Mmm, in fact it may not be required as it's a PPP link. I was thrown by your mentioning of DHCP.
With a point to point link the traffic should reach the gateway even outside it's subnet.
You may just need to set a different monitoring IP. The gateway might not respond to ping.
Edit the PPP gateway in System > Routing > Gateways tab. Set, for example, 8.8.8.8 as the 'Monitor IP'.
Steve