Easter was late, and when Tom and May left London to spend a week or two with old Mr. Carlingford at Applethorpe, spring had already burst out into freshest and greenest leaf. As they drove along the avenue from the Lodge gate, May thought she had never seen anything so beautiful. The ground sloped sharply from the road up on either side, and the russet of the last year’s dead bracken was mingled with the milky green of the fresh new shoots. Here and there an ash-tree with its black buds, or a lime on which the little fans of green leaves were beginning to burst from their red sheath, stood firmly among the young yearly plants, an experienced guarantee to the steadfast kindness of the varying seasons. Now and then a white-scutted rabbit bundled across the road, or a squirrel whisked up to some safer eminence, and scolded violently from among the branches. As they passed the lake, a moorhen half swam, half flew to seek the shelter of the rhododendron bushes, leaving a widening ripple behind it, and a sudden gust of wind arose, shaking half a dozen catkins from the listless birch-trees. The whole air was redolent of spring and country, and promise of fresh life.

Tom was driving, and May sat beside him. She had not been very well for a week or two, and as the wind struck her, he thought she shivered slightly.

“You’re not cold, are you, darling?” he said.

“No, Tom, only very happy.”

He laughed.

“Well, so am I; but I don’t shiver. Put that cloak round you.”

“Do you remember giving me your coat one night, Tom?” she asked.

“Yes; you were so obstinate, too. You refused to put it on for a long time.”

They drove on in silence for a little way.

“Are you glad to get down here?” asked Tom.

“Yes, very. I’ve got so many people I know here. You see, Tom, I’m not very clever, and I do like little quiet everyday things to do. And I see more of you here. You’re always so busy in London. Ted’s here, too. He got here two days ago.”

“Why doesn’t he come as your father’s curate?” asked Tom.

“Well, he has all his Cambridge work to do. He can’t very well give up that. And yet I don’t know.”

“I think he’s right,” said Tom. “He is doing splendid work, I believe. It doesn’t interest me, personally, but I do believe it ought to be done.”

“Ted told me you always used to howl at him so for working at scholiasts or syntax or something.”

“I know I used. But after all if the world is ever going to reach perfection, you have to work up all lines perfectly. And he says that scribes are terrible fellows for scamping their work and making stupid mistakes; they must be shown up.”

“But there are bigger things in the world than scribes and scholiasts, Tom,” said May, half-timidly.

“Yes, dear; but what is a man to do? He cannot work passionately at things he does not feel passionately.”

“But there is one thing which it is every one’s duty to feel passionately. And when a man goes into the church, it seems to me a sort of visible sign that he does feel it passionately.”

“But there are other things in the world,” said Tom. “What is beauty made for, or love, or anything lovely? Surely they are worth giving one’s life for? If there was only meant to be one thing in the world which it is right for men to strive after—I mean the personal direct relation with God—why are all these wonderful and beautiful things given us? Not just to look at and wonder and go by?”

“No. To help us to realize the personal and direct relation with God. We should look on them as signs of His love for us. Do you remember the first present you gave me, that little diamond ring? It was awfully pretty, but I loved it because you gave it me.”

Tom was silent.

“It’s no use talking of it, darling, even with you,” he said at last. “It is your passion, and I have another passion. Neither of us can really conceive that there is another standpoint besides our own. We acquiesce in there being others, but unless one experiences a thing, one cannot feel it.”

“I am not afraid, Tom,” said she. “He will teach us all in the way it is best for us to be taught. If we are willing to receive, He will give us the knowledge of Himself, when it is good that we receive it.”

“And there we are at one,” said Tom. “That I believe with my whole soul.”

They reached home just as evening was falling, but the night came on warm and cloudless. Tom helped May very tenderly out of the carriage, and after tea they walked a little up and down the gravel path above the long terrace. The beds were already odorous with spring blossoms, and white-winged moths hovered noiselessly over the flowers, and glided silently away again like ghosts into the surrounding dusk.

The mist was rising a little from the low-lying fields towards the village, across which two country lads were walking home, one with an empty milk-pail in his hand, the other with a spade over his shoulder, whistling loudly. And in the dusk husband and wife spoke together of the dear event that was coming, and in that human love and longing their souls met and mingled. May thought no more of the barrier which still stood between them even in their almost perfect love and confidence. She, in her clear unquestioning faith, was apt to lose sight too much of the use and value of beauty and love and life, which are as directly gifts from God as faith, and to wonder, with something like anguish, when she thought how completely they had possession of her husband, what the end would be. But now that the fulness and perfection of a woman’s life was promised her, she, too, for a little felt the sweetness and strength of living. She was a woman, and the crown of womanhood was coming to her; the divine miracle was near its fulfilment. She was alone in the hush of evening, beneath the opening stars, with her husband, and things human and divine seemed so mingled together, that neither failed of their completeness.

The next few days passed very peaceably. May, who had been rather languid and out of spirits in London, soon regained her serene health. She and Tom strolled together in the woods or drove out for an hour or two every day. Ted and his father were with them a good deal, and Tom, who had rather overworked himself in the last few weeks, found a new pleasure in hanging about doing nothing. May insisted on his going long rides or walks, in which she herself could not join, and after spending the morning quietly in the woods with Tom, or paddling about on the lake exploring the little creeks and islands, she would send Tom and Ted off together in the afternoon for a long tramp or a ride over the Surrey downs.

They had spent one of these afternoons, about a week after they had come to Applethorpe, in this manner, and about four o’clock had descended on to a little red-backed village standing in a hollow of the downs, surrounded by hop-gardens and strawberry fields, and having had tea in the country inn, proceeded homewards. Their way lay through the village street with its neat white cottages, and long strips of garden fronting the road. In one were flowering clumps of primroses, and a border of merry daffodils lay underneath the windows. In another a more ambitious show had been planned, and sundry little wooden labels, stuck about in beds of young fresh green, not yet in flower, promised a crop of annuals. In another a box hedge, cut into fantastic shapes, gave a genteel privacy, and marked it off from its neighbours. The little Norman church stood at the bottom of the street, and just as they passed the gate a group of mourners came away from a grave which the sexton was filling in. Tom waited for them to pass, and stood a moment watching them ascend the street. They went in, he noticed, at the house with the box hedge. A moment afterwards the clergyman, who knew Tom, came out, and as they stopped to speak to him, Tom asked what the funeral had been.

“A poor woman here,” he said, “who died in childbed two days ago. Poor thing! she leaves her husband, such a nice young fellow, quite alone. They had only been married nine months.”

Tom turned angrily round on the astonished young man.

“How can you say such horrible things?” he said, and walked off, followed by Ted, at five miles an hour.

Ted caught him up in a few moments, and made him abate his pace.

“Poor old boy,” he said, “don’t get in such a state about it!”

They walked on a few moments in silence.

“It’s all too horrible,” broke out Tom at length. “How can such things be? Poor darling! And I have been such a brute to her. Our lives are lived apart really. She thinks the passion of my life is no more than a plaything sent to amuse us, and the passion of hers is unintelligible to me. It is no more than a beautiful unconvincing fable.”

“But what if the fable is true?” asked Ted.

“It may be true, but how can I tell? All I know is that it isn’t convincing to me. It may be so, or it may not. But if it doesn’t convince me, what am I to do? I would give the world to be convinced of it.”

“She is very happy in your love,” said Ted.

“She is the best and sweetest woman on this earth,” said Tom. “I love her more and more every day. But I do love my art too. My life would be incomplete—impossible without either.”

Ted sighed.

“You are very fortunate. Your circle of completeness is widening every day. You are in love with love and life.”

“Teddy, do leave that place,” said Tom earnestly. “It is changing you. You always were narrow, you know, as I often told you, but you are getting narrower. You only care about dead things. You had better care about the worst of living things than the best of dead.”

“So you tell me. But no one can realize any one else’s conviction, as you have also told me. You are playing symphonies to the deaf. It may be so, or it may not be so. How can I tell?”

“But you know it is so,” said Tom.

“Sometimes I think it must be so. I know, at any rate, that you, for instance, get more keen and active happiness out of life than I do. The best emendation doesn’t give me the quality of pleasure which the smell of a spring morning or a hundred other things give you.”

“I told you so. You do know it,” said Tom. “Why don’t you act on it?”

“I can’t. There is no other reason. It is no use to say to myself: ‘You shall care for a spring morning more than you care for Zenobius.’ I don’t care passionately for Zenobius, but I don’t care at all for a spring morning.”

“I agree with you to a certain extent, you know,” said Tom—“more, at any rate, than I used to at Cambridge. I think scholiasts ought to be studied. They are a leaf, or a line in the book of ultimate perfection. But you have got them out of focus. They are too close to your eyes, and conceal everything else. Well, here we are at the vicarage. Good-bye, Teddy! I must go home quickly.”

Tom passed along the village street, and at the church suddenly the words of the clergyman came back to him with a sickening sense of revulsion. He paused at the door a moment, and then by a sudden impulse went in and knelt down in the nearest seat. He was not aware of conscious thought, only of an overmastering need. “Why am I here,” he thought to himself, “I who have no right here?” Then like an overwhelming wave the thought of May came upon him—May, the love of his strong, young life, soon to be in pain, perhaps in danger of death, like the woman in the cottage with the box hedge, with that yet unborn life within her. And the same impulse which had prompted him to come into the church, prompted him to say, “If there is One all-powerful and all-loving, may He be with her now.” And like the old pagans in Homer, he felt inclined to vow a hecatomb of oxen if his prayer was granted.

And thus in his terrible fear and need Tom was brought by his love for May to the feet of the unknown God.

He waited a moment before leaving the church, and looked round. There were the old windows he knew so well: a pink Jonah being fitted neatly into a green whale; a yellow-haired, long-legged David standing on the chest of a prostrate Goliath, and with immense difficulty lifting the giant’s sword; a perfect Niagara of dew descending on the fleece of Gideon, Joshua laying violent hands on a red sun and a yellow moon, and the walls of Jericho falling over symmetrically in one piece. The east window consisted of three narrow lancets, still faintly visible in the dusk, and the middle of these showed a figure crowned with thorns, with arms outspread, drawing the whole world unto Him....

He went quickly up over the fields from the village where he and May had walked the first night they came, and along the terrace walk. A little wind stirred in the bushes, and blew across him the faint odour of the flowers. In the house the lamps were already lit, and looking up to May’s bedroom window he saw through the white blind a light burning there. For one moment his heart stood still with fear, and then, regathering courage, he went into the house.

His father was sitting in the library, with a green reading-lamp by him, and he looked up quickly as Tom entered.

“Where is May? Where is May?” he asked.

Mr. Carlingford shut up his book.

“My dear boy, how late you are, and what on earth is the matter with you? Tom, for God’s sake don’t be hysterical or faint. It’s all right, but it has been very sudden. May’s child was born—a son—just about four o’clock. She is asleep now, and doing very well.”

Tom stood there, perfectly pale, with his mouth slightly open. Then quite suddenly his hat and stick fell from his hand, and he collapsed into a chair.

Mr. Carlingford rang the bell.

“Tom, if you behave like that, I shall disown you. I never saw such an absurd exhibition. Are you going to cry, or die, or what? Here, bring some brandy quickly,” he said to the man who answered the bell.

The brandy revived Tom somewhat, and he stood up, still looking dazed and puzzled.

“I don’t know what happened to me, father,” he said. “I never behaved like that before. I want to see May and—and my son. Say it again. What has happened exactly?”

“My dear Tom, from the way you behave, I should have thought that such a thing as the birth of a child was a unique phenomenon, whereas it is one of the most common exhibitions of the forces of Nature. It occurs, I am told, many times every minute on this earth. You can’t see either of them now.”

“The baby, just fancy!”

Tom picked up his hat and stick, and stood looking into the fire. Even Mr. Carlingford was slightly shaken from the web of cynical observation, out of the meshes of which, like a kind of spider, he culled the weaknesses of mankind, Tom, with his smooth hairless face, looked so boyish himself, and for a moment the old man’s memory went back with a sudden feeling of tenderness to the time when Tom had been a soft helpless atom like that which was lying upstairs now at its mother’s breast.

“Tom, old boy, I’m so awfully pleased,” he said. “I always had an absurd wish—I don’t know why—to see you with a baby sitting on your knee. You are a good boy; you chose the wife I would have had you choose, and she has behaved as a wife should behave.”

Tom turned round to his father with a beaming face.

“Then we are all satisfied, father,” he said, “and now I’m going upstairs very quietly to see if I can see her—them. Them!”

May was asleep, and he was told to delay any further visit till the morning. If she woke she had better not be disturbed; but she should be told that Tom had come in, and that he had been up to see her.

Next day was Sunday, and Tom awoke very early in that most delicious way of all, slowly, with a vague growing consciousness of utter happiness. The window was open, and he lay a few minutes letting the cool breeze ruffle his hair before he stirred. Then rising and putting on a dressing-gown, he went to make inquiries as to whether May was awake, and whether he might see her. The nurse answered both questions affirmatively, and he went in. She was lying propped up by pillows, and by the bed was a little pink-and-white cot, in which Tom could just see a little crumpled red face.

May welcomed him with a smile, and laid her finger on her lips.

“Hush, Tom, he’s asleep,” she whispered, “but you may look at him.”

Tom availed himself of the permission.

“What a queer little thing it is!” he said.

“Queer! It!” objected May. “It’s him, and he’s beautiful.”

Tom knelt down by the bed.

“My darling, my darling!” he whispered. “I didn’t know how happy I could be till I woke this morning. And it’s all real and true. I was almost afraid till I saw you that it was a dream or a wish of mine.”

He raised himself and bent over her, and their lips met in a long kiss of passion purified by tenderness.

He stood there for a moment, till the son and heir awoke and began to howl, bringing the nurse into the room, who incontinently dismissed Tom.

He went back to his room and drew up the blind, letting a yellow splash of sunlight on to the floor. In the bushes below the window a thrush sang out of the fulness of his heart the wonderful repeated song which he always knew, and which no one else will ever learn. Through the soft air swept the first swallows of the new summer, flying high over the shrubs and trees in the garden. Tom looked out for some minutes, sniffing in the clear morning air, when from the village began the church bell for early communion. A sudden impulse, an irresistible need to thank some one for his happiness, as strong and urgent as his need the night before of commending May to some protection stronger than man, made him dress quickly and walk down to the church.

It was almost empty. Ted and his father were at the altar, and a few parishioners were kneeling in the body of the church. The Ante-communion Service was nearly over, and Mr. Markham was reading the Prayer for the Church Militant as Tom entered. He went to the pew where he had knelt the night before, and soon the blessed command fell on his ears—

“Draw near with faith, and take this holy sacrament to your comfort.”

What did it mean? How could he draw near with faith? What was faith? And the grave, solemn voice from the altar answered him, that faith was to know that God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son.

Was this, then, the answer to his strange unformulated desire to thank some one for his happiness? Did it all come from this, from the quiet, still church, from the memory of that sacrifice which sanctified love and all that is beautiful?

He had wanted to vow a hecatomb of oxen the night before; he had longed to be able to promise something to any power which would give him what he had seen in May’s room that morning, and instead of that he himself was bidden to the feast, and with the others he went up and knelt at the table of Christ.

Tom waited outside the church for Ted and his father, in order to give them news of May, and then turned homewards again. The desire to seek aid which had prompted him to come to the church the night before had given place to the desire to give thanks. He had come one step nearer to the unknown God; he approached Him, not as a power, but as a benefactor. The words of the great thanksgiving had thrilled him through and through. “We praise Thee, we bless Thee.”

That desire of the human creature, constant through all centuries, to seek for that which is outside itself, and stronger than itself, and passes understanding, had come to him. Some hand had knocked, so he thought, on the door of his soul, and wakened it from its sleep of indifference. Was it perhaps, after all, only the result of this sudden change from his deathly fears of the night before to the embracing happiness of this morning? He could not tell; he scarcely cared to ask himself.

After breakfast he saw May again, and when the nurse put an end to their interview he went out under the cedar, filled with the double thought. The bell for eleven o’clock church was ringing, but Tom had no intention of going. The sacredness of the morning demanded solitude. He watched the servants going down to church in their Sunday clothes, and marked two footmen stealing away towards the woods, and by degrees the house grew still. Tom went in and found a Bible with some little difficulty, and brought it out. He wanted to know more of that wonderful Life that had died, and had risen again for ever in men’s hearts, and he turned to the Gospel of the Apostle of Love. There he could learn all that a man need know, all that he had missed all his life.

But how to get at it? How to know that those words were spoken for him? All he did know was that words and sentences which he had often heard before were meaningless no longer, that something which was very real and sacred to others had a sudden interest for him. He had never had doubts on such subjects; simply the belief in which he had been scantily brought up had faded and died a natural death, as leaves die in autumn when the sap no longer feeds them. So now the simple Gospel narrative struck him as so probable, so convincingly literal, that there was no question of sifting or examination possible. He remembered vaguely, and with some contempt, a book he had read not long before which seemed to deny the fundamental truths of Christianity because the writer could not bring himself to believe that Balaam’s ass really spoke. Even the literal truth of the Gospel did not seem to matter; the conception was divine; it was the best life that could have been lived: it was perfection, no less, and that which is perfect is not man, but God.

Socrates warns us of the inutility of an unexamined belief, a statement which is not universally true. For a man who is gifted or saddled—for it is a dangerous bequest—with a critical nature the remark is profoundly true. To deliberately refuse to look a doubt in the face is an act of cowardice, a sacrifice and a stifling of our intellectual capacities. But there are many natures, highly developed intellectually, which are not critical, and to such religion is a matter of either indifference or conviction. Whether there ever was a Garden of Eden with a tree in the middle of it, round which was coiled a serpent, is a question which has no interest for them. If pressed they may say that some things are not meant to be taken literally, and dismiss the subject from their minds. The critical mind finds some slight but spurious consolation in shrugging its shoulders and labelling them as fools, but its consolations end there, for there is no doubt which is the happier of the two, and that an uncritical mind is synonymous with a foolish one is not the case.

There is a certain experiment known to chemists as the solidification of a supersaturated solution. Some fluid is heated, and while hot there are dissolved in it large quantities of salt or alum. Now, a liquid when hot can hold more substance in solution than when it is cold, and when this surcharged liquid is allowed to cool quietly it actually holds more salt than it is theoretically capable of holding, and as long as it is left still it can do so. But if an atom of the same salt is put into it, the whole mass solidifies. Tom’s spiritual fluid had been subjected to a somewhat analogous experience. It had been surcharged with the salts of love and life, and then came the atom as momentous as the straw which breaks the camel’s back—the birth of the baby and the safety of May. It was necessary for him to have something to which he could refer, and from which he might derive his happiness; there must be for him a Superior Being. He did not wish to argue about it, to examine reasons for granting the existence of a first cause, or to split hairs over the precise way in which God became incarnate in man. Simply his happiness was too great for him to bear alone; his nature held more happiness than it could hold by itself, and he had to refer it to something outside his nature.