Poppy answered her "Yes!" And after a long time a few words dropped into the silence of the room.
"I wanted the money for my child."
The storm had died away at last, leaving a terrible peace behind it. The colour of the evening sky was sard-green, than which nothing can be more despairing.
Mrs. Portal sat with her head drooped forward a little as if very tired, and Poppy arose from her seat, pushed open a window, and stood looking out. The smell of wet steaming earth came into the room. Presently, speaking very softly, she continued her narrative:
"I wanted all the money I could get for my son. He had no name, no heritage ... his father ... had, I believed, married another woman. I was resolved that he should at least have all money could give him.... I thought that when he grew up he would turn from me in any case as a woman who had shamed him and robbed him of his birthright, so that it did not matter what I did while he was yet young, and yet loved me, to insure him health, a fine education, and a future. First it was to give him the bare necessaries of life, later to provide a home in the country where he could grow up strong and well under good, kind care ... then, my thoughts were for his future ... Oh! I hoped to redeem my soul by his future, Clem!... So I worked and lied ... and lied and took ... and lied and saved ... not often with my lips did I lie, Clem ... but always with my eyes. I had at last amassed nearly eight hundred pounds ... you will think that remarkable, if you will remember that always I amassed it virtuously ... that there is no man of all I met in those years who can call me anything but a good woman—abominably, disgustingly, vilely good.
"And then ... I was introduced to a financier, who, because of the charm of my innocent eyes, told me that, in a few weeks, he would transform my eight hundred pounds into eight thousand pounds. Incidentally, he remarked that we must see more of each other ... and I looked into his eyes and saw that they were not innocent,—and that there would be a difficult day of reckoning for me later on ... but for eight thousand pounds, and secure in mailed armour of purity, I risked that ... especially as he was just leaving England for a few weeks ... I handed over my eight hundred pounds without a qualm, for he had a great name in the financial world. In less than three weeks his dead body was being hauled over the side of a yacht in the Adriatic, and my eight hundred pounds was deader than Dead-Sea fruit, for I never heard of it again ... nor wanted to ... the need of it was gone ... my boy was dead!"
"Poppy! Poppy!" Clem got up and drew the girl down to the floor by her side. "Rest your head on me dear ... you are tired ... life has been too hard for you.
"'Dost thou know, O happy God!——'
"Life has been brutal to you. I think of my own sheltered childhood, and compare it with yours—flung out into the fiery sands of the desert to die or survive, as best you might!... The strange thing is that your face bears no sign of all the terrible things that have overtaken you! I see no base, vile marks anywhere on you, Poppy.... It cannot all be acting ... no one is clever enough to mask a soiled soul for ever, and from everyone, if it really is soiled.... You look good—not smirking, soft goodness that means nothing, but brave, strong goodness ... and I know that that look is true ... and so I can love you, after all these things you have told me ... I can love you better than ever. But why is it, Poppy?"
"I don't know. If it is so, the reason must be that all was done for Love, Clem ... because always I had a sweet thing at my heart ... the love I bore to my child, and to the father of my child. Because, like the mother of Asa, 'I built an altar in a grove' and laid my soul upon it for Love. I want to tell you something further. Being good, as the world calls it, has no charm for me. Many of the men I have spoken of had a sinister attraction. I understood what they felt. I looked into eyes and saw things there that had answers deep down in me. I am a child of passionate Africa, Clem ... the blood in my veins runs as hot and red as the colour of a poppy.... It is an awful thing to look into the eyes of a man you do not love and see passion staring there—and feel it urging in your own veins, too. It is an awful thing to know what it is that he is silently demanding, and what that basely answers in your own nature.... Yet there are worse things than this knowledge. A worse thing, surely, would have been to have gone hurtling over the precipice with some Gadarene swine!... Clem, if I had been really innocent those years, nothing could have saved me. I should have gone to the devil, as they call it, with some vile man I had no love for, just because I didn't know how to keep out of the traps laid for me by my own nature—and then I should have 'been at the devil' indeed! But I had bought knowledge with the price of my girlhood ... and I had mated with my own right man.... I had looked at life, if only for an hour, with love-anointed eyes ... and so, it came to pass that I had a memory to live for, and a child to fight for ... and courage to fight my greatest enemy—myself. I think no one who knew the workings of my heart would deny me courage, Clem."