Mary Newton Stanard - The Dreamer

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII.

In the days that followed, Edgar's friends found him unusually silent,
yet not morose. Serenity sat on his broad, thoughtful brow and in his
great, soft eyes. Nat Howard and his chums gave him the cold shoulder
and wore, in his presence, the air of offended dignity which the
small-minded are apt to assume when conscious of being in the wrong or
of having committed an injury which the victim has received with credit
and the offender has not forgiven. It is so much easier to grant pardon
for an injury received than for one given!

Edgar's own friends were more emphatic in their devotion to him than
ever--racking their young brains for ways in which to show their loyalty
and frequently looking into his face with the expression of soft
adoration and trust one sees in the eyes of a faithful dog. Edgar was
touched and gratified, and his sweet, spontaneous smile often rewarded
their efforts; but his face would soon become grave again and the boys
were aware that the mind of their gifted friend was busy with thoughts
in which they had no part. This gave them an impression of distance
between them and him. He all of a sudden, seemed to have become remote,
as though a chasm, by what power they knew not, had opened between
them--making their love for him as "the desire of the moth for the
star." They knew that he was more often than ever before working upon
his poetical and other compositions, but these were seldom shown, or
even mentioned, to them.

Each boy in his own way sought to bridge the gulf that separated them
from their idol. Robert Sully missed his Latin lesson on purpose in the
hope that Eddie would stay in and help him. And Eddie did, but wore that
same detached air in which there was no intimacy or comfort. When the
lesson was learned Edgar took a slate from the desk before them, rubbed
off the problem that was upon it, and quickly wrote down a little poem
of several stanzas. He held it out, with a smile, to Rob, telling him
that while teaching him his lesson he had been practicing "dividing his
mind," and that while one part of his brain had been putting English
into Latin the other part had composed the verses on the slate.

The dumfounded Rob read the verses aloud, but before he could express
his amazement Edgar had taken the slate from him and, with one swipe of
the damp spunge, obliterated the rhymes.

"Write them on paper for me, please," plead Robert.

The brilliant smile of the boy-poet flashed upon him. "Oh, they were not
worth keeping," said he, indifferently. "They were merely an exercise."
And picking up his books and hat, he walked out of the door, whistling
in clear, high, plaintive notes one of the melodies of his favorite Tom
Moore.

The boy left behind looked after him with a troubled heart and misty
eyes. This wonderful friend of his was as kind as ever, yet he seemed
changed. It was clear that he had "something on his mind."

"Will you go swimming with me this evening, Eddie?" said Dick Ambler
one day when school was out.

"With all the pleasure in life," was the hearty response.

Dick went home to his dinner with a singing heart. If anything could
bring Edgar down from the clouds to his own level, surely it would be
bathing together. He certainly could not make poetry while diving and
swimming, naked, in the racing and tumbling falls of James River. A
merry battle with those energetic waters kept a fellow's wits as well as
his muscles fully occupied.

But even this attempt was a failure. If Edgar made any poetry while in
the water he did not mention it; but he was absent-minded and unsociable
all the way to the river and back--sky-gazing for curious cloud-forms,
listening for bird-notes and hunting wild-flowers, and talking almost
none at all.

In the water he seemed to wake up, and never dived with more grace, or
daring; but no sooner had they started on the way home than he was off
with his dreams again.

Rob Stanard was more successful in his attempts to interest his friend.
In spite of their intimacy at school and on the playground Edgar had up
to this time never visited the Stanard home. Rob had enlisted his
mother's sympathy in the orphan boy and she had suggested that he should
invite Edgar home with him some day. It now occurred to Rob that this
would be a good time to do so, and knowing his friend's fondness for
dumb animals, he offered his pets as an attraction--asking him to come
and see his pigeons and rabbits. His invitation was accepted with
alacrity.

Edgar had seen Rob's mother, but only at a distance. He knew her
reputation as one of the town beauties, but lovely women were not rare
in Richmond, and, beauty-worshipper though he was, he had never had any
especial curiosity in regard to Mrs. Stanard. He was altogether
unprepared for the vision that broke upon him.

Instead of going through the house, Rob had piloted him by way of a side
gate, directly into the walled garden, sweet and gay with roses, lilies
and other flowers of early June.

Mrs. Stanard, who took almost as much pleasure in her children's pets as
they did, was standing near a clump of arbor-vitae, holding in her hands
a "willow-ware" plate from which the pigeons were feeding. She was at
this time, though the mother of Edgar's twelve-year-old chum, not thirty
years of age, and her pensive beauty was in its fullest flower. Against
the sombre background the arbor-vitae made, her slight figure, clad in
soft, clinging white, seemed airy and sylphlike. Her dark, curling hair,
girlishly bound with a ribbon snood, and her large brown eyes, were in
striking contrast to her complexion, which was pale, with the radiant
and warm palor of a tea-rose or a pearl. Her features were daintily
modelled, and like slender lilies were the hands holding the deep blue
plate from which the pigeons--white, grey and bronze, fed--fluttering
about her with soft cooings.

The picture was so much more like a poet's dream than a reality, that
the boy-poet stepped back, with an exclamation of surprise.

"It is only my mother," explained Rob. "She'll be glad to see you."

The next moment she had perceived the boys, and with quick impulse, set
the plate upon the ground and came forward, and before a word of
introduction could be spoken, had taken the visitor's hand between both
her own fair palms, holding it thus, with gentle, gracious pressure, in
a pretty, cordial way she had, while she greeted him.

The soft eyes that rested on his face filled with kindness and welcome.

"So this is my Rob's friend," she was saying, in a low, musical voice.
"Rob's mother is delighted to see you for his sake and for your own too,
Edgar, for I greatly admired _your_ gifted mother. I saw her once only,
when I was a young girl, but I can never forget her lovely face and
sweet, plaintive voice. It was one of the last times she ever acted, and
she was ill and pale, but she was exquisitely beautiful and made the
most charming Juliet. She interested me more than any actress I have
ever seen."

Edgar Poe longed to fall down and kiss her feet--to worship her. Her
beauty, her gentleness and her gracious words so stirred his soul that
he grew faint. Power of speech almost left him, and, vastly to his
humiliation, he could with difficulty control his voice to utter a few
stumbling words of thanks--he who was usually so ready of speech!

If she noticed his confusion she did not appear to do so. Her heart had
been touched by all she had heard from her son of the lonely boy, and
she had also been interested in accounts of his gifts that had come to
her from various sources. The beauty, the poetry, the pensiveness of his
face moved her deeply--knowing his history and divining the lack of
sympathy one of his bent would probably find in the Allan home, for all
its indulgences.

She sat on a garden-bench and talked to him for a time, in her gentle,
understanding way, and then, not wishing to be a restraint upon the
boys, (after placing her husband's fine library at Edgar's disposal, and
urging him to come often to see Rob) withdrew into the house.

The motherless boy looked after her until she had disappeared, and
stared at the door that had closed upon her until he was recalled from
his reverie by the voice of his friend, suggesting that they now see the
rabbits. Edgar looked at the gentle creatures with unseeing eyes, though
he appeared to be listening to the prattle of his companion concerning
them. Suddenly, in a voice filled with enthusiasm and with a touch of
awe in it, he said:

"Rob, your mother is divinely beautiful--and _good_."

"Bully," was the nonchalant reply. "The best thing about her is the way
she takes up for a fellow when he brings in a bad report or gets into a
scrape. Fathers always think it's their sons' fault, you know."

Edgar flushed. "_Bully_--" he said to himself, with a shudder. The
adjective applied to her seemed blasphemy.

Aloud, he said, "She's an angel! She's the one I've always dreamed
about."

"You dreamed about mother when you had never seen her?" questioned the
astonished Rob. "What did you dream?"

"Nothing, in the way you mean. I meant she is like my idea of a perfect
woman. The kind of woman a man could always be good for, or would gladly
die to serve."

"Well, I'm not smart enough to think out things like that, Eddie, but
Mother certainly is all right. What you say about her sounds nice, and
she'd understand it, too. I just bet that you and mother'll be the best
sort of cronies when you know each other better. She likes all those
queer old books you think so fine, and she knows whole pages of poetry
by heart. When you and she get together it will be like two books
talking out loud to each other. I won't be able to join in much, but it
will be as good as a play to listen."

The young poet bent his steps homeward with but one thought, one hope in
his heart, and that a consuming one: to look again upon the lovely face,
to hear again the voice that had enthralled him, had taken his heart by
storm and filled it with a veritable _grande passion_--the rapturous
devotion of the virgin heart of an ardent and romantic youth. First
love--yet so much more than ordinary love--a pure passion of the soul,
in which there was much of worship and nothing of desire. Surely the
most pure and holy passion the world has ever known, for in it there was
absolutely nothing of self. Like Dante after his first meeting with
Beatrice, this Virginia boy-poet had entered upon a _Vita Nuova_--a new
life--made all of beauty.

What difference did the taunts of schoolmates, the hardness of a
foster-father make now? The wounds they made had been gratefully healed
by the balm of her beauteous words about his mother. Those old wounds
were as nothing--neither they nor anything else had power to harm him
now. In the new life that had opened so suddenly before him he would
bear a charmed existence.

He went to his room before the usual hour that night, for he wanted to
be alone with his dreams--with his newest, most beautiful dream. To his
room, but not to bed. Life was too beautiful to be wasted in sleep. He
lighted his lamp and holding his mother's picture within its circle of
light, gazed long and devotedly upon it. Did she know of the great light
that had shone out of what seemed a sunless sky upon her boy? Had she,
looking out from high Heaven, seen the gracious greeting of the
beautiful being who was Madonna and Psyche in one? Had she heard her own
cause so sweetly championed, her own name so sweetly cleared of
opprobrium?

He threw himself upon his lounge and lay with his hands clasped under
his curly head, still dreaming--dreaming--dreaming--until day-dreams
were merged into real dreams, for he was fast asleep.

In his sleep he saw the lady of his dreams in a situation of peril, from
which he joyfully rescued her. He awoke with a start. His lamp had
burned itself out but a late moon flooded the room with the white light
that he loved. A breeze laden with odors caught from the many
rose-gardens and the heavier-scented magnolias, now in full bloom, it
had come across, stirred the curtain. His nostrils, always sensitive to
the odors of flowers, drank it in rapturously. So honey-sweet it was,
his senses swam.

He arose and looked out upon the incense-breathing blossoms, like
phantoms, under the moon. A clock in a distant part of the house was
striking twelve. How much more beautiful was the world now--at night's
high noon--than at the same hour of the day.

All the house, save himself, was asleep. How easy it would be to escape
into this lovely night--to walk through this ambrosial air to the
house-worshipful in which _she_ doubtless lay, like a closed
lily-flower, clasped in sleep.

A mocking-bird--the Southland's nightingale--in, some tree or bush not
far away, burst into passion-shaken melody that seemed to voice, as no
words could, his own emotion.

Down the stair he slipped, and out of the door, into the well-nigh
intoxicating beauty of the southern summer's night. Indeed, the odors of
the dew-drenched flowers--the moonlight--the bird-music, together with
his remembrance of his lady's greeting, went to his head like wine.

As he strolled along some lines of Shelley's which had long been
favorites of his, sang in his brain:

"I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And the spirit in my feet
Has led me--who knows how?--
To thy chamber-window, sweet!

"The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream;
The champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
Oh, beloved, as thou art!

"Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die, I faint, I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast.
Oh, press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last."

The words of the latter half of this serenade were meaningless as
applied to his case. To have quoted them--even mentally--in any literal
sense, would have seemed to him profanation; yet the whole poem in some
way not to be analysed or defined, expressed his mood--and who so brutal
as to seek to reduce to common-sense the emotions of a poet-lover, in
the springtime of life?

At length he was before the closed and shuttered house, standing silent
and asleep. Opposite were the grassy slopes of Capitol Square--with the
pillared, white Capitol, in its midst, looking, in the moonlight, like a
dream of old Greece. _Her_ house! He looked upon its moonlit, ivied
walls with adoration. A light still shone from one upper room. Was it
_her_ chamber? Was she, too, awake and alive to the beauty of this magic
night?

His heart beat tumultuously at the thought. Then--Oh, wonder! His knees
trembled under him--he grew dizzy and was ready, indeed, to cry, "I die,
I faint, I fail!" She crossed the square of light the window made. In
her uplifted hand she carried the lamp from which the light shone, and
for a moment her slight figure, clad all in white as he had seen her in
the garden a few hours before, and softly illuminated, was framed in the
ivy-wreathed casement. But for a moment--then disappeared, but the
trembling boy-lover and poet seemed to see it still, and gazed and gazed
until the light was out and all the house dark.

He stumbled back through the moonlight to his home, he crept up the
creaking stair again, to his little, dormer-windowed room; but sleep was
now, more than ever, impossible.

Though the lamp had gone out, a candle stood upon a stand at the head
of his bed. He lighted it, and by its ray, wrote, under the spell of the
hour, the first utterance in which he, Edgar Poe, ascended from the
plane of a maker of "promising" verse, to the realm of the true poet--a
poem to the lady of his heart's dream destined (though he little guessed
it) to make her name immortal and to send the fame of his youthful
passion down the ages as one of the world's historic love-affairs.

What was her name? he wondered. He had never heard it, but he would call
her Helen--_Helen_, the ancient synonym of womanly beauty, but the
loveliest Helen, he believed, that ever set poet-lover piping her
praise.

And so, "To Helen," were the words he wrote at the top of his page, and
underneath the name these lines:

"Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

"On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

"Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!"

CHAPTER IX.

With his meeting with "Helen," a new life, indeed, seemed to have opened
for Edgar the Dreamer. Not only had her own interest and sympathy been
aroused, but her husband, a learned and accomplished judge of the
Supreme Court of Virginia, also received him cordially and became deeply
interested in him, and he found in their home what his own had lacked
for him, a thoroughly congenial atmosphere.

"Helen" Stanard listened kindly to his boyish rhapsodies about his
favorite poets, and encouraged him to bring her his own portefolio of
verses, which he did, all but the ones addressed to herself--these he
kept secret. She read all he brought her carefully, and intelligently
criticised them in a way that was a real help to him.

As has been said, when Mr. Allan had discovered that his adopted son was
a rhymster, he had rebuked him severely for such idle waste of time, and
in a vain attempt to clip the wings of Pegasus, threatened him with
punishment if he should hear of such folly again. Mrs. Allan, on the
contrary, though she was not a bookish woman, had protested against her
husband's command--urging that Edgar be encouraged to cultivate his
talent. The ability to compose verse seemed to her, in a boy of Edgar's
age, little short of miraculous, and, proud of her pet's accomplishment,
she heaped indiscriminate praise upon every line that she saw of his
writing.

The boy, hardly knowing which way to escape, between these two fires
that bade fair to work the ruin of his gift, turned eagerly to his new
friend. "Helen" gently told him that she believed his talent to be a
sacred trust, and that he would be committing sin to bury it--even
though by so doing he should be fulfilling the wishes of his
foster-father to whom he owed so much. He must, however, not forget his
duty to Mr. Allan in regard to this matter, as in other things, but
treat his views with all the consideration possible. Above all things,
he was never to depart from the truth in talking to him, but to tell him
in a straightforward and respectful way that he believed it his duty
when poetical thoughts presented themselves to his mind, to set them
down, and even to encourage and invite such thoughts.

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