irritation in her brother's irascible voice. Was it possible that he had
knocked before, or was there--
The door opened in answer to her call, and Madigan stalked in. At sight
of the open letter he held, Miss Madigan hastily covered the one she was
writing.
[Illustration:
"Stamping ... in a frenzy"]
"Perhaps," said her brother, suppressed rage vibrating in his voice, "it
may be a change for you to _read_ letters. Read that!" He threw the page
on the desk before her, banging his knuckles upon it in an excess of
fury.
She took up the letter, a pretty rosy pink dyeing her cheeks (she was
one of those old maids whose exquisitely delicate complexions retain a
babylike freshness) as her eyes met the expression:
Anne was always a sot where her pen was concerned. The
habit's growing on her; she can evidently no more
resist it than Miles could the bottle.
"It must be from Nora Madigan," she exclaimed, recognizing the touch.
"Yes, it is from Nora, and it incloses one of your own. There it is."
He threw down before the ready letter-writer a composition which had
cost her much labor, the thought of many days, upon which she had based
unnumbered hopes and built air-castles galore, none of which, to do the
poor lady justice, was intended directly for her own habitation.
She took the letter and spread it out carefully before her; these
epistolary children of hers were tenderly dear to Miss Madigan. Her eye
caught a phrase here and there that appeared to be singularly
felicitous. This one, for instance:
Poor Francis, of course, knows nothing about this
letter. I am writing to you, my dear cousin, relying as
much upon your discretion as upon your generosity.
Or this one:
And Cecilia--she is really talented, though a commonplace
creature like myself can hardly give you an idea in just
what direction.
Or this one:
As to Irene, apart from her voice, which is really
exceptional, she is Francis over again--Francis as he
was, a high-spirited, reckless, devil-may-care fellow,
winning and tyrannical, as we all remember him in the
old days when the world was young.
Or even this:
I am afraid Kate will have to teach school, young as
she is. I can't tell you how I dread the long years of
drudgery I see before this slender, spirited child--she
is little more than that. Think, Miles, of these
motherless children growing up in this wretched hole
without the smallest advantage, and, if you can, help
them; or get some one else to. Couldn't you take Kate
into your own family? I'm sure she'd marry well, and
Nora wouldn't be troubled with her long. She's really
very pretty. Or couldn't you send me a little something
to spend on clothes for her? Or couldn't Nora be
persuaded to send her--
"Well," thundered Madigan, standing over her, "it must be pretty
familiar to you. Suppose you read what Nora says."
Miss Madigan put her own letter away with a sigh. It was really
unaccountable that Miles could have resisted it.
"Miles passed away six weeks ago,"
she read aloud in an awed voice.
"He had been ailing all spring. This letter, which came
a fortnight since, I opened, of course, and return it
to you that you may be made aware (if you are not
already) of the demands Anne makes upon comparative
strangers.
"For myself, I regret very much that your affairs are in
such a bad state. Anne says that there are six of your
children, all girls; but that can't be true--she always
loved to exaggerate miseries; it must be that her
writing is so illegible that--"
Miss Madigan's voice rebelled. She could read aloud adverse opinions
upon her common sense, her judgment, or her pride, but to impugn her
penmanship was to commit the unforgivable.
"I think Nora is distinctly insulting," she declared.
"No!" Madigan laughed wrathfully. "Do you, now? Why, what has she said?
Only that you're a beggar, and I'm a coward as well as a beggar, because
I don't dare to beg in my own name."
"Does she say that?" exclaimed the literal Miss Madigan, shocked.
"Where?" Her eyes sought the letter again.
"'Where'! Thousand devils--'where'!" Madigan tore it from her and threw
it to the floor, stamping upon it in a frenzy.
Sighing, Miss Madigan leaned her head on her hand. It was hard enough to
find one's most hopeful appeal wasted, without Francis's flying into
such a rage.
A silence followed.
"Look here, Anne,"--Madigan's voice was manifestly struggling to be
calm,--"you must quit this infernal letter-writing. How could you write
to Miles Madigan for charity, knowing that he cheated me out of my share
of the Tomboy? Half the mine was mine. You know that, and yet you hurt
my--"
"I fail to see," responded Miss Madigan, with dignity, "why I should
not write to my own relatives; why I should not try, for my nieces'
sake, to knit close again the raveled ties which your eccentricities
have--"
"In order to get a box of old duds sent clear from Ireland!"
"Has Nora sent a box?" asked Miss Madigan, eager as a child. "You see,
my letter did touch her, in spite of herself. And they won't be old
duds. They'll be handsome garments, Francis, just the thing for the
girls' winter wardrobe. Now that Nora's in mourning--"
With a crash that sent Miss Madigan's sensitive-plant rolling from its
stand to the floor, Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled.
Miss Madigan flew to the rescue, and she had begun to scoop up the
scattered earth when her eye lighted upon a line at the end of Nora's
letter:
As you know, Miles had only a life-interest in the
estate. At his death everything went to Miles Morgan.
Perhaps Anne would do well to apply to him. The little
matter of her never having seen him would not, of
course, stand in her way.
"Of course not. Why should it?" Miss Madigan asked herself.
She knelt down upon the floor in the midst of the debris and took from
her pocket the letter that Miles Madigan had never read. With the
slightest change, the recopying of the first page or so, why could not--
Miss Madigan sat down at her desk. In a moment the steady, slow, studied
pace of her pen was all that was heard in the disordered room, where the
sensitive-plant lay half uprooted on the floor.
* * * * *
The Madigans were up and out. All A Street was alive with tales of them.
In a cloud of dust due to their sweeping trains, they had swooped down
like the gay Hieland folk they were, and captured the admiration and
imitation of the slower, prosaic Lowlander.
They had not intended to go so far, accoutred as they were; but the
attention they attracted first challenged, then seduced the vain things
farther and farther, till they threw caution to the winds (and a
boisterous Washoe zephyr was abroad) and sallied shamelessly forth. In
their immediate train they carried Jack Cody, clothed and in his right
sex, and Bombey Forrest, beating her drum. Crosby Pemberton slunk
unrecognized in the rear.
[Illustration:
"Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled"]
In the van was Sissy victrix. She had cut her adorer dead, dead, dead,
and she now felt that resultant reckless uplift of spirits which is the
feminine corollary to demonstration of power (preferably unjust and
tyrannical) over the other sex.
"Let's try to see the walking-match," she suggested to Split.
"How can we, with all that tagging after us?"
With a sweeping gesture to the rear, Split indicated the trained twins
and Frances holding up her torn petticoat. Frank was bruised but
beaming; in fact, she had never felt so much a Madigan, for she had
never before been out on a raid.
"Let 'em tag," cried Sissy, gaily; her blood was up, and she knew no
obstacles.
Down a clay-bank, into a vacant lot strewn with tin cans, slid the
Madigans. Their trains hampered them, and, once started, only speed
could save them. But they were not Comstockers and Madigans for nothing.
Jack Cody, who had arrived first on the field, caught each whirling,
dwarf-like figure as it came flying down, holding it a moment to steady
it before he put it aside in order to receive the next female
projectile.
Sissy was the last, and Cody, by way of flourish to mark the conclusion
of his labors, lifted Split's little sister, train and all, as he caught
her, with a whoop of satisfaction.
His whoop was cut short abruptly, and he set her down, his ears
tingling. For Sissy, outraged in her sense of dignity as well as in the
offish prudery that characterized her, declined to accept patronage as
anybody's little sister, and boxed his ears as well as she could in the
short time given to her.
Cody looked at her. It was really the first time he had regarded her as
an unrelated individual. "Ye know what a boy does when a girl strikes
him," he threatened, a laughing glitter in his bold black eye that made
Sissy's heart jump.
But she held herself very primly, and the masking puritan in her voice
quelled him. "If he's a coward--yes," she responded haughtily, hurrying
on.
The boy looked after her as he joined Split. "She's funny--your sister,"
he said lamely.
"Who--Sissy? Oh, she's always cranky," said Irene, with Madigan candor
when a relative was criticized.
They hurried on. The barn-like opera-house is built uphill, like all
buildings on Virginia City's cross-streets, and it seems to burrow into
as well as climb the hill. In the rear, on the side where its boards
were unpainted and unplaned, certain knots had been converted into
knot-holes by the initiated.
Sissy was already on her knees, her eye glued to one of these apertures.
All she could see was a short curve of empty seats, a man's shoulder and
another's hat, a long space, and then the passing of a neat, long pair
of women's gaiters unhidden by skirts, and soon after the nervous
following of a smaller pair of women's ties.
"Why," she said, with a deep blush, fixing one eye upon the company,
while the other blinked from the strain put upon it, "they're women!
It's a women's walking-match."
"Sure," said Cody, without withdrawing his attention for a moment from
the view inside. "The big, long feet belong to the one they call La
Tourtillotte. She's French. The German one's Von Hagen."
"I think it's a shame," gasped Sissy. "Let's go home, Split."
Split, at her own particular knot-hole, affected not to hear. But Crosby
Pemberton, perched in the elbow of some long scantlings bracing the
building, took heart at Sissy's words.
"It isn't respectable, Sissy," he called to her. "No ladies go. Your
aunt wouldn't like it."
This was fatal. At his voice Sissy hardened, and with a gulp of disgust
she resolutely turned her attention to her knot-hole. In fact, as Crosby
reiterated his advice, she felt called upon more spectacularly to ignore
it, and seeing a more commanding and spacious knot-hole farther up, she
mounted upon a big dry-goods box, and from there seated herself in a
lone poplar, the apple of the proprietor's eye.
This was better, and in a sense it was also worse; for Sissy could
plainly see La Tourtillotte, a gaunt, businesslike creature in short
rainy-day skirt and sweater, her long, thin arms going like
pump-handles, her dark, tense face set upon a goal which seemed ever to
flee before her as her weary feet carried her slowly and still more
slowly around the circular track.
Despite her shocked sense of propriety,--and the lawless young Madigans
had very strict ideas as to the conventions for adults,--the ardor of
the struggle, the uncertainty of the issue, seized upon Sissy. She heard
a swift call from Irene, some distance below, and was vaguely aware that
the company, skirted and otherwise, was beating a retreat. But the
smaller of the two contestants, on the other side of the knot-hole, had
just come within the field of Sissy's rude lens. It was pitiable to see
the haggard look on the German woman's plump face, the childish
breakdown imminent behind the woman's staring eyes that met the bored
glance of the male spectators doggedly, though her stout little body was
still being carried resolutely, sluggishly, painfully along.
Sissy's hands flew to her breast. Something hurt her there, cried out to
her, threatened her. She was furious with rage and choked with
sympathetic sobs. She wanted to hurt somebody, and Jack Cody's insistent
whistle, which kept sounding the retreat, so irritated and confused her
that she fancied it was he that she would have liked to beat, as a
representative of his cruel sex. But when she looked down, at last awake
to the world on this side of the knot-hole, she saw Crosby Pemberton on
the box at her feet, and knew who it was that she longed to punish for
his own sins and every other man's.
"Quick--quick, Sissy! He's coming!" he cried, tugging at her skirt.
"Who? Go 'way!" Sissy stamped viciously, as she stood clinging to a
limb; yet in that very instant she had seen that all the Madigans and
their train had fled, save this poor servitor at her feet.
"Jan Lally--oh, hurry!"
Around the corner of the opera-house came a short-legged, bald little
German, so stout and so loosely put together that, as he ran, his
jelly-like flesh shook as though it was about to break the loose bag of
skin that held it. It was Lally's opera-house, and Lally was come to
catch trespassers in the act of seeing without paying.
Sissy's heart jumped to her throat. In the course of their maraudings,
the Madigans were not unaccustomed to a stern-chase and a lively one,
yet now it seemed to her that strategy was the watchword. Perched high
up in the tree, hidden by its foliage, who would notice her--if only
Crosby would go away!
But Crosby would not budge. He begged, he implored, he became confused
in trying to explain to her her danger, and at last burst into bitter
tears as he felt Lally's fat, moist hand upon his collar, and saw a
hereafter peopled with wrathful motherly faces in various stages of
disgust and despair.
"You come vid me. I gif you to Riddle. He lock you oop, you bat boy!"
A suppressed giggle of pleasure, at the thought of neat little Crosby
in the hands of the constable, shook Sissy, perched snugly like a
malicious little bird in the tree. It served him right, she said to
herself gleefully, ascribing the basest motives to Crosby, as one loves
to do when one's friends are not in good standing with one's self. He
had had no business to hang around and point the way to her
hiding-place!
"Oh, I say, Jan, let me off!" begged Crosby, white with terror of the
jail--and his lady mother. "I'll never peek again, sure I won't!"
"Nu! You come vid me. And _you_, too!"
Sissy looked down. Was it possible there was another laggard whom she
had not seen?
"I say--you, too!" bellowed Lally. "Vill you come now?"
In the very certainty of security a sudden panic fell upon Sissy. If she
only dared to move, to reassure herself! Of course it couldn't mean
herself--oh!
She felt a sudden tug that almost dislodged her. "You t'ink I don't
see--huh?" shouted the perspiring Teuton below. "What for you leave dis
trail hang down den--hey?" And he tugged again.
With a sickly remnant of dignity Sissy stepped down and out. She had
forgotten her train--the train that had been at once her pride and her
undoing.
"We--I was playing lady," she explained, trembling.
"Oop a tree--huh? Peeking t'rough knot-holes--yes? A fine lady! I fix
you."
A glow of defiance came to Sissy's cheeks. "I don't care," she cried,
stamping her foot as she stood enthroned on the dry-goods box, her train
about her. "It's a nasty, cruel show, anyway, and you couldn't hire me
to come and see it. You ought to be ashamed, Mr. Lally! How'd you like
it if your wife was staggering along in there without sleeping or eating
for six days?"
Mr. Jan Lally's purple face looked as though it had been slapped. What
had Mrs. Lally, with all her babies and busy housekeeping, to do with
business? He was so astonished and perplexed by the sudden onslaught
that the wriggling Crosby managed to slip out of his grasp, and got to a
safe distance before Lally realized it.
"Nu!" he grunted. "I cou'n't hire you--no? Vell, you come mitout hire. I
show _you_."
Sissy felt herself lifted down without ceremony and dragged off. Her
round face was white, her heart was beating like the stamps at the
Chollar pan-mill. Yet her train trailed after her still in mock dignity.
So did Crosby, at a respectful distance, fearing to follow, yet, though
helpless, incapable of desertion. But at the entrance to the opera-house
the door was shut in his face.
Sissy and her captor entered. The stage had been built out over the pit,
and in the very first row of the dress-circle, the rim of which was the
boundary of the contestants' suffering feet, Jan Lally sat down, with
Sissy at his side.
Ah, to sit in the front row of the dress-circle! To feel the opulence of
one's enviable position, as well as the artistic delight of being
properly placed where one could miss nothing, while the brass band
outside the opera-house played its third and last quick, jubilant
invitation to pleasure--so tantalizing to the outsider, so gratifying to
the fortunate one within!
Many and many a time had Sissy Madigan waited, during first and second
bands, for some miracle to set her where she now sat! Many a time had
the third selection been played, the players with their instruments
filed into Paradise, and the poor Madigan peri remained shut outside.
But now Cecilia hung her head, shamed by being caught; shamed by
punishment; shamed trebly by the fact that, apart from those poor
sexless, half-maddened machines tottering feverishly around and forever
around, she, Sissy Madigan, the proud, the pure, the proper, was the one
thing womanly in the house!
It was not a full house by any means, and only the men immediately next
to her seemed aware of her presence. Yet, with a consciousness that
seared her soul and humbled the pride of the childish prude as with a
stain upon her purity, Sissy felt the compounded, composite gaze of man
upon woman out of place. It withered, it scorched, it stung her.
But finally Von Hagen, the little German woman, going the round of her
maddening treadmill, reached the spot where Sissy sat. The sight of a
child there, of a bare, bowed, neat little head in the midst of that
inclosure of men's cold eyes, seemed to be the last touch needed to
overthrow her tottering reason. She stopped, swaying from the
unaccustomed cessation of motion, and held out her arms, smiling
vacantly and babbling baby-talk in German as though to a dearly loved
little _Mädchen_ of her own.
Swift horror piled on Sissy. She had never looked into eyes from which
sense had fled, and the sight stamped itself upon her brain with
terrible vividness as food for future nightmares. So frightened was she
that she was not aware of Jan Lally's relaxed hold upon her arm, which
ached from the tight grip he had had upon it. But when the overtaxed
body of the German woman fell in a heap almost at her feet, fright
became action in Sissy. She flew past old Jan (his one concern now being
for his walking-match), past the knees of the staring men, up the
interminable center aisle, her poor train switching behind her as she
stumbled, yet ran on, so absorbed by her suffering that she was unaware
of the attention her queer little figure attracted, till she was out at
last in the free air.
* * * * *
"Well, punish me!" she said, when she found Aunt Anne waiting for her at
the head of the long steps fifteen minutes later.
It was a good deal for a Madigan--the nearest they ever got to _mea
culpa_: they were not Christians.
* * * * *
Sissy's arrival was hailed by a populous nightgowned world, sent, like
herself, supperless for its sins to the purgatory of early bedtime.
Split came stealing in from the other room, bringing Frank along that
she might not cry and betray her elder sister's movements--a successful
sort of blackmail the youngest Madigan often practised. And later, Kate,
looking most conventional and full-dressed in this nightgowned society,
brought succor for the starving. They munched chocolate and camped
comfortably, three on each bed, while Sissy told her adventures. When
she came to the description of Von Hagen's fall, though still shuddering
at the memory, she acted the incident so dramatically that Frances set
up a howl, which was, however, most fortunately drowned by the ringing
of the front-door bell.
Split started to answer it, but her nightgowned state gave her pause.
"Perhaps father'll go," she suggested.
Kate shook her head. "He didn't come to dinner; he's been shut up in his
room all day."
"What's the matter?" asked Sissy. An old look, that washed all the
self-satisfaction from her round face, came over it now.
Kate shrugged her shoulders. "Something he and Aunt Anne talked about
to-day," she answered, as she went out into the hall with the air of a
martyr.
Sissy looked owlishly after her. Though Francis Madigan rarely ate
anything that was prepared for the family dinner, she could remember
the rare times when he had absented himself from it, and feel again the
usually ignored undercurrent of the realities upon which their young
lives flowed full and free.
But things happened too quickly at the Madigans', and to be preoccupied
to the exclusion of one's sisters was one of the forms of affectation
not to be tolerated. Split threw a pillow at her head, and the fight was
in progress when Kate called for volunteers to bring in a big box from
Ireland, left by a drayman who was fiercely resentful of the
extraordinary approach to the Madigan house.
Like a lot of white-robed Lilliputians, they tugged and hauled till they
got it into the parlor. But when they had lighted the tall,
old-fashioned lamp that they called "the lighthouse" they were disgusted
to find that the box was addressed to "Miss Madigan, Virginia City,
Nevada, California, U. S. A."
"Some people don't know anything about geography," sniffed Sissy.
"Well,--" Kate had been thinking,--"I'm Miss Madigan."
"Whoop--hooray!" The shout came from the twins. They were off into the
kitchen for Wong's hatchet, and when they pressed it obligingly into
Kate's hand, that young lady saw no way but to make use of it.
"Girls--it's clothes!" she exclaimed, her starved femininity reveling in
the quantity of material before her.
"Boys' clothes," said Split, holding up a full-kneed pair of
knickerbockers and a belted jacket. "Well!" With a philosophical grin,
she began to put them on.
"And ladies' clothes!" cried Sissy, dragging forth a long black cape.
"'Here would I rest,'" she chanted, draping it about her and
lugubriously mimicking Professor Trask as the Recluse in "The Cantata of
the Flowers."
"Let's do it! Let's sing 'The Flowers,'" cried Irene, shaking herself
into some Irish boy's jacket.
"Not much!" Sissy planted herself against the door, as though physical
compulsion had been threatened.
"Oh, yes, Sissy," begged Fom. "Bep and I can sing the Heliotrope and
Mignonette. Frank can be a Poppy, and we can double up and--"
"I'll be the Rose," put in Kate, quickly. She had a much-feathered hat
on her head and a crocheted lace shawl about her shoulders.
[Illustration:
"'Here would I rest,' she chanted"]
"_I_'ll be the Rose." Split, corrupted by her body's boyish environment,
stretched her legs apart defiantly. "You can't sing it; you know you
can't, Kate. You never could get up to G. If I'm not the Rose--"
"Oh, well," said Kate, drawing on a pair of soiled, long light gloves
she had pulled out of the box, "I'll be the Lily, then. Come on, Sis."
"I won't," said Sissy, almost weeping. She knew she would. "I won't be
the Recluse! I won't be the Recluse every time, just because you two are
so greedy and--"
"You know," said Kate, smothering a giggle, but not very successfully,
"no one can do it as well as you."
"And it's really a very important part, and the very first solo,"
chuckled Irene. "Else why did Professor Trask take it himself?"
"If it's so important," put in Sissy, grasping at a straw, "you'd better
take it yourself. Why must I always take a man's part? And I can't sing,
anyway."
"Why, Sissy!" Split's tone was flattery incarnate, but the irony in her
eye made her junior dance.
"You know I can't," she sniffled.
"But my voice and Split's go so well together in the Rose and Lily
duet," said Kate, putting the book of the cantata upon the piano-rack
and opening it persuasively.
"You promise me every time," wailed the downtrodden Recluse, reluctantly
moving forward, "that I won't have to be it the next time."