Part 27 (1/2)
”So it is,” agreed Murchison, dryly. ”So it is. The excellent Miss Jessups--how well they know!”
”He's guying her,” chuckled Sissy, making a mental vow to read Daudet or die in the attempt. ”And she doesn't know it.”
”Hus.h.!.+” came from Split.
In a tenor a bit foggy, but effectively sympathetic, old Westlake was singing, ”Oh, would that we two were maying!”
Sissy put her eye to the crack of the door, and Split, watching her, saw her round face grow red and indignant.
”What is it?” she whispered, squirming till she too had an eye glued to the crack.
”Look!” exclaimed Sissy, disgustedly.
Straight in their line of vision sat Kate, and upon her old Westlake's eyes were ardently fixed as he sang.
”It's--it's not decent,” declared Sissy, wrathfully.
”He does look like a calf.” Split grinned. Kate looked very pretty in that white cashmere embroidered in red rosebuds, which had been made over from the box from Ireland, Split said to Sissy, and so was deserving of forgiveness, she hinted; for when one had a new frock--
Sissy, the sensible, snorted unbelievingly. What gown had ever affected her?
”But I'll get even with him,” she said, stealing on tiptoe down the hall. ”Just you watch!”
Split, her nose in the crack of the door, watched. The Avalanche had finished his first verse and begun the second, when Sissy appeared in the parlor, very modest and retiring, walking behind chairs and effacing herself with an ostentation that could not but attract all eyes. She stopped at Miss Madigan's chair, asked a question,--which Split knew well was utterly irrelevant and immaterial,--and received an answer in Aunt Anne's company manner: a compound of sweetness and fl.u.s.tered inattention which no one could mimic better than Sissy herself.
Then she withdrew, slowly and by a tortuous route which brought her just beside him at the moment Westlake stopped singing. Without a word, yet with a gracious instinct for the momentary confusion in which the performer found himself, his seat having been taken while he sang, Cecilia pulled out another from the wall and moved it slightly toward him.
The little attention was offered so naturally, with such engaging demureness, that Mrs. Pemberton--whom the social amenities in children ever delighted--almost loved Sissy Madigan at that moment. So, by the way, did Split, out in the hall, her eye at the crack of the door, her feet lifting alternately with antic.i.p.ative rapture. For it was the Versailles _fauteuil_ that Sissy had so sweetly selected for old Westlake. And when the big fellow came down to earth with a crash, rising red and confused from the debris, Sissy was already out in the hall. She arrived at the crack in time to see Kate stuff her handkerchief into her mouth and hurry to the window, her shoulders shaking, while Miss Madigan flew to the rescue.
It took a recitation in Italian by Mrs. Forrest to rob Sissy Madigan, judge and executioner, of her complacency after this. Then Aunt Anne recited ”The Bairnies Cuddle Doon” charmingly, as she always did, but most Hibernianly, with that clean accent that makes Irish-English the prettiest tongue in the world. After which she received with smiling complacency the compliments of Mrs. Forrest, who told her that an ideal mother had been lost to the world in her.
Outside, two cynics listened with a bored air. They felt that they required a stimulant after this, so they made a hurried visit to the dining-room, thereby escaping Mr. Garvan's reading of ”Father Phil's Collection.” But when Henrietta Bryne-Stivers delivered ”Blow, Bugle, Blow,” changing from speaking voice to the sung chorus with a composure that was really shameless, the critics out in the hall received that insulting shock which novelty inflicts upon the provincial, which is the childish, mind. They revenged themselves in their own way, mouthing and att.i.tudinizing, caricaturing every pose which Miss Henrietta had been taught, by the instructor of Delsarte at Miss Jessup's, was grace.
They were caught in the midst of their saturnalia of ridicule by Kate, who promptly exploded at their uncouth, dumb merriment.
”Aunt Anne wants you, Sissy,” she said when she got her breath.
In an instant Sissy was sobered. It wasn't possible that she was to be sent to bed before supper! To be a waiter was the height of happiness for Sissy.
”It's because of the Versiye fotoy,” giggled Split, as she ran off to the dining-room.
”It isn't, is it?” whispered Sissy to Kate. And Kate shook her head rea.s.suringly, and waved her in. She couldn't answer audibly, for Dr.
Murchison was tuning up his sweet old violin, while Maude Bryne-Stivers offered to accompany him on the piano.
But Murchison knew too much of the manners and methods of Jessup's Seminary, as revealed by its showiest pupil.
”Thank you, thank you, Miss Maude, but this is a very old-fas.h.i.+oned and a very simple entertainment I'm going to give. Just the things that I play to myself when I'm weary of listening to humanity tell of its ills and aches--the egotist! Then I look down into the beautifully clean inside of my fiddle, its good old mechanism without a flaw, and listen to the things it has to tell.... Thank you, just the same, Miss Maude; this is not a theme worthy of your brilliant rendition, but, as I said, a simple, old-fas.h.i.+oned playing of the fiddle. I'll supply the old-fas.h.i.+oned part, and Sissy here can do the simple accompaniment, if she will.”
If she would! Sissy was so gaspingly happy and proud that she forgot even to pretend that she wasn't. Seating herself, she let her trembling fingers sink into the opening chord, while the old doctor's bow sought the strains of ”Kathleen Mavourneen,” of ”Annie Laurie,” the ”Blue Bells of Scotland,” and ”Rose Marie.”