The Madigans Part 7

Lying flat on her stomach beneath the window, Sissy heard her father's voice come clanging harshly on the lighter-timbred dialogue. Cautiously she raised herself on her elbow and let a single eye peer through the curtain at the group within. There, with his paint-pot in his hand, his brush and his pipe in the other, his unique nightcap rakishly on one side and drawn over his white head to protect it from the paint, Madigan stood in his overalls and heavy shirt--his Michelangelo costume, Kate had called it. He had been regilding an old mirror in his room, and having some gilt left at the bottom of his can, he was going about the house in search of tarnished articles of virtue.

"Oh, Francis!" exclaimed his sister.

"Why, how do you do, Mr. Madigan?" said Mrs. Pemberton, bravely, putting out her hand. "I did not know you were within hearing."

"Or you wouldn't have offered the lesson? Well, give it to me, now that I am here. No, I won't shake hands; mine are all sticky with gilt." He rested his elbow on his hip and stood at ease.

A savage delight at this outrage upon gentility in Mrs. Ramrod's very presence possessed that red republican Sissy. She giggled within herself, Madigan's att.i.tude, his streaked and gilded face, his confident voice, showed such delightful indifference to the effect his unconventional attire must have upon this Priestess of Form.

"I must beg your pardon, Mr. Madigan," said that lady, in her most official tone, "for using the expression I did. The matter I wished to bring to Miss Madigan's attention--and to yours, now that you are here--concerns one of your daughters. I should have come to tell you of it before, as was my duty, as I would wish any mother to do for me were it my daughter; but I have been busy helping the Misses Bryne-Stivers and Professor Trask with this concert for to-night. This must be my apology for the delay. For speaking--for telling you what I have to tell, no mother could apologize."

"H'm!" Madigan cleared his throat threateningly, and out in the sage-brush Sissy shook with apprehension. She knew that preliminary bugle-call to battle.

"I a.s.sure you, my dear Mrs. Pemberton, we can have only the kindest feelings for any one who will take an interest in those motherless--"

"Let Mrs. Pemberton go on, Anne," interrupted Madigan, harshly. "Just what is it, ma'am? Out with it."

Mrs. Pemberton rose, rustling her heavy silks.

"Merely, Mr. Madigan, that with my own eyes I saw your daughter take part in a vulgar kissing game--the only occurrence of any kind that marred the perfect propriety of my son's birthday party."

There was a long silence inside. Sissy, without, her heart beating so loud that she was afraid it might drown all other sounds, heard, despite it, Aunt Anne's gasp of horror, the tinkle of the jet on Mrs.

Pemberton's heavy gown, the squeaking of her father's paint-spotted slippers as he shifted his weight.

Finally it came. "That ox!" exclaimed Madigan, in a rage.

Mrs. Pemberton moved in majesty toward the door. "My son," she said slowly, "chivalrously tries to take the blame from her and insists that he proposed the game himself. But I know Crosby to be incapable of such a thing."

"H'm! Yes. So do I," a.s.sented Madigan.

Miss Madigan turned to her brother, and in a voice that suggested long years of martyrdom, said: "You will send her to the convent now, Francis? You positively must now. I really admire you for the way you have discharged a most unpleasant duty, Mrs. Pemberton. For years I've insisted that Irene must--"

"Irene? Yes, if it had been Irene, one could expect it," remarked Mrs.

Pemberton, funereally.

"But it wasn't--it couldn't be--"

"It was Cecilia." Mrs. Pemberton's grief-stricken tones conveyed all the disappointment she felt.

Cecilia, on her quaking knees, now peering through the window, saw a quick change come over her father's dread countenance. It smoothed, it wrinkled, it twitched, and his shoulders began to shake silently.

"No! Sissy?" he exclaimed, with an appreciative chuckle, which made that young perfectionist outside feel seasick, as though the hillside had swelled up beneath her. "And who was the boy, might I ask?"

"It was"--Mrs. Pemberton paused to mark both her shocked surprise at Mr.

Madigan's reception of the news, as well as the further enormity involved in its completion--"my son Crosby."

"No! Ha! ha! ha!" Madigan's rare laugh rang out.

Mechanically Sissy turned down her thumb to mark the number of times she had heard it, since Split and she had made a wager on it. Inwardly, though, she was nauseated by the thought that she was being laughed at.

As nearly dest.i.tute as a Madigan could be of humor, she would so much rather have been flayed alive, she thought in the depths of her puritanical soul, than suffer ridicule.

"Crosby--eh?" Madigan was recovering. "Congratulate him for me. I didn't know the little milksop had it in him. You ought to thank Sissy, ma'am, for proving that he is not really stuffed with sawdust. Where is she, anyway?"

Lying flat, her blushing face buried in the sage-brush, was Sissy at that moment, while Mrs. Ramrod rustled out of the room, precisely as she had done the day Crosby failed in the public oral examination in geography, Miss Madigan hurrying placatingly after.

But outside Sissy wept and would not be comforted. Her purist's pride was wounded; her prudish maiden's modesty was outraged--that her own father should believe it of her! And she must not open the subject or try to alter his opinion, for fear of the ridicule which seared her very soul!

A taste for the ethereally symbolic had not strongly manifested itself in Virginia City, yet under Professor Trask's direction "The Cantata of the Flowers" had been in active rehearsal for weeks. The professor relied upon the school-children for chorus material, and upon the Madigans to fill those lieutenancies without which the spectacular features of his production must be a failure--this last as a matter of course. For there were many Madigans, and those of them that were not leaders by instinct had developed leadership through force of environment, a natural desire to bully others being not the least important by-product of being bullied. Besides, the reputation they had of being talented the professor knew to be almost as efficacious in lending children self-confidence as talent itself.

Kate, therefore, who could not sing a note, but who was grace embodied, led a chorus of Poppies, whose red tissue-paper garments creaked and rustled as they swayed, waving their star-tipped wands and chanting "Breathe we now our charmed fragrance."

Florence and Bessie, whom the curse of being twins linked like galley-slaves, were Heather-bells in a childish chorus which piped forth the information "We are the Heather-bells: list to our song," but which was almost ruined by their common desire to get away from each other and lead in two different directions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "She was p.r.o.nounced a 'regular little love' by the Misses Bryne-Stivers"]

Quite self-possessed (even if she was very much off key), Sissy, who was the best "speaker" in her cla.s.s, warbled her part of a sanctimonious little duet in which Heliotrope and Mignonette voiced the sentiment--

"'Tis not in beauty alone we may find Purity, goodness, and wisdom combined"

Even small Frances, most self-conscious of Madigans, in a costume so inadequate that Bep's doll would have been scandalized at the idea of wearing it, posed and att.i.tudinized as a Dewdrop. She was p.r.o.nounced a "regular little love" by the Misses Bryne-Stivers, whom the Madigans had nicknamed the Misses Blind-Staggers--a resentful play upon their hyphenated name, as well as a delicate reference to their blue goggles that might have served as blinkers.

For Irene, though, as the unquestioned possessor of a voice, a solo had been interpolated. She was to repeat, for the first time on the professional stage, that renowned success in "The Zingara" which school exhibitions had made famous.

Just before the time came for Split to sing, Sissy was hovering about the prima donna in the dressing-room. As Miss Heliotrope she wore the dark-purple gown which Aunt Anne had made over from her own wardrobe.

(Being Comstock-born, Sissy knew no flower intimately, and could easily be imposed upon as to their habits and colors.) Above it her round little dark face looked almost sallow, in spite of the excited red that flamed in her cheeks.

The atmosphere of a theater was like wine to the Madigans. The smell of escaping gas in the dark was, in itself, enough to transport them by a.s.sociation of ideas out of the workaday world; and emotion due to a dramatic situation was the one evidence of sensibility they permitted themselves.

Yet Sissy, who was tying the ribbons on Split's tambourine, looked in vain for a reflection of that fever of delight which possessed herself.

Split was cross. She was languid. She was dull. She did not seem to enjoy even the pair of slippers she was pulling on. They had been given to Sissy by Henrietta Blind-Staggers, and their newness and beauty had tempted the poor Zingara. But if Sissy had not felt that the family fortunes were at stake, as she always did in the matter of a public appearance, she would never have made so generous an offer of her cherished property.

"But they seem awful tight, Split," she suggested.

"They're nothing of the sort," snapped Split, wincing as she rose to her feet.

"I don't see how you're going to dance in them."

"Will you just leave that to me, Miss Cecilia Morgan Madigan, and mind your own business?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'I don't see how you're going to dance in them'"]

Deeply offended, Sissy withdrew. No one called her Cecilia Morgan Madigan who did not want to wound her to the soul and remind her of an incident it were more generous to forget. She went out to the wings and stood there looking upon the stage and Professor Trask, who, as the Recluse, was gowned in mysterious flowing black, while he chanted "Here would I rest" in a hollow ba.s.s. But Sissy was worried. Not even being behind the scenes could still her apprehensions about Split. She longed to confide in some fellow-Madigan, but Kate was on the other side of the stage, and to all her winks and beckonings turned an uninterested back.

Then, all at once, sooner than she expected, the Recluse departed, the scenes shifted; there, alone on the stage, looking white in the glare of the footlights, was a bedizened, big-eyed, panting little Zingara, and the syncopated prelude began.

Sissy's fingers thrummed it sympathetically upon her knee, but Trask, who was playing the accompaniment behind the scenes, had put an unfamiliar accent upon the notes. Out on the stage the Zingara was beating her tambourine sadly out of time and was longing, with a panicky fear, for the familiar touch of Sissy's hand upon the piano.