During the winter before Edgar went to Stoke-Newington, he had attended
an "infant school," in Richmond, taught by a somewhat gaunt, but
mild-mannered spinster, with big spectacles over her amiable blue eyes,
a starchy cap and a little bunch of frosty cork-screw curls on each side
of her face. As a child, she had played with Mr. Allan's father on their
native heath, in Ayrshire, and to her, little Edgar was always her "ain
wee laddie." She had spoiled him inordinately and unblushingly. Also, as
she contentedly drew at the pipe filled with the offerings of choice
smoking-tobacco which he frequently turned out of his pockets into her
lap, she had taught him to read in her own broad Scottish accent, and to
cypher.
She had furthermore drilled him in making "pothooks and hangers," with
which he covered his slate in neat rows, daily. But it was at the Manor
House, in Stoke-Newington, that he was initiated into the mysteries of
writing. His hands were as shapely as a girl's, with deft, taper fingers
that seemed made to hold a pen or brush, and he soon developed a neat,
small, but beautifully clear and graceful hand-writing.
This new accomplishment became at once a delight to him, and as time
went on opened a new world to Edgar the Dreamer, who now began, when he
could snatch an opportunity to do so unobserved, to put down upon paper
the visions of his awakening soul. Sometimes these scribblings took the
form of little stories--crudely conceived and incoherently expressed,
but rich in the picturesque thought and language of an exceptionably
imaginative and precocious child. Sometimes they were in verse. For
subjects these infant effusions had generally to do with the lonely
grave in the churchyard in Richmond and the sad joy of the heart that
mourns evermore; with the beauty of flowers--the more beautiful because
doomed to a brief life; with the Gothic steeple, asleep in the still,
blue air, and the bell in whose deep iron throat dwelt a note that was
hollow and ghostly; with the great wall around the Manor House grounds
and with the mighty gate that swung upon hinges in which the voice of a
soul in torment seemed to be imprisoned, and with other things which
filled him with a terror that
"was not fright,
But a tremulous delight."
His learning to write bore still another fruit.
When Mrs. Allan had first adopted him and set apart a room in her home
for him, she had placed in a little cabinet therein the packet of
letters his dying mother had given him. She had not opened the packet,
for she felt that the letters were for the actress's child's eye alone.
He, when he looked at it, did so with a feeling of mixed reverence and
fascination which was deepened by his inability to decipher the secrets
bound together by the bit of blue ribbon tied around it. How the sight
of the packet recalled to him that sad, that solemn hour in which it
had been given into his hands! When getting him ready for
boarding-school, Mrs. Allan had packed the letters with his other
belongings, for she was a woman of sentiment, and she felt the child
should not be parted from this gift of his dying mother. But at length,
when a knowledge of writing made it possible for him to read the
letters, he was possessed with a feeling of shrinking from doing so, as
one might shrink from opening a message from the grave.
What grim, what terrible secrets, might not the little bundle of letters
reveal!
It was not until his fifth and last year at Stoke-Newington that Edgar
decided one day to look into the packet. He was confined to his bed by
slight indisposition and so had the dormitory to himself and could risk
opening the letters without fear of interruption. He untied the blue
ribbon and the thin, yellowed papers, with fragments of their broken
seals still sticking to them, fell apart. He picked up the one bearing
the earliest date and began to read. It was from his father to his
mother immediately after their betrothal. His interest was at once
intensely aroused and in the order in which the letters came, he read,
and read, and read, with the absorption with which he might have read
his first novel. They were a revelation to him--a revelation of a world
he had not known existed, though it seemed, it lay roundabout him--these
love-letters of his parents, literally throbbing with the exalted
passion of two young, ardent, poetic spirits. The boy had not dreamed
that anything so beautiful could be as this undying love of which they
wrote and the language in which they made their sweet vows to each
other. His own heart throbbed in answer to what he read. His imagination
was violently wrought upon and exquisite feelings such as he had never
known before awakened in his breast.
Under the spell of the letters the child-poet fell in love--not with any
creature of flesh and blood, for his entire acquaintance and association
was with boys--but with the ideal of his inner vision. From that time,
his poetic outbursts came to be filled with--more than aught else--the
surpassing beauty, the worshipful goodness, the divine love of woman. He
was a naturally reverent boy, but for these more than mortal beings, as
they appeared to his fancy, was reserved the supreme worship of his
romantic soul. Indeed, the adoration of his ideal woman--perfect in
body, in mind and in soul, became, and was to be always, a religion to
him.
To imagine himself rescuing from a dark prison tower, hid in a deep
wood, or from a watery grave in a black and rock-bound lake, at
midnight, some lovely maiden whose every thought and heart-beat would
thenceforth be for him alone--this became the entrancing inward vision
of Edgar the Dreamer--the poet--the lover, at whom Edgar Goodfellow with
whisper as insistent as the voice of Conscience, scoffed and sneered,
seeking to make him ashamed; but all in vain.
Of course it was to follow, as the night the day, that the boy would
find someone in whom to dress his ideal. Upon a Sunday soon after his
falling in love, he saw the very maiden of his dreams in the flesh. It
was in the Gothic church. From the remote pew in the gallery where he
sat with his school-mates, he looked down upon a wonderful vision of
white and gold in one of the principal pews of the main aisle. Clad all
in white and with a shower of golden tresses falling over her shoulders,
she was like a glorious lily or a holy angel. Her eyes, uplifted in the
rapture of worship, he divined, rather than saw, were of the hue of
heaven itself. He loved her at once, with all his soul's might. Her
name? Her home? These were mysteries--sacred mysteries--whose
unfathomableness but added to her charm.
After that, service in the Gothic church was a much more important event
to The Dreamer than before--an event looked forward to with trembling
from Sunday to Sunday. After that too, upon his periodical week-day
walks with the school, he would look up at the quaint old homesteads
they passed, with their hedged gardens, ivied walls and sweet-scented
shrubberies, and try to guess which was the house-wonderful in which she
dwelt. Then suddenly, one sweet May afternoon, he discovered it.
It was, as was fitting, the most antique, the most distinguished mansion
of them all. He saw her through the bars of the stately entrance gate as
she sat beside her mother, on a garden-seat, tying into nosegays the
flowers that filled her lap. Stupified by the shock of the discovery, he
stood rooted to the ground, letting his school-mates go on ahead of him.
She was much nearer him than she had been in the dusky church, and upon
closer view, she seemed even more lovely, more flower-like, more angelic
than ever before. He stared upon her face with a gaze so compelling
that she looked up and smiled at him; then, with sudden impulse,
gathered her flowers in her apron, and running forward, handed him
through the gate, a fragrant, creamy bud that she happened at the moment
to have in her hand.
As in a dream, he stretched his fingers for it. He tried to frame an
expression of thanks, but his lips were dry and though they moved, no
sound came. She had returned at once to her seat beside her mother, and
the voice of the usher (who had just missed him) sharply calling to him
to "Come on!" was in his ears. He hurried forward, trembling in all his
limbs. Twice he stumbled and nearly fell. The bud, he had quickly hidden
within his jacket--it was too holy a thing for the profane eyes of his
school-fellows to look upon.
When strength and reason came back to him he was like a new being.
Happiness gave wings to his feet and he walked on air. A divine song
seemed to be singing in his ears. Mechanically, he went through the
regular routine of school, with no difference that others could see. To
himself, heart and soul--detached and divorced from his body--seemed
soaring in a new and beautiful world in which lessons and teachers had
no place, no part. Whenever it was possible for him to do so unobserved,
he would snatch the rose from his bosom and kiss and caress it. He only
lived to see Sunday come round.
But on the next Sunday and the next she was absent from her accustomed
place. Such a thing had not happened before since he had first seen her.
He was filled with the first real anxiety he had ever known. Here was a
mystery in which there was no charm!
The Wednesday after the second Sunday upon which he had missed her was a
day dropped out of heaven. The mild, early summer air that floated
through the open windows into the gloomy, oak-ceiled schoolroom, was
ambrosial with the breathings of flowers. Young Edgar could not fix his
thoughts upon the page before him. The out-of-door world was calling to
him. He found himself listening to the birds in the trees outside and
gazing through the narrow, pointed windows at the waving branches.
Suddenly his heart stopped. The deep, sweet, hollow, ghostlike voice of
the bell in the steeple, tolling for a funeral, was borne to his ears.
In a moment his fevered imagination associated the tolling with the
absence of his divinity from her pew, and in spite of passionately
assuring himself that it could not be, and recalling how lovely and full
of health she had been when he saw her through the gate, he was
possessed by deep melancholy.
The days and hours until Sunday seemed an age to him--an age of
foreboding and dread--but they at last passed by. In a fever of anxiety,
he walked with the rest of the boys to church, and mounted the steps to
the school gallery.
It was early; few of the worshippers had arrived, but in a little while
there was a stir near the door. A group of figures shrouded in the black
habiliments of woe were moving up the aisle--were entering _her_ pew,
from which alas, _she_ was again absent!
_Then he knew_--knew that she would enter that sacred place
_nevermore_!
After the service there were inquiries as to the cause of a commotion in
the gallery occupied by the Manor House School, and it was said in reply
that the weather being excessively hot for the season, one of the boys
had fainted.