Late enough in all conscience was the last guest to arrive for the
Hadley-Owen masquerade.
Already town-cars, carriages, and private 'busses were being called
for and departing with their share of the more seasoned and
sober-sided revellers, to whom bed and appetite for breakfast had come
to mean more than a chance to romp through a cotillion by the light of
the rising sun--to say discreetly little or nothing of those other
conveyances which had borne away _their_ due proportion of far less
sage and by no means sober-sided ones, who yet retained sufficient
sense of the fitness of things to realise that bed followed by
matutinal bromides would be better for them than further dalliance
with the effervescent and evanescent spirits of festivity.
More and more frequently the elevators, empty but for their
attendants, were flying up to the famous ball-room floor of the
Bizarre, to descend heavy-laden with languid laughing parties of
gaily-costumed ladies and gentlemen no less brilliantly
attired--prince and pauper, empress and shepherdess, monk, milkmaid,
and mountebank: all weary yet reluctant in their going.
And at this hour a smallish gentleman, in an old-style Inverness
opera-coat that cloaked him to his ankles, with an opera hat set
jauntily a wee bit askew on his head, a mask of crimson silk covering
his face from brows to lips, slipped silently like some sly, sinister
shadow through the Fifth Avenue portals of the Bizarre, and shaped a
course by his wits across the lobby to the elevators, so discreetly
and unobtrusively that none of the flunkeys in attendance noticed his
arrival.
In effect, he didn't arrive at all, but suddenly was there.
A car, discharging its passengers before the smallish gentleman could
catch the eye of its operator, flew suddenly upward in the echo of a
gate slammed shut in his face; and all the other cars were still at
the top, according to the bronze arrows of their tell-tale dials. The
late arrival held up patiently; but after an instant's deliberation,
doffed his hat, crushed it flat, slipped out of his voluminous cloak,
and beckoned a liveried attendant.
In the costume thus disclosed, he cut an impish figure: "Satan on the
half-shell," Peter Kenny had christened him.
A dress coat of black satin fitted P. Sybarite more neatly than him
for whom it had been made. The frilled bosom of his shirt was set with
winking rubies, and the lace cuffs at his wrists were caught together
with rubies--whether real or false, like coals of fire: and ruby was
the hue both of his satin mask and his satin small-clothes. Buckles of
red paste brilliants burned on the insteps of his slender polished
shoes with scarlet heels; and his snug black silk stockings set off
ankles and calves so well-turned that the Prince of Sin himself might
have taken pride in them. For boutonnière he wore a smouldering
ember--so true an imitation that at first he himself had hesitated to
touch it. Literally to crown all, his ruddy hair was twisted upward
from each temple in a cornuted fashion that was most vividly
picturesque.
"Here," he said, surrendering hat and coat to the servitor before the
latter could remonstrate--"take and check these for me, please. I
shan't be going for some time yet."
"Sorry, sir, but the cloak-room down 'ere 's closed, sir. You'll have
to check them on the ball-room floor above."
"No matter," said the little man: and groping in a pocket, he produced
a dollar bill and tendered it to ready fingers; "you keep 'em for me,
down here. It'll save time when I'm ready to go."
"Very good, sir. Thank you."
"You won't forget me?"
The flunkey grinned. "You're the only gentleman I've seen to-night,
sir, in a costume anything like your own."
"There's but one of me in the Union," said the gentleman, sententious:
"my spear knows no brother."
"Thank you, sir," said the servant civilly, making off.
With an air of some dubiety, the little man watched him go.
"I say!" he cried suddenly--"come back!"
He was obeyed.
A second dollar bill appeared as it were by magic between his fingers.
The flunkey stared.
"Beg pardon, sir?"
"Take it"--impatiently.
"Thank you." The well-trained fingers executed their most familiar
manoeuvre. "But--m'y I ask, sir--wot's it for?"
"You called me a gentleman just now."
"Yes, sir."
"You were right."
"Quite so, sir."
"The devil _is_ a gentleman," the masquerader insisted firmly.
"So I've always 'eard, sir."
"Then you may go; you've earned the other dollar."