The Hearts Highway | Page 8

came up the aisle, and the governor, who had a
harsh face enough ordinarily, beamed mildly indulgent. His lady eyed
her with a sort of pleasant and reminiscent wonder, though she was a

haughty dame. The churchwarden settled back, and as for Parson
Downs, his great, red face curved in a smile, and his eyes twinkled
under their heavy overhang of florid brow, and then he declaimed in a
hoarser and louder shout than ever to cover the fact of his wandering
attention. And young Sir Humphrey Hyde, sitting between his mother,
Lady Betty, and his sister, Cicely, turned as pale as death when he saw
her enter, and kept so, with frequent covert glances at her from time to
time, and I saw him, and knew that he knew about Mistress Mary's
furbelow boxes.

II

My profession has been that of a tutor, and it thus befell that I was
under the necessity of learning as much as I was able, and even going
out of my way to seek those lessons at which all the pages of life are
open for us, and even, as it were, turning over wayside stones, and
looking under wayside weeds in the search for them; and it scarcely
ever chanced that I did not get some slight savour of knowledge
therefrom, though I was far enough from the full solution of the
problems. And through these lessons I seemed to gain some increase of
wisdom not only of the matters of which the lessons themselves treated,
such as the courses of the stars and planets, the roots of herbs, and
Latin verbs and algebraic quantities, and evil and good, but of their
bearing upon the human heart. That I have ever held to be the most
important knowledge of all, and the only reason for the setting of those
lessons which must pass like all things mortal, and can only live in so
far as they have turned that part of the scholar, which has hold of
immortality, this or that way.
I know not how it may be with other men, but of one branch of
knowledge, which pertains directly to the human heart, and, when it be
what its name indicates, to its eternal life, I gained no insight whatever
from my books and my lessons, nor from my observance of its
workings in those around me, and that was the passion of love. Of that I
truly could learn naught except by turning my reflections toward my

own heart.
And I know not how this also may be with other men, but love with me
had a beginning, though not an end and never shall have, and a
completeness of growth which makes it visible to my thought like the
shape of an angel. I have loved not in one way, but in every way which
the heart of man could conceive. There is no tone of love which the
heart holds for the striking which I have not heard like a bell through
my furthermost silences. I can truly say that when I rode to church with
Mary Cavendish that morning in April, though I loved in my whole life
her and her alone, and was a most solitary man as far as friends and
kinsfolk went, yet not one in the whole Kingdom of Virginia had fuller
knowledge of love in all its shades of meaning than I. For I had loved
Mary Cavendish like a father and like a lover, like a friend and a
brother, like a slave and like a master, and such love I had for her that I
could see her good beyond her pain, and would have had the courage to
bear her pain, though God knows her every pain was my twenty. And it
had been thus with me near sixteen years, since I was fourteen and she
was a little maid of two, and I lived neighbour to her in Suffolkshire. I
can see myself at fourteen and laugh at the picture. All of us have our
phases of comedy, our seasons when we are out of perspective and
approach the grotesque and furnish our own jesters for our after lives.
At fourteen I was as ungainly a lad, with as helpless a sprawl of legs
and arms and as staring and shamefaced a surprise at my suddenly
realised height of growth, when jostled by a girl or a younger lad, and
utter discomfiture before an unexpected deepness of tone when
essaying a polite response to an inquiry of his elders, as was ever seen
in England. And I remember that I bore myself with a wary outlook for
affronts to my newly fledging dignity, and concealed all that was
stirring in me to new life, whether of nobility