_ CHAPTER XXXVIII. 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 space, 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 sex, 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 passengers 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! God 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.
"Oh, yes, I know; but then I discovered you."
"Ah, but a still higher honour belongs to me, for I discovered you," retorted Henry. "When you consider that I discovered three such wonderful persons as you and Angel and Mike, don't you think, on the whole, that I'm singularly modest?"
"Do you love me?" said Esther, presently, quite irrelevantly.
"Do you love _me_?"
"I asked first."
"Well, for the sake of argument, let us say 'yes.'"
"How much?"
"As big as the world."
"Oh, well, then, let's have some Benedictine with the coffee!" said Esther.
"I've thought of something better, more 'sacramental,'" said Henry, smiling, "but you couldn't conscientiously drink it with me. It's the red drink of perfect love. Will you drink it with me?"
"Of course I will."
So the waiter brought a bottle bearing the beautiful words, "_Parfait Amour_."
"It's like blood," said Esther; "it makes me a little frightened."
"Would you rather not drink it?" asked Henry. "You know if you drink it with me, you must drink it with no one else. It is the law of it that we can only drink it with one."
"Not even with Mike?"
"Not even with Mike."
"What of Angel?"
"I will drink it with no one but you as long as I live."
"I will drink it then."
They held up their glasses.
"Dear old Esther!"
"Dear old Henry!"
And then they laughed at their solemnity. It was deeply sworn!
When Esther reached home that evening, she found a further telegram from Mike, announcing his arrival at Euston; and she had scarcely read it when she heard her father's voice calling her. She went immediately to the dining-room.
"Esther, dear," he said, "your mother and I want a word with you."
"No, James, you must speak for yourself in this," said Mrs. Mesurier, evidently a little perturbed.
"Well, dear, if I must be alone in the matter, I must bear it; I cannot shrink from my duty on that account." Then, turning to Esther, "I called you in to speak to you about Mike Laflin--"
"Yes, father," exclaimed Esther, with a little gasp of surprise.
"I met Mr. Laflin on the boat this morning, and was much astonished and grieved to hear of the rash step his son has chosen to take. The matter has evidently been kept from me,"--strictly speaking, it had; "I understand, though on that again I have not been consulted, that you and Mike have for some time been informally engaged to each other. Now you know my views on the theatre, and I am sure that you must see that Mike's having taken such a step must at once put an end to any such idea. Your own sense of propriety would, I am sure, tell you that, without any words from me--"
"Father!" cried Esther, in astonishment.
"You know that I considered Mike a very nice lad. His family is respectable; and he would have come into a very comfortable business, if he hadn't taken this foolish freak into his head--"
"But, father, you have laughed at his recitations, yourself, many a time, here of an evening. What difference can there be?"
"There is the difference of the theatre, the contaminating atmosphere, the people it attracts, the harm it does--your father, as you know, has never been within a theatre in his life; is it likely that he can look with calmness upon his daughter marrying a man whose livelihood is to be gained in a scandalous and debasing profession?"
"Father, I cannot listen to your talking of Mike like that. If it is wrong to make people innocently happy, to make them laugh and forget their troubles, to--to--well, if it's wrong to be Mike--I'm sorry; but, wrong or right, I love him, and nothing will ever make me give him up."
Mrs. Mesurier here interrupted, "I told you, James, how it would be. You cannot change young hearts. The times are not the same as when you and I were young; and, though I'm sure I don't want to go against you, I think you are too hard on Esther. Love is love after all--and Mike's one of the best-hearted lads that ever walked."
"Thank you, mother," said Esther, impulsively, throwing her arms round her mother's neck, and bursting into tears, "I--I will never give--give--him up."
"No, dear, no; now don't distress yourself. It will all come right. Your father doesn't quite understand." And then a great tempest of sobbing came over Esther, and swept her away to her own room.
The father and mother turned to each other with some anger.
"James, I'm surprised at your distressing the poor child like that to-night; you might have known she would be sensitive, with Mike only gone to-day! You could surely have waited till to-morrow."
"I am surprised, Mary, that you can encourage her as you did. You cannot surely uphold the theatre?"
"Well, James, I don't know,--there are theatres and theatres, and actors and actors; and there have been some very good men actors after all, and some very bad men ministers, if it comes to that," she added; "and theatre or no theatre, love's love in spite of all the fathers and mothers in the world--"
"All right, Mary, I would prefer then that we spoke no more on the matter for this evening," and James Mesurier turned to his diary, to record, along with the state of the weather, and the engagements of the day, the undutiful conduct of Esther, and a painful difference with his wife.
Strange, that men who have themselves loved and begotten should thus for a moment imagine that a small social prejudice, or a narrow religious formula, can break the purpose of a young and vigorous passion. Do they realise what it is they are proposing to obstruct? This is love--_love_, my dear sir, at once the mightiest might, and the rightest right in the universe! This is--Niagara--the Atlantic--the power of the stars--and the strength of the tides. It is all the winds of the world, and all the fires of the centre. You surely cannot be serious in asking it to take, in exchange, some obsolete objection against its beloved! _