What Was Done With Musidora

The details of Lucy Bray’s death were told to me by others. My childish recollection held every feature of that first awful scene as tenaciously as if the flames had kindled upon me, and not upon my hapless playfellow. What followed is a hazy kaleidoscope, lurid and vague, until my scattered thoughts settled to the perception that I was making a long visit at Uncle Carter’s and sharing Cousin Molly Belle’s room and bed.

She made me a new rag-doll-baby while I was there. That was the first thing that “brought me round,” as Aunt Eliza phrased it. For one whole day when it was raining and blowing out of doors, I had eyes and thoughts for nothing except the evolution of that miraculous doll-baby, as she grew and glowed into an entity under the fingers of my best-beloved crony. She was a blonde after she ceased to be a blank. Her eyes were blue, her cheeks were shaded carmine; she had a real nose raised above the dead level of her countenance, stuffed artistically, and kept in shape by well-applied stitches. Finally, and half a century thereafter I thrill in thinking of it, an intellectual cranium was covered with a cunningly fashioned wig of Cousin Molly Belle’s own silky auburn hair.

This last and transcendent touch was added after I went to bed one night. The superb creation, arrayed in a lovely light purple French calico frock that could be taken off at night and put on in the morning, and sure enough underclothes, all tucked and trimmed, smiled from my pillow into my eyes when I unclosed them at the touch of the morning light.

I christened my beauty “Mollabella,” and would not change the name for her maker’s gentle remonstrances and all my college cousin Burwell’s teasing.

Musidora had lapsed, little by little, into chronic invalidism, spending much of her time in bed. She was uncomely to any eyes but mine, and I would not subject her to unkind criticism. Her case was made hopeless by the officious kindness of Argus, a Newfoundland puppy, in bringing her to the playhouse one day after I had purposely left her tucked up snugly under three blankets inside of my reversed cricket by the dining-room fire. The attention was well meant, and he could not be expected to know that to drag sickly Musidora by the left leg through the mud until the infirm member parted company with the body, and to finish the journey with the head between his teeth, was not a happy device by which to win her owner’s regard. I forgave him, in time, but Musidora was, after this last misadventure, a problem. I wondered much, sadly and silently, what other little girls did with doll-babies who died natural deaths. Not like Rozillah, who was never mentioned in my hearing, unless I were very naughty indeed, and heroic treatment was indicated.

The day after my return home, the question was solved.

In the fortnight of my absence great changes had befallen our household. Lucy and her mother and the tiny scrap of a baby had died, and been laid under the snow in the Burwell burying-ground on the hillside beyond the Old Orchard. Mr. Bray had gone to Ohio along with the big covered wagon. Alexander the Great went with him in the carriage. With tears in her sweet eyes, my mother told me how fond the father was of Lucy’s pet, and how strangely the cat had acted in staying on Lucy’s grave all the time until Mr. Bray took him away by force and carried him off in the carriage with him.

From my retinue of vassals I had, in the chicken playhouse, a fuller and more circumstantial account of all that had passed during those gloomy days. The pleasant weather that succeeded the March snowstorm had given place to a cold, sweeping rain. I scampered as fast as I could across the yard to my castle, my red cloak over my head, and we had to shut the door to exclude the slant sheets of rain. All gathered in the upper end of the room where my chair stood, the only seat there except the floor. To the accompaniment of hissing rain and angry winds, the gruesome particulars of the triple funeral were narrated. Mariposa with the baby on her lap was chief spokeswoman, but nearly every one present had some item of his own, authentic or imaginary, to add. All were sure that the three whose fate had aroused the whole county to a passion of pity and regret were angels in heaven.

“Mammy, she say, s’long as po’ Miss Lucy was bu’n’ so bad, ’twas mussiful fur to let her go,” said Mariposa, rolling the baby over on his pudgy stomach, and patting his back to “bring up the wind.” “She say, ef one o’ we-alls was to get bu’nt or cripple’, or pufformed, or ennything like that, she’s jes’ pray all night an’ all day ’Good Lord, take ’em! Heavenly Marster! put ’em out o’ they mizzry!’ An’ Ung’ Jack, he say, seems ef everything that’s put in the groun’ comes up beautifuller ’n ’twas when it went in. He tell how the seeds, they tu’n into flowers, an’ apples an’ watermillions, an’ all that, an’ how folks tu’n inter angills.”

I cried myself to sleep that night. My mother, kept wakeful, doubtless, by her own sad thoughts, heard the sobs I tried to stifle with the bedclothes, and came to me with talk of the dear Saviour who had taken little Lucy to his arms, and of her happiness in being forever with the Lord.

I did not tell her what child would? that, while I missed and grieved for the companion of those three happy days, a deeper heartache forced up the tears.

For I knew now what must be done with Musidora.

I had taken her to bed with me that night for the first time in many weeks. Mary ’Liza was amused, in an amiable way, when she saw the bundle done up in red flannel Musidora’s rheumatism was awful! that I hugged up to me.

“I never let Dorinda sleep with me,” she observed. “I am afraid of hurting her. But I suppose you can’t hurt Musidora. Why don’t you give her to one of the colored children? She is really a sight.”

“Nobody asked you to look at her!” retorted I, crossly, putting my hand over the unfeatured face. “Mam’ Chloe says, ’Handsome is as handsome does.’ Anyhow, my doll-baby doesn’t say mean things to folks.”

The little bout raised the tear-level nearer to the escape-pipe. It was easy to cry when Mary ’Liza’s breathing assured me that she was asleep. It also confirmed my resolution to have the poor, deformed dear dead and buried without useless delay.

I cannot decide what moved me to bear her off secretly to the seldom-used staircase in the north wing to prepare her for her last long sleep. I escaped thither the next morning, as soon as lessons were over, and seated myself half-way up the steep staircase. It was scarred in many places by fire and smoke. No amount of scrubbing could quite efface the traces of the catastrophe. I looked at them for a long time before beginning my sad task, and did not shrink from the sight. My state of mind was distinctly morbid. Children were not reckoned to have nerves at that date, and little notice was taken of their silent moods. That I should voluntarily seek a solitary quarter of the house, which was shunned by others, never entered my mother’s or my nurse’s mind.

I had abundance of time in which to be as miserable as I thought I ought to be, and diligently nursed such sickly, sentimental fancies as ought to be foreign to a healthy young mind, while I divested maimed and sightless Musidora of her flannel mufflings and dressed her in a clean night-gown. Without saying what I meant to do with it I had begged a square of white cambric from Mam’ Chloe, and set about notching it with a pair of blunt scissors. Mariposa had described a winding-sheet minutely to me, and I meant that my dead doll-baby should be decently laid out. The notching took a tedious time, and the bows of the blunt scissors left purple furrows upon thumb and fingers. Uncle Ike had given me an empty raisin box. I lined it with Musidora’s own mattress and quilt, spread the “pinked” cambric on them, laid the remains (no figurative phrase in this connection) upon this bed, folding the one arm left to the unfortunate across her breast, and wrapped the edges of the winding-sheet over her face. With difficulty I coaxed the points of four projecting nails left in the lid into corresponding holes in the box, and having no hammer, sat down upon the top to make them fast, bouncing up and down a few times to make a good job of it.

I sat still awhile after closing the casket, and rehearsed mentally the order of the obsequies. I had, thus far, made no arrangements for them beyond instructing the colored children to meet me in the Old Orchard under the big sweeting when the sun reached the “noonmark” my father had, to please me, cut in the fence by the playhouse door. They would be there in force and on time. I would get myself and burden out of the end door of the north wing and steal around the yard fence to the back of the garden without being seen. I knew how Mary ’Liza would smile and hitch up her straight, clean nose at the box and its contents, and I had a boding fear lest grown people might disapprove of and forbid the funeral.

Upon that my heart was fully set. The grief of losing the ceremony would be harder to endure than the delicious mournfulness with which I had systematically imbued my soul. I chose four boys of uniform size for pall-bearers; Barratier was to have a spade ready and to dig the grave, and when it was filled in we would sing a hymn. Mourning garments were the knotty point. I, as Musidora’s mother, could not appear at her funeral in the crimson circassian frock I wore at present. That would upset everything.

A happy thought struck me. I recollected to have seen in the lumber-room, hanging upon some pegs high upon the wall, a row of old bonnets, and a black one among them. Other black things could be had for the hunting. I was a fanciful child, too used to conjuring up weird situations and make-believe happenings to be easily scared by what other children might dread. Nor was I then, or ever, a physical coward. As soon as the idea of visiting that upper room came to me I acted upon it. Tripping up the narrow stairs, I pushed hard against the door. It stuck in the frame, and I was fearing it might be locked when it gave way suddenly and I almost fell into the chamber. It was a dreary place, although the spring sunshine poured broadly from wall to wall. The charred brands of the fire that had wrought such woe were cold in the corners of the hearth, having toppled, head-foremost and backward, over the andirons after burning through in the middle. The old blankets and comfortables were huddled upon the mattress and trailed upon the floor, as my mother had left them in snatching one to throw about Lucy. A ball with which Alexander the Great had played was in a corner. But for the dead fire and the living sunshine and the stillness that met me on the threshold like a draught of icy air, we might have left the place not three minutes ago.

I learned, subsequently, that my mother had been sadly prostrated by the terrible threefold disaster, and had never had the nerve to re-visit the place where it began. None of the servants would have gone near it of their own free will. A queer, unfamiliar tremor I did not recognize as superstitious dread contracted my heart, and arrested me just within the doorway. The box, from which we had eaten our dinner, was in the middle of the floor, the three crickets pushed a little way back from it, and half-way between the fireplace and a window in the gable was the rocking-chair my mother had occupied while she held Lucy on her lap. Faded calico covered the seat, a valance of the same hung about the legs; two of the upright spindles were missing from the back. I took in every feature of the haunted room before I rushed over to the wall where the bonnets hung, climbed upon a chair, grabbed the black bonnet, and espying a black silk apron dependent from another peg, jerked it down, and ran off shakily, with my booty. The queer trembling had got into my legs, and as I went downstairs I steadied myself against the wall, avoiding, as I had not thought of doing as I went up, the scorched streaks on the walls and the stains on the steps. Even after I stood in the safe shelter of the garden fence, my heart beat so loudly that I put the raisin box down upon the grass, and pulled myself together.

The sunshine was genial to my chilled frame; through the palings I could see double rows of hyacinths, tulips, and butter-and-eggs, edging the walks, and bushes of lilacs and snowballs almost in bloom, just as they had looked before I went up to the lumber-room. The serene naturalness of it all restored my wits to me; I unrolled the apron which I had wrapped about the bonnet, and reawakened, as from a nightmare, to the business of the hour.

When I presented myself to the group awaiting me under the big sweeting, a low, but fervent, groan of admiration broke forth as from one breast. The bonnet covered my head generously, jutting six inches beyond my nose. The crepe curtain at the back descended to my shoulder-blades and flapped at the sides like the wings of a dejected crow. I had made a mourning-cloak of the apron by tying it, hind part before, about my neck, whence it drooped to my heels. Mariposa said respectful of the genius manifest in my caparison that I looked “mos’ ezzac’ly like a real, sure-’nough widder.” The boys were impressed into gravity becoming the occasion, and obeyed, with never a snicker or a grimace, my instructions as to the conduct of the ceremony.

I walked directly behind the coffin; Mariposa, with the baby on her left hip, marched next, arm-in-arm with another girl, who carried her baby a very young one over her shoulder, its head wobbling helplessly as she walked. The rest came after us, two-and-two, through the Old Orchard, out through the draw-bars at the lower end, and into the graveyard beyond.

It was a retired, and not an unlovely spot. A brick wall, splashed with ochre and gray lichens, enclosed six generations of dead Burwells and their next of kin. A locked gate kept out trespassers. Long streamers of brier and wild berry bushes, purple and ashy with the mantling sap drawn upward by the March sunshine, were matted over the older graves; a spreading “honey-shuck” tree arose near the middle of the badly kept square, and smaller trees flourished here and there. An apple tree, flushed with blossoms, leaned over the wall above the place selected for Musidora’s grave.

Barratier struck his perpendicular spade into the black soil in a truly workmanlike manner, utilizing the foundation of the wall as one side of the oblong pit. The coffin was lowered into place by means of tow-strings, provided by thoughtful Mariposa. There was no reason, save her punctilio of “doin’ things jes’ like folks,” why Barratier, or I, for that matter, should not have stooped and laid the casket in the eighteen-inch-deep hole with our bare hands. But lowered it was in funereal style, and covered with apple blossoms, before the bearers returned the black earth to the excavation and mounded it into proper shape. I stood at the head of the grave, my handkerchief at my eyes, trying with all my might to feel sorry enough to cry. The excitement of the conventional ceremonies, and the complacent consciousness of being the principal actor in it, and doing the thing creditably, drew the sting out of what would have been real grief had the flutter of my spirits allowed me to think. I believe that, if maturer mourners would be as frank as I, we should find that my experience was not singular, nor my reluctant composure unnatural.

Mariposa had her emotions better in hand. She sobbed volubly, wiping away real tears with the baby’s calico slip, and three other girls accomplished commendable snivels. An embarrassing halt brought down my handkerchief and hushed audible mourning. The affair was not over. Every eye was riveted expectantly upon me, and I had forgotten what came next. Mariposa plucked my cloak and whispered in my ear:

“Thar oughter be a pra’ar now!”

The propriety of the suggestion was obvious. I had seen pictures of funerals and knew how the officiating clergyman appeared in committing “dust to dust, ashes to ashes.” But there was the fear aforementioned of breaking a Commandment by addressing the Almighty in a make-believe service.

“’Tain’t a fun’ral ’thout thars a pra’ar!” Mariposa muttered insistently.

Nerved by the exigency, I lifted both hands and eyes toward the sky:

“World without end, Amen and Amen!”

“A-a-men!” groaned my faithful lieutenant. Her emphasis assured me that the inspiration I had obeyed was a felicitous touch. She pressed still closer to me, mindful of my dignity, and prompted me further, in an artistic mutter, without using her lips.

“The services o’ this solemn ‘casion will be close’ by er hymn.”

I uttered it as if she had not given the cue, and “lined out” the hymn I had pitched upon as eminently appropriate for the “solemn ’casion.”

“When I can read my title clear
To mansions in the skies.”

Mariposa raised the tune and carried it, the rest of the band screaming in her wake.

“I’ll bid farewell to every fear
And wipe my weeping eyes,”

I continued in a nasal sing-song.

The chorus was plain sailing before a spanking breeze;

“And wipe my weeping eye-eye-eyes!
And wipe my weeping eye-er-ése!
I’ll bid farewell to every fear
And wipe my weeping eyes.”

Like the echo of the final screech a fearsome wail arose from within the enclosure, a long-drawn cry, repeated while we stared into one another’s blanched faces, too affrighted for words.

Mariposa was the first to recover the use of her tongue and limbs.

“Th’ ghos’ o’ the little baby!” she yelled, and took to her nimble heels at a rate that made it impossible for the fleetest of her fellow fugitives to overtake her.

I was left all alone.