Miriam Michelson

“ The sharpness of sound when it did come, the strangeness of suppressed excitement, the unfamiliar place with Split's quick figure missing, the loneliness of being without her, the boredom of lacking a playmate or a fighting-mate—it all affected Sissy as the prelude of a drama the end of which has something terrifyingly fascinating in it. It must be wonderful to die, thought Sissy, with a swift, satisfying vision of pretty young death—herself in white and the mysterious glamour of the silent sleep. ”

“ Yet—in her heart—she knew that, though others might fall at the touch of that fearful scythe, she, Split Madigan, as fleet of limb as a coyote and as sound of heart as a young pine-cone, could never, never die; that the world could never be when her quick red blood should be quiet and her mountain-bred lungs should be stilled.
With a bound Sissy pushed the twins out of the door. She was at the bedside when Miss Madigan entered.
"Go outside, Sissy!" she commanded. "Can't you see you're exciting her? Isn't it hard enough for me to take care of her when she's so cross? She's not to be excited. ”

“ Irene's face was white and her eyes glittered. Sissy did not dare meet them, for, to a Madigan, to put a shame in words or looks was to double and triple it. She did not dare to condole; she had no heart to accuse. So she bent down again, ostensibly to tie her shoe, in order to give the furious little Zingara time to recover and to begin to undress. She heard the tambourine's tingling clatter as it was cast to the floor. ”

“ The air is like ethereal champagne in Virginia City, and on a late summer's evening, after the sun's honeyed freshness has been strained through miles of it, it has a quality that makes playing outdoors intoxicating.
Split, though, had not been playing. There was business on hand and she had been downtown to buy eggs for the picnic, with the usual result. She had never yet succeeded in bringing home an unbroken dozen, nor did she ever hope to; but she was really out of temper at the extraordinary dampness of the paper bag, to which her two hands adhered stickily. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This was better, and in a sense it was also worse; for Sissy could plainly see La Tourtillotte, a gaunt, businesslike creature in short rainy-day skirt and sweater, her long, thin arms going like pump-handles, her dark, tense face set upon a goal which seemed ever to flee before her as her weary feet carried her slowly and still more slowly around the circular track.
Despite her shocked sense of propriety,—and the lawless young Madigans had very strict ideas as to the conventions for adults,—the ardor of the struggle, the uncertainty of the issue, seized upon Sissy. ”

“ On each side would stand the miners, bowing, hat in hand, hurrahing for the great Emperor and his beautiful daughter—she who had so strangely lived among them under the name of Split Madigan. They would speak, realizing now, of certain royal traits they had always noted in her—her haughty spirit that never brooked an insult, her independence, her utter fearlessness, the reckless bravery of a long line of kings, and—and even that very disinclination for study which they had stupidly fancied indicated that Sissy Madigan was her superior! ”

“ 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 ”

“ Kate, therefore, who could not sing a note, but who was grace embodied, led a chorus of Poppies, whose red tissue-paper garments creaked and rustled as they swayed, waving their star-tipped wands and chanting "Breathe we now our charmed fragrance."
Florence and Bessie, whom the curse of being twins linked like galley-slaves, were Heather-bells in a childish chorus which piped forth the information "We are the Heather-bells: list to our song," but which was almost ruined by their common desire to get away from each other and lead in two different directions. ”

“ But after she got up there, Sissy faded out of the world. In Baldy Bob's coach Split was [Pg. 200] seized with Wanderlust. She sat erect and still up there in front, her hands clasped in her lap, her shining eyes averted from the motionless tongue below and fixed on the unrolling landscapes of the world; on plains and valleys, on villages nestling in trees and flying past, on great rolling fields of grain—perhaps a smooth, light, continuous sort of sage-brush, wrinkling in the wind as the sunflowers seem to when one looks up at the mountain from the sluice-box. ”

“ Thoroughly sophisticated are Comstock children as to the character of the masters of their masters, and Split Madigan knew how foreign to this man's nature a lovable action was. All the more, then, she valued the distinction which chance—fate—had made hers. And all the more did a something fierce and lawless and proud in herself leap to recognize the tyrant in him. Kings should be above law, as princesses were, was Split's creed; else why be kings and princesses? ”

“ I am very much interested in little Florence, and shall certainly come for her some day in my golden chariot to take her to my castle for a visit, because she is such a well-behaved child and knew me, in her childish way, for a noble lady in disguise. Cecilia? Which one is that? Oh, the one her sisters call Sissy! She needs disciplining sadly, Mr. Madigan, sadly. Much as he loves me, my father, the Prince, would not care to have me know her—as she is now. But she will improve, if you will be very, very strict with her. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Every man [Pg. 318] 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 peal of laughter burst from the Indian princess. But it ceased suddenly. For the door was thrown open with such violence that it made Jane Cody's wax flowers shake apprehensively under their glass bell, and a figure stalked out such as might haunt a dream—long, gaunt, awkward, inescapably boyish, yet absurdly feminine, now that the dark calico wrapper flapped at its big, awkward heels and bound and hindered its long legs.
Split looked from the heavily shod feet to the round, short-shaven black head, and a premonitory giggle shook her. ”

“ Madigan shut the book with a bang. The "martyring," boomerang that it had proved, was over.
The world seems new-born every summer morning in Virginia City. This little mining-town, dry, sterile, and unlovely, and built at an absurd angle up the mountain, is the poor relation of her fortunate cousins of the high Alps; yet shares with them their birthright—an open, boundless breadth of view, an endless depth of unpolluted, sparkling air, the fresh, shining virginity of the new-created. ”

“ Split Madigan had always fancied she could run. She never knew how impotent human fleetness is till she saw that lumbering coach go plunging swiftly and more swiftly away from her, across B Street, and tearing down the next hill with a speed that made her puny efforts laughable.
Baldy Bob, emerging from the saloon on the corner with that feverishly distorted view of the world due to never going back home after dinner downtown, saw his coach come down upon him as if to demand the washing so long promised. ”

“ Split breathed again, a full, deep breath of satisfaction. An Indian—she, Split Madigan? Perhaps; but an Indian princess, then, with a mission as great, glorious, and impossible as Fedalma's own.
When at last she did turn mechanically to answer the bell, she saw that Sissy had anticipated her and was showing old Professor Trask into the parlor. Ordinarily Irene loved to listen at the door while Sissy's lesson was in progress; for Trask was a nervous, disappointed wreck, whose idea of teaching music seemed to be to make his pupils as much like himself as harried youth can be like worried age. ”

“ I won't be the Recluse every time, just because you two are so greedy and—"
"You know," said Kate, smothering a giggle, but not very successfully, "no one can do it as well as you."
"And it's really a very important part, and the very first solo," chuckled Irene. "Else why did Professor Trask take it himself?"
"If it's so important," put in Sissy, grasping at a straw, "you'd better take it yourself. Why must I always take a man's part? And I can't sing, anyway."
"Why, Sissy!" Split's tone was flattery incarnate, but the irony in her eye made her junior dance. ”

“ Bep nodded miserably.
"Some morning," mourned Fom, wriggling unhappily, "we'll wake and it'll be all done. You'll just have to study hard, Bessie Madigan, and be in my class in school; I won't go back into the mixed primary—I just won't! Oh, Bep, why will you put your arm around me at night?"
"I don't. I always go to sleep with my back to you. You know I do. And in the morning, the first thing I know you're flinging my arm off. I believe you pull my arm over you yourself. I believe you want to get stuck together and be Chemise Twins!" ”

“ As he took his place at the head, his wrathful eye swept from Frances in her high chair, up along the line, past the twins, through Cecilia, Irene, and Kate, till it lighted upon Miss Madigan's good-humored, placid face. His sister's placidity was an ever-present offense to the father of the Madigans,—the most irascible of unsuccessful men,—and the snort with which he finished the inspection and took up the carving-knife had become a classic in Madigan annals long before Sissy brought down the house at the age of eight by imitating it one evening in his absence. ”

“ She held out a hand to him that was cold to the fingertips. All at once she felt so old, so [Pg. 323] 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 versatile Frank was most teachable. When Bep was "collecting bows," Frances would obligingly bow and bob for her minutes at a time, like a Chinese mandarin, or like some small priestess observing a solemn rite. What the Bad Luck was, the terrible alternative of all these precautions, poor Frank could form no idea. But she had come to associate it with the babbling tank, which seemed at night, when all was still, to be gurgling, "Bad Luck—Bad Luck!" threateningly at her. ”

“ Let's sing 'The Flowers,'" cried Irene, shaking herself into some Irish boy's jacket.
"Not much!" Sissy planted herself against the door, as though physical compulsion had been threatened.
"Oh, yes, Sissy," begged Fom. "Bep and I can sing the Heliotrope and Mignonette. Frank can be a Poppy, and we can double up and—"
"I'll be the Rose," put in Kate, quickly. She had a much-feathered hat on her head and a crocheted lace shawl about her shoulders. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Jim limped, his eyes were sore and watery, and it took him two weeks to conquer the Madigan woodpile, which any other Piute in town could have leveled in half the time.
"Him fall, eh?" he asked, dismantling the see-saw with that careful leisureliness that accounted for the Chinaman Wong's contempt for Indians.
"Not him; her, Jim."
Split possessed a passion for imparting knowledge, of which she had little, and which was hard for her to attain.
Jim grinned.
"She no got little gal like you teach her Inglis," he said, gently apologetic.
"Not she, Jim; he. How old is your little girl?" ”