The Heart's Highway. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
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 pang 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 or natural emotion, as if it were a dire shame, and whenever I had it in my heart to be tender, was so brusque that I seemed to have been provided by nature with an armour of roughness like a hedgehog. But, perhaps, I had some small excuse for this, though, after all, it is a question in my mind as to what excuse there may be for any man outside the motives of his own deeds, and I care not to dwell unduly, even to my own consideration, upon those disadvantages of life which may come to a man without his cognisance and are to be borne like any fortune of war. But I had a mother who had small affection for me, and that was not so unnatural nor so much to her discredit as it may sound, since she, poor thing, had been forced into a marriage with my father when she was long in love with her cousin. Then my father having died at sea the year after I was born, and her cousin, who was a younger son, having come into the estates through the deaths of both his brothers of small-pox in one week, she married her first love in less than six months, and no discredit to her, for women are weak when they love, and she had doubtless been sorely tried. They told me that my poor father was a true man and gallant soldier, and my old nurse used to talk to me of him, and I used to go by myself to think of him, and my eyes would get red when I was but a little boy with reflecting upon my mother with her new husband and her beautiful little boy, my brother John, a year younger than I, and how my own poor father was forgotten. But there was no discredit to my mother, who was only a weak and gentle woman and was tasting happiness after disappointment and sorrow, in being borne so far out by the tide of it that she lost sight, as it were, of her old shores. My mind was never against my mother for her lack of love for me. But it is not hard to be lenient toward a lack of love toward one's self, especially remembering, as I do, myself, and my fine, ruddy-faced, loud-voiced stepfather and my brother John.
A woman, by reason of her great tenderness of heart which makes her suffer overmuch for those she loves, has not the strength to bear the pain of loving more than one or two so entirely, and my mother's whole heart was fixed with an anxious strain of loving care upon my stepfather and my brother. I have seen her sit hours by a window as pale as a statue while my stepfather was away, for those were troublous times in England, and he in the thick of it. When I was a lad of six or thereabouts they were bringing the king back to his own, and some of the loyal ones were in danger of losing their heads along his proposed line of march. And I have known her to hang whole nights over my brother's bed if he had but a tickling in the throat; and what could one poor woman do more?
She was as slender as a reed in this marshy country of Virginia, and her voice was a sweet whisper, like the voice of one in a wind, and she had a curious gracefulness of leaning toward one she loved when in his presence, as if, whether she would or no, her heart of affection swayed her body toward him. Always, in thinking of my mother, I see her leaning with that true line of love toward my stepfather or my brother John, her fair hair drooping over her delicate cheeks, her blue eyes wistful with the longing to give more and more for their happiness. My brother John looked like my mother, being, in fact, almost feminine in his appearance, though not in his character. He had the same fair face, perhaps more clearly and less softly cut, and the same long, silky wave of fair hair, but the expression of his eyes was different, and in character he was different. As for me, I was like my poor father, so like that, as I grew older, I seemed his very double, as my old nurse used to tell me. Perhaps that may have accounted for the quick glance, which seemed almost of fear, which my mother used to give me sometimes when I entered a room where she sat at her embroidery-work. My mother dearly loved fine embroideries and laces, and in thinking of her I can no more separate her from them than I can a flower from its scalloped setting of petals.
I used to slink away as soon as possible when my mother turned her startled blue eyes upon me in such wise, that she might regain her peace, and sometimes I used to send my brother John to her on some errand, if I could manage it, knowing that he could soon drive me from her mind. One learns early such little tricks with women; they are such tender things, and it stirs one's heart to impatience to see them troubled. However, I will not deny that I may have been at times disturbed with some bitterness and jealousy at the sight of my brother and my stepfather having that which I naturally craved, for the heart of a little lad is a hungry thing for love, and has pangs of nature which will not be stilled, though they are to be borne like all else of pain on earth. But after I saw Mary Cavendish all that passed, for I got, through loving so entirely, such knowledge of love in others that I saw that the excuse of love, for its weaknesses and its own crimes even, is such as to pass understanding. Looking at my mother caressing my brother instead of myself, I entered so fully into her own spirit of tenderness that I no longer rebelled nor wondered. The knowledge of the weakness of one's own heart goes far to set one at rights with all others.
When I first saw Mary Cavendish she was, as I said before, a little baby maid of two and I a loutish lad of fourteen, and I was going through the park of Cavendish Hall, which lay next ours, one morning in May, when all the hedges were white and pink, and the blue was full of wings and songs. Cavendish Hall had been vacant, save for a caretaker, that many a day. Francis Cavendish, the owner, had been for years in India, but he had lately died, and now the younger brother, Geoffry, Mary's father, had come home from America to take possession of the estate, and he brought with him his daughter Catherine by a former marriage, a maid a year older than I; his second wife, a delicate lady scarce more than a girl, and his little daughter Mary.
And they had left to come thither two fine estates in Virginia—namely these two: Laurel Creek, which was Mary's mother's in her own right, and Drake Hill; and the second wife had come with some misgiving and attended by a whole troop of black slaves, which made all our country fall agog at once with awe and ridicule and admiration. I was myself full of interest in this unwonted folk, and prone to linger about the park for a sight, and maybe a chance word with them, having ever from a child had a desire to look farther into that which has been hitherto unknown, whether it be in books or in the world at large. My lessons had been learned that morning, as was easily done, for I was accounted quick in learning, though no more so than others, did they put themselves to it with the same wish to have it over. My tutor also was not one to linger unduly at the