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 a.s.sembled 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 _navete_ 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 G.o.dspeed, 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 pa.s.sionately invoked those terrible G.o.ds 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 _empress.e.m.e.nt_ 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 x.x.xVIII

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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.e.x, 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 pa.s.sengers 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! G.o.d 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.