workshop and his boudoir, his kitchen, his library, and his pantry in
one. The laxness of the family housekeeping had led him to distrust all
hands and heads but his own. Everything that he wanted, or that he might
want in the near future, he kept under his eyes, within reach of his
hands, where none might borrow or lose or destroy. In order to provide
for the needs which grew and changed daily, he fitted up rude shelf
above shelf, till the corners of the room were transformed into rough
bric-à-brac stands. Mr. Madigan had the unsuccessful man's pride in
trifling successes in amateur carpentering, in husbandry of any sort
unrelated to the real issues of his life; and every tool he needed for
the exercise of his skill he kept under lock and key. He believed in, he
trusted no Madigan. He had been known to lend his penknife to Sissy, but
that was when she was ailing long ago. He laid in supplies as though he
had inside information of a famine near at hand; and his pipes and his
great cans of tobacco were piled up with his cards and his books on the
table where he played solitaire all day and read half the night. The
sweets he liked occasionally, and the day's provision of fruit (for he
ate fruit only and at this time looked upon a vegetarian as a coarse
creature who belonged to a dead era), were packed in a small home-made
pantry of the design and construction of which he was quite vain. His
bed swathed in sheets; his blankets sewed securely together, as though
he feared they might escape; a device all his own of great wooden wedges
raising the lower end of the mattress so that his feet were on a level
with his pillowed head; the chest of little drawers which his daughters
called "father's hobby," nailed high on the wall and filled with all
sorts of odds and ends, the detritus and possible repair-material of
years of housekeeping--all this Sissy took in with the unseeing eyes one
has for the familiar.
She did not expect her father's room to be like any one else's; neither
did she look for an easy and successful termination to her quest.
Sometimes she got what she asked for, but she asked for little. And
to-day Francis Madigan had been tinkering at the old house, hammering
here and patching there, a process that specially tried his temper,
being a threatening indication of change, which he resented by declaring
that "everything goes to the devil."
"Father," began Sissy, carefully, as she met his inquiring eye, "do you
approve of dancing?"
He looked up from his cards. "What nonsense are you talking now?"
"Because Irene and I have a good chance to practise it--dancing--this
afternoon."
"Well--practise," he growled.
"Shall we? All right. It's Crosby's party, you know. He's thirteen
to-day. It's his party. His mother's giving it for him at Cooper's Hall.
And there'll be dancing and--"
"Nonsense!"
"Yes," agreed Sissy, sweetly. "But we'll go if you say so. I won't need
any dress, and--" she hurried on as he raised his head belligerently,
"neither will Irene. Isn't that lucky? My brown will do, though the
over-skirt does jump up when I dance and show the red sham underneath;
but--"
"What are you bothering me about, then?" he demanded indignantly,
throwing down his cards.
"Gloves," she said gently. Then quickly, before he could speak, "That's
all. They don't cost very much. Or, I'll tell you,"--her voice grew
suddenly most cheerful, as though she had made a discovery that must
delight him,--"we can wear mitts. I don't mind--and neither will Split.
Just a pair of blue lace ones for her and pink for me, or--or--" her
voice wavered, but she was ready to pay the price, "just blue ones for
Split, father."
He put his hand in his pocket. "Why not just pink ones for Sissy?" he
asked almost good-naturedly.
Sissy shook her head, but the red rushed to her cheeks. She had won!
"Are you sure you need them?" he asked cautiously in the very act of
bestowal.
"Sure! Sure!" she cried, throwing her arms gratefully about his neck
before she danced to the door.
"But you're going, too?" he called after her. "All right, then. Make
Irene behave. She's an ox--that girl."
An ox, of course, interpreted variously according to Madigan's mood and
the correlating circumstances, signified this time an indiscreet,
pleasure-mad child. Sissy understood, and she blushed for her sister. In
fact, she was always blushing for her sister. She considered it to be
her duty formally and officially to disavow her senior. So reprehensible
did she feel Split's conduct to be that some one must blush for it; and
as blushing was not Split's forte, Sissy did it for her.
And she really did it very well, with an assumption of chagrin that
could not fail to call attention subtly to the contrast between the
sisters. When Split failed in her lessons with a completeness, a
sensational ostentation that was shocking to Sissy, that Number 1
scholar blushed gently, and, discreetly lowering her head, became
absorbed in her work. After school, when Split was being kept in and
disciplined (a process which never failed effectually to discipline the
hardy individual who attempted it), when she wept and stormed and raged
and threw caution to the winds as only tempestuous Split could, then was
Sissy's attitude a marvel of disapproving rectitude. She had a great
deal of dignity, had Sissy, and the picture of holiness that she
presented as, with her books on her arm, she walked past the desk where
the sobbing sinner's head lay with tumbled curls and bloated face, came
as near as anything could to quench the passion of tears in which
Split's tempers culminated. On such occasions the infuriated Split was
wont, for just a moment, to conquer the half-hysterical sobs that
threatened to choke her as well as inundate the world, and make a face
at Saint Cecilia as she passed holily by. But Cecilia was a Madigan
always, as well as a saint temporarily, and her eyes were turned
prudently away just then, as though she were already studiously
pondering to-morrow's lesson.
But Sissy blushed her most perfect disapproval when she played chaperon
to her elder sister. It was a position for which she felt herself
peculiarly fitted, even without the semi-official commission she held--a
position which so conscientious a person could not regard in the light
of a sinecure.
As she danced only the more sedate dances, because of that obtrusive
tendency of the red sham to her skirt, Sissy was able to chaperon her
senior all the more effectively at Crosby Pemberton's party. Irene
danced like a thing whose vocation is motion. She was a twig in a
rain-storm, a butterfly seeking sweets, a humming-bird whose wing beat
the air with a very rhapsody of rhythm. She was on the floor with the
first note Professor Trask struck, and she danced down the side of the
little hall, when the waltz was over and all the other couples had
seated themselves, as though the meter of the music had bewitched her
feet and they might nevermore walk soberly.
"Split--don't!" It was the shocked voice of her young chaperon.
"Sissy--don't!" mocked the mutinous Split.
Even after she took the seat beside Sissy, her heels were lifted and the
toes of her slippers were beating time. She sat there chattering to a
group of boys buzzing about her, upon whom her high spirits had the
effect that dance-music had upon herself.
"You're the prettiest girl I've seen since I left the city, Irene,"
patronizingly whispered the boy lately from San Francisco, whose
metropolitan elegances had dazzled the eyes of the mountain maidens.
"I wonder how many girls Will Morrow's said that to this afternoon!"
came like a sarcastic douche from Sissy, who conceived it to be a
chaperon's duty to take the conceit out of citified chaps.
Young Morrow turned to find a small woman in brown eying him
disdainfully.
"Well--well, I never said it to you, anyway," he retorted gallantly.
"Good reason why. You knew I wouldn't believe you," Sissy declared,
floundering in her anger.
"Neither would anybody else."
[Illustration:
"The Belle of the Afternoon"]
"Why? Because you said it? Didn't know you had such a reputation." Sissy
was recovering. "Never mind, Split," she added, heavily sarcastic and
assuming a comforting air that maddened Irene, who desired nothing more
than to impress her new suitor with the elegant gentility of her manner,
her family's, and all that was hers. "Just to have a boy from the city
even pretend to think you're good-looking is worth living for. Boys know
so much--in the city!" she concluded witheringly.
Mr. Morrow from San Francisco looked bewildered. He had merely paid what
he considered a very dashing compliment to one girl, when lo! the other
overwhelmed him with her contempt. He turned for consolation to Irene.
"I'll show you how they dance the two-step in the city," he said,
holding out his hand as the music began again.
But he had reckoned without that stern censor of sisterly manners,
Cecilia Madigan; that loyal Comstocker who resented the implication of
her town's inferiority, quite independent of the fact that the insult
was not addressed to her but to one who, apparently, welcomed it.
"I think I'll go home now, Split," she remarked carelessly, rising.
A sudden blight fell upon the belle of the afternoon. When Sissy went,
go she must, too; this was the sole rule of conduct Francis Madigan had
devised for the guidance of his most headstrong daughter.
"Oh, Sissy--not till after supper!" she pleaded piteously.
"I--I've got some studying to do for the examination Monday," explained
the exemplary member of Mr. Garvan's class and society at large.
"Just wait till this one dance is over!" Coaxing was not Split Madigan's
forte; she was accustomed to demand.
But it was just that one dance that Sissy, the pure and patriotic, could
not countenance.
A quick flash of fury lighted Irene's eye. To be bossed publicly and
before Mr. Will Morrow of San Francisco! In her heart she swore to be
avenged; yet she dropped Mr. Morrow's hand and shook her head to all his
pleadings, as she followed her ruthless tyrant across the floor to the
little dressing-room.
But as the sisters emerged from the dressing-room door, Crosby Pemberton
and his cousin Fred stopped them.
"You're not going home, Split?" begged Fred. "I've been looking
everywhere for you. Oh, come and dance just this one with me!"
"Sissy's going," said Split, the lilting of the music stirring her
pulses and lifting her feet, despite the unmusical rage she was in, "and
I've got to go, too."
"Won't you stay--won't you wait just for this one, Sissy?" begged Fred.
"Why--certainly," acquiesced the gentle Sissy.
Split gasped with amazement. But she wasted no time, throwing off her
jacket with a quick twist of her wrist. Later she might fathom the
tortuosities of her tyrant's mind. All she knew now was that she might
dance. With whom was a small matter to Split Madigan.
Sissy watched her dance away, delight and malice in her eye. She was
watching till Mr. Morrow from the city should behold her revenge. But
Crosby did not know this, and he had plans of his own.
"Come and play a game over in the corner, just till this dance's over,
won't you, Sissy?"
"What kind of a game?" she demanded, following him mechanically.
"Oh, a new game. It's lots of fun. I'll show you."
Sissy consented. She could play a game--and she knew she was clever at
all games--without fear of betrayal from that red sham which she had
been fiercely sitting upon half the afternoon.
Before long, her emulative spirit got her so interested in this
particular game that she forgot not only the sham skirt but the sham
pretense upon which she had bullied Irene. And she played so well that
there was only one forfeit against her name, though Crosby, who had
named himself treasurer, held half the bangle bracelets and pins and
handkerchiefs of the little circle as evidence of dereliction in others.
He called her name first, as he stood with her little turquoise ring in
his hand and an odd light in his eye that might have enlightened her;
but she was looking toward the door, where the young gentleman from San
Francisco, in a Byronic pose, was staring gloomily at Irene dancing with
a rival, and so joying in the dance that she had forgotten all about
him.
"Open your mouth and shut your eyes,
And I'll give you something to make you wise,"
chanted Crosby, holding out the ring and beckoning to her.
Closing her eyes upon the spectacle of Mr. Morrow's suffering, Sissy
opened a mouth about which the malicious smile still lingered.
Crosby hesitated a moment. He was very much afraid of her, but as she
stood, docile and innocent, before him, with her eyes shut and her tiny
red mouth open, he could not fancy consequences nearly so well as he
could picture the thing his wish painted.
In a moment he had realized it, and Sissy, overwhelmed by astonishment,
dumb and impotent with the audacity of the unexpected, felt his arms
close about her and his greedy lips upon hers.
Oh, the rage and shame of the proper Sissy! Her mouth fell shut and her
eyes flew open. And then, if she could, she would have closed them
forever; for, before her in the sudden silence, towering above the
triumphant and unrepentant Crosby, stood Mrs. Pemberton, a portentous
figure of shocked matronly disapproval. And she promptly placed the
blame where mothers of sons have placed it since the first similar
impropriety was discovered.
"Cecilia!" she cried in that velvety bass that echoed through the
room--"Cecilia Madigan, you--teaching my son a vulgar kissing game--you,
the good one! Oh, you deceitful little thing!"
A MERRY, MERRY ZINGARA
It had been Crosby Pemberton's custom to climb the steps that led to
Madigan's every Wednesday afternoon at four, with his music neatly done
up in a roll, on his way to play duets with Sissy.
On the Wednesday that followed his birthday party--the mere mention of
which, after the lapse of four days, was enough to send Sissy into
hysterics--that young lady was seated in the parlor, ready for her
guest. She was ready for him in all the senses a Madigan knew how to
infuse into that frame of mind. She intended to make him as miserable as
she herself had been ever since that disgraceful episode in which she
had so innocently played the victim's part. She would show the betrayer
of trust no mercy--none. She would accept no apology. She would trample
upon his excuses and tear them limb from limb. She would show him her
scorn and detestation and make him feel how everlastingly unforgivable
his offense was; then she would send him forth forever from the house,
and dare him to so much as speak to her at school.
She pictured him going down the stairs for the last time, utterly
wretched, broken, despised, condemned. And in order to make the picture
more real, she glanced out of the window. Suddenly her hands flew in
terror to her breast, and all her plans for vengeance were left hanging
in mid-air; for it was not Crosby's trim little figure that was climbing
the steps, but the stately solidity of Mrs. Pemberton herself.
In her extremity, Sissy did not even stop to look at the back legs of
the piano; she sped across the room and made a flying leap through the
low west window. Mrs. Pemberton, glancing in through the open door as
she rang the bell, got a glimpse of two plump disappearing legs, but
when she and Miss Madigan entered, there was no trace of Sissy except
her jackstones. They stumbled over these, lying scattered on the floor,
where she had been sitting waiting for Crosby and concocting schemes of
punishment.
"I come to explain--" said Mrs. Pemberton, stiffly and a bit out of
breath, seating herself with a rigidity of backbone that would have
justified Sissy's bestowal upon her of the nickname Mrs. Ramrod, if she
could have seen it. But Sissy, lying attentive beneath the open window,
could not see; she could only hear. "I am here to tell you, Miss
Madigan, why Crosby did not come to-day to play duets."
"Dear me! didn't he come?" asked Miss Madigan, absently. "He isn't sick,
is he? Irene complains of headache and backache, and she's so languid
she let Sissy get the wish-bone--I call it the bone of contention--at
dinner yesterday without a struggle. I'm half afraid she'll not be able
to sing to-night at Professor Trask's concert; but perhaps it's only
that she danced too much at Crosby's party. She al--"
"It's about that--about the party that I wanted to speak to you,"
interrupted Mrs. Pemberton, severely.
"Yes? Such a lovely party, the girls say! I'm sure, Mrs. Pemberton, it's
just--"
"Did they tell you what--occurred?"
Miss Madigan blinked reflectively. Her acquaintance with the stately and
wealthy Mrs. Warren Pemberton was her most prized social connection.
What could have occurred?
"Why, of course, of course!" she laughed after a bit, pleasantly, still
trying to remember what the girls had gossiped about. "Delightful,
wasn't it?"
Mrs. Pemberton lifted her plumed head with a slow and terrible
solemnity. "De-lightful, Miss Madigan, de-lightful!"
The smile vanished from Miss Madigan's face. "I hope, dear Mrs.
Pemberton, that the girls did nothing that--that--They're such madcaps,
and their father never will--"
Miss Madigan's distress touched her august visitor. "I trust this," she
said significantly, "will be a lesson to Mr. Madigan."
"What--what will? If there's a lesson for Madigan, let him have it
direct, Mrs. Pemberton."
Lying flat on her stomach beneath the window, Sissy heard her father's
voice come clanging harshly on the lighter-timbred dialogue. Cautiously
she raised herself on her elbow and let a single eye peer through the
curtain at the group within. There, with his paint-pot in his hand, his
brush and his pipe in the other, his unique nightcap rakishly on one
side and drawn over his white head to protect it from the paint, Madigan
stood in his overalls and heavy shirt--his Michelangelo costume, Kate
had called it. He had been regilding an old mirror in his room, and
having some gilt left at the bottom of his can, he was going about the
house in search of tarnished articles of virtue.
"Oh, Francis!" exclaimed his sister.
"Why, how do you do, Mr. Madigan?" said Mrs. Pemberton, bravely, putting
out her hand. "I did not know you were within hearing."
"Or you wouldn't have offered the lesson? Well, give it to me, now that
I am here. No, I won't shake hands; mine are all sticky with gilt." He
rested his elbow on his hip and stood at ease.
A savage delight at this outrage upon gentility in Mrs. Ramrod's very
presence possessed that red republican Sissy. She giggled within
herself, Madigan's attitude, his streaked and gilded face, his confident
voice, showed such delightful indifference to the effect his
unconventional attire must have upon this Priestess of Form.
"I must beg your pardon, Mr. Madigan," said that lady, in her most
official tone, "for using the expression I did. The matter I wished to
bring to Miss Madigan's attention--and to yours, now that you are
here--concerns one of your daughters. I should have come to tell you of
it before, as was my duty, as I would wish any mother to do for me were
it my daughter; but I have been busy helping the Misses Bryne-Stivers
and Professor Trask with this concert for to-night. This must be my
apology for the delay. For speaking--for telling you what I have to
tell, no mother could apologize."
"H'm!" Madigan cleared his throat threateningly, and out in the
sage-brush Sissy shook with apprehension. She knew that preliminary
bugle-call to battle.
"I assure you, my dear Mrs. Pemberton, we can have only the kindest
feelings for any one who will take an interest in those motherless--"
"Let Mrs. Pemberton go on, Anne," interrupted Madigan, harshly. "Just
what is it, ma'am? Out with it."
Mrs. Pemberton rose, rustling her heavy silks.
"Merely, Mr. Madigan, that with my own eyes I saw your daughter take
part in a vulgar kissing game--the only occurrence of any kind that
marred the perfect propriety of my son's birthday party."
There was a long silence inside. Sissy, without, her heart beating so
loud that she was afraid it might drown all other sounds, heard, despite
it, Aunt Anne's gasp of horror, the tinkle of the jet on Mrs.
Pemberton's heavy gown, the squeaking of her father's paint-spotted
slippers as he shifted his weight.
Finally it came. "That ox!" exclaimed Madigan, in a rage.
Mrs. Pemberton moved in majesty toward the door. "My son," she said
slowly, "chivalrously tries to take the blame from her and insists that
he proposed the game himself. But I know Crosby to be incapable of such
a thing."
"H'm! Yes. So do I," assented Madigan.
Miss Madigan turned to her brother, and in a voice that suggested long
years of martyrdom, said: "You will send her to the convent now,
Francis? You positively must now. I really admire you for the way you
have discharged a most unpleasant duty, Mrs. Pemberton. For years I've
insisted that Irene must--"
"Irene? Yes, if it had been Irene, one could expect it," remarked Mrs.
Pemberton, funereally.
"But it wasn't--it couldn't be--"
"It was Cecilia." Mrs. Pemberton's grief-stricken tones conveyed all the
disappointment she felt.
Cecilia, on her quaking knees, now peering through the window, saw a
quick change come over her father's dread countenance. It smoothed, it
wrinkled, it twitched, and his shoulders began to shake silently.
"No! Sissy?" he exclaimed, with an appreciative chuckle, which made that
young perfectionist outside feel seasick, as though the hillside had
swelled up beneath her. "And who was the boy, might I ask?"
"It was"--Mrs. Pemberton paused to mark both her shocked surprise at Mr.
Madigan's reception of the news, as well as the further enormity
involved in its completion--"my son Crosby."
"No! Ha! ha! ha!" Madigan's rare laugh rang out.
Mechanically Sissy turned down her thumb to mark the number of times she
had heard it, since Split and she had made a wager on it. Inwardly,
though, she was nauseated by the thought that she was being laughed at.
As nearly destitute as a Madigan could be of humor, she would so much
rather have been flayed alive, she thought in the depths of her
puritanical soul, than suffer ridicule.
"Crosby--eh?" Madigan was recovering. "Congratulate him for me. I didn't
know the little milksop had it in him. You ought to thank Sissy, ma'am,
for proving that he is not really stuffed with sawdust. Where is she,
anyway?"
Lying flat, her blushing face buried in the sage-brush, was Sissy at
that moment, while Mrs. Ramrod rustled out of the room, precisely as she
had done the day Crosby failed in the public oral examination in
geography, Miss Madigan hurrying placatingly after.
But outside Sissy wept and would not be comforted. Her purist's pride
was wounded; her prudish maiden's modesty was outraged--that her own
father should believe it of her! And she must not open the subject or
try to alter his opinion, for fear of the ridicule which seared her very
soul!
* * * * *
A taste for the ethereally symbolic had not strongly manifested itself
in Virginia City, yet under Professor Trask's direction "The Cantata of
the Flowers" had been in active rehearsal for weeks. The professor
relied upon the school-children for chorus material, and upon the
Madigans to fill those lieutenancies without which the spectacular
features of his production must be a failure--this last as a matter of
course. For there were many Madigans, and those of them that were not
leaders by instinct had developed leadership through force of
environment, a natural desire to bully others being not the least
important by-product of being bullied. Besides, the reputation they had
of being talented the professor knew to be almost as efficacious in
lending children self-confidence as talent itself.
Kate, therefore, who could not sing a note, but who was grace embodied,
led a chorus of Poppies, whose red tissue-paper garments creaked and
rustled as they swayed, waving their star-tipped wands and chanting
"Breathe we now our charmed fragrance."
Florence and Bessie, whom the curse of being twins linked like
galley-slaves, were Heather-bells in a childish chorus which piped forth
the information "We are the Heather-bells: list to our song," but which
was almost ruined by their common desire to get away from each other and
lead in two different directions.
[Illustration:
"She was pronounced a 'regular little love' by the Misses
Bryne-Stivers"]
Quite self-possessed (even if she was very much off key), Sissy, who was
the best "speaker" in her class, warbled her part of a sanctimonious
little duet in which Heliotrope and Mignonette voiced the sentiment--
"'Tis not in beauty alone we may find
Purity, goodness, and wisdom combined"
Even small Frances, most self-conscious of Madigans, in a costume so
inadequate that Bep's doll would have been scandalized at the idea of
wearing it, posed and attitudinized as a Dewdrop. She was pronounced a
"regular little love" by the Misses Bryne-Stivers, whom the Madigans had
nicknamed the Misses Blind-Staggers--a resentful play upon their
hyphenated name, as well as a delicate reference to their blue goggles
that might have served as blinkers.