Part 33 (2/2)
The paper trembled in the hands--tiny and spirit-like--of Helen Whitman.
Her soul answered emphatically,
”It _is_ Fate!”
So he had been there in the flesh--near her--in the shadows of that mystic night! The presence was no creation of an overwrought imagination. It was Fate.
Tremulously she penned her answer to his appeal, but was it Fate again, which caused the letter to miscarry? It reached him finally, in Richmond--_Richmond_, of all places!--whither he had gone to deliver to audiences of his old friends, his lecture upon ”The Poetic Principle,”
in the interest of the establishment of his magazine, _The Stylus_. What could have been more fitting than that the gracious words of ”Helen of a thousand dreams” should come to him in Richmond?
Not many days later and he was under her own roof in Providence.
He waited in the dimness of her curtained drawing-room, ear strained for the first sound of her footstep. Noiselessly as a sunbeam or a shadow she entered the room, her gauzy white draperies floating about her slight figure as she came, while his great eyes drank in with reverent joy each detail of her ethereal loveliness--her face, the same he had seen in the garden, pale as a pearl and as softly radiant, and framed in cl.u.s.tering dark ringlets which escaped in profusion from the confinement of a lacy widow's cap--the tremulous mouth--the eyes, mysterious and unearthly, from which the soul looked out.
For one moment she paused in the doorway, her hand pressed upon her wildly beating heart--then, with hesitating step advanced to meet him.
Her words of greeting were few, and so low and faltering as to be quite unintelligible, but the tones of her voice fell on his ear like strangely familiar music.
The man spoke no word. As her eyes rested for one brief moment upon his, then fell before the intensity of his gaze, he was conscious of spiritual influences beyond the reach of reason. In a tremulous ecstacy he bent and pressed his lips upon the hand that lay within his own and it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from falling upon his knees before her in actual wors.h.i.+p.
Three evenings of ”all heavenly delight” he spent in her companions.h.i.+p--sometimes in the seclusion and dusk of her quiet drawing-room, sometimes walking among the roses in her garden, or among the mossy tombs in the town cemetery--their sympathetic natures finding expression in such conversation as poets delight in. Under the intoxicating spell of her presence all other dreams pa.s.sed, for the time, into nothingness and he pa.s.sionately cried,
”Helen, I love now--_now_--for the first and only time!”
Yet he was poor, and the weaknesses which had caused him to fall in the past might cause him to fall in the future. How could he plead for a return of his love?
His very self-abas.e.m.e.nt made his plea more strong. Still, she did not yield too suddenly. True, she too, was under the spell, but she resisted it. As he found his voice, and his eloquence filled the room a restlessness possessed her. Now she sat quite still by his side, now rose and wandered about the apartment--now stood with her hand resting upon the back of his chair while his nearness thrilled her.
There were objections, she told him--she was older than he.
”Has the soul age, Helen?” he answered her. ”Can immortality regard time? Can that which began never and shall never end consider a few wretched years of its incarnate life? Do you not perceive that it is my diviner nature--my spiritual being, that burns and pants to commingle with your own?”
She urged her frail health as an objection.
For that he would love--wors.h.i.+p her--the more, he said. He plead for her pity upon his loneliness--his sorrows--and swore that he would comfort and soothe her in hers, through life, and when death should come, joyfully go down with her into the night of the grave.
Finally he appealed to her ambition.
”Was I right, Helen, in my first impression of you?--in the impression that you are ambitious? If so, and if you will have faith in me, I can and will satisfy your wildest desires. Would it not be glorious to establish in America, the sole unquestionable aristocracy--that of the intellect--to secure its supremacy--to lead and control it?”
Still the _yes_ that so often seemed trembling upon her lips was not spoken. She received his almost daily letters and his frequent visits, listened to his rapturous love-making--trembling, blus.h.i.+ng, letting him see that she was under the spell, that she loved him. Indeed she could not have helped his seeing it had she wished; but when he spoke of marriage she hesitated--tantalizing him to the point of madness, almost.
What was it that held her back?--She too, believed that it was the hand of Fate that had brought them together--that they were pre-ordained to cheer each other's latter years, to establish that intellectual aristocracy of which he dreamed. Yet she shrank from taking the step.
When his great solemn eyes were upon her, his beautiful face pale and haggard with excess of feeling, turned toward her, his eloquent words of love in her ears, she sat as one entranced--bewitched; yet she would not give the word he longed for--the word of willingness to embark with him upon the sea of life. _Fear_ checked her. Such an uncharted sea it seemed to her--she dared not say him yea!
The truth was the poison was working--the Griswold poison. The wildest rumors came to her ears of the worse than follies of her lover. She knew that they were at least, overdrawn--possibly altogether false--yet they frightened her.
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