Poppea of the Post-Office

by Mabel Osgood Wright

During all this period Hugh had come home at the week ends, so that there had been no absolute break; but when he had finally gone, Poppea felt herself surrounded by a sort of open space wherein the air blew chilly and nothing offered a satisfactory shelter. She did not fully connect cause with effect in all its subtlety, but confessed to herself a loneliness that came simply from the cutting off of her glimpse of the outside world that Hugh had given her. His letters came at regular intervals, but they were largely of things, not people, and least of all himself, so that it was only when she went to see his mother and heard her homely talk that she felt any of the vitality that belonged to the real Hugh.

As for Mrs. Oldys, her eagerness to have Poppea with her was almost pathetic. Locked in her heart, where no one suspected its existence, was the simple mother-vision that so few cherish in its unselfish perfection: in this lay the future of her boy, spent away from her if it was best, and her place supplied by a younger woman to whom the knowledge she had held of his innermost thoughts must be transferred. But in this plan of hers for these many years it had been Poppea who was to be that other woman. Poppea, whom she had watched and brooded over almost as though she had been her own, and to whom now she revealed day by day the devotion with which she had surrounded this only child without in any way letting it hamper his freedom or his manhood.

No word or hint was ever dropped by her, and yet her belief in the outcome was as firmly fixed as if it had been a vital point of religion. Would her faith be shattered? Who could tell or count the pulse beats of a man and a maid, that, being good friends, have temperament and the world before them? Hugh was now trying one with the other. Might it not happen, far away as it seemed, that the change might also lie before Poppea?

It was now May; in August Hugh would return. As for the other traveller from Harley's Mills, John Angus, he was due at almost any moment, and the chill that was settling over his household at the prospect was a tribute to the awe in which he was held that, had he been asked, he doubtless would have preferred to any demonstration of affection.

Philip alone seemed to look forward with pleasure to seeing his father. He was in love with his work; Howell, seeing genius even in his crude efforts, had not only written John Angus, but had told the boy himself all that he dared, knowing that his temperament lay too much on the side of self-abasement to take undue harm from praise. Moreover, Philip had, with his master's help in technique, the expression being all his own, finished the bust of Poppea and had placed it at the window of his garden studio, where the beauty of its modelling was brought out by a background of living green. Surely John Angus must be pleased; must see at last that his son had not so much found his calling as that it had found him.

All about the studio were a score of other attempts of Philip's, very crude, and yet none lacking in a truthful force, and in half of these, what might be called the Poppea motive was visible. This he did not realize, nor would he have thought it strange if he had. Why should he not worship her?

His feeling had been the motive of all art in all ages. So had many a dreaming monk of old in a cloistered garden wrought his thought into a missal's page, his inspiration coming not from his walled-in self, but from the light upon it, shed, it might be, from the ideal of the real Virgin behind her image in the dim-lit shrine.

It chanced that upon the afternoon of John Angus's unheralded return, Poppea and Philip had been bidden to the church to practise a duet which they were to sing on Whitsunday at St. Luke's. This time Stephen Latimer accompanied them on the organ, and the pair standing side by side in the front choir stall facing the empty church, Poppea leaning forward slightly that she might see the music Philip held, with a tender, protective air, made a picture that would have appealed to any painter.

Going to his home to find it empty, Angus felt a quickening of the blood, a desire to see his son for his own sake, perhaps for the first time. Howell's words had pleased him in spite of himself; the crude, early American idea of material progress was now rapidly making way for the realm of literature and art. His life abroad had opened his eyes. To be the father of a famous sculptor had its mitigations, and then too, narrow though he was, he could not but realize the underlying compensation that art deals with the spirit of things and makes as naught any physical defect in its medium. Philip should also travel; he himself would take him.

So on the whole, John Angus was in what might almost be called a genial mood when, on hearing that his son was down at the church with Stephen Latimer, he ordered the carriage (he had walked up from the station) and went to seek him. He also looked in much better physical condition than when he went abroad, and only those who are expert in such matters would have detected the tension at the corners of the nostrils that came from the continual apprehension of the heart condition that had been his for years.