It was not until near the end of his third session in the school that the riddle was, quite suddenly, solved. Edgar Poe was now in his fifteenth year. One perfect May day, when the song of birds, the odors of flowers, the whisper of soft breezes and the languor of mellow sunshine outside of the open school windows were wooing all poetic souls to come out and live, and let musty, dry books go to the deuce, little Rob Sully found it impossible to fix his mind upon his Latin. As for Edgar's mind, it was plain from his expression that it was far afield; but then Edgar had the power of knowing his lessons intuitively, almost. Rob only "got" his by faithful plodding. When their respective classes were called, Edgar recited brilliantly, while Rob seemed like one befuddled and, making a dismal failure, was bidden to stay in and study at recess. A look of utter woe settled upon his thin, pallid face, which lifted as, impelled to look toward Edgar's desk, he caught his friend's eyes fixed upon him with their charming smile. He knew well what the eyes were saying:

"Don't worry, Rob, I'll stay in and help you."

And stay in the owner of the eyes did, patiently going over and over the lesson with the confused boy until the hard parts were made easy. Finally, when he saw that Rob had mastered it, Edgar walked out into the yard for the few minutes left of recess. The boys were all drawn up in a group a little way from the house and were being harangued by his rival, Nat Howard. His chums, Rob Stanard, Dick Ambler and Jack Preston, were standing together a few feet apart from the rest. Their faces were very red and the haranguing seemed to be addressed directly to them. Edgar stopped where he was, wondering what it was all about, but shy of joining a crowd over which Nat was presiding.

The speaker's voice rose to a higher key.

"I'll tell you, boys," he was saying, "if you persist in intimacy with this fellow, you needn't expect to be in with me and my crowd."

"We don't want you and your crowd," was the response. "He's worth all of you rolled into one."

Edgar's heart stood still. "Was Nat Howard talking about him?"

The voice went on: "I grant you the fellow's smart enough and game enough, but he's not in our class, and I, for one, won't associate with him intimately."

"His family's one of the oldest and most honorable in the country," said Robert Stanard. "I've heard my father say so."

"Yes, but his father must have been a black sheep to run away with a common actress—"

The harangue was brought to an abrupt end. The enraged Edgar had sprung forward and, with a blow in the face, struck Nat Howard down. Nat's friends were lifting him up and wiping the blood from his face and dusting his clothing, while Edgar's own friends gathered around him as if to restrain him from repeating the attack. He shook them off, gazing with contempt upon his limp and half-stunned adversary.

"I'll not hit him again until he repeats his offence," he assured the boys, "but I want him and all other cowardly dogs to know what's waiting for them when they insult the memory of my father and mother. Yes! my mother was an actress! God gave her the gifts to make her one and she had the pluck to use them to earn bread for herself and for her children. Yes! she was an actress! She had the lovely face and form, the high intelligence and the poetic soul for the making of a perfect woman or for the interpreter of genius—for the personification of a Juliet, a Rosalind or a Cordelia. Yes! she was an actress! And I'm proud of it as surely as I'm proud she's an angel in Heaven! And I'm proud that my father—the son of a proud family—had the spirit, for her sweet sake, to fly in the face of convention, to count family, fortune and all well lost to become her husband, and to adopt her profession; to learn of her, in order that he might be always at her side to protect her and to live in the light of her presence. If I had choice of all the surnames and of all the lineage in the world, I would still choose the name of Poe, and to be the son of David and Elizabeth Poe, players!"

The boys were silent. The school bell was ringing and Edgar Poe, still pale and trembling with passion, turned on his heel and strode, with head up, in the direction of the door. Rob Stanard and Rob Sully walked one on each side of him, while Dick Ambler and Jack Preston and several others among his adherents, followed close. A little way behind the group came the other boys, their still half-dazed leader in their midst. Good Mr. Burke (who had succeeded Mr. Clarke as school-master) guessed as they came in and took their seats that there had been an altercation of some kind, and that his two brag scholars had been prominent in it; but he was wise in his generation and allowed the boys to settle their own differences without asking any questions unless he were appealed to, when his sympathy and interest were found to be theirs to count upon.

The afternoon session was unsatisfactory, but the master was in an indulgent mood and apparently did not notice what each boy felt—a confusion and abstraction. There was a palpable sense of relief when the closing hour came.

* * * * *

At dinner that day Edgar was silent and evidently under a cloud, and scarcely touched his food. Frances Allan looked toward him anxiously and her husband suspiciously. When his lack of appetite was remarked upon, he, truthfully enough, pleaded headache. Mrs. Allan was all sympathy at once.

"You study too hard, dear," she said. "You may have a holiday tomorrow if you like, and go and spend the day in the country with Rosalie and the Mackenzies."

"No, no," replied the boy. "I'll just stay quiet, in my room, this evening. I'll be all right by tomorrow."

"What have you been eating?" demanded John Allan, gruffly.

"Nothing, since breakfast, Sir," was the reply.

"Headaches are for nervous women. When a healthy boy complains of one, and declines dinner, it generally means that he has been robbing somebody's strawberry patch or up a cherry-tree, stuffing half-ripe fruit," he said in the acid, suspicious tone that the boy knew. It was beyond John Allan's powers to imagine any but physical causes for a boy's ailments.

* * * * *

Not until the door of his own little bed-room was closed behind him did Edgar Poe even try to collect his thoughts. Then he sat down at his window and looked out over the fragrant garden to the quiet sky, contemplation of which had so often soothed his spirit, and tried to readjust the inner world he lived in, in accordance with the discovery he had just made. A first such readjustment his world had experienced three years before, when Mr. Allan had taunted him with his dependence upon charity. Before that time the world, as he knew it, had held only love and beauty—sorrow, as he had seen it, being but a solemn and poetic form of beauty. The change in such a world made by the discovery that his being an adopted son set him apart in a class different from other boys—a class unlovely and loveless—had been great, had stolen much of the joy from living; but he was very young then, and the joy of mere living and breathing was strong in his blood, and he had gradually become accustomed—hardened, if you will—to the idea of his dependence upon charity.

But here was a change far more terrible, and coming at a time when he was old enough to feel it far more keenly. He was indeed, in a class by himself—he was held in contempt because of what his angel mother had been! His holy of holies had been profaned, the sacred fire that warmed his inner life had been spat upon. It seemed he had been from the beginning despised, though he had not dreamed it, for that which he held most dear—of which he was most proud. The little, aristocratic, puffed-up world he lived in would doubtless always despise him; but that was because of its narrowness and ignorance for which he, in turn, would despise it. With the whimsical, half-belief he had always had that the dead remain conscious through their long sleep, he wondered if his beautiful young mother, with the roses on her hair, down under the green earth, was not aware of the love and loyalty of her boy and if her spirit soaring the highest heavens, would not aid him in carrying out the resolution which in the bitterness of his soul, he then and there made—the resolution to bring this mean little, puffed up world to do honor to his name—to her name, of which he was prouder in this hour when others would trample it in the dust than he had ever been before.

Young boy though he was, he was conscious of his God-given endowments. He felt that the divine fire of poetic feeling in his breast was an immortal thing. Up to this time, his singing had been as the singing of a wood-bird—an impulse, a necessity to express the thoughts and feelings of his heart. He had never looked far enough ahead to consider whether he should or should not publish his work; but now ambition awoke—full-grown at its birth—and set him afire. From those parents whose memory had been insulted he had received (God willing it) the precious heritage of brilliant intellect. He would put the work of this intellect—his stories and his poems—into books. He would give them to the wide world. He would win recognition for the name of Poe.

He drew from within his coat the miniature of his mother—her dying gift. He gazed upon it long and tenderly, and with it still exposed to view brought from his desk the little packet of yellowed letters in their faded blue ribbon. He knew them by heart, but he read them—each one—over again, as carefully as if it had been the first time. They were not many and those not long; but ah, they were sweet!—those tender, quaint love-letters that had passed between his parents in their brief courtship and married life. His father's so manly so strong—like the letters of a soldier. His mother's so modest, so tender. They did not stir his pulses so wildly now as they did upon his first reading of them, when a little lad at old Stoke-Newington—but they were no less beautiful to him now than then. The sentences made him think of the dainty, sweet aroma of pressed roses.

He tied the packet up again and kissed letters and picture, as if to seal the promise he was making them, then restored them to their hiding-places. With the bitter knowledge that had come to him, he felt that years had passed over him—that he would never be young again—this boy of fourteen!

He raised his deep, pensive eyes once more to the quiet sky and his spirit cried to Heaven to grant him power to accomplish this task he had set himself: to lift the loved name of his parents from the dust where it lay, and to set it high in the temple of fame, wreathed with immortal myrtle.

His resolution gave to his poetic face and his slender figure an air of mastery, as though some new, high quality had been born within him.



CHAPTER VIII.

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!"



CHAPTER IX.

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.



CHAPTER X.

The session at the University did not begin until the middle of February, so love's young dream was not to be interrupted too soon. Meantime, its sweetness was only enhanced by thought of the coming separation. The affair had too, the interest of secrecy, for the youthful lovers well knew the storm of opposition that would be raised, in both their homes, if it should be discovered. This need of secrecy made frequent meetings and exchange of vows impossible, but it gave to such as occurred the flavor of stolen sweets and kept the young sinners in a tantalized state which was excruciating and at the same time delightful, and which still further fed the flames and convinced them of the realness and intensity of their passion.

When they did meet, their awed, joyous confessions of mutual love charmed the lonely, romantic boy by their very novelty. In them his fairest dreams were fulfilled. How sweet it was in these rare, stolen moments, to crush the pure young creature, who would be his own some day, against his wildly beating heart—how passing sweet to hear against his ear her whispered, hesitating vows of deep, everlasting love!

In his pretty new room overlooking the terraced garden of the stately mansion which had become his home, Edgar Poe plunged headlong into Byron, and in the mood thus induced, penned many a verse, no worse and not much better than the rhymes of lovelorn youths the world over and time out of mind, to be copied into Myra's album.

Between the love-making and preparation for college, time took wings. In what seemed an incredibly short space summer and fall were gone, Christmas, with its festivities, was over and the new year—the year 1826—had opened.

It was upon St. Valentine's Day that, with a feeling of solemnity worthy of the act, the seventeen year old lover and student wrote the name Edgar Allan Poe, and the date of his birth, upon the matriculation book of the University of Virginia—open for its second session. Upon the day before the beauty and the poetry—the inspiration—of the place had burst upon him, and this first impression still held his soul in thrall.

Here, in this fair Virginia vale, ringed about with the heaven-kissing hills of the Blue Ridge, the scholastic village conjured by Jefferson's fertile imagination lay before him in the clear, winter sunshine. Its lawns and its gardens were just now white with an unbroken blanket of new-fallen snow; the young trees which had been planted in avenues along the lawns, but which were as yet hardly more than shrubs, glittered with icicles, and above them rose the classic columns of the colonnaded dormitories and professors' houses; while at one end of the oblong square the majestic dome and columns of the Rotunda stood out against the sky. As the entranced Dreamer gazed and gazed, trying to imagine what it must be like by moonlight—what it would be in spring—what (a few years later, when the trees should have grown large enough to arch the walks) in summer—he told himself that surely in this garden-spot of the Old Dominion, bricks and mortar had sprung into immortal bloom, and he found himself quoting a line of his own:

"The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."

Upon his earliest opportunity he sat down and wrote Myra a rhapsody upon it all. Her presence, he felt, and he wrote her, was all needed to make the place a paradise.

Under his name upon the matriculation book he had written, with confidence:

"Schools of Ancient and Modern Languages." In the school of Ancient Languages were taught (according to the announcement for the year) "Hebrew, rhetoric, belles-lettres ancient history and geography;" in the school of Modern Languages, "French, Spanish, Italian, German, and the English language in its Anglo Saxon form; also modern history and modern geography." A list, one would think, to daunt the courage of a seventeen year old student and make him feel that he had the world on his shoulders.

It was quite the contrary with The Dreamer. He felt instead that he had suddenly developed wings. Learning came easy to him. He was already a good French and Latin scholar, and the rest did not frighten him. Not only was he not in the least burdened by thought of the work he was cutting out for himself, but he was elated by a sense of freedom such as he had never known before. Always before, both at home and at school, he had been under surveillance. But now he was to be a partaker of the benefits of Mr. Jefferson's theories of the treatment of students as men and gentlemen—letting their conduct be a matter of noblesse oblige.

In the youth of seventeen this sudden withdrawal of oversight and regulation produced an exhilaration that was indeed pleasurable. Among the unfrequented hills known as the "Ragged Mountains," not far away, was a wild and romantic region that invited him to fascinating exploration—perhaps adventure. Instead of having to beg permission or to steal off upon the solitary rambles which he loved, to this enchanting country, he could, and did, go when he chose, openly, and with no questions asked or rebukes given.

He held up his head with a new confidence at the thought, and took his dreams of ambition and love, whenever he could allow himself time to do so, to the enticing new region (as unlike anything around Richmond as if it were in a different world) adjacent to which, for the time, his lot lay.

He did not neglect his classes, however. They were regularly attended and his standing was excellent; so the professors had no cause for making inquiry into the pursuits of his private hours. The library, too, in the beautiful Rotunda, was a new, if different, field for his exploration and one that gave him great delight, for he found there many volumes of quaint and curious lore whose acquaintance he had never before made.

* * * * *

His imaginary wings were soon enough to be clipped—his exhilaration to drop from him as suddenly as it had come.

He did not hear from Myra!

He watched eagerly for the mails, and as day after day passed without bringing him a letter, deep dejection claimed him. Finally he wrote to her again—and then again—and again—frantically appealing to her to write to him and assure him of her constancy if she would save his life.

Still, no word from her.

The truth was that Myra, at home in Richmond, was awaiting each mail-time as feverishly as he. The faint suggestion of rose her cheeks usually wore, had entirely disappeared and deep circles caused by lack of sleep and lost appetite made her light blue eyes appear more prominent than ever before. The ethereal look that had been her chief claim to beauty had become exaggerated into a ghastliness that was not in the least bewitching. She, like Edgar, had pocketed her pride and followed her first letter with others more and more expressive of her tender maiden passion; but her father, who had begun to suspect an affair between her and the players' son a short time before Edgar left for the University, had kept diligent watch for the passage of letters, and had successfully intercepted them.

And so the unhappy pair pined and sighed and gloomed, each reckoning the other faithless and believing that life was forever robbed of joy.

Edgar Poe had never really loved the girl. He had merely loved the dream to which her tender words and timid caresses gave an adorable reality; but now in his disappointment at not hearing from her he felt that her love and loyalty to him were the only things in the world worth having and persuaded himself that without her there as no incentive to live or to strive. His misery was increased by an over-whelming homesickness, to escape from which, he wandered restlessly about, vainly seeking excitement and forgetfulness.

In this mood, he eagerly accepted an invitation to spend the evening from a class-mate whose room in "Rowdy Row" had a reputation for conviviality. His own room, shared by a quiet and steady Richmond boy with whom he had a slight acquaintance at home, was in one of the cloister-like dormitories opening upon the main lawn.

While Edgar Poe had been a somewhat wayward and at times a disobedient boy, at home, he had never been a bad boy except when judged by John Allan's standards, and had never been in the least wild. Wines were used upon the table of his foster-father, as upon the tables of other gentlemen whose homes he had visited, and he had always been permitted to drink a small quantity at a time, at dinner, or to sip a little mint-julep from the goblet passed around before breakfast and supposed to be conducive to appetite and healthful digestion; but he had never thought of exceeding this allowance. As to cards, he knew nothing of them save as an innocent, social pastime in which he found pleasure, as in all other games and sports—especially such as required exercise of ingenuity or mental skill.

The evening in "Rowdy Row" was therefore a revelation, as well as a diversion to him. As he approached the end of this arcaded row in which his new friend's room was situated his interest received a spur from the sounds of hilarity that greeted him, and his spirits began to rise. In a few moments more he found himself in the midst of a group of exceedingly jolly youths evidently prepared to make a night of it. Several of them were gathered about a huge bowl in which they were mixing a variety of punch which they called "peach-honey." Others were seated around a card table while one of their number entertained the rest with what seemed to be almost magical tricks. These Edgar joined. His interest was immediately aroused and he fixed his eyes with intentness upon the juggler. The tricks were new to him, but he soon amazed the crowd by showing the solution of them all.

Finally, the punch was declared to be ready; other packs of cards were produced and the real sport of the evening began. It was Edgar's first experience in drinking with boys and his conscience, not yet hardened to it, kept him in check without worrying him enough to destroy his pleasure. Somewhat of his old exhilaration returned to him at the bare thought, for he felt himself a man, following his own will and yet not disobeying any direct command.

In spite of much urging, he only drank one glass of the peach-honey, but thanks to a jovial ancestor of whom he had never heard, but of some of whose sins (in accordance with the ancient law) he bore the marks in his temperament, he was peculiarly susceptible to the influences of strong drink, and as he drained the glass at a gulp, a new freedom seemed to enter his soul. The dejection which had oppressed him dropped from him instantly, and with his great eyes glowing like lamps with new zest in life, he sat down at a card table to be initiated into the mysteries of the fascinating game of loo, which had lately become the fashion, and at the same time into his first experience in playing for money.

He had beginner's luck—held good hands and won straight through the game. His success, with the effects of the punch, developed his wittiest vein and Edgar Goodfellow assumed complete ascendancy.

His new acquaintances were charmed, and encouraged his mood by loud applause and congratulated themselves upon having added to their number such good company.

From that night Edgar Poe's new friends, who constituted what was known as the "fast set" at the University, became his boon companions. It was in the card-table, much more than the punch-bowl that the charm for him lay, for the gambling fever had entered his blood with his first winnings, but in the combination of the two he found, for the present, a sure cure for his "blue devils."

Alas, Helen! Where was your sweet spirit that it did not hover, as guardian angel, about the head of this wayward child of genius in his hour of sore need, when temptations gathered thick around his pathway and there was no one to steer him into safer waters; no one to restrain his feet from their first blind steps toward that Disaster to which ruinous companionship invited him, with syren voice?

True, his staid room-mate, Miles George, raised his voice in warning against the dangerous intimacies he was forming but Miles' view seemed extreme to him. Besides, he found at the University the same caste feeling that had cut him off from familiar intercourse with the leaders among his Richmond schoolmates. It was but natural, therefore, that he should have turned gratefully, to the society where his welcome was sure.

Finally words passed between him and Miles, ending in a formal meeting, with seconds on both sides. Their only weapons were their fists, and they shook hands afterward; but the idea of continuing to share the same bed-room was out of the question. Of the vacant rooms to be had, Edgar promptly decided upon Number 13, Rowdy Row, and the second step in a wrong direction quickly followed the first.

He was hailed by the rest of the "Row" with delight, and he promptly decided to return their many hospitalities in his new room, which he proceeded to elaborately prepare for their reception.

The result was an early and noisy house-warming. The guests were filled with admiration to find the walls of Number 13 decorated in honor of the occasion with charcoal sketches representing scenes from Byron's works done by the clever hand of the new occupant himself. They also found Edgar Goodfellow in the character of host, presiding over his own card-table and his own bowl—a generous one—of peach-honey, in the highest feather and his most captivating mood.



CHAPTER XI.

Erelong Number 13 was the liveliest and most popular room in the Row, but of the orgies held there the faculty rested in blissful unconsciousness. At class-time young Poe was invariably in his place and invariably the pale, thoughtful, student-like and faultlessly neat and gentle-mannered youth whose intelligent attention and admirable recitations were the joy of his masters. They heard rumors that he was something of a poet and were not surprised, the suggestions of ideality in the formation of his brow and the expression of his eyes hinted at such talent, and so long as he did not let the Muse come between him and his regular work, he should not be discouraged or restrained.

Indeed, in spite of the sway of Edgar Goodfellow at this time, Edgar the Dreamer was often present too, and during solitary tramps into the wild fastenesses of the Ragged Mountains, he not only conceived many fancies to be worked into poems, but made mentally, the first draft of a story to win fame.

The love of no real woman came to supplant the seemingly faithless Elmira, and though he still carried his mother's miniature with him and gazed often and fondly upon it, the sense of nearness between her spirit and his and the soul satisfaction he had found in this nearness in the past, were gone. The gambling fever that had fired his veins and the nightly potations of peach-honey created an excitement and restlessness that blurred the images his memory held of the angel mother who had dominated his childhood and of the madonna-like mistress who had filled the dreams of his early youth. These holy dreams became for the time being, a reproach to him, for they aroused his conscience to an unpleasant activity which required more frequent recourse to peach-honey to quiet.

* * * * *

Love was, nevertheless, as necessary to this poet's soul as meat and drink were to his body, and in the No Man's Land, "out of space, out of time," which his fancy created and where it loved to stray, he fashioned for himself the weirdest, strangest lady ever loved by mortal. The name he gave her was "Ligeia." She laid upon him no exactions, chastened him with no rebukes, demanded of him no service save that he should dream—and dream—and dream; for was not she herself formed from "such stuff as dreams are made of?"

The music of nature had long possessed a sort of personality for Edgar Poe, and now the voices, the motions, the numberless colors of the world about him took definite shape in his fancy of a wonderous fairy-woman whom he worshipped with an unearthly, poetic passion that was compared to the passion of the normal man to flesh and blood woman as moonlight to sunshine—a passion which was luminous without heat.

Dim and elusive as is the very conception of "Ligeia" to the ordinary mind, she was perfectly real to her creator. In the summer-night breeze he heard the music of her voice and felt the delicious coolness of her caress. Tall, swaying trees spoke to him of her height, her majesty and her grace. He perceived the softness and lightness of her footfalls in the passage of evening shadows across a lake or meadow, the perfection of her features in the form and finish of flower petals and the delicate tints of her beauty in the coloring of flowers; the raven hue and sweeping length of of her tresses in the drowning shades of midnight and the entrancing veil of her lashes in deep mysterious woods; and when, in fancy, he looked beneath that veil into her eyes, as unfathomable as the ocean itself, he was struck dumb with reverence and wonder, for they held in keeping all the secrets of the moon and the stars, of dawn and sunset, of green things growing and flowers in bloom, of the butterfly in the crysalis and on the wing, of still waters and of running brooks.

To the inner vision of this most unusual youth, "Ligeia"—this myth called into being by the enchantment of his own fancy—not only became as real as if she had been flesh and blood; his pagan soul bowed down before her and she blotted from his mind, for the time, all thought or consciousness of more robust womanhood. She became, in imagination, the sharer of his studies, the wife of his bosom, and he sat at her feet and gladly learned from her the beautiful, strange secrets of this fearfully and wonderfully made world.

He was sometimes haunted by another, and a far less agreeable vision. In spite of the absence of restraint under which he lived and the fact that between his dreams, his books and his dissipations there seemed little opportunity left for the still, small voice to make itself heard, there were times when his better self shook off slumber and rose before him like a ghost that, for all his efforts, would not be laid—a ghost like him in all regards save for the sternness of its look and of the voice which accused him in whispers to which all others ears were deaf, but his own intensely, horribly sensitive.

It was generally at the very height of excitement in play, when he had just been dealt a hand which he told himself, with exultation, would win him all the money in the pool, or, perhaps at the moment when he raised the glass to his lips, anticipating the delicious exhilaration of the seductive peach-honey, that the unwelcome spectre would, with startling suddenness, appear before his eyes. His face would blanch, his own voice become almost as hoarse as the warning whisper that was in his ear, and with trembling hand he would put down the cards or the cup and refuse to have anything more to do with the evening's sport.

His companions at first thought these attacks the result of some physical weakness but finally became accustomed to them and attributed them to his "queerness."

* * * * *

Thus the youthful poet passed his year at college—dividing his time between his dreams, his classes and his carousals. The session closed in December. The final examinations occupied the early part of the month and when the faculty met upon the 14th., it was found that Edgar Poe had not only stood well in all of his studies, but in two of them—Latin and French—he had taken the highest honors.

In spite of this, and of the fact that at no time during the session had he come under the censure of the faculty, a startling revelation was made. Edgar Poe, model student as he seemed to be, whose only fault—if it could be called a fault—as the faculty knew him, had been a tendency toward a romantic dreaminess that had led him upon lonely rambles among the hills rather eccentric in a boy of seventeen; Edgar Poe, the quiet, the gentlemanly, the immaculately neat, the scholarly, the poetic, had been a spendthrift and a reckless gambler. His debts, for a boy of his age, were astounding. No one was more amazed at the sum of them than Edgar himself. He had always had the lordly indifference to money, and the contempt for keeping account of it, that was the natural result of being used to have what seemed to him to be an unlimited supply to draw upon, with the earning of which he had nothing to do. As to hoarding it, he would as soon have thought of hoarding the air he breathed which came to him with no less effort. He was, unfortunately, as heedless of what he owed as what he spent—lavishing it upon his companions as long as it lasted and when his supply of cash was exhausted running up accounts with little thought of a day of reckoning—though of course he fully intended to pay.

His mind was, indeed, too much engrossed with the charming creations of his brain to leave him time for brooding upon such sordid matters as the keeping of accounts, or the making of two ends meet. The amount of his indebtedness was now, however, sufficient to give him a shock which thoroughly aroused him, and he was genuinely distressed; for he had no wish to ruthlessly pain his foster-father. The haunting better self not only arose and confronted him, but remained with him, keeping close step with him and upbraiding him and condemning him in the whisper audible to his quick imagination and so terrifying.

Still, the thought that Mr. Allan had plenty of money, and that no severe sacrifice would be needful for the payment of his debts relieved his penitence of much of its poignancy. That Mr. Allan would settle these "debts of honor," as he called them, as the fathers and guardians of boys as reckless as himself had done, he had not the slightest doubt. But, as will be seen, he reckoned without Mr. Allan.

He wrote Mrs. Allan a dutiful letter, confessing all and expressing his sorrow, and begging to be permitted to repay Mr. Allan for settling his affairs at the University with work as a clerk in the counting house.

The letter filled the tender heart of the foster-mother with yearning. The sum frightened her, though she, like the boy, comforted herself with the thought that her husband could pay it without embarrassment. Still, she trembled to think of his wrath. Her chief feeling was one of sympathy for her erring, penitent boy. How natural it was for one of his age to be led away by evil associates! All boys—she supposed—must sow some wild oats, though few, she was confident, showed such a beautifully penitent spirit, and it would be a small matter in future years when he should have become the great and good man she knew he was going to be.

How noble it was of him to offer to give up or postpone the completion of the education so dear to his heart and tie himself to a desk in that tiresome counting-house in order to pay his debts—he that was born to shine as a poet. She exulted that he had offered to make such a sacrifice, but he should never make it, never while she had breath in her body to protest!

How her heart bled for him in his sorrow over his wrong-doing! How she longed to fold his dear curly head against her breast and tell him that he was quite, quite forgiven! She would reward him for the splendid stand in his classes and at the same time make him forget his troubles on account of the debts by giving him the loveliest imaginable Christmas. Uncle Billy must search the woods for the brightest greens, the prettiest holly; for the house must look its merriest for the home-coming of its young master, covered with honors! There must be mistletoe, too she told herself, her mouth dimpling and a suspicion of a twinkle flashing out from under her dewy lashes. The fatted calf should be killed, her boy should make merry with his friends.

The dear letter was kissed and cried over until it took much smoothing on her knee to make it presentable to hand over to her husband for perusal. Her fingers were still busy stroking out the crumples, though her tears were dried, and her thoughts were happily engaged with plans for a Christmas party worthy to celebrate the home-coming of her darling, when Mr. Allan came in to supper. She was brought back to recollection of the confession in the letter and her apprehensions as to how it would be received, with a start, and before timidly handing her husband the open letter, she began preparing him for its contents and excusing the writer.

"A letter from Eddie, John, dear. He has stood splendidly in his classes, but asks your forgiveness for having done wrong in his spare time. He is so manly and noble in his confession, John, and in his offer to make reparation!"

John Allan's face clouded and hardened instantly.

"What is this? Confession? Reparation?—Give me the letter!"

But she held it away from him.

"It seems he has gotten into a card-playing set who have led him away further than he realized. Oh, don't look like that, John! He is so young, and you know how evil association can influence the best of boys!"

But the storm gathered fast and faster on John Allan's face.

"Card-playing? Do you mean the boy has been gambling? Give me the letter."

She could withhold it no longer, but as he sat down to read it she threw herself upon an ottoman at his feet and clasping his knees hid her face against them, crying,

"Oh, John, have pity, have pity!"

But even as she sobbed out the words, she felt their futility. She knew that there was no pity to be expected from the owner of that face of stone, that eye of steel.

As he read, his rage became too great for the relief of an outburst. A still, but icy calm settled upon him. For some minutes he spoke no word and seemed unconscious of the tender creature so appealing in her loveliness and in the humility of her attitude, beseeching at his knee. The truth was, that much as he loved her, his contempt for what he called her "weakness" for the son of her adoption, but added to his harshness in judging the boy.

Presently he arose, impatiently pushing her away from him as he did so, saying;

"Pack my bag and order an early breakfast. I'm going to take the morning stage for the University."

It was a difficult evening for the little foster-mother. In the stately, octagon-shaped dining-room soft lamplight was cheerily reflected by gleaming mahogany and bright silver and china, upon which was served the most toothsome of suppers; but the meal was almost untouched and the mere pretense of eating was carried through in silence and gloom. In the drawing-room, afterward, the firelight leaped saucily against shining andirons and fender, bringing forgetfulness of the frosty night outside, while the carved wood-work and the great mirrors and soft-hued paintings, in their gilded frames, on the walls, and the deep carpets on the floors spoke of comfort. But the beautiful room was a mockery, for the promised comfort, was not there—only futile luxury. Upon that bright hearth was warmth for the body, but none for the spirit, for before it sat the master and mistress—the presiding geniuses of the house—upon whose oneness the structure of the home must stand, or without it fall into ruin; there they sat, wrapped in moods so out of sympathy and tune that speech was as impossible between them as if they had been of different tongues, and each unknown to the other.

Meantime, Edgar Poe was spending his last hours at the University in the dust and ashes of self-condemnation and regretful retrospection No farewell orgie celebrated his leave-taking. Only one of his friends was invited to his room that night and he no denizen of "Rowdy Row," but the quiet, irreproachable librarian. To this gentle guest The Dreamer confided his past sins and his penitence, while he laid upon the glowing coals the year's accumulation of exercise books, and the like, which had served their purpose and were finished and done with, and watched the devouring flames leap from the little funeral pyre they made into the chimney.

More than anything he had ever done in his life, he told his companion, he regretted the making of the gambling debts for which Mr. Allan would have to advance the money to pay. But, as has been said, he reckoned without Mr. Allan, who settled all other obligations, but utterly ignored the so-called "debts of honor."

"Debts of honor?" he queried with contempt. "Debts of dishonor, I consider them."

And that was his last word upon the subject.



CHAPTER XII.

The late January night was bitterly cold, and clear as crystal. There was a metallic glitter about the round moon, shining down from a cloudless, blue sky—too bright to show a star—upon the black and bare trees and shrubbery in the terraced garden of the Allan homestead.

Edgar Poe looked from his casement upon the splendor of the beautiful, but frigid and unsympathetic night. Bitterness was in his heart contending with a fierce joy. At last it had come—the breach with Mr. Allan—and he was going away! He knew not where, but he was going, going into the wide world to seek fame and fortune.

He had much to regret. He loved Richmond—loved it for the joy and pain he had felt in it; for the dreams he had dreamed in it. He loved it exceedingly for the two dear graves, one in the churchyard on the hill and one in the new cemetery, that held his beloved dead.

Yes, he was sorry to leave this home-city, if not of his birth, at least of his childhood and early youth, and his soul was still shaken by the scene with his foster-parents through which he had just passed. But in spite of all, his heart—rejoicing in the nearness of the freedom for which he had so fiercely longed, sang, and stilled his sorrow.

But a few weeks had passed since his return from the University. A few weeks? They seemed to him years, and each one had left a feeling of increased age upon his spirit.

The home-coming had not been altogether unhappy—humiliating as it was. In spite of the black looks of his foster-father, the little mother (bless her!) had welcomed him with out-stretched arms and eyes beaming with undimmed love. Never had she been more tenderly sweet and dear. She had given the most beautiful Christmas party, with all his best friends invited, and everything just as she knew he would like it. Her husband had frowningly consented to this, but her tears and entreaties were all of no avail to win his consent for the boy's return to college. Vainly had she plead his talents which she believed should be cultivated, and the injustice (since they had voluntarily assumed the responsibility of rearing him) of cutting short his education at such an early age. John Allan was adamant.

And so, after the holidays, he had taken his place in the counting-house of "Ellis and Allan."

Distasteful as the new work was to the young poet, he was determined to stick to it, and would probably have done so, but the strict surveillance he soon realized he was under (as if he could not be trusted!) and the manner of Mr. Allan who rarely spoke to him except when it was absolutely necessary, and seemed to regard him as a hopeless criminal, would have been unbearable to a far less proud and sensitive nature than Edgar Poe's. Both at the office and at home, Mr. Allan's narrow, steel-colored eyes seemed to keep constant watch, under their beetling brows, for faults or blunders; and it seemed to the driven boy that no matter what he did or said, he should have done or said just the reverse. He felt constantly that a storm was brewing which must sooner or later, certainly break, and that night it had burst forth with all the fury of the tempest which has been a long time gathering.

He hardly knew what had brought it on, or how it had begun. Its violence was so great as to almost stun him until at length, without being more than half conscious of the significance of his own words he had asked if it would not be better for him to go away and earn his own living; and then came his foster-father's startlingly ready consent, with the warning that if he did go he must look for no further aid from him.

His heart ached for the pretty, tender little mother. How soft the arms that had clung about his neck, the lips that had pressed his hot brow! How piteous her dear tears! They had almost robbed him of his resolution, but he had succeeded in steeling himself against this weakness. He had folded her close in his arms and kissed her, and vowed that, come what might, he could never forget her or cease to love her, and that he should always think of her as his mother and himself as her child. Then he had put her gently from him for, for all his vows, she was inseparably bound up in the old life from which he was breaking away—his life as John Allan's adopted son—she could have no real place in his future.

Yet the tie that bound him to her was the strongest in his life and could not be severed without keen pain. In the world into which he was going to fight the battle of life (he told himself) memory of her would be one of his inspirations.

But where was that battle to be fought, and with what weapons? He had been brought up as a rich man's son, and with the expectation of being a rich man's heir. He had been trained to no money-making work, physical or mental; and now he was to fare forth into the great world where there was not a familiar face, even, to earn his bread! What could he do that would bring him the price of a loaf?—

Did the question appal him? Not in the least. He had youth, he had health, he had hope, he had his beloved talent and the secret training he had given himself toward its cultivation. His "heart-strings were a lute"—he felt it, and with an optimism rare for him he also felt that he had but to strike upon that lute and the world must needs stop and listen.

What he did not have was experience and knowledge of the world. Little did he dream how small a part of the busy hive would turn aside to hear his music or how little poetry had to do with the earning of daily bread.

His trunk was standing open, half packed, though his destination was still undecided; and among the first things that had gone into it was a box containing a number of small rolls of neat manuscript. As he thought of them his heart warmed and his eyes grew soft.

"The world's mine oyster, and with my good pen I'll open it," he joyously paraphrased. But toward what part of the world should he turn his face—to what market take his precious wares? That was the all-important question! How much his fortune might depend upon his decision!

As he stood at the window, he stared into the brilliancy and the shadows of the icy, unresponsive night—seeking a sign. But the cold splendor of the cloudless sky and glittering moon and the inscrutible shadows in the garden below where the leafless trees and bushes cast monster shapes upon the frozen ground, alike mocked him.

Presently there was the first hint of softness in the night. It came like a sigh of tender pity across the stillness and he bent his head to listen. It was the voice of the faintest of breezes blowing up from the south and passing his window. He threw wide his arms to empty space as if to embrace some invisible form.

"Ligeia, Ligeia, my beautiful one," he breathed, invoking his dream-lady, "Be my counsellor and guide! Let thy sweet voice whisper whither I must go!"

But the voice was silent and all the night was still again.

He turned from the window and threw himself into his arm-chair, letting his eyes rove about the room as though he would seek a sign from its walls. Suddenly he sat erect, his dilated pupils fixed upon a point above the chimney-piece—upon a small picture. It was a little water-color sketch done by the hand of his versatile mother, and found among her belongings after her death. Like her miniature and her letters, the picture had followed him through his life and had always adorned the walls of his room. Often and over he had studied it until he knew by heart every stroke of the brush that entered into its composition. Yet he stared at it now as if he had never seen it before. Finally he took it down from its place on the chimney and held it in his hands, gazing upon it in deep abstraction.

Underneath the picture was written its title: "Boston Harbor—Morning," and upon its back,

"For my little boy, Edgar, who must love Boston, the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best and most sympathetic friends."

The picture gave him the sign! With rising excitement he decided that it must be accepted. To Boston, of course, he would go. Boston, the place of his birth and where his angel mother had found her "best, most sympathetic friends."

He would get away as early the next morning as possible, he told himself. He would waste no time in goodbyes, for, he remembered with some bitterness, there were few to say goodbye to. The boys were all off at college again, now that the holidays were over, and as for Myra, she had quickly consoled herself and was already a wife! He had addressed some reproachful verses to her as a bride; then dismissed her from his thoughts.

He arose and placed the picture carefully in the trunk with the rest of his treasures and then went to bed to fall into the easy slumber of one whose mind is well made up.

* * * * *

A few days later Edgar Poe had looked with delight and ineffable emotion upon the real Boston Harbor, with its rocky little islets and its varied shipping and its busy wharves, and—for him—its suggestions of one in Heaven.



CHAPTER XIII.

Upon his arrival in Boston, our errant knight, before setting out upon his quest for the Fame and Fortune to whose service he was sworn, spent some hours in wandering about the old town, with mind open to the quickening influences of historic association and eye to the irregular, picturesque beauty about him.

It was one of those rare days that come sometimes in the month of February when, though according to the callendar it should be cold, there is a warmth in the sunshine that seems borrowed from Spring. Tired out by his tramp, young Edgar at length sat down upon a bench in the Common, under an elm, great of girth and wide-spreading. The sunshine fell pleasantly upon him, through the bare branches. Roundabout were other splendid, but now bare elms and he sat gazing upward into their sturdy brown branches and dreamily picturing to himself the beauty of these goodly trees clothed in the green vesture of summer. Suddenly, by a whimsical sequence of suggestion, the pleasure he felt in the sunshine of February as it reached him under the tree in Boston Common, vividly called to mind the refreshing coolness of the shade of the elms, in full leaf, as he, a little lad of six, had walked the streets of old Stoke-Newington for the first time.

There was little relation between that first and this present parting with the Allans, yet in his mind they became inseparably connected. He recalled his happiness in his first essays at composition, made at the Manor School, and told himself that, though he did not know it at the time, that was the first step toward his life work. He was now, here in Boston, the city of his birth, about to take the second; for the hour had arrived when his work would be given to the world!

Across his knees he held the box containing his precious manuscripts. He arose from the bench and turning toward the lower end of the Common, walked, with brisk, hopeful step down town, in the direction of a well-known publishing house whose location he had already ascertained.

Edgar Poe had known sorrow, real and imaginary; he was now to have his first meeting with Disappointment, bitter and grim.

Of all the persons who had ever seen his work, every one had been warm in its praise—everyone saving John Allan only. Some had been positively glowing. True, they had not been publishers, yet among them there had been gentlemen and ladies of taste and culture. But here was a different matter. Here was a personage with whom he had not reckoned, but who was the door, as it were, through which his work must pass into the world. He was unmistakably a personage. His bearing, though modest, spoke of power. His dress, though unobtrusive, was in the perfect taste which only the prosperous can achieve and maintain. His features were cast in the mold of the well-bred. He was past middle age and his naturally fine countenance was beautiful with the ennobling lines which time leaves upon the face of the seeker after truth. He was courteous—most Bostonians and many publishers are. He was sympathetic. He was undoubtedly intellectual, but the eyes that regarded through big, gold-rimmed spectacles, the romantic beauty, the prominent brow and the distinguished air of the sweet-voiced youth before him, wore a not only thoughtful, but something more—a distinctly shrewd and practical expression. In them was no awe of the bare mention of "original poetry."

He took the little rolls of manuscript into his strong, and at the same time smooth and well-shapen hands, and drew them out to their full length with the manner of one who handled as good every day. He cast his eyes rapidly down the sheets—too rapidly, it seemed to the poet—with a not unkind, yet critical air, while the sensitive youth before him turned red and white, hot and cold, by turns, and learned something of the horrors of the Inquisition.

It was really but a very short space, but to the boy who seemed suspended between a life and a death sentence, it was an age.

Finally, he experienced something like a drowning sensation while he heard a voice that barely penetrated the flood of deep waters that was rolling over his head, saying words that were intended to be kind about the work showing promise, in spite of an absence of marketable value.

"Marketable value?" Heavens! Was he back in John Allan's counting house? What could the man mean? It was as literature, not as merchandize that he wanted his poetry to be judged!

In his dismay, he stammered something of the sort, only to be told that when his poetry was made into a book it would become merchandize and it mattered not how good, as poetry—it might be, the publisher could do nothing with it unless as merchandize it would probably be valuable too.

Then—he had been politely bowed out, with his package still under his arm!

During the few minutes he had spent in the publisher's office the sky had become overcast and a biting east wind had blown up from the river; but the change in the outside world was as nothing to that within him. He had not known how large a part of himself was his dream of becoming a poet. It now seemed to him that it was all of him—had from the beginning of his life been all of him. Since those old days at Stoke-Newington, he had been building—building—building—this castle in the air; now, at one fell blow, the whole fabric was laid in ruin!

Weakness seized his limbs and deep dejection his spirits. His life might as well come to an end for there was nothing left for him to live for. How indeed, was he to live when the only work he knew how to do had "no marketable value?" The money with which Mrs. Allan supplied him, before he left home—"to give him a start"—would soon be exhausted. What if he should not be able to make more?

Though he was in the city of his birth, he found himself an absolute stranger. If any of those who had been sympathetic friends to his mother were left, he had no idea who or where they were.

He went back to the lodgings he had engaged to a night of bitter, sleepless tossing.

But with the new day, youth and hope asserted themselves. He decided that he would not accept as final the verdict of any one publisher, though that one stood at the head of the list. With others, however, it was just the same; and another night of even greater wretchedness followed.

Upon his third day in Boston (he felt that he had been there a year!) he wandered aimlessly about, spirit broken, ambition gone. Finally, in Washington Street, he discovered, upon a small door, a modest sign bearing the legend:

"Calvin F.S. Thomas. Printer."

With freshly springing hope, he entered the little shop and was received by a pale, soft-eyed, sunken-chested and somewhat threadbare youth of about his own age, who in reply to his inquiry, announced himself as "Mr. Thomas."

Between these two boys, as they stood looking frankly into each other's eyes, that mysterious thing which we call sympathy, which like the wind "bloweth where it listeth and no man knoweth whence it cometh or whither it goeth," sprang instantly into being. The one found himself without his usual diffidence declaring himself a poet in search of a publisher, and the other was at once alert with interest.

Calvin Thomas had but just—timorously, for he was poor as well as young—set up his little shop, hoping to build up a trade as a printer. To be a publisher had not entered into his wildest imaginings—much less a publisher for a poet! But he was, like his visitor, a dreamer, and like him ambitious. Why should he not be a publisher as well as a printer? The poet had not his manuscripts with him, but offered to recite some extracts, which he did, with glowing voice and gesture—explaining figures of speech and allusions as he went along.