BOOK XIV. THE PRICE OF RANSOM
The faint grey of dawn was stealing across the lake; and still the spell was upon them.
“There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here
Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair.”
So she whispered; and he answered her—
“He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,
Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.
He went; his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground.”
Section 1. In the course of that summer there befell Corydon an adventure; Thyrsis had gone off one day for a walk, and when he came back she told him about it—how a young lady had stopped at the house to ask for a drink of water, and had sat upon the piazza to rest, and had talked with her. Now Corydon was in a state of excitement over a discovery.
Whenever Thyrsis met a stranger, it was necessary for him to go through elaborate intellectual processes, to find the person out by an exchange of ideas. And if by any chance the person was insincere, and used ideas as a blind and a cover, then Thyrsis might never find him out at all. In other words, he took people at the face-value of their cultural equipment; and only after long and tragic blunderings could he by any chance get deeper. But with his wife it happened quite otherwise; this case was the first which he witnessed, but the same thing happened many times afterwards. With her there would be a strange flash of recognition; it was a sort of intuition, perhaps a psychic thing—who could tell? By some unknown process in soul-chemistry, she would divine things about a person that he might have been a life-time in finding out.
It might be a burst of passionate interest, or on the other hand, of repugnance and fear. And long years of practice taught Thyrsis that this instinct of hers was never to be disregarded. Not once in all her life did he know her to give her affection to a base person; and if ever he disregarded her antipathies, he did it to his cost. Once they were sitting in a restaurant, and a man was brought up to be introduced by a friend; he was a person of not unpleasant aspect, courteous and apparently a gentleman, and yet Corydon flushed, and could scarcely keep her seat at the table, and would not give the man her hand. Years after Thyrsis came upon the discovery about this man, that he made a practice of unnatural vices.