Young Lives | Page 4

for their effect
upon his character. He was strong, good, clever, and handsome, and exceptionally all
those four good reasons for loving him; and the intellectual sympathy, the sharing of
broader interests, which she sometimes missed in him, she had for some three or four
years come to find in her eldest son, who, to his father's bewilderment and
disappointment, had reincarnated his own strong will, in connection with literary
practices and dreams which threatened to end in his becoming a poet, instead of the
business man expected of him, for which development that love of poetry in one parent,
and a certain love of books in both, was no doubt to some degree guiltily responsible.
James Mesurier, as we have said, was no judge of poetry; and, had he been so, a reading
of his son's early effusions would have made him still more obdurate in the choice 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