"Do you know Helen Whitman?" wrote one of The Dreamer's enemies to Dr.

Griswold. "Of course you have heard it rumored that she is to marry Poe.

Well, she has seemed to me a good girl and--you know what Poe is. Has Mrs. Whitman no friend in your knowledge that can faithfully explain Poe to her?"

But Rufus Griswold had already "explained Poe" to those whom he knew would take pains to pa.s.s the explanation on to "Helen"--had dropped the poison where he reckoned it would work with the greatest speed and effect. The explanation, with the usual indirectness of a Griswold, was sugared with a compliment.

"Poe has great intellectual power," he said with emphasis, "_great_ intellectual power, but," he added, with a sidelong glance of the furtive eye and a confidential drop in the voice, "but--he has no principle--no moral sense."

The poison reached the destination for which it was intended--the ears of Helen Whitman--in due course, and it terrified her as had none of the rumors she had heard before. Still her lover floundered in the dark--baffled--wondering--not able to make her out. Why did she tantalize him--torture him, thus?--keeping him dangling between Heaven and h.e.l.l?--he asked himself, and he asked her, over and over again. He became more and more convinced that there was a reason,--what was it?

Finally she gave it to him in its baldness and its brutality, just as it had come to her--wrote it to him in a letter. It brought him a rude awakening from his dream of bliss. That such a charge should be brought against him at all was bitter enough, but that it could be repeated to him by "Helen" seemed unbelievable.

"You do not love me," he sadly wrote in reply, "or you would not have written these terrible words." Then he swore a great oath: "By the G.o.d who reigns in Heaven, I swear to you that my soul is incapable of dishonor--that with the exception of occasional follies and excesses which I bitterly lament, but to which I have been driven by intolerable sorrow, I can call to mind no act of my life which would bring a blush to my cheek--or to yours."

He followed the letter with a visit--again throwing himself at her feet and thrilling her with his eloquence and with the magic of his personality.

She gave him a half promise and said she would write to him in Lowell, where he had engaged to deliver a lecture.

In this town was a roof-tree which was a haven of rest to The Dreamer.

Beneath it dwelt his friend and confidant, "Annie" Richmond--his soul's sweet "sister," as he loved to call her. And there he waited with a chastened joy, for he felt a.s.sured that the long wished for _yes_ was about to be said, yet dared not give himself over prematurely, to the ecstacy that would soon be his. In the pleasant, friendly family circle of the Richmonds, he sat during those chill November evenings, seeing pictures in the glowing fire, as he held sweet "Annie's" sympathetic hand in his, while the only sound that broke the silence was the ticking of the grandfather's clock in a shadowy corner.

Thus quietly, patiently, he waited.

But in Providence the Griswold poison was at work. All the friends and relatives of "Helen" were possessed of full vials of it--which they industriously poured into her ears. Against it the recollection of the night in the garden and her belief that Fate had ordained her union with the poet, had no avail. The letter that she sent her lover was more non-committal--colder--than any he had received from her before, yet there was still enough of indecision in it to keep him tantalized. In a state of mind well nigh distraction, he bade "Annie" and her cheerful fireside farewell and set his face toward Providence; but he went in a dream--the demon Despair, possessing him.

Unstrung, unmanned, almost bereft of reason, his old dissatisfaction with himself and the world overtook him--a longing to be out of it all, for forgetfulness, for peace, yea, even the peace of the grave,--why not?

A pa.s.sionate longing--a homesickness--for the sure, the steadfast, the unvariable love of his beautiful Virginia consumed him. Oh, if he could but lie down and sleep and forget until one sweet day he should wake in the land where she awaited him, and where they would construct anew, and for eternity, the Valley of the Many-Colored Gra.s.s!

He listened.... For the first time since the Star of Love had ushered in a new day in his life, he heard the swinging of the censers of the angels--he inhaled the incense--he heard the voice of Virginia in the sighing wind. She seemed to call to him.

"I am coming, Heartsease!" he whispered as he quaffed the potion that he reckoned would bear him to her.

But it was not to be. When he awaked, weak and ill, but sane, he found himself with friends. Calmness and strength returned and with them, horror at the deed he had so nearly committed, and deep contrition.

With all haste he again presented himself at the door of "Helen,"

beseeching her to marry him at once and save him, as he believed she only could, from himself. And the consequences of her indecision making her more alarmed for him than she had formerly been for herself, she agreed to an engagement, though not to immediate marriage.

He returned to Fordham and to faithful Mother Clemm a wreck of his former self, but engaged to be married!

Yet he was not happy--a new horror possessed him. As in the night when the Star of Love first rose upon his vigil it had stopped over the door of "a legended tomb," so now again was his pathway closed. Turn which way he would, the tomb of Virginia seemed to frown upon him. He remembered his promise to her that upon no other daughter of earth would he look with the eyes of love. Vainly did he seek to justify himself to his own heart for breaking the promise. No one could ever supplant her, or fill the void in his life her death had made, he told himself--this new love was something different, and in no way disturbed her memory.

But the tomb still stood in his way.

"I am calm and tranquil," he wrote "Helen," "and but for a strange shadow of coming evil which haunts me I should be happy. That I am not supremely happy, even when I feel your dear love at my heart, terrifies me."

Later he wrote,

"You say that all depends on my own firmness. If this be so all is safe.

Henceforward I am strong. But all does not depend, dear Helen, upon my firmness--all depends upon the sincerity of your love."

A month later the skies of Providence shone brightly upon him. He returned there, was received by Mrs. Whitman as her affianced lover, delivered his brilliant lecture upon "The Poetic Principle" to a great throng of enthusiastic hearers, and won a promise from his lady to marry him at once and return with him to Fordham. He scribbled a line to Mother Clemm notifying her to be ready to receive him and his bride and went so far as to engage the services of a clergyman, and to sign a marriage contract, in which Mrs. Whitman's property was made over to her mother.

But--just at this point a note was slipped into the hand of "Helen,"

informing her that her lover had been seen drinking wine in the hotel.

When he called at her house soon afterward she received him surrounded by her family and though there were no signs of the wine, said "no" to him, emphatically--for the first time.

He plead, but she remained firm--receiving his pa.s.sionate words of remonstrance with sorrowful silence, while her mother, impatient at his persistence, showed him the door. He prayed that she would at least speak one word to him in farewell.

"What can I say?" she questioned.

"Say that you love me, Helen."

"I love you!"

With these words in his ears he was gone. As he pa.s.sed out of the gate and out of her life he saw, or fancied he saw, through the veiled window, a white figure beckoning to him, but his steps were sternly set toward the opposite direction--his whole being crying within him, "Nevermore--nevermore!" She had stretched out her spiritlike hands, but to draw them back again, in the fashion that fascinated and at the same time maddened him, once too often. The wave of romantic feeling which had borne him along since his vision of her in the garden suddenly subsided, leaving him disillusioned--cold. The reaction was so violent that instead of the magnetic attraction she had had for him he felt himself positively repelled by the thought of her unearthly beauty--her mysterious eyes.

He went straight to the depot and took the train just leaving, which would bear him back to the cottage among the cherry trees.

Mother Clemm, expecting him to bring home a bride, had spent the day putting an extra touch of brightness upon the simple but already spotless, home. A cheerful fire was in the grate; branches of holly, cedar and such other such bits of beauty as the woods afforded were everywhere about the house, and the Mother herself, in the snowiest of caps with the sheerest of floating strings and a gallant look of welcome upon her sorrowful face, stood at the window and watched for the coming of the son that Heaven had given her, and the woman who was to take the place of the daughter that Heaven had taken away from her. Her oak-like nature had quailed at the thought--but it had withstood many a blast, it could weather one more, and after all, if "Eddie" were happy--.

In the far distance a figure emerged out of the gathering dusk--a man.

Could it be Eddie?--Alone?

Yes! It surely was he! The carriage of the head--the military cloak--the walk--were unmistakable.

But he was alone!--She grew weak in the knees.--The shock of joy more nearly unnerved her than had the pain. She had braced herself to bear the pain.

She recovered her composure and hastened to the door just in time to be folded into the arms of the figure in the cloak.

"Helen?"--she queried.

"Is dead--to me," he answered, with his arms still about her. "We will have nothing more to say of her except this: Muddie, I have been in a dream from which, thank G.o.d, I am now awake. In the darkness of my loneliness--of my misery, of which you alone have the slightest conception, I saw a light which I fancied would lead me to the love for which my soul is starving--to the sympathy which is sweeter even than love to the broken heart of a man. I followed it. I was deceived. It was no real light, but a mere will o' the wisp bred in the dank tarn of despair."

He released her to hang up the cloak in the little entrance hall, then taking her hand, which he raised to his lips, drew her into the sitting room.

"Ah, but it is good to be at home again!" he exclaimed.

His whole manner changed; a mighty weight seemed to roll from his shoulders as he stretched his legs before the fire. His old merry laugh--the laugh of Edgar Goodfellow--rang out as he told "Muddie" of the success of his lecture, in Providence,--of the great audience and the applause.

"Muddie," he cried, "my dream of _The Stylus_ will come true yet! A few more such audiences and the money will be in sight! And let me add, I am done with literary women--henceforth literature herself shall be my sole mistress. I am more than ever convinced that the profession of letters is the only one fit for a man of brain. There is little money in it, of course, but I'd rather be a poor-devil author earning a bare living than a king. Beyond a living, what does a man of brain want with money anyhow?--Muddie, did it ever strike you that all that is really valuable to a man of talent--especially to a poet--is absolutely unpurchasable?--Love, fame, the dominion of intellect, the consciousness of power, the thrilling sense of beauty, the free air of Heaven, exercise of body and mind with the physical and moral health that these bring;--these, and such as these are really all a poet cares about. Then why should he mind what the world calls poverty?"