Jessamy and Barbara were not long in discovering that Grace hated them, but Mrs. Van Alyn was blissfully unconscious that one of the young people she loved to have about her was consumed with jealous spitefulness.
The great night came at last; it was the middle of May, and warm. Mrs. Van Alyn's long parlors, where first the play was to have been given, were found inadequate to the guests who applied for tickets, and a small theater, closed for the season, had been secured without cost, as the masque was given for charity; only the lighting and similar expenses were incurred in its use. The prospect of appearing, as Bab said, "really on the boards, and not on carpet politely called the boards," was tremendously exciting. It seemed to change the whole affair, solemnizing it into something little short of professional. All the actors had to have hasty training in speaking and walking on a real stage, given at the last moment by a real actor and actress, who had taken up the masque with enthusiasm, and had done all in their power to perfect the young Shaksperians.
Jessamy and Barbara were wild with excitement. If it had not been for their mother, Phyllis's home bulletins would have been meager and delirious during these thrilling weeks, but Mrs. Wyndham kept "the stray unit of their four times one are four," as she called Phyllis, informed of the progress of the housekeeping and the revels.
Jessamy and Barbara set out dinnerless on the night of their "first appearance on any stage," as Jessamy reminded her mother it was, appetite lost in excitement.
She and Bab shared their dressing-room—what a delicious feeling of importance it gave them to know it was a dressing-room used by a real actress during the season!
Jessamy's Miranda costume was most beautiful; perhaps none of the others quite equaled it in poetic beauty, though most of the other costumes were more splendid. It was sea-green and white, hung with pearls and shells and narrow ribbon made to represent seaweed. A gauzy veil, white and filmy as sea-foam, floated from her beautiful hair, which hung, half loose, half confined with pearls, about her shoulders. Little Barbara looked her best in white and gold, with devices for increasing her height, and her hair piled high on her saucy head, held tilted scornfully as became both her actual self and Beatrice.
Grace Hammond was Viola, not in doublets, but in a short skirt, with sword at side and a rakish cap set boyishly on her dark hair. Ophelia—come to life, as the lines explained, for she had not been drowned, but had revived when they laid her in the grave—and Juliet and Desdemona, both happily resuscitated after the curtain had fallen on the play, and now come forth to prove it to those who loved and mourned them, Hermione, Rosalind, Cordelia, Portia, Katherine the Shrew, and Katherine the Queen, Queen Constance, Titania, Hero, and a few of the lesser known of Shakspere's lovable women, shyly opened their dressing-room doors one by one, and went to the wings to join Ferdinand, Benedick, Romeo, Bassanio, Othello, Hamlet, Laertes, Orlando, and all the other gallants in velvets, satins, laces, and ribbons, with Malvolio, gartered and bedizened, to lead the opening march.
The masque was but half an hour late in beginning, a wonderful feat of promptness for an amateur charitable entertainment. The curtain rose upon the pretty setting and a picturesque grouping of all the characters, which, immediately after the applause greeting it had begun to die away, broke up into a march to display the individual beauty concealed in the whole.
Then the masque proper began. There was, naturally, considerable difference in the talents of the actors, but their training had been good, and none was conspicuously bad. Grace Hammond acted with real ability, although she did not understand the character of Viola, construing her by her boyish costume rather after the spirit of Katherine. Jessamy's Miranda was the admiration of all beholders—sweet, innocent, alluring—all that a sea princess should be—while Bab charmed the most fastidious with her Beatrice, burred like a chestnut exteriorly, but womanly sweet and true of heart within.
Murmurs from the wings, plaudits from the audience, showed Grace that the Wyndhams, and more especially Barbara, whom she disliked more than Jessamy, were carrying off the honors of the evening, and her petty soul was filled with rage and bitterness.