The Dreamer Part 20

He had not intended to mention his troubles to Mr. Kennedy, but with each word he wrote the impulse to unburden himself which he always felt when talking to this kind, sympathetic man, grew stronger and he found his pen almost automatically taking an unexpected turn. It was out of the abundance of his anguished heart that he added:

"The situation is agreeable to me for many reasons--but alas! it appears that nothing can now give me pleasure--or the slightest gratification.

Excuse me, my Dear Sir, if in this letter you find much incoherency. My feelings at this moment are pitiable indeed. You will believe me when I say that I am still miserable in spite of the great improvement in my circ.u.mstances; for a man who is writing for effect does not write thus.

My heart is open before you--if it be worth reading, read it. I am wretched and know not why. Console me--for you can. Convince me that it is worth one's while to live. Persuade me to do what is right. You will not fail to see that I am suffering from a depression of spirits which will ruin me if it be long continued. Write me then, and quickly. Urge me to do what is right. Your words will have more weight with me than the words of others--for you were my friend when no one else was."

Some men of more goodness than wisdom might have read this letter with impatience--perhaps disgust, and tossed it into the waste basket, not deeming it worth an answer, or pigeon-holed it to be answered in a more convenient season--which would probably never have arrived. It is easy to imagine the contempt with which John Allan would have perused it. Not so John Kennedy. Busy lawyer and successful man of letters and of the world though he was, he had gone out of his way to stretch a hand to the gifted starveling he had discovered struggling for a foothold on the bottommost rung of the ladder of literary fame, and had not only helped him up the ladder but had drawn him, in his weakness and his strength, into the circle of his friends.h.i.+p, and now he had no idea of letting him go. Mr. Kennedy was a great lawyer with a great tenderness for human nature, born of a great knowledge of it. He did not expect young men--even talented ones--to be faultless or to be fountains of sound sense, or even always to be strong of will. When he received Edgar Poe's wail he had just returned to his office after a long vacation and found himself over head and ears in work; but he responded at once. If it had seemed to him a foolish letter he did not say so. If it had shocked or disappointed him, he did not say so. He wrote in the kindly tolerant and understanding tone he always took with his protege a letter wholesome and bracing as a breath from the salt sea.

"My dear Poe," he began, in his simple familiar way, "I am sorry to see you in such plight as your letter shows you in. It is strange that just at the time when everybody is praising you and when Fortune has begun to smile upon your hitherto wretched circ.u.mstances you should be invaded by these villainous blue devils. It belongs however, to your age and temper to be thus buffeted--but be a.s.sured it only wants a little resolution to master the adversary forever. Rise early, live generously, and make cheerful acquaintances and I have no doubt you will send these misgivings of the heart all to the Devil. You will doubtless do well henceforth in literature and add to your comforts as well as your reputation which it gives me great pleasure to tell you is everywhere rising in popular esteem."

This and more he wrote, in kind, encouraging vein, and closed his letter with a friendly invitation:

"Write to me frequently, and believe me very truly

"Yours,

"JOHN P. KENNEDY."

The same post that brought Mr. Kennedy's letter brought The Dreamer other mail from Baltimore--brought him letters from both Virginia and Mother Clemm.

They had an especial reason for writing, each said. They had news for him--news which was most disturbing to them and they feared it would be to him.

Disturbing indeed, was the news the letters brought. It drove him into a rage and aroused him into action which made him forget all of his late troubles.

Their Cousin Neilson and his wife, they wrote him, had not ceased to bring every argument they could think of to bear upon Virginia to induce her to break her engagement and had finally proposed that they should take her into their home, treat her as an own daughter or young sister, providing for her all things needful and desirable for a young girl of her station, until her eighteenth birthday, after which if she and Edgar had not changed their minds, they could be married.

He dashed off and posted answers to the letters at once, making violent protest against a scheme that seemed to him positively iniquitous and pleading with "Muddie" to keep Virginia for him. But writing was not enough. He determined to answer in person.

A day or two later Virginia and her mother were in the act of discussing his letters, which had just come, when the sitting-room door quietly opened, and there stood the man who was all the world to them!

Virginia, with a scream of delight, was in his arms in a flash and began telling him, breathlessly, what a fright she had been in for fear "Cousin Neilson" would take her away and she would never see him again.

With a rising tide of tenderness for her and rage against their cousin, he kissed the trouble from her eyes.

"Don't be afraid, sweetheart," he murmured, "He shall never take you from me. I have come back to marry you!"

"To marry her?" exclaimed Mrs. Clemm. "At once, do you mean?"

"At once! Today or tomorrow--for I must be getting back to Richmond as soon as possible. Don't you see, Muddie, that this is just a plot of Neilson's to separate us? He never cared for me--he loves Virginia and is determined I shall not have her. But we'll outwit him! We'll be married at once. We'll have to keep it secret at first--until I am able to provide a home for my little wife and our dear mother in Richmond, but I will go away with peace of mind and leave her in peace of mind, for once she is mine only death can come between us. We will keep it secret dear," he added, with his lips on the dusky hair of the little maid who was still held fast in his arms. "We will keep it secret, but if Neilson Poe becomes troublesome you will only have to show him your marriage certificate."

Virginia joyfully agreed to this plan, while the widow, finding opposition useless, finally consented too--and the impetuous lover was off post-haste for a license.

It was a unique little wedding which took place next day in Christ Church, when a beautiful, dreamy looking youth, with intellectual brow and cla.s.sic profile and a beautiful, dreamy-looking maid, half his age, plighted their troth. The only attendant was Mother Clemm in her habitual plain black dress and widow's cap, with floating cap-strings, sheer and snowy white. No music, no flowers, no witnesses even, save the widowed mother and the aged s.e.xton who was bound over to strict secrecy.

But in the dim, still, empty church the beautiful words of the old, old rite seemed to this strange pair of lovers to take on new solemnity as they fell from the lips of the white robed priest and sank deep into their young hearts, filling and thrilling them with fresh hope and faith and love and high resolve.

CHAPTER XXII.

In the following spring Edgar Poe and Virginia Clemm were, strange as it may seem, princ.i.p.als in another wedding. The months intervening between the two ceremonies had been teeming with interest to them both--filled with work and with happiness just short of that perfect satisfaction--that completeness--that unattainable which it is part of being a mortal with an immortal mind and soul to be continually striving after, and missing, and will be until the half-light of this world is merged into the light ineffable of the one to come.

The Dreamer had returned from his brief visit to Baltimore a new man.

The blue devils were gone. The heart and mind which they had made their dwelling-place were swept clean of every vestige of them and were filled to overflowing with a sweet and rare presence--the presence of her who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him; for he felt that her spirit was with him at every moment of the day, though her fair body was other whither. The consciousness of the secret he carried in his heart flooded his nature with suns.h.i.+ne. Because of it he carried his head more proudly--wore a new dignity which his friends attributed entirely to the success of his work upon the magazine. He was filled with peace and good will to all the world. He was happy and wanted everybody else to be happy--it was apparent in himself and in his work.

In his dreamy moods his fancy spread a broader, a stronger wing, and soared with new daring to heights unexplored before. When Edgar Goodfellow was in the ascendency he threw himself with unwonted zest into the pleasures that were "like poppies spread" in the way of the successful author and editor--the literary lion of the town.

He had always been an enthusiastic and graceful dancer and now nothing else seemed to give him so natural a vent for the happiness that was beating in his veins. His feet seemed like his pen, to be inspired. He felt that he could dance till Doomsday and all the prettiest, most bewitching girls let him see how pleased they were to have him for a partner. In the brief, glowing rests between the dances he rewarded them with charming talk, and verses in praise of their loveliness which seemed to fall without the slightest effort from his tongue into their pretty, delighted ears or from his pencil into their alb.u.ms.

There was at least one fair damsel--a slight, willowy creature with violet eyes and flaxen ringlets, who treasured the graceful lines he dedicated to her with a feeling warmer than friends.h.i.+p. She was pretty Eliza White, the daughter of his employer, the owner of the _Southern Literary Messenger_. She was herself a lover of poetry and romance, and a dreamer of dreams, all of which had erelong merged into one sweet dream so secret, so sacred that she scarce dared own it to her own inner self, and its central figure was her father's handsome a.s.sistant editor, who rested in blissful ignorance of the havoc he was making in her maiden heart, engrossed as he was in his own secret--his own romance.

New energy, new zest, new life seemed to have entered his blood. He had endless capacity for work as well as for pleasure and could write all day and dance half the night and then lie awake star-gazing the other half and rise ready and eager for the day's work in the morning. Such a tonic--such a stimulant did his love for his faraway bride and his consciousness of her love for him prove.

He was happy--very, very happy, but he desired to be happier still. The simple, beautiful words of the old, old rite uttered in the dim, empty church had woven an invisible bond between him and the maiden whom he loved to call in his heart his wife though the time when he could claim her before the world was not yet.

The miracle that this bond wrought in him was a revelation to him. Was the priest a wizard? Did the words of the ancient rite possess any intrinsic power of enchantment undreamed of by the uninitiated?

He had not believed it possible for mortal to love more wholly--more madly than he had loved the little Virginia before that sacred ceremony, but after it he knew there were heights of love of which he had not hitherto had a glimpse. Just the right to say to his heart "She is my own--my wife--" made her tenfold more precious than she had ever been before, but it also made the separation tenfold harder to bear--made it beyond his power to bear!

The Valley of the Many-Colored Gra.s.s had been dissolved--the spell that had brought it into being broken, by the separation, and he longed with a longing that was as hunger and thirst to reconstruct this magical world in which he and his Virginia dwelt apart with her who was mother to them both, in Richmond. And so, poor as he was, he arranged to bring Virginia and Mother Clemm to Richmond and establish them in a boarding house where he could see them often and wait with better grace the still happier day of making his marriage public.

The day came more speedily than they had let themselves hope. The popularity of the _Messenger_ and the fame of its a.s.sistant editor had grown with leaps and bounds. The new year brought the welcome gift of promotion to full editors.h.i.+p, with an increase of salary. With the opening spring began plans for the divulging of the great secret--for public acknowledgment of the marriage. But how was it to be done?--That was the question! Edgar Poe knew too well the disapproval with which the world regarded secret marriages--with which he himself regarded them, ordinarily. His sense of refinement of fitness, of the sacredness of the marriage tie, revolted from the very idea.

In what fas.h.i.+on then, could he and his little bride proclaim their secret that would not do violence to their own taste or set a buzz of gossip going? That the horrid lips of gossip should so much as breathe the name of his Virginia--that Mrs. Grundy should dare shrug her decorous shoulders, if ever so slightly, at mention of that sacred name--. The bare suggestion was intolerable!

At last a solution offered itself to his mind. Not for an instant did he regret the sacred ceremony in Christ Church, Baltimore. Not for worlds would he have cut short for one moment of time the duration of the beautiful spiritual marriage when he had been able to say to himself: "She whose presence fills my heart and my life--whose spirit I can feel near me at my work, in my hours of recreation and in my dreams, is my wife." But of this exquisite, this inexpressibly dear union the world was in utter ignorance. It was known only to the Mother, the priest and the aged s.e.xton. To these witnesses always, as to themselves, their marriage would date from the moment when the blessing was invoked above their bowed heads in Christ Church, but to the world--why not let it date from the day in which they would claim each other before the world, in Richmond?

The thing was most simple! A second ceremony in the presence of a few friends--a brief announcement in next day's paper--and their life would be begun with the dignity, the prestige, of public marriage.

The sixteenth of May was the day chosen for the event which was more like a wedding in Arcady than in latter-day society. As at the secret ceremony, the customary preparations for a wedding were conspicuously absent; yet was not the whole town gala with suns.h.i.+ne and verdure and May-bloom and bird-song?

Edgar Poe looked every inch a bridegroom as, with his girl-wife upon his arm, he stepped forth from Mrs. Yarrington's boarding-house, opposite the green slopes of Capitol Square. A bridegroom indeed!--plainly, but perfectly apparelled--handsome, proud, fearless--his great eyes luminous with solemn joy.

The simplest of white frocks became Virginia's innocence and beauty more than costly bridal array and the nosegay of white violets above her chaste bosom was her only ornament.

With this sweet pair came the happy mother and a little train of close friends. It was late afternoon. The suns.h.i.+ne was mellow and the air was filled with the delicious insense which in mid-May the majestic paulonia tree drops from its purple bells and which is the very breath of the warm-natured South.

No line of carriages stood at the door. No awning shut the picture they made from admiring eyes, but happily the little party chatted together as they strolled under over-arching greenery to the corner of Main and Seventh Streets, where in the prim parlor of the Presbyterian minister, the words were p.r.o.nounced which told the world that Edgar Poe and Virginia Clemm were one.

Upon the return of the party to Mrs. Yarrington's, a cake was cut, the health and happiness of the bride and groom were drunk in wine of "Muddie's" own make, and the modest festival was over.

How happy the young lovers and dreamers were in their home-making! Their housekeeping and furnis.h.i.+ngs were the simplest, but love made everything beautiful and sufficient. They had a garden in which they planted all their favorite flowers and to which came the birds--the birds with whom they had discovered a sudden kins.h.i.+p, for they too, were nesting--and filled it with music. And they sang and chatted as happily as the birds themselves as the pretty business progressed.

How delightful it was to receive their friends, together, in their own home and at their own board--Eddie's old friends, especially. Rob Stanard, now a prosperous lawyer, and Rob Sully whose reputation as an artist was growing, were the first to call and present their compliments to the bride and groom; and how cordial they were! How affectionate to Eddie--how warm in their expressions of friends.h.i.+p for the girl-wife!