Such grave consequences attended this Halloween trick that it is possibly worth while for me to turn aside from the direct record of the robbery and devote a chapter or two to a confession of one of our most serious scrapes.
It had been suggested by Cynthia and approved and carried out by Winnie before the days of the breaking off of their friendship. Cynthia had a way of suggesting plots for less cautious people to carry out, whereby they burned their fingers like the cat in the fable of the chestnuts.
The Amen Corner had conducted itself with praiseworthy propriety after the opening escapade of the season—that of the roller-coaster trunk—for the space of a few weeks. But when Halloween came we all felt the need of what Winnie called an explosion. We had been too preternaturally goody-goody, and the escape valve must be opened. We decided to celebrate the eve of “antics and of fooleries” befittingly, and we arranged to bob for apples, to snatch raisins from burning alcohol, thereby ascertaining the number of our future lovers.
We tied our garters around our feet
And crossed our stockings under our head;
We turned our shoes toward the street
And dreamed of the ones we were going to wed.
We poured molten lead into water, striving to ascertain the occupation of our future husbands from the forms which it took. Adelaide’s emblem was something like a letter A, and we all declared that it was a perfect easel and quite wonderful; but when we threw apple peelings over our heads, Milly’s broke into two sections, remotely resembling a scrawling C and a W. Milly herself was the first to recognize the letters and to blushingly declare that of course it was too absurd, it could not mean Carrington Waite.
Adelaide’s younger brother Jim was attending the cadet school in the city. He admired Milly exceedingly, as did many of the cadets who had met her at a fair given at Madame’s, the previous year, for the benefit of the Home of the Elder Brother. Stacey Fitz Simmons, drum major of the cadet band, and the best dodger and runner of the school foot-ball team, was also her devoted admirer. The button which Mr. Mudge had discovered in Milly’s bureau drawer was not from a West Point uniform but from Stacey’s; and the foot-ball team was not the Harvard—but the Cadet Eleven. We all tried to find emblems in the molten lead, or initials in the apple parings, suggesting the cadets, but Milly would none of them.
There was a Mr. Van Silver, much favored by Milly’s family, a caller at their cottage at Narragansett Pier, whom Adelaide had met while visiting Milly the previous summer. He was principally remarkable for owning a coach and four-in-hand, and as he had on one occasion invited Adelaide to a seat on the box, it was a little fiction of Milly’s that Mr. Van Silver was her humble slave. But we were all innocent in the ways of flirtations and, with the exception of Milly, heart whole and fancy free, and it was really a difficult thing to conjure up imaginary lovers—for the occasion.
The pièce de resistance of the evening was the trick played upon Adelaide. We planned on our programme that just as the clock struck the hour of midnight we would all try the experiment of walking downstairs backward with a lighted candle in one hand and a looking-glass in the other. Of course it would never do for the procession to file down the grand staircase in front of Madame’s rooms, but the spiral staircase, secluded in the turret, offered peculiar advantages for the scheme. It communicated with no other floor, only Professor Waite had the key to the door at the foot, and he was never in the studio at night. So the girls believed, until I informed them that he always came in for a few moments on Wednesday nights to leave his sketches made at the Kit Kat—and Halloween that year happened to fall upon a Wednesday.
“So much the better,” said Cynthia. “We will make Adelaide head the procession, and she will see Professor Waite’s face in her mirror. It will be too good a joke for anything, for she can’t bear the sight of him since she made that unfortunate speech when she saw him standing in the open door and thought it was Winnie en masquerade.”
“I am afraid it will be twitting on facts,” I said; “for I more than half suspect that Professor Waite admires Adelaide as much as she detests him. He has asked me more than once why she does not join the drawing class—and even suggested that I should induce her to pose for the portrait class. He said her profile was purely classical, and that she took naturally the most superb poses of any girl that he had ever met.”