Young Lives. Richard Le Gallienne
for him of a commercial career; but on general principles he was quite sufficiently firm against any but the most non-committing, leisure-hour flirtation with the Muse. The mother, while agreeing with the father's main proposition of the undesirability, nay, impossibility, of literature as a livelihood,--had not the great and successful Sir Walter himself described it as a good walking-stick, but a poor crutch; a stick applied, since its first application as an image, to the shoulders of how many generations of youthful genius,--was naturally more sympathetic towards her son's ambition, and encouraged it to the extent of helping from her housekeeping money the formation of his little library, even occasionally proving successful in winning sums of money from the father for the purchase of some book specially, as the young man would declare, necessary for his development.
As this little library had outgrown the accommodation of the common rooms, a daring scheme had been conceived between mother and son,--no less than that he should have a small room set apart for himself as a study. When first broached to the father, this scheme had met with an absolute denial that seemed to promise no hope of further consideration; but the mother, accepting defeat at the time, had tried again and again, with patient dexterity at favourable moments, till at last one proud day the little room, with its bookshelves, a cast of Dante, and a strange picture or two, was a beautiful, significant fact--all ready for the possible visitation of the Muse.
In such ways had the mother negotiated the needs of all her children; though the youth of the rest--save the eldest girl, whose music lessons had meant a battle, and whose growing attractiveness for the boys of the district, and one in particular, was presently to mean another--made as yet but small demands. In one question, however, periodically fruitful of argument, even the youngest was becoming interested,--the question of the visits to the household of the various friends and playmates of the children. To these, it must be admitted, James Mesurier was apt to be hardly less of a figure of fear than to his own children; for, apart from the fact that such inroads from without were apt to disturb his few quiet evening hours with rollicking and laughter, he, being entirely unsocial in his own nature, had a curious idea that the family should be sufficient to itself, and that the desire for any form of entertainment outside it was a sign of dissatisfaction with God's gifts of a good home, and generally a frivolity to be discouraged.
As a boy he had grown up without companions, and as a man had remained lonely, till he had met in his wife the one comrade of his days. What had been good enough for their father should be good enough for his children, was a formula which he applied all round to their bringing up, curiously forgetful, for a man at heart so just, of the pleasure one would have expected it to be to make sure that the errors of his own training were not repeated in that of his offspring. But, indeed, there was in him constitutionally something of the Puritan suspicion of, and aversion from, pleasure, which it had never occurred to him to consider as the end of, or, indeed, as a considerable element of existence. Life was somehow too serious for play, spiritually as well as materially; and much work and a little rest was the eternal and, on the whole, salutary lot of man.
Such were some of the conditions among which the young Mesuriers found themselves, and of which their impatience had become momentously explosive this February evening.
For some days there had been an energetic simmer of rebellion among the four elder children against a new edict of early rising which was surely somewhat arbitrary. Early rising was one of James Mesurier's articles of faith; and he was always up and dressed by half-past six, though there was no breakfast till eight, and absolutely no necessity for his rising at that hour beyond his own desire. There was still less, indeed none at all, for his children to rise thus early; but nevertheless he had recently decreed that such, for the future, must be the rule. The rule fell heaviest upon the sisters, for the elder brother had always enjoyed a certain immunity from such edicts. His sense of justice, however, kindled none the less at this final piece of tyranny. He blazed and fumed indignantly on behalf of his sisters, in the sanctuary of that little study,--a spot where the despot seldom set foot; and out of this comparatively trivial cause had sprung a mighty resolution, which he and she whom he proudly honoured as "sister and friend" had, after some girding of the loins, repaired to the front parlour this evening to communicate.
They had entered somewhat abruptly, and stood rather dramatically by the table on which the father was writing,--the son with dark set face, in which could be seen both the father and mother, and the daughter, timid and close to him, resolutely keeping back her tears, a slim young copy of the mother.
"Well, my dears?" said the father, looking up with a keen, rather surprised glance, and in a tone which qualified with some severity the "my dears."
The son had had some exceedingly fine beginnings in his head, but they fled ignominiously with the calm that was necessary for their successful delivery, and he blurted at once to the point.
"We have come to say that we are no longer comfortable at home, and have decided to leave it."
"Henry," exclaimed the mother, hastily, "what do you mean, how can you be so ungrateful?"
"Mary, my dear," interrupted the father, "please leave the matter to me." Then turning to the son: "What is this you are saying? I'm afraid I don't understand."
"I mean that Esther and I have decided to leave home and live together; because it is impossible for us to live here any longer in happiness--"
"On what do you propose to live?"
"My salary will be sufficient for the present."
"Sixty pounds a year!"
"Yes!"
"And may I ask what is wrong with your home? You have every comfort--far more than your mother or father were accustomed to."
"Yes, indeed!" echoed the mother.
"Yes, we know you are very good and kind, and mean everything for our good; but you don't understand other needs of our natures, and you make no allowance for our individualities--"
"Indeed! Individualities--I should like you to have heard what my father would have said to talk about individualities. A rope's end would have been his answer to that--"
"It would have been a very silly one, and no argument."
"It would have been effective, at all events."
"Not with me--"
"Well, please don't bandy words with me, sir. If you," particularly addressing his son, "wish to go--then go; but remember that once you have left your father's roof, you leave it for ever. As for your sister, she has no power to leave her mother and father without my consent, and that I shall certainly withhold till she is of a proper age to know what is best for herself--"
"She will go then without your consent," defiantly answered the son.
"Oh, Henry, for shame!" exclaimed Mrs. Mesurier.
"Mother dear, I'm sorry,--we don't mean to be disrespectful or undutiful,--but father's petty tyrannies are more than we can bear. He objects to the friends we care for; he denies us the theatre--"
"Most certainly, and shall continue to do so. I have never been inside a theatre in my life; nor, with my consent, shall any child of mine enter one of them."
"You can evidently know little about them then, and you'd be a much finer man if you had," flashed out the son.
"Your sitting in judgment on your father is certainly very pretty, I must say,"--answered the father,--"very pretty; and I can only hope that you will not have cause to regret it some future day. But I cannot allow you to disturb me," for, with something of a pang, Henry noticed signs of agitation amid the severity of his parent, though the matter was too momentous for him to allow the indulgence of pity.
"You have been a source of much anxiety to your mother and me, a child of many prayers;" the father continued. "Whether it is the books you read, or the friends you associate with, that are responsible for your strange and, to my thinking, impious opinions, I do not know; but this I know, that your influence on your sister has not of late been for good, and for her sake, and the sake of your young sisters, it may perhaps be well that your influence