“No, I came afterward. The year the darkeys moved away. But anybody can see how different she must have been from this one, who is the daughter of old Mr. Twine, the miller. She kept house for Mr. Blanton after his first wife died.” This was news to me, for I was absolutely ignorant of the family circumstances. I was eager to learn more of the story; but I could not gossip about my relatives with a stranger, so I said merely,
“Then she brought up the child—Pell, I mean?” Though the driver’s back was turned to me, I could see by the stubborn shake of his head that my question had aroused an unpleasant train of reflections. “No, Pell’s mammy took care of him until he was five years old. She had nursed his mother before him. I reckon she belonged to the family of the first Mrs. Blanton and came to Whispering Leaves with the bride. I never saw her. She died before my time here; but they say that as long as the old woman lived Pell never knew what it was to miss his mother. Mammy Rhody—that was her name—had promised the first Mrs. Blanton when she was dying that she would never let the child out of her sight; and they say she kept her promise to the dead as long as she lived. Whenever you saw Pell there was Mammy Rhody, sure enough, with her eyes on him. She slept in the room with him, and she always stood behind his high chair when they had him down to the table. Darkeys are like that, I reckon. A vow’s a vow. When she swore she’d never take her eyes off him, she meant just what she said.”
“The child must miss her terribly?”
Again I saw that stubborn shake of his head. “The queer part is that the boy insists she ain’t dead. Nothing they can do to him—Mrs. Blanton has talked to him by the hour—will make him admit that Mammy Rhody is dead. He says she plays with him just as she used to, and that all these birds you hear about Whispering Leaves are the ones that she tamed for him. Birds! Well, there never was, they say, such a hand with birds as Mammy Rhody. She could tame anything going from an eagle to a wren, I’ve heard, and some of the darkeys have got the notion that the woods about here are still full of the ghosts of Mammy Rhody’s pets. They say it ain’t natural for birds to call in and out of season as they do around Whispering Leaves.”
“And does Pell believe this also?”
“Nobody knows, ma’am, just how much Pell believes. They’ve tried to stop all that foolishness because it turns the heads of the darkeys.
“You can’t get one of them to stay on the place after sunset, not for love or money. It all started with the way Pell goes about talking to himself. Holy Moses! I ain’t skeery myself, ma’am, for a big fellow like me, but it gives me the creeps sometimes when I watch that child playing by himself in the shrubbery and hear him talking to somebody that ain’t there. He does the queerest things, too, just like climbing out on that high limb and calling out to his mammy that he was going to fall.”
“He might have been badly hurt if somebody hadn’t caught him,” I said.
The driver laughed politely, as if I had made a poor joke which he accepted on faith though he missed the humour. “He goes on pretending like that all the time,” he returned.
“But the old coloured woman, the one who caught him? Who is she?” I asked.