“One of your own?” laughed St. George—one of his merry vibrating laughs that made everybody happier about him. The sight of Richard had swept all the cobwebs out of his brain.
“No, you trifler!—one of Edgar Allan Poe's. None of your scoffing, sir! You may go home in tears before I am through with you. This way, both of you.”
The three had entered the coffee-room now, Richard's arm through St. George's, Harry following close. The inventor drew out the chairs one after another, and when they were all three seated took a missive from his pocket and spread it out on his knee, St. George and Harry keeping their eyes on his every movement.
“Here's a letter, St. George”—Richard's voice now fell to a serious key—“which I have just received from your friend and mine, Mr. N. P. Willis. In it he sends me this most wonderful poem cut from his paper—the Mirror—and published, I discover to my astonishment, some months back. I am going to read it to you if you will permit me. It certainly is a most remarkable production. The wonder to me is that I haven't seen it before. It is by that Mr. Poe you met at my house some years ago—you remember him?—a rather sad-looking man with big head and deep eyes?” Temple nodded in answer, and Harry's eyes glistened: Poe was one of his university's gods. “Just let me read to you what Willis says”—here he glanced down the letter sheet: “'Nothing, I assure you, my dear Horn, has made so great a stir in literary circles as this “Raven” of Poe's. I am sending it to you knowing that you are interested in the man. If I do not mistake I first met Poe one night at your house.' And a very extraordinary night it was, St. George,” said Richard, lifting his eyes from the sheet. “Poe, if you remember, read one of his stories for us, and both Latrobe and Kennedy were so charmed that they talked of nothing else for days.”
St. George remembered so clearly that he could still recall the tones of Poe's voice, and the peculiar lambent light that flashed from out the poet's dark eyes—the light of a black opal. He settled himself back in his chair to enjoy the treat the better. This was the kind of talk he wanted to-day, and Richard Horn, of all others, was the man to conduct it.
The inventor's earnestness and the absorbed look on St. George's and Harry's faces, and the fact that Horn was about to read aloud, had attracted the attention of several near-by members, who were already straining their ears, for no one had Richard's gift for reading.
In low, clear tones, his voice rising in intensity as the weird pathos of the several stanzas gripped his heart, he unfolded the marvellous drama until the very room seemed filled with the spirit of both the man and the demon. Every stanza in his clear enunciation seemed a separate string of sombre pearls, each syllable aglow with its own inherent beauty. When he ceased it was as if the soul of some great 'cello had stopped vibrating, leaving only the memory of its melody. For a few seconds no one moved nor spoke. No one had ever heard Richard in finer voice nor had they ever listened to more perfect rhythmic beauty. So great was the effect on the audience that one old habitue, in speaking of it afterward, insisted that Richard must have seen the bird roosting over the door, so realistic was his rendering.
Harry had listened with bated breath, absorbing every tone and inflection of Richard's voice. He and Poe had been members of the same university, and the poet had always been one of his idols—the man of all others he wanted most to know. Poe's former room opening into the corridor had invariably attracted him. He had frequently looked about its bare walls wondering how so great an inspiration could have started from such meagre surroundings. He had, too, with the romantic imagination of a boy, pictured to himself the kind of man he was, his looks, voice, and manner, and though he had never seen the poet in the flesh, somehow the tones of Richard's voice recalled to him the very picture he had conjured up in his mind in his boyhood days.
St. George had also listened intently, but the impression was quite different from the one made on the younger man. Temple thought only of Poe's despondency, of his striving for a better and happier life; of his poverty—more than once had he gone down into his own pockets to relieve the poor fellow's urgent necessities, and he was still ready to do it again—a readiness in which he was almost alone, for many of the writer's earlier friends had of late avoided meeting him whenever he passed through Kennedy Square. Even Kennedy, his life-long friend, had begun to look upon him as a hopeless case.
This antipathy was also to be found in the club. Even with the memory of Richard's voice in their ears one of the listeners had shrugged his shoulders, remarking with a bitter laugh that musical as was the poem, especially as rendered by Richard, it was, after all, like most of Poe's other manuscripts, found in a bottle, or more likely “a bottle found in a manuscript,” as that crazy lunatic couldn't write anything worth reading unless he was half drunk. At which St. George had blazed out: