Lost! One Mary Jane
“Can we see it right away?” asked Mary Jane as she hesitated by the newel post at the front stairs. (It was a lovely long, straight stairway with a white banister made of dainty white spindles and a mahogany railing wide and shining on top—just exactly the right sort of a banister for sliding down, and Mary Jane resolved to take a trial slide the first time she could get the hallway to herself!)
“If it’s what I think it is,” said Mrs. Merrill, looking laughingly at Mrs. Bryan, “you’d better run upstairs and wash off the stains of your journey before you go to see it, because once you get out in the kitchen with Mrs. Bryan you won’t want to bother with washing and combing. Is it what I think?” she added.
“Pretty likely!” laughed Mrs. Bryan, “you’re not forgetting so easily what you always liked to see. So do as your mother says, Mary Jane,” she added kindly to the little girl, “and as soon as she says you may, come out through that door over there and you’ll find me.”
Alice dashed up the stairs, with Mary Jane close at her heels, and in a very short time they were down again with clean hands and faces and fresh frocks and hair ribbons. Out through the door they went, through the dining-room and into a great, roomy kitchen about as different from their own little apartment kitchen as one could imagine. It had a big pastry table in the middle; two huge stoves at one side and a long sink and several tables on another side. Big windows looked out on a grassy yard.
“Oh!” exclaimed Mary Jane rapturously, “I’d just love to live at your house, Mrs. Bryan. Would you let me beat eggs and fix the edges of pies and wipe dishes?”
“And the cupboards!” exclaimed Alice no less pleased, “would you look at these cupboards, Mary Jane! Wouldn’t you just adore getting out sugar and spice and putting dishes away?”
“Well,” replied Mrs. Bryan, half puzzled but very much pleased with their enthusiasm, “you’re not much like most of the children who come here. Mostly they don’t know or care what a kitchen looks like or where it is! I can’t think what their mothers mean either, because a house without a kitchen is just nothing. And as for offering to help with dishes—” The good lady broke off in amazement at the unusual occurrence of two boarders offering assistance because they wanted to.
“Was this the surprise and may I look in that cupboard?” asked Alice as she spied a stack of pretty blue and white dishes—just the kind she had always wanted for her own—behind a half open cupboard door.
“Mercy no!” laughed Mrs. Bryan, “this isn’t the surprise. But goodness knows you may look in any cupboard you like, dearie; I know you won’t do any harm because you like things too well. The surprise is out here.”
The girls followed her through a long pantry, the walls of which were covered with cupboards and shelves clear up to the high ceiling, through a summer kitchen where maids were working at preparations for supper, and out into a half dim shed, the floor of which felt soft under their feet because it was covered with thousands of tiny chips of wood, left from the chopping of wood for the big kitchen range.
“There,” she said, pointing to two great tubs near the outside door, “that’s what your mother and your uncles used to like to see when they used to come here. Have ’em every Saturday evening—just that many,” she added as she pointed to the baskets, “and it’s time they went into the pot this very minute.”
“But what are they?” asked Alice while Mary Jane just stared at the queer sight.
Two heavily woven split baskets, bigger than bushel baskets, considerably, were filled with brownish, greenish things that seemed to move—but of course they couldn’t—but they did, they surely did. Moved slowly but crawlingly like great spiders—
“Ugh!” shivered Mary Jane, “whatever are they?”
“You’ve a good catch this time, haven’t you?” Mrs. Merrill’s voice behind her reassured Mary Jane. Her mother had followed them out and surely if her mother didn’t mind those queer things, they must be all right for she well knew her mother didn’t like spiders any better than she did!
“But what are they?” insisted Alice wonderingly.
“Don’t you know,” laughed Mrs. Bryan, “they’re lobsters. Sam caught ’em just to-day and a fine lot they are too. Do you like lobsters?”
“Um-m,” replied Alice, “do I? You just try me! But all the lobsters I ever ate were red, bright red.”
“Sure enough,” laughed Mrs. Bryan as she bustled about a great iron pot in a corner, “and all you ever will eat will be, I hope, because they’ll be cooked. The cooking makes ’em red. These are alive.”
“But if they’re alive you can’t cook ’em!” exclaimed Mary Jane in great excitement.
“Oh, yes we can,” replied Mrs. Bryan comfortably, “just that easily. We have the water boiling hot and dump ’em in—just that quick and they never know what happens to ’em. Now you can go out this door,” she added, “because we’ve got to hurry now with supper. But don’t you go far, for pretty soon you’ll hear a gong and that means ‘come to supper!’ and you come first thing because I know you must be hungry.”
Mary Jane and Alice needed no urging—they were hungry, for it had been a long time since breakfast at Cousin Louise’s, and their hurried luncheon in Boston wasn’t much to remember.
They ran out to the sand-pile, looked at the pretty shells, took a slide or two and a few swings in the big swing and made friends with the two children, a boy and a girl from Springfield, Massachusetts, who were playing there, and, in a very short while it seemed, the gong sounded and they went in to supper.
It was a different sort of a supper from any Mary Jane had ever eaten away at a hotel—though as a matter of fact the Willow Tree Cottage wasn’t really a hotel at all; it was an old New England farmhouse enlarged a bit and opened to some twenty-five selected boarders through the summer season. And this meal truly was not a dinner such as Mary Jane was used to eating in the evening; it was a real supper, delicious and old fashioned as one could hope to find. There was coffee cake, fresh baked and luscious with great “wells” of sugar and butter running through in streaks of sweetness; baked beans in brown pots; cold ham, coldslaw with a sour cream sauce, and hot potatoes with cream gravy. And then, after each table full of guests were seated and the meal began, Mrs. Bryan herself (she would trust this task to no one else) appeared with a great platter of lobsters, red and shining and smelling oh, so good!
Mary Jane helped herself very daintily but Mrs. Bryan said, “Here, honey, that’s no way to eat at my house! You take a big helping and then pass up! There’s three more platterfuls like this out on the kitchen table!” The girls needed no second urging; they liked lobster, but as they polished off claw after claw, they agreed that never never had they eaten lobster before—not really truly lobster as this luscious food proved to be.
As the maid appeared to ask what dessert they wanted, Mrs. Merrill said, “Do you want any dessert, girls? You’ve had such a good supper already.”
“Why mother!” exclaimed Mary Jane, “we were hungry!” And then as the maid said, “Huckleberry shortcake and apple pie” (meaning of course that Mary Jane should take her choice), Mary Jane, not understanding, replied blissfully, “I like ’em both, thank you!”
“Bless her heart!” laughed Mrs. Bryan, “she shall have ’em both, Ann. You bring the girls each a helping of pie and shortcake—it’s not too rich, it won’t hurt ’em for once,” she added as she saw Mrs. Merrill starting to object, “remember how you used to eat two helpings of dessert and how you made your dear father so ashamed!” Mrs. Merrill and the good lady laughed in recollection—and the girls had their double dessert.
In the long twilight the Merrills took a leisurely walk through the pine tree grove off toward the south of the cottage and home along the rocks by the ocean. By the time they turned toward home the sun had set in rosy glory and through the gathering shadows could be seen the gleam of lights in lighthouses near and far. ‘Way down the coast on some jutting rocks, still farther down on an out-reaching promontory, straight off to the northeast on the Isle of Shoals and away toward the north was the Portsmouth Light. Some lights burned steadily, red or white; some flashed on and off as though making a signal. Mrs. Merrill explained that each different location had its own light and method of burning it, so that a pilot, out in the ocean when he saw a light burning red, white, red white, could look on the chart and see just where that light belonged; and then, when he saw one burning white, white, red, he could look again and see where that one was.
The girls loved to watch the lights and to listen to the pound of the waves on the rocks near by. They would have liked to stay and watch a long time, but Mrs. Merrill led them back toward the cottage by dark and, to tell the truth, beds didn’t feel so very bad after such a big day and, soon after the stars peeped out, two tired travelers were sound asleep.
Sunday morning the girls slept late and almost missed breakfast; then after a short walk to the beach they slipped on fresh frocks and went with Mrs. Merrill to a quaint little church about a mile away. The walk there was charming, past the biggest hotel they had seen the night before, along the beach, through a wood and to the edge of a meadow where the little church, all vine-covered and rose-laden, came to view.
After dinner at noon, the girls sat on the beach a long time, watching the tide and talking over the good times they had had and were going to have. They persuaded their mother that because the water was too cold for bathing that day, they ought to stay over till afternoon of Monday so that they might have a chance to bathe in the ocean.
“We’ll do better than that,” decided Mrs. Merrill, when she saw how the girls were enjoying the sea air and the quiet, “I’ll wire Hal and we’ll stay till afternoon Tuesday. That will give him time to finish his visit leisurely and we will still have all of Wednesday in Boston and you may go in bathing twice—if the water isn’t too terribly cold.”
“I’m a-going in to-morrow even if it’s freezing!” said Mary Jane.
“So’m I,” agreed Alice, “we’re not afraid of cold and it’s such fun to jump in those big waves!” But they little guessed what was really going to happen when they went in bathing in that heavy surf!
The next morning, promptly at eleven, the whistle on the bathhouse blew 5-8.
“Fifty-eight,” said Mrs. Merrill thoughtfully, “that’s pretty cold, girlies.”
“Oh, we don’t mind,” Alice assured her. “The sun’s good and hot and if the water seems cold we don’t need to stay in long—we can come out and sit in the hot sand.”
So they took their suits and walked down to the bathhouse.
The tide was high that morning and the beach was narrow because the great waves washed up, higher and higher. Heavy posts driven into the bed of the ocean supported great ropes stretched where folks would want to stand in the waves, and if one watched and went out between waves and then held tightly to the rope while a wave broke over, there wasn’t a fraction as much real danger as there appeared to be from the noise and foam. Mrs. Merrill, grasping a hand of each girl, made a quick dash for the nearest rope and warned them to hold fast when the big wave came. Alice could manage herself very well, as she had a good strong grip and people were round about near to lend a hand if a wave should make her lose her footing for a second, but Mrs. Merrill held tightly to Mary Jane and together they jumped through the waves as the foamy crests of cold water broke just over them.
“Burr, it is cold, isn’t it!” said Mary Jane gayly as she shook the salt water out of her eyes.
“Plenty cold and you’re getting blue,” replied Mrs. Merrill with a keen look at her little girl. “Let’s go up and sit in the warm sand for a while. Alice, you come up the line, here, nearer to shore, and then as soon as I get Mary Jane settled in the sand snug and warm, I’ll come back and take you out farther.”
Left by herself a few minutes later, Mary Jane dug herself into the sand and buried her feet, her legs, and tossed the sand over her chest. Then, tiring of that amusement, she shook herself free of the sand, stood up and looked around and—but—after that nobody seemed to know just what Mary Jane did do.
Ten minutes after she left her so comfortably settled with her play, Mrs. Merrill and Alice, flushed and laughing with their fun in the waves, ran up the beach to where Mary Jane had been playing. But no Mary Jane was there to greet them!
Quickly Mrs. Merrill looked over the many bathers along the edge of the waves—there was no little girl with bobbed brown hair. Hurriedly she ran and questioned the life-guard; no, he hadn’t seen any little girl in a blue and white suit.
The word passed along from one person to another but not a soul could tell where the little girl was. Several had seen her playing and watching her mother and sister but no one had seen her get up and go away.
There was lost, one Mary Jane; and a distracted mother and sister together with a beach full of interested people started on a hunt for the missing child.