ESTHER AND HENRY ONCE MORE
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 love _me_?"
"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!