Then, too, there were the Sunday evenings, she and Daddy sitting on either side the fire in the foreroom,—Satira going invariably to the muscular type of prayer-meeting that would satisfy her soul's hunger for the next seven days.—Then the heartstrings would quiver in vain for the magic thrill and the sound of the melody that only one may play for each one of us, until to break the oppressive silence, she would lift the piano lid and let her fingers feel their way a moment, until the old-time hymns and anthems made response. Gradually Daddy would join in, until at the end of half an hour he was singing with might and main, although often quite off the key and half a bar behind. As she paused, he would limp to and fro rubbing his hands together, and saying for the fortieth time:—
"Pretty good music you and I can make, eh, Poppy? Forty years ago I was the loudest bass singer in this township, and 'twas when I was singing in First Church Choir that Mary, a stranger to me, sang the second treble, and it was the kind way she had of keeping me in line when I'd shied from the tuning-fork that made me take to her. Yes, it's true what the poet says, that Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. It soothed mine, Poppy, who always had dreaded women."
So the winter wore away. March, the tug of war between seasons, blustered out roaring defiance, and April, the capricious, in its last week had kept to one mood long enough to green the grass, draw red blood to the maple tops, and gold sap to the willows.
In two weeks more Philip would return. Poppea was entering the gate with a letter from him that had come in the last mail. She had walked slowly up from the new post-office in the brick block, reading it as she came. How different all concerning the new order was, to be sure: Entrance and Exit printed plainly on the doors; no little knots of men from the scattered back settlement exchanging news. Rather did these, after getting their mail, continue to come to their old haunt and talk to Gilbert as he sat in his shop, sometimes idle but never listless, while a large checkerboard put by Poppea's suggestion in the place of the boxes of the old beehive, filled the gap when the powers of conversation needed rest.
She stopped to look at a cluster of daffodils, whose jolly yellow flowers kept on beaming even through the dusk, and then went toward the house, when the wheels of a vehicle, coming rapidly up the road, stopped short, and Hugh Oldys's voice called:—
"Poppea, wait a minute, please," and without pausing to fasten the horse, he pushed through the gate and strode toward her.
"What is it, Hugh?" she almost cried out, shocked by the ashiness of his face and its nervous working. "Can I help you in any way?"
"Yes, you can help me and only you, though I do not know that I ought to let you undergo the strain even if you are willing.
"Listen and judge, Poppea. Last night my mother became physically ill; until then her bodily health has been better than for years. This afternoon within two hours her mind has suddenly cleared, the doctors explain it by the moving of a clot. She called me to her and spoke as naturally as before the blow fell; yet she remembers perfectly well that father is dead and that she has been very ill, though she has no sense of the length of time. Then she begged me not to leave her for so long again, and asked for you, Poppea."
"Why, Hugh, I will go to her at once. Could you think that I would not?"