The Heart

It was dawn before we were abed, but I for one had no sleep, being

strained to such a pitch of rapture and pain by what I had

discovered. The will I had not, to take the joy which I seemed to

see before me like some brimming cup of the gods, but not yet, in

the first surprise of knowing it offered me, the will to avoid the

looking upon it, and the tasting of it in dreams. Over and over I

said to myself, and every time with a new strengthening of

resolution, that Mary Cavendish should not love me, and that in some

way I would force her to obey me in that as in other things, never

doubting that I could do so. Well I knew that she could not wed a

convict, nor could I clear myself unless at the expense of her

sister Catherine, and sure I was that she would not purchase love

itself at such a cost as that. There remained nothing but to turn

her fancy from me, and that seemed to me an easy task, she being but

a child, and having, I reasoned, but little more than a childish

first love for me, which, as every one knows, doth readily burn

itself out by its excess of wick, and lack of substantial fuel. And

yet, as I lay on my bed with the red dawn at the windows, and the

birds calling outside, and the scent of the opening blossoms

entering invisible, such pangs of joy and ecstasy beyond anything

which I had ever known on earth overwhelmed me that I could not

resist them.

Knowing well that in the end I should prove my

strength, for the time I gave myself to that advance of man before

the spur of love, which I doubt not is after the same fashion as the

unfolding of the flowers in the spring, and the nesting of the

birds, and the movement of the world itself from season to season,

and would be as uncontrollable were it not that a man is mightier

even than that to which he owes his own existence, and hath the

power of putting that which he loves before his own desire of it.

But for the time, knowing well that I could at any time take up the

reins to the bridling of myself, I let them hang loose, and over and

over I whispered what Mary Cavendish had said, and over and over I

felt that touch of delicate tenderness on my arm, and I built up

such great castles that they touched the farthest skies of my fancy,

and all the time braving the knowledge that I should myself dash

them into ruins.