The melody was simple and light, with a little break in its sweetness. Sissy's touch was childlike, but her impressionable temperament, quickened by the strangeness of that dark room behind her, overflowed into the melody her fingers brought out. The accompanying bass was rhythmic, and the nervous, fevered child found mental and physical occupation in letting the fingers of her left hand pick out its detail upon the pillow which she had lately thrown in a passion against the wall because it had been so hot and she so miserably uncomfortable.
Sissy had begun the second part, the changing bass of which had been poor Split's pons asinorum. It was the part to which Sissy had always given a dramatic touch—partly because, it being simpler music than she was accustomed to, she could safely do so, and partly because it irritated Irene, to whom the most forthright interpretation was difficult. Her foot slipped now, through force of habit, upon the hard pedal, and in a moment she heard the whirring of Aunt Anne's skirts.
"Sissy, are you crazy, you—" she heard behind her, and then there came a sudden, an unaccountable stop.
Sissy turned. Behind and above Miss Madigan towered tall old Dr. Murchison. He had come back, as usual, up the long flight of steps, for his forgotten spectacles. One of his hands was clapped with good-humored firmness over the lady's mouth; the other was pointing to Split, sleeping like a Madigan again, while over Aunt Anne's head the doctor nodded and bobbed encouragingly to Sissy, like a benignant musical conductor deprived of the use of his arms.
Sissy turned again to the piano. It was a beautiful opportunity for her to affect disgust with the situation; to register a silent, but expressive, exception to being compelled to entertain Irene; and to pose, not only before her aunt but before the doctor, too, as a very important personage, whose services were in urgent demand, and who yielded under protest. But as a matter of fact she was too happy. There was no misconceiving the light that illumined the doctor's round, rosy face. Something her undisciplined, childish imagination had been coquetting with, as an untried experience, though never admitting its full, dread significance, was carried out of her horizon by the shining look of success in old Murchison's face; something that shook her strong little body with a long shiver, as she realized, in the second when she could almost feel the lift of its dark wings taking flight, the thing that might have been.
So Sissy played "In Sweet Dreams" "with expression."
Later she played it, and over and over again, with the salt tears trickling down her nose and splashing on the keys; played it with tired, fat fingers and a rebellious, burning heart. But this was during Split's convalescence—a reign of terror for the whole household; for to the natural taste she possessed for bullying, Split Madigan then added the whims and caprices of the invalid, who uses her weaknesses as a cat of a hundred tails with which to scourge her victims into compliance.
She was loath to get well, this tyrannical, hot-tempered, short-haired Zingara, who led her people such a merry dance, and she left the self-indulgent land of convalescence and the bed in the big back room with regret.