The Madigans Part 9

For an instant Sissy rebelled. Then she looked at the pa.s.sionate little figure sitting tensely upright, at the white fever-circle about the dry lips, at the short hair and the unnaturally bright, angry eyes. She went back to the piano, sat down, and with her foot on the soft pedal, that Aunt Anne might not hear, she began to play.

The melody was simple and light, with a little break in its sweetness.

Sissy's touch was childlike, but her impressionable temperament, quickened by the strangeness of that dark room behind her, overflowed into the melody her fingers brought out. The accompanying ba.s.s was rhythmic, and the nervous, fevered child found mental and physical occupation in letting the fingers of her left hand pick out its detail upon the pillow which she had lately thrown in a pa.s.sion against the wall because it had been so hot and she so miserably uncomfortable.

Sissy had begun the second part, the changing ba.s.s of which had been poor Split's _pons asinorum_. It was the part to which Sissy had always given a dramatic touch--partly because, it being simpler music than she was accustomed to, she could safely do so, and partly because it irritated Irene, to whom the most forthright interpretation was difficult. Her foot slipped now, through force of habit, upon the hard pedal, and in a moment she heard the whirring of Aunt Anne's skirts.

"Sissy, are you crazy, you--" she heard behind her, and then there came a sudden, an unaccountable stop.

Sissy turned. Behind and above Miss Madigan towered tall old Dr.

Murchison. He had come back, as usual, up the long flight of steps, for his forgotten spectacles. One of his hands was clapped with good-humored firmness over the lady's mouth; the other was pointing to Split, sleeping like a Madigan again, while over Aunt Anne's head the doctor nodded and bobbed encouragingly to Sissy, like a benignant musical conductor deprived of the use of his arms.

Sissy turned again to the piano. It was a beautiful opportunity for her to affect disgust with the situation; to register a silent, but expressive, exception to being compelled to entertain Irene; and to pose, not only before her aunt but before the doctor, too, as a very important personage, whose services were in urgent demand, and who yielded under protest. But as a matter of fact she was too happy. There was no misconceiving the light that illumined the doctor's round, rosy face. Something her undisciplined, childish imagination had been coquetting with, as an untried experience, though never admitting its full, dread significance, was carried out of her horizon by the shining look of success in old Murchison's face; something that shook her strong little body with a long shiver, as she realized, in the second when she could almost feel the lift of its dark wings taking flight, the thing that might have been.

So Sissy played "In Sweet Dreams" "with expression."

Later she played it, and over and over again, with the salt tears trickling down her nose and splashing on the keys; played it with tired, fat fingers and a rebellious, burning heart. But this was during Split's convalescence--a reign of terror for the whole household; for to the natural taste she possessed for bullying, Split Madigan then added the whims and caprices of the invalid, who uses her weaknesses as a cat of a hundred tails with which to scourge her victims into compliance.

She was loath to get well, this tyrannical, hot-tempered, short-haired Zingara, who led her people such a merry dance, and she left the self-indulgent land of convalescence and the bed in the big back room with regret.

THE SHUT-UPS

It was an early-morning rite practised by the twins, its performance hidden from everybody but each other, to see whether Dr. Murchison's prophecy had come true.

"There were once two little girls--twins," began the old doctor, significantly, the day Bep and Fom were vaccinated, after battling desperately against precedence, in the doctor's very office. "Now all twins love each other dearly."

The twins looked at him pityingly. To be so old and so ignorant!

"Yes, they do," he insisted. "Everybody knows they're fonder of each other than the closest sisters."

Bep glanced at Fom and Fom looked at Bep; there was something almost Chinese in the irony of their eyes; they knew just how fond of each other sisters can be! But they politely suppressed their incredulous grins.

"Well," resumed the old doctor, realizing how lacking in conviction his comparison might seem to a Madigan, "well, these twins were the exception: they did not love each other."

There was an interested movement from Bep.

"They hated each other."

Fom looked up eagerly; there was something human about such a tale. She felt her respect for Dr. Murchison reviving.

"They fought from morning till night. There was never a moment's peace when the two were together. Each was so jealous of the other that she would rather do without, herself, than share with her twin. It was disgraceful."

The twins leaned forward, charmed.

The doctor looked over his spectacles at them; there was no mistaking the effect he had produced. "Everybody warned them that unless they stopped squabbling, something dreadful would happen to them. But they never believed it till one day--"

The twins held their breath. Dr. Murchison went to the library and took out a book. He knew the value of a dramatic pause.

"--till one day they waked up in the morning and found that they were--stuck--fast--together--for life! Everything the dark one had she just had to share with her twin. And everywhere she went her lazy blonde sister had to go, too. People made up a terrible name for them. They called them"--he lowered his voice to the apologetic tone one has for not quite proper subjects--"the 'Siamese Twins,' and--if you don't believe me, here's their picture!" With a quick movement he opened the book before them.

The twins' faces went gray; in that second they even looked alike, so tense were both with the same emotion. Instinctively they made a swift motion, a dumb prayer for sympathy, toward each other; then as swiftly shuddered apart as though temporary contact might become lifelong bondage.

But as the months went by and they remained mercifully unattached (though battling still in their double capacity of Madigans and twins), they almost outgrew their credulity; yet still, on occasions, observed the morning ceremony of self-inspection.

In fact, though, nothing held them in peace together except sleep, when nature must have reunited them in dreams; for, no matter in what positions they were relatively when they closed their eyes, morning found their arms about each other, their breath intermingled, their little bodies intercurved like well-packed sardines.

On their birthday morning--the twins were born on Christmas--Fom waked very early, alarmed to find Bep's arm about her. She never remembered in the morning that at night her last hazy thought had been to reach for it, pull down the sleeve of its nightgown, and cuddle close to her twin.

She threw it from her now with unusual violence, and, sitting up in bed, slipped off her gown that she might closely examine her right side--the side that had been nearest Bep.

The blonde twin woke while this process was going on, and its dread significance shook the haze of slumber from her eyes. She, too, slipped her gown from her shoulders and, shivering with the cold, pa.s.sed an apprehensive hand along her left ribs.

"Do you?" she whispered.

"N-no. I don't think so. I--I dreamed that it was there, though. Do you?"

An a.s.senting shudder shook Bep's body.

"Where--oh, where? I don't believe it!" cried Fom. "You're just a 'fraid-cat trying to frighten me."

Bep pointed to her side. There it was unmistakably--a round black-and-blue mark.

A wail escaped Florence. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" she cried, "what in the world shall we do?"

Bep did not answer. She sat stupefied, staring at the evidence of calamity.

"If it's commenced on you, it's bound to commence on me before long. I wonder--how fast it grows?"

Bep shook her head. "It wasn't there when I went to sleep."

"If it grows on you toward me, and on me toward you that quick, why, in a week--we'll be--stuck fast--won't we?"

Bep nodded miserably.

"Some morning," mourned Fom, wriggling unhappily, "we'll wake and it'll be all done. You'll just have to study hard, Bessie Madigan, and be in my cla.s.s in school; I won't go back into the mixed primary--I just won't! Oh, Bep, why will you put your arm around me at night?"

"I don't. I always go to sleep with my back to you. You know I do. And in the morning, the first thing I know you're flinging my arm off. I believe you pull my arm over you yourself. I believe you want to get stuck together and be Chemise Twins!" Bep scolded tearfully, with her usual ill luck with unfamiliar words.

There was a sorrow-smitten pause.

"I say, Beppy," the termination was a sign of sudden good humor in Fom, "didn't you tumble down yesterday when you and Bombey Forrest were driving the Grayson kids round the block in your relay race?"

The light of hope leaped up in Bessie's eyes. "Could it be that?"

"Of course it could; it is, you silly!"