The Madigans Part 19

"But I want him to play wif," whimpered Frank. She was not so slow but that she could learn the lesson Fauntleroy's success taught.

Miss Madigan looked at her a moment. "Oh, you do!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed sarcastically. "You haven't sisters enough--you want more noise and confusion in this house!"

The wise Madigans looked from her to one another and merely thought things. There was sadly little of the "angel child" about them. Their intuition was keen enough to penetrate their aunt's secret wishes and tastes, and they were occasionally tempted, for the spoils to be gotten out of it, to play up to that lady's ideals. But Aunt Anne was considered almost too easy by the Madigans, whom honor restricted to those foemen worthy of their steel. Frances was the only one who could, without losing caste, cater to her aunt's well-known and deeply detested sentimentality.

She did for a time, and it was from Miss Madigan that she learned her famous accomplishment. It was sung, or rather droned, and it went like this:

"B--A--Ba, B--E--Be, B--I--Bi-- Ba--Be--Bi; B--O--Bo, Ba--Be--Bi--Bo, B--U--Bu, Ba--Be--Bi--Bo--Bu!"

Intoxicated by success, Frank sang this subtle ditty one day for Francis Madigan. He listened to it with that puzzled expression which his children's vagaries brought to his lined, stern face.

"Who taught you that nonsense, Frances?" he demanded sternly when she had finished.

Frank began to whimper. This was not the effect she had intended to produce.

"Who told you to say that gibberish?" her father repeated angrily.

Frank stammered the answer.

"And he tooked her--" she began her account of the incident afterward.

"Oh, you awful little liar!" interrupted a chorus of Madigans.

And Frank laughed with them. How she would have completed the sentence, if she had been permitted, she herself did not know.

A READY LETTER-WRITER

Split threw herself with a b.u.mp against Miss Madigan's door. It remained unansweringly closed.

"Where's Aunt Anne?" she asked Sissy, whom she had nearly walked over as she sat playing jackstones in the hall.

Sissy looked up. a.s.suming a rigidly erect position and scholastically correct finger-movement, she mimicked her aunt at her desk so faithfully that Split could almost see the close-lined pages of Miss Madigan's ornate handwriting on the carpet where her disrespectful niece pretended to trace it.

"Scribbling, huh?" Split asked.

Sissy nodded.

Split shrugged her shoulders impatiently. She had intended to ask a favor of Aunt Anne, but she knew how useless it would be now. So she pushed past Sissy, entered the room softly, and returned with a long-trained grenadine skirt.

Sissy's round eyes opened enviously. "Did she say you could have it?"

she asked.

A m.u.f.fled sound which could be variously interpreted came from Split, who was throwing the skirt over her head.

"Did she?" persisted Sissy, putting her jackstones in her pocket and rising emulatively.

But Irene was doubling fold after fold of the skirt in front to shorten it; behind her the train billowed with an elegance that sent ecstatic thrills through her and a pa.s.sion of envy through her sister.

"Is she writing yet?" Sissy asked at length.

Irene nodded. She was cinching her sash tight about the waist, so that her trained skirt might not come off in the ardor of "playing lady."

When Sissy disappeared, and reappeared with her aunt's claret-colored poplin, Split was catching up her train with a grace that was simply ravis.h.i.+ng as she rustled away.

"What'll you say to her--afterward?" called Sissy after her, prudently facing the future, even in the height of delight induced by feeling ruffles about her feet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry"]

"Pouf!" A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry; she believed herself to be very French in long skirts. "I'll just say she said 'Yes' when I asked her.

She never knows what she says when she's writing."

Sissy nodded understandingly, and rustled in a most ladylike manner after her senior. The twins saw the two beautiful creatures swis.h.i.+ng down the front steps, bound for the street to show their glory and feel the peac.o.c.k's delight in dragging his tail in the dust.

"Did she say you could have 'em?" they shrieked.

And Sissy responded with that quick imitative gesture that signified scribbling.

With a light on their faces such as the Goths might have worn when pillaging Rome, the twins made for the treasure-house. A few moments later they rustled gorgeously down the steps, followed by Frances, wearing her aunt's embroidered red flannel petticoat. Unfortunately, Frank's heels caught in this, as she too strutted worldward, and down she fell, b.u.mping from step to step, gaining momentum as she b.u.mped, and threatening to roll clear down to Taylor Street, and so on down, down into the canon, if she had not b.u.mped safely at last into the twins.

They, hearing her coming, had turned their backs and joined hands, and catching hold of the shaky banister on each side, presented a natural bulwark beyond which Frances and her b.u.mps and shrieks might not pa.s.s.

And through it all Miss Madigan wrote.

Miss Madigan was writing letters. Indeed, Miss Madigan was always writing letters. In any emergency she might be trusted to concoct a long and literary epistle, which she rephrased, edited, and copied till she felt all an author's satisfaction.

For the Madigans' Aunt Anne was afflicted with _cacoethes scribendi_, and was never so happy as when there was a letter to be written--except when she was actually writing it. But the heartlessness of the merely literary was very far indeed from Miss Madigan's ideal. She had the happiness to believe that, besides being very beautiful, her letters were most useful--in fact, indispensable. When everything else failed she wrote a letter. When that failed she wrote another.

A Malthusian consequence of her epistolary fertility, it might be feared, would be the necessary exhaustion of correspondents. But Miss Madigan's was a soul above the inevitable, as well as a pen divorced from the practical. On those occasions when the future of her nieces pressed itself questioningly upon that lady's mind she met the threat by declaring firmly to herself that she would "do her duty to those motherless children." It happened that her duty was her pleasure. It was her dissipation to suffer--on paper. In letters she enjoyed being miserable. No relative, therefore, however distant, no acquaintance, however slight, was exempt from this epistolary plague. To take the darkest view, most genteelly expressed; to make the most forthright and pitiful appeal in a ladylike and polished phrase; to picture the inevitable and speedy alternative if her plea were disregarded; and then to sign herself, "With a thousand apologies, and the a.s.surance that only the extreme need of some one's doing something for poor Francis's children would bring me to trouble you again,"--this was Miss Madigan's vice. And she was as intemperate in yielding to it as only the viciously good can be.

A rebuff, absolute silence, even the return of her letter unopened, produced in her not the slightest diminution of faith in the power of her pen. Invariably when she mailed a letter she was so struck by her own summing up of the situation that she felt there could not be the smallest doubt of a favorable response. He who read it must be convinced. If he was not, why, there was but one thing to do--write to him again. If not to him, to another. And the Madigans were a prolific family, its members widely scattered and differentiated--an ideal clientele for a ready letter-writer.

So Miss Madigan wrote. Her wardrobe was pillaged, her privacy violated, yet she knew it not, or knew it only as one is aware of the buzzing of gnats when he rides his hobby through a cloud of them.

But there came an interruption which she was compelled to heed.

"Anne, I say!"

Miss Madigan's busy pen paused. It seemed to her that there was unusual irritation in her brother's irascible voice. Was it possible that he had knocked before, or was there--

The door opened in answer to her call, and Madigan stalked in. At sight of the open letter he held, Miss Madigan hastily covered the one she was writing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Stamping ... in a frenzy"]

"Perhaps," said her brother, suppressed rage vibrating in his voice, "it may be a change for you to _read_ letters. Read that!" He threw the page on the desk before her, banging his knuckles upon it in an excess of fury.