Young Lives | Page 2

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