"H——! What a beast I am! But what is worse, I am a fool. I am no good any longer. I made a mistake in my diagnosis. That girl is straight! Pure as the untrodden snow! I had better cut my throat."
However, he did not.
Poppy, lying on her face in her cabin, was tasting shame. Bitter-sweet, mysterious, terrifying knowledge was hers at last—and with it was shame. Shame that the knowledge should come to her from profane and guilty lips! Shame that the child of the king of her heart should be unworthily born; that a king's child should be robbed of its kingdom; that the mother of her child should be one to whom men might throw vile words. Shame that she was a transgressor.
CHAPTER XIV
LONDON was not new to Poppy. She had lived there for months at a time, but always at the best hotels and under luxurious conditions. Now, she hardly knew where to seek a home in accord with her limited means, but she had heard of Bloomsbury as being the resort of writers and artists and people whose riches are rather to be found in their heads and hearts than in their purses; so she took her way thither.
She walked the old-fashioned squares the day after her arrival and found them all green-tracery, and darts of spring sunshine that touched the gloomy houses with the gilt of past romance. After much roaming, and knocking, and climbing of stairs, and making of awkward adieus to angry, disappointed landladies, she eventually discovered a tall, white house, whose front windows overlooked the pigeons pecking in the straggly grass that grows in the courtyard of the British Museum. A room on the top floor but one seemed likely to suit her purse and her tastes, and she seized upon it eagerly. It was big and bare, with no noise overhead, except the footsteps of two tired maids, who crept to bed at eleven o'clock with very little to say to each other. It seemed to Poppy that she could not have found any better place to start hard work in, and yet, from the first day there, a dreariness crept over her spirit—a kind of mental numbness she had never known before, oppressed her. She supposed it must have something to do with her physical condition and the shock she had lately received, and that after a few days it would pass. Instead, it increased. Her nights became indescribably weird and unhappy. Always it seemed to her that she heard someone calling somewhere, and she used to wake up, thinking that she had been urgently roused to fetch something. Sometimes, still half asleep, she would get up and begin to dress to go out; then, gradually becoming conscious of what she was doing, she would light the gas and stare round the room, looking for the person who had been speaking to her. In the daytime it became impossible to work, though she perpetually goaded herself to her writing-table. The only time she could get any ease from the intolerable restlessness and depression that filled her, was when she was half out of her window, leaning above the street, watching the intermittent stream of uninteresting-looking people who passed up and down the broad, dingy steps of the Museum, and listening to the roar of London afar. Trying to interpret the street calls was an idle amusement, too, wondering why the coal-carters should shout Ko-bel, and the cry of the oyster-man be exceeding dolorous like the cry of a soul in the depths.
Clam ... Clam ... clamavi.
In the afternoons, when still haunting sadness obsessed her, she would put on her hat and visit a picture-gallery, or walk in the park, or roam the streets looking at the shop-windows and into the strained, anxious faces of the hurrying passers-by. She speculated as to whether she would ever get that look, and always she wondered what was worth it; then one day, as she walked, she felt what seemed tiny fluttering fingers clutching at her heart-strings, and she knew! Flying home on swift feet, she nailed herself once more to her work-table. She must work, she told herself feverishly; and when she could not, frenzy seized her, then terror, then despair. Yes, those were the things she had seen in the strained, hurrying faces that passed along—frenzy, terror, despair; not for themselves, but for others. She must work!