Donald and Dorothy

by Mary Mapes Dodge

Once safely on board, Sailor Jack had time to reflect on his somewhat novel position—a jolly tar, as he expressed it, with two helpless little kids to take ashore as salvage. That the babies did not now belong to him never entered his mind; they were his twins, to be cared for and to keep, he insisted, till the "Cumberland" should touch shore; and his to keep and care for ever after, unless somebody with a better right and proof positive should meet him in New York and claim them, or else that some of their relatives should be saved in one of the other boats.

So certain was he of his rights, that when the captain's wife, who happened to be on board, offered to care for the little creatures, he, concealing his helplessness as a nurse, accepted her kindness with a lordly air and as though it were really a favor on his part. "Them twins is Quality," he would say, "and I can't have 'em meddled with till I find the grand folks they belong to. Wash their leetle orphan faces, you may; feed 'em, you may; and keep 'em warm, you may; but their leetle jackets, night gownds, and petticuts, an' caps has got to stay just as they are, to identify 'em. And this ere gimcrack on the leetle miss—gold it is, you may well say" (touching the chain on the baby's neck admiringly)—"this ere gimcrack likely's got a legal consequence to its folks, which I couldn't and wouldn't undertake to calc'late."

Meantime the sailors would stand around, looking reverently at the babies, until, with Jack's gracious permission, the kind-hearted woman would tenderly soothe the little ones to sleep.

Among the survivors of the wreck, none could give much information concerning the babies. Only two were women, and one of these lay ill in a rough bunk through the remainder of the voyage, raving in her fever of the brother who bent anxiously over her. (In her delirium, she imagined that he had been drowned on that terrible night.) Sailor Jack held the twins before her, but she took no notice of them. Her brother knew nothing about them or of any of the passengers. He had been a fireman on the wrecked vessel, and scarcely had been on deck from the hour of starting until the moment of the wreck. The other rescued woman frequently had seen a tall nurse with two very young infants on her lap, and a pale mother dressed in black standing near them; and she remembered hearing some one say that there was another lady with a young baby on board, and that the two mothers were sisters, or relatives of some kind, and that the one with twins had recently become a widow. That was all. Beyond vaguely wondering how any one could think of taking such mites of humanity across the ocean, she had given no more thought to them. Of the men rescued, not one had known of the existence of the three wee passengers, the only babies on board, as the little creatures seldom had been taken on deck.

The two mothers, as Jack learned from one of the women, had been made so ill by the voyage that they rarely had left their state-rooms. Mr. Robertson, Kate's husband, was known by sight to all as a tall, handsome man, though very restless and anxious-looking; but, being much occupied with the care of his wife and child, he had spoken to very few persons on board the vessel.

This was all Jack could find out, though he never wearied of making inquiries among the survivors. He was shrewd enough, however, to ask them to write their names and addresses for him to keep, so that, if the twins' people (as he called them) ever should be found, they could in turn communicate with the survivors. The family naturally would want to inquire about "the other baby and its poor father, and the two mothers, one of which was a widow in mournin'—poor soul! and the nurse-girl, all drowned and gone."

Long weeks afterward, one other boat was heard from—the only other one that was ever found. Its freight of human beings, only seven in all, had passed through great privation and danger, but they finally had been taken aboard a steamer going east. The list of persons saved in this boat had been in due time received by Mr. Reed, who, after careful investigation, at last ascertained to a certainty that they all were adults, and that neither Mr. and Mrs. Robertson, nor Wolcott Reed's widow, were of the number. He communicated in person or by letter with all of them excepting one; and that one was a woman, who was described as a tall, dark-complexioned girl, a genteel servant, who, as three of the men declared, had been occasionally seen, pacing up and down the deck of the ill-fated vessel during the early part of the voyage, carrying a "very small baby" in her arms. She had given her name as Ellen Lee; had accepted assistance from the ship's company, and finally she had been traced by Mr. Reed's clerk, Henry Wakeley, to an obscure boarding-house in Liverpool. Going there to see her, Mr. Wakeley had been told that she was "out;" and calling there again, late on the same day, he learned that she had paid her bill and left the house four hours before.

After that, all efforts to find her, both on the part of the clerk and of Mr. Reed, had been unavailing; though to this day, as the latter assured Donald, detectives in Liverpool and London had her name and description, as belonging to a person "to be found."

"But do they know your address?" asked Donald.

"Oh, yes, I shall be notified at once if any news is heard of her; but after all these years there is hardly a possibility of that. Ellen Lees are plentiful enough; it is not an uncommon name, I find; but that particular Ellen Lee seems to have vanished from the earth."