The Madigans Part 25

Wasn't it enough to have a reckoning with Madam Pemberton at the end of his day, without having that precious time utterly spoiled? He felt like turning back. Sissy knew well that there could be no picnic for him within the pale of her displeasure. The mountain air might be never so sweet with the wild sage perfuming it; the sun striping the shadowy town below with b.l.o.o.d.y bands might be never so promising; the mountain's peak, soft and deceitfully near, might be never so tempting--with Sissy chattering gaily in advance, ostentatiously ignorant of his very existence, the glory was cut out of Crosby's morn. It seemed, too, to him that he had never been so fond of her. His mother's disapproval of this Madigan since a certain episode (to avenge which cruel Sissy's thirst could never be slaked) had put the last touch to his devotion.

That matron's pleasure in their intercourse hitherto had been the one drawback to his delight in it. In his eyes, his inamorata walked now with the crown of the forbidden upon her haughty little head; and that Crosby was more of a natural boy than his effeminate tastes indicated is proven by the fact that he loved Sissy far more for this than for being "the good one" his mother had once thought and proclaimed her.

At the sluice-box which circles Mount Davidson, bringing the purest of water from a mountain lake, the party halted and was joined by other brave mountaineers, big and little; the latter in calico skirts, and s.h.i.+rts and knickerbockers. Bombey Forrest was the only one who came under neither of these heads. She was a slender slip of a girl whose mother, to the scandal of conventional folk, believed that for the first decade or so of child-life the boy's costume is fitter than the girl's.

So Bombey wore a knickerbockered sailor-suit with a broad collar and white braid; wore it with a bit of a conscious air, yet with that grace which long use and habit lend; with piquancy, too, for she was the least masculine of girls in mind and manner, and her delicate face with its golden curls bloomed like a flower on a strange stalk, above the a.s.sertive masculinity of her attire.

It was to Bombey that Crosby Pemberton turned for solace. (Split had promptly deserted him for Kate, whom she suspected of a contemptible desire to cut loose from the Madigans as children, and join the older members of the party.) He had not had the courage to forgo the picnic, though he knew his mistress well enough to be sure that by the end of the day he would realize that that course would have been the least painful. He carried Bombey's basket, like the little gentleman he was; not in the division-of-labor fas.h.i.+on, from which Cody's and Sissy's jangling buckets extracted a sort of cow-bell music as they ran merrily along, far in advance.

Cody spied the two below when he and Sissy sat down to rest on a huge boulder. Jack never knew how to treat Bombey Forrest, always feeling that the most decent thing to do was not to look at her. Despite his own bitter and recurring experiences (which, one might fancy, would have made him tender to the vicissitudes of s.e.x as warranted by clothing), something in him felt outraged and resentful at the sight of her.

"Look at the girl-boy and the boy-girl!" he sneered. "See how they poke along. They'll never get to the top."

Sissy's shoes were hot and dusty. The strong odor of sage-brush was in her nostrils. Her skirt was torn, and the short-stemmed desert-lilies she held in a moist hand were wilted. But she was happy, for she was outdoing, she was pretending, and she was punis.h.i.+ng. The only thing that detracted from her pleasure was to be obliged to concur in Cody's opinion. That roused her perversity. She loved to lead or to oppose--not to agree.

"Let's go on," she said imperiously. "What are you stopping for?"

As the sun climbed higher, the mountain's top got farther and farther away. But Cody, who had scaled not only its summit, but the flagpole that tipped it, knew its habit of piling one small hill up behind the other, as though, like a grotesque Gulliver playing a practical joke, it delighted in fatiguing and disappointing the Liliputians that swarmed up from its base. Crosby and Bombey and the twins, with the Misses Blind-Staggers,--blinder than ever to-day for the glare on their blue goggles,--had yielded long since. They were camping patiently in a ravine far below, where a tiny spring hinted at dining-room conveniences. The rest of the party, with Irene revenging herself upon Kate's disloyalty by sticking like a burr to that young lady (whom, Split thought, Mr. Garvan was treating altogether too much like a young lady), was close on the vanguard's heels. And Sissy and Cody, panting now, but toiling doggedly on, had reached the cool little cup-shaped hollow in the cone where the snow lies.

From here to the top was but a few minutes' run. Cody was all for halting and snow-balling the party as it came up, but Sissy was too exhausted to stop now.

"We'll rest at the top of the hill," she decided impatiently, and hurried him on, both a bit out of temper.

No beauty of winding river and peaceful valley checkered with fields of grain, no low-lying gardens and climbing forests, reward the scaler of the heights behind the Comstock--only the bare little brown town far down, digging tenacious heels into the mountain's side and propped up with spindle-shanked foothold, the great white inverted cones of steam rising from the mines, the naked and scarred majesty of the gray mountains all about, the desert gleaming like a lake in the east, and Washoe Lake gleaming like a desert in the west.

Yet Sissy held her breath. Something in the still purity of the air, the savage grandeur of the mountains, the great arch of liquid blue above her, caught and held her impressionable spirit. She stretched out her hands--a small, petticoated Balboa--to the world she had discovered.

"It--it makes you want to scream," she stammered.

"Booh!" It was a yell from Cody, delivered full in her ear. "If you want to scream, darn it, scream!" was his practical advice as he spat out the sunflower-seeds he had been chewing and prepared to climb the pole.

Sissy stood looking at him, the color flooding her face. And as he noted her expression, the boy suddenly remembered that he did not like Split's sister. But his mild memory of distaste was as nothing to the disgust that possessed Sissy. In her ecstasy she had unwittingly lifted a corner of the lid that she kept tight over her emotions. Logically, she hated the unimpressed and profane witness of the phenomenon.

She turned her back on him, refusing even to look at his progress up the high pole. She would not see when, at its top, small as a fly at the point of a pencil, he waved his hat and, ululating bra.s.sily, gave vent to the desire to be noisily vocal which had clutched Sissy's throat into silence. At luncheon, she found a spot that was farthest from him; and when he and Split tore noisily down the mountain's side on the way back, she submitted rather to be outdone than to join a party of which he was one.

Crosby Pemberton, bracing himself for the derision he expected from her, was delighted to see her come sliding down alone to the ravine, where the successful ones paused to take up the rest of the party. Her solitary state encouraged him, and he sought her where she sat knocking the sand out of her shoe.

"Sissy," he said softly, holding out a peace-offering, "I saved some cream-puffs for you."

But the ruthless Sissy was not to be so easily placated. "You mean for Split, don't you?" she said, scarcely looking at him, and diligently lacing her shoe. "She asked you to come, you know. I didn't."

With the look of a wounded dove, Crosby turned, and Sissy saw Irene a moment later, her teeth gluttonously closed over one of Delia's biggest puffs, a heart-breaking amount of "filling" gus.h.i.+ng over her cheeks and chin.

But to do without for the sake of principle was ever rapture to the purist. Sissy placed the pangs of desire to the credit side of Crosby's account; this was only one thing more she owed her victim. In fact, as the party started on, so engaged was she in inventing and perfecting tortures for him that she followed the procession on its unusual detour without demur. It was only when it was too late that she saw Bullion Ravine ahead of her, and the swaying high trestle over which the flume is carried.

Split's malicious face as that most sure-footed of Madigans touched the first plank made Sissy realize the test to which she was to be put. Her terror of giddy heights was treated as an absurd affectation by the steady-headed Madigans, and as such requiring discipline, which, with truly sisterly foresight, Split had provided. She ran across now with the joy of a thing that feels itself flying. Jack Cody turned a handspring in the very middle; and the sight so nauseated Sissy that she had to stand aside and let those immediately behind her pa.s.s first. Yet she dared not remain till the last, for a panicky picture in her mind showed her to herself paralyzed forever on the brink. As she put her foot on the first board, beneath which she could hear the running water chuckling and gurgling as it ran, she swore to herself that she would not look down. And, indeed, she did keep her eyes on Crosby Pemberton's straw hat, as he walked some distance in front of her. But the moment his foot touched the ground on the other side, the light structure, relieved of his weight, changed its rhythmic swaying, which had measured the steady strength of his step. Its rebound, exaggerated by Sissy's tense nerves, seemed sickeningly high; its fall ghastly low. Swung there from mountain to mountain, its slender supports looked frail as a spider's woof, and seemed to tremble with every gasping breath she drew.

In spite of herself, her eye caught the silvery glitter of the thread of water far below in the stony bed of the nearly dry creek.

It was all over with Sissy. Trembling with terror, she sat down, clutching the edge of the board beneath her, the world swimming away before her shut eyes, just as it did when one looked too long through a knot-hole at the flowing race in the flume beneath.

Irene's giggle came faintly to her; she was too terrified to resent it.

The murmur of voices that called her name, encouragingly, warningly, angrily, was not so loud as the chuckling of the water in the box which seemed to hurry her senses away. She lived through years of agony, in which she found herself wis.h.i.+ng that she could only fall and end it.

Then she felt the trestle bound beneath her, and she was waked by the touch of Crosby's hand.

"Get up!" he said in a tone of command that reminded her of that grenadier his mother.

She opened her eyes and saw that his face was white, but the glitter of determination in his eyes was so new and curious that it held her attention for the moment necessary to give her strength to obey. He almost pulled her to her feet, and then half dragged, half ran with her across. Yet within ten feet of the end, the trembling of his hand had communicated itself to her whole body. She watched the drops of perspiration fall from his pale face and, fascinated, followed them down with her eyes. Then wrenching her hand from his, she almost fell down again. It seemed to her her head swayed back and forth with such force as might bear her whole body with it, and she squatted down, s.h.i.+vering.

It was a most humiliating finish to an exciting adventure, for when he strove to compel her again to rise, Crosby found that terror is contagious. He himself dared not stand. He squatted down in front of her, and on all fours the two crawled toward the bank. Sissy could have kissed the earth when her hands touched it.

But it took her some time to recover. The sympathetic fussing of the Misses Bryne-Stivers she endured as in a dream. She even permitted Mr.

Garvan to take her hand and help her walk for a time. But when they reached the first house and had turned down Taylor Street, she was so thoroughly herself that she contrived to let the rest pa.s.s her, and she rested till Crosby came up. She was walking beside him, with a sudden flattering kindness that almost turned his head, when he looked in the direction in which her eyes were fixed, and saw his mother in her phaeton pull up and beckon to him.

He looked shyly at Sissy. He would have given much to be told that this forgiveness was not to be merely temporary, like others that had preceded it whenever Mrs. Pemberton might see and disapprove; that he was no longer to be flouted and scorned when there was n.o.body but Sissy herself to be glad of it.

"The shadow of the guillotine is over you!" said Sissy, in a bombastic whisper addressed to Mrs. Pemberton--a comforting formula the Madigans had invented to still their envy of those who rode in carriages. But her smiling face, when it turned toward Crosby, had no threat in it.

Relieved, forgiven, reinstated,--for there was a promise without words in his tyrant's good humor,--Crosby laughed out gaily. At that moment he had no more fear for Madam Pemberton than for the invoked Madame Guillotine.

"S' long, Sissy," he cried, waving his basket to her as he went, a young aristocrat, to meet his fate.

That night Sissy said her prayers in a rush. She wanted to give her undivided attention to plans of revenge on Split.

KATE: A PRETENSE

The lesser Madigans meant to stand no nonsense from Kate. Other girls'

big sisters had been known to a.s.sume superiority as their skirts lengthened, and to imply an esoteric something in their experience which younger sisters could not comprehend, and privileges which they might not share. But for them, the Madigans, though they were graciously willing to count Kate out of such outdoor sports as were incompatible with lengthened skirts, she might come no pretense of young-ladyhood over them. They were on the watch for the smallest affectation, the least sentimentality; and as for beaus per se--just let Kate try it!

Kate did, being human, a Comstock girl when girls were in a delightful minority, and a Madigan. But, realizing the argus-eyed watch put upon her, and the forthright methods of her sister Madigans, she tried it secretly.

To be sure, there was old Westlake,--he was at least thirty-five years old--whose intentions were quite apparent. He came up to play whist at the house whenever he was in town, upon which occasions Kate was always his partner; and he scolded her with the same proprietary freedom for leading a "sneak" suit as Francis Madigan did his sister--a lady who was never known to know what was trumps, and who smiled and blinked and blushed and made the same mistakes over and over again with a complacency that Madigan's fiercest thumps upon the table could not shake.

But the Madigans forgave Kate her Westlake, for the pleasure she took in guying him, and the loyal frankness with which she let them into all the moves of the game. He was "The Avalanche" to her and to them, because of his avoirdupois, his slow movements, and the imperviousness to a joke with which he was credited; because he could not take in all the little infinity of homely facetiae in which the Madigans lived and had their being. Besides, it was pleasant and exciting, being leagued with Kate against Aunt Anne, who was known to have positively had the indecency to speak openly upon the subject, and in favor of it, to her oldest niece!

"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!"