distorted view of the world due to never going back home after dinner
downtown, saw his coach come down upon him as if to demand the washing
so long promised. If it had been morning, he would have been properly
afraid of getting in the way of the monster let loose. But in the
evening Bob was accustomed to the occurrence of peculiar things. So he
ran--at that time of day he could run better than walk--out to the
middle of the street, threw up his arms, and called hoarsely upon the
mad thing to stop.
It did--for a moment, when it came in contact with his body; but it was
long enough for its course to be deflected from the steep hill below and
turned northward down the comparatively level cross street.
When Bob picked himself up and followed, he found a thin, white-faced,
red-haired girl running swiftly beside him. Later he accompanied her and
the plucky little Frank (still smiling and chuckling over her fine ride)
up the hill to the home of Mr. Francis Madigan, where he demanded
damages--both personal and mechanical.
"And fa-ther tooked her in his own room," Frank said with shuddering
unction, as she told the tale, "and she's in there yet!"
* * * * *
It was Fom who awakened a sense of the beautiful in Frank. She and Bep
were continually playing London Bridge, in the course of which it became
necessary to demand:
"Which would you rather have (that means, like best): a diamond horse
covered with stars, or a golden cradle with red silk pillows?"
Sentiment and the sad experience of her babyhood always prompted Frank
to choose the cradle, of course. After which, her preference promptly
became of no importance whatever; the whole beautiful business was put
aside, and she was bidden to get behind Fom. She discovered later that
whether she preferred diamonds and stars to gold and red silk, it was
all the same: she invariably had to get behind one twin or the other,
clasp her tightly about the waist, and pull--and pull--till the whole
universe gave way and she plumped down on the ground with a big twin
falling on top of her.
But there was another phase of the beautiful which was far more
satisfactory to Frank, while it lasted. Fom discovered it one day when
Split took Dora away from her, just because the brunette twin preferred
her lunch to the burned potatoes Split had baked in the back yard when
they were playing emigrants. It was then, in the depths of her grief,
that the inspiration came to her.
"Shall Fom make you look awful pretty, Frank?" she asked, in the form
which children suppose wheedles babies most successfully.
Frank didn't know; she was suspicious of the hollowness of the
beautiful and the inutility of choosing. Besides, she was making dolls'
biscuit just then from a piece of dough Wong had given her, cutting out
each individual bun with Aunt Anne's thimble.
But Florence coaxed and threatened and bribed, and when Francis Madigan
got home that night to dinner, he found his big porch covered with
children gathered from blocks around. Each held in his or her hand one
pin or more--the price of admission to the show. (Fom was a most thrifty
and businesslike Madigan.) And the show, which he as well as they saw in
the interval between the opening of his front door and its swift
closing, was Frances's plump, naked body draped in a sheet, posing, with
uplifted arms and an uncertain, apprehensive smile, on a tottering
draped pedestal, which fell with a crash when Fom, who was crouched
behind steadying it, beheld her father's face.
"And he tooked her," with bated breath Frank repeated the monotonous
refrain of her saga, "and he made her thwow evewy--pin--she'd made--out
the fwont window!"
* * * * *
As a Madigan, Frances should have been above fear. She was--except of
the tank in the back room up-stairs. Its gurglings and chucklings were
more than mortal four-years-old could bear at night in the dark,
particularly after Bep had taught her to be superstitious.
Bep's nature was spongy with a capacity for saturation. She took in
every new child fad and folly. She believed in a multiplicity of
remedies, and was ready to try a new one--on somebody else--whenever the
occasion offered. When Frank got the whooping-cough, and used to march
around the dining-room table, stamping in her paroxysms of coughing and
of speechless anger at the Madigans who followed mimicking her, Bep
decided that she would try the latest cure she had heard of. So she
wandered down to the gas-works one day, Frank's hand in hers, to give
her patient the benefit of breathing the heavily charged atmosphere down
there.
"How-do, Mrs. Grayson?" she greeted the gas-man's wife amiably, as she
opened the kitchen door.
Mrs. Grayson, her babies leaving her side to cluster interestedly around
Frank, replied that she and the children were well; that the epidemic of
whooping-cough had not reached them because they lived so far out of
town.
"Yes," assented Bep, politely; "and then, the smell of gas is so good
for whooping-cough. That keeps 'em well. And that's why I brought Frank
down here."
Mrs. Grayson's excitable motherhood took alarm. "I never heard," she
said quickly, "that breathing in coal-tar smells kept off
whooping-cough."
"No, neither did I, though p'r'aps it does. But it cures--I know that."
"You don't mean to say--" Mrs. Grayson flew like a terrified hen for her
chicks, lifting two by an arm each clear from the ground and hustling
the third into the kitchen before her.
"Yep, she's got it," said Bep, proudly. And Frank, feeling called upon
to be interesting, burst into a convulsive corroboration of the glad
tidings.
"You nasty little minx!" exclaimed Mrs. Grayson, as she shut the door in
Bep's face.
"What's 'minx'?" Frank asked her sister, as they toiled up toward town
again.
"Oh, it's a wild animal," answered Bep, readily; "but she don't know how
to say it. She's going to have bad luck, though; anybody can tell that
by the way she walked under that ladder. I shouldn't be a bit surprised
if every last one of her children gets the whooping-cough!"
And Frank felt sorry for the Graysons. For she was sure that Bep knew
whereof she spoke. She knew the laws of the superstitious country in
which she dwelt, did Bep: a country where if you sing before you eat,
you're bound to cry before you sleep; where, if you put your
corset-waist on wrong side out, and are hardy enough to change it, you
deserve what you're likely to get; where no sane girl will tempt
Providence by walking on a crack; where, if you lose something, you have
only to spit in the palm of your hand,--if you're dowered in the matter
of saliva,--strike the tiny pool sharply, and say:
"Spit, spit, spider!
If you show me where my pencil is
I'll give you a keg of cider!"
Then note the direction which the escaping particles of saliva take, and
there you are! or, rather, there it is--the lost article.
Or there it ought to be, unless you have been guilty of some inexcusable
act, such as omitting to wish at the very instant a star is falling, or
the first time you taste each new fruit in season, or if you have
forgotten to say:
"Star light, star bright,
First star I've seen to-night,
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish to-night!"
It was Bep who taught Frank to count white horses; to pick up a pin when
its head was turned toward her, to let it lie when it pointed the other
way; to bite the tea-grounds left in a cup, and declare gravely, if
soft, that a female visitor might be expected, and, if hard, a male;
never to cut friendship by giving or accepting a knife, a pin--indeed,
anything sharp; and never, by any chance, to tempt the devil of bad luck
by going out of a house by a different door than that by which she had
entered.
The versatile Frank was most teachable. When Bep was "collecting bows,"
Frances would obligingly bow and bob for her minutes at a time, like a
Chinese mandarin, or like some small priestess observing a solemn rite.
What the Bad Luck was, the terrible alternative of all these
precautions, poor Frank could form no idea. But she had come to
associate it with the babbling tank, which seemed at night, when all was
still, to be gurgling, "Bad Luck--Bad Luck!" threateningly at her.
Then she would go over her conduct during the day, carefully
scrutinizing her every action that might have given this chuckling Bad
Luck a hold over her.
Not a crack had been stepped on that she could remember; not a pin
picked up that should have been let lie; not--
The scream that burst from Frances one Sunday night during this
self-catechism brought Madigan and all the family to her bedside.
"What is it--what is it, child?" demanded her father.
And Frank repeated like a Maeterlinck or a bobolink, holding up a
shaking small hand whose nails Aunt Anne had trimmed that very morning:
"Monday for health,
Tuesday for wealth,
Wednesday the best day of all.
Thursday for cwosses,
Fwiday for losses--
Saturday no day at all.
And better the child had never been bawn
That pared its nails on a Sunday mawn!"
"And fa-ther tooked Bep," remarked Frank the next day, the light of
desire fulfilled in her eye, "and he said 'You ox!' and smacked her wif
two fingers!"
* * * * *
Miss Madigan, who was a congenital sentimentalist, her tendency
confirmed by a long course of novel-reading, would have loved a female
Fauntleroy, and hoped to find it in each of her brother's children in
turn--only to be bitterly disappointed when they came to an expressing
age.
It occurred to her once to satisfy her maternal cravings--so perversely
left ungratified amid much material that lacked mothering--with an
imported angel-child. She chose Bombey Forrest's three-year-old brother
for the purpose; a small manikin manufactured according to recipe by his
mother, whom he had been taught to call "Dear-rust" in imitation of his
pernicious progenitor; whose curls were as long, whose trousers were as
short, whose collars were as big, whose sashes were as flaunting as
feminine folly could make them.
The Madigans hailed his advent with delight the night he was loaned to
their aunt, in their mistaken glee fancying his visit was to themselves.
Miss Madigan soon undeceived them. At table he sat next to that devoted
lady, who heaped the choicest bits upon his plate of a menu which had
been ordered solely with regard to infantile tastes. Afterward this
maiden lady (whose genius for mothering cruel fate had condemned to
waste its sweetness upon half a dozen mere Madigans) built card houses
for her borrowed baby, read him the nursery rhymes that Sissy used to
tell to Frances, confiscated Fom's Dora for his pleasure, and Split's
book of interiors made of illustrated advertisements of furniture, which
she had cut out and arranged tastefully upon a tissue-paper background.
She dangled her old-fashioned enameled watch before his jaded eyes, and
even permitted him to hold Dusie, the canary, who pecked furiously at
the presuming hand that detained her.
At this the borrowed baby set up a howl of alarm, whereupon he was given
Sissy's jackstones--not altogether to that young lady's sorrow, for at
that moment Split was collecting a cruel pinch or bestowing a stinging
slap for every point in the game she had just won.
To the bathing of the child Miss Madigan gave her personal attention,
while Kate waited for the tub, into which it was her nightly task to
coax Frances. Then, when her charge was ready for bed, the devoted aunt
of other children sat rocking the borrowed baby softly till he fell
asleep. The whole household hushed that night when Baby Fauntleroy
Forrest's eyelids fell. An indignant lot of young Madigans were hustled
off to bed that his slumbers might not be disturbed; and yet the moment
Miss Madigan laid him, with infinite care and a sentimental smile, in
her own bed, his eyes flew open, like the disordered orbs of a wax doll
that has forgotten it was made to open its eyes when in a vertical
position and keep them shut when placed horizontally. He saw a strange
face bending over him, and he howled with terror.
Miss Madigan tried to comfort him, babbling fondest baby-talk in vain.
"I yant to go home!" wailed Aunt Anne's Fauntleroy.
Why, no; he didn't want to go home, the lady to whom he had been loaned
assured him. Mama was asleep and daddy was asleep and Bombey was asleep
and the pussy was--
"I yant to go home!" bellowed the borrowed baby.
But how could he go home? the lady, a bit impatiently, demanded. Wasn't
he all undressed? Did he want to go through the streets all
undressed--fie, fie, for shame!
"I yant to go home!" screamed Fauntleroy Forrest.
"Sissy--Irene--some one come here and amuse this child!" called Aunt
Anne, at her wits' end. Fauntleroy was black in the face from holding
his breath, and his borrower was nervously exhausted by the tension of a
day spent in attendance upon the lovely child.
A troop of nightgowned Madigans came joyously in. For the edification of
Fauntleroy, sitting up wide-eyed now in Aunt Anne's big bed, the tears
still on his cheeks, the Madigans made monkeys of themselves till he
dropped off asleep at last, when they were dismissed by a frazzled
maiden lady, who was left looking at the small thing lying in her bed as
at some strange animal whose waking she dreaded.
In the middle of the night and again toward morning the Madigans heard
Fauntleroy's frightened scream, and chuckled like the depraved young
things they were. But when Francis Madigan got up and, candle in hand,
his queer nightcap tumbling over his left eye, and his gaunt shadow
covering the wall and wavering over the ceiling, came to demand of Miss
Madigan what in thousand devils was the matter, the borrowed baby was
thrown into convulsions; while Don, the big Newfoundland, awakened by
the din, burst into hoarse barks that the mountains echoed and reëchoed.
After this it seemed best to Aunt Anne to sit up in bed for the rest of
the night, making shadow-pictures on the wall for Fauntleroy.
Miss Madigan's high color had faded the next morning. Accustomed to
unbroken sleep, she had not rested half an hour the whole night. It
seemed that Fauntleroy Forrest was in the habit of lying across his bed
instead of along it, and he had so terrorized the poor lady that she had
not dared to move him, when he did fall asleep toward morning and she
felt his toes digging into her ribs, lest he wake.
"Hurry with your breakfast, Sissy," she said faintly, sipping her tea,
"so that you can take him home before school."
"Don't yant to go home!" whimpered the baby, whom the morning light and
the presence of many small Madigans had reassured.
"He could stay and play with Frank, couldn't he, Aunt Anne?" suggested
Sissy, sweetly.
Miss Madigan's look spoke volumes.
"Yes, yes," cried Fauntleroy. "Don't yant to go home!"
His papa would be lonesome, Miss Madigan told him, archly; and his mama
would be lonesome, and Bombey--
"Don't yant to go home!" wept the baby.
"There! There!... Take him, Frank, into my room and amuse him--anything,
only don't let him cry!" exclaimed Miss Madigan. "I'm going into Kate's
room to lie down. I'm exhausted and--"
"Did Fauntleroy disturb you, Aunt Anne?" asked Kate, sympathetically.
But Miss Madigan hurried away. She was so unnerved she feared that she
might weep. But, after nearly half an hour's trying, she found she was
too tired to sleep, after all, and rising wearily, she went back to her
room for the book she had been reading.
The sight that met her eyes, as she opened the door, completed her
undoing. There was Fauntleroy, with an uncomprehending grin on his
cherubic face, pinching each separate leaf of her cherished
sensitive-plant. Evidently the borrowed baby did not exactly understand
the desperately funny quality of the act, but he knew it must be the
funniest thing in the world, for the Madigans were writhing grotesquely
in the unbounded merriment it caused.
With a cry, Miss Madigan flew forward and sharply slapped the
destructive baby hands.
"I yant to go home!" screamed Fauntleroy.
"Yes; and I want you to go, too," Miss Madigan declared, incensed. "Get
his things, Sissy, this minute."
"But I want him to play wif," whimpered Frank. She was not so slow but
that she could learn the lesson Fauntleroy's success taught.
Miss Madigan looked at her a moment. "Oh, you do!" she ejaculated
sarcastically. "You haven't sisters enough--you want more noise and
confusion in this house!"
The wise Madigans looked from her to one another and merely thought
things. There was sadly little of the "angel child" about them. Their
intuition was keen enough to penetrate their aunt's secret wishes and
tastes, and they were occasionally tempted, for the spoils to be gotten
out of it, to play up to that lady's ideals. But Aunt Anne was
considered almost too easy by the Madigans, whom honor restricted to
those foemen worthy of their steel. Frances was the only one who could,
without losing caste, cater to her aunt's well-known and deeply detested
sentimentality.
She did for a time, and it was from Miss Madigan that she learned her
famous accomplishment. It was sung, or rather droned, and it went like
this:
"B--A--Ba,
B--E--Be,
B--I--Bi--
Ba--Be--Bi;
B--O--Bo,
Ba--Be--Bi--Bo,
B--U--Bu,
Ba--Be--Bi--Bo--Bu!"
Intoxicated by success, Frank sang this subtle ditty one day for Francis
Madigan. He listened to it with that puzzled expression which his
children's vagaries brought to his lined, stern face.
"Who taught you that nonsense, Frances?" he demanded sternly when she
had finished.
Frank began to whimper. This was not the effect she had intended to
produce.
"Who told you to say that gibberish?" her father repeated angrily.
Frank stammered the answer.
"And he tooked her--" she began her account of the incident afterward.
"Oh, you awful little liar!" interrupted a chorus of Madigans.
And Frank laughed with them. How she would have completed the sentence,
if she had been permitted, she herself did not know.
A READY LETTER-WRITER
Split threw herself with a bump against Miss Madigan's door. It remained
unansweringly closed.
"Where's Aunt Anne?" she asked Sissy, whom she had nearly walked over as
she sat playing jackstones in the hall.
Sissy looked up. Assuming a rigidly erect position and scholastically
correct finger-movement, she mimicked her aunt at her desk so faithfully
that Split could almost see the close-lined pages of Miss Madigan's
ornate handwriting on the carpet where her disrespectful niece pretended
to trace it.
"Scribbling, huh?" Split asked.
Sissy nodded.
Split shrugged her shoulders impatiently. She had intended to ask a
favor of Aunt Anne, but she knew how useless it would be now. So she
pushed past Sissy, entered the room softly, and returned with a
long-trained grenadine skirt.
Sissy's round eyes opened enviously. "Did she say you could have it?"
she asked.
A muffled sound which could be variously interpreted came from Split,
who was throwing the skirt over her head.
"Did she?" persisted Sissy, putting her jackstones in her pocket and
rising emulatively.
But Irene was doubling fold after fold of the skirt in front to shorten
it; behind her the train billowed with an elegance that sent ecstatic
thrills through her and a passion of envy through her sister.
"Is she writing yet?" Sissy asked at length.
Irene nodded. She was cinching her sash tight about the waist, so that
her trained skirt might not come off in the ardor of "playing lady."
When Sissy disappeared, and reappeared with her aunt's claret-colored
poplin, Split was catching up her train with a grace that was simply
ravishing as she rustled away.
"What'll you say to her--afterward?" called Sissy after her, prudently
facing the future, even in the height of delight induced by feeling
ruffles about her feet.
[Illustration:
"A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In
Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry"]
"Pouf!" A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In Split it bred
and fostered a spirit of coquetry; she believed herself to be very
French in long skirts. "I'll just say she said 'Yes' when I asked her.
She never knows what she says when she's writing."
Sissy nodded understandingly, and rustled in a most ladylike manner
after her senior. The twins saw the two beautiful creatures swishing
down the front steps, bound for the street to show their glory and feel
the peacock's delight in dragging his tail in the dust.
"Did she say you could have 'em?" they shrieked.
And Sissy responded with that quick imitative gesture that signified
scribbling.
With a light on their faces such as the Goths might have worn when
pillaging Rome, the twins made for the treasure-house. A few moments
later they rustled gorgeously down the steps, followed by Frances,
wearing her aunt's embroidered red flannel petticoat. Unfortunately,
Frank's heels caught in this, as she too strutted worldward, and down
she fell, bumping from step to step, gaining momentum as she bumped, and
threatening to roll clear down to Taylor Street, and so on down, down
into the cañon, if she had not bumped safely at last into the twins.
They, hearing her coming, had turned their backs and joined hands, and
catching hold of the shaky banister on each side, presented a natural
bulwark beyond which Frances and her bumps and shrieks might not pass.
And through it all Miss Madigan wrote.
* * * * *
Miss Madigan was writing letters. Indeed, Miss Madigan was always
writing letters. In any emergency she might be trusted to concoct a long
and literary epistle, which she rephrased, edited, and copied till she
felt all an author's satisfaction.
For the Madigans' Aunt Anne was afflicted with _cacoëthes scribendi_,
and was never so happy as when there was a letter to be written--except
when she was actually writing it. But the heartlessness of the merely
literary was very far indeed from Miss Madigan's ideal. She had the
happiness to believe that, besides being very beautiful, her letters
were most useful--in fact, indispensable. When everything else failed
she wrote a letter. When that failed she wrote another.
A Malthusian consequence of her epistolary fertility, it might be
feared, would be the necessary exhaustion of correspondents. But Miss
Madigan's was a soul above the inevitable, as well as a pen divorced
from the practical. On those occasions when the future of her nieces
pressed itself questioningly upon that lady's mind she met the threat by
declaring firmly to herself that she would "do her duty to those
motherless children." It happened that her duty was her pleasure. It was
her dissipation to suffer--on paper. In letters she enjoyed being
miserable. No relative, therefore, however distant, no acquaintance,
however slight, was exempt from this epistolary plague. To take the
darkest view, most genteelly expressed; to make the most forthright and
pitiful appeal in a ladylike and polished phrase; to picture the
inevitable and speedy alternative if her plea were disregarded; and then
to sign herself, "With a thousand apologies, and the assurance that only
the extreme need of some one's doing something for poor Francis's
children would bring me to trouble you again,"--this was Miss Madigan's
vice. And she was as intemperate in yielding to it as only the viciously
good can be.
A rebuff, absolute silence, even the return of her letter unopened,
produced in her not the slightest diminution of faith in the power of
her pen. Invariably when she mailed a letter she was so struck by her
own summing up of the situation that she felt there could not be the
smallest doubt of a favorable response. He who read it must be
convinced. If he was not, why, there was but one thing to do--write to
him again. If not to him, to another. And the Madigans were a prolific
family, its members widely scattered and differentiated--an ideal
clientele for a ready letter-writer.
So Miss Madigan wrote. Her wardrobe was pillaged, her privacy violated,
yet she knew it not, or knew it only as one is aware of the buzzing of
gnats when he rides his hobby through a cloud of them.
But there came an interruption which she was compelled to heed.
"Anne, I say!"