Stephen, the son of these people, had one instinct that troubled him. At night--especially out of doors--it seemed rather strange that he was alive. The dry grass pricked his cheek, the fields were invisible and mute, and here was he, throwing stones at the darkness or smoking a pipe. The stones vanished, the pipe would burn out. But he would be here in the morning when the sun rose, and he would bathe, and run in the mist. He was proud of his good circulation, and in the morning it seemed quite natural. But at night, why should there be this difference between him and the acres of land that cooled all round him until the sun returned?
What lucky chance had heated him up, and sent him, warm and lovable, into a passive world? He had other instincts, but these gave him no trouble. He simply gratified each as it occurred, provided he could do so without grave injury to his fellows. But the instinct to wonder at the night was not to be thus appeased.
At first he had lived under the care of Mr. Failing the only person to whom his mother spoke freely, the only person who had treated her neither as a criminal nor as a pioneer. In their rare but intimate conversations she had asked him to educate her son.
"I will teach him Latin," he answered. "The rest such a boy must remember." Latin, at all events, was a failure: who could attend to Virgil when the sound of the thresher arose, and you knew that the stack was decreasing and that rats rushed more plentifully each moment to their doom? But he was fond of Mr. Failing, and cried when he died. Mrs. Elliot, a pleasant woman, died soon after.
There was something fatal in the order of these deaths. Mr. Failing had made no provision for the boy in his will: his wife had promised to see to this. Then came Mr. Elliot's death, and, before the new home was created, the sudden death of Mrs. Elliot.
She also left Stephen no money: she had none to leave. Chance threw him into the power of Mrs. Failing. "Let things go on as they are," she thought. "I will take care of this pretty little boy, and the ugly little boy can live with the Silts. After my death--well, the papers will be found after my death, and they can meet then. I like the idea of their mutual ignorance. It is amusing."He was then twelve. With a few brief intervals of school, he lived in Wiltshire until he was driven out. Life had two distinct sides--the drawing-room and the other. In the drawing-room people talked a good deal, laughing as they talked. Being clever, they did not care for animals: one man had never seen a hedgehog. In the other life people talked and laughed separately, or even did neither. On the whole, in spite of the wet and gamekeepers, this life was preferable. He knew where he was. He glanced at the boy, or later at the man, and behaved accordingly. There was no law--the policeman was negligible. Nothing bound him but his own word, and he gave that sparingly.
It is impossible to be romantic when you have your heart's desire, and such a boy disappointed Mrs. Failing greatly. His parents had met for one brief embrace, had found one little interval between the power of the rulers of this world and the power of death. He was the child of poetry and of rebellion, and poetry should run in his veins. But he lived too near the things he loved to seem poetical. Parted from them, he might yet satisfy her, and stretch out his hands with a pagan's yearning. As it was, he only rode her horses, and trespassed, and bathed, and worked, for no obvious reason, upon her fields. Affection she did not believe in, and made no attempt to mould him; and he, for his part, was very content to harden untouched into a man. His parents had given him excellent gifts--health, sturdy limbs, and a face not ugly,--gifts that his habits confirmed. They had also given him a cloudless spirit--the spirit of the seventeen days in which he was created. But they had not given him the spirit of their sit years of waiting, and love for one person was never to be the greatest thing he knew.
"Philosophy" had postponed the quarrel between them. Incurious about his personal origin, he had a certain interest in our eternal problems. The interest never became a passion: it sprang out of his physical growth, and was soon merged in it again. Or, as he put it himself, "I must get fixed up before starting." He was soon fixed up as a materialist. Then he tore up the sixpenny reprints, and never amused Mrs. Failing so much again.
About the time he fixed himself up, he took to drink. He knew of no reason against it. The instinct was in him, and it hurt nobody. Here, as elsewhere, his motions were decided, and he passed at once from roaring jollity to silence. For those who live on the fuddled borderland, who crawl home by the railings and maunder repentance in the morning, he had a biting contempt.
A man must take his tumble and his headache. He was, in fact, as little disgusting as is conceivable; and hitherto he had not strained his constitution or his will. Nor did he get drunk as often as Agnes suggested. Thc real quarrel gathered elsewhere.
Presentable people have run wild in their youth. But the hour comes when they turn from their boorish company to higher things.
This hour never came for Stephen. Somewhat a bully by nature, he kept where his powers would tell, and continued to quarrel and play with the men he had known as boys. He prolonged their youth unduly. "They won't settle down," said Mr. Wilbraham to his wife.
"They're wanting things. It's the germ of a Trades Union. I shall get rid of a few of the worst." Then Stephen rushed up to Mrs.
Failing and worried her. "It wasn't fair. So-and-so was a good sort. He did his work. Keen about it? No. Why should he be? Why should he be keen about somebody else's land? But keen enough.