The nurse-maid was in charge of a carriage, and in the carriage was a baby; and the baby was smiling at Corydon, and Corydon was smiling back. She was poking her finger at it, and it was catching at the finger with its chubby paws. “Isn’t he a little love!” Corydon repeated.
Thyrsis stared at her. But then, quickly, he hid his thought. He even pretended to be interested.
Now as a matter of fact he seemed to Thyrsis to be quite conspicuously ugly. He had red hair, and a flat nose, and was altogether lacking in aristocratic attributes. But Thyrsis answered promptly, “Yes, dear,” and continued to watch.
And Corydon continued to play. Apparently she knew something about babies--how to amuse them and how to handle them, and had even heard rumors about how to feed them. She was asking questions of the nurse-maid, and displaying interest--Thyrsis would have been no more amazed had he found her in converse with a Chaldean astrologer. For a full quarter of an hour she had managed to forget her agonies of spirit, and to play with a baby!
They got up to go. “You like babies, don’t you, dearest?” asked Thyrsis, as they walked.
And then there was a silence, while he pondered. Here, he perceived in a flash, was the great hand of Nature again!
Since the first day of their marriage Thyrsis had been haunted by the sense of a dark shadow hanging over them, of a seed of tragedy in their love. He had his great task to do, and Corydon could not do it with him. The long road of his art-pilgrimage stretched out before him; and some day he must take his staff and go.
And now here, of a sudden, was the solution of the problem! The answer to the riddle of all their disharmonies! Let Corydon have her baby--and then he might have his books! As he pondered, there came to him the words of the old doctor--“She wants that baby!”
So before he reached home, his mind was made up. Cost what it might, she should have the baby. But he would not tell her his reason--that must be a secret between himself and Mother Nature. And then it seemed to him that he could hear Mother Nature laughing behind her curtain--and laughing not only at Corydon, but at him. He recalled with a twinge all his earlier cynicism, his biological bitterness; he had taken up the burden of his virtues again!