Young Lives | Page 8

as he felt it his duty to do;
and, to her disappointment, he announced that, on the whole, it would perhaps be best for
him to go alone.
"It would almost kill poor mother," he said; "and father means well after all," he added.
"I'm afraid it would break father's heart," said Esther.
So these two young people agreed to spare their parents, though--let it not be otherwise
imagined--at a great sacrifice. The little paper on which they had carefully worked out
their housekeeping, skilfully allotting so much for rent, butcher's meat, milk, coals, and
washing, 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