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"There, look round you," he cried, taking off his hat and wiping the perspiration from his brow. "Well, uncle, where is it?" asked Leo, half-amused and half-sceptical. "Where! why, don't you see it? No, of course you don't. You're looking all round it, lad. Look down, down at your feet. Leonard Vandervell," he added, in sudden solemnity, "you're on it! you're standing on the North Pole now!"
This aroused him from the state of half-sceptical horror in which he gazed upon the scene of blood and death in the midst of which he stood. Presently his eye fell, for the first time, upon the motionless form of March Marston. The sight effectually restored him.
"The Non-Jurors of the twentieth century!" murmured Norham, with a half-sceptical intonation. "Ah, but this is the twentieth century!" said Meynell smiling. "And in our belief the denouement will be different." "What will you do you clergy when you are deprived?"
In fact the Bishop and her husband were to become, and to continue indefinitely, parties to old Antony's deception. She now understood the full significance of the half-humorous, half-sceptical attitude adopted by the Bishop, when she recounted to him the history of the vision. No wonder he had called Mary Antony a "most wise and prudent babe."
But the touch of sarcasm, of a half-hostile remoteness, in her look and manner, were often enough to belie the otherwise delightful impression of first youth, to suggest something older and sharper than her twenty years had any right to be. It meant that she had been brought up in a world of elder people, sharing from her teens in its half-amused, half-sceptical judgments of men and things.
As quickly as possible I told Tommy the story of my visit to Parelli's, and showed him the card which Latimer had sent me by the waiter. He took it out of my hand, looking at me with a sort of half-sceptical amazement. "You're not joking?" he said. "This is Gospel truth you're telling me?" I nodded. "Humour's a bit out of my line nowadays, Tommy," I answered.
The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic was common to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat snivelling conviction of the transitory nature of this life and the pity and horror of death. Old age and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an after-world these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease.
Once again Maxine had the sense of lifting a tangible veil, of gaining a glimpse of the hidden personality not the half-sceptical, pleasant, friendly Blake of the boy's acquaintance, but Blake the dreamer, the idealist who sought some grail of infinite holiness figured in his own imagination, zealously guarded from the scoffer and the worldling.
They have been brought up to believe strongly and heartily what they have been told, and they do not understand the half-sceptical way of regarding such things which is the result of larger views and more liberal education.
They speak of arrested development, of defect of will, of inheritances and surroundings, of a vacancy as yet unfilled by virtue. It is hard to think that people held by a half-sceptical pantheism, and the relativity of evil, have ever been face to face with the awful deeps and disobediences of their own heart, or have felt the hot breath of the devil on their own cheek.
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