Immediately Mrs. Kennedy filled the house with her lamentations, and mingled with them were cursings and revilings of Poppy. She would kill her, she shrieked, even as her child had been killed by that cursed Irish Fenian. She was raving mad for the time, and no doubt she would have killed Poppy, or attempted it, if her husband had not been there to keep her by main force from violence. But that Poppy should be driven from the house she insisted.
"She shall not sleep under my roof with that innocent little corpse," she screamed. "Go, go out of the house, brute and beast and devil." And breaking loose from her husband's hands she caught hold of the ghost-like child and flung her into the yard.
When Poppy got up from the ground it was late and the door was shut for the night. The world was black save for a few pale stars. She wondered heavily where she could go and lie down and sleep. She was like a man who has walked unceasingly for hundreds of miles. She could think of nothing but sleep. She groped for the forage-house door, thinking how sweet it would be to rest there on the bundles of forage, with the smell of the pumpkins coming down from the roof, where they were ripening; but the door was locked. The fowl-hok swarmed with lice in the summer; even in her weariness her flesh crept at the thought of spending the night there. She remembered the Kopje and her old friend the mimosa tree, but there was a certain gloom about the Kopje on a dark night. At last she thought of the poplar trees by the Big Dam; they were her friends—all trees were her friends. When her heart hurt her most and her eyes seemed bursting from her head because she could not cry, if she could get close to a tree and press against it, and put the leaves to her eyes, some of her misery seemed to be taken away: thoughts and hopes would come into her mind, she could forget what had made her unhappy and her little songs would begin to make themselves heard.
When she broke her arm she used to cry all night for them to put green leaves on the place to stop the aching, but they would not. Only the doctor, when he heard about it, brought her a bunch of geranium leaves one morning. She put them quickly under her pillow and when no one was there laid them down by her side, because she could not get them under the splints, and they eased the pain, until they were withered and "Aunt Lena" found them in the bed and threw them away: then the pain was as bad as ever.
The poplar trees grew in a long line of thirty or so by the side of the Big Dam which lay just outside the town past the Presidency. Poppy was sometimes allowed to take the children there, when Clara and Emily went to help mind the children, in case they climbed up the dam wall and fell into the water. They were tall, grand trees, that never ceased rustling in the breeze that crept across the big expanse of water, even on the hottest days. Poppy had climbed every one of them, and she never forgot the moment of pure gold joy that she felt when she reached the top of each and sat there silent and afar from the world, cloistered round by the mysteriously whispering leaves. But the seventh tree was her specially loved friend. It belonged to her—and she had climbed to its very tip, higher than anyone ever had before, and cut her name in the soft pale bark.
And this was the friend she turned to on that night of dreadful weariness when Ina died.
She never knew how she got through the town, silent and dark, and over the little hill thick with bessie bushes and rocks that lay between the Dames' Institute and the Presidency. She did not even remember climbing the tree, which had a thick smooth trunk and was hard to get up for the first six or seven feet. But at last she was in her seat at the top between two branches, cuddling up to the mother-trunk with her arms round it and her eyes closed.
Then, even though her heart took comfort, the darkness and strange sounds of the night terrified her, and filled her with dread and despair. There were wild ducks flying and circling in long black lines against the pallid stars over the dam, wailing to each other as though they had lost something they could never, never find again. And the wind on the water made a dreary pattering that sounded like the bare feet of hundreds of dead people who had come out of the graveyards close by, and were hurrying backwards and forwards on the dam. Then there would be a mysterious rushing through the trees and all the leaves would quiver and quake against each other, like little ghosts that were afraid to be out in the dark night. Poppy wondered if Ina's little ghost was with them.
In the highest windows of the Dames' Institute there were still a few lights showing, and a dim red glow came from a window at one end of the Presidency, and when Poppy opened her eyes these seemed like friends to her. But they went out one by one, and with the last, light seemed to go out of her mind too. She shut her eyes again, and pressed her heart against the poplar tree, and called through the darkness to her mother. She did not know whether she really called aloud, but it seemed to her that a long thin shriek burst from her lips, as a bullet bursts from a gun, piercing through the air for miles.
"Mother! Mother! Mother, my heart is breaking." She sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed, gripping the little ghostly leaves and pressing them to her eyes. But her mother did not come, of course. No one came. Only the little ghostly leaves shivered more than ever and the dreary dead feet came pattering over the water. At this time a sweet, sad cadence of words streamed into Poppy's head and began to form a little song. Strange, that though its burden was misery and wretchedness, it presently began to comfort her a little.