The Girl Scouts at Home Part 15

"Rosanna, be careful what you say!" exclaimed her grandmother angrily.

Remembering what Minnie had advised, Rosanna said nothing.

Her grandmother continued, "I have thought this all over and you know as well as I do what you have done, and how you have offended me, and I see no use in talking about it at all. You will stay here on a diet of bread and water until you are in a different frame of mind. I don't need to have you tell me how you feel, or what you think. A look at your face is quite sufficient. You are stubborn and unrepentant. Perhaps after a week or two spent thinking, you will see things in a different light. You will not be allowed any privileges at all. You will not even have your lessons. When your Uncle Robert comes home, you will not see him unless you have repented enough to be allowed to come down to your meals. Do you understand?"

Something queer and hard and grown-up came into Rosanna's soul. She looked her angry grandmother straight in the eye.

"Grandmother," she said very gently, "I hope you will not say anything that you will be sorry for."

"Don't be impertinent!" said Mrs. Horton.

"I don't mean to be," said Rosanna.

"You are!" said Mrs. Horton.

Rosanna turned around. "Oh, grandmother!" she commenced, then stopped.

"Oh, grandmother what?" asked Mrs. Horton.

"Nothing. Excuse me," said Rosanna.

"Then that's all," said Mrs. Horton. "You understand me?"

"I think I do," said Rosanna. She did not look up, and Mrs. Horton, unable to catch her eye, left the room.

Lunch time came, and with it her grandmother with a fresh gla.s.s of water and another slice of bread. Immediately after, Hannah appeared with a tray of luncheon.

Rosanna was really not hungry, but she was wise enough to know that it was a very bad thing to go without eating, especially when one has decided on a very serious and terrifying step. The afternoon dragged away.

At five her grandmother came in and offered her still another gla.s.s of water and slice of bread. Rosanna thanked her.

"Have you anything to say to me?" asked Mrs. Horton.

"No, grandmother," replied Rosanna, "only that I am very sorry that you are angry with me, and I hope some day you will be sorry too that you did not love me when I was here to love."

"Do you think of leaving?" said Mrs. Horton sneeringly. "You had better tell me where you are going so I can send your clothes. I believe that is the way they do with the sort of people you have been making friends with."

Rosanna did not reply:

"Let me catch you leaving this room!" said Mrs. Horton. She went out and closed the door. Rosanna nodded her head. Her mind was made up. She crossed to the dainty dresser, and switching on the lights did something she had never done in her life. Rosanna was not vain in the least, but if you could have seen her then, turning this way and that, lifting her long, heavy curls, wadding them on top of her head, or trying them in a long braid, you would have said that she seemed to be a very vain little girl indeed.

She appeared satisfied at last with what she saw in the gla.s.s, and noticed that it was growing quite dark.

She went over to her little bed, and knelt.

"Please, dear Lord," she whispered, "I don't want to do anything wrong.

Please help me because I am so afraid. And now that Minnie is gone and Helen, please give me somebody to love me. Amen."

She felt better after that, and sat down by the window. It was almost dark....

When Mrs. Horton left Rosanna, she went down to the big, dim library and, seating herself at her desk, commenced to write letters. She found it difficult to collect her thoughts and there was a bad feeling in her heart, as though she was wrong, as though she was doing something unwise, unkind, and perhaps really wicked. But she thrust it out of her thoughts because she didn't think that she ever _could_ do anything really wrong.

Something pressed hard on her heart, and she grew very restless. Some impulse led her to go to the telephone and call Mrs. Hargrave on the long distance line.

Mrs. Hargrave, who was very much bored by Cousin Hendy, was delighted to hear her old friend's voice. She did not let Mrs. Horton get a word in edgewise for the first two minutes. She seemed to think Mrs. Horton didn't care how much that telephone call was going to cost. She asked how she was, and how Robert was, and had he found his lost friend, and she certainly hoped he had, and when had they returned, and oh, wasn't it too bad Robert had been unable to come with his mother?

Then like a person who saves the best to the last, she asked with a note of triumph in her voice:

"Well, how do you think your darling Rosanna looks? I suppose you know she has gained five pounds while you were away. I think she is vastly improved. And so happy! My dear, of course, it is hard for us to realize it, but I think once in awhile it is a good thing to get right out and let the home people do for themselves and learn to depend on themselves a little. Don't you?"

Mrs. Horton smiled grimly. "It has certainly not worked out here to any great advantage, during my absence," she said.

"What?" asked Mrs. Hargrave. "I don't believe I hear you."

Mrs. Horton spoke into the telephone with careful distinctness. "If you do not know what has happened during my absence," she said, "I will tell you the state of affairs existing here in my home now, and you may be able to guess that something serious has occurred. In the first place Rosanna is in her room on a diet of bread and water. My chauffeur, with his pushing wife and ordinary child, has been discharged, and told to vacate to-morrow. Rosanna's maid, Minnie, had been discharged and is gone. All the servants have had severe scoldings."

There was a long silence, then Mrs. Hargrave said, "Are you crazy?"

"Not at all!" said Mrs. Horton.

"I will be home to-morrow morning," said Mrs. Hargrave. "I'll have to get there as soon as I can to keep you from making more of your dreadful mistakes. In the meantime, I am ashamed of you. Don't you go near Rosanna with your cutting speeches until I see you. Oh, I can't talk to you! Good-night!"

She rang off and Mrs. Horton slowly replaced the receiver. No, she did not intend to go near Rosanna. Rosanna was settled for the night so far as she was concerned. On her way up to bed, she opened the door of Rosanna's room, and listened. The child was sleeping so calmly that her grandmother could not even hear her breathe. She could see the little mound that Rosanna's body made on the bed, but she did not go into the room. She went on to her own room and sat down to think. The light was dim; just one small night light burning, and Mrs. Horton sat down in her favorite lounging chair and gave herself up to her unhappy thoughts. She was conscious of a feeling of wrongdoing yet she did not recognize it as such. Instead, she was sure that she had been very deeply wronged. After all her teaching, after all the years she had spent guarding Rosanna, on the first chance the child had slipped away from all she had been told.

She shuddered when she thought of it, remembering her own young sister and her unhappy fate. She did not realize that she was judging all humanity by the commonplace young scamp her sister had unfortunately married. It did not occur to her to ask herself if all the fine young men and women her son knew were also of that type.

The next thing she knew, the cold woke her. It was dawn, and she had slept in her chair all night. She was chilled to the bone. She slowly undressed, and feeling sore and stiff, took a hot bath and wrapped up in a warm kimono. She was about to lie down and finish the night when she thought of Rosanna.

Mrs. Horton stepped into a pair of slippers and crossed the room. As she pa.s.sed her desk, she looked up full at the picture of her dead son and his wife, Rosanna's father and mother. She stopped. Somehow those faces would not let her pa.s.s. They held her with sad, questioning eyes.

"What are you doing with our little child?" they seemed to say. "Have you loved her, mother? Have you been tender with her? Have you tried to understand her? Have you remembered that she is just a baby?"

Mrs. Horton thought of Rosanna in her beautiful, lonely room way down the corridor. She commenced to have a very guilty feeling.

"Have you loved her?" asked the two sad faces. "Have you been tender with her, mother?"

"I have done my duty by the child," answered Mrs. Horton. She went down the corridor to Rosanna's room, her head held high. The cold, pallid light of the hour just before day filled the house.

Mrs. Horton opened Rosanna's door and went in. She looked long at the little bed as though she could not believe her eyes. Then crossing, she opened the bathroom door, and then the clothespress, calling Rosanna's name sharply. There was no reply. The little dog followed her into the room and went sniffing and whining about. Mrs. Horton rushed back to the bed and saw that the little mound she had thought in the dark the night before was Rosanna was only a neat pile of little dresses.

Rosanna was gone!

Mrs. Horton remembered that the child was very fond of a wide seat in the library. She hurried down the broad stairs, expecting to find that the lonely child had crept down there to sit awhile and, like herself, had dropped to sleep, but the big room was empty. Mrs. Horton's heart commenced to hammer in a very strange way. Of course Rosanna must be in the house somewhere, and although she felt it was a very undignified thing to do, she went from room to room making a close and careful search of every nook where a child could hide. There was not a single sign of the little girl. Mrs. Horton had hoped to find Rosanna without calling the servants, but as she looked and looked, and the knowledge came to her that perhaps Rosanna was not in the house at all, she was filled with terror. She commenced to press the electric b.u.t.tons frantically and, wide-eyed and half dressed, the household commenced to gather from the servants' wing.

She managed somehow to let them know that Rosanna had disappeared, and everyone commenced a search that stretched to the playhouse, the pony stable and the garden.

She staggered up to her room and with shaking hands commenced to dress herself. The two sad faces on the wall stared at her.

"Oh, mother, mother, where is our baby?" they asked.