II
It was a riotous sort of day. The wind went rampaging about Central Park, and the sun laughed down upon the gay confusion of tossing branches, just beginning to grow green. In sheltered spots traces of snow still lingered, but it was melting very fast. The ground was soft, the iron thrall of winter was loosed.
It was not quite the sort of Sunday that Miss Mackellar could approve of. The wind disarranged her hair, and the promise of spring troubled her spirit. Her feet hurt, too. She sat down upon a bench and buttoned her voluminous plaid coat tightly about her, and, as the young child whose governess she was ran around and around the bench, she said “Woo!” each time the child appeared before her.
She did this with all the fervor she could command, for she was fond of the little girl, and she was a conscientious woman; but she knew that she failed. The child[Pg 249] was generously giving her every chance to be entertaining while sitting still, and she was not being entertaining. Before long she would be obliged to rise and limp off in quest of ducks and squirrels, who could do better.
“Woo!” she said once more.
“What is it ’at says ‘Woo’?” asked the child. “Bears?”
“Yes, pet—bears. Big, brown, woolly bears.”
“Do bears run after you?”
“No, pet. They sit in their dark, dark caves and say ‘Woo.’”
“I don’t like bears,” said the child flatly.
Miss Mackellar could think of no other retort than a fresh “Woo,” but it was not accepted.
“I like tigers,” said the child; “tigers ’at pounce.”
“Look out, then!” cried a gay voice. “I’m a tiger! And I pounce! Gr-r-r!”
It was a trim, brisk little red-haired woman who had just come around the turn in the path. In fact, like a real tiger, she had been lurking there in ambush for some time, watching and waiting unsuspected.
“Gr-r-r!” she said again, moving forward with gleaming eyes and outstretched claws.
The little girl was delighted. With shrieks of joy she ran behind the bench, pursued by this wholly satisfactory tiger. Around and around they went, the brisk little woman as indefatigable as the child.
But the dejected Miss Mackellar had a conscience which hurt her even more than her shoes. She believed that life was very hard and painful, and that if it wasn’t, then you were certainly doing wrong. She felt that she had no right to sit there and be comfortable.
“It’s very kind of you, I’m sure,” she said to Mrs. Fremby—for the tiger was that lady; “but really I shouldn’t let you. I ought—”
“It’s a pleasure,” Mrs. Fremby assured her. “I am very much in harmony with children. Gr-r-r!” She disappeared around the bench again. “In fact,” she continued, when she reappeared, “I wrote a series of articles once upon ‘Scientific Play.’ Play is really work, you know.”
“Indeed it is!” Miss Mackellar agreed, with a sigh.
“I mean for the child. It is in play that a child develops those qualities of—aha! Gr-r-r!” And again she was gone. “Now then!” she said, addressing the child. “The tiger’s going to hide around the corner, by those bushes, and you’d just better not look for it!”
Miss Mackellar could not help feeling glad that the lively game was now a little removed from her bench. She did not, however, believe in luck, unless it was bad, and she wondered earnestly why this little interlude of peace was granted to her. Perhaps it was to give her a chance to think about serious things. She did so.
But wasn’t it almost too quiet? Hunter and tiger had vanished around the corner. That had happened half a dozen times before, but this time it seemed so long—
Miss Mackellar rose to her feet with a worried frown.
“I shouldn’t let that child out of my sight,” she thought. “I am failing in my duty! They’ll have to come back and stay where I can see them, or”—she sighed—“or I suppose I’ll have to follow where they go.”
She walked around the turn of the path. No one in sight!
She walked on a little. She stopped to listen. Not a sound!
Then she went back to the bench and called:
“Natalie! Natalie!”
It is strange what a sinister effect may be caused by calling a person who does not answer. As soon as she had called, Miss Mackellar grew really frightened. She actually ran up the path, and, meeting a nursemaid with a perambulator, she cried:
“Oh, did you see a little girl with a tiger? No—I mean a little girl in a pink hat and a red-haired woman?”
“Er-huh,” said the nursemaid, staring hard at her. “Just a minute ago—goin’ up that way, to the entrance, walking terrible fast.”
“Oh, Heavens!” cried Miss Mackellar, ashen white. “Oh, stop them, somebody! The child has been kidnaped!”
The nursemaid also turned pale.
“Oh, my!” she exclaimed. “I never! Then I’d better get this baby home, quick as ever I can!”
And she set off with her perambulator at a dangerous rate of speed.
The luckless Miss Mackellar stood in the middle of the path, clasping her trembling hands, and trying in vain to make her panic-stricken brain function lucidly.[Pg 250] What she really wanted to do was to scream.
“No, no!” she said to herself. “I must keep calm. Oh, there’s a policeman! But I don’t know—perhaps that’s the wrong thing to do. It might get into the newspapers, if I tell a policeman, and Mr. Donalds is always so angry at newspapers. Oh! Oh! If they had only come to me and told me they were going to steal the child, I’d have been glad to draw all my money out of the savings bank and hide it under a tree for them! That’s what they always seem to want some one to do. Of course I know I wouldn’t have enough, but—oh, my precious Natalie! Oh, Mr. Donalds! Oh, my poor darling Natalie!”
She began to cry.
“I’ll go to Mr. Donalds this instant,” she thought. “I don’t care what happens to me. Let them put me in jail—that’s where I ought to be! It’s all my fault!”
Off she went, as fast as her shaking knees and her fluttering heart permitted; and this is her last personal appearance in this story, for any account of her interview with her employer would be too painful to set before a humane reader.
Only let it be said that she survived—that when Mr. Donalds rushed out of his house on East Seventy-Fourth Street, Miss Mackellar was still breathing. He had at first intended to take her with him, to identify persons and places, but even he could see the uselessness of doing so. She was in no condition to identify anything. She was beginning to rave about the child’s having been carried off by a tiger; so he left her behind.
Like a stone from a catapult he shot out of his house and down the street toward the park. He had no intention of allowing the police to interfere with his private affairs. He believed he knew very well who had stolen the child, and why.
“Very well, madam!” he said to himself. “We shall see!”