When Mary Rose went up to Mrs. Bracken's the next morning she took
Jenny Lind with her and placed the cage on the kitchen table.
"I can't bear to be alone," she had explained to Aunt Kate. "If I
don't have a friend with me I feel as if I was shut up in a dark
closet."
First Mary Rose went into the big living-room and picked up papers,
straightened the chairs and raised the shades as she had seen her aunt
do the day before. It was a very splendid room to Mary Rose but there
was something about it that made her frown as she stood in the doorway.
"It needs something. Even the chairs don't look as if they really knew
each other. It doesn't feel as if people ever had a good time in it."
She shook her head and thought of the shabby sitting-room in
Mifflin--not big enough to swing a cat in, daddy had said--where she
and daddy and Jenny Lind and George Washington and Solomon and Lena had
been crowded together. Everyone had had good times there.
She winked back a tear as she went down the hall. She glanced in at an
open door and stopped short as she found that she was looking into the
black eyes of a woman on the bed.
"Are you Mrs. Donovan's niece?" the woman said faintly. "Come in.
Gracious, but you're small for your age! You washed up very nicely
yesterday. I didn't close my eyes last night and I'm not feeling well
today, so I'm not going to get up for a while. I wish you would tell
your uncle that Mrs. Matchan can't practice this morning. I must get
some sleep. What's that in the kitchen?" she demanded as she heard a
happy chirp-chirp.
"That's Jenny Lind." Mary Rose was all sympathy for this lovely lady
who could not sleep. For a moment she had thought that she might be
the enchanted princess but if she was Mrs. Bracken she was a married
lady and Mary Rose had never heard of a married princess. All the
princesses she knew ceased to exist when they began to live happily
ever after.
"Jenny Lind?" asked Mrs. Bracken.
"My canary. I brought her for company. I never was in a house by
myself and it's lonely if you're only going on fourteen," faltered Mary
Rose, fully conscious that Mrs. Bracken did not care for canaries.
"Well, I can't have her in my kitchen. She makes me nervous. Put her
out in the hall and shut the bedroom door. When you have washed the
dishes I may let you make a cup of tea." And she closed the black eyes
which had looked at Mary Rose in such a chilly way.
Mary Rose went out on tiptoe. She meant to close the door softly but
she was so indignant that it would slam. Put her Jenny Lind out in the
hall where cats could get her? She would not. Even if cats were
forbidden to enter the Washington some cat might not know the law and
slip in. She would take no risk. She nodded encouragingly at the bird
as she looked about the kitchen. Near the sink was an open cupboard
with three shelves, broad and high enough to hold a birdcage. She
would put the cage on the lowest shelf and then if Mrs. Bracken came
out, she would push the door shut.
"You'd better go to sleep too, Jenny Lind," she cautioned in a low
voice. "The lady doesn't like you. She thinks you're noisy." She did
not tell Jenny Lind what she thought of the lady, but shut her lips
firmly and began her work. She did not sing that morning. She did not
even look up to smile and nod to Jenny Lind, but kept her eyes on her
dishes, her lips pressed into an indignant red button.
Suddenly there was a whir--a rattle--and she did look up to see that
the cupboard had vanished. Shelves and birdcage had all disappeared.
Nothing was left but a vacant space and an open door. Mary Rose
dropped the dish she held. Fortunately it was a kitchen bowl, but it
would have been the same if it had been one of the best cups.
[Illustration: "Shelves and birdcage had all disappeared."]
"Why--why!" gasped Mary Rose. She tried to put her head in the space
where the shelves had been to see where Jenny Lind had gone.
"Jenny Lind!" she shrieked suddenly. She could not help it. If your
pet canary was suddenly snatched from you by some mysterious power, I
rather fancy you would shriek, too. "Jenny Lind!"
The crash of the kitchen bowl or Mary Rose's astonished shriek brought
Mrs. Bracken from her bed. She stood in the doorway, one hand
clutching the kimono she had thrown around her.
"You must be more quiet," she said crossly. "How can I sleep when you
are making such a noise? And if you break any more dishes I shall have
to charge you for them. It's pure carelessness."
"It's Jenny Lind," gulped Mary Rose, too frightened to think of dishes.
And she tried to make Mrs. Bracken understand that Jenny Lind had been
there, in that hole in the wall, and that now--Oh, where was she?
Mrs. Bracken shrugged her shoulders. "It's the dumbwaiter," she
yawned. "Your bird has gone up to Mr. Wells or possibly higher. If
it's Mr. Wells I don't suppose you'll see the bird again. He's a very
peculiar man."
Mary Rose did not wait to hear another word. With Aunt Kate's big blue
and white checked apron on, the dish mop in her hand, and a great fear
in her heart, she dashed up the stairs and pounded on the door of the
apartment above. Mr. Wells came himself and if he had looked cross and
forbidding the night before he looked a thousand times crosser and more
forbidding now. Indeed, he exactly fulfilled Mary Rose's idea of an
ogre.
"Please don't hurt Jenny Lind," sobbed Mary Rose, as soon as she could
gather breath to speak. "I'll take her right away."
"Hurt who? Who's Jenny Lind?" growled the ogre.
"My bird! my Jenny Lind! She came up to your house with a dumbwaiter."
Mary Rose hadn't the faintest idea of what a dumbwaiter was and it
sounded horrible to her. "Please, please, give her to me at once!"
She fairly danced in her impatience. She would have rushed into the
apartment but Mr. Wells stood in the doorway.
"The dumbwaiter?" Mary Rose had never heard a more unfriendly voice.
He called to someone behind him and a Japanese man came and peered
under Mr. Wells' arm as he held it against the frame of the door.
"Sako has taken nothing from the dumbwaiter this morning," Mr. Wells
said very coldly after he had exchanged a few words with his servant.
"But if you have lost your bird it is only what you must expect. Pets
are not allowed in this house." And he scowled fiercely enough to
frighten anyone but the owner of a lost canary.
"They are if they're not children nor cats nor dogs," insisted tearful
Mary Rose. "Uncle Larry said the law never says one word about birds.
Oh, are you quite sure Jenny Lind isn't in your house?" she wailed.
"I told you we have taken nothing from the dumbwaiter," impatiently.
He thought he was wonderfully patient with the child. He could have
ordered her out of the building at once. "Your bird may have gone up
to the next floor."
"Perhaps she has." Mary Rose was on the stairs before he finished the
sentence. "I'm sorry for bothering you," she called back, "but if one
of your family was lost I rather think you'd try to find her."
Her voice rang out shrill and clear and it was such an unexpected sound
in the Washington, where children's voices were forbidden, that old
Mrs. Johnson opened her door in a spasm of curiosity. She closed it
abruptly when she met the cold unfriendly glance of Mr. Wells' black
eyes, and shook in her shoes.
Four doors faced Mary Rose when she reached the third floor. She
knocked on all of them not to waste time. Two doors remained firmly
closed. The other two opened simultaneously. In one stood a girl with
yellow hair and blue eyes and in the other was a young man who promptly
changed the morose expression he had put on when he rose for a
pleasanter one as he glanced across at Miss Blanche Carter before he
even looked at Mary Rose. Miss Carter looked at Mary Rose first and
then at Mr. Robert Strahan.
"Oh, please," Mary Rose was almost, if not quite, in tears, "have you
seen Jenny Lind?"
They stared at her. The only Jenny Lind they had ever heard of had
been quietly in her grave for many years. They looked at each other.
Mr. Strahan added a satisfied grin to his pleasant expression, for he
had wished to know Miss Carter ever since he had met her on the stairs
the day after he had moved into the Washington, but Fate had refused to
bring them together. He determined to make the most of this rare
opportunity as he kindly questioned Mary Rose.
"Who is Jenny Lind?"
"My canary," sobbed Mary Rose. "I put her on the shelf in Mrs.
Bracken's kitchen and she--she disappeared!"
"Cats," suggested Mr. Strahan with a very knowing glance for Miss
Carter.
Mary Rose shook her head. "Cats aren't allowed here. It was a
dumbwaiter, Mrs. Bracken said." Her voice was filled with anguish.
How hateful city life was!
"Oh! I thought it was the milkman." Miss Carter turned and ran into
her flat, Mary Rose at her heels. After a moment's hesitation, in
which he called himself a bashful idiot, Mr. Strahan deserted his
doorway for his neighbor's. On the top shelf of a cupboard like that
which had been in Mrs. Bracken's kitchen Mary Rose saw a bottle of
milk. She groaned. But Miss Carter gave a pull somewhere and sent it
higher. There on the lower shelf, swinging unconcernedly in her cage,
was Jenny Lind. Mary Rose gave a joyous shriek.
"I thought I'd never see her again. I can't thank you, but I'll
remember you as long as I live. I--I feel as if you'd saved her life."
She shivered as she remembered the snap of Mr. Wells' black eyes, the
click of his heavy jaw, when he had said that pets were not allowed in
the building.
"What is all this excitement?" questioned a soft voice behind them, and
Mary Rose whirled around and stared at another girl.
Now that her anxiety in regard to Jenny Lind was relieved, Mary Rose
had time to think of other things. She brushed the tears from her
eyes, and her face was wreathed with a dewy smile as she asked eagerly:
"Please, which--which of you is the enchanted princess?" One of them
must be. She knew it by a funny prickle down her back.
Both girls laughed, the yellow-haired one and the brown.
"Princesses aren't enchanted now." Miss Carter pulled a lock of Mary
Rose's yellow hair. "They have their eyes too wide open."
"But Mr. Jerry said there was, that in this very house was a most
beautiful princess who was under the spell of a wicked witch. He said
the old witch's name was Independence." Her words fairly ran over each
other, she was so afraid something would happen before she could
deliver Mr. Jerry's message to the princess. "And he said to tell the
princess that the prince wasn't ever going to Jericho, but was going to
stay right here on the job."
Miss Carter looked significantly at the brown-haired girl. "That
message isn't for me," she told Mary Rose. "Independence and I are
strangers. I can't bear the thing. I quite agree with Mr. Jerry that
she is an old witch. Isn't someone a picture, Bess," she asked, "with
her birdcage and checked apron?"
"She surely is." The impatient frown that had marred Miss Thorley's
face at the mere mention of Mr. Jerry's name slipped away. "I must
paint her. She'll make a fine ad. Who are you, honey?"
And Mary Rose told them who she was and how she had come from Mifflin
to make her home with Aunt Kate and Uncle Larry in the cellar-basement,
she meant; and how she had had to board out George Washington and had
taken Jenny Lind to Mrs. Bracken's for company while she earned money
to pay for George Washington's board.
"By jinks, what a jolly story," murmured Mr. Strahan who still clung to
his neighbor's doorway and his opportunity. The two girls looked at
him and the three smiled involuntarily.
"I must go back and finish the dishes," Mary Rose announced suddenly.
"Mrs. Bracken won't like it if I stay away any longer. I'm sorry I
bothered you," she smiled tremulously. "But I just had to find Jenny
Lind. Thank you for your trouble. Good-by."
"Come and see us again?" The invitation came in a chorus.
Mary Rose stopped abruptly. "Is that an honest and true invitation?"
she asked doubtfully. "Aunt Kate said I mustn't ever be a nuisance to
the tenements because children aren't allowed here. I'm not a child,
she said, because I'm going on fourteen, but I had to promise to be
careful of the tenements."
"Bless the baby," murmured Miss Carter as she and Mr. Strahan stood in
the hall and watched Mary Rose's head go down, down.
"I thought children were barred?" asked Mr. Strahan quickly, he was so
afraid that Miss Carter would disappear also.
"I thought pets were barred, too. She's a quaint little thing. I
suppose she is homesick. A city apartment house is not like a home in
a small town," she said, as if she knew, and she sighed.
"It is not!" He agreed with her emphatically. He had come from a
small town himself and he knew. "I think I'll make a little story out
of this. I'm a newspaper man, you know, and there isn't anything a
city editor likes better than he does a human interest story. I have a
hunch that there is a lot of human interest in that kid."
"I fancy you are right. I'm a librarian myself, and I should be at my
library this blessed moment. I'd far rather go down and help Mary
Rose," and she laughed scornfully because she had such simple tastes.
He looked as if he admired them. "If you feel that way you surely
aren't under the spell of that wicked witch Independence that Mary Rose
talks of." There was nothing scornful in his laugh. It held so little
scorn and so much admiration that she flushed.
"Independence!" she shrugged her shoulders. "I learned long ago that
independence is just another word for loneliness. My friend, Miss
Thorley, doesn't agree with me. We have very warm arguments over it."
"They haven't been warm enough to disturb me. You're very quiet
neighbors. Doesn't the very quiet get on your nerves sometimes? It's
something just to hear people, when you are alone and have no one to
talk to."
"Lonely! You?" She was astonished. "I don't see how a young man could
be lonely." Evidently her idea of masculine life was a merry round of
social pleasure.
His laugh was a trifle bitter. "A man can be lonely for exactly the
same reason a girl can," he asserted. "I've lived here for three
months, and this is the first time I've spoken to you."
The color deepened in her cheeks. "I suppose I shouldn't be talking to
you now but--Mary Rose--and we are neighbors. One does get so
suspicious living with suspicious people," apologetically.
"Please don't be suspicious of me. I'm the most harmless man in Waloo.
I'm too busy hanging on to my job to be dangerous. I propose a vote of
thanks to Mary Rose for bringing us together. All in favor say aye.
The ayes have it." He held out his hand.
She laughed consciously, but after a second she gave him her fingers.
"It is pleasant to be able to speak to one's neighbors," she admitted
with a hint of formality that in some way pleased Mr. Strahan.
Mary Rose stopped at Mr. Wells' door as she went downstairs. It would
be but friendly to tell him that Jenny Lind was found, he must be
anxious. But she hesitated before she rapped on the door, very gently
this time.
Mr. Wells had not lost any of his grimness when he opened it. He had
on his hat and he looked to Mary Rose's startled eyes as tall as the
steeple of the Presbyterian Church in Mifflin.
"Well, what now?" he snapped.
Mary Rose caught her breath. "I thought you would like to know that
Jenny Lind is safe." She lifted the cage so that he could see for
himself how safe and comfortable Jenny Lind was. "She was on the
lowest shelf of the dumbwaiter. The enchanted princess's milk bottle
was on the top shelf." And she chuckled. Now that she was no longer
frightened, Jenny Lind's adventure seemed a joke.
It was not a joke to Mr. Wells. "A city apartment house is no place
for pets--or children," he said and shut the door.
Mary Rose stared at the mahogany panels. "Crosspatch," she whispered.
And then she said it louder, "Crosspatch!"
The door opened as if by magic and Mr. Wells came out and shut it
behind him.
"Did you say anything?" he asked coldly.
Mary Rose was too startled and too honest not to tell the truth.
"I said crosspatch," she faltered and waited bravely for the deluge.
The two looked at each other. The tall man with the nervous, irritable
face and the little girl with the birdcage in her hand. She did not
say that she had called him a crosspatch, and kindly Discretion
whispered in Mr. Wells' ear that it would be wise to leave well enough
alone. Without another word he stalked by Mary Rose down the stairs.
Mary Rose followed meekly. "It's a lucky thing, Jenny Lind, that you
were not on his dumbwaiter. He's not what I call a very friendly man,"
she murmured.
She told Mr. Jerry all about it that afternoon when she ran over to see
how George Washington was doing as a boarder. Mr. Jerry watched her
curiously.
"Poor little kid," he thought. "She's up against it for fair with a
cold-blooded bunch like that." He was very sympathetic and kind and
quite enthusiastic over his new boarder. He cheered Mary Rose
amazingly and lifted her to the seventh heaven of delight when he
suggested that she should ride downtown with him in the automobile when
he went for his Aunt Mary.
"You may take Jenny Lind and George Washington with you," he was good
enough to say.
Mary Rose's dancing feet moved in a more sedate measure. "I think
Jenny Lind has had ride enough for one day. And George Washington
likes his four feet better than he does an automobile. He won't mind
if we leave him behind."
"Then you may sit on the front seat with me," Mr. Jerry promised.
"It's very exciting living in the city," sighed Mary Rose, when she was
on the front seat beside him. "I've been here only three days and see
all that's happened. Oh, there's the lady who found Jenny Lind--and
the enchanted princess, too!" she cried as they passed Miss Thorley and
Miss Carter. "Isn't that the enchanted princess, Mr. Jerry?" She
twisted around so that she could look into his face. He colored and
his eyes seemed to darken as he spoke to the two girls. Miss Thorley
nodded curtly, but Miss Carter waved a friendly hand. "My," sighed
Mary Rose, "if I were a prince I wouldn't let any old witch
Independence keep her enchanted."
"I wonder how you would prevent it," muttered Mr. Jerry under his
breath. "Saying and doing, Mary Rose, are two very separate and
distinct things."
"I know." Mary Rose felt quite capable of discussing the subject.
"Mr. Mann, the Presbyterian minister in Mifflin, preached a whole
sermon about that. He said the Lord didn't ever give you what you want
right off quick. You had to work for it, and the more precious it was
the harder you had to work. I should think that a beautiful princess
would be the most precious thing a prince could work for, shouldn't
you?"
Mr. Jerry took his hand from the wheel to squeeze Mary Rose's brown
fingers. "I should!" he said solemnly. "I do, Mary Rose, I do!"