Mary Newton Stanard - The Dreamer

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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.

Edgar Poe had been loved of women, he had been adored by small boys, he
had received many material benefits from his foster father, he had been
kindly treated by his teachers, but he was now for the first time taken
by the hand spiritually as well as physically, by a _man_, a man of
mental and moral force and of position in the world; a man, moreover,
who with rare divination appreciated, out of his own strength, the
weaknesses and the needs as well as the gifts and graces of his new
acquaintance, and who took his dreams and ambitions seriously. The sane,
wholesome companionship which The Dreamer found in him and at his
hospitable fireside acted like a tonic upon his spirits and improvement
in his health both of mind and body were rapid.

Though warning him against being over much elated at his success, and an
expectation of growing suddenly either rich or famous, Mr. Kennedy was
as good as his word in regard to helping him find a market for his work.
A proud moment it was when the young author received a note from his
patron inviting him to dine with Mr. Wilmer, the editor of _The Saturday
Visitor_ which had given him the prize, and some other gentlemen of the
profession of journalism. But his pleasure was followed by quick
mortification. _What should he wear?_ Still holding the open note in
his hand, he looked down ruefully at his clothes--his only ones. For all
their brushing and darning they were unmistakably shabby--utterly unfit
to grace a dinner-party. Nearly all of the hundred dollars which had
seemed such a fortune had already been spent to pay bills incurred
during his illness and to buy provisions for the bare little home which
had sheltered him in his need and which had become so dear to his heart.
No, he could not go to the dinner, but what excuse could he make that
would seem to Mr. Kennedy sufficient to warrant him in not only
declining his hospitality but putting from him the chance of meeting the
editor of the _Visitor_ under such auspices?

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