The Heart

At fourteen I was as ungainly a lad, with as helpless a sprawl of

legs and arms and as staring and shamefaced a surprise at my

suddenly realised height of growth, when jostled by a girl or a

younger lad, and utter discomfiture before an unexpected deepness of

tone when essaying a polite response to an inquiry of his elders, as

was ever seen in England. And I remember that I bore myself with a

wary outlook for affronts to my newly fledging dignity, and

concealed all that was stirring in me to new life, whether of

nobility 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.