The Heart

When her young sister had dismounted and had gone up the steps, she

kissed her, and the two entered the hall, clinging together in a way

which was pretty to see. I never saw such love betwixt two where

there was not full sympathy, and that was lacking always and lacked

more in the future, through the difference in their two temperaments

gotten from different mothers.

Madam Cavendish was still in her bedchamber, and the two sisters and

I dined together in the great hall. Then, after the meal was over, I

went forth with my book of Sir William Davenant's plays, and sought

a favourite place of mine in the woods, and stayed there till

sundown. Then, rising and going homeward when the mist floated over

the marshlands like veils of silver gauze, and the frogs chorused

through it in waves of sound, and birds were circling above it,

calling sweetly with fluting notes or screaming with the harsh

trumpet-clang of sea-fowl, I heard of a sudden, just as the sun sank

below the western sky, a mighty din of horns and bells and voices

from the direction of Jamestown. I knew that the sports which a

certain part of the community would have on a Sabbath after sundown,

when they felt so inclined, had begun. Since the king had been

restored such sports had been observed, now and then, according to

the humour of the governor and the minister and the others in

authority. Laws had been from time to time set forth that the night

after the Sabbath, the Sabbath being considered to cease at sundown,

should be kept with decorum, but seldom were they enforced, and

often, as now, a great din arose when the first gloom overspread the

earth. However, that night was the 30th of April, the night before

May day; and there was more merrymaking in consequence, though May

was not here as in England, and even in England not what it had been

in the first Charles's reign.

But they kept up their rollicking late that night, for the window of

my chamber being toward Jamestown, and the wind that way, I could

hear them till I fell asleep. At midnight I wakened suddenly at the

sound of a light laugh, which I knew to be Mary Cavendish's. There

was never in the maid any power of secrecy when her humour overcame

her. She laughed again, and I heard a hushing voice, which I knew to

be neither her sister's nor grandmother's, but a man's.

I was up and dressed in a trice, and sword in hand, and out of my

window, which was on the first floor, and there was Mistress Mary

and Sir Humphrey Hyde. I stepped between them and thrust aside Sir

Humphrey, who would have opposed me. "Go into the house, madam,"

said I to her, and pointed to the door, which stood open. Then while

she hesitated, half shrinking before me, with her old habit of

obedience strong upon her, yet with angry wilfulness urging her to

rebellion, forth stepped her distant cousin Ralph Drake from behind

a white-flowering thicket, and demanded to know what that cursed

convict fellow did there, and had he not a right to parley with his

cousin, and was her honour not safe with her kinsman and he an

English gentleman? I perceived by Ralph Drake's voice that he had

perchance been making gay with the revellers at Jamestown, and stood

still when he came bullyingly toward me, but at that minute Mistress

Mary spoke.