At the end of the scene, however, anxiety about her beloved portière overpowered everything else in the mind of the Vicar's wife, and she rushed after the actors to call out eager instructions. "Hang it up at once, there's good children. If you put it down on a chair, Peggy will sit on it as sure as fate! And oh! My table centres! Put them back in the drawer if you love me! Wrap them up in the tissue paper as you found them!"
"Mother, you are a terrible person! Go back there's a dear, and do keep quiet!" cried a muffled voice from behind the dining-room door, as Shylock dodged back to escape observation, and Mrs. Asplin retreated hastily, aghast at the sight of a hairy monster in whom she failed to recognise a trace of her beloved son and heir. Shylock's make-up was, in truth, the triumph of the evening. The handsome lad had been transformed into a bent, misshapen old man, and anything more ugly, frowsy, and generally unattractive than he now appeared it would be impossible to imagine. A cushion gave a hump to his shoulders, and over this he wore an aged purple dressing-gown, which had once belonged to the Vicar. The dressing-gown was an obvious refuge, but who but Peggy Saville would have thought of the trimming which was the making of the shaggy, unkempt look so much desired? Peggy had sat with her hands clasped on her lap, and her head on one side, staring at the gown when it was held out for her approval two days before, then had suddenly risen, and rushed two steps at a time upstairs to the topmost landing, a wide, scantily-furnished space which served for a playground on wet afternoons. An oilcloth covered the floor, a table stood in a corner, and before each of the six doors was an aged wool rug, maroon as to colouring, with piebald patches here and there where the skin of the lining showed through the scanty tufts. Peggy gave a whoop of triumph, tucked one after the other beneath her arm, and went flying down again, dropping a mat here and there, tripping over it, and nearly falling from top to bottom of the stairs. Hair-breadth escapes were, however, so much a part of her daily existence that she went on her way unperturbed, and carried her bundle into the study where the girls sniffed derisively, and the boys begged to know what she intended to do with all that rubbish.
"'They that have no invention should be hanged,'" quoted Peggy, unperturbed. "Give me a packet of pins, and I'll soon show you what I am going to do. Dear, dear, dear, I don't know what you would do without me! You are singularly bereft of imagination."
She tossed her pig-tail over her shoulder, armed herself with the largest pins she could find, and set to work to fasten the mats down the front of the gown, and round the hem at the bottom, so that the wool hung in shaggy ends over the feet. The skins were thick, the heads of the pins pressed painfully into her fingers, but she groaned and worked away until the border was arranged for stitching, and could be tried on to show the effect.
"Perfectly splendid!" was the verdict of the beholders. And so the matter of Shylock's gown was settled; but his beard still remained to be provided, and was by no means an easy problem to solve.
"Tow!" suggested Mellicent; but the idea was hooted by all the others. The idea of Shylock as a blonde was too ridiculous to be tolerated. False hair was not to be bought in a small village, and Maxwell's youthful face boasted as yet only the faintest shadow of a moustache.
The question was left over for consideration, and an inspiration came the same afternoon, when Robert hurled one of the roller-like cushions of the sofa at Oswald's head, and Oswald, in catching it, tore loose a portion of the covering.
"Now you've done it!" he cried. "The room will be covered with feathers, and then you will say it was my fault! We shall have to fasten the stupid thing up somehow or other!" He peered through the opening as he spoke and his face changed. "It's not feathers—it's horsehair! Here's a find! What about that wig for Shylock?"
Esther was dubious.
"It would take a great deal of horsehair to make a wig. It would spoil the cushion if the horsehair were taken away; it would spoil the sofa if the cushion were small; it would spoil the room if the sofa——"