As the darkness dropped down over the garden, warm, fragrant, heavy with August dew, it absorbed and gave back the delicious blended odours from the garden: cedar and juniper and box, white lilies, alyssum, mignonette, monthly roses and hardy tea roses, heliotrope, sweet peas, pungent marigolds, phlox, nasturtiums, and many more living jars of fragrance, uncovered to the sky as perpetual incense, and blended with the tonic scents from the herb garden, sage, savory, marjoram, thyme, and all the rest.
While the lantern-lighting was in progress the old garden filled with arrivals; no one was late, every one was curious to see what awaited them. There was a small but excellent little stringed orchestra, imported to Vineclad upon Mrs. Garden’s insistence; she would not listen to suggestions of less competent musicians to supply the music. The pulsating harp strings, the poignant sweetness of the violins and viols, the accents of the mandolins emphasizing the flowing melody with their metallic tinkle, filled the garden with music as suited to the fragrance-laden dusk, the lantern lights twinkling everywhere, as the birdsongs in the morning would be suited to the young light of dawn.
As the guests strolled through the beauty, admiring it, yet speculating on what was to follow, there began to wander through the paths other figures, each in costume, fantastic, pretty, or ugly, but always suggestive, and each of these figures wore on his breast or upon hers a number, or, sometimes, this number was worn upon the arm, when the design of the costume did not permit it upon the breast.
The first of these impersonations were not particularly hard to guess. Jane, as Joan of Arc, with shield and sword and a rapt look on her intent face, for instance, was obviously the Maid of Orleans, and so beautiful that it was clear why her soldiers would follow where she led.
“Little Miss Netticoat” also was easy to guess, though one of the prettiest figures of the evening. But there were many baffling impersonations; some hard to guess because they were so definite, plainly representing a particular and unmistakable character which eluded memory; others equally hard to guess because they were so indefinite. A continental uniform, for instance, might cover the representative of Washington, or of any of his generals, and a lady in a formal court dress of a hundred and twenty-five years ago might be almost any one in France, England, or the newly evolved Western republic.
The game grew exciting on both sides, actors’ and guessers’. Questions flew through the air, as hard to dodge as shrapnel. The hard-pressed actors were confronted with posers, relentlessly assailing them, backed up by a pencil, ready poised over a pad, to set down the name which a careless, too hasty answer might betray.
“It isn’t fair!” cried Florimel, driven into a corner in her Carmen costume by rapid-fire questioning of six people at once, drawn up before her. “What a lot of you to think up questions and only one of me to answer them! It’s worse than setting limed twigs for crabs!”
But Florimel was hard to entrap; her nimble wit was at its best, excited as she was by the marvellously good time she was having. Brilliant Florimel’s dark hair and eyes, and white and crimson cheeks, made her such a glowing picture in her pretty costumes that she could not help knowing what a success she made and having a good time in proportion to it.
Audrey Dallas proved helpless under fire of cross-examination, but Win’s legal training, or quick wit, or both, stood him in good stead in answering correctly, but not relevantly. He therefore made Audrey’s defencelessness a pretext for hovering near her, slyly to hint misleading answers to her. Even though Audrey was supposed to be looking toward college with an eye of single purpose, the Garden girls were sure she was not sorry that her inability to parry questions kept Win at her side. Win was quite well worth looking at in his various rôles, and laughter followed at his heels wherever he and Audrey went.
Sweet Mary was lovely as Milton’s daughter, guiding the poet’s steps. Mr. Moulton made a good foil to her fresh loveliness in his black scholar’s gown, though Mary told him that he “looked more like William Dean Howells than John Milton.”