OUT OF THE ASHES
Poppea's chief wonder on her return home was in finding everything
precisely as she had left it. A single winter does not witness a very
great change in place or people, but to Poppea, so much having been
crowded into those few months, it seemed as though the children of the
village should have become men and women in her absence.
By the first of May, Miss Emmy had returned to Quality Hill. Miss Felton
had decided to remain with Mr. Esterbrook in the Madison Square house
for the present, the outlook being pleasant, though the nearness of the
doctor was her first thought. As for Mr. Esterbrook himself, he had
rallied sufficiently to be put in a wheel-chair. His right side was
paralyzed and his speech as yet well-nigh unintelligible, so that his
wants were filled mainly by the intuition of Miss Elizabeth and Caleb.
In spite of his absence of the previous summer and a report that it was
to be repeated, John Angus had returned to Harley's Mills rather earlier
than usual, and Stephen Latimer, the only one of the people who had
received more than a casual greeting, said that he was looking ill, and
that he had virtually confessed to Latimer that the winter had been a
hard one to him, this being the first time that he had ever mentioned
his health.
The new venture at the Mills was beginning to see daylight, for Hugh
Oldys's inexperience was offset by the loyalty of the men who surrounded
him. There was much also in connection with the growing plant that
interested Hugh in an altruistic way, and already, in cooperation with
Stephen Latimer, he was establishing relations with his employees and
their families entirely different from those obtaining in the near-by
New England factory towns.
It was Poppea who felt herself the odd number. Within the limits of a
certain suppression of force, she had always seemed content, and her
quiet, well-directed energy had been the reverse of the restlessness
that now possessed her. She worked at everything with a feverish
intensity wholly new and very disturbing to Oliver Gilbert, whose daily
life had been unconsciously regulated by her impulse. Poppea not only
took charge of the making-up and sorting of the two heaviest mails of
the day, but had undertaken a new and gratuitous task,--the writing of
letters to the old country for those who either could not write at all
or could only pen their names and had no way of pouring out their
feelings to those they had left behind. In addition, she had announced
her intention of doing all the housework herself when Satira Potts
should leave, for although Mrs. Shandy had returned in April from her
visit home, Hugh Oldys's need of a housekeeper had taken her from the
field.
Jeanne Latimer, who had been appealed to both by Satira Potts and Miss
Emmy as the one most likely to convince Poppea of the foolishness of
such a course, ended by indorsing the girl's resolution, for she felt
the growing tension that the others did not notice, and knew well, from
her own temperament, that only what sometimes would appear to be foolish
activity keeps the nerves elastic and from snapping.
One day, in talking to Hugh Oldys about the life in the city, when he
had expressed, as far as he ever allowed himself to, the feeling of
being out of the midst of things after having once broken his way in, he
turned the matter quickly by saying to Poppea:--
"And you, how did you like the New York life? I do not mean the outside
things, the theatre, music, galleries, and shops, but the inner life
that you led of yourself?"
As he spoke they were walking down the road from Quality Hill toward the
village and the afternoon sun was sifting through the hilltops that
gradually increased in height as Moosatuck disappeared among them,--a
slender, silvery thread unravelling toward its source.
For a moment the girl stood looking afar off to where one hill, called
the mountain by the local youths who climbed it, arose above all the
others; presently she said, speaking as of a state of existence where in
passing through she had lost something of herself:--
"The life, the real life there in the city? Oh, Hugh! at first it seemed
like being on the mountain where everything is spread before one. You
are very lonely, to be sure, but still, somebody, and then suddenly you
find that you are nothing at all but the wind among the grass that falls
away as night comes!"
And reading from what she did not say rather than from what she did,
Hugh sighed and then quickened their pace, wondering what would be the
end of it all for both of them.
That night, or rather morning, the fire signal was given by one of the
factories on the Westboro road, to be repeated the next moment by the
whistle of the Owl Express due to pass at three, and which halted
presently, tolling its bell dismally. Instantly the male portion of the
village was in its boots and trousers and running toward the red light
at the north horizon. This was soon found to come from the railroad
station at Harley's Mills. 'Lisha Potts, who had arrived at the
post-office house with his team the previous evening to take his wife
home the next day, was among the first to reach the building which had
been set on fire at one end of the roof, presumably by a passing train.
Breaking into the ticket-office to haul out a small safe, and such
express packages as had not been delivered, was the work of a few
moments, while some energetic villagers, with more vigor than
discretion, rushed into the attic and threw from the dormers a lot of
old lanterns, boxes, broken bits of furniture, and like rubbish already
partly on fire, that had been accumulating there ever since the station
was built and antedating the checking system. The lanterns, of course,
were shivered to atoms in transit, while the other smouldering stuff
was promptly seized by the crowd below and dumped into the little brook
that ran along the north side of the track.
After these efforts, no attempt was made to save the building, for there
was no water-supply, or fire company other than a bucket-brigade, which
was ineffectual against the keen spring wind that was scattering the
brands over the thirsty old shingles. The burning station furnished an
hour's spectacle both for the villagers and the passengers on the Owl
Express which, being on the near track, had to wait; then shrivelled
into a cellar full of ashes crossed by a few charred beams, the fire of
which was soon changed to harmless smoke by the efforts of the
bucket-brigade. The express ceased its tooting, gave one long and two
short whistles, and proceeded on its way; while after the safe and
miscellaneous contents of the express office had been transferred to the
freight-house, the throng turned homeward to snatch a little sleep in
the couple of hours that remained before the working day began.
'Lisha Potts was so thoroughly awake that it did not seem to him worth
while to go to bed again, especially as he wished to make an early start
for home. Satira, having also been to the fire, was in a bustling mood,
so she prepared some of her famous coffee, and the pair sat down to a
four o'clock pick-up breakfast in the kitchen of the post-office house,
with many cautions of silence interspersed with little jokes and much
chuckling that belonged to a young couple on the verge of eloping rather
than to people of sedate years who were about to take up housekeeping
once more after a winter of partial separation.
Presently 'Lisha stood in the doorway facing the east, watching the sky
redden until the climax was reached in the coming up of the sun over
Moosatuck, while the swifts wheeling in and out of the stone chimney
behind him were making mimic thunder. He was undecided whether to begin
at once the grooming of his horses or take a stroll along the lane that
indirectly joined the two main roads and get a sniff of the mist-laden
morning air so necessary to those whose life has been of the open.
Choosing the latter, he had gone but a dozen rods when he met the
station-master, who had come across lots with the direct intention of
hunting him out. It seemed that the mass of smouldering débris cast from
the attic into the brook had bunched together and formed an impromptu
dam, to the extent that the little stream, unusually lusty from the
spring rains, had been diverted from its course to the switch track,
where it was now busily washing the ballast from between the ties. The
station-master's errand was to see if 'Lisha would hook up and cart the
stuff about half a mile farther down the road to where a bottomless
bog-hole conveniently consumed the refuse of the community.
Armed with a potato-digger by way of a weapon, 'Lisha was soon loading
the sodden stuff into his long wagon, which he chanced to be driving the
night before, when he had come direct from the lumber camp to the
post-office house.
"Do you reckon there's any of this old stuff that's any good to dry
out?" he asked the station-master, who was standing on the switch track
on the lookout for the milk train.
"Nope; there's no company property amongst it, only a lot of odds and
ends that's been up there since old Binks's day, and his widder didn't
see value in to move. That little cow-skin trunk I've never seen before;
it must have lain away in the dark pit behind the chimney; it might have
been a sort of a curiosity if it hadn't been scorched and bulged, but as
it is, better dump the whole lot and done with it."
Not until 'Lisha was unloading the steaming and ill-smelling mass did
the box in question excite his curiosity; then dropping it to the grass,
he finished his task and swept out his wagon before waiting to examine
the trunk.
The lock had been broken and rusted away, the strap also had
disintegrated, so that all that held it together was a loop of wire.
Jerking the top up disclosed a mass of smoking rags and a few bundles of
scorched papers. The smell of the burned hide with which it was still
partly covered nearly choked 'Lisha as he stooped to finger the
contents. He was about to gather the things together and give the trunk
a mighty toss into the swamp, when a bundle of yellow papers, swelled by
the dampness and heat, squirmed and fell apart, leaving a long envelope,
in fairly good condition, lying face upward. It was merely the sudden
movement of the papers that drew the man's eye toward them, but he
quickly went nearer for a second look, then seized upon the letter with
hands that shook so that the characters danced about like
will-o'-the-wisps before him. Yes, the address was plain enough, a
well-known name, written in a delicate, pointed hand; the sight of it
made his heart beat like a nervous woman's. Turning the letter, he saw
that the large seal on it had never been broken.
Carefully wiping it on his coat, 'Lisha put it in his pocket and began
to stir the other papers, but very carefully, for the heat and moisture
made it very easy for a careless motion to turn the bundles into pulp.
"To whomsoever's hands these papers may fall," was written across the
wrapper of the most considerable package, while even as 'Lisha read it
moisture altered the writing so that its identity vanished in a blurred
streak. Quickly realizing that unless the papers were carefully dried
and separated their purport would be lost, he tipped the water from the
trunk and closed the lid, saying apparently to Toby the near horse,
after the fashion of a woodsman who talks to his animals:--
"There's suthin queer about this trunk, but as I be the hands the papers
have fallen into, I reckon I'll look into them."
Then, as an impetus akin to an electric spark touched the mists of
conjecture that were gathering in his roomy if not systematically
ordered brain, he jumped fairly off the ground, shouting:--
"Great snakes! suppos'n' these here have something to do with the lady
baby! Maybe the box was meant to come along with her; those rags there
look as if they was once baby clothes. But how did them villains that
left her get her switched off from her goods, and why ain't the letter
'dressed to Oliver Gilbert instead of to--My Lord! but this here's a
dilemma with three horns, not the two-horned, ornery kind.
"If I take 'em to Satiry, she'll be so fussed up she'll worry 'em to
bits before read; if Oliver Gilbert or Poppy gets 'em and I'm on the
wrong track, as I've nothing yet but instinct to prove that I ain't,
it'll pull her heart out with disappointment or maybe give him a stroke,
for strokes comes frequent to folks turned of seventy. If a thing's so
red-hot you can't handle it, there's folks that by nature's meant to do
it for you, and them's the doctor, the lawyer, and the parson. I reckon
in this case the parson's the best, 'cause if the Lord has let down a
bit of his wisdom, discretion, and loving-kindness in a sheet by four
corners in this neighborhood, it's fell on Stephen Latimer.
"I'll just clip over there by the back way and leave the box and home
again before a soul's awake to spy and whisper; hey, Toby 'n Bill?"
And the horses, accustomed to respond to his cheerful address and being
keen for breakfast, replied by a doubly shrill whinny.
It was past six o'clock when 'Lisha drove into the yard of the Rectory.
Latimer had but then returned from the cottage colony at the Mills,
where he had given courage to a young mother on the road of shadows that
seemed doubly lonely in that she would leave her new-born son behind.
Latimer wore the look of having himself walked in the beyond at day
dawn, and rough 'Lisha, no less than Jeanne, was struck by the
illumination of his face.
At 'Lisha's whispered surmises concerning the contents of the trunk, he
showed no surprise, but the rapt intensity that surrounded him
increased.
"Take it to my study," was all he said; and when Jeanne came in a few
minutes later, attracted by the sound of voices, 'Lisha had gone, and
her husband sat looking at the object on the floor, his hands clasped as
though he prayed.
He read the question in her face, all the more beautiful to him that the
love and care of others had left their life-lines on the cheeks that
were once as round and dimpled as a baby's. Telling the bare facts, he
added: "Something was struggling to make known that this was coming, for
all last night the face of the new-born babe I christened was Poppea's
and the other face that of her mother. The day will come, Jeanne, when
there will no longer be anything unnatural about the happenings that we
call visions and miracles, because the knowledge will have come to us to
understand them."
Then after breakfasting together in the sweet spring morning, in quiet
confidence, only separated in degree from the other couple who ate at
the post-office house before the dawn, Stephen Latimer lay down to take
some open-eyed rest before examining the trunk. When he began the work,
he cautioned Jeanne to refuse him absolutely to all callers. Then,
provided with blotters, a thin paper-knife, and warm irons, he spread a
sheet upon the study floor and raised the water-soaked lid.
All through the morning he worked, separating and drying. At noon, when
Jeanne opened the door, he did not turn his head, and setting the tray
of luncheon where he could see it, she closed the door again without
speaking. When supper-time came and she again entered, the papers were
arranged upon his desk in tidy piles, and he was reading. He stretched
his hand out for the cup of tea she held and still kept at his task.
It was after eight o'clock when he called her, and white and exhausted
as he looked, she saw at once that he had reached some definite
conclusion. Begging him to take at least a bowl of soup, he assented,
and then drew her to him on the seat before the open window. Holding her
hand as if the tender grasp of it would focus and harmonize his
thoughts, he sat a moment silent, as though he had lost the gift of
words.
"Was Poppea's secret hid among those papers?" Jeanne finally asked,
unable to restrain her curiosity any longer. "And if it was, do tell me
quickly and simply who she is, and then the why of it after. You don't
realize, Stevie, what the strain of this long day has been upon a
woman."
"It can be told quickly, but for the rest it's not a simple matter,"
replied Stephen, trying with his tired brain to sort his ideas and put
them in sequence. "The papers in this trunk are various family letters,
the certificate of Poppea's birth and baptism and some of her mother's
diaries--"
"Yes, yes! but _who_ was her mother?" cried Jeanne, the uncontrollable
impetuosity of youth returning to her, so that she rose to a kneeling
position on the window-seat and almost shook her husband, so vigorously
did she grasp his shoulder.
"Helen Dudleigh, John Angus's first wife; she whom Gilbert calls 'the
little roseleaf.'"
"Helen Dudleigh!" Jeanne repeated in an indrawn voice. "Then Poppea can
have no legal father, because John Angus's first wife merely left him
and there was never a divorce. Perhaps this was the reason for her
going, you know none was ever given; but no one ever dreamed that any
fault lay with her."
"Yes, it was the reason of her going, yet no one need ever dream of
legal wrong, for John Angus himself is Poppea's father."
Jeanne fell back, and then, after searching her husband's face and
reading there that he was speaking the unmetaphorical truth, she drew a
low chair to where she might continue to look at him and whispered:--
"Go on!"
"There is much detail among those papers that belongs to Poppea alone,
but this is the brief story that I have drawn from them.
"Over thirty years ago, John Angus was travelling on the continent when,
at the same hotel where he was stopping, he met an English artist,
Walter Dudleigh, who was staying there, both on account of his health,
and because his young daughter Helen was studying singing.
"Dudleigh was a widower of good birth but of frail health and uncertain
means. That Angus was at once struck by the girl's delicate beauty--she
was then only eighteen--some of these letters prove, and after hearing
her sing at a fête of flowers given by the conservatory, in which she
took the part of a poppy, he proposed to her, or rather to her father
for her. The artist, knowing that he had only a short life before him
and no one with whom to leave his child, urged on the match, and as a
wedding gift to his son-in-law, painted a miniature of Helen as she had
appeared at the fête with the poppies in her hair, having the fanciful
name of Poppea engraved in the locket with the date.
"This is, of course, the miniature that hung about Poppea's neck when
she was found.
"Dudleigh died of hemorrhage of the lungs almost before the honeymoon
was over, leaving the girl an unexpected two thousand pounds that came
from her mother, and Angus soon after returned to this country with his
girl wife.
"From the first she seems to have had a hard time of it. An emotional
child with an artistic temperament, thrown not only among strange people
and customs, but married to a man who always commanded and never
explained, and who considered that implicit affection, if it might be so
called, was her legal duty, a sort of commercial article that he had
bought, and nothing to be either won or kept by consideration or
tenderness. She, chilled and lonely, evidently did not make the marked
social success he desired, and his constant reproach was that she bore
him no children, for John Angus seems to have had an exaggerated idea of
the political importance of founding a family, so often held by those
of no especial ancestry.
"Ten years wore away, and Helen Angus, still under thirty, had faded to
the timorous, trembling shadow that we knew, when one summer, the love
of youth and life taking a final flicker, in John Angus's absence she
came out of her seclusion and took part in some of the Feltons'
entertainments, and renewed her habit of going to church, which had
dropped away. At this time it chanced that Mr. Esterbrook's nephew, a
young army officer, met her, danced with her, and showed her some
courtesies, but no more than any woman might receive. Nevertheless, on
his return, Angus upbraided her for going out, and upon her maintaining
her own defence for the first time in many years, he struck her
furiously and left the house, not returning for more than a week.
"During this period of outraged feeling and humiliation, she discovered
that at last a child was to be born to her, and resolving that John
Angus should not have it in his power to torture another human being as
he had herself, she determined to go away, leaving a letter saying that
the price of her silence concerning his treatment culminating in the
blow was that he should not try to find her. Public censure on his
private conduct was not what was desired by Angus in his prayer-meeting
and political purity pose, so he seems to have heeded her request.
"Helen Angus went directly to the little village in Hampshire on the
Isle of Wight where she had spent her childhood and sought out Betty
Randal, a woman of fifty, who had also been her nurse and managed their
little household prior to her father's going abroad. With Betty she
arranged not only to care for her during the coming crisis, but if a
daughter should be born, to keep her as long as her little sum of money
lasted and to teach her to earn her living and thus make it possible for
her to be free from her father if she so desired on learning her
mother's story.
"A girl was born and duly baptized Helen Dudleigh, by the rector of St.
Boniface's near Bonchurch, and the mother, worn out by contending
emotions more than disease, lived to see her daughter three months old,
and then was laid away, according to a death notice in a Hampshire
paper. This notice was in an envelope lettered by an illiterate hand and
is dated two weeks after the last record in Helen Angus's diary. That
she knew that she could not live is certain, for all the written
evidence was carefully prepared and the writing is decipherable in spite
of time and the blur of moisture.
"One package contains Helen Angus's marriage certificate and the
certificate of Poppea's birth and baptism; another her diaries and some
letters marked, 'Not to be read by my daughter until she is either
eighteen or forced to return to her father.' And then a single thick
letter (the one that had attracted 'Lisha Potts), sealed and addressed
to John Angus, and underneath in brackets the words, 'To be delivered in
case he should dispute my daughter's paternity.'"
As Latimer paused to wipe away the drops of sweat that stood upon his
forehead, he laid the letter on the table beside his wife and both
looked at the yellow paper and blurred writing with a feeling of awe at
the living evidence of the poor little roseleaf, wife who, beneath their
very eyes, had suffered so much in silence and then as silently gone
away to die. Hot tears trickled between the fingers that Jeanne held
before her face, but after the relief they brought, questions again
formed themselves.
"But how did the child come here so soon and why was she left at Oliver
Gilbert's instead of the Angus house?" asked Jeanne, "and how could the
little trunk have been hidden away so long?"
"The last question might be easily answered," said Stephen. "It was left
in the height of the excited war times when the checking of baggage was
not as rigid as it is now. In fact, merely the name of the village may
have been on the box, which was put aside until called for and presently
forgotten."
"As to how Poppea came here, was separated from her possessions, and
left at the wrong door, there we have another and unsolved mystery that
must be learned from the man who left her, the man with the scar on his
hand."
"Was it the wrong door after all, Stephen? Has she not been protected
and loved as her mother would have wished until she knows what love is,
even if she has suffered in a lesser way?"
"Yes, Jeanne, in one way; but do you realize, at the same time, in what
a light she has learned to regard her father, and that a knowledge of
his unrelenting spite is almost a part of her being? In all this is her
mother justified, but how inextricably it complicates the future and
its relations to every one concerned."
"How and when shall you tell her, Stephen? To-night?"
"No, I am much too worn. I will write her a brief note at once, saying
that papers have come to me concerning the identity of her parents, and
asking her to come here at once. She will get the note in the morning
mail and be able to accustom herself to the contents without the effort
of speech."
"Why do you not go to her?"
"Because Poppea will need to be alone with her mother's papers for a
space. It would be too trying if she should hear it first amid the
confusion at the office or in the company of any one, even of Oliver
Gilbert."
"Is it not strange, Stephen, that 'Lisha Potts, who was the first to
open the door that night, should have been the one to bring this all
about?"
"Yes, Jeanne, more than strange; we seem to be floating in mystery. No,
I cannot sleep yet; I must let the organ speak to me. Come into the
church for a little while, dearest, and sit beside me while I play."