"Ah well, my dear, she's at rest now and your wild Irish father too. Her heart broke when he broke his neck somewhere down on the diamond diggings, and she didn't want to live any longer, even for you—her Poppy-flower she always called you. One day, when I went to see her, she said to me, looking at you with those eyes of hers that were like dewy flowers: 'Perhaps my little Poppy-flower will get some joy out of life, Mrs. Dale. It can't be for nothing that Joe and I have loved each other so much. It must bring some gift to the child.' And she told me that the reason she had called you Poppy was that in Ireland they have a saying that poppies bring forgetfulness and freedom from pain; but then she took to weeping, that weeping that is like lost melodies, and that only the Irishry know.
"'But I see,' she wailed, 'that she's marked out for sorrow—I see it—I see it.' And three nights after that she died."
This was Mrs. Dale's story. Poppy treasured it in her heart with the verbal picture of her mother, "eyes like a dewy morning, black, black hair, and a beautiful swaying walk."
"It must have been like hearing one of those old Irish melodies played on a harp, to see her walk along the street," was the thought Poppy evolved from Mrs. Dale's description.
After that she never found life quite unlovely again. But she longed to hear more, and whenever she could, even at the risk of curses and blows, she would steal to kind Mrs. Dale for another word. How ardently she wished her mother had lived. How unutterably beautiful to be called Poppy-flower! instead of Porpie! Her mother would have understood, too, the love and craving for books which had seized her since she had more learning. She would not have been obliged to creep into the fowls' hok or the forage-house when she wanted to read some book she had borrowed or found lying about the house, or the old Tennyson which she had rescued from the ash-heap one day and kept hidden under the chaff-bags in the forage-house.
"There's that Porpie with a book again!" was her aunt's outraged cry. "Lazy young huzzy! For ever squatting with her nose poked into a book reading some wickedness or foolishness I'll be bound.... Anything rather than be helpful ... no wonder your face is yellow and green, miss ... sitting with your back crooked up instead of running about or doing some housework ... more to your credit if you got a duster and polished the dining-room table or mended that hole in the leg of your stocking." Oh, the thousands of uninteresting things there are to be done in the world! thought Poppy. The dusters and damnations of life!
She used to long to be taken ill so that she might have a rest in bed and be able at last to read as much as she liked. But when she broke her arm she was too ill to care even about reading, and when she got scarlet fever she could not really enjoy herself, for Ina sickened of it too, and was put into bed with her, and was so fretful, always crying unless she was told stories or sung to. So they got better together and that was over.
Before she was twelve Poppy's schooldays came to an end. The five sovereigns had been spent and there was no more to come. Wasted money, Mrs. Kennedy said, and wrote and told the god-mother so. The fact that never a single prize had been won was damning evidence that the culprit was both idle and a dunce. It was quite true that she had learnt nothing much in the way of lessons. History and geography or anything with a story in it, or poetry, were the only things that interested her. Grammar and arithmetic were nothing but stumbling-blocks in her path, though she never spoke bad grammar, being quick to detect the difference in the language of her teachers and that of her aunt, and profiting by it, and she learned to use her voice as they did too—softly and low—never speaking the half-Dutch, half-English patter used by Mrs. Kennedy and her children to the accompaniment of "Och, what?" "Hey?" and "Sis!" Her Uncle Bob had a sweet way of turning his words in his lips, which made even the kitchen-Dutch pleasant to the ear, and with great delight Poppy discovered one day that she also had this trick. Not for years however, did she realise that this was Ireland in her tongue; her country's way of marking Bob Kennedy and Poppy Destin as her own, in spite of Africa.
Her ear was fine for beautiful sounds and her aunt's voice scraped the inside of her head more and more as time went on, and whenever the latter dropped an "h" Poppy picked it up and stored it in that dark inner cupboard of hers where was kept all scorn and contempt.