Mabel Osgood Wright

“ Winslow found himself leaning toward Poppea, holding her eyes and speaking with a vibrating eagerness that would have surprised any one of his half-hundred city intimates, both male and female. Of a distinguished family, rich in moderation, and with no one to please but himself, Winslow, though an indispensable social factor, was, as far as women were concerned, a devoted cynic, always at the beck and call of some modish woman, usually either married or a widow, but whenever the chains of his own forging seemed likely to fetter, he had always eluded them, to seek safety in numbers once more. ”

“ In spite of her vivacity and high spirits, Miss Emmy coughed wrackingly when she stopped, and even a casual observer could see the ominous falling away at the temples and behind the ears, as well as the wrinkling of the throat under its bertha of embroidered mull.
"I like the idea of singing as an employment," said Poppea, when Miss Emmy paused long enough to let her be heard; "but as to all the rest—well, that would have to be on a business basis also. From the moment I begin to earn money, I must pay money. ”

“ And when they do, remember one thing, honey-clover, don't let old Daddy hold you backward; step right off brisk. Daddy'll be content to stop behind, so long as he sees you on before."
"Don't, Daddy, don't," she whispered, putting her hand over his mouth to stop him. "Nobody else is going to walk beside me; it's either you or loneliness, so never speak of falling back." She did not repeat the reason that she had given Hugh Oldys, but Gilbert quickly divined it from the tension of her arm, and the momentary joy that he had felt was stifled in a sigh as though self merged in super-self. ”

“ How many odd moments as well as times of painful suspense the tea-tray has bridged over. Many a time the period of waiting for the kettle to boil has given the necessary pause to think that has changed a whole life, and the need of balancing a cup and saucer in the hand has made an excuse for looking down when looking up would have betrayed the whole.
As Jeanne pottered and poured, Poppea's wandering eyes caught upon a mere speck in the distance on the lower Bridgeton road. As it reached the great span over Moosatuck it took the shape of horse and wheels. ”

“ Oliver Gilbert sat before his desk in the workshop. He was not looking at what was before him, but out of the window across road and fields to where a pearly mist, in which floated the crescent of the new moon, hung above Moosatuck. The rush of the river over the last dam that checked it above the mills was occasionally punctuated by the cry of a little screech-owl or the call of a robin shifting its perch, while the rhythmic chorus of peeping frogs insisted upon "sleep-sleep-sleep." ”

“ Instantly a long, thin hand was laid upon hers that struggled under it for a moment but could not pull itself away.
"Some things are real if others are hid from us for a little while, Poppy. You see your home is here, yours to have and hold under love and law, and you see you've still got a Daddy; perhaps if you'd say the word just once, we'd both feel better."
The prisoned hand stopped struggling; raising herself on one arm she repeated slowly, "Yes, I've a Daddy." Then she hid her face upon his shoulder, the miniature of the other Poppea dangling from her neck. ”

“ Miss Emmy Felton had protested and begged to be allowed to keep the child in dainty nainsook and dimities, ribbons, and flowery hats, but Gilbert had stood firm that in clothing at least she must be like the neighborhood children, as he expressed it. Thus Poppea began life at Harley's Mills without pretence, having for guardian Mack, who was fast developing into a brown-and-white hound of medium size, a trace of setter blood showing in the grain of his hair, and having the forethought and human intelligence that is more often found in dogs of unknown parentage than in pampered thoroughbreds. ”

“ Having turned aside, he waited until the song ended, waited in a condition of mixed rage and pain that amazed him, feelings stirred in him which he believed buried; he seemed in some distant place; he could not account for himself to himself. Even then he did not move at once; the blending of the voices to any other ear had been uplifting. As Philip stepped from the stall to the lower level of the chancel steps and Poppea laid her hand lightly on his shoulder to steady him, John Angus caught the expression of his face, and suspicion, as ever, being his interpreter, he gnashed his teeth. ”

“ As soon as the wind-flowers starred the lowlands and the red bells of the columbine swung from their many shrines in the rocky banks, Oliver Gilbert once more resumed his Sunday habit of taking a posy to Mary and Marygold in God's-acre on the hillside. When the afternoon was right, Poppea went with him, riding in the old chaise safe in the grasp of Daddy's left arm. It was on one of the first of these visits that Gilbert began to train the five-fingered woodbine, that, creeping through the half-wild grass, clung to the two white stones and would not be denied. ”

“ Like the good fairy of a story who always comes to the christening to mend with her gift any evil that others have wrought, so at Poppea's naming, Nature the mother was the invisible sponsor, who gave her three gifts: love of the beautiful through eye and ear, love of the best through a warm heart, and the precious gift of the tears that cleanse the spirit. ”

“ Dear, patient Oliver Gilbert, in those few words he summed up the struggle that Poppea must fight her way through in the next ten years. Would she be victor or vanquished? As a girl glides unconsciously into womanhood, the mysteries that surround her are like the intangible, yet real, mists of daybreak that may clear away before the purifying rays of the sun, or solidify into angry storm clouds to blot out the entire day. ”

“ The only youths, who, dressed in their best, had come of a Saturday evening to lean on the little shelf before the window of the beehive and cast boldly admiring glances and random and irrelevant remarks at the postmistress, were of the verdant and irrepressible sort that Gilbert would not have tolerated for a moment, and that Poppea had effectually withered by giving absolutely no more heed to their pleasantries than to the wind muttering about the windows. ”

“ But it was through her interest in Poppea that Miss Emmy knew that time was passing, and yet the same interest kept middle age from laying hold upon her, either physically or mentally; Poppea, whom Miss Felton had from the beginning called Julia as a matter of principle, the second name having too theatrical a flavor to suit her. At first it had been the little child of five, coming to take her lesson in needlework on squares of dainty patchwork, one white, the alternate sprigged with blue forget-me-nots. The tiny silver thimble and work-box as a reward when the doll's bed-quilt was completed. ”

“ No, God couldn't be so cruel to Daddy and to me. Anything, any one but that man! I would rather have never known at all or have had my mother alone and closed my eyes to all the rest."
"Think what you say, Poppea!"
"It is because I am thinking that I say it; I would rather for myself alone have been born outside of what is called wedlock; it would have been more natural and less horrible!"
"But it is not for yourself alone, remember that. If the end lay with ourselves and we could bear all the penalty, there would be many a law that every one of us in our time would push aside or shatter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No one stays more than a month," he added, breaking through his habitual reticence on this subject, as though at last he must have the support of sympathy.
"No one but you, Hugh. Ah, how can you go on so when every one else falters?"
"Because she is my mother and not theirs; in that lies all."
"All?" Poppea echoed, leaning toward him with such unmistakable tenderness in her eyes that it must have broken through any self-raised barrier of the man's had he but seen and compassed it. ”

“ Yet what does Nature care for such distinctions and boundaries? She does not even stop to snap her fingers at them, but simply keeps on surrounding, overlapping, or undermining all barriers that oppose her plans.
The wash of earth and water from Windy Hill was toward Gilbert's orchard, with its trees of mossed-branch crannies and knot holes, beloved of robins, bluebirds, and woodpeckers, where the ample red cow flavored her cud with apple blossoms, meadow mint, or nips of the sweet corn in the vegetable patch, according to season and the location and length of her tether. ”

“ Thus, after the first week, Poppea's exercise was limited to the correct walk for girls of her age, up or down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, or with Nora for attendant, dressed in the neat garb of a city maid, down Twenty-third Street and eastward to Gramercy Park, a key to which exclusive enclosure had been given to the Misses Felton by one of their many friends in the surrounding houses. She often looked longingly at the girls of her own age who walked in groups of twos and threes, chatting vivaciously, the maid following far enough away to be out of sight if not out of mind. ”

“ When the only love of a silent man's life comes upon him when he is nearly forty, fairly sweeping him from his feet, and in less than three years wife and the child just forming her first words are snatched away, leaving him deaf at heart, work is the only consoler that can gain even his ear. So Gilbert had baked and swept and garnished, kept the geraniums and the calla lilies and pink flowering "Gypsey" in the windows, and a white spread upon the bed, and the hooded mahogany cradle-cover of pink and white basket-pattern patchwork, as it had been during those years. ”

“ Morewood's letter, and saw the woman who gave me life clinging to my little comrade, I knew the time had come when I must tell her that my love had changed."
"Then can we no longer be friends?" Poppea asked faintly. "Must I lose you, too, as I have lost Philip?"
"Always friends, Poppea; that is the beginning. Are not Stephen Latimer and Jeanne friends? and my father and mother also? But it must be more than friends, everything that a man and woman may be to each other. The change is that I love you as Latimer does Jeanne, that I want you for my wife. ”

“ Miss Emmy's momentary fit of retrospection was broken by the return of Poppea and Hugh, skating "cross-hands," and in a moment Miss Emmy was whirling over the ice until she began to feel, like Philip Angus, that the runners were on her own feet.
After a mile of this exhilaration, Hugh pushed the sled into a little cove, to the shelter of the high bank and a hemlock tree combined, that he might ease his numb hands and give Poppea a chance to collect her straggling hair. ”

“ Poppea was looking into the fire, watching the little flock of sparks creep up and burn a pathway through the soot. "Folks going to meeting," Satira Pegrim had called them when she had watched the same procession, born of the wood embers, in the foreroom chimney. Without looking up, she could feel Miss Emmy's eyes upon her face and knew that the question in them was a double one. ”

“ When in half an hour's time, clad in a comfortable bath-gown, he lounged into the library and rang for his coffee, picking up the letters that were neatly piled on the desk, so quickly does the mind of man travel to direct issues, that he was already considering the coming change of breakfasting in one of the smaller rooms below stairs, and picturing Poppea, gowned in some filmy draperies, flitting in like one of the streaks of morning sunshine. ”

“ Naturally it was Hugh who talked the most, his father putting brief questions and gazing in deep contentment at his wife, who, without expressing a shadow of the loneliness she must have felt or even asking Hugh why he had shortened his year by nearly three months, was reviving and expanding; a miracle under their very eyes, like the refreshment of a plant that, withered and famished, takes hold of life anew even at the breath of the wind that brings rain. ”

“ That Hugh had wholly put away his need of her was the meaning that Poppea took from Latimer's words. Then she, too, would lose herself in work, and the next day that she went to the city to sing, she let Miss Emmy persuade her that she owed it to her art to tarry between times and take the lessons that Tostelli was so eager to give her. When once hard at work, with the best music to be heard by way of relaxation, small wonder if the days were winged to Poppea, and at times disappointment and responsibility alike seemed the unreal things of life ”

“ That Gilbert was tired was apparent in the deepened lines of his face and droop of his shoulders, but it was wholly fatigue of mind. The adoption which had for a month filled his waking and sleeping thoughts was a thing accomplished. A week before, when the matter hung in the balance, possession of the child had seemed the finality. To-night it appeared as merely an open gate through which stretched a vista beyond ken; across this many figures passed to and fro, but with faces in shadow or averted. A question asked by Satira Pegrim at supper had given birth to the entire throng. ”