When Grandmamma Was New Part 6

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 ap.r.o.n 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 ap.r.o.n 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing. 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 nouris.h.i.+ng 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter VII

Just For Fun

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The floor of the summer-house at Uncle Carter's was of lovely white sand, and did not soil my clean pink gingham frock, although I sat down flat upon it. Under one of the three benches that furnished it, I had dug a vault yesterday. It was modelled upon the description given in _The Fairchild Family_ of one belonging to a n.o.bleman's estate. My self-education was essentially Squeersian. When I read a thing, I forthwith went and did it. The gardener had lent me a trowel, and I had found a thin, flat stone that served as a cover. Digging was easy work in the top-dressing of sand and the substratum of loose, dry soil.

There were eight niches in the vault--two on a side. When all was finished, I sallied forth in quest of occupants. My vault was stocked by nightfall. In one niche was a dead sparrow my cousin Burwell had shot by mistake and thrown away. In a second was a frog on which a horse or cow had trod, crippling it so badly that Uncle Carter mercifully killed it with a blow of his stick. The poultry-yard and an epidemic of pip supplied me with two more silent tenants. A mouse-trap strangled a fifth, the gardener's mole-trap yielded up a sixth. Nos. 7 and 8 were land-terrapins ("tar'pens," in negro dialect), which I knew must be dead when I found them, although I could discern no sign of violence. Their sh.e.l.ls were shut so tightly that I could not force a straw between the upper and lower, and no amount of kicking and thumping elicited any sign of life.

An innovation upon the Fairchild pattern was the deposit in the bottom of the vault of a tumbler full of flies which Aunt Eliza told the dining room servant to throw into the kitchen fire. A primitive snare for these destroyers of the housewife's peace was made by filling a tumbler within an inch of the brim with strong soap-suds, and fitting upon the top a round cover of thick "sugar-loaf paper," with a hole in the middle. Mola.s.ses was smeared all around this hole upon the under side of the paper, and an alluring drop or two on the top attracted attention to the larger supply of sweets. At least a quart of flies, per day, were caught in this way in the height of the season before window and door screens were invented.

I waylaid the man and tumbler in the back porch.

"Are they dead, sure enough?" I whispered.

"Dead as a door-nail, little mistis."

"Give 'em to me, please! I'll bury them."

He complied, good-naturedly. I poured the contents of the gla.s.s into the vault, and strewed fine dry sand over them an inch deep. Then I fitted on the flat stone, and said nothing to anybody of my new branch of industry.

I was tired of being called "an old-fas.h.i.+oned child!" My mother's oft and resigned e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n--"What _next_, I wonder!" was to my ears a covert reproach for not being "steady" and "a comfort," like Mary 'Liza.

Even my less critical father's shout of laughter at any unusual freak or experiment abraded my moral cuticle sometimes. At home the colored children would have entered heartily into my mortuary enterprise,--yes!

and kept my counsel. The reticence of the serf exceeds in dumb doggedness that of a misunderstood child. But I did not play with Uncle Carter's little negroes. Every Southern child comprehended the distinction between "home-folks" and other people's servants.

Not that I was ever lonely. What I called "things" were an unfailing resource to me. An ant-hill was entertainment for a whole forenoon; I watched bees and their hives by the hour; my vault kept me busy and happy all day. If Cousin Molly Belle suspected what I was about, she asked no questions, and refrained from spying upon me. When dressed clean in the afternoon, for the second time since breakfast,--the manufacture of mud-pies, puddings, and cakes, and the baking of several batches in the sun, having engrossed the morning,--I took _The Fairchild Family_ out into the summer-house and reread, for the tenth time, the account of the opening of the family vault.

Why, I reasoned within myself, should innocent dumb creatures be thrown away like dead leaves, when they have stopped living? It would be kind in me, or in anybody, to bury them in vaults, and to write Bible verses and all that on their tombstones. I would dig another vault to-morrow and look around for things to put into it,--and still another the next day. I had, in imagination, honeycombed the s.p.a.ce under the benches with catacombs, and my book was clean forgotten, before I saw a movement in the sandy flooring, close to the edge of the flat stone sealing the mouth of the vault. I leaned forward to inspect it more nearly. The stone had been undermined at one side, and a hole left there, through which a line of flies, gray with dust, was feebly crawling into the suns.h.i.+ne. There seemed to be a thousand of them, all dusty, but some more active than others. As soon as they were quite clear of the hole, they dispersed in various directions, some alighting upon twigs and blades of gra.s.s, some flying up to the benches, where they sat cleaning their bodies and wings with their feet and mouths.

I worked my hands into the hole and raised the stone. A cloud of resurrected flies arose in my astonished face. The vault was quick with them. The dry sand, warmed by the sun, that I had sifted over them, had acted as a hot blanket upon the chilled body of a dying man. When I got rid of the swarm I examined the vault. Both of the terrapins were missing. The sapping and mining was their work. Through the tunnel thus excavated they had regained their liberty, and released a mighty host of fellow-captives.

"The rest of you are _dead_, anyhow!" said I, aloud, intensely chagrined at the cheat practised upon my benevolent nature, and I shoved the stone back over the violated vault.

A shadow fell upon the white sand. Looking up, I saw a young gentleman in the door of the summer-house, smiling down at me. At the first glance I took him for my cousin Burwell, who was at home on his vacation. A second undeceived me. I scrambled to my feet and stared hard at the stranger who stood with his hands behind him, still smiling, but not saying a word. He was nattily dressed in a blue cloth coat and trousers, and a white waistcoat. A white satin stock of the latest style encircled a slender neck; he wore s.h.i.+ny boots, a leghorn hat was set jauntily above a crop of black curls. I was never shy, having been accustomed from my birth to meeting strangers and to "entertaining company" when called upon to do so. Yet I was strangely embarra.s.sed by the merry eyes fixed silently upon me.

"How do you do, sir!" I said, dropping a little courtesy, as well-bred children still did in that part of the civilized world.

Still without speaking, the stranger drew nearer and stooped to kiss me.

This was going several steps too far. I clapped one hand over my mouth and pushed him away with the other.

"Cousin Molly Belle! _oh_, Cousin Molly Belle!" I screamed between my fingers.

She was the only member of the family at home, my uncle, aunt, and their two sons having gone on an all-day visit to a plantation some miles away.

"Why, Namesake! don't you know me?"