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.