It was good to get back to reality, with Angel's blue eyes, Mike's laugh, and Esther's common sense.
"Let me look deep into them, Angel--deep--deep. It is so good to get back to something true."
"Are they true?" said Angel, opening them very wide.
"Something that will never forsake one, something we can never forsake! Something in all the wide world's change that will never change. Something that will still be Angel even in a thousand years."
"I hope to be a real angel long before that," said Angel, laughing.
"Do you think you can promise to be true so long, Angel?" asked Henry.
"Dear, you know that so long as there is one little part of me left anywhere in the world, that part will be true to you.--But come, tell me about London. I'm afraid you didn't enjoy it very much."
"Oh, yes, I loved London,--that is, old London; but new London made me a little sad. I expect it was only because I didn't quite understand the conditions."
"Perhaps so," said Angel. "But tell me,--did you go to the Zoo?"
"You dear child! Yes! I went out of pure love for you."
"Now you needn't be so grown up. You know you wanted to go just for yourself as well. And you saw the monkey-house?"
"Yes."
"And the lions?"
"Yes."
"And the snakes?"
"Yes!"
"Oh, I'd give anything to see the snakes! Did they eat any rabbits when you were there,--fascinate them, and then draw them slowly, slowly in?"
"Angel, what terrible interests you are developing! No, thank goodness, they didn't."
"Why, wouldn't it fascinate you to see something wonderfully killed?" asked Angel. "It is dreadful and wicked, of course. But it would be so thrillingly real."
"I think I must introduce you to a young man I met in London," said Henry, "who solemnly asked me if I had ever murdered anyone. You savage little wild thing! I suppose this is what you mean by saying sometimes that you are a gipsy, eh?"
"Well, and you went to the Tower, and Westminster Abbey, and everything, and it was really wonderful?"
"Yes, I saw everything--including the Queen."
For young people of Tyre and Sidon to go to London was like what it once was to make the pilgrimage to Rome.
Mike created some valuable nonsense on the occasion, which unfortunately has not been preserved, and Esther was disgusted with Henry because he could give no intelligible description of the latest London hats; and all examined with due reverence those wonderful books for review.
In Tichborne Street Aunt Tipping had taken advantage of his absence to enrich his room with a bargain in the shape of an old desk, which was the very thing he wanted. Dear old Aunt Tipping! And Gerard, it is to be feared, took a little more brandy than usual in honour of his young friend's adventures in the capital.
These excitements over, Henry sat down at his old desk to write his first review; and there for the present we may leave him, for he took it very seriously and was dangerous to interrupt.
More than a year had now gone by since Henry left home, and meanwhile, with the exception of Dot's baptism, there had been no exciting changes to record. Perhaps uneventfulness is part of the security of a real home. Every morning James Mesurier had risen at half-past six,--though he no longer imposed that hour of rising upon his daughters,--breakfasted at eight, and reached his office at nine. Every evening during those months, punctually at half-past six his latch-key had rattled in the front-door lock, and one or other of his daughters had hurried out at the sound to bid him welcome home.
"Home at last, father dear!" they had said, helping him off with his coat; and sometimes when he felt bright he would answer,--
"Yes, my dear, night brings crows home."
"Home again, James!" his wife would say, as he next entered the front parlour, and bent down to kiss her where she sat. "It's a long day. Isn't it time you were pulling in a bit? Surely some of the younger heads should begin to relieve you."
"Responsibility, Mary dear! We cannot delegate responsibility," he would answer.
"But we see nothing of you. You just sacrifice your whole life for the business."
If he were in a good humour, he might answer with one of his rare sweet laughs, and jokingly make one of his few French quotations: "Telle est la vie! my dear,Telle est la vie! That's the French for it, isn't it, Dot?"
James Mesurier was just perceptibly softening. Perhaps it was that he was growing a little tired, that he was no longer quite the stern disciplinarian we met in the first chapter; perhaps the influence of his wife, and his experiences with his children, were beginning to hint to him what it takes so long for a strong individual nature to learn, that the law of one temperament cannot justly or fruitfully be enforced as the law of another.
The younger children--Esther and Dot and Mat used sometimes to say to each other--would grow up in a more clement atmosphere of home than had been Henry's and theirs. Already they were quietly assuming privileges, and nothing said, that would have meant beatings for their elders. For these things had Henry and Esther gladly faced martyrdom. Henry had looked on the Promised Land, but been denied an entrance there. By his stripes this younger generation would be healed.
The elder girls hastened to draw close to their father in gratitude, and home breathed a kinder, freer air than ever had been known before. Between Esther and her father particularly a kind of comradeship began to spring up, which perhaps more than ever made the mother miss her boy.
But, all the same, home was growing old. This was the kindness of the setting sun!
Childless middle age is no doubt often dreary to contemplate, yet is it an egoistical bias which leads one to find in such limitation, or one might rather say preservation, of the ego, a certain compensation? The childless man or woman has at least preserved his or her individuality, as few fathers and mothers of large families are suffered to do. By the time you are fifty, with a family of half a dozen children, you have become comparatively impersonal as "father" or "mother." It is tacitly recognised that your life-work is finished, that your ambitions are accomplished or not, and that your hopes are at an end.
The young Mesuriers, for example, were all eagerly hastening towards their several futures. They were garrulous over them at every meal. But to what future in this world were James and Mary Mesurier looking forward? Love had blossomed and brought forth fruit, but the fruit was quickly ripening, and stranger hands would soon pluck it from the boughs. In a very few years they would sit under a roof-tree bared of fruit and blossom, and sad with falling leaves. They had dreamed their dream, and there is only one such dream for a lifetime; now they must sit and listen to the dreams of their children, help them to build theirs. They mattered now no longer for themselves, but just as so much aid and sympathy on which their children might draw. Too well in their hearts they knew that their children only heard them with patience so long as they talked of their to-morrows. Should they sometimes dwell wistfully on their own yesterdays, they could too plainly see how long the story seemed.
Telle est la vie!as James Mesurier said, and, that being so, no wonder life is a sad business. Better perhaps be childless and retain one's own personal hopes and fears for life, than be so relegated to history in the very zenith of one's days. If only this younger generation at the door were always, as it assumes, stronger and better than its elder! but, though the careless assumption that it is so is somewhat general, history alone shows how false and impudent the assumption often is. Too often genius itself must submit to the silly presumption of its noisy and fatuous children, and it is the young fool who too often knocks imperiously at the door of wise and active middle age.
That all this is inevitable makes it none the less sad. The young Mesuriers were neither fools nor hard of heart; and sometimes, in moments of sympathy, their parents would be revealed to them in sudden lights of pathos and old romance. They would listen to some old love-affair of their mother's as though it had been their own, or go out of their way to make their father tell once more the epic of the great business over which he presided, and which, as he conceived it, was doubtless a greater poem than his son would ever write. Yet still even in such genuine sympathy, there was a certain imaginative effort to be made. The gulf between the generations, however hidden for the moment, was always there.
Yet, after all, James and Mary Mesurier possessed an incorruptible treasure, which their children had neither given nor could take away. To regard them as without future would be a shallow observation,--for love has always a future, however old in mortal years it may have grown; and as they grew older, their love seemed to grow stronger. Involuntarily they seemed to draw closer together, as by an instinct of self-preservation. Their love had been before their children; were they to be spared, it would still be the same love, sweeter by trial, when their children had passed from them. In this love had been wise for them. Some parents love their children so unwisely that they forget to love each other; and, when the children forsake them, are left disconsolate. One has heard young mothers say that now their boy has come, their husbands may take a second place; and often of late we have heard the woman say: "Give me but the child, and the lover can go his ways." Foolish, unprophetic women! Let but twenty years go by, and how glad you will be of that rejected lover; for, though a son may suffice for his mother, what mother has ever sufficed for her son?
But though sometimes, as they looked at their parents, the young Mesuriers caught a glimpse of the infinite sadness of a life-work accomplished, yet it failed to warn them against the eager haste with which they were hurrying on towards a like conclusion. Too late they would understand that all the joy was in the doing; too soon say to themselves: "Was it for this that our little world shook with such fiery commotion and molten ardours, that this present should be so firm and insensitive beneath our feet? This habit--why, it was once a passion! This fact--why, it was once a dream!"
Oh, why shake off youth's fragile blossoms with the very speed of your own impatience! Why make such haste towards autumn! Who ever thought the ruddiest lapful of apples a fair exchange for a cloud of sunlit blossom? Whose maturity, however laden with prosperity or gilded with honour, ever kept the fairy promise of his youth? For so brief a space youth glitters like a dewdrop on the tree of life, glitters and is gone. For one desperate instant of perfection it hangs poised, and is seen no more.
But, alas! the art of enjoying youth with a wise economy is only learnt when youth is over. It is perhaps too paradoxical an accomplishment to be learnt before; for a youth that economised itself would be already middle age. It is just the wasteful flare of it that leaves such a dazzle in old eyes, as they look back in fancy to the conflagration of fragrant fire which once bourgeoned and sang where these white ashes now slowly smoulder towards extinction.
When Mike has a theatre of his own and can send boxes to his friends, when Henry maybe is an editor of power, when Esther and Angel are the enthroned wives of famous men, and the new heaven and the new earth are quite finished,--will they never sigh sometimes to have the making of them all over again? Then they will have everything to enjoy, so there will be nothing left to hope for. Then there will be no spice of peril in their loves, no keen edge that comes of enforced denial; and the game of life will be too sure for ambition to keep its savour. "There is no thrill, no excitement nowadays," one can almost fancy their saying, and, like children playing with their bricks, "Now let us knock it all down, and build another, one. It will be such fun."
However, these are intrusive, autumnal thoughts in this book of simple youth, and our young people knew them not. They were far indeed from Esther's mind as she talked with Dot of the future one afternoon. Instead, her words were full of impatience with the slow march of events, and the enforced inactivity of a girl's life at home.
"It is so much easier for the boys," she was saying. "There is something for them to do. But we can do nothing but sit at home and wait, darn their socks, and clap our hands at their successes. I wish I were a man!"
"No, you don't," said Dot; "for then you couldn't marry Mike. And you couldn't wear pretty dresses--Oh! and lots of things. I don't much envy a man's life, after all. It's all very well talking about hard work when you haven't got to do it; and it's not so much the work as the responsibility. It must be such a responsibility to be a man."
"Of course you're right, Dot--but, oh! this waiting is so stupid, all the same. If only I could be doing something--anything!"
"Well, youaredoing something. Is it nothing to be all the world to a man?" said Dot, wistfully; "nothing to be his heaven upon earth? Nothing to be the prize he is working for, and nothing to sustain and cheer him on, as you do Mike, and as Angel cheers Henry? Would Henry have been the same without Angel, or Mike the same without you? No, the man's work makes more noise, but the woman's work is none the less real and useful because it is quiet and underground."
"Dear Dot, what a wise old thing you're growing! But you know you're longing all the time for some work to do yourself. Didn't you say the other day that you seemed to be wasting your life here, making beds and doing housework?"
"Yes; but I'm different. Don't you see?" retorted Dot, sadly. "I've got no Mike. Your work is to help Mike be a great actor, but I've got no one to help be anything. You may be sure I wouldn't complain of being idle if I had. I think you're a bit forgetful sometimes how happy you are."
"Poor old Dot! you needn't talk as if you're such a desperate old maid,--you're not twenty yet. And I'm sure it's a good thing for you that you haven't got any of the young men about here--to help be aldermen! Wait till you come and stay with us in London, then you'll soon find some one to work for, as you call it."
"I don't know," said Dot, thoughtfully; "somehow I think I shall never marry."
"I suppose you mean you'd rather be a nun or something serious of that sort."
"Well, to tell the truth, I have been thinking lately if perhaps I couldn't do something,--perhaps go into a hospital, or something of that sort."
"Oh, nonsense, Dot! Think of all the horrible, dirty people you'd have to attend to. Ugh!"
"Christ didn't think of that when He washed the feet of His disciples," said little Dot, sententiously.
"Why, Dot, how dreadfully religious you're getting! You want a good shaking! Besides, isn't it a little impious to imply that the apostles were horrible, dirty people?"
"You know what I meant," said Dot, flushing.
"Yes, of course, dear; and I think I know where you've been. You've been to see that dear Sister Agatha."
"You admit she's a dear?"
"Of course I do; but I don't know whether she's quite good for you."
"If you'd only seen her among the poor little children the other day, how beautiful and how happy she looked, you might have thought differently," said Dot.
"Oh, yes, dear; but then you mustn't forget that her point of view is different. She's renounced the world; she's one of those women," Esther couldn't resist adding, maliciously, "who've given up hope of man, and so have set all their hopes on God."
"Esther, that's unworthy of you--though what if it is as you say, is it so great a failure after all to dedicate one's self to God rather than to one little individual man?"
"Oh, come," said Esther, rather wilfully misunderstanding, and suddenly flushing up, "Mike is not so little as all that!"
"Why, you goose, how earthly you are! I never thought of dear Mike--though it would have served you right for saying such a mean thing about Sister Agatha."
"Forgive me. I know it was mean, but I couldn't resist it. And it is true, you'll admit, of some of those pious women, though I withdraw it about Sister Agatha."
"Of course I couldn't be a sister like Sister Agatha," said Dot, "without being a Catholic as well; but I might be a nurse at one of the ordinary hospitals."
"It would be dreadfully hard work!" said Esther.
"Harder than being a man, do you think?" asked Dot, laughing.
"For goodness' sake, don't turn Catholic!" said Esther, in some alarm. "Thatwould break father's heart, if you like."
A horror of Catholicism ran in the very marrow of these young people. It was one of the few relics of their father's Puritanism surviving in them. Of "Catholics" they had been accustomed to speak since childhood as of nightmares and Red Indians with bloody scalps at their waists; and perhaps that instinctive terror of the subtle heart of Rome is the religious prejudice which we will do well to part with last.
Dot had not, indeed, contemplated an apostacy so unnatural; but beneath these comparatively trivial words there was an ever-growing impulse to fulfil that old longing of her nature to do something, as the Christians would say, "for God," something serious, in return for the solemn and beautiful gift of life. By an accident, she had met Sister Agatha one day in the house of an old Irish servant of theirs, who had been compelled to leave them on account of ill-health, and on whom she had called with a little present of fruit. She had been struck by the sweetness of the Sister's face, as the Sister had been struck by hers. Sister Agatha had invited Dot to visit her some day at the home for orphan children of which she had charge; and, with some misgiving as to whether it was right thus to visit a Catholic, whether even it was safe, Dot had accepted. So an acquaintance had grown up and ripened into a friendship; and Sister Agatha, while making no attempt to turn the friendship to the account of her church, was a great consolation to the lonely, religious girl.
Dot retained too much rationalism ever to become a Catholic, but the longing to do something grew and grew. At a certain moment, with each new generation of girls, there comes an epidemical desire in maiden bosoms to dedicate their sweet young lives to the service of what Esther called "horrible dirty people." At these periods the hospitals are flooded with applications from young girls whom the vernal equinox urges first to be mothers, and, failing motherhood, nurses. Just before she met Henry, Angel had done her best to miss him by frantic endeavours to nurse people whom the hospital doctors decided she was far too slight a thing to lift,--for unless you can lift your patients, not to say throw them about, you fail in the muscular qualifications of a hospital nurse. Dot, as we have seen, was impelled in this direction from no merely sentimental impulse, unless the religious impulse, which paradoxically makes nuns of disappointed mothers, may so be called. Perhaps, unacknowledged, deep down in her heart, she longed to be the nurse--of one little wonderful child. Had this been granted her, it is probable that the maimed and the halt would have had less attraction for her pitying imagination. As it was, however, she persuaded herself that she loved them. Was it because, at the moment, no one else seemed to need her love?
Esther's impatience was to be appeased, perhaps a little to her regret after all, by an unexpected remission of the time appointed between Mike and his first real engagement. Suddenly one day came an exciting letter from the great actor, saying that he saw his way to giving him a part in his own London company, if he could join him for rehearsal in a week's time.
Here was news! At last a foundation-stone of the new heaven was to be laid! In a week's time Mike would be working at one of the alabaster walls. Perhaps in two years' time, perhaps even in a year, with good fortune, the roof would be on, the door wreathed with garlands, and a modest little heaven ready for occupation.
Now all that remained was to make the momentous break with the old life. Old Mr. Laflin had been left in peaceful ignorance of the mine which must now be exploded beneath his evening armchair. Mike loved his father, and this had been a dread long and wisely postponed. But now, when the moment for inevitable decision had come, Mike remembered, with a certain shrinking, that responsibility of which Dot had spoken,--the responsibility of being a man. It was his dream to be an actor, to earn his bread with joy. To earn it with less than joy seemed unworthy of man. Yet there was another dream for him, still more, immeasurably more, important--to be Esther's husband. If he stayed where he was, in slow revolutions of a dull business, his father's place and income would become his. If he renounced that certain prospect, he committed himself to a destiny of brilliant chances; and for the first time he realised that among those chances lurked, too, the chance of failure. Esther must decide; and Henry's counsel, too, must be taken. Mike thought he knew what the decision and the counsel would be; and, of course, he was not mistaken.
"Why, Mike, how can you hesitate?" said Esther. "Fail, if you like, and I shall still love you; but you don't surely think I could go on loving a man who was frightened to try?"
That was a little hard of Esther, for Mike's fear had been for her sake, not his own. However, that and the even more vehement counsel of Henry had the desired bracing effect; and Mike nerved himself to deal the necessary blow at his father's tranquillity.
As the writer of this book takes no special joy in heart-breaking scenes with fathers, the painful and somewhat violent scene with Mr. Laflin is here omitted, and left to the imagination of any reader with a taste for such unnatural collisions. Any one over thirty will agree that all the reason was on Mr. Laflin's side, as all the instinct was on his son's. Luckily for Mike, the instinct was to prove genuine, and his father to live to be prouder of his rebellion than ever he would have been of his obedience.
This scene over, it was only a matter of days--five alone were left--before Mike must up and away in right good earnest.
"Oh, Mike," said Esther, "you're sure you'll go on loving me? I'm awfully frightened of those pretty girls in ----'s company."
"You needn't be," said Mike; "there's only one girl in the world will look at a funny bit of a thing like me."
"Oh, I don't know," said Esther, laughing, "some big girls have such strange tastes."
"Well, let's hope that before many months you can come and look after me."
"If we'd only a certain five pounds a week, we could get along,--anything to be together. Of course, we'd have to be economical--" said Esther, thoughtfully.
On the last night but one before his leaving, it was Mike's turn for a farewell dinner. Half-a-dozen of his best friends assembled at the "Golden Bee," and toasts and tears were mingled to do him honour. Henry happily caught the general feeling of the occasion in the following verses, not hitherto printed. Henry was too much in earnest at the time to regard the bathos of rhyming "stage waits" with such dignities as "summoning fates," except for whichnaïvetéthe poem is perhaps not a bad example of sincere, occasional verse:
Dear Mike, at last the wishéd hour draws nigh--Weary indeed, the watching of a skyFor golden portent tarrying afar;But here to-night we hail your risen star,To-night we hear the cry of summoning fates--Stage waits!Stage waits! and we who love our brother soWould keep him not; but only ere he go,Led by the stars along the untried ways,We'd hold his hand in ours a little space,With grip of love that girdeth up the heart,And kiss of eyes that giveth strength to part.Some of your lovers may be half afraidTo bid you forth, for fear of pitfalls laidAbout your feet; but we have no such fears,That cry is as a trumpet in our ears;We dare not, would not, mock those summoning fates--Stage waits!Stage waits! and shall you fear and make delay?Yes! when the mariner who long time lay,Waiting the breeze, shall anchor when it blows;Yes! when a thirsty summer-flower shall closeAgainst the rain; or when, in reaping days,The husbandman shall set his fields ablaze.Nay, take your breeze, drink in your strengthening rain,And, while you can, make harvest of your grain;The land is fair to which that breeze shall blow.The flower is sweet the rain shall set aglow,The grain be rich within your garner gates--Stage waits!Stage waits! and we must loosen now your hand,And miss your face's gold in all our land;But yet we know that in a little whileYou come again a conqueror, so smileGodspeed, not parting, and, with hearts elate,We wait.
Yes, for the second time the die was cast. Henry was already afoot on the adventure perilous. Now it was Mike's turn. These young people had passionately invoked those terrible gods who fulfil our dreams, and already the celestial machinery was beginning to move in answer. Perhaps it just a little took their breath, to see the great wheels so readily turning at the touch of their young hands; but they were in for it now, and with stout hearts must abide the issue.
This was to be Esther and Mike's first experience of parting, and their hearts sickened at the thought. Love surely does well in this world, so full of snares and dangers, to fear to lose from its eyes for a moment the face of its beloved; and in this respect the courage of love is the more remarkable. How bravely it takes the appalling risks of life! To separate for an hour may mean that never as long as the world lasts will love hear the voice it loves again. "Good-bye," love has called gaily so often, and waved hands from the threshold, and the beloved has called "good-bye" and waved, and smiled back--for the last time. And yet love faces the fears, not only of hours, but of weeks and months; weeks and months on seas bottomless with danger, in lands rife with unknown evils, dizzily taking the chances of desperate occupations. And the courage is the greater, because, finally, in this world, love alone has anything to lose. Other losses may be more or less repaired; but love's loss is, of its essence, irreparable. Other fair faces and brave hearts the world may bring us, but never that one face! Alas! for the most precious of earthly things, the only precious thing of earth, there is no system of insurance. The many waters have quenched love, and the floods drowned it,--yet in the wide world is there no help, no hope, no recompense.
The love that bound this little circle of young people together was so strong and warm that it had developed in them an almost painful sensibility to such risks of loss. So it was that expressions of affection and outward endearments were more current among them than is usual in a land where manners, from a proper fear of exaggeration, run to a silly extreme of unresponsiveness. They never met without showing their joy to be again together; never parted without that inner fear that this might be their last chance of showing their love for each other.
"You all say good-bye as if you were going to America!" Myrtilla Williamson had once said; "I suppose it's your Irish grandmother." And no doubt theempressementhad its odd side for those who saw only the surface.
Thus for those who love love, who love to watch for it on human faces, Mike's good-bye at the railway station was a sight worth going far to see.
"My word, they seem to be fond of each other, these young people!" said a lady standing at the door of the next carriage.
Mike was leaning through the window, and Esther was pressing near to him. They murmured low to each other, and their eyes were bright with tears. A little apart stood a small group, in which Henry and Angel and Ned were conspicuous, and Mike's sisters and Dot and Mat were there. A callous observer might have laughed, so sad and solemn they were. Mike's fun tried a rally; but his jests fell spiritless. It was not so much a parting, one might have thought, as a funeral. Little was said, but eyes were eloquent, either with tears, or with long strong glances that meant undying faithfulness all round; and Mike knew that Henry's eyes were quoting "Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!"
Henry's will to achieve was too strong for him to think of this as a parting; he could only think of it as a glorious beginning. There is something impersonal in ambition, and in the absorption of the work to be done the ambitious man forgets his merely individual sensibilities. To achieve, though the heavens fall,--that was Henry's ambition for Mike and for himself.
No one really believed that the train would have the hard-heartedness to start; but at last, with deliberate intention, evidently not to be swayed by human pity, the guard set the estranging whistle to his lips, cold and inexorable as Nero turning down the thumb of death, and surely Mike's sad little face began to move away from them. Hands reached out to him, eyes streamed, handkerchiefs fluttered,--but nothing could hold him back; and when at last a curve in the line had swallowed the white speck of his face, they turned away from the dark gulf where the train had been as though it were a newly opened grave.
A great to-do to make about a mere parting!--says someone. No doubt, my dear sir! All depends upon one's standard of value. No doubt these young people weighed life in fantastic scales. Their standard of value was, no doubt, uncommon. To love each other was better than rubies; to lose each other was bitter as death. For others other values,--they had found their only realities in the human affections.
Yes, Mike had really gone. Henceforth for ever so long, he would only exist for Esther in letters, or as a sad little voice at the end of a wire. It had been arranged that Henry should take Esther with him for dinner that evening to the brightest restaurant in Tyre. He was a great believer in being together, and also in dinner, as comforters of your sad heart. Perhaps, too, he was a little glad to feel Esther leaning gently upon him once more. Their love was too sure and lasting and ever-present to have many opportunities of being dramatic. Nature does not make a fuss about gravitation. One of the most wonderful and powerful of laws, it is yet of all laws the most retiring. Gravitation never decks itself in rainbows, nor does it vaunt its undoubted strength in thunder. It is content to make little show, because it is very strong; yet you have always to reckon with it. It is undemonstrative, but it is always there. The love of Esther and Henry was like that. It has made little show in this history, but few readers can have missed its presence in the atmosphere. It might go for weeks without its festival; but there it was all the time, ready for any service, staunch for any trial. It was one of the laws which kept the little world I have been describing slung safely in space, and securely shining.
It was, indeed, something like a perfect relationship,--this love of Esther and Henry. Had the laws of nature permitted it, it is probable that Mike and Angel would have been forced to seek their mates elsewhere. As it was, though it was thus less than marriage, it was more than friendship--as the holy intercourse of a mother and a son is more than friendship. Freed from the perturbations of sex, it yet gained warmth and exhilaration from the unconscious presence of that stimulating difference. Though they were brother and sister, friend and friend, Henry and Esther were also man and woman. So satisfying were they to each other, that when they sat thus together, the truth must be told, that, for the time at all events, they missed no other man or woman.
"I have always you," said Esther.
"Do I still matter, then?" said Henry. "Are you sure the old love is not growing old?"
"You know it can never grow old. There is only one Mike; but there is only one Henry too. It's a good love to have, Harry, isn't it? It makes one feel so much safer in the world."
"Dear little Esther! Do you remember those old beatings, and that night you brought me the cake? Bless you!"--and Henry reached his hand across the table, and laid it so kindly on Esther's that a hovering waiter retreated out of delicacy, mistaking the pair for lovers. It was a mistake that was often made when they were together; and they had sometimes laughed, when travelling, at the kind-hearted way passengers on the point of entering their carriage had suddenly made up their minds not to disturb the poor newly-married young things.
"And how we used to hate you once!" said Esther; "one can hardly understand it now. Do you remember how on Sunday afternoons you would insist on playing at church, and how, with a tablecloth for a surplice, you used to be the minister? How you used to storm if we poor things missed any of the responses!"
"The monstrous egoism of it all!" said Henry, laughing. "It was all got up to give me a stage, and nothing else. I didn't care whether you enjoyed it or not. What dragons children are!"
"'Dragons of the prime, that tare each other in their slime,'" quoted Esther. "Yes, we tore each other, and no mistake--"
"Well, I've made up for it since, haven't I?" said Henry. "I hope I'm a humble enough brother of the beautiful to please you nowadays."
"You're the truest, most reliable thing in the world," said Esther; "I always think of you as something strong and true to come to--"
"Except Mike!"
"No, not even except Mike. We'll call it a draw--dear little Mike! To think of him going further and further away every minute! I wonder where he is by now. He must have reached Rugby long since."
At that moment the waiter ventured to approach with a silver tray. A telegram,--it was indeed a telegram of tears and distance from Mike, given in at Rugby. Even so long parted and so far away, Mike was still true. He had not yet forgotten!
These young people were great extravagants of the emotional telegram. They were probably among the earliest to apply electricity for heart-breaking messages. Some lovers feel it a profanation thus to reveal their souls beneath the eye of a telegraph-operator; but the objection of delicacy ceases if you can regard the operator in his actual capacity as a part of the machine. French perhaps is an advisable medium; though, if the operator misunderstands it, your love is apt to take strange forms at its destination, and if he understands it, you may as well use English at once.
"Dear Mike! God bless him!" and they pledged Mike in Esther's favourite champagne. The wives of great actor-managers must early inure themselves to champagne.
"But if you're jealous of Mike," said Esther, presently, taking up the dropped thread of their talk; "what about Angel?"
"Of course it was only nonsense," said Henry. "I know you love Angel far too much to be jealous of her, as I love Mike; and that's just the beautiful harmony of it all. We are just a little impregnable world of four,--four loving hearts against the world."
"How clever it was of you to find Angel!"
"I found Mike, too!" said Henry, laughing.
"Oh, yes, I know; but then I discovered you."
"Ah, but a still higher honour belongs to me, for I discovered you," retorted Henry. "When you consider that I discovered three such wonderful persons as you and Angel and Mike, don't you think, on the whole, that I'm singularly modest?"
"Do you love me?" said Esther, presently, quite irrelevantly.
"Do you loveme?"
"I asked first."
"Well, for the sake of argument, let us say 'yes.'"
"How much?"
"As big as the world."
"Oh, well, then, let's have some Benedictine with the coffee!" said Esther.
"I've thought of something better, more 'sacramental,'" said Henry, smiling, "but you couldn't conscientiously drink it with me. It's the red drink of perfect love. Will you drink it with me?"
"Of course I will."
So the waiter brought a bottle bearing the beautiful words, "Parfait Amour."
"It's like blood," said Esther; "it makes me a little frightened."
"Would you rather not drink it?" asked Henry. "You know if you drink it with me, you must drink it with no one else. It is the law of it that we can only drink it with one."
"Not even with Mike?"
"Not even with Mike."
"What of Angel?"
"I will drink it with no one but you as long as I live."
"I will drink it then."
They held up their glasses.
"Dear old Esther!"
"Dear old Henry!"
And then they laughed at their solemnity. It was deeply sworn!
When Esther reached home that evening, she found a further telegram from Mike, announcing his arrival at Euston; and she had scarcely read it when she heard her father's voice calling her. She went immediately to the dining-room.
"Esther, dear," he said, "your mother and I want a word with you."
"No, James, you must speak for yourself in this," said Mrs. Mesurier, evidently a little perturbed.
"Well, dear, if I must be alone in the matter, I must bear it; I cannot shrink from my duty on that account." Then, turning to Esther, "I called you in to speak to you about Mike Laflin--"
"Yes, father," exclaimed Esther, with a little gasp of surprise.
"I met Mr. Laflin on the boat this morning, and was much astonished and grieved to hear of the rash step his son has chosen to take. The matter has evidently been kept from me,"--strictly speaking, it had; "I understand, though on that again I have not been consulted, that you and Mike have for some time been informally engaged to each other. Now you know my views on the theatre, and I am sure that you must see that Mike's having taken such a step must at once put an end to any such idea. Your own sense of propriety would, I am sure, tell you that, without any words from me--"
"Father!" cried Esther, in astonishment.
"You know that I considered Mike a very nice lad. His family is respectable; and he would have come into a very comfortable business, if he hadn't taken this foolish freak into his head--"
"But, father, you have laughed at his recitations, yourself, many a time, here of an evening. What difference can there be?"
"There is the difference of the theatre, the contaminating atmosphere, the people it attracts, the harm it does--your father, as you know, has never been within a theatre in his life; is it likely that he can look with calmness upon his daughter marrying a man whose livelihood is to be gained in a scandalous and debasing profession?"
"Father, I cannot listen to your talking of Mike like that. If it is wrong to make people innocently happy, to make them laugh and forget their troubles, to--to--well, if it's wrong to be Mike--I'm sorry; but, wrong or right, I love him, and nothing will ever make me give him up."
Mrs. Mesurier here interrupted, "I told you, James, how it would be. You cannot change young hearts. The times are not the same as when you and I were young; and, though I'm sure I don't want to go against you, I think you are too hard on Esther. Love is love after all--and Mike's one of the best-hearted lads that ever walked."
"Thank you, mother," said Esther, impulsively, throwing her arms round her mother's neck, and bursting into tears, "I--I will never give--give--him up."
"No, dear, no; now don't distress yourself. It will all come right. Your father doesn't quite understand." And then a great tempest of sobbing came over Esther, and swept her away to her own room.
The father and mother turned to each other with some anger.
"James, I'm surprised at your distressing the poor child like that to-night; you might have known she would be sensitive, with Mike only gone to-day! You could surely have waited till to-morrow."
"I am surprised, Mary, that you can encourage her as you did. You cannot surely uphold the theatre?"
"Well, James, I don't know,--there are theatres and theatres, and actors and actors; and there have been some very good men actors after all, and some very bad men ministers, if it comes to that," she added; "and theatre or no theatre, love's love in spite of all the fathers and mothers in the world--"
"All right, Mary, I would prefer then that we spoke no more on the matter for this evening," and James Mesurier turned to his diary, to record, along with the state of the weather, and the engagements of the day, the undutiful conduct of Esther, and a painful difference with his wife.
Strange, that men who have themselves loved and begotten should thus for a moment imagine that a small social prejudice, or a narrow religious formula, can break the purpose of a young and vigorous passion. Do they realise what it is they are proposing to obstruct? This is love--love, my dear sir, at once the mightiest might, and the rightest right in the universe! This is--Niagara--the Atlantic--the power of the stars--and the strength of the tides. It is all the winds of the world, and all the fires of the centre. You surely cannot be serious in asking it to take, in exchange, some obsolete objection against its beloved!