"I don't see how you can play any gruesome Hallowe'en tricks in this
house, Mrs. St. Clair," said Billie later at the dinner table. "It's the
abode of cheerfulness. Look at this dining room, for instance. A skull
and crossbones wouldn't even look dismal against this white wainscoting
and these pale yellow walls."
"She's trying to pump you, mother," put in Percy. "Now don't tell her
anything."
Mrs. St. Clair smiled archly. How pretty she looked, Billie thought, in
her pink crepe dress, with a beautiful collar of pearls around her
throat. Nothing would induce the widow to wear black, and, after a year
or two of mourning, she had gone back to colors and cheerfulness.
"He has got some big surprises for you, my dear. I'll only tell you this
much. It will be quite as ghastly as you could possibly desire, and I
hope nobody is wearing any clothes that will matter. Your dress, Miss
Alta, I am afraid will spot if you do all the things Percy is planning
for this evening. What a lovely frock, by the way. I think I have never
seen a more beautiful dress for a young girl."
All eyes were fastened on Fannie's dress, and there was general surprise
among the girls to see that Fannie was wearing an exquisite gown of pale
blue satin with an over-dress of blue gauze, edged with narrow silver
fringe. In her hair was a wreath of pink roses.
She was quite unembarrassed under the scrutiny of all these people, and
smiled complacently at Mrs. St. Clair.
Nobody had taken much notice of Belle until now. They had supposed she
had kept so unusually quiet because she was not in her own "set," as she
loved to call her coterie of seven. But to those who were familiar with
her, it was plain that something had happened. She did not seem herself.
Her eyes had a strange gray look to them. Two little white dents
appeared on either side of her nose and her lips were shrunk into pale,
narrow lines. But that was not all. Were they dreaming or was this the
first of Percy's Hallowe'en jokes? The beautiful, proud Belle was
wearing a faded yellow muslin.
She had tried to cover her shoulders with a little blue scarf, but it
was impossible to deceive the sharp eyes of her schoolmates.
"Nobody's clothes will be hurt, Mother," put in Percy, feeling somehow
that a cloud had fallen on the company, although he did not know enough
about girls' clothes to take in this remarkable change in Belle's
appearance. "Remember that this is a ghost party."
"What is a ghost party?" demanded Fannie, suddenly becoming animated
from the admiration she felt she had attracted.
"Everybody wears a sheet and pillow-case," answered Percy, "and, for one
thing, not a vestige of dress shows."
A look of triumph came into Belle's eyes at this and the two dents began
to disappear.
"I hear the other people coming, so we had better get into our costumes
if you are entirely through."
"Come up to my room, girls. Percy will take care of the boys. Marie and
I are commissioned to dress you up. I am obeying orders, you see," said
Mrs. St. Clair.
"And remember that you are supposed to be disguised," called Percy.
"Don't give yourself away by giggling, Miss Nancy-Bell."
"I'm sure I shan't want to giggle if I'm dressed as a ghost," answered
Nancy, following the others up the steps.
Half an hour later a company of spectres invaded the halls and drawing
room of Pine Lodge. There were silent ghosts and giggling ghosts, and a
roly-poly ghost, who bumped against a thin ghost and knocked him flat
and the thin ghost cried out:
"Oh, shades of departed Jumbo, don't sit on me!"
Then all the ghosts laughed and one ghost danced a jig that had the
shadow of a resemblance to the Fishers' Horn Pipe.
Presently there was a long and mournful trumpet call from up in the very
top of the house and a portly ghost who seemed to be holding up a train
under her white cotton shroud said:
"Now, my dear spirits, we are all to go up, if you will be good enough
to follow me," and the whole troop of ghosts began moving in a spectral
body up the front staircase.
There was a second long-drawn-out and despairing trump, and the phantom
beckoned them to hurry up, with her plump, pretty hand, and remarked:
"My darling Percival is so impatient."
Up the next staircase they trooped and finally up a narrow flight, at
the top of which hung a black curtain with cabalistic signs painted on
it in bright red.
Once past the curtain and there was a gasp of surprise and wonder. The
great attic of Pine Lodge, which stretched over the entire house, had
been transformed into a spirit dance hall. From the ceiling hung pumpkin
jack-o-lanterns of every size. Plates of salt and alcohol were burning
about the room, giving a ghastly greenish look to the picture. An old
witch dressed in black, with a long broomstick, was stationed by a
cauldron of melted lead, placed on a charcoal stove.
Repeating a cabalistic verse with incredible rapidity, which sounded
something like:
"Burra, burra pie, cat's eye, devil fry,
Singer, dinger, singer dinger, blood!"
the black witch dropped a spoonful of the lead into a bowl of water.
"Here is your fortune," she said, in a sing-song voice to the nearest
ghost.
"The lead has taken the shape of a letter. It brings news to you. It
comes from over the water on a ship. The letter is about something
round----"
"Money is round," put in a tall ghost, standing near. "So are rings and
necklaces----"
"There is trouble ahead," went on the witch. "There is trouble before
the letter ever reaches land."
The ghost who was listening moved away quickly.
"Of course, it was just a coincidence," she said to herself, "but I
wonder who the person was who said that about rings and necklaces. Oh,
dear! Oh, dear! I wish I had never taken that box in charge."
In another part of the room a red witch was engaged in launching little
fortune sail boats, made of English walnuts, on a troubled sea in a tub.
There were four other witches about the attic telling fortunes with
cards and in other ways, two gray ones, a white one, and a green one,
and there was an enormous gray cat with electric eyes and a tail four
feet long that curled up over its back. At last from behind a curtain
came the strains of weird music, and the witches and the gray cat danced
a quadrille, the witches riding on their broomsticks in a circle,
leaping over the cat as they advanced down the middle and finally ending
with a romp when all the ghosts joined in and danced together.
After a while the ghosts removed their sheets and pillow-cases and
became human beings once more, and the side shows, as Percy called them,
began. Every girl at the party bobbed for an apple, except Belle Rogers,
who declined emphatically. But those who remembered the red rubber
curlers understood her reasons for not wishing to wet her aureole of
golden hair.
Fannie Alta plunged her face and neck into the tub with a reckless
laugh, and spotted her pretty dress without a quiver of regret.
Nancy, in a little room hung in black in a remote corner of the attic,
held a lighted candle over her head, while she looked fearfully in the
glass and combed her hair. For just a breathing space a boy's fair,
ruddy face passed across the mirror and disappeared.
With a little shriek, Nancy looked quickly over her shoulder, but she
was entirely alone.
Billie went rather later than the others to try her fortune in the
mirror room. She had lingered along with a laughing, teasing circle
around the apple plungers, and, seeing Nancy come out of the mirror room
alone, she strolled over there. Nancy explained what she was to do, and
left her alone to her fate.
"Did you see any one, Nancy?" laughed Billie incredulously.
"Yes," she whispered mysteriously, "I did; but I wasn't frightened
because----"
"Because what?" demanded Billie, pinching her friend's round cheek.
"Because--it wasn't a person who would frighten any one," answered
Nancy, with a laugh, as she tripped away to the next side show, from
whence issued suppressed screams and howls which were explained when she
pulled the curtain and a skeleton jumped at her.
In the meantime, Billie had gone into the mirror room alone. She stood
looking gravely at herself in the glass, while she ran a comb through
her smooth locks with one hand and held a candle with the other. She
seemed to have waited a good while for the apparition which was supposed
to appear to show its face.
"I suppose this booth isn't in working order any longer," she thought,
as she laid down the comb, when suddenly from the deep shadows reflected
in the glass she made out the outline of a face.
Billie smiled. She had been prepared to recognize one of her friends,
but the smile faded from her lips; she put down the candle quickly and
faced about. The black curtain forming the wall of the little room was
still quivering, but no one was there.
She ran out hurriedly and looked about her. All the boys and girls were
dancing the barn dance, and the attic had become very cheerful and gay
it seemed to her in the brief moment in which she had tried her fortune
in the mirror room.
"It was just a foolish, nervous notion," she said to herself, turning to
meet Merry Brown, who was looking for her to be his partner in the
dance. "But that beaked nose and that wicked eye so close to it," her
thoughts continued. "Could I have been mistaken?"
"Are there any strangers here to-night?" she asked Merry, as they danced
down the room together.
"Not a single stranger," he replied. "Only the High School crowd."
When the dance was over, they filed in a long, laughing procession down
the three flights of steps to supper, and there was nothing spectral or
gruesome about the gay party which gathered around Mrs. St. Clair's long
table. Billie tried to talk and sing with the others and laugh at Roly
Poly McLane and Percy, who recited an absurd dialogue they had prepared
beforehand in which Roly Poly took the part of a fat, old man and Percy
a thin old woman. But all the time she kept asking herself:
"Did I see him, or was it just my imagination?"