It was that he had struck his
wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it,
notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love
that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond,
speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that
great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only
the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in
which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's
heart it was misery; in the soul of St. John it was perfect
blessedness.
By and by he became aware that there was a voice of singing
in the room. This, of course, was the voice of Diamond singing
to the baby -- song after song, every one as foolish as another
to the cabman, for he was too tipsy to part one word from
another: all the words mixed up in his ear in a gurgle without
division or stop; for such was the way he spoke himself, when he
was in this horrid condition. But the baby was more than content
with Diamond's songs, and Diamond himself was so contented with
what the songs were all about, that he did not care a bit about
the songs themselves, if only baby liked them. But they did the
cabman good as well as the baby and Diamond, for they put him to
sleep, and the sleep was busy all the time it lasted, smoothing
the wrinkles out of his temper.
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