Chapter CLXXXIX: Section 10: The doctor came next morning, and found the patient worse

This was the crisis, he said; if the little one lived through the night--And there he paused, seeing the agony in the eyes of the mother and father. They would do all they could, he said; they must hope for the best.

So the siege went on. Thyrsis sat through the night again--and Corydon, who could not rest either, would come into the room every little while, and listen and watch. They would hold each other’s hand for hours, dumb with suffering; ghostly presences seemed to haunt the sick-chamber and set them to trembling. Thyrsis found himself thinking of that most terrible of all ballads, “The Erl-King”. How he had shuddered once, hearing it sung!--

“Dem Vater grauset’s, er reitet geschwind!”

All through the night he seemed to hear the hammer-strokes of the horse’s hoofs echoing through his soul.

The child lived through the night, but the crisis was not yet over. The fever held on; the issue of life and death seemed to hang upon the flutter of an eyelid. There was one more night to be sat through and Thyrsis, whose restless intellect must needs be dealing with all issues, had by then fought his way through this terror also. They must get control of themselves at all hazards, he said; they must face the facts. If so the child should die--

He tried to say something of the sort to Corydon, seeking to steady her. But Corydon became almost frantic at his words. “You must not say such a thing, you must not think such a thing!” she cried.

Corydon had been reading about “new thought”, and she insisted that would be “holding the idea” of death over the child. “The thing for us to do,” she said, “is to make up our minds--he must live, we must _know_ that he will live!”--It was no time to argue about metaphysics, but Thyrsis found this proposition a source of great perplexity. How could a man make himself know what he did not know?

The crisis passed, and the child lived. But the illness continued for a couple of weeks--and how pitiful it was to see their baby, that had been so big and rosy, and was now pale and thin and weak! And when at last he got up and went outdoors again, he caught a cold, and there was a relapse, and another siege of the dread disease; the doctor had not warned them sufficiently, it seemed. So there was a week or two more of watching and worrying; and then they had to face the fact that little Cedric would be delicate for a long while--would need to be guarded with care all through the spring.

Thyrsis blamed himself for all that had happened; the weight of it rested upon him forever afterwards, as if it were some crime he had committed. Sometimes when he was overwrought and overdriven, he would lie awake in the small hours of the morning, and this spectre would come and sit by him. He had made a martyr of the child he loved, he had sacrificed it to what he called his art; and how had he dared to do it?

It was hard to think of a more cruel question to put to a man. Himself, no doubt, he might scourge and drive and wreck; but this child--what were the child’s rights? Thyrsis would try to weigh them against the claims of posterity. What his own work might be, he knew; and to what extent should he sacrifice it to the unknown possibilities of his son? Some sacrifice there had to be--such was the stern decree of the “economic screw.”

So Thyrsis once more was a field of warring motives; once more he faced the curse of his life--that he could not be as other men, he could not have other men’s virtues. It was the latest aspect, and the most tragic, of that impulse in him which had made him fight so hard against marriage; which had made him quote to Corydon the lines of the outlaw’s song--

“The fiend whose lantern lights the mead
Were better mate than I!”