A Scarlet Poppy and Other Stories

BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD

NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1894

Harper’s American Story-Tellers.

16mo, Cloth, Ornamental.

THE WATER GHOST, AND OTHERS. By John Kendrick Bangs. Illustrated. $1 25.

NOWADAYS, AND OTHER STORIES. By George A. Hibbard. Illustrated by the Author. $1 25.

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Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.

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Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

A SCARLET POPPY

[2]

A SCARLET POPPY

“It was only a quarter of a dollar, Mark.”

“Only a quarter of a dollar! It isn’t that quarter I complain of; it is its multiplication. Four of them make a dollar. How often have I told you, Helena, that the little foxes—”

“Oh, so often that I’d like to be in at the death of them all, and hang up the last brush on the wall!”

“Very likely. That’s quite in character. I fancy there’d be no wall to hang it on by that time, though. That’s all,” pushing back his coffee-cup.

“How perfectly absurd you are, Mark! Because I buy a scarlet paper poppy with a black curled paper heart, eight inches in diameter, to hang outside a lamp-shade, and pay twenty-five cents for it, you are brought [4]to the verge of bankruptcy and I am to be reduced to beggary!”

“It isn’t the poppy at all. It’s—”

“It seems to me that I might commit that extravagance every day if I wished and not ruin you. Three hundred and sixty-five quarters—ninety-one dollars a year. How poor you must be if ninety-one dollars a year can put you into insolvency! But I don’t wish. I—”

“It isn’t the poppy at all”—his face growing purple.

“Oh no, it isn’t the poppy; it’s the twenty-five cents. It isn’t this poppy; it’s the next one,” clasping her pretty hands behind her head, as she leaned back in an insolence of attitude.

“It isn’t the poppy at all; it’s the principle,” cried the exasperated Mr. Dunmore at last, raising his voice so that it could be heard over his wife’s treble, and over the screaming of the wild March gale outside.

“Oh, of course,” said his wife then, “if you choose to talk to me in that tone, it’s the end of argument. I can’t roar, and the strong lungs have it. But it’s very ungentlemanly [5]and unhandsome. It’s quite as mean as grudging me the original twenty-five cents for a decoration to my lamp-shade.”

“Helena, I can’t allow you to go on in this way.”

“You can’t allow me! As if I were going to ask you to allow me! I should suppose it was time you entered sufficiently into the spirit of the age, Mark, to know that wives nowadays are not slaves. They are not allowed or disallowed. And they can spend twenty-five cents without asking; especially if it’s their own,” added Mrs. Dunmore, with sharp emphasis, her great blue eyes sparkling in a way that great blue eyes can on occasion. “Go, lie down, Sauveur!” as the big St. Bernard, aware that something was wrong, came and laid his nose on her arm.

“Very well, then, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore, with great severity; “since you drive me to it—when it is your own.”

“Really?” said the young woman, with a severity quite as cold as his own. “How long since my own income ceased to be mine? I don’t think my poor father when he left [6]me my little property ever had an idea that any one was going to deny its being my own. ‘Free from marital control,’ he said,” cried Mrs. Dunmore, triumphantly. “‘Free from marital control,’” she repeated, with force. “Does that mean that you, or that I, have the spending of it?”

“You, assuredly, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore, with more calmness. “How many times this year have you had the spending of it already?”

“I must say, Mr. Dunmore, I fail to understand you.”

“I will enlighten you. When you made your Christmas presents on a scale entirely incommensurate with our means, and I remonstrated, you said you were going to pay for them all yourself out of your January dividends. But when your January dividends came in, the bill for your new cloak came also and took the whole sum.”

“Most men pay for their wives’ cloaks themselves,” said Mrs. Dunmore, with some bitterness.

“Not when their wives order four-hundred-dollar cloaks, and they can only afford [7]one-hundred-dollar ones without running into debt.”

“You have brought me up here into this frigid zone of a climate, Mr. Dunmore, and I certainly expected before I came to be clothed sufficiently to meet the rigor of the weather.”

“You are,” said her husband. “And you were before you spent the whole of your January dividends to pay for a seal-skin cloak. However, that’s neither here nor there. It became necessary then, after the system of genteel beggary in our civilization, to make Laura Kerna a wedding present.”

“We didn’t have any wedding presents ourselves, I suppose!” said the wife, witheringly.

“And I thought one of the twelve ladles that were given to us would do.”

“The idea! So perfectly disgraceful! Some men haven’t any sentiment,” addressing the universe.

“And you insisted on nothing less than a gold-mounted vinaigrette.”

“Dear knows she’ll need it, if all husbands are alike.”

[8]“And you would pay for it out of your January dividends,” said her husband, not noticing her interpolations. “But close upon that came my birthday, and you wished me to make myself a present of a new watch; and when I said it was impossible, you said you would pay for it out of your dividend.”

“If I ever heard of such unparalleled meanness!”

“A little later, when we were getting a fresh carpet for the drawing-room, and I thought Brussels would do, and you declared for Wilton, you assured me that you were to pay for that out of your dividend.”

“Well, if I couldn’t carpet my own house, I wouldn’t twit my wife for doing it.”

“You said the same about the India rug you ordered home without consultation, at two hundred and fifty dollars. It is a beauty, of course; I admit your taste; it is soft as velvet, and colored with sunbeams. But I knew if I paid for that I must go without paying for something else; and you said you would pay for it yourself with your dividend.”

“Pshaw!”

“You must remember that you wanted [9]some moonstones, when they came into fashion; for luck, you said; and about the same time a tall piano-lamp; and, not long after, a big Limoges vase; and in spite of my reluctance—”

“Reluctance!”

“You got them all, and charged them to your dividend again.”

“But, Mark—”

“Pardon me! The next thing that arose was the necessity of educating that young lad in art; and as I didn’t have that money to spare, you drew the money from the house-keeping fund, and said you would replace it from your dividend. Then you started to go down to the city and attend the Friday afternoon concerts, for which your ticket cost thirty-five dollars, and that of a companion thirty-five more; and when you were snowed in on the train, in just such a storm as this, if there ever was such a storm before, and obliged to have a doctor, and a set of bills—ever so little ashamed, perhaps, that your folly had brought about such unlooked-for expense—you said you could settle all that with your dividend. [10]How many times do you think you have used up your dividend money already? Do you think, this March morning, there is twenty-five dollars or twenty-five cents of it left? And don’t you know that my one wish in life is to keep out of debt, that if I am called off suddenly there may be something to take care of you with?—you who spend recklessly many times your own income

every year, and would mine if you could get at it! I shall make a will the next time I go to town, Helena,” said Mr. Dunmore solemnly, “in which I shall put every dollar of my property in trust; for you are not fit to be charged with a bank-note. Money melts out of your hands like morning dew, and you may be the most beautiful and winning woman in the world, but in money matters you are a child. You never go into a shop without telling the dealer how cheap his goods are, and asking him if he can’t take a little more.”

“I won’t listen to another word you say,” cried Mrs. Helena, springing to her feet. “I knew you were so careful as to be canny. I never knew a person with Scotch blood in him that wasn’t. So proud of your Scotch [11]blood as you are! But I didn’t suppose you looked askance at your own wife’s doctor’s bills. I’ll pay them myself out of my very next dividend, that I will! I never imagined you wanted me to stay stived up in a prison-house, going without pleasure or society. If it costs you so much more than you can afford to keep me, I can go to my aunt Potter’s. And I will go, this very day.”

“Hardly,” said Mr. Dunmore, looking out of the window at the storm, whose clouds of flying snow hid even the great mountain shapes from view.

“I don’t know why the storm should stop me. It isn’t any colder than my husband’s heart,” said Mrs. Dunmore. “And I’d as lief hear it now as hear you. It will be April and spring to-morrow, and no storm to be seen, but it will always be winter in your heart. You can leave your money, that you treasure so much more than you do my happiness, where you please. I don’t want any of it, or anything else that belongs to you. I wish I was dead and out of your way! You can keep it for your second wife to spend, if she can get hold of it, which is [12]more than I can do. I never want to look upon your face again! If there’s anything in the world detestable to me it’s meanness and stinginess and parsimony and miserliness and—” And here, words failing her and tears coming in their stead, Mrs. Dunmore rushed from the room and sought the seclusion of her bedchamber, where she hid her head in the pillows and cried herself into hysterics. And Mr. Dunmore, feeling that the house was far too hot to hold him, strode into the hall, and put on his great

fur overcoat, and buckled the hood about his ears, and slammed the door behind him, refusing to wait for the stout cob that usually bore him, and going out afoot into a storm that was no fiercer than the one raging within him at that moment.

A pretty sort of a home he had! his thoughts ran. The hospitality of the tempest was gentleness beside it. A shrew and a vixen and a spendthrift for a wife, who cared nothing for him but what she could get out of him, and made no acknowledgment of that; who scorned and flouted and fleered him, had no regard for his feelings, called [13]him—called him names! What a fool he was to submit to it! Why didn’t he send her—why didn’t he send her back to her aunt Potter’s, and sell out, and clear out himself? This life he lived was—it was no use saying what it was! It was the life to come, and he had been damned into it! He wished he had never seen her face! What an idiot a man was to give up his peace, his liberty, his pleasure, his everything, for the sake of companionship with a woman who thwarted him at every turn, in his feelings, his wishes, his will, till there was no peace in the house, and a struggle with the wildest storm that ever blew was rest, was relief from home and her! And in a white heat of angry commotion he plunged along, he hardly knew and hardly

cared whither, although really bound for the upper fields, in order to give some directions to the shepherds of the great sheep farm he carried on. And the wind roared above him and about him unheeded as, with head bent forward and hands clenched in his pockets, he labored on; and the snow whirled and fell and rose again, and built up its fantastic drifts on either side, and, occupied in his [14]bitter musings, he saw and heard none of it.

And none of it did Mrs. Helena hear or see, with her head buried in her pillows, crying now partly with pity of her own wretchedness, partly in the subsidence of her anger at she hardly knew what, and partly with the unspent force of her nervous agitation. Occasionally she sat up and twisted the long coil of her fallen hair, and enjoyed a sensation as if she were in some manner wringing her hands and tearing her hair. She called herself the most miserable woman under the sun, condemned to a living prison, bound to a man who detested her, and whom she—yes, whom she detested! A man? A brute! Oh, why had she ever given herself up to such a fate? What was there she had seen in him in the first place? Why hadn’t she divined his sordid and tyrannical nature then? Why had she let herself be overcome by his false promises, his smile, his face that used to seem to her like the face of a god, and now was that of a satyr—yes, of a satyr! A great bluff wind-blown satyr! How infamously he had talked to her about her dividend! [15]He grudged her the clothes she put

on; she was a burden to him, and he made her feel it, and, quite unconscious of the uncommonly congenial feeling in this regard, she wished she had never laid eyes on him. It was a shame for a man to treat his wife so! And there was more crying and wringing of hands; and then the great shoulder of the gale came pushing against the house so it startled her and made her shudder, and she lay back silent a moment, and then bunched the pillow about her ears, and in five minutes, worn out with her temper and her tantrum, was fast asleep.

And Mr. Dunmore, with the gale whistling about his ears, ploughed his way along the hillside to the upper farms, more to satisfy himself that the sheep were all folded than for anything else, now and then shaking the snow from his shoulders as a shaggy dog shakes off water-drops, and again bending his head and working onward, the new snow already ankle-deep and drifting wildly with the wind that at every gust seemed to blow more fiercely. At last he reached the little house of the shepherds, all glowing with his [16]successful struggle with the storm, and half forgetful of the rage with which he at first dashed into it; quite forgetful before his business with the shepherds was entirely finished, having disburdened his mind of all that had been weighing on it, feeling in a somewhat forgiving mood towards his irate little wife, who, after all, was not so much to blame, he said to himself; only a pretty woman a little spoiled, who liked to have pretty things about her. He would go into town himself to-morrow, and get her that Royal Worcester she had been longing for, the

poor child! Perhaps he had been too severe: it was the coffee—strong coffee always did fire up his nerves. A man was a wretch to talk so to a woman, anyway. And thus rambling on in his thoughts, he took the path down the hill, hardly remembering the tempest that hurtled round him, until all at once he felt as if it were making him its rallying-point, and found that it was all he could do, by summoning his strength, to stand up against it, while it sifted its fine icy particles under his coat and in about his neck and shoulders and ears in [17]a way to make him eager to get out of its reach. No matter; a storm on the last day of March couldn’t amount to much, even up in these New Hampshire hills. It would soon blow over. He would leave the exposed and winding highway, take the short-cut across the fields and down through the sheltered piece of wood, and so get home in time for lunch. He rather pictured Helena to himself, as forgiving as he was, dressed in her pretty tea-gown of green plush and white and gold, waiting for him at the head of a lunch-table set with especial nicety.

But Mr. Dunmore made a mistake when he left the open road. Let it wind about as it would, it had its protected sides and places, and at the end arrived. But these pathless wastes of the open pastures, snowed over and utterly unprotected, arrived nowhere. Turning his back once or twice on some broader pressure of the blast, he failed to orient himself; he could not see a rod before him for the driving snow; he ought by this time to be near the end, but there was nothing of the little piece of wood to be seen [18]or guessed; he attempted to go back and recover the main road; he paused at length, a mere atom in all the wide whirl and bluster of the storm, uncertain if the way led to left or right, before him or behind. He began to feel some slight apprehension then. He remembered all the dreadful stories he had read of Highland shepherds and their sheep in mountain snow-storms; and all at once he saw that he, too, in the bitterest blowing gale of the winter, had lost his way upon the hill. Very cold and very tired, half-desperate too, he thought a moment of sitting down to

rest. But that would never do, and he took heart of grace and plodded and struggled on, only succeeding in making sure that he was going down the hill and not up, but not at all sure that he was not skirting the hill to arrive at the stream and the houseless banks of the other side of the mountain; not at all sure either that in the dizzy blindness of the snow the next step might not lead him over some precipitous rock and out into nothingness. He paused to thrill at the thought, and then he lurched on again. At any rate, his only salvation lay in keeping in motion; [19]it was of no use to halloo; although he tried it once or twice, the gale blew his voice back down his throat and made him feel a more powerless mote than before, and he plunged along conscious that he must have wandered wide of the mark, and that the day must be drawing to a close. Helena, in her pretty gown at that pretty luncheon-table, began to fade out of his mental view. She had waited for him, doubtless, hoping he would come back in better humor. She had forgiven him. She would be

thinking he was still in a rage with her. She—she might never know that he had forgiven her.

For Mr. Dunmore was now acknowledging to himself what he had only dimly and unconsciously felt before, that it was doubtful if the night did not overtake him up here in this pathless wilderness of snow and wind and fury, and bring death to him upon its wings. But not if he could help it. His heart beat up strongly with his determination, and he swung his arms and shook his shoulders, and still waded downward through the drifts. It was hard to move one foot before [20]the other in the heavy snow-fall; hard to breathe in the force of the gale; impossible to hear anything but the resonance of the great gusts through the thick sky; impossible to see before him, the light growing less, not with the gale alone now, but with the declining day. Night was coming on, and he was lost in all the tumult of the tempestuous elements.