The Hearts Highway | Page 9

or natural emotion, as if it
were a dire shame, and whenever I had it in my heart to be tender, was
so brusque that I seemed to have been provided by nature with an
armour of roughness like a hedgehog. But, perhaps, I had some small
excuse for this, though, after all, it is a question in my mind as to what
excuse there may be for any man outside the motives of his own deeds,
and I care not to dwell unduly, even to my own consideration, upon

those disadvantages of life which may come to a man without his
cognisance and are to be borne like any fortune of war. But I had a
mother who had small affection for me, and that was not so unnatural
nor so much to her discredit as it may sound, since she, poor thing, had
been forced into a marriage with my father when she was long in love
with her cousin. Then my father having died at sea the year after I was
born, and her cousin, who was a younger son, having come into the
estates through the deaths of both his brothers of small-pox in one week,
she married her first love in less than six months, and no discredit to
her, for women are weak when they love, and she had doubtless been
sorely tried. They told me that my poor father was a true man and
gallant soldier, and my old nurse used to talk to me of him, and I used
to go by myself to think of him, and my eyes would get red when I was
but a little boy with reflecting upon my mother with her new husband
and her beautiful little boy, my brother John, a year younger than I, and
how my own poor father was forgotten. But there was no discredit to
my mother, who was only a weak and gentle woman and was tasting
happiness after disappointment and sorrow, in being borne so far out by
the tide of it that she lost sight, as it were, of her old shores. My mind
was never against my mother for her lack of love for me. But it is not
hard to be lenient toward a lack of love toward one's self, especially
remembering, as I do, myself, and my fine, ruddy-faced, loud-voiced
stepfather and my brother John.
A woman, by reason of her great tenderness of heart which makes her
suffer overmuch for those she loves, has not the strength to bear the
pain of loving more than one or two so entirely, and my mother's whole
heart was fixed with an anxious strain of loving care upon my
stepfather and my brother. I have seen her sit hours by a window as
pale as a statue while my stepfather was away, for those were troublous
times in England, and he in the thick of it. When I was a lad of six or
thereabouts they were bringing the king back to his own, and some of
the loyal ones were in danger of losing their heads along his proposed
line of march. And I have known her to hang whole nights over my
brother's bed if he had but a tickling in the throat; and what could one
poor woman do more?

She was as slender as a reed in this marshy country of Virginia, and her
voice was a sweet whisper, like the voice of one in a wind, and she had
a curious gracefulness of leaning toward one she loved when in his
presence, as if, whether she would or no, her heart of affection swayed
her body toward him. Always, in thinking of my mother, I see her
leaning with that true line of love toward my stepfather or my brother
John, her fair hair drooping over her delicate cheeks, her blue eyes
wistful with the longing to give more and more for their happiness. My
brother John looked like my mother, being, in fact, almost feminine in
his appearance, though not in his character. He had the same fair face,
perhaps more clearly and less softly cut, and the same long, silky wave
of fair hair, but the expression of his eyes was different, and in
character he was different. As for me, I was like my poor father, so like
that, as I grew older, I seemed his very double, as my old nurse used to
tell me. Perhaps that may have accounted for the quick glance, which
seemed almost of fear, which my mother used to give me sometimes
when I entered a room where she sat at her embroidery-work. My
mother dearly loved fine embroideries and laces, and in thinking of her
I can no more separate her from them than