Rebecca Mary

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.”

“You're too late,” Aunt Olivia said, firmly, “Don't stop me; there's something I must do before it gets too dark. It's six o'clock now.”

“Wait!” commanded Duty. “Are you crazy? You don't mean—”

“Go back there and look at that child—and hear what she's singing! Stay long enough to take it all in—don't hurry.”

But Duty barred her way, grim and stern.

Palely she put up both her hands and thrust it aside. She did not once look back at it.

Already it was dusky under the guest chamber window. She had to stoop and peer and feel in the long tangle of grass. She kept on patiently with the Plummer kind of patience that never gave up. She was eager and smiling, as though something pleasant were at the end of the peering and stooping and feeling.

Aunt Olivia was hunting for a key.