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
And first it was half derision, and Catherine and Cicely Hyde stood
near us like bridesmaids, and my brother John kept his place. Then
came Madam Judith Cavendish in a chair, and she was borne close to
us through the throng and was looking forth with the tears running
over her old cheeks, and extending her hands as if in blessing,
and she never after made any opposition to our union. Then came
blustering up Parson Downs and Ralph Drake, who afterward wedded
Cicely Hyde, and the two Barrys who had braved leaving hiding, and
the two black wenches who dwelt with them, one with a great white
bandage swathing her head, and Sir Humphrey Hyde, who had just
been released, and who, while I think of it, wedded a most amiable
daughter of one of the burgesses within a year. And Madam Tabitha
Storey, with that mourning patch upon her forehead, was there,
and Margery Key, with--marvellous to relate in that crowd--the
white cat following at heel, and Mistresses Allgood and Longman
with their husbands in tow. All these, with others whom I will not
mention, who were friendly, gathered around me, the while Mary
Cavendish sat there beside me, and again that half-derisive shout
of the multitude went up.
But in a trice it all changed, for the temper of a mob is as subject
to unexplained changes as the wind, and it was a great shout of
sympathy and triumph instead of derision. Then they tore off the
oak-sprigs with which they had bedecked themselves in honour of the
day, and by so doing showed disloyalty to the King, and the militia
making no resistance, and indeed, I have always suspected, secretly
rejoicing at it, they had me released in a twinkling, and foremost
among those who wrenched open the stocks was Capt. Calvin Tabor.
Then Mary Cavendish and I stood together there before them all.
It was all many years ago, but never hath my love for her dimmed,
and it shall live after Jamestown is again in ashes, when the
sea-birds are calling over the sunset-waste, when the reeds are tall
in the gardens, when even the tombs are crumbling, and maybe hers
and mine among them, when the sea-gates are down and the water
washing over the sites of the homes of the cavaliers. For I have
learned that the blazon of love is the only one which holds good
forever through all the wilderness of history, and the path of love
is the only one which those that may come after us can safely follow
unto the end of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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