been interpolated. She was to repeat, for the first time on the
professional stage, that renowned success in "The Zingara" which school
exhibitions had made famous.
Just before the time came for Split to sing, Sissy was hovering about
the prima donna in the dressing-room. As Miss Heliotrope she wore the
dark-purple gown which Aunt Anne had made over from her own wardrobe.
(Being Comstock-born, Sissy knew no flower intimately, and could easily
be imposed upon as to their habits and colors.) Above it her round
little dark face looked almost sallow, in spite of the excited red that
flamed in her cheeks.
The atmosphere of a theater was like wine to the Madigans. The smell of
escaping gas in the dark was, in itself, enough to transport them by
association of ideas out of the workaday world; and emotion due to a
dramatic situation was the one evidence of sensibility they permitted
themselves.
Yet Sissy, who was tying the ribbons on Split's tambourine, looked in
vain for a reflection of that fever of delight which possessed herself.
Split was cross. She was languid. She was dull. She did not seem to
enjoy even the pair of slippers she was pulling on. They had been given
to Sissy by Henrietta Blind-Staggers, and their newness and beauty had
tempted the poor Zingara. But if Sissy had not felt that the family
fortunes were at stake, as she always did in the matter of a public
appearance, she would never have made so generous an offer of her
cherished property.
"But they seem awful tight, Split," she suggested.
"They're nothing of the sort," snapped Split, wincing as she rose to her
feet.
"I don't see how you're going to dance in them."
"Will you just leave that to me, Miss Cecilia Morgan Madigan, and mind
your own business?"
[Illustration:
"'I don't see how you're going to dance in them'"]
Deeply offended, Sissy withdrew. No one called her Cecilia Morgan
Madigan who did not want to wound her to the soul and remind her of an
incident it were more generous to forget. She went out to the wings and
stood there looking upon the stage and Professor Trask, who, as the
Recluse, was gowned in mysterious flowing black, while he chanted "Here
would I rest" in a hollow bass. But Sissy was worried. Not even being
behind the scenes could still her apprehensions about Split. She longed
to confide in some fellow-Madigan, but Kate was on the other side of the
stage, and to all her winks and beckonings turned an uninterested back.
Then, all at once, sooner than she expected, the Recluse departed, the
scenes shifted; there, alone on the stage, looking white in the glare of
the footlights, was a bedizened, big-eyed, panting little Zingara, and
the syncopated prelude began.
Sissy's fingers thrummed it sympathetically upon her knee, but Trask,
who was playing the accompaniment behind the scenes, had put an
unfamiliar accent upon the notes. Out on the stage the Zingara was
beating her tambourine sadly out of time and was longing, with a panicky
fear, for the familiar touch of Sissy's hand upon the piano.
"Dum--dum-de-dum-dum--dum-dum--dum-dum!"
The notes came like a warning signal. The Zingara's throat was parched,
her feet ached excruciatingly merely from carrying her weight--how, oh,
how was she going to dance?
"Dum--dum-de-dum-dum--dum-dum--dum-dum!"
The last note prolonged itself into a summons. The Zingara's eye,
turning from the faces that danced before her, sent appealing glances to
the wings, where Sissy yearned toward her, all rivalry drowned in a
mothering anxiety for her success.
"'I'm a--mer-ry, meh-hi-ri-y--Zin-ga-ra!'" wailed Split, trying to get
her breath. "'From a--gold-e-en--clime I come!'"
Sissy's hands flew to her breast, then with a wild gesture up over her
ears, and she fled back to the dressing-room. Split the redoubtable,
Split the invincible, the impudent, ready, pugnacious Split had
stage-fright! The world rocked beneath Sissy's feet. Time stopped, and
all the world stood agape witnessing a Madigan's failure! It seemed to
the third of them that she could never bear to lift her head again and
meet a Comstocker's eye and see there that shameful record against the
family. But she scrambled quickly to her feet when Irene came running
in, "The Zingara" all unsung.
Irene's face was white and her eyes glittered. Sissy did not dare meet
them, for, to a Madigan, to put a shame in words or looks was to double
and triple it. She did not dare to condole; she had no heart to accuse.
So she bent down again, ostensibly to tie her shoe, in order to give the
furious little Zingara time to recover and to begin to undress. She
heard the tambourine's tingling clatter as it was cast to the floor. She
looked anywhere but at her sister, but she heard buttons give and
buttonholes rend, and bowed her head to the storm.
"I must say," she remarked in a scornfully careless tone when the
silence became oppressive, "that Trask plays funny accompaniments." And
she lifted her head, fancying herself rather clever in finding a
scapegoat.
She ducked immediately, but not in time. One of her own slippers,--oh,
the irony of things!--torn off and thrown by Split's impatient hand,
struck her in the face.
Sissy's cheek flamed. "Did you do that on purpose, Split Madigan?"
Split Madigan had not done it on purpose, for the reason mainly that it
had not occurred to her. But now that it was done, it was not in her
present fury against all the world to disclaim intention to insult so
small a part of it. Glad of an excuse to outrage some one, any
one,--and, even then, preferably Sissy,--to make her sister share some
of that hurt and sting and smart that burned within herself, she met
Sissy's eye maliciously, triumphantly, significantly.
Sissy gasped. She took the slipper in her hand and made for her enemy.
She intended, she believed, to ram her own best Sunday slipper down
Split Madigan's throat! And she got quite close before she could have
been made to believe that anything on earth or anywhere else could alter
her intention. But a little thing did; merely the sound of voices
outside the door and a swift, piteous change of expression in that
defiant face opposite.
Sissy dropped the slipper and flew to the door. She had a glimpse--which
she pretended not to have seen--of the Merry Zingara crumbling in a
passion of regretful sobs to the floor. Then she was standing outside,
her back to the closed door, a determined, fat little Horatius in
purple, with two red cheeks,--one, indeed, redder than the other where
the slipper had struck,--vowing to hold the bridge against all comers,
so that Split might mourn in peace.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
"'But is she _very_ sick?'"]
"But is she _very_ sick?" came the eager question.
"Well--pretty sick," said the doctor, gravely.
"Not very?" Sissy's voice fell disappointedly. She opened the door for
him and stood at the head of the steps as he prepared cautiously to
descend.
"You don't want your sister to be dangerously ill, do you?" Dr.
Murchison demanded sharply, turning upon her.
"N-no," said Sissy.
"Well, see that you don't squabble with her. Your aunt ought to have
sent for me five days ago, instead of which she lets a sick, nervous,
half-crazy child dance and sing on the stage. All poppycock!"
"Can I help you down the first step, doctor?" asked Sissy, gratefully.
She was so thankful for his words. No one--not even a Madigan,
accustomed to be held strictly accountable--could be to blame for a
failure if she had been ill at the time. The family was almost
rehabilitated, it seemed to Sissy.
The doctor's dim old eyes looked curiously at her. "I believe you've got
some deviltry in your head, Sissy. Now, you mind me and let your sister
alone. There! I'm all right now. I can go all right the rest of the way
when I'm once started down your infernal stairs. I ought to charge your
father double rates for risking my old bones on them. Yes, it's all
right now. It's only the first step that bothers me. It's always the
first step that costs--eh, Sissy?"
She looked blankly up at him.
He bent down and patted her head. "See here," he said, "I'll bet you've
got more sense than you want us to believe."
Sissy blushed. It was a tardy tribute, she felt, but as welcome as it
was deserved.
"With a lot of common sense and a physique like yours, you ought to make
a good nurse. Take care of your sister," he added almost appealingly,
divided between his knowledge of how poor a nurse Miss Madigan was and
how impossible it was to tell this to her niece. "She'll be cross and
irritable and--even worse than usual," he said, with a grim smile that
recognized the battle-ground upon which the Madigans spent their lives;
and this recognition made him seem more human to them than any other
adult. "But you just treat her like a teething baby. She's got a hard
row to hoe, that poor, bad Split. She must sleep, and you understand
her--Lord! Lord! the care these queer little devils need!" he muttered,
shaking his shoulders as he went on down the steps, as though physically
to throw off responsibility.
Sissy turned and went back into the house. It was a queer house, she
thought. To her alert impressibility, the sickness and apprehension it
inclosed were something tangible. She could taste the odors of the
sick-room. She could feel the weight of the odd stillness that filled
it. The sharpness of sound when it did come, the strangeness of
suppressed excitement, the unfamiliar place with Split's quick figure
missing, the loneliness of being without her, the boredom of lacking a
playmate or a fighting-mate--it all affected Sissy as the prelude of a
drama the end of which has something terrifyingly fascinating in it. It
must be wonderful to die, thought Sissy, with a swift, satisfying vision
of pretty young death--herself in white and the mysterious glamour of
the silent sleep. Poor Sissy, who had never been ill!
Split, with shorn head and with wide-open eyes and hard, flushed
cheeks, lay tossing on the big bed in the room off the parlor, which had
seldom been used since Frances was born there. "Mother's bed" the
Madigans always called it, and they crept into it when ailing, as though
it still held something of the old curative magic for childish aches,
though all but Kate had forgotten the mother's face as it was before she
lay down there the last time. Split had a big hot silver dollar in one
hand,--Francis Madigan's way of recognizing and sympathizing with a
child's illness,--and in the other an undivided orange, evidence enough
of an extraordinary occasion in the Madigan household. But she was not
waking. She was not sleeping. She was not dreaming. She knew that Sissy
had come in and had squatted on the floor with Bep and Fom, playing
dolls, probably. Yet she felt that numb, gradual, terrifying enlargement
of her fingertips, of her limbs, of her tongue, her body, her head, that
she had been told again and again was mere fancy. With a self-control
that was unlike her, an unnatural product of her unnatural state, she
locked her jaws together that she might not scream this once. And in the
eery stillness that followed the effort, which had made her ears buzz
and her temples throb, she heard quite sanely Florence's denial of some
charge her twin had brought against her.
"I didn't do any such thing," she whispered.
"You did," said Bep.
"I didn't."
"Cross your heart to die?"
The scream burst from Irene then--not the cry of delirium, but a sharp,
terrified, if inarticulate, call for help. If there was one thing Split
did respect, it was that Reaper whose name she could never hear without
a quick indrawn breath. Yet--in her heart--she knew that, though others
might fall at the touch of that fearful scythe, she, Split Madigan, as
fleet of limb as a coyote and as sound of heart as a young pine-cone,
could never, never die; that the world could never be when her quick red
blood should be quiet and her mountain-bred lungs should be stilled.
With a bound Sissy pushed the twins out of the door. She was at the
bedside when Miss Madigan entered.
"Go outside, Sissy!" she commanded. "Can't you see you're exciting her?
Isn't it hard enough for me to take care of her when she's so cross?
She's not to be excited. She's to be kept quiet. There, there,
Irene--it's only fancy, I tell you! Look at your fingers; they're
thinner, littler than they ever were. Look at Sissy's; see how much
bigger they are."
Irene lifted her fingers that had caught Sissy's. She looked from her
own fevered hand to Sissy's dimpled one and was comforted. But her hold
on her old enemy did not relax. She had something tangible now to
reassure her; something that spoke to her in her own language. Her eyes
closed, her tense little hand dropped wearily, but she held Sissy fast.
When she thought her patient was asleep, Miss Madigan tried to open her
fingers, but, with something of her old waywardness, Irene resisted. And
Sissy, with an old-fashioned nod of advice, motioned her aunt to let
things be. She curled herself up on a corner of the bed, and--it being
quite safe, no other Madigan being present but this unnatural one lying
prone, half conscious, half dazed--she put her other hand over the one
that held hers, and sat there quietly waiting.
The minutes came to seem like hours, but Sissy sat motionless and Miss
Madigan left the room. Presently an eery humming came from Split's lips.
Then, mechanically, Sissy's fingers picked out on the spread the simple
little melody Split sang as in a dream.
"Play it," the sick girl whispered, pushing away the hand she had held.
Sissy jumped as though she had been discovered indulging in gross and
inexcusable sentimentality. She looked down at Split with a puzzled,
sheepish smile, wondering how long it had been since her sister had come
into the real world out of that fantastic one where marvelous things
might happen.
"Play it!" repeated Split, fretfully.
Sissy rose and walked softly into the front room. She fancied if she
took a long time, yet appeared about to obey, Split would forget her
desire and, left alone in the silence, would fall asleep. She opened the
piano softly and pulled out the stool. Then leisurely she pretended to
arrange the light and the piano-cover.
Split, quieted by her apparent compliance, lay back with a sigh of
content. Her mind, whose very apprehension of the delirium had excluded
other thoughts, dwelt now restfully upon the combination of easy mental
effort and soothing melody her "piece" meant to her. Besides, she was
ordering her junior about, using her illness as a club to beat down
remonstrance. Split was really on the way to being herself again.
After a bit she found that she was almost dozing off, and waked with an
indignant start to see Sissy stealing softly out of the room.
"Where are you going?" she demanded. "Why don't you play it when I tell
you to?"
For an instant Sissy rebelled. Then she looked at the passionate little
figure sitting tensely upright, at the white fever-circle about the dry
lips, at the short hair and the unnaturally bright, angry eyes. She went
back to the piano, sat down, and with her foot on the soft pedal, that
Aunt Anne might not hear, she began to play.
The melody was simple and light, with a little break in its sweetness.
Sissy's touch was childlike, but her impressionable temperament,
quickened by the strangeness of that dark room behind her, overflowed
into the melody her fingers brought out. The accompanying bass was
rhythmic, and the nervous, fevered child found mental and physical
occupation in letting the fingers of her left hand pick out its detail
upon the pillow which she had lately thrown in a passion against the
wall because it had been so hot and she so miserably uncomfortable.
Sissy had begun the second part, the changing bass of which had been
poor Split's _pons asinorum_. It was the part to which Sissy had always
given a dramatic touch--partly because, it being simpler music than she
was accustomed to, she could safely do so, and partly because it
irritated Irene, to whom the most forthright interpretation was
difficult. Her foot slipped now, through force of habit, upon the hard
pedal, and in a moment she heard the whirring of Aunt Anne's skirts.
"Sissy, are you crazy, you--" she heard behind her, and then there came
a sudden, an unaccountable stop.
Sissy turned. Behind and above Miss Madigan towered tall old Dr.
Murchison. He had come back, as usual, up the long flight of steps, for
his forgotten spectacles. One of his hands was clapped with good-humored
firmness over the lady's mouth; the other was pointing to Split,
sleeping like a Madigan again, while over Aunt Anne's head the doctor
nodded and bobbed encouragingly to Sissy, like a benignant musical
conductor deprived of the use of his arms.
Sissy turned again to the piano. It was a beautiful opportunity for her
to affect disgust with the situation; to register a silent, but
expressive, exception to being compelled to entertain Irene; and to
pose, not only before her aunt but before the doctor, too, as a very
important personage, whose services were in urgent demand, and who
yielded under protest. But as a matter of fact she was too happy. There
was no misconceiving the light that illumined the doctor's round, rosy
face. Something her undisciplined, childish imagination had been
coquetting with, as an untried experience, though never admitting its
full, dread significance, was carried out of her horizon by the shining
look of success in old Murchison's face; something that shook her strong
little body with a long shiver, as she realized, in the second when she
could almost feel the lift of its dark wings taking flight, the thing
that might have been.
So Sissy played "In Sweet Dreams" "with expression."
* * * * *
Later she played it, and over and over again, with the salt tears
trickling down her nose and splashing on the keys; played it with tired,
fat fingers and a rebellious, burning heart. But this was during Split's
convalescence--a reign of terror for the whole household; for to the
natural taste she possessed for bullying, Split Madigan then added the
whims and caprices of the invalid, who uses her weaknesses as a cat of a
hundred tails with which to scourge her victims into compliance.
She was loath to get well, this tyrannical, hot-tempered, short-haired
Zingara, who led her people such a merry dance, and she left the
self-indulgent land of convalescence and the bed in the big back room
with regret.
THE SHUT-UPS
It was an early-morning rite practised by the twins, its performance
hidden from everybody but each other, to see whether Dr. Murchison's
prophecy had come true.
"There were once two little girls--twins," began the old doctor,
significantly, the day Bep and Fom were vaccinated, after battling
desperately against precedence, in the doctor's very office. "Now all
twins love each other dearly."
The twins looked at him pityingly. To be so old and so ignorant!
"Yes, they do," he insisted. "Everybody knows they're fonder of each
other than the closest sisters."
Bep glanced at Fom and Fom looked at Bep; there was something almost
Chinese in the irony of their eyes; they knew just how fond of each
other sisters can be! But they politely suppressed their incredulous
grins.
"Well," resumed the old doctor, realizing how lacking in conviction his
comparison might seem to a Madigan, "well, these twins were the
exception: they did not love each other."
There was an interested movement from Bep.
"They hated each other."
Fom looked up eagerly; there was something human about such a tale. She
felt her respect for Dr. Murchison reviving.
"They fought from morning till night. There was never a moment's peace
when the two were together. Each was so jealous of the other that she
would rather do without, herself, than share with her twin. It was
disgraceful."
The twins leaned forward, charmed.
The doctor looked over his spectacles at them; there was no mistaking
the effect he had produced. "Everybody warned them that unless they
stopped squabbling, something dreadful would happen to them. But they
never believed it till one day--"
The twins held their breath. Dr. Murchison went to the library and took
out a book. He knew the value of a dramatic pause.
"--till one day they waked up in the morning and found that they
were--stuck--fast--together--for life! Everything the dark one had she
just had to share with her twin. And everywhere she went her lazy blonde
sister had to go, too. People made up a terrible name for them. They
called them"--he lowered his voice to the apologetic tone one has for
not quite proper subjects--"the 'Siamese Twins,' and--if you don't
believe me, here's their picture!" With a quick movement he opened the
book before them.
The twins' faces went gray; in that second they even looked alike, so
tense were both with the same emotion. Instinctively they made a swift
motion, a dumb prayer for sympathy, toward each other; then as swiftly
shuddered apart as though temporary contact might become lifelong
bondage.
But as the months went by and they remained mercifully unattached
(though battling still in their double capacity of Madigans and twins),
they almost outgrew their credulity; yet still, on occasions, observed
the morning ceremony of self-inspection.
In fact, though, nothing held them in peace together except sleep, when
nature must have reunited them in dreams; for, no matter in what
positions they were relatively when they closed their eyes, morning
found their arms about each other, their breath intermingled, their
little bodies intercurved like well-packed sardines.
On their birthday morning--the twins were born on Christmas--Fom waked
very early, alarmed to find Bep's arm about her. She never remembered in
the morning that at night her last hazy thought had been to reach for
it, pull down the sleeve of its nightgown, and cuddle close to her twin.
She threw it from her now with unusual violence, and, sitting up in bed,
slipped off her gown that she might closely examine her right side--the
side that had been nearest Bep.
The blonde twin woke while this process was going on, and its dread
significance shook the haze of slumber from her eyes. She, too, slipped
her gown from her shoulders and, shivering with the cold, passed an
apprehensive hand along her left ribs.
"Do you?" she whispered.
"N-no. I don't think so. I--I dreamed that it was there, though. Do
you?"
An assenting shudder shook Bep's body.
"Where--oh, where? I don't believe it!" cried Fom. "You're just a
'fraid-cat trying to frighten me."
Bep pointed to her side. There it was unmistakably--a round
black-and-blue mark.
A wail escaped Florence. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" she cried, "what in the
world shall we do?"
Bep did not answer. She sat stupefied, staring at the evidence of
calamity.
"If it's commenced on you, it's bound to commence on me before long. I
wonder--how fast it grows?"
Bep shook her head. "It wasn't there when I went to sleep."
"If it grows on you toward me, and on me toward you that quick, why, in
a week--we'll be--stuck fast--won't we?"
Bep nodded miserably.
"Some morning," mourned Fom, wriggling unhappily, "we'll wake and it'll
be all done. You'll just have to study hard, Bessie Madigan, and be in
my class in school; I won't go back into the mixed primary--I just
won't! Oh, Bep, why will you put your arm around me at night?"
"I don't. I always go to sleep with my back to you. You know I do. And
in the morning, the first thing I know you're flinging my arm off. I
believe you pull my arm over you yourself. I believe you want to get
stuck together and be Chemise Twins!" Bep scolded tearfully, with her
usual ill luck with unfamiliar words.
There was a sorrow-smitten pause.
"I say, Beppy," the termination was a sign of sudden good humor in Fom,
"didn't you tumble down yesterday when you and Bombey Forrest were
driving the Grayson kids round the block in your relay race?"
The light of hope leaped up in Bessie's eyes. "Could it be that?"
"Of course it could; it is, you silly!"
"I'm not a silly. You were scared yourself," retorted the blonde twin,
relieved but pugnacious.
"Pooh! I only pretended, to frighten you," jeered Fom.
"Not much you didn't. I ain't anybody's dope."