Where was Edgar Poe? Again the question was being asked. In many
quarters and with varying degrees of interest it was repeated. But it
still remained unanswered.
In Richmond it was asked by the chums of his youth as they sat under
their comfortable vines and fig-trees, or stopped each other on a corner
for a few moments' social chat, or--catching some one of the rumors that
were afloat concerning the gifted companion of their golden days--looked
up from their desks in office or counting-house to ask each other the
question. Their faces were keen with interest for their admiration and
affection for The Dreamer had been sincere; yet it was not strong enough
after the lapse of years to make any one of them lay down work and go
forth to seek a solution of the mystery. Such an errand not one of them
felt to be his business. A quixotic errand it would indeed have been
considered and one which, if half the rumors were true, might have
necessitated a journey to the ends of the earth, to prove but a fool's
errand after all.
The oft-repeated question was one with which John Allan little concerned
himself. A robust son and heir had come in his late middle age to fill
all his thoughts with new interest and plans for the present and the
future. The patter of little feet of his own child on the stairs and
halls of his home, drowned the ghostly memories of other and less
welcome footfalls that had once echoed there.
He too, had heard rumors of the adventures and the misadventures of
Edgar Poe, but he did not consider it his business, as it was certainly
not his pleasure, to investigate them.
In Baltimore too, the question was asked by the kinsfolk whose
acquaintance Edgar had made during his visit there. But they had never
held themselves in the least responsible for this eccentric son of their
brother David, the actor--the black sheep of the family. Surely it was
none of _their_ business to follow him upon any chase his foolish fancy
might lead him.
But still, when the rumors that were rife reached their ears, it was
with no small degree of curiosity that they asked each other the
question: Where was Edgar Poe?--What had become of him?--Had he, as some
believed, met death upon the high seas or in a foreign land?--Was he the
real hero of stories of adventure which floated across the ocean from
Russia--from France--from Greece?
He had certainly contemplated going abroad--the Superintendent of West
Point Academy had had a letter from him sometime after he left there,
declaring his intention of seeking an appointment in the Polish army.
Had he gone, or was he, as some would have it, going in and out among
them, there in Baltimore, but unknown and unrecognized--his identity
hidden under assumed name and ingenious disguise?
Who could tell?
The wonder of it was not in the existence of the unanswered question--of
the mystery--but that the question could remain unanswered--the mystery
remain unsolved--and no attempt be made to lift the veil. That a young
man, a gentleman, of prominent connections, of handsome features and
distinguished bearing and address, of rare mental gifts and cultivation,
and of magnetic personality, could disappear from the face of the
earth--could, almost before the very eyes of his fellows, step from the
glare of the world in which he moved into the abyss of absolute
obscurity or impenetrable mystery, and create no stir--that no one
should deem it his or her business to seek or to find an answer to the
question, a reading of the riddle.
Not until two years after Edgar Poe had turned his back upon the closed
door of the Allan mansion, in Richmond, and stepped, as it seemed from
the edge of a world in which he was not wanted into the unknown, did
such an one arise. And that one was, as an especially good friend of
Edgar Poe's was most likely to be--a woman.
Between this woman:--Mrs. Maria Poe Clemm--a widow of middle age, and
The Dreamer, there existed the close blood-tie of aunt and nephew, for
she was the own sister of his father, David Poe.
More than that--there existed, though they had never seen each other, a
soul kinship rare between persons of the same blood, and which (for all
they had never seen each other) she, with the woman's unerring instinct
that sometimes seems akin to inspiration, divined. She too was something
of a dreamer, with an ear for the voices of Nature and a mind open to
the influences of its beauty, but with a goodly ballast of strong common
sense.
She was but a young girl when her handsome and idolized brother David
scandalized the family by marrying an actress and himself taking to the
stage. But she had seen the bewitching "Miss Arnold" at the theatre in
Baltimore--had, with fascinated eyes, followed her twinkling feet
through the mazy dance, had listened with charmed ears to her exquisite
voice, had sat spell-bound under her acting. To her childish mind, the
stage had become a fairy-land and Miss Arnold its presiding genius. That
brother David should love and marry her seemed like something out of a
fairy book. _She_ did not blame brother David; she secretly entirely
approved of him.
In her later years the death of the husband of her own youth who had
been romantically, passionately loved, had left her penniless but not
disillusioned; with her own living to get and a little daughter with a
face like a Luca Della Robbia chorister, and a voice that went with the
face, but who had the requirements of other flesh and blood children, to
be provided for. This child was the sunshine of the lonely widow's life,
yet she only in part filled the great mother's heart of her. Nature had
made her to be the mother of a son as well as a daughter, then
mockingly, it would seem, denied her.
But in her dreams she worshipped the son she had never borne, and deep
in her heart was stored, like unshed tears, the love she would have
lavished upon him had her whole mission in life been fulfilled.
She had heard little of her brother David's son Edgar, but that little
had always interested her. She was living away from Baltimore during his
visit there just before he entered West Point, and so she did not meet
him; but upon the death of her husband, soon afterward, she had returned
to the home of her girlhood, and established herself in modest, but
respectable quarters, to earn a livelihood for the little Virginia and
herself by the use of her skillful needle.
It was soon afterward that with a concern which no one but herself had
felt, she learned of the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of her
nephew.
She yearned over the wanderer and longed to mother him, as, somehow, she
knew he needed to be mothered. She kept near her a copy of his last
little book of poems which she had read again and again. In the earlier
ones she saw a loose handful of jewels in the rough, yet she recognized
the sparkle which distinguishes the genuine from the false. In the later
ones she perceived gems "of purest ray serene," polished and strung and
ready to be passed on from generation to generation--priceless
heir-looms.
She was a tall woman, and deep-bosomed, with large but clear-cut and
strong features, and handsome, deepset gray eyes which habitually wore
the expression of one who has loved much and sorrowed much. She had been
called stately before her proud spirit had bowed itself in submission to
the chastenings of grief--since when she had borne the seal of meekness.
But there was a distinction about her that neither grief nor poverty
could destroy. She was so unmistakably the gentle-woman. In the simple,
but dainty white cap, with its floating strings, which modestly covered
her dark waving hair, the plain black dress and prim collar fastened
with its mourning pin, she made a reposeful picture of the old-fashioned
conception of "a widow indeed."
Her hands were not her least striking feature. They were large, but
perfectly modelled, and they were deft, capable, full of character and
feeling. In their touch there was a wonderfully soothing quality. In
winter they always possessed just the pleasantest degree of warmth; in
summer just the most grateful degree of coolness. No one ever received a
greeting from them without being impressed with the friendliness, the
sympathy of their clasp.
As she bent her fine, deeply-lined face over them, and the work they
held, while the little Virginia sat nursing a doll at her feet, she
often stitched into the garments that they fashioned yearnings,
thoughts, questionings of the youth--her brother's child--whose picture,
as she had conceived him from descriptions she had heard, she carried in
her heart. She knew too well the weakness that was his inheritance and
she knew too, what perils were in waiting to ensnare the feet of untried
youth--poor, homeless and without the restraining influences of friends
and kindred--whatever their inheritance might be.
Sometimes she felt that the yearning was almost more than she could
bear, and that she must arise and go forth and seek this straying sheep
of the fold of Poe. But alas, she was but a woman, without money and
without a clue upon which to begin to work save such as wild, improbable
and contradictory rumors afforded. That was, after all, what she most
needed--a clue. If she could only find a clue, poor as she was, she
would follow it to the ends of the earth!
Upon a summer's day two years after Edgar's disappearance, and when she
had almost given up hope, the clue came. It was placed in her hand by
her cousin, and Edgar's, Neilson Poe, who had no faith in its value but
passed it on to her as it had come to him--"for what it was worth," as
he expressed it.
It was a strange story that Mrs. Clemm's cousin Neilson told her, and
which had been told him, he said, by an acquaintance of his from
Richmond who had known Edgar Poe in his boyhood.
It seems that this Richmond man had during a visit to Baltimore gone to
a brickyard to arrange for the shipment home of bricks for a new house
he was building. As he sat in the office talking to the manager of the
yard, a line of men bearing freshly molded bricks to the kiln passed the
open window. There was something about the appearance of one of the
laborers that struck the Richmond man as familiar and he turned quickly
to the manager and asked the name of the man, pointing him out. The name
given him was a strange one to him and he dismissed the matter from his
thoughts and returned to his business talk.
Upon his way to his hotel, however, the appearance of the brick-carrier,
and the impression that somewhere, he had seen him before, returned to
his mind and it came upon him in a flash, first that the likeness was to
Edgar Poe, and then the conviction that the man was none other than Poe
himself, though emaciated and aged to a degree that, with his shabby
dress and unshaven chin, made him scarcely recognizable. Though he had
been but a casual acquaintance of Edgar's, he was deeply touched at
seeing him so evidently in distress, and returned to the brickyard early
the next morning for the purpose of speaking to him and of helping him
back into the sphere in which he belonged and from which he had so long
disappeared. But the man he sought was not there and no one knew where
his lodgings were. He was a recent employe of the yard, they said, and
so gloomy and unsociable that he had made no friends. He was capable of
a great amount of work, which he performed faithfully, but kept to
himself and had little to say to anybody.
Upon the day before he had looked ill and had stopped work before the
day was over. He was evidently suffering from exhaustion, but had
declared that he needed nothing, and after sitting down to rest upon a
pile of bricks for a while, had gone off to his home--wherever that
might be--as usual, alone.
* * * * *
This story Neilson Poe set down as highly sensational. He did not
believe, he said with a laugh, that his cousin, when found, would be
doing anything half so energetic or useful as carrying bricks--he would
have more hope of him if he could believe it. The laborer's real, or
fancied, likeness to Edgar was but a case of chance resemblance, that
was all.
But that was not enough for Maria Clemm. She folded her sewing and laid
it away with an air of finality which plainly said that she had found
other and more pressing work to do. The sewing must wait a more
convenient season.
Then she went out into the streets sweltering in the summer heat, and
turned her face toward that obscure quarter of the town where human
beings who could not afford to rest or to dine might at least secure a
corner in which to "lodge" and the right, if not the appetite, to "eat,"
for an infinitesimal sum; for it was in this quarter that strange as it
might, seem, her instinct told her her search must be made--in this
quarter that Edgar Poe, the rich merchant's pampered foster-child, Edgar
Poe, the poet, the scholar, the exquisite in dress, in taste and in
manners, would be found.
When she did find him the mystery that had surrounded him was stripped
of the last shred of its romance. In a room compared to which the little
chamber back of the shop of Mrs. Fipps, the milliner, in which his
mother had drawn her last breath, and in which Frances Allan had found
and fallen in love with him, was luxurious, he lay upon a bed of straw
thrown into a dark corner, tossing with fever and in his delirium,
literally "babbling of green fields."
The kind-hearted, but ignorant and uncleanly slattern who sought with
"lodgings to let" to keep the souls of herself and family in their
bodies, gave him as much attention as the demands of a numerous brood of
little slatterns and a drunken husband would permit, and sighed with
real sorrow as she admitted that the "poor gentleman" was in a very bad
way. It was her opinion he had seen better days she confided to the
three other lodgers who were just then renting the three straw beds in
the three other corners of the same dark, squalid and evil-smelling
room. He was "so soft-spoken and elegant-like, if he _was_ poor as a
church mouse. Pity he had no folks nor nobody to keer nothin' about
'im."
It was not at once that Mrs. Clemm found him. She had sought him
diligently in what would to-day be known as the slum districts of the
city, descending the scale of respectability lower and lower until she
thought she had reached the bottom, but without success.
Then, upon the fourth or fifth day of her search, late in the afternoon,
when the little Virginia was watching anxiously from the sitting-room
window for "Muddie's" return, a wagon stopped before her door and out of
it and into the house was borne a stretcher upon which lay an apparently
dying man--ghastly, unshaven, and muttering broken unintelligible
sentences.
Keeping pace with the wagon as it crept along the street, might have
been seen the stately, sad-eyed Widow Clemm. When the wagon stopped, she
stopped, and directed the careful lifting of the stretcher from it. Then
she turned and opened the door of her small house and led the way to her
neat bed-chamber where, upon her own immaculate bed, the sick man was
gently laid--henceforth, as long as need be, a cot in the sitting-room
would be good enough for her.
The little Virginia, her soft eyes filled with wonder, had followed her
mother upon tip-toe.
"Who is it, Muddie?" she questioned in an awed whisper.
The anxiety in the widow's face gave place to a look of exaltation which
fairly transfigured her. Her deep eyes shone with the hoarded love for
the son so long denied her. She gathered her little daughter to her
breast and kissed her tenderly.
"It is your brother, darling," she gently said. "God has given me a
son!"
Well she knew that he was not yet entirely her own--that she would have
to wrestle fiercely with Death for his possession. But she had made up
her mind that she would win the battle.
"Death _shall_ not have him," she passionately told herself.
But the next moment, overwhelmed with a realization of human
helplessness, she was upon her knees at his bedside, crying:
"Oh, God, do not let him die! I have but just found him! Spare him to me
now, if but a little while!"