Young Lives | Page 3

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