Adventures in indigence, and other essays

by Laura Spencer Portor

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.