The Madigans Part 31

His enemy stood with downcast eyes, the red slowly mounting to the smoothed-back brown hair.

"Sissy's Number One in her cla.s.s," ventured Frank, as a recommendation.

"I'm not!" flamed forth Sissy. "I never was, or--or if I was it was because of--of--"

"Why, Sissy!" interjected Miss Madigan, grieved.

"Of a mistake of some sort," suggested the savior, soothingly. "Well, I suppose I could marry a girl that was only Number Two."

"I'm never Number Two--never! I'm Number--Twenty!" Sissy's eyes were raised for a moment to his--a revelation of the insulted dignity seething within her.

"Oh, well, a Number Twenty wife is good enough; but we'd have to live in Ireland, I suppose," said the savior, philosophically.

A pa.s.sion of wrath at his dullness filled the clever Sissy, and she sought for a moment before she found the weapon to hurt him.

"In Ireland, you know," she said, as deliberately as she could for fear of breaking into tears before she had delivered the insult, "the pigs live in the parlor, and--and the children have no place to sleep and--go barefooted!"

"Oh!" The savior was stunned for an instant, but he recovered. "No, I didn't know. But in Nevada, I'm told, the Indians eat Irishmen alive, and those that are left are shot down by white desperados on C Street every day just at noon! We couldn't live here, could we?"

Sissy gasped. She opened her lips as if to speak, but closed them again, and suddenly, in the instant's pause, there came an irresistible giggle from Split, already out in the hall.

Sissy's hands flew to her breast. She shook off her suitor's detaining hand and bolted.

"I couldn't help it," the savior said to Madigan, who was looking at him with that perplexed frown which the manifestation of his children's eccentricities so often brought to his face. "She is delightful. What jolly times we'll have getting acquainted! How fortunate you are, Mr.

Madigan, to have these--"

Madigan threw up his head, a challenge in his eye. Was he even to be congratulated upon his misfortunes?

"I always said," the savior went on, with a chuckle,--"in fact, I began 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 unenc.u.mbered,' 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.s.

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 pa.s.s 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 melee, 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 subst.i.tuted in a school--join in this mad revel, with an appet.i.te 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 repet.i.tion of the cla.s.sic 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 r.e.t.a.r.ding 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 bl.u.s.ter me.

"Old Moth-er--Gib-son--"

Bep stopped suddenly, for through the gla.s.s 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.