to do with sage-brush--was very select. Naturally, for it had had
its origin in Mrs. Pemberton's strenuous estheticism and double
parlors--possessions of which few Comstockers could boast. But after the
infant literary society had learned to stand alone, it adopted migratory
habits, meeting now at the Misses Bryne-Stivers's cottage, now at Mrs.
Forrest's over-furnished rooms, and occasionally even at the Madigans'.
There was at least room enough at the Madigans; it was the one
particular in which they were never stinted. The long, shabby parlor had
sufficient seating-capacity, even if the chairs were not all, strictly
speaking, presentable.
"Shall I bring in the Versiye fotoy?" asked Split on one of the
occasions when the meeting of the Tridentata necessitated a real
house-cleaning in which the full corps of Madigans took part.
"The Versailles _fauteuil_, Irene," replied Miss Madigan, doubtfully,
"is not reliable. If I wasn't sure that Mrs. Pemberton, who has seen
the real ones, would be sure to ask where it is, I'd keep it out; for
the last time she came so near sitting on it while I was reading my
paper on 'Home-keeping' that I got so nervous I left out all that part
about the housewife's duty being, above all, to make a spiritual home:
to diffuse about herself a home atmosphere, so that wherever she sat,
wherever two or three gathered about her, there was the Sanctuary of the
Church of Home, so to speak. And--"
"Then you want me to bring it in?" Split had too much to do to listen to
Tridentata culture. Her humble office was merely to make ready for the
literary feast and modest bodily refreshment to come.
It was one of the contradictions of Split's nature--her intense
occasional domesticity and the practical good sense that marked her home
economies. She rose now, basin in hand. Her sleeves were rolled up, her
bushy hair, a troublesome half-length now, was bound up in a towel. She
had been scrubbing and polishing the zinc under the stove, and she was
as happy as she was executive. She flew about trilling "The Zingara,"
with a smudge on her chin and a big kitchen-apron tied about her waist,
looking like a dirty little slavey; yet putting the mark of her
thoroughness upon everything she touched and Miss Madigan overlooked.
"The big rug from your room is to go over the hole by the window?" she
asked perfunctorily, being half-way through the hall at the time.
"Oh, I'm so glad you remembered it," said Miss Madigan. "Mrs. Forrest
tripped in that hole the last time. I thought it was exceedingly
impolite of her to call attention to it that way, because--"
"Shall I turn the couch-cover?" demanded Split.
"I don't see how you can," said Miss Madigan, helplessly. "It's worn on
the other side."
But with a tug Split had drawn it off, pillows and all, and she flew
up-stairs, carrying Kate in her wake to help her pull down a portière
which she intended transforming into a couch-cover.
Things sentient as well as material were accustomed to doing double duty
at the Madigans' on Tridentata nights. When Francis Madigan, forewarned
that his bell would often be rung that evening, but that he was not
expected to resent the insult, had retreated to his castle and pulled up
the drawbridge behind him, the slavey, with Sissy as assistant, became
doorkeeper, and, later, butler. Critics, of course, these two were ex
officio; and from their station out in the chilly hall, they listened to
and mocked at the literary program, which Miss Madigan had entitled, "A
Night of All Nations."
The opening duet between Maude and Henrietta Bryne-Stivers they had
heard before. Few people in Virginia, indeed, had not.
"Trash!" Sissy pronounced it in Professor Trask's best manner.
The reading from "Sodom's Ende," in the original, by the traveled Mrs.
Pemberton, was fiercely resented by her audience outside the gates. It
always made a Madigan furious to hear a foreign tongue; for, apart from
the affectation of strange pronunciations, the deliberate mouthing of
words (and you couldn't make Sissy Madigan believe that Mrs. Ramrod
understood half of what she was reading in that guttural, heavy tongue),
there was the impugnment of other people's lack of linguistic
accomplishment.
The critical paper on Daudet that followed was read by Miss Henrietta
Bryne-Stivers. While it was in progress the two Madigans out in the hall
each read an imaginary paper on the same topic, finishing with that
identical courtesy which Henrietta had imported from Miss Jessup's
school in the city. But Split tripped Sissy as she was bowing over low,
and she fell, as softly as she could, to the floor. Miss Madigan looked
out with a "S--sh!" Sissy cast off all blame in virtuous dumb-show, and
in the pause the two heard Dr. Murchison's voice as Henrietta passed him
and the door, on her triumphant way back to her seat.
"Allow me to compliment you, Miss Henrietta," said the old doctor,
pleasantly excited by so youthful a lady's literary discrimination. "You
are really fond of Daudet, then?"
Henrietta blushed. "Oh, no, indeed, doctor!" she said deprecatingly. "At
Miss Jessup's we girls were not permitted to read him, you know."
"Ah, I see," murmured the doctor. "Only to write about him?"
"Miss Jessup thought it was more--fitting, with the French authors,"
observed Henrietta.
"So it is," agreed Murchison, dryly. "So it is. The excellent Miss
Jessups--how well they know!"
"He's guying her," chuckled Sissy, making a mental vow to read Daudet or
die in the attempt. "And she doesn't know it."
"Hush!" came from Split.
In a tenor a bit foggy, but effectively sympathetic, old Westlake was
singing, "Oh, would that we two were maying!"
Sissy put her eye to the crack of the door, and Split, watching her, saw
her round face grow red and indignant.
"What is it?" she whispered, squirming till she too had an eye glued to
the crack.
"Look!" exclaimed Sissy, disgustedly.
Straight in their line of vision sat Kate, and upon her old Westlake's
eyes were ardently fixed as he sang.
"It's--it's not decent," declared Sissy, wrathfully.
"He does look like a calf." Split grinned. Kate looked very pretty in
that white cashmere embroidered in red rosebuds, which had been made
over from the box from Ireland, Split said to Sissy, and so was
deserving of forgiveness, she hinted; for when one had a new frock--
Sissy, the sensible, snorted unbelievingly. What gown had ever affected
her?
"But I'll get even with him," she said, stealing on tiptoe down the
hall. "Just you watch!"
Split, her nose in the crack of the door, watched. The Avalanche had
finished his first verse and begun the second, when Sissy appeared in
the parlor, very modest and retiring, walking behind chairs and effacing
herself with an ostentation that could not but attract all eyes. She
stopped at Miss Madigan's chair, asked a question,--which Split knew
well was utterly irrelevant and immaterial,--and received an answer in
Aunt Anne's company manner: a compound of sweetness and flustered
inattention which no one could mimic better than Sissy herself.
Then she withdrew, slowly and by a tortuous route which brought her just
beside him at the moment Westlake stopped singing. Without a word, yet
with a gracious instinct for the momentary confusion in which the
performer found himself, his seat having been taken while he sang,
Cecilia pulled out another from the wall and moved it slightly toward
him.
The little attention was offered so naturally, with such engaging
demureness, that Mrs. Pemberton--whom the social amenities in children
ever delighted--almost loved Sissy Madigan at that moment. So, by the
way, did Split, out in the hall, her eye at the crack of the door, her
feet lifting alternately with anticipative rapture. For it was the
Versailles _fauteuil_ that Sissy had so sweetly selected for old
Westlake. And when the big fellow came down to earth with a crash,
rising red and confused from the debris, Sissy was already out in the
hall. She arrived at the crack in time to see Kate stuff her
handkerchief into her mouth and hurry to the window, her shoulders
shaking, while Miss Madigan flew to the rescue.
It took a recitation in Italian by Mrs. Forrest to rob Sissy Madigan,
judge and executioner, of her complacency after this. Then Aunt Anne
recited "The Bairnies Cuddle Doon" charmingly, as she always did, but
most Hibernianly, with that clean accent that makes Irish-English the
prettiest tongue in the world. After which she received with smiling
complacency the compliments of Mrs. Forrest, who told her that an ideal
mother had been lost to the world in her.
Outside, two cynics listened with a bored air. They felt that they
required a stimulant after this, so they made a hurried visit to the
dining-room, thereby escaping Mr. Garvan's reading of "Father Phil's
Collection." But when Henrietta Bryne-Stivers delivered "Blow, Bugle,
Blow," changing from speaking voice to the sung chorus with a composure
that was really shameless, the critics out in the hall received that
insulting shock which novelty inflicts upon the provincial, which is
the childish, mind. They revenged themselves in their own way, mouthing
and attitudinizing, caricaturing every pose which Miss Henrietta had
been taught, by the instructor of Delsarte at Miss Jessup's, was grace.
They were caught in the midst of their saturnalia of ridicule by Kate,
who promptly exploded at their uncouth, dumb merriment.
"Aunt Anne wants you, Sissy," she said when she got her breath.
In an instant Sissy was sobered. It wasn't possible that she was to be
sent to bed before supper! To be a waiter was the height of happiness
for Sissy.
"It's because of the Versiye fotoy," giggled Split, as she ran off to
the dining-room.
"It isn't, is it?" whispered Sissy to Kate. And Kate shook her head
reassuringly, and waved her in. She couldn't answer audibly, for Dr.
Murchison was tuning up his sweet old violin, while Maude Bryne-Stivers
offered to accompany him on the piano.
But Murchison knew too much of the manners and methods of Jessup's
Seminary, as revealed by its showiest pupil.
"Thank you, thank you, Miss Maude, but this is a very old-fashioned and
a very simple entertainment I'm going to give. Just the things that I
play to myself when I'm weary of listening to humanity tell of its ills
and aches--the egotist! Then I look down into the beautifully clean
inside of my fiddle, its good old mechanism without a flaw, and listen
to the things it has to tell.... Thank you, just the same, Miss Maude;
this is not a theme worthy of your brilliant rendition, but, as I said,
a simple, old-fashioned playing of the fiddle. I'll supply the
old-fashioned part, and Sissy here can do the simple accompaniment, if
she will."
If she would! Sissy was so gaspingly happy and proud that she forgot
even to pretend that she wasn't. Seating herself, she let her trembling
fingers sink into the opening chord, while the old doctor's bow sought
the strains of "Kathleen Mavourneen," of "Annie Laurie," the "Blue Bells
of Scotland," and "Rose Marie."
The unspoken sympathy that existed between these two flowed now from the
bow to Sissy's fingers, and made a harmony as pretty as was the sight of
the old man and the happy child looking up at him. Sissy Madigan was
conscious that the doctor knew her--almost; that, nevertheless, she
occupied a place quite unique in his heart. And she loved passionately
to be loved, this hypocrite of a Madigan, who jeered and jibed at any
demonstration of affection. A sense of being utterly at harmony with the
world possessed her now; the fact that she was "showing off" was far,
far in the background of her consciousness, when all at once she
happened to glance out through the hall door.
She had left it ajar behind her, expecting Kate to follow her in. But
Kate, evidently, had not followed. She stood out there alone with Mr.
Garvan, her arms behind her, her slender figure drawn up beneath the
swinging hall lamp, her pert little head, circled by the braids she wore
coiled clear around it when she wanted to be very grown-up, upturned to
the master, her every feature stamped with coquetry.
Sissy shut her lips firmly--and the wrong note she struck marred the
doctor's finale. It was evident that Kate Madigan needed looking after.
* * * * *
She did; and yet no one but Kate and those she experimented upon could
help her to find herself.
A wilful Madigan, intoxicated with her first taste of a new pleasure,
was Kate. She had outgrown her short skirts with regret; she was
preparing to make them still longer with delight. She had the maturity
of her motherless and quasi-fatherless state to add to the natural
precocity of the mining-town girl, and of the eldest sister who has been
pushed out of her childhood by the press of numbers behind her. And yet
the wine of romance kept her almost babyishly young. She had a way of
proclaiming the fact that she read everything her father did. (Madigan,
marooned by his misfortunes in the most picturesque setting, where men
were living the most picturesque lives, turned his back upon it all and
found the action his dull days were denied in the elder Dumas.) By this
Kate intended to show how proud and unrestrained a Madigan was; hoped,
too, perhaps, that there might attach a bit--the least bit--of
suggestive license to the phrase. And all the while she was pitiably
unconscious of how innocuous the old romanticist's tales of adventure
may be, read in translation, by the light of such purity and innocence
as hers.
But she was pert, was Kate, and piquant; she presumed upon her youth,
upon her age. She was a child when you expected her to be a woman, and a
woman where you looked for the child. No dream of romance was romantic
enough to hold her fickle soul constant to it--to satisfy the hopes of
her heart. Every man she met was a prince; yet was he, too, bare and
poor and mean compared with The Man to come. The child in her was gauche
and crude, sitting in judgment--as cynical, as critical a spectator as
Sissy herself--upon the very hopes the woman awakened. In her eyes the
flash of coquetry was succeeded by the blank, childish irony which
denied the emotion hardly passed. She loved to shock pretense, yet she
was the most absurd and innocent of pretenders, for the terms in which
convention speaks were Greek to her. She was masterful, being a Madigan,
and daring and impertinent. A creature utterly impatient of forms, with
a boy-like chivalry, revealing how incomplete the work of sex was yet,
for the woman misunderstood--whom she, in her crude purity, understood
least of all. This was Kate, ready, at fifteen, to battle single-handed
with windmills, with world-old problems, with world-young prejudices; to
burn intolerance to ashes in the white flame of her brave young
innocence; to cry aloud the word that older, wiser cowards whisper or
stifle in their hearts; to make no compromise; to know that black is
black and white is white; to be unforgiving, as only cruel young
inexperience can be; to flame at a wrong and glow at its righting; and
yet to have her contradictions cased in a body of such vivid grace, a
mind leavened by humor, and a heart of such sweetness as made her the
irresistibly lovable Pretense she was.
Pretending to be a child, to annoy her Aunt Anne; pretending to be a
woman, to infuriate her younger sisters; pretending to be a saint,
pretending to be a sinner; pretending to scorn the world, yet quaffing
its first sweet draughts of individual power and experience with
full-opened throat; pretending to be mannish--driven to that extremity
by the super-femininity of Henrietta Bryne-Stivers; pretending to be
frivolous, to shock rigid Mrs. Pemberton; pretending to be a
blue-stocking with a passion for the solid and heavy in literature;
pretending to be a Spartan who must rise at dawn and, after a plunge in
ice-cold mountain water, climb, with only big Don, the Newfoundland, for
company, up to the sluice-box; there to pretend she was an esthete to
whom the sunrise, while she communed alone with nature, revealed things
invisible to the world below.
But Reality's day came. Miss Madigan went out into the future, sent
thither by her auntly sense of responsibility, and brought it back with
her. It led them straight to Warren Pemberton's office, and Pretense
fled like a shy shadow before the sun when Reality looked at her
through Pemberton's cold, dull eyes.
"Miss Madigan, Mr. Pemberton. My niece Kate," was the lady's
introduction as they entered.
The red-faced, heavy little man, too important a personage to be
expected to contribute socially to the life of the town, had been
looking at Miss Madigan as though he knew he ought to remember having
met her. She wanted something, of course. Everybody wanted something
from Warren Pemberton, King Sammy's viceroy, in charge of his mining
interests and his political plantations. But he brightened at the
formula, recollecting having heard it before from the same lady's lips,
and promptly placed her in the category of small political favors.
"I remember you, Miss Madigan--of course," he stammered. "Remember the
little girl, too. Crosby's flame, eh?"
Kate flushed, struck dumb with the insult, and her black-gray eyes
gleamed handsomely with anger. After getting herself up in her most
mature fashion to be mistaken for Sissy!
"Why, Mr. Pemberton," exclaimed Miss Madigan, flustered by propinquity
to greatness, "this is Kate, the Miss Madigan who--for whom--"
"Oh, excuse me." Pemberton sat rubbing his chin and silently blinking at
the Miss Madigan for whom his influence had been invoked. She felt he
was weighing her youth and inexperience against the thing that had been
asked for her. And the Madigan in her fiercely resented it; was tempted
to confirm his doubts by a saucy flippancy that would relieve her
impatience of a false position. But there was that other Madigan in her
to be reckoned with, that new one, on the reverse of whose shining,
romantic shield a plain, dull, tenacious sense of duty was slowly
spelling itself into legibility.
"Kate's really very clever, Mr. Pemberton," said Kate's aunt, tactfully;
and the girl's teeth clicked together, in her effort to control her
irritation. "And in some ways she is much older than her years. She will
graduate, you know, this year at the head of her class; she passed first
in the examination, and really, in a family where there are so many
girls--"
"Yes, yes, I know," interrupted the great man. "You told me all about
that, and I--"
"And you've had time to realize just how extraordinary a creature I am
and how pitiful a case ours is! Am I too brilliant altogether to be
wasted on school-teaching?" Wrath tingled in Kate's voice. She heard
Miss Madigan's gasp of horror, and could imagine the fishy
disconsolateness of her expression. And she saw the red-faced little man
opposite her start, as at the injection of a foreign tongue into the
interview.
"Eh--what? Oh, yes," he said dully. "I mean--no. It'll be--it's all
right."
"Oh, Mr. Pemberton, how can I thank you!" Miss Madigan clasped her
hands.
"Yes; I spoke to Forrest yesterday, and--and, of course, Murchison's
willing," went on the little man, gravely. "But there's no vacancy just
now, so they'll arrange to appoint substitutes. It's the way they do in
cities, I understand. And Miss Cecilia here will be--"
"My name, Mr. Pemberton, is Kate!"
"And Kate's exceedingly grateful." Miss Madigan gazed amazed at her
niece; she didn't look grateful.
"Not at all; not at all," murmured Pemberton, feeling for his papers
helplessly. "I'm so busy--"
"It--is good of you," stammered Kate, rising. "I am--very much obliged
to you." She held out a hand to him that was cold to the fingertips. All
at once she felt so old, so young, so niched forever in a somber, gray
life, so settled, so bound up by small formalities, so miserably unlike
a Madigan!
* * * * *
Yet the Madigan in Kate waked with a defiant brightness when the first
call came that took her temporarily over the threshold of the new life.
She left her own school-room, where her rôle was as congenial and
irresponsible as Sissy's, with an air of importance that roused envy in
her mates' hearts.
The very pretense rallied her, excited her, inspired her to continue to
pretend after she had left her audience behind her. And though she
entered the lower class-room, of which she was to have charge for a day,
with a terrified feeling of being thrown to the lions, she faced the
undisciplined mob that licked its lips in anticipation of a feast on raw
young substitute with a flash in her eye that promised battle first.
And she did make a hit at the beginning, thanks to her sister and
present pupil, Bessie, who was invariably late to school.
To Bep, the aspect of her own sister in a position of authority was the
hugest absurdity, and when the blonde twin sauntered in, tardy, as
usual, she joined the class as one of the lions. She intended to give
Kate distinctly to understand that she was mixed primary pupil first
and a Madigan afterward; that the substitute might expect no mercy from
her on the pitiful plea of relationship.
Bep's attitude was very Madigan; the only drawback to it was that it
left out of the reckoning the fact that she had a Madigan to deal with.
"Elizabeth Madigan," said the substitute, in the clear, high, formal
tone that, in itself, was sufficient to sever all bonds of kinship,
"where is your excuse for being late?"
Bep's blue eyes blinked. The impudence of Kate to talk that way to her!
"I ain't got any. Miss Walker never--"
"Miss Walker isn't teaching to-day," remarked the substitute, in the
patient tone which the enlightened have for dullness. "She is ill and I
am teacher here. Where is your excuse?"
Bep felt the silence grow around her. She saw the whole school drop its
mirth and its employments to watch this duel between Madigans.
"Why, you know very well, Kate Madigan--" she began hotly.
A sharp ring on the bell at the teacher's desk cut Bep's eloquence
short. "If you have anything to say to me, little girl, you will address
me as Miss Madigan."
The audacity of it struck Bep dumb. Call that slim girl Miss Madigan?
She'd like to see herself!
"You will go home, Elizabeth," the substitute continued, unconcernedly
making her way to the blackboard as though this life-and-death affair
were a mere incident in her many duties, "and bring me back a written
excuse for your tardiness."
Bep set her teeth. "You know I had to go an errand for Aunt Anne; you
saw me yourself," she muttered.
"A _written_ excuse, I said."
"I can't get any." Yet Bep rose. She felt the ground slipping from under
her.
"Then I am sorry to say," remarked the substitute, firmly, "that I shall
not be able to have you in my class to-day. Leave the room, Bessie....
Now, children, the first thing to do in subtraction--"
Bessie walked slowly up the aisle and toward the door. With the prospect
of a double disciplining, at home and at school, too, she dared not
rebel. Yet wrath smoldered within her. She came to where the substitute
stood at the board, calmly explaining the process of "borrowing," and
the resolution to regard her as an undeserving stranger was tempered by
Bep's desire to inflict an intimate, personal insult.
"I wouldn't be so afflicted as you," she growled under her breath, like
a small Mrs. Partington, misapplying her big word in her wrath, "for all
the world. And I'll get even!"
A gleam of quite unofficial laughter lit the substitute's eye. "You mean
'affected,' my little girl, not 'afflicted,'" she said clearly, pausing
pedagogically, chalk in hand. "Look up the difference in your
dictionary, and if you can't understand, come to me and I'll explain it
to you--after you bring your excuse."
And Bep brought her excuse. The substitute, her cheeks glowing with
excitement, yet calm-voiced and pretending valiantly, saw the door open
nearly an hour later, and a hand thrust through waving an envelop, as
though it were a lightning-rod that might attract the storm of her wrath
away from the one who carried it.
Gravely, even encouragingly, Miss Kate Madigan read a prayer from Miss
Anne Madigan that the teacher would kindly excuse the tardiness of
Elizabeth, her niece. She placed it on file religiously, like a
confirmed devotee to red tape, and resumed her lesson to the baby
class, with a matter-of-course air that completed the routing of Bep.