My last word of him was in an ill-scrawled, childish letter from a schoolmate: 'Mr. Cushion is dead; the doctor gave him some medicine and he died.' I was old enough to have a certain gladness mingle with my regret. The shadow was lifted; there were no more crooked roads to travel; my old friend was at rest.
It was my next old gentleman who introduced me to Shakespeare and the 'lean and slippered pantaloon.' A wicked sense of the appropriateness of the quotation flashed into my mind as he read it; I wondered, in fact, if the Bard of Avon had been shuffling around in dressing-gown and carpet slippers when it was written. Yet this untidy old man, who loved Shakespeare, reveled in Shelley, and wrote heroic verse and Greek dramas by the sackful, had, they told me, been a brilliant soldier, the pick and pride of his regiment, the model in dress and deportment of all the fresh recruits. Surely the irony of fate is something more than rhetoric.
If he wrote in lighter vein, he had lived in tragedy; between The Skylark and Under the Greenwood Tree we had glimpses of bloody battlefield, of disease-reeking, famine-scourged Southern prisons, of narrow escapes, and men hunted like wild beasts.
Very proud was my old friend when my own blundering thoughts first shaped themselves in verse; I doubt if Hamlet on his first appearance received such an ovation. And then one night the sacks of manuscript were packed, the little trunk strapped, and the daylight train bore away, we never knew whither, one who left word to no one, but three books—the battered Shakespeare, Shelley minus his cover, and a first edition of Whittier—to a little girl.
No word has come out of the silence, but when I am making air castles I like to think that some summer night I shall visit the Parthenon and find my old friend writing Greek dramas in the moonlight.
After that my old gentlemen began to come in pairs and trios, so that they seldom threw such a clearly focused memory. The one whom I loved best was not really the best known; we were both too shy to realize in time how much we might have been to each other. He was a gentle, quiet, courtly man; I remember that I always involuntarily looked for the pages holding up my court train of velvet and ermine when he bowed to me: a scholarly man, whom one would have taken for some gifted professor or polished diplomat: and he was in fact an Indian scout, known the length of the West for his courage and fidelity and unshakable honor. He would have stood with his life to a promise given the blackest renegade that ever harried his trail.
I knew in a vague way that his was a name in history; but we were always too busy with Sir Edwin Arnold and the Vedas and Mahatmas to talk of that. I can see him now throwing back the silver hair from a face as fine as some old marble Jove, and repeating the Sanskrit tales or the lines he loved best:—
| 'Such as thou shalt see not self-subduing do no deed of good, |
| In youth or age, in household or in wood: |
| It needs not man should pass by th' Orders Four |
| To come to Virtue; doing right is more |
| Than to be twice born: therefore wise men say |
| Easy and excellent is Virtue's way.' |
Fit words for him who subdued himself with such gentle patience to years of blindness; never saying 'Is the sun shining?' but 'How beautiful the hills are in the sunshine!' It was always daylight in his soul, till he slept at last in the sunniest corner of his beloved hills.
There are many dear old gentlemen still; indeed, now that I think of it, I have known but one young man at all intimately, and him I have not met face to face. Homer and Odysseus have been such satisfying friends to me that I have not missed Paris and Adonis. The flavor of old wine has been too long on my lips for me to change now, and I shall be well content to have it said of me at last: 'Here lieth one who had the friendship of old men and little children's love.'