Autumn with its enchanted October night, and winter filled with work and
spent in deep seclusion at Fordham, and spring with its revival of plans
for _The Stylus_, and the appearance of "Eureka!" as a book, and its
author's return to the world as a lecturer, slipped by.
About midsummer The Dreamer lay a night in the old town of Providence.
It was a warm night and the window of his room was open--letting in a
flood of light from the full moon. He leaned from the window which
looked upon a plot of flowers whose many odors rising, enveloped him in
incense sweet as the incense from the censers of the angels when the
spirit of his Virginia was near. But it was not of Virginia that the
fragrance told him tonight. Something about the blended odors, combined
with the sensuous warmth of the night and the light of the moon,
transported him suddenly, magically, back through the years to his
boyhood and to the little room in the Allan cottage on Clay Street,
hanging, like this room, over a space of flowers--the night following
the day when he had first seen Rob Stanard's mother.
Back, back into the long dead past he wandered! The broken and jaded
Edgar Poe was dreaming again the dream of the fresh, enthusiastic boy,
Edgar Poe.
How every incident of that day and night stood out in his memory! He
could feel again the wonder that he felt when he saw the beautiful
"Helen" standing against the arbor-vitæ in the garden; could see her
graceful approach to meet and greet him--the lonely orphan boy--could
hear her gracious words in praise of his mother while she held his hand
in both her own. As he lived it all over again, with the silver
moonlight enfolding him and the breath of the flowers filling his
nostrils, a clock somewhere in the house struck the night's noon hour.
He started--even so it had been that other night in the long past. He
half believed that if he should go forth into this night as he had gone
into that he should see once more the lady of his dream, with the lamp
in her hand, framed in the ivy-wreathed window, and seeing, worship as
he had worshipped then.
Scarce knowing what he did, he arose and hurrying down the stair was in
the street. The streets were strange to him but there was a pleasant
sense of adventure in wandering through them--he knew not whither--and
the sweet airs of the flowers were everywhere.
Suddenly he stopped. While all the town slept there was one beside
himself, who kept vigil. Clad all in white, she half reclined upon a
violet bank in an old garden where the moon fell on the upturned faces
of a thousand roses and on her own, "upturned,--alas, in sorrow!"
Faint with the beauty and the poetry of the scene he leaned upon the
gate of the
"enchanted garden
Where no wind dared to stir unless on tiptoe."
He dared not speak or give any sign of his presence, but he gazed and
gazed until to his entranced eyes it seemed that
"The pearly lustre of the moon went out:
The mossy banks and the meandering paths--
The happy flowers and the repining trees--
Were seen no more."
All was lost to his vision--
"Save only the divine light in those eyes--
Save but the soul in those uplifted eyes."
* * * * *
He continued to gaze until the moon disappeared behind a bank of cloud
and he watched the white-robed figure glide away like "a ghost amid the
entombing trees." Yet still (it seemed to him) the eyes remained. They
lighted his lonely footsteps home that night and he told himself that
they would light him henceforth, through the years.
Nearly a year had passed since that October night when the Star of Love
ushering in a new morning had prophesied to him of new hope--nearly a
year through which he had waited patiently, but not in vain. The time
had evidently come for the prophecy to be fulfilled and Fate had led him
to this town and the spot in this town where she that was to be (he was
convinced) the hope, the guide, the savior, of his "lonesome latter
years" awaited him.
Who was she?--
So spirit-like, so ethereal, she seemed, as robed in white and veiled in
silvery moon-beams she sat among the slumbering roses, and as she was
gathered into the shadows of the entombing trees, that she might almost
have been the "Lady Ligeia." Yet he knew that she was not. The "Lady
Ligeia" had been but the creation of his own brain. Very fair she had
been to his dreaming vision, very sweet her companionship had been to
his imagination--sufficient for all the needs of his being in his
youthful days when sorrow was but a beautiful sentiment, when "terror
was not fright, but a tremulous delight" but how was such an one as she
to bind up the broken heart of a man? It was the _human_ element in the
eyes of her that sat among the roses that enchained him.
Ethereal--spirit-like--as she was, the eyes upturned in sorrow were the
eyes of no spirit, but of a woman; from them looked a human soul with
the capacity and the experience to offer sympathy meet for human
needs--the needs even, of a broken-hearted man.
How dark the woe!--how sublime the hope!--how intense the pride!--how
daring the ambition!--how deep, how fathomless the capacity for
love!--that looked (as from a window) from those eyes upturned in
sorrow, in the moonlight while all the town slept!
Who was she?--this lady of sorrows. And by what sweet name was she known
to the citizens of this old town?--Surely Fate that had brought her to
the bank of violets beneath the moon--Fate that had led him to her
garden gate, would in Fate's own time reveal!
* * * * *
As Helen Whitman flitted as noiselessly as the ghost she seemed to be up
the dark stairway to her chamber, and without closing the casement that
admitted the moonlight and the garden's odors, lay down upon her
canopied bed, she trembled. What was it that she had been aware of in
the garden?--that presence--that consciousness of communion between her
spirit and his upon whom all her thoughts had dwelt of late? Herself a
poet, from her earliest knowledge of the work of Edgar Poe she had
seemed to feel a kinship between her mind and his such as she had known
in regard to no other. She had followed his career step by step, and out
of the many sorrows of her own life had been born deep sympathy for him.
Since his last, greatest blow, she had more than ever mourned with him
in spirit, for she too was widowed--she too had sat upon the Rock of
Desolation and knew the Silence and the Solitude.
She and The Dreamer had at least one mental trait in common--a tendency
toward spiritualism--a more than half belief in the communion of the
spirits of the dead with those of the living and of those of the living
with each other.
What had led her into the moonlit garden when all the world slept?
She knew not. She only knew that she had felt an impelling influence--a
call to her spirit--to come out among the slumbering roses. She had not
questioned nor sought to define it. She had heard it, and she had
obeyed. And then the presence!--
She had never seen Edgar Poe, yet she felt that he had been there in the
spirit, if not in the flesh--she had felt his eyes upon her eyes and she
had half expected him to step from the shadows around her and to say,
"I, upon whom your thoughts have dwelt--I, who am the comrade and the
complement of your inner life--I, whose spirit called to you ere you
came into the garden--I am here."
* * * * *
It was almost immediately upon The Dreamer's return to Fordham, and when
he was still under the spell of the night at Providence, that the
identity of the lady of the garden was revealed to him, in a manner
seemingly accidental, but which he felt to be but another manifestation
of the divinity that shapes our ends. Some casual words concerning the
appearance and character of Mrs. Whitman, spoken by a casual visitor,
lifted the curtain.
So the lady of the garden was Helen Whitman! whose poetry had impressed
him favorably and whose acquaintance he had desired. Helen
Whitman--_Helen_! As he repeated the name his heart stood still,--even
in her name he heard the voice of Fate. _Helen_--the name of the good
angel of his boyhood! Were his dreams of "Morella" and of "Ligeia" to
come true? Was he to know in reality the miracle he had imagined and
written of in these two phantasies?--the reincarnation of personal
identity? Was he in this second Helen, in this second garden, to find
again the worshipped Helen of his boyhood?
He turned to the lines he had written so long ago, in Richmond, when he
had gone forth into the midsummer moonlight, even as he had gone forth
in Providence, and had worshipped under a window, even as he had
worshipped at a garden gate. He read the first two stanzas through.
As he read he gave himself up to an overwhelming sense of fatality.
Could anything be more fitting--more descriptive? The end of the days of
miracles was not yet--this _was_ his "Helen of a thousand dreams!"
His impulse was to seek an introduction at once, but this seemed too
tamely conventional. Besides--he was in the hands of Fate--he dared not
stir. Fate, having so clearly manifested itself, would find a way.
His correspondence was always heavy. Letters, clippings from papers and
so forth, came to him by every post from friends and from enemies, with
and without signatures. Yet from all the mass, he knew at once that the
"Valentine," unsigned as it was, was from her.
By way of acknowledgment, he turned down a page of a copy of "The Raven
and Other Poems" at the lines, "To Helen," and mailed it to her. He
waited in anxious suspense for a reply, but the lady was coy. Days
passed and still no answer. The desire for communication with her became
irresistible and taking pen and paper he wrote at the top of the page,
even as long ago he had written, the words, "To Helen," and underneath
wrote a new poem especially for this new Helen in which he described the
vision of her in the garden (but placing it in the far past) and his
feelings as he gazed upon her:
"I saw thee once--once only--years ago;
I must not say _how_ many--but not many.
* * * * *
Clad all in white, upon a violet bank
I saw thee half reclining; while the moon
Fell on the upturned faces of the roses,
And on thine own, upturned,--alas in sorrow!
Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight--
Was it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow)
That bade me pause before that garden-gate
To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?
No footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,
Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven!--oh, God!
How my heart beats in coupling those two words!)
Save only thee and me!" ...
The paper trembled in the hands--tiny and spirit-like--of Helen Whitman.
Her soul answered emphatically,
"It _is_ Fate!"
So he had been there in the flesh--near her--in the shadows of that
mystic night! The presence was no creation of an overwrought
imagination. It was Fate.
Tremulously she penned her answer to his appeal, but was it Fate again,
which caused the letter to miscarry? It reached him finally, in
Richmond--_Richmond_, of all places!--whither he had gone to deliver to
audiences of his old friends, his lecture upon "The Poetic Principle,"
in the interest of the establishment of his magazine, _The Stylus_. What
could have been more fitting than that the gracious words of "Helen of a
thousand dreams" should come to him in Richmond?
* * * * *
Not many days later and he was under her own roof in Providence.
He waited in the dimness of her curtained drawing-room, ear strained for
the first sound of her footstep. Noiselessly as a sunbeam or a shadow
she entered the room, her gauzy white draperies floating about her
slight figure as she came, while his great eyes drank in with reverent
joy each detail of her ethereal loveliness--her face, the same he had
seen in the garden, pale as a pearl and as softly radiant, and framed in
clustering dark ringlets which escaped in profusion from the confinement
of a lacy widow's cap--the tremulous mouth--the eyes, mysterious and
unearthly, from which the soul looked out.
For one moment she paused in the doorway, her hand pressed upon her
wildly beating heart--then, with hesitating step advanced to meet him.
Her words of greeting were few, and so low and faltering as to be quite
unintelligible, but the tones of her voice fell on his ear like
strangely familiar music.
The man spoke no word. As her eyes rested for one brief moment upon his,
then fell before the intensity of his gaze, he was conscious of
spiritual influences beyond the reach of reason. In a tremulous ecstacy
he bent and pressed his lips upon the hand that lay within his own and
it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from falling upon his
knees before her in actual worship.
Three evenings of "all heavenly delight" he spent in her
companionship--sometimes in the seclusion and dusk of her quiet
drawing-room, sometimes walking among the roses in her garden, or among
the mossy tombs in the town cemetery--their sympathetic natures finding
expression in such conversation as poets delight in. Under the
intoxicating spell of her presence all other dreams passed, for the
time, into nothingness and he passionately cried,
"Helen, I love now--_now_--for the first and only time!"
Yet he was poor, and the weaknesses which had caused him to fall in the
past might cause him to fall in the future. How could he plead for a
return of his love?
His very self-abasement made his plea more strong. Still, she did not
yield too suddenly. True, she too, was under the spell, but she resisted
it. As he found his voice, and his eloquence filled the room a
restlessness possessed her. Now she sat quite still by his side, now
rose and wandered about the apartment--now stood with her hand resting
upon the back of his chair while his nearness thrilled her.
There were objections, she told him--she was older than he.
"Has the soul age, Helen?" he answered her. "Can immortality regard
time? Can that which began never and shall never end consider a few
wretched years of its incarnate life? Do you not perceive that it is my
diviner nature--my spiritual being, that burns and pants to commingle
with your own?"
She urged her frail health as an objection.
For that he would love--worship her--the more, he said. He plead for her
pity upon his loneliness--his sorrows--and swore that he would comfort
and soothe her in hers, through life, and when death should come,
joyfully go down with her into the night of the grave.
Finally he appealed to her ambition.
"Was I right, Helen, in my first impression of you?--in the impression
that you are ambitious? If so, and if you will have faith in me, I can
and will satisfy your wildest desires. Would it not be glorious to
establish in America, the sole unquestionable aristocracy--that of the
intellect--to secure its supremacy--to lead and control it?"
Still the _yes_ that so often seemed trembling upon her lips was not
spoken. She received his almost daily letters and his frequent visits,
listened to his rapturous love-making--trembling, blushing, letting him
see that she was under the spell, that she loved him. Indeed she could
not have helped his seeing it had she wished; but when he spoke of
marriage she hesitated--tantalizing him to the point of madness, almost.
What was it that held her back?--She too, believed that it was the hand
of Fate that had brought them together--that they were pre-ordained to
cheer each other's latter years, to establish that intellectual
aristocracy of which he dreamed. Yet she shrank from taking the step.
When his great solemn eyes were upon her, his beautiful face pale and
haggard with excess of feeling, turned toward her, his eloquent words of
love in her ears, she sat as one entranced--bewitched; yet she would not
give the word he longed for--the word of willingness to embark with him
upon the sea of life. _Fear_ checked her. Such an uncharted sea it
seemed to her--she dared not say him yea!
The truth was the poison was working--the Griswold poison. The wildest
rumors came to her ears of the worse than follies of her lover. She knew
that they were at least, overdrawn--possibly altogether false--yet they
frightened her.
"Do you know Helen Whitman?" wrote one of The Dreamer's enemies to Dr.
Griswold. "Of course you have heard it rumored that she is to marry Poe.
Well, she has seemed to me a good girl and--you know what Poe is. Has
Mrs. Whitman no friend in your knowledge that can faithfully explain Poe
to her?"
But Rufus Griswold had already "explained Poe" to those whom he knew
would take pains to pass the explanation on to "Helen"--had dropped the
poison where he reckoned it would work with the greatest speed and
effect. The explanation, with the usual indirectness of a Griswold, was
sugared with a compliment.
"Poe has great intellectual power," he said with emphasis, "_great_
intellectual power, but," he added, with a sidelong glance of the
furtive eye and a confidential drop in the voice, "but--he has no
principle--no moral sense."
The poison reached the destination for which it was intended--the ears
of Helen Whitman--in due course, and it terrified her as had none of
the rumors she had heard before. Still her lover floundered in the
dark--baffled--wondering--not able to make her out. Why did she
tantalize him--torture him, thus?--keeping him dangling between Heaven
and hell?--he asked himself, and he asked her, over and over again. He
became more and more convinced that there was a reason,--what was it?
Finally she gave it to him in its baldness and its brutality, just as it
had come to her--wrote it to him in a letter. It brought him a rude
awakening from his dream of bliss. That such a charge should be brought
against him at all was bitter enough, but that it could be repeated to
him by "Helen" seemed unbelievable.
"You do not love me," he sadly wrote in reply, "or you would not have
written these terrible words." Then he swore a great oath: "By the God
who reigns in Heaven, I swear to you that my soul is incapable of
dishonor--that with the exception of occasional follies and excesses
which I bitterly lament, but to which I have been driven by intolerable
sorrow, I can call to mind no act of my life which would bring a blush
to my cheek--or to yours."
He followed the letter with a visit--again throwing himself at her feet
and thrilling her with his eloquence and with the magic of his
personality.
She gave him a half promise and said she would write to him in Lowell,
where he had engaged to deliver a lecture.
In this town was a roof-tree which was a haven of rest to The Dreamer.
Beneath it dwelt his friend and confidant, "Annie" Richmond--his soul's
sweet "sister," as he loved to call her. And there he waited with a
chastened joy, for he felt assured that the long wished for _yes_ was
about to be said, yet dared not give himself over prematurely, to the
ecstacy that would soon be his. In the pleasant, friendly family circle
of the Richmonds, he sat during those chill November evenings, seeing
pictures in the glowing fire, as he held sweet "Annie's" sympathetic
hand in his, while the only sound that broke the silence was the ticking
of the grandfather's clock in a shadowy corner.
Thus quietly, patiently, he waited.
* * * * *
But in Providence the Griswold poison was at work. All the friends and
relatives of "Helen" were possessed of full vials of it--which they
industriously poured into her ears. Against it the recollection of the
night in the garden and her belief that Fate had ordained her union with
the poet, had no avail. The letter that she sent her lover was more
non-committal--colder--than any he had received from her before, yet
there was still enough of indecision in it to keep him tantalized. In a
state of mind well nigh distraction, he bade "Annie" and her cheerful
fireside farewell and set his face toward Providence; but he went in a
dream--the demon Despair, possessing him.
Unstrung, unmanned, almost bereft of reason, his old dissatisfaction
with himself and the world overtook him--a longing to be out of it all,
for forgetfulness, for peace, yea, even the peace of the grave,--why
not?
A passionate longing--a homesickness--for the sure, the steadfast, the
unvariable love of his beautiful Virginia consumed him. Oh, if he could
but lie down and sleep and forget until one sweet day he should wake in
the land where she awaited him, and where they would construct anew, and
for eternity, the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass!
He listened.... For the first time since the Star of Love had ushered in
a new day in his life, he heard the swinging of the censers of the
angels--he inhaled the incense--he heard the voice of Virginia in the
sighing wind. She seemed to call to him.
"I am coming, Heartsease!" he whispered as he quaffed the potion that he
reckoned would bear him to her.
* * * * *
But it was not to be. When he awaked, weak and ill, but sane, he found
himself with friends. Calmness and strength returned and with them,
horror at the deed he had so nearly committed, and deep contrition.
With all haste he again presented himself at the door of "Helen,"
beseeching her to marry him at once and save him, as he believed she
only could, from himself. And the consequences of her indecision making
her more alarmed for him than she had formerly been for herself, she
agreed to an engagement, though not to immediate marriage.
He returned to Fordham and to faithful Mother Clemm a wreck of his
former self, but engaged to be married!
Yet he was not happy--a new horror possessed him. As in the night when
the Star of Love first rose upon his vigil it had stopped over the door
of "a legended tomb," so now again was his pathway closed. Turn which
way he would, the tomb of Virginia seemed to frown upon him. He
remembered his promise to her that upon no other daughter of earth
would he look with the eyes of love. Vainly did he seek to justify
himself to his own heart for breaking the promise. No one could ever
supplant her, or fill the void in his life her death had made, he told
himself--this new love was something different, and in no way disturbed
her memory.
But the tomb still stood in his way.
"I am calm and tranquil," he wrote "Helen," "and but for a strange
shadow of coming evil which haunts me I should be happy. That I am not
supremely happy, even when I feel your dear love at my heart, terrifies
me."
Later he wrote,
"You say that all depends on my own firmness. If this be so all is safe.
Henceforward I am strong. But all does not depend, dear Helen, upon my
firmness--all depends upon the sincerity of your love."
* * * * *
A month later the skies of Providence shone brightly upon him. He
returned there, was received by Mrs. Whitman as her affianced lover,
delivered his brilliant lecture upon "The Poetic Principle" to a great
throng of enthusiastic hearers, and won a promise from his lady to marry
him at once and return with him to Fordham. He scribbled a line to
Mother Clemm notifying her to be ready to receive him and his bride and
went so far as to engage the services of a clergyman, and to sign a
marriage contract, in which Mrs. Whitman's property was made over to her
mother.
But--just at this point a note was slipped into the hand of "Helen,"
informing her that her lover had been seen drinking wine in the hotel.
When he called at her house soon afterward she received him surrounded
by her family and though there were no signs of the wine, said "no" to
him, emphatically--for the first time.
He plead, but she remained firm--receiving his passionate words of
remonstrance with sorrowful silence, while her mother, impatient at his
persistence, showed him the door. He prayed that she would at least
speak one word to him in farewell.
"What can I say?" she questioned.
"Say that you love me, Helen."
"I love you!"
With these words in his ears he was gone. As he passed out of the gate
and out of her life he saw, or fancied he saw, through the veiled
window, a white figure beckoning to him, but his steps were sternly set
toward the opposite direction--his whole being crying within him,
"Nevermore--nevermore!" She had stretched out her spiritlike hands, but
to draw them back again, in the fashion that fascinated and at the same
time maddened him, once too often. The wave of romantic feeling which
had borne him along since his vision of her in the garden suddenly
subsided, leaving him disillusioned--cold. The reaction was so violent
that instead of the magnetic attraction she had had for him he felt
himself positively repelled by the thought of her unearthly beauty--her
mysterious eyes.
He went straight to the depot and took the train just leaving, which
would bear him back to the cottage among the cherry trees.
Mother Clemm, expecting him to bring home a bride, had spent the day
putting an extra touch of brightness upon the simple but already
spotless, home. A cheerful fire was in the grate; branches of holly,
cedar and such other such bits of beauty as the woods afforded were
everywhere about the house, and the Mother herself, in the snowiest of
caps with the sheerest of floating strings and a gallant look of welcome
upon her sorrowful face, stood at the window and watched for the coming
of the son that Heaven had given her, and the woman who was to take the
place of the daughter that Heaven had taken away from her. Her oak-like
nature had quailed at the thought--but it had withstood many a blast, it
could weather one more, and after all, if "Eddie" were happy--.
* * * * *
In the far distance a figure emerged out of the gathering dusk--a man.
Could it be Eddie?--Alone?
Yes! It surely was he! The carriage of the head--the military cloak--the
walk--were unmistakable.
But he was alone!--She grew weak in the knees.--The shock of joy more
nearly unnerved her than had the pain. She had braced herself to bear
the pain.
She recovered her composure and hastened to the door just in time to be
folded into the arms of the figure in the cloak.
"Helen?"--she queried.
"Is dead--to me," he answered, with his arms still about her. "We will
have nothing more to say of her except this: Muddie, I have been in a
dream from which, thank God, I am now awake. In the darkness of my
loneliness--of my misery, of which you alone have the slightest
conception, I saw a light which I fancied would lead me to the love for
which my soul is starving--to the sympathy which is sweeter even than
love to the broken heart of a man. I followed it. I was deceived. It was
no real light, but a mere will o' the wisp bred in the dank tarn of
despair."
He released her to hang up the cloak in the little entrance hall, then
taking her hand, which he raised to his lips, drew her into the sitting
room.
"Ah, but it is good to be at home again!" he exclaimed.
His whole manner changed; a mighty weight seemed to roll from his
shoulders as he stretched his legs before the fire. His old merry
laugh--the laugh of Edgar Goodfellow--rang out as he told "Muddie" of
the success of his lecture, in Providence,--of the great audience and
the applause.
"Muddie," he cried, "my dream of _The Stylus_ will come true yet! A few
more such audiences and the money will be in sight! And let me add, I am
done with literary women--henceforth literature herself shall be my sole
mistress. I am more than ever convinced that the profession of letters
is the only one fit for a man of brain. There is little money in it, of
course, but I'd rather be a poor-devil author earning a bare living than
a king. Beyond a living, what does a man of brain want with money
anyhow?--Muddie, did it ever strike you that all that is really valuable
to a man of talent--especially to a poet--is absolutely
unpurchasable?--Love, fame, the dominion of intellect, the consciousness
of power, the thrilling sense of beauty, the free air of Heaven,
exercise of body and mind with the physical and moral health that these
bring;--these, and such as these are really all a poet cares about. Then
why should he mind what the world calls poverty?"
"Why indeed?" echoed happy "Muddie." It was so delightful to have her
son back at home, and in this hopeful, contented frame, she would have
agreed with him in almost any statement he chose to make.
He gave her loving messages from "Annie" and told her in the bright,
humorous way which was characteristic of Edgar Goodfellow, of many
pleasant little incidents of his journey. One of the nights to look back
upon and to gloat over in memory was this night by the fireside at
Fordham cottage with the Mother--a night of calm and content under the
home-roof after tempestuous wandering.
A quiet, sweet Christmas they spent together--he reading, writing or
talking over plans for new work, while she sat by with her sewing and
Catalina dozed on the hearth. Part of every day (wrapped in the old
cape) he walked in the pine wood or beside the ice-bound river, and for
the first time since the feverish dream of new love had come to him he
was able to visit the tomb of Virginia and to dwell with happiness, and
with a clear conscience, upon her memory. During these days of serenity
a ballad suggested by thoughts of her and his life with her in the
lovely Valley of the Many-Colored Grass took form in his mind. It was no
dirge-like song of the "dank tarn of Auber," but a song of a fair
"kingdom by the sea" and in contrast to the sombre "Ulalume" he gave to
the maiden in the new poem the pleasant sounding name of "Annabel Lee."
Out of these days too, came "the Bells" and the exquisite sonnet to his
"more than Mother."
One flash of the false light that had lured him reached The Dreamer at
Fordham. He held a letter addressed to him in the familiar handwriting
of Helen Whitman long in his hand without opening it. This flame was
burned out, he told himself--why rake its cold ashes? Yet he felt that
nothing that she could say would have power to disturb his new peace.
Still the Mother, though she kept her own counsel, trembled for herself
and for him as she was aware (without looking up from her sewing) that
he had broken the seal. Some minutes of tense stillness passed--then,
"Shall I read you her letter?" he asked.
"As you will."
"Then I will!--It is in verse and the place from which she dates it is,
"Our Island of Dreams," which she explains in a sub-heading is
"By the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn"
--a line which she has borrowed from Keats. This is what she writes:
"Tell him I lingered alone on the shore,
Where we parted, in sorrow, to meet nevermore;
The night-wind blew cold on my desolate heart
But colder those wild words of doom, 'Ye must part!'
"O'er the dark, heaving waters, I sent forth a cry;
Save the wail of those waters there came no reply.
I longed, like a bird, o'er the billows to flee,
From our lone island home and the moan of the sea:
"Away,--far away--from the wild ocean shore,
Where the waves ever murmur, 'No more, nevermore,'
Where I wake, in the wild noon of midnight, to hear
The lone song of the surges, so mournful and drear.
"Where the clouds that now veil from us heaven's fair light,
Their soft, silver lining turn forth on the night;
When time shall the vapors of falsehood dispel
He shall know if I loved him; but never how well."
Silence followed the reading of the poem-letter. Finally the mother
asked,
"Will you go back?"
He placed the letter upon the top of a pile in the same handwriting,
tied them together with a bit of ribbon and laid them in a small drawer
of his desk. Then, rising, he leaned over the back of "Muddie's" chair
and lightly touching her seamed forehead with his lips replied,
"Quoth the raven, nevermore!"
Then took up a garland of evergreen which he had been making when the
Mother came in with the mail, and set out in the direction of the
churchyard with its "legended tomb."