CONTRIBUTIONS TOWARDS A GENEALOGY

The egregious Miss Bashkirtseff did not greatly fascinate Esther. Her egotism was too hard, too self-bounded, even for egotism, and there was generally about her a lack of sympathy. Her passion for fame had something provincial in its eagerness, and her broadest ideals seemed to become limited by her very anxiety to compass them. Even her love of art seemed a form of snobbery. In all these young Mesuriers there was implicit,--partly as a bye-product of the sense of humour, and partly as an unconscious mysticism,--a surprising instinct for allowing the successes of this world their proper value and no more. Even Esther, who was perhaps the most worldly of them all, and whose ambitions were largely social, as became a bonny girl whom nature had marked out to be popular, and on whom, some day when Mike was a great actor,--and had a theatre of his own!--would devolve the cares of populous "at home" days, bright after-the-performance suppers, and all the various diplomacies of the popular wife of fame,--even Esther, however brilliant her life might become, would never for a moment imagine that such success was a thing worth winning, at the expense of the smallest loss to such human realities as the affection she felt for Mike and Henry. To love some one well and faithfully, to be one of a little circle vowed to eternal fidelity one to the other,--such was the initial success of these young lives; and it was to make them all their days safe from the dangers of more meretricious successes.

All the same, though the chief performer in Marie Bashkirtseff's "Confessions" interested her but little, the stage on which for a little while she had scolded and whimpered did interest her--for should it not have been her stage too, and Henry's stage, and Dot's stage, father's and mother's stage too? You had only to look at father to realise that nature had really meant him for the great stage; here in Sidon, what was he but a god in exile, bending great powers and a splendid character upon ridiculously unimportant interests? Indeed, was not his destiny, more or less, their destiny as a family? Henry would escape from it through literature, and she through Mike. But what of Dot, what of Mat, not yet to speak of "the children"?

All she envied Marie Bashkirtseff was her opportunity. Great Goddess Opportunity! So much had come to Marie in the cradle, and came daily to a hundred thousand insignificant aristocratic babes, to approach which for the Mesuriers, even ten years too late, meant convulsions of the home, and to attain which in any satisfactory degree was probably impossible. French, for example, and music! Why, if so disposed, Marie Bashkirtseff might have read old French romances at ten, and to play Chopin at an earlier age was not surprising in the opportunitied, so-called "aristocratic" infant. Oh, why had they not been born like the other Sidonians, whose natures and ideals had been mercifully calculated to the meridian of Sidon! Why didn't they think the Proudfoots and the Wilkinsons and the Wagstaffs, and other local nobody-somebodies, people of importance, and why did they think the mayor a ludicrous upstart, and the adjacent J.P. a sententious old idiot? Far better to have rested content in that state of life to which God had called them. To talk French, or to play Chopin! What did it matter? In one sense nothing, but in another it mattered like other convenient facilities of life. To the immortal soul it mattered nothing, but to the mortal social unit it made life the easier, made the passage of ideas, the intercourse of individualities, the readier, and, in general, facilitated spiritual and intellectual, as well as social, communication. To be first-rate in your instincts, in all your fibres, and third-rate in your opportunities,--that was a bitter indignity of circumstance.

This sub-conscious sense of aristocracy--it must be observed, lest it should have been insufficiently implied--was almost humorously dissociated in the minds of the young Mesuriers from any recorded family distinctions. In so far as it was conscious, it was defiantly independent of genealogy. Had the Mesuriers possessed a coat-of-arms, James Mesurier would probably have kept it locked up as a frivolity to be ashamed of, for it was a part of his Puritanism that such earthly distinctions were foolishness with God; but, as a matter of fact, between Adam and the immediate great-grandparents of the young Mesuriers, there was a void which the Herald's office would have found a difficulty in filling. This it never occurred to them to mind in the least.

It was one of Henry's deep-sunken maxims that "a distinguished product implied a distinguished process," and that, at all events, the genealogical process was only illustratively important. It would have been interesting to know how they, the Mesuriers, came to be what they were. In the dark night of their history a family portrait or two, or an occasional reference in history, would have been an entertaining illumination--but, such not being forthcoming, they were, documentally, so much the less indebted to their progenitors. Yet if they had only been able to claim some ancestor with a wig and a degree for the humanities, or some beautiful ancestress with a romantic reputation! One's own present is so much more interesting for developing, or even repeating, some one else's past. And yet how much better it was to be as they were, than as most scions of aristocratic lineage, whose present was so often nothing and their past everything. How humiliating to be so pathetically inadequate an outcome of such long and elaborate preparation,--the mouse of a genealogical mountain! Yes, it was immeasurably more satisfactory to one's self-respect to be Something out of Nothing, than Nothing out of Everything. Here so little had made so much; here so much had made--hardly even a lord. It was better for your circumstances to be inadequate for you, than you to be inadequate for your circumstances.

Henry had amused himself one day in making a list of all their "ancestors" to whom any sort of worldly or romantic distinction could attach, and it ran somewhat as follows:--

(1) A great-grandmother on the father's side, fabled to live in some sort of a farm-house chÂteau in Guernsey, who once a year, up till two years ago, when she died, had sent them a hamper of apples from Channel Island orchards. Said "chÂteau" believed by his children to descend to James Mesurier, but the latter indifferent to the matter, and relatives on the spot probably able to look after it.

(2) A great-grandfather on the mother's side given to travel, a "rolling-stone," fond of books and talk, and rich in humanity. Surviving still in a high-nosed old silhouette.

(3) A grand-uncle on the father's side who was one of Napoleon's guard at St. Helena!

(4) A grandfather on the mother's side, who used to design and engrave little wooden blocks for patterns on calico-stuffs, and whose little box of delicate instruments, evidently made for the tracing of lines and flowers, was one of the few family heirlooms.

(5) A grandmother on the father's side of whom nothing was known beyond the beautiful fact that she was Irish.

(6) A grandfather on the father's side who was a sea-captain, sailing his own ship (barque "the Lucretia") to the West Indies, and who died of yellow fever, and was buried, in the odour of romance, on the Isthmus of Panama.

(7) An uncle who had also been a sea-captain, and who, in rescuing a wrecked crew from an Australian reef, was himself capsized, and after a long swim finally eaten by a shark,--said shark being captured next day, and found to contain his head entire, two gold rings still in his ears, which he wore for near-sightedness, after the manner of common sailors, and one of which, after its strange vicissitudes, had found a resting-place in the secretaire of his brother, James Mesurier.

Such was the only accessible "ancestry" of the Mesuriers, and it is to be feared that the last state of the family was socially worse than the first. James Mesurier was unapproachably its present summit, its Alpine peak; and he was made to suffer for it no little by humble and impecunious relatives. Still, whatever else they lacked, Henry Mesurier loved to insist that these various connections were rich in character, one or two of them inexhaustible in humour; and their rare and somewhat timorous visits to the castle of their exalted relative, James Mesurier, were occasions of much mirthful embarrassment to the young people. Here the reader is requested to excuse a brief parenthetical chapter by way of illustration, which, if he pleases, he may skip without any loss of continuity in the narrative, or the least offence in the world to the writer. This present chapter will be found continued in chapter sixteen.