Rebecca Mary Part 7

"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 m.u.f.fin 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 m.u.f.fin 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 m.u.f.fins 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 ap.r.o.n.

"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 st.i.tching. 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 k.n.o.b. 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, 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 da.s.s 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 "da.s.s." 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 comrades.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s 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, m.u.f.fledly, 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?"