Rebecca Mary Part 8

"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 b.u.t.ter 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."