In the days that followed, Edgar's friends found him unusually silent,
yet not morose. Serenity sat on his broad, thoughtful brow and in his
great, soft eyes. Nat Howard and his chums gave him the cold shoulder
and wore, in his presence, the air of offended dignity which the
small-minded are apt to assume when conscious of being in the wrong or
of having committed an injury which the victim has received with credit
and the offender has not forgiven. It is so much easier to grant pardon
for an injury received than for one given!
Edgar's own friends were more emphatic in their devotion to him than
ever--racking their young brains for ways in which to show their loyalty
and frequently looking into his face with the expression of soft
adoration and trust one sees in the eyes of a faithful dog. Edgar was
touched and gratified, and his sweet, spontaneous smile often rewarded
their efforts; but his face would soon become grave again and the boys
were aware that the mind of their gifted friend was busy with thoughts
in which they had no part. This gave them an impression of distance
between them and him. He all of a sudden, seemed to have become remote,
as though a chasm, by what power they knew not, had opened between
them--making their love for him as "the desire of the moth for the
star." They knew that he was more often than ever before working upon
his poetical and other compositions, but these were seldom shown, or
even mentioned, to them.
Each boy in his own way sought to bridge the gulf that separated them
from their idol. Robert Sully missed his Latin lesson on purpose in the
hope that Eddie would stay in and help him. And Eddie did, but wore that
same detached air in which there was no intimacy or comfort. When the
lesson was learned Edgar took a slate from the desk before them, rubbed
off the problem that was upon it, and quickly wrote down a little poem
of several stanzas. He held it out, with a smile, to Rob, telling him
that while teaching him his lesson he had been practicing "dividing his
mind," and that while one part of his brain had been putting English
into Latin the other part had composed the verses on the slate.
The dumfounded Rob read the verses aloud, but before he could express
his amazement Edgar had taken the slate from him and, with one swipe of
the damp spunge, obliterated the rhymes.
"Write them on paper for me, please," plead Robert.
The brilliant smile of the boy-poet flashed upon him. "Oh, they were not
worth keeping," said he, indifferently. "They were merely an exercise."
And picking up his books and hat, he walked out of the door, whistling
in clear, high, plaintive notes one of the melodies of his favorite Tom
Moore.
The boy left behind looked after him with a troubled heart and misty
eyes. This wonderful friend of his was as kind as ever, yet he seemed
changed. It was clear that he had "something on his mind."
"Will you go swimming with me this evening, Eddie?" said Dick Ambler
one day when school was out.
"With all the pleasure in life," was the hearty response.
Dick went home to his dinner with a singing heart. If anything could
bring Edgar down from the clouds to his own level, surely it would be
bathing together. He certainly could not make poetry while diving and
swimming, naked, in the racing and tumbling falls of James River. A
merry battle with those energetic waters kept a fellow's wits as well as
his muscles fully occupied.
But even this attempt was a failure. If Edgar made any poetry while in
the water he did not mention it; but he was absent-minded and unsociable
all the way to the river and back--sky-gazing for curious cloud-forms,
listening for bird-notes and hunting wild-flowers, and talking almost
none at all.
In the water he seemed to wake up, and never dived with more grace, or
daring; but no sooner had they started on the way home than he was off
with his dreams again.
Rob Stanard was more successful in his attempts to interest his friend.
In spite of their intimacy at school and on the playground Edgar had up
to this time never visited the Stanard home. Rob had enlisted his
mother's sympathy in the orphan boy and she had suggested that he should
invite Edgar home with him some day. It now occurred to Rob that this
would be a good time to do so, and knowing his friend's fondness for
dumb animals, he offered his pets as an attraction--asking him to come
and see his pigeons and rabbits. His invitation was accepted with
alacrity.
Edgar had seen Rob's mother, but only at a distance. He knew her
reputation as one of the town beauties, but lovely women were not rare
in Richmond, and, beauty-worshipper though he was, he had never had any
especial curiosity in regard to Mrs. Stanard. He was altogether
unprepared for the vision that broke upon him.
Instead of going through the house, Rob had piloted him by way of a side
gate, directly into the walled garden, sweet and gay with roses, lilies
and other flowers of early June.
Mrs. Stanard, who took almost as much pleasure in her children's pets as
they did, was standing near a clump of arbor-vitae, holding in her hands
a "willow-ware" plate from which the pigeons were feeding. She was at
this time, though the mother of Edgar's twelve-year-old chum, not thirty
years of age, and her pensive beauty was in its fullest flower. Against
the sombre background the arbor-vitae made, her slight figure, clad in
soft, clinging white, seemed airy and sylphlike. Her dark, curling hair,
girlishly bound with a ribbon snood, and her large brown eyes, were in
striking contrast to her complexion, which was pale, with the radiant
and warm palor of a tea-rose or a pearl. Her features were daintily
modelled, and like slender lilies were the hands holding the deep blue
plate from which the pigeons--white, grey and bronze, fed--fluttering
about her with soft cooings.
The picture was so much more like a poet's dream than a reality, that
the boy-poet stepped back, with an exclamation of surprise.
"It is only my mother," explained Rob. "She'll be glad to see you."
The next moment she had perceived the boys, and with quick impulse, set
the plate upon the ground and came forward, and before a word of
introduction could be spoken, had taken the visitor's hand between both
her own fair palms, holding it thus, with gentle, gracious pressure, in
a pretty, cordial way she had, while she greeted him.
The soft eyes that rested on his face filled with kindness and welcome.
"So this is my Rob's friend," she was saying, in a low, musical voice.
"Rob's mother is delighted to see you for his sake and for your own too,
Edgar, for I greatly admired _your_ gifted mother. I saw her once only,
when I was a young girl, but I can never forget her lovely face and
sweet, plaintive voice. It was one of the last times she ever acted, and
she was ill and pale, but she was exquisitely beautiful and made the
most charming Juliet. She interested me more than any actress I have
ever seen."
Edgar Poe longed to fall down and kiss her feet--to worship her. Her
beauty, her gentleness and her gracious words so stirred his soul that
he grew faint. Power of speech almost left him, and, vastly to his
humiliation, he could with difficulty control his voice to utter a few
stumbling words of thanks--he who was usually so ready of speech!
If she noticed his confusion she did not appear to do so. Her heart had
been touched by all she had heard from her son of the lonely boy, and
she had also been interested in accounts of his gifts that had come to
her from various sources. The beauty, the poetry, the pensiveness of his
face moved her deeply--knowing his history and divining the lack of
sympathy one of his bent would probably find in the Allan home, for all
its indulgences.
She sat on a garden-bench and talked to him for a time, in her gentle,
understanding way, and then, not wishing to be a restraint upon the
boys, (after placing her husband's fine library at Edgar's disposal, and
urging him to come often to see Rob) withdrew into the house.
The motherless boy looked after her until she had disappeared, and
stared at the door that had closed upon her until he was recalled from
his reverie by the voice of his friend, suggesting that they now see the
rabbits. Edgar looked at the gentle creatures with unseeing eyes, though
he appeared to be listening to the prattle of his companion concerning
them. Suddenly, in a voice filled with enthusiasm and with a touch of
awe in it, he said:
"Rob, your mother is divinely beautiful--and _good_."
"Bully," was the nonchalant reply. "The best thing about her is the way
she takes up for a fellow when he brings in a bad report or gets into a
scrape. Fathers always think it's their sons' fault, you know."
Edgar flushed. "_Bully_--" he said to himself, with a shudder. The
adjective applied to her seemed blasphemy.
Aloud, he said, "She's an angel! She's the one I've always dreamed
about."
"You dreamed about mother when you had never seen her?" questioned the
astonished Rob. "What did you dream?"
"Nothing, in the way you mean. I meant she is like my idea of a perfect
woman. The kind of woman a man could always be good for, or would gladly
die to serve."
"Well, I'm not smart enough to think out things like that, Eddie, but
Mother certainly is all right. What you say about her sounds nice, and
she'd understand it, too. I just bet that you and mother'll be the best
sort of cronies when you know each other better. She likes all those
queer old books you think so fine, and she knows whole pages of poetry
by heart. When you and she get together it will be like two books
talking out loud to each other. I won't be able to join in much, but it
will be as good as a play to listen."
The young poet bent his steps homeward with but one thought, one hope in
his heart, and that a consuming one: to look again upon the lovely face,
to hear again the voice that had enthralled him, had taken his heart by
storm and filled it with a veritable _grande passion_--the rapturous
devotion of the virgin heart of an ardent and romantic youth. First
love--yet so much more than ordinary love--a pure passion of the soul,
in which there was much of worship and nothing of desire. Surely the
most pure and holy passion the world has ever known, for in it there was
absolutely nothing of self. Like Dante after his first meeting with
Beatrice, this Virginia boy-poet had entered upon a _Vita Nuova_--a new
life--made all of beauty.
What difference did the taunts of schoolmates, the hardness of a
foster-father make now? The wounds they made had been gratefully healed
by the balm of her beauteous words about his mother. Those old wounds
were as nothing--neither they nor anything else had power to harm him
now. In the new life that had opened so suddenly before him he would
bear a charmed existence.
He went to his room before the usual hour that night, for he wanted to
be alone with his dreams--with his newest, most beautiful dream. To his
room, but not to bed. Life was too beautiful to be wasted in sleep. He
lighted his lamp and holding his mother's picture within its circle of
light, gazed long and devotedly upon it. Did she know of the great light
that had shone out of what seemed a sunless sky upon her boy? Had she,
looking out from high Heaven, seen the gracious greeting of the
beautiful being who was Madonna and Psyche in one? Had she heard her own
cause so sweetly championed, her own name so sweetly cleared of
opprobrium?
He threw himself upon his lounge and lay with his hands clasped under
his curly head, still dreaming--dreaming--dreaming--until day-dreams
were merged into real dreams, for he was fast asleep.
In his sleep he saw the lady of his dreams in a situation of peril, from
which he joyfully rescued her. He awoke with a start. His lamp had
burned itself out but a late moon flooded the room with the white light
that he loved. A breeze laden with odors caught from the many
rose-gardens and the heavier-scented magnolias, now in full bloom, it
had come across, stirred the curtain. His nostrils, always sensitive to
the odors of flowers, drank it in rapturously. So honey-sweet it was,
his senses swam.
He arose and looked out upon the incense-breathing blossoms, like
phantoms, under the moon. A clock in a distant part of the house was
striking twelve. How much more beautiful was the world now--at night's
high noon--than at the same hour of the day.
All the house, save himself, was asleep. How easy it would be to escape
into this lovely night--to walk through this ambrosial air to the
house-worshipful in which _she_ doubtless lay, like a closed
lily-flower, clasped in sleep.
A mocking-bird--the Southland's nightingale--in, some tree or bush not
far away, burst into passion-shaken melody that seemed to voice, as no
words could, his own emotion.
Down the stair he slipped, and out of the door, into the well-nigh
intoxicating beauty of the southern summer's night. Indeed, the odors of
the dew-drenched flowers--the moonlight--the bird-music, together with
his remembrance of his lady's greeting, went to his head like wine.
As he strolled along some lines of Shelley's which had long been
favorites of his, sang in his brain:
"I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And the spirit in my feet
Has led me--who knows how?--
To thy chamber-window, sweet!
"The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream;
The champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
Oh, beloved, as thou art!
"Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die, I faint, I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast.
Oh, press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last."
The words of the latter half of this serenade were meaningless as
applied to his case. To have quoted them--even mentally--in any literal
sense, would have seemed to him profanation; yet the whole poem in some
way not to be analysed or defined, expressed his mood--and who so brutal
as to seek to reduce to common-sense the emotions of a poet-lover, in
the springtime of life?
At length he was before the closed and shuttered house, standing silent
and asleep. Opposite were the grassy slopes of Capitol Square--with the
pillared, white Capitol, in its midst, looking, in the moonlight, like a
dream of old Greece. _Her_ house! He looked upon its moonlit, ivied
walls with adoration. A light still shone from one upper room. Was it
_her_ chamber? Was she, too, awake and alive to the beauty of this magic
night?
His heart beat tumultuously at the thought. Then--Oh, wonder! His knees
trembled under him--he grew dizzy and was ready, indeed, to cry, "I die,
I faint, I fail!" She crossed the square of light the window made. In
her uplifted hand she carried the lamp from which the light shone, and
for a moment her slight figure, clad all in white as he had seen her in
the garden a few hours before, and softly illuminated, was framed in the
ivy-wreathed casement. But for a moment--then disappeared, but the
trembling boy-lover and poet seemed to see it still, and gazed and gazed
until the light was out and all the house dark.
He stumbled back through the moonlight to his home, he crept up the
creaking stair again, to his little, dormer-windowed room; but sleep was
now, more than ever, impossible.
Though the lamp had gone out, a candle stood upon a stand at the head
of his bed. He lighted it, and by its ray, wrote, under the spell of the
hour, the first utterance in which he, Edgar Poe, ascended from the
plane of a maker of "promising" verse, to the realm of the true poet--a
poem to the lady of his heart's dream destined (though he little guessed
it) to make her name immortal and to send the fame of his youthful
passion down the ages as one of the world's historic love-affairs.
What was her name? he wondered. He had never heard it, but he would call
her Helen--_Helen_, the ancient synonym of womanly beauty, but the
loveliest Helen, he believed, that ever set poet-lover piping her
praise.
And so, "To Helen," were the words he wrote at the top of his page, and
underneath the name these lines:
"Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
"On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
"Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!"