Chapter VI: Part 6

"Fly, the Avalanche is upon you!" was Sissy's dramatic way of warning her big sister that her suitor had been spied by the outpost coming up the steps.

And on such occasions Kate could slip out of the side door and be safely inside the Misses Blind-Staggers's sitting-room by the time Westlake's heavy step made the porch shake--and Sissy, too--with laughter. But this was before she went to open the door.

"Is your sister at home?" old Westlake asked confidently.

"Which one--Irene? Yes, she's home." Sissy's small round face was simplicity and candor incarnate.

"No," said old Westlake, uncomfortably. He had seen shrewdness once or twice behind the eyes where innocence now dwelt, and he only half trusted this demure, blank-faced child. "I mean your sister Katherine."

"Oh!" Cecilia exclaimed, in gentle surprise. "Oh, no, sir, she's out."

"Indeed!"

Old Westlake fancied he heard a mocking "indeed" that followed. In fact, an echo that had the queer effect of making him hear double seemed to accompany all his words. It came from the portières, which were suspiciously bulky, and shook as though something more than the wind moved them.

"And how soon will she be home?" he asked.

"Kate? You mean Kate? Oh, I really do not know." Sissy pronounced her words with pedantic care--a permissible thing among Madigans when adults were to be guyed.

Old Westlake (he was rather a handsome old fellow, with his regular features, his blond mustache, and prominent blue eyes) fidgeted uneasily. There must be some way, he felt, of moderating this half-chilly, half-critical atmosphere on the part of the smaller Madigans. But children were riddles to him, and the solutions his small experience offered were either too simple or too complex.

"She can't be intending to spend the whole day out?" he asked, conscious that he presented a ridiculous figure to the childish gray eyes lifted to his.

"No, I don't suppose she can," agreed Sissy. "Won't you come in?"

He followed her hesitatingly into the parlor and sat down, his eyes fixed upon the portières over the front windows, which still appeared to be strangely agitated.

"You--do you think it will be worth while--my waiting?" he asked helplessly, as Cecilia was modestly about to withdraw.

She looked up at him with the bland look of intelligence which it takes a clever child to counterfeit.

"Worth while waiting for Kate?" she asked in accents half puzzled, half reproachful.

Old Westlake blushed to the roots of his close-cropped fair hair. He fancied he heard a muffled gurgle behind the portières that wasn't soothing.

"Oh--you mean, is she likely to come home soon?" added Sissy, gravely, eying his discomfiture. "I really do not know."

"Is Miss Madigan in?" asked the desperate man.

"Why, do you call her that? I told you she was out."

"No; you told me Katherine was out. Is she in?" he asked eagerly.

Sissy stared at him stupidly. He returned her stare contemplatively. He yearned to bribe her, but he didn't dare. She looked too old to be bought, too young to understand; yet he was sure she was neither.

"Katherine, Kate, and Miss Madigan are out," said Sissy, didactically. "So are Kitty, Kathleen, and even Kathy--that's her latest; she wrote it that way in Henrietta Bryne-Stivers's autograph-album."

The visitor looked bewildered. "I asked you whether your aunt is in," he said, with some impatience.

"I beg your pardon," retorted Sissy, ceremoniously. No Madigan begged pardon unless intending to be doubly offensive thereafter. "You asked me whether my sister was in."

"Is--your--aunt--in?" demanded Westlake, with insulting clearness.

"She--is--in. I'll--tell--her--you're--here."

"Please." Westlake bit the word out, promising himself that his first post-nuptial act would be to shake this small sister-in-law well for her impertinence.

And this was the pathos, as well as the absurdity of old Westlake--he was so confident.

But he was not so confident that he did not long for an ally. And when Split stepped out from behind the portières, with a barefaced pretense of having just come through the long French window from the porch, he straightway invited her to go to the circus that evening with him and Kate.

There happened to be two sties on Split's left eye just then, and a third on the upper eyelid of the right one. But this, of course, was no reason for discouraging the overtures of a poor old man like Westlake, who, it appeared to Split, had some virtues, after all.

That evening Sissy, who was playing holey down on Taylor (a famous button-string had Sissy, as token of her prowess; it had a sample of almost every buttoned frock worn in Virginia for the past ten years), watched the three as they set out for the tent far down at the foot of the hill. And three things occurred to her, as she stood looking after them, Bombey Forrest waiting vainly, meanwhile, for her to shoot: First, that if his desire was to propitiate the clan, old Westlake had selected the wrong Madigan: Split being not nearly so tenacious an enemy nor so loyal a friend as herself. Second, that that same Split looked "like a silly" with the white handkerchief bound over her left eye, and her right one swollen and teary. She wondered, did Sissy, that they should take such a fright with them. And thirdly, the censor of the family sins made a mental note to the effect that Kate Madigan was putting on altogether too many airs as she pulled on her gloves; there was an inexcusable self-consciousness about her manner toward the Avalanche; and as for old Westlake himself, he was clearly taking advantage of Split's blindness and casting such glances at that giddy Kate as she, Sissy, would certainly not have tolerated--if she had been invited to go to the circus. If only she had!

It must not be supposed that the esthetic side of life for the Madigans was represented wholly by women's walking-matches and the circus. There was also the Tridentata.

Of course the Tridentata--the name was supposed to have something to do with sage-brush--was very select. Naturally, for it had had its origin in Mrs. Pemberton's strenuous estheticism and double parlors--possessions of which few Comstockers could boast. But after the infant literary society had learned to stand alone, it adopted migratory habits, meeting now at the Misses Bryne-Stivers's cottage, now at Mrs. Forrest's over-furnished rooms, and occasionally even at the Madigans'.

There was at least room enough at the Madigans; it was the one particular in which they were never stinted. The long, shabby parlor had sufficient seating-capacity, even if the chairs were not all, strictly speaking, presentable.

"Shall I bring in the Versiye fotoy?" asked Split on one of the occasions when the meeting of the Tridentata necessitated a real house-cleaning in which the full corps of Madigans took part.

"The Versailles _fauteuil_, Irene," replied Miss Madigan, doubtfully, "is not reliable. If I wasn't sure that Mrs. Pemberton, who has seen the real ones, would be sure to ask where it is, I'd keep it out; for the last time she came so near sitting on it while I was reading my paper on 'Home-keeping' that I got so nervous I left out all that part about the housewife's duty being, above all, to make a spiritual home: to diffuse about herself a home atmosphere, so that wherever she sat, wherever two or three gathered about her, there was the Sanctuary of the Church of Home, so to speak. And--"

"Then you want me to bring it in?" Split had too much to do to listen to Tridentata culture. Her humble office was merely to make ready for the literary feast and modest bodily refreshment to come.

It was one of the contradictions of Split's nature--her intense occasional domesticity and the practical good sense that marked her home economies. She rose now, basin in hand. Her sleeves were rolled up, her bushy hair, a troublesome half-length now, was bound up in a towel. She had been scrubbing and polishing the zinc under the stove, and she was as happy as she was executive. She flew about trilling "The Zingara," with a smudge on her chin and a big kitchen-apron tied about her waist, looking like a dirty little slavey; yet putting the mark of her thoroughness upon everything she touched and Miss Madigan overlooked.

"The big rug from your room is to go over the hole by the window?" she asked perfunctorily, being half-way through the hall at the time.

"Oh, I'm so glad you remembered it," said Miss Madigan. "Mrs. Forrest tripped in that hole the last time. I thought it was exceedingly impolite of her to call attention to it that way, because--"

"Shall I turn the couch-cover?" demanded Split.

"I don't see how you can," said Miss Madigan, helplessly. "It's worn on the other side."

But with a tug Split had drawn it off, pillows and all, and she flew up-stairs, carrying Kate in her wake to help her pull down a portière which she intended transforming into a couch-cover.

Things sentient as well as material were accustomed to doing double duty at the Madigans' on Tridentata nights. When Francis Madigan, forewarned that his bell would often be rung that evening, but that he was not expected to resent the insult, had retreated to his castle and pulled up the drawbridge behind him, the slavey, with Sissy as assistant, became doorkeeper, and, later, butler. Critics, of course, these two were ex officio; and from their station out in the chilly hall, they listened to and mocked at the literary program, which Miss Madigan had entitled, "A Night of All Nations."

The opening duet between Maude and Henrietta Bryne-Stivers they had heard before. Few people in Virginia, indeed, had not.

"Trash!" Sissy pronounced it in Professor Trask's best manner.

The reading from "Sodom's Ende," in the original, by the traveled Mrs. Pemberton, was fiercely resented by her audience outside the gates. It always made a Madigan furious to hear a foreign tongue; for, apart from the affectation of strange pronunciations, the deliberate mouthing of words (and you couldn't make Sissy Madigan believe that Mrs. Ramrod understood half of what she was reading in that guttural, heavy tongue), there was the impugnment of other people's lack of linguistic accomplishment.

The critical paper on Daudet that followed was read by Miss Henrietta Bryne-Stivers. While it was in progress the two Madigans out in the hall each read an imaginary paper on the same topic, finishing with that identical courtesy which Henrietta had imported from Miss Jessup's school in the city. But Split tripped Sissy as she was bowing over low, and she fell, as softly as she could, to the floor. Miss Madigan looked out with a "S--sh!" Sissy cast off all blame in virtuous dumb-show, and in the pause the two heard Dr. Murchison's voice as Henrietta passed him and the door, on her triumphant way back to her seat.

"Allow me to compliment you, Miss Henrietta," said the old doctor, pleasantly excited by so youthful a lady's literary discrimination. "You are really fond of Daudet, then?"

Henrietta blushed. "Oh, no, indeed, doctor!" she said deprecatingly. "At Miss Jessup's we girls were not permitted to read him, you know."

"Ah, I see," murmured the doctor. "Only to write about him?"

"Miss Jessup thought it was more--fitting, with the French authors," observed Henrietta.

"So it is," agreed Murchison, dryly. "So it is. The excellent Miss Jessups--how well they know!"

"He's guying her," chuckled Sissy, making a mental vow to read Daudet or die in the attempt. "And she doesn't know it."

"Hush!" came from Split.

In a tenor a bit foggy, but effectively sympathetic, old Westlake was singing, "Oh, would that we two were maying!"

Sissy put her eye to the crack of the door, and Split, watching her, saw her round face grow red and indignant.

"What is it?" she whispered, squirming till she too had an eye glued to the crack.

"Look!" exclaimed Sissy, disgustedly.

Straight in their line of vision sat Kate, and upon her old Westlake's eyes were ardently fixed as he sang.

"It's--it's not decent," declared Sissy, wrathfully.

"He does look like a calf." Split grinned. Kate looked very pretty in that white cashmere embroidered in red rosebuds, which had been made over from the box from Ireland, Split said to Sissy, and so was deserving of forgiveness, she hinted; for when one had a new frock--

Sissy, the sensible, snorted unbelievingly. What gown had ever affected her?

"But I'll get even with him," she said, stealing on tiptoe down the hall. "Just you watch!"

Split, her nose in the crack of the door, watched. The Avalanche had finished his first verse and begun the second, when Sissy appeared in the parlor, very modest and retiring, walking behind chairs and effacing herself with an ostentation that could not but attract all eyes. She stopped at Miss Madigan's chair, asked a question,--which Split knew well was utterly irrelevant and immaterial,--and received an answer in Aunt Anne's company manner: a compound of sweetness and flustered inattention which no one could mimic better than Sissy herself.

Then she withdrew, slowly and by a tortuous route which brought her just beside him at the moment Westlake stopped singing. Without a word, yet with a gracious instinct for the momentary confusion in which the performer found himself, his seat having been taken while he sang, Cecilia pulled out another from the wall and moved it slightly toward him.

The little attention was offered so naturally, with such engaging demureness, that Mrs. Pemberton--whom the social amenities in children ever delighted--almost loved Sissy Madigan at that moment. So, by the way, did Split, out in the hall, her eye at the crack of the door, her feet lifting alternately with anticipative rapture. For it was the Versailles _fauteuil_ that Sissy had so sweetly selected for old Westlake. And when the big fellow came down to earth with a crash, rising red and confused from the debris, Sissy was already out in the hall. She arrived at the crack in time to see Kate stuff her handkerchief into her mouth and hurry to the window, her shoulders shaking, while Miss Madigan flew to the rescue.

It took a recitation in Italian by Mrs. Forrest to rob Sissy Madigan, judge and executioner, of her complacency after this. Then Aunt Anne recited "The Bairnies Cuddle Doon" charmingly, as she always did, but most Hibernianly, with that clean accent that makes Irish-English the prettiest tongue in the world. After which she received with smiling complacency the compliments of Mrs. Forrest, who told her that an ideal mother had been lost to the world in her.

Outside, two cynics listened with a bored air. They felt that they required a stimulant after this, so they made a hurried visit to the dining-room, thereby escaping Mr. Garvan's reading of "Father Phil's Collection." But when Henrietta Bryne-Stivers delivered "Blow, Bugle, Blow," changing from speaking voice to the sung chorus with a composure that was really shameless, the critics out in the hall received that insulting shock which novelty inflicts upon the provincial, which is the childish, mind. They revenged themselves in their own way, mouthing and attitudinizing, caricaturing every pose which Miss Henrietta had been taught, by the instructor of Delsarte at Miss Jessup's, was grace. They were caught in the midst of their saturnalia of ridicule by Kate, who promptly exploded at their uncouth, dumb merriment.

"Aunt Anne wants you, Sissy," she said when she got her breath.

In an instant Sissy was sobered. It wasn't possible that she was to be sent to bed before supper! To be a waiter was the height of happiness for Sissy.

"It's because of the Versiye fotoy," giggled Split, as she ran off to the dining-room.

"It isn't, is it?" whispered Sissy to Kate. And Kate shook her head reassuringly, and waved her in. She couldn't answer audibly, for Dr. Murchison was tuning up his sweet old violin, while Maude Bryne-Stivers offered to accompany him on the piano.

But Murchison knew too much of the manners and methods of Jessup's Seminary, as revealed by its showiest pupil.

"Thank you, thank you, Miss Maude, but this is a very old-fashioned and a very simple entertainment I'm going to give. Just the things that I play to myself when I'm weary of listening to humanity tell of its ills and aches--the egotist! Then I look down into the beautifully clean inside of my fiddle, its good old mechanism without a flaw, and listen to the things it has to tell.... Thank you, just the same, Miss Maude; this is not a theme worthy of your brilliant rendition, but, as I said, a simple, old-fashioned playing of the fiddle. I'll supply the old-fashioned part, and Sissy here can do the simple accompaniment, if she will."

If she would! Sissy was so gaspingly happy and proud that she forgot even to pretend that she wasn't. Seating herself, she let her trembling fingers sink into the opening chord, while the old doctor's bow sought the strains of "Kathleen Mavourneen," of "Annie Laurie," the "Blue Bells of Scotland," and "Rose Marie."

The unspoken sympathy that existed between these two flowed now from the bow to Sissy's fingers, and made a harmony as pretty as was the sight of the old man and the happy child looking up at him. Sissy Madigan was conscious that the doctor knew her--almost; that, nevertheless, she occupied a place quite unique in his heart. And she loved passionately to be loved, this hypocrite of a Madigan, who jeered and jibed at any demonstration of affection. A sense of being utterly at harmony with the world possessed her now; the fact that she was "showing off" was far, far in the background of her consciousness, when all at once she happened to glance out through the hall door.

She had left it ajar behind her, expecting Kate to follow her in. But Kate, evidently, had not followed. She stood out there alone with Mr. Garvan, her arms behind her, her slender figure drawn up beneath the swinging hall lamp, her pert little head, circled by the braids she wore coiled clear around it when she wanted to be very grown-up, upturned to the master, her every feature stamped with coquetry.

Sissy shut her lips firmly--and the wrong note she struck marred the doctor's finale. It was evident that Kate Madigan needed looking after.

* * * * *

She did; and yet no one but Kate and those she experimented upon could help her to find herself.

A wilful Madigan, intoxicated with her first taste of a new pleasure, was Kate. She had outgrown her short skirts with regret; she was preparing to make them still longer with delight. She had the maturity of her motherless and quasi-fatherless state to add to the natural precocity of the mining-town girl, and of the eldest sister who has been pushed out of her childhood by the press of numbers behind her. And yet the wine of romance kept her almost babyishly young. She had a way of proclaiming the fact that she read everything her father did. (Madigan, marooned by his misfortunes in the most picturesque setting, where men were living the most picturesque lives, turned his back upon it all and found the action his dull days were denied in the elder Dumas.) By this Kate intended to show how proud and unrestrained a Madigan was; hoped, too, perhaps, that there might attach a bit--the least bit--of suggestive license to the phrase. And all the while she was pitiably unconscious of how innocuous the old romanticist's tales of adventure may be, read in translation, by the light of such purity and innocence as hers.

But she was pert, was Kate, and piquant; she presumed upon her youth, upon her age. She was a child when you expected her to be a woman, and a woman where you looked for the child. No dream of romance was romantic enough to hold her fickle soul constant to it--to satisfy the hopes of her heart. Every man she met was a prince; yet was he, too, bare and poor and mean compared with The Man to come. The child in her was gauche and crude, sitting in judgment--as cynical, as critical a spectator as Sissy herself--upon the very hopes the woman awakened. In her eyes the flash of coquetry was succeeded by the blank, childish irony which denied the emotion hardly passed. She loved to shock pretense, yet she was the most absurd and innocent of pretenders, for the terms in which convention speaks were Greek to her. She was masterful, being a Madigan, and daring and impertinent. A creature utterly impatient of forms, with a boy-like chivalry, revealing how incomplete the work of sex was yet, for the woman misunderstood--whom she, in her crude purity, understood least of all. This was Kate, ready, at fifteen, to battle single-handed with windmills, with world-old problems, with world-young prejudices; to burn intolerance to ashes in the white flame of her brave young innocence; to cry aloud the word that older, wiser cowards whisper or stifle in their hearts; to make no compromise; to know that black is black and white is white; to be unforgiving, as only cruel young inexperience can be; to flame at a wrong and glow at its righting; and yet to have her contradictions cased in a body of such vivid grace, a mind leavened by humor, and a heart of such sweetness as made her the irresistibly lovable Pretense she was.

Pretending to be a child, to annoy her Aunt Anne; pretending to be a woman, to infuriate her younger sisters; pretending to be a saint, pretending to be a sinner; pretending to scorn the world, yet quaffing its first sweet draughts of individual power and experience with full-opened throat; pretending to be mannish--driven to that extremity by the super-femininity of Henrietta Bryne-Stivers; pretending to be frivolous, to shock rigid Mrs. Pemberton; pretending to be a blue-stocking with a passion for the solid and heavy in literature; pretending to be a Spartan who must rise at dawn and, after a plunge in ice-cold mountain water, climb, with only big Don, the Newfoundland, for company, up to the sluice-box; there to pretend she was an esthete to whom the sunrise, while she communed alone with nature, revealed things invisible to the world below.

But Reality's day came. Miss Madigan went out into the future, sent thither by her auntly sense of responsibility, and brought it back with her. It led them straight to Warren Pemberton's office, and Pretense fled like a shy shadow before the sun when Reality looked at her through Pemberton's cold, dull eyes.

"Miss Madigan, Mr. Pemberton. My niece Kate," was the lady's introduction as they entered.

The red-faced, heavy little man, too important a personage to be expected to contribute socially to the life of the town, had been looking at Miss Madigan as though he knew he ought to remember having met her. She wanted something, of course. Everybody wanted something from Warren Pemberton, King Sammy's viceroy, in charge of his mining interests and his political plantations. But he brightened at the formula, recollecting having heard it before from the same lady's lips, and promptly placed her in the category of small political favors.

"I remember you, Miss Madigan--of course," he stammered. "Remember the little girl, too. Crosby's flame, eh?"

Kate flushed, struck dumb with the insult, and her black-gray eyes gleamed handsomely with anger. After getting herself up in her most mature fashion to be mistaken for Sissy!

"Why, Mr. Pemberton," exclaimed Miss Madigan, flustered by propinquity to greatness, "this is Kate, the Miss Madigan who--for whom--"

"Oh, excuse me." Pemberton sat rubbing his chin and silently blinking at the Miss Madigan for whom his influence had been invoked. She felt he was weighing her youth and inexperience against the thing that had been asked for her. And the Madigan in her fiercely resented it; was tempted to confirm his doubts by a saucy flippancy that would relieve her impatience of a false position. But there was that other Madigan in her to be reckoned with, that new one, on the reverse of whose shining, romantic shield a plain, dull, tenacious sense of duty was slowly spelling itself into legibility.

"Kate's really very clever, Mr. Pemberton," said Kate's aunt, tactfully; and the girl's teeth clicked together, in her effort to control her irritation. "And in some ways she is much older than her years. She will graduate, you know, this year at the head of her class; she passed first in the examination, and really, in a family where there are so many girls--"

"Yes, yes, I know," interrupted the great man. "You told me all about that, and I--"

"And you've had time to realize just how extraordinary a creature I am and how pitiful a case ours is! Am I too brilliant altogether to be wasted on school-teaching?" Wrath tingled in Kate's voice. She heard Miss Madigan's gasp of horror, and could imagine the fishy disconsolateness of her expression. And she saw the red-faced little man opposite her start, as at the injection of a foreign tongue into the interview.

"Eh--what? Oh, yes," he said dully. "I mean--no. It'll be--it's all right."

"Oh, Mr. Pemberton, how can I thank you!" Miss Madigan clasped her hands.

"Yes; I spoke to Forrest yesterday, and--and, of course, Murchison's willing," went on the little man, gravely. "But there's no vacancy just now, so they'll arrange to appoint substitutes. It's the way they do in cities, I understand. And Miss Cecilia here will be--"

"My name, Mr. Pemberton, is Kate!"

"And Kate's exceedingly grateful." Miss Madigan gazed amazed at her niece; she didn't look grateful.

"Not at all; not at all," murmured Pemberton, feeling for his papers helplessly. "I'm so busy--"

"It--is good of you," stammered Kate, rising. "I am--very much obliged to you." She held out a hand to him that was cold to the fingertips. All at once she felt so old, so young, so niched forever in a somber, gray life, so settled, so bound up by small formalities, so miserably unlike a Madigan!

* * * * *

Yet the Madigan in Kate waked with a defiant brightness when the first call came that took her temporarily over the threshold of the new life. She left her own school-room, where her rôle was as congenial and irresponsible as Sissy's, with an air of importance that roused envy in her mates' hearts.

The very pretense rallied her, excited her, inspired her to continue to pretend after she had left her audience behind her. And though she entered the lower class-room, of which she was to have charge for a day, with a terrified feeling of being thrown to the lions, she faced the undisciplined mob that licked its lips in anticipation of a feast on raw young substitute with a flash in her eye that promised battle first.

And she did make a hit at the beginning, thanks to her sister and present pupil, Bessie, who was invariably late to school.

To Bep, the aspect of her own sister in a position of authority was the hugest absurdity, and when the blonde twin sauntered in, tardy, as usual, she joined the class as one of the lions. She intended to give Kate distinctly to understand that she was mixed primary pupil first and a Madigan afterward; that the substitute might expect no mercy from her on the pitiful plea of relationship.

Bep's attitude was very Madigan; the only drawback to it was that it left out of the reckoning the fact that she had a Madigan to deal with.

"Elizabeth Madigan," said the substitute, in the clear, high, formal tone that, in itself, was sufficient to sever all bonds of kinship, "where is your excuse for being late?"

Bep's blue eyes blinked. The impudence of Kate to talk that way to her!

"I ain't got any. Miss Walker never--"

"Miss Walker isn't teaching to-day," remarked the substitute, in the patient tone which the enlightened have for dullness. "She is ill and I am teacher here. Where is your excuse?"

Bep felt the silence grow around her. She saw the whole school drop its mirth and its employments to watch this duel between Madigans.

"Why, you know very well, Kate Madigan--" she began hotly.

A sharp ring on the bell at the teacher's desk cut Bep's eloquence short. "If you have anything to say to me, little girl, you will address me as Miss Madigan."

The audacity of it struck Bep dumb. Call that slim girl Miss Madigan? She'd like to see herself!

"You will go home, Elizabeth," the substitute continued, unconcernedly making her way to the blackboard as though this life-and-death affair were a mere incident in her many duties, "and bring me back a written excuse for your tardiness."

Bep set her teeth. "You know I had to go an errand for Aunt Anne; you saw me yourself," she muttered.

"A _written_ excuse, I said."

"I can't get any." Yet Bep rose. She felt the ground slipping from under her.

"Then I am sorry to say," remarked the substitute, firmly, "that I shall not be able to have you in my class to-day. Leave the room, Bessie.... Now, children, the first thing to do in subtraction--"

Bessie walked slowly up the aisle and toward the door. With the prospect of a double disciplining, at home and at school, too, she dared not rebel. Yet wrath smoldered within her. She came to where the substitute stood at the board, calmly explaining the process of "borrowing," and the resolution to regard her as an undeserving stranger was tempered by Bep's desire to inflict an intimate, personal insult.

"I wouldn't be so afflicted as you," she growled under her breath, like a small Mrs. Partington, misapplying her big word in her wrath, "for all the world. And I'll get even!"

A gleam of quite unofficial laughter lit the substitute's eye. "You mean 'affected,' my little girl, not 'afflicted,'" she said clearly, pausing pedagogically, chalk in hand. "Look up the difference in your dictionary, and if you can't understand, come to me and I'll explain it to you--after you bring your excuse."

And Bep brought her excuse. The substitute, her cheeks glowing with excitement, yet calm-voiced and pretending valiantly, saw the door open nearly an hour later, and a hand thrust through waving an envelop, as though it were a lightning-rod that might attract the storm of her wrath away from the one who carried it.

Gravely, even encouragingly, Miss Kate Madigan read a prayer from Miss Anne Madigan that the teacher would kindly excuse the tardiness of Elizabeth, her niece. She placed it on file religiously, like a confirmed devotee to red tape, and resumed her lesson to the baby class, with a matter-of-course air that completed the routing of Bep.

But there was still another relative in the mixed primary--Frances. For half a day the smallest of Madigans was supposed to be doing kindergarten work, with a mild infusion of the practical in the shape of a-b-c's.

It did not occur to this young lady to try to disown the substitute. On the contrary, she was exceedingly proud of her proprietary interest in the teacher. She leaned her plump hand upon that august person's knee in all the easy charm of intimacy when the baby class gathered about her, and was so intoxicated by reflected glory that she forgot the two letters of the alphabet she was supposed to know.

There was one thing no Madigan--not even Kate--could pretend to: to be patient was beyond them all, talented as they were.

"It's 'B,' Frank!" the substitute cried, in her exasperation forgetting the dignified demeanor she had adopted. "Say 'B,' 'B,' you stupid!"

In that terrible moment Frank realized that there were drawbacks to being too well acquainted with the teacher. Her eyes filled with tears of chagrin. "'B, B, you stupid!'" she sobbed.

And a quick, clear laugh from the substitute completed the demoralization of the mixed primary. It was not, strictly speaking, "in order" when Mr. Garvan visited it.

* * * * *

Oh, to be out of school, at the end of that first day of adulthood! To be unwatched, to be free, to be little and young, if that pleased one! To walk up the hill and along the main street, and then, just as one was about to turn the corner prosaically and mount still higher--then to come face to face with a creature so elegant, so visibly "dressed," that no gambler in town could outshine him. By sheer good luck, to have been introduced to this dandy in one's capacity of teacher of the mixed primary that very morning, when he had been given permission by Mr. Garvan to make an announcement at the school concerning special privileges granted school-children at the "high-class minstrel performance" given at Lally's Opera House. To be unhampered now by the timidities of office, and ready to pick up the gage of coquetry his saucy glance threw down. And so, after the smallest second's hesitation,--the woman in one stifling both the child's and the substitute's hesitation,--to allow the gaudy stranger to walk beside one the length of C Street. And though the sidewalk was crowded, for stocks were up, and one had to wriggle one's way through the people packed tight in front of the brokers' offices, yet, in the very teeth of the townsfolk, to joy shamelessly in flirtation with this gorgeous, shining, flattering stranger--a social outlaw, as well as a bird of passage, the very disrepute of whose profession made temptation more subtly sweet!

* * * * *

"Split," whispered Sissy, her voice muffled with shame,--it was a week later,--"Kate walked with a minstrel! What shall we do?"

"Did she? Who told on her--Mrs. Ramrod? Well," added Split, out of the depths of experience, "it must have been that day she substituted."

OLD MOTHER GIBSON

Imprisoned in skirts, Jack Cody was awaiting his mother and relief, when there came a knock at the door, and a voice distinctly not Jane Cody's said:

"I beg your pardon, I'm sure, but your town's so jolly dark, I believe I've lost my way. I'm looking for--My word, what's that!"

A parabola of light had suddenly shot out athwart the soft black night. It seemed to come from the hill to the left, and it was accompanied by the tinkle of shattered glass.

"It's the Madigans." Jack's voice was wistful and his gaze was turned longingly upward.

"Madigans!" exclaimed the stranger, looking in amazement from the boyish face surmounting a shapeless woman's gown to the thing it watched so yearningly--a light flaring brightly on the hill, a lot of small dancing figures silhouetted blackly against it, the smell of coal-oil, and the shrill excited laughter of children.

"Upon my soul, yours is a strange country," the man went on--"stranger even than it looks. How in the world did you know that I was looking for the Madigans?"

"Are you?" asked the boy, dully. His body might be down in Jane Cody's cabin, but his soul was up aloft there where the Madigans held high carnival.

"Yes, I am," answered the stranger, his eyes fixed upon the odd figure before him.

"Well, there they are," the boy said, pointing upward to the grotesque dancing shadows.

"Eh?--I beg your pardon, I--I don't understand. Just what has happened?" asked the stranger.

"Nothin'," said Jack. "The lamp gets tipped over when they're playing Old Mother Gibson, and they just throw it out so's not to set the house afire."

"Every night?" asked the man, in the polite tone strangers adopt in striving to fathom a local mystery.

"Nope," said the boy, in a matter-of-fact tone. "They can't play it every night; sometimes their aunt won't let 'em."

"You appear to know them." There was a smile hidden beneath the voice; but Jack was thinking, not of the questioner, indistinguishable in the darkness, but of the mad carnival up yonder on the hill.

"Yep. That's Split," he said. "That one--see--with the bushy lot of hair, singing and cake-walking in front. She can do a cake-walk better'n any nigger I ever see."

"Indeed!"

"That's Frank, the baby--the one that's screamin' so. You can tell her squeals; they're laughin' ones, you know."

"I suppose I ought to know. Anyway, I'm glad to be told."

"Over on the side there, where there's a kind of blotch, is the twins; they must be fighting. Don, the dog, 's mixed up in it somehow."

"My word!" exclaimed the man, softly, to himself.

"That's Kate dancing round on the porch, and the one standing high-like, right next to the fire, with her arms up stiff, as if she was running the whole show, sort of--of--"

"A priestess, say, invocating the Goddess of Kerosene!"

"Huh?--Well, that's Sissy."

"Oh, is it? Tell me--is she nice--Sissy?"

"What?" asked the boy, so surprised that he withdrew his attention from on high and stared out at the man on the door-step.

There came a laugh out of the darkness. "It is an odd question, but then everything is so odd out here, I half hoped you wouldn't notice it. But you do know them, evidently. I wonder--do you mind going up there with me and showing me the way?"

But his last question had suddenly recalled to Jack Cody the reason why he wasn't at that moment one of the dancing black figures on the hill. The boy looked from his mother's wrapper to the man's face, growing more distinct now, out on the door-step, and the amused expression he saw there his sore egotism attributed to a personal cause. So he promptly slammed the door in the man's face.

There was an instant's pause out in the blackness, made denser now that the candle's light from the cabin was cut off; then a short, nonplussed laugh.

"Miles, old chap," the young man was saying to himself, as he turned cautiously to jump from the stoop and mount the hill, "this is Bedlam you've fallen into--this mad little mining-town ten thousand miles off in a brand-new corner of the world, all hills and characters! Now, what might be the sex of that animal you were talking to? And what in the name of peace are these Madigans? Are they the ones you're look--Steps, as I value my immortal soul!" he exclaimed, rubbing his shin where he had struck against the wandering Madigan stairway. "It would not have surprised me, now, if I had had to climb that hill on my hands and knees, and stand on my head when I got to the door, to knock at it with my heels!"

* * * * *

Miss Madigan's demeanor was beautiful to see. Just a bit--oh, the least bit of I-told-you-so in her manner, but also a generous willingness to postpone the acceptance of apologies due to one long misunderstood, and to take for granted the family's obligation.

"The estate must be worth at least ten thousand a year," she confided in her delighted perturbation to Frances, as she curled her hair. And Frank looked up at her, soulful and uncomprehending, and a bit cross-eyed, for the curl dangling down over her nose. "He'll marry Kate, of course--I had no idea he was so young. He'll just be the savior of the whole family. It's a providence,--Miles Madigan's dying when he did,--and wasn't it fortunate that Nora sent my letter back?... You will be good at the table, Frances, and show cousin Miles how nicely you can use your fork?... He is practically a cousin.... Have you washed your hands?"

"Hm-mm," murmured Frank, mendaciously. And then, as Aunt Anne appeared to doubt her word, "Just you ask God if I haven't," she suggested solemnly, carefully putting her hands behind her.

But Miss Madigan had no time to put questions to so distant an authority. She had Wong to placate--Wong with his wash-day face on, grim, ill-tempered, hurried, defying the world to put even the smallest additional burden on his shoulders on Monday. And Miles Morgan just arrived from Ireland!

And Francis talking to him in the library, in that distant, watchful, uncompromising way of his, that was just as likely as not to send the young man off in a huff.

"One needn't insult a man just because he's rich and a relative!" Miss Madigan's exclamation was uttered aloud unconsciously, so excited was she. It ended with a gasp, as Sissy collided with her on the way from peeking through the half-open library door at her father and his guest.

It was the bedroom, Kate's and Irene's, that Sissy was bound for; for there, in solemn conclave, the junior Madigans were assembled, waiting for their scout's report.

"He's big--but not so big as the Avalanche," she began the moment she had shut the door behind her and faced the questioning eyes that commanded her to stand and deliver. "He's straight, too, but not so poker-stiff as Mrs. Ramrod. He's got a big haw-haw voice, and scrubs every word he says with a tooth-brush before he says it. His hands are as white--as white; and they're cleaner than Crosby Pemberton's. He's got a tan shirt on, plaited in front, and every time Aunt Anne moves he's up like a jumping-jack till she gets sat down again. He says 'My word!' and 'in the States'--like that. He's got a mustache the color of your hair, Split, a scrubby, stiffy little mustache. His eyes are little twinkling things, and I believe--" she paused in her indictment to give the criminal the benefit of the doubt--"I do believe he had gloves on when he first came! I won't be sure; but, anyway, I hate him."

A gratified sigh rose from the Madigans assembled. It was good to have definite information, to know that this Miles Morgan was hatable. For the Madigans loved to hate any one who could put them under obligations--when they did not spend their very souls in a passion of gratitude to him. But for this interloping, distant relative from foreign shores they were prepared. They were ready to outrage him, to throw his patronage in his teeth, if he dared offer it, to out-Madigan the Madigans, if that were necessary; to disgust him and satisfy their pride, wounded by the insolence of his prosperity. Yes, it was good to hear Sissy's frank declaration of war. For war was as the breath of the Madigans' nostrils. They knew themselves there, and, though they might have trusted Sissy, they had feared for a moment that her report might not be all they had hoped.

"We'll show him," said Split.

"A patronizing, affected Irishman!" snorted Sissy, informally now that her official duties were ended.

"He thinks he'll come out here and run the whole family," said Fom, aggrieved.

"And show off how rich he is, and turn up his nose at things," said Bep, "and boss us. I'd like to see him try it!"

"And be shocked at what we don't know, and what we do do, and what we haven't seen and learned. I dare him just to say 'abroad' to me!" cried Kate, with a flash in her eye.

A chorus of groans went up from the indignant assemblage.

"Aunt Anne," put in Frank, a bit puzzled, "says he's the savior of the fam'ly. What's a--"

"The savior of the family! The savior!" mocked Sissy, genuflecting sarcastically. "The savior of the family will have you sent to a convent, Split, 'where young ladies are taught to behave properly.' The savior'll get a nursemaid for you, Frank, and you'll have to go about always holding her hand and wearing socks in the English style that'll show your bare, naked legs and--"

"I won't! I won't!" Tears of terror stood in Frank's eyes.

"The savior'll put a stop, Fom, to your--Kate Madigan, are you changing your dress?" Sissy's voice fell suddenly, and she put the question in a calm, magisterial tone that sent every eye in the room on a query toward the eldest Madigan.

Kate turned at bay. She had slipped off her waist, and the red was flushing her long throat and small, spirited face. "Well, miss, suppose I am?" she demanded hotly.

"She always changes her dress for dinner, you know," came in a sarcastic sneer from Split. "She wants to show our dear cousin how swell we are. We all wear low-necked rigs, and father has his swallowtail, and--"

"Shall I bring you the curling-iron, Kathy?" mocked Sissy.

"Don't you want a rose for your hair, Kathleen?"

"Or a ribbon here and there, as Mrs. Ramrod says, Kitty?"

"Aunt Anne says," said Frank, feeling that this was some sort of game and that her turn had come, "he's going to mawwy you. Is he, Kate?"

The white cashmere with the red-embroidered rosebuds slipped from Kate's hand. All innocent of malicious intent, Frank's shot had scored. The cry of the Pack that leaped about her could not touch Kate after this. She was frozen in by maidenly prudery, by childish self-consciousness, by Madigan perversity. When the bell rang she went in to dinner in her old pink gingham, her head high, her lips set, her eyes unseeing.

"She's got 'em," Sissy whispered to Split.

"Yep, that's the sulks all right," Split nodded.

"This is Kate." Miss Madigan, brave in her new purple gown with the lace collar at her throat, shot a reproachful glance at the unadorned young lady of the house. "Your cousin, Miles Morgan, Kate."

"Howd' ye do?" Kate said coldly, ignoring his outstretched hand and passing on to her seat, where she began busily to serve the butter.

The savior of the family looked after her, interested. Though guilty of every count in Sissy's indictment, he was not accustomed to being overlooked by such very young ladies.

"And this is Irene," said Miss Madigan, a tremor in her voice; she, too, knew now that Kate "had 'em." "This one is Cecilia; the twins, Bessie and Florence; and Frances, the baby."

The savior of the family glanced along the line of five blank faces, and felt the perfunctory touch of five small, slippery hands with nothing more human about their clasp than the childish masks above them.

"I say, how do you tell one another apart?" he asked, with a sudden gleam in his eye, as they passed him and slid into their places.

A dozen pitying eyes looked coldly at him; half a dozen small mouths curved disdainfully. His remark seemed to make them more than ever like mechanisms--hostile ones.

Miss Madigan dropped the soup-ladle in her confusion. To that experienced lady there was something ominous about so unbroken a union of Madigans; she remembered with sorrow the few times any subject had found them unanimous.

But Madigan came in just then, took his seat at the head, looked mechanically for the banished dog and the cat, and Dusie, chirping madly in her cage to attract his attention to the fact of her cruel and unusual imprisonment. He cleared his throat and took up the carver--and immediately Miles Morgan was conscious of an unbending of the small Madigans--a cuddling together, so to speak, and a swift interchange of impressions.

"You haven't given me an opportunity to explain, Miss Madigan--" he began, in the pause during which Madigan carved strenuously.

"'Aunt Anne,' if you please, my dear boy," urged Miss Madigan, warmly. "The relationship's distant, but now that you are with us we can have no ceremony out here in the wilds."

"Oh, thank you." The savior, turning toward her, saw the fattest little Madigan nudge her red-haired neighbor savagely. She was evidently angry at something. "It's good of you to take me in like this. What I want to say is that the train was late crawling crookedly up and around the mountains. I had no idea of arriving in the evening and coming in upon you this way. But when I got here, the town looked so savage, don't you know, so--drear--and desolate and--and flimsy, I got a bit home-sick--there! The thought of all you people, my own people, housed somewhere in the spraddling town, called to me. I positively couldn't wait till morning. You'll forgive me--Aunt Anne?"

A suppressed gurgle came from a blonde Madigan on the other side of the table, choking over her soup at this endearment. A brunette just her height spoke rapidly to her and persuasively, but to no avail. Alarming sounds came from the victim till presently a very dignified, small fat person rose from her seat, made her way to the nearly suffocated blonde, gave her a thump between the shoulder-blades that brought tears of another variety to the sufferer's eyes, and walked composedly back to her seat.

"How can you be so rough, Sissy!" Aunt Anne exclaimed in an agitated voice.

"Ah--Sissy!" The savior leaned forward, looking across with a smile in his eye that might have melted any heart save so savage a Madigan's. "So you are Sissy."

"My name," said that young person, meeting his smiling eye coldly, "is Cecilia."

"But your friends call you Sissy?"

"Yes, my friends do," admitted the perfectionist, with an accent that was supposed to be crushing.

"And you sign yourself so in your letters?" he went on pleasantly.

"My letters?"

"Yes; your informal little notes, you know."

Sissy laid down her spoon. A sudden distaste for eating, for living, for breathing had come upon her. She had forgotten her postscript to that unhappy letter; it was all so long ago, and Aunt Anne's letters never had had a sequel! But before her now the savior's head seemed to bob up and down sickeningly, while a voice cried in her ears so loud she fancied the whole table must hear it:

"You--whoever you are--needn't bother to answer this.
None of us Madigans wants your help or annybody else's.
It's only that Aunt Anne's got the scribbles, and we'll
thank you to mind your own business.

_"Sissy Madigan."_

The savior threw back his head in a quite boyish way and laughed aloud as he watched her face.

A cold rage seized Sissy. To be laughed at before the whole table! She hated him; she knew she hated him!

"I don't understand," said Madigan, feeling called upon to say something that was not vituperative at his own dinner-table. "You could never have seen a note of Sissy's, Mr. Morgan?"

"Never." The savior lied like a gentleman.

But he was mistaken if he supposed that he had placated Cecilia. She would not even meet his eyes, those eyes that twinkled so enjoyingly.

The savior tried Irene.

"You and I have hair the same color," he said genially. "I hope your temper isn't like mine, too."

"I hope not," she answered stiffly.

He laughed again, that big, amused laugh. Split's eyes shot fire. Evidently the Madigans were funnier than they knew.

"Now, I wonder," he said, "would that be a compliment or a confession?"

"Irene is trying and succeeding better every day in gaining self-control," interposed Aunt Anne, with hasty amiability. To discuss Irene's temper in committee of the whole, like that--the temerity of the man! "Won't you have some more mutton?" she pressed. "It's wash-day, you know, and it's just a pick-up dinner; but we're so glad to have you, if you'll excuse--"

"The apology's due from me, you know," he interrupted. "And the good fortune's mine, too. Fancy me dining the evening of my arrival at that brick barn they call the hotel down yonder! It will be hard enough when I really have to live there."

"You do not surely expect--" began Madigan, pausing over his strawberries.

"To live 'out West'? Will you let me tell you how it happened, Mr. Madigan? There isn't much to it--just this: Miles Madigan, as you know--do you know?--was not the man to leave much behind him. Not that he'd deliberately wrong a fellow, poor old chap, but--well--oh, you understand! Well, when his solicitors got through subtracting and dividing and subdividing, the heir--one Miles Morgan, bred to do nothing, and with a talent for that profession, I must admit--found himself poor, with just enough to live on. The ten thousand a year had--just slipped through Miles Madigan's fingers."

"Oh!" Miss Madigan's voice was sympathizing, disappointed.

"Then"--it was Frank's clear treble; she hadn't understood much, but she knew what "poor" meant: a Madigan learned that early--"then you're not going to mawwy Kate?"

Kate went white, while Miss Madigan's delicate face flushed purple, and Split pinched Sissy's arm, in her excitement, till that young woman cried aloud.

"Frances--outside!" stormed Madigan.

"Oh, Mr. Madigan--please!" deprecated the savior, holding out his arms to the whimpering Frances, who jumped into them as to a refuge. "No, little girl," he said, bending down to reassure her, "I'm going to marry Sissy; that's why I came out here."

A gasp of relief parted Kate's trembling lips. She was very near being fond of the detested savior in that moment, in her gratitude to him for not having looked at her.

But oh, the disdain of Sissy! It was such a very poor joke, in her opinion. Her round little face with its dots for features looked so sour and supercilious, as she passed the savior with averted eyes on her way out of the dining-room,--the children were withdrawing now,--that he could not resist putting out a hand to stop her.