Meantime, however, there was Adelaide, in whose seniority he felt a gentle guidance toward the elusive source of pleasure and away from the forever lurking shadow of misfortune. But this alliance was short-lived. Nor was this entirely without fault in Quincy. Doubtless, a moving factor in Adelaide’s defection was the longing she nursed to be of the company of Rhoda. Herein, her state was like that of Quincy toward his brother. But whereas the boy had felt a justice, fashioned almost a glory in his brother’s pointed superiority, Adelaide had resented this in Rhoda. Having resented it, she turned to Quincy, with, however, a tinge of spite upon her feeling. And when, at length, Rhoda opened the way toward comradeship, her real desire to join her ranks, to exercise her smouldering sex-patriotism, was bound to show.
The nature of Quincy, however, made all this easier for Adelaide. These were perhaps the blandest years, the most harmonious, of his life. But even here there was within him a source of conflict, a rift, destined to debar him from gracious or facile living. Adelaide found him slow to follow up a game or play into which, with the best impulse, he had entered. Always, there lay in him the instinct to retire, to grow cool, to wander off lack-spirited before her own climax of enthusiasm. Suddenly, she would find that his mood was changed, that he was spiritually alone and aloof, while they pursued together the sequence of some sport. And, once thus removed from their common-ground of interest, there was no retrieving him. He would sit a-dream on the grass, cold before the sand pile which their mutual eagerness was to have transformed into a castle. If one addressed him then, he would not hear. If one tried to shake him from his reverie, he would scratch and bite and scream.
This was all Adelaide knew. But behind his failure, even as a child, to sustain his interest, it mattered little in what end, there lurked a serious cause. Quincy lacked soul-endurance. The part of him that should have fired his acts seemed scant of fuel. And from this want had come a timidness of purpose, a tendency to veer and flutter and give way. Not only in the face of opposition was this true, but in the effort of accomplishment, in the very fact of nearing what he had desired. The imminence of approach to that toward which he had set out with heart a-gleam, served to slacken his pace and to disaffect his will.
Adelaide had suffered from this, in their serious business of play. Quincy’s own suffering, here as forever after, was to be indissolubly set in the suffering he helped to cause in others.
And at the time of this first instance, with its result of a tragic disaffection, he was not yet eight.
V
There was but a short interim between the alliance with Adelaide and the beginning of the reign of Jonas.
These were dull days of autumn. And during them, Quincy was put to school. This new event, however, appeared to involve him slightly. It taxed a surface of his attention. Its influence was neither encompassing nor deep. For Quincy was the kind of child who always precedes, in that he is an individual, the class in which his years cause him arbitrarily to be placed. With such, the average drone-exercise of school is an ugly filler of what might elsewhere have been golden hours. But if the business of reading and addition meant little to him, the new will of Jonas to acknowledge him as vassal meant relatively much.
Prior to his eighth birthday came a shift in the house. Rhoda and Adelaide were brought together into one room—it had been their request. Quincy was ousted from his bed—he regarded it as a promotion; and his room was given over to the crippled Marsden who was old and crabbed even for his hoary seventeen years. Jonas was removed from his spacious quarters to a wide, transformed attic under the eaves where the ceiling sloped and an air of solitude pervaded. A cot was placed beside his wooden bed for Quincy. The room left vacant on the second floor was made ready to receive a lodger; for the Burt finances were, as ever, ragged. It was written that no lodger should come. But there, at least, stood the empty room, in token of the family’s scrupulous intentions.
In this sharing of a room, apart from the ruck of life, with his life’s ideal, began an era in Quincy’s progress. The lad rejoiced in its marked position, under the roof. He rejoiced in the extra flight of stairs to be pattered up to reach it. He rejoiced in the singularity of the ceiling, in the lack of a conventional wall-paper,—the room was roughly wainscoted in pine, and plastered. But most of all, he rejoiced in the symbolism of his little white cot alongside the majestic bed. And so, since his happiness required precisely the meed of haughty tolerance, the stressed superiority of Jonas,—Quincy was happy.