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.