The Heart

I knew not how to talk to a little petted treasure of life like

that, and I dared not speak, but I looked at her, and she seemed not

to be afraid, but laughed with a merriment of triumph at seeing me

awake, and something she said in the sweetest tongue of the world,

which I yet made poor shift to understand, for her baby speech,

besides its incompleteness, had also a long-drawn sweetness like the

slow trickle of honey, which she had caught from those black people

which she had about her since her birth.

I had great ado to move, though my shoulder was not disjointed, only

sorely bruised, but finally I was on my feet again, though standing

rather weakly, and with an ear alert for the return of that wild,

careering brute, and the little maid was close at my side, with one

rosy set of fingers clinging around two of my rough brown ones with

that sweet tenacity of a baby grasp which can hold the strongest

thing on earth.

And she kept on jabbering with that slow murmur of sweetness, and I

stood looking down at her, catching my breath with the pain in my

shoulder, though it was out of my thoughts with this new love of

her, and then came my father, Col. John Chelmsford, and Capt.

Geoffry Cavendish, walking through the park in deep converse, and

came upon us, and stopped and stared, as well they might.

Capt. Geoffry Cavendish was a gaunt man with the hectic colour of a

fever, which he had caught in the new country, still in the hollows

of his cheeks. He was quite young, with sudden alertnesses of

glances in bright black eyes like the new colours in jewels when the

light shifts. His daughter has the same, though her eyes are blue.

Moreover, through having been in the royal navy before he got a

wound which incapacitated him from further service, and was indeed

in time the cause of his death, he had acquired a swift suppleness

of silent movement, which his daughter has inherited also.

When he came upon us he stared for but one second, then came that

black flash into his eyes, and out curved an arm, and the little

maid was on her father's shoulder, and he was questioning me with

something of mistrust. I was a gentleman born and bred, but my

clothes sat but roughly and indifferently on me, partly through lack

of oversight and partly from that rude tumble I had gotten. Indeed,

my breeches and my coat were something torn by it. Then, too, I had

doubtless a look of ghastliness and astonishment that might well

have awaked suspicion, and Capt. Geoffry Cavendish had never spoken

with me in the short time since his return. "Who may you be?" he

asked, and his voice hesitated between hostility and friendliness,

and my stepfather answered for me with a slight forward thrust of

his shoulders which might have indicated shame, or impatience, or

both. "'Tis Master Harry Maria Wingfield," answered he; then in the

same breath, "How came you here, sir?"