39
She was his maternal cousin, and his parents were keen that he should return from China to marry her. He said that he had made many lame excuses—which his parents had interpreted to be that his business was going so well that he dare not leave it [his usual ebullient tendency to exaggerate doubtless led them to assume he was making a fortune, and his brother, John, was therefore persuaded by their parents to travel out to China to let Mesny return home to marry]. However, Mesny's business was not sufficiently adequate for him to consider marrying anyone, not even the girl in Hankow, despite the Hankow girl having money of her own, and in addition, Mesny did not feel ready to marry and did not do so. He tells us that the Hankow girl went down to Shanghai, where she married a young man ‘whose name was still [in 1899] a household word, though husband and wife had long since been absent from the scene of their former experience in matrimony and other matters.'
Despite the view he held about marrying a girl from his own country, he married Chinese women, one immediately after the other. The local girl back in the Channel Islands, his cousin, Lydia, whom his parents wished him to marry, appears to have dropped out of the picture in the late 1860s or early 1870s, when he married his first Chinese woman, probably by Chinese rites first, followed by a western marriage at the Hankow Consulate some years later. He was still sending verses to Lydia in 1868 and, incidentally, writing a letter a month to his old father in Jersey.
We have little idea what happened to either his first or second wife. We know that the second was legally separated from him and had taken half his worldly wealth with her. Why did he move back to Hankow for his last years? He left Shanghai in 1914... the unanswered question is whether his wife's obtaining a legal separation led to his move from Shanghai to Hankow? Another oddity involved his only son, who moved from Hankow to Shanghai to work, in his early thirties, at about the same time as his father moved back to Hankow from Shanghai. Mesny's son-in-law was a British businessman who, at some stage, lived and worked in Ningpo, not too far from Shanghai, and yet Mesny moved in the other direction to Hankow, where he had acquired a menial job with a long-standing British firm until he died.
We do not know anything about his relationships with his son and daughter, particularly in later years. At the time of his death, his only son would have been 34 and probably married. His daughter, Marie,