Part 8

Doctor Highway loved truth, he hated falsehood, and this with so much fervor and so little compromise that he was pointed out by some as an atheist. He was perpetually inviting argument, but he, or she, had courage who accepted the invitation. Once, when he expatiated on the marvels of mechanical music-boxes, an older sister of mine, in her early teens, ventured boldly into the open with the tentative remark that, wonderful as such music might be, might it not nevertheless lack soul?

I can see him still. He jerked sharply in his chair. He flung his penetrating glance at her and at her only. He said, with a sharpness that had all the effect of anger, "_What do you mean by SOUL_!!"

You have seen a too bold rabbit scuttle into a hole at the near sound of a gun. My sister to outward appearances was still there; but to outward appearances only. She was indeed gone, vanished, obliterated, annihilated--disappeared as effectually as though the earth had swallowed her up. I have no record of the time when she again ventured into the open, but I would be willing to think it was not for years.

I remember supper-tables at which his conversations and brilliancy presided. I remember sharp revolutionary statements that fell from him as to Jonah and the whale, the flood; geological testimony as to the length of time consumed in the creation of the world; all given with his fine clear face lit up with a kind of righteous indignation, and his hand brought down at last so that the glass and silver and myself jumped suddenly.

No thunderbolt fell on the house those nights, though I watched for it with anxious waiting. Sometimes I think his was the beginning of my own courage; for whatever moral bravery was in me rose, I think, to honor this greater courage of his--a subaltern saluting a superior officer. When he was by I listened, fascinated. In these long years since he is gone, I too have loved truth; and I could wish for him now, sometimes, that the too-complacent guests and cutlery and glassware of our modern dinner-tables might be so startled and shocked by the thunder of as righteous a sincerity.

There was also--how warmly contrasted with Doctor Highway!--the young Byronic musician with the extraordinary tenor voice. He was the pride of his family, and to their dismay was resolved to go on the opera stage. He treated me as an equal and, dispensing largesse, wrote in my autograph book one day, in a fine stirring hand: "Music my only love, the only bride I'll ever claim." Later, it is true, he seemed to have repented his resolve and forgotten the album, for I believe that he claimed some two brides besides music; but this did not alter his educational value; that remained unspoiled.

There was, too, that great flashing fiery star, Mrs. Rankin, at work at the time of her visit on a drama, "Herod and Mariamne." She had a mannish face; she wore heavy rings on somewhat mannish hands, and was, no doubt,--it is now revealed to me,--an unclassified suffragette, born untimely, denied, cut off by the custom of those days from the delights of militancy, foredoomed to pass out of life with never the joy of smashing a single window.

She talked much of injustice. She had a big voice and a small opinion of men. This it is not unreasonable to suppose they reciprocated with a still more diminutive opinion of her.

One might think from all this that she should have been a pamphleteer. She was not. She was by all odds and incongruities a poetess, driven by the inexorable muse to daily sessions with Mariamne. Mariamne! Ah, what a subject for her--for _her_!

She must have absolute quiet. She must be undisturbed. During her stay we would romp in from our play to find my mother with a finger on her lips. Above stairs Mrs. Rankin might be pacing her room, declaiming, to the hearing of her own judicial ear only, the speeches of Mariamne, delivered in the voice of Herod, and the speeches of Herod, in a voice that should have been that of Mariamne. I can still hear the long pace and stride overhead.

Lest her type seem too strange, perhaps, it was explained to us, what Plato explained long ago, that a poet is rapt wholly out of himself and is as one possessed of the gods.

Then, too, which brought her nearer to our sympathies, my mother conveyed to us the more homely knowledge that Mrs. Rankin had had much unhappiness in her life; some Herod of her own, I believe. This secured to her our more willing respect and laid on us more than the ordinary obligation of courtesy. This virtue on our part was obliged to be its own reward, for there was no other that I can recall.

These people, you will note, were not bound to us by ties of blood. They were rather relations, rich or poor relations, of the spirit. I am bound also to tell of other guests than these: of those who by virtue of tradition and blood we more wontedly call "our own"; men and women of my mother's and father's families; aunts and uncles and "relatives," as we say.

But before I pass on to these, there is need to mention one more, at least, of the relations of the spirit--that one to me most memorable of them all; the young dramatist-poet, with his flying tie and his heavy hair, to whose romantic name--Eugene Ashton--I would how gladly have prefixed the title "Cousin" had I but been entitled to it; who was nevertheless cousin-german to the spirit of me, or closer still, a kind of brother-of-dreams. He had been into distant countries of the soul--that was clear by a far-away look in his eyes. I used to sit wordless and well-behaved in his presence, but I slipped my soul's hand in his, very friendly, the while; I wandered far with him into realms of fancy, and counted his approval and the merest glance he gave me as very nearly the most desirable thing I could attain to.

I can see him still, and those gray eyes of his, as young as the young moon and as many centuries old; I can still hear his very noble voice, reciting from time to time, as he was wont to do, some of his own verses. Or I can see him leaning forward, his gracious body bending into the firelight, to talk over with my sympathetic mother his plans for recognition and fame.

How little we guessed that his life was even then near to its setting! When one sees the morning star in the dawn, or Hesper in the twilight, hanging limpid, golden, one does not wonder will its glory be long or short; so much it holds one with its immortal loveliness, that little thought is given to the near-by day, or the night which shall quench it.

The other stars, Miss Lou Brooks, Mrs. Rankin, and the rest, shone long and high in the firmament of my childhood; but the mellow light of the gifts of Eugene Ashton, like the more splendid Hesper, hung low, already low on the horizon.

I shall not forget that morning we heard of his death. "Eugene Ashton is dead!" The news was not kept from us children. Yet I remember, too, that beyond the first sorrow and shock of such news lay a pardonable pride. He had loved our home; he had found comfort and rest of spirit there. I could still see his gray eyes looking into the firelight, and the bend of his gracious body, every inch of him a poet. There, with us, he had dared to be his best and had shared his gifts; his personality had lighted up those very rooms and his voice had sounded in them there where still my daily lot was cast. He had been our guest--to me the most memorable of them all. And now he was gone. Where? A kind of glory followed the thought. He was gone down over the rim of the horizon of life to the land of Death, as splendid there as here. We had lost him, whereas he, you see, had only lost us. It was our lives that were darkened, not his. It was on our lives, not on his, that the night fell. So he also, having been as a "morning star among the living," now, having died, was

... as Hesperus giving New splendor to the dead.

II

KITH AND KIN

So far, in mentioning the many guests who frequented the old home of my childhood, I have named only such as were relations of the spirit. Often these seemed to me more truly my kindred than those whose kinship was based upon ties of blood. Yet, as my memory brings before me those men and women of my mother's and father's families, I find myself aware that the bonds of blood are strong, strong.

These came bearing valid claim of right and title; these were not to be gainsaid or denied; these were accompanied by silent, but how indisputable, witnesses of feature and form. Whether I liked them or not, these were "my own."

But their chief power over me lay in this--that they linked my life openly to all that of the past which I could call mine. The older of them, who sometimes laid their hands on my head, touched with the other hand, as it were, the generation already gone. They still carried vivid memories of the dead in their hearts; spoke familiar words of them; or, perhaps, wore delicate pictures of them still in lockets at their throats. The invisible past was theirs visibly.

The Greeks, that people of sound ideals and of incomparable taste for living, did not consent to or admit of the departure of the older generation. To the invisible hands of the _lares_ and _penates_ was delivered the sacredness of the house itself. The spirits of the "departed" commemorated its lintels, kept clean and bright the fires of the hearth, guarded the home from evil if so might be, and gathered into a sweet influence those traits and characteristics and deeds long gone in the flesh and surviving in the spirit in some fine aroma of living.

It was, I believe, somewhat in the manner of the _lares familiares_ that the clan of our older "blood-kin," both those of a past and those of a very nearly past generation, added meaning to that old home of my childhood.

My great-aunts and great-uncles brought with them the spirits of ancestors, were, in a sense, abodes of ancestors themselves. An older generation looked out of their eyes; the spirits of men and women long gone still lingered with them. It lent a dignity to life.

We children stood aside while they passed by in front of us. We saw them served at table and elsewhere to the best of everything. To them, too, as to the _lares_, were given the first and best portions of viands. We listened to them as though to oracles speaking. It was for us to allow the rivers of their broader wisdom to flow undisturbed by that kind of stone-throwing, pebble-skipping curiosity so noticeable in the average liberated child of to-day. Into their fine flowing streams of narrative we flung no big or little stones of our questions or our egotism. Their talk rippled on or flowed stately.

"We were under full canvas,"--I can see the fine-featured old gentleman yet,--"we were in a zone of tempests, sailing round the Horn"--a wave of the hand here, and a pause.

What is "full canvas"? What is a "zone"? What is "Horn"? Indeed, we did not know. Be sure we did not interrupt the narrator to ask--not more than the audience arrests the ghost in "Hamlet" for exact definitions when it mouths out the sorrowful hollow words, "unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled."

The words defined themselves well enough for all practical and spiritual purposes. The mere sound of them was much, and the manner of saying them was much more. We got no definitions of "full canvas," "zone," or "Horn," for future reference; but what we did get was a present sense of some of the great allied human experiences--the unpitying power of the sea, the dread of a soul brought face to face with shipwreck and death, the quick awful moving of the "imminent hand of God," the cry of a coward, the fierce bravery of a brave man ready to fling life away for the sake of his fellows; then, the sense of a great deliverance and what we take to be the mercy of God. And beyond all these, for good measure, pressed down and running over, we had added unto us additional respect for those older and more experienced than ourselves, and the sense of a fine tale told tellingly.

But I would not have you suppose that I found all the old ladies and all the old gentlemen delightful. Some of them I disliked and wished gone. A sense of justice compels me to believe, however,--putting aside all question as to whether they charmed or disappointed us, and considering them only as purely educative mediums,--that these visitors of an older generation are not surpassed, indeed, are rarely equaled, by any theory or practice of modern pedagogy.

If Miss Lou Brooks and Eugene Ashton and Dr. Highway taught us much of foreign lands and strange worlds and spiritual astronomies; if they instructed me besides in the poetry and romance of life, these others gave me a knowledge and love and understanding of other times, other manners; they were a kind of incarnate treatises in history and ethics, philosophy, and comparative philology.

What a lesson in history and manners was my great-aunt Sarah for instance!

She was tall and stately, a kind of reproof to the shallowness of later days. There was about her the refinement and delicacy of a rare old vase. She had been young once; this my reason told me, for, in her home, a large stone house called "Scarlet Oaks," hung a very beautiful portrait of her, a delicate, very young, translucent face, rising above the shimmering satin of a low-cut wedding gown. But for this I should have taken her to have been always old, in the sense, I mean, in which the piping forms of youth, the "brede of marble men and maidens," on Keats's Grecian urn are "forever young, forever fair." There was such a finality and finish about her, like something arrested in its perfection; such achievement, such delicate completeness, it seemed, as could not change! It appeared that, when old age should waste our own generation, that delicate loveliness of her would remain untouched. She seemed already to live above, to survive, what was perishable and trivial in her own day and ours.

She affected cashmere shawls and cameos, and wore long and very elaborate mitts, and was always spoken of as "delicate." "Aunt Sarah is very delicate." That, indeed, she was!

We all waited upon my aunt Sarah, from the greatest to the least. She was very fond of my father, and to hear her address him as "William," and treat him with the condescension one gives to a child,--he who had iron-gray hair,--and to see his eager and affectionate and wholly respectful response, was to see time flow back.

My great-aunt had two brothers, my uncle Hays and my uncle William, who still wore great pointed collars, and black stocks that wound around the throat several times, and broadcloth coats. But my great-uncles, unlike my great-aunt, seemed passing by. There was in their somewhat careful, sometimes feeble step a suggestion of treaty and capitulation, and from time to time, in their glance or actions, the pathos of childlikeness so much more frequent in the old of that sex than of the other.

Such types were rare, even in my day. There were only a few, a very few such men and women left then, guests of a twice older generation, visiting still, with a kind of retained graciousness, in the house of life from which they were soon finally to depart. By an enviable fate some six or eight of these men and women belonged to me. An air of grandeur came to the house with them as with the coming of the gods and goddesses in the old days; the human dwellings expanded, and the lintels grew tall.

You can guess, perhaps, whether we children ventured a word! Glory enough to be permitted to come as silent as mice to supper, while they were there!

Yet I would not be misleading. Even those of a twice older generation were by no means inevitably stately and imposing. History is not given over entirely to kings and queens. There was, for instance, my great-aunt Henrietta, of the "other side of the house." She was a wholly different type. She was little. She wore three puffs at either side of her face. These were held in place by little gray combs. She knew everybody's affairs, and her chief delight was in recounting them. She was a living chronicle, an accurate, if inglorious, historian; an intimate and personal account, with a mind for little happenings and a prodigious memory for events; a sort of Pepys in petticoats and neckerchief.

She was the oldest survivor of my mother's people. The family tree was in her keeping. But she cared little enough to dig about its deep roots. She took no delight, apparently in the dignity of its stem, or pride in the wide spread of its branches. Her entire pleasure, rather, was in the twittering and whispering of its leaves. There was something bird-like and flitting in her character, and she gossiped like a chaffinch.

In her flowed together the great strains on my mother's side, Spencer and Halsted, names to conjure with. She had, certainly, not less to be stately about than my great-aunt Sarah. She had plenty of ancestors to be proud of, and for a touch of romance, had danced the minuet with Lafayette, when she was a slip of a girl and he a guest in her grandfather's house; but she never appeared in the least proud of her people, only unfailingly entertained by them.

It was at an early age that I resolved to model my life after my aunt Sarah rather than after my aunt Henrietta; yet recalling my aunt Henrietta's memorable characteristics, and that about Lafayette, and the delightful side-puffs, and her searching comments on humanity, I am willing to admit that she was perhaps the more vivid lesson of the two. And if one counts the lasting distaste for gossip which I acquired by being obliged to listen respectfully, hours at a time, it seemed, while she continued to profess her little astonishments and "you-don't-say-so's!" to my mother, with the best end of her sentences always finished, inaudible to me, behind her fan, I am even prone to believe her to have been the more influential and educative of the two.

In those days, those days when visits were long and frequent, the bond of kinship was firmly established, and family characteristics were strong and vivid. These were _Halsteds_, _Spencers_, _Hamiltons_, _Ogdens_, _Portors_, and not to be mistaken, any more than you mistake now your reader for your speller, your history for your geography.

It seemed, it is true, that they were there but to visit; but how much were they there, though how little were they aware of it, to teach, to enlighten, to admonish! With them came the Halsted or Spencer or Portor imperiousness or graciousness or brains; the Halsted eyes, which were beautiful, and the Halsted tempers, which were not; with them came those obstinate egotisms, those devotions and ideals, those headstrong weaknesses, those gentle fortitudes which, strong in themselves, survived vividly from generation to generation.

My aunt Henrietta, my aunt Sarah and the rest, it was plain to be seen, were the earthly abodes of strong antecedent family spirits; and now, these bodily abodes doomed to decay, had not those spirits, strong and nimble, already begun to frequent the available lives of the younger generation, resolved on living yet in the day-lighted world, and visiting still the glimpses of the moon; hopeful, perhaps, in the younger generation, to correct some old folly; or willful, and determined, it might be, to pursue in some younger life the old fatality and mistakes?

This was what it meant, this and not less, when, often a little wistfully, the passing generation remarked certain likenesses. "Mary, how _much_ she is getting to be like William!" or, "Do you know, she reminds me of her great-grandmother Ferguson"; or, "She has the Portor eyes"; and sometimes, cryptically, so that I might not guess too clearly what it meant, "Very like the Halsteds."

All those things were, I believe, far more influential and educative than the unthinking will admit. They gave me much food for thought. They roused in me commendable emotions, or salutary dismays. Might I some day be like my aunt Sarah? Was I really like my father? Could I worthily be classed with these others? And traits not to be proud of--was I in danger from these? So cautions and hopes and worthinesses grew up in me under the fine influence of what might be called a study in "Comparative Characteristics." There is not alone a dignity, but a tenderness as well, lent to life by such a study of former and passing generations. The results of living much of my childhood in the presence of the past, serving tea to it, offering it the required courtesies, putting footstools under its feet, were, I believe, a certain abiding reverence for human nobility, and a pity for human faults and weaknesses, and more, a desire and hope for nobility in myself, and a haunting dread that some family weakness might reappear in me; and these, as valuable assets to education, I would not rank below the dates of the battles of Crécy and Poitiers, and the siege of Paris--none of which dates, though I once learned them carefully, have remained with me.

There is not space to tell of that nearer constellation of warm and bright stars, guests who were my mother's and father's intimate friends and contemporaries. Even if there were nothing else to recommend them, these were men and women who had lived through the Civil War in their prime. To sit on the knee of my ex-soldier uncle, and know that where my head leaned he carried in his breast-pocket a little Testament, with a bullet-hole in it but not quite through it--the Testament having saved his life and stopped the bullet from reaching his heart; and to sit on the knee of another uncle, who actually carried a bullet from Antietam about in his body, yes, and for all that, was the very gayest of the gay--these experiences were spelling-books of a higher order and readings in life not to be looked down on.

There were other uncles, who visited the house only in tradition, but were entertained there how warmly of my eager fancy,--their adventurous lives having ended before mine began,--who were memorable lessons in daring, in courtesy, and in spirit!

There was my uncle Robert, for instance, who, to escape, for his part, from my Chancellor grandfather's stern requirement that all of his seven sons should study law, ran away and went before the mast at eighteen, and at twenty-one came sailing home again, master of his own vessel.

She was called the Griffin. Ah, the Griffin! the Griffin! Though I never set foot upon her deck, how well I knew her, masts, spars, canvas, tar, and timber! How often I had stood in dreams, a little figure at the prow, my skirts and hair blown back by the wind, while we sailed the seas, she and I and her gallant crew, under the wise direction of my sailor uncle! How often had we sought and found, across the pathless ways, those places, vague, vague and far away, but known and endeared to me by the wonder and the romance of their names--China and Celebes, Madagascar and Gibraltar, the Azores and Canaries and Shetlands, Hebrides, Bermudas and the Spice Islands, Ceylon and the Andamans, Marseilles and Archangel and Valparaiso! How possible all of them were, how sure of access, without regard to limiting geography! Let but the Griffin weigh her anchor, and her sails be set! How far! how far!

Never mind that the Griffin's master was dead and buried in the sea he loved, before I was born! I contrived to live above these facts, as I did above geography. Could it be possible, do you think, that this my best-loved uncle did not know me when I knew him so well? Was I not, somehow and notwithstanding, one of his close kith and kin, on whom he looked fondly? His favorite niece, perhaps with a spirit of adventure to match his own?

There were other uncles besides, with lives full as romantic. I mention only this one, because I loved him best.