CHAPTER x.x.xV

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 x.x.xVI

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 a.s.suming 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 grat.i.tude, 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 a.s.sumes, stronger and better than its elder! but, though the careless a.s.sumption that it is so is somewhat general, history alone shows how false and impudent the a.s.sumption 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.