Sissy turned and went back into the house. It was a queer house, she thought. To her alert impressibility, the sickness and apprehension it inclosed were something tangible. She could taste the odors of the sick-room. She could feel the weight of the odd stillness that filled it. 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. Poor Sissy, who had never been ill!
Split, with shorn head and with wide-open eyes and hard, flushed cheeks, lay tossing on the big bed in the room off the parlor, which had seldom been used since Frances was born there. "Mother's bed" the Madigans always called it, and they crept into it when ailing, as though it still held something of the old curative magic for childish aches, though all but Kate had forgotten the mother's face as it was before she lay down there the last time. Split had a big hot silver dollar in one hand,—Francis Madigan's way of recognizing and sympathizing with a child's illness,—and in the other an undivided orange, evidence enough of an extraordinary occasion in the Madigan household. But she was not waking. She was not sleeping. She was not dreaming. She knew that Sissy had come in and had squatted on the floor with Bep and Fom, playing dolls, probably. Yet she felt that numb, gradual, terrifying enlargement of her fingertips, of her limbs, of her tongue, her body, her head, that she had been told again and again was mere fancy. With a self-control that was unlike her, an unnatural product of her unnatural state, she locked her jaws together that she might not scream this once. And in the eery stillness that followed the effort, which had made her ears buzz and her temples throb, she heard quite sanely Florence's denial of some charge her twin had brought against her.
"I didn't do any such thing," she whispered.
"You did," said Bep.
"I didn't."
"Cross your heart to die?"
The scream burst from Irene then—not the cry of delirium, but a sharp, terrified, if inarticulate, call for help. If there was one thing Split did respect, it was that Reaper whose name she could never hear without a quick indrawn breath. 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. She's to be kept quiet. There, there, Irene—it's only fancy, I tell you! Look at your fingers; they're thinner, littler than they ever were. Look at Sissy's; see how much bigger they are."
Irene lifted her fingers that had caught Sissy's. She looked from her own fevered hand to Sissy's dimpled one and was comforted. But her hold on her old enemy did not relax. She had something tangible now to reassure her; something that spoke to her in her own language. Her eyes closed, her tense little hand dropped wearily, but she held Sissy fast.