Young Lives

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

HARD YOUNG HEARTS

Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class, fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,--a house boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried slips of front and back gardens,--on a May evening some ten or twelve years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts had been reached.

The house was still as for a battle. It was holding its breath to hear what was going on in the front parlour, the door of which seemed to wear an expression of being more than usually closed. A mournful half-light fell through a little stained-glass vestibule into a hat-racked hall, on the walls of which hung several pictures of those great steamships known as "Atlantic liners" in big gilt frames--pictures of a significance presently to be noted. A beautiful old eight-day clock ticked solemnly to the flickering of the hall lamp. From below came occasionally a furtive creaking of the kitchen stairs. The two servants were half way up them listening. The stairs a flight above the hall also creaked at intervals. Two young girls, respectively about fourteen and fifteen, were craning necks out of nightdresses over the balusters in a shadowy angle of the staircase. On the floor above them three other little girls of gradually diminishing ages slept, unconscious of the issues being decided between their big brother and their eldest sister on the one side, and their father and mother on the other, in the front parlour below.

That parlour, a room of good size, was unostentatiously furnished with good bourgeois mahogany. A buxom mahogany chiffonier, a large square dining-table, a black marble clock with two dials, one being a barometer, three large oil landscapes of exceedingly umbrageous trees and glassy lakes, inoffensively uninteresting, more Atlantic liners, and a large bookcase, apparently filled with serried lines of bound magazines, and an excellent Brussels carpet of quiet pattern, were mainly responsible for a general effect of middle-class comfort, in which, indeed, if beauty had not been included, it had not been wilfully violated, but merely unthought of. The young people for whom these familiar objects meant a symbolism deep-rooted in their earliest memories could hardly in fairness have declared anything positively painful in that room--except perhaps those Atlantic liners; their charges against furniture, which was unconsciously to them accumulating memories that would some day bring tears of tenderness to their eyes, could only have been negative. Beauty had been left out, but at least ugliness had not been ostentatiously called in. There was no bad taste.

In fact, whatever the individual character of each component object, there was included in the general effect a certain indefinable dignity, which had doubtless nothing to do with the mahogany, but was probably one of those subtle atmospheric impressions which a room takes from the people who habitually live in it. Had you entered that room when it was empty, you would instinctively have felt that it was accustomed to the occupancy of calm and refined people. There was something almost religious in its quiet. Some one often sat there who, whatever his commonplace disguises as a provincial man of business, however inadequate to his powers the work life had given him to do, provincial and humiliating as were the formulae with which narrowing conditions had supplied him for expression of himself, was in his central being an aristocrat,--though that was the very last word James Mesurier would have thought of applying to himself. He was a man of business, serving God and his employers with stern uprightness, and bringing up a large family with something of the Puritan severity which had marked his own early training; and, as in his own case no such allowance had been made, making no allowance in his rigid abstract code for the diverse temperaments of his children,--children in whom certain qualities and needs of his own nature, dormant from his birth, were awakening, supplemented by the fuller-fed intelligence and richer nature of the mother, into expansive and rebellious individualities.

It was now about eleven o'clock, and the house was thus lit and alive half-an-hour beyond the rigorously enforced bed-time. An hour before, James Mesurier had been peacefully engaged on the task which had been nightly with him at this hour for twenty-five years,--the writing of his diary, in a shorthand which he wrote with a neatness, almost a daintiness, that always marked his use of pen and ink, and gave to his merely commercial correspondence and his quite exquisitely kept accounts, a certain touch of the scholar,--again an air of distinction in excess of, and unaccounted for, by the nature of the interests which it dignified.

His somewhat narrow range of reading, had you followed it by his careful markings through those bound volumes of sermons in the bookcase, bore the same evidence of inherited and inadequately occupied refinement. His life from boyhood had been too much of a struggle to leave him much leisure for reading, and such as he had enjoyed had been diverted into evangelical channels by the influence of a certain pious old lady, with whom as a young man he had boarded, and for whose memory all his life he cherished a reverence little short of saint-worship.

The name of Mrs. Quiggins, whose portrait had still a conspicuous niche among the lares of the household,--a little thin silvery old widow-lady, suggesting great sadness, much gentleness, and a little severity,--had thus become for the family of James Mesurier a symbol of sanctity, with which a properly accredited saint of the calendar could certainly not, in that Protestant home, have competed. It was she who had given him that little well-worn Bible which lay on the table with his letters and papers, as he wrote under the lamplight, and than which a world full of sacred relics contains none more sacred. A business-like elastic band encircled its covers, as a precaution against pages becoming loose with much turning; and inside you would have found scarcely a chapter unpencilled,--texts underlined, and sermons of special helpfulness noted by date and preacher on the margin,--the itinerary of a devout human soul on its way through this world to the next.

The Bible and the sermons of a certain famous Nonconformist Divine of the day were James Mesurier's favourite and practically his only reading, at this time; though as a young man he had picked up a fair education for himself, and had taken a certain interest in modern history. For novels he had not merely disapproval, but absolutely no taste. Once in a specially genial mood he had undertaken to try "Ivanhoe," to please his favourite daughter,--this night in revolt against him,--and in half-an-hour he had been surprised with laughter, sound asleep. The sermon that would send him to sleep had never been written, at all events by his favourite theologian, whose sermons he read every Sunday afternoon, and annotated with that same loving appreciation and careful pencil with which a scholar annotates some classic; so true is it that it is we who dignify our occupations, not they us.

Similarly, James Mesurier presided over the destinies of a large commercial undertaking, with the air of one who had been called rather to direct an empire than a business. You would say as he went by, "There goes one accustomed to rule, accustomed to be regarded with great respect;" but that air had been his long before the authority that once more inadequately accounted for it.

Thus this night, as he sat writing, his handsome, rather small, iron-grey head bent over his papers, his face somewhat French in character, his short beard slightly pointed; distinguished, refined, severe; he had the look of a marshal of France engrossed with documents of state.

The mother, who sat in an armchair by the fire, reading, was a woman of about forty-five, with a fine blonde, aquiline face, distinctively English, and radiating intelligence from its large sympathetic lines. She was in some respects so different from her husband as at times to make children precociously wise--but nevertheless, far from knowing everything--wonder why she had ever married their father, for whom, at that time, it would be hypocrisy to describe their attitude as one of love. To them he was not so much a father as the policeman of home,--a personification of stern negative decrees, a systematic thwarter of almost everything they most cared to do. He was a sort of embodied "Thou shalt not," only to be won into acquiescence by one influence,--that of the mother, whose married life, as she looked back on it, seemed to consist of little else than bringing children into the world, with a Christian-like regularity, and interceding with the father for their varying temperaments when there.

Though it might have been regarded as certain beforehand, that seven children would differ each from each other in at least as many ways, it never seems to have occurred to the father that one inflexible system for them all could hardly be wise or comfortable. But, indeed, like so many parents similarly trained and circumstanced, it is questionable whether he ever realised their possession of separate individualities till they were pleaded for by the mother, or made, as on this evening, surprising assertion of themselves.

Though this system of mediation had been responsible for the only disagreements in their married life, there had never been any long or serious difference between husband and wife; for, in spite of natures so different, they loved each other with that love which is given us for the very purpose of such situations, the love that no strain can snap, the love that reconciles all such disparities. Though Mary Mesurier had also been brought up among Nonconformists, and though the conditions of her youth, like her husband's, had been far from adequate to the demands of her nature, yet her religion had been of a gentler character, broadening instead of narrowing in its effects, and had concerned itself less with divinity than humanity. Her home life, if humble, had been genial and rich in love, and there had come into it generous influences from the outer world,--books with more of the human beat in them than is to be found in sermons; and particularly an old travelled grandfather who had been regarded as the rolling stone of his family, but in whom, at all events, failure and travel had developed a great gentleness and understanding of the human creature, which in long walks and talks with his little grand-daughter somehow passed over into her young character, and proved the best legacy he could have left her. Through him too was encouraged a native love of poetry, of which in her childhood her memory acquired a stock which never failed her, and which had often cheered her lonely hours by successive cradles. She had a fine natural gift of recitation, and in evening hours when the home was particularly united in some glow of visitors or birthday celebration, she would be persuaded to recall some of those old songs and simple apologues, with such charm that even her husband, to whom verse was naturally an incomprehensible triviality, was visibly softened, and perhaps, deep in the sadness of his silent nature, moved to a passing realisation of a certain something kind and musical in life which he had strangely missed.

This greater breadth of temperament and training enabled Mary Mesurier to understand and make allowances for the narrower and harder nature of her husband, whom she learnt in time rather to pity for the bleakness of his early days, than to condemn for their effect upon his character. He was strong, good, clever, and handsome, and exceptionally all those four good reasons for loving him; and the intellectual sympathy, the sharing of broader interests, which she sometimes missed in him, she had for some three or four years come to find in her eldest son, who, to his father's bewilderment and disappointment, had reincarnated his own strong will, in connection with literary practices and dreams which threatened to end in his becoming a poet, instead of the business man expected of him, for which development that love of poetry in one parent, and a certain love of books in both, was no doubt to some degree guiltily responsible.

James Mesurier, as we have said, was no judge of poetry; and, had he been so, a reading of his son's early effusions would have made him still more obdurate in the choice for him of a commercial career; but on general principles he was quite sufficiently firm against any but the most non-committing, leisure-hour flirtation with the Muse. The mother, while agreeing with the father's main proposition of the undesirability, nay, impossibility, of literature as a livelihood,--had not the great and successful Sir Walter himself described it as a good walking-stick, but a poor crutch; a stick applied, since its first application as an image, to the shoulders of how many generations of youthful genius,--was naturally more sympathetic towards her son's ambition, and encouraged it to the extent of helping from her housekeeping money the formation of his little library, even occasionally proving successful in winning sums of money from the father for the purchase of some book specially, as the young man would declare, necessary for his development.

As this little library had outgrown the accommodation of the common rooms, a daring scheme had been conceived between mother and son,--no less than that he should have a small room set apart for himself as a study. When first broached to the father, this scheme had met with an absolute denial that seemed to promise no hope of further consideration; but the mother, accepting defeat at the time, had tried again and again, with patient dexterity at favourable moments, till at last one proud day the little room, with its bookshelves, a cast of Dante, and a strange picture or two, was a beautiful, significant fact--all ready for the possible visitation of the Muse.

In such ways had the mother negotiated the needs of all her children; though the youth of the rest--save the eldest girl, whose music lessons had meant a battle, and whose growing attractiveness for the boys of the district, and one in particular, was presently to mean another--made as yet but small demands. In one question, however, periodically fruitful of argument, even the youngest was becoming interested,--the question of the visits to the household of the various friends and playmates of the children. To these, it must be admitted, James Mesurier was apt to be hardly less of a figure of fear than to his own children; for, apart from the fact that such inroads from without were apt to disturb his few quiet evening hours with rollicking and laughter, he, being entirely unsocial in his own nature, had a curious idea that the family should be sufficient to itself, and that the desire for any form of entertainment outside it was a sign of dissatisfaction with God's gifts of a good home, and generally a frivolity to be discouraged.

As a boy he had grown up without companions, and as a man had remained lonely, till he had met in his wife the one comrade of his days. What had been good enough for their father should be good enough for his children, was a formula which he applied all round to their bringing up, curiously forgetful, for a man at heart so just, of the pleasure one would have expected it to be to make sure that the errors of his own training were not repeated in that of his offspring. But, indeed, there was in him constitutionally something of the Puritan suspicion of, and aversion from, pleasure, which it had never occurred to him to consider as the end of, or, indeed, as a considerable element of existence. Life was somehow too serious for play, spiritually as well as materially; and much work and a little rest was the eternal and, on the whole, salutary lot of man.

Such were some of the conditions among which the young Mesuriers found themselves, and of which their impatience had become momentously explosive this February evening.

For some days there had been an energetic simmer of rebellion among the four elder children against a new edict of early rising which was surely somewhat arbitrary. Early rising was one of James Mesurier's articles of faith; and he was always up and dressed by half-past six, though there was no breakfast till eight, and absolutely no necessity for his rising at that hour beyond his own desire. There was still less, indeed none at all, for his children to rise thus early; but nevertheless he had recently decreed that such, for the future, must be the rule. The rule fell heaviest upon the sisters, for the elder brother had always enjoyed a certain immunity from such edicts. His sense of justice, however, kindled none the less at this final piece of tyranny. He blazed and fumed indignantly on behalf of his sisters, in the sanctuary of that little study,--a spot where the despot seldom set foot; and out of this comparatively trivial cause had sprung a mighty resolution, which he and she whom he proudly honoured as "sister and friend" had, after some girding of the loins, repaired to the front parlour this evening to communicate.

They had entered somewhat abruptly, and stood rather dramatically by the table on which the father was writing,--the son with dark set face, in which could be seen both the father and mother, and the daughter, timid and close to him, resolutely keeping back her tears, a slim young copy of the mother.

"Well, my dears?" said the father, looking up with a keen, rather surprised glance, and in a tone which qualified with some severity the "my dears."

The son had had some exceedingly fine beginnings in his head, but they fled ignominiously with the calm that was necessary for their successful delivery, and he blurted at once to the point.

"We have come to say that we are no longer comfortable at home, and have decided to leave it."

"Henry," exclaimed the mother, hastily, "what do you mean, how can you be so ungrateful?"

"Mary, my dear," interrupted the father, "please leave the matter to me." Then turning to the son: "What is this you are saying? I'm afraid I don't understand."

"I mean that Esther and I have decided to leave home and live together; because it is impossible for us to live here any longer in happiness--"

"On what do you propose to live?"

"My salary will be sufficient for the present."

"Sixty pounds a year!"

"Yes!"

"And may I ask what is wrong with your home? You have every comfort--far more than your mother or father were accustomed to."

"Yes, indeed!" echoed the mother.

"Yes, we know you are very good and kind, and mean everything for our good; but you don't understand other needs of our natures, and you make no allowance for our individualities--"

"Indeed! Individualities--I should like you to have heard what my father would have said to talk about individualities. A rope's end would have been his answer to that--"

"It would have been a very silly one, and no argument."

"It would have been effective, at all events."

"Not with me--"

"Well, please don't bandy words with me, sir. If you," particularly addressing his son, "wish to go--then go; but remember that once you have left your father's roof, you leave it for ever. As for your sister, sh