Part 40

"But my voice and Split's go so well together in the Rose and Lily duet," said Kate, putting the book of the cantata upon the piano-rack and opening it persuasively.

"You promise me every time," wailed the downtrodden Recluse, reluctantly moving forward, "that I won't have to be it the next time."

"Well, you won't next time," said Kate, generously. "Will she, Split?"

"Well, I won't sing it this time," declared Sissy, seating herself at the piano, yet making a last stand at the very guns.

But Kate and Irene burst forth in the opening chorus with all the verve in the world. The Madigans never scorned expression when it was understood that they were acting. And the twins, still pulling stage properties out of the box, and even Frances, fantastically decorated with a torn Irish lace fichu over the bifurcated, footed white garment she still wore o' nights, joined joyfully in:

"'We are the flowers, The fair young flowers, That come at the voice of spring--' DING--DONG!"

It was a familiar old Madigan joke, always greeted with a shriek of laughter, to shout out the two notes of the accompaniment that punctuated the musical phrases. Its observance now put even Sissy in good humor, so that when the time came for the Recluse to make his appearance, she left the piano, and stalking miserably about with the preliminary cough with which the unfortunate Professor Trask was afflicted, she sang her doleful recitative.

The Madigans were never literalists. They were of the impressionistic school, which requires of the audience, as well as of the artist, high imaginative powers. And here the audience of one moment was the actor of the next, whose duty it was not to mind too closely the letter that killeth, but to mimic irreverently, to exaggerate, to make of themselves caricatures of the mannerisms of others, to nickname, to seize upon every peculiarity with their quick, observant, cruel young eyes and paint it in flesh-and-blood cartoons.

Thus, when the Rose, that "gentle flower in which a thorn is oft concealed," sang her duet with the Nightingale (Sissy trilling weakly on the piano, while Frank fluted her fingers affectedly as she had seen it done that memorable night) it was done in the hollow, throaty tones of the elder Miss Blind-Staggers, who had created the role; while the Lily sang through her nose, which she wiped every now and then in a manner unmistakably that of Henrietta Blind-Staggers.

"The Cantata of the Flowers" was never brought to a glorious completion by the Madigans, even though they skipped uninteresting and difficult parts, and, like the early Elizabethans, permitted no intermission between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free fight, when the Rose and the Lily hinted too openly at the Recluse's incurable tendency to sing off key. But that night it might have dragged its saccharine length of melody to the coronation of the Rose and a quick curtain if Miss Madigan had not walked right into the thick of it.

"Golly!" gasped Sissy, while Irene dodged behind Kate, who quickly turned down the lamp, and a hush fell upon the rest.

But Miss Madigan had been writing, or rather rewriting, letters. She had completely forgotten the heinous offense of the afternoon.

"Will you mail a letter for me, Sissy, the first thing in the morning?" she asked, still preoccupied. "Why are you in the dark?"

"We're just going to bed," remarked Sissy, with soothing demureness, taking the envelope from her aunt's hand and falling in with her mood, as one does with the mentally afflicted.

When Miss Madigan, fatigued with the labor of composition, had gone back to her room, Kate turned up the light again. "Same thing, I s'pose?" she asked. "Circumstances-letter--huh?"

"I s'pose so. 'T ain't sealed," said Sissy, with resignation. "But she always forgets to seal 'em." Then, suddenly inspired, she caught up Professor Trask's pencil lying on the piano, and on the vacant half-page at the end of Miss Madigan's letter she wrote in her best school-girl hand:

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

Sissy Madigan.

She read her composition to the startled but, on the whole, approving Madigans, sealed the letter, and was ready for bed.

They were all scampering through the long hall playing leap-frog--a specialty of Split's which her present costume facilitated--when Francis Madigan, candle in hand, came out of his room on his usual tour of nightly inspection. His short-sighted eyes fell upon Irene, a pretty, lithe, wavy-haired boy, before she and the twins bolted.

"What boy have you got there?" he demanded. "Send him home."

Kate took Frances up in her arms and covered the retreat; she knew how much the better part of valor was discretion.

Sissy remained standing, looking up at him. When she was alone with her father she was conscious of her poor little barren favoriteship, though she dared not impose upon it. In the candle-light his harsh, rugged features stood out marked with lines of suffering.

"It's all right, father," she said, with a quick choice of the lesser irritation for him. "He'll go--right away. Good night."

"Good night, child."

But she walked a step or two with him, slipping her hand at last into his, and pressing it tenderly.

"Is--anything the matter, father?" she whispered.

He threw back his head as though some one had struck him. It was not difficult to guess from whom the Madigans had inherited their fanatical desire to conceal emotion.