Poppea

“ 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. ”

“ Poppea turned quickly as though she would let him take her, then catching her breath, drew back, covering her face with her hands, while a half-forgotten harmony forced itself on her ears, and once more the Knight of the Grail waving farewell, with the mystic sadness on his face, passed before her mental vision.
"Oh, Hugh!" she moaned, "I've lost you, lost you! It isn't what I feel; it isn't what I wish! Don't you see that I can never be any man's wife, much less yours, who knows my whole life through, until I can give my own name with my love?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What do you know?" continued the man, lashed to frenzy.
"What do I know of you or you of me, either; what we are or may be?" said Philip, in the accents not only of manhood, but of a champion, the words coming from lips that once and for all had ceased to tremble. "But I do know that Poppea is a good woman and that I love her."
With a word that rang in Philip's ears for many a day and night, John Angus turned upon him as if to strike him down, even as long ago he had struck his roseleaf wife the day before she left him. ”

“ Gilbert sat at his desk, with all his little relics spread before him, the daguerreotype of Mary, a little black paper profile of Marygold, the shoes Poppea had first worn, and various photographs of her, from one taken at the county fair in company with Hugh Oldys, to the rather dramatic picture by Sarony in her first concert gown. Then putting these back into their drawer, he drew out the old ledger, read his Lincoln letters through, touching them lovingly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He saw that Poppea was moved, was trembling, and for the moment he believed he had almost won.
"Perhaps I have not yet dreamed as you say," she answered gently, "but of this I am certain: love does not come by learning, love knows and is sure." ”

“ Poppea's character in the rather fantastic performance was that of a young girl of the pastoral type, who for a part of the play personated an actress, and for this scene, in which there was a dance, she was to utilize the green muslin Perdita gown of her first appearance at Quality Hill. Of course at this season the poppies must be artificial and more abundant for stage effect, and after many protestations she was told that she simply must have her eyes pencilled and a dash of color added to her cheeks to guard against nervous pallor. ”

“ It is always the unexpected that subdues a man of John Angus's fibre, who lives by carefully made and guarded plans and prides himself on the fact of never changing his mind, and Poppea's quiet persistence, void of either impertinence, threat, or beseeching, was the last thing he had ever dreamed of encountering. ”

“ Knowing as she did all the by-ways, lanes, and pent roads of the entire township, the very last thing she thought of was to follow the highway or any of its cross-roads. So when Hugh was peering among the shadows of the walls and bushes that hedged them on either side, Poppea was crossing the graveyard toward the Northeast gate by which they had entered, flitting swiftly behind the larger stones for concealment. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Alas, no; it was a place of public entertainment where one, especially a young lady, must be very careful to do nothing unusual. So, though Miss Emmy looked as though she would not only have encouraged Poppea in her desire but gone with her if it had not been so cruelly windy, they turned their backs on the wonderful panorama, while Patrick sought an easier, if less picturesque, way home. ”

“ As Bradish Winslow's wife your word will be law, your position in society unassailable, and my cousin Hortense in particular will come grovelling to you by to-morrow, afraid of what she thinks you may know of her.
"Come to me, child, and let me protect you once for all!"
Poppea dragged herself slowly to her feet until her face was on a level with his, her eyes still fastened upon him, but the dulness was gone, and they blazed with a wild fury akin to delirium, and the color in her cheeks outdid the rouge that had not been wiped away.
"There is no one among them all to compare with you!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Shandy, Philip Angus's erstwhile nurse, had been obliged to leave him at fifteen altogether in the hands of a tutor, she had gladly, for the sake of being near the boy whom she almost worshipped, slipped into Satira's shoes as general caretaker at the post-office house, for Poppea's earnings, with her voice and as Gilbert's assistant, made such a helper possible.
No one in the village ever thought it strange that Poppea should fill a position hitherto occupied by a man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The invitation was accepted, and the moment that the official left his post behind the beehive, his entire manner changed; he talked and laughed with Gilbert in a way that dismissed a growing apprehension, complimented Satira Potts, who was substituting for the day, upon her cooking, and kept his eyes fastened upon Poppea in a way that made her color hotly and then turn rigid with resentment, saying that he had heard Harley's Mills was a very quaint town, and that there was a pretty walk by the river toward the hills. Wouldn't she be his guide that afternoon? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The matter that had brought Gilbert face to face with the rock behind which lay the pathway to futurity, was a call from a prosperous manufacturer of Bridgeton, a clean, well-built man of five and thirty, self-made and commercially intelligent, if lacking the culture that marks the man of real education. He had met Poppea at the church, where she had sung for several months the previous winter, and was sincere and outspoken in his admiration of her. ”

“ Mayhap the hearth'll need brushing," he added; "the swallows' nests always fall down of a winter."
The spare bedroom that was now Poppea's had an empty look, in spite of the bright-flowered wall paper and braided rugs. The straight white drapery at the windows, and on the old high-posted bed in which several generations had been ushered into the world, suggested ice and snow to Gilbert rather than a soft fabric. ”

“ To camp 'longside of an ice pond isn't marriage. I never did like lizards, real or human, since brother Cotton Mather put one down my neck in Sunday-school the day sister Clarissy Harlow 'sperienced religion and I screeched so folks thought I had it too."
On May Day itself, Poppea emerged from the hands of Satira Pegrim clad in the first attempts for many a year of that good woman in fashioning clothes for a child. ”

“ But he wishes to write in such a way that it will be clearly seen that he does not desire the new West Harbor position. Not that they would give it to so old a man, but it satisfies his pride not to allow himself to be merely dropped.
"Think of it, Aunt Emmy, very soon Poppea of the Post-Office must give up the name you gave her, not that she leaves it, but it will drop away from her."
"Why not take your mother's name, then?" said Jeanne Latimer. "Helen is more fitting to the woman than Poppea, though of course to us you will be Poppy for all time." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Consequently, he was quite unprepared and almost angry, when after coming into the room one day while they were practising, Jeanne had said:—
"Have a care, Stephen dear, that you do not develop a tragedy in, as you say, cultivating Philip's artistic perceptions. Will it be well, think you, that he falls entirely in love with Poppea?"
Even then Latimer would not understand. "There are many kinds of love that are far removed from tragedy," he answered.
"Yes, but to a sensitive dreamer for a woman like Poppea there is but one love," she had replied almost vehemently. ”

“ Oliver Gilbert was appalled at Poppea's indisposition, which he viewed in the light of a positive disaster. Leaving his six o'clock cup of coffee untasted, he went about putting up the early mail with shaking hands and a lack of precision that might well have called down criticism, had it been observed. Neither did he draw comfort from Mrs. Shandy's common-sense assurance that "Miss Poppy is only a bit done up with the strong heat coming all of a sudden, and having to sing before such a gathering of the quality for the first time. ”

“ That no American has lived or is fit to judge how or where they will spend their lives until they have seen and known New York," and Poppea arose to her knees in front of her admonisher, an expression of incredulity on her upturned face, and her hands clasped in a half-beseeching, half-defensive attitude. ”

“ Stephen Latimer, as soon as might be, communicated with the few people that Poppea considered had a right to know of the solving of the mystery of the name, and these were the Felton ladies, Satira and 'Lisha Potts, and Hugh Oldys. He wrote the details to Miss Felton and 'Lisha, but called upon Miss Emmy and Hugh the same evening.
If there is aught in the saying that bad news spreads like fire in dry grass, while good news requires three kindlings, then the news concerning Poppea must have been considered very bad indeed. ”