However we may hint at its explanation by theories of inheritance, it still remains curious with what unerring instinct a child of character will from the first, and when it is so evidently ignorant of the field of choice, select, out of all life's occupations and distinctions, one special work it hungers to do, one special distinction that to it seems the most desirable of earthly honours. That Mary Mesurier loved poetry, and James Mesurier sermons, in face of the fact that so many mothers and fathers have done the same with no such result, hardly seems adequate to account for the peculiar glamour which, almost before he could read, there was for Henry Mesurier in any form of print. While books were still being read to him, there had already come into his mind, unaccountably, as by outside suggestion, that there could be nothing so splendid in the world as to write a book for one's self. To be either a soldier, a sailor, an architect, or an engineer, would, doubtless, have its fascinations as well; but to make a real printed book, with your name in gilt letters outside, was real romance.

At that early day, and for a long while after, the boy had no preference for any particular kind of book. It was an entirely abstract pa.s.sion for print and paper. To have been the author of "The Iliad" or of Beeton's "Book of Household Recipes" would have given him almost the same exaltation of authorship; and the thrill of worship which came over him when, one early day, a man who had actually had an article on the sugar bounties accepted by a commercial magazine was pointed out to him in the street, was one he never forgot; nor in after years did he ever encounter that transfigured contributor without an involuntary recurrence of that old feeling of awe. No subsequent acquaintance with editorial rooms ever led him into materialistic explanations of that enchanted piece of work--a newspaper. The editors might do their best--and succeed surprisingly--in looking like ordinary mortals, you might even know the leader-writers, and, with the very public, gaze through gratings into the subterranean printing-rooms,--the mystery none the less remained. No exposure of editorial staffs or other machinery could destroy the sense of enchantment, as no amount of anatomy or biology can destroy the mystery of the human miracle.

So I suppose Nature first makes us in love with the tools we are to use, long before we have a thought upon what we shall use them. Perhaps the first desire of the born writer is to be a compositor. Out of the love of mere type quickly evolves a love of mere words for their own sake; but whether we shall make use of them as a historian, novelist, philosopher, or poet, is a secondary consideration, a mere afterthought.

To Henry Mesurier had already come the time when the face of life began to Wear a certain aspect, the peculiar attraction of which for himself he longed to fix, a certain mystical importance attaching to the commonest every-day objects and circ.u.mstances, a certain ecstatic quality in the simplest experiences; but even so far as it had been revealed, this dawning vision of the world seemed only to have come to him, not so much to find expression, as to mock him with his childish incapacity adequately to use the very tools he loved. He would hang for hours over some scene in nature, caught in a woodland spell, like a nympholept of old; but when he tried to put in words what he had seen, what a poor piece of ornamental gardening the thing was! There were trees and birds and gra.s.s, to be sure; but there was nothing of that meaning look which they had worn, that look of being tiptoe with revelation which is one of the most fascinating tricks of the visible world, and which even a harsh town full of chimneys can sometimes take on when seen in given moments and lights. And it was astonishing to see into what lifeless imitative verse his most original and pa.s.sionate moments could be transformed.

Still some unreasonably indulgent spirit of the air, that had evidently not read his ma.n.u.scripts, whispered him to be of good cheer: the lifeless words would not always be lifeless, some day the birds would sing in his verses too. This sense of failure did not, it must be said, immediately follow composition; for, for a little while the original expression of the thing seen reinforced with reflected significance its pale copy. It was only some weeks after, when the written copy was left to do all the work itself, that its foolish inadequacy was exposed.

"However, there is one consolation, they are not worse than Keats and Sh.e.l.ley wrote at the same age," he said to himself, as he looked through a bundle of the poor things the evening before his room was to be dismantled. "Indeed, they couldn't be," he added, with a smile.

Fortunately he was but nineteen as yet; would he venture on a like comparison were he twenty-five?

Yes, his little room was to be dismantled on the morrow,--this first little private chapel of his spirit. This fair order of shelves, this external harmony answering to an inner harmony of his spirit, were to be broken up for ever. Often as he had sat in the folioed lamplit nook which was, as it were, the very chancel of the little church, and gazed in an ecstasy at the books, each with a great shining name of fame upon its cover, it had seemed as though he had put his very soul outside him, externalised it in this little corner of books and pictures. His soul shivered, as one who must go houseless awhile, at the thought that to-morrow its home would be no more. When and how would be its reincarnation? More magnificent, maybe, but never this again. It was sacrilege,--was it not ingrat.i.tude too? When once more the books and the pictures began to form into a new harmony, there would be no mother's love to help the work go on....

But as he mused in this no doubt sentimental fashion, the door opened and the little red-headed Mike entered. His was a little Flibbertigibbet of a face, already lined with the practice of mimicry; and there was in it a very attractive blending of tenderness and humour. Mike was also one of those whom life at the beginning had impressed with the delight of one kind of work and no other. When a mere imp of a boy, the heartless tormentor of a large and sententious stepmother, the despair of schoolmasters, the most ingenious of truants, a humorous ragam.u.f.fin invulnerable to punishment, it was already revealed to him that his mission in life was to be the observation and reproduction of human character, particularly in its humorous aspects. To this end Nature had gifted him with a face that was capable of every form of transformation, and at an early age he hastened to put it in training. All day long he was pulling faces. As an artist will sketch everything he comes across, so Mike would endeavour to imitate any characteristic expression or att.i.tude, animate or inanimate, in the world around him. Dogs, little boys, and grotesque old men were his special delight, and of all his elders he had, it goes without saying, a private gallery of irreverently faithful portraits.

In addition to his plastic face, Nature had given him a larynx which was capable of imitating every human and inhuman sound. To squeak like a pig, bark like a dog, low like a cow, and crow like a c.o.c.k, were the veriest juvenilia of his attainments; and he could imitate the buzzing of a fly so cunningly that flies themselves have often been deceived. It was this delight in imitation for its own sake, and not so much that he had been caught by the usual allurements of the theatre, that he looked upon the career of an actor as his natural and ultimate calling. It was already privately whispered in the little circle that Mike would some day go on the stage. But don't tell that as yet to old Mr. Laflin, whatever you do.

There was a good deal more in Mike than pulling faces, as Esther recently, and Henry before her, had discovered. His acting was some day to stir the hearts of audiences, because he had instincts for knowing human nature inside as well as out, knew the secret springs of tears, as well as the open secrets of laughter; and it was rather on this common ground of a rich "many-veined humanity" that these two had met and become friends, rather than on any real community of tastes and ideas.

Yet Mike loved books too, and had an excellent taste in them, though perhaps he had hardly loved them, had not Henry and Esther loved them first, and it is quite certain, and quite proper, that he never found a page of any book so fascinating as the face of some lined and battered human being. Over that writing he was never found asleep.

There was one other literary matter on which he held a very personal and unshakable opinion,--Henry Mesurier's future as a poet; and on this he came just in the nick of time to cheer him this evening.

"The next move will be to London, old fellow," he said; "and then you'll soon see my prophecies come true. My opinion mayn't be worth much, but you know what it is. You'll be a great writer some day, never fear."

"Thank you, dear old boy. And you know what I think about your acting, don't you?"

Then it was that Esther appeared, and Henry made some transparent excuse to leave them awhile together.

"You dear old thing," said Esther, kissing him, "now don't stay away too long."

CHAPTER V

OF THE LOVE OF ESTHER AND MIKE, AND THE MESURIER LAW IN REGARD TO "SWEETHEARTS"

I'm afraid Esther was little more than fourteen when she had first seen and fallen in love with Mike. She had heard much of him from her brother; but, for one reason or another, he had never been to the house.

One evening, however, at a concert, Henry had told her to look in a certain direction and she would see Mike.

"I don't suppose you'll call him good looking," he said.

So Esther had looked round, and seen the pretty curly red hair and the eager little wistful humorous face for the first time.

"Why, he's got a lovely little face!" she said, blushing deeply for no reason at all,--except perhaps that there had seemed something pleading and shelter-seeking in that little face, something that cried out to be "mothered," and that instantly there had welled up in her heart a great warm wish that some day she might be that for it and more.

And at the same instant it had occurred to the boy, that the face thus turned to him for a moment was the loveliest face he had ever seen, the only lovely face he would ever care to see. But with that thought, too, had come a curious pang of hopelessness into his heart. For Esther Mesurier was one of those girls who are the prizes of men. With all those pretty tall fellows about her, it was unlikely indeed that she would care for a little red-headed, face-pulling ragam.u.f.fin like him!

And yet if she never could care for him,--never, never at all, what a lonely place the world would be!

When, after the concert, Henry looked round to introduce Mike to his sister, he had somehow slipped away and was nowhere to be seen.

However, it was not long after this that Mike paid a visit to Henry's study one evening, and, coming ostensibly to look at his books, once more saw his sister, and spoke to her a brief introductory word. His interest in literature became positively remarkable from this time; and the enthusiasm with which his actor's mind reflected, and, no doubt in all good faith, mimicked the various philosophical and literary enthusiasms of his friend, was, though neither realised it, a sure earnest of his future. More and more frequent visits to that study became necessary for its gratification; and, in the course of one of them, Mike confessed to Henry that he loved his sister, previously piling upon himself many antic.i.p.atory terms of ignominy for daring to do so presumptuous a thing. Henry, however, was so taken with the idea that, in his singleness of mind, he suffered no pang of retrospective suspicion of his friend's love for himself. Pending Esther's decision,--and of her mind in the matter, he had something more than a glimmering,--he welcomed Mike with gladness as a prospective brother-in-law, and, as soon as he found an opportunity, left them alone together, returning quite a long time afterwards--to find them extraordinarily happy, it would appear, at his safe return.

Esther and Mike had thus been fortunate enough to get that important question of a mate settled quite early in life, and to be saved from those arduous and desolating experiments in being fitted with a heart which so many less happy people have to go through. But this happy fact was as yet a secret beyond this strict circle of three; for, strange as it may sound, the beautiful attraction of a girl for a boy, the beautiful worship of a boy for a girl, were matters not even mentionable as yet in the Mesurier household. For a child, particularly a girl, under twenty to speak of having a "sweetheart" was an offence which had a strong savour of disgust in it, even for Mrs. Mesurier, broad-minded as in most matters she was.

So far as the only decent theory of the relations of the s.e.xes was involuntarily explicit, by virtue of certain explosions on the subject, it was something like this: That, at a certain age, say twenty-one, or, for leniency, twenty, as it were on the striking of a clock, the young girl, who previously had been profoundly and inexpressibly unconscious that the male being existed, would suddenly sit up wide awake in an att.i.tude of attention to offers of marriage; and that, similarly, the young man, who had meanwhile lived with his eyes shut and his senses asleep, would jump up also at the striking of a clock, and, as it were, with hilarity, say, "It is high time I chose a wife," and thereupon begin to look about, among the streets and tennis-parties known to him, for that impossible paragon,--a wife to satisfy both his parents.

One or two of Henry's earliest troubles and most drastic punishments had come of a propensity to "sweethearts," developed at an indecorously early age, and in fact at the time of which I write he could barely recall the name of Miss This or Miss The Other by the a.s.sociation of ancient physical pangs suffered for their sake. The greatest danger to such contraband pa.s.sions was undoubtedly the post; for, in the Mesurier household, a more than Russian censorship was exercised over the incoming and--as far as it could be controlled--the outgoing mail. One old morning, at family breakfast, which the subsequent events of the evening were to fix on his mind, Henry Mesurier had grown white with fear, as the stupid maid had handed him a fat letter addressed in a sprawling school-girl's hand.

"Who is your letter from, Henry?" asked the father.

Henry blushed and boggled.

"Pa.s.s it over to me."

Resistance was worse than useless. As in war-time a woman will see her husband set up against a wall and shot before her face, as a conspirator sees the hands of the police close upon papers of the most terrible secrecy, so did Henry watch that scented little package pa.s.s with a sense of irrevocable loss into the cold hands of his father. The father opened it, placed a little white enclosure by the side of his coffee-cup for further inspection, and then read the letter--full of "darlings" and "for evers"--with the severe attention he would have given a business letter. Then he handed it across to the mother without a word, but with the look one doctor gives another in discovering a new and terrible symptom in a patient on whom they are consulting. While the mother read, the father opened the little packet, and out rolled a tiny plait of silky brown hair tied into a loop with a blue ribbon.

"Disgusting!" exclaimed the father and mother, simultaneously, to each other, as though the boy was not there.

"I am shocked at you, Henry," said the mother.

"I shall certainly write to the forward little girl's parents," said the father.

"Oh, don't do that, father," exclaimed the boy, in terror, and half wondering if so sweet a thing could really be so criminal.

"Don't dare to speak to me," said the father. "Leave the breakfast-table. I will see you again this evening."

Henry knew too well what the verb "to see" signified under the circ.u.mstances, and the day pa.s.sed in such apprehensive gloom that it was a positive relief, when evening had at last come, to feel a walking-cane about him, at once more snaky and more notched than any previously applied to his stubborn young frame. Not to cry was, of course, a point of honour; and as the infuriating absence of tears inflamed the righteous anger of the parent, the stick splintered and broke with a crash, in which accident Henry learned he was responsible for a double offence.

"I wouldn't have broken that stick for five pounds," said the father, his interest suddenly withdrawn from his son; "it was given to me by my old friend Tarporley," which, as can be imagined, was a mighty satisfaction to the sad small soul, smarting, not merely from the stick, but from the sense that life held something stupid in its injustice, in that he was thus being mauled for the most beautiful exalted feeling that had ever visited his young heart.

Those dark ages of oppression were long since pa.s.sed for Henry and Esther, when Mike began to steal in of an evening to see Esther, and they were only referred to now and again, anecdotally, as the nineteenth century looks back at the days of the Holy Inquisition; but still it was wise to be cautious, for an interdict against Mike's coming to the house was quite within possibility, even in this comparatively enlightened epoch; and that would have been even more effective than James Mesurier's old friend Tarporley's stick of sacred memory.

CHAPTER VI

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF HOME

Recalling for another moment or two the ancient affair of the heart described in the last chapter, it may pertinently be added that James Mesurier fulfilled his threat on that occasion, and had in fact written to the "forward little girl's" parents. Could he have seen the rather amused reception of his letter, he would have realised with sorrow that an age of parental leniency, little short of degeneration, was in certain quarters unmistakably supplanting the stern age of which he was in a degree an anachronistic survival. That forward little girl's parents chanced to know James Mesurier enough by sight and reputation to respect him, while they smiled across to each other at his rather quaint disciplinarianism. Could Henry Mesurier have seen that smile, he would not only have felt rea.s.sured as to the fate of his little sweetheart, but have understood that there were temperate zones of childhood, as well as arctic, when young life waxed gaily to the sound of laughter and other musical accompaniments.

This revelation, however, was deferred some few years, till he became acquainted with the merry family of which Mike Laflin was the characteristic expression. Old Mr. Laflin was a little, jolly, bald-headed gentleman, bubbling over with mirth, who liked to have young people about him, and in his quips and cranks was as young as, and much cleverer than, any of them. It almost startled Henry on his first introduction to this family of two daughters and two brothers, where the father was rather like a brother grown prematurely bald, and the stepmother supplied with monumental dignity that element of solemnity without which no properly regulated household is complete, to notice the _camaraderie_ which prevailed amongst them all. Jokes were flying about from one to another all the time, and the father made a point of capping them all. This was home in a liberal sense which the word had never meant to Henry. Doubtless, it had its own individual restrictions and censorships; but its surface was at all events debonair, and it was serviceable to Henry as revealing the existence of more genial social climates than that in which he had been nurtured--though in making the comparison with his own atmosphere, he realised that this _bonhomie_ was nothing more important than a grace.

Perhaps, nay, very surely, the seriousness, even the severity of, his own training, had been among the very conditions needed to make him what he some day hoped to be, though they had seemed so purposely inimical.

Had James Mesurier's religion been more free and easy, a matter less personally a.s.sured and momentous, his son's almost oppressive sense of the spiritual significance of existence had been less radiant and constantly supporting. Life might have gained in superficial liveableness; but it would have lost in intensity, in real importance, and with that loss would have gone too Henry's chance of being a poet."