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[Illustration:
A Few of Irene's "Fathers"]
THE MADIGANS
BY
MIRIAM MICHELSON
AUTHOR OF "IN THE BISHOP'S CARRIAGE"
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY ORSON LOWELL
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1904
Copyright, 1904, by
The Century Co.
_Published October, 1904_
The DeVinne Press
CONTENTS
PAGE
Cecilia the Pharisee 3
A Pagan and a Puritan 39
A Merry, Merry Zingara 79
The Shut-Ups 115
The Ancestry of Irene 147
The Last Straw 189
A Ready Letter-Writer 219
"The Martyrdom of Man" 265
Kate: A Pretense 297
Old Mother Gibson 331
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
A Few of Irene's "Fathers" _Frontispiece_
"That settles Number 10," said Sissy, grimly 7
Left the room with such uncompromising hauteur
... that her aunt again exploded 13
"Please, Mr. Garvan," she said 17
Some of the Madigans 23
The Rest of the Madigans 29
Seizing Sissy in his arms, he bore her off to bed 35
"Play it, then, you mean thing," she cried, ... "if
it's going to do you any good!" 47
"Go and shake hands properly, like a little gentleman,"
bullied Mrs. Pemberton 53
Of the design and construction of which he was quite
vain 63
The Belle of the Afternoon 71
She was pronounced a "regular little love" by the
Misses Bryne-Stivers 91
"I don't see how you're going to dance in them" 95
"But is she _very_ sick?" 101
She glanced up the incline of the see-saw to the height
whence Irene looked down 153
"I want you--come!" the Indian princess announced 163
They had coasted only half a block 169
"Oh, you needn't glare at me!" exclaimed Bep 183
A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In
Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry 223
Stamping ... in a frenzy 229
Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled 237
"Here would I rest," she chanted 253
She walked a step or two with him 261
THE MADIGANS
CECILIA THE PHARISEE
I, Cecilia Morgan Madigan, being of sound mind and in
purfect bodily health, and residing in Virginia City,
Nevada, do hereby on this first day of April solemnly
promise:
1. That I will be Number 1 this next month at school.
2. That I will be pachient with Papa, and try to stand
him.
3. That I will set Bep--yes, and Fom too, even if she is
Irene's partner--a good example.
4. That I will not once this next month pinch Aunt
Anne's sensative plant--no matter what she does to me.
5. That I will dust the back legs of the piano even when
Mrs. Pemberton isn't expected.
6. That I will help Kate controll her temper, and not
mock and aggravate her when she sulks.
7. That I will be a little mother to Frank and teach her
to grow up and be a creddit to the famly.
8. That I will not steal candy out of Kate's
pocket--without first begging her very hard to give me
some.
9. That I will practice The Gazelle fathfully every
solatary day. And give up reading on the sly while I
play 5-finger exercises.
10. That I will try to bear with Irene. That I will do
all I can not to fight with her--but she is a selfish
devvil who is always in the wrong.
And all this I solemnly promise myself without being
coersed in any way, of my own free will, without let or
hidrance, because I want to be good.
_Cecilia Morgan Madigan_ (_called Sissy_),
Aged 11 last birthday.
P.S. And I feel sure I can do it all, God helping me,
except Number 10--which is the hardest.
* * * * *
Sissy, who had been sitting writing only half dressed, folded the paper
reverently, put it to her lips for lack of a seal, and then buttoned it
firmly inside her corset waist.
She felt so virtuous already that the carrying out of her intentions
seemed really supererogatory. When she went to Irene to have her button
her dress in the back, she had such a sensation of holiness, such a
consciousness of a forbearing, pure, and gentle spirit, that her
sister's malicious pretense of ignoring her presence appeared to her
nothing less than sacrilege.
"Ain't you going to button me, Split?" she demanded, indignant that her
enemy, whom she was going to treat with Christ-like charity, should
successfully try her temper before the ink was dry on her own promise to
keep the peace.
"Ask me pretty," grinned Split, whose nickname honored a gymnastic feat
which no other Madigan, however athletic, could accomplish half so
successfully as the second. "Say 'please.'"
"I won't do anything of the sort. You know you've got to do it, and
you've no right to expect me to say 'please' every time. You don't do it
yourself, you hateful thing!"
"Why don't you cry?"
"Because I won't for you--because you can't make me--because--"
"Because you are crying in spite of yourself! Because anybody can make
you cry, cry-baby!"
Sissy's hands flew up to her breast. It was a recognized gesture with
her, a physical holding of herself together in the last minute that
preceded her temperamental flying to pieces.
Split retreated cautiously, clearing the deck herself for action.
But no first gun was fired in that engagement. A crackling of the
document hidden over the spot where she thought her heart was came like
a warning note to Sissy. She struggled against it a moment; then her
hands fell. Meekly she turned her back upon her tormentor, and in a
voice of such exquisite holiness as to be almost unearthly, she said:
"Split dear, will you please button me?"
A look of outraged astonishment at the unheard-of endearment came over
Irene's face. The Madigans regarded demonstrative affection as pure
affectation at its best; at its worst it was little short of indecent.
"'Split dear?'" mocked Irene as soon as she recovered. "Yes, dear. Turn
around, dear. Stand straight, dear. Wait a minute, dear--"
Sissy stood in silence, biting her tongue that she might not speak. She
was so occupied with the desire to keep Number 10 of her compact with
herself that she did not notice how long it was before Irene really
began to button her waist. She did note, though, that she began at the
bottom, a proceeding Split fancied merely because it drove her junior
nearly frantic. She buttoned with maddening slowness up to the middle,
when she capriciously left this point and recommenced at the top.
[Illustration:
"'That settles Number 10,' said Sissy, grimly"]
Mentally Sissy followed the operation. It was almost complete when
through the little gap purposely left open Split deftly introduced a
providentially flattened piece of ice from the window-sill, giving her
victim a little shake that sent the ice slipping smoothly down her
squirming body, but escaping before Sissy could turn and rend her.
"That settles Number 10," said Sissy, grimly, to herself, while she
danced with discomfort. "I'll kill her if I get a chance--that's what
I'll do. I'll get even, or my name's not Sis Madigan."
She hurried back into her room, which the twins shared, and stood in
damp martyrdom while Bessie's butter-fingers crept with miserable
slowness up and down. She suffered so from Bessie's ineptness that,
despite the requirements of Number 3 of her code, she tore herself
violently from her and turned her back imploringly to Florence. But Fom
was a partizan of Split's, and it was against all the ethics of Madigan
warfare to aid and comfort the enemy. When Sissy, chastened, returned to
Bep's ministrations, the blonde one of the twins was so hurt and
offended by the implication of awkwardness--a point upon which she was
as vulnerable as she was sensitive--that Sissy slapped them both before
she went at last for relief to Aunt Anne.
This was fatal, as she knew it would be.
"I shall tell your father about Irene," her aunt said, looking up from
the coffee she was sipping as she lay in bed reading a French book. "But
it's just as well, for I told you yesterday that that dress was too
dirty to wear another day. Change it now--"
"Oh, Aunt Anne, it's late already--"
"You'll change that dress, Sissy, or you won't go to school."
"I won't! It's too late. I'll be late. That means one credit off, and
this month I'm going--" A remembrance of her lofty intentions came
suddenly to Sissy. All the world seemed bent on compelling her to
forswear herself.
"Cecilia!" commanded Miss Madigan.
Sissy stiffened.
"You've disturbed my reading enough this morning. If you say another
word I'll--"
"Oh, Aunt Anne--"
"Go over to the wall, Cecilia, and stand with your back to me for five
minutes."
With a fiendish light in her eye--a light of such desperate satisfaction
as betokened one gladly driven to commit the unforgivable Sissy moved
toward the sensitive-plant in the window.
"Not there! That poor plant seems to suffer sympathetically with your
badness. Stand over by the bureau."
Sissy obeyed. Her rage at being made ridiculous, her sense of outrage
that a perfectionist like herself should suffer punishment, added to her
knowledge of the flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into
dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man
might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been
mercifully spared the fracture of this one of her self-made
commandments.
She was standing with her nose pressed firmly against the green
wall-paper, her back laid open as by a surgical operation, and a towel,
which her aunt had forced into the aperture for drying purposes,
dangling down behind, when Kate, passing the door on her way to
breakfast, glanced in.
Her sputtering, quickly stifled screech of laughter sent Sissy spinning
about as a bull does when the banderilla is planted in his quivering
flesh. She looked at the doorway; it was empty, but she heard scurrying
footsteps without. Kate was on her way to tell the others.
She looked at Aunt Anne. That severe lady had dropped her book and,
seized by the contagion, was shaking with silent laughter.
Not a word did Sissy say. Her expression of disgust,--disgust that a
grown-up should be so silly as to see something funny in absolutely
nothing; disgust that her aunt should so weaken the effect of her own
discipline,--reinforced by the green smudge on her nose, rubbed off the
wall-paper, finished Miss Madigan. The lady no longer attempted to
conceal the disgraceful fact that she was laughing. She gave an audible
gurgle, and began to wipe the tears of enjoyment from her eyes.
In that moment the iron entered into Sissy Madigan's soul. She turned
again to the wall, and taking a pin which had fastened the bow of ribbon
at her throat, she pricked slowly but relentlessly in the loose
wall-paper this legend:
AUNT ANNE--PIG
After which she felt relieved, and, the five minutes being up, left the
room with such uncompromising hauteur, still splashed with green on the
nose, still split open down the back, with the towel's fringe dangling
in dignity behind, that her aunt again exploded.
[Illustration:
"Left the room with such uncompromising hauteur ... that
her aunt again exploded"]
The fact that she had irretrievably lost one credit through tardiness
set Sissy's lips in a tight line of determination to guard jealously
every one of the ninety-and-nine left to her.
At recess she remained at her desk studying her geography with an
intensity of purpose that made her rivals' hearts quake. She sat at the
teacher's desk--lifted to this almost regal eminence by his fondness for
her petulant ways as well as because of that quality of leadership which
made Sissy her fellows' spokeswoman. Hers was the privilege of using the
master's pencils, sharpened to a fineness that made neatness a
dissipation instead of a task. It was she, of course, who originated the
decorative style of arithmetic-paper much in vogue, on which each
example was penned off in an inclosure fenced by alternating vertical
and horizontal double hyphens.
But a queer, conscientious sense of the responsibilities of power and
place modified Sissy's rapturous delight in her position, so that she
kept it despite a fiercely jealous class-spirit developed by a strict
credit-system, by the emulative temper which the rarefied atmosphere of
the little mining town fostered, and by a young master just out of
college who looked upon his teaching as a temporary adventure, much as
a Japanese gentleman regards domestic service.
It was in her capacity of class representative that the master had
consulted Sissy upon the limits to be observed in the forthcoming public
oral examination in geography. And she had enlightened him as to what
would be considered quite "fair." This treaty, into which she entered
with the seriousness of an ambassador to an unfriendly power arranging a
settlement of a disputed question, had a character so sacred in her eyes
that its violation by the master in the course of the afternoon came
upon her like a blow.
"Cecilia Madigan," asked the master, "what is the highest mountain in
the world?"
Sissy rose. The imposing array of visitors in school faded out of her
horizon. All she could see was the eyes of her schoolmates turned in
accusatory horror upon her. They suspected her of betraying them; of
using her elevated position to hand down untrustworthy information.
"Please, Mr. Garvan," she said in tones more of sorrow than of anger,
skilfully showing her knowledge of the answer while denying his right to
it, "that question isn't on the map of Africa."
[Illustration:
"'Please, Mr. Garvan,' she said"]
A flush of annoyance mounted to the young master's forehead. Out of the
corner of her eye Sissy saw the preliminary twitch of the corners of his
lips that served the class for a danger-signal.
"What is the highest mountain, Cecilia?" he repeated sternly.
Sissy stood a moment looking at him. All that she might not say--her
contempt for pledge-breakers, her shocked hero-worship now forever a
thing of the past, her outraged school-girl's affection--she shot
straight at the master from her angry eyes.
Then she sat down.
"I don't know," she said.
He looked up from his book, incredulous. Ten credits out of one hundred
gone at one fell swoop--ten of Sissy Madigan's credits, for which she
fought so gallantly and which she cherished so jealously when she once
had them in her possession.
"I--don't--know," repeated Sissy, disdainfully.
The master passed the question. But as he put it to the next girl, Sissy
put another question, with her eyes, to the same girl.
"Are you a scab?" her steady gaze challenged. "Are you going to benefit
by what a mate suffers for principle's sake? Are you a coward who
doesn't dare to stand up for your class? And--do you know what you'll
get from me if you are?"
"I--don't--know," faltered the girl.
A glory of triumph shot over Sissy's face. It leaped like a sunrise from
peak to peak in a mountain-range of obstinacy. "I don't know"--"I don't
know"--"I don't know"--the shibboleth of the strikers' cause went down
the line. The master was shamed in public by the banner pupils of his
school. He writhed, but he put the question steadily to every girl till
he came to Irene, last in the line.
"What is the highest mountain in the world?" he asked, perfunctorily
now.
But, to his amazement, she rose, and, looking out of the window up to
the mountain to the skirts of which the town clung, she answered:
"Mount Davidson."
Sissy's savage joy followed so quickly upon her horror at her own
sister's defection that the closing of school left her in a trembling
storm of emotions. In the dressing-room, where the girls were putting on
their hats, she marched up to Irene, followed by her wrathful adherents
and feeling like an avenging Brutus.
"You're a sneak, Split Madigan! You're a coward, and--and a stupid
coward. You don't know enough to betray your class and get the benefit
of it, but you'd rather be mean than get credits, anyway. Nobody can
count on you. Changeable Silk, that's what you are--changing color all
the time, never standing firm! I hate you! Changeable Silk! Changeable
Silk!"
"Changeable Silk! Changeable Silk!" chanted her following.
The little dressing-room rang with the cry of the mob, so filled with
significance by the tone in which it was uttered that Irene paled and
shrank.
But only for a moment. The Madigans never lacked courage long. That
fierce internecine strife waged by the clan in the old house high on the
side of the hill made a Madigan quick and resolute.
"Stupid yourself, Sissy! My answer made him madder than your not
answering."
Sissy looked at her searchingly. "But--did you--" she wavered.
"Of course I did! Who's the stupid now? Do you s'pose I didn't know it
was--"
"What?--what?" Sissy repeated as her sister hesitated.
Irene turned up her nose insultingly. "I don't--know," she mocked, and
beat a successful retreat.
* * * * *
Francis Madigan dined in a long room, the only man at a table with seven
women ranging in years from four to forty-four. The accumulation of
girls in his family was so wanton an outrage upon his desires that he
rather rejoiced in the completeness of the infliction as an undeniable
grievance.
He needed a grievance as a shield against which others' grievances might
be shattered. And in default of a more tangible one, he cited his
heavily be-daughtered house. It was at dinner-time that he always seemed
to realize the extent of his disaster. As he took his place at the head,
his wrathful eye swept from Frances in her high chair, up along the
line, past the twins, through Cecilia, Irene, and Kate, till it lighted
upon Miss Madigan's good-humored, placid face. His sister's placidity
was an ever-present offense to the father of the Madigans,--the most
irascible of unsuccessful men,--and the snort with which he finished the
inspection and took up the carving-knife had become a classic in Madigan
annals long before Sissy brought down the house at the age of eight by
imitating it one evening in his absence.
[Illustration:
"Some of the Madigans"]
But to-night a most painful and ostentatious respect marked Sissy's
manner to her parent. She stood markedly,--while the others scrambled
into their chairs and Wong, the Chinese servant, sped about placing
everything on the table at once,--waiting for her father to be seated.
She was still waiting politely when his eye lighted upon her. "Sit down,
Cecilia!" he roared; "what d' ye want, gaping there?"
Sissy sat down. So holy was she that she did not resent (openly) the
low, delighted giggle Irene gave. She began to be politely attentive to
Dusie, her father's pet canary, though she loathed the spoiled little
thing that hopped about the table helping itself.
Madigan had a way of telling himself, in his rare moments of
introspection, that the tenderness he might have lavished upon a son he
spent upon the male offspring of more fortunate genera than man. The big
Newfoundland and the great cat came to meals regularly. They shared
Madigan's affection with the birds (whose cage, big as a dog's house, he
had himself nailed up against the side of the wall), that broke into a
maddening din of song, excited by the rival clatter of young Madigans
dining.
Protected by this shrill symphony from the sound of his daughters'
voices, Madigan fed his dog, his cat, and his favorite canary, and with
his head upon one hand, in token of his abiding disgust with the human,
daughterful world, ate quickly with the other.
This pose was the signal that freed the feminine Madigan tongue. Usually
they all broke into conversation at once; but on this evening there
seemed to be some agreement which held them mute till Irene spoke.
"I am glad to see you be so patient with papa, Sissy," she said gently.
His third daughter glanced apprehensively at Madigan. But her father had
retired within his shell, and nothing but a cataclysm could reach him
there.
"Why--" she said, puzzled, "why--I--"
"Promise me that you'll try to stand him," urged Split, joyously.
"And that you'll help me control my temper, and not mock and aggravate
me when I sulk," chanted Kate.
Sissy dropped her knife and fork, and her hands flew to her bosom, not
in wrath, but in terror. The crackling testament was gone!
"Split! You--"
"Try to bear with me, won't you, Sis, even if I am a devil?" grinned
Split.
"And set us a good example, Sissy," piped the twins.
Sissy gasped.
"Be a yittle muvver to Fwank," lisped the baby, prompted by a big
sister.
"And don't steal candy out of my pocket, will you, Cecilia Morgan?"
begged her oldest sister.
"And--"
Sissy sprang into the air, as though lifted bodily by the taunts of
these ungrateful beneficiaries of her good intentions.
"Sit down, you ox!" came in thundering tones from the head of the table.
When one was called an ox among the Madigans the culprit invariably
subsided, however the epithet might tend to make her sisters rejoice.
But Sissy had borne too much in that one day--always keeping in mind the
perfect sanctity with which she had begun it.
With an inarticulate explanation that was at once a sob, a complaint,
and a trembling defiance, she pushed back her chair and fled to her
room. Here she sobbed in peace and plenty; sobbed till tears became a
luxury to be produced by a conscious effort of the will. It had always
been a grief to Sissy that she could never cry enough. Split, now, could
weep vocally and by the hour, but all too soon for Sissy the wells of
her own sorrow ran dry.
Yet tears had ever a chastening effect upon the third of the Madigans.
In due time she rose, washed her face, and combed back her hair and
braided it in a tight plait that stuck out at an aggressive angle on the
side; unaided she could never get it to depend properly from the middle.
This heightened the feeling of utter peacefulness, of remorse washed
clean, besides putting her upon such a spiritual elevation as enabled
her to meet her world with composure, though bitter experience told her
how long a joke lasted among the Madigans.
She fell upon her knees at last beside her bed. No Madigan of this
generation had been taught to pray, an aggressive skepticism--the
tangent of excessive youthful religiosity--having made the girls' father
an outspoken foe to religious exercise. But to Sissy's emotional,
self-conscious soul the necessity for worded prayer came quick now and
imperative.
"O Lord," she pleaded aloud, "help me to keep 'em all--even Number
10--in spite of Split and the devil. Help--"
She heard the door open behind her.
[Illustration:
"The Rest of the Madigans"]
With a bound she was in bed, fully dressed as she was; and pulling the
covers tight up to her neck, she waited, to all intents and purposes
fast asleep.
"You little fool!" said Madigan, with a hint of laughter in his heavy
voice and laying a not ungentle hand on her blazing cheeks. "D' ye think
I care if you want to kneel and kotow like other idiots? If you're that
kind--and I suppose you are, being a woman--pray and be--blessed!"
It was the nearest thing to a paternal benediction that had ever come to
Sissy, but she was too wary a small actress to be moved by it out of her
rôle. Nor did her father wait to note the effect of his words. His heavy
step passed on and out of her room into his own, and the door slammed
between them.
In a moment Sissy was up; in another moment she had torn off her
clothes, blown out her candle, and jumped back into bed. She was almost
asleep when the twins came in, but she feigned the deepest of slumbers
when Bessie pushed a crackling piece of paper under her pillow, though
her fingers closed greedily about it as soon as the room was quiet
again.
She knew what it was--her precious compact with herself, that loyal
little Bep had recaptured from the enemy. She lay there, lulled by its
presence; and slowly, slowly she was dropping off into real slumber
when a sharply agonizing thought, an inescapable mental pin-prick,
roused her. It was Number 9. She had not touched the piano during the
whole of that strenuous day.
She withdrew her fingers reproachfully from the insistent reminder of
virtuous intention, and resolutely she turned her back on it and tried
to pretend herself to sleep. But every broken section of her treaty had
a voice, and above them all clamored the call of Number 9 that it was
not yet too late.
When Sissy rose wearily at last and draped the Mexican quilt about her,
the house was quiet. All youthful Madigans were abed, and the older ones
were in secure seclusion.
It was a small Saint Cecilia, with a short, stiff braid standing out
from one side of her head, and utterly without musical enthusiasm, that
sat down in the darkness at the old square piano. "La Gazelle" was out
of the question, for she had no lamp and she did not yet know the trills
and runs of her new "piece" by heart. But the five-finger exercises and
the scales that it had been her custom to run over slightingly while she
read from a paper novel by the Duchess open in front of her music--this
much of an atonement was still within her power.
With her bare foot on the soft pedal, that none might hear her, Sissy
played. It was dark and very quiet; the hush-hush of the throbbing mines
filled the night and stilled it. At times her heart stood still for fear
that she might be discovered; at other times the longing for a
sensational uncovering of her belated and extraordinary goodness seized
her, and her naked foot slipped from the cold pedal only to be hurriedly
replaced before the jangle of the keys could escape.
How long she practised, and whether she redeemed herself and Number 9,
Sissy never knew, for she fell asleep at last over the keys and was
waked by a hoarse scream and a wild cry of "De debbil! De debbil!"
It was Wong, the Chinaman, who had but one name for all things
supernatural. Coming home from Chinatown, he was passing the glass door
near which the piano stood when he saw the slender figure in its
trailing white drapery bowed over the keys.
Sissy looked up, sleep still bewildering her, and yet awake enough to be
fearful of consequences. She tore open the door and sped after the
Chinaman to enlighten him, but her pursuit only confirmed Wong's
conception of that mission of malice which is devil's work on earth. A
terrified howl burst from him. There was only one being on earth of whom
he stood in greater awe than the thing he fancied he was fleeing from;
that one, logically, must be greater than It. Taking his very life in
his hand, he doubled, darted past the shivering Thing, flew on through
the open door, and made straight for the master's room.
For Sissy there was nothing to do but to follow.
"I wanted to be good," she wailed, unnerved, when Aunt Anne had her by
the shoulder and was catechizing her in the presence of a nightgowned
multitude of excited Madigans.
But succor came from an unexpected quarter. "Let the child alone, Anne,"
growled Madigan, adjusting the segment of the leg of woolen underwear
which he wore for a nightcap; and seizing Sissy in his arms, he bore her
off to bed.
"Papa's pet! Papa's baby!" mouthed Irene, under her breath, as she
danced tauntingly along behind his back.
[Illustration:
"Seizing Sissy in his arms, he bore her off to bed"]
And Sissy, outraged in all the dignity of her eleven years at being
carried like a child, but unspeakably happy in her father's favor,
looked over his shoulder with a sheepish, smiling, sleepy face,
murmuring, "Sour grapes, Split, sour grapes!"
Afterward, encouraged by the darkness and the strangeness of being laid
in bed from her father's arms, Sissy held him a moment by her side.
"When men make promises on paper that they can't keep, father," she
whispered, "what do they do?"
"Oh, go to sleep, child! They become bankrupt, I suppose."
"And--and what becomes of the paper?"
"What do you know or care about such things? Will you go to sleep
to-night?"
"If you had any bankrupt's paper," she pleaded, catching hold of his
hand as he turned to leave her, "what would you do with it--please,
father!"
"Why, tear it up, you goose."
With a jump, Sissy was bolt upright in bed and holding up a fluttering,
much-folded sheet, an almost incredulous joy in her eager voice.
"Take mine and pretend I was bankrupt--please--oh, please!"
To Madigan all children, his own particularly, were such unaccountable
beings that a vagary more or less could not more hopelessly perplex his
misunderstanding of them. With a "Tut! tut!" of impatience, he took the
paper from her and tore it twice across.
A long sigh of relief came from Sissy as the bits fluttered to the
floor. "You're such a nice father!" she murmured happily, and fell
asleep, a blissful bankrupt instead of a Pharisee.
A PAGAN AND A PURITAN
"Split! Split!"
The morning was warm and young; Mount Davidson's side was golden with
sunflowers. On the long front piazza Mr. Madigan's canaries, in their
mammoth cage, were like to burst their throats for joy in the promise of
summer. Irene, every lithe muscle a-play, was hanging by her knees on
the swinging-bar, her tawny hair sweeping the woodshed floor as she
swung.
"Split, I say!"
The tone was commanding--such a tone as Sissy dared assume only on
Saturday mornings, when her elder sister's necessities delivered Irene
the Oppressor into her hands.
"Split Madigan!"
In the very exhilaration of effort--the use of her muscles was joy to
her--Split paused to wish that the house might fall on Sissy; that she
might suddenly become dumb; that the key to the piano might be
lost--anything that would avert her own impending doom.
But none of these things happened; they never did happen, no matter how
passionately the second of the Madigans longed for them on the last day
of the week.
"Split--you know very well you hear me," the voice cried, coming nearer.
Split burst into song. She was a merry, merry Zingara, she declared in
sweet, strong cadence, with a boisterous chorus of tra-la-las that
rivaled the canaries'; and the louder she sang, the faster she swung, so
that she was really half deaf and wholly giddy when she felt Sissy's
hand on her ankle.
"Oh, is that you, Sissy?" she asked, sweetly surprised, peering out from
under her bushy mane.
"Yes, it's me, Sissy!" Cecilia's small, round face was stern. "And
you've heard me from the very first, and if you want any--"
"Shall I show you how to skin the cat, Sis?" Irene interrupted hastily,
pulling herself up with a jerk.
But Sissy was fat and had none of her sister's wiry agility. She
declined; her mind was attuned to other issues just then, and her soul
was a-quiver with malicious, anticipatory glee; for this was the day of
Split's music lesson, and her teacher was none other than Sissy herself.
"So, if you want it," the younger sister's voice rose threateningly,
"you've got to come now."
"Let's leave it till the afternoon." Split's voice came from somewhere
in the midst of her evolutions.
"Will you come?" demanded Sissy peremptorily. "Once!"
How could Split answer? Her mouth was tight shut; she was pulling
herself up inch by inch, slowly, slowly, till her chin should rest upon
the bar.
"Will you come? Twice!"
Split's face was purple, and there was an agonized prayer for delay in
her eyes.
"Will you come? Third--and la-ast--" Sissy prolonged the note
quaveringly. It was not her intention to provoke her victim beyond
endurance. These lessons, which gave her the whip-hand over the doughty
and invincible Split, were far too precious to her.
"And la-ast," she repeated inexorably.
With a thud Irene dropped to the floor. Leaving all her
light-heartedness behind in the dusk of the shed, where the trapeze
still swung, she followed, a sullen captive; while Cecilia, gloating
like the despot she was, led the way.
"We'll begin with the piece," said Split, eagerly, seating herself
before the piano.
"No; scales and exercises first," declared Sissy, firmly. "Sit farther
back, Split, and keep your wrist up."
Split moved the stool a millionth of an inch. Why, oh, why had she
quarreled with Professor Trask? If some one had only told her that her
own rebellion would mean the substitution of Cecilia for herself as his
pupil, and another opportunity for that apt young perfectionist to
outrank her senior!
With a rattling verve, and a dime on each wrist, which Professor Cecilia
had placed there to effect a divorce between finger and arm movement,
Irene attacked her scales and exercises. She loathed five-finger
exercises. So did the talented but lazy Sissy, who knew well from
experience what torture would most try her victim's soul. Split merely
wanted to play well, to outplay Cecilia, to be independent of her and
play her own accompaniments.
"Lift your fingers, Split. You must raise your wrist," came in an easy
tone of command. "Repeat that, please. Again. There goes the dime
again! If you'd keep your wrist steady, it wouldn't fall off. No; you're
playing altogether too fast. Slowly! slow-ly! Bad fingering! bad
fingering! Wretched! Wait, I'll mark it for you."
With her nicely pointed long pencil, Sissy, a martinet for technic,
assumed all the airs of her own professor and prepared to explain the
obvious.
"No, you don't!" Irene's hand shot out from the keys to the sheet-music,
scattering the dimes; her wide-spread fingers covered the spot Sissy
contemplated adorning with prettily made figures.
"Don't what?" asked Sissy.
"Oh, Miss Innocence! Don't be so affected, that's what! Don't put on so
many airs! Don't pretend you know it all, Sis Madigan!"
"Why, Split! Do you s'pose I _want_ to put the fingering down?"
"You do; but you sha'n't!" exclaimed Split, savagely.
"All I want to do is to help you," said Sissy, with well-bred
forbearance.
"Well, don't show off, then."
Split withdrew her hand, and the lesson proceeded.
"I'll play your piece for you first, Split, to show you how it ought to
go." Sissy rose, her calico rustling, to change the professorial chair
for the stool of the demonstrator.
But Split sat like a rock.
"Professor Trask always does, Split."
There was an abused note in Sissy's voice that deceived her sister. In
the perennial game of "bluff" these two played, each was alert to detect
a weakness in the other; and Irene thought she had found one now.
Ignoring her professor, she placed "In Sweet Dreams" on the rack before
her, and gaily and loudly, and very badly, began to play.
Sissy rose majestically. Her correct ear was outraged, her small mouth
was shut tight. Without a word she resigned her post and made for the
door. She had quite reached it before Split capitulated.
"Play it, then, you mean thing," she cried, flouncing off the stool, "if
it's going to do you any good!"
Sissy hardened. She had a way of becoming adamant on rare occasions that
really struck terror to Split's facile soul, which resented a grudge
promptly and as promptly forgot all about it.
"I don't care to play it," said Sissy, loftily.
"Well--I want you to--now."
[Illustration:
"'Play it, then, you mean thing,' she cried, ... 'if
it's going to do you any good!'"]
"But I don't want to."
"Ain't you going to give me my lesson, then?" demanded Split, hoarsely.
"I thought you were so anxious to help me!"
Sissy was mute. Hers was a strong position, she felt.
"D' ye expect me to get down on my knees?" Irene's wrathful voice rose,
and her unstable temper rocked threateningly. A Madigan would willingly
have been flayed alive rather than apologize in so many words.
"I don't expect anything at all," remarked Sissy, coldly.
"Well, you'd better expect, for"--with a swift motion that cut off her
sister's retreat and put her own back to the door--"you'll play that
piece before you go out of this room."
Without a word Sissy plumped down on the floor. Unconcernedly she pulled
her jackstones out of her pocket, and soon their regular click-clock and
the deft thump of her small, fat fist was all that was heard in the
room.
It always seemed to Split that the last occasion of a disagreement
between herself and the sister nearest to her in years, and furthest
from her in temperament, was the most intolerable. Never in her life,
she thought, had she so longed to murder Sissy as at this minute.
She--Split--had no time to waste besieging the impregnable fortress of
Sissy's mulishness, when the hardening process had really set in. There
never was time enough on Saturdays to do half what one planned, and
to-day was the day of Crosby Pemberton's party, besides.
And still Split remained at the door, and still Sissy played jackstones.
Twice there were skirmishes between besieger and besieged--once when
Split crept upon Sissy and, with a quick thrust of her slim, straight
leg, disarranged an elaborate scheme for "putting horses in the stable,"
and once when there was a strategic sortie from Sissy, which failed to
catch the enemy napping.
It was Split who finally yielded, as, with rage in her heart, she had
known from the very beginning would be the case. But no Madigan ever
laid down her arms and surrendered formally.
Split threw open the door with a bang. "Go out, then, miss! go out!" she
commanded.
Calmly and skilfully Sissy finished the "devil on a stump," the last of
those ornamental additions the complexities of which appeal to experts
in the game; then she gathered up her beloved jackstones and got to her
feet. But dignity forbade that she should leave the room just when her
foe had ordered her to go. So she ignored the invitation, and going to
the piano, sat down in an ostentatiously correct position, requiring
many adjustments and readjustments, and began to play "The Gazelle."
She played prettily, did this young person, who seemed to Split
specially designed to infuriate her. And to-day she played "with
expression," soft-pedaling and lingering upon certain passages in a way
which the Madigans considered shameless.
"Oh, the affected thing! Just listen to her! How she does put on!"
sneered Split to the world at large.
Sissy's lips opened, then closed tightly. She had almost answered, for
no Madigan may be accused of sentimentality and live unavenged. Only a
moment, though, was she at a loss. Then calmly, prettily, she glided
into Split's own particular "piece." She knew this would draw blood. And
it did.
"You sha'n't play it now! You sha'n't!" Split cried, her ungovernable
temper aroused. She dashed impetuously for the piano and tore the sheet
of music from the rack.
It was the thing for which she had suffered so many lessons; for which
she had sat feeling like a mean-spirited imbecile with Sissy's
impertinent finger under her wrist, while all outdoors was calling to
her; for which she had forborne often and often during the week, only to
be more thoroughly bullied on Saturdays. Yet she tore it across and
recklessly trampled it underfoot. Then with her hands over her ears,
lest she hear the imperturbable and maddeningly excellent Sissy play "In
Sweet Dreams" without the notes, Split fled.
Sissy played on till the very last bar; she had an idea that Split might
be ambushed out in the hall. But when she got to the end and heard no
sound from there, she decided that the enemy was indeed vanquished, and
she rose to close the piano. As she did so she got a view of an
elegantly stout and very upright lady coming up the front steps, with a
fair, pale boy by her side.
[Illustration:
"'Go and shake hands properly, like a little gentleman,'
bullied Mrs. Pemberton"]
With an agility commendable in one so round, Sissy dropped beneath the
piano, and, whipping off her apron, proceeded to wipe the dust from the
back legs of the instrument with it. This done, she rammed the apron up
between the wall and the piano, and was seated, breathless, but with a
bit of very dirty white embroidery in her hands, when the lady entered.
"Ah, Cecilia, busy as usual," she said in an important, throaty voice.
"Yes, Mrs. Pemberton," said Sissy, softly.
"You see, Crosby, that even a child may make use of spare moments. Why
don't you say how-d'-ye-do to Cecilia? Where're your manners?" demanded
the lady.
"Yes, 'm. How-do, Sissy?" asked the boy, uncomfortably. He was a very
prim child, immaculately dressed, his smooth hair plastered neatly down
over his forehead; and he sat bolt upright on the edge of his chair, for
he knew well his mother's views about lounging.
"Go and shake hands properly, like a little gentleman," bullied Mrs.
Pemberton.
With a sickly smile Crosby walked over to Sissy and grasped her hand. He
let it go with an "Ouch!" that made Mrs. Pemberton turn majestically and
glare at him.
"I'm so sorry I stuck you, Crosby," said Sissy, softly, smoothing out
her embroidery. "I forgot there was a needle in my work."
Crosby looked at her; he knew just how sorry she was.
"The thing to say, Crosby," thundered his mama, "is, 'Not at all, not at
all, Cecilia!'"
"Not at all--not at all, Cecilia," squeaked the boy, his thin voice like
a faint echo of his mother's heavy contralto.
Sissy yearned to beat him; she always did. That she did not invariably
yield to her desire to express her resentment of so awfully mothered a
person, was due solely to a sentiment of chivalry: he was so weak and so
devoted to herself, and it took some courage to be devoted to Sissy.
"I'm ashamed of my son!" thundered Mrs. Pemberton.
Yes, Sissy knew that formula. She had heard the announcement first one
memorable day at school when she led a revolt against the master--a
revolt which only the girls of her clique were expected to indorse. But
Crosby, either because he was so accustomed to playing with girls that
he considered himself one of them, or because of that dogged devotion
which even so stern a puritan as Sissy could not sufficiently
discourage, had taken the cue from her lips. He, too, had failed
publicly and vicariously, in the very presence of his lion-hearted,
bull-voiced mother, and sat a white-faced criminal awaiting execution,
when Mrs. Pemberton, rising in her voluminous black silk skirts, like an
outraged and peppery hen, stood a moment speechless with wrath, and
then broke forth with her denunciation before the whole school, visitors
and all. "Mr. Garvan," she had exclaimed in a deep voice all a-tremble,
"I am ashamed of my son!" and sailed majestically from the room.
Crosby's action had really touched Sissy at the time, though, like the
diplomat she was, she had promptly disowned it.
But to-day Mrs. Pemberton's shame did not too much affect her offspring,
who sat, not quite so upright now, squeezing the blood from the finger
that Sissy's needle had pricked.
"Let me look at your embroidery, Cecilia," said the lady, patronizingly.
Sissy rose and brought it to her. Before Crosby she tried not to show
it, but this little Madigan was really suffering in her perfect soul:
she embroidered so badly, and knew it so well.
"H'm!" Mrs. Pemberton drew off her glove. "Make your stitches even, and
keep your work clean--like this--like this--see?"
Sissy saw. Under the firm, big, white hand the strawberry leaves and
blossoms sprang up and flourished. Mrs. Pemberton loved to embroider;
her voice was almost gentle when she painted on linen with her needle,
and then only did she forget to bully her boy.
"Perhaps you will play for us, Cecilia, if I do a bit of your work for
you?"
Sissy knew it was coming. Mrs. Pemberton always asked her to play, and
playing for company was pure show-off from a Madigan point of view.
Split would hear and taunt her with it later, she knew. But though she
scorned the servile and downtrodden Crosby, Sissy, no more than he,
dared disobey that grenadier, his mother. She took her seat at the
piano, opened a Beethoven that Mrs. Pemberton had given her the last
Christmas, under the impression that she was fostering a taste for the
classical, and, with a revengeful little hand that couldn't reach the
octaves, she began to murder the "Funeral March."
Just as the performer let her hands fall upon the last somber chord (her
puritanical soul enjoying the double dissipation of pretending to
herself while she afflicted others), she lifted her eyes to the mirror
over the piano and saw Irene out in the hall. In the mirror their eyes
met, and the mockery in Irene's was unmistakable as Sissy rose,
agitated, caught in the very act of showing off, convicted of being
affected.
"Very pretty; very pretty, indeed!" said Mrs. Pemberton,
absent-mindedly. "Now play another little waltz."
"Aunt Anne says, Mrs. Pemberton," put in Irene, entering, "will you come
to her room?"
Mrs. Pemberton rose, her deft hands still calling forth the perfection
of fruit from the stubborn linen soil upon which Sissy could make
nothing grow, and sailed across the hall. Crosby immediately jumped from
his chair.
"I say, Sissy," he cried, "I know an awful swell way to cut paper-doll
dresses."
Sissy looked at him. For all her sins (and in a hidden corner of her
heart that she rarely looked into, she knew herself for the hypocrite
she was, despite all her self-righteous pretense) this girl-boy's
devotion was her punishment. She did not envy Split her successes; in
fact, she often disapproved the methods by which they were attained. Her
pride would permit her neither to make such conquests, nor to enjoy them
when they were made; but she cursed her fate that Crosby Pemberton had
fallen to her share. For the love of a really bad boy Sissy felt she
could have sacrificed much--for a fellow quite out of the pale, a bold,
wicked pirate of a boy who would say "Darn," and even smoke a cigarette;
a daredevil, whose people could do nothing with him; a fellow with a
swagger and a droop to his eyelid and something deliciously sinister in
his lean, firm jaw and saucy black eye--a boy like Jack Cody, for
instance, for whom a whole world of short-skirted femininity divided
itself naturally into two classes: just girls--and Split Madigan. But
that a forthright, practical, severe person like herself should be made
ridiculous by Crosby's worship, and that Split, her arch-enemy, should
be there to hear her adorer make his sexless declaration, was too much!
Even a Madigan could not bear up under it. When Sissy looked from "Miss
Crosby" (as the very girls who played with him called him) to Split,
there were tears of rage trembling in her eyes.
But, with a generosity suspiciously unlike her, Split ignored the signal
of distress. "What time this afternoon will the party begin, Crosby?"
she asked.
"Oh, two o'clock. But you'll come early, won't you--Sissy?"
Sissy did not answer. She was waiting to see what Split's next move
would be.
"I don't know that I can go," said Split, gently. "I haven't any
gloves--unless--won't you ask father for some, Sissy?"
There was a prompt refusal upon Sissy's lips, but she did not utter it;
the Pembertons' visit had given the enemy too much material with which
to regale her fellow-Madigans at the dinner-table in the evening. Sissy
looked questioningly into Split's eyes, and silently the bargain was
struck: to so much refraining from ridicule in public on the part of
one, a certain indebtedness which the other might discharge by facing
Francis Madigan with a demand for money. It was hard, but Sissy shut her
teeth and got to her feet.
"Can I come with you, Sissy?" asked Crosby, following her to the door.
"If you'll let me have your tissue-paper and the scissors, I'll show--"
Sissy's hands flew to her breast. "I wish--I wish you'd never speak to
me again!" she exclaimed, and Crosby dodged as though he were
apprehensive that she might beat him.
"It's so kind of you to go the very minute I ask," giggled Split,
gleefully.
But Sissy shut the door behind her on Crosby's woeful face and Split's
radiantly happy one, and went to her fate.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
"Of the design and construction of which he was quite
vain"]