Aunt Olivia recognized the keenness of it to the child. She worried a
little about it; it reminded her of that other time of worry when
Rebecca Mary and she had nearly starved. Sheets and roosters—there were
so many worries in the world.
That other time she went to the minister, this time to the minister's
wife. One afternoon she went and carried her work.
“You know about children,” she began, without loss of time. “What
happens when they lose their appetite over a dead rooster?”
“Thomas Jefferson?” breathed the minister's wife, softly.
“Yes—he's dead and buried, and she's mourning for him. I set three tarts
on for dinner today, and I set three tarts AWAY after dinner. Rebecca
Mary is fond of tarts. What should you do if it was Rhoda?”
“Oh—-Rhoda—why, I think I should get her another rooster, or a cat or
something, to get her mind off. But Rhoda isn't Rebecca Mary—”
Aunt Olivia folded up her work. She got up briskly.
“They've got a white rooster down to the Trumbullses',” she said. “I
guess I better go right down now; Tony Trumbull is liable to be at home
just before supper. I'm very much obliged to you for your advice.”
“Did I advise her?” murmured the minister's wife, watching the resolute
swing of Aunt Olivia's skirts as she strode away. “I was going to tell
her that what would cure my Rhoda might not cure Rebecca Mary. Well, I
hope it will work,” but she was sure it wouldn't. She had grown a little
acquainted with Rebecca Mary.
It was the new, white rooster crowing, instead of the soul of Thomas
Jefferson. Rebecca Mary found out after she had dressed and gone
downstairs. Soon after that she appeared in the kitchen doorway with an
armful of snowy feathers. Aunt Olivia, over her muffin pans, eyed her
with secret delight. The cure was working sooner than she had dared to
expect.
“This is the Tony Trumbullses' rooster; if I hurry I guess I can carry
him back before breakfast,” Rebecca Mary said from the doorway. “I'll
run, Aunt Olivia.”
“Carry him back!” Aunt Olivia's muffin spoon dropped into the bowl of
creamy batter. One look at Rebecca Mary convinced her that the cure had
not begun to work. Imperceptibly she stiffened. “He ain't anybody's but
mine. I've bought him,” she explained, briefly. “You set him down and
feed him with these crumbs—he ain't human if he don't like cloth-o'-gold
cake.”
But the child in the doorway, after gently releasing the great fellow,
drew away quietly. The second look at her face convinced Aunt Olivia
that the cure would never work.
“You feed him, please, Aunt Olivia,” Rebecca Mary said; “I—couldn't.
I'll stir the muffins up.”
Nothing further was ever said about keeping the Tony Trumbull rooster.
He pecked about the place in unrestrained freedom until the morning work
was done, and then Aunt Olivia carried him home in her apron.
“I concluded not to keep him—he'd likely be homesick,” she said, with a
qualm of conscience; for the big, white fellow had certainly shown no
signs of homesickness. But she could not explain and reveal the secret
places of Rebecca Mary's heart. Aunt Olivia, too, had her ideas of
loyalty.
In the diary there occurred brief mention of the episode: “The Tony
Trumbull rooster has been here. I could eat him—that's how I feel about
the Tony Trumbull rooster.
“I never could have eatten Tomas Jefferson but once and then it would
have broken my heart but I was starveing. Aunt Olivia took him back.”
Thomas Jefferson's grave was kept green. Rebecca Mary took her stents
down into the orchard and sat beside it, sadly stitching. She kept it
heaped with wild flowers and poppies from her own rows. Aunt Olivia's
flowers she never touched. The bitterness of Aunt Olivia's not being
sorry—perhaps being glad—rankled in her sore little soul. It would have
helped—oh yes, it would have helped.
Aunt Olivia worried on. It seemed to her that all Rebecca Mary's meals
in one meal would not have kept a kitten alive—and that reminded her.
She would try a kitten. The minister's wife had said a rooster or a cat.
A white kitten, she decided, though she could scarcely have told why.
The kitten was better, but it was not a cure. Rebecca Mary took the
little creature to her breast and told it her grief for Thomas Jefferson
and cried her Thomas Jefferson tears into its soft, white fur. In that
way, at any rate, it was a success.
“Maybe I shall love you some day,” she whispered, “but I can't yet,
while Thomas Jefferson is fresh. He's all I have room for. He was my
intimate friend—when your intimate friend is dead you can't love anybody
else right away.” But she apologized to the little cat gently—she felt
that an apology was due it.
“You see how it is, little, white cat,” she said. “I shall have to ask
you to wait. But if I ever have a second love, I promise it will be you.
You're a great DEAL comfortinger than that Tony Trumbull rooster! I
could love you this minute if I had never loved Thomas Jefferson. Do you
feel like waiting?”
The little, white cat waited. And Aunt Olivia waited. She made tempting
dishes for Rebecca Mary's meals, and put a ruffle into her nightgown
neck and sleeves—Rebecca Mary had always yearned for ruffles.
“I don't believe she sees 'em. She don't know they're there,” groaned
Aunt Olivia, impotently. “She don't see anything but Thomas Jefferson,
and I don't know as she ever will!”
But Rebecca Mary saw the ruffles and fluted them between her brown
little fingers admiringly. She tried once or twice to go and thank Aunt
Olivia, and got as far as her bedroom door. But the bitterness in her
heart stayed her hand from turning the knob. If Aunt Olivia had only
known that being sorry was the right thing to do! Strangely enough,
though Rebecca Mary's view of the matter never occurred to Aunt Olivia,
she came by and by to being sorry on her own account. Perhaps she had
been all along, underneath her disquietude for Rebecca Mary's sorrow.
Perhaps when she thought how quiet it had grown mornings, and what a
good chance there was now for a supplementary nap, she was being sorry.
When she remembered that she need not buy wheat now and yellow corn, and
that the cookies would last longer—perhaps then she was sorry. But she
did not know it. It seemed to come upon her with the nature of a
surprise on one especial day. She had been working her un-“scrached,”
untrampled flower-beds.
“My grief!” she ejaculated, suddenly, as if just aware of it. “I declare
I believe I miss him, too! I believe to my soul I'd like to hear him
crow—I wouldn't mind if he came strutting in here!” And “in here” was
Aunt Olivia's beloved garden of flowers. Surely she was being sorry now!
It was the next day that Rebecca Mary's bitterness was sweetened—that
she began to be cured. She and the little, white cat went down together
to Thomas Jefferson's resting place. When they went home—and they went
soon—Rebecca Mary got her diary and began to write in it with eager
haste. Her sombre little face had lighted up with some inner gladness,
like relief:
“Shes been there and put some lavvender on and pinks. I mean Aunt
Olivia. And shes the very fondest of her pinks and lavvender. So she
must have loved Tomas Jefferson. Shes sorry. Shes sorry. Shes sorry. And
Ime so glad.”
Rebecca Mary caught up the little, white cat and cried her first tear of
joy on its neck. Then she wrote again:
“Now there are two morners instead of one. Two morners seams so mutch
lovinger than only one. I know he must feal better. I think he must have
been hurt before and so was I. I wish I dass tell Aunt Olivia how glad I
am shes sorry.”
But she told only the little, white cat. The Plummer mantle of reticence
had fallen too heavily on her narrow little shoulders. What she longed
to do she did not “dass.” But that evening in her little ruffled
nightgown she went to Aunt Olivia's room and thanked her for the
ruffles.
“They're beautiful,” she murmured, in a small agony of shyness. “I think
it was very kind of you to ruffle me—I've always wanted to be. Thank you
very much.” And then she had scurried away on her bare feet to the safe
retreat of her own room under the eaves. Aunt Olivia, left behind, was
unconsciously relieved at not having to respond. She was glad the child
had discovered the ruffles and was pleased. It was a good sign.
“I'll mix up some pancakes in the morning,” Aunt Olivia said,
complacently. “Pancakes may help along. Rebecca Mary is fond of 'em.”
The pinks and the fragrant lavender appeared to have established a
certain unspoken comradeship between the two “morners” of Thomas
Jefferson. Thereafter Rebecca Mary went about comforted, and Aunt Olivia
relieved. The little, white cat purred about the skirts of one and the
stubbed-out toes of the other in cheerful content.
“Well?” the minister's wife queried, in a moment of social intercourse
after church. She and Aunt Olivia walked down the aisle together.
“She's getting over it—or beginning to,” nodded Aunt Olivia. “That other
rooster didn't work, but I think the little cat is going to. She hugs
it.”
“Good! But she still mourns Thomas Jef—”
“Of course!” Aunt Olivia interposed, rather crisply. “You couldn't
expect her to get over it all in a minute. He was a remarkable rooster.”
“She misses him, herself,” inwardly smiled the minister's little wife.
Whether by virtue of her relationship to the minister or by her own
virtue, she had learned to read human nature with a degree of accuracy.
“I looked at myself in the glass tonight,” confessed Rebecca Mary's
diary, “but it was on acount of the rufles. I think Ime not quite so
homebly in rufles. I think Aunt Olivia was kind to rufle me. I should
like to ware this night gown in the day time. I wish folks did.”
The pencil slipped out of Rebecca Mary's fingers and rolled on the
floor, to the undoing of the little, white cat, who had gone to bed in
his basket. Rebecca Mary caught him up as he darted after the pencil,
and hugged him in an odd little ecstasy. She felt oddly happy.
“You little, white cat!” she cried, muffledly, her face in his thick
coat, “you've waited and waited, but I think I'm going to love you
now—you needn't wait any more.”
The Feel Doll
The minister uttered a suppressed note of warning as solid little steps
sounded in the hall. It was he who threw a hasty covering over the doll.
The minister's wife sewed on undisturbedly. She did worse than that.
“Come here, Rhoda,” she called, “and tell me which you like better,
three tucks or five in this petticoat?”
“Five,” promptly, upon inspection. Rhoda pulled away the concealing
cover and regarded the stolid doll with tilted head. “She's 'nough like
my Pharaoh's Daughter to be a blood relation,” she remarked. “She's got
the Pharaoh complexion.”
“Spoken like MY daughter!” laughed the minister. “But I thought new
dolls in this house were always surprises. And here's Mrs. Minister
making doll petticoats out in the open!”
“This is Rebecca Mary's—I'm dressing a doll for Rebecca Mary, Robert.
She's eleven years old and never had a doll! Rhoda's ten and has had—How
many dolls have you had, Rhoda?”
“Gracious! Why, Pharaoh's Daughter, an' Caiapha, an' Esther the
Beautiful Queen, an' the Children of Israel—five o' them—an' Mrs. Job,
an'—”
“Never mind the rest, dear. You hear, Robert? Do you think Rhoda would
be alive now if she'd never had a doll?”
The minister pondered the question. “Maybe not, maybe not,” he decided;
“but possibly the dolls would have been.”
“Don't make me smile, Robert. I'm trying to make you cry. If Rebecca
Mary were sixty instead of eleven I should dress her a doll.”
“Then why not one for Miss Olivia?”
“I may dress her one,” undauntedly, “if I find out she never had one in
her life.”
“She never did.” The minister's voice was positive. “And for that
reason, dear, aren't you afraid she would not approve of Rebecca Mary's
having one? Isn't it rather a delicate mat—”
“Don't, Robert, don't discourage me. It's going to be such a beautiful
doll! And you needn't tell me that poor little eleven-year-old woman-
child won't hold out her empty arms for it. Robert, you're a minister;
would it be wrong to give it to her STRAIGHT?”
“Straight, dear?”
“Yes; without saying anything to her aunt Olivia. Tell me. Rhoda's gone.
Say it as—as liberally as you can.”
The minister for answer swept doll, petticoat, and minister's wife into
his arms, and kissed them all impartially.
“Think if it were Rhoda,” she pleaded.
“And you were 'Aunt Olivia'? You ask me to think such hard things, dear!
If I could stop being a minister long enough—”
“Stop?” she laughed; but she knew she meant keep on. With a sigh she
burrowed a little deeper in his neck. “Then I'll ask Aunt Olivia first,”
she said.
She went back to her tucking. Only once more did she mention Rebecca
Mary. The once was after she had come downstairs from tucking the
children into bed. She stood in the doorway with the look in her face
that mothers have after doing things like that. The minister loved that
look.
“Robert, nights when I kiss the children—you knew when you married me
that I was foolish—I kiss little lone Rebecca Mary, too. I began the day
Thomas Jefferson died—I went to the Rebecca-Mary-est window and threw
her a kiss. I went tonight. Don't say a word; you knew when you married
me.”
Aunt Olivia received the resplendent doll in silence. Plummer honesty
and Plummer politeness were at variance. Plummer politeness said: “Thank
her. For goodness' sake, aren't you going to thank the minister's wife?”
But Plummer honesty, grim and yieldless, said, “You can't thank her,
because you're not thankful.” So Aunt Olivia sat silent, with her
resplendent doll across her knees.
“For Rebecca Mary,” the minister's wife was saying, in rather a halting
way. “I dressed it for her. I thought perhaps she never—”
“She never,” said Aunt Olivia, briefly. Strange that at that particular
instant she should remember a trifling incident in the child's far-off
childhood. The incident had to do with a little, white nightgown rolled
tightly and pinned together. She had found Rebecca Mary in her little
waist and petticoat cuddling it in bed.
“It's a dollie. Please 'sh, Aunt Olivia, or you'll wake her up!” the
child had whispered, in an agony. “Oh, you're not agoing to turn her
back to a nightgown? Don't unpin her, Aunt Olivia—it will kill her! I'll
name her after you if you'll let her stay.”
“Get up and take your clothes off.” Strange Aunt Olivia should remember
at this particular instant; should remember, too, that the pin had been
a little rusty and came out hard. Rebecca Mary had slid out of bed
obediently, but there had been a look on her little brown face as of one
bereaved. She had watched the pin come out, and the nightgown unroll, in
stricken silence. When it hung released and limp over Aunt Olivia's arm
she had given one little cry:
“She's dead!”
The minister's wife was talking hurriedly. Her voice seemed a good way
off; it had the effect of coming nearer and growing louder as Aunt
Olivia stepped back across the years.
“Of course you are to do as you think best about giving it to her,” the
minister's wife said, unwillingly. This came of being a minister's wife!
“But I think—I have always thought—that little girls ought—I mean Rhoda
ought—to have dolls to cuddle. It seems part of their—her—inheritance.”
This was hard work! If Miss Olivia would not sit there looking like
that—.
“As if I'd done something unkind!” thought the gentle little mother,
indignantly. She got up presently and went away. But Aunt Olivia, with
the doll hanging unhealthily over her arm, followed her to the door.
There was something the Plummer honesty insisted upon Aunt Olivia's
saying. She said it reluctantly:
“I think I ought to tell you that I've never believed in dolls. I've
always thought they were a waste of time and kept children from learning
to do useful things. I've brought Rebecca Mary up according to my best
light.”
“Worst darkness!” thought the minister's wife, hotly.
“She's never had a doll. I never had one. I got along. I could make
butter when I was seven. So perhaps you'd better take the doll—”
“No, no! Please keep it, Miss Olivia, and if you should ever change your
mind—I mean perhaps sometime—good-bye. It's a beautiful day, isn't it?”
Aunt Olivia took it up into the guest chamber and laid it in an empty
bureau drawer. She closed the drawer hastily. She did not feel as duty-
proof as she had once felt, before things had happened—softening things
that had pulled at her heartstrings and weakened her. The quilt on the
guest chamber bed was one of the things; she would not look at it now.
And the sheets under the quilt—and the grave of Thomas Jefferson that
she could see from the guest chamber window. Aunt Olivia was terribly
beset with the temptation to take the doll out to Rebecca Mary in the
garden.
“Are you going to do it?” demanded Duty, confronting her. “Are you going
to give up all your convictions now? Rebecca Mary's in her twelfth year-
pretty late to begin to humor her. I thought you didn't believe in
humoring.”
“I unpinned the nightgown,” parried Aunt Olivia, on the defensive. “I
never let her make another one.”
“But you're weakening now. You want to let her have THIS doll.”
“It seems like part of—of her inheritance.”
“Lock that drawer!”
Aunt Olivia turned the key unhappily. It was not that her “convictions”
had changed—it was her heart.
She went up at odd times and looked at the doll the minister's wife had
dressed. She had an unaccountable, uncomfortable feeling that it was
lying there in its coffin—that Rebecca Mary would have said, “She's
dead.”
It was a handsome doll. Aunt Olivia was not acquainted with dolls, but
she acknowledged that. She admired it unwillingly. She liked its
clothes—the minister's wife had not spared any pains. She had not
stinted in tucks nor ruffles.
Once Aunt Olivia took it out and turned it over in her hands with
critical intent, but there was nothing to criticise. It was a beautiful
doll. She held it with a curious, shy tenderness. But that time she did
not sit down with it. It was the next time.
The rocker was so near the bureau, and Aunt Olivia was tired—and the
doll was already in her arms. She only sat down. For a minute she sat
quite straight and unrelaxed, then she settled back a little—a little
more. The doll lay heavily against her, its flaxen head touching her
breast. After the manner of high-bred dolls, its eyes drooped sleepily.
Aunt Olivia began to rock—a gentle sway back and forth. She was sixty,
but this was the first time she had ever rocked a chi—a doll. So she
rocked for a little, scarcely knowing it. When she found out, a wave of
soft pink dyed her face and flowed upward redly to her hair.
“Well!” Duty jibed, mocking her.
“Don't say a word!” cried poor Aunt Olivia. “I'll put her right back.”
“What good will that do?”
“I'll lock her in.”
“You've locked her in before.”
“I'll—I'll hide the key.”
“Where you can find it! Think again.”
Aunt Olivia thrust the doll back into its coffin with unsteady hands.
The red in her face had faded to a faint, abiding pink. She locked the
drawer and drew out the key. She strode to the window and flung it out
with a wide sweep of her arm.
The minister's wife, ignorant of the results of her kind little
experiment, resolved to question Rebecca Mary the next time she came on
an errand. She would do it with extreme caution.
“I'll just feel round,” she said. “I want to know if her aunt's given it
to her. You think she must have, don't you, Robert? By this time? Why,
it was six weeks ago I carried it over! It was such a nice, friendly
little doll! By this time they would be such friends—if her aunt gave it
to her. Robert, you think—”
“I think it's going to rain,” the minister said. But he kissed her to
make it easier.
Rebecca Mary came over to bring Aunt Olivia's rule for parson-cake that
the minister's wife had asked for.
“Come in, Rebecca Mary,” the minister's wife said, cordially. “Don't you
want to see the new dress Rhoda's doll is going to have? I suppose you
could make your doll's dress yourself?” It seemed a hard thing to say.
Feeling round was not pleasant.
“P'haps I could, but she doesn't wear dresses,” Rebecca Mary answered,
gravely.
“No?” This was puzzling. “Her clothes don't come off, I suppose?” Then
it could not be the nice, friendly doll.
“No'm. Nor they don't go on, either. She isn't a feel doll.”
“A—what kind did you say, dear?” The minister's wife paused in her work
interestedly. Distinctly, Miss Olivia had not given her THE doll; but
this doll—“I don't think I quite understood, Rebecca Mary.”
“No'm; it's a little hard. She isn't a FEEL doll, I said. I never had a
feel one. Mine hasn't any body, just a soul. But she's a great comfort.”
“Robert,” appealed the minister's wife, helplessly. This was a case for
the minister—a case of souls.
“Tell us some more about her, Rebecca Mary,” the minister urged, gently.
But there was helplessness, too, in his eyes.
“Why, that's all!” returned Rebecca Mary, in surprise. “Of course I
can't dress her or undress her or take her out calling. But it's a great
comfort to rock her soul to sleep.”
“Call Rhoda,” murmured the wife to the minister; but Rhoda was already
there. She volunteered prompt explanation. There was no hesitation in
Rhoda's face.
“She means a make believe doll. Don't you, Rebecca Mary?”
“Yes,” Rebecca Mary assented; “that's her other name, I suppose, but I
never called her by it.”
“What did you call her?” demanded practical Rhoda. “What's her name
mean?”
“Rhoda!”—hastily, from the minister's wife. This seemed like sacrilege.
But Rhoda's clear, blue eyes were fixed upon Rebecca Mary; she had not
heard her mother's warning little word.
A shy color spread thinly over the lean little face of Rebecca Mary. For
the space of a breath or two she hesitated.
“Her name's—Felicia,” then, softly.
“Robert”—the children had gone out together; the minister's wife's eyes
were unashamedly wet—“Robert, I wish you were a—a sheriff instead of a
minister. Because I think I would make a better sheriff's wife. Do you
know what I would make you do?”
The minister could guess.
“I'd make you ARREST that woman, Robert!”
“Felicia!” But she saw willingness to be a sheriff come into his own
eyes and stop there briefly.
“Don't call me 'Felicia' while I feel as wicked as this! Oh, Robert, to
think she named her little soul-doll after me!”
“It's a beautiful name.”
Suddenly the wickedness was over. She laughed unsteadily.
“It wouldn't be a good name for a sheriff's wife, would it?” she said.
“So I'll stay by my own minister.”
One day close upon this time Aunt Olivia came abruptly upon Rebecca Mary
in the grape arbor. She was sitting in her little rocking chair, swaying
back and forth slowly. She did not see Aunt Olivia. What was she was
crooning half under her breath?
“Oh, hush, oh, hush, my dollie; Don't worry any more, For Rebecca Mary
'n' the angels Are watching o'er, —-O'er 'n' o'er 'n' o'er.”
The same words over and over—growing perhaps a little softer and
tenderer. Rebecca Mary's arm was crooked as though a little flaxen head
lay in the bend of it. Rebecca Mary's brooding little face was gazing
downward intently at her empty arm. Quite suddenly it came upon Aunt
Olivia that she had seen the child rocking like this before—that she
must have seen her often.
“Rebecca Mary 'n' the angels Are watching o'er,”
sang on the crooning little voice in Aunt Olivia's ears.
The doll in its coffin upstairs; down here Rebecca Mary rocking her
empty arms. The two thoughts flashed into Aunt Olivia's mind and welded
into one. All her vacillations and Duty's sharp reminders occurred to
her clearly. She had thought that at last she was proof against
temptation, but she had not thought of this. She was not prepared for
Rebecca Mary, here in her little rocking chair, rocking her little soul-
doll to sleep.
The angels were used to watching o'er, but Aunt Olivia could not bear
it. She went away with a strange, unaccustomed ache in her throat. The
minister's wife would not have wanted her arrested then.
Aunt Olivia tiptoed away as though Rebecca Mary had said, “'Sh!” She was
remembering, as she went, the brief, sweet moment when she had sat like
that and rocked, with the doll the minister's wife dressed, in her arms.
It seemed to establish a new link of kinship between her and Rebecca
Mary.
She ran plump into Duty.
“Oh!” she gasped. She was a little stunned. Aunt Olivia's Duty was
solid.
“I know where you've been. I tried get there in time.”