Chapter 4

“Tomas Jefferson passed away at ten minutes of three this afternoon blessed are them that die in the Lord. The minnister did not get here in time. I wish I had asked him to run for he is a very good minnister and would have. He helped me berry him in the cold cold ground and we sang a him. I dident ask him to pray because he was only a rooster, but he was folks to me. I loved him. It is very lonesome. I dred wakening up tomorrow because he always crowed under my window. The Lord gaveth and the Lord has taken away.”

This last Rebecca Mary erased once, but she wrote it again after a moment's thought. For, she reasoned, it was the Lord part of Aunt Olivia which had given Thomas Jefferson to her. In the primitive little creed of Rebecca Mary every one had a Lord part, but some people's was very small. Not Aunt Olivia's—she had never gauged Aunt Olivia's Lord part; it would not have been consistent with her ideas of loyalty.

It was very lonely, as Rebecca Mary had known it would be. At best her life had never been overfull of companionships, and the sudden taking- off—it seemed sudden, as all deaths do—of Thomas Jefferson was hard to bear. Strange how blank a space one great, white rooster can leave behind him!

The yard and the orchard seemed full of blank spaces, though in a way Thomas Jefferson's soul seemed to frequent his old beloved haunts. Rebecca Mary could not see it pecking daintily about, but she felt it was there.

“His soul isn't dead,” she persisted, gently. She clung to the comfort of that. And one morning she thought she heard again Thomas Jefferson's old, cheery greeting to the sunrise. The sound she thought she heard woke her instantly. Was it Thomas Jefferson's soul crowing?

“Aunt Olivia isent sorry,” chronicled the diary, sadly. “Prehaps shes glad. Once she wished the Lord had forgot to create roosters. But she was ever kind to Tomas Jefferson, considdering the seeds he scrached up. That was his besittingest sin and I know he is sorry now. I wish Aunt Olivia was sorry.”

Nothing was ever said between the two about Rebecca Mary's loss, but 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.