_ CHAPTER V. OF THE LOVE OF ESTHER AND MIKE, AND THE MESURIER LAW IN REGARD TO "SWEETHEARTS"
I'm afraid Esther was little more than fourteen when she had first seen and fallen in love with Mike. She had heard much of him from her brother; but, for one reason or another, he had never been to the house. One evening, however, at a concert, Henry had told her to look in a certain direction and she would see Mike.
"I don't suppose you'll call him good looking," he said.
So Esther had looked round, and seen the pretty curly red hair and the eager little wistful humorous face for the first time.
"Why, he's got a lovely little face!" she said, blushing deeply for no reason at all,--except perhaps that there had seemed something pleading and shelter-seeking in that little face, something that cried out to be "mothered," and that instantly there had welled up in her heart a great warm wish that some day she might be that for it and more.
And at the same instant it had occurred to the boy, that the face thus turned to him for a moment was the loveliest face he had ever seen, the only lovely face he would ever care to see. But with that thought, too, had come a curious pang of hopelessness into his heart. For Esther Mesurier was one of those girls who are the prizes of men. With all those pretty tall fellows about her, it was unlikely indeed that she would care for a little red-headed, face-pulling ragamuffin like him! And yet if she never could care for him,--never, never at all, what a lonely place the world would be!
When, after the concert, Henry looked round to introduce Mike to his sister, he had somehow slipped away and was nowhere to be seen.
However, it was not long after this that Mike paid a visit to Henry's study one evening, and, coming ostensibly to look at his books, once more saw his sister, and spoke to her a brief introductory word. His interest in literature became positively remarkable from this time; and the enthusiasm with which his actor's mind reflected, and, no doubt in all good faith, mimicked the various philosophical and literary enthusiasms of his friend, was, though neither realised it, a sure earnest of his future. More and more frequent visits to that study became necessary for its gratification; and, in the course of one of them, Mike confessed to Henry that he loved his sister, previously piling upon himself many anticipatory terms of ignominy for daring to do so presumptuous a thing. Henry, however, was so taken with the idea that, in his singleness of mind, he suffered no pang of retrospective suspicion of his friend's love for himself. Pending Esther's decision,--and of her mind in the matter, he had something more than a glimmering,--he welcomed Mike with gladness as a prospective brother-in-law, and, as soon as he found an opportunity, left them alone together, returning quite a long time afterwards--to find them extraordinarily happy, it would appear, at his safe return.
Esther and Mike had thus been fortunate enough to get that important question of a mate settled quite early in life, and to be saved from those arduous and desolating experiments in being fitted with a heart which so many less happy people have to go through. But this happy fact was as yet a secret beyond this strict circle of three; for, strange as it may sound, the beautiful attraction of a girl for a boy, the beautiful worship of a boy for a girl, were matters not even mentionable as yet in the Mesurier household. For a child, particularly a girl, under twenty to speak of having a "sweetheart" was an offence which had a strong savour of disgust in it, even for Mrs. Mesurier, broad-minded as in most matters she was.
So far as the only decent theory of the relations of the sexes was involuntarily explicit, by virtue of certain explosions on the subject, it was something like this: That, at a certain age, say twenty-one, or, for leniency, twenty, as it were on the striking of a clock, the young girl, who previously had been profoundly and inexpressibly unconscious that the male being existed, would suddenly sit up wide awake in an attitude of attention to offers of marriage; and that, similarly, the young man, who had meanwhile lived with his eyes shut and his senses asleep, would jump up also at the striking of a clock, and, as it were, with hilarity, say, "It is high time I chose a wife," and thereupon begin to look about, among the streets and tennis-parties known to him, for that impossible paragon,--a wife to satisfy both his parents.
One or two of Henry's earliest troubles and most drastic punishments had come of a propensity to "sweethearts," developed at an indecorously early age, and in fact at the time of which I write he could barely recall the name of Miss This or Miss The Other by the association of ancient physical pangs suffered for their sake. The greatest danger to such contraband passions was undoubtedly the post; for, in the Mesurier household, a more than Russian censorship was exercised over the incoming and--as far as it could be controlled--the outgoing mail. One old morning, at family breakfast, which the subsequent events of the evening were to fix on his mind, Henry Mesurier had grown white with fear, as the stupid maid had handed him a fat letter addressed in a sprawling school-girl's hand.
"Who is your letter from, Henry?" asked the father.
Henry blushed and boggled.
"Pass it over to me."
Resistance was worse than useless. As in war-time a woman will see her husband set up against a wall and shot before her face, as a conspirator sees the hands of the police close upon papers of the most terrible secrecy, so did Henry watch that scented little package pass with a sense of irrevocable loss into the cold hands of his father. The father opened it, placed a little white enclosure by the side of his coffee-cup for further inspection, and then read the letter--full of "darlings" and "for evers"--with the severe attention he would have given a business letter. Then he handed it across to the mother without a word, but with the look one doctor gives another in discovering a new and terrible symptom in a patient on whom they are consulting. While the mother read, the father opened the little packet, and out rolled a tiny plait of silky brown hair tied into a loop with a blue ribbon.
"Disgusting!" exclaimed the father and mother, simultaneously, to each other, as though the boy was not there.
"I am shocked at you, Henry," said the mother.
"I shall certainly write to the forward little girl's parents," said the father.
"Oh, don't do that, father," exclaimed the boy, in terror, and half wondering if so sweet a thing could really be so criminal.
"Don't dare to speak to me," said the father. "Leave the breakfast-table. I will see you again this evening."
Henry knew too well what the verb "to see" signified under the circumstances, and the day passed in such apprehensive gloom that it was a positive relief, when evening had at last come, to feel a walking-cane about him, at once more snaky and more notched than any previously applied to his stubborn young frame. Not to cry was, of course, a point of honour; and as the infuriating absence of tears inflamed the righteous anger of the parent, the stick splintered and broke with a crash, in which accident Henry learned he was responsible for a double offence.
"I wouldn't have broken that stick for five pounds," said the father, his interest suddenly withdrawn from his son; "it was given to me by my old friend Tarporley," which, as can be imagined, was a mighty satisfaction to the sad small soul, smarting, not merely from the stick, but from the sense that life held something stupid in its injustice, in that he was thus being mauled for the most beautiful exalted feeling that had ever visited his young heart.
Those dark ages of oppression were long since passed for Henry and Esther, when Mike began to steal in of an evening to see Esther, and they were only referred to now and again, anecdotally, as the nineteenth century looks back at the days of the Holy Inquisition; but still it was wise to be cautious, for an interdict against Mike's coming to the house was quite within possibility, even in this comparatively enlightened epoch; and that would have been even more effective than James Mesurier's old friend Tarporley's stick of sacred memory. _