"Anybody's dope," answered Bep, uncertainly; she knew how little words
were to be trusted.
"What's 'dope'?" demanded Florence.
"Why--what Kate said yesterday."
An enjoying giggle came from Sissy's bed. She had waked. "_Dupe_, you
goosy--_dupe_!" she chuckled.
"Yah! Yah!" sneered Fom, happy in her twin's discomfiture.
Bep blushed with mortification. "Don't you trophy over me, Fom
Madigan!" she cried wrathfully.
Sissy's giggle became a shout of laughter, and straightway she sallied
forth, benightgowned as she was, to carry the news of Bep's latest to
the Madigans--while Bep, aware that she had Partingtoned again, without
knowing just how, cried furiously after her: "I didn't say it! I
didn't!"
Bep's talent was dear to the Madigans. They seized upon each blunder she
made, and held it up, shrinking and bare, under the light of their
laughter-loving eyes. They ridiculed it interminably, and were
unflaggingly entertained by it, repeating it for the edification of each
new-comer so often and so faithfully that from conscious mimicry they
turned to use of it without quotation-marks, till, insensibly, at last
it was received into their vocabulary--which fact, by the way, made the
Madigan dialect at times difficult for strangers to master.
For instance, the rare rainy days in Nevada were always "glummy" among
Madigans, because the blonde twin had once been so affected by their
gloom that she spelled it that way. An over-credulous person was a
"sucher" since the day she had written it so. Jack Cody lived in the
"vikinty" of their house, because Bep Partington had so decreed. "Don't
greed" had become a classic since the day Aunt Anne issued her infamous
ukase, compelling that twin who (wilfully speculating upon her sister's
envy) kept goodies to the last to divide said last precious morsel with
the gloating other. And the Madigan who (taking base advantage of the
fact that Bep was at an age when to bite into a hard red winter apple
was to leave a shaky tooth behind) obligingly took the first bite, but
made that bite include nearly half the apple--that rapacious betrayer of
confiding helplessness deserved to be called a harpy. But she wasn't;
she was known as "a regular harper!"
The Madigans trooped back into the twins' room in a body to "trophy"
over Bep, whose double misfortune it was not only to be a Partington,
but to strenuously deny her kinship with the family of that name. Bessie
Madigan could not be got to admit that she had ever misused a word. And
though the expressions she coined became part of Madigan history, though
each piece was stamped undeniably by poor Bep her awkward mark, she
never ceased insisting that they were counterfeit, issued for the
express purpose of discrediting her well-known familiarity with elegant
English.
Yet she it was who had first miscalled her shadow a "shabby"; who had
asked to be "merinded to merember," like her absent-minded Aunt Anne;
and who had unconsciously parodied Split's passionate rendering of a
line of the old song, "I feel his presence near" into "I feel his
pleasant sneer"!
It was rarely that the Madigans could keep peace among themselves long
enough to make an onslaught in a body. But when they did, the lone
victim of their attack knew better than to struggle against her fate.
Poor Bep, her protests borne down, all her old sins of diction raked up
and, joined to the new ones, marshaled against her, became sulky. She
turned her back upon the enemy and retreated to a corner to find out
what Santa Claus and her own particular patron saint had to offer for
the double celebration.
There was a dictionary from Kate--an added insult. But, to compensate,
there was a whole orange from Aunt Anne, a bag of Chinese nuts from
Wong, and from Split and Sissy (a separate donation from each) an
undivided half-interest in the white kitten known as Spitfire.
When she had summed up the gifts of the gods to herself, Bep's eyes
turned quickly to Fom's pile.
There was an assortment of hair-ribbons, more or less the worse for
wear, from Kate, whose braids were coiled around her head these days.
(Bep didn't envy her twin these, for the excellent reason that a
back-comb was all that was necessary to keep her short blonde hair in
order.) Then there was, from Sissy, a pen-wiper, whose cruelly twisted
shape was a reflection of that needlewoman's agonies in its composition;
upon it were embroidered figures and colors of things never seen on sea
or land. (Fom might have that.) From Split--but Bep knew, of course,
what there was from Split. Every year regularly, since the second of the
Madigans had put away childish things, she had bestowed upon her
faithful retainer her favorite doll Dora,--the large one, with waxen
head and dark-brown tresses,--only to take it back at the first symptom
of revolt, for a caprice, or merely to feel her power. She was an Indian
giver, was Split. (Fom might have Dora, Bep said to herself, as long as
she could keep her.)
But then Fom, too, had a large, fair, yellow orange and a bag of strange
candies from Chinatown. As to these ...
The twins must be pardoned, but circumstances had soured them. They had
been cheated out of either a birthday or a Christmas--they had not
decided which was the crueler wrong, so had not yet adopted and
proclaimed their grievance. Besides this sorrow, each, by an interfering
and unprovoked intrusion, had defrauded the other of the child's
inalienable right to the center of the stage at least once a year. And
when one remembers how crowded was the Madigan stage with jealous
performers, any actor at all desirous of an opportunity must sympathize
with them.
It was not etiquette for the twins to remember each other's birthday
with a gift, one reason being that they were incapable of such a piece
of hypocrisy. Another was that it would have seemed too like the rigid
reciprocity of the Misses Blind-Staggers, whom it had been their custom
to parody since the day they had been invited down to the cottage to see
those ladies' strictly mutual Christmas presents. They played "From
Maude to Etta" and "From Etta to Maude," as they called it; Fom handing
to Bep, with great ceremony, a shoe, a stocking, or any other thing
traveling in pairs, with the legend "From Maude to Etta," and receiving
in return the mate of said shoe or stocking, "From Etta to Maude."
As for Francis Madigan, his daughters appreciated the fact that a girl's
birthday could be looked upon only as a day of wrath and mourning; it
came to be considered delicate, therefore, to mention the matter in his
presence. Christmas, of course, was "nonsense"--a blanket term of
disapproval behind which no one peered for reasons for its application.
On Miss Madigan anniversaries acted as a stimulant to an already
sufficiently fecund pen. They awakened in her that sense of
responsibility for her nieces' future, which nothing but an
exceptionally heartrending letter of appeal for financial assistance for
them could put comfortably to sleep again.
* * * * *
Out in the woodshed a disemboweled chest of drawers had been turned into
an apartment-house for dolls. All the dolls that had dwelt in the
Madigan family since Kate's babyhood (with the exception of Split's
Dora, whom Fom, according to the preordained penchant of mothers, loved
best because for her sake she suffered most) had descended to the twins.
On the top floor Mrs. Guy St. Gerald Clair lived with her husband and an
only daughter. Mrs. Clair was an elegant matron, quite new, a small
blonde who could turn her head. Florence's skilful fingers kept this
lady most beautifully gowned. And Split--whose favorite of the small-fry
dolls she had once been--still remembered her fondly, and passed over to
Fom the most wonderful patches. These she got from Jack Cody, the
washerwoman's son, who bribed his mother by promises of good conduct to
beg samples of their gowns from her aristocratic patrons.
Mr. Guy St. Gerald Clair was an unfortunate gentleman, tall,
low-spirited, loose-jointed, with fixed blue eyes and knobby black hair.
His melancholy, Bep was assured, was due to two things--the superiority
of his wife in the matter of a movable head, and the impossibility of
ever getting a pair of trousers that would come near to him in the seat
and stay away from him at the ankle. Fom's theory--a hypothesis that
enraged Bep--was that Mrs. Guy St. Gerald was the wealthy member of the
family, and that her husband basely envied her her good fortune. She had
a way, had Fom, of carrying on imaginary conversations with Mr. Clair
upholding this idea, which made her twin long to rend her, and the doll
too, limb from limb.
"Ah, Mr. Clair! Yes, thank you. Mrs. Clair not in?... I'm sorry. Gone
off to Newport, has she, to sell her marble palace? What about the one
on Fifth Avenue?... You don't say! Making it bigger? Well, well! And
made a million in stocks, too. How delightful! You wish that you had
some money--yes, I suppose--"
"He does not! He does not!" The interruption came fiercely from Bep.
"You talk to your own doll and leave mine alone."
"Pouf! If you're afraid he'll tell me how poor he is--"
"He ain't poor."
"What does he wear such trousers for, then? Tell me that!"
Bep looked unutterable things at her twin. "Just you make men's clothes
for a while, Fom Madigan, and see how 't is yourself!" she cried.
"Put Mrs. Clair in men's clothes?" demanded Fom, purposely
misunderstanding. "I'd like to see myself! The very richest lady in New
York in men's clothes--why, you could get arrested for that!"
"I'll change--" began Bep, quickly.
"No, thank you. You couldn't suit Mrs. Clair. She's that particular
about her things!"
"Well, just the same, I won't make men's clothes any more." Bep rolled
her head threateningly.
"Going to let Mr. Clair go naked?" inquired Fom, pleasantly. "He'll have
to be sent to the poorhouse, then."
"He sha'n't! He'll go to bed sick first, and then Mrs. Clair'll just
have to stay home in an old wrapper and nurse him."
"No; she'll take Anita and go off to the country.... Are you so sick,
Mr. Clair?" began Fom, while her slower twin danced with apprehension of
the outcome of this one-sided dialogue. "I'm awful sorry. Smallpox? Oh,
how dreadful! And that's why Mrs. Clair and Anita have gone--"
"'T ain't! 'T ain't smallpox! 'T ain't! 'T ain't! 'T ain't!" Bep hopped
about on one foot in her excitement.
"How do you know?" asked Fom, calmly. "Are you the doctor?"
The doctor lived in the flat below. He was a ready-dressed gentleman,
still stylish if a bit seedy, and his large family overflowed down into
the next two shelves. He was summoned.
"I have called you, doctor,"--began Fom.
"I've sent for you, doctor,"--interrupted Bep.
"Well!" exclaimed Fom, stiffly, "I think you might be polite enough to
let Mrs. Clair speak to the doctor about her own husband."
"What's she going to say?" demanded Bep.
"How should I know?" asked Fom, airily; and then, hurrying on, while she
made Mrs. Clair bow low before the ready-made physician, "I am Mrs.
Clair, doctor, the rich Mrs. Guy St. Gerald Clair who has all the
money--"
"It's no such thing! It's no such thing!" shrieked Bep.
"Well, Miss Florence Madigan!" exclaimed Mrs. Clair by proxy, "if your
sister Bessie ain't the rudest!"
"I'll smash her if she says that again!" came in a bellow from Bep.
"You touch my doll!" Daringly Fom placed Mrs. Clair within tempting
distance of Bep's hand.
"Well--just you let her say it again!"
"I don't need to. She's told me, so now I know it."
"You may go down-stairs again, doctor. It's a mistake," said Bep,
addressing the medical man. (The twins always tried to keep up
appearances before their dolls.) "Mr. Clair--the awfully rich Mr. Guy
St. Gerald Clair--is not sick at all. But you can send your bill to him
anyway, he won't care. It must have been some poor relation of Mrs.
Clair's--she didn't have a dress to her name before she married, you
know."
"Oh--oh! Bessie Madigan!"
"Well, she didn't," said Bep, stoutly.
"I'll bet you--I'll bet you a shut-up. There!" Cautious Fom rarely
hazarded so great a stake; but she felt that the occasion demanded
something adequate.
"All right; I'll leave it to Sissy." It was from Sissy that Bep had
inherited Mr. Clair. She would know.
Laying down stiff all-china Anita Clair, whose shoes she was painting
red to match her sash, Bep followed her twin into the house.
But the omnivorous Sissy was reading "The Boys of England"--a thing
Sissy loved to do; for it was a magazine not permitted to enter Mrs.
Pemberton's immaculate house, a recommendation in itself, and, besides,
Split, to whom Jack Cody had loaned it, was doubtless looking all over
for it at this very moment. Lying luxuriously flat upon the floor and
eating chocolate, Sissy had just got to that part where Jack Harkaway
"with one flash of Abu Hadji's ruby-incrusted simitar decapitated the
unfortunate Arab, and Dick Lightheart, seizing the bewitching Haidee,
had mounted his horse"--when the belligerent twins found her.
"Now, let me say it," began Fom.
"No; you won't ask it fair.... Sissy, tell me, wasn't Mr.--"
"Tra--la--la--la!" sang Fom, shrilly, drowning Bep's voice.
"Say!" Sissy looked up. Her cheeks were flaming with excitement, for any
bit of print, however crude, had the power to move her as reality could
not. At eleven she shivered and glowed over pseudo-sentiment, while a
tragedy in the mine--whose tall chimneys she could see from her
window--was as intangibly distant and irrelevant as weekly statistics of
the superintendent's mining reports.
Her juniors harkened respectfully; but neither would permit the other to
ask the question, for fear of its revealing the nature of the answer
hoped for. So they withdrew for a period, returning with the following
query, which Bep allowed Fom to put, so sure was she of the response:
"Did or did not Mrs. Clair ever have a dress before she married Mr.
Clair?"
To this the oracle gave answer:
She did not, for how could she, she being Mr. Clair's second wife; his
first, an accomplished lady, but all-solid china, having fallen from
the top story of the apartment-house and smashed herself into bits, and
the widower having himself accompanied Sissy and Split to the shop to
select her successor, whose first gown was, of course, a heavy mourning
robe.
Bep heaved a deep sigh of content. She ran back to the woodshed so
relieved that, although she had won a valuable shut-up, she did not care
to "trophy" in her victory. Fom followed. But her grief for Mrs. Clair
was bitterer even than her own disappointment.
"I want the Smith twins," she said stiffly, when they got back to the
dolls' sky-scraper. And Bep understood.
The Smith twins were an invention of technical Fom's that had become an
institution with herself and her playmate. Two tiny china dolls dressed
in baby long clothes (the better to hide the fact that they were
legless), the one with pink, the other with a blue sash, were brought up
from the lowest story, where broken-nosed Mrs. Smith lived with her
family of cripples.
They were dolls of bad omen, these two, but following instead of
prophesying a storm. When it became absolutely necessary for one Madigan
twin to be "mad" at the other, and yet that the business of playing be
uninterrupted, the Smith twins invariably made their appearance. They
were supposed to save one's dignity; in reality, they lent piquancy to
games and rendered "making up" delightful.
Occasionally Bep and Fom did disown each other and adopt a chum from the
outside world. One Beulah, known as "Bombey," Forrest was always ready
obligingly to serve either or both of them in the capacity of dearest
friend. But other playmates were tame after being accustomed to a
Madigan; and each twin was so jealously afraid of the other's having a
good time without her that she spent most of the period of estrangement
trying to spy out what the other and her interloping companion were
doing.
The Smith twins were easier.
"Tell Bep," said Florence to the pink-sashed small Smith, "that I think
she's a nasty mean thing, and Mrs. Clair'll never forgive her."
"Tell Fom," returned Bep, with spirit, putting the blue-sashed Smith
baby in her pocket as a sort of emergency battery, so that the wires of
communication might be set up at any time between her twin and herself,
"that I don't care a 'article for what she thinks. And Mrs. Clair's
nothing but a beggar. I wonder that Mr. Clair married her!"
The war was on.
* * * * *
Down on the dump, that fascinating mountain of soft, glittering waste
rock, the godless twins went to dig on Christmas afternoon. The mining
operations were elaborate that they projected there, particularly after
Jack Cody's brother Peter joined them. While Peter was rigging up
windlasses with pieced-out cord, Fom, with a couple of tin cups
purloined from Wong's kitchen, brought up the rock, piling it in
miniature dumps at the mouth of their shaft. Bep's awkward fingers could
be trusted only with the preliminary scooping out of the ground where a
new shaft was to be sunk.
"Tell Fom," she said to the blue-sashed Smith twin in her pocket, "that
I want the scooper; my hands are all sore."
"Tell Bep," returned Fom, quickly, "that she can't have it till Pete an'
I get through running our drift."
The excuse did not seem legitimate to Bep, whose grimy hands ached to
the fingertips from being used as both pick and shovel. She made a dart
for the "scooper"--a heavy china cup which had been smashed in so
fortunate a manner as to be ideally fitted for emptying ore by hand.
But Fom was slim, and quick as a cat. She threw herself bodily upon both
scooper and pick--the latter an old fork with but one tine left. Bep
promptly threw herself on top of her twin, while Peter, a laconic lad,
calmly set himself to rehabilitating the hind wheel of a battered tin
toy express which served as a dump-cart.
"Little folks shouldn't quarrel," suddenly said a slow voice above the
struggling arms and legs of the twins.
Fom looked up, still pressing her body hard against the tools in
dispute, while Bep got to her feet, red-faced and panting. "We're not
quarreling," said Florence, calmly.
Superintendent Warren Pemberton, still in his oilskins from a trip down
the mine, looked down at her and gasped. He did not know the Madigan
brunette twin, and actually thought she was lying. But Fom was never
known to lie; she only pettifogged.
"You're not quarreling!"
"Nope."
"Didn't I see you with my own eyes?" he demanded, piqued.
"People don't see people quarreling," said Fom, didactically. "They hear
them."
"Oh, that's it! Well, didn't I hear--"
"No, you didn't; for we're mad and don't speak to each other."
"But you're not quarreling?"
"Nope," repeated Fom, stoutly, "we're not."
Mr. Pemberton shook his head helplessly. "What are you doing?"
"I'm running a drift"--Fom misunderstood the drift of his
question--"from the Silver King to the Diamond Heart, and the earth
keeps coming down. Then Bep tries to make it harder by grabbing for the
tools and--"
"Why don't you timber?" suggested Pemberton, gravely.
"'Cause I don't have to," answered Fom, quite as seriously.
"Oh, you don't!" Pemberton, a man with no sense of humor, had been
unusually expansive; but he shrank angrily into himself now, as though
from a cold douche. It took some time for one to get accustomed to Fom's
way of instructing authorities upon the subjects which they were
supposed to know most about.
"No, that's silly," remarked Fom, superbly. "If the ground's sticky
enough, and you're not butter-fingered,"--with an insulting glance at
Bep,--"you can manage all right."
"But I'm not butter-fingered and I always timber." Warren Pemberton was
a slow man, but a dogged one; the elusiveness of this pert child
irritated him.
"That's 'cause you don't know any better," came from the expert, who had
returned to her task, the excited flourishes of her uplifted legs
betraying its difficulties.
"You're a little fool!" declared the superintendent. "Do you know who I
am? My name's Pemberton, and I--"
"Why don't you make your wife leave Crosby alone, then?" demanded Fom,
without seeming much impressed.
Warren Pemberton looked down upon her little body with an expression
that made Bep wonder why he refrained from stamping upon it.
"You don't think Mrs. Pemberton knows her business, either?" His ruddy,
full face looked apoplectic.
"Nope. Sissy says if she was Crosby she'd run away to sea. And she's
going to put him up to it, too, if--"
But Bep, frightened by the growing anger in the great man's face,
interposed. "Shall I shut her up for you, Mr. Pemberton?" she asked.
"What--what d' ye say? I wish to God you would, or that somebody could!"
"Fom," said Bep, authoritatively, "shut up!"
Fom jumped to her feet. There was appeal, wrath, rebellion in her
crimson face. She opened her lips as if to protest.
"Shut up, Fom," repeated Bep, distinctly. "I said _shut up_."
There came a deadly silence. Pemberton, in the act of stalking
ill-temperedly away, turned bewildered to regard the miracle.
"Say," asked Peter Cody, driven to speech by curiosity. "Say, Fom, do
you let your sister boss you like that? I thought you was twins."
Fom looked appealingly at Bep. If Bep would but explain the nature of a
shut-up--its power of suddenly depriving one of speech; of making one
temporarily dumb in the very midst of a sentence, at the bidding of the
winner of a wager, whenever, wherever the caprice to collect the debt of
honor occurred to her!
But Bep, after accompanying Mr. Pemberton a few steps, striving to
untell him what Fom had betrayed, turned her attention again to mining
matters. She knew well what Fom's eyes begged, but hid her head in the
Silver King, whence a subterranean giggle came, revealing her enjoyment
of the situation.
Fom's stormy eyes filled and the Silver King and the Diamond Heart
jigged back and forth till the tears splashed down and cleared her
vision.
"Ho--cry-baby!" called Peter Cody. Peter was one of those gallant
gentlemen who are never afraid of a playmate when some one else has
demonstrated that he can be downed.
At the taunt, a revengeful passion seized Fom, standing there--a lingual
Samson shorn of her tongue, two dirty channels plowed down her cheeks by
her tears. Deliberately lifting her foot, she brought it down, stamping
with all her might again and again.
The soft, loosely packed earth slid smoothly down. The Diamond Heart
caved in completely, the almost finished connecting tunnel was a wreck,
and the still rolling, moist gravel swept over Bep's head, filling up
the Silver King clear to the surface.
By the time Peter had realized their utter ruin, and Bep had shaken the
particles of sand and gravel from her hair and ears and throat, Fom was
nowhere in sight.
"Let's kill her," suggested Bep.
"Shall we?" asked Peter, with an air of stern justice.
They debated the question, fully realizing the make-believe of it, yet
taking pleasure in at least the mention of revenge.
Suddenly Bep gave a cry of triumph and picked up something from the
ground.
"What is it?" asked Peter.
"It's Fom's doll. It must have dropped out of her pocket when she was
digging and sassing Mr. Pemberton. We'll play there's been an
accident,--a cave in the mine,--and the doll'll be buried alive down
there. Wouldn't Fom howl?"