THE MASQUERADE
"I don't suppose we'll have the party now," observed Gladys, after Sylvia
had fallen asleep. "It's a shame. We were going to have such a big time
to-night."
"Indeed, we _will_ have the party anyhow!" said Nyoda emphatically.
"We'll outdo ourselves to make Sylvia have a hilarious time to-night. The
time to laugh the loudest is when you feel the saddest. Gladys, will you
engineer the candy making? You have your masquerade costume ready,
haven't you? The rest of you will have to hurry to get yours fixed, it's
three o'clock already. There are numerous chests of old clothes up in the
attic; you may take anything you like from them. And that reminds me, I
must go and bring out my old Navajo blanket for--" "Goodness!" she said,
stopping herself just in time, "I almost told who is going to wear it.
Now everybody be good and don't ask me any questions. I have to bring it
down and air it before it can be worn because it's packed away in
mothballs."
She ran lightly up the stairs, chanting:
"There was an old chief of the Navajo,
Fell over the wigwam and broke his toe,
And now he is gone where the good Injuns go,
And his blanket is done up in cam-pho-o-or!"
She trailed out the last word into such a mournful wail that the
Winnebagos shrieked with laughter.
A few minutes later she came down the stairs with a mystified face. "The
blanket's gone!" she announced. "Stolen. I had it in the lower drawer of
the linen closet off the hall upstairs, all wrapped up in tar paper. The
tar paper's there in the drawer, folded up, with the mothballs lying on
top of it, and the blanket is gone. Did any of you take it out to wear
to-night?" she asked, looking relieved at the thought.
No one had taken it, however. Slim was the only one who wanted to be an
Indian, and he was waiting for Nyoda to fetch the blanket for him.
Without a doubt it had been stolen. So the midnight visitor had been a
thief after all! But why did he take a blanket and nothing else? It was a
valuable blanket, but the silverware and jewelry in the house were worth
a great deal more. The mystery reared its head again. What manner of man
was this strange visitor?
"My mother always used to keep her silver wrapped in the blankets in a
clothes closet," said Gladys, "and burglars broke into our house and
found it all. The policeman that papa reported it to said that was a
common place for people to hide valuables and burglars usually searched
through blankets. This burglar must have been looking for valuables in
the blanket, and got scared away before he looked anywhere else, but took
the blanket because it was such a good one."
"That must have been it," said Nyoda. "I've heard of cases before where
valuables were stolen from their hiding places in blankets and bedding.
Well, we were lucky to get away as we did.
"Slim, you'll have to be something beside an Indian chief, for I haven't
another Navajo blanket. It's too bad, too, because you had the real bow
and arrows, but cheer up, we'll find something else. The trouble is,
though," she mourned, "we haven't much of anything that will fit you. The
blanket would have solved the problem so nicely."
"Let him wear the mothballs," suggested Justice. "He can be an African
chief instead of an Indian. A nice string of mothballs would be all----"
Slim threw a sofa cushion at him and Justice subsided.
The stolen blanket remained the chief topic of conversation until late in
the afternoon, when Katherine made a discovery which furnished a new
theme. She was up in the attic, hunting something from which to concoct a
masquerade suit, and while rummaging through a trunk came upon a
photograph underneath a pile of clothes. It was the picture of a young
girl dressed in the fashion of a bygone day, with a tremendously long,
full skirt bunched up into an elaborate "polonaise." Above a pair of
softly curved shoulders smiled a face of such witching beauty that
Katherine forgot all about the trunk and its contents and gazed
spellbound at the photograph. In the lower right hand corner was written
in a beautiful, even hand, "_To Jasper, from Sylvia_."
Katherine flew downstairs to show her find to the others.
"O how beautiful!" they cried, one after another, as they gazed at the
picture of the girl Uncle Jasper could not forget. The small, piquant
face, in its frame of dark hair, looked up at them from the picture with
a winning, friendly smile, and looking at it the Winnebagos began to feel
the charm of the living Sylvia Warrington, and to fall in love with her
even as Uncle Jasper had done.
"Take it up to Sylvia," said Migwan. "She'll be delighted to see a
picture of her Beloved."
Sylvia gazed with rapt fondness at the beautiful young face.
"Isn't--she--lovely?" she said in a hushed voice. "She looks as though
she would be sorry about my being lame, if she knew. May I keep her with
me all the time, Nyoda? She's such a comfort!"
"Certainly, you may keep the picture with you," said Nyoda, rejoicing
that a new interest had come up just at this time, and left her hugging
the photograph to her bosom.
Right after supper Nyoda shooed all the rest upstairs to their rooms
while she arrayed Sylvia for the party. In her endeavor to cheer and
divert her she gathered materials with a lavish hand and dressed her like
a real fairy tale princess, in a beautiful white satin dress, and a gold
chain with a diamond locket, and bracelets, and a coronet on her
fine-spun golden hair. The armchair she made into a throne, covered with
a purple velvet portiére; and she spread a square of gilt tapestry over
the footstool.
The effect, when Sylvia was seated upon the throne, was so gorgeously
royal that Nyoda felt a sudden awe stealing over her, and she could
hardly believe it was the work of her own hands. Sylvia seemed indeed a
real princess.
"We have on the robes of state to-night," said Sylvia, with a half
hearted return to her once loved game, "for our royal father, the king,
is coming to pay us a visit with all his court."
Nyoda made her a sweeping curtsey and hurried upstairs to dress herself.
The costumes of all the rest were kept a secret from one another, and no
one was to unmask until the stroke of eleven. She heard stifled giggles
and exclamations coming through the doors of all the rooms as she
proceeded down the hall.
Crash! went something in one of the rooms and Nyoda paused to
investigate. There stood Slim before a mirror, hopelessly entangled in a
sheet which he was trying to drape around himself. A wild sweep of his
hand had smashed the electric light bulb at the side of the mirror, and
sent the globe flying across the room to shatter itself on the floor.
"Wait a minute, I'll help you," said Nyoda, coming forward laughing.
Slim emerged from the sheet very red in the face, deeply abashed at the
damage he had done.
"I was only trying to grab ahold of the other end," he explained
ruefully, "like this--" He flung out the other hand in a gesture of
illustration, and smash went the globe on the other side of the mirror.
Nyoda laughed at his horror-stricken countenance, and soothed his
embarrassment while she pinned him into the sheet and pulled over his
head the pillow case which was to act as mask.
"Just as if you could disguise Slim by masking him!" she thought
mirthfully as she worked. "The more you try to cover him up the worse you
give him away. It's like trying to disguise an elephant."
She got him finished, and as a precaution against further accidents bade
him sit still in the chair where she placed him until the dinner gong
sounded downstairs; then she hastened on toward her own room.
"Oh, I forgot about Hercules!" she suddenly exclaimed aloud. "I promised
to get something for him."
"Migwan's gone down to fix him up," said a voice from one of the rooms in
answer to her exclamation. "She found a costume for him this afternoon,
and she's down in the kitchen now, getting him ready."
Nyoda breathed a sigh of gratitude for Migwan's habitual thoughtfulness,
and went in to don her own costume.
Down in the kitchen Migwan was getting Hercules into the suit she had
picked out for him from the trunkfull of masquerade costumes she had
found up in the attic. It was a long monkish habit with a cowl, made of
coarse brown stuff, and it covered him from head to foot. The mask was
made of the same material as the suit, and hung down at least a foot
below his grizzly beard.
"Sure nobody ain't goin' ter recognize me?" Hercules asked anxiously.
Migwan's prediction that an invitation to the party would cheer him up
had been fulfilled from the first. Hercules was so tickled that he forgot
his misery entirely. He was in as much of a flutter as a young girl
getting ready for her first ball; he had been in the house half a dozen
times that day anxiously inquiring if the party were surely going to be,
and if there would be a suit for him.
Migwan put in the last essential pin, and then stepped back to survey the
result of her efforts. "If you keep your feet underneath the gown, not a
soul will know you," she assured him. She had thoughtfully provided a
pair of gloves, so that even if he did put out his hands their color
could not betray him.
"Of course, you must not talk," she warned him further.
"Course not, course not," he agreed. "When's all dese here mask comin'
off?" he continued.
"When the clock strikes eleven we'll all unmask," explained Migwan, "and
then the Princess is going to give the prize to the one that had the best
costume."
"An' dey's nobody 'xcept me an' you knows I'm wearin' dis suit?" he
inquired for the third time.
Migwan reassured him, and with a final injunction not to show himself in
the front part of the house until he heard the dinner gong, she sped up
the back stairs to her own belated masking.
She had barely finished when the sound of the gong rose through the
house, and the stairway was filled with a grotesquely garbed throng
making its way, with stifled exclamations and smothered bursts of
laughter, into the long drawing room where the Princess sat. Migwan
clapped on her mask and sped down after them, getting there just as the
fun commenced. She spied Hercules standing in the corner behind the
Princess's throne, maintaining a religious silence and keeping his feet
carefully out of sight. She kept away from him, fearing that he would
forget himself and speak to her, entirely forgetting that he could not
recognize her under her disguise.
Sylvia shrieked with amusement at the grotesque figures circling around
her. It was the very first masque party she had ever seen, and she could
not get over the wonder of it. Nyoda smiled mistily behind her mask as
she watched her. How lonely that valiant little spirit must have been all
these years, shut away from the frolics of youth; lonely in spite of the
brave make believe with which she passed away the time! And now the years
stretched out before her in endless sameness; the poor little princess
would never leave her throne.
Sherry and Justice and the Captain kept Nyoda guessing as to which one
was which, but she soon picked out the one she knew must be Hercules, and
watched him in amusement. She had rather fancied that he would turn out
to be the clown of the party, but he sat still most of the time and kept
his eyes on the Princess. He seemed utterly fascinated by the glitter of
her costume. Even the Punch and Judy show going on in the other end of
the room failed to hold his attention, although the rest of the
spectators were in convulsions of mirth.
The Princess called on Punch and Judy to do their stunt over and over
again until they were too hoarse to utter another sound. Migwan, who had
been Judy, fled to the kitchen for a drink of water to relieve her aching
throat. She took the opportunity to slip off the hot mask for a moment
and get a breath of fresh air. She was almost suffocated behind the mask.
Then, while she stood there cooling off, she remembered the big pan of
candy Gladys had set outdoors to harden, and hastened out to bring it in.
Someone was walking across the yard, and as Migwan looked up, startled,
the light which streamed out of the kitchen door fell full upon the black
face of Hercules. Migwan stood still, clutching the pan of candy
mechanically, her eyes wide open with surprise. Hercules stood still too,
and stood staring at her with an expression of dismay. He no longer had
the monk's costume on.
"How did you get out here?" Migwan asked curiously. "You're inside--at
the party."
Hercules laughed nervously, and Migwan noticed that his jaw was
trembling.
"What's the matter, Hercules?" she asked. "What's happened?"
"Now, missy, missy--" began Hercules, and Migwan could hear his teeth
chatter, while his eyes began to roll strangely in his head.
"What's the matter, are you sick?" asked Migwan in alarm.
"Yes'm, dat's it, dat's it," chattered Hercules, finding his voice. "I'm
awful sick. I had to come outside."
"But I left you sitting in there a minute ago with your suit on," said
Migwan wonderingly, "and you didn't come out after me. Did you go out of
the front door?"
"Yes'm, dat's it," said Hercules hastily. "I come out de front doah an'
roun' dat way."
A sudden impulse made Migwan look down the drive, covered with a light
fall of snow and gleaming white in the glare of the street light.
"But there aren't any footprints in the snow," she said in surprise.
"Your footprints are coming from the barn." A nameless uneasiness filled
her. What was Hercules doing out here?
"Yes'm," repeated Hercules vacuously, "I came from de barn."
Migwan stared at him in surprise. Was he out of his mind?
"Hercules," she began severely, but never finished the sentence, for the
old man swayed, clutched at the empty air, and fell heavily in the snow
at her feet.