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.