At about the same time Mrs. Blanks lost the handsome, quiet young gentleman, who had evidently seen better days, from her unpretentious lodging house, and the walks under the elms in Boston Common were no longer trodden by The Dreamer from Virginia.
CHAPTER XV.
Where was Edgar Poe?—
Twice since he shook the dust of Richmond joyfully from his feet, fair Springtide had visited the terraced garden of the Allan home. Twice the green had come forth, first like a misty veil, then like a mantle enveloping its trees and its shrubs, its arbors and trellises; twice the procession of flowers, led by the crocuses in their petticoats of purple and yellow, had tripped from underground; twice the homing birds had built in the myrtles and among the snowy pear and cherry blossoms and filled all the place with music. Twice, too, in this garden, the pageant of spring and summer and sunset-hued autumn had passed, the birds had flown away again and winter snows had covered all with their whiteness and their silence.
And still the garden's true-lover, the poet, The Dreamer, was a wanderer, where?—
Oh, beautiful "Ligeia," was it not your voice that now and again whispered in the tree-tops and among the flowers? Could you not—did you not, bring news of the wanderer?
If she did, there was no human being to whom her language was intelligible, and the trees and the flowers keep their secrets well.
Within the homestead there was little change save a deepening of the quietness that had fallen upon it. In the master of the house there was no visible difference. There are some men who seen from year to year seem as unchanging as the sphinx. It is only after a long period that any difference in them can be detected and then they suddenly appear broken and aged. The fair lady of the manor was as fair as ever, but with the pale, tremulous fairness of a late star in the grey dawn of a new day in which it will have no part. Her bloom, her roundness, her gaiety—all these were gone. She spent more time than ever in the room which, waiting for its roving tenant, became more and more like a death chamber. The silence there was not now broken by her sobs even, for it was with dry-eyed grief that she watched and waited for her boy, these days—watched and waited and prayed. Ah, how she prayed for him, body and soul! Prayed that wherever he might be, he might be kept from harm and strengthened to resist temptation.
Was it her agonized petitions that kept him to the straight and narrow path of duty during those two years amid uncongenial surroundings and hard conditions?