The Madigans Part 2

This pose was the signal that freed the feminine Madigan tongue. Usually they all broke into conversation at once; but on this evening there seemed to be some agreement which held them mute till Irene spoke.

"I am glad to see you be so patient with papa, Sissy," she said gently.

His third daughter glanced apprehensively at Madigan. But her father had retired within his sh.e.l.l, and nothing but a cataclysm could reach him there.

"Why--" she said, puzzled, "why--I--"

"Promise me that you'll try to stand him," urged Split, joyously.

"And that you'll help me control my temper, and not mock and aggravate me when I sulk," chanted Kate.

Sissy dropped her knife and fork, and her hands flew to her bosom, not in wrath, but in terror. The crackling testament was gone!

"Split! You--"

"Try to bear with me, won't you, Sis, even if I am a devil?" grinned Split.

"And set us a good example, Sissy," piped the twins.

Sissy gasped.

"Be a yittle muvver to Fw.a.n.k," lisped the baby, prompted by a big sister.

"And don't steal candy out of my pocket, will you, Cecilia Morgan?"

begged her oldest sister.

"And--"

Sissy sprang into the air, as though lifted bodily by the taunts of these ungrateful beneficiaries of her good intentions.

"Sit down, you ox!" came in thundering tones from the head of the table.

When one was called an ox among the Madigans the culprit invariably subsided, however the epithet might tend to make her sisters rejoice.

But Sissy had borne too much in that one day--always keeping in mind the perfect sanct.i.ty with which she had begun it.

With an inarticulate explanation that was at once a sob, a complaint, and a trembling defiance, she pushed back her chair and fled to her room. Here she sobbed in peace and plenty; sobbed till tears became a luxury to be produced by a conscious effort of the will. It had always been a grief to Sissy that she could never cry enough. Split, now, could weep vocally and by the hour, but all too soon for Sissy the wells of her own sorrow ran dry.

Yet tears had ever a chastening effect upon the third of the Madigans.

In due time she rose, washed her face, and combed back her hair and braided it in a tight plait that stuck out at an aggressive angle on the side; unaided she could never get it to depend properly from the middle.

This heightened the feeling of utter peacefulness, of remorse washed clean, besides putting her upon such a spiritual elevation as enabled her to meet her world with composure, though bitter experience told her how long a joke lasted among the Madigans.

She fell upon her knees at last beside her bed. No Madigan of this generation had been taught to pray, an aggressive skepticism--the tangent of excessive youthful religiosity--having made the girls' father an outspoken foe to religious exercise. But to Sissy's emotional, self-conscious soul the necessity for worded prayer came quick now and imperative.

"O Lord," she pleaded aloud, "help me to keep 'em all--even Number 10--in spite of Split and the devil. Help--"

She heard the door open behind her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The Rest of the Madigans"]

With a bound she was in bed, fully dressed as she was; and pulling the covers tight up to her neck, she waited, to all intents and purposes fast asleep.

"You little fool!" said Madigan, with a hint of laughter in his heavy voice and laying a not ungentle hand on her blazing cheeks. "D' ye think I care if you want to kneel and kotow like other idiots? If you're that kind--and I suppose you are, being a woman--pray and be--blessed!"

It was the nearest thing to a paternal benediction that had ever come to Sissy, but she was too wary a small actress to be moved by it out of her role. Nor did her father wait to note the effect of his words. His heavy step pa.s.sed on and out of her room into his own, and the door slammed between them.

In a moment Sissy was up; in another moment she had torn off her clothes, blown out her candle, and jumped back into bed. She was almost asleep when the twins came in, but she feigned the deepest of slumbers when Bessie pushed a crackling piece of paper under her pillow, though her fingers closed greedily about it as soon as the room was quiet again.

She knew what it was--her precious compact with herself, that loyal little Bep had recaptured from the enemy. She lay there, lulled by its presence; and slowly, slowly she was dropping off into real slumber when a sharply agonizing thought, an inescapable mental pin-p.r.i.c.k, roused her. It was Number 9. She had not touched the piano during the whole of that strenuous day.

She withdrew her fingers reproachfully from the insistent reminder of virtuous intention, and resolutely she turned her back on it and tried to pretend herself to sleep. But every broken section of her treaty had a voice, and above them all clamored the call of Number 9 that it was not yet too late.

When Sissy rose wearily at last and draped the Mexican quilt about her, the house was quiet. All youthful Madigans were abed, and the older ones were in secure seclusion.

It was a small Saint Cecilia, with a short, stiff braid standing out from one side of her head, and utterly without musical enthusiasm, that sat down in the darkness at the old square piano. "La Gazelle" was out of the question, for she had no lamp and she did not yet know the trills and runs of her new "piece" by heart. But the five-finger exercises and the scales that it had been her custom to run over slightingly while she read from a paper novel by the d.u.c.h.ess open in front of her music--this much of an atonement was still within her power.

With her bare foot on the soft pedal, that none might hear her, Sissy played. It was dark and very quiet; the hush-hush of the throbbing mines filled the night and stilled it. At times her heart stood still for fear that she might be discovered; at other times the longing for a sensational uncovering of her belated and extraordinary goodness seized her, and her naked foot slipped from the cold pedal only to be hurriedly replaced before the jangle of the keys could escape.

How long she practised, and whether she redeemed herself and Number 9, Sissy never knew, for she fell asleep at last over the keys and was waked by a hoa.r.s.e scream and a wild cry of "De debbil! De debbil!"

It was Wong, the Chinaman, who had but one name for all things supernatural. Coming home from Chinatown, he was pa.s.sing the gla.s.s door near which the piano stood when he saw the slender figure in its trailing white drapery bowed over the keys.

Sissy looked up, sleep still bewildering her, and yet awake enough to be fearful of consequences. She tore open the door and sped after the Chinaman to enlighten him, but her pursuit only confirmed Wong's conception of that mission of malice which is devil's work on earth. A terrified howl burst from him. There was only one being on earth of whom he stood in greater awe than the thing he fancied he was fleeing from; that one, logically, must be greater than It. Taking his very life in his hand, he doubled, darted past the s.h.i.+vering Thing, flew on through the open door, and made straight for the master's room.

For Sissy there was nothing to do but to follow.

"I wanted to be good," she wailed, unnerved, when Aunt Anne had her by the shoulder and was catechizing her in the presence of a nightgowned mult.i.tude of excited Madigans.

But succor came from an unexpected quarter. "Let the child alone, Anne,"

growled Madigan, adjusting the segment of the leg of woolen underwear which he wore for a nightcap; and seizing Sissy in his arms, he bore her off to bed.

"Papa's pet! Papa's baby!" mouthed Irene, under her breath, as she danced tauntingly along behind his back.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Seizing Sissy in his arms, he bore her off to bed"]

And Sissy, outraged in all the dignity of her eleven years at being carried like a child, but unspeakably happy in her father's favor, looked over his shoulder with a sheepish, smiling, sleepy face, murmuring, "Sour grapes, Split, sour grapes!"

Afterward, encouraged by the darkness and the strangeness of being laid in bed from her father's arms, Sissy held him a moment by her side.

"When men make promises on paper that they can't keep, father," she whispered, "what do they do?"

"Oh, go to sleep, child! They become bankrupt, I suppose."

"And--and what becomes of the paper?"

"What do you know or care about such things? Will you go to sleep to-night?"

"If you had any bankrupt's paper," she pleaded, catching hold of his hand as he turned to leave her, "what would you do with it--please, father!"