Returning Rosa Marie
EARLY the next morning, Jean, needing her thimble to sew on a vitally
necessary button, ran to the supposedly empty cottage to get it. Taking
the short cut through the Tuckers' back yard she found Bettie feeding
Billy, the seagull, one of Bob's numerous pets.
"Billy always wakes everybody up crying for his breakfast," explained
thoughtful little Bettie. "Bob's spending a week at the Ormsbees' camp,
so I have to get up to feed Billy so father can sleep."
"Why don't the other boys do it?"
"Mercy! _They'd_ sleep through anything. Going to the Cottage?"
"Yes, come with me," returned Jean, "while I get my thimble. It's so
big that it almost takes two to carry it."
"All right," laughed Bettie, crawling through the hole in the fence.
Jean's thimble was a standing joke. A stout and prudent godmother had
bestowed a very large one on the little girl so that Jean would be
in no danger of outgrowing the gift. Jean was now living in hopes of
sometime growing big enough to fit the thimble.
"Why!" exclaimed Jean, after a brief search, "the key isn't under the
doormat! Where do you s'pose it's gone?"
"Here it is in the door. But how in the world did it get there? I
locked that door myself last night and tucked the key under the mat. I
_know_ I did."
"I saw you do it," corroborated Jean.
"Perhaps Marjory's inside."
"It isn't Mabel, anyway. She's always the last one up."
"Mercy me!" cried Bettie, who had been peeking into the different rooms
to see if Marjory were inside. "Come here, Jean. Just look at this!"
"This" was brown little Rosa Marie sitting up in the middle of the
pink and white spare-room bed, like, as Bettie put it, a brown bee
in the heart of a rose. Her small dark countenance was absolutely
expressionless, so there was no way of discovering what _she_ thought
about it all.
"My sakes!" exclaimed Jean, with indignation, "that lazy Mabel never
took her home, after all! Why! We'll have a whole band of wild Indians
coming to scalp us right after breakfast! How _could_ she have been so
careless. This is the worst she's done yet."
"But it's just like Mabel," said Bettie, giving vent, for once, to her
disapproval of Mabel's thoughtlessness. "She likes things ever so much
at first. Then she simply forgets that they ever existed."
"Who forgets?" demanded Mabel, bouncing in at the front door.
"You," returned Jean and Bettie, with one accusing voice.
"Prove it."
"You forgot to take Rosa Marie home last night."
"I never did. I took her every inch of the way home, stayed with her
all alone in the dark for pretty nearly a _year_, and then had to bring
her all the way back again, walking in her sleep. So there, now!"
"But why in the world didn't you leave her with her own folks?"
"Her horrid mother wasn't there. And between 'em, I didn't get any
supper and only a little sleep."
"But what are you going to do?" queried astonished Jean.
"After she drinks this quart of milk," explained Mabel, "I'm going to
take her home again."
"Where did you get so much milk?" asked Bettie, suspiciously.
Mabel colored furiously. "I begged it from the milkman," she confessed.
"That's why I'm up so early. I've been sitting on our kitchen doorstep
for two hours, waiting for him to come."
Mabel spent all that day industriously returning Rosa Marie to a home
that had locked its doors against her. No pretty, dark, French mother
stood in the doorway. No tall, dark man wandered about the yard. No
neighbor came from the tumbling houses across the street to explain the
woman's puzzling absence.
It proved a most tiresome day. Mabel was not only mentally weary from
trying to solve the mystery, but physically tired also from dragging
Rosa Marie up and down the hill between Dandelion Cottage and the
child's deserted home. The girls went with her once, but, having
satisfied their curiosity as to Rosa Marie's abiding-place, turned
their attention to pleasanter tasks. Walking with Rosa Marie was too
much like traveling with a snail. One such journey was enough.
Moreover, Mabel's pride had suffered. A grinning boy, looking from
plump Mabel's ruddy countenance to fat Rosa Marie's expressionless
brown one, had asked wickedly:
"Is that your sister? You look enough alike to be twins."
After that, Mabel feared that other persons might mistake the small
brown person for a relative of hers, or, worse yet, mistake her for an
Indian.
"Goodness me!" groaned Mabel, toiling homeward from her second trip,
"it was hard enough to borrow a baby, but it's enough sight worse
getting rid of one afterwards. There's one thing certain; I'll _never_
borrow another."
Late in the day Mabel thought of Mrs. Malony, the egg-woman. Perhaps
she would know what had become of Rosa Marie's vanished mother.
Dropping Rosa Marie inside the gate, Mabel knocked at Mrs. Malony's
door.
"The folks that lived in the shanty beyant?" asked Mrs. Malony. "Sure,
darlint, nobody's lived there for years and years save gipsies and
tramps and such like."
"But day before yesterday--no, yesterday morning--I saw a young
Frenchwoman----"
"A black-eyed gal wid two long braids and wan small Injin? Sure, Oi
know the wan you mane. Her man, Injin Pete, died a month ago, some two
days after they come to the shack."
"But where is she now?" asked Mabel.
"Lord love ye," returned Mrs. Malony, "how wud Oi be after knowin'? She
came and she wint, like the rest av thim."
"There was a man--not a gentleman and not exactly a tramp--talking
to her yesterday. Perhaps you know where _he_ is. I couldn't find
_anybody_."
"Depind upon it," said Mrs. Malony, easily, "she's gone wid him. She's
Mrs. Somebody Else by now, and good riddance to the pair av thim."
"But," objected Mabel, drawing the branches of a small shrub aside and
disclosing Rosa Marie sprawling on the ground behind it, "she left her
baby."
"The Nation, she did!" gasped Mrs. Malony, for once surprised out of
her serenity. "Wud ye think of thot, now!"
"I've _been_ thinking of it," returned Mabel, miserably. "And I don't
know what in the world to do. You see, she left the baby with _me_."
"Take her home wid ye," advised Mrs. Malony, hastily; so hastily that
it looked as if the Irishwoman feared that _she_ might be asked to
mother Rosa Marie. "I'll kape an eye on the shack for ye. If that
good-for-nothin' black-haired wan comes back, Oi'll be up wid the news
in two shakes of a dead lamb's tail, so Oi will. In the mane toime, be
a mother to thot innocent babe yourself. She needs wan if iver a choild
did."
"I've been that for two whole days now," groaned Mabel.
"Thot's right, thot's right," encouraged Mrs. Malony. "Ye were just
cut out for thot same. Good luck go wid ye."
Rosa Marie spent a second night in the spare room of Dandelion Cottage.
She, at least, seemed utterly indifferent as to her fate.