Poppea of the Post-Office

by Mabel Osgood Wright

Philip Angus continued with the Latimers, for his new house overlooking the sea would not be ready before October, and if the rumor proved true that Howell, the sculptor, was anxious to take Philip with him to winter in Rome, it was unlikely that it would be occupied before spring.

Of course there was much speculation concerning the amount and disposition of John Angus's property, especially his holdings in real estate, for he owned some of the most sightly tracts in the township in addition to the house and home acres on Windy Hill. Early in the autumn a definite statement was given out concerning the latter by no less an authority than Stephen Latimer. Poppea and Philip, agreeing that under no circumstances could they live there, proposed to devote it to a hospital and home for crippled children from the city, and the necessary alterations began soon after.

It was almost Thanksgiving time when Miss Emmy and Poppea returned, Miss Emmy going directly to the house on Quality Hill which she now called home, Miss Felton and Caleb having moved Mr. Esterbrook back to Madison Square at the beginning of cold weather. The village did not realize how much it had missed them both until Poppea was again seen walking daily up the road to Quality Hill, and Miss Emmy resumed her morning marketing trips, where she sat in the barouche (the lining was now a durable russet leather) dressed in very suitable and becoming brown with a warming glint of color in the velvet rose on her bonnet, holding a sort of court, whereat the butcher extolled the quality of his sweetbreads, and the blacksmith's wife related the details of her rheumatism and her husband's father's last seizure, with equal freedom.

Immediately after her return, Philip took Poppea to see the new house, to which a music room with a place for an organ had been added to the original plan by throwing out a wing to correspond with his studio. With her arm about his shoulders they walked slowly through the rooms, stopping before the picture that each window offered, until they came to one on the second floor, a bay from which one might not only look out to sea, but up the Moosatuck until it was lost in the hill-country.

"This is your room," he said, laying a detaining hand upon her arm to make her hear him out, "whenever you wish to come to it for an hour or forever, but I never shall ask you by so much as a word to leave Daddy, for I feel about it much as you do. What if he had not? Oh, Sister, what if he had not? You would have still been yourself, but I, what should I have been without you to love?" and the rapt expression stole across his face with which the devotee is pictured.

Presently, sitting side by side on the steps of the wide porch in the early winter sunshine, they talked over Philip's plans, the tide creeping up the sand laden with pungent seaweed, and the gulls now flying across with shrill cries, now dropping to rest upon the water.

At last Philip, taking Poppea's hand and laying it against his cheek, told her of what was closest to his heart,—his desire to go to Rome with Howell for the winter, to do there with the master a piece of work he could not hope yet to accomplish alone. Unrolling a paper he showed her the design for the group, the outcome of months of thought and dreaming. Two women, one taller than the other, with tender, radiant faces, standing side by side, hands outstretched to aid a crippled child, who, having dropped his crutch, was clinging to them. About the base this legend ran Amor Consolatrix.

"These are our mothers," he said softly, "yours and mine. When they are done in marble, they shall stand by the gate up at the hospital to welcome the children who must go in alone."

So Philip sailed away, and from the Christmas music at St. Luke's his silver voice was missing.

But if Philip's tones were silver, Poppea's now poured forth like rich, unalloyed gold. It seemed to her as though she had never fathomed the full joy of singing until, lacking necessity, it had ceased to be a possible commercial profession, and become, as now she held it, a freewill gift to all who asked for or needed it, singing alike in church, hospital ward, the poor-house, or in the low farm-houses of the back hill-country, where she carried hope and music to those for whom all other doors were closed. Once even had she gone over the deeply drifted roads on a wood sled with 'Lisha Potts to a revival meeting at his lumber camp, and in the rough faces of the wood-choppers read a deeper, truer appreciation than she had ever felt respond to her among the music-lovers of the drawing-room.