The Heart's Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth CenturyFreeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
History
The Heart's Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century
Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
Virginia -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- Fiction
I can see that church as well to-day as if I were this moment there.
Heavily sweet with honey and almond scent it was, as well as sweet
herbs and musk, which the ladies had on their handkerchiefs, for it
was like a bower with flowers. Great pink boughs arched overhead,
and the altar was as white as snow with blossoms. Up the aisle she
flashed, and none but Mary Cavendish could have made that little
journey under the eyes of the governor in his pew and the governor's
lady and all the burgesses, and the churchwarden half starting up as
if to exercise his authority, and the parson swelling with a vast
expanse of sable robes over the Book, with no abashedness and yet no
boldness nor unmaidenly forwardness. There was an innocent gayety on
her face like a child's, and an entire confidence in good will and
loving charity for her tardiness which disarmed all. She looked out
from that gauze love-hood of hers as she 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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