The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Author:Edgar Allan Poe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2013-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

Two

I woke up the next morning shivering from the cold. Leaving the girls curled up together under the quilts in our bed, I went to the window and cleared a spot in the frost. Snow was coming down, muffling sidewalks and streets, blanketing rooftops, capping the ornate iron railings of the stoops across the way. The milkman passed in a sleigh, the mane of his horse thick with icy crystals, as was his own hat and shoulders.

Wrapping my robe more closely around me, I went to the fireplace, uncovered the banked embers, and gave them a poke. One of Eliza’s Irish maids, the “second girl,” Martha, the cook’s and parlor maid’s helper, slipped into the room with a bucket of coal and a can of water, then whispered her apology when she saw me crouching there. As she took over tending to the fire, I wondered once more how I would have survived without the generosity of her employers and where I would go once my welcome wore out. There was no question of returning to my mother. She had never gotten over the disappointment of my marriage to Samuel. Father’s death the following year had further turned her against me; she blamed the blow of losing me for weakening his health. The doors to my sisters’ and brothers’ homes were equally closed, nor could I find shelter in the arms of another man, at least not a decent one, if I divorced Samuel for abandonment. No one wanted a divorcée as a wife. I did not even have the luxury of conducting an affair. Should I fall for a man while still married, Samuel had legal right to take the children. Only the Bartletts stood between me and deepest poverty and isolation.

As Martha finished stoking the fire and began pouring water into my pitcher, I thought of the ragged children I had seen outside the neighborhood coal yard, scrambling to pick up nuggets that spilled from the wagons as they left to make deliveries. Even as I imagined myself among them, scurrying to beat a waif out of a lump in my destitution, I saw the image of my husband before a cheerfully crackling fire, helping himself to marmalade for his toasted bread, his current mistress, young, blond, and very rich, smiling as he ate his egg. Was there a man ever born who was more supremely selfish than Samuel Stillman Osgood?

I was twenty-three when I met him, ten years ago. He was twenty-six, tall, and handsome in a rough, raw-boned way. He had hair and eyes the brown of fresh-turned earth, the high cheekbones of a Mohawk, and a strong, straight nose. I had come upon him in the paintings gallery of the Athenæum in my native Boston, where I had gone to write some poetry, hoping the art would inspire me. Little did I know that this confident, no, brash young man with the fistful of paintbrushes would forever disrupt my comfortable life.

He was working at an easel set up before the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.

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