The Madigans Part 5

"Very pretty; very pretty, indeed!" said Mrs. Pemberton, absent-mindedly. "Now play another little waltz."

"Aunt Anne says, Mrs. Pemberton," put in Irene, entering, "will you come to her room?"

Mrs. Pemberton rose, her deft hands still calling forth the perfection of fruit from the stubborn linen soil upon which Sissy could make nothing grow, and sailed across the hall. Crosby immediately jumped from his chair.

"I say, Sissy," he cried, "I know an awful swell way to cut paper-doll dresses."

Sissy looked at him. For all her sins (and in a hidden corner of her heart that she rarely looked into, she knew herself for the hypocrite she was, despite all her self-righteous pretense) this girl-boy's devotion was her punishment. She did not envy Split her successes; in fact, she often disapproved the methods by which they were attained. Her pride would permit her neither to make such conquests, nor to enjoy them when they were made; but she cursed her fate that Crosby Pemberton had fallen to her share. For the love of a really bad boy Sissy felt she could have sacrificed much--for a fellow quite out of the pale, a bold, wicked pirate of a boy who would say "Darn," and even smoke a cigarette; a daredevil, whose people could do nothing with him; a fellow with a swagger and a droop to his eyelid and something deliciously sinister in his lean, firm jaw and saucy black eye--a boy like Jack Cody, for instance, for whom a whole world of short-skirted femininity divided itself naturally into two cla.s.ses: just girls--and Split Madigan. But that a forthright, practical, severe person like herself should be made ridiculous by Crosby's worship, and that Split, her arch-enemy, should be there to hear her adorer make his s.e.xless declaration, was too much!

Even a Madigan could not bear up under it. When Sissy looked from "Miss Crosby" (as the very girls who played with him called him) to Split, there were tears of rage trembling in her eyes.

But, with a generosity suspiciously unlike her, Split ignored the signal of distress. "What time this afternoon will the party begin, Crosby?"

she asked.

"Oh, two o'clock. But you'll come early, won't you--Sissy?"

Sissy did not answer. She was waiting to see what Split's next move would be.

"I don't know that I can go," said Split, gently. "I haven't any gloves--unless--won't you ask father for some, Sissy?"

There was a prompt refusal upon Sissy's lips, but she did not utter it; the Pembertons' visit had given the enemy too much material with which to regale her fellow-Madigans at the dinner-table in the evening. Sissy looked questioningly into Split's eyes, and silently the bargain was struck: to so much refraining from ridicule in public on the part of one, a certain indebtedness which the other might discharge by facing Francis Madigan with a demand for money. It was hard, but Sissy shut her teeth and got to her feet.

"Can I come with you, Sissy?" asked Crosby, following her to the door.

"If you'll let me have your tissue-paper and the scissors, I'll show--"

Sissy's hands flew to her breast. "I wish--I wish you'd never speak to me again!" she exclaimed, and Crosby dodged as though he were apprehensive that she might beat him.

"It's so kind of you to go the very minute I ask," giggled Split, gleefully.

But Sissy shut the door behind her on Crosby's woeful face and Split's radiantly happy one, and went to her fate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Of the design and construction of which he was quite vain"]

Francis Madigan's room was his castle. It was his castle and his workshop and his boudoir, his kitchen, his library, and his pantry in one. The laxness of the family housekeeping had led him to distrust all hands and heads but his own. Everything that he wanted, or that he might want in the near future, he kept under his eyes, within reach of his hands, where none might borrow or lose or destroy. In order to provide for the needs which grew and changed daily, he fitted up rude shelf above shelf, till the corners of the room were transformed into rough bric-a-brac stands. Mr. Madigan had the unsuccessful man's pride in trifling successes in amateur carpentering, in husbandry of any sort unrelated to the real issues of his life; and every tool he needed for the exercise of his skill he kept under lock and key. He believed in, he trusted no Madigan. He had been known to lend his penknife to Sissy, but that was when she was ailing long ago. He laid in supplies as though he had inside information of a famine near at hand; and his pipes and his great cans of tobacco were piled up with his cards and his books on the table where he played solitaire all day and read half the night. The sweets he liked occasionally, and the day's provision of fruit (for he ate fruit only and at this time looked upon a vegetarian as a coa.r.s.e creature who belonged to a dead era), were packed in a small home-made pantry of the design and construction of which he was quite vain. His bed swathed in sheets; his blankets sewed securely together, as though he feared they might escape; a device all his own of great wooden wedges raising the lower end of the mattress so that his feet were on a level with his pillowed head; the chest of little drawers which his daughters called "father's hobby," nailed high on the wall and filled with all sorts of odds and ends, the detritus and possible repair-material of years of housekeeping--all this Sissy took in with the unseeing eyes one has for the familiar.

She did not expect her father's room to be like any one else's; neither did she look for an easy and successful termination to her quest.

Sometimes she got what she asked for, but she asked for little. And to-day Francis Madigan had been tinkering at the old house, hammering here and patching there, a process that specially tried his temper, being a threatening indication of change, which he resented by declaring that "everything goes to the devil."

"Father," began Sissy, carefully, as she met his inquiring eye, "do you approve of dancing?"

He looked up from his cards. "What nonsense are you talking now?"

"Because Irene and I have a good chance to practise it--dancing--this afternoon."

"Well--practise," he growled.

"Shall we? All right. It's Crosby's party, you know. He's thirteen to-day. It's his party. His mother's giving it for him at Cooper's Hall.

And there'll be dancing and--"

"Nonsense!"

"Yes," agreed Sissy, sweetly. "But we'll go if you say so. I won't need any dress, and--" she hurried on as he raised his head belligerently, "neither will Irene. Isn't that lucky? My brown will do, though the over-skirt does jump up when I dance and show the red sham underneath; but--"

"What are you bothering me about, then?" he demanded indignantly, throwing down his cards.

"Gloves," she said gently. Then quickly, before he could speak, "That's all. They don't cost very much. Or, I'll tell you,"--her voice grew suddenly most cheerful, as though she had made a discovery that must delight him,--"we can wear mitts. I don't mind--and neither will Split.

Just a pair of blue lace ones for her and pink for me, or--or--" her voice wavered, but she was ready to pay the price, "just blue ones for Split, father."

He put his hand in his pocket. "Why not just pink ones for Sissy?" he asked almost good-naturedly.

Sissy shook her head, but the red rushed to her cheeks. She had won!

"Are you sure you need them?" he asked cautiously in the very act of bestowal.

"Sure! Sure!" she cried, throwing her arms gratefully about his neck before she danced to the door.

"But you're going, too?" he called after her. "All right, then. Make Irene behave. She's an ox--that girl."

An ox, of course, interpreted variously according to Madigan's mood and the correlating circ.u.mstances, signified this time an indiscreet, pleasure-mad child. Sissy understood, and she blushed for her sister. In fact, she was always blushing for her sister. She considered it to be her duty formally and officially to disavow her senior. So reprehensible did she feel Split's conduct to be that some one must blush for it; and as blushing was not Split's forte, Sissy did it for her.

And she really did it very well, with an a.s.sumption of chagrin that could not fail to call attention subtly to the contrast between the sisters. When Split failed in her lessons with a completeness, a sensational ostentation that was shocking to Sissy, that Number 1 scholar blushed gently, and, discreetly lowering her head, became absorbed in her work. After school, when Split was being kept in and disciplined (a process which never failed effectually to discipline the hardy individual who attempted it), when she wept and stormed and raged and threw caution to the winds as only tempestuous Split could, then was Sissy's att.i.tude a marvel of disapproving rect.i.tude. She had a great deal of dignity, had Sissy, and the picture of holiness that she presented as, with her books on her arm, she walked past the desk where the sobbing sinner's head lay with tumbled curls and bloated face, came as near as anything could to quench the pa.s.sion of tears in which Split's tempers culminated. On such occasions the infuriated Split was wont, for just a moment, to conquer the half-hysterical sobs that threatened to choke her as well as inundate the world, and make a face at Saint Cecilia as she pa.s.sed holily by. But Cecilia was a Madigan always, as well as a saint temporarily, and her eyes were turned prudently away just then, as though she were already studiously pondering to-morrow's lesson.

But Sissy blushed her most perfect disapproval when she played chaperon to her elder sister. It was a position for which she felt herself peculiarly fitted, even without the semi-official commission she held--a position which so conscientious a person could not regard in the light of a sinecure.

As she danced only the more sedate dances, because of that obtrusive tendency of the red sham to her skirt, Sissy was able to chaperon her senior all the more effectively at Crosby Pemberton's party. Irene danced like a thing whose vocation is motion. She was a twig in a rain-storm, a b.u.t.terfly seeking sweets, a humming-bird whose wing beat the air with a very rhapsody of rhythm. She was on the floor with the first note Professor Trask struck, and she danced down the side of the little hall, when the waltz was over and all the other couples had seated themselves, as though the meter of the music had bewitched her feet and they might nevermore walk soberly.

"Split--don't!" It was the shocked voice of her young chaperon.

"Sissy--don't!" mocked the mutinous Split.

Even after she took the seat beside Sissy, her heels were lifted and the toes of her slippers were beating time. She sat there chattering to a group of boys buzzing about her, upon whom her high spirits had the effect that dance-music had upon herself.

"You're the prettiest girl I've seen since I left the city, Irene,"

patronizingly whispered the boy lately from San Francisco, whose metropolitan elegances had dazzled the eyes of the mountain maidens.

"I wonder how many girls Will Morrow's said that to this afternoon!"

came like a sarcastic douche from Sissy, who conceived it to be a chaperon's duty to take the conceit out of citified chaps.

Young Morrow turned to find a small woman in brown eying him disdainfully.

"Well--well, I never said it to you, anyway," he retorted gallantly.

"Good reason why. You knew I wouldn't believe you," Sissy declared, floundering in her anger.

"Neither would anybody else."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The Belle of the Afternoon"]