Poppea of the Post-Office

by Mabel Osgood Wright

"I am glad for you if you are glad, little comrade. Yet oftentimes lately it has seemed to me that the positive knowledge of a thing is so much harder to bear than the vague lack of it, that I have ceased to ask, Why?

"As ever your friend,

"Hugh."

Over these few words Poppea pondered long and sadly, seated in the window of her little bedroom with the warm air of late May again bringing the fragrance of apple blossoms with it. It was not yet a year since they two had walked home together and she had hidden her heart that with the first lift of its wings was poised, ready to fly to Hugh, and at the same time she proffered him friendship. Her motives, surely, had been of the most unselfish, and, as she then thought, far-seeing, but now how insignificant they seemed compared to her loss that lay in Hugh's acceptance of them. If she could have felt one pulse of the old pressure in his hand-clasp when they met, or read the faintest inclination toward a need of her between the lines of the brief note, how quickly she would have revealed herself. Not only had she ceased to be a necessity, but rather it seemed were their meetings becoming a strain upon him, where even his cordial outward friendship was forced.

Ah, back, far back, her thoughts flew, no longer the strains of the motive of the Mystery of the Name sang to her brain; like Elsa, in the pursuit of the mystery, she had not gained but lost. Moreover, though she was happy in the fact that she might now see Philip without restraint or reproach, her joy must be pale compared to his, for to him she was all.

For a week or more John Angus had made no move other than to see that a proper statement of the facts of her birth was added to the village record, writing tersely to Poppea that he had communicated with his London solicitor to have all possible details traced out; then he waited.

The second week brought another note addressed to Miss Angus, asking her to fix the time of her coming home, as there were some necessary preparations to be made.

This note remained unanswered for several days, not because of anything contemptuous or insolent in Poppea's attitude, but for the reason that she did not know how to word her refusal in order to make it final without first consulting Stephen Latimer, and yet if she did so, she feared that he might, from his high impersonal standpoint, try to dissuade her; until, as she was about to write, the New York lawyer of John Angus called at the post-office house.

He was a polished man of the world as well as a legal light, but all the subtly drawn pictures of advantage presented with the intricacies of his calling were shattered upon the bare rock of her simple statement, "This is my home, and I shall not leave Daddy or drop this name that has sheltered me so long."

Utterly baffled, the lawyer's admiration for the girl's firmness did not prevent his returning to Angus and imparting something of the bitter and sarcastic mood that opposition develops in legal temperaments. So that while Angus ceased his attempts to bring Poppea to him, he brooded over the matter to such an extent that he really came to believe that he alone was wronged. If he had been physically able, he would have again closed the house and gone away, but he could no longer hide his increasing feebleness even from himself; consequently he had lost the first field in his effort to conceal his condition from others. Besides, Philip, once more established at his work, was now to be reckoned with,—Philip with a man's spiritual courage and his newly acquired strength of having kin, no longer bearing that brand of utter desolation,—the being the last of one's race.

All the other outlets being closed, John Angus fell back upon the law for solace, and with its advice constructed a will under which, outside of the cautionary sum of one hundred dollars, Poppea was to benefit in no way by his estate. This was so tied up that Philip also would lose his rights if he attempted in any way to share with his sister, and the document being duly signed, sealed, was stowed away in the little safe inserted in the wall by his bed head. He would not be within hearing of criticism when the paper went into effect, so Angus, wearing his usual air of inscrutability, took up his life much as before, save that he suddenly announced that, owing to Philip's love of the sea, he would build a midsummer home for him with a studio attached, on a strip of land that he owned on the west side of Quality Hill, where the Moosatuck joins the bay; and almost before the community had grasped the news the quaintly gabled house was under way.

With Poppea the matter was not to be allowed to rest so soon. Letters came to her from all quarters, congratulating her, giving invitations for visits, the sudden desire for her company all too evidently the result of her supposedly changed condition. Gloria Hooper wrote more than cordially, while Mrs. Hewlett, the well-meaning but very dense mother of the two susceptible sons, ended her letter with this dubious sentence, "I take great credit to myself, dear child, for always having believed that you were not what you seemed to be."