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.