"And then?" said Howard.
"Why, you know the rest!" said Maud. "I saw as we sate by the wall, in a flash, that you did indeed care for me, and I thought to myself, 'Here is the best thing in the world, and we can't be going to miss it out of politeness;' and then it was all over in a moment!"
"Politeness!" said Howard, "yes, it was all politeness; that's my greatest sin. Yes," he added, "I do thank God with all my heart for your sweet courage that day!" He drew Maud's hand into his own, as they sate together on the grass just above the shingle of the little bay, where the sea broke on the sands with crisp wavelets, and ran like a fine sheet of glass over the beach. "Look at this little hand," he said, "and let me try to believe that it is given me of its own will and desire!"
"Yes," said Maud, smiling, "and you may cut it off at the wrist if you like—I won't even wince. I have no further use for it, I believe!" Howard folded it to his heart, and felt the little pulse beat in the slender wrist; and presently the sun went down, a ball of fire into the opalescent sea-line.
XXV
THE NEW KNOWLEDGE
But the weeks which followed Howard's marriage were a great deal more than a refreshing discovery of companionable and even unexpected qualities. There was something which came to him, of which the words, the gestures, the signs of love seemed like faint symbols; the essence of it was obscure to him; it reminded him of how, as a child, a laughing group of which he was one had joined hands to receive a galvanic shock; the circle had dislinked again in a moment, with cries of surprise and pleasure; but to Howard it had meant much more than that; the current gave him a sense of awful force and potency, the potency of death. What was this strange and fearful essence which could pass instantaneously through a group—swifter even than thought—and leave the nerves for a moment paralysed and tingling? Even so it was with him now. What was happening to him he did not know—some vast and cloudy presence, at which he could not even dare to look, seemed winging its way overhead, the passage of which he could only dimly discern, as a man might discern the flight of an eagle in a breeze-ruffled mountain pool.
He had come in contact with a force of incalculable energy and joy, which was different, not in degree but in kind, from all previous emotional experiences. He understood for the first time the meaning of words like "mystical" and "spiritual," words which he had hitherto almost derided as unintelligent descriptions of subjective impressions. He had thought them to be terms expressive of vague and even muddled emotions of which scientific psychology would probably dispose. It was a new element and a new force, of which he felt overwhelmingly certain, though he could offer no proof, tangible or audible, of its existence. He had before always demanded that anyone who attempted to uphold the existence of any psychic force should at the same time offer an experimental test of its actuality. But he was here faced with an experience transcendental and subjective, of which he could give no account that would not sound like some imaginative exaggeration. He was not even sure that Maud felt it, or rather he suspected that the experience of wedded love was to her the heightening and emphasizing of something which she had always known.
The essence of it was that it was like the inrush of some moving tide through an open sluice-gate. Till then it seemed to him that his emotions had been tranquilly discharging themselves, like the water which drips from the edge of a fountain basin; that now something stronger and larger seemed to flow back upon him, something external and prodigious, which at the same time seemed, not only to invade and permeate his thought but to become one with himself; that was the wonder; it did not seem to him like something added to his spirit, but as though his soul were enlarged and revived by a force which was his own all the time, an unclaimed, unperceived part of himself.