Young Lives | Page 7

youth, and be prepared to meet them, not in a spirit of despotic denial, but in
that of thoughtful provision. The young cannot afford to be generous, even if they possess
the necessary insight. It would mean their losing their battle,--a battle very necessary for
them to win.
Sometimes it would seem that a very little kindly explanation on the part of the elder
would set the younger at a point of view where greater sympathy would be possible. The
great demand of the young is for some form of poetry in their lives and surroundings; and
it is largely the fault of the old if the poetry of one generation is almost invariably the
prose of the next.
Those "Atlantic liners" are an illustration of my meaning. To the young Mesuriers they
were hideous chromo-lithographs in vulgar gilt frames, arbitrary defacements of home;
but undoubtedly even they would have found a tolerant tenderness for them, had they
realised that they represented the poetry--long since renounced and put behind him--of
James Mesurier's life. He had come of a race of sea-captains, two of his brothers had
been sailors, and deep down in his heart the spirit of romance answered, with voice fresh
and young as ever, to any breath or association of the sea. But he seldom, if ever, spoke
of it, and only in an anecdote or two was it occasionally brought to mind. Sometimes his
wife would tease him with the vanity which, on holidays by the sea, would send him forth
on blustering tempestuous nights clad in a greatcoat of blue pilot-cloth and a sealskin cap,
and tell how proud he was on one occasion, as he stood on the wharf, at being addressed
as "captain," and asked what ship he had brought into port. Even the hard heart of youth
must soften at such a reminiscence.
Then scattered about the house was many a prosaic bit of furniture which was musical
with memories for the parents,--memories of their first little homes and their early
struggles together. This side-board, now relegated to the children's play-room, had once
been their pièce de resistance in such and such a street, twelve years ago, before their
children had risen up and--not called them blessed.
A few years, and the light of poetry will be upon these things for their children too; but,
meanwhile, can we blame them that they cannot accept the poetry of their elders in
exchange for that of their own which they are impatient to make? And when that poetry is
made and resident in similar concrete objects of home--how will it seem, one wonders, to
their children? This old desk which Esther has been allowed to appropriate, and in a
secret drawer of which are already accumulating certain love-letters and lavender, will it
ever, one wonders, turn to lumber in younger hands? For a little while she leans her sweet
young bosom against it, and writes scented letters in a girlish hand to a little red-headed
boy who has these past weeks begun to love her. Can it be possible that the desk on
which Esther once wrote to her little Mike will ever hear itself spoken of as "this ugly old
thing"? Let us hope not.
CHAPTER III
OF THE LOVE OF HENRY AND ESTHER

Father and son had both meant what they said; and even the mother, for whom it would
be the cruellest wrench of all, knew that Henry was going to leave home. Not literally on
the morrow, for the following evening he had appeared before his father to apologise for
the manner--carefully for the manner, not the matter,--in which he had spoken to him the
evening before, and asked for a day or two in which to make his arrangements for
departure. James Mesurier was too strong a man to be resentful, and he accepted his son's
apology with a gentleness that, as each knew, detracted nothing from the resolution
which each had come to.
"My boy," he said, "you will never have such good friends as your father and mother; but
it is best that you go out into the world to learn it."
There is something terribly winning and unnerving to the blackest resolution, when the
severity of the strong dissolves for a brief moment into tenderness. The rare kind words
of the stern, explain it as we will, and unjust as the preference must surely be, one values
beyond the frequent forgivenesses of the gentle. Mary Mesurier would have laid down
her life in defence of her son's greatest fault, and James Mesurier would as readily have
court-martialled him for his smallest, and yet, somehow, a kind word from him brought
the tears to his son's eyes.
He had no longer the heart to stimulate the rebellion of Esther,