As we followed on that moonlight night, she and I alone, of a sudden
I felt my youth and love arise to such an assailing of the joy of
life, that I knew myself dragged as it were by it, and had no more
choosing as to what I should not do. Verily it would be easier to
lead an army of malcontents than one's own self. And something there
was about the moonlight on that fair Virginian night, and the
heaviness of the honey-scents, and the pressure of love and life on
every side, in bush and vine and tree and nest, which seemed to
overbear me and sweep me along as on the crest of some green tide of
spring. Verily there are forces of this world which are beyond the
overcoming of mortal man so long as he is encumbered by his
mortality.
Mary Cavendish gathered up her blue and silver petticoats about her
as closely as a blue flower-bell at nightfall, and stepped along
daintily at my side, and the feel of her little hand on my arm
seemed verily the only touch of material things which held me to
this world. We came to a great pool of wet in our way, and suddenly
I thought of her feet in her little satin shoes. "Madam, you will
wet your feet if you walk through that pool in your satin shoes," I
said, and my voice was so hoarse with tenderness that I would not
have known it for my own, and I felt her arm tremble. "No," she said
faintly. But without waiting for any permission, around her waist I
put an arm, and had her raised in a twinkling from the ground, and
bore her across the pool, she not struggling, but only whispering
faintly when I set her down after it was well passed. "You--you
should not have done that, Harry."
Then of a sudden, close she pressed her soft cheek against my
shoulder as we walked, and whispered, as though she could keep
silent no longer, and yet as if she swooned for shame in breaking
silence: "Harry, Harry, I liked the way you thrust them aside when
they were rude with you, to do me a service, and Harry, you are
stronger, and--and--than them all."
Then I knew with such a shock of joy, that I wonder I lived, that
the child loved me, but I knew at the same time as never I had known
it before, my love for her.
"Mistress Mary," I said, "I but did my duty and my service, which
you can always count upon, and I did no more than others would have
done. Sir Humphrey Hyde--"