It was a very modest party, but a merry one. The ground was covered with
the unsullied whiteness of new-fallen snow and the coming of most of the
guests was heralded by the tintinnabulation of the little silver bells
so charming to the ear of the host.
The Grahams were among the first to be welcomed out of the frosty night
into the glow of lamp and candle and firelight, by the cordial hand and
voice of Edgar Goodfellow. Mr. Graham was in tune to most heartily take
part in the commemoration of the birthday of the man who was making
_Graham's Magazine_ the success of the publishing world in America. His
kindling blue eyes had never been kinder, his smile never more bland.
Mr. Alexander, founder of _The Saturday Evening Post_ which so gladly
published and paid for everything that Edgar Poe would spare it from
_Graham's_ was the next, and close following him, Mr. Cottrell Clarke,
first editor of the _Post_, and his charming wife. Captain and Mrs.
Mayne Reid, who were among the most admiring and affectionate friends of
the Poe trio were also there, and other congenial spirits.
They came in twos and threes, their laughter as light and clear as the
tinkle of their sleigh-bells.
And Rufus Griswold was there. The Dreamer with his deep reverence for
intellectual ability had a sincere admiration for Dr. Griswold--though
he did say he was "no poet." He desired the approval--the friendship--of
this brainy man and was proud and happy to have him of his party.
Coming in after the rest of the company had assembled, the brainy man's
big frame, topped by his big head, with his prominent brow and piercing
eyes, his straight, thick nose, his large full-lipped close-set mouth,
his square jaw with the fringe of beard sharply outlining it, produced a
decided effect. He seemed to fill up a surprisingly large portion of the
room. Instinctively, the gentleman who had occupied the largest and
heaviest chair vacated it and invited him to be seated in it--which he
did, instinctively. He was a young man--under thirty--but looked much
older. His face was a strange one. It could not have been called ugly.
By some, indeed, it was considered handsome. It was strong, but it was
strange. There was an indefinable something unpleasant, something to
awaken distrust--fear--about it. Across the dome of the brow ran,
horizontally, a series of wavy furrows that produced, in place of the
benevolent air the lofty brow might have given, a sinister expression.
The eyes beneath the wrinkled brow were piercing and spoke of the fire
of active mentality, but they were always downcast and turned slightly
askance, so that few people caught the full force of their gleam, and
there was sternness and coldness, as well as will, in the prominent chin
and jaw.
He came late, but he was a little more cordial in his expressions of
pleasure in coming than any of those before him. His bows to Virginia
and Mrs. Clemm were more profound--his estimation of Virginia's beauty
he made at once apparent in the intense, admiring gaze he bestowed upon
her. His words of congratulation and good will for his host were more
extravagant than those of any of the others and were uttered in a voice
as smooth--as fluent--as oil; while he rubbed his large, fleshy hands
together in a manner betokening cordiality. When his host spoke, he
turned his ear toward him (though his eyes glanced aside and downward)
with an air of marked attention, and agreed emphatically with his views
or laughed uproariously at his pleasantries.
Yet at Rufus Griswold's heart jealousy was gnawing. Heaven had endowed
him with mind to recognize genius, yet had denied him its possession. He
that would have worn the laurel himself, was born to be but the
trumpeter of others' victories. He, like Edgar Poe, had an open eye and
ear for beauty--for harmony. He could feel the divine fire of
inspiration in the creations of master minds--yet he could not himself
create. He was a brilliant critic, but (as has been said) his ambition
was to be, like Poe, also a poet. His quick intuition had divined the
genius of Poe at their first meeting. He knew in a flash, that the neat,
slender, polished gentleman, with the cameo face, the large brow and the
luminous eyes, and with the deep-toned, vibrant voice, was one of the
few he had ever met of whom he could say with assurance, "There goes a
genius--" and of those few the topmost. Poe's writing, especially his
poetry, enthralled him. To have been able to come before the world as
the author of such work he would have sold his soul.
And this man who had caught him in a net woven of mingled fascination,
and envy, and hate, had, oh, bitter!--while generously applauding him as
a critic and reviewer--as a compiler and preserver of other men's
work--had added, "But--but--he is no poet."
He had received the stab without an apparent flinch. He had even laughed
and declared that Mr. Poe was right. That he himself knew he was no
poet--he did not aspire to be a real one, but only dropped into verse
now and then by way of pastime. The lie had slipped easily from his
tongue, but his eyes drooped ever so little more than usual as it did
so, their shifty gleam glanced ever so little more sidewise.
And though he came late to the birthday feast, his words of friendship
were emphatic and the laugh that told of his pleasure in being there was
loud and frequent. And he smiled and rubbed his hands together--and
bided his time.
And Edgar Poe was pleased--immensely pleased--on his gala night, with
the complimentary manner and the complimentary words of this welcome
guest--of this big, brainy man whose good opinion he so much desired.
Alas, hapless Dreamer! Did the gleam of those eyes cast alway slightly
downward, slightly askance--give you no discomfort? Did the fang-like
teeth when the thick lips opened to pour forth birthday wishes or
streams of uproarious laughter, and the square lines of the jaw, suggest
to your ready imagination no hint of cruelty? If you could but have
known that what time he laughed and talked with your guests and feasted
at your board, with its tasty viands and its cake with lighted candles,
and bent his furtive glance upon the beauty of your guileless
Virginia--if you could but have known that in his black heart the canker
jealousy was gnawing and that, behind the smile he wore as a mask, the
brainy man was biding his time!
It was a goodly little company--a coming together of bright wits and
(for the most part) of kind hearts, and the talk was crisp, and fresh,
and charming.
Supper was served early.
"My wife and her mother have thought that you Penn folk might like to
sit down to a Virginia supper," said the host, as he led Mrs. Graham to
the table, and stood for a moment while Virginia designated the seats to
be taken. Then still standing, said,
"Every man a priest to his own household, is our Virginia rule, but as
we have with us tonight one who before he took up Letters wore the
cloth, I'm going to abdicate in his favor. Dr. Griswold will you ask a
blessing?"
All heads were bowed while the time-honored little ceremonial was
performed, then seats were taken and the repast begun.
Virginia presided over the "tea-things," while Mrs. Clemm occupied the
seat nearest the door opening on the kitchen, that she might slip as
unobtrusively as possible out and back again when necessary; but most of
the serving was done by the guests themselves, each of whom helped the
dish nearest his or her plate, and passed the plates from hand to hand.
All of the supper, save the dessert and fresh supplies of hot waffles
was on the table. There were oysters and turkey salad and Virginia ham.
And there were hot rolls and "batter-bread" (made of Virginia meal with
plenty of butter, eggs and milk, and a spoonful of boiled rice stirred
in) and there was a "Sally Lunn"--light, brown, and also hot, and plenty
of waffles. In the little spaces between the more important dishes there
were pickles and preserves--stuffed mangoes and preserved quinces and
currant jelly. And in the centre of the table was the beautiful birthday
cake frosted by Virginia's dainty fingers and brilliant with its
thirty-three lighted candles.
There was just enough room left for the three slender cut-glass
decanters that were relics of Mother Clemm's better days.
"The decanter before you, Mr. Graham, contains the Madeira; the Canary
is before you, Captain Reid, and I have here a beverage with which I am
very much in love at present--_apple wine_--" Edgar Poe said, tapping
the stopper of a decanter of cider near his plate.
All understood. He had served the cider that he might join with them in
their pledges of friendship and good will without breaking through the
rule of abstemiousness in which he was finding so much benefit.
The toasts were clever as well as complimentary, and the table-talk
light and sparkling. Finally both Mrs. Clemm and Virginia arose to clear
the table for the dessert.
"You see, my friends, we keep no maid or butler," said the host, "but
I'm sure you will all agree with me in feeling that we would not
exchange our two Hebes for any, and they take serving you as a
privilege."
The cake was cut and served with calves-foot jelly--quivering and ruby
red--and velvety _blanc mange_.
After supper Virginia's harp was brought out of its corner and she sang
to them. With adorable sweetness and simplicity she gave each one's
favorite song as it was asked for--filling all the cottage with her pure
sweet tones accompanied by the bell-like, rippling notes of the harp.
The company sat entranced--all eyes upon the lovely girl from whose
throat poured the streams of melody.
She seemed but a child; for all she had been married six years she had
but just passed out of her "teens" and might easily have been taken for
a girl of fifteen. Her hair, it is true, was "tucked up," but the
innocence in the upturned, velvet eyes, the soft, childish outlines of
the face, the dimpled hands and arms against the harp's glided strings,
the simple little frock of white dimity, all combined to give her a
"babyfied" look which was most appealing, and which her title of "Mrs.
Poe" seemed rather to accentuate than otherwise.
Rufus Griswold's furtive eye rested balefully upon her. And this
exquisite being too, belonged to that man--as if the gods had not
already given him enough!
From a far corner of the room her husband gazed upon her, and bathed his
senses in contemplation of her beauty while his soul soared with her
song. Mother Clemm noiselessly passing near him to snuff a candle on the
table upon which his elbow, propping his head, rested, paused for a
moment and laid a caressing hand upon his hair. He impulsively drew her
down to a seat beside him.
"Oh, Muddie, Muddie, look at her--look at her!" he whispered. "There is
no one anywhere so beautiful as my little wife! And no voice like hers
outside of Heaven!... Ah--"
What was the matter? Was his Virginia ill? Even as he spoke her voice
broke upon the middle of a note--then stopped. One hand clutched the
harp, the other flew to her throat from which came only an inarticulate
sound like a struggle for utterance. Terror was in the innocent eyes
and the deathly white, baby face.
For a tense moment the little company of birthday guests sat rooted to
their places with horror, then rushed in a mass toward the singer, but
her husband was there first--his face like marble. His arms were around
her but with a repetition of that inarticulate, gurgling sound she fell
limp against his breast in a swoon. From the sweet lips where so lately
only melody had been a tiny stream of blood oozed and trickled down and
stained her pretty white dress.
"Back!--All of you!" commanded the low, clear voice of Edgar Poe, as
with the dear burden still in his arms he sank gently to the floor and
propping her head in his lap, disposed her limbs in comfortable, and her
dress in orderly manner. "Back--don't crowd! A doctor!"
One of the guests from nearby, who knew the neighborhood, had already
slipped from the door and gone to fetch the nearest doctor. The others
sat and listened for his step in breathless stillness.
Edgar Poe bent his marble face above the prostrate form of his wife,
calling to her in endearing whispers while, with his handkerchief he
wiped from her lips the oozing, crimson stream. His teeth chattered.
Once before he had seen such a stream. It was long ago--long ago, but he
remembered it well. He was back--a little boy, a mere baby--in the
small, dark room behind Mrs. Fipps' millinery shop, in Richmond, and a
stream like this came from the lips of his mother who lay so still, so
white, upon the bed. And his mother had been dying. He had seen her
thus--he would see her nevermore!... Would the doctor never come?--
* * * * *
Many days the Angel of Death spread his wings over the cottage in the
Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. Their shadow cast a great stillness
upon the cottage. Outside was a white, silent world. Snow had
fallen--snow on snow--until it lay deep, deep upon the garden-spot and
deep in the streets outside. There was no wind and the ice-sheathed
trees that were as sentinels round about the cottage stood still. They
seemed to listen and to wait.
Inside, in the bed-chamber upstairs, under the shelving walls of the low
Dutch roof, The Dreamer's heartsease blossom lay broken and wan upon the
white bed. It was a very white little blossom and the dark eyes seemed
darker, larger than ever before as they looked out from the pale face.
But they had never seemed so soft and a smile like an angel's played now
and again about her lips.
Beside her, with his lips pressed upon the tiny white hand which he held
in both his own was the bowed figure of a man--of a poet and a lover who
like the ice-sheathed trees seemed to listen and to wait--of a man whose
countenance from being pale was become ghastly, whose eyes from being
luminous were wild with a "divine despair."
At the foot of the bed sat a silver-haired woman with saintlike face
uplifted in resignation and aspiration. For once the busy hands were
idle and were clasped in her lap. She too, listened and waited, as she
had listened and waited for days. Oh Love! Oh Life! Are these the happy
trio who lived for each other only in the Valley of the Many-Colored
Grass?
The silence was only broken when the lips of the invalid moved to murmur
some loving words or to babble of the flowers in the Valley. She was in
no pain but she was very tired. She was not unhappy, for the two whom
she loved and who loved her were with her and though she was tired she
soon would rest--in Heaven. When she spoke of going the man's heart
stood still with terror. He held the hand closer and pressed his lips
more fiercely upon it.
He would not let her go, he vowed. There was no power in Heaven or hell
to whom he would yield her.
But she sweetly plead that he would not try to detain her--that he would
learn to bear the idea of her leaving him which now gave her no
unhappiness but for one thought--the thought that after a season he
might, in the love of some other maiden, forget the sweet life he had
lived with her in the Valley, and that because of his forgetting, it
would not be given to him to join her at last, in the land where she
would be waiting for him--the land of Rest.
At her words, he flung himself upon his knees beside her bed and offered
up a vow to herself and to Heaven that he would never bind himself in
marriage to any other daughter of earth, or in any way prove himself
forgetful of her memory and her love, and to make the vow the stronger,
he invoked a curse upon his head if he should ever prove false to his
promise.
And as she listened her soft eyes grew brighter and she, in turn, made a
vow to him that even after her departure she would watch over him in
spirit and if it were permitted her, would return to him visibly in the
watches of the night, but if that were beyond her power, would at least
give him frequent indications of her presence--sighing upon him in the
evening winds or filling the air which he breathed with perfume from the
censers of the angels.
And she sighed as if a deadly burden had been lifted from her breast,
and trembled and wept and vowed that her bed of death had been made easy
by his vow.
* * * * *
But it was not to be the bed of death. Little by little the shadow
lifted from over the cottage--the shadow of the wings of the Angel of
Death--and sunshine fell where the shadow had been, and a soft zephyr
made music, that was like the music of the voice of "Ligeia," in the
trees which dropped their sheath of ice. And the snow disappeared from
the streets and from the garden-spot which was all green underneath, and
by the time the crocuses were up health and happiness reigned once more
in the cottage.
But it was a happiness with a difference. A happiness which for all it
was so sweet, was tinctured with the bitter of remorse.
During the illness of his beloved wife, Edgar Poe had lived over and
over again through the horror of her death and burial with all of the
details with which the circumstances of his life had so early made him
familiar--and had tasted the desolation for him which must follow. While
his soul had been overwhelmed with this supreme sorrow his mind had been
unusually clear and alert. He had been alive to the slightest change in
her condition. Anticipating her every whim, he had nursed her with the
tenderness the untiring devotion, of a mother with her babe. Through
all his grief he was quiet, self-possessed, efficient.
But with the first glimmer of hope, his head reeled. His reason which
had stood the shock of despair, or seemed to stand it, gave way before
the return of happiness. A wild delirium possessed him. Joy drove him
mad, and already drunk with joy--mad with it--he flung prudence,
philosophy, resolutions to the wind and drank wine--and drank--and
drank. When--where--how much--he did not know; but at last merciful
illness overtook him and stopped him in his wild career.
With his convalescence his right mind returned to him; but he felt as he
did when he awoke to consciousness in Mother Clemm's bed-chamber in
Baltimore--that he had been down into the grave and back again.
Only--then there was no remorse--no fiercely accusing conscience to make
him wish from his soul that he might have remained in the abyss.
* * * * *
In dressing-gown and slippers he sat--weak and tremulous--in an
arm-chair drawn close to the open fire in the cottage sitting-room.
About him hovered his two angels, anticipating his every need, pausing
at his side now and again to bestow a delicate caress. Virginia was more
beautiful since her illness. Her face and figure had lost their
plumpness and with it their childish curves--but a something exalted and
ethereal had taken their place. Her eyes were softer, more wistful than
ever. Through her fair, transparent skin glowed the faintest, most
exquisite bloom. Her harp was mute. Her singing voice was gone. But the
deep, low tones of her speaking voice, full of restrained feeling, could
only be compared by her husband to the melodious voice of the
dream-woman, "Ligeia." They recalled to him the impression that the
voice of the priest as he read the funeral rite over his dead mother had
made upon his infant mind--the impression of _spoken_ music. His
Virginia could no longer sing, but every word that fell from her lips
was music.
As she and her tall, nun-like mother quietly stepped about the rooms
ministering to his comfort, lifting the work of preparing the simple
meals, mending the fire, and keeping the rooms bright into a sacred rite
by the grace, the care, the dignity with which it was performed, no
word, no look escaped either save of tenderness, patience, and boundless
love. All the reproaches came from within his own breast--from that
inner self that boldly tearing the veil from his deeds filled him with
loathing of himself.
The years, his troubles, and his illness, had wrought a great change in
him--outwardly. The dark ringlets that framed his face were still
untouched with rime, and the dark grey eyes were as vivid, as
ever-varying in expression as before, but the large brow wore a furrow
and over it and the clear-cut features and the emaciated cheeks was a
settled pallor. The face was still very beautiful, but in repose it was
melancholy and about the mouth there was a touch of bitterness. The
illumining smile still flashed out at times, and filled all his
countenance with sweetness and light--but it was rarer than formerly.
He had many reasons for being happy--for being thankful. The genius with
which he was conscious he was endowed in larger measure than others of
his generation was being recognized. He had fame--growing fame--and
money enough for his needs. He had what was as necessary to his soul as
meat was to his body--the love of a woman who understood him in all his
moods and who was beautiful enough in mind and in body and pure enough
in spirit for him to worship as well as to love--to satisfy his soul as
well as his senses. And this woman, at the very moment when he thought
himself about to lose her forever, had been given back to him--given
back clothed upon with a finer a more exquisite beauty than she had
possessed before.
He had indeed found the end of the rainbow, but what did it amount to?
He was dissatisfied--not with what life was giving him, but with what he
was doing with his life. At the moment when his cup was fairly
overflowing with happiness and he should have been strongest, he had
suffered himself to be led away by the Imp of the Perverse, and had
spoiled all. Nothing he had ever been made to taste he told himself, was
so unbearably bitter as this dissatisfaction--this disgust with self.
* * * * *
Yet when again the tiny crimson stream stained the sweet lips of his
Virginia, and again the Angel of Death spread a dread wing for a season
over the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, all his knowledge of the
bitterness--the loathing--of remorse was not sufficient to make him
strong for the struggle with grief and despair.
Again the reason of Edgar Poe gave way before the strain, and again he
fell.