The Madigans Part 28

"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 role 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 cla.s.s-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 antic.i.p.ation of a feast on raw young subst.i.tute 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 cla.s.s 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 subst.i.tute might expect no mercy from her on the pitiful plea of relationship.

Bep's att.i.tude 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 subst.i.tute, 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 subst.i.tute, 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 subst.i.tute 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 subst.i.tute, firmly, "that I shall not be able to have you in my cla.s.s 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 subst.i.tute 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 subst.i.tute'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 subst.i.tute, 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 cla.s.s, with a matter-of-course air that completed the routing of Bep.

But there was still another relative in the mixed primary--Frances. For half a day the smallest of Madigans was supposed to be doing kindergarten work, with a mild infusion of the practical in the shape of a-b-c's.

It did not occur to this young lady to try to disown the subst.i.tute. On the contrary, she was exceedingly proud of her proprietary interest in the teacher. She leaned her plump hand upon that august person's knee in all the easy charm of intimacy when the baby cla.s.s gathered about her, and was so intoxicated by reflected glory that she forgot the two letters of the alphabet she was supposed to know.

There was one thing no Madigan--not even Kate--could pretend to: to be patient was beyond them all, talented as they were.

"It's 'B,' Frank!" the subst.i.tute cried, in her exasperation forgetting the dignified demeanor she had adopted. "Say 'B,' 'B,' you stupid!"

In that terrible moment Frank realized that there were drawbacks to being too well acquainted with the teacher. Her eyes filled with tears of chagrin. "'B, B, you stupid!'" she sobbed.

And a quick, clear laugh from the subst.i.tute completed the demoralization of the mixed primary. It was not, strictly speaking, "in order" when Mr. Garvan visited it.

Oh, to be out of school, at the end of that first day of adulthood! To be unwatched, to be free, to be little and young, if that pleased one!

To walk up the hill and along the main street, and then, just as one was about to turn the corner prosaically and mount still higher--then to come face to face with a creature so elegant, so visibly "dressed," that no gambler in town could outshine him. By sheer good luck, to have been introduced to this dandy in one's capacity of teacher of the mixed primary that very morning, when he had been given permission by Mr.

Garvan to make an announcement at the school concerning special privileges granted school-children at the "high-cla.s.s minstrel performance" given at Lally's Opera House. To be unhampered now by the timidities of office, and ready to pick up the gage of coquetry his saucy glance threw down. And so, after the smallest second's hesitation,--the woman in one stifling both the child's and the subst.i.tute's hesitation,--to allow the gaudy stranger to walk beside one the length of C Street. And though the sidewalk was crowded, for stocks were up, and one had to wriggle one's way through the people packed tight in front of the brokers' offices, yet, in the very teeth of the townsfolk, to joy shamelessly in flirtation with this gorgeous, shining, flattering stranger--a social outlaw, as well as a bird of pa.s.sage, the very disrepute of whose profession made temptation more subtly sweet!

"Split," whispered Sissy, her voice m.u.f.fled with shame,--it was a week later,--"Kate walked with a minstrel! What shall we do?"

"Did she? Who told on her--Mrs. Ramrod? Well," added Split, out of the depths of experience, "it must have been that day she subst.i.tuted."

OLD MOTHER GIBSON

Imprisoned in skirts, Jack Cody was awaiting his mother and relief, when there came a knock at the door, and a voice distinctly not Jane Cody's said:

"I beg your pardon, I'm sure, but your town's so jolly dark, I believe I've lost my way. I'm looking for--My word, what's that!"

A parabola of light had suddenly shot out athwart the soft black night.

It seemed to come from the hill to the left, and it was accompanied by the tinkle of shattered gla.s.s.

"It's the Madigans." Jack's voice was wistful and his gaze was turned longingly upward.

"Madigans!" exclaimed the stranger, looking in amazement from the boyish face surmounting a shapeless woman's gown to the thing it watched so yearningly--a light flaring brightly on the hill, a lot of small dancing figures silhouetted blackly against it, the smell of coal-oil, and the shrill excited laughter of children.

"Upon my soul, yours is a strange country," the man went on--"stranger even than it looks. How in the world did you know that I was looking for the Madigans?"

"Are you?" asked the boy, dully. His body might be down in Jane Cody's cabin, but his soul was up aloft there where the Madigans held high carnival.

"Yes, I am," answered the stranger, his eyes fixed upon the odd figure before him.