It soon transpired that a favourite subject of his talk was that very weakness which most men would have been at pains to hide.

"So you're going to be a poet, Mr. Mesurier," he said. "Well, so was I once, so was I—but," he continued, "all too early another Muse took hold of me, a terrible Muse—yet a Muse who never forsakes you—" and he laid his hand on a decanter which stood near him on the table,—"yes, Mr. Mesurier, the terrible Muse of Drink! You may be surprised to hear me talk so; yet were this laudanum instead of brandy, there would seem to you a certain element of the poetic in the service of such a Muse. Drinks with Oriental or unfamiliar names have a romantic sound. Thus Alfred de Musset as the slave to absinthe sounds much more poetic than, say, Alfred de Musset as a slave to rum or gin, or even this brandy here. Yet this, too, is no less the stuff that dreams are made of; and the opium-eater, the absinthe-sipper, the brandy-drinker, are all members of the same great brotherhood of tragic idealists—"

He talked deliberately; but there was a smile playing at the corners of the mouth which took from his talk the sense of a painful self-revelation, and gave it the air of a playful fantasia upon a paradox that for the moment amused him.

"Idealists! Yes," he continued; "for what few understand is that drink is an idealism—and," he presently added with a laugh, "and, of course, like all idealisms, it has its dangers."

With a monomaniac, conversation is apt to limit itself to monologue; so, while Henry was greatly interested in this odd talk, it left him but little to say.

"I'm afraid I shock you a little, Mr. Mesurier, perhaps even—disgust you," said Mr. Gerard.

"Indeed, no!" exclaimed Henry; "but both the subject and your way of treating it are, I confess, a little new to me."

"You are surprised to find one who is what is popularly known as a drunkard not so much ashamed of as interested in himself; isn't that it? Well, that comes of the introspective literary temperament. It is only the oyster fascinated by the pearl that is killing it."

"You should write some 'Confessions' after the manner of De Quincey," said Henry.

"Indeed, I've often thought of it, for there's so much that needs saying on the subject. There is nothing with which we are at once so familiar and of which we know so little. For example"—and now he was quite plainly off again—"for example, the passion for, I might say the dream of, drink is usually regarded as a sensual appetite, a physical indulgence. No doubt in its first crude stages it often is so; but soon it becomes something much more strange and abstract. It becomes a mysterious command, issuing we know not whence. It is hardly a desire, and it is not so much a joyless, as a quite colourless, obedience to an imperious necessity, decreed by some unknown will. You might well imagine that I like the taste of this brandy there, as a child is greedily fond of sweetstuff; but it would be quite a mistake. For my own personal taste, there is no drink like a cup of tea; it is the demon, the strange will that has imposed itself upon me, that has a taste for brandy.

"I sometimes wonder whether we poor drunkards are not the victims of disembodied powers of the air who, by some chance, have contracted a craving for earthly liquors, and can only satisfy that craving by fastening themselves upon some unhappy human organism. At times there comes an intermission of the command, as mysterious almost as the command itself. For weeks together we give no thought to our tyrant. We grow gay and young and innocent again. We are free,—so free, we seem to have forgotten that we were ever enslaved. Then suddenly one day we hear the call again. We cry for mercy; we throw ourselves on our knees in prayer. We clutch sacred relics; we conjure the aid of holy memories; we say over to ourselves the names of the dead we have loved: but it is all in vain—surely we are dragged to the feet of that inexorable will, surely we submit ourselves once more to the dark dominion."

Henry listened, fascinated, and a little frightened.

"The longer I live, the more I grow convinced that this is no mere fancy, but actual science," Mr. Gerard continued; "for, again, you might well imagine that one drinks for the dreams or other illusory effects it is said to produce. At first, perhaps, yes; but such effects speedily pass away, they pass away indeed before the tyranny has established itself, while it would still be possible to shake it off. No, the dreams of drink are poor things, not worth having at the best. Indeed, there are no dreams worth having, believe me, but those of youth and health and spring-water."

And Mr. Gerard passed for awhile in silence into some hidden country of his lost dreams.

Henry gazed at him with a curious wonder. Here was a man evidently of considerable gifts, a man of ideals, of humour, a man witty and gentle, who surely could have easily made his mark in the world, and yet he had thrown all away for a mechanical habit which he himself did not pretend to be a passion,—a mere abstract attraction: as though a man should say, "I care not for the joys or successes of this world. My destiny is to sit alone all day and count my fingers and toes, count them over and over and over again. There is not much pleasure in it, and I should be glad to break off the habit,—but there it is. It is imposed upon me by a will stronger than mine which I must obey. It is my destiny."

"Yes, idealists!" said Mr. Gerard, presently coming back from his dreams to his great subject, with a laugh. "That reminds me of a story a business friend of mine told me the other day. A clerk in his office was an incorrigible drunkard. He was quite alone in the world, and had no one dependent upon him. The firm had been lenient to him, and again and again forgiven his outbreaks. But one morning they called him in and said: 'Look here, Jones, we have had a great deal of patience with you; but the time has come when you must choose between the drink and the office.' To their surprise, Jones, instead of eagerly promising reform, looked up gravely, and replied, 'Will you give me a week to think it over, sir? It is a very serious matter.' Drink was all the poor fellow had outside his drudgery; was it to be expected that he should thus lightly sacrifice it?—

"But, to talk about something else, your aunt, Mrs. Tipping, who has a great idea of my literary importance, has a notion that I may be of some help to you, Mr. Mesurier. Well, I'll tell you the whole extent of my present literary engagements, and you are perfectly at liberty to laugh. At the present time I do the sporting notes for the Tyrian Daily Mail, and I write the theological reviews for The Fleet Street Review. These apparently incongruous occupations are the relics of an old taste for sport, which as a boy in the country I had ample opportunity for indulging, and of an interrupted training for the Church—'twixt then and now there is an eventful gap which, if you don't mind, we won't sadden each other by filling—Let us fill our glasses and our pipes instead; and, having failed so entirely myself, I will give you minute directions how to succeed in literature."

Mr. Gerard's discourse on how to succeed in literature was partly practical and partly ironical, and probably too technical to interest the general reader, who has no intention of being a great or a little writer, and who perhaps has already found Mr. Gerard's previous discourse a little too special in its character. Suffice it that Henry heard much to remember, and much to laugh over, and that Mr. Gerard concluded with a practical offer of kindness.

"I don't know how much use it may be to you," he said; "but if you care to have it, I should be very glad to give you a letter to the editor of The Fleet Street Review. He has, I think, a certain regard for me, and he might send you a book to do now and again. At all events, it would be something."

Henry embraced the offer gratefully; and it occurred to him that in a day or two's time there was a five days' excursion running from Tyre to London and back, for half-a-guinea. Why not take it, and expend his last five pounds in a stimulating glimpse of the city he some day hoped to conquer? He could then see his friend the publisher, present his letter to the editor, and perhaps bring home with him some little work and a renewed stock of hopes.

So, before they parted that night, Mr. Gerard wrote him the letter.



CHAPTER XXXIII

"THIS IS LONDON, THIS IS LIFE"

Thus it was that, all unexpectedly, Henry found himself set down one autumn morning at the homeless hour of a quarter-to-seven, in Euston station. He was going to stay in some street off the Strand, and chartered a hansom to take him there. Few great cities are impressive in the neighbourhood of their railway termini. You enter them, so to speak, by the back door; and London waves no banners of bright welcome to the stranger who first enters it by the Euston Road.

But there was an interesting church presently, and on a dust-cart close by Henry read "Vestry of St. Pancras."

"Can that be the St. Pancras' Church," he said to himself, "where Mary Wollstonecraft lies buried, and Browning was married?"

Then as they drove along through Bloomsbury, the name "Great Coram Street" caught his eye, and he exclaimed with delight: "Why, that's where Thackeray lived for a time!"

Great Coram Street is little accustomed to create such excitement in the breast of the passer-by. But to the stranger London is necessarily first a museum, till he begins to love it as a home, and, in addition to dead men's associations, begins to people it with memories of his own. When you have lived awhile in Gray's Inn, you grow to forget that Bacon's ghost is your fellow-tenant; and it is the kind-hearted provincial who from time to time lays those flowers on Goldsmith's tomb. When you are caught in a block on Westminster Bridge, with only five minutes to get to Waterloo, you forget to say to yourself: "Ah, this is the bridge on which Wordsworth wrote his famous sonnet." You usually say something quite different.

The mere names of the streets,—how laden with immemorial poetry they were! "Chancery Lane!" How wonderful! Yet the poor wretch standing outside the public-house at the corner seemed to derive small consolation from the fact that he was starving in Chancery Lane.

But to Henry, as yet, London was an extended Westminster Abbey, and every other street was Poet's Corner. He had hardly patience to breakfast, so eager was he to be out in the streets; and while he ate, his eyes were out of the windows all the time, and his ears drinking in all the London morning sounds like music. At the foot of the street ran the Thames; he had caught a thrilling glimpse of it as he stepped from his cab, and had had a childish impulse to rush down to it before entering his hotel.

At last, free of food and baggage, light of heart, and brimming over with youth, he stepped into the street. It was but little past eight o'clock. He had just heard the hour chimed, in various tones of sweetness and solemnity, from several mellow clocks, evidently hidden high in the air in his near vicinity. For two or three hours there would be no editor or publisher to be seen, and meanwhile he had London to himself. He stepped out into it as into a garden,—a garden of those old-time flowers in which antiquity has become a perfume full of pictures.

Yes, there was the Thames! "Sweet Themmes, run softly till I end my song!" he quoted to himself. Chaucer's, Spenser's, Elizabeth's Thames!

It was a bright morning and the river gleamed to advantage. The tall tower of Westminster glittered richly in the sun, and the long front of Somerset House wore a lordly smile. The embankment gardens sparkled and rustled in morning freshness. Henry drew in the air of London as though it had been a rose. Here was the Thames at the foot of the street, and there at the head was the Strand, a stream of omnibuses and cabs, and city-faring men and women. The Temple must be somewhere close by. Of course it was here to his left. But he would first walk quietly by the Thames side to Westminster, and then come back by the Strand. As he walked, he stepped lightly and gently, as though reverent to the very stones of so sacred a city, and all the time from every prospect and every other street-corner came streaming like strains of music magnetic memories,—"streets with the names of old kings, strong earls, and warrior saints." If for no other reason, how important for the future of a nation is it to preserve in such ancient cities as London and Oxford the energising spectacle of a noble and strenuous antiquity; for there are no such inspirers of young men as these old places! So much strength and youth went into them long ago that even yet they have strength and youth to give, and from them, as from the strong hills, pours out an inexhaustible potency of bracing influence.

At last Henry found himself back at the top-end of his street. He had walked the Strand with deliberate enjoyment. Fleet Street he still reserved, but, as according to the tower of Clement Danes it was only just ten o'clock, it seemed still a little early to attack his business. A florist's close by suggested a charming commonplace way of filling the time. He would buy some flowers and carry them to Goldsmith's grave. Why Goldsmith's grave should thus be specially honoured, he a little wondered. He was conscious of loving several writers quite as well. But it was a Johnsonian tradition to love Goldy, and the accessibility of his resting-place made sentiment easy.

He repented this momentary flippancy of thought as he stood in the cloistered corner where Goldsmith sleeps under the eye of the law; and, when he laid his little wreath on the worn stone, it was a genuine offering. From it he turned away to his own personal dreams.

By eleven he had found his friend the publisher, in a dainty little place of business crammed with pottery, Rowlandsons, and books, and more like a curiosity-shop than a publishing-house, for the publisher proved an enthusiast in everything that was beautiful or curious, and had indeed taken to publishing from that rare motive in a publisher,—the love of books, rather than the love of money. He was aiming to make his little shop the rallying-point of all the young talent of the day, and as young talent has never too many publishers on the look-out for it, his task was not difficult, though it was one of those real services to literature which such publishers and booksellers have occasionally done in our literary history, with but scant acknowledgment.

Henry was pleased to find that he looked upon him to make one of his little band of youth; and as the publisher understood the art of encouragement, Henry already felt it had been worth while to come to London just to see him. He knew the editor to whom Henry had a letter and volunteered him another. The afternoon would be the best time; meanwhile, they must lunch together. He smiled when Henry suggested the Cheshire Cheese. Henry had a sort of vague idea that literary men could hardly think of taking their meals anywhere else. There had been an attempt to bring it into fashion again, the publisher said; but it had come to nothing—though he, for one, loved those old chop-houses, with their tankards, and their sanded floors. So to the Cheshire Cheese they repaired, and drank to a long friendship in foaming pewters of porter.

"Alas!" said Henry, "we are fallen on smaller times. Once it was 'the poet's pint of port.' Now we must be content with the poetaster's half-a-pint of porter!"

"You must come to my rooms to-night," said the publisher, "and be introduced to some of our young men. I have one or two of our older critics coming too."

Henry's fortune was evidently made.

He found the editor in a dim back room at the top of a high building, so lost in a world of books and dust that at first Henry could hardly make him out, writing by a window with his back to the door. Then an alert head turned round to him, and a rather peevish gesture bade him be seated, while the editor resumed his work. This hardly came up to Henry's magnificent dreams of the editorial dignity. Perhaps he had a vague idea that editors lived in palaces, and sat on thrones.

Presently the editor put down his pen with an exclamation of satisfaction; and the first impression of peevishness vanished in the cordiality with which he now turned to his visitor.

"You must excuse my absorption. It was a rather tough piece of proof-reading. A subject I'm rather interested in,—new Welsh dictionary. Don't suppose it's in your line, eh, eh?"—and the tall, spare man laughed a boyish laugh like a mischievous bird, and tossed his head at the jest.

His face was small and sallow and tired; but the dark eyes were full of fun and kindness. Presently, he rose and began to walk up and down the room with a curious, prancing walk, rolling himself a cigarette, and talking away in a rapid, jerky fashion with his continual, "eh, eh?" coming in all the time.

"Poor Gerard! So you know him? How is he now?" and he lowered his voice with the suggestion of a mutual confidence, and stopped in his walk till Henry should answer. "Poor Gerard! And he might have been—well, well,—never mind. We were together at King's. Brilliant fellow. So you know Gerard. Dear me! Dear me!"

Then he turned to the subject of Henry's visit.

"Well, my poor boy, nothing will satisfy you but literature? You are determined to be a literary man, eh, eh?" Then he stopped in front of Henry and laid his hand kindly on his shoulder, "Is it too late to say, 'Go back while there is yet time'? Perhaps—of course—you're going to be a very great man," and he broke off into his walk again, with one of his mischievous laughs. "But unless you are, take my word, it's a poor game—Yet, I suppose, it's no use talking. I know, wasted breath, wasted breath—Well, now, what can you do? and, by the way, you won't grow fat on The Fleet Street Review. Ten shillings a column is our magnificent rate of payment, and we can hardly afford that—"

Then he began pulling out one book and another from the piles of all sorts that lay around him. "I suppose, like the rest, you'd better begin on poetry. There's a tableful over there—go and take your pick of it, unless, of course, you've got some special subject. You're not, I suppose, an authority on Assyriology, eh, eh?"

Henry feared not, and then a new fit of industry came upon the editor, and he begged Henry to take a look at the books while he ran through another proof for the post.

That dusty table—evidently the rubbish-heap of the room—was Henry's first object-lesson in the half tragical, half farcical, over-production of modern literature. Such a mass of foolishness and ineptitude he had never conceived of; such pretentiousness too—and while he made various melancholy reflections upon human vanity, what should he unearth suddenly from the heap, but his own little volume. He could but half suppress a cry of recognition.

"What's that?" asked the editor, not turning round. "Found anything?"

"No," said Henry; "nothing—for a moment I thought I had."

Presently he had made a small pile of the most promising volumes, and turned to take his leave. The editor took up one or two of them carelessly.

"Not much here, I'm afraid," he said. "Never mind; see what you can make of them. Not more than three columns at the most, you know. And come and see me again. I'm glad to have seen you."

"Oh," said Henry, on the point of leaving, and laying his hand on his own little book, "may I take this one too? It's not worth reviewing, but it rather interested me just now."

"God bless me, yes, certainly," said the editor; "you're welcome to the lot, if you care to bring a hand-cart. Good-bye, good-bye."

And Henry slipped his poor little neglected volume into his pocket. On how many dusty tables, he wondered, was it then lying ignominiously disregarded. Well, the day would come! Meanwhile, he had his first batch of books for review.



CHAPTER XXXIV

THE WITS

There now remained the gathering of wits fixed for the evening. His publisher had asked him to dinner, but he had declined, from a secret and absurd desire to dine at "The Cock." This he gratified, and with his mind full of the spacious times of the early Victorians, he turned into the publisher's little room about nine o'clock to meet some of the later.

There was no great muster as yet. Some half-a-dozen rather shy young men spasmodically picked up strange drawings or odd-looking books, lying about on the publisher's tables, struggled maidenly with cigars, sipped a little whisky and soda; but little was said.

Among them a pale-faced lad of about fifteen, miraculously self-possessed, stood with his back to the chimney-piece. But soon others began to turn in, and by ten the room was as full of chatter and smoke as it could hold. Not least conspicuous among the talkers was the pale-faced boy of fifteen. Henry had been sitting near to him, and had been suddenly startled by his unexpectedly breaking out into a volley of learning, delivered in a voice impressively deliberate and sententious.

"What a remarkable boy that is!" said Henry, innocently, to the publisher.

"Yes; but he's not quite a boy,—though he's young enough. A curious little creature, morbidly learned. A friend of mine says that he would like to catch him and keep him in a bottle, and label it 'the learned homunculus.'"

"What dialect is it he is talking in?" said Henry; "I don't remember to have heard it before."

The publisher smiled: "My dear fellow, you must be careful what you say. That is what we call 'the Oxford voice.'"

"How remarkable!" said Henry, his attention called off by a being with a face that half suggested a faun, and half suggested a flower,—a small, olive-skinned face crowned with purply black hair, that kept falling in an elflock over his forehead, and violet eyes set slant-wise. He was talking earnestly of fairies, in a beautiful Irish accent, and Henry liked him. The attraction seemed mutual, and Henry found himself drawn into a remarkable relation about a fairy-hill in Connemara, and fairy lights that for several nights had been seen glimmering about it; and how at last he—that is, the narrator—and a particularly hard-headed friend of his had kept watch one moonlit night, with the result that they had actually seen and talked with the queen of the fairies and learned many secrets of the ——. The narrator here made use of a long, unpronounceable Irish word, which Henry could not catch.

"I should have explained some of these phenomena to you," whispered the publisher presently, noticing that Henry looked a little bewildered. "This is a young Irish poet, who, in the intervals of his raising the devil, writes very beautiful lyrics that he may well have learned from the fairies. It is his method to seem mad on magic and such things. You will meet with many strange methods here to-night. Don't be alarmed if some one comes and talks to you about strange sins. You have come to London in the 'strange sins' period. I will explain afterwards."

He had hardly spoken when a pallid young man, with a preternatural length and narrowness of face, began to talk to him about the sins of the Borgias.

"I suppose you never committed a murder yourself?" he asked Henry, languidly.

"No," said Henry, catching the spirit of the foolishness; "no, not yet. I am keeping that—" implying that he was reserving so extreme a stimulant till all his other vices failed him.

Presently there entered a tall young man with a long, thin face, curtained on either side with enormous masses of black hair, like a slip of the young moon glimmering through a pine-wood.

At the same moment there entered, as if by design, his very antithesis: a short, firmly built, clerkly fellow, with a head like a billiard-ball in need of a shave, a big brown moustache, and enormous spectacles.

"That," said the publisher, referring to the moon-in-the-pine-wood young man, "is our young apostle of sentiment, our new man of feeling, the best-hated man we have; and the other is our young apostle of blood. He is all for muscle and brutality—and he makes all the money. It is one of our many fashions just now to sing 'Britain and Brutality.' But my impression is that our young man of feeling will have his day,—though he will have to wait for it. He would hasten it if he would cut his hair; but that, he says, he will never do. His hair, he says, is his battle-cry. Well, he enjoys himself—and loves a fight, though you mightn't think it to look at him."

A supercilious young man, with pink cheeks, and a voice which his admirers compared to Shelley's, then came up to Henry and asked him what he thought of Mallarme's latest sonnet; but finding Henry confessedly at sea, turned the conversation to the Empire ballet, of which, unfortunately, Henry knew as little. The conversation then languished, and the Shelley-voiced young man turned elsewhere for sympathy, with a shrug at your country bumpkins who know nothing later than Rossetti.

In the thick of the conversational turmoil, Henry's attention had from time to time been attracted by the noise proceeding from a blustering, red-headed man, with a face of fire.

"Who is that?" at last he found opportunity to ask his friend.

"That is our greatest critic," said the publisher.

"Oh!" said Henry, "I must try and hear what he is saying. It seems important from the way he is listened to."

So Henry listened, and heard how the fire-faced man said the word "damn" with great volubility and variety of cadence, and other words to the same effect, and how the little group around him hung upon his words and said to each other, "How brilliant!" "How absolute!"

Henry turned to his friend. "The only word I can catch is the word 'damn,'" he said.

"That," said the publisher, with a laugh, "is the master-word of fashionable criticism."

Presently a little talkative man came up, and said that he hoped Mr. Mesurier was an adherent of the rightful king.

"Oh, of course!" said Henry.

"And do you belong to any secret society?" asked the little man.

Henry couldn't say that he did.

"Well, you must join us!" he said.

"I suppose there won't be a rising just yet?" asked Henry, realising that this was the Jacobite method.

"Not just yet," said the little man, reassuringly. So Henry was enrolled.

* * * * *

And so it went on till past midnight, when Henry at last escaped, to talk it all over with the stars. The evening had naturally puzzled him, as a man will always be puzzled who has developed under the influence of the main tendencies of his generation, and who finds himself suddenly in a backwater of fanciful reaction. Henry, in his simple way, was a thinker and a radical, and he had nourished himself on the great main-road masters of English literature. He had followed the lead of modern philosophers and scientists, and had arrived at a mystical agnosticism,—the first step of which was to banish the dogmas of the church as old wives' tales. He considered that he had inherited the hard-won gains of the rationalists. But he came to London and found young men feebly playing with the fire of that Romanism which he regarded as at once the most childish and the most dangerous of all intellectual obsessions. In an age of great biologists and electricians, he came upon children prettily talking about fairies and the philosopher's stone. In one of the greatest ages of English poetry, he came to London to find young English poets falling on their knees to the metrical mathematicians of France. In the great age of democracy, a fool had come and asked him if he were not a supporter of the house of Stuart, a Jacobite of charades. But only once had he heard the name of Milton; it was the learned boy of fifteen who had quoted him,—a lifelong debt of gratitude; and never once had he heard the voice of simple human feeling, nor heard one speak of beauty, simply, passionately, with his heart in his mouth; nor of love with his heart upon his sleeve. Much cleverness, much learning, much charm, there had been, but he had missed the generous human impulse. No one seemed to be doing anything because he must. These were pleasant eddies, dainty with lilies and curiously starred water-grasses, but the great warm stream of English literature was not flowing here.

As he neared his hotel, he thought of his morning visit to Goldsmith's tomb, and ten-fold he repented the little half-sneer with which he had bought the flowers. In a boyish impulse, he rang the Temple bell, and found his way again to the lonely corner. His flowers were lying there in the moonlight, and again he read: "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith."

"Forgive me, Goldy," he murmured. "Well may men bring you flowers,—for you wrote, not as those yonder; you wrote for the human heart."



CHAPTER XXXV

BACK TO REALITY

It was good to get back to reality, with Angel's blue eyes, Mike's laugh, and Esther's common sense.

"Let me look deep into them, Angel—deep—deep. It is so good to get back to something true."

"Are they true?" said Angel, opening them very wide.

"Something that will never forsake one, something we can never forsake! Something in all the wide world's change that will never change. Something that will still be Angel even in a thousand years."

"I hope to be a real angel long before that," said Angel, laughing.

"Do you think you can promise to be true so long, Angel?" asked Henry.

"Dear, you know that so long as there is one little part of me left anywhere in the world, that part will be true to you.—But come, tell me about London. I'm afraid you didn't enjoy it very much."

"Oh, yes, I loved London,—that is, old London; but new London made me a little sad. I expect it was only because I didn't quite understand the conditions."

"Perhaps so," said Angel. "But tell me,—did you go to the Zoo?"

"You dear child! Yes! I went out of pure love for you."

"Now you needn't be so grown up. You know you wanted to go just for yourself as well. And you saw the monkey-house?"

"Yes."

"And the lions?"

"Yes."

"And the snakes?"

"Yes!"

"Oh, I'd give anything to see the snakes! Did they eat any rabbits when you were there,—fascinate them, and then draw them slowly, slowly in?"

"Angel, what terrible interests you are developing! No, thank goodness, they didn't."

"Why, wouldn't it fascinate you to see something wonderfully killed?" asked Angel. "It is dreadful and wicked, of course. But it would be so thrillingly real."

"I think I must introduce you to a young man I met in London," said Henry, "who solemnly asked me if I had ever murdered anyone. You savage little wild thing! I suppose this is what you mean by saying sometimes that you are a gipsy, eh?"

"Well, and you went to the Tower, and Westminster Abbey, and everything, and it was really wonderful?"

"Yes, I saw everything—including the Queen."

For young people of Tyre and Sidon to go to London was like what it once was to make the pilgrimage to Rome.

Mike created some valuable nonsense on the occasion, which unfortunately has not been preserved, and Esther was disgusted with Henry because he could give no intelligible description of the latest London hats; and all examined with due reverence those wonderful books for review.

In Tichborne Street Aunt Tipping had taken advantage of his absence to enrich his room with a bargain in the shape of an old desk, which was the very thing he wanted. Dear old Aunt Tipping! And Gerard, it is to be feared, took a little more brandy than usual in honour of his young friend's adventures in the capital.

These excitements over, Henry sat down at his old desk to write his first review; and there for the present we may leave him, for he took it very seriously and was dangerous to interrupt.



CHAPTER XXXVI

THE OLD HOME MEANWHILE

More than a year had now gone by since Henry left home, and meanwhile, with the exception of Dot's baptism, there had been no exciting changes to record. Perhaps uneventfulness is part of the security of a real home. Every morning James Mesurier had risen at half-past six,—though he no longer imposed that hour of rising upon his daughters,—breakfasted at eight, and reached his office at nine. Every evening during those months, punctually at half-past six his latch-key had rattled in the front-door lock, and one or other of his daughters had hurried out at the sound to bid him welcome home.

"Home at last, father dear!" they had said, helping him off with his coat; and sometimes when he felt bright he would answer,—

"Yes, my dear, night brings crows home."

"Home again, James!" his wife would say, as he next entered the front parlour, and bent down to kiss her where she sat. "It's a long day. Isn't it time you were pulling in a bit? Surely some of the younger heads should begin to relieve you."

"Responsibility, Mary dear! We cannot delegate responsibility," he would answer.

"But we see nothing of you. You just sacrifice your whole life for the business."

If he were in a good humour, he might answer with one of his rare sweet laughs, and jokingly make one of his few French quotations: "Telle est la vie! my dear, Telle est la vie! That's the French for it, isn't it, Dot?"

James Mesurier was just perceptibly softening. Perhaps it was that he was growing a little tired, that he was no longer quite the stern disciplinarian we met in the first chapter; perhaps the influence of his wife, and his experiences with his children, were beginning to hint to him what it takes so long for a strong individual nature to learn, that the law of one temperament cannot justly or fruitfully be enforced as the law of another.

The younger children—Esther and Dot and Mat used sometimes to say to each other—would grow up in a more clement atmosphere of home than had been Henry's and theirs. Already they were quietly assuming privileges, and nothing said, that would have meant beatings for their elders. For these things had Henry and Esther gladly faced martyrdom. Henry had looked on the Promised Land, but been denied an entrance there. By his stripes this younger generation would be healed.

The elder girls hastened to draw close to their father in gratitude, and home breathed a kinder, freer air than ever had been known before. Between Esther and her father particularly a kind of comradeship began to spring up, which perhaps more than ever made the mother miss her boy.

But, all the same, home was growing old. This was the kindness of the setting sun!

Childless middle age is no doubt often dreary to contemplate, yet is it an egoistical bias which leads one to find in such limitation, or one might rather say preservation, of the ego, a certain compensation? The childless man or woman has at least preserved his or her individuality, as few fathers and mothers of large families are suffered to do. By the time you are fifty, with a family of half a dozen children, you have become comparatively impersonal as "father" or "mother." It is tacitly recognised that your life-work is finished, that your ambitions are accomplished or not, and that your hopes are at an end.

The young Mesuriers, for example, were all eagerly hastening towards their several futures. They were garrulous over them at every meal. But to what future in this world were James and Mary Mesurier looking forward? Love had blossomed and brought forth fruit, but the fruit was quickly ripening, and stranger hands would soon pluck it from the boughs. In a very few years they would sit under a roof-tree bared of fruit and blossom, and sad with falling leaves. They had dreamed their dream, and there is only one such dream for a lifetime; now they must sit and listen to the dreams of their children, help them to build theirs. They mattered now no longer for themselves, but just as so much aid and sympathy on which their children might draw. Too well in their hearts they knew that their children only heard them with patience so long as they talked of their to-morrows. Should they sometimes dwell wistfully on their own yesterdays, they could too plainly see how long the story seemed.

Telle est la vie! as James Mesurier said, and, that being so, no wonder life is a sad business. Better perhaps be childless and retain one's own personal hopes and fears for life, than be so relegated to history in the very zenith of one's days. If only this younger generation at the door were always, as it assumes, stronger and better than its elder! but, though the careless assumption that it is so is somewhat general, history alone shows how false and impudent the assumption often is. Too often genius itself must submit to the silly presumption of its noisy and fatuous children, and it is the young fool who too often knocks imperiously at the door of wise and active middle age.

That all this is inevitable makes it none the less sad. The young Mesuriers were neither fools nor hard of heart; and sometimes, in moments of sympathy, their parents would be revealed to them in sudden lights of pathos and old romance. They would listen to some old love-affair of their mother's as though it had been their own, or go out of their way to make their father tell once more the epic of the great business over which he presided, and which, as he conceived it, was doubtless a greater poem than his son would ever write. Yet still even in such genuine sympathy, there was a certain imaginative effort to be made. The gulf between the generations, however hidden for the moment, was always there.

Yet, after all, James and Mary Mesurier possessed an incorruptible treasure, which their children had neither given nor could take away. To regard them as without future would be a shallow observation,—for love has always a future, however old in mortal years it may have grown; and as they grew older, their love seemed to grow stronger. Involuntarily they seemed to draw closer together, as by an instinct of self-preservation. Their love had been before their children; were they to be spared, it would still be the same love, sweeter by trial, when their children had passed from them. In this love had been wise for them. Some parents love their children so unwisely that they forget to love each other; and, when the children forsake them, are left disconsolate. One has heard young mothers say that now their boy has come, their husbands may take a second place; and often of late we have heard the woman say: "Give me but the child, and the lover can go his ways." Foolish, unprophetic women! Let but twenty years go by, and how glad you will be of that rejected lover; for, though a son may suffice for his mother, what mother has ever sufficed for her son?

But though sometimes, as they looked at their parents, the young Mesuriers caught a glimpse of the infinite sadness of a life-work accomplished, yet it failed to warn them against the eager haste with which they were hurrying on towards a like conclusion. Too late they would understand that all the joy was in the doing; too soon say to themselves: "Was it for this that our little world shook with such fiery commotion and molten ardours, that this present should be so firm and insensitive beneath our feet? This habit—why, it was once a passion! This fact—why, it was once a dream!"

Oh, why shake off youth's fragile blossoms with the very speed of your own impatience! Why make such haste towards autumn! Who ever thought the ruddiest lapful of apples a fair exchange for a cloud of sunlit blossom? Whose maturity, however laden with prosperity or gilded with honour, ever kept the fairy promise of his youth? For so brief a space youth glitters like a dewdrop on the tree of life, glitters and is gone. For one desperate instant of perfection it hangs poised, and is seen no more.

But, alas! the art of enjoying youth with a wise economy is only learnt when youth is over. It is perhaps too paradoxical an accomplishment to be learnt before; for a youth that economised itself would be already middle age. It is just the wasteful flare of it that leaves such a dazzle in old eyes, as they look back in fancy to the conflagration of fragrant fire which once bourgeoned and sang where these white ashes now slowly smoulder towards extinction.

When Mike has a theatre of his own and can send boxes to his friends, when Henry maybe is an editor of power, when Esther and Angel are the enthroned wives of famous men, and the new heaven and the new earth are quite finished,—will they never sigh sometimes to have the making of them all over again? Then they will have everything to enjoy, so there will be nothing left to hope for. Then there will be no spice of peril in their loves, no keen edge that comes of enforced denial; and the game of life will be too sure for ambition to keep its savour. "There is no thrill, no excitement nowadays," one can almost fancy their saying, and, like children playing with their bricks, "Now let us knock it all down, and build another, one. It will be such fun."

However, these are intrusive, autumnal thoughts in this book of simple youth, and our young people knew them not. They were far indeed from Esther's mind as she talked with Dot of the future one afternoon. Instead, her words were full of impatience with the slow march of events, and the enforced inactivity of a girl's life at home.

"It is so much easier for the boys," she was saying. "There is something for them to do. But we can do nothing but sit at home and wait, darn their socks, and clap our hands at their successes. I wish I were a man!"

"No, you don't," said Dot; "for then you couldn't marry Mike. And you couldn't wear pretty dresses—Oh! and lots of things. I don't much envy a man's life, after all. It's all very well talking about hard work when you haven't got to do it; and it's not so much the work as the responsibility. It must be such a responsibility to be a man."

"Of course you're right, Dot—but, oh! this waiting is so stupid, all the same. If only I could be doing something—anything!"

"Well, you are doing something. Is it nothing to be all the world to a man?" said Dot, wistfully; "nothing to be his heaven upon earth? Nothing to be the prize he is working for, and nothing to sustain and cheer him on, as you do Mike, and as Angel cheers Henry? Would Henry have been the same without Angel, or Mike the same without you? No, the man's work makes more noise, but the woman's work is none the less real and useful because it is quiet and underground."

"Dear Dot, what a wise old thing you're growing! But you know you're longing all the time for some work to do yourself. Didn't you say the other day that you seemed to be wasting your life here, making beds and doing housework?"

"Yes; but I'm different. Don't you see?" retorted Dot, sadly. "I've got no Mike. Your work is to help Mike be a great actor, but I've got no one to help be anything. You may be sure I wouldn't complain of being idle if I had. I think you're a bit forgetful sometimes how happy you are."

"Poor old Dot! you needn't talk as if you're such a desperate old maid,—you're not twenty yet. And I'm sure it's a good thing for you that you haven't got any of the young men about here—to help be aldermen! Wait till you come and stay with us in London, then you'll soon find some one to work for, as you call it."

"I don't know," said Dot, thoughtfully; "somehow I think I shall never marry."

"I suppose you mean you'd rather be a nun or something serious of that sort."

"Well, to tell the truth, I have been thinking lately if perhaps I couldn't do something,—perhaps go into a hospital, or something of that sort."

"Oh, nonsense, Dot! Think of all the horrible, dirty people you'd have to attend to. Ugh!"

"Christ didn't think of that when He washed the feet of His disciples," said little Dot, sententiously.

"Why, Dot, how dreadfully religious you're getting! You want a good shaking! Besides, isn't it a little impious to imply that the apostles were horrible, dirty people?"

"You know what I meant," said Dot, flushing.

"Yes, of course, dear; and I think I know where you've been. You've been to see that dear Sister Agatha."

"You admit she's a dear?"

"Of course I do; but I don't know whether she's quite good for you."

"If you'd only seen her among the poor little children the other day, how beautiful and how happy she looked, you might have thought differently," said Dot.

"Oh, yes, dear; but then you mustn't forget that her point of view is different. She's renounced the world; she's one of those women," Esther couldn't resist adding, maliciously, "who've given up hope of man, and so have set all their hopes on God."

"Esther, that's unworthy of you—though what if it is as you say, is it so great a failure after all to dedicate one's self to God rather than to one little individual man?"

"Oh, come," said Esther, rather wilfully misunderstanding, and suddenly flushing up, "Mike is not so little as all that!"

"Why, you goose, how earthly you are! I never thought of dear Mike—though it would have served you right for saying such a mean thing about Sister Agatha."

"Forgive me. I know it was mean, but I couldn't resist it. And it is true, you'll admit, of some of those pious women, though I withdraw it about Sister Agatha."

"Of course I couldn't be a sister like Sister Agatha," said Dot, "without being a Catholic as well; but I might be a nurse at one of the ordinary hospitals."

"It would be dreadfully hard work!" said Esther.

"Harder than being a man, do you think?" asked Dot, laughing.

"For goodness' sake, don't turn Catholic!" said Esther, in some alarm. "That would break father's heart, if you like."

A horror of Catholicism ran in the very marrow of these young people. It was one of the few relics of their father's Puritanism surviving in them. Of "Catholics" they had been accustomed to speak since childhood as of nightmares and Red Indians with bloody scalps at their waists; and perhaps that instinctive terror of the subtle heart of Rome is the religious prejudice which we will do well to part with last.

Dot had not, indeed, contemplated an apostacy so unnatural; but beneath these comparatively trivial words there was an ever-growing impulse to fulfil that old longing of her nature to do something, as the Christians would say, "for God," something serious, in return for the solemn and beautiful gift of life. By an accident, she had met Sister Agatha one day in the house of an old Irish servant of theirs, who had been compelled to leave them on account of ill-health, and on whom she had called with a little present of fruit. She had been struck by the sweetness of the Sister's face, as the Sister had been struck by hers. Sister Agatha had invited Dot to visit her some day at the home for orphan children of which she had charge; and, with some misgiving as to whether it was right thus to visit a Catholic, whether even it was safe, Dot had accepted. So an acquaintance had grown up and ripened into a friendship; and Sister Agatha, while making no attempt to turn the friendship to the account of her church, was a great consolation to the lonely, religious girl.

Dot retained too much rationalism ever to become a Catholic, but the longing to do something grew and grew. At a certain moment, with each new generation of girls, there comes an epidemical desire in maiden bosoms to dedicate their sweet young lives to the service of what Esther called "horrible dirty people." At these periods the hospitals are flooded with applications from young girls whom the vernal equinox urges first to be mothers, and, failing motherhood, nurses. Just before she met Henry, Angel had done her best to miss him by frantic endeavours to nurse people whom the hospital doctors decided she was far too slight a thing to lift,—for unless you can lift your patients, not to say throw them about, you fail in the muscular qualifications of a hospital nurse. Dot, as we have seen, was impelled in this direction from no merely sentimental impulse, unless the religious impulse, which paradoxically makes nuns of disappointed mothers, may so be called. Perhaps, unacknowledged, deep down in her heart, she longed to be the nurse—of one little wonderful child. Had this been granted her, it is probable that the maimed and the halt would have had less attraction for her pitying imagination. As it was, however, she persuaded herself that she loved them. Was it because, at the moment, no one else seemed to need her love?



CHAPTER XXXVII

STAGE WAITS, MR. LAFLIN

Esther's impatience was to be appeased, perhaps a little to her regret after all, by an unexpected remission of the time appointed between Mike and his first real engagement. Suddenly one day came an exciting letter from the great actor, saying that he saw his way to giving him a part in his own London company, if he could join him for rehearsal in a week's time.

Here was news! At last a foundation-stone of the new heaven was to be laid! In a week's time Mike would be working at one of the alabaster walls. Perhaps in two years' time, perhaps even in a year, with good fortune, the roof would be on, the door wreathed with garlands, and a modest little heaven ready for occupation.

Now all that remained was to make the momentous break with the old life. Old Mr. Laflin had been left in peaceful ignorance of the mine which must now be exploded beneath his evening armchair. Mike loved his father, and this had been a dread long and wisely postponed. But now, when the moment for inevitable decision had come, Mike remembered, with a certain shrinking, that responsibility of which Dot had spoken,—the responsibility of being a man. It was his dream to be an actor, to earn his bread with joy. To earn it with less than joy seemed unworthy of man. Yet there was another dream for him, still more, immeasurably more, important—to be Esther's husband. If he stayed where he was, in slow revolutions of a dull business, his father's place and income would become his. If he renounced that certain prospect, he committed himself to a destiny of brilliant chances; and for the first time he realised that among those chances lurked, too, the chance of failure. Esther must decide; and Henry's counsel, too, must be taken. Mike thought he knew what the decision and the counsel would be; and, of course, he was not mistaken.

"Why, Mike, how can you hesitate?" said Esther. "Fail, if you like, and I shall still love you; but you don't surely think I could go on loving a man who was frightened to try?"

That was a little hard of Esther, for Mike's fear had been for her sake, not his own. However, that and the even more vehement counsel of Henry had the desired bracing effect; and Mike nerved himself to deal the necessary blow at his father's tranquillity.

As the writer of this book takes no special joy in heart-breaking scenes with fathers, the painful and somewhat violent scene with Mr. Laflin is here omitted, and left to the imagination of any reader with a taste for such unnatural collisions. Any one over thirty will agree that all the reason was on Mr. Laflin's side, as all the instinct was on his son's. Luckily for Mike, the instinct was to prove genuine, and his father to live to be prouder of his rebellion than ever he would have been of his obedience.

This scene over, it was only a matter of days—five alone were left—before Mike must up and away in right good earnest.

"Oh, Mike," said Esther, "you're sure you'll go on loving me? I'm awfully frightened of those pretty girls in ——'s company."

"You needn't be," said Mike; "there's only one girl in the world will look at a funny bit of a thing like me."

"Oh, I don't know," said Esther, laughing, "some big girls have such strange tastes."

"Well, let's hope that before many months you can come and look after me."

"If we'd only a certain five pounds a week, we could get along,—anything to be together. Of course, we'd have to be economical—" said Esther, thoughtfully.

On the last night but one before his leaving, it was Mike's turn for a farewell dinner. Half-a-dozen of his best friends assembled at the "Golden Bee," and toasts and tears were mingled to do him honour. Henry happily caught the general feeling of the occasion in the following verses, not hitherto printed. Henry was too much in earnest at the time to regard the bathos of rhyming "stage waits" with such dignities as "summoning fates," except for which naivete the poem is perhaps not a bad example of sincere, occasional verse:

_Dear Mike, at last the wished hour draws nigh— Weary indeed, the watching of a sky For golden portent tarrying afar; But here to-night we hail your risen star, To-night we hear the cry of summoning fates— Stage waits!

Stage waits! and we who love our brother so Would keep him not; but only ere he go, Led by the stars along the untried ways, We'd hold his hand in ours a little space, With grip of love that girdeth up the heart, And kiss of eyes that giveth strength to part.

Some of your lovers may be half afraid To bid you forth, for fear of pitfalls laid About your feet; but we have no such fears, That cry is as a trumpet in our ears; We dare not, would not, mock those summoning fates— Stage waits!

Stage waits! and shall you fear and make delay? Yes! when the mariner who long time lay, Waiting the breeze, shall anchor when it blows; Yes! when a thirsty summer-flower shall close Against the rain; or when, in reaping days, The husbandman shall set his fields ablaze.

Nay, take your breeze, drink in your strengthening rain, And, while you can, make harvest of your grain; The land is fair to which that breeze shall blow. The flower is sweet the rain shall set aglow, The grain be rich within your garner gates— Stage waits!

Stage waits! and we must loosen now your hand, And miss your face's gold in all our land; But yet we know that in a little while You come again a conqueror, so smile Godspeed, not parting, and, with hearts elate, We wait_.

Yes, for the second time the die was cast. Henry was already afoot on the adventure perilous. Now it was Mike's turn. These young people had passionately invoked those terrible gods who fulfil our dreams, and already the celestial machinery was beginning to move in answer. Perhaps it just a little took their breath, to see the great wheels so readily turning at the touch of their young hands; but they were in for it now, and with stout hearts must abide the issue.

This was to be Esther and Mike's first experience of parting, and their hearts sickened at the thought. Love surely does well in this world, so full of snares and dangers, to fear to lose from its eyes for a moment the face of its beloved; and in this respect the courage of love is the more remarkable. How bravely it takes the appalling risks of life! To separate for an hour may mean that never as long as the world lasts will love hear the voice it loves again. "Good-bye," love has called gaily so often, and waved hands from the threshold, and the beloved has called "good-bye" and waved, and smiled back—for the last time. And yet love faces the fears, not only of hours, but of weeks and months; weeks and months on seas bottomless with danger, in lands rife with unknown evils, dizzily taking the chances of desperate occupations. And the courage is the greater, because, finally, in this world, love alone has anything to lose. Other losses may be more or less repaired; but love's loss is, of its essence, irreparable. Other fair faces and brave hearts the world may bring us, but never that one face! Alas! for the most precious of earthly things, the only precious thing of earth, there is no system of insurance. The many waters have quenched love, and the floods drowned it,—yet in the wide world is there no help, no hope, no recompense.

The love that bound this little circle of young people together was so strong and warm that it had developed in them an almost painful sensibility to such risks of loss. So it was that expressions of affection and outward endearments were more current among them than is usual in a land where manners, from a proper fear of exaggeration, run to a silly extreme of unresponsiveness. They never met without showing their joy to be again together; never parted without that inner fear that this might be their last chance of showing their love for each other.

"You all say good-bye as if you were going to America!" Myrtilla Williamson had once said; "I suppose it's your Irish grandmother." And no doubt the empressement had its odd side for those who saw only the surface.

Thus for those who love love, who love to watch for it on human faces, Mike's good-bye at the railway station was a sight worth going far to see.

"My word, they seem to be fond of each other, these young people!" said a lady standing at the door of the next carriage.

Mike was leaning through the window, and Esther was pressing near to him. They murmured low to each other, and their eyes were bright with tears. A little apart stood a small group, in which Henry and Angel and Ned were conspicuous, and Mike's sisters and Dot and Mat were there. A callous observer might have laughed, so sad and solemn they were. Mike's fun tried a rally; but his jests fell spiritless. It was not so much a parting, one might have thought, as a funeral. Little was said, but eyes were eloquent, either with tears, or with long strong glances that meant undying faithfulness all round; and Mike knew that Henry's eyes were quoting "Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!"

Henry's will to achieve was too strong for him to think of this as a parting; he could only think of it as a glorious beginning. There is something impersonal in ambition, and in the absorption of the work to be done the ambitious man forgets his merely individual sensibilities. To achieve, though the heavens fall,—that was Henry's ambition for Mike and for himself.

No one really believed that the train would have the hard-heartedness to start; but at last, with deliberate intention, evidently not to be swayed by human pity, the guard set the estranging whistle to his lips, cold and inexorable as Nero turning down the thumb of death, and surely Mike's sad little face began to move away from them. Hands reached out to him, eyes streamed, handkerchiefs fluttered,—but nothing could hold him back; and when at last a curve in the line had swallowed the white speck of his face, they turned away from the dark gulf where the train had been as though it were a newly opened grave.

A great to-do to make about a mere parting!—says someone. No doubt, my dear sir! All depends upon one's standard of value. No doubt these young people weighed life in fantastic scales. Their standard of value was, no doubt, uncommon. To love each other was better than rubies; to lose each other was bitter as death. For others other values,—they had found their only realities in the human affections.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

ESTHER AND HENRY ONCE MORE

Yes, Mike had really gone. Henceforth for ever so long, he would only exist for Esther in letters, or as a sad little voice at the end of a wire. It had been arranged that Henry should take Esther with him for dinner that evening to the brightest restaurant in Tyre. He was a great believer in being together, and also in dinner, as comforters of your sad heart. Perhaps, too, he was a little glad to feel Esther leaning gently upon him once more. Their love was too sure and lasting and ever-present to have many opportunities of being dramatic. Nature does not make a fuss about gravitation. One of the most wonderful and powerful of laws, it is yet of all laws the most retiring. Gravitation never decks itself in rainbows, nor does it vaunt its undoubted strength in thunder. It is content to make little show, because it is very strong; yet you have always to reckon with it. It is undemonstrative, but it is always there. The love of Esther and Henry was like that. It has made little show in this history, but few readers can have missed its presence in the atmosphere. It might go for weeks without its festival; but there it was all the time, ready for any service, staunch for any trial. It was one of the laws which kept the little world I have been describing slung safely in space, and securely shining.

It was, indeed, something like a perfect relationship,—this love of Esther and Henry. Had the laws of nature permitted it, it is probable that Mike and Angel would have been forced to seek their mates elsewhere. As it was, though it was thus less than marriage, it was more than friendship—as the holy intercourse of a mother and a son is more than friendship. Freed from the perturbations of sex, it yet gained warmth and exhilaration from the unconscious presence of that stimulating difference. Though they were brother and sister, friend and friend, Henry and Esther were also man and woman. So satisfying were they to each other, that when they sat thus together, the truth must be told, that, for the time at all events, they missed no other man or woman.

"I have always you," said Esther.

"Do I still matter, then?" said Henry. "Are you sure the old love is not growing old?"

"You know it can never grow old. There is only one Mike; but there is only one Henry too. It's a good love to have, Harry, isn't it? It makes one feel so much safer in the world."

"Dear little Esther! Do you remember those old beatings, and that night you brought me the cake? Bless you!"—and Henry reached his hand across the table, and laid it so kindly on Esther's that a hovering waiter retreated out of delicacy, mistaking the pair for lovers. It was a mistake that was often made when they were together; and they had sometimes laughed, when travelling, at the kind-hearted way passengers on the point of entering their carriage had suddenly made up their minds not to disturb the poor newly-married young things.

"And how we used to hate you once!" said Esther; "one can hardly understand it now. Do you remember how on Sunday afternoons you would insist on playing at church, and how, with a tablecloth for a surplice, you used to be the minister? How you used to storm if we poor things missed any of the responses!"

"The monstrous egoism of it all!" said Henry, laughing. "It was all got up to give me a stage, and nothing else. I didn't care whether you enjoyed it or not. What dragons children are!"

"'Dragons of the prime, that tare each other in their slime,'" quoted Esther. "Yes, we tore each other, and no mistake—"

"Well, I've made up for it since, haven't I?" said Henry. "I hope I'm a humble enough brother of the beautiful to please you nowadays."

"You're the truest, most reliable thing in the world," said Esther; "I always think of you as something strong and true to come to—"

"Except Mike!"

"No, not even except Mike. We'll call it a draw—dear little Mike! To think of him going further and further away every minute! I wonder where he is by now. He must have reached Rugby long since."

At that moment the waiter ventured to approach with a silver tray. A telegram,—it was indeed a telegram of tears and distance from Mike, given in at Rugby. Even so long parted and so far away, Mike was still true. He had not yet forgotten!

These young people were great extravagants of the emotional telegram. They were probably among the earliest to apply electricity for heart-breaking messages. Some lovers feel it a profanation thus to reveal their souls beneath the eye of a telegraph-operator; but the objection of delicacy ceases if you can regard the operator in his actual capacity as a part of the machine. French perhaps is an advisable medium; though, if the operator misunderstands it, your love is apt to take strange forms at its destination, and if he understands it, you may as well use English at once.

"Dear Mike! God bless him!" and they pledged Mike in Esther's favourite champagne. The wives of great actor-managers must early inure themselves to champagne.

"But if you're jealous of Mike," said Esther, presently, taking up the dropped thread of their talk; "what about Angel?"

"Of course it was only nonsense," said Henry. "I know you love Angel far too much to be jealous of her, as I love Mike; and that's just the beautiful harmony of it all. We are just a little impregnable world of four,—four loving hearts against the world."

"How clever it was of you to find Angel!"

"I found Mike, too!" said Henry, laughing.

"Oh, yes, I know; but then I discovered you."

"Ah, but a still higher honour belongs to me, for I discovered you," retorted Henry. "When you consider that I discovered three such wonderful persons as you and Angel and Mike, don't you think, on the whole, that I'm singularly modest?"

"Do you love me?" said Esther, presently, quite irrelevantly.

"Do you love me?"

"I asked first."

"Well, for the sake of argument, let us say 'yes.'"

"How much?"

"As big as the world."

"Oh, well, then, let's have some Benedictine with the coffee!" said Esther.

"I've thought of something better, more 'sacramental,'" said Henry, smiling, "but you couldn't conscientiously drink it with me. It's the red drink of perfect love. Will you drink it with me?"

"Of course I will."

So the waiter brought a bottle bearing the beautiful words, "Parfait Amour."

"It's like blood," said Esther; "it makes me a little frightened."

"Would you rather not drink it?" asked Henry. "You know if you drink it with me, you must drink it with no one else. It is the law of it that we can only drink it with one."

"Not even with Mike?"

"Not even with Mike."

"What of Angel?"

"I will drink it with no one but you as long as I live."

"I will drink it then."

They held up their glasses.

"Dear old Esther!"

"Dear old Henry!"

And then they laughed at their solemnity. It was deeply sworn!

When Esther reached home that evening, she found a further telegram from Mike, announcing his arrival at Euston; and she had scarcely read it when she heard her father's voice calling her. She went immediately to the dining-room.

"Esther, dear," he said, "your mother and I want a word with you."

"No, James, you must speak for yourself in this," said Mrs. Mesurier, evidently a little perturbed.

"Well, dear, if I must be alone in the matter, I must bear it; I cannot shrink from my duty on that account." Then, turning to Esther, "I called you in to speak to you about Mike Laflin—"

"Yes, father," exclaimed Esther, with a little gasp of surprise.

"I met Mr. Laflin on the boat this morning, and was much astonished and grieved to hear of the rash step his son has chosen to take. The matter has evidently been kept from me,"—strictly speaking, it had; "I understand, though on that again I have not been consulted, that you and Mike have for some time been informally engaged to each other. Now you know my views on the theatre, and I am sure that you must see that Mike's having taken such a step must at once put an end to any such idea. Your own sense of propriety would, I am sure, tell you that, without any words from me—"

"Father!" cried Esther, in astonishment.

"You know that I considered Mike a very nice lad. His family is respectable; and he would have come into a very comfortable business, if he hadn't taken this foolish freak into his head—"

"But, father, you have laughed at his recitations, yourself, many a time, here of an evening. What difference can there be?"

"There is the difference of the theatre, the contaminating atmosphere, the people it attracts, the harm it does—your father, as you know, has never been within a theatre in his life; is it likely that he can look with calmness upon his daughter marrying a man whose livelihood is to be gained in a scandalous and debasing profession?"

"Father, I cannot listen to your talking of Mike like that. If it is wrong to make people innocently happy, to make them laugh and forget their troubles, to—to—well, if it's wrong to be Mike—I'm sorry; but, wrong or right, I love him, and nothing will ever make me give him up."

Mrs. Mesurier here interrupted, "I told you, James, how it would be. You cannot change young hearts. The times are not the same as when you and I were young; and, though I'm sure I don't want to go against you, I think you are too hard on Esther. Love is love after all—and Mike's one of the best-hearted lads that ever walked."

"Thank you, mother," said Esther, impulsively, throwing her arms round her mother's neck, and bursting into tears, "I—I will never give—give—him up."

"No, dear, no; now don't distress yourself. It will all come right. Your father doesn't quite understand." And then a great tempest of sobbing came over Esther, and swept her away to her own room.

The father and mother turned to each other with some anger.

"James, I'm surprised at your distressing the poor child like that to-night; you might have known she would be sensitive, with Mike only gone to-day! You could surely have waited till to-morrow."

"I am surprised, Mary, that you can encourage her as you did. You cannot surely uphold the theatre?"

"Well, James, I don't know,—there are theatres and theatres, and actors and actors; and there have been some very good men actors after all, and some very bad men ministers, if it comes to that," she added; "and theatre or no theatre, love's love in spite of all the fathers and mothers in the world—"

"All right, Mary, I would prefer then that we spoke no more on the matter for this evening," and James Mesurier turned to his diary, to record, along with the state of the weather, and the engagements of the day, the undutiful conduct of Esther, and a painful difference with his wife.

Strange, that men who have themselves loved and begotten should thus for a moment imagine that a small social prejudice, or a narrow religious formula, can break the purpose of a young and vigorous passion. Do they realise what it is they are proposing to obstruct? This is love—love, my dear sir, at once the mightiest might, and the rightest right in the universe! This is—Niagara—the Atlantic—the power of the stars—and the strength of the tides. It is all the winds of the world, and all the fires of the centre. You surely cannot be serious in asking it to take, in exchange, some obsolete objection against its beloved!



CHAPTER XXXIX

MIKE AFAR

This collision with her father braced up Esther's nerves, and made Mike's absence easier to bear. Her father made no more allusion to it. He was entering that period when fathers, however despotic, content themselves with protest, where once they have governed by royal proclamation. He was losing heart to contend with his children. They must go their own ways—though it must not be without occasional severe and solemn warnings on his part.

Mike and Esther wrote to each other twice a week. They had talked of every day, but a wise instinct prompted them to the less romantic, but likely the more enduring arrangement. It would be none the less open to them to write fourteen letters a week if they wished, but to have had to admit that one letter a day was a serious tax, not only on one's other occupations, including idleness, but also on the amount of subject-matter available, would have been a dangerous correction of an impulsive miscalculation.

Second-rate London lodgings are not great cheerers of the human spirit, and Mike was very lonely in his first letter or two; but, as the rehearsals proceeded, it was evident that he was taking hold of his new world, and the letter which told of his first night, and of his own encouraging success in it, was buoyant with the rising tide of the future. His chief had affectionately laid his hand on his shoulder, as he came off from his scene, and, in the hearing of the whole company, prophesied a great future for him.

Mike had been born under a lucky star; and he had hardly been in London two months when accident very perceptibly brightened it. The chief comedian in the company fell ill; and though Mike had had so little experience, his chief had so much confidence in his native gift, that he cast him for the vacant part. Mike more than justified the confidence, and not only pleased him, but succeeded in individualising himself with the audience. He had only played it for a week, when one Saturday evening the audience, after calling the manager himself three times, set up a cry for "Laflin." The obsequious attendant pretended to consider it as a fourth call for the manager, and made as if to move the curtain aside for him once more; but, with a magnanimity rare indeed in a "star" of his magnitude, "No, no!" he said; "it is Mr. Laflin they want. Quick, lad, and take your first call."

So little Mike stepped before the curtain, and made his first bow to an affectionate burst of applause. What happy tears would have glittered in Esther's eyes had she been there to see it, and in Henry's too, and particularly, perhaps, in excitable Angel's!

Even so soon was the blossom giving promise of the fruit.



CHAPTER XL

A LEGACY MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD

Meanwhile, Henry plodded away at Aunt Tipping's, working sometimes on a volume of essays for the London publisher, and sometimes on his novel, now and again writing a review, and earning an odd guinea for a poem; and now and again indulging in a day of richly doing nothing. Otherwise, one day was like another, with the many exceptions of the days on which he saw Angel or Esther. With Ned, he spent many of his evenings; and he soon formed the pleasant habit of dropping in on Gerard, last thing before bed-time, for a smoke and half an hour's chat.

There is always a good deal of youth left in any one who genuinely loves youth; and Gerard always spoke of his youth as Adam, in his declining years, might have spoken of Paradise. For him life was just youth—and the rest of it death.

"After thirty," he would say, "the happiest life is only history repeating itself. I am no cynic,—far from it; but the worst of life is the monotony of the bill of fare. To do a thing once, even twice, is delightful—perhaps even a third time is successfully possible; but to do it four times, is middle age. If you think of it, what is there to do after thirty that one ought not to have achieved to perfection before? You know the literary dictum, that the poet who hasn't written a masterpiece before he is thirty will never write any after. Of course, there are exceptions; I am speaking of the rule. In business, for example, what future is there for the man who has not already a dashing past at thirty? Of course, the bulk, the massive trunk and the impressive foliage of his business, must come afterwards; but the tree must have been firmly rooted and stoutly branched before then, and able to go on growing on its own account. The work, in fact, must have been done.

"Take perhaps the only thing really worth doing in life," and Gerard perceptibly saddened. "That is, marrying a woman you love, or I should say the woman, for you only really love one woman—I'm old-fashioned enough to think that,—well, I say, marrying the woman you love, and bringing into the world that miracle of miracles,—a child that shall be something of you and all her: that certainly is something to have done before thirty, and not to be repeated, perhaps, more than once before or after. She will want a boy like you, and you will have a girl like her. That you may easily accomplish before thirty. Afterwards, however, if you go on repeating each other, what do you do but blur the individuality of the original masterpieces—though," pursued Gerard, laughing, always ready to forget his original argument in the seductiveness of an unexpected development of it, "though, after all, I admit, there might be a temptation sometimes to improve upon the originals. 'Agnes, my dear,' we might say, 'I'm not quite satisfied yet with the shade of Eva's hair. It's nearly yours, but not quite. It's an improvement on Anna's, whose eyes now are exactly yours. Eva's, unfortunately, are not so faithful. I'm afraid we'll have to try again.'

"No, but seriously," he once more began, "for a really vital and successful life there is no adequate employment of the faculties after thirty, except, of course, in the repetition of former successes. No; I even withdraw that,—not the repetition, only the conservation, the feeding, of former successes. The success is in the creation. When a world is once created, any fool can keep it spinning.

"Man's life is at least thirty years too long. Two score years is more than enough for us to say what we were sent here to say; and if you'll consider those biographies in which you are most interested, the biographies of great writers, you cannot but bear me out. What, for instance, did Keats and Shelley and Burns and Byron lose by dying, all of them long before they were forty,—Keats even long before he was thirty; and what did Wordsworth and Coleridge gain by living so long after? Wordsworth and Coleridge didn't even live to repeat themselves, else, of course, one would have begged them to go on living for ever; for some repetitions, it is admitted, are welcome,—for instance, won't you have a little more whisky?"

Henry always agreed so completely with Gerard's talk, or at least so delighted in it, that he had little scope of opportunity to say much himself; and Gerard was too keen a talker to complain of a rapt young listener.

"How old are you?" he said, presently.

"Twenty-two next month."

"Twenty-two! How wonderful to be twenty-two! Yet I don't suppose you've realised it in the least. In your own view, you're an aged philosopher, white with a past, and bowed down with the cares of a future. Just you stay in bed all day to-morrow, and ponder on the wonderfulness of being twenty-two!

"I'm forty-two. You're beginning—I'm done with. And yet, in some ways, I believe I'm younger than you—though, perhaps, alas! what I consider the youth in me is only the wish to be young again, the will to do and enjoy, without the force and the appetite. But, by the way, when I say I'm forty-two, I mean that I'm forty-two in the course of next week, next Thursday, in fact, and if you'll do me that kindness, I should be grateful if you would join me that evening in celebrating the melancholy occasion. I've got a great mind to enlist your sympathy in a little ancient history, if it won't be too great a tax upon your goodness; but I'll think it over between now and then."

Gerard's birthday had come; and the ancient history he had spoken of had proved to be a chapter of his own history, the beauty and sadness of which had made an impression upon Henry, to be rendered ineffaceable a very few days after in a sudden and terrible manner.

One early morning about four, just as it was growing light, he had suddenly awakened with a strong feeling that some one was bending over him. He opened his eyes, to see, as he thought, Gerard hastily leaving his bedside.

"Gerard!" he cried, "what's the matter?" but the figure gave no answer, faded away down the long room, and disappeared. Henry sat up in bed and struck a light, his heart beating violently. But there was no one there, and the door was closed. It had evidently been one of those dreams that persist on the eye for a moment after waking. Yet it left him uneasy; and presently he wondered if Gerard could be ill. He determined to see; so, slipping on his dressing-gown, he crossed the landing to Gerard's room, and, softly knocking, opened the door and put in his head.

"Gerard, old chap, are you all right?—Gerard—"

There was no answer, and the room seemed unaccountably still. He listened for the sound of breathing, but he couldn't hear it.

"Gerard!" he cried, again louder, but there was still no answer; and then, with the silence, a chill terror began to creep through his blood. He had never yet seen death; and perhaps if he had the terror in his thought would not have been lessened. With a heart that had almost stopped beating, and knees that shook beneath him, he pushed open the door and walked over to the bed. It was still too dark to see more than outlines and masses of white and black; but even so he could see that the stillness with which Gerard was lying was the stillness of death.

His next thought was to rouse Aunt Tipping; and together the two bent over the dead face.

"Yes, he's gone," said Aunt Tipping; "poor gentlemen, how beautiful he looks!" and they both gazed in silence upon the calm, smiling face.

"Well, he's better off," she said, presently, leaning over him, and softly pressing down the lids of his eyes.

Henry involuntarily drew away.

"Dear lad, there's nothing to be frightened of," said his aunt. "He's as harmless as a baby."

Then she took a handkerchief from a drawer, and spread it gently over the dead man's face. To Aunt Tipping the dead were indeed as little children, and inspired her with a strange motherly tenderness. Many had been the tired silent ones whose eyes she had closed, and whose limbs she had washed against their last resting place. They were so helpless now; they could do nothing any more for themselves.

Later in the day, Henry came again and sat long by the dead man's side. It seemed uncompanionable to have grown thus suddenly afraid of him, to leave him thus alone in that still room. And as he sat and watched him, he gave to his memory a solemn service of faithful thought. Thus it was he went over again the words in which Gerard had made him the depository, the legatee, of his most sacred possession.

Gerard had evidently had some presentiment of his approaching end.

"I am going," he had said, "to place the greatest confidence in you one man can place in another, pay you the greatest compliment. I shall die some day, and something tells me that that divine event is not very far off. Now I have no one in the world who cares an old 'J' pen for me, and a new one is perhaps about as much as I care for any one—with one exception, and that is a woman whom I shall never see again. She is not dead, but has been worse than dead for me these ten years. I am optimist enough to believe that her old love for me still survives, making sweet the secret places of her soul. Never once in all these years to have doubted her love has been more than most marriages; but were I to live for another ten years, and still another, I would believe in it still. But the stars were against us. We met too late. We met when she had long been engaged to a friend of her youth, a man noble and true, to whom she owed much, and whom she felt it a kind of murder to desert. It was one of those fallacious chivalries of feeling which are the danger of sensitive and imaginative minds. Religion strengthened it, as it is so apt to strengthen any form of self-destruction, short of technical suicide. There was but a month to their marriage when we met. For us it was a month of rapture and agonies, of heaven shot through with hell. I saw further than she. I begged her at least to wait a year; but the force of my appeal was weakened by scruples similar to her own. To rob another of his happiness is an act from which we may well shrink, though we can clearly see that the happiness was really destined for us, and can never be his in any like degree. During this time I had received from her many letters, letters such as a woman only writes in the May-morning of her passion; and one day I received the last. There was in it one sentence which when I read it I think my heart broke, 'Do you believe,' it ran, 'in a love that can lie asleep, as in a trance, in this world, to awaken again in another, a love that during centuries of silence can still be true, and be love still in a thousand years? If you do, go on loving me. For that is the only love I dare give you. I must love you no more in this world.'

"Each morning as I have risen, and each night as I have turned to sleep, those words have repeated themselves again and again in my heart, for ten years. It was so I became the Ashton Gerard you know to-day. Since that day, we have never met or written to each other. All I know is that she is still alive, and still with him, and never would I disturb their peace. When I die, I would not have her know it. If love is immortal, we shall meet again—when I am worthier to meet her. Such reunions are either mere dreams, or they are realities to which the strongest forces of the universe are pledged."

Henry's only comment had been to grip Gerard's hand, and give him the sympathy of silence.

"Now," said Gerard, once more after a while, "it is about those letters I want to speak to you. They are here," and he unlocked a drawer and drew from it a little silver box. "I always keep them here. The key of the drawer is on this ring, and this little gold key is the key of the box itself. I tell you this, because I have what you may regard as a strange request to make.

"I suppose most men would consider it their duty either to burn these letters, or leave instructions for them to be buried with them. That is a gruesome form of sentiment in which I have too much imagination to indulge. Both my ideas of duty and sentiment take a different form. The surname of the writer of these letters is nowhere revealed in them, nor are there any references in them by which she could ever be identified. Therefore the menace to her fair fame in their preservation is not a question involved. Now when the simplest woman is in love, she writes wonderfully; but when a woman of imagination and intellect is caught by the fire of passion, she becomes a poet. Once in her life, every such woman is an artist; once, for some one man's unworthy sake, she becomes inspired, and out of the fulness of her heart writes him letters warm and real as the love-cries of Sappho. Such are the letters in this little box. They are the classic of a month's passion, written as no man has ever yet been able to write his love. Do you think it strange then that I should shrink from destroying them? I would as soon burn the songs of Shelley. They are living things. Shall I selfishly bury the beating heart of them in the silence of the grave?

"So, Mesurier," he continued, affectionately, "when I met you and understood something of your nature, I thought that in you I had found one who was worthy to guard this treasure for me, and perhaps pass it on again to some other chosen spirit—so that these beautiful words of a noble woman's heart shall not die—for when a man loves a woman, Mesurier, as you yourself must know, he is insatiable to hear her praise, and it is agony for him to think that her memory may suffer extinction. Therefore, Mesurier,—Henry, let me call you,—I want to give the memory of my love into your hands. I want you to love it for me, when perhaps I can love it no more. I want you sometimes to open this box, and read in these letters, as if they were your own; I want you sometimes to speak softly the name of 'Helen,' when my lips can speak it no more."

Such was the beautiful legacy of which Henry found himself the possessor by Gerard's death. Early on that day he had remembered his promise to his dead friend, and had found the silver box, and locked it away among his own most sacred things. Some day, in an hour and place upon which none might break, he would open the little box and read Helen's letters, as Gerard had wished. Already one sentence was fixed unforgettably upon his mind, and he said it over softly to himself as he sat by Gerard's silent bed: "Do you believe in a love that can lie asleep, as in a trance in this world, to awaken again in another,—a love that during centuries of silence can still be true, and be love still in a thousand years? If you do, go on loving me. For that is the only love I dare give you; I must love you no more in this world."

Strange dreams of the indomitable dust! Already another man's love was growing dear to him. Already his soul said the name of "Helen" softly for Gerard's sake.



CHAPTER XLI

LABORIOUS DAYS

With Gerard's death, Henry began to find Aunt Tipping's too sad a place to go on living in. It had become haunted; and when new people moved into Gerard's rooms, it became still more painful for him. It was as though Gerard had been dispossessed and driven out. So he cast about for some new shelter; and, one day, chance having taken him to the shipping end of the city, he came upon some old offices which seemed full of anxiety to be let. Inquiring of a chatty little housekeeper's wife, he discovered, away at the echoing top of the building, a big, well-lighted room, for which she thought the owner would be glad to take ten pounds a year. That whole storey was deserted. Henry made up his mind at once, and broke the news to Aunt Tipping that evening. It was the withering of one of her few rays of poetry, and she struggled to keep him; but when she saw how it was, the good woman insisted that he should take something from her towards furnishing. Receiving was nothing like so blessed as giving for Aunt Tipping. That old desk,—yes, she had bought it for him,—that he must certainly take, and think of his old aunt sometimes as he wrote his great books on it; and some bed-linen she could well afford. She would take no denial.

Angel and Esther were then called in to help him in the purchase of a carpet, a folding-bed, an old sofa, and a few chairs. A carpenter got to work on the bookshelves, and in a fortnight's time still another habitation had been built for the Muse,—a habitation from which she was not destined to remove again, till she and Angel and Henry all moved into one house together,—a removal which was, as yet, too far off to be included in this history.

Ten pounds a year, a folding-bed, and a teapot!—this was Henry's new formula for the cultivation of literature. He had so far progressed in his ambitions as to have arrived at the dignity of a garret of his own, and he liked to pretend that soon he might be romantically fortunate enough to sit face to face with starvation. He knew, however, that it would be a starvation mitigated by supplies from three separate, well-lardered homes. A lad with a sweetheart and a sister, a mother and an aunt, all in love with him, is not likely to become an authority on starvation in its severest forms.

A stern law had been passed that Henry's daytime hours were to be as strictly respected as those of a man of business; yet quite often, about eleven o'clock in the morning, there would come a heavenly whisper along the passage and a little knock on the door, soft as a flower tapping against a window-pane.

"Thank goodness, that's Angel!

"Angel, bless you! How glad I am to see you! I can't get on a bit with my work this morning."

"Oh, but I haven't come to interrupt you, dear. I sha'n't keep you five minutes. Only I thought, dear, you'd be so tired of pressed beef and tinned tongue, and so I thought I'd make a little hot-pot for you. I bought the things for it as I came along, and it won't take five minutes, if Mrs. Glass [the housekeeper] will only lend me a basin to put it in, and bake it for you in her oven. Now, dear, you mustn't—you know I mustn't stay. See now, I'll just take off my hat and jacket and run along to Mrs. Glass, to get what I want. I'll be back in a minute. Well, then, just one—now that's enough; good-bye," and off she would skip.

If you want to know how fairies look when they are making hot-pot, you should have seen Angel's absorbed little shining face.

"Now, do be quiet, Henry. I'm busy. Why don't you get on with your work? I won't speak a word."

"Angel, dear, you might just as well stay and help me to eat it. I sha'n't do any work to-day, I know for certain. It's one of my bad days."

"Now, Henry, that's lazy. You mustn't give way like that. You'll make me wish I hadn't come. It's all my fault."

"No, really, dear, it isn't. I haven't done a stroke all morning—though I've sat with my pen for two hours. You might stay, Angel, just an hour or two."

"No, Henry; mother wants me back soon. She's house-cleaning. And besides, I mustn't. No—no—you see I've nearly finished now—see! Get me the salt and pepper. There now—that looks nice, doesn't it? Now aren't I a good little housewife?"

"You would be, if you'd only stay. Do stay, Angel. Really, darling, it will be all the same if you go. I know I shall do nothing. Look at my morning's work, and he brought her a sheet of paper containing two lines and a half of new-born prose, one line and a half of which was plentifully scratched out. To this argument he added two or three persuasive embraces.

"It's really true, Henry? Well, of course, I oughtn't; but if you can't work, of course you can't. And you must have a little rest sometimes, I know. Well, then, I'll stay; but only till we've finished lunch, you know, and we must have it early. I won't stay a minute past two o'clock, do you hear? And now I'll run along with this to Mrs. Glass."

When Angel had gone promptly at three, as likely as not another step would be heard coming down the passage, and a feminine rustle, suggesting a fuller foliage of skirts, pause outside the door, then a sort of brotherly-sisterly knock.

"Esther! Why, you've just missed Angel; what a pity!"

"Well, dear, I only ran up for half-a-minute. I was shopping in town, and I couldn't resist looking in to see how the poor boy was getting on. No, dear, I won't take my things off. I must catch the half-past three boat, and then I'll keep you from your work?"

Esther always said this with a sort of suggestion in her voice that it was just possible Henry might have found some new way of both keeping her there and doing his work at the same time; as though she had said, "I know you cannot possibly work while I am here; but, of course, if you can, and talking to me all the time won't interfere with it—well, I'll stay."