coaxed, bribed, threatened, and bullied, had at last annually to be run
away from), for the reason that Frank had not slept well after the
martyring, and was still dreaming of creeping, crawling things with
blubber-lips and gloating eyes when, in the pellucid dawn, Jack Cody
found the Madigans waiting, in clean calicoes, perched on their
bottommost step.
The sun was barely over the top of Sugar Loaf, and the town, scantily
shrubberied (for water costs as many dollars in Virginia as there are
weeks in the year), lay sleeping in soft chill shadow below them,
looking oddly picturesque and strange in the unfamiliar light.
"Say," said Cody, "I think I see that Pemberton kid coming up Taylor. Is
he coming along?"
"No," said Sissy, promptly.
"Yes," said Split, firmly.
"Well, _I_ didn't ask him," from Sissy, with a haughty air of saying the
last word. The Madigans were quite accustomed to being social arbiters
in their own small world.
"Well, I did," remarked Split, easily.
A pugnacious red overshot Sissy's face. Crosby was her property, to
browbeat and maltreat as seemed best to her. She felt that Irene's
interference in a matter that was purely personal was unwarranted as it
was intolerable.
"He always has such good cream-tarts," explained Split.
"Well, he can have 'em and keep 'em," declared Sissy, savagely, turning
her back as Crosby yodeled a greeting and waved his hat gaily to her.
Cody grinned. "I think that kid better stay at home. It won't be much
picnic for him, will it, Sissy?"
Sissy sniffed. "He's Split's company," she said loftily. "She'll make
things pleasant for him."
But Crosby, glad to be among the enticing Madigans at any price, and
innocently joying in the picnic spirit that possessed him, came whooping
to his fate.
"Say," he said eagerly, putting down his basket with the air of one who
has a good story to tell, "do you know, I almost got caught this
morning. Ma said I wasn't to go, but I bet I wouldn't stay at home. So I
told Delia to put up my lunch last night, and to put in a lot of those
cream-tarts you like, Sissy--you used to like, Sissy...."
But Sissy, actuated by a delicate desire not to interfere in the
slightest with Split's plans for the entertainment of her guest, was
deep in conversation with Jack Cody. Crosby's jaw fell. He saw her give
her round tin lunch-bucket--the one he had so often carried to school
for her--to Cody, to sling with his own upon a leather strap. And as he
watched her start up the ravine carrying one end of the strap, and the
washerwoman's boy the other, he wondered passionately within himself at
the faithlessness and ingratitude of women.
Wasn't it enough to have a reckoning with Madam Pemberton at the end of
his day, without having that precious time utterly spoiled? He felt like
turning back. Sissy knew well that there could be no picnic for him
within the pale of her displeasure. The mountain air might be never so
sweet with the wild sage perfuming it; the sun striping the shadowy town
below with bloody bands might be never so promising; the mountain's
peak, soft and deceitfully near, might be never so tempting--with Sissy
chattering gaily in advance, ostentatiously ignorant of his very
existence, the glory was cut out of Crosby's morn. It seemed, too, to
him that he had never been so fond of her. His mother's disapproval of
this Madigan since a certain episode (to avenge which cruel Sissy's
thirst could never be slaked) had put the last touch to his devotion.
That matron's pleasure in their intercourse hitherto had been the one
drawback to his delight in it. In his eyes, his inamorata walked now
with the crown of the forbidden upon her haughty little head; and that
Crosby was more of a natural boy than his effeminate tastes indicated is
proven by the fact that he loved Sissy far more for this than for being
"the good one" his mother had once thought and proclaimed her.
At the sluice-box which circles Mount Davidson, bringing the purest of
water from a mountain lake, the party halted and was joined by other
brave mountaineers, big and little; the latter in calico skirts, and
shirts and knickerbockers. Bombey Forrest was the only one who came
under neither of these heads. She was a slender slip of a girl whose
mother, to the scandal of conventional folk, believed that for the first
decade or so of child-life the boy's costume is fitter than the girl's.
So Bombey wore a knickerbockered sailor-suit with a broad collar and
white braid; wore it with a bit of a conscious air, yet with that grace
which long use and habit lend; with piquancy, too, for she was the least
masculine of girls in mind and manner, and her delicate face with its
golden curls bloomed like a flower on a strange stalk, above the
assertive masculinity of her attire.
It was to Bombey that Crosby Pemberton turned for solace. (Split had
promptly deserted him for Kate, whom she suspected of a contemptible
desire to cut loose from the Madigans as children, and join the older
members of the party.) He had not had the courage to forgo the picnic,
though he knew his mistress well enough to be sure that by the end of
the day he would realize that that course would have been the least
painful. He carried Bombey's basket, like the little gentleman he was;
not in the division-of-labor fashion, from which Cody's and Sissy's
jangling buckets extracted a sort of cow-bell music as they ran merrily
along, far in advance.
Cody spied the two below when he and Sissy sat down to rest on a huge
boulder. Jack never knew how to treat Bombey Forrest, always feeling
that the most decent thing to do was not to look at her. Despite his own
bitter and recurring experiences (which, one might fancy, would have
made him tender to the vicissitudes of sex as warranted by clothing),
something in him felt outraged and resentful at the sight of her.
"Look at the girl-boy and the boy-girl!" he sneered. "See how they poke
along. They'll never get to the top."
Sissy's shoes were hot and dusty. The strong odor of sage-brush was in
her nostrils. Her skirt was torn, and the short-stemmed desert-lilies
she held in a moist hand were wilted. But she was happy, for she was
outdoing, she was pretending, and she was punishing. The only thing that
detracted from her pleasure was to be obliged to concur in Cody's
opinion. That roused her perversity. She loved to lead or to oppose--not
to agree.
"Let's go on," she said imperiously. "What are you stopping for?"
As the sun climbed higher, the mountain's top got farther and farther
away. But Cody, who had scaled not only its summit, but the flagpole
that tipped it, knew its habit of piling one small hill up behind the
other, as though, like a grotesque Gulliver playing a practical joke, it
delighted in fatiguing and disappointing the Liliputians that swarmed up
from its base. Crosby and Bombey and the twins, with the Misses
Blind-Staggers,--blinder than ever to-day for the glare on their blue
goggles,--had yielded long since. They were camping patiently in a
ravine far below, where a tiny spring hinted at dining-room
conveniences. The rest of the party, with Irene revenging herself upon
Kate's disloyalty by sticking like a burr to that young lady (whom,
Split thought, Mr. Garvan was treating altogether too much like a young
lady), was close on the vanguard's heels. And Sissy and Cody, panting
now, but toiling doggedly on, had reached the cool little cup-shaped
hollow in the cone where the snow lies.
From here to the top was but a few minutes' run. Cody was all for
halting and snow-balling the party as it came up, but Sissy was too
exhausted to stop now.
"We'll rest at the top of the hill," she decided impatiently, and
hurried him on, both a bit out of temper.
No beauty of winding river and peaceful valley checkered with fields of
grain, no low-lying gardens and climbing forests, reward the scaler of
the heights behind the Comstock--only the bare little brown town far
down, digging tenacious heels into the mountain's side and propped up
with spindle-shanked foothold, the great white inverted cones of steam
rising from the mines, the naked and scarred majesty of the gray
mountains all about, the desert gleaming like a lake in the east, and
Washoe Lake gleaming like a desert in the west.
Yet Sissy held her breath. Something in the still purity of the air, the
savage grandeur of the mountains, the great arch of liquid blue above
her, caught and held her impressionable spirit. She stretched out her
hands--a small, petticoated Balboa--to the world she had discovered.
"It--it makes you want to scream," she stammered.
"Booh!" It was a yell from Cody, delivered full in her ear. "If you want
to scream, darn it, scream!" was his practical advice as he spat out the
sunflower-seeds he had been chewing and prepared to climb the pole.
Sissy stood looking at him, the color flooding her face. And as he noted
her expression, the boy suddenly remembered that he did not like Split's
sister. But his mild memory of distaste was as nothing to the disgust
that possessed Sissy. In her ecstasy she had unwittingly lifted a corner
of the lid that she kept tight over her emotions. Logically, she hated
the unimpressed and profane witness of the phenomenon.
She turned her back on him, refusing even to look at his progress up the
high pole. She would not see when, at its top, small as a fly at the
point of a pencil, he waved his hat and, ululating brassily, gave vent
to the desire to be noisily vocal which had clutched Sissy's throat into
silence. At luncheon, she found a spot that was farthest from him; and
when he and Split tore noisily down the mountain's side on the way
back, she submitted rather to be outdone than to join a party of which
he was one.
Crosby Pemberton, bracing himself for the derision he expected from her,
was delighted to see her come sliding down alone to the ravine, where
the successful ones paused to take up the rest of the party. Her
solitary state encouraged him, and he sought her where she sat knocking
the sand out of her shoe.
"Sissy," he said softly, holding out a peace-offering, "I saved some
cream-puffs for you."
But the ruthless Sissy was not to be so easily placated. "You mean for
Split, don't you?" she said, scarcely looking at him, and diligently
lacing her shoe. "She asked you to come, you know. I didn't."
With the look of a wounded dove, Crosby turned, and Sissy saw Irene a
moment later, her teeth gluttonously closed over one of Delia's biggest
puffs, a heart-breaking amount of "filling" gushing over her cheeks and
chin.
But to do without for the sake of principle was ever rapture to the
purist. Sissy placed the pangs of desire to the credit side of Crosby's
account; this was only one thing more she owed her victim. In fact, as
the party started on, so engaged was she in inventing and perfecting
tortures for him that she followed the procession on its unusual detour
without demur. It was only when it was too late that she saw Bullion
Ravine ahead of her, and the swaying high trestle over which the flume
is carried.
Split's malicious face as that most sure-footed of Madigans touched the
first plank made Sissy realize the test to which she was to be put. Her
terror of giddy heights was treated as an absurd affectation by the
steady-headed Madigans, and as such requiring discipline, which, with
truly sisterly foresight, Split had provided. She ran across now with
the joy of a thing that feels itself flying. Jack Cody turned a
handspring in the very middle; and the sight so nauseated Sissy that she
had to stand aside and let those immediately behind her pass first. Yet
she dared not remain till the last, for a panicky picture in her mind
showed her to herself paralyzed forever on the brink. As she put her
foot on the first board, beneath which she could hear the running water
chuckling and gurgling as it ran, she swore to herself that she would
not look down. And, indeed, she did keep her eyes on Crosby Pemberton's
straw hat, as he walked some distance in front of her. But the moment
his foot touched the ground on the other side, the light structure,
relieved of his weight, changed its rhythmic swaying, which had measured
the steady strength of his step. Its rebound, exaggerated by Sissy's
tense nerves, seemed sickeningly high; its fall ghastly low. Swung there
from mountain to mountain, its slender supports looked frail as a
spider's woof, and seemed to tremble with every gasping breath she drew.
In spite of herself, her eye caught the silvery glitter of the thread of
water far below in the stony bed of the nearly dry creek.
It was all over with Sissy. Trembling with terror, she sat down,
clutching the edge of the board beneath her, the world swimming away
before her shut eyes, just as it did when one looked too long through a
knot-hole at the flowing race in the flume beneath.
Irene's giggle came faintly to her; she was too terrified to resent it.
The murmur of voices that called her name, encouragingly, warningly,
angrily, was not so loud as the chuckling of the water in the box which
seemed to hurry her senses away. She lived through years of agony, in
which she found herself wishing that she could only fall and end it.
Then she felt the trestle bound beneath her, and she was waked by the
touch of Crosby's hand.
"Get up!" he said in a tone of command that reminded her of that
grenadier his mother.
She opened her eyes and saw that his face was white, but the glitter of
determination in his eyes was so new and curious that it held her
attention for the moment necessary to give her strength to obey. He
almost pulled her to her feet, and then half dragged, half ran with her
across. Yet within ten feet of the end, the trembling of his hand had
communicated itself to her whole body. She watched the drops of
perspiration fall from his pale face and, fascinated, followed them down
with her eyes. Then wrenching her hand from his, she almost fell down
again. It seemed to her her head swayed back and forth with such force
as might bear her whole body with it, and she squatted down, shivering.
It was a most humiliating finish to an exciting adventure, for when he
strove to compel her again to rise, Crosby found that terror is
contagious. He himself dared not stand. He squatted down in front of
her, and on all fours the two crawled toward the bank. Sissy could have
kissed the earth when her hands touched it.
But it took her some time to recover. The sympathetic fussing of the
Misses Bryne-Stivers she endured as in a dream. She even permitted Mr.
Garvan to take her hand and help her walk for a time. But when they
reached the first house and had turned down Taylor Street, she was so
thoroughly herself that she contrived to let the rest pass her, and she
rested till Crosby came up. She was walking beside him, with a sudden
flattering kindness that almost turned his head, when he looked in the
direction in which her eyes were fixed, and saw his mother in her
phaeton pull up and beckon to him.
He looked shyly at Sissy. He would have given much to be told that this
forgiveness was not to be merely temporary, like others that had
preceded it whenever Mrs. Pemberton might see and disapprove; that he
was no longer to be flouted and scorned when there was nobody but Sissy
herself to be glad of it.
"The shadow of the guillotine is over you!" said Sissy, in a bombastic
whisper addressed to Mrs. Pemberton--a comforting formula the Madigans
had invented to still their envy of those who rode in carriages. But her
smiling face, when it turned toward Crosby, had no threat in it.
Relieved, forgiven, reinstated,--for there was a promise without words
in his tyrant's good humor,--Crosby laughed out gaily. At that moment
he had no more fear for Madam Pemberton than for the invoked Madame
Guillotine.
"S' long, Sissy," he cried, waving his basket to her as he went, a young
aristocrat, to meet his fate.
That night Sissy said her prayers in a rush. She wanted to give her
undivided attention to plans of revenge on Split.
KATE: A PRETENSE
The lesser Madigans meant to stand no nonsense from Kate. Other girls'
big sisters had been known to assume superiority as their skirts
lengthened, and to imply an esoteric something in their experience which
younger sisters could not comprehend, and privileges which they might
not share. But for them, the Madigans, though they were graciously
willing to count Kate out of such outdoor sports as were incompatible
with lengthened skirts, she might come no pretense of young-ladyhood
over them. They were on the watch for the smallest affectation, the
least sentimentality; and as for beaus per se--just let Kate try it!
Kate did, being human, a Comstock girl when girls were in a delightful
minority, and a Madigan. But, realizing the argus-eyed watch put upon
her, and the forthright methods of her sister Madigans, she tried it
secretly.
To be sure, there was old Westlake,--he was at least thirty-five years
old--whose intentions were quite apparent. He came up to play whist at
the house whenever he was in town, upon which occasions Kate was always
his partner; and he scolded her with the same proprietary freedom for
leading a "sneak" suit as Francis Madigan did his sister--a lady who was
never known to know what was trumps, and who smiled and blinked and
blushed and made the same mistakes over and over again with a
complacency that Madigan's fiercest thumps upon the table could not
shake.
But the Madigans forgave Kate her Westlake, for the pleasure she took in
guying him, and the loyal frankness with which she let them into all the
moves of the game. He was "The Avalanche" to her and to them, because of
his avoirdupois, his slow movements, and the imperviousness to a joke
with which he was credited; because he could not take in all the little
infinity of homely facetiæ in which the Madigans lived and had their
being. Besides, it was pleasant and exciting, being leagued with Kate
against Aunt Anne, who was known to have positively had the indecency to
speak openly upon the subject, and in favor of it, to her oldest niece!
"Fly, the Avalanche is upon you!" was Sissy's dramatic way of warning
her big sister that her suitor had been spied by the outpost coming up
the steps.
And on such occasions Kate could slip out of the side door and be safely
inside the Misses Blind-Staggers's sitting-room by the time Westlake's
heavy step made the porch shake--and Sissy, too--with laughter. But this
was before she went to open the door.
"Is your sister at home?" old Westlake asked confidently.
"Which one--Irene? Yes, she's home." Sissy's small round face was
simplicity and candor incarnate.
"No," said old Westlake, uncomfortably. He had seen shrewdness once or
twice behind the eyes where innocence now dwelt, and he only half
trusted this demure, blank-faced child. "I mean your sister Katherine."
"Oh!" Cecilia exclaimed, in gentle surprise. "Oh, no, sir, she's out."
"Indeed!"
Old Westlake fancied he heard a mocking "indeed" that followed. In fact,
an echo that had the queer effect of making him hear double seemed to
accompany all his words. It came from the portières, which were
suspiciously bulky, and shook as though something more than the wind
moved them.
"And how soon will she be home?" he asked.
"Kate? You mean Kate? Oh, I really do not know." Sissy pronounced her
words with pedantic care--a permissible thing among Madigans when adults
were to be guyed.
Old Westlake (he was rather a handsome old fellow, with his regular
features, his blond mustache, and prominent blue eyes) fidgeted
uneasily. There must be some way, he felt, of moderating this
half-chilly, half-critical atmosphere on the part of the smaller
Madigans. But children were riddles to him, and the solutions his small
experience offered were either too simple or too complex.
"She can't be intending to spend the whole day out?" he asked, conscious
that he presented a ridiculous figure to the childish gray eyes lifted
to his.
"No, I don't suppose she can," agreed Sissy. "Won't you come in?"
He followed her hesitatingly into the parlor and sat down, his eyes
fixed upon the portières over the front windows, which still appeared to
be strangely agitated.
"You--do you think it will be worth while--my waiting?" he asked
helplessly, as Cecilia was modestly about to withdraw.
She looked up at him with the bland look of intelligence which it takes
a clever child to counterfeit.
"Worth while waiting for Kate?" she asked in accents half puzzled, half
reproachful.
Old Westlake blushed to the roots of his close-cropped fair hair. He
fancied he heard a muffled gurgle behind the portières that wasn't
soothing.
"Oh--you mean, is she likely to come home soon?" added Sissy, gravely,
eying his discomfiture. "I really do not know."
"Is Miss Madigan in?" asked the desperate man.
"Why, do you call her that? I told you she was out."
"No; you told me Katherine was out. Is she in?" he asked eagerly.
Sissy stared at him stupidly. He returned her stare contemplatively. He
yearned to bribe her, but he didn't dare. She looked too old to be
bought, too young to understand; yet he was sure she was neither.
"Katherine, Kate, and Miss Madigan are out," said Sissy, didactically.
"So are Kitty, Kathleen, and even Kathy--that's her latest; she wrote it
that way in Henrietta Bryne-Stivers's autograph-album."
The visitor looked bewildered. "I asked you whether your aunt is in,"
he said, with some impatience.
"I beg your pardon," retorted Sissy, ceremoniously. No Madigan begged
pardon unless intending to be doubly offensive thereafter. "You asked me
whether my sister was in."
"Is--your--aunt--in?" demanded Westlake, with insulting clearness.
"She--is--in. I'll--tell--her--you're--here."
"Please." Westlake bit the word out, promising himself that his first
post-nuptial act would be to shake this small sister-in-law well for her
impertinence.
And this was the pathos, as well as the absurdity of old Westlake--he
was so confident.
But he was not so confident that he did not long for an ally. And when
Split stepped out from behind the portières, with a barefaced pretense
of having just come through the long French window from the porch, he
straightway invited her to go to the circus that evening with him and
Kate.
There happened to be two sties on Split's left eye just then, and a
third on the upper eyelid of the right one. But this, of course, was no
reason for discouraging the overtures of a poor old man like Westlake,
who, it appeared to Split, had some virtues, after all.
That evening Sissy, who was playing holey down on Taylor (a famous
button-string had Sissy, as token of her prowess; it had a sample of
almost every buttoned frock worn in Virginia for the past ten years),
watched the three as they set out for the tent far down at the foot of
the hill. And three things occurred to her, as she stood looking after
them, Bombey Forrest waiting vainly, meanwhile, for her to shoot: First,
that if his desire was to propitiate the clan, old Westlake had selected
the wrong Madigan: Split being not nearly so tenacious an enemy nor so
loyal a friend as herself. Second, that that same Split looked "like a
silly" with the white handkerchief bound over her left eye, and her
right one swollen and teary. She wondered, did Sissy, that they should
take such a fright with them. And thirdly, the censor of the family sins
made a mental note to the effect that Kate Madigan was putting on
altogether too many airs as she pulled on her gloves; there was an
inexcusable self-consciousness about her manner toward the Avalanche;
and as for old Westlake himself, he was clearly taking advantage of
Split's blindness and casting such glances at that giddy Kate as she,
Sissy, would certainly not have tolerated--if she had been invited to go
to the circus. If only she had!
It must not be supposed that the esthetic side of life for the Madigans
was represented wholly by women's walking-matches and the circus. There
was also the Tridentata.