STAGE WAITS, MR. LAFLIN
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 which _naïveté_ the 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 sky
For 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 so
Would 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 afraid
To bid you forth, for fear of pitfalls laid
About 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 close
Against 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 while
You come again a conqueror, so smile
Godspeed, 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 the _empressement_ had 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.