Hugh was puzzled, but not unsympathetically so, and less puzzled than might have been expected of so stolid a boy, and at so self-absorbed an age.
Stephen was uneasy and angry. He thrilled somewhat to Helen’s fancy, but he disliked both her claim and his own emotion to it.
All three of these children (for why beat longer about our bush?) in ways totally, almost antagonistically different, were somewhat “psychic.”
No one suspected it, much less knew it—and they themselves least of all. Hugh could not. Stephen would not. Helen was too young.
Psychic science or revelation had not, in those days, had much of a look in socially. And in Oxshott it had barely been heard of—merely heard of enough to give Ignorance a meaningless laugh. Spiritual planes and delicate soul-processes would seem to have little vibration with that environment of mundane interests and financial aggrandizement. But the souls of the other plane peep in through odd nooks, and work in seemingly strange ways. And, too, this one group of people, for all their wealth and their luxuries, lived rather “apart”—they were in the social swim—to an extent, and in the commercial ether up to their necks, but even so, in it, they were in another, and perhaps a more real and significant, way “cloistered” in it: apart.
“Gertrude is sleepy. I am sleepy too. Gertrude says: ‘Good-night, Helen.’ Good-night, Gertrude.”
Bransby swung her up to his shoulder and carried her off to bed. And Hugh, at a gesture of an imperious little hand, gathered up the two dolls, and followed after with them carefully. Helen was a motherly little thing—intermittently, and had her children to sleep with her—sometimes. The chain of flowers lay dying and forgotten.
CHAPTER VI
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.”