Читать книгу The Invisible Foe - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 9

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Stephen was not happy. He was loving but not lovable—on the surface at least. He was sensitive to a fault, brooding, secretive. He had loved his mother dearly, and Hugh had been her favorite. But that had soured and twisted him less than had the marriage-misery of her last years. He had seen and understood most of it; and it had aged and lined his young face almost from his perambulator days. His two earliest memories were of her face blistered with tears, and a tea-table on which there had been no jam, and not too much bread. Secure at Deep Dale, he had jam, and all such plenties, to spare. And he intended to command jam of his very own—and cut-glass dishes to serve it in—before he was much older, and as long as he lived. His days of jam-shortage were past. And they had left but little scar—if only he could forget that she had shared and hated it. But the tear-scars on her face, and on her heart, could never be erased—or from his—or forgotten.

Small boy as he was, all the future lines of his character were clearly drawn, and Time had but to give them light and shade—and color: there was nothing more to be done—the outline and the proportions were complete and unalterable. And at fourteen and a few months he was the victim of two gnawing wants: heart-hunger and ambition. Few boys of fourteen are definitely and greatly ambitious, or, if they are, greatly disturbed as to the feasibility and the details of its fulfillment. Fourteen is not an age of masculine self-distrust. Masculine self-depreciation and under-apprisement come slowly, and fairly late in life. There are rare, notable men to whom they never come. Such men carry on them a visible and easily-to-be-recognized hall-mark. Their vocabulary may be scant or Milton-much, but invariably its every seventh word is “I” or “me” or “my” or “mine.”

Stephen Pryde had no doubt of his own ability to earn success. But his mind was wide-eyed and clear-eyed, and he doubted if circumstances would not thwart, much less abet him. Already he saw that he could gain a great deal through his uncle and in his uncle’s way. The man had said as much. But Stephen was no disciple, and he was ill-content to win even success itself in subordination to any other, or in imitation of others or of their methods. He longed to carve and to climb unaided and alone. He wished to cleave uncharted skies—as the birds did. Ah! yes, there he was meek to imitate—to follow and imitate the birds, but not any other man.

Partly was this ingrained; firm-rooted independence, egoism, partly it came from the poor opinion he had already formed of his own sex. He thought none too well of men: his own father had done that to him. Towards all women he had a sort of pitying, tender chivalry. That his mother had done to him. He did not over-rate female intellect or character (like the uncle, whom he resembled so much, intellect in womenkind did not attract him, and he prized them most when their virtues were passive and not too diverse), but he bore them one and all good-will, and the constant small attentions he paid Mrs. Leavitt, and even the maid-servants, were almost as much a native tenderness as a calculated diplomacy. Mrs. Leavitt and the maids were not ungrateful. Women of all sorts and of all conditions are easiest purchased, and held, with small coins. A husband may break all the commandments, and break them over his wife’s very back roughly, and be more probably forgiven than for failing to raise his hat when he meets her on the street. Stephen was very careful about his hat, indoors and out. He had seen his father wear his in his mother’s sitting-room, and by her very bedside. The lesson had sunk, and it stuck.

But his love of his mother, and its jealous observance of her, had trained him to feel for women rather than to respect them. He had seen her sicken and shiver under the storm, and bow down and endure it patiently, when he would have had her breast and quell it. He had not heard Life’s emphatic telling—he was too young to catch it—that strength is strongest when it seems weak and meek, that great loyalty is the strongest of all strength as well as the highest of all virtues, and that often Loyalty for ermine must wear a yoke,—and always must it bear uncomplainingly a “friend’s infirmities.”

The boy was a unique, and a blend of his father and his “Uncle Dick.” He was wonderfully like each. From his mother he had inherited nothing but a possibility, an aptitude, a predisposition even, towards great loyalty, which in her had crystallized and perfected into everlasting and invincible self-sacrifice. In her son it was young yet, plastic and undeveloped. In maturity it might match, or even exceed, her own; or, on the other hand, experiences sufficiently rasping and deforming might wrench and transmute it, under the black alchemy of sufficient tragedy, even into treachery itself.

If few boys of fourteen are tormented by ambition, very many such youngsters suffer from genuine heart-hunger. We never see or suspect or care. They scarcely suspect themselves, and never understand. But the canker is there, terribly often, and it eats and eats. The heart-ache of a little child is a hideous tragedy, and when it is untold and unsoothed it twists and poisons all after life and character. Angels may rise above such spiritual catastrophe—men don’t.

Even more than Stephen longed to succeed, he longed to be loved. And in a hurt, dumb boy-way he realized that he did not, as a rule, attract love.

“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ’tis woman’s whole existence.” Hum? There are men and men. (There are even women and women.) Stephen longed to be very rich, and planned to do it. He longed to contrive strange, wonderful things that would cleave the air as birds clove it, revolutionize both Commerce and her servant and master Transport, make travel a dance and a melody, redraw the map of the world, carry armies across the hemispheres with a breath, hurl kings from their thrones, annihilate peoples in an hour—and he planned to do it: planned as he lay on the grass and watched the birds, planned as he sat in the firelight, planned as he lay in bed. But more than all this he longed to be loved: longed but could not plan it. The child knew his own limitations; and that he did was at once his ability and inability: it was equipment and drag-chain.

He ached for love. He longed to feel his uncle’s hand in caress on his shoulder. Once in the twilight he cuddled Helen’s doll to him, in fierce longing and loneliness of heart. And night after night he prayed that in his dreams he might hear his mother’s voice. And sometimes he did. Science asserts that we never hear in our sleep. Science still has some things to learn.

Stephen loved Hugh, and this affection was returned. But Stephen wanted more than that; Hugh loved every one. Their mutual fondness was placid and moderate. And it lacked novelty.

If Hugh loved every one, every one loved Hugh—unless Helen did not. And Helen was merely a baby, and cared for no one but her father—unless it was “Gertrude,” whom Stephen hated.

Even Richard Bransby himself, hard and impassive, began to warm to the younger boy, and Stephen sensed it. He was keen to such things, and read his uncle the more readily because they resembled each other in so much.

But, much as he desired to be loved, Stephen was not jealous of Hugh. Jealousy had as yet no hand in his hopes, his fears or his plans: Jealousy, sometimes Love’s horrid bastard-twin, sometimes Love’s flaming-sworded angel.

Possibly Stephen’s as-yet escape from jealousy and all its torments he owed in no small part to Helen’s indifference to Hugh, and to the fact that Hugh’s fondness of every one made Hugh’s fondness of Helen somewhat inconspicuous.

For odd Stephen loved wee Helen with a great love—greater than the love he had given his mother.

The day the boys had first come to Deep Dale Helen, running at play, had lost a tiny blue shoe in the grounds. Stephen had found and had kept it.

Helen liked her “pretty blue shoes,” and Mrs. Leavitt was sensibly frugal. The grounds had been searched until they had been almost dug up, and the entire servant-staff had been angrily wearied of blue kid shoes and of ferns and geraniums. But Stephen had kept it. He had it still. And he would have fought any man-force, or the foul fiend himself, before he would have yielded that bit of sky-blue treasure.

No one understood Stephen, not even the uncle he so resembled. He was alone and unhappy, only fourteen years old—a quivering personality concealed beneath a suave mask of ice, and young armor of steel.

Stephen had a tutor.

Helen and Hugh shared a governess.

Both instructors were “daily,” one coming by train from Guildford, the other by train from London.

Stephen was going to public school in a year or two, Hugh then falling heir to the tutor.

How long the governess would retain her present position had never been considered. Probably she would do so for some time. Helen liked her.