The Haunted Room

Leaning against the outside of the brick wall, too stunned to join in my companions’ stampede, I yet did not lose my senses. Neither did I cry out or whimper. Children have gone into convulsions and become idiotic for less cause. I was phenomenally healthy, and, as I have said, no coward. Before the hindmost deserter gained the draw-bars my reason was on the return path. I had the signal advantage above my comrades of not believing in ghosts. My father had asserted to me positively, once and again, that no such things existed, and put himself to much trouble to explain natural phenomena that are often misinterpreted by the ignorant and superstitious into supernatural manifestations. His orders were strict that the servants should never retail ghost stories in our hearing; and he was obeyed by the elder negroes. Mam’ Chloe, whatever may have been her reserved rights of private judgment, backed him up dutifully with the epigram:

“Folks that’s gone to the bad place can’t get out to come back, an’ them that’s in heaven don’t want to.”

The cry I had heard certainly sounded like the weak wail of Cousin Mary Bray’s skinny little baby, but God and the dear angels would never let the helpless, tiny mite wander back to earth alone. My mother had said to me, last night, that it would never cry any more.

“It was in pain all the while it was here,” she reminded me. “It never awoke that it did not begin to cry. Think how sweet it must be for it not to suffer now. I think that God sent for it to come to heaven because He was so sorry for it.”

Strength flowed into my soul with the recollection. My mother never said what was not exactly true. Happy, safe, and saving faith of childhood in a parent’s wisdom, a parent’s word, a parent’s power!

Curious, rather than frightened, I stepped over Musidora’s grave, and hurried around to the locked gate. Two unsodded mounds were near the entrance. One was long, and one short. Stretched upon this last was something that moved slightly and cried again, yet more piteously, when I called to it. The sight sent me flying like a flushed partridge through the Old Orchard to the garden fence, over it and up the middle walk of the garden. While yet afar off, I saw my father standing there talking with the gardener. Evidently the scattered horde had not spread an alarm. My father turned at my loud panting, and eyed me with astonishment. Without pausing to consider why he should be amazed, I caught hold of him and shrieked my news:

“Father! father! it is Alexander the Great come back to look for Lucy!”

My father seldom scolded. He more rarely punished without inquiry. He was stern now and spoke sharply.

“What is the meaning of this nonsense, Molly? You are forever getting up some new sensation. There is such a thing as having too much ‘make-believe.’ I would rather have a little sensible truth now and then.”

“But, father, really and truly ” chokingly, for his words were as drawn swords to my loving heart.

He pushed my hand away from his arm.

“When you look and behave less like a crazy child, I will hear what you have to say. Where did you get those things?”

I wished that the ground would open and swallow me away from his cold, contemptuous eye. I had forgotten my ridiculous costume entirely. The shame and humiliation of having exposed myself to his just criticism, the added disgrace of the grinning gardener’s enjoyment of the figure I had cut the absurd coal-scuttle of a bonnet hanging down my back, the black silk apron streaming behind me like a half-inflated balloon overwhelmed me with speechless confusion. I hung my head in an agony.

“Where did you get them, I say?” repeated my father.

“Up in the lumber-room,” I stammered, faintly and sheepishly.

“Go, put them back where you found them! Then, come to me. As I was saying, James ”

He went on with his directions to the gardener.

I slunk away, forgetful of everything except my personal discomfiture, dodging from one clump of shrubbery to another, lest I should be seen from the windows of the house, going almost on all-fours in exposed stretches of walk or garden-beds, and so making my retreat to the side door of the north wing. I had stripped off the hateful masquerade habiliments and rolled them into a compact bundle, but anybody who met me would ask what I was carrying under my arm, and I could bear no more that day. Unable to contain myself a minute longer, I sank down in the solitude of the steep staircase leading to the lumber-room, and had my cry if not out so nearly to the end that I felt adequate to making my judge see reason, if only he would not look at me as if he were ashamed of his daughter! Was it very wrong to take those things on the sly? Would I be punished for it? Had he told my mother yet? And did Mary ’Liza know about it? I could never, never tell her that I had worn the nasty bonnet and cloak as mourning to Musidora’s funeral. I would be whipped first.

Crying again in anticipation of the dilemma, I trudged slowly up the steps, and pushed back the door, which stuck fast again although I did not recollect shutting it.

“Just’s if somebody was leaning against it!” said I, pettishly, and flung my whole weight against the lower panel.

The door flew back and I fell headlong, face downward, on the floor, the bundle flying ahead of me clear to the hearth. I picked myself up, rubbed my smarting palms and, in a vile humor, recovered the detestable cause of all the trouble. I boxed the lop-ears of the bonnet, and gave the apron a vicious shake, in restoring them to their respective pegs. Then, I backed down from the chair on which I had been standing, and started for the door. A feeble cry stopped me as if a shot had passed through me.

The room was in afternoon shadow, and the blinds of the larger of the two windows had blown shut. The cry quavered out again, and at the same instant I saw or verily believed that I saw with my natural eyes Cousin Mary Bray seated in the rocking-chair between the hearth and the window, holding a baby in her arms. She was rocking gently back and forth, her face was pale and peaceful, and she wore a sort of dim gray dress. Thus much I had seen when my father called loudly to me from the bottom of the steps:

“Molly! what are you doing up there? Come down directly! do you hear?”

The apparition disappeared on the instant, and as I moved toward the door, I stumbled over something soft that mewed miserably. In a second I had it in my arms, a rack of bones covered with muddy, tangled gray fur, and rushed down the stairs.

“I told you so, father! don’t you see? It is Alexander the Great. Now, isn’t it?”

Will it be believed that the commotion attendant upon the recognition of the wanderer, the talk, conjectures and questions, the nursing and feeding, and cosseting the creature who was at the point of death from starvation and fatigue put all thought of revealing what I had beheld in the haunted chamber out of my head, until, when I recalled it in all its vividness, I simply could not speak of it? It was all like a swift, bad dream, the telling of which might revive the unpleasant sensation it created in passing. I do not pretend to explain a child’s reserve on subjects which have gone very far into the deeps of a consciousness that never lets them go. Perhaps the solution is partly in the poverty of a vocabulary which lags painfully behind the development of thought and emotion. Certain it is that I was a woman grown before I ever confided to a living soul what I thought sat in the rocking-chair in the haunted room, brooding peacefully above a quieted baby.

Lucy’s cat guided by what instinct only his Creator and ours knows had found his way to her grave over two hundred miles of fen, field, and forest. Not finding her there, he had tracked me to the room where she had last played with him. When carried to other parts of the house, he cried piteously all day and all night. When the north wing was locked against him, he went back to the grave and could not be coaxed away. Finally, my mother proposed that he be allowed to stay there, until cold weather. He was the plantation-pet all summer, growing plump, but never playful, with nourishing food and rest. His meals were sent to him twice a day, but he partially supported himself by catching birds and field-mice in the burying-ground, which he never left. We got used to his presence there after a while, and his habit of patrolling the top of the wall, several times a day, for exercise, or under the impression that he was guarding the short green mound where he slept every night.

As the winter approached repeated efforts were made to tempt him to the house, and when they were ineffectual my father took him there in his own arms. The cat refused food and sleep, keeping the household awake with his cries, and in the morning flew so savagely at his jailers that we were obliged to let him go.

The fiercest tempest known in mid-Virginia for forty years beset us on the anniversary of Lucy’s death, and raged for three days. When the drifts in the graveyard melted, we found Alexander the Great dead at his post.