THE STEADFAST HEART
in the contortion, for he did not like Angus. He did not like the boy, because when Titus joked he liked to hear the resultant cry of pain, and Angus would not cry out, could be made to betray no sign of fear or misery. It might have been courage, animal courage; it might have been mental and physical numbness, or, indeed, there might lie dormant and buried within the lad some store of real fortitude. Titus laid it to stubbornness, and regarded it as a species of filial disobedience.
As for Angus, he hated his father with the hatred of a dog which has been often kicked. It was a dull, inactive hatred, of which nothing could come. To run away never occurred to him, for such a solution of his problems required imagination, and Angus’s imagination was to be aroused from its sluggishness only when his mother conjured up terrors…. And where would he run? Was not the life of the Burkes a constant running away anyhow? From place to place they migrated, occupying filthy hovel after filthy hovel—until moved on by irate proprietors of adjacent henyards, or by constables after an epidemic of petty thefts. Such was all the life Angus could remember—if he had sought to remember. It had been, “Push on…. Push on…. You can’t stop here,” since the day when he could scarcely toddle…. In their
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