“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.”