pleasure at it and his admiration for Miss Medwin’s playing.

“You are, then, a lover of this Chopin?” said Gildea to Miss Medwin. “But he is not your Master, as you would say?”

“No,” she answered, “he is not my Master.—I suppose you mean Beethoven by that?” she added, looking up at him. He assented.

“And yet,” she said, “I cannot somehow call even him Master. I do not love music as I ought to do—especially Beethoven and Wagner. They are great, these men, very great, but I cannot lose myself in their spirit as I should do. I often feel this.”

“It was one of Heine’s few fantastic sayings,” said Gildea, “that Chopin was the Raphael of the piano, and indeed a piece like this, or the stately opening of the Thirteenth Nocturne—You remember it?” (She assented)—“or the Marche Funèbre, help to see what he meant; but to call him a Raphael seems to me inapt. No Raphael, for instance, would have dreamed of so entirely giving himself up to the influence of his passion as Chopin does. Surely it is not in _his_ spirit that you can lose yourself?”

“No,” she said, “less than in Beethoven’s. But perhaps Heine only meant his expression about Chopin comparatively. Chopin, you remember, is the only great composer who devoted himself to the piano. Certainly he is a master of it, but his style of art is not like Raphael’s—at least so far as I know of Raphael.”

They came back talking into the other room, where Gildea, from a glance at Mrs. Medwin’s face, perceived that she now wished them to go down to the yacht. In a few minutes he brought the conversation round to the subject and, having asked and she having expressed her wish, the party was presently crossing the lawn on its way down to the small landing-stage, close to which the “Petrel” had now been brought in. Mrs. Medwin, between Maddock and Alcock, was some yards ahead of Gildea and Miss Medwin who were following them.

“You did not know,” Gildea was saying to her, “that Mr. Hawkesbury was a friend of mine? He has been having lunch with us, and only just went away before you arrived. He, and another friend of mine whom you perhaps have met in Melbourne, Mr. Fitzgerald—No?—were unable to stay.”

“So I supposed,” said Miss Medwin, “or something like that.—You do not perhaps know,” she added, “that my aunt has a dislike for him that really almost amounts to antipathy?”

“Yes,” said Gildea, “I was aware of it: his social opinions are too much for her, and Sydney Medwin annoys her by constantly mentioning both them and him. A meeting would have been awkward indeed, but I made my calculations carefully, and I should have regretted not giving my friend Fitzgerald the opportunity of making Hawkesbury’s acquaintance. In a few days one will be going due north and the other due south, but I hope they will meet again later on. Two more charming examples of the two species of enthusiast it would be hard to find.”

“What do you call the two species?”

“The enthusiast of heat and the enthusiast of light: both are to me equally beautiful, equally charming!”

“Mr. Hawkesbury, then,” she said, “is the enthusiast of heat? I have never known any man so much in earnest as he is. He seems to understand nothing but devotion or abhorrence; and yet how well he generally conceals this from those whom he thinks unworthy of the knowledge of it! His patience and courtesy have often astonished and filled me with admiration. I have heard him arguing with a stupid opponent, and I have heard him addressing a crowd. His self-restraint, his clearness, were simply wonderful. Has he ever spoken to you of his friend and Master, as he says,—James Holden?”

“No,” answered Gildea, “but I happen to have seen Holden myself.—But here we are!”

Alcock from the deck and Maddock from the shore had assisted Mrs. Medwin over the plank into the “Petrel,” and now Miss Medwin, after shaking hands, expressing her regrets that he could not come, and saying good-bye to Maddock, followed.

Mrs. Medwin, Miss Medwin, Alcock and Gildea gathered opposite Maddock, with whom they talked while the ropes were being cast loose and the yacht got ready for starting. Then, as she glided away, bending slightly as the wind caught and filled her sails, Maddock took off his hat and stood bare-headed, bowing and waving farewell.