CHECKMATE
The entrance of the mad King's understudy had been arranged with scrupulous eye to effect. The King himself had ordered all details, and they were carried out exactly as he had planned, on a scale of ostentatious and almost insane extravagance in which he was wont to indulge.
The supposed King was made up to represent a Chinese Emperor, the full robes offering effectual concealment of any difference between the figures of the King and his substitute. His head was bald save for the ornamental head-dress and the long, coal-black pigtail. His features were entirely concealed behind the skin mask of a painted Chinese face drawn very tight, lifelike, yet infinitely grotesque; and his robes were gorgeous and most costly, embroidered with thousands of jewels in the quaintest and weirdest of Chinese designs.
He was seated in a royal palanquin, bore by eight bearers in most hideous garbs, each wearing a skin mask of the same kind as the central figure; and as they put down their burden in the middle of the hall they turned in all directions, and set their faces grinning and mouthing and grimacing with a most weird effect. The palanquin itself was decorated and bejewelled with the same lavish prodigality with which the lunatic King was accustomed to squander his people's money in trifles and fooling.
So gorgeous and costly was every appointment of it, indeed, that even while the spectators marvelled at its brilliance they cursed the wastefulness that made it practicable.
But it was quite impossible to mistake the whole thing for anything but a royal freak; and those present did not need the private mark that was, as usual, on the arm to reveal to them that the bowing, grinning, sumptuously apparelled figure that sat amid the cushions of the palanquin, squeaking out gibberish in a high-pitched voice as though indulging in Chinese greetings, was their King.
The whole scene was too characteristic of him.
Behind the palanquin, grouped with clever regard to color effects, were the members of a numerous suite, all attired in rich Chinese costumes, while musicians, playing upon all kinds of extraordinary instruments, clanged and clashed, trumpeted and drummed, squeaked and groaned, in a medley of indescribable discords and unrhythmic jangle. Yet in all the babel and confusion there was the method of shrewd organization and carefully thought out plan.
When the first effect of the dramatic entrance was over, the bearers took up the palanquin, a procession was formed, and the courtiers and musicians, reinforced by a number of dancing-girls and men, made a progress round the ball-rooms, and at last grouped themselves about and around a raised dais, on one side of which stood an improvised throne.
A programme of dancing was then gone through, followed by a number of ceremonial acts, all intended as a preface to the chief performance for which we were waiting so anxiously—the play of the formal abdication.