Edgar Poe sat easily upon a high stool in the little shop. His dress was handsome and, as always, exquisite in its neatness and taste. His whole appearance and bearing were marked by an "air" which deeply impressed the young printer who had promptly fallen under the spell of his personal charm. He had laid his hat upon the desk, baring the glossy brown ringlets that clustered about his large, pale brow. His clear-cut features were mobile and eager; his dark grey eyes full of life. His voice had a wonderful musical quality, becoming passionate when, as at present, his feeling was deeply aroused.

His poetry, recited thus, gained much of distinction. Its crudities would have been lost, to a great extent, even upon a critic. But Thomas was no critic. He was simply a dreamy, half-educated youth with a mind open to the beautiful and the romantic. The flights of the poet's fancy did not seem to him obscure or too fantastic. They admitted him to a magic world in which he sat spell-bound until silence brought him back to his tiny bare shop which seemed suddenly to have been glorified.

"It is wonderful—wonderful!" he breathed.

He began to picture himself as not only sharing the wealth, but the fame which the publication of these gems was bound to bring. But he had to explain that he was poor, and that he could not bring out the poems without financial aid. The money which had been given Edgar to set out in the world with, was already dwindling, but he managed to subscribe a sum which Thomas declared would be sufficient, with the little he himself could add, for the printing of a modest edition, in a very modest garb.



CHAPTER XIV.

In the Allan mansion, in Richmond, there was a stillness that was oppressive. No young foot-falls sounded upon the stair; no boyish laughter rang out in rooms or hall. There were handsome and formal dinners occasionally, when some elderly, distinguished stranger was entertained, but there were no more merry dancing parties, with old Cy playing the fiddle and calling the figures.

Frances Allan, fair and graceful still, though looking somewhat out of health and "broken," as her friends remarked to one another, trod softly about the stately rooms with no song on her lip, no gladness in her step. Her husband was grown suddenly prematurely old and his speech was less frequent and harsher than before. He was more immersed in business than ever and was prospering mightily, but the fact seemed to bring him no satisfaction. Even the old servants had lost much of their mirth. Their black faces were grown solemn and their tread heavy. They looked with awe upon their mistress when, as frequently happened, they saw her quietly enter "Marse Eddie's" room and close the door behind her.

In that room and there alone, the fair, gentle, woful creature gave free reign to the grief of her stricken mother-heart. The room was kept just as her boy had left it, for she constantly hoped against hope that he would return. Hers was the aching, pent-up grief of a mother whose child is dead, yet she is denied the solace of mourning.

Here was the bed which had pillowed his dear, sunny ringlets. Here were his favorite chair—his desk—his books. In a little trunk against the wall were his toys with some of the pretty clothes made with her own fingers, in which it had been her pride to dress him when he was a wee laddie. How she loved to finger and fondle them!

Fifteen years she had been his mother—now this was all she had! Somewhere in the same world with her he was living, was walking about, talking, eating, sleeping; yet he was dead to her! Oh, if she could only know that he was happy, that he was well, that he lacked nothing in the way of creature comfort; if she could know where he was, picture him at work or in his leisure hours, it would not be so hard to bear.

But she knew nothing—nothing—save that he had gone to Boston.

One letter she had had from him there—such a dear one!—she knew it by heart. In it he had called her "Mother" and assured her of his constant love and thought of her. He had arrived safely, he said, and would soon be busy making his living. Boston was a fine city and full of interest to him. When his ship came in he was going to have her come on and pay him a visit there. He would write again when he had anything worth telling.

Days had passed—weeks—and no word had come. Had he failed to obtain employment? Had he gone further—to New York, perhaps, or Philadelphia? She did not know. Oh, if she could but know!

Was he ill? Fear clutched her heart and made her faint. The suspense was terrible, and she had no one to go to for sympathy—no one. She dared not mention her anxiety to her husband; it made him furious. He could not stand the sound of Eddie's name, even—her darling, beautiful Eddie! Her arms felt so empty they ached.

Winter was passing. The garden that Eddie loved so dearly was coming to life. The crocuses for which he always watched with so much interest were come and gone. The jonquils were in bloom and the first sweet hyacinths, blue as turquoises, she had gathered and put in his room. It cheered her to see them there. Somehow, they made the room look more "ready" than usual—as if he might come home that day.

He did not come, but something else did. A letter with the Boston post-mark she had so longed to see, and a small, flat package addressed to her in his dear hand. She broke the seal of the letter first—she was so hungry for the sight of the familiar, "Mother dear," and to know how he fared.

It was a short letter, but, ah, the blessed relief of knowing he was well and happy! And prospering—prospering famously—for he told her he was sending her the first copy off the press of his book of poems! It was a very little book, he said, but it was a beginning. He felt within him that he would have much bigger and better things to show her erelong. For the present, he was hard at work making ready for a revised and enlarged edition of his book, if one should be called for.

There was a jubilant note in the letter that delighted her and communicated itself to her own spirits. She eagerly tore the wrappings from the package, and pressed the contents against her lips and her heart. It was but a slender volume, cheaply printed and bound, but it was her boy's first published work and a wonderful thing in her eyes. She already saw him rich and famous—saw him come home to her crowned with honor and success—vindicated.

She turned the pages of the book. He had written upon the fly-leaf some precious words of presentation to her. She kissed them rapturously and passed on to the title-page:

"Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. Boston: Calvin F.S. Thomas, Printer."

She was still gloating over her treasure when the brass knocker on the front door was sounded, and a minute later Myra Royster—now Mrs. Shelton—was announced. Taking the book with her, she tripped downstairs, singing as she went, and burst in upon Myra as she sat in state in the drawing-room, in all her bridal finery.

Myra noticed as she kissed her, her glowing cheeks and shining eyes.

"How well you are looking today, Mrs. Allan," she exclaimed.

"It is happiness, dear. I've just had such a delightful letter from Eddie, and this darling little book. It is his poems, Myra!"

Myra was all interest. "To think of knowing a real live author!" she exclaimed. "I was sure Eddie would be famous some day, but had no idea it would come so soon."

"Don't you wish you had waited for him?" teased Mrs. Allan, laughing happily.

They chatted over the wonderful news until nearly dinner-time, and after they had parted Mrs. Allan sat at the window watching for her husband to come home that she might impart it to him at the earliest moment possible. But when at last he appeared she put off the great moment until after dinner, and then when he was comfortably smoking a fragrant cigar she approached him timidly and placed the letter and the book in his lap without a word.

"What's all this?" he questioned sharply.

She made no reply, but hovered about his chair, too excited to trust herself to speak.

He picked up the letter and read it with a deepening frown, then opened the book and ran his eyes hurriedly down one or two of its pages. At length he spoke:

"So this is the way he's wasting his time and, I dare say, his money too. Will the boy ever amount to anything, I wonder?"

The happiness in Frances Allan's face gave place to quick distress.

"Oh, John," she cried, "Don't you think it amounts to anything for a boy of eighteen to have written and published a book of poetry?"

"Poetry? This stuff is bosh—utter bosh!"

For the first time in her life, there was defiance in her gentle face. Her clinging air was discarded. She raised her head and with flashing eyes and rising color, faced him.

"You think that, because you cannot understand or appreciate it," she retorted, with spirit. "Neither do I understand it, but I can see that it is wonderful poetry. If he can do this at eighteen I have no doubt he will make himself and us famous before many years are past!"

Her husband's only reply was an astonished and piercing stare which she met without flinching, then turned and swept from the room, leaving him with a feeling of surprise to see that she was so tall.

Her self assertion was but momentary. As she ascended the stair and entered Eddie's room, all the elasticity was gone from her step, all the brightness from her cheeks and eyes and, still clasping her boy's letter and book to her heart, she threw herself upon his bed and burst into a passion of tears.

* * * * *

Meantime, the elms on Boston Common were clothed with tender April green and under foot sweet, soft grass was springing. In this inspiring cathedral walked Edgar Poe, his pale face and deep eyes, passionate with the worship of beauty that filled his soul, lifted to the greening arches above him, his sensitive ears entranced with the bird-music that fluted through the cool aisles. His mind was teeming with new poems in the making and with visions of what he should do if his book should sell.

But it did not sell. The leading magazines acknowledged its receipt in their review columns, but with the merest mention, which was exceedingly disconcerting. It was discussed (but with disappointment) for a week by his friends at home and at the University, to whom he sent copies. Then was forgotten.

And now its author was, for the first time within his recollection, beginning to feel the pinch of poverty. His money was almost gone and he saw no immediate hope of getting more. He moved to the cheapest boarding house he could find but he did not mind that so much as the prospect that faced him of soon beginning to present a shabby appearance in public. His shoes were already showing wear, and he found that to keep his linen as immaculate as he had always been accustomed to have it cost money and he actually had to economize in the quantity of clothing he had laundered. This to his proud and fastidious nature was humiliating in the extreme.

He and Calvin Thomas held frequent colloquies as to ways and means of giving his book wider circulation. He visited the offices of the several newspapers of the town in the hope of getting work in the line of journalism—reporting, reviewing, story-writing, anything in the way of the only business or profession for which he felt that he had any aptitude or preparation; but without success.

At length the sign of "Calvin F.S. Thomas, Printer" had suddenly disappeared from the little shop in Washington Street, and a dismal "To Let," was in its place.

At about the same time Mrs. Blanks lost the handsome, quiet young gentleman, who had evidently seen better days, from her unpretentious lodging house, and the walks under the elms in Boston Common were no longer trodden by The Dreamer from Virginia.



CHAPTER XV.

Where was Edgar Poe?—

Twice since he shook the dust of Richmond joyfully from his feet, fair Springtide had visited the terraced garden of the Allan home. Twice the green had come forth, first like a misty veil, then like a mantle enveloping its trees and its shrubs, its arbors and trellises; twice the procession of flowers, led by the crocuses in their petticoats of purple and yellow, had tripped from underground; twice the homing birds had built in the myrtles and among the snowy pear and cherry blossoms and filled all the place with music. Twice, too, in this garden, the pageant of spring and summer and sunset-hued autumn had passed, the birds had flown away again and winter snows had covered all with their whiteness and their silence.

And still the garden's true-lover, the poet, The Dreamer, was a wanderer, where?—

Oh, beautiful "Ligeia," was it not your voice that now and again whispered in the tree-tops and among the flowers? Could you not—did you not, bring news of the wanderer?

If she did, there was no human being to whom her language was intelligible, and the trees and the flowers keep their secrets well.

Within the homestead there was little change save a deepening of the quietness that had fallen upon it. In the master of the house there was no visible difference. There are some men who seen from year to year seem as unchanging as the sphinx. It is only after a long period that any difference in them can be detected and then they suddenly appear broken and aged. The fair lady of the manor was as fair as ever, but with the pale, tremulous fairness of a late star in the grey dawn of a new day in which it will have no part. Her bloom, her roundness, her gaiety—all these were gone. She spent more time than ever in the room which, waiting for its roving tenant, became more and more like a death chamber. The silence there was not now broken by her sobs even, for it was with dry-eyed grief that she watched and waited for her boy, these days—watched and waited and prayed. Ah, how she prayed for him, body and soul! Prayed that wherever he might be, he might be kept from harm and strengthened to resist temptation.

Was it her agonized petitions that kept him to the straight and narrow path of duty during those two years amid uncongenial surroundings and hard conditions?

Who knows?

Yet the chair and the desk and the books and the vases of fresh flowers on the mantel, and the fire-wood resting on the shining andirons ready for a match, and the reading lamp with trimmed wick and bright chimney on the table, and the canopied white bed still waited, in vain, his coming.

Many months had passed since the name of Eddie had been spoken between husband and wife, but though she held her peace, like Mary of old, like Mary too, she pondered many things in her heart. He, loving her well, but having no aptitude for divining woman's ways, indulged in secret satisfaction, for he took her silence to mean that she was coming to her senses, and regarding the boy as he did. That she no longer importuned him to enquire into Edgar's whereabouts with the intention of inviting him home was a source of especial relief to him.

Then, upon a day two years after she had triumphantly placed Eddie's book and letter in his hands, it was his turn to bring her a letter.

"You see the bad penny has turned up again," he remarked, dryly.

She looked questioningly at the folded sheet. Its post-mark was Fortress Monroe and the hand-writing was not familiar to her.

"What is it?" she asked.

"A letter from Dr. Archer. He's surgeon at the fort, you know. Read it. It is about Edgar."

With shaking hands and a blanched face she spread open the sheet. A nameless dread possessed her. A letter about Eddie—not from him—and from a surgeon! For a moment darkness seemed to descend upon her and she could not make out the characters before her. She pressed her hand upon her heart. In sudden alarm, her husband rushed to a celaret nearby and brought out a decanter of wine. Pouring a glass he pressed it to her lips.

"Eddie," she gasped, as soon as she could speak. "Is he well?"

In spite of John Allan's anxiety, he was irritated, and showed it.

"Pshaw, Frances!" he exclaimed. "I hoped you had forgotten the boy. Yes, he's well, and, I'm glad to say, in a place where he is made to behave."

She calmed herself with an effort and began to read the letter. The story it told had a smack of romance.

Dr. Archer had (he wrote) been called to the hospital in the fort to see a private soldier by the name of Edgar A. Perry, who was down with fever. The patient spoke but little but the Doctor was struck with his marked refinement of look and manner, and there was something familiar to him about the prominent brow and full grey eyes, though the name was strange to him. His attention was aroused and he could not rid himself of the impression that he had seen the young man before. He mentioned the fact to some of the officers and found at once that his patient was a subject of deep interest to them. They felt sure (they told him) that he had a story. His polished manners and bright and cultivated conversation seemed to them incongruous with the duties of a private soldier, and they laughingly said that they suspected they were entertaining an angel unawares. Yet his duties were performed with the utmost faithfulness and efficiency. He had never been heard to speak of himself or his past in a way which would throw any light upon his history, and his reserve was of the kind which was bound to be respected. Dr. Archer had grown (he wrote) more and more interested in his patient as he became better acquainted with him, and being convinced that the young man had for some reason, gotten out of his proper sphere, he determined to try and help him back to it.

By the time the young soldier was convalescent the Doctor had won his confidence and obtained from him the confession that the name of Perry was an assumed one, and that he was none other than Mr. Allan's adopted son, Edgar Poe, whom Dr. Archer had not seen since he was a small boy.

The discovery of his identity had greatly increased the good Doctor's interest and he and the officers of the fort were of the opinion that as young Poe had made a model soldier (having been promoted to the rank of sergeant-major, for good conduct) the best thing that could be done for him was to secure his discharge and get him an appointment to West Point. This, Mr. Allan could bring about, he thought, through men of influence whose friendship the Doctor knew he enjoyed. Edgar had enlisted for five years. He had confessed that at the time he had been almost upon the point of starvation and had turned to the army when every effort to find other means of livelihood had failed.

The Doctor and other officers thought that it would be a great sacrifice to leave a young gentleman of Edgar's abilities to three more years of such uncongenial life.

He was quite recovered and in accordance with a promise made the Doctor, was writing to Mr. Allan at that moment.

"Did Eddie's letter come too?" Mrs. Allan asked, as she finished the one in her hand.

Without a word, her husband handed it over to her. In it Edgar expressed much contrition for the trouble which his larger experience in life told him he had cost his foster-father, and asked his forgiveness. He also asked that Mr. Allan would follow the suggestion of Dr. Archer, and apply for a discharge from the army for him, and an appointment to West Point.

He had not written his "Mother" in the past because he had unfortunately nothing to tell which he believed could give her any pleasure, but he sent her his undying love.

Frances Allan looked through wet lashes into her husband's face, but her eyes were shining through the tears.

"Oh, John," she said breathlessly, "You will have him to come and make us a little visit before he goes to West Point, won't you?"

"I'll have nothing to do with him!" was the emphatic reply. "He seems to be getting along very well where he is. Let him stick it out!"

Feeling how vain her pleadings would be, yet not willing to give up hope, she wept, she prayed, she hung upon John Allan's neck. She brought every argument that starved motherhood could conceive to bear upon him.

To think that Eddie was in Virginia—just down at Old Point! The cup of joy was too near her lips to let it pass without a mighty effort. But finally she gave up and shrank within herself, drooping like the palest of lilies.

Then came a day when a stillness such as it had never known before hung over the Allan home. The garden was at its fairest. The halls and the drawing-rooms, with their rich furnishings and works of art were as beautiful as ever; but there was not even a bereaved mother, with an expression on her face like that of Mary at the foot of the cross, to tread the lonely floors. The luxurious rooms were quite, quite empty—all save one—an upper chamber, where upon a stately carved and canopied bed lay all that was mortal of Frances Allan, like a lily indeed, when pitiless storm has laid it low!

The learned doctors who had attended her had given long Latin names to her malady. In their books there was mention of no such ailment as heartbreak, and so happily, the desolate man left to preside in lonely state, over the goodly roof-tree which her presence had filled and made sweet and satisfying, was spared a suspicion even, of the real cause of her untimely end.

His one consuming desire for the present was that all things should be done just as she would wish, and so—all minor bitternesses drowned in the one overwhelming bitterness of his loss—he scribbled a few hurried lines to Edgar Poe acquainting him with the sad news and telling him to apply for a leave and come "home" at once.

But the mails and travel were slow in those days, and when the young soldier reached Richmond the last, sad rites were over, and for the third time in his brief career the grave had closed over a beautiful woman who had loved him and upon whose personality had been based in part, that ideal of woman as goddess or angel before which his spirit throughout his life, with all its vicissitudes, bowed down. As the lumbering old stage crawled along the road toward Richmond, he lived over again the years spent in the sunshine of her presence. Her death was a profound shock to him. How strange that one so fair, so merry, so bubbling with life should cease to be! Would it always be his fate, he wondered, to love where untimely death was lying in wait?

Upon the night when he reached "home" and every night till, his furlough over, he returned to his post of duty at Fortress Monroe, he lay in his old room with his old household gods—his books in their shelves, his pictures on the walls, his desk and deep arm-chair, and other objects made dear by daily use in their accustomed places, and "the lamplight gloating o'er," around him. He was touched at the sweet, familiar look of it all and at the thoughtfulness of himself of which he saw signs everywhere. Could it be that he had been two years an exile from these homelike comforts or had it been only one of his dreams? In spite of the void her absence made, it was good to be back—good after his wanderings to come into his own again.

In the hush and loneliness of those few days under the same roof, the grief-stricken man and youth, their pride broken by their common sorrow, came nearer together than they ever had been before. It seemed that the gentle spirit of her whom each had loved hovered about them, binding them to each other by invisible, but sacred, cords. John Allan spoke to the players' son in tones that were almost fatherly and with quick response, the tender-hearted youth became again the Edgar of the days before reminders of his dependence upon charity had opened his eyes to the difference between a real and an adopted father.

Under this reconciling influence, the youth poured out expressions of penitence for the past and made resolutions for the future and Mr. Allan promised to apply for the desired appointment to West Point, but added that thereafter, he should consider himself relieved of all responsibility concerning Edgar.

This blunt and ungracious assurance strained the bond between the adopted father and son; the promised letter of application to the Secretary of War, ruthlessly shattered it. That his indulgencies during his year at the University of Virginia, so freely and earnestly repented, should have been exposed in the letter seemed to the boy unnecessary and cruel, but the man who had been fifteen years his father, the husband of her over whom the grave had but just closed and who had always loved him—Edgar—as an own and only son, had seen fit to add to the declaration,

"He left me in consequence of some gambling debts at the University," a disclaimer of even a sentimental interest in him!

"Frankly, Sir," the letter said, "I do declare that Edgar Poe is no relation to me whatever; that I have many in whom I have taken an active interest in order to promote theirs, with no other feeling than that every man is my care, if he be in distress."

Edgar Poe duly presented the letter, but the bitterness which during his brief visit home had been put to sleep, raised its head and robbed him of all pleasure in his anticipated change and of much of the incentive to put forth his best effort in it. He felt that the result of this ungracious letter must be to blot the new leaf which he had so ardently desired to turn with shadows of his past which no effort of his own could entirely obliterate.

For the soreness of finding himself disowned as Mr. Allan's son—this time publicly, in a manner—he found somewhat of balm in the letter of cordial praise addressed to the Honorable Secretary of War in his behalf, by the father of his old friend, Jack Preston. Mr. Preston described him as a young gentleman of genius who had already gained reputation for talents and attainments at the University of Virginia, and added,

"I would not write this recommendation if I did not believe he would remunerate the Government at some future day by his services and talents, for whatever may be done for him."

Happily for the, at times, morbidly, sensitive youth, he had soon forgotten the sting caused by the letter in a return to the dreams which he regarded as not only the chief joy but the chief business of his life; for though he was preparing himself for the profession of a soldier, he had never for a moment, forsworn the Muse of Poetry. For a whole year before being transferred to Fortress Monroe he had been stationed at Fort Moultrie, in Charleston harbor. There his wonderful dream-lady, "Ligeia," had seemed especially near to him, and often, when the day's work was done and he recognized her voice in the music of the waves or felt her kiss in the soft, southern air, blown across spicey islets, he would up and away with her across the world, on the moon's silver track; or on nights when no moon came up out of the sea, would wander with her through the star-sown sky.

There was one fair star that invited his fancy with peculiar insistence. It seemed to beckon to him with the flashes of its beams. He questioned "Ligeia" of it and she told him that it was none other than Al Aaraaf, the great star discovered by Tycho Brahe, which after suddenly appearing and shining for a few nights with a brilliancy surpassing that of Jupiter, disappeared never to be seen again; never except by him—The Dreamer—to whom it was given not only to gaze upon it from the far earth, but, with her as his guide, to visit it and to explore its fairy landscape where the spirits of lost sculptures enjoyed immortality.

The result of this flight of fancy to a magical world was the poem, "Al Aaraaf."

He spent the interim between his honorable discharge from the army and his entrance at West Point in a happy visit to Baltimore, where he made the acquaintance of his father's kindred and succeeded in publishing the new poem, with a revised edition of the old ones.

For the first time, his work appeared under his own signature:

"Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems. By Edgar A. Poe."

The new poem was unintelligible to the critics—but what of that? he asked himself. One of his optimistic moods was upon him. He despised the critics for their lack of perception and as he held the slim volume in his hands and gazed upon that, to him, wondrous title-page, his countenance shone as though it had caught the reflection of the magic star itself. What mattered all the wounds, all the woes of his past life? He had entered into a land where dreams came true!

For the first time, too, his work received recognition as poetry, in the literary world. It was but a nod, yet it was a beginning; and it pleased him to think that this first nod of greeting as a poet came to him from Boston, where his mother had found "her best, most sympathetic friends." Before publishing his new book he had sent some extracts from it to Mr. John Neal, Editor of the Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, who promptly gave them a place in his paper, with some kind words commending them to lovers of "genuine poetry."

"He is entirely a stranger to me," wrote the Boston editor, of the twenty-year-old poet, "but with all his faults, if the remainder of Al Aaraaf and Tamerlane are as good as the body of the extracts here given, he will deserve to stand high—very high—in the estimation of the shining brotherhood."

In a burst of gratitude the happy poet wrote to Mr. Neal his thanks for these "very first words of encouragement," he had received.

"I am young," he confided to this earliest friend in the charmed world of letters, "I am young—not yet twenty—am a poet if deep worship of all beauty can make me one—and wish to be so in the common meaning of the word."



CHAPTER XVI.

Upon a dark and drizzling November night of the year 1830, four cadets of West Point Academy sat around a cosy open fire in Room 28, South Barracks, spinning yarns for each other's amusement.

One of them—the one with the always handsome and scholarly, at times soft and romantic, but tonight, dare-devil face, was easily recognizable as Edgar the Goodfellow, frequently appearing in the quite opposite character of Edgar the Dreamer, and commonly known as Edgar Poe. His fellow cadets had dubbed him, "the Bard." Two of this young man's companions were his room-mates in Number 28, "Old P," and "Gibs," and the third was a visitor from North Barracks.

Taps had sounded sometime since, and the Barracks were supposed to be wrapt in slumber, but for these young men the evening had just begun. Several hours had elapsed since supper and it is a well-known fact that there is never a time or a season when a college boy is not ready to eat. Someone suggested that politeness demanded they should entertain their guest with a fowl and a bottle of brandy from Benny Haven's shop, and proposed that they should draw straws to determine which of the three hosts should fetch the necessary supplies. They had no money, but the accommodating "Bard" agreed to sacrifice his blanket in the cause of hospitality; and armed with that and several pounds of tallow candles, "Gibs," upon whom the lot had fallen, set forth to run the blockade to Benny's. This was a risky business, for the vigilance of Lieutenant Joseph Locke, one of the instructors in tactics who was also a sort of supervisor of the morals and conduct of cadets, was hard to elude. As one of the Bard's own effusions ran,

"John Locke was a very great name; Joe Locke was a greater, in short, The former was well known to Fame, The latter well known to Report."

The best that Benny would give, in addition to the bottle, for the blanket and candles, was an old gander, whose stentorian and tell-tale voice he obligingly hushed by chopping off its head. Under cover of the darkness and the storm, "Gibs" succeeded in safely returning to the Barracks but not until his hands and his shirt were reeking with the gander's gore. "The Bard," who was anxiously awaiting the result of the foraging expedition ventured outside to meet him. When he beheld the prize, he exclaimed, in a whisper,

"Good for you! But you look like a murderer caught red-handed."

His own words, almost before they left his lips, suggested to him an idea for a mammoth hoax—the best they had tried yet, he told himself. He hastily, and in whispers, unfolded it to "Gibs," whom he found all sympathy, then returned alone, to his friends in Number 28, reporting that he had seen nothing of their messenger, and expressing fear that he had met with an accident.

All began to watch the door with anxiety. After some minutes it burst open and "Gibs," who had carefully laid the gander down outside, staggered into the room, appearing to be very drunk and brandishing a knife, which he had rubbed against the fowl's bleeding neck. "Old P." and the visitor from North Barracks, too frightened for words, sat as though rooted to their chairs, while "the Bard" sprang to his feet and in a horror-stricken voice, exclaimed,

"Heavens, Gibs! What has happened?"

"Joe Locke—Joe Locke—" gasped "Gibs."

"Well, what of Joe Locke? Speak man!"

"He won't report me any more. I've killed him!"

"Pshaw!" exclaimed "the Bard," in disgust. "This is another of your practical jokes, and you know it."

"I thought you would say that, so I cut off his head and brought it along. Here it is!"

With that he quickly opened the door and picked up the gander and, whirling it around his head, dashed it violently at the one candle which was thus knocked over and extinguished, leaving the room in darkness but for a few smouldering embers on the hearth, and with the gruesome addition to the company of what two of those present believed to be the severed head of Lieutenant Locke.

The visitor with one bound was out of the room through the window, and made good his escape to his own quarters in North Barracks, where he spread the astounding news that "Gibs" had murdered Joe Locke; it was certainly so, for his head was then in Number 28, South Barracks.

"Old P." nearly frozen with fright, did not move from his place, and it was with some difficulty that "the Bard" and "Gibs" brought him back to a normal condition and induced him to assist in preparing the fowl which had played the part of Joe Locke's head, in the little comedy, for the belated feast—which was merrily partaken of, but without the guest of honor.

* * * * *

Edgar Poe had entered West Point in July, but hardly had its doors closed behind him when his optimism gave place to wretchedness and he began to feel that his appointment was a mistake. He had taken a fine stand in his classes, but he recognized at once a state of things most unpleasant for him for which he had not been prepared. As in his schooldays in Richmond and at the University, a number of the boys had withheld their intimacy from him on account of caste feeling, so now at West Point he found history repeating itself, but with a difference. In Richmond and at the University it had been as the child of the stage and as a dependent upon charity, that the line was drawn against him. With the aristocratic cadets, it was because of his promotion from the ranks. Yet the very experience which brought their contempt upon him gave him a sense of superiority that made their manner toward him the harder to bear, and drilling with green boys after having been two years a soldier, he found most irksome.

While the snubbing to which he was subjected was general enough to make his situation extremely unpleasant, however, it was by no means unanimous. "Gibs" and "Old P." his convivial room-mates in Number 28, took him to their hearts at once, and he really liked them when he was in the mood for companions of their type, but they wore cruelly upon his nerves when the divine fire within him was burning. So indeed would any room-mates, for at home always, and most of the time at the University, one of his chief comforts had been his own room where he could shut out all the world and be alone with his dreams.

There was, at West Point, nothing like a repetition of his course at the University. The trouble which his attack of gambling fever had gotten him into had proved a severe but wholesome lesson, and he had let cards alone at once and forever. In his ignorance of his own family history, he did not know that for one of his blood, the only safety lay in total abstinence from the cup that cheers, but the intense and instantaneous excitement he found a single glass of wine produced in his brain—an excitement amounting almost to madness—was in itself a warning to him, and kept him strictly within the bounds of moderation.

There were times, however, when with a chicken and a bottle of brandy, purchased secretly from old Benny, and smuggled, at great hazard, into the room, Edgar Goodfellow could, with zest join his rolicking room-mates in making merry, and in spite of his strict adherence to the single glass, generally out-do them at their own games.

But there was no place in that room for Edgar the Dreamer; and between the spirit-dulling routine and discipline of classes and drills with youths for the most part younger than himself and inferior in mentality and cultivation, but who bore themselves as his superiors, and the impossibility of an hour of solitude, the lovely "Ligeia" became unreal and remote. He could no longer catch the sounds of her voice, or feel her presence near. His muse, too, had become shy and difficult and when she deigned to visit him at all, it was generally in the quite new character of jester in cap and bells, under whose influence he dashed off humorous and satirical squibs at the expense of the professors and students, of which the lines on Lieutenant Locke are a specimen. These he recited for the benefit of the little parties that gathered in Number 28, by whom they were regarded as master-pieces of wit and were circulated through the school.

But he took no real pleasure in this perversion of his poetical gift, and feeling his soul cramped and cabined by the uncongeniality of his surroundings, he soon became convinced that West Point was not the place for him, and that he should leave it as soon as possible. He wrote Mr. Allan of his dissatisfaction—begging his assistance in securing a discharge. At no time would this request have been granted but it came at the most inopportune moment imaginable.

Some time before, certain ladies in Richmond who professed "to know the signs," had given out the interesting news that Mr. Allan was "taking notice." True it was that though such a thing had seemed impossible, his stocks were higher and more precisely folded than ever, his broadcloth was of a finer texture, his knee-buckles shone with a brighter lustre, but the most marked change in him was a certain springiness of gait altogether new to his silk-stockinged calves, and almost youthful, and a pleased expression of the hitherto stern eyes and mouth which made his usually solemn vizage look as if it might break out into smiles at any moment.

The signs, the ladies said, dated from the arrival of at "Powhatan," the country seat of the Mayo family, just below Richmond, of a fair guest—Miss Louisa Patterson, of Philadelphia. This lady was no longer young, according to the severe standards of that time of early marriages and correspondingly early "old-maidenhood," but so much the better, as she was therefore of suitable age for the elderly though spruce and prosperous widower. She was, withal, a decidedly personable woman with the elegant manners and conversation of the inner circles of the exclusive, stately society in which she had been nurtured—just the woman, the fair prophetesses said, to rule over John Allan (for everybody knew that a man who ruled his first wife was invariably ruled by his second) and to preside with distinction and taste over his drawing-room and his board. She was as suitable, in fact for the wife of ripe age as the flower-like Frances had been for the wife of youth. So Richmond gave its unqualified approval.

Nothing could have been more out of harmony with the sound of the "mellow wedding bells" pealing for this happy pair, than a reminder of the first wife of the bridegroom in the shape of a letter from Edgar Poe.

When Poe had entered West Point his foster-father had drawn a long breath of relief. He believed that the idle youth with whom his dead wife had been so strangely infatuated was off his hands for good and all. When the letter came to jar upon his new dream of love he was irritated, and in his brief mention of the matter to his bride it was very apparent, and left upon her mind the impression that Frances Allan must have been a weak and silly creature indeed, to have fancied an idle, ungrateful boy who spent his time drinking, gambling and scribbling ridiculous poetry. And the son of an actress! It would have been impossible for such a low character and herself to have remained under the same roof for a day, she was sure, and she told her husband so—imparting to her tone somewhat of the pity she felt to think of his having been yoked for years to such a morally frail specimen of womanhood as she conceived the first Mrs. Allan to have been.

So Mr. Allan's letter of refusal to help Edgar escape the life that was growing more and more irksome to him was as decided as it was brief. But Edgar was unshaken in his resolve to get away as soon as possible. In the meantime, finding no outlet for his restless creative faculty that would not remain inactive though there was no opportunity for its satisfaction, he gave himself over by turns, to deepest dejection and wildest hilarity.

Finally, as no other relief was at hand, he decided to force his discharge by deliberate and systematic neglect of the rules. The plan succeeded so well that before the session was out he was expelled from the Academy for disobedience of orders and failure to attend roll-calls, classes and guard-duty.



CHAPTER XVII.

Happily, the restraints of the Academy and his environment there, instead of crushing out young Edgar's impulse to dream and to put his dreams into writing (as a longer period of the same restraints and conditions might have done) had but quickened and strengthened these very impulses, and he had now but one wish, one aspiration in regard to his newly acquired freedom, and that was to dedicate it to the art of literature which had become more and more his passion and his mistress, and which since he had given up all idea of the army, he was resolved to make his sole profession.

His first step toward this end was to arrange, before leaving New York, for a new edition of his already published work, adding some hitherto unpublished poems which even in the unsympathetic atmosphere of Number 28 South Barracks had been undergoing a refining process in the seething crucible of his brain.

The money for this venture dropped into his lap, as it were, for when the new friends in whom he had confided passed the word around that "the Bard" was going to get out a book of poetry, the cadets (in anticipation of a collection of ditties cleverly hitting off the peculiarities and characteristics of the professors) to a man, subscribed in advance—at seventy-five cents per copy. In appreciation of their recognition of his genius, and little guessing what manner of book they expected it to be, "the Bard" gratefully dedicated the new volume "To the United States Corps of Cadets."

Happy it was for him that he was not present to hear those he had thus honored set up their throats in unanimous expressions of disgust when—the dedication leaf turned—they were confronted by a reprint of "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf," with the shorter poems, "To Helen," "A Paean," "Israfel," "Fairy-Land," and other "rubbish," as they promptly pronounced the entire contents of the book.

"Listen, fellows!" said one of the disgusted lot, with the open volume in his hand.

"'In Heaven a spirit doth dwell Whose heartstrings are a lute. None sing so wildly well As the angel, Israfel, And the giddy stars (so legends tell) Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice, all mute.'"

As he finished this opening stanza of what posterity has ranked as one of the most exquisite lyrics in the English tongue, but which was received by the audience of cadets with guffaws of derision, the reader closed the book with a snap, and dashed it across the room and into the open fire.

"Did you ever hear crazier rubbish?" he asked, with contempt. "Highway robbery, I call it, to send us such stuff for our good, hard cash!"

"The joke's on us this time, and no doubt about it," said the also chagrinned, but more philosophically inclined "Gibs." "The Bard means well, though, and no doubt he thinks the stuff is poetry."

"Old P." solemnly tapped his forehead with his forefinger.

"Something wrong here," he remarked, ominously, "I suspected it all along."

The business of getting his book published dispatched, the poet's thoughts turned lovingly toward Richmond which he still called "home," and carpet-bag in hand and a package of copies of his book which he intended as presents to his old chums under his arm, he set out upon the journey thither.

The streets of New York had been cold and bleak but he told himself as he journeyed, that April days at home were quite different. The grass would be already green upon the hillsides, many of the trees in leaf, and the dear spring flowers in bloom. He pictured the ample comforts of the Allan homestead, and of his own room in it, with its familiar furnishings. Of course he had no idea of looking to Mr. Allan for support—his pen must give him that now—but during the visit which he was going to make "at home" it would be pleasant to sleep once more in that room with all of its associations, though many of these were with the blunders of a blinded youth.

As he thought of Mr. Allan and his last meeting with him, his heart softened. He would try and keep their intercourse upon the friendly basis upon which his last sad visit home had placed it; would as far as possible, put himself in his foster-father's place and see things as he saw them.

How desolate the widowed man had seemed in the big, empty house during those chill, sorrow-stricken, February days! No wonder he had sought escape from his desolation in another marriage—his loneliness without the lovely little mother must have been unbearable. What was the new wife like, he wondered? Was she like the lady of the manor he remembered? Could there be another such gentle, tender, flower-like woman on earth?

In his unworldly, unpractical dreamer's soul it did not occur to him for one moment that her existence might make him any less Mr. Allan's adopted son, or even that, with all the rooms in the big house at her disposal, she might have taken a fancy to rearrange the one which, from the time the house became Mr. Allan's property, had been "Eddie's room," and which had so long stood ready for his occupancy—dedicated as it was to his own belongings.

* * * * *

At last he was on the sacred soil!

How fair and comfortable the old homestead looked in its setting of greening lawn and flowering garden, with the pleasant sunshine of the April afternoon over all! How cheerful—how ample—how homelike!

He ran up the steps of the commodious front porch and was on the point of opening the door when some impulse he could not define made him pause and, instead of turning the knob, announce himself with a rap upon the shining brass knocker.

One of the old family servants whom he had known and loved from his infancy, and with whom he had always been a pet, opened the door, and with beaming face and eager voice greeted him with the enthusiastic hospitality of his kind—lifting up his voice and his hands in praise to God that he was once more in this world permitted to look upon the face of "Marse Eddie."

The whilom young master of the house was equally, if less picturesquely, warm in his expressions of pleasure at seeing the old man again, and gave him his carpet-bag with instructions to take it to his room and to tell Mrs. Allan that he was there.

The venerable darkey's face fell. The "new Mistis" had "changed the house around some," he explained, apologetically, and "Marse's Eddie's" things had been moved to one of the servants' rooms, but "Marse Eddie's" old room was a guest chamber, and he "reckoned" that would be the place to take the bag.

The visitor's whole manner changed at once—froze. The flush of pleasure died out of his face and left it pale, cold and stern. A fierce and unreasonable rage possessed him. She had dismantled the room that his little mother had arranged for him and sent his things to a servant's room! Was this insult intentional, he wondered?

To his mind, his "little Mother" was so entirely the presiding genius of the place—he could not realize the right of anyone, not even a "new mistis," to come in and "change the house around."

Cut to the quick, he directed the old butler to leave the bag where it was and to let Mrs. Allan know that he was in the drawing-room.

No announcement could have given that lady greater surprise. She regarded Edgar's leaving West Point after her husband's letter, as direct disobedience, and his presenting himself at her door as the height of impertinence. Something of this was in the frigid dignity with which she received him—standing, and drawn up to the full height of her imposing figure.

She had never been within speaking distance of anyone drunk to the point of intoxication, but, somehow, she had received an impression that this was pretty generally the case with the young man now before her, and when he began somewhat incoherently (in his foolish rage) to ask her confirmation of the old servant's statement that his room had been dismantled, she was convinced that it was his condition at the moment. Turning, with the grand air for which she was noted, to the hoary butler who stood in the doorway between drawing-room and hall, respectfully awaiting orders as to "Marse Eddie's" bag, she said,

"Put this drunken man out of the house!"

The aged slave stood aghast. Between the stately new mistress whom it was his duty to serve, and the beloved young master whose home-coming had warmed his old heart, what should he do?

He stood in silence, his lined black face filled with sadness, his chin in his hand, his eyes bent in sorrow and shame upon the floor. What should he do?—

Fortunately, the new mistress did not see his indecision as she swept from the room, and "Marse Eddie" quickly relieved him of the embarrassing dilemma by picking up the carpet-bag and passing out of the door, closing it behind him.

It was all a mistake—a miserable mistake; but one of those mistakes in understanding between blind, prejudiced human beings by which hearts are broken, souls lost.

At the foot of the steps Edgar Poe paused and looked back at the massive closed door. Never—nevermore, it seem to say to him.—Never—nevermore!

While he had been inside the house one of those sudden changes in the face of nature of which his superstitious soul always made note, had taken place. A shower from a passing cloud had filled the depressions in the uneven pavement, where before only sunshine lay, with little pools of water, and had left the trees "weeping," as he fancifully described them to himself.

He walked along the wet streets for a few steps, by the side of the wall that enclosed house and grounds. Then he paused again and looked over into the dripping garden while he held consultation with himself as to what he should do next. As he looked the breath of drenched violets greeted his nostrels. He noticed that the lilacs were coming into blossom. The fruit trees already stood like brides veiled in their fresh bloom. The tulip and hyacinth and daffodil beds were gay with color. How their newly washed faces shone in the sunshine, just then bursting through the clouds!

Near him, just inside the wall, was a bed of lily-of-the-valley. He was seized with an almost irresistible desire to go down upon his knees by it and search among the glistening green leaves to see if the lilies were in bloom.

But the garden-gate, like the house door, was closed upon him and seemed to repeat the fateful word—Nevermore.

Whither should he turn his steps? To Mr. Allan's office?—Never!

His intention had been to submit himself to Mr. Allan as far as his self-respect would let him. To consult him in regard to the literary career he felt himself committed to now that (as he recalled with satisfaction) the bridges between him and any other profession were burnt behind him. His own plan, upon which he was resolved to ask Mr. Allan's opinion, would be to seek a position in the line of journalism which would give him a living while he was waiting for his more ambitious work to find buyers.

But since the interview with Mrs. Allan he realized the folly of this dream.

Then, whither should he go?—To the chums of his boyhood?—Rob Stanard, Dick Ambler, Rob Sully, Jack Preston, where were they?—Good, dear friends they had been, but it seemed so long since they had played together! What should they find to say to each other now? They were busy with their various avocations and interests—what room in their hearts and homes could there be for a wanderer like himself?

At the age of one and twenty, at the springtime of his life, as of the year—he felt himself to be as friendless, as much a stranger in the city which he called home, as Rip Van Winkle after his long sleep had felt in his. The only spots toward which he could turn with any confidence for sympathy were those two quiet cities within this city where lay his loved and lovely dead—"The doubly dead in that they died so young."

"How different my life would be if they had lived!" he murmured to the flowers.

Yet how fair was this world in which he had no place—even to a mere looker-on. How fair was this mansion, in its setting of April green and bloom, which had once owned him as its young—its future master. Above it Hope stretched her shining wings, but the hope was not for him. For him the closed door and the closed gate said only, "no more—nevermore."

But whither should he go?—whither?

As he turned from the garden and walked slowly, aimlessly, down the street, his great grey eyes fixed ponderingly upon the breaking clouds, a rainbow—bright symbol of promise—spanned the heavens. His eyes widened, his lips parted at the wonder and the beauty and the suddenness of it.

Whither should he go? Behold an answer meet for a poet!

Whither?—Whither?—The dark eyes in the pale cameo face turned skyward—the eyes of him who had declared himself to be a deep worshipper of all beauty grew more dreamy. Whither, indeed, but to the end of the rainbow!

By what "path obscure and lonely," the quest would lead him he knew not, but he would follow it to the bitter end, for there, perchance, he would find if not the traditional pot of gold, at least a wreath of laurel.

As he wandered down the street, his eyes still upon the bow, his dream was suddenly interrupted by the hearty voice of one of his boyhood's friends, and his sister Rosalie's adopted brother, Jack Mackenzie.

"Hello, Edgar!" he cried. "Did you drop from the clouds? Evidently, for I see your head is still in them."

He returned the greeting with joy. How good it was to feel the hand-clasp of friendship and welcome! He had always liked Jack—for the moment he loved him.

"And where are you bound—you and your bag?" asked Jack. "Not to Mr. Allan's, for you are going in the wrong direction."

"No," replied The Dreamer, with a whimsical smile. "I was going there, but I found the door shut, so I changed my mind, and had just decided to make the end of the rainbow my destination."

Jack's spontaneous laugh rang out. "The same old Edgar!" he said. "Well I won't interfere with your journey except to defer it a bit. You are going home with me, to 'Duncan Lodge,' now—at least to supper and spend the night; and to stay as much longer as pleases you. Rose and the rest will be delighted to see you."



CHAPTER XVIII.

Where was Edgar Poe? Again the question was being asked. In many quarters and with varying degrees of interest it was repeated. But it still remained unanswered.

In Richmond it was asked by the chums of his youth as they sat under their comfortable vines and fig-trees, or stopped each other on a corner for a few moments' social chat, or—catching some one of the rumors that were afloat concerning the gifted companion of their golden days—looked up from their desks in office or counting-house to ask each other the question. Their faces were keen with interest for their admiration and affection for The Dreamer had been sincere; yet it was not strong enough after the lapse of years to make any one of them lay down work and go forth to seek a solution of the mystery. Such an errand not one of them felt to be his business. A quixotic errand it would indeed have been considered and one which, if half the rumors were true, might have necessitated a journey to the ends of the earth, to prove but a fool's errand after all.

The oft-repeated question was one with which John Allan little concerned himself. A robust son and heir had come in his late middle age to fill all his thoughts with new interest and plans for the present and the future. The patter of little feet of his own child on the stairs and halls of his home, drowned the ghostly memories of other and less welcome footfalls that had once echoed there.

He too, had heard rumors of the adventures and the misadventures of Edgar Poe, but he did not consider it his business, as it was certainly not his pleasure, to investigate them.

In Baltimore too, the question was asked by the kinsfolk whose acquaintance Edgar had made during his visit there. But they had never held themselves in the least responsible for this eccentric son of their brother David, the actor—the black sheep of the family. Surely it was none of their business to follow him upon any chase his foolish fancy might lead him.

But still, when the rumors that were rife reached their ears, it was with no small degree of curiosity that they asked each other the question: Where was Edgar Poe?—What had become of him?—Had he, as some believed, met death upon the high seas or in a foreign land?—Was he the real hero of stories of adventure which floated across the ocean from Russia—from France—from Greece?

He had certainly contemplated going abroad—the Superintendent of West Point Academy had had a letter from him sometime after he left there, declaring his intention of seeking an appointment in the Polish army. Had he gone, or was he, as some would have it, going in and out among them, there in Baltimore, but unknown and unrecognized—his identity hidden under assumed name and ingenious disguise?

Who could tell?

The wonder of it was not in the existence of the unanswered question—of the mystery—but that the question could remain unanswered—the mystery remain unsolved—and no attempt be made to lift the veil. That a young man, a gentleman, of prominent connections, of handsome features and distinguished bearing and address, of rare mental gifts and cultivation, and of magnetic personality, could disappear from the face of the earth—could, almost before the very eyes of his fellows, step from the glare of the world in which he moved into the abyss of absolute obscurity or impenetrable mystery, and create no stir—that no one should deem it his or her business to seek or to find an answer to the question, a reading of the riddle.

Not until two years after Edgar Poe had turned his back upon the closed door of the Allan mansion, in Richmond, and stepped, as it seemed from the edge of a world in which he was not wanted into the unknown, did such an one arise. And that one was, as an especially good friend of Edgar Poe's was most likely to be—a woman.

Between this woman:—Mrs. Maria Poe Clemm—a widow of middle age, and The Dreamer, there existed the close blood-tie of aunt and nephew, for she was the own sister of his father, David Poe.

More than that—there existed, though they had never seen each other, a soul kinship rare between persons of the same blood, and which (for all they had never seen each other) she, with the woman's unerring instinct that sometimes seems akin to inspiration, divined. She too was something of a dreamer, with an ear for the voices of Nature and a mind open to the influences of its beauty, but with a goodly ballast of strong common sense.

She was but a young girl when her handsome and idolized brother David scandalized the family by marrying an actress and himself taking to the stage. But she had seen the bewitching "Miss Arnold" at the theatre in Baltimore—had, with fascinated eyes, followed her twinkling feet through the mazy dance, had listened with charmed ears to her exquisite voice, had sat spell-bound under her acting. To her childish mind, the stage had become a fairy-land and Miss Arnold its presiding genius. That brother David should love and marry her seemed like something out of a fairy book. She did not blame brother David; she secretly entirely approved of him.

In her later years the death of the husband of her own youth who had been romantically, passionately loved, had left her penniless but not disillusioned; with her own living to get and a little daughter with a face like a Luca Della Robbia chorister, and a voice that went with the face, but who had the requirements of other flesh and blood children, to be provided for. This child was the sunshine of the lonely widow's life, yet she only in part filled the great mother's heart of her. Nature had made her to be the mother of a son as well as a daughter, then mockingly, it would seem, denied her.

But in her dreams she worshipped the son she had never borne, and deep in her heart was stored, like unshed tears, the love she would have lavished upon him had her whole mission in life been fulfilled.

She had heard little of her brother David's son Edgar, but that little had always interested her. She was living away from Baltimore during his visit there just before he entered West Point, and so she did not meet him; but upon the death of her husband, soon afterward, she had returned to the home of her girlhood, and established herself in modest, but respectable quarters, to earn a livelihood for the little Virginia and herself by the use of her skillful needle.

It was soon afterward that with a concern which no one but herself had felt, she learned of the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of her nephew.

She yearned over the wanderer and longed to mother him, as, somehow, she knew he needed to be mothered. She kept near her a copy of his last little book of poems which she had read again and again. In the earlier ones she saw a loose handful of jewels in the rough, yet she recognized the sparkle which distinguishes the genuine from the false. In the later ones she perceived gems "of purest ray serene," polished and strung and ready to be passed on from generation to generation—priceless heir-looms.

She was a tall woman, and deep-bosomed, with large but clear-cut and strong features, and handsome, deepset gray eyes which habitually wore the expression of one who has loved much and sorrowed much. She had been called stately before her proud spirit had bowed itself in submission to the chastenings of grief—since when she had borne the seal of meekness. But there was a distinction about her that neither grief nor poverty could destroy. She was so unmistakably the gentle-woman. In the simple, but dainty white cap, with its floating strings, which modestly covered her dark waving hair, the plain black dress and prim collar fastened with its mourning pin, she made a reposeful picture of the old-fashioned conception of "a widow indeed."

Her hands were not her least striking feature. They were large, but perfectly modelled, and they were deft, capable, full of character and feeling. In their touch there was a wonderfully soothing quality. In winter they always possessed just the pleasantest degree of warmth; in summer just the most grateful degree of coolness. No one ever received a greeting from them without being impressed with the friendliness, the sympathy of their clasp.

As she bent her fine, deeply-lined face over them, and the work they held, while the little Virginia sat nursing a doll at her feet, she often stitched into the garments that they fashioned yearnings, thoughts, questionings of the youth—her brother's child—whose picture, as she had conceived him from descriptions she had heard, she carried in her heart. She knew too well the weakness that was his inheritance and she knew too, what perils were in waiting to ensnare the feet of untried youth—poor, homeless and without the restraining influences of friends and kindred—whatever their inheritance might be.

Sometimes she felt that the yearning was almost more than she could bear, and that she must arise and go forth and seek this straying sheep of the fold of Poe. But alas, she was but a woman, without money and without a clue upon which to begin to work save such as wild, improbable and contradictory rumors afforded. That was, after all, what she most needed—a clue. If she could only find a clue, poor as she was, she would follow it to the ends of the earth!

Upon a summer's day two years after Edgar's disappearance, and when she had almost given up hope, the clue came. It was placed in her hand by her cousin, and Edgar's, Neilson Poe, who had no faith in its value but passed it on to her as it had come to him—"for what it was worth," as he expressed it.

It was a strange story that Mrs. Clemm's cousin Neilson told her, and which had been told him, he said, by an acquaintance of his from Richmond who had known Edgar Poe in his boyhood.

It seems that this Richmond man had during a visit to Baltimore gone to a brickyard to arrange for the shipment home of bricks for a new house he was building. As he sat in the office talking to the manager of the yard, a line of men bearing freshly molded bricks to the kiln passed the open window. There was something about the appearance of one of the laborers that struck the Richmond man as familiar and he turned quickly to the manager and asked the name of the man, pointing him out. The name given him was a strange one to him and he dismissed the matter from his thoughts and returned to his business talk.

Upon his way to his hotel, however, the appearance of the brick-carrier, and the impression that somewhere, he had seen him before, returned to his mind and it came upon him in a flash, first that the likeness was to Edgar Poe, and then the conviction that the man was none other than Poe himself, though emaciated and aged to a degree that, with his shabby dress and unshaven chin, made him scarcely recognizable. Though he had been but a casual acquaintance of Edgar's, he was deeply touched at seeing him so evidently in distress, and returned to the brickyard early the next morning for the purpose of speaking to him and of helping him back into the sphere in which he belonged and from which he had so long disappeared. But the man he sought was not there and no one knew where his lodgings were. He was a recent employe of the yard, they said, and so gloomy and unsociable that he had made no friends. He was capable of a great amount of work, which he performed faithfully, but kept to himself and had little to say to anybody.

Upon the day before he had looked ill and had stopped work before the day was over. He was evidently suffering from exhaustion, but had declared that he needed nothing, and after sitting down to rest upon a pile of bricks for a while, had gone off to his home—wherever that might be—as usual, alone.

* * * * *

This story Neilson Poe set down as highly sensational. He did not believe, he said with a laugh, that his cousin, when found, would be doing anything half so energetic or useful as carrying bricks—he would have more hope of him if he could believe it. The laborer's real, or fancied, likeness to Edgar was but a case of chance resemblance, that was all.

But that was not enough for Maria Clemm. She folded her sewing and laid it away with an air of finality which plainly said that she had found other and more pressing work to do. The sewing must wait a more convenient season.

Then she went out into the streets sweltering in the summer heat, and turned her face toward that obscure quarter of the town where human beings who could not afford to rest or to dine might at least secure a corner in which to "lodge" and the right, if not the appetite, to "eat," for an infinitesimal sum; for it was in this quarter that strange as it might, seem, her instinct told her her search must be made—in this quarter that Edgar Poe, the rich merchant's pampered foster-child, Edgar Poe, the poet, the scholar, the exquisite in dress, in taste and in manners, would be found.

When she did find him the mystery that had surrounded him was stripped of the last shred of its romance. In a room compared to which the little chamber back of the shop of Mrs. Fipps, the milliner, in which his mother had drawn her last breath, and in which Frances Allan had found and fallen in love with him, was luxurious, he lay upon a bed of straw thrown into a dark corner, tossing with fever and in his delirium, literally "babbling of green fields."

The kind-hearted, but ignorant and uncleanly slattern who sought with "lodgings to let" to keep the souls of herself and family in their bodies, gave him as much attention as the demands of a numerous brood of little slatterns and a drunken husband would permit, and sighed with real sorrow as she admitted that the "poor gentleman" was in a very bad way. It was her opinion he had seen better days she confided to the three other lodgers who were just then renting the three straw beds in the three other corners of the same dark, squalid and evil-smelling room. He was "so soft-spoken and elegant-like, if he was poor as a church mouse. Pity he had no folks nor nobody to keer nothin' about 'im."

It was not at once that Mrs. Clemm found him. She had sought him diligently in what would to-day be known as the slum districts of the city, descending the scale of respectability lower and lower until she thought she had reached the bottom, but without success.

Then, upon the fourth or fifth day of her search, late in the afternoon, when the little Virginia was watching anxiously from the sitting-room window for "Muddie's" return, a wagon stopped before her door and out of it and into the house was borne a stretcher upon which lay an apparently dying man—ghastly, unshaven, and muttering broken unintelligible sentences.

Keeping pace with the wagon as it crept along the street, might have been seen the stately, sad-eyed Widow Clemm. When the wagon stopped, she stopped, and directed the careful lifting of the stretcher from it. Then she turned and opened the door of her small house and led the way to her neat bed-chamber where, upon her own immaculate bed, the sick man was gently laid—henceforth, as long as need be, a cot in the sitting-room would be good enough for her.

The little Virginia, her soft eyes filled with wonder, had followed her mother upon tip-toe.

"Who is it, Muddie?" she questioned in an awed whisper.

The anxiety in the widow's face gave place to a look of exaltation which fairly transfigured her. Her deep eyes shone with the hoarded love for the son so long denied her. She gathered her little daughter to her breast and kissed her tenderly.

"It is your brother, darling," she gently said. "God has given me a son!"

Well she knew that he was not yet entirely her own—that she would have to wrestle fiercely with Death for his possession. But she had made up her mind that she would win the battle.

"Death shall not have him," she passionately told herself.

But the next moment, overwhelmed with a realization of human helplessness, she was upon her knees at his bedside, crying:

"Oh, God, do not let him die! I have but just found him! Spare him to me now, if but a little while!"



CHAPTER XIX.

For many days the sick man lay with eyes closed in uneasy sleep or open, but unseeing, and with body writhing and tongue loosed but incoherent, showing that these half-waking hours, as well as the sleeping ones, were "horror haunted."

Finally the most terrible of dreams visited him. The circumstances of his life had caused him from his infancy to dwell much upon the subject of death. He had oftentimes taken a gruesome pleasure in trying to imagine all the sensations of the grim passage into the "Valley of the Shadow"—even to the closing of the coffin-lid and the descent into the grave. Now, in his fever-dream, the dreadful details and sensations imagined in health came to him, but with tenfold vividness. At the point when in the blackness and suffocation of conscious burial horror had reached its extremest limit and the sufferer was upon the verge of real death from sheer terror, relief came. He seemed to feel himself freed from the closeness, the maddening fight for breath, of the coffin, and gently, surely, borne upward out of the abyss ... upward ... upward ... into air—light—life!

For a long while he lay quite still, too exhausted to move hand or foot—to raise his eyelids even; but content—more—happy, perfectly happy, in the glorious consciousness of being able just to lie still and breathe the sweet air of day.

Presently, as he began to feel rested, the great grey eyes opened. For the first time since the conqueror, Fever, had overthrown him and bound him to the uneasy bed of straw, they were clear as the sky after a storm—swept clean of every cob-web cloud; but their lucid depths were filled with surprise, for they opened upon a cool, light, homelike chamber. The walls around him were white, but were relieved here and there by restful prints in narrow black frames. The four-post bed upon which he lay was canopied and the large, bright windows were curtained with snowiest dimity, but the draperies of both were drawn and he could look out at the trees and the sky now roseate with the hues of evening. In a set of shelves that nearly reached the ceiling stood row on row of friendly looking books. Upon a high mahogany chest of drawers, with its polished brass trimmings and little swinging looking-glass, stood a white and gold porcelain vase filled with asters—purple, white and pink—while before it, in a deep arm-chair, a little girl of ten or eleven years, with a face like a Luca della Robbia chorister, or like one of the children of sunny Italy that served for old Luca's model, was curled up, stroking a large white cat which lay purring in her lap.

Upon the child the wondering eyes of the sick man lingered longest and to her they returned when their survey of the rest of the room was done. Suddenly, impelled by the steadiness of his gaze, she lifted her own dark, soft eyes and let them rest for a moment upon his. She started—then was up and across the floor in a flash, carrying the cat upon her shoulder.

"Muddie, Muddie," she cried from the door, "The new Buddie is awake!"

Then, still carrying her pet, she walked, to his bedside and gazed earnestly and unabashed into the "new Buddie's" face. Her eyes had the velvety softness of pansy petals and as they looked into the eyes of the sick man recalled to his clearing mind the expression of mixed love and questioning in the eyes of his spaniel, "Comrade," the faithful friend of his boyhood.

At length he spoke.

"Who is 'Muddie'?"

"She's my mother, and you are my new brother that has come to live with us always."

A radiant smile illumined the pale and haggard face. "Thank Heaven for that!" he said. "And who brought me up out of the grave?"

The child was spared the necessity of puzzling over this startling question. Surely it was no other than she, he thought—she who at this moment appeared at the open door—the tall figure of a woman or angel who in the next moment was kneeling beside him with a heaven of protecting love in her face. She it was, no other! Through all of his dreams he had been dimly conscious of her—saving him from death and despair. Now for the first time, in the light of life, and in his new consciousness he saw her plainly.

* * * * *

Edgar Poe's convalescence was slow but it was steady, and even in his weakness he felt a peace and happiness such as he had rarely tasted. This frugal but restful home in which he found himself, with the ministrations of "Muddie" and "Sissy," as he playfully called his aunt and the little cousin who had adopted him as her "Buddie," were to him, after his struggle with hunger, fever and death, like a safe harbor to a storm-tossed sailor.

The little Virginia claimed him as her own from the beginning. As long as he was weak enough to need to be waited upon her small feet and hands never wearied in his service but as he grew better, it was he who served her. There never were such stories as he could tell, such games as he could play, and he took her cat to his heart with gratifying promptness. When they walked out together the world seemed turned into a fairyland as with her hand held fast in his he told her wonderful secrets about the clouds, the trees, the flowers, the birds and even about the stones under her feet. It was fascinating to her too, to lie and listen to him read and talk with "Muddie." She was not wise enough to understand much that they said, but at night, when she had been tucked into bed, he would sit under the lamp and read aloud from one of the books in the shelves, or from the long strips of paper upon which he wrote and wrote; and though she did not understand the words, she delighted to listen, for his voice made the sweetest lullaby music.

With the return of health and strength, energy and the impulse for life's battle began to return to Edgar Poe, and with them a new incentive. He began to awaken to the fact that "Muddie" and "Sissy" were poor and that his presence in their home was making them poorer—that the struggle to support this modest establishment was a severe one, and that he must arise and add what he could to the earnings of the deft needle. The three little editions of his poems had brought him no money—he had begun to despair of their ever bringing him any. He had sometime since turned his attention to prose but the manuscripts of such stories as he had offered the publishers had come back to him with unflattering promptness. He began now, however, with fresh heart to write and to arrange a number of those that seemed to him to be his best, for a book, to which he proposed to give the title, "Tales of the Folio Club."

But the new tide of hope was soon at a low ebb. The editors and publishers would have none of his work.

When the repeated return to him of the stories, poems and essays he sent out had begun to make him lose faith in their merit and to question his own right to live since the world had no use for the only commodity he was capable of producing, "Muddie" came in one evening with an unusually bright, eager look in her eyes and a copy of The Saturday Visitor (a weekly paper published in Baltimore) in her hand.

"Here's your chance, Eddie," she said.

In big capitals upon the first page of the paper was an announcement to the effect that the Visitor would give two prizes—one of one hundred dollars for the best short story, and one of fifty dollars for the best poem submitted to it anonymously. Three well-known gentlemen of the city would act as judges, and the names of the successful contestants would be published upon the twelfth of October.

With trembling hands the discouraged young applicant for place as an author made a neat parcel of six of his "Tales of the Folio Club" and a recently written poem, "The Coliseum," and left them, that very night, at the door of the office of The Saturday Visitor.

How eagerly he and "Muddie" and "Sissy" awaited the fateful twelfth! The hours and the days dragged by on leaden wings. But the twelfth came at last. It found Edgar Poe at the office of the Visitor an hour before time for the paper to be issued, but at length he held the scarcely dry sheet in his hand and there, with his name at the end, was the story that had taken the prize—"The MS. Found in a Bottle."

More!—In the following wonderful—most wonderful words, it seemed to him—the judges declared their decision:

"Among the prose articles were many of various and distinguished merit, but the singular force and beauty of those sent by the author of 'Tales of the Folio Club' leave us no room for hesitation in that department. We have awarded the premium to a tale entitled, 'The MS. Found in a Bottle.' It would hardly be doing justice to the writer of this collection to say that the tale we have chosen is the best of the six offered by him. We cannot refrain from saying that the author owes it to his own reputation as well as to the gratification of the community to publish the entire volume. These tales are eminently distinguished by a wild, vigorous and poetical imagination, a rich style, a fertile invention and varied, curious learning.

(Signed) "JOHN P. KENNEDY, J.H.B. LATROBE, JAMES H. MILLER, Committee."

Here was the fulfilment of hope long deferred! Here was a brimming cup of joy which the widowed aunt and little cousin who had taken him in and made him a son and brother could share with him! It seemed almost too good to be true, yet there it was in plain black and white with the signatures of the three gentlemen whose opinion everyone would respect, at the end. What wealth that hundred dollars—the first earnings of his pen—seemed. What comforts for the modest home it would buy! This was no mere nod of recognition from the literary world, but a cordial hand-clasp, drawing him safely within that magic, but hitherto frowning portal.

He felt as if he were walking on air as he hurried home to tell "Muddie" and "Sissy" of his and their good fortune. And how proud "Muddie" was of her boy! How lovingly little "Sissy" hung on his neck and gave him kisses of congratulation—though but little realizing the significance of his success. And how he, in turn, beamed upon them! The grey eyes had lost all of their melancholy and seemed suddenly to have become wells of sunshine. In imagination he pictured these loved ones raised forever from want, for he told himself that he would not only sell for a goodly price all the rest of the "Tales of the Folio Club," but under the happy influence of his success he would write many more and far better stories still, to be promptly exchanged for gold.

Bright and early Monday morning he made ready (with "Muddie's" aid) for a round of visits to the members of the committee, to thank them for their kind words. His clothes, hat, boots and gloves were all somewhat worse for wear and his old coat hung loosely upon his shoulders—wasted as they still were by the effects of his long illness; but he whistled while he brushed and "Muddie" darned and carefully inked the worn seams, and finally it was with a feeling that he was quite presentable that he kissed his hands to his two good angels and ran gaily down the steps. Hope gave him a debonair mien that belied his shabby-genteel apparel.

A quarter of an hour later Mr. John Kennedy, prominent lawyer and the author of that pleasant book "Swallow Barn," then newly published and the talk of the town, answered a knock upon his office door with a quick, "Come in!"

At the same time he raised his eyes and confronted those of the young author whom he had been instrumental in raising from the "verge of despair."

The face of the older man was one of combined strength and amiability. Evidences of talent were there, but combined with common sense. There was benevolence in the expansive brow and kindliness and humor as well as character, about the lines of the nose and the wide, full-lipped mouth, and the eyes diffused a light which was not only bright but genial, and which robbed them of keenness as they rested upon the pathetic and at the same time distinguished figure before him. What the kindly eyes took in a glance was that the pale and haggard young stranger with the big brow and eyes and the clear-cut features, the military carriage and the shabby, but neat, frock coat buttoned to the throat where it met the fashionable black stock, and with the modest and exquisite manners, was a gentleman and a scholar—but poor, probably even hungry. They kindled with added interest when the visitor introduced himself as Edgar Poe—the author of "Tales of the Folio Club."

The strong, pleasant face and the cordial hand that grasped his own, then placed a chair for him, invited the young author's confidence—a confidence that always responded promptly to kindness—and he had soon poured into the attentive ear of John Kennedy not only profuse thanks for the encouraging words in the Visitor but his whole history. Deeply touched by the young man's refined and intellectual beauty—partially obscured as it was by the unmistakable marks of illness and want—by his frank, confiding manners, by the evidences in thought and expression of gifts of a high order, and by the moving story he told, Mr. Kennedy's heart went out to him and he sent him on his way to pay his respects to the other members of the committee, rejoicing in offers of friendship and hospitality and promises of aid in securing publishers for his writings.