Chapter 10

It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find
there; in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant
stock, a seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and
sands; the growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with
kisses and the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all
little occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing
whether or no; mother's faith in excellences, the buds which were yet
invisible to all other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial
sunshine necessary to their growth; mother's generous interpretation of
all that was doubtful in him, and which might turn out good or bad,
according as should be believed of it; mother's pride in whatever the
boy accomplished, and unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so
satisfactory, for all his failures; mother's deep intuitive insight,
which should see the permanent good beneath all the appearance of
temporary evil, being wiser through her love than the wisest sage could
be,--the dullest, homeliest mother than the wisest sage. The Creator,
apparently, has set a little of his own infinite wisdom and love (which
are one) in a mother's heart, so that no child, in the common course of
things, should grow up without some heavenly instruction. Instead of
all this, and the vast deal more that mothers do for children, there
had been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion,
with only a fitful tenderness, with years' length between the fits, so
fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely
morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was
the boy's preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that
there had been for him of human life, and enough--he being naturally of
such good stuff--to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he
was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and
imperfections there were, in abundance, great uncultivated wastes and
wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled wilds where there might have
been stately, venerable religious groves; but there was no rank growth
of evil. That unknown mother, that had no opportunity to nurse her boy,
must have had gentle and noblest qualities to endow him with; a noble
father, too, a long, unstained descent, one would have thought. Was
this an almshouse child?

Doctor Grim knew, very probably, that there was all this on the womanly
side that was wanting to Ned's occasion; and very probably, too, being
a man not without insight, he was aware that tender treatment, as a
mother bestows it, tends likewise to foster strength, and manliness of
character, as well as softer developments; but all this he could