Part 10

With an agility commendable in one so round, Sissy dropped beneath the piano, and, whipping off her apron, proceeded to wipe the dust from the back legs of the instrument with it. This done, she rammed the apron up between the wall and the piano, and was seated, breathless, but with a bit of very dirty white embroidery in her hands, when the lady entered.

"Ah, Cecilia, busy as usual," she said in an important, throaty voice.

"Yes, Mrs. Pemberton," said Sissy, softly.

"You see, Crosby, that even a child may make use of spare moments. Why don't you say how-d'-ye-do to Cecilia? Where're your manners?" demanded the lady.

"Yes, 'm. How-do, Sissy?" asked the boy, uncomfortably. He was a very prim child, immaculately dressed, his smooth hair plastered neatly down over his forehead; and he sat bolt upright on the edge of his chair, for he knew well his mother's views about lounging.

"Go and shake hands properly, like a little gentleman," bullied Mrs. Pemberton.

With a sickly smile Crosby walked over to Sissy and grasped her hand. He let it go with an "Ouch!" that made Mrs. Pemberton turn majestically and glare at him.

"I'm so sorry I stuck you, Crosby," said Sissy, softly, smoothing out her embroidery. "I forgot there was a needle in my work."

Crosby looked at her; he knew just how sorry she was.

"The thing to say, Crosby," thundered his mama, "is, 'Not at all, not at all, Cecilia!'"

"Not at all--not at all, Cecilia," squeaked the boy, his thin voice like a faint echo of his mother's heavy contralto.

Sissy yearned to beat him; she always did. That she did not invariably yield to her desire to express her resentment of so awfully mothered a person, was due solely to a sentiment of chivalry: he was so weak and so devoted to herself, and it took some courage to be devoted to Sissy.

"I'm ashamed of my son!" thundered Mrs. Pemberton.

Yes, Sissy knew that formula. She had heard the announcement first one memorable day at school when she led a revolt against the master--a revolt which only the girls of her clique were expected to indorse. But Crosby, either because he was so accustomed to playing with girls that he considered himself one of them, or because of that dogged devotion which even so stern a puritan as Sissy could not sufficiently discourage, had taken the cue from her lips. He, too, had failed publicly and vicariously, in the very presence of his lion-hearted, bull-voiced mother, and sat a white-faced criminal awaiting execution, when Mrs. Pemberton, rising in her voluminous black silk skirts, like an outraged and peppery hen, stood a moment speechless with wrath, and then broke forth with her denunciation before the whole school, visitors and all. "Mr. Garvan," she had exclaimed in a deep voice all a-tremble, "I am ashamed of my son!" and sailed majestically from the room. Crosby's action had really touched Sissy at the time, though, like the diplomat she was, she had promptly disowned it.

But to-day Mrs. Pemberton's shame did not too much affect her offspring, who sat, not quite so upright now, squeezing the blood from the finger that Sissy's needle had pricked.

"Let me look at your embroidery, Cecilia," said the lady, patronizingly.

Sissy rose and brought it to her. Before Crosby she tried not to show it, but this little Madigan was really suffering in her perfect soul: she embroidered so badly, and knew it so well.

"H'm!" Mrs. Pemberton drew off her glove. "Make your stitches even, and keep your work clean--like this--like this--see?"

Sissy saw. Under the firm, big, white hand the strawberry leaves and blossoms sprang up and flourished. Mrs. Pemberton loved to embroider; her voice was almost gentle when she painted on linen with her needle, and then only did she forget to bully her boy.

"Perhaps you will play for us, Cecilia, if I do a bit of your work for you?"

Sissy knew it was coming. Mrs. Pemberton always asked her to play, and playing for company was pure show-off from a Madigan point of view. Split would hear and taunt her with it later, she knew. But though she scorned the servile and downtrodden Crosby, Sissy, no more than he, dared disobey that grenadier, his mother. She took her seat at the piano, opened a Beethoven that Mrs. Pemberton had given her the last Christmas, under the impression that she was fostering a taste for the classical, and, with a revengeful little hand that couldn't reach the octaves, she began to murder the "Funeral March."

Just as the performer let her hands fall upon the last somber chord (her puritanical soul enjoying the double dissipation of pretending to herself while she afflicted others), she lifted her eyes to the mirror over the piano and saw Irene out in the hall. In the mirror their eyes met, and the mockery in Irene's was unmistakable as Sissy rose, agitated, caught in the very act of showing off, convicted of being affected.

"Very pretty; very pretty, indeed!" said Mrs. Pemberton, absent-mindedly. "Now play another little waltz."

"Aunt Anne says, Mrs. Pemberton," put in Irene, entering, "will you come to her room?"

Mrs. Pemberton rose, her deft hands still calling forth the perfection of fruit from the stubborn linen soil upon which Sissy could make nothing grow, and sailed across the hall. Crosby immediately jumped from his chair.

"I say, Sissy," he cried, "I know an awful swell way to cut paper-doll dresses."

Sissy looked at him. For all her sins (and in a hidden corner of her heart that she rarely looked into, she knew herself for the hypocrite she was, despite all her self-righteous pretense) this girl-boy's devotion was her punishment. She did not envy Split her successes; in fact, she often disapproved the methods by which they were attained. Her pride would permit her neither to make such conquests, nor to enjoy them when they were made; but she cursed her fate that Crosby Pemberton had fallen to her share. For the love of a really bad boy Sissy felt she could have sacrificed much--for a fellow quite out of the pale, a bold, wicked pirate of a boy who would say "Darn," and even smoke a cigarette; a daredevil, whose people could do nothing with him; a fellow with a swagger and a droop to his eyelid and something deliciously sinister in his lean, firm jaw and saucy black eye--a boy like Jack Cody, for instance, for whom a whole world of short-skirted femininity divided itself naturally into two classes: just girls--and Split Madigan. But that a forthright, practical, severe person like herself should be made ridiculous by Crosby's worship, and that Split, her arch-enemy, should be there to hear her adorer make his sexless declaration, was too much! Even a Madigan could not bear up under it. When Sissy looked from "Miss Crosby" (as the very girls who played with him called him) to Split, there were tears of rage trembling in her eyes.

But, with a generosity suspiciously unlike her, Split ignored the signal of distress. "What time this afternoon will the party begin, Crosby?" she asked.