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?

Who knows?

Yet the chair and the desk and the books and the vases of fresh flowers on the mantel, and the fire-wood resting on the shining andirons ready for a match, and the reading lamp with trimmed wick and bright chimney on the table, and the canopied white bed still waited, in vain, his coming.

Many months had passed since the name of Eddie had been spoken between husband and wife, but though she held her peace, like Mary of old, like Mary too, she pondered many things in her heart.  He, loving her well, but having no aptitude for divining woman’s ways, indulged in secret satisfaction, for he took her silence to mean that she was coming to her senses, and regarding the boy as he did.  That she no longer importuned him to enquire into Edgar’s whereabouts with the intention of inviting him home was a source of especial relief to him.