In a dormer-windowed cottage overlooking a rose garden, on Clay Street, an erect gentleman in an uncompromising stock and immaculate ruffles, with narrow blue eyes under a beetling brow, and a somewhat hawk-like nose, sharply questioned a fair and graceful lady, with an anxious expression on her flower-face, as to why "that boy" did not come home to his supper. But they were used by now, to the boy's strange, wayward whims, and so did not marvel much. Only—they had not seen him since the feat that had set the town ringing with his name and it seemed to them that it would have been natural for him to come home in the flush of his triumph and tell them about it.
Edgar Poe had that day created the sensation of the hour by swimming from the Richmond wharves to Warwick—a distance of six miles—in the midsummer sun.
Richmond was a fair and pleasant little city in those days, in spite of the fact that our boy-poet found in it so much to make him melancholy. "The merriest place in America," Thackeray called it some years later, and would probably have said the same of it then had he been there. The blight of Civil War had not touched the cheerful temper of its people; the tenement row had not crowded out grass and flowers. It was more a large village than a town, with gracious homes—not elbowing each other for foundation room, but standing comfortably apart, amid their green lawns, and with wide verandahs overhanging their many-flowered gardens.
"After tea," on warm nights, the houses overflowed into these verandahs, and there was much visiting from one to another—much light-hearted talk and happy laughter; the popular theme being whatever happened to be "the news."
It was the day of contentment, for wants were moderate and plentifully supplied; the day of satisfaction in wholesome domestic joys; the day of hospitality without grudging; the day when sweetness extracted from little pleasures did not need spicing, for palates were not jaded; the day of the ideal simple life.
Upon this night, as on other nights, young girls who were not yet "gone to the springs" floated along the fashionable promenades, in airy muslins, with their cavaliers beside them. Groups of gentlemen and ladies sat on the porches and children played hide-and-seek, chased fire-flies, or sat on the steps and listened to the talk of their elders. And everywhere, in all of the groups, the chief topic was the boy, Edgar Poe, and his wonderful swim.
And the boy who had in an afternoon become, for the time being at least, the foremost figure in town, knew it, but did not care.
To lie alone on the grass by the grave of his dead divinity and gaze at the far stars, and brood upon his young sorrows—this gave him more satisfaction than to be the central figure of any one of the groups singing his praise; filled him with a romantic despair that to his high-strung soul had a more delicately sweet flavor than positive pleasure.
As to the erect gentleman in the high stock and the pretty lady with the tender, anxious face—they had, for the present, no part in his thoughts. It was wrong and ungrateful of him that they should not have, and if he had remembered them he would have known that it was wrong and ungrateful; but he would not have cared. And as for his food—he had supped royally, and without compunction, upon the fruit of an inviting orchard to which he had helped himself, unblushingly, upon his way into town.
A reckless mood, born of the restlessness that was in his blood, was upon him.