Miss Esperance and Mr Wycherly

by L. Allen Harker

"His spiritual condition!" Mr. Wycherly repeated vaguely. "Montagu's! He is surely a very young boy to have attained to a—spiritual condition?"

"That's just it," said Miss Esperance, despair in her voice, and grave disquietude writ large upon her face. "That's just it. Would you not say that he was far too young to be assailed by doubts? Would you not expect so young a child to accept the teaching of our religion without question or rebellion? And yet Montagu—" Here poor Miss Esperance again faltered, then by a mighty effort forcing herself to voice the dreadful thing—"told me to-day, when I was hearing him the Shorter Catechism, that he intended to become an Epicurean when he was grown up! What are we to do with him?"

It was well for Mr. Wycherly that his face was in shadow, for although his mouth remained quite grave, there were little puckers round the corners of his eyes, not wholly to be accounted for by the lines that time had drawn there. He coughed slightly, and cleared his throat. "Am I, dear Miss Esperance, to gather that you think I am in some degree to blame for Montagu's unregenerate frame of mind?" he asked gently.

"Not to blame!" she hastily ejaculated. "Not to blame! But perhaps he is learning rather too much about those old days, those unenlightened heathen times, and evidently you render it all so entertaining that he gets rather carried away, and is unable to distinguish between what is mere fable and what is historical, vital truth. He is very little," she continued pleadingly. "Do you think it is quite wholesome for him to learn so much mythology? Don't you think it is apt to unsettle him?"

Mr. Wycherly was silent for a minute. "Do you know," he asked suddenly, "that with the exception of the little 'gilt-books' you had as a child, we haven't a single child's book in the house? Perhaps I was wrong to discuss any school of philosophy with him—but as regards mythology, I have only told Montagu such stories as are in reality the foundation of most of the child-stories that have ever been written. I don't think they have really hurt him, and such knowledge will be of use to him by and by."

"But why should he seem positively to dislike proper religious instruction?" persisted Miss Esperance. "I am sure that when I was a child it never occurred to me to do other than learn what was set me with the greatest reverence. Montagu's critical and rebellious attitude was undreamt of in my young days."

"Montagu has a curiously analytic mind," said Mr. Wycherly slowly, "and a passionate longing for pleasantness and gaiety. It is probably inherited. You remember dear Archie loved cheerfulness, and perhaps that poor young mother—a Cornish girl, if I remember rightly—perhaps she, too, had the Southern love of colour and brightness in life. We are old people to have to do with children, Miss Esperance, and I—perhaps my aim has been too exclusively to teach Montagu to love study by making the approach to it as pleasant as possible. It is a great temptation, for I find him so docile, so receptive, so eager to please. But perhaps I have been wrong—though Socrates would bear me out. It is pleasant to wander in the Elysian fields with a young boy—but if you think—" Mr. Wycherly's voice had dropped almost to a whisper, and here he paused altogether. He seemed to have been talking to himself rather than to Miss Esperance, and to be looking past her into that pleasaunce of memory which is the priceless heritage of the old. Miss Esperance did not interrupt him, and presently he went on again. "Perhaps the recollection of my own mother that is clearest to me is that of seeing her come dancing down a garden path toward me. To me now she seems so inexpressibly young, and gay, and gracious; and I have remembered her more distinctly lately, because the other day when I was reading with Montagu that portion of the Odyssey which describes Nausicaa at play among her maidens, he interrupted me to exclaim: 'My mother was like that, so beautiful!' Now he has never spoken to me of his mother before. I did not even know that he remembered her, and it has made me think of how distinctly I remember my own. She was not five and twenty when she died."

Miss Esperance sat upright in Mr. Wycherly's chair, the lamplight falling full on her troubled face. In spite of her ready sympathy, a sympathy so spontaneous that it seemed to give itself at all times independently of her volition, she felt that her dear old friend was wandering from the real question at issue. It was all very well to point out that Montagu loved beauty. She was perfectly aware of it herself, and it was not without an agreeable thrill that she recalled a little scene enacted that very evening. Montagu, according to custom, had been reading aloud to her from one of the very "Gilt-Books" Mr. Wycherly had mentioned, when the child came upon the somewhat gratuitous and ungrammatical assertion with regard to the fleeting character of personal beauty: "People's faces soon alter; when they grow old, nobody looks handsome."

Then Montagu brought his fist down on the page with a thump, declaring indignantly: "That's nonsense! You and Mr. Wycherly are both old—and you are quite beautiful. There's a beautiful oldness as well, don't you think so, Aunt Esperance?"

The delicate colour that came and went so easily flushed her face as Miss Esperance met the child's eager, admiring eyes. "For none more than children are concerned for beauty, and, above all, for beauty in the old." She not only thought so, but knew so; but it was not the custom for women of her stamp to acknowledge that they took any sort of interest in their personal appearance, and although she was distinctly gratified, she merely shook her head, saying gravely: "What the writer would point out, Montagu, is this—that without beauty of character mere personal beauty is of but small account."