Young Lives | Page 8

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.
CHAPTER IV
OF THE PROFESSIONS THAT CHOOSE, AND MIKE LAFLIN
However we may hint at its explanation by theories of inheritance, it still remains curious with what unerring instinct a child of character will from the first, and when it is so evidently ignorant of the field of choice, select, out of all life's