The answer of the servant astonished him. His old room had been taken by Mrs. Allan as a guest-chamber and his personal effects removed to "the end-room." This was the last of several small apartments opening upon a narrow corridor extending on one side of the house above the kitchen and the servants' apartments. It had at one time been occupied by Mrs. Allan's maid.
On receiving this information, Poe was extremely indignant, and, refusing to have his carpet-bag carried to that room, requested to see Mrs. Allan.
The lady came down to the parlor in all her dignity, and answered to his inquiry that she had arranged her house to suit herself; that she had not been informed that Mr. Poe had any present claim to that room or that he was expected again to occupy it. Warm words ensued, and she reminded him that he was a pensioner on her husband's charity, which provoked him to more than hint that she had married Mr. Allan from mercenary motives. This was enough for the lady. She sent for her husband, who was at his place of business, and who, upon hearing her account of the interview, coupled with the assertion that "Edgar Poe and herself could not remain a day under the same roof," without seeing Poe, sent to him an imperative order to leave the house at once, which he immediately did. It was told by himself that as he crossed the hall Mr. Allan hastily entered it from a side-door and called harshly to him, at the same time drawing out his purse, but that he, without pause or notice, continued on his way.
This account of the rupture between Poe and the Allans I heard from the Mackenzies and Mrs. Julia Mayo Cabell, wife of Poe's schoolboy friend, Dr. Robert G. Cabell, to whom Poe himself related it. The friends of the Allens gave a much more sensational account of the affair, which was much discussed, and went the rounds of the city, with such additions and exaggerations as gossip could invent, until it culminated at length in the dark picture with which Griswold horrified the world.
It was to this incident that Poe alluded when he told Mrs. Whitman that "his pride had led him to deliberately throw away a large fortune rather than submit to a trivial wrong."
CHAPTER X.
THE CLOSING OF THE GATE.
When Poe, after leaving Mr. Allan's door, crossed the lawn and passed out of the gate, can any one realize how momentous was the instant of time in which the gate closed after him, or what a woeful human tragedy was in that instant inaugurated? The closing of the gate meant the shutting out forever of his past life; the clang of the iron latch was the knell of all that had been bright and pleasant and prosperous in that life, now lost to him forever. There he stood, homeless, penniless, friendless, utterly alone in the world, with a pathless future before him, shadowy, dim, no hand to point him onward and no star to guiden. From this moment commences the true history of Edgar A. Poe.