The Madigans Part 20

She took up the letter, a pretty rosy pink dyeing her cheeks (she was one of those old maids whose exquisitely delicate complexions retain a babylike freshness) as her eyes met the expression:

Anne was always a sot where her pen was concerned. The habit's growing on her; she can evidently no more resist it than Miles could the bottle.

"It must be from Nora Madigan," she exclaimed, recognizing the touch.

"Yes, it is from Nora, and it incloses one of your own. There it is."

He threw down before the ready letter-writer a composition which had cost her much labor, the thought of many days, upon which she had based unnumbered hopes and built air-castles galore, none of which, to do the poor lady justice, was intended directly for her own habitation.

She took the letter and spread it out carefully before her; these epistolary children of hers were tenderly dear to Miss Madigan. Her eye caught a phrase here and there that appeared to be singularly felicitous. This one, for instance:

Poor Francis, of course, knows nothing about this letter. I am writing to you, my dear cousin, relying as much upon your discretion as upon your generosity.

Or this one:

And Cecilia--she is really talented, though a commonplace creature like myself can hardly give you an idea in just what direction.

Or this one:

As to Irene, apart from her voice, which is really exceptional, she is Francis over again--Francis as he was, a high-spirited, reckless, devil-may-care fellow, winning and tyrannical, as we all remember him in the old days when the world was young.

Or even this:

I am afraid Kate will have to teach school, young as she is. I can't tell you how I dread the long years of drudgery I see before this slender, spirited child--she is little more than that. Think, Miles, of these motherless children growing up in this wretched hole without the smallest advantage, and, if you can, help them; or get some one else to. Couldn't you take Kate into your own family? I'm sure she'd marry well, and Nora wouldn't be troubled with her long. She's really very pretty. Or couldn't you send me a little something to spend on clothes for her? Or couldn't Nora be persuaded to send her--

"Well," thundered Madigan, standing over her, "it must be pretty familiar to you. Suppose you read what Nora says."

Miss Madigan put her own letter away with a sigh. It was really unaccountable that Miles could have resisted it.

"Miles pa.s.sed away six weeks ago,"

she read aloud in an awed voice.

"He had been ailing all spring. This letter, which came a fortnight since, I opened, of course, and return it to you that you may be made aware (if you are not already) of the demands Anne makes upon comparative strangers.

"For myself, I regret very much that your affairs are in such a bad state. Anne says that there are six of your children, all girls; but that can't be true--she always loved to exaggerate miseries; it must be that her writing is so illegible that--"

Miss Madigan's voice rebelled. She could read aloud adverse opinions upon her common sense, her judgment, or her pride, but to impugn her penmans.h.i.+p was to commit the unforgivable.

"I think Nora is distinctly insulting," she declared.

"No!" Madigan laughed wrathfully. "Do you, now? Why, what has she said?

Only that you're a beggar, and I'm a coward as well as a beggar, because I don't dare to beg in my own name."

"Does she say that?" exclaimed the literal Miss Madigan, shocked.

"Where?" Her eyes sought the letter again.

"'Where'! Thousand devils--'where'!" Madigan tore it from her and threw it to the floor, stamping upon it in a frenzy.

Sighing, Miss Madigan leaned her head on her hand. It was hard enough to find one's most hopeful appeal wasted, without Francis's flying into such a rage.

A silence followed.

"Look here, Anne,"--Madigan's voice was manifestly struggling to be calm,--"you must quit this infernal letter-writing. How could you write to Miles Madigan for charity, knowing that he cheated me out of my share of the Tomboy? Half the mine was mine. You know that, and yet you hurt my--"

"I fail to see," responded Miss Madigan, with dignity, "why I should not write to my own relatives; why I should not try, for my nieces'

sake, to knit close again the raveled ties which your eccentricities have--"

"In order to get a box of old duds sent clear from Ireland!"

"Has Nora sent a box?" asked Miss Madigan, eager as a child. "You see, my letter did touch her, in spite of herself. And they won't be old duds. They'll be handsome garments, Francis, just the thing for the girls' winter wardrobe. Now that Nora's in mourning--"

With a crash that sent Miss Madigan's sensitive-plant rolling from its stand to the floor, Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled.

Miss Madigan flew to the rescue, and she had begun to scoop up the scattered earth when her eye lighted upon a line at the end of Nora's letter:

As you know, Miles had only a life-interest in the estate. At his death everything went to Miles Morgan.

Perhaps Anne would do well to apply to him. The little matter of her never having seen him would not, of course, stand in her way.

"Of course not. Why should it?" Miss Madigan asked herself.

She knelt down upon the floor in the midst of the debris and took from her pocket the letter that Miles Madigan had never read. With the slightest change, the recopying of the first page or so, why could not--

Miss Madigan sat down at her desk. In a moment the steady, slow, studied pace of her pen was all that was heard in the disordered room, where the sensitive-plant lay half uprooted on the floor.

The Madigans were up and out. All A Street was alive with tales of them.

In a cloud of dust due to their sweeping trains, they had swooped down like the gay Hieland folk they were, and captured the admiration and imitation of the slower, prosaic Lowlander.

They had not intended to go so far, accoutred as they were; but the attention they attracted first challenged, then seduced the vain things farther and farther, till they threw caution to the winds (and a boisterous Washoe zephyr was abroad) and sallied shamelessly forth. In their immediate train they carried Jack Cody, clothed and in his right s.e.x, and Bombey Forrest, beating her drum. Crosby Pemberton slunk unrecognized in the rear.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled"]

In the van was Sissy victrix. She had cut her adorer dead, dead, dead, and she now felt that resultant reckless uplift of spirits which is the feminine corollary to demonstration of power (preferably unjust and tyrannical) over the other s.e.x.

"Let's try to see the walking-match," she suggested to Split.

"How can we, with all that tagging after us?"

With a sweeping gesture to the rear, Split indicated the trained twins and Frances holding up her torn petticoat. Frank was bruised but beaming; in fact, she had never felt so much a Madigan, for she had never before been out on a raid.

"Let 'em tag," cried Sissy, gaily; her blood was up, and she knew no obstacles.

Down a clay-bank, into a vacant lot strewn with tin cans, slid the Madigans. Their trains hampered them, and, once started, only speed could save them. But they were not Comstockers and Madigans for nothing.

Jack Cody, who had arrived first on the field, caught each whirling, dwarf-like figure as it came flying down, holding it a moment to steady it before he put it aside in order to receive the next female projectile.

Sissy was the last, and Cody, by way of flourish to mark the conclusion of his labors, lifted Split's little sister, train and all, as he caught her, with a whoop of satisfaction.