PART II. Love’s Captivity
BOOK VIII. THE CAPTIVE BOUND
They sat with the twilight shadows about them. Memories too poignant assailed them, and her hand trembled as it lay upon his arm.
“How strange it was!” she whispered. “Have we kept the faith?”
“Who knows?” he answered; and in a low voice he read—
“And long the way appears, which seem’d so short
To the less practised eye of sanguine youth;
And high the mountain-tops, in cloudy air,
The mountain-tops where is the throne of Truth,
Tops in life’s morning-sun so bright and bare!”
Section 1. This was a golden hour in Thyrsis’ life. The gates of wonder were flung open, and all things were touched with a new and mystic glow. He scarcely realized it at the time; for once he was too much moved to think about his own emotions, the artist was altogether lost in the man. Even the room in which he lodged was relieved of its sordidness; it was a thing that men had made, and so a part of the mystery of becoming. He yearned for some one to whom he could impart his great emotion; but because of the loneliness of his life he could find no one but the keeper of his lodging-house. Even she became a human thing to him, because of her interest in the great tidings. If all the world loved a lover, it loved yet more one through whom the supreme purpose of love had been accomplished.
Thyrsis went each day to the hospital, to watch the new miracle unfolding itself; to see the Child asserting its existence as a being with a life of its own. He could never tire of watching it; he watched it asleep, with the faint heaving of its body, and the soft, warm odor that clung to it; he watched its awakenings—the opening of its eyes, and the sucking movements that it made perpetually with its lips. They had dressed it up now, and hid some of its strangeness; but each morning the nurse would undress it, and give it a bath; and then he marvelled at the short crooked legs, and the tiny red hands that clutched incessantly at the air, and the strange prehensile feet, that carried one back to distant ages, hinting at the secrets of Nature’s workshop. Sometimes they would permit him to hold this mystic creature in his arms—after much exhortation, and assurance that his left arm was properly placed at the back of its head. One found out in this way what a serious business life really was.