OF THE LOVE OF HENRY AND ESTHER
Father and son had both meant what they said; and even the mother, for
whom it would be the cruellest wrench of all, knew that Henry was going
to leave home. Not literally on the morrow, for the following evening he
had appeared before his father to apologise for the manner--carefully
for the manner, not _the matter_,--in which he had spoken to him the
evening before, and asked for a day or two in which to make his
arrangements for departure. James Mesurier was too strong a man to be
resentful, and he accepted his son's apology with a gentleness that, as
each knew, detracted nothing from the resolution which each had come to.
"My boy," he said, "you will never have such good friends as your father
and mother; but it is best that you go out into the world to learn it."
There is something terribly winning and unnerving to the blackest
resolution, when the severity of the strong dissolves for a brief moment
into tenderness. The rare kind words of the stern, explain it as we
will, and unjust as the preference must surely be, one values beyond the
frequent forgivenesses of the gentle. Mary Mesurier would have laid down
her life in defence of her son's greatest fault, and James Mesurier
would as readily have court-martialled him for his smallest, and yet,
somehow, a kind word from him brought the tears to his son's eyes.
He had no longer the heart to stimulate the rebellion of Esther, as he
felt it his duty to do; and, to her disappointment, he announced that,
on the whole, it would perhaps be best for him to go alone.
"It would almost kill poor mother," he said; "and father means well
after all," he added.
"I'm afraid it would break father's heart," said Esther.
So these two young people agreed to spare their parents, though--let it
not be otherwise imagined--at a great sacrifice. The little paper on
which they had carefully worked out their housekeeping, skilfully
allotting so much for rent, butcher's meat, milk, coals, and washing,
and making "everything" come most optimistically to _£59 17s. 9d._ a
year, would be of no use now, at all events for the present. Their
little Charles and Mary Lamb dream must be laid aside--for, of course,
they had thought of Charles and Mary Lamb; and indeed, out beyond this
history of a few youthful years, their friendship was to prove itself
far from unworthy of its famous model.
Yet at this time it was of no great antiquity; for, but a very few years
back, Henry had been a miniature tyrant too, and ruled it over his
kingdom of six sisters with all the hideous egoism of a pampered "son
and heir." Although in the very middle class of society into which Henry
Mesurier was born, the dignity of eldest son is one but very
contingently connected with tangible inheritance, it is none the less
vigorously kept up; and, no doubt, without any consciousness of
partiality, Henry Mesurier, from his childhood, had been brought up to
regard himself as a sort of young prince, for whom all the privileges of
home were, by divine right, reserved. For example, he took his meals
with his parents fully five years before any of his sisters were
allowed to do so; and for retention of this privilege, when at length
the democratic measure of its extension to his two elder sisters was
proposed, he fought with the bitterest spirit of caste. Indeed, few
oligarchs have been more wildly hated than Henry Mesurier up to the age,
say, of fourteen. That was the age of his last thrashing, and it was in
the gloomy dusk of that momentous occasion, as he lay alone with
smarting back in the twilight of an unusually early bed-time, that a
possible new view of woman--as a creature of like passions and
privileges--presented itself to him.
His thrashing had been so unjustly severe, that even the granite little
hearts of his sisters had been softened; and Esther, managing to secrete
a cake that he loved from the tea that was lost to him, stole with it to
the top of the house, where he writhed amid lonely echoes and shadows.
She had brought it to him awkwardly, by no means sure of its reception,
but sure in her heart that she would hate him for ever, if he missed the
meaning of the little solatium. But fortunately his back was far too
sore, and his spirit too broken to remember his pride, and he accepted
the offering with gratitude and tears.
"Kiss me, Esther," he had said; and a wonderful thrill had gone through
the little girl at this strange softness in the mighty, while the dawn
of a wonderful pity for the lot of woman had, unconsciously, broken in
the soul of the boy.
"Kiss me again, Esther," he had said, and, with the tears that mingled
in that kiss, an eternal friendship was baptized.
Henry rose on the morrow a changed being. The grosser pretensions of the
male had fallen from him for ever, and there was at first something
almost awe-inspiring to his sisters in the gentle solicitude for them
and their rights and pleasures which replaced the old despotism. From
that time, Esther and he became closer and closer companions, and as
they more and more formed an oligarchy of two, a rearrangement of
parties in the little parliament of home came about, to be upset again
as Dot and Mat qualified for admission into that exclusive
little circle.
So soon as Henry had a new dream or a new thought, he shared it with
Esther; and freely as he had received from Carlyle, or Emerson, or
Thoreau, freely he passed it on to her. For the gloomiest occasion he
had some strengthening text, and one of the last things he did before he
left home was to make for her a little book which he called "Faith for
Cloudy Days," consisting of energising and sustaining phrases from
certain great writers,--as it were, a bottle of philosophical phosphates
against seasons of spiritual cowardice or debility. There one opened and
read: "_Sudden the worst turns best to the brave_" or Thoreau's "_I have
yet to hear a single word of wisdom spoken to me by my elders,_" or
again Matthew Arnold's
"_Tasks in hours of insight willed
May be through hours of gloom fulfilled_."
James Mesurier knew nothing of all this; but if he had, he might have
understood that after all his children were not so far from the kingdom
of heaven.