With his meeting with "Helen," a new life, indeed, seemed to have opened
for Edgar the Dreamer. Not only had her own interest and sympathy been
aroused, but her husband, a learned and accomplished judge of the
Supreme Court of Virginia, also received him cordially and became deeply
interested in him, and he found in their home what his own had lacked
for him, a thoroughly congenial atmosphere.
"Helen" Stanard listened kindly to his boyish rhapsodies about his
favorite poets, and encouraged him to bring her his own portefolio of
verses, which he did, all but the ones addressed to herself--these he
kept secret. She read all he brought her carefully, and intelligently
criticised them in a way that was a real help to him.
As has been said, when Mr. Allan had discovered that his adopted son was
a rhymster, he had rebuked him severely for such idle waste of time, and
in a vain attempt to clip the wings of Pegasus, threatened him with
punishment if he should hear of such folly again. Mrs. Allan, on the
contrary, though she was not a bookish woman, had protested against her
husband's command--urging that Edgar be encouraged to cultivate his
talent. The ability to compose verse seemed to her, in a boy of Edgar's
age, little short of miraculous, and, proud of her pet's accomplishment,
she heaped indiscriminate praise upon every line that she saw of his
writing.
The boy, hardly knowing which way to escape, between these two fires
that bade fair to work the ruin of his gift, turned eagerly to his new
friend. "Helen" gently told him that she believed his talent to be a
sacred trust, and that he would be committing sin to bury it--even
though by so doing he should be fulfilling the wishes of his
foster-father to whom he owed so much. He must, however, not forget his
duty to Mr. Allan in regard to this matter, as in other things, but
treat his views with all the consideration possible. Above all things,
he was never to depart from the truth in talking to him, but to tell him
in a straightforward and respectful way that he believed it his duty
when poetical thoughts presented themselves to his mind, to set them
down, and even to encourage and invite such thoughts.
At the same time, she earnestly warned him against being overmuch
impressed by the flattering estimates of his work of his friends,
especially of his mother, who was far too partial to him, personally, to
be a safe judge of his writings.
A happier summer than is often given mortals to know, Edgar the Dreamer
passed at the feet of the lovely young matron who had become a sort of
mother-confessor to him. Happiness which, with a touch of the
superstition that was characteristic of him he often told himself was
too perfect to last. What was it that made him feel sometimes in looking
upon her under the serene sky of that ideal summer that a cloud no
bigger than a man's hand threw its shadow upon her? Was it that faint
hint of sadness in her dark eyes or the ethereal radiance of her pale
complexion that while thrilling him with delight in the exquisite
quality of her beauty, filled him with foreboding?
* * * * *
Ere the frosts of autumn had robbed her garden of its glory, blighting
sorrow had fallen upon her tender mother-heart in the death of a darling
baby girl. Beneath this blow the health of sweet "Helen," always frail,
succumbed, and her home became thenceforth as a living tomb, in which
the few who ever saw her again trod softly and spoke in hushed voices.
When the earliest roses were in bloom in her garden two years after
Edgar Poe first saw her there, she lay in her coffin, and for him, the
world seemed to have come to an end.
She was laid to rest in the new cemetery on Shockoe Hill, not far from
the Allan home. The bier was followed by its black procession of
mourners, and no one knew that the heart of a youth who followed too,
but at a distance, was breaking. Though husband and children and brother
and sister were bowed with grief, he told himself that there was among
them no sorrow like unto his sorrow who had not even the right of
kinship to mourn for her. Of what business of his (he fancied, out of
the bitterness of his soul, the world saying) of what business of his
was her death? What business had he to mourn?
Again his feet kept time to the old refrain of never, nevermore, that
hammered in his brain--a refrain that to the unrealizing ear of the
child of three had been sad with a beautiful, rhythmic sadness that was
rather pleasurable than otherwise; that to the youth of sixteen was
still musical and beautiful, though filled with despair.
As at many another time his poetical gift gave him a merciful vent for
his pent up feeling, so now it came to his aid, and upon the night of
the day when she was laid to rest he poured out his sorrow in "The
Paean"--which he was afterwards to revise and rename, "Lenore"--
"An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young--
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young."
As during his childhood, and afterwards, he had found a mournful
pleasure in visiting the grave of his mother, in the churchyard on the
hill; so now he found a blessed solace, in his terrible loneliness, in
pilgrimages to the shrine (for as such he held the grave of his saint)
in the new cemetery. These pilgrimages he usually made at night--his
grief was too sacred a thing to be flaunted in broad daylight. Many a
night during the spring and summer found him slipping down the stair,
when the house was asleep, and taking his way through the silent city
of Slumber to that even more silent city of Death.
Oh, that those that lay there not much more still than they who lay
asleep in their beds in that other city, might arise like them with the
morrow's sun!
Often, as he walked along, drinking in the perfumed night air that he
loved--the night breeze gratefully lifting the ringlets from his fevered
brow--often he thought of that first summer's night when with the sweet
words of Shelley's serenade: "I arise from dreams of thee," singing
themselves in his heart, he had gone with light feet to worship beneath
her window.
Ah, the world was young then, for sweet hope was alive!
The iron gates of the cemetery were locked, but the wall was not very
high. To scale it but added zest to his adventure. He would be a knight
unfit for his vigil if he were to let himself be so easily balked.
Within the wall the odors of flowers were even heavier, more
oppressively sweet than without, and the silence surpassed the silence
of the outer city even as the stillness of the sleepers here surpassed
the stillness of those yonder.
He listened and listened to the silence. Surely if she should speak,
even from down under the ground he could hear her across this silence
which was as a void--a black and terrible void.
His first pilgrimages were by moonlight, but when the moonless nights
came he continued his vigils. He would have known the way by that time
with his eyes shut.
Sometimes he was afraid--horribly afraid. He seemed, in the shadows, to
descry weird phantom-shapes, moving stealthily; in the silence to hear
ghostly whispers; sometimes he fancied he heard _the silence itself_!
But in the very fear that clutched his throat there was a fascination--a
lure--that made it impossible to turn back.
His sorrow was exquisite; his terror was exquisite; his loneliness was
oh, how exquisite! Yet in courting them all, here in the dead of night,
prone on her grave, he found the only balm he knew--the only sympathy;
for to his fancy the dark and the quiet had always seemed sentient
things and he felt that they gave him a sympathy he did not--could not
ask of people.
* * * * *
A breathless night in July found him at the familiar tryst at an earlier
hour than was his wont. He lay upon the grass at her feet with his hands
clasped under his head and his face turned up to the stars. There was
moonlight as well as starlight, and in its silvery radiance his
features, always pale, had the frigid whiteness of marble. The wide-open
eyes that stared upward to the stars, were larger, darker than in
daylight, and more full of brooding; the white brow, with its crown of
dark ringlets was whiter and more expansive.
In a dormer-windowed cottage overlooking a rose garden, on Clay Street,
an erect gentleman in an uncompromising stock and immaculate ruffles,
with narrow blue eyes under a beetling brow, and a somewhat hawk-like
nose, sharply questioned a fair and graceful lady, with an anxious
expression on her flower-face, as to why "that boy" did not come home to
his supper. But they were used by now, to the boy's strange, wayward
whims, and so did not marvel much. Only--they had not seen him since the
feat that had set the town ringing with his name and it seemed to them
that it would have been natural for him to come home in the flush of his
triumph and tell them about it.
Edgar Poe had that day created the sensation of the hour by swimming
from the Richmond wharves to Warwick--a distance of six miles--in the
midsummer sun.
Richmond was a fair and pleasant little city in those days, in spite of
the fact that our boy-poet found in it so much to make him melancholy.
"The merriest place in America," Thackeray called it some years later,
and would probably have said the same of it then had he been there. The
blight of Civil War had not touched the cheerful temper of its people;
the tenement row had not crowded out grass and flowers. It was more a
large village than a town, with gracious homes--not elbowing each other
for foundation room, but standing comfortably apart, amid their green
lawns, and with wide verandahs overhanging their many-flowered gardens.
"After tea," on warm nights, the houses overflowed into these
verandahs, and there was much visiting from one to another--much
light-hearted talk and happy laughter; the popular theme being whatever
happened to be "the news."
It was the day of contentment, for wants were moderate and plentifully
supplied; the day of satisfaction in wholesome domestic joys; the day of
hospitality without grudging; the day when sweetness extracted from
little pleasures did not need spicing, for palates were not jaded; the
day of the ideal simple life.
Upon this night, as on other nights, young girls who were not yet "gone
to the springs" floated along the fashionable promenades, in airy
muslins, with their cavaliers beside them. Groups of gentlemen and
ladies sat on the porches and children played hide-and-seek, chased
fire-flies, or sat on the steps and listened to the talk of their
elders. And everywhere, in all of the groups, the chief topic was the
boy, Edgar Poe, and his wonderful swim.
And the boy who had in an afternoon become, for the time being at least,
the foremost figure in town, knew it, but did not care.
To lie alone on the grass by the grave of his dead divinity and gaze at
the far stars, and brood upon his young sorrows--this gave him more
satisfaction than to be the central figure of any one of the groups
singing his praise; filled him with a romantic despair that to his
high-strung soul had a more delicately sweet flavor than positive
pleasure.
As to the erect gentleman in the high stock and the pretty lady with
the tender, anxious face--they had, for the present, no part in his
thoughts. It was wrong and ungrateful of him that they should not have,
and if he had remembered them he would have known that it was wrong and
ungrateful; but he would not have cared. And as for his food--he had
supped royally, and without compunction, upon the fruit of an inviting
orchard to which he had helped himself, unblushingly, upon his way into
town.
A reckless mood, born of the restlessness that was in his blood, was
upon him.
The truth was, that poignant as was his pleasure in dwelling upon his
poetical sorrow for the adored "Helen"--his "lost Lenore"--it did not
fully satisfy him. His youthful heart was hungry for response to his
out-poured sentiment, for the more robust diet of mutual love. In plain
English, Edgar Poe wanted, and wanted badly, a sweetheart, though he did
not suspect it.
* * * * *
When, finally, he scaled the cemetery wall and took his way homeward he
did not go directly to the dormer-windowed cottage where the erect
gentleman and the pretty lady awaited him. Just as he was approaching it
he heard Elmira Royster's guitar in the porch opposite, and he crossed
the street and entered the Royster's gate.
The Roysters and Allans had been neighbors for years and he and Elmira
had been "brought up together." At the sound of approaching footsteps
the guitar grew suddenly silent and a slight, rather colorless girl in a
white dress, with a white flower in her fluffy blonde hair, came from
out the shadow of the microphilla rose that embowered the porch and
stood in the full light of the moon, giving him greeting.
"Oh, I'm so glad to see you, Eddie," she said. "All of the family but me
have gone to a party, and I'm so lonesome! Besides, I, like everybody
else in town, want a chance to congratulate you."
"Congratulate?" he replied, with a shrug, as he took a seat beside her,
under the roses, "Congratulate? In their hearts they all despise me."
Then with a smile,
"You see the blue devils have the upper hand of me tonight, Myra."
"Well, they are fibbing devils if they tell you you are despised. Dick
Ambler was over at your house looking for you a little while ago, and he
stopped by and told me about your swim. He said he and the other boys
that followed you in the boat had never seen anything so exciting in
their lives. They were expecting you to give out any minute and so much
afraid that if you did you would go under before they could get hold of
you. When you won the wager they were so proud and happy that they were
almost beside themselves."
"Oh, I know Dick and the rest are the best and truest friends a fellow
ever had--bless their hearts--but they are the exceptions."
"Nonsense! There's not a boy in town tonight who would not give his
head to be in your shoes, and" (shyly) "the girls are all wild about
you."
The hero smiled indulgently. No woman was ever thrown with Edgar Poe,
from his birth up, but in some fashion or degree, loved him, and to him
all women were angels. He never, as boy or man, entertained a thought or
wrote a line of one of them that was not reverent. He admired, in
varying degree, all types of feminine loveliness, but Myra, though he
liked her, was not the style that he most cared for. He had always
thought her too "washed out." The soul that shone through her rather
prominent, light-blue eyes was too transparent, too easily read. He
found more interesting the richer-hued brunette type, and the complex
nature that goes with it; the flashes of starlight, the softness and the
warmth, of brown eyes; the mysteries that lie in the shadow of dusky
lashes; the variety of rich, warm tones in chestnut and auburn tresses.
But Myra was a revelation to him tonight. He had never dreamed that she
could look so pretty--_so very pretty_--as she did now in her white
dress, with the moonlight filtering through the foliage upon her fair
hair and her face (turned full of liking and undisguised admiration upon
him) and her lovely arms, bared to the elbow. She had an ethereal,
fairy-like appearance that was bewitching, and in his despondent mood,
her frank praise was more than sweet. Still his answer was as bitter as
ever,
"Oh, well, what does it all amount to? They would say the same of any
acrobat in a circus whose joints were a bit more limber than those of
the rest of his tribe. That does not remove their contempt for me,
personally."
"I don't feel contempt for you, Eddie," she gently replied--just
breathing it.
(Myra was really wonderful tonight. He had not known her voice could
have so much color in it; and the white flower in her hair--a
cape-jessamine, its excessively sweet fragrance told him--gave her pale
beauty the touch of romance it had always lacked). The poetic eyes that
looked into hers mellowed, the cynical voice softened:
"Don't you Myra? Well, you'd better cultivate it. Its the fashion, and
it's the only feeling I'm worth."
"Eddie," she said earnestly--tenderly, "I want you to promise me that
you won't talk that way any more--at least not to _me_--it hurts me."
Her hand, on his sleeve, was as fair as a petal from the jessamine
flower in her hair. He took it gently in his.
"Dear little Myra, little playmate--" he said. "You are my friend, I
know, and have been since we were mere babies, in spite of knowing, as
you do, what a naughty, idle, disobedient boy I've been, deserving every
flogging and scolding I've gotten and utterly unworthy all the good
things that have come my way--including your dear friendship."
"You are breaking your promise already," she said. "You _shall not_ run
yourself down to me. I think you are the nicest boy in town!"
There was nothing complex about Myra. Her mind was an open book, and he
suddenly found he liked it so--liked it tremendously. Her unveiled
avowal of preference for him was most soothing to his restless,
dissatisfied mood.
"Thank you, Myra," he said tenderly, kissing the flower-petal hand
before he laid it down. He had a strong impulse to kiss _her_, but
resisted it, with an effort, and abruptly changed the subject.
"Did you know that we are going to move?" he asked. "And that I'm going
to the University next winter?"
"_To move_?" she questioned, aghast. "Where?"
"To the Gallego mansion, at Fifth and Main Streets. Mr. Allan has bought
it. The dear little mother, who, I'd say, if you'd let me, is so much
better to me than I deserve, is full of plans for furnishing it and is
going to fit up a beautiful room in it for me. It will be a delightful
home for us, and quite grand after our modest cottage, but do you know
I'm goose enough to be homesick at the thought of giving up my little
den under the roof? Myself and I have had such jolly times together in
it!"
She had scarcely heard him, except the first words and the stunning
facts they contained. There was a minute's silence, then she spoke in a
changed, quivering voice.
"Then that will be the end of our friendship, I suspect! When you get
out of the neighborhood, and are off most of the time at the University,
we will doubtless see little more of you."
Her clear blue eyes were shining up at him through tears. Her mouth was
tremulous as a distressed child's. The appeal met an instant response
from the tender-hearted poet. _Both_ the flower-like hands were captured
this time, and held fast, in spite of their fluttering. The excessively
sweet fragrance of the blossom in her hair was in his nostrils. Her
quick, short breaths told him of the tempest in her tender young bosom.
"Myra, little Myra, do you care like that?" he cried. "Then let the
friendship go, and be my dear little sweetheart, won't you? I'm dying of
loneliness and the want of somebody to love and to love me--somebody who
understands me--and you do, don't you, Myra, darling?"
She was too happy to answer, but she suffered him to put his arms around
her and kiss her soft pale hair--and her brow--and her tremulous
mouth--the first kisses of love to him as well as to her. And ah, how
sweet!
He laughed happily, lifted out of his gloom by this new, this
deliriously sweet dream.
"Do you know, little sweetheart," he said, in a voice that was bubbling
with joy, "I feel that you have cast those devils out of me forever. It
was you that I wanted all the time, and did not know it. Some of these
days, when I've been through college and settled down, we will be
married, and wherever our home is, we must always have a porch like
this, with a rose on it, and" (kissing her brow) "you must always wear a
jessamine in your hair."
And so the boy-poet and his girl play-mate, very much to their own
surprise, parted affianced lovers, and a long vista of sunlit days
seemed to beckon The Dreamer.