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Leaning against the outside of the brick wall, too stunned to join in my
companions' stampede, I yet did not lose my senses. Neither did I cry
out or whimper. Children have gone into convulsions and become idiotic
for less cause. I was phenomenally healthy, and, as I have said, no
coward. Before the hindmost deserter gained the draw-bars my reason was
on the return path. I had the signal advantage above my comrades of not
believing in ghosts. My father had asserted to me positively, once and
again, that no such things existed, and put himself to much trouble to
explain natural phenomena that are often misinterpreted by the ignorant
and superstitious into supernatural manifestations. His orders were
strict that the servants should never retail ghost stories in our
hearing; and he was obeyed by the elder negroes. Mam' Chloe, whatever
may have been her reserved rights of private judgment, backed him up
dutifully with the epigram:--
"Folks that's gone to the bad place _can't_ get out to come back, an'
them that's in heaven don't _want_ to."
The cry I had heard certainly sounded like the weak wail of Cousin Mary
Bray's skinny little baby, but God and the dear angels would never let
the helpless, tiny mite wander back to earth alone. My mother had said
to me, last night, that it would never cry any more.
"It was in pain all the while it was here," she reminded me. "It never
awoke that it did not begin to cry. Think how sweet it must be for it
not to suffer now. I think that God sent for it to come to heaven
because He was so sorry for it."
Strength flowed into my soul with the recollection. My mother never said
what was not exactly true. Happy, safe, and saving faith of childhood in
a parent's wisdom, a parent's word, a parent's power!
Curious, rather than frightened, I stepped over Musidora's grave, and
hurried around to the locked gate. Two unsodded mounds were near the
entrance. One was long, and one short. Stretched upon this last was
something that moved slightly and cried again, yet more piteously, when
I called to it. The sight sent me flying like a flushed partridge
through the Old Orchard to the garden fence, over it and up the middle
walk of the garden. While yet afar off, I saw my father standing there
talking with the gardener. Evidently the scattered horde had not spread
an alarm. My father turned at my loud panting, and eyed me with
astonishment. Without pausing to consider why he should be amazed, I
caught hold of him and shrieked my news:--
"Father! father! it is Alexander the Great come back to look for Lucy!"
My father seldom scolded. He more rarely punished without inquiry. He
was stern now and spoke sharply.
"What is the meaning of this nonsense, Molly? You are forever getting up
some new sensation. There is such a thing as having too much
'make-believe.' I would rather have a little sensible truth now and
then."
"But, father, really and truly--" chokingly, for his words were as drawn
swords to my loving heart.
He pushed my hand away from his arm.
"When you look and behave less like a crazy child, I will hear what you
have to say. Where did you get those things?"
I wished that the ground would open and swallow me away from his cold,
contemptuous eye. I had forgotten my ridiculous costume entirely. The
shame and humiliation of having exposed myself to his just criticism,
the added disgrace of the grinning gardener's enjoyment of the figure I
had cut--the absurd coal-scuttle of a bonnet hanging down my back, the
black silk apron streaming behind me like a half-inflated
balloon--overwhelmed me with speechless confusion. I hung my head in an
agony.
"Where did you get them, I say?" repeated my father.
"Up in the lumber-room," I stammered, faintly and sheepishly.
"Go, put them back where you found them! Then, come to me. As I was
saying, James--"
He went on with his directions to the gardener.
I slunk away, forgetful of everything except my personal discomfiture,
dodging from one clump of shrubbery to another, lest I should be seen
from the windows of the house, going almost on all-fours in exposed
stretches of walk or garden-beds, and so making my retreat to the side
door of the north wing. I had stripped off the hateful masquerade
habiliments and rolled them into a compact bundle, but anybody who met
me would ask what I was carrying under my arm, and I could bear no more
that day. Unable to contain myself a minute longer, I sank down in the
solitude of the steep staircase leading to the lumber-room, and had my
cry--if not out--so nearly to the end that I felt adequate to making my
judge see reason,--if only he would not look at me as if he were ashamed
of his daughter! Was it very wrong to take those things on the sly?
Would I be punished for it? Had he told my mother yet? And did Mary
'Liza know about it? I could never, never tell her that I had worn the
_nasty_ bonnet and cloak as mourning to Musidora's funeral. I would be
whipped first.
Crying again in anticipation of the dilemma, I trudged slowly up the
steps, and pushed back the door, which stuck fast again although I did
not recollect shutting it.
"Just's if somebody was leaning against it!" said I, pettishly, and
flung my whole weight against the lower panel.
The door flew back and I fell headlong, face downward, on the floor, the
bundle flying ahead of me clear to the hearth. I picked myself up,
rubbed my smarting palms and, in a vile humor, recovered the detestable
cause of all the trouble. I boxed the lop-ears of the bonnet, and gave
the apron a vicious shake, in restoring them to their respective pegs.
Then, I backed down from the chair on which I had been standing, and
started for the door. A feeble cry stopped me as if a shot had passed
through me.
The room was in afternoon shadow, and the blinds of the larger of the
two windows had blown shut. The cry quavered out again, and at the same
instant I saw--or verily believed that I saw with my natural
eyes--Cousin Mary Bray seated in the rocking-chair between the hearth
and the window, holding a baby in her arms. She was rocking gently back
and forth, her face was pale and peaceful, and she wore a sort of dim
gray dress. Thus much I had seen when my father called loudly to me from
the bottom of the steps:--
"Molly! what are you doing up there? Come down directly! do you hear?"
The apparition disappeared on the instant, and as I moved toward the
door, I stumbled over something soft that mewed miserably. In a second I
had it in my arms,--a rack of bones covered with muddy, tangled gray
fur,--and rushed down the stairs.
"I told you so, father! don't you see? It is Alexander the Great. Now,
isn't it?"
Will it be believed that the commotion attendant upon the recognition of
the wanderer, the talk, conjectures and questions, the nursing and
feeding, and cosseting the creature who was at the point of death from
starvation and fatigue--put all thought of revealing what I had beheld
in the haunted chamber out of my head, until, when I recalled it in all
its vividness, I simply could not speak of it? It was all like a swift,
bad dream, the telling of which might revive the unpleasant sensation
it created in passing. I do not pretend to explain a child's reserve on
subjects which have gone very far into the deeps of a consciousness that
never lets them go. Perhaps the solution is partly in the poverty of a
vocabulary which lags painfully behind the development of thought and
emotion. Certain it is that I was a woman grown before I ever confided
to a living soul what I thought sat in the rocking-chair in the haunted
room, brooding peacefully above a quieted baby.
Lucy's cat--guided by what instinct only his Creator and ours knows--had
found his way to her grave over two hundred miles of fen, field, and
forest. Not finding her there, he had tracked me to the room where she
had last played with him. When carried to other parts of the house, he
cried piteously all day and all night. When the north wing was locked
against him, he went back to the grave and could not be coaxed away.
Finally, my mother proposed that he be allowed to stay there, until
cold weather. He was the plantation-pet all summer, growing plump, but
never playful, with nourishing food and rest. His meals were sent to him
twice a day, but he partially supported himself by catching birds and
field-mice in the burying-ground, which he never left. We got used to
his presence there after a while, and his habit of patrolling the top of
the wall, several times a day, for exercise, or under the impression
that he was guarding the short green mound where he slept every night.
As the winter approached repeated efforts were made to tempt him to the
house, and when they were ineffectual my father took him there in his
own arms. The cat refused food and sleep, keeping the household awake
with his cries, and in the morning flew so savagely at his jailers that
we were obliged to let him go.
The fiercest tempest known in mid-Virginia for forty years beset us on
the anniversary of Lucy's death, and raged for three days. When the
drifts in the graveyard melted, we found Alexander the Great dead at his
post.
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