Whom the Gods Destroyed

by Josephine Daskam Bacon

Anne had supposed that her uncle would carry the poems to one of the leading magazines, but he pooh-poohed the idea.

"I think not. We're not going to have the boy mixed up with the hacks that turn out two or three inches of rhymes to fill up a page in a magazine," he declared. "We'll have D—— drop in some night and West shall read 'em to him. Then we'll bring out a book. Here and in England—they'll like him there, or I'm much mistaken."

In a month it seemed that they had always known him. Intimacy was so impossible with his inturned, elusive nature, that to have him sitting through hours of silence by the birch fire, abstracted, dreamy, inattentive, except to some chance word that stirred his fancy, was to know him well, to all intents. His nerves, dulled to all great torments like poverty, hunger, obscurity, quivered like violin strings under little unaccustomed jarrings. If interrupted in the reading of his verses he would lose his control beyond belief; a chance cough, the falling of an ember, put him out of tune for hours. He possessed little sense of humour, and the lightest satire turned him sulky. A child might have teased him to madness; it was evident to them that his utterly lonely life had preserved him from constant torture at the hands of associates.

Until the book was complete he refused to have the great publisher brought to hear it read. Sometimes for days they would not see him, then on some rainy evening he would appear, lonely and hungry, eager for the praise and warmth of Anne's library, an exquisite poem in his pocket. Served to repletion by the secretly scornful butler, he would smoke a while, then draw out the sheet of foolscap, and read in his nervous yet musical voice the latest page of the book that was to bring him fame.

On one such night—it was when he brought them "Dawn on the River," the only poem of which Anne had a copy, and the one which a well-known firm afterward printed under his photograph and sold by thousands at Easter-tide—he broke through the mist—it was too impalpable to be called a wall of reserve—that held his personality apart from them, and talked wonderfully for an hour. They seemed to see the clear soul of some gentle, strayed fawn; his thoughts were like summer clouds mirrored in a placid brook. All the crowding, sweating humanity of his stunted boyhood had flowed through his youth like an ugly drain laid through a fresh mountain stream. He seemed to have lived all his years with young David on the hillside, and wealth and poverty, crowds and loneliness, love and death were as far from his life as if the vast procession of them all that swept by him daily through the great city had never been.

As he talked, Delafield found his eyes drawn from the boy's face to Anne's. Never before had he seen just that faint, steady rose in her cheeks, that sweet glow in her eyes. As she leaned forward, her very pearls seemed to catch a red tinge from the fire: it occurred to him for the first time that she looked like Ellen's girls—there was a suggestion of Kitty in the curve of her cheek.

Was it possible that Anne—no, it could not be. To think of the men that had tried to come into her life and failed—such men! And this boy, this elf, to whom no woman was so real or so dear as a tree in the glen!

For two weeks after that night he did not come. Anne never mentioned his name, and Delafield, doubtful of what that might portend, tried to believe that she had forgotten him. Toward the end of the second week she spoke of the completion of his book, and suggested that her uncle should invite Mr. D——: "Urge Henry to consent to it," she added, "he will do anything for you, Uncle Les."

"More than for you?" he asked.

"For me?" She flushed a little. "I doubt if he distinguishes me from my portrait over the mantel!"