The Dreamer Part 33

Nearly a year had pa.s.sed since that October night when the Star of Love ushering in a new morning had prophesied to him of new hope--nearly a year through which he had waited patiently, but not in vain. The time had evidently come for the prophecy to be fulfilled and Fate had led him to this town and the spot in this town where she that was to be (he was convinced) the hope, the guide, the savior, of his "lonesome latter years" awaited him.

Who was she?--

So spirit-like, so ethereal, she seemed, as robed in white and veiled in silvery moon-beams she sat among the slumbering roses, and as she was gathered into the shadows of the entombing trees, that she might almost have been the "Lady Ligeia." Yet he knew that she was not. The "Lady Ligeia" had been but the creation of his own brain. Very fair she had been to his dreaming vision, very sweet her companions.h.i.+p had been to his imagination--sufficient for all the needs of his being in his youthful days when sorrow was but a beautiful sentiment, when "terror was not fright, but a tremulous delight" but how was such an one as she to bind up the broken heart of a man? It was the _human_ element in the eyes of her that sat among the roses that enchained him.

Ethereal--spirit-like--as she was, the eyes upturned in sorrow were the eyes of no spirit, but of a woman; from them looked a human soul with the capacity and the experience to offer sympathy meet for human needs--the needs even, of a broken-hearted man.

How dark the woe!--how sublime the hope!--how intense the pride!--how daring the ambition!--how deep, how fathomless the capacity for love!--that looked (as from a window) from those eyes upturned in sorrow, in the moonlight while all the town slept!

Who was she?--this lady of sorrows. And by what sweet name was she known to the citizens of this old town?--Surely Fate that had brought her to the bank of violets beneath the moon--Fate that had led him to her garden gate, would in Fate's own time reveal!

As Helen Whitman flitted as noiselessly as the ghost she seemed to be up the dark stairway to her chamber, and without closing the cas.e.m.e.nt that admitted the moonlight and the garden's odors, lay down upon her canopied bed, she trembled. What was it that she had been aware of in the garden?--that presence--that consciousness of communion between her spirit and his upon whom all her thoughts had dwelt of late? Herself a poet, from her earliest knowledge of the work of Edgar Poe she had seemed to feel a kins.h.i.+p between her mind and his such as she had known in regard to no other. She had followed his career step by step, and out of the many sorrows of her own life had been born deep sympathy for him.

Since his last, greatest blow, she had more than ever mourned with him in spirit, for she too was widowed--she too had sat upon the Rock of Desolation and knew the Silence and the Solitude.

She and The Dreamer had at least one mental trait in common--a tendency toward spiritualism--a more than half belief in the communion of the spirits of the dead with those of the living and of those of the living with each other.

What had led her into the moonlit garden when all the world slept?

She knew not. She only knew that she had felt an impelling influence--a call to her spirit--to come out among the slumbering roses. She had not questioned nor sought to define it. She had heard it, and she had obeyed. And then the presence!--

She had never seen Edgar Poe, yet she felt that he had been there in the spirit, if not in the flesh--she had felt his eyes upon her eyes and she had half expected him to step from the shadows around her and to say,

"I, upon whom your thoughts have dwelt--I, who am the comrade and the complement of your inner life--I, whose spirit called to you ere you came into the garden--I am here."

It was almost immediately upon The Dreamer's return to Fordham, and when he was still under the spell of the night at Providence, that the ident.i.ty of the lady of the garden was revealed to him, in a manner seemingly accidental, but which he felt to be but another manifestation of the divinity that shapes our ends. Some casual words concerning the appearance and character of Mrs. Whitman, spoken by a casual visitor, lifted the curtain.

So the lady of the garden was Helen Whitman! whose poetry had impressed him favorably and whose acquaintance he had desired. Helen Whitman--_Helen_! As he repeated the name his heart stood still,--even in her name he heard the voice of Fate. _Helen_--the name of the good angel of his boyhood! Were his dreams of "Morella" and of "Ligeia" to come true? Was he to know in reality the miracle he had imagined and written of in these two phantasies?--the reincarnation of personal ident.i.ty? Was he in this second Helen, in this second garden, to find again the wors.h.i.+pped Helen of his boyhood?

He turned to the lines he had written so long ago, in Richmond, when he had gone forth into the midsummer moonlight, even as he had gone forth in Providence, and had wors.h.i.+pped under a window, even as he had wors.h.i.+pped at a garden gate. He read the first two stanzas through.

As he read he gave himself up to an overwhelming sense of fatality.

Could anything be more fitting--more descriptive? The end of the days of miracles was not yet--this _was_ his "Helen of a thousand dreams!"

His impulse was to seek an introduction at once, but this seemed too tamely conventional. Besides--he was in the hands of Fate--he dared not stir. Fate, having so clearly manifested itself, would find a way.

His correspondence was always heavy. Letters, clippings from papers and so forth, came to him by every post from friends and from enemies, with and without signatures. Yet from all the ma.s.s, he knew at once that the "Valentine," unsigned as it was, was from her.

By way of acknowledgment, he turned down a page of a copy of "The Raven and Other Poems" at the lines, "To Helen," and mailed it to her. He waited in anxious suspense for a reply, but the lady was coy. Days pa.s.sed and still no answer. The desire for communication with her became irresistible and taking pen and paper he wrote at the top of the page, even as long ago he had written, the words, "To Helen," and underneath wrote a new poem especially for this new Helen in which he described the vision of her in the garden (but placing it in the far past) and his feelings as he gazed upon her:

"I saw thee once--once only--years ago; I must not say _how_ many--but not many.

Clad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half reclining; while the moon Fell on the upturned faces of the roses, And on thine own, upturned,--alas in sorrow!

Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight-- Was it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow) That bade me pause before that garden-gate To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?

No footstep stirred: the hated world all slept, Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven!--oh, G.o.d!

How my heart beats in coupling those two words!) Save only thee and me!" ...

The paper trembled in the hands--tiny and spirit-like--of Helen Whitman.

Her soul answered emphatically,

"It _is_ Fate!"

So he had been there in the flesh--near her--in the shadows of that mystic night! The presence was no creation of an overwrought imagination. It was Fate.

Tremulously she penned her answer to his appeal, but was it Fate again, which caused the letter to miscarry? It reached him finally, in Richmond--_Richmond_, of all places!--whither he had gone to deliver to audiences of his old friends, his lecture upon "The Poetic Principle,"

in the interest of the establishment of his magazine, _The Stylus_. What could have been more fitting than that the gracious words of "Helen of a thousand dreams" should come to him in Richmond?

Not many days later and he was under her own roof in Providence.

He waited in the dimness of her curtained drawing-room, ear strained for the first sound of her footstep. Noiselessly as a sunbeam or a shadow she entered the room, her gauzy white draperies floating about her slight figure as she came, while his great eyes drank in with reverent joy each detail of her ethereal loveliness--her face, the same he had seen in the garden, pale as a pearl and as softly radiant, and framed in cl.u.s.tering dark ringlets which escaped in profusion from the confinement of a lacy widow's cap--the tremulous mouth--the eyes, mysterious and unearthly, from which the soul looked out.

For one moment she paused in the doorway, her hand pressed upon her wildly beating heart--then, with hesitating step advanced to meet him.

Her words of greeting were few, and so low and faltering as to be quite unintelligible, but the tones of her voice fell on his ear like strangely familiar music.

The man spoke no word. As her eyes rested for one brief moment upon his, then fell before the intensity of his gaze, he was conscious of spiritual influences beyond the reach of reason. In a tremulous ecstacy he bent and pressed his lips upon the hand that lay within his own and it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from falling upon his knees before her in actual wors.h.i.+p.

Three evenings of "all heavenly delight" he spent in her companions.h.i.+p--sometimes in the seclusion and dusk of her quiet drawing-room, sometimes walking among the roses in her garden, or among the mossy tombs in the town cemetery--their sympathetic natures finding expression in such conversation as poets delight in. Under the intoxicating spell of her presence all other dreams pa.s.sed, for the time, into nothingness and he pa.s.sionately cried,

"Helen, I love now--_now_--for the first and only time!"

Yet he was poor, and the weaknesses which had caused him to fall in the past might cause him to fall in the future. How could he plead for a return of his love?

His very self-abas.e.m.e.nt made his plea more strong. Still, she did not yield too suddenly. True, she too, was under the spell, but she resisted it. As he found his voice, and his eloquence filled the room a restlessness possessed her. Now she sat quite still by his side, now rose and wandered about the apartment--now stood with her hand resting upon the back of his chair while his nearness thrilled her.

There were objections, she told him--she was older than he.

"Has the soul age, Helen?" he answered her. "Can immortality regard time? Can that which began never and shall never end consider a few wretched years of its incarnate life? Do you not perceive that it is my diviner nature--my spiritual being, that burns and pants to commingle with your own?"

She urged her frail health as an objection.

For that he would love--wors.h.i.+p her--the more, he said. He plead for her pity upon his loneliness--his sorrows--and swore that he would comfort and soothe her in hers, through life, and when death should come, joyfully go down with her into the night of the grave.

Finally he appealed to her ambition.

"Was I right, Helen, in my first impression of you?--in the impression that you are ambitious? If so, and if you will have faith in me, I can and will satisfy your wildest desires. Would it not be glorious to establish in America, the sole unquestionable aristocracy--that of the intellect--to secure its supremacy--to lead and control it?"

Still the _yes_ that so often seemed trembling upon her lips was not spoken. She received his almost daily letters and his frequent visits, listened to his rapturous love-making--trembling, blus.h.i.+ng, letting him see that she was under the spell, that she loved him. Indeed she could not have helped his seeing it had she wished; but when he spoke of marriage she hesitated--tantalizing him to the point of madness, almost.

What was it that held her back?--She too, believed that it was the hand of Fate that had brought them together--that they were pre-ordained to cheer each other's latter years, to establish that intellectual aristocracy of which he dreamed. Yet she shrank from taking the step.

When his great solemn eyes were upon her, his beautiful face pale and haggard with excess of feeling, turned toward her, his eloquent words of love in her ears, she sat as one entranced--bewitched; yet she would not give the word he longed for--the word of willingness to embark with him upon the sea of life. _Fear_ checked her. Such an uncharted sea it seemed to her--she dared not say him yea!

The truth was the poison was working--the Griswold poison. The wildest rumors came to her ears of the worse than follies of her lover. She knew that they were at least, overdrawn--possibly altogether false--yet they frightened her.