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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion!

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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.d."

"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 G.o.d 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 G.o.d," 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 x.x.xVII

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.