Marion Harland's Autobiography. Marion Harland
Up to this point of my story, what I have written is hearsay. With the awakening recorded in the last chapter, my real reminiscences begin.
The next vivid impression upon my plastic memory has its setting in the McQuie yard. My mother had been to Richmond on a visit and brought back, as a present from a woman who was said to be “good,” a doll for my sister. Perhaps she considered me too young to be intrusted with the keeping of the rare creation of wax and real hair. Perhaps she did not recollect my existence. In either case, as I promptly settled within myself, she was not the good woman of my mother’s painting.
Not that I had ever cared for “dead dolls.” When I could just put the wish into words, my craving was for a “real, live, skin baby that could laugh and talk.” But this specimen was so nearly alive that it opened its eyes when one pulled a wire concealed by the satin petticoat, and shut them at another tweak. Moreover, the (alleged) good woman in the beautiful city I heard as much of as of heaven, had sent my sister the gift, and none to me. Furthermore, and worst of all, my sister paraded the gift before my angry, miserable eyes, and, out of my mother’s hearing, taunted me with the evident fact that “nobody cared for a little girl whose hands were dirty and whose hair was never smooth.” I was barely three years old. My sister was a prodigy of learning in the estimation of our acquaintances, and nearer six than five. I took in the case with extraordinary clearness of judgment and soreness of heart, and meditated revenge.
Watching an opportunity when mother, nurse, and sister were out of the way, I stole into the office-cottage, possessed myself of the hated puppet, who had been put into my bed for an afternoon nap—lying there for all the world like “a sure-enough baby,” with her eyes fast shut—and bore her off behind the house. There I stripped off her gay attire; twisted a string about her neck; contrived—nobody could ever tell how—to fasten one end of the cord to the lowest bough of a peach-tree, armed myself with a stout switch, and lashed every grain of sawdust out of the dangling effigy.
I recollect that my sister, rushing to the scene of action, dared not approach the fury into which I had been transformed, but stood aloof, screaming and wringing her hands. I have no recollection of my mother’s interference, or of the chastisement which, I have been told, was inflicted with the self-same rod that had mangled the detested doll into a shapeless rag. In my berserker rage I probably did not hear scolding or feel stripes.
My father rented the house vacated by the Braggs, finding the daily ride to and from the store too long in the short winter days. Soon after our return to our old quarters, another boy was born to the bereaved parents—my brother Herbert. He was but a few days old when “Grandma” McQuie and her two daughters called to inquire after mother and child, and carried me off with them, I suppose to get me out of the way of nurse and mother. My whole body was a-tingle with excitement when I found myself snugly tucked up in shawls on the back seat of the roomy chariot, beside the dear old lady, and rolling down the road. We had not gone far before she untied and took off my bonnet, and tied over my curly head a great red bandanna handkerchief “to keep your ears warm.” The warm color and the delicious cosiness of the covering put an idea into my head. I had heard the story of Red Riding Hood from my colored nurse, and I had already the trick of “playing ladies,” as I named the story-making that has been my trade ever since. I was Red Riding Hood, and my grandmother was taking me away from the wolf. The woods we presently entered were full of fairies. They swung from the little branches of shrubs that brushed the carriage-windows, and peeped at me from behind the boles of oak and hickory, and climbed to the top of sweetbrier sprays writhing in the winter wind. One and all, they did obeisance to me as I drove in my state coach through the forest aisles. I nodded back industriously, and would have kissed my hand to them had not Grandma McQuie told me to keep it under the shawl.
My companions in the carriage paid no attention to my smiles and antics. They were busy talking of their own affairs, and probably did not give the silent child a look or thought. A word or a curious glance would have spoiled the glorious fun that lasted until I was lifted in Mr. McQuie’s arms at his hospitable door.
I never spoke of the “make believe.” What child does?
The Bragg house was roomy and rambling, and nobody troubled herself to look after me when I would steal away alone to the stairs leading to the room we had occupied while Mrs. Bragg and Lucy were alive, and sit on the steps which still bore the stains of the scorching flames that had licked up poor Lucy’s life, and dreaming over the details as I had had them, over and over, from my sister and ’Lizabeth, the colored girl whose life-work was to “look after” us three.
Just opposite the door of our old room was one that was always closed and locked and bolted. It shared in the ghoul-like interest I gave to the scorched stairs, and there was reason for this. The furniture of Mrs. Bragg’s chamber was stored here. Through a wide keyhole I could espy the corner of a bureau, and all of a Boston rocker, cushioned and valanced with dark-red calico. This, I assumed in the fancies which were more real than what I beheld with the bodily eyes, had been the favorite seat of the dead woman.
One wild March day, when the rain thundered upon the roof over my head, and the staircase and hall echoed with sighs and whistlings, my eye, glued to the awful keyhole, saw the chair begin to rock! Slowly and slightly; but it actually swayed back and forth, and, to the horrified fancy of the credulous infant without, there grew into view a shadowy form—a pale lady about whose slight figure flowed a misty robe, and who held a baby in her arms.
One long, wild look sufficed to show me this. Then I sped down the stairs like a lapwing, and into the dining-room, where sat ’Lizabeth holding my baby brother. I rushed up to her and babbled my story in panting incoherence. I had seen a ghost sitting in Mrs. Bragg’s rocking-chair, getting a baby to sleep!
The exemplary nurse was adequate to the occasion thrust suddenly upon her. Without waiting to draw breath, she gave me the lie direct, and warned me that “Mistis wouldn’t stan’ no sech dreadful stories. Ef so be you wan’ a whippin’ sech as you never had befo’ in all yer born days, you jes’ better run into the chamber an’ tell her what you done tole me, Miss Firginny!”
I did not go. Suppression of the awful truth was preferable to the certainty of a chastisement. Our parents were strict in their prohibition of all bugaboo and ghost stories. That may have been the reason we heard so many. It certainly accounts for our reticence on subjects that crammed our brains with fancies and chilled the marrow in our young bones.
The wind, finding its way between sashes and under the ill-fitting doors of the old house, no doubt set the chair in motion. My heated imagination did the rest. Five minutes’ talk with my mother or one hearty laugh from my father would have laid the spectre. She loomed up more and more distinctly before my mental vision because I kept the awesome experience locked within my own heaving heart.
Another thrilling incident, framed in memory as a fadeless fresco upon the wall of a locked temple, is the Bragg burial-lot, in which lay Lucy, her mother and baby-brother, and Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Bragg’s mother, who had followed her daughter to the grave a few weeks before we returned to the house. A low brick wall enclosed the plot, which was overgrown with neglected shrubbery and briers. On a certain day I set my small head like a flint upon the execution of no less an enterprise than a visit to the forbidden ground and a peep through the gates at the graves! I had never seen one. I do not know what I expected to behold of raw-head-and-bloody-bones horror. But ’Lizabeth’s hobgoblin and vampire recitals had enkindled within me a burning curiosity to inspect a charnel-house. Visions of skeletons lying on the bare ground, of hovering spectres and nameless Udolphian marvels, wrought me up to the expedition. The graveyard was a long way off—quite at the bottom of the garden, and the walk thither was breast-high in dead weeds. I buffeted them valiantly, striding ahead of my companions—my protesting sister, ’Lizabeth, and the baby borne upon her hip—and was so near the goal that a few minutes would show me all there was to see, when I espied Something gliding along the top of the wall! Something that was white and stealthy; something that moved without sound,