Poppea of the Post-Office

by Mabel Osgood Wright

ON THE WINGS OF THE MORNING

During the remainder of the summer the village of Harley's Mills went into a sort of chrysalis state as befitted its coming change of name. The fact that the Felton house had ceased to exist as a social centre and that many of the Quality Hill folk had gone abroad added considerably to its somnolence. Some of what are generally referred to by the local press as "leading citizens" had under construction a brick block on the Westboro side of the blacksmith shop in which the chief trade interests of the place were to be sheltered, including the new post-office.

Philip Angus continued with the Latimers, for his new house overlooking the sea would not be ready before October, and if the rumor proved true that Howell, the sculptor, was anxious to take Philip with him to winter in Rome, it was unlikely that it would be occupied before spring.

Of course there was much speculation concerning the amount and disposition of John Angus's property, especially his holdings in real estate, for he owned some of the most sightly tracts in the township in addition to the house and home acres on Windy Hill. Early in the autumn a definite statement was given out concerning the latter by no less an authority than Stephen Latimer. Poppea and Philip, agreeing that under no circumstances could they live there, proposed to devote it to a hospital and home for crippled children from the city, and the necessary alterations began soon after.

It was almost Thanksgiving time when Miss Emmy and Poppea returned, Miss Emmy going directly to the house on Quality Hill which she now called home, Miss Felton and Caleb having moved Mr. Esterbrook back to Madison Square at the beginning of cold weather. The village did not realize how much it had missed them both until Poppea was again seen walking daily up the road to Quality Hill, and Miss Emmy resumed her morning marketing trips, where she sat in the barouche (the lining was now a durable russet leather) dressed in very suitable and becoming brown with a warming glint of color in the velvet rose on her bonnet, holding a sort of court, whereat the butcher extolled the quality of his sweetbreads, and the blacksmith's wife related the details of her rheumatism and her husband's father's last seizure, with equal freedom.

Immediately after her return, Philip took Poppea to see the new house, to which a music room with a place for an organ had been added to the original plan by throwing out a wing to correspond with his studio. With her arm about his shoulders they walked slowly through the rooms, stopping before the picture that each window offered, until they came to one on the second floor, a bay from which one might not only look out to sea, but up the Moosatuck until it was lost in the hill-country.

"This is your room," he said, laying a detaining hand upon her arm to make her hear him out, "whenever you wish to come to it for an hour or forever, but I never shall ask you by so much as a word to leave Daddy, for I feel about it much as you do. What if he had not? Oh, Sister, what if he had not? You would have still been yourself, but I, what should I have been without you to love?" and the rapt expression stole across his face with which the devotee is pictured.

Presently, sitting side by side on the steps of the wide porch in the early winter sunshine, they talked over Philip's plans, the tide creeping up the sand laden with pungent seaweed, and the gulls now flying across with shrill cries, now dropping to rest upon the water.

At last Philip, taking Poppea's hand and laying it against his cheek, told her of what was closest to his heart,—his desire to go to Rome with Howell for the winter, to do there with the master a piece of work he could not hope yet to accomplish alone. Unrolling a paper he showed her the design for the group, the outcome of months of thought and dreaming. Two women, one taller than the other, with tender, radiant faces, standing side by side, hands outstretched to aid a crippled child, who, having dropped his crutch, was clinging to them. About the base this legend ran Amor Consolatrix.

"These are our mothers," he said softly, "yours and mine. When they are done in marble, they shall stand by the gate up at the hospital to welcome the children who must go in alone."

So Philip sailed away, and from the Christmas music at St. Luke's his silver voice was missing.

But if Philip's tones were silver, Poppea's now poured forth like rich, unalloyed gold. It seemed to her as though she had never fathomed the full joy of singing until, lacking necessity, it had ceased to be a possible commercial profession, and become, as now she held it, a freewill gift to all who asked for or needed it, singing alike in church, hospital ward, the poor-house, or in the low farm-houses of the back hill-country, where she carried hope and music to those for whom all other doors were closed. Once even had she gone over the deeply drifted roads on a wood sled with 'Lisha Potts to a revival meeting at his lumber camp, and in the rough faces of the wood-choppers read a deeper, truer appreciation than she had ever felt respond to her among the music-lovers of the drawing-room.

Then, too, there were the Sunday evenings, she and Daddy sitting on either side the fire in the foreroom,—Satira going invariably to the muscular type of prayer-meeting that would satisfy her soul's hunger for the next seven days.—Then the heartstrings would quiver in vain for the magic thrill and the sound of the melody that only one may play for each one of us, until to break the oppressive silence, she would lift the piano lid and let her fingers feel their way a moment, until the old-time hymns and anthems made response. Gradually Daddy would join in, until at the end of half an hour he was singing with might and main, although often quite off the key and half a bar behind. As she paused, he would limp to and fro rubbing his hands together, and saying for the fortieth time:—

"Pretty good music you and I can make, eh, Poppy? Forty years ago I was the loudest bass singer in this township, and 'twas when I was singing in First Church Choir that Mary, a stranger to me, sang the second treble, and it was the kind way she had of keeping me in line when I'd shied from the tuning-fork that made me take to her. Yes, it's true what the poet says, that Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. It soothed mine, Poppy, who always had dreaded women."

So the winter wore away. March, the tug of war between seasons, blustered out roaring defiance, and April, the capricious, in its last week had kept to one mood long enough to green the grass, draw red blood to the maple tops, and gold sap to the willows.

In two weeks more Philip would return. Poppea was entering the gate with a letter from him that had come in the last mail. She had walked slowly up from the new post-office in the brick block, reading it as she came. How different all concerning the new order was, to be sure: Entrance and Exit printed plainly on the doors; no little knots of men from the scattered back settlement exchanging news. Rather did these, after getting their mail, continue to come to their old haunt and talk to Gilbert as he sat in his shop, sometimes idle but never listless, while a large checkerboard put by Poppea's suggestion in the place of the boxes of the old beehive, filled the gap when the powers of conversation needed rest.

She stopped to look at a cluster of daffodils, whose jolly yellow flowers kept on beaming even through the dusk, and then went toward the house, when the wheels of a vehicle, coming rapidly up the road, stopped short, and Hugh Oldys's voice called:—

"Poppea, wait a minute, please," and without pausing to fasten the horse, he pushed through the gate and strode toward her.

"What is it, Hugh?" she almost cried out, shocked by the ashiness of his face and its nervous working. "Can I help you in any way?"

"Yes, you can help me and only you, though I do not know that I ought to let you undergo the strain even if you are willing.

"Listen and judge, Poppea. Last night my mother became physically ill; until then her bodily health has been better than for years. This afternoon within two hours her mind has suddenly cleared, the doctors explain it by the moving of a clot. She called me to her and spoke as naturally as before the blow fell; yet she remembers perfectly well that father is dead and that she has been very ill, though she has no sense of the length of time. Then she begged me not to leave her for so long again, and asked for you, Poppea."

"Why, Hugh, I will go to her at once. Could you think that I would not?"

"That—that is not all," he faltered, his shoulders drooping and his whole attitude broken and dejected. "She thinks that everything is as she had believed it would be—two years—ago. She thinks that we are married—that you are in the house, but stay out of the room for fear of disturbing her. Oh, Poppea, could you—could you slip a loose shawl or a sack over your shoulders and go in for a moment and speak to her or answer her, so that she need not know? Will you do it for the sake of all those years that we were comrades?"

Only for a moment had Poppea drawn back, but it was so imperceptibly that Hugh did not notice.

"I will go," she said slowly, without looking at him, "and you need wait only a minute."

Going swiftly to her room, she made a wrapper and pair of slippers into a hasty bundle and threw a light shawl about her head and shoulders. Saying a few words to Satira, who was in the kitchen kneading bread and so could not follow her to the gate for details other than she chose to give, she took her place silently by Hugh in the buggy.

On the drive neither spoke, for it was one of the hours when the softest spoken word is too harsh and jarring. Up from the marsh meadows the cry of the rejuvenated "peepers" rose in what to Poppea's nerves, strained to snapping, seemed a clamor that surrounded her head closely and dulled even her powers of thought.

At the threshold Mrs. Shandy was waiting, her eyes red from crying. With finger on her lips Poppea signalled that she wished to go to Mrs. Shandy's room. There she slipped on the wrapper she had brought, and loosing the pins, let her hair fall in a careless braid, as though she had but just waked up.

In the square upper hall Dr. Morewood sat in a deep easy-chair, reading by a shaded lamp. In answer to Poppea's questioning look he said in the low tone, that yet is not a whisper, which the sensitive physician acquires:—

"Yes, the brain is clear, but the physical vitality in its final flicker; at best it can hold its own but a few hours."

When, steadying herself by an almost superhuman effort, Poppea reached the door of Mrs. Oldys's chamber, so familiar in every detail even in the subdued light, Hugh was already there crouched by the bedside, one of his mother's transparent hands clasping his, while with the other she was striving to push back the heavy hair from his forehead.

At the sight of Poppea the nurse drew back into the alcove shadows. Seating herself in a vacant chair on the opposite side from Hugh and waiting a few seconds, the girl made a very slight motion that revealed her presence.

"My dear daughter!" Mrs. Oldys formed the words rather than spoke them, dropping her other hand upon Poppea's so that she was held fast as it were between them.

"Why have you stayed away so long? I have thought that you were ill," the voice was clearer now. "Did Hugh break your sleep to call you?"

"No,—Mother,—I was quite awake when he said you wanted me."

"And you will stay with me to-night?"

"Yes, surely I will stay."

"Now I am at peace, my two dear children—" the fluttering eyelids closed and for a while she seemed to sleep, except that the pressure of her hands did not relax.

Presently she looked up again.

"I cannot seem to think by myself," she said, "I need something to lean upon—to carry me with it. Do you remember, Hugh, the music—the song that you and Poppy used to sing sometimes without the organ? It brought me close to the gate—perhaps it would carry me through with it to-night."

Poppea, who was trembling like a leaf in the wind, looked toward Hugh, but his face was buried in his arm. Then a calm settled over her. Loosening the robe at her throat, she straightened herself, and from her lips the notes fell soft yet clear:—

"Hark! hark, my soul; angelic songs are swelling."

An expression of ineffable peace crossed Mrs. Oldys's face.

"Yes, that is it," she whispered, smiling.

Unfalteringly Poppea sang to the end, and it was not until the last note died away in complete silence that Hugh raised his head.

Presently the doctor looked in, the nurse came forward with some nourishment, and so the night wore on, but it was not until the dawn began to scatter darkness that the frail hands gradually relaxed their loving clasp, and the nurse looking from the shadows beckoned the watchers away.

Through the passageway and down the stairs Hugh and Poppea passed together. Then Hugh left her for a moment, returning to say that Dr. Morewood would drive her home as she must have some rest as soon as possible.

Mrs. Shandy, coming out, begged her to wait and take a cup of coffee, but Poppea shook her head.

Out on the porch in the fresh, yet mysterious air of coming day, they waited for the doctor to bring his chaise. Below lay Moosatuck veiled in mist; beyond, the blue ridge of the hills; one bird called, then another, until half a hundred had picked up the anthem. Each moment it grew lighter, the darkness huddled cornerwise down the west, while the morning star and the harbor beacon paled together.

For a time neither spoke nor looked at each other, then Hugh broke the silence.

"In a few days, Poppea,—when I am no longer needed,—I shall be going away for a rest, a long rest, and perhaps it may be that afterward my life will lie in other places." Then suddenly breaking down, he grasped her hands, and pressing them to his lips, said, with a half-suppressed cry:—

"Little comrade! Little comrade! All that I can tell you, all that I must tell you, is that God himself could not have done more for me than you have this night."

Poppea, who had been looking off into the sunrise, turned her head quickly, and for the first time in months, found his eyes fixed full upon her face before he could shift them.

At last she knew! Leaving her hands in his, she leaned toward him, murmuring in a voice so full of joy that it quivered as though strung with tears:—

"Where is more rest than here? I need you, Hugh!"

Then to the one behind the closed door and to the two facing the dawn a new life came on the wings of the morning.