THE WICKED GENII
Tania had been aroused in the night by seeing a dark figure standing with
his back to her only a few feet from her bed. Involuntarily the child
stirred. In that instant a black-masked face turned toward her and Tania
gave the single, terrified scream that Madge had heard. Before Tania
could call out again, a handkerchief was tied so closely around her mouth
that she could make no further sound.
A moment later the mysterious, sinister visitor picked the child up in
his arms and bore her swiftly and quietly away from the shelter of the
houseboat and her beloved friends. The little girl was very slender, yet
her abductor staggered as he walked. He had something besides Tania that
he was carrying.
About a quarter of a mile from the houseboat Tania was dumped into the
rear end of an automobile and covered with a heavy steamer blanket. Then
the automobile started off through the night, going faster and faster, it
seemed to her, with each hour of darkness that remained.
At times the little prisoner slept. When she awakened she cried softly to
herself, wondering who had stolen away with her and what was now to
become of her. But Tania was only a child of the streets and she had been
reared in a harder school than other happier children, so she made no
effort to cry out or escape. She knew there was no one near to hear her,
and the motor car was moving so swiftly that she could not possibly
escape from it.
Tania and her unknown companion must have ridden all night. Evidently the
driver of the car had not cared about the roads. He had pushed through
heavy sand and ploughed over deep holes regardless of his machine. Speed
was the only thing he thought of.
By and by the automobile stopped, after a particularly bad piece of
traveling. The driver got down, lifted Tania, still wrapped in her
blanket, in his arms and carried her inside a house. The child first saw
the light in an old room, up several flights of steps, which was drearier
and more miserable than anything she had ever beheld in her life in the
tenements. It was big and mouldy, and dark with cobwebs swinging like
dusty curtains over the windows that had not been washed for years. The
windows looked out over a swamp that was thick with old trees.
But Tania saw none of these things when the blanket was first lifted from
her head. She gave a gasp of fright and horror. For the first time she
now realized that her captor was her childhood's enemy and evil genius,
Philip Holt.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, with a long-drawn sigh that was almost a sob, "it is
_you_! Why have you brought me here? What have I done?" Then a look of
unearthly wisdom came into Tania's solemn, black eyes. She continued to
stare at the young man so silently and gravely that Philip Holt's blonde
face twitched with nervousness.
"Didn't you recognize me before?" he asked fiercely. "You were quite
likely to shriek out in the night and spoil everything, so I had to carry
you off with me, little nuisance that you are! You can just make up your
mind, young woman, that you will stay right here in this room until I can
take you to that nice institution for bad children that I have been
telling you about for such a long time. You'll never see your houseboat
friends again."
Tania made no answer, and Philip Holt left her sitting on the floor of
the gloomy room wide-eyed and silent.
For three days Tania stayed alone in that cheerless room. She saw no one
but an old, half-foolish man who came to her three times a day to bring
her food. He gave Tania a few rough garments to dress herself in and
treated the little prisoner kindly, but Tania found it was quite useless
to ask the old man questions. She was a wise, silent child, with
considerable knowledge of life, and she understood that there was nothing
to be gained by talking to her jailer, who would now and then grin
foolishly and tell her that she was to be good and everything would soon
be all right. Her nice, kind brother was going to take her away to school
as soon as he could. The wicked people who had been trying to steal her
away from her own brother should never find her if her brother could help
it.
So the long nights passed and the longer days, and little Tania would
have been very miserable indeed except for her fairies and her dreams. It
is never possible to be unhappy all the time, if you own a dream world of
your own. Still, Tania found it much harder to pretend things, now that
she had tasted real happiness with her houseboat girls, than she had when
she lived with old Sal. It wasn't much fun to play at being an enchanted
princess when you knew what it was to feel like a really happy little
girl. And no one would care to be taken away to the most wonderful castle
in fairyland if she had to leave the darling houseboat and Madge and Miss
Jenny Ann and the other girls behind.
So all through the daylight Tania sat with her small, pale face pressed
against the dirty window pane, waiting for Madge to come and find her.
She even hoped that a stranger might walk along close enough to the house
for her to call for aid. But a dreary rain set in and all the countryside
near Tania's prison house looked desolate. More than anything Tania
feared the return of Philip Holt. Once he got hold of her again, she knew
he would fulfill his threats.
During this dreadful time Tania had no human companion, but she was not
like other children. She was part little girl and the rest of her an elf
or a fay. The trees, the birds, and flowers were almost as real to her as
human beings. For, until Madge and Eleanor had found her dancing on the
New York City street corner, she had never had anybody to be kind to her,
or whom she could love.
Just outside Tania's window there was a tall old cedar tree. Its long
arms reached quite up to her window sill, and when the wind blew it used
to wave her its greetings. Inside the comfortable branches of the tree
there was a regular apartment house of birds, the nests rising one above
the other to the topmost limbs.
Tania held long conversations with these birds in the mornings and in the
late afternoons. She told them all her troubles, and how very much she
would like to get away from the place where she was now staying. However,
the birds were great gad-abouts during the day, and Tania could hardly
blame them.
There was one fat, fatherly robin that became Tania's particular friend.
He used to hop about near her window and nod and chirp to her as though
to reassure her. "Your friends will come for you to-day, I am quite sure
of it," he used to say, until one day Tania really spoke aloud to him and
was startled at the sound of her own voice.
"I don't believe you are a robin at all," she announced. "I just believe
you are a nice, fat father of a whole lot of funny little boys and girls.
I believe you are enchanted, like me. Oh, dear! I was just beginning to
believe that I wasn't a fairy after all but a real little girl with
pretty clothes and friends to kiss me good night." Tania sighed. "I
suppose I must be a fairy princess after all, for if I was a real little
girl no one would have cast another wicked spell over me and shut me up
in this dungeon in the woods, which is a whole lot worse than living with
old Sal."
Yet playing and pretending, and, worse than anything, waiting, grew very
tiresome to Tania. On the morning of the fourth day of her imprisonment
Tania awoke with a start. Something had knocked on her window pane. It
was only the old cedar tree, and Tania turned over in bed with a sob. But
the tapping went on. She got up and went to her window. Quick as a flash
Tania made up her mind to run away. Why had she never thought of it
before? It was true, her bedroom door was always locked, but here were
the branches of the cedar tree reaching close up to her window. Really,
this morning they seemed to speak quite distinctly to Tania:
"Why in the world don't you come to me? I shall hold you quite safe! You
can climb down through all my arms to the warm earth and then run away to
your friends."
It was just after dawn. The pink sky was showing against the earlier
grayness when Tania slipped into her coarse clothes and, like a small
elf, crept out of her window into the friendly branches of the old tree.
She was silent and swift as a squirrel as she clambered down. But she
need not have feared. No one in the lonely country place was awake but
the child.
Once on the ground, Tania ran on and on, without thinking where she was
going. She only wished to get far away from the dreary house where Philip
Holt had hidden her. There was a thick woods about a mile or so from
Tania's starting place. No one would find her there. Once she was through
it Tania hoped to find a town, or at least a farm, where she could ask
for help. In spite of her queer, unchildlike ways, Tania knew enough to
understand that if she could only find some one to telegraph to her
friends they would soon come to her.
But the forest through which Tania hoped to pass was a dreadful cedar
swamp, and in trying to cross it Tania wandered far into it and found
herself hopelessly lost.