Yet in the old white farmhouse where she had found refuge and a remarkable education, she had been able to watch with her own eyes the change of the famished, wretched little two-leaved seedling into a beautiful flowering plant.
She had often thought of herself as one set alone in an arid waste to travel where and how she could, with no help from anyone, and who, in her terrible travelling had found hidden gifts by the wayside, and little pools of consolation to lave her wounds and her weary heart, little patches of flowers to refresh her senses—all left there for her by the loving forethought of those who had travelled that way before her; her beauty, her voice, the grace of her body, her clear understanding, grace of tongue, had come upon her as she travelled to womanhood—all so unexpectedly; all wonderful gifts hidden deeply away until she came suddenly upon them, one by one.
At last, through long thinking and piecing together of many broken ends of memory and disjointed scraps of information concerning her family history, she had come very close to realising the truth—that she owed much of what she was to the sweet simple Irish-women who had been her maternal ancestors. If your grandmother has worn a shawl over her head and walked barefoot on the bitter coast of Clare with a smile on her lips and a melody in her heart, she had something better to bequeath to you than money or possessions: her song and her smile will come down through the years and make magic in your eyes; her spirit will trample your troubles underfoot. If your mother has laid her heart in a man's hands, and her neck under a man's feet, and died for want of his kisses on her mouth, she, too, will have had something to bequeath: a cheek curved for caresses, lips amorously shaped, and sweet warm blood in the veins.
And there was more that Poppy Destin did not know. She was only eighteen and could not know all her gifts yet—some women never know them at all until they are too old to use them! She had unwittingly left uncounted her biggest asset, though it was signed and sealed upon her face—the sign and seal of Ireland. Ireland was in the frank, sweet eyes of her; in the cheek-bones pitched high in her face; in her branching black hair; in her soft sad voice, and her subtly curved lips. Though she had never seen that sad, lovely land, she was one of its fair daughters: there lay her beauty; that was her magic.
Presently she left her glass and going to the load of trunks which had been piled up inside the door, she took her dressing-case from the summit of the pile, and unlocking it, extracted a little white vellum-covered note-book. Sitting down before her writing-table she opened the book at random and kissed its pages with a rush of tears and a passion that always surged in her when she touched it. For it contained the story of her childhood, sung in little broken, wretched songs. Her blurred eyes looked from one heading to another:
"My heart is as cold as a stone in the sea!"
"My soul is like a shrivelled leaf!"
"The woman with the crooked breast."
This was the title of old Sara's story made into a little song.
Poppy Destin dreamed of being a great writer some day; but she knew, with the sure instinct of the artist, that even if her dream came true she could never surpass these little studies in misery; these cries of wretchedness wrung from a child's heart by the cruel hands of Life.
Nothing had ever yet been able to wipe from her mind the remembrance of those days. For six years she had lived a life in which fresh events and interests were of daily occurrence; and like a blighted seedling transplanted to a warm, kind climate, she had blossomed and bloomed in mind and body. But the memory of those days that had known no gleam of hope or gladness hung like a dark veil over her youth, and still had power to drive her into torments of hatred and misery. Her soul was still a shrivelled leaf, and her heart as cold as a stone in the sea. She was very sure that this should not be so; she knew that she was incomplete. The instincts of her artist nature told her that somewhere in the world there must be someone or something that would wipe this curse of hatred from her; but she had never been able to find it, and she knew not where to seek it. Art failed her when she applied it to this wound of hers that bled inwardly. Despairingly she sometimes wondered whether it was religion she needed; but religion in the house of Luce Abinger was a door to which she found no key.
Often, abroad, she had stolen away and knelt in quiet churches, and burnt candles in simple wayside chapels, trying, praying, to throw off the heavy, weary armour that cased her in, to get light into her, to feel her heart opening, like a flower, and the dew of God falling upon it. She had searched the face of the Madonna in many lands for some symbol that would point the way to a far-off reflection in herself of