to say it before I got into knickerbockers,--that I intended to be the
father of a family numbering at least a 'baker's dozzen.' I believe I
had a vague notion that by means of superabundance of paternity I could
atone to myself for my lack of other family ties. I was always so
beastly alone. Yet no one--Miles Madigan least of all--saw the pathos of
my lot. 'He's young and unencumbered,' he said of me toward the last
when he was reminded of how little he had left for me. 'He'll get along.
Besides, there's that wildcat mine out in the States; I'm leaving him
that.'"
Madigan's pipe fell to the floor; he had been filling it for his
after-dinner smoke. "You've got the Tomboy!" he exclaimed.
"That interests you?" Morgan asked.
Kate, who picked up the pipe and handed it to her father, as she passed,
the last of the line of young Madigans on the way out, saw how Francis
Madigan's hand shook. Mechanically she paused and listened.
"I--I was swindled out of my share of that mine," he said harshly.
"Miles Madigan knew that in fairness half of it was mine. I found it. I
worked for it. I put aside all other opportunities to devote myself to
developing it. I sacrificed my children and my business to it. I gave up
the best years of my life to it. I bore disappointment and poverty
because of it. I was at the end of my tether when Miles Madigan went
into it with me; and yet when I saw he was bent on freezing me out of
it, I--I--But after he got it he didn't know what to do with it. He
left it to be worked and himself fleeced by strangers. But--it killed my
wife, and left me, after all those years of litigation, an embittered,
beggared, broken man!"
"And so it's but fair"--to Kate, shivering at the revelation in her
father's voice, Miles Morgan's words seemed like soothing music--"it's
but fair that you and I should handle the thing together--what there is
of it, Mr. Madigan," he added hastily, as Madigan was about to speak;
and he leaned forward, holding out his hand boyishly. "There may not be
much, but I can get English capital to develop it, at a sacrifice of
half its value now, and its possibilities. So that will leave only
quarter shares for each of us. I may be offering you only a lot of work
and a disappointment at the end. But the thing seemed worth enough to
me, 'way over on the other side, to come out here and look into it
myself. And one thing that made it seem so was the desperate battle you
had fought to keep it. I hoped--I hoped you'd like me well enough, when
we got to know each other, to help me with your experience,
and--frankly, to help yourself in helping me. I had no intention of
saying all this to-night, but--allow me, Cousin Kate."
He had dropped Madigan's hand after a hearty squeeze, and was standing
holding open the door for Kate to pass.
It was a glorified Kate, for, lo, the veil of ill humor had fallen; a
treacherous Kate, Sissy would have said, for she shone out now, warm and
sparkling, upon the man who had had the discrimination to let a brood of
small Madigans pass without special attention, yet who jumped to his
feet when the young-lady daughter of the house made her exit, and stood
looking after her till Madigan hauled him off to the library to talk
about the Tomboy.
* * * * *
That certain contentment which followed after an unusually good dinner,
when the world and the Madigans were young together, had inspired Old
Mother Gibson. The original couplet, with which all Madigans are
familiar, is not strictly quotable; it was not invented, but adopted, by
them. And it served merely to give a name to the game, which was half a
war-dance, half a cake-walk, accompanied by chanted couplets composed by
each performer in turn; said couplets being necessarily original and
relevant locally. The accompaniment--an easy change of chords--was
played on the piano _colla voce_. And no one minded in the least a
foot, more or less, at the end of a verse. The joke was the thing with
the Madigans, and the impromptu rhyme that brought down the house was
the one that hit hardest.
For Old Mother Gibson was a satire, a pasquinade, a flesh-and-blood
libel done in rhyme, of wildest license both as to form and matter, and
set to music--to be discharged full at the head of the victim. It began
in an orderly way, every Madigan in her turn playing both parts of
victim and cartoonist. But it degenerated into an open and shameless
mimicry of Aunt Anne, of Francis Madigan, of the school-master, Mrs.
Ramrod, the Misses Blind-Staggers, Professor Trask, Dr. Murchison, Wong,
Indian Jim, and, finally, each of the other's tenderest folly--till a
living caricature too true or too cutting precipitated an appeal to
arms, and the Lighthouse, which was always in the way, was tipped over
in the mêlée, and had to be thrown out of the window, there to burn
itself into darkness innocuously.
Old Mother Gibson was given by a full cast the night of the savior's
arrival. Though Jane Cody had been merciless, Jack, tempted beyond his
powers of resistance by the sounds of revelry upon the hill, was
stalking about in melancholy masquerade among its personnel. Bombey
Forrest, her delicate head looking like a surprised sunflower upon its
masculine stalk, had come in, and Crosby Pemberton, looking as much out
of place in his immaculate linen and small Tuxedo as either of these,
was joyous at being among Madigans again.
You might have heard--if you'd stood out on the piazza looking in, and
happened to have the key to the riddle--a hint in verse of every Madigan
escapade, of every Madigan failing, of all the Madigan jokes, on Old
Mother Gibson nights. You would have seen even Kate--young-lady Kate,
who had once substituted in a school--join in this mad revel, with an
appetite for fun that showed how much of a child she still was.
An impressionable young Irishman, who had come out upon the piazza to
smoke a cigar and think himself back into his usual poise after a day
full of new experiences, had his attention attracted by the strumming on
the piano; and glancing in through the open window, he saw a slender,
graceful girl, her dark head rising lightly from the sailor collar of a
pink gingham blouse. She was balancing lightly as she walked, keeping
time to the rhythm, and followed by a procession of children in single
file. (A belief in the efficacy of motion to stimulate one's power of
improvisation made Old Mother Gibson the liveliest of games.) And
arriving at the center of the stage, she delivered herself in a singsong
of the following:
"Old Mother Gibson, be on your best behavior,
Or you'll surely fail to satisfy the savior."
It didn't seem a very funny or apposite ditty to Miles Morgan, but, to
judge by its effect upon those within, it was exquisitely witty. The
whole company doubled up with laughter. It giggled till its collective
sides must have ached; then it slowly and gaspingly subsided. When it
had quieted down, the piano began again, and a red-headed Madigan,
intoxicated by the music, the license of the time, and the excitement
accompanying creative work, danced a fantastic _pas seul_, as she flew
about in the Mother Gibson merry-go-round.
"Old Mother Gibson's savior was a dandy--
He thought he'd buy the Madigans with a stick of candy!"
sang Split, and the parlor yelled itself hoarse with uproarious delight.
The fat little girl at the piano began to play, and stopped several
times, that she might wipe the tears of laughter from her eyes and get
her breath. At last, with a squaring of her shoulders and a stiffening
of backbone that seemed queerly familiar to Morgan, watching outside,
she half drawled, half sang, with an unmistakable accent:
"Old Mother Gibson was angry at the Fates;
My word! They sent the savior 'way out to the States!"
A sudden enlightenment came to Miles Morgan. For a moment the red flamed
up in his cheek, and if Split could have seen his face she might have
fancied that some imp had caught her likeness, when her temper had got
beyond her control, and set it on this man's body.
"The impudent little beggars!" Morgan cried furiously. "My word!" He
stopped, remembering the use to which his favorite exclamation had been
put. "But what a saucy lot!" He was laughing before he had finished
wording his thought.
He was interested now, and listened with a grin to Fom's declaration
that
"Old Mother Gibson ought to 've known better
Then to come in answer to Aunt Anne's letter."
He saw even Frank strutting in the ring, though she was capable only of
a repetition of the classic phrase with which each couplet began. And he
laughed with the rest at Bep,--poor, unready Bep, set as by a musical
time-lock and bound to go off,--getting slower and slower in motion as
well as utterance, the accompaniment retarding sympathetically as the
critical moment approached when she must be delivered of her rhyme.
"Old Mother Gibson, why do you--"
she began her singsong. "No, no! Wait. I know another. 'T ain't fair,"
she stammered in a prose parenthesis.
"Old Mother Gibson had a--
"Stop laughing, now; wait a minute. You don't give me a chance, Sissy.
You play faster for me than for anybody else! You do it a-purpose, too,
just 'cause you know it's easy to bluster me.
"Old Moth-er--Gib-son--"
Bep stopped suddenly, for through the glass doors came the subject of
her lay. He had a finger to his lips as he glanced at Sissy's back--a
hint that the rest of the company seized delightedly. And when the music
began again, he was not ashamed to make this contribution:
"Old Mother Gibson, take pity on a cousin
Left to the tender mercies of the other half-dozen!"
At first the accompanist, accustomed to the rodomontade of voice as well
as gesture of the excited performers, was not aware of the interloper.
When she finally spun around and saw the savior singing in the midst of
his libelers, she let him finish the couplet unaccompanied, and sat, a
fat, shocked statue glued to the piano-stool, staring at him.
It was absurd of him, but there was something in Old Mother Gibson, as
the Madigans sang and played her, that turned the soberest of heads. And
the savior's forte was not in being staid. He fell upon his knee before
her.
"Forgive me, O Sissy, for not being a Madigan," he begged, "and receive
me into the fold!"
She looked down at him, self-conscious, embarrassed; yet the hidden
sentimentality of her nature was appealed to by the masculine young face
turned half laughing, half seriously, to her.
"Are you sure," she asked shyly, "that you're not one already?"
* * * * *
It is of record that one evening during that summer when the old Tomboy
mine was reopened, a young Irishman newly arrived on the Comstock
escorted down to Fitzmeier's--where, everybody knows, there is ice-cream
to be had--six girls of assorted ages, one boy, and two young persons
whose garments belied their sex. Yet they all seemed rampantly happy and
quite unashamed.